The Elizabethan Age is noted for its tremendous intellectual productivity, for its relish in living, its adventurous ways on the high seas, in exploration, in colonization, in discovery. In the drama, in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Marlowe and Ford and Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker, the social and erotic phases of this tumultuous era play no mean or insignificant role. In palace and hut, in court and manor, the primary motif was love, in all its tantalizing manifestations. Love pervaded all. And the instruments for promoting love were all important, transcending domesticity and tranquillity, honor and ethics. The secretive drug, the rare pill, the poculum amatorium, the brew distilled by the wizened alchemist, the imported philtre, the dramatic potion are all made contributory to the furtherance of love and lust, to erotic subjugation, conquest, and mastery.
The corpus of Shakespearean plays, as an instance, contains a number of allusions to concoctions relating to amorous experiences. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3, Scene 2, Oberon, King of the Fairies, addresses Puck:
This falls out better than I could devise.
But hast thou yet latched the Athenian’s eyes
With the love-juice, as I did bid thee do?
Puck: I took him sleeping—that is finished too— And the Athenian woman by his side; That, when he waked, of force she must be eyed.
Later, in the same play, another reference of the same kind appears:
Oberon: What hast thou done? thou hast mistaken quite,
and laid the love-juice on some true-love’s sight.