7 - The descendants of Circe: witches and Renaissance fictions

Summary

This chapter begins with a magician's epilogue:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,

And what strength I have's mine own,

Which is most faint.

The words are Keith Thomas' at the beginning of the last chapter of Religion and the Decline of Magic. The appropriation involved in the text's conceit of Keith Thomas as Prospero is wittily apt: at the end of their magical works, both Thomas and Prospero contemplate the decline of magic (the title of Thomas' last chapter), both ask for release from their labours, perhaps both anticipate the cooperation and applause of their audiences with ‘the help of your good hands’. There are further consequences to this historian of magic speaking the words of a Renaissance magician from a play. For Thomas' appropriation causes his text to play at this moment between Renaissance history and Renaissance fictions, so that we glimpse not only Keith Thomas as Prospero, but also Prospero as Keith Thomas. As a result of Thomas' appropriation, we can catch sight in The Tempest, particularly in Prospero's famous renunciation of magic, as well as in this epilogue, of Prospero contemplating the prospect of magic's decline in the seventeenth century, and perhaps even the decline in that century of princely theurgy as it was exercised in what Orgel has called the ‘illusion of power’ of the Jacobean and Caroline court masque.

To extend this play between history and fiction in Thomas' epigraph a little further: it is extraordinarily difficult to get at any ‘history’ of events in The Tempest in a version not mediated to us by Prospero's authority, retelling or memory.