SOURCE: “‘My charms crack not’: The Alchemical Structure of The Tempest,” in Comparative Drama, Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter, 1997-98, pp. 538-70.

[In the following essay, Simonds examines the significance of alchemy in The Tempest, arguing that through alchemy Prospero transforms and reforms the world.]

In a previous essay I have discussed Shakespeare's Prospero as an Orpheus figure, as the persuasive rhetorician of mythology who leads mankind from barbarity to civilization through music and eloquence.¹ That he might also be an alchemist in The Tempest, which is to say an adept in a science that was more often than not an important aspect of the Renaissance magician's art, should not surprise readers and spectators familiar with the kind of alchemical language we hear spoken throughout the play. One of the original argonauts engaged in the Quest of the Golden Fleece, Orpheus himself, was considered by adepts to be an early alchemist as well as a magician.² Famous Renaissance magicians who also practiced alchemy as part of their repertoire included Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, Giambattista Della Porta of Naples, and the English alchemist Dr. John Dee, who taught chemistry to Sir Philip Sidney and his group. And, as many scholars have noted in other contexts, Shakespeare's audience probably knew alchemical language as well or better than we in the humanities today understand the language of modern physics and chemistry.³ An important part of the intellectual discourse of the time and widely discussed in hundreds of Renaissance books of secrets, alchemy often served as a familiar poetic metaphor for wit, love, death, religious conversion and salvation, and political reform—and even for the transforming art of poetry itself in the works of such authors as John Skelton, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir John Davies, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, and many others, as Stanton J. Linden has recently argued.⁴

Linden makes an important distinction in his study of alchemy in English literature between two types of the Opus magnum practiced during the Renaissance: the “Exoteric” or useful science that was “concerned with the physical transmutation of ‘inferior’ metals into ones more precious and, therefore, more perfect,” and the “Esoteric” or philosophical alchemy that sought knowledge of God's creation and tried to improve the spiritual condition of humankind (Linden, 7-8). Of course, the second type was also “useful” in that it attempted to discover medicines to cure man's bodily ills, even as it worked to change him or her spiritually. Another major distinction can be drawn between two types of alchemists and is mentioned in almost all alchemical texts of the period—the difference between the false alchemist, who knows nothing of the art and robs his clients of their gold with the promise of making more gold, and the true alchemist, who seeks for the Elixir, or a universal panacea for human ills, and does not charge anything for his most precious medicine. Gold is simply a byproduct for the true alchemist. Thus it is surely significant, as Harry Levin has pointed out, that Ben Johnson's The Alchemist, a theatrical satire on false alchemists or con men (who are not doing alchemy at all), was performed by Shakespeare's company within the same year as The Tempest,⁵ and this suggests (1) that there was considerable local interest in the subject of transmutation, and (2) that Shakespeare's virtuous Prospero, whose name literally means “successful,” might be an answer to Jonson's fraudulent Subtle and his cohorts as the portrait of a true alchemist, who is successful both in realizing personal perfection and in restoring the Golden Age.

H. J. Sheppard has defined alchemy in general as “the art of liberating parts of the Cosmos from temporal existence and achieving perfection which, for metals is gold, and for man, longevity, then immortality and, finally, redemption. Material perfection was sought through the action of a preparation (Philosopher's Stone for metals; Elixir of Life for humans), while spiritual ennoblement resulted from some form of inner revelation or other enlightenment (Gnosis, for example, in Hellenistic and western practices).”⁶ In 1604, the Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius wrote that from a physical standpoint “The Philosopher's stone, or tincture is nothing else, but Gold digested to the highest degree: For vulgar Gold is like an herb without seed, when it is ripe it brings forth seed; so Gold when it is ripe yeelds seed, or tincture.”⁷ Such seed or tincture could then be multiplied by the alchemist and used to perfect other material things. From a social point of view, however, the goal of alchemy was the renewal of time and the restoration of a regenerated or reformed humanity to the classical Golden Age or the biblical Eden, where the season is always a happy conflation of spring and summertime. It is not surprising, therefore, that alchemy had important political adherents, including Sir Walter Raleigh, the Wizard Earl of Northampton, and other progressive thinkers of the early seventeenth century, a period when the printing presses produced one utopian proposal after another and some reformers actually organized utopian brotherhoods based on ideals of the Golden Age.⁸ All this utopian activity led Christopher Hill to argue the relevance of alchemical practice to our understanding of the Cromwellian Revolution in England since “Ralegh's defense of the alchemical tradition, … from Paracelsus to Webster, was more than once associated with religious and political radicalism.”⁹ On the other hand, the complete innocence of the mythological periods described both in the Bible and in Ovid's Metamorphoses (considered to be a primary alchemical text by Renaissance adepts) could obviously never be restored. What alchemists like Prospero hoped to achieve through their study of God's original creation in Genesis and the practice of their own form of metallurgy as an art of re-creation was a brand new Golden Age founded on knowledge rather than on ignorance. They envisioned a “brave new world” of truth and wisdom that would include a thorough reform of humankind and of all human culture. The latter included the Christian religion, the universities, and the European governments then in power.

Thus the science of alchemy was by Shakespeare's time already a recognized metonym for reform and change that would soon be taken up with considerable enthusiasm by Puritans, Quakers, Levellers, and others, but was then employed later in the century with equal fervor against the Cromwellian revolutionaries by Charles II and his royalist supporters as validation for the restoration of the monarchy. Much as the styles of country houses and gardens played “a variety of coded roles” in respect to politics in Renaissance “country house poems” and in later English fiction,¹⁰ the occult language of alchemy was used over and over again politically during the seventeenth century to support many opposing positions. But it was never neutral, as J. Andrew Mendelsohn has brilliantly demonstrated.¹¹ In fact, the radical uses of alchemy were already evident in Italy during the early sixteenth century with the writings of Giovan Abioso da Bagnola, a tutor of the famous Renaissance magician, alchemist, and dramatist Giambattista Della Porta, whose later difficulties with the Inquisition are well known. According to William Eamon, “The quintessence, separated off from the dross of organisms through distillation, was for Abioso a metaphor for the reformation of society”¹² in all its aspects. Similarly, in England around the turn of the century, those who portrayed alchemy as false and indeed as a swindle tended to be conservatives, while those who saw it as an exciting philosophy of reformation were at the very least critical of the abuses of monarchy and often far more radical.

Although the conservative Ben Jonson rejected exoteric alchemy as fraudulent in The Alchemist, he also dramatized the fulfillment of the esoteric chemical dream of re-creation in two court masques, The Golden Age Restor'd and Mercvry Vindicated From the Alchemists at Court. In both masques, however, he reserved any enjoyment of the revived Golden Age for the court of King James I, who plays the forgiving Jove at the end of the former masque and the true Sol in the latter. The king is always in control of the alchemical process. In contrast, Prospero's “brave new world” begins with boiling the corrupt brains of the King of Naples and his counselors in order to transmute them into responsible Europeans leaders—a subtle political suggestion on stage, if there ever was one. And, in the end Prospero's new golden age, unlike Jonson's, will encompass everyone, including the rebellious servants Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo. Always cautious in his political criticism and thus never jailed, Shakespeare maintains the traditional social hierarchy in The Tempest, but there is no courtly flattery of the Jonsonian type in this play. Instead the dramatist issues a challenge to all humankind—from king to wild man—to reform, and Prospero begins the opus by first reforming himself into an attentive, forgiving, and merciful Duke as an aristocratic example to others.¹³ The purpose of this essay, however, is not to discuss specifically Shakespeare's political strategies but rather to establish that The Tempest is indeed a theatrical exercise in alchemical transmutation, which in turn would have had definite political overtones for a Renaissance audience.

I find it significant that scholars have never discovered an actual literary plot source for The Tempest, although much of the comic subplot is certainly influenced by Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. This apparent originality of the playwright was most unusual during the Renaissance when dramatists characteristically tended to adapt older materials to present needs, except for highly topical works based on current events. But, after studying the many references to Renaissance alchemy in the play, I am convinced that Shakespeare embedded nine clearly defined stages of the alchemical process within the dramatic action of his tragicomedy. I will argue here that Prospero is an alchemist as well as a magician, that his goal in The Tempest is to restore the Golden Age or, in terms of the future, to create a “brave new world” by perfecting the people, including himself, who will live in it, and that the art or science of alchemy thus provides a major shaping pattern for the tragicomedy as a whole.¹⁴ Indeed, John S. Mebane, although primarily interested in Prospero's magic, has already observed that the very title of the play is the alchemical term for the “boiling process which removes impurities from base metal and facilitates its transmutation into gold.”¹⁵ I will further argue here that Prospero succeeds in this incredible chemical project with the help of his daemon Ariel, who plays the role of volatile Mercurius for his master during the Opus magnum. The stages of alchemy that help to delineate the dramatic structure of The Tempest are (1) separation or divisio, (2) marination or salsatura, (3) nigredo or putrefaction and distraction, (4) dissolution and condensation, or the solve et coagula, (5) the Women Washing Sheets and the dyeing process, (6) the cauda pavonis or the peacock's tail, (7) the conjunctio or the chemical wedding, (8) squaring the circle, (9) the albedo or dawning, and, finally, the achievement of the philosopher's stone or perfection, often indicated in poetry by the number 10. Another major alchemical procedure, that of fermentation, occurs in the parodic subplot, which I shall briefly discuss later in this paper.

A first major step in alchemy is always the separatio. Paracelsus wrote that “the greatest miracle of all in Philosophy is separation,” and he called it quite simply “Magick.”¹⁶ This violent act of division is a replication in the heated alembic of God's original act of Creation: “When the great mysterie first separated all things, the first separation was of the Element, so that before all other things the Elements brake forth into their act and essence” (Paracelsus, Three Books of Philosophy, 10). In act 1, scene 1, of The Tempest, the mariners cry out, “We split, we split!”—“Farewell, my wife and children!”—“Farewell, brother”—“We split, we split, we split!” (1.1.61-62). Ariel, who as Mercury has caused the tempest, later describes the shipwreck scene to Prospero in terms of the fiery alchemical divisio or separatio:

I flam'd amazement. Sometime I'ld divide,
And burn in many places; on the topmast,
The yards and boresprit, would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join. Jove's lightning, the precursors
O' th' dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary
And sight-outrunning were not; the fire and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune
Seem to besiege, and make his bold waves tremble,
Yes, his dread trident shake.

(1.2.198-206; italics mine)

This miraculous confusion of fire and water and the trembling or boiling of the waves are such obvious references to alchemy (Srigley, 27-28) that a Renaissance audience would likely have recognized the allusion at once. Such storms were caused in the alembic by the application of fire and the mixing of sulphur, mercury, and salt with the metal to be transmuted.

The initial tempest at sea is echoed by a second storm in 3.3 when Ariel enters with thunder and lightning to judge the Three Men of Sin from above the illusory banqueting table (Srigley, 27). He tells them: “I have made you mad; / And even with such-like valor men hang and drown / Their proper selves” (3.3.58-60). At this point, the storm breaks out within the brains of the members of the shipwrecked court party, who then witness the miraculous disappearance of their food and the even more miraculous defeat of a steel sword by a mere feather or quill from Ariel's wing.¹⁷ As the daemon mockingly points out,

                                                                                                    The elements,
Of whom your swords are temper'd, may as well
Wound the loud winds, or with bemock'd-at stabs
Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish
One dowle that's in my plume.

(3.3.61-65)

During the alchemical confusion of elements (a return to original chaos), air or winds and salt water command the scene, while metals melt in the alembic, and people themselves return into the primal ooze or mud of creation. The second storm in the play then divides the court party from themselves psychologically, and leaves them physically motionless. We should note here that the human skull was often likened to an alembic or limbeck within which brains could be boiled by heat or by drunkenness (see Macbeth 1.7.61-67). Although these separations and divisions are metaphorically performed on stage, they would have to result from the literal practice (in the form of theatrical imitation) of alchemy within the cave by Prospero, the magician-alchemist (fig. 1). What happens in the laboratory alembic was believed to have a direct effect on both the weather and humankind, on both the macrocosm and the microcosm.

Secondly, Shakespeare indicates the stage of salsatura or marination, a reference to the salt baths in alchemy. According to the Turba philosophorum, which was included in a 1593 collection of alchemical texts entitled Artis Auriferae, “The vessel with the ingredients should be immersed in saltwater, and then the divine water will be perfected. It is, so to speak, gestated in the womb of the sea-water.”¹⁸ In The Tempest, both the King and his son as well as the courtiers on the ship are forced by the shipwreck to swim through the salt sea to shore. According to Ariel, “All but mariners / Plung'd in the foaming brine” (1.2.210-11).

Illustrations of the alchemical king swimming in exactly such a salt bath appear in many scientific texts of the Renaissance. My example (fig. 2), from Salomon Trismosin's Splendor Solis, depicts the marination process on the right and the renewed form of the purified chemical king, after his bath, on the left. Such images derive from Psalm 69:1-3:

Save me, O God; for the waters are come in, even unto my soul.
I stick fast in the deep mire, where no ground is;
I am come into deep waters, so that the floods run over me.
I am weary of crying.(19)

The close relationship between alchemy and Christianity noted by many scholars becomes quite clear in this particular instance.

In The Tempest, Ariel's first song “Come unto these yellow sands” both magically allays the fury of the waters through music and draws Ferdinand onto the beach with a promise of gold. It also tells the King's son in obvious alchemical terms what has become of the apparently drowned but soon to be transmuted Alonso:

Full fadom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

(1.2.397-402)

Michael Maier's Emblem 32 in Atalanta Fugiens compares the sought-after red stone, or the Philosopher's Stone, to coral, which is fished out of the salt water in the accompanying woodcut. The motto is “As coral grows under water and hardens in the air, so does the stone.” Maier's epigram in a modern translation tells us the following:

A moist plant grows beneath Sicilian waves,
And in warm water multiplies each branch.
It has the name of Coral, and grows hard
When Boreas sends his frost down from the North:
It then becomes a red, much fronded stone,
The stone of Physic well resembling.(20)

The importance of the actual Philosopher's Stone to esoteric alchemists lies in its universal curative powers rather than in its gold content, which is why Maier calls it “The stone of Physic.” But in The Tempest, before the subtle alchemical meaning of Ariel's “Full fadom five” song on marine and alchemical metamorphosis can be understood, both Alonso and Ferdinand must first suffer through the nigredo, or an apparent death through drowning, and bitterly grieve the loss of the other.

It would seem that Prospero's Opus magnum goes well so far with Ariel's help as Mercury, or the Bird of Hermes (Srigley, 43-46). However, imperfections in the world were believed to be the result of Adam's original sin and the following act of fratricide by his son Cain, all of which must be undone through the operations of the alchemist, if the Philosopher's Stone is to be achieved. A repetition of both original temptation and original fratricide by Prospero's brother Antonio and Alonso's brother Sebastian, while King Alonso and Gonzalo sleep, is prevented in the play by an alert Ariel. This attempted murder echoes both Antonio's former betrayal of Prospero and Cain's murder of Abel, the biblical act which initiated all human discord. Ariel awakens the intended victims just in time and forces the murderers to recognize their own villainy in the animal sounds they hear, while others hear only music, and to understand that everyone else now knows what gross matter or lead they actually are, as they stand embarrassed before their “awakened” king with drawn swords. Their punishment, like his, will be madness.

The third stage of the alchemical process in The Tempest is alternatively called the nigredo, putrefactio, mortificatio, and/or distractio, when referring to the alchemy practiced within the alembic of the human skull. This dark period of death and mourning for the old self results chemically from the mixing of mercury and sulphur that immediately turns the metallic substance in the actual glass or ceramic vessel to black. The same darkness, understood to signal the death of the metal, can occur simultaneously in the human psyche as a form of madness signifying the death of reason. Thus Prospero boils the brains of the court party within their skulls in order to mortify and putrefy them in preparation for their ultimate regeneration into human perfection. In Johann Andreae's The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, the process is imagined as the boiling of a blackamoor's head until it releases its metallic impurities and becomes white or silver. This unfortunately racist metaphor is based on a classical rhetorical topos of “Impossibility” that was given wide circulation during the Renaissance by Andrea Alciato's Emblem 59.²¹ Alciato's pictura shows two Europeans trying without success to wash the color from an Ethiopian's skin. But alchemists, of course, always claimed that they could do what was obviously impossible for others, and the Splendor Solis of Trismosin illustrates a black man turning white as he emerges from the mercurial bath (fig. 3). In The Tempest, the result of this alchemical “brain washing” for Alonso is the miraculous awakening of his conscience:

Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounc'd
The name of Prosper; it did base my traspass.
Therefore my son i' th' ooze is bedded; and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,
And with him there lie mudded.

(3.3.96-102)

The “plummet” (from the Latin word plomb or lead) measures the amount of water under a vessel and is, of course, made of lead, that same base metal which must be transmuted into gold by Prospero. Alonso envisions himself and his beloved son as both dead and buried like leaden plummets in the mud, which is similar to the kind of mudding imagery used by alchemists either to refer to the stage of putrefaction in their art or to the prima materia. Lyndall Abraham informs us that the mud of the Nile River was particularly potent for alchemy, which seems to have originated in Egypt: “In some treatises the black mud of the Nile was seen as the prima materia or undifferentiated matter of which the miraculous Stone was formed. In others the Philosopher's Stone was reported to be found in the mud of the ‘streamings of the Nile’.”²² On an emotional level, the mortification stage of alchemy is described by Ariel as that of “heart's sorrow, / And a clear life ensuing” (3.3.81-82).

It is not accidental that, as he boils their brains, Prospero also has the court party tread a confusing maze. Gonzalo complains, “Here's a maze trod indeed / Through forth-rights and meanders” (3.3.2-3), while Alonso later observes, “This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod, / And there is in this business more than nature / Was ever conduct of” (5.1.242-44), implying that “art” is at work here. Shakespeare's reiteration of the word “maze” points to one of the most common images used to symbolize the alchemical process of re-creation: the maze or labyrinth. Because the magician-scientist Daedalus was considered to be an early alchemist, Paracelsus entitled one of his books The Labyrinth of Alchymy as a warning to would-be practitioners of the difficulties of this art. Artephius spoke of alchemical secrets using the same image and addressing the initiate as follows:

Poor fool! Will you be simple enough to believe that we teach openly and clearly the greatest and most important of all secrets? I assure you that he who would explain, with the ordinary and literal meaning of words, what philosophers have written, shall find himself caught within the meanders of a labyrinth whence he shall never escape, because he will not have Ariadne's thread to guide him out. And whatever he may spend, that much will be lost in working thus.²³

Such a labyrinth of illusion also surrounds the alchemical fortress emblem in Heinrich Khunrath's Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae as a warning to false alchemists, while, according to Abraham, “The Arcanum makes it clear that the thread or clue that leads man out of the labyrinth of illusion is divine illumination” (Marvell and Alchemy, 195).

In The Tempest, however, the human objects of transmutation rather than the adept himself are lost in the maze, which here appears to symbolize both that primal chaos caused by the separation of all the elements and the chaotic mental state of madness. The clowns in the subplot experience a similar return to primal chaos through their drunkenness, as we shall later see. Meanwhile, Prospero watches all this safely from above, having, himself, designed the meanders that the court party must tread during the terrible nigredo or distractio before they are finally purified.

The banquet scene in 3.3 actually initiates the descent into madness or the distractio through a magical trick to convince the members of the court party that they can no longer distinguish between reality and illusion. Spirits enter to the sound of “Marvellous sweet music” (3.3.19) with a banqueting table loaded with food and drink. Sebastian, already beginning to change for the better, responds to this welcome appearance of needed sustenance with wonder:

                                                  Now I will believe
That there are unicorns; that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix' throne, one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.

(3.3.21-24)

Antonio agrees and carries belief one step further: “Travellers ne'er did lie, / Though fools at home condemn 'em” (3.3.26-27). The self-immolating phoenix, which rises from its own ashes, is often mentioned and illustrated in alchemical texts as a symbol of resurrection and of the desired Philosopher's Stone that renews the world, while the unicorn is also a common symbol of the Philosopher's Stone since its horn was believed “to possess miraculous healing powers”²⁴ like those of the Elixir.

The fourth stage that Shakespeare dramatizes in The Tempest is dissolution and condensation into dew, or the traditional alchemical series of solve et coagula. During their period of madness and grief, the personalities of the motionless court party are, we may assume, repeatedly dissolved, evaporated, and then condensed into a dew. Ariel is experienced in fetching such potent “dew” for Prospero from the distant Bermouthes or Bermuda, the site of numerous tempests or boilings:

                                                                                                    Safely in harbor
Is the King's ship, in the deep nook, where once
Thou call'dst me up at midnight to fetch dew
From the still-vexed Bermoothes, there she's hid. …

(1.2.226-29; italics mine)

Since this miraculous dew changes the Old Adam into the New Adam, it is the true secret of regeneration. Abraham states that in alchemical literature “‘Rain’ and ‘dew’ were synonyms for the beneficial, healing aspect of the mercurial water which transformed the black nigredo into the white albedo through the miraculous ‘washing’ of the dead bodies. … Through the celestial influence of the ‘rain’, or ‘dew’ inert matter could be animated; the dead brought to life” (Marvell and Alchemy, 115, 117). The source of this notion is Genesis 27:28: “Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine”—a passage that John Dee inscribed in Latin on the title page of his Hieroglyphic Monad (Antwerp, 1564).

Fifthly, we find repeated references in the play to calcination or to the Women Washing Sheets stage of the alchemical process, first in Ariel's assurance to Prospero that in the storm “Not a hair perish'd; / On their sustaining garments not a blemish, / But fresher than before” (1.2.217-19), and later in Gonzalo's four observations on the miraculous renewal of the garments of the court party. Gonzalo observes, “That our garments, being (as they were) drenched in the sea, hold notwithstanding their freshness and glosses, being rather new dy'd than stain'd with salt water” (2.1.62-65). Apparently ignored, Gonzalo repeats himself: “Methinks our garments are now as fresh as when we put them on first in Afric at the marriage of the King's fair daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis” (2.1.69-72). A few lines later, he notes again that “we were talking that our garments seem now as fresh as when we were at Tunis at the marriage of your daughter, who is now a queen” (2.1.97-99), and again, “Is not, sir, my doublet as fresh as the first day I wore it? I mean, in a sort. … When I wore it at your daughter's marriage?” (2.1.103-04, 106). Although Srigley mistakenly identifies this miracle as the cauda pavonis (33), it is a clear reference to the long cooking stage in alchemy known as the Women Washing Sheets. The renewal of the garments is analogous to Maier's Emblem 3 in Atalanta Fugiens which begins with the motto “Go to the woman who washes the sheets / And do as she does” (fig. 4). De Jong explains Maier's meaning as follows: that prime matter must be cleansed through calcination and that this cooking or “woman's work,” as it was called, refers back to the Rosarium Philosophorum, where we find it stated that “the clothes of King Duenach which are dirty with sweat, have to be washed with fire, and they have to be burnt by water” (De Jong, 66-67). Now the prime matter is ready for its new form, which is symbolized through the dyeing process that occurs simultaneously with the washing. An epigram by Daniel Stolcius that accompanies an illustration from Johannes Mylius's Philosophia Reformata states the following:

A woman sometimes mixes various colours, and straightaway washes therein linen or clothes. But the water departs and evaporates into thin air; the linen remains dyed with the desired colour. So the Water of the Sages penetrates the members of the metals, and in its swift flight makes bodies coloured.²⁵

In a similar manner, the clothes of the court party in Shakespeare's play are washed and “new dy'd” by the alchemist Prospero and his assistant Ariel.

The sixth stage of alchemy to be recognized in The Tempest is the famous cauda pavonis or the peacock's tail, which indicates that the alchemist's work is almost completed. Prospero's wedding masque for the young lovers visually dramatizes the fantastic display of colors in the glass alembic of what is often described in alchemical manuscripts as the peacock displaying his tail (fig. 5). Turning from the blackness or nigredo of the court party, which still mourns the presumed loss of Prince Ferdinand, Prospero now causes a theatrical descent from the heavens of the goddess Iris, who displays all the colors of the rainbow in her costume. Then Juno herself also descends in her chariot drawn by peacocks, while Iris announces proudly that “[Her] peacocks fly amain” (4.1.74) to be certain that we notice them. Once the peacocks can be seen by the audience, the two goddesses Juno and Ceres sing a pastoral blessing to Ferdinand and Miranda that actually promises the return of the Golden Age with its perpetual spring and summertime.²⁶

Spring come to you at the farthest
In the very end of harvest.

(4.1.114-15)

Aware of the Edenic allusions in the song, Ferdinand exclaims, “Let me live here ever; / So rare a wond'red father and a wise / Makes this place Paradise” (4.1.122-24). Alchemically, the work is now empowered, and transmutation will soon occur.

The seventh stage is the Conjunctio or the Chemical Wedding in preview (since it does not occur in reality until the betrothed couple returns to Italy). The dance of the Naiades or water nymphs and the Reapers called away from the harvest symbolizes the approaching alchemical wedding. This is the mysterious joining of opposites: moist and dry, cold and heat, female and male, moon and sun, body and soul, springtime and summer, Miranda and Ferdinand.

Iris.
You nymphs, call'd Naiades, of the windring brooks,
With your sedg'd crowns and ever-harmless looks,
Leave your crisp channels, and on this green land
Answer your summons; Juno does command.
Come, temperate nymphs, and help to celebrate
A contract of true love; be not too late.
                                                  Enter certain nymphs.
You sunburn'd sicklemen, of August weary,
Come hither from the furrow and be merry.
Make holiday; your rye-straw hats put on,
And these fresh nymphs encounter every one
In country footing.

(4.1.128-38)

The result of this joining of the cool and moist (springtime) with the hot and dry (summer) is, of course, temperance, the ideal of all Renaissance tragicomedies.²⁷ And the country dance that ensues on the green meadow before the lovers is representative not only of the fecund union of opposites in alchemy and of marriage itself, but also of the various aspects of human society as a whole in the new Golden Age.²⁸ A similar dance scene of nymphs and harvesters occurs in Andrew Marvell's alchemical poem “Upon Appleton House,” as Abraham has shown (Marvell and Alchemy, 118). Milton's Comus, which begins with a search for a “golden key,” also ends with a country dance in celebration of a wedding or a conjunctio, which is an essential aspect of the Opus magnum. That which has been rent asunder in the divisio must now be brought back together in a new form by the adept. But Shakespeare does not end the play here, since Prospero has yet another alembic bubbling with the drunken antics of the three rebellious clowns that he must immediately cool down, and the court party is, of course, still putrefying in a mire of grief and madness. Although the masque must be interrupted at this point, the opus itself continues on schedule.

Prospero next causes another important dissolution of his materials with the much quoted speech “Our revels now are ended.” The alchemist announces that his actors all “are melted into air” or distilled in the alembic from a liquid into a gas, an event that will one day have macrocosmic proportions according to the Book of Revelation:

The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind.

(4.1.152-56; italics mine)

The key word in this eschatological speech is the verb “dissolve,” an allusion to the repeated solve et coagula of alchemy. We should also note that an admittedly “vex'd” Prospero is now suffering himself from the effects of his chemicals. His own “old brain is troubled” (4.1.159), while the brains of the court party are elsewhere boiling within their limbeck skulls. These are indeed dangerous moments for the adept as he too undergoes the process of purification before transmutation: “A turn or two I'll walk / To still my beating mind” (4.1.162-63).

In act 5, after next cooling off the clown's overheated alembic and their equally over-heated revolutionary activities, Prospero announces with confidence:

Now does my project gather to a head:
My charms crack not; my spirits obey; and Time
Goes upright with his carriage.

(5.1.1-3; italics mine)

H. H. Furness first noted in the Variorum edition of the play the alchemical importance of the key word “crack,” which often happened to alembics placed over too high a heat. Prospero's speech also tells us that the time or “the sixth hour” is finally ripe for alchemical fruition, and that Saturn, the god of time who presides over the Golden Age, is once more sitting erect and vital in his triumphal chariot, as he is often depicted in alchemical texts showing sequences of planetary gods. Saturn, who represents here “the lead of the wise” (Klossowski de Rola, caption to pl. 47), causes the traditional melancholy of the adept.

Squaring the Circle is the eighth stage of alchemy in Shakespeare's tragicomedy. This is accomplished when Prospero traces out a magic circle with his staff and delivers his speech “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves.” We should not be surprised that the lines here resemble Medea's speech in book 7 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, since Medea was revered as one of the first great alchemists (see Srigley, 158) and was highly regarded as a successful adept by her scientific descendants rather than being reviled as a witch during the Renaissance. She not only helped Jason gain the Golden Fleece or achieve alchemical transmutation, but also rejuvenated Jason's aged father by giving him the first blood transfusion in literature—a transfusion in which she used for youthful and healthy blood what seems to be the alchemical aurum potabile that she has magically achieved in her boiling cauldron. Regeneration of both individuals and the world was the ultimate goal of esoteric alchemy, as I have previously stated.

Prospero's speech ends with the promise to abjure his “rough magic” and finally to bury his magical staff and drown his book once he has achieved his ends. This abjuration probably derives from Agrippa's ironic book The Vanitie of the Arts and Sciences,²⁹ which relates an apparent turning away from outward forms or empty “tricks” of magic, universally understood as “vanities,” to faith alone. Agrippa attacks only magicians who create illusions and false alchemists, however, while admitting that he is himself a properly trained alchemical adept and sworn to secrecy in matters of the “divine art.” In fact, the renunciation of illusionistic magic is an often repeated rhetorical topos in Medieval and Renaissance books of secrets. Almost everyone involved in early science at some point abjured magic, especially necromancy, since such black magic involved dealings with otherworldly spirits—as alchemy usually did not. Here Prospero does indeed appear to be endangering his soul as an alchemist with a daemonic helper. He must abjure such unlawful magic, but not necessarily his alchemy, before he returns to Milan. Eamon points out that even as early as the thirteenth century Roger Bacon makes a careful distinction between experimental science, such as alchemy, and unlawful magic.

Magic, he argued, is always illicit and sinful because it is either fraudulent, as in the deceits perpetrated by jugglers and ventriloquists, or else it is accomplished with the aid of demons. Fraudulent magic is worthless and without power; it is simply sleight of hand. Demonic magic, while powerful, cannot be controlled by human agency; instead, through it demons exercise their power over human souls. Against magic Bacon upheld the power of nature and of “art using nature as an instrument.” …

(Eamon, 67)

Thus Prospero is merely following the fashion in his vow to practice no more magic, which means freeing Ariel from his servitude and offering no more disappearing banquets or illusory court masques (another bit of subversion, no doubt).

In The Tempest, Ariel now brings the distracted court party into the magic circle, a figure which arises alchemically from the square of the four elements, the four seasons, the four directions of the compass, and the four arms of the cross. Abraham explains that the alchemical vessel itself was often called “the vas rotundum, or circular vessel” (Marvell and Alchemy, 47). The squaring of the circle thus “signified the making of the philosopher's stone, the Quintessence, otherwise known as ‘Heaven’” (49), and pointed to the end of the Opus magnum itself. According to Canon George Ripley, “When thou hast made the quadrangle round, then is all the secrett found.”³⁰ Once again Maier has illustrated this crucial alchemical moment in his Emblem 21 (fig. 6) under the inscriptio “Make a circle around man and woman, then a square, now a triangle, make a circle, and you will have the philosopher's stone” (Maier, 147).

His old enemies now before him in the circle, Prospero calls for music to help him cure the madness his alchemy has produced:

A solemn air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains,
Now useless [boil'd] within thy skull!

(5.1.58-61)

Musical performance was common in the practice of alchemy, as we know partly from Heinrich Khunrath's famous engraving of the alchemist's laboratory (fig. 7). The laboratory on the right is combined with an oratory on the left, while musical instruments are as prominent in the foreground as are the chemical utensils necessary for the Great Work. Indeed, music is particularly required to calm the fancy of the adept himself, who often suffered vexations from the effects of mercurial fumes in his laboratory. Inscribed in Latin on the Khunrath engraving is the following reminder: “Sacred music puts melancholy and evil spirits to flight, for the spirit of Jehovah sings happily in a heart filled with joy.”³¹ Indeed, alchemy was often referred to as the “musical art” since it relied on time and measure as much as did music. Thomas Norton advised in his Ordinal that elements should be joined together both “Arismetically / Bi subtile nombres proporcionally” and “Musicallye”:

… accordis which in musike be [vsed],
with their proporcions cawsen Armonye,
Moch like proporcions be in Alchymye. …(32)

And flasks were often called “viols” by alchemists. The calming and therapeutic effects of music were understood to be beneficial to all aspects of the spagyric art, although, in particular, alchemists used music to achieve ultimately a wresting of materials from Saturn's domination and the achievement of purity in a state of grace. Grace, according to John Donne, is nothing less than “the proper Physick of the soul.”³³

The albedo or dawning is the last or ninth step in Prospero's alchemy before the final achievement of the philosopher's stone. Prospero's call for solemn music in the play at once leads to the albedo, when darkness is followed by light, black by white. In Prospero's words,

The charm dissolves apace,
And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.

(5.1.64-68; italics mine)

We can assume that simultaneously in the cave laboratory, the color of the dissolving mixture in the alembic now whitens to mark the albedo: “as the morning steals upon the night.” And, as the mercurial fumes condense into dew, the brains of the court party mimic the chemical process in Prospero's “brave utensils” (3.2.96). The light of reason slowly returns, but only after the adept himself has used his “nobler reason” to control his own personal “fury” (5.1.26) at his earlier betrayal by the Three Men of Sin. The latter are all now cured of Adam's original sin after having partaken of the Paracelsian healing poison of guilt and remorse during the mortificatio of the alchemical process.

While all this has been going on, however, another pot has been boiling—the parodic brew of prima materia that makes The Tempest so much fun in the theater. Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo must, like their equally murderous courtly counterparts, undergo the alchemical process as the representatives of the lower classes or servants in society, although Prospero has little real hope of reforming the savage Caliban. Yet, we have heard Prospero call Caliban “Thou earth” (1.2.314), the very element that must, in fact, be transmuted in order to achieve the quintessence, and “thou tortoise” (1.2.316), an animal symbolizing “the matter of the alchemical art”³⁴ as well as providing the form of a type of alchemical vessel. Shakespeare's leaden clowns, like the court party, lose their minds in order to discover their souls, but not through madness. Intoxication, another important aspect of alchemy, does the trick.

In her important study of Bosch and alchemy, Dixon observes that in alchemical literature and illustrations,

The Tree of Life does not bear fruit of its own, but serves as host for a graceful vine which bears bunches of reddish and white grapes. Alchemically, red and white grapes symbolized the Elixir of Life, and the “Vine” was a synonym for the distillation process, also referred to as the “Vintage.” Distilled wine was considered a powerful medicine in itself and the “blood of the grape” is, after all, the basic ingredient which is transmuted into Christ's blood in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.³⁵

The vine and grapes entwined about the Tree of Life appear in all of the beautiful “Ripley Scrowles”—hand-painted alchemical manuscripts—that I have seen at the British Library, Beinecke Library, and Huntington Library, but at the top of the tree there is also a precious fruit—the child representing the Philosophical Stone or the Elixir. On either side of the vines of red and white grapes entwined about the Tree of Life stand the alchemical spouses, Sulphur and Mercury as a red man and a white woman, both up to their knees in the mysterious bath of mercurial transformation (fig. 8). We should remember, of course, that alchemists did discover “aqua vitae” (the water of life), which was 96٪ alcohol, in the twelfth century, while 100٪ alcohol was finally achieved by the “philosophers” in the fourteenth century.

In The Tempest, Stephano, the court butler, rides a butt of sack (Spanish wine fortified with distilled brandy) from the ship to the island, where he is hailed by Caliban as “a brave god” who “bears celestial liquor” (2.2.117). The allusion is to the god Dionysus or Bacchus, who represents the emotional and thus irrational life of the body as well as divine fecundity. When Caliban insists that Stephano's “liquor is not earthly” (2.2.126), he thereby suggests an “association between alcoholic spirits and the elixir” (Srigley, 40). Trinculo is little more than a professional drinker, as his name suggests; he is a theatrical satyr or a classical follower of Bacchus. In fact, “trinc” is the sacred word uttered by the Oracle of the Bottle on the “desired island” in book 5, chapter 4, of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel.³⁶ The bottle is shaped like a breviary and is called “trismegistian” by Panurge, who puts it to his lips and drains it of wine, much as Caliban is told to “kiss the book” (2.2.130) by Stephano in The Tempest. Rabelais's priestess Bacbuc then explains the meaning of the Oracle: “For Trinc is a panomphaean word, that is a word employed, understood and celebrated among all nations. It means simply: Drink!”³⁷“Trinken” is, of course, the German word for “to drink.” That we should take these comic scenes of drunkenness as a serious aspect of alchemy is made clear by Cornelius Agrippa, who mentions the “phrensie” of Bacchus in his Occult Philosophy 3.47, and asserts that it “divert[s] the soul into the mind, the supream part of it self, and makes it a fit and pure temple of the Gods.”³⁸ The drunkards in The Tempest are thus maddened by a chemical infusion of divinity. Shakespeare had earlier suggested an involvement of alcohol in the alchemical process in a statement similar to that of Agrippa through Falstaff's famous encomium of sack in 2 Henry IV.³⁹

The comic scene in The Tempest 2.2 ends with a wild song of “freedom,” which, of course, the adept or artist can never allow to enter into his dangerous work with poisonous chemicals and gases for very long. At the same time, the song does remind us of the political implications of the Opus magnum, although in the next scene the opposite state of “bondage” is praised by the king's son. Prince Ferdinand decides to marry Miranda “with a heart as willing / As bondage e'er of freedom” (3.1.88-89). The point seems to be that the subject must consent of his own free will to be ruled. Rabelais's great alchemical comedy of drunkenness also ends, as will The Tempest, with the promise of a marriage—the alchemical wedding between Mercury and Sulphur that finally results in the return of the Golden Age. The marriage is celebrated in the “Kingdom of Quintessence” with an elaborate game of chess symbolizing the Opus magnum itself and performed as a dance. Srigley suggests that the chess game played by Ferdinand and Miranda may derive from this source (39), which is certainly possible.

However, I cannot agree here with Srigley's assertion that the clowns are meant to symbolize “false alchemists” (41), since they are not alchemists at all but the prima materia or lead to be transmuted into something better by Prospero. Srigley offers no evidence from the play in proof of his negative view but rather proves exactly the opposite by his succeeding argument on the alchemical nature of drunkenness. Indeed, the clowns' theatrical transformation is finally as complete and significant as that of the court party, for Shakespeare seems to tell us in The Tempest that the Golden Age cannot return to the world only for aristocrats, as the court masques of the period would have it, but that all humanity must share in its blessings, once they have been taught to overcome their inborn greed for gold and power. By act 4, the native monster or wild man Caliban appears to have advanced in this respect over his shipwrecked fellows from Europe. In the “glistering apparel” scene, Stephano and Trinculo are attracted by the golden threads in the garments offered to them by Ariel, but Caliban sees at once that “it is but trash” (4.1.224) or fool's gold.

Meanwhile, to control the boiling over of the servant-class alembic, whose inhabitants are now “red-hot with drinking” (4.1.171), and their rebellion against authority, Ariel first lures the clowns with pipe and tabor through the mire into a foul lake of horse piss to cool them off. Urine was a commonly used ingredient in alchemy, as Surly mentions in Jonson's The Alchemist (2.3.194), while Gareth Roberts points out that the alchemical purification of prima materia included the use of “waters, salts, acids or sharp liquids (vinegar, urine).”⁴⁰ Foul odors were also typical at this stage of the alchemical process.

After the “glistering apparel” scene, Prospero and Ariel next hunt the drunkards with hounds. This comic chase may be a theatrical allusion to the metaphor of the hunt employed in the medieval alchemical poem called The Hunting of the Greene Lyon that Elias Ashmole included in his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum.⁴¹ Some alchemical writers thought the lion was a green vitriol, but others believed it to be a kind of salt. We should also note that Maier added a set of three-voiced fugues to his alchemical emblem book Atalanta Fugiens as a similar allusion to the hunting motif in the “divine art.” One voice follows or hunts down another in this music. According to Eamon, the metaphor was carried even further.

The conception of science as a hunt for the secrets of nature was … widely shared by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophers. “In these centuries,” observed Paolo Rossi, “there was continuous discussion, with an insistence that bordered on monotony, about a logic of discovery conceived as a venatio, a hunt—as an attempt to penetrate territories never known or explored before.” One implication of this idea was that nature was a great uncharted unknown, and that science had to begin anew. Another was that new methods and guides had to be found to help the intellect weave its way through the labyrinth of experience.⁴²

Thus the hunt became a motif common to all the experimental sciences at the time, not only to alchemy.

When Ariel finally drives the clowns back on stage in the last scene of The Tempest, Alonso asks Trinculo, “How cam'st thou in this pickle?” To this Trinculo replies sheepishly, “I have been in such a pickle since I saw you last that I fear me will never out of my bones” (5.1.282-84); italics mine). To be pickled is to be in a predicament, to be drunk, and also to be preserved in brine (Srigley, 42). The clowns, like the court party, have thus passed through their own marination in salty and acidic baths, have suffered the Bacchic madness of intoxication, have at last emerged in a purified state from the mud or ooze, and are now transmuted. Indeed, Alonso asks in amazement, “Where should they / Find this grand liquor that hath gilded 'em?” (5.1.279-80; my italics). Gilding was a common alchemical reference to the change from lead to gold.

Indeed, ever since Warburton, editors of The Tempest have routinely glossed the king's line on gilding as an alchemical reference to the Elixir (Srigley, 41) but have not been aware, it seems, of how thoroughly the process of alchemy permeates the play as a whole. The resulting gilding by the Elixir should be indicated on stage, perhaps by gold dust on the fancy costumes of the clowns, in order to announce visually the successful outcome of Prospero's work. Above all, we should see a physical difference in Caliban, who has changed psychologically and morally as well. Instead of shirking his work as usual when Prospero orders him to clean out the cave, Caliban replies, “Ay, that I will; and I'll be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace” (5.1.295-96). This new attitude is the most remarkable metamorphosis in the entire play and seems to indicate the tenth stage in the alchemical process—perfection.

Apparently unaware that he has miraculously succeeded in transforming “this thing of darkness” (5.1.275) into a willing servant, Prospero at least sees at this point that his Opus magnum has preserved the ship and all its crew, has restored the reborn alchemical king in a purified form to his son and the reborn son to the grieving father, as well as perfecting Antonio and Sebastian who could not have withstood the corrosive boiling of their brains without inner change, and has gently led Ferdinand and Miranda to their projected chemical wedding. Finally, he has regained his own lost dukedom and a second chance at good government. Now richly attired as the Duke of Milan, the erstwhile magus is one with the elegant court party whose outward appearance prompts Miranda's exclamation, “O brave new world / That has such people in't” (5.1.183-84). Her naive admiration heralds the return to the Golden Age, which will finally be celebrated by her nuptials with Ferdinand in Naples. Gonzalo then announces the golden ending to the story (1) by wishing upon the couple “a blessed crown” of gold, and (2) by insisting that the entire wondrous tale be written down “With gold on lasting pillars” (5.1.207-08; my italics). These pillars may well have been inspired by the seven pillars supporting the heavens in the great cosmological temple described by Rabelais in book 5, chapter 42, of Gargantua and Pantagruel. But the return to the Golden Age means also a return to the Age of Saturn, the god whose humour is melancholy. After Prospero has told his story to the regenerated Europeans and has witnessed the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand in Naples, he plans to “retire me to my Milan, where / Every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.311-12). His melancholy is apparently the price exacted by Saturn of all his alchemical adepts. Another possible explanation is that Prospero has not quite yet attained for himself the tenth step of the process—spiritual perfection, or a state of grace that can exist only between himself and his maker. Unlike Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare never plays God by clearly condemning or saving the souls of his heroes in his dramatic closures. Thus an actual validation of Prospero and Caliban as “sanctified,” in the sense of being purified from original sin, must of necessity take place off stage.

What the dramatist does make clear at the end of The Tempest is that the element of Air is now supreme. After assuring that Ariel will provide the “auspicious gales” (5.1.315) to blow the European ships back to Naples, the actor playing Prospero steps out of his role and, in a conventional if Christianized “plaudite,” asks for the “Gentle breath” of audience applause and prayers to free him, along with Ariel, from the stage that for several hours has represented an imaginary island.

We should also note, in conclusion, that the island setting itself has been one more symbol of the art of alchemy. Rabelais's archetypal “Kingdom of Quintessence” (or “Entelechy”) is an island reached only by those sailors who trust “to the whirlwind and current” (740) and are willing to accept some help from “Henri Cotiral, also known as Cornelius Agrippa or Herr Trippa” (739), a reference to Hermes Trismegistus. In addition, the Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius includes a similar island myth in his alchemical manual A New Light of Alchymie. During a dream vision, Neptune transports the author to a beautiful island filled with trees and flowers, a place comparable to Virgil's Elysian fields (52). Then Saturn arrives and dissolves the fruit of the tree of the Sun (dew) in ten parts of water (Mercury) to make aqua vita, or the Elixir of Life, before the visitor's wondering eyes. Although this completion of the Opus magnum is only a dream, Sendivogius then provides the reader with advice on how to accomplish it in the laboratory. A New Light, available in the Latin edition of 1604, was probably familiar to Shakespeare since it was used as the source of Mercury Vindicated by Ben Jonson (Linden, 132-51), whose grammar-school Latin was surely no better than that of his more famous colleague at the Globe. The difference was that Jonson (no more a university graduate than Shakespeare) flaunted his self-acquired erudition in his published works while Shakespeare wove his own self-acquired knowledge so thoroughly into the fabric of his art that we are still discovering colorful new threads of his thought to analyze. The golden thread of alchemy is of particular importance to our current understanding of The Tempest within its own historical context.⁴³

Notes

1. Peggy Muñoz Simonds, “‘Sweet Power of Music’: The Political Power of ‘the Miraculous Harp’ in Shakespeare's The Tempest,” Comparative Drama 29 (1995): 61-90 (reprinted in Emblem, Iconography, and Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson et al. [Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995], 61-90). All quotations from William Shakespeare in the present essay are from The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. According to R. Bostocke, an English apologist for Paracelsian medicine, the difficulties of obtaining the golden fleece “signified the practice of this Arte [alchemy], daungers and perills in this worke, the purging and preparing of the matters and substaunce of the medicine, in the furnaces that breath out fire at the ventholes continually in equal quantities” (R. B., The Difference Betweene the Auncient Phisicke … and the Latter Phisicke (London: Robert Walley, 1585), sig. Hii. See also Antoine Faivre, “An Approach to the Theme of the Golden Fleece in Alchemy,” in Alchemy Revisited, ed. Z. R. W. M. von Martels (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 250-55.

3. For the widespread interest in and knowledge of alchemical practice during the Renaissance, see Lyndy Abraham, “The Alchemical Context,” Marvell and Alchemy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), 1-35; hereafter cited parenthetically; and Charles Nicholl, The Chemical Theatre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 1-100.

4. Stanton J. Linden, Dark Hieroglyphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); hereafter cited parenthetically.

5. Harry Levin, “Two Magian Comedies: The Tempest and The Alchemist,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 47-58.

6. H. J. Sheppard, “European Alchemy in the Context of a Universal Definition,” in Die Alchimie in der europäischen Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, ed. Christoph Meinel (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986), 16-17, as quoted by Linden, Dark Hieroglyphicks, 11.

7. Michael Sendivogius, A New Light of Alchymie: Taken out of the fourtaine of Nature and Manual Experience, trans. John French (London: Richard Cotes, 1650), 28; cited hereafter parenthetically.

8. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform 1626-1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), 16.

9. Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (London: Panther, 1972), 131-49.

10. Alistair M. Duckworth, “Gardens, Houses, and the Rhetoric of Description in the English Novel,” in The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops et al. (Hanover and London: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., n.d.), 395-413.

11. J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Alchemy and Politics in England 1649-1665,” Past and Present 135 (May 1992), 30-78.

12. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 198.

13. To be fair to Ben Jonson, he was, of course, practicing a type of rhetoric that praised the ruler and thus challenged him to live up to the idealized picture presented by the poet. The danger of this strategy was that the king would believe that he had already reached perfection before any reformation had in fact taken place.

14. I am certainly not the first to argue the presence of alchemy in The Tempest, but scholars have tended to ignore earlier suggestions. In 1899, Morton Luce, editor of the Arden edition of the play, associated Prospero's magic with John Dee and the Rosicrucians, alchemists all. More recently, Michael Srigley has analyzed the text as an alchemical work in “The Furnace of Tribulation: The Tempest and Alchemy,” a chapter of his published dissertation Images of Regeneration: A Study of Shakespeare's “The Tempest” and its Cultural Background (Uppsala: University of Uppsala, 1985), to which I am much indebted. This pioneer work will be cited parenthetically hereafter.

15. John S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 181.

16. Paracelsus, Three Books of Philosophy (London: L. Lloyd, 1657), 8; cited hereafter parenthetically.

17. One wonders if Shakespeare is suggesting here that it would take an alchemical transmutation of the world to make the pen mightier than the sword in reality.

18. Artis Auriferae (Basel, 1593), 237, as quoted by Srigley, Images of Regeneration, 32.

19. See H. M. E. De Jong, Michael Maier's “Atalanta Fugiens”: Sources of an Alchemical Book of Emblems (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), 224; hereafter cited parenthetically. Psalm 69 is quoted in my text from the version in the Book of Common Prayer.

20. Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: An Edition of the Emblems, Fugues and Epigrams, trans. Joscelyn Godwin (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Phanes Press, 1989), 168-69. Although Maier's emblem book was not published until 1617, all the material in it was taken from earlier alchemical texts available to Elizabethans and Jacobeans, as De Jong has clearly demonstrated. Maier presented an emblematic alchemical Christmas greeting in 1611 to King James I of England while he was ambassador for the Elector Palatine to the English court. The following Christmas, 1612, the engagement between Frederick, Elector Palatine, and Princess Elizabeth was announced. See also Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 1-14.

21. Andrea Alciati, Emblemata cum commentariis [Padua 1621] (New York: Garland, 1976), 273. The history of this topos, without reference to its inversion in alchemy, has been traced by Jean Michel Massing, “From Greek Proverb to Soap Advert: Washing the Ethiopian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995): 180-201. Solomon Trismosin describes the alchemical version in his Splendor Solis (1582) as follows: “They saw a man black like a negro sticking fast in a black, dirty and foul smelling slime or clay; to his assistance came a young woman, beautiful in countenance, and still more so in body. … She clothed the man with a purple robe, lifted him up to his brightest clearness, and took him with herself to Heaven” (trans. J. K. [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1920], 31).

22. Lyndall Abraham, “Alchemical Reference in Antony and Cleopatra,” Sydney Studies in English 8 (1982-83): 101.

23. Artephius, as quoted in Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, Alchemy: The Secret Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 12-13.

24. R. J. Forbes, “Alchemy and Colour,” CIBA Review (1961/5): 8.

25. Daniel Stolcius, Viridarium Chemicum (1627), 251, as quoted in translation in Abraham, Marvell and Alchemy, 200.

26. This reference to the Golden Age is noted in Graham Parry, The Golden Age restor'd: The Culture of the Stuart Court (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 101-02.

27. For extended definitions of “Renaissance tragicomedy,” see Peggy Muñoz Simonds, Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare's “Cymbeline”: An Iconographic Reconstruction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 29-65, 356-63; and James J. Yoch, Jr., “The Renaissance Dramatization of Temperance: The Italian Revival of Tragicomedy and The Faithful Shepherdess,” Renaissance Tragicomedy, ed. Nancy Klein Maguire (New York: AMS Press, 1987), 115-38.

28. For the social symbolism of dancing in the English Renaissance, see Sarah Thesiger, “The Orchestra of Sir John Davies and the Image of the Dance,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 277-304.

29. Cornelius Agrippa, Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Science, ed. Catherine M. Dunne (Northridge: California State University, 1974). See especially the chapter “Of Alcumie,” 328-32.

30. George Ripley, The Compound of Alchymie, in Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (London: Nathaniel Brooke, 1652), 117, as quoted in Abraham, Marvell and Alchemy, 42.

31. Translation from the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica exhibition catalogue, The Silent Language: The Symbols of Hermetic Philosophy (Amsterdam: Pelikaan, 1994), 32.

32. Thomas Norton, Ordinal of Alchemy, ed. John Reidy, EETS, o.s. 272 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 53.

33. John Donne, The Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953-62), 1:196.

34. Martin Ruland the Elder, A Lexicon of Alchemy, trans. A. E. Waite (London: John M. Watkins, 1964).

35. Laurinda S. Dixon, Alchemical Imagery in Bosch's “Garden of Earthyly Delights” (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), 19.

36. Noted by Douglas Brooks-Davies, The Mercurian Monarch: Magical Politics from Spenser to Pope (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 92-93; cited hereafter parenthetically; and by Srigley, Images of Regeneration, 41.

37. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Jacques LeClercq (New York: Modern Library, 1936), 833-34.

38. Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 305; quoted in Brooks-Davies, The Mercurian Monarch, 142, n. 9.

39. See 2 Henry IV 4.3.96-102: “A good sherris-sack hath a twofold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which deliver'd o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit.”

40. 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), 57. For the alchemical extraction of curative salts from urine, see Eireneus Philalethes (Thomas Vaughan), The Secret of the Immortal Liquor Alkhest or Ignis-Acqua (Edmonds, Washington: Alchemical Press, 1984).

41. Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, 278-80.

42. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 269; the quotation within this passage is from Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. S. Attansio (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 42.

43. I am grateful to Alden and Virginia Vaughan for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this essay.