Joseph Campana. Shakespeare’s Once and Future Child: Speculations on Sovereignty. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2024. 272 pp. ISBN 9780226832531. $99.00 cloth.

Shakespeare’s Once and Future Child is emphatically not about children, the culture of childhood, or the care and rearing of children. Such topics have been treated by a number of excellent studies, and it is in part the success of their approaches that leads Joseph Campana to face down a conspicuous aporia: what else can the child, as a figure, do? Pivoting from the sentimentality and emphasis on vulnerability and care so often associated with children (and indeed with child studies in literature), this book explores instead how child figures bear the weight of political futurity in the blasted landscape of sovereignty’s perpetual ruin. Campana turns the old saw that “the children are our future” inside out to consider how the figure of the child in Shakespeare is stitched to discourses of sovereignty and political time. If conceiving of sovereignty – “that always-about-to-be broken promise of recurrence and futurity, of time stabilized by a tenuous succession of vulnerable bodies” (6) – requires daring leaps of imagination, it is the figure of the child, not the monarch, that lies at the core of that imaginative exercise.

The book’s subtitle, “Speculations on Sovereignty,” aptly captures Campana’s method of collating the speculative tendencies evident in both early modern and contemporary theoretical discourses of sovereignty, Shakespeare’s lyrical and dramatic experiments on the processes of sovereignty, and his own, often astonishing, conclusions about how those experiments inform the ongoing work of thinking politically about the future. And while Campana makes a good case for the uniqueness of Shakespeare’s treatment of child figures as vectors for thinking about political futures, the study’s broader meditation on figuration and the paradoxes of sovereignty provokes habits of looking that may extend well beyond the Shakespeare canon. For readers of The Spenser Review in particular, Campana’s Shakespearean interventions might inform reconsiderations of Spenserian child figures (Error’s inky brood, Britomart’s successive vision, Ruddymane, and Una, to name a few) and their relation to sovereign power.

Part I addresses the inconvenient reliance on children as a means of securing an “absolute, perpetual, and indivisible” sovereignty, as described by the period’s foremost theorist of sovereignty, Jean Bodin. Chapter one focuses on the dyad of the child and the sovereign, arguing that the “infinite plasticity” of child figures (19) makes them potent mechanisms for the “dissolution and redistribution of sovereignty” (20). This potency, in a dialectical relation with dependency, drives illuminating readings of Shakespeare’s Richard III and King John, where political futurity dissolves in the face of perverse adult fantasies, from the eroticization of childhood innocence to the indifference to children’s vulnerability. Chapter two attends to child sovereigns and the importance of children’s political bodies for the continuity of sovereign efficacy. If political succession requires the linear management of time, it also requires time’s denial—a paradox Campana traces through King James VI and I’s Basilicon Doron, which exposes the vulnerability of kingship by yoking the body of the sovereign to the vulnerable body of a child. By these lights, Campana reads the Henry VI plays’ emphasis on sovereignty’s “dilemmas of succession and perpetuity” (47) and Macbeth’s staging of the disastrous outcomes of a strategy for managing time by stopping it, in part through the murder of children.

Part II looks at child figures and the more-than-human world by cross hatching the “scalar politics and poetics of Rome” (10) with the plague-induced dialectic of population and depopulation that complicates notions of political collectivity in the early modern period. Chapter three turns to The Rape of Lucrece, where children serve as hypothetical bearers of Lucrece’s successive shame and trauma, as figures of Tarquin’s lineal annihilation, and as figures of disposable life. As a variety of “minimal life,” the diminutive child informs ways of imagining sovereign power and governance that reckon with collectivity amidst plague-induced shifts in the contours of sovereignty. Where life is understood abstractly as populations, women and children are the bearers of life over which the state exercises power to “distribute vulnerability and death” (89). Chapter four tracks “derangements of scale” (108) brought on by child figures whose “scalar peculiarities” point up the tenuous humanity of those who are subject to sovereignty (109). If works like Lucrece and Titus Andronicus thwart the game of sovereignty-by-the-numbers through deathly “negative enumeration,” Julius Caesar and Coriolanus stage the tension between subhuman individuals and superhuman collectivities in the Roman necropolis. In Coriolanus, the dangers of multiplicity inflect remarks about the numerous rabble, including children, as fragments, swarms, herds, and flocks: aggregates that question the necessity of sovereignty. By contrast, figures like Caius Martius, Antony, and Caesar achieve heroic singularity paradoxically as massy composites. Both moves prompt Campana to wonder whether the republican shift to conceiving of a polity as “the people” “dismantles or merely realigns structures of sovereignty in early modernity” (124).

In Part III Campana locates the child figure at the nexus of trade, risk, knowledge, and future in Shakespeare’s shipwreck plays. Here, populaces, not persons, provide ways of “seeing past the charism of identities and singularities, which is part of the trap of sovereignty.” In chapter five’s readings of The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, supernumerary children figure both loss and recovery. Figures of double embodiment like twins, Campana argues, expose the tension between the singular self and anxieties about multiplicity, duplication, and indistinguishability. In a marketplace of indistinguishables like Ephesus, “nonfunctional doubles [can] interfere with the smooth execution and singularity of sovereign will” (147), and flexibility becomes the prop of a recovered individual self. In Illyria, however, crises of distinguishability require “more transformations and sacrifices” to resolve (155). Reading Cesario not as an individual but instead as an assemblage that embodies cultural contradictions, Campana explores how gender is “a layered, doubled, distributed, and incipient phenomenon” that may not reside only in an individual body but instead be held by “networks of persons, bodies, and things as well as in their circulation across collectivities” (165). In both plays, the lost self is recovered through the flexible negotiation of a landscape of complexly intertwined information, trade, and risk: a landscape that uncannily mirrors the crises of information processing characteristic of today. Chapter six argues that in Pericles, sovereignty and the institutions that prop it up—education, dynastic succession, and the family unit—erode from ever stronger currents of circulation and “traffic.” In a modulation from studies that center the often-forced labor of child actors, Campana thinks broadly about stage “trafficking” as a set of systems dependent on forms of liquidity and exchange. Taking Marina as a trafficked child figure that is also emblematic of the processes of educating children into humanity, Campana shows how the (often forced) circulation of children “indicate[s] the emergence of a culture of risk management” (179). The mutability of the child—a feature of both educability and fungibility—is well suited to imagining the future in a world organized by risky sea-borne flows of commerce, a world where the child and the sovereign are “embedded in precarity,” and where humanist education no longer affords political protection (185).

The book’s conclusion draws to the surface what each of the foregoing chapters has implied, which is the triangulation of the child, the sovereign, and the human. “A child,” Campana writes, “is both not-yet or not-quite human and quintessentially human in its radically plastic nature” (199). Humanism arises as a response to this plasticity, endeavoring to educate the child into humanity through imitation. But like gender in chapter five, the human is an incipient and distributed phenomenon. Reading Mamillius’ figuration through an array of animal, vegetable, mineral, and object metaphors, Campana links The Winter’s Tale’s meditation on the child to the impossibility of meeting the play’s numerous demands “for verification” (205) in a world of too much information and too little certainty.

Shakespeare’s Once and Future Child exposes how our notions of futurity, seeded in early modernity, spring up from the interests of sovereignty. The management of lineal time, the power of the flexible individual, and forms of subjectivity based on ever more restrictive concepts of humanity and populace are lies that sovereignty has peddled all too successfully, and it has done so by playing a sophisticated game of figuration—a game it never lets the child win. But as Campana’s brilliant speculations on sovereignty demonstrate, the future does not have to be thought of as perpetuity, and the child is a slippery creature that occasionally wriggles its way out of sovereignty’s grasp, from the distributed and incipient gender of Cesario to the swarms, herds, and flocks whose presence and ongoingness require no sovereign. The book’s most exciting moments afford surprising glimpses, through Shakespeare’s most familiar figures, of alternate modes of identification and community praxis for readers concerned about the regulation of reproductive bodies and queer bodies, the pandemic-time management of populations, the treatment of migrants, the datafication and commoditization of students with escalating debt burdens, and the endless ways that digital environments demand verification of our “authenticity.” This excellent book rewards the time and care that reading it requires, and it will make an enduring mark on early modern studies.

Hillary Eklund

Grinnell College