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Ancient thoughts on alcohol as potion
Horace writes in the first century bce: “Wine…discloses secrets; ratifies and confirms our hopes; thrusts the coward forth to battle; eases the anxious mind of its burden; instructs in arts.” The Bible treats wine both as a commodity and as a symbol: a lesson about not putting new wine in old wineskins, a description of the sour wine given to Jesus, and references to wine at feasts and to people “overcome with wine.”
Medieval potion recipes always included alcohol, though the flowers and herbs were considered the active ingredients, not the alcohol.
Carl Van Doren notes that the Greeks and Romans forbade love philters: they were considered effective and possibly harmful. Van Doren adds that the Poet Lucretius and the Emperor Caligula both died accidentally from ostensible healing potions administered by their wives. Van Doren offers one medieval recipe for a love potion: “blood of a red-haired person, tongues of vipers, and winged ants, macerated in alcohol.”
 Potions (love and other) in operas
Poisons and other bad potions almost always work. Love potions almost never do—either they’re fraudulent, or the people taking them haven’t thought through the implications. Their malfunction may add a lesson to the plot, along the lines of “You can’t fool Mother Nature.”
Composers treat operatic potions musically. Wagner assigns characteristic music (leitmotifs) to them. Mozart, writing Bastien und Bastienne at the age of 12, already knew to make the music stagger slightly as Bastien reacted to drinking a phony love potion, so the audience would recognize that it was really wine. An early opera (Cesti’s Dori, 1657) considered poison vs. potion.
L’elisir d’amore refers to the legend of Tristan and Iseult (not Wagner’s opera, which it predates by 26 years). Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sorcerer parodies L’elisir slightly.
Love potions in literature/theatre
Misdelivered potions are a comic standard, from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the juice of “a little western flower” on people’s eyelids makes them love what they first see on waking, to Broadway’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Shakespeare’s tragic Romeo and Juliet also depends on misdelivered potions.
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