[In the following essay, Green examines the “language of alchemy” in The Phoenix and Turtle, and contends that the “alchemical connection clarifies the mode of love in the entire poem.”]

Critics generally recognise the language of scholasticism as an important stylistic context for Shakespeare's Phoenix and Turtle.¹ J. V. Cunningham, who formally proposed the context, refers the poem to the Thomist doctrine of the Holy Trinity, i.e., the relationship between the Phoenix and Turtle is continuous with that between the Persons of the Trinity.² The reciprocal relation between the Father and the Son derives from their mutual participation in the Holy Ghost, who both joins them together and in turn issues from their relation. The Phoenix and Turtle, then, symbolises the union between two real human lovers on the analogy of this unfathomable, transcendent relationship of Divine Love which unites the Father and the Son. For the most part, this interpretation should raise few objections. The principal, unitary idea in the doctrine of the Trinity is a commonplace in Elizabethan thought, so that Shakespeare's outlook could hardly have avoided being at least coloured by it. Nevertheless, certain areas of the interpretation are not entirely satisfactory.

To begin with, the poem simply does not contain any allusion to Divine Love itself. There is the danger, therefore, when filtering a poem through a reconstructed system of its embedded ideology, of losing the emphasis in the poet's original vision. Moreover, the doctrine of the Trinity is of a different order of experience: it requires an accommodation which is purely intellectual, whereas The Phoenix and Turtle achieves itself in a fusion of thought, feeling, perceptions, and sympathies. The reading of the Anthem is, it's true, systematic and highly ingenious, but it is incapable of saying how the poem works as a literary whole. For the diction of the poem has a vitality which the rather too theoretical “influence” does not do justice to. More damagingly, Cunningham claims to have identified the external source of Shakespeare's conception of this human relationship, and to have clarified the poem's controlling theme, but without saying what Shakespeare has done with that source. The poem's account of the central relationship pursues the full quality, meaning, and value of the physical and psychological coming together of the two birds, and Cunningham's interpretation does not tell us that. Scholasticism should be acknowledged as a possible context because it shows how strongly the diction refers us beyond the poem. But these objections are perhaps sufficient to indicate that the scholastic interpretation is far from irrefragable. I propose to read the poem in another context, the language of alchemy.

I

As a starting-point, I want to examine a stanza from the heart of the poem, stanza 9, which is readily intelligible, and yet not easy to grasp:

So between them Loue did shine,
That the Turtle saw his right,
Flaming in the Phoenix sight;
Either was the others mine.

(33-36)³

The main point of interest in this stanza is that the word “mine” (36) is usually read as a possessive pronoun. The line is then taken to mean that the birds loved each other so deeply that they identified themselves with each other. This reading is open to serious question, however, for at least three reasons. First, the first-person reference is a startling irruption into an otherwise evenly-textured commentary, so that it is not immediately clear whose conscious self is being engaged. Second, to take the word as a pronoun is to make the line sound too much like a facetious conundrum. And third, there is a more concrete sense of the word, “An abundant source of supply” (OED, s.v. Mine, sb., l.c). Rollins accepts this substantival meaning, as proposed by Schmidt, “a rich source of wealth”, and by Feuillerat, “the source of inexhaustible treasure” (pp. 327, 328). Prince, on the other hand, feels that this image does not develop in the poem, and is un-Shakespearian. He offers in turn the meaning “self”.⁴ And yet, perhaps we do not need to make a straight choice between these two basically opposed readings of the word.

The word is obviously intended to be ambiguous, and it is possible to read it as a pun in which the sense of the noun, “source of wealth”, predominates over that of the pronoun, “self”.⁵ What we have here is a far-fetched and artificial metaphor, whose physical accuracy may not be impressive but whose aptness is most certainly a striking one. In the metaphor, the poem emphasises splendour and wealth, thereby associating the value which the birds have for each other with the ultimate source of all earthly wealth, and the strength of their love with the security which the ownership of such a source guarantees. The union of the two birds suggests itself as an analogue of the maintenance of a public, political order. This meaning is obviously reconcilable with the immediate context and, in fact, in this sense, “mine” might be taken as a conceit for the depth and availability of the love existing “Twixt this Turtle and his Queene” (31). This metaphysical reading accords perfectly with the convention of intellectual wit. It rediscovers, exalts, and reinforces a relationship within the external universe. This, I think, is the simplest and most natural interpretation of the word, and must be taken as its primary meaning, even though the idea itself is not elaborated.

There is, however, another kind of ambiguity in our original stanza that we have yet to examine. So far, we have assumed that it is the radiance of the “shining” Love that enables the Dove to “see” what he is committing to the Phoenix; that “his right” derives its “flame” from Love. But it is equally possible to construe a causal syntactic link between “Flaming” and “mine”. The moment one notices a further reference of the word “mine”, viz., “mineral” or “ore” (OED, s.v. Mine, sb. 2), one is able to appreciate another attempt by the poem to depict the force of the love between the two birds; that is, a metaphorical description of the natural spontaneity of their desire in the presence of each other. It may well be more appropriate to take it that the “flames” issue from these combustible “minerals”. For, if so, this makes it easier to connect the action of “shining” with the later image of the birds as “starres of Loue” (51).

Moreover, there happens to be another connotation of “mine” which supports the meaning “mineral”, and throws more light on the poem than any of the meanings adduced so far. In his poem Providence, Herbert expresses a unitary notion of the external universe, and celebrates the harmonious merging of animate and inanimate bodies in the Great Chain of Being:

Frogs marry fish and flesh; bats, bird and beast;
Sponges, non-sense and sense; mines, th'earth & plants.

(135-36)⁶

“Mines” are said to “marry” earth and plants because they were thought to grow in the womb of the earth, where they formed metals in a protracted evolution which the alchemist tried to optimise inside his own laboratory. To the alchemist, a mine was primal, undifferentiated, elemental matter, or what in the technical jargon was called “remote” matter.⁷ The following passages from The Alchemist will illustrate what I mean—we have good reason to believe that Jonson's play is a reliable and accurate record of some of the ideas of Renaissance alchemy:

SURLY.
The egg's ordained by nature to that end,
And is a chicken in potentia.
SUBTLE.
The same we say of lead and other metals,
Which would be gold if they had time.
MAMMON.
And that
Our art doth further.
SUBTLE.
                                                  Ay, for 'twere absurd
To think that nature in the earth bred gold
Perfect, i' the instant. Something went before.
There must be remote matter.

.....

Nor can this remote matter suddenly
Progress so from extreme unto extreme,
As to grow gold, and leap o'er all the means.
Nature doth first beget th' imperfect' then
Proceeds She to the perfect.

(II.iii. 133-40, 155-59)⁸

The “remote matter” in Shakespeare's poem is the heart (29), and, growing together, the “Hearts” of the two birds produce a perfect love instantaneously, as the phrase “no space” (30) suggests (cf. Lr. V.iii.54 and Ant. II.i.31). This esoteric language serves as an index to the extraordinary intimacy which the birds feel. The Turtle sees his natural potentiality—what he can become—being realised in the Phoenix's acceptance of his sacrifice. Also, in order to assert the uniqueness of their union, the poem takes natural possibility beyond its “extreme” in the eulogising understatement “But in them it were a wonder” (32), i.e., only in these two alone is such a perfect relationship not too “absurd” or irrational. (Reason, of course, can make nothing of their “artful” union.)⁹ This alchemical association of the word “mine” is by no means an isolated image in the poem, and we shall go on to see some illuminating correspondences between The Phoenix and Turtle and practical alchemy. Indeed, this alchemical connection clarifies the mode of love in the entire poem.¹⁰

II

The practical aims of the Great Work were twofold: to transmute base metals into gold by means of the Philosophers' Stone or Elixir, and to confect “a universal medicine for the treating of all maladies” (Ruland, p. 369), the Elixir of eternal life. All perfectly proportioned material bodies were not subject to decay, and the Elixir could establish the balance of the basic elements in the human body, viz., Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt. Sulphur is characterised by fire, Mercury by fumes, and Salt by ash. It was an alchemical conviction that illness resulted from the inequilibrium of these three principles. According to the tenets of Hermetic philosophy, these three hypostatical principles are not chemical elements, but simply abstractions of certain human qualities. In addition, Sulphur is identified with the soul (anima), Mercury with the spirit (spiritus), and Salt with the body (corpus).¹¹

Turning to The Phoenix and Turtle, we notice that its tripartite format roughly matches this doctrine of the three primary “substances”. The first section, the Summons (1-20), emphasises the ideas of spirit or breath, particularly in words like “bird”, “Herauld”, “trumpet”, “fiend”, “death-deuining”, and “breath”, but also through its mood of sombre formality and ritual, and its sense of sympathetic unison. The second section of the poem, the Anthem (21-52), refers explicitly to fire. The third section, the Threnos (53-67), does not merely refer directly to ash, it reiterates the cycle of birth-procreation-death. And, co-operating with the “strictness” with which the birds are selected, the logically systematic movements of the three sections—“Let” (and its concomitant imperatives), “Here the Antheme doth commence”, “So” (25, 33), “thus” (37), “That” (45), “Whereupon” (49)—regulate the poem, as if by a procedure being correctly followed in order to obtain a desired result.

Understandably, alchemists recognised the value of secrecy, and went so far as to devise systems of cryptic symbols for describing their apparatus and recording formulae and procedures, “to wrap up their Secrets in Fables, and spin out their Fancies in Vailes and shadows” (Ashmole, p. 440). For instance, if the “proven” technique was correctly performed, the alchemist expected to see the mixture go through a series of gradual changes, identifiable by a corresponding sequence of coded colours. There were three main stages in the process of the Great Work: the black, the white, and the red. At the first stage of the operation, the natural colours of the mixture are all turned black by heating. When the sublimate, or solid residue, reaches the white stage through more heating, it is capable of transmuting base metals into silver. Finally, at the red stage, it can transmute metals into gold. Now, each of these stages has its own set of symbols, among which birds are common: “The colours of the Great Work were often represented by birds, such as the crow (black), swan (white), and phoenix (red). The formation of a white sublimate was sometimes expressed by depicting a swan or dove in upward flight” (Read, p. 17). The eagle also symbolised sublimation.¹²

In The Phoenix and Turtle, the funereal imagery in the Summons corresponds to the black stage (separatio, divisio, putrefactio) in the making of the Elixir. In the Anthem, the description of the Dove, which is usually silver in colour, and of the Phoenix, which is usually gold, corresponds to the change from the predominance of the white stage to that of the red. It is not possible to say precisely at what stage during the Great Work the Elixir actually comes into being, but the presence of both “birds”, white and red, is required, so that each seems to metamorphose the other in the action of their union.¹³ According to A. E. Waite, “The constituent forces of the Elixir are harmonised and united, so that they overcome divided substances, compelling them to assume its own nature and relinquish that which was theirs”.¹⁴ Both “birds”, then, are represented by the same “essence” (26), or qualitative extract, i.e., by the perfect part of their composite nature (Ruland, p. 137). The Anthem enigmatically enacts the central concern of alchemy, the process of coniunctio, in which the male and female principles of the universe unite. The Rebis or hermaphrodite is often used as an emblem of this union, and “marriage” is the term most frequently used to describe it.¹⁵ The two “birds” mingled so “equally” (as Donne puts it in The Good Morrow) that the Phoenix ultimately resisted physical corruption;¹⁶ that is, the mixture was so pure that the Elixir was achieved without leaving behind any residue of impurities: “Leauing no posteritie, / Twas not their infirmitie, / It was married Chastitie” (59-61). Finally, if The Phoenix and Turtle does have an allegorical harmony, then this alchemical figuration should persist until the end. The important image in the closing stanza is “vrne”, which is the “nest of the fowl” for all alchemists, or in our poem “the Phoenix nest” (56), in other words the vessel in which the Great Work is performed; at the same time, the vessel is a mystical idea, symbolising fire. Inside the vessel is the Elixir or the new, perfected, “exalted” Phoenix.¹⁷

Without attempting to seek a comprehensive and consistent extrapolation from the sequence of birds in the poem to the symbols of alchemy, we can see that there are some suggestive correlations. Admittedly, the peacock, whose rainbow-coloured tail marks an intermediary phase in the Great Work, is absent. Also, the sexes of the birds seem to be reversed; in alchemical recipes, normally, the queen is white and the king red.¹⁸ But what confirms the language of alchemy as at least an imaginative context for The Phoenix and Turtle, and strongly recommends that we take seriously the interpretation it offers, is the poem's structure of thought, feeling, and action, i.e., the energetic intensification and amplification given by the overall movement of the poem, which parallels the mounting tension in the alchemical operation. For it was also a common belief among alchemists that by repeating a successful procedure they increased the efficacy of the Elixir. Traditionally, the phoenix is the symbol of resurrection and immortality, and that is part of the significance of the phoenix's appearance in the opening stanza of this poem. It no longer represents simply the red stage of the Great Work, but is the finished product. The phoenix was actually one of many symbols for the Elixir (Ruland, p. 249). This “new” phoenix, then, is proof of the perfect purity that must be maintained in the other substances if the whole operation is to proceed successfully again.¹⁹

Equally cogent is the insistence in the Summons on purity and piety. Strictly speaking, there were two kinds of alchemy. One was practical, which was concerned with money and longevity. The other was mystical, and its aim was spiritual perfection. Moral purity and piety were prerequisites for success, and an alchemist had to be “A pious, holy, and religious man, / One free from mortal sin, a very virgin” (Alch. II.ii.98-99). Conversely, the practical transmutation of base metals became merely an emblematic analogue of the spiritual regeneration of sinful human nature. Alchemy was a high calling, and the Great Work an application of cabbalistic wisdom, the secrets of Creation itself.²⁰ As we saw earlier, it was a tenet of alchemy that the alchemist improved Nature. Theophrastus's Book of Nature contains one of the earliest explications of this theory: “Nature never produces that which is perfect, or that which is complete in its condition, but man has to complete it. This completing art is called alchemical” (Ruland, p. 99). Man himself, of course, is the most excellent part of Creation, but he is in no less need of a little alchemical “art”. As serious alchemists were fully aware, actually attaining the Elixir would be of far less value, psychologically and morally, than striving after it (Holmyard, pp. 15, 156-59; Shumaker, p. 170).

The interpretation of the word “mine” in The Phoenix and Turtle which this discussion has yielded so far is that the word suggests the creative, mysterious, and exalting dynamic of human love. All that remains now is to reach an interpretation of the alchemical imagery that will be appropriate to the treatment of love within the poem as a whole.

III

In searching for a coherent context for this alchemical interpretation of “mine”, we may begin by noticing that, on a theoretical level, the poem itself is an alchemical recipe. On the artistic level, however, the poem is neither mere description nor prescription, but the Elixir itself. The poem is “rightly placed” (Alch. II.iii.174), arranged in a way that is meant to educe human beings to their highest state of perfection.

The subdued tone of the poem's closing injunction engages the reader's heart and mind directly in an act of pious commemoration at a sepulchral shrine, an act which is meant to transform the reader's state of mind. When we arrive at the final stanza, we “project” our private moral values onto the values out of which the poem has been framed, and our “base” notions of love are thereby “transmuted” into a more enriched and spiritual form of relationship, an “heroic” love.²¹

The purpose and function of the poem's allegory is to involve us in this metaphysical process, to make us participate in it and so complete its movement; or, as Goddard says of Shakespeare's characteristic technique, the allegory incarnates the poem's “own image within everyone who genuinely comes to grips with it”.²² The Threnos, for instance, must become part of a dialectical process if it is to fulfil its function in the poem. For the “essence” of Shakespeare's Elixir is the paradox, which, by its nature—working through verbal contradiction and surprise—provokes a response from the reader.²³ Paradox defies paraphrase or summary, so Reason's version of the poem's central paradox—the union of chastity and beauty, let us say—remains plausible only so long as it is not met and resisted. The reader is forced to make his own assessment of the central paradox—as he sees it—in order to complete the processes of the poem. The basic mode, then, of the poem's presentation of love is kinetic—rhetorically cathartic—since it demands an answering dramatisation of the reader's own moral being.

Finally, considering the points of connection between the three sections of the poem in relation to its alchemical register, one sees that the terms used to depict the alchemical vessel, nest and vrne, assimilate the elegiac procession of birds in the first section of the poem. Clearly, if the imaginative organisation of the poem has this allegorical progression from nest to vrne, birth to death, then any reading of stanza 9 ought to recognise that theme. And the reading I would offer is: that each bird was, at once, the source and goal of the other; each was necessary to the other because each created the need in the other, and fulfilled it. This reading not only supplements the ideas of worth and power, intention and potentiality, but also reinforces the ceremonial pulse of the first two sections of the poem. The whole stanza might then be paraphrased as follows: “Their love was so sure and strong that it enabled the Turtle to appreciate fully the part he was playing in the making of the new Phoenix”.

Here, I think, is an experience of the reality of sexual love that is continuous with the intellectual and emotional impact of the Great Work itself. It is an experience of self-knowledge coming in a moment of responsible self-sacrifice, and it is the function of the poem's alchemical language to bring this out. The poem takes it upon itself to fashion and perfect the reader's humanity, and in that sense is redemptive. For the cumulative action of the poem is a kind of initiation into “eternitie”, giving us a sense of freedom and illumination.²⁴ After drawing us into the burial of the two “dead Birds”, the poem makes us feel stronger and rejuvenated, by resurrecting our idea of their true love into the world of the new Phoenix. In all its small proportions and short measures, The Phoenix and Turtle is Shakespeare's Magnum Opus.²⁵

Notes

1. E.g., Hallett Smith, introd. to the poem, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 1795, and Frank Kermode, “Shakespeare's Learning”, in his Renaissance Essays: Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (1971; London: Fontana, 1973), pp. 196-97.

2. “‘Essence’ and the Phoenix and Turtle”, ELH, 19 (1952), 265-76.

3. All quotations of PhT are taken from The Poems, ed. H. E. Rollins, A New Variorum Ed. of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938), pp. 323-31.

4. F. T. Prince, ed., The Poems, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. 181-82.

5. See J. C. Maxwell, ed., The Poems, The New Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966), p. 221. Cf. P. Dronke, “The Phoenix and the Turtle”, Orbis Litterarum, 23 (1968), 217, and W. H. Matchett, The Phoenix and the Turtle: Shakespeare's Poem and Chester's Loues Martyr, Studies in English Lit., 1 (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), p. 43.

6. The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides, Everyman's Univ. Lib., No. 1040 (London: Dent, 1974), p. 133. “Mine” also has a specific legal usage: see Jeremy Taylor, “The Marriage Ring”, Sermon XVII.5.

7. Martin Ruland the Elder, A Lexicon of Alchemy (Frankfurt, 1612), trans. A. E. Waite (1893; rpt. London: Watkins, 1964), pp. 398, 386-90; hereafter cited as Ruland.

8. Ed. A. B. Kernan, The Yale Ben Jonson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 74-75. See J. Read, The Alchemist in Life, Literature and Art (London: Nelson, 1947), p. 40, and E. H. Duncan, “Jonson's Alchemist and the Literature of Alchemy”, PMLA, 61 (1946), 699-710.

9. Arte then what Nature left in hand doth take,
   And out of One a Twofold worke doth make.

             A Twofold worke doth make, but such a worke
   As doth admitt Division none at all
   (See here wherein the Secret most doth lurke)
   Unlesse it be a Mathematicall.
             It must be Two, yet make it One and One
             And you do take the way to make it None.

   W. [R]edman, Ænigma Philosophicum [sic], ll. 5-12, rpt. in Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum, ed. Elias Ashmole (London: Nath. Brooke, 1652), p. 423; hereafter cited as Ashmole.

10. I am hardly the first to notice this link between PhT and the language of alchemy, but no one to my knowledge has explored the connection in any detail. R. G. Shahani, “The Phoenix and the Turtle”, N & Q, 191 (1946), 122, and A. Alvarez, “William Shakespeare: The Phoenix and the Turtle”, in Interpretations: Essays on Twelve English Poems, ed. J. Wain, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1972), p. 13, and Dronke (p. 218) give only momentary recognition to the alchemical ring of the words “Simple” and “compounded”. As a gloss on these words, the following extract from Roger Bacon's Radix Mundi is particularly apposite: “This is a great and certain truth, that the Clean ought to be separated from the Unclean, for nothing can give that which it has not: For the pure substance is of one simple Essence, void of all Heterogeneity: But that which is impure and unclean, consists of Heterogene parts, is not simple, but compounded (to wit of pure and impure) and apt to putrifie and corrupt” (trans. W. Salmon, Practical Physick, London: T. Howkins & J. Harris, 1692, Bk. III, Ch. xxxix, p. 590). Interestingly enough, the patron god of alchemy is Hermes the Herald, and the arbor philosophica is a favourite symbol for the alchemical process as a whole. See C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2nd ed., The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, XII (London: Routledge, 1968), 420.

11. J. M. Stillman, The Story of Alchemy and Early Chemistry (1924; rpt. New York: Dover, 1960), pp. 319-22; E. J. Holmyard, Alchemy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 174.

12. J. D. Mylius, Philosophia reformata (Frankfurt, 1622), rpt. in Jung, p. 373, fig. 200.

13. Cf. Chapman's Hero and Leander:

    This place was mine: Leander Now t'is thine;
    Thou being my selfe, then it is double mine:
    Mine, and Leanders mine, Leanders mine.
    O see what wealth it yeelds me, nay yeelds him:
    For I am in it, he for me doth swim.
    Rich, fruitful 1 love, that doubling selfe estates
    Elixer-like contracts, though separates.

    (III.411-17)

    The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. F. Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), II, 468. The red stage is sometimes called the “Mine of Celestial Fire” (Ruland, p. 398).

14. The Secret Tradition in Alchemy: Its Development and Records (1926; London: Stuart & Watkins, 1969), pp. 99-100.

15. Ruland, p. 394; Thomas Norton, The Ordinall of Alchimy, Ch. v, rpt. in Ashmole, p. 90; C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, XIV (London: Routledge, 1963), 457; W. Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns (London: Univ. of California Press, 1972), pp. 178, 183. Cf. the 7th emblem in Lambsprinck's De Lapide Philosophico Libellus (Frankfurt, 1625), which depicts the same bird in two states of being, as both flying up from and falling back into its nest. The accompanying motto reads: “Duæ aves in sylva nominantur; / Cum tamen saltem una intelligatur” (“Two birds are called by name in the wood / Although only one should be understood by it”, H. M. E. de Jong, Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens: Sources of an Alchemical Book of Emblems, Janus Suppléments, 8, Leiden: Brill, 1969, p. 91).

16. John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith, Penguin English Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 60, 1. 19. Editors and critics take the word “right” as it occurs in PhT at 1. 16 as a key to its usage at 1. 34, and arbitrarily assume that its meaning is, if not static, at least abstract. But “right” can also mean “territory, estate, dominion” (OED, s.v. Right, sb.¹, II.11.b). This usage may be rare, but it provides the semantic weight I suspect is lacking from the way we usually read the word in the context of the Turtle and his “Queene”. I would suggest that the word be taken to mean the physical body or “domain” of the “royal” Turtle.

17. Ruland, pp. 402, 434; Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 236-39. The association of phoenix and dove in alchemical illustrations lends some support to this interpretation. For instance, the depiction of the transmutation of elements in the 18th-century Sapientia veterum philosophorum … de summa et universalis medicina, Paris Bibl. de l'Arsenal MS. 974, esp. fig. xxxviii, vividly clarifies what I take to be the poem's underlying structure of thought, feeling, and action. For a facsim. rpt. of the figs., see S. K. de Rola, Alchemy: The Secret Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), pp. 108-17, esp. Pl. 50.

18. There is no consistency in the literary tradition of the phoenix (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 228-32; Shumaker, pp. 181, 196). See also G. Wilson Knight, The Mutual Flame: On Shakespeare's Sonnets and The Phoenix and the Turtle (London: Methuen, 1955), pp. 151-55, Matchett, pp. 21-29, and W. Empson, “The Phoenix and the Turtle”, Essays in Criticism, 16 (1966), 153.

19. The phoenix was thought to spring as pure and fresh as “a young virgin out of her ashes” (Jonson, Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court, ll. 86-87, in The Complete Masques, ed. S. Orgel, The Yale Ben Jonson, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969, p. 217).

20. A. G. Debus, “Alchemy”, Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. P. P. Wiener (New York: Scribners, 1973), I, 31-32.

21. I use “heroic” in Bruno's sense of the word, describing not only the nature of love's aspiration but also its nobility. See P. E. Memmo, Jr., trans., Giordano Bruno's The Heroic Frenzies: A Translation, Studies in Romance Lang. and Lit., 50 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of N. Carolina Press, 1964), pp. 17-18.

22. H. C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951), II, 151. Cf. A. Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 73-74.

23. See A. E. Malloch, “The Technique and Function of the Renaissance Paradox”, Studies in Philology, 53 (1956), 191-203, esp. 195.

24. C. J. Jung, “The Idea of Redemption in Alchemy”, in his The Integration of the Personality, trans. S. Dell (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1940), Ch. v, p. 251; M. Eliade, The Forge and The Crucible, trans. S. Corrin (London: Rider, 1962), pp. 151-52. Matchett remarks on the theological overtones of “Grace” being suggestive of sanctification (p. 50), but does not explicitly connect this idea with the concept of redemption.

25. Warm thanks to Timothy Cribb, Churchill Coll., Cambridge, for stimulating comments and helpful criticism.