The Statue Scene

Zamparo, Martina

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-05167-8_7

Martina Zamparo⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

143 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the stunning scene of Queen Hermione’s ‘rebirth’ by highlighting its Hermetic and alchemical implications. After considering Giulio Romano’s still debated reputation as a sculptor in Renaissance England, this chapter discusses the parallelisms with the Egyptian rituals of statue animation described in the Hermetic treatise Asclepius. It also considers Michael Maier’s possible role in organising a performance of The Winter’s Tale in the winter season of 1612–1613 in honour of Princess Elizabeth I Stuart and Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. This chapter also argues that Paulina’s healing art is especially worth reading in the light of alchemical symbolism: the lady reanimates the Sicilian queen by alluding to the alchemical process of fixatio. She can thus be read as a personification of Lady Alchymia.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

eBook: USD 16.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 109.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 109.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Garber, Shakespeare After All, 851.
2.
The Steward reveals to two gentlemen that Perdita has discovered that a statue of her mother is “in the keeping of Paulina” (5.2.93).
3.
Garber, Shakespeare After All, 851.
4.
Rogero: “Nothing but bonfires. The oracle is fulfilled, the king’s daughter is found. Such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it” (5.2.22–25).
5.
See Grace Ioppolo, “Shakespeare: from author to audience to print, 1608–1613”, in Power and Loughnane, Late Shakespeare, 152.
6.
See Tatspaugh, “The Winter’s Tale: shifts in staging and status”, 114.
7.
Ibid.
8.
As will be further considered, Paulina persuades the characters on stage and the audience members that Queen Hermione is really dead: “I say she’s dead – I’ll swear’t” (3.2.200). Later on, Antigonus provides one of the clearest references to the queen’s death. The Sicilian lord claims that the ghost of Hermione has visited him in a dream: “Come, poor babe. / I have heard, but not believed, the spirits o’th’ dead / May walk again. If such thing be, thy mother / Appeared to me last night, for ne’er was dream / So like a waking” (3.3.14–18). As Frye remarks, “by Jacobean dramatic conventions [this is] a pretty reliable sign that she’s really dead”. Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 163.
9.
See Ioppolo, “Shakespeare: from author to audience to print”, 152.
10.
On the statue scene as a later authorial addition devised by Shakespeare to imitate the fantastical style of court entertainments and masques, see Ioppolo, “Shakespeare: from author to audience to print”, 152.
11.
Limon describes these court entertainments as rituals rather than theatrical performances. Jerzy Limon, The Masque of the Stuart Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 62: “I stress again that the separation between the fictitious world and the spectators’ reality does not apply to the masque-in-performance. In other words, the masque spectacle is not autonomous after the fashion of a self-contained fiction performed before spectators who ‘belong’ to a different reality, but is, rather, an institutionally autonomous performance of a ritual in which all present take part”. In The Winter’s Tale, the audience is clearly part of the final ‘recognition scene’. When Paulina’s Steward recounts the off-stage encounter between Leontes and Perdita, he remarks how the public shared the characters’ feelings, as if it were a ritual: “Who was most marble there changed colour. Some swooned, all sorrowed. If all the world could have seen’t, the woe had been universal” (5.2.87–90).
12.
See Ewbank, “The Triumph of Time”, 155.
13.
Ibid. See also Graham Parry, The Golden Age, 102.
14.
Ernst H. Gombrich, New Light on Old Masters (London: Phaidon Press, 1986), 147.
15.
Sokol, Art and Illusion, 3. Sokol highlights Romano’s reputation in Renaissance England and points out that the very Ben Jonson mentions him in Timber or Discoveries: “he was named by Ben Jonson in his Timber as one of the ‘six famous Painters in Italy who were excellent, and emulous of the Ancients’, and is bracketed there together with such Renaissance grandees as Raphael, ‘Michel Angelo’, and Titian”. Ibid., p. 85.
16.
See Gombrich, New Light on Old Masters, 149. As recounted by Vasari, it was thanks to Pietro Aretino that Federico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, met Giulio Romano. See Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri, ed. Luciano Bellosi and Aldo Rossi (Torino: Einaudi, 1986), 831.
17.
As Gombrich remarks, “Giulio certainly had a splendid start in life as an assistant, and probably the favourite helpmate, of Raphael in Rome”. Gombrich, New Light on Old Masters, 147.
18.
Vasari, Le vite, 828.
19.
Ibid., 829.
20.
See ‘Giulio Romano’, in Sabatier, Shakespeare and Visual Culture, 98.
21.
See Vasari, Le vite, 836; Gombrich, New Light on Old Masters, 150.
22.
Vasari, Le vite, 833.
23.
Ibid.
24.
Stephen Orgel, Spectacular Performances: Essays on Theatre, Imagery, Books, and Selves in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 240.
25.
Ibid., 239. Camilla Caporicci has advanced the hypothesis that the idea for the story of Giulio Romano and the statue of Hermione was suggested by Tebaldeo’s Rime. In this collection, there are seven sonnets that celebrate the statue of a dead woman beloved by a man called Leone. In Tebaldeo’s sonnet sequence, the sculptor is Giancristoforo Romano. According to Caporicci, the name ‘Romano’ might have reminded Shakespeare of Giulio Romano. See Camilla Caporicci, “‘That Rare Italian Master’. Shakespeare and Giulio Romano”, Proceedings of the ‘Shakespeare and His Contemporaries’ Graduate Conference 2012 and 2013, ed. Mark Roberts, vol. 2, Spring 2014, The British Institute of Florence, Florence, 49–57.
26.
Vasari, Le vite, 837.
27.
Gombrich’s translation, New Light on Old Masters, 159.
28.
Gombrich comments thus: “If Shakespeare had seen the epitaph in Vasari, moreover, he might well have inferred from it that Giulio was a sculptor whose statues deceptively resembled life (Videbat Iuppiter corpora sculpta pictaque spirare)” Ibid., 160.
29.
“Whoever wrote these lines [Giulio’s epitaph] skilfully fused two motives appropriate to the artist. The first stems from the real epitaph of Giulio’s master Raphael in the Pantheon in Rome, penned by Bembo: ‘This is Raphael’s tomb, when he lived it was mother nature’s fear to be vanquished by him, and when he died, to die too’. The second, of course, alludes to Giulio’s most famous work, the Sala dei Giganti, which, after all, represents the theme of Jove calling the council of the Gods to punish the giants for attempting to scale heaven”. Ibid., 159–160.
30.
Kara Reilly, Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 35.
31.
See Gombrich, New Light on Old Masters, 160.
32.
Ibid. On Giulio Romano in The Winter’s Tale and on Bembo’s lines in honour of Raphael, see also Milena Romero Allué, “What you do still betters what is done”, 56–57.
33.
Giovan Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittvra (Ravenna: Francesco Tebaldini, 1587), 76. See also Rita Severi, “Art in Shakespeare: Giulio Romano and Giovan Paolo Lomazzo”, Journal of Drama Studies. An International Journal of Research on World Drama in English 7 (2013): 41–68.
34.
Orgel, Spectacular Performances, 240.
35.
Ibid.
36.
Ibid.
37.
“C’est la tradition hermétique qui porte la nouvelle célébration de l’art; avec le pouvoir de contempler le ciel et de connaître le divin, Hermès place parmi les privilèges de l’homme ‘l’invention des arts dédaléens’, c’est-à-dire la fabrication de ‘statues animées, pourvues de souffle’, cette illusion de la vie qui fait de l’art une véritable magie”. André Chastel, Marsile Ficin et l’art (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 69, also cited in Gilberto Sacerdoti, Nuovo cielo, nuova terra. La rivoluzione copernicana di Antonio e Cleopatra di Shakespeare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 60.
38.
Sacerdoti, Nuovo cielo, 61.
39.
Ibid., 176–177.
40.
Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius, in Copenhaver, Hermetica, 80.
41.
Ibid., 77.
42.
Ibid., 80.
43.
Hermes Trismegistus, “Discourse of Hermes Trismegistus: The Key”, ibid., 36.
44.
Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius, ibid., 71.
45.
Ibid., 81.
46.
Ibid.
47.
Giordano Bruno, Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, in Dialoghi filosofici italiani, ed. Michele Ciliberto (Milano: Mondadori, 2000), 637.
48.
Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays, 89.
49.
Ibid., 91. See also Sacerdoti, Nuovo cielo, 177. As the scholar observes, it is in this complex, abstruse, and heterogeneous Hermetic background that some of the most intense intellectual experiences of the epoch originated.
50.
See Simon Smith, “‘Pleasing Strains’: The Dramaturgical Role of Music in The Winter’s Tale”, Shakespeare Survey, vol. 67, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 376–77, and Delsigne, “Hermetic Miracles”, 104.
51.
Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius, in Copenhaver, Hermetica, 90.
52.
On the connections between the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and The Winter’s Tale, see Nuttall, “The Winter’s Tale: Ovid transformed”, 137–138.
53.
Ibid., 141. On Shakespeare’s use of Classical sources, see also Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); William C. Carroll, The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). For more on Ovid’s influence on Elizabethan and Shakespearean literature, see Charles Martindale, ed., Ovid Renewed. Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; repr. 2009), 121–150.
54.
See Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays, 89–90, and Romero Allué, “What you do still betters what is done”, 84.
55.
See Smith, Musical Response, 58.
56.
Ibid., 59–60.
57.
Ibid., 60.
58.
Maier’s music dedicated to King James is reproduced in Smith, Musical Response, 59. It is transcribed from “MS. Poems and music dedicated to King James VI by Michael Maier (the German alchemist and Rosicrucian), Count Palatine and doctor of medicine and philosophy”, National Archives of Scotland, MS GD 241/212.
59.
Smith, Musical Response, 59–60.
60.
Ibid., 58–59.
61.
Strong, The Renaissance Garden, 110.
62.
Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 215. As documented by Birrell, a number of esoteric books were included in Prince Henry’s library: “It is a commonplace that in the seventeenth century there was no hard and fast line between mathematics and astronomy on the one hand, and astrology, natural magic and occult science in general on the other. Prince Henry has the standard authors in the esoteric field: Reuchlin, Pistorius, Trithemius – the sort of tradition one associates with Dr John Dee”. Birrell, English Monarchs and their Books, 38.
63.
Hart, Art and Magic, 5.
64.
See Smith, Musical Response, 203–204: “Whilst Frances Yates and others have argued that Maier was already part of Frederick’s court circle upon his arrival in England in 1611, travelling explicitly as an ambassador to negotiate the marriage alliance with the English throne, Hereward Tilton has more recently suggested that Maier may only have attached himself to Frederick’s retinue […] during his time in London”.
65.
Graham Parry, The Golden Age, 95.
66.
McLean, “A Rosicrucian Manuscript”, The Hermetic Journal, 5.
67.
On Maier’s sojourn in England, see Figala and Neumann, “Michael Maier (1569–1622)”, 43–45; Karin Figala and Ulrich Neumann, “A propos de Michael Maier: quelques découvertes bio-bibliographiques”, in Alchimie, art, histoire et mythes, ed. Didier Kahn et Sylvain Matton, Actes du 1er colloque international de la Société d’Étude de l’Histoire de l’Alchimie, 14–16 Mars 1991 (Paris: S.É.H.A., 1995), esp. 659–661.
68.
Smith, Musical Response, 58.
69.
Strong points out that “Salomon de Caus’s magical, mechanical wonders, which were to be the focal points of the gardens of Anne of Denmark and her son, Henry, Prince of Wales, bring us into contact, therefore, with a tradition central to late Renaissance garden making, that of automata”. Strong, The Renaissance Garden, 75.
70.
See ibid., 74.
71.
Ibid., 78.
72.
William Eamon, “Technology as Magic in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance”, Janus 70, 3–4 (1983): 198. See also Agnieszka Żukowska, “‘Animated Porcelain of the Court’. Stuart Masquers as Magical Automata”, in Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare, ed. Sophie Chiari and John Mucciolo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 177.
73.
Strong, The Renaissance Garden, 112.
74.
John Dee, The Mathematicall Praeface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara (1570), ed. Allen G. Debus (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), cited in Eamon, “Technology as Magic”, 200 (emphasis in original).
75.
Ibid.
76.
As Hart explains, “John Dee visited the palace of Rudolf II in Prague, with its wonder rooms of automata employing a mechanical magic of the kind later displayed in the Stuart Court gardens designed by the Huguenot engineers, the de Caus brothers (Salomon and Isaac), and by Constantino de Servi, the latter having worked for Rudolf”. Hart, Art and Magic, 5.
77.
See Strong, The Renaissance Garden, 74.
78.
Ibid., 110. See also Romero Allué, “What you do still betters what is done”, 84.
79.
See Klossowski De Rola, The Golden Game, 42.
80.
“At the centre of this beautifully balanced composition three musical instruments are laid on the writing-table with a hard-to-decipher inscription reading: ‘Sacred music puts sadness and malevolent spirits to flight, because the spirit of Jehovah sings happily in a heart filled with holy joy’” Ibid., 42–43.
81.
Thomas Norton, The Ordinall of Alchimy, TCB 60.
82.
Ibid.
83.
John Dee, Monas Hieroglyphica (Antwerp: Gulielmus Silvius, 1564), facsimile edition of the Latin with facing page translation by C.H. Josten, Ambix 12, 2–3 (1964): 131, cited in Cavallaro, “The Alchemical Significance”, 161.
84.
Ibid.
85.
Ibid.
86.
See Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Pitcher, 343, note to line 98 (‘Music’), and 383–84.
87.
On the relationship between Heinrich Khunrath and Michael Maier, see Nils Lenke, Nicolas Roudet, Hereward Tilton, “Michael Maier – Nine Newly Discovered Letters”, Ambix 61, no. 1 (2014): 4.
88.
Smith, Musical Response, 60–61.
89.
Ibid., 60.
90.
Immediately after having being restored to life, Hermione addresses her daughter Perdita and says: “You gods, look down, / And from your sacred vials pour your graces” (5.3.121–22, my emphasis). On Paulina’s music and on the pun on ‘vials’, see Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Pitcher, 383–84. On the new musical resources offered by the Blackfriars theatre, see Lindley, “Blackfriars, music and masque”, 29–45.
91.
Hermes Trismegistus, The Emerald Table (Tabula Smaragdina), in Linden, The Alchemy Reader, 28: “That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of one thing”.
92.
Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius, in Copenhaver, Hermetica, 74.
93.
See Pitcher, ‘Introduction’ to Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Pitcher, 141.
94.
Ibid.
95.
Hart, Art and Magic, 138: “Natural harmony was implicit in the Elizabethan conception of the Mercurian monarch, since harmony was naturally identified as one of the many virtues of Mercury”. See also Brooks-Davies, The Mercurian Monarch, 118, n. 50.
96.
See Nichols, Progresses of James I, vol. 2, 296, also cited in Hart, Art and Magic, 26.
97.
As Hart observes, “Hermes was further identified in Neoplatonic mythology with the Roman god Mercury, and as the supposed founder of all the arts and sciences, including magic, this figure of ‘Mercurius Trismagistus’ came to personify links between Christian magic and art in the Renaissance”. Hart, Art and Magic, 3.
98.
Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 167.
99.
Delsigne, “Hermetic Miracles”, 104. See also Smith, Musical Response, 55, and Mitsuru Kamachi, “What’s in a Name?: Hermione and the Hermetic Tradition in The Winter’s Tale”, Shakespeare Studies 29 (1991): 21–36.
100.
See Pitcher, ‘Introduction’ to Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Pitcher, 141.
101.
See OED ‘Herma’ [https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/86240 accessed 29 Jun 2021].
102.
Ibid. See also Kamachi, “What’s in a Name?”, Shakespeare Studies, 21–22.
103.
In Cymbeline, Posthumus Leonatus (son of Sicilius Leonatus) is the husband of Imogen, the daughter of Cymbeline, king of Britain. As Nosworthy remarks, “Leonatus (lion’s whelp) implies that he was lion-hearted”. William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. J.M. Nosworthy (London: Methuen Drama, 1955; repr. Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 5, note to line 33.
104.
See Pitcher, ‘Introduction’ to Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Pitcher, 140.
105.
See ‘red lion’, in Abraham, Dictionary, 166–67. See also ‘quicksilver, ibid., 162: “argent vive or mercury. A name mainly applied to philosophical argent vive, the moist, cold, female seed of metals, which the alchemist must unite with philosophical sulphur, the dry, hot, male seed, in order to produce the philosopher’s stone”.
106.
Richard Carpenter, The Worke of Rich: Carpenter, TCB 275. On the shadowy figure of Richard Carpenter, see Anke Timmermann, Verse and Transmutation. A Corpus of Middle English Alchemical Poetry (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 41.
107.
Graham Parry, The Golden Age, 102.
108.
Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 32.
109.
Ibid., 29–30.
110.
Ibid., 30: “The pneuma is also to be rejoined with the body, presumably after the body has been purified. Elsewhere in his writings, Zosimos explains that this is a physical death followed by a reanimation of the body undergoing treatment. Alchemy, by providing the material key to this operation, reveals the method by which nature itself is not merely mimicked but transformed”.
111.
Barbara Obrist, Les débuts de l’imagerie alchimique (XIVe-XVe siècles) (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982), 45: “Le thème de l’homo faber ne sortira de son statut équivoque qu’au XVe siècle, dans les cercles florentins qui remittent en honneur l’Asclepius, et font traduire du grec le Corpus hermeticum entier auquel il appartient. Ainsi, dans un magnifique manuscript enluminé autour de 1475 en Italie du Nord, et contenant des oeuvres alchimiques pseudo-lulliens, on voit l’alchimiste dans la pose de Prométhée, tenant en main sa statue animée”. As documented by Obrist, the manuscript is collected in the National Library of Florence (MS. BR 52, III, II, 27; fol. CCLXVI). The plate is reproduced in Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, “Opera chemica. Eine unbekannte Bilderhandschrift der italienischen Frührenaissance”, Die BASF 10 (1960), 99.
112.
Cristiano Zanetti, Janello Torriani and the Spanish Empire. A Vitruvian Artisan at the Dawn of the Scientific Revolution (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 175.
113.
See Berti, Il principe dello studiolo, 63.
114.
See Paolo Rossi, I filosofi e le macchine, 1400–1700 (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1984), 177.
115.
See Jonson, Mercury Vindicated, ed. Butler, 439, note to line 102. For the alchemical interpretation of the myth of Prometheus, see Pernety, Les Fables Égyptiennes et Grecques, 2: 440–47. In his Dictionnaire mytho-hermétique, Pernety explains that the alchemical secrets have been handed down through several myths, among which is precisely the one of Deucalion and Pyrrha: “Cette matiere a été voilée par les Anciens sous diverses fables, mais plus particulierement sous celles d’Hercule et d’Anthée, de Pyrrha et de Deucalion”. See ‘Matiere’, in Pernety, Dictionnaire mytho-hermétique, 214.
116.
As Martin Butler explains in his edition of Jonson’s masque, the creatures produced by means of alchemical transmutation are called “of the first class” with reference to “some hierarchy within the works of artificial creation supposedly performed by alchemy”. Jonson, Mercury Vindicated, ed. Butler, 440, note to line 131.
117.
Ibid., note to line 137.
118.
Morienus, A Testament, 29 [Latin ed. Liber de compositione alchemiae, AA 2: 38]. See also Calid, The Booke of the Secrets of Alchimie, 30: “Moreover, lette him consider what is the ground-worke and beginning of the mastery, beeing to it, as the matrice is to living creatures, which are fashioned in the wombe, and therin receive their creation & nourishment”.
119.
Long, Hermaphrodites, 110.
120.
See Pereira, Alchimia, xxvi. As the scholar explains, besides the treatises that offer an objective description of alchemical substances and operations (without any obvious cosmological or ontological implication), there is a much larger group of works where the laboratory is clearly described as a reduced model of the cosmos, where the adept can even create life.
121.
Paracelsus, Of the Nature of Things, 4. A few words below Paracelsus writes: “wee must by no means forget the generation of Artificiall men. For there is some truth in this thing, although it hath been a long time concealed, and there have been no small Doubts and Questions raised by some of the ancient Philosophers, Whether it were possible for Nature, or Art to beget a Man out of the body of a Woman, and naturall matrix? To this I answer, that it is no way repugnant to the Art of Alchymie and Nature”. Ibid., 8.
122.
See Pereira, Alchimia, lxi, n. 35, and Pietro Citati, Goethe (Milano: Adelphi, 1990), 304.
123.
Genesis, 2:7. As Reilly remarks, “[t]he artist’s uncanny ability to create verisimilitude shocks him [Leontes]; it is as though the artist, Romano, has somehow created life or cut breath just as God in Genesis created life through breath”. Reilly, Automata and Mimesis, 37.
124.
John Gower Concerning the Philosophers Stone, TCB 370. See also George Ripley, The Mistery of Alchymists, TCB 386: “Shut well the Vessell for going forth of the Spirit; / Soe shall you all things the better keepe; / For how to get him againe it is strange to know, / […] Put into thy Vessell Water cleare, / And set it in Fire full forty dayes, / And then in the Vessell blacknes will appeare, / When that he is black he will change tyte / Many Colers in him then will appeare, / From coulour to colour till it be white, / Then it is tyme Son to change the Fire, / And melt the heat to your desire; […] A dry Fire put him till, / And a moyst Fire naturally, / Till he be made fixed”.
125.
‘The Epistle of George Ripley written to King Edward IV’, in The Alchemy Reader, 147: “make a marriage the bodie and spirite betwixt”. As remarked by Abraham, “[i]n a universe of macrocosmic-microcosmic correspondences, the ‘death’ of a metal and the rising of volatile spirits were seen as analogous to the death of the human body and the release of the vital spirit of life”. Abraham, Dictionary, 188.
126.
See ‘fixation’, in Abraham, Dictionary, 78.
127.
See ‘fire’, ibid., 76.
128.
Paracelsus, Concerning the Spirits of the Planets, HAWP 1: 74.
129.
Ibid.
130.
Calid, The Booke of the Secrets of Alchimie, 32.
131.
See Stanton J. Linden, ‘Introduction’ to Roger Bacon, The Mirror of Alchimy, xxii.
132.
Calid, The Booke of the Secrets of Alchimie, 45.
133.
Haley, Shakespeare’s Courtly Mirror, 59.
134.
George Ripley, The Vision of Sir George Ripley, TCB 374. Ripley’s Vision describes the phases of the Great Work by resorting to the symbolism of the toad, which “generally represents the base matter which, though poisonous, contains the precious philosopher’s stone within”. Abraham, Dictionary, 200. In his Vision, Ripley focuses on colour symbolism and describes the toad’s transmutation: “The Toade with Colours rare through every side was pear’st, / And White appeared when all the sundry hewes were past. / Which after being tincted Rudde, for evermore did last”. George Ripley, The Vision of Sir George Ripley, TCB 374.
135.
See ‘spirit’, in Abraham, Dictionary, 188.
136.
“George Ripley’s Song”, Ambix, 177–78.
137.
Ibid., 178.
138.
See Figure 32, in Abraham, Dictionary, 158. That Shakespeare was aware of the alchemical notion of ‘projection’ is testified by the tragedy Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra draws on this alchemical notion when praising the virtues of her beloved, Mark Antony, in alchemical terms. Antony, himself ‘perfect’, is able to ‘gild’ imperfect matter with his tincture: “How much unlike art thou Mark Antony! / Yet, coming from him, that great medicine hath / With his tinct gilded thee” (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5.37–39).
139.
George Ripley, The Compound of Alchymie, TCB 188.
140.
Grasshoff, The Golden Tract, HM 1: 14 [Tractatus Aureus, MH 12].
141.
John Gower Concerning the Philosophers Stone, TCB 370.
142.
George Ripley, The Compound of Alchymie, TCB 172.
143.
Ibid.
144.
Calid, Secret of Secrets, Appendix II, in Bacon, The Mirror of Alchimy, ed. Linden, 121. In another passage, Calid writes that “[w]hosoever therefore can convert the soule into the bodie, the bodie into the soule, and therewith mingle the subtile spirites, shall be able to tinct any body”. Calid, The Booke of the Secrets of Alchimie<Emphasis Type="Italic">, 38. See also ‘fixation’, in Abraham, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Dictionary, 78.
145.
‘The Epistle of George Ripley written to King Edward IV’, in Linden, The Alchemy Reader, 147.
146.
Delsigne, “Hermetic Miracles”, 105.
147.
Garber, Shakespeare After All, 841.
148.
Kamachi, “What’s in a Name?”, Shakespeare Studies, 27.
149.
See ‘queen (white)’, in Abraham, Dictionary, 161–62.
150.
Edward Kelley, Kelle’s Worke, TCB 325.
151.
Thomas Norton, The Ordinall of Alchimy, TCB 53.
152.
John Dastin, Dastin’s Dreame, TCB 258.
153.
Richard Carpenter, The Worke of Rich: Carpenter, TCB 275.
154.
Hermes Trismegistus, The Emerald Table (Tabula Smaragdina), in Linden, The Alchemy Reader, 28.
155.
Paracelsus, A Short Catechism of Alchemy, HAWP 1: 289.
156.
George Ripley, The Compound of Alchymie, TCB 172.
157.
Ashmole, “Annotations and Discourses”, TCB 465.
158.
Northrop Frye, “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale”, in Hunt, The Winter’s Tale: Critical Essays, 117–118.
159.
Ashmole, “Annotations and Discourses”, TCB 465.
160.
Paracelsus, Selected Writings, 82.
161.
Trismosin, Splendor Solis, ed. Skinner et al., 146.
162.
Frye, “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale”, 118.
163.
Engel, “Kinetic emblems and memory images”, 75.
164.
William Blomfild, Bloomefields Blossoms, TCB 310.
165.
Eugenius Philalethes, Magia Adamica: Or, The Antiquitie of Magic (London, 1650), 118, also cited in Jayne E. Archer, “Women and Chymistry in Early Modern England: The Manuscript Receipt Book (c. 1616) of Sarah Wigges”, in Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture, ed. Kathleen P. Long (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 193.
166.
Pilgrim, You Precious Winners All, 62.
167.
John Dastin, Dastin’s Dreame, TCB 258.
168.
Meredith K. Ray, Daughters of Alchemy. Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 5.
169.
On Thurneysser and his two editions of Quinta Essentia (Münster 1570; Leipzig 1574), see Bruce T. Moran, “Art and Artisanship in Early Modern Alchemy”, Getty Research Journal, no. 5 (2013), 8.
170.
John Thornborough, Letter of Chemistry to the right Honourable the Lady Knowles (British Library, MS Sloane 1799, fols. 75r-76r), cited in Archer, “Rudenesse it selfe she doth refine”, 47. As documented by Usher, Thornborough cultivated a lifelong interest in alchemy and published a work on alchemy and chemistry entitled Lithotheorikos (1621). See Brett Usher, ‘Thornborough, John’, ODNB 54: 591.
171.
See Pereira, Alchimia, L.
172.
Long, Hermaphrodites, 111: “Sol and Luna are often portrayed as a hermaphroditic brother-sister pair or rebis, sometimes as an incestuous pair (and then as King and Queen, or Prince and Princess)”.
173.
See Eliade, Forgerons; Eliade, “Le mythe de l’alchimie”, 157–167.
174.
See ‘philosophical tree’, in Abraham, Dictionary, 150–151. The image of the philosophical tree recurs also in the Visio Arislei, where the sacred art is allegorically described as a tree whose fruits (the universal medicine) will enable the one who eats them not to be hungry anymore, since they are a source of immortality. See Grégoire Lacaze, Turba philosophorum, 327.
175.
See De Jong, Commentary on Emblem XXVI, in Maier, Atalanta fugiens, ed. De Jong, 198–199.
176.
William Blomfild, Bloomefields Blossoms, TCB 310.
177.
Ibid., TCB 311.
178.
Aquinas (attributed to), Aurora Consurgens, 71. See also ‘sapientia’, in Abraham, Dictionary, 178.
179.
Colley, “Leontes’s search for wisdom”, South Atlantic Review, 43.
180.
See ‘women’s work’, in Abraham, Dictionary, 219.
181.
Tractatus Opus Mulierum, et Ludus puerorum, AA 2: 171.
182.
Trismosin, Splendor Solis, ed. Skinner et al., 154.
183.
Michael Maier, Epigram to Emblem III, in Atalanta fugiens, ed. De Jong, 67.
184.
Michael Maier, Motto accompanying Emblem III, ibid. 66. Warlick remarks that the scene portrayed in Emblem III “parallels the transition from the black phase to white, as women wash dirty laundry by pouring hot water over the clothes, removing the dirt to make them clean”. M.E. Warlick, “The Domestic Alchemist: Women as Housewives in Alchemical Emblems”, in Adams and Linden, Emblems and Alchemy, 39.
185.
Michael Maier, Motto accompanying Emblem XXII, in Atalanta fugiens, ed. De Jong, 176.
186.
Archer, “Women and Chymistry”, 194.
187.
Warlick, “The Domestic Alchemist”, 46–47.
188.
Ibid., 47.
189.
Ibid., 46.
190.
Ibid., 44–46.
191.
See Long, Hermaphrodites, 110.
192.
See Kathleen P. Long, “Odd Bodies: Reviewing Corporal Difference in Early Modern Alchemy”, in Long, Gender and Scientific Discourse, 66.
193.
Haley, Shakespeare’s Courtly Mirror, 92.
194.
Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 29.
195.
Ibid., 28.
196.
Ibid., 29.
197.
Ibid., 46.
198.
<IndexTerm ID="ITerm446">This ancient female adept known as Cleopatra is not the same person as the celebrated Cleopatra VII, Queen of the Ptolemy dynasty. See Linden, The Alchemy Reader, 44.
199.
George Baker, ‘To the Honourable, Vertuous, and his singular good Lady, the Noble Countesse of Oxeforde’, in Gesner, The newe Iewell. See also Archer, “Women and Chymistry”, 197.
200.
Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 14.
201.
John Aubrey, ‘Brief Lives’, chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 & 1696, 2 vols., ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), vol. 1, 311.
202.
Archer, “Women and Chymistry”, 197. See also Penny Bayer, “Women Alchemists and the Paracelsian Context in France and England, 1560–1616”, Early Modern Women 15, no. 2 (2021): 103–112.
203.
Principe, The Aspiring Adept, 9 (emphasis in original).
204.
“The early modern housewife was an important producer and consumer of chymical literature, knowledge, and practices”. Archer, “Women and Chymistry”, 192.
205.
Ibid., 197.
206.
Ray, Daughters of Alchemy, 5.
207.
John French, The Art of Distillation or A Treatise of the Choisest Spagyricall Preparations Performed by Way of Distillation, Being Partly Taken Out of the Most Select Chymicall Authors of Severall Languages, and Partly out of the Authors Manuall Experience (London: Richard Cotes, 1651), ‘To the Reader’, also cited in Archer, “Women and Chymistry”, 208.
208.
Robert Multhauf, “The Significance of Distillation in Renaissance Medical Chemistry”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 30, no. 4 (1956): 330–31, cited in Archer, “Women and Chymistry”, 207–208.
209.
Archer, “Women and Chymistry”, 216.
210.
Ray, Daughters of Alchemy, 4.
211.
Archer, “Women and Chymistry”, 215.
212.
Deborah E. Harkness, “A View from the Streets: Women and Medical Work in Elizabethan London”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82 (2008): 84.
213.
Ashmole, Prolegomena, TCB sig. B4v: “There you may meet with the Genii of our Hermetique Philosophers, learne the Language in which they woo’d and courted Dame Nature”.
214.
Hermes Trismegistus, The Emerald Table (Tabula Smaragdina), in Linden, The Alchemy Reader, 28.
215.
Engel, “Kinetic emblems and memory images”, in Power and Loughnane, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Late Shakespeare<Emphasis Type="Italic">, 84.
216.
See Chiara Crisciani, “Opus and sermo: The Relationship between Alchemy and Prophecy (12th–14th Centuries)”, Early Science and Medicine 13, no. 1 (2008): 4–24.
217.
Ibid., 23.
218.
Ibid.
219.
Ibid.
220.
Ibid., 22.
221.
Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 15: “As both occult objects and instruments of occult knowledge, women hold a crucial but often obscured position in the history of science”.
222.
Pilgrim, You Precious Winners All, 62.
223.
McAdam, “Magic and Gender”, 255.
224.
Pilgrim, You Precious Winners All, 71.
225.
See 1 Corinthians 15: 12–14: “Nowe if it be preached, that Christ is risen from the dead, how say some among you, that there is no resurrection of the Dead? For if there bee no resurrection of the Dead, then is Christ not risen. And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vaine, and your faith is also vaine”.
226.
See Pereira, Alchimia, xvii. Pereira refers to Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Because the creature also shall bee deliuered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious libertie of the formes of God”. St Paul to the Romanes 8: 21.
227.
Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays, 90–91.
228.
Engel, “Kinetic emblems and memory images”, 87.
229.
McAdam, “Magic and Gender”, 255.
230.
Ibid.
231.
On the effacement of gender boundaries in alchemical imagery and on the constant focus on the figure of the rebis, see Long, “Odd Bodies”, 65.
232.
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 48.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

University of Udine, Udine, Italy
Martina Zamparo

Authors

Martina Zamparo
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Martina Zamparo .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Zamparo, M. (2022). The Statue Scene. In: Alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale . Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05167-8_7

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05167-8_7
Published: 06 October 2022
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-05166-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-05167-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics