Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination
The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint

Healy demonstrates how Renaissance alchemy shaped Shakespeare's bawdy but spiritual sonnets, transforming our understanding of Shakespeare's art and beliefs.

Margaret Healy (Author)

9781107637740, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 July 2014

272 pages, 9 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.37 kg

"...treats Shakespeare's poetry as an allegory of the alchemical processes of soul making." --Recent Studies in the English Renaissance

Shakespeare's sonnets and A Lover's Complaint constitute a rich tapestry of rhetorical play about Renaissance love in all its guises. A significant strand of this spiritual alchemy is working the 'metal' of the mind through meditation on love, memory work and intense imagination. Healy demonstrates how this process of anguished soul work - construed as essential to inspired poetic making - is woven into these poems, accounting for their most enigmatic imagery and urgency of tone. The esoteric philosophy of late Renaissance Neoplatonic alchemy, which embraced bawdy sexual symbolism and was highly fashionable in European intellectual circles, facilitated Shakespeare's poetry. Arguing that Shakespeare's incorporation of alchemical textures throughout his late works is indicative of an artistic stance promoting religious toleration and unity, this book sets out a crucial new framework for interpreting the 1609 poems and transforms our understanding of Shakespeare's art.

Introduction
1. Alchemical contexts
2. Lovely boy
3. The Dark Mistress and the art of blackness
4. A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare
5. Inner looking, alchemy and the creative imagination
6. Conclusion: Shakespeare's poetics of love and religious toleration.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary theory [DSA]