Enchantment: After 422 Years A Drama That Evokes Shakespeare

By Federico Wardal

 After 402 Years, A Play Evoking Shakespeare

402 years on the wings of destiny until it reappeared: Enchantment, an esoteric drama written around the year 1620 about Shakespeare, four years after his death.

About the author, we only know that they were somehow connected with Denmark, since on May 4, 1709 the drama was donated in Vicenza by King Frederick IV of Denmark to Andrew Quintus, on the occasion of his proclamation as “Count of Wardal”.  Andrea Quinto loved the theater and as a Venetian loved The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet, both set by Shakespeare in the Veneto, and the co-star of Incantesimo is Hamlet, prince of Denmark.  This could explain the reason for the gift.  

The play, however, was given, not in Danish, but in English.  It is believed that the author was very close to Shakespeare, perhaps a disciple of him, since, in one scene, Shakespeare’s temperament is described as someone who often changes his mood.

Enchantment intrigues as it describes Shakespeare’s creative mechanisms relating to inventing Hamlet, Ophelia, Richard III, King Lear, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth and Juliet and Romeo.  But there is also an intense scene with the character of Death and some prophecies about today’s world.  Whoever wrote it is surely an esoteric who wrote the drama with the method of “automatic writing”, that is, through the connection with a spirit: that of William Shakespeare.

There is much to understand between the lines of the text, in which secret codes may be hidden that could be related to political secrets of northern European countries at the time of King Frederick IV of Denmark.  All this does not affect the extraordinary theatrical value of the text.  Its plot is totally unique.  An actor playing Hamlet, at the moment of the appearance of the ghost of his father, the king, murdered by his uncle, is captured by the spirit of Shakespeare, who, during a journey into the afterlife, makes him meet with his most famous characters.

It is interesting that if the automatic writing takes place under dictation by a spirit, by means of a special concentration or trance. Also the actor, co-star of the drama, is already in a state of special concentration or trance, for this reason he has the possibility of communication with the spirit of Shakespeare. The text clearly describes a fact known to few: the timescale of humans is different from that of ghosts. For this reason, the actor can take time off from his Hamlet play and travel with Shakespeare to the afterlife and then return to the scene, continuing the Hamlet play, without the audience noticing his absence in the least!

The richness of the text is impressive indeed. The author must have been a great scholar and soon it will be discovered who he or she is.  After 1709, the text again aroused interest and was translated, also in Vicenza, into Italian around the year 1800 by Countess Lucrezia Quinto, great-granddaughter of Andrea Quinto.

Then it was forgotten again, but now it is finally back in the light. Here it is in English and Italian.