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mangan Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring By Michael Mangan PERFORMING Magic and conjuring inhabit the boundaries and the Performing borderlands of performance. The conjuror’s act of R demonstrating the apparently impossible, the uncanny, the marvellous, or the grotesque challenges the spectator’s sense of reality. Michael Mangan holds the {DARK { D A K } It brings him or her up against their own assumptions Chair in Drama at Exeter about how the world works; at its most extreme, it asks University. His main research the spectator to re-evaluate his or her sense of the limits interests lie in theatre and society – more specifically, of the human. Performing Dark Arts is an exploration of the he has published in the paradox of the conjuror, the actor who pretends to be a subjects of theatre and gender, Shakespeare and Renaissance A T S magician. It aims to illuminate the history of conjuring by R examining it in the context of performance studies, and to theatre, the cultural history of popular performance, throw light on aspects of performance studies by testing and contemporary British them against the art of conjuring. The book examines not theatre. He has also worked A only the performances of individual magicians from Dedi as a playwright, a director, a RTS} A CULTURAL HISTORY to David Blaine, but also the broader cultural contexts literary manager, a dramaturg and an actor. in which their performances were received, and the o f CONJURING meanings which they have attracted. ‘This is an erudite book which wears its scholarship lightly and is a pleasure to read. Complex theoretical frameworks are introduced in ways that will make them accessible to the general reader, and the book’s A CULTURAL HISTORY argument opens up new implications and applications for the study of magic as performance...’ – Roberta Mock, Department of Theatre and o f C O N J U R I N G Performance, University of Plymouth ISBN 978-1-84150-149-9 0 0 9 781841 501499 intellect PO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE UK / www.intellectbooks.com B y MICHAEL MANGAN Front Matter.qxd 4/2/07 6:37 PM Page i Performing Dark Arts A Cultural History of Conjuring Front Matter.qxd 4/2/07 6:37 PM Page ii Front Matter.qxd 4/2/07 6:37 PM Page iii Performing Dark Arts A Cultural History of Conjuring Michael Mangan ^ciZaaZXi7g^hida!J@8]^XV\d!JH6 Front Matter.qxd 4/2/07 6:37 PM Page iv First Published in the UK in 2007 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK First Published in the USA in 2007 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637,USA Copyright © 2007 Intellect All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-84150-149-9 / Electronic ISBN 9781841509853 / ISSN 1753-3058 Series: Theatre and Consciousness Series editor: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe Already published in the series: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Theatre and Consciousness: Explanatory Scope and Future Potential (2005) Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Planman Technologies Printed and bound by HSW Print, UK. Front Matter.qxd 4/2/07 6:37 PM Page v Contents Preface and acknowledgements vii Introduction: magic and performance ix Chapter One Binaries: early attitudes to conjuring1 Chapter Two ‘The evil Spirit has a hand in the Tricks of these Jugglers’: conjuring and Christian orthodoxy 19 Chapter Three ‘Fire and faggot to burn the witch’? Conjuring between belief and unbelief in early modern England 31 Chapter Four On the margins: criminals and fraudsters 62 Chapter Five On the boundaries of the human 76 Chapter Six Acting and not-acting: Robert-Houdin 97 Chapter Seven Before your very eyes: life, death and liveness 116 Chapter Eight Narrative ambiguity and contested meanings: interpreting Harry Houdini 140 Chapter Nine Mediums and the media 162 Chapter Ten Magic, media and postmodernism 172 Endnotes 196 Bibliography 233 v Front Matter.qxd 4/2/07 6:37 PM Page vi Preface.qxd 4/2/07 6:38 PM Page vii Preface and acknowledgements This project started in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, with a suggestion from my editor, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe. It ended at the University of Exeter, not only with this book but also with the accompanying play The Inner Child’s Compendium of Magic (available on DVD from the Arts Documentation Unit, Exeter EX4 6JA UK). On the way it passed through De Montfort University, Leicester. In all of these places, and elsewhere, I have received invaluable help from friends and colleagues. Some have lent me books, videos and other magical material. Others have pointed me in directions that I would not otherwise have travelled in. Still others have offered thoughts, criticism, suggestions, feedback and many other kinds of professional and personal support. I had ventured into the field of magic history a few years before, and a section of Chapter Three appeared, in a much earlier version, in Performance Research 1: 3 (1996). This has now been significantly changed and updated. A section of Chapter Eight was first given as a keynote paper at the conference What A Man’s Gotta Do? Masculinities On Stage, UNE @ Shafston, Brisbane (April 2004). That original paper is to be included in a forthcoming volume of the same name, based on the conference proceedings and edited by Adrian Kiernander. I have received valuable advice and encouragement from the editors of both these publications. Sections of the book have also been delivered at research seminars and public talks in Exeter and Bristol. Of the individuals who have helped me in various ways, I am particularly grateful to Roland Clare for being in at the start; to Zara and Rachael for their unfailing support; to Sarah Dadswell for the Magic Circle deck of cards and for her insightful thoughts on Indian conjurors; to Gabriella Giannachi, Lesley Wade, Tess Buckland, Jon Primrose, Mike Wilson for pointing out to me and/or lending me books and other resources; to David Ian Rabey for suggestions about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell; to Derren Brown for an impromptu interview in a school corridor; to John and Patrick Mangan for the trip to the site of Houdini’s plane flight at Digger’s Rest; to Roberta Mock for her insightful criticisms; and to Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe for his careful and encouraging editorial work. I am grateful, too, to various groups of people who have made the experience of working on the history of magic easier, richer and more pleasurable: to those members of the production teams with whom I worked on the BBC’s six-part History of Magic series, who astounded and inspired me with their command of a complex field of research; to the original cast of The Inner Child’s Compendium of Magic: Jane Milling, Chris McCullough, Bella Merlin, James McLaughlin, Steve Cockett, Lucy Mitchell and Lizzie Pennington, and, in particular, Sarah Goldingay, who designed and produced the show and was a vii Preface.qxd 4/2/07 6:38 PM Page viii PERFORMING DARK ARTS continual source of stimulating ideas. Thanks, too, to the Drama Research Committee of Exeter University and the Theatre, Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, both of whom contributed to the research costs; to the staff and curators of the various libraries and collections which I have consulted – in particular those at the British Library, Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Wales, Exeter University Library, the Harry Price Collection and the Bill Douglas Collection. I owe a special debt to José Antonio Gonzalez, aka Marko, the Panamanian magician whom I have never met but whose online archive, The Learned Pig Project, is an essential resource for all those interested in the history and practice of magic. viii Introduction.qxd 4/2/07 6:38 PM Page ix Introduction: magic and performance The first thing a student of magic learns is that there are books about magic and books of magic… Magicians, as we know from Jonathan Strange’s maxim, will quarrel about any thing, and many years and much learning has been applied to the vexed question of whether such and such a volume qualifies as a book of magic. But most laymen find they are served well enough by this simple rule: books written before magic ended in England are books of magic, books written later are books about magic. The principle, from which the layman’s rule of thumb derives, is that a book of magic should be written by a practising magician, rather than a theoretical magician or a historian of magic. Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell1 Any good trick is accomplished by our imagination. Any great trick involves our own beliefs about the meaning of life. Burger and Neale2 ‘Sometimes such are called conjurers…’ Most words change their meanings over time, but some are particularly slippery and hard to pin down. This is not always a bad thing. On the contrary, it may be that these are the words that point us towards areas where something important is happening on a cultural level. Words which have the most complex, or even contradictory nuances and connotations, are, perhaps, most likely to be those words which refer to things that a culture deems important.3 The words with which this study is centrally concerned – ‘conjuror’, ‘magic’ and ‘magician’ – belong to this group.