Michael Witmore's Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance is a lively exploration of Renaissance “ways of thinking about the dual agency of children and fiction” (19). In what ways, asks Witmore, was fiction assigned a role in the Renaissance conceptual framework of a virtuous society, and how were performing children, “as conduits for forces that manifestly exceeded their immediate powers of physical action” (5), complicit “in changing notions of the agency of fiction that emerged in the skeptical, post-Reformation culture of Renaissance England” (4)?

Pointing to evidence of the close relationship between children and fiction, Witmore juxtaposes early modern concerns regarding the “agency of rhetoric, fiction, and illusion” with wide-ranging examples of the mimetic and imaginative energies children brought to public performances on the stage, in civic pageantry, in Shakespearean drama, and “as witnesses to, or victims of, witchcraft and demonic possession” (18).

Witmore's survey in chapter 1 of the historical associations of children with mimicry, spontaneity, and imaginative absorption feeds into his argument that actions taken by children in certain public performances reflected Renaissance ideas about the functions of fiction. Citing common lore as well as philosophical and religious texts as contributors to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ linking of fiction and children, he also illustrates the variably positive and negative values that might attach to such associations in a range of contexts. Upon this theoretical foregrounding of the obviousness of such associations in the period, Witmore constructs in each of the following chapters, via the concepts of animation, touch, impetus, and recursion, a rich narrative of “how the considerable powers of illusion were apportioned downward in a society that was skeptical of deceit but hungry for fiction” (19).

The manner of fictional agency that Witmore refers to as animation is examined in chapter 2 in the context of early modern civic pageants that marked the entry of a recently crowned monarch into London. Such pageantry's ability to convey with spectacular force the sacred power of the crown relied in large measure on the degree to which the child participants, “as the tiny orchestrators of events of the pageant world,” invoked “the expansive powers of the imagination itself ” (61). The reader is nudged in this chapter to move toward an appreciation of how the “toying model of fictional agency” (94) implied by such performances “provided an analysis … of how the imagination worked and of the forces that set it into motion” (65).

Linking the qualities of children and theater in chapter 3 via linguistic and anthropological theory, Witmore argues that the metadramatic nature of performance in the children's theaters, which provided the boy actors with a multiplicity of ways to stimulate audiences, was negotiated in different ways by playwrights struggling “to think more deliberately about the presence of real bodies in the theater and the effects these bodies might have on the theatrical imagination” (17). The way that Witmore teases out the varying approaches of different playwrights within specific cultural contexts opens the way for a more complex understanding of the performative world of the children's theaters.

Witmore's examination in chapter 4 of the function of Mamillius in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale is the basis for a wider theory of how children may function in Shakespearean drama “to exemplify fiction's self-extending range of action” (145). For Witmore, “the child … is the ultimate metaphor for poetic impetus in the play” (168).

The term recursion, which focuses Witmore's efforts in chapter 5 to account for children roles in demonic possession cases, suggests the processes whereby fictions maintain life and power. All four of the means of fictional agency explored in Pretty Creatures—animation, touch (or presence), impetus, and recursion—are also presented as the means by which children “seemed to extend their powers” in early modern England (208). Insistently provocative and compelling, Pretty Creatures rests upon a complex analogy that some readers may find less useful ultimately than the visual and textual details examined and the intellectually stimulating strands cast forth from an engaging scholarly mind.

Witmore's energetic foray into the Renaissance culture of fiction and the performances of children articulates an original conception of the cultural space occupied by such children and offers a stimulating interpretation and application of the period's theories of mimesis. Pretty Creatures offers innovative tools for looking afresh at the place of children in the complex intellectual matrix of the Renaissance imagination and for understanding how marginal or intermediary entities “(children, lies, imagined worlds, theatrical performances) could nevertheless have real, lasting effects in the world” (11).