He claims to have called up the Tempest.
The OP excludes Calpurnia’s visions – but this is a professional soothsayer, one infers he has such visions frequently.
He’s also a character who serves no other purpose in the story: Calpurnia’s visions are incidental to her being Caesar’s wife, but the Soothsayer is defined by his visions.
The goddess Diana appears in Pericles in a vision to Pericles:
Diana: My temple stands in Ephesus: hie thee thither,
And do upon mine altar sacrifice.
There, when my maiden priests are met together,
Before the people all, 2465
Reveal how thou at sea didst lose thy wife:
To mourn thy crosses, with thy daughter’s, call
And give them repetition to the life.
Or perform my bidding, or thou livest in woe;
Do it, and happy; by my silver bow! 2470
Awake, and tell thy dream.
In Henry VI, part 1, Joan of Arc summons demons to help her on the battlefield against the English, and then in part 2 of the play, Bolingbroke and Margery Jourdayn summon a spirit to tell them the fates of King Henry and the Dukes of Suffolk and Sommerset.
Also, in Richard III, before the last battle, Richard is visited by the ghosts of the people he murdered, who damn him and praise Henry VII.
Speaking of the witches in Macbeth…
In Agatha Christie’s ***Curtain, *** the last Hercule Poirot novel, it’s pointed out that the witches “prophecies” needn’t have been supernatural. Their first “prophecy” was something Macbeth already knew. And their second was something he himself MADE happen.
The forest moving was a good one, though.
He calls forth music a little later in that scene which the other characters comment on. The portrayals I have seen of this have the characters slightly startled by the music coming from an unseen (presumably Glendower’s magic) source.
Thanks everybody.
So basically we’ve got the witches in Macbeth, the fairies in Midsummer, and the magical creatures and Prospero in The Tempest. Interesting – one tragedy, one comedy, one romance.
I figured the histories wouldn’t make the list (magic not being real and all), so I’m intrigued by the “demons” in Henry VI and the music in Henry IV. Diana in Pericles might be only a vision, so I’m not sure it’s “really” her. It’s telling, and maybe disappointing, that Shakespeare never portrayed the classic Greek gods, heroes, or monsters. Yes, Theseus is in Midsummer but he isn’t doing any Minotaur-slaying.
Food for thought. Thank you again.
For what it’s worth, I don’t know enough to know whether Shakespeare wrote himself into a corner and – if you will – simply said A Wizard Did It when in need of a plot device for ROMEO AND JULIET: the plan that would solve all their problems, and instead leads to their untimely deaths, of course revolves around the following claim:
I can’t brew a potion like that. I can’t brew a potion of invisibility, either. Can you? Can anyone?
People have been buried alive because they appeared dead. It is not inconceivable there is a drug that could produce the effect.
For two and forty hours, at which point you’ll wake as from a pleasant sleep?
Yeah, that’s not realistic, but is it magic? Lots of writers have questionable pharmacology in their decidedly non-magical stories. The idea of an all purpose tranquilizer dart that harmlessly puts anyone to sleep, regardless of their body weight, potential allergies, or drug interactions is staple in a lot of spy thrillers. There is no such knock-out drug in real life, but that doesn’t mean that Q has a warlock working for him in his weapons lab.
Yeah, I’d put Friar Lawrence’s potion in the category of science fiction, not fantasy. Whether it could exist in real life or not, Lawrence’s position is very clearly that this is an all-natural phenomenon, that anyone with the appropriate scientific knowledge could put together. There’s no ritual chanting or exertion of will or invocation of powers, just a bit of this plant and that, in the right proportions.
Again, there’s the prophetic Cranmer in Henry VIII.
I saw that. :snick:
Tetrodotoxin:
In any case, it is never claimed to be supernatural, but treated as an esoteric knowledge.