ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the extent to which Greene and Peele justify structural discontinuity by the working of magic: this means studying the degree of control the magician exerts over the action of each play, and the steady decrease in his control as each play progresses. Elizabethan ambivalence about magic always imposed on the dramatist the duty to stage the collapse and/or repentance of the magician. The fact that no such shadow is cast over the endings of Friar Bacon and The Old Wives Tale despite the overt defeat of magic arts is evidence that Peele and Greene draw only a hesitant and incomplete analogy between the unrealism of their art, and the magic they dramatize. The two plays therefore contain "more than magic can perform," and Greene and Peele, the chapter argue, do not control as fully as their contemporaries (Marlowe and Shakespeare) the instability that an ambiguously conceived magic may give to dramatic art.
