The Weird World of Renaissance Magic

with Professor Katherine Walker

This talk will highlight how authors like Shakespeare and his contemporaries experimented with belief in magic, producing spectacular results upon the stage.  

Join us as Professor Katherine Walker (English Department, UNLV) shares her research on the magical beings and forces at work in seventeenth century England. This talk will highlight how authors like Shakespeare and his contemporaries experimented with belief in magic, producing spectacular results upon the stage.  

In Renaissance England, magic played a surprisingly important role in both intellectual life and literature. It wasn’t just seen as superstition—many educated people, including scholars and even some royals, were genuinely interested in astrology, alchemy, and the occult. Figures like John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I’s advisor, blurred the line between science and magic, using mathematics and mystical texts to try to understand the world.

This fascination shows up clearly in the literature of the time. In plays like Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe and The Tempest by Shakespeare, magic becomes a way to explore key ideas—such as the thirst for power, the danger of overreaching, and the tension between knowledge and morality. In England, magic wasn’t just a fantasy—it was deeply connected to the era’s real concerns and intellectual debates.

This talk will focus on the texts and belief of magic, where figures like faeries, ghosts, and demons will make an appearance. We’ll meet an interesting cast of characters, from charlatans to astrologers, witches and priests. And in the end, we will think about how magic threads throughout some of the greatest plays of the Renaissance. 

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