Simon Forman

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Simon Forman (December 30, 1552 – September, 1611) was a prominent English Elizabethan occultist, astrologist and herbalist active in London. He was born in Quidhampton near Salisbury, Wiltshire. After an abortive apprenticeship in Salisbury, he attended Magdalen College, Oxford. After a spell as a teacher in Salisbury, in 1597 he developed his interest in the occult, moving to London in 1592. He set up a medical practice in Billingsgate, providing astrologically based remedies. Having survived the plague outbreak in London during 1594 his medical reputation spread and attracted the attention of the Company of Barber-Surgeons (now the Royal College of Surgeons of England) who successfully banned him from medical practice. Nine months later, following the death of one of his patients, Forman was jailed. He continued to dispute with the Company of Barber-Surgeons, eventually getting a license to practice granted by the University of Cambridge.

His papers, detailing his disputes with the Company of Barber-Surgeons and his largely unsuccessful magical experiments are now in the Bodleian Library. He predicted his own death in a boat on the River Thames.

After his death he was implicated in the murder of Thomas Overbury through his association with his two patients, Lady Frances Howard, and Anne Turner.

At one time he possessed the copy of the Picatrix currently in the British Library.

Forman left behind a large body of manuscripts dealing with his patients and with all the subjects that interested him, from astronomy and astrology to medicine, mathematics, and magic. His Casebook is the most famous of these resources, though he also produced diaries and a third-person autobiography. His texts have proven to be a treasure trove of rare, odd, unusual data on one of the most studied periods of cultural history. His intimate knowledge of Shakespeare's circle makes him especially attractive to literary historians. Incidentally, one of Forman's most famous patients was the poet Emilia Lanier, a leading candidate to have been Shakespeare's Dark Lady.

Modern scholars—A. L. Rowse is one prominent example,^[1] and others have followed his lead—have exploited Forman's manuscripts for the manifold lights they throw on the less-exposed private lives of Elizabethan and Jacobean men and women.

[edit] The Book of Plays

Among Forman's manuscripts is a small document titled the "Bocke of Plaies," which records Forman's descriptions of four plays he witnessed in 1610-11, and the morals he drew from them. The document is noteworthy for the listing of three Shakespearean performances—Macbeth at the Globe Theatre on April 20, 1610;^[2] The Winter's Tale at the Globe on May 15, 1611; and Cymbeline, date and theatre not specified—and also for the debate about the document's authenticity that has characterized much of its existence. Skeptics have suspected that the Book of Plays is one of John Payne Collier's forgeries. (Collier announced his discovery of the document in 1836.)

The odd content of the Book raised suspicions. The fourth play described by Forman is a Richard II acted at the Globe on April 30, 1611; but from the description it is clearly not Shakespeare's Richard II. No other play of the same title is known from this historical interval; and the idea of The King's Men acting a Richard II other than Shakespeare's, at the Globe, has puzzled some readers. The description of MacBeth mentions characters riding, a detail that readers with a knowledge of Jacobean dramaturgy and stagecraft have found startling if not incredible.^[3] To skeptics, the riding business has stood out as a red flag of warning.

The psychological content of the text has been a stumbling-block for skeptics. The idea that Forman, a worldly-wise and canny operator—a cynic might consider him a successful con-man—would spend his time drawing sententious morals from the stage plays he saw, has struck some as psychologically false.

The spellings in the document have also aroused suspicion. While English Renaissance orthography is certainly flexible, some of the document's vagaries—"Bocke" for "book," "Rog" for "rogue," "Bomia" for "Bohemia"—suggest the comical faux-Elizabethan extravagances in the earlier forgeries of William Henry Ireland.

Much of the debate on the "Bocke of Plaies" has centered on palaeographic arguments about the manuscript's handwriting. The amateur palaeographer Samuel A. Tannenbaum was vocal in his skepticism in the 1930s;^[4] but his palaeographic criticisms were refuted by other commentators. Many scholars have accepted the Book of Plays, despite its problematic aspects, as genuine.^{[5] [6] [7]} Skeptics, however, continue to appear.^[8]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Rowse's books Shakespeare the Man (London, MacMillian, 1973) and Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age: Simon Forman the Astrologer (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974) draw heavily on Forman sources.
2. ^ Scholars, critics, and editors usually assume that this "1610" is a mistake for "1611," and that the whole of the Book of Plays most likely dates from that year. See: E.K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1930; Vol. 2, p. 337.
3. ^ Leah Scragg, "MacBeth on Horseback," Shakespeare Survey 26 (2002), pp. 81ff.
4. ^ Samuel A. Tannenbaum, Shakspearian Scraps and Other Elizabethan Fragments, New York, Columbia University Press, 1933.
5. ^ J. Dover Wilson and R. W. Hunt, "The Authenticity of Simon Forman's Bocke of Plaies," Review of English Studies, Vol. 23 No. 91 (July 1947), pp. 193-200.
6. ^ J. H. P. Pafford, "Simon Forman's Bocke of Plaies," Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 10, No. 39 (Aug. 1959), pp. 289-91.
7. ^ F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964; pp. 109 and 173.
8. ^ Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes From His Life, London, Arden Shakespeare, 2001; pp. xii-xiii.

[edit] References

• Judith Cook, Blood on the Borders: The Casebook of Dr. Simon Forman–Elizabethan Doctor and Solver of Mysteries, London, Headline, 1999.
• Judith Cook, Dr. Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician, London, Chatto & Windus, 2001.
• Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.