Supernatural Shakespeare:
Magic and Ritual in Merry Old England
For twenty-five years I've been studying magic, myth and ritual, with a particular focus on indigenous beliefs. And England, of course, appears in Indigenous Studies in the role of the Empire, the great boot stamping out tribal traditions. ...But was England ever “indigenous”? What were the beliefs and rituals? And what was the great boot that stomped it all down?
A couple years ago I told my brother, during a drive, that I wanted to write a book about indigenous English myths and rituals. And he almost fell asleep at the wheel. So I quickly added “and that'll be part of a study of witches, ghosts and fairies in Shakespeare!” He woke up, the car stopped swerving, Shakespeare had saved our lives.
And so I began a year of study, tracking down video performances and commentaries of all (all 39!) of Shakespeare's plays, and then began assembling bits of folklore and pagan practice into a book named “A Pageant Truly Played,” after a line from “As You Like It.” Then, just before finishing a first draft, I was struck with a catchier title: “Supernatural Shakespeare: Magic and Ritual in Merry Old England.”
As I was writing it, a friend asked me to take a slot at a mixed open-mic of prose, poetry, etc. I read a short section of the book, and was approached afterward by Marti Gorman of City of Light Publishing. And, to mis-quote Shakespeare, “the rest is history” (actually Shakespeare wrote “the rest is silence,” but that doesn't fit quite right here... Or at least I hope it won't).
The release ran into some delays due to the Coronavirus and ensuing production/transportation issues, but I'm excited to announce that the book is now available through City of Light Publishing!
Why Shakespeare? Why now?
We don't read or watch Shakespeare to him to “tell me more about who you are, tell me more about your time.” We go to Shakespeare and say “what can you tell us about who we are, about our time?” And if the day comes when he has nothing relevant left to tell us, then we're done with him.
The book, Supernatural Shakespeare contains a thousand factoids about heathen English belief and custom. But I didn't write it so someone could win at Trivial Pursuit. It's not a dictionary of trivia-answers. I'm interested in: “what can this study tell us about real issues of life in the 2020's? Real cultural debates?”
Not that the book uses Shakespeare as some kind of Ouija board or Nostradamus prophecy... What were the cultural debates then? And what does that tell us about cultural debates now?
The point can get lost in the poetry. We hear something, like that the seasons “change their wonted liveries” ah, it's very pretty. But he's talking about climate change – the seasons have switched costumes, the weather's out of whack and the wheat-crops are dying (which means the people are in great danger). In “Midsummer Night's Dream” the fairy king has this toxic masculine entitlement and it's going to kill everyone. Meanwhile there's a teenaged girl whose father is a toxic patriarch, he's about to hang his own daughter for disobedience. Then the enchanted forest heals the situation. There's magic and transformation, but there are also important messages about gender and ecology. These issues are really important now, and Shakespeare's got some insightful and witty things to say about them...IF we can decode that olde-timey thee-thou-thine poetry.
Supernatural Shakespeare was written to appeal to the occasional theatergoer, the scholar and the “bardolator” or whatnot. It's written as a nonfiction book, with quotes from the plays interspersed with commentary to help us understand what's being said and how it relates to issues of his time, so that we can think about how it relates to the big issues of our time.
