Shakespeare, Alchemy, and the Creative Imagination by Margaret Healy (review)

In Shakespeare, Alchemy, and the Creative Imagination, Margaret Healy offers a new approach to Shakespeare's 1609 poems, suggesting that they are informed by a "spiritual alchemy" that can turn the matter of our souls into a kind of gold (4). Unsatisfied with the scholarly consensus that the alchemical imagery of the poems is merely a "rhetorical flourish" (3), Healy finds inspiration in the fact that Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and many of Shakespeare's other contemporaries described alchemy as a method for purifying the "malleable mineral mind" (4). In this historical context, Healy argues, Shakespeare's alchemical language would have been taken as an invitation for his readers to transform the "base" metal of their psyches "through meditation on love, memory work, and intense imagination" (1, 4). Moreover, what held for the poet's original audience, Healy maintains, is true for us as well. By laboring through Shakespeare's esoteric symbolism and performing the "soul work" of smelting ourselves anew, we too can discover the spiritual experience of "a multiplicity in one," as our "post-Cartesian . . . binaries" and "modern disciplinary boundaries" merge alchemically into a state of "toleration and unity" (2, 207, 9, 196).

Healy's deep belief in alchemy makes her an ideal advocate for its spiritual possibilities, but like other pursuits of the philosopher's stone, her theoretical ambitions carry her well beyond the bounds of typical academic practice. Quoting the first quatrain of Sonnet 19—

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,And make the earth devour her own sweet brood,Pluck the keen teeth from the tiger's jaws,And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood.

Healy asserts that these lines are "baffling" and "particularly perplexing" until we realize that "Time (who, as Saturn, devoured his own children) is being invoked to assist sulphur (the lion) in the process of fixing mercury [the phoenix]. The tiger probably alludes to the acid added to the alchemist's alembic, which gradually 'loses its teeth' or abates as it aids the dissolution or devouring of the distinct, male and female raw 'materia' into a chemical soup from which the refined new hermaphrodite birth will emerge" (3, 67). Whatever the merits of this alchemical interpretation, it hardly seems less "baffling" (to use Healy's term) than the usual scholarly gloss (that Shakespeare is illustrating how time destroys even the most mighty things in nature). In addition, it heavily reorders the grammar of the original. Where Shakespeare depicts Time as acting on the lion, earth, tiger, and phoenix, Healy suggests that Time (like the earth) aids the lion (in concert with the tiger) to act on the phoenix. Healy, in short, does not merely detect a hidden significance in Shakespeare's lines; she also rearranges their literal sense. Such hermeneutic play is frequent in alchemical practice, but even by the loosened standards of alchemy, Healy's readings are unusually liberal. Discussing Shakespeare's sonnets to the dark lady, for example, she cites an alchemist's mention of "perfect blackness" as evidence that "blackness could resonate with perfection and divinity" (110), as though alchemists used "perfect blackness" to imply "godly blackness" rather than "total blackness" (literally, in alchemical terminology "the black of the blackest") (110).¹

Beyond such departures from ordinary usage, moreover, there is the larger question of whether modern readers would benefit from pursuing the ultimate goal of Healy's alchemical approach: the unification of contraries. For although Healy treats "toleration and unity" (210) as obviously equivalent, her book is a tacit reminder that an emphasis on the latter often cuts against the former. In one such instance, Healy mentions a chemist who proclaims a "difference between the auncient Physicke, first taught by the godly forfathers, consisting in unitie, peace and concord: and the latter Phisicke proceeding from Idolaters, Ethnickes and Heathen: as Gallen, and such other, consisting in dualitie, discord, and contraritie" (202). While celebrating concord and unity, in other words, this...