“This is an ambitious and genuinely innovative book. Campana has assembled a dynamic cluster of themes around the infinitely mutable, malleable, and violable figure of the child in Shakespeare. Roving freely across the breadth of Shakespeare’s works, Campana compellingly demonstrates how childhood came to figure the pressures and transformations of sovereignty, biopower, and mercantilism in the early modern period.”

Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine

“At a time of ‘trafficking’ panic and extinction anxiety, the fantasies of harm and futurity that cluster around the rhetorical figure of the child threaten to proliferate out of control. But when did this process start? And what might it take to think the child anew? Returning to a time before modern constructions of childhood in search of answers, in Shakespeare’s Once and Future Child Campana finds unexpected resonance in the biopolitical imaginary of early modern literature’s ‘sanctuary children,’ boy actors, and shipwreck survivors. Fresh and persuasive readings of Shakespeare and his literary contemporaries abound in this beautifully written and philosophically ambitious book.”

Drew Daniel, Johns Hopkins University