Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Lisa Hopkins, Helen Ostovich

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317102755
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Theatre

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern Stage furthers the debate about the cultural work performed by representations of magic on the early modern English stage. It considers the ways in which performances of magic reflect and feed into a sense of national identity, both in the form of magic contests and in its recurrent linkage to national defence; the extent to which magic can trope other concerns, and what these might be; and how magic is staged and what the representational strategies and techniques might mean. The essays range widely over both canonical plays-Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Doctor Faustus, Bartholomew Fair-and notably less canonical ones such as The Birth of Merlin, Fedele and Fortunio, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Devil is an Ass, The Late Lancashire Witches and The Witch of Edmonton, putting the two groups into dialogue with each other and also exploring ways in which they can be profitably related to contemporary cases or accusations of witchcraft. Attending to the representational strategies and self-conscious intertextuality of the plays as well as to their treatment of their subject matter, the essays reveal the plays they discuss as actively intervening in contemporary debates about witchcraft and magic in ways which themselves effect transformation rather than simply discussing it. At the heart of all the essays lies an interest in the transformative power of magic, but collectively they show that the idea of transformation applies not only to the objects or even to the subjects of magic, but that the plays themselves can be seen as working to bring about change in the ways that they challenge contemporary assumptions and stereotypes.

PART I
Demons and Pacts

Chapter 1
Magic and the Decline of Demons: A View from the Stage

Barbara H. Traister

Of course, religion ultimately outlived its magical competitors. … The religion which survived the decline of magic was not the religion of Tudor England. When the Devil was banished to Hell, God himself was confined to working through natural causes.

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic

Witchcraft seems a very different concept from necromancy and exorcism, but all three shared the daydream of interacting with demons.

Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers

Was the decline in belief in spiritual and demonic magic described by Thomas’s famous study reflected on the Tudor/Jacobean stage? An examination of the drama of the early modern period, most particularly drama from about 1590 until the 1620s, demonstrates a decline in the seriousness and status of spiritual and demonic magic similar to that which Thomas chronicled over a longer period in the culture at large. The human magus or witch and the spirits with which that human character interacted, either as their master or their victim, are the two anchors of my inquiry. I am not concerned with magical tricks, juggling, or natural magic, none of which involved contact with spirits and all of which continued essentially unabated into later periods. Rather my focus is on the relationship between human and spirit which blossomed and then faded on the stage over that roughly thirty-year period. My inquiry begins with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, each written around 1590 and heavily invested in magic as its subject matter. It ends with Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton (1621), ‘the most serious and intelligent exploration of witchcraft and devils in the drama of the period’.¹ Looking at a few of the twenty-odd plays containing magicians and witches written between those dates, I focus on the status and ability of the human who interacts with spirits and the portrayal of the spirits themselves. Most aspects of the human/spirit interaction alter during the period I examine: the human characters diminish in status, education, or intelligence; the staged demons’ theatrical presence dims and becomes less distinctly a portrayal of a spiritual being. The suave Mephistophilis who can discuss astronomy with Faustus and the talented Ariel who can offer ethical advice to Prospero give way to an ineffective devil imprisoned in the body of a hanged thief (The Devil is an Ass) and a talking black demon dog (The Witch of Edmonton). The most difficult bridge to construct in this argument is that between the demons of the magician plays of the 1590s and those demonic spirits that appear later as witches’ familiars. This problem arises, I think, from the difficulty of comparing demons which are aggressively sought by magicians or would-be magicians to enhance their own power and reputations, to demons which arrive on stage unsolicited but prompted by the potential witch’s desire for evil and for revenge, desire which makes her vulnerable to demonic attention and temptation. In the first instance, the magicians and demons often seem locked in a struggle for domination, while the witches’ demons always already have power over their human contacts.

Although magicians and witches had appeared on the popular stage before 1590, after the arrival of Doctor Faustus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, magic became a relatively common feature of popular drama and remained so until about 1620. Elizabethan stage magicians who dealt directly with demons or spirits were usually well educated or of high status in the society. Doctor Faustus, after all, is ‘the wonder of his age’, known far and wide for his intellectual abilities before he begins his magical study. Similarly Friar Bacon and the lesser magicians Bungay and Vandermast who appear with him are at the pinnacle of their countries’ intellectual elite. Vandermast is Germany’s ‘champion’ magician while Bungay takes a back seat only to Bacon among the scholars of Oxford. These magicians are honoured by their respective monarchs and enter a magical competition for national glory and renown.

Other magicians follow who also command some interest or respect by virtue of their social standing. In Barnabe Barnes’s potboiler The Devil’s Charter (1606), Pope Alexander VI actively solicits demonic spirits, first conjuring to get the devil’s assistance in obtaining the papacy and later calling demons to give him information about the murder of his younger son. Obviously a villain from his first moment on stage, Pope Alexander is nevertheless an important figure who wields a great deal of power and commands the attention of the audience. Prospero, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), is of high birth and a former ruler of Milan. While he has lost his political position and is trapped on an island, he retains his aura of power and command, now supported by magic rather than by political office. In the early seventeenth century, however, stage magicians of high status become rare. Several magicians retain vestiges of intellectual authority. In comedy, many are tutors (Peter Fabell in The Merry Devil of Edmonton, for example) and, in tragedy, friars sometimes summon spirits (as in Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois [1607]). Most frequently, however, the magician figure is a stock character on the order of the clown, referred to as ‘Enchanter’ (The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll [1599]) or a ‘Conjuror’ (The White Devil [1612]), and notable primarily for the spectacle he can provide, with or without the help of visible spirits.

Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass (1616) goes further than most other extant plays in its demotion of the human being associated with spirits. The character who desires a demon is Fitz-Dottrel, whose very name means ‘son of a fool’. He wants a spirit that will help him become a successful gambler and tries to hire conjurors to procure a demon for him. When a volunteer demon arrives unexpectedly from hell, Fitz-Dottrel at first refuses to believe he is a demon, although eventually he hires the small demon as a servant.

Female characters who interact with spirits are portrayed on stage as witches. Two different sorts of stage witches engage with spirits. Some are mysterious, enigmatic figures like the witches in Macbeth. These characters may not be fully human and derive from classical ideas about witchcraft. Similar witch characters appear in Lyly’s early comedy Endymion (1588)² and in Middleton’s The Witch (1616),³ a play plundered for material to supplement Macbeth soon after its appearance on the stage. Witches of this sort do not represent real women but are part of a literary imaginary derived from classical conceptions of witchcraft; they themselves seem nearly as demonic as the spirits with which they work. They are not captured or punished and, by their plays’ ends, melt back into the literary background from which they emerged.⁴ More realistic representations of the witch figure as human appear, however, in plays such as Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 1 (early 1590s), where Joan of Arc briefly talks to spirits, and The Witch of Edmonton. Joan of Arc’s onstage encounter with spirits is confined to act 5, scene 2, where her spirits, although they enter when summoned by Joan, refuse to help her even though she promises them her body and her soul. In her brief on-stage interaction with spirits, Joan is more like magicians than later witches. She summons what the play’s stage directions call ‘fiends’ to reassert her political and military power, not out of personal frustration and a desire for revenge. The Witch of Edmonton, however, written partly in response to an actual witch trial, portrays a frustrated woman, powerless within a society that mocks and torments her. She becomes vulnerable to a demonic spirit when she curses her powerlessness and wishes to retaliate against her enemies. In this moment of spiritual weakness she is approached by the demon dog and succumbs to its promise of help against her enemies. Her association with the demon, born from the lack of any other way to express her anger, offers a direct contrast to Joan of Arc or to a magician like Faustus, both of whom believe that the successful summoning and control of demons (or ‘spirits’ as Joan herself consistently says) will maintain or be the pinnacle of their famous careers. Faustus assumes that acquiring power over demons will make him not just an influential intellectual but rather ‘a demi-god’. Faustus and Bacon hold the stage in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign. But by the last years of James’ rule, the human characters most likely to have contact with demons are not intellectuals, like Faustus, or charismatic leaders, like Joan, but rather society’s marginalised, like the female village witch.

In a somewhat parallel way, stage demons are generally portrayed as powerful, or at least capable, in plays of the 1590s but they become weaker and less effective when they are depicted in plays over the next two decades. Doctor Faustus is crowded with demons both named and unnamed: Mephistophilis, of course, is on stage for much of the play, ordering about other demons.⁵ But it is easy to forget when reading the play that Lucifer and four unnamed devils spontaneously appear ‘above’ (3.1.sd)⁶ according to a stage direction in the 1616 text, to watch Faustus begin his initial conjuration. They arrive even before he has attracted Mephistophilis and are clearly prepared to fight for Faustus’s soul. Lucifer returns to the stage repeatedly, not only as an observer but also in a speaking role: arriving with Beelzebub in scene 6, he threatens the wavering Faustus and then orders up the parade of the Deadly Sins to distract him; in scene 19, he and Beelzebub again enter to oversee Faustus’s last hours and be present at his final moments. Additional devils impersonate the deadly sins, serve up food and drink, and carry off Benvolio and his friends (in the 1616 B-text) to torment them with thorns, mud, and rocks. These demons demonstrate both physical agency and intellectual heft: they exist apart from Faustus and can conspire about and plan his demise. Mephistophilis has excellent conversational abilities: when he disputes with Faustus, he repeatedly outmanoeuvres him despite the human’s vaunted intelligence.

In addition to its many demonic characters, the play contains a full-fledged conjuring scene in which Faustus draws a circle and repeats an abridged version of a ritual found in contemporary conjuring manuals. Whether because of the explicit words of the conjuration or the appearance on stage of so many demons, the play clearly had an emotional effect on its audience. E.K. Chambers gathered and printed reports of several performances where the actors panicked because a ‘real’ devil appeared on stage. In at least one instance, the actors’ fright spread to the audience and the theatre quickly emptied.⁷ At such moments, belief in the reality of magic, of effective ties between words spoken by a human and the presence of a demonic spirit, was clearly present in the theatre. As Andrew Sofer writes, ‘It was precisely the potential for inadvertent magic on the part of the players – the belief that Faustus’ spells might operate independent of actor and character – that thrilled and alarmed Elizabethan audiences, causing them to see devils that were not literally there’.⁸ That thrill accounted in part for the popularity of Marlowe’s play.

One demonic feat which is repeated with variations in almost every magical play is transportation. A spirit carries a human being from one place to another. Transportations begin innocently enough in Marlowe’s play when Mephistophilis carries Faustus, in a dragon-drawn chariot, to tour the cosmos. Later, as the magic in the play devolves to petty tricks, Mephistophilis and other demons transport Benvolio as part of his punishment for attempting to kill Faustus. These transportations, which Faustus authorises, provide an ironic counterpoint to Faustus’s own final transportation to hell in the penultimate scene of the play. ‘Hell is discovered’ (19.115sd) as the Good Angel exits for the final time. The clock strikes 11 and then 12. Additional devils arrive to join Lucifer and Beelzebub who are already present. Four lines later the devils ‘exeunt with him’ (19.190sd). Since the scholars find Faustus’ limbs scattered on the stage when they enter in the final scene, the most obvious staging probably saw Faustus transported into the Hell-mouth made available by the stage trap (a staging parallelled in Barnes’ The Devil’s Charter), followed by various body parts hurled back onto the stage for the scholars to discover. Faustus’ own fearful cry ‘Now, body, turn to air,/Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!’ (19.183–4) verbalizes what audiences are about to see on stage. Faustus’s obvious terror and his horrible physical fate must have affected playgoers who were believers in demons and their mission to win human souls.

Presenting a comic parallel to Doctor Faustus, Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is also populated with onstage demons, although they play minor roles in comparison to the significant functions of the named spirits in Faustus. Greene’s play was written about the same time as Faustus, and scholars have argued for decades about which play influenced the other. It contains no fewer than three magicians, all of whom are able to summon demons to the stage. Unlike Faustus, however, Bacon, Bungay, and the German magician Vandermast are all able to control the demons they summon although Vandermast’s control of the spirit Hercules falters once Bacon begins to issue commands to the spirit Vandermast has summoned. Demons in this play never come unbidden, as did Lucifer and Beelzebub, and always act only at the behest of one of the magicians. The struggle Greene represents here is not between spirit and human but among the magicians themselves, striving to see who can conjure the most powerful spirits. The humans’ ability to command spirits is taken for granted. Though Friar Bacon conjures on stage, the words of the conjuration ritual are not heard by the audience. There is a good deal of transportation by demonic spirits in the play, but only Bacon’s clown servant Miles, who has slept through the pronouncements of the Brazen Head and spoiled the elaborate magical experiment that B...