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After 400 years, the mind and works of Shakespeare continue to inspire worldwide awe. I first came to suspect that spirituality underlies his power when a friend recommended Dr. Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness twenty years ago. Like Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, Bucke’s survey forcefully reveals the fundamental unity among the spiritual searches of diverse religions, cultures, souls, and inspirations. The likelihood of a divinely inspired Shakespeare evidently haunted Dr. Bucke, for he spent the very last evening of his life debating whether or not that vast body of creative expression we know as The Works of Shakespeare actually erupted from one man’s awakening by the touch of God.
The more I study The Bard, the more I, too, am haunted by specters first raised by Dr. Bucke: that the Shakespeare of Stratford we know as William Shakespeare had nothing like the character to produce The Shakespeare Plays. In these few lines I introduce Bucke’s arguments that the plays were pseudonymously offered by Sir Francis Bacon. Although scholars have always blown off this idea, even conservative academics have recently begun to admit the best evidence we have about Shakespeare’s (the actor’s) life shows he was probably a stingy, usurious, family-abuser who consorted with London gangsters. I don’t ask you to explore all the complexities, but please consider fourteen key points paraphrased from Dr. Bucke :
a. The large number of new words in the plays, estimated at five hundred, mostly from the Latin, and the much larger number of old words used in a new sense, estimated at five thousand, make it clear that these were written not merely by a genius but by a learned man a man who read Latin so continuously as that he came almost to think in that language. [Will probably left school by age 13.]
b. The large number of phrases and turns of expression which are also found in both the “Shakespeare” plays and Baconian prose works cannot possibly be attributed to accident. One analysis concludes that 98.5 percent of Shakespeare’s words are also Bacon’s. [ Bucke does not even note the raw statistic on the size of the vocabulary of the plays: 14,000-20,000 words, depending on exactly how they “a word” is classed: vastly greater than any other writer in the English language. This accomplishment alone fits far better the voracious reader Bacon than the grammar-school-educated actor from Stratford.]
c. Bacon and “Shakespeare” read the same books, and the favorite books of the one were the favorite books of the other.
d. They write on the same subjects — and...
e. ...always from the same point of view. They never express irreconcilable
opinions.
f. These two authors were (if separate) the two greatest minds living in the world at that time. For thirty years they lived in what we today should consider a small city of one hundred and sixty thousand. And it does not appear that they even attempted to meet; there is no evidence that either of them ever knew of the existence of the other. The lesser (Bacon) left behind him abundant evidence of literary activity in the form of manuscripts, letters to and from friends, etc. The greater (Shakespeare) left none; not a manuscript, not a letter.
g. The localities of the plays are all such as are know to have been known to Bacon by residence, visiting or reading — not so to Shakespeare.
h. Parallelism between incidents and scenes of the plays
and Bacon’s life, not Shakespeare’s.
i. The close relation existing between Shakespeare’s Richard III and Henry
VIII and Bacon’s prose history of Henry the VII.
j. Allegations that the courtly, lawyerly Bacon was not a sufficient wit or poet to have produced the plays is answered by looking closely at his prose works. Bacon’s close associate, Macaulay, summarizes that, “The poetical faculty was powerful in Bacon’s mind, but not, like his wit, so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason and to tyrannize over the whole man.” He added, “No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly subjugated.”
k. The Promus of Formularies — a storehouse of sayings, epigrams, turns of phrase that Bacon compiled during the same years the first Shakespeare plays were appearing. The tabled items are not the types of expressions to appear in the Bacon prose works, but a large number find themselves in the Shakespeare plays.
l. About April 18th, 1621, after his fall from political power, Bacon composed a prayer which Addison quoted as resembling the devotions of an angel rather than those of a man. No truer or higher poetry is found in the plays or Sonnets than is found in it. No one with a soul can read it and doubt its absolute candor and honesty. In it Bacon says, “I have (though in a despisèd weed) procured the good of all men.” No one has ever explained what might be this “good of all men.” which Bacon had procured and which went about in a despisèd dress. “The good of all men” is such an immense phrase that the object referred to must necessarily be of towering import to Bacon: Perhaps his great philosophical works? Towering, for sure. But the object spoken of was in a despisèd dress, whereas the great prose works were in a genuine, high-class, philosophic garb as to form and style — more, they were in the best Latin that could, for love or money be procured for them. The “Shakespeare” plays, on the other hand, were in crude, colloquial English: even the best verse for the playhouse had about as much literary standing in Elizabethan England as do scripts for TV soap operas for us today.
m. Edwin Borman and H. J. Ruggles independently and from somewhat different points of view demonstrated how persistently the thought of Bacon and that of “Shakespeare” run in the same channel; how the science and philosophy of the first are constantly worked into the poetry of the second, becoming its very life blood and soul
n. Finally, consider the anagram in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost which when decoded from the Latin that it was Francis Bacon who authored the plays. —adapted by R.P. from R. Bucke
Editor’s Confession
None of the above points is a smoking gun. To ascertain exactly what happened four-hundred years ago in a culture that operated very differently from modern England or America is impossible. To weigh the sparse reports of long-deceased eye-witnesses requires great humor and humility as well as discernment and scepticism. And nearly none of the professionals or academics who spend their lives immersed in the great Works that Shakespeare (or Bacon or someone) left us, views Bacon (or Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, etc.) as an even slightly conceivable originator of The Works of Shakespeare.
Yet the more that successive decades reveal about the crude character of the Stratford actor the more we are left with complete inconsistency with a case of enlightenment.
After my first Shakespeare decade:
I am convinced that the 154 Shakespeare Sonnets cannot possibly be just what their surface story appears to present — a tortured bisexual poet who craves a gorgeous youth but becomes equally obsessed with a dark-haired young lady who has an affair with the poet’s adored youth. Almost without exception, all the brightest readers over the centuries have chosen to forget that poets quite often speak in metaphor! Alas, apparently lacking a spiritual life merely academic readers cannot begin to ask whether “Shakespeare” could have had an enlightenment experience and seen The Face of God and fallen in love with That Eternal Youth and poured out his heart to God in his Sonnets.
I am convinced that his love of Creator and of Creations inspired the author to paint lovingly this World in the medium of drama. And I find it much easier to see a heart large enough to engage this scenario in the life of Francis Bacon than to see it in the life of the actor Shakespeare from Stratford.
Who Cares?
Everyone understands romance and lust and sexual attraction — heterosexual, homosexual, or whatever — and how often that inspire art or literature of lasting value. I myself could not have developed an obsession about Shakespeare and his work if it did not feel to me utterly compelling that it must have come from the Great Spiritual Force awakened within some individual (Shakespeare or Bacon or whomever). I am not a literary scholar, and I confess that literature is not a raison d’etre for me. But the Spirit within it is.
Unfortunately for Shakespeare studies and for spiritual psychology, the vast number of scholars, readers, viewers, and performers of Shakespeare seem never even to ponder a possible role of Spirit in high creative processes or in the creative life.
If we could see that what a central roll the Divine Creator played in the enormous work this greatest of human creators we would have a surpassing example of the benefit of seeking first the Kingdom. Do you not think it worth a look?
© Richard Pinneau, 2003 Feedback appreciated: rp@richardpinneau.com |
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