Abstract
So long (righte Gentle and Courteous Reader) as wee live heere in this wretched vale of miserie, and myserable estate of our Probationership, we are all even the best of us all, to account no better of our selves, then that we live in a perpetuall warrefare, and most dangerous and deadlie combat.
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Notes
See S. Clark, Thinking with Demons, The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 31
C. Larner, Enemies of God, The Witch-hunt in Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2000 [1983]), p. 134).
For a full analysis of the links between the two works, see M. Gibson, Reading Witchcraft, Stories of Early English Witches (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 153–6.
Thomas Cooper, among many others, called ‘Poperie the nurse of Witchcraft’ (T. Cooper, The Mystery of Witchcraft (London, 1617), p. 120, cited in K. Tetzeli von Rosador, ‘The Power of Magic: From Endimion to The Tempest’, Shakespeare Survey, 43 (1991) 5).
See J. Lyly, Endymion, ed. D. Bevington, Revels Plays (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996).
J. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), p. 109).
We shall adopt the dates of composition suggested by the Arden 3 editors of these plays — ‘1592, or earlier, depending on how far conjecture is allowed to influence judgement’ for Henry VI, Part 2 (cf. W. Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, ed. R. Knowles, Arden 3 (London: Thomson Learning, 2001 [1999]), p. 111.
W. Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 1, ed. E. Burns, Arden 3 (London: Thomson Learning, 2000), p. 8.
‘Mere tattle and chat, even bogus and make-believe could serve this purpose as effectively as carefully corroborated evidence’ (A. Walsham, Providence in Early Modem England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 64).
C. Marlowe, The Tragédie of Doctor Faustus, in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. F. Bowers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), vol. 2, p. 163
K. Dockray, Henry VI, Margaret of Anjou and the War of the Roses: A Sourcebook (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), p. xxiv.
S. Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (London: Seaby, 1992), p. 66).
See G. Bullough, ed.. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge; New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), vol. 3, p. 90.
As Ronald Knowles remarks, ‘if this is Providence, it is of a kind difficult to credit, except in the simple mind of this king’ (R. Knowles, ‘The Farce of History: Miracle, Combat, and Rebellion in 2 Henry VI’, Yearbook of English Studies, 21 (1991) 169).
As D. P. Walker explains, ‘if the spirit of God, or a good angel, the messenger of God, dwells in a man and speaks through his mouth, the utterances claim supreme authority and may well add to, or alter, the original revelation.... And once the revelation has been petrified in canonical scriptures, such activities become still more obviously heretical’ (D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits, Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London: Scolar Press, 1981), p. 17).
R. Hooker, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 1, pp. 127–8, cited in F. W. Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham (Newark, London and Toronto: University of Delaware Press; Associated Ups, 1993), p. 51.
R. Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft [1584], intro. H. R. Williamson (Arundel: Centaur Press, 1964)
G. Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (1593), intro. B. White (London: Shakespeare Association, 1931)
Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, book 12, chapter 2, p. 189. On the fulfilment of this prophecy, see also F. K. Barasch, ‘Folk Magic in Henry VI, Parts 1 and 2: Two Scenes of Embedding’, in Henry VI: Critical Essays, ed. T. A. Pendleton (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), p. 121.
K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 155.
W. Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, in William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, eds S. Wells and G. Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
K. M. Briggs, Pale Hecate’s Team, An Examination of the Beliefs on Witchcraft and Magic among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and His Immediate Successors (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 59.
Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, ed. R. Knowles, p. 166. For the view that witchcraft and factional struggle often went hand in hand, see D. Willis, ‘shakespeare and the English Witch-Hunts: Enclosing the Maternal Body’, in Enclosure Acts, Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. R. Burt and J. M. Archer (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 99
‘... the said duchess may appear, more of malice than of any just cause thus to have been troubled’ (J. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, cited in N. S. Levine, ‘The Case of Eleanor Cobham: Authorizing History in 2 Henry VI’, Shakespeare Studies, 22 (1994) 110).
Historically, these last three were in fact members of the Catholic clergy who also had close ties with Duke Humphrey: Roger Bolingbroke (or Bultingbroke) was a prominent Oxford priest, Thomas Southwell was canon of St Stephen’s Chapel in the palace of Westminster and John Home (Shakespeare’s ‘Hume’), also known as Hunne, was canon of Hereford and St. Asaph and Eleanor’s chaplain (see: R. A. Griffiths, ‘The Trial of Eleanor Cobham: An Episode in the Fall of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Manchester, 51.2 (1969) 386–7).
See Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham, pp. 111–23 et passim. We shall come back to Harsnett later to highlight what was most probably the hidden agenda behind his writing of the Declaration. Shakespeare continued to be interested in the dramatic potential of exorcism, judging by Pinch’s very Catholic conjuring of spirits in The Comedy of Errors (c. 1594): ‘I charge thee, Satan, housed within this man, / To yield possession to my holy prayers, / And to thy state of darkness hie thee straight: / I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven’ (W. Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. C. Whitworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4.4.55–8).
This was no doubt because, like Eleanor Cobham, her figure had become politicized (see R. F. Hardin, ‘Chronicles and Mythmaking in Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc’, Shakespeare Survey, 42 (1990) 25–34
R. Hillman, Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 112–70).
The hidden agenda behind Harsnett’s Declaration may thus have been more complex than Stephen Greenblatt’s view that ‘Harsnett’s response is to try to drive the Catholic church into the theater’ (S. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 112).
John Dryden, ‘Prologue to the Tempest or the Enchanted Island’, in After ‘The Tempest’, sig. A4r, lines 19–26, cited in B. H. Traister, Heavenly Necromancers, The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), p. 149.
Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. 135. Shakespeare would again explore this logic of contrariety in his Jacobean tragedy of Macbeth with its multiple inversions of contraries (on this last point, see Stuart Clark, ‘Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft’, Past and Present, 87 (1980) 126).
Meta-drama never totally extinguished these concerns. Good examples of this are the stories which surfaced in the mid 1590s about an extra devil who appeared in a production of Dr Faustus at the Theatre and scared both the actors and the audience. The anonymous play The Puritan Widdow (1606) staged a fake conjuration of demons and demystified the conjuror’s powers. Yet, interestingly, the fake conjurer has doubts about his false art, because he fears it might in fact succeed: ‘But here lyes the fear on’t, how < if > in this false conjuration, a true Devill should pop up indeed?’ (3.5.125-7) (cited in J. D. Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 156).
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© 2006 Jean-Christophe Mayer
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Mayer, JC. (2006). Theatre, Witchcraft and the Crisis of Faith in King Henry VI, Parts 1 and 2. In: Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595897_2
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