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 SOVEREIGNs AND SUBJECTs IN
EARLY MODERN NEO-SENECAN DRAmA

Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama examines the

development of neo-Senecan drama, also known as ‘closet drama’, during the
years 1590–1613. It is the first book-length study since 1924 to consider these
plays – the dramatic works of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Samuel Brandon,
Fulke Greville, Sir William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary, along with the Roman
tragedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd – as a coherent group.

Daniel Cadman suggests these works interrogate the relations between sovereigns
and subjects during the early modern period by engaging with the humanist
discourses of republicanism and stoicism. Cadman argues that the texts under study
probe various aspects of this dynamic and illuminate the ways in which stoicism
and republicanism provide essential frameworks for negotiating this relationship
between the marginalized courtier and the absolute sovereign. He demonstrates
how aristocrats and courtiers, such as Sidney, Greville, Alexander, and Cary, were
able to use the neo-Senecan form to consider aspects of their limited political
agency under an absolute monarch, while others, such as Brandon and Daniel,
respond to similarly marginalized positions within both political and patronage
networks.

In analyzing how these plays illuminate various aspects of early modern political
culture, this book addresses several gaps in the scholarship of early modern drama
and explores new contexts in relation to more familiar writers, as well as extending
the critical debate to include hitherto neglected authors.

Daniel Cadman is Associate Lecturer in English, Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

 Studies in Performance and
Early Modern Drama
General Editor’s Preface
Helen Ostovich, McMaster University
Performance assumes a string of creative, analytical, and collaborative acts that, in defiance
of theatrical ephemerality, live on through records, manuscripts, and printed books. The
monographs and essay collections in this series offer original research which addresses
theatre histories and performance histories in the context of the sixteenth and seventeenth
century life. Of especial interest are studies in which women’s activities are a central feature
of discussion as financial or technical supporters (patrons, musicians, dancers, seamstresses,
wigmakers, or ‘gatherers’), if not authors or performers per se. Welcome too are critiques of
early modern drama that not only take into account the production values of the plays, but
also speculate on how intellectual advances or popular culture affect the theatre.
The series logo, selected by my colleague Mary V. Silcox, derives from Thomas
Combe’s duodecimo volume, The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1592), Emblem
VI, sig. B. The emblem of four masks has a verse which makes claims for the increasing
complexity of early modern experience, a complexity that makes interpretation difficult.
Hence the corresponding perhaps uneasy rise in sophistication:

Masks will be more hereafter in request,

And grow more deare than they did heretofore.

No longer simply signs of performance ‘in play and jest’, the mask has become the ‘double
face’ worn ‘in earnest’ even by ‘the best’ of people, in order to manipulate or profit from
the world around them. The books stamped with this design attempt to understand the
complications of performance produced on stage and interpreted by the audience, whose
experiences outside the theatre may reflect the emblem’s argument:

Most men do use some colour’d shift

For to conceal their craftie drift.

Centuries after their first presentations, the possible performance choices and meanings
they engender still stir the imaginations of actors, audiences, and readers of early plays. The
products of scholarly creativity in this series, I hope, will also stir imaginations to new ways
of thinking about performance.
Sovereigns and Subjects in Early
Modern Neo-Senecan Drama
Republicanism, Stoicism and Authority

DANIEL CADmAN
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Daniel Cadman 2015

Daniel Cadman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Cadman, Daniel.
Sovereigns and subjects in early modern neo-Senecan drama : republicanism, stoicism
and authority / by Daniel Cadman.
pages cm. -- (Studies in performance and early modern drama)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-3520-0 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-3521-7 (ebook) -- ISBN
978-1-4724-3522-4 (epub) 1. English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan,
1500-1600--History and criticism. 2. English drama--17th century--History and criticism.
3. Verse drama, English--History and criticism. 4. Kings and rulers in literature. 5.
Republicanism in literature. 6. Authority in literature. I. Title.
PR658.V4C33 2015
822’.309--dc23
2015015386

ISBN: 978-1-472-43520-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-61007-8 (ebk)
For my mother, Dilys Stevenson
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Contents

Acknowledgments   ix

Introduction   1

1 ‘The hurtful works of pleasure here behold’: Stoicism and

Sovereignty in Mary Sidney’s Antonius   23

2 ‘Plurality of Caesars’: Politics, Stoicism, and Exemplarity

in the Roman Plays of Thomas Kyd, Samuel Daniel, and
Samuel Brandon   41

3 Giving Tyrants Fame: Fulke Greville’s Mustapha and Alaham   69

4 William Alexander’s Darius and The Alexandræan Tragedy,

and Samuel Daniel’s Philotas   93

5 ‘The losse of that which fortune lends’: William Alexander’s

Croesus and Julius Caesar   127

6 ‘Insolent fictions of the tragic scene’: Stoicism and Republicanism

in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus and Catiline   149

7 ‘The news we heard did tell the tyrant’s end’: Elizabeth Cary’s
The Tragedy of Mariam   175

Conclusion   193

Bibliography   197

Index   215
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Acknowledgments

This book is the culmination of work and research which has taken place over a
number of years and, as a result, there are many individuals to whom I owe my
sincerest gratitude. I am especially grateful to Matthew Steggle for reading and
commenting upon numerous drafts of the book and for his unwaveringly patient,
generous, and enthusiastic guidance. I would also like to extend my thanks to
Lisa Hopkins, who was always on hand with encouragement and suggestions for
profitable lines of enquiry, and to Annaliese Connolly, who also offered invaluable
advice on early drafts and was instrumental in encouraging the initial interests that
would eventually develop into this book. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Alison
Findlay at Lancaster University for her continuing interest and enthusiasm for my
research; her advice on this book has been invaluable and hugely influential in
helping me improve its rigour and refinement. Tom Rutter also provided some very
useful advice and an abundance of incisive comments in his scrutiny of the early
versions of several chapters in this book. I am also grateful to Andrew Duxfield,
who was a vital source of sound advice and encouragement during the writing
process. I have benefited greatly from the lively and productive environment of the
English department at Sheffield Hallam University, which has been an invaluable
source of support and inspiration over the years. I have been grateful for the
company, generosity, and collegiality of Richard Wood, Kate Wilkinson, and
everyone (past and present) with whom I have had the great privilege of working.
I have had numerous opportunities to share early versions of this research at
a variety of conferences and workshops. These events have included a number
of the annual colloquia in the ‘Spiritual and Material Renaissances’ strand at
Sheffield Hallam University, as well as the SINRS symposium on ‘Renaissance
Republicanism’ at the University of Stirling, the British Shakespeare Association
conference entitled ‘Shakespeare Inside-Out: Depth, Surface Meaning’ at
Lancaster University, and the ‘British Graduate Shakespeare Conference’ held at
the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-Upon-Avon. I am grateful to the organisers of
all of these events and to the auditors for providing helpful questions and feedback
in discussions. The material on Alaham in Chapter 3 was previously published
as ‘Stoicism, Calvinism, and Determinism in Fulke Greville’s Alaham’, in James
D. Mardock and Kathryn R. McPherson (eds), Stages of Engagement: Drama and
Religion in Post-Reformation England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
2014), pp. 41–62. The research on Samuel Daniel’s Philotas in Chapter 4 was
previously published as ‘Th’accession of these mighty states: Daniel’s Philotas
and the Union of Crowns’, Renaissance Studies, 26.3 (2012), 365–84. I am grateful
for permission to reprint material from these publications and I would like to thank
the editors and anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions for revision.
x Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama

I am also grateful to the Document Supply Services staff at the Adsetts Centre
at Sheffield Hallam University for their help in securing a number of essential
resources. I would also like to extend my thanks to Erika Gaffney at Ashgate
for her support (and patience) throughout the publishing process and for carrying
out her role as commissioning editor in such a friendly and professional manner.
Thanks also to Whitney Feininger, Katie McDonald, Ally Berthiaume, Kevin
Selmes, and everyone at Ashgate for their help in making the publishing process
run as smoothly as possible. I also thank Dennis Sears at the Rare Book and
Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for his help
in securing permission for the cover image.
Finally, I can’t begin to express my gratitude to all my friends and family. My
biggest thanks must be reserved for my mother and Malcolm, and, of course, for
Kate, all of whom have provided unwavering support throughout both the high
and low points of this project. You are all exemplary stoics.
 Introduction

Towards a dramatic tradition

Mary Sidney’s Antonius (published in 1592) inaugurated a dramatic tradition that

has been the subject of considerable critical debate. T.S. Eliot argued that Mary
Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, had assembled a body of ‘shy recluses’ whose
intention was ‘to compose drama in the proper Senecan style’ and ‘make head
against the popular melodrama of the time.’1 For Eliot, these efforts to oppose the
commercial theatre ‘were bound to fail.’2 Such views had become something of a
commonplace before their dismissal in an important article by Mary Ellen Lamb
which argued that there was ‘no dramatic tradition surrounding the Countess of
Pembroke’ and that ‘the idea of reforming the English stage probably never entered
her head.’3 Lamb thus challenged both aspects of Eliot’s argument by refuting the
premises that the Countess had assembled a mobilised group of dramatists and that
their intention was to reform the commercial theatre. This book follows Lamb by
continuing to challenge the idea that the texts in this tradition were informed by an
anti-theatrical agenda. However, it still considers the intertextual affinities between
these plays by highlighting the dramatists’ common aims of developing a form of
humanist dramatic authorship which engaged, in particular, with such influential
outlooks as republicanism and stoicism. One of the key reasons for doing so was
to explore the relationship between the sovereign and their subjects. The plays in
this study have frequently been grouped together under the label of ‘closet drama’,
a term that suggests they were written for the purpose of private reading or recital
amongst a coterie of wits rather than for performance in the commercial theatres.
I will go on to suggest that this term is not an altogether accurate label for these
plays which are linked by more than their distance from the public theatres. The
book confines itself to the texts which were composed within two decades of Mary
Sidney’s translation of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine (1578), a play that was
instrumental in introducing Continental neoclassical tragedy into Renaissance
England.4 I will therefore focus upon the dramatic works of Mary Sidney, Samuel

1
T. S. Eliot, Elizabethan Dramatists (London: Faber, 1963), p. 43.
2
Ibid.
3
Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Myth of the Countess of Pembroke: The Dramatic Circle’,
The Yearbook of English Studies, 11 (1981), 194–202 (p. 196).
4
The term ‘closet drama’ is sometimes used to denote a number of later dramas,
including Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s The
Concealed Fancies, and the interregnum dramas of Margaret Cavendish and Thomas
Killigrew, which do not fall within the scope of this study.
2 Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama

Daniel, Samuel Brandon, Fulke Greville, William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary,
along with the Roman tragedies of Thomas Kyd and Ben Jonson, and emphasise
the intertextual affinities between them. In this introductory chapter, I provide
an overview of the change in critical attitudes towards these plays, as well as
commenting upon the origins of the dramatic tradition to which they belong and
the resonance of stoicism and republicanism, theories which, this book will argue,
are the common focal points for these dramatic works.
The idea that these texts were united by a common anti-theatrical agenda can
largely be attributed to the influence of Mary Sidney’s brother, Sir Philip Sidney,
whose Apology for Poetry (1582) has been assumed to be a kind of aesthetic
manifesto for the endeavours of her coterie, particularly in his criticism of the
commercial theatres, whose offerings observe ‘rules neither of honest civility
nor of skilful Poetry’ by failing to adhere to Aristotelian principles.5 Sidney
does, however, offer qualified praise for Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s
Gorboduc (1561), a play which, in spite of being ‘faulty both in place and time …
is full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of
Seneca’s style, and full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach,
and so obtain the very end of Poesy’.6 Sidney’s attention to Gorboduc is significant
in relation to the dramas of Mary Sidney and those whose dramatic works she
influenced. Gorboduc had an explicit political interest in advising the queen to
marry and produce an heir, thus providing a safeguard against the factionalism and
civil discord provoked by a crisis of succession which was dramatised in the play.7
According to Andrew Hadfield, Gorboduc was a part of ‘a long court tradition
of drama that was inherently political in seeking to advise the monarch either
forcefully, or subtly’.8 Karen Raber observes that, by translating a play by Robert
Garnier, Mary Sidney was drawing ‘upon an emergent tradition of political writing

5
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1973, reprinted 1984), pp. 133–4.
6
Ibid.
7
On the topicality of Gorboduc, see, for example, Kevin Dunn, ‘Representing
Counsel: Gorboduc and the Elizabethan Privy Council’, English Literary Renaissance,
33.3 (2003), 279–308, and Jessica Winston, ‘Expanding the Political Nation: Gorboduc
at the Inns of Court and Succession Revisited’, Early Theatre, 8.1 (2005), 11–34. For the
place of Gorboduc in the development of political tragedy, see Dermot Cavanagh, ‘Political
Tragedy in the 1560s: Cambises and Gorboduc’, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor
Literature, 1485–1603, ed. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), pp. 488–503.
8
Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), p. 4. Margaret Hannay also comments upon the appeal of the
political themes in Gorboduc and its affinities with the issues interrogated in Antonius,
suggesting that she ‘shared her family’s taste for political drama’ and, through her choice
of subject, ‘demonstrated her conviction that drama could be used for political statement’.
See Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 121.
 Introduction 3

in France’.9 Yet, as we shall see throughout this book, the neo-Senecan dramas also
complement an established tradition in England of politically engaged tragedy
both at court and in the public theatres, of which Gorboduc is an early example.
The emergence of this tradition also represents another facet of the works of
Seneca in Renaissance England. According to Eliot, ‘no Latin author was more
highly esteemed’ than Seneca; as well as his prominence on the Latin curriculum,
Eliot goes on to comment that no other author ‘exercised a wider or deeper
influence upon the Elizabethan mind or upon the Elizabethan form of tragedy than
did Seneca’.10 Various translations of Senecan plays appeared between 1559 and
1567 and were published together as Tenne Tragedies in 1581 edited by Thomas
Newton.11 Although they were products of the academic tradition, A.J. Boyle
argues that the appearance of the collected translations in 1581, shortly after the
opening of the public theatres, ‘were both index and product of a theatrical ideology
in which Seneca held a primary position’.12 The appearance of Senecan texts in
the vernacular was accompanied by the emergence of a number of original plays
written in the Senecan tradition; these included Gorboduc and the collaborative
play, The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587), along with a number of Latin imitations
which emerged in England and Scotland, including George Buchanan’s Jepthes
(1578) and Thomas Legge’s Ricardus Tertius (1579). The development of Senecan
tragedy therefore provides numerous points of contact between the academic and
the popular dramatic traditions.
Considering the development of Elizabethan tragedy, Eliot argues that there
were three distinct currents of the Senecan influence. The first is evident in the
tragedies of the popular theatre; the second is represented by the works of Mary
Sidney and the so-called ‘Senecals’, which, he argues, was ‘composed largely
in protest against the defects and monstrosities’ of popular tragedy; the third is
embodied by the two Roman tragedies of Ben Jonson, which Eliot considers to be
situated ‘between the two opposed classes’, representing an attempt ‘to improve
the form of popular drama by the example of Seneca; not by slavish imitation but
by adaptation, to make of popular drama a finished work of art’.13 While this book

9
Karen Raber, Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern
Closet Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), p. 85.
10
Eliot, pp. 11–12. Several important, though increasingly dated, studies have
assessed the influence of Seneca upon the tragic genre in Renaissance England; these include
John W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (London: Macmillan,
1893); F.L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (New York: Haskell House, 1966);
H.B. Charlton, The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1946, reprinted 1978); Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the
Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
11
Seneca his Tenne Tragedies, translated into Englysh (London: Thomas Marsh,
1581).
12
A.J. Boyle, Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition (London:
Routledge, 1997), p. 141.
13
Eliot, pp. 25–6.
4 Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama

will argue that the distinctions applied by Eliot are not quite so clearly defined,
it is necessary to note that the popular theatre and the so-called ‘Senecals’ can be
distinguished by the differing European traditions they appropriate. The typical
features of the tradition represented by Garnier include sententiae, long rhetorical
speeches and apostrophe, practically no action, stichomythia, a Chorus, and the
appearance of a messenger, or Nuntius, in order to fill in the gaps left by the
lack of action. This is therefore a type of drama that privileges the reactions of
characters to the events that are taking place over the portrayal of the actual events
themselves. Neo-Senecan drama therefore shifts the emphasis away from dramatic
action and visual spectacle, aiming instead to explore the potential ways in which
tragedy could function as a space to interrogate abstract political and philosophical
issues. As a result, one of the most distinctive features of the drama developed
in the works of Garnier and those of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean
dramatists is their multivocality. By focusing upon reaction rather than action,
these dramatists take advantage of Senecan tragedy’s potential to accommodate
a range of different political and ethical perspectives. Joel B. Altman comments
upon the interrogative potential of Seneca’s dramas by arguing that ‘Senecan
drama, while deeply concerned with the moral life, is not, strictly speaking, a
didactic work – as is the negative morality play or de casibus tragedy. It is a
sophistic construction, carefully designed to evoke a wide range of intellectual and
emotional responses to the action as it unfolds’.14 This aspect of Senecan tragedy is
one of the key areas developed by the neo-Senecan dramatists and one that makes
the form especially suited to the political content of the plays.
The apparently anti-theatrical nature of the neo-Senecan dramas has led to a
tendency amongst many critics to link them through the apparent problems they
pose in terms of performability. These plays have thus earned the label ‘closet
drama’, a term suggesting the private nature of any performances that might have
taken place within the estates of the dramatists or their patrons. It is therefore a
form of drama that has generally been defined in opposition to the output of the
commercial theatres.15 However, the fact these plays bypassed the public theatres
does not necessarily place them at odds with commercial dramas; the dramatists
I consider, with the exception of Greville, submitted their plays for publication
and, as a number of recent studies have shown, numerous early modern popular
dramatists aimed at targeting a broad readership through print and were clearly
thinking beyond theatrical performance for their works. The dramatists in this
study are therefore not alone when it comes to writing drama with a ‘literary’

14
Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development
of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 231.
15
This dramatic form is considered in relation to early modern play-reading in Marta
Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550–1700 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004). For more general comment upon the culture of early
modern play-reading, see the essays in Marta Straznicky (ed.), The Book of the Play:
Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (Massachusetts: University
of Massachusetts Press, 2006).
 Introduction 5

readership in mind.16 As Lukas Erne argues, with particular reference to Kyd’s

Cornelia, ‘closet’ and popular dramas should be considered as ‘complementary
rather than antagonistic in the influence they exerted’.17 Alison Findlay, Stephanie
Hodgson-Wright, and Gweno Williams have also challenged the idea that these
texts are unperformable, thus rendering the term ‘closet drama’ a somewhat
inadequate label for these plays.18 Coburn Freer also objects that the term
‘suggests willful obscurity and terminal stuffiness’.19 A number of readings have
also emphasised the common aesthetic conditions of theatrical and ‘closet’ drama.
Rosemary Kegl, for example, considers the compression of events into a twenty-
four hour time frame in Cary’s Mariam, a feature shared by a number of the other
plays in this study as a result of their efforts to conform to the Aristotelian unity of
time, as similar to the methods of the commercial dramas that condensed events
into the running time of a conventional theatrical drama, a point made prominent
in Sir Philip Sidney’s critique of the popular theatre. This, Kegl argues, is an
example of how these dramas tend to ‘replicate rather than reform the excesses
of popular productions’.20 It is therefore necessary to reconsider the idea that
this form of neo-Senecan tragedy was developed in England as a means of either
opposing the commercial theatre, or as an attempt at replacing it altogether, nor
can the relationship between commercial and neo-Senecan drama be any longer

16
See, for example, Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013); Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive
Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of
the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
17
Lukas Erne, Beyond ‘The Spanish Tragedy’: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 212.
18
See, for example, Alison Findlay and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright with Gweno
Williams, Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700 (London: Longman, 2000). For the
practical approaches see the filmed productions of early modern women’s plays in Alison
Findlay, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright and Gweno Williams, Women Dramatists 1550–1670:
Plays in Performance (Lancaster: Lancaster University Television, 1999). The research led
by Elizabeth Schafer on The Mariam Project has also explored the performative potential
of Elizabeth Cary’s play by staging a number of site-specific performances in a variety of
locations during 2013; accounts of these productions by director Rebecca McCutcheon
are available at http://rebeccamccutcheon.com/category/the-mariam-project/ [accessed 16
February 2015].
19
Coburn Freer, ‘Mary Sidney: Countess of Pembroke’, in Women Writers of the
Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1987), pp. 481–521 (p. 484). Freer also goes on to speculate about the performativity
of Mary Sidney’s Antonius (see pp. 485–6).
20
Rosemary Kegl, ‘Theaters, Households and a “Kind of History” in Elizabeth
Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam’, in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage,
ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999),
pp. 135–53 (p. 143).
6 Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama

predicated upon their apparent aesthetic contrasts. This, therefore, necessitates a

reconsideration of the term ‘closet drama’ as a means of grouping them together.
In this book, I adopt the term ‘neo-Senecan’ to denote the dramas written in this
neoclassical tradition, exhibiting the influence of Garnier in particular. Adopting
this term thus allows us to consider these plays in terms of their common aesthetic
and political features rather than classing them as ‘closet dramas’, a term that would
continue to define them by outmoded assumptions about their unperformability
and their apparent antagonism towards the commercial theatre.
Mary Ellen Lamb was one of the earliest critics to challenge the prevailing view
of these plays and fairly conclusively routed the notion that they were products
of any mobilised campaign against the commercial stage. In fact, it was more
than likely that there was very little, if any, personal contact between many of the
apparent participants in this ‘circle’. Any references to the Wilton or Pembroke
circle in modern scholarship tend to be merely a convenient means of referring
to the group of texts written in the neo-Senecan mode.21 However, one of the key
contentions of this book is that criticism following Lamb’s important conclusions
has, by discounting the premise that these texts were the output of an organised
circle, often ignored the intertextual affinities that exist between these plays that
highlight the authors’ engagement in a tradition of humanist dramatic authorship.
This tradition of dramatic authorship is characterised by the engagement in such
political and philosophical discourses as stoicism and republicanism – informed
both by classical authorities, like Seneca and Tacitus, and more contemporary
theorists, including Justus Lipsius and Niccolò Machiavelli – and the provision
of a space in which to interrogate them. These plays are also set during periods
of political or constitutional crises and focus upon the plight of politically
marginalised individuals who are forced to endure the circumstances of affairs
they are powerless to influence. These features are complemented by the
influence of both the classical Senecan tradition and the more recent appropriation
and adaptation of the form by Robert Garnier. The dispersion of this group of
texts does, however, mean that we now have the opportunity to reconsider its
membership. If these plays are no longer united by the premises that they are
unperformable or anti-theatrical, then such performance texts as Samuel Daniel’s
Philotas and Ben Jonson’s Roman tragedies can also be included. These plays will
also be considered as neo-Senecan dramas due to their adherence to many of the
neoclassical formal features and their alignment with the thematic features of the
coterie dramas.

21
An example of this occurs in G.A. Wilkes (ed.), The Complete Poems and Plays
of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554–1628) in Two Volumes, vol. 1 (Lewiston, NY: The
Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), p. 1. Judith Scherer Herz argues that ‘“patronage machine”
is a more apt description’ than ‘circle’ for Mary Sidney’s literary community at Wilton;
see, ‘Of Circles, Friendship, and the Imperatives of Literary History’, in Literary Circles
and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry
Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), pp. 10–23 (p. 17).
 Introduction 7

The purpose of this study is therefore to view the neo-Senecan texts as a

group, an outlook rarely – if ever – adopted at any length since Witherspoon’s
The Influence of Robert Garnier on Elizabethan Drama, and argue that the
intertextual affinities that exist between the texts are not, as has previously been
argued, rooted in any anti-theatrical agenda, but instead in a common desire to
explore such prominent political and philosophical outlooks as republicanism
and stoicism, particularly the utility of their application in the political sphere.
This book does not, however, attempt to argue that there is a coherent and unified
outlook in the various texts’ engagement with these axioms, but rather that they
are in dialogue with each other. In this sense, stoicism and republicanism represent
the key elements that are engaged by the dramatists in developing a tradition of
humanist dramatic authorship.

Stoicism

Stoicism was a source of considerable ambivalence in Renaissance England, as was

the reputation of Seneca, one of its most influential authorities. In Tacitus’ Annals,
the account of Seneca’s suicide, acting upon the orders of Nero, served to cement
his claims to exemplarity, particularly in the Renaissance era, by emphasising his
stoic fortitude and his wish that his followers should adhere to ‘the pattern of my
life’.22 However, the positive image of Seneca was not universally endorsed; in John
Marston’s The Malcontent, for example, Pietro dismisses Seneca as one who ‘writ
of temperance and fortitude, yet lived like a voluptuous epicure and died like an
effeminate coward’.23 The origins of such views lie in the writings of Dio Cassius,
whose critique of Seneca provoked Montaigne to actively refute the claims that he
was ‘avaricious, usurious, ambitious, cowardly, sensual, and a false pretender to
the title of philosopher’.24 Proponents of stoicism during the sixteenth century also
struggled with the question of how compatible this essentially pagan outlook was
with Christianity. This problem was not new and Seneca, in particular, had become
the lynchpin in many of these debates. In the fourteenth century, Petrarch had
done much to promote the adaptability of a Senecan outlook with Christianity in
his De remediis utriusque fortunae (1366), often misattributed to Seneca himself.
There was also the case of the purported correspondence between Seneca and
St Paul which, as Gordon Braden comments, maintained a ‘tenacious hold on
Christian credibility’ from the fourth century despite the fact that it turned out to
be a forgery.25 In spite of these attempts at asserting the affinities of Christianity

22
Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1956, reprinted 1974), XV, p. 376.
23
John Marston, The Malcontent (3.1.26–8), in ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays,
ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
24
Michel de Montaigne, Essays (2, 32), trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1987), p. 228.
25
Braden, p. 70.
8 Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama

and stoicism, the outlook was still greeted with a degree of ambivalence. As Sarah
Hutton points out, an early modern observer could find much that was admirable in
the teachings of the stoics, including ‘their moral seriousness and apparent piety,
their recommendation of forbearance in the face of adversity, their contempt of
worldly goods, their asceticism’ and their observation of such virtues as ‘prudence,
temperance, justice and fortitude’.26 Other elements, such as the acceptability of
suicide and their tendencies towards apathy and fatalism had to be ‘conveniently
glossed over’.27 However, there were many who felt compelled to do more than
simply ‘gloss over’ these details. James Hankins summarises some of the ways in
which various figures confronted these problems:

Previous humanists, aware of the conflict between pagan and Christian values,
try either (like Valla) to recast current Christianity in the light of pagan values;
or (like Ficino) to minimize the differences between high pagan and Christian
theology; or (like Bruni) to make a sharp distinction between political and
religious values, assigning to each its proper space.28

The need to reconcile the differences between traditional stoicism and Christianity
resulted, broadly speaking, in the development of neo-stoicism. Arguably the most
important figure in the development of Renaissance neo-stoicism was the Flemish
philosopher Justus Lipsius, whose works exerted considerable influence upon
the early modern exponents of stoicism, particularly through his efforts to make
it palatable to a Christian audience.29 Lipsius also had an important effect upon
the rise of neo-stoicism on the continent by influencing figures such as Hubert

26
Sarah Hutton, ‘Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism, Classical Imitation’, in A
Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2000, 2003 reprint), pp. 44–57 (p. 53).
27
Ibid.
28
James Hankins, ‘Humanism and the Origins of Modern Political Thought’, in The
Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), pp. 118–41 (p. 134).
29
For a summary of the major works of Lipsius and their influence upon the
development of neo-stoicism, see Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern
State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). The political bearings of Lipsian
neo-stoicism, see Natasha Constantinidou, ‘Public and Private, Divine and Temporal in
Justus Lipsius’ De Constantia and Politica’, Renaissance Studies, 26.3 (2012), 345–64.
For comment upon Lipsius’s influence in early modern England, see Adriana McCrea,
Constant Minds: Political Virtue and the Lipsian Paradigm in England, 1584–1650
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). The influence of Lipsius and neo-stoicism
upon Shakespeare is considered in Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), and Hassan Melehy, ‘The Mobility of Constancy:
Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Lipsius’, REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and
American Literature, 28 (2012), 73–91. For a more general overview of the influence
of stoicism upon early modern literature see Gilles D. Monsarrat, Light from the Porch:
Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature (Paris: Didier-Érudition, 1984).
 Introduction 9

Languet and Philippe du Plessis-Mornay. Although Sidney had met Lipsius, it was
most likely that his French mentors, Languet and Mornay, exerted the shaping
influence upon the development of his stoic outlook.30 Lipsius’s brand of stoicism
also set a precedent for the addition of a political edge to the neo-stoic outlook.
De Constantia, a dialogue in which a character named Lipsius is dissuaded from
fleeing the troubles caused by the wars in the Low Countries, is contextualised
explicitly against the backdrop of the political events taking place. Similarly,
Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death presents a decidedly negative portrait of
the court as a den of corruption. These examples tie in with the kind of explicit
criticism in the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, in which the French royal family are
denounced as the disciples of Machiavelli whose ‘evil arts, vicious counsels, and
false and pestiferous doctrines’ are responsible for the ‘calamities and destruction
in Gaul’.31 The anti-Machiavellian rhetoric of Mornay and the author of the
Vindiciae also aligns them with the Huguenot Innocent Gentillet’s Discours sur
les moyens de bien gouverner (1576). Guillaume du Vair’s La Philosophie Morale
des Stoïques (translated into English as The Moral Philosophy of the Stoicks in
1598) also applied stoic philosophy to the political situation in France. In all these
cases, stoicism is appropriated as a means of negotiating religious oppression with
Lipsius and the continental figures he influenced using it to respond to the religious
wars ravaging their countries.32 It has even been suggested that there are specific
links between the development of neo-stoicism and Protestantism. As Rudolph
Kirk argues, the ‘translation of stoic works seemed to accompany and follow the
Reformation’.33 This was no doubt part of its appeal to Sidney and his militant
Protestant colleagues. Also part of its appeal amongst English courtiers was its
political dimension along with its provision of a model for enduring political
turbulence. Neo-stoicism was also a source of consolation and its emphasis
upon self-sovereignty, or ruling oneself through self-discipline, provided some
consolation for politically marginalised courtiers who had been frustrated in
their attempts to influence state policy. This point is suggested by Lipsius’s De
Constantia, in which the sage Langius argues that, by striving towards the virtue
of constancy and resisting the impulses of hope and fear, ‘Thou shalt be a king
indeed, free indeed, only subject unto God, enfranchized from the servile yoke of

30
For Sidney’s connection to Languet and Mornay see, for example, Robert Stillman,
Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
31
Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos or, Concerning the Legitimate Power of a Prince Over
the People, and of the People Over a Prince, ed. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), p. 8.
32
It must be noted, however, that the appeal of stoicism was not exclusively Protestant;
the recusant Thomas Lodge, for example, had undertaken the first English translation of
Seneca’s complete prose works, whilst Lipsius wavered in his confessional allegiances
before finally returning to the Catholic faith before his death.
33
Justus Lipsius, Two Books of Constancie, ed. Rudolph Kirk (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1939), p. 21.
10 Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama

Fortune and affections’.34 Lipsius’s use of political language emphasises the extent
to which this kind of stoic outlook could potentially work to offset one’s political
marginalisation. Overcoming the temptations of hope and fear and resisting the
influence of Fortune is, for Lipsius, an ‘enfranchising’ experience, liberating one
from the ‘servile yoke of Fortune and affections’. Mastering one’s own actions
and impulses, and thus becoming a ‘king indeed’ by achieving self-sovereignty,
therefore becomes a means of overcoming one’s lack of agency in the sphere of
courtly politics.
One of the major consequences of the emergence of Renaissance humanism
was the reassessment of certain classical sources resulting, most notably, in the
rising popularity of Tacitus during the sixteenth century. This was due, in large part,
to the influence of Lipsius who had not only extolled the virtues of Tacitus but had
also prepared what had become the definitive edition of his works in 1574. There
were also more practical reasons for Tacitus’ rise to increased prominence. David
Norbrook comments upon the shifts in alignment to certain classical sources:

Throughout Europe, in the later sixteenth century, writers were turning away
from the elaborate ‘Ciceronian’ style, a style associated with public debate and
oratory, and turning to ‘silver Latin’ writers like Seneca and Tacitus. These men
were writing at a time when the Senate had lost its real political power and
important decisions were taken in private by the emperor and his associates. Thus
the ‘Tacitist’ movement had marked, though ambiguous, political connotations.35

The prominence of the Ciceronian style was thus replaced by that which Degory
Wheare described as ‘a new, concise and sententious way of Writing’.36 From this
point of view, Tacitus became particularly popular amongst courtiers like Sidney
and those belonging to the Essexian faction.37 Gordon Braden argues that for his
Roman contemporaries, Tacitus provides a vision of a ‘specifically aristocratic

34
Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. John Stradling (London: Richard
Johnes, 1594), 1. 6, C3r–C3v.
35
David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 171–2.
36
Degory Wheare, The Method and Order of Reading Both Civil and Ecclesiastical
Histories (London: Charles Brome, 1685), p. 105.
37
Morris W. Croll argues that the ‘cult of Tacitus’ lasted from 1575 to1650; see
Morris W. Croll, ‘Muret and the History of “Attic Prose”’, in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm:
Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Patrick et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1966), pp. 107–62 (p. 151). For a useful summary of the popularity of Tacitus and other
classical writers based upon the number of editions produced in 50 year periods, see Peter
Burke, ‘A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450–1700’, History and Theory,
5.2 (1966), 135–52. Other important material on the rise of Tacitism during the Jacobean
era can be found in J.M.H. Salmon, ‘Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus
in Jacobean England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 50.2 (1989), 199–225; and Alan
T. Bradford ‘Stuart Absolutism and the “Utility” of Tacitus’, Huntington Library Quarterly,
46.2 (1983), 127–55. The influence of stoicism upon Elizabethan political writing is also
 Introduction 11

hell, structured by the aristocratic assumption that individual character and fate
are the basic components of history … The apocalypse that seems to impend is
in part a very real history, but something more inward as well: a crisis of the
aristocratic imagination’.38 For Braden, this suggests the somewhat limited scope
of Tacitus’ appeal, having been ‘written from the perspective of a disenfranchised
but still ambitious upper class’.39 The appeal of Tacitus in early modern England
was focused upon a similarly niche audience. The militant Protestant faction held
socially elevated, yet politically disenfranchised positions in the Elizabethan
political hierarchy. Hopes that the situation would change with the accession of
James I were soon to be dashed. Much optimism was provoked by such signs as
James’s correspondence with Essex and the rehabilitation and redeployment into
political life of Essex’s former supporters, including the Earl of Southampton.
However, Cecil’s ability to secure the key position of influence in James’s
government meant that the situation remained largely unchanged from how it
had been during the final years of Elizabeth’s reign. This meant that the militant
Protestants remained the politically disenfranchised class they had been during
the previous reign. It is in this climate that the appeal of Tacitus became most
apparent with its practical examples of how to survive as a politically powerless
individual under a tyrannical system. This was also one of the criticisms levelled
at neo-stoicism by its detractors: its proponents were not living in a tyrannical
state meaning its relevance was somewhat doubtful. James himself had criticised
the stoics in Basilikon Doron, singling out Lipsius in particular, and dismissing
the ‘Stoicke insensible stupiditie, wherewith many in our dayes, preassing to
winne honour, in imitating that ancient sect, by their inconstant behaviour in
their owne lives, belie their profession’.40 This official criticism of neo-stoicism
further emphasised its status as a marginal political outlook. Similar uncertainty
surrounded the potential applications of Tacitean history, with some observers
highlighting the ambiguity over whether Tacitus’ Annals provided a pattern for
pragmatism and political expediency under a tyrannical regime, or whether they
could function as a manual for the politically ambitious. Such a mood is summed
up in a comment attributed to Isaac Casaubon, who asked,

what can be more pernicious (especially to a young man) than the reading of
those Annals? for as good examples when they are frequently in sight improve a

considered in F.J. Levy, ‘Hayward, Daniel, and the Beginning of Politic History in England’,
Huntington Library Quarterly, 50.1 (1987), 1–34.
38
Braden, p. 9.
39
Ibid.
40
James VI and I, Basilicon Doron in Selected Writings, ed. Neil Rhodes et al.
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 245. In the 1599 edition James’s attack took on a far more
personal dimension with a reference to ‘that proud inconstant LIPSIUS’. A summary of
some of the early Stuart attacks on the neo-stoics can be found in Salmon, 222–5.
12 Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama

man, without his observation, so ill Examples hurt us, for by little and little they
sink into our minds, and have the effect of Precepts, being often read or heard.41

Casaubon also asserted that certain applications of Tacitus could serve to ‘accuse
our present Princes of Tyranny, or … manifestly teach them the principles of
Tyranny’.42 In spite of such reservations, neo-stoicism had gained a following
from a niche group of courtiers in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras.
Its popularity amongst members of the Sidney and Essex circles ensured it would
have been familiar to the writers of the neo-Senecan dramas. Although formally the
tragedies are largely indebted to the dramatic writings of Seneca, their widespread
interests in the plight of the individual in a corrupt political sphere shows that,
politically and morally, their outlooks were more influenced by the writings of
Tacitus. In his important article on classical influences upon late sixteenth century
humanism, J.M.H. Salmon argued that the influences of Seneca and Tacitus were
more far more complementary than had previously been acknowledged:

Tacitus politicized Senecan philosophy and gave it a cynical bent, while Seneca
strengthened the lessons, already suggested in Tacitus’s history of Roman tyranny
and civil war, that private prudence and withdrawal were the best politics.43

This shows the extent to which the outlooks of the two classical authorities could
be blended to complementary effect. Joel Davis has, in fact, labelled Mary Sidney’s
Antonius a ‘neo-Tacitean’ tragedy.44 To the extent that they scrutinise the efficacy
of stoicism as a response to political tyranny, the rest of the plays in this study can
also be regarded as Tacitean in this respect. However, this is also the source of some
of the plays’ ambivalence towards this political outlook. The stoic emphasis upon
self-sovereignty emerges as little more than a compensatory achievement when
compared with the political impotence of many of its practitioners. As Gordon
Braden observes, ‘Stoicism is not finally a philosophy of political resistance.
The essential Stoic strategy for dealing with a tyrant is not interference but
indifference’.45 This leads many of the plays, with varying degrees of explicitness,
to question the practical utility of the stoic outlook as a means of dealing with the
harsh realities of political tyranny. In Kyd’s Cornelia, for example, the stoicism
of such characters as Cornelia, Cicero, and even Caesar himself, is offset by the
proactive anti-tyrannical resistance advocated by Brutus and Cassius. This puts
it somewhat at odds with republicanism, that other branch of classical humanism
that was beginning to exert influence upon the contemporary political discourse.

41
Quoted in Wheare, pp. 107–8.
42
Ibid., p. 107.
43
Salmon, 224.
44
Joel Davis, ‘Renaissance Neostoicism and the Sidney Family Literary Discourse’,
unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oregon, 1999, p. 179.
45
Braden, p. 17.
 Introduction 13

Republicanism

If republicanism stood for any clear and coherent doctrine in late sixteenth-
century England, it was the intellectual conviction that it was necessary to
control the powers of the crown by establishing a means of ensuring that a
coterie of virtuous advisers and servants would always have the constitutional
right to counsel the monarch, and so influence and control his or her actions with
the limits of the law.46

As Andrew Hadfield’s definition suggests, the term ‘republicanism’, if one were

to literally interpret it in relation to its translation of the Latin res publica – a
‘public thing’ – is something of a misnomer when used to describe that particular
strain of early modern political theory. The general public themselves were largely
excluded from any kind of constitutional processes that Renaissance political
theorists might have had in mind. This was therefore not a strain of republicanism
that prioritised the provision of any scope for public participation in a democratic
process. Christopher Hill has argued that if the period had any coherent outlook
towards public political involvement it was that ‘democracy was a bad thing’
and the public at large were perceived as ‘fickle, unstable, incapable of rational
thought’.47 They were frequently realised as Hydra, the many-headed monster, and
were thus an object of fear and derision. In his Discourses, Niccolò Machiavelli
summed up many fears held by Renaissance observers that ‘Democracy is
without difficulty converted into Anarchy’.48 Such fears and reservations about
allowing the public to influence the processes of government are underlined by
the dilemma faced by Achmat, the virtuous courtier in Fulke Greville’s Mustapha,
when he witnesses the popular revolt caused by the death of Mustapha. Initially
he questions why he should ‘helpe to stay the Peoples rage’, before asking, ‘Shall
man the damme, and grave of Crownes, / With mutenie, pull sacred Sceptres
downe?’49 Achmat’s dilemma is one shared by many Renaissance courtiers and
political theorists; although he has some sympathy with the aims of the public, he
cannot endorse the mentality and methods of the mob.
It is only within the last few decades that republicanism has come to figure
significantly in the study of Renaissance literature and it is only since the 1970s
that republicanism has been considered part of political discourse and practice in
Renaissance England. Patrick Collinson applied the term ‘monarchical republic’

46
Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, p. 17. Hadfield’s book provides a useful
overview of republicanism in early modern England; see, in particular, pp. 17–95.
47
Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in 17th Century England (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), p. 181.
48
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970), 1.2, p. 106.
49
Fulke Greville, Mustapha (5.3.90–106), in The Complete Poems and Plays of Fulke
Greville, Lord Brooke (1554–1628), 2 vols, ed. G.A. Wilkes (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin
Mellen Press, 2008), vol. 1, pp. 210–97.
14 Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama

to label the mixed constitutional form of government presiding over England.50

Arguing against J.G.A. Pocock’s view that Tudor England could not be described
as ‘a polis or its inhabitants citizens’,51 Collinson highlights various examples of
civic culture that could, broadly, be considered republican in spirit; these included
participation in local government, as well as the Bond of Association of 1585,
which proposed a period of interregnum rule should Elizabeth die suddenly or
be assassinated in office.52 In this kind of context, republicanism refers more to a
system of limited monarchy with increased participation from an elite intelligentsia
of advisers, whose influence would curb the absolute power of the monarch.
The reaction to the prospect of Elizabeth I’s potential marriage to François, duc
d’Alençon, in 1579 is indicative of the way in which the printed text could be
appropriated as a means of communicating the necessary advice to the monarch.
The two most notable examples of this are John Stubbs’s text, The Discoverie of
a Gaping Gulf, and Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Letter to Queen Elizabeth’, both of which
saw their writers greeted with heavy punishment. That the neo-Senecan dramas
in this study can be considered alongside such interventions in court politics is
suggested even by a cursory consideration of some of the authors who adopted
the form; these included members of the aristocracy, such as Mary Sidney and
Elizabeth Cary, and courtiers such as Fulke Greville and Sir William Alexander,
for whom a literary career would always be subordinate to their political roles.
Also present in the group are those who frequently engaged their literary works
for advisory and didactic purposes, like Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson; the
recognised topical resonance of these works is suggested by the appearance of
both dramatists before the Privy Council.
It is not just through these overtly political channels that the influence of
republicanism manifests itself in Renaissance literature. In recent years, a number
of critical works have focused upon the ways in which theories of republicanism
permeate many literary works, including book-length studies on such authors as
Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson.53 My approach to the authors in this study is

50
Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambleton Press, 1994),
pp. 31–57. For further discussions of the issues raised by this essay, see John F. McDiarmid
(ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick
Collinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
51
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and
the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975; reprinted
2003), p. 354.
52
In addition to Collinson and Pocock, the development of early modern republicanism
is also discussed in Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2
vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) and Markku Peltonen, Classical
Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
53
See, respectively, Hadfield (2005); Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican
Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009);
and Julie Sanders, Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998).
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adept lodged with his friend in the Abbey of Westminster, where he
worked, and perfected the stone which Cremer had so long
unsuccessfully sought. He was duly presented to the King, who,
previously informed of the talents of the illustrious stranger, received
him with regard and attention.
When he “communicated his treasures,” the single condition which
he made was that they should not be expended in the luxuries of a
court or in war with a Christian prince, but that the King should go in
person with an army against the infidels.
Edward, under pretence of doing honour to Raymond, gave him
an apartment in the Tower of London, where the adept repeated his
process. He transmuted base metal into gold, which was coined at
the mint into six millions of nobles, each worth three pounds sterling
at the present day. These coins are well known to antiquarians by
the name of Rose Nobles. They prove in the assay of the test to be a
purer gold than the Jacobus, or any other gold coin made in those
times. Lully in his last testament declares that in a short time, while
in London, he converted twenty-two tons weight of quicksilver, lead,
and tin into the precious metal.
His lodging in the Tower proved only an honourable prison, and
when Raymond had satisfied the desires of the King, the latter
disregarded the object which the adept was so eager to see
executed, and to regain his own liberty Lully was obliged to escape
surreptitiously, when he quickly departed from England.
Cremer, whose intentions were sincere, was not less grieved than
Raymond at this issue of the event, but he was subject to his
sovereign, and could only groan in silence. He declares his extreme
affliction in his testament, and his monastery daily offered up prayers
to God for the success of Raymond’s cause. The Abbot lived long
after this, and saw part of the reign of King Edward III. The course of
operations which he proposes in his testament, with apparent
sincerity, is not less veiled than are those in the most obscure
authors.[N]
Now, in the first place, this story is not in harmony with itself. If
Raymond Lully were at Vienna in 1311, how did John Cremer
contrive to meet him in Italy at or about the same time? In the
second place, the whole story concerning the manufacture of Rose
Nobles is a series of blunders. The King who ascended the throne of
England in 1307 was Edward II., and the Rose Nobles first appear in
the history of numismatics during the reign of Edward IV., and in the
year 1465.
“In the King’s fifth year, by another indenture with Lord Hastings,
the gold coins were again altered, and it was ordered that forty-five
nobles only, instead of fifty, as in the last two reigns, should be made
of a pound of gold. This brought back the weight of the noble to one
hundred and fifty grains, as it had been from 1351 to 1412, but its
value was raised to 10s. At the same time, new coins impressed with
angels were ordered to be made, sixty-seven and a half to be struck
from one pound of gold, and each to be of the value of 6s. 8d.—that
is to say, the new angel which weighed eighty grains was to be of the
same value as the noble had been which weighed one hundred and
eight grains. The new nobles to distinguish them from the old ones
were called Rose Nobles, from the rose which is stamped on both
sides of them, or ryals, or royals, a name borrowed from the French,
who had given it to a coin which bore the figure of the King in his
royal robes, which the English ryals did not. Notwithstanding its
inappropriateness, however, the name of royal was given to these
10s. pieces, not only by the people, but also in several statutes of
the realm.”[O]
In the third place, the testament ascribed to John Cremer, Abbot of
Westminster, and to which we are indebted for the chief account of
Lully’s visit to England, is altogether spurious. No person bearing
that name ever filled the position of Abbot at any period of the history
of the Abbey.
The only coinage of nobles which has been attributed to alchemy
was that made by Edward III. in 1344. The gold used in this coinage
is supposed to have been manufactured in the Tower; the adept in
question was not Raymond Lully, but the English Ripley.
Whether the saint of Majorca was proficient in the Hermetic art or
not, it is quite certain that he did not visit the British Isles. It is also
certain that in the Ars Magna Sciendi, part 9, chapter on Elements,
he states that one species of metal cannot be changed into another,
and that the gold of alchemy has only the semblance of that metal;
that is, it is simply a sophistication.
As all the treatises ascribed to Raymond Lully cannot possibly be
his, and as his errant and turbulent life could have afforded him few
opportunities for the long course of experiments which are generally
involved in the search for the magnum opus, it is reasonable to
suppose that his alchemical writings are spurious, or that two
authors, bearing the same name, have been ignorantly confused.
With regard to “the Jewish neophyte,” referred to by the Biographie
Universelle, no particulars of his life are forthcoming. The whole
question is necessarily involved in uncertainty, but it is a point of no
small importance to have established for the first time the fabulous
nature of the Cremer Testament. This production was first published
by Michael Maier, in his Tripus Aureus, about the year 1614. The two
treatises which accompany it appear to be genuine relics of Hermetic
antiquity.

The “Clavicula, or Little Key” of Raymond Lully is generally

considered to contain the arch secrets of alchemical adeptship; it
elucidates the other treatises of its author, and undertakes to declare
the whole art without any fiction. The transmutation of metals
depends upon their previous reduction into volatile sophic argent
vive, and the only metals worth reducing, for the attainment of this
prima materia, are silver and gold. This argent vive is said to be
dryer, hotter, and more digested than the common substance, but its
extraction is enveloped in mystery and symbolism, and the recipes
are impossible to follow for want of the materials so evasively and
deceptively described. At the same time, it is clear that the
operations are physical, and that the materials and objects are also
physical, which points are sufficient for our purpose, and may be
easily verified by research.
 Moreover, the alchemist who calls himself Raymond Lully was
acquainted with nitric acid and with its uses as a dissolvent of
metals. He could form aqua regia by adding sal ammoniac, or
common salt, to nitric acid, and he was aware of its property of
dissolving gold. Spirit of wine was well known to him, says Gruelin;
he strengthened it with dry carbonate of potash, and prepared
vegetable tinctures by its means. He mentions alum from Rocca,
marcasite, white and red mercurial precipitate. He knew the volatile
alkali and its coagulations by means of alcohol. He was acquainted
with cupellated silver, and first obtained rosemary oil by distilling the
plant with water.[P]

FOOTNOTES:
[K] This illness is referred to by another writer, with details of a
miraculous kind. “About 1275 (the chronology of all the
biographers is a chaos of confusion) he fell ill a second time, and
was reduced to such an extremity that he could take neither rest
nor nourishment. On the feast of the Conversion of St Paul, the
crucified Saviour again appeared to him, glorified, and
surrounded by a most exquisite odour, which surpassed musk,
amber, and all other scents. In remembrance of this miracle, on
the same day, in the same bed and place where he lived and
slept, the same supernal odour is diffused.”
[L] The following variation is also related:—“Finding him still
alive when they bore him to the ship, the merchants put back
towards Genoa to get help, but they were carried miraculously to
Majorca, where the martyr expired in sight of his native island.
The merchants resolved to say nothing of their precious burden,
which they embalmed and preserved religiously, being
determined to transport it to Genoa. Three times they put to sea
with a wind that seemed favourable, but as often they were forced
to return into port, which proved plainly the will of God, and
obliged them to make known the martyrdom of the man whom
they revered, who was stoned for the glory of God in the town of
Bugia (?) in the year of grace 1318.” From this account it will be
seen that the place of Lully’s violent death, as well as the date on
which it occurred, are both involved in doubt. He was born under
the pontificate of Honorius IV., and died, according to Genebrand,
about 1304; but the author of the preface to the meditations of the
Hermit Blaquerne positively fixes his decease on the feast of the
martyrdom of SS. Peter and Paul, June 29, 1315, and declares
that he was eighty-six years old.
[M] E.g., Jean-Marie de Vernon, who extends the lists to about
three thousand, and, following the Père Pacifique de Provence,
prolongs his life by the discovery of the universal medicine.
[N] “Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers,” ed. 1815.
[O] Kenyon, “Gold Coins of England,” pp. 57, 58.
[P] Gruelin, Geschichte der Chemie, i. 74.
 ARNOLD DE VILLANOVA.
The date and the birthplace of this celebrated adept are alike
uncertain. Catalonia, Milan, and Montpellier have been severally
named for the locality, and 1245 is, on the whole, the probable
period.
Arnold studied medicine at Paris for twenty years, after which for
ten more he perambulated Italy, visiting the different universities. He
subsequently penetrated into Spain, but hearing that Peter d’Apono,
his friend, was in the hands of the Inquisition, he prudently withdrew,
and abode under the patronage of Frederick, King of Naples and
Sicily, writing his tracts on medicine and his “Comment on the School
of Salerno.” He is said to have perished in a storm during the year
1314, but a circular letter written by Pope Clement V. in 1311
conjures those living under his authority to discover, if possible, and
send to him, the “Treatise on Medicine,” written by Arnold, his
physician, who promised it to the Holy Father, but died before he
could present it. In this case the date of his decease may be more
accurately fixed at 1310.
Arnold was, according to the custom of the period, charged with
magical practices. François Pegna declares that all his erudition in
alchemy was derived from the demon. Mariana accuses him of
attempting to create a man by means of certain drugs deposited in a
pumpkin. But he is justified by Delrio from these imputations, and the
orthodox Dictionnaire des Sciences Occultes considers that Clement
V. would not have chosen an initiate of magical arts as his physician.
In 1317 the Inquisition of Tarragona condemned his books to be
burned, but this was for the heretical sentiments which they
contained. He wrote strictures on the monastic state and the service
of religion, and maintained that works of divine faith and charity were
more agreeable to God than the Sacrifice of the Mass.
 His skill in Hermetic philosophy has been generally recognised.
His contemporary, the celebrated Jurisconsult, John Andre, says of
him:—“In this time appeared Arnold de Villeneuve, a great
theologian, a skilful physician, and wise alchymist, who made gold,
which he submitted to all proofs.” Arnold has also the character of
writing with more light and clearness than the other philosophers. His
alchemical works were published in 1509, in one folio volume. His
Libellus de Somniorum Interpretatione et Somnia Danielis is
excessively rare in its original quarto edition. Several alchemical and
magical works are gratuitously ascribed to him. Among these must
be classed the book called De Physicis Ligaturis, supposed to be
translated from the Arabic—De Sigillis duodecim Signorum, which is
concerned with the zodiacal signs—and the book of the “Three
Impostors,” which the Dictionnaire des Sciences Occultes
denominates “stupid and infamous.”
The Thesaurus Thesaurorum and the Rosarium Philosophorum,
the Speculum Alchemiæ and the Perfectum Magisterium, are the
most notable of all his alchemical treatises. To these the student
should add his Scientia Scientiæ and brief Testamentum. The
editions are various, but the tracts will be found in collected form in
the Bibliotheca Chemicæ Curiosa of J. J. Mangetus.
Arnold asserts that argent vive is the medicine of all the metals,
that vulgar sulphur is the cause of all their imperfections, that the
stone of the philosophers is one, and that it is to be extracted from
that in which it exists. It exists in all bodies, including common argent
vive. The first physical work is the dissolution of the stone in its own
mercury to reduce it to its prima materia. All the operations of the
magnum opus are successively described, including the composition
of the white and the red elixirs, and the multiplication of the metallic
medicine.
The marcasite frequently mentioned by Arnold is thought to be
identical with bismuth. He was acquainted with the preparation of oil
of turpentine, oil of rosemary, and performed distillations in a glazed
earthen vessel with a glass top and helm.
 JEAN DE MEUNG.
Poet, alchemist, and astrologer, a man of some fortune, and
issued from an ancient family, Jean de Meung was one of the chief
figures at the Court of King Philippe le Bel. He was born, according
to the latest authorities, about the middle of the thirteenth century,
and his continuation of the Roman de la Rose, which Guillaume de
Lorris had begun some time before the year 1260, was undertaken
not in his nineteenth year, as generally stated, but about or a little
before the age of thirty, and at the instance of the French King.
The Romance of the Rose, “that epic of ancient France,” as
Éliphas Lévi calls it, has been generally considered by alchemists a
poetic and allegorical presentation of the secrets of the magnum
opus. It professes, at any rate, the principles of Hermetic Philosophy,
and Jean de Meung was also the author of “Nature’s Remonstrances
to the Alchemist” and “The Alchemist’s Answer to Nature.” Hermetic
commentaries have been written upon the romance-poem, and
tradition has ascribed to the author the accomplishment of great
transmutations. The sermon of Genius, chaplain and confessor to
Dame Nature, in the Romance, is an exhibition of the principles of
chemistry, as well as a satire on the bombastic and unintelligible
preaching which was in vogue at that period. From verse 16,914 to
verse 16,997 there is much chemical information.
The year 1216 is the probable period of the poet’s death. The
story told of his testament has only a foundation in legend, but it is
worth repeating as evidence of the general belief in his skill as an
alchemist.
He chose by his will, says the story, to be buried in the Church of
the Jacobins, and, as an acknowledgment, left them a coffer that
appeared, at least by its weight, to be filled with things precious,
probably with the best gold which could be manufactured by the skill
of the Hermetists. He ordered, however, that this coffer should not be
opened till after his funeral, when, touched with the piety of the
deceased, the monks assembled in great numbers to be present at
its opening, and to offer up thanks to God. They found to their great
disappointment that the coffer was filled with large pieces of slates
beautifully engraved with figures of geometry and arithmetic. The
indignation of the fathers was excited by the posthumous imposture,
and they proposed to eject the body of Jean de Meung from their
consecrated precincts; but the Parliament being informed of this
inhumanity, obliged the Jacobins, by a decree, to leave the
deceased undisturbed in the honourable sepulchre of their
conventual cloisters.
In “Nature’s Remonstrance to the Alchemist,” who is described as
a foolish and sophistical souffleur, making use of nothing but
mechanical arts, the complainant bitterly abuses the fanatical
student who diffuses over her beautiful domain the rank odours of
sulphur, which he tortures in vain over his furnaces, for by such a
method he will assuredly attain nothing. The alchemist in his “Reply”
figures as a repentant being, convinced of his errors, which he
ascribes to the barbarous allegories, parabolic sentences, and
delusive precepts contained in the writings of the adepts.
 THE MONK FERARIUS.
About the beginning of the fourteenth century, this Italian artist
gave to the world two treatises—De Lapide Philosophorum and
Thesaurus Philosophiæ, which are printed in the Theatrum
Chimicum.
The “admirable spectacle” of the palingenesis of plants is
described by this Jesuit. “Immediately consequent on exposing to
the rays of the sun the phial, filled with quintessence of the rose,
there is discovered within the narrow compass of the vase a perfect
world of miracles. The plant which lay buried in its ashes awakes,
uprises, and unfolds. In the space of half-an-hour the vegetable
phœnix is resuscitated from its own dust. The rose issues from its
sepulchre and assumes a new life. It is the floral symbol of that
resurrection by which mortals lying in darkness and in the shadow of
death will pass into beautiful immortality.”
The treatise on the philosophical stone very pertinently remarks
that in alchemy the first thing to be ascertained is what is really
signified by the myrionimous argentum vivum sapientum, a point on
which the author gracefully declines information. Both works are
exceedingly obscure and vexatious. The Thesaurus Philosophiæ
testifies that the plain speaking of the philosophers is completely
illusory, and that it is only in their incomprehensible profundities that
we must seek the light of Hermes.
Alchemy is the science of the four elements, which are to be found
in all created substances, but are not of the vulgar kind. The whole
practice of the art is simply the conversion of these elements into
one another. The seed and matter of every metal is mercury, as it is
decocted and otherwise prepared in the bowels of the earth, and
each of them can be reduced into this prima materia, by the help of
which they are also, one and all, susceptible of augmentation and
multiplication, even to infinity.
 POPE JOHN XXII.
This pontiff is claimed as an adept by the alchemists, a fact which
is denied, but not disproved, by his orthodox biographers. That he
believed in the power of magic is shown by the accusation which he
directed against Géraud, Bishop of Cahors, whom he accredited with
the design of poisoning him, together with the entire college of
cardinals, and with having in particular contrived sorceries and
diabolical enchantments against all of them. He was the
contemporary of Raymond Lully and Arnold de Villanova, and is said
to have been the pupil and friend of the latter. Nevertheless, the
mischief occasioned at that period by the impostures of pretended
alchemists led him to issue a bull condemning the traders in this
science as charlatans who promised what they were unable to
perform. Hermetic writers assert that this bull was not directed
against veritable adepts, and his devotion to his laboratory at
Avignon seems a fairly established fact. Franciscus Pagi, in his
Breviarum de Gestis Romanorum Pontificum, has the following
passage:—Joannes scripsit quoque latino sermone artem
metallorum transmutorium; quod opus prodiit Gallici incerto
translatore Lugduni, anno 1557 in 8vo. It is allowed that he was a
writer on medicine. His Thesaurus Pauperum, a collection of recipes,
was printed at Lyons in 1525, and he was the author of a treatise on
diseases of the eye, and of another on the formation of the fœtus.
He was born at Cahors, according to the general opinion, of poor but
reputable parents; he showed at an early period his skill in law and in
the sciences. The circumstances of his life are exceedingly obscure
until his consecration as Bishop of Fréjus in 1300. Subsequently he
was promoted to the see of Avignon, and Clement V. created him
cardinal-bishop of Porto. He was raised to the pontificate at Lyons,
and reigned at Avignon till his death in 1334. He left behind him in
his coffers the sum of eighteen million florins in gold and seven
millions in jewels, besides valuable consecrated vessels. Alchemists
attribute these vast treasures to his skill in their science, and assert
in addition that he manufactured two hundred ingots, apparently on a
single occasion. By a calculation of one of his biographers, this
quantity of the precious metal was equivalent to £660,000, British
sterling. A treatise entitled “The Elixir of the Philosophers, or the
Transmutatory Art of Metals,” is attributed to him. It was translated
from the Latin into French, and published in duodecimo at Lyons in
1557. It is written ad clerum, and for this reason is probably the more
misleading. It represents the constituents of the perfect medicine to
be vinegar, salt, urine, and sal ammoniac, with the addition of an
undescribed substance called sulphur vive.
 NICHOLAS FLAMEL.
The name of this alchemical adept has been profoundly venerated
not only in the memory of the Hermetists but in the hearts of the
French people, among whom he is the central figure of many
marvellous legends and traditions. “Whilst in all ages and nations the
majority of hierophants have derived little but deception, ruination,
and despair as the result of their devotion to alchemy, Nicholas
Flamel enjoyed permanent good fortune and serenity. Far from
expending his resources in the practice of the magnum opus, he
added with singular suddenness a vast treasure to a moderate
fortune. These he employed in charitable endowments and in pious
foundations that long survived him and long sanctified his memory.
He built churches and chapels which were adorned with statues of
himself, accompanied by symbolical characters and mysterious
crosses, which subsequent adepts long strove to decipher, that they
might discover his secret history, and the kabbalistic description of
the process by which he was conducted to the realisation of the
Grand Magisterium.”
Whether Flamel was born at Paris or Pontoise is not more
uncertain than the precise date of his nativity. This occurred some
time during the reign of Philippe le Bel, the spoliator of the grand
order of the Temple, and, on the whole, the most probable year is
1330. His parents were poor, and left him little more than the humble
house in Paris which he continued to possess till his death, and
which he eventually bequeathed to the Church. It stood in Notary
Street, at the corner of Marivaux Street, opposite the Marivaux door
of the Church of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie.
Authorities disagree as to the amount of education that Flamel
obtained in his youth, but it was sufficient to qualify him for the
business of a scrivener, which, in spite of his wealth and his
accredited wisdom, he continued to follow through life. He was
proficient in painting and poetry, and had a taste for architecture and
the mathematical sciences; yet he applied himself steadily to
business, and contracted a prudent marriage, his choice falling on a
widow, named Pernelle, who, though handsome, was over forty
years, but who brought a considerable dowry to her second
husband.
In his capacity as a copyist before the age of printing, books of all
classes fell into the hands of Flamel, and among them were many of
those illuminated alchemical treatises which are reckoned among the
rarest treasures of mediæval manuscripts. Acquainted with the Latin
language, he insensibly accumulated an exoteric knowledge of the
aims and theories of the adepts. His interest and curiosity were
awakened, and he began studying them in his leisure moments. Now
tradition informs us that, whether his application was great, his
desire intense, or whether he was super-eminently fitted to be
included by divine election among the illuminated Sons of the
Doctrine, or for whatever other reason, the mystical Bath-Kôl
appeared to him under the figure of an angel, bearing a remarkable
book bound in well-wrought copper, the leaves of thin bark, graven
right carefully with a pen of iron. An inscription in characters of gold
contained a dedication addressed to the Jewish nation by Abraham
the Jew, prince, priest, astrologer, and philosopher.
“Flamel,” cried the radiant apparition, “behold this book of which
thou understandest nothing; to many others but thyself it would
remain for ever unintelligible, but one day thou shalt discern in its
pages what none but thyself will see!”
At these words Flamel eagerly stretched out his hands to take
possession of the priceless gift, but book and angel disappeared in
an auriferous tide of light. The scrivener awoke to be ravished
henceforth by the divine dream of alchemy; but so long a time
passed without any fulfilment of the angelic promise, that the ardour
of his imagination cooled, the great hope dwindled gradually away,
and he was settling once more into the commonplace existence of a
plodding scribe, when, on a certain day of election in the year 1357,
an event occurred which bore evidence of the veracity of his
visionary promise-maker, and exalted his ambition and aspirations to
a furnace heat. This event, with the consequences it entailed, are
narrated in the last testament of Nicholas Flamel, which begins in the
following impressive manner, but omits all reference to the legendary
vision:—
“The Lord God of my life, who exalts the humble in spirit out of the
most abject dust, and makes the hearts of such as hope in Him to
rejoice, be eternally praised.
“Who, of His own grace, reveals to the believing souls the springs
of His bounty, and subjugates beneath their feet the crowns of all
earthly felicities and glories.
“In Him let us always put our confidence, in His fear let us place
our happiness, and in His mercy the hope and glory of restoration
from our fallen state.
“And in our supplications to Him let us demonstrate or show forth a
faith unfeigned and stable, an assurance that shall not for ever be
shaken.
“And Thou, O Lord God Almighty, as Thou, out of Thy infinite and
most desirable goodness, hast condescended to open the earth and
unlock Thy treasures unto me, Thy poor and unworthy servant, and
hast given into my possession the fountains and well-springs of all
the treasures and riches of this world.
“So, O Lord God, out of Thine abundant kindness, extend Thy
mercies unto me, that when I shall cease to be any longer in the land
of the living, Thou mayst open unto me the celestial riches, the
divine treasures, and give me a part or portion in the heavenly
inheritance for ever.
“Where I may behold Thy divine glory and the fulness of Thy
Heavenly Majesty, a pleasure, so ineffable, and a joy, so ravishing,
which no mortal can express or conceive.
“This I entreat of Thee, O Lord, for our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy well-
beloved Son’s sake, who in the unity of the Holy Spirit liveth with
Thee, world without end. Amen.
“I, Nicholas Flamel, Scrivener, living at Paris, anno 1399, in the
Notary Street, near St James, of the Bouchery, though I learned not
much Latin, because of the poorness and meanness of my parents,
who were notwithstanding (by them that envy me most) accounted
honest and good people.
“Yet, by the blessing of God, I have not wanted an understanding
of the books of the philosophers, but learned them and attained to a
certain kind of knowledge, even of their hidden secrets.
“For which cause sake there shall not any moment of my life pass,
wherein remembering this so vast a good, I will not on my bare
knees, if the place will permit of it, or otherwise in my heart, with all
the entireness of my affections, render thanks to this my most good
and precious God.
“Who never forsakes the righteous generation, or suffers the
children of the just to beg their bread, nor deceives their
expectations, but supports them with blessings who put their trust in
Him.
“After the death of my parents, I, Nicholas Flamel, got my living by
the art of writing, engrossing inventories, making up accounts,
keeping of books, and the like.
“In this course of living there fell by chance into my hands a gilded
book, very old and large, which cost me only two florins.
“It was not made of paper or parchment, as other books are, but of
admirable rinds (as it seemed to me) of young trees. The cover of it
was of brass; it was well bound, and graven all over with a strange
kind of letters, which I take to be Greek characters, or some such
like.
“This I know that I could not read them, nor were they either Latin
or French letters, of which I understand something.
“But as to the matter which was written within, it was engraven (as
I suppose) with an iron pencil or graver upon the said bark leaves,
done admirably well, and in fair and neat Latin letters, and curiously
coloured.
“It contained thrice seven leaves, for so they were numbered in the
top of each folio, and every seventh leaf was without any writing, but
in place thereof there were several images or figures painted.
“Upon the first seventh leaf was depicted—1. A Virgin. 2. Serpents
swallowing her up. On the second seventh, a serpent crucified; and
on the last seventh, a desert or wilderness, in midst whereof were
seen many fair fountains, whence issued out a number of serpents
here and there.
“Upon the first of the leaves was written in capital letters of gold,
Abraham the Jew, Priest, Prince, Levite, Astrologer, and Philosopher,
to the nation of the Jews dispersed by the wrath of God in France,
wisheth health.
“After which words, it was filled with many execrations and curses,
with this word Maranatha, which was oft repeated against any one
that should look in to unfold it, except he were either Priest or Scribe.
“The person that sold me this book was ignorant of its worth as
well as I who bought it. I judge it might have been stolen from some
of the Jewish nation, or else found in some place where they
anciently abode.
“In the second leaf of the book he consoled his nation, and gave
them pious counsel to turn from their wickedness and evil ways, but
above all to flee from idolatry, and to wait in patience for the coming
of the Messiah, who, conquering all the kings and potentates of the
earth, should reign in glory with his people to eternity. Without doubt,
this was a very pious, wise, and understanding man.
“In the third leaf, and in all the writings that followed, he taught
them, in plain words, the transmutation of metals, to the end that he
might help and assist his dispersed people to pay their tribute to the
Roman Emperors, and some other things not needful here to be
repeated.
“He painted the vessels by the side or margin of the leaves, and
discovered all the colours as they should arise or appear, with all the
rest of the work.
“But of the prima materia or first matter, or agent, he spake not so
much as one word; but only he told them that in the fourth and fifth
leaves he had entirely painted or decyphered it, and depicted or
figured it, with a desirable dexterity and workmanship.
“Now though it was singularly well and materially or intelligibly
figured and painted, yet by that could no man ever have been able to
understand it without having been well skilled in their Cabala, which
is a series of old traditions, and also to have been well studied in
their books.
“The fourth and fifth leaf thereof was without any writing, but full of
fair figures, bright and shining, or, as it were, enlightened, and very
exquisitely depicted.
“First, there was a young man painted, with wings at his ankles,
having in his hand a caducean rod, writhen about with two serpents,
wherewith he stroke upon an helmet covering his head.
“This seemed in my mean apprehension to be one of the heathen
gods, namely, Mercury. Against him there came running and flying
with open wings, a great old man with an hour-glass fixed upon his
head, and a scythe in his hands, like Death, with which he would (as
it were in indignation) have cut off the feet of Mercury.
“On the other side of the fourth leaf he painted a fair flower, on the
top of a very high mountain, which was very much shaken by the
north wind. Its footstalk was blue, its flowers white and red, and its
leaves shining like fine gold, and round about it the dragons and
griffins of the north made their nests and habitations.
“On the fifth leaf was a fair rose-tree, flowered, in the midst of a
garden, growing up against a hollow oak, at the foot whereof
bubbled forth a fountain of pure white water, which ran headlong
down into the depths below.
“Yet it passed through the hands of a great number of people who
digged in the earth, seeking after it, but, by reason of their blindness,
none of them knew it, except a very few, who considered its weight.
“On the last side of the leaf was depicted a king, with a faulchion,
who caused his soldiers to slay before him many infants, the
mothers standing by, and weeping at the feet of their murderers.
 “These infants’ blood being gathered up by other soldiers, was put
into a great vessel wherein Sol and Luna came to bathe themselves.
“And because this history seemed to represent the destruction of
the Innocents by Herod, and that I learned the chiefest part of the art
in this book, therefore I placed in their churchyard these hieroglyphic
figures of this learning. Thus have you that which was contained in
the first five leaves.
“As for what was in all the rest of the written leaves, which was
wrote in good and intelligible Latin, I must conceal, lest God being
offended with me should send His plague and judgments upon me. It
would be a wickedness much greater than he who wished that all
men in the world had but one head, that he might cut it off at a blow.
“Having thus obtained this delicate and precious book, I did
nothing else day and night but study it; conceiving very well all the
operations it pointed forth, but wholly ignorant of the prima materia
with which I should begin, which made me very sad and
discontented.
“My wife, whose name was Perrenelle, whom I loved equally with
myself, and whom I had but lately married, was mightily concerned
for me, and, with many comforting words, earnestly desired to know
how she might deliver me from this trouble.
“I could no longer keep counsel, but told her all, shewing her the
very book, which, when she saw, she became as well pleased with it
as myself, and with great delight beheld the admirable cover, the
engraving, the images, and exquisite figures thereof, but understood
them as little as I.
“Yet it was matter of consolation to me to discourse and entertain
myself with her, and to think what we should do to find out the
interpretation and meaning thereof.
“At length I caused to be painted within my chamber, as much to
the life or original as I could, all the images and figures of the said
fourth and fifth leaves.
“These I showed to the greatest scholars and most learned men in
Paris, who understood thereof no more than myself: I told them they
were found in a book which taught the philosophers’ stone.
“But the greatest part of them made a mock both of me and that
most excellent secret, except one whose name was Anselm, a
practiser of physic and a deep student in this art.
“He much desired to see my book, which he valued more than
anything else in the world, but I always refused him, only making him
a large demonstration of the method.
“He told me that the first figure represented Time, which devours
all things, and that, according to the number of the six written leaves,
there was required a space of six years to perfect the stone; and
then, said he, we must turn the glass and see it no more.
“I told him this was not painted, but only to show the teacher the
prima materia, or first agent, as was written in the book. He
answered me that this digestion for six years was, as it were, a
second agent, and that certainly the first agent was there painted,
which was a white and heavy water.
“This, without doubt, was argent vive, which they could not fix; that
is, cut off his feet, or take away his volubility, save by that long
digestion in the pure blood of young infants.
“For in that this argent vive being joined with Sol and Luna was
first turned with them into a plant, like that there painted, and
afterwards by corruption into serpents, which serpents, being
perfectly dried and digested, were made a fine powder of gold, which
is the stone.
“This strange or foreign discourse to the matter was the cause of
my erring, and that made me wander for the space of one and
twenty years in a perfect meander from the verity; in which space of
time I went through a thousand labyrinths or processes, but all in
vain; yet never with the blood of infants, for that I accounted wicked
and villainous.
“For I found in my book that the philosophers called blood the
mineral spirit which is in the metals, chiefly in Sol, Luna, and
Mercury, to which sense I always, in my own judgment, assented.