SOURCE: "Tricksters and Quacks," in Pale Hecate's Team: An Examination of the Beliefs on Witchcraft and Magic among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and His Immediate Successors, The Humanities Press, 1962, pp. 131–50.

In the following essay, Briggs examines the satire of magic and its practitioners in seventeenth-century dramas.

The dramatists of the seventeenth century found good material in the practitioners of magic, the exorcists, astrologers and pretenders to the art of alchemy that abounded in those troubled days. From medieval times we find records of superstitious practices, and alchemy in particular enjoyed more serious repute in medieval and Tudor England than it did in the seventeenth century. The ferment of beliefs after the Reformation, the various strands of thought and the spread of scientific inquiry brought many things to the surface that had been quietly out of sight for centuries. We can ascertain from the diaries of some of the fashionable magicians...