ABSTRACT
The fictions of playwrights, Stephen Gosson told his readers, were the cups of Circe. 1 The magical power of Renaissance theater, its ability not merely to compel wonder in its audiences but to change them, whether for good or evil, by persuasion or seduction, is assumed by both attackers and defenders of the art, and Gosson’s warning fully acknowledges both the danger of the stage and its irresistible attractiveness. When Prospero, near the end of The Tempest, renounces his magic with a speech adapted almost verbatim from Ovid’s Medea, the evocation of witchcraft through the classic exemplar of a dangerously beautiful woman encapsulates the full range of Renaissance attitudes to the theatrical magician’s powers. But the literary allusion goes beyond the anti-theatrical trope; for at this moment the hero ceases to be a character and becomes a text. The script the actor recites is a book, a classic, a passage that every schoolchild in Shakespeare’s England could also recite. This is a very Jonsonian moment, the invocation of a classic text to establish the authority of the fiction, to strike the audience with a shock of recognition, to place the drama in the context not of an ephemeral performance, but of the history of poetry.
