Fake News

I was invited to respond, as an early modernist, to two essays on medieval fictionality by Julie Orlemanski and Michelle Karnes. Both writers take issue with Catherine Gallagher's well-known assertion that fiction was "invented" in the early eighteenth century, with the rise of the novel. In "my" period, 16th-17thcentury England, debate raged in the wake of the Protestant Reformation about the relationship of truth to the world of quotidian experience. The truths of Christianity violate everyday expectations, but which disruptions are miraculous and which are frauds is highly contested. Reformers satirize and debunk Catholic rituals and miracles, and Catholics similarly ridicule Protestant beliefs and practices. Which events present themselves as "true" seems to depend upon literary genre and the horizons of plausibility that those genres imply. Shakespeare, I argue, explores issues about truth and fraudulence, and their inextricability from questions of literary genre, with special self-consciousness in his tragicomedies, in particular The Winter's Tale, and also in Othello.