Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama

Conclusion

377 Conclusion The uncertainty we are left with at the conclusion to the analysis of Comus in some ways reflects a dialectical tension that we have observed, in various manifestations, within this study. The “grandiose autonomy desired by the Lady” and the “total fusion represented by Comus” both constitute narcissistic extremes of magical thinking, and they certainly beg some sort of resolution, but the resolutions in the works examined never quite transcend the lingering predicament of narcissistic self-construction and the limiting conception of the “other” (so often the female other). Whether we call the Lady’s Platonic or Neoplatonic aspirations magical or countermagical, we end up with a binary in which the excessively assertive and excessively passive poles seem to con- flate the suprarational and subrational as vitiators of viable integrity in the human self. To return to the introduction, while Vickers is in some ways justified in his challenge of Yates’s thesis concerning the roots of modern scientific discovery in the Hermetic /Neoplatonic movement of the Renaissance, there remains a curious similarity in the parallel aspirations of science and magic toward (extreme) control, and, if we compare Hermetic and Baconian constructions, the correlative denigration of a “female” Nature.1 Milton’s peculiar gender inversions might suggest that “the same fallen psychology, which Milton marginalizes [see Paradise Lost 2.662–66] in the intoxication and the nocturnal flights of witches, is paradoxically, not just the enemy, but the source of his own poetic inspiration,”2 but I think this return of the Circean repressed, while in some ways a valid description, is also 378 Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama an oversimplification of the issues at stake. Certainly Comus, at least, offers a higher (or lower?) imagination as the resolution to the masque’s ideological and psychological conflicts, and, if there is anything “Eucharistic” about Sabrina, nothing in her role suggests the reasonable reading of doctrinal signs (in addition to the mysterious process of the Holy Spirit’s transformations of the heart or soul), which we see in William Perkins’s description of the process of Communion. Nevertheless, the artistic control involved in her evocation certainly represents something other than a “total fusion” with Nature. A Glance beyond the Drama This dialectical resolution of excessive and insufficient reason would seem to return us decisively to the question of the power of the imagination and thus the power of the individual playwright or poet. But with the male writers explored in this study, the necessary recuperation of physicality seems complicated by a struggle between the supposed coming to terms with the male body and an attempt to control the female body, a process involving various ideologically and politically dubious displacements, as well as more interesting and potentially promising inversions. In addition, a resolution contingent upon the ultimate power of imagination grants to the writer enormous moral responsibilities. Gareth Roberts reviews Sidney’s claims that since the Renaissance poet-magician “asks to be trusted to use sweetened and pleasurable deceptions,” he can “therefore claim to be the opposite to the devil, the father of lies, and to the witch, both of whom deceive to destroy us with their mingling of fact and fiction.” Ironically, however, “Augustine used precisely the same topos of the sweetened and concealing cup for the deceitful mixture by which evil spirits with their deceptive fictions...lead Christians astray and poison them.” Roberts concludes, therefore, that Sidney tacitly admits “the danger of slippage between benevolent and malevolent deceptions of magic,” and that for Spenser in particular the Conclusion 379 image of the witch Circe emerges as “most radically subversive for male humanist poets like himself, for he saw her perilous and unlicensed power to destabilise the relation between fiction and truth.”3 But what here remains presumably a “male” resistance to “female” power (though it may be related to what Diehl suggests is the gendering of the imagination as female in Reformation thought)4 really invites a closer examination of the moral significance of the “magical” power of poetry and drama in relation to the processes of self-fashioning in Renaissance culture. Spenser may, in fact, offer an intriguing, perhaps even a more hopeful, resolution to some of the issues and contradictions explored in this study than the dramatists themselves. In an extremely provocative and important article, Patrick Cheney offers, through a reading of the allegory...