This Wooden O

Antitheatrical writers in early modern England compared the actor’s transformation into a character to a kind of illicit magic. In response, playwrights like William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson created a body of plays that treated the conjuror’s circle as a mirror of the theater. This episode brings you a story of magicians, witches, and the spectacles they conjured: the story of magic on the early modern English stage.

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.

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Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben.

Intro
In his 1632 treatise Histriomastix: The Player’s Scourge, or Actor’s Tragedy, the Puritan English author William Prynne writes a scathing critique of plays and the theater. Written in the form of a play itself, with “acts” and “scenes,” Histriomastix runs over a thousand pages. In his introduction, he writes, “I shall now address myself unto the Argument, or Subject, of this Tragical Discourse, which is no more in brief, than this Conclusion. That all popular, and common Stage-Plays, whether Comical, Tragical, Satirical, Mimical, or mixed of either (especially as they are now compiled and performed among us) are such sinful, hurtful, and pernicious Recreations, as are altogether unseemly and unlawful unto Christians.” After condemning the immoral subject matter of plays, Prynne goes on to condemn “the very form and manner of their Action.” His real target is not any particularly sinful plot but the mechanism of theater itself and the capacity of costume, gesture, and impersonation to transform an ordinary body into something it is not, to make the mundane read as spectacle and the actor read as king, or woman, or devil.

Antitheatrical polemicists like William Prynne treated the actor’s transformation into another identity as a species of illicit magic and the theater itself as a kind of magic circle that both housed this transformation and made it possible. Playwrights, for their part, seem to have understood both the danger and the opportunity this comparison offered. The result was a body of plays that treated the conjuror’s circle as a mirror of the theater, a place that can hold dangerous power just long enough, and just safely enough, to be watched.

In this episode, I bring you a story of magicians, witches, and the spectacles they conjured: the story of magic on the early modern English stage.

Man as Magus
In the final act of William Shakespeare’s 1611 play The Tempest, the magician Prospero ends the play by renouncing his magic and divesting himself of his book and staff, the tools of his magic arts, saying:

But this rough magic
I here abjure; and, when I have requir’d
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.

This abjuration can be interpreted in several ways. Audiences could read it as the culmination of Prospero’s revenge on his enemies. They could also see it as a magician repenting the use of “rough magic” and turning back toward more orthodox pursuits. However, audiences might be tempted to read this a third way. They could also see it as a form of meta-theater, in which the playwright himself sets down the tools of illusion and reveals the trick.

Supporting this last theory is the fact that Prospero delivers an epilogue at the end of the play directed specifically toward the audience, saying:

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have ‘s mine own;
Which is most faint: now, ‘tis true,
I must be here confin’d by you…
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands…
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev’d by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Prospero’s bald-faced plea for applause, asking for the audience to help with their “good hands,” reveals the mage for what he is—an actor playing a role—and reminds the audience that everything they’ve just seen play out before them, including the storm with which the play began, was an illusion performed by fictional characters.

Shakespeare was not the only playwright of his time playing with the idea of the play as a magical ritual. In his 1604 play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe staged an elaborate scene in which the lead character, the magician Faustus, conjures a devil to appear on the stage, just a few minutes into the performance. In the very first act, Faustus performs the conjuring scene, which is staged with the formal precision of an actual magical rite, complete with Latin incantations, a magic circle to contain the conjured devil, the invocation of the Trinity backward, and finally the appearance of Mephistopheles cued by special effects like thunder and smoke. Elizabethan audiences would have recognized that Marlowe is quite deliberately dressing black magic in the vestments of the Mass. To sell his soul and seal his compact with Mephistopheles, Faustus signs a contract in blood and speaks the words “Consummatum est,” the same words Jesus uttered from the cross. The audience is made to watch a blasphemy performed with all the theatrical symbols that would, in another context, signal sanctity. One famous anecdote that an actual extra devil turned up onstage during performances captures exactly the anxiety Marlowe is exploiting, that the boundary between theatrical conjuring and real conjuring is suspiciously blurred.

But Marlowe isn’t finished with the audience just yet. As with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Doctor Faustus also includes a play-within-the-play. Faustus stages a spectacle for onstage audiences as well as the real audience out in the house. He produces a pageant illustrating the Seven Deadly Sins for his own enjoyment, becomes invisible in order to abuse the pope, entertains the emperor by conjuring spirits to resemble Alexander the Great and his paramour, and conjures an illusory Helen of Troy for a group of scholars. Each of these is a demonstration of magic as entertainment. The audiences onstage respond to each spectacle with delight and wonder, just as the real audience is expected to. Onlookers are reminded that they, too, are admiring diabolic illusions. Worse still, the real audience saw Faustus make his bargain with Mephistophales. Unlike the onstage audiences, the real audience cannot pretend ignorance.

At the end of the play, the chorus recites a brief epilogue, saying:

Faustus is gone:  regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practice more than heavenly power permits.

This instruction, however, that the play should be seen as a cautionary tragedy, comes too late. The audience has already spent an entertaining two hours “wonder[ing] at unlawful things.” Even the final images of Faustus’s “hellish fall” and “fiendful fortune” are themselves spectacles, staged for maximum theatrical impact. Instead of excusing the audience, the epilogue drives home the audience’s complicity in allowing itself to be drawn in by the spectacle of the play.

This pattern gets turned on its head in Ben Jonson’s 1614 comedy Bartholomew Fair by the Puritanical character Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, who in the last act of the play denounces theater as sinful and profane but is out-argued by a puppet. Busy goes to the Fair to “protest” and “prophesy” against it and attacks a puppet show featuring a puppet named for the ancient Greek god Dionysus. Busy treats the puppets as idols, the puppeteer as a kind of pagan priest, and his own denunciation as a kind of exorcism. The puppet mocks his logic, and Busy falls back on the ultimate Puritan argument against the theater, saying, “my main argument against you is, that you are an abomination; for the male, among you, putteth on the apparel of the female, and the female of the male.” As a response, the puppet lifts up its garment to reveal it has no sex at all. Busy laments, “I am confuted, the cause hath failed me,” says he will allow the play to go on, and declares, “I am changed, and will become a beholder with you.”

Women and Witchcraft
While male characters like Prospero and Faustus in early modern England drama tended to practice the learned magic that required access to books and Latin literacy, female characters tended to be framed as witches. In The Tempest, Prospero’s female counterpart is the sorceress Sycorax, mother to Caliban, whom Prospero has pressed into his service. In the last act of the play, Prospero introduces Caliban to the other characters, saying:

His mother was a witch, and one so strong
That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs,
And deal in her command without her power.

Unlike the absent Sycorax, Prospero’s magic, and Prospero himself, are shown. We watch him raise the tempest that begins the action of the play, direct the air spirit Ariel, stage an illusory pageant, and finally break his staff in a scripted renunciation of his magic. Every major turn of the plot features Prospero performing magic in real time, in front of us, with his own body and voice as the instrument.

Sycorax gets none of this. Everything we know about her arrives through Prospero, which means her magic is always framed by her rival’s hostile perspective. By the time the play begins, Sycorax is long dead, and her only surviving traces are her son, Caliban, and the pine tree in which she imprisoned Ariel. Prospero even withholds the specifics of how her magic worked. We hear about its effects on the tides and the moon, but we see no method, no incantation, and no staged ritual. Prospero, the Milanese duke and scholar, gets full performance rights. Sycorax, Algerian and female, exiled from her home and dead before the play opens, gets narration only, filtered through the very man whose authority depends on her absence.

That said, Shakespeare does offer us a glimpse of women performing magic in his plays. However, unlike Prospero, these magical women are most often framed as witches and their magic as demonic. In the last act of Henry VI, Part 1, produced in 1590, the character of Joan of Arc, called Joan la Pucelle, shifts from a martial heroine to a conjuror of demons over the course of the play. She is introduced as a shepherd’s daughter claiming divine visions, then as an armored warrior who bests the Dauphin in single combat, then gradually recast by English characters as a woman of ill repute, then finally, in Act 5, unmasked as a witch who conjures devils onstage and is abandoned by them when her luck turns. In her desperation, Joan pleads:

Now help, ye charming spells and periapts;
And ye choice spirits that admonish me
And give me signs of future accidents.     Thunder.
You speedy helpers, that are substitutes
Under the lordly monarch of the north,
Appear and aid me in this enterprise.

Joan’s conjuration works. A series of fiends enter, and Joan appears momentarily relieved, saying:

This speedy and quick appearance argues proof
Of your accustom’d diligence to me.
Now, ye familiar spirits, that are cull’d
Out of the powerful regions under earth,
Help me this once, that France may get the field.

However, the fiends ultimately abandon her to her fate. The spectacle of the scene, including the sound of thunder and the appearance of the demons, shows that Joan’s supernatural powers are real. However, she is ultimately punished, both for losing in battle and for performing across categories that Elizabethan culture thought were fixed and separate: peasant and noble, maiden and warrior, sacred and demonic. The play offers some sense of order by framing her previous victories as the result of this demonic intervention, rather than the result of her own martial or spiritual authority.

In the sequel, Henry VI, Part 2, two other powerful women appear to conjure spirits, and like Joan, they too are removed from the political stage by disappearing from the actual stage. In the play, Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, is ambitious for status she can’t obtain through her own legitimate political action, so she turns to Margery Jourdain, a “witch of Eye,” and the conjurer Roger Bolingbroke, to raise a spirit and prophesy the king’s fate. The scene stages exactly the same apparatus as Faustus’s conjuring—a circle, an incantation, and a spirit summoned and interrogated—but where Faustus’s conjuring is treated as tragic and consequential, Eleanor and Margery’s is staged as a set-up. The whole affair is being watched by hidden observers who burst in to arrest everyone. Ultimately, Eleanor’s crime is framed as ambition exceeding her sanctioned role. She is destroyed for reaching for power through magic because direct political action was never open to her as a woman. Margery, meanwhile, is doubly marginal. She is both female and poor, and she, too, disappears from the play as soon as she’s served her plot function. Together, Eleanor and Margery map the spectrum of class onto gender: neither highborn female ambition nor lowborn female craft gets access to legitimate power, and both are accused of witchcraft the moment they try.

Shakespeare’s most famous witches, the Weird Sisters in his 1606 play The Tragedy of Macbeth, are likewise political players, but these figures manage to escape any kind of punishment, perhaps because they are never depicted as real women. They too engage in incantations and conjuring illusions and spirits, but they are separated from the human characters in the rest of the play. Their verse is in a different meter, trochaic tetrameter, rather than the iambic pentameter the other characters use. Their speech is full of riddling incantations and paradoxes like “fair is foul, and foul is fair” and “not so happy, yet much happier.” They are set apart as a different order of theatrical being. Crucially, it’s never established that their prophecies directly cause the action of the play. Instead, Macbeth finds himself seduced by their spectacle and does the work himself. There is a strong sense that the Weird Sisters’ power is performative and persuasive, just like the playwright’s. As in The Tempest, Doctor Faustus, and Bartholomew Fair, Macbeth features a play-within-the-play. The cauldron scene in Act 4 presents a spectacular vision, complete with special effects, staged for both Macbeth and the play’s real audience.

If male magic in early modern English plays is staged as a kind of authorship indistinguishable from playwriting, female magic is instead consistently coded as performance in the pejorative early modern sense: deceptive, seductive, and disordering, and it is never ended by the practitioner’s own authority. Sycorax doesn’t renounce her power; she’s exiled and dies. Joan doesn’t choose to stop; she’s captured and burned. Eleanor is exposed and banished. The Weird Sisters simply vanish. Their motives are never explained because the play never grants them the power that would make them “authors” of anything. They are forces that occur rather than minds that decide. This distinction between masculine authorship and feminine performance reveals broader early modern anxieties about female speech itself, especially the fear that women’s speech was inherently deceptive and disordering in a way that male speech, backed by institutional learning, was not. These plays use the gender of the performer to determine which performances are treated as art and which are treated as crime.

Globe and Circle
To fully understand how audiences would read these depictions of magic in early modern English drama, it helps to envision the spaces in which these plays would have been performed. The most famous of these spaces is probably London’s Globe Theatre, home to many of Shakespeare’s plays. While no one in 1599 would have explicitly said, “the Globe is a conjuror’s circle,” both structures perform a similar function. Both mark off a bounded space within which extraordinary and potentially dangerous things are permitted to happen precisely because the boundary contains them. The conjuror’s circle protects the conjuror from what he summons. The Globe’s polygonal stage (“this wooden O” as the chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V calls it) does something similar. It creates a space for representations of regicide, rebellion, blasphemy, demonic conjuring, and social inversion that would be incredibly dangerous outside that boundary. This is not to say that playhouse architecture was designed with occult theory in mind, but it is clear that people in early modern England thought about theatrical space using the vocabulary of ritual containment. Not only did playwrights use it as a place to conjure spectacle within a spectacle, but antitheatrical writers explicitly compared playhouses to sites of idolatrous or diabolical danger.

The anxiety about idolatrous images was real. Reformation iconoclasm’s core anxiety was that a crafted image could become a site of misplaced devotion, where viewers mistake the representation for the thing represented, or worse, believe the image itself possesses religious power. Antitheatrical writers like William Prynne transferred this anxiety onto the actor’s body by describing the actor as a “crafted image” of a person who is not there: a false Caesar, a false king, or, during the era in which women were forbidden to act and boys had to play female parts, a false woman. Prynne explicitly uses the vocabulary of “counterfeiting” to describe this, taking advantage of the word’s double meaning of impersonation and fraud. The Reformation’s assault on Catholic ideas around transubstantiation, relics, and exorcism generated an entire critical vocabulary. Terms like “counterfeit,” “vain show,” “juggling,” “illusion,” “idolatry,” “conjuring tricks” were originally aimed at Catholic ritual. When Protestant polemicists wanted to discredit the Mass, they called it theater. Following the English Reformation, antitheatrical writers redeployed these terms against the stage. William Prynne’s Histriomastix draws on this, treating playhouses as sites of a false, Catholic-adjacent ritual.

The Jacobean Witchcraft Act of 1604, which tightened the 1563 Elizabethan statute, created more risk for anything onstage that might be read as an actual working conjuration rather than a represented one. This gave playwrights a strong incentive to make sure the audience always recognized representations of magic as theater, not as functional ritual. They relied on visible trapdoors, thunder-sheets, and stage machinery that Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences would recognize as theatrical convention. Incantations were delivered in stage-Latin or invented tongues, never anything liturgically exact. Above all, the plays consistently condemned the very magic they put on display.

We can think of damnation and exile as a kind of narrative tax: the price a playwright paid for the privilege of representing magic vividly and at length. Faustus gets roughly 2,000 lines of increasingly spectacular magical performance before Marlowe balances the ledger with his damnation in the final act. Shakespeare pays the same tax earlier; Sycorax is punished before The Tempest even begins, which buys Prospero extensive, largely untroubled stage time for his own magic, right up until his renunciation at the close. This isn’t necessarily cynical on either playwright’s part. They may have sincerely meant to frame magicians tragically, but sincere or not, the functional effect is the same. The play gets to deliver the pleasure of transgressive spectacle while its moral structure officially disapproves of it.

Conclusion
The technical magic of the theater is probably best embodied by the ultimate transformation on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Since women were prohibited by law from appearing on stage, boy-actors would play women’s roles. Before a single line was spoken, an actor had already transformed his male body to appear, sound, and move as female. This is, incidentally, exactly what magical conjuring claims to do: take one substance and, through the correct application of craft, produce the convincing appearance of another. When Faustus conjures Helen of Troy, famously played, in an all-male company, by a boy-actor, the play layers the plot’s magical transformation (a devil disguised as Helen) on top of an already-transformed body (a boy disguised as a woman). The audience would certainly have been aware of this illusion, even while being entertained by it.

This is also exactly the claim iconoclasts feared about crafted images, which may explain why Prynne’s Histriomastix and other antitheater polemics condemn theater wholesale, not just plays with immoral content but the formal apparatus of performance itself. Disguise and illusion are structural features of all theater, comedies and moral tragedies alike. This is why antitheatrical texts can condemn even plays that punish vice, like Doctor Faustus, with the same intensity as openly bawdy ones. For these Puritanical writers, it is the embodied transformation itself that constitutes sin. This is a genuinely different and, in some ways, more serious charge than just saying “plays contain immoral stories,” and it is the one that makes the strongest argument for the idea of the theater as a “magic circle.” Before any magic occurs in the story, every performance has already demonstrated the theater’s core argument: that reality itself can be altered through craft, even if only for a couple of hours.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Bluesky at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.