The Cygnet and the Shepherd: Children’s Agency in Shakespeare’s King John

Abstract

Scholarship on the child characters in Shakespeare’s King John has generally emphasized their helplessness in the face of the political ambitions and dominant emotions of the play’s adult characters. Arthur, especially, is often described as being entirely absent of agency, despite his vital importance to the plot. In response to this critical consensus, my essay explores an alternative reading of the play which instead centres the sparse agency the children do possess, and thus explicates Arthur and Henry III’s ephemeral, subversive visions of the future that unsettle the play’s ordered ending.