Dreams, Prophecies and Politics

It appears from his dense marginal annotations that the Renaissance mathematician, imperial propagandist and occult philosopher John Dee, in the late 1550s, had with apparent interest read the In Librum Aristotelis de memoria et recordatione commentarij of Claudius Campensis. This work — in the name of refuting the ‘impious and wicked’ opinions of Aristotle who ‘linked all the faculties of the soul with corporeal things’ — advanced a physiological theory of dreams which revolved around the recalling of the animal spirits into the brain during sleep. ² While he was clearly interested in the physiology of dreams, Dee’s reflections on his own dreams tended more towards a conception of the dream as prophetic or oracular. Dee saw prophetic dreams and visions as a vital part of Renaissance magic. In a fourteenth-century manuscript of a work doubtfully attributed to Roger Bacon, De somno et vigilis, for example, Dee noted in the margin that prophetic dreams were ‘a great secret of magic’ (Magiae secretu[m] magnu[m]). ³ Dee also set great store by revealed knowledge which he believed could be gained through familiar conversation with spiritual beings: dream-like ‘visions’ discerned in a ‘shew stone’ (an instrument used in ‘scrying’ or ‘crystallomancy’) and relayed by a ‘scryer’ or ‘seer’ who had the ability to see with the ‘eyes of the spirit’. ⁴ While such beliefs have been scorned by many modern historians as superstitious and fraud ulent delusions, they also provide a unique point of access to the religio-political life of the times. In this essay I will — so to speak — be dealing with the ‘dream-work’ of Elizabethan court politics through the oneiric and visionary experiences of one of its relatively minor protagonists. By this I do not mean some kind of psychoa nalytical re-reading of political events in the Elizabethan court via the subjects engaged in them. The perils of such a hermeneutical exercise for the cultural historian, as Jean-Pierre Vernant has pointed out in another context, are only too clear:

68It is impossible that dreams, seen as a reality outside history, should contain and yield up the meanings of works of culture. The meanings of dreams themselves, in as much as they are symbolic, appear as a cultural fact that can be discovered by means of a study of historical psychology. ⁵

Rather I propose (as Vernant suggests) to treat Dee’s dreams and visions (or at least their interpretations, which are co-emergent with their narration) as ‘cultural facts’ in themselves which are tractable to historical investigation and recovery. What I want to consider is the ways in which the historically contingent textual-psycho logical events which comprise the so-called ‘private’ and ‘spiritual’ diaries of John Dee for the years 1575–85 sketch out (albeit in a fugitive or evanescent form) a form of intimate political subjectivity — a subjectivity which gave dramatic expression both to the religious dimensions of political agency and to the structures of favour and disfavour which shaped the political life of the period.