Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance. By Michael Witmore. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007; pp. 248. $39.95 cloth (original) (raw)

Theatre Survey, 2009

Abstract

The 1546 anamorphic painting by William Scrots of the nine-year-old Edward Tudor with which Michael Witmore introduces his intriguing study of children and fiction in Renaissance England stands admirably as an emblem of the historical and interpretive work of his book Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance. When viewed from the traditional vantage point directly in front of the painting, the image one sees is doubled: a radically distorted image of the young prince is superimposed on a conventional landscape drafted in standard linear perspective. In this view, the landscape is recognizably “realistic,” while the image of the prince, crafted according to a wholly different perspective, is nearly indecipherable. But once the viewer crosses the room and views the painting obliquely from the right side of the frame, the image of the prince comes instantly into clear and exclusive (or, one might say, royal) focus. Witmore reads the allegory: “With the addition of time and motion, a likeness of Henry’s precious son has taken over the frame” (1). While this allegorical reading of the figure of the child sets the model for Witmore’s readings across a wide range of cultural events and literary texts—royal pageants, children’s theatre, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and witchcraft trials and possessions—it reveals at the same time a deep engagement with critical and methodological concerns in a number of fields, including early modern cultural studies and the history of the child. The great virtue of Witmore’s book is that this anamorphic child—this child viewed from different disciplinary perspectives—snaps into a new clarity with a new urgency. Witmore’s focus on early modern children as an “intermediary species within the kingdom of self-possession” allows them to emerge as figures for both the attractions and dangers of fiction that “were themselves derived from the suspension of adult faculties of reason and prudential self-control” (5). Witmore’s discussion draws upon the seemingly natural abilities of the child for both spontaneous mimicry (mimesis) and imaginative absorption, traits that served to render children ideal embodiments of the powers of fiction and imaginative productions. Witmore’s first chapter offers a historical account of those qualities of child mimicry and absorption that link them to the operations of fiction. To this end, he offers a description of an “anthropology of fictional practice” (24) that emerged from a broad spectrum of ideas, from legal theory to theology, to poetics and Book Reviews

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