“Framed in Wax”: Fiction as Artificial Experience in The Duchess of Malfi

Abstract

E arly modern theories of fiction, to quote Heraclitus’ famous aphorism about nature, love to hide. Many of the most exciting theoretical explorations of fiction from the period are to be found in texts that pretend to be doing something else. Literary scholars are adept at finding the self-reflexive critical epitomes hiding in early modern poetry, drama, and imaginative prose. Formative examples include Philip Sidney’s lyric engagement with the problem of invention in the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella (c.1582), William Shakespeare’s staged confrontation between the value of art versus nature in The Winter’s Tale (1611), and Margaret Cavendish’s interrelation of reason and fancy as rational parts of matter in The Blazing World (1666). When treated as theoretical works, such literary exempla prompt scholars to conceive of early modern poetic theory as the by-product of poetic craft, rather than the reverse. I propose that