Shakespeare's children

The present study explores the role and social status of children in the plays and in the sonnets by Shakespeare. I have attempted to trace the tension between accepted societal attitudes of the time and the underlying sympathy and compassion for children made manifest in the text through dramatic situation and language.In the Histories and in the Tragedies, children are seen as pawns in adult power plays, while a disregard for a child's natural developmental progress is made apparent in both the Histories and the Comedies. Nevertheless at times, and particularly in the Tragedies and in the Romances, the actual children in the plays become agents of reconciliation and regeneration; in Macbeth, the victimized children acquire the status of a powerful symbol. The Sonnets, which deal with childhood as an abstract idea, foreshadow this synthesis of actuality and metaphoric tenor