SOURCE: “Shakespeare's Heroic Elixir: A New Context for The Phoenix and Turtle,” in Studia Neophilologica, Vol. 51, No. 2, 1979, pp. 215-23.

In the following essay, Green examines the “language of alchemy” in The Phoenix and Turtle, and contends that the “alchemical connection clarifies the mode of love in the entire poem.”

Critics generally recognise the language of scholasticism as an important stylistic context for Shakespeare's Phoenix and Turtle.¹ J. V. Cunningham, who formally proposed the context, refers the poem to the Thomist doctrine of the Holy Trinity, i.e., the relationship between the Phoenix and Turtle is continuous with that between the Persons of the Trinity.² The reciprocal relation between the Father and the Son derives from their mutual participation in the Holy Ghost, who both joins them together and in turn issues from their relation. The Phoenix and Turtle, then, symbolises the union between two real human lovers on...