Horatio Faustus

By Paul Gray

SEX AND SOCIETY IN SHAKESPEARE'S AGE: SIMON FORMAN THE ASTROLOGER

by A.L. ROWSE

315 pages. Scribners. $12.50.

Scholars know Simon Forman as the man who attended--and made notes on --four of Shakespeare's plays performed during the dramatist's lifetime. Historian A.L. Rowse, 72, knows Forman as something more: an extravagant conflation of Horatio Alger and Doctor Faustus whose claim to fame lies buried in a "vast mass" of barely decipherable manuscripts. Having burrowed through this trove of papers, Rowse now announces that Forman "has exposed himself as no one has done, not even Pepys or Boswell or Rousseau, and with more naive candor and ingenuous truthfulness than a Henry Miller."

Until a goodly swatch of Forman's writing is actually published, that assertion lacks underpinning. What Rowse does show beyond question is that Forman was an invaluable eyewitness to his superstitious yet brilliant era. Born in 1552, the self-educated country bumpkin who set up shop in London as an astrologer and unlicensed doctor soon became a kind of lay analyst to a cross-section of his society. Titled ladies, including the Countess of Essex and Somerset, consulted him. So did churchmen, merchants, seafarers, servants and prostitutes. A grandson of Thomas More was one of his clients, as were Shakespeare's landlady and Emilia Bassano, the mysterious Venetian who Rowse claims (in Shakespeare the Man) was the "Dark Lady" of the sonnets.

Forman's supplicants requested bizarre services. Some asked him to divine the whereabouts of lost objects. Sailors' wives wondered when --or if--their husbands would return. Many visitors wanted to know whether their enemies were bewitching them. Most frequently, Forman consulted his charts about affairs of the heart--his own as well as others'. During his long quest for a proper bride, the astrologer rejected all women who could not pass the ordeal by horoscope. The stars told him that one candidate "will ... bear outward in her behavior a fair show, but she will play the whore privily." He never called on her again.

Nor did Forman refrain from physical ministrations, medical and otherwise. He invented a code word --halek--to record sexual relations with female patients. The word pops up with awesome regularity throughout the good doctor's case notes. The Dark Lady herself received his attentions. In his mid-50s, he was still haleking as often as three times a day, and the hundreds of casual adulteries confessed to by his clients suggest that Forman was not unusually randy. Rowse's exclamation, "What a free-for-all Elizabethan sex-life was!" is amply documented.

Purged Victims. The chief trouble the astrologer endured was relentless persecution by the Royal College of Physicians. The established doctors resented the healing business that Forman diverted from them. He had learned what little medicine he knew "under a hedge." Forman replied that he had kept up his practice in London during the plague of 1592-93, when most respectable physicians had fled to the country. Rowse takes Forman's side. Judging from surviving records, the untutored amateur seems to have wreaked less carnage than the certified practitioners who bled or purged victims at the drop of a symptom.

Forman instead brewed up harmless-sounding potions, including one made of "sage, marjoram, elderbuds, ashbuds, berberis, liquorice, aniseed, aloes and juniper berries." He seems to have reassured people more than he treated them, and that was probably for the best, given the primitive state of medical science and the appalling maladies of the time. Confronted with a patient who "breeds worms in his nose of stinking sweet and venomous humor," Forman sensibly recommended a change in diet and frequent face washing.

Virgin Queen. Forman was an abysmally credulous soul. "If I sneeze," he wrote, "once at the left nostril after sunset, it means an unknown person is coming; if twice at the right nostril be fore sunrise, it means a friend coming speedily for physic, or some sick body."

This, in the golden age of the Virgin Queen, Raleigh, Drake and Shake speare? Of course, Rowse answers. "Living on the borders of a mental world expanding into the unknown, they did not know what might not be possible."

Astrology, after all, eventually led to astronomy, just as alchemy (which For man also dabbled in) laid the ground work for chemistry and physics. Forman may have been foolish, but he was not a charlatan. The Elizabethan epoch was one of rich contradictions; it is impossible to comprehend that time merely by reading its high literary work. As Rowse shows, men like Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare transcend their age; Forman embodies it.

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