I am Jack Strauss, a performing magician and mentalist. Dr Henry Best is one of my stage personae, and I developed him over many years in the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval/renaissance history club.
Dr Henry Best is an historically plausible Elizabethan wizard who might have lived in the late 1500s. He has consulting offices on the first floor of his London townhouse, has rooms in Southwark near the Rose theater, and keeps an estate near York. Wizard is a very real profession in that time and place, and Henry Best would have presented himself as a learned doctor, lifting curses, consulting in astrology or other divinatory arts, and, if times were lean, might have resorted to selling maps to buried treasure, which were the “lucky lotto numbers” of their day. He often travels, in support of his studies, whenever things get a little too hot in London.
I tend to think of Dr Best as existing somewhere on the spectrum between Dr John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s very sincere astrologer who conversed with angels, and Professor Marvel, Dorothy Gale’s carnie psychic with a heart of gold, but he moves left and right along that spectrum at need.
As Henry Best, I perform a range of shows, from classic sleight of hand magic, to mind reading and fortune telling via the command of spirits, in the style expected of an Elizabethan sorcerer.
I am a student of historical divinatory arts. Much of my research is done via reconstructive anthropology, practicing these arts with real clients under field conditions, to gain practical experience, hopefully leading to insights that more traditional scholarship might miss.