When local poet James Norcliffe published the collection Letters to Dr Dee in 1993, he thought it necessary to add the following explanatory note about his title:
Despite the oriental sounding name, the Dee I write to in these sequences is not Van Gulik's Chinese Magistrate of the Tang Dynasty, but John Dee, the Elizabethan magus. Dee was a man who straddled the medieval and modern worlds, a true alchemist of the crystal ball gazing type, a searcher of the philosopher's stone, the astrologer for Elizabeth I; and yet probably the foremost mathematician of his day, the man whose navigational assistance helped Frobisher in his search for the North-West Passage. Dee was reported to have had the largest personal library of any contemporary European at his home in Mortlake. I had been reading about this odd combination of mystic and rational man and I found it interesting to address my notes to him.
James Norcliffe. Letters to Dr Dee. Hazard Poets. Christchurch: Hazard Press, 1993.I'm not sure if Norcliffe would run into the same difficulties with name recognition now as he did then. I've already had my say on the subject of "Van Gulik's Chinese Magistrate of the Tang Dynasty," Judge Dee, so I thought this might be the moment to extend the same courtesy to Dr John Dee, Norcliffe's "Elizabethan magus."
Or rather, what interests me here is not so much Dr Dee himself, fascinating - albeit distinctly dodgy - figure though he undoubtedly was, but the various roles he's been allotted in popular culture since his death in penury, a forgotten man, in 1609 (or was it toward the end of 1608? Nobody seems to be quite sure).
Peter French. John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus. 1972. New York: Dorset Press, 1989.One of the most vital building blocks in Dee's posthumous reputation is the book above, which I was fortunate enough to find a second-hand copy of the other day (though I'd known of its existence for many years). It's referred to repeatedly in the later works of Frances Yates, undoubtedly one of the most influential modern historians of the Hermetic and esoteric strains in Renaissance thought.
Frances Yates. Theatre of the World. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.The last paper Yates gave in her lifetime was on, in fact, on John Dee, and he played an increasingly important (some would say deleterious) role in her thinking from the 1970s onwards. In brief, her contention was that his acknowledged skill as a mathematician and scientist should not be overshadowed by his popular reputation as a kind of Doctor Faustus, consorting with demons and spirits for dubious ends.
Frances Yates. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. 1979. Ark Paperbacks. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
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Méric Casaubon: A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits (1659)Meric Casaubon. A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits. 1659. Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing LLC, n.d.The tone of the earlier writing about Dr Dee was largely set by the book above, Méric Casaubon's rather sensationalist tome recording the experiments Dee performed with his personal medium Edward Kelley, a dubious con-man who persuaded Dee that he could not only establish contact with spirits, but that this knowledge could be used to achieve the Philosopher's Stone.
The two scholars did a kind of European tour through the lands of the Holy Roman Empire in the mid-1580s, during which:
They had audiences with Emperor Rudolf II in Prague Castle and King Stephen Báthory of Poland, whom they attempted to convince of the importance of angelic communication.They were suspected, however - probably justifiably - as passing on information to Queen Elizabeth's spymaster Francis Walsingham at the same time as pursuing their alchemical researches, which may explain some of the suspicion with which they were treated.
In 1587, at a spiritual conference in Bohemia, Kelley told Dee that the angel Uriel had ordered the men to share all their possessions, including their wives ... The order for wife-sharing caused Dee anguish, but he apparently did not doubt it was genuine and they apparently shared wives. However, Dee broke off the conferences immediately afterwards. He returned to England in 1589, while Kelley went on to be the alchemist to Emperor Rudolf II.
Kelley eventually fell from grace when he failed, despite all his grandiose promises to the Emperor, to produce gold from base metal. He died trying to escape from prison sometime around 1597-98.
Dee, too, had a rather unfortunate time of it in his later years:
Dee returned to Mortlake after six years abroad to find his home vandalised, his library ruined and many of his prized books and instruments stolen. Furthermore, he found that increasing criticism of occult practices had made England still less hospitable to his magical practices and natural philosophy.The accession of the rabid witchhunter and demonologist King James to the throne in 1603 was not good news for Dee. While Elizabeth had continued to back her old astrologer and adviser to some extent, even when he fell from favour everywhere else, James did not feel similarly inclined.
Dee was, it seems, forced to sell off most of the remainder of his once awe-inspiring library to provide for daily necessities for himself and his daughter Katherine.
Colin Wilson. The Occult: A History. 1971. Occult Trilogy #1. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.For a spirited (if somewhat sensationalist) account of all these doings, you could do worse than read the relevant section in Colin Wilson's bestselling page-turner The Occult. Nobody ever accused Wilson of not knowing a good story when he ran across it, and much of the subsequent palaver about Doctor Dee is probably based on the information included in his book.
Benjamin Woolley. The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee. 2001. A Flamingo Book. London: HarperCollins, 2002.If, however, you'd like to read something a bit more reliable about the life and times of this extraordinary man, the book above might be a better place to go. If you'd like even more detail than that, however, I'd recommend a perusal of his surviving diaries.
Edward Fenton, ed. The Diaries of John Dee. Charlbury, Oxfordshire: Day Books, 1998.There's an edition of Halliwell's nineteenth-century edition of Dee's private diary available online, also well worth a look:
The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, and the Catalogue of His Library of Manuscripts. Ed James Orchard Halliwell. London: Printed for the camden Society, 1842.
Dee's credibility problems began pretty early. Already, in his own lifetime, he was popularly regarded as a sinister occultist, and there are many reasons to suppose that Doctor Faustus in Marlowe's play is at least partly based on him and his jaunts with Edward Kelley - his Mephistopheles - around Central Europe.
Elizabeth appointed Dee Warden of the sternly Protestant Christ's College, Manchester in 1595, shortly after the first performances of Marlowe's masterpiece, and it's tempting to conjecture that this may be one of the reasons "he could not exert much control over its fellows, who despised or cheated him."
Was the magician Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, in Shakespeare's penultimate play The Tempest similarly based on Dee? The answer is probably yes. The latter had, after all, recently died, which made him fair game for an enterprising playwright. And, after all, what other models for a old-school Renaissance Magus were to be found in Jacobean Britain?
After that the trail went cold for a bit until the appearance of Méric Casaubon's immensely damaging account of Dee's séances with Edward Kelley (mentioned above) in 1659. This may not have been Casaubon's intention, but it did mean that Dee was now considered just one more name on a long list of credulous alchemists and occultists (Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Ficino, Cagliostro) whose ideas had been swept into oblivion by the new experimental science of the Enlightenment.
Dee was, accordingly, the obvious suspect to have formerly owned the famously indecipherable Voynich manuscript:
Dee has often been associated with the Voynich manuscript. Wilfrid Michael Voynich, who bought the manuscript in 1912, suggested that Dee may have owned it and sold it to Rudolph II. Dee's contacts with Rudolph were less extensive than had been thought, however, and Dee's diaries show no evidence of a sale.Similarly, H. P. Lovecraft felt no qualms about dubbing him translator of the English version of his imaginary forbidden tome, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred's Kitab al-Azif, or Necronomicon:
It wasn't until later in the twentieth century that scholars began to pay him serious attention again. But the appearance of various studies of his influence on the English Renaissance by by Frances Yates and her successors was, unfortunately, accompanied by some rather less flattering portrayals.
The character John Dee (aka Doctor Destiny), for instance, appeared in the first, 1988-1989 story-arc of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman as a psychopathic killer, the son of Aleister Crowley-like Magus Roderick Burgess and his absconding lover Ethel Cripps. At the end of his rampage in the comic he's returned to a cell in Arkham Asylum.
Neil Gaiman. The Sandman Library I: Preludes & Nocturnes. [Issues #1–8, 1988–1989]. 1991. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 1995.Peter Ackroyd's contribution to this thriving sub-genre is not really much better. His House of Dr Dee lacks the dramatic energy and interest of previous efforts such as Hawksmoor (1985) or Chatterton (1987). It's almost as if he expects the famous house at Mortlake to supply the plotting for him. Even Wikipedia is hard put to it to sum up the point of it all:
The novel is a mix of the two men's stories as Palmer continues to find out more about the doctor. As the investigation continues, it is revealed that both men are similar in that they are both selfish and would rather be left to themselves.A little like their author, one is tempted to add.
I won't go into all the other movies, fictions and video games inspired by - or including - Dr Dee. Some of the brighter spots are John Crowley's four-volume novel-sequence Ægypt (1987-2007); Michael Scott's six-volume fantasy series The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel (2007-12); and Phil Rickman's The Bones of Avalon (2010), where Dee plays an undercover secret agent turned detective.
You can find a more comprehensive list here.
Perhaps the most intriguing of the bunch to date is Blur-alumnus Damon Albarn's 2011 opera Dr Dee:
There was once an Englishman so influential that he defined how we measure years, so quintessential that he lives on in Shakespeare’s words; yet so shrouded in mystery that he’s fallen from the very pages of history itself.The opera was originally conceived as a collaboration with comics-maestro (and self-styled modern Magus) Alan Moore, who initially suggested this choice of subject. The collaboration soon broke down, but Albarn persevered with the project.
That man was Dr Dee – astrologer, courtier, alchemist, and spy.
Not having seen it, I can't comment further, but:
The Guardian gave the Manchester production four stars, saying that it "reaches to the heart of the tragedy of an overreaching intellect destroyed by a deal with a second-rate Mephistopheles". The Independent also awarded four stars, saying that the production was "mostly a triumph ... Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph gave the same star-rating, describing the opera as "fresh, original and heartfelt". The NME described it as "visually sumptuous and musically haunting".Mind you, there's a rather amusing rant on a blog called The Renaissance Mathematicus entitled "Mythologizing John Dee" which sets out to unpack all the half-truths and false assumptions in the blurb above, sent out by the Manchester Festival.
Let’s take a look at how many of the facts ... are correct. John Dee did not define how we measure the years. He was consulted by the court on the possibility of introducing the Gregorian Calendar into England ... Far from being so shrouded in mystery that he’s fallen from the pages of history I can think of no other minor figure from the Elizabethan Age, and let us not fool ourselves in comparison to many others Dee in a very minor figure, who is so present in the pages of history. In not just British but European literature Dee is THE Renaissance Magus, minor and major figure in novels, films and theatre.
The list, astrologer, courtier, alchemist and spy, leaves out his principle [sic. - for "principal"] occupation: mathematician. Dee was one of the leading mathematical practitioners of the age known and respected throughout Europe. Also calling him a courtier is not strictly correct as although he was often consulted by the court as an expert on a wide range of topics he never succeeded in his aim of receiving an official appointment at court, Elizabeth and her advisors preferring to keep him at arms [sic] length ...
Lastly we turn to his supposed inspiration of Shakespeare and Marlow [sic]. The claim that he was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero is a rather dubious supposition with no proven basis in fact. This claim seems to have been fuelled by Peter Greenaway basing his Prospero, in the film Prospero’s Books, at least partially on Dee.
Peter Greenaway. Prospero’s Books: A Film of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1991.It's somehow comforting to know that Dr Dee can still rouse such passions after all these years! (And no doubt few of my own blogposts are free from typos, either ...) Is that true about Prospero’s Books, though? Did it really suggest the Dee-as-Prospero theory? It may have popularised it, but it certainly didn't start it:
In an analysis of The Tempest, Frances Yates writes: “It is inevitable and unavoidable in thinking of Prospero to bring in the name of John Dee, the great mathematical magus of whom Shakespeare must have known, the teacher of Philip Sidney, and deeply in the confidence of Queen Elizabeth I."Yates's book Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach was first published in 1975, long before Greenaway's film.
Another blogger sums up the present situation as follows:
It is popular to run to the historical visage of the famous physician, astrologer, and scrier, John Dee, as a probable influence whenever the stereotype of the bearded, crystal gazing, and be-robed wizard appears in literature or mythology. Dee has been suggested for Soloman of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Prospero of the Tempest, Faust of the Faust legends, and many other similar wizard-like personages over the centuries.Why can't we just give the poor guy a rest? "You were silly like us," as Auden said of W. B. Yeats, another inveterate Occultist:
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"In his house at Mortlake dead Dee waits dreaming." All he ever wanted, apparently, was just to read his books in peace and quiet, whilst conferring with angels or spirits from time to time by means of his Enochian tablets ...
[In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming]- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928)
