‘…and so shall you seem to have cut your nose in sunder’

In this paper I intend to explore the relationships between certain aspects of drama and popular performance in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period; in particular I shall examine the phenomenon of conjuring and illusion as it existed on the street-corner or at the fair, and on the stage. To introduce and to frame this discussion of performance, however, I first of all want to refer (paradoxically) to a novel.