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 pedagogy, that helped to shape an interrogation of the nature and place of fiction in Renaissance England. This discussion traces these qualities and their consequences through a broad range of philosophical and religious texts. For Renaissance writers, children's mimetic abilities were so powerful precisely because they existed or were exercised in the absence of a fully rational intellect. For English Protestant thinkers, this fact proved to be critical in their efforts to condemn Catholic ritual as childish, even as they attempted “to reconcile the virtues of imaginative play” (57).

Witmore organizes the remaining chapters of his study by means of the detailed and nuanced analysis of four main “modes of fictional action” (15) across a range of cultural spectacles and literary texts: animation in the enactment of civic pageants; touch in the popular children's theatres of the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century; impetus (a concept borrowed from mechanics) and the figure of Mamillius in The Winter's Tale; and recursion in seventeenth-century witchcraft trials and possessions. Witmore's account of early modern children within these contexts is “a story about how the considerable powers of illusion were apportioned downward in a society that was skeptical of deceit but hungry for fiction” (19).

One early modern institution that served as an ideal setting for the production and consumption of fictions was the theatre, and Witmore's chapters devoted to children and Renaissance theatre will be of special interest to scholars of theatre and theatre history. Witmore's third chapter is given over to a meticulous discussion of “Phatic Metadrama and the Touch of Irony in English Children's Theater” of the period, with particular focus on Marston (Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge), Jonson (Cynthia's Revels and Poetaster), and Francis Beaumont (The Knight of the Burning Pestle) and the figuration of the child actors as “representatives of theatrical fiction's power of touch” (96). Similarly, the ensuing discussion in Chapter 4 of the figure of Mamillius in The Winter's Tale allows for a new reading of Shakespeare's “posture toward spontaneity, art, and imitation” (140) that has been rather absent from most criticism of the play and of the playwright more generally.

The standout chapters in this study, however, are those that address civic pageants and witchcraft trials and possessions. Witmore's discussion in Chapter 2 of Elizabeth's coronation pageant of 1559 covers some already familiar territory and depends upon the indispensable work of a number of other critics, especially David Bergeron. But even if this is familiar territory, Witmore's focus on animation enables him to provide new insights, especially on the appearance of child performers in the pageant and their relation to “pageantry's wondrous powers of vivification and motion” (60) and the effect of seemingly spontaneous child action in the pageant as a species of automatization. Witmore's discussion linking these child performers to animated clocks (by such artisans as Thomas Dallum) and to mechanical machines more generally (such as those created by Agostino Ramelli) is especially fascinating. In Witmore's account, the pageant allows us to see forms of monarchy's power that are different from those highlighted by much recent contemporary criticism: “How does the monarch animate the world? In the same way that the imagination animates its objects: by wish and will rather than force and exertion” (91).

Witmore's final chapter, on witchcraft trials and possessions, is the most surprising one in the book, as it brings a new focus on the figure of the child in what we may call the culture of witchcraft in the period and the crucial role played in it by recursion—the power held by both fiction and by lies to propagate themselves. Witmore's argument here is both innovative and compelling. Children as witnesses in witchcraft trials were altogether more than manipulated actors; they were, Witmore argues, “living embodiments of the recursive processes of imitation and mimetic contagion” typically associated with the diabolical (175). Witmore succeeds here—and in the book as a whole—not only in offering a fresh perspective on witchcraft, but also in establishing one of the book's methodological objectives: the critical relocation of the figure of the child beyond “the traditional milieu of the family and school” (25).