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

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

Belief in spirits, demons and the occult was commonplace in the early modern period, as was the view that these forces could be used to manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson explores these beliefs in relation to women and scientific knowledge, arguing that the early modern English understood their emotions and behavior to be influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies in the natural world. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi, she demonstrates how these plays stage questions about whether women have privileged access to nature's secrets and whether their bodies possess hidden occult qualities. Discussing the relationship between scientific discourse and the occult, she goes on to argue that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.

Dr Ronald Gray, Fellow of Emmanuel College, lectured at Cambridge University on German Literature and Philosophy for 33 years, and now expands his article, “Will in the Universe: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Plato’s Symposium, Alchemy and Renaissance Neo-Platonism,” published in Shakespeare Survey 59 (Cambridge University Press, 2006). This developed from his Goethe the Alchemist: A Study of Alchemical Symbolism in Goethe’s Literary and Scientific Works, 1952, greeted on publication as “a major contribution to Goethe Studies.” Diotima’s vision of universal love in The Symposium is echoed not only in Castiglione’s The Courtier but in alchemy, in its symbolical sense; these, together with Christian ideas combined in Shakespeare’s imagination, strongly influenced the Sonnets. Where possible, Shakespeare inserted themes of the Sonnets in his plays. The result is a paradoxical combination of mysticism, sometimes erotic, in the Sonnets, with real situations and real lovers in both Sonnets and plays. The supreme realisation of the Dark Lady is Cleopatra, but the Lady also has mythic dimensions.

As a figurehead for the literary humanities, and a dramatist whose plays feature fairies, ghosts, and spirits, Shakespeare may not be the first author that comes to mind when thinking about science. Tom Rutter shows, however, that in his plays and poetry Shakespeare made detailed use of the knowledge and theories of the cosmos, the natural world, and human biology that were available to him. These range from astronomical and anatomical ideas derived from medieval scholars, Islamic philosophers, and ancient Greek and Roman authorities, through to the challenges issued to those earlier models by more recent figures such as Copernicus and Vesalius. Shakespeare's treatment of these materials was informed by the poetic and dramatic media in which he worked; the dialogic nature of drama enabled an approach that could be provisional, exploratory, and tolerant of uncertainty and contradiction. Shakespeare made the early modern playhouse a venue for the production of scientific understanding through performance, illusion, and the creative use of space. As well as surveying current scholarship that contextualizes Shakespeare's work in relation to histories of meteorology, matter theory, humoral physiology, racialization, mathematics, and more, Shakespeare and Science offers detailed original readings of a variety of texts including the Histories, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, the Sonnets, and Lucrece. It also makes extensive reference to works by Shakespeare's near-contemporaries such as Robert Recorde, William Fulke, Juan Huarte, and Thomas Elyot. Its four chapters focus on astronomy and meteorology, matter, the body, and mathematics. Rutter's overall approach is informed by recent studies that interrogate 'science' as a concept, and that question both the boundary between literature and science and the idea of a seventeenth-century 'scientific revolution'.

It is my intention, in reading together literary critics, artists and theorists, to show how the development of Shakespeare's conception of his own subjectivity develops over the course of his sonnet sequence. I will discuss and utilise the Jungian concept of individuation, and the Lacanian concept of desire, as well as language from the lexicon of the fifteenth and sixteenth century alchemists to develop an understanding of how the intimately psychological nature of the production of art is being demonstrated by Shakespeare in his poems.

This volume in the long-running and acclaimed Shakespeare Dictionary series is a detailed, critical reference work examining all aspects of magic, good and evil, across Shakespeare's works. Topics covered include the representation of fairies, witches, ghosts, devils and spirits.

"Disknowledge": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England, Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded. Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change. Disknowledge describes how John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Harvey, Helkiah Crooke, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery, rhetoric, and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult questions: how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction. Disknowledge further shows how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new, posthumanist mode of knowledge: writing fiction. Covering a wide range of authors and topics, Disknowledge is the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledge—willfully adhering to something we know is wrong—resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.

This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary text and looking outwards to social, cultural, and historical aspects, it comes to grips with the instabilities of ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world’s ordinary functioning might be said to be ‘enchanted’, is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? We have a received historical narrative of disenchantment as a large-scale early modern cultural process, inexorable in character, consisting of the substitution of a rationally understood and controllable world for one containing substantial areas of mystery. Early modern cultural change, however, involves transpositions, recreations, or fresh inventions of the enchanted, and not only its replacement in diminished or denatured form. This collection is centrally concerned with what happens in theatre, as a medium which can give power to experiences of wonder as well as circumscribe and curtail them, addressing plays written for the popular stage that contribute to and reflect significant contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice. The volume uses the idea of dis-enchantment/re-enchantment as a central hub to bring multiple perspectives to bear on early modern conceptualizations and theatricalizations of wonder, the sacred, and the supernatural from different vantage points, marking a significant contribution to studies of magic, witchcraft, enchantment, and natural philosophy in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

Poet and scholar team Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith collect and foreground an impressive range of sonnets, including formal and formally subversive sonnets by established and emerging poets, highlighting connections across literary moments and movements. Poets include Phillis Wheatley, Fredrick Goddard Tuckerman, Emma Lazarus, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, Fradel Shtok, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dunstan Thompson, Rhina P. Espaillat, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Wanda Coleman, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, and Diane Seuss. The sonnets are accompanied by critical essays that likewise draw together diverse voices, methodologies, and historical and theoretical perspectives that represent the burgeoning field of American sonnet studies. Contributor List: Essayists Abdul Ali, Baltimore, MD Anna Lena Phillips Bell, University of North Carolina, Wilmington Jodie Childers, Queens, New York Benjamin Crawford, University of Alabama Meg Day, Franklin and Marshall College Donna Denizé, St. Albans School Michael Dumanis, Bennington College Jordan Finkin, Hebrew Union College Rebecca Morgan Frank, Northwestern University Anna Maria Hong, Mount Holyoke College Gillian Huang-Tiller, University of Virginia, Wise Walt Hunter, Clemson University John James, University of California, Berkeley Matthew Kilbane, University of Notre Dame Diana Leca, University of Oxford Ariel Martino, Colgate University Nate Mickelson, New York University Lisa L. Moore, University of Texas at Austin Timo Müller, University of Konstanz, Germany Carl Phillips, Washington University in St. Louis Zoë Pollak, Columbia University Jonathan F.S. Post, UCLA Stephen Regan, Durham University, UK Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia Hollis Robbins, University of Utah Nathan Spoon, Joelton, TN Marlo Starr, Wittenberg University Yuki Tanaka, Hosei University, Japan Tess Taylor, Ashland University Michael Theune, Illinois Wesleyan University Eleanor Wakefield, University of Oregon Lesley Wheeler, Washington and Lee University Jon Woodson, Howard University emeritus Contributors List: Poets Elizabeth Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, Julia Alvarez, Maggie Anderson, Tacey Atsitty, Charles Bernstein, Ted Berrigan, Jen Bervin, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Henri Cole, Wanda Coleman, Countee Cullen, William Cullen Bryant, E.E. Cummings, Meg Day, Natalie Diaz, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rhina Espaillat, Tarfia Faizullah, Robert Frost, torrin a. greathouse, Marilyn Hacker, Robert Hayden, Terrance Hayes, Anthony Hecht, Lynn Hejinian, Leslie Pinckney Hill, Anna Maria Hong, Langston Hughes, David Humphreys, Helen Hunt Jackson, Tyehimba Jess, Helene Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, June Jordan, Douglas Kearney, Richard Kenney, Joan Larkin, Emma Lazarus, Mani Levb, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Nate Marshall, Bernadette Mayer, George Marion McClellan, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Claude McKay, Joyelle McSweeney, Lo Kwa Mei-en, James Merrill, Phillip Metres, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Simone Muench, Marilyn Nelson, Craig Santos Perez, Carl Phillips, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Posey, Lizette Woodworth Reese, Adrienne Rich, Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyeser, Kay Ryan, Diane Seuss, Fradel Shtok, Aaron Shurin, giovanni singleton, Patricia Smith, Mary Ellen Solt, Nathan Spoon, Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Su, Lorenzo Thomas, Dunstan Thompson, Natasha Tretheway, Fredrick Goddard Tuckerman, Mona Van Duyn, Ellen Bryant Voight, Margaret Walker, Lucian B. Watkins, Phillis Wheatley, John Wheelwright, Jackie K. White, Walt Whitman, James Wright, Elinor Wylie