Shakespeare and Childhood endeavors to bridge the divide between the study of children and that of children's literature by juxtaposing examinations of children within Shakespeare's writings with inquiries into the ways that children responded to Shakespeare. Although the field of children's literature easily accommodates discussions of Shakespeare, a gap exists between this field and the study of early modern children. Shakespeare and Childhood reveals the possibilities as well as the difficulties in promoting dialogue between childhood studies and the study of children's literature.

Lacking the cultural interest in children we hold today, the early modern period presents a particular problem for examination of the child. Nevertheless, children emerge as powerful forces in the early modern economy and culture, comprising a large part of the English workforce including actors performing on the London stage. The book's first section, “Shakespeare's Children,” examines early modern conceptions and uses of childhood, covering a range of subjects, including child characters, child actors, adult children, and deceased children. Catherine Belsey's examination of the young princes in Richard III points to the particularly fraught nature of representations of royal children in aesthetic productions. Belsey contends that the political need to depict a strong royal figure was inherently at odds with the child's innocent remove from adult matters. Both A. J. Piesse and Lucy Munro explore the metatheatrical function of the child in early modern drama. Piesse's essay argues that the children within Shakespeare's plays serve a dual function. Depictions of children coming into knowledge through texts reveal a larger cultural phenomenon in which identity is textually mediated. The child also functions as a metatheatrical figure that embodies the central concerns of the play in which it appears. Lucy Munro draws upon a rich understanding of child actors to explore the ways in which Shakespeare links his depictions of Coriolanus as a childish figure (the man playing child) to the child actors of the children's companies (children playing men). Munro asserts that Shakespeare appropriates the children's companies’ “critique” of “tragic heroism” by highlighting the disjuncture between the actors and their roles (87).

The other two chapters in this section focus on the relationship between parents and children. Hattie Fletcher and Marianne Novy turn to older children to explore a conundrum found in father-daughter relationships throughout Shakespeare: despite the importance of the male heir in the period, Shakespeare's plays portray fathers placing a stronger identification in their daughters than their sons. Finally, Patricia Phillippy turns to the more symbolic function of the child, comparing Anne de Vere's “Foure Epytaphes” with Shakespeare's sonnets to explore the ways in which gender construction is built around issues of reproduction and loss.

By focusing on children's uses of Shakespeare, the essays in the second half of the volume, “Children's Shakespeares,” offer insights on the cultural expectations of children as well as the impact of the child as consumer of culture. Susanne Greenhalgh's focus on child performers in film representations of A Midsummer Night's Dream provides a potential point of dialogue with the essays dealing with child actors in the first half of the collection by demonstrating that conventions of child performance mirror cultural understandings of children. The other essays in this section explore the ways in which children are able to appropriate the Shakespeare they are given for their own uses. Kathryn Prince's examination of Shakespeare's appearance in Victorian children's periodicals and Naomi Miller's examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century adaptations of Shakespeare for children offer similar theses that Shakespearean texts attempted to mold their child readers but nevertheless offered spaces of agency for those readers. Richard Burt's examination of Shakespeare's appearances in tween culture also explores the issue of the child audience's agency, offering that, while tween media may adapt Shakespearean plots, it does so while challenging and attempting to undermine the value placed on Shakespeare's canonical status. Pascale Aebisher's examination of the Terry family's memoirs explores the ways that different members of the family portray Shakespeare as an influential force in their childhood, functioning as a vehicle for the development of their identity and understandings of the world. Kate Chedgzoy's examination of Shakespeare as a character in contemporary children's fiction identifies similar patterns of appropriation to those of the Terry family. In these contemporary works, frequently targeted to boys, the figure of Shakespeare offers a means for developing a “postfeminist heterosexual masculinity” (189).

The essays throughout Shakespeare and Childhood are greatly complemented by a critical apparatus that develops a context not only for these works, but also for future studies of these topics. The separate introductions written by Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessy are rich with historical and theoretical background and provide helpful overviews to those new to the debates about children and childhood in the early modern period and the uses of Shakespeare as children's literature. Their discussions are augmented with a bibliography on Shakespeare and children that provides an excellent resource for any scholar interested in this field. And, while Mark Lawhorn's “Children in Shakespeare's Plays: An Annotated Checklist” appears only in an appendix, this catalog of children presents provocative and surprising alignments of child figures that would have made a fascinating article.

Although the individual elements of the collection are strong, the bifurcation of the book into the two sections creates the impression of two separate entities with little to say to one another. The study of childhood and children's literature feels segregated and disparate. And, while the essays in “Shakespeare's Children” are compelling, several of them could have benefited from a stronger historical context. At times, authors make generalizations about the role of children in the period that have been dispelled by the recent historical scholarship on early modern children. A more historical grounding might also provide the benefit of a ground for comparison between the essays. Nevertheless, Shakespeare and Childhood lays the groundwork and reveals the potential for more conversations about the relationship between “Shakespeare's Children” and “Children's Shakespeares.”