Shakespeare in the “Shoe” Novels of Noel Streatfeild

This article situates Noel Streatfeild’s career novels of the mid twentieth century within the long history of Shakespeare for children, showing that she was an innovator in this field. The engagement that girls in these novels have with the works of Shakespeare includes reading the texts for pleasure, the acquisition of knowledge of the plays for its own sake, and identification with Shakespeare’s characters; all activities encouraged in literature for girls for over a hundred years before Streatfeild. But the “Shoe” novels take the process further into an exciting realm of creative engagement, in which girls act in Shakespeare’s plays on the professional stage, and in doing so, earn prestige, independence and hard cash. Streatfeild’s depiction of girls’ encounters with Shakespeare is innovative: she presented Shakespeare as a force who could improve the lives of girls, facilitating their well-being, independence, and their sense of cultural identity within the family or their social class. They are not lectured by Shakespeare, but liberated.