Simon Forman (December 30, 1552 – September 12, 1611) was arguably the most popular Elizabethan astrologist, occultist and herbalist active in London during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and James I of England. His reputation, however, was severely tarnished after his death when he was implicated in the plot to kill Sir Thomas Overbury. Writers from Ben Jonson to Nathaniel Hawthorne came to characterize him as either as a fool or an evil magician in league with the devil.
Life
Forman was born in Quidhampton, Fugglestone St Peter, near Salisbury, Wiltshire on December 30, 1552.[1][2] At the age of nine he went to a free school in the Salisbury area but was forced to leave after two years following the death of his father on 31 December 1563. For the next ten years of his life he was apprenticed to Matthew Commin, a local merchant. Commin traded in cloth, salt and herbal medicines, and it was during his time as a young apprentice that Forman started to learn about herbal remedies. After arguments with Mrs Commin, Simon found his apprenticeship terminated, and he moved to Oxford to live with cousins. He then spent a year and a half at Magdalen College, Oxford where he studied chiefly medicine and astrology continuing the same studies in Holland.
Through the 1570s and 1580s Forman worked as a teacher while studying the occult arts. In 1583 he moved to London starting up a practice as a physician in Philpot Lane, Westminster. Having survived an outbreak of the plague in the city that year and again in 1594 his medical reputation began to spread. Around this time a Buckinghamshire clergyman named Richard Napier (1559 – 1634) became his protégé. From 1597 he began to develop a more serious interest in the occult [3] eventually setting up an alternative medical practice in Billingsgate, providing astrologically-based remedies keeping detailed casebooks of his clients' questions about illness, pregnancy, stolen goods, career opportunities and marriage prospects. In his new office he was able to fulfill the role of both physician and surgeon (seen as two very separate professions by his medical peers). This unorthodox practice, however, soon attracted the attention of the Company of Barber-Surgeons (now the Royal College of Surgeons of England) who successfully banned him from medical practice. Since he possessed no diploma, and following the death of one of his patients, Forman served several prison sentences. He continued to dispute with the Company of Barber-Surgeons, eventually obtaining a license to practice from the University of Cambridge in 1603.
With a notable sexual appetite, Forman was said to have pressed himself upon nearly every women he met. Forman himself wrote of his conquests in his diaries, showing as little regard for the background of his inamoratas as for the location of consummation. Many of his clients provided brief affairs. He wrote of having his first sex with his "beloved" on 12/15/1593, 5:00 PM, London." Then writing after "She died 6/13/1597." On July 22, 1599, Forman wed seventeen year-old Jane Baker, a girl renting a room in his house in Lambeth. Having never been content with just one woman, the marriage sadly, “did not make much difference to (his) way of life, except that he had an inexperienced girl now as mistress of the house; he continued to be master.”[4] In 1611, he accurately predicted his own death on the River Thames. Another astrologer, William Lilly, reports that one warm Sunday afternoon in September of that year, Forman told his wife that he would die the following Thursday night (September 12). And, sure enough:
“[M]onday came, all was well. Tuesday came, he was not sick. Wednesday came, and still he was well: with which his impertinent wife did much twit him in the teeth. Thursday came, and dinner was ended, he very well. He went down to the waterside, and took a pair of oars to go to some buildings he was in hand with in Puddle-dock. Being in the middle of the Thames, he presently fell down, only saying, ‘Am impost, an impost’, and so died.”[5]
After his death he was implicated in the murder of Thomas Overbury through his association with his two patients, Lady Frances Howard, and Mrs Anne Turner. During the testimony of Howard's trial, lawyers hurled accusations at Forman, claiming that he had given Lady Essex the potion with which she plotted to kill Overbury. During the trial he was described by Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench as the 'Devil Forman'; the result being that his reputation was severely tarnished.
Work
Forman's papers have proven to be a treasure trove of rare, odd, unusual data on one of the most studied periods of cultural history. They include autobiographies, guides to astrology, plague tracts, alchemical commonplace books and notes on biblical and historical subjects. They also contain his disputes with the Company of Barber-Surgeons and his largely unsuccessful magical experiments. 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 only printed work was a pamphlet advertising a bogus method for divining the longitude while at sea.
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,[6] 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. Sixty-four volumes of his manuscripts were collected by Elias Ashmole in the seventeenth century, and are now held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Others can be found in the Plymouth Library. A Brief Description of the Forman MSS. in the Public Library, Plymouth, was published in 1853.
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 20 April 1610;[7] The Winter's Tale at the Globe on 15 May 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 30 April 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.[8] 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;[9] but his palaeographic criticisms were refuted by other commentators. Many scholars have accepted the Book of Plays, despite its problematic aspects, as genuine.[10] [11] [12] Skeptics, however, continue to appear.[13]
References in Fiction
Simon Forman is the protagonist of the Elizabethan mystery series by Judith Cook, The Casebook of Dr Simon Forman -- Elizabethan doctor and solver of mysteries. These well-researched mysteries are based on the original casebook manuscripts, and contain a mix of historical and fictional characters.
Notes
- ^ Forman, Simon, in Dictionary of National Biography (volume 19)
- ^ Ann Hoffman, Lives of the Tudor age, 1485-1603 (1977), p. 177
- ^ http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/casebooks/formancasebooks.html
- ^ Rowse, p. 93
- ^ http://ladyofspiders.wordpress.com/2007/10/13/
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Leah Scragg, "MacBeth on Horseback," Shakespeare Survey 26 (2002), pp. 81ff.
- ^ Samuel A. Tannenbaum, Shakspearian Scraps and Other Elizabethan Fragments, New York, Columbia University Press, 1933.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964; pp. 109 and 173.
- ^ Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes From His Life, London, Arden Shakespeare, 2001; pp. xii-xiii.
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.
- Barbara Howard Traister, The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2001.
External links
- Extracts from Forman's Metrical Autobiography with other notes (published 1853). [1]
- Simon Forman in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.
