Alchemists of eloquence
Thomas Nashe's alchemical satire
Alchemie is a pretty kinde of Game,
Somewhat like Tricks o'the Cards, to cheat a man,
With charming.
Ben Jonson’s 1610 play, The Alchemist, has solidified in our minds the image of the trickster-alchemist - conning unwitting patrons with his fake philosopher’s stones and elixirs of life. Researches by Lawrence M. Principe and Katherine Eggert has worked to dispel the belief that alchemy was always perceived as fraudulent and separate from artisanal labour and advancements in science in the early modern period. Nonetheless, the image of the trickster-alchemist in England goes back at least as far as Chaucer, who described it as a ‘slidynge science’. And the sixteenth-century pamphleteer, Thomas Nashe, described alchemy as the ‘durt of wisdome’.
Nashe was a keen satirist and alchemy was often a target for his railing prose. More often, however, Nashe uses the figure of the trickster-alchemist as an attack on his fellow writers. Alchemy could also be a symbol for certain ways of speaking. As one sixteenth-century metallurgy treatise complained, alchemists only use ‘obscure language’ and ‘strange words’. John Lyly’s play, Gallathea (1592), offers a satirical glimpse at how alchemical language was perceived. The scene shows an alchemist’s servant, Peter, astounded by the mysterious language of his master,
What a life doe I leade with my Maister nothing but blowing of bellows, beating of spirits, & scraping of Croslets? it is a very secrete Science, for none almost can vnderstand the language of it. Sublimation, Almigation, Calcination, Rubification, Encorporation, Circination, Sementation, Albification, and Frementation. With as many termes vnpossible to be vttered, as the Arte to be compassed.
Peter’s list of alchemical terms, preceded by alchemical practices - the ‘blowing of bellows, beating of spirits, & scraping of Croslets’ - renders the language and practice of alchemy itself meaningless. And in Nashe’s entry to the literary scene in 1589, he was quick to use alchemy as a metaphor for his contemporaries’ hollow and ‘puffed up’ language,
…[the] idiote art-masters, that intrude themselues to our eares as the alcumists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbraue better pens with the swelling bumbast of a bragging blanke verse.
In this context, the ‘alcumists of eloquence’ are playwrights - ‘mounted on the stage of arrogance’. In this preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon, Nashe uses a range of alchemical imagery to comment on literary style. Imitators ‘embowel the clouds’ with their comparisons and they are ‘alcumists of eloquence’ with swollen language. Commenting on the translation attempts of Richard Stanyhurst, Nashe, mimicking Stanyhurst’s own phrasing, calls him a ‘Thrasonicall huffe snuffe…whose heroicall Poetrie [is] infired...with a hexameter furie’. The imitative language of huffing and puffing connects ‘alcumists of eloquence’ to a particular figure: the ‘puffer’ - another word for an alchemist, particularly the deceitful or amateur sort, who would use bellows and furnaces for his practice.
Chaucer’s trickster-alchemist, Canon (The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale), and his assistant who ‘blowe[s] the fir’ would be seen as ‘puffers’, as would the instrument used to stoke the fire - the bellow. Although the literal use of ‘puff’, an imitative Germanic-rooted word (like ‘huff’) meaning to blow out air or to inflate something, was well in use by this point, the sixteenth century sees the first use in the OED of ‘puff’ in a figurative sense - ‘puffing’ as to give undue, ‘inflated’ praise or to cause someone to ‘swell’ with vanity. The inflated imagery of both the ‘puffer’ alchemist and the ‘puffed up’ braggart are evoked by Nashe in this preface. That something might be deceitfully expanded once ‘puffed up’ with air, only to prove hollow within, connects the ‘swelling’ and ‘huffe snuffe’ of alchemy (both its techniques and falsities) and the empty-headed writer and his language that Nashe attacks. Inflation, swelling, and puffing are traits of the ‘alcumists of eloquence’.
Nashe goes on to use even more alchemical language in his preface, arguing that ‘Puritie expell[s] the infection of absurditie’ and ‘vndescerning iudgement, makes drosse as valuable as gold’. This conceit suggests that the reader must be ‘purified’, as the ‘swollen’ language they have read has tricked them into believing ‘dross’ to be ‘gold’. Nashe may attack alchemy and his ‘puffing’ contemporaries, but he also offers a remedy to their faults through alchemical language of his own, promising to purify the reader and offer them ‘pure’ gold.
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Sources:
An alchemist of the 'puffer' (uninitiated) type, surrounded by equipment. Engraving by W. French after D. Teniers the younger (Wellcome Library, no. 36010i):
https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kxnyh3mc
The Rosarium Philosophorum (University of Glasgow, Special Collections, MS Ferguson 210):
https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/exhibns/month/april2009.html
puff, n. and adj.] 6, OED Online
Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale’, The Canterbury Tales (from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, Houghton-Mifflin Company)
Katherine Eggert, ‘The Alchemist and Science’, Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Patrick Cheney (OUP, 2006).
Ben Jonson, The alchemist (London: Thomas Snodham for Walter Burre, 1612)
John Lyly, Gallathea (London: Printed by Iohn Charlwoode, 1592)
Thomas Nashe, ‘To the Gentlemen Students of both Uniuersities’, in Robert Greene, Menaphon (London: Printed by T[homas] O[rwin] for Sampson Clarke, 1589)
Lawrence M. Principe, ‘Apparatus and Reproducibility in Alchemy’, Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry, ed. Frederic L. Holmes and Trevor Harvey Levere (MIT Press, 1999).