Two years and one first draft later, I finally made my long-coveted research trip to Prague.
I’d wanted to go since I started researching the book 2 years ago. Turns out many of Dee and Kelley’s old Bohemian haunts still exist and, as they say, there’s nothing like the real thing. Besides, any excuse to travel!
I did so much that the past 2 weeks feel like a month, but in a good way. Despite my efforts to not to do ALL THE THINGS at once I couldn’t resist the Prague Castle after dark walking tour my second night.
For three hours our guide took us through the huge castle complex and regaled us with stories of weird Prague: the golem, the imprisoned violinist, Tycho Brahe and his metal nose. Normally crowded with tourists, at night it’s fairly empty, and the cold and rain made it even more evocative.
The Golden Lane at night, by Charlotte Dries. Imagine an astronomer on the roof, an alchemist toiling away underground…
And the view:
Prague from the Castle, by Charlotte Dries
Historic Prague is geographically small – most of it is visible in the picture above – but so much is packed into those endlessly winding little streets!
More in the coming weeks: two very different alchemical labs, a gorgeous library, Renaissance science bros. But to keep this book related:
The White Tower in Golden Lane, one of the many places Edward Kelley was imprisoned.
Special thanks to my friend Charlotte Dries, who had the good sense to have a quality camera with her at all times!
Whenever I tell people I’m writing about John Dee and Edward Kelley, they tend to say:
“Who?”
I’m surprised how often I hear this – they’re “B-list” historical figures but I’m not the first to fictionalize them. A friend suggested I whip ’round the Web to see if they ever showed up in the more accessible worlds of tv/movies/video games and I found a few examples:
Edward Kelley was harder to find; he’s better known in the Czech Republic than in the English-speaking world due to his gold transmuting feats (“feats?”) in Prague. Still, he turned up in the (now defunct) Facebook game Assassin’s Creed: Project Legacy. The designers clearly did their homework: they included Kelley’s stepdaughter Elizabeth Jane Weston and together with Dee they do alchemy and look at mysterious books.
Edward Kelley showing Elizabeth Jane Weston the magic red dust. Image found at assassinscreed.wikia.com
I found other brief references: Dee in “Elizabeth: The Golden Age“; an Edward Kelley costume for rent (but only in the Czech Republic). There’s more at their respective Wikipedia pages, but most of the references are literary.
Feel free to include other examples in the comments!
Given the sheer oddity of Dee and Kelley’s story (two men talking to angels!?) it’s no surprise that wild tales grew up around them. But, I want to write something historically accurate so I’ve been slowly winnowing out the facts from the legends. The further I go the stranger it gets, and Stephenie Woolterton’s post on bias in historical research reminds me that “facts” are always filtered through those relating them.
I’ve found two broad interpretations of Dee and Kelley’s partnership:
Kelley was a fraud, full stop. Espoused mostly by Dee’s biographers, it makes sense at first glance but on closer examination seems inadequate. Their partnership went on for 7 years – if it was a con Kelley deserves credit as the best actor/storyteller of his age! It also ignores Kelley’s repeated attempts to leave Dee’s employment and his doubts about the holiness/usefulness of the spiritual messages. Why question it if he had Dee fooled? Why start the fraud in the first place?
Kelley channeled something outside himself and the seances can be taken at face value. A minority opinion embraced by some modern-day occultists, it sidesteps their work’s resemblance to earlier magical systems (even Kelley points this out) and the English grammar and structure of the alleged “angelic” language.
If the historians can’t be trusted, the primary sources aren’t much better. Save a few letters and other miscellanea we only have Dee’s account of 1582-1589 and he’s not completely reliable.
Dee’s “private” diary was written in the margins of almanacs and wasn’t all that private. Erasures suggest that Kelley edited it with Dee’s knowledge and one can infer Dee expected that it might be read by others. Susan Bassnett points out that Dee left out significant information about Kelley’s stepchildren and brother – who and what else did he leave out, and why?
The spiritual diaries appear to be verbatim transcripts of Dee and Kelley’s seances, but they are incomplete. Not everything has survived to the present, and some pages were destroyed before their importance was known. We only have what Kelley saw fit to share with Dee and have little notion of any communications he received/created without Dee’s direction.
Indeed, very little is certain about Kelley at all. His early life is a series of rumors (did he raise the dead? Did he lose one ear, both ears, or no ears for forgery?) and almost everything else is from Dee’s diaries. He often comes off as a selfish, temper tantrum-throwing brat but given their tumultuous relationship it’s fair to say Dee had his own biases.
And here I show my own. I think Sledge comes closest to the truth when he suggests that Dee and Kelley’s work was the product of a mix of fraud, mental illness, and self-hypnosis. My hard-headed modern mind can’t accept a supernatural explanation but I doubt Kelley came up with 7 years worth of prophecies and magic on his own. I also suspect the more heretical material wouldn’t have shocked him so if he’d consciously invented it.
Dee pushed Kelley into frequent altered states and documented the “spirits’” every word. Is it unimaginable that with Dee’s constant encouragement Kelley might start to believe his own lies, but be resentful and angry from overwork? In this sense I don’t think Kelley was the cardboard-cutout con artist put forth by Dee’s biographers. Far more likely that Enochian magic came out of a shared madness between the two, with Kelley’s delusions directed by Dee’s obsessions.
In the end, does any of this really matter? I’m writing fiction, after all, and am free to make up what I can’t prove. Much as my inner history geek wants to know “the truth” I have to accept that reality is often subjective – one of the themes of my novel. Just because a thing isn’t objectively real doesn’t make it any less relevant.
Selected sources:
Bassnett, S. (2006). Absent Presences: Edward Kelley’s Family in the Writings of John Dee. In John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought (pp. 285–294). Dordrecht: Springer.
Laycock, D. C., Kelly, E., Dee, D. J., & Duquette, L. M. (2001). The Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Angelic Language As Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley. Weiser.
Sledge, J. J. (2010). Between Loagaeth and Cosening: Towards an Etiology of John Dee’s Spirit Diaries. Aries, 10(1), 1–35.
I don’t think I’d have lasted 24 hours in the Dee household without tearing my hair out.
Paging through his personal and spiritual diaries I catch glimpses of people who, while colorful, I’d never want to meet: Dee’s cranky alchemical apprentice; two maids who accidentally set fire to their room twice in one year; the manservant he fired for getting drunk and cursing out the rest of the staff. That’s just a sampling and while there’s no full list it seems Dee had at least nine servants and probably more during my 1583-9 time frame.
The Dees weren’t unusual. Almost everyone of middling rank or higher had live-in staff. If you didn’t have servants you’d likely be one because up to a quarter of the population was in service. And even if everyone was nice as pie there was never, ever a break from their company. Servants worked in all parts of the house and some slept on their masters’ bedchamber floors (dedicated servants’ dormitories were rare). Houses were often designed with linked rooms so even if your maid or man had a private bedchamber they probably passed through yours to get there. Decorative elements like wooden screens and bed curtains compensated for this lack of privacy, but only just.
The Great Bed of Ware from the V&A website. A representative Elizabethan bedstead in all but size.
In short it was damn near impossible to be truly alone*, a fact that makes my inner introvert blanch while my writer’s mind reels at the potential mayhem.
Pro: lovely opportunities to endanger my characters! Dee and Kelley were into so many questionable things that any sudden walk-ins could easily create panic and rumors of Dee’s “conjuring” that Jane would struggle to explain away. Hours of amusement!
Con: a massive narrative hurdle. I’ve got to get the servants out of the house for their infamous “crossmatching” incident, which the Dees and Kelleys swore to keep secret on pain of death. Dee’s spiritual diary offers no details beyond a terse “pactu factu” (pact fulfilled) so I have free rein, but how do I empty the house believably? Send everyone to a market fair (if there was one)? Hide in an unused wing (ditto)? Bribe everybody (though they’re poor)?
I’m almost done with the first draft (!) and am still unraveling this snarly plot knot.
*Even more so if you take children and visitors into account.
Selected Sources:
Cooper, Nicholas. Houses of the Gentry 1480-1680. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.
Dee, John (author), Stephen Skinner (editor), and Meric Casaubon (Preface). Dr John Dee’s Spiritual Diaries (1583-1608): Being a reset and corrected edition of a True & Faithful Relation of what Passed for many Yeers between Dr John Dee…and Some Spirits. Woodbury MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2012.
Orlin, Lena Cowen. Elizabethan Households: An Anthology. Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1996.
I cannot count the times I’ve said this during my research.
John Dee and Edward Kelley were two borderline heretical Protestants traveling in hardcore Catholic Europe during the wars of religion. When does it get smart to tell a Jesuit they talked with angels (seriously?) or try to show a priest their records of the same (dude!)?
Right now I’m wrestling with a scene in which Kelley tells a papal representative – in detail – what he thinks is wrong with the Catholic church.
Dude, seriously?
I know – in reality people sometimes just do stupid things, but in fiction actions need reasons lest the reader shut the book in disbelief.
Dee never described Kelley’s motive in his account of this incident. While this gives me freedom to make something up, I’m pulling historical and personality threads from everywhere to plausibly explain this blind spot.
Kelley’s not the only one to leave me scratching my head – these guys sometimes baffle me to the point that I stammer like a stoned surfer! I doubt “Dee and Kelley’s Excellent Adventure” would sell to the historical fiction crowd but I’m tempted to write it just to get the “OMG WTF were you thinking?!” out of my system.
