easoning follows. One could only assume that Shakespeare would have tried to make the magic in the play as fooling and magical as possible. Although there were two magic effects in the play, one of them –the spirit music—would not have fooled even the most unsophisticated and nave audiences. Even before the era of Harry Houdini, or even the wandering street magicians of the 1700's, audiences were not fooled by music being played offstage. It is the other effect, that of the banquet disappearance that, well executed, would have fooled Shakespeare's audiences, and would even have a shot of passing muster today. However, this banquet sequence was in the masque scene, theoretically added two years after the original writing of the play. The question that begs to be answered therefore, is why didn't Shakespeare fund some other way of including a more sophisticated magic effect into the play? The most logical answer would be that he learned more about magic and witch techniques after he wrote the play. Maybe at first he was unable to grasp the explanations in the Scot text, or maybe he didn't even read it before the original writing—possibly it was just called to his attention, and he was unable to lay his hands on a copy until after he wrote the play Whether or not Shakespeare ever read the Scot text in its entirety, or whether or not the banquet disappearance was added before or after the original writing, neither is relevant to magic's central importance to the play. Obviously, magic could grab audiences of Shakespeare's time. As it happens, magic had been grabbing audiences since 2500 BC (according to a depiction of a magician on the Beni Hassan tomb in Egypt) and magic continues to grab audiences today. It caught Shakespeare's eye, and has made the play timeless, and theatrically entertaining. ...
