ABSTRACT
A major industry has grown up to feed Shakespeare to the nursery and schoolroom, and it is on foundations acquired in childhood that the superstructure of much of our knowledge is built. (Bottoms, “Familiar” 11)
Contemporary culture circulates William Shakespeare, the man and his works, as a “privileged site of intersecting codes that refl ect and effect discourse production and consumption” (Freedman 245). No longer is “Shakespeare” generally understood as the author of a stable body of unifi ed texts, but rather as a complex signifi er, not confi ned to ‘high culture’ but continually expanding through integration into popular culture, which “contributes to Shakespeare’s status as a widely shared touchstone and thus sustains his cultural life and power, albeit in forms and with meanings that stand well outside ‘proper’ Shakespeare” (Lanier, Shakespeare 19). This book traces an aspect of this expansion by examining the discursive ends to which “Shakespeare” is put in contemporary children’s literature. Following Neill, my question is not whether Shakespeare is being taught to contemporary children, but how he is being taught in a cultural rather than an institutional manner. When children’s literature is Shakespeared it not only rewards cultural capital, but also inscribes gendered juvenile readers who are made subject to a literary culture within which the Bard functions as father fi gure to sons or daughters, rendering the expansion of “Shakespeare” an emphatically political act.
