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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Queensland University of Technology ePrints Archive QUT Digital Repository: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/ Hateley, Erica (2009) De-colonising Shakespeare? : Agency and (masculine) authority in Gregory Rogers's The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard. Papers: Explorations into children's literature, 19(1). pp. 59-68. © Copyright 2009 School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University De-Colonising Shakespeare?: Agency and (Masculine) Authority in Gregory Rogers’s The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard Erica Hateley Underlying social space are territories, lands, succeeding by evading William Shakespeare. geographical domains, the actual In doing so, Rogers makes an ironic geographical underpinnings of the imperial, intervention into a genre that is itself and also the cultural contest. To think about inherently ironic, and by multiplying ironic distant places, to colonize them, to populate levels of meaning opens up a space for child or depopulate them: all of this occurs on, readers to consider themselves as agents about, or because of land. […] Imperialism within or without reference to (at least some) and the culture associated with it affirm both existing social and cultural hierarchies. the primacy of geography and an ideology Although these are both important strategies, about control of territory . the book nonetheless rests on a gendered logic (Said 1994, p.78) of masculine agency and feminine passivity as embodied by William Shakespeare and Although Said is writing about literal Elizabeth I: present here as figures of adult geographies here as well as cultural mappings cultural authority with whom the child of them, I open with his claims in order to protagonist must engage in order to succeed. initiate my consideration of the ways in which Thus, even as a case can be made for the book ‘Shakespeare’ as a discourse (Freedman 1989, revising dominant understandings of p.245) and Shakespeare’s historical and Shakespeare as a figure of cultural authority geographical contexts have been made over and even of cultural paternity, I argue that it into culturally-contested terrain within does not challenge the patriarchal ideology contemporary children’s literature for the with which colonial logics have historically purposes of constructing and controlling intertwined, and which structure social space and subjectivities. Historically, understandings of Shakespeare as a cultural both the discourse of ‘Shakespeare’ and the father figure. depiction of William Shakespeare as a character have been deployed as structuring Boy-Meets-Shakespeare Plot: De/colonising logics for narratives about the inherent value strategies of Shakespeare, and in turn, for discussions of Rogers’s surface narrative of challenging not just the legitimacy but the necessity of Shakespeare’s cultural authority make sense young people’s subordination of self to for a contemporary (perceivably postcolonial) Shakespeare. Gregory Rogers’s The Boy, The Australian child-readership, insofar as, ‘The Bear, The Baron, The Bard (2004) not only adaptation and re-interpretation of the earlier participates in that tradition of children’s Old World literature of colonization, i.e., The literature which deploys Shakespeare as a Tempest , as literature of decolonization is […] colonising discourse but also disrupts the at its best, superior in effectiveness to an anti- norms of the tradition in two important ways. colonial polemic […] it constitutes one of the First, where boy-meets-Shakespeare most cogent strategies of decolonization in narratives privilege a paternal Shakespeare literature’ (Zabus 1985, p.49). This makes (father to Western culture, father to boys) and sense in the context of a long history of identify Shakespeare’s value through his adaptations and appropriations of linguistic mastery, Rogers offers a wordless Shakespeare’s works for global, adult Shakespeare. Second, he depicts a boy audiences, but is a little more problematic in Papers 19: 1 2009 59 © 2009 the context of children’s literature. In fact, the work hard—most often as a playhouse offering of Shakespeare to young readers is in apprentice—and build a pseudo-filial general a vexed enterprise: there can be no relationship with Shakespeare, who in turn guarantee that a child reader will have a pre- becomes a willing father-figure to said boy. existing knowledge of Shakespeare, and so The cultural logic of such trajectories, authors must often provide the very cultural obviously, is that contemporary child readers competency they wish to critique. Further, can gain paternal wisdom and support from Shakespeare is valued notionally for his the plays Shakespeare left behind; or in other mastery of and over the English language, but words, we can all be Shakespeare’s children if such complex linguistic features as those we read the ‘right’ way. The implied child found in Shakespeare’s writings are seen as readers have modelled for them an example of too difficult for young or beginning readers. relating to Shakespeare which on the surface Janet Bottoms notes that, ‘the plots, appears to affirm individual development, but previously criticized by scholars as which actually deploys a colonial logic of Shakespeare’s weakest point, have come to be subjection of the self to a broader cultural seen as valuable in themselves because they authority. In keeping with boy-meets- are his ’ (Bottoms 2000, p.17), that is, they are Shakespeare narrative tradition, Rogers’s useful to children’s writers because they protagonist travels to Elizabethan London and present less linguistic difficulty than encounters Shakespeare, but in contrast with Shakespeare’s own verse. Nonetheless, given earlier incarnations of the plot, not only does the socialising and acculturating project of not form a bond with the playwright but children’s literature as a genre, and the actually encounters him as a threat. Boy- cultural capital of Shakespeare, there is an meets-Shakespeare texts draw on dominant unsurprisingly long history of producing understandings both of childhood and of Shakespearean texts for young people that do Shakespeare in popular culture. Not not critique or even question the cultural coincidentally, each of these has been authority of ‘Shakespeare’. Despite its catchy, characterised by and through colonising alliterative title, The Boy, The Bear, The logics. As Loomba and Orkin note: Baron, The Bard is a picture book that does not engage with Shakespeare’s plots, and — Shakespeare lived and wrote at a time because it is wordless — cannot engage with when English mercantile and colonial Shakespeare’s language, and thus enterprises were just germinating. […] simultaneously evokes and undermines what four hundred years later, both has evolved into a relatively stable boy- Shakespeare and colonialism have left meets-Shakespeare plot. their imprint on cultures across the globe. [… and] colonial educationists This plot operates most often in historical or and administrators used […] timeslip texts, wherein a young person Shakespeare to reinforce cultural and (usually a boy) comes into contact with the racial hierarchies. Shakespeare was ‘real’ William Shakespeare in his own time. made to perform such ideological work Examples of the boy-meets-Shakespeare plot both by interpreting his plays in highly can be found in novels such as Geoffrey conservative ways (so that they were Trease’s 1940 classic, Cue for Treason , J. B. seen as endorsing existing racial, gender Cheaney’s The Playmaker (2000) and The and other hierarchies, never as True Prince (2002), and Gary Blackwood’s questioning or destabilizing them) and by more recent trilogy of novels, The constructing him as one of the best, if not Shakespeare Stealer (1998), Shakespeare’s ‘the best’, writer in the whole world. He Scribe (2000) and Shakespeare’s Spy (2003). became, during the colonial period, the The boy protagonists of these novels usually quintessence of Englishness and a instinctively register Shakespeare’s genius, measure of humanity itself. Thus the Papers 19: 1 2009 60 © 2009 meanings of Shakespeare’s plays were It’s commonly claimed that these kinds of both derived from and used to establish works [predominantly televisual] colonial authority. entertainingly introduce children to (Loomba and Orkin 1998, p.1) Shakespearian plots and language, preparing them for serious study later As with the irony of offering Shakespeare’s on. While this is true, we should notice plots to children, we see here another irony of that they also introduce children to Shakespearean appropriation: at the same hierarchies of taste and position time as Shakespeare is made over into a tool Shakespeare firmly as an elitist icon with of Colonialism, the works of Shakespeare mass culture as his popular, comic, themselves are ideologically colonised. In anarchic Other. But to rest on this point turn, child readers are colonised in the sense is potentially misleading. We should also that they are inducted into a cultural recognize that by virtue of being hierarchy. Glancing back at Said’s claims members of a society, children, like their about control of territory, there are thus adult counterparts, are always already multiple ironic intersections between enmeshed in a system of cultural Shakespeare as territory and tool of hierarchies not of their own making, one territorialisation, children’s literature as in which Shakespeare is already encoded territory and tool of territorialisation,

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