Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring (Intellect Books - Theatre and Consciousness)

mangan Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring By Michael Mangan Performance, University of Plymouth IS...

Author: Michael Mangan

76 downloads 1162 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

mangan

Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring By Michael Mangan

Performance, University of Plymouth

ISBN 978-1-84150-149-9

intellect PO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE UK / www.intellectbooks.com

9 781841 501499

{ D A K } A R T S A

C U L T U R A L o f

H I S T O R Y

C O N J U R I N G

A CULTURAL HISTORY of CONJURING

‘This is an erudite book which wears its scholarship lightly and is a pleasure to read. Complex theoretical frameworks are introduced in ways that will make them accessible to the general reader, and the book’s argument opens up new implications and applications for the study of magic as performance...’ – Roberta Mock, Department of Theatre and

P E R F O R M I N G

R

Michael Mangan holds the Chair in Drama at Exeter University. His main research interests lie in theatre and society – more speciﬁcally, he has published in the subjects of theatre and gender, Shakespeare and Renaissance theatre, the cultural history of popular performance, and contemporary British theatre. He has also worked as a playwright, a director, a literary manager, a dramaturg and an actor.

{ DA R K A RT S }

It brings him or her up against their own assumptions about how the world works; at its most extreme, it asks the spectator to re-evaluate his or her sense of the limits of the human. Performing Dark Arts is an exploration of the paradox of the conjuror, the actor who pretends to be a magician. It aims to illuminate the history of conjuring by examining it in the context of performance studies, and to throw light on aspects of performance studies by testing them against the art of conjuring. The book examines not only the performances of individual magicians from Dedi to David Blaine, but also the broader cultural contexts in which their performances were received, and the meanings which they have attracted.

Performing

Magic and conjuring inhabit the boundaries and the borderlands of performance. The conjuror’s act of demonstrating the apparently impossible, the uncanny, the marvellous, or the grotesque challenges the spectator’s sense of reality.

00

B y

M I C H A E L

M A N G A N

Front Matter.qxd

4/2/07

6:37 PM

Page i

Performing Dark Arts A Cultural History of Conjuring

Front Matter.qxd

4/2/07

6:37 PM

Page ii

Front Matter.qxd

4/2/07

6:37 PM

Page iii

Performing Dark Arts A Cultural History of Conjuring Michael Mangan

^ciZaaZXi7g^hida!J@8]^XV\d!JH6

Front Matter.qxd

4/2/07

6:37 PM

Page iv

First Published in the UK in 2007 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK First Published in the USA in 2007 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2007 Intellect All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1- 84150-149-9 / Electronic ISBN 9781841509853 / ISSN 1753-3058 Series: Theatre and Consciousness Series editor: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe Already published in the series: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Theatre and Consciousness: Explanatory Scope and Future Potential (2005) Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Planman Technologies Printed and bound by HSW Print, UK.

Front Matter.qxd

4/2/07

6:37 PM

Page v

Contents Preface and acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: magic and performance

ix

Chapter One Binaries: early attitudes to conjuring

1

Chapter Two ‘The evil Spirit has a hand in the Tricks of these Jugglers’: conjuring and Christian orthodoxy

19

Chapter Three ‘Fire and faggot to burn the witch’? Conjuring between belief and unbelief in early modern England

31

Chapter Four On the margins: criminals and fraudsters

62

Chapter Five On the boundaries of the human

76

Chapter Six Acting and not-acting: Robert-Houdin

97

Chapter Seven Before your very eyes: life, death and liveness

116

Chapter Eight Narrative ambiguity and contested meanings: interpreting Harry Houdini

140

Chapter Nine Mediums and the media

162

Chapter Ten Magic, media and postmodernism

172

Endnotes

196

Bibliography

233

v

Front Matter.qxd

4/2/07

6:37 PM

Page vi

Preface.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page vii

Preface and acknowledgements This project started in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, with a suggestion from my editor, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe. It ended at the University of Exeter, not only with this book but also with the accompanying play The Inner Child’s Compendium of Magic (available on DVD from the Arts Documentation Unit, Exeter EX4 6JA UK). On the way it passed through De Montfort University, Leicester. In all of these places, and elsewhere, I have received invaluable help from friends and colleagues. Some have lent me books, videos and other magical material. Others have pointed me in directions that I would not otherwise have travelled in. Still others have offered thoughts, criticism, suggestions, feedback and many other kinds of professional and personal support. I had ventured into the field of magic history a few years before, and a section of Chapter Three appeared, in a much earlier version, in Performance Research 1: 3 (1996). This has now been significantly changed and updated. A section of Chapter Eight was first given as a keynote paper at the conference What A Man’s Gotta Do? Masculinities On Stage, UNE @ Shafston, Brisbane (April 2004). That original paper is to be included in a forthcoming volume of the same name, based on the conference proceedings and edited by Adrian Kiernander. I have received valuable advice and encouragement from the editors of both these publications. Sections of the book have also been delivered at research seminars and public talks in Exeter and Bristol. Of the individuals who have helped me in various ways, I am particularly grateful to Roland Clare for being in at the start; to Zara and Rachael for their unfailing support; to Sarah Dadswell for the Magic Circle deck of cards and for her insightful thoughts on Indian conjurors; to Gabriella Giannachi, Lesley Wade, Tess Buckland, Jon Primrose, Mike Wilson for pointing out to me and/or lending me books and other resources; to David Ian Rabey for suggestions about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell; to Derren Brown for an impromptu interview in a school corridor; to John and Patrick Mangan for the trip to the site of Houdini’s plane flight at Digger’s Rest; to Roberta Mock for her insightful criticisms; and to Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe for his careful and encouraging editorial work. I am grateful, too, to various groups of people who have made the experience of working on the history of magic easier, richer and more pleasurable: to those members of the production teams with whom I worked on the BBC’s six-part History of Magic series, who astounded and inspired me with their command of a complex field of research; to the original cast of The Inner Child’s Compendium of Magic: Jane Milling, Chris McCullough, Bella Merlin, James McLaughlin, Steve Cockett, Lucy Mitchell and Lizzie Pennington, and, in particular, Sarah Goldingay, who designed and produced the show and was a

vii

Preface.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page viii

PERFORMING DARK ARTS

continual source of stimulating ideas. Thanks, too, to the Drama Research Committee of Exeter University and the Theatre, Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, both of whom contributed to the research costs; to the staff and curators of the various libraries and collections which I have consulted – in particular those at the British Library, Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Wales, Exeter University Library, the Harry Price Collection and the Bill Douglas Collection. I owe a special debt to José Antonio Gonzalez, aka Marko, the Panamanian magician whom I have never met but whose online archive, The Learned Pig Project, is an essential resource for all those interested in the history and practice of magic.

viii

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page ix

Introduction: magic and performance The first thing a student of magic learns is that there are books about magic and books of magic… Magicians, as we know from Jonathan Strange’s maxim, will quarrel about any thing, and many years and much learning has been applied to the vexed question of whether such and such a volume qualifies as a book of magic. But most laymen find they are served well enough by this simple rule: books written before magic ended in England are books of magic, books written later are books about magic. The principle, from which the layman’s rule of thumb derives, is that a book of magic should be written by a practising magician, rather than a theoretical magician or a historian of magic. Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell1 Any good trick is accomplished by our imagination. Any great trick involves our own beliefs about the meaning of life. Burger and Neale2

‘Sometimes such are called conjurers…’ Most words change their meanings over time, but some are particularly slippery and hard to pin down. This is not always a bad thing. On the contrary, it may be that these are the words that point us towards areas where something important is happening on a cultural level. Words which have the most complex, or even contradictory nuances and connotations, are, perhaps, most likely to be those words which refer to things that a culture deems important.3 The words with which this study is centrally concerned – ‘conjuror’, ‘magic’ and ‘magician’ – belong to this group. We use them today in everyday speech to refer to a performer of illusions on the stage or on the street, but in other contexts they mean a practitioner of darker arts. Broadly speaking, before the eighteenth century the terms ‘magician’ and ‘conjuror’ (like the words ‘wizard’ and ‘warlock’ and their female counterpart ‘witch’) were reserved for those who practised, or were seen to practise, the black arts, while terms such as ‘juggling’ and ‘legerdemain’ referred to the entertainer. As one early writer on magic, conjuring, juggling and witchcraft put it: ‘Sometimes such are called conjurers… Sometimes jugglers are called witches. Sometimes also they are called sorcerers’.4 In current use, both ‘conjuror’ (or ‘conjurer’) and ‘magician’ are used to refer to one who performs tricks and sleights in order to entertain. American usage tends to prefer ‘magician’; British English tends towards ‘conjuror’ – but both are acceptable.5 The degree of semantic complexity, and even confusion, which we find in these terms is significant, not least because it reminds us that the conjuror constantly confronts us with questions of our own beliefs about the world.

ix

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page x


Although the ambiguity of ‘magic’ will be an important theme in what follows, it is important to be clear from the outset that this is a book about tricks, staged illusions, prestidigitation and legerdemain, not about spells, charms or grimoires. I should establish, too, at this point that I am not writing as a magician, as a member of the Magic Circle, or even as a halfway competent conjuror. I am an actor, a playwright, a theatre director, a performer in other modes, but the two or three magic tricks I can competently perform may amaze my friends, but only if they are being kind to me. I am writing as a historian of performance, and the questions I shall be asking are those which arise from the academic discipline of performance studies. Performance studies is a comparatively new discipline, and one which is in many ways still finding its feet. It draws on drama and theatre studies, on anthropology, history and sociology; journals such as The Drama Review, Performing Arts Journal, Performance Research and Studies in Theatre and Performance have, over the past decade or so, published groundbreaking studies which have explicitly or implicitly begun to delineate the field and procedures, but there is not yet a settled research methodology, nor even agreement as to the limits of the discipline’s subject matter. According to Richard Schechner, who has done more than anyone to establish and define the field, performance must be construed as a ‘broad spectrum’ or ‘continuum’ of human actions ranging from ritual, play, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts (theatre, dance, music) and everyday life performances to the enactment of social, professional, gender, race and class roles, and on to healing (from shamanism to surgery), the media and the internet… [T]here is no historically or culturally fixable limit to what is or is not ‘performance.’ Along the continuum new genres are added and others are dropped. The underlying notion is that any action that is framed, presented, highlighted or displayed is a performance.6

As a definition this may seem – some argue that it is – unconscionably broad. Yet, as I intend to show, this breadth is particularly appropriate to the study of magic. If conjuring seems at first to relate only to what Schechner calls ‘popular entertainments’ (perhaps symbolized by the classical picture of the magician in evening wear pulling a rabbit out of a hat) a little reflection forces us to start to add other images which resonate with key words from Schechner’s list. Ritual, for example, is evident not only in the performance of the stage or parlour spiritualist who claims to summon up the voices of the dead, but also, on a more mundane level, in the performances of most conjurors. These are frequently ‘ritualized’ in their form (traditionally including magic words, props and gestures) and often appear to effect changes in the real world. We see magic-as-play in the many magic sets and compendiums of magic which are marketed for children.

x

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xi

INTRODUCTION: MAGIC AND PERFORMANCE

Magic is, of course, a long-standing component of theatre, not only insofar as magicians have performed in theatres for the last two centuries, but also in that stage illusions are incorporated into many plays: the medieval European theatre featured magic tricks such as the conjuring of Moses in the medieval mystery plays, the Elizabethans saw Faustus and Prospero conjure on the early modern stage, the Victorian theatre employed magical illusions such as Pepper’s Ghost, while Maskelyne used short one-act ‘plays’ and sketches as vehicles for his conjuring tricks. Magic-as-healing is evident not only in shamanic practices, but also in the mountebanks of the Renaissance, the medicine shows of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in present-day crossovers between stage hypnotism and hypnotherapy. Magic and the media is another well-established connection: we see it in the way in which late nineteenthcentury magicians’ acts influenced the development of the early cinema, in Houdini’s manipulations of print and film media, in the recurrent tension between liveness and mediatization in contemporary conjuring, and in the way in which the Internet has recently become one of the main homes of magic in contemporary culture. At the same time, cultural historians have become increasingly interested, since the 1970s, in the concept of performance as a way of analysing everyday life. Whereas cultural history in the 1950s and 1960s tended to see social interactions in terms of a dramaturgical model based on social ‘scripts’ and structural rules, an increasing focus on ‘culture as a series of recipes for carrying out “performatives”’ has led to an emphasis on improvisation rather than on culture as a set of fixed rules.7 Thus performance, both in its literal sense and as a metaphorical way of understanding social interaction, has become an increasingly important topic in academic inquiry. The permeable boundary between what is and is not performance is important, too, to my particular approach to the study of magic. The focus of this study is on the popular entertainer, and as I say, the book is not intended to be an anthropological or historical study of magical practices in their more efficacious sense. Nonetheless, these practices and beliefs form an important backdrop to the whole issue of magic as performance, and to the questions of fiction and reality which the performance of magic raises. So Schechner’s definition of performance as ‘any action that is framed, presented, highlighted or displayed’ is one which invites precisely the kind of investigation which I am proposing: one which crosses the borders between the stage and everyday life, just as magic itself crosses – repeatedly – those borders. I shall be asking questions, then, about some of the things which historians of magic have traditionally explored in the past, but I also ask some questions with which they have not particularly been interested: questions, for example, about gender, about epistemology, about the insights which a consideration of magic can give us into other aspects of a culture or a historical period. My

xi

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xii


subject matter is not only the performances of individual magicians themselves but also the context in which their performances were received. I am interested not only in magic but in ideas about magic and the meanings of magic. What kinds of pleasure does it offer the spectator? Why did people go to see conjurors at certain key points in the past? Why do they still do so today? What kind of place did the performance of magic have in relation to broader cultural beliefs and practices? How, at various historical moments, has magic been perceived and understood? How has it operated as a metaphor in different cultures? Most of all: what are the meanings which magic as performance has attracted? These are the kinds of questions which the book will be asking. In order to answer them, I shall be drawing on the work of performance theorists such as Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, E. T. Kirby, John F. Kasson and Philip Auslander, as well as on that of historians of magic such as Edwin Dawes and Milbourne Christopher. I will be looking at the conjuror in fiction as well as in real life, and I will be drawing parallels between the art of the magician and the writings of poets, polemicists, playwrights, psychoanalysts, philosophers, theologians and film-makers. Underlying this cultural history of magic is one basic assumption: that cultural meanings are not universal, that they change with time and are contingent upon their historical circumstances.

Universals and boundaries In order to demonstrate the implications of this last point, let us take a fairly simple example: that of the classic illusion of ‘Sawing a Woman in Half ’. According to most accounts, this was first performed in London in 1921 by the British illusionist Percy Thomas Tibbles, who worked under the stage name of ‘Selbit’.8 What links can be made between the date of Selbit’s sawing trick and the comparatively recent legislation which had been passed, allowing for partial female suffrage in the United Kingdom?9 Does Selbit’s sawing routine (which was a huge success in its day as well as becoming one of the iconic images of the conjuror’s act itself) represent some kind of social subconscious in revengeful mood? Does its misogynist violence represent, on some level of codification, a backlash against the perceived threat of growing female social, political and economic power? It could certainly be interpreted this way.10 The stories which magicians tell gain resonance from the other stories which surround them, and to interpret the meaning of Selbit’s trick we may well want to stress its relation to narratives of female emancipation in the early twentieth century, and, by extension, to the larger pattern of cultural misogyny (visible, too, in films, plays, novels), which inscribes the woman as the victim, as the passive figure who is acted upon rather than acting, who is the subject of persistent patterns of male/female violence and abuse. Thus, on what Roland Barthes termed the level of myth, Selbit’s trick is doing some very powerful cultural work. ‘Myth’, according to Barthes

xii

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xiii


…has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal… Myth does not deny things, on the contrary its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification…11

The sawing in half of a woman certainly ‘does not deny’ cultural misogyny. On the contrary, it performs it and celebrates it. And by presenting it as entertainment, it also naturalizes it. We could say that this particular trick has been particularly successful in this respect. It has become so famous, and such a ‘natural’ part of the image of the conjuror – as iconic as the rabbit and the top hat – that it is easy for an audience to forget, ignore or repress its own awareness of the violence which it enacts. It makes the idea of mutilating a woman (in Barthes’ somewhat ironic inflection of that term) ‘innocent’. This, though, is not the end of the story. Sawing a woman in half is an illusion which has taken place not once, in 1921, but repeatedly in the acts of countless conjurors since then. Repetition, after all, is one of the key features (some might argue, the defining feature) of performance. And just as a successful play, opera, symphony or dance will be performed at a historical moment at or near to its composition, but then repeated in later years, by later generations, with varying degrees of faithfulness to or deviation from the original production, so it is with conjuring tricks: ‘Sawing a Woman in Half ’ exists both as a particular historical event, deriving meaning from the cultural conditions surrounding the moment of its first performance, and also as a repeated routine. Indeed, its enduring popularity means that it has become a staple – even an iconic – trick of a certain kind of magic show for the greater part of a century, from the ‘sawing rage’12 of the 1920s onwards. So when it was performed for the first time in 1921, it may have carried a particular meaning which was very specific to its culture – in this case the sub-text of a general bourgeois backlash against the achievements of the female suffragists. The specific social and cultural conditions which created those meanings have now changed (though a convincing argument could also be made that a more recent anti-feminist backlash means that they are not so far away as they once were!) and as a result that particular meaning may have become less dominant. Thus, Selbit performing the trick to an audience in 1921 may mean one thing; another magician performing the same (or similar) trick in 2005, might mean something rather different. Here, for example, is Eugene Burger’s account of the illusion as he perceives it, writing in the 1990s. Sawing a woman in two can be horrible or humorous. It can also be holy. Saying this I have not forgotten that it is both witnessed and performed as sexist. Even so, it is, in essence, holy. My assumption is that this twentieth century trick is our leading example of what magic is about, an example that

xiii

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xiv


has roots as old as magic itself. The theme is death and rebirth… The horror remains, as does the humour, but both performer and audience are also given the opportunity to participate in the holy. A real magic show is not an arena for secular distraction, but a relatively safe place for us to experience the sacred.13

Burger substitutes a different interpretive frame, one which depends less on the gender politics of the historical moment when the trick was first performed than on its persistence as an archetype of the ‘twentieth century trick’. In this reading of the trick’s meaning the original (misogynistic) meanings have not been entirely obliterated, but they seem to have faded, while other kinds of meanings have been attached, meanings dependent on seeing contemporary magic as somehow partaking of the ‘sacred’. My point is not to argue which of these readings is ‘correct’.14 It is to illustrate the way in which the same trick means different things in different contexts. Historical distance from the original moment of performance affects meaning. So does the way a particular trick is transformed and re-presented. In another cultural context, the ‘same’ trick is re-packaged for a different audience, with rather different results. And so in the mid-twentieth century we see a rather different style of sawing a lady in half exhibited by Mark Wilson on his American television shows. Wilson presented the routine in a way which minimized any sense of threat and played down the sense that this is in any way a violent act. In order to understand how the tricks have evolved, and the meaning of their evolution, we need to take into account the historical dimension which relates them to the expectations and receptive capacities of their audience. To the fact, for example, that Wilson was performing for the newly popular medium of commercial television, on a show whose target audience was the family, whose content and mood was strictly controlled by the sponsors and advertisers whose product it was designed to sell. We could go further and talk about the broader cultural climate of 1950s America in which Wilson developed his television act. This was a time of high conservatism and high consumerism, a time which saw the growth of the suburbs, the establishment of television as the dominant medium, and a cultural optimism which was still in part a reaction against memories of the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust revelations, the devastation of Hiroshima, and the tensions of the cold war. Under these conditions, the inherent violence of the sawing routine needed to be de-emphasized for good cultural reasons. In order to play at cutting a person in half as part of family viewing at that time, the routine had to be made acceptable to the schedulers, whose primary aim is to sell the products which the programmes ‘carry’. Mark Wilson’s implied audience was a nuclear American family, sitting in the comfort of their comparatively affluent home, engaged in the shared

xiv

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xv


pleasurable activity of watching television together. The picture, of course, is an idealized one, but idealized archetypes are the bricks from which television schedules are built, and they become the norms which determine programme style and content. This is a particularly important point to make in relation to this book and its historical argument. Meanings change. They change according not only to the intentions of the producer/practitioner but also to the social contexts of production and reception, and according to the available interpretive contexts. And they can change according to the uses that different producers and different interpretive communities make of them. But if meanings are not universal, nonetheless, certain themes recur. One theme to which I shall return frequently in this book is that stage magic regularly performs what Una Chaudhuri (in another context) has described as ‘boundary work’.15 The conjuror’s act of demonstrating the apparently impossible, the uncanny, the marvellous, the grotesque is effectively one which challenges the spectator’s sense of reality, which brings him or her up against their own assumptions about how the world works. It tests the spectator’s perceptions against the cognitive structures which allow those perceptions to make sense. At its extreme, it asks the spectator to re-evaluate his or her sense of the limits of the human. If this sounds as if it is making too extravagant a claim for what is, after all, a fairly low-status performing art, let me add that these challenges, these tests, to everyday reality are not always cataclysmic. Indeed, their effect may be conservative rather than revolutionary. When the card the spectator selects disappears from one place and reappears in another, she may – in most cases she certainly will – simply settle for the fact that some kind of sleight of hand or substitution is going on, and that while she cannot see how it has been done, the laws of physics have not been broken. Most conjurors, it should be added, would completely approve: few have any wish to suggest that they are messing with the paranormal – and since they have engineered the illusions, they know for a fact that they are not. Boundary work in this sense can often be reassuring: it is often a matter of confirming one’s sense of those boundaries. But the point is that magic has no point unless it offers up – however lightheartedly, however insincerely – the possibility that those boundaries may indeed be breached.

Lies, damned lies and conjurors’ autobiographies: writing about magic MM: It’s a fine line, isn’t it, between what a magician, a conjuror, does as a skilled performer and just lying? Especially on television, where you have such control over what the audience sees. You could simply lie about everything – but

xv

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xvi


then there would be little for us, the audience, to admire. So a magician wants to avoid just lying, doesn’t he? DB: Yes. Absolutely.

Interview with Derren Brown, Bristol 1996 Everything I’ve ever told you is a lie. Including that. Peter Cook as the Devil in Bedazzled

Most histories of magic are written by practising conjurors or magical technicians. Some of the best of them, such as Milbourne Christopher’s entertaining and lucid Illustrated History of Magic and Edwin Dawes’ The Great Illusionists,16 benefit greatly both from the encyclopaedic knowledge of the dedicated enthusiast and from the technical knowledge of the practitioner and performer. Others seem rather to be hampered by their position within the magic community: by codes of silence, by internal quarrels about who first invented which trick, by the need for self-promotion – and some of the greatest magicians are the worst offenders in this last respect! There are several good histories already in existence. Those just mentioned, Dawes’ The Great Illusionists and Christopher’s Illustrated History of Magic, tell the story of magic, illusion and conjuring from the earliest days through to the mid-twentieth century. Jim Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant17 brings the story more or less up-to-date with thoughtful reflections on modern magicians. Ricky Jay’s Talking Pigs and Fireproof Women18 looks at the stranger outreaches of magical showmanship. Between them, these works map out the territory which I explore in this book. Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale’s Magic and Meaning is not strictly a history of magic, but it contains a series of provocative and intelligent reflections on the philosophical aspects of magic past and present. David Blaine’s Mysterious Stranger19 has become a bestseller in the last couple of years. These are all eminent figures in the world of Magic in their own right: Christopher and Blaine have had stellar careers as professional conjurors; Steinmeyer is one of the world’s leading designers of magic illusions; Dawes is the official historian of the Magic Circle. These books are largely written for a market which straddles the general reader and the practising professional or amateur conjuror. There has also been a growing interest in magic among academic researchers in recent years. In the UK, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust have both funded research projects investigating conjuring. The results are beginning to be seen: for example, Philip Butterworth’s detailed and scholarly Magic on the Early English Stage, which develops some of his earlier ideas from articles in Theatre Notebook, is an excellent large-scale study of the relationship between Tudor ‘jugglers’ and the early modern theatre.20 The kindred art of ventriloquism has been the subject of a brilliant monograph by Steven

xvi

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xvii


Connor.21 And if the history of magic has attracted attention, so has the psychology of magic: respected academic psychologists such as Richard Wiseman and Peter Lamont have published books and papers on this; and Lamont, who is also a historian, has published book-length studies of the Indian Rope Trick and of the Victorian medium D. D. Home.22 There is significant overlap between the worlds of academia and of conjuring: Lamont and Wiseman are both former professional conjurors, while Edwin Dawes is by profession a professor of biochemistry. It is notable, too, the extent to which professional magicians, far more than other artists, are fascinated with the history of their own art form. On the whole it is not professional dancers who write deeply researched histories of dance, nor do rock stars write great histories of rock music; actors tend not to have written good histories of the theatre (although some directors have). But magicians do… Perhaps there are inherent similarities between the typical mindset of the historian and that of the conjuror. Certainly many conjurors are proto-historians – antiquarians, in that eighteenth-century sense of collectors of books and artefacts from the past. Harry Houdini was a prime example – collecting obsessively, buying up other specialist collections competitively. In the UK the British Library and University of London Library have benefited from this: the Evanion Collection and the Harry Price Collection respectively are valuable resources for the researcher.23 Equally important, perhaps, magicians make good historians because they are able to negotiate some of the inherent problems of writing magic history. Writing about the history of magic does present certain unique problems. In the first place there are the kinds of problem which any performance historian has to deal with – those related to the central problem of the ephemeral nature of performance. Before we attempt any realistic account of how any aspect of performance – whether acting, juggling, directing, dance, singing, stage design, popular theatre – has operated in the past, we are forced to accept that we are engaging with ghosts and echoes of a vanished event. The performances whose significance we are trying to recapture took place in a context which can never fully be re-created: their meaning existed in the engagement of a specific moment, the moment of performance. It arose from the immediacy of the encounter between this particular performer and this particular audience, an encounter which took place in that foreign country which is the past. We cannot visit, we cannot experience it directly, we can only put together a sense of what it must have been like from a jigsaw of documentary sources: video recordings, photographs, performers’ memoirs, interviews, newspaper reviews, and performance documents such as prompt books, posters, programmes, stage diagrams and scripts. Even with the best will in the world, such documents will be of variable reliability. The publicity photograph may show an image which never appeared in the performance itself and the theatrical poster almost certainly will! The

xvii

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xviii


newspaper review may be biased or ignorant. The actor’s reminiscence may be self-serving or faulty. We will often have little confidence in the source material; sometimes we may have too much. Traditionally the academic discipline of drama and theatre studies has been dominated by study of the dramatic text: this is because (among other reasons) the verbal text, out of all of these documentary sources, has usually been the richest, the most engaging, the most immediate. Read with skill, it brings a sense of the presence of the event – so much so that sometimes it has been mistaken for the event itself. We have a full (if disputed) text of Hamlet. This is invaluable because it means that the play (or a version of it) can live again and again for each new generation as part of that powerful dialogue with the past which is the basis of the staging of classic plays. Invaluable too, when we are performing that very different act of historical imagination: trying to understand what an audience might have experienced in, say, Shakespeare’s Globe. It is the best evidence we have; and even the scholarly arguments about the text are helpful in refining our sense of that original performance. But it is not the performance itself. It does not bring into our lives the full, sweaty, noisy, confusing experience of the Globe in 1601, nor the presence of Richard Burbage swinging round to an audience and asking them for the first time that question of being and not-being. And some might argue that perhaps this is just as well. Perhaps no actual performance would ever be able to live up to the richness of the imagined performance of generations of Shakespeare-lovers. Perhaps Burbage himself, with his antique acting style, would disappoint us. Perhaps if we were able to choose between retaining possession of the verbal text and being allowed a time-machine journey to an afternoon at the Globe in 1601, we would do well to keep the words and dispatch the live performance to the dustbin of history. But since we are unlikely to have that choice, we do well to remember the distance that exists between the fossil record of a theatrical event, which is the verbal text, and the immediacy of that past event itself. The further one moves away from the literary tradition of dramatic theatre, from the authored play with a published text, the more reliant one becomes on the surrounding fragments and ephemera: the programmes, playbills, memoirs, adverts, reviews. With popular forms, such as music hall, vaudeville, stand-up comedy or magic, these are particularly few and far between, since it has traditionally been seen as less important to provide any kind of permanent record of popular cultural forms. Thus, as I say, even with the best will in the world it makes such forms hard to reconstruct imaginatively. But when we are dealing with magic and magicians we are not necessarily dealing with the best wills in the world. More to the point, we are not dealing with those who see it in their own interests to tell the truth about themselves and their art. Magicians’ own accounts of their performances are sometimes valuable, but rarely entirely reliable. Even enthusiastic collectors of magic books, such as Gary Brown and Michael Edwards, admit that

xviii

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xix


though entertainment was their business, magicians from magic’s Golden Age produced numerous autobiographies that were less than entertaining. Partly a product of the writing style of the day, as well as the result of a lives [sic] of deceit and exaggeration, these works tend to be ponderous, slowmoving accounts which make claims of dubious historical value.24

Traditionally, the task of the historian has been to separate truth about the past from fiction, falsehood or misunderstanding. Traditionally, the task of the magician has been to confuse, to falsify, to create illusions – to lie. ‘Magicians’, as Sara Crasson puts it, lie by the very nature of what they do… Magicians lie about their origin, their nationality, their education. They lie about what they are doing onstage when they say they are putting the ball under the cup or in the pocket… Magicians tell you their equipment came from some exotic flea market, from their ancestors, from the attic of a haunted house. Lies, more lies. They talk about fantastic feats they have performed. Still more lies. And when they retire and write their memoirs, they lie there, too…25

Crasson tells only part of the story. Researchers into magic (myself included) can also report great openness and generosity both from individual conjurors and from institutions such as the Magic Circle. But the culture of secrecy and misdirection is real, and it presents particular problems for the historian of magic performance. It should be added that recent modes of historiography, particularly those taking on a postmodern flavour, are deeply sceptical about the possibility of recovering any kind of absolute truth about the past. They see value, too, in the fictions which the past creates about itself: in its self-images, its propaganda and its self-delusions. Thus the myths which magicians create about themselves, the misperceptions, the ideas about magic, are all grist to the mill. Even so, it can be a very fine line between chronicling the myths of the past and simply being taken in by them, and by a tradition of professional entertainers who guard their secrets fiercely, and for whom misdirection is an essential source of their power. The most realistic way to think about magicians’ own accounts of their lives, careers and tricks is to consider them as extensions of their stage acts – as a particular kind of ‘performative writing’. This concept of ‘performative writing’ is one which, in performance studies and contemporary literary theory, has developed a specific meaning, whereby the written text is made to function in a more expressively performative manner.26 (This may or may not result in an actual performance. For many practitioners and proponents of performative writing, the written text ‘choreographed through space across a sequence of pages’27 is the performance.) Drawing on influences as diverse as poetry, fictional prose, graphic design, alternative literacies and live art, and having a close

xix

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xx


connection with contemporary French écriture, performative writing lies between the critical and creative and has elements of both. It arises partly as a response to the challenge of performance studies’ brief to explore performativity in all its social manifestations, and partly in response to a broadly postmodern tendency to dissolve apparent oppositions – in this case the opposition between that which is written and that which is performed. Thus performative writing is most often associated with the aesthetics of the contemporary avant-garde, and with that of contemporary critical theory.28 It is not usually attached to something as mainstream as a conjuror’s routine, nor as sternly positivist as an encyclopaedia. Yet in an important sense, the Encyclopaedia Britannica contains, in its entries on magic, some superb early examples of performative writing – writing which functions in a performative manner, in an area between the creative and the critical. If one of the trademarks of the conjuror’s stage act is that he does one thing while appearing to do another, the encyclopaedia entries are precisely analogous to the stage performance. Britannica entries on magic have, for the most part, been written by practising professional conjurors. Why should they not be? Who better to speak with authority about the topic, to provide the definitive and truthful account which an encyclopaedia implicitly promises its readers? The problem is that, as I have already suggested, professional conjurors have a relationship with the truth which is at best ambiguous. This is not just to do with the age-old question of ‘revealing the secrets’. The writer of the entry can be judicious enough about that – deciding which, if any, conjuring tricks are well enough known for their exposure to present little or no threat to himself or his colleagues. The issue is more to do with a deeper contradiction between two types of discourse. If the discourse of the encyclopaedia typically claims objectivity and transparency, the discourse of the conjuror is typically designed to deceive, to distract, to misdirect – and ultimately to enhance the prestige, the mystique of the speaker. The entries on ‘Magic’ in the 1926 (13th) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were written by Harry Houdini, and they had the basic effect of presenting a history of magic in which everything was shown to lead up to Houdini himself. A more recent edition of Britannica rather shamefacedly admits that there is something rather graceless about Houdini’s ‘failing to name even a single previous practitioner of his art’. It goes on to say: Even a superficial reading of this article, written for the Thirteenth Edition (1926), conveys the inescapable conclusion that Harry Houdini’s view of the topic was focused on two matters. The first was the debunking of the thenfashionable spiritualists; the second was Houdini.29

What seems to be one thing is in fact another. What appears to be a history of magic is in fact another elaboration of the Myth of Harry Houdini. It is not just

xx

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xxi


that Houdini was an egoist – although in his intensely complicated way, he was. It is that for Houdini (as for most magicians) the function of public language is to convey a sense of his own special powers or skills. The magician’s act depends upon such a sense: people go to see him precisely because of those special powers. And Houdini, of course, being the supreme myth-maker and self-publicist that he was, was hardly going to let an opportunity like writing the definitive encyclopaedia article slip by him. Because the very fact of the encyclopaedia’s implicit claims of objectivity, authority and truthfulness work to his advantage: they provide a perfect kind of misdirection, a backdrop against which the textual performance of Harry Houdini can take place. Many other magicians have written Histories of Magic whose actual aims were subtly different from, and far more self-interested than, their stated ones: but few had as welcoming a stage to perform their texts on as Houdini had in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. One who did was another Britannica contributor, John Algernon Clarke, whose contribution on ‘Magic, White’ for the 9th edition of the encyclopaedia was, as Jim Steinmeyer puts it ‘a wry bit of showmanship that should never have got past the encyclopaedia’s editors’.30 In fact, Clarke was not a showman at all but an inventor. Among his inventions was one of the most popular magic tricks of the age. In the 1870s, Clarke worked with John Nevil Maskelyne – at the time the dominant personality in the world of English stage conjuring – on ‘Psycho’, one of the many automata that were so popular in Maskelyne’s stage shows at the Egyptian Hall in Picadilly. Psycho was the most famous of these. A small and obviously mechanical figure, Psycho was dressed in oriental costume and sat on a small box, isolated by a glass cylinder so that the audience could see that no strings, wires or electrical cables were involved. The box itself was far too small to contain an assistant. Psycho appeared to be able to do mathematical calculations and answer questions by pointing to or moving cards; he was also able to play whist, picking out the correct card for each play between his thumb and forefinger, displaying it to the audience, and handing it to Maskelyne to play. Psycho’s clockwork mechanism was actually controlled by a combination of a hidden operative, compressed air or gas and a set of bellows: George Cooke, Maskelyne’s assistant, was hidden backstage where he could see the cards and worked a small bellows which moved the hand by manipulating the air pressure in the cylinder.31 Clarke’s Britannica entry on ‘Magic, White’ may well have been co-authored by Maskelyne himself. It not only writes the history of magic so as to stress the importance of Maskelyne and Cooke, the Egyptian Hall and Psycho, it also disingenuously claims that Psycho ‘appears to be perfectly isolated from any mechanical communication without… [and that] what the mysterious means of connection are has not been discovered’.32 This was quite untrue: an 1876 magazine article by William Pole had described the mechanism correctly, and

xxi

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xxii


newspapers and magic journals had repeated Pole’s exposé.33 The secret of Psycho was pretty much common knowledge. Clarke’s article, however, goes on to say that while it was true that the joint inventors had ‘patented a method of controlling the speed of clockwork mechanism by compressed air or gas… it is not known whether the principle obscurely described in the specification was applicable in any way to the invisible agency employed in Psycho’. The encyclopaedia article effectively becomes part of the act – an extension of the patter by which the conjuror shapes the audience’s experience of the trick. Maskelyne and Clarke firmly deny that the trick is done with compressed air – and they make their assertion (as Houdini would later do) in a forum whose probity is usually taken for granted. William Pole’s explanation is discredited, and the reader/audience is sent away looking for other explanations. The ‘lie direct’ is not, perhaps, the most subtle kind of misdirection – but in this case the blatancy of the untruth, and the authority of the context in which it appears, means that it is unusually effective. It is also rather witty. Whereas Houdini’s self-advertisements in his entry appear merely opportunistic, Clarke is playing a rather more subtle game with his reader. He includes his own name twice in his Britannia essay – not only signing the article but also naming himself in it as the joint inventor of Psycho and the pneumatic mechanism. Since it is clearly impossible for him both to have patented the device (as inventor) and to be ignorant of its working (as author of the article), the alert reader will deduce that there must be some irony at play. As with all the best performative writing, there is a marked element of playfulness about Clarke’s entry.

Performing Dark Arts The aim of this monograph, then, is to throw light on some aspects of conjuring by looking at them in the context of performance studies and to throw light on aspects of performance studies by testing them against the art of conjuring. It will attempt to pick a way through the labyrinthine paths of dubious documentation in order to explore the changing meanings of the conjuror’s art from earliest times to the present day. It will focus, in the main, on figures and events which previous historians such as Dawes and Christopher have already established as landmarks in the long and complicated history of magic: practitioners such as Robert-Houdin, Harry Houdini and Georges Méliès; events such as the Bottle-Conjuror hoax; and publications such as Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft.34 And it will follow a broadly chronological approach – although, since the book also has a thematic dimension, there will sometimes be overlaps between one chapter and another in terms of historical periods. Chapter One will look at the prehistory of conjuring over a very wide chronological sweep and at the vexed question of roots and origins. Questions of origins are frequently discussed in performance studies, and most histories

xxii

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xxiii


of conjuring place the origins of the art in ancient Egypt. The story of the conjuror Dedi at the court of King Khufu has become the typical starting point for histories of conjuring. I will be examining traditional explanations of the roots of the art in order to explore the relevance of shamanic traditions to the history of conjuring. The Christian Church has always had a deep distrust of conjuring: either dismissing it as trickery or associating it with devilish practices. From scriptural times onwards, Judaeo-Christian prophets, scholars and priests have pointed out the difference between ‘real’ miracle workers (inspired by the one true God) and the phoneys, fakes and mere conjurors. Chapter Two examines the way in which the Biblical narrative of Moses and Aaron’s ‘conjuring’ in Pharaoh’s court has been interpreted; at the way in which Christian orthodoxy has traditionally constructed a dichotomy between the true and the false wonderworker; and at the way in which ‘juggling’ (conjuring) became a polemical term at the time of the Reformation. Chapter Three deals with the emergence of the conjuror in the early modern period – the earliest historical period for which we have solid documentary evidence. As well as looking at the relationship between the ‘street-conjuror’ and the emerging professional theatre, the chapter will explore the way in which, in an age when belief in ‘real’ magic was prevalent, Tudor and Stuart ‘jugglers’ negotiated the potentially difficult relationship between magic as entertainment and magic as efficacy. The chapter will focus on contemporary accounts of conjuring – in both senses of the word – in some of the books about both witchcraft and legerdemain which were beginning to be published in the period. Chapter Four is about the conjuror as trickster and covers a period from the early seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth. During these centuries the conjuror enjoyed a fairly dubious social status and was often classed with rogues, vagabonds and ‘coney-catchers’. As this chapter illustrates, the common view was not entirely wrong, and extracts from early seventeenthcentury plays give entertaining examples of the dishonest juggler at work. For eighteenth-century culture, however, there was something quite fascinating about crime and criminals: this is an age in which highwaymen and thieves such as Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin could become local heroes, while the satires of writers such as Gay and Swift turned the criminal into an icon of the age. In a similar way, in the writings of these satirists, the conjuror becomes a metaphor for an increasingly uncertain culture, while the famous hoax of the ‘BottleConjuror’ translated some of Gay’s and Swift’s literary fantasies into reality. Another kind of hoax but of a more ambiguous nature was that of the talking animals which became particularly popular during the ‘long eighteenth century’. Chapter Five looks at these together with automata such as von Kempelen’s ‘Mechanical Turk’, which professed to be able to perform human functions by mechanical means. I argue that both of these acts perform a kind of ‘boundary

xxiii

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xxiv


work’ which was of particular significance in the period of the Enlightenment. By blurring the distinctions between animal and human on the one hand, and between machine and human on the other, the talking animals and intelligent machines, which became a part of the repertoire of eighteenth-century illusionists, were asking important questions about what it meant to be human – questions which, as I suggest in the final sections of the chapter, continue to be relevant today. Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin is the subject of Chapter Six. Three aspects of the ‘father of modern magic’ are explored in detail: first of all his re-definition of the art of conjuring – not only through his own impressive performances but also through his writings about the art, and his much-quoted epithet about a conjuror being an actor playing the part of a magician, a phrase which is revisited in the light of questions about the nature of acting itself. The chapter takes another look, too, at the famous story of Robert-Houdin and the Marabouts: the incident in Algeria where the conjuror was commissioned by the French foreign office to put on a display of white man’s magic in order to aid the French colonialist enterprise. Finally it explores the way in which RobertHoudin’s role playing permeates not only his stage performance but also his writings. Conjuring seems to depend more than most arts upon the live presence of the performer, yet there is a strong relationship between the conjuror’s act and the rise of the early motion picture industry. Chapter Seven charts the history of this relationship, including its pre-history in early visual illusions such as the magic lanterns and phantasmagorias of previous centuries. It analyses that relationship in the context of current debates within performance studies about the nature and the importance of ‘liveness’ as a concept, but also looks at ways in which the relationship prompted – and was nurtured by – conjurors’ and film-makers’ fascination with the way in which these new visual media enabled them to explore images of life and death. By way of development of this idea, the chapter looks in detail at the impact of the major contributor to the crossover between magic and the movies: Georges Méliès. Chapter Eight again focuses largely on a single performer: Harry Houdini. Like Robert-Houdin (whom he first revered and later rejected), Houdini was a performer who never really stopped performing. Picking up on points made earlier in this introduction, this chapter analyses the way in which the myth of Harry Houdini was created by Houdini himself and by the media which he manipulated so successfully, but also at various kinds of interpretations which that myth has generated. It explores ways in which Houdini has been analysed by cultural historians with an interest in gender. Continuing the Houdini theme, Chapter Nine looks at Houdini’s engagement with spiritualists towards the end of his career – and places that in the context of the wider debates about spiritualism in the late nineteenth and early

xxiv

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xxv


twentieth centuries. It examines the tradition of stage spiritualism made famous by practitioners such as the Fox Sisters and the Davenport Brothers and its relationship to the spiritualist movement; and it analyses the contradictory attitudes towards such contact with the dead expressed by the scientific establishment. The final chapter discusses the relationship between the conjuror and the mass media in the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. It focuses in particular on the issue of postmodernism and compares the way in which magicians have traditionally blurred the line between truth and reality with the relativism of the postmodern world-view, characterized by the hyper-real, by the ‘precession of simulacra’, and by a distrust of the rational, and in which the rejection of traditional epistemological distinctions, hierarchies and categories means that the real and the imaginary continually collapse into each other. It examines the uses which conjurors have made of television and considers in detail the work of contemporary illusionist David Blaine.

‘…and that’s magic!’ Throughout this book I have tried – not always entirely successfully – to resist the temptation to make pronouncements about ‘what magic is’. Nonetheless, an incident which occurred between the completion of the penultimate and final drafts of this book prompts me to offer at least an anecdotal definition. Derren Brown is currently one of the UK’s most successful magicians, with several television series and specials to his credit. His technique of ‘Mind Control’ is a stylish re-working of the traditional mentalist’s act which frequently leaves volunteers and victims convinced that he does indeed possess special psychic powers, and the journal of the paranormal, Fortean Times, has run several features on him. Early in the gestation period of the book, at a time when Brown was still virtually unknown, I had been introduced to him by Roland, a mutual friend who lives in Bristol. A few years later we had met up again and Brown had been kind enough to allow me to conduct an impromptu interview with him (a quotation from which appears earlier in this chapter). Soon after completing the manuscript of this book, I visited Roland; at the end of the visit he drove me to the station to catch my train. As we drove, we talked. He asked me how the book was going; I replied that I had finished it. He suggested that Brown (whom Roland had not seen for quite a while) might be interested in seeing it; I agreed that it would be courteous to send him a copy and that I would do so… And so we continued, chatting generally about Brown’s recent stellar career. Our conversation about him had hardly ended when Roland, still in the car, received a call on his mobile phone. It was Derren Brown, calling from London. That in itself seemed an extraordinary coincidence, but when Brown went on to say, apparently out of the blue, ‘Oh, yes – I’d be very happy to look at the manuscript of your friend’s history of conjuring, although

xxv

Introduction.qxd

4/2/07

6:38 PM

Page xxvi


I’m rather busy at the moment. Goodbye’, it appeared for all the world as if the modern mentalist had indeed read our minds. Brown’s phone call touched unwittingly on one of the central themes of this book: those unstable points of intersection between that which is known to be illusion and that which is thought to be uncanny. One aspect of the pleasure that an audience takes in magic is its impulse to believe – on some level, however temporarily and however provisionally – that something extraordinary, impossible or marvellous has been witnessed. For just a fraction of a second my response to Brown’s phone call was to suspend all my disbelief about conjurors and how they create their illusions. Only then did the rational mind kick in and start to seek a more mundane explanation. But the good magic trick frequently derives its effect from the fact that the ‘magical’ explanation of what has taken place may seem – temporarily at least – as plausible as the actual (and rational) explanation. It may be hard for a rationalist to believe that Derren Brown really possesses some kind of psychic sense. But it is also pretty hard to swallow what actually happened: that while Roland and I were talking in the car, Roland had quite inadvertently dialled a number on the mobile phone in his pocket; and that of all the numbers stored on his mobile, the one which was dialled was that of Derren Brown; and that Brown, picking up the phone, had then heard a conversation about him on which he could then capitalize by calling back and seeming to have read our minds over a distance of a hundred miles or more. For, as I suggested before, a good conjuror is never off duty. The weaving of the mystique and the myth continues offstage as well as on: we shall see this in more detail in several of the chapters below. And one of the conjuror’s most potent tools is his ability to blur the distinction between what is and what is not ‘performance’.

xxvi

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 1

Chapter One

Binaries: early attitudes to conjuring Originary myths What are the roots of conjuring? Is it even possible to ask such a question? It is certainly true that the lack (or at least the very fragmentary and ambiguous nature) of any documentary evidence makes it difficult to do more than speculate about the roots of conjuring. It is worthwhile doing so, however, since the stories we tell about origins are an integral part of how we understand the present. In fact, the literature of conjuring is ready enough to supply answers to the question of origins – and Egypt features prominently in most accounts. Early writers were pretty much unanimous that the origins of conjuring – or ‘juggling’ as it was called in the early modern period – could be traced back to the time when [c]ertain Egyptians banished their country (belike not for their good conditions) arrived here in England, who being excellent in quaint tricks and devices, not known here at that time among us, were esteemed and had in great admiration, for what with strangeness of their attire and garments, together with their sleights and legerdemains, they were spoke of far and near, insomuch that many of our English loiterers joined with them and in time learned their craft and cozening… These people, continuing about the country in this fashion, practising their cozening art of fast and loose and legerdemain, purchased to themselves great credit among the country people, and got much by Palmistry and telling of fortunes.35

According to the standard historical account in the early modern period the original jugglers are ‘Egyptians’. But ‘Egyptians’ is actually an ambiguous word: on the one hand it has its modern meaning of an inhabitant or native of Egypt. On the other hand it is the origin of the word ‘gypsy’ – and in common usage the two ideas merge into one another, as the distinction between place of origin and travelling subculture becomes blurred. The gypsies and travellers, marginalized and exotic in appearance and language, become identified with the criminal subculture of the sixteenth century with ‘their craft and cozening’. There may be some truth to this. Gypsies – travellers – have traditionally had an important role to play in popular culture.36 For the settled majority this ethnic minority has always, like the magician, represented something a little beyond the boundaries of accepted knowledge, custom and common sense. It seems to have been in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that gypsies first

1

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 2


made their impact on the European consciousness. The first record of their appearance in the British Isles is in 1505 in Scotland, …in the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer. They presented themselves to James IV as pilgrims, their leader being lord of ‘little Egypt’… In England, this category of persons was first recorded in 1514 in the form of an ‘Egyptian’ woman who could ‘tell marvellous things by looking into one’s hands’… One origin for this Egyptian label, both in the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe is, according to Clébert, that well before Gypsies or ‘Tsiganes’ were publicly recorded in western Europe (in the fourteenth century) ‘all mountebanks and travelling showmen found themselves dubbed “Egyptians”’.37

The social identity of gypsies, then, seems bound up from the very beginning with both magic and performance. The gypsy genealogy of conjuring is only part of the story, however. Another version of the theory that the art of conjuring is Egyptian in origin looks back to a much earlier period – that of the Old Testament. Thomas Frost, author of one of the first detailed histories of conjuring, begins there: As Egypt was the cradle of the sciences, so it is in Egypt that we find the first instances of the practice of the arts by which the senses of the observer have been, from time immemorial, deluded and imposed upon. That the practitioners of magic had attained a high degree of skill as early as the epoch of the Pharaohs is shown by the Biblical account of the wonders which they were able to display in competition with Aaron. We read in that remarkable narrative that ‘Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent. Then Pharaoh called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments. For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.’ The trial of skill between the Hebrew and the Egyptian magicians was well contested at the outset, and in its progress must have been one of intense and growing interest to the people of both nationalities.38

The story of Aaron’s rod (to which we will return in the next chapter) features in most histories of magic. But a different kind of case for the Egyptian origins of conjuring was bolstered by a discovery made by nineteenth-century Egyptologists. The earliest accounts of magic tricks that we have today come from the document known as ‘p.Westcar’, or the Westcar Papyrus – named after Henry Westcar, who acquired it in Egypt round about 1824–5. The text is fragmentary and incomplete and is written in hieratic (i.e. cursive handwritten)

2

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 3

BINARIES: EARLY ATTITUDES TO CONJURING

rather than hieroglyphic script, and it seems to originate from the Middle Kingdom period of Ancient Egypt history, round about 1700 to 1800 B.C.E. It has been the subject of scholarly debate, and many different translations, ever since Westcar passed the papyrus to German Egyptologist Richard Lepsius. Among these fragments is the frequently told story of Dedi (or Djedi) and the Pharaoh. It is the incident which most modern histories of magic take as the starting point of magic as performance. Here is a fairly typical version of the story: The first magic exhibition took place almost five thousand years ago when Cheops, the pharaoh who presided over the building of the Great Pyramid summoned a magician named Dedi to his palace. He was said to be able to restore decapitated heads… The pharaoh wanted to see Dedi do his famed decapitation, so he offered the magician a condemned prisoner, but Dedi refused to decapitate a human victim. Instead he randomly chose a goose from the pharaoh’s menagerie. He grabbed the goose’s body with one hand and with the other pulled its head off. He then extended his arms, demonstrating that the goose’s head was no longer connected to its body. Then he laid the goose’s limp body on the floor, walked a few paces away, and set the head down on the ground. After everyone could observe that the decapitated goose was dead, he put the body under one of his arms and walked back over to the head and picked it up. He pushed the lifeless head onto the body and suddenly the goose squawked, full of life, and ran around the room.39

The particular re-telling of Dedi’s performance which I have just quoted, suitably coloured and angled towards his own style, is by the successful contemporary illusionist David Blaine. Like most historians of magic who refer to the story, Blaine treats Dedi’s decapitation routine as ‘The first somewhat reliable account of an actual magician’s performance being presented solely as an amusing entertainment’.40 And, indeed, five thousand years later, the same trick of decapitating and restoring the head of a fowl can be seen performed by Blaine himself on TV and video.41 He does it in his own very streetwise style, on the streets of a downtown area of an unnamed American city, to an audience of passers-by rather than to a Pharaoh in his own court, but it is certainly the same trick. There is, in fact, something quite ‘staged’, and rather knowing, about Blaine’s echo of this, one of the earliest recorded conjuring tricks. The video performance is driven, at least in part, by Blaine’s own sense of intellectual showmanship: he is very aware (often ironically) of his own relation to his heritage as a conjuror, and a large amount of his act relies on intertextual quotation and reference to earlier feats of previous generations. Even so, the five-thousand-year span between the two performances is significant. Not many of the performing arts can point to routines with so long a shelf life. The

3

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 4


decapitation feat (‘one of the oldest in the bag of magician’s tricks’,42 according to Milbourne Christopher) appears to be a perennially popular illusion. But although the trick is substantially the same, its meaning will not remain constant. Magic tricks and illusions take place in the minds of spectators as much as they do in the hands of the prestidigitator – and this has several consequences. Spectators bring to performance a set of assumptions about how the world is, how it operates, the limits of possibility within that world, the place of performance within it, the limits of performance – and so on. An illusion such as the above performed within a culture which officially acknowledges the ability of humans to influence natural processes by means such as religious ritual will have a very different meaning from the same illusion performed in one which officially believes this to be impossible. Blaine, on the streets of America at the end of the twentieth century, positions himself as an entertainer rather than as an occult practitioner, and his actions are received accordingly. The audience experience a momentary shock, followed by laughter, relief, admiration. We may not know how it was done, but we are impressed. It’s a clever trick. But how appropriate is it to project our contemporary experience of the streetconjuror’s illusion back in time, to read Dedi’s decapitation as ‘the first somewhat reliable account of an actual magician⬘s performance being presented solely as an amusing entertainment’? One of the recurring themes of the book will be the interplay between the two apparently separate categories of magic which is perceived as performance or entertainment and the magic which is perceived as manifestation of the occult or paranormal. Where does Dedi’s performance lie in this nexus? The answer is quite complex. Problems of translation and interpretation have been compounded because the Westcar papyrus is incomplete and possibly corrupt, with key sections of the text missing. The extant text is written in a jerky and fragmented style, possibly that of someone unskilled in such writing. It has even been suggested that it was written by ‘a child [who] was learning [hieratic script] in school and attempting to copy it.’43 More to the point, the Papyrus itself is telling stories which are set in a distant past. The characters include Prince Hordadef – one of the main narrators of the stories in the papyrus – and his father King Khufu (better known nowadays by the Greek form of his name, Cheops). Khufu lived and ruled in the early twenty-sixth century B.C.E., and commissioned the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza. By the time the manuscript was written – about a thousand years later! – Khufu himself was effectively a mythical character. If we look at the context in which Dedi’s decapitation routine is placed in the manuscript, we begin to get a slightly different picture. First of all, there is the way in which Dedi is introduced into the narrative. It is interestingly ambiguous. King Khufu has been listening to tales of magic from the past – tales of a scribe who makes a wax crocodile that comes to life to punish an adulterer, and of another

4

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 5


with the power to divide the waters of a lake. Then his son offers to introduce him to a present-day magician. Prince Hordadef stood before the king, and he said: ‘Your Majesty has heard tales regarding the wonders performed by magicians in other days, but I can bring forth a worker of marvels who now lives in the kingdom.’ King Khufu said: ‘And who is he, my son?’ ‘His name is Dedi,’ answered Prince Hordadef. ‘He is a very old man, for his years are a hundred and ten. Each day he eats a joint of beef and five hundred loaves of bread, and drinks a hundred jugs of beer. He can smite off the head of a living creature and restore it again; he can make a lion follow him; and he knows the secrets of the habitation of the god Thoth, which Your Majesty has desired to know so that you may design the chambers of your pyramid.’44

In the context of the Westcar narrative, then, Dedi looks at first like a much more ‘real’ figure than the mythical heroes of the stories Khufu is listening to: he is, after all, living in the ‘present day’ and Hordadef offers to bring him into the King’s presence. But when Hordadef starts to describe him, Dedi turns into yet another miraculous figure – more bizarre, in fact, than the comparatively humdrum chief scribes of long ago. He is a hundred and ten years old and he eats five hundred loaves of bread and drinks a hundred jugs of beer a day! Even more significantly, he is credited with divine knowledge – he ‘knows the secrets of the habitation of the god Thoth’. This is something which particularly interests Khufu: Dedi is summoned to the court. The decapitation routine which Blaine describes (and re-creates) involves just one goose. The account in the Westcar papyrus describes Dedi building up to a rather more impressive climax. Refusing to decapitate a human prisoner, Dedi first performs the trick on a duck; then he repeats it with a goose; finally ‘King Khufu then caused a cow to be brought in, and its head was cut off. Dedi restored the animal to life again, and caused it to follow him.’ Geese and ducks are comparatively simple subjects for the decapitation trick. The performer relies largely on the natural instinct of a fowl to tuck its head under its wing; he then provides a false head to substitute for the real one. Cows, which lack both wings and any instinct to hide their head under them, are somewhat trickier… After performing the decapitation trick, Khufu quizzes Dedi about this knowledge. Dedi answers with all the ambiguity of a practised soothsayer: His Majesty then spoke to the magician and said: ‘It is told that you possess the secrets of the dwelling of the god Thoth.’

5

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 6


Dedi answered: ‘I do not possess them, but I know where they are concealed, and that is within a temple chamber at Heliopolis. There the plans are kept in a box, but it is no insignificant person who shall bring them to Your Majesty.’ ‘I would fain know who will deliver them unto me,’ King Khufu said. Dedi prophesied that three sons would be born to Rud-dedit, wife of the chief priest of Ra. The eldest would become chief priest at Heliopolis and would possess the plans. He and his brothers would one day sit upon the throne and rule over all the land. King Khufu⬘s heart was filled with gloom and alarm when he heard the prophetic words of the great magician.45

Dedi pleases the king, however, and is duly rewarded: ‘thereafterwards [he] dwelt in the house of the Prince Hordadef. He was given daily for his portion an ox, a thousand loaves of bread, a hundred jugs of beer, and a hundred bunches of onions.’ Quite apart from the munificence of Dedi’s fee, the context of the decapitation trick suggests that this is by no means simply an account of a ‘magician⬘s performance being presented solely as an amusing entertainment’. On the contrary, the Dedi of the Westcar papyrus is a prophet, a sage, and a priest-like figure who knows the secrets of the gods. The story which is told about him is set around with religious and mystical apparatus which is clearly taken with complete seriousness by Khufu, Hordadef and their court – and as far as we can tell, by the writer(s) of the papyrus, one thousand years later, as well. The decapitation routines which he performs are merely a demonstration – a token of his abilities. What he is really there for is to prophesy to the King. Dedi himself may or may not have existed; the performance in front of Pharaoh may or may not have taken place. But whether it did or not, it is wrapped up – like the tales of Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights – in a concentric series of narratives-within-narratives, each of which refers us back to an earlier era. The Westcar papyrus itself comes to us from 25 centuries ago. The writer of that papyrus tells of Khufu, who lived more than a thousand years before that – and in that narrative Khufu listens to tales from a time even longer ago. These tales effectively frame Dedi’s performance and give it meaning. When Khufu sees Dedi’s performance with the duck, the goose and the bull, he concludes that he is in the presence of a magician as great as – or greater than – those in the fables, and he goes on to ask his advice about the building of the pyramids. And what meanings are we to make of it? Historians of magic tend to read the Dedi story as if it were an event which really took place. And, since historians of magic are a sceptical bunch, with little or no time for supernatural explanations, and since they know how the trick of decapitating a bird is done, they quite reasonably attribute that technique to Dedi. One of two readings is now possible.

6

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 7


Either the whole performance was analogous to a modern conjuring show, with everybody knowing that it is all an illusion and enjoying the fact; or else Dedi was fooling his audience, using techniques which street magicians still use today, into believing he had supernatural powers. Clearly, the context of the story precludes the first interpretation. The royal audience is not there just to watch a clever prestidigitator (a ‘magician’s performance being presented solely as an amusing entertainment’). It is, or rather it believes it is, witnessing an engagement with the supernatural. The second interpretation, then, that what was produced as sleight of hand was received as the supernatural, is more plausible – but it is also problematic. According to this interpretation, Dedi becomes a sophisticated manipulator of a gullible (or at least a credulous) royal audience. In a rebuttal of what they call the ‘economicopolitical’ theory, Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale draw attention to the fact that in most contemporary accounts of the origins of conjuring there is an underlying assumption that ‘these earliest conjurors were really unscrupulous characters; what we call con men… [who] were promoting their deceptions and lies… for their own personal gain’.46 It is an assumption which contains a strong element of anti-clericalism. They cite as typical examples James Randi’s characterization of early conjuring as being ‘the carefully guarded weapon of the priesthood, by which it was used to establish a belief in supernatural powers among an uninformed public’,47 and Milbourne Christopher’s account of early conjurors, which goes as follows: Ancient religious wonder-workers played on the superstition of their followers by performing impressive feats. The temple ritualists, medicine men, soothsayers, and oracles employed the same basic principle – misdirection to divert attention from the method to the effect – as the conjuring entertainers who candidly admitted that they were only human. Of course, those who claimed to be the intermediaries of the gods, and those who could ‘prove’ their claims with their feats, often attained positions of great power and influence. Rulers knelt before them and offered bountiful sacrifices to the deities they represented.48

Burger and Neale are sceptical of this account of priests, oracles and ‘temple ritualists’ wilfully and cynically deceiving their neighbours, but it has a long history. Albert Hopkins’ great Victorian treatise Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography contains a chapter concerned with the ‘Temple Tricks of the Greeks’ which shows, with detailed diagrams, how many of the apparently supernatural effects of the temples of Classical and Hellenic Greece were achieved by sophisticated mechanical devices using the same principles of engineering – hydraulics, mechanics, steam pressure – which lay behind the industrial might of nineteenth-century western capitalism. Thus milk and wine flowed from altars, sacred flames lit spontaneously, doors into the gods’ holy

7

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 8


places opened magically by themselves, and water changed into wine – all by means of clever technology, operated by the priests of the temple in order to maintain their own power and influence. Comparing the mechanisms of lustral vases in the Greek temples to those of vending machines in 1889, he concludes: The mechanism is almost identical with that shown in the modern device; in fact this ancient vase… is the prototype of all modern automatic vending machines, and simply serves as the proof of the truth of the saying, ‘There is nothing new under the sun’.49

But Hopkins’ book itself is based on far older sources. Much of what he describes is based directly on the writings of Heron (or Hero) of Alexandria, the Greek geometer and inventor who flourished in the first century A.D., and was the inventor of the ‘aeolipile’, the first known steam-driven engine. Heron’s writings on mechanics and pneumatics contain much of what we know about the engineering of the ancient Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations. Heron was every bit as sceptical as Hopkins, and his books contain many detailed explanations of how the temple priests performed their apparently miraculous effects. Two hundred years or so later, Bishop (later Saint) Hippolytus, one of the Fathers of the early Christian Church, wrote a work called Philosophumena, or The Refutation of All Heresies, in which he lists and refutes all the heresies of the pagans. This contains sections on the illusions of pagan priests, showing how they performed such miracles as plunging their hands into burning pitch; bringing about spontaneous combustion through incantations or (a trick well known to theatrical special effects departments) creating the effect of thunder: Thunder is produced is very many ways. For very many large stones rolled from a height over wooden planks and falling upon sheets of brass make a noise like thunder. And they coil a slender cord round the thin board on which the woolcarders press cloth, and then spin the board by whisking away the string when the whirring of it makes the sound of thunder. These tricks they play thus.50

From Heron and Hippolytus through to nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians of magic such as Hopkins, Christopher and Randi, then, this image persists: of the priests, soothsayers, medicine men and oracles of earlier (or more ‘primitive’) civilizations as skilful prestidigitators, deliberately deceiving believers for personal power or influence. Nor are such anecdotes confined to the preChristian era. For example, in sixteenth-century England there was the famous ‘Rood of Grace’ at Boxley Abbey in Kent – a ‘cross bearing an image of a crucified Christ that was capable of moving’.51 The abbey became an important place of pilgrimage because of the apparent holiness of the Rood, but when the abbey was sacked at the time of the Reformation it was discovered by the jubilant reformers

8

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 9


that the monks had been deceiving the people, and that ‘the thing was worked by wires through little pipes’.52 It is the context of this, and other tales of trickster-priests, that the story of Dedi is most usually understood: if he is not simply a hired entertainer (and he is clearly not), then he becomes one of these cynical tricksters. The problem is that this interpretation tends to treat the Westcar account of Dedi and the Pharaoh as if it were something like a reliable eyewitness account of an ancient conjuring routine. Of course, it is anything but. Rather it is generically related to those tales of wonder to which King Khufu is listening – surreal tales which (like Scheherazade’s) are set in a semi-mythical past and which have their own order of truth. This suggests that we need to read the story in a rather different way, one which takes account of its fictional, quasi-mythical aspects. By this I do not mean we should simply dismiss it as a falsehood: rather that we need to consider just what kind of truth it articulates. The story of Dedi and the Pharaoh is not itself a myth, but the kind of truth to which it lays claim is closer to that of myth than it is to that of documentary – a truth which is not dependent on the apparent facts of the story, and whose value is not diminished if these are shown to be false. The cultural work it does may be in part aetiological – it explains something about the origins of the Great Pyramid. It is also partly ontological, of the order of myth which locates events in a sacred past, a time of origins which is separate from the present, but with which – through the myths themselves – the present can make connections. Myths make connection with this real and sacred time.53 Burger and Neale are right to question the ‘economico-political’ theory of the origins of conjuring, and its universal ‘presumption that the earliest magicians (the priests or temple ritualists) were scoundrels (and worse!)’54 – although, there were indeed plenty of these. However, the grounds on which they mount their critique of the economico-political theory of origins are not ones which I would necessarily share. ‘Can the origin of magic be exhaustively explained’, they ask, ‘simply by introducing the categories of political power and economic wealth?’55 Perhaps not; even so, I would resist any reading which assumes that power and wealth are unimportant in a consideration of what conjuring and magic are all about. At heart, in fact, conjuring is all about power – of one sort or another. The problem, however, is that power and its workings are complex phenomena, changing in form along with the historically specific circumstances in which they are embedded.

Shaman/showman The more important insight which lies at the heart of Burger and Neale’s critique is that the relationship between belief and disbelief need not be that of mutually exclusive binary opposition. It could even be, as they suggest, that ‘the seemingly alien conjunction of belief and disbelief may well be quite standard

9

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 10


human behaviour’.56 In order to explore this notion, and its implications more fully, we need to consider the relation between the entertainer and the priest, the showman and the shaman. The story of Dedi brings us to one of the key explanations of the roots of conjuring: that it is a remnant of magic in that other sense of the word – efficacious magic, magic performed in the belief that it will affect things in the everyday world. Edmund Wilson articulated elegantly this sense that the art of the conjuror contains a level of hidden symbolism which links us, too, with a sacred past. Writing in the 1940s (not one of the greatest or most glamorous ages of stage conjuring) Wilson sees a deeper level of meaning in this comparatively low-status branch of showbiz. There is, he says: …more to these feats and to our pleasure in them than we are likely to be conscious of. Some of the tricks that have lasted longest and become fixed in the popular imagination must be the remnants of fertility rites. The wand is an obvious symbol, and has its kinship with Aaron’s rod and the Pope’s staff that puts forth leaves in Tannhäuser. Its production of rabbits and flowers from a hat has become the accepted type-trick of conjuring. And the magician who escapes from the box: what is he but Adonis and Attis and all the rest of the corn gods that are buried and rise? 57

The idea that inherent in the tricks of the modern conjuror are echoes of fertility rites, puts the conjuror’s act, too, on the level of myth. The conjuror who pulls the rabbit or the flowers from the hat, or escapes from the box, is making a connection, however unconscious, with that sacred and ideal time of primordial origins. Moreover, Wilson’s reference to ‘Attis and Adonis and all the rest of the corn gods that are buried and rise’ reminds us that the routines of the conjuror and the illusionist impinge on a special relationship which theatre anthropology has traditionally emphasized, between performance and magic. Performance Studies has a fascination – often a rather uneasy fascination – with roots and origins. Questions about the origins of theatre, of course, pre-date Performance Studies as such, and disciplines such as classical studies and anthropology have also offered answers to the question of where theatrical performance comes from. There are broadly two schools of thought. The first sees theatre and drama as being essentially imitative and having evolved from religious rituals which were originally created as symbolic enactments of natural phenomena or forces. The palaeolithic cave paintings, dating from between 40,000 and 10,000 B.C.E., in the cave of Les Trois Frères in southern France are frequently cited as evidence of such rituals. These masked figures, wearing animal masks and skins, seem to be performing some kind of sacred dance. Ritualistic performances such as these comprised symbolic actions intended supernaturally to influence or transform the

10

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 11


material world, to promote fertility, or to celebrate the annual cycle of the seasons. The purpose of these ritualized performances was to imitate natural forces and thereby to control them, bringing them down to something more approaching a human scale. From these imitative dances – eventually – grew theatre as we understand it. An alternative strand of theories, though, locates the roots of theatre in shamanistic58 rituals – those trance ‘performances’ which give the shaman access to the spirit world, where he or she meets with, and is possessed by, spirits. The shaman’s journey is typically a healing one, and what is brought back from the spirit world is to be shared with the tribe or an individual. The purpose of the ritual is to manifest an actual supernatural presence to the audience – most often in the service of performing a healing act on behalf of an individual or the community. Unlike the dancers in the nature-worship rituals – who are understood to be symbolically representing a natural or supernatural force – the shaman is believed to be embodying it, and making it fully and actually manifest to the audience/congregation.59 Paradoxically, however, the components of the shamanic ritual, which can include dancing, acrobatics, juggling, fire-walking and fire-eating, sometimes look very much like those of the modern popular entertainer. For example, Margaret Lantis, in her study of Alaskan shamans, recorded a range of sleightof-hand tricks including sword-swallowing; escapology; knives or spears being driven into the body without injury; beads being swallowed and then recovered from another person’s ear; and tricks with string that is cut and then restored.60 Walter Hoffman’s accounts of the Algonquin shamans include ventriloquism and descriptions of a routine in which a bear’s claw hangs upside down on an inverted mirror (held in place by a secret daub of wax).61 The spiritual task of the shaman, which is to manifest ‘an immediately present reality of a different order’,62 does not preclude the use of precisely those techniques of sleight of hand which a modern-day conjuror would learn. In anthropological literature there is a story which has become almost iconic. First recounted by Franz Boas from a fragment which he had obtained, it concerns a Kwakiutl Indian named Quesalid, from the Vancouver region of Canada.63 Quesalid is a sceptic who does not believe in the powers of sorcerers and shamans of his own culture. Accordingly, he inveigles his way into becoming initiated as a shaman precisely in order to expose them and their conjuring tricks. He quickly learns that, as he suspected, most of what they do consists of sleight of hand. One particular trick which is used in curing the sick involves concealing a small tuft of down in the corner of the shaman’s mouth: the shaman produces this at the dramatic moment, covered in blood (from his own gums or tongue, which he has bitten) and announces that this ‘bloody worm’ is in fact the disease which he has removed from the patient’s body.64 Quesalid is ready to expose the shamans for the frauds that they are. Before he can do so,

11

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 12


however, he is asked to treat a sick person who has dreamed that Quesalid will heal him. Using the trickery he has been taught, he performs the requisite rituals, and the treatment …was an outstanding success. Although Quesalid came to be known from that moment on as a ‘great shaman’ he did not lose his critical faculties. He interpreted his success in psychological terms – it was successful ‘because he [the sick person] believed strongly in his dream about me.’ 65

But increasingly complex encounters lead Quesalid to re-think further his initial scepticism. Seeing other shamans at work using techniques different from his own, he becomes increasingly convinced that there are various modes of supernatural healing, and that some are less false than others. In particular, he is appalled and disgusted by those shamans who diagnose and claim to cure their patients without actually producing the ‘disease’ – the material object, such as the bloody tuft, which has been ‘removed’ from the patient’s body. Moreover, he repeatedly finds that his cures work where his competitors’ do not. Gradually, as his own fame grows, he modifies his original position. He continues to expose ‘fakes’, but his original attitude has changed considerably. The radical negativism of the free thinker has given way to more moderate feelings. Real shamans do exist. And what about him? At the end of the narrative we cannot tell but it is evident that he carries on his craft conscientiously, takes pride in his achievements, and warmly defends the technique of the bloody down against all rival schools. He seems to have completely lost sight of the fallaciousness of the technique which he had so disparaged at the beginning.66

Is there a contradiction in Quesalid’s position? From a purely positivist standpoint, certainly there is. Yet anthropological literature is full of stories of encounters between anthropologists and shamans, in which the anthropologist points out that the shaman is simply using sleight of hand in order to perform his miracles, and the shaman replies, effectively, so what? The technique of the shaman operates within a mental framework where belief and disbelief are not mutually exclusive binary oppositions. Is this where conjuring comes from? Are we to hear, in the performance of the theatrical conjuror or the street magician, a plaintive echo of the shaman performing rituals for the benefit of the tribe? An influential article by E. T. Kirby in The Drama Review (1974) located the roots of contemporary popular entertainment – ventriloquism, puppetry, conjuring and escape acts, acrobatics, fire-eating, clowning and so on – in the shamanic experience. Making a rough distinction between the ‘drama’ and popular entertainment, Kirby argues that

12

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 13


[a]t their origin, popular entertainments are associated with trance and derive from the practices of trance, not of childhood play or imitation. They do not seek to imitate, reproduce or record the forms of existent social reality. Rather, the performing arts that develop from shamanist trance may be characterized as the manifestation, or conjuring, of an immediately present reality of a different order, kind, or quality, from that of reality itself. Shamanist illusionism, with its ventriloquism and escape acts, seeks to break the surface of reality, as it were, to cause the appearance of a super-reality that is ‘more real’ than the ordinary.67

Kirby’s suggestion is echoed and developed by Rogan Taylor in his fascinating and provocative book The Death and Resurrection Show, which draws on welldocumented shamanic traditions from Siberia to the Americas and shows parallels between the ecstatic journey of the shaman and the functions of all kinds of contemporary performance. He speculates, ‘based on a combination of facts and circumstantial evidence’,68 on the process by which shamanism became show business. The tribal audience certainly would not have arrived at the shaman’s healing séance in the expectation of being mildly amused or merrily entertained. They came to witness, and to take part in, something powerful and sacred. They expected to experience their religion in action. But if it is true that showbusiness as we know it has derived directly from the performances of the ancient shamans, then there must be a process or a combination of historical circumstances which isolated the showbiz elements in such performances, and detached them from their originally-integrated positions as parts of a greater whole: the shamanistic world view.69

He is particularly interested in the possibility that this shamanistic descent manifests itself most powerfully in popular culture, rather than in high or official culture: But the people’s entertainment, that constant rival of official displays of power and grandeur, was provided by the travelling players, the low-caste or out-caste groups who had never whole-heartedly entered society and stopped travelling. It is among them that showbusiness has its natural roots. Popular entertainment is a form of ‘petrified shamanism’. It is petrified in both sense of the word: it is a hard, shiny shell which surrounds, conceals and protects a great mystery. It is also a fearful response in that it recognises that this mystery at its heart has become taboo and dangerous to promote. Consequently there are probably quite direct and profound connections between the magical performances of shamans and those types of entertainment which have always

13

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 14


belonged to the ordinary people. These modern forms of showbusiness, the clown shows, pantomime, the circus, popular music and street performances, are steeped in magical history. They offer an alternative culture, a counter-culture, to the official blandishments of civilised society.70

Taylor is writing in the years before Cultural Studies had seriously problematized this rather romantic picture of a popular culture which offers a beneficial imaginative alternative to official culture. He also overstates his case: art fulfils various kinds of functions, not all of them derived from the shamanic healing journey to the Underworld, and some forms are more susceptible to this mode of analysis than others. Even so, his account is a plausible one, and his concentration on popular cultural forms strengthens his argument. The direct and profound connections which Taylor hypothesizes between the magical performances of shamans and contemporary popular entertainment should have a particular resonance for the art of conjuring. After all, the most famous definition of a conjuror, coined by Robert-Houdin, is that he is ‘an actor playing the part of a magician’.71 And while many modern entertainers would seek to distance themselves from the image of the shaman or the mystic, others work hard to foreground that connection. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, Carter the Great, wearing his turban, would talk of his meetings with Eastern fakirs, creating a background narrative suggesting secret knowledge and initiation into ‘real’ magic. More recently, David Blaine, in his autobiographical Mysterious Stranger, from which his version of the Dedi story quoted above is taken, draws on a wide range of religious and mythical symbolism and stresses his encounters with shamans from tribal cultures. Taylor substantiates his argument by reference to well-documented ethnographic and anthropological studies of various tribes, both nomadic and settled, which effectively show the process of evolution from shamanism into show business in action. The most compelling of these accounts comes from Ivan A. Lopatin’s study of the social life and religious beliefs and practices of the Kitimat Indians of British Columbia in the first half of the twentieth century.72 Lopatin describes how a Kitimat shaman, in order to gain recognition of his professional status, had to establish a social status based not only on the acquisition of material goods, but also on his skill and generosity as a host; he was expected to throw parties and provide entertainment for his guests – often with the aid of other shamans: Because of their many-sided talents, shamans were invited by hosts at potlatches [parties] to entertain their guests. Two, three, or even more shamans would perform ‘Kamlanies’ (séances) merely for the purpose of displaying their powers. They vied with one another in their singing, dancing, play, wit and eloquence. They recited long poetic narrations of their

14

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 15


supernatural adventures in the company of their ‘ashutas’ (spirits) and performed shamanistic tricks. They walked with bare feet in the fire, ate the glowing embers, drove knives into their bodies. In this case the shamans served as prestidigitators, jugglers and acrobats, their performances being nothing more than stage play.73

Further, if a Kitimat shaman lost status because, for example, of failed cures, one way in which he could repair his damaged reputation was to take part against other shamans in public contests of skill. The use of jugglery among the shamans aggravated the contest for prestige. When one of the shamans entertained his audience by performing tricks, the others strove with all their might to detect these tricks and prove to the audience that they had been deceived by the juggling shaman. Sometimes they performed their own tricks in order to out-juggle their rival. Success in such a contest depended mostly upon the shaman’s assistants. They acted as his accomplices and spies.74

The Kitimat Indians in the early twentieth century occupied an intermediate position in which old beliefs were still important, but at the same time ‘such performances, made on demand for less than sacred purposes, are readily deteriorating into caricatures’.75 It is possible to see this (as Taylor here seems to see it)76 simply as evidence of a decline within the Kitimat tribal structure and belief system: a deterioration over time from an ancient dignified tradition into the conditions of mere show business. But as a model for a broader understanding of the relationship between the shaman of the tribal society and the entertainer-magician of the industrial society, it leaves too much unexplained. Admittedly, it fits well with the kind of standard theatre history which traces drama from ritual origins to secular comedy and tragedy. However, it does not do justice either to the shamanic dimension of popular culture or to the extent to which tribal shamanism itself depends on showmanship. Both in contemporary and in ancient societies, elements of shamanism and conjuring, of ritual magic and entertainment, are woven together into a more complex pattern than this linear chronological model would suggest.

Magic, efficacy and entertainment There are, however, alternatives to the standard socio-Darwinist account of the origins of theatre, which sees it as having ‘descended’ directly from religious rituals of the past, mutating into a secular art form in the process. In recent years, following the work of Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, it has been more common to focus on synchronic rather than diachronic processes, and

15

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 16


to explore the complex webs of interrelationships between ritual and theatre which exist at any one time in a culture; or, to adopt Schechner’s terminology, between those performances whose end is ‘efficacy’ and those whose end is ‘entertainment’.77 Efficacy/ritual stands at one end of a continuum of performance. It involves the expectation of results; is linked to an absent Other [often in the form of god[s] or spirits]; relates to symbolic time; suggests that the performer is possessed, in a trance or somehow imbued with power; the audience’s role is participatory, it believes uncritically in the reality of what is presented and is implicated in an act of collective creativity. Entertainment/theatre exists at the opposite end of the spectrum. Its purpose is fun, there is no absent Other necessary and the focus is on the here and now. The performer is in control and not linked to any supernatural power, while the audience observes and appreciates (often critically) rather than participates. What Schechner’s model emphasizes is the interplay between efficacy and entertainment. It is not a simple chronological progression (or ‘descent’) from one to the other, but a changing and dynamic relationship in which both elements are always present to some extent (even if, sometimes, one of them is only vestigially so). The key image is that of a ‘braid’. [T]heater history can be given an overall shape as a development of a braided structure continuously interrelating efficacy (ritual) and entertainment (theater). At each period in every culture one or the other is dominant – one is ascending while the other is descending. Naturally, these changes are part of changes in the overall social structure of a culture… For Western theatre, at least, I think it can be shown that when the braid is tight – that is when efficacy and entertainment are both present in nearly equal degrees – theater flourishes.78

Thus, for example, not only is theatre and theatre-going inherently ritualistic of itself, but even the most intensely efficacious ritual contains an element of ‘theatricality’, of entertainment – witness the centrality of dance and song in the work of the shaman. The periods in the European cultural tradition at which the performative braid of efficacy and entertainment has been drawn the tightest include the Elizabethan/Jacobean period and the present day. In our own day a declining mainstream commercial theatre coexists (and sometimes conflicts) with a resurgent theatre of efficacy which includes such manifestations as paratheatrical and experimental performance events with various levels of ritual intention; political, applied and direct-action theatre; and performative therapies such as dramatherapy, psychodrama, sociodrama, forum theatre and so on. In the early modern period the tendency was in the opposite direction: declining traditions of ‘efficacious performances’ (represented by liturgical plays,

16

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 17


church ritual and court ceremony) impacted with an emergent theatre of entertainment (popular entertainments, fairground shows and the performances of travelling players and musicians) in a convergence which resulted in the rich mixture of the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage. The stage illusionist, the vaudeville or street-corner conjuror, embodies some of the strengths, but also some of the paradoxes and contradictions of the interplay between performance as efficacy and performance as entertainment. For the conjuror is one thing pretending to be another. This is entertainment masquerading as efficacy; and it is the exploitation of the ambiguity between the two which lies at the heart of the stage magician’s art. Like the shaman, the stage illusionist blurs the distinctions between the two, makes magic into performance, and performs magic in the process. Objects appear, vanish, reappear in unexpected places; bodies are dismembered then miraculously restored to wholeness again; or else the conjuror himself ‘dies’ in a locked chest or coffin, only to return from the underworld unharmed. The conjuror and the shaman both perform ‘the death and resurrection show’.79 The conjuror’s social function may be less complex than the shaman’s, lacking for the most part any professed healing or cohesive power.80 The conjuror’s act, however, is more multi-layered than the shaman’s in this sense: that the latter depends on leading an audience/congregation into a secure belief (usually shared by the shaman him- or herself) in the performer’s ‘supernatural’ powers, in the certainty that the shaman stands on the threshold between two worlds: the natural world and the supernatural. The conjuror, on the other hand, performs highly ritualized routines which both invoke and also disavow the supposition of supernatural influence. The performance of theatrical magic typically exploits an ambiguous space between the disturbing/ exciting possibility that what an audience is seeing might genuinely flout the laws of nature, and the reassuring/disappointing awareness that it probably does not – that it is all really done by sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors, and the arts of deception. Conjurors and writers on magic tend to take strong moral positions on this: for example, Henry Hay, author of ‘the acknowledged classic text for conjurors, both beginning and advanced’ tells the trainee magician that conjuring is the art – let’s say the game – of entertaining by tempting a particular audience to accept, temporarily, minor infractions of natural law. If you ask them to accept permanently – to believe – you are a charlatan, a messiah, perhaps both; not a prestidigitator.81

And this is the essential rhetorical manoeuvre which is involved in the illusionist’s act. We are asked to take pleasure in ambiguity, ambivalence and contradiction: not in the conviction that the performer is really able to defy

17

Chapter 01.qxd

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 18


natural laws, but in the tension between this imaginative possibility and the contradictory reassurance that he cannot. This tension between belief and unbelief, between the frame of the fiction and the awareness that it is a frame, is also a major part of the rhetoric of the theatre. But it is a tension which is not always stable – and indeed, a tension which is not always under the control of the performer. There are times when ambiguity collapses under pressure.

18

Chapter 02.qxd

4/2/07

6:32 PM

Page 19

Chapter Two

‘The evil Spirit has a hand in the Tricks of these Jugglers’: conjuring and Christian orthodoxy In the previous chapter, I argued that the relation between entertainment and efficacy, between magic as performance and ‘real’ magic, is a complex one. In this chapter, I shall examine some of the ways in which religious commentators in various ages have sought to ignore that complexity, and to insist on clear-cut distinctions between the true wonders which belong properly only to God, and the false wonders of heathens. Given the Christian church’s deep-seated ambivalence towards all kinds of theatrical display, it is perhaps not surprising to discover that one of the ways in which theologians have discredited the supernatural claims of rival belief systems is by dismissing their wonderworkers and priests as mere tricksters. In the writings and thought of many early Christians on the subject, ‘performance’ is assigned a negative value. When, for example, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Christian missionaries began to make regular contact with the shamans of the ‘heathen barbarians’ whom they were intent on converting, they treated them with a mixture of tolerance and contempt. Louis Hennepin, for example, one of the Franciscan friars who explored the upper Mississippi valley in the late seventeenth century describes them as follows. There’s no nation but what have their Jugglers, which some count Sorcerers: but ‘tis not likely they are under any Covenant, or hold communication with the Devil. At the same time, one may venture to say, that the evil Spirit has a hand in the Tricks of these Jugglers, and makes use of them to amuse these poor People, and render them more incapable of receiving the Knowledge of the true God. They are very fond of these Jugglers, tho they cozen them perpetually.82

‘Jugglers’ here is used in the Renaissance sense, to mean what we would call a conjuror or illusionist. Certainly Hennepin has no doubt that these ‘jugglers’ (whose feats included rain-making, healing and creating good luck for the hunters) were nothing but dishonest performers – tricksters, who ‘cozen [their people] perpetually’. It is significant that Hennepin is not interested in branding these jugglers as Devil worshippers. (Indeed, to do so would, in some ways, be detrimental to his argument, for it would grant them greater power: it is a more astute move to label them as frauds). Yet neither does he see them as totally innocent on that

19

Chapter 02.qxd

4/2/07

6:32 PM

Page 20


score; and his argument that the non-Christian wonder-workers are in some way complicit (however unwittingly) with the Devil, since the Devil makes use of them to distract their audiences from knowledge of the true God, articulates an ancient problematic.

‘Moses was a juggler’ Miracles have traditionally been seen by the church as a vivid way of demonstrating the active interest which God takes in human affairs. However, their usefulness as a proof of God’s existence, or at least of his partiality to one faith community over another, is limited by the fact that miracle-working is also claimed by other religions. Judaeo-Christian thought, as a result, has always had within it a strong tradition of de-bunking rival miracle workers. From scriptural times onwards, prophets, scholars, scribes and preachers have been eager to point out the difference between ‘real’ miracle workers, those inspired by the one true God; and the phoneys, the fakes, the mere conjurors. The process starts in some of the earliest scriptural writings. In the myth of Exodus, so central to both Judaism and Christianity, Moses is portrayed not only as a spiritual leader but also as an agent of divine miracle-working. When he and his brother Aaron take on the task of effecting the liberation of the Israelites from their captivity in Egypt, they go before Pharaoh armed with miracles. The Lord said to Moses and Aaron ‘When Pharaoh says to you “Perform a miracle”, then say to Aaron, “Take your staff and throw it down before Pharoah and it will become a snake.”’ Then Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. Pharaoh summoned the wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts. Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs.83

Moses and Aaron are manifesting the power of the one true God (Moses has earlier been coached by God himself to perform the transformation ‘so that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob – has appeared to you.’)84 Pharaoh’s wonder-workers, on the other hand, are ‘sorcerers and… magicians’ who managed their inferior effects ‘by their secret arts’. Different interpreters understood these secret arts in different ways, of course, but by the Renaissance it was a commonplace assertion that the Egyptian court magicians were mere tricksters, using sleight of hand. The sixteenth-century writer Reginald Scot, for example, cites authorities approvingly: ‘[a]nd yet (as Calvine

20

Chapter 02.qxd

4/2/07

6:32 PM

Page 21

THE EVIL SPIRIT HAS A HAND IN THE TRICKS OF THESE JUGGLERS

saith of them) they were but Jugglers. Neither could they doe, as many suppose. For as Clemens saith; These Magicians did rather seem to doe these wonders, than work them indeed.’85 This is the view most frequently found in histories of conjuring, where Pharaoh’s conjurors frequently feature, along with their compatriot Dedi, as some of the earliest recorded examples of prestidigitators. There are even accounts of how the trick might have been done. Writing in 1898, Henry Ridgeley Evans recounts the familiar biblical anecdote, telling how, ‘[f]ar back into the shadowy past, before the building of the pyramids, magic was a reputed art in Egypt, for Egypt was “the cradle of magic”. The magicians of Egypt, according to the Bible chronicle, contested against Aaron at the court of Pharaoh.’86 Provocatively, however, Evans goes on to relate how he had been told by Robert Heller, ‘prestidigitateur, traveller in the Orient and skeptic’, how he had seen the same trick performed in Cairo by the ‘Dervishes’. The rods actually were serpents, and hypnotized to such an extent as to become perfectly stiff and rigid. When thrown upon the earth, and recalled to life by sundry mystic passes and strokes, they crawled away alive and hideous as ever. Said Heller ‘It was in the open air that I saw this strange feat performed’. Transferred to the gloomy audience chamber of some old palace where the high roof is supported by ponderous stone columns painted with hieroglyphics, where rows of black marble sphinxes stare at you with unfathomable eyes, where the mise-en-scène is awe-inspiring – this trick of the rods turning into serpents becomes doubly impressive, and indeed, to the uninitiated, a miracle.87

At first sight Evans and Heller (who is characterized as a ‘skeptic’) seem to be repeating the usual binary opposition between true miracles and trickery. On closer reading, however, they appear to be suggesting something rather different from the classic Christian interpretation. Rather than distinguishing between the true miracle and the false illusion, it is now left to the reader to infer that Aaron, too, might have been working with hypnotized snakes in order to perform what seems like a miracle ‘to the uninitiated’. Evans presents the case tactfully enough. Although the academic theology of his day, in the wake of Enlightenment materialism, had largely abandoned any serious reliance on scriptural miracles as a philosophical foundation for the proof of God, nonetheless the churches, faced by the increasing secularisation of nineteenth-century thought, were unwilling completely to relinquish miracle narratives which, in the popular imagination, provided a steadfast anchor for faith. Heller’s implication that Aaron, too, was effectively performing a conjuring trick strikes deep into the problematic relationship between the performing conjuror and Christian doctrine. Three hundred years earlier, a similar suggestion was enough to get a man killed.

21

Chapter 02.qxd

4/2/07

6:32 PM

Page 22


By the time he was in his late twenties, the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe had a reputation for being a dangerous atheist. His most famous play, Doctor Faustus, integrates popular performing traditions and theological debate, and while it is actually rooted in orthodox Christian debates about sin and repentance, its demonic theme may well have contributed to Marlowe’s growing reputation. At any rate, in 1593 he was arrested on charges of holding and uttering treasonable and atheistic opinions and put on trial before the Star Chamber, the judicial arm of the Privy Council. A government ‘informer’, Richard Baines, was given the task of preparing the case against him, and on the basis of hearsay evidence and some doubtfully attributable documents, presented to the court a ‘Note concerning the opinion of one Christopher Marly [sic] concerning his damnable judgment of religion and scorn of Gods word’, which accused him, among other things, of voicing the beliefs [t]hat Moses was but a juggler and that one Heriots, being Sir W. Raleigh’s man, can do more than he. That Moses made the Jews to travel forty years in the wilderness, which journey might have been done in less than one year, ere they came to the promised land, to the intent that those who were privy to most of his subtleties might perish, and so an everlasting superstition remain in the hearts of the people. That the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe. That it was an easy matter for Moses, being brought up in all the arts of the Egyptians, to abuse the Jews, being a rude and gross people. That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest.88

Baines is not the most credible of witnesses: it is not certain that Marlowe expressed any of these opinions, even in his cups. But the point is that these blasphemies are thinkable, even for post-Reformation Christians. The patriarchal prophet is compared unfavourably to a juggler in the household of a contemporary nobleman.89 Like Evans and Heller, Marlowe (or Baines’ version of Marlowe) is impressed with ‘the arts of the Egyptians’ and attributes much of Moses’ skill to having learned his conjuring from them. Two further points attributed to Marlowe suggest just how dangerous all this thinking could be – where it could lead to. Christ himself becomes implicated – not as a trickster but as a bastard, and Mary his mother is accused of whoredom – a different kind of ‘juggling’ in Renaissance slang. Even more damaging is the conclusion that these conjuring tricks are all in the service of political and ideological manipulation. Moses led the children of Israel into the wilderness because he needed to wait for all those who knew the secrets of his conjuring to perish: only then would he be able to found the nation of priest-rulers who could rely on the superstition of the people to act as an instrument of their own oppression.

22

Chapter 02.qxd

4/2/07

6:32 PM

Page 23


‘The first beginning of religion was’, Marlowe damningly suggests, ‘to keep men in awe’. Marlowe was never convicted of atheism: he died, in suspicious circumstances, knifed to death in a Deptford tavern by one of Elizabeth’s government agents.

The early church: Hippolytus’ Philosophumena and Simon the Magician Marlowe turned the orthodox dichotomy on its head, casting Moses, rather than Pharaoh’s magicians, as the ‘juggler’. But this polemic dichotomy between the true and the false miracle worker, in which the latter is equated with a street conjuror, goes back into the roots of the Christian Church. In the third century A.D., Hippolytus, Bishop, Saint and Martyr and one of the fathers of the early Christian Church, describes in detail many of the deceptions practised by false magicians of the early centuries of the Christian era. And he (i.e. the magician) taking some paper, orders the enquirer to write down what it is he wishes to enquire of the daemons. Then he having folded up that paper and given it to the boy, sends it away to be burned, so that the smoke carrying the letters may go hence to the daemons. But while the boy is doing what he is commanded, he first tears off equal parts of the paper, and on some other parts of it he pretends that the daemons write in Hebrew letters. Then having offered up the Egyptian magician’s incense called Cyphi, he scatters these pieces of paper over the offering…90

This is the beginning of a long and involved description of a conjuring trick in which the false magician – a pagan or a heretic: it is not always clear which – manipulates the uneducated masses, tricking them into a belief in his supernatural powers by a sequence of misdirections, substitutions, scientific cheats, and sleights of hand. The complex routine which Hippolytus describes is one in which this magician convinces the crowd that he can predict their questions, and communicate with – and control – spirits and daemons. He substitutes one piece of paper for another, appears to burn the ‘message’ to the daemons, but later glimpses the writing by secretly applying a chemical solution of copperas (sulphate of iron) to its ashes. He creates a disturbance amongst the spectators to distract them from seeing his secret actions, he produces the dramatic off-stage sound effect of thunder by rolling large stones over wooden planks, and he primes his assistant to speak in the voices of daemons, giving answers to questions whose content (or so it seems) he cannot possibly know. Once more the copperas comes in useful, as a secret ink which – at the right moment – displays the answers to the questions on what seemed to be blank paper… Hippolytus warms to his theme, exposing other tricks of conjurors: plunging their hand unscathed into boiling water is effected by preparing it first with

23

Chapter 02.qxd

4/2/07

6:32 PM

Page 24


vinegar and soda so that it bubbles at a temperature well below boiling point. Conjuring up spirit visions in bowls of water is achieved by carefully preparing both the vessels and the room in which they are viewed. Smoke and mirrors allow the conjuror to bring the moon and stars into the room. The appearance of a fiery daemon in the air is managed by the more gruesome method of having an accomplice coat a bird – a hawk or a kite – with tar, set fire to it, and let it go. And the bird scared by the flame is carried into the height and makes very speedy flight. Seeing which, the fools hide themselves as if they had beheld something divine. But the winged one whirled about by the fire, is borne whither it may chance and burns down now houses and now farm-buildings. Such is the prescience of magicians.91

The dry contempt of the last sentence is characteristic of Hippolytus’ attitude not only towards these magicians, but towards all purveyors of heresies. But for Hippolytus, as for many of the church fathers, magicians posed a particular problem since they claimed precisely the kind of supernatural power which was so central to the church’s hold over the popular imagination: the power to perform miracles. It was essential for the early church to assert and maintain an absolute distinction between the truth of the Christian miracle worker and the falsehood of the pagan magician or sorcerer. The ‘unmasking’ that Hippolytus is undertaking here – his insistence that the pagan wonder-workers are merely frauds, whose effects can be explained away in purely rational terms, and in terms of deliberate deception practised on a gullible public, is part of a battle for the very survival of the early church. He also, clearly, enjoys what he is doing. Showing the audience how it is done is a pleasure as well as a duty – despite the inevitable and predictable misgivings about the dangers of publishing such knowledge: These contrivances I shrank from setting out in the book, seeing that some ill-doer taking hints from them might attempt (to practise) them. But now the care of many young men capable of salvation has persuaded me to teach and declare them for the sake of protection (against them). For as one will use them for the teaching of evil, so another, by learning them will be protected (against them) and the magicians, corruptors of life as they are, will be ashamed to practise the art. But learning that the same (tricks) have been taught beforehand, they will perhaps be hindered in their foolishness.92

Hippolytus’s attack on the magicians is usually dated at about 220 A.D. Certainly, the mention of apparently recently having taken responsibility for the ‘care of many young men’ suggests that he is writing soon after he has been elected one of two ‘Bishops of Rome’ in 218 A.D. – in a bitter schism which saw

24

Chapter 02.qxd

4/2/07

6:32 PM

Page 25


the papacy split, and a prolonged rivalry between himself and other claimants to the papal throne. It is in this context that he writes, in Greek, the Philosophumena, the ‘Refutation of all Heresies’ which will become his most influential work. It is a long and systematic theological argument in which he attempts to demonstrate that the various current Christian heresies which so concerned the early church, can be traced back to their roots in false pagan philosophies. In it he catalogues and classifies the various philosophers of the classical Greek world, dividing them in to natural philosophers, ethicists, dialecticians etc. He surveys their works in order to show where they deviate from teachings of the true church, discrediting them where possible or showing how any truths they happen to have stumbled upon are mere forerunners of the fuller truths of the Christian message. It is a careful work of scholarship in which he painstakingly untangles what philosophers actually said from what was attributed to them by later interpreters. Thus he chronicles previous debates about whether Plato believed there to be one God, or ‘many Gods without limitation’.93 He writes mainly about the ancient Greeks, but also includes ‘Brachmans’ (sic) of India and the Druids of the Celts. In Book IV he takes a particular swipe at ‘the diviners and magicians’ – which include not only the conjurors we have just encountered but also astrologers, ‘metoposcopists’ (who tell a man’s character or fortune from his face), mathematicians, star diviners and neo-Pythagoreans. More importantly, surveying the current corpus of beliefs and heresies, he attempts to winnow out the true from the false in contemporary religious teaching. He critiques the various writers and teachers of the third century – teachers such as Simon Magus, Valentinus, Basilides, Saturnilus, and sects such as the Sethians, the Naassenes and the Docetists. This, we should not forget, was at a time when the nature of Christian belief was intensely controversial. As a result the church itself was undergoing frequent splits and schisms: as we have already seen, Hippolytus himself played an important part in these controversies. The debates and political manoeuvrings of the early church amounted to a protracted ideological battle for the soul of Christendom itself. Early Christianity was not a single body of stated and agreed knowledge but a site of ongoing dialectics in which certain beliefs eventually came to predominate over others. The various belief systems which the dominant group within the church Fathers came to denounce as heresies included Arianism (which asserted that Christ was not coequal with God); Gnosticism (which held that man might be liberated by his own knowledge); Pelagianism (which denied original sin); Nestorianism (according to which Christ had two natures: one moral, one divine); and Monophysitism (which denied the humanity of Christ). In Hippolytus, the demonizing of those who hold or promote heretical beliefs is often associated with the concept of ‘magic’. Of these figures, the most

25

Chapter 02.qxd

4/2/07

6:32 PM

Page 26


prominent, and the one most remembered by the church in later years, was Simon Magus – Simon the Magician. Simon was a ‘man who had practised sorcery in the city and amazed all the people of Samaria’. This is how we first come across him, in the Acts of the Apostles,94 which was probably written between 63 and 70 A.D. Here he is credited with having had a great following in Samaria. ‘They followed him because he had amazed them for a long time with his magic’.95 He converts to Christianity and is baptized by Philip, but in seeing the miracles of the Apostles Peter and John, ‘he offered them money and said “Give me also this ability so that everyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.” Peter answered “May your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money. You have no part or share in this ministry because your heart is not right before God.”’96 Simon Magus, then, is a fringe figure: someone who begins as an outsider, a competitor to the Christian tradition. The apparent wonders which he performs in Samaria before conversion are contrasted with the true miracles of the Apostles. He practises ‘sorcery’ and ‘magic’. Yet he does convert – but only to be shown up even more sharply for the opportunist that he is. His attempt to buy the power of the Holy Spirit is inappropriate (to the point of damnation) and he is expelled from the ministry because ‘his heart is not right before God’. Already tinged with the charge of charlatanism and trickery, he is seen to be in it for all the wrong reasons, even when in the presence of the true spirit. He is the archetype of the false magician – the conjuror as trickster, fraudster, powertripper and profiteer. In the Middle Ages and early modern period, his name later gives rise to the English word ‘simony’, meaning the buying and selling of ecclesiastical privileges such as pardons and benefices. If Simon appears in the canonical Acts of the Apostles, the earliest of the New Testament texts, written about 30 to 40 years after the crucifixion, he also appears in the second-century Acts of Peter, where his story is elaborated in some detail. The Acts of Peter is one of the five Apocryphal books of Acts (the others are Paul, John, Andrew and Thomas) excluded, along with additional Gospels and Epistles, from the New Testament canon – which was established by various Councils in the first few centuries of the history of the Christian Church. The Apocryphal Acts are composed partly of stories which parallel and echo or develop the stories in the canonical Acts of the Apostles; partly of material apparently derived from contemporary oral tradition; and partly of romantic additions. The most recent and authoritative editor of the The Acts of Peter says: As with many other apocryphal Acts, it is the product of popular piety. Such literature seems to have been influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the unorthodox teachings of the day, and this influence was responsible for prejudicing the early fathers against the work. More significant, perhaps, is that the use of these Acts by heretics ensured its removal from official church lists.97

26

Chapter 02.qxd

4/2/07

6:32 PM

Page 27


But although Gnostics and other heretical sects may have made use of The Acts of Peter, and may even have influenced its composition through their part in ‘popular piety’, the Acts is not a Gnostic text. Indeed, Simon Magus – who is elsewhere credited by the church Fathers as being one of the main teachers of Gnosticism (accounts of his teachings are given in works by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus98) is once more represented as evil personified. Although it never made it into the canon of scripture, the Acts of Peter is a fine folkloric tale of the battle between Good (represented by Saint Peter himself) and Evil (represented by Simon). Much of the Acts of Peter is, in fact, an account of the contest between Simon Magus and [Simon] Peter for the heart and soul of Rome itself. The writer of the Acts of Peter repeatedly insists that Simon Magus is a fake. He manages to fool some of the people of Rome but ‘they that were firm in the faith derided him. For in dining chambers he made certain spirits enter in, which were only an appearance, and not existing in truth.’99 The rivalry between Simon Magus and Peter eventually takes the form of a public competition in which Simon claims he will prove his own power by flying above the city. And already on the morrow a great multitude assembled at the Sacred Way to see him flying. And Peter came unto the place, having seen a vision (or, to see the sight), that he might convict him in this also… So then this man standing on an high place beheld Peter and began to say: Peter, at this time when I am going up before all this people that behold me, I say unto thee: If thy God is able, whom the Jews put to death, and stoned you that were chosen of him, let him show that faith in him is faith in God, and let it appear at this time, if it be worthy of God. For I, ascending up, will show myself unto all this multitude, who I am. And behold when he was lifted up on high, and all beheld him raised up above all Rome and the temples thereof and the mountains, the faithful looked toward Peter. And Peter seeing the strangeness of the sight cried unto the Lord Jesus Christ: If thou suffer this man to accomplish that which he hath set about, now will all they that have believed on thee be offended, and the signs and wonders which thou hast given them through me will not be believed: hasten thy grace, O Lord, and let him fall from the height and be disabled; and let him not die but be brought to nought, and break his leg in three places. And he fell from the height and brake his leg in three places. Then every man cast stones at him and went away home, and thenceforth believed Peter.100

Simon is a deeply ambiguous figure in Christian folklore. A shadowy figure in the canonical texts, he comes into his own in the Apocrypha. But there and elsewhere there are so many stories, and such different stories, told about him that it seems likely that the historical Simon (for whose existence there is

27

Chapter 02.qxd

4/2/07

6:32 PM

Page 28


substantial evidence) may have transmuted, in legend, into an amalgam of several figures and narrative patterns from the period. Many of the stories about him derive from the turbulent days of the early church, when conflicting sects struggled for power – or for survival. Amongst these was the Gnostic sect of Simonianism – which revered Simon as a God-prophet equal to Jesus himself, and which wove about him a powerful, surreal and erotic mythology. In the beginning from the First God (who is held to be Simon himself) leaped forth the First Thought. She created the angels and powers, the world, and man, but was afterward held captive by the powers, and passing through different human bodies finally became manifest in a prostitute. Her name was Helen. To free her, Simon, the First God, appeared as a man. He came also to offer salvation to men.101

The accepted Roman accounts, on the contrary, either demonize him as ‘the angel of satan’,102 or else dismiss him as a mountebank and a charlatan, or both. Here, Simon, the conjuror, becomes the abjected Other. But taken as a whole, Simon is a much more complex – and for many Christians a deeply disturbing – figure who haunts the origins of orthodox belief.

‘A spurious piece of legerdemain’: the Reformation From its earliest days, then, Christian orthodoxy has tended to identify ‘juggling’ with evil and with the Devil. The kind of magic which involves invoking spirits, and the kind which involves trickery are both regarded with suspicion: both are the domain of the Father of Lies. And if the past-tense miracles of scriptural and apocryphal narrative were problematic in one sense for the Renaissance, the present-tense ‘miracles’ of liturgical practice have repeatedly posed problems of another kind. For postReformation Europe in particular, the question of the relationship between magic-making and true religion was a vexed one. Keith Thomas has famously charted the relationship between Religion and the Decline of Magic, but within the cultural practices of religious communities themselves the relation between ritual and magic was loaded with political meanings. Thus, in the sixteenth century, Protestantism ‘presented itself as an attempt to take the magical elements out of religion’.103 In order to do this, it simultaneously characterized the opposition as superstitious, obsessed with endowing ‘physical objects with supernatural qualities by special formulae of consecration and exorcism’.104 Thus, ‘magic’ became, in a theological context, a dirty word and one of the most potent and efficacious insults which had been flung at the Catholic Church at the time of the European Reformation was the charge that, as Calvin said, Catholics saw the Eucharist as a kind of magical incantation or magic trick – itself a form of idolatry. The insult stuck: in the early eighteenth century

28

Chapter 02.qxd

4/2/07

6:32 PM

Page 29


non-conformist polemicists such as Daniel Defoe were still condemning Catholicism as ‘one entire system of anti-Christian magic’.105 Alizon Brunning sums up the way in which the …association of the trickster figure with Catholic priests has a long heritage in anti-Catholic polemic. According to Reformers ‘Protestant derogation of the mass as play made the priest a juggler’; the transubstantiation of the Eucharist could never really happen so priests were therefore actors and conjurors who pretended or cheated their audience in a form of make believe. As Keith Thomas points out, ‘What was transubstantiation but a spurious piece of legerdemain… the pretence of a power plainly magical, of changing the elements in such a sort as all the magicians of Pharaoh could never do, nor had the face to attempt the like, it being so beyond all credibility.’ In A Discourse Concerning the Sacrament of the Lordes Supper [c1550] Nicholas Udall attacks ‘the iugling sleytes of the Romish Babylon’ and, as Axton suggests, maintains that ‘Christ is no iugler neither doth he mock or daly with our senses… such iugling castes as the adversaries would have here in the matter of the sacrament.’ The anxiety about the possibility of material transformation becomes effaced and ameliorated when attackers resort to the more comforting accusation that such ritual is simply a performative act without material efficacy. Theatre, as Paul Whitfield White points out, had become ‘a metaphor to expose the hypocrisy, deceitfulness and spiritual emptiness of the wicked usually associated with Roman Catholicism.’106

Which takes us back to Christopher Marlowe and his claim that ‘Moses was a juggler’. Later, according to his accuser Baines, Marlowe goes on to say something even more shocking: ‘That if there be any God or any good religion, then it is in the Papists’ because the service of God is performed with more ceremonies, as elevation of the mass, organs, singing-men, shaven crowns, etc. That all Protestants are hypocritical asses.’107 Marlowe overturns all the expected norms of conventional Protestant English thought – not only by asserting a preference for the Catholic rite, but because of the grounds of this preference. He rejects the notion of deep spiritual truth in favour of the theatrical pleasures of the conjuring tricks themselves. Marlowe’s sensibility – or the sensibility attributed to him – is shockingly postmodern when it comes to religion. The reality is that of the surface, the value of the ritual is in its performativity. Traditional Christian attitudes towards conjurers are deeply ingrained. They involve a strict (if moveable) binary opposition between the true miracle worker and the false ‘magician’, or ‘sorcerer’. In insisting on such a binary opposition the Church is playing for high stakes, since the false miracle workers represent possible alternative traditions to Christianity itself! But anthropological studies of shamanism from the nineteenth century onwards suggest a different model,

29

Chapter 02.qxd

4/2/07

6:32 PM

Page 30


one in which performativity and efficacy are not opposed but complementary, and in which ‘belief ’ takes a subordinate place to both. It is this towards which Marlowe gestures so subversively in his scandalous preference for the Catholic rite. If there is ‘any God or any good religion’ then it is to be found in the showman rather than the shaman – and specifically in the juggling showmanship of the Catholic mass. This is heresy indeed.

30

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 31

Chapter Three

‘Fire and faggot to burn the witch’? Conjuring between belief and unbelief in early modern England Jugling is now become common Samuel Rid108

Efficacy and entertainment: conjuring devils on the early modern stage In Chapter One we looked at questions of origins and the roots of performance in both ‘magical’ (or shamanic) and mimetic practices. In early modern England these two traditions continued to play a part in defining the role of the juggler, or practitioner of legerdemain. On the one hand, witchcraft beliefs were still prevalent, and ‘real’ magic a feature of everyday reality in the beliefs of many people. On the other hand, the sixteenth-century street conjuror or illusionist saw the rise of a form of popular entertainment which would both compete with and incorporate his own form of wonder-working, as jugglers’ routines became incorporated with increasing frequency into the dramas of the early modern stage. Indeed, the evolving professional theatre – in the process of inventing its own kind of ‘magic’ – was fascinated with the idea of magic in the folkloric sense. Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights produced scores of plays about witchcraft and about ghosts, fairies and magicians. Of course, plays from the Middle Ages onwards contain a range of magical illusions, or references to magical illusions, of one kind or another. Medieval mystery plays, for example, featured the staff/serpent transformation routine in the Wakefield cycle play of Pharaoh, where Moses changes his staff into a serpent and back again.109 But the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre saw a dramatic increase in the use of illusions on stage, and a growing interest in magic that is not confined to Biblical miracles.110 On a symbolic level the magician is in many ways a prototypical, if paradoxical, Renaissance figure. He is a representative of the new world of learning of Renaissance culture, and Italian neo-Platonism. He is also, inevitably, a traditional kind of folk devil, a dark figure dabbling in ‘unlawful things… more than heavenly power permits’.111 His occult power becomes a metaphor for the ambiguous state of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, in the period. Poised ambivalently between medieval and modern ways of thinking, between scientific rationalism and superstitious folk belief, the magician is both humanly

31

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 32


flawed and exceptionally powerful in his control over the forces of nature – a potential hero or, like Icarus, a figure doomed by his pride to attempt to soar too near the sun and, overreaching himself, plummet to his destruction. He embodies ‘the paradox of superhuman power that is humanly limited’.112 He is also, as far as the audience is concerned, a star attraction. And so, when Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy bites out his tongue and offers it to the King; when the brazen head speaks in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; when Ariel makes the banquet disappear in The Tempest; when the tapers light themselves onstage in A Game At Chess – all these are examples of more or less elaborate conjuring tricks to charm an audience. The spectators who come to see plays such as Doctor Faustus, or The Tempest, or Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay are, among other things, coming to see the wonders and illusions of the fairground jugglers and practitioners of legerdemain translated into the theatre. For an essential dimension of the theatrical figure of the magician in the play is his physical presence, there on the stage, embodied in an actor, before the very eyes of an audience. This mixture of magic and theatre was a powerful combination. At Exeter in the early seventeenth century (the exact date is not clear) a company of travelling players were presenting a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. It is a play about dabbling in the dark arts: Faustus, the Renaissance intellectual, having apparently mastered most of the legitimate knowledge of his culture, begins to explore the forbidden knowledge of the occult. The Devil sends his messenger Mephistophilis to offer Faustus a deal: all the worldly power and knowledge he desires in exchange for his soul. Faustus accepts his offer – and is eventually damned. The play gives actors plenty of opportunity for performing some light-hearted conjuring tricks and theatrical illusions, but it also has scenes in which Faustus performs rituals to conjure up devils and spirits. A contemporary manuscript source tells of [c]ertain players at Exeter acting upon the stage the tragical story of Doctor Faustus the conjurer; as a certain number of Devils kept every one his circle there, and as Faustus was busy in his magical invocations, on a sudden they were all dashed, every one harkening other in the ear; for they were all persuaded there was one devil too many amongst them; and so after a little pause desired the people to pardon them, they could go no further with this matter; the people also understanding the thing as it was, every man hastened to be first out of doors. The players (as I have heard it) contrary to their custom, spending the night in reading and in prayer got them out of town the next morning.113

This anecdote is a particularly resonant one in the history of stage conjuring because it raises a particularly disturbing possibility: that in an age of belief

32

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 33

FIRE AND FAGGOT TO BURN THE WITCH

in – and fear of – ‘real’ magic, the theatrical performance of magic might turn out to be too realistic. In an age in which beliefs in witchcraft and devil worship were widespread in all levels of society throughout Europe, women or men who were accused of practising magic in this sense were in genuine danger of being punished by death. The Exeter performance of Doctor Faustus seems to indicate a fault line: a point at which – for those involved in it – the fictional performance turns, terrifyingly, into reality. Writers on magic have tended to stress the potential for this sort of misunderstanding of early conjuring acts. Thomas Frost, whose Lives of the Conjurors is one of the seminal books on the history of conjuring, argued that [t]he spread of the Reformation in northern and central Europe had no effect in rendering the unhappy wight who was accused of sorcery less liable to be imprisoned and exposed in the pillory, happy if he escaped the stake and faggot. The statutes of Henry VIII against conjuration, witchcraft, false prophecies, and demolition of crosses provided the penalty of death for such offences… It would have been easy for conjurors to have avoided bringing themselves under the operation of this law, if the people had been less ignorant, and therefore less accessible to the suggestions of superstition. But there were few persons in those days who could see the simplest conjuring trick performed without a sensation of awe mingling with their wonder, and there was in every assembly some weak-minded person ready to declare that such things could be done only by the aid of the devil.114

More recently, Milbourne Christopher, in his Illustrated History of Magic, one of the standard books on the subject, argues that when higher church authorities launched their long, ruthless campaign against witchcraft, devil worship and sorcery, [c]onjurors, who claimed no demonic powers, suffered along with other innocent victims… After performing in Padua and Mantua, Italy, a man named Reatius was seized and tortured until he admitted he produced his deceptions with sleight of hand and the help of confederates.115

The issue, once more, is that of the potential slippage between one kind of ‘magic’ and another, between what was termed in the previous chapter efficacy and entertainment. We have already suggested that it is not possible to chart a simple linear progression from ‘primitive’ cultures, who believe in magic-asefficacy, through to ‘sophisticated’ ones (like our own?) who engage with magic only on the level of entertainment. The entertainment/efficacy braid is a dynamic, not a static, feature of performance. In order to examine, then, the way that that braid looked in a particular culture, let us look in more detail at the

33

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 34


complex net of meanings and beliefs which traverses the notion of ‘conjuring’ in the early modern period: at the professional entertainers, the practitioners of legerdemain; at their relationship to the wider world of popular entertainment; and to the broader understandings of the notions of magic and knowledge (both permitted and forbidden) against which both of these played out their parts.

Brandon and the pigeon We should begin with the status of the conjuror (or ‘juggler’, more precisely) in early modern England. In fact, it is not all that easy to find a starting point. Accounts of early English ‘juggling’ acts are comparatively few and far between: few details have survived. By definition, there is something ephemeral about the very nature of popular culture, especially in the ages before mechanical reproduction and mass media. The names of leading writers, painters, composers often echo down through the years: the names of leading acrobats, jugglers and trapeze artists less frequently. Once magic becomes big business, or at least a big part of show business in the mid-nineteenth century and begins to make use of the machinery of advertising and publicity (newspaper reviews, photographs, illustrated posters and engravings), it becomes much easier to identify and study the careers of individual magicians. Indeed, many of the greatest magicians of the nineteenth century, performers such as Professor Anderson, Maskelyne and Robert-Houdin, were skilled self-publicists as well as skilled conjurors, and their cultural footprints are comparatively easy to spot and to follow. But the further back we look the harder it is to trace individual performers of stage magic, or to understand what their performances might have been like. Municipal records give some facts and figures – where a juggler performed, and when, and how much he was paid etc. – but it is hard to build up a picture of their actual acts. Nonetheless, some traces exist. The earliest individual British performer for whom we have a definite record was a man called Brandon, who achieved quite a degree of fame in the reign of Henry VIII. Comparatively little is known about his life, although Philip Butterworth has done some splendid work in piecing together what there is to be found out about ‘the King’s Juggler’, as Brandon was known.116 It is not clear quite what the role of King’s Juggler involved, although Brandon seems to have enjoyed a similar status to some of the wellknown licensed fools of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, men like Richard Tarlton or Will Kemp, who maintained careers as freelance performers while simultaneously enjoying royal or aristocratic patronage.117 No contemporary records exist which can give us an extended sense of what Brandon’s actual performances might have been like or what sort of tricks he performed. We do, however, have a few fragmentary references from near-contemporary sources. For example, Reginald Scot, writing a few years after Brandon’s death, gives the

34

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 35


following vivid account of one of his tricks which seems to have passed into Elizabethan folklore: What wondering and admiration was there at Brandon the juggler, who painted on the wall the picture of a dove, and seeing a pigeon sitting on the top of a house, said to the King; Lo now your grace shall see what a juggler can do, if he be his crafts master; and then pricked the picture with a knife so hard and so often, and with so effectua[…] words, as the pigeon fel down from the top of the house stark dead. I need not write any further circumstance to shew how the matter was taken, what wondering was thereat, how he was prohibited to use that feat any further, lest he should imploy it in any other kind of murther, as though he, whose picture soever he had pricked, must needs have died, and so the life of all men in the hands of a juggler: as is now supposed to be in the hands & wils of witches. This story is, untill the day of the writing hereof, in fresh remembrance, and of the most part beleeved as canonicall, as are all the fables of witches: but when you are taught the feat or sleight (the secrecy and sorcery of the matter being bewraied, and discovered) you will think it a mockery, and simple illusion. To interpret unto you the revelation of this mysterie; so it is, that the poor pigeon was before in the hands of the juggler, into whom he had thrust a dramme of Nux vomica, or some other such poison, which to the nature of the bird was so extream a venome, as after the receipt thereof it could not live above the space of half an hour, and being let lose after the medicine ministred· she alwaies resorted to the top of the next house: which she will the rather do, if there be any pigeons already sitting there, and (as it is already said) after a short space falleth downe, either stark dead, or greatly astonied. But in the mean time the juggler used words of art, partly to protract the time, and partly to gain credit and admiration of the beholders. If this or the like feat should be done by an old woman, every body would cry out for fire and faggot to burn the witch.118

One of the interesting things about Brandon’s trick is how much it looks like a piece of ‘real’ sorcery. Brandon is challenging his royal audience with the possibility that he has killed a pigeon by remote magic: he stabs the picture of the bird, which is painted on the wall, and as a result (or so it seems) a real pigeon, sitting on a nearby roof falls dead. It is the technique of the witch, of the voodoo priest: violence enacted on the doll affects the person in real life. In fact, Scot explains, this was simply an example of what he calls ‘private Confederacie’ – by which he means secret preparation beforehand: Brandon had actually poisoned the bird earlier and timed his trick to coincide with the working of the poison. It is an effective (if rather cruel) illusion by a licensed professional entertainer. Perhaps, indeed, it was too effective: his audience could not guess the secret and as a result Brandon was prohibited by the King from ever performing it

35

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 36


again ‘lest he should imploy it in any other kind of murther, as though he, whose picture soever he had pricked, must needs have died, and so the life of all men in the hands of a juggler’. There seems to be a genuine fear on Henry’s part that such magic might get out of hand. For Brandon the punishment might have been a comparatively small price to pay for the way in which the story would have enhanced his reputation: indeed the additional publicity and the attribution to him of supernatural powers might well have been very good for his career. There is, however, a potential downside, as Scot’s ominous last words indicate: ‘If this or the like feat should be done by an old woman, every body would cry out for fire and faggot to burn the witch.’119 Scot is in no doubt that in his society the relationship between playing at being a magician and actually being thought to be a magician is an unstable and potentially dangerous one. In fact his whole book, the Discovery of Witchcraft, which we look at in more detail presently, is aimed at clarifying the relationship between different kinds of ‘conjuring’. But how true is it that the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century juggler, living in a time of witchcraft persecution, was himself in danger of being persecuted as a sorcerer? The history of conjuring certainly abounds with stories that suggest that it might be true. What may be less expected is how fragile this evidence turns out to be. Thomas Frost, for example, tells us that Scot speaks of ‘a juggler [who] was, in the reign of Elizabeth, condemned as a wizard, and would have been pilloried but for the interposition of the Earl of Leicester’.120 On closer examination, though, this turns out to be ‘T.E., Master of art, and practiser both of physick, and also in times past, of certaine vaine sciences’: not a street entertainer at all, but a doctor who, Faustus-like, seems to have got hold of the wrong books and to have started claiming occult powers. And while T.E. now admits that ‘among all those famous and noted practisers, that I have beene conversant withall these xxvi. yeares, I could never see any matter of truth to be done in those wicked sciences, but onely meere cousenings and illusions’,121 his cozening was that of the practitioner of folk magic rather than that of the entertainer.122 Many of the other stories which appear to show conjurors being taken for wizards turn out to be similarly ambiguous. For example Girolamo Scoto – who appears in Johnson’s Volpone as ‘Scoto of Mantua’, a mountebank and travelling snake-oil salesman – was in real life a knight and a diplomat, working at the courts of, among others, the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II. He was also a celebrated amateur ‘juggler’ – specializing, as far as we can tell, in card tricks, and with enough of a reputation that Thomas Nashe, in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), talks of ‘Scoto, that did the juggling tricks before the Queen’ (i.e. Elizabeth I) when he visited England between 1576 and 1583.123 At one point, though, Girolamo Scoto’s career runs into the kind of trouble that Reginald Scot might have predicted for the illusionist in an age of witch-hunters: he finds

36

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 37


himself accused of sorcery proper. His accuser was Anna of Saxony, wife of Count Palatine John Casimir. She was charged with committing adultery with a young knight, Ulrich von Liechtenstein; in her defence she maintained that she had been bewitched by Scoto, who entered her room by magic carrying a cross bound with wire. Scoto, she claimed, ordered the wire to unravel and wrap itself round her body, binding her tightly so that she could not resist his amorous advances. Later he tired of her, she claimed, and fled with her most precious jewels, leaving her in the power of Ulrich. The juggler is accused of being a wizard. Yet, although the story might illustrate a cultural nervousness about the status of the ‘juggler’, it has, for Scoto at least, a happy ending: not even the most credulous prosecutor seemed impressed: no charges were brought against Scoto, while Anna and her lover were imprisoned for life.124 Similarly, tales of accusations of sorcery surround the legendary William Banks,125 who together with his bay horse, Morocco, was one of the great celebrities of Elizabethan and Jacobean popular culture. As Edwin Dawes observes, ‘there is scarcely a humorous writer between 1590 and 1620 who does not mention them’.126 Among those who do are Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Nashe.127 Morocco performed a variety of tricks which the credulous might ascribe to magic powers. Samuel Rid, writing in 1612, describes their performance: Such a one is at this day in London; his master will say ‘Sirra, here be diverse gentlemen, that have lost diverse things, and they hear say that thou canst tell them tidings of them where they are. If thou canst, prithee show thy cunning and tell them.’ Then hurls he down a handkercher or a glove that he had taken from the parties before, and bids him give it the right owner, which the horse presently doth. And many other feats this horse doth… which not one among a thousand perceives how they are done, nor how he is brought to learn the same.128

Rid, whose book is about juggling tricks, is perfectly well aware that the trick is done through subtle signals between master and horse: As for example, his master will ask him how many people there are in the room: the horse will paw with his foot so many times as there are people. And mark the eye of the horse is always on his master, and as his master moves, so goes he or stands still… … And note that that the horse will paw an hundred times together, until he sees his master stir: and note also that nothing can be done, but his master must first know, and then his master knowing, the horse is ruled by him by signs.129

But if the rationalist is clear how the trick was done, it seems that there may still be room for ambiguity. We get a hint of this in a fictional dialogue published

37

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 38


by ‘John Dando’ and ‘Harry Runt’ – purportedly ostlers at the inn where they were staying who are recording a ‘conversation’ which they overheard between the horse and his master. Maroccus Extaticus. Or, Bankes’ Bay Horse in a Trance takes the showman and his horse and makes them the mouthpieces for a satirical Discourse set downe in a merry Dialogue, between Bankes and his beast: Anatomizing some abuses and bad trickes of this age.130 The dialogue itself, which is a fairly standard Elizabethan satire on the low morals of London, and the goings-on in its inns and brothels, treats the idea of the talking horse as perfectly normal. At one point in the course of their conversation, though, the fictional Banks asks Morocco if the horse bears a grudge against ‘that drabbe that the last daie when shee sawe thee heere doo thy trickes, sayd thou wert a deuill & I a coniurer?’131 The horse’s reply is nonchalant: Morocco does not seem particularly bothered by the prostitute’s outburst. The question remains, though: does this piece of fictional dialogue point towards a real-life problem for the Elizabethan juggler and his horse? On the surface, there are elements of the legend which suggest that it might have done: contemporary sources tell how Banks and Morocco were accused of sorcery – and even executed for it – while touring on the continental mainland. Thomas Morton, for example, recounts an anecdote… …which Banks told me at Frankfurt, from his own experience in France among the Capuchins, by whom he was brought into suspicion of magic because of the strange feats which his horse Morocco played.132

The context and the tone of the story, though, both suggest that it should be taken with a degree of scepticism. The tale is one which ends up very much to Banks’s own advantage, as he turns the tables on his accusers. He orders Morocco ‘to seek out one in the press of people who had a crucifix on his hat; which done, he bade him kneel down unto it, and not that only but also to rise up again and to kiss it.’ Morocco, that is to say, performs a version of his usual routine and, in the process, proves them both innocent of sorcery since ‘the devil had no power to come near the cross’.133 The story is repeated by Morton (in the context of an anti-Catholic polemic) but it originates with Banks himself. And, like Brandon with his pigeon, Banks comes out of it with his reputation greatly enhanced. Not only is he skilful enough to pass for a real sorcerer in the first place, he is then witty enough to outsmart the superstitious (Papist) foreigners, to play them at their own game and prove that he is innocent after all. It all sounds rather more like an effective piece of PR than evidence of any real accusation of sorcery. It may be that these early jugglers were – within their own cultural constraints – every bit as adept at publicity as their nineteenth and twentieth successors after all. The story of Banks, Morocco and the French Capuchins, then, is dubious. The more melodramatic version of the legend – in which the juggler and his

38

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 39


innocent horse were both burned at the stake as sorcerers – is simply false. It originates, as far as we can tell, in Ben Jonson’s account: Old Banks the juggler, our Pythagoras, Grave tutor to the learned horse. Both which, Being, beyond sea, burned for one witch…134

in his poem ‘On The Famous Voyage’. But once more, Banks and Morocco are actually characters in a satirical fantasy: ‘On the Famous Voyage’ is a mockheroic poem depicting a ‘Voyage’ through the ditches, sewers and waterways of London. Banks and Morocco appear (not even as themselves, but in their new re-incarnation, ‘Their spirits transmigrated to a cat’!) only as cartoon characters in a surreal and nightmarish landscape: it is all a joke, and Banks and Morocco were both alive and well when the poem was written and published.135 In fact, what is a little surprising about conjuring in the early modern period is how very few substantiated examples we find of jugglers falling foul of the laws against witchcraft. Most of those which can be checked out lead to a dead end: law cases collapse, anecdotes turn out to be of dubious provenance, or less conclusive than they first seemed. Thomas Frost’s assertion that ‘there were few persons in those days who could see the simplest conjuring trick performed without a sensation of awe mingling with their wonder’ may have some truth in it, and there may well have been the occasional onlooker who, like the fictional prostitute in Maroccus Extaticus was ‘ready to declare that such things could be done only by the aid of the devil’.136 But the significant point is that few of these accusations seem to have been taken particularly seriously by the authorities – either in Britain or on the continental mainland. Even Frost admits that ‘from the accession of James I., in the first year of whose reign sorcery was made a capital offence none of the professors of the Black Art [i.e. jugglers] seem to have suffered the penalty’.137 The early modern juggler, then, might not, after all, have operated in the continual shadow of the gallows or the stake. This is not to say that those areas of ambiguity, the cultural tensions between magic as entertainment and magic as efficacy, are irrelevant. Many people did believe fervently in witchcraft; and jugglers in fairgrounds, markets, street corners and inn yards did perform apparently miraculous illusions. We need, though, to consider further just how that braid between entertainment and efficacy might have been configured in this period – and we can see that braid in more detail by looking at some of the ways in which ‘juggling’ was written about in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: in works such as Thomas Hill’s Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions (1567), Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), Samuel Rid’s Art of Jugling (1612), and the pseudonymous138 Anatomie of Legerdemain by Hocus Pocus Junior (1634). The contemporary literature of conjuring and legerdemain

39

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 40


gives us, in many ways, a clearer perspective on juggling in the early modern period than do the scant documentary records we have of the professional entertainers themselves. Moreover, the existence of this emerging literature of juggling and legerdemain confirms a sense that there was a general interest in the topic. It also reminds us that conjuring tricks are not only the preserve of the professional conjuror: the middle-class reading public of Elizabethan and Jacobean England was able, and eager, to buy books containing instructions as to how to perform illusions for their own entertainment.

Thomas Hill Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions (1567) One of the earliest of English books about conjuring is Thomas Hill’s Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions (1567). In fact, this was, according to its author, a translation of a work ‘Written first by sundry scholars of the University of Padua’, and intended ‘for the commodity of sundry Artificers, as for the matters of pleasure, to recreate wits at vacant times.’139 The self-advertisement strikes that ambivalent tone which will become characteristic of magicians’ handbooks in years to come, simultaneously claiming the high seriousness of Italian Renaissance scholarship, and addressing itself to the popular market, ‘to recreate wits in vacant times’. Like many later magic handbooks, too, it is questionable quite how many of Hill’s tricks would actually have worked. Nonetheless, Hill promises to teach the diligent reader how, for example, ‘to stick an Iron or Steel Bodkin into the head of either Cock, Hen or Chicken’, ‘How to make letters appear of the colour of Gold, Copper, or Silver’, or To make a blown Bladder to dance and skip from place to place. To do this, put Quicksilver in a bladder, and lay the bladder in a hot place, and it will after skip from place to place without handling140

Practicality apart, some of Hill’s illusions might seem culturally somewhat risky in an age which frequently took its religious beliefs with deadly seriousness. Neither Hill’s account of ‘How to turn water into wine, a proper secret’, nor his instructions about ‘How to walk on the water, a proper secret’ seem to be particularly effective tricks. The latter involves tying wooden pattens to the feet, and a sceptical marginal note, written in a seventeenth-century hand in one extant edition, sneers ‘and if you do not sink, you shall be sure to go upon the water’.141 Even so, to use two of the key miracles of the New Testament as a basis for conjuring tricks whose purpose is simply ‘to recreate wits in vacant times’, is to play with powerful and potentially dangerous imagery.142 Conjuring tricks are not all the book has to offer, however. Readers could also learn ‘How to make Hens lay Eggs all the Winter through’ by changing their feed; ‘To make birds come to your Culver-house’ by tempting them with honeysoaked grain; and ‘To kindle fire at the Sun’ by reflecting and focusing sunlight

40

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 41


onto very small kindling, as well as recipes for toothpaste, and remedies for worms and fleas. The conjuring tricks, the folk remedies and the commonsense tips for good husbandry sit side by side in the book, undifferentiated. Hill’s modern editor describes the collection as ‘a ludicrous mixture of oldwives tales, parlour tricks that are sure to fail, and, occasionally, good advice for housewives or small farmers’143 – but this understates it. Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions also contains instructions as to ‘How to see many and diverse strange sightes in a Urinal’, procedures for testing a young woman’s virginity by burning herbs under her nose (‘and if she be corrupt she shall piss’), dubious diagnostic techniques to ‘know if a sick person shall die or not’, and a divining method ‘to find a person drowned, that hath been sought for’. At this point the miscellany moves beyond old wives’ tales and veers close to a rather different kind of magic: the kind that in some communities could get an old wife hauled before a court and accused of witchcraft. What is significant about Hill’s work is precisely its lack of differentiation between one kind of heading and another. The ease with which Hill moves from one mode to the next, from health and housekeeping tips, to illusions to amaze your friends, to snippets of folk magic, implies a world-view in which the boundaries between one kind of magic and another, between performance and medicine, between husbandry and divination are extremely permeable: the braid of entertainment and efficacy is particularly tightly woven here. Keith Thomas, in his seminal study of Religion and the Decline of Magic, has described how a residual paganism allowed ‘cunning men’ (and women) and popular magicians to make a considerable living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, selling their arts of divination, making love potions and aphrodisiacs, charming and blessing. Some of these folk magicians clearly believed in their own magical powers. Others were self-confessed impostors.’144 The boundaries may frequently become blurred between the professional village magic worker and the confidence trickster, or between the confidence trickster and the performing juggler. The jumble of ideas in Hill’s handbook of magical effects shows the blurring of these boundaries in action. Entertainment and efficacy, in Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions, look less like a braid and more like a porridge: and to this extent, Hill states a problem which later writers about magic and conjuring will have to solve.

Reginald Scot The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) We have already come across Scot as the source of the story of Brandon’s pigeon, and his ominous afterword that ‘If this or the like feat should be done by an old woman, every body would cry out for fire and faggot to burn the witch’. That sentence effectively goes to the heart of his central concerns in the book. Again, The Discovery of Witchcraft is not strictly speaking a book about conjuring in the modern sense, although like Hill’s Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions, it

41

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 42


does contain tips and instructions regarding how to perform juggler’s illusions. But in most other respects Scot’s book is the very opposite of Hill’s. Whereas Hill is content to let all kinds of material sit side by side in an undifferentiated way, Scot is absolutely concerned to draw distinctions between one kind of ‘magic’ and another. This indeed, is his whole aim – to show that many of the supposed feats of witches, wizards and other kinds of black magicians, which were fuelling the growing fears of, and reactions against, witches in the period, actually had nothing to do with occult powers. Scot concludes that witchhunting is itself a kind of bewitchment – and that [t]he common people have been so assotted and bewitched, with whatsoever poets have feigned of witchcraft, whether in earnest, in jest, or in derision; and with whatsoever loud liars and cozeners for their pleasures herein have invented, and with whatsoever tales they have heard from old doting women, or from their mothers’ maids, and with whatsoever the grandfool their ghostly father, or any other morrow mass priest had informed them; and finally with whatsoever they have swallowed up through tract of time, or through their own timorous nature or ignorant conceit, concerning these matters of hags and witches: as they have so settled their opinion and credit thereupon, that they think it heresy to doubt in any part of the matter…145

Here more than anywhere we hear the message that there is danger of confusion between the ‘juggler’ and the sorcerer – but we hear it stated in the voice of someone who does not believe in sorcery. Scot’s book is the prime example in English of a slowly rising tide of rational scepticism among sixteenth-century European Protestant writers concerning popular beliefs in the occult. It is in the tradition of those works by European Humanist intellectuals such as Montaigne and Erasmus, and early scientists such as the physician Johann Weyer, all of whom had all argued against the growing spate of European witchcraft persecutions.146 Scot’s work, however, is one of the most sustained attacks on the popular fears, superstitions and prejudices which gave rise in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the persecutions. It was also sufficiently influential to move James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) to respond with his own Daemonologie,147 a passionate defence of the persecutions. Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft is a lengthy and detailed attempt to show that most accusations of witchcraft were based either on spite or (more usually) on ignorance, and that the witchcraft itself is usually a case either of trickery, or of folk medicine. In the process he demonstrates to the reader the techniques by which many of the tricks are carried out, and the ways in which the less scrupulous (or perhaps the less cautious) miracle-monger might fool his audience. Thus, the book is full of examples of exposures of supposedly supernatural practices which we can recognize as the tricks of the professional juggler.

42

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 43


Like most of his contemporaries, Scot does not deny the reality of the Devil. What he doubts is that Satan works through the human agency of the poor victims of the witch trials. Working empirically, he gathers enough examples of tricksters and trickery to feel that he must have convinced any fair-minded observer that the witch persecutions were a case of communal hysteria founded on Catholic prejudice. ‘Who’, he asks, will maintain, that common witchcrafts are not cozenages, when the great and famous witchcrafts, which had stolen credit not only from all the common people, but from men of great wisdom and authority, are discovered to be beggarly slights of cozening varlets?148

A recurrent theme of Scot’s book is the gullibility of those who mistake the skill of the performer for the dark powers of the occultist. With example after example, using his research, his wit and his rational world-view, Scot debunks the whole machinery of early modern demonology. His writing is often serious, occasionally playful. At one point he gives the reader a whole chapter in which he explains how to conjure devils in a way which accords with popular tradition: When you will have any spirit, you must know his name and you must also fast and be cleane from all pollution, three or four dayes before; so will the spirit be the more obedient unto you. To make a circle and call up the spirit with great intention, and hold a ring in your hand, rehearse in your ownee name, and your companye (for one must always be with you) this prayer following, and no spirit shall annoy you, and your purpose shall take effect.149

The rest of the chapter is devoted to the prayer and the magic words to be used – with the wry observation that ‘this agreeth with popish charmes and conjurations’150 – in order to summon and control a demon. As readers we are led into the supposition that Scot is, in all seriousness, teaching us, like Faustus, to conjure spirits. But the rug is immediately whisked away from under our feet: the next chapter is entitled ‘A confutation of the manifold vanities conteined in the precedent chapters, specially of commanding of divels’. It starts: He that can be perswaded that these things are true, or wrought indeed according to the assertion of couseners, or according to the supposition of witchmongers and papists, may soone be brought to believe that the moone is made of green cheese.151

We are left feeling foolish for having gone along with the previous chapter at all. It turns out that, like a good conjuror, Scot was misdirecting our attention. The technique allows him to have it both ways. First he offers us the guilty

43

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 44


thrill of being apparently initiated into the occult practises; then (having lured us into becoming just as gullible as those he elsewhere ridicules) he initiates us into his own healthy scepticism. Scot’s imagined reader is literate, educated, sophisticated – and a rationalist. He or she is also fascinated by the techniques of the juggler. In Book XIII, Scot begins to talk ‘Of illusions, confederacies, and legierdemaine, and how they may be well or ill used.’152 This section of Scot’s Discovery is generically related both to the ‘how-to…’ manual of conjuring tricks – which he takes great delight in detailing for the reader – and also to Elizabethan cony-catching literature: those books which opened up to a literate, educated and respectable public the tricks and stratagems of the Elizabethan underworld. Many of the routines Scot describes are party tricks, designed to amaze your friends, or to win a bet. His list includes tricks with balls, coins, paper and handkerchiefs – for example: To make a little ball swell in your hand till it be very great. To consume (or rather to convey) one or many bals into nothing. How to wrap a wag upon the knuckles. To convey money out of one of your hands into the other by legierdemain To convert or transubstantiate money into counters, or counters into money To put one testor into one hand, and another into the other hand, and with words to bring them together To put one testor into a strangers hand, and another into your own, and to convey both into the strangers hand with words To throw a piece of money away, and to find it again where you lost With words to make a groat or a testor to leap out of a pot, or to run along upon a table To make a groat or a testor to sink through a table, and to vanish out of a handkercher very strangely A notable trick to transforme a counter to a groat An excellent feat, to make a two penie peece lie plaine in the palme of your hand, and to be passed from thence when you list To convey a testor out of ones hand that holdeth it fast To throw a piece of money into a deep pond, and to fetch it again from whence you list To convey one shilling being in one hand into another, holding your hands abroad like a rood To transforme any one small thing into any other forme by folding of paper.

He gives detailed instructions as to how to perform these tricks. When he comes to card tricks, however, he is more cautious. Tricks with cards are much closer to roguery, as he explains in Chapter XXVII, which is on the subject ‘Of cards, with good cautions how to avoid cozenage therein: speciall rules to convey and

44

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 45


handle the cards, and the manner and order how to accomplish all difficult and strange things wrought with cards.’153 And at this point, the book shifts genres. It is no longer merely a how-to guide: it is a manual of urban self-defence, intended to warn the innocent reader against the tricks of a particularly predatory kind of juggler: the card sharp. Having now bestowed some waste money among you, I will set you to cards; by which kind of witchcraft a great number of people have juggled away not only their money, but also their lands, their health, their time, and their honesty. I dare not (as I could) shew the lewd juggling that cheaters practice, lest it minister some offence to the well disposed, to the simple hurt and losses, and to the wicked occasion of evil doing. But I would wish all gamesters to beware, not only with what cards and dice the play, but especially with whom and where they exercise gaming. And to let dice passe (as whereby a man may be inevitably cousened) one that is skilful to make and use Bumcards, may undoe a hundreth wealthy men that are given to gaming: but if he have a confederate present, either of the players or standers by, the mischief cannot be avoided. If you play among strangers, beware of him that seems simple or drunken; for under their habit the most speciall couseners are presented, and while you think by their simplicity and imperfections to beguile them (and thereof perchance are perswaded by their confederates, your very friends as you think) you your self will be most of all overtaken. Beware also of the […]tors by, and lookers on, and namely of them that bet on your side, for whilest they look on your game without suspition, they discover it by signes to your adversaries, with whom they bet, and yet are their confederates.154

But despite his disclaimer, Scot does indeed show ‘the lewd juggling that cheaters practice’, showing the reader how to do several card tricks, all of which could be used in dishonest play as well as in honest delight. How, for example, ‘to deliver out four aces, and to convert them into four knaves’155 and ‘How to tell one what card he seeth in the bottome, when the same card is shuffled into the stock.’156 What is extraordinary about the book is how thorough it is as a handbook of conjuring – and how modern it seems, not only in its rational scepticism, but in its technical descriptions. Like most descriptions of magic tricks, the moves are a little hard to follow on the page, and the Elizabethan English makes it harder for the contemporary reader. Yet most of the principles which Scot adumbrates in these chapters are to be found in modern conjuring manuals. For example, the basic principle of card magic in which Scot instructs his Elizabethan reader, is one that few modern conjurors would dispute:

45

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 46


But in shewing feats, and juggling with cards the principal point consisteth in shuffling them nimbly, and alwaies keeping one certain card either in the bottome, or in some known place of the stock, four or five cards from it. Hereby you shall seem to work wonders; for it will be easie for you to see or spie one card, which though you be perceived to do, it will not be suspected, if you shuffle them well afterwards.157

He details, too, techniques which are still the stock-in-trade of modern conjurors such as the finger break and the in-jog: And this note I must give you, that in reserving the bottome card, you must alwaies (whilest you shuffle) keep him a little before or a little behind all the cards lying underneath him, bestowing him (I say) either a little beyond his fellowes before, right over the forefinger, or else behind the rest, so as the little finger of the left hand may meet with it: which is the easier, the readyer, & the better way. In the beginning of your shuffling, shuffle as thick as you can; and in the end throw upon the stock the neather card (with so many mo at the least as you would have preserved for any purpose) a little before or behind the rest. Provided alwaies, that your fore finger, if the pack be laid before, or the little finger, if the pack lie behinde, creep up to meet with the bottome card, and not lie betwixt the cards: and when you feel it, you may there hold it, untill you have shuffled over the cards again, still leaving your kept card below. Being perfect herein, you may do almost what you list with the cards.158

His techniques involve basic issues such as catching an early glimpse of the target card in order to be able to producing it later in the routine: ‘then shuffle the cards, or let any other shuffle them; for you know the card already, and therefore may at any time tell them what card they saw: which neverthelesse would be done with great circumstance and shew of difficultie.’159 And as that last phrase shows, Scot had a good sense of the showman’s instinct for making the comparatively simple appear extremely difficult. The same is true of the descriptions of other kinds of tricks. Book XIII of Scot’s Discovery is a primer of basic magic techniques. Some, admittedly, seem wilfully obscure, such as his assertion that ‘To make a shoal of goslings, or (as they say) a gaggle of Geese to seem to draw a timber log, is done by that very means that is used, when a cat doth draw a fool through a pond or river: but handled some what further off from the beholders.’ (Perhaps the cat routine was familiar enough to Elizabethan readers as to need no further explanation?) Others are disappointingly prosaic: ‘To make one dance naked: Make a poor boy confederate with you, so as after charms, &c. spoken by you, he uncloth himself, and stand naked, seeming (whilest hee undresseth him) to shake, stamp, and crie, still hastening to be unclothed; till he be stark naked.’160 On the whole

46

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 47


though, Scot offers a manual of magic tricks, most of which are as relevant today as they were when they were written. A contemporary conjuror would recognize both the techniques and the apparatus which Scot describes; clearly the ‘jugglers’ of his day were familiar with the kinds of devices which later generations went on to use in different ways. The use of a code between the magician and the assistant in order to give the impression of psychic powers, for example, was a major feature of Victorian mentalist acts. In the following description we see that Scot pre-empts some of the ‘mind-reading’ techniques of the Golden Age by four centuries: Juggling knacks by confederacy, and how to know whether one calls cross or pile [i.e. heads or tails] by the ringing. Lay a wager with your confederate (who must seem simple, or obstinately opposed against you) that standing behind a door, you will (by the sound or ringing of the money) tell him whether he cast cross or pile; so as when you are gone, and he hath fillipped the money before the witnesses who are to be cozened, he must say; What is it, if it be cross; or What ist, if it be pile: or some other such sign, as you are agreed upon, and so you need not fail to guess rightly. By this means (if you have any invention) you may seem to doe a hundred miracles, and to discover the secrets of a man’s thoughts, or words spoken a far off.161

The Elizabethan juggler’s system is a little more rudimentary than the elaborate system of verbal codes developed by the nineteenth-century mentalists, but the technique is essentially the same. And while Scot describes it in terms of a very basic trick ‘to know whether one calls cross or pile’ he is alert to the infinite possibilities inherent in such a code: ‘By this means (if you have any invention) you may seem to do a hundred miracles, and to discover the secrets of a man’s thoughts…’ Scot’s careful analysis of the topic of magic illustrates the ways in which the concepts of juggling and conjuring are used in the Renaissance – as does his own use of the terms. Scot approaches the distinction between efficacious magic and magic as entertainment in a very different way from Thomas Hill; for Scot, there is no such thing as efficacious magic, therefore everything is performance. Throughout the Discovery the words ‘conjuror’, ‘conjuring’, ‘conjuration’ etc. are used – as they would have been used generally in the period – to refer to someone who claims, tries, or pretends to practise efficacious magic. But of course, in Scot’s hands – since he steadfastly refuses to give credence to beliefs in witchcraft – what this really means is someone who is tricking his audience. ‘Juggler’ along with its cognates, is a more straightforward word in Scot’s vocabulary. It means principally a professional performer, though this too has overtones of dishonesty. In Scot’s view there is, clearly, no great distance between

47

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 48


the performer and the cheat. Yet he is broad-minded enough to admit that there is room for the entertainer, and scrupulous enough to worry away at the various shades of distinctions between, on the one hand the entertainer and the fraudster, and on the other between the entertainer and the occult practitioner. He goes into detailed arguments about the similarities and differences between different kinds of ‘conjuring’, practised for different reasons and to different effects, before announcing, To conclude, it is to be avouched (and there bee proofes manifest enough) that our Jugglers approach much neerer to resemble Pharaohs Magicians, than either witches or conjurors, and make a more lively shew of working miracles than any inchantors can doe: for these practise to shew that in action, which witches doe in words and terms.162

He concludes that there is no harm in the juggler’s art so long as the power of almighty God is not transposed to the juggler, nor offence ministred by his uncomely speech and behaviour, but the action performed in pastime, to the delight of the beholders, so as alwaies the juggler confesse in the end that these are no supernatural actions, but devices of men, and nimble conveyances…163

Provided that the entertainer comes clean about his skill, and does not try to pass it off as supernatural, it should be regarded as a legitimate performing art. There is one further level to Scot’s argument. In the Discovery the notion of conjuring is unremittingly linked, not only to the notion of deception but also to that of Catholicism. As suggested in the previous chapter, this is a common Renaissance trope, and Scot frequently pretends to confuse the words ‘conjuror’ and ‘cozener’164 in order to make his point through humour. More seriously, though, phrases such as ‘papists and conjurors’ or ‘papists conjurors and witches’ are formulae of which Scot is particularly fond.165 Where one of these concepts is to be found, the other is frequently nearby. Thus, for example, Scot talks about superstitions of past ages, superstitions such as that of a holy garment called a wastecote for necessity was much used of our forefathers, as a holy relique, &c. as given by the Pope, or some such arch-conjuror, who promised thereby all manner of immunity to the wearer thereof; insomuch as he could not be hurt with any shot or other violence.166

In true Protestant style the Pope is described as a conjuror – indeed an ‘archconjuror’, a false magician who practises superstitious (and ineffective) magic.

48

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 49


The magic waistcoat’s promises of immunity are – Scot leaves us in no doubt about this – false. Like the villainous Archimago,167 the wicked wizard in Edmund Spenser’s complex and influential religious and political allegory The Faerie Queene, the Pope becomes an archetype of false belief. The old religion (which was, according to the dominant Protestant ideology of Elizabeth’s day, the false religion) is damned by association with magic. Scot’s underlying rational Protestant world-view means that the language in which he describes the magicians of his day is always doing some religious-political work. The word ‘conjuror’ yokes together Catholicism and fraudulence.

Samuel Rid The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine (1612) Scot, then, over his 400-odd pages, considers the nature of juggling and legerdemain as part of his larger concern: to discredit, in the name of rational Protestant scepticism, popular assumptions about witchcraft and natural magic, and to contribute to the doctrinal polemics of post-Reformation England. Thirty years later, much of his research turns up under another writer’s name, cheerfully plagiarized by Samuel Rid in The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine (1612), the book which can probably claim to be the first purpose-produced handbook for the amateur conjuror. What is interesting here is not the plagiarism itself (which was a common enough tactic among early modern writers and among conjurors of all periods) so much as what gets left out: that is to say, everything except the tricks themselves. Rid strips away Scot’s more serious theological and humanitarian purposes and publishes a simple handbook of juggling and legerdemain which offers the reader a series of party tricks. The fact that Rid can bracket this so unproblematically as a form of entertainment reinforces the sense that by the early years of the seventeenth century a distinct and recognizable performance art has emerged. ‘Jugling’, as Rid says ‘is now become common’168 – and in the process it has generated a market for instruction booklets. In The Art of Jugling, Rid offers both a definition of the art as a whole and plenty of examples of individual illusions. His definition (freely borrowed from Scot) is that [t]he true Art therefore of Jugling consisteth of Legerdemain: that is the nimble conveyance and right dexterity of the hand, the which is performed diverse ways, especially three: the first and principal consisteth in hiding and conveying of balls; the second in alteration of money; the third in shuffling of cards. And he that is expert in these may show many feats and much pleasure.169

Rid has defined his readership more precisely than did Thomas Hill. The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine is aimed squarely at the amateur conjuror who wants to learn, for example, ‘A very pretty trick to make a groat or a testor to sink through a table, and to vanish out of a handkerchief very strangely’, or how ‘To

49

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 50


consume (or rather convey) one or many balls into nothing’, ‘To convey money out of one hand into the other, by legerdemain’, ‘To throw a piece of money away, and to find it again where you please’. Occasionally Rid slips into an admonitory tone similar to that used in the coney-catching pamphlets of Greene and others, and includes warnings about how to avoid being cheated at dice and cards. For the most part, however, this early aficionado of conjuring is sharing with the reader a naive enthusiasm for juggling as performance. Thus, for example: To cut half your nose in sunder, and to heal it again presently without any salve. [This is easily done; however being nimbly done it will deceive the sight of the beholders.] Take a knife, having a round hollow gap in the middle, and lay it upon your nose, and so shall you seem to have cut your nose in sunder: provided always that in all these, you have another like knife without a gap, to be showed upon pulling out of the same, and words of enchantments to speak. Blood also, to bewray the wound, and nimble conveyance.170

Again, the trick itself is copied almost verbatim from Scot, but Rid’s parenthesis is his own, and in it we can detect an almost childish delight in sleight of hand, and in these jokeshop illusions. The reader, it is implied, will probably want to rush off immediately and try out these party pieces. It is a fair assumption that in this instruction manual Rid is painting a reasonably accurate picture of the kind of routine which a contemporary professional juggler would have performed. As well as being taught individual illusions, the reader is initiated into the basics of conjuring: the importance of carrying the trick off with confidence (‘a good face’); of nimbleness of execution (‘for if you be a bungler, you both shame your selfe, and make the Art you goe about to be perceaued and knowne, and so bring it into discredit’171) and of a good line in patter in order to misdirect the audience’s attention. This last is a standard feature of handbooks of magic tricks from earliest times to the present day: the art of the magician does not lie in manual dexterity alone, but in the context in which it is presented. Note, though, what sort of patter Rid recommends: You must also have your words of Art, certain strange words, that it may not only breed the more admiration to the people, but to leads [sic] away the eye from espying the manner of your conveyance, while you may induce the mind, to conceive, and suppose that you deal with Spirits: and such kind of sentences, and of speeches, are used in divers manners; fitting and correspondent to the action and feat that you go about. As ‘Hey Fortuna, furia, nunquam, Credo, passe passe, when come you Sirrah?’ or this way: ‘Hey Jack, come aloft for thy master’s advantage, pass and be gone!’ Or

50

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 51


otherwise, as ‘Ailif, Casil, zaze, Hit, metmeltat, Saturnus, Iupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercurie, Luna?’ Or thus: ‘Drocti, Micocti, et Senarocti, Velu barocti, Asmarocti, Ronnsee, Faronnsee, hey pass, pass.’ Many such observations to this art, are necessary, without which all the rest, are little to the purpose.172

The patter, which the early modern juggler is encouraged to adopt, is the ‘words of art’ of the practising sorcerer or occultist. Once more we are directed towards the ambiguous position of the juggler in relation to ‘real’ magic. Given the seriousness of the penalties for being convicted of practising genuine witchcraft during this period – and these had increased significantly in the last few years under James I – it might be expected that the professional entertainer would steer clear of anything which might raise that suspicion. On the contrary, however, Rid’s juggler is positively instructed to lead his audience ‘to suppose that you deal with Spirits’, by chanting a quaint mixture of Latin, English and total gibberish.173 Interestingly, some of the ‘words of art’ that Rid suggests are taken from contemporary accounts of real charms and folk magic, spells and incantations which are believed by their users to be genuine and effective: ‘Ailif, Casil, zaze, Hit’, for example, is recorded by Scot as coming from ‘A charme teaching how to hurt whom you list with images of wax’.174 According to Rid, this patter, some of which is taken from the practices of those claiming real occult knowledge, is the very essence of the act: ‘Many such observations to this art, are necessary’ he says, ‘without which all the rest, are little to the purpose.’ The patter of the seventeenth-century juggler is designed precisely to dress the entertainment in the garments of efficacy. Just as Brandon’s reputation might have been enhanced by the pigeon episode; and just as Banks may well have invented (or at the very least, capitalized happily upon) the story of how he and Morocco were accused of witchcraft on the continent, so here the apprentice amateur conjuror is being encouraged to take risks with his performance and to flirt with the notion of the truly subversive. A description of a juggler’s act from later in the century shows even more clearly the way in which the seventeenth-century juggler might encourage the illusion that he is performing ‘real’ magic. Thomas Ady’s Candle in the Dark contains the following description. A juggler, knowing the common tradition and foolish opinion that a familiar spirit in some shape must be had for the doing of strange things, beyond the vulgar capacity, he therefore carrieth about him the skin of a mouse stopped with feathers, or some like artificial thing, and in the hinder part thereof sticketh a small springing wire of about a foot long, or longer, and when he begins to act his part in a fair or a market before vulgar people, he bringeth forth his imp, and maketh it spring from him once or twice upon the table, and then catcheth it up, saying, Would you be gone? I will make

51

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 52


you stay and play some tricks for me before you go?… Then begin the silly people to wonder, and whisper, then he sheweth many slights of activity as if he did them by the help of his Familiar, which the silliest sort of beholders do verily believe.175

The ‘imp’ is manipulated through a combination of ventriloquism (the juggler makes ‘a squeaking noise with his lips’) and legerdemain. It fools some of the people some of the time, yet only ‘the silliest sort of beholders do verily believe’ that it is really a familiar spirit. For most, it remains either ambiguous or a dramatic fiction. Ady portrays a split audience, in which different spectators interpret what they are seeing in different ways. Some see it as pure entertainment; others see it as trafficking with spirits. It is interesting, however, to see who Ady is referring to when he talks of the ‘silliest sort of beholders’. It sometimes happens, he explains, that if here have been any University Scholars at the beholding, or at the acting of these common Tricks, they have gone out and fallen into a dispute upon the matter, some saying, Sensus nunquam fallitur circa proprium objectum,176 some have said that the Juggler by his Familiar doth thicken the Air, some again that he hurteth the Eye-sight, and so deceiveth the beholders; and in all their discourse they shew themselves very Philosophical, but very little capacious. And Cooper writing upon that subject, hath pretended to shew himself Theological, but betrayeth himself to be very silly, blind, and ignorant.177

It is not only the poorest section of the crowd, nor those with the least formal education, who are prone to mistake sleight of hand for sorcery. The scholars’ cleverness, their tendency to over-interpret, renders them every bit as gullible as the ignorance of the ‘vulgar people’. A timely warning to academics who write about magic! The seventeenth-century juggler was able to ply his trade in the shadowy area between belief and illusion. In The Art of Juggling, Rid adds a conventional health warning, carefully condemning those who use such tricks for harm. He is aware that the boundaries between entertainment and efficacy need to be handled with care. Echoing Scot, he warns that ‘…when these experiments grow to superstition and impiety, they are either to be forsaken as vain, or denied as false’. However, he goes on to affirm that howbeit, if these things be done for recreation and mirth, and not to the hurt of our neighbour, nor to the profaning and abusing of Gods holy name: then sure they are neither impious nor altogether unlawful, though herein or hereby a natural thing be made to seem supernatural.178

52

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 53


William Vincent (attrib.) Hocus Pocus, The Anatomy of Legerdemain (1634) Atttitudes towards ‘jugglers’ during this period, then, are complex. It would certainly be a mistake to assume that all performers of theatrical magic were automatically in danger of being charged with being in league with the devil. There is nothing simple or uniform about the beliefs which were held about magic and witchcraft in the late Middle Ages and the early modern periods. During this time we see both credulity and scepticism, both belief in the supernatural and an urge to debunk such belief. Thus on the one hand we can identify a sceptical strain in English Renaissance thought (represented most clearly by Scot) which meant that popular entertainers who performed magic tricks would not automatically be accused of witchcraft – even when, as Rid recommends, they went out of their way to appear as if they were really communing with spirits. On the other hand we can distinguish a significant background of superstition and occult belief (a background so prevalent that Scot needed to write his book because he was so concerned at the way in which ‘The common people have been so assotted and bewitched, with whatsoever poets have feigned of witchcraft’179) against which performers such as Banks and Brandon carried out their juggling tricks. Both the writings and the career of another early modern juggler give us a further insight about the way in which rationality and superstition intersect in early modern juggling performances. The phrase ‘Hocus Pocus’ lives on in our common speech long after the showman who performed under that name has vanished into obscurity. Originally, though, Hocus Pocus was a juggler who played at fairs, markets, country houses, at civic entertainments and on street corners during the early seventeenth century. In fact, it is quite probable that more than one practitioner operated under that name: for later generations, certainly, ‘Hocus Pocus’ seems to have become a generic name for a certain kind of juggler who, like Santa Claus or Ronald McDonald, was able to be in many places at once. However, evidence from various civic records (including court records from Leicester in which he is accused of obtaining money by deception) has led recent scholars to identify the original Hocus Pocus as William Vincent.180 The stage name was kept alive, at least in part because it became incorporated into the title of one of the most-frequently reprinted of seventeenth-century books on conjuring: Hocus Pocus, The Anatomy of Legerdemain. The Anatomy of Legerdemain, once more, repeats a good deal of material from both Rid and Scot – although in this case the author is more careful to use his own words when lifting material than was Rid. Many of the tricks, though, are the same; and again, taken together they provide a good overall picture of the repertoire of the early modern juggler. Here, for example, are the instructions for ‘An excellent feat to make a two-penny piece lie plain in your hand, and to be passed from thence when you list’:

53

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 54


Put a little red wax (but not too thin) upon the nail of your longest finger, and let a stranger put a two-penny piece into the palm of your hand, and shut your fist suddenly, and convey the two-penny piece upon the wax, which with use you may so accomplish as no man shall perceive it. Then say, Ailiff, casil, zaze, hit, mel, and suddenly open your hand, holding the tips of your fingers rather lower then higher than the palm of your hand, and the beholders will wonder where it is become. Then shut your hand suddenly again, and lay a wager whether it be there or no; and you may either leave it there, or take it away with you at your pleasure.181

One thing which has survived from Rid is the patter. The ‘words of art’ are the same: ‘Ailiff, casil, zaze, hit’ – once more, they are those words from the spell to ‘hurt whom you list with images of wax’, but taken completely out of context, and used to disguise a quick and simple coin effect. Where The Anatomy of Legerdemain shows a great advance on its predecessors is in its illustrations, which are many and detailed. The book is clearly intended as a serious manual of professional techniques for would-be jugglers. It is a far cry from Scot’s painstaking unmasking of pseudo-witchcraft in the Discovery. This, though, makes the very end of The Anatomy all the more surprising. The author begins his conclusion conventionally enough, boasting that if the reader has taken the trouble to understand the book ‘there is not a trick that any juggler in the world can show thee, but thou shalt be able to conceive after what manner it is performed.’ He then adds, however, the surprise proviso: ‘if he do it by a sleight of hand, and not by an unlawful and detested means.’ After all the instructions how to perform the tricks, the author suddenly opens the door to the occult. He goes on to affirm [t]hat there are such it is not to be doubted of, that doe work by unlawful means, and have besides their own natural endowments the assistance of some familiar, whereby they many times effect such miraculous things as may well be admired by whomsoever shall either behold or hear tell of them.182

We are suddenly back in the world of Jacobean folk beliefs about witchcraft, a world in which ‘miraculous things’ are carried out by ‘familiars’ – minor demons at the service of the witch or wizard. The author goes on to assure the reader that I could give an instance in one whose father while he lived was the greatest juggler in England, and used the assistance of a familiar; he lived a Tinker by trade, and used his feats as a trade by the by; he lived, as I was informed, always be-tattered, and died for ought I could hear in the same estate. I could here, as I have instanced in this man, so give you his name, and where

54

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 55


he liveth, but because he hath left the bad way, and chose the better, because he hath amended his life, and betook himself to an honest calling, I will rather rejoice at his good, then do him any the least disgrace by naming him to be such a one.183

This is a strange bit of teasing: coyly the author refuses to name the anonymous ‘father [who] while he lived was the greatest juggler in England, and used the assistance of a familiar’. Yet the implication is that he is speaking of his own father – and since the author of this work calls himself ‘Hocus Pocus Junior’, the inference we are asked to draw is that this ‘greatest juggler in England’ who used the assistance of a familiar and then repented, is actually ‘Hocus Pocus’ himself: William Vincent. Yet even here we cannot rest. It gets even more complicated – since it is more than likely that William Vincent himself was actually the author of The Anatomy of Legerdemain.184 If this is indeed the case, and father and son are one and the same, then it seems the writer is accusing himself of having practised witchcraft – and then providing himself with an alibi by claiming to be dead! The meaning of that final paragraph shifts once again, becoming selfreferential – and by now almost certainly ironic. Once more, the apparent claim of supernatural aid looks more and more tongue-in-cheek. Several years after Vincent’s death, Hocus Pocus is still remembered as an archetype of the street conjuror: in 1655 Thomas Ady defines the craft of juggling as consisting first, in sleight of hand, or cleanly conveyance… [which] is profitably seen in our common Jugglers, that go up and down to play their Tricks in Fairs and Markets. I will speak of one man more excelling in that craft than others, that went about in King James’s time, and long since, who called himself, The King’s Majesty’s most excellent Hocus Pocus, and so was he called, because that at the playing of every Trick, he used to say, Hocus pocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter jubeo, a dark composure of words, to blind the eyes of the beholders, to make his Trick pass the more currently without discovery, because when the eye and the ear of the beholder are both earnestly busied, the Trick is not so easily discovered, nor the Imposture discerned.185

Like Rid, Ady accurately describes the function of the magician’s patter as being to ‘busy’ the ear of the beholder and prevent the discovery of the trick. He does not suggest that Vincent followed Rid’s advice in adopting a pseudo-occult persona (although the Latinate phrases are clearly intended to sound vaguely mystical). What Ady does tell us, though, is that, like Brandon, Vincent claimed royal patronage. Calling himself ‘The King’s Majesty’s most excellent Hocus

55

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 56


Pocus’, he seems to have been licensed, not merely by a local magistrate, nor even by the Master of the Revels, but by the King himself. Such a prestigious patron was the privilege of very few entertainers: among this elite was Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men. The records bear out Vincent’s claim. N. W. Bawcutt, in his authoritative study of Vincent, cites a royal warrant, issued in July 1619 on behalf of King James: A Licence to William Vincent under the Signet, to exercise the Art of Legerdemaine in any Townes within the Relme of England and Ireland during his Mats pleasure.186

The fact that the license apparently had to be renewed in 1627, after James’s death, strengthens the case for seeing this as a personal warrant. And this is interesting because the notion of ‘license’ has a specific significance in this period. To be licensed is to be given permission to say and do things that are otherwise unlawful, like the licensed fools in Shakespeare’s plays, whose satires and jibes against their employers are met with laughter rather than with punishment. By licensing the performer, the authorities – in this case the authority of the King himself – sanction subversion. And in this case (and this is what makes it more significant in the case of Vincent than it was in the case of Brandon) the juggler is being licensed directly by James – the ‘Royal Scotchman’ whose passionate belief in the reality, and the danger, of witchcraft led him to participate directly in witch trials, to publish his Daemonologie as a direct refutation of Reginald Scot’s sceptical Discovery, and to strengthen existing witchcraft legislation with a statute of 1604. Against all the background of debates about the occult, against the proliferation of folk magic and pagan belief in rural areas, at a time when witchcraft was still punishable by death,187 a famously superstitious king is happy to license Hocus Pocus.

‘Betwixt jest and earnest’ The bent little fortune-tellers terrorizing their clients with crystal balls are toy models of the great ones who hold the fate of mankind in their hands. Theodor Adorno188

In the science of optics there is a useful technical term, ‘paraxis’. A paraxial region is ‘an area in which light rays seem to unite at a point after refraction. In this area, object and image seem to collide, but in fact neither object nor reconstituted image genuinely reside there: nothing does’.189 The paraxial region is a useful metaphor for the imaginative space in which the juggler’s performance of magic takes place: an imaginative space which ‘is neither

56

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 57


entirely “real” (object) nor entirely “unreal” (image), but is located somewhere indeterminately between the two.’190 Certainly, when it comes to questions of magic, conjuring and juggling, the vision of the early modern period is multifocal, able to contain paradoxes and contradictions. I have argued against the notion that the juggler in this period was in continual danger of being arrested for a witch or conjuror, yet the ambiguous space between efficacy and entertainment was real. The point is, though, that for the most part this ambiguous space existed in the mind of the audience rather than in the attitudes of the authorities or the laws of the land.191 Moreover, it is a space which seems, on the whole, to have been regarded as a creative and playful one, rather than as a dangerous one, by the juggler and his audience. Such indeterminate spaces are not met with approval by all. Sir Thomas Browne despaired of the common people’s willingness to be exploited by this kind of ambiguity. His Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors (1646) is one of the earliest theoretical studies of English popular culture. Unsurprisingly, since he was writing during the period of the English Civil War, Browne sees himself as playing for high stakes. Like many other scientific rationalists of this pre-Enlightenment period, he sees the perpetuation of rational Christianity, grounded in logic, rhetoric and syllogistic reasoning as well as in faith, as the keystone of civilization. The ‘Popular Errors’, of which his book is an anatomy and a refutation, threaten the basis of civilization itself, and his book is a passionate attempt to defend rational belief, lest the world plunge back into another Dark Ages. Thus in Book I of the work, Browne anatomizes the various ways in which erroneous, superstitious or just plain wrong-headed thinking and beliefs arise in his society. By ‘errors’, of course, Browne means everything apart from his own moderate rational Protestant Christianity. For Browne, there is no conflict between reason and faith – indeed, he sees ‘true’ Christianity as supremely rational, based on the rationality of Christ himself: But the wisdom of our Saviour, and the simplicity of his truth proceeded… [by] placing his felicitie in things removed from sense, and the intellectual enjoyment of God… [T]here is surely no reasonable Pagan, that will not admire the rationall and well grounded precepts of Christ, whose life as it was conformable to his doctrine, so was that unto the highest rules of reason; and must therefore flourish in the advancement of learning, and the perfection of parts best able to comprehend it.192

Browne has confidence in the absolute rightness of his Anglican world-view. As a result, when he looks at contemporary culture he is appalled by the extent to which the ‘epidemic’ of popular errors has spread. One of the main sources

57

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 58


of these popular errors is the gullibility (or ‘erroneous disposition’) of the people, and in Chapter III Browne spends some time analysing this gullibility. In Browne’s view, illiteracy, weak understanding and herd thinking lie at the root of the problem, but these are made worse by the ease with which folk are led astray by charlatans of one form or another. Browne is convinced that there is a continuum between, on the one hand, contemporary Christian heresies and the spectre of competing world religions such as Islam, and, on the other hand, the forms of popular error and manipulation of the masses which take place on a lower level. If the fraudulent ‘Priests of Elder time’, prophets such as Mohammed, and other brands of Christianity pose a kind of threat to Browne’s ordered, rational view of Christian civilization, so a similar kind of threat is posed by mountebanks and travelling performers: Saltimbancoes, Quacksalvers and Charlatans, deceive them in lower degrees… Astrologers, which pretend to be of Cabala with the starres, such I mean as abuse that worthy enquirie, have not been wanting in their deceptions… Fortune tellers, Juglers, Geomancers, and the like incantatory impostors, though commonly men of inferior ranke, and from whom without illumination they can expect no more then from themselves, doe daily and professedly delude them: unto whom (what is deplorable in men and Christians) too many applying themselves betwixt jest and earnest, betray the cause of truth, and insensibly make up, the legionarie body of errour.193

Browne lumps together the street entertainers and the confidence tricksters: in his mind, the dividing lines between the performer and the criminal are blurred, to say the least. There is a subtlety in Browne’s analysis of the spirit in which ‘men and Christians’ – who, he implies firmly, should know better – engage with some of these charlatans. They do so, he says ‘betwixt jest and earnest’. It is an important insight into a kind of liminality, a state betwixt and between in which neither belief nor scepticism predominates. Browne has no truck with this state of mind, of course: for him it ‘betrays the cause of truth’ and simply, if unconsciously, contributes to the growing and ‘legionarie’ body of error. It is, however, central to our theme. Just as Browne lumps together entertainers and criminal tricksters, so here is the other side of the coin: people who consult fortune tellers or geomancers are positioned both as audience and victim – ‘betwixt jest and earnest’. Browne, in his politico-theological analysis of his culture, saw the juggler as representing the thin end of the wedge of barbarism. And it is here, in the interstices between jest and earnest, that the Exeter anecdote, of the performance of Doctor Faustus at which actors and audience alike ‘were all persuaded there was one devil too many amongst them’, appears. It is, in some ways akin to the stories of Banks and Brandon and Hocus Pocus. Like those, it is yet another story of a magical performance which operates on

58

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 59


the threshold between make-believe and reality. And in this case the possibility that truly occult powers might be involved is one which infects not only the audience but the performers as well. But it is significant that this, one of the most vivid anecdotes about a conjuring performance which seemed to cross over the threshold into the realms of the supernatural, does not come from accounts of jugglers at all, but from a description of a performance by a company of professional actors. Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre-makers were vividly aware of the fact that, in the theatre, illusion depends upon an unstable double vision. The fictional world of the dramatic narrative is a product of the conjunction, and the interpenetration, of the ideal and the material: the ‘ideal’ fiction of the narrative ‘materializes’ in the bodies of real, present human beings, carrying physical stage props and wearing physical costumes. Theatrical spectatorship therefore involves a negotiation between two realities, and Elizabethan playwrights and acting companies were experts at manipulating these realities. At Exeter, however, things seem to have got out of control. Actors and audience, their imaginations working together, are suddenly faced with the possibility that their theatrical magic might be more than just metaphor. The unnerving sense of that extra devil on the stage suggests that by playing out the story of Faustus’s satanic pact they might themselves have unwittingly entered into a similar contract. The majority of educated Elizabethans, including many of the lawmakers, seem at heart to have agreed with Scot that, on the whole, the entertainer, the juggler, the practitioner of legerdemain, poses little threat to the commonwealth: Howbeit, if these things be done for recreation and mirth, and not to the hurt of our neighbour, nor to the profaning and abusing of God’s holy name, then sure they are neither impious nor altogether unlawful, though herein or hereby a natural thing be made to seem supernatural. Such are the miracles wrought by jugglers, caused by fine and nimble conveyance, called legerdemain…194

And, indeed, for most Elizabethan cultural polemicists195 the emerging professional theatre was actually a cause of far more serious anxiety than the routines of the fairground juggler. The position of the Elizabethan professional actor was not very different in legal terms from that of the juggler: the 1572 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds linked actors and jugglers together quite specifically, stipulating that unless they were licensed to perform by an aristocratic patron or a magistrate, all ‘common players in interludes, minstrels, jugglers, peddlers, tinkers and petty chapmen… shall be taken, adjudged and deemed rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars.’196 But although they were linked on this level, there were also differences. Jugglers were often considered to exist on the margins of criminality, allied with cheats, frauds and

59

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 60


‘coney-catchers’; but despite that – or possibly because of that – the threat which the juggler posed to the social and imaginative order was limited. The professional theatre, on the other hand, posed a different kind of threat. It was more of an unknown quantity: highly popular, undergoing a phase of rapid growth and development – and capable of transporting audiences into unfamiliar realms of the imagination. The antitheatrical prejudice of certain social groups led to a massive and occasionally hysterical cultural campaign to limit, censor and close down the public theatres of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. And amongst those polemicists for whom the new Elizabethan commercial theatre represented the worst form of depravity, the argument that the illusions of the stage were indeed demonically inspired was more than merely metaphorical. William Rankins, writing in A Mirror of Monsters, says of the players of these theatres that they are sent from their great captain Satan (under whose banner they bear arms) to deceive the world, to lead the people with enticing shows to the devil, to seduce them to sin, and well-tuned strings to sound pleasing melody when people in heaps dance to the Devil.197

Rankins’ assertion that the actor is an agent of Satan articulates an extreme view, it is true, but his outburst bears witness to the level of concern which this burgeoning art form evoked amongst some of those who saw it as their duty to police the imaginations of their fellow citizens. This may be because basic relationship which the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre establishes with its audience is qualitatively different from that between the juggler and his audience. The juggler’s relationship with his audience is essentially a combative one: he performs impossibilities and challenges his audience to see how the trick is done (making quite sure they are unable to do so). The success of his act depends on the position of superiority which he establishes. But the magic of the developing Elizabethan popular theatre was of a different order. It involved a different kind of relationship, a different kind of contract, between the performer and the audience, one based on imaginative collaboration. Shakespeare’s famous Prologue to Henry V articulates brilliantly the way in which the bare Elizabethan stage invited the audience to join in the act of creation. Piece out our imperfection with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide one man And make imaginary puissance. Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i’th’receiving earth; For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings…198

60

Chapter 03.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 61


This is an essentially different contract from the one which exists between the conjuror and his audience. The theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries offers a collaborative relationship rather than a competitive one: the audience is implicated in the act of creation, seduced into sharing the work with the performers. And this may be, in the end, why it was fitting that it was the actor, rather than the juggler, whose mode of entertainment seemed the more genuinely threatening to public order.

61

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 62

Chapter Four

On the margins: criminals and fraudsters The Beggar’s Bush In early modern England, then, the professional juggler was quite likely to be seen as a confederate of the criminal underworld (‘practising’, as Rid says ‘their cozening art of fast and loose’199) rather than as a confederate of the devil. When Scot’s detailed exposé of the tricks of ‘cozening varlets’ in his Discovery of Witchcraft makes a case for a rational and sceptical understanding of their trickery, it also demonstrates how good some of their ‘beggarly slights’ are. And while those who falsely claim to practise a real form of magic are acquitted of witchcraft, they are nonetheless, in Scot’s eyes, criminally culpable and to be punished by the law. Howbeit I confess, that the fear, conceit and doubt of such mischievous pretences may breed inconvenience to them that stand in awe of the same. And I wish, that even for such practices, though they never can or do take effect, the practisers be punished with all extremity; because therein is manifested a traitorous heart to the Queen, and a presumption against God.200

The economy of Elizabethan ideology and power typically reinscribes the pettiest interpersonal misdemeanour as an offence against the State, against the Queen and against the Divine purpose. Accordingly, Scot’s scepticism acquits the fake magician of occultism, only to condemn him or her anew for manifesting ‘a traitorous heart to the Queen, and a presumption against God’. Thus, while famous jugglers such as Brandon, Banks and Hocus Pocus may have achieved a kind of cultural respectability, many of their colleagues were seen in a very different light. In Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Antipholus of Ephesus describes how he was set upon by a gang including one Pinch – …a hungry, lean-fac’d villain A mere anatomy, a mountebank, A threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller, A needy, hollow-ey’d, sharp-looking wretch, A living dead man. This pernicious slave, Forsooth, took on him as a conjurer…201

In fact, Antipholus has got it wrong: Pinch is actually a schoolmaster. But the description serves to identify a social stereotype of a more criminal type of juggler.

62

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 63

ON THE MARGINS: CRIMINALS AND FRAUDSTERS

It is a stereotype which we can see in action in another play from the period. In Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Beggars Bush,202 there is a vividly depicted scene between three ‘Beggars’, Higgen, Ferret and Prig, and three drunken ‘Boors’.203 The beggars – and Prig in particular – are also cheats, looking to prey on the gullible, and it is worth looking at the scene in some detail, since we can see in it a vivid early representation of the conjuror as trickster. Prig first approaches the victims, asking, ‘Will ye see any feats of activity, Some sleight of hand, leigerdemain? hey pass, Presto, be gone there?’ The Boors welcome him, and his first ‘trick’ is a simple joke: ‘Look you my honest friends, you see my hand; Plain dealing is no Divell: lend me some money; Twelve-pence a piece will serve.’ He appears to be offering to do a trick with it, but when the victims hand it over, he simply pockets it, saying, ‘I thank you, Thank ye heartily: when shall I pay ye?’ This is taken in good part as a piece of harmless fun (‘Ha, ha, ha, by th’ masse this was a fine trick’, chortle the Boors), and Prig goes on to promise that ‘now I’le shew your worships A trick indeed’. Accompanied by appropriately nonsensical incantations (‘Ascentibus, malentibus, Presto’), he makes three balls disappear, and then plucks them ‘like three bullets from your three noses… Titere, tu patule… Recubans sub fermine fagi… Silvestram trim tram’.204 The trick is a classic piece of street conjuring. However, it is also a cover for a robbery. As Prig pulls the bullets from the Boors’ noses, Higgen is busy picking their purses. The Boors, blissfully unaware of Higgen’s legerdemain, are impressed by Prig’s. He then promises them: Prig. One trick more yet; Hey, come aloft: sa, sa, flim, flum, taradumbis? East, west, north, south, now flye like Iack with a oumbis. Now all your money⬘s gone: pray search your pockets. 1st Boor. Humb. 2nd Boor. He, 3rd Boor. The Devill a penny’s here, Prig. This was a rare trick. 1st Boor. But ⬘twould be a farre rarer to restore it. Prig. I⬘le do ye that too: look upon me earnestly, And move not any wayes your eyes from this place, This button here: pow, whir, whiss, shake your pockets. 1st Boor. By the masse ⬘tis here again boye.205

Prig apparently returns their vanished coins, and then magnanimously refuses any further payment for the entertainment, protesting that ‘My first trick [i.e. the money he “borrowed” from them at the start of the routine] has

63

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 64


paid me.’ He and his companions scurry away from their befuddled but delighted audience before the boors discover – as they do a few lines later, when they try to pay their drinks bill – that he has switched their real money for fake: Boy. This is a counter Sir. 1st Boor. A counter? stay ye, what are these then? O execrable Jugler! O damn⬘d Jugler! Look in your hose, hoa: this comes of looking forward. 3rd Boor. Divell a Dunkirk! what a rogue⬘s this Jugler, This hey pass, repass, h⬘as repast us sweetly.206

Prig and his companions are closely related to other entertaining low-life characters from Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and theatres; to the ‘coneycatchers’ whose criminal activities are exposed by Elizabethan writers such as Awdeley, Harman and Greene;207 to the rogue Autolycus in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale who mixes some thievery with his ballads and trinkets; to the cutpurses at Ben Jonson’s Bartholemew Fair who ply their trade while ballad singers and puppet shows distract their victims. Prig’s thefts, however, are skilfully woven into the very fabric of his juggling act: his legerdemain and his ‘words of art’ are all part and parcel of his roguery. Beggar’s Bush illustrates some of the issues which Scot deals with in his Discovery of Witchcraft, and throughout the period there are certainly enough real-life examples of street conjurors accused of ‘cozening’ their clients. James’s royal juggler William Vincent, ‘Hocus Pocus’, appears in the magistrates’ records of Leicester in 1625, accused of cheating a man at cards.208 The juggler as a kind of confidence trickster is a particularly significant figure in the period from which Beggar’s Bush comes. Beaumont and Fletcher are articulating in this play a common social attitude towards the juggler, portraying him as a certain type of nimble-witted predator. Thus, in Beggar’s Bush, the juggler gets pressed into service in the broader Elizabethan and Jacobean project of social satires about the gullibility of the common people. This was a central theme in the satire of the period for a number of interrelated reasons. In social and economic terms, the growth of agrarian and mercantile capitalism, which meant that land was increasingly seen in terms of monetary value, encouraged both financial speculation among the landed classes, and a drift to the city among the labouring classes – both of which created ideal conditions for the clever (and usually urban) fraudster to prey on his gullible country cousin. In intellectual terms, the very nature of the world itself appeared to be changing. The discoveries of early modern science, from the circulation of the blood, to the recognition that the earth circles the sun, to – eventually – Newton’s principles of Optics and Mechanics, were all re-defining the nature of humanity and its place in what

64

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 65


seemed to be an increasingly expanding and mechanical universe. And in terms of religious belief, the doctrinal and organizational upheavals of the period between the Reformation and the Civil War meant that the apparent certainties of a stable world-view had been replaced by a culture of controversy: the truths of everyday life were the subject of debate and argument, and people died and killed in defence of matter of doctrinal detail.209 In their various ways, all of these placed a new emphasis on the importance of the intellect as a survival mechanism in this confusing and rapidly changing world. There was a sense that while, as Donne put it, the ‘new philosophy calls all in doubt’,210 it was important to wrestle with the new complexities of this world, both on an individual level and on a broader social level. The individual squire cheated out of his inheritance might be a laughing matter and the subject for a comedy – but that pattern frequently repeated could potentially cause an economic collapse on a national scale. A new scientific discovery such as the telescope gave rise to exciting possibilities – but when you looked through that telescope and saw no sign of God or his heavens up there, what did that do to man’s sense of his place in the universe? The doctrinal arguments of the preacher in the pulpit could become the rallying cry for a popular revolution or the ideological basis for political and religious tyranny. It was important to keep your wits about you. Whatever form it took – whether that of the countryman come to town in search of labour, the younger son of a landowner looking to make a quick fortune, the ordinary man trying to come to terms with the implications of the new science, or the Christian assailed by a variety of different accounts as to how and why his soul might be damned or saved – gullibility was potentially socially dangerous. Little wonder, then, that in certain periods the juggler – the entertaining professional trickster who makes a living by challenging the interpretative faculties of his audience and deceiving them – takes on a symbolic meaning, representing a whole class of rogues who live on the naïveté of their victims. In periods when a culture is particularly concerned with the importance of interpretation, or when it has a particularly strong sense of its own vulnerability, the juggler represents a threat to its ability to maintain its own boundaries. In economic terms the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were times of great structural change as feudal structures gave way to those based on capital. Change was the lifeblood of the Elizabethan and Jacobean economy – and consequently it was also a source of intense anxiety. It underlies the philosophical obsession with the themes of metamorphosis, mutability, decay, mortality, instability, time and progress which can be observed nearly everywhere in the culture’s literature: in its sermons, social treatises, scientific tracts, love poems, plays, romances, and theological discourses. In his so-called ‘Mutabilitie’ Cantos at the end of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser attempted to reconcile the paradoxes of a world in apparent flux, articulating a vision of Nature in which the

65

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 66


incessant changeability of earthly forms is itself an expression of a deeper cosmic pattern: I well consider all that ye have said And find that all things steadfastness do hate And changed be: yet being rightly weighed They are not changed from their first estate; But by their change their being do dilate: And, turning to themselves at length again, Do work out their own perfection so by fate.211

Under such circumstances, a juggler who makes solid objects change place, appear, disappear and transform is performing the economic and philosophical obsessions of a whole culture. Such a performance may be greeted with delight or mistrust – or, as is often the case, with a mixture of both.

Augustan jugglers and Augustan satirists Later cultural moments experienced their own versions of such economic anxieties. By the first half of the eighteenth century, for example, the residual elements of feudalism had all but vanished in Britain. The institutions of mercantile capitalism were no longer emergent structures, but the dominant form of economic, social and cultural life. They had achieved a level of stability which would last until they were challenged by the emergence of industrial capitalism towards the end of the century. The Augustan period’s obsession with fraud and criminality was not rooted in an overwhelming sense of cosmic change, but in questions about the nature of its apparently solid and respectable social structures. One repeated topos among the social satirists of this period was the similarity between the petty and open vices of the criminal underworld and the larger, hidden vices of the apparently respectable world – a world in which vice and exploitation seemed increasingly prevalent and increasingly profitable. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, one of the great box office phenomena of the eighteenth-century theatre, made much of the parallels between the thefts perpetrated by London’s underclass and those perpetrated by its politicians, authorities and rulers. Alexander Pope’s Dunciad imagines a nightmare London in which civilized values disintegrate; William Hogarth’s etchings and caricatures vividly depict the chaotic underbelly of London life; Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, charts a rational man’s descent into madness when faced with the contradictions of his society. On one level, the self-image of Augustan culture seems confident and self-assured; on another, however, it is haunted by the anxiety that its whole economic and social structures are driven by ‘Vice’, and that this may lead to a cultural collapse. The nightmare of cultural meltdown which so obsessed the Augustan satirists became a genuine economic possibility in 1720 with the collapse of the South

66

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 67


Sea Company, which had been founded in 1711 in order to trade, mainly in slaves, with Spanish interests in South America. The company’s collapse precipitated a financial and economic crisis on a scale comparable to that of the Wall Street crash in the 1920s, ruining many private investors, bringing down government stock, and exposing the potential fragility of the financial institutions and economic structures which had seemed so secure. The memory of the South Sea Bubble haunted early eighteenth-century society. Edwin Dawes cites one particularly effective satirical engraving, Arlequyn Actionist (Harlequin the Stockholder, 1720), which shows a conjuror and his apparatus in the foreground, while in the background distraught and ruined shareholders riot.212 Dawes adds: The mania that the South Sea Bubble generated is an illuminating example of public hysteria. It highlights one of the traits that both conjurer and confidence-trickster trade upon – the gullibility of the masses and an almost pathological compulsion to be deluded.213

This is true – but it is also true that the South Sea Bubble was not, strictly speaking, a confidence trick: it was the inevitable economic result of a wild outburst of speculation in a government-sponsored investment scheme whose purpose was to raise capital in order to liquidate the national debt.214 There was certainly corruption within both the South Sea Company and the government, but the collapse of the market and of the scheme was due also to the comparative inexperience of government, speculators and directors alike in handling financial investment on such a scale. The South Sea Bubble was the result of overoptimistic speculation, coupled with ruthless profiteering: it was what happens when a capitalist economy overheats and then loses confidence. Even so, Dawes is right to draw attention to the ways in which in this period the conjuror became an icon in the popular media, representing the dangers inherent in the general public’s willingness to believe in all sorts of unlikely schemes. The conjuror, the confidence trickster and the capitalist all depend on the willingness of their public to believe in their promises, and the faith required of the speculator by the capitalist is the obverse of the gullibility which the confidence trickster requires of his victim, or the conjuror of his audience. When John Gay wrote his short poem ‘The Jugglers’, which was published as one of his collection of Fables in 1727, it is not unlikely that the South Sea Bubble experience was in the back of his mind: Gay, after all, was one of the stockholders who had been left near-destitute by the company’s failure. ‘The Jugglers’ gives us some insight into the actual performances of an early eighteenth-century conjuror, but it also elaborates on a developing nexus of ideas about conjuring and society. As in The Beggar’s Opera, Gay uses the arena of London low life to present a moral allegory. In this case the allegorical framework is couched in terms of the traditional motif of the challenge between

67

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 68


the mortal and the god – the kind of challenge of which there are plenty of examples in the Greek myths, such as Arachne’s spinning competition with Athena, and Marsyas’ musical competition with Apollo. In Gay’s poem, the ‘goddess’ Vice hears of the juggler’s fame and challenges him to a conjuring competition. Vice is a mock-heroic allegorical figure of the kind much favoured by Augustan poets.215 She does not represent any particular form of vicious behaviour; rather, she personifies the vice that underlies the society’s whole way of being. Convinc⬘d of his inferior skill, She sought his booth, and from the croud Defy⬘d the man of art aloud. Is this then he so famed for slight, Can this slow bungler cheat your sight, Dares he with me dispute the prize?216

We should note that this conjuror is not himself a criminal. He is simply a proficient professional entertainer, whose arts attract the attention of the goddess. Since this is a famous and successful conjuror he is not working the street corners but seems to have a semi-permanent booth – probably, though it is not made explicit, at one of the great London fairs such as Bartholomew Fair. The poem goes on to catalogue his act: The cups and balls he play⬘d; By turns, this here, that there, convey’d: The cards, obedient to his words, Are by a fillip turn⬘d to birds; His little boxes change the grain, Trick after trick deludes the train. He shakes his bag, he shows all fair, His fingers spread, and nothing there, Then bids it rain with showers of gold, And now his iv⬘ry eggs are told, But when from thence the hen he draws, Amaz⬘d spectators humm applause.217

The list is predictable enough: the cup and balls, card tricks, transpositions and transformations. These are the kinds of tricks which we might expect and to which other sources refer. The repertoire of the street conjuror apparently changed little in hundreds of years – although the production of the live hen from the ivory egg sounds as if it might have been an innovation worth seeing! More interesting, though, is the way in which Gay uses the conjuror’s act as a

68

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 69


symbol for the dishonesty of the city. When Vice takes the stage, her conjuring act is far more spectacular: she shows the crowd a distorting mirror which makes each spectator admire the handsomeness of his own image; she produces ‘magic’ banknotes which make politicians speak or stay silent; a thief takes hold of a purse – and then watches it turn into a hangman’s noose in his hand; a rake lays hold of a beautiful woman only to find that he is holding a box of pills, cures for the pox. Time after time Vice offers lures which turn into curses: Twelve bottles rang’d upon the board, All full, with heady liquor stor⬘d, By clean conveyance disappear, And now two bloody swords are there.218

This emblematic narrative, in which drink leads to quarrelling and death, is typical of Vice’s tricks; they are all small morality plays, in which her power to seduce and then destroy men is displayed. The attitude towards the art of ‘juggling’ which Gay displays is ambiguous, however. On the one hand, conjuring clearly becomes a metaphor for the workings of Vice; she is, indeed, the supreme conjuror. On the other hand, though, when the actual street entertainer acknowledges her supremacy, the tone is not entirely clear. The Juggler now, in grief of heart, With this submission own⬘d her art. Can I such matchless slight withstand? How practice hath improv⬘d your hand! But now and then I cheat the throng: You ev⬘ry day, and all day long.219

The comparison between the two suggests both the similarity and the difference. The professional entertainer is a novice compared to the goddess Vice; his tricks and illusions are comparatively harmless. Gay’s friend and fellow satirist Jonathan Swift also used the image of the conjuror in the third volume of his Miscellanies (1736). This included a pastiche advertisement for ‘The Wonder of all the Wonders that ever the World Wondered at’, to be performed ‘for all persons of quality and others’, by a fictional conjuror named John Emanuel Schoitz, ‘newly arrived in this city’.220 The city in question is Dublin, and the wonders promised by the fictitious Schoitz start with the promise to ‘heat a bar of iron red hot and thrust it into a barrel of gun powder before the company, and yet it shall not take fire’. The imagined tricks become increasingly unlikely and increasingly gruesome: in an early version of the ‘gun trick’, Schoitz offers to discharge a loaded blunderbuss into the face of one of the spectators ‘without the least hurt’; to ‘take a pot of scalding oil and throw it

69

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 70


by great ladlefuls directly at the ladies without spoiling their clothes or burning their skins’ and to make the Gentlemen ‘drink a Quart of hot melted lead’ without harm. He promises to drive spikes, pikes, nails and swords through the bodies of the Ladies and Gentlemen present (and their children); to hang their servants from the roof; to rip out their eyes and teeth, jumble them up and then give them back to them and ‘Many other performances of art, too tedious here to mention’. Swift’s advertisement is, of course, a parody of contemporary conjuror’s advertisements – but it is also more than that. This conjuror’s imaginary act has a political dimension too: it frames a fantasy of vengeance perpetrated against the Persons of Quality who are invited to attend. ‘John Emanuel Schoitz’ sounds very much like a projection of Jonathan Swift himself – one of his many fictional personae – and his imaginary acts of violence are all directed at the rich and their dependants. Beneath the fun that is being poked at the claims of conjurors lies a typically savage Swiftian attack on the Anglo-Irish ruling classes, the landlords who, in another context, he described as cannibalistic monsters who, ‘as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children’.221

Dudley Bradstreet and the Bottle-Conjuror In Gay and Swift, then, the figure of the conjuror-as-trickster takes on additional dimensions: as foil for the greater vices of London and as the hero-villain of a bloodthirsty revenge fantasy. Stylistically accurate though it was, Swift’s parody advertisement for the ‘Wonder of all the Wonders’ appeared only in book form, in his Miscellanies: consequently, even if the underlying political polemic were missed, the context meant that there was little chance of a reader mistaking it for a genuine advertisement. It was perhaps a little harder for audiences to spot any false notes in the conjuror’s publicity material that appeared during the run of Samuel Foote’s satirical revue An Auction of Pictures at the Little Theatre (also known as the New Theatre) in the Haymarket. Certainly, the coming attraction on 16 January 1749 promised to be something very special. The conjuror who was booked to perform there would, the public were assured, perform a routine in which [h]e presents you with a Common Wine Bottle, which any of the Spectators may first examine; this bottle is placed on a Table in the middle of the Stage, and he (without any equivocation) goes into it, in the Sight of all the Spectators, and sings in it; during his stay in the Bottle, any person may handle it, and see plainly that it does not exceed a common Tavern Bottle.222

The promised trick – never before seen – attracted the expected attention. There was a large (though not a capacity) crowd, who had paid the sort of seat prices associated with a new attraction: ‘stage, 7s6d, boxes 5s., pit 3s., gallery,

70

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

7:26 PM

Page 71


2s.’223 When the show failed to start at the advertised time, the crowd’s impatience was at first good-natured, then became more and more bad-tempered. The report in the General Advertiser for the following day recorded that the only [miracle] he perform’d was that, he render’d himself invisible (without any Equivocation) to the no small disappointment of the gaping Multitude; who being told from behind the Curtain that the Performer had not yet appear’d, but that if they would stay until the next Night, instead of a Quart Bottle he should creep into a Pint, immediately grew outrageous, and in a Quarter of an Hour’s Time broke to Pieces all the Boxes, Benches, Scenes and everything that was in their power to destroy, leaving only the Shell of the House remaining.224

The crowd also stormed the box office and took back the entrance money. The riot caused damages to the tune of £4,000, as estimated by the theatre owner, John Potter. According to Potter, the theatre had been rented for the night of the hoax by one William Nicholls – who then disappeared without trace. The ‘Bottle-Conjuror’ became a cause célèbre in London. In the popular press, in broadsides, satirical pamphlets and cartoons,225 he was more frequently admired for the impudence of his deception than he was vilified for his dishonesty. One contemporary source records that ‘Most of the Wits employed their Pens for a Month after upon this Subject, and all in Defence of the Bottle-Conjurer’.226 The subject also, as Milbourne Christopher records, ‘provided hilarious scenes for contemporary theatrical productions.’227 For example, The Bottle Conjurer Outdone or The Power of Magic and the Escape of Harlequin into a Quart Bottle played at the Great Tiled Booth, Bowling Green, Southwark on 20 February 1749 as a Benefit for Mr Morgan (who played Harlequin), and was repeated at Bartholomew Fair at Yates’s Great Theatrical Booth on 23rd August.228 Advertisements for further ridiculous feats appeared in response to the debacle: one in the General Advertiser for 27 January 1749 announced that Don John de Nasquitine, sworn brother and champion to the man that was to have jumped into the bottle… hereby invites all such as were then disappointed to repair to the theatre on Monday the 30th, and that shall be exhibited to them which never was before, nor ever will be hereafter seen. All such as shall swear upon the Book of Wisdom that they paid for seeing the Bottle man, will be admitted gratis; the rest at Gotham prices.229

The last sentence (with its reference to the ‘Book of Wisdom’ and ‘Gotham prices’230 – as well as its promise of free admission) gives the game away: this is a satirical joke, not another moneymaking confidence trick.

71

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 72


It was the sheer scale and simplicity of the fraud that seems to have caught the public imagination; and if the Bottle-Conjuror became a kind of criminal folk hero, the audience were despised as typical of the gullible masses who were so easily defrauded. This, perhaps, is somewhat unfair, since it is the very nature of any conjuror’s pre-publicity that it promises an audience the seemingly impossible and invites them to attend in order to see how the conjuror fulfils that promise, how he reconciles the apparent contradictions of his claim. The audience who were attracted by the Bottle-Conjuror’s publicity were no more naïve than any other audience queuing for a ‘magic’ show. They were, however, both fooled and robbed. The Bottle-Conjuror was never unmasked. Among those rumoured to have perpetrated the scam were Samuel Foote himself, John Potter the proprietor of the theatre, the Duke of Cumberland and two different aristocrats both called John Montagu – one of whom was the 2nd Duke of Montagu, the other the 4th Earl of Sandwich.231 None of these, however, actually claimed responsibility, and Potter and Foote vociferously denied it. One man who did claim responsibility for the Bottle-Conjuror hoax was the Irish gentleman-adventurer Dudley Bradstreet, who, six years later, published a detailed account of it in his autobiography, The Life and Uncommon Adventures of Capt. Dudley Bradstreet. Bradstreet was a colourful character. The early part of his narrative describes his military career in which he was ‘employ’d in Secret Services by the M-----stry of G---t B----n, in the Late Rebellion’. He talks of ‘His M----sty’s present to him… [and] His letters to his M-----sty, and the answers he received from the K---g, [and] The reward he got for his Services, occasioning his Scheme of the Bottle-Conjurer.’ He goes on to tell how he [p]ass[ed] as a magician in Covent-Garden, where many of high Birth and Fortune of both Sexes, and even famed for Wisdom, resorted to him, upon his promising to renew their Age, making them thirty or forty Years younger than they were, informing others when their Husbands or Wives should die [and of] His being made Governor and Judge of the finest Seraglio in England, and his promised Feast to the city of London; Facts well known to all the Courts of Europe.232

Bradstreet also wrote a play about the Bottle-Conjuror, one of the ‘contemporary theatrical productions’ mentioned by Christopher. His Life includes the full text of The Magician, or The Bottle-Conjurer,233 of which he claims ‘every part of it is true, except the confining of the Business of ten days to twenty-four Hours, which the Rules of the Stage require’.234 Bradstreet himself features as ‘Captain Spy, A Schemer’, and the play portrays not only the Bottle-Conjuror hoax, but also Bradstreet’s time as a Covent Garden conjuror. In the early scenes a Procuress brings victims to the ‘magician’, who fleeces them of their

72

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 73


money by pretending to tell their fortunes. A typical scene is one in which Lady Judgeill comes to see the conjuror wanting to be reassured that she will soon be rid of her ageing husband and find happiness with young Lord Variety. The conjuror of course obliges – though with a twist: Lady Judgeill. When will my Lord die? Conjuror. He approaches Death nearer and nearer every day; the better you behave and the more you both caress, the faster it will hurry him to his Grave. Lady Judgeill. Dear Sir, I’ll kiss and embrace him, for the future, every Night while he lives, and Day if he pleases…235

This sequence bears a strong resemblance to Ben Jonson’s plays about confidence tricksters, Volpone and The Alchemist. Indeed, the comparison with the latter is knowingly and overtly made within the play itself: the Bradstreet character, ‘Spy’, is advised by his confederate Liewell that ‘you should have a good many large old Books and a Globe laid before you; it is so in the Play called the Alchymist’. 236 Spy disagrees, arguing disingenuously that [a]s we are Originals there ought to be no Imitation; and as you are to permit nobody near me, but those whose lives and Adventures are all known to us, I think I may safely go on without the Tools used by the Conjurers of old.237

The irony is that there is nothing very original at all about Spy’s stratagems. His techniques are precisely those described by Jonson nearly a hundred and fifty years earlier. Thus, according to Bradstreet’s dramatized account, the Bottle-Conjuror is not simply a one-off prank; it is a calculated act of vengeance by a servant of the crown who felt himself unfairly treated. It is also, however, a logical extension of the Covent-Garden adventures. The scam at the Haymarket Theatre is simply a more public, audacious and profitable version of the phoney fortune-telling routine which he had been previously running. But in the play this routine itself is derived from Jonson – as Bradstreet’s real-life Covent Garden scams may well have been. The Bottle-Conjuror, seen through Bradstreet’s narrative, becomes something more than a rather crude hoax. It becomes part of a circulation of meanings between the theatre and everyday life, in which Jonsonian comedy becomes imitated for real-life profit, developed into a larger-scale hoax which preys on an appetite for theatrical entertainment itself – the result of which destroys a theatre! This later gives rise to a play which frames the real-life events in terms of Jonsonian comedy (to which it overtly refers) in order to present in theatrical terms a theatrical event which never took place! In this complex interaction between the stage and reality, the Bottle-Conjuror hoax is effectively produced by Jonsonian comedy – a comedy which itself satirizes the greed and gullibility of Londoners.

73

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 74


The proliferation of smoke and mirrors does not stop there. Was Bradstreet really the Bottle-Conjuror? Quite possibly: while others have been credited with the hoax, no alternative culprit has been identified with any certainty – and Bradstreet has a clear advantage over other candidates in that he has actually claimed responsibility. Even so, it is difficult to be sure that Bradstreet’s account is not fictional; that he is not simply cashing in, from the comparative safety of Dublin, on the notoriety of the hoax. As I have already suggested, magicians (even the most respectable of them) are notoriously unreliable in their memoirs and frequently prone to claiming more credit than is due them. In Bradstreet’s case, there are certainly some aspects of his account which seem questionable. For example, although he claims to have had expert advice in the production of the play from the famous actress Peg Woffington and describes the production itself, there is no clear independent evidence that the play was ever actually performed on the London stage. It may be that Bradstreet’s Bottle-Conjuror is every bit as insubstantial as the one that the audience waited impatiently to see at the New Theatre that night in January 1749. What is certain is that Bradstreet gives us a detailed and sustained contemporary insight into this notorious hoax. He also agrees with all the other commentators that the Bottle-Conjuror incident should be seen as a moral lesson. It shows, he says that ‘the Wise may be imposed upon, and that a needy Schemer may occasion such convulsions as might involve thousands in the Danger, and proves, a Farthing Candle, properly applied, sufficient to fire the World.’238 He goes on to lament that [i]t might well be expected that this Affair would reform the Town, but alas! immediately after, a Man who kept an Ale-house at the Raven in Golden-lane advertised that Don Quevedo de Jumpedo was just arrived in Italy, and would in five Nights jump down his own throat at his House. An incredible number went to see this Performer and were all disappointed, except the Man who promised it.239

The Bottle-Conjuror incident, then, derives its meaning from eighteenthcentury obsessions with economic fraud; it becomes a moral parable, or a kind of satiric social drama in a Jonsonian vein, in which the Conjuror’s duped audience become symbolic of the gullibility of those who would be taken in by all sorts of unlikely schemes, and the absent Conjuror himself becomes an admirable rogue, who, in profiting from the greed and gullibility of his victims, simultaneously has a lesson to teach them. There may be another level, too, on which the incident reverberated with something important in the Zeitgeist. George Winchester Stone has pointed out the link made by some contemporaries between the Bottle-Conjuror hoax and the appearance of an important philosophical essay by the Scottish empiricist

74

Chapter 04.qxd

4/2/07

6:33 PM

Page 75


David Hume: ‘Hume’s “Essay on Miracles” was published in April 1748; and there are several allusions to it in the newspaper account and letters.’240 The ‘Essay on Miracles’ was a rational and empiricist critique of that tradition – still a very important one within the Christian Church – which regarded Biblical miracles as a manifestation, or even a ‘proof ’ of the truth of Christianity.241 Hume’s great predecessor, the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke had defended the traditional view that miracles played an essential role in demonstrating the divine truth of Christian revelation. Hume rejects this, arguing that since ‘no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof ’,242 and that since the occurrence of a miracle is by definition against natural law, then reports of miracles are more likely to be false than they are to be accurate. Reports of miracles should therefore be rejected – and, indeed, if it seems we have directly witnessed a miracle ourselves, then we should be prepared to doubt the testimony of our own senses. Hume’s argument articulated an increasingly widely held Enlightenment position against any form of religious superstition – a position which culminated in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (1764) where he argues that biblical accounts of the miracles of Jesus should be understood allegorically. While many churchmen and theologians at the time condemned Hume as a dangerous atheist, in fact his challenge to the miraculous tradition within religious belief was actually beneficial to the established Church in the long run. The arguments which he and fellow empiricists were making forced theologians to respond with a robust reconsideration of doctrine. The Church’s gradual shift towards a theology that depended less on the ‘evidence’ of the miraculous for its justification, and more on a combination of faith and reason, actually owed a great deal to Hume’s attack. So when, the day after the hoax, an anonymous writer in the Daily Advertiser commented that ‘Those opposed to a recent late book would have been gratified had the Conjurer jumped into the bottle and proved “that miracles had not yet ceased”’,243 he is making a jocular connection with a serious cultural issue. Of course, the publication of Hume’s essay in itself had no causal relationship either with the Bottle-Conjuror riot or with the tide of public opinion which followed it. The incident at the Haymarket Theatre, however, tapped into the same kind of debates which were raised by Hume’s critique. The scorn poured on the ‘gaping Multitude’ who had been duped by the Bottle-Conjuror, was a manifestation, on a popular level, of the same kind of rational scepticism which fuelled Hume’s critique of the appeal to miracles as a foundation stone of belief. The Bottle-Conjuror fiasco may have touched more than one nerve in the collective psyche of mid-eighteenth-century London.

75

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 76

Chapter Five

On the boundaries of the human Besides, animals were only demoted to the status of inhumanity as reason and humanism progressed. A logic parallel to that of racism… The convergence of processes of civilization is astounding. Animals, like the dead, and so many others, have followed this uninterrupted process of annexation through extermination, which consists of liquidation, then of making the extinct species speak, of making them present the confession of their disappearance. Making animals speak, as one has made the insane, children, sex (Foucault) speak. This is even deluded in regard to animals, whose principle of uncertainty, which they have caused to weigh on men since the rupture in their alliance with men, resides in the fact that they do not speak. Jean Baudrillard244

A theme of this book is the way in which magic inhabits the epistemological boundaries of the age in which it finds itself. The conjuror is constantly engaged in boundary work: in the name of entertainment (or wonder), he brings us up against the limits of a culture’s beliefs and knowledge and of its habitual ways of understanding the world. Thus, in an age of superstition and supernatural belief, the conjuror trades on the supernatural in order to suggest explanations for his performances. As we have seen, Samuel Rid, writing in the Jacobean period, encourages his jugglers to capitalize on the imagery of the ‘real’ wizard and to play up against the edge of his culture’s belief about the power of man to harness occult powers. In ages less likely to take for granted the reality of the supernatural, conjurors find other boundaries against which to work. Implicitly or explicitly, they challenge the laws of nature: by passing one solid object through another, by performing levitations, by ‘changing’ one thing into another, by killing or dismembering and then reviving or making whole. The themes of the conjuror’s narrative play, time after time, with the possibility (or the fantasy) that apparent natural laws may not, after all be absolute. And in an age of materialism and rationality, this in itself becomes one of the attractions of his performance: that in a world which the scientist purports to explain with increasing thoroughness, he reminds the audience that there is after all the possibility of wonder. The conjuror then is generally operating on or near the boundaries of a culture’s knowledge. In this chapter, however, I shall be talking about boundary work in a more precise and particular sense – the way in which the performances of conjurors and their colleagues have variously subverted and/or reinforced the boundaries of what it means to be human.

76

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 77

ON THE BOUNDARIES OF THE HUMAN

In our construction of ‘the human’, one of the ways in which we have traditionally proceeded is by drawing boundaries in order to delineate what the human is not. The historian Keith Thomas traces this back to Descartes, who stressed the lordship of humanity over a natural world which is characterized as inert and lacking in any spiritual dimension. According to Thomas, ‘Man stood to animal as did heaven to earth, soul to body, culture to nature.’245 In fact this absolute distinction between man and nature pre-dates Descartes by millennia. It is articulated in the Book of Genesis, the founding myth of western culture. But it is true that Cartesian philosophy, and the greater Enlightenment project in which it played such an important role, made that distinction culturally more urgent. And if the distinction between man and animal is so important, the key questions of what it is that distinguishes us from animals become important too. Again the common-sense response is an important one: man is a rational animal and a language animal. These are the key borderlines – and therefore the site of both scientific experiment and imaginative exploration. Hence the prevalence of talking animals in folk tales and mythology; hence the prevalence of myths relating to deities or sorcerers who, like Circe, turn men and women into animals – teasing us with the horrifying possibility that the boundary may be broken down. Hence, too, the widespread fascination with twentieth-century scientific explorations into the language of animals, and, with those attempts, to teach chimpanzees and dolphins a human language which have met with such limited success. Another important distinction is that between the animate and the inanimate, or to put it another way, between mechanical and inanimate and the organic. Again, this is not always as simple, nor as innocent, as it seems – as the Elizabethan scholar John Dee discovered at an early age, when the mechanical flying scarab which he designed for a Cambridge college production of Aristophanes’ Peace was taken for a living monster, leading to the first of the many accusations of sorcery which pursued him for the rest of his life.246 In later years the pervasive imagery of both the universe and the human body as some kind of machine (with or without a ghost in it) attests a growing uncertainty about the simple distinction between the human and the inanimate: when Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein uses electricity to animate the apparently lifeless assemblage of parts on his laboratory table, he articulates this uncertainty about how absolute this separation actually is. So, too, in a different mode, does James Whale’s 1931 film version of Frankenstein, where the bolt through Boris Karloff ’s neck wittily sums up this complex of ideas in a single visual image. Science fiction films and novels have relentlessly explored the ambiguities of this theme through numerous robots and androids – most successfully, perhaps, in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). On another level, the image of the human mind as a kind of computer has become common in recent years. This, though, is hardly comforting, since the computer on our

77

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 78


desk can perform most reason-based tasks more efficiently than the one which (we are told) we carry around in our heads. Perhaps man is not, after all, such a rational animal: certainly, since the advent of the computer, popular culture has tended to take its cue from Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, seeking definitions of the human which do not depend on rationality. If the construction of the human involves definitions such as ‘not animal’, ‘not inorganic’ another involves the category ‘not disembodied spirit’. Biblical traditions which distinguish us from beings of pure spirit: in the traditional hierarchy of creation humanity is ‘lower than the angels’, and the spheres which relate to these different orders of creation remain separate: they are the realms of heaven (or hell) and earth. Here, too, boundaries seem less than absolute: in folk traditions across the world there are endless tales of ghosts returning, of witches and sorcerers who, like the Witch of Endor, were able to conjure them up, or of oracles who maintained a privileged communication with the spirit world. The shamanic tradition which is referred to in Chapter One is dependent on the concept of being able to negotiate between one world and the other. Later European philosophical developments led thinkers to approach this boundary in a slightly different way. Cartesian dualism sees reality as a dichotomy of matter (extended or spatial substance) and spirit (thinking substance, including God). Descartes argued for the independent existence of a non-corporeal realm and a physical realm and saw the mind as separate from body, the two representing separate and distinct principles of being or classes of substance in the universe. And while an increasing secularization of western thought during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has called into question the nature of the ‘spirit’ side of Descartes’ dichotomy, there are still millions of people for whom its existence is not in question, and for whom scientific advances tend to confirm rather than refute their beliefs. The performance of magic touches on this question in a variety of ways. In this chapter, I shall be looking at two areas of magic in particular – both of them in some ways peripheral to the mainstream of conjuring as we now conceive it, but nonetheless an essential part of the history of magic: talking animals and automata.

‘Appearances of Reason in the Brute’: human/animal William Banks and his horse, Morocco, whom we encountered in an earlier chapter, are good examples of the kind of subliminal trickery which may be employed in order to make an animal seem to have human intelligence. We saw that part of the mythology of this famous double act involved hints and suggestions of sorcery – suggestions which Banks himself may well have encouraged as a publicity strategy. But in some ways Banks and Morocco were before their time; the great age of the ‘intelligent animal act’ was the long eighteenth century – that period between the Restoration and the Regency which

78

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 79


broadly coincides with the philosophical period we call the Enlightenment. And to this later age, this kind of entertainment presented a different kind of philosophical question. The great intellectual project of the European Enlightenment movement was to synthesize ideas of God, man and nature into a coherent world vision in which human reason, through which man understands the universe and his place in it, becomes the prime mover. John Collier summed up what had become the common view when, at the end of the eighteenth century, he concluded in his inquiry into the ‘Vital Principle and the Soul of Man’ that the superiority of Reason is what marks man off from the rest of Creation, the fact that God has endowed him with Faculties, distinct perceptions, and in vast abundance; genius, reflection, reason, and foresight, together with a knowledge of his God, and the means of tracing him out, whereby his elevated thoughts improve these his admirable talents, and turn them to excellent advantage. No one animal in the creation partakes with Man in this sublime exercise of his faculties, and in the consolations which accompany it. It is the particular excellency of his reasonable creatures only… Reason (for instance) avails itself of the sacred treasury of the past, compares it with the present and judges its influence on the future. Reason surveys and connexts the scattered variety of intellectual knowledge diversified among the Brute creation, as it were into one whole, the animating soul presiding over all, concentring in itself ‘the sum of all their powers’. Reason in Man is active and fruitful, unrestrained by place or time, capable of varying and enlarging its attainments… Compare this now with the actions and appearances of reason in the Brute.247

Enlightenment rationalism went hand in hand with advances in scientific thought, and scientists took an almost missionary zeal, throughout the eighteenth century, in spreading the word amongst the public. Demonstrations and explanations of scientific principles and inventions spread from London’s coffee houses, to salons, theatres, halls, mechanics’ institutes and scientific and literary societies both in the capital and in the provinces. By the end of the eighteenth century nearly every English town of any significance was part of a regular circuit of lectures and exhibitions: science was offered to the public in the form of performance, and successful careers might be made out of it since ‘“knowledge”, as Benjamin Martin reflected, “is now become a fashionable thing.”’248 It is important not to oversimplify. For every action, as one of the Enlightenment’s greatest thinkers explained, there is an equal and opposite reaction,249 and the Age of Reason also showed intense interest in the irrational and the supernatural. As recent scholars have argued, ‘the eighteenth century

79

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 80


was too deeply involved with the occult to have us associate it exclusively with rationalism, humanism, scientific determinism and classicism’.250 Nonetheless, there was a dominant strain within Enlightenment thought which celebrated the rationality of man. To the exhibitors of the intelligent animals, this must have been a godsend, offering them the chance to subvert just that boundary between man and the animal world which scientific and theological thought looked to emphasize. Thus the Age of Reason was also the heyday of phenomena such as William Pinchbeck’s ‘Pig of Knowledge’, James Hazard’s ‘Learned Pig’, Sieur Rea’s ‘Little Scientific Pony’, Signor Castelli’s Dog ‘Munito’, the ‘Wonderful Intelligent Goose’ and many other Learned, Sapient, Scientific, and Philosophical farmyard and domestic animals. Frequently publicized in terms which imitated, quoted and parodied the more ‘respectable’ scientific lectures and demonstrations with which they competed for customers, these intelligent animals were exhibited not only in fairs but also in lecture rooms, arcades, halls and institutes throughout Europe and America. Some, like Munito the dog, could also be consulted… AT HOME At No. 1, Leicester Square, Where he exhibits, Daily, every Hour from TWELVE till FIVE, His wonderful and surprising Knowledge, which last Year so greatly entertained all those who honoured his Performance with their presence. MUNITO, besides his former accomplishments, will astonish the Public with his vast Knowledge in the Sciences of GEOGRAPHY, BOTANY, and NATURAL HISTORY251 Intelligent animals appeared, too, in another form in one of the greatest of the satires against the rationalist assumptions of Enlightenment philosophy. In the fourth and last book of Jonathan Swift’s surreal and misanthropic fantasy Gulliver’s Travels, the eponymous narrator collapses into an existential despair at the irrationality and the inhumanity of his fellow men, comparing them unfavourably to the wise and benevolent race of the Houyhnhnms, the talking horses he had encountered on his final voyage. Swift’s talking animals are far removed from those on display in eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century London and Boston, but they share an ideological function: to problematize the assumptions about the primacy of man’s role as ‘rational animal’. For some Enlightenment spectators this raised some serious questions. A contemporary publication, Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous histories, designed for the instruction of children, respecting their treatment of animals articulates some of these issues. It is written in the form of a series of conversations between a mother (‘Mrs. Benson’) and her daughter, and some friends. In one

80

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 81


of these conversations, they discuss the recent phenomenon of the Learned Pig, which Mrs. Benson had seen on a visit to London. This Pig was able to ‘spell’ words by pointing at, or picking up, cards arranged on the floor – leading the conversation towards the question of whether the Pig can really have human-like intelligence. At first Mrs. Benson brushes the question away: For my part, replied Mrs. Benson, I find the subject so much above my comprehension, that whenever my mind is disposed to expatiate on it, I check the inclination, from an opinion that it is of no consequence to me, whether animals have intellects or not, and that it is amongst those things which the Almighty has intentionally concealed from our penetration. That they are in the power of man, and subservient to his use and pleasure, gives them a sufficient claim to our compassion and kindness…252

Later, however, when her daughter presses her more insistently on the question, she replies firmly in the negative. Nor are animals capable of attaining human sciences because, for these, human faculties are requisite; and no art of man can change the nature of any thing, though he may be able to improve that nature to a certain degree; …And I would advise you, Harriet, never to give countenance to those people who shew what they call learned animals; as you may assure yourself they exercise great barbarities upon them…253

If the impulse of Enlightenment rationalism is to insist on the clear and unalterable distinction between man and the animal world, then the showman’s response is to subvert that distinction. Trimmer’s Mrs. Benson sees a danger in the Learned Pig, in that it threatens to blur an important boundary. The showman could respond, however, that such exhibitions were actually in the spirit of the Enlightenment itself. This, certainly, is the line taken by William Pinchbeck, the owner and exhibitor of the ‘Pig of Knowledge’ which caused a great stir in late nineteenth-century America, when he eventually wrote an explanation of how the act was done in The Expositor, the first conjuring book published in America. He explains the way in which a pig can gradually be brought to respond to subtle cues and trained to pick up cards by rewarding it with food. The Expositor takes the form of a rather witty series of fictional letters between Pinchbeck and a correspondent who is eager to learn Pinchbeck’s secrets, starting with the training method for the Pig. Pinchbeck was writing in part, it seems, in order to defend himself against the accusation that training the pig involved, as Sarah Trimmer put it, ‘great barbarities’. However he was also writing as a true man of the Enlightenment: THE intention of this work was not only to amuse and instruct, but also

81

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 82


to convince superstition of her many ridiculous errors, – to shew the disadvantages arising to society from a vague as well as irrational belief of man⬘s intimacy with familiar spirits, – to oppose the idea of supernatural agency in any production of man, – and lastly, how dangerous such a belief is to society, how destructive to the improvement of the human capacity, and how totally ruinous to the common interests of mankind.254

The correspondent, too, writes in a spirit of enlightened rational curiosity. He wishes to understand how the routine works in order to refute the more mystical accounts of it which he has heard. Wherever I stop on my tour I am sure to hear of the fame of your celebrated Pig, and the many different opinions prevailing relative to the mode of his tuition, makes him a subject of general speculation. Some contend it is witchcraft; and others, like the ancient Pythagoreans, believing in the transmigration of souls, conclude that the spirit of the grunting philosopher might once have animated a man. An evening or two since, stopping at an inn, your Pig being the topic of conversation, I could not but listen to a grave old gentleman, who, putting on a very affected, sage like look, declared his performances were the effects of the Black Art; that the Pig ought to be burnt, and the Man banished, as he had no doubt but you familiarly corresponded with the devil. O monstrous! will time and experience never remove such credulity from the earth? Must ingenuity, the parent of manufactories, the progressive pillar to wisdom and the arts, whose summit supports a mirror where superstition may see her own gorgon image, be thus broken and overturned by the rude hands of ignorance and pride? We rejoice that we live in an enlightened part of the world, where liberty extend her choicest blessings, and where the Presiding Magistrate is a philosopher, and under his patronage men of talents dare to be such; and these absurd opinions are but the dogmas of devotees and folly.255

Pinchbeck’s Pig of Knowledge both subverts and polices Enlightenment assumptions about the boundary between the human and the animal. In performance, it seems to have encouraged in the spectator a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’256 – a temporary acceptance of imaginative possibility. It may have teased his audience into all sorts of musings about sorcery, the transmigration of souls and the human spirit inhabiting a pig’s body. But in his published explanation, Pinchbeck reverts to the party line of the Age of Reason: he not only explains how the trick is done, but as he does so he simultaneously praises all that is ‘progressive’, ‘enlightened’ and libertarian about his society. In doing so Pinchbeck takes on the role of the showman-as-satirist: displaying the distortions only in order to emphasize the norms of Nature against which they appear to transgress.

82

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 83


Subverting the distinction between man and the animal world took a variety of forms, of which intelligent animals, like Morocco, Munito and the Pig of Knowledge were only one. More extreme were the later freak shows and dime museums of nineteenth- century entrepreneurs such as P. T. Barnum. As Jane Goodall has shown, the relationship between the scientific and performative traditions of display was a complex one, involving various forms of co-dependency: At this time there was a… prospect that scientific modernisers might lose their battle against the superstitious ideas that had such a strong hold on the popular imagination. But these agonistic tensions did not settle into a set of simple dichotomies: modernity versus tradition, rationality versus superstition, natural order versus an outlandish theatre of wonders. What makes the history interesting is the breakdown of these dichotomies…257

Thus, one of the forefathers of P. T. Barnum’s ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ was also one of the great Enlightenment projects: Leibnitz’s proposal for ‘A New Sort of Exhibition’, a museum of everything which would contain performances by both humans and animals, together with exhibitions of new scientific technology. Leibnitz’s aim was to attract the general public and to teach them about new advances in science through the medium of popular culture: conjurors, clowns, fire-eaters, shadow plays, acrobats and comedies, as well as scientific exhibitions and displays. In Barnum’s hands this became an exhibition which juxtaposed the contents of the American Museum (which he acquired in 1841) with ‘every known category of popular entertainment’, exhibiting not only learned animals and talking birds but all kinds of monsters, real and faked, such as the famous ‘Fejee Mermaid: the most stupendous curiosity ever submitted to the public for inspection’.258 And while mermaids and intelligent pigs remain in the realms of fantasy,259 evolutionary theory – versions of which were already current in French scientific circles in the early nineteenth century, fifty years before Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 – eventually meant that the nature of the boundaries between man and the animal world would be up for reconsideration in very different terms.

‘The whole thing is an allegory, a continuous metaphor’: human/mechanical The Professor of Poetry and Eloquence took a pinch of snuff, and, slapping the lid to and clearing his throat, said solemnly, ‘My most honourable ladies and gentlemen, don⬘t you see then where the rub is? The whole thing is an allegory, a continuous metaphor. You understand me? Sapienti sat.’ But several most honourable gentlemen did not rest satisfied with this explanation; the history

83

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 84


of this automaton had sunk deeply into their souls, and an absurd mistrust of human figures began to prevail. Several lovers, in order to be fully convinced that they were not paying court to a wooden puppet, required that their mistress should sing and dance a little out of time, should embroider or knit or play with her little pug, &c., when being read to, but above all things else that she should do something more than merely listen – that she should frequently speak in such a way as to really show that her words presupposed as a condition some thinking and feeling. Ernst T. A. Hoffmann260

The intelligent animal act was popular in the late eighteenth century, but it had a fierce competitor. No sooner has Pinchbeck’s correspondent in The Expositor mastered the knack of using food to train the Pig to respond to his cues, than he writes to report sadly that the Pig no longer excites admiration. There is a certain Philosophical Machine lately arrived from France, which engrosses universal attention. The admittance to visit this curiosity is fifty cents; and people throng in crowds to view it. The Proprietors name it The Invisible Lady and Acoustic Temple;261

He goes on to describe the Philosophical Machine, which, like the pig, claims the supposedly human quality of rational discourse: In the middle of a room is seen a railing in the form of an octagon, painted red: In the centre of this is suspended a square chest, whose circumference contains about twenty-four inches: Apparently isolated on this, is a dome supported by four small columns: A small glass globe, silvered, ornaments and caps the extreme convexity of this dome. From each corner of this chest proceeds a trumpet: To the concavity of either of these you may put a question, and a rational answer, in an effeminate tone of voice, will be immediately returned.262

It is also good enough to fool a professional: Astonished, I placed my ear to the floor, to the walls, and even clambered to the ceiling to discover the agent to whom I attributed the answers: I listened, but distinguished no sound.263

More important than the intelligent animal act to the mainstream of stage magic has been the automaton – a machine which in one way or another imitates nature. Many of the great magicians such as Robert-Houdin and John Nevil

84

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 85


Maskelyne were (or at least claimed to be) trained in the mechanics of clockmaking and watchmaking. Some of those who weren’t relied on partners who were so trained: Isaac Fawkes, the great eighteenth-century showman who exhibited at Southwark Fair and Bartholemew Fair, worked in partnership with a Fleet Street clockmaker,264 who created illusions in which art imitated life. Automata in the broadest sense of the word (meaning mechanical devices which simulate human or natural functions either on a mimetic or a pragmatic level) have a long history, and have played an important part in the development of western technology. With the rediscovery of Greek culture during the Renaissance, the newly translated writings of scientists and engineers of the ancient world such as Heron of Alexandria provoked widespread interest. Heron’s Pneumatics, in particular, was taken up by practically minded thinkers such as Agostino Ramelli, whose Diverse e Artificiose Macchine …borrowed heavily from the Alexandrine writings. He described and illustrated for the first time the rotary pump, mechanical details of windmills, and a coffer-dam of interlocking piles, as well as other technological developments. Consistent with other writings of the period, Ramelli did not neglect to include several examples of biological automata in the form of hydraulically operated singing birds.265

Although there is no strict dividing line between the categories, I am more concerned in this chapter with these ‘biological’ automata than with the protoindustrial applications. In particular, animated human figures seem to have made their first appearance in the sixteenth century, in the work of Hans Bullmann of Nuremberg (c 1525) and Gianello Torriano of Cremona. Automata have been a feature of the leisure industry since their invention, and from the sixteenth century onwards, the pleasure gardens of the very rich have been adorned with hydraulic and pneumatic entertainments in form of fountains and grottoes, artificial birdsong, animated animals and human figures of ever-increasing elaborateness. For example, in Archbishop Marcus Sitticus’s chateau at Heilbronn, the famous seventeenth-century water gardens were augmented in 1725 by the designs of a Nuremberg craftsman called Lorenz Rosenegge; his mechanical theatre contained no less than two hundred and fifty-six figures, powered by water-turbine and a complex system of gearing. The life of an entire village takes place on a stage that measures about six yards in width. As sentinels move about to announce the time, noblemen bow to ladies who flutter their fans, while guards on sentry duty show their arms, jugglers in Hungarian costumes watch a ballerina dance with a tame bear, and merchants sell their wares. Of particular interest is the left wing of the theatre, which is shown in the process of construction, with the workmen plying their respective trades.266

85

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 86


No conjuror could approach such magnificence: still, it has traditionally been one of the functions of popular culture to appropriate the pleasures of the very rich and re-present them, in modified form, for the enjoyment of poorer folk. What Rosenegge provided for the Archbishop’s private delight, showmen such as Isaac Fawkes and his successors offered to the customers at Bartholomew Fair. In the past decade or so Performance Studies has taken a particular interest in ‘technological’ theatre. Traditionally, the role of technology has generally been seen to be a framing one: defining the spaces and effects within a performance, and enriching and focusing the audience’s experience through light and sound. More recently, performance theorists – drawing on Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, on Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, and on N. Katherine Hayles’ arguments about ‘the posthuman’ – have begun to explore the relationship between the human performer and the mechanical, digital or virtual performer.267 In one sense, of course, this is a very ancient form of performance: the integration of the human body with a mechanical simulacrum is at the root of all puppetry. But the technology of performance has expanded to include video imagery, computer-generated images and environments, web-based technology, prosthetic technologies drawn from medical science, and ‘robots’. Whether such technology is seen as an extension of the body or as an alternative to the body, the interaction between the human and the non-human, between the live and the mediated, has become a central theme of Performance Studies. Conjurors’ automata play a key role in the history of this. They were at the height of their popularity during the ‘long eighteenth century’ – a period in which technology had developed sufficiently to allow for the creation of figures which seemed sufficiently lifelike, while the mass production of the Industrial Revolution was not sufficiently advanced to make technological marvels a commonplace. During the earlier part of this period, automata were largely limited to machines which looked like natural objects. Hence the age’s fascination with all kinds of mechanical marvels such as pipesmoking skeletons, mechanical ducks and peacocks, mechanical artists and instrumentalists such as the flute player and the Writing and Drawing Master. Jessica Riskin has characterized the differences between seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century automata by showing how in earlier designs the mechanism is all subterranean and the imitative figures all on top. But, even in cases where the mechanism was contained within the figures, it played no part in the imitation, which was purely external. An artificial swan, presented to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1733 by a mechanician named Maillard, contained its mechanism inside itself. The swan paddled through the water on a paddle wheel while a set of gears swept its head slowly from

86

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 87


side to side. It was intended to represent the behavior of a natural swan, but by no means to reproduce its physiology. By the late eighteenth century, automata were imitative internally as well as externally, in process and substance as well as in appearance.268

And if the talking animals and learned pigs were rarely taken seriously by the scientific establishment of the Enlightenment, the automaton was seen as raising genuine questions about the nature of human and artificial ‘intelligence’. Jacques Vaucanson, for example, invented a set of automata which included a pipe-and-tabor player, a flute player, and a duck which ‘stretches out its neck to take corn out of your hands; it swallows it, digests it, and discharges it digested by the usual passage… The Food is digested, as in real Animals, by Dissolution, not by Trituration, as some natural philosophers will have it.’269 Vaucanson displayed these figures commercially in Paris in 1738, but this popular display was secondary to his main purpose, which was to be seen as a serious philosophical investigator into human nature. In this he was successful: Voltaire championed him as ‘Prometheus’ rival’, and in 1757 he beat Dennis Diderot (the very personification of the Enlightenment intellectual) to an appointment as ‘Associated Mechanician’ to the Paris Academy of Sciences.270 According to one recent scholar of Vaucanson’s automata, their success lay in their author’s transformation of an ancient art. Automata, ‘selfmoving machines,’ had existed from antiquity, but as amusements and feats of technological virtuosity. Vaucanson’s automata were philosophical experiments, attempts to discern which aspects of living creatures could be reproduced in machinery, and to what degree, and what such reproductions might reveal about their natural subjects. Of course, his automata were also commercial ventures intended to entertain and demonstrate mechanical ingenuity. But their value as amusements lay principally in their dramatization of a philosophical problem that preoccupied audiences of workers, philosophers, and kings: the problem of whether human and animal functions were essentially mechanical.271

It seems a large leap from the philosophes of the Paris Academy to the showman of London’s fairground booths and parlours, but in fact the distance is not as great as it might first appear. While Isaac Fawkes and his colleagues had none of Vaucanson’s intellectual ambitions, the effect which their automata had upon their public was much the same. And, indeed, Vaucanson himself soon became one of Fawkes’s successors; by 1742 his mechanical figures were showing ‘at the Long Room at the Opera House at the Haymarket, at 1, 2, 5 and 7 in the afternoon’.272

87

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 88


And for all his philosophical pretensions, Vaucanson was not above a little deception: his Defecating Duck was actually a fraud. Far from imitating the digestive functions of a live bird, close observation discovered (although not until several years later) that the grain was entirely separate from the excrement – which was loaded into the tail end before each performance! Frederic Nicolai published the first exposé of the Duck in 1783,273 but it may come as no surprise to discover the great Robert-Houdin claiming to have made the same discovery himself quite independently, while repairing the Duck’s mechanism in 1845. ‘To my great surprise’, he says, ‘I found that the illustrious master had not disdained to have recourse to a trick which a conjurer would have been proud of. The digestion, so pompously announced in the memoir, was only a mystification – a real canard, in fact. Decidedly, Vaucanson was not only my master in mechanism, but I must bow before his genius for juggling.’274 Opinion is divided as to how seriously to take Robert-Houdin’s claim – or as to whether the parts he was cleaning even came from Vaucanson’s Duck.275 For the conjuror, a particular attraction was the more ambitious kind of automaton (real or fraudulent) which could interact with spectators – machines such as the Sagacious Swan who read spectators’ thoughts and guessed the value of cards they had chosen; or the Talking Head, which (like that of the medieval Friar Bacon) would make predictions, were particularly popular. More impressive than any of these, though, was the eighteenth century’s most famous automaton: Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Chess Player, also known as the Mechanical Turk, which was exhibited in the courts and salons of polite upper-class society in eighteenth-century Europe. Its first public appearance was in 1770, before an audience which included the Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa.276 Von Kempelen was an aristocrat, courtier and counsellor – a wealthy civil servant, in fact, and an accomplished linguist who also had an interest in and knowledge of physics, mechanics and hydraulics. His initial interest in mechanical marvels was that of the amateur scientist and philosophe. His attempt to design a machine which could talk was another experiment which tested one of the key attributes of human nature, spoken language, and he regarded it as an altogether more serious undertaking than his Chess Player. Indeed, von Kempelen was surprised and not a little embarrassed by the success of the chess-playing automaton, and the consequent fame which it brought him. A few years after its début he dismantled it – only to be ordered to rebuild it by Emperor Joseph II in 1781, in order to impress the visiting Grand Duke Paul of Russia. When Joseph II subsequently granted him two years’ leave from his court duties in Vienna in order to take the Mechanical Turk on a European tour, von Kempelen (who may have been in some financial difficulties at the time) acquiesced – but not altogether enthusiastically. In Paris the Turk publicly played and beat a number of highly ranked chess players, including Benjamin Franklin. The most interesting of these games,

88

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 89


however, is one which the Turk actually lost – against the man generally recognized to be the best chess player in Europe. According to Philidor’s son André, in a story first published in the French chess magazine Le Palamède in 1847, von Kempelen approached Philidor on the eve of their contest, asking him effectively to throw the match. Philidor was not a vain man and apparently agreed to allow the machine to beat him if it played well enough for such a victory to be plausible. But, he said, if it did not prove to be a strong player, he would have no qualms about defeating it. Evidently the Turk was nowhere near being a strong enough player for a victory over Philidor to have been convincing, for Philidor easily won the game. But he later confessed that no game against a human opponent had fatigued him to the same extent. Philidor apparently believed that the Turk was genuine, and found the idea of a chess-playing machine rather terrifying.277

It is not the attempt to fix the match which is so intriguing about this anecdote. It is Philidor’s reported response to the game: the fact that he believed in the genuineness of the Turk and was so disturbed by prospect of a chess-playing automaton. Philidor found the automaton disturbing precisely because it took on human opponents at an exercise of rationality – and won – beating the rational animal at the very thing which made him most human. It may be, too, that at some level Philidor recognized that his match against the automaton had something iconic about it. What he certainly could not have recognized was that this challenge anticipated, in an inverted way, the test which the twentieth-century logician, mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing designed in order to determine the boundaries of machine intelligence – and which is now recognized as one of the foundation stones of modern computer science: ‘Simply put, the computer passes the test and is deemed an intelligent “thinking machine” if a human conversing with it via typewritten messages cannot tell whether it is another human or a machine’.278 Contemporary language-based computer programmes, operating under Turing test conditions, can pass for ‘human’ approximately fifteen per cent of the time. A famous programme named ELIZA279 – after Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle – more or less successfully emulated the linguistic gambits of the psychotherapist, giving rise to a spate of Computer-Aided Self-Help programmes which are now in use in reputable clinics: the Royal College of Psychiatrists has concluded that ‘computer-aided self-help cuts therapist time with each patient significantly, without impairing improvement, for patients with anxiety and depression.’280 Philidor, a respected and successful composer and musician and a prodigious intellectual as well as the most brilliant chess player of his generation, was in a better position than most to carry out such a test. Von Kempelen’s ‘computer’ lost

89

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 90


the game of chess, but it passed the more important test. Unlike the machine in the Turing test, however, its task was to convince its opponent, not that it was human, but that it was a genuine ‘intelligent, thinking machine’. If the match between Philidor and von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk anticipates the Turing test in this respect, there is another way in which it anticipates a more recent milestone in the history of thinking machines. Half a century after Turing’s original formulation of his test, Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion, was narrowly outplayed by the IBM computer Deep Blue in a six-match tournament which once more prompted a re-think of what we mean by the whole concept of Artificial Intelligence – and indeed, of human intelligence. ‘When IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in 1997, most Artificial Intelligence researchers and commentators decided that chess playing did not require intelligence after all and declared a new standard, the ability to play “Go”’.281 Automata such as the Mechanical Turk challenged the audience’s own sense of ‘liveness’ 282 – its understanding of the boundaries not only between the human and the non-human but between the organic and the inorganic. They generated in audiences a double-sided response which involved both the will to believe that something truly unnatural was taking place, and also the urge to explain it rationally. As Pinchbeck’s Expositor correspondent exclaims, Is it possible that the most ingenious of mankind could contrive a machine capable of giving rational answers? No, I am convinced to the contrary: Neither has the proprietor any connexion with a familiar spirit. But on what principle these opaques are enabled to discourse, is the mystery I wish you to unriddle.283

The actual explanation was both ingenious and mundane. Most conjurors’ interactive automata – and the Mechanical Turk was no exception – were operated by a combination of the cogs and wheels of the traditional watchmakers craft, and by mechanisms relying on hydraulics and air pressure, often controlled by a hidden operator. In the case of the Turk, an ingeniously designed cabinet with a sliding seat and various folding partitions created the false impression that no human being could fit inside the mechanism; meanwhile, a set of magnets attached to the underside of the chessmen relayed information to the operator about an opponent’s moves. The names and identities of von Kempelen’s operators are not known. In later years, however, when the automaton passed into the hands of Johann Maelzel, he is known to have hired expert chess players such as Johann Allgaier, Aaron Alexandre, William Lewis and Peter Williams as operators.284 These mechanical inventions, the automata, are particularly significant in terms of the boundary work that they do, not only because they seem to challenge

90

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 91


something very essential about the construction of humanity, but also because they tap into a powerful and ambivalent Enlightenment image: that of the Universe as a kind of divinely inspired machine. Newtonian physics became western philosophy’s dominant explanation of how the universe works, and during the eighteenth century it became increasingly common to think of the universe itself as being essentially mechanical. A famous argument for the existence of God put forward by William Paley (the ‘high priest’ of the theological utilitarians)285 in 1802 sums up the way in which rational theology had developed since the early years of the Enlightenment.286 Deeply embedded in Paley’s thought, as it was deeply embedded in the thought of many thinkers of the time, is a conviction that the universe is basically mechanistic. In Natural Theology, an influential and popular work which went through twelve editions in its first seven years, he imagines a man finding a watch and wondering how it came to be there, what its origins were. This mechanism being observed (it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it; but being once, as we have said, observed and understood), the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.287

This becomes Paley’s dominant metaphor: he describes the universe as a watch, and God, in a resonant image, as the great watchmaker,288 He articulates an increasingly common view of the universe as a great and complex machine, operating according to those laws of mechanics which Newton had formulated, just over a century earlier, and whose discovery had not only made possible the birth of the machine age in the eighteenth century, but in doing so had changed the culture’s construction of Nature, and of man’s relationship with it. Thus Paley can write ‘That an animal is a machine, is a proposition neither correctly true nor wholly false’.289 This is why, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the question of the boundary between man and machine became so very important: because of the suspicion that the difference between the living organism and the mechanical device may not, after all, be so great. If the universe is essentially a great machine, it becomes, literally, vital to establish what, if anything, makes us more than machines. Is it the soul (the ‘ghost in the machine’?) Or is it – as Paley suggests here – the mystery that lies beyond the machine The difference between an animal and an automatic statue, consists in this, – that, in the animal, we trace the mechanism to a certain point, and then we are stopped; either the mechanism becoming too subtile for our

91

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 92


discernment, or something else beside the known laws of mechanism taking place; whereas, in the automaton, for the comparatively few motions of which it is capable, we trace the mechanism throughout. But, up to the limit, the reasoning is as clear and certain in the one case, as in the other.290

Paley’s argument was, in his own terms, an optimistic one: the Great Watchmaker that he envisaged was a beneficent being. For some of the Romantic generation, however, the image took on a rather bleaker aspect. Newton’s universe could seem an impoverished and desolate place, as William Blake makes clear when he talks despairingly of the ‘Newtonian Voids between the substance of creation’291 and prays ‘May God us keep/From single vision and Newton’s sleep.’292 Paley’s image of the watch lying abandoned on the heath was at best an ambivalent one. If the watchmaker had made it and wound it up, had he also walked away from it? A large part of the Romantic poets’ project lay in an insistence (in which it sometimes sounds as if they are trying to convince themselves) that the universe was not after all merely a machine, but was vitalized with ‘something far more deeply interfused… a motion and a spirit, that… rolls through all things’.293 Automata, then, operate at this interface between the mechanistic and animistic. By replicating organic life in terms of machinery, automata like Vaucanson’s Duck and von Kempelen’s Turk articulate an age’s ambivalence about mechanistic explanations of the universe. The two contradictory claims – ‘that life is essentially mechanistic and that the essence of animal life is irreducible to mechanism’294 are not reconciled in the figure of the automaton. Rather they confront each other in all their contradictoriness. Von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk challenges the spectator to explain its feats, and in doing so the spectator is forced to construct explanations which either leave her common-sense world-view intact (there is a human intelligence at work here), or else subvert its boundaries (a machine may have ‘intelligence’). And, just as the exhibitors whose learned animals posed a challenge to common-sense Enlightenment distinctions between the human and the animal were touching on important scientific themes, so the automata raised questions about human and artificial intelligence which would be more fully explored by the scientific inventions of a later generation. Paradoxically, the ‘wondrous’ explanation of the Mechanical Turk leads to a world-view which is more modern than its alternatives.

The Uncanny The story of the automaton does not end with the end of the Age of Enlightenment. While the insights of later computerized generations were not available to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers, nonetheless the boundary between the human and the artificial continued to obsess

92

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 93


philosophers; and the showman’s automaton continued to be a popular addition to conjuring shows. In the 1870s, when magic had moved into the large theatres and music halls and was playing to the newly leisured working classes and middle classes of nineteenth-century London, J. N. Maskelyne re-packaged the mechanical figure for this new theatrical environment. His ‘Psycho’ – essentially a card-playing automaton, but an intricately designed and extremely effective one – was one of the most famous of these theatrical effects. And while figures like Psycho continued to amuse the audiences at the Egyptian Hall, their wider metaphorical significance continued to attract the attention of philosophers. If William Paley’s Natural Theology sits at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sigmund Freud’s principles of psychoanalysis dominate the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth. In his essay on ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche), Freud looked at the significance of the boundary between the human and the mechanical. It is because of Freud’s essay that this word, ‘uncanny’, has become so current in certain areas of cultural and performance studies. It is a useful one in thinking about conjuring and its significance, but its full meaning cannot be understood without looking at the ambiguity inherent in the German word which Freud used: Freud, like many psychoanalytic critics after him, was particularly fond of the richness of meaning offered by puns and wordplay. Das Heimliche – the non-negated version of the word – contains a double meaning. It refers on the one hand to that which is familiar (‘homely’) and comfortable. Its opposite, therefore, das Unheimliche, carries a feeling of estrangement, of no longer being ‘at home’ in the world. However, a second meaning of das Heimliche means that which is hidden or concealed. In this sense of the word das Unheimliche is that which is revealed. Das Unheimliche exposes that which is usually kept out of sight. Thus ‘the uncanny combines these two semantic levels. It uncovers what is hidden and, by doing so, effects a disturbing transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar’.295 Freud’s essay on ‘The Uncanny’ was an extended piece of literary criticism of E. T. A. Hoffman’s short story ‘The Sand-man’, in which a young man, unable to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate, falls in love with Olympia, a lifelike automaton. It was also a response to an earlier philosophical work on the same theme. In ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906), Ernst Jentsch had defined ‘the uncanny’ in terms of a person’s feelings of uncertainty – in particular an uncertainty about whether something was animate or inanimate. Freud comments: Jentsch has taken as a very good instance ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate’; and he refers in this connection to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata. To these he

93

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 94


adds the uncanny effect of epileptic fits, and of manifestations of insanity, because these excite in the spectator the impression of automatic, mechanical processes at work behind the ‘ordinary appearance of mental activity’. Without entirely accepting this author⬘s view, we will take it as a starting point for our own investigation.

The sensation of ‘the uncanny’, then, may be produced by the suspicion that a human being may be nothing more than an elaborate mechanism. This is, as we have seen, the very position in which Paley’s Natural Theology places the human subject, and a subsequent ambivalence about the mechanistic interpretation of the universe is deeply woven into post-Enlightenment thinking. As Freud’s final sentence suggests, he was to take Jentsch’s insight and give it a characteristic twist. Jentsch had argued that while people vary greatly in their susceptibility to the feeling of the uncanny, it is particularly strong in those who are comparatively uneducated (by whom he meant primitive peoples, children, women, and the lower classes) or of a nervous disposition, epileptics and the insane. Freud, however, considered the uncanny from the standpoint of psychoanalytic theory, in which the frightening element is something which has been repressed and which then later recurs. Freud’s account of the Uncanny turns it into a phenomenon of normal, rather than abnormal, psychology: it is a feeling which arises when some idea or emotion from early childhood, something which has been buried or hidden from itself by our conscious mind, is triggered by an experience in the present, comes to light and reasserts itself. By definition, the sensation of the Uncanny is something which only an enlightened adult can experience: Freud explained that since children do not strictly distinguish between the animate and the inanimate, they are inclined to think their dolls or stuffed animals are alive. As adults, then, the sight of a life-like automaton or automatic human behavior reactivates the infantile belief that we thought we had surmounted.296

And this, perhaps, is not a bad model for thinking about the pleasures of magic in performance as a whole. While it appeals to children, magic is also a grown-up form of entertainment for the same reason that the sensation of ‘the Uncanny’ is grown-up. It triggers a relationship between the ‘adult’, rational mind and the beliefs that we thought we had surmounted. I have suggested that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century automata perform boundary work which both marks and problematizes the distinction between the human and the non-human. Hoffman’s story, and Freud’s reading of it, is about what happens when those boundaries break down. The feeling of ‘The Uncanny’

94

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 95


is one prompted by the return of the repressed – and not surprisingly, in Freud’s interpretation ‘the repressed’ turns out to be feelings of childhood sexuality. Both at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth the conjurors’ automata – figures like Psycho – continued to be touchstones for a philosophical puzzle which lay at the heart of a culture’s anxiety about what it was to be human.

New media and the dissolution of borders By way of conclusion of this chapter, I want to turn to a very modern version of the automaton. In recent years, the world of magic has had to come to terms with new media: the Internet and digital technology have presented new challenges and new opportunities. As ever, conjurors have looked for ways of turning the latest scientific developments into material for their acts – as can be seen, for example, in the Internet magic tricks available at sites such as http://www.geocities.com/Baja/4954/, http://www.caveofmagic.com/ and http:// www.internetmagictricks.com/. These, though, are comparatively simple adaptations of old routines. Some of the wider implications which digital technology will have for the contemporary conjuror are raised in a provocative article by Christophe Lombardi entitled ‘The Cyborg Magician’. Lombardi describes the research of Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University, whose work with microelectronic implants itself goes some way towards dissolving the boundaries between human and computer. Warwick’s implants have enabled him to create a direct link between a computer and his own nervous system, and Lombardi attempts to assess the implications that this new technology will have for conjurors – including the possibility of microelectronically assisted telepathy. He adds that Of course, when such technology will be readily available to everyone (at least anyone who can afford it; another ethical question…), it will be impossible to deceive audiences with it. But remember Robert Houdin and ‘The Light and Heavy Chest’: there will be a few years when such technology will not be known to everyone, but when it will be accessible to a few people who are prepared to pay to get it and who will then be able to use it to accomplish impossible feats, not with a gimmick, not with clever misdirection, but with an implant! Among those few, the magicians who will choose to use this technology will have as much impact as Robert Houdin in Algeria in 1856! They will have become the first ever cyborg magicians!297

In fact, this kind of ‘magic’ is already being performed, although in a cultural context which Lombardi may not have envisaged. Postmodernism dissolves the boundaries between high art and popular art, so perhaps it is not surprising to find

95

Chapter 05.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 96


that the first ‘cyborg magician’ is actually an avant-garde performance artist, Stelarc, whose work ‘explores and extends the concept of the body and its relationship with technology through human/machine interfaces’.298 As well as working with implants and prosthetic body parts, Stelarc has developed an exhibit entitled Prosthetic Head (2002) – which is actually a digital version of the old Talking Head routine so popular with Victorian conjurors.299 The nineteenthcentury illusion was produced using a three-legged table and a live assistant whose body was hidden by cunningly positioned mirrors. The postmodern version is a three-dimensional digitally animated caricature of Stelarc himself, which appears on a screen and answers questions that audience members ask it in real time by means of a computer keyboard. Way beyond the capabilities of programmes such as ELIZA, Stelarc’s head performs so well that, although intellectually, (audience members) know they are just pushing buttons to activate software, yet they find themselves feeling their way through the conversation, hoping the head will maintain the logical flow, or perhaps perversely, willing him to get it wrong, and fail the ‘like a human’ test.300

Prosthetic Head poses a question which is not, on the surface, that different from the one posed by von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk. But at the level of detail things are very different indeed. The Enlightenment chess-playing machine was actually a trick. It did not do what it claimed to do: it was actually worked by a human operator hidden inside the mechanism. Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head is also operated by a human, but Stelarc makes no secret of the fact – and that human agency only reaches as far as the design and programming of the software which generates the head and its answers. The ‘magic’ lies in the fact that in this instance what you see is what you get: a piece of computer software, the skill and complexity of whose design enables it to emulate human responses in ways that evoke wonder.

96

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 97

Chapter Six

Acting and not-acting: Robert-Houdin He (the magician) creates so convincing an illusion of actuality that our eyes accept what our minds hold in abeyance. It is this conflict between eyes and minds that produces the sense of wonder in us.301 Bernard Beckermann A conjuror… is an actor playing the part of a magician.302 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin

Conjurors, actors and jugglers ‘A conjuror… is an actor playing the part of a magician.’ Robert-Houdin’s definition of the conjuror has become a piece of folklore, which professional conjurors delight in repeating to each other in order to remind themselves of the element of showmanship that the good conjuring act demands. The phrase is so well known, and so frequently quoted among conjurors, in fact, that it is worth teasing its meaning out a little. First of all, the notion of acting is a more complex one than may seem to be the case at first. Some sense of this complexity is given if we consider the contention of performance theorist Marvin Carlson that, within the context of a play frame, a performer ‘is not herself (because of the operations of illusion), but she is also not not herself (because of the operations of reality). Performer and audience alike operate in a world of double consciousness’.303 In order to try to make sense of some of the questions about what acting is, and how it relates to other kinds of performance, Michael Kirby broke down the apparently simple concept into five distinct modes:304 at one end of the spectrum he placed ‘nonmatrixed performing’, by which is meant ‘doing something onstage other than playing a character’.305 The examples he gives are of the kurombo and koken of kabuki performances – the stagehands who move props and help actors to change costumes in full view of the audience. In fact, similar kinds of stagehands may be used in a magic performance: the kinds of semi-visible assistants, for example, who help to cover up, or carry on and off stage, a large prop or piece of equipment. Next comes ‘symbolized matrix performing’ where the performer’s presence (or costume, or function) presents him or herself in a special way, drawing attention to themselves as skilful and/or entertaining in their own right, but still there largely to support the central character. In the context of a traditional magic show, this typically is the modality of the glamorous female assistant, whose function is dependent on the presence of the lead performer.

97

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 98


‘Received acting’ (the third point in the continuum) ‘is what “extras” do – they are in costume, they may speak fragments of lines, and the audience reads them as part of the situation of a scene. But extras do very little “character acting”’.306 Kirby’s final two points on the spectrum, ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ acting, are distinguished from each other largely by the different levels of physical, mental and emotional commitment which they involve. When Robert-Houdin talked of the conjuror as an actor playing the part of a magician, he was probably talking about what Kirby calls ‘simple acting’, which involves simulation and impersonation, rather than the investment of the whole being of the performer in the created reality of a character. Complex ‘realistic’ acting of this kind, in the sense that we understand it, was not something of which Robert-Houdin would have had any experience: it was largely an invention of the modernist, naturalist and post-naturalist theatre of the last decades of the nineteenth century. Acting, as a sub-category of performing, then, contains a variety of possible modes; the magic show can employ more than one at a time, and may well shift between them during the performance. Robert-Houdin, however, meant something quite specific when he talked about the conjuror being an actor playing the part of a magician, and the original force of his assertion is not always understood by those who now quote it so freely. It must be admitted that translations from the original French do not help; it is often also rendered, rather more obscurely: ‘The magician is an actor playing the part of a magician’! The full quotation, in context, sheds some light on Robert-Houdin’s meaning. He is writing towards the end of his career, in a volume entitled Les Secrets de la Prestidigitation et de la Magie: Comment on devient sorcier (1868). The tone, incidentally, is important: Robert-Houdin deliberately and ironically uses the occult term ‘sorcier’, as if he is promising to initiate his reader into the secrets of the dark arts. When Angelo John Lewis, the British writer on magic, translated that volume into English under the nom-de-plume by which he would become famous,‘Professor’ Hoffman, he kept the sly tone by rendering the subtitle How to Become a Wizard.307 In fact the book has nothing to do with wizardry, of course, and everything to do with the skills of the stage illusionist. Yet that light-hearted gesture towards the occult is important to what RobertHoudin is saying, for he is redefining the job of the professional illusionist. The comment about the conjuror and the juggler/magician comes in the context of an attempt to untangle the various terms for the profession: prestidigitator, escamoteur,308 juggler, conjuror, magician… All this takes place in French, of course, and the debate is about the nuances of French words and French professional terminology. As a result, ‘Professor Hoffman’, in one of his footnotes, dismisses it as of little relevance to his English readership. He apologizes for the fact that ‘The present chapter being a disquisition on the precise signification of a couple of French terms, will have but little interest for the ordinary English reader’ (Note 34), and explains that he only included it in

98

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 99

ACTING AND NOT-ACTING: ROBERT-HOUDIN

order to avoid mutilating Robert-Houdin’s original text. In fact, he could not have been more wrong: not only does the chapter include the most famous of all definitions of the conjuror, but its discussion about words, their definitions and their connotations, illuminates a series of much larger issues about the concept of magic as a performance art in the nineteenth century. Part of the credit for this must belong to Hoffman himself: it is in the English translation that Robert-Houdin’s dictum is best known, and the truth is that Hoffman – who was no professional showman, but an Oxford-trained barrister, fiction writer and journalist as well as an amateur conjuror – has provided a translation of Robert-Houdin’s original which is both clear and lucid, and which does justice to the complexity of what Robert-Houdin is trying to achieve.309 Here is Robert-Houdin’s definition in its context – part of a measured consideration of various terms for what he calls ‘fictitious magic’, in which he is in the process of rejecting both ‘prestidigitation’310 and ‘escamotage’ as too limiting in their connotations: Neither one of these denominations, however, authorised though they are by long use, is in my opinion fully adequate to describe the art of fictitious magic. Escamotage will always recall to the mind the ‘cup-and-ball’ tricks, whence it derives its origin, and referring specially, as it does, to one particular feat of dexterity, suggests but an imperfect idea of the wide range of the wonderexciting performances of a magician. Prestidigitation seems to imply, from its etymology, that it is necessary to have nimble fingers in order to produce the illusions of magic, which is by no means strictly true. A conjuror is not a juggler; he is an actor playing the part of a magician; an artist whose fingers have more need to move with deftness than speed. I may even add that where sleight-of-hand is involved, the quieter the movement of the performer, the more readily will the spectators be deceived. The conjuror claims to possess supernatural powers; he holds in his hand a wand the might of which nothing can resist. Why then should he need, in order to work his wonders, to exaggerate the quickness of his movements? Such a mode of proceeding is illogical and inconsistent… The word prestidigitation, therefore, only imperfectly describes the art which it denotes.311

Between them, Hoffman and Robert-Houdin provide a cool and rational account of a new kind of conjuror – one who is not simply a prestidigitator or an escamoteur but whose ‘art of fictitious magic’312 encompasses ‘a wide range of wonder-exciting performances’. At the centre of this is the notion that ‘the conjuror claims to possess supernatural powers’. It is a claim which both conjuror and audience may

99

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 100


know to be quite spurious, but in the best traditions of Romantic theatre’s dependence on the audience’s suspension of disbelief, both parties agree to suppose that, for the duration of the performance at least, it may be true. For Robert-Houdin, this playful claim to supernatural powers is what validates the performance: the conjuror ‘holds in his hand a wand the might of which nothing can resist’. Nowadays the magician’s wand is an outdated cliché; Robert-Houdin, however, sees it as the conjuror’s icon par excellence: ‘This elegant little staff,’ he says with no pre-Freudian irony whatsoever, ‘is the emblem of his magic power. A touch of the wand on any object, or even a wave in that direction, forms the ostensible scause of its transformation or disappearance’. (More pragmatically, he then adds that the wand is a useful device for disguising the palming of objects, and gives the conjuror something to do with his hands, thereby saving him from ‘the well-known stage bugbear, the consciousness of possessing arms, and not knowing what to do with them’!)313 The juggler/actor dichotomy is illuminating on several levels, and because Robert-Houdin emphasizes what the conjuror is not, as well as what he is, it is easier to see the way in which his dichotomy is weighted. On the one hand, he is making a social point. ‘Juggler’, of course, was a previous term for an illusionist or conjuror, but to Hoffman and Robert-Houdin the word carries the wrong connotations: it suggests not only a particular kind of performance skill, but also a particular kind of social milieu. Thomas Frost, writing at about the same time as Robert-Houdin, had this to say of the social status of conjurors in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century: The social position of the professional conjuror was at this period even more dubious than that of the actor. The prejudice against his art and its professors which had been born of ignorance and superstition was dying out with the process of mental enlightenment; but he was ranked, in common with the juggler, the posturer, and the tumbler, as a vagrant, and in his provincial ramblings was sometimes in danger of being treated in that character with the stocks. He might be patronised by the upper classes, and even by the royal family; but he was not admitted into good society, or even regarded as a respectable character.314

It is, in part, an insistence on his own claim to respectability that motivates Robert-Houdin’s definition. We can see this more clearly if we compare his assertion with another contemporary account of the relationship between the conjuror and the juggler – one which comes, appropriately, from a juggler himself. Thomas Mayhew, in his invaluable survey of London Labour and the London Poor (1849–62) includes an interview with a man who is described as a ‘street-juggler’. This man, too, wishes to make a clear distinction between conjuring and juggling, although in his own day-to-day business of making a

100

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 101


living he does not always find it easy to do so. Even so, we can see that the latter term has undergone some change of meaning and is beginning to refer primarily to tricks of manual dexterity as opposed to tricks of deception. According to Mayhew, the man had the reputation of being ‘one of the cleverest that ever came out’.315 He is both a street entertainer and a theatrical performer, playing the music halls and concert halls of London as well as its street corners and public parks. He admits, however, that ‘I’m too old now to go out regularly in the streets. It tires me too much, if I have to appear at a penny theatre in the evening.’316 He had started out performing as a tumbler while still a boy, but then ‘One night I went to the theatre and there I see Ramo Samee doing his juggling, and in a minute I forgot all about the tumbling, and only wanted to do as he did.’317 Now, forty years later, Mayhew’s London juggler (born and raised, as he tells Mayhew, on the Waterloo Road) continues to perform in the oriental persona which he adopted in emulation of his childhood hero: I used to have a bag and bit of carpet, and perform in streets. I had Indian⬘s dress made, with a long horse-hair tail down my back, and white bagtrousers, trimmed with red, like a Turk⬘s, tied right round at the ankles, and a flesh-coloured skull-cap. My coat was what is called a Turkish fly in red velvet, cut off like a waist-coat, with a peak before and behind. I was a regular swell, and called myself the Indian Juggler.318

It is a point of great pride with this juggler that ‘he not only learned how to do all [Ramo Samee’s] tricks, but also did them so dexterously, that when travelling “Samee has often paid him ten shillings not to perform in the same town with him”’.319 He claims that his own earnings, at the height of his powers, amounted to £3 per day or more, but at the time Mayhew meets him, the juggler and his wife – a strong-woman who, he claims, can lift 700 lbs by the hair of her head – are making rather less than this: approximately five shillings and sixpence a day between them (plus the results of a collection) in their engagement at the Temple of Mystery in Old Street Road, where the playbill advertises him as ‘The Renowned Indian Juggler, performing his extraordinary Feats with Cups, Balls, Daggers, Plates, Knives, Rings, Balancing, etc. etc.’320 The act includes both conjuring and juggling in the modern senses of the word. After the juggling I generally has to do conjuring. I does what they call ‘the pile of mags’, that is, putting four halfpence on a boy’s cap, and making them disappear when I say ‘Presto, fly!’ Then there’s the empty cups, and making ⬘taters come under ⬘em, or there⬘s bringing a cabbage into a empty hat. There’s also making a shilling pass from a gentleman’s hand into a nest of boxes, and such-like tricks: but it ain⬘t half so hard as juggling, nor anything like the work.321

101

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 102


Mayhew’s interview was published in 1861, at a time when the move into the music halls, ‘penny theatres’ and halls of mystery such as London’s famous Egyptian Hall,322 was changing the nature of magic, establishing it more firmly as an art of the theatre rather than of the street. Mayhew’s interviewee – although described by Mayhew as a street juggler – is clearly more at home in the theatre. Certainly, as far as this performer is concerned, there is no straightforward division which locates the magician in the theatre and the juggler in the street.323 Moreover, his pride in his skill as a juggler, and his corresponding disdain for the conjuring aspect of his routine (‘and such-like tricks’) is clear from his tone, and he is eager to distinguish between the two forms of entertainment, one skilful and dextrous, the other deceptive and simplistic. I’m a juggler, (he tells Mayhew) but I don’t know if that’s the right term, for some people call conjurers jugglers; but it’s wrong. When I was in Ireland they called me a ‘manulist’, and it was a gentleman wrote the bill out for me. The difference I makes between conjuring and juggling is, one⬘s deceiving to the eye and the other’s pleasing to the eye - yes, that’s it – it’s dexterity.324

The opposition between what pleases and audience and what deceives an audience is telling. Clearly, there is an ethical dimension to the juggler’s distinction between the two kinds of performance. (This is borne out by his insistence that the police know him and rarely prevent or interrupt his street performances). We get a clearer sense of how he sees the relationship between proper juggling and what he scathingly calls ‘the wizard’s business’ when he talks about how real jugglers will often have to turn their hand to the latter in order to eke out their meagre income. But the ‘pure’ juggler’s art appears to be on the decline in the middle years of the nineteenth century: as Mayhew’s informant explains, there ain’t above twenty jugglers in all England… such as goes about pitching in the streets and towns. I know there’s only four others besides myself in London, unless some new one has sprung up very lately. You may safely reckon their earnings for the year round at a pound a week, that is, if they stick to juggling; but most of us joins some other calling along with juggling, such as the wizard’s business, and that helps out the gains.325

Playing the part of a gentleman It is from this kind of figure that Robert-Houdin wishes the new kind of conjuror to distance himself. His strategy is to downplay ‘mere’ physical skill and to stress the imaginative aspect of the conjuror’s art. He is aligning the conjuror with the theatre rather than with the fairground, the circus or the street; with the ‘art’ of the drama rather than the mere ‘entertainment’ of the street performer;

102

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 103


with high culture rather than with popular culture. Live entertainment in nineteenth-century Europe was highly stratified, and licensing laws in most countries distinguished between music halls, variety halls and places of popular entertainment on the one hand and ‘legitimate’ theatres on the other. It should be borne in mind, too, that the theatres of mid-nineteenth-century European capital cities such as London and Paris, in these years pre-dating the rise of naturalist drama, revelled in large-scale illusion, not only in their crowdpleasers and melodramas but also in their more serious dramatic productions. Thus, while the conjuror’s most usual venue was actually likely to be the variety hall rather than the theatre, Robert-Houdin is making the point that his spiritual home is in the heart of the mainstream theatrical culture. It is, on one level, part of his larger project, to establish the conjuror as a ‘respectable’ kind of entertainer; and if he was not the only nineteenth-century conjuror to make this case, nor even the first, he was certainly one of the most influential. And if the profession of actor was not entirely respectable in nineteenth-century Europe, the world of the professional actor was certainly a step up from that of street entertainers such as feature in London Labour and the London Poor. Elsewhere in his Secrets we can see the further evidence of the way in which Robert-Houdin is concerned with establishing the social status of the conjuror. In an earlier chapter he lays down a set of General Principles for the wouldbe conjuror. Many of these Principles are good, sound, technical advice. For example, he counsels the conjuror not to exceed the attention span of the audience (which for conjuring acts he puts at a maximum of two hours), and to structure his performance as a crescendo with each trick being more impressive then the one before. He warns the novice not to announce a trick’s intended effect in advance – so that if things go wrong, the conjuror has left himself an escape route by being able to resolve the trick in a different way. At times, though, Robert-Houdin’s general principles read more like a guide to etiquette. In some instances this is a specifically professional etiquette appropriate to the conjuror: he states, for example, with high-minded disdain, that he ‘cannot suppose that any conjuror would for one moment dream of employing confederates among the audience. This sort of joint hoax has now gone quite out of fashion. A trick performed on this principle is out of the pale of conjuring altogether’.326 But he is not only setting down the boundaries of acceptability and fashion in terms of the conjuror’s techniques: he is also pronouncing on the more general etiquette of good society and its values. Thus he admonishes the would-be conjuror to ‘speak with perfect grammatical correctness’, and to ‘avoid coarse chaff ’; he urges him to adopt a ‘hearty, genial manner, taking care, however, to keep rigidly within the bounds of propriety and good taste’.327 And he admonishes him (in a tone of horror!) to avoid garish costumes, wizards robes and the like: ‘Let us leave tinsel and high-crowned hats to mountebanks’ he says scornfully – adding that ‘[t]he most probable result of assuming the conventional garb of a wizard

103

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 104


will be to make the wearer an object of derision’.328 The conjuror may indeed be an actor playing the part of a magician – but he is certainly not playing the part of a pantomime magician! Instead, Robert-Houdin assures the apprentice conjuror that ‘the ordinary dress of a gentleman is the only costume appropriate to a high-class conjuror’.329 The phrases are telling: ‘gentleman… high-class’: one of Robert-Houdin’s underlying general principles seems to be that the conjuror is to be reinvented, not as a mountebank or a juggler, but as a perfectly socialized nineteenth-century gentleman. There is a paradox here, however, since one of the prime virtues of the Victorian gentleman is integrity or honesty. The conjuror, therefore, since he trades in deceptions, has to work doubly hard to establish his claim to any such title. The part of a high-class gentleman is actually just another role, another form of disguise, another piece of misdirection: the costume, manners and poise of the suave and socialized gentleman conceal a wonder-worker, the performer whose greatest skill lies in his ability to evoke wonder, to produce ‘wonder-exciting performances’.330 For social cachet is not the only thing that Robert-Houdin is concerned with. At the same time he is making a contribution to a rather local professional quarrel. When he coined the phrase in the middle of the nineteenth century, two different kinds of magic act were competing for box office supremacy: on the one hand were the champions of ‘pure’ sleight of hand; on the other were those for whom complex mechanical apparatus lay at the heart of their acts. Robert-Houdin himself had spent his early years training and working as a watchmaker, and the skills he learned there stood him in good stead as a professional illusionist. While he was adept in most areas of magic, his fame as an illusionist was based to a not inconsiderable extent on his ‘mechanical wonders’. His ‘Soirées fantastiques’ at the Palais-Royal in Paris and St. James’ Theatre in London included mechanical effects such as his ‘Pâtissier du Palais-Royal’, a miniature figure in a doll’s house patisserie, who produced sweetmeats to order for the audience331 and his Marvellous Orange Tree which blossomed, bore fruit and had butterflies flying round it. Many of Robert-Houdin’s contemporaries regarded mechanical figures such as this as being in the tradition of seventeenthand eighteenth-century automata: complex machines such as were displayed in Fawkes’ and Pinchbeck’s booth at Bartholomew Fair way back in the 1720s. As such they may have seemed rather old-fashioned to those of his competitors who were now looking to eliminate such mechanical devices from their act, and to emphasize instead the manipulative skills of the prestidigitator. Thus, RobertHoudin’s apothegm is at least in part a dig at those of his colleagues who prided themselves on their physical skills. By labelling them mere ‘jugglers’ he is simultaneously defending his own status as a provider of wonders – including the mechanical wonders for which he was so well known. His formulation also makes an important claim for the conjuror as someone who offers the audience a glimpse of something beyond the mundane. The journey which the conjuror

104

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 105


offers may not be the spirit-journey of the wizard or shaman; but it is the imaginative journey on which the professional actor takes the audience. Despite his professed scepticism about ‘mere’ prestidigitation, RobertHoudin is equally scornful of those practitioners who rely entirely on self-working apparatus to achieve their effects: It is easy enough no doubt, to play the conjuror without possessing either dexterity or mental ability. It is only necessary to lay in a stock of apparatus of that kind which of itself works the trick. This is what may be called the ‘false bottom’ school of conjuring. Cleverness at this sort of work is of the same order as that of the musician who produces a tune by turning the handle of a barrel-organ. Such performers will never merit the title of skilled artists, and can never hope to obtain any real success.332

It is not entirely surprising to find that Robert-Houdin’s directions to conjurors contain both paradoxes and self-contradictions. For example, at one point he virtually contradicts his dismissal of prestidigitation when he declares rhetorically ‘To succeed as a conjuror, three things are essential – first, dexterity; second, dexterity; and third dexterity’. He then goes on, however, to say that [t]he art of conjuring bases its deceptions upon manual dexterity, mental subtleties, and the surprising results which are produced by the sciences. The physical sciences generally, chemistry, mathematics, and particularly mechanics, electricity and magnetism, supply potent weapons for the use of the magician. In order to be a first-class conjuror it is necessary, if not to have studied all these sciences thoroughly, at least to have acquired a general knowledge of them, and to be able to apply some few of their principles as the occasion may arise. The most indispensable requirement, however, for the successful practice of the magic art is great neatness of manipulation combined with special mental acuteness.333

Thus while the conjuror is no mere prestidigitator but an actor playing the part of a magician, in order to play this part well that actor needs dexterity (and dexterity and dexterity!), mental acuteness and a knowledge of the physical sciences. But the point is that for Robert-Houdin these are simply the necessary physical and mental skills which enable the act to take place at all: dexterity is not an end in itself, but is a means to an end – and that end is to produce ‘wonder-exciting performances’. His own description of the ‘Marvellous Orange Tree’ routine gives a clear impression of the kinds of effects that Robert-Houdin was seeking in his repertoire:

105

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 106


I borrowed a lady’s handkerchief. I rolled it into a ball and placed it beside an egg, a lemon, and an orange, upon the table. I then placed these four articles one into another, and when at last the orange alone remained, I used the fruit in question in the manufacture of a magical solution. The process was as follows; – I pressed the orange between my hands, making it smaller and smaller, showing it every now and then in its various shapes, and finally reducing it to a powder, which I passed into a phial in which there was some spirit of wine. My assistant then brought me an orange tree, bare of flowers or fruit. I poured into a cup a little of the solution I had just prepared, and set fire to it. I placed it near the tree, and no sooner had the vapour reached the foliage, than it was seen suddenly covered with flowers. At a wave of my wand the flowers were transformed into fruit, which I distributed to the spectators. A single orange still remained on the tree. I ordered it to fall apart in four portions, and within it appeared the handkerchief I had borrowed. A couple of butterflies with moving wings took it each by a corner, and, flying upwards with it, spread it open in the air.334

It is a complex and somewhat surreal routine, and one which blends various kinds of conjuring skills. The automaton is there in the form of the tree and the butterflies, but it is not in itself the object of wonder. This is the middle of the nineteenth century, the heart of the machine age – and, so, paradoxically the mechanical tree itself is no longer enough to impress the conjuror’s audience. So Robert-Houdin weaves around the machine a narrative of natural and unnatural transformations, of disappearance and restoration, of magical potions, of winter and spring – a narrative whose execution depends upon dexterity and sleight of hand as much as on mechanical devices, but which is made possible by those devices. We do not have access, in this account, to the ‘boniment’ – the patter which Robert-Houdin wove around these various appearances and disappearances, and on which he himself placed so much emphasis in his advice to conjurors: the patter is ‘the story told by the performer, the discourse, the speech… in fact the mise en scène with which we dress up a conjuring trick in order to give it an appearance of reality’.335 Even without this mise-en-scène, however, we can see that Robert-Houdin’s Marvellous Orange Tree is an expert amalgam of the mechanical and the organic, in which the one is played off against the other in a way which is perfectly calculated to appeal to the broad spectrum of nineteenth-century urban audiences. One of the great skills that Robert-Houdin had as a performer was his ability to fuse the old and the new. The Marvellous Orange Tree updates those mechanical marvels of the kind that Isaac Fawkes had exhibited at Bartholemew Fair in the late 1600s. In other parts of his act, as we have seen, Robert-Houdin was particularly fond of exploiting ‘the surprising results which are produced

106

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 107


by… the physical sciences generally, chemistry, mathematics, and particularly mechanics, electricity and magnetism’.336 Nor was he above using pseudoscience to achieve his effects. We have already considered the way in which early modern magic performances related to – and could also be distanced from – notions of ‘efficacious magic’ in the form of contemporary witchcraft beliefs. But other kinds of belief are equally important. Very frequently the conjuror flirts with the ‘magic’ of science – and especially the magic of ‘bad science’ or pseudo-science – which is why, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so many magicians called themselves ‘Professor’ in their stage names, conferring upon themselves a quasi-scientific authority which that title bestowed. In the middle years of the nineteenth century, for example, Robert-Houdin performed a levitation act, using his son as the subject, which he called the ‘Suspension Étheréenne’. Playbills proclaimed that this Ethereal Suspension would demonstrate ‘Suspended Equilibrium by Atmospheric Air, through the Action of Concentrated Ether’, and the accompanying engraving shows RobertHoudin’s son horizontal in mid-air, apparently asleep, with his head resting on his elbow, which rests on a staff which is balanced on a stool which is placed on trestle of which one end has been removed.337 It is an impressive generic levitation routine, carried out by means of hidden supports. But Robert-Houdin invests his routine with a particular meaning for his audience and presents it as a miracle of modern medicine: Surgery had supplied me with the first idea of it. It will be remembered that in 1847 the insensibility produced by inhaling ether began to be applied in surgical operations; all the world talked about the marvellous effect of this anaesthetic, and its extraordinary results. In the eyes of many people it seemed much akin to magic. Seeing that the surgeons invaded my domain, I asked myself if this did not allow me to make reprisals. I did so by inventing my ethereal suspension, which, I believe, was far more surprising than any result obtained by my surgical brethren. The subject I intended to operate on was my younger son, and I could not have selected one better suited for the experiment. He was a stout lad of about six years of age, and his plump and rosy face was a picture of health. In spite of his youth, he displayed the greatest intelligence in learning his part, and played it with such perfection, that the most incredulous were duped. This trick was very much applauded, and I am bound to say that my arrangements were excellently made… Still, it sometimes happened that sensitive persons, regarding the etherization too seriously, protested in their hearts against the applause, and wrote me letters in which they severely upbraided the unnatural father who sacrificed the health of his poor child to the pleasures of the public. Some went so far as to threaten me with the terrors of the law if I did not give up my inhuman performance. The anonymous writers of such accusations did not suspect the pleasure they caused me. After amusing the family circle, I kept

107

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 108


the letters preciously as proofs of the illusion I had produced.338

One reason why all magic tutors insist that a conjuror’s patter is as important as his ‘nimbleness of conveyance’ is that the patter directs the audience towards the thing that they are supposed to be seeing. It provides the cognitive frame with which the magician wants to tease (or to completely deceive) the audience. It works best when the frame refers to something which is on the edge of the audience’s understanding: to frame an illusion in terms of principles that are too well known gives the audience nothing at which to wonder; to frame it in terms of something completely outlandish removes an audience’s will to complicity. But to frame a routine in terms of something which just might be true, or in terms of scientific principles of which they have heard but which they do not fully understand, is to play upon an ambiguity which for some audience members will be understood as part of the entertainment, but which for others will seriously complicate their picture of reality – as the outraged letters from audience members illustrate. Robert-Houdin’s misdirection may have been doubly effective in this instance, since there is a second meaning of the word ‘ether’ which may also have contributed to the way in which the trick was understood by its audience to be a ‘scientific’ demonstration. In this second sense of the word, ‘ether’ (or ‘aether’) was believed by nineteenth-century physicists to be one of the fundamental substances of the universe. With the acceptance in the early nineteenth century of the wave theory of light, and the concomitant theories of electromagnetic radiation, it had been felt necessary to postulate a medium – ether – through which these waves could travel. This hypothetical and elusive substance was believed to permeate all space, but to offer no resistance to motion. The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 (which laid essential groundwork for Einstein’s theories of relativity) predicted that the velocity of the Earth through the ether could be measured with reference to the variation of the speed of light; when the speed of light was observed to be constant, the very existence of ether was brought into question, and by the early twentieth century it had been abandoned as an unnecessary hypothesis. But in the 1850s ether was a matter of scientific orthodoxy – albeit one which was very poorly understood. Robert-Houdin’s claim in his playbill that he will produce his levitation effect ‘by Atmospheric Air, through the Action of Concentrated Ether’ would activate this meaning of the word. It is hard to decide whether RobertHoudin intended this double meaning, although I suspect he did. The effect, in terms of offering the audience a framework for interpreting what they are seeing, is doubly ‘scientific’ – and doubly confusing. On the whole, however, Robert-Houdin seems to expect a sophisticated response from his audience; he expects them to take the fiction of the ‘ethereal suspension’ for what it is. His mild surprise, and the amusement which he

108

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 109


shares with his family, at the scientific narrative being taken too seriously demonstrate this.339

‘Enacting the part of a French Marabout’ Earlier in the book, in a chapter entitled ‘Conjuring and its Professors’, RobertHoudin had given his own account of the early history of magic, beginning, like Rid, with the Egyptians, and naming in particular Jannes and Jambres, the magicians at Pharaoh’s court and their magical combat with Moses and Aaron. Robert-Houdin, however, locates the roots of fictitious magic (or ‘white magic’ as he also, rather confusingly, calls it) among a wider range of early and Eastern civilizations, citing as well as the Egyptians, the Chaldees, the Ethiopians and the Persians. Like the true practical nineteenth-century man that he is, RobertHoudin elevates the wonders of modern science over the fabled deeds of these early conjurors, inviting his readers to imagine the astonishment that these ‘wonder-workers’ would have felt if faced with a lecture by the most ordinary of modern scientists: ‘We cannot doubt that, in their eyes, our professor would pass, then and there, from the rank of magician to that of demigod, or even higher still’. Robert-Houdin is clearly unconvinced by any antiquarian tendency to validate the present with reference to the past, or to glorify the feats of the modern conjuror by glamourizing his relationship with his magical forebears, and he concludes, rather elegantly, that ‘if antiquity was, as is sometimes asserted, the cradle of magic, it is because the art of magic was then in its infancy’. It is this rational and sceptical aspect of Robert-Houdin’s character, together with his insistence on personifying the civilized virtues of the good nineteenthcentury middle-class gentlemen, which come together in one of the most famous anecdotes told about him: that of his magical competition with the Marabouts. In 1856 he was called out of retirement by Colonel de Neveu, head of the political office at Algiers, who persuaded him to perform before some of the principal chieftains of the Arab tribes in Algeria. It was a request with a clear political dimension. The discourse of magic – in the efficacious sense of the word – has long been important in a colonial context. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century anthropological theory tended to arise from – and thus confirm and support – the agenda of European and American colonialism and imperialism. The first question facing the colonial administrator was the extent to which local magical practices represented a serious threat to the colonialists’ ability to control and dominate non-European populations. The second question was, if they were a threat, how they should be managed. There was a broad consensus that …magic is one of the most pressing problems confronting colonial governments. While white magic can have beneficial effects in spurring harmonious and beneficial social interaction, black magic is thoroughly

109

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 110


detrimental… [Nonetheless] efforts by colonial government to eradicate magic might be misplaced, since in many native societies magic serves useful social functions… [and] before measures against sorcerers and witch doctors can be effective, a colonized population must be educated away from their beliefs in sorcery.340

In fact, there were specific aspects about the situation in French colonial North Africa in the 1850s which meant that the question of ‘magic’ was a particularly loaded one. French military rule had only very recently been established over what was an existing sophisticated Islamic culture, and relations between the colonizers and the colonized were violent, aggressive, and marked by mutual incomprehension. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that colonization had made the Muslim society more barbaric than it had been before the French arrived. Within this uneasy situation, Islam had become a central element in Algerian nationalist struggles against French colonial rule, and the Marabouts – a distinct brotherhood of mystical and military leaders who drew both on folk traditions and Sufi teachings – played a key role in this resistance. To the colonial administrators, however, the Marabouts must have seemed very much like the witch doctors and sorcerers of the ‘primitive’ animist tribal cultures of Central Africa, since they were believed by the local peoples to possess special supernatural powers. The colonial authorities rightly perceived them as a threat and attempted to restrict their influence wherever possible. It was in pursuit of this political goal that Robert-Houdin was invited to Algiers, at a time (one of many) when there was a strong possibility of further tribal insurrection. He treated the responsibility as an honour: I must say that I was much influenced in my determination by the knowledge that my mission to Algeria had a quasi-political character. I, a simple conjurer, was proud of being able to render my country a service. It is known that the majority of revolts which have to be suppressed in Algeria are excited by intriguers, who say they are inspired by the Prophet, and are regarded by the Arabs as envoys of God on earth to deliver them from the oppression of the Roumi (Christians). These false prophets and holy Marabouts, who are no more sorcerers than I am, and indeed even less so, still contrive to influence the fanaticism of their co-religionists by tricks as primitive as are the spectators before whom they are performed. The government was, therefore, anxious to destroy their pernicious influence, and reckoned on me to do so. They hoped, with reason, by the aid of my experiments, to prove to the Arabs that the tricks of their Marabouts were mere child⬘s play, and owing to their simplicity could not be done by an envoy from Heaven, which also led us very naturally to show them that we are their superiors in everything, and, as for sorcerers, there are none like the French.341

110

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 111


In his Memoirs, Robert-Houdin tells how he successfully challenged the Marabouts to a public magic competition. In front of an audience of civil authorities and tribal delegates including ‘caïds, agas, bash-agas, and… some sixty Arab chiefs, clothed in their red mantles (the symbol of their submission to France)’,342 he stepped forward with a grave sense of his national and political responsibility: I was here not merely to amuse a curious and kind public; I must produce a startling effect upon coarse minds and prejudices, for I was enacting the part of a French Marabout. Compared with the simple tricks of their pretended sorcerers, my experiments must appear perfect miracles to the Arabs… It was not enough to amuse my spectators; I must also, in order to fulfil the object of my mission, startle and even terrify them by the display of a supernatural power.343

He succeeded, of course. His performance included many variations on standard theatrical routines: he produced not only flowers but also (appropriately enough!) cannonballs from a hat; a suitably non-alcoholic version of ‘The Inexhaustible Bottle’ delivered apparently endless supplies of both sweetmeats and coffee from a punchbowl; five-franc pieces appeared in locked boxes suspended above the audience. But it was the three tricks at the climax to the show which were to seal his reputation as a sorcerer. Antagonistic volunteers were invited up onto the stage. The first – a ‘herculean Arab’344 – was invited to pick up a solidly built but small box, but was humiliated by being unable to do so. (The box was held down by an electro-magnetic charge – which was later used to give the volunteer a shock which further humiliated him.) This was disturbing enough and elicited whispers of ‘Shaitan!’ from his audience. The second trick was one especially requested by Colonel de Neveu, in order to respond to a particular claim of the Marabouts: One of the means employed by the Marabouts to gain influence in the eyes of the Arabs is by causing a belief in their invulnerability. One of them, for instance, ordered a gun to be loaded and fired at him from a short distance, but in vain did the flint produce a shower of sparks; the Marabout pronounced some cabalistic words, and the gun did not explode. The mystery was simple enough; the gun did not go off because the Marabout had skilfully stopped up the vent. Colonel de Neveu explained to me the importance of discrediting such a miracle by opposing to it a sleight-of-hand trick far superior to it, and I had the very article.345

In response Robert-Houdin performed a version of the well-known gun trick. In this, a gun was fired directly at his heart (by a particularly aggressive-sounding

111

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 112


volunteer who repeatedly told Robert-Houdin that he wanted to kill him), but the bullet ended up embedded in an apple. For his third trick, Robert-Houdin made a volunteer, a young man of about twenty years of age, completely disappear – causing a riot in which ‘the Arabs… impelled by an irresistible feeling of terror… rose in all parts of the house, and yielded to the influence of a general panic.’346 The whole incident has strange echoes of Moses and Aaron demonstrating the power of the one true God in the court of Pharaoh: here, though, RobertHoudin demonstrates the power of civilized western showmanship in ‘the Algiers theatre… a very neat house, in the style of the Variétés at Paris, and decorated with considerable taste.’347 One of the noticeable things about the whole incident is the ambiguity about what Robert-Houdin is actually trying to achieve. On one level his brief is to suggest that ‘white man’s magic’ is more powerful than that of the local wonder-workers, and that he himself is a powerful sorcerer, one who is able to perform ‘perfect miracles’ and to ‘startle and even terrify them by the display of a supernatural power.’ But on another level, his task is more ambitious than that. After the performance, he tells us, the interpreters and all those who had dealings with the Arabs received orders to make them understand that my pretended miracles were only the result of skill, inspired and guided by an art called prestidigitation, in no way connected with sorcery. The Arabs doubtlessly yielded to these arguments, for henceforth I was on the most friendly terms with them.348

The deeper purpose of Robert-Houdin’s performance, then, is to effect a major ideological shift by advancing the claims of western material rationalism over those of the folk rituals of the Marabouts – and, by association, over the claims of Islam itself. Its function is to construct a clear opposition between rationalism and ‘superstition’ and convince the Arabs that the rationalism is superior. The magician is engaged in that most essential of colonial enterprises: that of establishing the validity of the colonialists’ world-view over that of the subject people.

‘My public shall be the reader, and my stage a book’: playing the part of a historian The story of the contest with the Marabouts, as Robert-Houdin tells it, has all the satisfying structure of myth: an archetypal conflict between civilization and magical belief. The event certainly took place: whether it took place in quite the way the protagonist tells it is less certain. History, however, is typically written by the victors, and if what Robert-Houdin produces is a story of his own heroism in an ideological struggle, we are not surprised. Perhaps, indeed, it is on a mythic level that the story is most valuable;

112

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 113


certainly the Memoirs of Robert-Houdin are notoriously unreliable – as well as being one of the keystone texts of modern magic, a book which would have been read by every magician of the succeeding generations, the ‘most influential book in the world of magic’.349 In the Memoirs, Robert-Houdin chronicles his career, and in particular his relationship with his mentor, an older magician called Torrini. The young Robert-Houdin first encounters Torrini when the older man saves his life. Robert-Houdin, travelling through France, has eaten a dish of stew which poisons him. On the road, he falls into a fainting fit, and when he recovers he finds himself in a carriage belonging to Torrini, who explains: My name is Torrini, and I am a conjurer by profession. You are in my house – that is, in the carriage I usually employ as my domicile. You will be surprised, I dare say, to learn that the bedroom you now occupy can be lengthened into a theatre, and in that room behind the red curtains is the stage on which my apparatus is arranged… I found you lying insensible, with your face to the ground. Fortunately for you, I was then taking my morning walk by the horses’ side, and this circumstance saved you being run over. By Antonio’s help I carried you to my bed, and my knowledge of medicine restored you to life.350

The story is a dramatic enough one as it stands, but it becomes even more so. Robert-Houdin is grateful but bemused at the extent to which this stranger has befriended him and seems to have his interests at heart. Torrini goes on to explain why ‘…a man belonging to a class not generally erring on the side of sensibility, should have evinced such compassion for your sufferings’.351 It is produced, he tells the young man, …‘by the sweet illusion of paternal love… I had a son, a beloved son; he was my hope, my life, my happiness; but a dread fatality robbed me of him: he died, and, terrible to say, he was assassinated, and his murderer stands before you!… Yes, yes, his murderer!’ Torrini went on, his voice growing gradually firmer: ‘and yet the law could not punish me; it left me life. In vain I accused myself before my judges; they treated me as a maniac, and my crime was regarded as accidental homicide. But what do I care, after all, for their judgment? Whether through carelessness, or imprudence as they say, my poor Giovanni is not the less lost to me, and I shall reproach myself with his death my life long… What I have said will suffice to explain the natural cause of my sympathy towards you. When I first saw you, I was struck by the likeness you bore in age and height to my unhappy boy. I even fancied I could trace a certain resemblance in your face, and, yielding to this illusion, I decided on keeping you near me, and nursing you as if you were my own child. You can now form an idea of the agony I endured during the week when I was compelled to despair of your restoration to life. But Providence, taking pity on us both, has saved you. You are now quite

113

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 114


convalescent, and in a few days, I trust, will be perfectly recovered. Such, my boy, is the secret of the affection I displayed towards you.’352

We learn a little more about the attractive, mysterious and romantic Torrini as the narrative progresses. Robert-Houdin explains that Torrini’s real name is deGrisy, and that the ‘murder’ of his son was actually an on-stage accident during a conjuring trick in which the son was assisting. The guilt of this tragic mishap haunts Torrini, but he finds some redemption in this second ‘son’, Robert-Houdin. Torrini goes on to become his mentor, and a second father to him, and it is from Torrini that Robert-Houdin learns the true art of the conjuror. If the story of their meeting and subsequent relationship, and the way in which it is narrated, smacks somewhat of the more melodramatic kind of nineteenth-century novel, there is little wonder. Torrini did not exist: he was a composite figure ‘constructed from bits of other performers’ lives’.353 The Memoirs, presented as documentary truth by Robert-Houdin and his translators, and accepted as such by generations of readers including Charles Dickens and Harry Houdini,354 are actually based on a fiction. When Thomas Frost wrote one of the first and most comprehensive histories of conjuring, his Lives of the Conjurors, he included Robert-Houdin’s stories of de Grisy/Torrini as literal fact, thus embedding Robert-Houdin’s fiction even more firmly in the folklore of the subject. In the introduction to this book, I suggested that many conjurors’ writings on their own art should be seen as a form of essentially ‘performative’: as emulating and extending the stage act; as consisting of a sequence of gestures designed to misdirect the reader’s attention, to say one thing while doing another; and as repeatedly performing that quintessential conjuror’s routine of appearing to explain the trick while actually doing no such thing. The notion of the bookas-performance is actually one which Robert-Houdin himself disarmingly suggests. In his ‘Overture’ to his memoirs he explains how now, in retirement, he continually experiences a frisson of pleasure as eight o’clock strikes, since this is the time his performances would begin. ‘Then, with my eye eagerly fixed on the hole in the curtain, I surveyed with intense pleasure the crowd that flocked in to see me. Then, as now, my heart beat, for I was proud and happy of such success’.355 He begins to imagine a different kind of performance: These emotions and souvenirs are not at all painful to me: on the contrary, I summon them up with pleasure. At times I even mentally transport myself to my stage, in order to prolong them. There, as before, I ring the bell, the curtain rises, I see my audience again, and, under the charm of this sweet illusion, I delight in telling them the most interesting episodes of my professional life. I tell them how a man learns his real vocation, how the struggle with difficulties of every nature begins, how, in fact----

114

Chapter 06.qxd

4/2/07

6:34 PM

Page 115


But why should I not convert this fiction into a reality? Could I not, each evening when the clock strikes eight, continue my performances under another form? My public shall be the reader, and my stage a book.356

We started this chapter with a consideration of different modalities of acting. Robert-Houdin himself displays different modalities of acting too. What part is the magician playing? The stage conjuror in the guise of a respectable gentleman? The French marabout who subverts his own supernatural claims? The authoritative historian of magic – whose story is actually fabricated… For Robert-Houdin, it seems, all the world was a stage, and in his lifetime he played many parts. He also stated quite openly and disingenuously what many conjurors writing about magic try to conceal: that the conjuror does not stop performing when he picks up the pen.

115

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 116

Chapter Seven

Before your very eyes: life, death and liveness Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence… The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Walter Benjamin357 No illusion is good in a Film, as we simply resort to camera trix, and the deed is did. Harry Houdini

Death and the Maiden A late nineteenth-century theatre: Onstage, a lady sits in a chair. A conjuror steps forward and with a flourish, covers her with a cloth. A pause, a gesture – the cloth is removed, the lady has vanished. The conjuror picks up the chair with one hand, to show how empty it is. He replaces it. Then, another gesture and – out of nowhere – the chair is occupied, not by the lady but by a skeleton! A grim image of human mortality, and a reference to the iconic motif of Death and the Maiden. This has been a theme of the memento mori trope from the artists of the Middle Ages to Schubert; in 1894 Edward Munch had produced a modernist version on the same theme. But the conjuror’s art is not only about death but also about resurrection. The magician proudly displays his skeleton long enough for us to see that it is real, then covers it once more with the cloth. Once more he whips it away and – surprise! – the lady is sitting where she had formerly been. She stands, they bow and leave the stage. This scene does not take place on a stage, but on the screen. I have just described Georges Méliès film – Escamotage d’une Dame chez Robert-Houdin/ The Vanishing Lady at the Robert-Houdin Théâtre (1896). The film’s location forms a significant link between magic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was, as the title suggests, filmed in the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, the famous Parisian two-hundred-seat theatre which had once been the home of the ‘father of modern magic’ and which Méliès – magician and film pioneer – now owned and ran. In 1888, Méliès had sold his share of his father’s footwear manufacturing business, and with the proceeds had bought the exhibition

116

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 117

BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES: LIFE, DEATH AND LIVENESS

rights for the theatre from Robert-Houdin’s daughter-in-law for 40,000 francs. He had it refurbished and re-opened it as Paris’s answer to Maskelyne and Cooke’s Egyptian Hall in London. The young Georges had been fascinated by magic since the age of ten, when, according to legend, he had been taken to see Robert-Houdin himself, not long before that great man’s death. As a young man he had trained as an amateur conjuror, taking lessons from Emile Voisin who owned a magician⬘s shop in the Rue Vielle-du-Temple and performing mainly for family and friends; when his father sent him to London, ostensibly to train for the world of business, he had been a frequent customer at the Egyptian Hall. At the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, he was manager and producer as well as performer – though, it seems, not a terribly good one. Under his management the theatre ran at a financial loss for several years, specializing in rather derivative programmes, featuring large-scale and rather expensive illusions. Méliès did, however, have an intuitive grasp of the importance of narrative within magic performances, and developed his own trademark forms of magic sketches and magic scenes, involving several magicians on stage at once. It was this interest in narrative which later enabled him to effect a fusion between nineteenth-century conjuring traditions and the new medium of film. Méliès’ Escamotage was based on the illusion which had been made famous in both at the Théâtre Robert Houdin and at the Egyptian Hall by the French conjuror Bualtier de Kolta. In this short film, however, it was Méliès himself who played the part of a conjuror, while the maiden in the chair was Jehanne d’Alcy, Méliès regular collaborator (and lover – later to become his wife) who had figured in many of the illusions in the stage shows at the Robert-Houdin. The illusion was created by the simple means of filming one action (d’Alcy’s first appearance in the chair), stopping the camera, changing the scene (first removing d’Alcy from the chair, then replacing her with a skeleton, then returning her to the chair) and then rolling the camera again.358 When played back, the illusion was that the lady had disappeared, turned into a skeleton, and then been brought back to life. In the annals of film history, Escamotage is generally regarded as revolutionary because it is the first recorded use of stop-action (also known as ‘stop-motion’) editing. In it Méliès first begins to explore a use of cinema which breaks free of the mode of realism, the record of those everyday scenes of middle-class life, which was dominant in the early years of the moving pictures. His subsequent experiments with the relationship between magic and cinema are of immense importance to the history of both these art forms. An age of mechanical – or of digital – reproduction poses particular problems for the art of the conjuror, which appears to be one whose particular attraction lies in its liveness. Indeed, Walter Benjamin’s insistence, quoted above, that the ‘presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity’ takes on a particularly resonant meaning when applied to conjuring, whose very

117

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 118


essence lies in challenging concepts of authenticity. The physical presence of the performer ‘in time and space, [his] unique existence at the place where [he] happens to be’ would seem to be an essential part of the pleasure of the conjuror’s act. Certainly, the effect of the visual and electronic media on the conjuror’s art has been profound, and at times it has threatened to engulf it, to eclipse it, or to render it irrelevant. In the early years of the twentieth century, as the cinema replaced the showman as the main purveyor of wonders (and the mainstream theatre, in response, clung ever more firmly to the tenets of psychological naturalism) it soon became clear that the Golden Age of Magic was over. This chapter will examine the conjuring act as a point at which liveness and mediatized performance intersect. This includes the part played by Magic Lantern and light shows in the magicians’ acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the paradoxical contributions which the live magic shows of the late nineteenth century made to the early development of motion pictures. In the course of this I shall be considering not only some of the theoretical issues relating to ‘live’ performance, but also ‘liveness’ in another sense of that word. The questions which were first articulated by Benjamin, about the status, function and value of the work of art in an age of mechanical representation have a particular intensity in the area of performance. The arrival of the electronic media in the first quarter of the twentieth century and its ensuing dominance in the form of film, TV, radio, video and audio recordings and digital media have raised essential questions about the place of live performance: firstly, whether live performance will be able to continue to compete with the media in the cultural or economic marketplace; secondly, whether there is any good reason why it should. Philip Auslander has argued that at the level of cultural economy theatre (and live performance generally) and the mass media are rivals, not partners. Neither are they equal rivals: it is absolutely clear that our current cultural formation is saturated with, and dominated by, mass media representations in general and television in particular.359

It is an argument which throws into question some age-old assumptions about the primacy of liveness in performance – and inevitably, theorists have come up with various answers to the question. The value of live performance, it may be argued, lies precisely in its difference from mediatized events. The presence of the performer, the energy that exists between the performer and the audience, creates a special kind of community among the participants. Its very ephemerality, the fact that it exists only ‘in the moment’, sets it apart from the mass media. At its most extreme – as articulated, for example, by Peggy Phelan in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance – this defence goes on to argue that live performance

118

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 119


…becomes itself through disappearance… Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility – in a maniacally charged present – and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious, where it eludes regulation and control… Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward.360

Auslander makes a characteristically uncompromising response towards such arguments for the primacy of live performance. He rejects Phelan’s assertion, that live performance (by ‘disappearing’ and subsequently persisting only in the spectator’s memory) ‘eludes regulation and control’, that by implication it somehow lies outside the ideological reach of contemporary market capitalism, and the forces which govern that economy. He also has little time for what he sees as traditional unreflective assumptions that fail to get much further in their attempts to explicate the value of ‘liveness’ than invoking clichés and mystifications like ‘the magic of live theatre’, the ‘energy’ that supposedly exists between performers and spectators in a live event, and the ‘community’ that live performance is often said to create among performers and spectators.361

Auslander’s point is that while live performance and the mass media are rivals in the cultural and economic marketplace, contemporary live performance both seeks to replicate television, video and film and also incorporates media technology to such an extent that the live event itself becomes a product of media technologies. He cites a range of examples, from the low-level mediatization of electric amplification through to the lip-synched miming of the pop singer in the ‘live’ performance, the use of giant television screens in a variety of live events from sports fixtures to rock concerts to performance art, or video screens within theatrical performances, in order to argue that it is no longer realistic to see liveness and mediatized performance as ontological opposites. Live conjuring is, of course, alive and well and living in children’s parties, in corporate hospitality events, and in designated street theatre venues in tourist areas such as London’s Covent Garden or Sidney Harbour. Some might argue that it exists here in its purest form. Yet, in conjuring – as in acting or pop music – the mass media is a dominant and determining factor: those present-day conjurors whose names are well known are those who have come to terms in various ways with the dominance of recorded/broadcast media. Asked to name a conjuror, UK audiences over the past thirty or so years might have come up with names such as Tommy Cooper, Paul Daniels and Derren Brown. US audiences might name David Copperfield, Penn and Teller, David Blaine. All of these have made their career on television.

119

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 120


Auslander’s argument (somewhat simplified in this summary) provides us with a way of approaching the initial confrontation and the subsequent negotiations between live conjuring and mediatized performance. A rough graph of this might show a U-shaped curve in which nineteenth-century conjurors’ initial excitement at the possibilities of moving picture technology is first replaced by disappointment and anxiety, and later by a willingness to exploit the new technology on its own terms. The early realization (most succinctly articulated by Harry Houdini in the epigraph to this chapter) that there might be something self-cancelling about the use of ‘camera trix’ in the magician’s art was followed by the even more devastating comprehension of the extent to which the recorded and broadcast media would come to dominate the world of entertainment. A later chapter will look more closely at the ways in which twentieth-century conjurors responded to this challenge. The present chapter is concerned with the initial confrontation between the magician and the film-maker. The contribution which nineteenth-century conjuring made to the rise of the early film is now a commonplace of film history; however, it is one which is worth revisiting in the light of Georges Méliès’ Escamotage and its powerful invocation of Death and the Maiden.

Moving images and the conquest of death: the Magic Lantern The history of optical illusion… travels a course from religious belief in magic to the start of mass media entertainment, and at every step of the way the potential for tricking the eye and inventing new diversions (from pop-up books to the movies) marches in time to the progressive understanding of vision, its function, and above all its propensities. As one conjuror writes, ‘to deceive, you must know what your audience is thinking.’ Marina Warner362

Méliès was present when the movies were born – which, according to traditional film history, was at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café at 4, Boulevard des Capucines in Paris on 28th December 1895, when the Lumière brothers first showed their Cinematographe pictures to a paying audience. Although other inventors such as Thomas Edison, Max Skladanowsky and William Paul were working along similar lines, textbooks of film history usually credit this show at the Salon Indien as ‘the first public showing of motion pictures projected on a screen’.363 It took place before a small audience of thirty-three people, who had paid a franc each. A review in La Poste for 30th December enthused that …photography no longer records stillness. It perpetuates the image of movement. The beauty of the invention resides in the novelty and ingenuity

120

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 121


of the apparatus. When these gadgets are in the hands of the public, when anyone can photograph the ones who are dear to them, not just in their motionless form, but with movement, action, familiar gestures and the words out of their mouths, then death will no longer be absolute, final.364

This is a truly extraordinary review. The anonymous critic expounds an apocalyptic vision in which the moving image is something which will mean that ‘death will no longer be absolute, final’. A death and resurrection show indeed. Just as the developing technologies of mass communication had begun to offer hope that there might be ways of contacting those who have passed over to the other side,365 so the reviewer of the world’s first film-show sees in the Cinematographe, not the future of mass entertainment, but a way in which the dead will become present to us. If we are unable to speak to them, then they will at least be able to speak to us. Popular entertainment, of course, has long been fascinated with this particular boundary. Ghosts, vampires, and the various kinds of undead are a perennial theme of popular culture, and one which magicians have not been slow in exploiting. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the main medium for this kind of spooky magic was the Magic Lantern or Phantasmagoria, which tapped into Gothic fantasies of phantoms and spirits. The Magic Lantern has a history which goes back well beyond the Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher or his contemporary Christiaan Huygens, both of whom have been credited with its invention in the mid-seventeenth century.366 Its prehistory includes Aristotle’s writings, in which the principles on which the Magic Lantern is founded are first elaborated; experiments in light and shadow by medieval philosopher-scientists such as Friar Roger Bacon (b. 1214) which enabled the development of magic shadow entertainment devices; and inventions such as Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘bulls-eye’ lens, which was a primitive but effective light condenser. Nonetheless, if Kircher did not invent the Magic Lantern,367 he was still an important popularizer of it in the later editions of his Ars Magnae Lucis et Umbrae.368 The shows with which Kircher is said to have entertained his friends are particularly resonant. They contained ‘images of devils with pitchforks, Mister Death brandishing his scythe, a soul burning in purgatory, and other supernatural scenes, as if the new technology inevitably involved phantasms and spectres’; optical illusions, even those created in the spirit of scientific experiment, have a tendency to ‘disrupt the boundaries between reality and fantasy.’369 Early versions of the Magic Lantern were powered by oil or candle – weak light sources which were barely enough to provide more than the most blurred images. Even so the principles of the Magic Lantern were soon embedded in popular culture. By the end of the seventeenth century there was a new kind of entertainer – the wandering lantern player, the ‘galante-show’ entertainer

121

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 122


whose painted slides would be shown in inns or fairs. The narratives of these shows varied widely: frequently they had a supernatural or magical theme: tales of elves, demons, goblins and ghosts. The street magician had found a new way of producing uncanny wonders in the name of entertainment. Magic Lantern shows cover a broad spectrum. Small models were sold as children’s toys. Some of the itinerant ‘galante-show’ lanternists used comparatively primitive machines, perhaps accompanied by narrative or music of the lanternist’s own making. But the travelling lantern show could also be quite sophisticated, bringing together a range of mechanical and optical effects and providing a great opportunity for the lanternist’s own creativity. For example, the German lanternist Max Skladanowsky (1863–1939)370 was the son of a glazier and minor industrialist. Trained as a photographer, he also undertook apprenticeships in glass painting and optics with the Hagedorn company, who manufactured both Magic Lanterns and theatrical lighting apparatus. The skills which he and his father had between them were combined in a Magic Lantern show with which they both (along with Max’s brother Emil) toured Germany, Central Europe and Scandinavia between 1879 and 1892, and one of whose main features was a sophisticated dissolve between one slide and another. As well as the Magic Lantern, the family presented a complex version of the automaton – a mechanical theatre. In 1892 Max and his brother had invented and constructed a chronophotographic camera. Using this and unperforated roll film controlled by a worm-gear motion, he shot a short (fortyeight frame) motion film of his brother Eric. By 1895 Max had developed and patented the ‘Bioskop’ – a mechanism for projecting the resulting image to an audience of the kind that one might get in a theatre. The Bioskop used principles derived from the double-lens ‘dissolves’ used in his Magic Lantern show. And since a public performance of their ‘Bioskop’ pictures actually predated the Lumière brothers’ show at the Salon Indien by over a month, the Skladanowsky brothers technically have a better claim than their French counterparts to having been the first in Europe to project film to a paying audience. In the end, though, the Bioskop’s reliance on Magic Lantern techniques was as much of a handicap as it was a success. The double-lens, alternate frame technology of the Skladanowskys’ projection technique was clumsy and technologically something of a dead end. At the luxury end of the Magic Lantern scale were the elaborately mounted shows of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, using sophisticated multi-lensed apparatus, which were mounted in America by Joseph Boggs Beale, and in London between 1838 and 1876 at the Royal Polytechnic Institute in Regent Street. The Institute had a large theatre equipped for Magic Lantern shows of a particularly sophisticated kind and boasted a repertoire of over 900 slides – some of them as large as two feet across – designed by Childe and Hill. The programme covered everything from

122

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 123


current affairs (such as front-line reports from the battlefields of the Empire) through to fairy-tale narratives. These shows involved the use of several lanterns and quantities of large handpainted slides to produce ‘dissolving views’, multiple effects and illusions of movement. The slides that these men painted are the finest that were ever produced by hand painting. The images produced were often 2000 square feet or more, and the use of the beautiful but highly dangerous hydrogen-oxygen ‘limelight’ enabled these images to be shown to large audiences. Behind the screen the appropriate music and sound effects were produced.371

Limelight – which was now in regular use for other forms of theatre lighting – was created by squirting a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen onto a limestone base. Once the gases were set alight, the limestone itself became incandescent, emitting a light which was ‘as powerful as a modern movie projector’.372 During the Victorian era (the golden age of Magic Lantern projection) handpainted slides gave way to – or were complemented by – photographic ones. The possibility of mass production meant that the aesthetic qualities of the slides themselves tended to deteriorate even as the lantern mechanisms became more technically sophisticated. While the Magic Lantern retained its function as a form of entertainment (including the illicit thrills of parlour showings of more sophisticated kinds of adult entertainment) it was also a vehicle for education, for the dissemination of news and current affairs, for moral exhortation (temperance and religious lectures were given using Magic Lanterns) and for the demonstration of scientific principles. But of all the variations on the ‘Magic Lantern’ theme, one of the most striking originated in Paris: the ‘Fantasmagorie’, or Phantasmagoria, of Étienne Gaspard Robert, or Robertson as he called himself. This light/shadow show was first seen in Paris, just after the French Revolution, and retained its popularity in both Europe and America throughout the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. It started – as many of the ‘wonders’ of the age started – as a straight scientific lecture, illustrating optical principles, but Robertson had the instincts of the showman rather than the scientific demonstrator, and his audience, in the years following the Terror, had developed a taste for the macabre and the uncanny. In 1799 Robertson opened a new kind of light and shadow show – and one of the earliest examples of that very modern art form, the technologically driven site-specific performance. The audience was led by lantern-light through the grounds and the passageways of an old, abandoned and ruined Capuchin monastery (convent). The walls were hung with strange pictures, skulls and bones – the bones, they were told of long-dead monks. The inner sanctum was hung with black velvet and illuminated by a single lamp. Here Robertson began what seemed like another scientific lecture – an apparently

123

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 124


psychological discussion of the effects on the psyche which were created by thoughts of phantoms and witches. Then, suddenly the lamp went out. Thunder roared and lightning flashed. Church bells tolled, the lightning and thunder increased, and a tiny figure – half-human, half-demon – appeared in the air, shimmering and ghostly. Gradually the figure seemed to approach, growing larger and larger, until suddenly it disappeared with a wail. Bats fluttered on the walls, ghosts and goblins groaned, skeletons came hurtling toward the audience. Women who had come to the show fainted in terror. Bold men hid their eyes. The show was a smash success – the toast of Paris.373

Robertson’s Phantasmagoria was created through a comparatively simple trick of projection. Behind the screens which the audience faced, six assistants provided sound effects and operated several lanterns, back-projecting distorted human images onto the obscured and semi-transparent screen. Some were on wheels and could be moved silently back and forth behind the screen, making the images grow and shrink, approach and retreat, appear and disappear. Others were hand-held allowing bats and ghosts to swoop around the room. The routine, however, was given added power by its setting: the Capuchin monastery was the very stuff of Gothic fiction, with its ruined abbeys and demonic monks. The framework of Robertson’s lantern show was one in which scientific truth was interrupted by, and collapsed into, the supernatural, playing expertly on a tension in the audience’s psyche between the rational and the irrational. Robertson’s show spawned a host of imitators. Sir David Brewster’s description of a Phantasmagoria, which a showman called Philipstrahl exhibited in Edinburgh in 1802, is particularly vivid: The small theatre of exhibition was lighted only by one hanging lamp, the flame of which was drawn up into an opaque chimney or shade when the performance began. In this darkness visible, the curtain rose, and displayed a cave, with skeletons and other terrific figures in relief upon its walls. The flickering light was then drawn up within its shroud, and the spectators in total darkness found themselves in the middle of thunder and lightning… [These] were followed by the figures of ghosts, skeletons, and known individuals, whose eyes and mouths were made to move by the shifting of combined slides. After the first figure had been exhibited for a short time, it began to grow less and less, as if removed to a great distance, and at last vanished in a small cloud of light. Out of this same cloud the germ of another figure began to appear, and gradually grew larger and larger, and approached the spectators, until it attained its perfect development… [F]igures which retired with the freshness of life came back in the form of skeletons, and the

124

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 125


retiring skeletons returned in the drapery of flesh and blood… The effect of this part of the exhibition was naturally the most impressive. The spectators were not only surprised, but agitated, and many of them were of the opinion that they could have touched the figures.374

Even without the aid of the atmospheric setting – but with the aid of a technologically well-equipped performance space – Philipstrahl’s Phantasmagoria, even more vividly than Robertson’s, creates a nightmare world in which the boundaries of life and death dissolve, in which solid figures dematerialize, bodies turn into skeletons and vice versa. It is a surreal show which bears comparison with some of the best work of George Méliès. Images from shows such as these fed back into the more traditional lantern slide shows of the travelling lanternists, for whom the aspect of the macabre became one of the most popular elements within the variety bill which was the standard fare of their shows. Meanwhile, at the time of the Lumière brothers’ soiree, one of the most popular illusions on the London stage was ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ , an illusion of a phantom, produced by cunningly angled mirrors, which had started life in the lecture hall as a demonstration of principles of optics. It became a regular entertainment at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic – that strange hybrid place of erudition and entertainment – and then found its way both into magic shows and eventually into the mainstream theatre, where scenes such as that in Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers were written expressly to exploit its potential for supernatural illusion. Thus, as Pepper’s Ghost moved from the lecture hall to the theatre it changed its function and its epistemological status: as a theatrical device its function was to produce that most unscientific of effects – a ghost. What started out as a scientific demonstration of Enlightenment rationalism turned into a producer of the irrational.

Magicians at the Salon Indien Thus the moving Cinematographe images which the La Poste reviewer (quoted above) saw at the Salon Indien had been anticipated by the Magic Lantern shows and the Phantasmagorias of the previous century. But there is a significant difference in the way in which the two kinds of entertainment were received by their different audiences: if Robertson, Philipstrahl and their colleagues used the available technology to create a sense of the abnormal and the supernatural, the reviewer from La Poste is caught by the very ordinariness of the pictures which he saw. This is what stimulated such a powerful sense of awe in him: walking, moving images of men and women who, through continual re-presenting, would continue their phantom life, not as fictions of the storyteller, but as themselves, caught on film in all their mundane reality.

125

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 126


For the La Poste reviewer, the future of the cinematograph seemed to lie in the hands of the amateur enthusiast rather than the professional film-maker. In this he was not entirely wrong, of course: home movies became a flourishing pastime among twentieth-century enthusiasts, although it was not until nearly a hundred years later that the user-friendly video camera made amateur ‘moviemaking’ truly ubiquitous. Moreover, the films which he saw at the Salon Indien were, as the majority of early films from the 1890s and 1900s would be, much more like home movies in both form and content than they were like feature films: street scenes with horses and carts and passers-by, made by apparent amateurs for whom the delight of motion photography is such a novelty that ‘the camera was turned on anything which moved sufficiently to demonstrate the ability of the equipment to capture it. Street scenes could provide multitudinous lines of movement, the outdoor locations suggesting boundless off-screen space’.375 This, though, is what the reviewer finds so amazing – a way of perpetuating everyday life in all the reality of its ordinary motion and bustle, in such a way as to challenge the finality even of death. In the audience that evening, however, at the Salon Indien, was the thirty-four-year-old Georges Méliès: a struggling theatre proprietor and occasional conjuror whose technical experiments would marry the emerging realist tradition with the older traditions of the Phantasmagoria and the nineteenth-century conjuring show in such a way as to establish the basis of a whole vocabulary of film-making. Méliès was not one of the great magical innovators of his time. On the contrary, as might be inferred from his acquisition and refurbishment of the Théâtre Robert Houdin, he seems to have seen his role in life as being to perpetuate the conjuring traditions of previous generations. Along with the theatre itself Méliès had also acquired and renovated many of the mechanical marvels created by Robert-Houdin himself. Even in Robert-Houdin’s heyday there may have been something slightly retrograde about these mechanical devices, but by the time Méliès inherited them at the end of the nineteenth century the art of the conjuror had moved on, and many of these automata must have seemed outdated and quaint.376 Ironically, the man who was soon to establish a vocabulary for the twentieth century’s most innovative art form was curating a collection of memorabilia of performances from a bygone era. Equally traditional were the items with which Méliès frequently ended his evening’s programmes. As in Robert-Houdin’s own programmes, and like those of Maskelyne and Cooke at the Egyptian Hall, Méliès’ finales often involved Magic Lantern shows, or shadow-puppet shows – old favourites which had maintained their popularity in the late nineteenth century and were guaranteed crowd-pleasers. This meant that for many years before he encountered the Cinematographe, Méliès was both technically proficient at projecting images and was also used to regarding them as an integral part of a magic performance.

126

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 127


Indeed, this was his first reaction when invited to the Lumières’ exhibition at the Salon Indien. According to Méliès, [t]he other guests and I found ourselves in front of a small screen, similar to those we use for projections, and after a few minutes, a stationary photograph showing the Place Bellcour in Lyons was projected. A little surprised, I scarcely had time to say to my neighbour: ‘Have we been brought here to see projections? I’ve been doing these for ten years.’ No sooner had I stopped speaking when a horse pulling a cart started to walk towards us followed by other vehicles, then a passerby. In short, all the hustle and bustle of a street. We sat with our mouths open, without speaking, filled with amazement.377

What nobody seems to have foreseen at the Salon Indien was the revolution in commercial entertainment that the projected moving image would precipitate. Even the Lumière brothers, like Maskelyne, believed that the craze for moving images would be short-lived. While the craze was alive, however, there was a crowd of people demanding to get on the bandwagon. In what Erik Barnouw has called ‘The Scramble’378 – the great rush, following the first public projections of moving images, to find ways of capitalizing on the new technology – magicians were frequently at the front of the queue. The Lumières entrusted the UK marketing of their Cinematograph to Felicien Trewey – a master magician of the previous generation, whose speciality had been shadowgraphy – another form of light-magic. Devant, using Paul’s rival equipment, ran three provincial touring theatrograph companies as well as his projections at the Egyptian Hall. The Algerian Isola brothers, Emile and Vincent, whose magic theatre was in direct competition with the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, also attended the Lumières’ demonstration at the Grand Café and within months had started not only showing films at their Théâtre Isola but marketed their own ‘Isolatagraph’ projectors. Carl Hertz, one of the best-known magicians in Europe, bullied Robert William Paul into selling him a Theatrograph just in time to set off on a world tour – thereby initiating the history of film in both Africa and Australia. His journeys criss-crossed those of other entrepreneurs. A Lumière opérateur beat him to Bombay, but Hertz had already beaten him to Australia. Along with Hertz, other magic acts were descending on India with cinematographic marvels: the arrivals included a ‘Hughes Photo-Motoscope’ and ‘Professor Anderson and Mlle. Blanche and their Andersonoscopograph’.379

David Devant, the first president of the Magic Circle was no great movie director or performer, but he too has his place in the history of early cinema, in Britain at least. In fact, it may have been Devant, rather than Méliès, who was actually the first to use stop-action photography in a film. He certainly claimed to be the first

127

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 128


magician to appear in an animated film, and it is also true that he sold Méliès his first moving picture apparatus. The Magic Circle owns a copy of a short piece of film, also dated 1896, in which Devant performs a series of metamorphoses in which he, too, is clearly using stop-action photography.380 Out of his top hat Devant pulls rabbits, cards, a carafe of wine, and then another top hat. A small bunch of flowers instantly becomes a large bunch of flowers, then, as a climax to the act, metamorphoses into a cage full of birds which suddenly vanishes. It looks utterly dreadful. The stop-action technique is clumsy and jerky, while Devant, who looks painfully ill at ease in front of the camera, has no notion how to time his actions against the camerawork. The forced smile with which he finishes his performance has an air of terrible desperation about it.381 Whether or not Devant’s film pre-dates Méliès’ Escamotage (and if it does it would be only by a matter of weeks) his counterclaim does nothing to challenge Méliès’ claim to a place in history: in fact it rather tends to strengthen it. By demonstrating how easy it is to use the camera badly, Devant’s short film allows us to see just how effective Méliès is at creating his own conjunction of cinematography and conjuring. Devant’s place in film history, then, is as an entrepreneur rather than as a creative artist. He had been present on 20th February 1896 at the Regent Street Polytechnic at a demonstration of the Lumière brothers’ Cinematographe. At that time he was partnering John Nevil Maskelyne at the Egyptian Hall in England’s most famous magic soiree. He was extremely impressed with the Cinematographe, but he was unable to convince the Lumières to sell, rather than hire, one to him. Nor was he able to convince Maskelyne of the long-term viability of moving picture shows – especially at the £100 per week that the Lumières were asking. So, while Maskelyne maintained that the movies were just a passing fad, and the Lumières refused to sell their invention, Devant bought a similar machine (a ‘Theatrograph’) from the British inventor Robert William Paul and struck a deal with Paul whereby he received commission for selling others and became the first independent licensed operator in the UK.382 In terms of performance, however, Devant wisely stayed with his live act. Other magicians who saw the potential for including moving picture projections in their acts included Leopoldo Fregoli, Alexander Victor (‘Alexander the Great’), Walter R. Booth, Billy Bitzer, Albert E. Smith, J. Stuart Blackton and Harry Houdini.383 But in the early years, it was Méliès above all who was able to see the creative potential for the magical aspects of this new medium. Méliès, like Devant, had attempted to buy a Cinematographe from the Lumière brothers, but they refused to sell, and so he acquired (from Devant) two of Robert William Paul’s rival Theatrographs.384 He then modified these in a rather do-it-yourself way, using spare mechanical parts from his theatrical workshop, so that it could be used as a camera as well as a projector. Méliès patented his ‘Kinétographe’ in September 1896, but in fact did not continue long with the manufacture of it. Apparatus manufactured by Leon Gaumont,

128

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 129


Charles Pathé, Georges Démeny and the Lumières themselves turned out to be more efficient, both for showing and for producing short films. Between 1896 and 1913 Méliès produced over 500 of these,385 only a few of which now survive. His first attempt had been a one-minute film called Une Partie de Cartes (1896) a home movie showing himself, his brother Gaston and a friend playing cards in the garden of their home at Montreuil-sur-Bois. It was made in frank imitation of a similar Lumière brothers’ movie from the previous year, Partie d'Écarté. That year, 1896, saw Méliès make eighty more short films. Their titles give an indication of their content: many of them were travelogues & news documentaries such as Sauvetage en Rivière (River Rescue), street scenes from Parisian locations such as Bois de Boulogne and Boulevard des Italiens, and the occasional, more theatrical, comic sketch such as Les Ivrognes (the Drunks). While Méliès is now best known for his fantasy films, he actually set out, like most early film-makers, to make documentary-style, ‘slice-of-life’ factual films. Given his personal and professional interest in the theme of magic, it is not surprising that some of these, such as Le Mystère Indien Fakir (The Mysterious Indian Fakir), Séance de Prestidigitation (An Evening of Conjuring) and Dix Chapeaux en 60 Secondes (Conjuror Making 10 Hats in 60 Seconds), took conjuring as their theme. But it was not so much the theme of Méliès film as his technical innovations that secured his place in the annals of film history. According to Méliès own testimony, the discovery which changed his career happened by accident – and (ironically enough) while he was making one of his documentary-style ‘shorts’. The camera he was using in the early days was a very basic one, with a tendency to tear or jam the film: One day early in my career as I was casually photographing the Place de l'Opéra, my camera jammed… with unexpected results. It took me a minute to release the film and start cranking the camera again. During that minute the passersby, the buses and the cars had of course moved. Later, when I projected the filmstrip… I saw a ‘Madeleine-Bastille’ bus suddenly change into a hearse, and some men become women. In this way the substitution trick, the so-called ‘stop-action technique’ was discovered…386

It is possible that the story happened just as accidentally as Méliès tells it, and that it was as much a surprise to him as he claims. It is perhaps a little hard to believe: Méliès was, after all, an experienced showman, familiar with the techniques of projected images. The Magic Lanterns which he had been using for many years in his theatre used a similar kind of stop-action technique to effect image transformations, as well as sophisticated dissolves and metamorphoses. Perhaps, though, what so astonished Méliès was the realization of the sort of effects which could be obtained simply by applying some of these old magic-lantern principles to the realistically photographed human body – and then finding the frameworks

129

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 130


which would turn a technical trick into a narrative of wonder. Fittingly, it was the conjuror’s trick, Bualtier de Kolta’s Vanishing Lady which provided the first of these frameworks. Méliès’ unique genius – and eventually his limitation – lay in perceiving and exploiting the similarity between the creative possibilities of film and the pleasure of the conjuror’s act. Watching the buses turning into hearses and the men turning into women in his film of the Place de l’Opéra, he recognized these metamorphoses as being akin to those that conjurors had been performing, using the techniques of live conjuring, at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. The realization that what had happened accidentally could be made to work deliberately led him to make Escamotage d’une Dame chez Robert-Houdin. In a macabre reversal of the enthusiastic notice of the Lumière’s soiree in La Poste, Méliès created an illusion, not of eternal life but of sudden, grotesque and symbolic death. Less impressive in scale and macabre symbolism, perhaps, than the omnibus which turns into a hearse, Méliès nonetheless tamed the grotesque metamorphosis of his accidental discovery and reproduced it as a music hall routine. Yet Escamotage was not regarded as a great success by Méliès himself, nor, apparently by his earliest audiences: ‘Evidently the whole thing appeared childish on the screen. The audience… did not get the idea.’387 In fact, it is a paradoxical film, and one which does not fully engage with the possibilities of the new art form. Although it plays – as a conjuror plays – with the limits of the possible, it is framed as a slice of cinematic realism, not very different in kind from the street scenes, and scenes of family life which were the staple of the first few years of film-making. It is, to all intents and purposes, a realistic document of an item of popular entertainment. For many years, Bualtier de Kolta and other magicians, had been performing ‘The Vanishing Lady’, or a virtually identical trick, live to audiences. Most of what the audience sees on screen could have indeed been seen on the stage of the Robert-Houdin and many other theatres – effected by means of a trick chair which allowed the lady, beneath the cloth, to slide down into a trapdoor. Méliès uses a different, and cinematic, technique to get the same effect on screen, but he then presents his film as if it were an exact reproduction of the de Kolta routine. Even so, there was one element which could not have been performed live: the instantaneous appearance, (from nowhere, and without the conjuror’s traditional covering cloth) of the skeleton in the chair. That really does need the trickery of stopaction photography: one moment the chair is empty, the next, the skeleton has appeared in it. The essence of the live trick is maintained but elaborated upon by the camera in the figure of Death.

Innovations If Escamotage was only a qualified success, Méliès’ next steps, however, moved things on significantly. Having discovered the potential of the new moving

130

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 131


pictures for producing surreal, fantastic or impossible images, he set about exploiting it to the full, inventing on the way several genres which would later be taken up by the Hollywood studios. Other films of 1896 included the first ‘monster movie’, Une Nuit Terrible (A Terrible Night) in which a man wakes to see a giant beetle threatening him; meanwhile the three-minute ‘feature’ Le Manoir du Diable (The Devil’s Castle) may well have been the first vampire film. In a medieval hall a bat circles and transforms into Mephistopheles, (Méliès), who waves his hand and a large cauldron appears. At another wave of his hand a beautiful woman emerges from a puff of smoke and an old man appears from the floor carrying a book. Everything disappears at a sign from the evil one then a cavalier arrives holding a cross causes the Devil to throw up his arms and disappear in a cloud of smoke.388

At the end of 1896 he launched his own production company Star Films: their slogan ‘The Whole World Within Reach’ gives a sense of how Méliès saw films as changing the world. By 1897 he had opened his own greenhouse-like studio in the grounds of the family home, where nearly all his subsequent films were shot. While he continued to manage the Théâtre Robert-Houdin (including four largescale ‘spectaculars’ mounted between 1905 and 1907), much of his energy was now spent on producing, scripting, directing, designing, editing and acting in his films. He continued to experiment with conjuring-style effects in films. Some of them are, like the first Escamotage, framed as documentary-style representations of conjurors on stage at the Robert-Houdin Théâtre. In others, Méliès expands the conjuring routines of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin to provide the narratives of the film: a routine called The Tricks of the Moon, for example, became the film The Moon at Arm’s Length (La Lune à un Metre, 1898). In others he draws on the imagery of the conjuror’s act to create a world of horrors, fantasies, and startling effects which prefigure the dream-logic of the surrealists. In this Méliès resembles Charles Ludwig Dodgson, the mathematician and amateur conjuror who, as Lewis Carroll, took the playing cards, top hats, pocket watches and white rabbits from the magician’s act and turned them into the grotesque and comic dystopia of Wonderland. Méliès’ continued to experiment during the 1890s: One trick leads to another. In the face of the success of this new style, I set myself to discover new processes, and in succession I conceived dissolves from scene to scene effected by a special arrangement in the camera; apparitions, disappearances, metamorphoses obtained by superimposition on black backgrounds, or portions of the screen reserved for décors; then superimpositions on white backgrounds already exposed which are obtained by a device which I am not going to reveal, since imitators have not penetrated

131

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 132


the whole secret. Then came tricks of decapitation, of doubling the characters, of scenes played by a single actor… Finally, in employing the special knowledge of illusions which 25 years in the Théâtre Robert-Houdin had given me, I introduced into the cinema the tricks of machinery, mechanics, optics, prestidigitation etc. With all these processes mixed one with another and used with competence, I do not hesitate to say that in cinematography it is today possible to realise the most impossible and the most improbable things.389

Thus, during 1897, for example, his films included titles such as Le Cabinet de Mephistopheles (Mephistopheles’ Cabinet) and Le Château Haunté (The Haunted Castle) – in both of which he played the Devil. The fantasy of Gugusse et l⬘Automate (The Clown and the Automaton) harked back to earlier days of mediatized magic; in L⬘Auberge Ensorcelé (The Bewitched Inn) a traveller staying at the inn is terrified by his clothes coming to life and dancing around of their own accord; Le Magnetiseur portrayed a hypnotist at work.390 The same year Méliès developed what he called ‘Spirit photography’ in films such as La Caverne Maudite (Cave of Demons, 1897). The term is reminiscent of those projects by which spiritualists (both genuine and bogus) attempted to reunite science and spirituality by capturing the spirit-world on photographic stock. Méliès’ technique, however, is closer to Robertson’s Phantasmagoria than it is to Kirlian photography: it refers to double-exposed sequences in which the walls of a cave can be seen through the translucent ghosts and skeletons which haunt it. The following year in Un Homme de Têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads, 1898), a man’s heads take on a life of their own, multiply and float around the room, using the cinema’s first split-screen shot: that is to say a shot in which an actor plays opposite ‘himself ’. Cendrillon (Cinderella, 1899) was a large-scale production – over seven minutes long and using over thirty actors! Here, too, Méliès proved to be a pioneer in the development of a cinematic language. At a time when most films were single-shot affairs, he was editing scenes together to produce a chronological narrative. Yet once again we see Méliès’ achievement to be one based as much in tradition as in radical innovation: Cendrillon also featured the first successful cinematic adaptation of the old ‘dissolve’ technique favoured by Magic Lanternists. Méliès used the cinema as a box of magic tricks, from which he pulled dreamlike sequences as well as realist newsreels, documentaries and slices of life. To do this, he inevitably borrowed from existing narrative genres. As well as the stock routines of the conjuror, he also drew on folk tales and melodramas; on gothic fantasies such as Bluebeard; and on pantomime stories such as Cinderella. And while Méliès would have been familiar with the conventions of the British pantomime from his youthful stay in London, Katherine Singer Kovacs has also pointed out that he would have had much greater familiarity with a native French genre which is virtually unheard of today: the French popular theatrical genre of

132

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 133


the féerie.391 Similar in some ways to the pantomime, but also closely allied to the tradition of melodrama,392 the féerie was a specifically French form which had developed in the years soon after the Revolution. It played to a largely uneducated working-class audience, one which was hungry for entertainment. It gave them fairy-tale adventure narratives, which enacted a battle between good and evil. As the name suggests, the féeries of the Parisian theatre were peopled by supernatural beings such as fairies, genies, monsters, gnomes and witches, as well as by stock characters from a popular theatrical tradition which stretches back to commedia dell’ arte: the heroine, her handsome lover, the lazy servant and the grotesque rival. It made full use, too, of the theatre’s capacity for the spectacular: metamorphoses, flying, instantaneous scene changes, mime and dance, magical transformations – and happy endings. These féeries were a historical precursor of the fantasy genre of films and literature, a magical narrative for adults. Here, too, Méliès is a pioneer: his most famous fantasy film, A Trip to the Moon (1902), is generally acknowledged to be one of the defining films in the genre of science fiction. A comic fantasy of space flight, the film was a box office smash, and remains an acknowledged classic of early cinema. In its first few years, cinema was driven by forces other than storytelling, and early cinema-going may have been driven not by a desire for narrative but by the spectators’ fascination with the spectacle and – crucially – with the technology which created it. Tom Gunning has coined the phrase ‘the cinema of attractions’ for what he sees as the dominant mode of cinema in the period up to 1906. Rather than being an involvement with narrative action or empathy with character psychology, the cinema of attractions solicits a highly conscious awareness of the film image engaging the viewer’s curiosity. The spectator does not get lost in a fictional world and its drama, but remains aware of the act of looking, the excitement of curiosity and its fulfilment.393

Gunning’s definition of dramatic/cinematic narrative is, perhaps, a little oversimplified: as Brecht well knew, there have always been modes of engagement with narrative which do not involve this kind of loss of self in the fictional world. But Gunning’s larger point is an important one. He argues that while early film-makers such as Méliès and Porter have been studied primarily from the viewpoint of their contribution to film as a storytelling medium, this is an approach which potentially distorts both the work of these film-makers and the actual forces shaping cinema before 1906… [Early audiences’] viewing experiences relate more to the attractions of the fairground than to the traditions of the legitimate theatre. The relation between films and the emergence of the great amusement parks, such as Coney Island, at the turn of the century provides rich ground

133

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 134


for rethinking the roots of early cinema. Nor should we forget that in the earliest years of exhibition the cinema itself was an attraction. Early audiences went to exhibitions to see machines demonstrated… rather than to see films. It was the Cinematographe, the Biograph or the Vitascope that were advertised on the variety bill in which they premiered, not Le Déjeuner de Bébé or The Black Diamond Express.394

Méliès’ experimental films seem both to fulfil Gunning’s criteria and to exceed them. They do indeed have an element of the fairground attraction – or indeed the magic show – about them, but they also frame themselves within the context of folk tales, myths and contemporary theatrical genres. Their narratives may not be complex in any psychological sense, but the games they play with reality demand an agile imaginative response from a spectator who is engaged in the story being told. The audience is being given a bravura demonstration of the technical possibilities of the movies, one which appeals to their informed interest in the technology of motion picture projection, to the ‘excitement of curiosity and its fulfilment’ – but it is also being led into a fairy-tale dreamworld, a world of make-believe.

George Méliès’ sympathy for the devil As well as pioneering the science-fiction film, Méliès could also claim to be the first horror movie maker. Many of his early cinematic fantasies echo the disturbing images of death and disfigurement of the nearby ‘Théâtre Grand Guignol’ – a theatre offering a particularly Parisian form of popular culture, featuring nightly programmes which played to the more sadistic elements of the spectators’ responses. ‘Grand Guignol’ (which means ‘Big Puppet Show’, or ‘Puppet Show For Adults’) is loosely used to refer to a mode of theatre in general – a ‘theatre of horror’ which blends some of the pleasures of Gothic drama and melodrama with elements of a more ‘realistic’ style of writing and playing which shows the influence of nineteenth-century European naturalism even while its narratives deal with the grotesque, the outlandish and the horrific. More strictly, however, the term refers to those plays written for and staged at the particular theatre opened by Oscar Metenier in 1897, the Théâtre du Grand Guignol in the rue Chaptal in Montmartre. Metenier had spent six years as a collaborator of Andre Antoine at the Théâtre Libre, one of the totemic theatres of the naturalist movement. It was arguably the tension between a theatrical naturalism which was always threatening to break down under the effect of its grotesque subject matter, and the more highly wrought, stylized and presentational style of performance with which audiences would have been familiar from earlier melodramas, which made Grand Guignol theatre so mesmerizing to audiences in the early years of the twentieth century.395

134

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 135


There are already several points of similarity between the original Grand Guignol and contemporary magic/conjuring shows. Both depend on an element of illusion: the theatre of Grand Guignol and its derivatives, like their slightly less disreputable cousin the melodrama, made use of – and indeed depended on – the kinds of trompe- l’oeuil effect which was at the heart of several kinds of magic tricks. At the affective level, magic and the Grand Guignol both deal with the outlandish, the extreme. The Grand Guignol was a theatre of horror, and here, too, many magic tricks offered a kind of frisson of danger – of decapitation, of impalement, of dismemberment – which was similar in kind to the thrill of the theatrical genre. An evening at the Guignol and at a conjuring show were similarly structured: in an age in which the two dominant modes of performative entertainment were the single substantial performance (e.g. opera, naturalistic play) and the variety bill (cabaret, music hall, circus), both the theatre of the Grand Guignol and the magic show of the Golden Age tended towards the latter. The two forms played to similar audiences, employed similar forms of publicity, and had similar places in the overall cultural ‘map’ of imaginative and theatrical entertainments. Méliès drew on both in order to create his own particular form of cinema. Méliès, however, like many of today’s horror film-makers, was drawn towards the combination of horror and laughter which the new medium offered. Just as the lady in Escamotage was restored to life, so the gruesome in Méliès films tended usually to be redeemed by the humorous. Maybe at some level Méliès realized that the newness of this medium had such potential for transforming reality that it needed to be kept under control in some way. Perhaps Méliès most ambitious production of the 1890s was also his most appropriate one. In 1897 he adapted a short section of the Faust legend, for his own Faust and Marguerite in which Faust makes a pact with the Devil. This uses Gounod’s operatic version of the story. According to John C. Tibbetts, Gounod⬘s Faust has been adapted to the screen (for better or worse) more than any other opera. In 1897 the Lumières produced two short scenes from the opera – Mephistopheles⬘s supernatural apparition and Faust⬘s transformation from wizened old scholar to stalwart youth. In 1904 Méliès’s Faust et Marguerite stomped the opera into a twenty-minute adaptation in twenty short tableaux [in which] Méliès… portrayed Mephistopheles…396

Tibbetts’ statement is suggestive, although his chronology and attributions are open to debate: like the history of magic, the history of early film is not always easy to reconstruct.397 What is certain, though, is that Méliès was fascinated with the Faust legend and returned to it several times in his film-making career. Nor was he the only film pioneer who found the story particularly enthralling. Here is the full list of Faust films from the silent era of which reliable documentation still remains:

135

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 136


1897

a) Faust et Marguerite. (France) Dir. Georges Méliès. With Jeanne d⬘Alcy. b) Cabinet de Méphistophélès. (France) Dir. Georges Méliès.

1898

a) Faust and Mephistopheles. (UK) Dir. George Albert Smith. b) La Damnation de Faust. (France) Dir. Georges Méliès.

1900

Faust and Marguerite. (USA) Dir. Edwin S. Porter.

1903

Faust aux enfers. (France) Dir. Georges Méliès. Faust et Méphistophéles. (France) Dir. Alice Guy.

1909

Faust. (USA) Dir. Edwin S. Porter. With William Sorelle.

1910

Faust. (UK & France) Dir. Henri Andréani and David Barnett. With Fernanda Negri Pouget, Tom Santschi.

1911

Faust. (UK) Directed by Cecil M. Hepworth. With: Hay Plumb, Claire Pridelle, Jack Hulcup, Frank Wilson.

1913

Der Student von Prag [The Student of Prague]. (Germany) Dir. Stellan Rye, Screenplay Hanns Heinz Ewers.

1922

Don Juan et Faust. (France) Dir. Marcel L⬘Herbier.

1923

Faust. (UK) Dir. Bertram Phillips. Screenplay Frank Miller III.

1925

La Damnation de Faust. (France) Dir.Victor Charpentier and Stéphane Passet.

1926

Faust - eine deutsche Volkssage [Faust: a German Folk Legend]. (Germany) Dir. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. With Gösta Ekmann, Emil Jannings and Camilla Horn.

Méliès, Alice Guy, F. W. Murnau: it is an extraordinary list. Even Edwin S. Porter has a go at a Faustus scene – which is particularly surprising in view of the fact that Porter is usually thought of as representing a very different tradition from Méliès. As the maker of the ground-breaking Great Train Robbery (1902) he is hailed as the father of the Western movie – a genre whose habitual mode is a form of heightened realism rather than fantasy. The catalogue describes his Faustus and Marguerite (1900) in the following terms: Marguerite is seated before the fireplace, Faust standing by her side. Mephistopheles enters and offers his sword to Faust, commanding him to behead the fair Marguerite. Faust refuses, whereupon Mephistopheles draws the sword across the throat of the lady and she suddenly disappears and Faust is seated in her place.398

136

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 137


Porter’s narrative seems to be based on Méliès’ Escamotage. In both its narrative and its title it refers back to Méliès’ own first Faust film, Faust and Marguerite. Méliès dreamed a dream which was shared by the rest of the pioneers of early cinematography. In his paper ‘Facing the Divide: Turn of the Century Stage Magicians’ Presentations of Rationalism and the Occult’, Fred Nadis argues that although magicians such as Kellar, Maskelyne, Thurston and Houdini made use of playful posters showing them communicating with ‘little devils whispering helpful secrets in their ears’, magicians at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries went out of the way to deny any real occult status, to ‘make it clear that their effects were the result of trick mechanisms, practice and stagecraft’. 399 The new magicians of the cinema were, it seems, less nervous about seeming to sup with the devil: indeed the Faustus legend haunts early film-making, and the Devil is always around… Méliès returned to the Faust theme not once but several times in his filmmaking career – and in these and other films he returned time after time to what appeared to be his favourite role: ‘Méliès’ numerous appearances as the Devil must far outnumber that of any other actor, having appeared in as many as 24 manifestations in his films.’400 The slogan of Star Films in the 1890s – ‘The whole world within reach’ is an uncanny echo of the fantasies of omnipotence which haunt Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in the first great play of that name from the 1590s. Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please? …I’ll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl And search all corners of the new-found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates… [I’ll] make a bridge through the air To pass the ocean. With a band of men I’ll join the hills that bind the Affrick shore, And make that country continent to Spain And both contributory to my crown.401

Globalization and imperialism combine in this dream of luxury. But the fascination of Méliès and the early film-makers with the Faust legend does more than offer an ironic and unconscious harbinger of the role of the film industry in the global economy in the later twentieth century. It also gestures – almost guiltily, as if the film-makers were aware of something of the power of these new inventions – towards that long Christian tradition which sees the Devil as a creator of illusions. The Devil conjures lies which imitate the true creation – for

137

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 138


he cannot truly create but only imitate. The Devil ‘summons images in the mind’s eye, playing on desires and weaknesses. He toys with us, especially when creating spectacles that are not there, for the word “illusion” itself comes from “ludere”, “to play” in Latin’.402 And no story plays on this theme more persistently than the Faust legend. In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, in particular, the devil in the person of Mephistopheles (Méliès’ role) becomes a diabolic showman-cum-projectionist. He conjures visions for Faustus, and more than once, at points when Faustus appears to be relenting and turning back to God, the Devil distracts him with shows, pageants and illusions. Devils dance before him and Faustus asks ‘What means this show?’; Mephistophilis replies ‘Nothing, Faustus but to delight thy mind’.403 At another point, when once more he threatens to turn back to God, he is diverted by the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins. Finally, in the play’s closing phase, the vision of Helen of Troy ‘sucks forth’ Faustus’s soul404 and seals his damnation. The deal that Faustus made turned out to be bad business. Méliès, too, was a poor businessman. As proprietor of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin before he became involved in movies, he had often been running at a loss. As a film-maker, his strengths were also his weaknesses: as public passion for realist narratives like Porter’s Great Train Robbery grew, Méliès’ experiments with cinematic magic seemed more and more peripheral to the direction in which the movies were going. It would be several years before the full force of his influence and his experimental discoveries would be felt. And on a commercial level, he made several disastrous decisions. For example, in 1909, as chair of the Congress International des Editeurs du Film, Méliès presided over their resolution to rent all films rather than sell them outright – a practice already being adopted by Pathé but one which would adversely affect his own financial interests.405 Even his masterpiece A Trip to the Moon, which was hugely popular at the box office, was also one of the most intensely pirated films of its time. Copyright problems – or rather the lack of clear copyright legislation – meant that Méliès never profited to the extent he should have done from his films. In 1915, financial difficulties forced him to sell the Théâtre Robert-Houdin – ironically enough, to a cinema operator. In one sense then, the movies – or at least that aspect of the movies which became the ‘Dream Factory’ – was born out of late nineteenth-century magic shows. But one of the classic myths of our civilization is that of the child that destroys its father: the Oedipal relationship between the growing film industry and its parents seemed doomed to end with the child flourishing at the expense of the parent: magic, it seemed was to be killed by the success of the electronic media. The question of ‘liveness’ is not only one of theory: it is also about very practical issues such as theatre economics. In the early years of the twentieth century, vaudeville artists found themselves in competition with the new

138

Chapter 07.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 139


media: first of all the growing movie industry, then radio and eventually television. The entertainment industry as a whole expanded, but that sector of it which was devoted to the live variety act, shrank as people chose to spend their leisure time and their surplus income in cinemas (and later in their own homes) rather than variety halls or magic theatres. The Egyptian Hall and its successor, St George’s Hall, managed to survive a little while into the movie era but not very long. With hindsight, many of Méliès’ generation of conjurors might have felt that that the pact they made with the new art form turned out to be a Faustian one after all.

139

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 140

Chapter Eight

Narrative ambiguity and contested meanings: interpreting Harry Houdini My brain is the key that sets me free All the world is a theatre to me. Harry Houdini406

Creation myths: Houdini and his origins The story of Harry Houdini has been told frequently. It has become a popular subject not only amongst aficionados of magic and conjuring, but also amongst cultural historians. He was one of the showbiz superstars of his own day: George Bernard Shaw is reputed to have said that the two most famous men in the world after Jesus Christ were Houdini and Sherlock Holmes.407 It is an interesting coupling, since both the escape artist and the detective of Baker Street were creatures who inhabited the borderline between fantasy and reality. And like Sherlock Holmes, the fame has endured: since his death Houdini has attained iconic status. Today, a hundred years after his rise to fame, a Houdini fan culture keeps the flame alive and maintains an interest in his life and career through institutions such as the Houdini Historical Centre in Wisconsin and the Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and also through open-access Internet sites such as Houdiniana.com. Houdini continues, too, to be an inspiration not only to magicians but to playwrights and contemporary performance artists such as Talking Birds, Lisa Watts and Brian McClave.408 At the time of writing, Simon Bent’s play The Escapologist, based partly on Houdini’s biography, is touring in the UK in a production by Suspect Culture. To write about Houdini, though, is to repeat uncertainties, for much of his life is surrounded in myth. A famous selfpublicist, Houdini made up his own legends, weaving together fact and fantasy to create an illusory figure who became in many ways more real than the historical Ehrich Weiss who first invented him. As with so much else about him ‘Harry Houdini’s origins are complex issues. Biographer Ruth Brandon describes his life as being ‘defiantly American’409 but this oversimplifies it. ‘I don’t like America so well, although I am a full-blooded American’,410 he once told a reporter, and his self-proclaimed ‘full-blooded American-ness’ is itself ambiguous. As with many of America’s European immigrants in that period, the exact details of Houdini’s place and date of birth are uncertain. Modern biographers,411 with documentary evidence to back them up, are now more or less agreed that he was born Erik (later spelled Ehrich) Weisz (later Weiss) in Budapest on 24th March 1874, son of Rabbi Samuel Weisz

140

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 141

NARRATIVE AMBIGUITY AND CONTESTED MEANINGS

and his second wife, Cecilia, and that Cecilia and the four-year-old Ehrich moved to Appleton, Wisconsin in 1878 to join Samuel, who had been offered a position as rabbi to the small Jewish community there through the offices of a friend (having, in the process, his name changed to ‘Weiss’ by US immigration officials). Houdini and his family always maintained vigorously that they had moved to Appleton by 1874, and that Ehrich’s birth took place there on 6th April of that year. Wisconsin census records contradict this, however, and from the tone of some of Houdini’s own remarks, it appears that he himself was not entirely convinced of the literal truth of his American origins. There also seems to have been some debate about his birth date within the family. In November 1913, a few months after his mother’s death, Houdini wrote to his brother Theodore (‘Dash’): Re the Birthdays, I shall celebrate mine? (sic) always April 6th. It hurts me to think I cant talk it over with Darling Mother and as SHE always wrote me on April 6th, that will be my adopted birthdate.412

It seems that Houdini makes a very definite decision to ‘adopt’ 6th April as the date of his birth. It is a choice made in the face of other possibilities and made on the basis of his mother’s account. The choice is symptomatic: for Houdini, the literal and historical truth of his birth date is less important than the consistency of a narrative which he inherited from his mother: a narrative which also establishes him as ‘a full-blooded American’. And, of course, this may well have been Cecilia’s intention, arising from the common need felt by recent immigrant families, to establish a firm claim to their new nationality. Thus, to the extent that the family’s ‘official’ story of its own past insisted on the American birth of the young Houdini, reinventing him as a citizen of the New World, he is indeed defiantly American. But the immigrant experience is frequently a schizophrenic one, in which old identities vie with the new ones, and tales and memories of the old country overlay the reality of the new. In the domestic mythology of the Weiss family these tales seem to have been of a particularly romantic kind, in which fantasy blotted out the bleak actuality of their early American life, and in which a more vivid and colourful narrative emerges – again one which acts as a template for an understanding of the later Houdini. In reality Houdini’s father, Samuel, was a failure in his scholarly and pastoral calling. Fired by his Appleton congregation and unable to sustain a position as a rabbi in Wisconsin, Milwaukee or New York, he found it ever harder to support his increasingly impoverished family. He ended up as a production worker in a necktie factory (working alongside the teenage Ehrich413) and died ‘a disappointed and impoverished man, one of the many invisible immigrants unable to adapt in the increasingly prosperous New World’.414

141

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 142


In the Houdini/Weiss mythology, however, Samuel was a dashing scholar-hero, whose flight from the old country was surrounded by romantic embellishment. Father insulted by prince Erik – challenged to dule – which was fought following morning and Father killing his opponent then fled to London and stayed there for a time after which he took sailing vessel to New York. After reaching New York kept going to Appleton, Wis. where he… sent for Mrs. W. and soon after her arrival Houdini was born 6th April 1874. And he was named Ehrich Prach after Prince Ehrich.415

Quite apart from the inherent romanticism of the narrative, the marginalized social situation of Jews in the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian empire make it virtually impossible that this event should have taken place. But in any case it is more interesting as fiction than as fact. It is often assumed that Houdini himself concocted these tales: Ruth Brandon implies as much when she talks of Houdini ‘portraying his parents as he would have wished them to be: as romantic participants in the cultural and noble life of Budapest’.416 And, indeed perhaps he did; it is by no means impossible that this is his own personal fantasy, or even a deliberately self-romanticizing publicity legend, since Houdini as self-publicist is almost as impressive as Houdini the illusionist and escapologist. But another explanation is also likely. The version quoted above is related as fact, not by Houdini but by his brother Theodore (known in the family as Dash, and later on the professional stage as Hardeen). Other similar domestic myths seem to have been current in the Weiss family, all of them emphasizing the family’s importance back in Hungary. Thus, for instance, Houdini’s younger sister told of another family story, again repeated as fact but equally unlikely, which she had inherited from their mother Cecilia: in this, the Kaiserin Josephine had made frequent visits to their Weiss family home in Budapest, ‘to pay respect to our important and intellectual dad’. It might well be that Cecilia was the actual originator of the family legends, and that just as Houdini received from her the story, which he decided to believe, of his Appleton and April birth date,417 so too he learned from her the fabulous stories of the importance of the family back in the homeland. Perhaps they were invented by the mother as compensation for the reality of her husband’s decline and the family’s increasingly unsuccessful circumstances in the New World. Such stories form a substantial genre in the folklore of American immigrants – and they frequently embody an ambiguous attitude towards the past which has been left behind. In such stories, the surface details may be invented, but a deeper structural reality might be being unconsciously articulated. In the case of the Weiss family legend, the increasing anti-Semitism of late-nineteenth-century Europe might well be figured in the ‘insult’ which the supposed Prince – a representative narrative figure standing for the authorities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – offered

142

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 143


to the rabbi. In the ‘duel’ we see an image of the antagonism which Samuel might well have felt between himself and that society and, in his killing of the prince, a wish-fulfilment of some imagined victory over it, ending in his escape (indeed on one level the escape may well have been, in one sense, the victory). But if these tales personify on one level the antagonisms which lead the immigrant to leave the old country they also, on another level, frequently dramatize a form of celebration of that old country, and a reconciliation with it. In the case of the Weiss family legend, this reconciliation is located in the figure of Ehrich himself: ‘And he was named Ehrich Prach after Prince Ehrich.’ The antagonist’s name is reconfigured in the name of the son: it combines victory and reconciliation – and (again) self-aggrandizement. Whoever actually originated this tale of the family’s importance, and melodramatic romanticization, with its themes of honour and death, exile and recovery, they fit well with the sorts of professional mythologizing which Houdini himself practiced later in his life. ‘Houdini’ was a narrative invention of Ehrich Weiss, a narrative which may well have had its roots in the uncertain relationship of the first-generation immigrant to his adopted country. Houdini, in fact, seems to have been what Ivan Kalmar has termed an ‘eji’.418 The term, which is pronounced, with deliberate punning in mind, as ‘edgy’ is an acronym for ‘Embarrassed Jewish Individual’ – embarrassed in relation to his own background: not exactly renouncing his own Jewish identity, but uncertain how this background relates to his newer identity, often wondering the extent to which as a Jew he will remain always an outsider, defined by his Jewishness.419 Ehrich Weiss became the more generically European ‘Harry Houdini’: like the good magician he was, he chose a name which would misdirect the attention. Ernst and Carrington quote at least one contemporary who asserted confidently that while ‘Houdini was reared in the Hebrew religion… he gave up Judaism’.420 But Houdini never denied his Jewishness, although he did marry outside the faith. Moreover, in later years, Houdini seems to have identified himself more strongly with his religious roots: in 1918 he founded the Rabbis’ Sons’ Theatrical Association (President: Harry Houdini; Vice-presidents Al Jolson and Irving Berlin). Hardeen’s German spelling seems to have been as poor as his English. He gives ‘Prach’ as Ehrich’s second name, with the connotation of ‘Prince’ (although quite where this word appears in Ehrich’s name is not clear: it is not on any of the census documents which relate to Ehrich). The German word – and German was the everyday language of the Weiss household – is actually ‘Pracht’. It means not literally ‘Prince’ but a cluster of closely related concepts: ‘finery’, ‘gorgeousness’ and so on. Houdini was, from his first stage appearances, to revivify it and its meanings. At the age of nine he appeared before an audience as a trapeze artist and contortionist, ‘Ehrich, Prince of the Air’. The young boy finds his princely identity in the stage name and makes cross-linguistic puns on the sounds of his own: Ehrich/air. Within the family the pun was even more

143

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 144


noticeable: Ehrich’s pet name was ‘Ehrie’, which later became the ‘Harry’ of his public persona. When Ehrich Weiss grew up to become Harry Houdini, the contortionist became the escapologist, twisting his way out of his bonds and the Prince of the Air metamorphosed into the ‘Handcuff King’(and sometimes the less catchy ‘Monarch of Leg Shackles’). Yet Houdini retained a fascination – even an obsession – with the air. Whether suspended high above the city streets, struggling to escape the straitjacket; or learning to fly and setting himself the challenge of becoming the first man to fly an aeroplane in Australia;421 or doing his own aerial stunts in his movies, the trace of Ehrich, Prince of the Air remains. Two other elements from the archetypal narrative find their way into Houdini’s later career. First there is the ‘challenge to dule’ (sic) which is the initial conflict of the drama; this becomes a repeated theme of Houdini’s stage career, which was effectively based on a series of challenges. Secondly, of course, the fantasy father’s great feat was not only to uphold his honour, but also to escape afterwards. It was the escape which became the essence of Houdini’s career: an escape which repeated that of the fantasy father, but which also – in the tradition of great immigrant narratives – in real life provided the material means to escape from the poverty to which the father’s actual failure had led them. Houdini escaped not only from ties, but also from tie-cutting on the workbench.

Dramatizing deliverance: Freudian narratives Ruth Brandon insists – perhaps as a riposte to some oversimplified psychoanalytical readings – that Houdini was ‘pre-Freudian’,422 but in a literal sense this is not exactly the case. On the contrary, the two men were contemporaries, and the rise to fame of Houdini coincides neatly with that of that other Austro-Hungarian Jewish genius: in the first twenty years of the twentieth century the imagery and the mythology of both men cast a spell over the western imagination. Moreover, it is hard to ignore the Oedipal resonances in Houdini’s life. His father’s failure as a rabbi meant a loss of status and authority both in society and within the family. At an early age, Ehrich found himself, if not actually replacing his father as the family breadwinner and protector, at least of near-equal status with him, as they worked side by side in the necktie factory. For the rest of his life he took his role as his mother’s protector with immense seriousness – indeed his obsessively close relationship with his mother up to the time of her death is one of the most notable facts about Ehrich’s private life. A famous photograph from 1907 shows him in his mid-thirties, with his arms round both his mother and his wife;423 his handwritten inscription ‘My two sweethearts’ might be a conventional compliment; in fact it indicates the extent to which the two women in his life merged into each other in his mind. Samuel died when Ehrich was eighteen. Denied the completion of the Oedipal struggle by the actual death of his father, Harry found a new and

144

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 145


mythical father figure in the legendary conjurer Robert-Houdin, whose name he adapted and adopted as his own, turning himself from Ehrich to Harry in the meantime. Later, when Houdini had reached maturity as a performer, he turned against this second father, writing an exposé of the ‘dishonesty’ of RobertHoudin in a vitriolic outburst entitled The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin,424 in which he claims to set the record straight regarding Robert-Houdin’s actual contribution to the history of magic. In fact, The Unmasking is a strange and illogical attack on the great nineteenth-century conjuror, and one which seems to have been driven by Houdini’s own sense of professional rivalry with the past master rather than by any scholarly or historical impulse. On a psychic level, however, it allowed him a version of the archetypal confrontation with the father figure which the death of his actual parent had denied him. In fact, conjuring and escapology as forms of entertainment have their own Freudian dimension. This has less to do with Oedipal patterns than with another key Freudian narrative – one to which Freud himself came comparatively late in his career, but which is no less resonant for that. Watching his grandson at play, Freud observed a repeated pattern of play whereby the child happily throws his toys away, making at the same time a sound which Freud and the child’s mother agreed represented the German word ‘fort’ [‘gone’]. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘there’]. This then was the complete game – disappearance and return. As a rule, one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act. The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement – the instinctual renunciation (that is the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach.425

The conjuror plays a game of fort/da with the audience – or more precisely, he invites the audience to play the game in their own minds. As he makes objects disappear and reappear, the primal game of absence and presence is re-staged in

145

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 146


an ambiguous show of collusion between stage and audience. The audience is placed in a multiplicity of different interpretative positions, the pleasure being the inability they have in deciding between them. Somewhere between the rational and the superstitious lies the pleasure: the sense that while everybody knows that there is no thing as magic, nonetheless perhaps… The audience ‘knows’ that what they are being offered is not miraculous, yet the skilful conjuror arranges things so that other explanations do not quite work. A puzzle is proposed and a series of possible resolutions of that puzzle are offered, yet none is entirely satisfactory. The essential mode of the conjuror is that of the challenger: ‘Here, I shall do something and you will not be able to guess how I did it – will you?’ The conjuror’s skill in leaving his audience balanced between explanations usually depends on one of a very limited number of actualities. The trick may be effected by means of a downright lie: the apparently innocent bystander or audience member is actually an assistant, an accomplice, and in on the act. Or else it relies on a more or less elaborate mechanical device: a marked deck of cards, a specially built cabinet with a hinged wall, a dummy piece of rope that parts in the middle, handcuffs with a prepared lock. Or perhaps it depends upon a trick of timing: the substitution took place before the trick even appeared to have begun. Then again, maybe it is set up by careful and prosaic preparation: the mystic knows you have a deceased Aunty Molly because she found out by asking around a few days earlier… These techniques were Houdini’s stock-in-trade. But the escapologist offers a special refinement on the fort/da sequence – a refinement which relies on the notion that, as Freud says, ‘the greater pleasure [is] attached to the second act’ – the act of reappearance. The object which is made to disappear and reappear – either literally, in cabinets, coffins and tanks full of water, or on a more symbolic level in the handcuffs and restraints – is the performer’s body itself. The reappearance of the liberated body is the moment of triumph, the ‘da’ of the equation. The ‘pleasure’ of the act is the apparent threat that such reappearance or release cannot, after all, take place: the locks are too strong, the knots too tight, the casket too solid. Yet reappear he does!

Dime museum narratives Houdini was, as a friend of the family put it, ‘a product of his early professional years. He thought the freak world was normal and the straights were freaks’.426 But first and foremost he was a conjuror,427 and he learned his trade in travelling shows and dime museums, with sleight of hand acts as well as his specialist handcuff escapes. We can get a sense of the range of Houdini’s general magic act by considering an early publication – H. Houdini’s Magic Book – a slim volume also known as Magic Made Easy, which ‘Professor Harry Houdini, King of Cards and Handcuffs’ published in 1898, before he had established himself as a famous magician or escapologist. In reality the book was more or less a catalogue in which

146

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 147


Houdini advertised tricks and apparatus for sale through what he called his ‘School of Magic’ – a mail-order magic business which the young travelling magician had established at a time when it was by no means clear that he would be able to make a decent living as a performer. ‘This book’, he writes in the Preface, is especially prepared for LEARNERS and is the A.B.C. of magic. I TEACH and INSTRUCT thoroughly by mail in all branches of Spiritualism, Slate Writing and Sleight of Hand… In submitting this supplementary list to your notice, my object is to introduce to the exponents of the Art a class of goods superior to any hitherto offered for sale.428

This superior class of goods included everything from party tricks and jokes to spiritualist and fortune-telling routines, from sets of marked cards (‘A little study makes you an expert’), to the secret drawings of the Trilby aerial suspension ‘as done by Hermann the great… $1.00’, to expensive performance apparatus such as ‘The Maniac’s Strategy’ ($100.00).429 The confident-sounding rhetoric of the descriptions of the tricks (‘A most excellent trick, not to be had elsewhere… A marvellous deception’)430 fails to conceal the anxiety of a young conjurer who is by no means confident that he will be able to make his way in the world through performance alone. The catalogue gives away some secrets immediately – such as ‘How to Blow over a Bottle or Heavy Object’ (‘Put it upon a paper bag and blow into the bag, which puffs up and overthrows the bottle’)431 – while it advertises others for sale. Houdini’s claim that… I am not offering for sale a lot of worthless secrets or cheap ideas, but supplying the necessary apparatus incidental to the business. Everything in this list is new, of the best quality and made by experienced mechanics; therefore purchasers may rely upon receiving value for their money, and will find everything just as represented.432

…is clearly overstated. Many of the items are far from new, and the question of value for money well be a moot one in several cases. Yet included in the catalogue are some notable items. For example, the ‘Hindoo Needle Trick’ – which later became almost as famous a part of Houdini’s repertoire as his escapes – is offered for $5.00 as ‘one of the best and easiest tricks to do’. Also available – but presumably at a much higher rate, since these are listed as ‘Price on application’ – is a complete Handcuff Act, as well as details and diagrams of the trick with which Harry and his wife/assistant, Bess, were beginning to make a reputation for themselves: the ‘Metamorphosis Substitution’.433 ‘Don’t expose your tricks, as they lose their value when too common’ warns the Professor in his ‘Hints for Amateurs’ early in the volume,434 yet here is the same

147

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 148


man apparently offering his own secrets to all and sundry on the open market! The myth that magicians never tell their secrets is just that – a myth. Selling the secrets – selectively, of course! – has always been a lucrative part of the conjurer’s trade, and the archives of magic are full of books by the most famous conjurers of their day, in which they demonstrate to amateurs as well as fellow professionals just how (some of) it is done. Even so, there is an air of desperation about Magic Made Easy. On the one hand there is the attempt to claim some sort of gravitas and authority. The twenty-four-year-old Harry promotes himself as ‘Professor’ Houdini, ‘Inventor, Originator, and Manufacturing Magician’, and Principal of a ‘School of Magic’. On the other hand, the impoverished ‘Professor’ is advertising in the same catalogue his ‘Money Making Secrets’ such as ‘Tooth Ache Remedy’ and ‘Eruption Ointment for Frosted Feet’:435 the pose of scholar and mystic gives way here to the blandishments of the snake oil salesman from the travelling medicine shows with which the young Houdini was all too familiar. A final advertisement gives the game away: To Advertise My School of Magic I Will Send to any Address, Postage Paid for 25c. the following, viz: 118 Magic Tricks and Mysterious Experiments. 85 Puzzles Illustrated. 101 Conundrums and Riddles. Secret of Second Sight and Mind Reading. How to Eat Fire. 100 Recipes for Making Money Secrets. 100 Secrets of How to Become Beautiful. 255 Selections for Autograph Albums. 10 Model Love Letters. Fortune Telling by Palmistry, Tea or Coffee Grounds and White of an Egg. A Complete Dictionary of Dreams. Guide of Flirtation with Fan, Eyes, Parasol and Gloves. Cure for Bashfulness. Language of Gems and Flowers. Love’s Telegraph. How to Tell One’s Age. 15 Versions of Love. Some of Nature’s Wonders. 25 Pictures of Famous Actresses. Pictures of the Presidents of the United States. 21 Songs, with Words and Music. Formulas for Making Invisible Inks for Secret Correspondence.436 There is something wonderfully random about the list. It is easy to see how the ‘118 Magic Tricks and Mysterious Experiments’ might be used to promote a School of Magic. It is far less clear how the Pictures of the Presidents of the United States or the 10 model love letters or the 255 selections for autograph

148

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 149


albums would contribute to that project. An intriguing number of items on the list seem to have more to do with sexual attraction, courtship skills and erotic savoir-faire than they do with the training of magicians or conjurers. The School of Magic is actually a Curiosity Shop, selling whatever its readership might fancy. The eclectic sales pitches of Magic Made Easy constitute another of the untold stories of Harry Houdini: a ragbag of early-twentieth-century capitalism, clearly from the same world as – but without the moral imperatives of – an aspirational young man in a Horatio Alger novel. During those early professional years Harry Houdini lived and worked with the denizens of freak shows and circuses, playing the travelling medicine shows, music halls, theatres, beer halls and dime museums across America. As an employee of Welsh Brothers’ All-United Golden Shows, he sat snarling in a cage as the Wild Man from the Java jungle, who lived on a diet of raw meat and tobacco; he also worked as an actor in melodramas, as a Punch and Judy man, and as part of a comedy double act with his wife, Bess (‘The Rahners… America’s Greatest Comedy Act’).437 Elements of many of these early acts appear in his later persona. For example, his escapes from dungeons, chains and straitjackets – and especially the apparently life-threatening feats of his middle period shows where he dived into rivers, hung from tall buildings, or allowed himself to be ‘tortured’ in elaborate contraptions such as the water-torture cell, had more than a hint of melodrama about them: the narrative of peril and escape is a central feature of the melodramatic imagination. The symbolism of escape is a powerful motif, and the escapologist as popular entertainer has a strong mythical dimension. Bound in chains, imprisoned in a dungeon or locked into a coffin-like box, buried beneath the icy waters of a river or trapped inside a tank of water, the escape artist stares death in the face, teases his audience with the possibility that he may indeed not be able to survive – and then, with a dramatic gesture returns to the land of the living. In his analysis of the shamanistic origins of popular entertainments, E. T. Kirby has foregrounded the use which shamans in various cultures have made of the images and techniques of escapology: The Cree shaman allows himself to be stripped nearly naked and tied tightly within an elk’s skin. After a lengthy incantation, he escapes suddenly from his bonds. (Hoffman, 142) Ojibwa shamans will ‘permit themselves to be securely tied, placed within the jugglery, and a moment later be at liberty and cords at some other locality.’ (Hoffman, 143) The practice is also common throughout Alaska, where it is elaborated upon in terms of spectacle and ‘real life drama’. …A Kwaikutl shaman appears to have her head cut off or to be run through with a sword. She is then sealed in a wooden box which is consumed in a fire until only bones remain, and the ‘spirit’ of the woman then speaks from the fire… The woman later appears unharmed, of course.438

149

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 150


The shaman returns from the spirit world with the power to heal. Perhaps, too, for the crowds who assembled in theatres and on river banks to watch Houdini return, time after time, from the brink of defeat or of death, there was something cathartic about the experience. On a more mundane level of myth, Houdini’s act in its early days retained something about it of the Punch and Judy show which he had once operated. Houdini himself resembles a more benevolent version of Mr. Punch, the menacing trickster who escapes the gallows and takes revenge on those who would do him down by substituting his persecutors as victims, and who perpetrates symbolic violence upon his doll-wife. Consider the symbolic reverberations of Mr. Punch in the iconic trick with which Houdini first made his name: ‘Metamorphosis’. Metamorphosis Exchange made in three seconds The Greatest Novelty Mystery Act in the World! All the Apparatus used in this Act is inspected by a Committee selected from the Audience. Mons. Houdini’s hands are fastened behind his back and the knots are sealed; then placed in a massive Box which is locked and strapped, the box is then rolled into a small cabinet, and Mlle. Houdini draws the curtain and claps her hand three times, at the last clap of her hands the curtain is drawn open by Mons. Houdini and Mlle. Houdini has disappeared, and upon the box being opened she is found in his place in the bag, the seals unbroken and her hands tied in precisely the same manner as were Mons. Houdini’s when first entering the bag. Just think over this, the time consumed in making the change is THREE SECONDS! We Challenge the World to produce an act done with greater Mystery, speed, or dexterity. Respectfully yours, the Houdinis.439

‘Metamorphosis’ stages a ritualized dance of dominance and submission, captivity and freedom as the Punch and Judy man plays public victim games with ‘Mlle. Houdini’ (his wife/sister?) in the routine which first brought them fame. Perhaps, too, there was a more private drama of dominance and submission taking place within their relationship. Consider the following stories from Ruth Brandon’s biography of Houdini: Bess relates [an incident] which took place about a year after they were married… She insisted upon going to see a show which Houdini, obsessively

150

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 151


uncomfortable with any hint of the risqué, had forbidden. ‘He said the show was unfit for me and if I disobeyed him he would spank me and send me home. Naturally after that warning I went to the show. He followed me, carried me out, spanked me thoroughly, divided all our poor savings and led me firmly to the railroad station, bought my ticket to Bridgeport where my sister lived, and put me on the train… At the last minute, lifting his hat courteously, he said: “I always keep my word. Goodbye, Mrs. Houdini.” My heart was breaking and I was on the edge of hysteria, but the memory of the spanking rankled and enabled me to reply with a pretence of calm dignity: “Goodbye, Mr. Houdini”. …Six hours later, at 2 a.m. the bell rang and I heard Houdini’s voice. I flew to the door and we fell into each other’s arms, weeping. “See, darling,” said Houdini, “I told you I would send you away if you disobeyed, but I didn’t say I wouldn’t fly after you and bring you back.”’ 440

A single incident should not, it is true, be used to speculate about an entire relationship yet there is so much that is suggestive about this. For a start, there is Houdini’s obsessive discomfort with any hint of the carnal. The first episode in this short narrative involves Houdini’s attempt to prevent his wife from seeing a show, keeping her away from the risqué and the sexual. It should be remembered that Bess was hardly more than a child when the two married and that her slight figure (which she herself hated) made her seem, in terms of the fashions of the day, somewhat unwomanly. Houdini’s choice of wife was a slim, boyish adolescent: Bess is frequently pictured in boys’ costumes, which she wore for their act. In this incident he attempts to keep her de-sexualized – thereby taking over a parental role to some extent, since Bess’s own mother, a strict Catholic ‘thought all theatre wicked’.441 Playing out the parent/child scenario, Bess disobeys and the punishing husband-father ‘spanks’ her and sends her home. The Houdini’s marriage seems to be one which involves some of the sado-masochistic role-playing which is also (though differently) articulated in Houdini’s professional act. The stiff formality of the conversational exchange at the station adds a further dimension: Mr. and Mrs. Houdini address each other in a strangely ritualized way, dignified and distant, like the relationship between so many distant Victorian fathers and their children. The narrative context (told, we remember, by Bess herself) represents the abusive incident as a father’s authoritarian discipline, within the rituals of domestic punishment of the disobedient child, while Bess’s own reaction is characterized by a suppression of the emotions of loss which the incident stirred in her. Significantly, it was only in this role and in relation to Bess, that Harry Houdini was able to play the father: he and Bess had a childless marriage. Here, though, is another ‘take’ on the relationship. In – of all places – a testimony before a Senate committee who were investigating spiritualism, Houdini called on Bess to act as a character witness in the following way:

151

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 152


Houdini: Step this way Mrs. Houdini. One of the witnesses said that I was a brute, that I was vile and that I was crazy… I will have been married, on June 22, thirty-two years to this girl… Outside of my great mother, Mrs. Houdini has been my greatest friend. Have I shown traces of being crazy unless it was about you? Mrs. H. : No. Houdini: Am I a good boy? Mrs. H. : Yes. Houdini: Thank you, Mrs. Houdini.442

The relationship between context and content is extraordinary. Witness to a Senate investigation, Houdini then – lawyer-like – produces witnesses of his own, demanding questions of her in rhetoric which is appropriate to the courtroom but sounds equally like the patter of the stage conjuror (‘Have we ever met before?’ ‘No’ ‘Thank you.’) The witness he produces is ‘this girl’. Bess was nearly 50 at the time.

Masculine qualities According to his friend and eventual antagonist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini ‘had the essential masculine quality of courage to a supreme degree’.443 The notion of masculinity has become particularly important in recent interpretations of the meanings of Houdini’s act, such as the recent study by John F. Kasson, which analyses the gender implications of the Houdini phenomenon. Kasson places Houdini in the tradition of bodybuilders and male body culturists, linking him with Eugene Sandor the famous nineteenth-century strong man who adapted older traditions of manly physical challenge to promote a new mass culture of entertainment. And as he made the exposed male body a compelling spectacle in live performance, he also drew on classical art traditions to pioneer its dissemination… Sandor revealed how the erotics of the male body could be broadly exposed precisely because it was never explicitly mentioned. Studious concentration on antique sculpture and muscular development provided the crucial fig leaf.444

Certainly, Houdini’s exposure of the male body was relentless. As he began to specialize in escapology routines, the element of bodily display became increasingly important in Houdini’s act, and he would frequently perform his escapes semi-naked, ostensibly to demonstrate that he had no hidden keys or picklocks about his person. The effect was to increase the sense both of the performer’s vulnerability and also of his power – since Houdini, though a small man, was physically muscular.

152

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 153


POSITIVELY The only Conjuror in the World that escapes out of all Handcuffs, Leg Shackles, Insane Belts and Strait-Jackets, after being STRIPPED STARK NAKED, mouth sealed up, and thoroughly searched from head to foot, proving he carries no KEYS, SPRINGS, WIRES or other concealed accessories…445

Such nakedness is, of course part of the act, and part of the challenge. It is a form of guarantee that there is nothing hidden up the sleeve, since there is no sleeve. The naked body is used to validate the essential truthfulness of the conjuror – to answer the charge of deception. There may be other levels of meaning involved too, whether intentionally or not. Ruth Brandon has suggested the ‘sexual agenda underlying Houdini’s insistent professional nudity.’446 In a suggestive parallel argument, Adam Phillips has – not entirely whimsically – suggested a similarity between Houdini and the pornographer: As with pornography, the audience knew what they would be getting, but they needed a minimum of variation to sustain their excitement: in Houdini’s case not a different body, but different props and new positions. In a sense Houdini was to escapism what pornography is to sex: dazzlingly literal, demanding nothing of the consumer but his money and his fascination. Because their arts depend on simplifying rather than complicating what they depict, the escape artist, like the pornographer, doesn’t want to change his audience, he wants to keep them the same…447

What Kasson, Brandon and Phillips all indicate is the extent to which Houdini was ‘performing the body’ – and, in particular, performing a version of the male body which positioned it both as victim and as victor. Writers on Houdini, many of whom are fans and champions, tend to stress the latter: the figure of the victorious escapologist, having successfully challenged death or immobilization, emerging from the tank, the river, the cell, the shackles. Within current academic masculinity studies, Harry Houdini has begun to assume some importance among the various iconic ‘masculine’ figures to whom reference is frequently made (along with screen personae such as those of Sylvester Stallone and John Wayne, examples of physical perfection such as Eugene Sandow or Johnny Weissmuller, or sporting icons such as Mike Tyson or David Beckham). Like these icons of popular culture Houdini has come to be seen as embodying certain kinds of historically gendered meanings – enacting, for example, narratives of mastery in the face of helplessness, of authority in the face of subjection. John F. Kasson, for example, reads him in the following way:

153

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 154


By performing amazing feats of mastery over objects and situations, the magician became an exemplary masculine figure to complement the strongman. Both spoke to dreams of dominance and authority in the modern world… [Houdini’s special take on this involved] making themes of risk and control, helplessness and mastery, central to his art and to the male body… In an age of often bewildering obstacles and intimidating authorities, he dramatized the ability of a lone figure to triumph over the most formidable restraints and the most implacable foes and against the most impossible odds… the masculine power he embodied was a claim of invincibility.448

There is certainly some validity to Kasson’s reading. Houdini’s escape act dramatized an archetypal narrative, in which the male body is displayed, subjected to imprisonment or danger, and then shown to triumph over its subjection. I would argue, though, that Houdini is a more ambivalent figure than Kasson’s interpretation suggests, and that the iconography of his escape acts, in the middle of his career, as ‘Handcuff King’, performs a more complex kind of cultural work than simply ‘embodying a claim of invincibility’. Let us look in detail at a couple of instances of Houdini’s live act at the height of his fame. For example, the publicity material from his 1914 tour of Britain announces ‘The Shipwrights’ Challenge to Houdini’ in the following terms: January 12th 1914 Dear Sir, We, the undersigned, Shipwrights employed at the yard of Vickers Limited, having heard of your ability to escape from apparently impossible and peculiar places, challenge you to allow us to construct a large and strong Packing Case of 8’ x 1’ timber, secured by 3’ French wire nails, into which we will rope and nail you, and believe that you will not be able to escape therefrom. If you accept this challenge it must be clearly understood that you are not to demolish the box in your attempt to escape. We will send Box for examination, but reserve the right to re-nail each and every board, to prevent any preparation on your part. Clement H. Dennis, Joseph Benson, James Flett, Thomas C. Dennis Shipwrights Employees of Vickers Ltd. Houdini accepts the above challenge for the Second House, Wednesday January 14th, 1914, on the Stage of the Tivoli Theatre, Barrow-in-Furness, under the condition that the Box is not air-tight.449

154

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 155


This is a fairly typical publicity tactic of Houdini at this stage in his career. He is travelling from town to town both in the United States and in Europe on an international variety circuit, doing what is in essence an extremely repetitive, if compelling, routine. He escapes from things. In order to keep up public interest in his escape act he regularly invites (or arranges) public challenges from particular sectors of the communities to whom he was about to perform. I suggested earlier in this book that the implicit contract between the conjuror and the audience involves challenge rather than co-operation, as the spectators attempt to outguess the performer who is trying to fool them. Houdini, however, made challenges an explicit and central element of his act, using them to structure his show and to give it both variety and local interest. These challenges usually came either from the legal or medical authorities (especially those with access to cells and straitjackets) or else from fraternities of industrial workers. His most famous challenges were of those from police forces, but he was challenged too by life guards, locksmiths, packers, shippers, brewers, riggers, dairymen, construction workers, mental hospital physicians, envelope manufacturers, leather manufacturers, sailors, as well as various individuals, physical culturists and rival magicians. As well as being an integral part of the conjuror’s relationship to the audience, the repeated ploy of the public challenge may also be regarded as a stereotypically masculine way of framing a stage performance. It is an aggressive form of showmanship, which shares a mythology with the knight errant, the gunfighter, the wandering Eastern master of martial arts – or indeed with the champion Western fist fighter, either in the fairground booth or in the professional ring.450 And it became one of the high points of Houdini’s act as his reputation grew. He challenged the world at large to restrain him, and he in his turn was challenged to escape by all manners of institutions and individuals. Thus Houdini effectively dramatizes himself as the ordinary man, one of the toiling masses, pitting himself against the apparatus of a mechanized and massproducing industrial society, with its locks, bolts, chains, boxes, trunks, packing cases, cells, milk churns – the images of containment and containerization which are both the products and the producers of late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury capitalism and its systems of control. In his biography of Charles Dickens, Peter Ackroyd talks of Dickens as being ‘heroic’ because he dramatized the two key institutions of nineteenth-century western society, the factory and the prison. To this extent, Houdini is, in a strange way, Dickens’ successor, stripping these themes of the nineteenth-century novel down to their very basics and bringing them up-to-date for a variety-show audience by focusing them on the image of his own body. His roots in the performances and images of the nineteenth century are tangible, but he is also very much of the modernist period, too, dramatizing the triumph of the will, the inner strength and coherence of the individual which are the recurrent themes of modernism.

155

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 156


And like those other great early-twentieth-century exponents of physical theatre, Chaplin and Keaton, Houdini represents the vulnerable man as hero. Indeed, this was his essential routine: repeatedly to make himself vulnerable in order to become the victorious hero, emerging unscathed from society’s apparatuses of restraint. He creates a narrative of heroic escape from apparent humiliation or doom, putting centre stage the escape motif which had been a dramatic and literary theme from the early Jack Sheppard plays through to the cliffhanger structures of the emerging movie serials which Houdini himself so desperately wanted to master. The challenges led Houdini into some strange versions of his escape act. At the Oxford Music Hall at 14/16 Oxford Street in November 1908, he topped the bill (above both Harry Randall and ‘Max Gruber’s Horse, Pony and Elephant’451) and engaged in a typical series of dramatic and rather surreal Friday night confrontations. On 13th November, he was challenged by the Alliance Dairy, who had thrown down the gauntlet in the belief that Houdini’s famous ‘Milk Churn’ escape was possible only because Houdini could see through the water. ‘If you will allow us to send along 60 gallons of Milk and fill up the Can’, the dairymen added, ‘…our opinion is that you will be unable to make your escape in this fashion’;452 the following week, on the 20th, he was challenged by an unlikely sounding quartet of Chinese seamen called ‘Ching, Wang, Chang and Youn’, who requested to be allowed to ‘come on stage so that we can bind you to a Sangnau’ – which they explained was ‘a form used for punishing criminals in our own country’.453 And on the 27th November Houdini answered the following challenge: OXFORD SUFFRAGETTES CHALLENGE TO HOUDINI Mr Harry Houdini, Dear Sir, We, the undersigned Members of the Women Suffragettes, having heard that it is impossible for you to be secured, and so far, only men have tried to fasten you, we wish you would allow us to secure you to a Mattress with Sheets and Bandages; and think that we will be able to fasten you so that you will not be able to effect your escape. We challenge you to allow us to come on the stage of the Oxford Music Hall, any night during your engagement, and allow us to put our theory into practice. (Signed) Peggy Wheatley, 53 Camberwell Road,

156

Mabel Stacy 16 Old Kent Road, Peckham

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 157


Ethel Gibson 26 Stafford Road Roman Road, Bow

M. Guy-Browne Clarence Gate

R. Cecil Clapham Park

Maud Fern 23 Holmes Road, Kentish Town NW The test will take place at the OXFORD, Friday Nov. 27454 Very few women feature in biographies of Harry Houdini. Notable exceptions are the ever-present figure of his mother, whom he adored, and his wife, Bess, to whom he was likewise devoted. The rest are bit-part players, such as the actresses who co-starred with him in his rather dreadful movies, and with whom he was too physically awkward and embarrassed ever to manage a decent screen kiss. Which makes these suffragettes, who pose their challenge to Houdini in specifically gendered (and thus political) terms, all the more interesting because of their comparative rarity. Gendered readings of magicians’ routines can often be fairly simple. There is, of course, the aspect of power which lies at the heart of the magic act: the performance of the magician constitutes a theatrical display of power and control – over the natural world, over the very laws of Nature themselves, which the rational world since the Enlightenment had understood to underlie all being. The overwhelming majority of these performers of power on the stage have been men. While there was plenty of room on the European stage for female actors, singers, dancers, acrobats and other kinds of performing artist since the eighteenth century, female magicians were always (and continue to be) in the minority.455 At any rate, the magician’s appearance often constructed in terms which refer to both gender and class. The typical magician’s costume – the classic top hat, white tie and tails – signifies power and authority which is class-specific, but also when contrasted with the more submissive and decorative costuming of his equally typical ‘lovely assistant’ (which is either domestically demure or enticingly under-clad) gender-specific. This can be taken further. It is hardly controversial to point out that lots of fairly terrible fantasies have been acted out on the bodies of women – in the guise of this lovely assistant – during the past century or so of conjuring acts. They have been locked in cabinets, stuffed into baskets, pierced and impaled with swords, daggers, spears and knives, made to disappear, dismembered, decapitated and – most famously – sawn in two. Houdini’s encounter with the suffragettes at the Oxford Playhouse represents a different – and more complex – staging of a gender confrontation. He is challenged not only by women but by self-identified suffragettes: the political group whose own theatrical and performative tactics of protest contributed to the raising of public awareness which eventually resulted

157

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 158


in the Emancipation of the People Act of 1918. Their challenge, moreover, is couched in the terms of gender politics. Men have not subdued Houdini, they proclaim – but we will. The challenge – like so many of Houdini’s challenges – is good publicity for both sides. And, of course, the challenge ends in masculine triumph: Houdini – eventually – escapes.456 Tension, followed by release. It is perhaps the most basic of narrative patterns. The escapologist’s performance, in a way, is the distillation of this narrative – it is the narrative stripped down to its most basic elements. In Harry Houdini’s version of this, there is perhaps a particularly gendered meaning. His repeated insistence on bodily display turns the performance into a narrative about masculinity, a small morality play in which subjection is followed by escape; submission followed by the re-establishment of authority. If the male body is – briefly – feminized by being bound and subjected, it then – through its own resources – reclaims its dominance by escaping. John F. Kasson’s reading of Houdini, places him, appropriately enough, between the real-life Sandow and the fictional Tarzan. It also casts him in the role of hero and victor, as exemplar of a triumphant (and triumphalist) masculinity. This interpretation works well on one level: it is a gender-inflected reading of the overt narrative that Houdini himself appears to be consciously presenting. It is, however, incomplete: the masculine exemplar is being oversimplified. And Houdini is anything but a simple figure. We can see this in the complex relationships between the public figure Harry Houdini and the private man Ehrich Weiss; in the way in which the relentless energy which was invested in acting the part of Harry Houdini onstage and off eventually led to the virtual obliteration of Ehrich Weiss; in Houdini’s obsessive relationship with his mother; in his projection of that relationship onto his relationship with his wife and his extreme diffidence in the company of any other women; in his almost pathological attempt to destroy the reputation of his adopted father figure, Robert-Houdin; in the metaphorical or psycho-sexual meanings which his repeated performance of a sado-masochistic gestus might have had for Houdini himself. All of these will reveal a complex and contradictory figure. But these complexities and contradictions are not just backstage affairs; they also permeate the theatrical experience of Houdini’s public persona and performances. If we see in Houdini only the figure of the heroic masculine it may be because we are oversimplifying the narrative ‘transaction’ in which his performances engaged their audiences. Tension is followed by release, certainly – but the reading which stresses ‘the ability of the lone figure to triumph… against the most impossible odds’ focuses only on the second part of that equation. Freud pointed out that the greater pleasure of the fort/da sequence is attached to ‘the second act’ – but this is not the only pleasure. Meaning lies not only in the outcome of the story but in the experience of the performance as a whole: the journey

158

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 159


towards the ending is important, as well as the ending itself. The imaginative collaboration between the audience and the stage certainly involves awareness of generic elements – such as the importance of the happy ending in a comedy, or the knowledge of impending downfall in a tragedy. But the meaning of the whole is not totally determined by that awareness. In fact, it is often the case that in those performative forms where generic markers are at their strongest, those generic markers are, for an audience, the least engaging part of the whole experience, not the most engaging. We do not go to see action/adventure movie merely to see if the hero will prevail, but to take part in the struggle that leads to the outcome. We do not watch a tragedy to see if the heroine will die, but to share vicariously her journey towards that death. Something similar operates with the escapology act. The generic markers of the escapologist’s act are extremely strong: the audience knows what the ending is going to be – it is going to be the artist’s escape. Consequently, in the audience’s experience of the performance, the climax of the achieved escape becomes, in some ways, the least interesting thing about what is happening, because it can be taken for granted. The climax of the performance is also its anti-climax. And so, paradoxically, the escapologist needs to stress the restraint rather than the liberation, in order to invite the audience not only to witness, but also in some sense to share imaginatively in the hero’s predicament. Houdini the showman knew this perfectly well. As one of his brother’s pupils put it, Houdini’s genius was that ‘he could make it look extremely tough’457 – even when it wasn’t! One of his famous challenges, at the Euston Palace of Varieties, involved an apparently impenetrable bank safe. Houdini invited audience members to inspect the safe, and to search him for hidden devices; he shook their hands and was locked into the safe. The audience watched with mounting tension as nothing happened. Concern turned to anxiety; anxiety to fear, fear to panic. Eventually, the audience… went wild with anxiety and after 45 minutes demanded he be released. A sweating, haggard Houdini emerged exhausted from the safe. What the audience didn’t know was that Houdini had been watching them through the curtains, having escaped in a matter of seconds thanks to a three-pronged gimmick attached to the finger-ring of the last person to shake his hand.458

To escape in three seconds is poor showmanship. What matters is what precedes it: the build-up of suspense, the playing on the audience’s fears, and increasing its involvement with the plight of the apparent victim. Moreover, the mode of that involvement may be quite complex. The audience is, after all, watching someone suffer. Or to be precise, actually, very often they’re not watching at all – the escapologist in his chains, his bank safe, his milk churn is hidden, for very good practical reasons, behind a curtain. But that, of course,

159

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 160


allows the spectator’s imagination even more room to imagine what unseen tortures the escape artist might be going through. The audience, then, creates in its own imagination the scenes of horror which take place behind the curtain. And just as recent film theorists have argued about the subject position of the spectator in the Hollywood horror film, and the extent to which that position is constructed in terms of a sadistic or a masochistic gaze, so the audience who witnesses the escapologist act is offered a range of subject positions. The very sparseness of the narrative allows great freedom of choice in this respect, and, indeed, may allow for more than one position at any one time: empathy and Schadenfreude may not be mutually exclusive responses. Theatrical spectatorship is more complex since the stage, even at its most naturalistic, offers only an incomplete image which always leaves something to the imagination, a dimension which the audience itself must supply in order to complete the imaginative transaction. Then, in Houdini’s escapes, the spectator’s subject position is problematized still further by the contradictory messages which the audience receives concerning the level of actual difficulty or danger which is involved. On the one hand it is watching a show: sitting (usually) in theatre seats having paid money for an evening’s theatrical entertainment. On the other hand, what it is watching may involve actual physical risk – and even the death of the performer. The messages are contradictory, but once more generic expectations become important. On the whole, the audience is able to indulge, without too much guilt, some of the darker pleasures of witnessing suffering because they know that this is NOT a public execution, or a traffic accident, or a public punishment, but part of an ‘act’. Houdini’s escapes were his trademark, but in performance he surrounded them with other, more traditional, conjuror’s illusions: making objects vanish, making them appear, transposing them… The escape act sets the notion of physical danger within the broader context of the conjuror’s performance as a whole, which (on one level at least) the audience knows – or suspects that it knows – is a fake, all done with smoke and mirrors. To read Houdini as a kind of exemplar of the heroic masculine is not wrong, but it is only part of the picture. Houdini is a fascinating figure for those who are trying to make sense of twentieth-century masculinities, but not because he embodies the hero who triumphs against the most impossible odds. Houdini exemplifies something far more kaleidoscopic: he is a figure who changes with the change of the light; not a heroic unity so much as a fragmentation of meanings, an appropriate elusiveness which defies a single reading. Thus the generic expectations associated with the magician mean that the heroic masculinity you are being presented with is already encoded as an illusion, a cheat. What you see is not what you get. The masculine power he embodied was not so much invincibility as contradiction – which, in another sense makes him a very appropriate icon of that slippery, ill-defined thing called ‘masculinity’.

160

Chapter 08.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 161


I have not discovered any first-hand verbal descriptions of Houdini’s challenge from the suffragettes at the Oxford playhouse in 1908. There is, however, a pictorial record of the event, in the form of two (posed?) performance photographs. The first shows Houdini, the ‘justly world famous self-liberator’ as his publicity described him,459 being secured with sheets and bandages by the six respectably bonneted suffragettes; the second shows him lying, almost peacefully, in his bonds, beginning the attempt to escape.460 The posts and legs of the metal-frame bed seem to be adorned with ribbons – in the symbolic colours of the Suffragette movement? The whole image takes on a surreal nature: very different from the usual ones associated with the muscular heroic escape artist. Here we have instead a grown-up child, tucked up in bed by a bevy of mother-nurses, who seem both comforting and threatening. If we want to understand Houdini’s performances of masculinity in all their complexity, we need to pay attention to this picture as well as all the others.

161

Chapter 09.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 162

Chapter Nine

Mediums and the media Doyle interprets Houdini Ehrich Weiss, then, created a complex projection of himself which became the quasi-mythical ‘Harry Houdini’ – an ambiguous figure who for later generations has become a site of contested meanings. One of the starkest disagreements about the ‘interpretation’ of Harry Houdini, however, took place between Houdini himself and his erstwhile friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It concerned Houdini’s relationship to the spirit world. Much of the latter part of Houdini’s career was spent in the unmasking of fraudulent ‘mediums’. In terms of performance traditions, the step from the world of escapology to that of spiritualism was not a large one. On a metaphorical level, there is clearly an element of ‘liberation’ in the spiritualist enterprise: both for the medium who escapes the limitations of the flesh, and for the spirit voices who are freed back into the world of the living. On a more mundane level, however, the escape artist and the stage medium shared a common heritage of performance, since many of the spiritualist acts of the previous generation were also effectively escapology acts. Bound and restrained in various ways in order to ‘prove’ that the spirit-effects could not be made by any human agency, the Victorian medium’s act depended on an ability to free him- or herself surreptitiously. Houdini and his fellow escapologists simply made explicit and central what had been functional and implicit. It may be that here, too, there was something of a ‘gender agenda’ at work. Escapology, it is suggested, is a particularly masculine mode of magic performance, demanding muscularity, physical prowess and what Conan Doyle called ‘the essential masculine quality of courage’461 and related to the masculine arts of display like that of the physical culturist. Spiritualism, on the other hand, was one of the few areas of magic which offered women the chance of competing on anything like equal terms with their male counterparts. There were, of course, many male mediums, such as Daniel Dunglas Home and the Davenport brothers. But the female medium played into a convenient Victorian and Edwardian stereotype of women as being more ‘spiritual’ than men, and female mediums such as the Fox sisters, Florence Cooke and Houdini’s particular antagonist, Mina Crandon (‘Margery’), were just as numerous, and just as successful, as men. At a symbolic level, the spiritualist phenomenon may have suggested an element of a feminine magical power with which Houdini was particularly uncomfortable.462 At an overt level, however, Houdini presented the issue simply as the distinction between the honest illusion of the performer and the dishonesty of those who imply that their powers may be more than just make-believe. In the

162

Chapter 09.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 163

MEDIUMS AND THE MEDIA

early years, before he became the Handcuff King, and well before he turned his energies to exposing fake mediums, Houdini worked as a jobbing performer in travelling shows, across America. Among his many early acts was one he performed with Bess: a spiritualist routine, consisting of psychic demonstrations and ‘tent-show séances’.463 Harry and Bess used all the usual tricks of the stage psychic, gathering information beforehand about likely audience members. Houdini compiled a book containing lists of people who attended séances in various towns. To add to his stock of information, the magician visited graveyards to make careful notes from tombstones and attended places where local gossip was to be heard. In the guise of a canvasser he would call at houses and obtain opportunities to inspect family Bibles which often contained much useful information.464

Paid tipsters would also pass on information about the identities of those in the audience, and Houdini’s memory, his ‘cold reading’ skills465 and his showmanship would then provide the spectators with the paranormal experiences they craved, while Bess fell into trances to receive messages from ‘the other side’. According to Houdini, they eventually gave up the Spiritualism routine out of a sense of guilt: people were too easily fooled, and the belief which they had in the reality of the Houdinis’ powers made him uncomfortable. ‘When I noted the deep earnestness with which my utterances were received… I felt the game had gone far enough, for I most certainly did not relish the idea of treading on the sacred feelings of my admirers.’466 Houdini had both an expert inside knowledge of the tricks of the spiritualist trade, and a moralistic distaste for them. It is particularly ironic then, that in later years, when these feelings resurfaced, leading Houdini to attempt to make clear distinctions, after all, between the freak world and the normal world, and to mount a campaign of exposure against all fraudulent (and therefore, as he came to believe, against all) mediums, he found himself, paradoxically, having to defend himself against the charge – made by defenders of Spiritualism – that he himself possessed genuine paranormal powers and was able to perform some of his feats by dematerialisation, or by use of psychic energy.467 ‘It has been stated in print by a staunch believer in Spiritualism’, he complained, ‘that I possess psychic power, but were I to accept that statement as being true, I should be pluming myself with false feathers’.468 Despite his vigorous defence of the claims of material reality, and his insistent debunking of the claims of the mediums and spiritualists, many refused to take him at his word, and continued to attribute to him supernatural powers which they simply believed he himself suppressed and/or denied. The most famous – and one of the most insistent – of those who tried to convince Houdini of his own powers as a medium was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is perhaps not surprising that Doyle was a great fan of Houdini: his own most

163

Chapter 09.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 164


famous creation, Sherlock Holmes had something of the magician’s style about him – producing startling and unexpected results from a logical chain which remains hidden to the observer until the maestro deigns to explain it. Holmes himself notes the similarity in ‘A Study in Scarlet’: refusing to explain his reasoning to the long-suffering Watson, he remarks, ‘You know a conjuror gets no credit when once he has explained his trick; and if I show you too much of my method of working you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.’469 The budding friendship between the two men foundered, however, on their disagreement about spiritualism. Doyle was as fervent a believer as Houdini was a sceptic. Not only did Doyle believe in Spiritualism in general, he also believed in fairies: he was an outspoken champion of the Cottingley ‘spirit photographs’, the famous hoax in which two young girls convinced the British press that they had captured images of fairies on film.470 Doyle believed, too, that Houdini himself was in touch with the spirit world, and that Houdini’s own claims that he performed all his feats through a combination of physical prowess and sleight of hand were either disingenuous or simple denial. Before their friendship completely soured, Doyle asked Houdini: My dear chap, why go around the world seeking a demonstration of the occult when you are giving one all the time? Mrs Guppy could dematerialize, and so could many folk in Holy Writ, and I do honestly believe that you can also… My reason tells me you have this wonderful power, for there is no alternative.471

Doyle’s words contain an echo of the famous words of his own creation, Sherlock Holmes: ‘How often have I said to you’ Holmes scolds Watson, ‘that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?’472 But Doyle and Houdini clearly differed in their assessment of what falls into the category of ‘the impossible’. They also differed in their interpretation of what was going on in Houdini’s own act: Doyle was convinced that Houdini misunderstood the nature of his own powers and that what Houdini performed as entertainment was (unbeknown to the performer himself) actually accomplished through his ‘mediumistic powers’. It was a belief Doyle never renounced. A few years after Houdini’s death, Doyle wrote to Houdini’s first biographer, Harold Kellock: I have written a little pamphlet, expounding my reasons for thinking that Houdini had mediumistic powers, as the Davenports undoubtedly had, and that he used them upon the stage. My reasoning is cumulative, coming from many quarters, and all pointing to the same end, though he was most clever about the use of trick boxes and so on, in concealing the true source of his powers.473

Houdini, on the other hand, had no doubt that the source of his powers had nothing to do with the spirit world. He knew how to perform all the mediums’

164

Chapter 09.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 165


effects – and he was continually astounded and appalled by Doyle’s naïveté about the simplest conjuring tricks. He refused to take seriously the claims of the spiritualists, and looked upon Doyle as a well-meaning and sincere but gullible romantic. On one level, both men had an urgent desire to see proof of contact beyond the grave, since Doyle had lost a beloved son in the First World War, while the death of Houdini’s adored mother, Cecilia, had shaken the conjuror to the core. But while Houdini remained sceptical, Doyle was thoroughly persuaded not only that his son had contacted him through professional mediums, but also that his own wife was able to speak to the spirit world. In June 1922 the friendship between Houdini and Doyle finally foundered on a particularly disastrous attempt by the Doyles to convince the hitherto politely sceptical Houdini. Arthur invited the Houdinis to stay with them in Atlantic City, where a séance was arranged. In this séance, Lady Doyle ‘contacted’ Houdini’s mother through spirit writing, producing some exceptionally unconvincing messages (in English – a language his mother could not read, speak or write) which Houdini found embarrassing in their improbability. Left with the choice between two possibilities, that Lady Doyle was fooling him or was fooling herself, Houdini was in no doubt that it was the latter. However, the intellectual debate had taken too personal a turn, and the friendship cooled. The story is famous partly because there is something iconic about it. It portrays a clash of world-views, the rational versus the irrational – but with a twist. Promoting the cause of the irrational is Doyle: highly educated, publicly honoured by the British establishment, a doctor and man of science turned novelist, the creator of the ultra-rationalist Sherlock Holmes. On the side of pragmatic rationalism is the showman and purveyor of illusions, the self-educated Houdini, an American popular hero and man of the people. The high culture of the old world confronts the popular culture of the new – and it is the champion of American popular culture who, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, seems to have got it right and to have been more ‘scientific’ in his outlook than his opponent.

Sisters and Brothers Doyle’s position, of course, was hardly an isolated one. He was taking a position in a larger argument about communication with the dead which had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century and continued to be hotly debated until the middle of the twentieth. His obsession with talking to the dead was, to this extent, very much of its time. It is easy to look back with superiority and condescension at those who took Doyle’s line. The image of the medium in the darkened room, asking in a tremulous voice ‘Is anybody there?’ has become a cultural cliché. And it is true that Doyle and his fellow believers were in some fairly uninspiring company: it seems hard to credit how some of the most famous figures of nineteenth-century spiritualism were ever taken seriously. The origins of the Spiritualist movement are generally traced back to 1848, when the Fox family of

165

Chapter 09.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 166


Hydesville, New York began to experience a series of random and mysterious rapping sounds around their farmhouse.474 Two young daughters, Margaret (8) and Kate (6), appeared to be at the centre of it all. They called the presence that caused it ‘Mr. Splitfoot’ and seemed to be able to interpret his rappings as messages from the beyond the grave. Their older married sister, Leah, took charge of the children, formed a society to promote spiritualism – and in particular to promote the talents of her two sisters, who became instant celebrities, putting audiences and individuals in touch with the spirit world at $100–$150 per night,475 first of all in Rochester, then New York and Philadelphia, and then on tour across America and Europe, promoted by – amongst others – the great showman and entrepreneur P. T. Barnum. Child celebrity brought with it the inevitable problems in adulthood: drink, depression and eventual poverty. In 1888, Margaret, feeling betrayed and exploited by her elder sister, made a public confession of the tricks she had used to produce the effects of spirit rapping, such as hidden strings and being able to click her toe joints against the floor. By now the spiritualist craze had grown into a religious movement, however, and Margaret’s confession was simply discounted by many believers – especially when the story emerged that she and her sister had been offered a large sum of money by a reporter for their confession. Margaret later recanted, but neither her confession nor her recantation made much difference to a movement that had entirely outgrown them. Spiritualism had taken on a life of its own, and the possible fraud of an eight-year-old girl forty years earlier could have little effect on its progress. Nor could the unmasking of other stage spiritualists such as William and Ira Davenport – brothers who, at the age of about 9 and 10 years old had first seen the Fox sisters in Rochester and, who soon after, began to give their own private séances in darkened rooms in New York State and New York City.476 After incidents in which they were discovered wandering round the room, making noises on the ‘spirit instruments’ which were supposed to be their means of communication with the dead, they developed a stage act in which their spirit communications took place while they were tied up inside a special cabinet. Like the performances of the Cree and Ojibwa shamans, communication with the spirit world is enabled by escapology. The spirit cabinet within which the Davenports conducted their conversations with spirits was simply a large wooden box. However, as Jim Steinmeyer has pointed out, this meant that [t]he performers could standardize the rope tying, control the sequences, and carry the ‘darkness’ with them – the headline-making subject of Spiritualism could take the stage and be exhibited before hundreds of people at a time. Over the years their various cabinets were pawned, lost, or broken to bits by angry mobs. The Davenports would appear in the next city with a sketch for a local carpenter and would quickly be back in business.477

166

Chapter 09.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 167


The Davenports, in fact, seem to have been repeatedly unmasked. Their initial American tours between 1855 and 1864 were comparatively successful, but when the American Civil War affected business and they attempted to transfer their act to the UK, they found the audiences far more suspicious. P. T. Barnum describes with great Schadenfreude how they ‘suffered an unpleasant exposure in Liverpool, England’478 when they refused to be tied by a particular member of the committee, walked offstage and left the crowd demanding their money back. Similar fiascos followed in Huddersfield and Leeds and on the Continent. In later years, the great John Nevil Maskelyne claimed to have begun his own career of stage magic by unmasking the Davenports. He was sitting to one side of the stage at a performance in Cheltenham when a small piece of drapery fell from the window behind me. A ray of sunshine shot into the cabinet, lighting up Ira Davenport, whose actions thus became visible to me. There sat Ira, with one hand behind him, and the other in the act of throwing the instruments out… I had discovered the secret.479

But it hardly needed Maskelyne to expose the brothers’ techniques. This Cheltenham performance took place in March 1865 – weeks after the Northern tour had left the Davenports’ reputation in tatters. Unmasking the Davenports, in fact, was fast becoming a favourite audience occupation, not only in Britain but also in continental Europe, where audiences waited eagerly for the chance to show up the frauds for what they were. Yet, despite P. T. Barnum’s claim that ‘the very thorough exposure of the Davenports… is an additional proof – if such were needed of the truth of what I have alleged about the impostures perpetrated by them and their “mysterious” brethren of the exhibiting sort’,480 both spiritualism and the Davenports thrived. The Davenports thrived because their growing reputation for fallibility seemed to attract audiences rather than deter them. Spiritualism thrived because ‘the exhibiting sort’ were only peripheral to its main popularity. By the 1860s it had become both a mass religious phenomenon and an important area for scientific investigation.

Science and spiritualism This is one of the reasons why Spiritualism is such an important cultural phenomenon in the nineteenth century. On one level it might appear to be a romantic reaction against the increasingly mechanistic and materialist worldview of nineteenth-century Europe and America – and for some people that is undoubtedly how it was experienced. But it also offered the possibility for a reunion between a religious and a scientific world-view. It arose at a time when the two great ways of explaining the universe, religion and science, seemed set on opposite paths; when each major scientific discovery made the hypothesis of a divine creator seem less and less necessary; and when Christian theologians

167

Chapter 09.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 168


made their strongest arguments for faith in despite of, rather than because of, scientific advances. A belief in both science and Christianity was by no means impossible, but attempts to reconcile these two kinds of knowledge and belief were becoming increasingly problematic – and not infrequently led those individuals who tried to catastrophic crises of faith and of conscience.481 The possibility that, through an understanding of spiritualism, science and religion might once more be reunited was a deeply seductive one. The question provoked immense scientific controversy, the importance of which went far beyond the reputations of the Fox sisters or the Davenport brothers. Many of the greatest scientific minds of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were engaged in the debate on one side or the other – and many of them as committed spiritualists or defenders of the spiritualist movement. As a recent BBC television programme put it: Some of science⬘s biggest names have not only dabbled in, but been entirely convinced by the world of the seance. Guglielmo Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell and John Logie Baird are familiar to most for the household indispensables they invented. But the attraction to spiritualism they all shared is definitely not part of the GCSE science syllabus. All three men, and many other Victorian scientific pioneers, became involved with the religion, which depended on strange forces being demonstrated through bizarre phenomena.482

Towards the end of his life Edison seems to have seriously considered the possibility of a machine which he hoped would do just that and be able to communicate with the dead. In an article in Scientific American for 30th October 1920 he argued that [i]f our personality survives, then it is strictly logical and scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect and other faculties and knowledge that we acquire on this Earth. Therefore, if personality exists after what we call death, it is reasonable to conclude that those who leave this Earth would like to communicate with those they have left here… I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then, if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected or moved or manipulated… by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something’. 483

There is no evidence of Edison’s having attempted to construct a machine – that was left to others such as F. R. Melton, a Nottinghamshire inventor who, in the 1920s, developed a ‘spirit telephone’ with which he believed he would be able to amplify psychic voices which were already in the ether.484 However, after Edison’s death, John Logie Baird – another of the pioneers of television – claimed

168

Chapter 09.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 169


to have been at a séance in which the spirit of Edison was contacted.485 Guglielmo Marconi and Nikolai Tesla, both of whom take some share of the credit for the invention of radio, were both reported to have received strange and unexpected signals on their wireless equipment, sounds which they believed to be communications from another world.486 Oliver Lodge, the British physicist whose contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy led him to become the first person to transmit a radio signal, a year before Marconi, looked to a combination of psychical and physical research to provide the missing link between the spiritual and the material.487 He was a friend of Doyle; like him he had lost a son in the First World War, and believed that he was in spirit contact with his lost boy.488 Perhaps the most impressive of all the scientific spiritualists was Sir William Crookes – an extraordinary experimental scientist, a chemist and physicist who was at various times in his life President of the Chemical Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Society of Chemical Industry, the British Association and the Royal Society. His work touched on a number of key areas in earlytwentieth-century science, including the identification of elements, spectroscopy and radiography. His investigations into cathode rays, including early versions of the cathode ray tube, led to the development of television technology. Crookes first approached Spiritualism in a spirit of scepticism, intending to apply a strictly scientific rigour to the study, and assuming it to be superstition and trickery. His studies of celebrated mediums such as Daniel Dunglas Home and Florence Cook, however, convinced him of the reality of Spirit phenomena, and he wrote several books and papers on the subject.489 Speaking to the British Association in 1898 he said, ‘Thirty years have passed since I published an account of experiments tending to show that outside our scientific knowledge there exists a Force exercised by intelligence differing from the ordinary intelligence common to mortals. I have nothing to retract. I adhere to my already published statements. Indeed, I might add much thereto.’490 It is important not to overstate the case or to swing to the opposite extreme and suggest that the weight of orthodox scientific opinion was actually on the side of the spiritualists. There was plenty of opposition too. Foremost amongst the sceptics was the fundamentalist Christian and the most brilliant physicist of his generation, Michael Faraday, who, in letters to The Times and lectures to the Royal Society, proclaimed his contempt for the claims of spiritualism.491 And while Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, is often enlisted in support of the spiritualists, and was indeed interested in its possibilities as a young man, he soon rejected the possibility of spirit communication. He wrote to his fiancée, Mabel Hubbard, in 1875: The subject of ‘Spiritualism’ is one that interests me exceedingly although I haven’t a particle of belief in the reality of the manifestations… My brother

169

Chapter 09.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 170


Melville and I were at one time much interested in Spiritualism. We made a solemn compact that whichever of us should die first would endeavour to communicate with the other if it were possible to do so… It is now between five and six years since my brother died, but nothing has happened to make me alter my opinion concerning Spiritualism.492

The point is that while many scientists remained sceptical about the claims of spiritualism, the argument about spiritualism was not between science and superstition: it was taking place within the scientific community itself. Houdini himself acknowledged this even while pouring his contempt on the credulous, wonder-loving scientist [who] still abides with us, and while his serious-minded brothers are wringing from Nature her jealously guarded secrets, the knowledge of which benefits all mankind, he gravely follows that Will-of-the-wisp, spiritism, and lays the flattering unction to his soul that he is investigating ‘psychic phenomena’.493

The caricature which Houdini draws of his opponents does not fit the reality. It was major figures from the scientific establishment who showed serious interest in the possibilities of Spiritualism over a period of nearly a hundred years. Some of them, such as Crookes and Lodge, devoted much of their energy to an attempt to establish a scientific basis for the study of spirit communication. In his disagreement with Houdini, Doyle was not simply seduced by a lunatic fringe: he was taking an intellectual position which was not only theoretically tenable within the scientific paradigms of the day, but actually supported by many of the most practical and forward-looking of the great names in science: the pioneers whose work laid the foundation for the communications revolution of the twentieth century. It is a fortuitous pun: those scientists who were most willing to countenance the spiritualist mediums were the ones who invented the electronic media. It is perhaps not surprising that those who were working with the ‘invisible’ communication technologies that would come to dominate the twentieth century should show most interest in imagining how far the implications of their discoveries might extend into the realms of metaphysics. Seen from this perspective, Doyle’s argument with Houdini becomes more than just the conflict between the naïve (and rather romantic) novelist and the hardheaded showman. If Doyle’s position meant that he was aligned with the discredited Fox sisters and Davenport brothers, it also meant that he was aligned with Marconi, Edison, Crookes, Tesla, Logie Baird and Lodge.494 There is another philosophical conflict underlying this one. Houdini’s career was built on an aesthetic of bodily presence: the escapologist displayed his body, allowed his body to be restrained, liberated his body from bonds… Live performance and bodily presence were the essence of his act – so much so that

170

Chapter 09.qxd

4/2/07

6:35 PM

Page 171


when he attempted to transfer his performance to the movies the results were disastrous. Thanks to pioneers such as Edison, Marconi, Crookes and Lodge, however, the twentieth century was to be the century in which the great discovery – even before the digital revolution – would be that [e]lectricity has made angels of us all… spirit freed from flesh, capable of instant transportation anywhere… In preliterate societies, the separation of spirit from flesh is thought to occur in the surrealist realm of dream, art, ritual, myth. Daily life, in the field or on the hunt, is intensely sensate, with all senses alert, and the spirit imprisoned in the body. We reverse this. Our electronic workaday world divorces images from physical reality.495

Not that Doyle saw things in this metaphorical way. In a sense, he too was a literalist, and for him the real task was to establish and maintain communication with those individuals who had died and ‘passed over’. He continued to believe that the blatantly phoney Davenport Brothers ‘undoubtedly’ had mediumistic powers.496 And when he invited Harry and Bess Houdini to the fateful séance in Atlantic City, he was there to investigate a huge and powerful radio amplifier which he believed might prove useful in communicating with the spirit world.497

171

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 172

Chapter Ten

Magic, media and postmodernism Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory… Jean Baudrillard498 Who wants to work on TV? There’s no money in it. Television is the crap end of magic. It’s the bottom end of showbusiness… Paul Daniels499

Magic and the postmodern A theme of this book has been the way in which the meanings of magic change in relation to the society in which the magic is produced. Magic has one kind of meaning in the Renaissance, another in the Enlightenment, yet another in the era of high industrial capitalism. The logic of the argument means that inevitably this final chapter should address the recent past: the era of the modern and, more significantly, the postmodern condition. The term ‘postmodern’ can hardly be avoided by anyone attempting to write about contemporary culture – especially contemporary popular culture. But how useful is the word in a discussion of magic and conjuring? The twin projects of exploring the direct influence which postmodern thinking has had on particular aspects of contemporary culture, and of using the standpoint of postmodernism as a theoretical perspective from which to analyse all sorts of cultural phenomena both past and present, amount by now to a respectable, and even a venerable tradition in academic inquiry. The tradition, however, has its problems. Firstly, there is no real agreement as to what postmodernism actually is. Insofar as it is a technical term, many of its key philosophers themselves differ or disagree about its definition. For Jean-François Lyotard, it is about ‘an incredulity towards metanarratives’;500 for Jean Baudrillard (see epigraph abov) it is about a world of simulations, simulacra and hyperreality… In more general intellectual discourse the word is used to refer to a whole range of overlapping concepts drawn from a range of largely French philosophers. These concepts include the refusal of ‘grand narratives’ or ‘metanarratives’ (such as Marxism and Christianity); a fragmentation of the self and the rejection of the unified subject; avant-garde

172

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 173

MAGIC, MEDIA AND POSTMODERNISM

experiments with form, especially those involving a degree of aesthetic fragmentation, self-reference or intertextuality; a mistrust of language’s ability accurately to describe the world; a rejection of categorical certainties and a corresponding dissolution of distinctions between (e.g.) high and low culture; and a mistrust of the truth claims of previously privileged discourses. At times the word seems to be used to refer to so many things that it ceases to be useful as a category – which is, of course, ironically in keeping with some of postmodernism’s own tenets. Besides, many of the distinct features now commonly associated with it are not in themselves new or unique to postmodernism: experiments with fragmentation of aesthetic form pre-date postmodernism, as does irony (a term which now seems hardly to exist in its own right without the ‘postmodern’ tag). At the most basic level, postmodernism might be defined as the result of the abandonment of the Enlightenment project of rational enquiry into the human condition.501 Yet even this broad concept needs to be treated with some care lest it turn into a kind of grand narrative itself: no movement is ever total – we are only ever talking about tendencies. Just as the Enlightenment itself was not only about rational, scientific humanism, so the postmodern age is postmodern only in parts. In 1984 Fredric Jameson claimed that postmodernism is the cultural dominant of late or multinational capitalism;502 in 2006 the revival of religious fervour which is a dominant factor in global politics suggests a resurgent commitment to grand narratives on the part of societies and individuals. Thus, for example, the beliefs and concerns of the American religious right, mediated through the policies of a Republican presidency, have a massive, and apparently increasing, impact on the everyday lives of a large proportion of the planet’s population. Despite all these caveats, postmodernism is a term which cannot be ignored. It has dominated cultural analysis over the last twenty or so years, and, consequently, it is important to take seriously those descriptions of the contemporary world offered by postmodern philosophers and cultural critics. In many ways, moreover, the conjunction seems an appropriate one. Magicians, as we have seen, have traditionally blurred the line between truth and reality. A world characterized by the hyper-real, by the ‘precession of simulacra’, and by a distrust of the rational, a world in which traditional epistemological distinctions, hierarchies and categories have been replaced by relativism, and where ‘the real and the imaginary continually collapse into each other’503 seems like fertile ground for the magician. Earlier in the book, I was attempting to show how eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century conjuring operated in terms of an Enlightenment world-view; I now want consider its operation in terms of the apparent abandonment of that world-view. The point of this is not to prove that such-and-such a performer can be fitted into the box marked ‘postmodernism’, or to insist that magic is relevant, cool or sexy because it is postmodern, but to explore some of the ways in which the alleged abandonment of that

173

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 174


Enlightenment project of rational criticism has influenced this aspect of popular culture. And since postmodernism is, among other things, a response to a world dominated by mass communication and mediated reality, the rest of this chapter will focus on conjuring in the broadcast media, and will look in particular at the work of David Blaine, who is, at the time of writing, the magician who is using that media most intensely and receiving its most constant attention.

Magic on television We have already considered the ways in which magic and recorded media first encountered each other: as the twentieth century progressed, conjurors found various ways of coming to terms with the impact which recorded and broadcast media had on a performance art which initially appeared viable only in a live situation. Houdini had a few unsatisfactory forays into film-making, while Howard Thurstone and Harry Blackstone followed a more traditional route by incorporating films as part of the entertainment in their live shows.504 More successful, paradoxically, were experiments which utilized the medium of radio. In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, for example, ‘Blackstone’ (actually played by actor Ed Jerome) featured on prime-time US radio as ‘The Magic Detective’, a series which exploited structural similarities between the narrative of the conjuror’s act and that of the detective story. Called in to help solve various crimes, Blackstone would mystify his friends, his glamorous assistant and the hapless criminals by applying the techniques of the conjuror to the process of detection. At the end of each episode he then explained to listeners how to perform a simple magic trick.505 (This combination of conjuring and crime-busting was revived on US television by the Magician series in the 1970s, and again on British television in the 1990s with BBC’s Jonathan Creek, which added a conjuring twist to the classic locked-room mystery format). And in fact, television has been quite hospitable to ‘straight’ conjuring acts – partly because broadcast television in its early days was live, and thus able to escape, in part at least, the stigma of what Houdini called ‘camera trix’.506 In the United States the earliest successful television magician was Mark Wilson, whose Time for Magic on WFAA local TV station in Texas in the Fifties was picked up by ABC and became The Magic Land of Alakazam, the US’s first networked magic series, which aired for five years on ABC and CBS507 from 1959. The price television demanded, initially at least, was that conjuring should increasingly learn to package itself as family viewing, downplaying any suggestions of danger or darkness. This was especially true in America, where television advertisers and sponsors were particularly influential in the decisions of the programmers. Thus, a trick such as P. T. Selbit’s ‘Sawing the lady in half’, which in its theatrical manifestation had an unquestionable sense of danger, becomes in Wilson’s hands something much less threatening.508 In Britain, Robert Harbin (who had appeared on television as early as the 1940s) transformed the routine into ‘The Zig-Zag Girl’

174

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 175


– an equally effective magic illusion, but one whose imagery is light-heartedly comic rather than grotesque.509 Comedy and magic, in fact, become a regular combination in television conjuring in the UK: the avuncular David Nixon developed a gentle comic routine; Paul Daniels adopted a persona which combined conjuring skills with the patter and audience rapport of the Northern stand-up; while the great Tommy Cooper made his apparent ineptitude as a magician a central part of his comedy act. More recently, the misanthropic, iconoclastic and often very funny Jerry Sadowitz has two showbiz personae: as magician and standup comedian. His TV anti-talk show, An Audience with Jerry Sadowitz, ran from 1998 to 2001 on Channel 5, and the distance between Sadowitz and Tommy Cooper says much about the changing relationship between television and conjuring. One of the most brilliant TV magicians, however, was Uri Geller, who first rose to fame in the Sixties and the early Seventies. He used – and at the time of writing continues to use – television as an essential tool of his magic, standing on its head the commonplace that magic only really works in a live setting: the theatre, street or the close-up of table magic. Geller’s most effective stage was not the theatre, or even the televised magic spectacular. It was the TV chat show – a genre of popular entertainment which appears to position itself as a form of live encounter. The chat show creates and exploits celebrity at the same time as its contrived intimacy appears to deny the falseness of celebrity, since it carries with it the implication that the audience is being given a privileged – and honest – view behind the scenes of celebrity life. It is, in effect, an extremely effective form of misdirection in itself. Thus, bending spoons on stage in a magic show is one thing: doing it in the relaxed environment of the chat show is another thing entirely. In that context, Geller was implicitly saying – ‘This is not showbiz; this is me. I’m really doing this. Look, come closer, bring the cameras in as close as you like. This is reality.’ The patter is the same but the framework is different. This is the showman apparently offstage. And as a piece of showmanship it is superb. By claiming a genuine paranormal power he sets himself apart not only from rival conjurors, but also from the dominant ways in which the western mind has traditionally explained the universe. He is making a huge claim: if, as he suggests, he can bend the spoon or make your watch stop simply by the power of his will, then we have to re-think the whole way in which we understand the laws of nature and our place in the cosmos. Little wonder that fellow magicians denounced him: not only was Geller breaking some kind of unwritten rule by claiming paranormal powers, he was doing so in a way that was commercially enormously successful. He was turning himself into a celebrity – one of the most powerful forms of twentieth-century metamorphosis. Fellow conjuror James Randi has carried on a debunking campaign against Geller which is comparable to Houdini’s crusade against the spiritualist Marjorie. In this ongoing confrontation, Randi takes the part of the Enlightenment rationalist. In fact Randi has developed his initial position of rational scepticism

175

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 176


into a kind of intellectual mission: the website of the ‘James Randi Educational Foundation’ is no ten-cent School of Magic like the young Professor Houdini’s, but a well-presented, wide-ranging and intelligent ‘non-profit learning resource aimed at promoting critical thinking everywhere’.510 But where does that leave Geller? Randi would say it leaves him among the ‘miracle-mongers’ who attempt to deceive a gullible world by claiming that their sleights of hand are genuine wonders. Another way of looking at it, however, is to see Geller as exploiting the very condition of postmodernity which Baudrillard terms the ‘precession of simulacra’, where, in societies saturated by images, distinctions between the simulated and the real have collapsed. These are societies in which men and women make offers of marriage to characters in soap operas; where television villains are confronted in the street and warned about the possible future consequences of their villainous behaviour; where television doctors, television lawyers and television detectives regularly receive requests for help and advice.511

In this context, perhaps Uri Geller should be seen, not as a traditional charlatan but as the first truly postmodern magician? Other contenders for that title, in very different mode, include David Blaine (of whom more later), Penn and Teller, with their self-referential and ironic mode of performance, and the British conjuror Simon Drake. During the early 1990s, Drake’s Secret Cabaret was a rare example of a conjuring act which achieved a measure of ‘cool’, in terms of success with young adult audiences. Magic was never quite the ‘new rock and roll’ but Drake himself was certainly capable of playing to the rock audience: he developed his idiosyncratic style touring largescale rock venues with Kate Bush, and has appeared live with many other rock bands. The success of magicians such as Blaine and Derren Brown, as well as Channel 5’s Monkey Magic, now means that there is a widespread audience for conjuring of one kind or another, but when Drake’s Secret Cabaret was first broadcast this was by no means the case. Nonetheless, The Secret Cabaret became a cult TV show on Channel 4. Using the structural techniques of the rock video, it drew on the imagery of horror films: lighting, set, costume and music worked together to evoke the world of the vampire movie, the slasher movie, or the supernatural thriller, in which darkly erotic figures were threatened with gruesome deaths, tied to sacrificial altars or impaled on monstrous spikes. Playing to an audience well educated in such conventions of popular culture, Drake invited them to read his illusions intertextually, and to conflate the pleasures of the horror film with those of the conjuring performance. On the one hand the audience was invited into the fantasy world of the horror movie, in which the spectator’s gratification lies in a complex interplay of ‘spectator-positions’, in which the sadistic pleasure of watching the horrors unfold on the body of the

176

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 177


victim is intertwined with the masochistic one of identification with the victim him- or herself. On the other, it was challenged – as a conjuror’s audience is typically challenged – to guess how it is done. In fact The Secret Cabaret is an effective exercise in Brechtian theatrical technique. Brecht’s theories of theatre are rooted in his famous distinction between Aristotelian theatre (which draws the spectator into sympathetic feeling for the protagonist) and Epic theatre which continually interrupts that involvement by means of various techniques of alienation, forcing the spectator to step back and evaluate what she has just seen. The intertextual play between the horror movie and the conjuring trick which lay at the heart of The Secret Cabaret meant that the spectator was always caught between these two modes of engagement. The act was experienced by most spectators as a television programme, as part of the Channel 4 series – but for the live audience there was the additional level of the liveness of the performer’s body; the tantalizing possibility, never present in the screening of a horror movie, that there might be some real blood this time. Thus, Drake’s illusions become ironic reflections on illusion itself, on the very notion of what Coleridge called ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’,512 and on the nature of the fantasies through which (say) the horror movie engages its audience. Such complex ironies and intertextualities are now habitually referred to as postmodern. Is it also ironic that Drake now maintains a successful career in corporate entertainment, specialising in ‘lighthearted amputations and decapitations of senior executives for corporate events and private functions’? And how postmodern is that? If, as I suggested earlier, performances such as those of Stelarc and his prosthetics ask one kind of question about the integrity of the unified human subject, another kind of question is raised by the revival of the ‘mentalist’ act in the hands of modern conjurors such as Derren Brown. Mental magic had its heyday in the golden age of magic during the nineteenth century – although, as we have seen, the basic techniques of the ‘mind-reading’ routine had been established several centuries earlier. As ever, the magician was ready to learn – or steal – from the scientist, and the advent of clinical hypnotism. Franz Anton Mesmer’s theories of mesmerism/hypnotism began with attempts to cure patients using magnets, from which, in the 1770s, he developed his celebrated theory of ‘animal magnetism’, which he described as a physical fluid in the bloodstream. Mesmer himself was somewhat of a paradox: before his fame, he had been a successful doctor in Vienna, but in all probability had plagiarized the doctoral dissertation which won him his qualification.513 His demonstrations of ‘animal magnetism’, laced with equal parts of showmanship and mysticism, were not universally accepted in his lifetime: many of his peers believed him to be a fraud. Nonetheless, the therapeutic claims Mesmer made for his theory were attractive to large sections of society in the Paris of the Enlightenment, who saw in them the promise of a rational explanation for all kinds of illness

177

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 178


whose causes were otherwise unknown. As Robert Silverberg puts it, ‘Mesmer was a charlatan who grew rich from the foolishness of his patients, but the strange part of his story is that his notion of animal magnetism is still with us today, and is widely used in medicine as well as in the world of entertainment.’.514 Freud’s investigation of the subconscious began with his use of hypnotism, which he had learned from Charcot, as a therapeutic tool in the treatment of hysteria. In fact, stage hypnotism as a branch of entertainment has undergone a sudden and serious decline in very recent years, at least in the UK.515 A series of incidents in which subjects suffered real-life psychological disturbances after being hypnotized on stage, and in particular the legal case of Howarth v Green,516 have dealt a body blow to the profession. What had been a thriving branch of show business in the early Nineties, when hypnotist Paul McKenna was one of Britain’s best-paid and most successful television entertainers, is now struggling for survival. Interestingly, McKenna himself, who was a successful defendant in one of these negligence cases, has successfully relaunched his career, not as an entertainer, but as a life skills guru. His book Change Your Life in 7 Days (including free mind-programming CD) was a bestseller in 2004. A broadly sensible self-help book, which says little that has not been said by self-help books before it, Change Your Life in 7 Days, along with McKenna’s books and DVDs on weight loss, smoking and self-confidence, show us the showman changing back into shaman, healer and therapist. Postmodernist philosophy rejects the liberal-humanist concept of the unified subject, but in truth both hypnosis and Freud already threaten that concept – the one by demonstrating that the mind can be invaded and controlled from outside, the other by positing a multifaceted subjectivity, split between the conscious and the subconscious and consisting of an ego, a superego and an id, all of which frequently pull in different directions. (For that matter, the Good and Bad Angels of Doctor Faustus’s conscience do something very similar for the Renaissance subject!) But a particularly postmodern twist is added to the mentalist act by Derren Brown, whose ‘Mind Control’ act skilfully skirts round the muddied waters of stage hypnotism, re-inventing old routines for a new audience, insisting that he does not read his subjects’ minds nor hypnotize them, but influences their thoughts. In particular, Brown explains, he operates through the planting of various subliminal images, manipulating his subjects at a deep unconscious level in the same way that advertisers are supposed to manipulate us through subliminal advertising. One of the most memorable routines in his television show Mind Control was one in which he used as voluntary subjects two men from the advertising industry. They had been asked – under closed conditions – to come up with a logo for a particular firm (of taxidermists). When they produced their designs, Brown opened an envelope to demonstrate that he had predicted precisely that design on

178

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 179


their part. Then – to explain how it had been done – he played back to them parts of the programme which had been shown earlier, to demonstrate that earlier on they had been subject to a series of subliminal messages. In the taxi on the way to the experiment and in the lobby of the building in which it had been carried out, they had been deliberately exposed to images which subconsciously they had then incorporated into their final design because he, Brown, had manipulated them into doing so. It was particularly sweet to see advertising executives on the receiving end of such manipulation! It was explained to the advertising executives that they had been influenced by subliminal advertising – that form of hidden persuasion whereby the public can be coerced into making certain decisions by means of images and messages which do not even register with the conscious mind. This term ‘subliminal advertising’ comes from the late 1950s, from the work of James Vicary, who conducted a series of experiments on cinema viewers in a New Jersey movie theatre in order to prove that by flashing advertising suggestions (‘Drink CocaCola’ and ‘Hungry? Eat Pop-Corn’) onto the screen during the playing of the movie, for just 1/3000th of a second at a time, below the threshold of conscious perception, the audience could be coerced into buying these products. Vicary’s experiment seemed to result in a 57.8 per cent rise in popcorn sales and an 18.1 per cent rise in Coca-Cola sales. In Something Wicked This Way Comes, Brown’s 2005 live touring show, subliminal advertising featured again: the finale involved a long and complex sequence which involves sealed envelopes and audience volunteers. Through a series of correct predictions, Brown eliminated all but the final envelope – which was locked inside a suitcase much earlier in the show. Once more, a series of steps led to a final prediction: a word, taken from an article in that day’s paper, was on a card inside the case. The audience as a whole had made the choice which newspaper to go for: it had turned out, on the night I saw it, to be the Daily Mail; a variety of audience volunteers had chosen which page of the paper (page thirteen), which article on the page, which word in the article… By a series of separate stages, each one apparently random, the word ‘executive’ was selected – and that was the word in the sealed envelope, locked within the suitcase! By way of finale, Brown again ‘explains’ the trick. It’s similar to the advertising-exec routine, but in the context of a live performance, and with us, the audience, as the victims. A video camera (the audience had been shown it earlier in the show but not told its function) had been running throughout the performance, we are informed. Brown now plays back videotaped moments from earlier in the show to demonstrate that he had implanted similar subliminal messages in our minds. The word ‘Mail’, the number 13, the word ‘executive’ itself – all these were, as the edited footage now proves to us in action replay, continually repeated to us at odd times and in unlikely contexts during the earlier parts of the show in order to influence us. We, the audience, acting

179

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 180


both communally and individually, had made a series of unconscious choices which took us to the point where the word ‘executive’ on that piece of paper was (Brown explains) the inevitable choice. We, like the advertising executives, had been manipulated into choosing what Brown wanted us to choose. The detailed explanation of how we had been fooled forms the climax to the show. All is revealed, and Brown’s powers – not as a psychic, not as a prestidigitator, but as a ‘Jedi Master’517 of mass psychology – are confirmed. We go home, no longer asking how he did it, but knowing how it was done – and both amazed and disturbed. We, like the advertising executives on the television show, had been the victims of a form of subliminal advertising. That, at least, is the narrative which we are asked to accept. The camera after all never lies… And we all know about the subtle ways in which late capitalism seeks to manipulate us as consumers, we know that mass media has the power to influence us at levels which we ourselves do not perceive. Subliminal advertising clearly works. Except that it doesn’t. While subliminal perception is a well-substantiated psychological phenomenon (our senses can indeed take things in which our conscious minds do not register), there is no evidence to suggest that such sense-impressions can be used to influence us directly – to make us buy, choose, vote in a particular way.518 James Vicary’s experiment was a fraud: subsequent attempts to duplicate it failed to establish any increased pattern of purchasing, and Vicary himself eventually admitted that he had falsified his original experimental data. The power of subliminal advertising is nothing but an urban myth. It is, however a very potent one. The experiments and their apparent conclusions remain in the public memory: the US Congress drafted legislation forbidding subliminal advertising, the Federal Communications Commission banned it from TV and radio broadcasting in 1974. Later writers repeated Vicary’s unsubstantiated claims about the efficacy of subliminal advertising, while Vicary’s own confession of his fraud received very little media coverage, and was soon forgotten. It seems that there is a will to believe in the almost limitless power of the advertising industry. If Vicary’s experiment chimed very much with the mood of its own time (1957 was also the year that Vance Packer’s The Hidden Persuaders made the best-seller lists with its analysis of the power of the advertising industry) it continues to resonate with ours. In a culture which is saturated by advertising, it is hard not to believe in the almost limitless power of the hidden persuaders to creep beneath the thresholds of our consciousness and tinker with our minds. Derren Brown’s explanation – his apparent demonstration – of his power to do this, is satisfying to us on a deep cultural level. The routine – and, most importantly, his explanation of it – offers a satisfactory explanation for otherwise amazing phenomenon because it mobilizes our expectations of being manipulated by mass media, by the advertising industry, by politicians, by industrial/military complex etc. And, by his use of the video camera, and the

180

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 181


instant editing it affords, Brown wittily employs the technology of the mass media to do it. Witty, self-referential and ironic – it is a very sophisticated routine, and one well-suited to the postmodern age of late capitalism.519

David Blaine: acting the part of a martyr I felt I was in the middle of a Kafka novel. David Blaine520 Resolution – the tidy ending – is the tradition in magic… Someone disappears, he reappears. The ambiguity in contemporary film and literature had been missing from magic. It⬘s time for magic’s postmodern period. David Copperfield521

If any one conjuror might be credited with (or accused of) taking contemporary magic into the ambiguous postmodern period that David Copperfield describes, it is probably David Blaine. Like Houdini (with whom he himself constantly invites comparison) Blaine is a celebrity figure. His friends include – or have included – film and pop megastars such as Leonardo di Caprio and Michael Jackson as well as magicians from previous eras such as Uri Geller. Like Houdini, Blaine is capable of pulling large crowds and of staging performances which seem in some way to have some cultural importance – to matter. Unlike Houdini, however, who was elected President of the American Association of Magicians, Blaine does not, it seems, have a very high reputation among fellow conjurors. Discussions on TalkMagic, a UK online chat forum for enthusiasts and practitioners reveal evidence of scepticism about him: one contributor writes, ‘I was a bit baffled when Blaine was stuck up that pole, in a little box, in London for so long. He didn⬘t escape or anything! That *might* be endurance, but it⬘s not *magic* for me! Actually it was very, very, very, very boring!’ Another adds, ‘David Blaine is just a good club level magician that got lucky’.522 Whereas most celebrities are constructed in the public consciousness on the basis of a spurious ‘knowability’ or familiarity, one of the interesting things about Blaine is the difficulty which so many people have of knowing what to make of him. The consensus among conjurors seems to be that Blaine is a competent but not spectacularly good performer, and that his real skill is for self-publicity. Not that this is such a bad thing for a magician: Houdini was as skilled a self-publicist as he was an illusionist, and the arts of illusion and self-publicity are closely aligned. In the history of stage magic it is virtually a cliché to say that one of Houdini’s greatest tricks was the creation of Houdini; like so many clichés, however, this points to an important truth. Ehrich Weiss created his alter ego,

181

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 182


Harry Houdini, who grew from a popular entertainer into (eventually) a quasimythical figure – a carefully constructed nexus of symbols and suggestions which pushed important buttons in the psyche of early- twentieth-century America and Europe. It may be that Blaine is a controversial figure in the world of magic (and popular entertainment in general) because he, too, pushes such buttons, creates such mythical resonances in the figure of the conjuror. But where Houdini’s myth-making is regarded with affection, Blaine’s is frequently derided. The discussion of Blaine’s performance on TalkMagic continues: A: …when I hear people comparing Houdini with Blaine, my blood boils. Simply put, there is no real comparison. Houdini was a master of controlling the media and he did this on his own. Blaine has a team of publicists. Possibly, you could compare Blaine’s collective publicists to Houdini, but not Blaine himself. Add to this the fact that Houdini was loved by the general populace and Blaine’s latest stunt, ‘Over the Under,’ [sic] left him the butt of many jokes in England and quite despised, and the comparisons really begin falling apart. B: Blaine⬘s ego was obviously demonstrated in his poor judgment of staging ‘Above the Below’ here in Britain. He expected every body to stop and actually take notice of him when in actual fact people merely mocked him.523

To the outsider the professional criticisms of Blaine seem somewhat meanminded: Blaine paid his dues as a jobbing magician and made his name with close-up magic in restaurants and clubs before embarking on a media career that successfully brought some of the excitement of street magic to the small screen with the networked show ‘Street Magic’. As one or two of the more generous voices on TalkMagic acknowledge, he ‘made magic cool again’.524 It was only later that he progressed to larger stunts, like Above the Below and Frozen in Time in which he was entombed in a block of ice for three days, Vertigo which saw him stand perched on a ninety-foot-high pole for 35 hours, or the self-explanatory Buried Alive. Perhaps some of the responses can be put down to professional jealousy: in a profession in which few are able to make a living wage, Blaine’s media status, and the reputed dollars which accompany it,525 make him a natural target for resentment. But even taking this into account, Blaine’s reputation was – and remains – remarkably low amongst his fellow magicians. Perhaps even more difficult to explain is the violent and aggressive response to his act by many members of the public. Blaine has plenty of fans, yet those who take against him do so, it seems, in particularly vitriolic ways. ‘People merely mocked him’, says one of the contributors to TalkMagic – but the word hardly does justice to some of the responses from the crowd below. Blaine-baiting took various forms during ‘Above the Below’. One man with a golf iron and several dozen balls used Blaine’s perspex cage as target practice. Another attached a beefburger to a remote-controlled toy helicopter and flew it up to his box to taunt him. Men bared

182

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 183


their arses at him and women their breasts; one woman mockingly displayed herself naked beneath the box in order to arouse him sexually. More common were the eggs, paint and various foodstuffs with which some of the onlookers jeeringly pelted the dangling conjuror.526 It may be that Blaine was on the receiving end of a rising feeling of anti-Americanism in the wake of the Second Gulf War earlier in the year, and the failure of the hunt for the illusory weapons of mass destruction on which the British involvement in the invasion of Iraq had been predicated. Certainly the nationalistic suggestion made by the TalkMagic contributors quoted above – that American audiences may be stupid enough to be fooled by Blaine’s antics, but that he is making a mistake trying it on with the sceptical British – captured a sentiment that was commonly expressed at the time. Fiona McCade’s wittily unsympathetic review of Above the Below sums up the general tone of anti-Blaine camp, together with an explanation based on national character. The British audience, she tells us, were just bored and hoping for a seizure, or at least a small haemorrhage, to relieve the monotony. It’s all very well being told that someone’s internal organs are digesting themselves, but unless you’re watching When Good Organs Go Bad on the Discovery Channel, self-absorption – be it physical or mental – is a dull business. What the American Blaine failed to grasp is that the British like their magic to be magical. A white rabbit starving to death in a top hat would have been a better idea, but then the old British love of animals would have kicked in. Much as Blaine’s head would have been if he’d messed with a bunny. We’d have appreciated Paul Daniels, entombed in concrete for, well, as long as you like really, but even that wouldn’t have entranced us. When a magician steadfastly refuses to be magical – and Blaine’s friend Uri Geller, who has made a whole career out of not being magical, insisted Blaine’s ordeal was officially Not Magic – then what’s left? As a stunt, it was crap… So what was it? …It was pointless, self-obsessed and involved bad hygiene and Perspex. In short, the perfect modern art installation.527

A more sympathetic review had appeared a few weeks before McCade’s in the Guardian – one which was given weight by the fact that it was written by Michael Billington, for twenty years probably the most continually influential theatre critic in the UK. Billington talks of how he started off in a mood of Beckettian scepticism. However, what gradually hits me is that, having arrived at the South Bank as a metaphorical Blaine-basher, I am now succumbing to the carnival atmosphere. The sunshine, of course, helps. But the bizarre paradox is that

183

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 184


Blaine⬘s act of imprisonment seems to have a liberating effect on the rest of us. Stay there long enough and you not only begin to forget your own rushed daily routine but meet lots of interesting new people. It says something about our own form of solitary confinement that it takes a man in a glass box to get us to open up to other human beings. It may not be drama or magic but the Blaine experiment also has the power of a puzzle. George Stratis, supervising a party of busily sketching 11-yearolds from Alexandra Park School, said to me: ‘The question I keep asking is ⬘Why?⬘ What drives him? Is it self-fulfilment, money, vanity, exhibitionism, the desire to test human powers of endurance?’ That was the same question everyone was asking, though rarely so succinctly expressed. There is no easy answer: the truth is that Blaine, as Churchill once said of Russia, is ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. But, precisely because we can all attach our own private meaning to Blaine⬘s action, this strange public confinement in the end acquires something of the unresolvable ambiguity of art. 528

For Billington, as for McCade, ‘the intriguing question is: what are we really watching? A piece of performance art? A 44-day play? A theatrical illusion?’ He contrasts Blaine’s stunt to an account of a Houdini escape from a locked trunk, in which Houdini escaped very quickly but then let the audience sweat it out for 45 minutes before appearing, apparently exhausted. But in the case of Blaine, as Billington acknowledges, ‘there is no gimmick: he really does seem to be going through a form of living hell.’ Magic that ‘steadfastly refuses to be magical’ breaks certain boundaries, not least by refusing the audience’s expectation of being fooled. An article in The Independent on the same day observed that ‘Plenty of people have turned out to see Blaine. But hardly anyone is willing, it seems, to believe that what they see is what they get.’529 Houdini insisted that his act was based on mechanisms and tricks – and Doyle refused to believe him. Blaine insisted that all he was doing was sitting in a box losing weight, and the audience wanted to know where the tricks were. Various theories circulated among the crowd which watched below at Tower Bridge, from the plausible to the preposterous. Did the water which was supposed to be Blaine’s only sustenance for 44 days actually contain an invisible but nutritious soup? Was his lip salve impregnated with nutrients? Was there a secret escape hatch which allowed him to leave the box at night for a slap-up meal, leaving behind a hologram or automaton or body double in his place? Was the duvet which was his only covering, actually made of a giant marshmallow which he secretly ate, replacing the lost mass with inflatable material…?530 The possible explanations proliferate: whether your conclusion is that ‘as a stunt it was crap’ or that ‘Blaine’s action acquires something of the unresolvable

184

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 185


ambiguity of art’, hardly anybody is willing to believe that what they see is what they get. The questions raised by Blaine’s act are, in a sense, the kinds of questions that avant-garde art forms tend to attract: on the one hand, questions of categorization – what are we dealing with here? – and, on the other hand, questions about justification: what’s the point? They pose an epistemological conundrum: what does it all mean? Yet, paradoxically, the main difficulty with understanding Blaine’s act has less to do with an absence of meaning than with an excess of possible meanings. David Blaine resolutely and repeatedly stages illusions – if they are illusions – which operate intertextually and referentially. This, of course, hardly makes him unique among magicians. There is something implicitly intertextual in the most standard of magic routines: the meaning of which is derived from the way in which it both repeats and varies narratives derived from earlier practitioners. When a magician produces a dove from nowhere, he does so in the full knowledge – a knowledge which he knows the audience shares – that he is repeating a routine performed by previous practitioners. The skilful magician allows the audience both the pleasure of recognition – the knowledge of the kind of trick they are about to see – and of novelty: this time the trick is done slightly differently or has a twist. So if Blaine’s act seems to gesture towards earlier illusionists, it does so in company with nearly every other magician who ever performed. Nonetheless, there is something particularly knowing about the referential nature of Blaine’s performances: the references to other magicians are part of the meaning of the act itself. It is not surprising that he has written a book, Mysterious Stranger, in which autobiography is interwoven with a history of magic. As I have already suggested, when magicians write about magic, they are engaged in a performative act. Blaine’s book is a good example of this: Mysterious Stranger is part of that larger social performance which is the David Blaine show, and in which Blaine writes himself into the history of magic. He does this both by means of his illusions and by the way in which the narrative of magic history is woven into those illusions. As writer and as performer, Blaine presents himself both as a practitioner and as a scholar of magic. The intertextuality with which he engages is most often with the great illusionists of the past. He re-creates the first recorded magic trick, Dedi’s decapitation routine, on the streets of New York. Even more obvious is the way in which Blaine’s illusions continually refer to Harry Houdini. It is, perhaps, hard for an illusionist to escape the shadow of Houdini. It is a comparison which Blaine encourages and exploits – and which so irritated the contributors to TalkMagic. The posters for Buried Alive (like much of Blaine’s publicity) were couched in a graphic style redolent of the 1920s: the connotations of Houdini are already unmistakeable. Blaine has made no secret of his admiration for the great escapologist; and the public, crowd-gathering feats of endurance and confinement which constitute many of Blaine’s most high-profile acts make it

185

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 186


almost inevitable that journalists would attach such labels as ‘The Next Houdini’ to him (as, for example, on the cover page of the ‘Now’ section of New York’s Daily News for 5 April 1999). After the successful completion of the feat, the New York Post reported how Blaine said he devised the ‘Buried Alive’ stunt because his idol, Houdini, had been contemplating a similar feat before his death in 1926. But yesterday Houdini’s niece said the master escapist would not have survived seven days… ‘My uncle did some amazing things but he couldn’t have done this,’ said Marie Blood. ‘He was so athletic and active that he wouldn’t have had the patience that David showed.’531

The compliment is perhaps a little double-edged. Later, in Mysterious Stranger, Blaine himself elaborates the comparison. He reproduces a poster which Houdini designed for a live burial routine within his stage act, adding dryly, ‘He never performed it’,532 and quotes Houdini’s own account of a bet he had made, that he could be buried alive six feet underground and escape: Houdini’s only condition was that the burials be graded, first escaping from one foot under, then two, slowly working his way to six feet deep. Houdini and his party left Los Angeles and drove to Santa Ana, where he knew the soil was sandy and would allow some oxygen to penetrate it. He breezed through the shallow burials, but he had some difficulty with the four- and five-foot plantings. Then, when he attempted to escape from a six-foot grave, he got the scare of his life.533

Houdini panicked, yelled and only barely escaped with his life. ‘My friends about the grave’, writes Houdini, ‘said that, chalky and pale and wild-eyed as I was, I presented a perfect imitation of a dead man rising’.534 The point of the narrative in Mysterious Stranger is to underline the sense in which he, Blaine, competes with – and in this case outdoes – Houdini. But if one of the referential sets which Blaine mobilizes is comparison with great figures from the history of magic, another is altogether more mythical. Blaine’s performances continually draw on imagery from religious traditions. In the Mysterious Stranger account of ‘Buried Alive’, he stresses not only the links with Houdini, but also with traditions of sacred endurance, from, for example, India: By the 1950s burying oneself alive was common practice in India. The sincere holy men who attempted this feat without resorting to trickery invariably wound up suffocated and dead. Their numbers were so large that in 1955, the Indian government formally outlawed living burials.535

186

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 187


Much more significantly, however, Blaine draws on Christian traditions. The image of death and resurrection which is implicit in ‘Buried Alive’ has, of course, huge resonances within Christian thought. How disingenuous, then is Blaine being, when he casually drops into his description of this feat the fact that ‘I had originally planned to be buried on Good Friday, and I was going to spend my birthday, which fell that year on Easter Sunday, underground, but we delayed it until the religious holiday was over’?536 A similar theme of death and resurrection is apparent elsewhere in Blaine’s routines: ‘Frozen in Time’ sees him frozen in ice for the religiously symbolic period of three days. ‘Vertigo’ in which he stood on a high column, re-enacts the feat of the mystical figure of St. Simeon Stylites – ‘the first and probably the most famous of the long succession of stylitoe, or “pillar-hermits”, who during more than six centuries acquired by their strange form of asceticism a great reputation for holiness throughout eastern Christendom.’537 Simeon, a fourth-century Christian monk, undertook increasingly intense feats of self-deprivation, fasting, mortifying his own body, and eventually withdrawing to the desert where he imprisoned himself on a platform on a pillar fifty feet above the ground. Paradoxically, his (apparently sincere) attempt to retreat from society only increased his celebrity: crowds of pilgrims followed him into the wilderness in an attempt to benefit from his enlightenment. Blaine’s ‘Above the Below’ exploits similar connotations. A man sits in a box, fasting, an object of curiosity and fascination to the crowds below. For more than forty days he exists without food and sustenance. When he emerges from his self-imposed seclusion he addresses the crowd, sharing with them the enlightenment he has attained through his ordeal, blessing them, weeping: This has been one of the most important experiences of my life. I’ve learned more in that – in that little box than I have in years. I learned… nothing makes any sense anyway. I learned how strong we all are as human beings – how strong we all are. But most importantly, I learned to appreciate all the simple things in life. A smile from a strange one or a loved one. The sunrise, the sunset. Everything that God has given us. And I thank you all so much.538

It is a performance which is distilled from a heady mix of Houdini, Christian traditions, high art and popular culture. The high art comes courtesy of Franz Kafka. Blaine’s own reference to Kafka in the epigraph to this section is significant, for Kafka inhabits the same kind of cultural niche as the performance artist, in whose terms Blaine seems to frame his own act. Of Above the Below, Blaine has said, ‘I think of it as [a] performanceart piece… it also had to do with the Kafka short story called “The Hunger Artist”, about this performer that put himself on display in a little cage and starved himself.’ 539 Kafka’s ‘Hunger Artist’ is written to be understood on a metaphorical level, as a parable of the suffering artist. Blaine, however, engages

187

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 188


with it on a literal level – and actually does so in a very precise way, recreating the conditions of Kafka’s fiction in terms which would not have been apparent to the audience of Above the Below. The spectators in Kafka’s story lose interest in the Hunger Artist because they are never quite convinced that he is really suffering; Blaine’s performance-art piece evoked the same puzzle for many of the spectators at Tower Bridge. Kafka’s narrative seems idiosyncratically surreal. In fact, behind this fantasy of the hunger artist lies a tradition of real-life figures. The nineteenth-century’s fascination with the body as exhibit, the same fascination which gave rise to the freak show, leads to some outlandish places. The German poet Heinrich Heine described one example in which the real-life hunger artist appears as political propagandist. Near the Porte Saint-Martin there lay on the damp pavement a death pale, hoarsely coughing man, of whom the crowd said that he was dying of hunger. But my companion assured me that this man died of hunger every day in another street and got his living by it, being paid for it by the Carlists, in order that the mob by such a sight might be goaded against the government. It would appear however, that this cannot be a very remunerative calling, because such numbers of those who follow it actually do starve to death.540

In another context, of course, periodic fasting is a traditional activity within many religions, done for the sake of purification, mortification or enlightenment. It can take various forms: it may be governed by the calendar or by the needs of the individual; it may be undertaken communally or in solitude ; it may be of varying degrees of intensity – from the comparatively light abstinence of Lent in contemporary western culture, which might involve giving up a luxury, to the intense deprivations of the devotee in the desert. It may be a matter of private devotion, or of public celebrity, and it may not always be easy to tell the difference between the two. In the Middle Ages, saints such as Saint Catherine of Siena were known to establish their holiness by periods of intense fasting – often, like Simeon Stylites, achieving fame in their own lifetimes in the process. In fact, fasting as a way of making one’s name as a holy man or woman became increasingly disturbing to the medieval church – which had originally been quite enthusiastic about the mortification of the flesh. In 1573 the Church officially requested St Catherine to stop her fasting; she replied however that although she had prayed to God for the ability to take food, she was simply unable to do so. The Church accepted this as a sign of her holiness, accepting, too, that whether they wanted it or not, they had a celebrity on their hands. A more modern diagnosis would probably read her symptoms as a sign of anorexia. Catherine may have achieved sainthood, but many others simply starved. With the benefit of such hindsight, it is certainly tempting to look to a simple

188

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 189


medical model to explain the strange phenomenon of ‘fasting girls’ which was a feature of both European and American folk culture. The most famous of the nineteenth-century British instances was Sarah Jacobs, the ‘Welsh Fasting Girl’.541 Sarah’s case was first brought to national attention by a local minister, to whom Sarah seemed to be a saintly figure, in the tradition of the fasting saints and holy men and women of the Middle Ages. He wrote to his local paper, and Sarah, who was already a local celebrity, soon became a national one, the focus of theological as well as medical attention. Although she was confined to her bed and suffered from various ailments, Sarah was not emaciated or wasted; on the contrary her many visitors were continually impressed by her vivacity and her prettiness. Many, like the minister, saw her as a holy figure: her nickname, the ‘Wonderful Little Girl’, attests to the reverence which some felt for her. The legal authorities, however, saw things differently. Sarah died and Evan and Hannah Jacob, her parents, were committed on 15 March 1870 and tried at the assizes for the manslaughter of their daughter. Both were found guilty: Evan was sentenced to a year’s hard labour and Hannah to six months. Their gaunt faces stare out of the mugshots in the Carmarthen Record of Felons: numb, shocked, bewildered. It is here, in the interstices of the canonized and the anathematized, of the holy and the pathological, that David Blaine’s unusual and much-derided performance is located. So much of Blaine’s act is quotation. Above the Below quotes not only Houdini’s many heroic escapes and gestures towards the theme of death-and-resurrection, it also engages with the traditions of popular sainthood exemplified by both Catherine of Siena and Sarah Jacob. Its subject matter is deprivation, mortification of the flesh, confinement and starvation – those traditional themes of the performance of Sainthood. Its form is more radical: Billington’s comparison with performance art is appropriate, for Blaine’s performance has the same relation to traditional magic routines as some kinds of performance art has to traditional drama. This is non-matrixed magic, a form of performance which deliberately eschews the pleasures of the well-made play, abandoning narrative and concentrating on the fact of its own being to the extent that the spectator seems to become irrelevant. If it is not Magic, asks Fiona McCade in her grumpy review of Above the Below, then what is it? It is myth-making: conscious and pre-meditated. And – at some deep level – perhaps it is that consciousness, that pre-meditation that generates the ambivalence that Blaine seems to generate in so many of his audiences and fellow-professionals. The conjuror, said Robert-Houdin, is an actor playing the part of the magician. But what part is the magician playing? Houdini played the part of the hero, first of all as the handcuff king, escaping miraculously against the odds, and, secondly, as the self-appointed nemesis of fraudsters and charlatans. Blaine chooses a more dramatic, or more grandiose, role still: that of Saint and martyr. It is a more

189

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 190


difficult and complicated part to play than that of the hero or the fool, since when people start to suspect the probity of the Saint they can turn nasty. There is, however, a paradox in this: on one level, the paint- and egg-throwing, the missiles, the taunting actually help to create the very effect that Blaine is seeking. The audience become part of the performance, and the rituals of humiliation which they perform contribute to the very drama of martyrdom which Blaine is enacting. Even so, Above the Below remains problematic, and the memory it leaves in the cultural consciousness is not one of success.542 The contributors to the TalkMagic forum locate the problem as being rooted in Blaine’s ‘ego’ on the one hand and his ‘team of publicists’ on the other. When Ehrich Weiss created the heroic figure of Houdini, he did so more or less unconsciously: the Houdini myth was an experiment, undertaken at a time when the mass media was still in its birth throes, and when neither the forms nor the consequences of celebrity were fully understood. And Houdini shared the authorship of his own myth with his public: the most important part of its creation took place in the minds and the imaginations of those Americans and Europeans who responded to that vulnerable, heroic figure. Blaine, by contrast, seems to know what the blueprint is. Nearly a century on from Houdini, Blaine’s books, websites, TV programmes, videos and DVDs are the inevitable product of an age where the process of canonization through celebrity is conducted so much more efficiently: the suspicion arises that, like most celebrities, Blaine’s saintly figures appear somewhat commodified. It is a particular hazard of postmodern art: to be subsumed by the global technologies by which you were initially enabled. No longer the author of his own script, Blaine is that which has been scripted – by Channel 4, by Sky TV, by Random House, by TimeWarner/AOL.

Magic in an age of technological rationalism A real magic show is not an arena for secular distraction, but a relatively safe place for us to experience the sacred. Burger and Neale543 Magic is very real to the Haitians, and it has sinister connotations. As much as I tried to explain that what I was doing was entertainment, not real magic, they weren’t buying it… Compared with Haiti, doing magic for the Yanomamo Indians of the Venezuelan rain forest was a walk in the park. David Blaine544

David Blaine is one of the many modern conjurors who have explored the encounter between his own illusions and the ritual performances of shamans in societies where magic is, as he puts it, ‘very real’. It throws into sharp relief the

190

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 191


argument, which we considered in Chapter One, that the art of the conjuror contains a level of hidden symbolism which links us with a sacred past, remnants of pre-industrial beliefs, echoes of shamanic rituals and magical practices now emptied of their efficacy and re-born as entertainment. If this is so, the conjuror seems to offer a form of compensation for something lost: in an age of science and technology, belief in magic (which came naturally to earlier societies) is no longer available to us. By engaging in a theatrical context with the skills of the stage conjuror, however, we can experience imaginatively a kind of echo of the past and convince ourselves temporarily that the world is still full of wonder and magic. Yet to describe our culture as being ‘an age of science and technology’ is to oversimplify things – especially if we then assume that scientific/technological thinking has somehow made irrational belief impossible. In fact, the age is actually schizophrenic – or more accurately, multiphrenic – in its attitude to questions of magic, wonder, the irrational. If the dominant mode of modern knowing is rational, sceptical and scientific in tone, there is also a rich alternative culture. Magic is certainly in the air: the popular culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is saturated with images of magic. It is possible to construct a provisional taxonomy of magic in contemporary popular culture. In the area of popular fictions the phenomenally successful Harry Potter books and films, the re-emergence of The Lord of the Rings as a significant cultural presence and the revived interest in the magical Christian allegories of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia all offer magic as an ingredient of that fantasy staple, the eternal battle of good and evil. These, though, are only the tip of the iceberg. Fantasy programmes about witches (teenage and otherwise) and vampire slayers with magical powers are scattered liberally through the television schedules, while the descendants of Eighties ‘Swords-and-Sorcery’ fictions are the basis of a large percentage of digital role-playing games. In most of these, magic tends to be seen largely in terms of thaumaturgical self-defence: it is a survival tool, whether in the corridors of Hogwarts School or in the last great battle against the Dark Lord. The implied audience is often of teenage years (though the actual audience demographic may be much wider) and the heroes are frequently either actually children or, in some way, childlike. The magical powers of these fictional narratives offer the fantasy of being able to win out against the greater odds of an adult world whose own powers appear supernaturally destructive. Another kind of magic – the magic of being able to communicate with spirits – is the subject matter of documentary-style television series such as Living TV’s Most Haunted, in which teams of reporters explore reputedly haunted buildings in order to investigate and experience the presence of the paranormal: ghostly shapes, footfalls, unexplained fluctuations in temperature, objects that move on their own and other paranormal activities are repeated features of the series. The success of programmes such as this bear witness to the continuing importance of the supernatural in many peoples’ cultural lives. In a similar vein, but with a much

191

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 192


broader frame of reference, the magazine Fortean Times, the ‘monthly magazine of news, reviews and research on strange phenomena and experiences, curiosities, prodigies and portents’,545 is thriving. It covers such topics as ghosts, mythical beasts, crop circles, flying saucers, psychic healing, alien contact, urban myths, calendrical customs, symbology and earth mysteries, while maintaining ‘a position of benevolent scepticism towards both the orthodox and the unorthodox’546 which often amounts to a drily ironic attitude. Both television and the printed media have found a substantial contemporary market which both exploits and perpetuates folkloric beliefs in the uncanny. Outside the world of the media, of course, the rise of alternative spiritualities has proved to be a significant phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic. Robert Forman has argued that the apparently diverse activities of unaffiliated individuals who practice their own private spirituality, as well as of groups such as ‘Buddhists, Neo-advaitan meditators, esoteric Christians, renewal Jews, Taoists, spiritual healers, the spirituality in business consultants and so on… may well develop into something like a community across the great religious divides.’547 To this might be added the various branches of pagan and neo-pagan spiritualities, with their various Wiccan, Druidic, Celtic, Norse, Roman, Greek and Egyptian variations. While not recognized as standard religious denominations in most countries, many of these new religions are sufficiently developed to be classed as fullyfledged faith communities with legal rights (such as the right of access to a pagan ‘chaplain’ in UK prisons), and not all of them would claim a ‘magical’ dimension. Nonetheless, their status on the fringes of mainstream religious belief, together with a surviving mystical strand of New Age thinking, remains popular enough that few English towns are without a shop in which you can buy crystals, charms, amulets, potions and books of spells for all sorts of purposes. Within the mainstream Christian Church itself, forms of magical belief continue to exercise massive influence on millions of people in various ways. Six million pilgrims travel to Lourdes each year in the hope of a miraculous cure for ailments. In America an ABC News poll in February 2004 found that 61 per cent of Americans believe in the literal truth of Biblical narratives including the Creation story and Moses’ parting of the Red Sea.548 At the same time, as centrist religious institutions see attendances fall, the rise of ‘magical’ religious fundamentalism of various kinds continues. Sometimes it goes beyond fundamentalism. In July 2005, Sita Kisanga, Sebastian Pinto and one other unnamed woman, members of a North London Church, were gaoled for ten years, four years and ten years respectively for torturing an 8-year-old girl they believed to be a witch. According to one member of the North London community in which the torture took place, ‘In our community ndoki [witchcraft] happens because it is killing people. In our community in the UK everyone believes in it.’549 Witchcraft beliefs are alive and well and thriving in North London. Nor are such forms of occultism limited to marginalized sectors of the community in the West: in a way that makes the X-Files look mundane, there are

192

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 193


substantiated reports that a sector of US Military command has moved on from its long-standing fascination with UFOs and has been developing a special unit for use in the ‘war against terror’: the First Earth Battalion, by using New Age techniques such as meditation, yoga, and guided imagery, aims at turning out warriors who are a combination of Ninja, Jedi knight and advanced Zen master, capable of telepathy, of walking through walls, and of killing an animal – or a human being – simply by staring at it.550 What is this about? Is it some nostalgic reaction against the sceptical secularism of the rational, technological age which characterizes late capitalism? Is it a protest against the alienation of contemporary urban life? A consequence of changes in traditional roles relating to gender, the family and authority in general? The result of intercultural encounters on a spiritual level due to immigration and travel? A simultaneous disenchantment both with the established churches and with scientific orthodoxy? A combination of all of these, combined with ‘an innate human drive for spirituality’?551 Whatever its causes, it goes extraordinarily deep. The journalist Francis Wheen, in a tirade against the ‘mumbo jumbo’ which he sees as having conquered the world, has argued despairingly that the values of the Enlightenment – ‘an insistence on intellectual autonomy, a rejection of tradition and authority as the infallible sources of truth, a loathing for bigotry and persecution, a commitment to free inquiry, a belief that (in Francis Bacon⬘s words) knowledge is indeed power’552 – are being undermined by New Age mystics, by religious fanatics, by postmodern relativists, by crystal-gazers and academics, management gurus and alternative therapists… The list goes on. A recent article in New Scientist by Richard Koch and Chris Smith (the former UK Minister of Culture) talks of the ‘widespread western, and especially American, descent into superstition… There is an apparent belief in magic that has no parallel since the Middle Ages.’553 The sociological and cultural causes which lie behind the current appetite for fantasy magic, and the persistence of what Wheen refers to dismissively as ‘Mumbo-Jumbo’ are subjects too large to tackle here in any detail, although Koch and Smith’s thesis is worth consideration: that western science has eaten away at the very intellectual conditions (i.e., a cosmology based in a belief in a one all-powerful God whose perfect creation awaited rational scientific explanation) which made it possible in the first place. More to the point: does the current cultural fascination with boy wizards and teenage witches, with astrology and grimoires, have anything to do with conjuring and stage magic? I would say that it does, and that this should alert us to some of the complexities of the function of performed magic in the present day. Certainly there are areas of overlap. For example, Fortean Times concentrates mainly on the uncanny, but it also has a healthy interest in the doings of conjurors, prestidigitators and stage illusionists: thus the July 2004 issue contains an interview-based article on Derren Brown, in which the author concludes: ‘I for one am looking forward to being further deceived and enchanted – but Brown’s version of magic is not merely

193

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 194


entertaining; it challenges you to examine your own beliefs.’554 The same issue also has two articles on magicians, conjurors and illusionists at war, covering incidents ranging from Robert-Houdin’s deception of the Marabouts (see Chapter Six) to Jasper Maskelyne’s large-scale illusions which managed to make the Suez Canal invisible to enemy aircraft during the Second World War.555 Moreover, it is significant that the current appetite for magic and occult phenomena in the more general sense has coincided with a general revival of interest in magic in the sense of conjuring and illusion, especially among the young. Television programmes on magic are thriving like never before. Particularly successful at the present time are performers whose work suggests something rather more ambiguous than the traditional skills of legerdemain associated with the conventional stage conjuror: performers such as Derren Brown and David Blaine. If we do see something vestigial in the act of the contemporary conjuror, something which bears traces of an efficacious ritual, we should be careful how we represent the implications of this. It seems natural to identify our ‘own’ culture with the values of reason and science, and cultures of the past (or the distant present) with superstition and magic. Yet we too have our magical beliefs and the complexity of present-day culture allows for many strands. Magical thinking in children has been studied in quite some detail. Magical thinking in contemporary western adults has received rather less attention. It is, however, a widespread phenomenon, and one which is thrown into sharp relief when brought up against stage magic and conjuring tricks. Psychologist Andreas Hergovich conducted a series of experiments in which two groups of subjects – believers in paranormal phenomena and sceptics – were shown a series of conjuring tricks (‘pseudo-psychic demonstrations’) and asked about what they thought they had experienced. Not surprisingly the experiments proved that …belief in paranormal phenomena has a major effect on the reception of pseudo-psychic demonstrations. Independently of whether a magic trick or a paranormal demonstration is expected, believers in paranormal phenomena in line with the results of Wiseman and Morris (1995) have a greater tendency to categorise the presentation as paranormal than do sceptics. They exhibit a greater degree of amazement and do not assume that such phenomena are based on fraud or a simple trick. The same mechanism of ‘‘immunisation’’ of one’s own position also seems to apply to sceptics. They remain sceptical even after being told that they are about to witness a paranormal phenomenon. They have a greater tendency to assume fraud or dismiss the whole thing as a trick. Moreover, they are less amazed than believers in paranormal phenomena. Sceptics tend to be more impressed when the trick is declared to be a magic trick from the start, while the opposite is true for believers in paranormal phenomena. They are more amazed when told that they are about to witness a demonstration of a paranormal phenomenon.556

194

Chapter 10.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 195


It is easy to be critical of such an apparently predictable – not say circular – conclusion: that believers in the paranormal are more likely to see paranormal meanings in a magic trick, whereas sceptics are more likely to be sceptical. But the point is that the experiments of Hergovich and others indicate there are a statistically significant number of subjects for whom the paranormal explanation of a magic trick is plausible. Magical thinking, in the broadest sense of the phrase, is not limited to ‘primitive’ cultures; nor is it simply the false beliefs of pre-literate peoples. Indeed, it is by no means incompatible with an informed understanding of modern technology: Wiccans and other pagan groups can claim a high percentage of university-educated members, many of whom work in fields such as information technology, electronics and new media. Magical thinking is not merely something which mankind is destined to transcend as rationalism and science triumph: that linear/progressive view, which was once the accepted ethnological wisdom, appears to fly in the face of experience. In the technology-driven societies of the western world in the twenty-first century, believers in the paranormal, practisers of New Age spiritualities, followers of nature religions and western shamans join together with horoscope readers, occultists and esotericists of all kinds in actively engaging in an exploration of alternate kinds of connections between man and the natural world. These explorations may in part be historically specific responses to a globalized, postmodern world; they may be something more deeply rooted in the human psyche: an aspect of being human, a way of being in the world which we share with our earliest ancestors. Either way, they represent a vein of contemporary consciousness which writers and film-makers have not been slow to tap into. The conjuror, as always, exploits it in two apparently contradictory ways: debunking mysticism in the name of rationalism, while simultaneously offering tantalizing glimpses of wonder which suggest that, perhaps, after all, there are possibilities that lie beyond the everyday realities of ‘common sense’. It is a double-game which magicians have played through the ages. The conjuror’s act is made out of sleights of hand, trick equipment, lies and misdirections. We know that. And yet its effectiveness depends on its ability to make suckers of us nonetheless. In the process, sometimes it leaves us as disillusioned as the eighteenth-century London audience waiting in vain for the ‘Bottle-conjuror’ to appear. Sometimes it leaves us wanting to insist, as Houdini’s spiritualist admirers insisted, that there is something more marvellous going on than the conjuror himself will admit. And at its most effective, perhaps, it leaves us in two minds and somewhere in-between: sceptical still, but with an odd suspicion that, as Edmund Wilson says, there may indeed be …more to these feats and to our pleasure in them than we are likely to be conscious of… And the magician who escapes from the box: what is he but Adonis and Attis and all the rest of the corn gods that are buried and rise?557

195

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 196

Endnotes 1 Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004) p. 11. 2 Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale, Magic and Meaning (Seattle: Hermetic Press Ltd. 1995) p. 97. 3 See Dick Hebdige ‘Postmodernism and ‘The Other Side’’ in John Storey (ed.) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. A Reader Second edition (1998) p. 372. 4 Reginald Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft proving the common opinions of witches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars… to be but imaginary, erronious conceptions and novelties… written and published in anno 1584, by Reginald Scot, Esquire. (London: [Richard Cotes] 1651) p. 83. 5 I shall be using both terms, largely for the sake of variety. 6 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: an Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) p. 2. 7 Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004) pp. 90–91, 92. 8 Selbit’s claim to be the trick’s originator was vigorously challenged at the time by Horace Goldin. See Horace Goldin, It’s Fun to Be Fooled (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1937). 9 Women over thirty had been granted the vote in 1918. 10 I believe that this is a perfectly valid historical reading of Selbit’s routine – though the three-year gap between the legislation and the appearance of the trick suggests that if this is to be seen as repressed male revenge, then perhaps that revenge was on a rather slow burn. Equally, however, it could be pointed out that the routine involves not only dissection but also subsequent restoration. A more optimistic reading might stress the resilience of the female. 11 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972) quoted in John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture; A Reader (Harlow: Longman Pearson, 1998) p. 117. 12 Milburne Christopher, Magic: A Picture History (New York: Dover 1991. Reprint of Panorama of Magic, 1962) p. 190. 13 Burger and Neale, Magic and Meaning, pp. 96, 98. 14 For what it is worth, my own preference is for the historically- and genderspecific reading. The trick is ‘Sawing a Woman in Half ’ – not ‘Sawing an

196

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 197

ENDNOTES

Assistant in Half ’. This, of course, has something to do with the ease with which a small-bodied woman will fit inside the trick box – but I believe that it also has something to do with the way in which gender politics operates in the mind of the trick’s typical audience. 15 Una Chaudhuri, ‘Zoo Stories: ‘Boundary Work’ in Theater History’ in Peter Holland and W. B. Worthen (eds.) Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) pp. 136–150. 16 Edwin A. Dawes, The Great Illusionists (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1979). 17 Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned How to Disappear (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003). 18 Ricky Jay, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (London: Hale, 1987). 19 David Blaine, Mysterious Stranger, (London: Channel 4 Books, 2002). 20 Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 21 Steven Connor, Dumbstruck. A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 22 Peter Lamont, The Indian Rope Trick (London: Abacus, 2005); Peter Lamont, The First Psychic: The Peculiar Mystery of a Victorian Wizard (London: Little, Brown, 2005). 23 See Steven Connor, ‘Sleights of Voice: Ventriloquism, Magic and The Harry Price Collection’ (talk given to the Friends of the University Library. Archived online at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/skc/hpc/ Accessed 8th June 2004. 24 Gary Brown and Michael Edwards, ‘Dusty Tomes: A Guide to the History of Magic’, in Magical Past-Times: The On-Line Journal of Magic History. http://illusionata.com/mpt/view.php?id=39&type=articles (2004) Accessed 7th August 2005. 25 Sara Crasson, ‘Magic History and Magical Myths: The Historian⬘s Challenge’, in Magical Past-Times: The On-Line Journal of Magic History http://illusionata.com/mpt/view.php?id=77&type=articles (1999) Accessed 20th January 2006. 26 This phrase is used differently in some other contexts. An older use of the term would mean simply ‘writing for performance’: playwriting, scriptwriting, theatrical devising, or composing performance poetry. For an educationalist, on the other hand, the phrase can mean simply ‘writing to demonstrate what knowledge you⬘ve acquired when you⬘ve performed your lab experiment, your research, your note-taking in class, your reading of the textbook’ (James Seitz,

197

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 198


quoted by Peter Hart in ‘Using Writing to Promote Learning’, University Times (University of Pittsburgh) 35: 7 (November 2002). http://www.pitt.edu/ utimes/issues/35/021121/13.html Accessed 25th February 2005). I want to distinguish the way in which the phrase is used in performance studies from these. 27 Ann Daly, ‘Ann Daly: Performative Criticism’ http://www.anndaly.com/ educator/syll-perfcrit.html Accessed 25th February 2005. 28 See for example Della Pollock, ‘Performative Writing’, in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (eds), The Ends of Performance, New York: New York University Press, 1998; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Teaching “Experimental Critical Writing”’, in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds, The Ends of Performance, New York: New York University Press, 1998. 29 Unattributed notes to ‘Houdini on conjuring’, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online http://www.britannica.com/original?content_id=1323. Accessed 11th June 2004. 30 Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned How to Disappear (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003) p. 108. 31 See Christopher, Magic: A Picture History pp. 148–9; Albert A. Hopkins (ed.) Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography (New York: Munn / Scientific American, 1898) Reprinted as Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography (New York: Dover Publications, 1976) p. 367; Steinmeyer Hiding the Elephant pp. 103–4. 32 John Algernon Clarke, ‘Magic, White’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica 9th Edition (Edinburgh: Algernon and Charles Black, 1875–1889) cited in Steinmeyer Hiding the Elephant p. 108. 33 Macmillan’s Magazine, January 1876. 34 Reginald Scot, Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft proving the common opinions of witches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars… to be but imaginary, erronious conceptions and novelties… written and published in anno 1584, by Reginald Scot, Esquire. (London: [Richard Cotes] 1651). 35 Samuel Rid, The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine (London: 1612) sig. Bv. 36 For a more detailed account of gypsy culture and its history see J. P. Clébert, The Gypsies trans. Duff (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Peter Burke, in Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1978; revised 1996 and reprinted Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2002) argues for the importance of the gypsy tradition in early modern popular culture. 37 Judith Okeley, The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983) p. 3. See also B. Vesey-Fitzgerald, Gypsies of Britain (Newton

198

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 199

ENDNOTES

Abbott: David and Charles, 1944. Enlarged edn. 1973) pp. 21, 28 and Clébert, The Gypsies p. 27. 38 Thomas Frost, The Lives of the Conjurors (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876) Chapter One. Archived online at http://thelearnedpig.com.pa/magos/books/frost/ index.html Accessed 15th January 2006. 39 David Blaine Mysterious Stranger (London: Channel 4 Books, 2002) p. 24. 40 See ‘The Westcar Papyrus’, http://www.magicandillusion.com/libr/orig/west/ west01.html See also Third Dynasty http://www.crystalinks.com/thirdynasty. html Both Accessed 16th August 2005. 41 See also Blaine Mysterious Stranger p. 122. 42 Milbourne Christopher, Magic: A Picture History (New York: Dover 1991. Reprint of Panorama of Magic, 1962) p. 1. 43 Geoffrey Graham, papyrus Westcar (website) http://www.rostau.org.uk/ WESTCAR/PURPOSE.HTM#anchor688833 Accessed 16th August 2005. 44 Donald Mackenzie, Egyptian Myth and Legend, (London: Gresham Publishing Co., 1907) Archived online at http://nefertiti.iwebland.com/texts/westcar_ papyrus.htm Accessed 16th August 2005. 45 Mackenzie, Egyptian Myth and Legend. 46 Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale, Magic and Meaning (Seattle: Hermetic Press, 1995) p. 65. 47 James Randi, Conjuring (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992) p. xi cited in Burger and Neale Magic and Meaning p. 66. 48 Milbourne Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (London: Robert Hale and Co., 1973) p. 12 cited in Burger and Neale, Magic and Meaning pp. 65–6. 49 Albert A. Hopkins (ed.) Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography (New York: Munn / Scientific American, 1898) Reprinted as Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography (New York: Dover Publications, 1976) p. 219. 50 Hippolytus, Philosophumena, or the Refutation of all Heresies. Formerly attributed to Origen, but now to Hippolytus, Bishop and Martyr, who flourished about 220 A.D. trans. F. Legge (London and New York: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1921) p. 96. 51 Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) p. 123. 52 Letter from John Hoker of Maidstone to ‘Bullinger’, 24 February 1538 cited in Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage p. 124.

199

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 200


53 ‘Myth’ The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions. Ed. John Bowker. Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference Online. http://www. oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t101.e5023 Accessed 18th August 2005 The complex field of myth interpretation is still contentious. Successive attempts to define what myths meant to the cultures which produced them have led to a broad range of interpretive strategies. See Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality. Trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). 54 Burger and Neale Magic and Meaning p. 68. 55 Burger and Neale Magic and Meaning p. 68. 56

Burger and Neale Magic and Meaning p. 52.

57 Edmund Wilson, ‘John Mulholland and the Art of Illusion’, in Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties.(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1950) pp. 147–152. 58 The word ‘shaman’ and its cognates, like so many words that we have to deal with, has a range of meanings. In its original, limited and technical sense it refers to social functions and belief systems specific to peoples of the Siberian Tungus, and which became an object of fascination for Europeans in the eighteenth century (see Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). A second meaning expands the term to include similar practices and beliefs held in other tribal peoples in Europe, Asia, North and South America and Australia: these practices include ‘all kinds of ceremonial systems combining curing by means of spirit journey and exorcism with techniques drawn from the performing arts’ (Schechner, Performance Theory p. 65n.). Even more broadly, the term is now used to refer to a variety of contemporary cultural practices ranging from New Age consciousness-raising techniques to modern modes of experimental performance. I am using the term in its second sense. 59 We may want to compare this to the arguments between Catholics and Protestants at the time of the Reformation (and subsequently) as to what actually happened during the Mass. The Protestant insistence on the symbolic nature of the bread and the wine may be contrasted with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the body and blood of Christ are made manifest in the consecrated host. 60 Margaret Lantis, Alaskan Eskimo Ceremonialism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1947) p. 88. 61 Walter Hoffman, The Menomini Indians (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896) pp. 97–9.

200

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 201

ENDNOTES

62 E. T. Kirby ‘The Shamanistic Origins of Popular Entertainments’ The Drama Review 18: 1 (March, 1974) p. 14. 63 Quesalid’s story is recounted and analysed by many commentators. See Claude Lévi-Strauss Structural Anthropology trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) pp. 175–81; and Richard Schechner Performance Theory Revised edition (London and New York: Routledge, 1988) pp. 225–7. 64 E. T. Kirby describes this trick as being ‘characteristic of shamanism the world over, the apparent extraction of the disease agent from the patient in the form of some material object – a bone, stone or tuft of fibres – that has been concealed in the shaman’s mouth and is produced at the crucial moment’. See Kirby, ‘Shamanistic Origins’ p. 7. 65 Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology p. 176. 66 Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology p. 178. 67 Kirby, ‘Shamanistic Origins’ pp. 5–15. 68 Rogan Taylor, The Death and Resurrection Show, (London: Reed, 1985) p. 44. 69 Taylor, The Death and Resurrection Show, p. 44. 70 Taylor, The Death and Resurrection Show, p. 62. 71 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic; or, How to become a Wizard… Translated and edited, with notes, by Professor Hoffmann [pseud., i.e. Angelo John Lewis] (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1878) p. 43. 72 Ivan A. Lopatin, The Social Life and Religion of Indians in Kitimat, British Columbia (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1945). 73 Lopatin, Social Life of Indians in Kitimat p. 77, cited in Taylor Death and Resurrection Show p. 48. 74 Lopatin, Social Life of Indians in Kitimat p. 78, cited in Taylor Death and Resurrection Show p. 49. 75 Taylor, Death and Resurrection Show p. 48. 76 Elsewhere, more suggestively, Taylor talks about modern showbusiness as a ‘consciously worked disguise of [the shamanic] mystery’ (p. 50). 77 Schechner, Performance Theory p. 120. 78 Schechner, Performance Theory p. 123. 79 Taylor, The Death and Resurrection Show, passim.

201

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 202


80 Although there are exceptions to this rule: see the final chapter of this book. 81 Henry Hay, The Amateur Magician’s Handbook, 4th edition (Edison NJ: Castle Books, 1982) p. 2. 82 Louis Hennepin, Description of Louisiana (Paris, 1683). Cited in Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century p. 31. 83 Exodus VII 6–12. (New International Version). 84 Exodus IV 5 (New International Version). 85 Reginald Scot, Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft proving the common opinions of witches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars… to be but imaginary, erronious conceptions and novelties… written and published in anno 1584, by Reginald Scot, Esquire. (London: [Richard Cotes] 1651) p. 222. Compare to Robert-Houdin, in The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic, where he asserts that ‘The Egyptians, the Chaldees, the Ethiopians and the Persians have each boasted many experts in this mysterious art [such as] Jannes and Jambres, the magicians of Pharaoh, who ventured to compete with the miracles of Moses’. Note the slight but important distinction that he makes between Pharaoh’s ‘magicians’ (whom he names, according to tradition, Jannes and Jambres) and the true ‘miracles’ of the prophets of Jehovah. 86 Henry Ridgely Evans ‘Introduction. The Mysteries of Modern Magic’ in Albert A. Hopkins (ed.) Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography (New York: Munn/Scientific American, 1898) Reprinted unaltered as Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography (New York: Dover Publications, 1976) p. 1. 87 Evans ‘Introduction’ in Hopkins Magic p. 1. 88 Christopher Marlowe, Complete Plays and Poems edited by E. D. Pendry and J. C. Maxwell (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1976) p. 513. 89 The ‘Heriots’ concerned is almost certainly Thomas Hariot (1560–1621), who was much more than a ‘juggler’ in the sense Baines uses the word (i.e. a conjuror). Supported by Raleigh’s patronage, Hariot was a respected mathematician, astronomer and naturalist in his own right. 90 Hippolytus, Philosophumena, or the Refutation of all Heresies. Formerly attributed to Origen, but now to Hippolytus, Bishop and Martyr, who flourished about 220 A.D. trans. F. Legge (London and New York: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1921) p. 92. 91 Hippolytus, Philosophumena, p. 101. 92 Hippolytus, Philosophumena, p. 99. 93 Hippolytus, Philosophumena, p. 52.

202

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 203

ENDNOTES

94 Acts 8:9–24 (Quotations from NIV Study Bible). 95 Acts 8:11. 96 Acts 8:19–21. 97 J. K. Elliott (ed.), The Apocryphal New Testament. A Collection of Apocryphal Literature in an English Translation based on M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) p. 392. 98 Jerald C. Brauer (ed.) Westminster Dictionary of Church History (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Westminster Press, 1971) p. 362. 99 Acts of Peter Chapter Thirty One From M. R. James (trans) The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924) Online publication by Peter Kirby, Early Christian Writings http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/actspeter.html Accessed 29th August 2005. 100 Acts of Peter Chapter Thirty Two. 101 Brauer(ed.), Westminster Dictionary of Church History p. 362. 102 Acts of Peter Chapter Thirty Two. 103 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1978) p. 68. 104 Thomas Religion and the Decline of Magic p. 68. 105 Daniel Defoe, cited in Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic and Science in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 37. 106 Alizon Brunning, ‘Jonson⬘s Romish Foxe: Anti-Catholic Discourse in Volpone.’ Early Modern Literary Studies 6.2 (September, 2000): 4.1–32 Archived online at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-2/brunvol.htm Accessed 15th January 2006. 107 Marlowe, Complete Plays and Poems p. 513. 108 Samuel Rid, The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine (London: 1612) sig. B2 v. 109 David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975) p. 331. Strictly, according to the account in Exodus Chapter Seven it was Aaron whose staff metamorphosed. The Wakefield authors, who had a good sense for the dramatic, concentrate all the power in Moses. 110 This has been of increasing interest to scholars of the early modern theatre. In a useful seminal article, Louis B. Wright catalogues and analyses over fifty examples of and references to conjuring, juggling and illusions in plays before 1642. See Louis B. Wright, ‘Juggling Tricks and Conjury on the English Stage Before 1642’, Modern Philology (1927) vol. 24 pp. 269–284. More recently,

203

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 204


Philip Butterworth’s Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which appeared too late for me to use more extensively in this chapter, looks at the whole issue in more detail. 111 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus Epilogue ll 25, 27 in Christopher Marlowe, Complete Plays and Poems, edited by E. D. Pendry and J. C. Maxwell (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1976) p. 326. 112 Barbara Howard Traister, Heavenly Necromancers; the Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984) p. 146. 113 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923) p. 423. 114 Thomas Frost The Lives of the Conjurors (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876) Chapter V. Archived online at http://thelearnedpig.com.pa/magos/books/ frost/index.html Accessed 15th August 2005. 115 Milbourne Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (London: Robert Hale and Co., 1973) pp. 16–17. 116 Philip Butterworth, ‘Brandon, Feats and Hocus Pocus: Jugglers Three’ in Theatre Notebook: A Journal of the History and Technique of the British Theatre vol. 57 number 2 pp. 89–106. See also Butterworth Magic and the Early English Stage pp. 9–14. 117 There may well have been some overlap between the professional clown and the juggler. See Wright, ‘Juggling Tricks and Conjury on the English Stage’ p. 270. 118 Reginald Scot, Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft proving the common opinions of witches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars… to be but imaginary, erronious conceptions and novelties… written and published in anno 1584, by Reginald Scot, Esquire. (London: [Richard Cotes] 1651) p. 217. 119 Scot, Discovery p. 217. 120 Frost, Lives of the Conjurors Chapter V. 121 Scot, Discovery p. 337. 122 Similarly, the ‘man named Reatius’ who is mentioned in passing by Milbourne Christopher (Illustrated History pp. 16–17; see above) seems to have been claiming to do real magic, rather than being one of those ‘innocent victims’ who ‘claimed no demonic powers’. Otherwise it is hard to see why – as Christopher tells it – he had to be tortured before admitting to achieving his illusions by means of legerdemain. 123 Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller ed. J. B. Steane, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) p. 297.

204

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 205

ENDNOTES

124 Christopher, Illustrated History pp. 21–2. 125 See Eva, Griffith, ‘Banks, William (fl. 1591–1637).’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Archived online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1292 Accessed 12th August 2005. Also Butterworth Magic on the the Early English stage pp. 59–73. Most English accounts give Banks’ first name as William, although ‘Richard’ occurs in a few German sources. 126 Dawes, Great Illusionists p. 27. 127 Shakespeare, William Love’s Labor’s Lost, (1598) in The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen B. Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1997) p. 742; Ben Jonson Works ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–53) vol. VIII, p. 88; Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, (1594) ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) p. 275, Anon Tarlton’s Jests (1611) (reprinted London: London Shakespeare Society, 1844) pp. 23–4; See also William D’Avenant, The Long Vacation in London, (London, 1697) p. 24. 128 Rid, Art of Jugling sig. G-Gv. 129 Rid, Art of Jugling sig. Gv. 130 John Dando and Harry Runt, Maroccus Extaticus. Or, Bankes’ Bay Horse in a Trance. A Discourse set downe in a merry Dialogue, between Bankes and his beast: Anatomizing some abuses and bad trickes of this age (London: Cuthbert Burby, 1595). 131 Dando and Runt, Maroccus Extaticus sig. Cv. 132 Thomas Morton, A direct answer vnto the scandalous exceptions, which Theophilus Higgons hath lately obiected against D. Morton (London: Edmund Weaver, 1609) p. 11. 133 Morton, A direct answer p. 11. 134 Ben Jonson, ‘On the Famous Voyage’ ll.156–8, in The Complete Poems edited by George Parfitt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) p. 91. 135 According to most accounts, Banks was still alive in the 1637 – probably eking out his retirement as a vintner in Cheapside. The publishing history of Jonson’s ‘On The Famous Voyage’ is complex, and the poem was subject to revisions, but the lines about Banks and Morocco being burned date from no later than 1625. 136 Frost, Lives of the Conjurors Chapter V.

205

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 206


137 Frost Lives of the Conjurors Chapter V. 138 But see below for a discussion of likely authorship. 139 Hill, Thomas, A Book of Elizabethan Magic. Thomas Hill’s Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions (1567) edited by Thomas Ross (Regensburg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1974) p. 13. 140 Hill Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions p. 58. 141 Hill Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions p. 9. 142 Recently, a contemporary conjuror has gone one better, in claiming to recreate the miracle of the Virgin Birth. A report in the Guardian for 20/10/05 announced that ‘the illusionist David Copperfield is promising to impregnate a girl on stage. Speaking to German magazine Galore, he said: ‘In my next show I’m going to make a girl pregnant on stage… naturally it will be without sex.’ Archived online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/ 0,3604,1596125,00.html Accessed 9th January 2006. 143 Thomas Ross in Hill, Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions p. 8. 144 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1978) pp. 252–300. 145 Scot, Discovery p. 340. 146 See Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic and Science in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 40. 147 James I, Daemonologie (Edinburgh: R. Waldegrave, 1597). 148 Scot, Discovery p. 342. 149 Scot, Discovery p. 278. 150 Scot, Discovery p. 278. 151 Scot, Discovery p. 279. 152 Scot, Discovery p. 216. 153 Scot, Discovery p. 233. 154 Scot, Discovery pp. 233–4. 155 Scot, Discovery pp. 234–5. 156 Scot, Discovery p. 235. 157 Scot, Discovery p. 234. 158 Scot, Discovery p. 234.

206

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 207

ENDNOTES

159 Scot, Discovery p. 235. 160 Scot, Discovery pp. 238–9. 161 Scot, Discovery p. 238. 162 Scot, Discovery p. 125. 163 Scot, Discovery p. 248. 164 See, for example, pp. 285, 296, 314. 165 See, for example, pp. 219, 324, 332. 166 Scot, Discovery p. 167. 167 The name contains a pun: Archimago is both an ‘arch-magician’ (compare Scot’s ‘arch-conjuror’) and also an arch-image – i.e., something false and untrustworthy. 168 Rid, Art of Jugling sig. B2v. 169 Rid, Art of Jugling sig. B3. 170 Rid, Art of Jugling sig. E3v. 171 Rid, Art of Jugling sig. B3v. 172 Rid, Art of Jugling sig. B3v. 173 Compare the language of the spells which Faustus and his confederates use to conjure the Devil in Marlowe’s play. 174 Scot, Discovery p. 185. Scot, as we have seen, sets little store by such charms, but he describes in detail the practises of those who do. 175 Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark shewing the divine cause of the distractions of the whole nation of England and of the Christian world (London: for Robert Ibbotson, 1655) p. 36. 176 ‘The senses are never deceived about their own objects.’ 177 Ady, A Candle in the Dark p. 40. I have not been able to find out who ‘Cooper’ is. 178 Rid Art of Jugling sig. B2v-B3. 179 Scot, Discovery p. 340. 180 N. W. Bawcutt, ‘William Vincent, Alias Hocus Pocus: A Travelling Entertainer of the Seventeenth Century’ Theatre Notebook 54:3 (2000) pp. 130–8. Philip Butterworth confirms Bawcutt’s identification. For the alternative view, that ‘Hocus Pocus’ was not so much the name of individual as ‘the generic name

207

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 208


for legerdemain performers’ see Louis B. Wright ‘Juggling Tricks and Conjury on the English Stage’ p. 271. 181 ‘Hocus Pocus Junior’ [William Vincent?], Hocus Pocus Junior The anatomy of legerdemain. Or, The art of iugling set forth in his proper colours, fully, plainly, and exactly; so that an ignorant person may thereby learn the full perfection of the same, after a little practise. Unto each trick is added the figure, where it is needfull for instruction. 3rd edition (London : Printed by I. D[awson] for R. M[ab] and are to be sold by Francis Grove at his shop upon Snow-hill, neer the Sarazens-head, 1638) sig. G3v-G4. 182 ‘Hocus Pocus Junior’, The anatomy of legerdemain sig. H3v. 183 ‘Hocus Pocus Junior’. The anatomy of legerdemain sig. H3v-H4. 184 See Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage p. 24. 185 Ady, A Candle in the Dark p. 29. 186 Bawcutt, ‘William Vincent alias Hocus Pocus’ p. 131. 187 The last witch in England to be executed was Alice Molland, hanged in 1684 – coincidentally, at Exeter, which seems to have been a place particularly susceptible to superstition. 188 Theodor Adorno, ‘Theses against Occultism’ in Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974) p. 240. 189 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (London; Methuen, 1981) p. 19. 190 Jackson, Fantasy p. 19. 191 There are times, it is true, when the distinction between the audience and the authorities is not clear-cut. Brandon’s audience, in performing the pigeon trick, is the King himself – who is also the ultimate legal authority. In this case Henry’s own response seems to have been ambivalent. He responds legalistically insofar as he forbids Brandon to repeat the trick, but takes no further action. 192 Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) edited by Robin Robbins. 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) p. 17. 193 Browne, Pseudodoxia pp. 19–20. 194 Scot, Discovery p. 216. 195 The word ‘Puritans’, which is usually used to refer to the anti-theatrical contingent, is really a convenient shorthand: the theatre’s enemies were more broadly based than the sectarian label suggests.

208

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 209

ENDNOTES

196 ‘Note of acts’, Journal of the House of Lords: volume 1: 1509–1577 (1802), p. 728. Archived online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp? compid=31838 . Accessed 19th January 2006. 197 William Rankins A Mirror For Monsters (London, 1587) fol. 2v. 198 William Shakespeare, Henry V Prologue ll. 23–8. 199 Samuel Rid, The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine, (London: 1612) sig. Bv. 200 Reginald Scot, Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft proving the common opinions of witches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars… to be but imaginary, erronious conceptions and novelties… written and published in anno 1584, by Reginald Scot, Esquire. (London: [Richard Cotes] 1651) p. 342. 201 William Shakespeare, A Comedy of Errors in The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen B. Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1997) V.i. ll. 238–43. 202 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Beggars Bush (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1647). The play, first performed in 1622, remained popular throughout the Restoration period and into the eighteenth century. It was chosen as the production with which Thomas Killigrew and the King’s Company reopened their re-built Drury Lane Theatre in 1674. 203 In this context the word ‘Boor’ means ‘countryman’ – the Flemish equivalent of a yokel. (The play is set in Bruges.) 204 Beaumont and Fletcher, Beggars Bush III i, ll. 44 ff. 205 Beaumont and Fletcher, Beggars Bush III i, ll. 77–89. 206 Beaumont and Fletcher, Beggars Bush III i, ll. 120–5. 207 The standard modern collection of Elizabethan coney-catching pamphlets is still Gamini Salgado’s Coney-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). 208 N. W. Bawcutt ‘William Vincent, alias Hocus Pocus: a travelling entertainer of the seventeenth century’ Theatre Notebook 54:3 (2000) p. 130; Philip Butterworth ‘Brandon, Feats and Hocus Pocus: Jugglers Three’ in Theatre Notebook: A Journal of the History and Technique of the British Theatre vol. 57:2 (2003) pp. 89–106, 98–9. 209 This is a necessarily condensed account of a complex pattern of social changes taking place over a century or so. 210 John Donne, ‘An Anatomy of the World’ (London: Samuel Macham, 1611) line 205.

209

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 210


211 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene edited by Thomas P. Roche Jr (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) p. 1054. 212 Edwin A. Dawes, The Great Illusionists (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1979) p. 46. 213 Dawes, The Great Illusionists p. 48. 214 See J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) p. 59. 215 Compare, for example, the figure of Dullness in the Dunciad, written by Gay’s friend Alexander Pope. 216 John Gay, Fable XLII ‘The Jugglers’, ll. 6–11 in The Poetical Works edited by G. C. Faber (London: Oxford University Press / Humphrey Milford, 1926) pp. 267–8. 217 Gay ‘The Jugglers’ ll. pp. 15–26. 218 Gay ‘The Jugglers’ ll. pp. 39–42. 219 Gay ‘The Jugglers’ ll. pp. 69–74. 220 Jonathan Swift Miscellanies. The Third Volume (London: for Benjamin Motte and Charles Bathurst, Lawton Gilliver and John Clarke, 1736) pp. 59–62. Gay and Arbuthnot also contributed to this volume, but the Dublin setting makes it almost certain that Swift was indeed the author. 221 Jonathan Swift A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people from being a burthen to their parents, or the country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. (Dublin: S. Harding, 1729) p. 7. 222 Milbourne Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (London: Robert Hale and Co., 1973) p. 83. 223 George Winchester Stone, The London Stage 1660–1800, A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces Part four. 1747–1766 (Carbondale, Ill.: South Illinois University Press, 1960) p. cxcvii. See also pp. cxcviii and 59. 224 General Advertiser 17 January 1749, cited in Stone, London Stage Pt Four p. 91. 225 Such as the anonymous Letter to the Town Concerning the Man and the Bottle (London: 1749). See Stone London Stage Pt Four pp. 90–3. 226 Dudley Bradstreet, The Life and Uncommon Adventures of Capt. Dudley Bradstreet. Being the most Genuine and Extraordinary, perhaps, ever published (Dublin: S. Powell, 1755) p. 334. See also below. 227 Christopher, Illustrated History p. 83. 228 Stone, London Stage Pt Four p. 93.

210

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 211

ENDNOTES

229 Stone, London Stage Pt Four p. 93. 230 The village of Gotham in Nottinghamshire was legendary for the supposed stupidity of its inhabitants. 231 See Christopher, Illustrated History pp. 83–4, Dawes, The Great Illusionists pp. 48–51 and Stone London Stage Pt Four p. 59. 232 Bradstreet, Life, title-page. 233 Bradstreet, Life pp. 249–333. 234 Bradstreet, Life pp. 247–8. 235 Bradstreet, Life p. 304. 236 Bradstreet, Life p. 296. 237 Bradstreet, Life pp. 296–7. 238 Bradstreet, Life p. 334. 239 Bradstreet, Life p. 334 (Although Bradstreet is wrong in his reading of this if, as I suspect, he is referring to the ironic advertisement for Don John de Nasquitine – see above). 240 Stone, London Stage Pt Four p. cxcviii. 241 David Hume, ‘An Essay on Miracles’ (1748) in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. A New Edition (London: A. Millar, 1758). The essay also appeared later in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, a work which Hume revised continually until his death in 1776. 242 Hume, Essays p. 354. 243 Daily Advertiser 17th January 1749, cited in Stone, London Stage Pt Four p. 90. 244 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation translated by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) pp. 133, 136. 245 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1984) pp. 34–5. See also Susan Greenwood, The Nature of Magic. An Anthropology of Consciousness (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005) pp. 1–4. 246 See Charlotte Fell-Smith John Dee (London: Constable and Co. 1909) pp. 3–4 and John Dee Essential Readings edited by Gerald Suster (Great Britain: Crucible, 1986) p. 10. 247 John Collier, Essays on the progress of the vital principle from the vegetable to the animal kingdoms and the soul of man, introductory to contemplations on deity (London: T. Gillett, Nathaniel Scarlett, 1800) pp. 128–9.

211

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 212


248 Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (London: Penguin, 2000) p. 144. 249 Newton’s third law of motion, formulated in Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (1686). 250 Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992) p. 7. 251 Poster for Signor Castelli and his dog Munito. 252 Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous histories, designed for the instruction of children, respecting their treatment of animals (Dublin, 1794) p. 68. 253 Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous histories pp. 72–3. 254 William Frederick Pinchbeck, The Expositor; or Many Mysteries Unravelled. Delineated in a series of letters, between a friend and his correspondent. Comprising the learned pig, invisible lady and acoustic temple, philosophical swan, penetrating spy glasses, optical and magnetic, and various other curiosities on similar principles: also, a few of the most wonderful feats as performed by the art of legerdemain: with some reflections on ventriloquism. (Boston: 1805) Preface ‘To the Public’. 255 Pinchbeck, The Expositor Letter I, from AB to WFP. 256 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: 1817) Chapter XIV. Archived online at http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/biographia. html Accessed 20th June 2005. 257 Jane R. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) p. 13. 258 Advertisement for P. T. Barnum’s 1842 exhibition, cited by Goodall, Performance and Evolution p. 24. Conversely, when George Shaw, the Keeper of the Department of Natural History of the British Museum, received from Australia in 1799 a stuffed duckbilled platypus, it took some time for him and his fellow naturalists to be convinced that this was not simply a hoax: a moleskin with a duck’s bill attached. See Ann Moyal, Platypus: The Extraordinary Story of How a Curious Creature Baffled the World. (New York and London: Allen & Unwin. 2002). 259 And both have been the subject of successful feature films: Ron Howard’s Splash (1984) and Chris Noonan’s Babe (1995) respectively revive the fantasy of the liminal space between human and animal – or fish! 260 Ernst T. A. Hoffmann, ‘The Sand-man’ (1817) from Weird Tales, volume 1, translated by J. T. Bealby (New York: Charles Scribner⬘s Sons, 1885). Online version at http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/sandman.htm Accessed 29th December 2005.

212

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 213

ENDNOTES

261 Pinchbeck, The Expositor Letter IX ‘From A.B. to W.F.P.’ 262 Pinchbeck, Expositor Letter IX ‘From A.B. to W.F.P.’ 263 Pinchbeck, Expositor Letter IX ‘From A.B. to W.F.P.’ 264 Also, confusingly, surnamed Pinchbeck. 265 Sylvio Bedini, ‘The Role of Automata in the History of Technology’ Technology and Culture 5 (winter 1964) reproduced online at http://xroads.virginia.edu/ ~DRBR/b_edini.html Accessed 20th December 2005. 266 Bedini, ‘The Role of Automata’. 267 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation translated by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’ in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–181; N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Philip Auslander, Liveness (London and New York, 1999) and ‘Humanoid Boogie, Reflections on Robotic Performance’, (unpublished paper). 268 Jessica Riskin, ‘The Defecating Duck, or the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life’ Critical Inquiry summer 2003 29:4 p. 602. 269 Vaucanson, Jacques An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton trans. J. T. Desaguliers (London: T. Parker for Stephen Varillon, 1742) p. 21. 270 Riskin, ‘Defecating Duck’ p. 601. 271 Riskin, ‘Defecating Duck’ p. 601. 272 Vaucanson, Account of the Mechanism title page. 273 Friedrich Nicolai, Chronique à travers 1’Allemagne et la Suisse, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1783), vol. 1 p. 284. 274 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin¸Ambassador, Author and Conjuror Written by Himself translated by Lascelles Wraxall (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859; reprinted by T. Werner Laurie Ltd., 1942) p. 140. 275 See Riskin, ‘Defecating Duck’ p. 609 note 18. 276 For a detailed account of von Kempelen’s automaton, see Tom Standage, The Mechanical Turk (London: Penguin, 2002). 277 Standage, The Mechanical Turk p. 52. 278 Standage, The Mechanical Turk p. 229.

213

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 214


279 ‘Eliza’ [Jozef Stefan Institute], ‘ELIZA – a friend you could never have before’ Online at http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html Accessed 15th December 2005. 280 Royal College of Psychiatrists press release 1st July 2003. http://www.rcpsych. ac.uk/press/preleases/pr/pr_445.htm Accessed 15th December 2005. 281 Riskin, ‘Defecating Duck’ p. 623. See also Katie Hafner ‘In an Ancient Game, Computing’s Future’ New York Times 1st August 2002 p. 5. 282 cf Philip Auslander, ‘Humanoid Boogie, Reflections on Robotic Performance’, paper presented at the Centre for Performance Research’s Towards Tomorrow conference (University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2005). 283 Pinchbeck, Expositor Letter IX. 284 Standage, The Mechanical Turk pp. 206–7. 285 Porter Enlightenment p. 422. 286 William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. Collected from the Appearances of Nature. (London 1802; 12th edition 1809). 287 Paley, Natural Theology p. 3. 288 An image which writers on the human condition have been revisiting ever since Paley coined it; see, for example, Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: why the evidence of Evolution reveals a world without design (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). 289 Paley, Natural Theology p. 81. 290 Paley, Natural Theology p. 20. 291 William Blake, ‘Milton’ II:37 line 46 in Complete Writings edited by Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1972) p. 528. 292 William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, 22nd November 1802, in Complete Writings edited by Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1972) p. 816. 293 William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey’ (1798) ll. 96, 101, 103 in Poems Volume 1, edited by John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) p. 360. 294 Riskin, ‘Defecating Duck’ p. 612. 295 See Jackson Fantasy p. 65. My account of the multiple meanings of ‘das Unheimliche’ is indebted to Jackson’s response to Freud. 296 Margaret Iversen, ‘The Uncanny’ review of Michael Kelley The Uncanny (Cologne: Walther König, 2004) in Papers on Surrealism Issue 3 winter/ spring

214

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 215

ENDNOTES

2005, http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal3/ acrobat_files/iversen_review.pdf Accessed 20th July 2005. 297 Christophe Lombardi ‘The Cyborg Magician’ in Visions: the Online Journal of the Art of Magic www.online-visions.com/other/0405christophe.html Accessed 2nd January 2005. 298 Stelarc ‘The Body is Obsolete’, Stelarc website at http://www.stelarc.va.com. au/index2.html Accessed 3rd January 2006. 299 See Hopkins Magic p. 69. Other versions of (essentially) the same trick were ‘The Living Half-woman’ and ‘The Decapitated Princess’. Compare, too, the mythical talking brazen head which was supposed to be owned by the medieval scholar/wizard Roger Bacon. 300 Stelarc et al., ‘Stelarc – Prosthetic Head’ Australian Centre for the Moving Image, website http://www.acmi.net.au/7E8A5C8E6F304A839116C3C74F81440C.htm Accessed 2nd January 2006. At the Centre for Performance Research’s conference ‘Towards Tomorrow’ Conference (Aberystwyth, 2005) Stelarc presented his Prosthetic Head to a large audience of sophisticated Performance Studies scholars in conference mode. The audience responded with a wave of naïve delight. 301 Bernard Beckermann, Theatrical Presentation: Performer, Audience, and Act (London: Routledge, 1990) p. 33. 302 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic; or, How to become a Wizard… Translated and edited, with notes, by Professor Hoffmann [pseud., i.e. Angelo John Lewis] (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1878) p. 43.

303 Marvin Carlson, Performance: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996) p. 54. 304 Michael Kirby, A Formalist Theatre (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987) and ‘On Acting and Not-Acting.’ [1972] in Acting (Re)Considered, edited by Phillip Zarrilli, (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 43–58. 305 Schechner, Performance Studies: an Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) p. 147. 306 Schechner, Performance Studies p. 147. 307 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic; or, How to become a Wizard… Translated and edited, with notes, by Professor Hoffmann [pseud., i.e., Angelo John Lewis] (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1878). 308 ‘Escamotage (conjuring) comes from the Arab word escamote, signifying the little cork ball subsequently known as a muscade (nutmeg), from a fancied resemblance to that fruit. Originally the term Escamotage was applied solely to cup-and-ball conjuring, but it was subsequently used as a comprehensive

215

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 216


term to describe the performance of conjuring tricks generally.’ (RobertHoudin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 42). 309 Hoffman wrote some of the classic nineteenth-century books on magic, books such as Modern Magic, More Magic, Later Magic and Latest Magic. The literary critic Edmund Wilson described these as being ‘a series of treatises in the soundest tradition of British expository writing: dense, comprehensive, exact and ornamented with Latin quotations’ (in Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1950) p. 148. 310 The debate was an ongoing one for Robert-Houdin, who on other occasions does in fact refer to himself as a ‘Prestidigitator’. 311 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 43. 312 This seems to be Robert-Houdin’s own phrase, and it is rather a good one: ‘fictitious magic’ is, perhaps a better phrase than ‘stage magic’ since it acknowledges that not all magic of this kind is performed upon a stage or in a theatre. By implication, however, it leaves open the possibility that there exists another, non-fictitious kind of magic. 313 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 65. 314 Thomas Frost, The Lives of the Conjurors (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876) chapter VI. 315 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work, volume. III, (London: Griffin, Bohn and Company, 1861) p. 104. 316 Mayhew, London Labour vol. III p. 106. 317 Mayhew, London Labour vol. III p. 104. Ramo Samee was a well-known popular entertainer whose career in the US and the UK spanned the years from 1819 until his death in 1850. Described in the Salem Gazette for 5 October 1819 as ‘East Indian’, Samee’s success both contributed to and was a consequence of the rise of the vogue for orientalism in nineteenth-century popular culture. Samee’s act included sword-swallowing and prestidigitation as well as juggling, and he is credited with being the first famous performer of the Needle Swallowing Trick, which he performed at the Garrick Theatre in London. 318 Mayhew, London Labour vol. III p. 105. 319 Mayhew, London Labour vol. III p. 104. 320 Mayhew, London Labour vol. III p. 107.

216

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 217

ENDNOTES

321 Mayhew, London Labour vol. III p. 107. 322 Maskelyne and Cooke’s thirty-year residency at the Egyptian Hall in London began in 1873, but the Hall had been the home of magic and illusion for many years before that. 323 Mayhew also interviews two ‘Street-Conjurors’, who confirm this impression. See London Labour, vol. III pp. 107–113. 324 Mayhew, London Labour, vol. III p. 104. It should be noted that the street conjurors also see ‘dexterity’ as the foundation of their art – although several of the tricks they describe involve dubious bets with the audience. 325 Mayhew, London Labour vol. III p. 107. 326 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 35. 327 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 32. 328 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 36. 329 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 36. 330 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 43. 331 Milbourne Christopher, Magic: A Picture History (New York: Dover 1991. Reprint of Panorama of Magic, 1962) p. 76. 332 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic pp. 29–30. 333 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 29. 334 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 26. 335 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 78. 336 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 29. 337 Christopher, Magic: A Picture History p. 77. 338 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador, Author and Conjuror Written by Himself translated by Lascelles Wraxall (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859; reprinted by T. Werner Laurie Ltd., 1942) pp. 269–70. 339 Elsewhere in his Memoirs (pp. 223–6) Robert-Houdin tells the story of the young woman, slightly disturbed, who was so impressed by the ‘sorcery’ with which he read her mind that she immediately attempted to hire him to put a curse on her enemies. 340 Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic and Science in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) pp. 208–9.

217

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 218


341 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs pp. 320–1. 342 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs p. 327. 343 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs pp. 328–9. 344 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs p. 332. 345 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs p. 332. 346 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs p. 334. 347 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs p. 326. 348 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs p. 335. 349 Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned How to Disappear (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003) p. 141. 350 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs p. 52. 351 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs p. 53. 352 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs pp. 53–4. 353 Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant p. 143. Steinmeyer adds ‘In recent years researchers have discovered a more likely story. A wealthy amateur magician named Mr. David was a friend of Jean Robert’s uncle. He probably provided the youth with the rudiments of the art.’ 354 Oddly, in his mid-life attack on his childhood hero, Harry Houdini ‘unmasked’ all sorts of things about Robert-Houdin (many of them utterly mistakenly) but completely missed this imposture. Houdini never guessed that Torrini was nothing more than a literary construct. 355 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs p. 17. 356 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs p. 18. 357 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations translated by Harry Zorn (London: Pinlico Press, 1999) p. 214. 358 The clip can be viewed online at http://www.mshepley.btinternet.co.uk/ vlady.rm See also Méliès the Magician DVD (Chicago: Facets Multimedia, 2002). 359 Philip Auslander, Liveness (London and New York, 1999) p. 1. 360 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993). 361 Auslander, Liveness, p. 2.

218

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 219

ENDNOTES

362 Marina Warner, ‘Camera Ludica’ in Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes and Marina Warner, Eyes, Lies and Illusions (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004) p. 20. The embedded quotation is from Jim Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003). 363 See, for example, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction. Second edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986) p. 347. 364 Cited by M. Shepley, ‘Méliès and Early Film’ in The Missing Link, http://www.mshepley.btinternet.co.uk/Méliès2.htm Accessed 22nd December 2005. This useful website concentrates on late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century cinema, and gives a very good account of Méliès’ contribution to film-making in this period. It also contains links to clips of many of the extant films discussed. 365 See below, Chapter Seven. 366 For the debate as to whether Kircher or Huygens should be credited with the invention of the Magic Lantern, see the webpages of the Magic Lantern Society at http://www.luikerwaal.com/newframe_uk.htm?/mls_uk.htm Accessed 20th December 2005. 367 Joscelyn Godwin, Athenasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979) p. 83. 368 Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magnae Lucis et Umbrae (Rome, 1646). 369 Marina Warner, ‘Camera Ludica’ in Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes and Marina Warner, Eyes, Lies and Illusions (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004) p. 14. 370 More information about Skladanowski and Magic Lanterns can be found in Deac Rossell ‘Max Skladanowsky’ in Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey ed. Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan, (London: British Film Institute, 1996) Archived online at http://www.victoriancinema.net/skladanowsky.htm Accessed 25th March 2005); Terry Borton, ‘Traditional Holiday Magic Lantern Shows’, published in The Bulletin of The League of Historic American Theaters, (Nov. 1998). Archived online at http://www.magiclanternshows.com/history.htm Accessed 20th September 2005; Janet Tamblin, ‘A Brief History of the Magic Lantern’ (c. 1979), handbill in Bill Douglas Collection, University of Exeter. Full text available online at http://toytheatre.info/Technic/Magic/History.htm Accessed 22nd December 2005; Mannoni, Nekes and Warner, Eyes, Lies and Illusions; and Mervyn Heard, The History of the Phantasmagoria (unpublished Ph.D., University of Exeter, 2001). 371 Tamblin, ‘A Brief History of the Magic Lantern’.

219

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 220


372 Borton, ‘Traditional Holiday Magic Lantern Shows’. 373 Borton, ‘Traditional Holiday Magic Lantern Shows’. 374 Sir David Brewster, cited in Frost Lives of the Conjurors Chapter III. 375 Dan North, ‘Magic and Illusion in Early Cinema’ in Studies in French Cinema; 1: 2 (2001) p. 76. 376 Maskelyne, it is true, was still making good use of ‘Psycho’ at this point – though even he was a bit faded, having been first exhibited twenty years earlier. 377 Cited by M. Shepley, ‘Méliès and Early Film’ website. 378 Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) pp. 45ff. 379 Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema p. 60. The ‘Professor Anderson’ mentioned here is not the famous ‘Wizard of the North’, who had died in 1874 – though it may have been one of his erstwhile assistants, now operating under ‘the Professor’s’ name. 380 Exhibited publicly summer 2005 at the British Library in the exhibition Hey Presto! which commemorated the centenary of the Magic Circle. 381 Another clip from 1896, shown in the same exhibition, features a much more assured J. N. Maskelyne doing his multiple plate-spinning routine. Because of its simplicity, its reliance on physical skill, and its absence of ‘camera trix’ this works surprisingly well on celluloid. 382 Edwin A. Dawes, ‘Devant, David (1868–1941)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004). Archived online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/60049 Accessed 7th September 2005. 383 Houdini’s serious involvement with films did not start until 1918, with The Master Mystery, in which he tried doggedly but unsuccessfully to turn his live show persona into an action hero of the silent screen. However, he was also involved in that early scramble to marry magic and the movies. In the early 1900s (the exact date is unknown) he made a short film – probably about three and a half minutes long – for Pathé-Frères called Merveilleux Exploits du Célèbre Houdini à Paris, fragments of which still exist. The story involves Houdini’s wrongful arrest on a Paris street, followed by (inevitably) his escape from straitjacket, handcuffs and cell. For a more detailed description, see Kenneth Silverman, Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss (New York: HarperCollins, 1996) p. 96. 384 From David Devant. See below. 385 IMDB credits him with 564 separate titles as Director – though a few of these appear to be reissues of the same footage. Even so, 500+ is a conservative

220

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 221

ENDNOTES

estimate: other sources suggest that Méliès had as many as 1200 short films to his name. See North, ‘Magic and illusion in early cinema’, p. 74. 386 Georges Méliès, cited in Georges Sadoul, Georges Méliès (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1970) pp. 106–7. 387 Méliès, cited in North, ‘Magic and illusion in early cinema’ p. 74. 388 K. Jenkins, The Missing Link http://www.kjenkins49.fsnet.co.uk/ Accessed 9th August 2005. 389 Cited M. Shepley in ‘Méliès and Early Films’, The Missing Link http://www.mshepley.btinternet.co.uk/Méliès2.htm Accessed 9th August 2005. 390 ‘A Hypnotist at Work’ was the title of the film for its American release. 391 See Katherine Singer Kovacs ‘Georges Méliès and the Féerie’ in Film Before Griffith ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) pp. 244–57. 392 The féerie was never a pure form. In its early days the term melodrama-féerie was often used to designate these plays. Later on there were, in addition, pantomime-féeries, opéra-féeries and vaudeville-féeries. 393 Tom Gunning, ‘An aesthetic of astonishment: early film and the (in)credulous spectator’ in L. Williams (ed.) Viewing positions: ways of seeing film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 394 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions’ in T. Elsaesser & A. Barker (eds.) Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI 1990). 395 See Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, Grand-Guignol: the French Theatre of Horror (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002) pp. 34–8. 396 John C. Tibbetts, ‘The Voice that Fills the House: Opera Fills the Screen’ in Literature/Film Quarterly, 32: 1 (2004) Archived online at http://www.findarticles .com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200401/ai_n9406989 Accessed 30th March 2005. 397 It is possible that the Lumières produced an 1897 Faust short, but the usually authoritative Internet Movie DataBase has no record of it – nor indeed of any film on the Faust theme by the Lumières. It may be that Tibbetts is thinking of Méliès own Faust et Marguerite. Again, IMDB has no record of a 1904 version of Faust et Marguerite, although M. Shepley, in The Missing Link, affirms that that year Faust et Marguerite ‘featured a synchronised soundtrack of Gounaud’s (sic) opera that was played alongside the projection of the film’. Meanwhile, Jacques Malthête, in the filmography of his book Méliès: Image et Illusions (Paris: Éditions Exporégie, 1996) lists a production in 1902 of Faust aux Enfers with the subtitle Pièce Fantastique en 16 Tableaux. This could well be the twenty-minute adaptation of Gounod to which Tibbett refers. In 1904,

221

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 222


again according to Malthête (but not IMDB), Méliès returned to the Faust theme with Le Damnation de Docteur Faust – which itself may have been either a re-make or a re-release of his own 1898 Le Damnation de Faust! 398 Plot summary written by Edison Films Catalogue. Online version at http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0000301/plotsummary. Accessed 30th March 2005. 399 Fred Nadis, ‘Facing the Divide: Turn of the Century Stage Magicians’ Presentations of Rationalism and the Occult’ Journal of Millennial Studies (winter 2000) p. 1 www.mille.org/publications/winter2000/nadis.PDF Accessed 8th September 2005. 400 M. Shepley, ‘Méliès and Early Films’. 401 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus I.i. 78–84 and I.iv. 105–9. 402 Marina Warner, ‘Camera Ludica’ in Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes and Marina Warner, Eyes, Lies and Illusions (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004) p. 14. 403 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus II.i l.85, in Complete Plays and Poems edited by E.D. Pendry and J. C. Maxwell (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1976) p. 286. 404 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus V. ii l.102 in Complete Plays and Poems p. 320. 405 Chronomedia, http://www.terramedia.co.uk/Chronomedia/years/1909.htm Accessed 9th September 2005. 406 Quoted in Ruth Brandon, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini (London: Mandarin, 1994), p. 52. 407 There is, as far as I can find, no published source for this in any of Shaw’s writings; it appears to be one of the many reported verbal witticisms attributed to him. It is, however, quoted with confidence in reputable popular educational sites such as PBS’s The American Experience Teacher’s Guide (http:// www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/houdini/tguide/ Accessed 30th December 2005) and Massimo Polidoro’s lecture site (http://www.massimopolidoro.com/eng/ lectures/lecfindex.html Accessed 30th December 2005). 408 Talking Birds’ Smoke, Mirrors and the Art of Escapology. http://www. talkingbirds.co.uk/indexes/index2.html Accessed 31st December 2005 and http://www.theatredesign.org.uk/arcdet/xjava.htm Accessed 31st December 2005; Lisa Watts and Brian McClave Escape Mechanism http://www.bbc.co. uk/arts/shootinglive/2002/wattsmcclave/ Accessed 31st December 2005. 409 Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 11. 410 Silverman, Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss (New York: HarperCollins, 1996) p. 107.

222

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 223

ENDNOTES

411 As well as those of Brandon and Silverman mentioned above, authoritative biographies of Houdini include Milbourne Christopher, Houdini: The Untold Story (London: Cassell, 1969); Bernard C Meyer, Houdini: A Mind in Chains A Psychoanalytic Portrait (New York: Dutton, 1976); James Randi and Bert Randolph Sugar Houdini: His Mind and Art (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1976). Adam Phillips Houdini’s Box. On the Arts of Escape (London: Faber and Faber, 2001) and John F. Kasson’s Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: the White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001) are not strictly speaking biographies, but both contain much useful biographical insight. 412 Letter to Theodore Weiss, November 22nd 1913. Reproduced in Frank Koval The Illustrated Houdini Research Diary Parts 1 and 2 (Oldham and Chadderton: Koval, 1992) p. 29. 413 Silverman, Houdini!!! p. 7. 414 Phillips, Houdini’s Box p. 7. 415 Manuscript by Theodore Weiss quoted in Brandon, Life and Many Deaths (p. 8). Brandon retains Theodore’s original spelling. 416 Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 9. 417 See Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 11. 418 Ivan Kalmar, The Trotskys, Freuds and Woody Allens (London: Viking, 1993). 419 He was quite justified in this. Conan Doyle, who became for some while a close friend of Houdini, never felt he understood him and put his inability to do so down to Houdini’s ‘Oriental’ nature, which he shared with ‘our own Disraeli’ (quoted Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 234). 420 Walter F. Prince, in The Enchanted Boundary (Boston: Boston Society for Psychic Research, 1930) p. 152, cited and corrected by Bernard Ernst and Hereward Carrington in Houdini and Conan Doyle: the story of a strange friendship. (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1933) p. 41. 421 He failed – just. He is recorded as the first person to complete an ‘officially recorded, controlled powered flight’ in Australia – an impressive three-anda-half-minute flight at the height of a hundred feet on 18th March 1910 at Digger’s Rest, Victoria. The previous day, however, near Sydney, a racing driver named Fred Custance had flown a Bleriot monoplane for five and a half minutes – but reaching a height of no more than a dozen feet before trying a higher flight in which he lost control and crashed the plane. As Kenneth Silverman says, Custance ‘may not have flown so much as hopped’ (Houdini!!! p. 147).

223

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 224


422 Brandon, Life and Many Deaths. 423 Walter B. Gibson and Morris N. Young, Houdini on Magic (New York: Dover Books, 1953) opposite p. 269. 424 Harry Houdini, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin (New York: Publishers Printing Co., 1908). See also Brian Lead and Roger Woods, Houdini the Myth Maker: the Unmasking of Harry Houdini (Accrington: Caxton Printing, 1987). 425 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Reprinted in Anna Freud (ed.) The Essentials of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) p. 225. 426 Jack Flosso quoted in Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 53. 427 Though opinion differs as to how good a conjuror he was. See Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned How to Disappear (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003) p. 5 ff. for his argument that ‘Houdini was a terrible magician’. 428 Magic Made Easy is reproduced in facsimile in Walter B Gibson, The Original Houdini Scrapbook (New York, London and Sidney: Corwin Sterling and Oak Tree Press, 1977) pp. 79–94. All quotations are taken from the Gibson facsimile. This quotation p. 81. 429 Houdini, Magic Made Easy pp. 85, 87, 82. 430 Houdini, Magic Made Easy pp. 83, 86. 431 Houdini, Magic Made Easy p. 84. 432 Houdini, Magic Made Easy p. 81. 433 Houdini, Magic Made Easy p. 88. 434 Houdini, Magic Made Easy p. 81. 435 Houdini, Magic Made Easy p. 93. 436 Houdini, Magic Made Easy p. 94. 437 The National Cyclopedia of American Biography vol XIV states that Houdini’s duties in his early days included ‘handling the Punch and Judy show, performing a ventriloquial act, acting the clown, and playing cymbals in a band’ (cited in Kovals Illustrated Houdini Research Diary p. 34). Also, according to Webster’s New Biographical Dictionary (Merriam-Webster Inc. Springfield, Mass. 1983) he was ‘a trapeze artist’ (p. 490), though this is more likely a reference to one of the stories about his childhood persona, ‘Ehrich, Prince of the Air’. 438 E. T. Kirby, ‘The Shamanistic Origins of Popular Entertainments’ The Drama Review vol. 18 no. 1 (March, 1974) pp. 7–8.

224

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 225

ENDNOTES

439 Poster advertising the Houdinis’ act, printed in Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan p. 90. 440 Brandon, Life and Many Deaths pp. 44–45. 441 Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 37. 442 Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 51. 443 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Edge of the Unknown (London: John Murray, 1930) p. 2, quoted by Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 153. 444 Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man p. 76. 445 Publicity for Houdini, cited in Phillips, Houdini’s Box p. 109. 446 Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 140. 447 Phillips, Houdini’s Box p. 119. 448 Kasson Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man pp. 79, 154. 449 Local poster from Houdini’s tour of northern Britain, 1913–14. 450 The Los Angeles Record of 1st December 1915 chronicled a strange confrontation between Houdini and the then world heavyweight boxing champion Jess Willard ‘precipitated by Willard’s gruff refusal to comply with a friendly request made by Houdini that he act on a committee to watch the performer’s act from the stage.’ Quoted in Walter B. Gibson, The Original Houdini Scrapbook (New York, London and Sidney: Corwin Sterling and Oak Tree Press, 1977) p. 167. 451 Houdini, Publicity poster, reproduced in Gibson, Houdini Scrapbook p. 100. 452 Houdini, Publicity poster, reproduced in Gibson, Houdini Scrapbook p. 35. 453 Houdini, Publicity poster, reproduced in Gibson, Houdini Scrapbook p. 34. 454 Houdini, Publicity poster, reproduced in Gibson, Houdini Scrapbook p. 38. 455 This gender imbalance, incidentally, could be read in more than one way. It could be a testament to the secure grip which patriarchy has always had on representations of power. Conversely, it could signal one of those repressed anxieties about women which patriarchy so often throws up: a fear of the female as ‘other’, a fear that the feminine may really be possessed of some form of darker power and that to represent this however light-heartedly may be dangerous. 456 Although one of Houdini’s foremost chroniclers, Walter S. Gibson, who knew many of Houdini’s friends and family noted (but on what evidence?) that the illusionist ‘regarded this as one of his most difficult escapes’ (The Houdini Scrapbook p. 39).

225

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 226


457 Silverman, Houdini!! p. 97. 458 Michael Billington, ‘After 22 days of turning starvation into a stunt, the puzzle of David Blaine’s ordeal remains – why?’ The Guardian, 27th September 2003. 459 Gibson, Houdini Scrapbook p. 101. 460 Reproduced in Gibson, Houdini Scrapbook p. 39. 461 Quoted in Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 153. 462 See Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man p. 141ff. 463 National Cyclopaedia of American Biography vol. 4 cited Koval Research Diary p. 34. See also Phillips Houdini’s Box p. 123. 464 J. C. Cannell, The Secrets of Houdini (New York: Dover Publication, 1973) p. 22. 465 Cold reading is the generic term referring to the techniques used by many pseudo-psychics to persuade a subject that the reader, through some sort of mysterious special ability, knows supposedly hidden details about him or her. 466 Cited in Phillips, Houdini’s Box p. 123. 467 See, for example, James Hewat Mackenzie, Spirit Intercourse: its theory and practice (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1916). 468 Walter B. Gibson and Morris N. Young, Houdini on Magic (New York: Dover Books, 1953) p. 124. 469 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Study in Scarlet’ in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) p. 33. 470 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event…’ Strand Magazine. An Illustrated Monthly December 1920 pp. 463–8. 471 Cited in Phillips, Houdini’s Box p. 126 and Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 240. 472 Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes p. 111. 473 Ernst and Carrington, Houdini and Conan Doyle p. 175. 474 For a detailed recent account of the Fox sisters, see Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead; Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004). For a contemporary account, see Reuben Briggs Davenport, The Death-Blow to Spiritualism: being the true story of the Fox sisters, as revealed by authority of Margaret Fox Kane and Catherine Fox Jencken. (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1888).

226

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 227

ENDNOTES

475 Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant p. 54. 476 P. T. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World. An account of humbugs, delusions, impositions, quackeries, deceits and deceivers generally, in all ages. (New York: Carleton, 1866.) pp. 74–5. 477 Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant p. 57. 478 Barnum, The Humbugs of the World. p. 135–6. 479 J. N. Maskelyne, ‘My Reminiscences’ Strand Magazine 39 (1910) pp. 17–24 480 Barnum, The Humbugs of the World. p. 137. 481 One of the most dramatic and poignant accounts of such a crisis is Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (London: Heinemann, 1907). 482 Hannah Goff, ‘Science and the Séance’, article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ magazine/4185356.stm Accessed 5th September 2005. The programme was broadcast on BBC2, 31st August 2005. 483 Cited in Ronald W. Clark, Edison – The Man Who Made the Future (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977). 484 D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless, Phone Calls from the Dead (London: New English Library, 1979) pp. 136–9. 485 John Logie Baird, Sermons, Soap and Television – Autobiographical Notes (London: Royal Television Society, 1988) pp. 68–9. 486 Margaret Cheney Tesla: Man Out Of Time (New York: Dorset, 1981) p. 151. 487 Lodge, Sir Oliver My Philosophy. Representing my views on the many functions of the ether of space. (London: Ernest Benn, 1933). 488 See Oliver Lodge, Raymond. Or Life and Death (London: Methuen & Co., 1916). 489 Collected in R. G. Medhurst (ed.) Crookes and the spirit world: a collection of writings by or concerning the work of Sir William Crookes in the field of psychical research. (London: Souvenir, 1972). 490 Sir William Crookes, Presidential Address to the British Association, 1898. 491 Michael Faraday, Letter to The Times 30th June 1853; ‘Mental Education’, Lecture to Royal Institution, 6th May 1854. 492 Alexander Graham Bell, Letter to Mabel Hubbard [Bell], 26th September 1875, in The Alexander Graham Bell Collection in the Library of Congress. Online version at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/magbell: @field(DOCID+@lit(magbell03400114)) Accessed 5th September 2005.

227

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 228


493 Houdini, Miracle-Mongers and their Methods: A Complete Exposé (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993) pp. 96–7. 494 Similar debates continue to simmer. On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, 2nd October 2001, Sue MacGregor chaired a debate arising out of ‘a stir in the scientific community because of claims made in a booklet [of Royal Mail stamps issued to commemorate the Nobel prize] that telepathy, and other paranormal activity, will one day be explained by modern physics.’ The claim was made by Professor Brian Josephson, professor of physics at Cambridge University, and a winner of the Nobel prize for physics himself – no scientific lightweight. Among Josephson’s critics on the programme was magician James Randi. 495 Edward Carpenter, Oh What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me! (St. Alban’s: Paladin, 1976) pp. 11, 19. 496 Ernst and Carrington, Houdini and Conan Doyle, p. 175. 497 Kenneth Silverman, Houdini!!! The career of Ehrich Weiss (New York: HarperCollins, 1996) p. 280. 498 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ in Simulacra and Simulation trans. Sheila Fariah Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) p. 1. 499 Interview in Radio Times 26 March–1 April 2005 p. 35. 500 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986) p. xxiv. 501 Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick, Cultural theory: the key concepts (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) p. 294. 502 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’ New Left Review 146 (1984) pp. 53–92. 503 John Storey (ed.), Cultural theory and Popular Culture. A Reader 2nd edition (Harlow: Longman Pearson, 1998) p. 347. 504 Harry Blackstone Jr, with Charles and Regina Reynolds, The Blackstone Book of Magic and Illusion (New York: Newmarket Press, 1985) p. 64. 505 Jerry Haendiges, Vintage Radio Logs http://otrsite.com/logs/logb1020.htm. Accessed 2nd January 2006. A large selection of these radio shows are reproduced on José Antonio Gonzalez (ed.) TLPP Magic CD 3 (The Learned Pig Project, 2005). 506 See above, Chapter Seven. 507 Anonymous article on MagicWeb Channel http://www.magicwebchannel. com/hall_wilson.htm. Accessed 2nd January 2006.

228

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 229

ENDNOTES

508 See Introduction. 509 In marked contrast, during this same period the South American illusionist Richiardi, who used a buzz saw for the illusion in his live shows, retained and emphasized all the horror of the routine. His son, Richiardi, Jr., continued the act with equal effect. A detailed account of Richiardi’s sawing can be found in Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale, Magic and Meaning (Seattle: Hermetic Press, 1995) pp. 90–93. 510 James Randi, The James Randi Educational Foundation, http://www. randi.org Accessed 4th January 2006. 511 Storer, Cultural Theory p. 346. 512 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: 1817) Chapter XIV. Archived online at http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/ biographia.html Accessed 20th June 2005. 513 Pattie, F. A. Mesmer and Animal Magnetism: A Chapter in the History of Medicine. Unpublished manuscript. Lexington, KY 1989. 514 Robert Silverberg, Scientists and Scoundrels: A Book of Hoaxes (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965) Archived online at Questia website, http:// www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=14913056 Accessed 4th January 2006. 515 In some other European countries, such as Norway and Sweden, it is banned altogether. 516 Howarth v Green [2001] All England Law Reports (D). 517 The phrase is used in the programme for the show. 518 Some social psychology experiments have suggested, that, for example, ‘people with a competitive disposition were more likely to compete in a game after subliminal exposures to competitive words’. See S. L. Neuberg, ‘Behavioral implications of information presented outside of conscious awareness: The effect of subliminal presentation of trait information on behavior in the prisoner’s dilemma game’, Social Cognition, 6, (1988) pp. 207–230. This seems a very long way from the kinds of targeted precision implied by Brown’s routine. 519 Elsewhere Derren Brown presents himself very much as Enlightenment sceptic, however. His TV special Messiah (broadcast on Channel 4, 10th January 2005), in which he attempted to pass himself off as the real thing to various American New Age and charismatic Christian groups carried on the Houdini/ James Randi tradition of debunking mysticism. 520 David Blaine, Mysterious Stranger (London: Channel 4 Books, 2002) p. 78.

229

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 230


521 Quoted in Magic Times 36: 1082 (15th December 2000) http://www. magictimes.com/archives/2000/2000-12_11-17.htm Accessed 31st December 2005. 522 Contributors to the TalkMagic forum at http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ ftopic2099-0-asc-15.php Posted 9th November 2004 and 28th November 2004. Accessed 9th June 2005. 523 Contributors to the TalkMagic forum at http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ ftopic2099-0-asc-15.php. Posted 9th November, 28th November and 30th July 2004 Accessed 9th June 2005. 524 Contributor to the TalkMagic forum at http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ ftopic2099-0-asc-30.php Posted 3rd May 2005 Accessed 9th June 2005. 525 Blaine’s fee for the stunt was reported in the media at $600,000. See James Doherty, ‘After 44 days, Blaine’s out of his box’ The Scotsman Monday 20th October 2003. Archived online at http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id= 1158142003 Accessed 5th September 2005. 526 Doherty, ‘After 44 days, Blaine’s out of his box’. 527 Fiona McCade, ‘Maybe Blaine had the right idea after all’ The Scotsman 20th October 2003. 528 Michael Billington, ‘After 22 days of turning starvation into a stunt, the puzzle of David Blaine’s ordeal remains – why?’ The Guardian 27th September 2003. 529 The Independent 20th October 2003. 530 See Doherty, ‘After 44 days, Blaine’s out of his box’. All these explanations were seriously proposed. 531 Marie Blood, interview in New York Post 13th April 1999, p. 14. 532 Blaine Mysterious Stranger p. 88. 533 Blaine Mysterious Stranger p. 159. 534 Cited in Blaine, Mysterious Stranger p. 159. 535 Blaine Mysterious Stranger p. 160. 536 Blaine Mysterious Stranger p. 165. 537 The Catholic Encyclopaedia Archived online at http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/13795a.htm Accessed 9th June 2005. 538 David Blaine, interviewed in video Above the Below, directed by Harmony Korine (Video Collection Int. Ltd., 2003).

230

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 231

ENDNOTES

539 Quoted in Fiona McCade, ‘Maybe Blaine had the right idea after all’ The Scotsman 20th October 2003. 540 Heinrick Heine, Works, translated by Charles Leland. (London: Heinemann, 1893) p. 130. 541 See William A. Hammond, Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous Derangement (New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1876) Chapter XIV. Online at http://www.hutch.demon.co.uk/fasting_girl.htm Accessed 4th January 2006. 542 In one end-of-year media poll, Blaine was voted the biggest failure of 2003. ‘One in four Britons ranked the American illusionist as the top flop of the last 12 months for his 44-day starvation stunt. He ranked higher than ousted Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, Eurovision duo Jemini and the entire Australian nation in a poll of 1000 people to find the failures of 2003.’ Edinburgh Evening News 29th December 2003. Archived online at http://news.scotsman. com/topics.cfm?tid=577&id=1418592003 Accessed 5th September 2005. 543 Burger and Neale, Magic and Meaning p. 98. 544 Blaine, Mysterious Stranger pp. 116–7. 545 Fortean Times, July 2004, p. 78. 546 ibid. 547 Robert Forman, Grassroots Spirituality: What it is, Why it is here, Where it is going (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004) pp. 17–18. Reviewed by William S. Haney II in Consciousness, Literature and the Arts 6:1 (April 2005) http://www.aber.ac.uk/cla/archive/forman.html Accessed 3rd May 2006. 548 Jennifer Harper, ‘Most Americans Take the Bible Stories Literally’ Washington Times, 17th February 2004. Archived online at http://www. washtimes.com/national/20040216-113955-2061r.htm. Accessed 12th January 2006. The sample was relatively small (just over 1,000 respondents) but other surveys have produced similar figures. 549 The Times 9th July 2005. 550 Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats (London: Picador, 2004). 551 Forman, Grassroots Spirituality p. 132. 552 Francis Wheen, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. A Short History of Modern Delusions (London: HarperCollins, 2004) pp. 5–6. 553 Richard Koch and Chris Smith, ‘The Fall of Reason’ New Scientist 190: 2557 (24th June 2006) p. 25.

231

Footnote.qxd

4/2/07

6:36 PM

Page 232


554 Jack Phoenix, ‘The Modern Mentalist’ in Fortean Times 185 (July 2004) pp. 28–32. 555 David Sutton, ‘Bodyguard of Lies’ in Fortean Times 185 (July 2004) pp. 38–45. Gordon Rutter, ‘Magic Goes to War’ in Fortean Times 185 (July 2004) pp. 46–50. 556 Andreas Hergovich, ‘The effect of pseudo-psychic demonstrations as dependent on belief in paranormal phenomena and suggestibility’, Personality and Individual Differences 36 (2004) p. 378. 557 Edmund Wilson, ‘John Mulholland and the Art of Illusion’, in Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1950) pp. 147–152.

232

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 233

Bibliography Adorno, Theodore, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974). Ady, Thomas, A Candle in the Dark shewing the divine cause of the distractions of the whole nation of England and of the Christian world (London: Robert Ibbotson 1655). Anon, ‘The Westcar Papyrus’, http://www.magicandillusion.com/libr/orig/west/ west01.html Accessed 16th August 2005. Anon, Breslaw’s last legacy; or, the magical companion: containing all that is curious, pleasing, entertaining,… London, 1784. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO Accessed 7th March 2005. Anon, London unmask’d: or the new town spy. Exhibiting a striking picture of the world as it goes. In a ramble through the regions of novelty… in the cities of London and Westminster,… By the man in the moon. London, [1784?]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO Accessed 7th March 2005. Anon, Review of Monsieur Philippe’s Modern Miracles at the Strand Theatre London 1846 in The Times Tuesday April 14 1846 p. 5. Anon, Tarlton’s Jests (1611, reprinted London: London Shakespeare Society, 1844). Anon, The History of the Famous Bottle Conjuror in the year 1748–9. Being the advertisements that appeared in all the public papers of the period relative to that… imposition (London: 1804) Anon, Third Dynasty, http://www.crystalinks.com/thirdynasty.html Accessed 16th August 2005. Astley, Philip, Natural magic: or, physical amusements revealed (London, 1785). Archived online at Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. Auslander, Philip, ‘Against Ontology: Making Distinctions Between the Live and Mediatized’ Performance Research 2:3 (1997) pp. 50–55. Auslander, Philip, ‘Humanoid Boogie, Reflections on Robotic Performance’, paper presented at the Centre for Performance Research’s Towards Tomorrow conference (University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2005). Auslander, Philip, Liveness (London and New York, 1999). Bailey, Peter, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: CUP, 1998).

233

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 234


Baird, John Logie, Sermons, Soap and Television – Autobiographical Notes (London: Royal Television Society, 1988). Barnouw, Erik, The Magician and the Cinema (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Barnum, P. T., The humbugs of the world. An account of humbugs, delusions, impositions, quackeries, deceits and deceivers generally, in all ages. (New York: Carleton, 1866). Barthes, Roland, Mythologies Selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers (St Alban’s: Paladin, 1972). Barton, Tamsyn S., Power and Knowledge. Astrology, Physiognomics and Medicine under the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation translated by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Bawcutt, N. W., ‘William Vincent, alias Hocus Pocus: a travelling entertainer of the seventeenth century’ Theatre Notebook 54:3 (2000) pp. 130–8. Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher, The Beggars Bush (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1647). Beckermann, Bernard, Theatrical Presentation: Performer, Audience, and Act (London: Routledge. 1990). Bedini, Sylvio, ‘The Role of Automata in the History of Technology’ Technology and Culture 5 (Winter 1964). Online version at http://xroads.virginia.edu/ ~DRBR/b_edini.html Accessed 20th December 2005. Bell, Alexander Graham, The Alexander Graham Bell Collection in the Library of Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/magbell:@field (DOCID+@lit(magbell03400114 Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations translated by Harry Zorn (London: Pinlico Press, 1999). Bevington, David, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). Billington, Michael, ‘After 22 days of turning starvation into a stunt, the puzzle of David Blaine⬘s ordeal remains - why?’ The Guardian 27th September 2003. Blackstone, Harry Jr., with Charles and Regina Reynolds, The Blackstone Book of Magic and Illusion (New York: Newmarket Press, 1985). Blaine, David, Mysterious Stranger (London: Channel 4 Books, 2002). Blake, William, Complete Writings edited by Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1972).

234

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 235

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction. Second edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). Borton, Terry, ‘Traditional Holiday Magic Lantern Shows,’ published in the bulletin of The League of Historic American Theaters, Nov. 1998. Reprinted at http://www. magiclanternshows.com/history.htm Accessed 20th September 2005. Bowker, John (ed.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Bradstreet, Dudley, The Life and Uncommon Adventures of Capt. Dudley Bradstreet. Being the most Genuine and Extraordinary, perhaps, ever published (Dublin: S. Powell, 1755). Brandon, Ruth, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1994). Brauer, Jerald C., (ed.), Westminster Dictionary of Church History (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Westminster Press, 1971). Brewster, Sir David, Natural Magic (London: John Murray, 1832). Brown, Gary and Michael Edwards, ‘Dusty Tomes: A Guide to the History of Magic’, in Magical Past-Times: The On-Line Journal of Magic History. http://illusionata.com/mpt/view.php?id=39&type=articles (2004). Accessed 7th August 2005. Browne, Sir Thomas, Pseudodoxia Epidemica edited by Robin Robbins. 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Brunning, Alizon, ‘Jonson⬘s Romish Foxe: Anti-Catholic Discourse in Volpone.’ Early Modern Literary Studies 6.2 (September, 2000) 4.1–32 Archived online at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-2/brunvol.htm Accessed 15th January 2006. Burger, Eugene and Robert E. Neale, Magic and Meaning (Seattle: Hermetic Press Ltd. 1995). Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1978; revised edition 1996; reprinted Aldershot: Ashgate Press 2002). Burke, Peter What Is Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). Burling, William J., A Checklist of New Plays and Entertainments on the London Stage, 1700–1737 (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses 1993). Busby, Sian, ‘A Wonderful Little Girl’: The True Story of Sarah Jacob, the Welsh Fasting Girl (London; Short Books, 2003). Butterworth, Philip ‘Brandon, Feats and Hocus Pocus: Jugglers Three’ in Theatre Notebook: A Journal of the History and Technique of the British Theatre vol 57:2 (2003) pp. 89–106.

235

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 236


Butterworth, Philip, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Cannell, J. C., The Secrets of Houdini (New York: Dover Publications 1973). Carlson, Marvin, Performance: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996). Carpenter, Edward, Oh What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me! (St. Alban’s: Paladin, 1976). Carroll, Charles Michael, The Great Chess Automaton (New York: Dover Publications, 1975). Catholic Encyclopaedia Archived online at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/ 13795a.htm Accessed 9th June 2005. Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage, volume 4, (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1923). Chaudhuri, Una, ‘Zoo Stories: “Boundary Work” in Theater History’ in Peter Holland and W. B. Worthen (eds), Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) pp. 136–150. Cheney, Margaret, Tesla, Man Out Of Time (New York: Dorset, 1981). Cheshire, D. F., Music Hall in Britain (Newton Abbott: David and Charles 1974). Christopher, Milbourne, Houdini: The Untold Story (London: Cassell 1969). Christopher, Milbourne, Magic: A Picture History (New York: Dover 1991. Reprint of Panorama of Magic, 1962). Christopher, Milbourne, The Illustrated History of Magic (London: Robert Hale and Co., 1973). Chronomedia, http://www.terramedia.co.uk/Chronomedia/years/1909.htm Accessed 9th September 2005. Clarke, John Algernon, ‘Magic, White’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica 9th Edition (Edinburgh: Algernon and Charles Black, 1875–1889). Clarke, Ronald W., Edison - The Man Who Made the Future (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977). Clébert, J. P., The Gypsies translated by Charles Duff (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Clulee, Nicholas, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion, (London and New York: Routledge 1988). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria (London: 1817) Chapter XIV. Archived online at http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/biographia.html Accessed 20th June 2005.

236

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 237

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Collier, John, Essays on the progress of the vital principle from the vegetable to the animal kingdoms and the soul of man, introductory to contemplations on deity (London: T. Gillett, Nathaniel Scarlett, 1800). Connor, Steven, ‘Sleights of Voice: Ventriloquism, Magic and The Harry Price Collection’ (talk given to the Friends of the University Library. Archived online at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/skc/hpc/ Accessed 8th June 2004). Connor, Steven, Dumbstruck. A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Cornford, Francis The Origin of Attic Comedy, (London: Edward Arnold, 1914). Covell, Alan Carter, Folk Art and Magic: Shamanism in Korea (New Jersey: Hollym Corporation, 1988). Crasson, Sara, ‘Magic History and Magical Myths: The Historian⬘s Challenge’, http://illusionata.com/mpt/view.php?id=77&type=articles (1999) Accessed 20th January 2006. D’Avenant, William, The Long Vacation in London (London, 1697). Daly, Ann, ‘Performative Criticism’ http://www.anndaly.com/educator/syllperfcrit.html Accessed 25th February 2005. Dando, John and Harry Runt, Maroccus Extaticus. Or, Bankes’ Bay Horse in a Trance. A Discourse set downe in a merry Dialogue, between Bankes and his beast: Anatomizing some abuses and bad trickes of this age (London: Cuthbert Burby. 1595). Davenport, Anne and John Salisse, A Candid View of Maskelyne’s, 1916–17 (Leicester: John Davenport, 1995). Davenport, Reuben Briggs, The Death-Blow to Spiritualism: being the true story of the Fox sisters, as revealed by authority of Margaret Fox Kane and Catherine Fox Jencken. (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1888.). Davis, Erik, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York: Three Rivers, 1998). Dawes, Edwin A., Isaac Fawkes. Fame and Fable (Anlaby: author, 1979). Dawes, Edwin A., The Great Illusionists (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1979). Dawes, Edwin A., Vonetta, Mistress of Mystery (Anlaby: author, 1982). Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker: why the Evidence of Evolution reveals a World without Design (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). De Zoete, Beryl, Dance and Magic Drama in Ceylon (London: Faber, 1957).

237

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 238


Decremps, Henri, The Conjuror Unmasked or La Magie Blanche Dévoilée: Being a Clear and Full Explanation of all the Surprizing Performances Exhibited as Well in this Kingdom as on the Continent, By the most eminent and dexterous Professors of Sleight of Hand… translated from the French of Mounsieur Decremps (London: Thomas Denton 1785). Dee, John, Essential Readings edited by Gerald Suster (Great Britain: Crucible, 1986). Dee, John, The Compendious Rehearsal of John Dee made unto the two Honourable Commissioners, (London: 1592). Doherty, James,‘After 44 days, Blaine’s out of his box’ The Scotsman Monday 20th October 2003. Archived online at http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id= 1158142003 Accessed 5th September 2005. Donne, John, ‘An Anatomy of the World’ (London: Samuel Macham, 1611). Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, ‘Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event…’ Strand Magazine. An Illustrated Monthly (December, 1920) pp. 463–8 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, The Edge of the Unknown (London: John Murray, 1930). Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, The History of Spiritualism (London: Cassell and Co., 1926). Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). Edgar, Andrew and Peter Sedgwick, Cultural theory: the key concepts (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Edison Films Catalogue. Archived online at http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0000301/ plotsummary Accessed 30th March 2005. Eliade, Mircea, Myth and Reality. Trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy Trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). ‘Eliza’ [Jozef Stefan Institute] ‘ELIZA – a friend you could never have before’ Online at http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html Accessed 15th December 2005. Elliott, J. K. (ed.), The Apocryphal New Testament. A Collection of Apocryphal Literature in an English Translation based on M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Ennemoser, Joseph, The History of Magic, to which is added an appendix of the most remarkable and best authenticated stories of Apparitions, Dreams, Second

238

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 239

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sight, Somnambulism, Predictions, Divination, Witchcraft, Vampires, Faeries, Table-turning and Spirit-Rapping translated from the German by William Howitt, selected by Mary Howitt. 2 volumes. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854). Ernst, Bernard M. L. and Hereward Carrington, Houdini and Conan Doyle: the story of a strange friendship. (London: Hutchinson, 1933). Fell, John L. (ed.), Film Before Griffith (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983). Fell-Smith, Charlotte, John Dee (London: Constable and Co., 1909). Fischer, Lucy, ‘The Lady Vanishes: Women, Magic and the Movies’ in John L. Fell, (ed.), Film Before Griffith (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983) pp. 339–354 Flaherty, Gloria, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Frazer, James, The Golden Bough, (London: Macmillan 1911–15). Freud, Anna (ed.), The Essentials of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Frost, Thomas, The Lives of the Conjurors (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876) Archived online at http://thelearnedpig.com.pa/magos/books/frost/index.html Accessed 15th January 2006 Gaebelein, Frank E. and J. D. Douglas (eds), The Expositor’s Bible Commentary Twelve volumes (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing 1976–1996). Gay, John, The Poetical Works edited by G. C. Faber (London: Oxford University Press/Humphrey Milford, 1926). Geis, Gilbert and Ivan Bunn, A Trial of Witches: a seventeenth-century witchcraft prosecution (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Gibson, Walter B. and Morris N. Young, Houdini on Magic (New York: Dover Books 1953). Gibson, Walter B., The Original Houdini Scrapbook (New York, London and Sidney: Corwin Sterling and Oak Tree Press, 1977). Gill, Robert, Magic as a Performing Art (London and New York: Bowker, College of Librarianship Wales Bibliographies 1976). Godwin, Joscelyn, Athenasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979). Goff, Hannah, ‘Science and the Séance’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/ 4185356.stm Accessed 5th September 2005.

239

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 240


Goldin, Horace, It’s Fun to be Fooled (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1937). Gonzalez, José Antonio (ed.), The Learned Pig Project website http:// thelearnedpig.com.pa Accessed 15th January 2006. Gonzalez, José Antonio (ed.), TLPP Magic CD 3 (The Learned Pig Project, 2005). Gonzalez, José Antonio (ed.), The Best of TLP E-Zine (Panama: Learned Pig Publications, 2003). Goodall, Jane R., Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Gosse, Edmund, Father and Son (London: Heinemann, 1907). Graham, Geoffrey, papyrus Westcar website http://www.rostau.org.uk/WESTCAR/ PURPOSE.HTM#anchor688833 Accessed 16th August 2005. Greenwood, Susan, The Nature of Magic. An Anthropology of Consciousness (Oxford and New York: Berg 2005). Griffith, Eva, ‘Banks, William (fl. 1591–1637).’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1292 Accessed 12th August 2005. Gunning, Tom, ‘An aesthetic of astonishment: early film and the (in)credulous spectator’ in L. Williams (ed.), Viewing positions: ways of seeing film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995). Gunning, Tom, ‘The Cinema of Attractions’ in T. Elsaesser & A. Barker (eds), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI 1990). Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Haendiges, Jerry, Vintage Radio Logs http://otrsite.com/logs/logb1020.htm Accessed 2nd January 2006 Hall, Trevor H., A Bibliography of Books on Conjuring in English 1580–1850 (Lepton: Palmyra Press 1957). Hall, Trevor H., Old Conjuring Books: A Bibliographical and Historical Study with a, Supplementary Check-List (London: Duckworth 1972). Hammond, Paul, Marvellous Méliès (London: Gordon Fraser 1974). Hammond, William A., Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous Derangement (New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1876). Archived online at http:// www.hutch.demon.co.uk/fasting_girl.htm Accessed 20th June 2006. Hand, Richard J. and Michael Wilson, Grand-Guignol: the French Theatre of Horror (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002).

240

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 241

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harper, Jennifer, ‘Most Americans Take the Bible Stories Literally’ Washington Times, 17th February 2004. Archived online at http://www.washtimes.com/ national/20040216-113955-2061r.htm Accessed 12th January 2006. Harrison, Jane, Ancient Art and Ritual (New York: Henry Holt, 1913). Hart, Peter, ‘Using Writing to Promote Learning’, University Times (University of Pittsburgh) 35:7 (November 2002). http://www.pitt.edu/utimes/issues/35/ 021121/13.html Accessed 25th February 2005. Hay, Henry, The Amateur Magician’s Handbook, 4th edition (Edison NJ: Castle Books. 1982). Heard, Mervyn, ‘The History of the Phantasmagoria’ Unpublished Ph.D., Exeter University, 2001). Hebdige, Dick, ‘Postmodernism and “The Other Side”’ in John Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. A Reader Second edition (Harlow: Longman Pearson, 1998). Heine, Heinrich Works, translated by Charles Leland. (London: Heinemann, 1893). Herbert, Stephen and Luke McKernan, Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey (London: British Film Institute, 1996). Hergovich, Andreas, ‘The effect of pseudo-psychic demonstrations as dependent on belief in paranormal phenomena and suggestibility’ in Personality and Individual Differences 36:2 January 2004 pp. 365–380. Online version available at http:// www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V9F-48761M2H&_user=10&_handle=V-WA-A-W-WA-MsSAYVA-UUW-U-AABDDCAEBEAABCBBWDBE-CCAZEUDUB-WA-U&_fmt=full&_coverDate=01%2F31% 2F2004&_rdoc=10&_orig=browse&_srch=%23toc%235897%232004%239996 39997%23474672!&_cdi=5897&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_url Version=0&_userid=10&md5=c79b93ff2be4045220b4e0632a2d2af6 Accessed 19th December 2005. Highfill, Philip H., Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London 1660–1800 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978). Hill, Thomas, A Book of Elizabethan Magic. Thomas Hill’s Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions (1567) edited by Thomas Ross (Regensburg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1974). Hippolytus, Philosophumena, or the Refutation of all Heresies. Formerly attributed to Origen, but now to Hippolytus, Bishop and Martyr, who flourished about 220 A.D. trans. F. Legge (London and New York: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1921) pp. 92–103.

241

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 242


‘Hocus Pocus Junior’ [William Vincent?], Hocus Pocus Junior The anatomy of legerdemain. Or, The art of iugling set forth in his proper colours, fully, plainly, and exactly; so that an ignorant person may thereby learn the full perfection of the same, after a little practise. Unto each trick is added the figure, where it is needfull for instruction. 3rd edition (London: Printed by I. D[awson] for R. M[ab] and are to be sold by Francis Grove at his shop upon Snow-hill, neer the Sarazens-head, 1638). Hoffman, Walter, The Menomini Indians (Washington: Government Printing Office 1896). Hoffmann, Ernst T. W., ‘The Sand-man’ (1817) from Weird Tales, volume 1, translated by J. T. Bealby (New York: Charles Scribner⬘s Sons, 1885). Online version at http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/sandman.htm Accessed 29th December 2005. Holland, Peter and W. B. Worthen (eds), Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Hopkins, Albert A. (ed.), Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography (New York: Munn/Scientific American, 1898) Reprinted unaltered as Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography (New York: Dover Publications, 1976). Houdini, Harry, Miracle-Mongers and their Methods: A Complete Exposé (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993). Houdini, Harry, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin (New York: Publishers Printing Co., 1908). http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO Accessed 7th April 2005. Humdrum, Humphrey, Mother Midnight⬘s comical pocket-book: or, a bone for the criticks. Being a sure and certain cure for the hip… wrote… by… Humphrey Humdrum, Esq. London, [1753]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO Accessed 7th April 2005. Hume, David, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. A New Edition (London: A. Millar, 1758). Iversen, Margaret, ‘The Uncanny’ Papers of Surrealism 3 (Winter/Spring 2005), Archived online at http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/ journal3/acrobat_files/iversen_review.pdf Accessed 20th July 2005. Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981). James, I., Daemonologie (Edinburgh: R. Waldegrave, 1597). Jameson, Fredric, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’ New Left Review 146 (1984) pp. 53–92.

242

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 243

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jay, Ricky, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (London: Hale, 1987). Jones, Warren H. and Leonard Zusne, Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989). Jonson, Ben, The Complete Poems edited by George Parfitt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). Jonson, Ben, Works ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1925–53). Journal of the House of Lords: volume 1: 1509–1577 (1802), p. 728. Archived online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=31838 Accessed 19th January 2006. Kalmar, Ivan, The Trotskys, Freuds and Woody Allens (London: Viking, 1993). Kant, Immanuel, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone trans. Theodore M. Greene (New York: Harber and Bros, 1960). Kasson, John F., Houdini, Tarzan, and the perfect man: the white male body and the challenge of modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). Kift, Dagmar, The Victorian Music Hall. Culture Class, Conflict translated by Roy Kift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Kirby, E.T., ‘The Shamanistic Origins of Popular Entertainments’ The Drama Review 18:1 (1974) pp. 5–15. Kirby, Michael, ‘On Acting and Not-Acting.’ [1972] in Acting (Re)Considered, edited by Phillip Zarrilli, (London: Routledge. 1995) pp. 43–58. Kirby, Michael, A Formalist Theatre (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). Kircher, Athanasius, Ars Magnae Lucis et Umbrae (Rome, 1646). Kors, Alan C. and Peters, Edward (eds), (1972) Witchcraft in Europe 1100–1700: A Documentary History, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kovacs, Katherine Singer, ‘Georges Méliès and the Féerie’ in Film Before Griffith ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) pp. 244–57. Koval, Frank, The Illustrated Houdini Research Diary Parts 1 and 2 (Oldham and Chadderton: Koval 1992). La Frenais, Rob, ‘Magic and Performance,’ Performance Magazine Jan–Feb 1982 pp. 16–21. Lamb, Geoffrey, Victorian Magic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976).

243

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 244


Lamont, Peter, The First Psychic: The Peculiar Mystery of a Victorian Wizard (London: Little, Brown, 2005). Lamont, Peter, The Indian Rope Trick (London: Abacus, 2005). Lantis, Margaret, Alaskan Eskimo Ceremonialism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1947). Lead, Brian and Roger Woods, Harry Houdini: Legend and Legacy (Accrington: Lead and Woods, 1987). Lead, Brian and Roger Woods, Houdini the Myth Maker: the unmasking of Harry Houdini (Accrington: Lead and Woods, 1993). Levi, Eliphas, The History of Magic (London: Rider & Co., 1913. 10th impression 1974). Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Lodge, Sir Oliver, My Philosophy. Representing my views on the many functions of the ether of space. (London: Ernest Benn, 1933). Lodge, Sir Oliver, Raymond. Or Life and Death (London: Methuen & Co., 1916). Lombardi, Christophe, ‘The Cyborg Magician’ in Visions: the Online Journal of the Art of Magic www.online-visions.com/other/0405christophe.html Accessed 2nd January 2005. Lopatin, Ivan A., The Social Life and Religion of Indians in Kitimat, British Columbia (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1945). Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). Mackenzie, Donald, Egyptian Myth and Legend, (London: Gresham Publishing Co., 1907) Archived online at http://nefertiti.iwebland.com/texts/westcar_ papyrus.htm Accessed 16th August 2005. Mackenzie, James Hewat, Spirit Intercourse: its theory and practice (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1916). Magic Lantern Society, The Magic Lantern Society Website http://www. luikerwaal.com/newframe_uk.htm?/mls_uk.htm Accessed 20th December 2005. Malthête, Jacques, Méliès: Image et Illusions (Paris: Éditions Exporégie, 1996). Mangan, Michael, ‘…and so shall you seem to have cut your nose in sunder: Illusions of power on the Elizabethan stage and in the Elizabethan Marketplace’ Performance Research 1:3 (1996) pp. 46–57. Mannoni, Laurent Werner Nekes and Marina Warner, Eyes, Lies and Illusions (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004).

244

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 245

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Marlowe, Christopher, Complete Plays and Poems edited by E. D. Pendry and J. C. Maxwell (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1976). Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus ed. Sylvan Barnet, (New York: New American Library 1969). Maskelyne, Jasper Magic Top Secret. On the adaptation of the conjuror’s art to the battlefield (London: Stanley Paul and Co., 1949). Maskelyne, John Nevil, ‘My Reminiscences’ Strand Magazine 39 (1910) pp. 17–24. Maskelyne, John Nevil, Maskelyne on the Performance of Magic (New York: Dover Publications, 1976). Maskelyne, John Nevil, The Fraud of Modern ‘Theosophy’ Exposed. A brief history of the greatest imposture ever perpetrated under the cloak of religion (London: George Routledge and Sons, and New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1912). Mauss, Marcel, A General Theory of Magic translated by Robert Brain (Routledge, 1972; reprinted 2001). Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work Volume III, (London: Griffin, Bohn and Company, 1861). McCade, Fiona, ‘Maybe Blaine had the right idea after all’ The Scotsman 20th October 2003. McGrath, Alister E., Christian Theology. An Introduction 3rd Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). Medhurst, Richard George (ed.), Crookes and the spirit world: a collection of writings by or concerning the work of Sir William Crookes in the field of psychical research. Collected by R. G. Medhurst; material introduced and edited by M. R. Barrington. (London: Souvenir, 1972). Mellor, G. J., The Northern Music Hall. A Century of Popular Entertainment (Newcastle upon Tyne: Graham, 1970). Meyer, Bernard C., Houdini: A Mind in Chains. A Psychoanalytic Portrait (New York: Dutton, 1976). Morton, Thomas, A direct answer vnto the scandalous exceptions, which Theophilus Higgons hath lately obiected against D. Morton (London: Edmund Weaver, 1609). Moyal, Ann, Platypus: The Extraordinary Story of How a Curious Creature Baffled the World (London: Allen & Unwin, 2002).

245

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 246


Mulholland, John, Quicker than the Eye: the Magic and Magicians of the World (Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, 1932). Nadis, Fred, ‘Facing the Divide: Turn of the Century Stage Magicians’ Presentations of Rationalism and the Occult’ Journal of Millenial Studies vol 2 no 2 Winter 2000 http://www.mille.org/publications/winter2000/nadis. PDF Accessed 29th December 2005. Nardi, Ralph, ‘The Social World of Magicians: Gender and Conjuring’, in Sex Roles, 19 (1988) pp. 759–770. Nashe, Thomas, The Unfortunate Traveller ed. J. B. Steane, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). Neuberg, S. L., ‘Behavioral implications of information presented outside of conscious awareness: The effect of subliminal presentation of trait information on behavior in the prisoner⬘s dilemma game.’ in Social Cognition, 6, (1988) pp. 207–230. Newton, Isaac, Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (London, 1686). Nicolai, Friedrich, Chronique à travers 1’ Allemagne et la Suisse, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1783). North, Dan, ‘Magic and Illusion in Early Cinema’ in Studies in French Cinema; Volume 1 Number 2, 2001, pp. 70–79. Okeley, Judith, The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983). Paley, William, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. (London 1802; 12th edition, 1809). Pattie, F. A., Mesmer and Animal Magnetism: A Chapter in the History of Medicine. (Unpublished manuscript. Lexington, Ky. 1989). Phelan, Peggy and Jill Lane (eds), The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993). Phillips, Adam, Houdini’s Box (London: Faber, 2001). Pinchbeck, William Frederick, The Expositor; or Many Mysteries Unravelled. Delineated in a series of letters, between a friend and his correspondent. Comprising the learned pig, – invisible lady and acoustic temple, – philosophical swan, – penetrating spy glasses, optical and magnetic, and various other curiosities on similar principles: also, a few of the most wonderful feats as performed by the art of legerdemain: with some reflections on ventriloquism. (Boston: 1805).

246

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 247

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pinetti, G. et al., The Conjuror’s Repository, or the whole Art and Mystery of Magic Displayed (London: T. & R. Hughes, n.d.). Plumb, J. H., England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974). Polidoro Massimo, ‘Lectures’ Archived online http://www.massimopolidoro.com/eng/ lectures/lecfindex.html Accessed 30th December 2005. Pollock, Della, ‘Performative Writing’, in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (eds), The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Popple, Simon and Joe Kember, Early Cinema From Factory Gate to Dream Factory (London and New York: Wallflower, 2003). Porter, Roy, The Enlightenment (London: Penguin, 2000). Prince, Walter F., The Enchanted Boundary (Boston: Boston Society for Psychic Research, 1930). Ralegh, Sir Walter, A History of the World (London: 1614). Randi, James and Bert Randolph Sugar, Houdini: His Mind and Art (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1976). Randi, James, Conjuring (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992). Randi, James, The James Randi Educational Foundation, http://www.randi.org/ Accessed 4th January 2006. Rankins, William, A Mirror of Monsters (London: 1587). Ravenscroft, Thomas, Scaramouch a Philosopher, Harlequin a Schoolboy, Bravo, Merchant and Magician. A Comedy after the Italian manner. Acted at the Theatre-Royal (London: Robert Sollers, 1677). Rid, Samuel, The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine, (London: 1612). Riskin, Jessica, ‘The Defecating Duck, or the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life’ Critical Inquiry Summer 2003 29:4 pp. 599–633. Roach, Paul, ‘Wandering Between two Worlds: Victorian England’s Search for Meaning’ http://www.gober.net/victorian/reports/mesmersm.html Accessed 19th December 2005. Robert-Houdin, Jean Eugène, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador, Author and Conjuror Written by Himself translated by Lascelles Wraxall (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859; reprinted by T. Werner Laurie Ltd., 1942). Robert-Houdin, Jean Eugéne, The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic; or, How to become a Wizard… Translated and edited, with notes, by Professor Hoffmann [pseud., i.e. Angelo John Lewis] (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1878).

247

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 248


Robert-Houdin, Jean Eugéne, The secrets of stage conjuring Translated and edited, with notes by Professor Hoffmann [pseudo. Angelo John Lewis]. (London: Routledge, 1881). Rogo, D. Scott and Raymond Bayless, Phone Calls from the Dead (London: New English Library, 1979). Ronson, Jon, The Men Who Stare at Goats (London: Picador, 2004). Rosengren, Karl S. and Carl N. Johnson and Paul L. Harris (eds.), Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific and Religious Thinking in Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Ross, Thomas, A Book of Elizabethan Magic. Thomas Hill’s Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions (Regensburg: Verlag Hans Carl 1974). Rossell, Deac, ‘Max Skladanowsky’ in Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey ed. Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan, (London: British Film Institute, 1996) Archived online at http://www.victoriancinema.net/skladanowsky. htm Accessed 25th March 2005). Sadoul, Georges, Georges Méliès (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1970). Said, Edward Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). Salgado, Gamini, Coney-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1972). Schechner, Richard Performance Studies: an Introduction (New York and London: Routledge 2002). Schechner, Richard, Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 1988). Scot, Reginald, Scot⬘s Discovery of Witchcraft proving the common opinions of witches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars… to be but imaginary, erronious conceptions and novelties… written and published in anno 1584, by Reginald Scot, Esquire. (London: [Richard Cotes] 1651). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, ‘Teaching “Experimental Critical Writing”’, in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, (eds), The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Seitz, James, University Times (University of Pittsburgh) vol 35 no 7 November 2002. http://www.pitt.edu/utimes/issues/35/021121/13.html Accessed 25th February 2005). Shakespeare, William, The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen B. Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1997).

248

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 249

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Shepley, M., ‘Melies and Early Film’, The Missing Link, http://www.mshepley. btinternet.co.uk/Méliès2.htm Accessed 22nd December 2005. Shumaker, Wayne, Natural Magic and Modern Science. Four Treatises 1590–1657 (Binghamton, New York: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989). Silverman, Kenneth Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). Speaight, George, ‘Professor Pepper’s Ghost’ Theatre Notebook 54:3 (2000) pp. 16–25. Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene edited by Thomas P. Roche Jr. (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1978). Standage, Tom, The Mechanical Turk: The True Story of the Chess-Playing Machine that Fooled the World (London: Penguin, 2002). Steinmeyer, Jim, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned How to Disappear (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003). Stelarc, ‘The Body is Obsolete’, Stelarc Website http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/ index2.html Accessed 3rd January 2006. Stelarc, et al., ‘Stelarc – Prosthetic Head’, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, website http://www.acmi.net.au/7E8A5C8E6F304A839116C3C74F81440C.htm Accessed 2nd January 2006. Stone, George Winchester, The London Stage 1660–1800, A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces Part four. 1747–1766 (Carbondale, Ill.: South Illinois University Press, 1960). Storey, John, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture; A Reader (Harlow: Longman Pearson, 1998). Stott, Raymond Toole, A Bibliography of English Conjuring 1569–1876 vol II (Derby: Harpur and Sons, 1978). Stott, Raymond Toole, A Bibliography of English Conjuring 1581–1876 (Derby: Harpur and Sons, 1976). Styers, Randall, Making Magic: Religion, Magic and Science in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004). Swift, Jonathan, A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people from being a burthen to their parents, or the country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. (Dublin: S. Harding, 1729).

249

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 250


Swift, Jonathan, Miscellanies. The Third Volume (London: for Benjamin Motte and Charles Bathurst, Lawton Gilliver and John Clarke, 1736). Talking Birds Theatre Company, Smoke, Mirrors and the Art of Escapology http://www.talkingbirds.co.uk/indexes/index2.html Accessed 31st December 2005. Also http://www.theatredesign.org.uk/arcdet/xjava.htm Accessed 31st December 2005. TalkMagic forum, http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic2099-0-asc-15.php Accessed 9th June 2005. Tamblin, Janet, ‘A Brief History of the Magic Lantern’ (c. 1979), handbill in Bill Douglas Collection, University of Exeter. Full text available online at http:// toytheatre.info/Technic/Magic/History.htm Accessed 22nd December 2005. Taylor, Rogan, The Death and Resurrection Show, (London: Reed 1985). Teller, Interview with Rick Maue Voices Vol 2, Issue 2, page 2 [Voices is an online magic journal, edited by Rick Maue, at http://www.deceptionsunlimited.com/ vateller.html Accessed 22nd December 2005. The NIV Study Bible: New International Version (London, Sydney and Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton 1998). Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1984). Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1978). Thompson, Roger (ed.), Samuel Pepys’ Penny Merriments, Being a Collection of Chapbooks, full of Histories, Jests, Magic. Amorous Tales of Courtship, Marriage and Infidelity, Accounts of Rogues and Fools, together with Comments on the Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). Thurschwell, Pamela, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: CUP 2001). Tibbetts, John C., ‘The Voice that Fills the House: Opera Fills the Screen’ in Literature/Film Quarterly, vol 32 no 1 (2004) Archived online at http://www. findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200401/ai_n9406989 Accessed 30th March 2005. Traister, Barbara Howard, Heavenly Necromancers; the Magician in English Renaissance Drama, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984). Trimmer, Sarah, Fabulous histories, designed for the instruction of children, respecting their treatment of animals (Dublin, 1794).

250

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 251

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Turner, Victor, From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982). Turner, Victor, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1985). Turner, Victor, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1986). Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969). van Gennep, Arnold, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Vaucanson, Jacques, An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton trans. J. T. Desaguliers (London: T. Parker for Stephen Varillon, 1742). Vesey-Fitzgerald, B., Gypsies of Britain (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1944 enlarged edn. 1973). Vincent, William – see ‘Hocus Pocus Junior’. Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary, Selected and Translated by H. I. Woolf (New York: Knopf, 1924). Archived online at http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/ volsuper.html Accessed 1st August 2005. Von Kempelen, Wolfgang, Le Mécanisme de la parole suivi de la description d’une machine parlante (Vienna: 1791). Vyse, Stuart A., Believing in Magic: the Psychology of Superstition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Warner, Marina, ‘Camera Ludica’ in Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes and Marina Warner, Eyes, Lies and Illusions (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004). Watts, Lisa and Brian McClave, Escape Mechanism http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/ shootinglive/2002/wattsmcclave/ Accessed 31st February 2005. Weisberg, Barbara, Talking to the Dead; Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco 2004). Wheen, Francis, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. A Short History of Modern Delusions (London: HarperCollins, 2004). Williams, Raymond, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976). Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Wilson, Edmund, Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1950).

251

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 252


Wolff, Christian, Reasonable Thoughts about God, the World, the Human Soul, and just about everything (London: 1720). Wordsworth, William, Poems Volume 1, edited by John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Wright, Louis B., ‘Juggling Tricks and Conjury on the English Stage Before 1642’, Modern Philology 24 (1927) pp. 269–284. Yates, Frances, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964).

252

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 253

Bibliography.qxp

4/2/07

6:31 PM

Page 254

mangan

Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring By Michael Mangan

Performance, University of Plymouth

ISBN 978-1-84150-149-9

intellect PO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE UK / www.intellectbooks.com

9 781841 501499

{ D A K } A R T S A

C U L T U R A L o f

H I S T O R Y

C O N J U R I N G

A CULTURAL HISTORY of CONJURING

‘This is an erudite book which wears its scholarship lightly and is a pleasure to read. Complex theoretical frameworks are introduced in ways that will make them accessible to the general reader, and the book’s argument opens up new implications and applications for the study of magic as performance...’ – Roberta Mock, Department of Theatre and

P E R F O R M I N G

R

Michael Mangan holds the Chair in Drama at Exeter University. His main research interests lie in theatre and society – more speciﬁcally, he has published in the subjects of theatre and gender, Shakespeare and Renaissance theatre, the cultural history of popular performance, and contemporary British theatre. He has also worked as a playwright, a director, a literary manager, a dramaturg and an actor.

{ DA R K A RT S }

It brings him or her up against their own assumptions about how the world works; at its most extreme, it asks the spectator to re-evaluate his or her sense of the limits of the human. Performing Dark Arts is an exploration of the paradox of the conjuror, the actor who pretends to be a magician. It aims to illuminate the history of conjuring by examining it in the context of performance studies, and to throw light on aspects of performance studies by testing them against the art of conjuring. The book examines not only the performances of individual magicians from Dedi to David Blaine, but also the broader cultural contexts in which their performances were received, and the meanings which they have attracted.

Performing

Magic and conjuring inhabit the boundaries and the borderlands of performance. The conjuror’s act of demonstrating the apparently impossible, the uncanny, the marvellous, or the grotesque challenges the spectator’s sense of reality.

00

B y

M I C H A E L

M A N G A N

Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring (Intellect Books - Theatre and Consciousness)

Sacred Theatre (Intellect Books - Theatre and Consciousness)

Theatre and Consciousness: Explanatory Scope and Future Potential (Intellect Books - Theatre and Consciousness)

Futures Past: Thirty Years of Arts Computing (Intellect Books - Computers and the History of Art)

Awakening the Performing Body. (Consciousness, Literature & the Arts)

Performing Arts in a New Era

The Performing Arts in a New Era

A Secret History of Consciousness

Musical Theatre: A History

Performing Spanishness: History, Cultural Identity & Censorship in the Theatre of Jose Maria Rodriguez Mendez

Utopia and Consciousness (Consciousness, Literature and the Arts)

Poetry, consciousness and community (Consciousness Literature and the Arts)

Filming and Performing Renaissance History

A Cultural History of Heredity

Conjuring science: scientific symbols and cultural meanings in American life

Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)

Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)

Consciousness (Bradford Books)

Kudiyattam Theatre and the Actor's Consciousness

Impotence: A Cultural History

Boxing: A Cultural History

Insomnia: A Cultural History

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

A History of Theatre in Africa

Performing the Body in Irish Theatre

Performing the Body in Irish Theatre

Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2010

Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2003: Film, Television, Radio, Theatre, Dance, Music, Cartoons and Pop Culture

Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 1998: Film, Television, Radio, Theatre, Dance, Music, Cartoons and Pop Culture

Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring (Intellect Books - Theatre and Consciousness)

Sacred Theatre (Intellect Books - Theatre and Consciousness)

Theatre and Consciousness: Explanatory Scope and Future Potential (Intellect Books - Theatre and Consciousness)

Futures Past: Thirty Years of Arts Computing (Intellect Books - Computers and the History of Art)

Awakening the Performing Body. (Consciousness, Literature & the Arts)

Performing Arts in a New Era

The Performing Arts in a New Era

A Secret History of Consciousness

Musical Theatre: A History

Performing Spanishness: History, Cultural Identity & Censorship in the Theatre of Jose Maria Rodriguez Mendez

Utopia and Consciousness (Consciousness, Literature and the Arts)

Poetry, consciousness and community (Consciousness Literature and the Arts)

Filming and Performing Renaissance History

A Cultural History of Heredity

Conjuring science: scientific symbols and cultural meanings in American life

Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)

Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)

Consciousness (Bradford Books)

Kudiyattam Theatre and the Actor's Consciousness

Impotence: A Cultural History

Boxing: A Cultural History

Insomnia: A Cultural History

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

A History of Theatre in Africa

Performing the Body in Irish Theatre

Performing the Body in Irish Theatre

Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2010

Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2003: Film, Television, Radio, Theatre, Dance, Music, Cartoons and Pop Culture

Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 1998: Film, Television, Radio, Theatre, Dance, Music, Cartoons and Pop Culture

Recommend Documents