Author : Martina Zamparo
Release : 2022-10-05
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind :
Book Rating : 67X/5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK

Alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale write by Martina Zamparo. This book was released on 2022-10-05. Alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book explores the role of alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Hermetic philosophy in one of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Winter’s Tale. A perusal of the vast literary and iconographic repertory of Renaissance alchemy reveals that this late play is imbued with several topoi, myths, and emblematic symbols coming from coeval alchemical, Paracelsian, and Hermetic sources. It also discusses the alchemical significance of water and time in the play’s circular and regenerative pattern and the healing role of women. All the major symbols of alchemy are present in Shakespeare’s play: the intertwined serpents of the caduceus, the chemical wedding, the filius philosophorum, and the so-called rex chymicus. This book also provides an in-depth survey of late Renaissance alchemy, Paracelsian medicine, and Hermetic culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Importantly, it contends that The Winter’s Tale, in symbolically retracing the healing pattern of the rota alchemica and in emphasising the Hermetic principles of unity and concord, glorifies King James’s conciliatory attitude.