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The Influence of Alchemy and Rosicrucianism in William THE INFLUENCE OF ALCHEMY AND ROSICRUCIANISM IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE AND THE TEMPEST, AND BEN JONSON'S THE ALCHEMIST MARK FRANCIS JONES A thesisUniversity submitted toof the Cape Faculty Town of Arts University of Cape Town For the degree of Master of Arts Cape Town, 1987 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town ,.I In Memory of Doctor Harold Kaplan obit 1986 "Ex Deo Nascimur, In Jesu Morimur, Per Spiriturn Sanctum Reviviscimus." .... University of Cape Town \ THE INFLUENCE OF ALCHEMY AND ROSICRUCIANISM IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1 S PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE AND THE TEMPEST, AND BEN JONSON'S THE ALCHEMIST. JONES, Mark Francis, M.A. University of Cape Town, 1987. This thesis traces the influence of alchemy and its renaissance in the early seventeenth century as Rosicrucianism, in William Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Tempest, and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist. Shakespeare's Final Plays are a dramatic experiment that ventures beyond realism, with a common symbolic pattern of loss and reconciliation that reflects the alchemical one of Man's Fall, self-transmutation and reconciliation with the divine spark within him. Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a crude first attempt in this genre, portraying Everyman's journey to perfection in Pericles's wanderings. The quest for Antiochuss' Daughter represents the search for Man'soriginal purity of soul, which has, however, become corrupted and dominated by Man's lower nature, embodied in the incestuous King Antiochus. The prince's flight by sea indicates a process of self-transmutation: the loss of his fleet in a tempest symbolises the purification of his Soul from earthly desires, reflected in the laboratory refinement of base metals in fire (lightning) and water (sea). Pericles is able to unite with his refined Soul, incarnated in Thaisa: from their union the .. \1 Philosopher's Stone or the Spirit, Marina, is born, who transmutes the base metals of men's natures by evoking the divine "seed of gold" within them, even in a degraded brothel. The Spiritr now grown to strength, is able to reunite the other component of Everyman, Body and Soul, the parents, who have completed their purification. The Tempest represents Shakespeare's complete mastery of his alchemical theme. The Alonso-Ferdinand pair embodies Everyman, . ' ' the father or Soul having been seduced into evil, incarnate in Antonio, while the son, not yet king, is the divine spark within ~ him. This seed of gold must be separated from the corrupted soul in the purifying alchemical tempest, so as to grow back to the Spirit, symbolised by his meeting and eventual marriage with Miranda. Alonso can only be reunited with his son after his purificatory wanderings about the island, in which he confronts his guilt embodied in a Harpy, who awakens his conscience and reminds him why he has lost his divine inner nature he sought for. Prospero represents the Spirit-Intellect of Everyman, tainted by the lower nature, evident in his desire for revenge, and embodied in Caliban. When the unfallen spiritual forces incarnate in Miranda win him over to compassion, he ~orgives his enemies and can meet the repentant Alonso, and return to earthly duties as the Everyman who has reclaimed his divine heritage. lll Ben Jonson's The Alchemist shows the debasement of alchemy by frauds who exploit those who, ignoring its spiritual aims, see it as a magical means to obtain gold. Alchemy becomes a symbol of the goldlust ruling London society, as opposed to the spiritual gold of wisdom sought by the true alchemist. The gulls caricature the goal of self-transmutation in their desire to transmute their mundane, lacklustre selves into "something rich and strange" through the Philosopher's Stone. Jor1sor1, deeply learned in alchemy, parodies many of its key concepts and motifs; the final perfection of Man and Nature, the consummation of the esoteric alchemica~ Opus, is distorted in false, exoteric alchemy hy the degradation and impoverishment of both frauds and gulls. 1V PRE-FACE My interest in alchemy was generated by the investigations of C.G. Jung. The idea of applying it in literary criticism was inspired not only by the many Jungian interpretations of literature, but also by a book hinting at the rich possibilities of alchemical motifs in Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare's Flowering of the Spirit, by M.I. Bennell and I. Wyatt. I originally attempted to trace the influence of alchemy in the works of poets, playwrights and satirists from Chaucer through to Bulwer-Lytton, but finally focused attention on works sh~wing the most fertile and brilliant use of alchemy. Jung has effectively refuted the notion that alchemy is a recondite superstition, and shown it to be a precursor of modern psychology, a milestone on the way to solving the riddle of Man's being. Alchemy went beyond psychology in placing Man in a spiritual universe, engaged in a struggle to surmount and transform his flawed nature, ranking the alchemist with the Christian mystic. The alchemist approached Nature as something in which the divine element was hidden, akin to his own inner nature in a universe intimately inter-relatea, and sought to release this divine spark. Such an holistic approach to the universe needs to be reconsidered by the materialistic, mechanistic world-view. That Shakespeare sought to incorporate such motifs in his plays seems in concord with his attempt to bring Man to self-knowledge. V I would like to thank my supervisor, Mr Brian Lee, for his invaluable advice, salted with a dry sense of humour, and the Human Sciences Research Council for their equally indispensable financial assistance. -... f vi I~ TABLE OF CONTENTS Page . ! l I i PREFACE i" ;. .\ 1 ! Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 'f i ( 2 PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE 37 i f• t ~ 3 ..,THE TEMPEST 90 i~ 4 ' THE ALCHEMIST 14-6 f. i : 5 CONCLUSION 197 t I WORKS CITED 20"7 ~.. '. l . -- .•. _,t ., '_! 1. INTRODUCTION By the end of the seventeenth century, alchemy had split into two camps, the one preoccupied with its philosophical aspect, the other with its laboratory work. Alchemy's scientific heirs therefore value the alchemists' empirical experimentation, which laid the foundations of modern chemistry by investigating chemical properties. The alchemical philosophy which motivated such experiments, however, is dismissed as obsolete superstition, as a ... misguided or fraudulent attempt to transmute base metals into gold. There have been modern attempts to reassess alchemy as a psychological and spiritual discipline, for the ~lchemists described their "Magnum Opus" or "Great Work" as "tam ethice quam physice" (Jaff~ 60), "as much ethical as physical", involving the simultaneous transmutation of the alchemist's inner nature along with his laboratory materials. Alchemy's "ethical work" was investigated intensively by the pioneer psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, who saw in it an historical prefiguration of his psychological theories. Psychology is concerned with "techniaue~ for allowing consciousness to experience and transform negative unconscious energies" (Ahern 168), and Jung viewed alchemy from this perspective as a "pr~jected psychology of the collective unconscious" (Jaffe 57), rather than as an expression of an es6teric cosmology •. The "collective unconscious" is mankind's common psychic background which, according to Jung, contains 1 archetypal forms expressing the proces~ of individual psychological development or "individuation" which man can choose to foster or repress. These archetypes assume similar but unique forms throughout the world in mythology and folklore according to the various cultural influences (Jaff~ 51). Jung believed that the contents of the collective unconscious were able to rise to consciousness through the hundreds of re-distillations involved in purifying the materials which the vigilant alchemist had to watch, requiring much patience and persevering concentration. This. induced a meditative, trance-like state in which the stages and imagery of inner individuation were projected by the practitioner, ., unconsciously, into the chemical processes (Jaff~ 59). The alchemists, investigating the mystery of matter, projected the contents of their unconscious into the unknown, which acted like a blank screen, so that matter mirrored back their psychic processes (Jaff6 57). Jung took the words of the alchemist Sendivogius as indicating this mingling of matter and the unconscious: "To caus2 things hidden in the shadow to appear, and to take away the shadow from them, this is permitted to the intelligent philosopher by God through nature" (Jaffe 58).· Jung interpreted the stages of the alchemical Opus in terms of the stages of individuation. The first ~Black" or "Nigredo" stage of the Work, involving what alchemists called the 'death' of the I i metal, the psychologist saw as the projected 'blackness' or t I negativity and depression within the experimenter. The laboratory t I f I 't work involved 'killing' or 'putrefying' the metal so that the dross could be removed from the metal's original purity, and the alchemist had to be careful of noxious gases. This Jung called the confrontation with the "shadow", an archetype of negative unconscious forces which had to be accepted and actively assimilated into one's unconsciousness, transformed into positive forces. This transformation or purification of negative energies was held by Jung to be achieved through abreacting or reliving the original traumas which produced them, analogous to alchemy's second "White" or "Albedo" stage in which the black,. putrid materials were 'washed' or 'whitened'.
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