Three Children and Shakespeare

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Anne Terry White, William Shakespeare, and Beatrice Tobias. Three Children and Shakespeare. [1st Ed.]. New York: Harper, 1938. 

Image source: University of Oregon Rare Book Collection

Like the Lambs’ and E. Nesbit’s, Anne Terry White’s book incorporates retellings of Shakespeare plays intended to convey Shakespeare’s importance to children. However, White’s version places new emphasis on modern life and scholarship. Her book is presented as an extended prose dialogue, with a fictional mother explaining what she learned at university about early modern theatrical practice to her children. She then relates the plots of 4 plays, with discussion of the historical context of their production. Images here show the start of the story, with the mother explaining Shakespearean cross-dressing, the use of early modern theaters for bear-baiting, and the layout of the theaters.


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White emphasizes how the mother employs historical knowledge about theater in Shakespeare’s time to invite her children’s interest. Here she describes early modern practices of theatrical cross-dressing and bear-baiting.

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White’s children are critical thinkers, challenging both their mother and Shakespeare’s period’s cultural and theatrical practices. Here they assess the virtues and limitations of the bare-bones Shakespearean thrust stage.

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The daughters rebel at the moral of female submission at the end of The Taming of the Shrew. Their mother suggests that their strong responses testify to Shakespeare’s power as a dramatist.

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Modern children contemplate Shakespearean theatrical institutions and historical difference in the book’s apt endpapers.

White’s views about Shakespeare and children differ from the 19th-century emphasis on morality and simple appreciation of Shakespeare. White’s fictional frame represents education as dialogue, with her child characters depicted repeatedly interrupting their mother and questioning Shakespeare’s choices. In a stark turn away from 19th-century views that Shakespeare was the signal source of moral truths, children and mother conclude that Shakespearean theater does not always echo their own moral beliefs, but is effective in “stirring” the audience. At left, the daughters express discomfort with the end of The Taming of the Shrew , and their mother offers a way of recuperating distasteful lessons via aesthetic appreciation.

The book’s endpapers, drawn by Beatrice Tobias, express the theme of the book, showing modern children contemplating Shakespeare’s theater and its audience at a remove. The early modern part of the image is at once stylized in scale and historically realistic.

Three Children and Shakespeare