Seminar on Magic in early modern drama

Posted on by Yan Brailowsky in Courses, News

Cover image: Macbeth, 1952. Photo by Angus Mcbean, copyright RSC, All rights reserved.

Fall 2026/2027

Descriptif

This seminar examines the representation of magic, witchcraft, and the supernatural in early modern English drama (c. 1500–1700). The course locates plays in their intellectual, theological, and socio-political contexts, exploring how playwrights engaged with contemporary debates on demonology, natural philosophy, and the Reformation. Students will analyze how stage magic functions both as spectacle and as a vehicle for discussing notions of authority, knowledge, and human or non-human agency.

Primary texts include plays by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, as well as lesser-known playwrights to trace shifting attitudes toward magical practice—from illicit sorcery to learned or theatrical illusion. The plays will be studied not only as literary texts but as performance scripts shaped by the affordances of early modern playhouses—trapdoors, flying machinery, sound effects, costuming, and lighting—as well as dramaturgical devices such as metatheatre, spectacle, and the manipulation of time and space. Students will consider how magical scenes were staged and how actors embodied supernatural figures, from witches and spirits to learned magicians or elaborate tricksters, across historical periods. Comparative analysis will address differences between public and court theatres, including the influence of court masques on representations of magic and transformation.

The seminar will engage in interdisciplinary approaches, incorporating history of science, religious studies, and cultural theory. Students will consider how early modern understandings of the occult intersected with emerging scientific rationalism and colonial encounters. Although the seminar will focus on early modern practice, it will also make forays into modern-day adaptations (notably on film), to discuss how current technology changes our perception of what counts as magical, and how the popularity of fantasy as a genre in the twenty-first century relates to the interest in magic in early modern drama. If time allows, students will also be able to direct and perform an extract of ‘magical scenes’ from the corpus.

This seminar will be of interest to students in Literature, History, History of science, Anthropology, Philosophy, Theology, Film and Performance Studies.

Objectifs

This course teaches students to combine different approaches, such as performance studies and contextual analysis, to offer in-depth readings of canonical plays and lesser-known works from English drama from the 16th and 17th centuries, and its contemporary afterlives.

Pré-requis obligatoires

Anglais B2.

Compétences visées

  • Mobiliser des connaissances historiques, des références culturelles et artistiques afin d’opérer des transferts entre les aires géographiques, politiques et culturelles.
  • Développer des méthodes de recherche, de recueil et d’analyse de données dans des domaines spécifiques liés à la culture, l’art, la littérature, les civilisations et la linguistique dans une langue étrangère ou régionale.
  • Développer une conscience critique des savoirs dans un domaine et/ou à l’interface de plusieurs domaines.
  • Mobiliser des savoirs hautement spécialisés, dont certains sont à l’avant-garde du savoir dans un domaine de travail ou d’études, comme base d’une pensée originale.

Bibliographie indicative

Primary sources

  • Dekker, Thomas, John Ford, and William Rowley. The Witch of Edmonton. Edited by Lucy Munro. Arden Early Modern Drama. The Arden Shakespeare, 2017.
  • Greene, Robert. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Edited by Daniel Seltzer. University of Nebraska Press, 1963.
  • Jonson, Ben. The Alchemist. Edited by Tanya Pollard. Arden Early Modern Drama. The Arden Shakepeare, 2023.
  • Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Edited by John Davies Jump. Routledge English Texts. Routledge, 1965.
  • Middleton, Thomas. The Witch. Edited by Elizabeth Shafer. New Mermaids. A&C Black / Bloomsbury, 2014.
  • Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edited by A. R. Braunmuller. New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  • Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. Arden Third Series. Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1999.

Secondary sources

  • Bladen, Victoria, and Yan Brailowsky, eds. Shakespeare and the Supernatural. Manchester University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526109071.
  • Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford University Press, 1997.
  • Das, Nandini, and Nick Davis, eds. Enchantment and Dis-Enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Wonder, the Sacred, and the Supernatural. Routledge, 2016.
  • Forsyth, Neil. Shakespeare the Illusionist: Magic, Dreams, and the Supernatural on Film. Ohio University Press, 2019.
  • Harris, Anthony. Night’s Black Agents: Witchcraft and Magic in Seventeenth-Century English Drama. Manchester University Press / Rowman and Littlefield, 1980. http://archive.org/details/nightsblackagent0000harr.
  • Hopkins, Lisa, and Helen Ostovich, eds. Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Ashgate, 2014.
  • Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
  • Kors, Alan Charles, and Edward Peters, eds. Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
  • McCarthy, Andrew D., and Verena Theile, eds. Staging the Superstitions of Early Modern Europe. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.
  • Moore, Andrew. Magic in Early Modern England: Literature, Politics, and Supernatural Power. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2023.
  • Oldridge, Darren. The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England. Routledge, 2016.
  • Poole, Kristen. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
  • Shapiro, Barbara J. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England. Princeton University Press, 1983.
  • Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1971.
  • Walker, Katherine. ‘State of the Field: Early Modern Magic’. Literature Compass 20, no. 3 (2023): e12701. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12701.

Planning

  1. Introduction. Black magic: Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ (I)
    • William Shakespeare-Macbeth (The New Cambridge Shakespeare), 1st Edition
    • VIDEO : ‘Macbeth’ (2010), dir. Rupert Goold, with Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood
    • VIDEO: ‘Throne of Blood’ (1957), dir. Akira Kurosawa
  2. Black and white magic: Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ (II) and ‘The Tempest’
    • Shakespeare William-The Tempest – Arden Third Series
    • VIDEO: ‘The Tempest’ (2010), dir. Julia Taymor, with Helen Mirren, Ben Whishaw, Djimon Hounsou
    • VIDEO: ‘The Tempest’ (2019), Stratford Festival, dir. Antoni Cimolino
  3. Magic and comedy (I): Greene’s ‘Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’
    • GREENE Robert, ed. Daniel Seltzer, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
  4. Magic and comedy (II): Jonson’s ‘The Alchemist’
    • JONSON Ben, ed. Tanya Pollard, The Alchemist
  5. Magic and history (I): Marlowe’s ‘Doctor Faustus’
    • MARLOWE Christopher, ed. John D. JUMP, Doctor Faustus
    • AUDIOBOOK : BBC3 ‘Doctor Faustus’
  6. Magic and history (II): Dekker, Ford and Rowley’s ‘The Witch of Edmonton’
    • ROWLEY William-DEKKER-FORD, The Witch of Edmonton, ed. Lucy Munro
  7. Magic and satire: Middleton’s ‘The Witch’
    • MIDDLETON Thomas, The Witch, ed. Liz Shafer
  8. Examen

Published by Yan Brailowsky

Professor of early modern British history and literature in the English department of the University of Paris Nanterre (Paris X) in France. I teach courses on early-modern history and literature, among others, at both undergraduate and graduate level.