Previous articleNext article FreeMargaret Healy Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination: The Sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint.” Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination: The Sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint.” Margaret Healy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. x+260.Aaron KitchAaron KitchBowdoin College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreNo longer relegated to the bargain basement of intellectual history, alchemy has been revived as a subject of study. Historians of science such as William Newman and Lawrence Principe, for example, have defined alchemy as an experimental science that made the scientific revolution possible.1 Cultural and literary historians have likewise analyzed alchemy as an entrepreneurial business, a form of natural philosophy, and an epistemological foundation of artisanal production.2 Margaret Healy’s Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination is thus a timely contribution to a burgeoning field of study, though she relies less on new scholarship than on a traditional approach to alchemy as a branch of Christian Neoplatonism. Defining alchemy primarily as an esoteric or spiritual activity, Healy ultimately aligns it with larger voices of “social cohesion” and “toleration” in a fractured and war-torn Europe, attributes that, she speculates, may have attracted an author like Shakespeare (210). Such a rosy picture of alchemy may well have been surprising to such practitioners as John Dee and Edward Kelly, who were asked by Queen Elizabeth I to help create new wealth for the English state and thus defend it against Catholic enemies in Europe.Healy is not the first scholar to point out that hermetic texts permeated Christian humanism, drawing on the foundational work of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. She quotes a passage from Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) to show how English defenses of poetry such as those by Philip Sidney and George Puttenham fuse paradoxes into larger harmonic unities based on alchemical logic (50–51). Alchemy also fosters new forms of poetic insight through intense questioning, which leads Healy to describe Shakespeare’s poetry as “philosophical and ethically complex work about erotic and spiritual desire” (134). Healy points to alchemy to explain how Shakespeare’s poetry can be both sacred and profane, both cosmological and mundane, and both spontaneous and intricately constructed. Her detailed readings show us a poet who reveled in alchemical terms and concepts; even rhetorical structures such as antithesis and hendiadys, in their capacity to bond different words and concepts together, enact alchemical unification (63). Healy pushes even further to claim that alchemy proves that Shakespeare placed his sonnets in the order in which they appear today and that they are structured according to numerological guidelines.When Healy attempts to enter the alchemically oriented mind of Shakespeare the poet, however, some of the richly textured ironies and ambiguities of Shakespeare’s language collapse into a sometimes predictable structure of alchemical unification, or coniunctio. Her larger claim that Shakespeare uses alchemy to represent the regeneration of the soul through “a repetitive process of memory work and meditation” (4) is provocative but difficult to prove with certainty. How is the “concave womb” in the first line of A Lover’s Complaint, for instance, a reference to an alchemical vessel for mixing chemicals (136)? It is true that some alchemical authors imagined their flasks as wombs and pictured the process of alchemical transmutation as a “chemical wedding” that involved sexual intercourse, conception, pregnancy, and birth. But the womb of Shakespeare’s poem is a hill situated in the pastoral landscape of shepherds rather than an alchemical laboratory. Moreover, that concave womb is empty, devoid of activity or chemical reactions. If it is an image of alchemical activity, then it is activity that has failed to take place.At other moments, the alchemical context becomes fuzzy, as in Healy’s numerological interpretation of the sonnets. Florentine Neoplatonists may have “revivified” numerological ideas in the fourteenth century, but they did so not from an explicitly alchemical context (83). In one head-spinning section of the book, we move from number theory to Aristotle and Pythagoras, to Thomas Norton’s Ordinall (ca. 1477), to the Rushton Triangular Lodge in Wiltshire (built in 1591), to Henry Reynolds’s Mythomystes (ca. 1633), through the production of textbooks of Euclidean mathematics before considering how Shakespeare’s Sonnet 27 invokes Saint John’s vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem (77–90). The point is that alchemy, like mathematics, values harmony and unity through symmetry, but here too the necessity of alchemy for the entertaining but esoteric numerical readings on display is questionable.Given Healy’s essay on alchemy’s relationship to bodies and the scientific revolution in Renaissance Transformations: The Making of English Writing (1500–1650) (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), one might have expected more on alchemy and the body in Shakespeare. But the author remains wedded to approaching alchemy primarily as a spiritual enterprise, which means she overlooks some fundamental aims of the operative art as practiced in early modern Europe, especially chrysopoesis, or gold-making, and pharmacology, including efforts to concoct aurum potabile as a remedy for disease. When Healy reports that Henry Vaughan was forced to defend alchemy against “malicious despisers of true knowledge” (35), we get a taste of the kind of intellectual conflict that roiled alchemy throughout early modern Europe. This glimpse at some internal divisions in accounts of early modern alchemy is rare, and more often Healy invokes a more narrowly distilled definition of alchemy on which to base her readings.One of the most provocative and valuable sections of Healy’s book concerns the language of blackness in the sonnets. Where Kim F. Hall and others have drawn attention to the racial and cultural contexts of the “dark lady” and the aesthetics of blackness that are especially prevalent in Sonnet 127–Sonnet 144, Healy alludes to the alchemical practice of figuring chaos as a black metal that must be repaired and regenerated through purification by the liberation of the spirit. Here, Healy moves beyond Shakespeare to cull literary examples from Philip Sidney, Edward Herbert, Henry King, and George Herbert, as well as from objects such as the ornate cameo of a blackamoor surrounded by precious jewels that Elizabeth I gave to Sir Francis Drake after he circumnavigated the globe (105–7). Healy argues that the proverbial saying “To wash an Ethiope white” did not necessarily represent an impossible task, since such transformation, for alchemists, was considered a real possibility. In assembling a poetic and material collection of what she calls “literary dark ladies” (110), Healy shows how alchemical unification—in which oppositions such as those between white and black, male and female, must be seen as part of a many-leveled continuum—enriches our understanding of race in the early modern period.In offering formal readings of the sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, Healy acknowledges her debt to literary scholars—such as Charles Nicholl and, more important, Stanton J. Linden—who have authored important studies of nonsatirical representations of alchemy in authors stretching from Chaucer to Jonson.3 She shares Lee Patterson’s appreciation of alchemy in medieval England as a poetic blend of astrology, Christianity, and Neoplatonism that fosters the creation of a kind of autonomous desire that marks modernity.4 Healy’s book does not cite Patterson’s 1993 essay, and it might well have benefited from his statement on the linguistic dilemma at the heart of alchemy, a kind of paradox of revelation in which the adept knows the truth but cannot put that truth into words. In her reliance on alchemy as an allegorical system of meaning that informs Shakespeare’s poetry, Healy ironically overlooks the problems of representation that are central to alchemy itself as a science of representation and observation. (In this context, it is worth remembering that alchemy supplied English with the words “gibberish”—derived from the Arabic alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan—and “jargon.”)Despite these limitations, Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination is a rewarding read. Healy is an erudite scholar who writes in lucid prose and works at a crucial intersection of literary, scientific, religious, and cultural history in early modern England. Notes 1See, e.g., William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Lawrence Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton University Press, 1998).2See Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton University Press, 1994); Anthony Grafton and William Newman, eds., Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); and Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2004).3Charles Nicholl, The Chemical Theatre (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); and Stanton J. Linden, Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).4Lee Patterson, “Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993): 25–57. 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