Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama

Notes

389 NOTES Notes to Introduction 1. Brian Vickers, “Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 95. Vickers’s observation concerning the Renaissance ascription of “occult” power to words can be interestingly related to David Hawkes’s claim in The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of Representation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), that the “original Faust’s belief that signs are efficacious constitutes his deal with the devil,” and that later treatments of the myth in Western culture provide an ongoing “ethical critique of the growing power of performative representation” (inside front cover). While I appreciate the boldness, within a postmodern critical context, of Hawkes’s critique of the “rhetorical (for it is not logical) association of the performative with liberation” (4), I do not share his tendency (as I see it) to demonize the power of the human imagination. See my review, Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2008): 293–94. 2. Charles G. Nauert, Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 3. 3. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), 4–5. 4. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 229. 5. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 5. 6. Paola Zambelli, “Scholastic and Humanist Views of Hermeticism and Witchcraft,” in Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe, ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (Washington, D.C.: Shakespeare Folger Library, 1988), 128; D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (1958; repr., Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975). See especially the discussion “Ficino and the Demons” (45–53), and the description of Agrippa’s appropriation of Ficinian magic (95–96). See also Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 156. 7. Brian Easlea, Witch-Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific Revolution 1450–1750 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980), 5. 8. In fact, Stuart Clark,Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), argues that magia daemonica and magia naturalis were natural philosophical analogues, providing parallel explanations—sometimes in competition , sometimes in alliance—for the same range of phenomena .... [Therefore] we would do better to associate demonology with development and, indeed, ‘advancement,’ in natural knowledge than with stagnation or decay. If the devil was a part of early modern nature, then demonology was, of necessity, a part of early modern science. (155–56). 9. Vickers, introduction to Occult and Scientific Mentalities, 6. 10. Barbara Howard Traister, Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984); John S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 11. Quoted material from Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 5. It is interesting to note that several Renaissance treatises on the occult, such as Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, are now available in new editions intended not for scholars of early modern culture but for contemporary practitioners of magic. 12. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 1. 13. Simone Pétrement, A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism, trans. Carol Harrison (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990), 1, 8. 14. Roger E. Moore, “The Spirit and the Letter: Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Elizabethan Religious Radicalism,” Studies in Philology 99 (2002): 137. 15. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964; repr., New York: Vintage, 1969), 403–04. 16. William Perkins, A Treatise of Mans Imaginations, in The Works of...M. William Perkins, vol. 2 (London: John Legatt, 1631), 459–61, 477; STC 19653. 17. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, introduction to Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000), 2; quoting Debora K. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, 390 Notes to Pages 3–8 and Subjectivity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 190. 18. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible, 4, 194, 193, 194. 19. My acceptance of the social necessity of such self-coherence leaves me uneasy, I must...