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“Aery nothings and painted devils”, an extract from Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds

Human beings are subject to a continual process of bodily transformation, but shape-shifting also belongs in the landscape of magic, witchcraft, and wonder. Marina Warner, in her award-winning essays Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self, explores this idea ranging from Ovid to Lewis Carroll. In the extract below she looks at Shakespeare’s use of magic and demons in his plays Macbeth and A Winter’s Tale.

Demonology, ghosts, projections, and photographs are bound up in the figure of the double through the deep association of the devil with conjuring illusion; this connection underlies the very principle of doubling as a variety of metamorphosis. When the first Christians discovered the rituals of the peoples in America, they identified them with classical and medieval witchcraft and divination; they also, as Richard Eden describes, identified the images of their gods with ‘the devyl, whom they paynt of the selfe same fourme and colour, as hee appeareth unto them in dyvers shapes and fourmes. They make also Images of golde, copper, and wood, to the same similitudes, in terrible shapes, and so variable, as the paynters are accustomed to paynt them at the feete of sainct Michaell tharchangell, or in any other place, where they paynte them of most horrible portriture.’ The devil’s image is not stable, and the images of Catholic worship were themselves a source of horror for many writers in these islands: Lady Macbeth, for example, taunts her husband, saying, ‘’Tis the eye of childhood | That fears a painted devil’ (II. ii).

In some senses, the painted quality of the devil revealed his fraudulence: he was master of deception and illusion, but also, as Lady Macbeth is saying, a manufactured bogey, a phantom of the sick brain. In one obvious sense, devils can only ever be ‘painted devils’, that is counterfeit, since they assume the forms they do in order to manifest themselves to humans. In the literature of doppelgängers, this question of the status of the double—is it real, or is it imagined?—and, if it is imagined, is it no less real for that?—returns insistently, and its undecideability, which gives many of its vehicles their narrative grip, finds expression through images of projections and images, artefacts and delusions; the story or play then tries to decide the images’ status with regard to the real.

Image magic frequently proceeds by mimesis and replication; verbal spells also use imitation and doubling to achieve their ends. The spectres that conjuring raises are related to embodied doubles because magical operations allegedly raised ghosts, conjured apparitions, projected the shadow not the substance, the double not the original. ‘Double double, toil and trouble,’ chant the witches in Macbeth over their cauldron (Macbeth, iv. i) Elsewhere, Macbeth rails against, ‘these juggling fiends … that palter with us in a double sense …’ (v. vii).

Shakespeare knew his demonology. Thomas Aquinas, following Augustine, had determined that the devil could not be capable of actually performing metamorphoses, or of being in two or more places at once (the divine gift of ubiquity), or of knowing the future, since these were the unique prerogatives of God. But the devil was an ape, a mimic, a deceiver, who could create the illusion of such feats. The condition of Shakespeare’s many apparitions is uncanny: Banquo’s ghost is both there and not there, visible but not palpable.

In The Winter’s Tale, Paulina, during the celebrated ‘resurrection’ of Hermione, play- acts bringing to life her statue, her eerie double. This tremendous scene also develops the relationship between ‘painted devils’ and ‘aery nothings’ in Shakespeare’s use of magic. For in order to bring Hermione back into the unfolding story, Paulina acts the priest-magician, turning to stagecraft, that is, pretence. The capacity of theatre to produce the illusion of real presence vexes Shakespeare, precisely because he is all too aware of its connections to diabolical illusion. The resulting ambiguity about the status of the image’s picture-flesh enhances the hallucinatory atmosphere of the play’s closing scene. Both Leontes and Hermione are poised between sleep and waking states; as the statue awakes, to Paulina’s command, Leontes still thinks it might be an illusion, as in a dream. He exclaims,

There is an air comes from her. What fine chisel

Could ever yet cut breath?

(v. iii. 78-9)

And then, as he touches her—embraces her, ‘O, she’s warm!’ here echoing Ovid’s Pygmalion. And then continues, ‘If this be magic, let it be an art | Lawful as eating.’

The paradoxes of ekphrasis—its material immateriality—relate to the illusions of presence in spectral conjuring. Because the scene is not magic—in the play, it really is Hermione; but Shakespeare’s art does enter the realm of magic: he takes us to places in make-believe where we could not otherwise go.

The first performances of Dr Faustus and of Macbeth may have used early magic lantern effects, projections on to smoke and through glass, to summon painted devils. When Prospero talks of his ‘insubstantial pageant’, it is hard not to imagine stagecraft of an optical variety. Indeed, when in his famous speech, he says, ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ (The Tempest, iv. i. 14 ff.), could that ‘on’ suggest that dreams appear on something, on the screen of fantasy, the scrim on which shadow puppets play? Theatrical illusion offers an analogy to the spectral conjurings of enchanters as well as to the phantasms of haunted minds, to Goya’s nightmare of reason. In the Dream Theseus talks of ‘shaping fantasies’, ‘aery nothing’, to which ‘the madman, the lover, and the poet | Give a local habitation and a name …’ (v. i. 5—17). Reversing Prospero’s metaphor, Theseus also says that actors themselves are ‘shadows’; Puck repeats this in the play’s envoi (‘If we shadows have offended’, v. i. 423ff). These shadows will gather as projections of the internal world of spectres; concepts of the mind’s eye were reproduced in the devices of the magic lantern and the phantasmagoria or raree show.

To Theseus’ dismissals, Hippolita comes back, thoughtfully, challenging him for making too light of imagination’s power to shape reality:

But all the story of the night told over,

And all their minds transfigur’d so together,

More witnesseth than fancy’s images,

And grows to something of great constancy …’

(Dream, v. i. 23—6)

The experience of this Dream has been more than mere fancifulness can bring about, she says, admiringly, thus opening the way to Coleridge’s distinction between constitutive Imagination and playful Fancy.

Featured image credit: ‘A Midsummer Nights Dream, Act IV Scene I’ by Fuseli, Henry, 1741-1825, artist. Simon, John Peter, 1764?–c.1810, engraver. From the Library of Congress. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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