Simon Forman - Work

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. . Modern scholars—A. L. Rowse is one prominent example, 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. One of Forman's patients was the poet Emilia Lanier, Rowse's candidate to have been Shakespeare's Dark Lady; another patient was Mrs Mountjoy, Shakespeare's landlady. 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.