The wooden case for Dr Dee’s mirror, covered in tooled leather with labels in the handwriting of Horace Walpole (1717–97).
DR DEE’S MAGICAL MIRROR
From Prospero’s hardworking helpers in The Tempest to the whimsy of Titania’s midsummer fairy train and the dark spirits that Lady Macbeth summons to turn herself into a killer, Shakespeare’s plays are filled with otherworldly presences, usually invisible but often a key part of the action:
PROSPERO: Spirits, which by mine art
I have from their confines called to enact
My present fancies.
TITANIA: I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep…
Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed!
LADY MACBETH: Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty.
In every case the proximity and the influence of a world of spirits are taken for granted. Gregory Doran of the Royal Shakespeare Company describes the impact of these supernatural beings in Shakespeare’s era:
This was a society that believed in ghosts, was frightened of them and was aware of the presence of the devil, and though the belief in fairies was waning, the conjuration of them on the stage would nevertheless surprise and scare people.
In the late sixteenth century, harnessing invisible spirit power was an exercise similar to harnessing the invisible power of the wind. It was unpredictable and complicated, but if you could do it – rather like improving the technology of your ship’s sails – the world and its wealth were at your feet.
Reaching the spirit realm was, however, a touch more tricksy and considerably more demanding than improving navigation. One of the most effective ways of accessing the world of the spirits was through an object now housed in the British Museum. It is a round disc of highly polished black stone, about the size of a domestic side-plate but much heavier, about 880 grams. It is a mirror said to have belonged to one of the Shakespearean world’s most famous practitioners of the occult arts, Dr John Dee. Made of obsidian – a black volcanic stone – that has been highly polished, it is an oddly potent artefact that one is almost nervous to pick up. It is gleaming and smooth, like something modern and industrial, but it is at least half a millennium old. There is a small bump at the top through which a hole has been pierced. With a strong cord, you could – for whatever practice – suspend this heavy, honed disc.
John Dee was particularly known for what he called his ‘showstones’, reflective objects in which, combining prayer with optics, he was able to conjure up and talk to angels. Dee had decided he needed to consult the angels, his ‘scholemasters’ as he described them, to understand fully the natural and supernatural world. But, despite much trying, Dee found he could not access the angels directly – he needed a medium, an intermediary. The most famous of these was his assistant, the astrologer Edward Kelley – a figure now viewed as probably the real charlatan in the Dr John Dee show. With Kelley’s help, the angels turned out to be beguilingly chatty, and Dee recorded their conversations in a set of ‘angelic diaries’. As is the way of history, after his death Dee’s angel messages were discarded and a century later were found being used to line pie dishes, but some were rescued and have survived. We can see from these surviving accounts that the whole set-up was intensely theatrical: the elaborately costumed angels, with their crowns, rods and other props, stagily declaimed mysterious messages: ‘I am Prince of the Seas: My power is upon the water. I drowned Pharaoh…My name was known to Moyses. I lived in Israel. Behold the tyme of Gods visitation.’ With visitors like this you can see why Dee became a celebrity. The consultation ended, we are told, with a black curtain being drawn within the showstone. The audience with the spirits was over.
The wooden case for Dr Dee’s mirror, covered in tooled leather with labels in the handwriting of Horace Walpole (1717–97).
John Dee was a celebrated mathematician and a particular expert on Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician and father of geometry; in the 1550s he was offered lectureships in mathematics in Paris and in Oxford. But his behaviour was often that of a ‘conjurer’, that ambivalent word which to us suggests deception, but to an Elizabethan meant more neutrally someone who claimed the power to call up spirits. To the modern mind, this blend of science and magic disconcerts, but in Shakespeare’s day there was a natural affinity between the two worlds. Professor Lisa Jardine explains the relationship:
The term they used was a magus – this was someone who was at once a magician and a scientist, and there really was no boundary between the two. A magus was somebody who exercised power over the natural world by some means that were unfathomable. So Dr Dee was in a very real sense a magus; in fact he was probably our only home-grown Renaissance magus. He was highly educated in mathematics, in astronomy, in languages – classical languages certainly – and he combined this intellectual training with a huge capacity and will to operate and control: he aspired to power.
Dee kept extensive notes of his encounters with angels through his sessions involving mediums and ‘showstones’. This page from his Conversations with Angels described the encounter with the ‘Prince of the Seas’.
Among the educated elite, John Dee had an authority similar to that of a modern celebrity scientist, whose work we admire, but can only dimly apprehend. When physicists and astronomers talk to us today of parallel universes and negative matter, few of us know enough ourselves to have any idea whether these conjectures are well founded or not. But we accept that this highly authoritative science appears to explain our world – just as Shakespeare’s contemporaries accepted Dee’s explanations of the workings of stars and spirits.
Elizabeth I certainly took him seriously. Dee lived at Mortlake, to the west of London, and the Queen visited him there several times, consulting him about an auspicious date for her coronation and other astrological matters. He also provided some afternoon entertainment for her, using all his scientific skills to create an optical illusion involving a mirror that, as you moved towards it, gave alarming and amusing three-dimensional reflections. Dee’s cleverly contrived optical effects produced exactly the desired result: ‘her Majestie’s great contentment and delight’. It was a typical Dee blend of high science, high society, high-jinks and high theatre.
Dr Dee believed his angelic conversations were the crowning achievement of his career, but some of his contemporaries believed that his science was little different from sorcery. They feared he was flirting with the Devil; neighbouring children ‘dreaded him because he was accounted a Conjurer’. Lisa Jardine explains what Dee did to earn such a reputation:
In his early life, Dee showed off by being very clever, often through casting horoscopes. We might think of this as simple superstition, but it involved lining up the heavenly bodies and calculating where they would be at a particular time, and, if you believe that has some control over our lives, then that could be seen as science. He also used his knowledge of mechanics to dazzle people. In a production of an Aristophanes play at Trinity College, Cambridge, he used a three-pulley arrangement to hoist a man and a scarab beetle up to the top of the theatre, and everybody fled in dismay, thinking he had performed magic.
A wax disc engraved with magical figures and names, one of three almost certainly made by Dee or under his supervision, to fulfil the commands given him by angels.
He was also the target of serious accusations, among them formal charges of witchcraft. Like Galileo a short time later, he complained vociferously about it all in the petulant tones of the misunderstood star:
And for these and other such like marvellous Actes and Feates, Naturally, Mathematically, and Mechanically wrought and contrived; ought any honest Student and Modest Christian Philosopher, be counted, & called a Conjurer?…Shall that man be (in hugger mugger) condemned as a Companion of the Hellhoundes, and a Caller, and Conjurer of wicked and damned Spirites?…O Brainsicke, Rashe, Spitefull, and Disdainfull Countrey men.
Dee was the prototype of the controversial celebrity, the magus that people loved to hate.
Dee’s fame clearly coloured the creation of some great theatrical characters such as Christopher Marlowe’s damned Dr Faustus and Shakespeare’s own master of magical effects, Prospero. The Tempest’s ‘majestic visions’, a little like the magic mirror tricks laid on for Elizabeth, are high-end stagecraft: shipwrecks at sea, lavish banquets that appear and vanish in a trice – at once theatrical magic for the spectator and the product of demanding technology. But it became possible to stage such effects only once Shakespeare’s company began to use an indoor space at Blackfriars alongside the outdoor Globe theatre in around 1608. Gregory Doran explains how Shakespeare’s theatre managed the magic:
When they moved inside to the Blackfriars theatre, they had control of light, which is very important. If you can control the light, you can control the effect. In the Globe’s stage, in the open air, there were no lighting effects to speak of, and with the audience wrapped all the way around, it was almost impossible to hide the strings.
Indoors at Blackfriars, stage magic reached a new pitch of sophistication in The Tempest. Flying beetles and other effects that had once resulted in John Dee being labelled a dangerous conjuror could now be achieved without anyone suspecting sorcery.
Prospero’s magic, like Dr Dee’s, is much more than light entertainment. With his superior learning, Prospero doesn’t just whip up storms and banquets: he takes over the island on which The Tempest is set. Magic – like any mystification, if done the right way – confers authority, so we should not be surprised that Dee’s skills as a magus were closely aligned to the structures of Elizabethan economic and political power. Lisa Jardine again:
Elizabeth I was a real intellectual and sought out Dee for advice about where in the new world she might make discoveries, or significant new land claims. She did get advice on a propitious day for her coronation – he cast her horoscope to decide that – but she respected his advice on the basis of their mutual intellectual depth and understanding. Dee produced a run of documents concerned with policies on fishing rights and territorial waters, really important things that depended on his command of geography and the extent of conquest and exploration; he had access to and engaged with matters of serious national intelligence.
This was knowledge potentially as important for national prosperity as Drake’s discovery of several different routes to the Pacific (see Chapter 1).
It is difficult for us now to know what to make of Dr Dee advising the Queen on colonial expansion in America. But, watching Caliban or Ariel do Prospero’s bidding, the audience can never have been in any doubt that, when two worlds meet, he who has the magic holds the power. After Prospero (as the exiled Duke of Milan) arrives on the island, his knowledge – his magic – releases Ariel from the tree where a witch had imprisoned him. Ariel complains that he was promised his freedom, but Prospero spells it out clearly: ‘It was mine Art that made gape the pine’. Ariel is delivered from one bondage only to be enslaved in another.
A powerful European takes over an island – is this The Tempest, or is it really about England and Spain making conquests in the New World? Shakespeare’s audience would certainly have been reminded of recent events on the other side of the Atlantic. In the 1590s Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlers had tried to establish a colony on Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina, and had perished. A new English colony at Jamestown in Virginia had been established just a year or two before The Tempest was first performed. Nobody knew whether it would survive the combined hazards of the natives and the climate.
Frontispiece of General and rare memorials pertayning to the perfect arte of navigation, by John Dee, 1577. In this work, Dee coined the term ‘British Impire’ and set out Elizabeth I’s rights over many northern territories, based on the precedents of King Arthur’s conquests.
Encounters with indigenous people like Caliban and Ariel were always likely to be fraught. American Indians had a superior understanding of their land and its resources, but scientific knowledge like Dee’s could still overwhelm them – especially if you presented your science (as Prospero does) as a secret power that only you could command. To those who do not understand it, science often appears to be magic and can easily be used as a tool for subjugation. It was a tactic that the Spaniards had deployed to great effect in the conquest of Mexico and Peru.
It is therefore unsettling to realize that Dr Dee’s mirror was almost certainly itself a piece of Spanish booty from Mexico. It turns out that this polished disc of black obsidian is in fact an Aztec mirror, painstakingly crafted in Mexico some time before the Spanish arrived. It was shaped with stone tools, and we now know – though Dee probably did not – that the high polish was achieved by long rubbing with bat excrement. The fine skeletons of the insects the bats had eaten survived the digestive journey to produce a wonderfully abrasive paste at the other end. This mirror is – entirely appropriately – fashioned with help from creatures of the night.
Aztec royalty used obsidian mirrors as symbols of their power and as a means of seeing into the future, deriving part of their authority from a god named Tezcatlipoca, ‘the Lord of the Smoking Mirror’. When Spanish science (and horses and guns) overwhelmed the magic of Mexico, this magical object travelled to Europe, where it became part of another – but in some ways disconcertingly similar – structure of knowledge possessed only by a privileged, powerful few.
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Shakespeare’s Prospero is perhaps the most positive portrayal of a magus in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama – and this comes in part from the self-restraint with which he learns to use his magical powers. Having been usurped as Duke of Milan and exiled to the island by his brother partly because of his obsession with the occult, Prospero does continue to use magic. But once he has restored justice, order and happiness on the island, he sets it aside and denounces the egotism and arrogance of the magus:
PROSPERO: But this rough magic
I here abjure; and when I have required
Some heavenly music – which even now I do –
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
Prospero’s surrender of magic has sometimes been interpreted as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage – The Tempest, written in about 1610, was his last play as sole author. But just as striking is Shakespeare’s message about the wisdom with which some rare men choose to give up their powers: Prospero has the self-control to jettison his own supernatural strength. While in Doctor Faustus – Marlowe’s play about the dangers of knowledge, power and greed – the terrified Faustus offers to ‘burn his books’ to save himself from hell, Prospero voluntarily drowns his book of magic, which he had previously called the ‘volumes that I prize above my dukedom’.
Dee’s later life and magical demise were less happy and less celebrated. In 1595 Elizabeth made him warden of Christ’s College, Manchester, but he received no such favours from James I, whose hostile and punitive views on witchcraft were well known (see Chapter Ten). Most of Dee’s family appear to have been lost to the plague in 1605, and he returned from Manchester to Mortlake with his one surviving daughter to look after him in his old age. He spent his final years in relative poverty, and his famous library – one of the largest of the age – was broken up, and many of his possessions sold.
Derek Jacobi as Prospero in The Tempest, Sheffield Crucible Theatre, 2002. For his magus Prospero, Shakespeare was able to draw both on the legacy of real figures such as Dee and on popular theatrical characters such as Dr Faustus.
For generations after his death, Dee was held to be a dubious character, a charlatan whose sleights of hand and gift of the gab earned him unwarranted status in a gullible age. The eighteenth-century writer and politician Horace Walpole, who at one point acquired Dee’s magic mirror for his own antiquarian collection, dismissed Dee as a ‘conjuror’ who used the mirror ‘to deceive the mob’. Nowadays, Dee is regarded as a genuine scholar and thinker, a polymath whose interests ranged from Euclidean geometry, calendar reform and geographic exploration to astrology, alchemy and conjuring angels. He is understood as part of an intellectual continuum that stretched from outright charlatans like his sometime associate the astrologer Edward Kelley, through Tycho Brahe and Galileo, to luminaries of the Scientific Revolution like Isaac Newton – some of whose interests in alchemy and the occult had far more in common with a figure like Dee than used to be admitted.
At his peak as a magus, Dee was cultivated by ambitious rulers across Europe. From Louvain to Prague, the powerful consulted him on everything from prospecting in the Americas to predicting the future. And in due course Dee followed the path of practically every other scientist or magus of the age, from Johannes Kepler to Giordano Bruno, to the court of the other intellectual ruler, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, whom he visited in 1583. Rudolf’s palace at Prague, like the lawn at Mortlake, was a place where political power paid homage to the power of spirits.
Dr Dee’s spirits, like Prospero’s, were usually benign (although the spirits in The Tempest do cause a shipwreck). Others could conjure darker, more dangerous forces. In the next chapter we shall face another (spirit-induced) storm at sea – this time with witches, trying to drown the King and Queen of Scotland.
