The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking by Linda Woodbridge

Abstract

N OTES 1 Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), 4. 2 Michael Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Min­ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi. e r ic sav o y / University of Calgary Linda Woodbridge, The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994). ii, 390. $47.50 US cloth, $17.95 US paper. This is not another book on black magic, white magic, or hermetic magic; on John Dee, Prospero, and the witches of Macbeth. Linda Woodbridge, as she makes clear, is writing not about magic but about magical thinking: a fundamental habit of belief, associated with the popular imagination but not confined to it, that evolves systems of threat and protection concerning the body, the land, and the seasons. It is the sort of belief that surfaces in the fear of the evil eye, the fear that praise will bring disaster, the hope that reading scripture in the fields will be good for the crops. In Shakespeare’s time it existed side by side with the new rationalism of the Renaissance, and, as she amply demonstrates, his imagination drew on both; so much so that the exact degree of his belief or disbelief can be hard to determine. She also produces some disconcerting examples to show that magical thinking has not died out in our own time: the protests against the channel tunnel, for example, have roots in the ancient fear of contamination through the entry of foreign matter into the body, a fear that led the Elizabethans to mistrust bathing because it opened the pores and made the body vulnerable to plague. Woodbridge’s treatment of her theme is lively, informative, and firmly di­ rected. She demonstrates that links we might think of as literary analogies are embedded deep in Shakespeare’s culture. Though she presents a rich col­ lection of folk beliefs, and her enjoyment of them is infectious, this is not a soft-centred, nostalgic tribute to quaint old folk-ways but a rigorous and well documented examination of a whole mentality. It is also a necessary correc­ tive to some of the narrower habits of thought in contemporary Shakespeare criticism: the materialist tendency to see him demystifying and ironizing the beliefs of his time, the new historicist tendency to see everything in terms of political power. Shakespeare’s concern with the threat of invasion, for example, is recognizably linked with the current political situation of Eng­ land; but when the threat to a land is linked with threats to a house, and to a woman’s body, something more than politics is at work. Woodbridge 364 demonstrates these links effectively in discussions of Titus Andronicus, Lucrece , and Cymbeline. Critics usually see a psychological or political basis for Coriolanus’s intense dislike of praise, and this may be part of the truth; but another part, Woodbridge suggests, is the ancient belief that excessive praise will incur the wrath of the gods. The same factor is at work when Collatine’s praise of Lucrece leads to her rape. The banishment of enemies and the demonizing of foreigners (especially the French) in the history plays show a need to deal with one’s own corrup­ tion by transferring it on to someone else — the need, in other words, to find a scapegoat. (There are other modern analogies here, in our tendency to blame everything on the government, and our belief that we can deal with the evils of life by sueing somebody.) The political conflicts of the history plays can also be linked to the generational conflict embodied in the seasons, as age and winter are driven out by youth and spring. But this does not always work in a simple way: the Renaissance, though it recognized no mid­ dle ground between youth and age, did recognize hybrids: the aged virgin (Queen Elizabeth), the child with the wisdom of an old man (Octavius). In Antony and Cleopatra “sexuality and fertility ... attach to the ‘aged’ couple and its youth is a killjoy, almost (in his opposition to the union of Antony and Cleopatra) a young...