"The Tempest" and Renaissance Magical Theory

“The fearefull aboundinge at this time in this countrie, of these detestable slaues of the Deuill, the Witches or enchaunters, hath moved me (beloued reader) to dispatch in post, this following treatise of mine . . .” (xi). Thus begins the preface to a book called Daemonologie, in Forme of ane Dialogue published in the year 1597. There is nothing particularly remarkable about the book itself. What makes the book singular is its authorship. It was written by none other than the King of Scotland himself, James VI, a man who would later have a profound influence on the religious world as King James I of England. The fact that he wrote this treatise, along with an earlier work entitled Newes From Scotland declaring the Damnable Life and death of Doctor Fian, a notable sorcerer . . ., indicates the prevalence through the Middle Ages and Renaissance of a belief in the magical arts. It was a belief in witches, wizards, conjurers and enchanters that permeated all of European society from the king on down. It was a belief that shaped the development of western society and culture, politically, artistically and religiously.

But why did people believe in witches and their counterparts? “It is perhaps safest to observe that a belief in witchcraft requires, or rests upon, an underlying cultural structure of belief in magical power—either Christian and/or folk and popular” (Carroll 301). Our modern American conception of magic in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is such that we believe that magic was seen as evil, as being Satanic in origin. When we think of magic in these times we envision witches being burned at the stake. This belief is greatly colored by our cultural past particularly in relation to the Salem witch trials. American culture is founded largely on Puritanism which did view magic as evil. Because of ethnocentrism we project our cultural biases onto other western nations which results in inconsistencies. The fact is that belief in magic was central to western culture and integral to its development. Christianity was founded upon magicians called saints and their magical acts called miracles. The Christian sacraments are magical in nature. What are Baptism, Confession, and Last Rites but the magical vanishings of sin and what is a priest performing the transubstantiation of Communion wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ if not an alchemist? The later Reformation and the consequent emphasis on humanism that shaped the Renaissance was likewise predicated upon magic. The ultimate point of the Reformation was to allow individuals to appropriate the Church’s magic for themselves in order to reach God on their own and save themselves while the thrust of humanism is to allow people to attain their fullest potential, to find divine power within themselves. Thus belief in magic and therefore in witches and wizards was a necessary component of medieval and Renaissance life.

Indeed, not believing in magic was not an option at the time. As the Church inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger argue in their book Malleus Maleficarum (1484), failing to believe in magic was a type of religious infidelity and thus heretical.

But this is contrary to the true faith, which teaches us that certain angels fell from heaven and are now devils, and we are bound to acknowledge that by their very nature they can do many wonderful things which we cannot do. And those who try to induce others to perform such evil wonders are called
witches. And because infidelity in a person who has been baptized is technically called heresy, therefore such persons are plainly heretics. (2-3).

If God created devils and witches use magic to do the devils’ bidding then to disbelieve in the use of magic is to disbelieve in God. “In short, to doubt the existence of demons and their activities, ‘as do the epicurean Atheists’, was to deny the very existence of God” (Anglo 8). Witches are proof of God’s existence and by God you had better believe in them. The punishments for not believing in them could be as severe as the punishments for proclaimed witches themselves.

Since magic played such a central role in these times it is clear that it was not perceived as evil nor Satanic. The truth is that magic in itself was seen as value neutral, i.e. it was neither good nor evil. As noted, magic—like everything else in creation—came from God and to deny its existence or claim that it was evil was heretical for doing so denied the existence or benevolence of God. But like any of God’s creation magic can be perverted to serve evil ends. So what makes something evil in the first place? From the medieval Christian church’s perspective, particularly after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, anything not affiliated with it or sanctioned by it was evil (Schroeder). Magic use by non-Christians such as Moslems and Jews or other heretics—especially Reformists—was therefore witchcraft.

The Malleus Maleficarum was written as the 15th century was coming to its end. It seems clear that Kramer and Sprenger wrote it in response to the burgeoning Reformist sentiment that would come to fruition in the early 16th century. This point is driven home by the way they condemn the emergent “scientific” philosophy concordant with the Reformation that viewed belief in witchcraft as superstitious and fostered by the Church as a corrupt means of social control.

For certain writers, pretending to base their opinion upon the words of S. Thomas when he treats of impediments brought about by magic charms, have tried to maintain that there is not such a thing as magic, that it only exists in the imagination of those men who ascribe natural effects, the causes whereof are not known, to witchcraft and spells . . . in the very first place they are shown to be plainly heretical by many orthodox writers, and especially by S. Thomas, who lays down that such an opinion is altogether contrary to the authority of the saints and is founded upon absolute infidelity. (2).

Indeed, the vehemence that sometimes informs the inquisitors’ polemic is such that it is difficult to tell which is the greater heresy: witchcraft or doubting the Church’s stance on it.

This position is philosophically problematic. If magic comes from God then it should follow logically that using magic brings one closer to God. How can the Church fathers therefore condemn others for using it especially when they use it themselves? This perceived hypocrisy is one of the very issues that motivated the Reformation. “The anger of the Reformers against Catholicism is readily understandable. The Catholic Church itself practiced magic: by producing effects on inanimate objects; inducing psychosomatic symptoms; and, above all, working miracles in the Mass with its music, words of consecration, incense, wine, and transubstantiation” (Anglo 9). From the Reformers’ perspective this hypocrisy was just another indication of the Church’s corruption.

This is not to suggest that the Reformers denied magic. They simply did not believe the Church had the authority to regulate it. The ultimate goal of the Reformation was to replace the Church with the individual, to make the individual responsible for his or her own spiritual salvation. This philosophy leads naturally to humanism, the belief that people can “fashion” themselves (to borrow a term from Stephen Greenblatt), that they are not born into their lots in life and that they can explore their potential.

Since man has no particular nature and is therefore the point at which liberty is total, the world of forms is subject to man. He is thus able to reach beyond it in the sense that he can degenerate into demonism as well as ascend towards the deity and the super-intellectual . . . His humanity consists not in a given nature, but in the fact that he can make himself, that he can choose. (Garin 90).

Humanists are concerned with the possibilities of humanity and believe that people can achieve spiritual perfection. This is the ideology that underlies Hermeticism.

Essentially Hermeticism deals with raising the consciousness of the practitioner, allowing it to achieve a transcendent state which allowed the practitioner to manipulate the natural world. This magical manipulation is brought about through the understanding of “sympathies.” Everything in the universe is sympathetic to everything else; i.e. every part of the natural world has its corresponding part in the celestial and spiritual worlds that operate in sympathy with each other. What affects one part affects them all. As the character of Ulysses describes it in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Infixture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order.
. . . But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny?
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth?
. . . Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows. (1.3.85-110).

The musical metaphor that Shakespeare employs here is apt; just as strings vibrate in sympathy when their neighbors are plucked so does the universe vibrate and harmonize in the Hermetic perception. After all, does not the phase of the moon in the celestial sphere influence the tides in the physical? Shakespeare, a consummate humanist, explores this idea of universal sympathies in many of his works, perhaps most obviously in Macbeth and King Lear, when eclipses occur and animals are frenzied when the natural orders of king over subject and father over daughters are inverted.

According to Hermetic philosophy a person can learn to manipulate this metaphysical system of sympathies consciously and in so doing raise his or her own consciousness and place within that system. In his De Occulta Philosphia the Renaissance occultist Cornelius Agrippa articulates how such a person could do so. According to Agrippa there are three types of “magic:”

First, natural magic, the manipulation of forces in the world of elements, mostly based on notions about so-called sympathies . . . Second, mathematical magic, operations performed on the basis of insights into mathematics and its subdivisions (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, and mechanics) . . . Third, religious magic, rituals of magic intended to establish contact with inhabitants of supercelestial worlds—that is, spiritism. (Johannisson 252-53).

Agrippa’s perception of magic expresses the holistic view of Hermeticism and in many ways anticipates modern theories of quantum mechanics.

In her pioneering research into Hermeticism in the Renaissance and its influence on the development of modern science Frances Yates examines the core texts of the philosophy, the Corpus Hermeticum, those supposedly written by the so-called Hermes Trismegistus. During the Renaissance this Hermes was believed to have been an Ancient Egyptian priest, “almost contemporary of Moses, a Gentile prophet of Christianity, and the source—or one of the sources with other prisci theologi—of the stream of ancient wisdom which had eventually reached Plato and the Platonists” (Yates 234). In this body of work, the origins of humanity are described. Just like the Adam of Genesis,

The Hermetic man in the "Pimander" [the most recognized work of the Corpus] also falls and can also be regenerated. But the regenerated Hermetic man regains the dominion over nature which he had in his divine origin. When he is regenerated, brought back into communion with the ruler of ‘the all’ through magico-religious communion with the cosmos, it is the regeneration of a being who regains his divinity. (235).

It is this Hermetic man that the Renaissance humanists imagined as the ultimate fulfillment of human potential. It is no wonder that the Church, bound by its medieval—even draconian—mysticism, distrusted such Hermetic humanism and its Reformist antecedents. It called into question the value of the Church’s magic.

The old medieval image of an order of which man was a part was broken . . . Man can avail himself of ordered forms to sublimate things in God or to hurl them into the darkness of abnormality, the monstrous, and the chaotic. The controversy between true, natural magic and ceremonial magic amounted to this. True magic was defended because it was work which made use of the given forms in order to construct an ascending chain of Being. Ceremonial magic, on the other hand, was attacked because it was work which led into the abyss of sin and chaos. (Garin 91).

It is at this point that the figures of the witch and wizard emerge. The wizard or magus epitomizes the values of Hermetic humanism. The witch however is the embodiment of the fears surrounding it particularly on the part of the Church. The witch is the perversion of those values. Of course it would be disingenuous to suggest that the dichotomous relationship between the witch and wizard was merely a matter of Reformation politics with Protestants viewing themselves as wizards and Catholics seeing those Reformers as witches. True, the Catholic church did portray Protestants as heretics and the medieval worldview conflated heretics and witches. But Protestants themselves made a similar distinction between witches and wizards. Daemonologie, written nearly a hundred years after the Reformation by the very Protestant King James, stands as a testament to that fact. The opposing attitudes regarding witches and wizards are the result of sweeping social changes occurring in western culture at the time of which the Reformation and the resulting emphasis on humanism is only a part, albeit a large one. The figures of the witch and the wizard are therefore totemic; they represent a confluence of various forces that are historical, religious, political and economic in origin.

Because Hermetic humanism was viewed from opposing positions it is only natural that the qualities that define witches and wizards should be dichotomous. The most obvious distinction between the two is gender: witches were predominantly female and wizards were predominantly male. This is a natural polarity in light of the patriarchal structures of most medieval and Renaissance societies. Since humanism suggests an inversion of the established social order, giving the individual precedence over the collective and—it would have appeared—the commoner over the noble, it would have seemed that a logical end result would be the overthrow of the male by the female. It is understandable then that a fear of such a topsy-turvy world would result in the demonization of the female. From the opposite perspective the proponents of Hermetic humanism in a patriarchal society would see the self-fashioned human as a paragon of their values so it only follows that the wizard would be male as a symbol of the perfection of mankind. Since magic usage is about displays of power it is expected that a man wielding such power in a patriarchal society would be viewed positively whereas a woman wielding the power would be a perversion.

In addition to the changing religious and social landscape there was also a changing economic landscape due in large part to two factors: the bubonic plague and the exploration and colonization of the New World. The plague wiped out anywhere from a third to half of the population of Europe. At this point in the late Middle Ages European nations were largely agrarian and as a consequence of the plague’s huge death toll there were fewer peasants to harvest crops. Peasant labor became a valuable commodity and feudal lords were placed in the position of competing with each other for it. Commensurately the peasants were increasingly able to set their own terms on wages and thus capitalism as the basis for a large-scale economy was born (Hilton 153-54). Expeditions to the New World further fueled the development of capitalism by creating a great demand for supplies and a need to market commodities coming from the New World. A merchant class arose to meet these needs, allowing former peasants to become wealthy and rise in social rank. Social anxiety caused by this shift is embodied in the figures of the witch and wizard. It is no accident that people accused of witchcraft tended to be relatively poor commoners whereas wizards were typically associated with the aristocracy.[1] Witches were those people who worked selfishly for their own personal gain and were rising above their ordained social stations. Wizards by contrast worked selflessly for the betterment of society as a whole.

Witches and wizards also represent changes in the European educational system. Coincident with the Reformation and the emergence of the middle classes was a corresponding rise in literacy and proliferation of literature, including the translation of the Bible and other sacred texts into the vernacular. The Church no longer controlled the word of God which was one of the bases of its power. While humanists rejoiced in the opportunities offered by readily available education such easy access to knowledge was viewed as dangerous from a medieval perspective. Again these conflicting attitudes are embodied by the witch and wizard. Both the witch and wizard were seen to possess similar knowledge but they came by this knowledge in very different ways. For the wizard,

it was theoretically possible to attract the power of a particular celestial body by engraving the correct image at the correct time on the appropriate gem—a recondite skill which could only appertain to the learned magus. But what of the witch? She, too, was deemed to operate largely through the exploitation of natural magic and was commonly accused of employing drugs to procure effects such as love and the recovery of health, or, conversely, poisoning and death. How did she master knowledge which cost the magus a lifetime of arduous study? Such abilities could not be innate. Instead they were attributed to demonic pacts. (Anglo 5).

From a medieval perspective knowledge and skill that comes with little effort is not to be trusted. Combined with the threat of Islam (Muslims were widely regarded as practitioners of witchcraft) which promotes education particularly of women the persecution of witches and the exaltation of wizards became a means by which theocracies tried to maintain social control.

These various power dynamics regarding witches and wizards are seen in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Prospero, the primum mobile of the world of the play, is a dominant Christian male and an educated man of aristocratic birth. While it is his excessive devotion to his Hermetic studies that causes his overthrow as Duke of Milan it is his hard-earned mastery of those studies that allows him to reshape his world as he sees fit in order to restore natural order to it. He therefore is the consummate humanist wizard.

Moreover Prospero’s most famous speeches in the play reveal him also to be a consummate Hermetic philosopher. Hermeticism as noted is marked by a metaphysical awareness of the underlying structure of reality. The Hermetic philosopher is able to see past the constructs of the physical plane to the true Platonic forms beneath them. As Prospero says,

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherent, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.148-56).

In this most celebrated passage Prospero is doing more than commenting on the transitory nature of all things. He is offering a glimpse into the mists of reality. Reality, like the masque the spirits performed in the play, is “baseless” and “insubstantial.” It is an illusion lacking substance. Of course Prospero himself is an illusion, a figment of a playwright’s imagination, as he acknowledges here in the last line. Not only is this passage metaphysical it is also metatheatrical, breaking the fourth wall and reminding the audience that the reality in which they are engrossed is nothing more than a dream within a dream.

There has been a tendency historically to identify Prospero and his words with Shakespeare himself. This is understandable as the line separating the wizard and the writer is lightly drawn. “The magus believes that because nature is animate—not completed and finished—he can enter into it, operate on it, and manipulate it. Magic means using nature instrumentally, becoming more powerful. Magic is art, having the power to change and to transmute” (Johannisson 252). This is what a poet does as well and thus we are encouraged to view Shakespeare as a Hermetic magus. The portrayal is apt as Shakespeare was a self-fashioned man from relatively humble origins who was able to gain an education, wealth and influence through the opportunities presented to him by the era in which he lived. “Book, costume, powerful language, the abilities to enact the fancies of the brain: these are key elements of both magic and theater” (Greenblatt 330). Just as Prospero is artist Shakespeare was magus.

Prospero however, like Shakespeare, is a somewhat problematic figure. Just as the description of Shakespeare’s background gives him characteristics more associated with witchcraft Prospero’s actions sometimes border on that as well. The application of his magic is mostly devoted to tormenting the other characters and in his later famous speech in which he renounces his magic Prospero reveals that “graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth / By my so potent art” (5.1.48-50). As Stephen Greenblatt notes in his introduction to the play, “For the playwright who conjured up the ghosts of Caesar and old Hamlet, the claim does not seem extravagant, but for a magician it amounts to an extremely dangerous confession. Necromancy—communing with the spirits of the dead—was the very essence of black magic” (330). Furthermore Prospero’s power is derived from the ability to control spirits like Ariel whom Prospero calls a “malignant thing” (1.2.258). How are we to reconcile these facts with a perception of the wizard as a benevolent artist?

In context . . . ‘malignant’ probably refers to Prospero’s somewhat exaggerated accusation that Ariel is resistant to the magician’s orders, not that he is essentially evil, and the accusation itself evokes speeches from Ariel which develop the contrast between Prospero’s art—which the airy spirit does, in fact, obey—and the witchcraft of Sycorax, with which Ariel had refused to comply. Moreover, Prospero’s intellectual and spiritual self-purification has given him a degree of control over his spirits which is based not on supplication of these lower spiritual orders, but on the participation of the awakened human soul in the very highest levels of the cosmic hierarchy. (Mebane 181).

It must also be remembered that Prospero’s actions are methodical and ultimately for a socially good purpose. As Greenblatt notes in his article “Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne,” Prospero’s tormenting of others serves to arouse anxiety within them in order to reinforce social order: “anxiety, in the form of threats of humiliation and beating, had long been used as an educative tool” (113). Prospero is employing a socially accepted practice.

Despite how we may feel about Prospero’s moral values there is a clear delineation of him as a wizard as compared to a witch. Although the play’s witch Sycorax is conveniently dead at the outset of the play and therefore not able to interfere with its action the scant description we get of her clearly paints her as the witch. We are told that,

This damned witch Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Algiers
Thou know’st was banished. (1.2.265-68).

Algiers was and is a Muslim city. As we know the Christian church regarded Muslims as heretics which the medieval and Renaissance minds conflated with witchcraft. The fact that Sycorax was banished from a stronghold of infidel witches suggests that her witchcraft was so terrible that it was perceived as a threat even to other witches. Combined with the fact that Ariel her spirit servant refused to aid her in her magic suggests the extreme unnaturalness of it.

There is a tendency in contemporary Shakespeare criticism to ignore or downplay the magical elements of the play. Such criticism therefore does not identify Sycorax in relation to Prospero. It identifies her instead in relation to Miranda. “Sycorax is more than the justification for Caliban’s territorial rights to the island—she operates as a powerful contrast to Miranda” (Loomba 328). While it is possible to compare and contrast Sycorax and Miranda on the basis of feminine identity (woman to girl, mother-figure to daughter-figure, “whore” to virgin) such reduction of Sycorax to merely her sex/gender denies her the fundamental magical element so important to her character. When viewed in her entirety it becomes obvious that Sycorax is not a foil to Miranda but to Prospero.

Although Sycorax herself does not appear in the play her spirit is present in her offspring Caliban. It has been suggested that Caliban’s character serves to disempower his mother. “It is notable that the acknowledged, if evil, power of Sycorax is effectively undermined by the bestial stupidity of her son, rather as the power of Tamora is defused in Titus Andronicus and that of the Queen in Cymbeline” (Thompson 341). However the fact that Caliban lacks the magical power his mother supposedly possessed suggests that such power is ultimately as baseless as “this insubstantial pageant faded.” Moreover Caliban’s presence in the play serves to remind the audience of her. He comes to represent her in the play as the dark half of Prospero, as the flip side to his coin. It was fashionable at one time to view the play psychoanalytically and see Caliban as representing Prospero’s id desires and the cave into which Prospero sends Caliban in the end was seen as Prospero’s subconscious. There is a logic to this interpretation; Caliban after all has been placed into a similar situation as Prospero as deposed ruler and the centrality of Caliban to the play’s subplot parodies Prospero’s role in the main plot. Just as Prospero’s magic comes from his book (possibly a metaphor for the Bible) and is therefore founded on a mastery of language, so Caliban’s power comes from his mastery of language. As he says, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse” (1.2.366-67). Cursing of course is the province of witchcraft. It is therefore ironic that unlike Prospero’s book the “book” that Caliban comes to worship is not a book at all. Stephano tells him repeatedly to “kiss the book” (2.2.121), meaning a bottle of sack, in a profane parody of swearing an oath on the Bible. Caliban thus is constructed as an inversion to Prospero just as the inversion of the Renaissance wizard was the witch.

It is clear that witches and wizards are totemic representations of competing zeitgeists. The witch is a vestige of the medieval worldview, the personification of the fears aroused by the threats of an encroaching humanism. In The Tempest however the fact that Caliban and Sycorax are ultimately powerless suggests the powerlessness of the witch and if the witch is powerless then she poses no threat. Thus the medieval fears of humanism are shown to be baseless and foolish. The wizard by contrast is the embodiment of the promise of humanism, a progressive spirit wiping away the ignorant superstitions of the past.

Works Cited
Anglo, Sydney. “Evident Authority and Authoritative Evidence: The Malleus Maleficarum.” Articles on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, vol. 4: The Literature of Witchcraft. Ed. Brian P. Levack. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992.

Carroll, William C., ed. “Witchcraft and Prophecy: Discourses of Witchcraft.” Macbeth: Texts and Contexts. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.

Garin, Eugenio. “Magic and Astrology in the Civilisation of the Renaissance.” Articles on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, vol. 11: Renaissance Magic. Ed. Brian P. Levack. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne.” Materialist Shakespeare: A History. Ed. Ivo Kamps. London: Verso, 1995.

---. “The Tempest.” The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition: Romances and Poems. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Hilton, Rodney. Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381. New York: The Viking Press, 1973.

James I, King of England. Demonology: Includes News From Scotland, on the Death of a Notable Sorcerer. Ed. G. B. Harrison. San Diego: The Book Tree, 2002.

Johannisson, Karin. “Magic, Science, and Institutionalization in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus. Washington: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988.

Loomba, Ania. “From Gender, race, Renaissance Drama.” The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelen. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.

Mebane, John S. Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Schroeder, H. J., trans. “Medieval Sourcebook: Fourth Lateran Council: Canon 3 on Heresy 1215.” The Disciplinary Decrees of the Ecumenical Counci. St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1937. Internet Medieval Source Book. Ed. Paul Halsall. Feb. 1996. Fordham University. 25 Apr. 2005. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/lat4-c3.html.

Shakespeare, William. “The Tempest.” The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition: Romances and Poems. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

---. “Troilus and Cressida.” The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition: Comedies. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Thompson, Ann. “’Miranda, Where’s Your Sister?’: Reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelen. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.

Yates, Frances A. “The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science.” Articles on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, vol. 11: Renaissance Magic. Ed. Brian P. Levack. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992.

[1]The impression we have today of witches being burned at the stake is mostly false: that punishment was reserved for heretics. Although witchcraft was regarded as a type of heresy those accused of witchcraft were mostly commoners for whom hanging was the traditional form of capital punishment. This supposes of course that the alleged witches survived their trials.

“Get Thee to a Nunnery”: The Role of the Nun on the Elizabethan Stage

The phrase that serves as the title of this piece has long been a source of controversy among scholars. What exactly did Shakespeare mean by “nunnery”? One side claims that the word was Elizabethan slang for a brothel; the other argues that it meant a convent and nothing more. But what if it meant both? It is well known that Shakespeare was a master wordsmith who loved the pun and double entendre. If the word had such a connotation how could he resist?

But if brothels and prostitutes were implied how did such a dichotomous conflation occur? How were nuns perceived at the time? And more to our purpose how were nuns and other clerical figures seen when portrayed on the Elizabethan stage?

Shakespeare’s plays are vastly populated with such characters as is much of the other drama from the period. We have the duplicitous friars of Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing, the scurrilous magicians Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and the gluttonous Zeal-of-the-land Busy of Bartholomew Fair; we see the horribly manipulated Ophelia, the disconsolate lover Hermia and Greene’s trifled-with Margaret, all of whom are threatened with the constraining chastity of the convent. All of these characters are bound together by common identities that shed a negative light on the devoted life. They are marked by habits and behavior that run counter to our currently sanctified images of members of the cloth: the monks and friars are power-mad panderers to young lovers, reveling in Epicurean delights; nuns and prospective nuns are characterized by a tendency toward sexual indiscretions. Such personages are stock comic figures of the period familiar to the contemporary audiences as hypocrites and buffoons, manipulators and whores. And it is this perspective that is of paramount importance to us for understanding the social constructs that governed the creation of such characters must by necessity alter drastically the way we understand those characters and what they represent.

Elizabethan views of the clergy grew out of the antimonastic satire of medieval literature which in turn resulted from the historical record and accounts of the repeated indecencies of wayward nuns and monks. Such indecencies, particularly those sexual in nature, have plagued the church since the inception of monasticism in the late fourth century. In his book examining the history of celibacy in the church Gordon Thomas states that the decree of celibacy

coincided with the spread of monasticism, replacing martyrdom as the ultimate witness to Christ. During the fourth and fifth centuries Mary’s popular appeal greatly increased, and her virginity became widely accepted, providing a still more secure basis, in the teaching of the Church, for its priests and later its nuns to accept compulsory celibacy . . . It is, nevertheless, a matter of clerical rather than divine law, and as a result to question celibacy has often been seen as a challenge to the Church’s authority. (9)

Thomas’ point is that members of the clergy have historically viewed celibacy as a human construct and thus as unnatural and profane and have routinely challenged the Church’s position. The implication is that the clergy, specifically nuns, have just as routinely broken their vows of celibacy. Graciela Daichman’s study into English conventual records of the medieval period bears out this belief. She found that “incidents of misconduct were alarmingly frequent, if we are to trust the historical documents of the period” (Daichman 3). Bishops called in to investigate conventual scandals often issued injunctions against the sisters for sins that “ranged from the trivial to the cardinal, from failure to attend services to incontinence and child-bearing” (4). As Daichman points out records of such immorality “date as far back as the early twelfth century, although they do not become common until the beginning of the fourteenth, increasing in number and severity throughout the entire fifteenth century, almost to the end of the medieval period . . Prolifigate nuns were not a rare phenomenon in the Middle Ages” (5). In other words the wayward nun was a common sight in Medieval England right into the 1500’s and thus would make a readily identifiable sight on the Renaissance stage.

Of course not all nuns were prolifigate, as Daichman puts it. Most were sincerely devoted to their vows and dedicated to their spiritual beliefs. And of those who were disobedient not all were sexually active or promiscuous; many were only guilty of mere recalcitrance or willfulness and relatively few were found to be apostate for reasons other than sexuality. But it is the sensual nun who presents the greatest aberration from the norm and it is always the aberration that receives the most interest.

Even though the aberrations were in the minority they were still numerous enough to become a stereotype. So what could create such aberrations? What would make a nun willing to reject her vows in the pursuit of sexual pleasure? One explanation is that posed by Thomas that the Church’s decree of celibacy was perceived as unnatural. Daichman goes further, claiming that such behavior was caused by the reasons women joined the convent in the first place.

The circumstances under which these women entered the cloister were precisely the determining factor for their behavior once inside. Those who became nuns of their own volition because of a strong religious vocation, still found the fourteenth-century nunnery the ideal place for a spiritual communion with God that it had been when St. Jerome founded the first convent in Rome around the year 400. There were other women, however, forced into the nunnery for social, economic, or political reasons and often totally unsuited for the religious life who seem to be the ones guilty of the immodest or indecent behavior described above. (12)

The other reasons that Daichman cites include forcing young girls into the convent as a means of disposing of them in order to steal their inheritances, to insure that they don’t marry and produce children or to place a check on their behavior (13). Still other women like wealthy widows entered the nunnery as a matter of social convention without regard for religious calling and often engaged in fierce rivalry with the abbesses (16). It was also a social convention especially among large families to have at least one daughter enter the sisterhood. It is all these girls and women who joined nunneries for reasons other than religious vocation that proved to be the most problematic. They rebelled against being forced into chastity against their wills and in the cases of the wealthy wished to maintain their lavish lifestyles.

Another cause for their immodest behavior was the punishments levied against it. While punishments for men who were declared guilty of seducing nuns or leading them into indecency were harsh, ranging from fines and imprisonment to public beatings and excommunication, the punishments for nuns were relatively mild. Although apostasy was treated severely by the Church carnal sins were reprimanded only by such soft punishments as segregation and house arrest (Daichman 7-10). Though this served the Church by allowing it to conceal scandals it didn’t serve to dissuade the sisters from committing such breaches of morality and their reputations as bawds were reinforced in the public conscience.

It is this public perception that is reflected in the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The tradition of antimonastic satire, a genre designed to provoke laughter that would find its greatest outlet in the works of Chaucer, Boccacio and Aretino, ironically began in the Church itself as moralist sermons.

The French moralists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, like Guiot de Provins and Hughes de Berzé in their Bibles and Matheolus in his Lamentations, indignantly denounce the unchaste behavior of religious women whom they accuse of concealing their boundless concupiscence with an aura of spirituality and devotion. (Daichman xviii-iv)

These tracts related salacious tales of nuns’ sexual escapades that were meant to be edifying for the sisters, pointing out their folly and heaping scorn upon their apostate souls. The focus was not on the incidents described but on the messages and morals they conveyed. It is therefore delightfully irreverent that the jongleurs appropriated the very same tales for their fabliaux. The aim of the jongleur was quite different from that of the moralist, blasphemously setting out to expose the nuns and by extension the Church to ridicule for the purposes of entertainment. “Thus, the reprobate nun was the target of countless ribald tales that eventually found their way into vernacular verse; scurrilous and unredeemed by any sense of moral decency, the fabliaux mock the immoral habits of certain religious women with total impunity”
(Daichman xv).

The other two literary forms in which the degenerate nun appears at this time are satiric parodies and the “chanson de nonne.” The medieval parody, perhaps the most recognized of which is William Langland’s Piers Plowman, exists between the moralist tract and the fabliau. While largely meant to be humorous like the latter the parody being satiric takes a darkly caustic look at monastic corruption. “In the Spill or Libre de les dones, the Portuguese Jacme Roig gives a detailed picture of a medieval nunnery where vices and corruption are rampant, much like the section in Nigellus Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum in which, half seriously and half in jest, the decay of the female monastic order is exposed” (xiv). The parodist merges the moralist and jongleur, creating works whose function is to shame and entertain at the same time.

The other genre, the “chanson de nonne” or “song of the nun,” is rather similar to the Elizabethan Mirror for Magistrates. While the tone is “often highly indecorous and most of the ‘chansons’ have an air of almost irrepressible frivolity” they depict “the plaint of the nun unwillingly professed” and are clearly sympathetic to her plight (xv). One example of a chanson quoted by Daichman goes:

My father has no other daughter; he has sworn a hundred times that he will make me a nun, but I will not be one and I do not want to. I would rather have a husband who would kiss me in the night three times, once in the morning and once at night, once at midnight; these are the three. (xv)

Even though this example shows an understanding of why a nun would choose to be prolifigate its irreverent tone and mocking of the trinity clearly encapsulates the popular view of nuns and the Church current at the time. This view in English literature reaches its greatest expression and model in the work of Chaucer.

One of the most memorable characters Chaucer created is Madame Eglentyne the Prioress of The Canterbury Tales. Madame Eglentyne represents the beginning and arguably the culmination of a tradition of wayward nuns in English literature. While the sisters of the chansons and fabliaux are largely continental figures, Madame Eglentyne is one of the first to appear in the literature of England. This is not because her real-life counterparts didn’t exist; there was simply no literary precedent for her in the English language. At the time English was considered a crude vernacular language that wasn’t fit for proper literary expression. Chaucer was one of the first to embrace the language and write for the English people in their own tongue, providing an archetype for the English writers of the Renaissance. Chaucer imported the immodest sister into English literature and it is largely because of his example that she existed into the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages.

Although Madame Eglentyne is not described as sexually promiscuous like the Wife of Bath she is the prototypical wayward nun. She is a gaudily dressed figure, swaggering and swearing, who blatantly flouts her vows by joining the pilgrimage in the first place. “Her head dress, her manners, her rosary, and her brooch caused her to stand out among the other pilgrims; in fact, her very presence in such company ought to have attracted everyone’s attention, since nuns were not allowed to go on pilgrimages by ecclesiastical ruling” (Daichman 137). In fact Madame Eglentyne, with her attention to medieval fashion, her “pynched wympul” and her “ful symple and coy” smile, sounds more like a courtesan than a nun. Chaucer describes her in a way that suggests flirtation and romance, focusing on her physical attributes. “It is quite possible that if Chaucer could convey to his audience the image of a nun who, like ‘the sensual anchoress’ was weighted down by her flesh, that is, by the magnitude of her carnal appetites, everyone would laugh at her too” (151). It is hardly the image that comes to mind today when we think of a nun.

The image of the nun actually seems to have become more barbed during the English Renaissance thanks largely to the Reformation and the outlawing of Catholicism. As Darryl Gless points out in his book Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent:

the question of monastic devotion retained this vitality because it brought into focus a fundamental doctrinal conflict between Catholics and Protestants, a disparity that bulked large in the religious controversies of Shakespeare’s lifetime . . . These orthodoxies constituted shared ideas or types that the playwright could exploit to communicate meaning. (66)

In other words Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights could draw on established stock figures, including religious figures such as the wayward nun, to embellish their plots and attack the Catholics. And draw on them they did, particularly in the “city comedy.”

The city or citizen comedy as opposed to the more pastoral forms are marked by a heightened sense of the prurient, of strong libidinous urges, and the man or woman of God was not immune. The overwhelming majority of these plays are about sex and sexual politics. The work of Thomas Middleton is preoccupied with examining how sexuality is constructed and how everyone should have the right to pick their own sexual partners. The city comedy of Jonson shows how all social classes are prone to the same follies and confusion when it comes to sex. Even Shakespeare’s city comedy of which The Merry Wives of Windsor is a prime example looks at the machinations of sex and how people try to manipulate others for sexual gratification. It is in these plays that we see the most equality in how both genders are depicted; the women are often as lusty as the men and as smart or dumb as their masculine counterparts.

While the figure of the nun is relatively rare on the stage in city comedy or otherwise (possibly because of the nature of the transvestite theatrical tradition) the image of the duplicitous or gluttonous man of God abounds. In the early Tudor interlude The Four PP we see a Pardoner like Chaucer's hawking religious relics who is clearly a scoundrel. The relics, “blessed” jawbones, toes, slippers, teeth and bees are all fakes contrived to cheat the truly pious of their money; we then see him enter into a lying contest in which he speaks of going to hell where he talks freely and casually with devils. In another early comedy, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, we are presented with Doctor Rat, a curate who spends his days in taverns swilling ale. Jonson’s Zeal-of-the-land Busy, a puritan, gorges himself on piglets, claiming that he will “eat exceedingly and prophesy.” And let’s not overlook Greene’s friars who delight in conjuring tricks and conversing with devils and Friar Bacon’s idolatry in fashioning the giant head of brass. These are hardly the pursuits of truly holy men.

Those holy women who do appear do not seem to fare much better. Throughout the drama of the period nuns and nunneries are always mentioned in relation to sexual indiscretions. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Hermia is threatened with forced chastity and “ the livery of a nun, / For aye to be in shady cloister mewed, / To live a barren sister all your life, / Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon” (1.1.74-7) for the sin of loving a man of whom her father disapproves. To return to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay we have Margaret pledging herself to a convent for being sexually used and discarded by her lover Lacy. In this light it is no wonder that nunneries were viewed as brothels and that Ophelia is commanded to get to one for they are the havens of the sexually dispossessed.

But the most interesting commentary on the devoted life in Renaissance drama is perhaps found in Shakespeare’s so-called problem play Measure for Measure. This play is unique in Shakespeare’s canon because of its focus on religion and the tenets of Christianity. The title of the play is a reference to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and the play examines the Christian concepts of mercy and justice to a greater extent than The Merchant of Venice as the plot is entirely about those dichotomous ideas. Two of the primary characters, Duke Vincentio and Isabella, represent the Catholic brother and sister and a third character, Mariana, confines herself to a holy house for the shame of being rejected by her lover. But it is Isabella who is the most compelling figure, a character who is often misunderstood and misrepresented to today’s audiences, for she is the most complex and arguably the last great comic wayward nun.

Today’s audiences see Isabella in the wrong light because no connections are made between her and the comic tradition from which she comes. Instead she is often perceived as a tragic figure akin to Ophelia. Act 3, scene 1, in which she reveals to her brother Claudio that his life could be saved if only she has sex with Angelo and Claudio then enjoins her to do so, is always staged in a highly melodramatic way that heightens the discomfort of the audience but in Shakespeare’s reality that scene is actually highly comic. The irony of that scene is not that she is asked to sexually compromise herself but that she refuses to do so. The modern audience fails to see the social construction behind the creation of Isabella and thus they fail to see her as representative of a comic type.

There are hints throughout the entire play that Isabella is a comic type and not necessarily meant to be taken seriously. As many critics point out the plot of the play blends two common folk tales, those of the Corrupt Magistrate and the Disguised Ruler. Other stock figures abound: the young lovers (Claudio and Juliet), the faithful servant (Escalus), the clowns and fools (Pompey, Elbow, and Froth), the bawd (Mistress Overdone) and the wronged woman (Mariana). Shakespeare is obviously aware of character types and uses them; how could it possibly be argued that Isabella doesn’t fit the same pattern?

Further proof that Isabella represents a character type that is associated with licentiousness is found early in the play. In 1.2 religious law and bawdiness become linked. When quoting lines 4 through 9 Gless says “The opening echo of the Litany (‘Heaven grant . . .’) and the reference to the commandments initiate this bawdy scene’s obsession with liturgical allusion, religious law, and the self-interested reinterpretation of that law” (62). In scene 3 when the Duke receives his disguise from Friar Thomas, yet another monk willing to engage in trickery and manipulation of the truth, the Duke’s first words are, “No, holy father; throw away that thought; / Believe not that the dribbling dart of love / Can pierce a complete bosom. Why I desire thee / To give me secret harbor, hath a purpose / More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends / Of burning youth” (1-6). These lines clearly show that monasteries were commonly thought of as havens of sexual offenders. A similar idea emerges in scene 4 when Lucio meets with Isabella in the convent of the sisters of Saint Clare. Lucio, as is his nature, repeatedly baits Isabella, saying “Hail, virgin--if you be” and “‘tis my familiar sin / With maids to seem the lapwing, and to jest, / Tongue far from heart, play with all virgins so” (16, 31-33). As Nicholas Radel puts it in his essay “Reading as a Feminist,” “Lucio’s banter suggests that Isabella’s decision to enter the nunnery is not a serious one in the world at large. His first greeting--playing upon a common Elizabethan-Jacobean comic stereotype--calls into question the chastity of all nuns” (111, emphasis added).

Still further evidence for Isabella being a sexual and sexualized creature is offered by Radel when he points out that all of the other female characters in the play exist within the world of the play as sexual objects. “Mistress Overdone, Julietta [sic] and Mariana all serve as part of a stock of character types in the period that signify women’s availability to men” (110). Mistress Overdone is a seasoned prostitute and owner of one of the local brothels; Juliet is the impregnated fiancée of Claudio; and Mariana is the rejected lover of Angelo who is arguably coerced into allowing her body to be used to trick and gratify Angelo. Overdone represents the economic aspect of female sexuality while Juliet portrays the social aspect and Mariana serves for the political. Shakespeare has clearly established a pattern into which Isabella must fit and she does, fulfilling the religious role of female sexuality.

But the final proof that Isabella plays the role of the wayward nun comes from Isabella herself in her words and deeds. The simple fact that she is entering a convent calls her motives into question. Why does she feel the need to become a nun in the first place? To refer back to Daichman’s research she shows that women became nuns for religious, economic, political or social reasons. We can reasonably rule out economics as there is no evidence offered in the play to suggest that she has a wealthy dowry or is being disposed of. Likewise there is nothing to show her as a political figure, at least not initially. There is no real proof that she feels a religious calling; her behavior is marked by excessive pride and masochism rather than the humility and charity requisite of religious vocation. She constantly desires harshness and “a more strict restraint” (1.3.4). That leaves only the social, meaning she is either a) a daughter of a large family; b) a widow or spinster; or c) a disconsolate lover like Mariana. As to the first option Claudio seems to be the only relative she has and as for the second she is often described as youthful and the fact that the Duke offers to marry her in the end of the play precludes widowhood. That leaves only the last option, suggesting that she is no stranger to sexuality.

Furthermore her speech in her first meeting with Claudio supports this conclusion. She says, “Women! Help heaven! Men their creation mar / In profiting by them. Nay, call us ten times frail; / For we are soft as our complexions are, / And credulous to false prints” (2.4.127-30). In the introduction to the Signet Classic edition of the play editor S. Nagarajan glosses this passage by saying, “Isabella’s novitiate should perhaps be regarded as her answer to the problem of the ‘prompture of the blood,’ of which she seems to have some personal knowledge if one may judge from the accents of her admission to Angelo that women, no less than men, are frail” (xxvi). Gless’s reading supports Nagarajan’s:

The unobtrusive and unintentional erotic symbolism (the printing image) in these last lines indicates that Isabella has known the yearnings of the flesh. Her determined espousal of the Poor Clares’ “strict restraint” therefore implies not purely virginal ignorance and innocence, but a deliberate flight from the world. (98)

Finally the fact remains that Isabella is willing to substitute Mariana for herself in the play’s infamous bed-trick. Coaxed by the Duke (disguised as a friar, let’s not forget) she willingly aids in the violation of another woman by a man who legally is not her husband. Isabella willingly breaks the very law for which her brother is about to die, a law that she endorses as “just but severe,” endangering Mariana body and soul. Isabella in effect becomes a procuress no different than Mistress Overdone.

Gless concludes his discussion by asserting that Isabella’s “physical appearance, her speeches, and her actions repeatedly remind us that she has been developed from a special category of type figures” (141). But she is more than simply that. Modern audiences consistently overlook Isabella as a stereotype largely because she is such a complex figure. She is like Ophelia in that she is swept up into events larger than herself over which she has no real control. She becomes a comment on the futility of religious devotion and on how pointless her role in society really is. Divine law is the only law that matters, Shakespeare seems to say, and the laws of man such as decrees of chastity are unnatural. And that is the message that the tradition of the wayward nun from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance has left us.

Works Cited
Daichman, Graciela S. Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986.

Gless, Darryl F. Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. Ed. by S. Nagarajan. New York: Signet Classics, 1964.

---. Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. by Paul Bertram. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1997.

Thomas, Gordon. Desire and Denial: Celibacy and the Church. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1986.

Radel, Nicholas. “Reading as a Feminist.” Measure for Measure. Ed. by Nigel Wood. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996.

Through Hell and History

Throughout the scope of western literature, from so-called pagan to Christian thought, there has been a shifting relationship between history and the underworld. From the Homeric epic to the Miltonic mode Hell is a dichotomous representation of human history providing different lessons regarding how life should be lived. For the Classical poets the underworld was inhabited by the heroes of myth who provided models of human conduct that is to be emulated by the living. For the Medieval and Renaissance poets and indeed for modern writers as well Hell is the domain of evil, of the villains, and gives examples of what is not to be done in life.

The story of a protagonist’s journey through Hell and conversing with the dead is an extremely old archetype. In the Bible there appears the story of the Witch of Endor: Saul, the first king of Israel, has her conjure the spirit of the prophet Samuel who proclaims the defeat of Saul by David. In Greek mythology there is the story of the musician Orpheus who descends into the domain of Hades to reclaim the soul of his dead wife Eurydice and to lead her back into the world only to lose her by defying the injunction against looking back to her as she follows. And in Book XI of Homer’s The Odyssey, “The Book of the Dead,” Odysseus consults the shades of the underworld on how to return to his home in Ithaca.

In this book of The Odyssey Odysseus calls the spirits of the dead to him by performing a ritual in which he digs a trench and fills it with blood. Upon doing so the spirits come to him. The first he sees is one of his soldiers, Elpenor, who had died the night before. It is here with Elpenor that we first begin to see the connection between history and the dead for Elpenor’s message is to implore the following of Greek tradition in his burial: “So burn me there with all my arms, such as they are, and raise a mound for me on the shore of the grey sea, in memory of an unlucky man” (173). Should Odysseus neglect to observe tradition, Elpenor warns, “the gods may turn against you when they see my corpse” (ibid.). Failing to emulate the dictates of history means destruction and ruin; history must be followed.

Next Odysseus sees his dead mother, a link to his personal history, but before he can speak with her he is confronted by the spirit he was seeking. The prophet Teiresias in a parallel to Saul-Samuel drinks the offered blood and foretells Odysseus’ fate. Teiresias gives a warning about the journey ahead; they will come across cattle and sheep belonging to the Sun God:

If you leave them untouched and fix your mind on getting home, there is some chance that all of you may yet reach Ithaca, though not in comfort. But if you hurt them, then I warrant you that your ship and company will be destroyed . . . (174)

The warning continues, foreshadowing the events that will and do befall Odysseus during his journey. The implication here is clear: just as with Elpenor’s request the dictates of history here represented by Teiresias are ignored at great risk.

Afterwards Odysseus allows himself to speak with his mother. When she leaves she is followed by a procession of women, the mothers of the heroes of Greece. It seems in this passage that Odysseus and by extension Homer is paying homage to them and what they represent which is the history of Greece. Thus the ancient Greek conception of what we would now call Hell is really a representation of history whose function is to show us where we fit in relation to the past and to remind us to honor and cherish the past and to follow its example.

This interpretation of Hell carries over into the Roman worldview as seen in The Aeneid of Virgil. In Book VI Aeneis of Troy, Odysseus-like, seeks out a spirit who will foretell to him where he must go to build his kingdom. Aeneis’ ordeal here in fact is almost exactly like that related in The Odyssey with few differences: a blood sacrifice is made in order to interact with the spirits; Aeneis is (twice) implored to properly bury a corpse following his people’s traditions; and he meets and speaks with a progenitor, his father in this case. One of the two main differences is that Aeneis actually goes into the underworld to meet the dead instead of calling the dead to him. Before he can do so though he must observe the funeral rites of his ancestors: “First give the man his rest,/ Entomb him; lead black beasts to sacrifice;/ Begin with these amends” (153-55). The past must be honored and appeased before it will respond.

The other substantial difference in this text is the geography of the underworld. Whereas the Land of the Dead that Odysseus visits is inhabited by a jumble of spirits The Aeneid divides it into two regions analogous to the Christian Hell and Heaven: the fortress of Tartarus and the Elysian Fields. Within the fortress are the worst malefactors of history: the race of Titans, Theseus, Phlegyas and so on. Elysium however, while populated by the virtuous of history, is also unique in that is populated by Aeneis’ descendants, the figures of future history. Virgil’s underworld represents the continuum of time and the topography is significant: the confining fortress of Tartarus signifies the past as a closed circuit, dark and unable to be changed or affected by the present, for “it is decreed/ That no pure soul may cross the sill of evil” (559-60). Elysium by contrast is a space composed of light and open fields indicating the openness and freedom of the future. It is also a place of the past but it is a different history that inhabits this area than that which is in Tartarus; whereas Tartarus is occupied by a perverted past that refused to honor its own history the Elysian Fields is composed of a past that informs the future and guides it.

The Classical perception of history as represented by its perception of Hell is that history is something that must be emulated in order to maintain cosmic harmony. The Renaissance and later view is that history is an accumulation of disasters that must be transcended if humanity is to progress. As the twentieth century critic Walter Benjamin puts it in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (257-58)

The Classical thinkers looked to history to see what to do; the Renaissance marked the modern change in perception that looks at history to see what not to do. Those who forget the past, the axiom goes, are doomed to repeat it. This perspective is perfectly captured by John Milton in Paradise Lost.

Milton’s view of history is larger and more expansive than that conceived of in the Classical world. For Milton history predates the creation of the world. His magnum opus opens in Hell shortly after the battle for Heaven and will later move even farther before that, narrating the events that lead to that conflagration. While the argument here concerns “man’s first disobedience, and the fruit/ Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste/ Brought Death into the world” (1.1-3) Milton examines the chain of causality that led to that event.

We see Satan and his minions bound on a lake of fire, recovering from their defeat and expulsion from Heaven. After rousing themselves they build the temple of Pandemonium and hold a war council on how to proceed. As their actions reveal the fallen angels refuse to learn from history and choose instead to repeat it. Pandemonium resembles a temple of Heaven from which “many a row/ Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed/ With naphtha and asphaltus, yielded light/ As from a sky” (1.727-30). It is clearly an attempt to reconstruct Heaven. Furthermore their decision to wage war with God is informed by their history; they are repeating their actions in Heaven instead of learning from their mistakes. Milton continually points out that Satan and the others have the option of repenting and undoing the damage done thereby negating history but they continually refuse to do so. “Yet not for those,/ Nor what the potent victor in His rage/ Can else inflict, do I repent, or change” (1.94-6).

Satan’s solution to turn humanity away from God is also indicative of an uninformed reaction to history. Man’s disobedience and challenge to God’s authority and subsequent fall and expulsion directly mirrors the experience of Satan and the fallen angels. Man didn’t learn from history’s bad example and thus repeated it. This experience curiously reflects Milton’s own experience with the Commonwealth; he disobeyed God by aligning himself with those who deposed Charles I, God’s anointed servant, and he was later punished for it. Milton himself failed to learn from the mistakes of history of which he seems to be well aware here.

Since this view of history is dependent on the idea of transcendence and that the wreckage of history must be righted and moved beyond, the question becomes how is that done? For Milton the answer is simple: repentance. Christian doctrine dictates that salvation can be gotten through repentance and the absolving of the self; one must ask God for forgiveness and truly believe that it is needed and possible. The key to repentance is understanding the nature of the transgression; in other words the sinner must ruminate on history in order to avoid falling into the same mistakes.

For Homer and Virgil however repentance is not an option because it is not necessary. If you honor your history and your ancestors and take pride in them then you are doing the right thing and will succeed. If you fail to see your place in history and ignore it then there is no salvation. While the Classical and Renaissance thinkers view history from antithetical perspectives they both believe in the same thing: a knowledge of history must inform the future.

Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. by E. V. Rieu. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1946.

Milton, John. “Paradise Lost.” The Annotated Milton. Ed. by Burton Raffel. New York: Bantam Books, 1999.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Random House, 1981.