Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama

Wonder, the Sacred, and the Supernatural

Nandini Das, Nick Davis, Nandini Das, Nick Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317290674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary text and looking outwards to social, cultural, and historical aspects, it comes to grips with the instabilities of 'enchanted' and 'disenchanted' practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world's ordinary functioning might be said to be 'enchanted', is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? We have a received historical narrative of disenchantment as a large-scale early modern cultural process, inexorable in character, consisting of the substitution of a rationally understood and controllable world for one containing substantial areas of mystery. Early modern cultural change, however, involves transpositions, recreations, or fresh inventions of the enchanted, and not only its replacement in diminished or denatured form. This collection is centrally concerned with what happens in theatre, as a medium which can give power to experiences of wonder as well as circumscribe and curtail them, addressing plays written for the popular stage that contribute to and reflect significant contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice. The volume uses the idea of dis-enchantment/re-enchantment as a central hub to bring multiple perspectives to bear on early modern conceptualizations and theatricalizations of wonder, the sacred, and the supernatural from different vantage points, marking a significant contribution to studies of magic, witchcraft, enchantment, and natural philosophy in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

1 Demonism and Disenchantment in the First Part of the Contention

Jesse M. Lander

The history plays are not an obvious resource for an account of Shakespeare’s engagement with the supernatural. The genre of the history play has, with good reason, been understood as secular. There are serious arguments to be made about what counts as secularisation and what might be defined as secular, but whatever precise claims are made, the term designates the worldly, and it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the history plays are about the world and, perhaps, an increasing sense that the world is becoming more worldly.¹ As a new genre, the history play exemplifies a quickening of interest in politics and political action. At the same time, the genre displays a new commitment to history as a positive value. These twin investments, in politics and history, the hurly-burly of human affairs construed as consequential, are what make the genre appear especially worldly. However, this claim does not deny the presence of the supernatural in the plays that we call histories. Nor does it relegate the supernatural to the status of the residual, an ideological hangover that will gradually dissolve in time. In what follows I want to make the case that Shakespeare’s earliest history play, The First Part of the Contention presents a distinctly post-Reformation vision of history that is simultaneously disenchanted and diabolical.² Referring to the play by its original title, following Taylor and Wells, locates it more precisely in its moment of composition and production (as opposed to its later re-fashioning as one part of a three-part play in the folio); while the quarto text provides invaluable evidence of staging, I am ultimately more interested in the existence of textual variants than I am in proposing a theory that would explain them. The play exhibits a generally disenchanted view of the political world; action is dominated by an array of non-royal agents who vie for power, and the king himself, despite his piety, lacks the sanctity and charisma that elsewhere accompanies figures of sacred kingship. Most importantly, The First Part of the Contention stages the exposure of a false miracle, a moment of emblematic disenchantment. Simultaneously, the play depicts a world in which demonic conjuration is a frighteningly real possibility that raises difficult questions about diabolic agency in a partially disenchanted world. The implications of this argument are two-fold: it suggests that the traditional account of the genre has overlooked the degree to which the history play registers the various interpretive conflicts, as well as actual violence, that followed the Reformation, and it provides evidence for the complexity of the process of disenchantment.

The post-Reformation aspect of the history plays is not primarily a matter of topical allusion—the sort of glancing references that occasionally flash into focus, as when, for example, Bardolph is condemned to death for stripping an altar in Henry 5 (3.6.39–41, 100–107). More consequential is a basic framework in which the subjects of history act in a world in which access to and evidence of the divine have become problematic. The reformers identified the corruption of the Catholic Church as a historical development, a decline from an initial state of primitive purity. Defenders of traditional religion, in turn, accused the reformers of inventing a new church, an innovation without precedent and without history. As a consequence history becomes a central discourse and, at the same time, precisely because historical questions become so acute in the wake of the Reformation, what counts as accurate, true history was endlessly contested.³ The English Reformation could, on the one hand, be understood as evidence of God’s special care for England; on the other hand, it could be understood as a tribulation visited upon the English in order to test their faith. These circumstances promoted historical revisionism and made it impossible to avoid an awareness that the events of the past were subject to competing interpretations. Leaving aside the special case of Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s history plays provide very little direct evidence of a benign providential order. This absence has led many scholars to conclude that the history plays are deeply informed by a Machiavellian sensibility. Phyllis Rackin, for example, structures her analysis around a dichotomy that pits Machiavellian against providential: “The conflict in Renaissance theories of history between providential and Machiavellian views of historical causation involved the most important cultural and social issues of a changing world: the conflicts between feudal values and capitalist practice and the relationship between the two orders of the divine and the human.”⁴ This is true at a certain level, but that level is one of extraordinary abstraction. For the people writing the histories and attending the history plays, it was possible to reconcile a providential view of history with an awareness of the pragmatic value of a politique attention to, in the words of Francis Bacon, “what men do and not what they ought to do.”⁵ An awareness of and a commitment to divine providence did not entail a denial of human political agency; Calvinism famously promulgated theological predestination and promoted political activism.⁶ Considering The First Part of the Contention, Rackin concludes that the play does not adjudicate between the claims of Machiavellianism and providentialism; it offers “no clear answer to the riddle of historical causation.”⁷ But to imagine that it might is to consider the play as a meditation on historiography and the philosophy of history. In other words, the play refuses to provide answers to questions that vex modern readers, who, influenced by Enlightenment philosophy and Newtonian science, tend to be obsessive about causality. That said, the play does present history as puzzling, even mysterious, but this condition is, I would argue, perfectly congruent with a period that was experiencing extraordinary historical change accompanied by vociferous and violent debates about what God wanted to see done.

By claiming that disenchantment is complex, I mean to insist that it is neither inexorable nor irreversible. Even the association, often assumed, between secularisation and disenchantment is open to question. Jane Bennett, for example, has recently articulated a position that is “both worldly and enchanted.”⁸ Bennett identifies enchantment as a resource for modern life that does not entail a nostalgia for an earlier lost world: “Enchantment consists of a mixed bodily state of joy and disturbance, a transitory sensuous condition dense and intense enough to stop you in your tracks and toss you onto new terrain and to move you from the actual world to its virtual possibilities.”⁹ Bennett’s rehabilitation of enchantment is ultimately in service of an argument about contemporary political possibilities, but it remains suggestive for an account of the history of disenchantment. Weber, in contrast, understands enchantment as a response to the supernatural. He famously described the processes of intellectualisation and rationalisation as inexorable, universal, and unidirectional:

Hence it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.¹⁰

The “mysterious incalculable forces” that have been evacuated from the world are the spirits that the savage hoped to control using “magical means.” Elegant and powerful, Weber’s formulation exhibits a bracing conceptual clarity, but early modern historians have worried that it does not do justice to conditions on the ground in post-Reformation Europe. Robert Scribner, for example, denies that Reformed religion led to a desacralisation of the world: “Far from further desacralising the world, Calvin and the reformed religion intensified to an even higher degree the cosmic struggle between the divine and the diabolical.”¹¹ This dynamic is forcefully demonstrated by The First Part of the Contention, which pairs an alarming scene of demonic conjuration with a scene in which a claimed miracle is revealed to be a fraud.

The Duchess of Gloucester, Eleanor Cobham, wife to the Lord Protector, is established early in the play as aspiring to the crown. Seeking knowledge of the future, she commissions a demonic consultation at the end of the play’s first act. This conjuration is a spectacular piece of theatre. Described by Michael Hattaway as “Shakespeare’s invention,” the conjuration is not derived from Shakespeare’s historical sources.¹² While the episode clearly owes a debt to Doctor Faustus, which had recently demonstrated that stage devils made for excellent theatre, the episode is not merely a bit of sensational hocus-pocus.¹³ In the first place, the diabolical prophecies are fully integrated into the play; whatever one concludes about them, one is not permitted to forget them. Additionally, the highly detailed and at times divergent accounts of the scene provided by the Q and F texts of the play suggest a moment of considerable interpretive consequence. The claim here is not that one version is superior to the other, but rather that the divergence between them is symptomatic a broader unease about the staging of the supernatural.¹⁴

The play’s presentation of a team of conjurers is unusual. Unlike the standard scene of conjuration that emphasises the singular power of the magician, in this case the spirit is raised by a witch and a magician assisted by two priests.¹⁵ The division of labour among these various agents is not always clear in part because of discrepancies between the Q and F versions of the play. The opening SD in the Quarto reads: “Enter Elnor, with sir Iohn Hum, Koger Bullenbrooke a Coniurer, and Margery Iourdaine a Witch.” In contrast, the Folio reads “Enter the Witch, the two Priests, and Bullingbrooke.” While Q has no second priest (Southwell), it nonetheless manages to suggest complicated lines of authority. The Q scene begins with Eleanor clearly in charge; she hands Hume a scroll containing the questions to be put to the spirit and then retires to the tower (tiring house) to observe the conjuration.¹⁶ Hume then addresses the group: “Now sirs begin and cast your spels about, / And charme the fiendes for to obey your wils, / And tell Dame Elnor of the thing she askes.” Importantly, Margery speaks next, giving directions to Bolingbroke: “Then Roger Bullinbrooke about thy taske, / And frame a Cirkle here vpon the earth, / Whilst I thereon all prostrate on my face, / Do talke and whisper with the diuels be low, / And coniure them for to obey my will.” A stage direction then announces: “She lies downe vpon her face. Bullenbrooke makes a Cirkle.” The magician invokes Night and demands that she send up “The spirit Askalon”; this is followed by a direct address to the spirit in corrupt Latin: “Askolon, Assenda, Assenda.” Thunder and lightning accompany the rising of the spirit who addresses Bolingbroke. After answering three questions the spirit concludes the interview: “Now question me no more, I must from hence againe.” Immediately, “He sinks down againe.” Bolingbroke then launches into a detailed, and entirely superfluous, command to depart:

Then down I say, vnto the damned poule.
Where Pluto in his firie Waggon sits.
Ryding amidst the singed and parched smoakes,
The Rode of Dytas by the Riuer Stykes,
There howle and burne for euer in those flames,
Rise Iordaine rise, and staie they charming Spels.
Sonnes, we are betraide.

Unlike the earlier moment in which Jourdain directed Bolingbroke, here he instructs her to cease. The direction to rise indicates that she has remained prostrate throughout the interview with “Askalon.” The coordination of the action between the witch and the magician suggests cooperation rather than strict hierarchy; furthermore, the presentation of the action raises some doubt about the degree of control that the conjurers have over the spirit. Finally, Q’s conspicuous use of the imagery of the classical underworld manages to entirely avoid the vocabulary of orthodox Christianity.¹⁷

The Folio version of the conjuration adds an additional person to the team, a second priest, and it delays the entrance of Eleanor. Hume initiates the action by reminding the team that the Duchess “expects performance,” a term that draws attention to the dramatic aspect of ritual magic and raises the possibility that the ensuing conjuration may be mere performance or imposture. Bolingbroke assures him that they are ready and asks “will her Ladyship behold and heare our Ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Demonism and Disenchantment in the First Part of the Contention
• 2 Mortal, Martyr, or Monster? Working on the King’s Corpse in the Henriad
• 3 The Charm in Macbeth
• 4 Enchanted Materialism in Paracelsus, Hobbes, and Hamlet
• 5 “Wondrous” Healing: The “New Philosophy”, Medicine and Miracles on the Early Modern Stage
• 6 “Things Which Are Not”: Idolatry and Enchantment in The White Devil
• 7 Charisma and the Making of the Misanthrope in Timon of Athens
• 8 “The Wealthy Magazine of Nature”: Knowledge, Wonder, and Gunpowder in Fletcher’s The Island Princess
• 9 “Almost a Miracle”: Penitence in The Winter’s Tale
• 10 Ghost-Stories and Living Monuments: Bringing Wonders to Life in The Winter’s Tale
• Contributors
• Index