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Hateley, Erica (2009) De-colonising Shakespeare?: agency and (masculine) authority in Gre- gory Rogers’s the boy, the bear, the baron, the bard. Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 19(1), pp. 59-68.

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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.

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, and as high culture. Shakespearean children’s literature as (Lanier 2002, p.108) combining all of these elements. It is such a Colonising/Paternal Shakespeare—the It is true and right that conceptions of the playwright as unique, inspirational, genius reader implied by children’s literature as role-model—against whom or which Rogers’s potentially or actually colonised subject have picture book attempts to work. That said, been contested within children’s literature Rogers’s seeming critique of Shakespearean studies. Those critics too ready to see the real value can really only be recognized by readers child reader coalescing seamlessly with the already at least somewhat versed in this value; implied child reader leave themselves open to in turn, this necessary irony maps onto a the accusation of over-simplifying reading tension between Rogers’s arguably processes and effects, and perhaps more decolonising gestures and the necessarily saliently, to the charge of viewing children as colonising implications of the boy-meets- passive, acquiescent ‘empty vessels’. Shakespeare plot. Despite cogent critiques of Nonetheless, and bearing in mind certain ‘child as colonised subject’ then, I am (albeit problematic) assumptions about nonetheless drawing on Roderick McGillis’s childhood being a territory of colonisation points about the broad ironies of asserting undertaken by adult culture, it is no great decolonising logics within children’s surprise, that within the genre of literature: Shakespearean children’s literature, such logics are prevalent, not only in terms of When we bring ideas of liberation and implied readership but also in diegetic decolonization to the subject of children representations of children forming and their literature, the irony ought to be interpersonal relationships with William evident: children continue to be the Shakespeare. There are a number of works subaltern and their literature continues which not only thematise, but consciously or to serve as a colonizing (socializing, not depend on, visions of Shakespeare and taming, wrecking—all these words have childhood bound up within precisely those appeared in works about children and colonial ideologies identified by Loomba and their literature) agent par excellence . But Orkin. Hence Douglas Lanier notes: I need to note a farther irony. I speak of

Papers 19: 1 2009 61 © 2009 the irony of knowing, or what Richard the curtain to find himself in the Globe Rorty calls “knowingness” . Theatre over four centuries earlier. To quote (McGillis 2000, p.224) one reviewer’s summary:

Such knowingness is indeed the irony not His appearance mid-performance only of Shakespeare for children, but also the disrupts the play and angers the irony that Nodelman attributes to picture playwright (who seems to be William books as a genre: Shakespeare), so he flees the theater and acquires a companion when he frees a Irony occurs in literature when we know caged bear; boy and bear cross the something more and something different bridge to the north of the river, where from what we are being told. We are they free a prisoner, the titular baron, aware that the words we are reading are from the Tower, and then return to the incomplete. Something similar happens river, where they meet the queen on her when we interpret a picture ironically; royal barge and engage in a frolic. Still we believe we know more and different pursued by the playwright, the boy heads information from what the picture shows back to the now-darkened theater, where us. he narrowly escapes the irate (Nodelman 1988, p.223) Shakespeare by returning to his own time. With such complication, and competing and (Stevenson 2004, pp.182-183) complementary ironies as those produced when combining “Shakespeare” (plots vs. Although the text is wordless, its narrative is language), children’s literature (colonising vs. clearly indicated by the book’s illustrations, non-colonising), and picture books (known which follow a top-to-bottom, left-to-right vs. unknown), within a wordless picture book pattern as do most English-language texts. “about” a boy’s encounter with William Reader identification is initially produced by Shakespeare, the production and reading of the fact that the boy is the only character who such a text is clearly a complex, and perhaps appears in the story’s early action (even inescapably ironic, project. That is, where this though Shakespeare has already appeared on text is activating a decolonising cultural the endpaper), and is shown engaging in critique, this activation is complicated by the stereotypical childhood physical play and necessity of Shakespearean knowledge to pretence. Reader identification is produced recognizing such a critique, and is further and sustained by continuing visual and complicated by tensions between the book’s narrative focus on the boy, as well as by cultural politics and its gendered politics. inviting readers to share his child’s-eye perspective on the world in which he finds himself. The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard and Childhood Agency The absence of language, and the powerful The most cursory of readings shows the effects of such absence, are highlighted if centrality of Shakespeare to Rogers’s picture Rogers’s book is compared with Marcia book, even as it simultaneously demonstrates Williams’s Mr. William Shakespeare’s Plays that this is a story of childhood agency (1998) and Bravo, Mr. William Shakespeare! available to all readers, regardless of whether (2000) both of which successfully integrate said readers have cultural competencies in images of plays in performance and their “Shakespeare”. Briefly, in The Boy, The Bear, audiences, and language drawn directly from The Baron, The Bard , a young boy of Shakespeare’s plays as well as audience contemporary London pursues a lost football commentaries. The effect of these multiple into an empty theatre. Once there, he dresses strands in Williams’s picture books makes for up in abandoned costume and steps through an entertaining and educational read, but

Papers 19: 1 2009 62 © 2009 although the child reader is interpellated as an This balance and tension between intelligent and independent reader by individualism and environment, between Williams, she cannot reproduce the subjectivity and objectivity, appear in a performance and language spaces of the variety of ways throughout The Boy, The Globe theatre and have a sustained figure of Bear, The Baron, The Bard wherein Rogers identification for that reader. Williams’s offers openings which variously focus on full- readers are clearly outside the book whereas bleed landscape/environment images, and Rogers invites his readers into the book white-space montages of people dancing in offering them emotional and narrative modes any or no environment. In one full-bleed of identification. As Perry Nodelman points opening, readers are given a bird’s-eye view out, ‘Because [wordless] books have no of Tower Bridge, and although they may words to focus our attention on their notice that witches are rowing on the Thames meaningful or important narrative details, (a nod, perhaps, to Shakespeare’s Macbeth , they require from us both close attention and anachronistic as this is, given Elizabeth’s a wide knowledge of the visual conventions presence in the book), the image emphasises that must be attended to before visual images the foreignness of this environment for the can imply stories’ (Nodelman 1988, p.186). boy and for readers. In juxtaposition with this Therefore, presuming a reader with environmental focus, another opening, this competence in normative Western with a full-bleed white background, shows visual/narrative conventions, this picture book Elizabeth’s court at play, inviting readers to offers a story of and about childhood agency focus on bodies and community, or at least whereby the protagonist undertakes social relations. Indeed, readers are arguably independent movement/action, and the child invited to see the similarities between reader is invited to undertake independent children and adults on this latter opening, meaning-making. whereas earlier the book clearly differentiated between the two groups, at least in the boy’s The book’s images vary in their composition experience of arriving at the Globe. William with regard to layout, point of view, Moebius tells us that, ‘The more frequently perspective, implied movement etc. Images the same character is depicted on the same work at different points in the book to page, the less likely that character is to be in manipulate time and space in different ways, control of a situation’ (Moebius 1986, p.149), showing that Rogers’s comment about but Rogers both affirms and denies this claim: ‘illustration working as literature’ is borne out the reverse S-shape of the images depicts the by this book. Point of view is manipulated in boy and the bear’s integration into the social various ways throughout the text, and is elite, even as that elite is shown to be childish exemplified by the images depicting the boy’s (or at least out of control). They also offer a arrival on-stage at the Globe. Readers are kind of revisionist historical account insofar offered a view of the Globe’s audience from as the three ‘processions’ depict a burgeoning the boy’s point of view. This image is romance for Elizabeth; she is shown three immediately followed by a reversal, showing times, and may exercise social control, but the audience’s point of view of the boy on does not necessarily have self control. stage. Thus readers are encouraged to be conscious of viewing and being viewed, and Unsurprisingly, given that The Boy, The Bear, even as they are invited to identify with the The Baron, The Bard is a timeslip story, boy and his curiosity about the world he finds Rogers plays with representations of himself in, are also visually reminded that the temporality as much as he does with people boy himself is also an object of curiosity in and places. Thus, one image (an exploding this world. The book depends on readers’ clock) is devoted to the boy’s slide through recognition of the boy, and possibly four centuries. As the boy is about to return to themselves, as both subject and object. his own time, however, several images are

Papers 19: 1 2009 63 © 2009 devoted to a split-second during which the history that renders The Boy, The Bear, Shakespeare only narrowly misses grasping The Baron, The Bard simultaneously playful the boy’s cloak. I point out these temporal about, and participatory in, the project of strategies because: socialisation and acculturation endemic to the production of Shakespeare for children. All cultural paradigms […] can be characterized in terms of their specific The extent to which Rogers seems to privilege mode of organization of time and space. a pleasurable, entertaining experience over an They can be characterized in terms of (a) educational one, particularly when compared how time and space are organized and with Williams’s books, is indicated by the (b) in terms of what imparts organization relatively straightforward point that even as to time and space. The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard (Abercrombie, Lash and Longhurst 1992, delineates a very clear narrative drive, no p.119) specific historical knowledge is necessary in order to understand this narrative. That said, if Rogers’s production of time and space is one is familiar even in the most general way innovative within the context of with popular tropes of Elizabethan London Shakespearean children’s literature insofar as and its two most notorious residents—Queen it achieved entirely through visual images, Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare—the and works to maintain distance between narrative would also seem to have a specific Shakespeare and the protagonist. Nonetheless, symbolic drive. But herein lies a problem: for ‘what’ imparts organisation to the narrative is Rogers to mobilise a decolonising critique, the cultural value and authority of the colonial must be recognized, taken account Shakespeare. Thus, even as The Boy, The of, known.. Whether the Shakespearean or the Bear, The Baron, The Bard invites and colonial is known or not, this is a remarkable facilitates a readerly pleasure independent of story of childhood (and implied readerly) ‘Shakespeare’, in order to engage fully with agency. That the boy moves into or through the book’s cultural politics, its Shakespearean the playhouse, the prison, the palatial barge, aspects must be taken account of. It is and repeatedly not merely gestures towards, possible, rather than probable, that the child but literally liberates confined subjects reader of Rogers’s text will have the indicates a reversal of the logics which historical, cultural, or literary/generic identify children as subjects to be acted upon knowledge to understand all of the ironic by adult culture. In this picture book, a child gestures made by The Boy, The Bear, The not only refuses to be acted upon, but also Baron, The Bard . Given this fact, the book as rescues others from the same plight, undoing a whole becomes an ironic entry into a genre the physical confinement of the bear and the that is itself fundamentally ironic: baron, and even initiating a romance for the Shakespeare for children. The adult mediators ‘Virgin Queen’. Nonetheless, violent and/or of the genre—authors, editors, publishers, physically threatening images of Shakespeare booksellers, librarians, parents, teachers, such as those offered by Rogers are highly etc.—knowingly (if not necessarily unusual in children’s fiction, or indeed, in consciously) thus withhold information from popular culture generally, and are thus child readers at the very moment of seeming important. When readers see Shakespeare to provide it. That is, in the proffering of scowling at, apparently attempting to throttle, Shakespeare as entertainment, we mask the and constantly pursuing the boy it is made instrumentality of Shakespeare as education clear that this is no father-figure Shakespeare and/or capital. We do not disclose the (or, at least, no benign paternal Shakespeare). centuries-long process of making Shakespeare In fact, this Shakespeare seems devoted to exclusive, superior, canonical, colonial, and curbing rather than developing the boy’s of the production of Shakespeare as marker of abilities or independence. Further, if we know socio-cultural legitimacy. We do not disclose

Papers 19: 1 2009 64 © 2009 what bear baiting is; if we know that the most authority over child listeners, common reason for being imprisoned in the particularly the intellectual authority Tower was treason; if we know who William conferred by the ability to read (which Shakespeare was and ‘is’; this book is an younger children, who are most often the impressive complication of the genre of audience for picture books, either lack or Shakespeare for children. The boy’s are in the process of learning). This transgressive movement through the social disparity confers some of the reader’s and geographic spaces of late sixteenth- authority onto the story itself because the century London mobilises a kind of words are, as child audiences experience decolonising critique of the logics Said the performance, being spoken by the attributed to Imperial spaces and territories, adult figure and are thus arguably which serves to dislocate Shakespearean endorsed by them. authority, and disrupt teleologies of (Parsons 2004, n.p.) Shakespeare and Empire in favour of childhood agency. Indeed, if we are to believe Hence, the potential correlation between the the endpapers, Shakespeare has been changed eponymous boy’s avoidance of Shakespeare by this encounter more than the boy has. and the reader’s avoidance of the social and Where the opening endpapers depict a portrait ideological authority of a mediating adult of a startled but noble Shakespeare meeting reader, means that while Rogers critiques the reader’s gaze, and with a coat of arms in adult culture via his Shakespearean content the background, the closing endpapers repeat and context, child readers are potentially left this image with the difference that free to accept or reject such cultural codings. Shakespeare now appears tousled, holds a Such an interpretation of The Boy, The Bear, football under his arm, and is evading the The Baron, The Bard is liberating—for child reader’s gaze as he glares stage left. Even as and adult readers—even as the fact of adult Rogers is (necessarily) implicated in the very production and circulation of the text might Shakespearean discourses he is complicating, render such a liberatory reading illusory. or even challenging, the most important gesture he makes is to reward child readers Nonetheless, whether child readers are left to with a sense of agency rather than passive make and unmake meanings within and about subjection to the discourse of Shakespeare. the book themselves, encoded in the text are a number of ideological representations or The wordlessness of the text extends this assumptions that ought to give critical readers logic of juvenile agency to readers: this story of any age pause. The book’s opening images is available to child reader of full or no of an abandoned proscenium theatre—images linguistic literacy. Just as the boy evades adult which juxtapose powerfully with the lively intervention in his life, so might readers evade images of the Elizabethan thrust-stage the normative reading experience attached to theatre—indicate a kind of mourning for live picture books. Nikolajeva notes that theatre in contemporary culture. Overall, it ‘Picturebooks, more than any other kind of must be said, The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, children’s literature, are read and appreciated The Bard is a book that celebrates by children and adults together, most often performance, costume, disguise, and with the adult reading the book to a child or deception, or in other words, theatre. This is group of children’ (Nikolajeva 2003, p.243). Pointing not necessarily problematic, but it does out the ideological functions of such reading establish a romance of cultural decline that situations, Parsons more explicitly argues: potentially undermines the book’s project of desacralising Shakespeare. Similarly, the picture books can be understood as book mobilises a relatively unproblematic complicit with typical reading situations. critique of bear baiting and imprisonment (of Such situations commonly entail an bears and humans), but the liberation of the adult/older reader who has some level of

Papers 19: 1 2009 65 © 2009 bear and the baron leads to a disturbing account of Elizabethan England as a revision of Elizabeth I. patriarchal culture is the Queen herself. Although she certainly worked within Revisioning Elizabeth I and Shakespeare: inherently patriarchal logics, Elizabeth’s Masculine Agency and Gendered Ideology emphatically female body always posed a On the one hand, Rogers refigures threat to such logics. Rogers’s account of Elizabethan culture as pleasurable when seen Elizabeth simultaneously emphasises to revolve around Elizabeth herself, rather stereotypical femininity and de-emphasises than the threatening tone of Shakespeare’s her political subjectivity. Thus, although presence. On the other hand, Elizabeth is Rogers’s revision of Elizabeth is seemingly excluded from both the book’s title and its analogous with his revision of Shakespeare, politics of power: the book implies that she the radical departure from the Tilbury image falls in love-at-first-sight with the newly of Elizabeth as political agent undertakes liberated baron, and thus she incorporates the quite different cultural work. Whatever else boy, the bear, and the baron into her court he may be in this text, Shakespeare remains a which here is a place of dancing and games. playwright and thus retains cultural agency This particular representation of Elizabeth is where Elizabeth’s cultural status is as revisionary as the book’s representation of diminished. Shakespeare, but it revises her in such a way as to dislocate her from political agency: this Such elements of The Boy, The Bear, The is not the Elizabeth of history, not the Baron, The Bard , for all of its interventions in Elizabeth of Tilbury. I name Tilbury the dominant boy-meets-Shakespeare plot of specifically here as it is possibly the best- contemporary children’s literature (and the known Elizabethan ‘moment’ beyond cultural paternalism such plots promote) Elizabethan or English Renaissance Studies. suggest that it nonetheless promulgates the Although the inspection of the troops at patriarchal ideology that often underpins these Tilbury is probably as mythicised as it is plots. As Kate Chedgzoy notes of YA mythic, it nonetheless continues to operate incarnations of the plot: metonymically for contemporary understandings of Elizabeth I as a political the fiction of the Shakespeare theatre and personal force to be reckoned with. As company as surrogate family combines Susan Frye notes, ‘examination of these with the emotional investment of Western [Tilbury] fictions reveals how they perpetuate culture in the fantasy of Shakespeare the belief in an English first unified under himself as idealized father figure to Elizabeth—a belief that constructs Elizabeth I produce an uneasy meditation on the as a personally complex but politically repressions and exclusions of gender and monolithic figure’ (Frye 1992, p.96). The sexuality that have to be performed in book’s containment of Elizabeth within a order to sustain those fantasies. logic of romance and nurturing serves a (Chedgzoy 2007, p.197). related but crucially different ideological project from that of the rewriting of Although Rogers critiques the fantasy of Shakespeare. In the latter case, the book Shakespeare as idealised father figure, he charts shifting modes of power and agency as nonetheless would seem to reproduce a sites of contest between male figures: even as problematic vision of gendered ideology in Shakespeare is demonised, he is nonetheless a the process. The boy protagonist is, after all, a figure of power. In comparison, Elizabeth is boy, and much of the book’s action centres on reduced to a fluttering, dancing ninny; her social relations between men. The revision serves to further consolidate power overarching vision of liberation or freedom as operating amongst or between men. The does not seem to be as universal as one might always-already destabilising presence in any wish, regardless of the book’s production and inculcation of childhood agency. In this sense,

Papers 19: 1 2009 66 © 2009 the text retains a kind of colonising, time) to travel before we fully reimagine acculturating, and socialising drive: it does children’s potential Shakespearean and non- reward agency in relation to Shakespeare, but Shakespearean agency and authority. If this only to some . book is actually about the struggle for control of social and cultural territory, it seems that Conclusion even when Shakespeare’s paternity is The fundamental irony of The Boy, The Bear, questioned, the patriarchal logics that The Baron, The Bard is less the idea of underpin such models are not. wordless and non-paternal Shakespeare than the fact that Rogers must deploy the colonising strategies of Shakespearean REFERENCES children’s literature generally in order to Abercrombie, N, Lash, S & Longhurst, B (1992) mobilise a decolonising critique of ‘Popular representation: recasting realism’, in Shakespearean children’s literature. To S. Lash & J. Friedman (eds) Modernity and imagine childhood agency for his protagonist, Identity. Oxford, Blackwell, pp.115-140. Rogers must in some sense withhold it from his reader; to critique Shakespearean Blackwood, G (1998) The Shakespeare Stealer. authority, he must render it ridiculous; and to New York, Dutton Children’s Books. produce a non-ironic Shakespearean children’s text, he must embed himself in Blackwood, G (2000) Shakespeare’s Scribe. New discourses characterised first and foremost by York, Dutton Children’s Books. competing ironies, not the least of which is an unquestioned patriarchal logic. Presumably, Blackwood, G (2003) Shakespeare’s Spy . Rogers is conscious of and caught between, New York, Dutton Children’s Books. both the aesthetic power of Shakespeare’s works and of the Imperial and Colonial uses Bottoms, J (2000) ‘Familiar Shakespeare’, in to which those works have been put. But as E. Bearne & V. Watson (eds) Where Texts Richard Burt reminds us: ‘Though the and Children Meet . London, Routledge, production of a new Shakespeare version or pp.11-25. citation tends to imagine itself as breaking with the old, with tradition, it also always Burt, R (1998) Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: creates an archive making it continuous with Queer Theory & American Kiddie Culture . past versions’ (Burt 1998, p.20). Therefore, it New York, St. Martin’s. is not surprising that The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard aligns with the history of Cheaney, J. B. (2000) The Playmaker . New York, Shakespearean children’s literature even as it Dell Yearling. complicates it. Gregory Rogers’s work may Cheaney, JB (2002) The True Prince . New York, be an early—if not the first—example of new Dell Yearling. ways of offering Shakespeare to child readers, but it nonetheless participates in the cultural Chedgzoy, K (2007) ‘Shakespeare in the project of offering Shakespeare to children. company of boys’, in S. Greenhalgh, R. Shaughnessy & K. Chedgzoy (eds) This book initiates a new critical and cultural Shakespeare and Childhood . Cambridge, conversation about what Shakespeare has Cambridge University Press, pp.184-200. meant, and can or should ‘mean’ when we are thinking about children and their literature, Freedman, B (1989) ‘Misrecognizing particularly in relation to the colonising uses Shakespeare’, in N. Holland, S. Homan & of people, texts, or ideas saturated with B. Paris (eds) Shakespeare’s Personality . cultural capital. Novelty alone, however, does Berkeley, University of California Press, not negate the necessity of analysis: there still pp.244-260. seems to be some distance (be it in space or

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