Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- A note on the texts
- Introduction
- 1 Alchemical contexts
- 2 Lovely boy
- 3 The dark mistress and the art of blackness
- 4 A Lovers Complaint by William Shake-speare
- 5 Inner looking, alchemy and the creative imagination
- 6 Conclusion: Shakespeare's poetics of love and religious toleration
- Notes
- Index
4 - A Lovers Complaint by William Shake-speare
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- A note on the texts
- Introduction
- 1 Alchemical contexts
- 2 Lovely boy
- 3 The dark mistress and the art of blackness
- 4 A Lovers Complaint by William Shake-speare
- 5 Inner looking, alchemy and the creative imagination
- 6 Conclusion: Shakespeare's poetics of love and religious toleration
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Love is strong as death … the coales therof are fiery coales, and a vehement flame. Much water cannot quench love, neither can the floods drowne it.
(Salomons Song, viii: 6)And I saw as it were a glassie sea, mingled with fire, and them that had gotten victorie of the beast … stand at the glassie sea, having the harpes of God.
(Revelation, xv: 2)We left diseased Will at the close of the sonnet sequence desperately returning to his mistress's ‘eyes’ in search of a water ‘cure’ – a ‘bath for my help’ (Sonnet 153, 13–14); and finally Diana's ‘cool well’ provides a glimpse of hope in Sonnet 154 (9). Bawdy meaning acknowledged (‘eye’ as female genitalia), this is also suggestively a ‘healthful remedy’ for his burning sexual infection and/or a spiritual one; the latter is evoked by the submerged religious paradox contained in the final line, ‘Love's fire heats water; water cools not love’ (Sonnet 154). Resonating with the fiery-water biblical passages above about the strength of ‘Love’ and attaining ‘victorie of the beast’, the concluding sonnet thus cleverly hints at the successful completion of an alchemical opus culminating in the Seal of Solomon – ‘fluid fire’ and ‘fiery water’ – with the integration of all opposing elements of the soul including religious love and desire for sex.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative ImaginationThe Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, pp. 131 - 156Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011