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Mamillius, The Winter’s Tale, and the Impetus of Fiction A childe is a Man in small Letter, yet the best Copie of Adam before he tasted of Eve, or the apple; and hee is happy whose small practice in the World can only write this Character. Hee is nature’s fresh picture newly drawn in oil, which time, and much handling, dimmes and defaces. —John Earle, Micro-cosmographie (London, 1628) Shakespeare scholars have sometimes associated his late plays with childhood, suggesting that the indifference shown to the canons of probability in The Tempest, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Two Noble Kinsmen expresses a new, childlike indulgence of the poet’s imagination unseen in preceding plays. Depending on how one chooses to group the plays written after 1607—they are still variously referred to as late plays, tragicomedies, and romances—this slide into improbability has different causes.1 The idea of aesthetic regression, however, has lingered around descriptions of the plays, perhaps because critics are still attracted to Edward Dowden’s suggestion, made over a century ago, that Shakespeare deliberately retreats into serenity after having probed the depths during the tragedies and the Roman plays. The late romances, he argues, show the playwright at a more tender remove from his subjects, “bending over those who are like children still absorbed in their individual joys and sorrows.”2 The biographical thrust of Dowden’s argument has since been discredited, but the idea of a childlike late Shakespeare has persisted. Stanley Wells, for example, characterizes the experience of these late plays in self-consciously regressive terms. Tracing the “distinctive” character of the late plays to the prose romances that were popular in the late sixteenth century, he writes that “the full response to the works of the romancers [4] 1. These causes are surveyed in Barbara Mowat, “‘What’s in a Name?’ Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. 4: The Poems, Problem Plays, Late Plays, ed. R. Dutton and J. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2003), 129–49. 2. Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, 4th ed. (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1879), 415. [138] Pretty Creatures comes only when we find ourselves reading for pure pleasure, caught up in the swirl of the story, rapt in wonder and tense with anticipation—reading in fact as children read.”3 There is something of the nineteenth-century gilded view of childhood in this description, even if the purity of childish reading is being affirmed for anti-utilitarian rather than moral reasons. While these readings may seem anachronistic, I think nevertheless that there is a historical case to be made for a childish period in Shakespeare’s work, one that focuses more on the dramaturgical experience of these plays than on the psychic desires that may have generated them. As Mary Ellen Lamb and others have shown, both Shakespeare and his Renaissance audience associated children with fantastic stories—tales filled with precisely the kind of self-contained and so self-sanctioning imaginative excess that was offered by romance action and Jacobean tragicomic plotting.4 Such an association helps us understand the cultural landscape in which these plays were conceived and the poetic work they were understood to do. It will always be possible to link the fantastic qualities of these plays to the court masque or the popularity of tragicomedy at court, but these sources do not explain the almost willfully naive intelligence behind the plays mentioned above, their emphasis, in Barbara Mowat’s words, on “the power of story.”5 By drawing Shakespeare and his late writing into the larger conversation about children and fictional agency in the seventeenth century, I argue that the mannered naivete of the late plays is not so much an expression of authorial regression as it is part of an ongoing attempt by the author to explore the affective force of fiction. Childhood and childishness were central to that project, although not for the biographical or psychological reasons that are often proposed. The closing lines of Duke Theseus from The Two Noble Kinsmen, perhaps the last play that Shakespeare wrote (in collaboration with Fletcher), are emblematic of the role of childhood and childishness in the late plays. Offered at the end of a story that has just been violently deflected from its expected end, the analogy linking the characters in the story with children has a miniaturizing or minimizing effect on the action. O you...

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