Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Having Our Will: Imagination in Recent Shakespeare Biographies
- Toward a New Biography of Shakespeare
- Jonson, Shakespeare and the Exorcists
- ‘Lending soft audience to my sweet design’: Shifting Roles and Shifting Readings of Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’
- ‘Armed at point exactly’: The Ghost in Hamlet
- Writing About Motive: Isabella, the Duke and Moral Authority
- Writing Performance: How to Elegize Elizabethan Actors
- Elizabeth Montagu: ‘Shakespear’s poor little Critick’?
- Rewriting Lear’s Untender Daughter: Fanny Price as a Regency Cordelia in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
- The Prequel as Palinode: Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines
- Shakespeare Among the Workers
- Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare: Or, her Silence on Master William
- Shakespeare and the Invention of the Epic Theatre: Working with Brecht
- Dramatizing the Dramatist
- Shakespeare in Drama Since 1990: Vanishing Act
- Writing about [Shakespearian] performance
- Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism
- Writing Shakespeare in the Global Economy
- The ‘Complexion’ of Twelfth Night
- Translation as Appropriation: Vassilis Rotas, Shakespeare and Modern Greek
- How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?
- Mistress Tale Porter and the Triumph of Time: Slander and Old Wives’ Tales in The Winter’s Tale
- Shakespeare Performances in Ireland, 2002–2004
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2004
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 2003
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare in Performance
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Jonson, Shakespeare and the Exorcists
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Having Our Will: Imagination in Recent Shakespeare Biographies
- Toward a New Biography of Shakespeare
- Jonson, Shakespeare and the Exorcists
- ‘Lending soft audience to my sweet design’: Shifting Roles and Shifting Readings of Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’
- ‘Armed at point exactly’: The Ghost in Hamlet
- Writing About Motive: Isabella, the Duke and Moral Authority
- Writing Performance: How to Elegize Elizabethan Actors
- Elizabeth Montagu: ‘Shakespear’s poor little Critick’?
- Rewriting Lear’s Untender Daughter: Fanny Price as a Regency Cordelia in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
- The Prequel as Palinode: Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines
- Shakespeare Among the Workers
- Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare: Or, her Silence on Master William
- Shakespeare and the Invention of the Epic Theatre: Working with Brecht
- Dramatizing the Dramatist
- Shakespeare in Drama Since 1990: Vanishing Act
- Writing about [Shakespearian] performance
- Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism
- Writing Shakespeare in the Global Economy
- The ‘Complexion’ of Twelfth Night
- Translation as Appropriation: Vassilis Rotas, Shakespeare and Modern Greek
- How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?
- Mistress Tale Porter and the Triumph of Time: Slander and Old Wives’ Tales in The Winter’s Tale
- Shakespeare Performances in Ireland, 2002–2004
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2004
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 2003
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare in Performance
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Summary
In The Puritan (published in 1607), there is a delightfully tongue-in-cheek moment when Captain Idle (a highwayman pretending to be a conjurer) explains his supposed scruples about conjuring to Sir Godfrey Plus, the principal target of his trickery:
I understand that you are my Kinsmans good Maister, and in regard of that, the best of my skill is at your service: but had you fortunde a mere stranger, and made no meanes to me by acquaintance, I should have utterly denyed to have beene the man; both by reason of the Act past in Parliament against Conjurers and Witches, as also, because I would not have my Arte vulgar, trite, and common.
(F2V)In other words: we all know what you are asking me to do is illegal (I can even cite the precise statute), but seeing as you are a gentleman and vouched for by my kinsman, I am prepared to employ my skills for you in private. The statute referred to dated from 1604 and was not against conjuring and witchcraft per se (which were covered by other laws) but was aimed at persons ‘taking upon them by witchcraft &c., to tell or declare in what place any treasure of gold or silver should or might be found or had in the earth or other secret places’.
That is, it was a law against pseudo-supernatural con-trickery, which is doubly funny in context, because the whole point of this con is to restore to Sir Godfrey a gold chain that has previously been ‘borrowed’. The con itself is splendidly theatrical (4.2. in modern editions), with Idle laying out a ‘circle’ that might have been taken from the props for Dr Faustus, to the accompaniment of timely ‘thunder’ and ‘lightning’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 15 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005