Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- A note on the texts
- Introduction
- 1 Alchemical contexts
- 2 Lovely boy
- 3 The dark mistress and the art of blackness
- 4 A Lovers Complaint by William Shake-speare
- 5 Inner looking, alchemy and the creative imagination
- 6 Conclusion: Shakespeare's poetics of love and religious toleration
- Notes
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- A note on the texts
- Introduction
- 1 Alchemical contexts
- 2 Lovely boy
- 3 The dark mistress and the art of blackness
- 4 A Lovers Complaint by William Shake-speare
- 5 Inner looking, alchemy and the creative imagination
- 6 Conclusion: Shakespeare's poetics of love and religious toleration
- Notes
- Index
Summary
No study abounds in the marvellous like that of metallurgy, and no other branch of science presents us at every turn with such totally unexpected, and in many cases inexplicable, results. The old idea of the transmutation of metals was, no doubt, induced by some of these, and is not merely an idle dream of the alchemist … Certain forms of lead and copper, pure though they be, oxidize with great rapidity in air … Ingots of tin … have fallen into powder; and many metals, including iron, on being released from an amalgam of mercury, are left in such an extraordinary state that they take fire … The presence of the vapour of iron shows that the metal is an important constituent of the sun and of most of the heavenly bodies.
(Ironwork)Metallurgy is a science of extraordinary wonder and unpredictability, closely associated with the sun and the ‘heavenly bodies’ even at the turn of the twentieth century when the above study was written. The transformation of base substances dug out of the bowels of the earth into metal of value, of dull blackness into a spectrum of colour and polished brightness through fire and chemical reactions, is magical and captivating. It is not surprising, therefore, that at certain periods in history the ‘marvellous’ metallic stuff that dreams are made of, together with the fiery craft of its transmutation, has taken a powerful grip on the cultural imagination; in Western Europe the Renaissance was one of these, the nineteenth century another.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative ImaginationThe Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, pp. 1 - 13Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011