Secret Arts and Public Spectacles: The Parameters of Elizabethan Magic (original) (raw)
Related papers
John Dee and Prospero: Alchemy, Angels, and Empire in The Tempest
Thesis, University of Windsor, 2023
John Dee and Prospero: Alchemy, Angels, and Empire in the Tempest ABSTRACT For John Dee (1527-1609), like many others in the sixteenth century, the divide between politics, science, and the occult was permeable. At the height of Dee’s career, he had assembled the largest private library in England and built bibliographic networks of like-minded intellectuals from lending and sales. His consultations varied from explanations of Euclidean geometry to sailors to providing magical advice for Elizabeth I and other European monarchs. Dee is simultaneously important to both early modern science and esoterica. The aim of this thesis is to illuminate the ways in which his politics, his colonial projects, and his occult thought underwrites Shakespeare's character Prospero in The Tempest. The resemblance between Dee and Prospero has been noted by Frances Yates, Frank Kermode, Barbara Mowat, and other scholars. I extend the premise established by Yates and others to read Prospero as a response to currents in occult thought in the late 16th century. Ariel is examined in the context of early modern theurgy through grimoires, and Caliban’s rebellion against his lexicon as a satire of the Adamic language—both spell-books and Edenic linguistics were thematic concerns of Dee’s conversations with angels. This thesis contends that The Tempest offers criticism of Dee’s instrumentalization of occult knowledge by disrupting bibliographical authority, as seen in Prospero’s emblematic drowning of his most powerful book. By exploring the motif of medical alchemy, millenarian archetypes, and the influence of colonial treatises, I show Prospero’s transformation from renaissance magus to poet lies in a critique of Dee’s political project of an alchemical utopia. Instead, Shakespeare argues in favour of an Orphic governance denoting harmony with nature, which is evidenced by the use of music and poetry in the final act of the play.
South Central Review, 2009
Awarded the Kirby Prize for the Best Article of 2009 by the South Central MLA. This article argues that art functioned as the mechanism through which early modern culture shifted from Aristotelian scholasticism to modern fact-based experimental science and situates Shakespeare’s play The Tempest within that larger epistemological shift. It provides an account of two developments that were important for the emergence of early modern science: first, the development of maker’s knowledge traditions; second, changes in philosophical attitudes toward the meaning of accidents. Both art and accident had been excluded from the primary Aristotelian categories of knowledge, but they are central to The Tempest and to early modern culture more generally. Prospero’s “Art” expresses the remarkable power of this model of art as a knowledge practice; yet, the play also suggests reasons why the Renaissance conception of art as knowledge was ultimately displaced by a modern science of facts. Through the example of The Tempest, Spiller argues that we must reassess our understanding of what counted as knowledge in order to understand the role that art, poetry, and drama had on the early modern development of science.
Magic, Conversion, and Prayer in Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Diacovensia, 2022
This paper deals with the concepts of magic, conversion to Christianity, and prayer in Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Employing New Historicism and using Christian writings, it analyses Prospero's prayer and conversion, which have so far been neglected by scholars in favor of magic, and juxtaposes them to magic. This reading supports the underrepresented view of Prospero's magic as heretical and punishable, suggests that Prospero's abjuration of magic is comparable to the deliverance from the occult and conversion to Christianity, and reveals the first interpretation of Prospero's prayer. Namely, prayer, following Prospero's conversion, is represented by Shakespeare as the true and ultimate value of human life and the antithesis to magic.
AUTHOR AND AUTHORITY. JOHN GIELGUD’S PROSPERO IN PETER GREENAWAY’S PROSPERO’S BOOKS
En 1991, el director Peter Greenaway hizo, a partir de La tempestad de William Shakespeare, una película experimental y visualmente audaz, titulada Prospero’s Books (Los libros de Próspero), con John Gielgud en el papel de Próspero. Filmada en 35mm y editada haciendo uso extenso del procesamiento digital de las imágenes, Prospero’s Books es una fantasmagoría tecnológicamente avanzada que revela los múltiples aspectos del meta-masque de Shakespeare. En la película, Gielgud da voz a todos los personajes, convirtiendo La tempestad en un acto creativo que nace y tiene lugar en la mente de Próspero. Prospero’s Books se interroga, entonces, sobre qué significa ser autor, actor y director, haciendo de la obra de Shakespeare una reflexión metalingüística.
The Enigmatic Nature of Shakespeare’s The Tempest
International Journal of Language and Literary Studies
Prospero in Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest, written around 1611 and first published seven years after the dramatist’s death, in 1623, is not a duke who has failed in his task of ruling, but a man who has gained power to direct and discipline others. To that sense, he tends to be the god-man like who rightly castigates and strictly scourges. The magician appears to be so humane at times and too harsh at other times that he dazzles, leads astray or terrifies the island’s dwellers, an ambivalent mission that further intensifies the enigmatic nature of the play. While he has intentionally raised a storm to cause the disorder of the drunken sailors' minds and bodies, thus leaving them on shore at the mercy of chance, instead of winds and waves as before, he has laboriously established order towards the end of the play. Prospero's white magic helps him bring together characters speaking their true character irrespective of their social classes: princes, courtiers, and sa...
According to the scientific/materialist paradigm of our time, the only true reality is the one we can detect with our five senses. Believers and practitioners of the occult are usually dismissed as heretics, blasphemers aligned with the Devil, or just simply crackpots. In the Elizabethan era, however, belief in the occult was virtually universal. The Renaissance era saw the emergence of new ideas and a deep curiosity about anything mystical. It was the age of Nostradamus, when the Renaissance fusion of Christianity, Hermetic Philosophy (a set of beliefs based primarily upon the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus) was accompanied by a strong belief in magic, astrology and alchemy. 1