Shakespeare wrote more than fifty parts for children, amounting to the first comprehensive portrait of childhood in the English theatre. This book shows how performances on stage and film have used the range of Shakespeare's insights in order to re-examine and re-think these issues in terms of society and culture.

Arguing that contemporary culture uses Shakespeare to re-think these same issues today as we experience a post-modern crisis in 'childness', Shakespeare and Child's Play first locates ideas of childhood in early modern theorisations and performances then analyses a range of recent performances on stage and film that put our own culture's conflicted responses to the emotive issue of the child squarely in view.