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"Falling to a Devilish Exercise": Magic and Spectacle on the Renaissance Stage Shayne Confer

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Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fall 2009 "Falling to a devilish exercise": Magic and Spectacle on the Renaissance Stage Shayne Confer Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Confer, S. (2009). "Falling to a devilish exercise": Magic and Spectacle on the Renaissance Stage (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/428 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “FALLING TO A DEVILISH EXERCISE”: THE OCCULT AND SPECTACLE ON THE RENAISSANCE STAGE A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Shayne Confer December 2009 Copyright by Shayne Confer 2009 “FALLING TO A DEVILISH EXERCISE”: THE OCCULT AND SPECTACLE ON THE RENAISSANCE STAGE By Shayne Confer Approved November 11, 2009 ________________________________ ________________________________ Bernard Beranek, Ph.D. Stuart Kurland, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Associate Professor of English (Dissertation Director) (First Reader) ________________________________ ________________________________ Laura Engel, Ph.D. Magali Michael, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of English Chair, English Department (Second Reader) Professor of English ________________________________ Christopher Duncan, Ph.D. Dean, McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts iii ABSTRACT “FALLING TO A DEVILISH EXERCISE”: THE OCCULT AND SPECTACLE ON THE RENAISSANCE STAGE By Shayne Confer December 2009 Dissertation supervised by Bernard Beranek, Ph.D. The enormous amount of research on the subject of early modern magic indicates clearly that magical thought occupied a significant place in contemporary mental patterns. Its existence was widespread enough to cause popular prejudice against its most esoteric forms combined with tacit acceptance of “folk” magic. I posit that the early playwrights who dramatized the magus were thus fairly constricted in how the magus could appear without unduly scandalizing the popular audience. This essentially created a sub-genre of the “magus play” that established a self-perpetuating theatrical tradition formed largely by audience prejudice. As this prejudice began to wane (for reasons still only partially understood), later dramatists such as Shakespeare and Jonson found themselves in possession of an increasingly stale tradition that had become shackled to a public morality no longer in existence. They were then capable of utilizing the outer iv shell of the tradition to take the magus play in shocking new directions, alternately adapting and utilizing its generic conventions to create a new theatrical experience for what had by then become a largely upscale audience. This dissertation seeks to trace a vital sub-genre of the theatre from its origins through its apotheosis. v DEDICATION This endeavor is dedicated to my loving wife, Kelly, without whom none of this would have been possible, and my son Haydn, for whom this has all been done. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank Bernard Beranek, Stuart Kurland, Laura Engel, and Albert Labriola for their tireless efforts in the formation and execution of this dissertation. More generally, I would like to acknowledge the debt I owe to the faculties of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, The University of Montana, and especially Duquesne University for the large role they have played in shaping my scholarship. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract.............................................................................................................................. iv Dedication.......................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgement ............................................................................................................ vii Introduction........................................................................................................................ ix Chapter 1..............................................................................................................................1 Chapter 2............................................................................................................................24 Chapter 3............................................................................................................................49 Chapter 4............................................................................................................................85 Chapter 5..........................................................................................................................123 Epilogue ...........................................................................................................................158 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................164 viii Introduction Once grant the possibility of the active agency of the supernatural, and the bases of credibility, as we know them, are radically changed. -Madeleine Doran Madeleine Doran’s 1940 article, “On Elizabethan ‘Credulity’: With Some Questions Concerning the Use of the Marvelous in Literature,” immediately presents its reader with a provocative question: “Given certain attitudes towards strange features of the world, how will these attitudes affect the response of the reader and audience towards literature that makes reference to these wonders?”(151). While Doran attempts to provide some answers to this question, she frankly admits that her paper raises far more questions than it answers. However, she has provided for posterity a useful list for organizing future thought on the topic by providing a three-level hierarchy of credulity, roughly summarized as the following: 1. Complete acceptance of the miraculous as factual. 2. Admitting the possibility of the miraculous while not actively convinced of its factuality. 3. Total denial of the possibility of the miraculous, while retaining its symbolical or metaphorical import. (170-1) While this framework is exceptionally useful, it is also unacceptably broad. Aware of this limitation, Doran restricts her application of it to literature to the final few pages of her essay. Even then, she finds herself confronted by ghosts, witches, the phoenix, and monsters from The Faerie Queene; obviously, not all of these would have engendered the ix same belief from the same people, and none of us possess world enough and time to explore them all. The present dissertation is largely inspired by the questions raised by Doran, with some modifications and limitations that allow it to answer at least one of her questions. Since 1940 the study of so-called occult phenomena in Renaissance1 times has exploded into its own industry and received considerable scholarly attention. The subject has also divided into various disciplines: witchcraft, fairy lore, astrology, alchemy, etc. One can now focus on a specific area of the occult without the need to discuss everything else; it has become clear that a given individual in late 16th century London may have believed in all, none, or a combination of occult phenomena. Magic and witchcraft have received the most recent scholarly attention, for entirely different reasons. Witchcraft is a community phenomenon with a particular gender bias, and it has proved amenable to sociological, anthropological, and feminist studies. Magic, on the other hand, has received increased attention largely as it relates to the development of modern science; the Renaissance magus worked closely with the natural and occult properties of objects, hoping to create desirable effects by combining a large number of sympathetic properties at a carefully chosen place and time. In this sense, there is a connection between magical practice and modern science. However, the Renaissance magus also attempted to evoke and manipulate “spirits” (whether angelic or demonic) in his magic. This both distances Renaissance magic from modern science in a fundamental way and affects how the magus would have been perceived by his contemporaries. There is an ambivalence inherent in magic that is absent from 1 Throughout the essay, I use the term “Renaissance” loosely to refer to Europe between approximately 1400-1700; the term “Shakespearean” designates the drama of approximately 1580-1640. While neither term is obviously exact, I use them in place of more cumbersome terms for ease of reading and reference. x witchcraft, and the drama captures a sense of this ambivalence during a twenty-year period when the magus was among the most enduring stage characters. In choosing magic as the object of this dissertation, I have narrowed the focus considerably from Doran’s original field. However, the more important difference in my approach is the angle from which the subject is viewed. While Doran’s hierarchy concerns itself with the reaction of the audience to supernatural literature, I examine the extent that audience expectations, beliefs, and “credulity” influenced and determined the use of magical spectacle in drama to explain why the magus figure is never allowed an unqualified
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