William Vincent and His Performance Troupe, 1619–1649

ecent attention to the evidently remarkable seventeenth-century English entertainer William Vincent might be dated from 1993, when Richard Burt identified the connection between the man and his widely known contemporary stage name,Hocus Pocus, a fact not known to G. E. Bentley in writing his entry on Vincent for The Jacobean and Caroline Stage in the 1940s. The first of two successive royal patents issued to Vincent was discovered by N. W. Bawcutt, who in 2000 published the new evidence of Vincent’s earlier career and surveyed some of the many allusions to him that continued to appear until the end of the century. A phrase from his juggler’s patter became his signature stage title and passed into subsequent English usage as “hocus pocus” to mean both trickery and verbal obscurantism, much employed in the later seventeenth century in works of religious polemic. (Vincent may have had another performance alias suited to another aspect of his skills, as I go on to argue.) Five years later Philip Butterworth surveyed some of Vincent’s career as part of his book on stagemagic, identifying further allusions and claiming the anonymous 1634 book Hocus Pocus Junior as William Vincent’s work, a case he strengthened in a short note in 2014.Most recently I have identified a playbill dating from the early 1630s preserved at the British Library as advertising a performance by Vincent and his company in Bristol. In this article, I consider some of the suggestions of this ac-