Elizabethan
magic
Richard Luckett
Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age A. L. Rowse (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £4.50) A. L. Rowse's latest book is essential reading for anyone interested in charlatanry. It may be remembered that not long ago Dr Rowse, through the kind offices of The Times, was able to announce to a large public his conclusive identification of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. She was, he asserted, one Emilia Bassano, the wife of Lanier, a musician, and the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain. An essential part of his original case was that she was dark in colouring, and that her husband's name was William — which helped to explain some of the punning on 'Will' in the Sonnets. Miss Mary Edmond was quick to point out that Emilia's husband was actually named Alphonso, and other scholars were as swift to question Emilia's colouration; the word that Dr Rowse read as 'brown', they argued, might well be 'brave'. Thus one of the essential props of Dr Rowse's case was removed, and another shaken. Yet, nothing daunted, Dr Rowse has continued to uphold his identification, though it now seems to depend less on mere documentary evidence than on what the dust-jacket biography of his latest book describes as "the psychic gifts and temperament of a Celt."
But even the sceptics who have had the temerity to doubt his thesis could not deny that the source in which he found the references to Emilia — the private papers of Simon Forman, the astrologer — was as likely a place as any for such a matter to come to light, as well as being a valuable repository of information of a kind that is not normally passed down from one age to the next. Forman recorded his own doings, the most intimate details of the lives of his clientele, his prognostications, and the eventual outcome of the affairs that he attempted to forecast. Since he also practiced medicine, albeit unofficially, he included details of the diseases that he diagnosed and treated. Now Dr Rowse has used his exploration of this material as a basis for a biography of Forman, and an account of the light it casts on his times.
Dr Rowse contends that the survival of Forman's papers means that we know him more intimately even than we know Pepys, Boswell, Casanova or Rousseau. It is certainly true that Forman was wont to set down the times and places at which he enjoyed sexual intercourse, but the fact that he records so scrupulously each occasion on which — to use his own expression — he did 'halek' with Mistress X or Y does not really amount to self-revelation. The style is strongly reminiscent of that current in the kind of diaries Which at one time used to feature prominently in divorce court spectaculars, though in Forman's case this material is intermingled with the necessary jottings of a professional astrologer. At one point Rowse describes Forman as "a born writer manqué"; the observation is at first baffling, suggesting, as it does, that some form of literary contraception had occurred.
The matter becomes clearer, however, as we get into the book. For what has taken place is an imaginative identification of a kind rare amongst modern historians. "Humans will believe anything — provided that it is silly enough" Dr Rowse remarks, and credulity Obviously holds a great fascination for him.
He describes the meeting between Forman and Dr, Dee in terms that demonstrate the fascination: "The respectable Dee was now ageing and discouraged, a little crazy with Paranoia", whilst Forman, who in his early days was definitely not respectable has now attained to something like Dee's social position, but is as "credulous as ever — each was as bemused as the other." Unfortunately Rowse's fascination prevents him from investigating areas other than the psychological; there are long accounts of Forman's dreams, but there is nothing of any substance on the methods of 'casting' and `scrying' used by Forman. "In the absence of fact, people's imaginations run away with them," he remarks, but he does not attempt any estimate of what exactly it was that Forman took to be fact.
The total effect is of a rather disorganised gallery of Elizabethan portraits as seen (and haleked) by Forman, and glossed by Rowse. In a footnote Dr Rowse chides the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford for his "characteristic inaccuracy", but his own scholarship is not impeccable. He writes at some length of Hugh Broughton, a puritan divine who consulted Forman, and comments that "The great Victorian scholar, Bishop Lightfoot, could still say that his writings 'do carry in them a kind of holy and happy fascination'." He has here confused Joseph Lightfoot, Victorian Bishop of Durham, with John Lightfoot, the seventeenth century Hebraist. The error is only explicable in terms Of a careless reading of the Dictionary of National Biography, but it is odd that Dr Rowse is unable to recognise a seventeenth century quotation when he meets one. But not all historians are gifted with literary sensibility, and some of them, as he himself is aware, are pretty rum people. On page 291 of Simon Forman he says all that needs to be said on the matter: "What such people really dislike is my insistence on the truth, and esPecially its implications, that most of what Passes for thought with most people is nonsense. (This book is a marvellous exposure of It.)"
Richard Luckett is Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at St Catharine's College, Cambridge
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