The influence of alchemy and Rosicrucianism in William Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The tempest, and Ben Jonson's The alchemist

Bibliography: pages 207-213.This thesis traces the influence of alchemy and its renaissance in the early seventeenth century as Rosicrucianism, in William Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Tempest, and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist. Shakespeare's Final Plays are a dramatic experiment that ventures beyond realism, with a common symbolic pattern of loss and reconciliation that reflects the alchemical one of Man's Fall, self-transmutation and reconciliation with the divine spark within him. Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a crude first attempt in this genre, portraying Everyman's journey to perfection in Pericles's wanderings. The quest for Antiochus's Daughter represents the search for Man'soriginal purity of soul, which has, however, become corrupted and dominated by Man's lower nature, embodied in the incestuous King Antiochus. The prince's flight by sea indicates a process of self-transmutation: the loss of his fleet in a tempest symbolises the purification of his Soul from earthly desires, reflected in the laboratory refinement of base metals in fire (lightning) and water (sea). Pericles is able to unite with his refined Soul, incarnated in Thaisa: from their union the Philosopher's Stone or the Spirit, Marina, is born, who transmutes the base metals of men's natures by evoking the divine "seed of gold" within them, even in a degraded brothel. The Spiritr now grown to strength, is able to reunite the other component of Everyman, Body and Soul, the parents, who have completed their purification. The Tempest represents Shakespeare's complete mastery of his alchemical theme. The Alonso-Ferdinand pair embodies Everyman, the father or Soul having been seduced into evil, incarnate in Antonio, while the son, not yet king, is the divine spark within him. This seed of gold must be separated from the corrupted soul in the purifying alchemical tempest, so as to grow back to the Spirit, symbolised by his meeting and eventual marriage with Miranda. Alonso can only be reunited with his son after his purificatory wanderings about the island, in which he confronts his guilt embodied in a Harpy, who awakens his conscience and reminds him why he has lost his divine inner nature he sought for. Prospero represents the Spirit-Intellect of Everyman, tainted by the lower nature, evident in his desire for revenge, and embodied in Caliban. When the unfallen spiritual forces incarnate in Miranda win him over to compassion, he forgives his enemies and can meet the repentant Alonso, and return to earthly duties as the Everyman who has reclaimed his divine heritage. Ben Jonson's The Alchemist shows the debasement of alchemy by frauds who exploit those who, ignoring its spiritual aims, see it as a magical means to obtain gold. Alchemy becomes a symbol of the goldlust ruling London society, as opposed to the spiritual gold of wisdom sought by the true alchemist. The gulls caricature the goal of self-transmutation in their desire to transmute their mundane, lacklustre selves into "something rich and strange" through the Philosopher's Stone. Jor1sor1, deeply learned in alchemy, parodies many of its key concepts and motifs; the final perfection of Man and Nature, the consummation of the esoteric alchemical Opus, is distorted in false, exoteric alchemy hy the degradation and impoverishment of both frauds and gulls

The Dropping of a Bird or- The true Story of the Disembowelment of Curdia

Your Highness, I realize I am your Minister of Offensive Defense, but I do indeed hope I never have another assignment like this one

Momentum as a Factor in National Security

My thesis is creative momentum, its components and char­acteristics and its relation to all development-good or bad, natural or man-made, political, military, administrative, scientific, economic and industrial

The Uses Of Biography: The Case Of Willa Cather

In the first of his series of lectures on biography at the University of Toronto, Leon Edel observed that the writing of a literary life would be nothing but a kind of indecent curiosity, and an invasion of privacy, were it not that it seeks always to illuminate the mysterious and magical process of creation. Edel was generalizing about the life of Henry James when he made that statement, for he was deep in the writing of the James biography to which he devoted about twenty years of his life. For a writer such as James this view of biography is undeniably true. His writing was his life, and there is no separating the two. One cannot imagine a biography of James in which the biographer talks only of his relations with his brothers and sister, his parents, his goings and comings between England and America, his travels on the Continent, his social life in London, and his country life in Rye. And I think Edel\u27s generalization also applies to Willa Cather, whose dedication to her art was as consuming a passion as was James\u27s. I don\u27t know whether or not it would be indecent curiosity exactly to write a life of Cather that dealt only with her early years in Red Cloud, her college days in Lincoln, her journalistic beginnings, her school teaching, her managing editorship of McClure\u27s Magazine, her trips back and forth between Nebraska, the Southwest, and New York, her travels in Europe, and her New York apartments, but it surely would be of limited value unless it related her life to her writing. Certainly the purpose of a biography of Cather must be to illuminate the mysterious and magical process of creation. That is what I intended when I wrote my book about her, and I hope I succeeded. How does the biographer manage to illuminate the mysterious and magical act of creation? First of all he must approach his subject objectively. Then he must be willing to undergo a great deal of drudgery to collect his data. Finally, he must have a reasonable amount of success in clearing the roadblocks from his path. The biographer is a historian, and a biased historian is not much use to anyone. In our Western culture we hold the ideal of objectivity high, though it may often be much more honored in the breach than in the observance. Of course, we do not rewrite our history every time a hero falls from power as the Russians do, but we change our viewpoint from age to age. Emerson said that every age had to write its own books, and his words were prophetic. The history of literary reputations makes it clear how perspectives change as the culture changes. But given these inevitable shifts, one still hopes for objectivity in a biographer. One does not ask the biographer to be completely neutral about his subject. That would be asking too much, for who would spend months or years of his life writing the life of someone he did not have a strong interest in and liking for? Complete neutrality probably would result in something like a clinical case history, and I think that in biography, as in fiction, what Cather called the gift of sympathy is necessary for good work