Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance 9780801463556

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PRETTY CREATURES

PRETTY CREATURES Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance MICHAEL WITMORE

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Publication of this book was made possible in part by a grant from Carnegie Mellon University. Copyright© 2007 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2007 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Witmore, Michael. Pretty creatures : children and fiction in the English Renaissance I Michael Witmore. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4399-2 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. English literature-Early modern, 1500-1700-History and criticism. 2. Children in literature. 3. Theater and children-England-History-16th century. 4. Theater and children-England-History-17th century. 5. ChildrenEngland-History-16th century. 6. Children-EnglandHistory-17th century. I. Title.

PR428.C44W58 2007 820. 9'28209031-dc22

2007005922

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Note on Modernization Introduction

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1

1

Ut Pueritas Poesis: The Child and Fiction in the English zo Renaissance

2

Animated Children in Elizabeth's Coronation Pageant of 1559 sB

3 Phatic Metadrama and the Touch of Irony in English Children's Theater 95 4 Mamillius, The Winter's Tale, and the Impetus of Fiction 13 7 5 The Lies Children Tell: Counterfeiting Victims and Witnesses in Early Modern English 171 Witchcraft Trials and Possessions Epilogue

Index

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213

Acknowledgments

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arly modern authors often described their books as children, perhaps because both were demanding of their time but ultimately offered a certain kind of hope. The demands of raising this "child" were eased by the generous help of friends, colleagues, students, and a number of institutions. For their reactions, advice, and assistance, I thank William Blake, Gina Bloom, Jonathan Burton, Claire Busse, Kevin Butler, Lorraine Daston, Ewan Fernie, William Galperin, Genevieve Guenther, Selena Beckman-Harned, Jonathan Hope, Andrea Immel, Katie Lynn Jensen, Barbara Johnstone, David Kaufer, James A. Knapp, Peggy Knapp, Edel Lamb, Michael Mascuch, Marianne Novy, Simon Palfrey, Peter Hans Reill, Marie Rutkoski, Scott Sandage, Jonathan Sawday, David John (DJ) Schuldt, Jonathan Sterne, Kristina Straub, Holger Schott Syme, Jennifer Waldron, Julian Yates and Robert Zehmisch. Katherine Eisaman Maus and another (anonymous) reader from Cornell University Press provided invaluable comments while the manuscript was under revision. Unlike the faults of a real children, those remaining in this book should all be laid at the doorstep of its parent, generous assistance from others notwithstanding. I also thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a summer stipend; the Cotsen Children's Library at Princeton and the Carnegie Mellon Department of English for its sponsorship of a conference on early modern children and children's books in April of 2002; and the Shakespeare Association of America for its sponsorship of a panel on Shakespearean Children in 2005. Colleagues in the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies have provided a stimulating community for work in the early periods, and my students and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon have proven once again to be a responsive audience for many of the ideas presented here. I also thank David Thompson, Curator of Horology at the

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Acknowledgments

British Museum, for invaluable advice and for allowing me to examine several pieces in the museum's collection. My greatest thanks go to Kellie Robertson who, while I was researching and writing this book over the last several years, introduced me to the storied glories of London and the pleasures of life in Pittsburgh, both of which I never tire of. With warmth and affection, this book is dedicated to her.

Note on Modernization

W

here I have quoted directly from early modern texts or manuscripts, I have not modernized the spelling. Contractions have been expanded and the modern equivalent for certain letters (v/u, i/j,f!s) provided. For the most part, I have quoted from contemporary editions of plays, although in certain instances I have preferred printed early modern editions. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Shakespeare are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).

PRETTY CREATURES

FIGURE

1.

Edward VI, by William Scrots, 1546, shown as anamorphosis. National Portrait

Gallery, London.

Introduction

W

hen he posed in profile for the portrait opposite, Edward Tudor was nine years old. By almost any measure of age familiar to his elders, the crown prince was still a child, lacking those qualities of reason, policy, and prudence that he would need when he became king scarcely a year later. The strange portrait produced for the Tudor court is a marvel of perspective, its competing vantage points superimposing a radically distorted image on a placid landscape. While it is a wonder of art, the painting is also a visual commentary on the crown prince's fortunes and the age of pueritas, or childhood, in which he was assumed to dwell. "Look at him now," the portrait seems to say, "and you behold a creature unformed." But if the spectator moves to the side of the painting and glances across its surface, the image of a poised, self-confident prince appears. With the addition of time and motion, a likeness of Henry's precious son has taken over the frame, the verdant landscape blurring behind him. As if by a spell or command, the pastoral demesne of childhood has been conjured away. Enter future king. The Flemish painter William Scrots (Guillim Stretes) employed a technique of systematic distortion known as anamorphosis when he created this image for the Tudor court. The technique had already been developed by artists on the Continent as a variation on linear perspective and was familiar in England when Scrots put brush to canvas in 1546. His German predecessor at court, Hans Holbein the Younger, had used anamorphic distortion in his famous portrait The Ambassadors (1533), in which a distorted skull floats disturbingly before two proud courtiers. The metaphysical conceit of Holbein's earlier painting, embedded as it was in the ruse of perspectival manipulation, would not have been lost on those who encountered the large canvas in Whitehall, where it stood for

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Pretty Creatures

FIGURE 2 . Edward VI, by William Scrots, 1546, shown in perspective. National Portrait Gallery, London.

many years. "Remember death," the portrait says. "It looms before you unrecognized." Although he uses this same technique, Scrots seems to be suggesting something quite different with his portrait of Edward Tudor. Here the maxim tends toward the paradoxical: "Time kills, but it ripens too." As the delicate features of the prince are called into life, viewers are thus meant to grasp something not just about perspective but about childhood and its inevitable linkage to time. The structural power of the anamorphic image is a particularly apt metaphor for the ruses of fiction in a world of deceit and, p erhaps more philosophically, for the inevitable failures of art really to be what it pretends

Introduction

[3]

to be. 1 In Scrots's portrait, we see the powers of anamorphosis unleashed once again in the service of metaphysical reflection; the topic is not vanity, however, but the constitutive nature of time in the development of the human being. For in the eyes of many who viewed the painting, a child like Edward was best understood in terms of what he was to become: a self-possessed adult and perhaps someday king. In the late medieval and Renaissance ontologies of age, he and others of a similar age were conspicuously lacking those distinguishing qualities of reason, foresight, and deliberative action that adults were credited with in full measure. Indeed, since antiquity, infancy and childhood had been described as periods in which the human animal lacked all the cognitive attributes of its natural kind. Stepping around the painting over four centuries later, we can still observe the way in which Scrots's portrait engages this view of childhood as temporally incomplete, setting its central figure before us as a foreshortened version of the man Edward would presumably become. In producing this painting of Henry's celebrated offspring, Scrots has begun to explore the deep-what we would now call structural-relationship between the subject of his portrait and the properties of the anamorphic image. Both are in a state of torsion. Both are constitutively incomplete. In art, as also in life, that which appears unfinished begs completion, and it is the aim of the anamorphic image to move its viewer across the room and give meaning to that motion. The charm of viewing this portrait of Edward, which today stands in the center of the Tudor room of the National Portrait Gallery, comes from seeing the profile freed from its lateral acceleration, in witnessing-as one walks around the frame-the "surprise of intelligibility" as the front and back of the image snap into place. 2 That act of resolving the anamorphic projection is one of vivification, a motive form of enargeia (the classical rhetorical term for vividness) that brackets the illusion of receding space while suggesting another vantage point from which that illusion can be grasped as a fiction. What viewers marvel at in such an image is its apparent agency-its ability to bring to life that which, strictly speaking, is inert. Borrowing a phrase from W. J. T. Mitchell, we might say that the painting "wants" to be seen: even though it is composed of inorganic matter, it seems nevertheless to possess a moving intelligence, one that guides and anticipates its viewer's movements around the room. 3 Indeed, there is something in the portrait's power to animate and vivify 1. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 17-21, and Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). 2. The phrase was coined in another context by Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 7· 3· W. J. T. Mitchell, "What Do Pictures Really Want?" October 77 (1996): 71-82.

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its child-subject that confirms the Tudor iconoclasts' worst anxieties about the seductive power of images. Like other self-conscious, self-consuming artifacts produced in the sixteenth century, Scrots's painting embodies the idea that images, fictions, and other products of the imagination have their own power to act and move, even if the nature and scope of that power are uncertain. Thus while Edward's representatives were energetically destroying sacred images of saints-an iconoclastic program that was, as we will see in the next chapter, justified on the grounds that such images made their viewers bow to and idolize mere images of human beings in "childish" submission-Scrots was producing a self-legitimating icon for the head of state, legitimating because one could credit its moving power to a visual technique (and a rather fashionable one at that) rather than some soul-snaring diabolical ruse. Scrots saw something in the face of Edward that we, in our postFoucauldian concern with the adult ironies of power, have failed to grasp. His painting suggests that children and the products of the imagination are kin, and that the ways of the one provide clues to the apparent mysteries of the other. The goal of this book is to elaborate this kinship and pinpoint its causes in changing notions of the agency of fiction that emerged in the skeptical, post-Reformation culture of Renaissance England. For it was in this environment, I will argue, that the capacity of both children and fiction to act in the world without themselves being deliberate actors became startlingly clear. This kinship of children and fiction was nowhere more visible than in the public spectacles that regularly placed child performers at the center of adult attention in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To the extent that Renaissance writers and audiences were anxious about the power of fiction to advance or obfuscate divine and experiential truths-anxieties that were magnified by Reformers' claims that the rituals of the old faith were a collection of foolish (but unnervingly powerful) acts of make-believe-they could glimpse in the actions of child performers a foreshortened image of that other, more unaccountable form of action that fiction and feigning introduced into the world. Such unaccountable forms of action were fascinating precisely because they did not spring from a culturally intelligible "doer" who could be decisively credited with a comparably deliberate "deed." By comparing the strange force of imaginative fictions to the apparently spontaneous antics of children, Renaissance writers hit upon an analogy that-like the better-known comparison of fiction making with conjuring-helped explain the way in which the products of the imagination could be both potent and inscrutable. An alter ego to the Renaissance magus, the child performer summoned powers that were more subtle or insensible than the usual causes governing action in everyday life. Such powers were not so much occult as occluded, a categorical leftover within a system that assigned practical and moral

Introduction

[5]

agency only to individuals who could originate their own actions through rational deliberation. 4 An intermediary species within the kingdom of self-possession, children could illustrate the fundamental pleasures and dangers of fictional diversion because those pleasures and dangers were themselves derived from the suspension of adult faculties of reason and prudential self-control. But the analogy of children and fiction did not rest only on their similar modes of action. The charge of such performances lay also in the child's apparent kinship with the very substance of imaginative creation itself. Physically slight and fine of feature, children seemed to be stamped from a preternaturally flexible medium, one that-like the stuff of imaginationwas subject to its own kind of physics, indifferent to the brute necessities of matter and motion. On the stages of the newly professionalized theater companies, on the streets of London's civic pageants, and in the ecclesiastical and judicial venues that were set up to investigate claims of witchcraft and demon possession, children took center stage as conduits for forces that manifestly exceeded their immediate powers of physical action. Because they could not impose their will on the physical world of things, the subordinate status of children within the social and developmental hierarchy made them, in their very being, the perfect metaphor for the quasi-metaphysical operations of imaginative fiction-for its capacity to do things to the mind and will with just a feather's touch of friction. That capacity for action at a distance was particularly fascinating to Renaissance writers because it could be found nearly everywhere. The pervasive reach of fictional "making" as a material practice, social ritual and imaginative exercise made it, in the words of Ronald Levao, a "fully ambiguous intellectual resource" in the Renaissance-a resource that was engaged in activities as diverse as lying or dissimulation to stage playing and "feigning" to the mutually acknowledged "imposture" that was associated with rhetorical display. 5 The sense that children were still fresh with the paint of creation made them "prettie creatures" in a number of senses proper to these words as they were used in the period. The term "prettie," for example, was regularly applied both to children and their behavior in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, somewhat as the words "cute" and "precious" are used today. 6 But "prettie" was not simply a term for diminutive beauty,

4· On the larger question of the "fictional" assignment of agency in early modern England, see Luke Wilson, Theaters of Intention: Drama and the Law in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1-67. 5· Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney and Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), xxii. 6. Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd ed., s.v. "pretty," def. 4.a-c.

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nor was it a marker of incipient sexuality, as our post-Freudian lexicon might suggest. Rather, it was a term that signified a degree of learned sophistication, both a capacity for artful contrivance and a state of having been so contrived (as, for example, one might say that a garden was "prettie" because it had been laid out in such a way as to invite admiration)? To call a child "prettie" was thus to draw attention to his or her capacity to reproduce, nearly automatically, adult expressions and behaviors in diminutive form. The adjective implied that mimesis became art when it occurred on a smaller scale. A pretty child was a living example of what the contemporary critic Susan Stewart has identified as the miniature's unique ability to bear the signature of artistic creation, its ability to "present a diminutive, and thereby manipulable, version of experience."8 Alongside this association with artfulness was a biological sense of the child's incomplete humanity and dependency on higher powers such as parents or the divine maker. Thus, the term "creature" was used regularly to connote the child's primitive lack of those essential predicates of reason and self-possession that the Tudor and Stuart gerontocracies reserved for adult males. Like women in the period, children were more likely to be called "creatures" because of their perceived exclusion from, or dependence on, the patriarchal and divine sources of order around them. 9 By reminding readers of the earlier connotations of these words, I hope to suggest more precisely why Renaissance child performers delighted or terrified audiences who witnessed their actions. Such words suggest that children were appreciated simultaneously for their "cunnyng" and (what seems to us a contradiction) for their unpremeditating "simplicity." At their most powerful, the children in this book were every bit as rhetorically sophisticated as their adult courtier counterparts; their lack of guile, however, was sometimes more convincing. Not only did children possess the cardinal poetic virtue of mimesis in spades, but they also had a prodigious capacity for deep absorption in imagined worlds. This twin capacity for spontaneous mimicry and imaginative absorption made the child one of the paradigmatic producers and consumers of fiction in the Renaissance, a speaking counterpart to the ape that H. W. Jansen argued was so central to the iconography of art and artistic creation in Renaissance painting. 10 By recovering this 7· Ibid., def. 2.b. 8. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 69. 9· OED, s.v. "creature," def. 2.a; 3.b. Shakespeare refers to the weeping Lucretia and her maid as "pretty creatures" (l. 1233) in The Rape of Lucrece, for example, at a point where both are being represented as unable to initiate action on their own. See The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 10. H. W. Jansen, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1952).

Introduction

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deep association of children with mimesis and imaginative absorption, we learn that Renaissance writers and audiences saw a powerful, almost symmetrical connection between the creation of fictions, which in children was understood to be nearly spontaneous, and the consumption of those fictions, which was natural in the child but potentially regressive in the adult. As native experts in both ends of the counterfeiting process-the imaginative feigning of reality on the one hand, and the credulous reception of such imaginary confections on the other-children could lend an air of innocence to traffic in fictions, particularly when the whole process seemed exempt from adult interests and passions. A large part of children's symbolic appeal during this period grew, in fact, out of a sense that they were agents without interests, that they could take action with energy and passion, but that all such actions had somehow been exempted from the constraining forces of reason, deep-seated desire, and conscience. This quality of exemption meant that children could appear charming and unaffectedly elegant in some circumstances, a quality that was played up in civic pageantry and in the drama of the children's theater companies, or dangerously receptive to adult manipulation and fantasies, a possibility that led some to shake their heads in disbelief when children claimed to have witnessed witchcraft or to have been possessed by demons. In describing child performers as agents without interests and then associating their odd form of action with the moving power of feigned realities in the Renaissance, I may appear in this book to be working toward a Kantian aesthetic avant la lettre. 11 There is certainly some similarity here between the "purposeful purposelessness" of, say, one of Kant's beautiful painted flowers and the unaffected vivacity of the performing child, a being who, according to the collective wisdom of the period, was in childhood still a member of the animal kingdom and therefore of nature-that all-important preserve of Kantian beautyY But to see the child performer as the embodiment of something like disinterested beauty in Renaissance spectacles is to miss a profound difference between Renaissance aesthetics-which embraced the openly instrumental ethos of rhetoric and pedagogy-and its Kantian or Romantic counterparts, which tended to distinguish objects that were contemplated disinterestedly for their beauty from those that were pursued for sensual pleasure or an instrumental purpose. 13 For the writers, actors and audiences treated in this 11. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), §2. 12. Ibid., §16. In this respect, children are eminently imaginable objects and may, because of their diminutive form and actions, have a certain vivifying force in the imagination. On the particular powers of certain types of imagined objects, see Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). 13. Genevieve Guenther proposes the term "instrumental aesthetics" for this sensibility in Renaissance literature and culture, one I find quite apt. See her essay, "Spenser's Magic,

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book, the automatism of the child-his or her immersion in the realm of spontaneity and concomitant removal from the realm of rational or practical judgment-was a powerful analogue of fiction's power because it provided flexible ways of thinking about the relationship between artifice and action, not because it removed imagination from the realm of interest and calculation. A recurring theme of this book is that the child-fiction analogy signifies both enthusiasm and anxiety about the ways in which various forms of interest (political, libidinal, spiritual, diabolical) could be extended or even spontaneously reproduced through various instruments in the world, including living "instruments" like children, an engagement that expressed the culture's broad fascination with the nature of "means" and "instrumentalities." 14 The Renaissance taste for spectacles made up of seemingly automatic or spontaneous actions-for spectacles, like those examined in the following chapters, that were carried along by "pretty creatures" who seemed to act without extended deliberation in machinelike or reflex fashion-was not an anticipation of Kantian aesthetics or any of its descendants, but an expression of the deep Renaissance appreciation for the vastness of instrumentality in all its obvious and subtle forms. It was this subtle form of instrumentality with which children were most often associated, and this capacity for subtle action was credited to fiction and counterfeiting in statements about the products of the imagination during the period. Consider, for example, the way in which the proverbial "cunning lies" of Satan were represented during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when a significant number of children across England claimed to be speaking for devils that had been sent by witches to torment them. To those who believed that the devil had actually commandeered the bodies of such children, the child was viewed as a puppet who had somehow become subject to Satan's will. The proper therapy was to repossess the body of that child from his or her diabolical usurper, either through prayer and fasting or, if one was Catholic, through the formal rite of exorcism. This public process of dispossession, itself a highly theatrical affair in which the devil's lies were sometimes energetically refuted, drew the attention of London authorities in the late 1590s, at precisely the time when the children's theater companies-the Children of Paul's and the Children of the Chapel-were having some of their greatest successes on the London stage. These ecclesiastical authorities, wary of the disruptions

or Instrumental Aesthetics in the 1590 Faerie Queene," English Literary Renaissance 36, no. 2 (2006): 194-226.

14· Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1-2, makes the case that this interest spread across the realms of rhetoric, politics, theater, and, most explicitly, the discourse of machines in the English Renaissance.

Introduction

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caused by such spectacles, claimed that the children were "counterfeiting" possession in shabby little theatrical "interludes" that were presided over by exorcists, something that the children could do nearly spontaneouslysometimes with no overt coaching-because they were natural mimics and would succumb to the symptoms of possession by merely hearing about them. When such "scholars" (so called because child actors were traditionally drawn from grammar or choir schools) were isolated from their exorcists, they often confessed to shamming, as was the case with thirteenyear-old John Smythe, who under interrogation by King James in 1616 confessed to a "Deceit" in which he foamed at the mouth and pretended to know Greek and Latin with no training in either. 15 What was to some an example of the devil's astonishing work in a surrogate was to others an example of how easily children could be duped into believing lies (here, about the reality of possession) that were circulating among adults. In either case, the child was an instrument, reactive to the point that he or she might at any moment take hold of an idea regardless of its truth and live it with terrifying conviction. This childish capacity for nearly automatic, reflexlike action would, in the Renaissance discourse of witchcraft and possession, serve to illustrate fiction's ability to jump from one body to the next, perpetuating itself and its powers in creatures who lacked the experience or reason to evaluate and then suppress its appeals. The obverse of this strange power of automatic continuation, a testament to the diabolical cunning of all really good lies, was the capacity of fiction for touch and affection, one that was foregrounded in the performances of the children's theater companies and in civic pageantry. 16 In the case of children's theater companies active around the turn of the seventeenth century, the capacity for touch seems to have been associated with the diminutive bodies of the performers, particularly in plays that were performed entirely by children rather than by a mixture of children and adolescents (as was the case during the years following James's installation as monarch). This aesthetics of touch, one that exploited moments of metadramatic awareness of the child's body on stage, was carefully nurtured in the children's companies who put it to devastating

15. I treat this and other cases of counterfeit possessions in chapter 5· The case of Smythe, the "Boy of Leicester," appears in Francis Osborne, A miscellany of sundry essayes, paradoxes, and problematicall discourses ... (London: John Grismond, 1659), 6-g. After his confession, Smythe traveled the country with James on his royal progress, "Where upon a Small Entreaty, He would repeat all his Tricks often times in a Day" (8). r6. The tendency of Renaissance artists to see touch, particularly the fashioning touch of the artist, as a metaphor for the power of rhetorical figures or artistic productions to act materially upon the world is described by Lynn Enterline, "Afterword: Touching Rhetoric" in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 243-54.

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use in the service of satire. The haptic rhetoric surrounding descriptions of the children's "jests" in these plays-they are regularly described as "stinging," "cracking" and "biting"-suggests that these companies used the spectator's awareness of child actors' bodies in novel, sometimes quite arresting ways. Alongside these more bracing fictions we can stand the almost celestial spectacles of civic pageantry as it was practiced in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, using child orators and singers to create a charmed universe for the monarch upon his or her entrance to the City. Here the manner of touch between fiction and spectator was metaphysical instead of sensible, with children acting as cherublike guardians of the illusion, extending the limits of a self-contained world through an enclosing envelope of song, verse, and synchronized motion. The entire world of London was miniaturized in such spectacles, making physical coercion unnecessary and the slightest monarchical gesture an almost cosmic force of its own. Subtlety, embodied in the miniaturized pageant world and the delicate "prettiness" of its child inhabitants, translated into access to the public imagination and perhaps even the royal will. The continued appearance of the language of force, mechanics, touch, motion, and action throughout the various chapters of this book reflects a conviction that Renaissance artists and writers were just as interested in taking the measure of fiction in terms of causes and effects as they were in studying its symbolic or hermeneutic meanings. Such terms might seem more appropriate to the study of celestial mechanics or kinesthetics, lively Renaissance subjects in their own right, but they are particularly suited to the study of children's performances because these actors seemed to have powers of action that exceeded their diminutive physical presence. Figuratively speaking, children were masters of what Renaissance philosophers occasionally referred to as "subtle motion," an ability to act or move something based on an agent's fineness rather than its great size or magnitude of motion. It is well known that Renaissance theories of music and poetry praised the ability of refined or harmonious sounds to penetrate the senses and move the spirit in ways that less refined ones could not-a testament to the complexity of sensation or, in some instances, the supersubtle substance of the soul and its passions. 17 This principle seems to have informed at least one of the aesthetics that evolved around children's performances in the period, the assumption being that the fineness or artifice apparent in their actions and physiognomy gave them an almost 17. On the significance of such widely discussed theories, as explicated in works such as Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, 1621 ), 3 72-74, and Thomas Hoby's translation of Baldesar Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (London: Thomas Creede, 1603), C5v, see Linda Austern, Music in English Children's Drama of the Later Renaissance (Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992), 167-69.

Introduction

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physical power to beguile the senses and reason. As living ambassadors for the realm of the imagination, then-creatures of the threshold who could shuttle the emotions across the passepartout or frame of a publicly exhibited work-children represented the ideal of frictionless transport into and out of counterfactual worlds. 18 Like the child Mamillius who whispers a winter's tale to his mother, the pretty artifice of childish feigning could become a symbol for the powers of art to pass through doors that otherwise remained closed, illustrating the capacity of all refined products of art to dissolve the obstacles (resentment, jealousy, guilt, avarice, skepticism, time) that impeded imaginative or passionate engagements with fictions. The texts and spectacles analyzed in this book should thus be taken to represent disparate parts of what was a broader, largely unformalized ontology of fiction, one sufficiently complex to explain how entities whose very being was marginal or intermediary (children, lies, imagined worlds, theatrical performances) could nevertheless have real, lasting effects in the world. The paradox of creating powerful effects from marginal meanswhat was, in essence, the paradox of techne, or the machine-held broad appeal to English writers and artists, leading them to embrace both abstract and physical terms in their analysis of how fictions work. 19 In trying to bridge this gap between the metaphysical and the concrete in my own study, I have made departures both from traditional studies of the history of childhood and from some of the techniques and assumptions at work in contemporary studies of Renaissance literature and culture. A few words about these departures are necessary before I go on to introduce the chapters of the book whose broad themes I have already touched on above.

There is a certain brand of reproductive sentimentality that can sometimes make the scholarly study of children and culture of childhood seem somewhat trifling, idle, even childish. This contemporary cultural sensibility, whose persistence only exacerbates what is already a longstanding post-Romantic exhaustion with the figure of the child, is one of the reasons why "serious" discussions of children and their place in Renaissance or early modern culture have tended to stress their place in larger structures such as the family or educational institutions rather than 18. The crucial role of the frame in aesthetics is addressed, in another context, by Jacques Derrida in his The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 6o-75. 19. Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature, 8.

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their successes as actors or performers. 20 Since the publication of Philippe Aries's seminal work, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l' ancien regime (1960 ), it has become fashionable to debate exactly when and how childhood became a widely accepted concept, with opinion in the last decades turning against Aries's claim that the Middle Ages lacked a viable conception of childhoodY The move to historicize childhood itself has not, however, significantly altered the general impression, at least in studies of the English Renaissance, that the marginalization of children in this patriarchal, gerontocratic society meant that their cultural achievements were similarly marginal. I mention this fact because the notion of cultural achievement leads us to some very difficult questions about how a study of children in the Renaissance might adequately come to terms with the presence of this disproportionately large segment of its members-in the mid-sixteenth century nearly 40 percent of the population was under the age of ISentirely by means of current analytics of ideology, practice, or power. 22 If we focus specifically on those children who played the role of performers in this culture, whether as child actors in "pretty" shows like civic pageants or demon-possessed victims in terrifying spectacles like exorcisms, we miss something crucial if we take their limited agency and cultural authority as evidence of their merely instrumental subservience to various sorts of disciplinary or regulative cultural mechanisms. Once we say that child performers and, by extension, Renaissance fictions, were invested with the apparent capacity to act in the world without themselves being governed by some self-regulating force of interest, we cannot then insist that the actions of these wayward "agents" were nevertheless fully comprehended within the agonistic play of interests in the larger culture. 23 The crucial cultural phenomenon to be explained here is not the reality or ideological illusion of childish innocence with respect to adult aims and 20. Philippe Aries, L'enfant et Ia vie familiale sous !'ancien regime (Paris: Pion, 1960). On the fortunes and interpretations of Aries's ideas in contemporary studies of children, see Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore, "Little Differences: Children, Their Books, and Culture in the Study of Early Modern Europe," editors' introduction to Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-18oo (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1-18. 21. Aries's book appeared in English as Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. R. Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962). 22. Examples of such approaches are cited below. On population see Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 15. In this book I take the terminus of childhood to be fourteen years of age for boys, twelve for girls, for reasons explained in chapter 1. 23. In treating fictions as agents capable of advancing or withdrawing from cultural interests, I am taking my cue from the work of Bruno Latour and, more recently, Julian Yates, both of whom insist on the power of nonliving entities such as objects and representations to acquire limited forms of agency in social situations. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13-15, and Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), chap. 1.

Introduction

[13]

schemes-nor, by extension, the autonomy of fictions with respect to sociopolitical pressures. Rather, we have to understand why this culture was fascinated by precisely those fictions and spectacles-apotheosized in the performances of children-whose signifying agents seemed exempt from, rather than opposed to, the interests that formed the basis of its governing ideology. The difference between seeming exemption from interests and a more deliberate opposition to them is important here, since the former implies a space of play within the larger cultural field that both fiction and children were sometimes thought to enjoy. The Foucauldian analytic of power is at once too crude and too refined an approach with which to understand this will to play, not because the analytic fails to recognize the central role of seemingly marginal subjects (it clearly does), but because the analysis itself tends to concentrate on structures that are either exhaustingly large or infinitesimally small, a preference that follows from the belief that power manifests itself at the extreme ends of a tectonic/microscopic divide. 24 The trifling interests and actions of children do not really register on either end of this sublime continuum, and as the analysis unfolds in subsequent chapters, I hope to show that the Renaissance appreciation of the trifling aspect of children's performances-and by analogy, certain types of fictional diversion-could not be reduced to the proliferation of various forms of governmentality or the recuperative/ exclusionary scaffolding of classical reason. 25 (Cases of child demonic possession are the exception, although here, too, it is possible to see the subjection of the child within the power /knowledge regime of witchcraft prosecutions failing to exhaust the will to play embodied in an apparently nondeliberating subject.) Such an aesthetics of the trifling is also at odds with the terms of the subversion-containment model that has been used to provide political readings of public celebrations and spectacles in Renaissance

24. Foucault's enduring preference for analyses that juxtapose extremes of scale is aptly described by Mitchell Dean, who characterizes the objects of Foucauldian government as occupying "a massive domain between the minutiae of individual self-examination, self-care, and self-reflection, and the techniques and rationalities concerned with the governance of the state." See Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology (New York: Routledge, 1994), 176-77. 25. Children thus have something in common with what Naomi Schor has analyzed under the heading of the "ornamental" or the "detail": all are endowed with some kind of purpose that is apparent on the level of an integrated whole (the spectacle, the work), but they are themselves, in Schor's words, "definalized," withdrawn from purpose as agents in and of themselves. See Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 29. For a study of the trivial and ornamental in the Renaissance that focuses more deliberately on their role in fashioning subjectivity, see Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

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studies. 26 Child performers were not necessarily admired in the spirit of carnivalesque, Falstaffian excess or as representatives of some collective, hierarchy-inverting grotesque when they performed in public. Their usurping role in the public sphere, if that is what it was, was certainly an inversion of developmental hierarchies, but it did not signify exclusively or even primarily in the arena of collective power struggles. Rather, child performers were culturally significant because they offered an oblique commentary on how the world and its flesh-bound contingencies could be charmed, usurped, or set in clocklike motion by an animating imagination. In making the case for the metafictional appeal of certain types of children's performance, I am not trying to resurrect an ideal realm of pure aesthetic play for analysis; rather, my aim is to show that analytical rubrics like "power" and "subversion" fail to explain the extent of this period's interest in public forms of interest-negating diminutive play. This is not to say that spectators were unaware of the ulterior motives that might inform "pretty" performances by children; they only had to look for the schoolmaster in the wings or the monarch in the audience to see that there were other, larger forces being brought to bear on such performances. What gave those audiences pleasure, however, was the way in which these childish spectacles seemed deliberately to withdraw from the calculating realms of sectarian, civic, and royal authority. Such a withdrawal had its own political consequences, but those consequences are unintelligible when we divide child actors from the deeper interests they served, winnowing the trifling aspects of these spectacles from the adult concerns they clearly were meant to engage. As a counterpoint, then, to more recent work that has shown how power and political interests managed to shape even the most innocent forms of imaginative play in the Renaissance, I have tried to understand how certain Renaissance fictions involving children generated a withdrawal effect that had its own mechanisms and consequences for the period as we understand it. In doing so I have chosen to focus on two types of evidence: entertainments or public displays in which children played a prominent public role, and texts that employed images of children and ·childhood to explore the nature of fiction and imaginative life. In some cases-for example, civic pageantry and the children's theater companies-my choice of subject will be obvious since the prominence of children in these events is well known. In another-the study of child witnesses and victims of witchcraft and possession-my choice 26. On the political dynamics of subversion or transgression and its containment for political ends, see Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and Peter Stallybrass and Allan White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

Introduction

[15]

may be less obvious as there has been far less attention paid to the stylized roles played by children in these public events and the connection of such performances to larger debates about the nature of fiction. These "performances" are every bit as theatrical, however, as the more familiar child entertainments of the period. William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, finally, is given its own chapter because it stands as one of the most focused explorations of the nature of fiction-its childish irrationality and unthinking potency-produced in the period. Taken together, the performances of children in the subject-specific chapters that follow will serve to illustrate four distinct modes of fictional action, modes that I have identified as animation, touch, impetus, and recursion. An overview of the arguments contained in each chapter will be helpful at this point, since as a foursome these modes represent an abstracted anatomy of fiction and its powers of action in English Renaissance culture. To ground this fourfold analysis historically, we begin in Chapter 1 with a historical survey of the child's association with mimicry, spontaneity, and imaginative absorption-qualities that are often connected with the production of fictions and their effects on those who entertain them. Here I will be arguing that specific actions taken by children in public spectacles reflected equally specific ideas about how fiction worked and, more important, what purposes it ought to serve. Such an approach assumes that the link between children and fiction was obvious in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an obviousness that was reinforced in common lore but also in philosophical and religious texts. On the philosophical side of the equation, Renaissance fiction makers and consumers inherited a long-standing tendency within philosophical debates about fiction (beginning with Aristotle and Plato) of associating mimesis with childish mimicry, an association that relied upon the notion that children might be virtuoso repeaters of what they had seen and heard precisely because their actions were not governed by reason: such actions sprang from the organic soul (which humans were thought to share with animals) rather than the intellective one. This association was both drawn from, and contributed to, a body of popular intuitions about children and childhood that constituted a complementary reservoir of anthropological common sense by the Middle Ages-for example the belief that children were without guile, were captive to their immediate appetites, were sexually naive, or were the epitome of improvidence. These perceived traits were so powerfully ingrained in popular and learned discourse that the child, although sometimes more "adult" in fact than in theory, became an exemplary figure for all that humans lack when they are stripped of reason and experience. As such, this proverbial child became a trope in arguments about the proper place of literacy and images throughout the later Middle Ages and, more decisively during the

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sixteenth century, in the conflicts over religious practices that marked the unfolding of the Protestant Reformation. Indeed, conflict around the legitimacy of Catholic ecclesiastical rituals and liturgical practices had the effect of cementing the link between children and fiction around the middle of the sixteenth century. As Catholics and, later, moderate Anglicans were attacked by radical reformers for their "childish" indulgence in dubious rituals and their perceived submission to "popery" or "puppetry," a specifically childish form of imaginative absorption became the symptom or liability of those who succumbed to fiction's devious appeal. Childish mimicry, which represented an extension of that absorption into the realm of unthinking action, would also illustrate the most damning effects of fiction on its audience-its unregulated agency in the world-even if in other contexts (such as the theater) mimetic repetition could be made to signify more salutary forms of play and recreation. Chapter 2 explores the first mode of fictional agency-animation-by providing an analysis of Tudor and early Stuart coronation entries into London, a genre of elaborate public display that, on the eve of a monarch's coronation, employed grammar and choir "scholars" in elaborate pageants set throughout the City. Such pageants made children into living parts of a musical clockwork-a spectacle that placed the monarch at the center of a quasi-animistic heterocosm in which all forms of motion were a coordinated form of praise. As the moving parts of a larger machine, child performers drawn from the choir schools would have reminded spectators of the charmed worlds of Renaissance automata and monumental clocks-instances of living architecture that themselves incorporated mechanical children to achieve their effects. This insistence on automated or seemingly self-eventuating action was not simply a visual or aural phenomenon but a verbal one, since the conditions of address throughout such pageants emphasized the performative power of the child's words to bring about a new state of affairs in the realm. This first study of civic pageantry, then, will provide us an opportunity to think about the ways in which fiction was understood to animate objects that had taken residence in the imagination, in effect removing them from the accidents of time and experience. Such a movement was politically important to new monarchs as they crossed the threshold of the City, since it reserved not just the transcendental powers of divinity-hedged monarchy but the space of the transcendental itself for the new king or queen who stood above time and its vicissitudes. Chapter 3 illustrates the fictional power of touch through an exploration of various forms of meta dramatic communication in several plays written for the children's companies by John Marston, Ben Jonson, and Francis Beaumont. Here I will be focusing on the sensuous exposure of the child's speaking body in a series of highly self-referential dramas that premiered

Introduction

[17]

soon after the children's company reopened for commercial playing in 1599. I will argue that each playwright used the presence of children on stage to express a particular view on the role fiction ought to play in the world. More so than others writing for the children's companies, Marston, Jonson, and later Beaumont were alive to the associations that accompanied children on stage (for example, their proverbial apelike imitative powers) and made reference to these qualities in the spoken dialogue of the plays. More important, each knew that the presence of the child's body was a crucial fact of the theatrical situation, serving as the phenomenal foundation for what we might now call (dipping into the vocabularies of linguistics and anthropology) the phatic level of contact that obtains between performer and auditor in the theater. This capacity for theatrical fiction to touch its auditor and then call attention to that capacity for touch was a key dramaturgical feature of children's drama-a genre that was itself distinguished by its excess of pre- or extracommunicational modes of exchange. Indeed, all these dramatists had to find ways of managing this tendency of children's theater to produce an excess of phatic contact, a danger that (like an unruly live animal on stage) forced them to think more deliberately about the presence of real bodies in the theater and the effects these bodies might have on the theatrical imagination. Chapter 4 explores another mode offictional agency, impetus, by adapting this concept from medieval mechanics, where it refers to a moving body's acquired power of motion, and applying it to the dramaturgical structures of Shakespearean romance, specifically The Winter's Tale. Perhaps more than any other play in the Shakespearean corpus, The Winter's Tale investigates the nature of mimetic making by staging various forms of resemblance (for example, that of father to son, sculpture to model) in order to chart their effects on various spectators. Here I will be discussing the ways in which both the individual child character, Mamillius, and The Winter's Tale as literary artifact are charged with a particular impetus or durative power of signification that Shakespeare associated with the power of certain objects to continue their motion through space beyond the reach of a guiding hand. Mamillius's significance within the larger debates about artistic creation that swirl around the play are thus best grasped by examining what the boy does rather than what he says or knows. Dramaturgically speaking, his role is to carry the story, to tell the "sad tale" that's "best for winter" in some nonspace outside the play. Aligned as it is with both the origin of the narrative and its mode of continuation, the boy's role can thus fruitfully be compared with that of other errant objects in the late romances-Imagen's ring, Perdita's tokens, Iachimo's trunk, Thaisa's coffin-all of which are endowed with some kind of crucial, but also uncomprehending, force of movement that carries the story forward. In serving as both the encompassing medium for the narrative

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and a character within it, Mamillius becomes an answer to a set of questions that Shakespeare's plays posed throughout his career. How can one account for theatrical fiction's self-perpetuating power of action? How can something that is made of nothing live when its originating source is gone? What kind of object is a play and how might its substance bear the print of the faculty that created it? In the actions of Mamillius, I conclude, Shakespeare may have glimpsed the nature of his own fiction's essentially automatic mode of self-perpetuation, its alliance with forces that could be called neither deliberate nor comprehending but rather necessary, like the blind impetus that carries an object through space. My fifth and final chapter explores the singular power of fictions and lies to propagate themselves through a process of recursion, one that was particularly apparent in the exploits of children who stood as witnesses to, or victims of, witchcraft and demonic possession during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In such cases, the child's status as unreasoning witness or victim made him or her the perfect conduit for diabolical action; indeed, in children, possession could be seen to spread readily, usually after a given child had heard about other cases of possession through witnesses or print. One needed only to represent the devil's actions to a child to find a child who was ready to represent the devil. Possession thus spread in a kind of contagious, self-proliferating mimesis, a multiplication algorithm in which the mere act of imitating or repeating the actions of the devil in one victim effectively reproduced those actions in another. Somewhat like print itself, child demoniacs and witnesses were a living medium for diabolism's recursive intensification, a free press on which Satan could print reams of subtle lies. The process was diabolical for two reasons, first because it pitted these children against both themselves and members of their families, sequestering them in a sort of psychic box where the authority of the body and its ungovernable actions were impossible to challenge. (As one skeptic remarked, children became susceptible to demonic possession the moment they began to think about it actively; once fear had made children "suspect themselves," the devil's work was essentially done.) More important, the supposition of feigning or deceit-ubiquitous when dealing with the archfiend-could never be shaken, even if the feigning in question was revealed to be that of the mischievous child. For when children were discovered to be faking or shamming and confessed to the imposture (not an uncommon occurrence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries), there was no way to demonstrate that their confessions were not themselves lies prompted by the devil, a recursive logic that made the possibility of continued demonic influence empirically impossible to disprove. The history of the devil's power as witnessed by the child in this period is thus not simply a chronicle of religious and social strife

Introduction

[19]

but also, just as vitally, a backhanded encomium to the self-instantiating power of the Renaissance imagination. In focusing on these four ways of thinking about the dual agency of children and fiction-their shared capacities for animation, touch, impetus, and recursion-I hope to illuminate what was ultimately theRenaissance's pervasive concern with the role of fiction in a virtuous society and the attributes that legitimated whatever role it was finally assigned. Such attributes could be glimpsed in real children but only in the presence of a prior interpretation of the privations of youth and-what was new in the Renaissance context-a heightened self-consciousness about the unregulated agency of rhetoric, fiction and illusion. By examining how these very adult concerns with feigning and imposture were transferred onto a marginalized but highly visible social group, I will be attempting, like the anamorphic portraitist, to show how the center and periphery were interrelated. The story of these "prettie creatures" is, in the last analysis, a story about how the considerable powers of illusion were apportioned downward in a society that was skeptical of deceit but hungry for fiction. Children occupied a unique place in that society, acquiring an unpredictable form of symbolic power that they would exercise for as long as fiction cast its playing shadows on everyday life.

[1] Ut Pueritas Poesis THE CHILD AND FICTION IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

They have certain childish processions, wherein are carried about certain puppets, made for their Lady, and some boy that is better clerk than his fellows goes before them with words of the Popish Litany; where the rest of the fry following make up the quire. -WILLIAM BEDELL, letter to Mr. Adam Newton, dean of Durham, giving an account of the state of religion in Venice, January 1, 1607/8 For the third vice or disease of learning, which concerneth deceit or untruth ... is of all the rest the foulest ... For as the verse noteth, Percontatorem fugito, nam garrulus idem est [Shun the inquisitive man, for he is a babbler], an inquisitive man is a prattler, so upon the like reason a credulous man is a deceiver: as we see it in fame, that he that will easily believe rumours will as easily augment rumours and add somewhat to them of his own; which Tacitus wisely noteth, when he saith, 'Fingunt simul creduntque' [Those who are prone to invent are also prone to believe], so great an affinity hath fiction and belief. -FRANCIS BACON, The Advancement of Learning, Book I

T

he perils of credulity in the face of lies, fiction, and imposture were well known in antiquity and the Middle Ages; they did not have to be invented by anxious Protestants like William Bedell, who compared Catholic ritual to a perverse form of childish play; nor by skeptical philosophers like Francis Bacon, who feared humanity's collective impotence in the face of "Idols" and fictions. As early as Plato's Republic, we find Socrates making a systematic contrast between a virtuous mind dedicated to advancing the collective good of the state and a fallen one, lost in vain contemplation of that which is not real. Like so many writers who followed him, Plato conceived of the individual who entertains fictional constructs as a child or youth. Repeating widely held views on the animal-like irrationality of children, Plato viewed preadult life as a period in which imagination, memory, and the passions were powerful, but reason was poor. Thus, poets represented a threat to the ideal republic because they robbed the individual of rational agency directed at the collective good, which for Plato was the highest political virtue. Such virtuous agency was

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impossible without discretion, reflection, and the ability both to inhibit one's desires and to distinguish the imaginary from the real. What was dangerous about the poet's fictional "making" was that, unlike a simple recounting of the facts, it undertook to imitate the actions of others and so blurred the distinction between narrator and those whose actions were being described (Republic 3·394). 1 This fictional tendency toward "personation," as the trope would eventually be called, might eventually undo the fledgling republic. "Haven't you observed," Socrates remarks, "that imitations, if persisted in from childhood, settle into habits and fixed characteristics of body, voice or mind?" (Republic 3·395). 2 For Plato, fiction might eventually annul the benefits of age and experience, pacifying the energetic warrior-to-be (whether child, boy, or man) and placing him in a state of repugnant dependency. But the art of imitation could, by a similar set of analogies, be defended on the basis of its potentially therapeutic powers. In Aristotle's Poetics, for example, we find a more positive account of poetic imitation. "Mimesis," he writes, "is innate in human beings from childhood-indeed we differ from the other animals in being most given to mimesis and in making our first steps in learning through it-and pleasure in instances of mimesis is equally general" (Poetics 1448b).3 For Aristotle and a long line of poetic theorists after him, poetic imitation-springing from the most primitive of human abilitiescould be a positive force precisely because it produced a pleasure common to all. When channeled into an appropriate generic form like tragedy, this universal appetite for imitation could purge spectators of fear, plunging them into state of infantile terror only to reel them in with the measured speeches of a comprehending hero. Unlike his teacher, Aristotle believed

that imitation was a childish game that adults can play at too. Such analogical uses of children to describe the place of fiction in a virtuous society would be revived in the sixteenth century, precisely because the child could illustrate or embody the ambiguous agency of fiction in a way that earlier forms-for example, the medieval dream vision-could not. 4 Indeed, among the Protestant reformers, London playwrights, and English diabolists dealt with in this study, the question of where fiction belonged in public life-the question, that is, of what fiction did and not just what it was-demanded immediate, practical answers. Because early moderns agreed with the ancients that children fundamentally lacked 1. D. A. Russel and M. Winterbottom, eds., Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 62-63. 2. Ibid., 63. 3· Ibid., 94· 4· Medieval dream visions tended to emphasize their ontological ambiguity rather than their power of action in the world. On the former, see Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 135·

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reason (although they had it in potentia), the child's actions could become a model of sorts for the shifting powers of the stage or fancy, both of which could prove threatening if institutionalized in public theater and religious ritual. Like the "personations" of the adult actor, children's actions were perceived to be a repetition, a displaced version of an original that lay somewhere else. One did not have to be familiar with Plato to see this form of repetition as potentially disturbing, an occasion for the unregulated proliferation of ideas and behaviors. From this perspective, the problem with fiction was not simply that it was counterfactual but that it proceeded from an art that was not subject to the same rules and probabilities that governed discourse and experience. Like rhetoric, which was regularly derided for its association with feigning and its indifference to reason, fiction appealed directly to passions and the imagination, precipitating what looked like an automatic, unthinking response from its audience. Poetic feignings and rhetorical devices thus threatened to recreate the lawless conditions of their invention in the souls of those who entertained them. It was this perceived state of lawlessness--childish bedlam, perhaps-that the sixteenth-century critics of the stage and "popish" ritual felt they needed to curtail. Not everyone felt this way, however. Those who were more sanguine about the effects of fiction on the soul tended to follow Aristotle in suggesting that the potential abuses of fictional imitation were contained by the regularities of genre or counterbalanced, as later critics would suggest, by the capacity of fiction to encapsulate ideas or illustrate virtues. For Aristotle, the artifice of both poet and rhetorician could be subsumed under disciplinary rules that encouraged its legitimate use. Imitation, while it might be the most childish of human faculties, was thus, for that very reason, adaptable to some greater good. Like the English courtier and poet Philip Sidney, who used similar arguments to defend poetic "making," Aristotle argued for the redemptive vividness of poetic fiction. Poetry and drama had a singular power to particularize their subjects or examples, moving the soul in ways that simple historical narration could not. Implicit in this more positive account was the idea that artistic imitation could lead to ethical imitation. 5 All people, Aristotle seems to be saying in the Poetics, enjoy a good imitation--children perhaps most of all. The child in the man is thus not a phase to be transcended (as it is in the case of Plato's citizen-in-the-making) but a connection to some universally shared capacity for play and imposture that the fictive text or performance might put to positive use.

5· This illuminating parallel belongs to Kathy Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 172.

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Even this brief foray into the history of poetics should remind us that children have played a key role in the Western conception of how fictions act and what they do to those who entertain them. I have begun this study of early modern child witnesses, actors, and demoniacs with ancient discussions of mimesis and poesis in order to make a certain procedural point of order. Any discussion of children that treats their role as dramatic performer or social actor must, even in the least apparently aesthetic contexts, be aware of this extra layer of significance. The most important assumption in this tradition is that children and the products of the imagination have interchangeable qualities. The watchword of this tradition might be ut pueritas poesis: as with childhood, so with fiction. Indeed, whenever philosophers, theologians, physicians, and poets try to understand the effects of poetic feignings on the soul of an audience, tropes of children and childhood are never far away. In the sixteenth century, English critics of theater or of "fantastic" Italian romances would thus regularly describe these fictions as "toyes," "idle" occupations, "foolish trifles," and the like. The audience for such stories would be described as rationally deficient, "childish" in wit, "simple" in years, apelike in their uncomprehending absorption of what they saw and heard. Such opprobrious terms can be linked, in one way or another, with a rhetoric of childhood and infantilization that was passed along from ancient Greek culture through the Middle Ages and into the turbulent years of the Protestant Reformation. That this rhetorical link between the child and fiction was so durable is due, in no small part, to the fact that the qualities perennially ascribed to children-their capacity for spontaneous mimesis, their lack of experience, their simplicity, their utter absorption in the present-were perfectly suited to the task of describing the effects of drama, rhetoric, and other imitative arts on an imaginatively engaged audience. Nowhere is this link more apparent than in England during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a time when children moved from their traditional role in civic pageants and processions to take up a fashionable place on the professional stage and, in terrifying counterpoint, became spectacular witnesses and victims in witchcraft trials and exorcisms. In each of these areas of early modern English life, the child performer served as an embodied representative of the powers of fiction to act at a distance, to exercise a power over the soul that seemed out of proportion to the fiction's quasi-immaterial being. Thus when a ten-year-old stepped out onto a richly decorated pageant base to welcome Queen Elizabeth on her arrival to London in 1559, he did not simply deliver a message of thanks from a grateful City. Rather, this diminutive performer was acting as an ambassador from another world whose signal property was a fluid, imaginative integrity that stood in symmetrical opposition to the

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urban world of the spectator. The pageant world in its entirety, and not simply the creatures in it, was actively extending its reach into the temporal environs of the royal presence. As we will see in the following chapter, the piping voice of the child served to bridge the ontologically distinct space of the pageant itself and the counterfactual imagination in which it was entertained. And directing this quasi-transcendental traffic was a young grammar "scholar" whose animated gestures and set speeches did just what the illusion did: both were making a pretty, disarming appeal, fitting themselves to the mind with the dexterity of a phantasm. This was not the majesty of Platonic allegory but the open hand of rhetoric. The fact that this hand was small-a miniature piece of humanity hedged by the grandeur of the court-only made its approach more beguiling. By proposing that child performers could actually be the representatives of fiction and not just its inhabitants, I hope to demonstrate that the many writers, pageanteurs, exorcists, and jurists who worked with children in Renaissance public spectacles were, deliberately or implicitly, taking part in a much larger debate about the place of fiction in society. They did so by engaging an anthropology of fictional practice-an amalgam of ideas about the human soul and its development that emerged from the disparate corners of Christian theology, legal practice, poetic theory, and humanist pedagogy. 6 The child became a crucial figure in this anthropological discourse during the sixteenth century since, perhaps more than any other creature, it served as a model for all of the prerational faculties engaged by fictions or connected with its production. The chapters that follow will demonstrate that the socially "appointed inferiority" of children served to enhance their symbolic power whenever they took the stage? Because early modern English culture excluded children from the increasingly vast realm of adult accomplishment, a realm we associate with the expansive personalities and ambitions of Renaissance culture, these diminutive actors could work behind the scenes of fictional representation precisely because they seemed small, spontaneous, and marginal. We might even say that the child was a special type of early modern actor, one who inhabited a structural gap between performer and performance that characterized all forms of theatrical and rhetorical 6. I am treating this collection of ideas and practices as a dispersed version of what William Bouwsma and Hans Blumenberg have treated under the rubrics of the "anthropology of religion" or "philosophical anthropology." See Hans Blumenberg, "An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric," in After Philosophy: End or Transformation? ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 429-58, and William Bouwsma, A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 25-26,230-31,403-5. 7· The phrase "appointed inferiority" belongs to Paul Griffiths. See his Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 13.

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display during the period. 8 The story I have to tell here is thus one of an outsider who, like the long-lost hero in a romance, ends up acquiring extraordinary powers. To understand why the child came to occupy this position, and perhaps also to leaven the romance plot with historical fact, we must understand the assumptions underlying the link between children and fictional imitation in the later Middle Ages and early modern period. Because this is a study not simply of children but of their role as prototypical feigning, fiction-consuming animals, I will be integrating recent work in the social and cultural history of children with discussions about the place of representation in early modern life. This approach builds on continuing debates in Renaissance and early modern studies about the nature of agency, rhetoric, authority, and the theater in early modern culture. Part of my motivation for pursuing these topics with respect to children, quite apart from my belief that we do not yet have an adequate description of the child as a type of performer in early modern English culture, is my feeling that the study of children needs to continue its trajectory beyond the traditional milieu of the family and the school. Studies of gender, sexuality, and sectarian ideologies have been important in broadening the scope of this field over the last few decades. 9 Critics working in these areas have been ablt' to move beyond controversies about when childhood emerged as a distinct cultural category (the legacy of Aries mentioned in the introduction), offering fresh ideas about how the meaning of childhood as a phase of life contributed, sometimes decisively, to the ways in which certain poetic and dramatic fictions appealed to the feelings and preoccupations of their audiences. In arguing that there was a perceived link between what children were and how fictions worked in this period, however, I will not always use the customary landmarks for plotting cultural systems-for example, those of gender, sexuality, and class. The link between fiction and childhood was built on assumptions about the developmental incompleteness of certain individuals-an incompleteness that, in early modern eyes, only God

8. The situation is similar to that of puppets, or "motions"-also popular performers during the period-which were also presumed not to be fully deliberating in a way that adult actors were. On the puppet's unique ability to demonstrate the structural difference between the site of a theatrical signification and the producer of that signification, see Steve Tillis, "The Actor Occluded: Puppet Theatre and Acting Theory," Theatre Topics 6, no. 2 (1996): 109-19, 111. 9· See, for example, Leah Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978); Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff, eds., Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994); and Gina Bloom, '"Thy Voice Squeaks'": Listening for Masculinity on the Early Modern Stage," Renaissance Drama 29 (1998): 39-71.

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and angels could hope to evade. My immediate focus, then, will be on philosophical categories like agency, deliberation, spontaneity, and rationality, even if these abstract categories must ultimately be linked to more familiar, and comparatively more concrete, forces and themes in English life-for example the cultural consequences of the Protestant Reformation, the relationship between drama and patriarchal gerontocracy, the emergence of a merchant class, the rediscovery of rhetoric, and the much debated difference between nature and art. Most important in this initial discussion are a number of groups who were either emboldened or threatened by the presence of what they perceived to be fictions in the world around them. Ultimately it was these groups who appropriated the rhetoric of childhood in order to explain the particular efficacy of imaginative modes of thought. Foremost among them were the Protestant reformers who are the focus of this chapter. But we can also trace the child analogy through the work of humanist pedagogues, philosophical skeptics, rhetoricians, and literary critics, something I will do briefly here as well. All of these writers agreed that childhood ought to be understood privatively, as a lack of something found in older humans. Whether that lack was a good thing or a bad thing varied, but a basic framework for thinking about children in contrast with other types of creature (adults, animals, puppets, demons, angels) was embraced by all. As a figure for cognitive privation, the child would regularly be assimilated to the weaker side of a number of important binaries in the late Middle Ages and into the early modern period: he or she was often aligned with animals rather than humans, with the illiterate rather than those who could read, with literal rather than allegorical interpretation, with ornament rather than substance, and with the body as opposed to the soul or mind. ~z~

Child Lore: Simplicity, Absorption, Appetite, and Unreason

In a study of heresy in the fourteenth century, Rita Copeland has shown that nonclerical interpreters of the scripture were regularly characterized as" childish" by church elites, a rhetorical move that was intended to quash demands of Lollard reformers who were agitating for adult literacy and a vernacular scripture. By metaphorically transferring childhood as a category of abjection from real children to disenfranchised adults, sheargues, ecclesiastical authorities delegitimized this oppositional social group and attempted to limit its demands for universal access to the scriptures. 10 If the trope of childhood could be imported into the debates over literacy 10. Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 23.

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and vernacularity in the fourteenth century, it had to be already fairly well developed, at least as a bundle of attributes that could be intelligibly redeployed. For the clerical elites in Copeland's study, the most useful bit of child lore was the notion that children could interpret only the literal, rather than the figurative, sense of texts. Citing Origen's fourth-century views on scriptural interpretation, the polemical clerics asserted that adult readers of the vernacular would be "simple" in understanding (simpliciares) and so could have access only to the literal meaning of the words on the page (that is, the body of the text rather than its spirit)_ll The scripture in all its hermeneutic complexity would be lost on these childish vernacular readers, which is why it had to be reserved for the established clerical body of adult Latin readers. Thus, a relatively common anthropological distinction between adult and child, loaded with its own textual history and accommodating social practices, became a rationale for limiting access to the Bible. The terms of the dispute suggested that what was native to the child was dangerous in the man, especially if that man could read. The rhetoric of simplicity that Origen employed was itself a product of antiquity, which furnished medieval writers with authoritative declarations concerning the child's proverbial lack of reason, discretion, and experience. In addition to earning Plato's skepticism, childhood was also dismissed by Cicero, who remarked in De republica that "the thing itself cannot be praised, only its potential." 12 The cognitive inferiority of children relative to adults was also glossed in Terentian comedy, the poetry of Lucretius, and Seneca's letters.B These ideas were formalized during the Middle Ages in a scheme known as the aetates hominum, or "ages of man," a visual and categorical system that divided the human life span into three, four, six, and sometimes seven distinct phases. 14 The number of

11. Origen, De principiis 4.2.4 in Origin, On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1936), 275-77. 12. Quoted in Judith M. Gundry-Volf, "The Least and the Greatest: Children in the New Testament" in The Child in Christian Thought, ed. M. J. Bunge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001), 32. 13. See Cicero, De republica; Lucretius, De rerum natura (3.762), trans. W. H. D. Rouse, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 246-47, on the parallel weakness of the child's body and mind; Terence, Hecyra (3.1), trans. H. T. Riley (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892), 270; and Seneca, Ethical Letters, trans. R. M. Gummere, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:236-37; 3:368-39. On the classical bias against childish unreason, see Thomas Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 1-48, and Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 98-108. 14. On the aetates hominum tradition and its links to astrology and epochal history, see J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), and Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). See also the discussion in Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage,

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phases and the numerical ages at which they began and ended varied with the criterion of measurement, but they tended to be divided into blocks of seven years. The widely read and translated twelfth-century encyclopedist Bartholomaeus Anglicus, for example, placed the end of the first stage, infantia, at seven, with the second-pueritas, or childhood proper-extending to fourteen. At the end of the first stage, the individual attained the ability to speak and might perhaps begin learning right from wrong; at the end of the second, he or she might even have the discretion to put such moral knowledge into action. Adolescence, the third age--characterized by vigorous physical activity and sexual awakening--could last to twenty-one, twenty-eight, or as late as thirty-five, a taxonomical ambiguity that would persist into early modern discussions of age, particularly debates about the age of majority. 15 Anglicus's book was reproduced several times in English after its first translation in the fourteenth century, carrying with it a number of formulaic ideas about the imprudence of children, their complete subjection to their appetites, and their tendency to repeat what they heard without knowing its significance. Such ideas proved remarkably durable, perhaps because they could be clustered within a larger developmental pattern that was itself linked allegorically with other schemes like the days of creation or the seasons. The scheme was thus well known when Shakespeare took it up in Jacques' famous speech in As You Like It (2.7), where the infant is described "mew ling and puking in the nurse's arms" and the schoolboy is said to creep "like snail I unwillingly to school" (2.7.143, 145-46). No doubt Shakespeare had his own poetic reasons for choosing "puking" as the hallmark of the first phase. He was not alone, however, in adapting what was a highly developed medieval structure to his own ends. Indeed, depending on where one thought adult powers showed themselves most distinctively, the measures of childhood could shift. Throughout the Middle Ages, there was no single measure or test for when childhood began and ended, although the English church had begun to treat childhood as a distinct phase of life by about 1200. 16 Variability in thresholds and definitions suggests that adults themselves were often uncertain which measure of minority should be used in a given context. Medieval writers were on fairly uncontroversial ground, however, when they asserted (on the authority of Aristotle) that childhood was an age in

1962), 18-25, and Aristotle's remarks in Rhetoric 2.12-14., trans. Ingram Bywater (New York: Modern Library, 1984), 122-23. 15. See Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Batman uppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum (London: Thomas East, 1582), 6.1. 16. Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 7·

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which reason and sexual desire were not fully developed. 17 And while medieval writers were fond of saying that the innocence of childhood would pass away, this did not prevent them from pairing children with angels in order to make a point about the (temporary) virtues of the former. The perceived moral innocence, generosity, and cognitive simplicity of children are evident in medieval sermons and the stories from the Legenda aurea, or Lives of the Saints (a thirteenth-century compendium of stories that became the standard source of information about saints in the two centuries that followed), where child saints are characteristically depicted as unwitting agents of discovery. 18 As Shulamith Shahar writes of the spiritually precocious child in the Lives, "Due to the wholeness of his faith, his ability to be amazed by wondrous things, and his innocence, the child is sometimes privileged to grasp a significant truth which is still hidden from adults." 19 The perceived simplicity of the child also increased his or her narrative appeal as an innocent victim, a pathos that derived not just from the fact that children were frequently injured in accidents but also from the tendency to associate them-in the most ideologically fraught regions of the communal imagination-with sacrifice, particularly that of the Eucharist. 20 Miri Rubin has shown, for example, that children were repeatedly associated with discoveries of the abused host in anti-Semitic host-desecration narratives and stories of eucharistic miracles; in some of these stories, a child was literally glimpsed in the host at the moment of its consecration. 21

17. Anglicus seconds the Aristotelian notion that children are not subject to "moving of Venus" until they reach the age of adolescence, approximately fourteen. In boys, Aristotle points out, a change in voice is a sure sign that sexual desire is stirring. See Batman uppon Bartholome, 6.1. 18. G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 33-34· 19. Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1990), 17-18. The pairing of children in the Middle Ages with other nondeliberating creatures like madmen, which ultimately gave them supernatural protection, is also described in Jerome Kroll, "The Concept of Childhood in the Middle Ages," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 13 (1977): 384-93; 389. For particular incidents in the Legenda aurea, or Lives of the Saints, see Jacobus de Voragine, Thus endeth the legende, named in latyn Lege[n]da aurea ... , trans. William Caxton (London: Wynkyn de Warde, 1527), for example, the entries on Saint Agnes or Pancrace. See also Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 171-87. 20. On the historiographical usefulness of records of accidents befalling children, see Michael Goodich, Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public Salvation (Chicago:.University of Chicago Press, 1995), 102; Ronald C. Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997); and Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000-1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 26-28. 21. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 118-19, and Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late

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While children lost some of their moral innocence in the wake of John Calvin's criticisms of innate human depravity, most notably his argument that they "bring their owne damnation from their mothers wombe," the cognitive incompleteness of children was never seriously doubted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 22 Indeed, a mixture of experiential, intellectual, and sexual privation continued to distinguish childhood for early moderns in much the same way as it did in the Middle Ages, even if that state was occasionally represented as a positive spiritual ideal in Reformation and Counter-Reformation interpretations of the new testament's rhetoric of childhood. 23 But as Keith Thomas points out, the age at which these deficits were "overcome" could always be an object of institutional and generational negotiation; the various benchmarks of adulthood gradually rose, in fact, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the reigning gerontocracy tried to retain the prerogatives of adulthood by discouraging early marriage, delaying inheritances, and increasing the age at which children could make contracts. 24 The religious tensions introduced by the Reformation, moreover, exerted upward pressure on the age at which children were to be confirmed or to communicate, raising the numerical age to as high as twelve or fourteen. In the latter case, this was the age at which some Elizabethan bishops felt a child had reached the "years of discretion," much higher than the previous age of seven stipulated in Catholic doctrine. 25 The age of baptism was also subject to upward pressure, as Reformed doctrines of conscience-particularly those that emphasized mankind's rational powers of spiritual discernment-put more emphasis on the deliberate assent to God's covenant of grace through the process of

Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), particularly 77-78 on the unassailability of child witnesses in inquiries into host desecration. 22. John Calvin, The institution of Christian religion ... translated into English according to the authors last edition ... by Thomas Norton (London: Arnold Hatfield, 1599), I4r. English children would have encountered this idea in Nuremberg catechism that was being advocated by Archbishop Cranmer during the reign of Henry; here the child in his mother's womb was understood already to be tainted by "evylllusts and appetites." See Philippa Tudor, "Religious Instruction for Children and Adolescents in the Early English Reformation," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35, no. 3 (1984): 394· 23. Important loci are Matthew 18:1-5 and 1 Corinthians 14:20. On Calvin's agreement with Paul's prescription to emulate children's lack of malice but not their lack of understanding, see Barbara Pitkin, "'The Heritage of the Lord': Children in the Theology of John Calvin," in Bunge, Child in Christian Thought, 165. The Counter-Reformation's emphasis on childlike simplicity as a spiritual ideal is described in Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, 6o. 24. See Keith Thomas, "Age and Authority in Early Modern England," Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976): 205-248. 25. The Canon of 1604 made communication compulsory at sixteen, an age that functioned as a minimum for clergy. See Thomas, "Age and Authority," 224. On the beginning of

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catechetical instruction and subsequent reflection. 26 Legal procedure for handling witnesses was, similarly, an area in which the putative simplicity of the child mandated special procedures. The seventeenth-century jurist Matthew Hale, in his survey of legal practice, says that a child of fourteen has reached the age of discretion and can give sworn testimony in court, although Hale believes the court could rely on testimony of younger children in cases of witchcraft, buggery, and rape. 27 These are only a few areas in which the beginnings and endings of childhood were subject to scrutiny in Renaissance and early modern culture: in each, we see a relatively uncontroversial belief in the child's cognitive inferiority-one that was already well developed in the Middle Ages-being adapted to different social and institutional needs. The continuity in the basic perception must always, in discussions of the early modern thresholds of childhood, be balanced against the proliferation of areas in which such beginnings and endings mattered and so needed to be defined. As inheritors of conflicting standards for judging age, early modern writers had to assert their own priorities in wielding analytic categories such as discretion, reason, will, conscience, concupiscence, and election in their definitions of childhood-all terms of art that could be used to make the divisions more precise, even if they were based on more fluid observations. If we recognize that these categories were themselves based on comparisons between different individuals, and that the choice of which individual to compare and on what basis was not dictated by nature alone, we are left with Keith Thomas's conclusion that "there is nothing constant about the social meaning of age." 28 Nevertheless, broad generalizations are possible: if there were no common perceptions about what a "child" was in a given period, childhood could never have become a useful topos in various poetic, theological, and political debates. We are thus best served, when dealing with a social category as fluid as early modern childhood, by focusing on those qualities that children recognizably lacked in comparison with their adult counterparts: reason, deliberation, sexual desire, and conscience. To the extent that numerical

"discretion" in early modern England at ages fourteen to sixteen, see Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority-Formative Experiences in England, 1560-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 53· 26. On the theological complications introduced by more voluntarist notions of salvation, see Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 4o-46, and C. John Sommerville, The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 71-80. 27. See Matthew Hale, Historia placitorum coronae. The history of the pleas of the crown (London: E. and R. Nutt, and R. Gosling, 1736), 1:634; 2:278-79; and Jean Bodin, De Ia demonomanie des sorciers (Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1580), 178-83. 28. Thomas," Age and Authority," 205.

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ages represent something like common perception of that lack, the ages of fourteen for boys and twelve for girls seem to have been the terminus ad quem for such privations, a measure that Thomas adopts (with caveats) in his discussion of the issue and that is, moreover, remarkably consistent with medieval views. 29 So what did it mean to possess "no actuall evident use of ... reason," as Oxford scholar Henry Cuff asserted of children in the early seventeenth century? 30 Since antiquity, it had often meant that children were well-nigh identical to animals, although they ought eventually to grow out of this condition. Aristotle's remarks on the matter remained authoritative: for him, as for many medieval commentators who followed him, children demonstrated the link between the human and animal kingdoms, since members of both groups could be seen to display timidity, fear, or confidence. But the child, Aristotle pointed out, lacked the crucial species differentiae of knowledge, wisdom and sagacity, qualities that would eventually distinguish him from his animal counterparts. 31 The benefits of age are specified more concretely in a mid-sixteenth-century English translation of Aristotle's Ethics, where children are said to straddle the boundary between those creatures who possess an animal will, which is

29. Keith Thomas, "Children in Early Modern England," in Children and Their Books, ed. Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 50. This is also the endpoint used by Susan Brigdon in her study of adolescence during the period; see her "Youth and the English Reformation," Past & Present 95 (1982): 37· For medieval views on the beginning of full moral discretion, see Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 23-31; Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 123; and Sally Crawford, Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Phoenix Mill, U.K.: Sutton, 1999), 42. In" Age and Authority," Thomas argues that it was during the Tudor and Stuart periods that numerical age gained social relevance (207). 30. Henry Cuff, The differences of the ages of mans life together with the original/ causes, progresse, and end thereof (London: Arnold Hatfield, 1607), 127. Cf. G. Goodman, The fall of man, or the corruption of nature, proved by the light of our natural/ reason (London: Felix Kyngston, 1616), 185: "Before wee come to tenne yeeres of age, we have no judgment at a!." Ian Green notes four early-sixteenth-century catechisms stating that children are unable to examine themselves reasonably and so-catechizing notwithstanding-must be declared unfit for communion. See Ian Green, '"For Children in Yeeres and Children in Understanding': The Emergence of the English Catechism under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37(3): 411. 31. Aristotle, History of Animals 588a15-588b4 in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 921-22. The pronoun "his" here reflects Aristotle's belief that adult males possess reason to a greater degree than females. See also Plato's remark in Laws 7.8o8d: "Of all wild things, the child is the most unmanageable." Plato, The Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), 298.

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a kind of appetitive motive force, and those who exercise the inhibiting force of "election:" For whyl the operacyon of the wyll, is common with Beastes and children, but the election apperteineth not but to him that abstaineth him self from concupiscence ... the wyl is the [e]ntent, but the electio[n] is an antecede[n]t unto the [e]nte[n]t. 32 Prior restraint of the will by an inner "entent" is one of the hallmarks of adult behavior in Aristotelian ethics; it creates a realm of indifferent deliberation in which there is no necessitating external claim (sensual appetites, etc.) that might compromise elective choice. Election also helps lift the individual out of the realm of unthinking habit or unbridled appetite (the "willfulness" condemned by Puritans), a pair of vices that go hand in hand with the capacity for spontaneous imitation. 33 Without the faculty of elective deliberation, the vocal utterance turns out to be just another spontaneous gesture-something people recognize when they remark on the childish tendency to babble, prattle, and repeat things like a parrot who repeats what it hears with no evident comprehension. 34 A number of examples from early modern texts bear out this association between animal unreason and unthinking speech. The Puritan .minister William Gouge, for example, argued that teaching young children was like teaching a parrot "or such like unreasonable creatures: they may learne what is taught them but they cannot conceive it." Bacon, too, made the equation between child and bird, saying that it was a wonder how both learned to speak through imitation. 35 Such habitual ways of using

32. Aristotle, The ethiques of Aristotle, that is to saye, preceptes of good behavoute [sic] and perfighte honestie, now newly tra[n]slated into English (London: Richard Grafton, 1547), CV2r. See also Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Preface, Book I, Book VIII, ed. Arthur S. McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 71, and Thomas Elyot, A Critical Edition of Sir Thomas Elyot's The Bake named the Governour, ed. Donald W. Rude (New York: Garland, 1992), 101, on similarities among children, madmen, and simpletons. 33· On Puritan responses to the problem of childish "willfulness," see Sommerville, Discovery of Childhood, 71-107. 34· On the general tendency to treat children as animals and pets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which for Alan Macfarlane indicates that they were more akin to "luxury items" than "investments," see Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300-1840 (Oxford: Blackwell University Press, 1986), 55-57. On the deeper philosophical confusion about the differences between children and animals in the early modern period, see Erica Fudge, "Learning to Laugh: Children and Being Human in Early Modern Thought," in Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800, ed. Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore (New York: Routledge, 2005), 19-40. 35· William Gouge, Of domesticall duties (London: John Haviland, 1622), 545; Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum: Or a Natural History in Ten Centuries 3.236 in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Basil Montague, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1852), 39·

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language might have spiritual benefits, however. In John Dod's popular treatise A plaine and familiar exposition of the ten commandments, children are encouraged to "have wordes taught them, when they are able to heare, and speake words: and afterward when they come to more discretion, they will conceive, and remember the sense. " 36 Sixteenth-century religious writers embraced the long-standing practice of teaching doctrine through repetition, even if it was not accompanied by comprehension. The massive proliferation of catechisms from the 1570s to the outbreak of the Civil War, both in the state-sponsored Anglican mainstream and among members of the Protestant left, attests to the popularity of the view that, in speech as in behavior, the sapling needed to be directed if it were to avoid growing into a crooked branch. 37 It is thus not surprising that the works of Calvin were translated into child-friendly form during the seventeenth century. 38 A more pessimistic view of what we might call "automatic" imitation could be found in Quintilian's Institutio aratoria, a treatise that was a standard feature of the Tudor studia humanitatis by the mid-sixteenth century.39 Here Quintilian notes that while the art of rhetoric consists essentially in imitation-a natural tendency that can be witnessed in children who" copy the shapes of letters [so] that they may learn to write"-the youthful orator should not simply parrot what he hears, since such "precocious" talents rarely produce "sound fruit." 40 Educators and moralists were suspicious of the child's tendency toward spontaneous imitation as well, even if they felt that the capacity could be exploited in more deliberate ways. In William Vaughan's Golden-grove (16oo), a good schoolmaster is said to require 36. See John Dod, A plaine and familiar exposition of the ten commandments (London: Humphrey Lownes, 1606), 194--95· See also Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 49, and Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 177. 37· See, for example, A short catechisme for little children learned by one at three years of age (London: Thomas Dawson, 1589). See also Green, "'For Children in Yeeres'"; Tudor, "Religious Instruction for Children"; Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 107, and "Humanists, Puritans and the Spiritualized Household," Church History 49 (1980): 18-34; and Margaret Aston, England's Iconoclasts, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 353-56. 38. Robert Russel, A little book for Children and Youth (London, n.d.), B2v-B3r. 39· Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23. The English Ramist Gabriel Harvey lectured on precisely the passage quoted below (10.2) during the three years when he was professor of rhetoric at Cambridge (1573, 1574, 1575). See Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 187. See also T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 2:197-238. 40. Quintilian, Institutio aratoria 1.3.3 and 10.2.1-5 in Quintilian, Institutio aratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1927-32), 1:54-55, 474-77. Quintilian is affirming a popular classical view. See Thomas Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 1-48, and Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 98-108.

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"affability & courtesie, lest his schollers, as apes, taking exa[m]ple by his froward looks, become rough and disobedient." 41 It was also commonly assumed that what was learned earliest was learned best. Thus William Kempe, in his treatise The education of children in learning (1588), advises parents to avoid rude or barbarous speech when their children are present. "For a Child like an emptie new vessell being voide of all learning, is most apt to receive that which is first taught." 42 The Protestant moralist Lewis Bayly went further in his The practice of piety (1642), lamenting that youths were" Ape-like delighting in nothing but in toyes and babies." His judgment on "infants" was even harsher: they were nothing but "brute[s] having [the] shape of a man." 43 There were moral consequences to this lack of reflection, so evident in the frequent comparisons with animals. Most immediately, lack of election or deliberation in the child meant that he or she lived in a state of utter absorption in the present, unable to differentiate immediate pleasures from potentially greater pleasures in the future. This incapacity for prudential calculation meant that the child could not reproduce the prevailing set of values that were upheld by such a calculus. Thus, in Stephen Batman's 1558 edition of Anglicus's encyclopedia mentioned above, we read the following: Sith all children ... thinke onely on things that be, and regard not of things that shall be, they love playes, game and vanite, and forsake winning and profite: and things most worthye they repute least worthy, and least worthy most worthye. They desire things that be to them contrary and grievous, and set more of the image of a childe, than of the image of a man, and make more sorrow and woe, and weepe more for the losse of an apple, than for the losse of their heritage ... They love talking ... keep no counsayle, but they tell all that they heare or see. 44

This is one of the most important premodern descriptions we have of childhood, so completely does it knit together the different strands of classical and medieval child lore. For example, play-in the sense of both theatrical drama and recreation-is connected to the child's complete abandonment to the present and his or her inability to look, counterfactually, into a

41. William Vaughan, The golden-grove, moralized in three books (London, 16oo), Y2r. 42. William Kempe, The education of children in learning: declared by the dignitie, utilitie, and method therof (London: Thomas Orwin, 1588), E4r. 43· Lewis Bayly, The practice of pietie directing a Christian how to walk that he may please God (London, 1640), 55-56. 44- Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Batman uppon Batholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum (London: Thomas East, 1582), 6.6.

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future where there might be greater gain. There are links, too, between the literalism that Origen ascribed to children and the presentism of child consciousness described above. 45 Literalism and imprudence both suggest a fundamental inability to entertain multiple levels of consciousness or meaning at once. Ludic distraction, moreover, is described as an acute form of temporal isolation-an imaginative removal from the worldwhile gabbling and mimicry become symptoms of a fundamental lack of deliberating control over language. Children pay a moral price for their preoccupation with "things that be," since they cannot grasp the adult value of things like patrimony, indulging instead in "vanite" like gaming and "playes." The childish tendency to repeat things is not completely useless, however. In rhetorical accounts of forensic inquiry, for example, a child's parroting becomes an indirect route to the truth. Under the canons of proof advanced in Cicero's Topica, children and drunken men are said to reveal truths that adult witnesses cannot, precisely because their lack of reason translates into a concomitant lack of guile. Thus in situations where public speech is approached with skepticism (something that is assumed in forensic rhetoric), it can be helpful to have a nondeliberating witness who automatically repeats what he or she has heard. Such proofs might be described, again in rhetorical terms, as "inartificial" or selfevident, since they persuade by "necessity" instead of rhetorical art. 46 The theory is confirmed by a number of proverbs current in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. "A child, a fool and a drunken man will ever show their conditions and the truth" is one version of the idea. "Fooles and children often do prophesie" is another, along with "Truth's told by babes and fools." Other proverbs emphasize what we might call the child's capacity to serve as a ready-made human Dictaphone: "What children hear at home soon flies abroad" and "Small pitchers have wide ears." 47 An English translation of Erasmus's De civilitate morum puerilium, a treatise instructing the child in manners, tries to mitigate the child's inability to keep private counsel. "If you happen to notice or overhear

45· The present-mindedness of youth is described in similar terms in Kempe's Education of children in learning, sig. Fr: "For the unskilfulnes and folly of youth must be ordered and guided by the wisedome of old men, because youth is forgetfull, not greatly moved with regard of things past, or things to come, but wholly carried away with that which is before their face." 46. Cicero, De inventione, De optima genere oratorurn, Topica, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 438-41. The Topica was used in rhetorical training throughout the Middle Ages (where it was taught alongside commentaries by such figures as Boethius) and into the seventeenth century. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 34· 47· Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), entries C300 and C328.

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something," Erasmus writes to his young pupil, "see to it that you appear ignorant of the knowledge you possess." 48 It would take considerably more than a single chapter of this book to trace the history of the inversion whereby nondeliberating creatures like children, drunkards, and fools are gifted with the capacity to tell the truth or to discover it for adults. Several sources are worth noting here, however, since they bear directly on some of the ideas discussed above. First, there is the scriptural tradition of assigning wisdom to children, a move that raises humility over worldly sophistication and learning. 49 The famous quotation from Psalm 8:1-2 in the Geneva Bible appears as follows: "Out of the mouth of babes and suckelings hast thou ordeined strength, because of thine enemies, that thou mightest stil the enemie and the avenger." The marginal gloss notes that "the wicked wolde hide Gods praises, yet [the] very babes are sufficie[n]t witnesses of the same." When Jesus quotes this passage later in Matthew 21:15-16, reproving the priests and scribes, children once again serve a prophetic role by proclaiming Jesus the son of David. 50 At times the gospel writer also describes the model entrant to heaven as being a child, suggesting that divine favor is a pure gift rather than something acquired through adherence to the law. 51 On this interpretation, the child guarantees the completely one-sided nature of Christian redemption precisely because he or she lacks the capacity to obtain favor through works. The favor for children may also, however, simply reflect the common belief that children are devoid of sexual passions and other worldly desires (for, say, riches) and thus model a piety that adults can only aspire to. It was this piety that inspired Francis and Bernard, coming to shape a particularly powerful brand of late medieval devotional practice and Counter-Reformation piety that celebrated childish humility over intellectual penetration. Another source of the child-truth formula is the ancient topos of the puer senex, a figure that Ernst Robert Curtius once described as a "hagiographical cliche." 52 Such figures are usually children who have a precocious 48. Erasmus, Collected Works, val. 25 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 288. Robert Whittington's English translation appears in five editions from 1532 to 1578. 49· See Gundry-Volf, "Least and the Greatest," 29-60. The rhetorical advantage of putting wisdom in the mouth of a child is that, given his or her lack of experience, the source of that wisdom is clearly somewhere else. 50. The Geneva Bible (1560) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 51. On this contrast, see Gundry-Volf, "Least and Greatest," 34-39. 52. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 100. For later versions of the figure, see Fran~oise Waquet, "Puer doctus, les enfants savants de Ia no>publique des lettres," in Le Printemps des genies: les enfants prodiges, ed. Michele Sacquin and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1993), 87--99; and Gillian Avery, "The Voice of the Child, Both Godly and Unregenerate, in Early Modern England" in Goodenough, Heberle, and Sokoloff, Infant Tongues, 16-27.

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grasp of their spiritual destiny or are capable of adult ratiocination and debate (for example, Jesus with the Pharisees); they serve to foreground the value of a wisdom that is seemingly innate rather than gained through experience. Children who are preternaturally wise are striking precisely because their actions and abilities are contrary to nature, something that A. J. Burrow has pointed out in the context of Anglo-Saxon saints' lives. 53 Indeed, the tradition of saints' lives-which, as we noted above, regularly depicted young saints acting with a wisdom or conscience that exceeded their years-provided early modern English readers with well-worn narratives in which unprepossessing children regularly outshone their elders. When St. Pancrace, for example, is described in an early-fifteenth-century translation of the Legenda aurea making his conversion to Christianity at fourteen, he is warned by Diocletian that he is too young to understand such a decision. The boy responds: "yf I be a chylde of body I yet myn herte isolde/ & by [the] vertue of my god Jesu chryst your thretenynges and menaces make me no more to move than doth the payntynge that I se upon [the] wall." 54 Such episodes must be understood in the spirit of inversion in which they were offered, since what made these precocious saints admirable is the fact that they did not bear out the usual assumptions about the absorption and irrationality of children. Rather, a precocious saint was a type of religious marvel or prodigy that served as an ideal of transcendence in a culture that valued the adult virtues of reason and deliberation. 55 It is worth noting here that in the early modern period, as in the Middle Ages, the human capacity for what Burrow calls downward transcendence is regularly vilified; a grown man who acts like a child is, by definition, a fool. Shakespeare's Lear, as he is depicted in the first Quarto History of King Lear (1607-8), for example, would have struck many seventeenth-century spectators as an aged child, an impression that is encouraged when Edgar says that the king has been "childed" just as he himself has been "father'd" (13.99). 56 Usually it is only when childishness

53· Burrow, Ages of Man, 105. 54· De Voragine, Thus endeth the legende, named in latyn Lege[n]da aurea, Cxxiiiv. On the very adult struggles of child saints, see Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 17-47. The link between children and revelation is also evidenced by the tradition of sarles biblicae, in which a child blindly picks a verse from the scripture for adult edification or, as in the case of Augustine, prompts such a procedure. See Pierre Courcell, "L'Enfant et les 'sorts bibliques,'" Vigiliae Christianae 7 (193): 194-220. 55· This model of a "Transzendenzideal" in which grace provides the abilities of older ages to be transferred onto younger ones originates with Christian Gnilka, whose theory is summarized by Burrow, Ages of Man, 95· 56. The remark disappears from the 1623 Folio edition of the play. See The Norton Shakespeare, 2408-9.

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is directed, in the form of trust and dependence, toward God that credit is given to adults for moving backward on the developmental scale. 57 In the absence of reason, imagination takes the lead. In the Jesuit Thomas Wright's The passions of the mind (1601), for example, the volatile relationship among reason, imagination, and sense (what we would call sensation) is illustrated as follows: Three sortes of actions proceede from mens soules, some are internall and immateriall, as the actes of our wits & willes: others be mere external and materiall, as the actes of our senses, seeing, hearing, moving &c[;] others stand beetwixt these twoo extreames, and border upon them both; the which wee may best discover in children, because they lacke the use of reason, and are guided by an internall imagination, following nothing else but that pleaseth their sences, even after the same maner as bruite beastes doe. Wright describes the sources of human action in Aristotelian terms, with reason sharing the field with imagination and sense in the battle for governance of the soui.S8 The rational will, exalted here in its immateriality, is not subject to immediate determination by external impulses in the same way that the senses are; its immateriality is, in effect, the principal guarantee of its deliberative independence. But the imagination stands somewhere "beetwixt" these two extremes of independent self-determination and external receptiveness, providing guidance that is simultaneously internally and outwardly oriented. It is as if the pleasures of the senses (external, material) can be vicariously satisfied by the "phantasie," or imagination, which represents pleasurable objects without their necessarily having to exist. There is a parallel between what the imagination does here and what the child mimic is described doing above: like the prattling child, the imagination can be said to mimic sensory experience without rational constraint. This kind of absorption in what is simply "there" in the imagination-whether or not it has been taken from the world or manufactured wholesale-is precisely what Plato objects to in 57· A possible exception, of course, is the Erasmian "praise of folly," but this regression or downward transcendence is also laced with irony. See the following discussion. 58. Th[omas] W[right], The passions of the minde (London: Valentine Simmes, 1601), 12. As a Jesuit, Wright probably knew the works of continental Aristotelians like Toletus, Suarez, and Fonseca, all of whom elaborated the relationships among the faculties in a similar framework. See Dennis DesChenes, Life's Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 1-7, 155--69. On the importance of the faculty model in medieval and early modern thought, see Murray Wright Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1927); Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and J. B. Bamborough, The Little World of Man (London: 1952), 20-33,41-43.

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the Laws (653a-c) and what other critics of fiction and feigning will object to below. 59 The intensity of imagination that early modern writers associate with children suggests a broader anthropology of human agency that will inform sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discussions of the place of fiction in social life. What is perhaps most distinctive about rational, adult action in this broader account is that adults, unlike children, possess a crucial ability to self-interrupt; that is, they can take the initiating stepprompted by the rational soul, which undertakes intellectual functions like willing and deliberation-of breaking the hold of imaginative absorption and initiating evaluative reflection! whereas children are constitutionally unable to do so. In terms of Renaissance psychology, the childish desire for "playes" or "toyes" mentioned above is ultimately a function of the his or her possession of the "organic soul" without its "intellective" counterpart: the former encompasses the faculties of memory and imagination, while the latter must be fully developed in order for the will and reason to function. 60 Like animals, who also possess the organic soul without its intellective counterpart, children are relegated to a realm of reflex and diversion without the benefits of reason and its ethical cognate, prudence, which together weigh the value of various future likelihoods. In the example of the child, such prudence-obliterating objects can be either imaginative or real: both will occupy the simple creature who, for better or worse, has what Leah Marcus has described as an integral "wholeness and unity of mind." 61 Thus Wright remarks, "[S]ince we see not by faith present, those things we expect by hope, or abhorre by feare, in the meane time the devill, flesh, and world, delighting us with a present bait, we neglect that we should expect, and accept that we find next: not unlike to children who preferre an aple before their inheritance." 62 The image of settling for whatever is "next" confirms that the problem with children is the utter seriality of their intellective life, itself the result of the incomplete differentiation of the soul's governing faculties. Children do not step back, evaluate the field, and choose what they will become occupied with. If the apple is near, it must be eaten. Like all proverbial associations, the ones I have outlined above are loose but interconnected. What knits them together is a conviction that children, 59· Plato's remarks refer to the proper sequence of pleasures that must be encountered in early childhood in order to naturally acquire virtue. See Plato, The Laws, trans. T. J. Saunders (New York: Penguin, 1970), 85-86. 6o. On the "organic soul," see Katharine Park, "The Organic Soul," in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464-84. 61. Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, 90. 62. Wright, Passions of the minde, 312.

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lacking the adult experience and the capacity for deliberate, rational action, become a living demonstration of what it is like to live without these adult virtues. The child embodies a state of unthinking agency, desirous and active but indifferent to the lessons of experience or the rules of reason. In the Tudor gerontocracy, a society in which almost all positions of authority were held by adult males, the parrotlike precocity of children that Quintilian condemned would be criticized in adults, but when displayed by a child it might sometimes have offered a reassuring proof of the superiority of adult wisdom. Indeed, the sobriety and majesty of the so-called "plain style" of speech would have been particularly conspicuous in a culture that was schooling its children in self-consciously ornate rhetorical techniques. 63 So, too, the child's seemingly natural absorption in its own fabulations, a state that would prove damning when ascribed to the subject of both the popular theater and Catholic piety and ritual, might-when removed from these adult contexts-seem more like a natural foible to be corrected rather than condemned. During the sixteenth century, English writers would, for a number of different reasons, exploit this negative exemplum of the miming, absorbed child for its polemical and ideological value. When they turned to the child as an illustration of fiction's powers, they found a creature full of suggestive contradictions. The proverbial child was responsive but not judgmental, imaginative without being skeptical, imitative without feeling ethical restraint, presentcentered without self-regard, and affected without guile. Such an exception to the adult order of things proved indispensable to religious, social, and even literary critics who needed to acknowledge the power of imaginative invention and absorption while pointing out that certain ways of exercising these faculties ought to be left in the nursery. -fZ~

Play, Credulity, and the Dangers of Unregulated Imagining

Recent studies of the English Reformation have challenged the assumption-advanced, in part, by the success of Jonas Barish's The Antitheatrical Prejudice-that Protestants were categorically opposed to

63. On the plain style and its association with adult gravitas, see Kenneth J. E. Graham, The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) and R. F. Jones, "The Moral Sense of Simplicity," in Studies in Honor of Frederick W. Shipley (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), 265-87. Jones points out a number of sixteenth-century sources in which ornate rhetoric is dismissed as "chyldishe eloquence" (266), "babling" (272), and "childish trifles" (273).

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the theater in particular and to fiction in general. 64 Almost twenty years ago, Reformation historian Patrick Collinson, writing on the question of whether Protestants had any culture besides that of the Bible, argued that "[n]on-fiction, [i.e.] texts on practical subjects, was, in the perspective of the godly religious mind, legitimate. Fictions were not, religious and secular literature being in deadly competition for the possession of the imaginative and leisure hour." 65 The word "competition" here suggests an exclusive relationship between two genres of literature, with the gaudy products of the secular poets' imagination chasing away the humble props of sacred reflection. In reality the two were more compatible. While it is true that, toward the end of Elizabeth's reign, Protestant controversialists vocally condemned the theaters and those who patronized them, there is ample evidence that even those we call Puritans-those most ardent Protestants on the left-did not see their piety as intrinsically opposed to imaginative recreation. We are now more likely to see the playing field between religion and fiction as somewhat more level than Collinson once suggested. One need look no further than John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, a milestone of Protestant historiography, to see that Protestant martyrs were caught up in a drama every bit as theatrical as the type that regularly appeared in Southwark. 66 The stage itself, moreover, was more responsive to religious interests during the sixteenth century than was previously assumed, as the work of Deborah Shuger, Paul White, and Huston Diehl has shown. 67 Even after religious topics were banned from the professional stages in 1559, critics of Tudor-Stuart drama discern signs of what has been called a Protestant poetics in drama that is not explicitly religious. 68

64. See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Protestant "hostility" toward the stage has been difficult to characterize with precision because of the difficulty of defining Nonconformist groups with terms like "Puritan" and the fact that polemical opposition to the stage did not fully develop until the late sixteenth century. 65. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestantism: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 95· 66. Foxe was himself literally a playwright. According to Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 24: "Foxe champions another kind of theater, substituting the theatrics of martyrdom for traditional pomp and pageantry." 67. Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Diehl, Staging Reform, chap. 1; Paul Whitfield White, Theater and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 68. See, for example, Bryan Crockett, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), and Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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It is not surprising, then, that the anti theatrical and antifictive writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries needed to specify what, in particular, was so objectionable about the practice of attending the theater or, for that matter, reading romances, lyrics, or epics. Critics of theatrical (as opposed literary) feigning could recall the Deuteronomic prohibition against men dressing as women or claim-as did William Prynne in his encyclopedic condemnation of the stage, Histriomastix (1633)-that stage performances made male audience members effeminate. But the core objection of Prynne and others seems to have been that in attending plays, auditors gave their assent to something that was either not real or not right, and that both were grave spiritual mistakes. 69 Thus Anthony Munday would write, in a much earlier attack on playing and the theater,

Onlie the filthines of plaies, and spectacles is such, as maketh both the actors & beholders giltie alike. For while they saie nought, but gladlie look on, they al by sight and assent be actors. 70 For Munday and others, the problem with theatrical spectatorship was that it uncovered a fundamental instability within human identity, one that Protestant reformers sought to remedy with familiar prescriptions: modesty of dress, plainness of expression, attendance at church and an undistracted focus on one's spiritual journey. Indeed, it was the work of religion and moral education to consolidate that identity, not only through religious instruction but through the cultivation of a culture that reinforced or mirrored the mandates of scripture. Professional stage plays, almost by definition, could not be a part of this consolidating culture, since in offering fashionable comic or tragic tales they inevitably mixed the good and bad, real and unreal. (Academic drama, a classicizing instructional genre that was initially favored in grammar schools, was at first excused from this critique.) The ontological fluidity of theatrical illusion-its provisional existence, its dependence on belief and fashion-could thus be placed in unflattering parallel with both the plasticity of the imaginative faculty that entertained such illusions and, by extension, the fluid spiritual identity of the auditor. For ardent antitheatricalists like Munday, there could be no doubt that the frivolous, morally ambiguous spectacles performed in the professional theaters would activate the wayward

6g. William Prynne, Histrio-mastix. The players scourge, or, actors tragaedie, divided into two parts .... (London: E[dward] A[llde, Augustine Mathewes, Thomas Cotes] and W[illiam] · J[ones], 1633), 209. 70. Anthony Munday, A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and theaters . .. ([London: Henrie Denham], 1580), 3·

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tendencies of a fallen and changeable human disposition. As something of a psychological corollary, a rhetoric of didacticism and pedagogy would emerge in anti theatrical discourse as practitioners sharpened their critiques, suggesting that the theater resurrected some primitive malleability in human nature, not for divine instruction but for corruption and diversion, turning sport and pastime into what Stephen Gosson famously called a "schoole of abuse." 71 It is thus not surprising to find critics of both the stage and Catholic ritual making identical complaints in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The fundamental problem with both playing and the "idolatrous" rites of Catholic worship was that they lulled the spectator or worshipper into a state of childlike credulity and malleability, one in which "brown paper" fictions and props were taken for the solid fundaments of reality. Gosson developed the analogy of the "school" of the theater with frequent references to the auditors at stage plays as "scholers" or grammar schoolers, a term of abuse that would be applied to child actors and "feigning" child demoniacs in the years that followed. The "discipline" provided by plays, he writes in Playes confuted in five actions (rs8s), is like to the justice that a certaine Schoolemaster taught in Persia, which taught his schollers to lye, and not to lye; to deceive, and not to deceive, with a distinction howe they might doe it to their friends, & how to their enemies; to their friends, for exercise; to their fooes, in earnest. Wherein many of his schollers became so skilfull by practise, by custome so bolde, that their dearest friendes payde more for their learning then their enemies. 72· With his analogy of scholar and schoolroom, Gosson looks forward with dread to the day when the implied pupil in the theatrical academy will find his pliable nature settled into a distorted form, somewhat like the proverbial crooked branch that resulted from poor cultivation. Studious imitation might quickly flower into a dangerous facility for play and playing, childish habit into adult vice. The same process of reversioncorruption would be energetically condemned by Protestant critics of Catholic ceremony, who suggested that the Mass and the veneration of the saints were imaginative diversions fit only for children, taught them

71. Stephen Gosson, The schoole of abuse conteining a plesaunt invective against poets, pipers, plaiers, jesters, and such like caterpillers of a co[m]monwelth . . . (London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1579). 72. Stephen Gosson, Playes confuted in five actions . . . (London: Thomas Gleason, 1582), C6r-v.

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by predatory instructors. Such claims were risky, however. Reformers could not condemn imaginative absorption entirely, since even the most austere forms of Protestant worship involved some kind of symbolic, and so imaginative, engagement with the immaterial and divine. By ridiculing both the act and the actor within Catholic doctrineworking from feigned ritual to infantile believer-critics of the old religion may have inadvertently solidified the link between children and fiction in the minds of English readers. But they also cleared the way for a recuperation of imaginative absorption in religious worship by claiming that their own practices were somehow more adult-that unlike Catholics, who bowed in idolatrous, childlike submission to images of the saints, reformed worshippers knew their symbols were symbols and so could redirect their attention away from the representatives and props of divinity toward divinity itself. Calvin may have found parental sin in the heart of the child; his English interpreters would go further in arguing that childish vanities lingered in the hearts of adults. Indeed, the persistence of such an unreformed childhood in sensuous or ritual adult behavior is mentioned again and again in treatises condemning idolatry; we see it, for example, in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, when William Bedell argues that "idolatry"-the typical target of Protestant critics and iconoclasts-is a specifically childish vice. "Noe sooner doe their children almost creep out of their Cradles," he writes, "but they are taught to be Idolators." In complaining about "childish processions" in Venice in which "puppets" made for the Virgin are carried about, Bedell is ultimately criticizing an adult vice-that of being childish without noticing that one is slipping back across the developmental scale. In this preposterous Catholic republic of childish ritual, Bedell seems to be saying, no one can see that the world is turned upside down. Righting that world would involve the literal dismantling of popish "toys" and "idols," a program of iconoclasm that had already taken hold of England during the reigns of Henry and Edward?3 A spectacular instance of this iconoclastic furor, one involving a rather more exalted puppet, occurred in 1548 when a rood figure of Christ once ascribed marvelous powers of motion-the Rood of Grace at the Cistercian abbey at Boxley-was paraded about at Paul's Cross and demonstrated to be a fake. In a story that was communicated to the continental reformer Johann Bullinger by a correspondent from Kent,

73· On Protestant iconoclasm, see Diehl, Staging Reform, 14-22 passim; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in the Popular Religion of Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 27-36; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 140o-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 494-96, and John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535-1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

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the writer tells of a marionette-like creature whose eyes and lips were shown to move by artificial means, creating a great clamor at the deceit (imposturam), which ultimately resulted in the rood's being given to boys to break up at Paul's Cross. 74 The message in this theater of de-animation, we can gather, was that Catholic piety was really a form of childish entertainment mistaken for sacred revelation?5 Those who bowed to the rood when it "gestured" toward them were making an elementary mistake, one that would be mocked in songs and homilies.76 Animation, giving life and intention to something that is-strictly speaking-a bundle of stuff: this is another name for the basic error of idolatry. But who or what did the animating in such situations? It was not simply the cleric behind the curtain, pulling on the strings and speaking words through the tube that had been buried in the rood figure's body. Criticism of Catholic puppetry, mummery, and idols would be useless if reformers did not also believe that the imagination had its own autonomous power. Why, after all, would reformers endorse a program of skeptical debunking, albeit in highly theatrical forms, if it were reason and good judgment, rather than fantasy, that were bringing inanimate creatures like the Rood of Grace to life? If the simple act of taking off one's hat to the image of a saint suggested childlike duty to a parent, the answer would be to take away such trifles and demand adult behavior. What was particularly galling to reformers was the tendency of Catholics to substitute a part for a whole, a mere show or appearance for some reality it must ultimately signify.77 Thus the following complaint, from a volume of Elizabethan sermons, that the idolator has been taken in by a body without a soul, a container with no contents: We (sayth Seneca) be not twice children (as the common saying is) but alwaies children: but this is the difference, that we being elder, play 74· See Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, vol. 3, part 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1829), 18o--81; and Robert Heylyn, Ecclesia restaurata; or, the history of the reformation of the Church of England . .. (London, 1661), g-10. 75· Thus iconoclasts, during the reign of Edward, gave icons and other "idols" to children to play with. See Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 75· 76. A ballad by William Gray entitled "The Fantasy of Idolatry," for example, gave details about various fallen idols from Boxley, Walsingham, Ramsbury, Hailes and elsewhere, describing them as "puppets, maumats and elfes." See Aston, England's Iconoclasts, 1:429-40. The Elizabethan homilist (1562) condemns idolatry on the following grounds: "as little girls play with puppets, so be these decked images great puppets for old fools to play with" and "True Religion then ... standeth not in making, setting up, painting, gilding, cloathing and decking of dumb and dead images (which be but great puppets and babies for old fools in dotage, and wicked idolatry, to dally and play with)." See Certain sermons or homilies appointed to be read in churches, in the time of Queen Elizabeth offamous memory (London: T. R., 1673), 156, 159. 77· Katharine Eisaman Maus see this process at work in the theater in her Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 32: "Renaissance theatrical method is ... radically synechdochic, endlessly referring the spectators to events, objects, situations, landscapes that cannot be shown to them."

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the children: and in these playes they bring in before great, and well decked puppets (for so he calleth Images) Oyntment, Incense, and Odours. To these puppets they offer up Sacrifice, which have a mouth, but not the use of teeth . ... There is a like foolishness, and a lewdnesse in decking of our images [in England], as great puppets for old fooles, like children, to play the wicked play of Idolatry before, as was among the Ethnickes, and Gentiles?8 Adult skepticism or distanced self-reflection is offered as an antidote to idolatrous self-absorption, a state that allows the surfaces of things to obscure the mechanisms (or void) within. Pious adoration becomes an "Ethnick" atavistic reversion. A similar dual consciousness or willing imaginative cooperation is urged by Shakespeare's chorus in Henry V, albeit to different ends: 0 pardon: since a crooked figure [the 0 shaped theater] may Attest in little place a million, And let us, ciphers to this great account, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder. Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts: Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance. (prologue, 15-25) The words in this opening prologue urge the spectator to ignore the material obstacles to theatrical play, as if the imagination's attachment to certain objects can be secured only by a deliberate act of consent. The spectator can, Shakespeare is assuming, be goaded into the counterfactual world by the insufficiency of the spectacle and its "cipher"-like vehicles: the mere stuff and bodies on stage become even more real when their artificiality is consciously grasped.79 Such a cooperative spectator will, like the actor doubling parts, be divided into a thousand parts-precisely the type of cognitive self-division that a child, whose imagination is fused to an incompletely governing reason, will be unable to achieve. 80

78. Quoted in Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, 8o (italics added). 79· Knapp, Shakespeare's Tribe, 132-35, associates this type of imaginative addition or "immaterial communion" with Protestantism, a point I will return to below. 8o. As we will see in the case of Shakespearean romance, theatrical performances regularly appropriate the skepticism deployed by Protestant reformers, using it to intensify imaginative absorption instead of dissolving it.

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There is clearly room in Protestant reforming literature for a theory of adult knowing-play (glossed by Seneca above) that is distinct from indiscriminate, childlike belief. Some of the intellectual feats of Protestant casuistry, which deployed the counterfactual imagination in the service of moral erudition, would have required just such imaginative flexibility. 81 But the general tone of Protestant antiritualism is usually so unforgiving that the positive uses of imaginative feigning are difficult to discern, even among critics who retain aspects of Catholic practice. Martin Luther, for example, is breathless in his condemnation of what he sees to be Catholic make-believe. Children may play such games, but "for us old fools to go about in mitres and clerical finery, and take it so seriously,-so seriously, indeed, that it becomes an article of faith,-so that whoever does not adore this child's play must have committed a sin and have his conscience tortured by it,-that is the very devil!" 82 Calvin agrees with Luther, expressing vaguely Platonic fears about the dangers of mimesis when he condemns the Catholic Mass as a "trick of jongleurs, a wanton, apish imitation of Christian truth." 83 Significantly for Calvin, it is not simply the act of imitation that is to be condemned but its object. What puts Catholic playing beyond the pale for the Genevan reformer is its repetition of true piety in an uncomprehending form. He may have had a particular example in mind. Since at least the eleventh century, Catholics had been celebrating the feast of the "Boy Bishops" during the month of December, a ritual that inverted church hierarchy by having a boy from the choir play the role of priest or bishop for several weeks. Throughout the month of December, beginning on St. Nicholas's Day to the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the episcopus puerorum took the place of his superiors in certain church rites, taking with him "a counterfaict of prebends" who would all receive canonical obedience from the bishop, dean and other members of the church hierarchy. 84 Such counterfeit clergy figures were enormously popular throughout Europe and in Scandinavia; in England the practice thrived until it was outlawed by proclamation of Henry VIII in 1541. (It was revived again under Mary.) During the Boy Bishop's rule: 81. On casuistry, see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), chap. 10. 82. Martin Luther, The Works of Martin Luther, ed. Henry Eyster Jacobs et al., vol. 4 (Philadelphia: Holman, 1931), 38o-81. 83. Quoted in Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, 8o. 84. See Two sermons preached by the boy-bishop, one at St. Paul's, temp. Henry VIII, the other at Gloucester, temp. Mary (London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1875); Neil Mackenzie, "Boy Into Bishop," History Today 37 (1987): 10-16; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 13-44; and Shulamith Shahar, "The Boy Bishop's Feast: A Case-Study in Church Attitudes Towards Children in the High and Late Middle Ages," in The Church and Childhood, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 243-60.

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Children were wont to be arrayed in chimera, rochets, surplices [the robes of office], to counterfeit bishops and priests, and to be led, with songs and dances, from house to house, blessing the people, who stood grinning in the way to expect that ridiculous benediction; yea, that boys in that holy sport were wont to sing masses, and to climb into the pulpit to preach (no doubt learnedly and edifying) to the simple auditory. 85 In this mid-seventeenth-century description of the practice by the Bishop of Chester, George Hall, we learn that this troupe of boys would don the ceremonial robes of the bishop or priest and eventually preach "learnedly" to a "simple" auditory. Hall is speaking ironically about these days in which the nave became the nursery, but there is good reason to think that an admonitory sermon delivered with lively gesture and good pronunciation might have indeed impressed both literate and illiterate audiences. To Protestant reformers, however, the entire affair looked like mayhem. Given Protestant skepticism about Catholic ritual prior to such inversions, this particular practice suggests that what Eamon Duffy has called "traditional religion"-religion sustained from below rather than imposed from above-was not unaware of the fictive elements in its worship. Celebrants could affirm the festival of the boy bishop as "holy play" without seeing the inversion as a decisive act of demystification. For Calvin and other reformers, some of whom prevailed on Henry to ban the practice when it was rumored that choristers were actually saying Mass, there was no significant difference between the ritual and its inversion. The parody of the child prelate simply demonstrated the essence of the old religion in minuscule, revealing its dalliance with infantile trifles and failure to embrace a more sober, knowing truth. This trifling quality of childish performance and precocity may have been emptied out as efforts at reform continued over the course of the sixteenth century. The child's dalliance with inverted truth would, however, be ripe for appropriation (and satirical inversion) when the newly revived boy companies began to perform in the 1590s, as we will see in chapter 3· The liturgy, too, was an area where reformers saw a link between childish mimesis and religious travesty. The Henrican reformer Thomas Cranmer's introduction of the English Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and 1552 created a standardized set of offices for English worship in the vernacular. The new English liturgy was meant to bring deliberate, collective understanding to congregants who seemed otherwise lost in what Cranmer called a "game and fond play" when the offices were in Latin. "Had you rather be like pies and parrots," he asks, "that be taught to speak, and yet understand not one word what they say, than be true christian men, that pray 85. George Hall, Triumph of roman ism (1655), quoted in Two Sermons, xix-xx.

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unto God in heart and faith?" 86 But Cranmer's offices were themselves criticized by more ardent reformers who felt that scripted prayers, even if they were understood by those who read them, were not spontaneous and so did not carry the authenticating stamp of intention or inner consent. Thus, as Ramie Targoff has shown, the standardized liturgy became a subject of controversy precisely because the act of reading and repetition raised difficult questions about the role of intention and rational assent in public worship. 87 To John Field and Thomas Wilcox, both vituperative critics of the old religion, the act of reading a set response suggested vain repetition, "as evill as playing upon a stage, and worse too." 88 Thomas Cartwright, a spokesman for the Nonconformist position in the 1570s, further articulated the problems that follow from the repetition (either on stage or in church) of sacred texts: The boke is such a peece of work as it is straunge we will use it; besides I cannot accompt it praying, as they use it commonly, but only reading or saying of prayers, even as a childe that learneth to read, if his lesson be a prayer, he readeth a prayer, he doth not pray. 89 Cartwright's complaint suggests a scarcity in the economy of the soul, as if repetition of sacred words automatically becomes mere childish imitation, crowding out any capacity for reason to give its inner stamp of consent. Unlike the catechism, where repetition is meant to teach and explain through repetition, prayer requires an inner resolve to mean what one says. Without such an animating intention or knowing consent, a truly performative prayer becomes prattle. Against this position, however, Richard Hooker argued that what is common about common prayer is precisely what makes it meaningful in the eyes of God. As Targoff points out, Hooker and other Anglicans criticized the Nonconformist emphasis on spontaneity in prayer and preaching, suggesting that the rhetorical antics of Nonconformist ministers introduced a potentially chaotic strain

86. Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), 169-70. 87. Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 38. 88. W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1907), 22. 89. Quoted in Frere and Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes, 114-15. See also Henry Barrow, A briefe discovery of the false church (1590): "Shall we think that God hath any time left these his servants so singly furnished and destitute of his grace, that they cannot find words according to their necessities and faith, to expresse their wantes and desires, but need thus to be taught line unto line, as children new weaned from the brestes ... ?"Henry Barrow, The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1587-1590, ed. Leland H. Carlson, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 2003), 364.

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into the music of public worship. 90 Thus the imitative vices that were first associated with the Latin liturgy come to be associated with histrionic excess-and in particular, the instrumental power of such excess-in Hooker's justification of a common worship text. This led him to praise the original (but textually absent) performance of apostolic utterance while dismissing recent Nonconformist preaching innovations: [T]he vigor and vital efficacy of sermons doth grow from certain accidents which are not in the [sermons] but in their maker; his virtue, his gesture, his countenance, his zeal, the motion of his body, and the inflection of his voice who first uttereth them as his own, is that which giveth them the form, the nature, the very essence of instruments available to eternallife. 91 Hooker is voicing a long-standing criticism of rhetoric here, arguing-as Plato had once done in the Gorgias-that the slippery art of public speaking is inferior to principled knowledge ("who first uttereth them as his own"). 92 Over and against this derivative mode of inspiration, Hooker advances the claims of communal worship, which offers the individual an opportunity for regeneration by combating "the distraction and devotional lethargy that emerge from the difficulty of praying privately or individually without liturgical guides." 93 As the debate about repetition versus comprehension unfolded, participants like Cranmer, Whitgift, and Hooker would be forced to navigate, in one way or another, the triple link between childishness, the stage, and imitation. For a pragmatist like Hooker, who wanted to revive imitation as a legitimate exercise, it became crucial to partition off the excesses of "zeal" and "vocal inflection" from the legitimate kernel of communal, mutually reflective worship. ~z~

Pedagogy, Poesy, and Rhetoric

The need to separate what was mannered, childish, and merely repetitive from what was strong, deliberate, and potentially rewarding in the realm of imitation was also registered throughout early modern debates about pedagogy, poesy, and rhetoric. While I will be examining several offshoots of these debates in this book, it is important to recognize here that tension between good and bad feigning not only informed the

go. Targoff, Common Prayer, 47-49. 91. Richard Hooker, Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977),107-8. 92. See Gorgias 465a in Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton and Chris Emlyn-Jones (New York: Penguin, 2004), 32. 93· Targoff, Common Prayer, 53·

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pedagogy of the period, which regularly advocated imitation of classical models through the "double translation" of ancient Latin texts into English and then back into Latin, but was also evident in attempts to bring the knowledge of Italian literary criticism (and its classical sources) to bear on vernacular poetry and writing for the stage. 94 Rhetoric, too, was becoming not simply a pragmatic necessity of the law courts or pulpit but a sine qua non of urbane, courtly sophistication. 95 In each of these areas of early modern life-pedagogy, poesy, and rhetoric-the virtues of imitation and imposture were regularly weighed against their vices. What was the practical and ethical impact, for example, of modeling one's words on patches of text stitched together from ancient Latin texts? In imitating the Ciceronian periodic style, something Erasmus parodied as affected and jejune, was one giving the reins of the soul over to passion at the expense of reason (the former being susceptible to the high-flown style of aureate Latin)? Were ornament and elocution the essence of poetic style, or were matters of invention and conceit-those offices that treated topics and argumentmore important? And how could one discern the real intentions of an individual who, following the recommendations of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, constantly dissimulated his or her carefully practiced remarks so

94· On the classical curriculum advocated in England by educators such as Thomas Elyot, Roger Ascham, Richard Mulcaster, and William Kempe, many of whom were inspired by the recommendations of continental humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Louis Vives, seeR. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 329-68; Bolgar, "Classical Reading in Renaissance Schools," The Durham Research Review 2 (1955): 18-26; Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 117-43; Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, chap. 6; and Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 19-26. On the influence of Italian literary criticism and classical models on English poetry and drama, see G. Gregory Smith's introduction to his edited volume, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chap. 1; and Arthur Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986). 95· On the significance of rhetoric in early modern English culture, the remarks of Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake in their introduction to Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) are representative: "This was a society obsessed with questions of rhetorical artifice and artificiality and with the occasions for dissimulation and concealment offered by rhetorical skill." See also Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 157-64; Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987); Wayne Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men's Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, chap. 2.

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that they could be repeated in public with studied ease, or sprezzatura?96 In an age that openly praised studied imposture, the childish act of repeating what one had seen or heard was but a single level in an escalating game of power and display. To many of those who asked these sorts of questions, the child served as a figure for an affected but unconscious style that had never been refined or "filed" by experience. In a pedagogical context, as in the debates on catechizing above, childish imitation was often seen as the first step to greater things. The pedagogical reformer Roger Ascham, for example, warns that children are always picking up the habits they see around them, but he is nevertheless confident that a careful modeling of the best sorts of actions in classical literature will lead the grammar scholar to a higher form of imitation. Just as Virgil imitated Homer, Ascham writes, students can be taught to "know perfectly and which way to follow" the ancient exemplar, treating dissimilar matters in similar form, or introducing pleasant variation in the treatment of a single theme. 97 That said, Ascham is loath to allow his students to behave like those "ltalianated Gentlemen" who have returned from "Papist" lands where they are "allured to wantonness." In a long excursus that ends Book I of The Schoolmaster, he condemns the reading of "fond" texts like the Marte D'Arthur, which have the effect of working various "toys" (i.e., trifling desires or fancies) in young blood. Humanist zeal for Latin letters finds a dual opponent here in vernacular romance and the "school" of Catholic mores in Italy. Whatever his real target, the language of Ascham's condemnation links the reading of fabulous tales to wantonness, idleness, and foolish impetuosity-hallmarks, we recognize, of the very worst sort of childish play. 98 Erasmus made a similar point in his Cicerionianus, a dialogue in which an ardent Ciceronian, Nosoponus, is subjected to what we might call 96. Baldesar Castiglione, The courtier of count Baldessar Castilio devided into foure bookes ... done into English by Thomas Hobby (London: John Wolfe, 1588), D6r. See also Stephen Guazzo, The civile conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo written first in Italian, and nowe translated out of French by George Pettie ... (London: Richard Watkins, 1581), 8r. 97· Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 57-58, 116-17. But as Ascham's predecessor in pedagogical reform, Thomas Elyot, warned forty years earlier in The Governour (1531), the gentleman student who stops the study of Latin after merely mastering the forms (which often happens at around age fourteen) will be praised no more than "a popinjay, a pye, or a stare," since "lyke to a trumpet they make a soun[d]e without any purpose." Elyot, A Critical Edition, 59· 98. See Ascham, Schoolmaster, 68-69; 75· Ascham may be taking his theme from a passage in Quintilian's Institutes (10.2.11), a text that Terence Cave argues is particularly concerned with the vice of mere repetition. See The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 38. As Rebecca Bushnell, Culture of Teaching, 31, notes, the early humanist educational program aimed at eradicating slavish imitation or subservience to rules.

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therapeutic ridicule for his insatiable desire to reproduce exactly the Ciceronian style. Having read only Cicero for seven years and created a massive lexicon of his every word-a book so great it must be hefted by a donkey-Nosoponus regales his interlocutors with the extremes to which he is willing to go in order to wear the mantle of his master. Why follow the Grammarians, he asks rhetorically, in declining every verb in all its forms, when the only truly exalted forms are to be found in Cicero, who uses amo (I love) and amas (you love), but never amabatis (you were loving)? Bulephorus, the Socratic ironist in the dialogue and second for Erasmus, uses a number of arguments to point out the folly of this man who has sunk to the most "apish" form of imitation. Bulephorus tells a story about his visit to Rome in which he witnesses an oratory contest conducted in the presence of Pope Julian II. The winning speaker, treating the theme of the glory of Christ's passion, proceeds to employ the most exquisite rhetorical devices in praise of the suffering of Christ, but all his examples are taken from Roman history. To stir joy at the resurrection, for example, the speaker praises the triumphs of Scipio, Paulus Aemilius, Caius Caesar, and the deified emperors. "In so Roman a fashion spoke that Roman," Bulephorus says, "that I heard nothing about the death of Christ." Such gaffes are typical of schoolboys: He was a most ambitious candidate for Ciceronian eloquence and seemed to the Ciceronians to have spoken wonderfully, though he said almost nothing on the subject which he seemed neither to know nor to care for. ... The speech could have been approved as a specimen of talent and genius, if it had been delivered by a school boy; but what good was it for such a day, before such auditors, and on such a theme, I pray? 99 The vice of speaking like someone rather than to someone is exemplified here by the rote reproduction of the classical model-something acceptable only in the grammar schooler. It would be precisely this kind of apish style that the English Ramist Gabriel Harvey would object to a half a century later in his own Ciceronianus, a text in which he recommends emulating Cicero's aptness of arguments and decorousness of style rather than the simple repetition of his examples and figures. 100 As English theorists of rhetoric like Harvey evaluated the different classical styles-brief, grand, and easy-the child would serve as a model, not just

99· Desiderius Erasmus, Ciceronianus, trans. Izora Scott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 64-5. See also Cave, Cornucopian Text, 39-49. 100. Gabriel Harvey, Gabrielis Harveii Ciceronian us, vel oratio post reditum, habita Cantabrigiae ad suos auditores (London: Henry Binneman, 1577). See also Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 247-55.

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for a brand of unreasoning imitation but of a particular kind of ornamental affectation that tickled the senses while leaving reason unmoved. Such a speaker epitomized a certain failure of art, since unlike the adult speaker, who has learned to hide his verbal gambits and wiles, the child lays them out openly. In the late sixteenth century, criticisms such as these would actually cement the link between childish actions and fictional imposture, since it was in such precocious performances that the nature of rhetorical imposture might be explicitly grasped. Literary criticism in this period also relied on the trope of childishness to castigate what were seen as stylistic and imaginative excesses. Stylistic faults were criticized in much the same vein as rhetorical onesnot surprising when one considers that in the sixteenth century, rhetoric and poetics were two sides of the same coin. 101 George Puttenham, for example, tends to merge into the word "maker" a number of senses: the maker of (counterfactual) fictions, the maker of speeches, and the maker of public performances (i.e., the courtier). Of "our English maker," he writes [W]e doe allow our Courtly Poet to be a dissembler only in the subtilties of his arte, that is, when he is most artificiall, so to disguise and cloake it as it may not appeare, nor seeme to proceede from him by any studie or trade of rules, but to be his naturall; nor so evidently to be descried, as every ladde that reades him shall say he is a good schaller, but will rather have him to know his arte well, and little to use it. 102 The "schollar," or schoolboy, here seems to exemplify the poet's art-that is to say, the particular techniques of the artist-rather than using those techniques for a deliberate effect. Those who want to excel at feigning need specifically to avoid this puerile artfulness and employ an art of a different, more calculating sort. Thomas Nashe, in his criticism of Alehouse poets and "our new found Songs & Sonets, which every rednose Fidler hath at his fingers end," complains that the negative example of such imitation has left English letters in a state of infantile disarray: There is no such discredit of Arte as an ignoraunt Artificer ... so he that estimates Artes by the insolence of Idiots, who professe that wherein they are Infants, may deeme the University nought but the nurse of £ollie,

101. See Arthur F. Kinney, "Rhetoric as Poetic: Humanist Fiction in the Renaissance." ELH 43, no. 4 (1976): 413-43. On the rhetorical aspects of poetry, see George Puttenham, "The Arte of English Poesie," in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), 2:8-9. 102. Puttenham, "The Arte of English Poesie," 186-87.

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and the knowledge of Artes nought but the imitation of the Stage. This I speake to shew what an obloquie these impudent incipients in Arts are unto Art. 103 Nashe's rhetoric of childhood makes not only the products of art but the knowledge of that art itself a mere imitation. Just as the priest on stage may not really understand the nature of grace or the child may prattle without knowing anything about language, so, too, the "ignaurant Artificer" speaks words without any knowledge of why he is doing so. If the child reveals the impostures of art or-from the point of view of the audience-the dangers of attending only the surface qualities of language, it is not surprising to find repeated condemnations of certain poetic forms (for example, the "letter" or figure poem) as "folish idle phantasticall ... triflinge and childishe toyes," "meere folleryes, vices taken upp for virtues, apish devices, frivolous boyishe grammer schole trickes." 104 Often it is only when this more bald version of making or feigning has been trotted out that the truly restorative powers of drama can be praised, a strategy we will see Ben Jonson using in his children's company plays. Thus George Whetstone, in his Dedication to The right excellent and famous historye of Promos and Cassandra, writes: The auncient Romanes heald these showes [of Menander, Plautus and Terence] of suche prise that they not onely allowde the publike exercise of them, but the grave Senators themselves countenaunced the Actors with their presence: who from these trifles wonne morallytye, as the Bee suckes honny from weedes. But the advised devises of auncient Poets, disc[r]edited with tryfels of yonge, unadvised, and rashe witted wryters, hath brought this commendable exercise in mislike. 105 The phrase" advised devices" here perfectly captures the positive use of fiction for moral instruction, even if this same sort of "trifle" can be abused by the "unadvised" young. With Whetstone we glimpse the deep ambivalence that Elizabethan writers and their Jacobean successors felt when it came to fictional imitation and rhetorical imposture, an ambivalence that Thomas Greene has argued was resolved only in Jonson's particular poetics of

103. Thomas Nashe, "The Anatomie of Absurditie" (1589), in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:334. 104. Letter from Gabriel Harvey to Immerito [Edmund Spenser], April 1580, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:126. On the "infant" vice of literalism among bad translators, see Thomas Nashe's preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon (1589), in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:314-15. 105. George Whetstone, Dedication to The right excellent and famous Historye of Promos and Cassandra (1578) in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:59.

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classical imitation. 106 Clearly poetic making and rhetorical feigning were an avenue-perhaps even a royal road-to the inner workings of the soul. But under what circumstances was such traffic beneficial? As with Protestant attempts to reconcile the virtues of imaginative play with the apparent theatrical vices of Catholic ritual, English theorists of imitation and pedagogy were forced to find an exemplary limit case that would highlight the differences between good and bad forms of dissemblance or imposture. Childish imitation and absorption were two of the very best examples that could be found to explain (1) the almost irrational means by which fictions could be produced (automatic imitatio) and (2) the overwhelming effects that such fictions could bring about in the soul, inviting those who entertained them to abandon reason on the basis of their absorption in surface effects, props, and "toyes." What was extreme about the child was the special condition of privation in which he or she lived, a privation of reasonable self-governance that guaranteed that this captive population of pretty creatures-like the birds on Darwin's isolated Galapagos islands-could be used to illustrate principles and hidden mechanisms that would otherwise go unnoticed. For the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, performances of child actors, witnesses, and "scholars" were the ready-made laboratories in which the limits of imitation could be probed and flights of fancy tested. The results were as provocative as they were inconclusive. 106. Thomas M Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), chap. 4 and 271---