Spiritual Alchemy through Embodied Hieroglyphs in Jonson’s Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court

Abstract

In his verse epistle to Aurelian Townshend, Thomas Carew describes wit- nessing a court masque, Townshend's 1632 Tempe Restored, as a wondrous, transformative experience:It filled us with amazement to beholdLove made all spirit, his mould,Dissected into atoms, melt awayTo empty air, and from the gross allayOf mixtures and compounding accidents,Refined to immaterial elements. (77-82)Townshend 's masque replaces the representative of earthly desire, Circe, with the embodiment of divine beauty, played by Queen Henrietta Maria. Here Carew's language figures that transformation as alchemical refinement: love is disassembled into its component parts, like a metallic allay of mixtures, and refined into something transcendent. The corporeal mould becomes imma- terial, a perfected neoplatonic essence. Carew speaks for the audi- ence, ventriloquizing their collective wonder, and he also implies that the audience partakes in this transmutation by beholding it. The audience mem- bers witness an act of (which Carew's reference to dissection ties to another scientific context, that of the anatomical theater), but they also are the material upon which that works. The spectators will join with the masquers in dance, during which the masquers' perfection spreads to the rest of the court. For observers of the Stuart masque, entailed much more than the making of gold: it included transformation both per- sonal and global, both divine and divinely sanctioned. In Carew's account of Tempe Restored, the physical performance space becomes a theatrical alembic in which the noble masquers and their elite audience are refined by watching and enacting the verbal, visual, and kinetic process of the masque.But how can we reconcile a widespread contemporary belief in spiritual alchemy with the equally widespread satirical representation of practical al- chemy? These seemingly contradictory intellectual trends coexist within Ben Jonson's masque Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court. Like The Al- chemist, Mercury Vindicated seems to deride as a discipline filled with charlatans who erroneously value art over nature and who cozen the foolish or greedy for financial or social gain. Performed at Whitehall on 6 January 1615 by the professional actors of the King's Men and twelve male masquers, the masque begins in an alchemical laboratory, in which the personified Mercury escapes from a furnace, complains of the many abuses committed against him by alchemists, and begs for King James to save him from his oppressors.1 While Mercury opines about his situation, the alchemists, led by Vulcan and his as- sistant Cyclope, attempt to recapture him in two alchemically themed anti- masques. Eventually, the king's presence banishes the alchemists; a glorious bower containing an embodied Nature, accompanied by the masquers and Prometheus, replaces the laboratory; and the performance culminates in the noble masquers joining with the audience in a courtly dance. It is easy to read the alchemical content of Mercury Vindicated as an unambiguous condemna- of practical and a useful satirical tool.2 In arguing that Jonson only denounces or calls upon its figurative resonance for poetic pur- poses, such readings neglect the full import of the masque's complex emblem- atic and alchemical context.Mercury Vindicated has received less scholarly attention than other works like The Masque of Blackness, and recent criticism has most often focused on the masque's immediate courtly context: the rivalry between Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and the king's new favorite, George Villiers.3 The transforma- tion of men, then, has both philosophical and topical relevance. As Martin Butler suggests, this particular masque staged a contrast between false pro- ductivity and true creation in senses at once material and social (222). …