References to the Quarto and Folio of King Lear are taken from William Shakespeare The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 1986. References to Othello, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest are taken from an Arden edition of the play, unless otherwise specified.
References to Hermetic texts are drawn principally from Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a new English translation by Professor Brian P. Copenhaver. Copenhaver’s work comprises seventeen texts: Books I to XIV and Books XVI to XVIII and the Asclepius, translations of the Greek and Latin of the Budé edition also used by Nock and Festugière. The former group derives originally from the fourteenth century manuscript translated by Marsilio Ficino in 1463 (MS A Laurentianus, Florence), while the remaining three tracts were translated by Lodovico Lazzarelli (Biblioteca Comunale, Viterbo).
Copenhaver’s translation is complemented by the 1579 French translation and commentary of François Foix de Candale: Le Pimandre de Mercure Trismegiste de la philosophie Chrestienne, Cognoissance du verbe divin, et de l’excellence des oeuvres de Dieu, traduit de l’exemplaire Grec, avec collation de tres-amples commentaires. Par François Monsieur de Foix, de la famille de Candale, Capitale de Buchs, etc. Evesque d’Ayre, etc. à très-haute, très-illustre, et très puissante Princesse, Marguerite de France, Roine de Navarre fille & soeur des Rois très-Chrestien (accessed online from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France). Foix de Candale’s translation includes as chapter XV three tracts taken from Johann Stobaeus and the Suda, which were first added to the Corpus Hermeticum by Adrian Turnebus in 1554. Foix includes chapter XVI, merges chapter XVII with chapter XIV and, following Turnebus, he omits chapter XVIII.
Other translations consulted for the purpose of cross-referencing translations were: Corpus Hermeticum, vols I, II, edited by A. D. Nock and translated by A.-J. Festugière. Corpus Hermeticum, vols III, IV Fragments extraits de Stobée, edited and translated by A.-J. Festugière.
Hermetica vols I–III, edited and translated by Walter Scott.
The Way of Hermes New Translations of The Corpus Hermeticum and The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius. Clement Salaman, Dorine van Oyen, William D. Wharton, Jean-Pierre Mahé.
Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500) The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents. Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, 2005. This book includes Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis, translated into English from the French translation made by Gabriel du Préau in 1549, and based on the 1985 edition by Professor Claudio Moreschini.
The name for God, Poimandres, sometimes given in the literature as Pimander, is spelt Pymander throughout.
Symbols used when quoting from the Hermetica replicate those used by Copenhaver:
angled brackets < >: insertion of a word or words
square brackets [ ]: removal of a word or words
pointed brackets { }: a word or words regarded as unintelligible or otherwise problematic
ellipsis … : a lacuna or gap in the text
Translations from the French are my own except where otherwise acknowledged.