Magic & Art

Magic has a long tradition as something that happens or features in art and literature. Indeed, magic and art have often been linked together. In The Tempest, Prospero is a magician, an authorial self-insert for Shakespeare, and a theatrical impresario and director, conjuring a wedding masque performance for his daughter and her fiancé. The antitheatricalists in England in the Renaissance saw theater in more diabolic terms. For example, Stephen Gosson associated occultism and theater, and Gosson situates both in terms of devilry. He connects attending theater to sitting “at the table of Idolators,” imbuing symbols and persons with fictive significance just as, arguably, magicians do. In turn, the dialogue and “Poetrie” in plays comes from “the deuill” using verse to most “wonderfully tickle the hearers[’] eares.” As Gosson argues, the devil uses “the eye[s]” of audiences to lure them in through “the beautie of the…Stages,” as well as entertainments like “maskes, vaunting, [and]…daunsing of gigges,” all with the intent of luring observers to the “vanetie of pleasure” and to become “carnally minded” and thus drawn from Christ. [1] From another perspective, magicians have often termed their magic the “Art”—and Prospero, Faustus, and even pulp mages like Elminster have done so.[2] Philip Sidney argued for art’s (poetry’s) power to correct and to improve upon a deficient nature and world in his Defense of Poesy, and magic certainly serves a similar function in fiction, at least.[3] My purpose in this post is to explore the significance of magic’s use in art, a purpose that emphasizes magic’s subversiveness and its emancipatory possibilities—in art and otherwise—from a personal and political perspective.