'Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind': Shakespeare's Sonnets, Alchemy and Individuation.

Book excerpt: It is my intention, in reading together literary critics, artists and theorists, to show how the development of Shakespeare's conception of his own subjectivity develops over the course of his sonnet sequence. I will discuss and utilise the Jungian concept of individuation, and the Lacanian concept of desire, as well as language from the lexicon of the fifteenth and sixteenth century alchemists to develop an understanding of how the intimately psychological nature of the production of art is being demonstrated by Shakespeare in his poems.