Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (review)

As early as Plato’s Republic, writers have turned to the figure of the child to explain, condemn, or celebrate the power of the imagination. Michael Witmore’s Pretty Creatures provides a compelling explanation for the prominence of this connection between children and fiction in early modern England, “a society that was skeptical of deceit but hungry for fiction” (19). Children, Witmore argues, were perfect metaphors for the agency of fiction not only because they, like the imagination, were seen to lack reason and self-control, but because they seem to absorb fictions so readily and mimic them without deliberation. Through subtle and intelligent readings of child performers in civic pageants, professional stage plays, and witchcraft trials and exorcisms, Witmore demonstrates how children illustrate the uncanny power of fiction to affect audiences, moving emotions from a distance. Although the chapter on The Winter’s Tale is most obviously pertinent to readers of Shakespeare Quarterly, the entire book will be of interest insofar as it contributes much to our understanding of children as performers of and in dramatic fiction, as well as to a broader sense of how theater works on its audiences.

After an introduction that sets out the book’s argument in clear and elegant terms, the first chapter offers a well-researched history of philosophical and religious ideas about children, tracing the development of common-sense lore about children as simple, irrational, given to mimicry, and imaginatively absorbed. Witmore deftly addresses classical and medieval antecedents for these ideas while explaining—through discussion of Reformation writers such as Anthony Munday and Stephen Gosson and humanist scholars such as Roger Ascham—what made early modern England’s connection between childhood and fiction distinctive. Each of the four chapters that follow investigates a “mode . . . of fictional action” that children illustrate: “animation, touch, impetus, and recursion” (15).

Chapter 2 explores the function and effect of animated motion in civic pageantry, focusing on coronation entries of Tudor and Stuart monarchs into London. Witmore challenges prior scholarship that locates the pageant’s efficacy in its magnificent spectacles and sense of grandeur. Instead, he draws our attention to the pageant’s use of motion and sound and its sense of the miniature. With their songs, speeches, and engagements with mechanical contraptions, children synchronized the events’ various elements and participants, bringing the pageant world alive. Child performers thus demonstrate how fiction animates objects, removing them from the “accidents of time and uncertainties of history” (91). Witmore strikes an important balance: he recognizes the ideological conservatism of the coronation pageant without eliding the agency of its child performers, whose power is aligned with that of fiction itself.

The book’s third chapter moves from the civic to the professional stage to investigate the child performer’s association with another mode of fictional agency—touch. To elucidate the way fiction “touches” its audiences, the chapter examines metadrama in children’s company plays. Witmore’s emphasis on the child actor as child positions him to offer a smart twist on this well-trodden theme. The reason, Witmore argues, that metadrama could be so effective in these plays is that the child performer was understood to be “cognitively incomplete” (102) and always, on some level, outside the terms of the fiction he performed. The profoundly metatheatrical inductions of John Marston’s Antonio plays, Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels, and Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle are good choices here. Most interesting, though, is Witmore’s attention to the differences among these playwrights in their approach to the metacommunicative or phatic connection between actor and auditor. For instance, where Marston exploits the child’s penchant for uncontrollable, apish speech in order to display theater’s disruptive nature, Jonson contrasts the mimicry of children with that of adults to harness the theater as a vehicle of social reform. The chapter concludes with a fresh reading of Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, the early theatrical failure...