Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination

Margaret Healy is Reader in English and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex. She teaches many aspects of Renaissance literature and is particularly interested in the cultural history of the body and the interfaces among literature, medicine, science and art. She is the author of Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (2001) and Richard II (1998), and the co-editor of Renaissance Transformations: The Making of English Writing, 1500–1650 (2009). She edits the new British Medical Journal, Medical Humanities.

• Introduction; 1. Alchemical contexts; 2. Lovely boy; 3. The Dark Mistress and the art of blackness; 4. A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare; 5. Inner looking, alchemy and the creative imagination; 6. Conclusion: Shakespeare's poetics of love and religious toleration.

"Healy displaysconsiderable erudition in a broad array of topics, including Neoplatonism, esoteric, as well as practical alchemy, theological allegory, and much of the critical tradition of interpreting these poems." -Katherine Eggert,University of Colorado