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COPYRIGHT 2006 www.wmich.edu/compdr
Philip Butterworth. Magic on the Early English Stage. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xxii + 295. $85.00.
Philip Butterworth is rapidly establishing himself as the pre-eminent authority on special effects on the medieval stage. In his first book, Theatre of Fire (Society for Theatre Research, 1998), he introduced us to the practicalities of pyrotechnic and other special sound and light effects in early English and Scottish theater. In his second book, Magic on the Early English Stage, he now investigates magical tricks, illusions, appearances, and puppets on the early English stage (and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in Europe and even, in one instance, in China). Butterworth is also currently editing a volume 'of essays, The Narrator, the Expositor, and the Prompter in European Medieval Theatre, for Brepols, and, with Joslin McKinney, completing The Cambridge Introduction to Scenography. His approach is cautious, scholarly, and thorough.
In Magic on the Early English Stage, Butterworth begins by carefully defining his terms. Although conjuring is now "the principal term ... used to encompass magical activity," this word, he tells us, "was not used in its current sense in England until the nineteenth century" (2). The more common term for many centuries was juggling, whose meaning is now confined to...
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