[In the following excerpt, Abraham argues that Pericles embodies emblems of alchemy in the treatment of its two romance themes: the difficult quest and loss and restoration.]

Pericles, Prince of Tyre is presented primarily by means of narrative and spectacle rather than through drama. Many of the play's enacted episodes, as well as the dumbshows interpolated in Gower's narrative chorus, take the form of three-dimensional emblems and tableaux. The emblematic nature of the play has been well documented: Maurice Hunt has explored the structure of Pericles in the light of the emblematic imagination, Claire Preston has demonstrated the play's emblematic mode of glossing and moralising its stage pictures and the phenomenon of nature, and Alan Young has traced the sources of the knights impresas which occur in the tournament scene.¹ This paper will show that another dimension of emblem material has been interwoven into the fabric of Pericles. This material is alchemical. In “Pericles and the Emblem Tradition,” Maurice Hunt elucidates Pericles's own relationship to emblematic thought, his failure to read and create emblems as the fishermen at Pentapolis can, the development of his capacity to create “ingredients of potential emblems,” and the final movement of his thought and expression beyond the emblematic way of thinking (pp. 1-20). There are, however, additional allusions made to emblems in the play which are alchemical in nature, and which are not there for Pericles to interact with or decode. Rather, Pericles and the events in which he participates are the subject of these emblems and are there for the audience to experience, or even, for the well-read, consciously to decode.

The story of Pericles with its tempests and shipwrecks, its weddings, funerals and miraculous reunions, is not simply the tale of a physical journey, but, like its forerunner the medieval romance, expresses the perils and travails, the joys and wonders of the human psyche. John Arthos has observed that the primary concern of the play is with “matters [of] the soul.” The motif of the perilous night-sea journey is, of course, an ancient one, as is the death-regeneration theme which is common to many philosophies and devotional systems, and these themes do not belong exclusively to alchemical expressions of the journey of the soul. But, as Charles Nicholl observed when discussing the literature of Shakespeare and Donne, time and place throw up a language, a specific instrument for a universal purpose, and the language which the searching mind of the Renaissance found to express the theme of regeneration was that of alchemy.² It was common for alchemists to co-opt collective cultural property for their own purposes. Gareth Roberts has pointed out that particularly after the fifteenth century writers gave an alchemical twist to classical mythology and medieval romance: “Narratives from classical antiquity were regularly appropriated and interpreted as alchemical allegories, especially (and for obvious reasons) those of the achievement of difficult quests, again suggesting alchemy's affinity with romance narrative.”³ This paper will show that the theme of the difficult quest and the miracle of loss and restoration in Pericles is of an alchemical nature and that this is in part communicated to the audience through allusion to alchemical emblems.⁴

The author of Pericles was clearly familiar with the alchemical myth of the rex marinus, the drowning king who is saved and redeemed. In Pericles, however, this material is used imaginatively, not as an intellectual system. Shakespeare is not concerned with constructing a scientific, alchemical cosmos in the play, as Milton does in Paradise Lost. Nor does he strictly adhere to the emblem sequence of any one alchemical treatise as John Donne sometimes does.⁵ Yet the emblematic mode of expression, as well as the rich source of alchemical emblem materials available at this time, clearly influenced the writing of Pericles.⁶ As the play progresses, the necessary stages of the psyche's alchemical journey are revealed emblematically, existing simultaneously with the more matter-of-fact narrative of Pericles's adventures in a “world where fishermen, sailors and even brothel keepers struggle to earn precarious livings … a world replete with puddings and flapjacks … and a snoring royal household.”⁷

F. D. Hoeniger has expressed puzzlement that the theme of Pericles seems based on the profound Christian view of suffering and redemption and yet remains totally “secular in content and intention.”⁸ This article contends that Pericles is based on an alternative Renaissance vision of suffering and regeneration, the alchemical vision, whose images of the rex marinus represent the stages of the metaphysical transmutation of the soul. The use of this imagery enables Shakespeare to present a non-Christian miracle play with all the attendant aura of magic and wonder, and which at the same time communicates a profound re-statement of the travails and triumphs which accompany the inner transformation of man, without attaching it to the dogma of any particular religious position.

In Thomas Charnock's poem The Breviary of Naturall Philosophy (1557), the alchemical quest is presented as a sea-journey with the ship symbolizing the glass vessel:

And we are now ready to the Sea prest,
Where we must abide three moneths at the least;
All which tyme to Land we shall not passe,
No although our Ship be made but of Glasse,
But all tempest of the Aire we must abide,
And in dangerous roades many tymes to ride …
But shortly we shall passe into another Clymate,
Where we shall receive a more purer estate.(9)

Pericles's quest involves a number of perilous sea-journeys as well as arrivals in new climates and purer estates. Like the alchemical quest Charnock describes, the journey in the play follows the rhythm of a repeated cycle of sea and dry land, storm and harmony, separation and union, loss and restoration, death and regeneration. During the process of the opus alchymicum, a miraculous child is born and grows to maturity.

The reiterated cycle of separation and union (coniunctio), and the birth of the philosophical child or stone, are central motifs in both the metalline and metaphysical aspects of the opus. During the reiterated cycle of solve (separation) and coagula (union), the matter for the philosopher's stone was rendered purer and more subtle. The alchemical separatio involved the dissolution of the matter used to create the miraculous stone. This matter, symbolized by the alchemical king or rex marinus, was dissolved into the original stuff of creation, the prima materia, which could then be moulded into a substance of more noble form, creating a regenerate being. During the dissolution, the soul of the “king” had to be separated from the influence of the earthly body in order to gain new insight from a greater perspective. This separation always involved suffering and melancholy as well as the experience of loss or death—a dying to the old state of being. But the coagula, or union which followed, was a joyful time of celebration, restoration, and harmony.

Pericles opens with the young prince's arrival at Antioch seeking to win the heart of the beautiful daughter of the King (I.i.53). In order to win her he must first solve a riddle which all previous suitors, their skulls grimly on view, have failed to solve. Pericles's successful resolution of the riddle does not deliver him into the arms of Antiochus's daughter as he expects, but instead brings him face to face with the startling revelation of her incestuous relationship with her father. Left alone on stage Pericles goes over and over the horrifying facts:

Where now you both a Father and Sonne,
By your vntimely claspings with your child,
(which pleasures fittes a husband not a father)
And shee an eater of her Mothers flesh,
By the defiling of her Parents bed,
And both like Serpents are; who though they feed
On sweetest Flowers, yet they Poyson breed.

(I.i.127-33)¹⁰

Here the act of incest is synonymous with the act of consuming and devouring.¹¹ The same coupling of incest with the act of consuming is a feature of the first and most primitive of the three major unions in alchemy. The initial coniunctio between the male and female seeds of metals, sulphur and argent vive, was frequently represented as a cannibalistic, incestuous copulation between either father and daughter, mother and son, or brother and sister. The regeneration of the alchemical king in George Ripley's Cantilena (c. 1580), a proto-emblematic poem, is initiated through the incestuous relationship of mother and son. The “Author” in Bassett Jones's “Lithochymicus” hears a voice in the middle of the night which utters an alchemical riddle concerning the foul incest of the king and his sister:

“As for thy Kinge, his sin soe fowle
          (In that he made a Strumpett
Of's Sister) was, that now his Sowle
          To th' inmost Hell is shrunked
Within himself;”

(II, 64-68)¹²

Though of different natures, the two participants in the alchemical coniunctio were personified as coming from the same family because the alchemists believed that all things were created from one and the same substance, the prima materia. The image of incest emphasized the essential similarity of the substances being joined, even though they appeared to be opposites displaying the contrary “male” and “female” qualities (hot and dry, cold and moist). Paracelsus enigmatically wrote of the matter in the vessel: “'Tis dissolved by it self, coupled by it self, marries it self and conceives in it self.”¹³ The incestuous coupling was frequently described as cannibalistic, the ingestion of one or both of the participants symbolizing the death of the earlier state of separation prior to union. This initial, dark coniunctio is also said to be fraught with conflict. Jung has observed that since the conflict in this union is never lacking in moral complications, it is “appropriately expressed in the morally obnoxious form of incest.”¹⁴ The incestous union as a fantastic monstrosity with an onlooking death's skull is illustrated in Sebastion Brant's Hexastichon (1503), recalling the skulls of the dead suitors which accompany the incestous union of Antiochus and daughter (though I am not suggesting that Brant is a source for Pericles).¹⁵ Another common symbol for the initial coniunctio is that of the poisonous and cannibalistic copulation between two serpents, a comparison which Pericles also makes. Nicolas Flamel wrote that the serpents, sulphur and argent vive, “bite one another cruelly, and by their great poyson and furious rage they never leave one another.”¹⁶ Despite its repulsive appearance, this initial coniunctio is a necessary step through which the alchemical matter, the king, must pass in his journey towards self-knowledge and union at a more refined level.¹⁷ In The Chemical Theatre Charles Nicholl has observed that the alchemical journey “entails a submission to some drastic, mysterious and overwhelming process: the torment of dismemberment, the perils of a sea journey, the incestuous marriage which leads to imprisonment and death” (p. 141).

At Antioch Pericles has witnessed the first alchemical union. On resolving the riddle put to him by Antiochus's daughter, on seeing through and rejecting apparent beauty “stor'd with ill” (I.i.77), he passes a test of discrimination, and, now disillusioned, quickly moves into the succeeding state of separation. Pericles flees Antioch for Tyre and plunges into a state of melancholy, the psychological state that accompanies the alchemical separatio:¹⁸ “Dull eyde melancholie” becomes his “sad companion” (I.ii.2). Pericles tells Lord Hellicanus:

I sought the purchase of a glorious beautie,
From whence an issue I might propagate,
Are armes to Princes, and bring ioies to subiects,
Her face was to mine eye beyond all wonder,
The rest harke in thine eare, as black as incest.

(I.ii.72-76)

Like the barren king in Ripley's Cantilena (verse 10) and the alchemical rex marinus in the Viseo Arislei (1593),¹⁹ Pericles's hoped for propagation has been thwarted. The resultant melancholy, and the fear of Antiochus's possible revenge, throws him into a state of a “thousand doubts” (I.ii.98). It is made clear in the alchemical texts that loss, melancholy, and doubt are part of the process of attaining discrimination and that this discrimination comes about as a result of the initial separation of the body and soul of the “king,” the stone's matter. The “solutio” is spiritual and moral, as well as physical.²⁰ Likewise Pericles's moral solution to the incest riddle leads to his physical solution in the sea. The alchemical solutio of the stone's matter was frequently symbolized by the immersion of the king in the sea. The mercurial waters of dissolution and transformation were referred to as the “sea,” the aqua marina. The Sophic Hydrolith states that the matter must be dissolved “by means of the sweet universal … marine water” and the Turba philosophorum instructs the alchemist that to make the Tyrian tincture (the purple elixir), he must “cook the matter with that same marine water until it shall become dry.” The sea is a symbol for the solve, while the coming to dry land is a symbol for the coagula.²¹ The alchemical marination involved the penetration of sapientia or wisdom into the previously immature matter of the stone. When Pericles flees from Tyre he undergoes a journey which closely resembles the night-sea journey, the dissolution, of the alchemical rex marinus. He is shipwrecked in a tempest, losing all his men, his possessions, his identity, and almost his life. Washed up on the shores of Pentapolis, he answers the fisherman's question, “Canst thou catch any Fishes then?” with

What I haue been, I haue forgot to know;
But what I am, want teaches me to thinke on:
A man throng'd vp with cold, my Veines are chill,
And haue no more of life then may suffize,
To giue my tongue that heat to aske your helpe:
Which if you shall refuse, when I am dead,
For that I am a man, you see me buried.

(II.i.75-81)

Almost all he has imagined himself to be and to possess has been lost at sea.

Shakespeare may have been familiar with the emblem of the rex marinus almost drowning in the sea and his rescue to dry land, illustrated in Trismosin's Splendor Solis published in 1598 (first published in 1582; also available in manuscipts, 1532, 1532-35, 1577, 1582, 1584-88)²². … The text states that “the old Philosophers … saw the impetuosity of the sea … They further saw the King of the earth sink, and heard him cry out with eager voice: ‘Whosoever saves me shall live and reign with me for ever, in my brightness on my royal throne’” (Splendor, p. 29). The emblem which follows that of the rex marinus in the Splendor Solis series depicts the melancholic, muddied man stepping out of the water to be cleansed and robed in a fresh garment by his queen prior to their union.²³ The text reads, “to his assistance came a young woman … on her head she had a crown of pure gold” (p. 31). A version of the rex marinus emblem, too late to have influenced Pericles, occurs in emblem 31 of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618). … The “summary” which accompanies this emblem states that the king's ship has sunk “by which the others perished and he alone escaped” and that he must be warmed and then provided with a royal marriage (Atalanta, p. 223). On emerging from the sea and reaching the dry land of Pentapolis, Pericles, “throng'd vp with cold” from his immersion, is likewise warmed and provided with a royal marriage. He finds himself at the birthday celebrations of Thaisa, daughter of the king. The celebrations include a tournament parade of knights in which the bedraggled Pericles in his rusty armour is crowned by Thaisa over the other knights as “king of this dayes happiness” (II.iii.11).

The “infection” or imperfection of the metal before purification and redemption was known as alchemical rust. Dastin's Dreame (early fourteenth century) calls it “cancred rust” (TCB, p. 262). John Gower writes in his poem “Concerning the Philosophers Stone” that the Stone “pureth” metals from the “vice … Of rust” (TCB, p. 371) This alchemical metaphor is applied to the purification of the human soul in Lucy Hastings's poem on the death of her son, Henry Lord Hastings:

His Soul is he, which when his Dear
Redeemer had refin'd to a height
Of Purity, and Solid weight;
No longer would he Let it Stay,
With in this Crucible of Clay,
But meaning him a richer Case,
To raise his Luster, not imbase,
And knowing the infectious Dust
Might Canker the bright piece with Rust,
Hasted him hence.

(ll. 7-16)²⁴

The fisherman who has caught Pericles's armour in his net says: “Ha bots on't, tis come at last; & tis turnd to a rusty Armour” (II.i.125). “Bots” literally means a maggot infection in cattle or horses.²⁵ Perceiving the noble spirit under the infection of rusty metal, Thaisa, in true fairy-tale mode, redeems Pericles, dispells his melancholy, and unites with him in a royal wedding.²⁶ Paradoxically the metal or matter for the Stone has first to pass through the rusty stage—the stage of dissolution and putrefaction—before it can be miraculously redeemed (coagulated or congealed). Calid wrote: “Know, that except thou subtiliate the bodie till all become water, it will not rust and putrefie, and then it cannot congeale.” Hortulanus wrote in his “Briefe Commentarie” of 1597: “Wherefore separation made, and conjunction celebrated, manie myracles are effected.” Andreae's The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz makes it clear that the separatio of the sea journey is a necessary prelude to the royal marriage or coniunctio.²⁷ At this point Pericles may be seen to have moved from the separatio (dissolution) at sea into the second union (coagulation) which the alchemists symbolized by the wedding of the lovers. Thaisa's father, King Simonides, closes the last scene of Act II with: “It pleaseth me so well, that I will see you wed, / And then with what haste you can, get you to Bed” (II.v.92-93). The wedding and bedding here in Pericles, evokes the copulation of the alchemical king and queen, which is illustrated in the fifth emblem of the Rosarium philosophorum (1550) (also collected in the second volume of the Artis auriferae [1593]). … The presence of the sea-water in the emblem indicates its integral role in the preparation for the coniunctio. By means of this union the philosophical child or stone is conceived and born.

Gower, the Chorus of Pericles, is named after John Gower, author of Confessio Amantis, one of the sources of Pericles. Gower also had associations with alchemy. Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis is an alchemical poem, and, according to Elias Ashmole, Gower was Chaucer's master in the art of alchemy.²⁸ The Chorus, “Gower,” opens Act III of Pericles, announcing the conception of the babe from the union of king and queen:

Now sleepe yslacked hath the rout,
No din but snores about the house,
Made louder by the orefed breast,
Of this most pompous maryage Feast:
The Catte with eyne of burning cole,
Now coutches [sic] from the Mouses hole;
And Cricket sing at the Ouens mouth,
Are the blyther for their drouth:
Hymen hath brought the Bride to bed,
Whereby the losse of maydenhead,
A Babe is moulded.

(III.Chorus, 1-11)

“Moulded” seems a strange word to use to describe the birth of the babe, unless the context is alchemical. The separation of unformed matter and its casting into a mould is a process which has its origins in the laboratory of the alchemist.²⁹ In Andreae's The Chymical Wedding, the term is used to describe the creation of the alchemical babes. The matter for the “babes” is “cast thus hot as it was into two little forms or moulds” (pp. 199-200). An anonymous seventeenth-century alchemical treatise speaks of baking the infant stone “in an Oven.”³⁰ The use of “moulded” to describe the conception of the babe in Pericles, juxtaposed with such furnace-evoking imagery as the “burning cole” and “Ouen's mouth,” has an alchemical ring.

The wedding and conception of the couple's child is followed by news that Antiochus and his daughter are dead and that the crown of Tyre awaits the new king. They depart from Pentapolis for Tyre, but while at sea a mighty tempest threatens to overtake their vessel and Queen Thaisa “do's fall in travayle” (III.Chorus,52). The birth of the babe, Marina, occurs amidst the tumult of “th'unfriendly elements” (III.i.58). Pericles proclaims:

Now mylde may be thy life,
For a more blusterous birth had neuer Babe:
Quiet and gentle thy conditions; for
Thou art the rudelyest welcome to this world,
That euer was Princes Child; happy what followes,
Thou hast as chiding a natiuitie,
As Fire, Ayre, Water, Earth, and Heauen can make,
To harould thee from the wombe.

(III.i.27-34)

In alchemy, the birth of the philosopher's babe or mercurial stone takes place when the four chiding, quarrelling elements, fire, air, water and earth, are reconciled and united into a new perfect entity, the fifth element.³¹ In a sixteenth century treatise, Benjamin Lock wrote that “after long strife [the elements] are made frendes, concluding in such a perfect unity as can not be broken.”³² The opus alchymicum was primarily a work of reconciliation between apparently incompatible opposites. This reconciliation was not merely the pacification of the natural antagonism of the physical elements but, at the same time, involved the resolution of moral conflict into a state of truth. The fifth element or quintessence was considered to be the physical equivalent of heaven, a virginal, eternal substance, an embodiment of truth and virtue. This substance, capable of preparing the “body” of the king for the final coniunctio of the opus, had the power to transform corruption into purity, disease into health. The birth of the philosophical babe from the copulation of king and queen and the turbulent four elements is depicted in a widely circulated sixteenth-century manuscript, “Praetiosum Donum Dei,” which was also printed under the title “Spiegel der Philosophen” in Salomon Trismosin's Aureum Vellus (1598-1604)³³. … When the king (fire and air) is united with the queen (water and earth) the four tempestous elements are reconciled into the babe of the fifth element.

The image of the crowned virgin was frequently used to symbolize the fifth element or infant stone. The maid of the fifth element occurs in a verbal emblem in Ripley's Cantilena. The king, redeemed of his melancholy, is given the four elements in which the crowned maid dwells:

Foure Elements, Brave Armes, and Polish'd well
God gave him: In the mid'st whereof did dwell
A Crowned Maid, ordained for to be
In the fifth Circle (of the Mystery).

(verse 30)

The birth of the elemental quintessence, the maid, occurs in the mercurial “sea” or aqua marina—the water of dissolution and generation. The maid with her royal parents amongst the elements on the sea is illustrated in an emblem from Mylius's Philosophia reformata (1622)³⁴. … Pericles's Marina, born at sea, named after the sea, daughter of the four chiding elements seems a very emblem from an alchemical text.³⁵ John Arthos has rightly observed that Marina is “mostly a symbolic, not a dramatic character” (“Pericles,” p. 268).

At Marina's birth Pericles enters into his second separatio at sea. He is separated from Queen Thaisa who seemingly dies in childbirth and is cast into the ocean in a “Chist” (chest) (III.i.71), which washes up on the shores of Ephesus. Like the alchemical queen, Thaisa is only apparently dead and is miraculously revived by the “secret Art” of Cerymon the physician (III.ii.32). The chest containing Thaisa's body is described as “like a Coffin” (III.ii.52). It displays the typical ambiguity of the alchemical vessel at the birth of the stone. In alchemical theory, birth and generation were inextricably linked with the death and putrefaction of the old “seed” or “parent,”³⁶ thus the vessel or chest is simultaneously a place of death and life. The vessel contains the body of the apparently dead queen (or united king and queen), but this body has given forth the new life of the stone, the philosopher's gold. It is both treasure chest and coffin. The queen in the Tractatus aureus says: “After death life has been restored to me … the treasures of the wise and mighty were committed to me” (HM, I, 48). In Pericles Cerymon says of Thaisa's coffin/chest, “If the Seas stomacke be orecharg'd with Gold, / T'is a good constraint of Fortune it belches vpon vs” (III.ii.54-55). The chest, “entreasured / with full bagges of spices,” contains the queen's corpse with its eyes like “heauenly jewels,” “fringes of bright gold” streaming with “Diamonds of a most praysed water” (III.ii.65-66, 100-2). The chest also contains Pericles's material treasure, his casket and jewels (III.ii.76). Is it a coffin or a treasure chest?³⁷

Emblems of the coffin or chest containing the royal body are among the most commonly occurring emblems in alchemical texts. In general the focus is on the king. One of the earliest emblems is found in a fourteenth-century manuscript of Gratheus.³⁸ In Andreae's The Chymical Wedding the head of the king is found “in a little chest” (p. 123). The forty-fourth emblem of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens shows the king discovered in a chest …, while the eighth emblem from Petrus Bonus's Pretiosa margarita novella, edited by Janus Lacinius (1546) shows the king resurrected in his coffin³⁹ …, as does the twentieth emblem (second series) of Mylius's Philosophia reformata. The Rosarium philosophorum, however, shows the reanimation of the queen. The sixteenth emblem shows the “soul” reentering the hermaphroditic body to revive the queen in preparation for the third coniunctio. The subscriptio says: “Here comes the soul from heaven, / glorious and clear, truly / reviving the philosopher's daughter” (p. 94). Shakespeare has completely feminized the emblem in his version of Thaisa's reanimation.

Thaisa is revived but, believing herself separated from Pericles forever, allows Cerymon to “place” her as a votaress in “Dianaes temple” (III.iv.1-15; V.iii.24). Here she remains, as if in a state of suspended animation, until the final scene of the play, the final coniunctio. As Bullough has observed, Diana is the presiding goddess in Pericles “because it is a play set in pagan times and containing much about chastity” (Narrative Sources, p. 372). In the alchemical narrative the appearance of Diana heralds the whitening of the matter of the stone into Luna. This is the stage where the “body” is completely purified and smells most fragrant, a characteristic Thaisa's body exhibits. Cerymon says, “it smels most sweetly in my sense” and the second gentleman replies, “A delicate Odour” (III.ii.60-1). At this stage the sweet white stone is capable of elevating base metal to silver. Ruland's Lexicon of Alchemy (1612) says: “When the sages speak of their Moon in this state they call it Diana Unveiled … the Matter at the Perfect White.”⁴⁰ In Pericles both king and queen make a vow to Diana. While Thaisa is enclosed in Diana's temple, Pericles vows to Diana that his hair shall remain uncut until Marina marries.

Although Thaisa is “resurrected” from her alchemical coffin of death and rebirth, Pericles is as yet unaware of this. At Pentapolis he has come to the conclusion that “Time's the King of men, / Hee's both their Parent, and he is their Graue” (II.iii.45-46). Pericles is still bound by the illusory world of time where birth is followed by death and not the reverse as Thaisa has experienced. Pericles's rational and imaginative faculties have not yet expanded to comprehend the ways of the gods. In the incidents which follow, Pericles does not sail directly to Ephesus to seek out Thaisa (as he is later able to do after his consciousness is open to the epiphany of Diana), but instead sails to Tharsus. Here he leaves the motherless Marina with Cleon and Dionisa for “carefull nursing” (III.i.81):

“Here I charge your charitie withall, leaving her
The infant of your care, beseeching you to give her
Princely training, that she may be maner'd as she is borne.”

(III.iii.14-16)

Marina's nursing and subsequent education is duly taken over by her foster parents. Gower narrates:

Now to Marina bend your mind,
Whom our fast growing scene must finde
At Tharsus, and by Cleon traind
In Musicks letters, who hath gaind
Of education all the grace,
Which makes her both the art and place
Of general wonder:

(IV.Chorus.1-10)

This sequence of events follows the exact pattern of the stone's growth in the opus alchymicum. While the king and queen lie dead or are absent, the infant stone, created by nature, continues to grow, having been left in the care of foster parents.⁴¹ In The Chymical Wedding, Christian Rosencreutz witnesses an “alchemical comedy” in which the stone, “a lovely Babe” is found in a “little Chest” which has floated in from the sea. The King of the land becomes her foster father, commanding “that the Child should be tenderly nursed.” He provides for “the discipline of the young lady (who after she was a little grown up was committed to an ancient Tutor)” (p. 112). Just as Cleon is requested to give Marina “Princely training,” so the King in The Chymical Wedding makes sure that the young lady is “royally brought up” (p. 113). All goes well for this young lady until she falls into the hands of an evil Moor who casts her into prison to await her death. Her life is saved when she consents to be the Moor's concubine (pp. 115-16). Marina's fate is not dissimilar. She does not consent to become a concubine but she is captured and sold by pirates to a brothel at Mytilene (frequently spelt “Metaline” in the 1609 Quarto). The Bawd describes Marina to a client: “Wee have heere one, Sir, if she would, but / there neuer came her like in Metaline” (IV.vi.30). It is possible that Shakespeare is here playing on metalline themes. In alchemy the stone is the paragon of the metallic kingdom just as Marina is named the “paragon” of “Metaline” (IV.ii.156). The Philosophia maturata instructs the alchemist on the maturing of the Stone: “Be thou therefore not solicitous or curious in choosing thine Earth, so that it be of a Metalline Nature, and enduring the Fire.”⁴²

Marina's jailer and pander, Boult, also has alchemical associations. “Boult” is Shakespeare's name for him. (Neither of the two major sources uses this name). He is so named not only because he keeps the door bolted and doorkeeper means “pander,” but also because one of the names of the flask in which the stone is kept well closed is the “bolts-head.” In Jonson's The Alchemist Face assures Subtle that the stone has been placed ‘in a Bolts-head, nipp'd to digestion” (II.iii.73-74). Musgrove has discussed the alchemical word-play concerning the bolted-in whore in Robert Herrick's “No Lock against Letcherie,” the first two lines of which are: “Barre close as you can, and bolt fast too your doore, / To keep out the Letcher, and keep in the whore.”⁴³ During the opus the stone had to be kept well shut within the vessel. Meanwhile, the enclosed Marina is doing exactly what the virgin-stone is supposed to be doing. She is busy converting all the clients. Shakespeare uses this theme to its best comic advantage:

GENT. 1
But to haue divinitie preach't there, did you euer dreame of such a thing?
[GENT.] 2
No. no, come I am for no more bawdie houses, shall's goe heare the Vestalls sing?
[GENT.] 1
Ile doe any thing now that is vertuous, but I am out of the road of rutting for euer.

(IV.v.1-9)

The uncorrupt and virgin stone was considered to be an alexipharmic, a panacea for disease both moral and physical. It had the power to convert disease into health, corruption into purity,⁴⁴ a power attributed to Brutus by Casca in Julius Caesar: “And that which would appear offence in us / His countenance, like richest alchemy, / Will change to virtue and to worthiness” (I.iii.158-60). Mary Astell likewise wrote in “Awake my Lute”:

Who has the true Elixir, may impart
Pleasure to all he touches, and convert
The most unlikely grief to Happiness,
Vertue this true Elixir is.

(ll. 100-3)

In alchemy the redemption of man is frequently seen as analogous to the purification of base metal. In his sermon for Easter Monday, 1622, John Donne referred to the transformative power of God's spiritual alchemy: “For brass, I will bring gold, says God in Esay; and for iron, silver. God can work in all metals and transmute all metals: He can make … a Superstitious Christian a sincere Christian; a Papist, a Protestant.”⁴⁵ “Transmutation” and “conversion” were equivalent terms in alchemy, as illustrated by Calid's words: “Now according to Avicen, it is not possible to convert or transmute Metals, unless they be reduced to their First Matter” (p. 122). Ben Jonson plays on religious and alchemical conversion in The Alchemist, when he has Mammon bring along a friend to Subtle the alchemist “In hope, sir, to convert him” (II.iii.4).

In the brothel at “Metaline,” Marina's powers of conversion are not at a loss for base matter on which to work. The horrified bawd testifies that Marina has the moral power to “make a Puritaine of the divell” (IV.vi.10). Through her virtue, Marina also has the power to “multiply” material gold. She converts the “Metaline” governor, Lysimachus, into an honourable man, who then bestows gold and more gold upon her: “heeres golde for thee,” “hold, heeres more golde for thee” (IV.vi.111,119). The brothel becomes a place of transformation, of transmutation. Marina even converts Boult, offering to make gold for him not through whoring but through singing, weaving, and dancing. She offers to be prostituted to “the basest groome that doeth frequent your house” if she fails to multiply gold through a noble occupation (IV.vi. 200-2). She thus elevates Boult from the baseness of the brothel, both morally and materially. She, like the “fift Essence,” keeps “from corruption all other Bodyes that are joyn'd with it.”⁴⁶ Gower narrates:

Marina thus the Brothell scapes, and chaunces
Into an Honest-house our Storie sayes:
Shee sings like one immortall, and she daunces
As Goddesse-like to her admired layes.

(V.Chorus. 1-4)

John Arthos has commented that “the brothel was traditionally the scene in the old romances and in the lives of saints where the power of innocence and trust could be most powerfully asserted” (“Pericles,” p. 268). Marina's situation, while obviously alluding to this tradition, seems uniquely alchemical because her power to convert morally is paralleled with her ability to induce the production of gold. Compare, for instance, the alchemical power of Queen Elizabeth in Sir John Davies's acrostic hymn (1599): “Rudeness itselfe she doth refine / Even like an Alchymist divine, / Grosse times of iron turning / Into the purest forme of gold.”⁴⁷

Meanwhile Pericles has also been undergoing the blackness and “death” of the alchemical nigredo (separatio). He remains separated from Thaisa and Marina whom he believes are dead. He is shown Marina's tomb by Cleon and Dioniza, her “murderer,” whereupon he “makes lamentation, puts on sack-cloth, and in a mighty passion departs” (IV.iv). In reality Marina (virtue and truth) lives but Pericles is still ignorant of this. Having failed to decode the emblem of Dioniza's “soft and tender flatterie” as a mask for her “blacke villanie” (IV.iv.44-45) Pericles must once again undergo the alchemical dissolution (separatio) in order to perfect his discrimination. Devoured in sorrow, shot through with sighs, swearing never to wash his face or cut his hair, he encloses himself in his “Tyrian Shippe” with its “banners Sable” (V.Chorus. 18). He sails to Mytilene (Metaline, the place of transformation) where Hellicanus informs Lysimachus:

Syr our vessel is of Tyre, in it the king, a man,
Who for this three moneths hath not spoken to anie one, but to prorogue [sic] his griefe.

(V.i.12-14)

The image of the precious red/purple dye of Tyre captured in the vessel was used in alchemy to symbolize the color of the final stage of the stone. Philalethes wrote: “And so the Red they name … their Tyre.” The Turba philosophorum (1593) says of the stone's matter: “leave it for several days in its own vessel, until the most precious Tyrian colour shall come out” (p. 48). The eighteenth emblem of the Splendor Solis shows the king in his vessel having attained the Tyrian red robe. Further, Pericles's “three moneths” at sea parallels the “three moneths” length of the sea journey in Charnock's alchemical poem. Pericles has not yet reached his goal and is still long-haired, distempered, “melancholie” and “great with woe” (V.i.222, 106), but because he is described as enclosed in the Tyrian vessel, the culmination of the opus is near. His cure will come from the healing power of the quintessential maid born of the four elements. Verse 36 of Ripley's Cantilena says of this maid:

Thus she Triumphantly of Kings is Chiefe
Of Body's sick the only Grand Reliefe:
Such a Reformist of Defects, that shee
Is worshipped by Men of each degree.

Likewise, Marina, “the maid of Metaline” (V.i.42), is brought forward to heal the “kingly patient” Pericles with her “sacred Physicke” (V.i.71-74). Even before the powerful magic of recognition has completely dawned Pericles describes Marina as “a Pallas / for the crownd truth to dwell in” (V.i.121-22), recalling Robert Fludd's description of the quintessential stone as a “christall pallas” in which “wisdom” dwells.⁴⁸ Although she has undergone acute hardship and “endured a grief / Might equal” Pericles's own (V.i.87-88), Marina is unravaged and intact, tested and found perfect. She releases within Pericles a “great sea of ioyes” which threaten to overwhelm him “with their sweetnesse” (V.i.193-95), thus transforming the bitter aqua marina of death into the sweet beneficent waters of regeneration and life.

At last Pericles has calmed the tempest of the sea. And he has attained patience, perceiving it as it smiles back at him through his daughter (V.i.137), assuring her “Nay Ile be patient” (V.i.146). This attainment opens the way for full recognition, at which point Pericles beholds his “dead” daughter resurrected and is himself simultaneously healed and regenerated. In alchemy, resurrection is transmutation. Pericles glosses their reunion with “Oh come hither, thou that beget'st him that did thee beget” (V.i.196-97) converting the original fleshly incestuous union of Antiochus and daughter into the spiritual alchemical union of the mother with the son who is the father. Marina as “mother” has given birth to the king's new self, which at the same time is reunited with Marina as daughter. The royal incest of mother and son leading to the regeneration of the king is similarly described in Ripley's Cantilena. The king says:

By other means I cannot enter Heaven:
And therefore (that I may be Borne agen)
I'le Humbled be into my Mother's Breast
Dissolve to what I was. And therein rest.
Hereat the Mother Animates the King,
Hasts his Conception, and doth forthwith bring
And hid him closely underneath her Traine
Till (of herselfe) sh'had made him Flesh againe.

(verses 12-13)

The circular, “incestous” nature of the alchemical opus is clearly demonstrated here—the matter of the stone (the king) can only be redeemed (reborn) by the quintessential maid who is his own offspring from an earlier coniunctio.

Pericles's regeneration is all but complete. He is now awakened to the possibility of the grace of the gods. As a prelude to the final coniunctio or chemical wedding he falls into a dream in which Diana, “Goddess Argentine” with “silver bow,” directs him to her temple at Ephesus (V.i.248-50). The whole company sail to Ephesus where Pericles again witnesses the “great miracle” of resurrection—this time of Queen Thaisa (V.iii.57). Here Lysimachus also does “his sacrifice / As Diana bad” (V.i. 12-13). Thus must Pericles, Thaisa, Lysimachus, and even Marina, who still wears Diana's “siluer liuery” (V.iii.7), pass through the temple of Diana, the silver stage of the opus, before the final golden coniunctio or royal wedding can occur. The royal wedding between Marina and Lysimachus (transformed into a “Prince, the faire betrothed”) is now able to take place. Pericles says:

Wee'le celebrate their Nuptialls, and our selues
Will in that Kingdome spend our following daies, our Sonne
And daughter shall in Tyrus raigne.

(V.iii.80-82) …

Through undergoing the night-sea journey of suffering, Pericles has been transmuted. He has learnt patient endurance and attained recognition, reunion, and happiness—that condition for which the Tyrian stone, the reign of the state of Tyrus, is the ultimate symbol.

F. D. Hoeniger has observed that “Pericles can hardly have been intended by its creator to delight audience or reader in the sense that the comedies do. Rather its appeal is to our sense of wonder, a wonder which reaches its high point in the scenes of recognition.”⁴⁹ By informing the text of Pericles with alchemical imagery Shakespeare has not only given the audience the experience of Pericles's own wondrous transformation through recognition, but at the same time given the informed spectator, who may wish to decode the alchemical images, an opportunity to partake, at yet another level, in the “jouissance of recognition,” the essential experience of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.⁵⁰

Notes

1. Maurice Hunt, “Pericles and the Emblem Tradition,” Studies in the Humanities, 17 (1990), 1-20; Claire Preston, “The Emblematic Structure of Pericles,” Word and Image, 8 (1992), 21-38; Alan R. Young, “A Note on the Tournament Impresas in Pericles,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1985), 453-56.

2. John Arthos, “Pericles, Prince of Tyre: A Study in the Dramatic Use of Romantic Narrative,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 4 (1953), 259; Charles Nicholl, The Chemical Theatre, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 130.

3. Gareth Roberts, The Mirror of Alchemy: Alchemical Ideas and Images in Manuscripts and Books from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 74-75.

4. Alchemical emblems appear to belong to the genre of spiritual emblems and to the formal “meditative emblem” described by Michael Bath in Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994), pp. 163-64. Such alchemical emblem books as Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim, 1618), Daniel Stolcius's Viridarium chymicum (Frankfurt, 1624) and The Book of Lambspring (Frankfurt, 1625) follow the familiar format of motto, pictura, and subscriptio, while others, such as the Rosarium philosophorum (Frankfurt, 1550; Basel, 1593) (which does include the epigram) and Salomon Trismosin's Splendor Solis (Rorschach, 1598) dispense with the motto altogether and supply a long and detailed text which relates to the emblems in a similar way to the subscriptio. Alchemical emblems are used to symbolize “chymical” substances and forces, and the relationship of these forces to each other. These, in turn, often represent psychic processes. The emblems are frequently arranged in a specific order to symbolize the processes of the opus alchymicum and so have a relationship not only to the text but to each other. Alchemical emblems also include mandalas.

5. See Lyndy Abraham, “Milton's Paradise Lost and ‘The Sounding Alchymie,’” Renaissance Quarterly, 12 (1998), 261-76; “‘The Lovers and the Tomb’: Alchemical Emblems in Shakespeare, Donne, and Marvell,” Emblematica, 5 (1991), 311-18.

6. In Literature in the Light of the Emblem (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1979), Peter Daly warns that “critics have been more successful when they interpret literature against the general background of emblem-books, using them not as sources but as parallels or keys to the understanding of literature” (p. 61).

7. H. Neville Davies, “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” Afterword to William Shakespeare, Perikles, trans. by B. A. Herrman (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1995), p. 172.

8. William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, ed. by F. D. Hoeniger, Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1963), p. lxxxviii, subsequently referred to as Pericles (Arden).

9. Thomas Charnock, The Breviary of Naturall Philosophy, in Theatrum chemicum Britannicum, ed. Elias Ashmole (1652; facsimile reprint, New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967), p. 292 (subsequently referred to as TCB). See also Sir George Ripley's A Compound of Alchymie: “In Bus and Nubi he [the Stone] shall arise and ascend / Up to the Moone, and sith up to the Sonne, / Through the Ocean Sea, which round is without end: / Only Shypped within a little glasen Tonne, / When he commeth thither, then is the Maistrie Wonne, / About which Iourney greate good shall ye not spend, / And yet ye shall be glad that ever it was begonne” (TCB, p. 115). Charles Nicholl has recently suggested in The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado (London: Cape, 1995) that Sir Walter Raleigh's perilous Guiana voyage was a kind of alchemical field trip, part of his “chymical” pursuit involving not only physical gold but the “golden king” of the alchemists (pp. 314-35).

10. All quotations are from William Shakespeare, The Late, And much admired Play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre (London, 1609), facsimile reprint of 1609 Quarto (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963).

11. See Anthony J. Lewis, “‘I Feed on Mother's Flesh: Incest and Eating in Pericles,” Essays in Literature, 15 (1988), 147-63. Lewis writes of the eating and incest image in the riddle: “The tenacity with which the metaphor has remained in all versions of the Pericles story attests to something more than simply the regressive pull of literary tradition” (p. 151).

12. Bassett Jones, “Lithochymicus,” in Alchemical Poetry 1575-1700, From Previously Unpublished Manuscripts, ed. Robert M. Schuler (New York: Garland, 1995), p. 256. For Ripley's Cantilena, see F. Sherwood Taylor, “George Ripley's Song,” Ambix, 2 (1946), 178. This English translation is attributed to Sir George Wharton (b. 1614) by W. H. Black on the grounds of handwriting. According to F. Sherwood Taylor, however, Thomas Charnock's annotations show that it must be earlier than 1591 (the year of Charnock's death).

13. Paracelsus, His Aurora & Treasure of the Philosophers, published by J. H. Oxon. (London: Giles Calvert, 1659), p. 53.

14. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 415.

15. Sebastion Brant, Hexastichon … in memorabiles evangelistarum figuras (n.p., 1503). An etching of the severed heads displayed on the gate of London bridge by Claes Jan Visscher (1616) has been included as suggestive visual material in the introduction to Pericles by the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Works (1988), ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 1038.

16. Nicolas Flamel, His Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures which he caused to bee painted upon the Arch in St. Innocents Church-yard in Paris (1612) (London: Thomas Walkley, 1624), p. 68.

17. In both the major sources for Pericles the daughter is distraught and grief-stricken at the fact of the incest (John Gower, Confessio Amantis [1483, 1533, 1554], Bk. 8, ll. 320ff; and Lawrence Twine's The Patterne of Painefull Adventures [ca. 1594], Chap. 1; see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. 6 [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966], 377, 427). Antiochus's daughter displays no emotional attitude but simply hands over the riddle describing her situation to her suitors, giving her emblematic stature—a “pictura” with epigram (see Claire Preston, “The Emblematic Structure of Pericles,” p. 32).

18. Jung wrote that the nigredo or separation “not only brought decay, suffering, death and the torment of hell visibly before the eyes of the alchemist, it also cast the shadow of its melancholy over his own solitary soul” (Mysterium coniunctionem, Bollingen Series XX [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963], p. 350). The nigredo took place under the regimen of melancholy Saturn (philosophical lead). For a full discussion of alchemical melancholy see Noel L. Brann, “Alchemy and Melancholy in Medieval and Renaissance Thought: A Query into the Mystical Basis of their Relationship,” Ambix, 32 (1985), 127-47. Brann writes: “Much as Christian mystics in general began their purgative ascent to Heaven with a melancholy ‘dark night of the soul,’ so did the medieval and Renaissance alchemical mystics in particular begin their purgative journey with an experience of melancholy ‘darkness’ or nigredo, corresponding to lead among the metals and to the planet Saturn among the planets” (p. 129).

19. Viseo Arislei, collected in Artis auriferae quam chemiam vocant (Basel: Conrad Waldkirch, 1593), pp. 146-54.

20. The sixteenth-century alchemist Gerard Dorn wrote of the separatio: “To this is compared philosophical knowledge, for as by solution bodies are dissolved [solvuntur], so by knowledge are doubts of the philosopher resolved [resolvuntur]” (Speculativa philosophia, [1602], p. 303; cited in Jung, Mysterium coniunctionem, p. 271).

21. The Sophic Hydrolith (1625) in The Hermetic Museum, ed. A. E. Waite (1893; rpt. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1991), p. 98 (subsequently referred to as HM); Turba philosophorum, a tenth-century Arabic text collected in Artis auriferae (Basel, 1593), cited from A. E. Waite's 1896 edition of the Turba (rpt. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1970), p. 48; for the equivalence of “wet” with the solve and “dry” with the coagula, see George Ripley, A Compound of Alchymie, in TCB, pp. 151, 163.

22. Jim Binns writes that “manuscripts remained a viable and popular means of propagating texts in the renaissance” (Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age [Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990], p. 392).

23. The queen is winged since she represents volatile spirit.

24. This poem, said to be in the handwriting of Henry Hastings's mother Lucy, is on the fly-leaf of the Huntington Library copy of Lachrymae Musarum: The Tears of the Muses; Written By divers persons of Nobility and Worth, Upon the death of the most hopefull, Henry Lords Hastings (London: Tho. Newcomb, 1649).

25. Pericles (Arden), p. 48.

26. Pericles says to King Simonides, “My actions are as noble as my thought / That never relisht of a base discent” (II.v.59-60).

27. Calid, The Booke of the Secrets of Alchimie, in Roger Bacon, The Mirror of Alchimy Composed by the Thrice-Famous and Learned Fryer, Roger Bachon (1597), ed. Stanton J. Linden (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 36; Hortulanus, A briefe Commentarie of Hortulanus the Philosopher upon the Smaragdine Table of “Hermes” of “Alchimy,” in Roger Bacon, The Mirror of Alchimy, p. 19; Christian Rosencreutz, The Hermetick Romance, or The Chymical Wedding, trans. E. Foxcroft (London: A Sowle, 1690), pp. 134-35. Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1654) used “Rosencreutz” as a pseudonym. Rosencreutz's Chymische Hochzeit was published in Strasbourg in 1616.

28. The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 2 vols. (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1901), I.iv.2457-632. Elias Ashmole included this piece as “John Gower concerning the Philosophers Stone” in his anthology of English alchemical verse (TCB, pp. 368-73). For Gower as Chaucer's alchemical master, see TCB, p. 470. For a discussion of Gower's piece, see Stanton J. Linden, Darke Hieroglyphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1996), pp. 57-59.

29. For “mould” used in an alchemical context, see, for example, Dryden's Annus Mirabilis: “Me-thinks already from this Chymick flame, / I see a City of more precious mold: / Rich as the Town which gives the Indies name, / With silver pav'd, and all divine with Gold” (ll. 1169-72) (The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958], 1,103).

30. Ferguson MS 238, f. 3r, Glasgow University Library.

31. Johannes Mylius wrote that Mercurius has the microcosm “in himself, where are also the four elements and the quinta essentia which they call Heaven,” cited in C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 219.

32. “Benjamin Locke, His Picklock to Riply his Castle,” Wellcome MS 436, f. 26.

33. Salomon Trismosin, Aureum Vellus oder Guldin und Kunstkammer (Basel, 1598-1604), pp. 44-278.

34. Johannes Mylius, Philosophia reformata (Frankfurt: Lucas Jennis, 1622), emblem 17, second series.

35. In both the major sources for Pericles, Gower's Confessio Amantis and Twine's The Patterne of Painefull Adventures, the child is named Thaise and Tharsia, respectively. Marina is Shakespeare's own “alchemical” name for her. F. D. Hoeniger observes that Shakespeare also gives Marina a far more important role than she takes in the sources. Pericles (Arden), p. 4.

36. Johannes Fabricius writes of the model of conception and generation widely held in the Middle Ages, upon which alchemical theory was based: “The alchemical principle of putrefaction builds on the doctrine that all nature is renewed after dying away, and that in order to grow, an organism must first die. An apple, or any other fruit, has to putrefy before its seed can take root and produce more apples” (Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and their Royal Art [Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1976], p. 17).

37. For a fantasia on chests and trunks see Alastair Fowler, “The Porphyrean Trunk,” The Yale Review, 82 (1994), 59-66.

38. Gratheus, no title, end of fourteenth century, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek MS 2372.

39. This series of emblems first appears in a manuscript, “De Alchimia” c. 1526 (Leiden, Rijksuniversiteitsbibliothek, Cod. Voss. Chem. F 29). The emblem I have used is from the series in Ferguson MS 248 (University of Glasgow), which appears to be identical with a sixteenth-century manuscript by Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter (died 1577), “Alchimia,” now at Leiden, Rijksuniversiteitsbibliothek, Cod. Voss. Chem Q. 6.

40. Martin Ruland the Elder, A Lexicon of Alchemy (1612), trans. A. E. Waite (London: John Watkins, 1964), p. 400.

41. Arthur Dee wrote, “and you shall know (as Rosarius saith) our Stone is found created of Nature; which truly is to be understood of the matter of the Stone compounded by Nature, and formed into a Metallick form, but given to Art imperfect, that by degrees it might be brought beyond the degree of perfection”; Fasciculus chemicus (1630), trans. Elias Ashmole (1650), ed. Lyndy Abraham (New York: Garland, 1997), p. 7.

42. Philosophia maturata: an exact Piece of Philosophy containing The Practick and Operatives, part thereof in gaining the Philosophers Stone, published by Lancelot Colson (London: G. Sawbridge, 1662), p. 18. “Metalline” (OED), 2. made of metal. 3. Resembling metal in appearance, lustre.

43. Musgrove writes: “There is a small leather vessel for holding oil, called scortella from scortum ‘whore.’ In the dictionaries, ‘letch’ is given as a variant of ‘leach’ which, as verb or noun, refers to the percolation of liquids” (S. Musgrove, “Herrick's Alchemical Vocabulary,” AUMLA, 46 [1976], 260).

44. The treatise Pearce the Black Monke upon the Elixir says of the stone (in this case a masculine “child”): “And fede the Chylde as you schowlde do, / Tyl he be growne to hys full age, / Than schal he be of strong courage, / And tourne alle Bodies that leyfull be, / To hys owne powre and dignitye, / And this is the makyng of owre Stone” (TCB, p. 270).

45. Mary Astell, “Awake my Lute,” in Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse, ed. Germaine Greer, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, Melinda Sansone (London: Virago, 1988), p. 340. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1953-62), IV, 110.

46. “Incertus author,” cited in George Thor, Zoroaster's Cave, in An Easie Introduction to the Philosophers Magical Gold (London: Matthew Smelt, 1667), p. 65.

47. “Hymns Astraea” in The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 71.

48. Robert Fludd, “Truth's Golden Harrow,” in G. H. Josten, “Truth's Golden Harrow: An Unpublished Alchemical Treatise of Robert Fludd in the Bodleian Library,” Ambix, 3 (1949), 121.

49. Pericles (Arden), p. lxxiv.

50. In Speaking Pictures, Michael Bath discusses the relationship between the motto, picture, and epigram of an emblem, and the “jouissance” of recognition felt by the reader when the distance between motto and picture is solved by the epigram (p. 73).