Volume 14, Number 1 & 2 · January 29, 1970
Magical Mystery Tour
By Wylie Sypher
Theatre of the World
by Frances A. Yates
University of Chicago, 218 pp., $8.50
One should not be deceived by Frances Yates's disclaimer that she has been only an ardent reader. She is a person of immense learning. When in May, 1966, she claimed in these pages that she had found in an illustration by Robert Fludd the secret of the structure of the stage in Shakespeare's Globe Theater, she raised, as might be expected, a small storm. There are, to be sure, many objections to her proposal. Yet over the years in a sequence of profoundly researched books she has been doing nothing less than reinterpreting the nature of Renaissance humanism. Indeed, she has gone far to prove that there were two different Renaissance humanisms: one originating in the fourteenth century with the revival of Latin texts by Petrarch, the other originating in the discovery of Hermetic texts in the fifteenth century. These two humanisms meant two contrasting experiences, the first academic and stylistic, the other magical and astral. The latter humanism may be the authentic one, associated as it was with the most potent exercise of the artistic, philosophic, and religious imagination.
Review, 3005 words
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