Magi Imaginationis: Imagining Alchemists and Magicians in New Atlantis, The Tempest, and The Alchemist, by D. P. Hurley, 1998

Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art
Wherein all nature’s treasury is contain’d.

David Hurley

1998

Introduction

In the epilogue to Shakespeare’s Last Plays Frances Yates not only reaffirms her view that Jonson’s The Alchemist and Shakespeare’s The Tempest offer two conflicting representations of the Renaissance magus, but on the pre-proto-penultimate page she introduces the ghostly figure of Bacon and links him with Shakespeare and ‘the Renaissance Hermetic tradition’. She quickly informs us that she is ‘absolutely convinced that the real author of the works of Shakespeare was Shakespeare’ and expands on her absolute conviction with a cut-and-dried full stop – which is somewhat qualified by the first word of the next sentence: ‘Yet…’. Yates continues:

…there is probably a link between Bacon and Shakespeare for they belong in the same line of country.

Yates sees The Tempest as a play ‘infused with the spirit of Dee’, and Bacon as partaking in that spirit but too cautious to declare himself. The ground for the scientific breakthrough of the seventeenth century, she insists, was laid by Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, made manifest in England through Dee, articulated for the London audience of The Tempest by Shakespeare, and adopted by Bacon. Bacon was frightened to show his hand because, she argues, he ‘had to placate James’, who pursued an equivocating policy of raising Protestant hopes through the marriage of Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine while ‘encouraging a Spanish match for other members of his family’. Jonson’s plays and masques are seen as articulating the anti-hermetic, and anti-alchemical aspect of James’s policy (against that of his children Henry and Elizabeth) and place Jonson in the opposing camp to Bacon and Shakespeare.

This is a neat and rather exciting interpretation of early Stuart ideological struggle and one which has engendered heated debate. Brian Vickers places the historical (or perhaps one should write rhetorical) method of Yates’s earlier book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment under scrutiny in an article in the Journal of Modern History, emphatically rejecting several of her claims. In doing so Vickers himself makes an assertion which deserves closer scrutiny. He claims that ‘Bacon delivered some violent attacks on alchemy and other occult sciences’ which, if true, would place him closer to Jonson and The Alchemist than Shakespeare and The Tempest, assuming that the opposition between these two plays is as Yates describes it.

It is my intention in this essay to look the way in which these three writers present the alchemist or magus figure. In dealing with Jonson and Shakespeare I shall concentrate on the two plays already mentioned, The Alchemist and The Tempest which were produced in 1610 and 1611 respectively and form the basis of much of Yates’s argument about the relative positions of Jonson and Shakespeare. In dealing with Jonson I will also mention some of his other references to alchemy. I will begin, however, by attempting an overview of some of Bacon’s statements on alchemy because this will provide us with some intimation of the complexities inherent in the subject. I shall then compare Shakespeare’s characterisation of Prospero with Bacon’s treatment of the Fathers of Salomon’s House in his fable New Atlantis before moving on to consider Jonson.

The complete paper is available for download in PDF format and comes with notes, translations and a comprehensive bibliography.