Shakespeare on Love

Shakespeare on Love:
The Sonnets and Plays in Relation to Plato’s
Symposium, Alchemy, Christianity
and Renaissance Neo-Platonism

By

Ronald Gray
Fellow of Emmanuel College
Cambridge University
 Shakespeare on Love:
The Sonnets and Plays in Relation to Plato’s Symposium, Alchemy, Christianity
and Renaissance Neo-Platonism,
by Ronald Gray

This book first published 2011

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2011 by Ronald Gray

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-2711-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2711-9

FOR DOROTHY
 FROM REVIEWS OF BOOKS
BY RONALD GRAY

Goethe the Alchemist: ‘This book is a major contribution to Goethe

Studies’ (W.H. Bruford, Professor of German, Cambridge University).
Brecht: ‘Mr Gray’s essay on Brecht seems to me the best criticism of the
plays available in English … a positive relief after the endless circling and
the chatter of Brecht selling’ (Raymond Williams, Professor of English,
Cambridge University).
Kafka’s Castle: ‘This is a most impressive and convincing investigation of
Kafka’s novel and just the sort of study that needed to be written at the
present moment … One would gladly dispense with much of the
voluminous literature (on Kafka) in return for more from Dr Gray’ (W.
Lucas, Professor of German, Manchester University).
Franz Kafka. Carefully written and researched, aware of secondary
literature, novel in some aspects but not opinionated, this book will truly
facilitate the study of this enigmatic writer for non-German readers.
Anyone who desires a guide in his searchings for Kafka’s meaning will do
well to read this book from cover to cover. Much that is said about
Kafka’s perfection, about his battle with his sense of degradation, about
what ultimately inspired Kafka’s fiction, has not been said better. (Anon.
in Choice.)
Introduction to German Poetry: Mr Gray’s book is one of those that help
more than they seem to promise. It applies, in the happiest manner,
something like I.A. Richard’s Practical Criticism to the reading of German
poetry, and makes a stimulating vade-mecum. Never bludgeoning, never
condescending, Mr Gray persuades the student by asking many pertinent
questions, to read closely, think clearly and develop his sensitivity’ (Anon,
Times Educational Supplement).
Goethe: A Critical Introduction: ‘… this readable and intelligent book
…. Possibly cavils a little too much … Even so, it is the best of its kind
available to English readers, and rather better than so reserved a
commendation suggests’ (D.J. Enright, in The Listener).
Poems of Goethe: ‘Dr Gray’s interpretations are as always based on sound
scholarship, stimulating, indeed provocative and happily free from jargon
… Dr Gray is particularly good at detecting artificiality, pretentiousness
and coyness’ (W.E. Yuill, Professor of German, Nottingham University).
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

By the Same Author.................................................................................... ix

Prologue...................................................................................................... xi

Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii

Chapter One................................................................................................. 1
Controversies and Coincidences

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 25

The Young Man and the Mistress

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 43

The Sonnets and the Plays

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 55

The Sonnets and Antony and Cleopatra

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 65

A Lover’s Complaint

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 79

The Muse

Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 85
Varied Perceptions of Philosophies of Opposites

Epilogue: Dante and Shakespeare............................................................. 97

Bibliography ............................................................................................ 103

Index........................................................................................................ 111
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR

1952 Goethe the Alchemist. A study of alchemical symbolism in Goethe’s

literary and scientific works (Cambridge University Press).

1956 Kafka’s Castle (C.U.P.)

1961 Brecht (Oliver and Boyd)

1962 The Twentieth Century Views Kafka. A Collection of Critical

Essays) (ed.) (Prentice-Hall).

1965 An Introduction to German Poetry (C.U.P.). Revised publication

as German Poetry. A Guide to Free Appreciation 1976 (C.U.P.)

1966 Poems of Goethe. A Selection with Introduction and Notes

(C.U.P.).

1967 The German Tradition in Literature 1871-1945 (C.U.P.)

1967 Goethe. A Critical Introduction (C.U.P.).

1976 Brecht the Dramatist (C.U.P.)

1973 Franz Kafka (C.U.P.).

2006 ‘Will in the Universe. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plato’s

Symposium and Alchemy and Renaissance Neo-Platonism’,
Shakespeare Survey 59 (C.U.P.), pp.225-238.

Contributions to Modern Language Review, The Times Literary

Supplement, The Listener, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The New
Statesman, German Life and Letters, Cambridge Quarterly, The Gadfly,
The Human World, The New Humanist, etc.
 PROLOGUE

Contradictions and stark contrasts abound in the Sonnets as in the

plays. Malvolio’s absurd compliance to what he believes to be Olivia’s
wishes are a travesty of the Sonnets poet’s devotion. The poet declares he
is his lover’s adversary and advocate. The poet’s mistress can do no
wrong: ‘all my best doth worship thy defect’. For the witches’ chorus in
Macbeth ‘fair is foul and foul is fair’. The two lovers in The Phoenix and
the Turtle are ‘two distincts, division none’, like the Sonnets poet and his
lover, who is both real and a fusion of two sexes (‘for a woman wert thou
first created’). The apparently mystical union in Sonnet 33 is echoed in
Bottom the Weaver’s garbled version of St Paul’s account of ecstasy. The
tragic ending of Romeo and Juliet has exactly the same sequence of events
as the hilarious farce of Pyramus and Thisbe, performed by Bottom’s
company.
In the study that follows these and other contrasts and contradictions
are related to the universal vision of love in Plato’s Symposium and in
Renaissance neo-Platonism and alchemy.
 PREFACE

This book expands the article which was published in 2006 in

Shakespeare Survey 59 (Cambridge University Press), entitled ‘Will in the
Universe: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Plato’s Symposium, Alchemy and
Renaissance Neoplatonism’. It includes also a chapter on ‘The Muse’, a
chapter on ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, arguing for Shakespeare’s authorship of
this poem, and one on ‘Varied Perceptions of Philosophies of Opposites’,
considering Shakespeare’s place in a tradition beginning with Heraclitus
and ending with T.S. Eliot. ‘Dante and Shakespeare’ concludes.
William Empson’s study of ambiguities, still engaging after eighty
years, is broadly similar to my own thesis, although Empson treats no
passages in Shakespeare that I treat, and vice-versa. His concern is for the
most part with verbal analysis, puns, grammar, punctuation, with
ambiguities arising from these, treating mostly short extracts. Only in the
last chapter but one does he deal with contradicting opposites, and here he
touches on mysticism, as I do, as well as Freud. He is not concerned with
the contraries in regard to love. I hope readers will find us
complementary, nevertheless, though I am no match for Empson’s urbanity
and wit.
Mahood’s study of word-play again mentions none of the passages I
quote, but may also be seen as a complement to my own, which ranges
more widely than Mahood’s in comparing single Sonnets with other
Sonnets, Sonnets with plays, plays with plays, and includes some
indications of a European background in both poetry and philosophy
against which Shakespeare’s achievements can be seen. Mahood is, like
Empson, not concerned with love.
A.D. Nuttall’s recent work on Shakespeare the Thinker (2007) seemed
likely at first to have interpreted in a way similar to my own. But although
Professor Nuttall interprets Measure for Measure in terms of a paradoxical
heresy, it does not deal with alchemy, or Plato or the neo-Platonists, but
merely one of a great variety of interpretations of dialectical philosophies
which I outline in a final chapter. Alchemy, however, was certainly known
to Shakespeare in all its practical and symbolical meanings, whereas he is
more likely not to have heard of Gnosticism in any form. Noel Cobb’s
study of secret alchemy at the heart of The Tempest has more to do with
the psychological ideas of C.G. Jung than with the play.
xiv Preface

Much closer to my own argument is Robert Grudin in his Mighty

Opposites, Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety (1979) which is
concerned, as I am, with the philosophy of polarity in Renaissance
thinkers. We differ, for example, as regards the paradox in Castiglione’s
view that without evil ‘there would be no real goodness’, that ‘goodness
necessitates evil’ (p.20), which I do not find, as Grudin does, in relation to
King Lear and Measure for Measure. Michael McCanles’ Dialectical
Criticism and Renaissance Literature (1975) is also concerned with polar
opposites, but McCanles confines himself to discussing ‘The Dialectic of
Right and Power in Eight Plays of Shakespeare’. This is mainly political,
outside my own field of interest. McCanles also writes about Donne,
Herbert, Marvell and Paradise Lost as part of the same dialectical
traditions, affording much less space to Shakespeare in particular. I often
felt an affinity with G. Wilson Knight’s views, although I see Nietzsche as
only one of many writers in the same broad tradition. I stress that the
alchemical and Platonist aspects present a wholly different scenario, which
affects also my view of Helen Vendler’s distinguished Art of
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World.
There is no mention of interpretations of the Sonnets in relation to
alchemy in Rollins’ Variorum Edition of 1944, apart from the textual
editing of ‘alcumy’, and little since that date.1 Margaret Healy’s
Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination was announced for
2011 by C.U.P. at a time when the present book was being corrected in
proof.
The great knowledge of occultist and Rosicrucian philosophies, both of
them related to alchemy, in the works of Frances Yates, gave little insight
into the influence of alchemy itself or of Plato on Shakespeare. Her chief
work on Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Last Plays. A New Approach, she
summarized as showing Shakespeare’s great creations – Hamlet, Lear,
Prospero belonging to the last stage of ‘Renaissance occultist philosophy’,
struggling in the throes of the reaction.
James Schiffer’s Introduction, ‘Reading New Life into Shakespeare’s
Sonnets’, to the critical essays on the Sonnets, edited by him, provides a
survey that adds accounts of most of the work of all kinds done since
Rollins’ time, as well as of a few earlier pieces. (The internet bears
witness to a very large increase in interest in alchemy generally in recent
times.)
David Schalkwyk’s Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
and Plays (2002) treats the connection between the Sonnets and plays in
a way entirely different from my own, concerning itself with philosophical

1
See Schiffer.
 Shakespeare on Love xv

issues related to Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin. His Shakespeare, Love and
Service, although treating the interaction of love and service in the Sonnets
and plays, also approaches them differently. Joel Fineman’s Shakespeare’s
Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets, widely
influential, is also philosophical and linguistic in its approach, in the field
of studies by Lacan and de Saussure.
I am very much indebted to friends, especially Dorothy Sturley, and
colleagues, some of whom have been aware of my interests for the twenty-
eight years since I retired. I thank most cordially Professor John Kerrigan,
and Professors Colin Burrow and Katherine Duncan-Jones, for expert
critical comment at a later stage. I thank also Fellows of Emmanuel
College, the late Professor Derek Brewer, Professors Peter Burke and
Geoffrey Hill, Dr John Harvey and Dr Christopher Burlinson, the Rev.
Don Cupitt, as well as Dr Leo Salingar, Dr Douglas Cook, Dr Bernard
Brown and Mr John Martin, for their encouragement at many stages in the
book’s development. Members of the University of the Third Age in
Cambridge participated in discussions of the Sonnets over several years,
which were also of great help to me. Professor W.E. Yates encouraged me
to write about the Austrian dramatist Grillparzer.2 My knowledge of the
plays was helped by many Shakespearean discussions I hosted under the
chairmanship of Harold Mason and by my years as Senior Treasurer of
Cambridge University Marlowe Dramatic Society. Some of the present
book repeats arguments I used in the article in Shakespeare Survey 59.
I warmly thank my daughter Sue, and her husband Professor Robin
Perutz, Vivien Perutz, my son Professor John Gray and his late wife
Professor Jean Rudduck.
I am most grateful to Mrs Linda Allen who has typed my many
revisions year after year with great accuracy and patience with my
handwriting.

2
See ‘Grillparzer and Shakespeare’ in Grillparzer und die europäische Tradition,
edd. Alex Stillmark, W.E. Yates, Fred Wagner, Vienna 1987.
 CHAPTER ONE

CONTRARIES AND COINCIDENCES

Let me not to the marriage of true mindes

Admit impediments, love is not love
Which alters when it alteration findes,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever fixed marke
That lookes on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandring barke,
Whose worths unknowne, although his higth be taken.
Lov’s not Times foole, though rosie lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickles compasse come,
Love alters not with his breefe hours and weekes,
But beares it out even to the edge of doome;
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

This is probably the best known of all the Sonnets, the word
‘impediment’ echoing the marriage ceremony in the Book of Common
Prayer, where the priest asks whether there is any reason why the bridal
couple should not be married. Other Christian parallels may also come to
mind, especially St Paul’s famous words on Charity (or Agapé),
contrasting with Eros: Charity (Geneva Bible: Love):1
suffereth long, and is kind [bountiful], …envieth not, … vaunteth not
itself … seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked [not provoked to
anger], thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth.
(I Cor. 13.4-6)

Shakespeare certainly knew these lines, as he also must have known the
Song of Solomon in the Old Testament:

1
Quotations from the Geneva Bible of 1584 are given only if significantly
different from the Authorised Version.
2 Chapter One

many waters cannot quench love,

Neither can the floods drown it.
(S. of S. 7.7.)

Sonnets 153 and 154 allude to these verses, with the assertion that ‘the
holie fire of love’ cannot be put out by any bath, and that ‘Loves fire
heates water, water cooles not love’. The Song of Solomon is, however, an
erotic poem, and the love it speaks of is not essentially like St Paul’s.
Shakespeare often combines both.
There are also moments in both the Sonnets and the plays where a lover
is inspired more by Jesus’s love that turns the other cheek, and does not
resist evil (Matt. 5.39 and 44).. Shakespeare inherits this along with
Agapé and Eros, a part of a long tradition that stretches back to pagan
sources as much as to Christian and Judaic ones, as he suggests in the
Sonnet immediately following 116, where he says he has ‘frequent binne
with unknown mindes’ (117.3). If the man whose ‘great deserts’ the poet
has failed to repay, the man whose ‘deare purchas’d right’ (117.5-6) he has
ignored, is meant to recall Christ, and there are reasons, to be explored
later, for thinking he does, the poet is confessing that he has been in the
habit of reading unorthodox authors, and even perhaps adopting their
ideas. He has

hoisted sayle to al the windes

Which should transport me farthest from your sight.
(117.7-8)

Something similar is suggested already in the couplet of 116, where the

poet concedes that what he has just said about love may be ‘error’, as
though it were not in accord with some official statement of doctrine,
which might be ‘proved’ [tested] as though by some Inquisition. In fact he
has not been entirely orthodox, for all the resemblance to St Paul. The
marriage he speaks of in 116 is not necessarily one of a man and a woman:
it is rather a marriage of true minds, which may be the minds of a man and
a woman, or of two male or two female lovers. The unknown writer in
whom such a love is celebrated could well be Plato, and we may now turn
to see what Shakespeare knew of him, and how much it inspired him.
Plato’s works, scarcely known in Europe before the late fifteenth century
when they were translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino, brought new
perceptions of religion to the whole Western world. His Symposium
especially made a great impact. Spenser admired it, and there is in fact, as
will appear, a passage in the Symposium which Shakespeare knew and
imitated fairly closely.
 Contraries and Coincidences 3

At the climax of the discussion of love in its various forms, Socrates

relates how he was told by a wise woman called Diotima about a vision of
universal love that might be attained by a man loving first one, then many
men, finally bursting forth as ‘a wondrous vision which is the very soul of
the beauty he has so long toiled for’ (para.211). This is for Socrates, as
Plato portrays him, so convincing that he tries to bring others to realise it
also. ‘Every man of us should worship the god of Love, … all my life I
shall pay the power and the might of Love such homage as I can’
(para.211).
Socrates and St Paul are alike, yet not alike. Both celebrate Love, but
for Socrates this means love of Beauty, inspired by Eros, while for St Paul
beauty is never explicitly mentioned, and Eros is a hindrance. It is better
to marry than to burn with passion (I Cor. 7.9). Jesus speaks with apparent
approval of men who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of
heaven’s sake (Matthew 19.12), and the history of Christianity until
recently has on the whole looked at celibacy as preferable to marriage.
Shakespeare in the first seventeen Sonnets is decidedly in favour of beauty
as the fruit of sexual desire.
Sonnet 1 announces a theme that runs through all the Sonnets up to
number 17: that a young man should do all he can to beget a child. It may
be, it has been thought, that Shakespeare was commissioned by a mother
whose son was not inclined to marry, to write encouraging him. But even
if that is so, it does not reveal in what spirit Shakespeare writes. He is in
love with the young man, though quite capable of addressing him with
scorn as well as adoration, and the whole point of these Sonnets is the
necessity not to promote some family estate, but to make sure Beauty
remains throughout generation after generation. Marriage, as distinct from
having children, is never really mentioned. There are many women, the
poet tells the man, who would be glad to help.
The aim is that ‘beauties Rose might never die (1.2), as though each
new child perpetuated the beauty of its father, maintaining it in existence.
Rose is printed in italics in the Quarto version of 1609 (the only version
published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, which I shall quote throughout rather
than any edited version). This may not matter – the compositors of that
time could be wayward, and print italics where none was intended. The
word does, however, suggest the symbolical significance of, for example,
the Roman de la Rose, translated by Chaucer, where the Rose is a flower at
the centre of the garden of Love, and the rose of antiquity, sacred to
Venus, as portrayed in Renaissance and later art.2

2
James Hall, Dictionary of Subject and Symbols in Art, John Murray, 1974,
rev.ed., 1979, p.268.
4 Chapter One

The child possessing this beauty is expected to resemble its parent

completely — ‘thou art thy mothers glasse [mirror], and she in thee calls
backe the lovely Aprill of her prime’ (3.9-10), and this we must accept for
the poem’s sake. Bernard Shaw was right when he replied to a woman
who proposed marriage ‘What if the child inherits my body and your
brains?’3 In fact the genealogical issue is less relevant than the symbolical,
for the inheritance is that of a ‘summe of summes’ (4.8), a substance rather
than a shadow (5.14), a gift of nature that should be cherished (11.12),
truth and beauty combined (14.11). It is even a kind of distillation (5.8),
though not an alchemical one This is not to say that the young man is not a
mortal like anyone else. To maintain his beauty is even equivalent, the
poet argues, to maintaining his virtue to confront a kind of Last Judgment:
What will he say, the poet asks, if he is ever challenged in old age to show
what has become of the beauty he had in his youth, and has no child to
show he has preserved it (2.4-12)? What ‘acceptable Audit can he leave’
(4.12). This unusual combination of the Christian Day of Judgment with
the pagan worship of Beauty is worth noting in the Sonnets following 17.
Christianity and pagan religion momentarily combine.
In Sonnet 18 the sequence reaches an unexpected conclusion. Sonnet
17 had ended with the reply the young man might make if the beauty
ascribed to him by the poet were to be doubted and were regarded as mere
hyperbole. If he had a child, its beauty would complement that of the
poems:

But were some childe of yours alive that time,

You should live twise in it, and in my rime.
(17.13-14)

It would do more than complement, Sonnet 18 now argues, or rather

announces with swelling grandeur:

But thy eternall Sommer shall not fade

Nor loose possession of that faire thou ow’st, [ownest]
Nor shall death brag thou wanderst in his shade,
When in eternall lines to time thou grow’st
(18.9-12)

The ‘eternall lines’ have a double sense: they are both the lines of the
poem and the lines of descent, through which beauty is preserved from one

3
Justin Wintle and Richard Herrin, The Penguin Concise Biographical
Quotations, Penguin Books, 1981, p.558 (quoting Hesketh Pearson, Bernard
Shaw. His Life and Personality).
 Contraries and Coincidences 5

generation to another — and this is not merely a pun. The poet has begun
to see that beauty is not simply a matter of facial or bodily form, but can be
equally present in poetry. And to appreciate this we need to consider what
the Symposium has to say.
Young men are lying round a table enjoying a banquet and relating
their ideas about love. It is always about love between men, as it is in
many of the Sonnets, or the love of men for beautiful boys. Aristophanes
the writer of comedies tells a story of a time when there was a race of
human beings who were of both male and female gender, and who
assaulted Zeus on Mount Olympus, only to be sliced in half as ‘one slices
an apple’ and set down each with either male or female genitals. Love, he
announces, is the everlasting quest for the other half. Shakespeare
evidently knew of this, for in Twelfth Night he gives a speech to Antonio,
seeing for the first time Viola with her brother, her identical twin, saying:

How have you made division of yourself?

An apple cleft in two is not more twin
Than these two creatures.
(T.N. 5.1.221-2)

It could be, of course, that he had only heard of Aristophanes’ story from
Ben Jonson or some other learned friend. His knowledge of the climax of
the speeches is another matter. When it is the turn of Socrates to speak he
describes his encounter with Diotima, from whom he learned how a lover
‘will fall in love with the beauty of an individual body’, and how he must
then consider ‘how nearly related the beauty of one body is to the beauty
of any other’, and then ‘set himself to be the lover of every lovely body’.
From this the lover will see that ‘the beauties of the body are nothing to the
beauties of the soul … and from this he will be led to contemplate the
beauty of laws and institutions’ (para.210). Shakespeare seems to have
been inspired by this passage when he wrote, as we just saw, that the
beauty of his verse and the beauty of the child-to-be were one and the
same. He does not take the further steps described by Diotima, seeing
beauty in institutions. But he is very likely to have been influenced by her
when he wrote of his lover’s presence everywhere.

Speake of the spring, and foyzon [harvest] of the yeare,

The one doth shadow of your beautie show.
The other as your bountie doth appeare,
And you in every blessed shape we know.
In all externall grace you have some part …
(53.9-13)
6 Chapter One

The beauty of nature is still only a shadow of the man’s. (Here, like many
other poets of his time, Shakespeare is thinking of Plato’s myth of the
Cave, Republic, book 7 in which men take the shadows they see on the
wall of the cave where they are imprisoned for the reality which exists in
an ideal world unknown to them.) Similarly, the poet sees the beauty of
the violet, the lily and the rose as ‘stolen’ from his lover (99.1-14). They
were ‘but figures of delight’, ‘Drawne after you, you patterne [italics
inserted] of all those’; the poet has only the ‘shaddow’ and must be
contented (98.12-14). As in Plato’s philosophy of ideals, the true form of
things is beyond our ken, but we may see in reality an imitation of the
pattern.
There are difficulties in Plato’s thought here. In the myth of the Cave
the imprisoned men see only shadows. This is not the same as imitations
from a pattern, which can still afford, as Shakespeare says, ‘delight’. This
has to be borne in mind in other passages, where the young man somehow
seems to be an ideal figure, not a shadow.
Easily the most far-reaching part of the Symposium is the section in
which Diotima reveals the climax of the lover’s progress.
And now, Socrates, there bursts upon him that wondrous vision which is
the very soul of the beauty he has toiled so long for. It is an everlasting
loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades
… subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness; while every
lovely thing partakes of in such sort that, however much the parts may wax
and wane, it will be neither more nor less, but still the same individual
whole. (para.211)

Shakespeare reflects the ‘eternal oneness’, of which Diotima speaks, in

Sonnet 84: ‘which can say more, Than this rich praise, that you alone, are
you’ (84.1-2). In 124, however, he adopts much more of her description:

Yf my deare love were but the childe of state,

It might for fortunes basterd be unfathered,
As subject to times love, or to times hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gatherd.
No it was buylded far from accident,
It suffers not in smilinge pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled discontent,
Whereto th’inviting time our fashion calls:
It feares not policy, that Hereticke,
Which workes on leases of short numbred howers,
But all alone stands hugely pollitick,
That it nor growes with heat nor drownes with showres.
 Contraries and Coincidences 7

‘All alone’: Shakespeare, although he uses these words, does not commit
himself to them as Plotinus did. He more probably put the passage from
Plato into verse without considering every detail. For the most famous of
the neo-Platonists, ‘a liberation from all terrene concerns’, a life
unaccompanied with human pleasures, and, in his famous words ‘a flight
of the alone to the alone’ was a supreme good.4 Shakespeare’s concerns
were very much with human pleasures. His love is, he continues,
nevertheless not subject to the vagaries of time, is ‘not Times foole’
(116.9) but exists far from the accidentals, in the philosophical sense of a
property of a thing which is not essential to its nature, but is, like Plato’s
ideal world, ‘an everlasting loveliness’, the world outside the shadows, in
short an ‘ever fixed marke’ (116.9), not shaken by tempests, or by events
in time. Rebellion and the flattery of courts are unknown to it. It does
not fear policy’s adaptability to changing circumstances, but stands all
alone, as in Diotima’s words: ‘subsisting of itself and by itself in an
eternal oneness’. It is ‘hugely pollitick’: adapted to all circumstances,
rather than seeking one course or another.5 It is not a heretic, who adopts
one aspect of a religion, in contrast to the Church, which claims to
comprehend the whole. It is unchanging: neither heat nor rain alters it, as
Diotima also says ‘it neither comes nor goes, flowers nor fades’.6
The poet adopts this ideal love as his own. But he does not speak of
any long pilgrimage such as Diotima describes, and may simply have
adopted her description as satisfying his ambition. He may not have
experienced any vision. Yet the question still remains, whether he did so,
in the light of some other Sonnets to which I now turn. Not only St Paul is
concerned with absolute love: many other strands of thought were current
in the sixteenth century, adding various new features, all converging on
one another in various ways. First comes alchemy, the search for a power
to transmute base metals into gold.
Alchemy began with attempts at gilding naturally or artificially for
purposes of decoration. From Egypt it travelled through Arab culture to
Europe in the twelfth or thirteenth century, and was seen as a means of not
merely decorating with gold but making it out of so-called base metals. An
alchemist called Nicholas Flamel was said to have made a huge fortune.
But there was a catch. To achieve so much you needed a Philosophers’
Stone, lapis philosophorum, and if you read alchemical works you would
discover the necessary ingredients, Mercury and Sulphur – not, however,

4
Mead, p.322.
5
Evans glosses ‘something’ immensely, vastly prudent or sagacious, unaltered.
OUP edition of the Sonnets, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1996, p.238.
6
The couplet of 124 is obscure and would take too long to expound.
8 Chapter One

the substances usually known by that name, but the ‘philosophical’ kind,
and what these were would be revealed in due course. Nobody was ever
again successful – if Flamel himself ever was. When books began to be
printed they would be illustrated with dragons, basilisks, a child blazing
with light, a serpent biting its tail, and often a man and a woman, both with
wings, engaged in intercourse. Bringing the metals to this point by means
of heating them in a chemical retort alchemists spent fruitless hours in
front of dirty furnaces with great risk of fires breaking out. Yet despite the
failures, they continued for at least three hundred years. Swindlers like
Subtle and Surly in Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist profited by
promising the gullible endless means of producing gold. Shakespeare
was well aware of the fruitlessness of the ancient pursuit. Timon of
Athens, striking a poet, mocks him with an impossibility: ‘You are an
alchemist. Make gold of that!’ (Timon of Athens 5.1.114). Yet alchemical
symbols are often used poetically in the Sonnets as well as in the plays.
On the other hand, Isaac Newton was, even in the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries, so persuaded that there must be some
seriousness behind all this nonsense, that he copied out reams and reams of
alchemical literature, being convinced, probably, that having been granted
by Providence his great scientific discoveries, the Philosophers’ Stone
must also come his way.
There was a serious side. Even Jonson’s Surly objected that the Stone
requires:

A pious, holy and religious man,

One free from mortal sin, a very virgin.
(The Alchemist 2.2.97-8)

There is in fact a resemblance between the achieving of the Stone and

Diotoma’s revelation of universal love. For a mystic like the self-educated
Silesian cobbler, Jakob Boehme, almost an exact contemporary of
Shakespeare, alchemical language suited his mystical vision completely.
For him Sulphur was the Wrath, and Mercury the Love or Mercy of God,
while the union of the two, so often shown as a sexual intercourse, was
connected with the female Shekinah of the Jewish Kabbala, who was a
mirror-image of God. ‘The true name of the Stone’, Basil Valentine
declared, was ‘according to temporal understanding, called ALL IN ALL.7
Oswald Croll, a follower of Paracelsus, writes that the alchemists

7
Basil Valentine, Von dem grossen Stein der Uhralten, Franckenhausen 1602,
p.24. Translation of quoted passage by R. Gray.
 Contraries and Coincidences 9

‘leave themselves, and totally go out from themselves …’ seeking the ‘one
MIND which is above every MIND’. They look for ‘the intimate vision of
God … a foretaste of the Celestial country’.8

It is conceivable that this foretaste had somehow survived from the vision
of universal love in the Symposium. The two opposites, Sulphur and
Mercury, can be seen as the alchemical inheritance of the hermaphrodites
in Aristophanes’ fable – though beings combining male and female can be
found in many other cultures. The ‘chemical marriage’ reflects the sexual
union, so often spoken of in the writings of mystics like St Teresa of Avila
and St John of the Cross, also has an unexpected Platonic parallel, for
Diotima tells Socrates that ‘to love is to bring forth upon the beautiful,
both in body and soul’ (para.206. Italics added). Platonic love, usually
meaning a love without erotic attraction, is at least in this one place, more
akin to mystical love, often described as a mystic marriage.
Another parallel is with Renaissance neo-Platonism, which puts in
intellectual form what alchemists put in pictures and symbols. Nicholas of
Cusa, a German who was highly regarded by Florentine neo-Platonists,
introduced the expression coincidentia oppositorum, not so much as
including male and female, but as the state of the world as we know it, a
continual opposition of all kinds, and the coincidence of all such opposites
in God. It is easy to see the alchemical parallel here, but it reappears in
Hegel’s polarities, progression from one pair of opposites to a fusion of
both, and a renewed opposition followed again by fusion.9 In fact the
symbolism of male and female can create infinite pairs, if one accepts the
premise that they are as inclusive as is claimed, for example, by Goethe,
who writes that we speak of a ‘here’ and a ‘there’, ‘above’ and ‘below’,
‘before’ and ‘after’, ‘activity’ and ‘passivity’, ‘male and female’.10
There is often a resemblance in this form of neo-Platonism to
Petrarchism, with which Shakespeare was familiar. The sonnet form itself
is strongly influenced by Petrarch, and so are the use of antithesis,
oxymoron and other combinations of opposites. Mercutio mocks Romeo as
a would-be Petrarch (R and J, 2.4.41), and Romeo offers confirmation of
this when he reels off a Petrarchan list: “O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, feather of lead, bright smoke,
cold fire, sick health”, etc. (R and J, 1.181-4). Some passages in the
Sonnets might owe a debt to Petrarch at least as much as to the other
Platonist tradition to which I refer. (see William Melczer, Neo-Platonism
and Petrarchism, familiar or strange bed-fellows, 1975). But Romeo’s list

8
Oswald Croll, transl. H. Pinnell, London 1657, p.214.
9
Hegel was indebted to Boehme. See C. Taylor, Hegel, p520.
10
In the Foreword to Zur Farbenlehre.
10 Chapter One

is ironically presented, and Petrarchism did not have the far-reaching

philosophical and mystical implications that the Symposium and its
successors have.
The Symposium mattered also to the Italian humanist Baldassare
Castiglione, whose Il Cortegiano was translated as The Courtier, and was
well known in Shakespeare’s day. The part of it that concerns us is the
conversation between Florentine ladies and gentlemen, debating ‘whether
women be not as meete for heavenly love as men’11 meaning the heavenly
love that Diotima speaks of. (Where Plato described a progression from
the love of one man to the love of many, Castiglione writes ‘And thus shall
he beholde no more the particular beautie of one woman, but an universall,
that decketh out all bodies’.)12 There are some doubts among the company
whether women can be altogether trusted not to misuse any licence
granted, but despite this the argument continues, that kissing may be not
merely sensual but a bond between souls. A man and a woman can ‘power
them selves by turne the one into the other bodie, and bee so mingled
together, that each of them has two soules’. Once again ‘Platonic love’ is
seen not as shunning erotic expression but as ‘bringing forth’ upon the
beautiful in body as well as in soul. And besides, the exclusive privilege
of men in attaining the vision of love is extended to women also. This
affords Shakespeare a wider range than would be available if he had only
encountered the Symposium.
The intermingling of tradition, Plato, neo-Platonism, alchemy, stretches
still further when we find authors speaking of Christian parallels. For
every base metal contained a kernel or seed of gold, surrounded by ‘dross’,
and to remove this dross was to allow the gold itself to shine forth in
splendour. For the Christian, this could be interpreted as freeing the soul
from sin and allowing Christ to transmute and take over the reborn soul.
Some alchemists spoke also of a blackening – probably observed when
mercury was heated – known as the stage of ‘nigredo’, or death to the self.
George Herbert (1593-1633) interpreted it in this way in ‘The Elixir’ (this
being another name for the Stone):

All may of thee partake:

Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture (for thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean …

11
Castiglione, The Courtier, ed. J. Whitfield, p.324 (end of Book 4).
12
op.cit. p.318.
 Contraries and Coincidences 11

This is the famous stone

That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for lesse be told.13

Shakespeare, seldom making any explicit reference to Christ, was

aware of the human parallel between the transmuting power of the Stone
and the ability to influence other men and women. When Cleopatra praises
Mark Antony, she compares a messenger from him with Antony himself,
and concedes that the messenger has been a little changed:

How much unlike art thou Mark Antony

Yet, coming from him that great med’cine hath
With his tinct gilded thee.
(A. and C. 1.5.35-7)

Antony, like the medicine of the Elixir, has gone some way to turning the
man into gold, gilding him. Similarly, Casca speaks of Brutus with
admiration:

O, he sits high in all the people’s hearts;

And that which would appear offence in us,
His countenance, like richest alchemy.
Will change to virtue and to worthiness.
(J.C. 1.3.150-160)

It seems that Shakespeare saw his lover, if only momentarily, as

Cleopatra saw Antony in the passage I just quoted. That is the conclusion
I draw from Sonnet 33 and 34, taking the two together. In the first he
speaks as though he were ‘turned to gold’, by a sun which seems a parallel
with his lover. In the second he fuses the identity of the lover with the sun.
In other Sonnets, as I shall show, he himself is indistinguishable from
either.

13
For examples of Christ-symbolism in alchemy see C.G. Jung, Die Erlösungs-
vorstellungen in der Alchemie, Zurich 1947, pp.84-104. Also Jung, Psychologie
und Alchemie, Zurich 1944. The mystical poet Henry Vaughan and his twin
Thomas were strongly influenced by alchemical ideas. Milton’s thoughtful man,
‘Il Penseroso’, studies ‘thrice-great Hermes’, Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary
father of alchemy, after whom Tristram Shandy’s father desired that his son should
be named. Strindberg made alchemical experiments. Yeats wrote ‘Rosa
Alchemica’. Joyce referred to himself in Finnegans Wake as ‘the first till last
alshemist’.
12 Chapter One

Full many a glorious morning have I seene,

Flatter the mountaine tops with soveraine eie,
Kissing with golden face the meddowes greene;
Guilding pale streames with heavenly alcumy:
Anon permit the basest cloudes to ride,
With ougly rack on his celestiall face,
And from the for-lorne world his visage hide
Stealing unseene to west with this disgrace:
Even so my Sunne one early morne did shine,
With all triumphant splendor on my brow,
But out alack, he was but one houre mine,
The region cloude hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth,
Suns of the world may staine, when heavens sun staineth.
(Sonnet 33)

In the first quatrain the sun is seen like a King – Louis XIV, ‘le roi
soleil’ comes to mind – who shines on the mountain-tops as the King might
shine on his courtiers, flattering them by illuminating their uncouth shapes;
the sun goes on to kiss, and make the meadows look like gold, and
‘gilding’ streams too, with what is called ‘heavenly’, that is, not money-
grubbing alchemy.
This is a poetic image, not an account of a real alchemical procedure.
The natural scene is evoked by the alchemical parallels, but the next
quatrain speaks of a more human effect. ‘My Sunne’ is of course the
poet’s lover, but he still acts like the sun in heaven coming with ‘all
triumphant splendour’ on the poet’s brow. We may also see him as
transforming the poet, even if only for an hour, gilding him as the sun
gilded the meadows and the stream. As readers, we now have to ask
whether this is meant as mere ornament, hyperbole as flattery, sincere
admiration, or to some degree a way of putting in poetry the experience of
a great moment in the poet’s life. ‘All triumphant splendour’, is apt for
some transcending realisation more than for some mortal lover.
‘Triumphant’ in particular is suited to some being that by its or his great
power is truly able to triumph. We should remember too what Touchstone
says to Audrey, that ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’ while still
taking in the full power of poetry that acknowledges itself to be feigning.
Mystics often speak of the sun to convey, poetically rather than
realistically, the nature of their vision. Jacob Boehme legendarily fell into
a trance while gazing at a reflection of the sun in a polished metal plate.
Evelyn Underhill14 quotes many examples where for the mystics ‘a new sun
arises above the horizon and transfigures’ their twilit world. W.H.

14
Underhill, p.28.
 Contraries and Coincidences 13

Auden15 believed indeed that ‘the primary experience, complicated as it

became later – out of which the Sonnets to the friend spring was a mystical
one’. It may be that Sonnet 33 was in fact the origin of all the rest,
although many of these are about love in its usual human sense.
The question is complicated by the fact that the poet’s lover and the sun
are in the next Sonnet inextricably identified with one another.

Why didst thou promise such a beautious day,

And make me travaile forth without my cloake,
To let bace cloudes ore-take me in my way,
Hiding thy brav’ry in their rotten smoke.
Tis not enough that through the cloude thou breake,
To dry the raine on my storme-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speake,
That heales the wound, and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give phisicke to my griefe,
Though thou repent, yet I have still the losse,
Th’offenders sorrow lends but weake reliefe
To him that beares the strong offenses losse.
Ah but those teares are pearle which thy love sheeds,
And they are ritch, and ransome all ill deeds.
(Sonnet 34)

The Sonnet begins prosaically with a complaint. ‘Thou’ – that is, the
poet’s lover – has wrongly forecast a fair day, so that the poet went out
without his cloak. But the ‘bravry’, the colourfulness of the man’s dress or
of his character is hidden by clouds, just as the sun was in the previous
Sonnet, hiding him, and this is the man’s fault: he has ‘let’ the clouds do
this. But the charge is unfair: nobody can make the weather behave in one
way or another.
In the second quatrain the man actually is the sun. It is no use breaking
through the clouds to dry the poet’s face, since this merely heals the
wound, without curing the disgrace. The confusion of the man with the
sun grows on as we read. What wound has the sun caused, what disgrace?
Does the poet mean some rejection of love, symbolised by clouds masking
that hurt? Has the lover suddenly taken the place of the sun? The sun
can’t ‘repent’ or feel ‘sorrow’ – unlikely consequences of having made a
wrong weather forecast – Nor can the sun shed tears, as the final couplet
says he does – it is surely the lover who sheds them, showing his love for
the poet. Yet the tears may be rain, and the poet may be deceived in seeing
them as signs of repentance.

15
Auden, p.1726.
14 Chapter One

Going back to Sonnet 33, here is the same ambiguity. The sun that
shines on the poet’s brow may be the sun, his human lover, or it may be
akin to the Philosophers’ Stone, with its power to transmute. ‘Suns of the
world may staine, when heavens sun staineth’ (33.14). Both suns are the
same sun, as the poet sees them.
The ambiguity in both these Sonnets is found very often, throughout
the whole collection. Remaining within the field of alchemy, let us look
now at Sonnet 20.

A Womans face with natures owne hand painted,

Haste thou the Master Mistris of my passion,
A womans gentle hart but not acquainted
With shifting change as is false womens fashion,
An eye more bright then theirs, lesse false in rowling:
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth,
A man in hew all Hews in his controwling,
Which steales mens eyes and womens soules amaseth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a dotinge,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prickt thee out for womens pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy loves use their treasure.
(Sonnet 20)

The first two lines are about a man whose appearance is as much
feminine as masculine. It has often been noticed that this suits the Earl of
Southampton, thought to have been the lover to whom the Sonnets are
addressed in the Dedication, the mysterious Mr W.H., their ‘onlie
begetter’. ‘Master Mistris’ is less easily understood as meaning the Earl,
or any other lover: we do not call a male lover a ‘master’, nor does
‘mistress’ seem appropriate in terms of ordinary parlance, however
feminine the man’s looks. The next couplet provides a hint: the lover’s
eye, which for Elizabethans would illuminate the objects it sees, as by a
ray, and not by a light reflected from the object, as in the modern view,
gilds what it gazes on. Like the sun in Sonnet 33, it turns what it gazes at
into something resembling gold, perhaps, one may say, imparting its
quality to it as Antony and Brutus impart their own qualities.
‘A man in hew all Hews in his controwling’ is also open to more than
one interpretation. ‘Hews’ can mean ‘hues’, or ‘shapes’, objects that are
hewn. It can mean ‘form, shape, figure’. By Oscar Wilde, it was taken,
humorously, to mean ‘Hughes’, a supposed boy-actor with whom
Shakespeare was in love. There may very well have been such a love for
one of the boys who played women’s parts, and who might appear very