Grief fills the room up of my absent child
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
– King John, Act III, sc. iv

How do we imagine the fictional children of Shakespeare’s plays if we focus on them as emanating from a father who had lost a real child? What significance might we discover in the recurring motif of twins separated (Twelfth Night, Comedy of Errors), children resurrected (A Winter’s Tale), or sons avenging a murdered parent (Hamlet)? How might having lost a son at 11 shaped Shakespeares’s art? 

Hamnet novelist Maggie O’Farrell comments: “I’m amazed really that people have debated about whether or not Shakespeare was grieving and whether the death affected his work. Of course it did. It’s baffling to me that people haven’t thought more about [Hamnet’s] importance, particularly when the spelling of his name and the title of his most famous play were interchangeable.” (The Guardian, 5/1/22)

Establishing evidence to determine the emotional state of a man who lived over 400 years ago is not the purview of scholarly research. But it is, importantly, the purview and purpose of a humanistic approach to art. Walshe’s research seeks to revisit and animate the children of Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of a man grappling with the death of his only son. How might we view Twelfth Night’s Viola and Sebastian, twins separated by shipwreck, presuming each other dead, and then powerfully reunited at the play’s end? How can we consider the murder of young sons in Macbeth or Titus Andronicus? What new significance might we find in the reunion of parents and children cast out, such as Perdita of A Winter’s Tale or Rosalind of As You Like It? Whether in his Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, or Romances, children are everywhere in Shakespeare.

The purpose of this project is to conduct travel, research, and an exploration of Shakespeare’s work as it relates specifically to the depiction of children. Inspired by the novel Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and the performance works of Lisa Wolpe (The Alchemy of Gender), this research is aimed at generating material for a future, original performance examining the role of children – twins in particular – in Shakespeare’s plays.