TY - JOUR
AU - Tribble, Evelyn
AB - Prospero’s wedding masque for Ferdinand and Miranda fails. At the height of its extravagance, Iris commands the reapers to enter and dance “in country footing” with the “fresh nymphs.”1 But as the “graceful dance” is about to conclude, Prospero’s sudden start dissolves the spectacle. The Folio stage direction reads: Enter certaine Reapers (properly habited:) they joyne with the Nimphes, in a gracefull dance, towards the end whereof, Prospero starts sodainly and speakes, after which to a strange hollow and confused noyse, they heavily vanish.2 Prospero’s start has a prolonged after effect, and Ferdinand and Miranda anxiously comment on the agitation that is so clearly written upon him: ferdinand   This is strange. Your father’s in some passion           That works him strongly. miranda              Never till this day         Saw I him touched with anger so distempered!                       (4.1.143–45) Both Miranda and Ferdinand emphasize Prospero’s loss of control—the passion “works” him, anger renders him off-balance, literally out of humor (“distempered”). Prospero attempts to reassure Ferdinand, telling him to “[b]e cheerful” (l. 147), an injunction followed by his famous description of the evanescence of the “insubstantial pageant” (l. 155). So potent is the invitation to read these lines metatheatrically that it is possible to overlook the more practical point Prospero makes: “These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits” (ll. 148–49). As spirits, they are subject to Prospero’s control, but that control is apparently not absolute: it exists only so long as he actively exerts it through his magical practice. The high psychophysical costs of orchestrating the spirit world and maintaining the “spell” (l. 126) are made clear by Prospero’s description of the effect of the moment on his mind and body:          Sir, I am vexed; Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled. Be not disturbed with my infirmity. If you be pleased, retire into my cell And there repose. A turn or two I’ll walk To still my beating mind.                   (ll. 158–63) The emotional toll of the masque’s dissolution is starkly legible upon Prospero’s body; he is weak, troubled, infirm. The reference to his “beating mind” suggests a brain almost escaping all control under the strain of the effort.3 In this essay, I argue that early modern magical practices help explain Prospero’s exhaustion, agitation, and anger both at this point and throughout the play. The costs and difficulties of magic-work can be grasped through a reading of early modern grimoires, the magical practice manuals that proliferated across early modern Europe. Much work on magic in The Tempest has pursued the question of whether Prospero’s magical powers are maleficent or beneficent: is he more akin to a scholar-magus figure such as John Dee or to a demonic conjurer such as Doctor Faustus? But as Barbara Mowat has pointed out in “Prospero’s Book,” this binary way of looking at magic neglects an important set of material texts: the manuscript grimoires that circulated in the late medieval and early modern period, in both vernacular and Latin versions.4 As I will show, these widely known manuals depicted magic as an agonistic, demanding practice that required states of profound concentration and absorption; thus, one way of reading Prospero’s start is as an indication of the failure of the control and attention needed to manage his magical projects. Magic was regarded as a combative practice, involving difficult and protracted negotiations with the spirit world. The contested relationships of service that permeate The Tempest are illuminated by the fraught relationship between master and spirits that was seen as inherent to conjuring practices, and this context helps explain a long-standing critical concern about the play: Prospero’s anger.5 Reading the play through these handbooks shows that the constraints and parameters of contemporary magical practices shape the play far more than has been recognized. In The Tempest, the grimoire tradition is both ubiquitously present and strangely elusive. Indeed, many of the mechanisms of Prospero’s magical practice seem deliberately ambiguous, and Shakespeare eschews many of the traditional trappings of conjuring plays. When Prospero first enters, he is dressed in the “magic garment” associated with the magus—“Lie there my art” (1.2.24–25)—but its precise workings remain opaque. Nor do we often see Prospero himself practice magic directly, apart from his apparent use of charms—perhaps activated through his staff or extended arm—to put Miranda to sleep or to stop Ferdinand “from moving” when the young man attempts to attack him (l. 467). Significantly, the most important of all magical items in the play—the book itself—remains persistently offstage: peculiarly so, especially in light of predecessor plays such as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter. In Shakespeare’s play, books are repeatedly referenced and invoked, but are not explicitly called for as part of the stage action. In Act 3, Prospero announces his intention of performing “business” out of sight:          I’ll to my book, For yet ere suppertime must I perform Much business appertaining.            (3.1.94–96) James Kearney has argued that The Tempest is “a play about the power of books that refuses to make a spectacle of the book. . . . The Tempest consists of plots and characters that revolve around an archive that is always elsewhere, always off stage.”6 Citing Kearney, Katherine Eggert argues that “Prospero’s inattention to his books is even more remarkable than Faustus’s; they are so unimportant to him that … they are never even seen on stage.”7 In this essay I will argue that the absence of these books signals their importance. Not only is the secrecy of the grimoire and its attendant rites vital to its efficacy, but by keeping the magician’s books out of sight Shakespeare also both evokes and evades Prospero’s connection with contemporary magical practice. Here as elsewhere in his works, Shakespeare imitates an existing tradition while simultaneously disavowing it.8 Rather than being represented directly, the grimoire tradition has a pervasive yet dispersed and displaced influence on the play. The background presence of this tradition raises the emotional temperature of the play; conveys the dangers of magical practice and the toll it takes on its practitioners; registers the physical, emotional, and cognitive states needed to perform magic; and helps explain the play’s urgency and the reasons for the highly conflictual nature of almost all of Prospero’s interactions with other characters. The grimoire tradition and its implications for Prospero’s practice are hidden in plain sight, part of the mental furniture that a contemporary audience might have brought to any play on the subject of magic. I. Magic, Labor, and Absorption: The Grimoire The author of the most comprehensive treatment of the history of these books, Owen Davies, defines grimoires broadly as “books of conjurations and charms, providing instructions on how to make magical objects such as protective amulets and talismans. They are repositories of knowledge that arm people against evil spirits and witches, heal their illnesses, fulfill their sexual desires, divine and alter their destiny, and much else besides.” He adds that although some magical texts “were concerned with discovering and using the secrets of the natural world,” grimoires are distinguished by their emphasis on “the conjuration of spirits, the power of words, or the ritual creation of magical objects.”9 Judging from the number of surviving early modern manuscripts, many hundreds once would have been found across Europe and England.10 Recent scholarship emphasizes the diversity and eclecticism of these manuscripts.11 Julien Veronese distinguishes between the traditions represented by manuscripts such as The Key of Solomon, which stress invoking and then binding demons to the magus’s will, and those like the ars notoria, which “aspire to establish a less strained relationship with the angelic world.”12 Yet the boundaries between these types are relatively fluid and indistinct. Following the trailblazing work of Frank Klaassen and Claire Fanger on these manuscripts, Mowat notes that despite their variability, grimoires have a number of features in common: they are “uniformly religious in tone” and invoke God as the “source of power”; they are almost entirely concerned with conjuring and its attendant apparatus in all its variant forms; and they “display unquestioning faith in the power of words and images to call forth and control spirits.”13 The implications of these manuscripts for understanding Renaissance stage magic have not been fully explored. One reason for their comparative neglect among modern scholars is that they were rarely printed. This was so not simply because of strict legal and religious prohibitions against conjuring, as Keith Thomas suggests.14 In addition, and perhaps more fundamentally, the labor of writing and making the book was part of the magical process: “The very act of writing itself was imbued with occult or hidden power.”15 One could not simply purchase a book of ritual magic; the book was “less a repository of truth than a vehicle for its discovery.”16 These books reveal that magic is an embodied and extended process, not just a matter of reciting spells. As we encounter them, one conclusion is overwhelming: magic is an enormous amount of work, requiring not just extensive paraphernalia but also prolonged spiritual and mental preparation.17 The amount of labor involved can be seen by looking at one of these material objects themselves: Folger MS V.b.26, a large book of magic and spells written in both English and Latin.18 The Folger Library has the work in two volumes (the second volume was acquired at auction in 2007, nearly fifty years after the first volume was acquired in 1958), with a total length of 235 leaves; it consists primarily of closely written secretary hand, with minute attention to mise-en-page, comprising numbers, marginal notations, charms, spells, charts, catalogues of demons, extensive rubrications, and elaborate images of conjuring circles, emblems, and spirits. Compiling such a book is in itself a highly laborious task, but it represents only a small fraction of the physical, spiritual, and emotional investment needed to perform magic. As Elizabeth M. Butler puts it, the elaborate preparations and rituals required of the aspirant magician “are certainly calculated to deal the death blow to any notions harbored by intending practitioners that magic is a short cut to their desires.” Rather, magic is “a severe discipline both on the mystical and the practical side.”19 Rigorous psychophysical preparation and stamina are necessary for successful commerce with the spirit world. One of the preoccupations of the grimoires is the cultivation of absorption states over a prolonged period of time; this form of mental focus is critical to the mental and physical preparation for conjuring.20 Achieving such states requires exacting and complex provisions for the demanding “worcke” (as it is termed throughout the manuscript) of conjuring spirits. The process begins with a series of extremely long and demanding prayers in both English and Latin.21 The opening “oratio,” or prayer, immediately disrupts the black/white dichotomy that is often used to discuss magic; practitioners of this art believed that such holy practices authorized and facilitated their interactions with spirits, even demonic agents. The prayer, addressed to the “moste myghtie Jehova,” first implores the “Lord God” for forgiveness and mercy and emphasizes that only God’s power can permit the magus to call spirits of his own: “Bowe downe thy eare O Lord vnto me thy unworthy servant, for thy deare son’s sake, Christe Jesus. Saye vnto me aloud, loe I give thee power over all cleane & vncleane spirits, for I knowe O Lord that thou hast power to doo it.”22 The magician does not immediately traffic directly with spirits, but first seeks the permission and intercession of God both to call them up and to ensure that they obey: “[L]et all such spirites which I shall call or commaund to come, or avoid from anie place, be present & readie with all dilligence to obaye my will & commaundements to their vttermost powers.” From the outset, the magus is keenly aware of the precarious nature of his control over the spirits and implores God to punish all those who refuse to do his bidding: “[L]et thy holy aungells carrie them into the bottomless pit of ffier & brimstone after the malediction pronounced upon them by me.”23 Nearly all the spells and incantations are larded with imprecations to recalcitrant spirits and appeals to God and angels to intercede so that they can be controlled: “I do charge & commaunde you that you … license & permitt all superiour spirits & dyvells, to compell, urge & commaund this spirit N. [i.e., name of spirit] to come speedily, & to appeare visiblly here in a circle for him made and prepared.”24 In short, these manuscripts prominently feature difficult and agonistic relationships with the spirit world and stress the intense efforts needed to conjure and control spirits. The manuscripts also emphasize the need for extensive mental and physical preparation to enlist God’s intervention in the process of magic work. The Folger manuscript includes numerous directions for physical action, affect, and even tone of voice. Hebrew letters “must be named piteouslie deuoutely and meekly.”25 A substantial section of the manuscript with the running title “How to Call” prescribes the physical and emotional requirements for calling spirits: the soul must be cleansed and the magician absolved of sin, while the body must be made “cleane from sweate & all other corruptions” and clothing “muste be sweete smellinge, & of good savoure, for spirrits therin delight exceedingly.” The magus must “go to this operation as sadly and deuoutly and holy as thou shouldst go to receive the blessed sacrament of our Lords body and blood.”26 Along with such psychophysical preparations, a marginal note in the manuscript specifies an extensive apparatus, “The necessaries for this art of Necromancy.” These include: [A]n honest consecrated priest, 3 honest sociates [associates], Bookes, velem, standish [an ink stand], Circle, palme crosses, sticks, a knyeff with a whit hafte, a blacke goates horne, a sworde, a scepter, 2 ringes one of copper annother of silver gilt in the one must be written Tetragrammaton, in the other words to please the spirit, a rodd of correction, the lamina, The principalls crowne, a crowne of virgin parrchmont for every of the sociates, ynke to wriet orderly prepared, Salomons pentacle, Salomons seals, 7 plannets & their caracters, oyles, powders, blood, chalke, pennes, suffumigations, a copper needle, vestment, albs, stoale, phannel, glove, garments whiete, candells, coales, senser, holy water buckett, sprinckle, water, salt, … suffumigaciones for the Angells, suffumigations to please the spirits, suffumigations to urdge the spirit a bodye, ordures for the excommunication, etc.27 This voluminous catalogue of properties does not guarantee success; even a magician who has observed these exacting and difficult conditions may fail to raise his desired spirit. Spirits come reluctantly if at all: they are “very loathe to be brought to subjectin … their nature is to prolong their comming as long a tyme as possible.” The manuscript describes a sort of psychological warfare, in which spirits delay and complain in the hopes of forcing the magus to “infringe your worcke & to give over your purpose.” The emotional toll of conjuring is acknowledged: “[D]ismaye not thy selfe therfore be constant & bold, have faithe & hope to doe well, continew thy purpose, & have a desire to see the end, & doupt not of good and happie success.” The magus must have “perseverance viz though thou have no appearance or sight by callinge one hower 2 etc one daye 2 etc one weeke 2 etc, one moneth 2, etc.”28 The relationship between the magician and his spirits is thus inherently agonistic and adversarial, and the would-be magician is given extensive instructions for summoning recalcitrant spirits. Marginal notes pepper the page with injunctions such as “[i]f he come not say as followeth” and “[i]f he wilbe rebellious & not come saye this [const]rainte.”29 In the face of rebellion and recalcitrance, the magician is instructed to escalate threats against the spirits, speaking in a louder and louder tone of voice and uttering increasingly threatening maledictions: “[I]f they come not then write their names & pictures in paper & burne them in the fier with ordurs ut supra & pronounce very angerly etc.”30 The dominant affect of magic is anger and frustration; the magician is repeatedly told to up the ante, to escalate threats, to work harder and prepare longer. At a number of points the psychic toll of such frustration is acknowledged: conjuring is a difficult task, and not all times and seasons are apt for the art. The magician must be sure to cultivate an appropriate emotional state and not capitulate to the spirit: KNOWE thou who ever thou be that shalt be master in this worcke his secrete & profounde that all is before sayed maye be moste perfectly done, & yet the spirit not come, nor be made subiecte, & the reasone may be, for that some thinge maye be polluted, it maye be the first moneth that he was called, or the firste tyme he was called by the booke, but therfore dismaye not thy selffe but put thy trust in God, observe the observacions, be shure to have all needfull necessaries, a fitt place, convenient tyme an intent to perserver & not to give over untill thou haue thy purpose, & then no doupte, but thou shalte prevaile, & at length obtaine thy purpose, but & if the spirit doe understand that thou once fayent & meane to give over, if thou speed not at the ffirst or second tyme, then will be be obstinate & delaye his comminge to the end to put thee from thy purpose, wherfore once beginning, prosecute & persever.31 Above all, the magician must remain unperturbed: “It behoveth that the worcker of Magicke be of a constant credulike & confident & that he doe in noe wise doubt neither stagger in his minde for the obtayinge of his purpose for as a firme, & stedfast credulike doth worcke many marvelous thinges, soe a distrust an a doubte destroy ether the vertue of worckers mind, & defraudeth him from his desired effects.”32 This passage emphasizes the importance of mental states, especially concentration and confidence; should the practitioner “stagger in his minde” and thus disrupt the required absorptive state, he stands to lose the war of wills with the spirit world. The psychophysical toll of magical practice is enormous, and magic is presented in this manuscript not as a set of easy recipes but as a demanding and difficult practice requiring immense concentration, fortitude, and emotional equilibrium. Failure is a constant possibility and conjuring always involves a contentious relationship with spirits, who constantly struggle to gain the upper hand over the magus. II. Magic on the Early Modern Stage Early modern plays that treat magic demonstrate wide familiarity with the grimoire tradition. The large body of evidence assembled by Mowat for the ubiquity of grimoires includes the fact that Ben Jonson himself apparently owned a magical manuscript.33 Grimoires lie in the background of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV: Owen Glendower and Hotspur argue over the Welsh magus’s claims of magical prowess, especially his boast that he “can call spirits from the vasty deep” (3.1.50).34 In light of the precarity and difficulty of summoning spirits reiterated in the grimoires, Hotspur’s retort is even more pointed than it might seem: “Why so can I, or so can any man / But will they come when you do call for them?” (3.1.54–55). Hotspur also justifies his rudeness to Glendower by pointing out how tedious he is on the subject of conjuring: “He held me last night at least nine hours / In reckoning up the several devils’ names / That were his lackeys” (3.2.149–51). Hotspur likely refers to the detailed catalogue of the “offices of the spirits” typically featured in manuscripts like Folger MS.V.b.26. Pages seventy-three through ninety-three of the Folger manuscript contain exactly such a reckoning, exhaustively listing the spirits at the beck of the Kings of the North, South, East and West; more than seventy-five belonging to the King of the South alone are enumerated. Aficionados of conjuring manuscripts such as Glendower might indeed tax the patience of their auditors. Other plays in the period emphasize the difficulty of summoning and controlling spirits and the vexed relationship of spirit and magician. Faustus and Mephistopheles provide perhaps the best-known example. Faustus professes his delight with “[h]ow pliant” his demon is, only to find that Mephistopheles’s real master is Lucifer.35 In Robert Greene’s Alphonsus of Aragon, the enchantress Medea seeks to understand the outcome of an intended war to be waged by Amurack. Medea first charms Amurack to sleep with music, and then begins “the ceremonies belonging to conjuring” in an attempt to summon the spirit of Calchas: Thou which wert wont in Agamemnons dayes To vtter forth Apolloes Oracles At sacred Delphos, Calchas I do meane, I charge thee come, all lingring set aside, Vnles the pennance you thereof abide. I coniure thee by Plutoes loathsome lake, By all the hags which harbour in the same, By stinking Stix, and filthie Flegeton, To come with speed, and truly to fulfill That which Medea to thee streight shall will.36 Medea’s conjuration is closely affiliated with the instructions given in the grimoires: it combines adjurations to appear “without lingering” and “with speed,” and the language of the summons is larded with threats. Calchas does appear—the stage direction reads “Rise Calehas vp in a white Cirples and a Cardinals Myter, and say”—but he displays the same recalcitrance that characterizes the spirit world in the grimoire tradition: Thou wretched witch, when wilt thou make an end Of troubling vs with these thy cursed Charmes? What meanst thou thus to call me from my graue? Shall nere my ghost obtaine his quiet rest? Muttering, he obeys Medea’s behest to “enquire of the Destinies, / How Amurack shall speed in these his warres”: “Forst by thy charme though with vnwilling minde / I hast to hell, the certaintie to finde.”37 This attitude toward conjuring is more starkly apparent in Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter, a King’s Men play performed for the court at Whitehall for Candlemas (February 2) 1607, and printed in the same year.38 A vehemently anti-Catholic play, The Devil’s Charter recounts the rise and fall of Roderigo Borgia, who makes a pact with the devil to become Pope Alexander VI—only to be cheated of his full term of power by his failure to comprehend the full terms and conditions of the demonic contract. The play contains the most prolonged conjuring scenes in early modern drama, and it requires a large array of demonic apparatus, including incense, dragons, descent machinery, fire, and lightning. In the opening dumb show Borgia becomes pope and confers with “a Moncke with a magical booke and rod,” in order to summon a “diuill in most ugly shape.”39 At Borgia’s command, the devil reappears in a more pleasing shape “in black robes like a pronotary, a cornered Cappe on his head”; a blood pact is made and a “triple Crowne [is] set upon Alexander’s head, the Crosse-keyes delivered into his handes; and withall a magicall booke.”40 But the most elaborate conjuring scene occurs in 4.1, when Alexander summons spirits to help him discover who is responsible for the death of the Duke of Candy, his son. To call the spirits, Alexander “commeth vpon the Stage out of his study with a booke in his hand.” His preparations for conjuring closely mirror those prescribed in the Folger manuscript: he assembles magical paraphernalia, including his robe, his pentacle, and his preparations for fumigation. “Cense well Barnardo: bring me some fire in an earthen vessell / Now must I laboure like a collyers horse.”41 These elaborate practices are drawn directly from the grimoire tradition, including the names of the spirits, the instructions for gesturing with the rod, and the nonsense words intoned.42 Like Calchas in Alphonsus, the Devil seems resentful at being called up and interrupted from “strong business of high state.”43 The Devil complies with Alexander’s demands, but the riskiness and fraught nature of the moment are made clear by the repetition of the stern injunction to the conjurer: “Keepe a firm station stir not for thy life.”44 Across early modern drama, then, the dominant affective repertoire of magic is a mixture of anger, fear, and anxiety, marked by a constant struggle to exert dominance over the spirit world.45 These conclusions are in keeping with recent research that has put the history of witchcraft and sorcery within the context of the history of emotions. Work on emotion and witchcraft has shown that female witches were often seen as suffering from “unbridled passion.”46 E. J. Kent argues that male magicians were also seen as emotionally out of control, albeit in the register of ambition and pride rather than the resentment, greed, or lust commonly attributed to the witch.47 Another vein of evidence about the psychophysical states induced by magical practice can be found in accounts of the relationship between John Dee and one of his scryers, Edward Kelley.48 Dee did not directly conjure spirits but instead used an intermediary to converse with them by gazing into a crystal, a practice known as scrying. Kelley prepared for at least fifteen minutes before he could see the spirits and seems to have entered an absorptive state or trance: “He then settled himself to Action, and on his Knees att my desk (setting the stone before him) fell to prayer and entreaty &c . . . . And within one quarter of an howre (or less) he had sight of one in the stone.”49 Not only is the relationship between Dee and Kelley highly fraught, but also the demands of the spirits are extremely complex and difficult, as in disputes about the construction of a ritual table: “I pray you,” Dee pleads to the spirits via Kelley, “make some of these last instructions more playne and euident.”50 The entire process is marked by anger, melancholy, doubts, and assertions of control and dominance, as when Dee writes of “great and eager pangs” between himself and Kelley as a result of the latter’s conviction that the entire enterprise was the product of “evill and illuding spirits.”51 III. Prospero’s Project Barbara Mowat argues that in his dealings with the spirits, Prospero displays “an insouciance and arrogance that would have baffled the master who constructed MS V.b.26.”52 Yet, the emotionally fraught nature of service and control in The Tempest seems anything but insouciant, even though the grimoire model is referenced only obliquely. Indeed, reading grimoires illuminates a number of ongoing critical concerns about the play, including the nature of magic, Prospero’s affective states, his relationship with Ariel, and his ultimate renunciation of magic. In describing his magical studies in Milan, Prospero explicitly refers to entering an absorption state: “[B]eing transported / And rapt in secret studies” (1.2.76–77). “Rapt” conveys a state both of absorption and of being carried out of oneself, precisely the sort of mental and physical state needed to perform magic. As Mowat notes, the “language of rapture and transport” is commonly used in the magical tradition, including in the works of Agrippa and Dee.53 Prospero tells Miranda that he was “all dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of my mind” (ll. 89–90). His account of increasing isolation as he refines his magical practice is in keeping with the grimoire’s injunctions to secrecy: “& above all thou must worcke soe secretly, that none knowe thy entente[;] … what soever is seene or harde, by the spirits illusiones or otherwies, it must not be discovered to anie other earthly creature.”54 This injunction helps explain the invisible workings of Prospero’s magic, at least to mortal characters, and Prospero’s complex negotiations between the mortal and the invisible world. The overwhelming emphasis in the grimoires on the dangers and difficulties of commanding the spirit world also illuminates the emotional temper of the play and the fraught dynamics of service that underpin it.55 When Caliban urges Trinculo and Stephano to seize Prospero’s books, he tells them that without the book he “hath not / One spirit to command. They all do hate him / As rootedly as I” (3.2.93–95). Like the spirits invoked in the grimoires, they do the magus’s bidding reluctantly and grudgingly. While Caliban is no spirit, his hatred of and bondage to Prospero align him not only with Ariel but also with the spirit world that populates the island. In this context, the clashes between Ariel and Prospero over the terms of servitude are predictable elements in any form of magical practice. Ariel’s complaints about the “toil” and “pains” of his service (1.2.242) accord with the agonistic nature of service that characterizes the work of summoning and deploying spirits in the grimoires. Likewise, the punishments and threats that suffuse The Tempest, such as Prospero’s threat to “rend an oak / And peg thee in his knotty entrails till / Thou hast howled away twelve winters” (ll. 294–96), are found everywhere in the grimoires: “I coniure thee, I constraine thee & I pinche thee N [name of spirit] for thy contempt & disobedience, in that thou commest not at this my commaundement.”56 The invisible spirits may pinch Caliban in the play, but they may equally be subjected to pinching by the magus who commands them. In The Tempest, Shakespeare represents the struggle for control of the spirit world not only through Ariel, whose genealogy is markedly different from that of the spirits commanded in the grimoires, but also through the struggles for control and dominance throughout the play, including those involving Caliban, Miranda, and Antonio. Prospero often seems at once highly powerful and completely dependent upon others, including not only Ariel and his invisible servants but also Caliban, who undertakes more quotidian “offices” such as fetching wood. Indeed, Prospero performs much of his magic by proxy rather than by direct action; Ariel and the invisible “rabble” (4.1.37) of spirits carry out his most extravagant magical acts. The grimoire tradition demonstrates that magic-by-proxy was the dominant form: most of the elaborate preparations described were aimed at raising particular spirits who specialized in the desired magical practice (for example, writing books for the magus, finding lost objects, gaining wealth). The work of magic was not so much directly casting spells as it was summoning, commanding, placating, and orchestrating sometimes recalcitrant spirits. And this indeed is precisely the labor that Prospero performs in The Tempest. We might say that Prospero works as a kind of exalted project manager. I choose this term advisedly: the word “project” appears far more often in this play than in any other Shakespeare wrote. Prospero’s plans are referred to as a “project” by both Ariel and Prospero. Ariel declares that he must prevent Sebastian and Antonio from murdering Alonso and Gonzalo “for else his project dies” (2.1.300). Prospero himself twice refers to his “project”: in the final act, when he says “[n]ow does my project gather to a head” (5.1.1), and in the epilogue, when he begs the audience to release him, “or else my project fails / Which was to please” (Epilogue.12–13). The word “project” also refers to Caliban’s plot against Prospero—Ariel tells Prospero that the conspirators were “always bending / Towards their project” (4.1.174–75), here in the sense of a nefarious scheme or plot.57 This usage is in keeping with an emerging set of connotations related to the term “projector,” the first use of which is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary around the time of the writing of The Tempest. Vera Keller and Ted McCormick argue that in the early modern period, “projector” had “specific and contentious implications,” linked with plans for public improvement, grandiloquent schemes, shady practices, and failure.58 As Mordechai Feingold writes, “from the moment the term projector was introduced into the English language during the 1610s, it invariably denoted a grasping parvenu—if not outright charlatan—rather than a public-spirited man.”59 To think about Prospero’s magic as a “project,” then, is to see it as ambitious, multifaceted, highly complex and therefore subject to failure, and perhaps potentially suspect. The word may also connote the distributed nature of the magical system; Prospero’s magical power does not inhere within him but is distributed across his study and apparatus—staff, book, garment—as well as the agency of Ariel and his invisible subordinates. Performing magic involves a complex and time-pressured set of tasks that require careful instruction and monitoring of Ariel and the “meaner ministers,” or adjunct spirits under his control. While Ariel and the spirits carry out Prospero’s commandments, in Ariel’s case with a good deal of panache, Shakespeare makes it clear that it is Prospero who specifies the nature and timing of the tasks. John Garrison writes that “Prospero’s way is to put everyone to work. . . . In Prospero’s utopia, everyone is working. That is, everyone but him and Miranda.”60 I agree with the former statement, but take issue with the latter. Undoubtedly Prospero’s work is largely invisible and based on systematic exploitation of the labor of others, but it also takes acute mental and physical energy to orchestrate and control. As the play begins, Prospero is running a just-in-time production system triggered by the sudden appearance of the ship “by accident most strange” (1.2.178). This is a bit of astrological fortune that must be pursued immediately:          and by my prescience I find my zenith doth depend upon A most auspicious star, whose influence If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes Will ever after droop.                 (ll. 180–84) Grimoires frequently specify the importance of precise timing to take advantage of propitious astrological and meteorological circumstances, as well as the importance of acting quickly once the moment is at hand. Prospero’s remark is in keeping with the preoccupation with time and its passage that marks the play. Strangely we have simultaneously a sense that nothing happens and that the action moves swiftly. This paradox stems from the combination of frenetic multitasking and delegation that characterizes his magical practice. The nature of Prospero’s task management is evident from the bureaucratic/legalistic nature of the language in the first exchange with Ariel: prospero            Hast thou, spirit,      Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee? ariel   To every article.                      (ll. 193–95) Ariel’s stunning descriptions of his feats in generating the shipwreck and instilling terror in the voyagers demonstrate his artistic flourishes in carrying out Prospero’s instructions, but Prospero is also careful to determine that his plan has been fully implemented the men unharmed and their garments dry, the ship safely in harbor with the mariners “stowed” inside asleep, and the remainder of the fleet “[b]ound sadly home for Naples” (ll. 230, 235). When Prospero reminds Ariel that “[t]he time ’twixt six and now / Must by us both be spent most preciously” (ll. 240–41), the famous dispute about the terms of Ariel’s employment takes place; this exchange, too, is characterized by the language of contract and obligation. The complexity of the orchestration of Prospero’s project is shown by his need to manage competing demands on his attention. Editors designate his continual marking of his progress with the various tasks as “asides,” or addresses to the audience. While they certainly provide the audience with important information about Prospero’s intentions, these moments may also work as self-talk or verbal self-monitoring in order to help him perform multiple roles simultaneously. When he watches the effect of the first meeting between Miranda and Ferdinand, he both performs the role of angry father and comments on his manipulation of affective temporalities: “[T]his swift business / I must uneasy make” (ll. 453–54). The complex monitoring of the progress of the love plot is shown by the rapid changes of addressees: It works. [comment on the progress of the plot] Come on.—[order to Ferdinand] Thou hast done well, fine Ariel.—Follow me;—[meta-commentary and order to the invisible Ariel]                          (ll. 494–95) This pattern—in which Prospero addresses the invisible Ariel while simultaneously directing speech to the mortals on stage—is repeated a number of times in the play, as in 4.1.164 (“Come with a thought, I thank thee, Ariel. Come!”). These instances of divided address give a sense of the complex and precarious nature of the magical project. The importance of careful monitoring is also shown by the repeated stress on Ariel’s exact adherence to the minutiae of his instructions. At the end of the second scene, Prospero tasks Ariel: “Hark what thou else shalt do me” (1.2.496). He elaborates: prospero          exactly do     All points of my command. ariel            To th’ syllable.               (ll. 500–1) Although precision is demanded, the exact content of these instructions is left unspoken. In what follows, Ariel uses solemn music to cause the shipwrecked aristocrats to sleep, opening the opportunity for Sebastian and Antonio to hatch their assassination plot. Later in the scene, as the two plotters “talk apart,” Ariel enters “with music and song” and announces: My master through his art foresees the danger That you, his friend, are in, and sends me forth (For else his project dies) to keep them living.               (ll. 298–300) The exact means of Prospero’s foresight is ambiguous, especially given that the entire point of the episode seems to be to catch Sebastian and Antonio in the act. But this is another example of the constant yet invisible monitoring that characterizes Prospero’s magical practice. Similarly, in the opening of 2.2, Caliban’s curses are followed by “a noise of thunder” (sd), which causes him to fear that “[h]is spirits hear me” (l. 3). Yet the power of these spirits is apparently circumscribed and they will not attack “unless he bid ’em. But / For every trifle are they set upon me” (ll. 7–8). In addition to the crisis management in which Prospero is engaged, he apparently continues his routine monitoring of Caliban for minor offenses like “bringing wood in slowly” (l. 16)—or at least Caliban so thinks. Prospero’s supervision takes on a literal cast in the first full-scale magical display that actually takes place on stage: he watches the harpy scene play out “on the top (invisible)” (3.3.18sd). Although Ariel rather than Prospero speaks directly to the aristocrats, Prospero explicitly states that he has scripted Ariel’s address to the three “men of sin” (l. 53), which certainly sounds much more like Prospero’s than Ariel’s normal mode of speaking. Prospero praises his performance: Bravely the figure of this harpy has thou Performed, my Ariel; a grace it had, devouring. Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated In what thou hadst to say. So, with good life And observation strange, my meaner ministers Their several kinds have done. My high charms work, And these, mine enemies, are all knit up In their distractions. They now are in my power; And in these fits I leave them while I visit Young Ferdinand (whom they suppose is drowned).                 (ll. 83–92) This is a busy agenda indeed. Prospero comments on how Ariel has added “grace” to his personation, a term of art for the elaborations and embellishments skilled actors were trained to employ. Actors were meant to adhere to the words and explicit instructions of the playwright; but like musicians, their true artistry lay in their ability to imbue the words with skilled improvisations. To “grace” was therefore not at odds with following Prospero’s exact “instruction.” The “meaner ministers,” or subordinate spirits, are likewise praised for their acting skill: they have performed “with good life and observation strange.” Scarcely are the acting notes distributed than Prospero swerves to an interim reckoning of progress: his “high charms work,” and his enemies can be safely left while he attends to the next stage of the project—the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda. Thus, the masque is performed at a critical juncture, when the various elements of the plan are reaching a crisis point. Shakespeare’s stagecraft emphasizes the speed with which the next scene unfolds; only twenty lines pass before Prospero reenters with Ferdinand and Miranda as he prepares to oversee this most complex feat of art yet with the aid of his “industrious servant Ariel” (4.3.33): Thou and thy meaner fellows your last service Did worthily perform, and I must use you In such another trick. Go bring the rabble (O’er whom I give thee power) here to this place. Incite them to quick motion, for I must Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple Some vanity of mine art. It is my promise, And they expect it of me.                 (4.1.35–42) The self-deprecating nature of a “vanity of mine art” is at odds with the scale of the show and Prospero’s reaction to its dissolution. Ariel is given only about seven lines offstage to prepare before he is summoned to stage the big show with as many extras as he can muster: “[B]ring a corollary / Rather than want a spirit” (ll. 57–58). In this context, the start that will ultimately dissolve the masque can be reexamined. The start is a very particular form of gesture. It is a form of movement that occurs outside volitional control—or, in the case of a theatrical startle, is feigned as involuntary. Startle exists on the cusp between reflex and emotion; indeed, much of the debate on startle focuses precisely on the question of how it should be classified.61 The startle is a (near) involuntary reaction to the unexpected, often most intensely experienced as a transition from one state to another. The start is often conceived of as an act of betrayal by the body, particularly fraught in a culture that emphasized forms of bodily control and comportment.62 In one sense the start is a moment of transparency: it is visible to the observer, exciting commentary and questions of the sort Miranda and Ferdinand direct toward Prospero in the wake of the masque. In Shakespeare’s plays, starting is sometimes associated with deep preoccupation. Lady Percy demands to know why Hotspur “bend thine eyes upon the earth, / And start so often when thou sit’st alone?” (2.3.42–43). In Henry VIII, Norfolk observes of Wolsey:                we have Stood here observing him. Some strange commotion Is in his brain; he bites his lip, and starts.                    (3.2.111–13) However, while the fact of the start is incontrovertible, its meaning—both to the start-er and to the observer—may remain opaque. “Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?” asks Banquo (Macbeth, 1.3.51–52). Macbeth never replies directly: “[R]apt” (l. 57), he attempts to make sense of his reaction, in a kind of ex post facto self-monitoring. Startle often involves a transitional or liminal moment, a border crossing between one state and another.63 The ghost of Hamlet’s father “was about to speak when the cock crew,” but Horatio notes that after the sound “it started like a guilty thing / Upon a fearful summons” (Hamlet, 1.1.151–54). Just as the crowing of the cock marks the transition from night to dawn, the ghost’s start marks the moment at which he is pulled from the world of the living to the world of the dead. This association of starting with crossing a barrier also explains why in early modern drama the sleep–wake transition is often characterized by a start, as a character moves between sleep and full awakening. Among numerous examples of “start,” the most common in Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson’s Dictionary of Stage Directions is to “start up” from sleep.64 Such starts are often associated in literature with a guilty or disturbed mind, an uneasy conscience, as is the case in Richard’s sudden awakening in the final act of Richard III following the seriatim appearance of the ghosts of those he has slain. Transition between states accounts not just for sleep–wake startles but for the propensity of startle to occur in moments of absorption, when one is fully occupied with the task at hand, lost in thought, or concentrating on a difficult and tension-filled task. In this context, Prospero’s demand for silence and attention as the masque begins takes on more weight. His command for quiet—“No tongue, all eyes. Be silent!” (4.1.59)—is not simply a plea to attend to the show but a measure of the concentration and absorption needed to pull it off. Silence and attention are needed to safely interact with the spirit world: recall the invocation in The Devil’s Charter to “[k]eep a firm station, stir not for thy life,” or Faustus’s warning to the scholars when he summons Helen to “[b]e silent then, for danger is in words.”65 It is thus perhaps more consequential than it may seem when Ferdinand blithely interrupts the masque to inquire about its mechanisms: “May I be bold / To think these spirits?” (4.1.119–20). Prospero replies that they are indeed:       Spirits, which by mine art I have from their confines called to enact My present fancies.                (ll. 120–22) Prospero then twice calls for Ferdinand to be quiet: “Sweet now, silence!”; “Hush and be mute, / Or else our spell is marred” (ll. 124, 126–27). It is only eleven lines later that the masque dissolves following Prospero’s start, suggesting that the moment of disruption is in part triggered by his inability to maintain his absorptive state in the face of the competing demands upon his attention. The would-be magus of the grimoire is warned not to “stagger in his minde” as he carries out the dangerous and difficult work of summoning spirits. Prospero’s start marks a moment of “stagger,” a failure to collect the mind against enemies and obstacles, real or perceived. To forget the “foul conspiracy” (l. 139) is much more than a momentary lapse; it potentially marks a rupture in the fabric of the entire “project,” which hinges on the constant monitoring of its multiple components. This is no mere passing thought; it seems here a supremely dangerous moment, as Prospero realizes that he has dropped the ball—and a ball that could well mean his own murder. His agitation, anger, and chagrin at the dissolution of his masque mark both the power of the absorption state needed to orchestrate the masque and the precarity of his hold over the spirits. It is sometimes said that the threat posed by Caliban and his confederates seems trivial; Francis Barker and Peter Hulme remark on its “excess” and on the “disproportion between apparent cause and effect.”66 Stephen Orgel argues rightly that “critics have tended to underestimate the seriousness of the moment, observing that the plotters are inept and comic, and pose no real threat.”67 Even if the conspiracy is played for comedy, that effect is created primarily by the drunken Europeans; Caliban, by contrast, is in deadly earnest in carrying out his project. This project is discovered by Ariel in 3.2, when he enters “invisible” and overhears the plan: “This will I tell my master,” he says (l. 115). Exactly what and when he tells Prospero is left unclear. After the start has dissolved the masque, Prospero asks Ferdinand and Miranda to leave him and calls Ariel to plan a response: “Spirit, we must prepare to meet with Caliban” (4.1.166). Ariel assures him that all is in hand:          When I presented Ceres, I thought to have told thee of it, but I feared Lest I might anger thee.                   (ll. 167–69) Is the implication that Ariel is freelancing here? Rather than carrying out instructions to the last syllable, is Ariel venturing out on his own, perhaps consciously trying not to unsettle the delicate balance of absorption and orchestration that has so far characterized Prospero’s magical practice? In the grimoire tradition, control over spirits is everything; it is precisely because of their danger and power that they must be governed. Shakespeare’s decision to present Ariel, spirit though he is, as a complexly embodied character marks his departure from that tradition. It is perhaps in this context that we might reexamine Prospero’s decision to renounce his magic in the face of Ariel’s emotive description: ariel       Your charm so strongly works ’em      That, if you now beheld them, your affections      Would become tender. prospero          Dost thou think so, spirit? ariel   Mine would, sir, were I human. prospero              And mine shall.                          (5.1.17–20) Debapriya Sarkar has challenged the dominant redemptive interpretation of this exchange, noting that “Prospero’s use of the indicative mood upstages Ariel’s subjunctive speech act, the spirit’s projection subsumed into the narrative Prospero continues to shape and manipulate. This moment—like the play, which is punctuated by Prospero’s utterance—structurally orients audiences to consider his words as the culmination of the exchange.”68 In this way, we might see the continued agonistic nature of their relationship, an upstaging in which Prospero attempts to quash what Sarkar terms the “speculative poiesis” of Ariel.69 Considered in this light, Prospero’s renunciation of his magical powers might well be less a moment of conversion than an admission of the costs of magic and his inability to sustain its demands. In contrast to the spectacular conjuration scenes in Doctor Faustus and The Devil’s Charter, in The Tempest Prospero constructs a magical circle only as he prepares to renounce his powers. This choice both implies and shields him from explicit demonic ties; as Barbara Traister has argued, “conjurations appear only in plays about evil magicians.”70 Yet in the final moments of The Tempest, Shakespeare has it both ways: the most powerful and familiar conjuring practice takes place as Prospero renounces his art, conjuring while abjuring. Moreover, the grammar of Prospero’s conjuration/renunciation is strangely ambiguous. Grimoires are written in the imperative mode such that the most common form of address in the conjurations is invocation + command or malediction: “I coniure thee thou spirit, & that by him that did make the world to shake, & by him that made the stones rent, the graves open & dead bodies to rise up, & by him that entered the lowest partes, & disspossessed dyvells forth of men, that this fier of hell maye burne thee that thoue maye nowe feele thy selfe to burne & be payned & that in thine owne persone, eternallye.”71 Prospero’s most explicit stage-magical language, the famous “ye elves of hills” speech, describes in explicit fashion the feats that the inhabitants of the spirit world, “[w]eak masters though you be” (5.1.41), have permitted him to accomplish. He begins with an invocation to the “elves,” “ye on the sands,” “you demi-puppets,” and “you whose pastime / Is to make midnight mushrumps” (ll. 33, 34, 36, 38–39). Collectively, these “weak masters” have aided Prospero in performing powerful magical spells that have enabled him to dim the sun, call forth waves and create powerful storms, and even open graves and release the dead. Yet this vivid description of power (ll. 32–51) lacks a predicate. The “yous” that are addressed in the speech are commanded to do nothing; instead, the apparent invocation abruptly ceases with the caesura in line 50: “By my so potent art. But this rough magic / I here abjure” (ll. 50–51). This grammatical lapse perfectly encapsulates Shakespeare’s studied evasions of the nature of the magical practices that underpin The Tempest: the boldest claims to magical power are left incomplete, the agency deferred. The unusual in-character epilogue that closes the play further complicates the question of agency and power as Prospero’s “project” is once again recast, and the power/service dynamics are transferred onto the complex relationships between character, actor, and audience. Prospero, lacking “Spirits to enforce,” implores the audience for “release” (Epilogue.14, 9). Even as he seems to step out of the fiction of the play, Prospero reminds the playgoers of the tense relationship between enchantment and entrapment that characterizes his magical practice. This essay has benefited from careful and patient feedback both from individual readers and from audiences who have heard earlier verisons. Debapriya Sarkar and Roslyn Knutson helped me to refine my arguments, and I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers at Shakespeare Quarterly for their helpful suggestions. Audiences at the seminar series of the English Department at the University of Connecticut, the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, and the Columbia Shakespeare Seminar provided incisive commentary that greatly improved the essay. Thanks also to the staff at the Folger Shakespeare Library for introducing me to the wonders of The Book of Magic. Footnotes 1 The Tempest, 4.1.137, 138. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the play come from The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 2 The Norton Facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare, prep. Charlton Hinman, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), TLN 1805–8. 3 See Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), for a reading of the images of psychic containment and confinement that pervade the play. 4 Barbara A. Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001): 1–33. See also Stephen Orgel’s recent discussion in “Secret Arts and Public Spectacles: The Parameters of Elizabethan Magic,” Shakespeare Quarterly 68.1 (2017): 80–91. Stephen Clucas provides an incisive discussion of the distinction between “white magic” and “dark temptations,” arguing for continuities rather than sharp distinctions between religious and magical practices; see “False Illuding Spirits & Cownterfeiting Deuills: John Dee’s Angelic Conversations and Religious Anxiety,” in Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100–1700, ed. Joad Raymond (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 150–74, esp. 151. 5 Critics have repeatedly called attention to Prospero’s anger in the play. See Peter Lindenbaum, “Prospero’s Anger,” Massachusetts Review 25.1 (1984): 161–71; Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Contexts of The Tempest,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Routledge, 2002), 194–208, who ascribe Prospero’s anger to his “unconscious anxiety” (205) as a result of the colonialist enterprise. Meredith Anne Skura disputes this view in “Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40.1 (1989): 42–69: “the extraordinary intensity of Prospero’s rage suggests a conjunction of psychological as well as political passion” (61). 6 James Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2009), 179. 7 Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2015), 153. 8 This practice of “perverse imitation” frequently characterizes Shakespeare’s approach to source material. Perhaps the most familiar example is Hamlet, which both participates in and resists the revenge tradition that lies behind the play. Shakespeare lards the play with the trappings of the revenge genre, with an appropriately bloody final act, while simultaneously suggesting that revenge is ultimately haphazard, meaningless, and chaotic. In René Girard’s well-known formulation, Shakespeare provides “the crowd with the spectacle they demand while simultaneously writing between the lines, for all those who can read, a devastating critique of that same spectacle”; Girard, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 287. Compare Kiernan Ryan, who writes: “In Hamlet Shakespeare deliberately sabotages the whole genre of revenge tragedy by creating a tragic protagonist who refuses, for reasons he can’t fathom himself, to play the stock role in which he’s been miscast by the world he happens to inhabit”; Ryan, “Hamlet and Revenge,” Discovering Literature: Shakespeare & Renaissance, March 15, 2016, https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/hamlet-and-revenge. I am grateful to Jeremy Lopez for suggesting the term “perverse imitation.” 9 Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 1. Key studies of the tradition include Elizabeth M. Butler, Ritual Magic (1949; repr., University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1998); Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997); Frank Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2013); and Claire Fanger, ed., Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1998). 10 Butler writes that “there are probably hundreds” of such manuscripts still surviving (Ritual Magic, 48). Klaassen estimates there are sixty-four surviving English magical manuscripts of various kinds dating from 1250–1500; see “English Manuscripts of Magic, 1300–1500: A Preliminary Survey,” in Conjuring Spirits (n. 9 above), 3–31, esp. 26. For a catalogue and description of extant manuscripts, see Laura Mitchell, ed. and comp., “Late Medieval Learned Magic,” https://magicalmedieval.wordpress.com, February 2021. 11 See Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” 7, for further discussion of scholarship on the wide proliferation of these manuscripts, as well as their relative neglect. 12 Julien Veronese, “Solomonic Magic,” in The Routledge History of Medieval Magic, ed. Sophie Page and Catherine Rider (London: Routledge, 2019), 187–200, 194. 13 Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” 9–10. 14 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Penguin, 1971), 229. As Mowat notes, the most significant exception to the general rule that grimoires were not printed is Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, which reprints a grimoire in order to confute it. There is evidence that the 1651 edition of Scot’s Discoverie may have been a result of demand for the grimoire rather than increased appetite for Scot’s skepticism (Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” 10–12). 15 Davies, Grimoires, 2. 16 Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic, 4. 17 As Klaassen writes, “the practice of ritual magic required a tremendous amount of raw work”; see “Subjective Experience and the Practice of Medieval Ritual Magic,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 7.1 (2012): 19–51, 20. 18 The notes in the Folger online catalogue, Hamnet, describe the manuscript as follows: “An eclectic anthology of spells and invocations with charts, magic circles, and descriptions and drawings of spirits, angels, and demons. Draws on the Solomonic tradition, with traces of the Lemegeton (including the Goetia), references to ‘Friar Bacon’ (Roger Bacon), and set within a Christian framework. Multiple spells relate to deterring or catching thieves and curing or preventing sicknesses. Includes translations of Psalms 43, 47, 51, 54, 67, 121, 138, and 150 (p. 25–26).” 19 Butler, Ritual Magic, 54. 20 The nature of “absorption states” has been explored by contemporary social scientists such as T. M. Luhrmann. See Luhrmann, Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald Thisted, “The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity,” American Anthropologist 112.1 (2010): 66–78, esp. 75. Luhrmann argues that absorption is “best understood as the mental capacity common to trance, hypnosis, dissociation, and much other spiritual experience in which the individual becomes caught up in ideas or images or fascinations.” Elsewhere she argues that absorption is not simply an internal or personal trait; rather, it can be “be trained and elaborated, and the cultural interest in the phenomena associated with the fruits of this capacity rises and falls over time”; Luhrmann, “The Art of Hearing God: Absorption, Dissociation, and Contemporary American Spirituality,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 5.2 (2005): 133–57, 154. The examples Luhrmann and her team have studied include evangelical Christians in California and India and contemporary witches practicing in England. Intense prayer, ritual practices, and crystal gazing are all examples of absorption practices, and groups and individuals engaging in them show a high level of attention to inculcating absorptive states. Such states require training and practice and are not acquired easily. As I will show when I return to the interrupted masque, it is in this context that we can understand the intensity of Prospero’s affective response to his sudden start and the dissolution of his absorptive state. 21 Prayer of any form was considered to be a demanding psychophysical practice in the wider religious culture. See Peter Iver Kaufman’s discussion of the “energy, intensity, and violence of prayerful performances” in “‘Much in Prayer’: The Inward Researches of Elizabethan Protestants,” Journal of Religion 73.2 (1993): 163–82, 173, as well as Naya Tsentourou, “Sighs and Groans: Attending to the Passions in Early Modern Prayer,” Literature Compass 12.6 (2015): 262–73. Clucas argues for a homology between prayer and incantation, noting that scholars of magic have tended to place too much emphasis on the “separateness of (orthodox) religion and (heterodox) magic” (“False Illuding Spirits,” 151). 22 Folger MS.V.b.26, p. 15. Page numbers have been inserted in a modern hand on the top right corner of the manuscript. 23 Folger MS.V.b.26, p. 15. 24 Folger MS.V.b.26, p. 94. 25 Folger MS.V.b.26, p. 59. 26 Folger MS V.b.26, p. 111. 27 Folger MS V.b.26, p. 110. 28 Folger MS V.b.26, p. 111. 29 Folger MS V.b.26, p. 36. 30 Folger MS.V.b.26, p. 120. 31 Folger MS V.b.26, p. 108. 32 Folger MS V.b.26, p. 159. 33 Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” 7. 34 References to Shakespeare’s plays other than The Tempest come from The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1998). 35 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993), 1.3.30. 36 Robert Greene, The comicall historie of Alphonsus, King of Aragon (London: Thomas Creede, 1599), STC (2nd ed.) 12233, sig. E1r. Taken from the Early English Books Online (EEBO) facsimile of the Huntington Library copy. 37 Greene, Alphonsus, sig. E1v. 38 Martin Wiggins suggests a composition date of 1606. See Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, British Drama, 1533–1642: A Catalogue, 10 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 5:1523. 39 Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter, ed. R. B. McKerrow (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1904), Prologue.35–40. 40 Barnes, Devil’s Charter, Prologue.55–56. 41 Barnes, Devil’s Charter, TLN 1748–49. 42 Similar instructions and names of spirits are found in Folger V.b.26, pp. 86–91. 43 Barnes, Devil’s Charter, TLN 1773. 44 Barnes, Devil’s Charter, TLN 1788, 1800, 1810. 45 See E. J. Kent, “Tyrannical Beasts: Male Witchcraft in Early Modern English Culture,” in Emotions in the History of Witchcraft, ed. Laura Kounine and Michael Ostling (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 77–94. 46 Michael Ostling and Laura Kounine, introduction to Emotions in the History of Witchcraft (n. 45 above), 1–29, 1. 47 Kent links the male witch to the tyrant, arguing that “it was the tyrannical ambition for knowledge, power, and influence that drove men to seek the secret and hidden ways of diabolic witchcraft” (“Tyrannical Beasts,” 80). 48 Accounts of these sessions are in British Library, Sloane MS 3188, and Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1790, art. 1; later conversations are printed in Meric Casaubon’s A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for many Yeers between Dr John Dee . . . and Some Spirits (London, 1659). See Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999); Clucas, “False Illuding Spirits”; and Christopher Whitby, “John Dee and Renaissance Scrying,” Bulletin of the Society of Renaissance Studies 3 (1985): 25–36. The fullest account of the conversations is Whitby, John Dee’s Actions with Spirits: 22 December 1581 to 23 May 1583 (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018; rpt. of Garland edition, 1988). Clucas argues that Sloane MS 3188 provides “an unusually detailed account of an experience of ‘familiar conversation’ with angelic beings, and reveals much about the religious motivations for such conversations, and the religious anxieties that afflicted those involved in them” (“False Illuding Spirits,” 154). 49 Whitby, “John Dee’s Actions,” 1:17 [9a]. 50 Whitby, “John Dee’s Actions,” 1:166 [50a]. 51 Whitby, “John Dee’s Actions,” 1:167 [50b]. 52 Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” 27. 53 Barbara Mowat, “Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus,” English Literary Renaissance 11.3 (1981): 281–303, 284–85. 54 Folger MS V.b.26, p. 111. It should be noted the grimoires do not necessary envisage that the magus works alone; trusted confederates are often mentioned. In contrast, Prospero is a solitary worker. 55 On service, see David Schalkwyk, “Between Historicism and Presentism: Love and Service in Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 17 (2005): 1–17; Michael Neill, “‘Noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs’: The Burden of Shakespeare’s Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59.1 (2008): 36–59; Melissa E. Sanchez, “Seduction and Service in The Tempest,” Studies in Philology 105.1 (2008): 50–82; and Rebecca Kumar, “‘Do You Love Me, Master?’: The Erotic Politics of Servitude in The Tempest and Its Postcolonial Afterlife,” in Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. Cassander L. Smith, Nicholas R. Jones, and Miles P. Grier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 175–96. 56 Folger MS V.b.26, p. 198. 57 As Eggert has shown (Disknowledge, 155), the term also has an alchemical meaning: the moment at which the base material becomes gold, an allusion also identified in the Vaughans’ Arden edition. See also Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994). 58 Vera Keller and Ted McCormick, “Towards a History of Projects,” Early Science and Medicine 21.5 (2016): 423–44, 424. 59 Mordechai Feingold, “Projectors and Learned Projects in Early Modern England,” Seventeenth Century 32.1 (2017): 63–79, 63. 60 John S. Garrison, Shakespeare and the Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018), 108. 61 Debates about categorizing startle revolve around the question of the nature of the relationship between emotion and cognition. While Paul Ekman and others categorize startle as a reflex, philosophers such as Jenefer Robinson, following the work of Joseph LeDoux on fear stimuli in rats, argue that startle is a prototypical emotion. See Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Ronald C. Simons, “Is the Startle Reaction an Emotion?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49.5 (1985): 1416–26, and Robinson, “Startle,” Journal of Philosophy 92.2 (1995): 53–74. The debate about startle as emotion or reflex to some extent mirrors controversies over the contrast between affect and emotion; for a nuanced discussion of these issues, see Rick Anthony Furtak, “Emotion, the Bodily, and the Cognitive,” Philosophical Explorations 13.1 (2010): 51–64. The most accessible treatment of the phenomenon is Ronald Simons, Boo! Culture, Experience, and the Startle Reflex (New York: Oxford UP, 1996). 62 A contemporary conduct book, Youth’s Behaviour, warns the aspiring gentleman not to allow his gestures to betray his inner thoughts: “In thy walkings alone, expresse no passion in thy gesture, lest by that meanes thou shouldest turne thy breast into Cristall, and let others reade thy minde at a distance.” Francis Hawkins, Youth’s Behavior, or Decency in Conversation Among Men (London, 1646), STC (2nd ed.) Y204, sig. C2v. Taken from the EEBO facsimile of the British Library copy. 63 Simons, Boo!, 3. 64 Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 214–15. 65 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 5.1.25. In the prologue to The Merry Devil of Edmonton, the audience is enjoined to silence and attention before the play begins: “Your silence and attention, worthy friends, / That your free spirits may with more pleasing sense / Relish the life of this our active scene” (Nicola Bennett, ed., The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Globe Quartos [New York: Globe Education and Theatre Arts Books/Routledge, 2000], Prologue.1–3). I am indebted to Bronwyn Johnston for this reference. 66 Barker and Hulme, “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish,” 205. 67 Stephen Orgel, ed., The Tempest (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), 50. 68 Debapriya Sarkar, “The Tempest’s Other Plots,” Shakespeare Studies 45 (2017): 203–30, 203. 69 Sarkar, “The Tempest’s Other Plots,” 204. 70 Barbara H. Traister, Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1984), 59. Of course, the question of whether Prospero himself is an evil magician is up for debate. 71 Folger MS V.b.26, p. 115. © Folger Shakespeare Library 2022. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © Folger Shakespeare Library 2022. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - “A Strange, Hollow, and Confused Noise”: Prospero’s “Start” and Early Modern Magical Practices
JO - Shakespeare Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/sq/quac016
DA - 2022-07-11
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-strange-hollow-and-confused-noise-prospero-s-start-and-early-modern-kczraCh8gd
SP - 229
EP - 253
VL - 72
IS - 3-4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -