This book explores the role of alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Hermetic philosophy in one of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Winter’s Tale. A perusal of the vast literary and iconographic repertory of Renaissance alchemy reveals that this late play is imbued with several topoi, myths, and emblematic symbols coming from coeval alchemical, Paracelsian, and Hermetic sources. It also discusses the alchemical significance of water and time in the play’s circular and regenerative pattern and the healing role of women. All the major symbols of alchemy are present in Shakespeare’s play: the intertwined serpents of the caduceus, the chemical wedding, the filius philosophorum, and the so-called rex chymicus. This book also provides an in-depth survey of late Renaissance alchemy, Paracelsian medicine, and Hermetic culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Importantly, it contends that The Winter’s Tale, in symbolically retracing the healing pattern of the rota alchemica and in emphasising the Hermetic principles of unity and concord, glorifies King James’s conciliatory attitude.

The Alchemy Reader is a collection of primary source readings on alchemy and hermeticism, which offers readers an informed introduction and background to a complex field through the works of important ancient, medieval and early modern alchemical authors. Including selections from the legendary Hermes Trimegistus to Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, the book illustrates basic definitions, conceptions, and varied interests and emphases; and it also illustrates the highly interdisciplinary character of alchemical thought and its links with science and medicine, philosophical and religious currents, the visual arts and iconography and, especially, literary discourse. Like the notable anthologies of alchemical writings published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it seeks to counter the problem of an acute lack of reliable primary texts and to provide a convenient and accessible point of entry to the field.

This collection of essays makes an important contribution to scholarship by examining how the myths and practices of medical knowledge were interwoven into popular entertainment on the early modern stage. Rather than treating medicine, the theater, and literary texts separately, the contributors show how the anxieties engendered by medical socio-scientific investigations were translated from the realm of medicine to the stage by Renaissance playwrights, especially Shakespeare. As a whole, the volume reconsiders typical ways of viewing medical theory and practice while individual essays focus on gender and ethnicity, theatrical impersonation, medical counterfeit and malfeasance, and medicine as it appears in the form of various political metaphors.

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

Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War is the first book to read Shakespeare's drama through the lens of Cold War politics. The book uses the Cold War experience of dissenting artists in theatre and film to highlight the coded religio-political subtexts in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and The Winter's Tale.

This is Volume VI in the selected works of Frances Yates, providing a new approach to Shakespeare's last plays. First published in 1975, these are a collection of lectures that offer the new thinking about certain ideas concerning Shakespeare's relation to the problemsand thought currents of his times.

Alchemy has traditionally been viewed as 'the history of an error', an example of medieval gullibility and greed, in which alchemists tried to turn lead into gold, create fabulous wealth and find the elixir of life. But alchemy has also been described as 'the mightiest secret that a man can possess', and it obsessed the likes of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and many of the founders of modern science. This book explores the history of the so-called Royal Art, from its mysterious beginnings in Egypt and China, through the Hellenistic world and the early years of Islam and into mediaeval Europe. Some of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages, figures such as Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Thomas Aquinas were drawn to alchemy, and legendary alchemists such as Nicholas Flamel were thought to have actually succeeded in finding The Philosopher's Stone. During the Renaissance, Paracelsus and his followers helped revolutionize medicine, and during the seventeenth century, alchemy played a major role in paving the way for modern science. During the twentieth century, it became a focus of interest for the psychologist Carl Jung and his followers, who believed that the alchemists had discovered the unconscious. In this fully revised edition, Sean Martin has expanded the sections on Chinese and Indian alchemy and has added new material on the relationship between alchemy and early modern science, while also making a fresh assessment of this most enduringly mysterious and fascinating of subjects, to which all others have been described as 'child's play'.

Everyone knows Rumpelstiltskin’s story—or thinks they do. But this innocent-seeming tale hides generations of women’s shrewd accounts of their relationships with men. And the verdict is not flattering. The fairytale may count among the world’s oldest dirty jokes. The theme of the tale, an observation repeated and varied throughout, mocks male inadequacy in many forms, beginning with sexual failure. The punchline misplaced, over time its wickedly funny insights about adult life passed for childish nonsense. The story hides, in plain sight, criticism of workplace sexual harassment—centuries before society took notice of the indignity. Rumpelstiltskin tells a feminist tale with lessons for men and women, about what women said to each other when they thought their private conversation and complaints passed unnoticed. In the story’s different versions, the Brothers Grimm, who recorded the tale, missed women’s wry observations.