ABSTRACT
To fully situate the operations of theater and “new” science in the seventeenth century, it is necessary to understand how they functioned as interdictions against the occult sciences and arts. Within this general era, as imagined by traditional histories, the occult science most at issue was alchemy. Although alchemy continued to inform both performance and science, it was sufficiently debased by this new collusion to lose any institutional power it might have gained in earlier centuries.
