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:
Dee may be the inspiration behind white-bearded wizards Gandalf and Dumbledore but seems to be more of a niche/”alternative” character on his own. Director Derek Jarman and author Alan Moore were/are fans; it cracks me up that Richard O’Brien played Dee in Jarman’s punk film “Jubilee”.
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.
And of course, “Supernatural” introduced the Enochian angel language to a wide tv audience.
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!
I did check my copy of “The Hollywood History of the World” (http://jlsjlsjls.freehostia.com/booklist/author/record1039.html) but no mention of Dee or Kelley in the index. 🙁
JLS (feeling quite chuffed anyway ’cause she at least knew who Dee and Kelley were before the writing began)
There’s John Crowley’s “Aegypt Cycle” (the first three books of it detail parts of the Dee/Kelley partnership, mixed in among the main narrative and lots of Giordano Bruno). There’s a ridiculous romp of a novel called “Vampire A Go-Go” by Victor Geschler that features Kelley as a ghost narrator; it’s quite hilarious, although not very historically accurate (it does, however, feature some lovely descriptions of the strangeness of Prague Castle). Judith Cook’s “School of the Night” and Peter Ackroyd’s “The House of Dr. Dee” are others, although I haven’t read them yet and can’t vouch for their character.