Shakespeare and religio mentis A Study of Christian Hermetism in Four Plays (Studies in Religion and the Arts, 19) 9004516328, 9789004516328

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
A Note on the Texts
A Note on Hermetism and Hermeticism
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introduction
1 Nostalgia for Catholic Tradition in Shakespeare’s Audience
2 Shakespeare’s Religious Sympathies
3 Hermes Trismegistus Enters the Platonic Academy in Quattrocento Florence
4 Religious Hermetism in the Twentieth Century
5 Hermes Finds a New Home in the Academy in the Twenty-First Century
6 Towards a Definition of Western Esotericism
7 More about Religious Hermetism
8 Before the Recovery of Pymander – Hermes Trismegistus in Medieval Times
9 The Reception and Transmission of the Hermetic Texts in Fifteenth Century Italy, in Sixteenth Century France and in England – Hermes Trismegistus in the Renaissance
PART 1
Introduction to Part 1
1. How Hermes Trismegistus Became Hermes Christianus
1 From Jesus of Nazareth to Nicholas of Cusa
1.1 The First Christians
1.2 About the Hermetic Theosophy
1.3 Hermes and the Church Fathers
1.4 Hermes and Plato (429–347 BCE) on God, the Soul, and the Mind
1.5 Hermes and Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE)
1.6 The Chaldean Oracles
1.7 Hermes and Gnōsis: On Good and Evil
1.8 Hermes and a Neoplatonist: Plotinus (c.205–270)
1.9 Iamblichus (c.245–c.325)
1.10 The Early Christian Church
1.11 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c.500)
1.12 The Division of East and West
1.13 Hermes, Plato and Christianity in the Middle Ages
1.14 Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464)
2 Christian Hermetism in the Renaissance: The Corpus Hermeticum and Some Early Translators
2.1 About the Corpus Hermeticum
2.2 Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499)
2.3 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494)
2.4 Francesco Giorgio (1466–1540)
2.5 Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Corpus Hermeticum and His Commentary – Crater Hermetis
2. The Transmission and Reception of Christian Hermetism in France and England in the Long Sixteenth
1 Introduction
2 John Colet (c.1466–1519)
3 Thomas More (1478–1535)
4 Erasmus (1466/69–1536)
5 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535)
6 Hermes in France: Translation, Transmission and Reception by Court and Episcopate
7 Hermes in Late Tudor England: The Transmission and Reception of the Hermetic Texts
8 The Family of Love in England
9 Familism and Hermetism Compared
10 Philippe du Plessis Mornay (1549–1623)
11 Giordano Bruno (1548–1600)
12 John Dee (1527–1608)
PART 2
3. Love’s Labour’s Lost: The Path to Self-Knowledge Deferred
1 Dating the Play
2 France 1572–1579–1585 – An Experiment in Religious Toleration: From the Marriage to the Reunion to the Final Separation
3 Hermetic Thought and Hermes Himself in the Play
4 Hermes Trismegistus in the Discourse of the Day
5 England and France 1589–1598 – the Political Landscape: From the Accession of Henri IV to the Edict of Nantes
6 Characters Drawn from Literature and from Life
7 Love’s Labour’s Lost and Old Comedy
8 An Unsatisfactory Conclusion
4. King Lear: The Path to Self-Knowledge and Spiritual Regeneration
1 The Critical Debate and Sources of King Lear
2 The Transformation of Lear
3 Lear’s Essential Spirituality Contrasted with Gloucester’s Materiality
4 Three Kinds of Madness: Tom o’Bedlam, Lear, the Fool
5 The Characterization of Goneril and Regan in Hermetic Terms
6 How Many Texts? Quarto Excisions and Folio Additions
7 From Quarto to Folio: Toward a Hermetic Exegesis of King Lear
5. Othello: The Path to Self-Knowledge Reversed
1 Othello: The Date and Source of the Play
2 Othello and King Lear Compared and Contrasted
3 Othello’s Descent
4 Free Will and Choice, Destiny and the Origin of Evil
5 Iago: The Mind Reader
6. The Tempest: The Path to Immortality
1 The Play in Performance and Print
2 A Literal Reading
3 A Metaphorical Reading: The Storm as Allegory, the Structure of the Play as Alchemical
4 A Metaphysical Reading: The Immortal Soul
5 Prospero as Hierophant
6 Prospero as Christian and Hermetist: Shakespeare’s Apotheosis
7. Shakespeare and the Path to Salvation
1 Shakespeare’s Religious Sympathies – Christian or Pagan
2 Hermes in the Plays – Audi, Vide, Tace!
3 A Religion of the Mind
4 A Way Forward
5 Shakespeare and the Reading Groups
6 A Religion of the World
7 An Age with Secrets
Epilogue: Hidden in Plain Sight: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion
Postscript
Appendix 1: From Hermes to Hermes Trismegistus
Appendix 2: More about the Hermetic Theosophy
1 Corpus Hermeticum
1.1 Books II–XII
1.2 Books XIV–XVIII
2 Asclepius
Appendix 3: From the Mémoires of Marguerite de Valois
Appendix 4: The Family of Love, or Familia Caritatis
1 Diffusion or Transmission of Familism
2 Converts
3 Familists in the Netherlands
4 Familists in France
5 Familists in England [summarized in main text]
References
Primary Sources
Manuscripts
British Library
Other Works
Secondary Sources
Index

Citation preview

Shakespeare and Religio Mentis

Studies in Religion and the Arts Editorial Board James Najarian (Boston College) Eric Ziolkowski (Lafayette College)

volume 19

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sart

Shakespeare and Religio Mentis A Study of Christian Hermetism in Four Plays By

Jane Everingham Nelson

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Study for Harpocrates (Silentio Deum Cole) by Giulio Bonasone. The Greek god Hermes, god of eloquence, identified by his winged helmet, is presented here as Harpocrates, god of silence. National Gallery of Art, Washington, accession number 1974.117.2. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund. Licence: Creative Commons Zero (CC0). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nelson, Jane Everingham, author. Title: Shakespeare and religio mentis : a study of Christian Hermetism in four plays / by Jane Everingham Nelson. Description: Leiden, The Netherlands : Koninklijke Brill NV, [2022] | Series: Studies in religion and the arts, 1877-3192 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022024660 (print) | LCCN 2022024661 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004516328 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004520608 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616–Criticism and interpretation. | Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616–Religion. | Hermes, Trismegistus. | Hermetism in literature. | Christianity in literature. | English drama–Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600–History and criticism. | English drama–17th century–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR3011 .N45 2022 (print) | LCC PR3011 (ebook) | DDC 822.3/3–dc23/eng/20220805 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024660 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024661

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1877-3192 isbn 978-90-04-51632-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-52060-8 (e-book) Copyright 2022 by Jane Everingham Nelson. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Hermes Trismegistus as depicted on the floor of the Duomo in Siena c.1488

William Shakespeare as depicted by Martin Droeshout 1623 on the title page of Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories and Tragedies or the First Folio. Credit: the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 22273 Fol 1 no 72.

Contents List of Figures xi A Note on the Texts xii A Note on Hermetism and Hermeticism XiV Acknowledgements xv Prologue xvi Introduction 1 1 Nostalgia for Catholic Tradition in Shakespeare’s Audience 5 2 Shakespeare’s Religious Sympathies 6 3 Hermes Trismegistus Enters the Platonic Academy in Quattrocento Florence 10 4 Religious Hermetism in the Twentieth Century 11 5 Hermes Finds a New Home in the Academy in the Twenty-First Century 16 6 Towards a Definition of Western Esotericism 22 7 More about Religious Hermetism 25 8 Before the Recovery of Pymander – Hermes Trismegistus in Medieval Times 29 9 The Reception and Transmission of the Hermetic Texts in Fifteenth Century Italy, in Sixteenth Century France and in England – Hermes Trismegistus in the Renaissance 34

PART 1

Introduction to Part 1 44

1

How Hermes Trismegistus Became Hermes Christianus 46 1 From Jesus of Nazareth to Nicholas of Cusa 46 1.1 The First Christians 46 1.2 About the Hermetic Theosophy 47 1.3 Hermes and the Church Fathers 48 1.4 Hermes and Plato (429–347 BCE) on God, the Soul and the Mind 48 1.5 Hermes and Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE) 52 1.6 The Chaldean Oracles 53 1.7 Hermes and Gnōsis: On Good and Evil 54 1.8 Hermes and a Neoplatonist: Plotinus (c.205–270) 55

viii

Contents

2

2

1.9 Iamblichus (c.245–c.325) 56 1.10 The Early Christian Church 57 1.11 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c.500) 60 1.12 The Division of East and West 61 1.13 Hermes, Plato and Christianity in the Middle Ages 62 1.14 Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) 63 Christian Hermetism in the Renaissance: The Corpus Hermeticum and Some Early Translators 64 2.1 About the Corpus Hermeticum 64 2.2 Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) 69 2.3 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) 73 2.4 Francesco Giorgio (1466–1540) 74 2.5 Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Corpus Hermeticum and His Commentary – Crater Hermetis 74

The Transmission and Reception of Christian Hermetism in France and England in the Long Sixteenth Century ‘L’âge d’or de l’hermétisme religieux’ ( Jean Dagens) 79 1 Introduction 79 2 John Colet (c.1466–1519) 82 3 Thomas More (1478–1535) 84 4 Erasmus (1466/69–1536) 86 5 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535) 87 6 Hermes in France: Translation, Transmission and Reception by Court and Episcopate 89 7 Hermes in Late Tudor England: The Transmission and Reception of the Hermetic Texts 100 8 The Family of Love in England 102 9 Familism and Hermetism Compared 103 10 Philippe du Plessis Mornay (1549–1623) 104 11 Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) 105 12 John Dee (1527–1608) 107

PART 2 3

Love’s Labour’s Lost: The Path to Self-Knowledge Deferred 117 1 Dating the Play 117 2 France 1572–1579–1585 – An Experiment in Religious Toleration: From the Marriage to the Reunion to the Final Separation 119

Contents 

ix

3 Hermetic Thought and Hermes Himself in the Play 122 4 Hermes Trismegistus in the Discourse of the Day 126 5 England and France 1589–1598 – the Political Landscape: From the Accession of Henri IV to the Edict of Nantes 132 6 Characters Drawn from Literature and from Life 135 7 Love’s Labour’s Lost and Old Comedy 137 8 An Unsatisfactory Conclusion 139 4

King Lear: The Path to Self-Knowledge and Spiritual Regeneration 141 1 The Critical Debate and Sources of King Lear 142 2 The Transformation of Lear 149 3 Lear’s Essential Spirituality Contrasted with Gloucester’s Materiality 158 4 Three Kinds of Madness: Tom o’Bedlam, Lear, the Fool 160 5 The Characterization of Goneril and Regan in Hermetic Terms 162 6 How Many Texts? Quarto Excisions and Folio Additions 165 7 From Quarto to Folio: Toward a Hermetic Exegesis of King Lear 167

5

Othello: The Path to Self-Knowledge Reversed 175 1 Othello: The Date and Source of the Play 175 2 Othello and King Lear Compared and Contrasted 176 3 Othello’s Descent 180 4 Free Will and Choice, Destiny and the Origin of Evil 187 5 Iago: The Mind Reader 194

6

The Tempest: The Path to Immortality 204 1 The Play in Performance and Print 206 2 A Literal Reading 206 3 A Metaphorical Reading: The Storm as Allegory, the Structure of the Play as Alchemical 210 4 A Metaphysical Reading: The Immortal Soul 213 5 Prospero as Hierophant 224 6 Prospero as Christian and Hermetist: Shakespeare’s Apotheosis 227

7

Shakespeare and the Path to Salvation 232 1 Shakespeare’s Religious Sympathies – Christian or Pagan 235 2 Hermes in the Plays – Audi, Vide, Tace! 236 3 A Religion of the Mind 241

x

Contents

4 5 6 7

A Way Forward 243 Shakespeare and the Reading Groups 244 A Religion of the World 247 An Age with Secrets 250

Epilogue Hidden in Plain Sight: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion 252 Postscript 255 Appendix 1: From Hermes to Hermes Trismegistus 256 Appendix 2: More about the Hermetic Theosophy 259 Appendix 3: From the Mémoires of Marguerite de Valois 266 Appendix 4: The Family of Love, or Familia Caritatis 267 References 279 Index 302

Figures 1 The epitaph to Shakespeare in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-uponAvon, c.1620 XVI 2 15th to 17th century translations, editions and commentaries of Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepius (Hermetica) adapted from Wouter J. Hanegraaff “How Hermetic was Renaissance Hermetism?” Aries 2015 (2): 179–209 78 3 Title page of The History of the World, Ralegh 1614, showing the Providential Eye (also the symbol of Osiris). Image ID F7AABD, used by permission of Classic Image/Alamy Stock Photos 111 4 Title page of first Quarto of True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters With the unfortunate life of Edgar etc. 1608. Credit: the Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 22292 140 5 Title page of first Quarto of The Tragœdy of Othello The Moore of Venice bearing the emblem of Hermes’ caduceus gripped by two hands, published in 1622, STC 22305 Image ID MPBF5H, used by permission of The Picture Art Collection/ Alamy Stock Photos 174

A Note on the Texts References to the Quarto and Folio of King Lear are taken from William Shakespeare The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 1986. References to Othello, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest are taken from an Arden edition of the play, unless otherwise specified. References to Hermetic texts are drawn principally from Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a new English translation by Professor Brian P. Copenhaver. Copenhaver’s work comprises seventeen texts: Books I to XIV and Books XVI to XVIII and the Asclepius, translations of the Greek and Latin of the Budé edition also used by Nock and Festugière. The former group derives originally from the fourteenth century manuscript translated by Marsilio Ficino in 1463 (MS A Laurentianus, Florence), while the remaining three tracts were translated by Lodovico Lazzarelli (Biblioteca Comunale, Viterbo). Copenhaver’s translation is complemented by the 1579 French translation and commentary of François Foix de Candale: Le Pimandre de Mercure Trismegiste de la philosophie Chrestienne, Cognoissance du verbe divin, et de l’excellence des oeuvres de Dieu, traduit de l’exemplaire Grec, avec collation de tres-amples commentaires. Par François Monsieur de Foix, de la famille de Candale, Capitale de Buchs, etc. Evesque d’Ayre, etc. à très-haute, très-illustre, et très puissante Princesse, Marguerite de France, Roine de Navarre fille & soeur des Rois très-Chrestien (accessed online from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France). Foix de Candale’s translation includes as chapter XV three tracts taken from Johann Stobaeus and the Suda, which were first added to the Corpus Hermeticum by Adrian Turnebus in 1554. Foix includes chapter XVI, merges chapter XVII with chapter XIV and, following Turnebus, he omits chapter XVIII. Other translations consulted for the purpose of cross-referencing translations were: Corpus Hermeticum, vols I, II, edited by A. D. Nock and translated by A.-J. Festugière. Corpus Hermeticum, vols III, IV Fragments extraits de Stobée, edited and translated by A.-J. Festugière. Hermetica vols I–III, edited and translated by Walter Scott. The Way of Hermes New Translations of The Corpus Hermeticum and The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius. Clement Salaman, Dorine van Oyen, William D. Wharton, Jean-Pierre Mahé. Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500) The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents. Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, 2005. This book includes Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis, translated into English from the French translation made by Gabriel du Préau in 1549, and based on the 1985 edition by Professor Claudio Moreschini.

A Note on the Texts 

xiii

Within this study the treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum are referred to as Books rather than chapters which Foix prefers. References are given as CH followed by the number of the book and the section inside square brackets e.g. (CH IV [3]). The name for God, Poimandres, sometimes given in the literature as Pimander, is spelt Pymander throughout. Symbols used when quoting from the Hermetica replicate those used by ­Copenhaver: angled brackets < >: insertion of a word or words square brackets [ ]: removal of a word or words pointed brackets { }: a word or words regarded as unintelligible or otherwise problematic ellipsis . . . : a lacuna or gap in the text Translations from the French are my own except where otherwise acknowledged.

A Note on Hermetism and Hermeticism Throughout this study, ‘Hermetism’ is distinguished from ‘Hermeticism’. Following Father Festugière in La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste 1950, 89, and as defined by Roelof van den Broek in the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, 2005, 558–570, the term Hermetism is restricted to the specific religious world view and philosophic discourse in and around the Corpus Hermeticum which was devoid of any kind of magic, and the Asclepius, texts first published together in Latin in 1505 and now collectively known as the Hermetica. The term ‘Hermeticism’ is reserved for that whole ensemble of magical ideas, related to Hermetism but including alchemy, magia, astrology and Cabala. These texts, mostly practical or technical, were known in antiquity and coalesced in the Renaissance. They are not part of this study. Even so, their beliefs saturate the culture in which Shakespeare lived and wrote; the plays show knowledge of both discourses, alchemy being the link between them, as the practical alchemical process, which transforms base metals into pure gold, functions as a trope of the gnostic ascent of the soul toward spiritual purity. O voi ch’arete li’ntelletti sani  Mirate la dottrina che s’asconda Sotto’l velame de li versi strani. Dante

You of sound mind, I bid  You look beneath the strange veiled way I tell This story to the struggle of the soul  Of one who seeks redemption. Trans. Clive James

Acknowledgements I must first acknowledge my debt to past and present scholars in the field of inquiry. The study has its origin in the provocative and inspirational work of Dame Frances Yates and could not have been carried out without the invaluable English translation of the Hermetica by Professor Brian Copenhaver. I am also grateful to Professor Wouter Hanegraaff for alerting me to the fact that Bishop Foix de Candale’s translation and commentary on Pymander is available in digitized form from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. I have been particularly grateful for the opportunity to audit lectures on Reformation Theology at the Adelaide College of Divinity and to present at conferences – such as ANZAMEMS in Wellington, New Zealand, and ESSWE in Erfurt, Germany – where the responses and suggestions of other delegates were always appreciated. Closer to home I have valued the interest, support and encouragement of friends over several years. I am especially grateful to my son Michael for technical help and for always making time to read and discuss the latest chapter. And my special thanks to Dr Helen Payne whose knowledge of Elizabethan and Stuart court life saved me from blunders, and to Dr David Hilliard for his knowledge of the period generally, and not least for his enthusiasm. Thanks are also due to Associate Professor Lucy Potter and to Professor Stephen Muecke. My greatest debt however is to the late Dr Heather Beviss Kerr whose positive approach and gift for asking penetrating questions helped shape the study in its early days. As a Shakespeare scholar, her knowledge of the field was invaluable. The loss of her scholarship, her insights, her warm encouragement and her wise advice generously and kindly given, is incalculable. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that whatever flaws remain in this monograph can only be laid at my door. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the support I have received for my research through the provision of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Prologue In the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon there is a plaque commemorating the poet Shakespeare high up on the north-east wall. It was commissioned by persons unknown and placed at some time between 1616 and 1623, probably c.1620. The first two lines are in Latin, a language which only a small fraction of the population could read at the time.

Figure 1 The epitaph to Shakespeare in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratfordupon-Avon, c.1620

Those able to read may have been surprised to learn that inside this church dedicated to the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – the miracle that is the very heart of Christian belief – the epitaph lists a trinity of pagan greats, a king, a philosopher and a poet: Nestor, king of the Pylians, Socrates, the greatest of philosophers, Plato’s mentor, and Publius Virgilius Maro, greatest of the Roman poets. The people mourn him, as we might expect, but why is the man, Shakspeare (sic), whose name is an ornament to his tomb, both buried in the earth and also on Olympus, home of the pagan gods? This book holds the answer to that question.

Introduction Berowne: What is the end of study let me know? King (Ferdinand of Navarre): Why, that to know which else we should not know. Berowne: Things hid and barred you mean from common sense? King: Ay, that is study’s god-like recompense. (1.1.55–58) William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1598

…

Poimandres to Hermes Trismegistus: This is the final good for those who have received knowledge: to be made god. Corpus Hermeticum (Book I [26])

∵ A few words of teasing banter in the opening scene of Love’s Labour’s Lost appear to echo the serious promise made by Poimandres (or god) that knowledge makes a man a god.1 At one level they reflect Berowne’s objections to study by foreshadowing the epistemological debate that opposes commonsense knowledge arising from the active life to knowledge learned from books. At another level, they hint at gnōsis or the knowledge of God that rewards the contemplative study of self, central to the religious philosophy of Christian Hermetism. The apparently tenuous connection between these two dialogues prompts the question: was Shakespeare a Hermetic thinker? To be specific: is there evidence in his plays that Shakespeare was familiar with the religious philosophy of Hermetism as it is articulated in the texts of the Corpus Hermeticum and its 1 The first Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum was titled Pymander, sive de potestate et sapientia Dei after the name given to God, Poimandres or Pymander, in the first treatise. The body of texts was referred to by that name until 1854, since when the collection has been known as the Corpus Hermeticum. In this study the title is abbreviated to CH, each treatise is referred to as a Book and each section of a Book is numbered and the number enclosed in square brackets, as CH I [1].

© Jane Everingham Nelson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004520608_002

2

Introduction

companion text the Asclepius, collectively known as the Hermetica? The juxtaposition above also lays bare the premise that a passage of dialogue may be deliberately ambiguous and susceptible to different interpretations. A surface or exoteric meaning publicly available may both protect and evoke an esoteric or inner meaning hidden from the many and intended for the few. In this case, the king’s speech, innocent enough, may remind those in the audience with knowledge of the esoteric philosophy of Hermes that knowledge can transform a man into a god. In the sixteenth century, God mattered. Religion mattered. And nothing mattered more to men and women than the salvation of one’s immortal soul at the moment of death. According to Lucien Febvre, ‘religion coloured the universe’ (1982, 131) and, in denying the existence of Atheism in the sixteenth century, he claimed that it was virtually impossible in that age to conceive of a world without God.2 The term ‘Atheist’ was certainly used, but it was employed as a term of abuse to attack a range of beliefs and practices from heresy to sodomy, and it included scepticism and religious doubts of any kind.3 However, while no issue may have been more pressing than the salvation of one’s soul, it is equally true that for many individual men and women in Elizabethan England no issue was more controversial. The Christian church was divided, and the Reformed or Protestant Church and the Traditional or Catholic Church (which offered limbo and Purgatory as preludes to salvation or hellfire) differed on the consequences of sin, and how salvation was to be effected.4 Despite the Acts of Elizabethan Settlement and the consequent whitewashing of church interiors, the fearful memory of the colourful ‘Doom’ frescoes lingered still in Shakespeare’s England.5 These murals once loured in Catholic churches reminding all that on the Day of Judgment, Christ would send the saved aloft, and hobgoblins would pitchfork sinners into the fires of hell.6

2 In 1947, Febvre was disputing the opinion of Abel le Franc that Rabelais was an Atheist. Carlo Ginzburg, 1976, later challenged Febvre’s extension of his argument about Rabelais to an entire age (The Cheese and the Worms, xxx). 3 ‘it was suicidal for anyone knowingly to proclaim doubt or disbelief’ (MacCulloch 2003, 693). 4 The issue offers some instructive parallels with the twenty-first century where no matter is more pressing or more controversial than the extent of climate change and mankind’s general responsibility, having caused the problems, for saving the planet for future generations. Politicians and scientists are divided on how salvation of the planet is to be achieved. 5 Shakespeare awakens the memory of the Last Day for his audience when Macduff, on finding the slain Duncan, calls the household to ‘see/The great doom’s image!’ (Macbeth, 2.3.76–77). 6 MacCulloch includes in Reformation an illustration (Plate 3) of the Last Judgment or Doom showing the saved and the damned on the Day of Judgment. Once a backdrop to the Rood screen at Wenhaston in Suffolk, England, it was rediscovered in 1894 when rain removed the whitewash.

Introduction

3

What will happen to my soul after death? Will I be saved? Men and women wanted to know. Martin Luther (1483–1546) decreed that faith alone would save mankind, while John Calvin (1509–1564) taught that God had already determined who was elected to salvation, even before Adam’s Fall in Eden, and that mankind is powerless to affect God’s sovereign will. In response, at the Council of Trent (1547–1563) the Catholic Church decreed that, although ‘God necessarily takes the initiative in salvation through grace’, justification requires man’s cooperation with God; that ‘humanity retains free will after the Fall’; and that ‘God’s grace is available through the good works which humans can perform’ (MacCulloch 2003, 235). In short, for the Reformed Church, Man’s justification is effected by faith or by grace and without his cooperation, while for the Traditional Church it is effected by cooperation with God and the labour of meritorious works. In both cases, God’s will is sovereign. By contrast, the Corpus Hermeticum presents a theory of salvation to be achieved through knowledge of God or gnōsis. Indeed, Jean-Pierre Mahé claims that Hermetism is more than a theory – it presents the reader with a practical way to train the mind by teaching the steps to be taken along the way of Hermes to salvation. In other words, it empowers the individual to achieve salvation through his own efforts. According to the Hermetica, it is the process of acquiring knowledge (noesis) of one’s own mind (nous) that leads the individual upwards towards that suprarational and reciprocated knowledge (gnōsis) of the Mind of God (Nous), which is perfection, spiritual rebirth, and the salvation of one’s immortal soul. In Book X of the Corpus Hermeticum we learn that the knowledge of God, who is within us all, is the only way to salvation: ‘It is ascent to Olympus’ (CH X [15]). The way of Hermes requires silence and meditation, and a pious life lived apart from the crowd (Mahé 2004, 102–103). The knowledge of self or noesis is activated by love, especially agape or love of one another. In the Asclepius, Hermes speaks of religio mentis [25], or a ‘religion of the mind’, and André-Jean Festugière comments that it is ‘a fortunate locution that could serve to describe all of Hermetic piety’ (in Copenhaver 1992, 242). In a century where the divisions in the church engendered intolerance, hatred, war and bloodshed, a tolerant religion that empowered the individual, predicated upon peace, harmony and love, such as Hermetism offered, may have appealed to many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Once reconciled with Christianity, pagan Hermetism, this prisca theologia, this tolerant, gnostic ‘religion of the mind’, had the potential to become the religion of the world. When the fourteenth century Greek manuscripts of the Corpus Hermeticum, with its pia philosophia, entered the Latin West around 1462, the treatises were believed to be of the greatest antiquity – prisci theologi, God’s first words to mankind. The Corpus was revered as the work of a single man, Hermes Trismegistus, who was hailed as a predecessor of pagan philosophy and a near

4

Introduction

contemporary of Moses and Zoroaster. Early translators such as the Greek scholar Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), and the poet Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447– 1500), soon reconciled the pagan texts with Catholic teaching. One hundred and fifty years were to pass before Isaac Casaubon established the true provenance of the texts on secure philological grounds.7 In 1614, Casaubon was able to demonstrate that, far from predating Plato and foretelling the coming of Christ, the texts had been written in Greek in the centuries 100–300 CE, and reference many works that date from those years, such as the synoptic Gospels, the epistles of Paul, Philo, and the pagan Neoplatonists including Plotinus, Proclus and Porphyry. Following Casaubon’s revelation, the texts of the Corpus Hermeticum were discredited; many regarded them as forgeries; over time they were rejected, mocked and apparently forgotten. The publication of the first English translation of the Corpus in 1650, however, suggests that interest in the religious philosophy persisted quietly in England, invisible, or possibly underground. Another three centuries must elapse before Richard Reitzenstein (1861–1931) in 1905 piqued the interest of textual scholars in the esoteric texts and the history of religion, resulting in translations and commentaries that have studded the twentieth century. In the latter years of last century, historians Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy revisited the accepted and widely held Protestant/Whig version of the Reformation in Elizabethan England and argued convincingly that the memory of familiar Catholic traditions and a nostalgic longing for the high days and holydays that had given colour and shape to life persisted long into the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Their revised opinion preceded a renewed interest in Shakespeare’s religious sympathies which was spearheaded at a landmark conference held at the University of Lancaster in 1999. By coincidence, 1999 also saw the endowment of a new Chair in the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam, according long overdue academic respectability to the study of the history of esoteric thought.8 It is the confluence of these three streams of revisionist thought (discussed below), each unsettling in its own way, that has enabled this study at this time. 7 Casaubon, a Protestant, was in the employ of James VI and I and was interested to find the true faith in the original Christian message. He was not the first to doubt that Hermes Trismegistus was a contemporary of Moses and anterior to Plato. In 1567, Gilbert Genebrard in Paris dated the Hermetic texts after 303 BCE. Teodoro Angelucci and Cardinal Baronius also doubted the texts’ authenticity, albeit for different reasons (Moreschini 2011, 273–276). To the list of critics prior to Casaubon, Hanegraaff adds an English man, William Harrison, in 1570 (2012, 75 n.291). 8 Allison Coudert summed up its new status after a decade: ‘No longer marginalized, esotericism must now be viewed as an integral part of Western religious, intellectual and cultural history’ (2009, 120).

Introduction

1

5

Nostalgia for Catholic Tradition in Shakespeare’s Audience

The revised view of the Religious Reformation in England was expounded principally by Haigh who argued that it was a Political Reformation because the differences between Catholic and Protestant were settled from the top by Acts of parliament: the 1559 Act of Supremacy, which made the young Queen Elizabeth Supreme Governor of the Church of England, thereby severing all links with Rome and the Vatican, and the Act of Uniformity which obliged all clergy throughout England and Wales to use the English language Book of Common Prayer (1993, 239–242). Haigh’s assessment was complemented by that of Duffy who argued that at the popular level the reformation was slowed by the people’s resistance to change. Duffy’s meticulous research has revealed the practical effects on the people of the 1559 Injunctions, whose intention was to suppress or destroy all the externals of Catholicism (1992, 569).9 However, as Duffy explains, ‘dislike of change, Catholic instincts, hope for a speedy restoration of the old ways, and Tudor thrift [. . .] ensured widespread inertia and concealment’ (571). The reforms attacked the cycles of religious plays long integrated into the late medieval church; all Mary plays were excised from the York cycle in the 1560s, the Chester cycle was performed for the last time in 1575, and in the Towneley plays, passages on the seven sacraments especially those referring to the Real Presence in the Eucharist, were scratched out and marked ‘corectyd and not playd’ (Duffy 1992, 580). In addition to these attempts to obliterate the memory of Catholic religious culture once symbolized in familiar and comforting Catholic ritual and Catholic drama, all ‘monuments of superstition’, such as statuary, rood screens, altar stones and holy water stoups regarded as sacred had to be smashed, or removed and put to profane use (Duffy 1992, 586).10 In short, for the majority, the Reformation in England was protracted and painful and, as Duffy observes, resulted in ‘the destruction of a vast and resonant world of symbols’ (1992, 591). All that was familiar and beloved in the daily life of communities and the seasonal life of the church was reduced to sola Scriptura. However, even that was not sufficient for a minority who resisted all attempts on the part of the authorities to find a via media for the Church of England, for example through judicious wording of the liturgy, and allowing some vestments to be worn. This minority, decried as Puritan, increased in number as the century wore on; they wanted the church 9 10

Each parish was required to deliver up to the visiting commissioners ‘all vestments, copes and other ornaments, plate, books in the Latyn tonge, grails, legends, processionals, hymnals, manuals and suchlike’ to be burnt (Duffy 1992, 570). Some rood screens have survived, presumably protected, such as that in the church of St Nicholas in Castle Hedingham, Essex, England.

6

Introduction

purified of every last vestige that was redolent of the idolatry, corruption and superstition of Rome and the Pope. Nevertheless, Duffy and Haigh agree that, even though Elizabethan England was officially a Protestant nation, it was not a nation of Protestants, and a longing for the old Catholic England endured well into Elizabeth’s reign (Haigh 1993, 280). At the same time, the importance attached by Protestants to reading the Bible in one’s vernacular language resulted in a society that was becoming increasingly literate; the growing numbers of printers, publishers and booksellers in England and Europe in the sixteenth century bear witness to an appetite for reading. 2

Shakespeare’s Religious Sympathies

The revised assessment of the history of English Catholicism in Shakespeare’s world preceded the conference at the University of Lancaster that brought the religious aspect of Shakespeare’s plays into sharper focus. The resultant ‘turn to religion’ in early modern studies had a strong impact on literary scholarship (Jackson and Marotti 2004, 169), and a sharp rise in the number of books and papers devoted to the interpretation of religion in the plays of Shakespeare soon followed.11 Summing up the conference, Stephen Greenblatt announced that it was no longer possible to speak of Shakespearean England as a monolith, calling it rather ‘half a century of violent spiritual upheaval’ (2003, 31).12 As Duffy, Michael Questier and other historians have clearly demonstrated, the people’s memory for the old traditional practices, and yearnings for the comfort of the sacraments did not disappear when the Act of Uniformity and the Thirty-Nine 11

12

The 1999 Lancaster Conference to investigate Shakespeare’s religion, and religion in Shakespeare’s plays generated papers from twenty-seven scholars published in two volumes in 2003 – Theatre and religion and Region, religion and patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare, edited by Richard Dutton et al. The same year saw Dennis Taylor and David Beauregard’s edited collection on Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England with papers from a further sixteen scholars. In 2004, Jackson and Marotti reviewed the position in ‘The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies’. In 2006 English Language Notes devoted an entire issue to religion in Shakespeare, and in 2011 Jackson and Marotti published an edited collection of ten more papers. The past two decades have been punctuated with individual volumes on religion in Shakespeare’s plays from scholars both established and new including Kristen Poole 2000, Stephen Greenblatt 2001, Richard Wilson 2004, Beatrice Groves 2007, David Beauregard 2008, 2013; Adrian Street 2009, Alison Shell 2010, Peter Iver Kaufman 2013, and David Scott Kastan 2014. In Introduction to Theatre and religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson.

Introduction

7

Articles passed into law. It is this ‘collective memory’ for traditional beliefs and practices and texts familiar to audience and readers which, Assmann argues, is also a ‘connective memory’ that Shakespeare draws up from his own ‘stored memory’ (2006, 11).13 That stored memory is often complemented with purposeful alterations made to source material, which all speak of a conscious artistry at work. The debate about the direction of the playwright’s religious sympathies has advocates for each, or sometimes both, of the orthodox confessions. Beatrice Groves, arguing that ‘England’s Catholic past is an abiding presence in Shakespeare’s work’ (2007, 3), observes that ‘Shakespeare’s dramaturgy is sensitive to the intensely visual aspects of his Catholic cultural heritage’ but also ‘to the rich verbal texture of Protestantism’ (2007, 6). Maurice Hunt notes a hybrid discourse in his discussion of Henry V, where he points to Shakespeare’s ‘syncretic’ fusing of Catholic and Protestant vocabularies, for example, in the depiction of Falstaff or of the outcome of the battle of Agincourt where the Protestant notion of deliverance blends with the Catholic one of miracle (1998, 176–206). England’s Catholic heritage included the mystery plays which, Groves argues, ‘like the mass had been a powerful spectacle and the memory of both remained in many early-modern minds’ (2007, 39). Groves, whose work is particularly strong in the links she makes between the iconography of the mystery plays and Shakespeare’s plays, makes a similar kind of visual connection between the ‘muffl’d’ Claudio’s reprieve at the end of Measure for Measure and the raising of Lazarus as it was enacted in the Chester mystery play of that name (2007, 162–163). Memories for things seen long before, or in other countries – frescoes, icons, paintings, stained glass and rood screens – surface in tableaux, such as that presented to the audience when Lear enters weeping with the dead Cordelia in his arms, recalling for many a shared memory of the pietà; Katharine Goodland activates the same iconography in Lady Anne’s sobbing lament for her father-in-law Henry VI in Richard III (2003, 59). Visual memory enhances auditory memory in the image of ‘Bare ruin’d quiers, where late the sweet birds sang’ in sonnet 73, and inspired Duffy to meditate on ‘Shakespeare’s appropriation of a highly charged contemporary and historical trope laden with contentious . . . religious significance’ in its evocation of ‘the ruins of England’s Catholicism’ (2003, 41). The idiosyncratic and subjective nature of allegorical exegesis is illustrated in two interpretations of The Comedy of Errors. The play, concerning two sets of 13

Aleida Assmann distinguishes between ‘functional memory’ and ‘stored memory’. She sees the latter as moving towards ‘cultural forms of the unconscious’. (In Jan Assmann 2006, 24).

8

Introduction

identical twin brothers – Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Ephesus, and their servants, twins named Dromio – is usually sourced to the Menaechmi by Plautus, but it may also owe the setting in Ephesus and the second pair of identical twins to the Clementine Recognitions.14 Clare Asquith, a Catholic polemicist, interprets Antipholus of Ephesus as representative of soulless, mercantile Protestant England, where commerce rules, that is, ‘the body’, and Antipholus from Catholic Syracuse, ‘the wandering stranger’, she represents as ‘the spirituality missing from England since the Reformation’ (2005, 56). On the other hand, Donna Hamilton interprets Adriana’s locking Antipholus of Syracuse out of the house, mistaking him for her husband, and believing him to have contaminated it, as a parody of the conformist rhetoric of Protestants discrediting and excluding presbyterians and puritans, mistakenly calling them dangerous and ‘Antichristian’ (1992, 70); moreover, Hamilton interprets the changing of the bracelet in Plautus’ story to a golden chain in the play, as a purposeful alteration in the direction of Protestantism evoking William Perkins’ paper on predestination and salvation, A golden chaine, or the description of theologie, containing the order of the causes of salvation and damnation (1992, 84). Hamilton sees that the action of the play, where everyone seeks the chain and is ‘linked to one another by this common interest’ (84), is a metaphor for salvation, concern for which unites all members of the church and audience, regardless of their confession. Similarly, the storm and shipwreck which separated the brothers years before is a frequent trope for the upheavals and divisions in the church, but one which is common to Catholics and Protestants.15 At the end of the play it is Emilia, the mother of the Antipholus twins, now a Catholic Abbess, who recognizes that all those present are of one family: masters and servants, Ephesians and Syracusans, conformists and nonconformists, insiders and outsiders are all invited into the church; the Antipholus twins now reunited, along with their servants, enter hand in hand as equals. For Asquith, when the mother Abbess welcomes them all into the church, she is uniting ‘England’s soul and body’ within the ‘universal framework of Catholic Christendom’ (2005, 56). In other words, the identical twins are tropes of the two confessions, divided for a time, and now reunited in the arms of the mother church. It is an interpretation which could explain the riotous reaction

14 15

The Recognitions was available in Latin translation in the sixteenth century having been published at Basle in 1536. Hamilton quotes Foxe who, in his Actes and Monuments, reminded the populace that since we are all in one ship together, for our own salvation: ‘let us not mangle nor devide the shippe, which, being devideth, perisheth’ (1992, 85).

Introduction

9

to the play by the predominantly Protestant audience at Gray’s Inn when it was performed at the 1594 Christmas Revels. Clearly, interpretation flows from what the audience brings to a play or from what the reader brings to a text. Shakespeare’s audiences interpreted the plays in the light of their lived experience; the modern reader adds knowledge of the context – historic, political and theological. In this study, the four dramatic texts are interpreted in the light of the collected Hermetic texts which function as ‘intertexts’, defined by Michael Riffaterre as ‘one or more texts which the reader must know in order to understand a work of literature’ (1990, 56). Although they may differ, Asquith and Hamilton agree that Shakespeare wrote in order to shed light on contested theological and ecclesiastical issues, current at the time. Asquith observes, and I find it hard to disagree: ‘[o]n the spiritual level, this hope of reintegration is Shakespeare’s central preoccupation from first to last’ (2005, 59). Annabel Patterson reaches a similar position in a discussion of Henry VIII, when she perceives the case for religious toleration and associates Shakespeare ‘with religious eirenicism’ (in Marotti 2003, 224). After the Lancaster conference, the prevailing view of a Protestant ‘Anglican’ Shakespeare was replaced in many quarters by a belief in a ‘Catholic’ Shakespeare. Duffy’s nuanced conclusion is that, whether or not Shakespeare can be claimed as a Catholic writer, ‘he must have struck alert contemporaries as a most unsatisfactory Protestant’ (2003, 56), and Marotti adds more precisely that, although Shakespeare ‘may have outwardly conformed to the official state religion, [that is to the Church of England] he could not, and apparently did not wish to, sever his or his culture’s ties to a Catholic past and its residual presence’ (2003, 232). It is clear that the debate about the religious sympathies shown in the plays rests on the assumption that Traditional Catholic or Reformed Protestant were the only religious alternatives available to Shakespeare. The possibility that the plays might interrogate one or other of the Emergent (dissenting or non-conformist) sects, or that some plays might have an esoteric spiritual dimension has rarely been recognized. At Lancaster in 1999, Margaret Jones-Davis argued that the reconciliation at the end of Cymbeline was consonant with Hermetism. However, her opinion that ‘[r]eligious hermetism was a common ground of agreement between the warring factions’ (2003, 205) is not borne out by the historic evidence.16 A decade earlier, in 1989, Robert Schwarz published a 16

There is nothing documented to suggest that there was any common ground between the confessions, despite the conciliatory policies of James VI and I. When Cymbeline, with its obvious message of reconciliation, was performed at Court, Stuart England had seen the defeat of an act of Catholic terrorism, the first on British soil. On November 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators attempted to blow up the House of Lords when King James was to be present.

10

Introduction

paper: ‘Rosalynde among the Familists’, where he argued that, in As You Like It, Shakespeare’s additions to and departures from the source, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, are lent coherence when viewed against the beliefs and practices of the peace-loving antinomian sect known in England as the Family of Love. Catholics and Protestants both attacked Familists, whom they identified as ‘libertines’. Schwarz claims that when Duke Senior rebukes the melancholy sceptic, Jaques, as a former ‘libertine’ (2.7.65), given the primary meaning of the word in the late sixteenth century, the Duke is calling him a ‘Familist’.17 Duke Senior’s ‘co-mates and brothers in exile’, no longer ‘knolled to church’, themselves find ‘tongues in trees’ and god within themselves, as they enjoy a loving, communal existence apart from the corrupt world, like members of the Family of Love (see Appendix 4).18 Wherever Shakespeare’s guarded religious sympathies lie, the idea that one’s choices may be transformative (as happened to Prince Henry, later Henry V in the Henriad, to King Lear and to Othello), and the notion of religious toleration and peaceful reconciliation (which were anathema to both the orthodox Christian confessions), but which Asquith, Donna Hamilton, Patterson, Schwarz and Jones-Davis amongst others, have all identified in the plays, may readily be found in the ancient wisdom narrative of the Hermetica attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. 3 Hermes Trismegistus Enters the Platonic Academy in Quattrocento Florence In 1453, Byzantium (Constantinople) fell to the Ottoman Turks releasing a flood of manuscripts onto the market. About a decade later, the great Florentine merchant prince Cosimo de’Medici (1389–1464) purchased a Greek manuscript consisting of fourteen treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. He passed it at once to the Greek scholar, physician and later priest Marsilio Ficino, to be translated into Latin. Ficino was the leader of an informal Platonic Academy, set up by de’Medici as a meeting-place for intellectuals in Florence. The resultant Book on the Power and Wisdom of God, Whose Title is Poimandres was for many years referred to as Pymander, and since 1854 as the 17 18

‘libertinage . . . in the sixteenth century meant those who were filled with the “Holy Spirit” and thus thought themselves free from any ecclesiastical discipline’ (Mosse 1960, 426). According to Alastair Hamilton in The Family of Love, this ‘vague but ubiquitous sect’, the libertines were said in 1579 to be ‘increasing, and with them the true atheists’ (1981, 109). Neither Schwarz nor Hamilton connects Familists with Hermetists and they may not know of the similarities between them.

Introduction

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Corpus Hermeticum; the Books, numbered I–XIV, were theoretical treatises and entirely free of magic. Ficino’s Greek manuscript was not the only one to arrive in the Latin West, as Lazzarelli had a version with three additional Books, now numbered XVI to XVIII. It is likely that Ficino’s translation circulated in manuscript, as the ancient tracts were immediately welcomed as prisci theologi, God’s earliest words to man as received and recorded by Hermes Trismegistus – ‘thrice greatest because he was the greatest philosopher and the greatest priest and the greatest king’ (Copenhaver 1992, xlviii). The evidence of the warm reception accorded Hermes Trismegistus in Italy in the fifteenth century may still be found in mosaic, in paintings and in frescoes. Today, any visitor to the great cathedral in Siena can see Hermes Trismegistus depicted in mosaic and labelled as a contemporary of Moses.19 Humanist scholars, convinced of the great antiquity of the texts, and fascinated to return ad fontes, revered Pymander as the well-spring of all religions. Here was a salvific theosophy, with no taint of magic, older than Christianity, that ranked with the other great monotheistic Abrahamic religions – Judaism and Islam. Whether God had made the revelation first to the Hebrews through Moses, to the Egyptians through Hermes or to the Persians through Zoroaster,20 as Eugenio Garin pointed out in the middle of the twentieth century, it was the whole concept of ‘a universal revelation hidden behind the “symbols” of historical religions’, which had been known to mankind even before the revelation recorded in the Torah, which fuelled the idea of tolerance associated with the Corpus Hermeticum (in Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 6). 4

Religious Hermetism in the Twentieth Century

Hermetic studies have attracted modern scholars since Reitzenstein first proposed an Egyptian provenance for the texts in 1905 and, controversially, in 1914 that ‘the Corpus proved the existence of a Hermetic religious community [in 19

20

The story of how Hermes of Alexandrian antiquity, known to the Egyptians as Thoth, conductor of the dead to the underworld, became Mercury to the Romans and emerged as the prophet Hermes Trismegistus, as well as an outline of the iconographic record of his reception in Renaissance Italy may be found in Appendix 1. After reviewing the long debate which continued in the twentieth century, Moreschini asserts, ‘The once debated Egyptian setting of the Hermetic texts has now been securely established by Garth Fowden, and they are recognised as “the Hellenistic transformation of a very ancient cultural and religious heritage”. It is now a communis opinio that the theosophy of Hermes Trismegistus in its various forms (philosophy, alchemy, astrology, magic) effectively arose in an Egyptian setting’ (2011, 7).

12

Introduction

antiquity] which used its treatises in their worship’ (in Copenhaver 1992, lii). In the first half of the century the field was enriched by a number of editions, translations and commentaries of several Hermetic texts by scholars including Walter Scott, Arthur D. Nock, André-Jean Festugière and C. H. Dodd, and latterly by Jean-Pierre Mahé, Brian Copenhaver, Claudio Moreschini, and Wouter Hanegraaff with Ruud Bouthoorn. Both Scott and Festugière are credited with making the useful distinction between the huge numbers of Hermetic texts of antiquity and known in the Middle Ages that were popular or technical occult texts dealing with alchemy, astrology and magic,21 and the small body of Hermetic treatises, first identified as Pymander, but now known as the Corpus Hermeticum. Devoid of magic, these treatises are learned, theoretical, religious and philosophical; along with the text of Asclepius, they are the focus of this study. A broader but still specialized interest in the religious philosophy contained in the Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepius may be dated to a seminal paper by Paul Oskar Kristeller, published in Italian in 1938.22 In Marsilio Ficino e Lodovico Lazzarelli, Kristeller recommended ‘that the history of the reception of the hermetic writings should urgently be put on the agenda of Renaissance research’ (in Hanegraaff 2012, 329). Soon after, in 1945, debate over the Egyptian origins of the Corpus was settled with a spectacular find of ancient papyri buried in a jar in Upper Egypt, probably in the second half of the fourth century CE. The library of gnostic or apocryphal gospels in the Coptic language found near the city of Nag Hammadi permits the inference first, that gospels of Christian Gnosticism were deliberately culled from the New Testament, and that the sixteenth century opposition of orthodoxy to gnostic soteriology had its roots in ancient times; second, the existence of what is now known as Nag Hammadi Codex VI validates the interpretation of Books I and XIII of the Corpus Hermeticum, books of initiation which were available in Shakespeare’s day and which are integral to this study. In 1956 an Armenian language version of a collection of aphorisms entitled The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius, probably dating from the sixth century, was published by H. Manandyan. It was followed in 1982 by a critical text revised by Mahé with a new translation and commentary. Six years later J. Paramelle made an exciting discovery when he found excerpts from the 21

22

Copenhaver cautions that Iamblichus’ claims of between twenty thousand and more than thirty-six thousand books by Hermes in Hellenic Egypt are exaggerated, and that there are possibly about twenty known Greek works by or about Hermes Trismegistus dealing with occult practices, some of which may be dated to the fourth century BCE (1992, xvi). Marsilio Ficino e Lodovico Lazzarelli, contributo alla diffusione delle idee ermetiche nel rinascimento (Kristeller 1938, 237–262).

Introduction

13

Greek original of the Armenian texts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Codex Clarkianus 11). Nevertheless, it was Frances Yates’ seminal work on Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition in 1964 that brought the Nolan’s eclectic mix of Hermetism, magia, alchemy, astrology and Cabala to the attention of a wide Anglophone readership in the twentieth century. Yates herself recognized in the mix the pre-Christian origins of a religion ‘followed in the mind’, observing that: [the] religion of the world that runs as an undercurrent in much of Greek thought, particularly in Platonism and Stoicism, becomes in Hermetism actually a religion, a cult without temples or liturgy, followed in the mind alone, a religious philosophy or philosophical religion containing a gnosis. (1964, 1991, 4–5) However, approaching the field from the perspective of Bruno’s idiosyncratic interests, which included magic and the art of memory, and from his eclectic use of sources, Yates presented Hermetic thought in the Renaissance as magical. ‘Magia, Cabala, and Alchymia’ (1972, xii) prevailed, Yates claimed, from the time of the texts’ arrival in Renaissance Florence until the eighteenth-century Enlightenment when those beliefs were replaced by rational thought. She described the Hermetica as ‘collections of documents of pagan gnosticism of the early centuries’ (1964, 1991, 108), but she believed that ‘[g]nosticism and magic go together’ (1964, 1991, 44). Wouter Hanegraaff holds that Yates gave undue emphasis to two brief passages about magic in the Asclepius (23–24, 37–38), and to another text known as Picatrix which was written in Arabic under Hermetic influence (Yates 1964, 1991, 49). As a result of what Hanegraaff terms Yates’ ‘grand narrative’ (2001, 15), scholars were subsequently led ‘to draw direct connections between the development of a “learned magic” in the Renaissance and Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum’ (2009, 1). As Hanegraaff observed: ‘the “magical” dimension of hermet[ic]ism was not new in the Renaissance, and what was new (the Corpus Hermeticum) was not magical’ (2009, 2). Influenced by her friend Gershom Scholem, Yates also associated ‘gnosticism’ with early Jewish Kabbalah and she noted that Ficino’s contemporary, Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) connected Hermetic teaching about the Powers (CH XIII [7]) with Kabbalist teaching about the Sephiroth (1964, 1991, 109).23 Thus, after 1964, Anglophone scholarship tended to conceive of Renaissance Hermeticism as a confluence into which flow gnostic Hermetism, magia, 23

The ten ‘powers’ that Pico lists in his Conclusiones are drawn from the twelve ‘torments of matter’ discussed in Chapters 4 and 5.

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Introduction

Cabala, alchemy and also astrology. This mind-set, that presents the Renaissance perception of the Corpus Hermeticum as a collection of occult pagan texts, constituting in Hanegraaff’s terms a ‘quasi-autonomous counterculture’ (2001, 15) that was opposed to Christianity, goes some way to explaining why those scholars who have recognized Hermetic magic and alchemy in Shakespeare’s plays have not been predisposed to recognize Hermetism as a discourse about a potentially salvific religion that was believed to be prophetic of Christianity. John Mebane, for example, saw Prospero’s art as ‘quite literally Hermetic magic’, albeit magic that ‘strives to effect moral and spiritual reform’ (1989, 179– 80), while Harold Bloom, a self-confessed ‘heretical transcendentalist, Gnostic in orientation’, stressed the urgency of knowing Shakespeare’s [religious] ideology, ‘whether Christian, sceptical, hermetic or whatever’ (1999, 13). For Bloom, the plays remain ‘aesthetically, cognitively [. . .] morally, even spiritually’ ‘beyond the end of the mind’s reach’ (1999, xvii). Bloom compares Prospero to a mystical Sufi, ‘like himself descended from the ancient Hermetists’ (1999, 666). In addition, a handful of doctoral students has linked Hermeticist thinking to one or other of Shakespeare’s plays through his use of magic, typically playful folk magic as with Puck, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and subtle alchemical references for those in the know in Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest amongst others.24 Early in the twentieth century, several scholars such as Colin Still, George Wilson Knight and W. R. Elton were aware of but unable to explain the hints of paganism in some plays by Shakespeare. J. C. Maxwell described King Lear as ‘a Christian play about a pagan world’ (1950, 142). E. A. J. Honigmann, noting that Othello is sometimes perceived as a Christian convert from Islam, points out that ‘Othello’s first account of the handkerchief (3.4.77) associates his parents with an undefined paganism’ (1997, 23). Frank Kermode who sees Prospero as a magus, compares him to Hermes Trismegistus himself, calling upon the words which Francis Bacon used of King James VI and I: ‘he standeth invested with that triplicitie which in great veneration was ascribed to the ancient Hermes, the power and fortune of a King, the knowledge and illumination of a Priest, and the Learning and universalitie of a Philosopher’ (1954, xlix–l). 24

Linda Carney. 1977. ‘Alchemy in Selected Plays of Shakespeare’; M. Walls. 1986. ‘The Renaissance Hermetic Tradition in Shakespeare’s Plays’; Evelyn Wallace-Carter. 1997. ‘The Alchemical Pattern in William Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well’; Katherine Bartol Perrault. 2001. ‘Astronomy, Alchemy, and Archetypes: An Integrated View of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’; Cassandra Amundsen. 2010. ‘The Path to Personal Salvation: The Hermetic Trope of “Self-Mastery” or Gnosis in Shakespeare, Bacon and Milton’; Caitlin Larracey. 2013. ‘Renaissance Drama and Magic: Humanism and Hermeticism in Early Modern England’.

Introduction

15

Yates’ work on Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) and the ‘Hermetic tradition’, conducted at the Warburg Institute in London renewed interest in Bruno himself amongst scholars of Italian including Hilary Gatti, Ingrid Rowland, and more recently, Michele Marrapodi and Gilberto Sacerdoti. All have found evidence in the plays that Shakespeare had encountered the Nolan philosophy, possibly through his books written in Italian during his London years (1583–1585). But Bruno, fascinating and fearless in his pursuit of truth through reason, and eclectic in his philosophy, was no longer a believing Catholic; as a young man he had left his Dominican order in Nola, after being excommunicated for harbouring heretical Arian beliefs. Nor was he a non-magical religious Hermetist, for, as Yates observed, ‘his panacea for the religious situation of Europe [was] a return to magical Hermetism and magical Egyptianism’ (emphasis in original) (1964, 1991, 179). Hanegraaff has taken Yates to task because, in a paper delivered after the seminal work on Bruno, she went on to claim the Hermetic Tradition ‘as an essential almost causal factor in the emergence of the scientific revolution’ (2001, 14). Yates’ later works that incorporate a Hermetic theme, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972) and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979), both attracted students to the Warburg and inspired literary scholars such as Mebane and Bloom amongst others listed above. Her last books acclaimed by many British historians (as, for example, ‘learned, original and exciting’), also attracted some stringent criticism, notably from Brian Vickers who objected to her methods, criticizing in particular her treatment of evidence (1979, 287–316). In Paris, in 1979, Professor Antoine Faivre was installed in the chair for ‘Histoire des courants ésoteriques et mystiques dans l’Europe moderne et contemporaine’ in the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Section Sciences religieuse), formerly the chair for ‘Histoire de l’ésotérisme chrétien’. For Faivre the history of those esoteric currents in modern Europe began in the Christian West during the Renaissance. In 1992 he pioneered a definition of ‘Western Esotericism’ as a ‘form of thought’ recognizable in Western traditions since the Renaissance in four intrinsic and two extrinsic features: Correspondences, Living Nature, Imagination/Mediations, and Transmutation; to which he added the Concordance of Tradition and the Transmission of Knowledge. Later, Faivre was to refer to esotericism as an ensemble of spiritual currents ‘which share a certain air de famille as well as the form of thought which is its common denominator’ (in McCalla, 2001, 436). In this century, Faivre’s definition has been subjected to rigorous critical scrutiny, and attempts to define ‘Western Esotericism’ are ongoing (see below). Despite the research being conducted at the Sorbonne and at the Warburg Institute, as Roelof van den Broek summarized the twentieth century position in 2009, those scholars wishing to study Hermetic and esoteric traditions in

16

Introduction

other institutions were met with the ‘common antipathy against esotericism and obscurantism’ that made it ‘almost inconceivable that one could study modern hermetic and esoteric traditions without being an obscurantist oneself’ (2009, 11). All that changed when the field was admitted to the University of Amsterdam in 1999. 5 Hermes Finds a New Home in the Academy in the Twenty-First Century The inaugural chair for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents25 at the University of Amsterdam was filled in 1999 by Professor Wouter Hanegraaff who readily acknowledged the early contributions to Hermetic scholarship by Frances Yates and Antoine Faivre. Within a very few years the achievement was consolidated by the introduction of scholarly journals such as Aries, by the establishment of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE), and by increasing numbers of students. In northern Europe this has resulted in an increase in the number of scholarly publications about Western esotericism, particularly in the last decade where a vast expansion and diversification of the field of inquiry has relegated to relative obscurity interest in the original site whose foundations were laid when the philosophic Greek treatises of Hermes Trismegistus, along with previously unknown manuscripts of Plato, Plotinus, Proclus and others were first welcomed to the Platonic Academy in quattrocento Florence.26 On the other hand, research into the Italian Renaissance continues to flow from Italy and elsewhere; translations of the early editions and commentaries on Pymander have ignited critical interest in other works by the early translators, Ficino and Lazzarelli, as well as in Pico and particularly in sixteenth century Bruno.27 Nevertheless, despite 25

The name is used as an exact equivalent of ‘History of Western Esotericism’ and the critical historical research undertaken is ‘directly or indirectly related to the so-called “Hermetic Philosophy” of the Renaissance’. A Response to Frequently Asked Questions. University of Amsterdam. 26 See for example New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism. 2021, edited by Egil Asprem and Julian Strube. Leiden: Brill. The editors list current research into the field as far apart as Scandinavia and Asia, as antiquity and modernity, as esotericism in feminist and queer studies, but record no current interest in fifteenth century Italy which Yates (mistakenly) saw as the birthplace of Hermeticism, nor in the sixteenth century, hailed as a golden age for the Hermetism that informs this study. 27 See The Rebirth of Platonic Theology, edited by James Hankins and Fabrizio Merio 2013. Harvard University Centre for Italian and Renaissance Studies. See also various chapters in The Routledge Research Companion to Anglo-Italian Renaissance Literature and Culture,

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the expansion of the field now designated ‘Esotericism’, the editors of New Approaches claim that theoretical and methodological problems of definition, and demarcation of ‘key concepts such as secrecy, knowledge, identity, polemics and the West’, raised by Kocku von Stuckrad in 2012, have yet to be resolved to universal satisfaction (Asprem and Strube 2021, 2). It may well prove impossible to find a definition of ‘esotericism’ that will adequately describe a set of beliefs and practices that occur over millennia and across the world. Nevertheless, pioneering attempts by Faivre to define the field, alluded to earlier, provide a useful overview of Renaissance Hermeticism or the intellectual milieu of continental Europe and England in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century which welcomed the newly recovered texts of the Greek Pymander. Since 2000, scholarly research into the field, once principally concerned with the history of the Hermetic philosophy in the Renaissance, has proceeded on several fronts, reflecting different interests and points of view. In 2009 Monica Neugebauer-Wölk identified two parallel research perspectives in the field of ‘Western esotericism’: the study of esotericism, and the study of ‘esotericism within the context of European History of Religion’ (139). The former view she associates with Faivre and Hanegraaff, and with the study of the Hermetic philosophy of the Corpus Hermeticum and its reception in the Latin West during the Renaissance, which is the subject of this monograph. The latter she alleges is ‘primarily a German phenomenon’ associated with von Stuckrad amongst others. From this school of thought has emerged an understanding that ‘the religious history of Europe has a pluralistic structure and that even in Western culture religion is by no means identical with Christianity’ (Neugebauer-Wölk 2009, 139). Interestingly, this parting of the ways reflects an earlier separation between ‘two strongly different even logically incompatible intellectual paradigms or styles of thinking’ that took place throughout the sixteenth century (Hanegraaff 2012, 192). Hanegraaff identifies these as the ‘“Platonic” paradigm’ that developed in response to Ficino’s translations, especially the ancient wisdom revealed to Hermes Trismegistus by Pymander, and as the ‘“Alchemical” paradigm’ that was the innovative response of Theophrastus von Hohenheim or Paracelsus (1493–1541), who also knew Pymander (2012, 192–194 passim). It is the former that is of interest to this study, as we trace the response to philosophical, non-magical Hermetic thought from Catholic Italy, through France and the Netherlands to Tudor England at a time when Shakespeare, whose Catholic edited by Michele Marrapodi 2019. See also “Ficino on Force, Magic, and Prayers: Neoplatonic and Hermetic Influences in Ficino’s Three Books on Life”, Denis Robichaud 2017 in Renaissance Quarterly. Robichaud has consulted nine archival manuscripts now located in Florence, in Paris and in Rome.

18

Introduction

sympathies have been established (see above), was writing. By contrast, the influence of Paracelsus, the originator of iatrochemistry, was felt in northern and eastern Europe. In Denmark, his writings were known to Tycho Brahe, in Prague to Edward Kelley (John Dee’s nemesis), and in Protestant Germany his works apparently influenced the Lutheran author of the Hermetic Rosicrucian manifestos published in 1614, by which time Shakespeare had laid down his pen. For the past two decades, discussion of ‘Western esotericism’ has attempted both to locate the field in time and place, and also to define it. Scholars have discussed the extent to which esotericism is an historic presence rooted in the antique world of the past, and the nature of its presence in the post-Enlightenment world up to the ‘New Age’ and the present day; the extent to which the concept ‘esotericism’ itself is a Western construct or may be observed in other cultures such as Eastern Europe, Africa or India, or in other religions such as Judaism and Islam; and, most relevant to this study, the degree of importance attached to the recovery of the religio-philosophic treatises of the Pymander in the Latin West during the Italian Renaissance. In the Introduction to Dictionnaire critique de l’ésotérisme, published in Paris in 1999, the editor Jean Servier, an ethnologist, promised the reader an open book on a hidden world: ‘From the aborigines of Australia to ancient Scandinavia, from the Celts to pharaonic Egypt, from the early Christians to the Mesopotamians, from Iran to India’. Servier may have established the ubiquity of esoteric thought but, as Carole Frosio observed in her review, the dictionary fails to provide the reader with a definition of esotericism adequate to include all the entries under the title’s rubric (2001, 88–89). In fact the dictionary exemplifies the problem of finding just what it is that the plethora of ideas and currents of thought, practices and people have in common. Servier does however clarify that esotericism concerns what is hidden and only to be revealed to initiates, which presumably means those who have read his dictionary! Christopher Partridge, editor of a more recent encyclopaedic work on The Occult World, which could properly have been sub-titled A Survey of Western Esotericism from Antiquity to the Present, bypasses the problem of defining ‘Western esotericism’ by avoiding the term in its title. Nevertheless, the work was criticized by at least one European reviewer who deplored what he perceived as a ‘strongly Anglo-American bias’ (Plaisance 2016, 148–149). The choice of title may conceal another problem for a field which defines itself as religious; Hanegraaff for example had earlier defined the ‘occult’ as a sort of ‘secularized esotericism’ (2001, 9),28 while Neugebauer-Wölk argues that early 28

Hanegraaff’s definition sounds like a contradiction in terms but it nevertheless covers two aspects of the word ‘occult’ as connoting both knowledge (such as of medicines, remedies

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modern esotericism should be defined as a religious alternative to Christianity, meaning it should be seen as an ‘independent religious system of meaning’.29 The magisterial work on the world of the occult provides a richly detailed survey of esoteric currents through the ages, from ‘Ancient and Medieval Sources’ to ‘Popular Culture’ and ‘Beliefs, Practices, Issues and Approaches’ in modern times. In Chapter 1, Ancient Esoteric Traditions, Dylan Burns favours von Stuckrad’s definition of the ancient tradition as a current concerned with ‘the mediation of some kind of absolute knowledge via a dialectic of secrecy, concealment, and revelation’ (2016, 17). Burns describes the religio-philosophic Pymander as ‘the ancient esoteric text par excellence’ but accords the text no special status to distinguish it from other Hermetic texts that deal with ‘practical “occult” techniques’ such as magic or astrology (see below) (2016, 22). Part 2, devoted to The Renaissance, contains a chapter on ‘The Hermetic Revival in Italy’ where György Szönyi references, amongst many others, recent specialist studies that provide a wealth of detail on the contributions of three prominent Renaissance figures – Ficino, Pico and Lazzarelli – made in response to the recovered Pymander (2016, 51–73).30 Both Ficino, Greek scholar, translator and Catholic priest, and Lazzarelli, a poet, are of interest to this study because their translations and commentaries on the Hermetic treatises were available in Shakespeare’s time. By 2005, Hanegraaff, in conjunction with Ruud Bouthoorn, had published the first English translation and commentary on the Hermetic writings and related documents of Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500). Their book includes the philosophical Dialogue on the Supreme Dignity of Man, entitled The Way of Christ and the Mixing Bowl of Hermes or the Crater Hermetis, ‘a Christian

29

30

and ideas) that must be hidden lest it prove dangerous in the wrong hands, and everyday events suspected of embodying mysterious power – magnetism or magnetic attraction was one such event judged ‘occult’ before a rational, secular, scientific explanation was found. In Locations of Knowledge (Kocku von Stuckrad 2010, 49–50). Neugebauer-Wölk lists five characteristic thematic fields of esotericism that demonstrate its independence from Christianity all of which are compatible with our definition of the Hermetic thought associated with Pymander or Hermetism. Firstly, esoteric authors claim knowledge revealed from non-Christian sources such as the Corpus Hermeticum or the Chaldean Oracles; second the claims lead to the promise of ‘higher knowledge’; third, esoteric knowledge is put into social and political practice challenging the institutionalized formal church; fourth the practical application of esotericism has implications for gnosis or self-redemption; and fifth, the idea of ‘invisible church and secret society’ is a powerful alternative to the public nature of formal church worship. These studies include amongst others: Marsilio Ficino and his Influence, ed. Stephen Clucas, Peter Forshaw and Valery Rees 2011. Leiden: Brill; Pico on Magic and Astrology by Sheila Rabin. 2008. In M V Dougherty. Pico della Mirandola: New Essays. Cambridge: CUP.

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Initiation into the Hermetic Mystery’ derived from the Corpus Hermeticum (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 2005, 57, 61) that is used as an intertext in this study.31 Hanegraaff describes Lazzarelli as ‘a deeply pious Christian Hermetist’ who is ‘central to the early history of Renaissance Hermetism’ (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 2005, 7). That same year, Hanegraaff, with Faivre, van den Broek and Jean-Pierre Brach, published their edition of the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism in which Hermetism is defined as a term used ‘to indicate the specific religious world view of the so-called philosophical Hermetica’ (2005, 559). Under ‘Hermetic Literature of Antiquity’, the dictionary distinguishes the texts of the philosophical Hermetica from those of the technical Hermetic corpus. The latter shares with the former the notion of a universal coherence or interconnectedness between all things in the material and in the celestial world. However, the vast technical corpus includes books on astrology, alchemy, magic, medicine, hieroglyphics and the construction of temples amongst others. By contrast, the philosophical Hermetic texts outline a religious theory of salvation. The non-magical, ethical, gnostic religio-philosophy which outlines an esoteric path to salvation by way of knowledge acquired by the reasoning mind – knowledge which may only be revealed to the initiate – is referred to as Hermetism. This doctrine of the religion of the mind (religio mentis) must be distinguished from the technical, practical instructions, recipes and rituals which are often irrational and may involve magic, practical alchemy, astrology, numerology, superstition, occult signs and symbols, or patterns and portents which all shelter under the term Hermeticism.32 Both Hermetism and Hermeticism involve knowledge that may be hidden, secret or esoteric, but it is only Hermetism that teaches the path to knowledge of the god within, or that by using one’s reasonable mind one can unite with the Mind of God, and with that gnōsis reach salvation. On the other hand, Hermeticism covers an array of beliefs and practices, many irrational, that men and women have developed since ancient times in an effort to explain, control and predict the material world. To place religious Hermetism and magical Hermeticism together under the same blanket term, ‘esotericism’, is to blur

31 32

The English translation is a new version of the Italian edition, Dall’Asclepius al Crater Hermetis, published in 1985 by Claudio Moreschini who had access to the autograph manuscript. Neugebauer-Wölk notes that the term ‘Hermeticism’ was favoured by Yates and generally in Anglo-American research, as well as by those who wished to avoid antagonizing other scholars with the provocative term ‘esotericism’ (2009, 137).

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a distinction that is crucial to this study33 and miss the significance of what some believed in Shakespeare’s time, as I will argue, was a religion that had the potential to re-form the whole world. The term ‘esoteric’ requires some explanation. It derives from the Greek meaning ‘further in’ and was first used in English by Thomas Stanley (1626– 1678) in his History of Philosophy (1655–1662) in reference to Pythagoras who was said to have allowed some of his pupils access to external or exoteric knowledge, while an élite group were permitted access to deeper, inner or esoteric knowledge.34 The distinction may imply but does not necessarily assert a distinction between secular and religious knowledge. In this exegetical study, setting the Hermetic texts against the play texts, I draw attention to words and ideas which simultaneously have one surface or exoteric meaning for the audience or reader of the play, but which conceal a deeper, esoteric meaning whose significance may be revealed to those who bring to the play their knowledge of the way of Hermes. The concealment, which von Stuckrad argues is definitive for what he has termed ‘esoteric discourse’ (2010, 43–64 passim), is achieved in the plays by various methods of dissimulation such as ambiguity, allegory, characterization and other devices of dramaturgy, as Part 2 of this monograph will examine. In the world outside the playhouse, esoteric knowledge, like any practice deemed heretical, treasonous or dangerous, was concealed, protected by a variety of ‘ways of lying’ that included dissembling, equivocation and Nicodemism (Zagorin 1990, 100–130 passim). In this context ‘esoteric’ refers both to the hidden knowledge of the paideia that can be revealed (spoken aloud), to the person deemed ready for it,35 and also to the more profound, inner knowledge – the gnōsis, or suprarational knowledge of the Mind of God, which is the culmination of the paideia, reached after contemplation and in a heightened state of consciousness. The experience of gnōsis is a profoundly private mystery which cannot be revealed and for which there are no words. 33

34 35

von Stuckrad for example does not distinguish between secular and religious thought and claims that ‘Most scholars share the opinion that “esotericism” covers such currents as Gnosticism, ancient Hermetism, the so-called “occult sciences” – notably astrology, (natural) magic, and alchemy – Christian mysticism, Renaissance Hermeticism, Jewish and Christian Kabbalah, Paracelsianism, Rosicrucianism, Christian theosophy, illuminism, nineteenth century occultism, traditionalism and various related currents up to “New Age” spiritualities’ (2008, 223). OED dates the usage to 1655 and defines ‘esoteric’ as ‘(Of a philosophical doctrine, mode of speech etc.) designed for, or appropriate to, an inner circle of advanced or privileged disciples; communicated to, or intelligible only to the initiated.’ It was permitted for a friend with the knowledge, that is, an Adept, to reveal that hidden inner meaning to another deemed ready and worthy to be initiated.

22

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Moreschini and other Italian scholars continue to enrich the field of inquiry through translations of and commentaries on the gnostic Hermetic texts meaning the Pymander itself and those that came after it. In 2011 Moreschini’s examination of ‘the way Christian philosophers and theologians appropriated and then elaborated Hermetic theosophy’ (vii), entitled Hermes Christianus, was published in English translation. His discussion of Ficino’s translation of Pymander draws on a new edition of the work by Maurizio Campanelli also published in 2011. Moreschini’s book includes his invaluable Prolegomena to the French translation of and commentary on the Corpus Hermeticum done by Bishop François Foix de Candale (1512–1594).36 Consequently, the translation of Moreschini’s work has enabled twenty-first century Anglophone scholars to study the effects of the assimilation of the Hermetic texts to Christianity in the years between 1463 and 1614. 6

Towards a Definition of Western Esotericism

The following brief outline of the current efforts to define ‘Western esotericism’ or ‘Hermeticism’ is intended to clarify the distinction between the magical Hermes of the Middle Ages, whose name had been associated with magic and trickery, eloquence and silence, astrology and alchemy since ancient times, in huge numbers of practical texts, and the ‘Hermes Trismegistus’ believed to be a wise man, near contemporary of Moses and author of the collection of non-magical religio-philosophic treatises, now known as the Corpus Hermeticum, which are the concern of this study. The former provides some insights into the pre-scientific ways of thinking or making sense of the world they lived in that were available to European men and women in late antiquity, the Middle Ages and in sixteenth-century Tudor England. Essentially outward-looking, these ancient and medieval practices survived until the Enlightenment and some, in one form or another, up to the present day. The latter, termed Hermetism, were essentially inward-looking, and concern the ways of knowing oneself and god contained in the salvific religious philosophy of the body of Greek texts that were welcomed in Florence c.1462. Effectively discredited in 1614 and

36

Moreschini’s translator, Patrick Baker, cautions readers that the English translation is two steps removed from Foix de Candale’s Middle French since Moreschini had first translated it into Italian. However, in this study I have accessed Foix de Candale’s original as printed and published in 1579 and available online from the Nationale Bibliothèque de France.

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subsequently rejected and forgotten, their theosophy also survives in various forms up to the present day. Thirty years ago, Antoine Faivre, himself a Christian theosopher and Freemason, was the first to attempt a theoretical definition of esotericism that would provide a methodological tool capable of being ‘completed and corrected’ by future researchers (in Hanegraaff 2012, 353). He defined esotericism as a ‘form of thought’ realized in four intrinsic or necessary components and two that are non-intrinsic. They are the idea of Correspondences between the visible and invisible universe, expressed in the famous Tabula Smaragdina or Emerald Tablet which taught that the macrocosm and the microcosm are interdependent: ‘As below, so above; as above, so below’ (Linden 2003, 28),37 and Living Nature, the idea of the universe itself as a living organism linked by a mystical network of sympathies and antipathies. The third characteristic, Imagination, is a vital tool leading towards spiritual enlightenment and connected to Mediations which act through rituals, symbolic images and intermediaries such as angels. Arthur McCalla explains these as complementary notions linked to the idea of Correspondences which act like an ‘eye of fire’ to pierce appearances and render the invisible visible’ (2001, 436), and fourth, the process of Transmutation where, by analogy with the purifying transmutation of base metals into gold, the human spirit of the initiate may be similarly purified, perfected and reborn and, once enlightened with knowledge, become one with God. These four intrinsic characteristics Faivre complemented with the Concordance of Traditions, seeking agreement between all esoteric traditions, and Transmission where the illuminated Adept must guide the initiate into the esoteric knowledge. Faivre’s typology of esotericism was derived inductively from the Hermetic view of the world that he observed in Europe following the recovery of the texts of the Corpus Hermeticum; in other words, modern Western esotericism for Faivre began with the Renaissance. However, precisely because it was developed ‘with reference to one cultural/geographical area and limited to one historical period’ (Eddy 2004, 214), predating the Enlightenment, Faivre’s paradigm has been subjected to critical scrutiny and development in recent years – ‘completed and corrected’ as he himself anticipated. Hanegraaff argued that the constituent criteria that Faivre proposed in his definition of esotericism together provided a theoretical model of ‘early modern enchantment’ that opposed ‘the disenchanted world views that came to dominate Western culture in the wake of the scientific revolution’ (2013, 5). But later, Hanegraaff 37

Impossible to date with accuracy, a Latin translation of an Arabic version appeared in the twelfth century.

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Introduction

clarified the definition of ‘form of thought’ as existing only as ‘the product of specific historic and cultural conditions’ rather than a theoretical concept (2015b, 78) (emphasis in original). Faivre’s world of ‘enchantment’ has a family resemblance to the now largely discredited view of Yates, who interpreted the texts of the Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepius, possibly seeing them through Bruno’s eyes, as responsible for the interest in Hermetic magic, alchemy and astrology in Renaissance Europe, and seeing the Enlightenment as their demise. But Faivre’s four criteria are not all of the same order. Only the first two reflect medieval magical beliefs; they concern the relationship of humankind to the external world – how human beings once made sense of and explained the world they lived in by looking for correspondences or signs in the stars, or in number in a world they did not understand and were powerless to predict or control. Magic was the means by which the secrets of God’s universe could be revealed, and magic of all kinds, good and bad, was sought: astral, demonic, sympathetic and natural, as well as numerology and gematria. Self-evidently these ways of explaining the world already prevailed in Europe, along with the Latin text of Asclepius, and predate the recovery and Latin translation of the treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum during the Italian Renaissance. The third and fourth characteristics of Faivre’s underlying ‘form of thought’ are somewhat different – both may also be found in the Pymander treatises, and both concern the interior world of human beings. Imagination concerns individuals, the mind, the mind’s eye and perceptions of reality (CH XI [18]; X [4]). Transmutation refers to a process analogous to alchemy whereby men and women could learn how to perfect themselves, and also to choose to change or shape their own destinies, becoming spiritually reborn in fact (CH XIII passim). Faivre went on to explain the ‘form of thought’ as a way of viewing the world that lent coherency to ‘an ensemble of spiritual currents’, which he itemized as: ‘spiritual alchemy, neo-Alexandrine hermetism, Christian Kabbalah, the so-called philosophia occulta, Paracelsianism, theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and a number of initiation societies as well as later currents’ (in McCalla, 436). Of these, only ‘neo-Alexandrine hermetism’, now established as the HellenicEgyptian source of Pymander (and possibly the associated ‘spiritual alchemy’, a trope for the process of spiritual rebirth which it teaches), purged now of all magic, was new to the Latin West in the fifteenth century. All the other currents in Faivre’s ‘ensemble’ were made in response to Pymander, which may explain why Faivre initially saw the Italian Renaissance as the birthplace of esotericism/Hermeticism. Faivre did not examine the response to Pymander of Catholic Christians, such as Ficino himself, and

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then Lazzarelli who saw the texts as prophesying the Christian truth. However, some of the esoteric currents he listed, such as Kabbalah, and the occult magic, alchemy and astrology, date from antiquity and were already familiar to readers of Pymander. Pico, and Johannes Reuchlin, for example, made the connection with ancient Jewish Kabbalah; others saw that the spiritual purification achieved through gnōsis was a trope for practical alchemy; theosophists, as they were later named, recognized a path to knowledge of God, or gnōsis. In predominantly German-speaking countries Paracelsianism and the later Rosicrucianism prevailed. The Swiss born Paracelsus, a physician and alchemist who established the role of chemicals in medical treatments, was a strong influence on the Hermetic, Rosicrucian manifestos usually attributed to the Lutheran, Johann Valentin Andreae. Nevertheless, the German manifestos post-date the interests of this study whose focus is on England in the time of Shakespeare. Faivre’s ensemble of currents includes those which modern scholars understand by ‘Western esotericism’ and which shelter under the term ‘Hermeticism’ (Hanegraaff 2005, 243). Many of these pre-scientific ideas, Hanegraaff argues, are connected by the fact that after the rational Enlightenment they were rejected as legitimate knowledge and for the most part fell out of favour. Religious Hermetism, the ‘religion of the mind’, however, fell out of favour much earlier and for different reasons. 7

More about Religious Hermetism

Hermetism is the name given to the particular current of religio-philosophic discourse flowing from its wellspring in Hellenic Egypt, as explicated in Pymander, that was revered as the prisca theologia when the treatises arrived in fifteenth century Italy. The manuscript, consisting of fourteen treatises which found a home in the Florentine Academy around 1462 to be translated by Ficino, was later supplemented by three additional tracts from a longer manuscript known to Lazzarelli. The collection of seventeen texts, now known as the Corpus Hermeticum, was for many years referred to as Pymander after the name for God in the first treatise, ‘Poimandres’. Pymander was soon connected with another set of Hermetic texts, long known in Latin as the Asclepius, and the two sets of religio-philosophic texts are now united under the rubric Hermetica. The Hermetic texts which Ficino and Lazzarelli translated outline the levels of the paideia which the initiate must ascend, using the mind to know oneself, perfect oneself and ultimately, possibly in a state of ecstatic trance, achieve a higher and suprarational knowledge (gnōsis) of the Mind of God that

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is spiritual rebirth and salvation (Hanegraaff 2008, 133–151). For Hanegraaff, as the title of the dictionary he co-edited indicates, gnōsis is of fundamental importance to Western esotericism. The way of Hermes to salvation must be experienced; it can be told but it cannot be taught, and according to Iamblichus, ‘the theurgic mystagogy cannot even be thought’ (Shaw 2015, 139). Having thus achieved the knowledge and the status of Adept, it is incumbent on the initiate to ‘become guide to the worthy’ (CH I [26]) and also to ‘promise to be silent’ (CH XIII). That is the paradox inherent in the texts which, throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were revered as God’s earliest words to humankind. What was new in fifteenth century Florence, was that the fourteen treatises of Pymander translated by Ficino from the Greek were entirely devoid of any reference to magic, astrology or alchemy. What they did contain was an answer to the ethical question that underlies most religions: how should I live my life in order to save my immortal soul?38 As we will see, when coupled with the text of Asclepius (which did contain a brief reference to magic), the texts offered a view of creation which differed from that of Genesis; a view that owed something to Plato of death as nothing more than change effected as separation of the immortal soul from the material body which was then recycled into the cosmos; a humanist view of humankind as superior to all animals, possessed of dignity, of imagination and of rational mind, empowered with the will freely to choose one’s fate. There is only a little that is unique to the Corpus Hermeticum and much that represents a syncretization of ideas that may be found in other sources, including some texts of late antiquity and the Middle Ages which are briefly outlined in Chapter 1 of this book. The rise and fall of the religio-philosophic Corpus Hermeticum, with its hope of salvation by gnōsis for all, in a world transformed by tolerance and love for one another, began with its arrival in Catholic Europe c.1462 and effectively ended in 1614. The trajectory may be read in the warm welcome given to the texts, newly Latinized in the belief that they were God’s earliest words to humankind; they spread rapidly throughout Europe thanks to the new technology of printing. They were welcomed in Italy, treated with respect in France and with caution in England, only to be discredited by the twin events of 1614. In England, Isaac Casaubon exposed them, on philological grounds, as texts of the first centuries of the Christian era, while in Germany, a Lutheran enthusiast, probably Andreae, assisted by a printer in the employ of the Calvinist Landgrave, Maurice of Marburg, published a strongly Hermetic manifesto described as Rosicrucian. It was quickly followed by two more in 1615 and 1617. Not only 38

The concept of ‘soul’ is attributed to the pagan Plato.

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did the manifestos present a fictional German ‘Christian Rosencreutz’, they were also greatly influenced by Paracelsus and by alchemy, and they took the opportunity of condemning the Pope and Mahomet as ‘blasphemers against our Lord Jesus Christ’.39 The Protestant manifestos caused alarm in Germany. Any converts to Hermetism, assuming there were some, denied all knowledge or were silenced. The repudiated texts were publicly disowned, held in disrepute, and in Germany virtually obliterated by the Thirty Years War. In England, any who might have been suspected of following Hermetism, such as members of the Family of Love or possibly even Freemasons, have left scarcely a trace on the public record before the 1640s. Later in the seventeenth century, in England the Rosicrucians were comprehensively ridiculed in Samuel Butler’s satire, Hudibras. Nevertheless, as Andreas Önnerfors observes, their ‘theosophy not only survived the enlightenment, but flourished’ (2016, 176). Hermetic thought continues to flourish quietly in the modern world in theosophy, as well as in deism, in the philanthropic brotherhood known as Freemasonry,40 and more tenuously in the Society of Friends or Quakers, both of which societies welcome people of all faiths. On the other hand, the constituents of Esotericism or Hermeticism – the practice of alchemy and resort to a belief in the stars as much as in the power of numbers magically to explain the inexplicable world – date to ancient times and may be found in Pharaonic and in Hellenized Egypt. Despite being swamped in the eighteenth century by a tsunami of irrefutable mathematical and empirical explanations of God’s world, several of those esoteric currents survived the rational Enlightenment, and today related beliefs and practices persist in horoscopes, Tarot cards, belief in alternative medicines, suspicion of science (currently of epidemiology and vaccines), and other practices which, rejected by the mainstream, serve to define practitioners as ‘Other’. Faivre’s pioneering definition of ‘esotericism’ was criticized because it was derived inductively from a finite set of sources located in the early modern period, and because his definition limited the application of the concept to the Renaissance and denied its application to other periods such as those that preceded the Renaissance – late antiquity and the Middle Ages – and also to the New Age and modern times. Von Stuckrad, for example, challenges Faivre’s definition of esotericism as a ‘form of thought’ and contends that ‘Western 39 40

From the second manifesto, Confessio Fraternitatis. Robert Macoy admits that ‘alchemy has been more or less connected with Freemasonry’ since the Rosicrucians and claims that ‘one of the most interesting degrees in Freemasonry, the twenty-eighth – “Adepts or Knights of the Eagle and the Sun”’ an English order, is founded on the Hermetic philosophy (1989, 81).

28

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esotericism should be understood as part and parcel of a broader analysis of European history of religion’ (2008, 217), an approach which accords no special status to the non-magical religious Hermetism of the Corpus Hermeticum and subsumes it into the wider field of magical Hermeticism. Even though he acknowledges that ‘esotericism’ is widely used to signify ‘movements that are based on a secret wisdom that is only accessible to an “inner circle” of initiates’, von Stuckrad holds that ‘secret initiatory knowledge’ is relatively unimportant (2008, 217). On the other hand, Hugh Urban advances the proposition that ‘esotericism is very often an élitist phenomenon, the province of highly educated, affluent and powerful intellectuals, who do not wish to overthrow the existing religious and political structures, but rather either to reinforce them or else to bend and reshape them’ (1997, 1). He notes that Faivre’s extensive theorizing does not account for the social and political contexts in which esoteric traditions emerge (1997, 2) and proposes to examine ‘the strategies and tactics through which secrets are concealed and revealed, to whom in what contexts and through what relations of power they are exchanged’ (1997, 3) (emphasis in original). Urban’s sociological approach is compatible with von Stuckrad’s preference for approaching esotericism as a current of ‘esoteric discourse’ amenable to techniques of discourse analysis and suggests a future line of inquiry to complement this book. Where this study seeks to establish the presence or absence of doctrines arising from the Corpus Hermeticum in four plays through an exegetical analysis of their content, a sociological study could address the strategic importance of Shakespeare’s audiences, which were by no means restricted to London nor for that matter to England; nor were his plays solely the entertainment of the masses. Richard Dutton has demonstrated Shakespeare’s role as dramatist to the royal court where the plays were written and revised for the highly educated, well-read, powerful, travelled élite such as Urban describes. It is not widely discussed in current Anglophone scholarship, but troupes of players, usually under the patronage of a nobleman, performed throughout the length and breadth of England in great houses and in towns.41 From 1583 when the Queen’s Men were formed for the purpose of informing the English of their own history and whipping up patriotism as they prepared to defend England against the Spanish, until at least 1618 when Derby’s Men are reported in Yorkshire, even the London-based companies travelled. The Lord Admiral, Charles Howard, who was also responsible for issuing travellers with passes to guarantee 41

They included the Queen’s Men, Sussex’s Men, Pembroke’s Men, Derby’s Men in England and the Browne-Greensch troupe who were especially prominent in Germany.

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safe passage through the ports, was patron of a well-known company, the Admiral’s Men.42 Albert Cohn reports troupes of English players travelling intermittently throughout Germany, between 1585 and well after the Thirty Years War had begun. Emil Herz records twenty-three English plays performed in Europe, mainly Germany, but also in Gdansk, Vienna and Prague, by ten companies of English players over a period of thirty or more years. Twelve of those plays were attributed to Shakespeare and included King Lear and Othello.43 Players were well-placed to provide cover for gathering intelligence; they were equally well-placed, had they so wished, secretly to disseminate a non-conformist, nonconfessional dissident religion such as Christian Hermetism without causing alarm. In England and in France, Familists remained invisible by practising Nicodemism (see Appendix 4). ‘The esoteric tradition’, Urban contends, ‘allows the individual to live a seemingly orthodox, traditional conservative life in the outer social world, while at the same time leading a secret inner life, often involving powerful heterodox or even antinomian practices’ (1997, 3). 8 Before the Recovery of Pymander – Hermes Trismegistus in Medieval Times In a major paradigm shift von Stockrad has challenged the assumption that the European history of religion is monolithically Christian and called for Western Europe in the Middle Ages to be recognized as a religiously plural culture, a concept which Faivre’s definition that implicitly privileges Western Christianity in early modern Europe does not accommodate. Von Stuckrad is principally concerned with the contribution of the other monotheistic Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, to European culture. In this respect, however, continental Europe differs from England where there is no recorded Islamic presence, and where, after the appalling York pogrom of 1190 and the official expulsion in 1290, Jewish people had no overt community presence for centuries. Von 42

43

It may or may not be a coincidence that in 1723 Anderson’s Constitutions named Charles Howard as a masonic Grand Master. William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, who was Lord Chamberlain in 1623 when the First Folio was published, is also recorded as a masonic Grand Master. See Albert Cohn. 1865. Shakespeare in Germany. London: Asher; Emil Herz. 1903. Englische Schauspieler und englisches Schauspiel zur Zeit Shakespeares in Deutschland. Hamburg and Leipzig: Leopold Voss. More recently Jerzy Limon has detailed the presence of English players in Central and Eastern Europe, Poland, Bohemia and Austria where they performed some sixty-three plays, including eight by Shakespeare, between 1590 and 1660. Jerzy Limon. 1985. Gentlemen of a Company. Cambridge: CUP.

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Stuckrad and others have raised objections to the perceived hegemony of the adjective ‘Western’ which has both cultural and geographic connotations and, as we noted earlier, the research field is now expanded to include esotericism and mysticism occurring in Islam and in Judaism as well as in North America, Africa, India and beyond. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that, as we have seen, Shakespeare’s England, although no longer perceived as monolithically Protestant, was both culturally Western and predominantly and officially Christian. Von Stuckrad, however, seeks to recognize the status and the contribution to esoteric thought from Hebrew, from Arabic and also from the Persian. It is a point well made. As he explains, Jewish Kabbalah, practical alchemy, gnōsis and even a form of mysticism known as Sufi, practised by the Persian Sunni Muslim, Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi (1154–1191), like neo-Alexandrine Hermetism itself, were known in medieval times (2010, 27–28). Szönyi is another who noted that the Middle Ages were a world with a ‘great variety of medieval magical theories and practices’, including the technical and popular hermetic texts, ‘certain trajectories springing from Jewish merkabah mysticism and the Kabbalah’, as well as Arabic works of magic that had been translated into Latin, such as Picatrix (2016, 55). Medieval Hermes, whose sayings Caxton printed, was still a presence (Gill 1984, 223), and Maurizio Campanelli in a recent paper has demonstrated that even the new profile of Hermes Trismegistus which Ficino sketched in the Preface to his translation to replace the medieval ones is still coloured by the old Arabic Hermes (2019, 57). Beliefs and practices, like magic and astrology, contributed to the view of the world and the place of human beings in that world that obtained from the earliest years of the Christian Era, and they contribute to a broader overview of the intellectual milieu that received the prisca theologia in Catholic Italy c.1462. Ficino was already familiar with Hermes Trismegistus through the Liber viginti quattuor philosophorum,44 and the fourth century Logos teleios or Perfect discourse which had been known in the Latin West as Asclepius for centuries. Asclepius complements Pymander but it contains four sections (23–24, 37–38) about statues becoming ‘ensouled and conscious’ which tainted the text with a reputation for bad magic.45 The latter book refers to the power, wisdom and goodness of God, and the title which Ficino gave to his translation of Pymander echoes the first two attributes (potestas et sapientia Dei), while 44

A medieval text sometimes attributed to Hermes Trismegistus containing twenty-four definitions of God. 45 The Asclepius was known to Augustine (354–430 CE), who attacked Hermes in The City of God.

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he dedicated the Asclepius to voluntas Dei, the will of God, which ‘created all things on account of the love lodged in its goodness’ (Opera I, 488). From the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, the Hermetic texts were known in some form, directly or indirectly, to men such as the Greek intellectual and aristocrat Michael Psellos (c.1018–c.1082) of Constantinople. It was Psellos who reintroduced the study of Plato, Plotinus and Homer (through a summary of the Iliad), to Byzantine scholarship. Psellos loathed goetia and it is possible that he (or other later Byzantine scholars who shared his loathing) had scrupulously expurgated any hint of magic from the redacted manuscript treatises of Pymander (the Corpus Hermeticum) that were brought to Cosimo de’Medici in Florence. In Renaissance Italy the texts of Pymander, newly translated from the Greek, were being read in a world that had been being quietly influenced for several centuries in the east by contact with Greek and Roman manuscripts. Ancient manuscripts were known to men such as Pierre Abelard (1079–1142) in France, to Albertus Magnus (1199–1280) Bishop of Cologne in Germany, and to Alighieri Dante (1265–1321) in Italy. Manuscripts were actively sought by Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) (1304–1374) who has left marginalia evidence that he knew of Hermetic thought, and also by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), all later described as ‘humanists’. It is not impossible that Hermes’ view of the worth and dignity of humankind expressed in Asclepius, which influenced Pico della Mirandola, was known also to scholars of the studia humanitas. In England the Hermetic doctrines were known at the university of Oxford to the philosophers Roger Bacon (c.1220–1292) (who also knew Greek, and Arabic texts on optics), and to Thomas Bradwardine (1300–1349). Bradwardine challenged the importance given to free will by Hermes, on the grounds that, by empowering Man to seek his own salvation, free will effectively diminishes the sovereign power of God; he also suggested that the controversial passages in Asclepius be interpreted as allegorical.46 Bradwardine acknowledged Hermes Trismegistus as the father of the philosophers who recognized the goodness and perfection of God, and he interpreted the triple greatness of the philosopher in his own way, as ‘king of Egypt, philosopher and poet’ (Moreschini 2011, 118–119). These several belief systems – humanism, the magical Hermeticism, Jewish and Islamic mysticism – were complemented by parallel currents also rooted in antiquity such as the mathematical and scientific currents, harbingers of the 46

Bradwardine’s interest in the Hermetic doctrine has been deduced from underlinings and marginalia in a manuscript found by Eugenio Garin at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence (1988), discussed in Moreschini (2011, 118).

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rational Enlightenment, which I mention here merely to distinguish them from esoteric currents. They included the introduction of Hindu-Arabic numerals, and the concept of algebra in the ninth century by the Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khowarizmi (780–850). Translated into Latin from the Arabic in the twelfth century by Robert of Chester, algebra became known in the West. Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576), for example, used algebra to solve the cubic equation in 1545 just two years after Copernicus’ work on the heliocentric universe was published posthumously. In the mid-seventeenth century, René Descartes (1596–1650), who had encountered algebra while at university, famously applied algebra to Pythagoras’ theorem. Experimental science using observation and measurement was increasingly practised, for example by Solomon de Caus (1576–1626) who was a hydraulic engineer. De Caus was in the employ of Prince Henry Stuart (1594– 1612) in London and, after the prince’s premature death, of his brother-in-law, Frederick V Elector Palatine. De Caus designed and built the once famous terraced Palatine gardens on the hillside below the Heidelberg Schloss. There, inspired no doubt by the Tivoli Gardens, he used water to power the mechanized statues in the wonderful Hortus Palatinus, to the delight of the Princess Elizabeth Stuart, Electress Palatine and later Queen of Bohemia, and the English entourage who accompanied her to Heidelberg as a bride in 1613. The century that began with Galileo (1564–1642) searching the skies with his telescope, and the new emphasis on observation and empirical study, also saw the invention of the microscope in 1600 by Zacarias Janssen (1585–?) and its scientific use by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) in the Netherlands, and also in England by Robert Hooke (1635–1703). Arguably it was the inventiveness and brilliance of these minds, and others like Isaac Newton (1643–1727) and Gottfried Liebniz (1646–1716), which led to the so-called ‘disenchantment’ of the rational Enlightenment and the eventual rejection of the form of thought and most of the ensemble of Hermetic ideas that characterized the years of the Renaissance. The ‘enchanted’ world which welcomed Pymander in 1463 was believed to be a geocentric sphere surrounded by eight or possibly nine concentric spheres where God and his angels occupied the outermost places in a finite universe; it was a world where people sought certainty in astrology, looked for meaning in numerology, and hoped to unlock the secret of making gold; it was a world where men and women kept secrets, and men, like the polymath Johannes Trithemius, Abbott of Sponheim (1462–1516), and the mathematician Cardano, found ways to communicate in secret codes and ciphers. It was a world that held the Polish astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), and the German Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1536), polymath

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and mathematician now hailed as a Christian Hermetist, but formerly reviled as a black magician. While Agrippa was devising Magic Squares (Tyson 2004, 733–751), Copernicus was establishing the truth of an heliocentric universe. According to Yates, Copernicus saw the clause in Book XVI [7] of the Pymander, that ‘the sun is situated at the centre of the cosmos, wearing it like a crown’ as validation of the position he had arrived at by mathematical proof.47 Beliefs that in the modern world are held to be incompatible could be held in the same mind. John Dee, an English polymath, astrologer and mathematician, was feared and ostracised as a magician when, by using ropes and pulleys, he created the illusion of a man who could fly, in a student production of Aristophanes’ Pax. The man who practised astrology and understood the Hermetic teaching well enough to write the abstruse Monas Hieroglyphica, also wrote the Mathematicall Preface to the first English translation of Euclid. Similarly, the French Catholic Bishop Foix de Candale, whose translation and extensive commentary of the Corpus Hermeticum is consulted in this study, made the first French translation of Euclid. Habits of mind fade slowly. Kepler practised astrology. Newton had an interest in alchemy. Some members of the Royal Society were also Freemasons. Three hundred years after the recovery of Pymander and a hundred and fifty years after Hermes Trismegistus’ status as ‘King, Philosopher, Priest’ as old as Moses was diminished, the old magical Hermes was also slipping away: the universe was heliocentric, and mathematical knowledge that stemmed originally from Pythagoras, geometry from Euclid, algebra from the Arabs, in the minds of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Mersenne, Descartes, and then calculus from Newton and Leibniz had changed the way people understood their world. Alchemy, astrology, numerology, Kabbalah, gematria and other magical and esoteric practices were increasingly marginalized, rejected because there were better ways to explain the world. Mathematics had usurped magic, and reason had enlightened and modernized the world. Shakespeare lived half-way between those worlds. The early modern world view that Faivre identified as a world of ‘enchantment’ saturates the plays of Shakespeare as any work of art is saturated with the culture from which it springs. However, where previous studies have explored the Hermeticism of that magic world, this study looks for evidence that the current of the gnostic religious philosophy of the Corpus Hermeticum or Hermetism that flowed through the long sixteenth century is also flowing through the plays.

47

Frances Yates. 1984. “Copernicus”. In Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renaissance: Collected Essays.

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9 The Reception and Transmission of the Hermetic Texts in Fifteenth Century Italy, in Sixteenth Century France and in England – Hermes Trismegistus in the Renaissance Soon after he obtained the text called Poimandres, Cosimo de’Medici also purchased numerous texts of Plato, previously unknown in the West, as well as those of some Neoplatonists: Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus. Ficino proceeded to translate them and went on to write and publish extensive commentaries which circulated in print as soon as they were finished. An edition of Asclepius was also printed in 1469, but Pymander was not published in print until 1471, and not by Ficino. It is possible that the admonition to secrecy in Book XIII made Ficino cautious, while others responded to the contradictory exhortation in the first Book to share the news. Book I, after outlining the process by which the material body may rise up, purifying itself of its torments until, reborn, it enters into god (I [24–26]), encourages those who have received the knowledge of god, the gnōsis, not to delay telling others: ‘having learned all this, should you not become guide to the worthy so that through you the human race may be saved by god?’ (I [26]). By contrast, Book XIII which gives more detail about how mankind may ‘know the means of rebirth’ and ‘be divinized by this birth’ (XIII [10]), teaches that ‘the hymn of rebirth’ cannot be taught and is ‘a secret kept in silence’ (XIII [16]). Like Ficino, Lazzarelli did not see his translation into print, preferring to present the beautiful manuscript to his friend and mentor, the self-styled ‘Mercurio’ da Correggio. While the fourteen tracts which Ficino had were theoretical, entirely free of magic and alchemy, Lazzarelli was working from a manuscript with three additional tracts (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 2005, 4), one of which, Definitions of Asclepius to King Ammon, situates the sun at the centre of the cosmos, and also tells of astral daemons which determine one’s destiny at birth. Although concepts like astral daemons may have challenged Christian orthodoxy, early Catholic translators, such as Lazzarelli, found ways of reconciling Hermetic thought with Christian teaching. In fact, they read the Hermetic texts as affirmation of Christian teaching. In 1501, after Lazzarelli’s death, his eccentric mentor, da Correggio, to whom Lazzarelli had gifted his work, presented the manuscript to an ambassador of the French king, Louis XII. Symphorien Champier, one of the king’s physicians, is believed to have been present in Lyon at the time, and in 1507 he published Lazzarelli’s three additional chapters, as Diffinitiones Asclepii.48 48

It is not entirely clear how Champier obtained the manuscript, but Hanegraaff cites Vecce who identified Champier as a physician seen talking with Correggio (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 2005, 41 n.133).

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Ficino’s translation was already known in France thanks to a new corrected edition published in 1494 by Lefèvre d’Etaples. Then in 1505 Lefèvre published another edition of Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum to which he appended the Asclepius, and Lazzarelli’s commentary on Book IV, the Crater Hermetis. The latter work, described by Hanegraaff as ‘one of the purest and most explicit examples of hermetic-Christian syncretism’, has been recognized by Kristeller ‘as a work of pivotal importance to our understanding of Renaissance hermetism’ (in Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 2005, 57). In the Crater Hermetis, Lazzarelli develops his arguments in the form of a didactic dialogue with Ferdinand I of Aragon, king of Naples and Sicily (1423/24–1494) who ‘intent on contemplation’ desired ‘peace of mind’ (1.3, 169). Ferdinand was of great interest to the French who had a long history of warring for possession of Naples and Milan. He is very probably the Ferdinand for whom Shakespeare named the king in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the prince of Naples in The Tempest. The former provides an unusual historic link between the world of the play and the real socio-political world in which the esoteric Hermetic text was read. The play appears to dramatize aspects of the reunion of the Catholic Marguerite de Valois with her estranged husband Henri Bourbon, Huguenot king of Navarre, between 1579 and 1582 (Viennot 199 n.399).49 Furthermore, there is substantial evidence, discussed below, that during those years Foix de Candale’s Le Pimandre, dedicated to Marguerite, was read and discussed openly at the court of ‘le roi son époux’. It is clear from the record of translations, editions and transmission that from 1494 to 1579 the Hermetic texts were received most favourably in France both by the Catholic court and the episcopate. Translations and commentaries were not only openly dedicated to bishops, but also undertaken by bishops such as Foix de Candale who was both Catholic Bishop of Aire and also kinsman to the Huguenot Henri of Navarre. Nevertheless, despite this and despite the politique inclinations of the court, in the second half of the sixteenth century, before the Treaty of Nantes, continual savage religious civil wars destroyed roughly a third of the population of France. In the late 1570s, a sect which had begun in the Netherlands in 1540 as Das Haus der Liebe emerged in England as the Family of Love. Their gnostic beliefs in the perfectibility of men and women who through their own efforts could become god-like, or ‘godded with god’ as they expressed it, were remarkably similar to Hermetic doctrine. After investigation by the Privy Council, the queen issued a Proclamation against them in 1580; although Familists virtually

49

The Huguenots were French Calvinists.

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disappeared from the public record from that time, they almost certainly continued to meet protected by their practice of Nicodemism.50 Unlike Catholic France, where Hermetic texts were apparently published and read openly from 1494 to 1579 or later, Protestant England, after the accession of Queen Elizabeth, avoided the virus of heresy by enforcing draconian legislation.51 Early in the century there had been interest in Hermetism on the part of John Colet (?1466–1519) who corresponded with Ficino, Thomas More (1478–1535), who translated the Life of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and by visitors to England such as Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466/69–1536), followed by Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535) in 1510, but there is little recorded before Dr John Dee (1527–1608) produced the famously obscure Monas Hieroglyphica in 1564. Recognized as a polymath extraordinaire, Dee was an astronomer, astrologer, alchemist, Catholic priest, Greek scholar and mathematician as well as Hermetic magus (Parry 29). He shared an interest in geometry with the French bishop-translator, Foix de Candale. Dee’s documented interest in Hermetism begins with his time in Paris in 1550, when he lectured on mathematical philosophy to a class that included Adrian Turnebus. In 1554 Turnebus published a new Greek edition of the Corpus Hermeticum; to Ficino’s fourteen chapters he added as Book XV some fragments from the Anthologium of John of Stobi or Stobaeus,52 and Lazzarelli’s Diffinitiones Asclepii, which Dee owned (French 55). Dee’s enigmatic Monas which undertook to ‘enable man to release himself from his body and return to his original divine nature’ (French 7) is purely Hermetic. His vast library ‘where the Hermetic corpus . . . occupied a prominent 50 51

52

Nicodemites conformed outwardly to the official church wherever they found themselves and followed their own beliefs and practices in secret or at least in private. To control the spread of sedition and heresy, after 1559 all books to be imported from abroad or to be printed in England had to be licensed by ‘her majesty, six of her privy council, or certain specified dignitaries of the Church’ (Oxford Companion to English Literature, 1101), such as Archbishop Whitgift after 1583, or the Bishop of London, and only members of the chartered Stationers’ Company were permitted to print work for sale. Similarly, from 1574 all plays in England, whether for private entertainment or on the public stage, had to be approved by the Master of the Revels, and ‘no plays were to be so licensed which treated of religion or of the governance of the country’ (Oxford Companion, 1105). Both had the power to censor or to forbid the printing of a manuscript, or the performance of a play, to call in and burn existing publications and after 1581 to punish and imprison offenders. Around the year 500 CE Stobaeus compiled an anthology containing forty excerpts from Hermetic writings including parts of Books II, IV, X and the Asclepius. The clear implication is that at least those treatises were known by that time, if not already collected in the form of the Corpus Hermeticum (Copenhaver 1992, xlii). Later editors of the Corpus Hermeticum who omitted Book XV retained the numbering of Books XVI to XVIII.

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corner’ (Sherman xiv), was available to his many friends, who included Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), and Sir Walter Ralegh (?1554–1618), both of whom revealed a knowledge of Hermetism in their writing. It was Sidney who undertook to English De la Vérité de la religion chrétienne by his friend the Protestant Philippe du Plessis Mornay (1549–1623), who had originally dedicated the work to Henri of Navarre.53 Yates notes that the marginalia record Mornay’s frequent recourse to the Pymander and the Asclepius, and describes Mornay as ‘an example of how men were turning to the Hermetic religion of the world to take them above these conflicts’ (1964, 1991, 176–177). By ‘conflicts’, she is referring to the continual religious wars between the Catholic League, led by the duc de Guise, and the Huguenots, that were devastating France. Nevertheless, while Jeanne Harrie correctly calls for more evidence to support Yates’ opinion of Mornay (1978, 505), it is a matter of fact that Henri of Navarre, a man probably sympathetic to religious Hermetism, was able to legislate religious peace in France. It was possibly Sidney who brought Bruno to England from Paris where he had been well-received at the court of Henri III to whom he dedicated a work on solar magic and the art of memory: De umbris idearum (On the Shadows of Ideas) was published in Paris in 1582. In London Bruno resided with the French ambassador, the politique Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissière, between 1583 and 1585. Bruno was a prolific writer with wide-ranging, eclectic interests; during his London years he wrote extensively on a variety of subjects and published six works in Italian, presumably for the court where he was warmly received.54 Bruno was familiar with the Hermetic texts, and in 1583 he astonished dons at Oxford with his enthusiasm for the heliocentric universe revealed in the Corpus Hermeticum which asserts, centuries before Copernicus, that ‘the sun is situated in the centre of the cosmos’ (CH XVI [7]). Bruno’s London works included La cena de le ceneri (Ash Wednesday Supper), where he expounds Copernican theory and mocks the Oxford dons. In De gli eroici furori (Heroic Frenzies), he inveighs against wasting time on the love of woman in favour of the spiritual love of God, which inflames the soul with the love of wisdom; somewhat tactlessly, he dedicated the book to Sidney, author of the love songs and sonnets Astrophel and Stella. A third book, the heretical Lo Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast) about purging heaven of all the vices, particularly ignorance, is an allegory for 53 54

The implication of the dedication is that the Huguenot king of Navarre looked with interest on religious Hermetism. All were published by John Charlwood but under a false imprint presumably to mislead the censor.

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reforming the whole wide world. There is no record of Bruno’s ever having met Dee, who may have been present at his Oxford lecture, but who left London for Prague at the end of 1583. Ralegh, however, knew Dee, sought his advice on navigation, and was in a position to borrow his books; his knowledge of Hermetism is clear from his History of the World published in 1614. Ralegh’s coterie included Ferdinando, Lord Strange, whose playing company, Strange’s Men, was the first to perform plays later attributed to Shakespeare on the public stage, possibly Christopher Marlowe, and the poets George Peele and George Chapman – all contemporaries of and probably known to Shakespeare. Like Marlowe, whose Massacre at Paris drew on the events following the marriage of Henri Bourbon and Marguerite de Valois, Chapman was knowledgeable about affairs at the French court and wrote at least three plays employing that knowledge.55 More immediately relevant to this study however is an assertion by Jean Jacquot, Chapman’s biographer, that he ‘connaissait bien’ Ficino’s Latin translation of Pymander liber de potestate et sapientia Dei (1951, 74 n.30). Jacquot connects the vision that Chapman claimed inspired him to translate Homer with passages borrowed from Books I and X of Pymander and argues convincingly that other works of Chapman such as The Essay on the Soul, The Shadow of Night, Banquet of Sense and The Tears of Peace not only cite frequently from Plato, Plotinus and Ficino, but are saturated with ideas from the Hermetica (1951, 225). Francis Bacon (1561–1626) is another contemporary of Shakespeare who took an interest in philosophic Hermetism. Steven Matthews in his dissertation on Bacon notes cautiously that ‘his particular Christian theology [. . .] facilitated a sympathetic reception of particular Hermetic ideas’ (2004, 380). In England, the last two decades of the sixteenth century were politically volatile. The country feared invasion by the Catholic Spanish from without and support for the Catholic Spanish from fifth columnists within. As a member of the Privy Council in 1588, Archbishop Whitgift set up a panel to ‘peruse and allow’ books for the Stationers’ Company to license and print. Their task was to suppress or prevent any kind of dissidence or heterodoxy which was deemed seditious because it undermined the authority of church and state. Whitgift, who was also the head of the Conciliar Court of High Commission, a church court whose primary purpose was to try recusant Catholics, turned his attention to non-conformists but particularly the Presbyterian Separatists who wanted to abolish the episcopate. The Separatist John Penry, believed, wrongly, 55

Bussy d’Ambois about a former lover of Marguerite de Valois, assassinated just before she travelled to Navarre in 1579, The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois and The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron.

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to have been responsible for printing the Martin Marprelate tracts attacking the episcopate, was hanged in 1593, while Robert Southwell, a devout Jesuit priest, a notable poet, and a kinsman of Shakespeare, was arrested in 1592 and after three years of torture, publicly hanged, drawn and quartered, the punishment for traitors. A Jesuit priest living in exile, Robert Parsons, accused Ralegh of running a ‘school of Atheism’, members of the Privy Council of ‘living as Atheists’, and Lord Burghley, the Queen’s Treasurer, he accused of encouraging Atheism in the universities (Trevelyan 2003, 191). The playwright Christopher Marlowe was arrested in May 1593 on a charge of Atheism but released on his own recognizance by the Court of Star Chamber, only to meet a violent death, before the month was out, at the hands of a man the coroner found to have acted in selfdefence. It was said of Marlowe that ‘almost into every company he cometh he perswades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbears and hobgoblins’, and that there will soon be ‘by his and his felowes persuasions as many of their opinion as of any other religion’.56 The implication of the accusation is that Marlowe’s ‘Atheism’ is a kind of religion. If indeed it was religious Hermetism that Marlowe was allegedly spreading, then his documented words enter the stream of discourse that includes a scatter of overt references to Hermes or Hermes Trismegistus. These may be found in the writing of men such as Gabriel Harvey, George Peele and Thomas Nashe, as well as in the report of the Christmas revels held at Gray’s Inn in 1594, the Gesta Grayorum. The implication is that in the early part of the 1590s, Hermetism was part of the conversation at a time when plays later attributed to Shakespeare were beginning to come to the public stage. If there were conventicles of men and women such as the Family of Love, or brotherhoods such as the Freemasons, meeting to read, debate and learn about non-conformist ideas, such as may be found in the Hermetic texts, they have left scarcely a trace on the public record. The stream of discourse dries up, or flows underground or is concealed in ambiguity, allegory, or tropes of various kinds. Asquith argues that Shakespeare concealed his Catholic politics in code and ‘consistently used allegory to communicate with an oppressed and persecuted [Catholic] England’ (2005, xvii); while Donna Hamilton, a decade before the Lancaster conference, believes that Shakespeare incorporated ‘the idioms of protestant polemical discourse in his plays’ (1992, x). Both offer reasons why Shakespeare might have needed to resort to ambivalence, and they identify methods by which he achieved this. Neither suspects that Shakespeare 56

BL Harleian MS 6848 ff. 185–186. See also copy of this document with deletions MS 6853 ff. 307, 308.

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may have been concealing an interest in a non-conformist religion. Discussing the hermeneutics of censorship, Patterson floated the notion of ‘a highly sophisticated system of oblique communication’ used by Shakespeare and others to communicate with readers and audiences without inviting confrontation (1984, 45). She singles out King Lear as a play that was ‘designed to be ambiguous’, and she perceives that the play raises disputed questions ‘not capable of easy resolution’ (1984, 60). In this study I also ask whether, by embedding controversial religious questions in his plays, Shakespeare might be providing his readers with the impetus and the wherewithal for religious debate. First, because heterodox ideas encountered in the Hermetica had a contribution to make to religious discussion and, second, although it was forbidden to dispute religious matters (referred to as the ‘prophesyings’), arising from the approved Homilies delivered in church, there was no law preventing men and women from discussing a play they had seen on stage or read together from a manuscript. Of the plays discussed in this study, Love’s Labour’s Lost was the first of the canon to be printed under Shakespeare’s name (‘newly corrected and augmented’), and that may have occurred without his authority. That play and The Tempest were only ever performed at court. King Lear was first printed in Quarto in 1608 after Whitgift’s death and Othello not until 1622. Both carried on the title page a printer’s emblem of a Hermetic caduceus gripped by two hands. None of these plays attracted official censure. For readers in the sixteenth century, the Hermetic texts provided a discourse grounded in and validated by the authority of the past, while at the same time both asserting man’s aspirations to perfectibility and imagining the concomitant possibilities of a tolerant utopian society. Pico della Mirandola famously developed the idea of the former in his Oratio, De hominis dignitate (c.1487) and Shakespeare’s debt to Pico may be seen in Hamlet’s praise of Man: ‘Hamlet: What piece of work is a Man [. . .] in apprehension how like a god’ (2.2.305–308).57 In the last decade of the sixteenth century in England, every effort was made to silence dissidence: offending plays were censored, printing presses destroyed, and printed books called in and burnt on Whitgift’s orders. Traitors and heretics were treated alike. Catholic priests, like Southwell, and 57

Lodovico Lazzarelli used the phrase in A Dialogue on the Supreme Dignity of Man, entitled The Way of Christ and the Mixing-Bowl of Hermes (c.1494) and Hanegraaff notes, after Moreschini, that ‘the “Dignity of Man” was a popular theme at the time’; he suggests that the title was probably conferred on Pico’s Oratio in ‘a corrupt 1504 Strasbourg version’, and that the original title may have been Oratio ad laudes philosophiae or similar (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 167).

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non-conformists, like Penry, died hideously; an eloquent Atheist like Marlowe, reputed to be persuading large numbers of men to ‘Atheism’, died in suspicious circumstances, and the Familist sect seems to have sunk without a trace. Playwrights could be imprisoned for offending, but there is no record of any of the plays securely attributed to Shakespeare having been censored by the Master of the Revels or prevented by the Stationers’ Company.58 Several conclusions are possible: either the plays contain nothing that could be deemed heretical, or Shakespeare was protected by men who were sympathetic to his religious views, or seditious and heretical material, if any, slipped under the radar, unnoticed by the censor, protected by literary techniques such as ambiguity and allegory. The Hermetic texts taught, paradoxically, that the knowledge of the way of Hermes to gnōsis and salvation should be kept secret from the profane (Book XIII), while the one who has received the knowledge has an obligation to become ‘guide to the worthy so that through you the human race may be saved by god’ (CH I [26]). Thus, in a country where the Master of the Revels was authorized to censor any play that treated of religious matter, the playwright who had both promised to reveal the secret of rebirth to no one, lest he be accounted its betrayer, and who also felt under obligation to disseminate knowledge that could save the world, had a twofold reason to dissimulate. Part 1 of this book looks more closely at the influences on Hermetic thought as the tracts were being written in the early centuries CE, in more detail at the texts of religious Hermetism themselves and contrasts the open dissemination of Hermetic ideas in France with their guarded reception in England in the sixteenth century. Part 2 locates the selected plays in their historic-politicalreligious context, and interprets the play texts in the light of the texts of the Hermetica and related commentaries. 58

In 1598 Ben Jonson and two others were imprisoned in the Marshalsea for their part in the play The Isle of Dogs, which was suppressed and destroyed. Thomas Nashe, a c­ o-author, escaped imprisonment. In June 1599 Whitgift and Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London ordered the wardens of the Stationers’ Company to prohibit further publication and destroy existing copies of all Nashe’s works and certain other satirical works. All plays dealing with England’s history were to be approved by members of the Privy Council. However, when Shakespeare’s play Richard II, including the deposition scene, was performed on the eve of the Essex rebellion in 1600, Augustine Phillips of the Chamberlain’s Men was questioned, but not the playwright. Richard II was first published in 1598 but the deposition scene was not included until 1608 when the fourth Quarto was published.

PART 1

∵

Introduction to Part 1 When the great Renaissance merchant-prince, Cosimo de’Medici (1389–1464) of Florence purchased fourteen Greek treatises from Byzantium brought to him by a manuscript hunter around 1462, he could not have anticipated that the ideas they contained concerning the nature of God, the nature of Man, the creation, the choices to be made on the path of the soul to salvation, and the idea of death as separation and change might be of interest more than half a millennium later. He passed the manuscripts to Marsilio Ficino of the Florentine Academy to translate into Latin as a matter of urgency. The resultant set of Hermetic texts, for many years known as Pymander, is now referred to as the Corpus Hermeticum. The translated texts were immediately hailed as prisci theologi, or God’s earliest words to man, as revealed to the ancient sage, Hermes Trismegistus. They may first have circulated in manuscript copies, but they appeared as incunabula in 1471; the evidence of the warm reception accorded to Trismegistus in Italy in the fifteenth century survives to this day in mosaic, in paintings and in frescoes.1 The following century has been acclaimed as the golden age of religious Hermetism.2 It was a time when the treatises were revered as writings of the greatest antiquity, the work of the thrice great Hermes, and contemporaneous with Moses and the Pentateuch or Torah. Ficino believed that Trismegistus may have lived after Moses and Zoroaster but certainly before Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato, and that the texts themselves were prophetic of the coming of Christ. Indeed, Agostino Steuco later asserted that Trismegistus earned his name because he had prophesied the Trinity before Plato was even born (in Campanelli 2019, 59). Until the philologist Isaac Casaubon exposed the truth in 1614, it was not known that the texts had been written by a number of hands in the centuries following the birth of Christ. In fact, the Hermetic texts draw upon the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Torah, and upon many books of the New Testament including the Gospel of John and several epistles of Paul. Moreover, in addition to Gnostic ideas, the texts are seen to syncretise thought found in Plato (c.428 BCE–c.348 BCE) (Copenhaver’s commentary references fourteen books of Plato, most 1 The story of how Hermes of Alexandrian antiquity, known to the Egyptians as Thoth, conductor of the dead to the underworld, became Mercury to the Romans and emerged as the prophet Hermes Trismegistus, as well as an outline of the iconographic record of his reception in Renaissance Italy may be found in Appendix I, From Hermes to Hermes Trismegistus. 2 ‘l’âge d’or de l’hermétisme religieux’, Jean Dagens, 1961. © Jane Everingham Nelson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004520608_003

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frequently Timaeus, Phaedrus and the Republic);3 in the Stoics; in Philo (c.20 BCE–50 CE) of Alexandria, whose concept of the Word or Logos probably influenced the Gospel of John; ideas found in the middle Neoplatonists such as Plotinus (205–270), the Syrian Porphyry (232–303), and Iamblichus (c.245– c.325); and in pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c.500). While these influences and connections are indisputable, the direction of influence is always going to be problematic. The authors of the Hermetic texts were clearly aware of the thinking of the Neoplatonists and, to the extent that their texts draw on Plato, the Hermetic texts are themselves Neoplatonic. Moreschini cautions that to make a ‘clear separation between Hermetism and Neoplatonism is of little use for understanding the thought of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ (2011, 155–156). That may be generally true; nevertheless, there are important differences. The Hermetic texts offer alternative answers to the most pressing religious questions of the age, such as the salvation of one’s immortal soul, and Hermetism, unlike Neoplatonism, offers those individuals who choose to use the mind to exercise their free will a path to knowledge of God and salvation. For this reason alone, a Christianized gnostic Hermetism may have attracted and interested men and women who were prepared to follow the way of Hermes/Christ to perfection of self and salvation. The works of all the writers mentioned earlier, as well as those of the Patristic apologists, Eusebius and Lactantius, were known to university-educated men and well-read women in Shakespeare’s time.4 Belief in the Hermetica as prisci theologi, contemporaneous with Moses and the Pentateuch, known to Plato himself, and prophetic of Christ’s coming, prevailed. It follows that recognizing in the Hermetic texts a consonance of thought with Plato or with the Gospel of St John, and knowing of the approval of men such as Lactantius, and a millennium later of John Colet, dean of St Pauls, his friend, Desiderius Erasmus, and more than one French bishop, would serve to authenticate and validate the antiquity of the eirenic Hermetic texts for the Elizabethan reader. In a time of religious upheaval when the Christian Church, mired in bitter division, seemed to have lost its way, a religious philosophy that promised salvation and brought Christ’s simple message that we have compassionate love for one another must have seemed providential. 3 Timaeus is one of the few Platonic books known in Latin before de’Medici purchased the remainder of the canon in Greek. Others include Phaedo and sections of the Parmenides. 4 Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley, wife of the Lord Treasurer, famous as one of the most highly educated women in England, had a copy of Eusebius in her library.

Chapter 1

How Hermes Trismegistus Became Hermes Christianus 1

From Jesus of Nazareth to Nicholas of Cusa

1.1 The First Christians It is ironic that in the sixteenth century the church and state, which authorized the merciless torture of heretics, claimed to be acting in the name of Jesus, a Jewish preacher and healer from Nazareth, hailed now as the Prince of Peace and King of Love. He had lived in Palestine, where he taught the good news that the God perceived as a God of judgment was also a merciful and loving father. He preached in parables which carried a simple message that men and women should treat others as they themselves would like to be treated, that they show mercy, forgiveness and compassionate love for one another.1 Subsequently, men and women who heard the news and believed that He was the Son of God were taught that His suffering on the cross was a sufficient redemption for their sins and that those who believed in Him would have everlasting life. His own exemplary life and his apparently miraculous powers as a healer led his disciples to call him Christ (the Anointed one), from the Hebrew for Messiah. Christ’s teachings were spread by His apostles, the most prolific of whom, Paul, has left us his letters written to encourage groups of his converts all around the Mediterranean. Some years after His death, four of Christ’s apostles recorded in the synoptic gospels what they remembered of His birth, His life and His teaching, His cruel death on the cross and His miraculous resurrection. There were other disciples however, like Philip, and Thomas (known as Judas Thomas or Thomas Didymus, the Twin, the brother of Jesus whom Nestorians claimed as their founder),2 whose Gospel stories were only discovered within 1 The precept known as the Golden Rule comes from the Sermon on the Mount: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them (Matthew 7: 12). The two Great Commandments, found in The English Book of Common Prayer, are taken from the Gospel according to Mark: The Lord our God, the Lord is One; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength. You shall love your neighbour as yourself (12: 29–31). 2 This Thomas, also known as Thomas the Wanderer and Thomas the Knower, is credited with spreading Nestorian Christianity, or his version of it, eastwards and as far afield as China and South India. The Gnostic Society Library: http//:gnosis.org/thomasbook/ch30.html accessed 01.01.2021. © Jane Everingham Nelson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004520608_004

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living memory.3 In 1945, thirteen papyrus codices (bound books, not scrolls) were found in a jar buried near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt.4 Most of these codices, which date from the second and third centuries and were originally translated from the Greek, are Gnostic texts which had been hidden with other similarly apocryphal works in Coptic. They were subsequently translated into several European languages including English and one of them, Codex VI, 6, is of especial interest, even though it cannot have been known in the sixteenth century. It is now well-known that Codex VI contained three ‘indisputably Hermetic tractates’, since numbered 6–8 (Fowden 1986, 5). Two of these, were known in Greek from the Corpus Hermeticum, and the third NHC VI, 6, now named The Ogdoad reveals the Ennead, appears to continue and complete the two initiatory books, I and XIII of the Corpus. Nag Hammadi Codex VI, The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth (or the Ogdoad and the Ennead), is a dialogue between a father, addressed as ‘Hermes’ or ‘Trismegistus’ and a ‘son’ his disciple. It represents the culmination of the way to salvation by ascent to the eighth and ninth spheres which was begun in Book I of the Corpus Hermeticum and continued in Book XIII. As the great scholar Jean-Pierre Mahé says in his introduction to the tractate, ‘by describing an initiation mystery, the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth shows us the religious and existential dimension of Hermetic thought. The concern of Trismegistus is to open a path, to guide his disciples up to spiritual rest and illumination,’ and Mahé adds his opinion that ‘this goal could hardly be met without the organisation of communities and mystery ceremonies’ (2008, 352). 1.2 About the Hermetic Theosophy The Hermetic theosophy has been described as ‘a form of revealed knowledge’ lying somewhere ‘between the Greek rationalist tradition and Eastern wisdom’ (Giovanni Filoramo 1993, in Moreschini 10). The essential and distinguishing themes of the theosophy found in the Hermetica are the androgynous nature of God who is Mind and creator, who out of watery chaos and darkness brought order, life and light, and who created a second mind, a craftsman;5 the twofold nature of mankind: ‘in the body mortal but immortal in the essential man’; Man is also androgyne ‘because he comes from an androgyne father’.6 Men 3 The Gospel of Thomas was not known in the sixteenth century, but the Acts of Thomas written in the third century, ‘hovered on the borders of acceptability in Christian sacred literature’ until being declared heretical at the Council of Trent (1547–1563) (MacCulloch 2009, 202). 4 According to James Robinson, ‘the discovery has added about thirty-one new texts to our knowledge of religion and philosophy in antiquity’ (2008, xiii). 5 CH I [2], [4], [6], [9], [12], [13]. 6 CH I [15], IV [6].

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and women have freedom of will that enables them to make choices that will eradicate the vice of ignorance and other torments acquired on the descent through the spheres prior to birth; knowledge of self will lead by degrees to perfection,7 and to the revelatory and reciprocated knowledge of the Mind of God that is spiritual rebirth and salvation – the ‘ascent to Olympus’.8 Evil is explained as the result of Man’s rational choices and no responsibility of God.9 Death is only change: the mortal body separates from the immortal soul and nothing is destroyed, but only dissolved, as the body returns, in an everlasting cycle, to the cosmic elements from which it was formed, while the separated soul is spiritually regenerated.10 1.3 Hermes and the Church Fathers Claudio Moreschini has established the extent of interest in the philosophic Hermetic doctrines on the part of Christians in late antiquity. He cites Latin Christian writers such as Tertullianus (c.160–225) who mistakenly believed Hermes to be a precursor of pagan philosophers like Plato (28), and Lactantius (c.250–325) who ‘was more convinced than anyone of the affinity between Hermetic doctrines [. . .] and Christian ones’ (Moreschini 2011, 33). Lactantius argued from the philosophic texts that, whereas Christianity reveals ‘a full and absolute truth’, Hermetism ‘was the revelation of an ancient but partial truth’ (Moreschini 2011, 48). Moreschini reports that Cyril of Alexandria in the 5th century also sought ‘an accord between Christianity and the doctrines of Hermetism’ in the manner of Lactantius, noting that he ‘quotes both the treatises that will end up constituting the Corpus Hermeticum and other writing that we do not know’ (85). By contrast, Augustine (354–430 CE), Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, who apparently had not seen the Greek Pymander, but on the basis of the ‘god-making’ passages in the Latin Asclepius (23–24 and 37–38), attacked Hermes’ use of magic and repudiated Hermetic doctrine (Moreschini 2011, 76–77).11 1.4 Hermes and Plato (429–347 BCE) on God, the Soul, and the Mind The Hermetic texts present the various doctrines in the form of dialogues, whereas although the Platonic dialogues represent a large and systematic set 7 8 9 10 11

CH I [19], [24], IV [7], X [8], XIII [7–10], Asclepius [6]. CH X [15]. CH IV [8]. CH I [24–26], VIII [1], XI [15], XII [16], XIII [13], XVI [9], Asclepius [2]. The dangerous passages in the Asclepius refer to humanity’s attempting to imitate divinity by making ‘statues ensouled and conscious [. . . ]; statues that foreknow the future and predict it by lots, by prophecy, by dreams and by many other means’ (Asclepius 24).

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of concerns, Plato himself never offers a coherent set of doctrines. As Julia Annas points out: ‘He leaves us with the dialogues and we have to do for ourselves the work of extracting and organizing his thoughts’ (2003, 24). In this respect, Plato is a model for Shakespeare who embeds ideas within the play for audience and reader to interpret and debate. Like Plato, Shakespeare plants the seed from which religious debate can grow, while never openly revealing his own religious leanings. Unlike Plato, Shakespeare employs the whole gamut of mechanisms available to the playwright, detaching himself from the big religious questions through the dramatic mechanisms of characterization in dialogue, and through setting and plot; through the literary mechanisms of ambiguity and allegory he creates space for a religious debate to engage audience and readers. After a caveat that ‘hardly a single doctrine associated with Plato has been held by all Platonists’, Kristeller lists ‘[t]ypical Platonist doctrines [as] the eternal presence of the universal forms in the mind of God [the One], the immediate comprehension of those forms by human reason [Logos] and the incorporeal nature and immortality of the human soul’ (1979, 50, 55). Both Plato and Hermes see God as the One. Plato rejected the idea of a plurality of gods interfering in men’s lives, and argued that God, the One, is purely good, perfection in fact. The virtuous man should aspire to be like God. In Timaeus, Plato explains that because he is good, God has created the best of all possible worlds and one that is ordered according to mathematical calculations: God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad [. . .]. Wherefore also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order [30]. Wherefore he made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the centre [33] . . . And in the centre he put the soul [. . .] and he made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary [. . .] Having these purposes in view he created the world a blessed god [34].12 Hermes also refers to God as the One or the Monad which, ‘because it is the beginning and root of all things, is in them all as root and beginning [. . .]. Because it is a beginning, then, the monad contains every number, is contained 12

Plato’s doctrine of becoming that ‘began with the One and the Dyad as opposed principles’ (Copenhaver 1992, 138) was derived from the Pythagorean conception of numbers which Jacques Gohorry says ‘were used very willingly by Pythagoras and other very holy philosophers for the adumbration of the greatest matters’ (in Clucas 2010, 157).

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by none, and generates every number without being generated by any other number’ (CH IV [10]). Concerning the fate of the soul after death, Socrates asks Simmias: ‘Do we believe there is such a thing as death? Is it not the separation of soul and body?’ (Phaedo 64). Then he tells Cebes: ‘That soul, I say, herself invisible, departs to the invisible world – to the divine and immortal and rational’, where she is freed from all human ills and forever dwells ‘in company with the gods’ (Phaedo 81). ‘But the soul which has been polluted, and is impure at the time of her departure, and is the companion and servant of the body [. . .] is held fast by the corporeal [. . .] dragged down into the visible world [. . .] prowling about tombs and sepulchres, near which, as they tell us, are seen certain ghostly apparitions of souls which have not departed pure’. King Hamlet, who died unshriven, denied the last rites like all men visited with sudden and unexpected death, may well be perceived as one such soul.13 Socrates goes on to describe how certain souls wander until they are imprisoned in another body appropriate to their natures, so that for example, those who indulged in gluttony and drunkenness ‘would pass into asses and animals of that sort’. In the Corpus Hermeticum, however, Pymander repudiates this Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis, telling Hermes: ‘it is not allowed for a human soul to fall down into the body of an unreasoning animal’ (CH X [19]). Socrates continues: ‘Noone who has not studied philosophy and who is not entirely pure at the time of his departure is allowed to enter the company of the Gods, but the lover of knowledge only’ (Phaedo 82). Hermes seems to be thinking along the same lines when Pymander tells him: ‘he who has understood himself advances towards god’ (CH I [21]); ‘This is the final good for those who have received knowledge: to be made god’ (CH I [26]). For Hermes, like Socrates, knowledge of God must be accompanied by an ethical life. In Book X, The Key, he says that this knowledge is only available to the reverent souls which get ‘free of the body and fight the fight of reverence’, meaning ‘Knowing the divine and doing wrong to no person’ (CH X [19]). The reward for such a soul is the ‘ascent to Olympus’ (CH X [15]). By contrast, ‘The one who loved the body that came from the error of desire goes on in darkness, errant, suffering sensibly the effects of death’ (CH I [19]). For Plato, the soul (anima) is not simply opposed to the body, since he speaks of it as animating the ensoulled body. Hermes says something similar to Asclepius: It is ‘not the body 13

The critical opinion that King Hamlet’s ghost leaves Purgatory in order to see his murder avenged by another murder is hard to reconcile with the Catholic Church’s notion of Purgatory as a place where troubled souls await the purging of their sins which those left behind expedite through prayer.

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itself but what is within the body that moves the soulless thing is what moves them both, the body that bears as well as the body that is borne’ (CH II [9]). Plato saw the soul as identical with the mind, and as a different kind of entity from the body. His description of the frenzies which can beset the mind, which he recounts in Phaedrus, also have a counterpart in the ecstatic state of mind described in the Corpus Hermeticum (I [4]; XI [20]), although Plato does not suggest that the seer, the lunatic, the poet and the lover are not fully conscious. Shakespeare clearly knew of these madnesses from Phaedrus, and he makes a quite explicit reference to them in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the heroine is named Hermia, and dreams, visions and altered states of reality add a Hermetic quality. For the contemplative Hermetist, the fleeting moment of gnōsis or true knowledge of God is achieved in a trance-like state of semi-conscious ecstasy; it is beyond reason, momentary, cannot be expressed in words, and is experienced in silence. Socrates’ argument in Phaedrus is that since the use of reason is the mark of sanity, the kind of knowledge that goes beyond it is the province of the divinely mad. Socrates tells the Fair Youth: ‘There is a madness which is a divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men’ [244]. He lists first the prophetess at Delphi, and the Sibyl, who when out of their senses conferred great benefits on Hellas, and concludes that ‘prophecy is a madness’ [244]. Second, he names the lunatic, arguing that since madness is of divine origin, madness is superior to the sane mind [244]; thirdly he describes ‘the madness of those who are possessed by the Muses’, who inspire frenzy in the poet, awakening ‘lyrical and all other numbers’, and other men to noble deeds [245]. After a lengthy dissertation on the immortal soul, and the mind of the philosopher, Socrates turns at last to the fourth kind of madness, ‘of all inspirations the noblest and the highest to him who has it or shares in it, and that he who loves the beautiful is called a lover’ [249]. In his most beautiful play about lovers written for performance at a private wedding Shakespeare wrote: Lovers and madmen have such seething brains. Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.4–8) In the context of dreams and altered realities such as Dream constructs for the lovers in the wood, Shakespeare has enhanced the divine Platonic madness with the Hermetic ecstasy. There can be little doubt that Shakespeare had read

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Phaedrus when he wrote these words for a court audience of Christians many of whom would also have been familiar with Plato. The evidence suggests that the poet may also have read the Corpus Hermeticum and understood it to be anterior to Plato’s book. The concept of destiny, whether Man’s fate is predestined, the fate of the soul after the death of the body, the role of the stars in determining one’s nature, whether the will is free, the consequences of Man’s freedom to make choices, and the source of human evil are all debatable questions which divided the Christian church in Shakespeare’s day, and to which Plato and Hermes both contribute debatable answers. 1.5 Hermes and Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE) Philo, an Hellenic Jew from Alexandria, is remembered for his allegorical interpretations which later influenced the Christian Father Origen, and which were to become the accepted form of biblical exegesis (an exegetical method also adopted by some critics of the Shakespeare canon). He is important, as much because he epitomizes the cross-fertilization of Greek thought with Judaism, as for ideas and symbols shared with later Johannine thought and the Corpus Hermeticum. As C. H. Dodd notes, Philo’s exegesis of the Jewish Pentateuch is ‘steeped in Gentile thought’ especially ‘the popular Platonic-Stoic philosophy which meets us also in the Hermetica’ (Dodd 1953, 54). For example, Logos, the Word, to which Philo accords a central place in his system, is Stoic in origin (Dodd 1953, 10).14 The Fourth Gospel famously begins: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. (The Gospel according to John, 1:1–2) Similarly, Hermes tells Tat: ‘Since the craftsman made the whole cosmos by reasoned speech, not by hand, you should conceive of him as present, as always existing, as having made all things. . .’ (CH IV [1]). In Book I of the Corpus, Poimandres tells Hermes: ‘The lightgiving word who comes from mind is the son of god’ (CH I [6]). As Dodd observes, ‘This light-symbolism is found everywhere in Philo’s writings’ (1953, 55). The author of John’s Gospel uses light in the same way, to mean the Deity. In the Fourth Gospel we read: ‘Again Jesus spoke to them saying, “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life”’ (8: 1). In Book I of the Corpus 14

Philo also postulates that Logos or Divine Reason is an intermediary between the uncreated and the created. Philo. 1929, 2004, vol I: xix.

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Hermeticum, Poimandres (God) tells Hermes: ‘Mind (Nous) the Father of all, who is life and light, gave birth to a Man like himself’ [12]. Other symbols common to Philo, the Fourth Gospel and the Corpus Hermeticum are of ‘God as the Fountain from which life-giving water streams’ (Dodd 1953, 56), and significantly, God as shepherd. The concept comes from the Book of Numbers in the Pentateuch, and is repeated in the well-known Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’. John uses the same symbol in his parable of God as the shepherd of the Jewish people: ‘Jesus said unto them [. . .] I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep’ (10, xi). Philo makes use of the symbol in Book III On husbandry and, largely for that reason, Copenhaver agrees that the best etymology for ‘Poimandres’ is poimēn andrōn (shepherd of men) (1992, 95). Philo was a prolific writer and his works were known and available in the sixteenth century when his concept of a creator God, Architect of the Universe, may have quickened the interest of Bishop François Foix de Candale in France and Dr John Dee in England, both mathematicians, in the great geometrician Euclid. It may or may not be relevant that Freemasons term God the ‘Great Architect of the Universe’ (GAOTU). Foix de Candale made a French translation of Euclid, and Dee wrote a lengthy preface to an English translation in 1570. They are connected not only by their common interest in mathematics, but also by the fact that each is recognized as a Christian Hermetist. 1.6 The Chaldean Oracles Attributed to Zoroaster, the Chaldean Oracles were a form of theurgy, which Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke claims were produced by Julian the Theurgist in the second century ‘possibly through mediums’ trances’ (2008, 25). They are a way of establishing contact with the gods and spirits both through raising and purifying consciousness and through rituals and material objects that will conjure angelic and demonic beings into our presence (2008, 25). They were esteemed by the later Neoplatonists, and are of interest here because of their cosmology which involves a hierarchy of planes the first of which contains an Intelligible Triad consisting of Father, Magna Mater or Hecate, and Intellect. The role of Hecate, which was clearly understood by Shakespeare, although not necessarily from this source, was to ‘act as a channel for influences travelling between intelligible and sensible realms’ (Goodrick-Clarke 2008, 26). Hecate appears in Macbeth and also figures in the German translation of Hamlet Q1, the U ­ r-Hamlet, Der Bestrafte Brudermord oder Prinz Hamlet aus Dännemark.15 15

Hamlet Q1 and the Ur (or original) Hamlet have several features in common such as the names of some characters. The Chamberlain is named Corambis or Corambus for example in Q1 and the Ur Hamlet, respectively, while he is Polonius in Q2 and the First Folio.

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1.7 Hermes and Gnōsis: On Good and Evil The various Gnostic systems derive ideas from many sources including ‘Greek religion and philosophy, Jewish scriptures and other oriental traditions’ as well as Christianity (Dodd 1953, 98). Some may even have preceded Christianity. What most Gnostic systems have in common is a pessimistic dualism wherein man is trapped in the misery of the material world, longing to rise to a higher order. Where they differ is in their explanations of how the relation between these two worlds of good and evil may be conceptualized. Some Gnostics argued for a malevolent demiurge responsible for the creation of the evil material world and contrasted with a higher, spiritual order. In this they differed from Plato, whose benevolent demiurge brought order out of disorder ‘considering that this was in every way better than the other’ (Timaeus [30]). Early Christian writers rejected both the heretical doctrine of creation as well as the doctrine of salvation by gnōsis not redemption, which is at the heart of the Hermetic doctrine. Of the many varieties of pagan and Christian gnostic thought, it was the extreme form of pessimistic dualism adopted by Mani which Augustine attacked, while the thinking of Valentinus, a theologian from the mid-second century, is more optimistic. Both these ways of thinking about the world and man’s place in it have been found in the Corpus Hermeticum. In Book I where Pymander is speaking to Hermes, the opposition of darkness and light is interpreted by Klein as ‘a mythological prologue based on Manichaean dualism’ (in Copenhaver 98).16 Book XI on the other hand, where Mind is speaking to Hermes, is completely optimistic. God tells Hermes: God makes eternity; eternity makes the cosmos; the cosmos makes time; time makes becoming. The essence (so to speak) of god is [the good, the beautiful, happiness,] wisdom; the essence of eternity is identity; of the cosmos, order; of time, change; of becoming, life and death [2]. [. . .] Eternity establishes an order, putting immortality and permanence into matter [3]. Thus, on the whole, Pymander resembles Plato’s God, the One or, as we read in Book IV of the Corpus, the Monad. For the Hermetist, gnōsis, or knowledge of the Mind of God is the apex of the Hermetic experience, when in an ecstatic state beyond reason, the pupil sees the vision of ‘the incorruptible,

16

It is possible that Q1 is a version of, and the Ur Hamlet is translated from, the same lost original. The dark is expressed in negatives, ‘fearful and gloomy’, ‘indescribably agitated’, ‘an unspeakable wailing roar’, which contrast with the positives of ‘light’, ‘holy word’, ‘fire . . . nimble and piercing’, ‘spirit’ (CH I [4–5]).

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incomprehensible beauty of that good’ (CH X [5]). Hanegraaff finds a parallel here with Platonic descriptions of divine beauty in the Symposium, where ‘Both passages speak of a “vision that is not a vision”’ that may only be perceived by the ‘“mind’s eye”’ (2015, 192). Glenn Alexander Magee’s comparison of Gnosticism and Hermeticism effectively defines Hermetism, which posits that knowledge of God is knowledge of his created world, and that the relationship between man and God is reciprocal: Gnosticism and Hermeticism (sic) both believe that a divine ‘spark’ is implanted in man, and that man can come to know God. However, Gnosticism involves an absolutely negative account of creation. It does not regard creation as part of God’s being, or as ‘completing’ God. Nor does Gnosticism hold that God somehow needs man to know Him. (10) Magee goes on to remind the reader that ‘Hermeticism (sic) is also very often confused with Neoplatonism’ (10). 1.8 Hermes and a Neoplatonist: Plotinus (c.205–270) It was not only the early Christian Fathers who rejected the Gnostics. The Greek Egyptian, Plotinus, objected to the notion of dualism (Ennead II Book IX), which he repudiated as forcefully as he rejected the Christian conception of a historic redemption, preferring his own system of an intellectual mysticism. Plotinus appears to have modified the idea of an afterlife expounded by Socrates in Phaedo [81] (outlined above), holding instead that the impure soul is reincarnated after death when its future will be determined by the life lived here on earth or ‘the Spirit of here and now’ (Ennead III Book IV, 2); the purified soul then ascends to the One and is united with the cosmic universal Soul. Actually, in Phaedrus, Socrates seems to accommodate that view when he explains that ‘the soul through all her being is immortal’ [245] and that the time with the gods in Hades is part of a much larger cycle lasting ten thousand years after which, having achieved perfection, ‘she can return to the place from whence she came’ [248]. The Corpus Hermeticum seems closer to Socrates than to Plotinus when it emphasizes God’s role in man’s salvation, combined with the importance of gnōsis: ‘For god does not ignore mankind; on the contrary, he recognizes him fully and wishes to be recognized. For mankind this is the only deliverance, the knowledge of god. It is ascent to Olympus’ (CH X [15]). In other words, Man needs to know God in order to be complete, but the relationship is reciprocal – God also needs Man to know Him and complete Him. As Moreschini has it: ‘Platonic mysticism is an ontological mysticism that regards the being of man itself’, whereas the mysticism of Hermes as explained in Book XIII

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is ‘a mysticism of renewal: it is necessary to be saved from without by means of a new birth. It is being itself that must be changed’ (2011, 20). It is arguable (see Chapter 4 and the two versions, Q and F, of the play) that in King Lear Shakespeare is searching for a way to dramatize this change and rebirth. Plotinus posited an absolute transcendent One or Good, and three degrees of higher being: the intellect, the higher soul (whether World Soul or individual soul), and the lower soul or nature (Goodrick-Clarke 2008, 21). For him, the material universe was a single, integrated, interdependent, living thing having a single Soul, so that every part was influenced by every other part. Thus, as Goodrick-Clarke explains: ‘a sympathy pervades this universe, manifested as a system of correspondences existing among the stars, animals, plants, minerals and human organs, giving rise to the idea of a mapping between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of a human being’ (23). For Neoplatonists the life lived ‘here and now’ is important since it determines life in the hereafter; they resemble the Hermetists in their belief that human happiness and perfection were achievable through philosophical contemplation. They rejected the Gnostic idea of the creator as an evil demiurge, and defined evil as the absence of good and occasioned by human sin. Far from despising the material world, Plotinus saw the creation as beautiful, and outlined a way in which the soul can free itself from sin, ascending by stages to become one with God. The process is not unlike that described by Pymander in Book I when he tells of the human beings rushing through the cosmic framework until ‘they enter into god’ (CH I [26]). Moreschini contrasts the Latin Neoplatonists, who offer no answers to ‘the anguishing questions of life’, with the appeal of Hermetism, and posits that, prior to the arrival of the Corpus Hermeticum, it was the Asclepius ‘with its theosophy, with its pietas and gnosis, with its exaltation of human dignity, [that] furnished the Latin west of the late Imperial Age with the text and the certainty that were otherwise missing for non-Christians’. In the Asclepius they found ‘the pagan equivalent of Christianity, revelation, gnosis and the salvation reserved for the just’ (2011, 73). 1.9 Iamblichus (c.245–c.325) While Plotinus and his Syrian disciple Porphyry, who was also opposed to Christianity, both held a belief in God as the One or Monad, a supreme and transcendent being, beyond all categories of being and non-being, it was Porphyry’s pupil, Iamblichus, who distinguished two aspects of Plotinus’ One – the transcendental, and the creator god. He introduced the idea of multiple divinities, ensouled in the material world as superhuman beings, whose identities he took from the Greek and Oriental mythologies. Not capricious like the

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gods in the Greek pantheon, they controlled natural events, had knowledge of the future and were responsive to prayers and libations, in other words to theurgy, which Iamblichus believed could allow the soul to ascend to a higher spiritual plane. Goodrick-Clarke likens the process to ‘modern mediumship’, where a spirit descends into the medium from a higher astral plane and takes possession – ‘such divination unites humans with the gods’ (25). Iamblichus’ intention was salvation and the reunification of the embodied soul with the One; his philosophy was widely admired and said to have influenced Christian sacramental theology which emerged about this time. Followers would tread a dangerously fine line between magic and religious ritual. 1.10 The Early Christian Church When the Emperor Constantine I, a Christian, assumed power in 306, he found a church riven with disputes; one in particular concerned Christology or the nature of Jesus Christ and the relationship between the Father and the Son. Arius (d.336) of Alexandria argued, like others before him who doubted the full divinity of Christ, that Christ cannot be God, partly because God is unknowable, invisible and immortal, whereas Jesus was known, seen, and died on the cross before being resurrected, and partly because he was inferior or subordinate to the Father and created out of nothing. Constantine convened a council of bishops at Nicaea in 325 to solve the problem. They came up with a statement of belief, categorically refuting every one of Arius’ objections. Now known as the Nicene Creed, that statement, later modified c.450 with reference to the Person of Christ and the status of the Holy Spirit, is still used all over the world in Catholic and Anglican churches. Arius was excommunicated for heresy, but missionaries carried Arianism east among the Goths and other nations.17 Towards the end of the fourth century, Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, instructed all the monasteries in Egypt to eliminate apocryphal writings from their libraries (Robinson 2008, xiii). He listed the twenty-seven books that were acceptable, which now comprise the New Testament. It is possible that the thirteen papyrus codices discovered near Nag Hammadi in 1945 were among the works excluded at that time. Nevertheless, the nature of Christ was still being hotly disputed a century after Arius. Yet another Christological doctrine had been advanced by Bishop 17

Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, was a staunch supporter of Arius. He was the first to write a history of the early church. A copy of his works probably the Ecclesiastical History is listed in the library of Mildred Cooke Cecil, a noted Greek scholar and wife of William Cecil who was, amongst other roles, Master of the Court of Royal Wards. Hence the wards brought up in his household who included the earls of Oxford, Rutland, Southampton and Essex would have had access to this history.

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Nestorius (c.386–c.450) of Syria, who in 428 was appointed the Patriarch of Constantinople. He held that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, in other words that the Incarnate Christ was two separate Persons: the divine Logos and the human Christ, united under one prosōpon or persona.18 From this position he argued that Mary was the mother of the human Christ (from which it follows that she is not also the mother of God). In this he was opposed, probably for political reasons more than theological, by Cyril (d.444) the Patriarch of Alexandria.19 At the Council of Ephesus in 431, Nestorius was accused of heresy, and Nestorianism was anathematized. The heresy was attacked in the Athanasian Creed (so-called) c.428, which expounded the doctrine of the Trinity and is still used in the Lutheran Church and occasionally in the Church of England where it begins the service of Mattins on certain feast days.20 Nevertheless, a number of churches supported Nestorius, and Nestorian Christianity moved east of Antioch, first to Edessa, then into Persia, where it was in conflict with Zoroastrians, and beyond Persia into Central Asia. The Nestorian view of Christ reflects, and may even be the origin of, the Hermetic view of Man as two persons (a corporeal, material or human being and an incorporeal, essential or divine being), united under one identity during life and separating at death when the mortal person that is a human body is changed back into the cosmic elements, and the immortal, incorporeal divine person that is mind /spirit/soul lives on. Nestorians are credited with a role in the survival of Greek culture in the Middle Ages through their translations of Greek into Syriac and Arabic.21 Nestorian Christianity survived in pockets of the Eastern Church until Tamburlaine, or Timur the Lame, almost succeeded in wiping out Nestorians in the fourteenth century as he slaughtered his way through Asia and Persia.22 It

18 19 20 21

22

Both words translate as ‘theatrical mask’ in their respective languages. Cyril’s attempts at reconciliation (see above) ‘aroused a great deal of interest in the Renaissance’ (Moreschini 84–85). The creed avers that ‘Whosoever will be saved’ must hold the catholic faith which is ‘That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity’ (The Book of Common Prayer). The English could have encountered Christian Nestorianism when they opened a consulate in Aleppo in 1583, if not before. Aleppo stood at an important junction of the Silk Road. ‘As a result of economic development, many European states had opened consulates in Aleppo during the 16th and the 17th centuries, such as the consulate of the Republic of Venice in 1548, the consulate of France in 1562, the consulate of England in 1583 and the consulate of the Netherlands in 1613’ in Mesopotamia – Unabridged Guide (http:// www.panoramaline.com/aleppo-arab.htm). Tamburlaine’s exploits were brought to life for London audiences in Christopher Marlowe’s triumphant plays about Tamburlaine the Great in 1587–1589.

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is arguable that Shakespeare is referencing Nestorius in The Comedy of Errors.23 Based on Plautus’ comedy and the Clementine Recognitions, the play is set in Ephesus, and the heroes, the identical Antipholus twins, simultaneously reference both Thomas the Wanderer24 and the Nestorian doctrine of two persons united in one name or one identity. Reacting against Nestorianism, the Council of Chalcedon in 451 confirmed the definition of Nicaea, declaring that Christ is ‘one Person in two Natures, the Divine of the same substance as the Father, the human of the same substance as us, which are united unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably’ (Dictionary 315). It took two centuries of argument before the Chalcedonian position was finally accepted by Western and most Eastern Churches.25 This Trinitarian dogma, central to Christian theology, was further developed in the Latin Church, principally by St Augustine in De Trinitate. Partly based on Tertullian, the doctrine was later elaborated by St Thomas Aquinas.26 In the fifteenth century Ficino claimed that Hermes, who attributed power, wisdom and goodness to God, was anticipating the ‘Christian theologians who identify that triad with the Persons of the Trinity’.27 The influence of the three Neoplatonic hypostases of the One, Intelligence (that is Mind or Nous), and Soul on the conception of Father, Son and Holy Spirit has not gone unremarked. Hence, as Hanegraaff observed, critics of Plato and Platonism in the sixteenth century, seeking to establish the purity of the Christian message, found that the body of Christ had been infected with ‘the virus of paganism’ from the earliest years of the Christian era (2012, 94). The most sacred mystery at the heart of Christianity: God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity, had been conceived in pagan minds. The debate over the Trinity, whether Father, Son and Holy Spirit were equal and coeternal, emerged again in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when men began to look again at Arius’ and Nestorius’ arguments and question the 23

In The Comedy of Errors, a Hermetic hermeneutic adds another layer to the allegorical exegesis discussed in the Introduction, when the Duke asks of the Antipholus brothers: ‘which is the natural man, / And which the spirit? (5.1.332–333). 24 Lat. erro, -are vb. to wander, stray or lose one’s way. 25 The expanded Nicene Creed is named in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England agreed in the mid-sixteenth century and is recited before the Eucharist: ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth: And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost . . .’ (The Book of Common Prayer). The English Book of Common Prayer also uses the Apostles’ Creed c.390 at daily Morning Prayer. 26 See Dictionary of the Christian Church, 1641. 27 ‘his power, as an example of his wisdom in the service of his goodness, creates the world’ Ficino, Liber viginti quattuor philosophorum (in Moreschini 2011, 134).

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divinity of Christ. For the Arian heresy Miguel Serveto of Navarre was burnt, Giordano Bruno was excommunicated and left the Dominican order, and Fausto Sozzini survived by taking his beliefs to the more tolerant clime of Poland where John Sigismund allowed him and his followers, the Socinians, to worship. It is arguable that in King Richard II Shakespeare is presenting just such a man as Hermes described, informed by Nestorian Christology, namely two persons, divine and human in one man. Adrian Streete lists the critics and editors who ‘have long observed the pervasive presence of Christological rhetoric and imagery in Richard II’, and argues that ‘the alliance of Richard with Christ’ offers ‘a deeply ambivalent confirmation of monarchical absolutism’ (2009, 162, 165).28 Streete observes that the play (if the 1595 dating is secure), was written in response to the so-called ‘Doleman’ tract concerning the succession, believed to be from the pen of the Jesuit exile Robert Parsons.29 The tract calls upon ‘Stowe and Hollingshead and other Chroniclers of England’ to support the claim that the Houses of York and Lancaster conspired to depose the anointed King Richard, whose government was intolerable. It not only casts doubt upon the legitimacy of the Lancastrian Tudors and the queen, it also opposes the ‘King’s Two Bodies’ to the Body of the Realm or the Republic (Streete 2009, 166–168). If the play creates a space for the dangerous debate on the whole matter of the succession and the right of parliament to depose a divinely anointed monarch who is also a tyrant, it also creates a space for the equally dangerous debate on the church’s ruling on the nature of Christ. Orthodoxy decreed that the Incarnate Christ was a single person, at once God and man, while the Nestorian view that the Incarnate Christ was a hypostatic union of two separate persons, both fully human and fully divine, was regarded as heretical. 1.11 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c.500) A Christian theologian from the Eastern Church in Syria, Dionysius combined Christianity with Neoplatonism. He was especially revered because it was believed (mistakenly) that he was Dionysius the disciple of the apostle Paul. In fact, he was living centuries after Paul and after the Gnostics, Hermetists and Neoplatonists mentioned earlier. He wrote on the being and attributes of God, the mystic ascent of the soul to union with God and explained how the nine orders of angels mediate God to mankind. The nine orders were grouped into three triads, each group representing one Person of the Trinity. Kristeller calls 28 29

Streete names ‘Victorian scholars like Henry Reed, Walter Pater and C. H. Herford’, as well as Ivor B. John, first editor of the Arden edition of Richard II, and more recently [1957] J. A. Bryant and Ernst Kantorowicz (2009, 162–163). Robert Parsons. A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of England.

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him ‘a Christian mystic’ (1979, 129), while Moreschini saw him as more Plato’s heir than the pagan Neoplatonists (2011, 144). However, for the later Christian Neoplatonists, such as Ficino, it was Dionysius’ thinking that allowed them to reconcile pagan philosophy with Christian theology. Clearly Neoplatonism itself changed over time as new thinkers assimilated their own lived experience and encounters with others to Plato’s thinking, which was itself open to interpretation, and now more than eight hundred years old. But the key concepts of what Hanegraaff terms Platonic Orientalism, which survived to pervade the later Renaissance wisdom narrative are: the concept of sympathetic correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm, of a universe animated [by a World Soul], of transmutation linked to the ‘alchemical’ paradigm, and, crucially, the concept of ‘higher knowledge’ or gnōsis (Hanegraaff 2012, 73).30 1.12 The Division of East and West After the sack of Rome in 410, the Eastern Roman Empire, administered now from Byzantium (Constantinople), became the principal site of Hellenistic civilization. ‘While the Latin West entered the Dark Ages’, claims GoodrickClarke, Byzantium ‘carried the torch of Alexandrian world culture for a millenium’ (2008, 33). That Judaic-Hellenistic culture, bred in Egypt, included the works of the Greek philosophers, Platonists and Neoplatonists, as well as the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. As the Arabs grew to power east of Byzantium, they ‘swiftly assimilated the esoteric sciences of astrology, alchemy, and magic, all based on ideas of correspondences between the divine, celestial, and earthly spheres’ and, fascinated by Hermes Trismegistus, produced ‘their own Hermetic literature with revelations of theosophy, astrology, and alchemy’ (Goodrick-Clarke 33–34). The famous Tabula Smaragdina or Emerald Tablet, believed to outline the secrets of the preparation of the philosopher’s stone, dates from this period (the sixth to eighth century). The words ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus appear to refer to the Neoplatonic belief in sympathetic correspondences between heaven and earth, the macrocosm and the microcosm, and to creation effected by a single unifying force: True it is without falsehood, certain and most true. 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. (Linden 28) 30

Hanegraaff defines ‘Platonic Orientalism’ as ‘a very ancient spiritual wisdom transmitted by Platonism’, possibly originating in Persia with Zoroaster, or in Egypt with Hermes or with Moses (2015a, 205).

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Translated here from a twelfth century Latin translation of an Arabic version, the passage speaks of the alchemical union of opposites in the act of creation: ‘The father thereof is the Sun, the mother the Moon’. The father and mother, the male and female principles, are binary opposites whose alchemical marriage or union results in gold, the symbol of purity and perfection. The alchemical process is also an image of the ascending soul: ‘With great sagacity it doth ascend gently from earth to heaven. Again it doth descend to earth, and uniteth in itself the force from things superior and things inferior’ (Linden 28). Platonic ideas of a world created by a benevolent demiurge and animated by a soul, like human beings, and Neoplatonic/Hermetic ideas of correspondence between the little world of mankind and the skies above, of mankind’s fate being written in the stars, and of a world peopled by angels and demons, were taking shape in an increasingly Christian world. 1.13 Hermes, Plato and Christianity in the Middle Ages Goodrick-Clarke lists the medieval scholars who mention Hermes Trismegistus or the Asclepius, starting with Michael Psellos, whom he describes as ‘a Byzantine Platonist of the eleventh century’, who ‘used the Hermetic and Orphic texts to explain the Scriptures’ (2008, 34).31 According to Moreschini, Psellos ‘took a fiercely polemical stance towards Hermetism, condemning its involvement with magic’ (2011, 128). Indeed, Moreschini suggests that the Corpus Hermeticum that has come down to us may have been compiled at this time by someone who deliberately excised all reference to magic and occultism for the same reason that Psellos condemned it (2011, 2).32 Interest in the Hermetic writings (centred on the Latin Asclepius or Logos teleios (Perfect Discourse)), increased in the mid-thirteenth century in Cologne, in Paris and at Oxford, where Hermes Trismegistus was regarded as more of a moral philosopher (Moreschini 113–115). A Greek scholar from Constantinople, Georgius Gemistos (c.1360–1452) named himself Plethon after Plato, whom he greatly admired, and wanted to restore the pagan religion of Greek antiquity. He was not a mystic but embraced the characteristic Platonic doctrines of ‘the reality of universals and ideas, on the divine origin of the world, and on the immortality of the soul’ (Kristeller 1979, 157). He was the first to attribute to Zoroaster the Chaldean Oracles from which he believed Platonic philosophy was derived. He was a follower of the Stoics, Proclus and Pythagoras (Kristeller 1979, 156, 157), and felt that ‘all Greek 31 32

The list includes Theoderic of Chartres, Albertus Magnus, Alain of Lille, William of Auvergne and Roger Bacon of Oxford University. He could have added Pierre Abelard, Petrarch and Thomas Bradwardine. See also Copenhaver 1992, xli.

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philosophies could be harmonized and that a profound knowledge of Plato could become the basis of religious unity’ (Goodrick-Clarke 2008, 36), and ‘replace both Christianity and Islam as the religion of the future’ (Hanegraaff 2012, 38). In 1438, he was part of a delegation to Italy invited to take part in a council ‘to discuss a possible reunion of the Eastern and Western churches’ (Hanegraaff 2012, 28). He strongly opposed the union of Greek and Latin Churches on theological grounds, but his enthusiasm for Plato is said to have persuaded Cosimo de’Medici, who was effectively the ruler of Florence at the time, to set up a Platonic academy33 where he later employed Ficino. Hanegraaff claims ‘near universal agreement’ that ‘Plethon was indeed a “neo-pagan” opponent of Christianity’,34 but emphasizes that in this respect he was unique and that ‘Renaissance Platonism was a deeply Christian phenomenon’ (2012, 39). Nevertheless, in tracing true philosophy back to Zoroaster and the Magi (who were either wise men associated with the nativity of Jesus, or wicked magicians), and ignoring both Moses and Hermes, Plethon, who has been romanticized as ‘the “second Plato” from the East’ (2012, 40), set the scene for the discourses that were to follow about the relationship between religion and magic. 1.14 Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) Nicholas, a German cardinal and philosopher, was another of the Christians who saw that Hermes ‘was one of the pagan wise men who rightly believed in the oneness of God’ (Moreschini 2011, 121). Nicholas, unlike Pletho, favoured reconciliation with the Greek Church, and also worked (without success) to reconcile the Bohemian Hussites to the Catholic Church.35 He was interested in Hermetism, which he knew through the Asclepius. According to Moreschini, a manuscript now held in Brussels ‘contains marginal annotations by Cusanus’ who underlined statements ‘with the greatest relevance to Christian theology’ (124). He was influenced by Dionysius the Areopagite, and agreed with Lactantius that ‘a doctrine as central to the Christian religion as the generation of the Son was indeed revealed to Hermes’ (Moreschini 122). He held that Dionysius, Saint Paul in his letter to Timothy, and Christ himself, in warning against throwing pearls before swine, were echoing Hermes Trismegistus in advising against ‘initiating the ignorant into the secrets of mystical knowledge’ 33 34 35

Hanegraaff regards the story as apocryphal (2012, 41 n.161). Kristeller doubts that his reputation for paganism is justified (1979, 156). The Hussites were followers of Jan Hus (1372–1415) who spearheaded the Reformation in many ways; Hus followed John Wycliffe’s lead in arguing for a vernacular Bible, the rejection of the right to property and the hierarchical organization of society. Bohemia became more aware of Wycliffe and England after the marriage in 1382 of Anne the sister of King Wenceslas to Richard II.

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(Moreschini 121). Nicholas died as Ficino was completing his translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, providing, as Moreschini points out, ‘a crystal clear line of demarcation in the history of Christian Hermetism’ (121). 2

Christian Hermetism in the Renaissance: The Corpus Hermeticum and Some Early Translators ‘I am a Christian, Pontano, but I am not ashamed to be an hermetist as well.’ Crater Hermetis [4.1]

The attraction of the texts of the Hermetica to Renaissance Christians was their undoubted antiquity, coupled with a belief in their authenticity. When readers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encountered the doctrines of the Hermetica, it was in the belief that Hermes Trismegistus had preceded Plato, Philo, the Gnostics, the Stoics, the Neoplatonists, the writers of the synoptic gospels, and the early Christian Fathers. Humanist scholars in the Renaissance confidently viewed the way of Hermes to salvation as outlined in the Corpus Hermeticum, now purged of all magic, as the precursor of Christianity, and ranked it with the other monotheistic Abrahamic religions – Judaism and Islam. This is what they encountered: 2.1 About the Corpus Hermeticum36 The Corpus Hermeticum takes the form of dialogues between Hermes and God, who introduces himself as ‘Poimandres, mind of sovereignty’ (CH I [2], XI),37 Hermes and his son Tat (IV, V, VIII, X, XII, XIII), and between Hermes and Asclepius (II, VI, IX, XIV). For Fowden, this dialogic form ‘emphasizes [the] primarily didactic intention’ of the writings and he notes that ‘different texts are aimed at readers or auditors at differing levels of enlightenment’ (1986, 97). Festugière believes that ‘the intention of the treatises is to use a problem debated in [ancient] schools to initiate discussion’ (Moreschini 2011, 11). His opinion is consistent with the style of the Platonic dialogues where philosophical issues 36 The Corpus Hermeticum used in this study is principally Copenhaver’s English translation of the seventeen books, numbered I–XIV first translated into Latin from the Greek, by Ficino, and books XVI–XVIII, first translated by Lodovico Lazzarelli, and the Asclepius. Because there was no English edition before John Everard’s translation in 1650 based on Patrizi’s edition, I complement Copenhaver with a French translation of Pymander made by Bishop Foix de Candale, published in 1579 and potentially available to Shakespeare. 37 The name ‘Poimandres’, poimēn andrōn (shepherd of men) occurs fourteen times in the Corpus Hermeticum: twelve times in Book I and twice in Book XIII (Copenhaver 1992, 95).

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are embedded, and also with dramatic dialogues where Shakespeare arguably embeds religious and philosophical questions that invite debate. Mahé is of the opinion that some of the treatises, particularly those that appear discontinuous, are intended to provide space for silent meditation when one may see the god within, in the mind’s eye (2004, 103).38 Within and between the treatises, ‘Hermes professes the most contradictory opinions on all the topics he treats’ (Moreschini 2011, 11). While the texts consistently present God as good, they sometimes emphasize his transcendence, and at others his immanence ‘amounting to a complete pantheism’ (Dodd 1953, 17). God is the Monad (CH IV [10]) and he is also Nous or Mind (CH I [2, 9, 12]). Certain tracts conceive of the existence of a second god entrusted with the creation of the world: ‘The mind who is god, being androgyne and existing as life and light, by speaking gave birth to a second craftsman, who, as god of fire and spirit, crafted seven governors’ (CH I [9]). This second god is Logos: ‘The lightgiving word who comes from mind is the son of god’ (CH I [6]). The different treatises are not of equal importance or function. Book I: of Hermes Trismegistus: Poimandres, and Book XIII: A secret dialogue of Hermes Trismegistus on the mountain to his son Tat: On being born again, and on the promise to be silent (completed, as we now know, by Nag Hammadi Codex VI), for example, are both regarded as initiatory texts which outline a journey to be undertaken by degrees, at first in private study, and later ‘under the guidance of a spiritual master’ (Fowden 1986, 98). In Book I, Pymander reveals creation to Hermes in an endless vision in which everything became light – clear and joyful – and in seeing the vision I came to love it . . . darkness arose separately [and . . . ] changed into something of a watery nature, indescribably agitated and smoking like a fire; it produced an unspeakable wailing roar [4]. But from the light. . . a holy word mounted upon the nature, and untempered fire leapt up . . . to the height above [5] . . . . ‘I am the light you saw, mind, your god. . . The lightgiving word who comes from mind is the son of god’ [6]. The whole passage about the vision seems to have inspired Hendrik Niclaes to found the sect known as Das Haus der Liebe or the Family of Love, George 38

This is also explained in CH V [2] and in X [4–5] and XIII [3]. Mahé is discussing the Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius and was doubtless influenced by the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth found near Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, both of which he translated. For details of the Armenian versions of the former and of the Codex Clarkianus found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1988, see The Way of Hermes, translated by Clement Salaman et al. 2000.

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Chapman to translate Homer, and may even have influenced Shakespeare’s conception of the tempest in the play of that name. Pymander explains how ‘Mind the father of all, who is life and light, gave birth to a man like himself whom he loved as his own child’ (I [12]). Unlike Genesis, the first Book of the Corpus Hermeticum emphasizes the joy and love which Mind, Nature and Man all took in creation [12–14]. The Book asserts unequivocally that ‘unlike any other living thing on earth, mankind is twofold – in the body mortal but immortal in the essential man’ [15]. This characteristically Hermetic view of humankind reflects or possibly influenced the Christology of Bishop Nestorius, noted above, namely that ‘there were two separate Persons in the Incarnate Christ, the one Divine and the other Human (as opposed to the orthodox teaching that [. . .] Christ was a single person, at once God and man)’.39 Genesis teaches that God made man in his own image and after his likeness (1: 26), and Pymander tells Hermes that Nature ‘brought forth bodies in the shape of the man. From life and light man became soul and mind; from life came soul, from light came mind’ (CH I [17]). However, although Man may be made in God’s image, in order to become god-like, Man must know himself, and direct his will to choose the good. Pymander explains that ‘the one who recognized himself attained the chosen good, but the one who loved the body that came from the error of desire goes on in darkness, errant, suffering sensibly the effects of death’ [19]. Pymander then outlines the way to death available ‘to the reverent’ [22]. At each stage of the journey the ascending soul surrenders the vices which it acquired on its descent to earth through the planetary spheres, and as the material body is released ‘the senses rise up and flow back to their particular sources’ [24]. Book I lists the energies that will be surrendered at each of the seven planetary levels before entering the region of the ogdoad [25–26]. Foix de Candale in his commentary on this Book names each sphere (‘Lune, Mercure, Venus, Soleil, Mars’ and so on), details the senses that were acquired from each on the descent, and emphasizes that the celestial bodies cannot oblige the soul to act, but can only incline or predispose the soul, which retains its freedom of will, to carry out or to reject the impulse (1579, 86). As Fowden points out, Book I is unusual in treating the vision of God as something that may be experienced only after the soul has been separated from the body by 39

Nestorius taught that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, in other words that the Incarnate Christ was two separate persons: the divine Logos and the human Christ, united under one prosōpon or persona (Dictionary of the Christian Church, 1138). Prosōpon, from ancient Greek, refers to a face, countenance or mask, and also references a dramatic part, character or outward appearance.

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death (1986, 99). Pymander concludes the book with an exhortation urgently to spread the message: ‘This is the final good for those who have received knowledge: to be made god. Why do you still delay? Having learned all this, should you not become guide to the worthy so that through you the human race might be saved by god?’ (I [26]).40 Book XIII, by contrast, tells of palingenesia or a spiritual regeneration while still alive: ‘bursting into a new plane of existence previously unattained’ (Fowden 1986, 108). There Tat receives apparently instantaneous purging of the twelve torments listed as: ignorance, grief, incontinence [intemperance], injustice, lust, greed, deceit, envy, treachery, anger, recklessness and malice (CH XIII [7]). In silence he receives the transforming knowledge of God, of joy, of continence, of perseverance, of liberality, truth and so on (XIII [8]). In short, reborn through the knowledge of God, he assumes the attributes of God and, perfected, becomes a god like God. As Moreschini puts it: ‘the supernatural powers, which are hypostases of god, penetrate man and construct the divine person, the logos, within him, and with their arrival alone, expel the vices that originate from the constitutive matter of man’s former self. [. . .] It is being itself that must be changed’; he notes that ‘the idea of a union between man and god’ may also be found in the Acts of Thomas, and in John 3: 3–6 (2011, 20).41 However, the purging is not automatic. If he is to save himself, mankind must choose to overcome the torments that beset one beginning with the torment of ignorance. William Grese observes that it is the emphasis on spiritual regeneration, without which mankind cannot know God, which distinguishes Book XIII from the other books of the Corpus Hermeticum. But the concept of regeneration is not unique to Hermetism and is found in other Hellenistic mystery religions (Grese 1979, 72), such as the Eleusinian rites, which were known to Henri (of Navarre) IV of France, and some of his courtiers, and to the earl of Essex amongst others, including Shakespeare; they are referenced in The Tempest, and also in the Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris. Book XIII ends with the

40

This provocative call to evangelize the message and save the human race is echoed in the Rosicrucian manifesto, Fama Fraternitatis or Rumour of the Brotherhood published in 1614, calling for the reformation of the whole wide world, Allgemeine und General Reformation, der gantzen weiten Welt (236) (in Yates 1972, 2000, 236–251). 41 The Acts of Thomas was declared heretical at the Council of Trent. John 3: 3–6, ‘Jesus answered [Nicodemus] Truly, truly, I say unto you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God. [. . .] unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.’

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singing of the secret hymn of praise to the one who has brought about spiritual enlightenment: Holy knowledge, you enlightened me; through you, hymning the intellectual light, I take joy in the joy of mind [18]. Life, preserve the universe within us; light, enlighten it; god, {spiritualize} it. For you O mind, are a shepherd to your word [19].42 Finally, Hermes exhorts Tat to ‘promise to be silent about this miracle, and reveal the tradition of rebirth to no one lest we be accounted its betrayers’ (CH XIII [22]). This is the challenge for followers of religious Hermetism: to promulgate a message that must remain secret and may only be revealed to initiates. A close analysis of King Lear, accompanied by study of the zodiac of human behaviours and feelings (the torments) and their remedies listed in Book XIII, arguably sheds light on Shakespeare’s conceptualization of his characters, their motivations and their psychology; moreover, the two versions of the play (Quarto and Folio) illustrate the contrasting doctrines contained in Books I and XIII about whether spiritual rebirth is achieved in this world or the next. More about the Hermetic texts may be found in Appendix 2. In retrospect it is clear that the efforts of sixteenth-century theologians to establish Biblical revelation as pure and absolute truth were frustrated by the intrusion of pagan thought. The books of the Hermetica, showing the way to salvation, were validated for some Christians by passages such as the ones summarized above. Some passages in the Hermetic texts are redolent of Genesis, or of John’s Gospel, but others are heretical and disagree with many doctrines of the institutional Church, both Traditional and Reformed. The Church taught that God is sovereign, omniscient, invisible and unknowable, while Hermes taught that God is Mind, and that Man may find knowledge of Mind within himself; the church taught that the only way to redemption and salvation was through Jesus (our only Mediator and Advocate), while Hermes taught that Man was free to choose the path to salvation, by replacing ignorance with knowledge of self, and that he could aspire to perfectibility and divinity; on creation the church decreed creatio ex nihilo, while Hermes taught that nihil ex nihilo fit, and that the ordered world was created from existing chaos; orthodox 42

It is precisely from hymns such as this that Gilles Quispel posits the existence of a Hermetic Lodge in Alexandria. Professor Quispel writes confidently: ‘It is now completely certain that there existed before and after the beginning of the Christian era in Alexandria a secret society, akin to a Masonic Lodge’ (2004, 10). See also “The Asclepius: From the Hermetic Lodge in Alexandria to the Greek Eucharist and the Roman Mass.” (Quispel 1998, 69–77).

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teachings differed also on the origin of evil, and on whether body and soul will be resurrected together on the Day of Judgment. The way of Hermes teaches the aspirant to contemplate in silence or in the society of friends; to examine one’s life and take steps to perfect oneself; to give loving service to others; to live in peace and harmony. For the Hermetist, god is within, and he or she has no need of the oppressive machinery of the institutionalized Church – great consecrated buildings, ordained priests, paraphernalia, vestments, candles, incense and icons. Followers of Hermes need fear no hobgoblins nor foul fiends wanting to pitchfork them into the everlasting flames. They are indifferent to the arguments over the number of sacraments, and although they follow the way of Christ, they have no need to profess belief in the miracle of a resurrected Christ. In sixteenth-century England any who followed the way of Hermes would certainly have attracted the opprobrium of Atheism. The Renaissance scholar would read in Book I of the Corpus Hermeticum that he had an obligation to use the knowledge to be a ‘guide to the worthy’ [26] and save the human race, and in Book XIII that he must ‘Promise to be silent and reveal the tradition of rebirth to no one lest we be accounted its betrayers’ (CH XIII [22]). It is not surprising that in the two centuries after the texts were translated into Latin, this conflicting advice was obeyed by some and ignored by others. 2.2 Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) The eminent Greek scholar, priest and physician was engaged in the translation of some of Plato’s works when the Greek manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum fell into his hands. It had been purchased by his patron Cosimo de’Medici along with previously unknown works of Plato. As Moreschini points out, the erudite Ficino was already ‘well acquainted with certain aspects of medieval Hermetism’ (2011, 133), and by 1463, Ficino had translated into Latin fourteen tractates of the Corpus Hermeticum, which were apparently all that he had. Having fulfilled his patron’s wish to read the ancient theology before he died, Ficino then devoted himself to the rest of the Platonic texts. To complement his translations, Ficino wrote commentaries on the newly recovered writings and produced some eighteen books on Platonic theology. From the Symposium he translated the ‘discourses on love’ [173] where Plato had written: For I know not any greater blessing to a young man who is beginning life than a virtuous lover, or to the lover than a beloved youth (178) . . . Love is the eldest and noblest and mightiest of the gods, and the chiefest author and giver of virtue in life, and of happiness after death. (Symposium, 180)

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Ficino’s comments on the book famously transformed Plato’s philosophy of love into a doctrine of chaste Platonic love, while endorsing ‘Plato’s belief that the soul’s spiritual ascent to ultimate beauty was fuelled by love between men’ (Kraye 1994, 79). As a consequence, Ficino has been seen by some as more Platonist than Hermetist. Michael Allen, for example, holds that ‘Plato was the sublime philosopher for Ficino, and Hermes only a distant precursor’ (­Moreschini 2011, 138). Nevertheless, Moreschini, following Sebastiano Gentile, argues that Ficino’s respect for the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus preceded his translation of the Corpus Hermeticum and did not pass away over time. Despite his deserved reputation as a Platonist, the Hermetic pia philosophia was ‘essential for Ficino until the end of his life’ (Moreschini 156 n.79), and arguably coloured his reading of Plato whom he believed to have been Hermes’ successor. In 1471, Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum bearing the title Liber de potestate et sapientia Dei, Pimander (usually shortened to Pymander after the name for God used in the first book) was printed at Treviso, but apparently without Ficino’s knowledge or consent.43 The editio princeps was so badly flawed that Hanegraaff doubted that Ficino really understood the central tenet of Hermetism in what he was translating, and felt that he ‘completely missed both the special religious connotations and the central importance of the Greek word gnosis and its cognates’ (2009, 3). Hanegraaff noted that Ficino avoided the dangerous word ‘gnōsis’ (as indeed did Lazzarelli), and chose a less incendiary cognate, ‘cognitio’ (2015a, 195–196). Furthermore, Hanegraaff argues, Ficino seemed to have missed or misunderstood a key Hermetic message about seeing with ‘the eyes of the heart’ or ‘the mind’s eye’, and notes that one entire sentence from the crucial initiatory Book XIII was omitted from the Treviso edition. Another error occurred because the word ‘not’ was omitted from the Greek original (CH IX [10]), obliging Ficino to misinterpret the sentence. As a result, the reader misses the vital message that knowledge of God (gnōsis) is a gift from God and can not be communicated through ‘reasoned discourse’ but ‘only beheld directly by some faculty beyond the senses and reason’ (­Hanegraaff 2015a, 189). Despite Hanegraaff’s doubts, Ficino’s scholarship is not in question. Stephen Clucas, for example, reports that John Dee, a noted Greek scholar 43

The culprits were the Flemish Geraert van der Leye and his Italian colleague Francesco Rolandello (Hanegraaff 2015a, 184). The badly flawed edition circulated throughout Europe in various edited versions and vernacular translations for the next eighty years. In 2011, Maurizio Campanelli published his extensive research on the editio princeps of 1471 set from Ficino’s manuscript, and the nine subsequent editions printed from it between 1481 and 1551 (see Figure 2). He found the original printed Latin translation was so corrupted with textual errors that in many places it made no sense (in Hanegraaff 2015a, 185).

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himself, made a margin note on his copy of Ficino’s Omni Divini Platonis Opera that the Republic has been ‘right well translated’ (2011, 233). Ficino’s preference for ‘cognitio’ over ‘gnōsis’ may have been a simple precaution, since the doctrine of gnōsis was anathema to the church and, as the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices implies, the Gnostic gospels had been deliberately hidden and omitted from the New Testament. Moreschini argues that Ficino ‘join[ed] Christian revelation with Hermetic doctrine’ (2011, 155) and also found agreement between Hermes and Plato. Indeed, he seems to have assimilated Plato and the Neoplatonists to Hermes Trismegistus, whom he believes to be their source, and both to Christianity, when he asserts for example in his Theologia Platonica that ‘the human soul – a soul moreover which was immortal, free and most fulfilled in God’, has a divine component (Arnold 2011, 63).44 Both John Vyvyan and Leland Miles, neither of whom refers to the Corpus Hermeticum in their writing, found Ficino’s position on Platonism to be so idiosyncratic that Vyvyan coined the term ‘Marsilian’ to describe it, and Miles called it ‘uncharacteristic’ (1962, 148). Arguably, a student of the Corpus Hermeticum might recognize those same anomalies as Hermetic. Hanegraaff is of the opinion that Ficino’s failure to have his translation printed indicated his lack of interest (2015a, 184). However, given the admonitions to secrecy quoted above (CH XIII [22]), and the importance of restricting the message to those willing to undertake the path to becoming an Adept, Ficino may well have taken a deliberate decision to limit access to the mysteries in a way that is impossible once a manuscript is published in print. There is no doubt at all about Lazzarelli’s enthusiasm for Hermetism yet he, too, did not publish his translations, presenting them instead to his esteemed mentor ‘Mercurio’ da Correggio, who after Lazzarelli’s death passed the manuscript to an ambassador of Louis XII in Lyon in 1501.45 It is possible that Agrippa reveals the reason for Ficino’s reluctance to publish in Book III of The Third and Last Book of Magic and Occult Philosophy, an early version of which he took to England in 1509 or 1510. Chapter II opens with

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Jonathan Arnold quotes from the Preface to Theologia Platonica where Ficino finds in Plato’s philosophy a strongly Hermetic cast: ‘Since Plato holds the soul to be a kind of mirror in which the divine countenance is easily reflected, his scrupulous step by step search for God continually prompts him to turn towards the beauty of the soul, understanding the famous oracle “Know thyself!” to mean above all that whoever desires to know God should first know himself’ (2011, 63). See also D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology (1972, 67–73); G. Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (1969, 2–3). More details are given in Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn, 2005, 38–44.

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this warning, the sense of which Ficino would also have found in the Corpus Hermeticum: Whosoever therefore thou art that now desirest to study this science, keep silent and constantly conceal within the secret closets of your religious breast, so holy a determination; for (as Mercury saith) to publish to the knowledge of many a speech thoroughly filled with so great majesty of the deity, is a sign of irreligious spirit; and divine Plato commanded that holy and secret mysteries should not be divulged to the people; Pythagoras also, and Porphyrius consecrated their followers to a religious silence. (2004, 443)46 In the opening chapter of Book I of his famous Liber de Vita (The Book of Life), Ficino lists Nine Guides for Scholars undertaking the ‘bitter, arduous and long journey. . . to the highest temple of the nine Muses’ that is Olympus, the goal of life’s journey as we are told in Book X [15] of the Corpus Hermeticum (3). Vyvyan, in Shakespeare and Platonic Beauty published in 1961, just three years before Yates’ work brought the Hermetic tradition to the attention of Englishspeaking scholars, finds that Ficino’s original (‘Marsilian’) attempts to harmonize Platonic doctrines with Christianity are quite unorthodox and he quotes Ficino’s Hermetic Letter to the Human Race, beginning: ‘Cognosce teipsum, divinum genus mortali veste indutum!’ (Know thyself, divine race clothed with a mortal garment!), but does not acknowledge its source in the Corpus Hermeticum, Book VII. Contrary to orthodoxy, Ficino acknowledges the intrinsic divinity of man (Vyvyan 1961, 35), rejects the Catholic doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (1961, 42) and ‘develops the doctrine of pre-existence’ (1961, 46). All of these ideas are contained in the Corpus Hermeticum. Vyvyan observes that Ficino harmonizes the notion of the Platonic ascent with current theology ‘to the satisfaction of Catholics and Protestants alike’ (1961, 49), although that could hardly have been Ficino’s intention in 1474! But most significant for the Hermetist, Vyvyan shows that in his Commentary, Ficino ‘formulated the characteristic Renaissance belief in the creative power and absolute supremacy of love’ (1961, 38). Fortunately for him, writes Vyvyan, ‘the revolutionary nature 46

Donald Tyson lists five reasons for silence or circumspection concerning the holy doctrine of Hermes: ‘lest it be prophaned by the entrance and presence of a throng of listeners’ (Asclepius); profane minds cannot grasp holy doctrine and mock those who preach it; silence allows divine enlightenment of the doctrine to occur (CH XIII); it is futile to attempt to express the inexpressible; translation distorts the sense of the writings and causes obscurity – only when the Egyptian words are spoken does ‘the force of the things signified work in them’ (CH XVI) (2004, 445).

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of his findings does not seem to have been appreciated by the ecclesiastical authorities during his lifetime for it is hardly possible that they could have wittingly permitted its dissemination’ (50). Giuseppe Saitta, writing of Ficino’s philosophy, Vyvyan’s ‘Marsilianism’, or arguably, Christian Hermetism, in 1923, still unaware of Ficino’s interest in the Corpus Hermeticum, had this to say: This concept [that man is a ‘child of God’ truly in his own self essence] completely broke through the boundary within which religion had been enclosed by Catholicism, pointing towards a free religion, which is the same as liberty of thought. In this way, the Italian Renaissance inspired a process of religious renewal, less widespread, but more profound than the Reformation.47 Vyvyan’s interest in Platonism in the works of Shakespeare obliged him to account for the presence of romantic love in those plays by recourse to Baldassare Castiglione and Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) (1528) (53). Here chaste Platonic love is complemented by the chivalric tradition of courtly love. However, Hermetism itself with its philosophy of unification and reconciliation is perfectly allegorized as love and marriage, often conveyed as an alchemical trope. More recently, Jonathan Arnold also attributes the sixteenth-century fashion for the literature of love to Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium, which he sees emerging in Castiglione in 1528, and also in ‘the Elizabethan poets, Philip Sidney, George Chapman and Edmund Spenser’ (59), but makes no mention of their contemporary, Shakespeare. 2.3 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) Pico, a young nobleman, contemporary of Ficino, himself vulnerable to feminine beauty, nevertheless agreed with the master that while ‘earthly love, that is the love of corporeal beauty, is more properly directed towards women than towards men, the reverse is true of heavenly love’ which should be ‘directed entirely towards the spiritual beauty of the soul or intellect’ (in Kraye, 1994, 80). He is another who, like Ficino, was inspired to assimilate Hermetism and Platonism to existing theologies. He had learned Jewish Kabbalah from members of the Jewish diaspora in Italy and believed that Kabbalah actually confirmed Christian truth. In a huge work, consisting of nine hundred theses drawn from all sorts of religious sources including magic, entitled Conclusions, he claimed that ‘no knowledge gives us more certainty about Christ’s divinity than magic 47

La Filosofia di Marsilio Ficino, Giuseppe Saitta 1923, 87 (cited by Vyvyan 1961, 50).

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and Kabbalah’.48 Pope Innocent VIII intervened to prevent the planned public disputation of the Conclusions, and Pico was forced to withdraw and to apologise. He went on to write the Oratio mentioned above, influenced by the notion of man’s perfectibility found in the Hermetica, which was to become a virtual manifesto of the Renaissance view of man. 2.4 Francesco Giorgio (1466–1540) A Franciscan friar and a Venetian, Giorgio was also doubtless influenced by the Jewish diaspora who flooded into Italy after their expulsion from Isabella’s Spain in 1492. A Christian Cabalist who believed that God and the Hermetic Monad are identical, he readily assimilated Christian Cabala to Hermetism and the whole philosophy of Pythagorean number and harmony.49 The doctrine of correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm showed him that ‘the heavens and the stars have been made by the “perfect artisan” in such a way as to move with the greatest harmony and diffuse their good influence on all inferior things’.50 His long musical poem De Harmonia Mundi comprised three ‘“songs” [. . .] in which the continuous references to Platonic, neo-Platonic and Hermetic texts are intertwined with astronomical doctrines and alchemical allusions’.51 In 1975 Daniel Banes used knowledge of Kabbalah in an attempt to show that the characters in The Merchant of Venice may be mapped diagrammatically onto the Sephiroth of Jewish Kabbalah where Tiphereth (Beauty or Mercy, realized as Portia) mediates between Din (Severe judgment, who is Shylock) and Hesed (loving-kindness, represented by Antonio) (in Yates 1979, 152–153). It is also arguable that the marriage of the Jewish convert Jessica to the Catholic Lorenzo that enacts Jewish/Christian reconciliation is celebrated in the ‘concord of sweet sounds’ that unites the Hermetic harmony in the golden heavens with the earthly harmony supplied by the musicians (Merchant of Venice, 5.1.54–88). 2.5 Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Corpus Hermeticum and His Commentary – Crater Hermetis Hanegraaff makes a cogent and persuasive argument that only Lodovico Lazzarelli really understood the Hermetic message of spiritual regeneration and convincingly reconciled the texts with Christianity. In his Fasti Lazzarelli writes: 48 49 50 51

Dictionary of Gnosis, 951. I employ the spelling ‘Kabbalah’ when referring to the Jewish system and ‘Cabala’ when referring to the Christian. Dictionary of Gnosis, 397. Dictionary of Gnosis, 396.

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Jesus is the Logos and the Word, the Mind and Wisdom, who first was Pimander in the mind of Hermes.52 In the Preface to the Crater Hermetis, Lazzarelli claims to have become ‘so absorbed in the study of the divine books of Hermes Trismegistus and also in the most holy words of Moses and the prophets, and most of all in those of Jesus Christ our Saviour, that all other writings [. . . ] have completely lost their appeal to me’ (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 2005, 46). Even so, he took time to write and publish a long poem on the silkworm, De Bombyce, an allegory of the resurrection: Child of God, whom I revere with my mind, whom I praise with my song, For hidden under this veil lies the palingenesis, the wedding of the Word, and the birth-giving of the Gods.53 Hanegraaff interprets the last lines of the long poem ‘as foreshadowing the initiation into the mystery of spiritual regeneration’, a theme which is central to Lazzarelli’s ‘most important hermetic work’, the Crater Hermetis (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 2005, 55). The imagined dialogue is between Lazzarelli (speaking as one whose mind has been illumined by Pymander-Christ), Ferdinand I of Aragon, King of Naples and Sicily (1423/24–1494) (the son of King Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragon), who is his ‘pupil’, and a third man, his Secretary of State, Giovanni Pontano (a poet and astrologer). Early in the discourse, Lazzarelli tells the latter: ‘I am a Christian, Pontano, but I am not ashamed to be an hermetist as well’ [4.1]. This open avowal of the compatibility of Christianity with Hermetism was to be echoed by other Christians throughout the century, including certain members of the French episcopate. As Hanegraaff’s detailed footnotes reveal, Lazzarelli’s dialogic commentary is saturated with references to both Old and New Testaments, and to the Books of the Corpus Hermeticum. References to Plato, Philo and Dionysius are scattered throughout this learned dialogue. Lazzarelli’s choice of a dialogue for his commentary on the Hermetica is itself instructive, as it is not only modelled after the Platonic and Hermetic tradition, it also validates the words which Lazzarelli had translated in Book XVI [2] that the written (Greek) language was ‘empty’, but that speaking the 52 53

Sourced to Fasti Christianae Religionis, ed. M. Bertolini 1991. Naples: D’Auria (in ­Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 19). In Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 2005, 54.

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words (in the Egyptian language admittedly) had the power to effect a spiritual transformation in the listening disciple. In short, the Hermetist must first listen (audi), to the spoken word, then see (vide), that is, know with the mind’s eye,54 and remain silent about the mystery (tace). Unlike Ficino, for whom the divine Plato was the ultimate authority, Lazzarelli agrees with Porphyry that ‘the original fountain of wisdom is in Egypt’ and that ‘true felicity can be obtained only by self-knowledge’ (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 2005, 63). Lest the point be understood as a reference to the maxim of the Delphic oracle to ‘know thyself’, he is unequivocal in his assertion to Ferdinand that ‘I do not take an oracle of Apollo as my point of departure, but the teachings of Hermes’ (Crater [6.1]) (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 183). In his dialogue Lazzarelli addresses Ferdinand’s questions about the way to self-knowledge, to knowledge of God, and about the soul. Convinced that Hermes is the Messenger of Great Counsel sent as the Prince of Peace to conciliate man and God (Crater [1.1]), Lazzarelli ignores the dangerously heterodox and heretical references to a second god which are in the Corpus Hermeticum (I [6]), and adopts the orthodox view of the relationship of the person of Christ to God, pronounced at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, namely that Christ is one Person in two Natures ‘truly God and truly Man’ ([1.1]) and inseparably united. In this Lazzarelli departs from the Nestorian view that Christ was two separate persons, which is reflected in the Hermetic view of the twofold nature of Man (CH I [15]). With similar confidence, he confronts the dangerous ‘magic’ idolatrous clauses in the Asclepius [23–24, 37–38], arguing that Hermes had indeed lapsed into idolatry, but as a pagan living before the Incarnation, he was still not perfectly enlightened and was therefore unable to attain perfect knowledge of God, whereas we, Christian Hermetists, are able to ‘go beyond Hermes’ wisdom and attain that perfect knowledge of God, by means of which [we] may participate in God’s “fertility”’, and ‘create souls’ (Hanegraaff 2009, 10). Lazzarelli’s thinking was later to influence Cornelius Agrippa and through him John Dee. As we know, Lazzarelli had access to a more complete Greek manuscript which he collated with Ficino’s original manuscript, producing a body of seventeen books. The last three books, including the Definitions of Asclepius, exhort the readers to praise God and live in harmony and peace, brought together by the charm of love, by which is meant eros (CH XVIII [14]). Focussing on eros, rather than agape, has had the effect of generating a link to a key hermetic 54

Video, videre vt. (mind) to observe, be aware, know. Collins Latin Dictionary.

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trope which several scholars have recognized in some of Shakespeare’s plays, namely alchemy.55 The art of alchemy was ‘the great passion of the age’ (Abraham xv) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was practised in all the courts of Europe including, as Glyn Parry’s recent biography of Dee has revealed, the English court (2011, 85). Lyndy Abraham lists ten or more men and women close to the court and in circles surrounding Dee, Walter Ralegh, and Henry Percy earl of Northumberland (the ‘wizard earl’ so-called) who ‘pursued the art of alchemy’ (1998, xv).56 The practical alchemy of the laboratory, involving the marriage of elements and a process which achieves purity through progressively driving off all impurities until the quintessence of pure gold is achieved, is clearly analogous to spiritual alchemy or the mystic ascent of the purified soul described as the Hermetic way to salvation. It is becoming increasingly clear, writes Abraham in the Introduction to her Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, ‘that Hermetic and alchemical thought deeply influenced the Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, and that writers of the stature of Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne [. . .] drew on a rich source of alchemical imagery for their writing’ (xv). There is no denying the widespread interest in alchemy and magic in sixteenth-century England and Europe, nor indeed the presence of magic in some of Shakespeare’s plays, but the overwhelming teaching which readers could learn from the books of the Corpus Hermeticum was the way of Hermes to knowledge of self, to perfectibility and divinity, to knowledge of the Mind of God and salvation, and to love of the other. At its heart, the Hermetic doctrine appears no different from the doctrine of peace and love taught by Jesus Christ. In the next chapter I continue the narrative of the reception of the new editions, translations and commentaries of the Hermetica and the Crater Hermetis as they were transmitted in manuscript and print in sixteenth-century France and England. 55

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The erotic union or alchemical wedding is a crucial operation in the creation of the philosopher’s stone which is conceived by uniting the hot, dry, male principle (sulphur) with the cold, moist, female principle (argent vive or mercury). ‘Through this “marriage” of opposites the goals of the opus, the production of gold and its metaphysical equivalent was obtained’ (Abraham 1998, 35). Abraham’s list includes Sir Philip Sidney, his close friend, Sir Edward Dyer, his sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, Ralegh’s half-brother, Adrian Gilbert, and the mathematician Thomas Hariot.

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1. Florence 1463 trans. Ficino tractates I-XIV Pymander (Corpus Hermeticum) MS (Latin) 2. Treviso 1471 Ficino tractates I-XIV Pymander (Latin) 3. Ferrara 1472 2a. Venice 1481 4. Rome 1482 Lazzarelli I-XIV + XV-XVII (Diffinitiones Asclepii ) +Asclepius (Latin) (MS given to ‘Mercurio’ da Correggio) 2b. Venice 1491 2c. Venice 1493 2d. Paris 1494 ed. Lefèvre d’Etaples (owned by Colet; seen by Erasmus?) 4a. Lyon 1501 Correggio presents Lazzarelli’s 17 chapters in MS to ambassador of Louis XII 2e. Mainz 1503 2f. Paris 1505 ed. Lefèvre d’Etaples + Asclepius and Crater Hermetis commentary by Lazzarelli ded. to Bishop Briçonnet 4b. Paris 1507 Symphorien Champier publishes Lazzarelli’s Diffinitiones Asclepii 5. Florence 1513 2g. Venice 1516 5a. Basle 1532 (owned by Dee?) 2h. Lyon 1549 (French) trans. du Préau (owned by Puttenham?) 2i. Basle 1551 (owned by Dee?) 6. Paris 1554 Turnebus (Greek) includes Diffinitiones + Stobaean fragment XV (owned by Dee) 7. Bordeaux 1574 Foix de Candale (Greek and Latin) ded. to Catherine de Medicis 1579 Foix de Candale (French) ded. to Marguerite de Valois 5b. Cracow 1585 Rosselli (owned by Dee?) 8. Ferrara 1591 ed. Patrizi 8a. England 1650 trans. Everard (English) Figure 2 15th to 17th century translations, editions and commentaries of Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepius (Hermetica) adapted from Wouter J. Hanegraaff “How Hermetic was Renaissance Hermetism?” Aries 2015 (2):179–209

Chapter 2

The Transmission and Reception of Christian Hermetism in France and England in the Long Sixteenth Century ‘L’âge d’or de l’hermétisme religieux’ ( Jean Dagens)

Having learned all this, should you not become guide to the worthy so that through you the human race might be saved by god? CH I [26]

…

Promise to be silent and reveal the tradition of rebirth to no one lest we be accounted its betrayers. CH XIII [22]

∵ 1 Introduction The radical gnostic ideas contained in the Hermetica provided a stream of alternative religious and philosophical discourse that continued to flow, albeit sporadically, sometimes openly, and sometimes concealed in various ways, throughout the long sixteenth century from 1494 to 1614 and beyond. Although the path to spiritual regeneration and gnōsis was to be revealed only to initiates, the first Book of the Corpus Hermeticum called upon those who had been accepted and had received knowledge to become a guide to others worthy of being admitted to the secrets. The texts of the Hermetica carry a number of ideas that were regarded by both the Traditional and the Reformed Church as heterodox; some were also deemed heretical.1 Gnostic soteriology was abhorrent to both; Calvinists denied 1 Heretical ideas include: salvation by knowledge of self, achieved through contemplation leading to a trance-like state and the supra-rational knowledge of God, or gnōsis; a God both

© Jane Everingham Nelson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004520608_005

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free will, and in England, religious toleration, which Antoine Faivre claims as the sign that Hermes is passing (1995b, 39), was officially regarded as a mischief, and deplored at every level. Alexandra Walsham explains that men and women felt it their Christian duty to denounce heterodoxy in order to save the soul of the sinner – ‘to persecute was to display a charitable hatred’ (2006, 2). In truth, any practice that challenged the power of the church as institution was politically dangerous. Nevertheless, beneath the history of a century that records events of religious intolerance and barbaric cruelty lies another that, as Walsham observes, is harder to write – a history of tolerance (2006, 29). It is also harder to find. However, a brief survey of the century reveals that eirenic, ecumenical and charitable discourse, along with a view of a New Man perfectible through his own efforts, all having an affinity with religious Hermetism, shines occasionally or at least glints not far beneath the surface. Given the cruel punishments meted out to heretics and Atheists of all persuasions, the consequent need for discretion as well as the Hermetic admonition to secrecy, how might the texts of the Hermetica with their dangerously heretical ideas have been safely disseminated? The material transmission of texts was effected by travellers, merchants, students, scholars, diplomats and courtiers; by the sharing, copying, translating, lending and gifting of manuscripts; by printers and publishers; by buying and lending books and commentaries on books, and through personal correspondence. The evidence for these practices is in the manuscripts, incunabula and codices themselves, in marginalia, in private, royal and college library catalogues, in publishers’ lists, in dedications and in letters. How texts were read, and their ideas received, is more difficult to map. Overt evidence that Hermetic ideas were being discussed and assimilated may be seen in the iconography of paintings, and printers’ emblems which conveyed ideas allegorically or symbolically; it may be found, more nuanced, in the beliefs and opinions expressed in private writing such as memoirs and letters, and dispersed in a scatter of printed books. Sometimes the influence of Hermes is fleetingly discernible in poetry, especially poetry set to music, sometimes it is reflected in acts of love as caritas, especially associated with healing, sometimes in efforts to bring peace to a country ravaged by war.2 Manuscripts and printed books were available to the solo and silent educated reader who transcendental and immanent; a second Mind creator-craftsman; creation as the ordering of existing chaos; the divinization of humankind; the divinity of the human soul; the free will of mankind; the perfectibility and limitless aspiration of mankind. They include also a Nestorian view of mankind as twofold, and of death as separation of the immortal soul from the mortal body which returns to the elements. 2 Typically the influence of Hermes has been identified by modern scholars as Neoplatonic, or sourced to the Bible, the Church Fathers or to church tradition. In the sixteenth century, when the Corpus Hermeticum or the Asclepius was not named, it may have been to protect

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may have engaged in an annotated dialogue with the text such as Dee practised (Sherman 1995, 79–112).3 More frequently in the sixteenth century, reading was shared with like-minded others closeted in a group to engage in conversation, debate and interpretation, a practice most valuable to the reader when the text was allegorical, allusive or unorthodox. Sir Henry Wotton noted in his commonplace book, ‘A friend to confer readings together most necessary’ (in Jardine and Grafton 1990, 31 n.3).4 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton argue that scholarly reading was always ‘goal-oriented’, active rather than passive, ‘reading as a trigger for action’ (1990, 40). They take their example from the scholar, acting as ‘facilitator’, reading for the statesman (in this case Gabriel Harvey reading Livy and a dozen related works for and with the earl of Leicester), and their evidence from marginalia and letters (35, 49–50). In the absence of annotated copies of Pymander, the practice which Jardine and Grafton describe provides a model for the reception of the Corpus in France and later, in England. There, in 1577 a royal letter forbade clergy and lay people to gather together after church and discuss ideas encountered in the scripture reading or the sermon, a practice known as ‘prophesyings’ (MacCulloch 2003, 384). However, there was nothing to prevent members of an audience, whether in private or in public theatres, from gathering after the performance to discuss ideas encountered in a play. Whether the plays of Shakespeare included ideas that invited debate on some of the great religious concerns of the period, and whether ideas from the Hermetic texts could contribute to those debates, is a question of interest to this study. A related question is whether interested friends of the playwright were ever invited to discuss a play in manuscript before or after performance but prior to printing; there are certain anomalies, additions and alterations, referenced later, that appear to be non-authorial and that could be explained by such a practice. Once translated, the Hermetic texts circulated in manuscript and print. The ideas they contained were received with varying degrees of interest, fear and scepticism by their readers in Europe and England, where the discourse of religious Hermetism, as the word implies, ran around in currents, sometimes underground and sometimes apparently drying up altogether. Key figures in the written and oral transmission of this neo-Alexandrian Hermetism (this pia philosophia, now purged of all corrupting traces of magic and alchemy), in addition to Ficino, Pico and Lazzarelli, include: John Colet, Thomas More and the writer from accusations of dabbling in the occult because Hermes’ name carried the taint of magic. 3 See also Stephen Clucas. 2011. “John Dee’s Annotations to Ficino’s Translation of Plato”. Laus Platonici Philosophi, 227–248. 4 From L. P. Smith. 1907. The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, vol II, 494. Oxford.

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Desiderius Erasmus, Cornelius Agrippa, Lefèvre d’Etaples and Symphorien Champier, Adrian Turnebus, Bishop François Foix de Candale and Philippe du Plessis Mornay, Jean Bodin, John Dee and Giordano Bruno, Francesco Patrizi and John Everard.5 Foix de Candale and Dee were both interested in the geometrician Euclid, and others with an interest in mathematics and numerology include the Abbot Trithemius, Agrippa’s friend, and Gerolamo Cardano. The latter two had a particular interest in codes and ciphers as ways of protecting and transmitting secret knowledge. Faivre ends the list of esoteric currents to be found in the Renaissance and beyond with alchemy, a very ancient art, and Rosicrucianism, which sprang to life in the form of three manifestos published in Germany in 1614, 1615 and 1617. 2

John Colet (c.1466–1519)

John Colet, Dean of St Pauls, spent some years in Italy and Paris (1493–1496) after graduating from Oxford.6 Sears Jayne speculates that his study of Genesis may have led Colet to make contact with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola who had just published his Heptaplus, and through him to learn about Ficino (1963, 44). The new edition of Ficino’s Pymander, recently published by Lefèvre d’Etaples in Paris in 1494, would have been available to Colet. Having returned to ­England, Colet exchanged letters with Ficino in Florence until the latter’s death in 1499.7 In the light of Hanegraaff’s concerns about the key Hermetic message being misunderstood from the botched editio princeps, this exchange of letters allowing for discussion and clarification becomes extraordinarily 5 Faivre enumerates other Renaissance currents which, although most lie outside the purview of the present study, I list here: the Christian Kabbalah associated with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin, Guillaume Postel, Agrippa, and Francesco Giorgi; the theory and practice of chemical medicine and astrology of Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim or Paracelsus. Faivre adds white magic which makes use of ‘names, rites and incantations, with a view to establishing a personal relationship with entities [. . .] that belong to the [. . .] mundus imaginalis’. He lists the best-known representatives of the latter group as Ficino himself, Agrippa, Jacques Gohory, Dee and Bruno. To this philosophia occulta Faivre adds ‘various forms of arithmology (the sciences and symbolism of numbers), and speculations on music’ (Faivre 1998, 114–115). 6 Colet appointed his friend, William Lily, the scholar and grammarian, as the first headmaster of St Paul’s School. Lily’s grandson was John Lyly, the playwright and secretary to the earl of Oxford, also a poet and playwright, and the contemporary of Marlowe, Peele and Chapman. 7 Jayne’s book, John Colet and Marsilio Ficino, published in 1963, is his response to the discovery in the library of All Souls College, Oxford, of a first edition of the Epistolae of Ficino published in Venice in 1495. He includes about 5000 words of marginalia in Colet’s hand (4) and two letters from Ficino to Colet (dated 1498 and 1499), in one of which he explains ‘the difference between intellect and love’, apparently in answer to a previous letter (82).

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significant.8 The influence of both Pico and Ficino on Colet has been documented by Leland Miles in John Colet and the Platonic Tradition, which was published in 1962, just two years before Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Like John Vyvyan, Miles is forced to identify what can now be recognized as characteristic of Hermetic thought as an ‘uncharacteristic’ position taken by Ficino in Theologia Platonica (1962, 148). For example, as Miles explains, Colet exalts love over faith, inspired by Ficino’s argument that love, whether romantic or divine, transforms the lover into the object loved, and finally that it is love which brings the goodness or perfection prerequisite to union (1962, 148–149). Most revealing of all, Miles notes that ‘Colet supports his point by using the Ficinian term “gods” rather than the conventional Pauline term “saints”: men must become gods before they can merge with God’ (149). The Pauline triad of faith, hope and charity, Colet re-orders as hope, faith and love which he equates with purification, illumination and perfection (that is likeness to God), the stages through which the soul must pass on its mystical ascent (Miles 1962, 140). Miles refers to the stages as ‘Dionysian’, but they are clearly also Hermetic. Miles asserts that Colet ‘appropriates Ficino’s doctrine of reciprocal love between God and man’ and describes the actual union ‘in terms of a Plotinian ecstasy foreign to Pauline mysticism’ (149). Both the notion of reciprocity and of the union being achieved in an ecstatic state beyond sense or reason are also purely and distinctively Hermetic. That same Hermetic concept of reciprocal love also inspired Colet to write in Right Fruitful Monition: ‘Remember, as a man loveth, so he is, for the lover is in the thing loved more properly than in himself’.9 He went on to interpret the Eucharist: ‘At the table of the Lord [. . .] the communicants of Christ are transformed into Him’, in a way that was later to help Protestants cast off the superstition associated with transubstantiation, and approach the mystery of the Eucharist in a spirit of 8 Hanegraaff reports from Maurizio Campanelli’s research, that the Treviso editio princeps of Ficino’s Pymander was nothing less than ‘an authentic textual disaster’. Moreover, he claims, attempts such as those of Lefèvre d’Etaples to correct the printed Latin translation and improve subsequent editions resulted in ‘a wide range of variant readings of an original that had already been wholly corrupt in the first place’ (2015a, 184–185). 9 The idea of the lover becoming the beloved is also in Bruno’s De gli eroici furori in his interpretation of the myth of Diana and Actaeon, and it influenced Marguerite de Valois. In the Fourth Dialogue of The Heroic Enthusiast, Tansillo tells how young Actaeon sees a ‘face more beautiful than e’er was seen [. . .] and the great hunter straight becomes that which he hunts/ The stag [. . .] his own great dogs quickly devour’. Actaeon signifies intellect pursuing wisdom and beauty urged on by love; ‘ravished out of himself by so much splendour, he became the prey [. . .] for having absorbed the divinity into himself it was not necessary to search outside himself for it’. Cicada responds: ‘For this reason it is said “The Kingdom of Heaven is in us”; Divinity dwells within, through the reformed intellect and will’ (Bruno, 1889, trans. Williams 66–68).

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love.10 Miles saw Colet as ‘“a transition figure” who harboured both Catholic and Protestant sympathies’ (Kaufman 1977, 311 n.71). Hanegraaff’s fears that Ficino himself had failed ‘to understand the specific religious message’ of the Corpus, namely of salvation to be achieved ‘by means of “supra-rational” knowledge or gnosis’, and that as a consequence the doctrine was overlooked (2015a, 205), would seem now to be unfounded, at least in the case of Colet and by extension his confidants. 3

Thomas More (1478–1535)

Colet was a good friend of Sir Thomas More and both men formed a lasting friendship with Erasmus who first visited England in 1499. Peter Kaufman notes that the ‘nature and extent of Erasmus’ intellectual indebtedness to John Colet’ has been much disputed, but Ivan Pusino, who studied the influence of Pico on Erasmus supports Kaufman’s opinion that it was Colet who introduced Erasmus to the writings of Pico and other Florentine Neoplatonists, including Ficino (1977, 297–298).11 Pico himself, or his thinking, made an impression on More, who was sufficiently intrigued by the man and his interest in the ‘secret misteryes of the hebrewes, Caldyes and Arabies’ to translate both his Works, and the Life of Pico written by his nephew, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, thereby introducing ‘many things drawen owt of ye olde obscure philosophye of Pithagoras, trismegistus, and orpheus’ to the English-speaking world (in Curtwright 2012, 28).12 More wisely chose to omit the section about Pico’s use of Jewish Kabbalah to prove the truth of Christian revelation. In 1509 Erasmus was again in England staying with More and writing In Praise of Folly. Susan Bruce records that the two men together had earlier translated into Latin some of the Lucian dialogues, such as Menippus, which helped shape More’s Utopia (1999, xii). Certainly, More sent the manuscript to Erasmus who was responsible for some of the marginalia. As a novel both serious and satirical which mixes real people and fictional characters, the book reads like a manifesto for a land where ‘all things be common to every man’ (1999, 119), where money is held in contempt (1999, 121), and where religious toleration prevails: no man shall be blamed for reasoning in the maintenance of his own religion. For King Utopus, hearing that the inhabitants of the land were 10 11 12

Quoted by Miles who refers to the Hermetic notion of reciprocal love as Ficino’s (135). Kaufman cites Pusino. 1928. “Der Einfluss Picos auf Erasmus.” Zeitschrift für Kirchenge­ schichte 46: 93–96. More undertook the translation as a gift for Sr. Joyce Leigh of the Poor Clare convent.

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before his coming thither at continual dissension and strife among themselves for their religions . . . made a decree that it should be lawful for every man to favour and follow what religion he would, [. . .] so that he did it peaceably, gently, quietly and soberly [. . .] and use no kind of violence. (More 1999, 108–109) Yates calls this eirenic Utopian law which argues for religious toleration ‘the distinctive badge of religious Hermetism’, for a people she cautiously suggests ‘are perhaps Christian Hermetists’ (1964, 1991, 186). In my view, More’s idea of religious toleration, which at first sounds rather like the multi-faith society described by Jean Bodin at the end of the century,13 is soon revealed as rather more Erasmian in the assertion which follows that there can be only one true religion:14 Furthermore, though there be one religion which alone is true, and all other vain and superstitious, yet did he well foresee (so the matter were handled with reason and sober modesty) that the truth of the [sic] own power would at the last issue out and come to light. [. . .] Therefore all this matter he left undiscussed, and gave to every man free liberty to believe what he would. (More 1999, 109) Then comes the caveat: Saving that he earnestly and straitly charged them that no man should conceive so vile an opinion of the dignity of man’s nature as to think that the souls do die and perish with the body. (More 1999, 109–110) Not only does the ‘tolerant’ King Utopus insist that Utopians believe in the immortality of the soul (a belief shared with Hermes, Plato and later Christians), but they must also believe in a providential God and an afterlife where vices will be punished and virtues rewarded. Antinomians and believers in metempsychosis are to be deprived of all honours and excluded from public office in Utopia. Finally, such misguided men will be given the opportunity to dispute, but only with priests, ‘hoping that at the last that madness will give place to reason’ (More 110). It is a view of religious toleration which owes more 13 14

Jean Bodin. Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime, passim. Erasmus, like the English in the Elizabethan and Stuart years and even beyond the 1689 Act of Toleration, held the view that toleration was a necessary civility to be extended to speakers as they engaged in the search for a single, common and universal truth (Remer 1994, 307).

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to Erasmus than to Trismegistus, but More’s own beliefs are protected from censure by the satirical tone. He obviously knew Pico’s thought from translating the Life, and Colet we know had read and corresponded with Ficino. Thus, when Erasmus visited them in England, it is reasonable to conclude that they read the Florentine Neoplatonist/Hermetists and discussed them, with Ficino’s own letters to Colet open before them. 4

Erasmus (1466/69–1536)

Both Colet and Erasmus were spokesmen for widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the Catholic Church as an institution in the years preceding the Reformation, as was Lefèvre d’Etaples (Kaufman 1977, 298), editor of Ficino’s Pymander. All three men were associated with the early reception of the Corpus Hermeticum and all are now renowned for their calls for reformation of the Roman Catholic Church. However, the extent to which each was personally influenced by the Platonic/Christian/Hermetism of the Florentine Dionysian/Neoplatonists is difficult to assess at this distance. All three, like More, remained staunchly loyal to the Catholic Church even as they called for reforms. Where Miles found the influence of Ficino in Colet, Erasmus is remembered now, in addition to his calls for an eirenic solution to religious problems, for his insistence on the ability of human beings to exercise their free will and, by their own choice, to control their destiny. Twenty years after meeting Colet, Erasmus was to fall out with Luther, bitterly and publicly, over the issue of the extent to which man had freedom of will. In the Enchiridion Militis Christiani or Handbook of a Christian Knight, written soon after his first visit to England, and published in 1503, Erasmus writes of the human being having ‘a middle soul’ located between the body and the spirit ‘which is modelled on God’s own nature’. The soul being drawn both to the incorporeal spirit and to the corporeal body, the human being ‘through his will is free to choose whichever side he wishes’, ‘Therefore, the spirit makes us gods’.15 Erasmus connects this view both with Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians (I, 5: 23), where he refers to body, soul and mind, and with Origen, and it is readily recognisable in the Corpus Hermeticum Book IV.16 As Stewart MacDonald observes, ‘he was anxious to emphasise that the philosophy and wisdom of the ancients ­constituted eternal truths which 15 16

From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The choice between the incorporeal spiritual world and the corporeal material world is represented in the Pythagorean Y which opens Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica. CH IV [7]: ‘Choosing the stronger then [. . .] not only has splendid consequences for the one who chooses in that it makes a human into a god [. . .] choosing the lesser has been man’s destruction.’

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were compatible with the teachings of Christ and of the early Church’ (2000, 3). In this opinion his thinking is consonant with, or indeed may have been influenced by, Lazzarelli. In a study entitled Erasmus and the Process of Human Perfection: Philosophy of Christ, Sylvia Fitzpatrick refers to Erasmus’ ‘version of Christianity’ as ‘first and foremost a way or method of human perfection’ (2012, 5): The Erasmian programme of perfection relies on an intimate knowledge of the self. [. . . ] He believed that the human mind contains the divine spark or image of Christ and that if we access this by a process of selfknowledge we will then discern for ourselves the way or method of perfection, which is the philosophy of Christ (original italics). (2012, 100) In describing Erasmus’ philosophy as one that aims at perfection to be achieved through self-knowledge, Fitzpatrick effectively identifies his ‘philosophy of Christ’ with the philosophy of Hermes. Erasmus’ writings reveal a deep understanding of ideas that are integral to the Corpus Hermeticum: the importance of exercising free will on the path to Christ, the importance of self-knowledge, and the promise of Hermes Trismegistus to the perfectibility and divinity of Man. Given that Erasmus took as his device a depiction of Terminus, associated with Hermes, and that a friend referred to him as Termaximus (that is, Trismegistus), I conclude that Erasmus may have been personally affected by the message of spiritual regeneration. The spirituality, piety and eirenicism which marked Erasmus’ private life quite possibly originated in, or were at the very least validated by, the Hermetica. Erasmus made a third visit to England between 1509 and 1511, when he stayed with More. His visit coincided with that of the young Agrippa of Nettesheim, later to become notorious for his knowledge of the esoteric philosophy, but there is no record of their having met. 5

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535)

Agrippa arrived in England late in 1509. Three years earlier, he had been at the University of Paris where Donald Tyson claims that he gathered around him ‘a group of scholars pursuing studies into the occult mysteries’ (2004, xvi).17 What is certain is that when Agrippa was in Paris, several newly published texts of the Hermetic corpus were available for purchase. These were Lefèvre’s 1505 17

Tyson later refers to the group as an ‘occult brotherhood’ (2004, xvii), which gives a sinister cast to what may in other circumstances have been perceived as the sort of discussion group that emerged later in the century.

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edition of Pymander and Asclepius to which he had added Lazzarelli’s commentary, Crater Hermetis, somewhat abbreviated, and Champier’s 1507 Latin Corpus Hermeticum complete with Lazzarelli’s last chapters.18 Not only that, Reuchlin’s work on the Kabbalah, De Verbo Mirifico (1494), had been followed up with De Arte Cabalistica (1506). Pico had earlier connected Hermetic Magia with Cabala and Pythagorean mathematics (Yates 1964, 146); Reuchlin further developed the idea, and Agrippa, whose books reveal his deep fascination with number, gave a series of lectures on Reuchlin at the University of Dôle in Bordeaux, in the summer of 1509 (Tyson 2004, xviii). Erasmus, though a friend of Reuchlin, did not like Cabala and his dislike for the subject or perhaps a desire for secrecy may account for the absence of a record of a meeting with the young Agrippa, who in 1510 was in Oxford attending Colet’s lectures on St Paul.19 Agrippa brought with him to England an early version of the now famous De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy), liberally studded with references to Hermes. His interest in number he shared with Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, to whom he dedicated the Libri Tres, and who responded with a letter including the warning: Yet this one rule I advise you to observe, that you communicate vulgar secrets to vulgar friends, but higher and secret to higher and secret friends only. (lvii) Trithemius’ own work, the Steganographia, is about ways of communicating secrets cryptographically so that the meaning is hidden in plain sight. Agrippa’s deep understanding of the Hermetic way is revealed in his Oratio in praelectione Hermetis trismegisti (1515): ‘[Hermes] instructs us moreover in the knowledge of oneself, the ascent of the intellect [. . .] the divine union, and the sacrament of regeneration’ (in Keefer 1988, 619). In other words, Hermes instructs us on the path to follow in order to achieve the promise made to Christian believers in the First Letter of Peter: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. (1 Peter 1: 3) 18 19

Lefèvre d’Etaples removed Pontano from the dialogue and altered Lazzarelli’s opinion of the wisdom lineage, putting Moses before, not after, Hermes Trismegistus (Hanegraaff 2009, 14–15). Years later, after the publication of De vanitate scientiarum et artium in 1530, Erasmus wrote to Agrippa from Freiburg in 1531 and again in 1533, admiring ‘the courage and the eloquence’, and revealing that, being compelled to abstain from study after supper, he had employed a famulus to read Agrippa’s book to him (Haydn and Nelson 1968, 394–395).

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Hanegraaff, who identified the supra-rational spiritual regeneration that comes from gnōsis as the sine qua non of Hermetism (2008, 128), feared lest the flawed first edition of Ficino’s translation may have obliterated the message (2009, 3), but Agrippa, who had the opportunity of reading Lazzarelli’s translation, seems not only to have understood it but to have recognized that it complements the Christian message. Indeed, Hanegraaff sees that Lazzarelli’s translation holds the key ‘to understanding Agrippa’s mature [. . .] religious perspective as presented in De Occulta Philosophia’ (2009, 6). Michael Keefer gives a brilliant exposition of the problem that presented itself to Agrippa, namely the confounding of holy writ with gnostic heresy. He holds that for Agrippa, Hermetic rebirth is both ‘the highest form of magic’ and at the same time, ‘the purest form of Christianity’ (1988, 621, 650). Despite the vilification of posterity, who condemned him as a black magician, Agrippa fits the description of a Christian Hermetist as aptly as did Lazzarelli. 6 Hermes in France: Translation, Transmission and Reception by Court and Episcopate In the latter part of the fifteenth and the early part of the sixteenth century, France had engaged in territorial wars with Spain over Milan and Naples;20 but that did not halt the interchange of people, texts and ideas between France and other parts of Italy nor the spread of Florentine Neoplatonism, nor of Hermetism. If it was Colet who introduced the Florentine Neoplatonists to early Tudor England, it was Symphorien Champier of Lyon (c.1470–1538) who brought Lazzarelli to France. Whereas Champier himself seems to have been virtually ignored in Anglophone history, his contacts and connections make him a key 20

France and Spain had fought over possession of Naples and Milan for decades. Ferdinand I (referred to as Ferrante King of Naples), the illegitimate son of Alfonso King of Aragon, is the Ferdinand whom Lazzarelli tutors in the Crater Hermetis. René I d’Anjou and his son, Duke Jean, contested the kingdom of Naples in a battle commemorated in a long poem by Lazzarelli. When Ferdinand died in 1494, Charles VIII of France asserted his inherited Angevin claim to the crown of Naples, and invaded Italy; he took Naples, but was driven out of Italy by an alliance between Maximilian I, Spain and the Vatican. In 1499, Louis XII invaded again and took Milan and Naples, but was driven out of Naples in 1503 by Spain. In 1515 François I, having won the Battle of Marignano, concluded a peace treaty allowing him to keep Milan while Spain kept Naples. In 1521, François was drawn into war again and lost Milan; attempts to retrieve Milan in 1525 were disastrous, and led to François being captured by the Spanish and forced to sign a treaty (Cambrai, 1529), in which he renounced all claims to Italy. It is arguable that Shakespeare used these events as the backstory in setting The Tempest.

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figure in the transmission of Hermetic thought in France, although his own contribution is largely inconsequential.21 For Copenhaver, Champier’s interest lay in his being ‘a leading proponent of medical humanism’ and ‘an early reader of Ficino’ (1978, 95–96). Moreover, a discovery by Carlo Vecce in 1988, reported by Hanegraaff, sheds light on Champier’s role in the passage from Italy to France of Lazzarelli’s manuscript, which the latter had presented as a gift to his eccentric mentor, ‘Mercurio’ da Correggio in 1482.22 Champier is believed to have been present when Correggio, invited to visit Louis XII in Lyon in 1501, presented the king’s ambassador with Lazzarelli’s precious manuscript.23 One must assume that Champier was permitted to make a copy of the manuscript because he published it in Paris in 1507. Champier’s interest in Ficino, and his decision like him to ‘treat medicine and theology as interdependent disciplines’ probably stems from his time at the University of Paris, before 1495, where he was taught by, among others, ‘Johannes Colar britannus’ who is probably John Colet (Copenhaver 1978, 46), the Englishman who so admired Ficino.24 Certainly his explanation of why he, a doctor, was so interested in theosophy, stems from Ficino as much as from the Corpus Hermeticum. 21 22

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D. P. Walker includes him in a chapter on ancient theology in sixteenth century France in The Ancient Theology (1972, 63–131). His biographer, Copenhaver makes ‘no claims for his greatness’ and calls his long-winded pages ‘barren and unoriginal’ (1978, 95). The evidence lies in two letters: one from Trithemius quoted in Copenhaver (1978, 51), the other from Pietro Aleandro, a manuscript hunter (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 40). They record a visit from Mercurio da Correggio to King Louis XII in Lyon in 1501. This Correggio, a man of great wealth but allegedly of little formal education, lived with his family a life of ostentatious poverty. He believed himself to be and convinced others that he was Pymander and the son of God. Lazzarelli was devoted to him and made him a gift of his unpublished manuscript translation of seventeen Books of the Corpus Hermeticum. Lazzarelli having died in 1500, Correggio, invited to speak to the French king who was interested in his practice of medicine and alchemy, presented Louis with his writings (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 41). Trithemius reports that the doctors at the royal court were ‘amazed and astonished that a man too unlettered to have an adequate knowledge of Latin should have talents so profound, especially in medicine’ (Copenhaver 1978, 51). To the king’s ambassador he presented what Maria Paola Saci has ascertained was Lazzarelli’s translation of the Corpus and the three chapters known as the Diffinitiones. One letter records that ‘Mercurio was disputing with one of the king’s physicians’, a man later identified by Vecce as Champier (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 40, 41 n.133). Hanegraaff traces its passage from the ambassador to Aleandro who ‘took it with him to Venice in 1503 and then to Rome, from where Egidio da Viterbo could have taken it to Viterbo’ where it remains to this day (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 41). Champier claimed to have studied with Pico in Paris, and Copenhaver thinks Champier’s ‘assaults against occultism’ derived more from Pico and his nephew than from Ficino (1978, 55).

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Champier’s response – ‘that it is because nature has joined soul to body in us by means of the spiritus. The body is cured with the remedies of medicine, the spiritus . . . is regulated and nourished with aerial scents and sounds and chants’ (Copenhaver 1978, 54) – reflects Hermes’ teaching on the healing power of music and the importance of tuning ‘the inward lyre’ and adjusting it to ‘the musician’ (CH XVIII [5]). Shakespeare may be thinking similarly of the power of music to nourish the spirit when he introduces music as ‘the food of love’ or speaks of the ‘harmony [. . .] in immortal souls’ which can only be heard in heaven, or when he fills the isle with ‘Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not’.25 When Champier published Lazzarelli’s complete Pymander in 1507, it was in a climate made favourable by the publication two years earlier of Lefèvre’s second edition of Ficino’s Pymander, along with the Asclepius, a commentary condemning the bad magic therein, and Lazzarelli’s abbreviated Crater Hermetis. This time, Lefèvre dedicated the work to a Bishop, Guillaume Briçonnet of Meaux. Standard reference works regularly ignore his 1505 work on the Hermetica, but the Encyclopedia Britannica records that ‘he seems to have undergone a religious crisis in 1505 and turned to mysticism’. In 1525 both Lefèvre and Briçonnet were brought before an inquisitorial tribunal to answer charges of heresy;26 the charges ostensibly related to Lefèvre’s translation of the New Testament into French and the influence of Luther and also to a certain Cenacle de Meaux. The Circle of Meaux was a short-lived conventicle set up by Lefèvre to discuss reforms in the Church. Confronting the tribunal, Briçonnet recanted, and Lefèvre escaped to Strasbourg assisted by Marguerite d’Angoulême, Queen of Navarre. Called back from his exile by her brother François I, Lefèvre became tutor to his children before settling in Nérac at the court of Marguerite. The fact that Briçonnet was also ‘remembered for his spiritual correspondence with Marguerite de Navarre’ (Ferguson 2011, 189), raises the possibility that her well-known interest in Evangelical ideas and her support for the reformers may have owed something to Hermetic thought as well as to the Neoplatonists. Queen consort of Navarre (1492–1549), the wife of Henri II d’Albret, and grandmother of Henri of Navarre, Marguerite d’Angoulême had made Nérac a great religious and humanist centre (Champeaud 81). She was widely admired in France, as much for her intellect and her writing as for her kindness and 25 26

Twelfth Night, 1.1.1; The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.63; The Tempest, 3.2.137. The tribunal was allowed by Pope Clement at the request of Queen Louise, the queen mother, who was anxious to prevent the spread of Protestantism in France.

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generosity.27 In the spirit of true agape, she initiated reforms in convents and hospices and founded the Hôpital des Enfants Rouges for abandoned children in Paris. Growing up, she had access to the famed library of illuminated manuscripts and printed books at the Angoulême court in Cognac and was rumoured to have carried with her at all times Ficino’s translation of Plotinus’ Enneads.28 Erasmus admired her, as did François Rabelais, who dedicated The Third Book of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of the Good Pantagruel to her. Queen Marguerite remained a loyal Catholic but her only surviving child, Jeanne d’Albret (1528–1572), hastened the pace of reform when she inherited Navarre, now converted to Calvinism, married Antoine of the House of Bourbon (1518–1562), and became the mother of Henri Bourbon of Navarre. In 1533 Marguerite’s fourteen-year-old nephew, later Henri II of France, married Catherine de Medicis, and the Valois family tree was split in two.29 In Lyon, Champier was in touch, ‘either intellectually or personally with the best minds of his time’ (Copenhaver 1978, 75). It was to Lyon that Agrippa came in 1524 as physician to the queen mother, Louise of Savoy. For the few years he was there, Agrippa moved in the same circles as Champier, who mentions a meeting he had with ‘Agrippa germano viro multiscio’, who is probably Agrippa von Nettesheim (Copenhaver 1978, 75).30 Rabelais (1483/94?–1553), physician, former Franciscan and writer, is another who came to Lyon, and whose works were certainly known in England.31 G. Mallary Masters analyses Rabelais’ books from the perspective of Rabelais’ interest in Plato which is wellknown, and also in the Corpus Hermeticum which is not so well-known, and in ‘the dialectic common to both’ (1969, 2). However, for Masters, ‘Hermetism’ includes magic, astrology, alchemy, Cabala, the initiatory cults of Pythagoras and Orpheus, as well as Platonism and Neoplatonism, complicated, as he says, by their association with Christianity. In the chapter entitled ‘Rabelais hermeticus’ (1969, 72–97), Masters explicitly defines ‘hermetism’ in terms of the black 27

During her lifetime she was also admired in England. Elizabeth while still a princess translated her Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (Mirror of the sinful soul), as a gift for her stepmother, Catherine Parr. The queen’s mother, Anne Boleyn, while in France (1515–1522) in the service of Queen Claude, the sister-in-law of Queen Marguerite, may have met her and been influenced by her radical views. 28 Poetry Foundation. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/marguerite-de-navarre accessed 2/01/21. 29 In fact the Catholic branch was further split between the politique Catholic royalists, loyal to the king, and the militant Catholic Guisards, loyal to the duc de Guise. 30 Hanegraaff notes that Agrippa and Champier may also have met when both were lecturing in Pavia in 1515; Agrippa was lecturing on Ficino, and Champier was in the medical faculty (2009, 16 n.51). 31 Books I and II of Gargantua and Pantagruel were first translated into English in 1653.

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arts, while the religious Hermetism of the Corpus Hermeticum is conflated with Neoplatonism in the chapter ‘Rabelais Platonicus’ (1969, 14–36). Masters sees that Rabelais is as scathing about alchemists and the sale of indulgences as he is satirical of astrologers, but that, even while indulging in the comic ironic inversions for which he is famed, nevertheless reveals an understanding of the quest for self-knowledge and of the goal of universal harmony. From Rabelais’ ‘facetious versions of some of Champier’s titles’, Copenhaver is sure that he knew of Champier’s works (1978, 73–74). Indeed, it is not unreasonable to conclude that two physicians in the same town, both attached to the court, would have known each other, and that Rabelais would have had the opportunity to read Champier’s publication of the Corpus Hermeticum. In 1549, Gabriel du Préau dedicated his French translation of the Hermetica and the Crater Hermetis to Cardinal Charles de Lorraine. Five years later, Adrian Turnebus published the first Greek language edition of the Corpus Hermeticum.32 To Ficino’s original fourteen tracts, Turnebus added three fragments from Stobaeus and one from the Suda as Chapter XV. It was in those years, during the reign of Henri II that the group of seven poets known as La Pléiade began to meet at the home of Jean-Antoine de Baïf.33 Roger Howell observes that their interest in Greek language and literature ‘was connected with Neoplatonism and probably with magic and mysticism as well’ and that ‘they were proponents of a sort of ecumenical movement’ where Catholics and Protestants came together (159). History records that in an increasingly literate society, as more printed books were becoming available, men and women began to gather in small groups to share reading of books and manuscripts with like-minded others, often with a scholar acting as ‘facilitator’ (Jardine and Grafton 1990, 35). It was also in the mid-sixteenth century that conventicles of men and women began to gather in private houses to read the works of a German mystic, Hendrik Niclaes (1502–1580), a merchant mercer and architect of the Familia Caritatis or Das Haus der Liebe, first heard of in East Friesland in 1540. A prolific and singularly obscure writer, Niclaes regularly signed himself with his initials which also stood for Homo Novus; his teaching closely resembles Hermetic doctrine in many respects. The goal of his followers was to live a life so pure that they would achieve perfection and become god-like or ‘godded with god’. It is now known that the sect spread into France where it was called La Maison de la Charité, but its followers left scarcely a trace on the public record. 32 33

‘It contains a dedication to Lancelot de Carle, Bishop of Riez, a friend of Ronsard, by Angelus Vergicius’ (Walker 1972, 68). In Greek mythology, the eldest of the Pléiades was Hermes, son of Zeus and Maia.

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In 1570 the French king, Charles IX, founded the first of the great musical academies, Baïf’s Académie de Poésie et Musique, the aim of the academy being to achieve union between poetry and music (Yates 1947, 19). The plan, which sounds distinctively hermetic, was to revive the music of the ancients because ‘these melodies [. . .] are believed to have the power of refining and purifying the minds of the auditors, and, through this purification, of initiating them into higher states of knowledge’ (Yates 1947, 36). As we saw, Champier had also claimed therapeutic and psychological effects for music (Copenhaver 1978, 54). Soon after the establishment of Baïf’s academy, the apothecary Nicholas Houël founded the Maison de la Charité Chrétienne in Paris in 1576 (Ingman 1984, 226).34 Yates describes it as ‘a combined orphanage, school, hospital, and pharmacy’ where ‘music forms part of the cure and the curriculum’, and suggests a possible link between Houël’s establishment, the Family of Love, and the court of Henri III (1947, 157). Given the importance attached to music in the Corpus Hermeticum (XVIII), and the therapeutic effects of spiritual harmony, it is possible that Houël’s generous act is also linked to the agape associated with Hermetism. In 1574, twenty years after the Turnebus edition, François Foix de Candale, Bishop of Aire sur l’Adour, published another edition of the Greek Hermetica and a Latin translation, based on Turnebus’ edition of fourteen treatises, to which he had added the fragments from Stobaeus mentioned earlier, and two tracts from Lazzarelli. Moreschini acclaims Foix de Candale as ‘among the greatest Hermetic philosophers of the sixteenth century’ (2011, 189). Foix dedicated the work to the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medicis. It is reasonable to suppose that she looked favourably on a work whose first Latin translation had been commissioned by Cosimo de’Medici of the great dynasty from which she herself was descended. In 1579, Foix de Candale published his French translation and an extensive commentary on the Corpus Hermeticum, entitled Le Pimandre de Mercure Trismegiste de la philosophie Chrestienne. He dedicated the work to the queen’s daughter, the Catholic Marguerite de Valois (1553–1615), who was about to be reunited with her husband, Henri of Navarre, at the Huguenot court in Nérac. In short, in France, the Hermetic texts were openly received at the highest levels by both the episcopate and the court. Cardinal Jacques Davy du Perron was not afraid to quote from the scriptures and pagan philosophers in the same sermon, in a marriage of sacred and profane that was apparently common at Vincennes, but which outraged the Catholic League who accused Henri III of condoning sorceries (Yates 1947, 170–171). Yates quotes from a famous discours 34

In a discussion of religious tolerance in the poetry of Jean de la Jessée, whom she suspects of being a Familist, Heather Ingman notes that Jessée was a friend of Houël.

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spirituel of the Cardinal, excerpts that suggest his acquaintance with the Hermetica. For example, in speaking of a truth beyond reason, and the desire which the soul has of knowing the Divinity, du Perron says: Our soul receives only images and appearances instead of truth and reality; as when we see visions in dreams and stretch out our hands to grasp them, it is only air and shadows that we grasp, and no solid body. So it must not be thought strange if [. . .] our soul cannot satisfy herself, nor assuage the desire she has of knowing, in anything save the manifest vision of the Divinity. For all other knowledge feeds her only on semblances and representations, filling her with nothing solid [. . .] but there in that glorious vision of God which we await in the other world [. . .] it will be his own Essence, who is the Essence of Essences, the origin and source of all being which [. . .] will communicate itself to our soul, as our soul is infused and spread throughout our body. (Yates 1947, 168) While in the Corpus Hermeticum we read: One dares to say, Asclepius, that god’s essence (if in fact he has an essence) is the beautiful but that the beautiful and the good are not to be detected in any of the things in the cosmos. All the things that are subject to the sight of the eyes are as phantoms and shadowy illusions (CH VI [4]). God is in mind, but mind is in soul, and soul is in matter . . . (CH XI [4]) Du Perron speaks openly, not of faith in God but of the Hermetic desire of the soul to know God, and he refers to the ephemeral nature of reality found in Plato and also in Stobaeus. Shakespeare references these same issues about the nature of truth and reality in The Tempest. The Cardinal also refers to the pagan belief in pantheism, and to ‘the Sun, which the Egyptians called the invisible God’ (in Yates 1947, 169). He defines God as ‘an intellectual sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere’. Yates alleges he is influenced here by Nicholas of Cusa, but the definition was also linked graphically to Trismegistus at about that time. Nevertheless, despite this evidence that the Hermetic texts were read with approval in France, whatever eirenic ideas they contained did not prevent the country from being torn apart by eight civil wars in the years between 1563 and 1585.35 35

The French Wars of Religion began in 1563 after the assassination of François de Guise; they were repeated in 1568; 1572 (the massacre on St Bartholomew’s day); 1573; 1575; 1577; 1580; 1585. Almost one third of the population of France died in these wars.

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The involvement of Catherine de Medicis in the bloody massacre of Protestants on St Bartholomew’s day in 1572 earned her a lasting reputation for ruthlessness. She had made several previous attempts to reconcile Protestant and Catholic differences, and with the Chancellor, Michel de l’Hôpital (1507– 1563), she had convened the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561.36 The queen’s daughter, Marguerite de Valois, a devout Catholic, records in her Mémoires for 1561 that when she was but eight years old, many ladies and lords of the court tried to convert her to Huguenotism at that time and that it was only with the greatest difficulty that she resisted (74–75). The whole court, she writes, was infected with the heresy, and even her brother the duc d’Anjou (who was to become King of France, Henri III), had been prevailed upon to change his religion.37 In 1572, Catherine again attempted to reconcile the two confessions, this time through the marriage of her daughter to the Huguenot Henri Bourbon of Navarre. The subsequent events on St Bartholomew’s day are too well-known to repeat here. Marguerite was placed in an invidious position and wrote: ‘the Huguenots were suspicious of me because I was a Catholic and the Catholics because I was married to the King of Navarre who was a Huguenot’ (1999, 97). After six years of marriage she was eventually permitted to join her husband at 36

The conference at Poissy brought together the French bishops under Cardinal F. de Tournon and the Protestant ministers led by the Calvinist Theodore Beza. It failed to bring about a reconciliation when Catholics and Protestants were unable to agree over the Eucharist but was followed by a decree of tolerance granting some rights to Protestants in France. The decree was ignored by followers of the Duc de Guise who massacred a group of worshipping Protestants at Vassy and the first religious civil war began soon after. De l’Hôpital was a moderate, a Catholic with a Protestant wife and children, who advocated religious toleration to be achieved by peaceful means. He held that a ruler should be prepared to put the interests of the state above religious factions, a position later described as politique. 37 [1561] ‘To keep my religion at the time of the Colloquy of Poissy when the whole court was infected with heresy, I had to withstand the urgent persuasions of several lords and ladies of the court and even my brother d’Anjou, now King of France, who even as a child had not been able to escape the influence of wicked Huguenotism, constantly calling on me to change my religion, often throwing my Book of Hours into the fire, and giving me instead psalms and Protestant prayers and forcing me to take them’. [1561] Et la résistance aussi que je fis pour conserver ma religion du temps du colloque de Poissy, où toute la Cour était infectée d’héresie, aux persuasions impérieuses de plusieurs dames et seigneurs de la Cour et même de mon frère d’Anjou, depuis roi de France, de qui l’enfance n’avait pu éviter l’impression de la malheureuse huguenoterie, qui sans cesse me criait de changer de religion, jetant mes heures souvent dans le feu, et au lieu me donnant des psaumes et prières huguenotes me contraignant les porter (Mémoires, 1999, 74–75). Marguerite’s memory does not always accord with documented evidence such as her letters, and it is possible that writing long after the event she is attempting here to damage her brother, Henri III (1999, 47).

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the court in Nérac in August 1579 and stayed with him until January 1582.38 Her Mémoires written afterwards and not published until 1626 record her memory of how they accommodated their religious differences: [1579] A happiness which lasted the space of the four or five years that I was in Gascony with him, spending most of our time at Nérac where our Court was so brilliant and so delightful that we did not for a moment miss the French Court: we had with us there the Princess of Navarre, my husband’s sister, since married to my nephew the duc de Bar; I had besides a great number of ladies and young women of my own, and the King my husband was attended by a large group of lords and gentlemen, all as honest men as the most gallant to be seen in any Court; and we regretted only that they were Huguenots. But of these differences of religion there is nothing to say; the King my husband and the Princess his sister going to one side to listen to a sermon, whilst my household and I heard mass in a chapel which is in the park; as I left, we gathered to stroll together either in a beautiful garden, ornamented with long avenues bordered with laurel and tall cypress trees, or in the park, along the paths which ran for three miles beside the river. The rest of the day was spent in innocent amusements; and after dinner and in the evenings, there was usually a ball (199). But Fortune, envious of such a happy life (which seemed, by reason of the peace and harmony that prevailed, to scoff at her power, as if we had not been subject to her capriciousness), in order to worry us, stirred up new reasons for war between the King my husband and the Catholics, making the King my husband and the Marechal de Biron (who, at the request of the Huguenots, had been appointed the King’s [meaning her brother Henri III] lieutenant in Guyenne), such enemies, that although I tried to bring them together, I could do nothing to prevent it. They made their separate complaints to the King. The King my husband insisted on the removal of the Marechal de Biron from Guyenne and the Marechal accused the King my husband, and the rest of those who were of the socalled reformed religion, with wishing to violate the peace treaty. [1580]

38

Her memory enlarges two and a half years to ‘four or five’ (1999, 199 n.397). Navarre himself who had been obliged to convert to Catholicism and had been under house arrest since the St Bartholomew’s day massacre, managed to effect his escape in 1576 with a handful of loyal friends, and make his way back to Nérac.

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To my great sorrow, the division thus begun grew ever greater and I was unable to do anything about it. (200)39 Details such as these from Marguerite de Valois’ Mémoires provide a clear picture of how religious toleration was practised at the Huguenot court. Protestants and Catholics came happily together in their social life and worshipped just as happily apart. In England, by contrast, only five years later in 1584, for a Catholic priest to administer the sacrament was outlawed as treason. Without the insight from the Mémoires, the significance of the men whom Shakespeare names in Love’s Labour’s Lost would be lost to reader and audience. It is certain that there were some in Shakespeare’s audience who recognized the Catholic Armand de Gontaut, duc de Biron, in Berowne. The other lords attending the king in Shakespeare’s play are Dumaine who was Charles de Lorraine, duc de Maine or Mayenne (1554–1611), the Catholic younger brother of Henri de Guise, Navarre’s implacable enemy, and Longaville who was Henri d’Orléans, duc de Longueville and whose sister was married to Navarre’s cousin Henri, Prince of Condé (1552–1588). With this knowledge we see that Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the king and his friends swear to devote themselves to self-improvement, self-denial and contemplation in order to achieve the promised godlike status, unites Catholic and Protestant in the same way as the real court at Nérac promoted religious toleration. Not long before Marguerite arrived in Nérac with her entourage, she had received the Hermetic books translated into French and dedicated to her by Foix de Candale.40 Only months earlier, she had also received the Discours de l’honneste amour, sur le Banquet de Platon par Marsille Ficin, translated by Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie. La Boderie (1541–1598) an apparently unwavering Catholic, a poet and philologist, was secretary to François (formerly duc d’Alençon) now duc d’Anjou (1555–1584), the king’s brother, and had translated a number of Ficino’s and Pico’s works.41 It seems reasonable to conjecture that Marguerite took her new books with her to Nérac to read aloud in the company 39

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For French original see Appendix III. The Editor of the Mémoires, Eliane Viennot, notes that the fame of the Nérac court must have reached England and inspired Shakespeare to write Les Peines d’amour perdues or Love’s Labour’s Lost. She does not suggest how this may have happened nor why Shakespeare and his court audience may have been interested (199 n.399). Although completed in 1572, Foix’s translation was published in January 1579, in Bordeaux. La Boderie published in French translation: Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium; his De Triplici Vita; Pico’s De Hominis Dignitate and Francesco Giorgi’s De Harmonia Mundi (Walker 1972, 66).

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of others, possibly in the royal library.42 Moreover, Agrippa d’Aubigny, ‘inventor and designer of masquerades and tourneys’ in which Huguenots and Guisards performed together at the French court, has described an academy at Navarre ‘in imitation of Henri III’s academy’ in Paris (Yates 1947, 257, 258). Clearly, its fame had spread to England, for Shakespeare makes his character Ferdinand, King of Navarre, refer to it in the opening lines of Love’s Labour’s Lost: Navarre shall be the wonder of the world, Our court shall be a little academe, Still and contemplative in living art. (1.1.12–14) Loris Petris refers to the Neoplatonism enjoyed at the Nérac court (2012, 283).43 She acknowledges that Jean Balsamo established in 1991 that the plethora of new French translations from the Tuscan Neoplatonists was of interest to the men and women gathered in Navarre.44 However, it is clear from Petris’ discussion of Pibrac’s long poem L’Ombre de Bussy (The Ghost of Bussy) that the Neoplatonism which so fascinated the court was derived from the Hermetica and could properly be termed Hermetism.45 Petris argues that Pibrac is acknowledging and giving voice to Marguerite’s Neoplatonic proclivities in the dialogue of Flore to Lisis in the poem.46 However, when the two lovers become one in a reciprocal spiritualized love, Pibrac reveals his knowledge of the Pimandre and of Foix de Candale’s commentary. Marguerite de Valois herself employs the Hermetic concept of the androgynous nature of God in letters to her friend the duchess of Nevers in 1579, and later to her lover Jacques de Harlay, seigneur de Champvallon, in 1583. The Hermetic notion of man’s becoming one with God 42

43 44 45 46

Damien Plantey describes the library as it was in 1580, divided into two parts, for private study, and for entertainment where games such as chess were played. Amongst the collection he lists books of poetry sacred and profane, books of music for church and court, a history of the French wars in Italy and, cheek by jowl on the shelves, prayer books, Protestant books of psalms and Catholic books of hours. There was also a fountain and an artificial garden composed of flowers of silk and gold wire and a little silver tree enamelled in green. It offered for every season of the year a natural setting encouraging conversation both literary and spiritual (152). It is possible that Shakespeare had the library setting in mind when he ended Love’s Labour’s Lost with songs for Hiems and Ver. ‘la topique néoplatonicienne goutée à la cour de Nérac’ (Petris 2012, 283). J. Balsamo. “Marguerite de Valois et la philosophie de son temps.” Marguerite de France, reine de Navarre et son temps. Actes du colloque d’Agen. 1991 (Petris 2012, 283 n.55). Pibrac wrote the poem for Marguerite following the assassination of her former lover, Bussy d’Amboise in 1579. Twenty-five years later in England, Chapman wrote several plays about the same man. ‘Pibrac connaȋt la propension néoplatonicienne de Marguerite et il sait y répondre’ (Petris 283).

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is here interpreted as the power of love to restore and complete the divided couple, as La Boderie wrote in the translation of Ficino which he dedicated to Marguerite: ‘When they were divided, love pulled the two halves together to repair and restore the whole’ (Petris 2012, 283).47 Petris points out that Marguerite echoes his words, writing to Champvallon: ‘Love can only be perfect through the harmony of two souls united by the same will’ (284).48 It seems clear that the Queen of Navarre had read and assimilated the ideas in the Hermetic texts. There can be little doubt that the works of the Florentine Neoplatonists, as well as Foix de Candale’s French translation of and commentary on the Corpus Hermeticum were read, possibly aloud, and discussed in the library by the gentlemen who surrounded the king, and the ladies who followed in the train of the queen, constituting, around 1580, an ‘Academy of Navarre’ to rival the Palace Academy in Paris. 7 Hermes in Late Tudor England: The Transmission and Reception of the Hermetic Texts In the years before and after 1580, diplomatic contact between the English and French courts, associated with an attempt to unite the crowns in marriage, was frequent and friendly and provided an opportunity for texts of all kinds to be brought from France to England.49 It is no secret that English men and women of letters knew and read the French poets, for the evidence in print is indisputable.50 There is no reason to doubt that other French publications, such

47 48 49 50

‘Depuis qu’ils furent divisez, la moitié fut par amour tirée à sa moietié, pour refaire et restituer l’entier’ (Petris 283). ‘L’amour ne peut être parfait que par l’accord de deux âmes unies par une même volonté’ (Petris 284). Under Elizabeth, successive kings of France were made members of the Order of the Garter: Charles IX in 1564, Henri III in 1575, and Henri IV in 1590. Sidney Lee in the Introduction to Elizabethan Sonnets (1904) outlines the frequent and egregious practice of the Elizabethan poets of borrowing, by translation and paraphrase, without acknowledgment, from the French poets. Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Thomas Watson, Anne Cecil de Vere, Samuel Daniel and Thomas Lodge all flagrantly plagiarize Desportes and Ronsard, not to mention the older poets, Clément Marot and Jacques du Bellay. Shakespeare’s use of Belleforêt’s Histoires Tragiques as a source for Hamlet is not disputed, even though it was not Englished until 1608. Harold Jenkins, editor of 1982 Arden edition of Hamlet suggests the 1576 edition of Belleforêt as Shakespeare’s likely source (89). Margrethe Jolly in 2012 found over fifty echoes from the French source, ‘whether exactly parallel, adapted or transposed’ (Parergon, 29, 92).

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as Foix’s translation and commentary just published in 1579, aroused similar interest in England and were obtained by travellers or brought as gifts. In 1579 a group of Commissioners led by Jean de Simier was in England for several months to negotiate the terms of the projected marriage between Henri III’s younger brother, François, duc d’Anjou, and Queen Elizabeth. Although ostensibly a Catholic, like his brother the king, François was a politique, suspected in France of harbouring sympathies for the reformers.51 The politiques were Catholic moderates who, as a matter of policy, prized peace and toleration, putting the unification and pacification of the state above religious adherence. It was a policy consistent with Hermetic thinking, even if it cannot be shown to have been motivated by it. D’Anjou himself made several visits to England, and in 1581 he was accompanied by Jean Bodin, who had been a member of his entourage for ten years. Bodin charmed the English with his wit and erudition, but his religious views were hard to determine. In 1562 he had signed the oath of loyalty to the Catholic faith, but in 1569 he was arrested and imprisoned as ‘an adherent of the new religion’ (Kuntz 1975, xxi). His ‘new religion’ has generally been understood as Protestantism but it is possible that what was meant was Hermetism. According to his translator and biographer, Marion Leathers Daniels Kuntz, Bodin was both ‘profoundly religious’, intolerant only of Atheism, and also felt that ‘true religion requires no church’ (Kuntz 1975, xxix). This is a sentiment which the Familists also shared. In her magisterial study of the Colloquium heptaplomeres, Kuntz notes the frequency of Bodin’s references to Hermes Trismegistus and concludes that the book was at its core Hermetic (1975, liv). Again, like the Familists, and also like Hermetists, Bodin’s Colloquium heptaplomeres, not published in his lifetime, makes the case for complete religious toleration of all faiths. Kuntz quotes Pierre Mesnard who described Bodin as having ‘a grand conception of salvation open to all, Christians or pagans on equal footing’ (1975, xx). The concept of universal salvation is not the only one that Bodin shares with Familism and the Corpus Hermeticum. In an earlier work, Universae naturae theatrum, he wrote that ‘God created the universe through the exercise of His free will, and He bestowed free will on man’ (in Kuntz, xxxiv). In the Theatrum Bodin wrote: ‘I have placed before your eyes good and evil, life and death; choose therefore the good and you will live’ (in Kuntz, xxxiv). The words echo Hermes telling Tat about the effects of choice: ‘choosing the stronger . . . has splendid consequences . . . in that it makes the human into a 51

Suspicious of a French Catholic, the English were divided over the match, Leicester, ­ alsingham and Sidney opposing it, and Lord Burghley and the earls of Sussex and W Oxford being in favour.

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god’ (CH IV [7]). Moreover, they imply a Hermetic notion that evil originates with mankind. As Hermes says: ‘the evils for which we are responsible, who choose them instead of good things, are no responsibility of god’s’ (CH IV [8]). Kuntz remarks Bodin’s admiration for Ficino, Pico and the ancient theologians. The diary of John Dee records a meeting with Bodin at Westminster (10), but before I discuss England’s most famous proponent of Hermetism and others whose knowledge of Hermetism is also recorded, I turn to the emergence of the Family of Love in England. 8

The Family of Love in England

Whereas Familism was a well-kept secret in France until the Plantin archive was opened in the late nineteenth century (Mangani 1998, 72), in England the sect rose suddenly to public prominence around 1579 and then seemed to disappear after 1582. In fact, the group continued invisibly, without attracting attention, and enters the public record again after the accession of James VI and I. Christopher Marsh names 116 individual men and women or families either accused of belonging to the Family, identified from other sources such as wills, or ‘probable Familists’. From his close examination of the wills of known Familists, Marsh concluded that the frequency of the innocent phrase ‘loving friends’ was a probable indicator of a member of the society. Ten of the known Familists held positions close to the queen as Yeomen of her Guard (Marsh 1994, 116). They were under the captaincy of Christopher Hatton (Marsh 1994, 117), and later under Walter Ralegh whose knowledge of the Hermetic philosophy is recognized in The History of the World, written while he was imprisoned in the Tower, and published in 1614. The best evidence that the Family of Love was regarded as a serious alternative religion comes from the exiled priest Robert Parsons, who in 1580 wrote: ‘There are at this day in your Majesties Realme, fower known religions . . . distinct both in name, spirite and doctrine . . . the Catholickes, the Protestants, the Puritanes and the householders of love’.52 The sect was attacked from all sides. Protestants thought their belief in free will and charitable good works favoured Catholicism, and their views on perfectibility and living purely were too Puritan; Puritans reviled them for denying the doctrine of original sin; they were despised by Catholics as hypocrites and cowards for their policy of 52

Robert Parsons. 1580. A brief discourse contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to Church, Douai. From ‘The Epistle Dedicatorie (to Queen Elizabeth)’. Cited by Martin, 1989, 217 n.9.

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dissimulation or equivocation which allowed then to evade prosecution by lying about their private beliefs while conforming outwardly with the prevailing religion, a practice known as Nicodemism.53 Between June 1575 and January 1581, the Privy Council dealt with nineteen items concerning the sect or its members.54 In October 1580 the queen issued a Proclamation against the Familists. However, ‘the horrible secte of grosse and wicked heretiques’ was never pursued. Familists who had been arrested, interrogated and imprisoned were released. No Familists were hanged, and by the end of 1582, the matter was no longer a concern. Nevertheless, the possibility that the teaching that Niclaes was promulgating was influenced by Hermetic thought, and that the Familists continued to practise Hermetic teachings at the grassroots level, cannot be ignored. (See Appendix 4 for more details.) 9

Familism and Hermetism Compared

Familists struggled with the paradox of keeping a low profile, while at the same time feeling obliged to evangelise. The same tension between maintaining secrecy and spreading the word is contained in the Corpus. The Hermetica and Niclaes shared virtually all their doctrines: toleration of all religions; man is perfectible; man is born free from sin; man’s will is free (for the Hermetist, evil comes from Man when he chooses the vice of ignorance); that life is a journey to the terra pacis, or the land of peace to be found within; that we should live in imitation of God from whom we came and to whom we can return in this life; that our lives should be filled with loving service to others; that through silent contemplation and examining our souls we can achieve self-knowledge, be spiritually regenerated and enter into union with the Divine Mind (Familists called this being ‘godded with god’); that only after that mystic experience can regenerated man be baptised as a ‘new man’: Homo Novus. Frederik Nippold, the nineteenth century German scholar, remarked in relation to Niclaes’ strictures for the administration of the affairs and rituals of the Family, that it is ‘astonishing how much the organisation of the Family resembles the Jesuit order and how similar the ritual is to the Freemasons’ (V, 329–330 in Dietz Moss 1969, 13). 53 54

In John 3: 1–2 Nicodemus visited Jesus under cover of night. See also Acts of the Privy Council XII, 232: ‘we are given to understand that there are divers persons terming them selves to be of the Familie of Love, maintaining erroneous doctrines and using private conventicles contrarie to her Majesties lawes’ (in Marsh 1994, 111).

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Plantin’s emblem seems to confirm Nippold’s opinion. The Familist emblem used by Plantin on some of Niclaes’ works combines the heart, symbolizing love (used also by the Jesuits to symbolize the burning heart of Jesus), with the handshake indicating friendship (employed in various ways by masons to indicate degrees of freemasonry). Above is written Charitas extorsit, and the verse below reads: Our heart is the Minde of God most-hie, which, given the similarities listed above, seems to be a clear indication of the connection of Familism to the Hermetic teaching about aspiring to the Mind of God. Some of their ideas, such as peace and love, which are the core of Christ’s teaching, and should have been central to the orthodox Christian Church, are realized in Familism as pacifism or the refusal to bear arms, and as the requirement to show loving service or charity to all.55 Other beliefs and practices, such as toleration of all religions, or through silent contemplation learning to know God are associated only with the Hermetica and the Family of Love. The vexed issue of whether Man through contemplation and knowledge of self can become god in this life (the Familist belief which so horrified outsiders) has its roots in the debate of the patristic Fathers of antiquity as to whether Christ was a man like God or was God himself.56 Hamlet’s words to Guildenstern: ‘What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason [. . . ] in apprehension how like a god:’ (2.2.303–306), can be seen as referencing the still current Christological debate, and opening for audience and reader a later discussion of the Familist position. 10

Philippe du Plessis Mornay (1549–1623)

Another whose name has been associated with Hermetism is Philippe du Plessis Mornay. Mornay was one of those Protestants who had sought refuge in England after the terrible events of Saint Bartholomew’s day. He was especially close to Sidney and Leicester who, Mornay’s wife recorded, were ‘her husband’s closest friends during the eighteen months [1577–1578 and 1580] he spent in London on a [diplomatic] mission from the King of Navarre’ (in Howell 1968, 55). He was a friend of the king and a regular visitor at the Huguenot court; Yates 55 56

Rufus Jones finds many similarities between Familism and the later Quakers (1909, 428). The practice of charity and giving practical help is characteristic of the Freemasons. This important issue is discussed above in The Early Christian Church. Bishop Arius argued that Christ was a man, like God, but separate from God; Nestor argued that Christ was one man with two separate natures: human and divine; and the Nicene and later Chalcedon Councils insisted that ‘He is of one substance with the Father’, that He had one nature and that He was inseparable from God.

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cites him as an example of ‘how men were turning to the Hermetic religion of the world to take them above these conflicts’ (1964, 176). Robert Kinsman also describes him as ‘a Protestant Hermetist’ who ‘believed that religious tolerance would be attained by a return to a Hermetic religion of the world’ (in Harrie 1978, 501). Nevertheless, despite his obvious knowledge and interest, Harrie doubts Mornay’s commitment to Hermetism. She argues that his references to Hermes Trismegistus in his Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne contre les athées, épicuriens, payens, juifs, mahométans et autres infidels (published in Antwerp in 1581), are confined to this one work where they are augmented by references to ‘all non-Christian authorities whose works demonstrated conformity with Christian truth’, including other prisci theologi (1978, 505). Foix de Candale, by contrast, Harrie describes as ‘a convinced and enthusiastic Hermetist’ (1978, 513). Both men wanted to see the reunification of the church, but neither man was willing to compromise his commitment to his confession. The bishop sought a peaceful solution, but Mornay, a soldier as well as a theologian, like Sidney was willing to take part in a just war. That Sidney undertook the translation of Mornay’s Traité de la Vérité is an indication of his sympathy for his friend’s religion and politics.57 Clearly Mornay’s work was present in England and there is a possibility that Hermetic works relating to the Traité, such as translations of Pymander, were also made available to the translator. Whether or not Hermetic texts arrived in England at that time, Hermetic thought certainly did, in the person of the eccentric and extraordinary Giordano Bruno. 11

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600)

Bruno of Nola, excommunicated by his Dominican order for doubting the divinity of Christ, had arrived in Paris in the early 1580s where he published two books on the magical Hermetic art of memory. He trailed in his wake the whole tradition of magic, astrology, alchemy and Cabala long associated with Hermeticism. He would have had opportunity in Italy to see the Pymander, and in Paris he could have read Foix de Candale’s Latin translation published in 1574. But he had moved beyond finding the Christian message in the pagan texts. In 1583, sent to London by Henri III, Bruno was staying at the French embassy where Mauvissière was ambassador. While his views on the centrality 57

After Sidney’s death the translation was substantially revised and completed by Arthur Golding, who may therefore be supposed to have been sympathetic to the views expressed. Golding is famous as the translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a book very well-known to Shakespeare.

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of the sun, or on the impossibility of the Trinity, may have intrigued or possibly horrified those who heard them, Bruno’s visit to London seems to have stimulated an interest in Hermetic thought. He was made welcome at the court of Elizabeth and, in the nearly three years he spent in London, he produced six books in Italian, presumably for the edification of the travelled, Italianspeaking court. The first of these, La cena de le ceneri or The Ash Wednesday Supper (meaning the Eucharistic meal), conveys his belief that a political alliance could best be effected by a unification of religion; this was to be achieved through his idiosyncratic Hermetic theory of the Eucharist that transcended the controversies over transubstantiation. Bruno dedicated one of his most daringly heretical books, Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast), to Sidney, who may have read it with his circle. It concerns expelling the torment of ignorance as ‘the preparatory condition for achieving reason’ (de Leon-Jones 1992, vii). Another work also dedicated to Sidney, De gli heroici furori (The Heroic Frenzies) asserts in the Preface that ‘It is truly [. . . ] the work of a low filthy animal nature to have made oneself the constant admirer, and to have fixed a solicitous attachment upon or around the beauty of a woman’s body’ (Rowland 2008, 175). Bruno expatiates on this theme, repudiating the pursuit of unrequited love as unworthy of Man, calling it a mania or madness, as Plato did in Phaedrus, and arguing that only the love of knowledge and God is worth the pain. On the one hand Bruno may be responding to Sidney’s long plaint of unrequited love in the sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella; on the other hand, his revelation of the power of knowledge and love to transform captures the Hermetic struggle of the soul to reach the divine light achieved when ‘by virtue of harmony and the fusion of opposites, the intellect becomes one with the affections and man realizes the good and rises to the knowledge of the true’ (Williams 20). The poems illustrate in typical Brunian terms the Hermetic path to spiritual gnōsis, without ever mentioning Hermes. The concept of the necessary melding of the intellect and senses is contained in Book IX of the Corpus Hermeticum (On understanding and sensation), and in Chapter 4 I discuss the use Shakespeare makes of this concept in King Lear.58 Some scholars, such as Gatti and Sacerdoti, have found evidence that Shakespeare had encountered Bruno’s writings, but while Bruno may be regarded as the epitome of the Renaissance philosopher, he is neither a non-magical religious Hermetist nor a true Christian.59 58 59

Gatti claims that Shakespeare and Marlowe both penetrated to the heart of Bruno’s thinking. In verbal parallels with Lo spaccio, she finds ‘a Brunian core’ in Hamlet (1989, 141–142). It should come as no surprise that Bruno’s plans for a religion that would heal the divided church and welcome all comers were a highly original mix of Euclidean geometry (an

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John Dee (1527–1608)

Philip Sidney’s interest in an ‘ecumenical religious movement which would unite all Protestants and perhaps eventually all Christians into a common body’ is less likely to have come from Bruno as his biographer suggests (­Howell 112), and more likely from his mentor and friend, that most famous of all English Christian Hermetists, Dr John Dee. The death of Colet in 1519, and the return of Erasmus and Agrippa to Europe circa 1510, might have spelt an end to Hermetism in England had not Dee devoted himself to it. He is most famous for the enigmatic and opaque Monas Hieroglyphica, which Clulee describes as ‘a daring and inventive proposal for a symbolic language that had the power to reveal the divine plan of creation, to explain the workings of the material world in the principles of alchemy and to assist in the mystic ascent of the soul’ (2005, 197). Yewbrey and van Dorsten suggest that the Monas may be ‘Dee’s proposal for a cosmopolitan, non-sectarian, tolerant religion . . . designed to prepare mankind for salvation’ (in Clulee, 1988, 78, 124). The monad or ‘root of all things’ (CH IV [10]), a language that will assist the ascent of the soul, a tolerant religion that will prepare mankind for salvation are ideas readily sourced to the religious philosophy of the Corpus Hermeticum. Dee’s travels took him to Europe where he had many friends and was greatly respected. As a young man he had studied with and befriended Mercator and was the friend of Ortelius, the map-maker, and Plantin, the printer. Both Ortelius, who was a kinsman of Sidney’s friend Daniel Rogers, and Plantin were known to Sidney and both are known to have belonged to the sect, Das Haus der Liebe (Woolley 2001, 63). His biographer, Peter French, speculated that ‘Dee may have gleaned some of his religious ideas from the secret sect known as the Family of Love’ (1972, 124 n.2), but French did not recognize those ideas as Hermetic or connect them with Dee’s ‘belief that his Hermetic religion of love transcended that of any contemporary church’ (1972, 123). Dee’s home at Mortlake housed ‘England’s largest and most valuable collection of books and manuscripts’ (Sherman 1995, 30). The library catalogue which he made in 1583, listing between three and four thousand titles, is witness to his catholic interests. He owned the works of Plato and Aristotle, Seneca, Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles, Plutarch, Plotinus, Reuchlin, and a manuscript copy of Trithemius’ Steganographia. He is said to have kept his copy of Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia libri tres acquired in 1550, open on interest that Foix de Candale shared with Dee), Bruno’s own interest in the art of memory and his belief in the magical Egyptian origin of the Hermetica, and that they were redolent of Freemasonry, which sees God as the great Geometer or Architect of the Universe.

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a lectern at all times, which suggests that he consulted it frequently. Dee possessed Plato’s Timaeus in the ‘lingua gallica’, acquired in Paris in 1551, and he owned and annotated Ficino’s Latin translation of Plato’s works – his detailed marginalia have been discussed by Stephen Clucas (2011, 227–247 passim). He also owned Ficino’s commentary, the Theologia Platonica published by Froben in Basle in 1532.60 Of his Hermetic library, Roberts and Watson list about twenty-five works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, many of which relate to alchemy, the philosopher’s stone and astrology. But he also possessed several editions and translations of the Corpus Hermeticum including one published in Basle. The lists made in his own hand of the books in his library and the dates he acquired them include ‘Mercurii Trismegisti Poemander, graecè . . . paris 1554’. This is almost certainly the Turnebus Greek edition of the Corpus Hermeticum mentioned earlier (French 1972, 55).61 In their catalogue of Dee’s library Roberts and Watson also list a Corpus Hermeticum in Greek acquired in 1567 with ‘frequent Dee marginalia’ (1990, 161). In addition to the works already mentioned, the list includes the Corpus Hermeticum in Latin, the Asclepius and another Poemander. It is very likely that Dee owned the edition printed in Cracow in 1585 prepared by Hannibal Rosselli and accompanied by detailed commentary. Parry records that Dee was in Poland at that time and, newly reconciled to Catholicism, made his confession to Friar Rosselli (2011, 87). Rosselli shared Dee’s interest in angels and it is reasonable to suppose that Dee obtained, or at least read, Rosselli’s commentary on a work which he already knew. If that were the case, then Dee had access to yet another edition not corrupted by the printers’ errors which had so distorted the Treviso edition more than a century before. Dee’s were not the only Hermetic texts in London. Three book lists made by George Puttenham, author of The Arte of Poesie, between 1562 and 1580 include La Puissance et Sapience de Dieu et la Volonté de Dieu, 1557, Paris, which 60

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Johann Froben (1460–1527), who published for Erasmus and for More, used a printer’s emblem that showed the caduceus of Hermes, entwined by two serpents and topped by a dove of peace held by two hands emerging from clouds. By 1532, Froben having died, the printing house was run by his son, Hieronymus, and continued to employ the caduceus emblem. I am not claiming here a necessary connection between Froben and the religious Hermetism of Hermes Trismegistus, but a version of the emblem, where the caduceus is flanked by cornucopiae and grasped by two hands in a friendly handshake was later employed by Andreas Wechel. The emblem was obtained by the printer Nicholas Okes and used for the title pages of Quarto King Lear and Othello, which may reasonably indicate a connection between those plays and Hermes/Hermes Trismegistus. Turnebus, a Greek scholar like Dee, had attended Dee’s lectures on mathematical philosophy in Paris in 1550 (French 1972, 31).

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is probably du Préau’s 1549 French translation; he also lists Ficino, Mirandola and Erasmus (Willis 2003, 222). Andrew Perne, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge is another who owned a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum and may have been sympathetic to the teaching.62 In short, in Shakespeare’s time, Hermetic texts were available in London and elsewhere in Latin and Greek, and also in French. From these resources manuscript copies could be made and disseminated to groups of men and women to read, listen to and discuss, as was becoming the custom. Not only was Dee an avid collector, his diary and his reputation reveal him to have been a generous lender (Halliwell 1842). Peter French likens his home to the ‘Platonic academies in Florence’ last seen in London in the days of More and Colet (1972, 60).63 William Sherman describes the ‘Mortlake Hospice for Wandering Philosophers’ where a visitor might bump into Francis Bacon, Richard Hakluyt, the governors of the Muscovy Company planning voyages to the North West passage, or the queen and the Privy Council (1995, 40). Dee’s own diary records visits from men directly and indirectly connected with this study including ‘Jan 16th 1577, the Erle of Leicester, Mr Philip Sydney, Mr [Edward] Dyer’ (1842, 2). In 1581 he records making acquaintance with Jean Bodin ‘in the Chambre of Presence at Westminster’ (1842, 10). After his return from abroad he records several visits from the earl of Derby, Will Stanley, between 1595 and 1597, sometimes accompanied by his countess, Elizabeth Vere Stanley (1842, 55, 59), and on 9th October 1595 he dined with Sir Walter Ralegh at Durham House (1842, 54).64 Dee is clearly a nodal figure in the transmission of Christian Hermetism. For most of the sixteenth century he was welcome at court, and he had friends in high places, such as the children of the Duke of Northumberland, whom he tutored.65 Through his third wife, Jane Fromonds, who had been lady-in-waiting to Lady Howard, he was connected to Admiral Charles Howard, patron of 62

63 64 65

Perne, whom Patrick Collinson describes as ‘Catholic-Protestant-of no religion, or Neutral’ (1994, 180), presided over Peterhouse ‘where Papists, Protestants and Puritans all contrived to coexist without any of the factional turmoil which periodically distracted [. . . ] some other colleges’ (203). Perne was also rector of Balsham and in 1575 was obliged to investigate reports of Familists in the parish. Collinson reports that, after listening to the parishioners, Perne did little or nothing about them (1994, 202). See also MacCulloch (2013, 180–181). French also suggests that Dee’s library looked forward towards the Royal Society (1972, 60). Stanley was the younger brother of Ferdinando Lord Strange, whose company, Strange’s Men, was the first to perform plays later attributed to Shakespeare on the public stage. Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, Ambrose, earl of Warwick, and Mary Dudley Sidney and her son, Philip Sidney, and daughter, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.

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the Admiral’s Men (Woolley 2001, 115). He was friends with the Walsinghams, Leicester, and the Sidney circle which included Gabriel Harvey and Edward Dyer. Sidney’s Arcadia, as I argue in Chapter 4, shows evidence of knowledge of the Corpus Hermeticum, and Harvey mentions Hermes in a work attacking Thomas Nashe, so it is at least possible that Dee introduced them to the Hermetic books. Dee also tutored Ralegh’s captains on the use of the astrolabe. The Ralegh set who met at Durham House in the 1590s included Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, George Peele, George Chapman and possibly Christopher Marlowe. In an earlier study I found evidence of Marlowe’s familiarity with the Hermetica and of Bruno’s influence.66 The evidence that ‘Hermes Trismegistus’ had entered the discourse of the day comes from several extant literary works. Peele in 1593 paid tribute to Northumberland for ‘following the auncient reuerend steps / Of Trismegistus and Pythagords’, and the Prince of Purpoole mentions Trismegistus by name at the 1594 Christmas revels for Gray’s Inn, when The Comedy of Errors entertained and possibly outraged the guests. And Chapman’s French biographer, Jean Jacquot, after noting his frequent debt to Plato, identifies both ideas and specific passages in his poems and plays that have been influenced by the Corpus Hermeticum. These include the vision that brought Homer to Chapman to be Englished, which Jacquot likens to Hermes’ vision of Pymander (CH I [1–4]) (3). Jacquot praises Chapman’s ability in Monsieur d’Olive to convey emotions through the music of poetry which he compares favourably to Shakespeare’s gift (1951, 222 n.66), and he finds direct borrowings copied by Chapman from Ficino’s Latin translation of ‘Pimander Ch VII’ (1951, 226–227 n.84). Ralegh’s The History of the World, written for the young Prince Henry Stuart, heir to the throne (see Figure 3), also reveals his own familiarity with Hermetic thought. The title page of the book carries symbols connecting it with the Hermetic tradition, and the Preface deplores ‘the private contention, the passionate disputes, the personal hatred and the perpetual war, massacre and murders for religion among Christians’, the very injuries which a tolerant, eirenic, world religion could heal. France managed to achieve religious toleration through a legislated peace, in the Edict of Nantes. But in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign, England was forced to maintain constant vigilance against invasion from Catholic Spain and fifth columnists at home while also supporting Protestant allies in France and the Netherlands. Religious toleration was despised, and an ecumenical or 66

‘What doctrine call you this? An Inquiry into Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and Hermetic Thought 1582–1593’. Dissertation for the degree of Master of Arts, University of Adelaide, 2012.

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Figure 3 Title page of The History of the World, Ralegh 1614, showing the Providential Eye (also the symbol of Osiris)

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universal church was unthinkable. Domestic peace was achieved by means of draconian legislation. Dissent was silenced by the censorship laws implemented by the Master of the Revels and by the Stationers’ Register. In the 1590s Archbishop Whitgift expanded his remit to apprehend Catholic priests to include non-conformists – dissenters were to be pursued with the same rigour as practising Catholics. Marlowe was caught in this net, accused of spreading Atheism, ‘a blanket term for religious doubt of any kind’ (MacCulloch 2003, 693). In the subsequent investigation, one of those persuaded to ‘Atheism’ by Marlowe’s eloquence claimed that there would shortly be ‘by his & his felowes persuasions as many of their opinion as of any other religion’.67 The implication of the allegation is that Marlowe is one of a number of fellows who are spreading the word about an unorthodox religion, not that they are denying God. An informer reported in 1593 that ‘Marloe had told him that hee hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raliegh & others’ and the same man accused the Privy Council ‘saying that they are all Atheistes & Machiavellians, especially my Lord Admirall’. The damaging report confirms and lends veracity to allegations made in 1592 by Robert Parsons who accused Ralegh of conducting a ‘school of Atheism’ in Durham House and expanded the libel to include Lord Burghley and most of the Privy Council.68 The evidence is tenuous and possibly incapable of proof; nevertheless, given what we know about Ralegh, Marlowe and Chapman’s interest in Hermetism, I cannot exclude the possibility that the enthusiasm of Marlowe and his fellows for ‘Atheism’ was the passion of a convert for Christian Hermetism. Taken as a whole, the body of evidence suggests that in Calvinist England, Hermes Trismegistus was known to an educated few, such as members of the Inns of Court, and that the Corpus Hermeticum was discussed privately in ‘little academes’, by men such as the Sidney circle, with Dee at Mortlake, or at Durham House in the Strand by Ralegh’s coterie of friends. Dee, Ralegh and even the queen have been suspected of sympathising with the Familists. And the possibility that the tolerant and clandestine sect in their pursuit of individual perfection and godlike status constituted a viable alternative religion with an affinity to Hermetism cannot be excluded. Indeed, it is tempting to suggest that the Familists, who were revealed in the nineteenth century to have had a presence in France and in the Netherlands, had also a clandestine presence in England and that they were effectively closet Hermetists.

67 68

BL Harleian MS 6848 f. 191. Responsio ad Elizabethae Reginae Edictum contra Catholicos, translated as Advertisement Written to a Secretary of My L. Treasurer.

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But in the 1590s, as plays later attributed to Shakespeare began to come to the public stage, the extremes of orthodoxy whether Jesuit or Puritan, as well as all kinds of non-conformism, were officially silenced. In the second part of this study, I discuss four of Shakespeare’s plays: Love’s Labour’s Lost, King Lear, Othello and The Tempest. Each play deals in different ways with the key motifs of Hermetism: knowledge and love, the mind and its attributes, free will and choice, thought, imagination and memory. Love’s Labour’s Lost, to which I turn first, concerns different kinds of knowledge and different kinds of love in a small French kingdom practising religious toleration.

PART 2

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Love’s Labour’s Lost: The Path to Self-Knowledge Deferred Love’s Labour’s Lost entertained the English court of Elizabeth with a lighthearted love comedy mocking a French king whose plans to follow the ascetic life and ascend to god-like status and immortality are thrown into disarray by the arrival of a princess and her ladies. Behind the play lies an actual historic politico-religious experiment undertaken by Henri of Navarre, a notorious womaniser, who attempted via the inner reform demanded of the Hermetic initiate to model religious toleration in his kingdom. The fictional King Ferdinand of Navarre simultaneously references both Henri Bourbon, Huguenot King of Navarre, and Ferdinand, King of Naples who was instructed in the way of Hermes by Lodovico Lazzarelli. While no single literary source has ever been identified for the play, the open-ended structure of Love’s Labour’s Lost appears to owe a debt to a now obscure French play written in the style of Old Comedy – La Néphélococugie ou la nuée des cocus (Cloud-cuckoo Land). Ideas from the Corpus Hermeticum and echoes of Lazzarelli’s dialogue with King Ferdinand, the Crater Hermetis, reverberate throughout the play. 1

Dating the Play

A Pleasant Conceited Comedie called, Loves Labors Lost. As it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas was first made available in print in 1598. However, the title page proclaiming the play to be ‘newly corrected and augmented’ implies the existence of an earlier script. Although the play was performed before the court audience during the Christmas festivities of 1597 or earlier, the composition of the play may date to a time between 1588 and 1596 (Lefranc 1936, 411).1

1 It is not known which company performed the play. There is no performance recorded in the public theatre. A letter from Sir Walter Cope to Robert Cecil Viscount Cranbourne in 1604 advises that, after a search for a play that the queen (Anne) had not seen, Burbage had revived Love’s Labors Lost which would be ‘played to Morowe night at My Lord of Sowthamptons’ (quoted by Londré 1997, 43). The next recorded performance was in 1839 (Londré 1997, 23). © Jane Everingham Nelson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004520608_006

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H. R. Woudhuysen describes Love’s Labour’s Lost as ‘a distinctly odd and difficult play’ with ‘some hidden meaning which can be recovered only if the right key to it is found’ (2001, 1). Various keys have been tried over the years. Each one has unlocked something different and meaningful in the play which, nevertheless, continues to puzzle the critics. Here, I try a Hermetic key and find that the play opens to reveal a meaning that would surely have struck a chord with some in the court audience. Words such as ‘god-like’, and ideas found in the Corpus Hermeticum are explicit in the dialogue. If the Hermetic discourse is hidden, it is hidden in plain sight where it is often the subject of the raillery which contributes to the overall mood of frivolity. Far from puzzling Queen Elizabeth and her court, the play overflows with recognizable allusions to events known to them, such as the visit of Marguerite de Valois and her ladies to her estranged husband, Henri of Navarre. Moreover, recent research has shed light on events that were doubtless the subject of gossip after 1586, namely that the reconciliation of the Catholic princess and her Huguenot husband foundered on the couple’s licentious behaviour which outraged her brother Henri III, and presumably either shocked or amused the English court (Cooper 2012, 45–78 passim). Fixing the date of a Christmas performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost with some confidence between the Gray’s Inn revels held between Christmas and Candlemas 1594–1595 and its publication in 1598 suggests that the French court and the behaviour of the King of Navarre were of interest to the English court in those years. In 1936 Abel Lefranc uncovered a number of details in Love’s Labour’s Lost which any in the English court who had visited the court at Nérac would have recognized.2 The history of Anglo-French relations in the decades preceding the play is instructive because, although the events of Love’s Labour’s Lost are not historical re-enactment, new evidence reveals that the plot recreates an aborted attempt at religious toleration in Navarre, which anticipates the Edict of Nantes by some twenty years (Champeaud 2012, 79–90 passim). The ratification of the Edict that granted religious toleration to all Protestants in Catholic France coincided with the publication of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the first of the canon to be attributed to Shakespeare in print on the title page.

2 The events include the tragic death of Hélène de Tournon, daughter of Marguerite de Valois’ principal lady-in-waiting, who died of love in 1576. Her mother left the queen’s service and sent another of her daughters in her place (Lefranc 1936, 424). Rosaline’s words to Katherine: ‘You’ll ne’er be friends with him [Cupid]: ’a killed your sister’ (5.2.13) are probably a reference to the sad event. The household accounts for King Henri indicate that nine tapestries depicting the ‘Neuf Preux’ (Nine Worthies) were moved from Pau to Nérac in November 1578 (Lefranc 1936, 425). They provide a possible inspiration for the choice of entertainment.

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2 France 1572–1579–1585 – An Experiment in Religious Toleration: From the Marriage to the Reunion to the Final Separation The wedding of Protestant Henri Bourbon with Marguerite de Valois in August 1572, orchestrated by Catherine de Medicis, was intended to unite France and put an end to the religious wars. Instead it ignited the appalling events of St Bartholomew’s Day when the streets of Paris ran with the blood of slaughtered Protestants. Henri spent the next three years under house arrest in Paris. When he escaped and returned to his home in Nérac, the Huguenot king undertook an unusual experiment, which Grégory Champeaud argues prepared the way for the sojourn of his wife, who returned to him in 1579, briefly accompanied by the Queen Mother (2012, 79–90 passim). Champeaud points out that when Henri returned to Navarre he was in an untenable position. The Peace of Beaulieu, signed in 1576, made him the Catholic king’s representative as Governor of the province of Guyenne (Aquitaine), while simultaneously he was leader of the Huguenots (Champeaud 2012, 79). His response was to surround himself with a circle of about 150 men representing both confessions, thereby creating a ‘laboratory of co-existence’ which constituted a genuine experimental centre of toleration (Champeaud 2012, 80). The experiment did not last long but it showed what was possible. Henri wrote to a friend: ‘There are two religions here. You would not believe how well they get on with those of the [Catholic] Religion which have likewise come to find me here’ (in Champeaud 2012, 83).3 Navarre is so close to the Spanish border that the arrivistes who came to find him undoubtedly included Spaniards such as Don Antonio Pérez, possibly caricatured in Don Armado, who was to seek asylum in the Béarn in 1591. Given that since the days of Henri’s grandmother, Marguerite de Navarre, Nérac had been one of the great religious and humanist centres of royalty open to theologians, philosophers, poets and artists, it was appropriate that Henri should make his principal court there, where it became a miniature Louvre (Champeaud 2012, 82). Marguerite’s diary records how she and the king her husband arranged their separate places of worship, and how happy their separate parties seemed to be, strolling around together by day and dancing at night. Champeaud contends that the dual confessional ‘political laboratory’ prepared the way for the ‘poetical laboratory’ composed of poets, such as Guillaume du Bartas, and musicians of both confessions, whom Marguerite brought with her in 1579 (2012, 90). It seems likely that together they created an albeit short-lived model state for the religious toleration which 3 ‘Il en est des deux religions. Vous ne sauriez croire comme ils se sont bien accordés avec ceux de la Religion qui m’y sont pareillement venus trouver.’

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Henri as Henri IV, King of France, and converted to Catholicism, hoped to achieve for all of France in the Edict of Nantes. There is substantial evidence that Henri and the friends assembled with him at Navarre after 1576 had the opportunity to encounter the Corpus Hermeticum. Bishop Foix de Candale, esteemed as ‘among the greatest Hermetic philosophers of the sixteenth century’ (Moreschini 2011, 189), had published an annotated Greek text and Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum in 1574. Dedicated to the Queen Mother, it was available in Paris at a time when Henri was living there under house arrest. The translation was followed by the French translation and lengthy commentary dedicated to Marguerite de Valois and presented to her on the eve of her visit to Navarre in 1579. A letter to her brother the king, soon after her arrival, records a request to allow Foix de Candale to live near her and her husband to manage and attend to [their] affairs (Angard and Chichkine 2012, 23).4 Moreover, a letter from an Italian diplomat records that she and her brother, the duc d’Anjou passed Lent 1581 with Foix in Cadillac (Angard and Chichkine 2012, 55). Her biographer, Eliane Viennot, writes that it has long been known that Marguerite encountered great philosophic texts at the end of the 1570s, and twenty years later was still devoted to Platonism and Hermetism.5 Her continuing interest in Hermetism is confirmed by the sonnet below which clearly shows her knowledge and assumes that knowledge in her readers: Is it to attain the great name of Pymander That silent and mute, you are always dreaming, No, not dreaming but rather thinking and meditating On the most god-like subjects that the mind can understand?6 Lefranc drew attention to the Mémoires of Marguerite de Valois as the probable source of the visit of the princess and her ladies in Love’s Labour’s Lost 4 ‘lépistolière demanda que Candale [. . .] pourrait ’ (Angard and Chichkine 2012, 23). 5 ‘On sait depuis longtemps que Marguerite dut s’initier aux grands textes philosophiques à la fin des années 1570, [. . .] et que, vingt ans plus tard, elle était toujours férue de platonisme et d’hermetisme’ (Giacomotto-Charra 2012, 209). 6 Est-ce pour acquérir ce grand nom de Pimandre Qu’en silence et muet allez toujours rêvant, –– Non rêvant! mais plutȏt pensant et contemplant Aux plus divins sujets que l’esprit peut comprendre. Her sonnet, ‘Sur les œuvres et silences d’Antoine La Pujade’, appeared in Œuvres chrestiennes in 1603.

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(1936, 414).7 A recent paper by Laurent Angard and Vladimir Chichkine confirms details of the visit but draws attention to the discrepancy between Marguerite’s memory of events and the reality. The fact is that in 1577 the Peace of Bergerac was signed, and Henri III, Marguerite’s brother, ratified the Edict of Poitiers, a virtual forerunner of the Edict of Nantes, intended to stabilize the court and neutralize the Guise faction. However, Navarre’s Protestant companions denounced the Peace, and in Provence, Catholics refused to recognize the Edict (Angard and Chichkine 2012, 17–19). Marguerite emerges as the peacemaker able to talk to both sides.8 She had great influence over her younger brother, the duc d’Anjou, and increasingly over her husband (Cooper 2012, 51). Despite the infidelities on both sides, she was politically loyal to her husband, and he expressed affection for her and made her welcome when she first arrived with her mother the queen (Angard and Chichkine 2012, 21). The ‘idylle néracaise’ ended in tears, however, not only because, despite their combined efforts, the religious civil wars did not cease, but also because the marriage ended. Henri became infatuated with one of Marguerite’s maids of honour, Françoise de Montmorency (La Fosseuse) who bore him a son (stillborn), while Marguerite took Jacques de Harlay, Lord Champvallon as her lover and allegedly bore him a son in mid-August 1583. Her brother the king was outraged and ordered her to return to her husband which Marguerite at first refused to do. She returned to him briefly in August 1584 and departed Nérac forever on 19 March 1585. She remained under house arrest in the king’s castle at Usson for twenty years, and Champvallon, from the security of his home in Sedan, asked Elizabeth of England for asylum (Cooper 2012, 67–68). All this was known in England via correspondence from Henry Killigrew-Davison, from Ambassador Amyas Paulet to Lord Burghley and to the queen, and from Lord Cobham to Burghley and to Sir Francis Walsingham (Cooper 2012, 46–64 passim, 74). In addition, the events took place at a time when the two courts were in frequent diplomatic contact to negotiate a possible marriage between Elizabeth and Anjou. One additional source of gossip about the scandals at the French court presented itself in the person of the Hermeticist Giordano Bruno, sent to London by Henri III in 1583. The irony of the lascivious court at Nérac aspiring to immortality by following an ascetic doctrine which taught that lust is the cause of death would not have been lost on the English. 7 Although E. K. Chambers was sceptical because the Mémoires were unpublished in Shakespeare’s lifetime (William Shakespeare I 338), other sources such as correspondence both private and diplomatic were available. 8 In April 1580 Marguerite wrote to her friend the duchesse d’Uzes ‘je vous jure avec vérité que, tout ce que je puis faire pour servir à la paix, je le faisé’ (Angard and Chichkine 29). (I can tell you truthfully that everything that can be done to bring about peace, I have done.)

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The reconciliation of Henri of Navarre with his Catholic queen briefly carried the hope of religious peace for France. On the available evidence it is likely that the couple were both interested in the Hermetic texts, which were available in Latin and in French translated by their kinsman, Bishop Foix de Candale, who was on hand to teach and explain the way of Hermes. But the short-lived, happy marriage, a state where religious toleration and peace prevailed, and the concomitant hopes of an end to civil war were all lost to sexual desire. In other words, the labours of love were lost in lust. The research outlined above, published in Albineana 24, has provided a more detailed backstory for the play than has previously been available. It is clear now that, for an English court with a knowledge of French affairs, Love’s Labour’s Lost would have been both highly topical and hugely entertaining as early as 1586. 3

Hermetic Thought and Hermes Himself in the Play

Love’s Labour’s Lost opens with a proclamation from Ferdinand of Navarre reminding his courtiers, his ‘fellow-scholars’ (1.1.17), of their promise to defy death, repudiate the desires of the material world, and spend three years with him in a world of study and silent contemplation that will make them ‘heirs of all eternity’ (1.1.7). Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live registered upon our brazen tombs And then grace us in the disgrace of death; When spite of cormorant devouring time, Th’endeavour of this present breath may buy That honour which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge, And make us heirs of all eternity. Therefore, brave conquerors – for so you are, That war against your own affections And the huge army of the world’s desires – Our late edict shall stand in force. (1.1.1–11) Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis, dedicated to Ferdinand I of Aragon, King of Naples and Sicily (1423/24–1494)9 opens in a similar vein with Lazzarelli’s invitation to the king: 9 The full title of Lazzarelli’s commentary is A Dialogue on the Supreme Dignity of Man, entitled the Way of Christ and the Mixing Bowl of Hermes, by Lodovico Lazzarelli of Septempeda, Christian Poet. Dedicated to the divine Ferdinand of Aragon, King of Sicily.

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to come and share this happiness of mine: you who in these latter days of your life have left the reins of government to your eldest son Alfonso and, intent on contemplation and pious works, have devoted yourself to attaining peace of mind. (1.3) The similarities between Shakespeare’s fictional King Ferdinand and Lazzarelli’s historic King Ferdinand, both intent on withdrawing from the material world with its ‘desires’ (1.1.10) and responsibilities, in order to pursue the vita contemplativa, strongly suggest that Shakespeare knew Lazzarelli’s work and that the King of Navarre is named for Ferdinand of Naples.10 But the similarities go beyond two Christian kings with identical names deciding to follow the way of Hermes to salvation and immortality. Lazzarelli begins his work by assuring King Ferdinand that he is a Christian, but ‘not ashamed to be an hermetist as well’, because the teachings do not clash with Christian doctrine (4.1). He tells the king ‘everything that we shall here investigate regarding true felicity, we will draw not only from the doctrine of the Gospel, but also from the teachings of Hermes’ (4.3). Ferdinand responds: ‘Let us come right to the point. . . how would I be able to know myself?’ In reply, Lazzarelli tells him that ‘When he was asked that question, Pimander answered Hermes: “Embrace me with your mind and I will teach you everything you wish to know.”’ (5.1) After a long prayer, he continues: Hermes says that God, having created all things in the beginning, exclaimed: ‘Increase, grow up and multiply [. . .] And you, who have been given an inheritance of mind, recognize your origin and take heed of your immortal nature, and know that love of the body is the cause of death.’ [. . . ] These words of Hermes contain the tree of life, by which we live, as well as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which brings us death. And as you see, the main point of this precept is that we should know ourselves. (6.2)

10

It is interesting that in the opening scene of Love’s Labour’s Lost where the references to the Corpus Hermeticum and the Crater Hermetis are quite explicit, the king is given as ‘Ferdinand’ throughout, and that thereafter, except for four speeches in 2.1, he is given as ‘Navarre’. One possible explanation is that the playwright was thinking of the king as Ferdinand, being instructed in Christian Hermetism by Lazzarelli as he wrote the first scene and then, given the location of the play in Nérac, reverted to thinking of the king as Henri of Navarre. Another possibility is that the corrections and additions mentioned on the title page were the work of a second playwright.

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Lazzarelli explains to the king the importance of that self-knowledge which leads to knowledge of God or gnōsis to which love holds the key, and warns him against that love of the body, which leads to death. The precept is to be found in Book I [18] of the Corpus Hermeticum.11 Hence, anyone familiar with the Corpus Hermeticum or with Lazzarelli’s dialogue with Ferdinand of Naples would recognize that when, in the play, King Ferdinand encourages his friends to ‘war against your own affections / And the huge army of the world’s desires’ (1.1.9–10) in order to find the immortality they seek, he is echoing Lazzarelli’s warning to the other King Ferdinand about death being the consequence of yielding to desire. In learning to resist the mortal and corporeal desires of the flesh and devote their minds to study – ‘Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep’ (1.1.48) – the king and his friends will be following the teaching found in Book IV of the Corpus (the Crater Hermetis). There King Ferdinand could learn, like his namesake Lazzarelli’s pupil, that people who missed the gift of mind ‘have sensations much like those of unreasoning animals’ and ‘they divert their attention to the pleasures and appetites of their bodies’ (CH IV [5]). In the play, Costard and the pregnant Jaquenetta exemplify such people, and Armado is not above suspicion. Hermes tells Tat that the way to possess mind and to understand god is first ‘to hate your body’ (CH IV [6]). The king, who understands what is involved in living a virtuous life, knows that he and his men must battle against ‘the huge army of the world’s desires’ (1.1.10), while they undertake the sort of mindful, meditative and disciplined life that will lead to gnōsis and immortality. Longaville understands that they are undertaking to study a philosophy of mind: ‘The mind shall banquet though the body pine’ (1.1.25). Dumaine, too, knows that he is renouncing the delights of the corporeal world and joining the company of philosophers. To love, to wealth, to pomp, I pine and die, With all these living in philosophy. (1.1.31–32) Moreover, those with knowledge of the Corpus Hermeticum or the Crater Hermetis would recognize that, when Berowne demands to know the point of study, Navarre’s response, ‘Why, that to know which else we should not know’ (1.1.56) is alluding to the tree of life. Berowne, on the other hand, referring to

11

‘Let him is mindful recognize that he is immortal, that desire is the cause of death, and let him recognize all that exists’ (CH I [18]).

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‘the thing I am forbid to know’ (1.1.60) is alluding to the tree of knowledge.12 Finally, as a reward for learning what can only be known through silent contemplative study, the king and his friends will become ‘god-like’ (1.1.58). This is precisely the promise made to those who have self-knowledge in the Corpus: ‘This is the final good for those who have received knowledge: to be made god’ (CH I [26]). By contrast with the men, the princess and her ladies seem already to have achieved god-like status. Dumaine hints at it when speaking to his ‘most divine Kate’ (4.3.80), and Longaville calls Maria ‘a heavenly love’ (4.3.63). Berowne is entranced by the girls’ ‘heavenly eyes’ (5.2.761) and refers to ‘heavenly Rosaline’ (4.2.217), while Boyet reports that the king called the princess ‘an angel’ (5.2.103). When the princess arrives from Catholic France, she brings with her the epicene and ‘honey-tongued’ Boyet (5.2.334), who acts as messenger between the two courts. Lefranc alleges that Shakespeare modelled Boyet on Marguerite’s chancellor, the fifty-year-old Guy du Faur (1529–1584), seigneur de Pibrac (1936, 418). And Margaret Tudeau-Clayton has pointed out that most of the Protean array of functions which characterize Boyet, and which Berowne ironically exposes in the course of the play, also belong to Mercury (that is, Hermes) (Clayton 2004, 209). Pibrac, who was also a poet, knew and understood Marguerite’s interest in the ‘neoplatonism relished at the court of Nérac’ (Petris 2012, 283).13 Famed for his eloquence like Boyet in the play, Pibrac accompanied Marguerite to Navarre and fell in love with her (Lefranc 1936, 418). She fended him off with the same sort of persiflage that the princess offers Boyet (2.1.13–19), whom Katherine mocks as ‘Cupid’s grandfather’ (2.1.254), (Lefranc 1936, 420). The mythical Hermes’ principal function is as go-between, but his role as god of merchants is hinted at in the princess’ implied reference to Boyet in the ‘base sale of chapmen’s tongues’ (2.1.16), and his role as a pedlar (like his son Autolycus), when Berowne calls him ‘wit’s pedlar’ (5.2.317). He is the god of games of chance, ‘Monsieur the Nice / That when he plays at table chides the dice’ (5.2.325–326), (Clayton 2004, 210–216). When he acts as an usher (5.2.328), Woudhuysen also likens him to Mercury (2001, 259 n.328). Later, the arrival of Marcadé performing Mercury’s

12 13

The king’s use of ‘should’ in ‘should not know’ is ambiguous; the phrase means both ‘[otherwise] would not know’ and ‘ought not to know’. Berowne picks up the second meaning. ‘Pibrac connâit la propension néoplatonicienne de Marguerite et il sait y répondre. La topique néoplatonicienne goûtée à la cour de Nérac informe le discours’ [de L’Ombre de Bussy, par Pibrac] (Petris 283).

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role as psychopomp confirms that Mercury/Hermes does indeed come from the princess’s world of Catholic France (SD 5.2.711) (Berry 1969, 76).14 When the men fall predictably in love with the ladies, the immediacy of present desires drives out all thought of three years of disciplined self-study that will bring them Hermes’ promised immortality. Berowne is besotted with Rosaline but, still attached to the material world, persuades himself that everything worth knowing can be learnt from a woman’s eyes: ‘From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive: / [. . .] they are the books, the arts, the academes’ (4.3.324, 326).15 The parting advice of the ladies to each of their lovers suggests that they want the men to return to their original plans. They must be patient for a year. Longaville promises Maria that he will ‘stay with patience’ (5.2.823); Dumaine too is advised to wait (5.2.815); Berowne must undertake some charitable service in a hospital, while the king is enjoined by the princess to spend a twelvemonth in silent contemplation, ‘Remote from all the pleasures of the world’ (5.2.790). Choosing temperance over impetuosity, altruistic agape over selflove, and seeking the self-knowledge that will dispel ignorance are all given in the Corpus as virtuous choices that lead to knowledge of self and gnōsis. The play’s ending where nothing has changed (except perhaps for the pregnant Jaquenetta), nothing is resolved, and all is deferred but still open to possibilities is characteristic of the genre, Old Comedy, discussed below. In both, lighthearted farce exposes the serious target of the satire to laughter. 4

Hermes Trismegistus in the Discourse of the Day

At the end of the play the princess sends the king to ‘some forlorn and naked hermitage’ (5.2.789), but she has already revealed how well she understands the king’s aspiring mind and his wish for an uplifting inner spiritual experience: Was that the King that spurred his horse so hard Against the steep uprising of the hill? [. . .] Whoe’er ’a was ’a showed a mounting mind. (4.1.1–2, 4) 14 15

Mary Ellen Lamb claims that Marcadé is named for Philippe Emmanuel de Lorraine, duc de Mercoeur, known to the English as Duke Mercury and a prominent member of the League (1985, 50 n.2). Another explanation of his name is that he is one who mars Arcady. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Helena understands that Demetrius ‘errs, doting on Hermia’s eyes’ (1.1.230), she goes on to assert a Hermetic sentiment: ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind’ (1.1.234).

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Her words reflect a line from the Discours philosophiques, by Pontus de Tyard, where the ‘“raising of the intellect” is thought of as a mountain on which are many paths [. . .] all directed towards the summit’ (Yates 1947, 77–78).16 The chapter opens with the statement that ‘the true life of man consists in the raising of the intellect towards the understanding of divine things, without being sunk in sensuality and matter’ (Yates 1947, 78). Tyard’s thought is readily sourced to Book IX of the Corpus Hermeticum (On understanding and sensation), and also to Book IV where Hermes teaches ‘There are two kinds of entities, corporeal and incorporeal, corresponding to mortal and divine’ (CH IV [6]); ‘Choosing the stronger [. . .] makes the human into a god’ (CH IV [7]). Tyard’s book was published in 1587, and a few years later in 1594 members of Gray’s Inn attending the Christmas revels would hear similar advice delivered to the ‘Prince of Purpoole’ by the ‘The Second Councellor advising the Study of Philosophy’. Like Ferdinand, who exhorted the lords to relegate fame to the material world and seek immortality through the knowledge that makes us ‘heirs to all eternity’ (1.1.7), and like Tyard, who advised using the mind to ascend to knowledge of the divine, the Counsellor also advocates the pursuit of hidden knowledge. Hinting at the Persian Zoroaster and Hermes, he tells the ‘Prince’ to: bend the Excellency of your spirits to the searching out and discovering of all whatsoever is hid in secret in the World, that your Excellency be not as a Lamp that shineth to others, and yet seeth not itself; but as the Eye of the World, that both carrieth and useth Light. Antiquity, that presenteth unto us in dark Visions, the Wisdom of former Times, informeth us, that the Kingdoms have always had an Affinity with the Secrets and Mysteries of Learning. Amongst the Persians, the Kings were attended on by the Magi; (34) [. . . ] Thus, when your Excellency shall have added depth of Knowledge to the fineness of Spirits, and greatness of your Power, then indeed shall you lay a Trismegistus; and then, when all other Miracles and Wonders shall cease, by reason that you shall have discovered their natural Causes, yourself shall be left the only Miracle and Wonder of the World. (Gesta Grayorum, 35) 16

Pontus de Tyard was a poet of the Pléiade and ‘a musical humanist of Baïf’s academy’ (Yates 1947, 77).

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The ironic tone exaggerating the powers that Hermes promises and mocking the ‘Prince’ who, having unlocked all nature’s secrets, will be the only ‘wonder of the world’ left, implies that Hermetism is an in-joke shared by members of the Inn. The Counsellor’s speech may have been written by Francis Bacon who was a resident member of the Inn at the time, and it is worth noting that Antonio Pérez was Bacon’s guest that night (Ungerer 1976, II, 397). In the play, when Ferdinand asserts that ‘Navarre shall be the wonder of the world’ (1.1.12), he is referencing not only Pico della Mirandola, and the Hermetic Asclepius but also the Second Counsellor in the Gray’s Inn Revels (Elam 1985, 89).17 Clearly, the name Hermes Trismegistus, abbreviated to ‘Trismegistus’, was familiar to the audience gathered at Gray’s Inn. In fact, it is one of several references to Hermes or Hermes Trismegistus which have survived in published works and which provide evidence that the name had entered the discourse of the day. That is by no means proof that Christian Hermetism was part of that discourse, although the reference to the ‘ascending spirit’ quoted by Gabriel Harvey in Pierce’s Supererogation (1593) suggests that the writer is familiar with the Hermetic corpus or its teaching: You may discourse of Hermes’ ascending spirit, of Orpheus’ enchanting harp, of Homer’s divine fury, of Tyrtaeus’ enraging trumpet, of Pericles’ bouncing thunderclaps, of Plato’s enthusiastical ravishment, and I wot not what marvellous eggs in moonshine, but a fig for all your flying speculations when one good-fellow with his odd jests, or one mad knave with his awk hibber-gibber, is able to put down twenty of your smuggest artificial men, that simper it so nicely and coyly in their curious points. (1593, 19)18 In the same pamphlet Harvey refers to the apostle Paul as ‘a Christian Mercury’ (41).19 Thomas Nashe, Harvey’s enemy, also clearly knew the name and uses it as synonymous with that of the Greek god Hermes in Summer’s Last Will and Testament written in 1592–1593 and published in 1600.

17

18 19

The phrase occurs in Pico’s famous oration, On the Dignity of Man, and is taken from Asclepius (6) where Hermes tells him ‘a human being is a great wonder, a living thing to be worshipped and honored; for he changes his nature into a god as if he were a god’ (Copenhaver 1992, 69). Quoted by Harvey from John Eliot’s Ortho-epeia Gallica (1593) in Pierce’s Supererogation (1593, 19). Paul and Barnabas performed a miracle at Lystra and the writer records that the people thought they were gods and called Paul ‘Hermes’ because he was the chief speaker (Acts of the Apostles: 14: 12).

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Winter: Till Hermes, secretary to the gods, Or Hermes Trismegistus, as some will, Weary with graving in blind characters, And figures of familiar beasts and plants, Invented letters to write withal. (1260–1264) (in McKerrow 1958, 273) Also in 1593 George Peele penned The Honour of the Garter in tribute to Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, on the occasion of his installation as a Garter Knight.20 Ad Maecaenatem Prologus Plaine is my coate, and humble is my gate, Thrice noble Earle, behold with gentle eyes My wits poore worth: euen for your noblesse, (Renowned Lord, Northumberlands fayre flower) The Muses loue, Patrone, and fauoret, That artizans and schollers doost embrace, And clothest Mathesis in rich ornaments, That admirable Mathematique skill, Familiar with the starres and Zodiack. (To whom the heauen lyes open as her booke) By whose directions vndeceiueable, (Leauing our Schoolemens vulgar troden pathes) And following the auncient reuerend steps Of Trismegistus and Pythagords, Through vncouth waies and vnaccessible, Doost passe into the spacious pleasant fieldes Of diuine science and Phylosophie; (1–17) Peele is paying tribute to the earl for turning his steps away from the well-trodden paths of the book-learned schoolmen toward Trismegistus and his divine philosophy, much as the King of Navarre wishes to do in the play. Twenty years later Ralegh himself revealed his knowledge of the Hermetic texts in his 20

Peele was one of the University Wits, so-called, and possibly also a member of the coterie of men who surrounded Sir Walter Ralegh which had probably included Marlowe and was known to include the earl of Northumberland, Thomas Hariot, the mathematician, and Matt Roydon, a poet. For a time, some scholars believed that the phrase ‘school of night’ used in the play referred to this group.

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History of the World written while he was in prison. The title page of the book was surmounted by the all-seeing Eye of Osiris that clearly indicates the Hermetic content (see Figure 3), and which also recalls the Eye of the World in the Second Counsellor’s speech made at Gray’s Inn. Erasmus, Rabelais and Sidney have all been associated with an interest in the Hermetic texts. Rolf Soellner suggests that Erasmus’ Enchiridion Militis Christiani might have sparked the idea of spiritual warfare in the play (1972, 79–80), and the word ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’ has been traced to Erasmus’ Adagia (1500), where it praises Hermes (Hutton 1931, 393).21 Rabelais’ Gargantua et Pantagruel (1532, 1534) has been proposed as the source of the name ‘Holofernes’ (Woudhuysen 2001, 110). Frances Yates saw a connection between a sonnet of Sidney’s, where he describes himself as a ‘slave-born Muscovite’ and the four lords’ decision to apparel themselves ‘like Muscovites or Russians’ (5.2.121), enslaved by love for the ladies whom they visit in Navarre’s park (1936, 133–134). The king’s party disguised as a ‘mess of Russians’ (5.2.361) would also remind courtiers of the Gray’s Inn Revels, as it was recorded in the Gesta Grayorum that the Prince of Purpoole’s court was visited by some ‘Russians’. There is some suggestion that Love’s Labour’s Lost may be Shakespeare’s riposte to Sidney’s condemnation, in An Apology for Poetry, of the practice of mixing genres, resulting in plays that are ‘neither right tragedies, nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns’ where they ‘thrust in clowns by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical matters, with neither decency nor discretion’ (in Shepherd 1965, 135). This is certainly true of the clown Costard, whose name is slang for ‘head’, but elsewhere in the Apology Sidney’s thinking is consonant with Shakespeare’s in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Sidney, like Berowne, criticizes men (such as the curate and the pedant in the play), who think learning is an end in itself and give themselves to astronomy or music or mathematics only to find ‘by the balance of experience [. . .] that the Astronomer looking to the stars might fall into a ditch’ (Shepherd 1965, 104). Berowne is critical of men who acquire knowledge of no practical use in order to ‘give a name to every fixed star’, but ‘Have no more profit of their shining nights / Than those that walk and wot not what they are’ (1.1.89–91). However, unlike Berowne, Sidney appreciates that it is not knowledge of indiscriminate facts but knowledge of self, the Hermetic noesis, that leads one to ‘well-doing’ or acts of charity. He writes: the highest end of the mistress-knowledge . . . stands (as I think) in the knowledge of a man’s self . . . with the end of well-doing and not of 21

‘Gaudet honorificabilitudinitatibus Hermes/Consuetudinibus, sollicitudinibus’ (Hutton 393).

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well-knowing only [. . .] the ending end of all earthly learning being virtuous action, those skills, that most serve to bring forth that, have a most just title to be princes over all the rest. (in Shepherd 1965, 104) The notion resonates with the Corpus Hermeticum which teaches that ‘when mind has entered a reverent soul, it leads to the light of knowledge. Such a soul as this [. . .] [is] always blessing all people and doing them good’ (CH X [21]). But Berowne has yet to learn to know himself and acquire the god-like mind which the king promised would be study’s recompense (1.1.58). Berowne must learn what Sidney knows, namely that love is in the mind and leads to charitable acts. In Act 4, waxing eloquent about ‘Love’, Berowne lists its power to double (4.3.305) or intensify all the corporeal senses (4.3.308–313). Then in a neat sophism he argues that it is religion for the men to repudiate their oaths (Not to see ladies etc. 1.1.48) because religion teaches charity and charity is love. He ends his speech, with a half-jesting rhetorical flourish: ‘who can sever love from charity?’ (4.3.339). The notion of a symbiotic relationship between eros (amor) and agape (caritas) or ‘well-doing’, which Sidney appears to understand, and Berowne has chanced upon by sophistry is reflected in Lazzarelli’s explanation of the mystery of love to King Ferdinand (28.1). It is clear that his understanding of love is closer to eros than to agape, and that eros includes agape (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 2005, 70), although the reverse is not necessarily true. At the end of the play, when Berowne beseeches his mistress Rosaline to ‘Impose some service on me for thy love’ (5.2.828), she invokes agape, that prince of skills, and commands him to the virtuous action which Sidney saw as the highest end of self-knowledge. Berowne is to serve a twelvemonth using his jesting wit to cheer ‘the speechless sick’ (5.2.839). In short, the whole ‘love is charity’ episode is firmly underpinned by a Hermetic subtext traceable to Ferdinand and Lazzarelli’s dialogue in the Crater Hermetis (28.2). A contemporary work which provides an analogous situation for the four men who meet in order to discuss philosophy is L’Académie Françoise by Pierre de la Primaudaye (1545–1619). His widely read work, written in 1577 and translated into English by Thomas Bowes in 1586, is recommended reading by the Prince of Purpoole (29).22 La Primaudaye, a Protestant and follower of Jean Bodin, like him believed in religious toleration. He spent a lifetime at court and was gentleman of the chamber to the duc d’Anjou, a politique (Yates 1947, 124), 22

‘Item, Every Knight of this Order shall endeavour to add Conference and Experience by Reading; and therefore shall not only read and peruse Guizo, the French Academy, Galiatto the Courtier etc’. Gesta Grayorum, 29.

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and part of the dual confessional coterie that surrounded the duc. In the dedicatory epistle, his translator, Bowes, explains that the author’s purpose was ‘the practice of vertue in life, and not the bare knowledge and contemplation thereof in braine’.23 In L’Académie, La Primaudaye alludes to the well-known debate about the relative merits of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. The sentiment both echoes Sidney’s opinion given above and resonates with Shakespeare’s satire of the silent, contemplative utopian retreat that King Ferdinand attempts to create in Navarre, which was a ‘cloud-cuckoo land’ doomed to failure, unless accompanied by ‘the practice of vertue’ and the strength of will to resist desire. In L’Académie Françoise, four young men, friends from Anjou, meet in a garden to discuss moral philosophy. They give their discourse the title Academy, after Plato. However, from the first day it is clear that they are undertaking the Hermetic path to salvation through gnōsis or ‘that knowledge which we ought to have of ourselves as being the storehouse of all wisdom and beginning of salvation’ (1618, 10). Quoting Socrates’ famous precept written in the temple of Apollo, they plan to emulate him in seeking to know themselves but go beyond Socrates adding that ‘the perfect knowledge of ones selfe, which consisteth in the soule, is in such sort joined with the knowledge of God, that the one without the other cannot be sincere and perfect’ (11); in other words, they are speaking of gnōsis. They attribute the sentiment to Plato, but it is entirely consonant with the Corpus Hermeticum which teaches that ‘he who has understood himself advances toward god’ (I [21]). They determine to follow Plato who is alleged to have said ‘That the perfect dutie of man is, first to know his owne nature: then to contemplate the divine nature: and last of all to bestow his labor in those things which may be beneficial to all men’ (12). The precept may be found in the Corpus Hermeticum: ‘Such a soul [. . .] always blessing all people and doing them good in every deed and word in memory of its father’ (CH X [21]). 5 England and France 1589–1598 – the Political Landscape: From the Accession of Henri IV to the Edict of Nantes As a Protestant king, Henri of Navarre had enjoyed excellent relations with the English court, although the queen herself profoundly distrusted him (Hammer 1999, 243). Many of his followers, such as Philippe du Plessis Mornay, whose religious work Philip Sidney had begun translating, and the young earl of 23

See 1594 3rd edition, 3, in La Primaudaye 1618 The French Academy. EEBO.

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Essex, were mutual friends. However, following the assassination of the childless Henri de Valois III in 1589, Henri of Navarre unexpectedly became king of Catholic France. He was fiercely opposed by the increasingly powerful Catholic League led by the Guise family, and it was feared that their hostilities could put England in peril, by opening the way for ‘full-scale civil war and invasion by Spain’ (Hammer 1999, 92). Paul Hammer claims that Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, idolized Henri and ‘found inspiration in the cause and friendship of the French king’ (92). The queen, who favoured Essex, and reluctantly assisted Henri only because it was crucial for England’s defence, offered Essex the command of an English force sent to assist in the besieging of Rouen in 1591. The campaign proved disastrous. His brother was killed, and his failure earned him the queen’s bitter anger, but Essex remained intensely loyal to Henri.24 Then, on 25 July 1593 in the Abbey of St Denis, Henri, England’s ally in the war against the Spanish, converted to Catholicism. Nonetheless, Essex maintained correspondence with the king, and between June 1593 and July 1595, he and Francis Bacon played host to Antonio Pérez, sent to England by Henri. Pérez, having fled Spain in 1591, where he had been secretary to Philip II, was an invaluable source of inside information on Spanish affairs. Shakespeare may be lampooning Pérez’ flamboyant style in Don Adriano de Armado, the braggard soldier arriviste at the court of Navarre (Yates 1936, 13). At home, Essex took on the role of his late stepfather, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, in hosting visiting dignitaries, including Catholics, and from the 1590s he began to support toleration for Catholics who were anti-Spanish and loyal to the queen. His toleration of moderate Catholics may have been strengthened by his dislike of ‘Topcliffian’ brutality and the shocking fate of the young Jesuit Robert Southwell in 1595.25 However, despite suspicions that he had converted to Catholicism, Essex remained committed to international Protestantism, and for him and his supporters, France was the place where religious toleration, despised by the English, could be achieved. As Hammer notes, demonstrating that he was not anti-Catholic allowed Essex to continue to support Henri even after his conversion to Catholicism (1999, 178). Furthermore, a Protestant king who so effortlessly embraced Catholicism for political expedience raises the possibility that he may have been a Nicodemite and sympathetic to Christian Hermetism. 24 25

Essex nevertheless enjoyed the support of powerful men in Lord Burghley, Christopher Hatton, Lord Hunsdon and Charles Howard the Lord Admiral. ‘“Topcliffian”, meaning excessively brutal, after the notorious priest-hunter and torturer Richard Topcliffe’ (Hammer 1999, 174 n.130). After three years of torture, Southwell S J was sentenced to be hanged and bowelled alive.

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Evidence that Henri IV, the Huguenot/Catholic convert, was interested in religious Hermetism may lie in a letter from Robert Naunton to ‘le Compte d’Essex’, dated 26 March 1597 (Ungerer II, 1976, 128).26 The letter refers to the king’s having secretly taken part in the Eleusina Sacra, ancient Greek springtime rituals of fertility, rebirth and purification.27 Although it is true that the relationship between Hermetism and mystery religions is much debated, both involve ‘a secret discipline leading to purification, a vision of the divine realm and spiritual illumination or rebirth’ (Fowden 1986, 149). On the one hand, Hermetism is silent and contemplative, requires oral group instruction, and study of the Hermetic texts leading to a personal, inner spiritual experience, such as Ferdinand of Navarre swore to follow with his friends in the play: Our court shall be a little academe, Still and contemplative in the living art. (1.1.13–14) On the other hand, mystery religions typically required ‘special priesthoods, cult-places and ceremonies’ and a mystery cult ‘may play a part in the lower stages of spiritual progress’ (Fowden 1986, 149–150). It is not impossible that the Eleusinian ritual of purification and rebirth reported by Naunton had a Hermetic significance for the king and his friends. The very fact that Naunton wrote to Essex in this way, referring to the Eleusina Sacra without explanation, implies that Essex already knew about the ritual and was interested in it.28 What Naunton’s letter puts beyond doubt however, is that at Easter 1597, prior to the Edict of Nantes, Henri IV and some of his followers were able to reconcile their Protestant/Catholic Christianity with a pagan, possibly Hermetic, ritual of spring and rebirth. 26 27

28

For the letter, see Chapter 6 p. 225. Naunton (1563–1635), undercover and officially fulfilling the role of tutor, was employed by Essex to keep him informed of affairs at the French court. Mackey’s Symbolism of Freemasonry refers to the Eleusinia (sic) as the most popular of the mysteries dedicated to Demeter (or Ceres as she appears in The Tempest); they represent the loss and restoration of Persephone, ‘and the doctrines of the unity of God and the immortality of the soul’ (Clegg 1921, 337). Robert Macoy devotes several pages to the ‘Eleusinia’ in his Dictionary of Freemasonry and makes claims for their peculiar ability to ‘reform the manners and perfect the education of mankind’ (1989, 137). Without giving anything away to the uninitiated, Macoy reveals that a Herald begins the rites by ordering ‘the profane and the impious’ to depart (1989, 136), and elsewhere Fowden connects the ‘herald’ referred to in the mysteries with the herald sent by God in Book IV [4] of the Corpus Hermeticum (1986, 149 n.28). These rituals are of interest to Freemasons, but for now, any connection between Hermetism, the Eleusinian mysteries and Freemasonry remains no more than an intriguing possibility.

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Characters Drawn from Literature and from Life

In Love’s Labour’s Lost fictional characters such as Holofernes and Costard, and historic characters such as the Worthies, are mixed with real men in the persons of the French king of Navarre named for a Spanish king, Ferdinand, and his French courtiers. None of the men named was at Nérac in the years of Marguerite’s sojourn there, but all would have been known personally or by repute to the court audience in London. All were military men, and their names appear to have been chosen because of their confessional allegiances. The youngest, Longaville, Henri d’Orleans, duc de Longueville (1568–1595), was Henri’s cousin and a Huguenot who fought against the ultra-Catholic Guise faction. By contrast, Dumaine, that is duc de Mayenne, Charles de Lorraine (1554–1611), was a Guise, head of the Catholic League and Navarre’s bitter foe.29 Similarly, Armand de Gontaut, baron de Biron (1524–1592), a likely model for Berowne, was a Catholic who had fought for the Guise, and whom the king had made maréchal de Guyenne.30 He was a constant problem for Henri and never ceased to undermine him. He was behind an attempt to poison the king, and in September 1580 laid siege to Nérac (Cooper 2012, 52–53). No editor has identified Berowne (baron de Biron) as a Catholic opponent of Navarre, but Marguerite de Valois’ diary makes his constant opposition clear. Consequently, an English court audience for the performance ‘before her Highnes this last Christmas’ would have known that two of the men swearing to spend three years in contemplative study with Navarre were Catholics, and understood that the court at Nérac was a site of religious toleration. The princess, also termed ‘queen’, was identified as Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre in 1919 (Lefranc 1936, 412).31 Her knowledge of and interest in Hermetism is beyond dispute, but her ladies in the play are not real persons, unless Katherine is named for Catherine de Bourbon, Henri of Navarre’s sister. There is no shortage of models for the pedant Holofernes who is a fund of arcane and pointless knowledge, much of it in Latin. Woudhuysen suggests Rombus from Sidney’s Lady of May (2), while Yates, in addition to John Florio 29 30 31

Some scholars (Yates 1936, 3; Woudhuysen 2001, 68) have acknowledged that the character Dumaine is named for the Guisard Duke; after Navarre’s conversion they were technically on the same side. It is also possible that ‘Berowne’ references Armand’s son, Charles de Gontaut (1562– 1602), who was baron de Biron after the death of his father. Discussing whether Love’s Labour’s Lost Q1 was set from authorial copy, Woudhuysen makes the following observation: ‘The Princess starts off as Queen in 2.1.13 but for the rest of the scene is Princess. She is Queen throughout 4.1 and 5.2 except for one moment when she appears as Lady’ (2001, 308).

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and Harvey, offered Richard Lloyd the tutor of William Stanley, later 6th earl of Derby, mainly because of his play on the Nine Worthies, published in 1584 (1936, 12).32 Holofernes the pedant, Nathaniel the curate, Costard, Dull, and also Don Armado the braggard and his page, young Moth, are all redolent of the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte, while Armado may also have a live counterpart in the ageing Spaniard, Pérez. The hierarchical grouping of the characters reflects the distinction between intellect and affect made in Book IX of the Corpus, On understanding and sensation, which emphasizes the importance of harmonious balance between mind and body.33 The king’s plan is that he and his courtiers will deny all bodily desires for sex, food and sleep – ‘Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep’ (1.1.48) – and devote themselves entirely to contemplative study and the intellectual life. Unexpectedly swept away by passion, they must learn to balance the senses with the intellect. On the other hand, the princess and her ladies already possess both understanding and feeling and are wise enough to know that the men must learn to temper passion with patience. From her reference to ‘his silent court’, it is clear that the princess understands that the three years of ‘painful study’ when ‘No woman may approach’ involves more than booklearning (2.1. 23–24). At the end, when the king relents and wants to break his oath, the princess will not let him: ‘So much I hate a breaking cause to be / Of heavenly oaths, vowed with integrity’ (5.2. 355–356), because she understands the significance of his vow. The high-born royals and noble men and women contrast with the low-born Jaquenetta and Costard who, having ‘sensations more like those of unreasoning animals’ (CH IV [5]), are ruled by their senses and have little understanding; they ignore the king’s edict and immediately gratify their desire. Holofernes and Nathaniel, the bookmen, represent pure intellectuals, devoid of all feeling, who delight in Latin phrases, but whose book-learning does not extend to self-knowledge. Dull, whom Holofernes describes as ‘unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained’ and ‘unlettered’ (4.2.16–18), Nathaniel calls ‘only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts’ (4.2.26–27). Dull, having no understanding and little feeling, is thereby lowest in the hierarchy. Nevertheless, while the 32

William Stanley (1561–1642) was issued with a passport in February 1576 and is known to have spent several years travelling in Europe with his tutor. As a descendant on his mother’s side of Henry VII and his daughter Marie Tudor Queen of France, Stanley would have had entrée to the courts of France. In 1586 he returned to France with his father the 4th earl of Derby, then ambassador to France. 33 Book IX teaches that in human beings, sensation, which is material and mortal, must be combined with understanding, which is essential and immortal, unlike in other living things where ‘sensation is combined with the natural character’ (CH IX [1]).

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curate and the pedant are saturated with the book-learning which Berowne derided, the audience quickly appreciates that it is only Dull who has the sense to know a pricket when he sees one (4.2.12). The ‘unlettered’ Dull it would seem has more understanding and common sense than his educated ‘superiors’. It is hard not to laugh at such caricatures without including in the raillery that part of the Hermetic philosophy which they exemplify and exaggerate. But it is precisely because the lower order characters in Love’s Labour’s Lost lack harmonious balance between understanding and sensation, that they are indistinguishable from the stock characters that people Old Comedy. 7

Love’s Labour’s Lost and Old Comedy

Although no single literary model has ever been identified for Love’s Labour’s Lost, Alfred Harbage saw its affinity with the plays written for Paul’s Boys in the 1580s because of the numerous parts for women, and with the works of their manager, John Lyly, such as Campaspe (1962, 131). Trevor Lennam felt it owed something to a morality play presented at court in 1567/68, The Marriage of Wit and Science about a king and his courtiers, ‘wits who would be scholars seeking “the light of truth” – Wisdom’ (1973, 55). Woudhuysen suggested that Shakespeare was challenging Sidney’s precepts of what a play should be (2001, 6). But in calling the play ‘odd and difficult’ (1), he may have been thinking of the many features that characterize Love’s Labour’s Lost as Old Comedy. Rather than simply defying Sidney, Shakespeare seems to be attempting an unfamiliar kind of comedy. Northrop Frye provides a useful description of the characteristics of Old and New Comedy from which it is possible to recognize many of the unusual or ‘odd’ features of Love’s Labour’s Lost. They include a dialectical structure, distinguished by an agon or contest such as the verbal sparring between the lords and the ladies, and a ‘processional or sequential form, in which characters may appear without introduction and disappear without explanation’ (Frye 1970, 3), such as Holofernes, Nathaniel and Marcadé.34 Other features are ‘the introduction of historical figures’, such as the Nine Worthies, and ‘personalities as representatives of larger social forces’ (Frye 1970, 3). For example, the king as representative of the Huguenot wishing to

34

Holofernes and Nathaniel appear late in the play, without notice, in 4.2, where they personify Berowne’s point about wasting one’s eyesight to acquire arcane knowledge that adds nothing to life. Marcadé conveniently drops into 5.2. at line 710 to bring an end to the interminable play about Nine Worthies.

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study Hermetism, and the princess, accompanied by Boyet, representative of Catholic France already familiar with Hermes/Mercury. Other features that Frye describes and which are to be found in the play are the vaudevillean dialogue, the long harangues, and the mood of a musical comedy (1970, 4). The musical presence is affirmed by the fact of Moth’s song, ‘Concolinel’ (3.1.3), by the last two songs, by Ver and Hiems, and by the cascade of love sonnets and songs which lend themselves to a lute accompaniment.35 When the lords disguised as Muscovites enter accompanied by blackamoors (5.2.158) it is to music, and there are other opportunities for music during that scene when the disguised lords mistakenly woo the wrong ladies, unaware that, forewarned, the ladies have also masked their identities. The predominant tone of Old Comedy is satirical. If Shakespeare wanted to mock Henri’s failed attempt to follow the way of Hermes to self-discipline and self-knowledge while he was cuckolding his wife and being cuckolded by her, then Le Loyer’s La Néphélococugie ou la nuée des cocus (Cloud-cuckoo Land), modelled on Aristophanes’ The Birds, in the genre of Old Comedy was a perfect exemplar.36 Evidence that Shakespeare knew Le Loyer’s play comes not only from the open-ended structure and other features which their two plays share with Old Comedy, but also from Le Loyer’s practice of using names from Rabelais, and from the character Cornard, who ‘corresponds to the Greek comic bomolochos or hanger-about for scraps’ (Perret 1990, 61). Cornard calls to mind Moth when he mocks the curate and the pedant telling Costard that ‘They have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps’ (5.1.35–36). Another connection between both plays and the historic context comes from the seemingly inexplicable choice of a song about the cuckoo: ‘O, word of fear, / Unpleasing to a married ear’ (5.2.889–890) to end a play in which there is not even a whisper of adultery.37 In short, the number of parallels with a genre

35 36

37

Recent research has identified Moth’s song as: ‘Quand Colinet faisoit l’amour’, ‘a comical erotic chanson about male genitalia’ intended to mock the oblivious Armado. Ross W. Duffin. 2015. ‘Concolinel’: Moth’s Lost Song Recovered? Le Loyer’s play is about two old cuckolds, Genin and Cornard, who flee from home and find refuge with birds, all cuckoos, with whom they unite against their enemies to build ‘a fantastic city in the clouds. [. . .] Their new society is besieged from above and below, by gods and men, but the downtrodden birds and bird-people are victorious at the end of the comedy’. Like Aristophanes’ play, La Néphélococugie is allegorical and the satire is comprehensively aimed at religious tyranny, judicial corruption and ‘the charlatans and parasites’ that invaded Athens and sixteenth century France alike (Perret 1990, 22). It is not impossible that an early version of the play before it was ‘corrected and augmented’ carried some reference to the adultery which we now know ended the happy sojourn in Navarre and the marriage of Henri and Marguerite, and that when the reference was cut the song was retained.

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associated with social satire tends to confirm the opinion that Shakespeare’s play has a similar purpose. 8

An Unsatisfactory Conclusion

The ending of the play where nothing is resolved presents a final puzzle. It is well-known that when Socrates asked the oracle in the temple at Delphos the way to happiness and the ethical life, the answer was: ‘Know thyself’. But Lazzarelli tells Ferdinand, ‘Let me make clear that I do not take an oracle of Apollo as my point of departure, but the teachings of Hermes’ (6.1). The hope and expectation in the final scene is that the songs of Apollo they have been enjoying will be replaced by the rigorous precepts of Mercury/Hermes. But the contemplative life is not easy, and ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way, we this way’ (5.2.917–918). There is to be no union yet. They must all go their separate ways and any hope of a tolerant, eirenic marriage of Protestant Navarre and Catholic France effected through a reformed Hermetic Christianity is lost for the time being. When the play is over, the Elizabethan court audience might reflect that transforming Protestant Navarre into the ‘wonder of the world’ (1.1.12), which required men to follow the virtuous ‘way of Hermes’ and create a state of godlike men, was an unrealisable fantasy like the cloud-cuckoo land of Le Loyer’s play. However, the peaceful union promised after a twelvemonth in the play did become a reality, not through a reconciliation or the marriage of opposites but through legal process when, in 1598, France ratified the Edict of Nantes and legalized religious toleration. In Chapter 6, the exegesis of The Tempest reveals a play where opposites are reconciled through the union of Naples and Milan, both famously lost to the French by King François I, great uncle of Henri of Navarre, and where I will argue, the island setting is a trope for a place where the immortal soul/mind of each of the drowned await eternal life. But I turn first to two plays which illustrate the ‘torments of matter’ that beset the minds of men and exemplify one man’s ascent to knowledge of self and another man’s descent into ignorance.

Figure 4 Title page of first Quarto of True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters With the unfortunate life of Edgar etc. 1608 Note: When the True Chronicle Historie was published in 1608, the title page displayed a printer’s emblem showing the caduceus of Hermes. The wand is entwined by snakes, topped by Pegasus, embellished with wings and cornucopia, and gripped by two hands. The emblem appears only twice on publications firmly attributed to Shakespeare - the second is on the 1622 Quarto of Othello. The choice of emblem may be innocent or it may signal the Hermetic sympathies of the printer, the publisher or the playwright, or the Hermetic content of the plays.

Chapter 4

King Lear: The Path to Self-Knowledge and Spiritual Regeneration Love’s Labour’s Lost ends as the young king embarks upon his journey of selfknowledge. He is to spend a twelvemonth, offstage, remote from the responsibilities of kingship learning about love – that it is in the mind – and about loving service. If there ever was a play celebrating Love’s Labour’s Won, when the king returns to the princess and reaps the rewards of his spiritual journey, all record of it has been lost. King Lear, like the young King Ferdinand, also wants to divest himself of the cares and responsibilities of office – ‘To shake all cares and business from our age’ (1.1.38) and ‘Unburthen’d crawl toward death’ (1.1.40). Like Ferdinand, Lear’s knowledge of himself at the beginning of the play is but slender. For the Hermetist, it is not the burdens of office that weigh Lear down, it is the torment of ignorance that he must overcome. In the play that bears his name, reader and audience accompany the king along his painful journey and witness his growth into knowledge of himself, as he learns what love means, and understands the real responsibilities of kingship with its obligation to care for all his subjects. At the end of the play, knowing himself both loving and beloved, he departs alone, like Ferdinand, for a place remote from this world, but unlike Ferdinand, he leaves for that bourn from which no traveller returns. Just why Shakespeare has placed a Christian king in a pagan world has long puzzled the critics. Once again, the playwright is drawing upon ideas from the Corpus Hermeticum, but no longer in order to mock; here Hermetic thought is deeply embedded in the psychology of the characters and contributes to the architecture of the play. The characters fall easily into two groups. The good men and women, Cordelia, Edgar, Kent and the Fool all speak truth, which arrives when ‘the good has been fulfilled’ (CH XIII [9]). The torments of matter, such as lust, greed, deceit, envy, treachery, anger, recklessness and malice, are shared amongst the wicked characters; Goneril, Regan and Edmund between them exhibit the whole gamut. Moreover, Edmund’s contempt for astral influences resonates with Book I [25] and is discussed below in connection with revisions to the Quarto edition of the play. Albany and Cornwall function as enablers, allowing their wives to show their true natures; while Gloucester, who in the opening scene recalls with relish the ‘good sport’ of adultery, meets his end in darkness, believing himself to be with strangers until his last © Jane Everingham Nelson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004520608_007

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moments; his lonely death provides a foil for that of Lear who dies in joy surrounded by those who love him. Whether Lear’s spiritual rebirth occurs in this world or the next distinguishes the ending of the Quarto edition of the play from that of the Folio. The last lines of the Quarto reflect an understanding of spiritual rebirth occurring after the death of the body as described in Book I of the Corpus Hermeticum, while the final moment of Lear’s joy in the Folio edition of the play confirms his rebirth in this life and is closer to the teaching of Book XIII. A lengthy textual, bibliographic debate has led to the current critical opinion that the 1623 Folio edition of King Lear is a substantially different play from the first Quarto. I suggest that a Hermetic hermeneutic reveals a coherent rationale for many of the revisions, whether excisions or additions, to the Quarto.1 1

The Critical Debate and Sources of King Lear

Critics are divided in their opinions of this play. According to one scholar of King Lear, ‘No other Shakespearean play has had such strong condemnation and such awe-inspiring praise simultaneously heaped on it’ (Ioppolo 2003, 1). Moreover, as textual study of the Quarto, the Folio, and the conflated editions of the play has established, there is more than one King Lear for scholars to grapple with. Nevertheless, few would disagree with Charles Gildon for whom in 1710 the injustice of Cordelia’s death raised ‘Indignation and Horror’ (in Ioppolo 2003, 48). Samuel Johnson in 1765 was ‘so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them’ (in Ferrell 2011, 99). Two hundred years later, Jan Kott agrees: ‘In the whole Shakespearian repertory I can find no scene as revolting as Cordelia’s death’ (1967, 281). In truth, the manner of her death off-stage is left to the imagination, but Kott is alive to the grotesque and absurd. Nevertheless, our understanding of Lear’s plight is complemented by the heightened sensations occasioned by Cordelia’s death as Hermes explains in Book IX. While the fact and manner of her death may shock us, it is the timing of her death

1 In this chapter, references to Shakespeare’s play are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Scene and line references are from the Quarto History of King Lear (pp. 1027–1061); act, scene and line references are from the Folio Tragedy of King Lear (pp. 1063–1098). Throughout this chapter, words added in the Folio edition are in bold, and excisions from the Quarto are italicized. When a citation occurs in both Q and F with minor differences, F is preferred.

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in Lear’s mind which has significance for Lear’s own apotheosis, and which distinguishes the ending of the first Quarto edition from that of the first Folio. John Keats and other Romantics who were interested in Hermetic thought understood that King Lear is a play about the mind, whether or not they knew Hermetism as a religio mentis.2 Charles Lamb asserts that it is Lear’s mind ‘which is laid bare’; he feels that King Lear is a play to be read because: ‘On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, – we are in his mind’ (1992, 123). In the twentieth century, A. C. Bradley agrees with Lamb that the play is ‘too huge for the stage’ arguing that, while King Lear is not the best of his plays, it is ‘Shakespeare’s greatest work’, because it appeals ‘not so much to dramatic perception as to a rare and more strictly poetic kind of imagination’ (1904, 243, 247–248). A Hermetic exegesis supports Lamb’s opinion that reading the play allows the reader access to Lear’s mind, and that this simultaneously has an effect upon the mind of the contemplative reader, moved like Gildon, Johnson and Kott amongst others, to ‘howl’ (5.3.232) silently with Lear and share his grief. Scholars of Hermetism (such as K. W. Tröger and Richard Reitzenstein), claim a similar transformative effect for Book XIII of the Corpus Hermeticum which tells of ‘rebirth and apotheosis’ and is intended to work spiritual regeneration in those who read it (Copenhaver 1992, 181–182). Concerning the religious nature of King Lear, criticism has swung between interpretations of the play as sublimely Christian with a providential God, or as grimly pagan and utterly godless. Bradley sees the entire play as about Lear’s redemption (1904, 285), Geoffrey Bickersteth thinks Cordelia personifies Christ (in Elton 1966, 3–4), while R. W. Chambers, who sees the play as a tale of redemption through suffering, calls it ‘a vast poem on the victory of true love’ (1940, 49). Roy Battenhouse recognizes numerous biblical echoes (1969, 270– 282 passim), but even while he asserts that King Lear is a tragedy concerned, by definition, with human downfall, he observes in Lear’s response to grief at the end of the play ‘a kind of spiralling upward’ (289) which speaks of a very different trajectory. Battenhouse’s sense that the action has cycled upward resonates with the argument that spiritually Lear is undergoing the Hermetic ascent to gnōsis. At the other extreme, D. G. James sees no sign of Christian doctrine in King Lear, but only a world of savagery and evil (1951, 70), and Kott, writing in the ruins of post-war Poland, sees it as ‘a play about the disintegration of the 2 In Keats, Hermeticism and the Secret Societies Jennifer Wunder notes that ‘in a late October 1817 letter to Bailey, Keats appears to be examining many hermetic ideas espoused by Paracelsus, the Rosicrucians, and various Masonic groups and synthesizing them with his own perspectives’ (2008, 98).

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world . . . brutal and tragic, serious and grotesque’, both nihilist and absurd, and hails Shakespeare as a political visionary (1967, 296–297). In ‘King Lear’ and the Gods, William Elton undertook to examine the validity of the view that ‘Lear is an optimistically Christian drama’ (1966, 3). Elton analyses four attitudes to providence that were known in Shakespeare’s day and which he thought contributed to the pattern of Shakespeare’s play. They include the ‘prisca theologia or virtuous heathen view’ that virtuous pagans like Cordelia and Edgar could attain salvation (75–114); the pagan-atheist view, personified in Goneril, Regan and Edmund (115–146); and the pagan-superstitious view represented by Gloucester (147–170). Elton has difficulty fitting Lear into these categories and resorts to Deus Absconditus (the concealed god) for the protagonist himself (171–263). Elton concludes that to view King Lear as an ‘optimistically Christian drama’ is seriously to misinterpret it, and that ‘the play is in its premises ostensibly pagan’ (1966, 171). He does not include Hermes Trismegistus among the pagan prisci theologi, but it is the core of this argument that Lear’s travails along the path to redemption and salvation, which some critics see as Christian, are also recognizable as the ‘way of Hermes’ to salvation, and that the play has both Christian and Hermetic resonances. Both search for God. The difference between them is that Christians search for a redemptive God external to them, while the gnostic Hermetist finds within oneself the palingenesia that liberates one from ‘fate and materiality’ either in this life (CH XIII [3]), or the next (CH I [24–26]).3 Virtually no recent criticism touches the issue of Lear’s journey to selfknowledge, possibly because, as Paul Jorgensen admits in his 1967 Introduction to Lear’s Self-Discovery, it had become a cliché even then. Jorgensen’s own fresh look at Lear’s journey does not address the problem of whether or not Lear finds salvation ‘as the final stage of self-knowledge’ or, in other words, by gnōsis. This, Jorgensen admits, is ‘a thornier question’ (1967, 31). In 1972, Rolf Soellner devoted an entire book to Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge, arguing from his premise that lack of self-knowledge is ‘the spring for most of Shakespeare’s plays’ (281). In a work of great erudition, Soellner contends that the Elizabethans were saturated in the Socratic notion of self-knowledge (nosce teipsum) (1972, xi). However, the knowledge of self that proceeds from the examined life which Socrates advocates is not the same as the noesis which leads the contemplative Hermetist to the purging of the ‘torments of matter’,

3 It is this liberation from ‘the “tent” of the earthly body’ that ‘Hermetists thought of as “rebirth”’ (Fowden 1986, 109).

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to gnōsis and spiritual rebirth.4 In support of his argument, Soellner cites from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Somnium Scipionis, books of moral philosophy ‘widely used in the schools’ in Shakespeare’s day (1972, 9), both of which are identifiable loci classici in the Corpus Hermeticum (I [18], 112; V [5], 140). Similarly, he cites De Officiis where, following Plato, Cicero lists the four cardinal virtues (justice, prudence, fortitude and temperance) noting that: ‘of these, temperance was most closely associated with self-knowledge’ (11). As Shakespeare characterizes Lear, it is intemperance, accompanied by ignorance of self, that is amongst Lear’s greatest corporeal torments.5 In short, while some critics see Shakespeare’s King Lear as informed by a classical humanism of pagan origin, but not necessarily Hermetic, others interpret it as Christian. The origin of each position may be found in the two works which, it is generally agreed,6 are the principal sources of the play, namely, the early anonymous play The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters etc. which is predominantly Christian, and a tale from Sidney’s long novel, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia which is not.7 Although there is nothing in the early sources to suggest that Lear and his daughters lived in Christian times, when the unknown author of King Leir dramatized the tale, he gave it a bias not only Christian but post-­Reformation.8 4 The interest in self-knowledge in the literature of the Renaissance is frequently ascribed to the humanist interest in Plato and Socrates who attributed the advice to the Delphic oracle – advice which Lazzarelli specifically repudiates (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 2005, 26.2, 249). However, alongside books urging the moral imperative of the examined life and emphasizing the study of the body, such as Sir John Davies’ Nosce Teipsum (1599) or Pierre Charron’s Of Wisdom (trans. c.1612), are numerous books urging knowledge of self as a prerequisite to knowledge of God or gnosis, although they do not use that term. Jorgensen quotes from Pierre de la Primaudaye who wrote in The French Academie (1594): ‘self-knowledge is “a guide to leade him [man] to the true knowledge of God”’ (1967, 32), and Ralegh, in his Hermetic History of the World asserted that ‘[i]t is therefore Death alone that can suddenly make man to know himself’ (in Jorgensen 1967, 20). 5 Soellner expands his argument with examples such as those from the Enchiridion (1502), where Erasmus, who may have been influenced by the Hermetica, writes of the need to balance and reconcile the warring elements of passion and reason, and warns that self-control is necessary for salvation (1972, 4). Soellner also cites the Jesuit Diego de Estella in a translation by Thomas Rogers (1586), whom he terms a ‘nosce teipsum’ author. De Estella writes that ‘the knowledge of ourselves bringeth us to the knowledge of God’ (1972, 16). This is a key tenet of Christian Hermetism, which distinguishes it from the Socratic dictum. 6 Bullough 1973, VII 270, 284; Muir 1975, xxxiv, xxxv; Knowles 2002, 12–35. 7 Old Arcadia was completed in 1581, while New Arcadia was unfinished at Sidney’s death in 1586. A composite Arcadia was published in 1590. 8 The date of the play has never been securely established, and it may have been written for the Queen’s Men before 1587. Sarah Beckwith suggests King Leir derives from ‘the late 1580s or early ’90s’ (2011, 91). It is probably the Queen’s Men’s play performed by Queen’s Men and

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Early in the play, Leir refers to Gonorill and Ragan as ‘the kindest girls in Christendom’ (sc 6.91). From scene 17 the play is punctuated with Christian references such as ‘King of Heaven’ (sc 17.162), ‘just Jehova’ (sc 19.205), ‘the will of God’ (sc 19.210), ‘high anointed of the Lord’ (sc 19.250), ‘see what God will send / When all means fail, he is the surest friend’ (sc 23.98), and towards the end, a furious Gonorill insults Cordella calling her ‘Puritan, dissembling hypocrite [. . . ] I’ll make you wish yourself in Purgatory’ (sc 30.68–71) in a curious amalgam of confessions, which for a London audience was tantamount to denouncing her as a Familist.9 The irony of Gonorill’s reviling Cordella as a dissembling hypocrite would not have been lost on the audience who had seen her overblown protestations of love for her father rewarded with a third of his kingdom. The anonymous playwright darkens the story of ungrateful children with the addition of Ragan’s plot to bribe a murderer to kill her father (sc 19). He adds further complexity to the characters such as Ragan who, when the plot is exposed, feigns indignation and blames Cordella (sc 22.56–58). Leir eventually admits his fault and even forgives his ‘unkind Girls’ (sc 24.58). The tale ends happily. Leir confesses the whole sorry saga to a weeping, compassionate Cordella and her husband; mutual requests for pardon are met with mutual forgiveness and love and, after ‘the just revengement of the wronged King’ (sc 30.48), reconciliation, Christian forgiveness and compassion conclude the play. However, apart from the abuse of their father and the idea of murder, concepts which are listed in Book IX [3], the plot of King Leir owes little to the Corpus Hermeticum. By contrast, the Arcadia story, which is clearly the source of the Gloucester plot that Shakespeare added to King Leir, incorporates most of the demonic concepts listed in Book IX of the Corpus Hermeticum. In the French translation by Foix de Candale which was published in 1579 and potentially available to Sidney, the evil concepts sown by the demons are: ‘adultaires, meurtres, Sussex’s Men together at the Rose in 1593/94. Henslowe records receiving ‘38 shillings for kinge leare on 6 april 1593 and 26 shillings on 8 april 1594’ (Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2002, 21). 9 See Chapter 2 and also Kristen Poole who points out that Knewstub in denouncing Familists in 1579 called them Puritans, not because they were seeking ‘ecclesiastical or moral reform’, but because they ‘bragge of all perfection’ (2000, 74–75). Familists were notorious for protecting themselves by dissembling and ‘verbal hypocrisy’ (2000, 83). J. W. Martin records that Archbishop Sandys attacked Familists for hypocrisy and suggested that they resembled ‘church papists’ (1989, 197); Lord Burghley referred to them as ‘papisticall’ in a letter to Walsingham in 1578 (in Martin 216 n.5). It may be significant that, despite having been entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1594, there is no record of the play in print until 1605 following the publication of A Supplication of the Family of Love, addressed to King James in 1604.

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parricides, sacrileges, impietez, estranglemants, precipitacions’ (292) (acts of adultery, murder, killing one’s father, acts of sacrilege, impious (irreverent or godless) acts (such as suicide), strangling, hurling oneself from a high place).10 Arcadia tells of a king and his two sons, one conceived in adultery who smooth-talks his way into his father’s affections and persuades him ‘to mislike, then to hate, lastly to destroy’ his virtuous and kind legitimate son, by employing ‘poysonous hypocrisie, desperate fraude, smooth malice, hidden ambition and smiling envie’ (in Bullough VII, 404).11 The tale is narrated to two princes, who overhear an old man, ‘poorly arrayed’ and blind, trying to persuade his son to leave him to his fate. They reveal themselves and hear the story first from the virtuous son, Leonatus, of how his father, Prince of Paphlagonia, was ‘by the hard-hearted ungratefulness’ of his other son deprived both of his kingdom and his sight, whereupon, driven to grief, he had begged Leonatus to lead him ‘to the toppe of this rocke, thence to cast himself headlong to death’ (in Bullough 403). The father then takes up the tale and admits how, ‘dronke in my affection to that unlawful and unnatural sonne’, he had allowed him free rein until ‘ere I was aware, I had left myself nothing but the name of king’. The tyrant son then put out his eyes and ‘let me goe [. . .] delighting to make me feel my miserie’. None dares to help, whereupon his good son reappears and out of ‘dutifull affection’ cares for his afflicted father (in Bullough 405). The tale ends with the overthrow of the evil brother, Plexirtus, by Leonatus, after which the old king dies. The brothers are reconciled. Although Leonatus’ compassionate treatment of the father who had rejected him and forgiveness of his brother are truly Christian, Sidney’s version refers neither to pagan gods nor to the Christian God. However, the events of the tale of the Paphlagonian prince – adultery, the intention to murder, the physical assaults on the father, the wish to commit suicide by jumping from a rock – mirror four of the concepts sown in the mind by evil demons listed in Book IX. While adultery and murder are not uncommon elements in narrative plots, it is the addition of the other less usual ideas that strengthens the case that Sidney is following the Corpus Hermeticum as he plots the tale of the Paphlagonian king. Moreover, the deception (‘fraude’), ‘malice’ and ‘envie’ used to describe the wicked son may be found 10

11

The seven demonic concepts are not connected to the seven deadly sins. Three of the concepts reflect commandments from God given to Moses (6. Thou shalt not commit adultery; 7. Thou shalt not kill; 8. Thou shalt honour thy father and mother). Scott finds parallels in CH I [23] and [25] and VI [1] and [3] (Copenhaver 1992, 151). In CH I [23] Poimandres speaks of ‘the avenging demon’ who arms the evil person ‘for lawless deeds so that greater vengeance may befall him’. The reference will be picked up in the next chapter in connection with Iago and Othello. All references to Sidney’s Arcadia in this section were found in Bullough VII.

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amongst the torments listed in Book XIII. But while Sidney as novelist does no more than prosaically list them, in Shakespeare’s hand those same qualities become powerful motivators of the dramatic action. Moreover, whereas Sidney uses the demonic concepts from Book IX to structure and drive the plot in Arcadia, by contrast in King Lear, Shakespeare draws on the entire zodiac of torments listed in Book XIII to define and motivate his characters to enact the demon’s wicked ideas, so that it is the characters (whose idiosyncratic ‘torments of matter’ are akin to personality traits, feelings or habits of mind), that drive the action. Hermes explains them as follows: This ignorance, my child, is the first torment; the second is grief; the third is incontinence [intemperance]; the fourth, lust; the fifth, injustice; the sixth, greed; the seventh, deceit; the eighth, envy; the ninth, treachery; the tenth, anger; the eleventh, recklessness; the twelfth, malice. (CH XIII [7]) The two narratives, Arcadia and King Leir, seamlessly spliced in King Lear, now interact in ways that allow Shakespeare to provide compelling motivations for the characters’ behaviour. In doing so he goes beyond Sidney’s tale and draws on the material torments listed above. It is the torment of lust that motivates Goneril to commit adultery, murder her sister and take her own life, while Gloucester, whose downfall is the result of the lust that had led him to adultery years earlier, wants to end his life by ‘falling from a cliff’ at Dover. Regan’s envy, malice and reckless anger define her character and motivate her impetuous murder of the servant who came to Gloucester’s aid. The greed, deceit and treachery, which motivate Edmund’s wicked actions, single him out, as he dissociates himself from those who would blame their behaviour on the stars and, declaring himself the author of his own wickedness, consciously chooses to be bad. By contrast, the virtuous characters, Edgar and Cordelia, as well as Kent and Albany, do not harbour any of the evil demons’ seeds; they are associated with truth, especially with the Words of Truth, and with compassionate love. Cordelia is explicitly associated with Truth, ‘who puts deceit to flight’ (XIII [9]), from the outset when the king exclaims upon her refusal to flatter: Lear: So young and so untender? Cordelia: So young, my lord and true. Lear: Well, let it be so. Thy truth then be thy dower. (Q 1.99–101; F 1.1.106–108) In the old King Leir, the king attributes Cordelia’s answer to her pride: ‘Why how now, Minion, are you growne so proud?’ (l. 285), and she responds explaining

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that he has misconstrued her ‘playne meaning’ (l. 301). No explicit reference connects Cordelia to truth in the early play. It is purposeful alterations such as this which support the argument that Shakespeare is using the play to illustrate a Hermetic point. Similarly, it is significant that Edgar reveals the truth about himself and about their father to the mortally wounded Edmund, whose machinations take the form of deceit and treachery. As Hermes tells Tat, ‘Truth expels deceit’, and upon hearing Edgar’s words, Edmund recognizes truth and admits: ‘’Tis true’ (5.3.164) in words that appear in the Folio. R. G. Moulton observed in 1885 that in Shakespeare’s play ‘the two plots work side by side’ and that in each the tragic action emerges ‘from the initial error committed by the protagonist’ (in Bullough VII, 286). However, a Hermetic exegesis discriminates between those ‘initial errors’. Gloucester’s error is the torment of lust which is ‘the cause of death’ (CH I [18]), while Lear’s errors are his lack of self-knowledge and the intemperate rages which he conquers on his journey to spiritual rebirth.12 Whereas Moulton argues that Lear’s tragedy is one of ‘excessive retribution for his pride’ (286), a Hermetic reading interprets his end as a joyful apotheosis achieved in Act 4 after the purging of ignorance, intemperance, injustice and grief.13 Whereas Bullough believes that Gloucester and Lear have similar deaths ‘between joy and grief’ (284), a Hermetic hermeneutic distinguishes Gloucester from the king. Gloucester, too late to seek forgiveness or give his blessing to the son he had believed was lost to him (5.3.188–191), dies in darkness conflicted between joy and grief, while (in the Folio version) Lear meets death in joy, purged of his torments and surrounded by men who love him. 2

The Transformation of Lear

From Hermes’ list we learn that ignorance is the principal torment followed by incontinence (intemperance), injustice and grief. These are the torments which afflict Lear who, unlike Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes, has committed no crime and has no blood on his hands. In the course of the play, read as an allegory of his soul’s journey to spiritual rebirth, Lear slowly conquers his torments. Ignorance gives way to self-knowledge, he learns to temper his immoderate wrath, he attempts to bring his elder daughters to justice, and eventually, 12 13

Like Soellner, Elton links the idea of Lear’s rage being opposed to Gloucester’s lust to Erasmus, whose Folly believes that Jupiter has set up Anger and Lust against our Reason (in Duthie 1967, 380). Dover Wilson and Nicholas Brooke have also both observed that Lear’s redemption and regeneration occur in Act 4 (in Duthie 378).

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having found compassionate love commensurate with his understanding, his grief over losing Cordelia is replaced by his joy at being reunited with her. In short, the torments which Lear suffers and overcomes on his journey are four of those which Hermes revealed to Tat before explaining how, by summoning the powers which will expel them, he can ‘cleanse’ himself of his tormenters: To us has come knowledge of god, and when it comes, my child, ignorance has been expelled. To us has come knowledge of joy, and when it arrives, grief will fly off to those who give way to it. [8] The power that I summon after joy is continence [temperance], O sweetest power! Let us receive her too, most gladly, child. As soon as she arrives, how she has repulsed incontinence! [. . . ] This next level, my child, is the seat of justice. See how she has expelled injustice, without a judgment. (CH XIII [9]) A comparison of King Lear with the source play King Leir reveals that Regan’s words: ‘’Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself’ (Q 1.283–284; F 1.1.292–293), are a conscious and deliberate departure from the old play. There it is Gonorill who says of her father: ‘For he you know is always in extremes’ (l.195). In his King Lear, Shakespeare takes care at the outset to establish that Lear does not know himself. For the Hermetist this means that the king must overcome his ignorance of self in order to know God and achieve spiritual rebirth, because ‘he who has understood himself advances toward god’ (CH I [21]). Just before this pronouncement, Hermes had explained the different outcomes for those who have knowledge of self and those without it: the one who recognized himself attained the chosen good, but the one who loved the body that came from the error of desire goes on in darkness, errant, suffering sensibly the effects of death. (CH I [19]) Here is the Hermetic rationale for the twin plots in the new version of the old play, where Shakespeare contrasts the essential mind of the spiritual Lear with the body of the mortal Gloucester, a material man ‘soil[ed]with vice’ (CH IX [5]). Lear must learn through suffering to know himself, and attain ‘the chosen good’, while Gloucester’s fate is to wander on in darkness feeling his way toward death. Regan’s perceptive assessment of her father’s lack of self-knowledge is followed by Goneril’s appraisal: ‘The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash’ (Q 1.285–286; F 1.1.294–5). Confirming that Lear’s explosive temper has been ‘long-engrafted’ (Q 1.287; F 1.1.297) couples the two elements: Lear’s lack of understanding and his ungoverned rage. The evidence of his daughters’

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judgment is enacted in his attempts to bribe them publicly to express their love for him. In furiously casting out the daughter who calls his bluff by confronting him with the truth that he is making of love a material commodity, he reveals that he neither understands nor feels compassion for her. It is a critical commonplace that for Lear to know himself he has first to learn to feel, through the experience of real suffering. Stanley Wells, for example, says of Lear, ‘physical suffering can bring mental revelation [. . .] people will not begin to see until they learn to feel’ (1980, 64). The same sentiment resonates with Book IX of the Corpus Hermeticum where Hermes explains to Asclepius: ‘Both sensation and understanding flow together into humans, intertwined with one another, as it were. For without sensation it is impossible to understand, and without understanding it is impossible {to have sensation}’ (CH IX [2]). According to the Corpus, the index of understanding will be reasoned speech, and the gradual progress towards gnōsis will be accompanied by a growth in feeling. Hence as Lear’s mind sinks increasingly out of touch with reality (a condition best described as ‘mad’) he ascends into understanding of himself, the mark of which is his reasoned speech, and with that growing understanding of self is entwined understanding of others, signalled by new feelings of empathy. With conscious artistry, Shakespeare plots Lear’s transformation; it is a journey that mirrors the path traced for the initiate in Book XIII of the Corpus Hermeticum. First, Lear’s gradual transformation from ignorance to self-knowledge is signalled by changes to his sense of identity. From the first Act, Shakespeare accompanies Lear’s spiritual growth with the realization that others in his world also commodified love, and that the love and respect formerly shown to him were for his title and his lands, not for himself. In Goneril’s palace, he cannot command the respect he formerly took for granted. He begins to doubt his own identity: ‘Who am I, sir?’ (Q 4.75; F 1.4.76) is followed by ‘Does any here know me? Why, this is not Lear. [. . . ] Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (Q 4.220, 225; F 1.4.208, 212). From ‘king’ he slips into his identity as ‘father’, but still commands like a king: ‘The King would speak with Cornwall; the dear father / Would with his daughter speak, commands, tends service’ (Q 7.263–265; F 2.2.273–274). By Act 3 he pities himself, reduced now to a ‘weak and despised old man’ (Q 9.20; F 3.2.20) at the mercy of the storm. Later, hallucinating, confusing Gloucester with Goneril, he admits that he no longer has any authority: ‘the thunder would not peace at my bidding’ (Q 20.100–101; F 4.5.101–102), but still to his distracted mind he is ‘every inch a king’ (Q 20.105; F 4.5.107). He is still finding the way to knowledge of himself when, stripped bare of the garments of kingship, Cordelia’s gentlemen find him and take him to the French camp, where he sleeps.

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Second, Lear must learn to moderate his wrath, by controlling his hasty temper. Enraged to new heights by Goneril’s criticism of his ‘all-licensed fool’ (Q 4.195; F 1.4.183), of his ‘knights and squires / Men so disordered, so debauched and bold’ (Q 4.235–236; F 1.4. 219–220), and of his own lack of decorum: ‘As you are old and reverend, should be wise’ (Q 4.234; F 1.4.218), Lear utters a most terrible curse condemning his ‘thankless child’ (Q 4.283; F 1.4.269) to childlessness. In his rage and grief, close to hot tears, he appeals to the Goddess Nature to convey sterility into his daughter’s womb: 14 Dry up in her the organs of increase, And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honour her. (Q 4.272–274; F 1.4.258–260)15 The full implications of his curse are to be found in the Corpus Hermeticum: Prudent people [. . .] regard the making of children as a duty in life to be taken most seriously and greatly revered, and should any human being pass away childless, they see it as the worst misfortune and irreverence. After death such a person suffers retribution from demons. This is his punishment: the soul of the childless one is sentenced to a body that has neither a man’s nature nor a woman’s – a thing accursed under the sun. (CH II [17]) Lear’s terrible curse is cruel enough in this world, but a Hermetic reading shows that his ungoverned rage has condemned his daughter’s soul to perpetual torment in the next life. Forced now to depart, Lear sends letters ahead to Regan and only then, as his suffering begins, does he admit his folly in banishing Cordelia from his heart: ‘I did her wrong’ (Q 5.24; F 1.5.25). The words surface from deep within. He departs from Goneril’s palace, fearing that he is going mad, and the Fool 14

15

Like Edmund in Scene 2, Lear calls on the Goddess Nature (1.4.273), who, the Corpus says, is the Goddess of Creation. In Book I, Pymander tells Hermes that Mind, the father of all who is life and light, gave birth to a man like himself whom he loved as his own child, whereupon the man looked through the cosmic framework, displaying to lower nature the fair form of god. ‘Nature smiled for love when she saw him’ [14]. The man saw a form like himself in water and, wishing to enter it, ‘inhabited the unreasoning form. Nature took hold of her beloved, hugged him all about and embraced him, for they were lovers’ (CH I [14]). ‘Because of this, unlike any other living thing on earth, mankind is twofold – in the body mortal but immortal in the essential man’ (CH I [15]). ‘honour her’ as in the eighth commandment: ‘Honour thy father and thy mother [. . .]’.

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remarks on his lack of wisdom (Q 5.43–44; F 1.5.43–44). In the second act, Lear learns to control his temper with patience. Bewildered at finding Regan away from home, infuriated by Regan’s and Cornwall’s failure to greet him when he arrives at Gloucester’s castle, and enraged at finding his messenger in the stocks, he explodes furiously, before interrupting himself with the possibility that Cornwall may have a reason for the neglect of his duty: ‘Maybe he is not well . . . We are not ourselves / When nature being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body. I’ll forbear’ (Q 7.267–271; F 2.2.277–281). It is the first glimmer of his understanding that others might have feelings, but it is a struggle for him. Regan begs him: ‘I pray you, Sir, take patience’ (Q 7.300; F 2.2.310). Then Goneril’s cool indifference infuriates him and he warns her: ‘I prithee daughter, do not make me mad’ (Q 7.376; F 2.2.391). When he decides to stay with Regan believing in her tender heart, she rebuffs him, telling him: ‘those that mingle reason with your passion / Must be content to think you old’ (Q 7.392–393; F 2.2.407–408). She knows him better than he knows himself, and her choice of words is a reminder that he has not yet succeeded in tempering rage with reason. In Hermetic terms, at this point of his journey, Lear is not yet cleansed of the torment of intemperance, and the sensation and understanding which should ‘flow together into humans’, are not yet ‘intertwined with one another’ (CH IX [2]). A minute later, Lear is begging the Heavens for patience: ‘You Heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!’ (Q 7.430; F 2.2.445). It is from these few references to patience that critics, such as Hannibal Hamlin, have argued that the Old Testament Book of Job has ‘deeply and persuasively informed [this] play’ (2011, 129).16 While I do not dispute that Hamlin and others find a ‘constellation of allusions’ here (2011, 132), the analogy is difficult to sustain because the biblical Job is from the outset a blameless and upright man who exhibits patience in adversity, and unswerving faith in God, for which God rewards him with beautiful daughters and long life. Nor are Kent and Gloucester in any sense ‘Job’s comforters’ for Lear, although the Fool might fill the role occasionally. Unlike Job, Lear is at the start of the play an intemperate autocrat, ignorant of his own ‘torments’, one whom adversity transforms into a temperate or patient man. In Act 3, the previous pattern repeats itself. Lear’s raging at the storm gives way to self-pity. He feels himself as much a victim of the storm as of his 16

G. Wilson Knight compares the whole play to the Book of Job in The Wheel of Fire (1954, 191). Others who find a biblical allusion to Job include: Arthur Kirsch in The Passions of Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes (1990, 105); Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (1987, 152); Julia Reinhard Lupton, “The Wizards of Uz: Shakespeare and the Book of Job.” In Shakespeare and Religion (2011, 163–184 passim).

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daughters, and submits to the elements, reduced now from king to ‘A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man’ (Q 9.20; F 3.2.20). Still self-pitying, he believes himself to be ‘a man / More sinned against than sinning’ (Q 9.60; F 3.2.60). Buffeted, and in Hermetic terms, ‘cleansed’ (or in Christian terms ‘baptised’) of his inner torments by the terrible storm, Lear becomes aware of the transformation taking place in his mind and cries out: ‘my wits begin to turn’ (Q 9.68; F 3.2.67). As ignorance dissipates, knowledge grows, and with understanding he begins at last to feel what others feel. He turns to his Fool: Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold? I am cold myself. (Q 9.69–70; F 3.2.68–69) [...] Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart That’s sorry yet for thee. (Q 9.73–74; F 3.2.72–73) It is at this point that understanding of, and feeling for, the suffering of others begin to combine in him. Refusing to take shelter, Lear tries to make sense of things but finds that ‘this tempest in my mind’ prevents him from feeling anything except ‘filial ingratitude’ (Q 11.12, 14; F 3.4.12, 14), and he refuses to allow himself to think about it: ‘Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all, –/ O, that way madness lies . . . No more of that’ (Q 11.19–21; F 3.4.20–22). Then, at the midpoint of the play, Shakespeare brings understanding and sensation together in Lear’s great speech where reason and compassion unite. Lear extends his pity for the Fool, whom he can see before him, to all suffering mankind wherever they are. Significantly, physical suffering, such as the homeless poor experience, brings with it compassion, agape or charitable love. When compassion enters Lear’s heart, he wishes to pray but before he seeks shelter for himself in the hovel, again he thinks first of his Fool: In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty – Nay get thee in. I’ll pray and then I’ll sleep. (F 3.4.26–27) These two lines, evidence of the compassion that has entered Lear’s heart, first appear in the Folio where they preface Lear’s great reverential prayer for all the hungry poor and homeless and his confession of his part in their misery: Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

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How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, Pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the Heavens more just. (Q 11.25–33; F 3.4.28–36) The significance of his prayer at the midpoint of the play cannot be overestimated; the speech displays a reverence of mind in Lear that is synonymous with Hermetic piety. Hermes warns Asclepius that ‘the reverent will be thought mad’ (Asclepius [25]); at this point Edgar enters in his guise as Mad Tom, and Lear begins to remove his own clothes in an act of apparent madness. The king now understands that, without the trappings of kingship and authority, he himself is no different from other men. He knows now that ‘Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou [Edgar] art’ (Q 11.97–98; F 3.4.100–101) and he tries to tear off his clothes. Literally and dramatically, he is behaving like a mad man, allegorically he is removing the trappings of authority, but spiritually, by ripping off ‘the garment of ignorance’, he is taking a step on the path to self-knowledge and rebirth (CH VII [2]). Hermes is referring of course to the material and mortal body, which at the end Lear leaves behind. Third, now that his rage is tempered, Lear has still to deal with the torment of injustice which the Corpus teaches will be expelled by justice (CH XIII [9]). Justice and injustice are the ‘chief preoccupation of the mock trial’ in Quarto Scene 13 as Roger Warren observes (1983, 50). In this scene, as the king grows increasingly out of touch with reality, he arraigns his daughters. He orders Edgar and the Fool to take their places on the Bench, creating thereby an ‘ensemble of madness’ (Warren 45), real and assumed.17 Edgar and the Fool can see that Lear’s mind is disordered and hallucinating, and they briefly enter into the imaginary situation (Warren 1983, 51). In the Quarto scene, Lear’s discourse blends the reasoned logic of court formalities – ‘Bring in the evidence’ (31), ‘Thou robed man of justice’ (32) – with the memory of his daughter’s cruel treatment: ‘She kicked the poor King her father’ (43). In effect, Lear’s mind merges his memory of the injustice in the topsy-turvy world where his children had authority over their father with the injustice of the ‘False justicer’ 17

Warren’s focus is on the difficulties in staging the scene and the positive effect that its omission from the Folio has on preparing the audience for ‘the climactic meeting of the mad Lear and the blind Gloucester in 4.6’ (1983, 49).

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who let Regan escape (51). The scene blends his memory (of cruelty), which is a property of mind, with understanding (of corruption) which is the instrument of reason. But the Corpus Hermeticum teaches that ‘Mind differs from understanding . . . Understanding is the sister of reasoned speech, or each is the other’s instrument’ (CH IX [1]). It is arguable that the changes made to the Quarto Scene 13, where mind and reason merge, were made to illustrate the point that, although Lear has lost his mind, he has not lost his reason.18 In his examination of the motives and consequences of those changes, Roger Warren argued convincingly that eliminating the mock trial scene had the effect of allowing the later scene (Folio 4.5) to provide a concentrated focus on ‘the way [Lear’s] mind works, of the logical connections which underlie the mad remarks and which make the speeches effective in both dramatic and psychological terms’ (1983, 50). I agree with Warren that the later scene emphasizes Lear’s reason. But I go further and suggest that a possible motive for the elimination of the scene lies in the distinction which Hermes makes between mind and reason, and the consequence of the change is to illustrate, as I said above, that Lear’s mind, though apparently deranged, retains reason. An addition in the Folio supports that claim. Lear amplifies the ‘False justicer’ whom ‘the strong lance of justice’ cannot touch because he is protected by the symbols of his authority: Lear: Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it. None does offend, none, I say, none; I’ll able ’em: Take that of me, my friend, who have the power To seal th’accuser’s lips. (F. 4. 5.161–166) The addition to Lear’s speech lends resonance and weight to Edgar’s response: Edgar: O! matter and impertinency mix’d – Reason in madness! (Q 20.163–164; F 4.5.170–171) Edgar’s words now illustrate and exemplify Hermes’ notion that the mind, though out of touch with reality, may still retain reason. Others have seen this. Muir, for example, observes that the theme of ‘reason in madness’ is essential to the play’s meaning (1960, 33). 18

The next chapter contrasts Lear with Othello, whose mind remains sane even as his reason is being distorted with false information.

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A second consequence of omitting the scene where Lear’s disturbed mind still has memory of his daughters’ ill treatment allows memory in a later scene (Q 21; F 4.6) to function as the sign that sleep has restored him to health. Once Lear is found by Cordelia’s scout, he is taken to the French camp and able to sleep at last. In the Folio, Lear wakes to Cordelia’s kiss (4.6.24), but in the Quarto edition, Queen Cordelia’s entrance is accompanied with music, we hear that Lear ‘hath slept long’ (Q 21.16; F 4.6.16), the doctor calls for the music to be louder (21. 23), and Lear wakes to music. The episode calls to mind a passage from the Corpus Hermeticum which speaks of understanding and sensation being in harmony when sleepers awake: {It seems to me that [. . .] when sleepers wake, and sensation }. At any rate, is distributed to body and to soul, and, when both these parts of sensation are in harmony with one another, then there is an utterance of understanding, engendered by mind. (CH IX [2])19 When Lear wakes, restored, he remembers everything. He is sane enough to know that he may not be in his ‘perfect mind’ (Q 21.60; F 4.6.56), but the evidence that his mind is restored is in his memory and his awareness of reality. He knows his age, ‘Fourscore and upward’ (Q 21.59; F 4.6.54); he knows that he is in fresh garments, and in an unfamiliar place; and importantly he recognizes Cordelia, remembers how her sisters treated him and how he treated her. He asks her to ‘forget / And forgive’ (Q 21.83; F 4.6.76–77). In short, his speech completely dispels any suggestion of permanent dementia. It is crucial to the Hermetic reading that Lear has recovered his mind at this point. The doctor confirms this when he tells Cordelia: ‘the great rage / You see, is killed [cured] in him’ (Q 21.76–77; F 4.6.72–73).20 His choice of the word ‘rage’ to mean Lear’s madness unites that madness (going mad) with Lear’s intemperate anger (getting mad), both of which are now vanquished.21 Not all critics appreciate the significance of this.22 But Lear’s mind is now fully aware of his own role in 19 20 21 22

In all quotations from Copenhaver’s translation of the Hermetica, angled brackets indicate the insertion of a word; square brackets, the removal of a word, and pointed brackets a word regarded as unintelligible or problematic. See Front Matter. In the Folio the doctor’s lines are given to a ‘Gentleman’. Shakespeare’s decision to send Lear temporarily mad may rest in this very double meaning since in English ‘mad’ can mean both a loss of mental capability and also an excess of anger. Grace Ioppolo, for example, says only that the ‘mad Lear is reunited with his loving daughter’ (2003, 98).

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what has passed, and this knowledge of self combines with his new joyful experience of a love that is selfless. He is no longer interested in confronting his ungrateful daughters when he and Cordelia are taken prisoner in the British camp: Cordelia: Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters? Lear: No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison; We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage. (Q 24.7–9; F 5.3.7–9) He wants only to ask Cordelia’s forgiveness and ‘live / And pray, and sing’ (Q 24.11–12; F 5.3.11–12). This too appears to echo the Corpus Hermeticum where Hermes tells Tat that, once he has been purified, the secret hymn of rebirth can be divulged: Powers within me [meaning the powers which overcame the torments], sing a hymn to the one and the universe [. . .] Holy knowledge, you enlightened me; [. . . ] I take joy in the joy of mind. (CH XIII [15–18]) The penultimate sentence of Book XIII warns the reader to ‘promise to be silent about this miracle, child, and reveal the secret of rebirth to no one lest we be accounted its betrayers’ [22]. The Hermetic implication of their singing together is that Lear’s torments have been extinguished. At this point Lear’s knowledge of self has grown into understanding, he has learnt to temper his wrath, he has experienced compassion, he has tried to bring his miscreant daughters to justice, and now grief is replaced by joy. In Hermetic terms he has rid himself of the torments of ignorance, intemperance, injustice and grief and is ready to be spiritually reborn. Traditional Christian critics like Bradley, Bickersteth and R. W. Chambers all agree that it is at this point that Lear attains redemption. In short, for the Christian, redemption and Hermetic apotheosis are perceived as two sides of the same divinizing coin. 3 Lear’s Essential Spirituality Contrasted with Gloucester’s Materiality The rulers in Shakespeare’s two sources, King Leir and Arcadia, are similar in several respects. To distinguish them when he combines the stories, Shakespeare makes the Prince of Paphlagonia into the Duke of Gloucester, but he must also distinguish Lear who achieves self-knowledge and spiritual rebirth (whether in this life or the next), from Gloucester whose ‘error of desire’ leads

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him to death. Evidence that Shakespeare is consulting the Corpus in his conception of these characters comes from the care he takes to separate ‘understanding’ and ‘sensation’ from physical ‘seeing’ and ‘feeling’. ‘See’ can mean both literal eyesight and ‘know’ or ‘understand’ (as in ‘I see what you mean’). ‘Feel’ can refer both to physical touch and also to emotion. Lear’s discourse includes the language of intellect and understanding, ‘mind’, ‘reason’, ‘known’ and ‘knowledge’, as well as of sensation or emotion as in ‘wrath’ and ‘passion’. The discourse around Gloucester employs the language of sensation, both literal and physical: ‘let him smell / His way to Dover’ (Q 14.91–92; F 3.7.91–92); ‘You cannot see your way’; ‘I stumbled when I saw’ (Q 15.15, 17; F 4.1.17, 19); ‘to see thee in my touch’ (Q 15.21; F 4.1.23). Even when Gloucester suddenly realizes that he has been deceived into believing ill of Edgar, he says only ‘O, my follies! Then Edgar was abused’ (Q 14.89; F 3.7.89). After a spontaneous act of charity, giving his purse to ‘Poor Tom’, Gloucester echoes Lear’s wish to share superfluity with the poor and uses ‘see’ ambiguously: Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, That slaves your ordinance, that will not see Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly; (Q 16.65–67; F 4.1.61–63) His words reflect Hermes’ doctrine that ‘without understanding it is impossible {to have sensation.}’ (CH IX [2]). Then, when the eyeless Gloucester meets Lear again, Lear joshes him, using ‘see’ to mean ‘know’ or ‘understand’: Lear: You see how this world goes. Gloucester: I see it feelingly! Lear: What! art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. (Q 20.142–146; F 4.5.143–147) Lear sees (in both senses of the word) clearly. Gloucester can feel but has no insight into the cause of his own misery. And Shakespeare seems to understand the doctrine of the interdependence of understanding and sensation outlined in Book IX of the Corpus Hermeticum well enough to make a wry joke. Another passage in Book IX introduces the idea of the ‘god-fearing person’ who has received good seeds from God – ‘virtue, moderation and reverence’ – but who ‘may appear to be mad’ to the multitude (CH IX [4]). This person to whom all things are good and who, even when ‘they lay plots against him . . . alone makes evil into good’ (IX [4]), may be the inspiration for Shakespeare to disguise the virtuous Edgar as ‘Mad Tom’.

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Three Kinds of Madness: Tom o’Bedlam, Lear, the Fool

In none of the sources of Shakespeare’s play is there a precedent for the king to go mad.23 However, in Book IX of the Corpus Hermeticum, immediately following the list of the seeds which the mind conceives from God and from demons, the fourth paragraph introduces the element of ‘madness’. Shakespeare’s decision to let the old king suffer in the mind and to introduce contrasting kinds of ‘madness’ in two other characters may derive from Hermes’ explanation to Asclepius: Few seeds come from god, but they are potent and beautiful and good – virtue, moderation and reverence. Reverence is knowledge of god, and one who has come to know god, filled with all good things, has thoughts that are divine and not like those of the multitude. This is why those who are in knowledge do not please the multitude, nor does the multitude please them. They appear to be mad, and they bring ridicule on themselves. They are hated and scorned, and perhaps they may even be murdered. [. . . ] The godfearing person, at least, will withstand all this because he is aware of knowledge, for all things are good to such a person, even things that others find evil. If they lay plots against him, he refers it all to knowledge, and he alone makes evil into good. (CH IX [4]) Here may lie the impulse to create the God-fearing and virtuous Edgar who deliberately feigns madness, but who at the end ‘alone makes evil into good’. In terms of the plot, in order to escape capture, Edgar deliberately poses as Poor Tom, a madman from Bedlam, someone to be avoided. In Hermetic terms, Edgar’s goodness marks him as one who is reverent and likely to be reviled as ‘mad’. That Edgar’s understanding is intertwined with feeling is clear when his tears for the king ‘begin to take his part so much / They mar my counterfeiting’ (Q 13.55–56; F 3.5.19–20). Edgar regrets (‘O fault!’ (5.3.184)) that he revealed the truth of his identity to his father too late. As he reports to Edmund, the sudden conflict between the extremes of grief and joy caused the old man’s flawed heart to break before he could ask his son’s forgiveness (Q 24.193–196; F 5.3.188–191). Edgar’s function in the play, disguised as Poor Tom o’Bedlam, a gibbering idiot, is to provide a necessary foil for Lear, whose hallucinatory madness, brought on by lack of sleep, the night in the storm and the shock of his 23

‘It will have been noticed that in none of the fifty or sixty versions of the Lear story in existence before Shakespeare’s play does the old king go mad’ (Muir 1975, xxxix n.2).

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daughters’ ingratitude, has to be distinguished both from a decaying mind (senile dementia) and from mere idiocy. In order for the Hermetic gnōsis to be realized, Lear’s mind must retain reason. While Poor Tom spouts gibberish, and pretends to be raving, Lear, speaking with courtesy and reason, takes him for a Greek philosopher, ‘learned Theban’, ‘good Athenian’, and attempts to engage him in a rational discussion on the causes of thunder (Q 11.144, 166; F 3.4.147, 169).24 The episode sharpens the contrast between Lear’s reasonable speech at a time when his exhausted mind is losing touch with reality, and Edgar’s deliberate nonsense, feigned to disguise his reality. Lear’s mind is still capable of understanding hypocrisy and double standards as well as corruption in high places. ‘[H]andy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’ (Q 20.148; F 4.5.149–150) he asks. As we saw, it is Edgar who observes that Lear, though his mind appears deranged, retains his reason, when he comments on Lear’s ‘Reason in madness’ (Q 20.164; F 4.5.171). The character of the Fool is another of Shakespeare’s additions to the source story; no natural Fool, he is a professional Fool, a wise Fool. As the touchstone of sanity and good sense, his Fool provides a different kind of foil for Lear as he descends into madness. He reprimands Lear: ‘Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise’ (Q 5.43–44; F 1.5.43–44). Lear’s reply sounds the two key concepts (understanding and sensation), like notes in a chord: ‘O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! / Keep me in temper. I would not be mad!’ (Q 5.45–46; F 1.5.45–46). The note ‘mad’, once struck, continues to reverberate throughout the next three acts, providing contrast with the ascent of Lear’s reasoning mind. Just as the old King Leir and Sidney’s Arcadia provided Shakespeare with the principal sources for the intertwined plots and characters of King Lear, the Corpus Hermeticum may well be the origin of his understanding of human behaviour. The Hermetic texts appear to provide a blueprint for the architectplaywright’s intelligent design of the play, and his insights into the minds of his characters – especially into the psychology of two wicked women.

24

Critics frequently cite Shakespeare’s use of Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) as the source of Edgar’s gibberish (King Lear, ed. Muir 1975, 239– 242). It is possible that the borrowing goes in the other direction. Bullough reveals that ‘to expound us these new devils names’ Harsnett calls upon ‘Porphyrius, Proclus, Iamblichus, and Trismegistus, the old Platonicall sect that conversed familiarly, and kept company with devils’ (414–415). It is not clear why Harsnett should have attributed knowledge of the devils’ names to Platonists and Neoplatonists unless to discredit them.

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The Characterization of Goneril and Regan in Hermetic Terms

Unlike Lear, Goneril and Regan are not cleansed of their torments, namely lust, deceit, envy, anger, recklessness and malice. Hermes adds to his list of the powers that oppose those torments, naming perseverance, liberality and truth: Now in fourth place I summon perseverance, the power opposed to lust [. . .] The sixth power that I summon to us is the one opposed to greed – liberality. And when greed has departed I summon another, truth, who puts deceit to flight. And truth arrives. See how the good has been fulfilled my child, when truth arrives. For envy has withdrawn from us, but the good, together with life and light has followed after truth, and no torment any longer attacks from the darkness. Vanquished, they have flown away in a flapping of wings. (CH XIII [9]) Goneril does not attempt to counter her lust for Edmund with ‘perseverance’ (that is, continued resistance), and Regan’s malice, envy, anger and recklessness also stay with her. Their vices persist in each of them even after the arrival of truth in the person of Cordelia, who is prevented by their father from confronting them. None of the wicked characters attempts the ascent toward knowledge which frees the soul of its torments, and both the elder daughters die violent deaths. A Hermetic exegesis reveals how carefully Shakespeare has crafted his characters to illustrate how torments, when neither recognized nor resisted, will destroy one. For example, in Quarto 16/Folio 4.2, Goneril speaks lovingly to Edmund, gives him her favour to wear, and kisses him. When he has gone she compares him to her husband, exclaiming to the empty air: Oh the difference of man and man! To thee a woman’s services are due: My fool usurps my body. (F 4.2.27–29) [My foot usurps my body. (Q 16.28)] This is the moment, when she is thinking of Edmund, that the demon plants the seed of adultery in her mind to be nurtured by her feelings of lust. To emphasize the point that she would prefer to have Edmund in her bed, ‘Oh the difference of man and man!’ was added to the Folio edition. In the same scene Goneril hears the news of Cornwall’s death, and her immediate reaction is to begin to fear her sister as a rival in her desire for Edmund:

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Goneril: One way I like this well; But being widow, and my Gloucester with her, May all the building in my fancy pluck Upon my hateful life. (Q 16.82–85; F 4.2.51–4) But Goneril is still married to the good Albany, whom she loathes, while Regan, now widowed, is free to marry again. In the Quarto, Goneril’s lust for Edmund gives way to the torment of envy: ‘I had rather lose the battle than that sister / Should loosen him and me’ (Q 22.20–21). However, this line does not appear in the Folio, and from her words two scenes later we learn that, while the Quarto depicts her envy, in the Folio it is not envy but her adulterous lust for Edmund that has opened the way for the demon to plant the idea of murder. When Regan cries: ‘Sick! O, sick!’ and Goneril replies in an aside: ‘If not, I’ll ne’er trust poison’ (Q 24.93–94), altered in the Folio to: ‘If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine’ (5.3.89–90), we know that she has had a hand in her sister’s affliction. It is lust, too, which is the cause of her plan to eliminate her husband, Albany. Minutes later, when Edmund has fallen to Edgar, and Albany confronts her with the letter in which she betrays him, she retires (F 5.3.SD 149). Albany who knows her better than anyone, orders someone to ‘Go after her. She’s desperate. Govern her’ (Q 24.157; F 5.3.152). Before long we learn that the demon has planted the impious or godless idea of suicide, desperation has overtaken her, and she has stabbed herself: Edgar: What means this bloody knife? Gent: ’Tis hot, it smokes; It came even from the heart of – O! she’s dead. Albany: Who dead? Speak, man. Gent: Your lady, sir, your lady: and her sister By her is poisoned. She confesses it. (Q 24.218–222; F 5.3.198–202) Edmund then admits: ‘I was contracted to them both’ (Q 24.223; F 5.3.203). A Hermetic exegesis reveals how in constructing his characters, Shakespeare illustrates the ways in which the torments of lust and deceit germinate the evil seeds of adultery, murder and suicide, and motivate one to perform the act. Regan, who thinks she knows herself as well as she knows her father, boasts in her first words that ‘I am made of that self mettle as my sister’ (Q 1.64; F 1.1.69). Like many a younger sister, she follows her elder sister in everything and tries to outdo her. Lear, who understands her as little as he understands himself, believes her when she says ‘I am glad to see your highness’ (Q 7.290; F 2.2.300).

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He still hopes her ‘tender-hafted nature’ will not force him to reduce his retinue as Goneril commanded (Q 7.329; F 2.2.344). In high rage and close to tears, Lear stamps out into the storm occasioning Goneril’s words: ‘’Tis his own blame; / Hath put himself from rest and must needs taste his folly’ (Q 7.448–449; F 2.2.462–463). Similarly, Regan, combining smug self-righteousness with malice, echoes her elder sister and justifies their cruelty telling Gloucester: O sir, to wilful men The injuries that they themselves procure Must be their schoolmasters. (Q 7.459–461; F 2.2.474–476) When her husband takes the decision to put the disguised Kent in the stocks for the morning, Regan wants her father’s messenger left there ‘till night, my Lord; and all night too’ (Q 7.129; F 2.2.131). She seems to relish cruelty. When we see her next, she has turned her malice to Gloucester, and when he is bound to a chair, she plucks his beard in an act of irreverence to the old man who is her host. She appears to enjoy Gloucester’s agony as his eye is torn out, and when he begs for help she cries maliciously: ‘one side will mock another; th’other, too’ (Q 14.68; F 3.7.68). On fire now, angered when a servant comes to Gloucester’s aid, she seizes her husband’s sword and without hesitation recklessly murders the man (SD Q 14.77, 79; F 3.7.77, 79). After Cornwall’s death, Regan conceives the idea of marrying Edmund, but when she realizes that Goneril has the same idea she begins to suffer the torment of envy: Regan: Tell me but truly – but then speak the truth – Do you not love my sister? Edmund: In honoured love. Regan: But have you never found my brother’s way To the forfended place? (Q 22.8–11; F 5.1.8–11) In Regan, the idea of performing assaults on her father and subjecting her father’s loyal friends Kent and Gloucester to abuse is fed by the torment of malice, while her disposition to anger and recklessness leads her to unpremeditated murder. Without the knowledge of self which their father is so painfully acquiring, neither Regan nor Goneril can recognize and make the choice to vanquish the torments listed in the Corpus Hermeticum and must suffer their torture (CH XIII [7], [9]). The Corpus Hermeticum provides Shakespeare with a comprehensive zodiac of traits, feelings and habits of mind that motivate his characters to behave in ways that audience and readers find convincing, because we recognize the

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ways human beings have always behaved and still do behave. The Hermetic texts also provide a coherent rationale for many of the revisions made to the Quarto edition – revisions so substantial that current scholarship now treats the Quarto and the Folio as two different versions of the play. 6

How Many Texts? Quarto Excisions and Folio Additions

In his path-breaking work on the revisions to King Lear, Steven Urkowitz asserted that there are three texts of this play (1980, 3). He listed first the Quarto, His True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three daughters with the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster which was published singly in 1608; next The Tragedie of King Lear, the edition that was included in the First Folio of 1623; and last, the conflated editions made from both of them.25 Compared with the Quarto Historie, the Folio Tragedie: contains about 100 lines not printed in Q; it does not contain about 300 lines (including one whole scene) which are present in Q; it also differs from Q in hundreds of substantive readings and divides the play into acts and scenes. (Fitzpatrick 2011, 27) For these reasons, Wells and Gary Taylor, editors of The Complete Works, felt that the revisions to the Quarto, which were both ‘local’ and ‘structural’, had resulted in a ‘substantially different text’ that justified their including both Quarto and Folio texts, edited nevertheless, in the collection (1025).26 While the fact of the revisions is ‘incontestable’ (Taylor 1983, 429), and their nature and effects have been variously explained by textual scholars, the date and authorship, as well as a convincing rationale for the revisions, continue to be a matter of debate. Gary Taylor, in an erudite and comprehensive chapter in The Division of the Kingdoms, concludes that the Quarto was ‘originally 25

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He could have added two more, both the early True Chronicle History of King Leir and a late seventeenth century adaptation. In 1681, Nahum Tate, in adapting Shakespeare’s play, chose to bow to the demands of natural justice and end the play happily with the marriage of Edgar and Cordelia. According to Wells, Shakespeare’s version was ‘too much for some audiences’ and Tate’s adaptation held the stage until 1843 (1986, 1025). The editorial practice of conflating the Quarto with the Folio, which began in the eighteenth century, has come under increasing scrutiny since the 1970s, and although the conflated text results in ‘redundancy or confusion’ as Granville Barker wrote (in Wells et al. 1986, 1025), it continues to be the text most often read and performed.

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composed in late 1605 to early 1606’, and that the revisions published in the Folio were undertaken in 1609 or 1610 (1983, 429).27 Concerning the authorship of the revisions, Wells followed Taylor (1983, 351–429 passim), and argued that alterations made to the Quarto text which appear in the Folio represent an act of conscious revision on Shakespeare’s part. Wells is confident that the 1608 Quarto ‘represents the play as Shakespeare originally wrote it’ (1986, 1025), but he is not confident of the reasons for those revisions: This is a more obviously theatrical text. [. . ] The reasons for these variations, and their effect on the play, are to some extent matters of speculation and of individual interpretation. Certainly they streamline the play’s action [. . .] and may have been dictated in whole or in part by theatrical exigencies or [the revision] may have emerged from Shakespeare’s dissatisfaction with what he had first written. (1986, 1063) It was Urkowitz’s contention originally that the revisions were done carefully ‘to bring the text into accord with important theatrical values – concision, contrast and surprise’ (1980, 55). Nevertheless, even Taylor admits, in respect of the excision of the mock trial scene, that ‘if we are to believe that Shakespeare himself did the cutting, most of us will need to be persuaded that the omission actually improves, rather than defaces the play’ (1983, 90). William Carroll also doubts that ‘Shakespeare’s own “theatrical” revisions are an improvement’ (1988, 229). Although the date and authorship of the alterations to the 1608 Quarto cannot be established beyond doubt, the critical consensus is first: that the revisions substantially affect some roles and second: that ‘[t]here is nothing opportunistic about them’ (Kerrigan 1983, 218).28 While it is true that 27

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While the dating of the composition may be earlier than Taylor concluded, his dating of the revisions is supported by the neat italic booklist of twelve tomes of plays belonging to Sir John Harington made before his death in 1612. The list of the contents of each tome shows King Leire old in the first tome, K. Leir of Shakspear in the second, and K. Leyr W. Sh in the eighth (F. J. Furnivall). As for the date of the first composition of The Historie of King Lear, it could have been written at any time in the 1590s after the publication of Sidney’s Arcadia in 1590. Concerning the alleged sources, Montaigne was already available, and Harsnett may have borrowed from Shakespeare or used the same source as Shakespeare (see also Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists” in Hartman and Parker ed. 1985 Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, 163–186), a possibility which allows a date for the Quarto before 1603. Kerrigan has analysed the revision to the part of the Fool and concludes that it ‘significantly alters the Fool’s personality’ (1983, 218); Urkowitz observes that the variants in the admittedly small role of Albany ‘raise crucial dramatic issues for readers and performers’ (1980, 80); Michael Warren notes that about half of the 300 lines excised from the Quarto

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brevity is usually accepted as an index of a script being prepared for the stage, the thrust of the changes is too consistent to have been dictated by ‘theatrical exigencies’. I agree with Kerrigan that the revisions to the Quarto are not opportunistic, but carefully and purposefully done. 7

From Quarto to Folio: Toward a Hermetic Exegesis of King Lear

Most of the revisions to the Quarto that affect characterization incline towards bringing the motivations for action of the characters closer to the Corpus Hermeticum and are arguably motivated by an underlying rationale sympathetic to Hermetism. Some revisions to the Quarto and their consequences have already entered the discussion above. Others, both excisions and additions, are explained below in the light of passages from the Corpus Hermeticum. The first example comes from an extensive revision that occurs in Act 1 Scene 2. Several lines listing a dozen predictive effects of eclipses that Edmund tells Edgar in the Quarto, beginning with ‘unnaturalness between the child and the parent’ (Q 2.139–144) are altered and given to Gloucester in the Folio. Gloucester lists eight consequences of ‘These late eclipses in the sun and moon’ (Q 2.103–109; F 1.2.101–107), several of which have already come to pass. His speech is then augmented in the Folio as follows: Gloucester: This villain of mine comes under the prediction: there’s son against father. The King falls from bias of nature: there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. (F 1.2.107–112) (my emphasis) An appraisal of the French translation available in Shakespeare’s day reveals that the unusual word ‘machinations’ was used by Foix de Candale in his Commentaires and suggests that Shakespeare may have had Foix’s Pymander at his elbow. The discourse in this scene from line 103 to 132 (Q); 101–130 (F) reflects both Book I sections [24–26] of the Corpus Hermeticum, and the detailed commentary on that Book made by Foix. In Book I, Pymander tells Hermes that as the soul journeys toward death it ascends through the seven planetary spheres

were taken between Act 3 Scene 6 and Act 5 Scene 3, resulting in substantial diminution in the role of Kent before his last words of grief as Lear dies (1983, 70–71).

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yielding up, in order, the moral fault that predominates in each sphere and which it had acquired on its descent: Thence the human being rushes up through the cosmic framework, at the first zone surrendering the energy of increase and decrease; at the second, evil machination, a device now inactive; at the third the illusion of longing, now inactive; at the fourth the ruler’s arrogance, now freed of excess; at the fifth unholy presumption and daring recklessness; at the sixth the evil impulses that come from wealth, now inactive; and at the seventh zone, the deceit that lies in ambush. (CH I [25]) (my emphasis) Obviously Copenhaver’s translation, ‘evil machination’, was not available to Shakespeare. However, in a translation which was extant in Shakespeare’s day, Foix de Candale prefers ‘l’entreprinse’ and translates the clause as follows: ‘A la seconde l’entreprinse des maux qui est fraude sans effect’ (83), (‘At the second, the evil undertaking, which is deceit, [becomes] ineffective’). But in his commentary Foix explains ‘l’entreprinse’ as ‘machination’ (86).29 Shakespeare, revising the Quarto, appears to have borrowed the unusual word from Foix’s commentary. Foix devotes several pages of discussion to this single clause, and his explanation and his language are mirrored both in Gloucester’s words (‘machinations, hollowness, treachery’) and in Edmund’s monologue that follows. When Gloucester leaves the stage, Edmund mocks the idea of behaviour being determined by the stars: This is the excellent foppery of the world: that, when we are sick in fortune – often the surfeits of our own behaviour – we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical predominance . . . (Q 2.113–118; F 1.2.116–121) In the commentary, Foix elaborates the point giving a name to each of the seven planets and specifying the fault which predominates in each sphere. For example, in the second planetary sphere, which belongs to Mercury, the 29

The word ‘machination’ occurs only twice in the canon, both times in this play in passages added in the Folio. An unusual word which entered the language in 1549 (OED), it has an exact counterpart in French, ‘la machination’. The second occurrence was added to a speech by Edgar to Albany: ‘If you miscarry, / Your business of the world hath so an end / And machination ceases’ (5.1.34–36).

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ascending soul yields up the evil machinations (‘machination des maux’) such as deceit (‘fraude’) acquired in the descent, but not necessarily carried out during life. In the lines added to the Folio (1.2.107–112, see above), Gloucester is speaking specifically of the second sphere where Foix explains that ‘machinations des maux . . . qui est fraude’ predominate: A LA SECONDE ceinture ou sphere, qui est Mercure, il luy rend la disposition, preparation & inclination, qu’elle avoit reçeu par les actions, de L’ENTREPRINSE, ou machination DES MAUX, & preparation ou disposition, QUI EST FRAUDE, qu’il portoit en l’ame, SANS EFFECT (86).30 (my emphasis) (At the second zone or sphere, which is Mercury, he yields up the disposition, preparation and inclination to evil machination acquired through his actions, and the preparation or disposition to deceit that he carries in his soul [becomes] ineffective.) Edmund’s monologue (partly quoted above) that follows hard upon Gloucester’s exit concurs with Foix’s position. Foix counters the idea of astral determinism by explaining that a celestial body can only give the soul the disposition but not the obligation to act: ‘De tant que l’action du corps celeste, ne peut donner à l’ame que l’inclination, ou disposition, & non la necessité de l’effect’ (86). (‘Insofar as the action of a celestial body can only incline or predispose the soul and not compel the effect of that inclination’). Similarly, Edmund is scornful of ‘drunkards, liars, and adulterers’ who claim ‘enforc’d obedience of planetary influence’ (1.2.122–123), and of those who blame their ‘goatish disposition on the charge of a star!’ (1.2.125–126). Indeed, Edmund mocks any form of ‘heavenly compulsion’ or ‘spherical predominance’ (1.2.120, 121) having an effect on his own behaviour, exactly as Foix explains. In short, Foix emphasizes that the stars can predispose but never compel, and Edmund concludes by repudiating all astral influences on himself and asserting total responsibility for his own evil actions, saying ‘I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing’ (Q 2.126–128; F 1.2.128–130). Although Foix does not deny planetary influence, he explains that the soul has free will to act upon or to reject it – ‘il reste à la liberté ou arbitre de l’ame de l’effectuer ou repousser’ (86) (‘it is up to the freedom or the will of the soul to carry out or to repulse it’). Action cannot occur ‘sans le consentement de l’arbitre’ (‘without the consent of the 30

Majuscules indicate words that are in the French translation of the passage in the Corpus Hermeticum. The surrounding words are Foix’s comments.

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will’). Clearly Edmund believes he is exercising his own free will in choosing to do evil. However, Gloucester’s words referring to the predicted ‘machinations, hollowness, treachery’ etc. (F 1.2.110–111) are given substance in the action within minutes. In a speech added in the Folio, Edmund immediately appears to be acting under the influence of the second planetary sphere when he reveals his evil machinations. His scheme is to betray Edgar and deceive their father. To that end he invites Edgar to ‘retire with me to my lodging’ and advises him to ‘go arm’d’ (F 1.2.157, 159). His plan invites the question whether Edmund is fated to act in this way or is freely choosing to deceive. It is a moot point. One answer, offered in Book IV of the Corpus, is that when he asserted his right to the land of ‘Legitimate Edgar’ (1.2.16), being motivated by his traits of envy and greed, Edmund made a choice for the material, corporeal, sensible and mortal world which ‘has been mankind’s destruction’ (CH IV [7]). Whether he was fated to make that choice by ‘the [star] demons on duty at the exact moment of birth’ as Hermes teaches in Book XVI [15] is a matter for debate. The issue is taken up in the next chapter in connection with Othello. Other revisions similarly indicate the influence of Hermetic thought on the play. For example, Scene 17 in the Quarto, where Cordelia is depicted as suffering grief on hearing of her father’s condition, has been excised. Since grief is one of the torments or states of mind that must be purged by the ascending soul, removing the scene is consistent with the need to portray her as having achieved perfection. Another excision affects Lear’s characterization. It is important that at the end of his life Lear is seen to be of sound mind and fully aware of who he is, who Cordelia is, and how he has injured her. With full understanding of himself, combined with feelings of compassionate love, comes the knowledge of God which accompanies spiritual rebirth. For that reason, the madness must be shown to be temporary, brought on by the injustice of his daughters’ treatment, exacerbated by sleep deprivation, and not an indication of senility or second childhood. Hence, in the Quarto when Goneril instructs Oswald to provoke her father by treating him negligently, she justifies her order, telling him ‘Old fools are babes again’ (Q 3.19). Five lines of that speech, beginning ‘Idle old man’ (Q 3.16–20) suggesting that Lear is in a second childhood, have been excised from the Quarto, and do not appear in the Folio.31 In addition, the Hermetic description of ‘the god-fearing person’ who is ‘aware of knowledge’ (CH IX [4]), provides a motive for the alterations in the 31

Incidentally, it follows from this interpretation that the ambiguity of ‘child-changed father’ (4.6.15) is resolved in favour of a father who has been changed by his children, rather than a father who has been changed into a child.

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characterizations of Albany and Edgar, discussed in detail by Urkowitz (80– 128 passim). He observed that changes made to the Quarto, in giving the last speech to Edgar in the Folio, increased Edgar’s role in the scene while reducing Albany’s (125). In the Folio it is Edgar, not Albany, who is left alone to carry the lessons learnt into the future (5.3.299–303), exactly as we would expect of a revisionist following the Corpus IX [4]: ‘If they lay plots against him, he refers it all to knowledge, and he alone makes evil into good.’ In another scene, when Lear realizes that naked Edgar is ‘the thing itself’, ‘a poor bare, forked animal’, he struggles to rid himself of his own clothes. The Quarto has ‘Off, off, you lendings! Come on, be true.’ (11.99), which may be a scribal error, but the Folio alters the line to ‘Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here’ (F 3.4.102). In Hermetic terms, in divesting himself of his clothes, Lear is symbolically and spiritually approaching self-knowledge and rebirth, because the Corpus reveals that in approaching God, ‘you must first rip off the tunic that you wear, the garment of ignorance, the foundation of vice, the bonds of corruption’ (CH VII [2], [3]). Again, in nearly his last words Lear asks Kent to ‘undo this button’ (Q 24.304; F 5.3.285). In Hermetic terms he is divesting himself of the corporeal, material, mortal world and preparing his soul for the incorporeal, essential and immortal world to come. Two questions remain: what was achieved by altering the timing of Lear’s end in the Quarto? And the question that has always bedevilled the play: why did Cordelia have to die? A Hermetic reading offers answers to both. The architecture of King Lear follows the trajectory of Lear’s soul toward his spiritual rebirth, which is the path to gnōsis and salvation. When, rested and refreshed, Lear is reunited with Cordelia, the last torment leaves him. He knows himself, remembers what he did, knows Cordelia has cause to harm him, and asks for her forgiveness. The doctor confirms that ‘the great rage’, which may mean his temper or his madness, has left him. When next we see him with Cordelia they are both captives, but it is clear that his grief over his daughters’ treatment of him has been replaced with the joy of being with Cordelia and the prospect of years in her company. According to Book XIII of the Corpus, once all the torments have ‘flown away in a flapping of wings’ (CH XIII [9]), rebirth and apotheosis can begin. It is well-known that the moment of Lear’s death in the Folio differs from that in the Quarto where Lear’s last words are: And my poor fool is hanged. No, no life. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more. Never, never, never. – Pray you, undo This button. Thank you, sir. O, O, O, O! (Q 24.300–304)

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From his last words in the Quarto: ‘Break, heart, I prithee break’ (Q 24.306), it is clear that the torment of grief has returned at the moment of death. This has implications for the moment of apotheosis. Once again, it is a moot point whether having achieved perfection and apotheosis in life, one can regress. The addition to the Folio solves the problem. The line ‘Break, heart’ is given to Kent, and Lear’s last words in the Folio are: Do you see this? Look on her. Look her lips. Look there, look there. (F 5.3.286–287) He dies. The addition of those two lines has puzzled critics, although Bradley was aware that their effect is to allow Lear to die in ‘unbearable joy’ (1904, 291), believing that his darling lives. A Hermetic hermeneutic suggests a rationale for the addition. Lear, having already achieved gnōsis and apotheosis at the end of Act 4, cannot regress. Grief cannot return and he dies now, as Bradley saw, in joy. The earthly part of his soul’s journey is complete. Book I of the Corpus teaches that rebirth and apotheosis are ‘accessible only after the death of the body’ (Copenhaver 1992, 183). But in Book XIII Hermes tells Tat: ‘noone can be saved before being born again’ ([1]). Throughout the journey, Lear has overcome his passionate temper, and made an effort to bring his miscreant daughters to justice; he has grown into knowledge of himself, as compassion and understanding of the true nature of love flowered within. For Lear to be born again he must conquer the last torment – grief. The difference between the timing of Lear’s death in the Quarto, when he is tormented again with grief, and in the Folio, where joy prevails, reflects the difference between the two initiatory Books, I and XIII, about the moment of apotheosis.32 In the final minutes of the play Lear enters bearing Cordelia, pièta-like, in his arms. Contrary to all the sources as far back as Geoffrey of Monmouth and against the demands of natural justice, Cordelia is murdered. The effect of her death on the Romantic and later critics was horror, revulsion and indignation at the injustice. However, those are sensations experienced afterwards on reflection; it is the sight of Lear with Cordelia in his arms that shocks the audience and brings a surge of compassion for Lear. In the Corpus we read that, if understanding is to occur in the mind, it must be accompanied by sensation. In other words, bodily sensation must extend to 32

In Book I spiritual rebirth takes place after death when, ‘beyond the ogdoadic region . . . having become powers, they enter into god’ (CH I [26]). In Book XIII rebirth and divinization can occur in this life once all the torments have been overcome: ‘Now I am not what I was before. I have been born in mind’ (CH XIII [3]). ‘The arrival of the decad sets in order a birth of mind that expels the twelve; we have been divinized by this birth’ (CH XIII [10]).

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the mind and soul and when that occurs full understanding and transformation of self will follow. Can understanding be understood without sensation, however, in the way that one pictures images when dreaming? . . . It seems to me that . . . when sleepers awake, and sensations . . . At any rate is distributed to body and to soul, and, when both these parts of sensation are in harmony with one another, then there is an utterance of understanding engendered by mind. (CH IX [2]) To understand Lear fully, we must feel what he feels. For a minute or two, as Lamb knew, our poetic imagination is activated and we are Lear. We are in his mind. At that moment when audience and readers empathise with Lear’s suffering, when heightened understanding and compassion unite, it is possible that we ourselves may experience a spiritual transformation. Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights were very aware of the effect a play could have on members of the audience. His contemporary Thomas Dekker admired the playwright ‘who can move the hearts of his audience, who can make even the ignorant among them “applaud what their charm’d soul scarce understands . . . infusing them with raptures”’ (in Kirsch 2015, 26).33 Four hundred years later, Richard McCoy comments on the transformative power he finds in Shakespeare’s plays which ‘can still inspire feelings akin to communion’ (2011, 83), and cites Coleridge who saw dramatic illusion as a ‘means of access to a higher truth’ (80). A theatregoer who in the last moments of King Lear were to experience a rush of compassion akin to the heightened awareness that precedes gnōsis could potentially take a step on the path to self-knowledge and spiritual regeneration. For the studious reader, King Lear has the power to complement Book XIII of the Corpus Hermeticum that ‘Lèse-Mysterium or reading-mystery’ whose purpose is to teach the initiate (Copenhaver 1992, 182). I turn next to Othello, where Shakespeare colours his characters from the same palette as in King Lear. Once again, the comprehensive Hermetic zodiac of ‘torments of matter’, traits of personality, or habits of mind, some of which all human beings possess to a greater or lesser degree, provides the architect/ playwright with the motivators that prompt his dramatic creations to act as they do, and that shape their relationships. The play invites debate on issues concerning astral determinism and the avoidance of one’s destiny, on the origin of evil, on whether regression from perfection is possible, and on whether one has the freedom to choose the shape of one’s life. 33

From the Prologue to If It Be Not Good (1612).

Figure 5 Title page of first Quarto of The Tragœdy of Othello The Moore of Venice bearing the emblem of Hermes’ caduceus gripped by two hands, published in 1622

Chapter 5

Othello: The Path to Self-Knowledge Reversed Othello, viewed through the lens of Hermetism, stands as a riposte to King Lear. The Moor’s transformation from a ‘perfect soul’ in the first act (1.2.31) to an ‘ignorant’ dolt in the fifth (5.2.160) is a reversal of Lear’s ascending trajectory from ignorance of self to knowledge. In creating Othello, Shakespeare draws on the very ‘torments’ or traits that characterize Lear, and he equips Iago with the same array of ‘torments’ that beset the wicked in King Lear. Moreover, in dramatizing Cinthio’s story, Shakespeare has drawn attention to the then topical theological debate on predestination as opposed to free will, presenting it in Hermetic terms as the struggle between a destiny determined by the stars and a mind that is free to do as it wishes. Interpreted in that Hermetic light, Iago is revealed as the personification of an astral demon whose mission is to ensure that Othello does not thwart his destiny, which is to die by his own hand. Iago accomplishes his mission by deliberately and systematically planting demonic concepts in Othello’s mind that affect his reason and judgment, thereby manipulating his will and causing him to act as Iago wishes. The whole tragic episode involving the presumption of adultery, as well as murder and suicide, raises both the epistemological problem of knowing one’s own and another’s mind, as well as the question of ultimate responsibility for a crime perpetrated by one compelled to act by destiny. 1

Othello: The Date and Source of the Play

The Tragedy of Othello was performed at Whitehall before King James in November 1604; King Lear was performed for the king in December 1606. However, while the visit of the Moorish Ambassador from the King of Barbary to the court of Elizabeth in 1600 (in Honigmann 1997, 2 n.1) suggests a likely date for the writing of Othello after 1600 and before November 1604, an Hermetic exegesis suggests that King Lear is the anterior text.1 When the plays were first printed in Quarto, both carried an old printer’s emblem of the caduceus of 1 Traditionally dated after the publication of Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures in 1603, the Quarto King Lear could have been written at any time after the publication of Sidney’s Arcadia in 1590. We cannot ignore the possibility that Harsnett borrowed from Shakespeare or that both used the same source. © Jane Everingham Nelson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004520608_008

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Hermes held by two hands gripped in a friendly handshake on the title page.2 The implication is that both plays are somehow connected to Hermes. However, the emblem is only one of the similarities to be observed from reading these plays, which in performance may appear to have little in common.3 It is well-known that Shakespeare found the story of Othello in De Gli Hecatommithi by Giovanni Battista Giraldi, known as Cinthio. But it was Alfred Hart who dated ‘The Moore of Venice’ to 1601–02, following the visit of the Moorish Ambassador. A translation of John Leo’s A Geographical History of Africa was printed that same year, where Londoners could read that Berbers were: most honest people. . . and destitute of all fraud and guile; not only imbracing all simplicitie and truth, but also practising the same throughout the whole course of their lives. . . No nation in the world is so subject unto jealousie; for they will rather leese their lives, then put up any disgrace in the behalfe of their women. (in Bullough VII, 209) Shakespeare’s choice of a Moor to personify a temperate man of ‘a constant, loving, noble nature’ (2.1.287) who, made suspicious by his trusted Ensign, is consumed with jealous rage and murders his wife, owes something to both those events. That the Moor in question is a mercenary soldier renowned for his prowess in the field accounts for two other aspects of Othello’s character that contribute to the sad outcome of this play – namely, that he takes his orders from above without being required to understand the reason for them, and that he places absolute trust in the men closest to him. 2

Othello and King Lear Compared and Contrasted

Both plays underwent substantial revision before their publication in the First Folio in 1623; in each case both the purpose and the putative author of the revisions have attracted comment. The current critical consensus is that in each

2 There is an enigmatic line in Act 3 that may be an oblique reference to this emblem. Othello says to Desdemona: ‘The hearts of old gave hands / But our new heraldry is hands, not hearts’ (3.4.46–47). A heart behind clasped hands was the emblem used on some Familist works printed by Plantin. 3 Whereas King Lear is played out en plein air where violence rages and the tragedy has universal reverberations, Othello is an inward-looking domestic tragedy of abuse taking place within a curtained bed in a locked room.

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case the revisions were probably authorial.4 However, where many of the revisions to King Lear enhance the affinity of the play with Hermetic thought, not all additions to Othello had that effect.5 Nevertheless, Honigmann compares ‘the strengthening of Edgar in the Folio version at the end of King Lear’ with the strengthening of Emilia in Othello and argues that the ‘two different tragedies were revised for a similar purpose (viz. to permit a humane “morality” to reassert itself at the close)’ (1982, 159). Honigmann sees Edgar and Emilia as both contributing to the restoration of a moral world. Edgar to Edmund and Emilia to Iago effect this restoration by speaking Truth, which the Corpus Hermeticum teaches ‘puts deceit to flight’ (XIII [9]). The endings of both King Lear and Othello affect audiences and readers in a way that marries understanding with strong feeling and brings about that knowledge of self which Hermes teaches brings the initiate closer to the god within and to spiritual rebirth. Others have experienced that too, without necessarily connecting the effect with Hermetic doctrine. Kim Hall for example asserts that ‘Othello appeals as much to the passions as to the mind’ (2007, 23) and comments on the ‘peculiar sense of being involved in the action’ (221). Marvin Rosenberg observes that ‘from the beginning, men wept at Othello’, and he asks: ‘How did the playwright do it? What was his artistic design?’ (1961, 1993, 209). A Hermetic exegesis sheds light on Shakespeare’s artistry by demonstrating how in Hermetic terms even a soul that has reached perfection and gnōsis may be susceptible to the seeds of doubt carefully and deliberately planted in the mind by a demon (CH IX [3]). In dramatic terms, a ‘perfect soul’ (1.2.31), a noble man of honour and glorious reputation, is deceived into committing murder, believing that he is acting honourably. But it is not enough to commit the act. The demon is not satisfied until Othello commits an act of such enormity that once he knows the truth and understands what he has done, distraught with grief, he cannot live with the knowledge. ‘What you know, you know’ (5.2.300) are virtually Iago’s last words. It is the knowledge more than the act itself that precipitates Othello’s destiny, namely to take his own life. We wept with Lear and for him too. The wonder is that we weep for Othello. In both plays, the line between Christian and pagan is blurred. Traditional critics like Battenhouse stress the Christianness of Othello (1969, 94), while Irving Ribner even finds a biblical analogy with Desdemona as ‘a reflection of 4 For the provenance of King Lear see previous chapter. Honigmann (in Arden 3rd edition of Othello), argues that Q and F derive from two different autograph manuscripts, but quotes Greg who was impressed by the ‘Shakespearian quality of both versions’ (1997, 356–357). 5 It must be acknowledged that the lengthy addition to Emilia’s speech on sexual equality (4.3.85–102) has no obvious direct connection with the Hermetica.

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Christ’ whose death may ‘spring man’s redemption’ (1960, 112). Another critical Christian view posits that Othello ‘takes upon himself the full office of God’, while Iago’s role is Satanic. Even more recent critics such as Stanley Cavell hold that ‘Othello is the most Christian of [Shakespeare’s] tragic heroes’ (2003, 129). On the other hand, Dennis Taylor sees Othello as a contradiction, one who at the end ‘plays the Catholic hero striking the Turk, or the Protestant hero striking the anti-Christ’, even while acknowledging that ‘the person he is striking is himself’ (2003, 23). Julia Lupton also argues that Othello is divided, but for her the division is between ‘Islamic and pagan origins’, and she references Daniel Boyarin who argues that Othello is ‘unambiguously a Muslim’ (2011, 186 n.21). Marjorie Garber sees Desdemona and Iago as ‘good angel’ and ‘bad angel’ engaged in a psychomachic struggle for Othello’s soul (2004, 593), while a Hermetic reading suggests that Iago wants Othello’s reasonable mind as well as his incorporeal soul. It is true that Desdemona’s language is recognizably Christian; for example, denying Othello’s accusations that she is a strumpet, she does so in the strongest terms she knows: ‘No, as I am a Christian’ (4.2.84); ‘No, as I shall be saved’ (4.2.88), and in her cry, ‘O heaven, forgive us!’ (4.2.90). Robert West concludes of Othello that ‘[i]t affirms no transcendent heaven and hell, but it does affirm a morality agreeable to Christianity’ (1964, 342). The morality of love, truth and compassion is one that Christianity shares with Hermetism. Othello admittedly knows something of Christian belief as, about to murder his wife, the man who may be a convert to Christianity urges her to pray, as he ‘would not kill thy unprepared spirit’ (5.2.32). On the other hand, he speaks of prophetic magic sewn into a handkerchief by an Egyptian sibyl using the silk of sacred worms, given to him by his mother on her deathbed. It is the handkerchief which Emilia has stolen from Desdemona, and which ‘to lose’t or give’t away were such perdition / As nothing else could match’ (3.4.69–70).6 The reference to a pagan sibyl carries an allusion to the pagan Hermes Trismegistus.7 Towards his end, in an amalgam of Christian and pagan, Othello agonizes over his fate at the Day of Judgment when he will meet his ‘ill-starred’ wife (5.2.270). While Othello appears to the Christian audience and reader as a former Muslim mercenary with links to Africa, fighting now for a Christian master, a Hermetic reading recognizes a once ‘perfect soul’ (1.2.31) whose reason is so compromised, and whose will is so perverted by a demonic being, that he is deceived

6 There is no such detail in Cinthio’s source. The prophecy is validated by the ensuing events. 7 The pagan Hermes was associated with the prophetic sibyls. The image of Hermes Trismegistus depicted on the floor of the Cathedral of Siena is surrounded by ten sibyls.

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into making choices that reduce him to a godless, irreverent and material man capable of murder. From a Hermetic perspective, Othello’s path is the reverse of Lear’s. Where Lear journeys from ignorance of self to knowledge, from intemperate rage to self-control, from grief to joy, Othello passes from ‘perfect’ to ‘ignorant’, from self-control to apoplectic rage, from joy to grief. Joel Altman observes that within Othello itself ‘there is an obsession from the very beginning of the play with figures of reversal’ (1987, 135). He identifies ‘this psychological topsyturvydom’ with the rhetorical figure of hysteron proteron meaning that the natural order of events is reversed and argues that the device ‘figures Othello at large and also in several particulars’ (133–134). Altman claims that Othello is a play where ‘under the sway of passion, effects precede causes (rationally construed)’, and every kind of improbability leads to ‘the phenomenon of preposterous conclusions’ (132–133). The improbabilities have attracted criticism since Thomas Rymer in 1693; but it is the speed with which Othello is convinced of Desdemona’s guilt in the absence of evidence and denied the opportunity to question the principals and get to the truth of the matter, that is most puzzling.8 Altman’s cogent case for reversals within Othello lends weight to the argument that Othello’s transformation reverses Lear’s and supports the observation that both plays draw on the same books of the Corpus Hermeticum. In Book XIII where Hermes reveals the secret of spiritual regeneration to Tat, he lists twelve ‘irrational torments of matter’ ([7]) which the soul accreted ‘in its fall through the zodiac’ (Copenhaver 1992, 187), and which must be purged if one aspires to perfect one’s soul. All twelve torments belong to characters in both King Lear and Othello. Lear vanquishes his torments on his transformative ascent to gnōsis as he acquires knowledge of self, self-control and joy. These are the very virtues that Othello of the ‘perfect soul’ possesses at the outset, only to relinquish as he descends into ignorance, passion and grief. In King Lear Shakespeare shares eight torments amongst Goneril, Regan and Edmund, while in Othello, the same cluster, with the addition of jealousy, a special kind of envy, provides Iago with the constellation of torments with which to destroy 8 Rymer claimed ‘certainly never was any Play fraught like this . . . with improbabilities’; he was particularly exasperated by the characterization and called the play a fable (in Hadfield 2003, 46). The entire action after arrival in Cyprus takes ‘some thirty-three hours’ (Ridley 1976, lxviii).The so-called ‘double time scheme’, first observed by Christopher North in 1849, condenses and intensifies the Iago/Othello/Desdemona action, while simultaneously allowing time for Roderigo to grow tired of plying Iago with jewels to buy Desdemona’s affection, for news of the Turkish defeat to travel back to Venice, and for Lodovico and Gratiano to travel from Venice to Cyprus with the news that the Governor is to be replaced.

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his victims.9 In King Lear, the wicked receive poetic justice, while in Othello it is the innocent, the naïf and the gullible who suffer injustice. In King Lear, Cordelia’s Truth and Christian forgiveness open the king to joy and salvation, while in Othello, Desdemona’s forgiveness comes too late and Emilia’s truth leads to his grief and destruction. In King Lear, as we saw, the wicked characters enacted ideas listed in Book IX of the Corpus Hermeticum. Those concepts – adultery, murder, assaults on one’s father, the irreverent act or suicide, and strangling – which entered the minds of Goneril, Regan and Edmund, were, as Hermes taught, sown in the mind by some putative, unspecified ‘demon that steals into the mind to sow the seed of its own energy’ (CH IX [3]). In Othello, by putting Iago centre stage Shakespeare gives a form and identity to such a demon. Book XVI explains in some detail how the demonic beings work to ‘reshape our souls to their own ends’ ([14]). ‘Hermes has called this government “fate”’ (CH XVI [16]) and, as Othello illustrates, the account in Book XVI fits Iago’s modus operandi perfectly, as the demon Iago becomes, in a Hermetic exegesis, the personification and governor of Othello’s fate. 3

Othello’s Descent

That Othello knows himself and his worth to the state is established when he is first on stage and, advised by Iago to go indoors because Brabantio is after him, he stands his ground fearlessly, saying: Not I, I must be found. My parts, my title and my perfect soul Shall manifest me rightly. (1.2.30–32) His confident assertion resonates with the words of Hermes who teaches that the soul which has reached perfection is a soul which has knowledge of itself, because ‘[t]he virtue of soul [. . .] is knowledge’ (CH X [9]).10 Claudio Moreschini points out however, that because the perfect ‘reach perfection on account of a free decision of their own’, the ‘certainty in individual free-will’ is not absolute, and ‘destiny is still a problem’ for them (2011, 16). A Hermetic exegesis therefore 9 10

They are lust, greed, deceit, envy, treachery, anger, recklessness and malice (CH XIII [7]). Jealousy is subsumed in the Hermetic text under ‘envy’ which Hermes explains ‘forms below in the souls of people who do not possess mind’ (CH IV [3]). The word ‘virtue’ here seems to refer to an innate quality or nature.

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suggests that Othello in Act One is being portrayed as a man who, throughout his life, has used his mind and reason to direct his will to virtuous acts that led to knowledge of self and perfection of soul. With respect to Lear, it was argued that the revisions made to the Quarto at the end of the play imply that once the king’s torments, such as intemperance and grief, are purged, they cease to afflict. However, in Othello, Shakespeare invites the audience to consider whether torments once purged in this life can return. Can knowledge of self regress to ignorance? By the last Act, Othello, the general who once knew what and who he was, no longer knows himself. Emilia condemns him as a ‘dolt, / As ignorant as dirt!’ (5.2.159–160). When Lodovico comes looking for him, Othello refers to himself in the past, asking if he wants ‘he that was Othello’ (5.2.281). Othello, the man who had fashioned his own life, bewildered now and ‘perplexed in the extreme’ (5.2.344), realizes too late that he has been ‘wrought’ (5.2.343) by Iago’s villainy. From the first scene, it is clear that Othello not only knows himself, but that he stands high in the opinion of others, renowned for self-control. The evidence is in the action when Brabantio, stirred up by Roderigo on Iago’s orders, demands Othello be arrested for enchanting and stealing his daughter. Othello refuses to be drawn into a fight and offers to answer the charge peaceably. Later, when a mutiny breaks out on Cyprus, also instigated by Iago, Othello leaves his nuptial bed to quell the riot with his authority. When his efforts to get to the source of the ‘barbarous brawl’ (2.3.168) are thwarted by Iago’s feigned innocence, and by the wounded Montano’s plea of self-defence, Othello admits to feeling anger: ‘My blood begins my safer guides to rule / And passion, having my best judgment collied / Assays to lead the way’ (2.3.201–203), but his feelings are still well under his control. In both King Lear and Othello the protagonist loses touch with reality for a time and experiences a sort of madness. On the one hand, although Lear’s exhausted mind causes him to hallucinate and imagine bringing Goneril to justice before him, reason never quite deserts him, and he is fully restored after a long and healing sleep (Q 21; F 4.6). On the other hand, Othello, at first sceptical that Desdemona should play him false with Cassio, reasonably demands to ‘see before I doubt’ (3.3.193). The poisonous concept of adultery, planted by Iago, begins to fester, and his ‘tranquil mind’ becomes disturbed (3.3.351) and ‘eaten up with passion’ (3.3.394). When Iago obligingly provides Othello with a reason to doubt, firing his imagination with a luridly erotic dream of his own invention (3.3.416–428), Othello loses consciousness and falls to the ground in a trance or petit mal seizure (SD 4.1.43). Afterwards, Othello’s mind is much changed for the worse; his impaired mind distorts reality, reason and judgment desert him as Iago intended and predicted, and he enters the material

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realm, governed by his senses. The result is that he cannot recognize Desdemona’s truth, but only the sensation of her smell ‘so sweet that the sense aches’ (4.2.70), the feel of her ‘skin as smooth as monumental alabaster’ (5.2.5), and the taste of her ‘balmy breath’ (5.2.16). The great love that began as a meeting of minds (1.3.253, 1.3.266), where they each repudiated the body, has become for Othello entirely sensual.11 In Hermetic terms, Othello’s loss of reason reduces him to the level of the beasts who, unable to reason, are governed by their senses. By Act 4, Othello is so wrought up, so inflamed by passion, that he strikes Desdemona. Lodovico, who obviously knew Othello’s reputation for self-control, is astonished by the change he sees in him, and cries: Is this the noble Moor whom our full senate Call all in all sufficient? This the nature Whom passion could not shake? (4.1.264–266) The words echo a phrase from the Corpus Hermeticum: For the soul, when it is blind and discerns none of the things that are nor their nature nor the good, is shaken by the bodily passions, and the wretched thing becomes – in ignorance of itself – a slave to vile and monstrous bodies, bearing the body like a burden, not ruling but being ruled. (CH X [8])12 This is the path of Othello’s transformation from a man whose emotions are controlled by reason to one shaken to destruction by intemperate passion, unaware that his mind has been poisoned and that he is ‘not ruling but being ruled’ (CH X [8]) by Iago. It is in this state of mind that he is completely taken in by Iago’s duplicity in the bloody duel between Roderigo and Cassio, and praises ‘brave Iago, honest and just’ (5.1.31). Allowing himself no reasonable doubt of Desdemona’s 11

12

An alteration to the Quarto supports this reading. Desdemona’s words implying sensual pleasure: ‘My heart’s subdued / Even to the utmost pleasure of my lord’ (1.3.252–253) have been removed from the Quarto and replaced in the Folio with ‘Even to the very quality of my lord’. Copenhaver translates the passage from the Greek as above: ‘For the soul . . . is shaken by the bodily passions’ (CH X [8]). Nock and Festugière give ‘l’âme. . . subit les secousses violentes des passions corporelles’ (I, 117). In translating the same passage, Foix says of the soul: ‘elle brunche aux passions du corps’ (X [8], 359). In the absence of a dictionary definition, I conjecture that ‘brunche’ is a dialect word for ‘shake’.

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infidelity and believing Cassio to be dead, he resolves to end Desdemona’s life. His words as he leaves reveal his thoughts: ‘Thy bed, lust-stained, shall with lust’s blood be spotted’ (5.1.36–37). When next we see Othello, it is in the following scene and his words are a continuation of that thought. As he approaches Desdemona’s bed he cries: It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul! Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars, It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow . . . (5.2.1–4) Different editors have suggested various interpretations of the ‘cause’.13 None has understood that, although uttered in separate scenes, Othello’s two speeches are sequential. But since the Corpus Hermeticum is adamant ‘that desire [lust] is the cause of death’ (CH I [18]), it follows that Othello’s belief in Desdemona’s adultery is, to his deluded mind, sufficient cause for the act he now resolves to take, namely, to end her life. In King Lear, it was Gloucester, the material man, for whom the adulterous lust that produced Edmund ‘Cost him his eyes’ (Q 24.169; F 5.3.164). In Othello, Shakespeare takes pains to establish that Othello’s love for Desdemona is not tainted by lust. From his own words to the Signoria, theirs is a true marriage of minds ‘as soul to soul affordeth’ (1.3.115). That the love between him and Desdemona was a meeting of minds is confirmed by Desdemona who tells the Signoria, ‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind’ (1.3.253). When adding his voice to that of Desdemona before the Senators, Othello assures them that he will not be tempted to put personal pleasure before his duty to the state, ‘to please the palate of my appetite’ (1.3.263). He assures them that he is of an age when youthful lust has died, and his attraction is to Desdemona’s mind (1.3.263–266). Harold Bloom claims that ‘nothing that the Moorish captain-general says or does reflects an authentic lust for Desdemona’, and doubts that the marriage was consummated (1999, 457). However, a Hermetic interpretation of the absence of lust would lead one to conclude, not that the marriage was not consummated, but that their love is true and lasting. When the two are reunited after their separate voyages to Cyprus, we hear Othello’s happiness as he greets 13

Ridley suggests that the cause is Desdemona’s ‘unchastity’, but goes on to say that ‘what precisely Othello means is far from clear’ (1976, 177 n.1); Honigmann suggests the cause may be chastity, purity or ‘the good of the world in general’ (1997, 305 n.1); Bate and Rassmussen give ‘offence / reason for action’ (2009, 117 n.1); Hall suggests ‘cause of justice, the offense itself which must be corrected in the name of justice’; this seems to imply that the cause is adultery (2007, 150 n.1).

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her with ‘O my soul’s joy’ (2.1.182), and see for ourselves that their love is not a mere lust of the blood but a true marriage of minds and souls: Amen to that, sweet powers I cannot speak enough of this content, It stops me here, it is too much of joy. (2.1.193–195) And yet, within a day, bereft of reason by the passion of ‘a jealousy so strong’ practised ‘upon his peace and quiet / Even to madness’ (2.1. 299; 308–309) that judgment cannot withstand it, Othello turns to the senses and demands to see the proof of her infidelity with his own eyes. After barely two days on Cyprus, the general is racked with grief and suffering too great for him to allow himself to live. Filled with remorse he wants to be roasted in sulphur and washed ‘in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!’ (5.2.277). His agony recalls for the audience Iago’s plan to plant a ‘dangerous conceit’ (3.3.329) that will ‘Burn like the mines of sulphur’ (3.3.332), and also resonates with Hermes’ explanation to Asclepius of the punishment reserved for the irreverent and godless soul: Do you not see what tortures the irreverent soul suffers, howling and shrieking, ‘I’m on fire, I’m burning. I don’t know what to say or do. I’m eaten up, poor wretch, by the evils that possess me.’ (CH X [20]) One line reveals his torture as he understands with horror what he has done and how he has been deceived: ‘O Desdemon! dead, Desdemon. Dead! O, O!’ (5.2.279). How does it happen that, within such a short space of time, a man of honour and valour, a man loving and beloved, should become so obsessed with sensual ideas of adultery and lust that he is deluded into believing that the only honourable choice before him is to kill the thing he loves? In Book IX, On understanding and sensation, Hermes’ words to Asclepius suggest that the answer lies with Othello’s understanding:14

14

It seems significant that despite his reputation, knowledge and experience of the Turk, Othello is not invited to be part of the decision which the senators reach through reasoned discussion. They deduce by logic that the Turk is bound for Cyprus not Rhodes (‘this cannot be, / By no assay of reason’ (1.3.18–19)), and issue orders to the general ­accordingly.

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For sensation to have a share in understanding is human, but as I said before, not every person enjoys understanding. One will be a material, another an essential person. As I mentioned, material people surrounded by vice get the seed of their understanding from the demons, but god saves those who in their essence are surrounded by good. (CH IX [5]) Unlike King Lear who was surrounded by good people who loved and respected him (Kent, his Fool, Edgar and Cordelia), Othello is alone. Isolated by race, colour, culture and position and possibly also by creed, his only confidant is Iago whose raison d’être is to destroy him. We believe Iago when he tells us in soliloquy that Othello is deceived by appearances and ‘thinks men honest that but seem to be so’ (1.3.398–399). We believe it because Othello is so totally convinced of the honesty of the man who has admitted to the audience that he is not really who he appears to be: ‘I am not what I am’ (1.1.64). A Hermetic reading recognizes Iago as the ‘demonic being’ that steals into Othello’s trusting mind to sow ‘the seed’ from which Othello conceives the ideas of adultery, murder by strangulation (4.1.204), and suicide (CH IX [3]), and nourishes them with the feelings of jealousy, disgust, revenge, betrayal and dishonour that map the path to Desdemona’s death and his own self-destruction. Kim Hall, collating a variety of texts which provide cultural contexts for Othello, describes the interest in ‘reason’s ability to control passion’ as a ‘phenomenon of the early modern period’ (2007, 315), and traces contemporary discussions of passion to ‘humoral and complexion theory’ (318). These theories associate a person’s inner or spiritual state with the physical appearance; they are, as she says, ‘thoroughly intertwined with ideas of gender, nation, and ethnicity’, and they assume that passions or emotions are feminine while reason and intellect are masculine (318). While these theories may explain the growth of compassionate feeling in King Lear as the growth of his feminine side, they do not explain Othello’s loss of control, nor the subjugation of his reason and judgment accompanied by overwhelming passion. Earlier it seemed that the Moor’s susceptibility to jealous passion was consistent with the ethnic stereotype probably held by the audience, but there is nothing effeminate in Othello’s torment. While these theories attempt to connect human differences in generalized terms to observable behaviours and physical appearance, the Hermetic texts provide a model that attributes individual human differences to the mind, rather than to physical qualities such as gender and ethnicity. As Hermes says: At any rate, is distributed to body and to soul, and, when both these parts of sensation are in harmony with one another, there is an utterance of understanding, engendered by mind. Mind conceives

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every mental product: both the good, when mind receives seeds from god, as well as the contrary kind, when the seeds come from some demonic being. (CH IX [2], [3]) Iago is well aware of his role as the metaphorical gardener that is implied here and made clear in his conversation with Roderigo (1.3.320–333). He also knows that ‘we have reason to cool our raging motions’ (1.3.330–331). In Book IX of the Corpus Hermeticum we read that ‘mind is so powerful [that] when it has been guided by reason up to a point, it has the means to get [to] the truth’. ([10]). Iago knows that if he is to succeed in his mission to destroy Othello, and prevent him from discovering the truth, namely that Desdemona is chaste, he must deprive Othello of reason by putting the Moor ‘At least into a jealousy so strong / That judgment cannot cure’ (2.1.298–300). Hall cites a possible source of the danger of failing to master the ‘troublesome passions’ like jealousy in L’Académie Françoise by Pierre de la Primaudaye: the soul which being filled with infinite perturbations [. . .] is carried away with inconstancy and uncertainty into a stream of troublesome passions, which, if they be not cut off and mastered by reason, draw a man into utter destruction. (325) The passage occurs in the chapter Of the diseases and passions of the body and soul and appears to be a commentary on the Corpus Hermeticum which also has something apposite to say about this particular disease of the soul: A great disease of the soul is godlessness, and next is mere opinion; from them follow all evils and nothing good [3] . . . But those human souls that do not have mind as a guide are affected in the same way as souls of animals without reason. For angers and longings [passions and desires] are irrational vices that exceed all limits [4]. (CH XII) Copenhaver’s comment on the word ‘opinion’, the ‘disease of the soul’ next to godlessness, adds an interesting dimension to the discussion. Translated from the Greek doxa, the word means both ‘the “reputation” one has in the opinion of others – hence, “glory”’, and also ‘a state of mind between ignorance and knowledge’ (1992, 158), that is, doubt.15 Shakespeare unites these two meanings in the characterization of Othello as a man of glorious reputation brought 15

Copenhaver directs the reader to Plato’s Symposium where Socrates tells Agathon that there is a mean between wisdom and ignorance which is ‘right opinion’ [202A] (1992, 158).

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down by doubt. Where Lear’s ascent to gnōsis was achieved through physical suffering as he discards his torments, Othello’s descent to ignorance is marked by the psychological torture he suffers in his mind through doubt. Paul Jorgensen sees ‘know’ and ‘think’ and their cognates in the play as ‘leit motifs’, noting how the word ‘think’ supplants the word ‘know’ in the mouths of both Othello and Iago after the first scene of the third act (1964, 265). However, after observing that Othello is the least thoughtful of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, ‘not intellectually equipped to enlarge by his own sense of tragedy upon man’s plight in general’, Jorgensen comments that Shakespeare ‘alters the quality and function of thought’ in Othello (1964, 265). In fact, the alteration is from the meditative hero like Hamlet and Macbeth who thinks about, to Othello who thinks that, in the sense of being unsure of what he knows. Iago uses the word in this sense when he claims as motive for his hatred of Othello that ‘it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets / He has done my office’ (1.3.386–387). Othello uses it when, on the rack, his peace of mind gone (3.3.351), not knowing what to think, he lurches between opposed beliefs echoed in the sickening see-saw rhythm of his words: By the world, I think my wife be honest, and think she is not, I think that thou art just, and think thou art not. (3.3.386) Othello requires evidence from his senses before he believes. He asks for ‘the ocular proof’ (3.3.363), before demanding ‘a living reason she’s disloyal’ (3.3.412). But instead of a reason, Iago plants a sexually arousing scene in Othello’s mind’s eye that swamps reason and which, for the credulous Othello, removes all doubt. When Iago swears ‘I am your own forever’ (3.3.482), the real meaning is reversed. From that point, Othello and his will are Iago’s forever.16 4

Free Will and Choice, Destiny and the Origin of Evil

The thrust of the action of Othello is towards Iago’s domination of Othello’s reasoning mind and subversion of his will, in order that his destiny be fulfilled. In an early scene Iago manipulates the young Roderigo, as he will later manipulate Othello, to make the choice that will destroy him. Having told Roderigo that the scales of life are balanced between reason and sensuality, 16

Honigmann agrees with this reading and compares the relationship to that between Faustus, who sold his soul, and Mephistopheles (1997, 240 n.482).

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he derides Roderigo’s obsessive love for Desdemona as ‘a lust of the blood and a permission of the will’ (1.3.349). Hermes teaches that lust can be purged by ‘perseverance, the power opposed to lust’ (CH XIII [9]), but Iago does not advise Roderigo to summon his strength and choose to resist. He provokes him instead into countering his virtue with his will. Rolf Soellner claims that ‘an interest in the manipulation of the will’ was in the air at the time Shakespeare wrote Othello (1972, 268). In fact, throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the extent to which men and women were free to make choices that would affect the fate of their immortal souls was profoundly contentious in England and the Netherlands. Not only was the Reformed Church divided from the Catholic Church on this issue, the Reformed Church itself was divided over whether humankind had free will. At one extreme, followers of Calvin were taught that God had decided before Adam who was elected to salvation and who destined for damnation. Moreover, Calvinists were taught that not only did Christ’s sacrifice redeem none but the elect, but that men and women were powerless to affect their destiny. For Calvinists, God was ‘the author of Adam and Eve’s fault and hence of all human sin’ (MacCulloch 2003, 375). Foix de Candale, a Catholic bishop, challenged this doctrine, calling it a blasphemy to suggest that God was responsible for evil.17 At the other extreme, Jacob Arminius (1560–1609) of the Netherlands, believed that the fate of men and women was not predestined, but that they were entirely free to choose to act in ways that would ensure their salvation. Between the extremes of Calvinism and Arminianism lay the teachings of the Catholic Church and the Lutherans.18 In mediaeval times, the Catholic Church had reconciled St Augustine’s teaching with Origen’s doctrine of human free will.19 Furthermore, at the Council of Trent (1547–63), the Catholic Church formally rejected the Protestant doctrine of predestination that renders mankind powerless, but acknowledged that justification is a transformation that 17 18

19

In a margin note to his commentary on Chapter XIV section 7, Foix writes: ‘Calvin en ses institutions blaspheme de rendre Dieu aucteur de mal’ (643). In his treatise, On Free Will, Augustine argues that Man erred by necessity and through ignorance, because as a consequence of inheriting Adam’s sin, he ‘has not the freedom of will to do what he ought’. Man should humbly confess and ask for God’s help (Battenhouse 1969, 219). Origen (c.185–c.254) a native of Alexandria who received a Christian education, ‘a biblical critic, exegete, theologian and spiritual writer’, was ‘well-versed in the works of the Middle Platonists and studied pagan philosophy and literature’ (Dictionary of the Christian Church 1193). He was writing at the same time as the Corpus Hermeticum was being written and, as far as can be known, since no original works have survived, he was a mystic who taught that ‘all spirits were created equal, but through the exercise of their free will they developed in hierarchical order and some fell into sin’ (Dictionary 1194).

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‘requires man’s cooperation with God’, or in other words they made a place for Man’s having free will. Because Arminius’ views were compatible with the Catholic teaching on free will, his followers in the Low Countries were suspected of sympathising with the Catholic Spanish. In England, which had long supported the Netherlands in their resistance to Spanish domination, Arminian doctrine on free will was viewed as treasonous as well as heretical. Even more extreme than Arminius, followers of Pelagius denied the doctrine of original sin and held that men and women are entirely free to choose good by virtue of their God-given nature and without the need for God’s grace.20 Battenhouse recognizes Pelagianism in Iago’s theory of free will as he expounds it to Roderigo (380–384). When Iago tells Roderigo ‘’tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus’ (1.3.320–333), he is effectively echoing Hermes’ advice to Tat that ‘Mind can do as it wishes’ (CH XII [8]).21 Arminius himself was accused of the heresy of Pelagianism which in this respect is clearly identical to Hermes’ teaching. The dispute about free will was formally resolved in favour of Calvinism and predestination at the Synod of Dordt in 1618–1619. Consequently, when the first Quarto of Othello was published in 1622, it was in the context of a continuing, heated, divisive debate about free will, with serious political consequences.22 Nevertheless, the widespread theological debate over the relative merits of predestination and free will did not preclude a general belief in a sympathetic correspondence between the macrocosmos and the microcosmos. In Garth Fowden’s words, astral influences on the character and lives of men and women were ‘part of the common coin of late pagan thought’ (1986, 117). They are implicit for example in Book I [24] and [25] of the Corpus Hermeticum and explicit in Book XVI, but they are not unique to the Hermetic texts. Belief in astral influences on terrestrial affairs was also commonplace in Shakespeare’s time.23 In King Lear Shakespeare has Kent explain the difference between Cordelia and her sisters, saying, ‘The stars above us govern our conditions’

20 21 22 23

Pelagius was a late 4th – early 5th century British theologian whose ideas were supported by Bishop Nestor. As Salaman et al. put it: ‘Since it rules all things and is the soul of God, Nous is able to do just as it wills’ (XII [8]). The issue continued to divide the Church of England, Charles I and Archbishop Laud favouring the Arminian position on free will. Wesleyan Methodism, which emerged in the eighteenth century, was sympathetic to Arminianism. The evidence that these beliefs persist into the third millennium is in newspapers and magazines which regularly publish horoscopes making predictions based on people’s zodiac sign at birth.

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(Q 17. 34).24 Similarly, Othello at the very moment that he becomes aware of the enormity of the act he has just committed cries: ‘My wife, my wife! What wife? I have no wife’ (5.2.96) and looks for ‘a huge eclipse / Of sun and moon, and that th’affrighted globe / Should yawn at alteration’ (5.2.98–100). Moments later, he addresses Desdemona, whose own fate was prophesied in her birth name (the unfortunate one), as ‘ill-starred wench’ (5.2.270). Earlier, in doubt and despair over Iago’s lying hints of Desdemona’s infidelity, Othello too believed that his unavoidable destiny – to be cuckolded as he thinks – was conferred in the womb: ’Tis destiny unshunnable, like death – Even then this forked plague is fated to us When we do quicken. (3.3.279–281) Fowden, referring his readers to the Hermetica – the Asclepius and Book XVI of the Corpus Hermeticum – explains cosmic sympathy as follows: The creative and beneficent powers of God flow through the intelligible and sensible realms to the sun, which is the demiurge around which revolve the eight spheres of the fixed stars, the planets and the earth. From these spheres depend the daemons, and from the daemons Man who is the microcosm of creation . . . The divine powers that bind this closely-knit structure together are sometimes called ‘energies’. . . These energies derive from the sun, the planets and the stars and they operate on all bodies (77). The daemons . . . are simply personifications of these sympathetic energies – they may be either good or bad, but they are emanations, possessing neither body nor soul.25 Needless to say, their effect on human beings is all the more insidious for that. They penetrate to the very core of the body and attempt to subject the whole man to their will. This, expressed figuratively, is the crucial doctrine of fate. (1986, 78) Whereas Books IV and XII of the Corpus Hermeticum stressed that men with mind are free to direct their will to choose, Book XVI introduces the complication of ‘demons on duty at the exact moment of birth, arrayed under each of the stars [who] take possession of each of us as we come into being and receive 24 25

The line does not appear in the Folio. Fowden draws attention to CH XVI [10–16] and XII [21]: ‘If they are entirely energies, my child, by whom are they energized?’ (1986, 78 n.16).

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a soul’ (CH XVI [15]). These astral demons ‘follow the orders of a particular star and are good and evil according to their natures’ (CH XVI [13]). They ‘govern this earthly government. Hermes has called this government “fate”’ (CH XVI [16]). In the play, Shakespeare has imagined Iago as just such a soulless astral demon made corporeal, resulting in the half-man, half-devil that Othello recognizes (5.2.398). Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously saw in Iago ‘a being next to Devil only not quite Devil’ and recognized ‘the motive-hunting of Motiveless malignity’ (1987, 315). A Hermetic reading agrees. Iago has no motive to harm Othello; he is simply a malign demon, made corporeal for the purpose, following the orders of Othello’s zodiac star. In other words, he is the personification of Othello’s fate. Astrological determinism and theological determinism have much in common. Orthodox Protestants in Shakespeare’s audience might argue that Othello’s unavoidable fate was ordained by a sovereign and infallible God, while others might be inclined to see Othello’s destiny as controlled by the demon energized by the zodiac star that predominated at his birth. Either way, the pagan Stoic idea of fate ineluctable is referred to openly in the play. The Hermetic discourse On the mind, found in Book XII, offers those possessed of mind and reason a way to escape their fate. Hermes explains that ‘all people are subject to fate . . . And what is fated affects all people. Yet those who possess reason, whom (as we have said) mind commands, are not affected as others are’ (CH XII [6], [7]). Book IV reiterates that, although not all men possess mind (CH IV [3]), those who do have the freedom of will that enables them to choose between the essential, divine, incorporeal, intelligible realm inhabited by god, and the material, mortal, corporeal, sensible realm that leads to ‘mankind’s destruction’ (CH IV [6], [7]). In short, essential man can control destiny with mind, as Hermes explains to his son Tat: This being so, there is nothing dimensional among intellectual beings, and thus, since mind rules all and is the soul of god, mind can do as it wishes. (CH XII [8]) Man can choose the intelligible path to knowledge or ‘virtue of soul’ (CH X [9]), or the sensible path to ignorance that is ‘vice of soul’ (CH X [9]). If he chooses the former, fate cannot touch him, because as Moreschini explains, ‘Fatal destiny rules only carnal man’ (2011, 236). And Stobaeus warns, when Man is no longer directed by mind or nous, he is no longer free, because ‘having “chosen the material world”, he [man] is driven by the forces which work in the material world’ (SH VIII §7) (in Scott III, 395). In short, destiny has no hold over the soul of essential man so long as his mind and reason direct his will to choose

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the path to virtue. But in the play, Iago manipulates Othello’s mind, deliberately disturbing his reason and judgment, so that the choice to commit the act that will incur the dreadful outcome is driven by emotions and not by reason. As we saw, Shakespeare is careful to establish at the outset that Othello has the qualities of an ‘essential’ man – knowledge of self, reason and mind. When Iago urges Othello to avoid a confrontation with (as he thinks) Brabantio, Othello stands his ground knowing himself to have a ‘perfect soul’ (1.2.31). Such a soul, having achieved perfection in this life, indicates a mind that has attained gnōsis, and should be proof against fate. The term ‘perfect’ is used several times in the Hermetic texts to describe those with mind. For example, in The mixing bowl or the monad expounded by Lazzarelli in the Crater Hermetis, after explaining that God shared reason but not mind with all men, Hermes tells Tat that God invited all men to immerse themselves in the mixing bowl with the result that: All those who heeded the proclamation and immersed themselves in mind participated in knowledge and became perfect people because they received mind. (CH IV [4]) Foix also uses the word ‘perfect’ in his translation of the passage: Parquoy tous ceux qui ont ecouté le cri, & se sont plongez en la pensée, on teste faicts participants de cognoissance, & ayant receu la pensée, on este hommes parfaicts. (153) According to Hermetic doctrine, the perfect ‘reach perfection on account of a free decision of their own’, but the motion of the cosmos plays a part (CH IX [5]) and for that reason ‘destiny is a problem for perfects’ (Moreschini 16). Destiny is a problem because, acting on the orders of the stars, the demons on duty at the exact moment of birth take possession of our souls, but not our reason. We all have reason, which for a very few is enlightened by ‘a single ray of god’ ‘shining upon him in his rational part’ that will nullify the effect of the demons and avert our destiny (CH XVI [16]). ‘All others the demons carry off as spoils, both souls and bodies, since they are fond of the demons. . .’ (CH XVI [16]) – Othello’s fate, to be ‘ensnared. . . soul and body’ (5.2.299) by the man he liked and trusted, seems to be the dramatic enactment of Asclepius’ words. The original Hermetic manuscript is unintelligible and problematic at this point. Copenhaver suggests: ‘{And it is this love that} misleads and is misled’ (XVI [16]). But in the translation available in Shakespeare’s day, Foix writes ‘C’est la raison qui deçoit ou est decevé & non l’amour’ (728). (‘It is reason

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which misleads or is misled, not love.’) Foix’s translation may shed some light on Shakespeare’s decision to have Iago deceive Othello’s reason by feeding him misinformation, although it is arguable that Othello’s love for his Ensign also affected his judgment. Either translation sheds light on the events of the play. To return to the point: even though ‘Mind prevails over all’ and can set a human soul ‘above fate’ (CH XII [9]), destiny may still control the mortal body. However, in his commentary Foix asserts something different: ‘destiny not only rules bodies . . . it also has the greatest power over the soul’, which is subordinated to it (511–516 passim), and that while the body may be subjected to destiny, the soul of the noble man is not (525). Only when it commits the sin of ‘despising and refusing the aid of the holy Mind’ is the soul subject to destiny. This interpretation sheds light on Iago’s plot to overcome and incapacitate Othello’s mind, compromise his reason and judgment and thereby ensnare his soul. To this end he penetrates Othello’s mind, ‘practising upon his peace and quiet / Even to madness’ (2.1.308–309) and pours ‘pestilence into his ear’ (2.3.351) with the result that Othello’s will is no longer directed by his mind, which has ceased to function reasonably, but is at the mercy of overpowering sensations. Othello’s mind no longer does as he wishes. Othello’s mind does as Iago wishes. Othello’s despairing cry, ‘Who can control his fate?’ (5.2.263) implies that he feels powerless to avert the destiny that awaits him. Nevertheless, natural justice for Desdemona’s cruel and undeserved death demands that Othello be punished in this world and damned in the next. Tat raises a pertinent question when he asks Hermes: If it is absolutely fated for some individual to commit adultery or sacrilege or do some other evil [such as murder], how is such a person still to be punished [ ] when he has acted under compulsion of fate? (CH XII [5]) Tat’s question, like Othello’s, raises not only the issue of responsibility for evil, but the issue of the origin of evil itself. The debate is further complicated by Pymander’s telling Hermes in Book I that while he himself, Mind, is present to the reverent ([22]), he gives way to ‘the avenging demon’ who arms the evil person ‘the better for lawless deeds so that greater vengeance may befall him’ ([23]). And in Book XII Hermes tells Tat that fate decides that a man deserves punishment and ‘compels him to commit the crime in order that he may incur the suffering’ (Scott II, 345). According to this, the reason he deserves punishment and has rendered his body and soul vulnerable to destiny is that ‘he has rejected God’s offering of nous’ or mind (Scott II, 345). As Hermes tells Tat, ‘the evils for which we are responsible, who choose them instead of good things,

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are no responsibility of gods’ (CH IV [8]). In other words, mankind is the author of evil, not an astral demon acting under orders, not God, but man or in this case, Othello. Once again the point is moot. Can it be argued that Othello’s responsibility for Desdemona’s murder is mitigated on the grounds of diminished responsibility? Did Othello, blinded by his trust in his Ensign, actively choose to reject mind, or was he passively deprived of its reason and judgment by Iago? Was Othello complicit in his destiny? Was he compelled by the demands of a culture which believes in ‘honour killing’, where a man ‘will rather leese his life than put up with any disgrace in the behalf of their women’? If Iago is human then he must bear some responsibility for choosing to manipulate Othello’s will as he did. If Iago is an astral demon whose mission was to compel Othello to commit a crime so heinous that, being the honourable man that he was, he would suffer sufficiently to end his own life, then Othello was powerless to choose and cannot be blamed. In his last words to Iago, Othello demands to know ‘Why [that demi-devil] hath thus ensnared my soul and body?’ (5.2.299).26 His question is clear proof that Othello knows exactly what has happened to him, although perplexed as to the reason. It is not the act per se, but the knowledge that his lawless act was neither justified nor honourable that occasions the violent grief and despair that leads Othello to kill himself. Iago’s answer ‘What you know, you know’ (5.2.300), and his refusal to speak another word is the clearest indication that corporeal Iago exists merely in order to see that Othello fulfils his destiny. In effect, Iago exists for no other purpose. As he tells us, he is not what he is. 5

Iago: The Mind Reader ‘I am not what I am’. (1.1.64)

What is he? The previous section dealt with the matter of Iago’s motivation, and concluded that he had no motivation to harm, but was acting directly under orders of Othello’s birth star. This section addresses his methods and finds that he alternates his demon self, whom he reveals in soliloquy as he plans his strategy, with the human self who carries out the plans. Arguably, Shakespeare has modelled the 26

Although the word ‘devil’ is frequently used, the word ‘demi-devil’ occurs in only one other play in the whole canon. Prospero refers to Caliban as a demi-devil (The Tempest, 5.1.272).

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human Iago on Edmund, and endowed or equipped him with the same list of evil ‘torments of matter’ that beset the three wicked personae in King Lear. Despite the title of the play, Iago, described in the cast list as ‘a Villain’, is the dominant character in Othello. He has a repertoire of devilish torments which match those listed in Book XIII of the Corpus Hermeticum, and which explain his actions. Principal amongst those torments is malice, manifest as hatred, which he justifies as anger with Othello and envy of Cassio, but which has no real motive. Next are deceit and treachery which, as we see, manifest in the same tactics that Edmund used: feigned reluctance, artful cleverness, fabrication and manipulation of evidence, and outrageous lies. Iago exploits Roderigo’s lust for Desdemona and enriches himself from the young man’s pocket, for greed. He exploits Othello’s love for Desdemona and his sense of honour by taunting him with the image of her lustful behaviour and arousing his jealousy. At the end of the play he becomes angry with Emilia who exposes his lies, and recklessly stabs her. One way or another, Shakespeare incorporates every one of the ‘irrational torments’ into this play, as he did in King Lear. But deceit is Iago’s signature trait, and he sets the duplicitous tone when he swears by the two-faced god, Janus (1.2.33) and casts a miasma of doubt over the whole play. Iago has perplexed literary critics who place him on a continuum where at one extreme he is a decent man, passed over for promotion, cuckolded and rightfully resentful, who took understandable if excessive revenge, while at the other he is a comic Vice figure from a Morality play, Satan, or a devil personified. Tucker Brooke calls him a man of ‘honesty and innate kindliness’, ‘a man of warm, sympathetic qualities’ (1948, 48, 49). Marvin Rosenberg cannot agree that Iago is basically a decent man, but he also defends Iago against critics like Robert Heilman who ‘finds serpent and devil references that identify Iago “with the devil himself”’ (Rosenberg, 1955, 145 n.8).27 Leah Scragg points to an association between Iago and the powers of darkness (2007, 53) and E. E. Stoll calls him ‘a devil in the flesh’ (1962, 231), while for Bloom he is ‘not the Christian devil or a parody thereof, but rather a free artist of himself’ (1999, 464). Nevertheless, the word ‘devil’ occurs more often in Othello than in any other play by Shakespeare. Bernard Spivack sees Iago as the successor to the allegorical Vice figure (1958, 57), whom he resembles through making the audience complicit in his plans, but Ridley rejects the description of him as ‘an incarnate fiend’ and calls him ‘the master of destiny’ (1976, lxi). Ridley’s opinion resonates with the Hermetic interpretation of Iago as a soulless demon made corporeal acting under orders of Othello’s zodiac star to ensure that, though already 27

Robert Heilman. 1952. “Dr Iago and his Potions.” Virginia Quarterly Review, 568–584.

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‘perfect’, he does not avert his astral destiny.28 Despite these differences, the critical consensus is that Iago is a being unique in Shakespeare and generally acknowledged as the worst of his villains. On his own admission Iago is not what he appears to be. Who or what is he? For the Hermetist he is twofold, being both wicked demon acting under orders of Othello’s birth star and, temporarily, a human being. He is Othello’s fate, his own astral demon clothed in flesh, but endowed with some qualities that mark him as human, such as age (28), a wife (Emilia), a Spanish name, and a place alongside the general in battle. Apart from those details, the human Iago, unlike Othello, has no past life, ‘no biographical self’, as Paul Cefalu points out (2013, 285) and, I might add, no foreseeable future after uttering his final word. It is as a demon that Iago takes the audience into his confidence in soliloquy, making us complicit, horrified watchers of his evil as he reveals the torments at his disposal, and his modus operandi as he plants the poisonous seeds of doubt in the mind of Othello. At the end of the play when he has achieved Othello’s destiny, namely his ruination by his own hand, Iago refuses all explanation, suffers no remorse and closes his mouth forever (5.2.300). As a human being, Iago is Othello’s ensign, Emilia’s husband, Desdemona’s protector, Roderigo’s go-between and Cassio’s comrade-in-arms. He has a reputation for honesty and trustworthiness that protects him for most of the play, but his actions belie his reputation, as audience and readers know. When the action begins we learn that he has already told Roderigo that he harbours the very human quality of hate for Othello (1.1.5–6). Next he casts around for a reason to explain that hate, and a human motive to justify what he has been sent to do, namely to effect Othello’s destiny. Altman, who identified Iago’s practice of reversing the logic of events in this way, claims it is characteristic of Iago to ‘assert a conviction, then rapidly adduce evidence to show cause’ (1987, 134). The most egregious example occurs in soliloquy, when sneering at Roderigo’s gullibility, he reiterates his hatred for the Moor and follows this with a vague hint at adultery as motive for that hate: ‘And it is thought abroad that ‘twixt my sheets / He’s done my office’ (1.3.386–387), before admitting that it may not be true but it ‘Will do as if for surety’ (1.3.389) (my emphasis). Iago’s decision to treat an improbable possibility as certainty foreshadows the terrible doubts and imagined reality of adultery that he plants in Othello’s mind. Iago’s words highlight the central problem of blame in Othello in words that 28

More recent critics have seen the contemporary relevance of issues in the play to do with ‘gender, race, sexuality and status’ (Hadfield 2003, 1), and Robert Matz in 1999 explored the significance of male on male relationships in Othello in a paper entitled ‘Slander, Renaissance Discourses of Sodomy and Othello’.

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echo a passage from the Corpus Hermeticum. When Tat asks how one who has acted under compulsion of fate is to be punished (XII [5]), Hermes answers: As mind quells anger and longing [passion and desire], it acts differently in each individual, and one must understand that some of these are men who possess reason and that others are without it. (XII [6]) One who has reason will not be affected because he has committed adultery, my child, but as if he had done so, nor will he be affected because he has murdered but as if he had murdered. (XII [7]) (emphasis in original) The act on which the entire tragedy of Othello depends did not take place. The torment of jealous rage which attacks Othello’s reasonable mind depends on the act ‘as if ’ it had taken place. The word ‘adultery’ is never used, and the act takes place only in Othello’s mind where the demon Iago has sown the concept. How does Iago achieve his ends? If Iago is a soulless energy, such as Fowden described, made corporeal, then his modus operandi will be to insinuate himself into Othello’s mind and disable his reason so that he is able to control Othello’s will. Iago knows exactly how to do this, and he practises on Roderigo. He explains to Roderigo his understanding of how humans can use their will to make the choices that shape their lives. Roderigo, planning to drown himself on learning that Desdemona, whom he loves obsessively, has married Othello, tells Iago, ‘I confess it is my shame to be so fond, but it is not in my virtue to amend it’ (1.3.319). Iago responds with a long exposition on the will which would have been particularly topical at the times the play was performed and published. His response disabuses Roderigo of the notion that ‘virtue’ is an unchangeable quality conferred at birth, and tells him that it can be changed, because it is ‘in ourselves that we are thus, or thus’ (1.3.320). But after telling the young man that it is up to us to master our destiny using our minds to direct our wills to make the virtuous choice, he plays on Roderigo’s weakness of mind to ensure that he chooses the path that leads to his downfall. Having advised Roderigo that ‘the power and corrigible authority of this lies / in our wills’ (1.3.326–327), Iago reminds him that mankind has ‘reason to cool our raging motions’ (1.3.331), to balance sensuality and protect us from the ‘preposterous conclusions’ to which the ‘blood and baseness of our natures’ would otherwise drive us (1.3.328–329). To make his point, Iago uses the analogy of a garden: ‘Our bodies are gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners’ (1.3.321–322). He explains to Roderigo that ‘if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce’, let the garden grow ‘sterile with idleness’, or ‘manured with industry’ the

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choice is entirely ‘in our wills’ (1.3.322–323, 325, 327). But he neglects to say who chooses which plants to nurture, which to neglect. Pico della Mirandola also uses this analogy in his famed Oration where he says the seeds come from God. There Pico echoes Hermes’ words that Man can choose the path to divinity and immortality or the lesser route to mortality: Thou [. . .] art the molder and maker of thyself; thou mayst sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the higher natures which are divine. [. . .] It is given to him to have that which he chooses and to be that which he wills [. . .]. At man’s birth the Father placed in him every sort of seed and sprouts of every kind of life. The seeds that each man cultivates will grow and bear their fruit in him. If he cultivates [. . .] the seeds of sensation, he will grow into a brute. If rational, he will come out a heavenly animal. If intellectual, he will be an angel, and a son of God. (1998, 5) Iago does not advise Roderigo how to choose which herbs to cultivate; he restricts his choices to the mortal or material world of sensation, as if he knows that material choice ‘has been mankind’s destruction’ (CH IV [7]). A passage in Book IV, referred to earlier, appears to provide a source for this idea. Hermes tells Tat that ‘God shared reason among all people [. . . ] but not mind’, and that the people who did not receive mind ‘have sensations much like those of unreasoning animals . . . they divert their attention to the pleasures and appetites of their bodies’ (CH IV [4], [5]).29 Roderigo is one of those with reason but without mind. A Hermetic reading interprets Roderigo’s fate as assured when he confesses that he is unable to find the will to resist his passion for Desdemona. His obsessive love or lust for Desdemona is the indication of his choice for the material or corporeal realm that ‘has been mankind’s destruction’ (CH IV [7]). In following Iago’s self-­ serving advice to put money in his pocket and not give up hope of enjoying Desdemona, Roderigo seals his own fate. The moment he begins to reason that Iago’s ‘words and performances are no kin together’ (4.2.185), Iago smoothtalks him, sets him up to kill, or be killed by, Cassio and eventually delivers the fatal, murderous blow, in the dark, himself (SD 5.1.61). 29 Book XII says something different: Hermes tells Tat that mind quells ‘anger and longing’, but that ‘it acts differently in each individual, and one must understand that some of these are men who possess reason and that others are without it’ (CH XII [6]).

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How is it that the men whom Iago dupes all call him honest until the fifth act, while reader and audience can see his duplicity from the beginning? Audience and reader have the advantage of setting the deeds of the human Iago against the words of the demon Iago, which in soliloquy he confides to us alone. Just as Shakespeare plots Othello’s descending trajectory to mirror Lear’s Hermetic ascent, so he humanizes the demon Iago as he practises his deceptions, by drawing on the same range of tactics that the human Edmund employed for the same purpose. Iago builds one man’s trust in him by feigning reluctance to speak ill of another. When Othello asks him about the fracas which the audience knows was engineered by Iago, he claims not to know (2.3.175), and when pressed, he names Cassio, at the same time protesting: ‘I had rather have this tongue cut from my mouth / Than it should do offence to Michael Cassio’ (2.3.217–218). Later Iago’s disingenuous reluctance to doubt Cassio’s honesty by weighing his words ‘before thou giv’st them breath’ (3.3.122) completely hoodwinks Othello who knows the ploy but dismisses it because: . . . such things in a false disloyal knave Are tricks of custom, but in a man that’s just They’re close delations, working from the heart, That passion cannot rule. (3.3.124–127) In fabricating evidence to mislead, Iago is without equal. Possibly the best example of his artful cleverness is his response to Othello’s reasonable demand to witness the evidence of Desdemona’s infidelity before he doubts her honesty (3.3.193). Increasingly tormented, Othello threatens Iago with ‘deeds to make heaven weep’ (3.3.374) if he cannot give Othello the ‘ocular proof’ (3.3.363). Though ‘eaten up with passion’ (3.3.394), at this stage Othello still retains his reason. Iago twists the knife and asks Othello if he would like to turn voyeur and see his wife in the act. He fills Othello’s mind with images of goats, monkeys, wolves on heat. Maliciously, protesting he is driven to it ‘by foolish honesty and love’ (3.3.415), he caps the performance with the most outrageous lie that he himself has lain with Cassio and heard him talking in his sleep about Desdemona. It takes only the mention of the strawberry spotted handkerchief for Othello’s reason to be usurped by passionate, jealous rage demanding Cassio’s death. When next the two are together Iago drips more inflammatory pestilence into Othello’s imagining mind: ‘kiss in private’ (4.1.2), ‘naked in bed’ (4.1.3), ‘handkerchief’ (4.1.10), and slanders Cassio, conjuring up each baseless detail by asking ‘What if . . .?’ (4.1.24).

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Whereas in humanizing Iago, Shakespeare endows him with the tactics that Edmund employed, in characterizing Iago as demon, Shakespeare references concepts attributed to ‘some demonic being’ in the Corpus Hermeticum (IX [3]), namely ‘adultaires, meurtres, impietez, estranglemants’ (Foix 292) (acts of adultery, murder, the godless act or suicide, strangulation), as well as drawing on the ‘irrational torments of matter’ which are listed in Book XIII [7]. It is a masterly touch of the playwright to have Iago simultaneously admit and deny his wickedness while claiming to counsel Cassio ‘Directly to his good’ (2.3.345). Lest there be any doubt as to his status as demon he tells us: When devils will the blackest sins put on They do suggest at first with heavenly shows As I do now. (2.3.346–348) Hermes’ explanation of how ideas enter the mind through the agency of a demon who steals into the mind ‘to sow the seed of its own energy’ (CH IX [3]) resonates strongly with Iago’s explanation, uttered in soliloquy, of the effect on Othello’s mind of the concepts that he is sowing: The Moor already changes with my poison: Dangerous conceits are in their nature poisons Which at the first are scarce found to distaste But with a little art upon the blood Burn like the mines of sulphur. (3.3.328–332) In King Lear the concepts are worked almost invisibly into the fabric of the play. But in Othello when we hear Iago planting the idea of murder by strangulation (4.1.204) in Othello’s mind, we witness ‘the avenging demon’ at work, arming his victim the better for the ‘lawless deeds so that the greater vengeance may befall him’, as Pymander told Hermes in Book I [23]. In fact, Othello does not follow Iago’s advice to the letter, but chooses to smother Desdemona instead. Nevertheless, the method of murder that Iago suggests appears indebted to Foix’s translation.30 In Hermetic terms, the astral demon Iago is acting under orders to compel Othello to commit the crime and incur the suffering that he

30

In Cinthio, the Ensign’s bizarre plan is to beat Desdemona to death with a stocking filled with sand, before disguising the murder by having the ceiling collapse upon her (Bullough 1973, VII, 250).

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will deserve as a consequence of the act.31 Pursuing this argument, it becomes clear that Othello’s destiny, ‘the preposterous conclusion’, was to end his own life when the full knowledge of what he has done destroys his will to live. The demon Iago has accomplished his mission by manipulating Othello to reject the guidance of the mind or nous given him by God. When Iago is operating as a human, the ‘irrational torments of matter’ that beset human beings – malice, greed, envy, lust, anger and recklessness – are all part of his repertoire as well as the deceit and treachery which he shares with Edmund. He reveals them in soliloquy, taking us into his confidence as he steps out of his human role and speaks directly to the audience in the manner of Vice. Malice, greed and envy he reveals in his first soliloquy. Ill-will towards Othello is Iago’s overt motivation throughout: ‘I hate the Moor’ (1.3.385) he tells us, but for no very convincing reason. Similarly extorting money from Roderigo seems to be motivated more by amusement than greed, done ‘for my sport and profit’ (1.3.385). And desire to get Cassio’s place does not seem to arise from bitter envy. In fact, Iago is curiously passionless, and in an aside casts himself as a spider who will delight to ‘ensnare as great a fly as Cassio . . . to strip you out of your lieutenantry’ (2.1.168–169, 171–172). But when Othello, deceived by his machinations, promotes him to lieutenant, it is clear that Iago never intended to desist, as he continues with his plans for Othello’s and Cassio’s ruin. Lust and the idea of adultery are Iago’s concern in his second soliloquy as he reveals his plan to slander Cassio to Othello, alleging lustful behaviour, ‘I’ll have our Michael Cassio on the hip, / Abuse him to the Moor in the rank garb’ (2.1.303–304) and adds the gratuitous comment that Cassio has also seduced his wife Emilia. Once again his topsy-turvy logic is at work. He soon reveals that he plans to entrap Cassio by getting him drunk. How he plans to deceive and betray Othello, he reveals to us in the soliloquies that follow. Iago’s duplicity defines him. Not only does he incite riots more than once, he changes sides and either re-enters on the other side or appears as the innocent, newly arrived on the scene. In the second brawl incited between Roderigo and Cassio, both of whom it would suit him to have dead, he comes from behind and wounds Cassio in the leg (SD 5.1.26), then finishes off Roderigo, all the while shouting for help against the treacherous villains who ‘Kill men i’th’ dark’ (5.1.63). A minute later, he is blaming Bianca for the fracas and calling for a chair out of feigned concern for Cassio (5.1.96). Iago’s treachery is unparalleled. He exploits Roderigo’s obsessive love, strips him of every penny, mocks him and then murders him. Cassio, whom 31

This is the answer to Tat’s objection to punishment for a crime which fate compelled one to commit. It is explained at length by Scott (1924–26, II, 344–345).

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he claims to resent because he has the lieutenantry, is slandered and nearly killed in Iago’s mission to ruin Othello. Desdemona he claims to love because she will contribute to Othello’s ruin, but he betrays her trust in him in order to complete Othello’s destruction. After winning Cassio’s trust and advising him to beg Desdemona to plead with Othello for his reinstatement, which we are well aware is a piece of the plan to entrap and destroy Othello, Iago boldly challenges the audience to call him villain, ‘When this advice I give is free and honest’ (2.3.332). He is both smug and brazen. Delighting in the most cunning of all his deceptions where he dupes Othello into misinterpreting what he is witnessing between Cassio and Desdemona, he tells us: As he shall smile, Othello shall go mad. And his unbookish jealousy must construe Poor Cassio’s smiles, gestures and light behaviour Quite in the wrong. (4.1.101–104) But ‘truth puts deceit to flight’ (CH XIII [9]). When confronted with Emilia’s truth – ‘You told a lie, an odious, damned lie! / Upon my soul, a lie, a wicked lie!’ (5.2.176–177) – Iago loses his customary sang froid. From his angry response to the threatened exposure of his deceit, and his reckless efforts to silence Emilia, we are left in no doubt that Iago fears she will prevent him from completing his mission. When Emilia refuses to be silenced and finds the courage to expose Iago’s villainy, she reveals the truth about how the handkerchief was lost. Faced with truth, Iago reacts in a very human way with anger and stabs his defenceless wife (SD 5.2.232). The reckless act completes the array of ‘irrational torments of matter’ that define him in his human guise. When Othello realizes he has been deceived by a demon, he wants to know why. ‘Demand that demi-devil / Why he hath ensnared my soul and body?’ (5.2.298–299). What motive could Iago have? Cefalu argues that Iago’s ‘hyperbolic mind reading’ is the ‘cause of his seemingly motiveless evil’ (2013, 266). To understand Iago’s uncanny ability to interpret and access the thoughts of Othello, Roderigo, Desdemona and the others, Cefalu explores Iago’s ‘Theory of Mind’.32 He argues for an integration of cognitive literary criticism with the psychoanalytic, explaining that, while the former explains how characters think, the latter is better equipped to explain why. After postulating Iago’s ‘constitutional discontentedness’ as a motive for envy and cruelty, Cefalu concludes that ‘Iago doesn’t clearly know why he hates Othello’ (2013, 278), and 32

A phrase borrowed from philosophy and psychology to describe awareness of the existence of other minds and our knowledge of how to read other people’s minds.

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searches for reasons in his unconscious mind. That Othello does not know why the ‘demi-devil’ has ensnared him indicates that he cannot read Iago’s mind, although he once suspected that Iago ‘hadst shut up in thy brain / Some horrible conceit’ which he begged Iago to reveal: ‘If thou dost love me, / Show me thy thought’ (3.3.117–119). Othello dies convinced that the destiny that he believed he had overcome by surviving battle is no longer his to control: with this little arm and this good sword I have made my way through more impediments Than twenty times your stop: but O vain boast, Who can control his fate? ’Tis not so now. (5.2.260–263) Calvinist and pagan agree that Man is powerless to affect the destiny that God ordained, or the fate determined by the stars at birth. The Hermetic answer to Othello’s feeling that events are out of his control is that only mind can overcome fate because ‘Nous is able to do just as it wills’ (CH XII [8]).33 In Othello, Shakespeare invites us to consider the question of a man whose perfected soul should have ensured his salvation but whose mind proved susceptible to manipulation by a malevolent force. Where does the ultimate responsibility for the murder of Desdemona and the death of Othello lie? Jane Adamson has argued that the ‘central critical questions’ culminate in the last scene (1980, 11), where audience and reader are forced to judge Othello. She contrasts the opposed views of well-known critics such as Coleridge and Bradley who see Othello as a vulnerable but noble hero to be pitied as the victim of a man of ‘hellish cunning’, with those of others, like F. R. Leavis, who see him as the egotistical culpable agent of a devil (1980, 12). A Hermetic hermeneutic reconciles these opposed views, showing that Iago, the ‘demi-devil’ is both human being and wicked demon. Othello is both the pitiable victim of the human Iago and the culpable agent of the demon Iago. The separation of mind from reason which is so clearly explained in Book IV of the Corpus Hermeticum allows Shakespeare to create in Othello a man whose reason was compromised though his mind remained sane, in contrast to Lear, a man whose mind retained reason even in extremis. Lear had slowly to learn to know himself, while Othello rapidly lost touch with the man he once knew himself to be. In the next chapter I turn to The Tempest where Shakespeare introduces the Hermetic concept of death of the body as change and dissolution, and addresses the final epistemological problem – knowing reality. 33

Translation by Salaman et al. 2004.

Chapter 6

The Tempest: The Path to Immortality I cried ‘Is it a shade or man I see? And he replied: ‘No, not a man. Not now. I was once though.’

Dante to Virgil, Divina Commedia, Book I, Canto I, 75–77

∵ In The Tempest, the audience encounters in Prospero, Duke of Milan, a man who, after long years of contemplative study, has already ascended the Hermetic path to knowledge, and has almost attained the god-like status to which Ferdinand of Navarre aspired. Whereas in Love’s Labour’s Lost the audience farewells the young King Ferdinand as he resumes his delayed journey to knowledge and spiritual rebirth, and in King Lear, audience and reader accompany the old king along the painful way of Hermes to salvation, in Prospero, the audience meets a man in the prime of life, and one for whom the years of contemplation, which cost him his dukedom, are in the past. The story of Prospero begins in darkness, on a ship at sea, with ‘a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning’ (SD), like the Corpus Hermeticum itself, which begins with water ‘indescribably agitated’, that produced ‘an unspeakable wailing roar’ (CH I [4]). The Tempest may be understood at three levels: the literal, the allegorical and the metaphysical. But the discourse of each is not discrete; words are ambiguous, meanings dissolve across porous boundaries and Hermetic thought colours the play. A literal interpretation grounds the play in history that was not only of interest to the French court but also connects with Alfonso, and Ferdinand, King of Naples his son, who was initiated into the Hermetic paideia by the poet Lodovico Lazzarelli (see Chapter 1). Allegorical and metaphysical layers are both suffused with Hermetic thought. As an alchemical allegory, the structure becomes a trope for the purifying Hermetic ascent, while a metaphysical interpretation links the play to the discussion of truth and reality in Chapter XV (the Stobaean fragment) of Foix’s translation. These hermeneutic levels are reflected in criticism of the play which tends to be split amongst materialist critics who see the play literally in terms of ‘the racist and imperialist bases of English nationalism’ (Cohen 1985, 401), and who © Jane Everingham Nelson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004520608_009

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search the historic record for a literal storm and shipwreck; critics who support an alchemical reading, typified by Peggy Muñoz Simonds (1997, 538–570 passim); and a metaphysical or spiritual interpretation exemplified by Colin Still in Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, and G. Wilson Knight in Myth and Miracle. At the level of metaphor, the alchemical structure of The Tempest, which Simonds noted, serves as a trope for the Hermetic progress of the soul from turmoil to perfection, and allegorizes the violent tempest as part of that process. At the metaphysical or anagogical level this most beautiful and mysterious play may be read as an exploration of the life of the soul after the death of the body, where Shakespeare has met the challenge of dramatizing reality – in the Platonic sense of life outside the cave – as an illusion of the stage.1 A number of critics have observed the elusive, ethereal, dreamlike qualities of the play.2 These traits may come, I suggest, from the characters’ hovering between the corporeal life of the body in the (unreal) world we know as reality, and the life of the incorporeal yet strangely embodied and conscious souls in the world of the island that is simultaneously an illusion of the stage and the illusory ‘real’ world of sprites and shades that we may encounter after death. When interpreted as a play about the life of the immortal soul after the death of the body, The Tempest not only takes a position on the contemporary theological debate but is also open to the Platonic/Hermetic idea of the nature of reality itself. In this interpretation Prospero plays the part of hierophant initiating Ferdinand into the mysteries. For much of the play Prospero behaves like a mortal man with god-like powers, a virtual Hermetic magus, while in the Epilogue he hints at a Catholic Christianity when he begs our ‘indulgence’ to set him free, presumably from limbo. In short, a Hermetic hermeneutic interprets Prospero as a Christian Hermetist and, when the Epilogue is added to a performance, as a Christian Hermetist with Catholic sympathies. To put the arguments in context I begin with a word about known references to The Tempest in the seventeenth century, before discussing the literal and the metaphorical readings. I preface the metaphysical interpretation with a brief outline of the theological debate about the soul and finally turn to Prospero.

1 Plato proposed that the people we see as inhabiting the real material, corporeal and mortal world are but shadows or illusions in the cave. It is when we leave the cave to enter the spiritual incorporeal world of the immortals that we find reality or truth. The ultimate truth, some say the only truth, is God. Stobaeus explains this in the chapter added to the Corpus Hermeticum as Book XV. 2 For example: Colin Still, 1921; Don C Allen, 1960; D. G. James, 1967.

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The Play in Performance and Print

From the Revels Accounts, it is known that The Tempest ‘was presented at Whitehall before ye kinges Maiestie’ (Chambers 1923, II, 342) at Hallowmas in 1611. It was listed again in 1613 as one of several performances at court to celebrate the betrothal of the Princess Elizabeth Stuart to Frederick the Elector Palatine. There is no further mention until it appears on the Stationers’ Register in November 1623 and is placed first in the Folio collection of plays by William Shakespeare published that same month. As Stephen Orgel points out there is no reason to assume that 1611 was the first performance, although he believes it to be an early one (1987, 62), but Kositsky and Stritmatter argue from apparent parodic references to The Tempest in plays as early as 1603 (Darius) and 1605 (Ayrer’s Die Schӧne Sidea and Jonson’s Eastward Ho), that the date of writing could be as early as 1603 (2009, 3). Indeed, by uniting Naples and Milan, the play effects the reconciliation of the Italian city states lost to France by Henri IV’s great uncle, François I, making it appropriate entertainment for the French court of Henri IV and his second wife Marie de Medici of the famed Italian dynasty at any time after 1600. 2

A Literal Reading

In the latter part of the twentieth century, post-colonial sympathies and ideologies began to inform much of the criticism of the play. Prospero is ‘demonized’ and Caliban ‘sentimentalized’ as a victim robbed of his inheritance (McDonald 2007, 17). Francis Barker and Peter Hulme assert that ‘“English colonialism” provides The Tempest’s dominant discursive “contexts”’ (1985, 201). According to Russ McDonald, interest in the place of the Strachey letter and the Virginia pamphlets has become increasingly censorious and shrill ‘in delineating the text’s relation to the problems of cultural tyranny, political freedom and exploitation’ (2007, 16). Knowledge of the contemporary interest in English settlement (whether that led by Ralegh to Roanoke in 1585 recorded by Hariot, or later encounters with native Americans in Virginia or Jamestown) has intensified that interest. The effect has been, as McDonald points out, ‘a critical usurpation of the dramatic sovereignty of Prospero’, and by extension, an attack on earlier studies that are now considered ‘limited for their neglect of political issues’ (16 n.8). Critical opinions of Prospero, Ariel and especially of Caliban reflect the diversity of interpretations. Prospero, as Orgel says, is understood as ‘a noble ruler and mage, a tyrant and megalomaniac, a necromancer, a Neoplatonic scientist,

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a colonial imperialist, a civilizer’ (1987, 11). Orgel himself sees Prospero as an angry man whose memory of his past is ‘punctuated with expletives and retrospective rage’ (15) and repudiates the traditional interpretations of Prospero as a god. David Taylor also interprets Prospero as a tyrant as well as a ‘usurper’ (2012, 510), ‘sorcerer and patriarch’ (511), and ‘oppressor’ (517). Hallett Smith calls him ‘a rather testy and impatient man’ (1969, 10). Lytton Strachey finds Prospero ‘self-opinionated and sour’, a man whose gravity is ‘another name for pedantic severity’ (1969, 90). Jonathan Bate holds that ‘Prospero’s mistake was to pursue learning for its own sake rather than as a means to a political end’ (2008, 4). Bate also argues that Prospero himself is the source of Caliban’s baseness, and that ‘the only profit from the language lessons delivered to him by Prospero and Miranda is the ability to curse’ (2008, 7).3 In short, numerous contemporary critics find Prospero no god but a deeply flawed mortal who has enslaved the rightful owner of the isle, Caliban. The playbook terms Caliban ‘a salvage and deformed slave’, and Prospero calls him ‘[d]ull thing’ (1.2.285), ‘beast’ (4.1.140) and ‘demi-devil’ (5.1.272). In the hierarchical order of being, as understood by Shakespeare’s audiences, and also in Hermetic terms, Caliban is to Prospero as Dull is to Ferdinand of Navarre. Lacking reason, both are closer to the beasts, but unlike Dull, Caliban has feeling, which makes him subject to the irrational torments of matter, specifically lust, greed and general malice. His base nature makes him impervious to nurture and, dominated by the torment of lust, he attempts to violate Miranda without remorse. He is easily led by Stephano and Trinculo, also greedy, into the temptation to steal from and murder Prospero. Nevertheless, whether or not Caliban symbolizes Prospero’s own corporeal, bestial nature, he is clearly well under Prospero’s control. He resents his master, as we learn when Prospero remembers the ‘foul c­ onspiracy / Of the beast’ against his life (4.1.139–140). By nature, Caliban is subservient. Even when he attempts to free himself from Prospero’s control, it is only to give allegiance to Stephano whom he first revered as a celestial being. But Caliban is also half-devil. Like Iago, that other ‘demi-devil’ (5.1.272), Caliban is resistant to any ‘print of goodness’ (1.2.354), and although Shakespeare has ‘not honour’d [him] with / A human shape’ (1.2.283–284), the poet has endowed Caliban with personality and emotions. He is by no means so comely as Iago, but nor is he so wicked. At the end he is remorseful and sees the error of his ways: ‘What a thrice-double ass / Was I, to take this drunkard for a god, / And worship this dull fool!’ (5.1.295–297). 3 Even so, Bate had previously noted the beauty of Caliban’s language, for example when Caliban assures Stephano that ‘the isle is full of noises / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not’ (3.2.133–134).

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In Hermetic terms Caliban is visible, corporeal and base, lacking intellect and ruled by his senses; he is either mortal, like his mother, or immortal like his demon father. By contrast, Ariel resists a literal, material interpretation being invisible, incorporeal and from the ethereal world of the immortal sprites to which he will return after delivering Prospero’s promise of ‘calm seas [and] auspicious gales’ (5.1.314). It is Ariel who ‘perform’d to point the tempest’ (1.2.194) as Prospero bade him. Vivid accounts of wild storms running ships aground near the Bermudas in 1609 brought back to England by those attempting to colonize Virginia have been suggested as a source for The Tempest. Despite ‘a long line of literary storms which lie behind the play’ (Kermode 1954, xxvii n.3), the Bermuda event is traditionally used to date Shakespeare’s impulse to write the play to 1610. Orgel for example notes that the play is ‘almost certainly indebted’ to the 1610 letter from Sir William Strachey describing the circumstances of a voyage to Virginia where ships were blown off course and wrecked in Bermuda (1987, 62).4 However, that Strachey’s letter was any kind of source has been disputed on the one hand by Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky, and hotly defended on the other, by Alden T. Vaughan. In 2007 Stritmatter and Kositsky argued that Strachey was a notorious plagiarist and that the letter arrived too late to have been even a manuscript source for Shakespeare (453–461 passim). In 2009 Kositsky and Stritmatter, deploring the dominance of Americanist readings of The Tempest, welcomed the renewed interest in the Mediterranean contexts of the play and proposed Richard Eden’s 1555 translation of Peter Martyr’s De orbe novo decades (1516) as Shakespeare’s ‘prime source of New World knowledge’ (4).5 Eden, they argue, through repeatedly calling on the analogy between Aeneas and the Renaissance voyagers, ‘folds together the Mediterranean and colonial frames of reference that are also conflated in The Tempest’ (2009, 3). Eden’s analogy with Aeneas the voyager may have led Shakespeare to Aeneas’ Mediterranean voyage narrated in Book VI of the Aeneid. Certainly, 4 The letter was first published in 1625 in Purchas his Pilgrimes as a “True Reportory of the wreck and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight, upon and from the islands of the Bermudas, his coming to Virginia and the estate of the colony then and after under the government of the Lord La Warre, July 15, 1610”. 5 Kositsky and Stritmatter note that Eden’s version of Martyr’s narrative draws examples from Virgil’s Aeneid, and from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, both of which provided Eden with substantial material and ‘a copious vocabulary of natural history’, as well as names found in The Tempest (2009, 6). Like Stritmatter, Michael Brennan praises Richard Hakluyt’s 1587 Paris edition of Martyr’s works, with its dedication to Ralegh and its appreciation of ‘Martyr’s first-hand accounts of exploration and conquest’ (1996–97, 240). Like Hakluyt, Montaigne also drew on Martyr and Eden, and both provide credible sources for Shakespeare’s play; for example, the name Caliban is believed to be derived from Montaigne’s essay On Cannibals.

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Shakespeare’s debt to Virgil in The Tempest has long been known (Still 1921, 16–33; Whittington 2014, 98–120). It is possible that the storm which opens The Tempest, engineered by Prospero’s god-like powers, is a conflation of the watery darkness that opens the Corpus Hermeticum created by Pymander, and the storm that blew Aeneas’ fleet off course and landed the Trojans in Carthage.6 In that tale the storm was whipped up by the goddess Juno, and calmed by Neptune. The connection with the Aeneid is clearly deliberate as there are several rather forced references to the widow Dido and Carthage in the play (2.1.73; 2.1.80). Latinists in Shakespeare’s audience would know that, after leaving Carthage, the Trojan fleet dropped anchor at Cumae near Naples where Aeneas sought the means safely to visit Dis in the underworld and speak with his father. There he saw the shades of drowned sailors he had known in life, such as Orontes and Palinurus. And there he saw and wept for the shade of Dido amongst the other shades waiting in the afterlife. It was this episode in Book VI of the Aeneid which both gave the pagan Virgil his status among Christians and provided the model for Dante’s meeting with Virgil in the Inferno. The Mediterranean voyage from Carthage to Naples seems to have been strategically chosen to remind the audience of Aeneas’ voyage from Carthage to Naples and his visit to the underworld. Kositsky and Stritmatter go on to argue that Eden’s translation of Martyr provided a ‘historical template for the sibling contretemps between Prospero and Antonio’ (2009, 6). As Kositsky records, Martyr dedicated his book to Ascanio Sforza (1455–1505), youngest son of the first Sforza Duke of Milan, whose brother Lodovico seized de facto power in Milan before being deposed by the French forces of Louis XII in 1499. Kositsky argues that Shakespeare’s interest in these intrigues is ‘confirmed by his adoption of the specific names Alonso and Ferdinand for two Tempest protagonists; both names were traditional among the Aragonese in-laws of the Sforzas’ (2009, 7). Pursuing this line of research opens the history of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century struggle of the French to dominate Spanish Naples and Milan, and provides an even more direct and specific source for Shakespeare’s play. In 1460, the French Duke Jean II d’Anjou lost Naples to Ferdinand I, the son of Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragon, who was supported by Alessandro Sforza (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 9–10). This is the Ferdinand of Aragon, King of Naples whom Lazzarelli instructed in the way of Hermes. Milan, which since 6 Other sources which may have informed Shakespeare’s dramatization of the storm at sea include Erasmus’ Naufragium, and the ‘great storm at sea’ which Pantagruel met in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (Book IV, XVIII).

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1277 had been in the possession of Louis XII’s great grandmother’s family, the Visconti, was lost to the Sforza in 1450. It was Louis XII (1462–1515), who conquered Milan in 1499 and Naples in 1501. Naples was subsequently conquered by Ferdinand III in 1504, and Milan by Massimilian Sforza in 1512. Inheriting his childless uncle’s crown in 1515, the 20-year-old François I (1494–1547), great uncle of Henri IV of France, returned Milan to France in 1515, only to lose it to the Sforza in 1522. His efforts to reclaim Milan for France in 1525 led to huge loss of life, a catastrophic defeat, two years as a hostage of the Spanish and the eventual exchange of his two little sons for his freedom. All this would have been well-known to the English, as Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, was briefly Queen of France as the third wife of Louis XII, and Anne Boleyn, the queen’s mother, was educated in the French court where she became the friend of Marguerite of Navarre, Henri IV’s grandmother. Moreover, Lord Strange, whose company was the first to stage plays later attributed to Shakespeare on the London stage, and his younger brother, Will Stanley, were descended from Henry VII through Mary Tudor, Queen of France and later, Duchess of Suffolk. Any in England who knew of the humiliating loss suffered by François I, might see deep political and religious implications for the French in The Tempest. In the play the Spanish King of Naples apologises to the Duke of Milan and is forgiven; then the kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Milan are united peacefully through what may be seen as an alchemical or Hermetic marriage. 3 A Metaphorical Reading: The Storm as Allegory, the Structure of the Play as Alchemical The storm, which is a convenient plot device to bring the characters together after the passing of many years, has been subjected to a wide range of interpretations. In addition to the documented records and literary sources just mentioned, the Corpus Hermeticum supplies details of a vision which Pymander granted to Hermes that may have provided a source to Shakespeare.7 In several respects Ariel’s account of the storm and his role in it, particularly his description of the flames flickering up the masts and along the yards, resembles Pymander’s vision. Ariel reports to Prospero how well he has obeyed his commands and created a spectacle:

7 Jean Jacquot has made a similar claim for George Chapman, Shakespeare’s contemporary, who, he argues, was inspired to translate Homer in a vision redolent of the appearance of Pymander to Hermes Trismegistus in Book I of the Corpus Hermeticum (1951, 74 n.30)

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In every cabin, I flam’d amazement: sometime I’d divide And burn in many places; on the topmast, The yards and boresprit, would I flame distinctly, Then meet and join. (1.2.197–201) Pymander gave Hermes a vision of: Untempered fire [which] leapt up from the watery nature to the height above. The fire was nimble and piercing and active as well, and because the air was light it followed after spirit and rose up to the fire away from earth and water so that it seemed suspended from the fire. (CH I [4])8 Simonds, however, interprets Shakespeare’s treatment of the storm as an allegory of the alchemical process (1997–98, 538–570 passim). John Mebane also notes that alchemists used the word ‘tempest’ as a metaphor for ‘the boiling process which removes impurities from base metal and facilitates its transmutation into gold’ (1989, 181). The alchemical process is analogous to the ‘way of Hermes’ which led the contemplative person from the turmoil and corruption of the dark material world to ascend by degrees, shedding the dross of the corporeal world at each level until purified and perfected in soul and mind; having achieved gnōsis, the initiate can be spiritually reborn, incorporeal and immortal.9 The analogy with spiritual alchemy supports the argument that The Tempest is principally concerned with the nexus of Christian and Hermetic teachings about immortality, that is, with the life of the purified and perfected soul/mind after the death of the body.10 8 9

10

The flame, mentioned in Eden’s History of Travel, as St Elmo’s fire (Kermode, 1987, 22 n.200) is also known as Hermes’ fire. It should be reinforced here that, unlike spiritual alchemy, practical alchemy plays no part in religious Hermetism, and for that matter is specifically refuted in the first Rosicrucian manifesto, Fama Fraternitatis. Shakespeare makes no direct mention of alchemists, as Lyly does for instance in Gallathea or Jonson in his satire The Alchemist, but he understands the alchemical process and in The Tempest employs it as a structural trope. Simonds identifies nine stages of the alchemical process the first three of which allegorize the events of the opening scenes of the play. However, terms with alchemical significance are not confined to the storm, and a recognizable alchemical discourse is threaded throughout the play. The first stage of the alchemical process, the separation or divisio, parts the targeted ship from the rest of the fleet, but it also arguably separates the souls of the drowned from their bodies; the next stage of salsatura or marination sees the king and his courtiers plunge into the ocean ‘in the cycle of solve et coagula’ (Abraham 179). Lyndy Abraham explains that sea water is a synonym for the prima materia or mercurial water

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The English court, in common with most of the courts of Europe, took a keen interest in the practice of alchemy (Parry 2011, 71). The court audience would, I think, have delighted in recognizing the nuanced allusions to the alchemical process in The Tempest, and many would have understood that process as a trope of spiritual gnōsis. For those in the audience versed in alchemy, the courtiers emerging from their drenching with their garments ‘being rather new dyed than stained with salt water’ (1.2.61–62) immediately references the alchemical arcanum, the mercurial water, the water of life which does not wet the hands (Abraham 1998, 213). Similarly, the marinating and drowning of the king in sea water, and his subsequent resurrection, is recognisable as part of the process of the making of the Philosopher’s Stone. Lyndy Abraham explains that ‘the kingdom is renewed when the king follows the alchemical philosopher’s advice to have the opposite sexes marry’ and ‘the philosopher’s son is born, himself a king, stronger and purer than his father’ (1998, 112). Hearing from Gonzalo that the king and his party have been wandering around in a ‘maze’, ‘through forthrights and meanders’ (3.3.2–3), a court audience would recognize that the maze signifies the alchemical labyrinth, ‘a place of confusion, geographical or mental’ (Abraham 113) for the Court Party. They are in Prospero’s power. It is only when Prospero decides to dissolve the charm (5.1.64) that sense and reason are restored, they ‘learn to discriminate between the true and the false’ and emerge from the ‘labyrinth of illusion’ (Abraham 113). In this scenario it is not hard to cast Prospero as the alchemical philosopher, Alonso as the once unregenerate king, a reborn Ferdinand and the already perfect Miranda enacting the marriage between opposite sexes, and to envisage that Ferdinand of Naples will be a stronger, purer king than Alonso. In short, which is the solvent for the stone. ‘The alchemical king (the raw matter of the stone)’, ‘must be marinated in sea water before he is rescued and brought to dry land (signifying the coagula)’ (Abraham 1998, 179). The main stages of the opus are the nigredo, or blackness which represents putrefaction or distraction (Simonds 1997–98, 542); the iridescent peacock green when the heat increases, the sulphur and mercury change colour and the metals become white hot (the albedo or silver stage), and finally the rubedo stage when the metal becomes pure red gold. All are recognizable in the play: nigredo is captured in Miranda’s words: ‘The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch’ (1.2.3). The albedo stage, ‘symbolized by all things pure, white or silver’ (Abraham 5) surfaces in Ferdinand’s protest that ‘the white cold virgin snow upon my heart’ (4.1.55) will curb his dalliance, followed immediately by the rainbow of Iris’ ‘wat’ry arch’ (4.1.71), and Juno’s peacocks (4.1.74) which supply the iridescent green; later in that same scene Ariel calls one of the hounds by the name of ‘Silver’ (4.1.256). At the very end, when grief has been replaced by the joy of finding that which was lost, Prospero forgives all whether they were penitent or not and Gonzalo urges that the whole amazing episode be recorded ‘With gold on lasting pillars’ (5.1.208).

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viewed in this way, the whole play becomes an enactment of the alchemical process and the trope par excellence of Ferdinand’s spiritual rebirth. 4

A Metaphysical Reading: The Immortal Soul

The concept of an immortal human soul that survives the death of the body may be traced back to Plato where for example Socrates asks Simmias whether death is not ‘the separation of soul and body’ (Phaedo [64]). For Plato, the soul was the true self imprisoned for a time in an alien body. There is ‘no specific teaching on it in the Bible beyond an underlying assumption of some sort of afterlife’.11 However, a doctrine of life after death that is surprisingly similar to Hermetism entered Judaism in the period between the testaments, that is in the early years of the Christian era, at approximately the period that the Corpus Hermeticum was being written. It teaches ‘that every human being is a composite of two entities, a material body and a nonmaterial soul; that the soul. . . departs from the body at death; that though the body disintegrates in the grave, the soul by its very nature is indestructible; and that it continues to exist for eternity’.12 The author of this entry remarks that ‘not even a hint of this dualistic view of the human being appears in the [Hebrew] Bible’ (2000, 200). However, this concept of mankind as twofold is central to Hermetic thought. The idea that death is the separation of soul from body, which originated with Plato, the idea that the soul itself is immortal and indestructible and that in death the body is not destroyed but only changed, recycled back into the elements, these ideas are the substance of Book VIII of the Corpus Hermeticum and are incorporated into Book XV of Foix de Candale’s Pymander (678). Over time, the soul came to be regarded as an image of God, and St Augustine endowed it with memory, intellect and will, but the idea was not generally accepted until the Middle Ages. The Christian Church was divided over whether the soul died with the body to be resurrected on the Day of Judgment when it would face retribution. The Catholic Church invented interim stages known as limbo for the guiltless and the unbaptized, and Purgatory where sinners had to spend time until purified for heaven (Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, 1030–1032).13 The Reformed Church countered with the idea of ‘soul sleep’, or 11 12 13

Dictionary of the Christian Church, p. 1520. Encyclopedia of Judaism, 2000, I, p. 200). Limbo is a theological invention of the Catholic Church, being that place where unregenerated souls, by which is meant those who die guiltless or unbaptised, can ‘enjoy

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the belief that the soul sleeps until the resurrection. Most commonly, Christians are taught that the soul is immortal, but that it dies with the body to be resurrected with the body on Judgment Day; most Protestants hold that judgment follows immediately upon the death of the body. Hermes, by contrast, taught that ‘unlike any other living thing on earth, mankind is twofold – in the body mortal but immortal in the essential man’ (CH I [15]). Foix de Candale elaborates the idea in his commentary on Section 11 of Book XV, the Stobaean fragment that is devoted to a discussion of death (678). As a Christian, Foix de Candale distinguishes the death of mortal beasts without soul from that of Man whose soul, inspired by the breath of God when he made Man in his image, lives on, so long as death has separated it from the contaminating flesh (679). In his commentary, Foix compares Stobaeus’ fragment to Book VIII of the Corpus Hermeticum (679). There Hermes tells Tat: ‘we must speak about soul and body and say in what way the soul is immortal’ (VIII [1]). Death, he claims, is not destruction but only change, since the material body is part of the cosmos and ‘none of the things in the cosmos is destroyed’ (CH VIII [1]). He explains that at death the mortal, corporeal body is recycled into the immortal, indestructible cosmic elements; that is why nothing is ever destroyed. In Book XI, Mind (Pymander or God) also refutes the idea that death is any kind of destruction and explains: ‘Death is not the destruction of things that have been combined but the dissolution of their union’ (CH XI [15]). Hermetism therefore defines the death of the body as change and dissolution into its original cosmic elements. Shakespeare appears to be referencing these ideas when Ariel comforts Ferdinand. He refers to the death and dissolution of the drowned king as a ‘seachange’ (1.2.403), and later, when Prospero disappears the pageant, he foretells that the illusion, like the world and us who are but dreams, will all ‘dissolve’ (4.1.154). The mortal body may dissolve and change, but the immortal soul lives on. However, neither Hermes nor Foix in his commentary addresses the problem of whether the individual soul continues to exist as a separate embodied conscious entity. Both Nock (I, 85) and Scott (II, 190) suggest that, by omitting the issue, the passage in Book VIII implicitly denies that individual consciousness survives the death of the body. For an answer to the question of whether the part of the conscious mind that accounts for one’s personality and identity, that is the memory and imagination, will survive the death of the body, we must turn to Ficino in his Platonic full ­natural happiness’ though excluded from ‘supernatural beatitude’ (Dictionary of the Christian Church, 982). In Dante’s Divina Commedia, limbo is the first circle of Hell where Virgil, who has been living with other great poets including Homer, offers himself as guide to Dante.

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Theology. David Leech notes that as a Christian, ‘Ficino also requires an afterlife embodiment, and not only because of an obligation to defend the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead’ (2011, 309). Ficino’s thinking about a soul possessed of memory appears to reconcile Plato on the separated soul with Hermes’ teaching on the soul as incorporeal and ethereal and with the Christian notion of a soul resurrected in a recognizable body.14 It is this marriage of Hermetic doctrine and Christian belief which underpins Shakespeare’s thinking in The Tempest. Shakespeare may also have found sources for this idea in Virgil’s Aeneid and in Dante’s Divina Commedia. Aeneas encountered recognizable embodied souls on his visit to the underworld in Book VI, as we saw, and Dante tells how the long dead Virgil acting as hierophant escorted him through the Inferno. In The Tempest, the men we saw go down with the sinking ship, the souls whom Miranda saw ‘dash’d all to pieces’ (1.2.8) appear before us in fresh clothes, walking about and wondering at the isle, their different personalities intact. Can they be real? Theodore Spencer observes that The Tempest is Shakespeare’s ‘final treatment of the difference between appearance and reality’ (1942, 43). I make the case for a metaphysical interpretation of The Tempest, both in the discussion it prompts about the nature of reality, and in what a Hermetic hermeneutic of the play implies about the life of the immortal soul after the death of the body. Chapter XV in the French translation and Commentaires by Foix15 opens with Hermes telling Tat: ‘It is not possible for Man (being an imperfect animal, made up of imperfect parts) to speak with confidence about reality’ (649).16 Man, he explains, is imperfect because he is made up of a mix of the cosmic elements, although each element is real when unmixed: ‘Fire is only fire and no other thing, earth is earth and no other thing: air is only air, but our bodies 14

Since Ficino believed Hermes preceded Plato, he sees Plato as the debtor. Following Casaubon’s revelation in 1614, it became obvious that the reverse was true and that the authors of the Hermetic texts drew on Plato. 15 Book XV (649–683) consists of three fragments of writing by Stobaeus and one from the Suda, which Turnebus added to his fourteen chapters of the Corpus in 1554, and which Foix de Candale included as Chapter XV in the French translation dedicated to Marguerite de Valois in 1579. Scott believes Turnebus found the texts he included in Trincavelli’s edition of the Florilegium published in Venice in 1535–36 (III, 305). 16 ‘De la verité, ô Tat, il n’est possible l’homme (estant animal imparfaict, composé de membres imparfaicts . . .) en parler seurement’ (XV, 1, 649). Scott explains that the same Greek word translates as ‘true’ for a proposition and also as ‘real’ for a thing, and that in this fragment from Stobaeus the word signifies ‘real’ and ‘reality’ (III, 309). Foix has chosen to translate the Greek as ‘verité’ or truth, but as the rest of the chapter makes clear, he is discussing reality.

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are made up of all of them’ (649).17 Shakespeare draws on this idea when Ariel warns the king: ‘I and my fellows / Are ministers of Fate: the elements, / Of whom your swords are temper’d’ (3.3.60–62).18 It is precisely because they are elemental that Ariel and his fellow ministers of Fate are invulnerable. It is the clearest statement we have that Ariel’s ministers, the Shapes, and later the goddesses, the nymphs and the reapers are incorporeal spirits from the other world – the world of reality. Leaving aside the obvious difficulty of how we (unreal, material, corporeal mortals) in the audience can see Ariel and his company, we share in the stage illusion that the King and the Court Party are able to see the invisible Ariel when he is disguised as a Harpy. When Alonso appears, we should ask: ‘Is it a shade or man I see?’ as Dante asked Virgil. The tenor of the question is to know whether Alonso and the others have crossed over. As soon as we confront that question, the play shimmers with ambivalence. What is visible is unreal. Only the invisible is real. As Hermes explains to Tat, it is the Mind of God, who is real and invisible, that makes visibility (CH V [1]). What of Prospero? Opinions are divided over whether Prospero is a god, a Hermetic magus or a mortal man. Traditional critics tend to see The Tempest as the apotheosis of Shakespeare’s career and Prospero as speaking for the playwright. Wilson Knight for example suggests two readings: in one, Prospero becomes ‘the “God” of the Tempest universe’, while in the other ‘Prospero is not God but Shakespeare’ (1947, 1985, 25, 26). Spencer also describes Prospero on his enchanted island as ‘like a god, controlling the world of nature and the elements’ (1942, 46). Wilson Knight suggests that Shakespeare was projecting his own spiritual experience into the play which ‘traces [. . .] the past progress of his own soul’ (1947, 23). Frank Kermode observes that Prospero’s Art functions as an exercise of ‘the supernatural powers of the holy adept’ (1987, xlvii) and is symbolic of ‘the world of mind’, not ‘the world of sense’ which Caliban inhabits (xlviii). Kermode’s comments on the worlds of mind and of sense resonate with Hermetic doctrine about understanding and sensation to be found in Book IX; his reference to the powers of the Adept acquired after contemplation also chime with Hermetic teaching. It is, claims Kermode, ‘the practical application of a discipline of which the primary requirements are learning and temperance, and of which the mode is contemplation’ (xlviii).19 In support of 17 18 19

‘Le feu est seulement feu et rien autre chose: la terre est mesme terre et rien autre chose: l’air est le mesme air, mais nos corps sont composés de toutes ces choses’ (649). I follow Kermode’s punctuation and note, rendering the meaning: ‘We are the elements of which your swords are tempered; therefore they cannot hurt us’ (1987, 89 n.61). It is worth recalling that it was knowledge of self and temperance which Lear had to learn, and that the Corpus Hermeticum lists ignorance and intemperance as two of the irrational torments of matter to be overcome on the way of Hermes to spiritual rebirth.

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his argument, Kermode cites briefly from Agrippa. The reference is drawn from a longer passage in Book III Chapter III of Three Books of Occult Philosophy where Agrippa describes ‘what manner of person a magician ought to be’: Therefore it is meet that we who endeavour to attain to so great a height should especially meditate of two things: first, how we should leave carnal affections, frail sense and material passions; second, by what way and means we may ascend to an intellect pure and conjoined with the powers of the gods, without which we shall never happily ascend to the scrutiny of secret things, and to the power of wonderful workings, or miracles: for in these dignification consists wholly, which nature, desert, and a certain religious art do make up. (448) Agrippa is alluding to the means by which the aspirational man should contemplate the way to leave his corporeal or mortal entity and find the way to ascend to the Mind of God and acquire god-like powers. His words seem to provide a model for the character of Prospero. D. G. James locates Agrippa’s magician in the context of ‘the revival of Hermetic and neo-Platonist thought in the Renaissance [and of] attempts in the sixteenth century to syncretize these teachings with Christianity itself’ (1967, 60). Like John Vyvyan, James sources the revival to Ficino, and is also fully aware of Pico’s influence on sixteenth century thought, particularly in the distinction Pico makes between daemonic magic, and ‘that which properly belonged to a Christian magus’ (1967, 54).20 But whereas Michael Keefer makes a cogent argument for Agrippa’s being a Christian Hermetist (1988, 622), James, perhaps believing Agrippa’s reputation as a black magician, sees Shakespeare’s concept of Prospero, the ‘holy and priestly magus’ (1967, 61) as a reaction against Agrippa.21 Orgel calls Prospero an ‘illusionist’ (1987, 47), an ‘enchanter’ whose powers are ‘explicitly theatrical’ in ways that align the magician with the playwright (50). However, he is critical of those who refer to the magician as a ‘Renaissance scientist’, and those who interpret the play as allegory and find alchemical metaphors in the structure, as Simonds does (51).22 20 21 22

It is of interest that James acknowledges as invaluable the help of both C. S. Lewis, the noted Christian scholar, and Frances Yates whose Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition he recognizes as ‘a work of profound learning’ (viii). In Chapter 2 Agrippa’s thought was sourced to the fifteenth century translations of the Corpus Hermeticum. His books on occult philosophy were an important influence on John Dee. Hallett Smith claims that a Jacobean audience would have regarded Prospero as a sort of scientist whose science came from books (1969, 5); Simonds describes The Tempest as ‘a theatrical exercise in alchemical transmutation’ (1997–98, 541).

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Simonds interprets Prospero as both a magician and an alchemist who has the goal of restoring the Golden Age or a biblical Eden – in this reading, Ariel, as his messenger, represents the volatile Mercurius (1997, 539). Earlier she had seen Prospero as ‘Shakespeare’s Renaissance analogue to Orpheus’ (1995, 63). Her opinion that Shakespeare is ‘primarily interested in . . . reform during an age of Reformation’ (1995, 61) strikes a sympathetic note with the current argument. Simonds contrasts the music that fills the isle, the ‘sounds and sweet airs’ (3.2.134), with the discordant ‘cacophony of baying dogs’ (1995, 76) and links the former to Apollo and the world of the intellect with the latter’s Dionysian world of discordant passions. In describing the harmony achieved in this play, Simonds turns to Book XVIII of the Corpus Hermeticum and quotes Hermes’ advice that to achieve harmony you ‘should tune the inward lyre’ (1995, 88 n.13).23 Mebane also references Hermes, claiming Prospero’s Art is both Hermetic and theatrical – magic that not only ‘creates visions’ but also ‘strives to effect moral and spiritual reform’ (179–180). James calls Prospero a ‘priestly and spiritual magician’ (1967, 60), while Kermode views him as a neoPlatonic mage with the powers of the ‘holy adept’ (1987, xlvii). For Kermode, Prospero is a prince and a scholar (xlviii). He likens Prospero to King James whom Francis Bacon lauded, saying that the king: standeth invested with that triplicitie which in great veneration was ascribed to the ancient Hermes, the power and fortune of a King, the knowledge and illumination of a Priest, and the learning and universalitie of a Philosopher.24 In effect, Kermode is comparing Shakespeare’s conception of Prospero to Hermes Trismegistus. The thrust of this body of criticism is towards an extraordinary conflation of Prospero with Hermes Trismegistus and with his creator, Shakespeare himself. Prospero’s ‘god-like’ behaviour, seen in his power to control the elements as well as the minds of his daughter, other men, and the beings of the isle, is reminiscent of King Ferdinand of Navarre who aspired to god-like status to be achieved through an ascetic life and contemplative study. Prospero speaks of his own years of ‘being transported / And rapt in secret studies’ (1.2.76–77), 23 24

Foix omitted Book XVIII from his translation. If Shakespeare is referencing the line from Book XVIII as Simonds suggests, the inference is that he has access to another edition of the Corpus Hermeticum. Kermode quotes from Cleland, The Institution of a Young Noble Man, but it was Bacon who wrote the lines in the dedication to the king of the First Book of The Advancement of Learning, 1605.

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dedicating his time ‘To closeness and the bettering of my mind’ (1.2.90). The Adept who can ‘Put the wild waters in this roar’ and also ‘allay them’ by his art (1.2.1–2) deserves the epithet god-like. But what is God like? The Corpus supplies an answer, namely that God ‘is invisible and entirely visible’ (CH V). While God himself is not-begotten, unimagined and invisible, ‘in presenting images of all things he is seen through all of them and in all of them’ (V [2]). God himself can only be seen with the ‘mind’s eye’ (V [2]), that is, with understanding and imagination: This discourse I shall also deliver to you in full, O Tat, lest you go uninitiated into the mysteries of the god who is greater than any name. You must understand how something that seems invisible to the multitude will become entirely visible to you. Actually, if it were invisible it would not be [. . .]. Also, while remaining invisible because it always is, it makes all other things visible. (CH V [1]) Hermes’ words explain how an invisible God makes himself visible to us, and how while remaining invisible himself, he makes other things visible to us; this is the secret or mystery of Hermetic initiation (Nock, 1960, 58). It is a secret which Prospero imparts to Ferdinand as he celebrates the betrothal with a masque. In Act 3.3 Shakespeare gives dramatic substance to this metaphysical idea of invisibility when the stage direction positions Prospero above the stage ‘invisible’ (3.3.SD 18), directing and orchestrating the action.25 Below Prospero in this scene ‘Strange Shapes’ bring in a banquet, dance to ‘solemn and strange music’ and invite the King to eat (SD 17). Still invisible, Prospero watches as Ariel obeys his thoughts. Disguised as a Harpy, Ariel makes the banquet vanish in thunder and lightning, before accusing the men, condemning them to ‘Ling’ring perdition – worse than any death / Can be at once’ (3.3.77–78), and vanishing to the sound of thunder.26 The words ‘ling’ring perdition’ echo a phrase – ‘eternele perdition’– which occurs in Foix de Candale’s commentary on Section 10 of 25 26

There is no reason to doubt that the stage direction is authorial. The Tempest is notable for the number and detail of its stage directions. The choice of ‘invisible’ is presumed to be authorial as it is present in the First Folio and all subsequent Folios. In Shakespeare’s Mystery Play Still draws attention to ‘a notable resemblance’ between the banquet presented to the Court Party in The Tempest (3.3.17 SD), before the Harpy (Ariel) made it vanish ‘with a quaint device’ (3.3.53 SD), and the banquets in the underworld described by Virgil as ‘furnished out with regal magnificence’, which ‘those who, while life remained, had been at enmity with their brothers’ were debarred from touching by the chief of the Furies (1921, 31). In fact, Still notes ‘a striking and sustained resemblance

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Chapter XV (678).27 The context of the phrase in the play where it is directed at the ‘three men of sin’ (3.3.53) is identical to the context in Foix’s commentary, where he is listing the sins which deserve this awful punishment. Hermes tells Tat how difficult it is to know God and how impossible for a visible, corporeal being to describe an invisible, incorporeal being. One is transient, the other eternal; one is created in the imagination, the other is real. Doubtless we can see the corporeal with our eyes and what the eye can see, the tongue can tell, but that which is incorporeal cannot be comprehended by our senses and is seen only in the mind’s eye. In the next scene, invisible again, Prospero joins Ariel and watches Stephano and Trinculo tempted to steal from him, before setting his spirits ‘in shape of dogs and hounds’ (4.1.254 SD) to hunt them about. The paragraph from Book V quoted above concludes with Hermes telling Tat: The very entity that makes visibility does not make itself visible; what is not itself begotten; what presents images of everything present to the imagination. For there is imagination only of things begotten. Coming to be is nothing but imagination [1]. Clearly, the one who alone is unbegotten is also unimagined and invisible, but in presenting images of all things he is seen through all of them and in all of them; he is seen especially by those whom he wished to see him. (V [2])28 In his commentary on this passage, Foix explains: ‘So every phantasy which develops in the mind is only the living depiction of the thing which the eye or some other bodily sense wishes to imagine’ (195).29 William Jones clarifies the notion in these terms: ‘all bodies and their qualities exist, indeed, to every wise and useful purpose, but exist only as far as they are perceived’ (in Scott II, 159).30

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between the story of the Court Party, initiation records in general, and Virgil’s Aeneid VI in particular’ (16). The theological meaning of ‘perdition’ is complemented in French by a second nautical meaning, where it signifies a ship in distress, breaking up or driven ashore (Harrap). Shakespeare uses the word with this meaning when he assures Miranda that no harm has come to the souls on board the wreck ‘not so much perdition as a hair’ (1.2.30). Foix de Candale’s translation of passage [1] reads: ‘Comme toujours estant, et manifestant, il n’est pas manifesté, il n’est pas engendre, mais faict en l’imagination toutes choses imaginables, de tant que imagination n’est que des seules choses engendrées, a cause qu’imagination n’est que generation’ (192). ‘Toute vision qui le faict donc en la pensée n’est que viue representation de la chose, que loeil ou autre sens corporel desire concevoir’ (195). The quotation is attributed to Sir William Jones and is taken from Hargrave Jennings, The Rosicrucians (147) (Scott II, 159).

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As Walter Scott explains in his commentary on the passage, the phantasiai or fleeting images presented to the imagination signify ‘an opinion formed in the mind as the result of an impression on the senses’ (II, 159).31 This idea is given dramatic substance when we hear that each member of the Court Party either perceives the isle differently or else perceives a different isle. Adrian and Gonzalo, both good men, experience the island as ‘of subtle, tender and delicate temperance’ (2.1.41), where ‘The air breathes upon us most sweetly’ (2.1.45) and the grass is ‘lush and lusty’ (1.2.51). By contrast, Sebastian and Antonio, usurper and would-be usurper, see and smell the isle as ‘rotten’ (2.1.46) ‘perfum’d by a fen’ (2.1.47), where the grass is ‘tawny’ brown (2.1.52). In short, we are inclined to doubt that the isle has any objective reality. The apparently material world of the isle, and by extension our world, is an illusion like the shadows in Plato’s cave, and the only reality is incorporeal and invisible. The ultimate truth, some say the only truth, is God, as Stobaeus explains. God/Pymander, both invisible and immortal, is also Mind, and Hermes asserts that for mankind ‘Nothing is more god-like than , nothing more active nor more capable of uniting humans to the gods and gods to humans; mind is the good demon’ (CH X [23]).32 In the Perfect Discourse, Hermes tells Asclepius that the highest part of Man is his intellect comprised of soul, consciousness, spirit and reason or nous that brings him closer to the Mind of God or Nous. Hermes goes on to say that these four higher order elements are matched by ‘four [lower order] faculties of thought, consciousness, memory and foresight by means of which [Man] knows all things divine’ ([11]). It is clear that each one of these faculties plays a part in Shakespeare’s representation of Prospero’s mind and in his control over the minds of others. Thought includes ‘incorporeal imagination’ (CH XI [18]), which travels at the speed of light, and animates Ariel. When Prospero summons him, he calls ‘Come with a thought’ (4.1.164) and Ariel replies ‘Thy thoughts I cleave to’ (4.1.165). He is capable of instantly carrying out anything that Prospero thinks. He can ‘fetch dew / From the still-vex’d Bermoothes’ (1. 2.228–229), and ‘drink the air before me, and return / Or ere your pulse twice beat’ (5.1.102–103). As Mind tells Hermes: in incorporeal imagination things are located differently. Consider what encompasses all things, that nothing bounds the incorporeal, that nothing is quicker not more powerful. [18] 31 32

Scott consulted Plato, Sophist (264 A) for this definition. Foix de Candale translates: ‘de laquelle n’est chose plus divine ny de plus grand efficace, ny qui plus conioigne les hommes aux Dieux et les Dieux aux hommes’ (407).

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Consider this for yourself: command your soul to travel to India, and it will be there faster than your command. Command it to cross over to the ocean, and again it will quickly be there, not as having passed from place to place but simply as being there. (CH XI [19]) Thinking at the speed of light is one of the powers that makes Man god-like. It is Ariel who instantly brings the thoughts of Prospero’s mind into visible reality, whether it be in raising the tempest, creating sounds and sweet airs, presenting a banquet, bringing fellow spirits from the aether, or joining with Prospero, both of them invisible, to tempt, confound and punish Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban. In Hermetic terms, Ariel embodies pure intellect and is without empathetic feeling, although he knows what it is. When he tells Prospero about the condition of the king and his followers, the three men of sin having lost their reason, and the others being ‘Brimful of sorrow and dismay’ (5.1.14), he reveals that, were he human, he would feel compassion for them: Ariel: Prospero: Ariel:

. . . if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender. Dost thou think so spirit?’ Mine would sir, were I human. (5.1.18–20)

In Hermetic terms, Ariel is an incorporeal agathodaimon, once the unwilling hostage of Sycorax, but ‘too delicate / To act her earthy and abhorr’d commands’ (1.2.272–273). In this reading, he is an extension of Prospero’s incorporeal mind – his thought and imagination. He is known only to Prospero, speaks only to Prospero, and is ‘invisible to every eyeball else’ (1.2.304). Consciousness ‘is added to understanding’ (Asclepius, 6), and includes her sister ‘reasoned speech’ (CH IX [1]), and sensation (CH IX [2]). Through Ariel, Prospero is able to affect the conscious minds of others to suit his purpose. Ariel puts members of the Court Party to sleep, leaving Antonio and Sebastian to plot ‘open-ey’d conspiracy’ (2.1.296). Later, when Ariel addresses the ‘three men of sin’ (3.3.53) he affects their minds, makes them ‘mad’ (3.3.58) and so ‘knit up in their distractions’ (3.3.90) that Gonzalo is concerned that the madness or ‘ecstasy’ may provoke them to harm themselves. When we see them again, charmed and within Prospero’s circle, their brains are useless, ‘boil’d within [their] skull’ (5.1.60). At Prospero’s command solemn music slowly dissolves the charm, and reason and senses are gradually restored to them. As Hermes teaches, ‘reasoned speech’ and sensation ‘flow together into humans’ but are eliminated in ‘dream-vision’, although ‘{when sleepers wake, and sensation }’ (CH IX [2]).

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As for memory, Hermes tells Asclepius: ‘The understanding of human consciousness, what it is and how great it is, comes entirely from memory of past events’ ([32]). In The Tempest, as Prospero reminds the three men of sin of the remorseless cruelty with which they treated him and his daughter, they are released from their dream-like trance and ‘their rising senses / Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle their clearer reason’ (5.1.65–67). Speaking almost to himself, Prospero observes: ‘Their understanding / Begins to swell: and the approaching tide / Will shortly fill the reasonable shore’ (5.1.79–81). Alonso remembers that three hours earlier he was ‘wrack’d upon this shore’ (5.1.137) and lost his son Ferdinand. Earlier we heard that Prospero’s own memory of the events that brought him and Miranda to the isle is clear and detailed. In the course of recounting what happened to them, he acknowledged his own responsibility and blamed himself for awakening ‘an evil nature’ in his false brother (1.2.92–93). For the Hermetist such self-knowledge is the necessary prelude to gnōsis. That Ariel is the embodiment of Prospero’s thought, that Prospero can use his mind to control the conscious minds of others, and that his own memory of past events is vivid has not gone unnoticed by critics, although they do not connect them with Asclepius’ list. The fourth faculty of foresight has not been recognized, but I suggest that it motivates the beautiful speech which concludes the masque with Juno and Ceres. The spirits have vanished into their element, ‘thin air’ (4.1.150), and Prospero predicts that at some future time the unreal and illusory, material world – ‘the baseless fabric of this vision’ (4.1.151), the ‘insubstantial pageant’ (4.1.155) – will all similarly ‘dissolve’ and ‘leave not a rack behind’ (4.1.154, 156). He foresees that the ‘great globe’ of the world, and all heirs of the world, that is future generations, including us who ‘are such stuff / as dreams are made on’ (4.1.156–157) will dissolve without a trace. The notion that ‘we’ mortals are unreal and illusory and destined to be dissolved into the cosmos belongs to the Corpus Hermeticum as we saw earlier. Corporeal matter is dissolved and recycled into the cosmic elements which are eternal. In this way nothing is ever destroyed. In Book XII Hermes tells Tat: ‘There never was any dead thing in the cosmos, nor is there, nor will there be’ [15]. When Tat asks whether things that live in the cosmos die, Hermes tells him: ‘They do not die, my child; as composite bodies they are only dissolved. Dissolution is not death, but the dissolution of an alloy. They are dissolved not to be destroyed but to become new’ [16]. Knowledge of the Hermetic philosophy sheds light on Ariel’s lovely song to Ferdinand about the death of his drowned father whose mortal remains lie on the sea floor: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made;

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Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. (1.2.399–404) This is the fate of those whose ‘little life is rounded with a sleep’ (4.1.157–158) – to return to the immortal cosmos transformed into something new, rich and strange. But what of the conscious mind and the soul? Where is the incorporeal soul or spirit of this mortal, Ferdinand’s father? God, says Foix echoing Socrates, separates the spirit from the flesh in death (679). Hence, when the audience sees Alonso again in Act 2, despondent over the loss of his son (2.1.118), we remember that Ariel has reported the king drowned. Now we must believe either that Ariel was mistaken or tricking or lying, or that Alonso has parted from his mortal self and we are witnessing his now embodied soul. Alonso and, by extension, the rest of the Court Party who had been on the foundering ship are, in this metaphysical hermeneutic, all spirits or embodied souls. 5

Prospero as Hierophant

Colin Still treats The Tempest as a ‘psychological pilgrimage described (after the manner of the pagan rites) as a journey through Purgatory to Elysium and beyond’ (1921, 121), and closely resembling Aeneas’ passage from Purgatory to Elysium (162). He identifies those pagan rites as the initiation ceremonies employed in the Eleusinia Sacra, and finds them in the masque presented to Ferdinand and Miranda. Kermode is sceptical and asks for ‘some better account of the provenance of these ritual patterns which might explain their presence in Shakespeare’ (1987, lxxxiii). He does not deny the presence of initiation rites in The Tempest but suggests that ‘the ceremonial magic of the neo-Platonic tradition incorporates elements of the Mysteries’ (1987, lxxxiii). Kermode may feel it is incautious to connect the betrothal masque to the Eleusinia Sacra in the absence of evidence and prefer to look to Neoplatonism as a source. However, documented evidence providing support for Still’s opinion in the form of Robert Naunton’s letter to Essex entered the public domain in 1976 thanks to the research of Gustav Ungerer. The letter reports King Henri IV’s involvement in the Eleusinia Sacra rituals of rebirth at Easter 1597. The fact that Naunton sent it to Essex without further explanation suggests that the spring fertility ritual was known on both sides of the Channel. The implication is that some of the court audience would have recognized the ritual and appreciated its significance in signalling Ferdinand’s spiritual rebirth. The letter, dated ‘5 April,

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1597, endorsed Mr Naunton au Compte d’Essex, 26 March, 97 at Paris’, made reference to the Eleusinian mysteries being secretly celebrated by ‘Vitellius’ (Henri IV) that Easter: The k. is said at the campe to be come towarde Beauvais thereabout to treate with his councell, which are yet here. But here it is muttered that he is stealing from his business this holie time to visit his Mris [. . . ]. But these Eleusina Sacra are now growen to be misteries not to be told in Gath in no wise. (Ungerer II, 128) The ritual pattern of descent or loss followed by an ordeal or a search for the one who was lost, culminating in the regeneration or rebirth of the one who was found is a narrative that frequently interests Shakespeare in the last plays.33 It is the pattern not only of the resurrection of Christ,34 but also of numerous myths of immortality, such as Isis’ search for Osiris, Orpheus’ for Eurydice, or Demeter’s for Persephone (Ceres’ for Proserpine) which Prospero, in the role of hierophant, presents to Ferdinand and Miranda. The pattern of descent, suffering, transformation and the vision that precedes ascent is readily discernible in The Tempest. It is a journey of the soul, and the Hermetic ascent to gnōsis. For the king and the Court Party, the drowning in turbulent sea water represents both the descent and the ritual cleansing; the wandering in search of the lost son enacts the ordeal and suffering; after a period of sleep followed by semiconsciousness some emerge transformed, others not. Alonso is transformed and aware of his transgression, but upon seeing Ferdinand exclaims lest he be a ‘vision of the island’ (5.1.176). Ferdinand’s journey is similar to the king’s, but not the same. Shakespeare explicitly associates him with hell when he plunges overboard. Ariel reports that as he leapt he cried: ‘Hell is empty / And all the devils are here’ (1.2.214– 215). The ordeal of grief as he weeps for his drowned father is allayed by the beauty of the music which draws him towards Miranda. Upon seeing him, Miranda recognizes ‘A thing divine’ (1.2.421), while Ferdinand thinks she is a goddess. Things seem unreal to him and he admits: ‘My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up.’ (1.2.489). As an ordeal, Prospero imposes the pain of physical

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The pattern is repeated in Cymbeline, Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. From the Nicene Creed: ‘One Lord Jesus Christ. . . who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven. And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man. And was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried. And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures and ascended into heaven.’

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labour. Once Ferdinand has ‘stood the test’ (4.1.7), Prospero gives him his daughter Miranda and prepares him for initiation. That the masque is intended as an initiation to spiritual rebirth and immortality is clear from the conditions Prospero imposes. The initiate must be prepared by an ascetic diet of ‘fresh-brook mussels, wither’d roots and husks’ (1.2.466).35 The ceremony may not be witnessed by the profane. Only Ferdinand and Miranda see it and Miranda is already ‘perfect and peerless’ (3.1.47). In Hermetic terms, as her name suggests, Miranda is ‘a great wonder, a living thing to be worshipped and honored’ (Asclepius [6]). Ferdinand is twice cautioned to eschew lust, not to ‘break her virgin-knot’ (4.1.15) before the ‘full and holy rite be minister’d’ (4.1.17), and to ‘be more abstemious’ (4.1.53). Next, the blessing must be witnessed in silence: ‘No tongue! all eyes! Be silent’ (4.1.58). Those in the know in Shakespeare’s audience would know that, because the man and maid are to be united in true love, the love goddess Venus and her ‘waspish headed son’ (4.1.99) have been excluded lest they charm the couple into breaking the vow of abstinence prematurely. Ferdinand, only a few hours ago believing himself in hell, now sees that he has reached ‘Paradise’ (4.1.124). When Ferdinand tells Alonso that he has ‘Receiv’d a second life’ (5.1.195) from Prospero, a Hermetic reading indicates that he is referring to a spiritual rebirth and, initiated, to be on the brink of immortality. Colin Still contends that the whole play is shaped by the ‘Lesser Initiation’ of the Court Party and Ferdinand’s ‘Greater Initiation’ into the mysteries, whose rites ‘were an enigmatical representation of certain religious truths’ (1921, 84). For the initiate, a vision of the deity is the culmination of the rite and, as Still observes, Ferdinand is granted a vision of Ceres, ‘presiding deity of the Eleusinian cultus’ (47). Still compares Ferdinand’s meeting Miranda with Dante’s meeting Beatrice (162). Presumably Still believes that Miranda will guide Ferdinand to Paradise, as Beatrice guided Dante. In this reading, the enchanted island is Ferdinand’s Elysium to Dante’s Eden. Still goes so far as to say that the ‘Poet has reproduced [. . .] both the substance and the form of the Christian and non-Christian traditions’ (120), and makes the claim that ‘for all mankind, whether pagan or Christian, there is but one Way to Salvation’ (126). By contrast, a Hermetic reading would deny Still’s assertion, because Hermetism offers an alternative path to salvation – the gnostic way of Hermes. A Hermetic hermeneutic gives rise to questions about the fate of the others on board the doomed vessel. Have any of them survived and if so in what sense? As mortal men or as incorporeal shades? Rereading the first act in the light of this interpretation yields a new understanding of the events. As always 35

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the king and his friends agreed to accompany their study with fasting.

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in the theatre we are witnessing an illusion of reality on stage, but here Shakespeare is presenting a reality that is itself an illusion. We can now ‘believe’ that the ship we saw in trouble was indeed ‘Dash’d all to pieces’ (1.2.8) and that the men on board all perished just as Miranda witnessed. There has been editorial comment over the significance of the anacoluthon after the word ‘soul’ in Prospero’s comforting explanation to Miranda: I have with such provision in mine Art So safely ordered that there is no soul – No, not so much perdition as an hair Betid to any creature in the vessel. (1.2.28–31) The First and Second Folios have no punctuation after ‘soul’, while the Third and Fourth Folios insert a comma. Later editors replaced the comma with an emdash, which Kermode follows, while noting that other editors supply the word ‘lost’ to complete the sentence. A Hermetic interpretation suggests that Prospero breaks off because he is reluctant to say what has happened. If he uses ‘soul’ in the same sense as Miranda uses it when she says, ‘Poor souls, they perish’d’ (1.2.9) that is, as a synecdoche for ‘man’, he would be telling her an untruth to deny that they were lost. If he uses ‘soul’ as a synonym for ‘spirit’, breaking off suggests he is unwilling to let her know the truth that the voyagers’ mortal bodies are five fathoms down but their immortal souls have survived and they are all shades, even she. When Miranda first sees Ferdinand, she is sure he is a spirit (1.2.414), and Prospero quickly explains that he ‘eats and sleeps and hath such senses / As we have’ (1.2.415–416). She is yet to discover as Aeneas did when he visited the world of the afterlife that there the shades also banquet and feel. Prospero’s soothing words to Miranda, telling her ‘There’s no harm done’ (1.2.15), and his assurances that all has been done ‘in care of thee’ (1.2.16), may now be interpreted as his plan to find her a companion for the afterlife.36 6

Prospero as Christian and Hermetist: Shakespeare’s Apotheosis

Prospero has been compared, as we saw above, to Hermes Trismegistus, to King James and finally to Shakespeare himself. A hermeneutic which blends 36

Some in Shakespeare’s audience would know that Aeneas grieved to find the widow Dido wandering amid the shades in the Mourning Fields before fleeing back to her former husband, Sychaeus, who returned her love (Aeneid, VI [440]).

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Hermetism with Christianity interprets Prospero as both Hermetic magus and Christian, and places the character in the long line of Christian men who were also Hermetists that included Lazzarelli, Agrippa, Foix de Candale, Hannibal Rosselli, and finally Shakespeare’s contemporary, the real-life magus, John Dee (Yates 1979, 1999, 186–192 passim). From the wild storm at the outset to the ‘calm seas, auspicious gales’ (5.1.314) at the end, Prospero controls the elements like a magus. It is in the Epilogue when his ‘charms are all o’erthrown’ (Epilogue 1) that he reveals himself as a Christian man. Shakespeare’s achievement is to fashion Prospero in Hermetic terms as ‘a human [who] is a god-like living thing’, ‘a mortal god’ (CH X [24], [25]). With his mind he can control not only the elements, but also the minds of others, inducing sleep, charming men, creating illusions by making the invisible visible. As a magus, he can by his art ‘Put the wild waters in this roar’ (1.2.2), replicating Pymander’s vision granted to Hermes: Then the darkness changed into something of a watery nature, indescribably agitated, and smoking like a fire; it produced an unspeakable wailing roar. (CH I [4]) Prospero is a Hermetist who, through long and patient study, has attained the ‘god-like’ status promised to the Adept. He himself remembers how he retreated from the world (as Lazzarelli’s King Ferdinand did, and as Shakespeare’s Ferdinand of Navarre eventually did), dedicating himself to ‘secret studies’ (1.2.77), and ‘the bettering of my mind’ (1.2.90) that led to self-knowledge.37 In demanding the return of his dukedom and redressing the injustice that was done to him, as a Hermetist he purges himself of the torment (5.1.132–133). However, Christianity and Hermetism merge in this play. The Christian spectator or reader might interpret that same action as Prospero behaving like the ‘God of the island’ enacting the justice of the God of the Old Testament, or in forgiving his brother’s ‘rankest fault’ (5.1.132) as the merciful God of the New. When Prospero reassures Miranda, distressed and compassionate for those she has seen perish in the storm that he raised with his powers, that ‘There’s no harm done’ (1.1.15), the Christian in the audience might recognize the providential God to whom Christians appeal for those in peril on the sea. The ‘Ling’ring perdition’ (3.3.77) that the messenger/angel Ariel (SD 3.3.52) promises Alonso, connotes 37

In the Crater Hermetis, Lazzarelli refers to Ferdinand King of Naples, son of King Alfonso of Aragon, and father of another Alfonso, having ‘in these latter days of your life [. . .] left the reins of government to your eldest son Alfonso and intent on contemplation and pious works [. . .] devoted yourself to attaining peace of mind’ (1.3).

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loss and punishment for the Hermetist, while for the Christian, it signifies eternal damnation in hell. The New Testament God of mercy who promises forgiveness to all who do truly and earnestly repent is also recognizable.38 Forgiveness and sin play no part in gnostic Hermetic thought, but harbouring an ‘irrational torment’ like anger would be recognized by a Hermetist as a barrier to spiritual rebirth. Prospero’s reaction to the conspirators surprises Miranda who had never before seen him ‘touch’d with anger’ (4.1.145). From this perspective, Christian forgiveness is the power which Prospero summons to overcome his last torment of matter, anger. When Alonso asks for pardon (5.1.119), Prospero embraces and implicitly forgives him. Prospero pits his noble mind against his justifiable rage and hurt at ‘their high wrongs’ (5.1.25), and chooses the virtuous action, that is, he chooses to forgive and not to punish: Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury Do I take part: the rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance: (5.1.26–28) The word ‘virtue’ carries a resonance that is both Christian and Hermetic.39 Similarly shared is the sensation of compassion which leads Prospero to weep ‘fellowly drops’ with ‘Holy Gonzalo’ (5.1.64, 62). Sebastian’s offence against his brother is ignored, but despite his disgust, Prospero forgives his own brother unconditionally (5.1.131). Antonio’s lack of response is one of the many ‘loose ends’ (Miko 1982, 3) in the play. That he neither asks for nor wants forgiveness raises for the Christian the question of his salvation, by referencing the contemporary debate within Protestantism over whether Christ died to redeem all or died only for the elect. Antonio raises the issue of whether Christ’s forgiveness extends to the unrepentant sinner. For Catholics in the audience, the debate hinges on whether Prospero’s forgiveness will sufficiently redeem Antonio’s sin or whether he must spend time in Purgatory.40 The Hermetist in the audience would require the men to identify the torment that had led them 38 39 40

‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness’ (1 John 1: 9). For the Hermetist, ‘the virtue of soul [. . .] is knowledge’ (CH X [9]). The knowledge of God is the only deliverance for mankind. ‘It is ascent to Olympus’ (CH X [15]). Calvin’s dogma of predestination taught that before Adam God had pre-determined who would be saved and who would be damned. Whether they sought it or not, the elect would be saved by Christ’s sacrifice. Calvin’s concept of atonement limited to the elect was opposed by those who believed that Christ’s sacrifice atoned for the sins of all, as John taught: Jesus Christ ‘is the expiation of our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins

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into error and summon the appropriate power to overcome it. Caliban, who is also offered Prospero’s pardon (5.1.293), promises to ‘seek for grace’ (5.1.295). His words reference a then current debate about the irresistibility of God’s grace. We must assume from his words that Caliban has been taught this, but whether he, a ‘demi-devil’ (5.1.272), has a soul, is one of the elect, or will be offered prevenient grace, is another question for the audience and reader to debate.41 Prospero (and possibly Shakespeare too) ends the play as a Christian with a paraphrase of the prayer which Christ taught his disciples, known as the Lord’s Prayer. Kermode observed this in a footnote to the Epilogue (1954, 134), and McAlindon also noted an echo of the prayer in Gonzalo’s words as the ship went down: ‘The wills above be done’ (1.1.66) (2001, 340).42 In the Epilogue, Prospero turns to us in the audience and asks us to pray for the mercy that ‘frees all faults’ (18) by forgiving all. Like the Christian who asks that his or her trespasses be forgiven, ‘as we forgive those who trespass against us’, Prospero asks us to forgive him ‘As [we] from crimes would pardon’d be’ (Epilogue 19) and save him from ending in ‘despair’ (Epilogue 15). Whether it was a sin to despair of salvation and to lose hope in God was another heated debate within the Reformed religion in the last decade of the sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth century.43 Finally, Prospero’s last request: ‘Let your indulgence set me free’ (Epilogue 20), employs a word that is both innocently secular and pregnant with meaning in Catholic Christianity.44 The implication for the Catholic Christian is that Prospero is asking the living audience to intercede for his soul with prayers that will release him from the island, perceived either as limbo, if you believe him guiltless, or Purgatory if you see him as a sinner.

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of the whole world’ (1 John 2: 2). Purgatory is a twelfth century doctrine of the Western Catholic Church. For those in Shakespeare’s day who saw Caliban as a denizen of the New World such as Ralegh or Hakluyt spoke of in Virginia, the debate was about whether God’s mercy extended to the unbaptized who, through no fault of their own, had not heard the Good News. His words paraphrase the Lord’s Prayer when the Christian asks that ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. A treatise on the subject by the physician Timothy Bright was published in 1586 and widely circulated. A Treatise of Melancholie. ‘Containing the causes thereof ... with the phisicke cure, and spirituall consolation for such as haue thereto adioyned an afflicted conscience.’ London: Vautrollier. The word ‘indulgence’ occurs only three times in the Shakespeare canon; elsewhere it is used in the secular sense of ‘allowing’ something and not associated with prayer. ‘Indulgences: The remission by the Church of the temporal penalty due to forgiven sin, in virtue of the merits of Christ and the saints. Indulgences can also be gained by the living for the souls in Purgatory but only by an act of intercession’ (Dictionary, 829–830).

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Over the action of The Tempest, Hermes shimmers and flashes visible to those who can see with the mind’s eye. He is the mercurial messenger, Ariel, creating illusions in the minds of men so that we are never sure if it is a shade or a man we see. He is present as the invisible psychopomp ready to escort souls to their next stage. And he is present as the god of thieves tempting Trinculo and Stephano with ‘glistering apparel’ (4.1.SD 193). This is Hermes the mythical god in many guises. Whereas in the three plays already discussed, I have argued for the presence of religious/philosophic Hermetic thought, and found neither magic nor alchemy, in The Tempest Shakespeare has delighted his audience with both, not to mention the music which fills the air. In the apotheosis of his artistry, the mind that created Prospero has brought us face to face with mythical Hermes, mystical Trismegistus and the Mind of God, the creator himself.

Chapter 7

Shakespeare and the Path to Salvation In sixteenth-century Europe religion mattered. God mattered. And nothing mattered more to men and women than the salvation of one’s immortal soul. However, for many, institutionalized religion was a source of anxiety, doubt and scepticism. It was also a site of controversy, intolerance and war. The Church, Traditional and Reformed, agreed on the immortality of the soul, although they may have forgotten the pagan origin of the concept, but on the question of the route to salvation the Church was divided.1 There was disagreement over whether salvation was the reward of good works and faith, of faith alone, or whether one’s destiny had already been decided by God before Adam’s Fall in Eden. By contrast, the body of pagan Hermetic texts that arrived in the Latin West in 1462 offered individual men and women a path to salvation – through knowledge of self and love of others, to perfection and the reciprocated love and knowledge of God or gnōsis – that was empowering and enabling. The Corpus Hermeticum, purged of magic and revered as prisca theologia, promised a doctrine that could save the human race, and brought with it the hope of reconciliation, tolerance and peace. Who knew? Shakespeare knew. In all four plays discussed here – Love’s Labour’s Lost, King Lear, Othello and The Tempest – there is evidence that the playwright has a substantial knowledge of the doctrine of religious Hermetism. With the possible exception of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare’s understanding of the Hermetic theosophy, and his close knowledge of the Corpus Hermeticum, is more extensive and more profound than could have arisen from hearsay or casual discussion. The evidence and the nature of the Hermetic thought embedded in the selected plays strongly suggest that Shakespeare not only studied the texts of the Corpus Hermeticum and knew the companion text, the Asclepius, but that he also read the commentaries available at the time – Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis, and Foix’s lengthy commentary on his French translation, the Pymander. 1 Followers of the Reformed Church, able now to read the Bible in their vernacular, would have found few references to soul in either Testament. The concept originates with Plato, who held that ‘the immortal soul is the true self imprisoned for a time in an alien body’. Nevertheless, by the fifth century the soul had come to be universally regarded as an image of God (Genesis 1: 26) and St Augustine explained it as an image of the Trinity comprising memoria, intelligentsia and voluntas (Dictionary of the Christian Church, 1520). © Jane Everingham Nelson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004520608_010

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Close similarities of thought and verbal borrowings connecting the plays with the Commentaires are an indication that Shakespeare was also reading Foix’s French translation of Pymander. Of course, that does not exclude the possibility that Shakespeare consulted other translations and commentaries.2 It must not be forgotten that the Hermetica themselves syncretize many of the ideas circulating, probably in Alexandria, in the first centuries after the birth of Christ when, as Isaac Casaubon established in 1614, the texts were actually written. Some ideas found in the Corpus Hermeticum and the Asclepius can also be found in the Hebrew Bible, the synoptic gospels, especially the gospel of John, several letters of Paul, and other books of the New Testament; in the Gnostics (who were carefully excluded from the New Testament); in numerous books of Plato, the Stoics, Philo and the middle Neoplatonists, Plotinus, Proclus and Porphyry. Many of the similarities between ideas in the Hermetic texts and in the plethora of sources may be attributed either to a common source or to a direct borrowing, although the direction of influence is often hard to determine. Shakespeare scholars familiar with the language of the liturgy, the Bible, and the Church Fathers, and also with the language of the classics have recognized many of these sources, both Christian and pagan, in the canon. However, there is a cluster of ideas in the Hermetica that are specific to gnostic Hermetism, though controversial, heretical, and even repugnant to Christian orthodoxy. This group includes the teaching that Man is capable of ascending to god-like status and salvation by knowledge of self, won through contemplation leading to a supra-rational knowledge of God, or gnōsis, that may be reached in a state of ecstasy; that the reciprocated knowledge of God is ‘ascent to Olympus’; that the ascent to perfection is achieved through the process of recognizing and choosing to discard the traits of personality one is born with, that is the ‘torments of matter’ acquired on the descent through the spheres prior to birth; that individual men and women have the will freely to determine their fate through the choices they make in life; and that Man is the author of evil, not God. The Hermetic doctrine holds that God is androgynous, and that humankind is made in the image of God but must use self-discipline to achieve god-like perfection. The Hermetic texts present a view of mankind as twofold – spiritual and corporeal – which reflects Nestorian Christology, and of death as separation of the soul, which is immortal, from the mortal body, 2 Other translations available at the time, which future scholars may wish to examine, were the translation and commentary by Friar Rosselli probably owned by Dee, and the new translation published by Francesco Patrizi in 1591. Patrizi used only the fourteen chapters that were known to Ficino and rearranged the order of the chapters. He based his version on that of Turnebus and Foix de Candale and, like him, included two books derived from the Stobaean fragment; he also added the Asclepius (Scott III, 321; Yates 1964, 1991, 182).

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which returns to the elements to be eternally recycled. The intertextual exegesis juxtaposing Hermetic texts with the plays selected from the canon indicates the extent of Shakespeare’s familiarity with the non-conformist, heretical, gnostic, religious philosophy that is Hermetism. Consequently, the audience or reader who brings knowledge of the texts of the Hermetica to the play possesses the potential to access a new layer of understanding. For example, the members of Gray’s Inn and their guests, who were about to watch The Comedy of Errors, and who were amused by the Second Counsellor’s mocking advice to the Prince of Purpoole to ‘lay a Trismegistus’, may be assumed at the very least to have known whom he meant, and some to have heard of Hermes’ description of Man as having two separable parts united under one name. In the play, the identical Antipholus brothers are reunited after years of separation and welcomed by their mother, the Abbess. Asquith interpreted the action as an allegory of the union of Catholic and Protestant in the arms of the Catholic mother church. Some of the guests that night, who included Bacon and his Spanish protégé Pérez, may have been reminded of the Protestant Henri of Navarre’s embrace of Catholicism the previous year. Asquith’s interpretation is given an added dimension, for those with knowledge of the Hermetic texts, by the words of the Duke in the dénouement. Looking at the Antipholus twins he asks ‘One of these men is genius to the other; . . .which is the natural man, / and which the spirit?’ (5.1.331–333). His question, otherwise inexplicable, evokes the twofold nature of Man as explained by Pymander to Hermes (CH I [15]) and reveals an amusingly literal, dramatic reality in the idea of two separate beings united in one name. Is Shakespeare testing the waters? History records a riot amongst the largely Protestant audience that night; the uproar may (or may not) have been their outraged reaction to a heresy. According to Pymander in Book I of the Corpus Hermeticum, knowledge of ‘how to enter into god’, meaning knowledge of the way of Hermes to salvation through spiritual rebirth and gnōsis, places a burden of responsibility on those who possess the knowledge. Pymander challenges all who have received knowledge and become god-like to use their knowledge without delay by becoming a ‘guide to the worthy so that through you the human race might be saved by god’ (I [26]). Paradoxically, in a later Book, Hermes warns Tat to obey the promise ‘to be silent about this miracle and reveal the tradition of rebirth to noone’ (XIII [22]).3 It is arguable that Shakespeare is rising to this challenge and does so differently for different audiences. 3 This call to spread the message and save the human race is echoed in the Rosicrucian manifesto Fama Fraternitatis or Rumour of the Brotherhood published in Germany in 1614, calling for the reformation of the whole wide world, Allgemeine und General Reformation, der gantzen weiten Welt: ‘When now these eight brethren had disposed and ordered all things in

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Both Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest were written for the court, and there is no record of their having been presented in the public theatre. In both plays Hermetic ideas lie on the surface and are accessible to men and women with some awareness of the special significance of the word ‘god-like’, or of the contemplative life that facilitates self-knowledge, or of the separation of the spirit from the material body at death, or of the notion that God is the only reality and the only truth. Both plays carry Hermetic ideas, one about the ascetic path to salvation, the other about the afterlife of the soul. By contrast, to discover the Hermetic teaching on spiritual rebirth in the play King Lear, or the teaching that desire is the cause of death in Othello, one needs a guide with the Hermetic knowledge and the book at one’s elbow. 1

Shakespeare’s Religious Sympathies – Christian or Pagan

Critics without knowledge of the Hermetica to illumine their exegesis of Shakespeare’s plays often turn to the Bible as their guide. They are not disappointed. Shakespeare’s knowledge and use of the Christian Bible in the plays, including the Bishop’s Bible and the small Geneva Bible used by Protestants, was established by Richmond Noble over eighty years ago (1935), and more recently by Naseeb Shaheen (1987), and Roger Stritmatter (2001). Similarly, Peter Milward made a strong case for Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Spiritual Exercises used by Jesuits, while historians including Christopher Haigh, Eamon Duffy and Michael Questier established a new appreciation of the Catholic resistance to change at the grassroots level which had implications for some in Shakespeare’s audiences. The subsequent renewal of interest in Shakespeare’s religious sympathies led a group of eminent scholars to a consensus that the plays of Shakespeare reveal ‘a religious sceptic who was intellectually and emotionally attached to some features of the “old religion”’ of Catholicism (Jackson and Marotti 2011, 4–5). Nevertheless, when so many of the plays are set in Catholic countries, it is arguable that referencing Catholic discourse, holy orders or sacraments lends necessary authenticity to the character more than it reveals the playwright’s personal religious preferences.4 These remain opaque, protected as Gary Taylor notes by ‘the systematic cultivation of ambiguity and equivocation in such manner . . . that everyone was sufficiently instructed, and able perfectly to discourse of secret and manifest philosophy . . . they separated themselves into several countries [. . . ] that their Axiomata might in secret be more profoundly examined by the learned’ (Williamson 2002, 105) 4 Fourteen plays or about two-fifths of the canon are set or have scenes set in Italy.

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Shakespeare’s writing’ (2003, 248). Taylor sounds a caveat against concluding with certainty what Shakespeare believed. However, a number of scholars at the Lancaster conference, including Peter Milward SJ, Carol Enos and Robert Miola, demonstrated Shakespeare’s memory for Catholic discourse, and Miola concluded that ‘we will read [Shakespeare’s] plays differently if we attend to their Catholic sub-texts’ (Wilson 2003, 31). The Hermetic exegesis of the plays undertaken here complements the findings of the Lancaster conference. Remembering the favourable reception granted to the Hermetic texts in fifteenth century Italy and sixteenth century France, and the willingness of the first Catholic translators to see their affinity with Christian teaching, I suggest we will understand Shakespeare’s plays differently if we both acknowledge the ‘Catholic sub-texts’ and bring a knowledge of the tenets of Christian Hermetism to our reading and viewing. The debate about Shakespeare’s religious sympathies, whether Catholic or Protestant, was long complicated by his evident knowledge of pre-Christian pagan philosophers. Numerous scholars have commented on this interest – William Elton, J. C. Maxwell and Frank Kermode for example – and John Vyvyan established Shakespeare’s profound understanding of Platonic ideas, particularly his knowledge of Ficino’s Theologia Platonica, a book owned and annotated by John Dee and potentially available to Shakespeare. Frances Yates’ seminal work on Giordano Bruno sparked the interest of many scholars, including some, like Hilary Gatti, John Mebane, Katherine Perrault, Arthur Versluis and Gilberto Sacerdoti, who have found evidence that Shakespeare knew of the magia, alchemy and astrology that characterize the numerous practical Hermetic texts that also interested Bruno, who preferred ‘the magical religion of the Egyptians . . . to any other religion’ (Yates 1964, 212). The presence of magic, an awareness of astrology, and a knowledge of the alchemical process in Shakespeare’s plays is undeniable, but this study has focussed exclusively on his knowledge of the religious philosophy of Hermetism, aware, thanks to scholarly works such as Moreschini’s Hermes Christianus, that the pagan Hermetic texts were not repudiated but welcomed and reconciled with Christianity by their Catholic translators almost as soon as they arrived in fifteenth century Florence. 2

Hermes in the Plays – Audi, Vide, Tace!

In this study, which treats the Hermetic texts as intertexts in Riffaterre’s terms, and juxtaposes them with the selected plays for the purpose of comparison, knowledge of the Hermetic intertext has illuminated and given significance to

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the religious and philosophic Hermetic ideas inherent in the plays – meanings lost to us over the passage of time.5 Without overt proselytizing, Shakespeare seeds the idea from which religious debate can grow, while never revealing his own religious leanings. In this he resembles Plato whose dialogues are famed for the skill with which he detaches himself from controversial subjects for debate. In constructing, and indeed inhabiting, his characters with conscious artistry, Shakespeare also distances himself from the big religious questions of the age, such as whether Man’s actions are ruled by his free choices or by God’s sovereign will, and raises others such as the origin of sin or one’s responsibility for evil. Through the dramatic mechanisms of characterization in dialogue, through setting and plot, and through the literary mechanisms of ambiguity and allegory, Shakespeare creates space for a religious debate to arise. It is a debate to which Hermetic ideas can now make a contribution, although Shakespeare’s own beliefs remain tantalisingly obscure. The evidence of Hermetic thought identified in the selected plays includes: the divinization of Man referenced in Love’s Labour’s Lost and realised in The Tempest; the twofold nature of Man, both mortal and spiritual; the importance of knowing oneself (noesis) as a step on the journey of the soul to knowledge of the god within (gnōsis), and spiritual regeneration in this world or the next (in King Lear); the role of mind and reason in directing the will to make virtuous choices that ensure salvation; and the origin of evil (in Othello). The separation of the mortal, material body from the immortal, essential and incorporeal soul at death may have originated with Plato, but the notion that death is not destruction but only the dissolution of the mortal body which will undergo a ‘sea-change’ and be recycled back into the elements of which it was composed is found in the Corpus Hermeticum and in The Tempest. The plays and the Hermetic texts are connected by verbal echoes between text and intertext, in direct verbal borrowings, in the playwright’s revisions, and in a general consonance and affinity of thought. Where alchemy is present, it is coded as allegory, a trope for the purifying Hermetic ascent. Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest both reference the Hermetic doctrine that Man, through long contemplation leading to knowledge of self or noesis, 5 Following Casaubon, Hermetic thought was gradually rejected in the seventeenth century. Everard’s English translation of Patrizi’s edition was published posthumously in 1650. Keats, Coleridge and other Romantics showed interest in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and interest was again revived by the theosophical movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But despite interest from serious scholars such as Richard Reitzenstein, A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière, Walter Scott, C. H. Dodd and Paul Oscar Kristeller amongst others, the texts slipped out of sight, and were for many years virtually forgotten by mainstream academia.

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can achieve gnōsis. The former play openly, and apparently with the approval of the Master of the Revels and the Stationers’ Register, allows King Ferdinand to speak the gnostic heresy that the recompense for the proposed three years of contemplative study is to become ‘god-like’. It is a phrase found in the Corpus Hermeticum which teaches that ‘the human is a god-like living thing’ (X [24]), the man with knowledge will ‘be made god’ (I [26]), and it resonates with the phrase used by the Family of Love – ‘to be godded with god’. When Love’s Labour’s Lost was published, the title page announced that it was ‘newly corrected’; there is no way of knowing now if more explicit heresies were removed in the process, but clearly, the word ‘god-like’ remained. As it stands, the academic debate about the way to knowledge – via the vita activa or the vita contemplativa – was an old one and would have caused no alarm. There is a strong probability that the choice of name for Ferdinand of Navarre, the king who aspires to god-like status in the play, is a purposeful decision to reference his namesake, Ferdinand, King of Naples, who was tutored in the contemplative way of Hermes, ‘the road that leads to life’ (1.1.167) and culminates in knowledge of God.6 The connection between Navarre and Naples connects the play with Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis and grounds the stage fiction in historic fact. It is Lazzarelli who associates contemplation with love. In the Crater Hermetis, he tells Ferdinand that ‘first contemplation excites love, and then love turns the human mind to God’ (24.2.243), but as Hanegraaff points out, ‘Lazzarelli’s understanding of love appears to be more reminiscent of eros than of agape (although he would undoubtedly have considered the latter to be included in the former)’ (Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn 2005, 70).7 At the end of Shakespeare’s play, the pleasures of the court are temporarily abandoned while King Ferdinand and the lords resolve, for one kind of love, to embrace an ascetic life for another kind of love, namely service to others, for a twelvemonth. For love of Rosaline, Berowne is to serve ‘the speechless sick’ (5.2.839), and the king is to test his love by spending a twelvemonth in silent contemplation, ‘austere [and] insociable’ (5.2.793) in a remote hermitage. The light of Lazzarelli’s dialogue in the Crater Hermetis, when shone on Love’s Labour’s Lost, reveals the significance of these loving impositions and lends religious substance to what has often been understood as nothing more than a light-hearted musical comedy with a puzzling ending. 6 Lazzarelli equates ‘the way of Hermes’ with a verse from the Gospel of Matthew: ‘For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few’ (7: 14). 7 Hanegraaff has shown that Agrippa knew Lazzarelli’s commentary (2009, 10), so it is possible that it was known in England through John Dee who admired Agrippa and owned his work.

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Like the real Ferdinand, King of Naples, and the fictional Ferdinand, King of Navarre, who both retired for a time from their princely duties, Prospero, Duke of Milan, neglected his civic duties in order to pursue ‘secret studies’ (1.2.77) and ‘the bettering of [his] mind’ (1.2.90). In the figure of Prospero Shakespeare shows what it means to have achieved the god-like status that the young King Ferdinand aspired to in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Using his mind (‘Nothing is more god-like than ’ (CH X [23])), Prospero, this ‘god of power’ (1.2.10), can control the elements and the minds of others. Prospero himself assumes multiple identities – learned Hermetist or magus, father, brother, duke – and in the Epilogue he speaks like a Christian and a Catholic. But for most of the play he is the director of the action, controlling all with his god-like mind. In The Tempest, ideas that may have originated with Plato or with Ficino or with Virgil, poetry from Ovid, ideas from the Hermetica and prayers from the Christian liturgy all melt and dissolve in the fertile, creative mind of the playwright who transforms those ideas so that they appear to be organic, inherent properties of the characters and through them of the dramatic action. Hermetic thought colours and is coloured by other thoughts. For example, the play blends the Hermetic view of the twofold nature of Man with the Platonic teaching on the permanent separation of soul and body after death, and the Christian belief in resurrection. A Hermetic exegesis of the consecutive scenes where Alonso is both drowned and alive reveals an idiosyncratic view of the resurrected soul permanently separated from the body, and lays bare with great comfort and beauty the metaphysics of death.8 The idea of death as the dissolution of the mortal body returning to the elements, found in Book VIII of the Corpus Hermeticum, helps the audience understand that the body of the drowned Alonso is undergoing a sea-change, recycled into pearls and coral, and that what we see on stage is not a man but his shade – his embodied spirit, with soul intact and retaining conscious mind, and memory of his past actions. There are other aspects of the dramatic discourse that bloom when understood in the light of the Hermetic teaching. In The Tempest, the purifying Hermetic ascent for example is glimpsed through the alchemical colours passing from the pitch-black tempest through peacock green to silver and to ‘gold on lasting pillars’ (5.1.208). The qualities of mind that Prospero exhibits, thought (which includes imagination), consciousness, memory and foresight can be sourced to the Asclepius [11]. Chapter XV, found in Foix’s Pymander, about truth and reality, visibility and invisibility, is the probable origin of our disorientation 8 Compare the Christian teaching. St Thomas Aquinas taught that body and soul constitute a human unity, and though separated at death will eventually be reunited and reach their highest destiny in a life of abiding union with the risen Christ (Dictionary, 822).

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when, as spectators, we suspend disbelief and believe that the stage illusion we are witnessing is real, only to hear from Prospero that the great globe, signifying the real world, and we ourselves are similarly illusory and destined to dissolve without a trace, like the characters when the play is over. The movement between reality and unreality, visibility and invisibility, illusion and delusion, sleep or trance creates a dream-like sense of enchantment in this play that may for the well-read audience evoke memories of Aeneas at Cumae, or of Dante asking Virgil whether he is man or shade, but which also recalls ineluctably, for those in the know, the visions of the Corpus Hermeticum. In conceptualizing Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest Shakespeare appears to have drawn upon his memory of the Crater Hermetis and Ferdinand’s dialogue with Lazzarelli; he seems also to have consulted Books V and X of the Corpus Hermeticum, as well as Book VIII and sections of Chapter X, ‘The Key’ – almost certainly in Foix de Candale’s French edition. The conclusion is supported by the ideas about truth and reality, and about the nature of the invisible god which were discussed in relation to The Tempest. The notion reflects the thinking of Stobaeus as it occurs in Chapter XV of Foix’s French translation based on the 1554 Greek edition of Adrian Turnebus. In Miola’s terms, the several intertexts are functioning, transformed in Shakespeare’s memory, as a ‘source remote’ (2004, 20). By contrast, the structure of King Lear and the psychology of the characters in that play and in Othello as much as the purposeful alterations made to Quarto editions all arguably indicate the playwright’s close knowledge of several books of the Corpus Hermeticum. The first Quartos of The True Chronicle Historie of King Lear, 1608 and The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, 1622, both carried the old printer’s emblem featuring the familiar caduceus of Hermes, grasped by two hands in a friendly grip. There is every possibility that the emblem was chosen to indicate Hermetic content to anyone intending to purchase the playbook. The evidence of verbal borrowings strongly suggests that Shakespeare is consulting the Commentaires on the Pymander made by Foix de Candale. The infrequent word ‘machination’ found in the commentary (Foix 86), added during revision of the Quarto, is used twice in the Folio King Lear and nowhere else in the canon. Similarly, ‘eternele perdition’ (Foix 678), translated as ‘lingering perdition’, is borrowed for The Tempest. The context in which each was used by Foix closely resembles the context in which the word occurs in the plays, suggesting that Shakespeare may have Foix’s text at his elbow as he fine-tunes his characters – an example of what Miola calls the ‘source proximate’ (2004, 19). King Lear and Othello are both known to have undergone extensive, probably authorial, revisions. In the case of King Lear, the revisions that abbreviated

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and rewrote parts of the Quarto were so substantial that Quarto and Folio are now treated as independent versions. Lear is unique in the canon in that Quarto and Folio, preceded by the source play King Leir, provide a series of three plays where the alterations may reasonably be assumed to be purposeful. A Hermetic exegesis suggests a rationale for these changes, and close examination of a number of revisions suggests that they serve the purpose of dramatically illustrating the Hermetic teaching. Leir, whose behaviour is described by Goneril as ‘extreme’ in the anonymous play, is revealed by Regan in the Quarto Lear as a man who has ‘ever but slenderly known himself’ and is in need of the knowledge of self that following the way of Hermes brings. And Cordelia who is ‘proud’ in King Leir, becomes ‘true’ in King Lear Quarto and Folio. The only anomaly in the argument that the alterations tend towards embedding Hermetic thought lies in the decision to remove music, so important to the union of sensation and understanding in the awakening mind (CH IX [2]), from the Folio scene where Cordelia enters and Lear awakes. By contrast, in The Tempest, when sense and reason gradually return to the minds of the entranced miscreants, Prospero calls for ‘a solemn air . . . the best comforter / to an unsettled fancy’ (5.1.58–59). In many ways the entire play is one great symphony. 3

A Religion of the Mind

A Hermetic hermeneutic reveals in both King Lear and Othello Shakespeare’s deep fascination with the human mind and its effect on behaviour, that is, his understanding of human psychology. Mind is central to Hermetic doctrine which holds that God is Mind and life and light (CH I [12]). Hermetism is described as a religion of the mind, because it teaches that man must use his mind, first to know himself (noesis) and then to know the mind of the god within (gnōsis). Shakespeare portrays Lear’s mind as it is being driven to the brink of madness. Although distraught with grief, hallucinating, raving and exhausted, almost deranged for a time, Lear’s mind retains its reason throughout. Physically and mentally he is restored to health and normality by sleep, but his spiritual transformation is effected by understanding in that moment when he knows himself. In Othello we see the opposite. Shakespeare creates a mind that retains its sanity but whose reason and understanding is compromised by his trust in a friend who subtly feeds him the poison of doubt. Even more subtle is the deft way in which Shakespeare, in King Lear, embeds the concepts seeded by wicked demons – adultery, murder, assaulting one’s father, the impiety of suicide, jumping from a cliff – which a character possessed of one or more of the twelve traits of personality, dispositions, or

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habits of mind listed as ‘torments of matter’ – ignorance, intemperance, lust, greed, envy, deceit, anger, malice and the rest – chooses to enact. In this way the dramatic action in King Lear springs organically from the very nature of the dramatis persona, as the men and women who people the stage reveal their natures in their actions and their words. For example, it is the torment of lust that Goneril feels for Edmund that activates the idea of adultery in her mind, and (in the Quarto edition) it is the torment of envy that activates the concept of murder and leads her to poison her sister. The omission from the Folio of the Quarto line where Goneril reveals her envy of her younger sister, widowed and free to marry Edmund, is an indication that Shakespeare is purposefully manipulating the ‘torments of matter’, and has decided to assign envy to Regan the younger sister. Subsequent discussion by readers might lead to the insight that, whereas any one of us might entertain a wicked idea in mind, we are not under obligation to commit the act (of murder, adultery, suicide and so on). Hermes teaches that we have free will and can choose how we will act. Men and women on Shakespeare’s stage, as in life, choose to do what they do, because they are what they are – even Edmund who thinks he knows who he is, and even Iago, who claims not to be what he is. It is up to audience and reader to be alive to the dramatic irony inherent in discrepancies, or in the case of the king or of Othello, to wonder at the transformation. This connection between mind and behaviour is the province of human psychology, and in constructing the characters who people his plays, Shakespeare reveals not only his consummate artistry but also his profound understanding of the psychology of human beings. Thinking about the two tragic plays in this study, in the light particularly of Book XIII where Hermes lists twelve of the habits of mind or traits of personality that are universal to mankind, I felt I had tapped the well-spring of Shakespeare’s profound understanding of the connection between the human mind and human behaviour. No longer does the narrative line of the plot drive the action of a play; it is the mind of the characters portrayed, revealed in dialogue and soliloquy, that motivates action and interaction. The transformation that takes place in Lear’s mind as he understands himself and learns the meaning of compassionate love illustrates in dramatic terms Hermes’ teaching that the path to salvation or redemption is achieved through inner reform. The dangerous corollary is that those who follow the way of Hermes to salvation no longer need Christ, except as a guide. His role as Redeemer and as ‘our only Mediator and Advocate’ is redundant, and herein lies the heresy. Identifying the ‘torments’, or habits of mind, as motivators to action of the characters Shakespeare creates is not to diminish one whit the genius that gave dramatic

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life to those human qualities listed in the Corpus, but rather to explain why the plays that Shakespeare composed continue to transcend time and place, and are ‘not of an age, but for all time’. Not only does Hermetic doctrine inform Shakespeare’s artistry in creating his characters, but Shakespeare does not resile from embedding Hermetic ideas pertinent to then current religious controversies, or from philosophic debate, or from contributing to a view of the mystery of the afterlife. Othello’s plight, for example, challenges all thinking readers to consider the legal, moral and ethical issues of culpability: to what extent is Othello responsible for the choice he made? If one’s mind were to choose to commit an act when disordered, diseased, duped, drugged or deranged, is one still culpable? Should the Ensign Iago who duped and incited Othello to murder bear any of the blame? Othello confronts the theologian with the question of the origin of evil: the Christian finds the answer in original sin, while for the Hermetist it is Man himself whose mind directs his will to act, and the matter of mitigating circumstances is left open to debate. Othello also openly invites discussion of the then current Arminian controversy on free will and choice which is crucial to Hermetic doctrine. In so many of the plays, the transformations of men and women, whether for better or for worse, by their choices freely made, speak eloquently of Hermes. The frequency with which the plays conclude with the restoration of order or with peace, harmony and the reconciliation of opposites also suggests the presence of Hermes. For all these reasons I conclude that the Hermetic texts constitute a unifying, coherent and credible source for Shakespeare’s portrayal of the mind of Man, and the profound understanding of human psychology that eternalizes these plays, and that the Hermetic texts must be considered in accounting for the power and relevance of these plays across time and place. 4

A Way Forward

My research into Hermetic thought in Shakespeare’s plays has given rise to two possible lines of inquiry for the future. First, that the conventicles of men and women who are known to have met clandestinely to discuss religious matters may also have read aloud, listened to and discussed plays in manuscript. Second, that Christian Hermetism may have been perceived by some as a viable alternative religion, a religion of the world, capable of uniting the confessions or circumventing them, and bringing about the toleration and peace that the divided church in England and Europe so desperately needed.

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Shakespeare and the Reading Groups

Writing about Shakespeare’s plays as books as well as playscripts, Lukas Erne pointed out that while ‘performance tends to speak to the senses . . . a printed text activates the intellect’ (2003, 23). Shakespeare, argues Erne, is a literary dramatist who wrote to be read. Jardine and Grafton note the common practice amongst the educated to employ a scholar to act as ‘facilitator’ of their reading, and they cite Sir Henry Wotton who wrote in his commonplace book, ‘A friend to confer readings together most necessary’ (1990, 31 n.3). In fact, it was the practice of men and women from all strata of society to meet in groups led by a friend or guide, and read aloud, listen to, copy passages into a ‘commonplace book’, and discuss ideas. It is possible that their interests extended beyond the vernacular Bible to histories and classical works, and included manuscripts as well as printed books of different kinds, such as plays. The custom of the laity to meet secretly in conventicles to read, hear and discuss the vernacular scriptures was established in the late fourteenth century by the Lollards, and although the movement declined, the practice, known as ‘the prophesyings’, of lay people meeting, often with clerics, persisted in Elizabeth’s reign, despite her disapproval. Both the history and the literature of the sixteenth century refer to groups of men and of men and women, outside the universities, meeting to talk. Many of the groups that I encountered in reading about the century had knowledge of the Hermetic texts. In early Tudor England, the writings of Colet, More and Erasmus, all good friends who apparently discussed the new philosophy, reveal their interest in the Hermetica. In Paris, Agrippa was said to have been part of an ‘occult brotherhood’ that emerged at the same time as Lefèvre’s new editions of the Hermetica, to which he had added Lazzarelli’s commentary, the Crater Hermetis. In France, the short-lived Cenacle de Meaux, convened in 1525 by Lefèvre and his friend Bishop Briçonnet of Meaux, to whom he had dedicated his edition of Pymander, Baïf’s Academy where members of La Pléiade met, Henri of Navarre’s Nérac experiment, and Pierre de la Primaudaye’s seemingly fictional account of the young men in Anjou all reference places where the new Hermetic philosophy was welcomed. In addition, there were members of the Maison de la Charité in France (followers of Hendrik Niclaes, the Familist), whose existence was so successfully hidden that it was not suspected until the archive of Plantin the printer was opened in the nineteenth century.9 Evidence of the Family of Love in England dates from around 1550, enters the public record in a flurry of accusations from 1578 to 1582 before disappearing 9 The Family of Love was founded in East Friesland c.1540 by Hendrik Niclaes.

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from the record. But as the French experience made clear when Plantin’s enterprise was revealed, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. However, it may be evidence of a determined and successful practice of Nicodemism. The Familists were groups of men and women who appear to have been practising the ‘way of Hermes’ to perfection of self and becoming ‘godded with god’. They are known to have met in each other’s houses where they discussed the prolific and obscure writings of Niclaes, such as the Glass of Righteousness and Terra Pacis and others which all bear a striking similarity to many tenets of Hermetic doctrine. Niclaes’ books, written in Low German, were presumably smuggled into England by merchants, and translated orally for the groups, largely based in East Anglia and in Devon. Some members of the queen’s loyal and trusted guard, known as her ‘Spears’, were exposed as Familists, and it is possible that Ralegh, whose home as it happens was in Devon, was introduced to Niclaes and to Hermetism, when he was appointed captain of the Yeomen of the Guard. The queen herself, having issued a Proclamation against the Family in 1580, took no action against them, which has led the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch to suggest that she ‘may have lent a sympathetic ear to pantheist heretics who were among her most faithful servants’ (2013, 182). Similarly, James VI and I when he came to the throne inveighed against Familists briefly before falling silent. Nothing more is recorded about the vexatious group until the emergence of the Society of Friends (Quakers) in the latter half of the seventeenth century. While MacCulloch might dismiss the Familist beliefs as ‘pantheist and heretical’, which technically they are, a more detailed examination reveals their close affinity with religious Hermetism. Other groups close to the city and the court who were known to have an interest in Hermetism include Dee’s visitors to his home at Mortlake; the Sidney circle known as the Areopagite; the Northumberland circle who met at Syon House, home of Henry Percy; and the ‘School of Night’, as Ralegh’s coterie meeting at Durham House in the Strand were called, although Robert Parsons, a Jesuit priest exiled in Paris, alleged that Ralegh was conducting a ‘school of Atheism’. All those men had connections to Hermetic thought, either overt or covert. In May 1593, the playwright Christopher Marlowe was apprehended on a charge of Atheism; subsequent investigation reported that ‘hee hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raliegh & others’,10 ‘almost into every company he cometh he perswades men to Atheism’,11 and that there would shortly be ‘by his and his felowes persuasions as many of their opinion as of any other 10 11

BL Harleian 6848 f. 190. BL Harleian 6848 ff. 185–186.

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religion’.12 Ralegh was subsequently identified by his own hand as sympathetic to Hermetism, which permits the conclusion that his and Marlowe’s ‘Atheism’ is another sort of religion. Lucien Febvre argued that to deny the existence of God was impossible in the sixteenth century, and Marlowe’s ‘Atheism’, if it is Hermetism, does not deny the presence of God, it merely holds that God is knowable within each of us. The implication of the evidence assembled to prosecute him is that Marlowe was a convinced Hermetist, an enthusiastic convert, intent on spreading the good news to all and sundry, whether ‘worthy’ or not. By ill-luck he was silenced within the month. Any of the groups mentioned above, as potential students of the Corpus Hermeticum, could have found that reading and discussing King Lear and Othello illuminated their understanding of the doctrine. Furthermore, the handful of private and university library catalogues still extant reveals that copies of the Hermetic texts were available, as were collections of Shakespeare’s plays in Quarto editions. Between them, Dee, Puttenham and Perne, Master of Peterhouse in Cambridge, all owned copies of the religious philosophic Hermetic texts in various editions and translations. Sir John Harington of Kelston, the queen’s godson and a frequent visitor to London and the court, had an extensive library of playtexts including three titled: King Leire old, K. Leir of Shakspear, and K. Leyr W. Sh. Admittedly they may refer to three copies of the same play but it is more likely that Harington owned each of the three versions discussed earlier. In their introduction to the First Folio in 1623 John Heminge and Henrie Condell urged ‘the great Variety of Readers’ to: Reade him therefore, againe and againe: And if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him. And so we leave you to other of his Friends, whom if you need, can be your guides. The clear implications are first that there is matter in the plays that repays deep study and repeated reading, and that readers who may not immediately understand a play should enlist another friend of the playwright to guide them, and second that the practice of reading with a guide is not unusual. Are they dissimulating? What is the matter that is so hard to understand that the reader may need a friend of Shakespeare to guide him? Is the word ‘friend’ used innocently as Wotton used it, or is there a veiled reference here to a Society of Friends? Is there an implication that Shakespeare is a ‘guide to the worthy’, and 12

BL Harleian 6848 f. 191, a fair copy in the same hand as f. 190.

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that his ‘Friends’ are those who have understood his meaning and are ready to guide others who need help to understand it too? Both the tragedies in this study appear to be literary texts, revised more for readers than for a theatre audience. I argued that the revisions to King Lear tended towards enhancing the Hermetic content, and I suggest now that some of the alterations may have resulted from discussion of the manuscript undertaken by readers of the play seeking to understand the Hermetic texts.13 If men and women made shorthand copies of what they were studying for their own later use then there are implications here for what Adele Davidson has called ‘The Textual Mystery of King Lear’ (2009). She argues that many of the errors and anomalies in the first Quarto of King Lear may be attributed to the compositors’ having first to reconstruct a longhand copy from a shorthand copy. The shorthand copies, she found, were not made by a professional scrivener during a live performance as was commonly supposed but taken from a manuscript copy of the play (31), made by a shorthand amateur with a working knowledge of Willis’s Art of Steganographie published in 1602. The possibility that men and women not immediately connected with theatre gathered to listen to, read and discuss Shakespeare’s plays in manuscript, and occasionally made copies for their own use that found their way to a printer, warrants further inquiry. But the more important matter is to consider whether men and women gathered in order to discuss the plays as dramatizations of the religious ideas they were encountering in their study of the Hermetica. Possibly the most important matter is to know whether having read and understood the plays, in the light of the Hermetica and the Crater Hermetis, men and women became converts to Christian Hermetism. 6

A Religion of the World

The idea that Christianized Hermetism was seen as a viable alternative religion also warrants investigation. In the years of interest to this study, the religious upheavals meant that Christians in England may fairly be said to have held beliefs somewhere along the spectrum of Catholic, Protestant and Puritan, with the Church of England occupying the middle way. And we should not 13

However, the strongest support for my speculation here that readers may have suggested amendments to the plays comes not from an alteration to Hermetic thought but to Emilia’s long speech about a woman’s sexual needs and men’s double standards (4.3.85–102), which was added to the Quarto and which seems to be a powerful expression of a woman’s view expressed in a woman’s voice.

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dismiss Robert Parsons’ accusation in 1580 when he wrote to the queen letting her know that he knew of a fourth religion in her realm, ‘the householders of love’, granting Familism a new status.14 However, while to practise the traditional religion was deemed a heresy and after 1584 a treason, the boundary separating the two confessions was quite porous.15 Michael Questier has drawn attention to the numbers of converts, even serial converts, including clerics, to and from Catholicism.16 Fundamentally, the convert was always looking for assurance of salvation. The queen herself is famously quoted as desiring not ‘to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts’, and a gentleman as close to the court as the queen’s witty godson, Harington of Kelston, could describe himself with impunity as all three: a ‘Protesting, Catholique Purytan’, although he remains silent about the fourth (3).17 The religious situation was further complicated by disagreements not only between orthodox Protestants but also amongst the numerous non-conformist or dissenting sects such as the Freewillers, Spiritualists, Libertines, Anabaptists, Arians, Nestorians, Arminians and the radical Separatists, such as John Penry and Robert Browne.18 Many groups were difficult to detect because they conformed outwardly in order to keep the law and avoid prosecution, while maintaining their real beliefs inwardly. These so-called Nicodemites, who practised dissembling and equivocation and were accused by their neighbours of lying and hypocrisy, included Church Papists as well as the members of the tolerant Family of Love.19 Men and women of any religious persuasion were welcome

14 15

16

17 18 19

Robert Parsons. 1580. A brief discourse contayning certain reasons why Catholics refuse to goe to Church. See “The Family of Love and its Enemies” (Carter 2006, 651–672). ‘For the Elizabethan Crown, the prosecution of dissenting religious belief as treasonous or seditious, rather than heretical, would be the means by which the religiously divisive would be silenced and wavering subjects would be convinced of the necessity of submitting to authority.’ Edwin Owen Williams. 2003. “Trials of conscience: Criminalizing religious dissidence in Elizabethan England” (January 1). Dissertation from ProQuest. Paper. AAI3087484.http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3087484. Notable serial converts include Dr William Alabaster (1568–1640) and Archbishop Marc’Antonio de Dominis (Questier 1996, 55). Conversion was far from a simple matter. Theologically, converts weighed up the authority of the Church Fathers and church tradition against the authority of the scriptures. Politically, the royal supremacy was pitted against the primacy of the Pope. John Harington Kt. of Kelston. A Tract on the Succession to the Crown (1602). Mentioned in Twelfth Night: ‘I had as lief be a politician as a Brownist’ (3.2.34). Church Papist was a term of abuse for those English Catholics who outwardly conformed to the established Protestant Church and yet inwardly remained Roman Catholics. They were part of ‘the amorphous mass of individuals who conformed fully, partially or occasionally with the established [Protestant] Church’ (Walsham 2014, 10).

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to join the Family, and share its teachings, which appear to answer the hope of John Dee, a Christian Hermetist, for a ‘non-sectarian, tolerant religion’.20 Only Familism and, arguably, nascent Freemasonry, offered a space where confessional divisions and traditional religious rituals were irrelevant. Familism, like Hermetism, was a religion that demanded no sacraments, no liturgy, no ordained ministers, no vestments, no candles and no consecrated buildings. The continuing presence of Familists in England, largely unrecorded after 1582, is documented in the mid-seventeenth century when they evolved into the Society of Friends or Quakers.21 References to Freemasonry, which developed its own set of specific ritual practices in the sixteenth century are similarly rare.22 Some writers, perhaps privy to secret knowledge, have identified passages in Shakespeare which they argue symbolically or directly reference Freemasonry.23 David Stevenson describes Freemasonry as ‘a religious fraternity without religion’ (1988, 124), and notes that there are ‘resemblances between Hermeticism [sic] and freemasonry which cannot be dismissed as mere coincidences’ (85). Following the stream of Hermetic thought as it ebbed and flowed throughout the sixteenth century, and the recurring references to an ‘other religion’, to a nova de universis philosophia, and to what modern critics have termed ‘a Hermetic religion of the world’, ‘a new religion’, or ‘a cosmopolitan non-sectarian religion’, raises the possibility that there may have existed an alternative religious movement that has slipped unnoticed from the official Anglophone history of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. A tolerant religion based on knowledge of self, compassionate love of others and of God, that ignored all artificial divisions imposed by the institutional churches and brought men and women together. Such a religion might have been able to heal the ruptures that had plunged the century into bloody religious wars. It was not to be. 20 21 22

23

Niclaes invited to the Family of Love: ‘All lovers of truth, of what Nation and religion soever they be, Christian, Jew, Mahomites or Turk and Heathen’ (in Ingman 1984, 225). John Everard (?1584–1640), whose translation of Patrizi’s edition of the Corpus Hermeticum was published posthumously in 1650, was also a Familist. Freemasonry is another topic which for many years was avoided by academic historians, who possibly regarded it as a disreputable subject of study. David Stevenson, then Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen, acknowledges as much in the preface to his 1988 book, The Origins of Freemasonry (1). He dates the earliest record of speculative Freemasonry in Scotland to the very end of the sixteenth century and devotes a large part of the chapter on the Renaissance contribution to issues associated with this study: Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, the Reformation and the Rosicrucians (77–124 passim). Dodd, Alfred. 1933. Shakespeare: Creator of Freemasonry (74–149); Richard Alan Wagner. 2010. The Lost Secret of William Shakespeare, available as an e-book; Peter Dawkins. 2004. The Shakespeare Enigma (205, 261–262). All are founded on the premise that Shakespeare is the nom de plume of Francis Bacon.

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Jeanne Harrie, who recognized the popularity of Hermetism in the century and the parallel growth of eirenic, reunionist opinions, called for further research before suggesting a causal relationship (1978, 514). My research has suggested to me that the century was studded with small numbers of good men and women who wanted the peace that religious toleration would bring, but were rightly fearful of advocating the ecumenism that fully embracing gnostic Hermetism might effect. The stream of alternative religious thought merging Hermetism with Christianity that began in Italy, spread cautiously through France and more discreetly in England, was carried undercover into Germany, possibly by players, and was still alive and of interest to some in England after the civil war. Identifying this current has allowed me to situate the plays in this study in a particular politico-religious context not previously acknowledged. However, more extensive exegesis of the rest of the canon in the light of other editions and translations of the Hermetic and related texts should be undertaken if the hypothesis is to be confirmed. 7

An Age with Secrets

Jean Dagens characterized the long sixteenth century as ‘the golden age of religious Hermetism’ (1961, 6), but for Michel de Montaigne the most notable quality of the century was dissimulation; Perez Zagorin has called it an age of Nicodemism. It was an age when men and women pretended not to be what they truly were, for fear of capture, persecution, torture and agonizing death. Jesuit priests, like the recusant Robert Southwell, hid their identity under pseudonyms when they returned to England, using the name of a man who had died. In 1991, Zagorin devoted a book to ways of lying – dissimulation, simulation, equivocation, casuistry and Nicodemism – in early modern Europe. He mentions Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Bacon as men who understood and wrote about the practices of deception, and cites dramatic characters, Edmund and Iago, as examples of consummate dissimulators (255–256). Zagorin however, does not suspect Shakespeare of being himself a dissimulator. There is no evidence that Shakespeare’s plays were censored on religious grounds nor that the playwright ever feared punishment. Consequently, I conclude that the Hermetic thought revealed in this study was successfully concealed both from state and church authorities in England and from Archbishop Whitgift in particular, as well as from the profane and unworthy. The two plays considered in this study that were written for the court, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest, are the two where Hermetic ideas are closest to the surface and most easily recognized by any who were familiar with the

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teaching; the two plays that were printed with a title page featuring Hermes’ caduceus are the two where, I argue, the way of Hermes only reveals itself under the ultra-violet light of the Corpus Hermeticum. It seems that Shakespeare used his genius to become a ‘guide to the worthy so that through [him] the human race might be saved by god’ (CH I [26]), and succeeded in finding a way to conceal ‘the tradition of rebirth’ (CH XIII [22]) to be revealed only to those who sought the way of Hermes to salvation that may be read in the pages of the Corpus Hermeticum. It follows that Shakespeare himself had a profound knowledge of the Hermetic theosophy and was an active and conscious participant in the dissemination of Hermetic thought. Whether he thought of himself as an AngloCatholic Christian, a Hermetist, a Familist or a Freemason remains his secret. The friends who erected a monument to him in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon were proud to reveal to those in the know and conceal from the profane and unworthy that Shakespeare the poet had ascended to knowledge of God and been received on Olympus.

Epilogue

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion The Anglican Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon has a plaque commemorating the poet Shakespeare high up on the north-east wall. It was commissioned by persons unknown and placed some time between 1616 and 1623, probably close to 1620. See Figure 1. The first two lines are in Latin, a language which only the educated few could read at that time. IVDICIO PYLIVM GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM, TERRA TEGIT, POPVLVS MÆRET, OLYMPVS HABET Inside this Christian church it is surprising to read an epitaph that lists a pagan trinity: a king, a philosopher and a poet. It was the Englishman, Thomas Bradwardine, who described the triple majesty of Hermes Trismegistus as ‘King, Philosopher and Poet’, which the author of the epitaph follows. Some who visited the church may have suspected a connection with Hermes Trismegistus, ‘king, philosopher, priest’, to whom Bacon had compared King James in The Advancement of Learning. But the king is not James, nor even Solomon. Pylium references Nestor, King of the Pylians, whose name also belonged to Nestor, the bishop whose understanding of Christ as two separate persons, human and divine, was rejected at the Council of Ephesus but nevertheless spread east of the Mediterranean for a millennium; Nestor’s Christology is reflected in the Hermetic view of each human being as two persons, corporeal and incorporeal, sharing one name. Socrates refers to the great philosopher famed for the dictum ‘Know thyself’ which is the first step on the way of Hermes to salvation. Maro, Publius Virgilius, is Virgil, the poet who guided Dante through the Inferno. There, in limbo, Virgil introduced Dante to the shades of the great poets – Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. For those who have read Dante, the implication of Maro’s name is that Shakespeare is about to join the immortals. Dante was on his way to Paradise, but according to the epitaph, the mortal remains of Shakespeare are buried in earth (terra tegit), while the separated, immortal soul of the great poet Shakespeare is on Olympus (Olympus habet), home of the pagan gods. As Hermes Trismegistus tells his son, Tat: ‘This is the

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only salvation for man: knowledge of God. This is ascent to the highest abode of the gods. It is ascent to Olympus’ (CH X [15]).

…

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Postscript The epitaph to Shakspeare (sic) in the chancel of Holy Trinity Stratford challenges the passerby to take the time to puzzle out – ‘read if thou canst’ (the names of) – those whom envious Death hath placed with Shakespeare in the monument. The unusual wording and the anomalies in the spelling as much as the inclusion of ‘sieh’, the singular imperative of the German verb sehen (to see, espy or spy), all hint that something is concealed in the message, waiting to be revealed. Furthermore, the oblique reference to Nestor, King of the Pylians may have led the engraver, Martin Droeshout, to conceal William Shakespeare behind a prosōpon or theatrical mask on the title page of the First Folio (see Frontispiece). The choice of the Nestorian prosōpon reflecting the Hermetic view of mankind suggests that ‘William Shakespeare’, author of the Folio, may be two men who share one name, like the Antipholus twins. The possibility lends credence to the research of a number of eminent Shakespeare scholars who have argued, whether on the grounds of style, structure or statistical analysis, that fewer than two thirds of the plays in the canon are by Shakespeare alone and the remainder show ‘overwhelming evidence. . . [of] the collaborative nature of these plays’ (Taylor 2014, 1 n.2). (See Brian Vickers 2002, Shakespeare Coauthor. Oxford; Hugh Craig and Arthur Kinney 2009, Shakespeare, Computers and the Mystery of Authorship. Cambridge; Jonathan Bate et al. ed. 2013, William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays. Macmillan; Gary Taylor 2014, “Why did Shakespeare Collaborate?” In Shakespeare Survey 1–17. Cambridge University Press.)

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Appendix 1

From Hermes to Hermes Trismegistus Let us be clear that ‘Hermes’ called ‘Trismegistus’ is a construct, not a single man as Moses or Zoroaster are believed to have been. Originating in Egypt, famed in the ancient world for its magic, he is a composite of Thoth the Egyptian moon god, and the Greek Hermes. For the Greeks, the gods were supranational, so it is no surprise that by the third century BCE, in Hellenic Egypt, the Egyptian magician-god, Thoth (Theuth in Plato’s Phaedrus), was identified as Hermes. Like Hermes, Thoth was the guide of the souls of the dead, and appeared to Isis while she was trying to put Osiris back together. Both Thoth and Hermes were messengers of the gods, interpreting and mediating between the divine and the human; the art of interpretation or hermeneutics took its very name from Hermes; to both were attributed the invention of writing.1 They were the gods of eloquence, lords of wisdom and protectors of all knowledge; they were both associated with medicine, and also with invention, trickery and invisibility. Hermes is also linked to Terminus the god of boundaries and endings, and as Alison Shell has pointed out, makes an appearance in that identity in both The Winter’s Tale and Two Noble Kinsmen (2010, 224). Unlike Thoth who was represented in hieroglyph as a baboon or as an ibis-headed man, Hermes was represented in winged cap or broad-brimmed traveller’s hat, shod in winged sandals, and carrying a snake-entwined caduceus. Hermes was the god of trade and commerce and also a musician, the inventor of the lyre, which he gave to Apollo to appease him (Oxford Companion 288). The Romans identified Mercury, their own god of merchants and trade, particularly the corn trade, with Hermes. Mercury shared all of Hermes’ attributes, and like him was represented in winged hat and shoes and bearing the distinctive caduceus (Companion 374). Quick-witted, intellectually brilliant or ‘mercurial’, his day is Wednesday (mercredi, mercoledi), his number is 4, and he has a planet named for him. Paradoxically, this inventor of writing and god of eloquence is also the god of secrecy and silence. Like Mercury, the son of Jupiter and Maia, Hermes also had a genealogy: he was the son of Zeus and Maia, eldest of the Pléiades, and the father of Autolycus, who like his father was a master of fraud and theft. Thoth’s genealogy is less certain and more complicated and would not detain us here were it not that Cicero in De Natura Deorum listed five different Hermes, the third of whom was the son of Zeus and Maia, while the fifth fled to Egypt where he gave the Egyptians their laws and alphabet and was known 1 Fowden posits that his ‘characteristic function in the Hellenistic period [was] as the logos or “word”, the interpreter of the divine will to mankind’ (1986, 24). © Jane Everingham Nelson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004520608_013

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as Thoth (Fowden 1986, 24). In a sort of reverse Euhemerism, around 196 BCE, the Jewish scholar, Artapan, assimilated the god Hermes/Thoth to Moses (Faivre 1995b, 76). Somewhat later, Christian apologists like Clement of Alexandria were prepared to see Hermes-logos as prophetic of Christos-logos, and he was represented as a Good Shepherd, carrying a sheep (Faivre 1995b, 22). Similarly, Faivre claims, although Hermes is not mentioned in the Qur’an, Arab historians ‘quickly identified him with Idris’, who is also Enoch from Genesis (1995b, 19). As elusive as argent vive, his name and symbols simultaneously and ambiguously reference the mythical pagan god and the legendary Egyptian magus. It is really not possible to say exactly when writings about astrology, practical alchemy, magic and theurgy began to circulate under the name of Hermes and when the title Trismegistus was added. It is the case that hundreds of texts have been attributed to him over the centuries, but the texts of the Corpus Hermeticum that concern us here are believed to have been written in the same milieu as the synoptic gospels, and the Latin Asclepius somewhat later. Stanton Linden shows that, in spite of the momentous exposure by the philologist, Casaubon, of the texts’ true provenance, the influence of Hermes Trismegistus was ‘enormous and long-lasting, extending from the earliest alchemical writings down to the late seventeenth century’ when Sir Isaac Newton wrote his Commentary on the Emerald Tablet (27). In other words, years that included Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Ralegh and Chapman, where the influence has been noted, and Shakespeare, where so far it has not.2 That Hermes and Trismegistus, now Christianized, were welcomed in Florence is clear from Botticelli’s famous Primavera. The Roman goddess of love, Venus, whom Ficino had described as ‘a nymph of excellent comeliness [. . . ] beloved by God’, now has Christian/Hermetic virtues: ‘Her soul and mind are Love and Charity’ (Stemp 2006, 156). Venus is the focus of the painting, the little love god Cupid (also known as Eros), blindfolded, flies overhead aiming his arrow at one of the three Graces who are clasping each other in a circle. Zephyrus and Mercury bookend the scene, and Mercury uses his caduceus to push away a few clouds from the lush garden where flowers and fruit hang together on the trees. Edgar Wind recognized in the painting the three phases of the Hermetic process: the emanation in Zephyr’s descent, conversion in the dance of the three Graces and reascension in the person of the feathered Mercury (125).3 While Botticelli was carrying out the commission for his patron Lorenzo in 1480, the pillars 2 These currents continued to flow well beyond the years of this study and may be seen in Robert Fludd, the Cambridge Platonists, Tommaso Campanelli, Valentin Andreae, Jacob Boehme, Athanasius Kircher, Michael Maier, Andrew Marvell, John Keats, William Blake, Mozart, Hegel, W. B. Yeats and many more. 3 Wind claims ‘it is practically certain’ that Primavera and its companion piece The Birth of Venus were commissioned by or for Lorenzo di Pier Francesco, the cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and a pupil of Ficino (1967, 113).

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in the Salone Sistino in the Vatican Library were being decorated with paintings of the ‘inventors’ of writing. Hermes-Thoth or ‘Mercurius-Thoyt-Aegyptiis’ is there holding the caduceus and wearing the winged hat (Faivre 1995b, 134–135). In 1488 a portrait of Hermes Trismegistus in mosaic was placed on the floor of the cathedral in Siena, then under construction. Faivre records the surprising fact that soon after this, Pope Alexander VI, ‘the protector of Pico della Mirandola’, ‘commissioned a great fresco in the Borgia apartments of the Vatican, abounding with Hermetic symbols and zodiacal signs’ (1995b, 40); there Trismegistus is fixed forever in the company of Moses and Isis. Any sixteenth century visitor to Florence, Siena or Rome could see at once that Trismegistus was revered, and in a Christian setting. Faivre points out that Hermes Trismegistus appeared in illustrated manuscripts even before 1461, but it is in the second half of the sixteenth century that he was first represented in the presence of an armillary sphere (representing the works of God), and a pair of compasses, the geometer’s instrument (implying that the world is the product of intelligent design) (1995b, 133). The image is labelled ‘Trismegistus’ and encircled by the words: Deus est sphaera intelligibilis cuius centrum est ubique et circunferentia nusquam (God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere). Faivre also describes a painting by Giorgione dated to 1500, not labelled and therefore liable to interpretation, but which appears to connect Trismegistus with the architect’s instruments; it depicts three men: an old, bearded man holding a manuscript, who could be Trismegistus, a younger turbaned Oriental, and a young European holding the geometer’s instruments of compasses and square (1995b, 133). A century later, Jean-Jacques Boissard (1528–1602) depicted an unmistakable Trismegistus standing in front of discarded weapons of war, and a caduceus where the twin snakes appear to be knotted together; he holds an armillary sphere aloft in his right hand and a book in his left hand. The symbolism seems to suggest that his pagan origins have been discarded and Trismegistus stands now for peace and knowledge. There is a remarkable similarity between Boissard’s image, engraved by Theodor de Bry, and another dated to 1594 of Christianus Philosophus depicting a man standing before the evidence of God’s creation: sun, moon and stars, surrounded by the wonders of earth, sea and sky, holding aloft an armillary sphere in one hand, while in the other he grasps a book entitled Verbum Dei. From his mouth issue the words, ‘Meditabor Verbum atque Opera Jehovae’ (I will ponder the word and the work of God). For the reader who is able to place Boissard’s engraving of Hermes Trismegistus in the context of the ‘Christian philosopher’, Hermes Trismegistus has been Christianized.

Appendix 2

More about the Hermetic Theosophy 1

Corpus Hermeticum

1.1 Books II–XII

In Book II, Hermes Trismegistus speaks with Asclepius, whom the Greeks identified as the son of Apollo and god of healing and who carried the traveller’s staff entwined by the serpent of rejuvenation. He teaches him about the motion of the cosmos and speaks of the incorporeal nature of the divinity, of being and of not-being. God, he explains, is the cause of things that are – ‘all things are those that come to be from things that are, not from those that are not’ because ‘he has left nothing else remaining that is not-being’ [13]. Hermes’ teaching clearly contradicts the Catholic edict of creatio ex nihilo pronounced at the Council of Trent, and endorses Lear’s exclamation that ‘Nothing comes from nothing’. Book III, the ‘sacred discourse’, is brief, complete in itself, and quite unlike the rest of the Corpus in its denial of the transcendence of God and the immortality of Man. Copenhaver suggests that ‘it seems possible to read paragraph 4 as disparaging earthly monuments for their impermanence’ (131). It is a notion shared by the King of Navarre in the opening speech of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Book IV bears the title: A discourse of Hermes to Tat: The mixing bowl or the monad.1 Lazzarelli used the title in his commentary, Crater Hermetis – A Dialogue on the Supreme Dignity of Man, entitled the Way of Christ and the Mixing-Bowl of Hermes. In this Book we learn that ‘God shared reason among all people . . . but not mind’ [3]. Mind he put in a great mixing bowl which he sent below with the instruction to all to immerse themselves in it. ‘All those who heeded the proclamation and immersed themselves in mind participated in knowledge and became perfect people because they received mind’ [4]. It is in this Book that we learn again the importance of choice. One may reach perfection as a result of a decision made by one’s free will: ‘Choosing the stronger [. . .] has splendid consequences for the one who chooses – in that it makes the human into a god’ [7], but ‘certainty in individual free will is not absolute’, or as Moreschini has it, ‘destiny is still a problem for perfects’ (16). It is an issue that I raise in connection with Othello. Festugière cites Book V, That god is invisible and entirely visible, as an example of a particularly optimistic gnōsis, but also describes it as ‘a leading example of the 1 In Timaeus [41], the demiurge used a krater (or basin) to mix the world soul.

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eclecticism and incoherence that he finds characteristic of the Hermetica’ (Copenhaver 140). It is about seeing with the mind’s eye, and about the power of dreams to lift one above the earth in order ‘to see the motionless set in motion and the invisible made visible through the things that it makes!’ (CH V [5]): Would that you could grow wings and fly up into the air, lifted between earth and heaven to see the solid earth, the fluid sea, the streaming rivers, the pliant air, the piercing fire, the coursing stars, and heaven speeding on its axis above the same points. (CH V [5]) This vision of the cosmos Nock and Festugière source to Cicero’s Dream of Scipio. An important function of this Book is to initiate Tat in the mysteries. Hermes tells him: O Tat, lest you go uninitiated into the mysteries. . . You must understand how something that seems invisible to the multitude will become entirely visible to you. . . Also, while remaining invisible because it always is, it makes all other things visible. ([1]) . . . Clearly, the one who alone is unbegotten is also unimagined and invisible, but in presenting images of all things he is seen through all of them and in all of them; he is seen especially by those whom he wished to see him. (CH V [2]) Later Hermes reminds his son: this is the god invisible and entirely visible. This god who is evident to the eyes may be seen in the mind. (CH V [9]) The issue of how mankind might know the reality of God is taken up again in Book VIII and is the concern of much of Book XV, the Stobaean fragments. These ideas enter the discussion of The Tempest in Chapter 6. Book VI tells of the perfection and goodness of God, while Book VII emphasizes the danger of ignorance and the importance of seeking a guide to lead one to ‘the portals of knowledge’ [2]. The title of the short Book VIII: That none of the things that are is destroyed, and they are mistaken who say that changes are deaths and destructions really says it all. The Book falls naturally into three parts concerned with God, the cosmos and mankind. ‘God is in reality the first of all entities, eternal, unbegotten, craftsman of the whole of existence’, by whose agency ‘a second god came to be in his image . . . everliving because he is immortal’ but not eternal like the father [2]. For this reason, since ‘the cosmos is a second god and an immortal living thing’, and ‘all things in the cosmos are parts of the cosmos, but especially mankind’, it follows that in death the body is not destroyed but

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only changed back into the elements of the cosmos [1], while the soul being immortal is indestructible. Finally, Hermes tells Tat, the father decided that, unlike other living things, mankind should possess ‘mind’, putting him ‘in a relationship of sympathy with the second god and of thought with the first god’ [5]. The next treatise, Book IX, clarifies the relationship of mind to understanding: ‘Mind differs from understanding as much as god differs from divinity’ [1]. On understanding and sensation: [That the beautiful and good are in god alone and nowhere else], begins by explaining how understanding differs from sensation, and that the two are ‘intertwined with one another’ in human beings (CH IX [2]). Sensation belongs to the material (or mortal) man, understanding to the essential (or spiritual) man, and the two are mutually dependent. We also learn that ‘Mind conceives every mental product’, both the good which come from God as well as ‘seeds from some demonic being’ [3], which the God-fearing person will withstand, ‘because he is aware of knowledge’ [4]. Concepts sown in the mind in this way by the demons include ‘adultery, murder, violence to one’s father, sacrilege, ungodliness, strangling, suicide from a cliff’ [3].2 This point is taken up in Chapter 4, in connection with the events of the plot in Arcadia and King Lear. Book X, The key, continues the lesson, first warning that ‘the vice of soul is ignorance’ [8], while ‘the virtue of soul, by contrast, is knowledge’ [9]. Fowden points to ‘a useful distinction’ between two types of knowledge: epistēmē (science), which is the product of logos or reason, and gnōsis (knowledge of the Mind of God) which is the product of understanding (noesis) with faith (pistis) (1986, 100, 101). It is in this Book that we learn that knowledge of God consequent upon knowledge of self or noesis is ‘ascent to Olympus’ [15]. Hermes explains to Asclepius that even though all things that exist have senses, ‘knowledge differs greatly from sensation’, for gnōsis is the goal of epistēmē, ‘knowledge is the goal of learning and learning is a gift from god’ [9], but ‘all learning is incorporeal using as instrument the mind itself’ [10]. The doctrine appears to underlie the decision taken by the lords in Love’s Labour’s Lost who swear to renounce the things of the flesh in order ‘to know which else we should not know’ (1.1.56). In Book XI, Mind (Nous) or God himself, speaks to Hermes about causes and change. He repeats the doctrine that ‘Death is not the destruction of all things that have been combined but the dissolution of their union’ [15]. Having dealt with the corporeal, 2 Translation taken from Salaman et al. (9.3, 42) (2000). Copenhaver in 1992 gives a slightly different translation: ‘adulteries, murders, assaults on one’s father, acts of sacrilege and irreverence, suicides by hanging or falling from a cliff and all other such works of demons’ (CH IX [3]). John Everard whose 1650 English translation was based on Patrizi’s rearranged edition of 1592 gives: ‘Adulteries, Murders, Striking of Parents, Sacrileges, Impieties, Stranglings, throwing down headlong’ as the works of evil demons (13.14, 107). Foix de Candale, in his 1579 translation available in Shakespeare’s day, gives: ‘adultaires, meurtres, parricides, sacrileges, impietez, estranglemants, precipitacions’ (292).

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Mind goes on to consider the speed and power of the incorporeal imagination than which ‘nothing is quicker nor more powerful’ [18]. The mind may ‘command your soul to travel to India, and it will be there faster than your command’ [19]. In this way by virtue of the quickness of thought, Man becomes like God who also has ‘everything – the cosmos, himself, universe – like thoughts within himself’ [20]. Thus, being equal to God, man can understand God, and like God can command the elements. In The Tempest I argue that Prospero, as god-like magus, commands both the elements and their sprite Ariel who, as thought made corporeal, is the agent of Prospero’s imagination. In Book XII Hermes is once again speaking to Tat about mind, ‘the very essence of god’ [1]. We read that mind can quell anger and longing and that God has granted mankind ‘mind and reasoned speech which are worth as much as immortality’ [12]. Mind is powerful enough to conquer destiny, but Tat raises the question of retribution for one who commits a crime ‘under compulsion of fate’ [5]. It is a problem that is relevant to Othello.

1.2

Books XIV–XVIII

In Book XIV Hermes purports to offer ‘a more mystical interpretation’ of ‘the nature of things’ to Asclepius [1]. He deals with the crucial question of causes, of the creator God and his creation. It is the issue which made an absolute division between the Catholic Church’s ruling on creatio ex nihilo and the pagan assertion that nihil ex nihilo fit.3 Hermes tells Asclepius: ‘For I maintain that things begotten come to be by the agency of another; it is impossible, however, for anything to be older than all begotten entities unless it alone is begotten’ [2]. Concerning God the maker, however, this Book differs from the theology of Books I and XIII, asserting that between ‘what comes to be and who makes it [. . .], there is nothing, no third thing’ [4]. ‘For the two are all there is . . . and it is impossible to separate one from the other’ [5]. In other words, there is no intermediary Logos. Although Book XV is missing from the modern English Corpus Hermeticum, it was available in the 1579 French translation by Bishop Foix de Candale, based on the 1554 Greek edition published by Adrian Turnebus.4 The chapter begins by asserting the impossibility that Man, being imperfect, could speak with confidence about ‘la vérité’, 3 The idea that God made the universe out of existing matter ‘received its death blow in the conflict with Gnosticism’. The thesis of creatio ex nihilo ‘was dogmatically formulated at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215’ (Dictionary of the Christian Church, 429). 4 To his edition of the fourteen chapters translated by Ficino, Turnebus added three fragments by Stobaeus as well as one from the Suda as Book XV. Walter Scott in Hermetica, Vol. III alleges that Turnebus found the passages in an edition of the Florilegium of Stobaeus published by someone unknown in Venice in 1535 or 1536.

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by which Hermes means the truth or reality of God.5 Foix quickly reassures his readers that Hermes is referring to ‘une essence divine’ and establishes Stobaeus’ Christian credentials by connecting Hermes’ words with Jesus Christ ‘when he said I am the way, the truth and the life’ (649). In section 2, Hermes tells Tat that everything on earth is not real but only a copy of reality (651).6 The doctrine echoes Platonic doctrine on forms, ‘that there is nothing real here below’, and is taken up again in section 10 in connection with the difference between forms that are ‘invisible, divine and real’ and visible ‘corporeal things’ (672). In section 11, the third Stobaean fragment (Moreschini 191), the writer finds it necessary to speak of death, feared, he says, by the common people because they do not understand it.7 Man is different from all other animals; brute beasts die and their bodies change and dissolve, but in Man the soul, the divine essence, separates from the flesh at death (679). Foix himself compares Stobaeus’ fragment to Book VIII of the Corpus Hermeticum (679).8 Book XVI, Definitions of Asclepius to King Ammon on god, matter, vice, fate, the sun, intellectual essence, divine essence, mankind, the arrangement of the plenitude, the seven stars, and mankind according to the image, was not available to Ficino, but was added, along with Books XVII and XVIII, by Lodovico Lazzarelli. The Books, which Lazzarelli would have been reading in Greek, warn against translating the tractate into Greek lest the secret meanings be lost or distorted. The clear implication is that there existed an original in a language other than Greek which can only have been Egyptian, and that the Egyptians had a low opinion of the Greeks, their ‘empty speeches’ and ‘inane foolosophy’ [2]. Jorgen Sørensen adopts Reitzenstein’s notion that the texts were a Lèse-mysterium, ‘designed to perform very much the same function as the rituals of mystery cults’, in other words they were ‘supposed to cause spiritual illumination in the reader’ (41).9 In short, Book XVI illustrates ‘the transition from ritual text to devotional and meditative literature’ (Sørensen 57). The Book gives an image of the sun ‘situated at the centre of the cosmos wearing it like a crown’ and steadying ‘the chariot of the cosmos’, fastening the reins to itself, which are: ‘life and soul and spirit and immortality 5 ‘De la verité, O Tat, il n’est possible l’homme (estant animal imparfaict, composé de members imparfaicts, et tabernacle constitué de divers corps et de plusieurs) en parler seurement’ (Chapter XV [1]), (Foix, 649). 6 ‘Toutes choses donc, O Tat, qui sont en la terre, ne sont pas verité, mais imitations de verité’ (651). 7 Il nous faut maintenant parler a la mort. Car la mort effraye le vulgaire . . . par l’ignorance du faict (XV [11]), (Foix, 678). 8 Moreschini provides precise information about Foix’s use of the passages which Turnebus inserted from Stobaeus as well as a passage from the Suda, which is section 12 (683–686), (190). 9 Jorgen Podemann Sørensen. “Ancient Egyptian Religious Thought and the XVIth Hermetic Tractate.” The Religions of the Ancient Egyptians: Cognitive Structures and Popular Expressions, ed. Gertie Englund. Proceedings of Symposia in Uppsala and Bergen, 1987 and 1988.

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and becoming’ [7]. It was a passage to which Copernicus (1473–1543) referred, and which he took as affirming the correctness of his theory established empirically by mathematics.10 It draws on the Egyptian view of the sun as a divinity and may also derive from the Greek myth of Phaeton the charioteer in Plato’s Phaedrus (246–254). In this Book, Asclepius tells Ammon how the sun arrays ‘troops of demons [. . . ] under the regiments of stars, an equal number of them for each star’ [13]. Some of these demons are ‘mixtures of good and evil’; ‘granted authority over the things of the earth [. . .] they produce change’ and ‘at the exact moment of birth, arrayed under each of the stars, take possession of each of us as we come into being and receive a soul’ [14, 15]. He continues: ‘With our bodies as their instruments, the demons govern the earthly government. Hermes has called this government “fate”’ [16]. I discuss in the chapter on Othello the use Shakespeare appears to make of this notion in his characterization of Iago. Foix de Candale incorporates the few lines discussing the reflections of incorporeals that constitute Book XVII into Chapter XIV in his Pymander (738) and, following Turnebus, omits the next Book entirely. Book XVIII seems rather different from the rest of the Corpus Hermeticum. It presents God as a ‘tireless musician’ who not only produces ‘harmony in song’ but also provides ‘the rhythm of the music appropriate to each instrument’ [1]. If the instrument, meaning ‘us’, is defective, no one should blame the musician. The treatise exhorts all men to ‘tune the inward lyre and adjust it to the musician’ [5]. It ends with a panegyric praising the almighty, exhorting men to ask forgiveness from the God from whom emanates the energy above to the cosmos here below, reminding us that ‘beings are not different from one another’, that ‘all have one mind, the father’ and that ‘the charm that brings them together is love, the same love that makes one harmony act in all things’ [14]. The final paragraph advises us to extend our reverence for God to praise for kings, whose virtue lies in their being ‘the arbiter of peace’, through the ‘discourse that brings peace’, whose name is ‘the token of peace’ [15]. In short, the last book speaks of peace and love in a way that is absolutely consonant with the message of the Prince of Peace and King of Love, and which rings with the confident hope that through forgiveness and love humankind can achieve reconciliation and a life of harmony.

10

Copernicus wrote: ‘In the midst of all resides the Sun. For who could place this great light in any better position in this most beautiful temple [of the world] than that from whence it may illumine all at once? So that it is called by some the lamp of the world; by others the Mind; by others the ruler. And Trismegistus calls it the visible god’. Quoted by Frances Yates in a BBC Radio 3 talk, published in The Listener and in Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renaissance vol. 3, 256.

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Asclepius

‘To me this Asclepius is like the sun.’ A Holy Book of Hermes Trismegistus addressed to Asclepius. This book, the Asclepius, referred to as the Logos teleios or Perfect Discourse, was translated from the Greek possibly as early as the fourth century. It is in this book that we read the now famous words, which prompted Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (c.1487): a human being is a great wonder, a living thing to be worshipped and honoured: for he changes his nature into a god’s, as if he were a god; he knows the demonic kind inasmuch as he recognizes that he originated among them; he despises the part of him that is human nature, having put his trust in the divinity of his other part. [. . . ] He cultivates the earth; he swiftly mixes into the elements; he plumbs the depths of the sea in the keenness of his mind. Everything is permitted him: heaven itself seems not too high, for he measures it in his clever thinking as if it were nearby [. . .] He is everything, and he is everywhere. [6] The passage shares the Nestorian view of Man as composed of two separate parts – the human and the divine – found in Book I [15]. By virtue of his mind, a human being, like God, is everything and everywhere. The Asclepius was sometimes attributed to Apuleius, who is generally held responsible for the four controversial paragraphs citing bad magic [23–24, 37–38], where Trismegistus speaks of humanity having ‘been able to discover the divine nature’ [37] and how to make ‘statues ensouled and conscious, filled with spirit and doing great deeds; statues that foreknow the future and predict it by [. . .] prophecy’ [24]. The Book ends with a prayer, a thanksgiving for ‘a father’s fidelity, reverence and love’, and for the gifts of mind: ‘consciousness, by which we may know you; reason, by which we may seek you in our dim suppositions; and knowledge, by which we may rejoice in knowing you’, and lastly with a shared pure meal ‘that includes no living thing’ [41].

Appendix 3

From the Mémoires of Marguerite de Valois [1579] Félicité qui me dura l’espace de quatre ou cinq ans que je fus en Gascogne avec lui, faisant la plupart de ce temps-là notre séjour à Nérac, où notre Cour était si belle et si plaisante que nous n’enviions point celle de France: y ayant Madame la princesse de Navarre sa sœur, qui depuis a été mariée à Monsieur le duc de Bar mon neveu, et moi [ayant] bon nombre de dames et filles, et le roi mon mari étant suivi d’une belle troupe de seigneurs et gentilshommes, aussi honnêtes gens que les plus galants que j’aie vus à la Cour; et n’y avait rien à regretter en eux, sinon qu’ils étaient huguenots. Mais de cette diversité de religion il ne s’en oyait point parler, le roi mon mari et Madame la princesse sa sœur allant d’un côté au prêche, et moi et mon train à la messe en une chapelle qui est dans le parc; d’où comme je sortais, nous nous rassemblions pour nous aller promener ensemble ou en un très beau jardin qui a des allées de lauriers et de cyprès fort longues, ou dans le parc que j’avais fait faire, en des allées de trois mille pas qui sont au long de la rivière. Et le reste de la journée se passait en toute sorte d’honnêtes plaisirs, le bal se tenant d’ordinaire l’après-dȋnée et le soir. (199) Mais la Fortune, envieuse d’une si heureuse vie (qui semblait, en la tranquillité et union où nous nous maintenions, mépriser sa puissance, comme si nous n’eussions été sujets à sa mutabilité), excita pour nous troubler nouveaux sujets de guerre entre le roi mon mari et les catholiques, rendant le roi mon mari et Monsieur de maréchal de Biron (qui avait été mis en cette charge de lieutenant de roi en Guyenne à la requête des huguenots) tant ennemis, que, quoi que je pusse faire pour les maintenir bien ensemble le roi mon mari et lui, je ne pus empêcher qu’ils ne vinssent en une extrême défiance et haine, commençant à se plaindre l’un de l’autre au roi – le roi mon mari demandant que l’on lui ôtât Monsieur le maréchal de Biron de Guyenne, et Monsieur le maréchal taxant mon mari et ceux de la Religion prétendue d’entreprendre plusieurs choses contre le traité de la paix. [1580] Ce commencement de désunion allant toujours s’accroissant à mon grand regret, sans que j’y pusse remédier. (Mémoires, 200)

© Jane Everingham Nelson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004520608_015

Appendix 4

The Family of Love, or Familia Caritatis There are at this day in your Majesties Realme, fower known religions . . . the Catholikes, the Protestants, the Puritanes and the householders of love. Robert Parsons SJ (1580)

∵ In 1540, there arrived in Emden in East Frisia two men of interest to this study because of the possibility that the one, Jan Łaski (1490–1560), brought with him an edition of the Corpus Hermeticum which the other, Hendrik Niclaes (c.1502–1580), subsequently heard, or was able to read. The Polish reformer, Łaski or Johannes à Łasco, as he was known in England,1 was the nephew of another Jan Łaski, the Archbishop of Poland, Chancellor of the Crown. Twenty years earlier, in 1520, à Łasco had left Cracow and settled in Basle where he lived for a time with Erasmus, who had been his uncle’s great friend, and became close friends with Heinrich Zwingli, the Protestant reformer (Louthan 2014, 32).2 While he was in Basle, in 1532 a new edition of the Corpus Hermeticum was published there based on a manuscript first published in Florence in 1513 (Hanegraaff 2015a, 185).3 Whether à Łasco took the printed book with him to Emden in 1540 cannot be established, but the tolerant climate that prevailed in Emden at that time was one that was conducive to the sharing of new religious ideas. In 1542, Countess Anna van Oldenburg, regent of Emden, appointed à Łasco to a position of influence as pastor of the Reformed Church.4 1 A Łasco was the relative of the younger Prince Albert Łaski who was at Oxford when the Hermeticist Giordano Bruno gave his famous lecture in 1583, and who then accompanied Dr John Dee (whose Hermetic interests were established in his Monas Hieroglyphica, and whose desire to see a unified world religion are well-known) back to Poland. 2 Details of Erasmus’ role in Poland, well-known in Europe, have only recently entered Anglophone scholarship. See “A Model for Christendom? Erasmus, Poland and the Reformation” (Howard Louthan 2014, 18–37). 3 The only other edition based on the Florentine manuscript was published in Cracow in 1585, lending weight to the supposition that the Basle edition was known to à Łasco and perhaps taken or sent by him to Poland. 4 The countess was searching for a middle way between Catholicism and Lutheranism in Emden, but the experiment failed, and in 1549 à Łasco was forced to leave. He moved to England where he established the Strangers’ Church for European Protestants in London. © Jane Everingham Nelson, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004520608_016

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Hendrik Niclaes, a merchant mercer from Amsterdam, settled in Emden, where he founded the mystical religious sect known as Haus der Liebe (House, Household or Family of Love in English; Maison de la Charité in French). Niclaes had been brought up in a devout Catholic family, and it is generally assumed that his radical notions stemmed from mystical experiences in childhood which convinced him of the transforming power of an inner religious experience (Martin 1989, 181).5 Alastair Hamilton explored the possibility of influence from Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ which dates from 1424, and from the Theologica Germanica (or The Book of the Perfect Life), usually dated to 1453, which he claims ‘were so outstandingly popular in Familist circles that we can safely assume that Niclaes read them, assimilated them and made eclectic use of them’ (1981, 6).6 The same may plausibly be said of the Hermetica, where the transformative experience which Rufus Jones describes is a recognizable version of the process of spiritual regeneration in Book I [1] of the Corpus.7 To date, noone has suspected that Niclaes may have encountered the Hermetic texts, but given Łaski’s reforming zeal and the possibility that he owned the Basle publication, there was an opportunity for Niclaes to hear the Hermetica in Emden. While Roman Catholicism shares one or two ideas with Hermetism (free will and a belief in the immortality of the soul), Protestants and Puritans share only the latter and were fiercely opposed to the former. A comparison of the Hermetica with Niclaes’ When à Łasco left England following the accession of Queen Mary Tudor in 1553, he settled in Brandenburg where he was able to help Catherine Willoughby Bertie, Duchess of Suffolk during her Marian exile. Catherine was the second wife of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, whose first wife had been Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary, Queen of France. She was a close friend of the then Princess Elizabeth. Her son by her second husband, Peregrine Bertie, married the earl of Oxford’s younger sister, also Mary. Thus she provides yet another conduit for the transmission of new religious ideas coming from the Continent into England at the level of the nobility. Within two years of à Łasco’s departure, the first and best known Familist missionary, Christopher Vittels, arrived at Colchester from Amsterdam (Marsh 54, 55). 5 According to Rufus Jones, at the age of nine, Niclaes had a vision that ‘the light of the splendour and glory of the Lord in shape like a mountain rising from the bed [. . . illuminated] him in mind and spirit through and through.’ ‘He felt himself penetrated with the divine Spirit, and, to use his later phrase, raised to “a begodded man”’ (1909, 431). 6 Luther produced two editions of the Theologica Deutsch which originates from an unknown priest and possibly a knight of the Teutonic order. The book instructs the reader on the attainment of spiritual perfection, on goodness etcetera, and situates mystical activity within a Christian context (Stjerna 2007, 395–396). There are some similarities too with the early fifteenth century contemplative and mystic Brethren of the Common Life (Jones 1909, 298–332 passim). 7 Compare: ‘Once when thought came to me of the things that are and my thinking soared high [. . . ] an enormous being completely unbounded in size seemed to appear to me (CH I [1]). I saw an endless vision in which everything became light (CH I [4]); I am the light you saw, mind, your god [. . . ] that in you which sees and hears is the word of the Lord, but your mind is god the father (CH I [6]); this is the final good for those who have received knowledge: to be made god’ (CH I [26]).

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admittedly obscurely expressed teachings, yields ten or more ideas, characteristic of Familism which are consonant with ideas to be found in the Hermetica, some found only in the Hermetica. For Familism and Hermetism compared, see main text.

1

Diffusion or Transmission of Familism

Niclaes was a most prolific writer and the STC lists about eighteen titles by him as well as other Familist works attributed to him. J. W. Martin lists ‘a play and several kinds of verse, in addition to prayers, pastoral letters, and other more specifically religious genres’ among his copious output (1989, 185). However, it is difficult to formulate a comprehensible and systematic statement of his beliefs from a prose style described by one of his attackers as full of ‘riddels and dark speeches’ (in Martin 186). Given that he was able to attract followers estimated at a thousand or more in England in the 1570s, to a sect that survived for over a century, it is probable that the Elders whom he taught transmitted his ideas more clearly in the oral face-to-face interactions that were a mandatory part of the house meetings. Both Familists and Hermetists were caught in the tension between the need to preserve their secrets, and the obligation to evangelize. It is possible that Niclaes in his riddling written works was following the advice attributed to Ficino to write ‘by ambiguities and Aenigmas, that if the book happen to be cast away by sea or by land, he who should read it might not understand it’.8 His ideas attracted converts in Europe where his works were translated from his ‘Basse Almayne’ (Low German)9 into Latin, French and High German (Martin 181), before the first English translations appeared in 1574.10

2 Converts The teachings of Niclaes were conveyed principally in books, printed abroad and smuggled into England. The best known of the printers was Christopher Plantin, widely believed to have been a Familist himself and whose house in Leiden attracted ‘friends, authors, illustrators, and assistants who shared his views’ (van Dorsten 1970, 28). Jan van Dorsten found evidence to suggest a ‘powerful, as it were, masonic, network of 8 9 10

BL Sloane MS 3638 Item 7 ch. 17. Purported to be a translation of Liber de Arte Chemica by Marsilius Ficinus, printed in the Theatrum Chemicum. ‘The works of chief importance’ included The Glass of Righteousness, The First Exhortation of H.N. to his Children, The Evangelium Regni (Gospel of the Kingdom) and Terra Pacis (Spiritual Land of Peace) (Jones 1909, 433). From Emden in East Friesland, the society spread to other towns in Friesland, to Holland, Brabant, Flanders and France (Jones 1909, 432).

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politicians and viri docti’ (1970, 29).11 The network included Benito Montano, court chaplain to Philip II, who was overseeing the publishing of the famous polyglot Bible, Justus Lipsius and Ortelius, the famous map-maker. Van Dorsten comments that ‘the official picture of their “conversions”, from Roman Catholicism to Calvinism and back, presents a bewildering picture’, and suggests that ‘in many instances, Familistic tendencies offer a positive explanation for what would otherwise be called “inconstancy”’ (29). This same phenomenon of conversions, even serial conversions, was occurring in England. These were not all conversions of political expediency such as that of Henri IV who converted from Protestant to Catholic. These converts were men who had been persuaded (and often then dissuaded) by argument. Notorious among them were Andrew Perne, Master of Peterhouse; the Catholic Archbishop, Marc Antonio de Dominis; and William Alabaster. Perne, whom Patrick Collinson describes as ‘Catholic-Protestant-of no religion, or Neutral’ (1994, 180), presided over Peterhouse ‘where Papists, Protestants and Puritans all contrived to coexist without any of the factional turmoil which periodically distracted [. . .] some other colleges’ (203). Perne was also rector of Balsham, and in 1575 was obliged to investigate reports of Familists in the parish. Collinson reports that, after listening to the parishioners, Perne did little or nothing about them (202).12 De Dominis came to England in 1616, converting on ‘vaguely ecumenical grounds’, and then reconverting (Questier 1996, 55). Alabaster, poet, chaplain to Essex during the ill-fated Irish campaign, eventually married Katherine Fludd, widow of Thomas Fludd the brother of Robert Fludd, author of Utriusque Cosmi Historia 1617 (History of the Two Worlds). A most committed Hermetist, Robert Fludd details the ‘harmonious design of the cosmos and the corresponding harmonies in Man’ (Yates 1972, 2000, 79). The fact that both Alabaster and his brother-in-law evinced an interest in Cabala suggests that they quite possibly engaged in discussion of Hermetic ideas. Gary Ferguson reports the phenomenon in France in the 1540s even before the advent of Familism, where men moved ‘back and forth between the two confessions several times’ (2011, 189). Van Dorsten has explained the conversions reported at Leiden as motivated by Familism (1970, 29). However, having uncovered the many similarities between Familism and Hermetism, and knowing now that the Hermetica was read in Spain, admired in Italy, respected by the French episcopate, and a topic of interest at the court of Navarre, I am of the opinion that it is the way of Hermes to salvation that converts found both attractive and unsettling. 11 12

He is not suggesting that they were Masonic brethren. Collinson’s own summing up that Perne ‘was content to be pastor to a sect of well-camouflaged heretics of the most radical kind’ (202) is an indication that even so fine a scholar as Collinson has based his opinion of the Familists on the pejorative declarations of their attackers.

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271

Familists in the Netherlands

The printing house of Christopher Plantin at Antwerp, with branches established in Leiden (1576) and Paris (1583), was first associated with the Family of Love by late nineteenth century research into the Plantin/Moretus archives in the Netherlands (Mangani 72). The houses were meeting places for men such as Mercator and Ortelius, the famed map-makers and, as van Dorsten has shown, for Englishmen such as Daniel Rogers, who was Ortelius’ cousin, and who in England became a member of the Sidney circle (1962, 19, 21). Hubert Languet, Sidney’s mentor, used the Antwerp address as a poste restante, and may or may not have been aware of Plantin’s Familist inclinations. In a letter from Antwerp, dated 14 October 1579 to Sidney ‘because a few years ago you wanted to know the “mysteries” behind this name of the House of Charity’, Languet recounts the most extraordinary story of a criminal sect involved in multiple bigamy, robbery, pillage, in following orders ‘to poison some wells’, and in the overthrow of all princes and magistrates. The letter was sent at the height of the negotiations for the marriage of the queen to Anjou and may have confirmed Sidney’s objection to the match. It is either deliberate misinformation, misunderstanding of the real facts, or Languet is talking about an actual criminal gang who are masquerading as Familists (Kuin 2012, 923–924). The most probable explanation is that Languet himself has been deliberately misinformed. It is clear that the identities, beliefs and practices of Familists were a closely guarded secret. Wallace Kirsop claims Plantin’s circle as ‘an almost unique example of a successfully secret society’ (1964, 107). Kirsop refers to ‘the coded fictions of letters’ (106), and their willingness to equivocate, but undoubtedly Familists evaded detection because they could simultaneously ‘adhere sincerely to the sect and maintain unswerving membership of the Catholic church’ (105). The historian’s suspicion is aroused by membership of the orthodox religion in the presence of toleration of the reformed religion. Giorgio Mangani in 1998 argued for a connection between Ortelius’ cordiform projection of the world and the Plantin House’s printer’s emblem used on the cover of his publication of Niclaes’ The Mirror of Justice, Antwerp, 1556. The emblem consists of a heart enclosing two hands gripped in a handshake (similar to the two hands in Wechel’s emblem); three upright lilies make the backdrop (Mangani 73). Plantin’s usual emblem was a pair of compasses and the motto labore et constantia. The burning heart, according to Mangani, was ‘at the centre of Familist iconography’; it symbolized ‘charity and love for others and the divine force of illumination’, and appeared frequently in Niclaes’ publications sometimes accompanied by the Hebrew word for God, YAWEH (Mangani 72). The same symbol, ‘the sacred heart of Jesus’ was employed by the Jesuits, who also used the cordiform map projections in their mission to take the Word to the world (Mangani, 71). In 1593, Plantin’s Antwerp House published an emblem by Joris Hoefnagel: Allegory of Hermathena. It depicts Hermes and Athena as

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an owl, holding Hermes’ caduceus, poised on a terrestrial globe from which grow olive branches symbolizing harmonia mundi (the peace of the world). The globe rests on Ortelius’ atlas, Theatrum orbis terrarium. So important was the atlas in spreading the Word and bringing both ‘inner illumination’ and ‘light to unknown lands’, that Guillaume Postel, Ortelius’ great friend, hailed it as of equal importance to the polyglot Bible, written for the entire human race (Magnani 77).

4

Familists in France

Printing, publishing and bookselling are the ideal ways to disseminate ideas, both overtly and covertly. Kirsop explains that ‘new adherents were won primarily through personal contacts and through judicious circulation of the books’, and that ‘[t]he doctrines were always intended for a carefully chosen élite’ (108). That books by Niclaes (and also by Barrefelt who broke away from the sect in 1573) were available in France is clear from the listing of titles in French translation in catalogues (Kirsop 111). However, no such books appear to have survived. Some members in the entourage of the French king’s younger brother François duc d’Anjou are suspected of belonging to the Maison de Charité, but there is nothing at all to connect the duc directly with Familism apart from his tolerant, pacifist politique stance, which is odd in a soldier. He was not an intellectual and read no languages other than French. Nevertheless, according to Mack Holt, ‘many of the best minds of the sixteenth century either served in his household or sought his patronage’ (1986, 16). The duc would certainly have heard about the Hermetic texts from his sister Marguerite de Valois, to whom he was very close, and he was in a position to hear of Familism from men such as Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Clovis Hesteau de Nuysement or Jean de la Jessée. The latter was one of those, ‘Catholique de surface ou secrètement protestant, ayant des amis de deux bords.’13 The religion of the duc d’Anjou was similarly suspect. In 1575, after a falling out, François had left the French court and allied himself for a time to the Huguenot Henri Condé, a Prince of the Blood, and at the age of twenty-one forced his brother, the king, to sign the pro-Protestant ‘peace of Monsieur’ or the Edict of Beaulieu. The 1580 war was concluded in November with La Paix de Fleix, a treaty in which Marguerite de Valois herself played a part.14 In her record of the event, Marguerite gives the credit 13 14

‘Overtly Catholic or covertly Protestant, having friends on both sides.’ J. Pineaux. La Poésie des Protestants (1559–1598) Paris, 1971, 320–321. In Ingman 1984, 225–228. Marguerite herself does not mention the part she played in summoning negotiators for the treaty but a letter from her mother the queen exists in which she congratulates her on her contribution (Mémoires, 200 n.413).

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to her brother who joined them in Gascony for seven months from September of 1580 until the following May, during which time he tried unsuccessfully to reconcile Henri, her husband, to de Biron. When d’Anjou left Gascony, he went secretly to England in June 1581 and again in 1582, although all hope of a defensive political alliance with England through marriage to the queen was by then lost.15 In 1581, d’Anjou was accompanied to England by Jean Bodin, whom he had first appointed to his entourage ten years earlier. Bodin charmed the English with his wit and erudition, but his religious views were hard to determine.16 According to his translator and biographer, Marion Leathers Daniels Kuntz, Bodin was both ‘profoundly religious’, intolerant only of Atheism, and also felt that ‘true religion requires no church’ (xxix). This is a sentiment which the Familists also shared. In her magisterial study of the Colloquium heptaplomeres, Kuntz notes the frequency of Bodin’s references to Hermes Trismegistus and concludes that the book was at its core Hermetic (liv). Again, like the Familists, and also like Hermetists, Bodin’s Colloquium heptaplomeres, not published in his lifetime, makes the case for complete religious toleration of all faiths. Kuntz quotes Pierre Mesnard who described Bodin as having ‘a grand conception of salvation open to all, Christians or pagans on equal footing’ (xx). This concept is not the only one that Bodin shares with the Corpus Hermeticum. In an earlier work, Universae naturae theatrum, he wrote that ‘God created the universe through the exercise of His free will, and He bestowed free will on man’ (Kuntz xxxiv). In the Theatrum, Bodin wrote: ‘I have placed before your eyes good and evil, life and death; choose therefore the good and you will live [. . .]’ (in Kuntz, xxxiv). The words clearly echo Hermes to Tat about the effects of choice: ‘And the evils for which we are responsible, who choose them instead of good things, are no responsibility of god’s’ (CH IV [8]). Kuntz remarks Bodin’s admiration for Ficino, for Pico and for the ancient theologians. Like Pico, Bodin does not regard Adam’s sin and fall as an ‘indelible stain’, but a sin that the individual can redeem by his own choices. Like d’Anjou in 1575, another who had allied himself to the Prince of Condé and his cause was Philippe du Plessis Mornay. So far, those I have discussed, who looked favourably on the Hermetica, were Roman Catholic like Foix de Candale, but Mornay was one of those Protestants who had sought refuge in England after the terrible events of Saint Bartholomew’s day in 1572. It is no surprise that he too was a visitor to the Huguenot court in Navarre; he was close to Henri and undertook diplomatic missions for him to England. Mornay is of interest to this study because of his familiarity with Hermetic ideas. Yates cites him as an example of ‘how men were turning to the Hermetic 15 16

Anniina Jokinen. “Biography of François, Duke of Alençon and Anjou.” Luminarium Encyclopedia. accessed 10.09.2015 In 1562 he signed the oath of loyalty to the Catholic faith, but in 1569 he was arrested and imprisoned as ‘an adherent of the new religion’ (Kuntz xxi).

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religion of the world to take them above these conflicts’ (1964, 176), and Robert Kinsman describes him as ‘a Protestant Hermetist’ who ‘believed that religious tolerance would be attained by a return to a Hermetic religion of the world’ (in Harrie 501). However, Jeanne Harrie doubts Mornay’s commitment to Hermetism, despite his obvious knowledge and interest. She argues that his references to Hermes Trismegistus in his Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne, published in 1581, are confined to this one work where they are augmented by references to ‘all non-Christian authorities whose works demonstrated conformity with Christian truth’, including other prisci theologi (505). Foix de Candale, by contrast, Harrie describes as ‘a convinced and enthusiastic Hermetist’ (513). Both men wanted to see the reunification of the church, but neither man was willing to compromise his commitment to his confession. Heather Ingman in a discussion of religious tolerance in the poetry of Jean de la Jessée, whom she suspects of being a Familist, notes that he was a friend of the apothecary Nicholas Houël, who founded the Maison de la Charité Chrétienne in Paris around 1576 (1984, 226). Yates describes it as ‘a combined orphanage, school, hospital, and pharmacy’ where ‘music forms part of the cure and the curriculum’, and suggests a possible link between Houël’s establishment, the Family of Love and the court of Henri III (1947, 157).17 A firmer indication of a connection between Houël and Hendrik Niclaes’ Family has been provided in a recent publication. To accompany her chapter on Houël and the Maison in Experiences of Charity, Lisa Keane Elliott has included six coloured plates discovered in the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow. They illustrate stages in the process of setting up the House of Christian Charity to the glory of Christ. Each rectangular plate is surrounded by a border one of whose verticals displays the initials H overlaid with N, to read ‘N H’ or Nicholas Houël. Closer examination reveals that on the other side the initial N is overlaid with H to read ‘H N’ for Hendrik Niclaes or Homo Novus, the distinctive signature of Niclaes. The Maison de la Charité followed in the charitable footsteps of Marguerite of Navarre in 1536 and continued after Houël’s death when Henri IV ‘established a hospice for poor invalid gentlemen there in 1598’ (Elliott 168). The Maison Royale de la Charité Chrétienne for disabled soldiers and the dependents of soldiers killed in battle was almost unique in Europe. The whole episode epitomises the doctrine of loving service to others that is the mark of both Familism and Christian Hermetism and, as we see, it chimes with the sentiments of Lear when he realizes a king’s responsibility for his destitute subjects, and also with Rosaline’s commandment to Berowne to spend ‘a twelvemonth in an hospital’ (5.2.859) in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

17

Given the importance attached to music in the Corpus (XVIII), and the therapeutic effects of spiritual harmony, it is possible that Houël’s generous act of charity is also linked to the caritas associated with Hermetism.

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5

275

Familists in England [summarized in main text]

Whereas Familism was a well-kept secret in France until the Plantin archive was opened and pamphlets, letters and books revealed its activities, in England the sect rose suddenly to public prominence around 1579 and then seemed to disappear after 1582. In fact, the group continued invisibly, without attracting attention, and enters the public record again after the accession of James VI and I. Christopher Marsh names 116 individual men and women or families either accused of belonging to the Family, identified from other sources such as wills, or ‘probable Familists’. From his close examination of the wills of known Familists, Marsh concluded that the frequency of the innocent phrase ‘loving friends’ was a probable indicator of a member of the society. Ten of the known Familists held positions close to the queen such as in her Guard, or for example as ‘Yeoman of the Jewel House’ or ‘Yeoman Warder of the Tower’ (265–287). Marsh’s meticulous microhistory of Familists in England reveals gentlemen or yeoman farmers, a printer, settled freeholders and a scatter of itinerants such as a mercer and weavers. The perception that Familists were mainly drawn from semi-literate artisans and merchants is hard to reconcile with a doctrine that was transmitted principally by printed books. The Family were most densely settled on the east coast in Essex, Cambridgeshire and the isle of Ely, but they also had a presence in Devon. As Marsh points out, his study ‘presents compelling evidence to suggest that most people were content to live peacefully alongside those who were known to hold religious beliefs that had been publicly attacked by Queen, Privy Council and Church’ (14). However, this ‘toleration’, as Alexandra Walsham emphasizes, ‘did not mean religious freedom’. It was ‘a conscious decision to refrain from persecuting something one knew to be wicked and wrong’ (Walsham 2006, 4). And in the case of the dissenting Familists, one of the things that was wicked and wrong was their own belief in what the English held to be the mischievous practice of religious toleration. In England the best information about Familist beliefs and practices comes from their attackers, from their own depositions, or in one case, from a forced public recantation.18 Although the sect had been present in England from as early as 1555, they came to official notice briefly in 1561 and again in 1574 (Hamilton 1981, 116–117, 120). They were suspected by the government because they met secretly and in unsanctified places, and they were feared because they accepted men and women of all religions and confessions which members were not required to renounce, since outward conformity to a particular religious practice was not deemed relevant to a religion that was concerned with personal spiritual regeneration. In addition, they were feared because their mission to evangelize was combined, as we know, with ‘a striking command of 18

Kristen Poole. 2000. Radical Religion, 74–78; J. W. Martin. 1989. Religious Radicals in Tudor England, 213–225.

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the printing press’ (Marsh 111), which was beyond the official censorship of the Stationers’ Company.19 The most vituperative attacks appeared in 1579 when John Rogers published The Displaying of an Horrible Sect, followed by John Knewstub’s Confutation of Monstrous and Horrible Heresies and Thomas Rogers’ Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England (in Jones 1909, 440, 443, 444). They were attacked by Protestants who thought their belief in free will and charitable good works favoured Catholicism, and their views on perfectibility and living purely, too Puritan; they were reviled by Puritans for denying the doctrine of original sin; they were despised by Catholics as hypocrites and cowards for their policy of dissimulation or equivocation which allowed then to evade prosecution by lying about their private beliefs while conforming outwardly with the prevailing religion, a practice known as Nicodemism.20 They were misunderstood by those who thought they were Anabaptists, or called them the Family of Lust, or the ‘familie of selflove’, and later they were mocked by writers such as Nashe and Middleton. In 1575 Familists were under surveillance because Niclaes’ works were being smuggled into England at a time when English Catholic missionary priests trained in Europe were also beginning to return home in secret. Walsham argues that it is more than coincidence that the ‘moral panic’ engendered by the arrival of the first Jesuits into England occurred at the same time as the anxieties about the Family surfaced (2014, 330).21 Jesuits and Familists were seen as two sides of the same coin: both operated clandestinely and ‘both professed an intense spirituality that their enemies dismissed as hypocritical piety’ (Walsham 2014, 330). Moreover, both were interested in the education of young minds.22 St Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises and Niclaes’ Terra Pacis, or the journey to the spiritual land of peace, both offer the disciple a contemplative way to God that resonates with, if not derived from, the Corpus Hermeticum. Other similarities between Familism and Hermetism, however, caused outrage from Catholics and Protestants alike: these ‘heresies’ included allegorical interpretation of the incarnation and the resurrection, leading some to be accused of Arianism, the belief that Man was born free of sin and through his own efforts could lead a pure and Christ-like life, eventually becoming like God or, what was even more blasphemous, becoming God. 19 20 21 22

Because of his involvement in printing and publishing Familist works, Thomas Basson (1555–1613), English schoolmaster, translator and printer, emigrated to Leiden, where he was associated with Familism, like Plantin before him (van Dorsten 1962, 141). Familists were not the only dissenters to survive by devious means. Sephardic Jews in London were reported to attend Protestant churches and take communion while observing Judaic rites in private (Walsham 2006, 191). Fathers Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion arrived in England in June 1580 (Walsham 2014, 317). The Jesuit commitment to education continues today; the Familist interest is depicted in a woodcut of children in school in Niclaes’ Exhortatio I reproduced in Poole 81.

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However, while the Jesuits were outlawed in England, attempts to outlaw the Familists eventually failed and they continued to go regularly to church, and as Marsh found in the parish of Balsham, to participate fully in the daily life of the village (95–96). Being pacifists, they posed a threat to no one, whereas Catholics owed allegiance to the Pope and were held to be potential traitors willing to support a Spanish invasion and to see the queen replaced by a Catholic. Concern about Familists increased when their presence at court was revealed. That concern may have motivated Sidney’s request to Languet for information, mentioned above. The courtier Familists included Yeomen of the Guard, under the captaincy of Christopher Hatton, and later under Walter Ralegh. Men selected for their height and strength, the Yeomen (not to be confused with the ‘Beefeaters’ at the Tower) were charged with safeguarding her Majesty’s safety, night and day, at home and on progress. Between June 1575 and January 1581 the Privy Council dealt with nineteen items concerning the sect or its members, five of which concerned the Queen’s Guard (Martin 215).23 In October 1580 the queen issued a Proclamation against the Familists. However, ‘the horrible secte of grosse and wicked heretiques’ was never pursued. Familists who had been arrested, interrogated and imprisoned were released. No Familists were hanged, and by the end of 1582, the matter was no longer a concern. The affair coincided with the several visits from the French court and from the duc himself, mentioned above, but whether the matter was discussed in a way that contributed to the uneventful outcome it is impossible to say. However, rumours persisted of friends in high places for the Familists, whose beliefs and practices, as we saw, are so closely identified with Hermetism. Marsh refers to John Etherington who in 1645 recalled that ‘some great Peers and Persons of quality, and estate in this land as elsewhere . . . have taught and entertained [the teachings of HN] with great affection and high applause’. The word ‘applause’ seems to imply a performance of some sort, but Etherington named no names, speaking only of ‘one great person’ in particular (whom he addressed as “My Lord”) who had plainly professed the doctrine of HN (Marsh 166–167). In 1604, a spokesman for the Family (probably the Yeoman Robert Seale) wrote a Supplication to King James defending the Family (Marsh 201). His letter was in response to James’ Basilikon Doron which had galvanized anti-Familist Puritans into action against the Family. The Supplication was published in Cambridge ‘with the addition of lengthy and vitriolic editorial “Examinations”’ (Marsh 203). It seems, asserts Marsh, ‘that the Examiner was a man who had held his tongue through the last two decades

23

See also Acts of the Privy Council XII, 232: ‘we are given to understand that there are divers persons terming them selves to be of the Familie of Love, maintaining erroneous doctrines and using private conventicles contrarie to her Majesties lawes’ (in Marsh 111).

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of Elizabeth’s reign, when someone influential had protected the Family’ (203). Like Elizabeth before him, James took no action. During the course of this study, I have found such a plethora of similar beliefs and practices between spiritual Familism and the mystic Christian Hermetism as to suggest that Familism is a branch of a tree, whose tap root descends to Hellenic Egypt and whose trunk is the Corpus Hermeticum. Christian Hermetism resembles Familism, whose fundamental tenets are religious reconciliation and toleration of all faiths; it is possible that the Familists who gave such offence were actually closet Hermetists.

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Index Abelard, Pierre 31 Abraham, Lyndy 77, 212 academies: Academy of Navarre 99–100 Baïf’s Académie de Poésie et Musique 94, 244 Palace Academy, Paris 100 Platonic Academy, Florence 10, 16, 25, 44, 63 twenty-first century 16–17, 22 Act of Uniformity 5–6 Acts of Elizabethan Settlement 2 Adamson, Jane 203 agape 3, 76, 92, 94, 126, 131, 154, 238 Agrippa, Cornelius 32, 36, 71, 76, 82, 87–89, 92, 107, 217, 228, 244 alchemy 12–14, 20, 22, 24–27, 30, 33, 34, 61, 77, 81, 82, 92, 105, 107, 108, 211–212, 231, 236, 237 algebra 32–33 al-Khowarizmi, Muhammad ibn Musa 32 Allen, Michael 70 al-Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din 30 Altman, Joel 179, 196 Andreae, Johann Valentin 25 androgynous nature of God 47, 99, 233 Angard, Laurent 120 angels 23, 32, 60, 62, 108 Annas, Julia 49 Aquinas, Thomas 59 Arianism 57, 276 Arius of Alexandria 57, 59 Arminius, Jacob 188 Arnold, Jonathan 73 Artapan 257 As You Like It 10 Asclepius 2–3, 12–13, 24–26, 30–31, 34–37, 48, 50, 56, 62–63, 76, 88, 91, 95, 128, 184, 192, 221, 233, 257, 261, 265 Asquith, Clare 8–10, 39, 234 Assmann, Jan 7 astrology 12–14, 19, 20, 22–26, 30, 32, 33, 61, 92, 105, 108, 168–169, 189, 236, 257 astronomy 12, 33, 37, 74, 130, 264 Athanasian Creed 58 Atheism 2, 39, 69, 112, 246 Augustine, Saint 48, 54, 59, 188, 213

Bacon, Francis 14, 38, 128, 218 Bacon, Roger 31 Baïf, Jean-Antoine de 93, 244 Balsamo, Jean 99 Banes, Daniel 74 Barker, Francis 206 Bate, Jonathan 207 Battenhouse, R. W., 143, 177, 189 Bickersteth, Geoffrey 143 Biron, Armand de Gontaut, baron et maréchal de 97–98, 135 Bloom, Harold 14, 183 Boccaccio, Giovanni 31 Bodin, Jean 82, 85, 101–102, 109, 131, 273 Boissard, Jean-Jacques 258 Botticelli, Sandro 257 Bouthoorn, Ruud 12, 19 Bowes, Thomas 131 Boyarin, Daniel 178 Bradley, A. C., 143, 172 Bradwardine, Thomas 31, 252 Brahe, Tycho 18 Briçonnet, Guillaume 91 Brooke, Tucker 195 Bruce, Susan 84 Bruno, Giordano 13, 15, 37, 60, 82,105–106, 121, 236 Bullough, Geoffrey 149 Burns, Dylan 19 Butler, Samuel 27 Cabala 74, 88, 270 caduceus 40, 175, 240, 251, 256, 258 Calvin, John 3, 188 Calvinism 79, 92, 112, 188–189, 203 Campanelli, Maurizio 22, 30 Cardano, Gerolamo 32, 82 Carroll, William 166 Casaubon, Isaac 4, 26, 44, 233, 257 Castiglione, Baldassare 73 Catherine de Medicis 92, 94, 96, 119 Catholic League 37, 94, 133, 135 Catholics in England: persecution of 38, 40, 98, 112 post-Reformation 4–7, 39, 133, 235 Cavell, Stanley 178

303

Index Cefalu, Paul 196, 202 Cenacle de Meaux 91, 244 censorship 38, 40–41, 112, 250 Chambers, E. K. 121n Chambers, R. W. 143, 158 Champeaud, Grégory 119 Champier, Symphorien 34, 82, 89–92, 94 Chapman, George 38, 66, 110 Charles IX, King of France 94 Chichkine, Vladimir 120 Christian Hermetists 20, 33, 53, 76, 85, 89, 107, 205, 217, 249 Cicero 145, 256, 260 Clement of Alexandria 257 Clucas, Stephen 70, 108 Clulee, Nicholas 107 Cohn, Albert 29 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 173, 191 Colet, John 36, 45, 81–84, 86, 88–90, 244 Collinson, Patrick 270 Comedy of Errors, The 7, 9, 59, 110, 234 Condell, Henrie 246 Constantine I, Emperor of Rome 57 contemplation 9, 21, 35, 56, 98, 104, 122, 123, 126, 132, 204, 216, 233, 237, 238 conventicles 39, 91, 93, 243–244. See also reading groups Copenhaver, Brian 12, 53, 90, 93, 168, 186, 192 Copernicus, Nicolaus 32–33, 37, 264 Corpus Hermeticum: English translation 4, 20 French translation 22 in England  36–38, 100–102, 105, 107–112 in Europe 26, 80 in France 35, 89–100 in Italy 11, 25, 31, 44 in the Middle Ages 64, 69 Latin translation 10, 69–70 provenance 4, 11, 64, 257 Cosimo de’Medici 10, 31, 34, 44, 63, 69 cosmic sympathy 190 Council of Ephesus 58, 252 Council of Trent 3, 188, 259 Crater Hermetis 19, 35, 75, 77, 88, 93, 117, 122, 124, 131, 192, 232, 238, 240, 244, 247 creatio ex nihilo 68, 72, 259, 262 creation 26, 44, 47, 54, 55, 61, 65, 68, 107, 190 Cymbeline 9

d’Aubigny, Agrippa 99 da Correggio, Mercurio 34, 71 Dagens, Jean 250 Dante, Alighieri 31, 215, 216, 226, 240, 252 Das Haus der Liebe. See Family of Love Davidson, Adele 247 Day of Judgment 2, 69, 178, 213–214 de Caus, Solomon 32 Dee, John 33, 36, 38, 53, 70, 76, 82, 102, 107–110 Dekker, Thomas 173 demons 34, 146–147, 180, 190–192, 200, 241 Descartes, René 32 determinism 34, 52, 168–169, 173, 175, 191, 203 Devereux, Robert, earl of Essex 133 divinity of mankind 36, 58, 67–68, 72, 77, 87, 198, 237, 265 Dodd, C. H., 52 Droeshout, Martin 255 du Bartas, Guillaume 119 du Perron, Jacques Davy 94–95 du Préau, Gabriel 93 dualism 54–55, 66, 213, 233–234, 239, 252 Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester 133 Duffy, Eamon 4–7, 235 Dutton, Richard 28 ecstasy 25, 51, 83, 233 Eden, Richard 208 Edict of Nantes 35, 110, 118, 120–121, 134, 139 Egypt 11–12, 25, 27, 61, 76 eirenicism 9, 80, 85, 87, 250 Eleusina Sacra 134, 225 Elizabeth I, Queen of England  4–6, 36, 101, 118, 248, 278 Elizabeth Stuart, Princess, Electress Palatine 32, 206 Elliott, Lisa Keane 274 Elton, William 14, 144 English players in Germany 29, 250 Enlightenment 13, 15, 18, 22–25, 32–33 Erasmus 36, 45, 82, 84, 86–88, 130, 267 Erne, Lukas 244 eros 76, 106, 131, 238 esotericism 15–20, 22–28, 30 Euclid 33, 53, 82 evil, author of 48, 102, 188, 193, 233, 243 Faivre, Antoine 15–17, 20–25, 27, 33, 80, 257–258

304 Family of Love 10, 27, 65, 238, 267–278 and Christopher Plantin 104, 269 and Hendrik Niclaes 65, 93, 244, 267–268 and Hermetism 35, 103–104, 112, 245, 269, 276 and loving friends 102 and the Privy Council 103, 277 in England 10, 27, 35, 39, 102–103, 107, 112, 244–245, 249, 275–278 in France 94, 274 in the Netherlands 271 Febvre, Lucien 2, 246 Ferdinand I of Aragon, King of Naples and Sicily 35, 75, 122, 209 Ferguson, Gary 270 Festugière, André-Jean 3, 12, 64, 260 Ficino, Marsilio 4, 10, 16, 19, 24–26, 30, 34, 44, 59, 64, 69–72, 83, 108, 214–215, 236 Fitzpatrick, Sylvia 87 Florence 10, 13, 16, 22, 44 Foix de Candale, François 22, 33, 35, 36, 53, 66, 82, 94, 98, 105, 120, 146, 167–8, 188, 214, 228, 263, 264, 273 forgiveness 146–147, 158, 171, 180, 229, 264 Fowden, Garth 64, 66, 189–190, 197, 261 François I, King of France 91, 139, 206, 210 François, duc d’Anjou 98, 101, 120–121, 272 free will 26, 31, 45, 86–87, 101, 169, 188–189, 233, 242 Freemasonry 27, 33, 39, 53, 249 French, Peter 107, 109 Froben, Johann 108 Frosio, Carole 18 Frye, Northrop 137–138 Galileo 32 Garber, Marjorie 178 Garin, Eugenio 11 Gatti, Hilary 15, 106, 236 gematria 24, 33 Gemistos, George (Plethon) 62–63 Genesis 26, 44, 66, 68 Gentile, Sebastiano 70 geometry 33, 36, 53, 82 Gildon, Charles 142 Giorgio, Francesco 74 Giraldi, Giovanni Battista 176 gnōsis 1, 3, 20–21, 25–26, 51, 54–55, 71, 124, 132, 211, 233, 261

Index Gnosticism 12–13, 47, 54–55, 71 good shepherd 53, 257 Goodland, Katharine 7 Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas 53, 56–57, 61–62 Gospel of John 44–45, 52–53, 68 Grafton, Anthony 81, 244 Gray’s Inn 9, 39, 110, 118, 127–128, 130, 234 Greenblatt, Stephen 6 Grese, William 67 Groves, Beatrice 7 Guise, Henri, duc de 37, 98 Haigh, Christopher 4–5, 235 Hall, Kim 177, 185–186 Hamilton, Alastair 268 Hamilton, Donna 8, 10, 39 Hamlet 40, 50, 104 Hamlin, Hannibal 153 Hammer, Paul 132 Hanegraaff, Wouter 11–20, 23, 25–26, 34, 55, 59, 61, 70, 74–75, 82, 84, 89, 238 Harbage, Alfred 137 Harington, John of Kelston 246, 248 Harrie, Jeanne 37, 105, 250, 274 Hart, Alfred 176 Harvey, Gabriel 81, 128 Heilman, Robert 195 heliocentrism 32–33, 37, 106, 264 Heminge, John 246 Henri II, King of Navarre (Henri d’Albret) 91 Henri III and IV, King of Navarre and France (Henri Bourbon) 35, 37, 67, 94, 117, 118, 122, 132–134, 224, 234 Henri III, King of France (Henri de Valois) 37, 94, 118, 121, 133 Henri, Prince of Condé 98 Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales 32, 110 Henry V 7 Henry VIII 9 heresy 2, 36, 57–58, 89, 91, 96, 234, 248 Hermes Christianus 22, 236 Hermes Trismegistus 3, 10, 17, 22, 30–31, 33, 39, 44, 61–62, 64, 108, 110, 128, 252, 256; in art, 11, 44 Hermes, mythical 125, 176, 231, 240, 256 Hermetica. See Corpus Hermeticum; Asclepius Hermeticism  12–13, 20–25, 27, 28, 31, 33, 55, 105. See also alchemy, astrology, Cabala, magic

305

Index Hermetism: and Family of Love 35, 103–104, 112, 245, 269, 276 and Hermeticism 12, 20, 22, 28 and Neoplatonism 45, 55–56, 61, 71, 93, 99 and religious tolerance 3, 26, 105, 232 and silence 3, 34, 51, 69, 72 beliefs 20, 35, 233–234, 237, 259–262; Christian Hermetism 1, 29, 73, 109, 112, 128, 133, 236, 243, 247, 274, 278 guide to the worthy 26, 34, 41, 67, 69, 234, 246 in antiquity 3, 11, 12 44, 45, 48, 64 in England 37–39, 86, 105, 107, 109, 112, 246 in France 75, 89, 99, 120, 134 in Germany 63 in Italy 24, 70, 73 in secret 20, 28, 29, 34, 41, 68, 82 in the Arab world 13, 30, 61, 257 in the Middle Ages 30–31 Marsilianism 71–72 neo-Alexandrine 24, 30, 81 path to salvation  20, 45, 47, 68, 77, 132, 226, 232 prisca theologia 3, 25, 30, 232 religion of the world 3, 13, 37, 105, 243, 247, 249, 274 Herz, Emil 29 Honigmann, E. A. J. 14, 177 Hooke, Robert 32 Hôpital des Enfants Rouges 92 Houël, Nicholas 94 Howard, Charles, earl of Nottingham 28, 109 Howell, Roger 93 Hulme, Peter 206 Hunt, Maurice 7

Johnson, Samuel 142 Jones, William 220 Jones-Davis, Margaret 9 Jorgensen, Paul 144, 187 Julian the Theurgist 53

Iamblichus 26, 56–57 ignorance, vice of soul 37, 48, 67, 103, 106, 141, 145, 149–151, 171, 179, 191, 242, 261 Ingman, Heather 274 intertexts 9, 20, 236–237, 240

Kabbalah 13, 24, 73–74, 84 Kaufman, Peter 84 Keats, John 143 Keefer, Michael 89, 217 Kelley, Edward 18 Kermode, Frank 14, 216, 218, 230, 236 Kerrigan, John 166 King Lear: Christian or pagan 14, 141, 143–145 death of Cordelia 7, 142, 171–172 death of King Lear 142, 149, 171–172 effect on audience 142–143, 172 knowledge of self 141, 144–145, 149–150, 155, 157–158, 172 madness 156–157, 160–161, 170, 241 memory 156–157 redemption, 143–144, 158 retention of reason 156, 161 revisions 142, 165–167, 170, 176, 241 spiritual rebirth 142, 149, 158, 171 torments 141, 145, 148–149, 153–154, 158, 162–163, 170, 171, 242 Kinsman, Robert 105, 274 Kirsop, Wallace 271 knowledge: of God. See also gnōsis; of self 3, 25, 48, 66, 68, 77, 104, 125–126, 130, 132, 139, 237 secret 2, 20–21, 28, 29, 41, 63, 71, 82, 88, 219, 234, 263 the path to salvation 1, 3, 20, 25, 45, 67, 104, 232 virtue of soul 180, 191, 261 Kositsky, Lynne 206, 208–209 Kott, Jan 142–143 Kristeller, Paul Oskar 12, 35, 49, 60 Kuntz, Marion Leathers Daniels 101–102, 273

Jacquot, Jean 38, 110 James VI and I, King of Scotland and England 14, 102, 245, 252 James, D. G. 143, 217 Janssen, Zacarias 32 Jardine, Lisa 81, 244 Jayne, Sears 82 Jeanne d’Albret 92

L’Académie Françoise 131–132, 186 La Primaudaye, Pierre de 131, 186 Lactantius 48 Lamb, Charles 143, 173 Languet, Hubert 271 Łaski, Jan 267 Lazzarelli, Lodovico 4, 11, 16, 19, 20, 25, 34–35, 71, 74–76, 117, 123–124

306 Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Guy 98, 100 Le Loyer, Pierre 138, 139 Leavis, F. R., 203 Leech, David 215 Lefèvre d’Etaples, Jacques 35, 82, 86, 91 Lefranc, Abel 120, 125 Lennam, Trevor 137 Leo, John 176 lèse-mysterium 173, 263 libertines 10 Liebniz, Gottfried 32 Linden, Stanton 257 Lodge, Thomas 10 Lollards 244 Longueville, Henri d’Orléans, duc de 98, 135 Louis XII, King of France 34, 90, 209–210 Love’s Labour’s Lost: backstory 118, 122, 135 becoming god-like 117, 118, 125, 131, 139 love in the mind 124, 131 musical comedy 138, 238 Old Comedy 117, 137–138 overcoming desire 124, 126, 136, 238 pursuit of knowledge 124, 131, 134, 136, 237 religious toleration 117–119, 122, 131, 133, 135 service to others 126, 131 silent contemplation 122, 125–126, 132, 136 tree of knowledge 125 tree of life 125 Lupton, Julia 178 Luther, Martin 3, 86 Macbeth 53 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 245 MacDonald, Stewart 86 macrocosm and microcosm 23, 56, 61, 74, 189 madness 51, 106, 222. See also King Lear, Othello Magee, Glenn Alexander 55 magic 11–14, 19–20, 24, 30, 33, 62, 77 Magnus, Albertus 31 Mahé, Jean-Pierre 3, 12, 47, 65 Maison de la Charité. See Family of Love Manandyan, H. 12 Mangani, Giorgio 271 Manichaeism 54 Marguerite d’Angoulême 91, 92, 119, 210, 274 Marguerite de Valois 35, 38, 94, 96, 98–99, 118–120, 135, 266, 272 Marlowe, Christopher 38–39, 41, 110, 112, 245

Index Marotti, Arthur 6 Marrapodi, Michele 15 Marsh, Christopher 102, 275 Martin, J. W. 269 Martyr, Peter 208 Masters, G. Mallary 92 mathematics 32–33, 36, 53, 82, 88 Matthews, Stephen 38 Mauvissière, Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la 37, 105 Maxwell, J. C. 14 Mayenne, Charles de Lorraine, duc de 98, 135 McAlindon, Tom 230 McCalla, Arthur 23 McCoy, Richard 173 McDonald, Russ 206 Measure for Measure 7 Mebane, John 14, 211, 218 Merchant of Venice, The 74 Mesnard, Pierre 101, 273 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 14, 51 Miles, Leland 71, 83 Milward, Peter 235 Mind of God (Nous) 3, 20–21, 25, 48, 54, 77 mind’s eye 24, 55, 65, 70, 76, 219–220, 231, 260 Miola, Robert 236, 240 Monad 49, 54, 56, 65, 107 Montaigne, Michel de 250 More, Thomas 36, 84–86 Moreschini, Claudio 22, 45, 47, 55, 61–64, 67, 69–70, 94, 180, 191, 236, 259 Mornay, Philippe du Plessis 37, 104–105, 273 Moulton, R. G. 149 music for the soul 91, 94 mysticism 30–31, 55, 83 Nag Hammadi Library 12, 47, 57 Nashe, Thomas 128 Naunton, Robert 134, 224 Neoplatonism 34, 45, 53, 55–56, 60, 71, 99 Nestor, King of the Pylians 252, 255 Nestorianism 46, 58–59, 60, 76, 233, 252, 255, 265 Nestorius, Bishop of Syria 58–59, 66, 252 Neugebauer-Wölk, Monica 17–18 Newton, Isaac 32, 257 Nicene Creed 57 Nicholas of Cusa 63, 95

307

Index Niclaes, Hendrik 65, 93, 103, 244, 267–269, 271. See also Family of Love Nicodemism 21, 29, 36, 103, 245, 248, 250 nihil ex nihilo fit 68, 262 Nippold, Frederik 103 Noble, Richmond 235 numerology 24, 74, 82, 88 occult 12, 18, 33, 93 Old Comedy 137–138 Olympus 3, 48, 50, 55, 72, 233, 253, 261 Önnerfors, Andreas 27 Orgel, Stephen 206–208, 217 Origen 52, 188 Ortelius, Abraham 107, 270–271 Othello: Christian or pagan 14, 177, 178, 189, 191, 203 deluded mind 183–184 demons 175, 177, 180, 185, 191, 194–195, 199–200, 202 descent to ignorance 179, 181–182, 187, 191 free will or destiny 188, 190–194, 197, 203 loss of reason 178, 181–182, 184, 186–187, 192–194, 197, 203 love and lust 183–184, 188, 195, 198–199, 201 love as a marriage of minds 183 madness 181, 186 perfect soul 175, 177–179, 181, 196, 203 responsibility for evil 193, 203 revisions 177 torments 179, 195, 196, 200–202 truth 177, 182, 186, 202 pacifism 104, 272, 277 paganism 3, 14, 59, 61, 68, 76, 95, 144. See also King Lear, Othello paideia 21, 25, 204 palingenesia 67, 144 Paracelsus 17–18, 25, 27 Paramelle, J. 12 Parry, Glyn 77, 108 Parsons, Robert 39, 60, 102, 112, 245, 248 Partridge, Christopher 18 Patterson, Annabel 9, 40 Peele, George 110, 129 Pelagius 189 Penry, John 38, 41 Percy, Henry, earl of Northumberland 77, 129 Pérez, Antonio 128, 133

perfectibility 3, 23–24, 35, 40, 48, 56, 68, 77, 87, 102–103, 192, 233 Perkins, William 8 Perne, Andrew 109 Petrarca, Francesco (Petrarch) 31 Petris, Loris 100 Philo of Alexandria 52 philosophia occulta 24 pia philosophia 3, 70, 81 Pibrac, Guy du Faur Seigneur de 125 Picatrix 13, 30 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 13, 31, 40, 73, 82, 84, 198 Plantin, Christopher 104, 107, 245, 269, 271 Plato 26, 34, 45, 48–52, 54, 59, 62–64, 69–71, 132, 213 Phaedo 50, 55, 213 Phaedrus 51–52, 55, 106, 264 Symposium 55, 69, 73 Timaeus 45, 54, 108 Plotinus 55–56 Pontano, Giovanni 75 Pope Innocent VIII 74 Porphyry 56, 76 predestination 52, 175, 188–189, 232 printers’ emblems 40, 80, 104, 175, 240, 271 prisca theologia 3, 25, 30, 144, 232 prophesyings 25, 40, 44, 81, 244 Protestants 6, 27, 83, 104, 118–119, 191, 214 Psalm 23 53 Psellos, Michael 31, 62 Pseudo-Dionysius 45, 60 Puritans 5, 102, 268, 276–277 Pusino, Ivan 84 Puttenham, George 108 Pythagoras 21, 32, 50, 92 Quakers 27, 245, 246, 249 Questier, Michael 6, 235, 248 Rabelais, François 92, 130 Ralegh, Walter 37–39, 102, 109, 112, 129, 245 reading: active 81 Bible 6, 244 reading groups 81, 93, 244, 246 Shakespeare’s manuscripts 40, 81, 143, 246–247 reconciliation 9, 63, 73–74, 243 redemption 46, 54, 68, 178, 242 Reformation 2, 4–5, 86, 218

308 Reitzenstein, Richard  4, 11, 143 religio mentis 3, 20, 25, 143, 241 religious civil wars 35, 37, 95, 119, 121 religious persecution 3, 110, 112, 250 religious plays 5, 7 religious toleration  9, 80, 84, 85, 98, 101, 103, 110, 271, 273, 275, 278. See also Love’s Labour’s Lost Reuchlin, Johannes 25 Ribner, Irving 177 Richard II 60 Richard III 7 Ridley, M. R. 195 Riffaterre, Michael 9, 236 rituals 20, 23, 53, 134, 224, 226 Roberts, R. J. 108 Romeo and Juliet 14 Rosenberg, Marvin 177, 195 Rosicrucianism 18, 25–27, 82 Rosselli, Hannibal 108 Rowland, Ingrid 15 Rymer, Thomas 179 Sacerdoti, Gilberto 15, 236 Saitta, Giuseppe 73 salvation of the soul: predestination 3, 52, 189, 232 through faith alone 3, 232 through good works 3, 232 through grace 3 through knowledge 3, 20–23, 25, 26, 34, 45, 50, 54–55, 63, 68, 76–79, 84, 87, 88, 93, 103–4, 125, 126, 132, 232, 241, 249 universal 101, 144, 229, 273 Scholem, Gershom 13 Schwarz, Robert 9–10 Scott, Walter 12, 221 Scragg, Leah 195 Serveto, Miguel 60 service to others 69, 103, 104, 126, 131, 141, 238, 274 Servier, Jean 18 Shaheen, Naseeb 235 Shakespeare, William and ambiguity 2, 21, 39–41, 49, 204, 236–237 and magic 14, 33, 77, 178, 236 and music 91, 138, 157, 218, 241 and romantic love 73, 183 and the royal court 28, 40, 117–118, 212, 235

Index epitaph 252, 255 inviting religious debate 9, 40, 49, 65, 81, 170, 173, 175,189, 193, 205, 229, 230, 237, 243 knowledge of Hermetism 9–10, 40, 51, 159, 232–235, 243, 251 religious sympathies 4, 6–7, 9–10, 14, 39–41, 101, 235–236, 251 understanding of psychology 148, 161, 163–164, 241–242 verbal borrowings 167–168, 219, 240 Sherman, William 109 Sidney, Philip 37, 73, 104–107, 110, 130–132, 137, 146–148, 271 Simonds, Peggy Muñoz 205, 211, 217–218 Smith, Hallett 207 Society of Friends. See Quakers Socrates 50–51, 55, 132, 144, 213, 224, 252 Soellner, Rolf 130, 144, 188 sonnets 7, 37, 106, 120, 130, 138 Sørensen, Jorgen 263 soul: afterlife of 2, 26, 48, 50, 52, 55, 58, 66, 171, 205, 211, 213–215, 252 and mind 51, 66 ascent of 47, 60, 77, 83, 107, 167, 169–170, 211 disease of 186 embodied 57, 205, 214–215, 224, 239 immortality of 2–3, 45, 48–49, 51, 62, 71, 85, 188, 205, 211, 213–214, 232–233, 237 journey of 66, 149, 167, 225, 237 metempsychosis 50, 85 nature of 55, 71, 85–86, 95, 213–214, 237, 239 resurrection of 69, 213–215, 239 separation from material body 26, 48, 50, 58, 66, 213–215, 224, 233, 235, 237, 239 soul sleep 213 world 56, 61 Southwell, Robert 39–40, 133, 250 Spencer, Theodore 215–216 spiritual regeneration  48, 67–68, 74, 75, 79, 87–89, 143, 173, 179, 225, 237, 268, 275 Spivack, Bernard 195 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre 96, 104, 119 Stanley, Thomas 21 Stanley, William, earl of Derby 109, 136, 210 Steuco, Agostino 44 Stevenson, David 249 Still, Colin 14, 205, 224, 226

309

Index Stobaeus, Johann 36, 93–95, 191 Stoll, E. E. 195 Strachey, Lytton 206 Streete, Adrian 60 Stritmatter, Roger 206, 208–209, 235 Sufism 14, 30 Szönyi, György 19, 30 Tamburlaine 58 Taylor, David 207 Taylor, Dennis 178 Taylor, Gary 165, 235 Tempest, The 14 alchemical process 204, 205, 210–213, 217, 239 allegory 204, 211, 217 ascent of the soul 205, 215, 225 death as dissolution 214, 223, 237, 239 Eleusinian mysteries 224–225 illusion 212, 214–216, 219, 221, 223, 227 initiation 224, 226 literal readings 204, 206, 208 magic 217–218, 224, 231 memory 221, 223, 236, 239 music 218–219, 222, 225, 231, 241 separation of mortal body and immortal soul 213 spirits 216, 220, 222–225 spiritual rebirth 204, 213, 224, 226, 229 Tertullianus 48 theosophy 11, 22–25, 27, 47, 90, 232, 251 Thirty-Nine Articles 6–7 torments of matter 67, 139, 173, 200–202, 207, 233, 242. See also King Lear, Othello Trinity 44, 58–60 Trithemius, Johannes 32, 82, 88 Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret 125 Turnebus, Adrian 36, 93 Two Noble Kinsmen 256

Tyard, Pontus de 127 Tyson, Donald 87 Ungerer, Gustav 224 Urban, Hugh 28–29 Urkowitz, Steven 165–166, 171 Valentinus 54 van den Broek, Roelof 15 van Dorsten, Jan 107, 269–271 van Leeuwenhoek, Antoni 32 Vaughan, Alden T. 208 Vecce, Carlo 90 Vickers, Brian 15 Viennot, Eliane 120 Virgil 209, 215–216, 239–240, 252 vita activa 132, 238 vita contemplativa 123, 132, 238 von Stuckrad, Kocku 17, 21, 27–29 Vyvyan, John 71–72, 83, 217, 236 Walsham, Alexandra 80, 275 Warren, Roger 155–156 Watson, A. G. 108 Wells, Stanley 151, 165 West, Robert 178 Whitgift, John 38, 40, 112, 250 Wilson Knight, George 14, 205, 216 Wind, Edgar 257 Winter’s Tale, The 256 Wotton, Henry 81, 244, 246 Woudhuysen, H. R. 118, 125, 135, 137 Yates, Frances 13, 15–16, 24, 33, 37, 85, 94–95, 104, 130, 135, 236, 274 Yewbrey, Graham 107 Zagorin, Perez 250 Zoroaster 4, 11, 44, 53, 62–63, 127