Conspicuous ‘markers’ are often understood to structure early modern dramatic English illustrations of magic: such activity is thought to be introduced through strange-sounding incantations or transgressive rituals, or it is linked to a site underneath the stage. But in several plays, as this thesis demonstrates, magic escapes these conventions. In Macbeth, The Tempest, and The Witch of Edmonton, rites, distinctive speeches, under-stage spaces and anarchic ceremonies do not always govern ‘supernatural’ occurrences. Instead, characters often encounter magical phenomena or meet otherworldly beings when they venture into secluded, hidden, and anarchic spaces within their dramatic worlds. Spaces such as the lands lying behind city or castle walls, territories beyond shorelines and across mysterious oceans, and private spaces within the early modern home unsettle conceptions of an ‘otherworld’ as a spatially separate place, upsetting the borders that separate the world of the play from its supernatural counterpart. These accessible yet mysterious spaces constitute potent locales where characters can encounter entities ‘beyond the real world’ as they can conceive of it. This shift is bound up in wider historical and theological contexts and shifts, including the changing attitudes towards magic effected by the Reformation. This thesis, then, shows how an ‘otherworld’ seeps into the everyday spaces of early modern plays, expanding our sense of what magic could be in the early modern period.
Wildernesses, islands, and domestic spaces: social attitudes to magical practice in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
Rendall, E. B. M. (Author). 27 Sept 2022
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)