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Contarini's avatar

Pretty convincing!

It makes me want to listen to the three hour podcast -- but I probably can't.

In addition to making it shorter, go all-in the other way: turn it into a short book and make it available by Kindle and print to order.

It is a jarring reassessment and deserves wide dissemination and discussion.

Be sure to send this article to Pearce!

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The Hidden Life Is Best's avatar

Thank you Contarini! Dare I send it to Pearce? 😬

OK I will! Thanks again!

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Contarini's avatar

Absolutely send it!

You guys should do a podcast together about it.

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Nick Bryant's avatar

Yes, indeed, Mr. Fredericks takes us on a deep dive that one has to ponder. The vampire symbolism he delineates puts Romeo in a very different light. Please excuse the pun. The play is also replete with Masonic symbolism. And his interpretation of the Friar and Nurse as evil doers is certainly an interesting take, but one that is not baseless.

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JJ's avatar

I love this take and it becomes so blisteringly obvious now. Great job!

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The Hidden Life Is Best's avatar

Thanks Jessica!

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JJ's avatar

You're welcome.

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Simon's avatar

"We can safely put away any notions of some that Shakespeare secretly advocated Catholicism!"

This line is mostly familiar to me from Clare Asquith in 'Shadowplay' and how she constructed it is most interesting. Her central claim is that every time "Shakespeare" uses "high" or "fair" (or close synonyms thereof) he means Catholic and the inverse ("low" and "dark") means Protestant. Small problem: "low" and "dark" were commonly applied to anything an author wanted to look bad. It's nonsense. What Asquith really wanted was to find a way to give Stratford Will the university education he so obviously needed - so if he was a secret Catholic then, she argues apparently seriously, he was smuggled into Catholic-sympathising Oxford under an alias! That's how he learnt it all! Don't worry about the specific references to Cambridge.... or that the whole thing is a fantasy house of straw.

Is Clare Asquith just some random eccentric? No. Her mother is Viscountess Sidmouth. Her husband is Raymond Asquith, great-grandson of H.H. Asquith UK PM 1908-16. Quigley and Docherty/MacGregor have plenty to say about Asquith the PM. There are few men with more blood on their hands. Raymond Asquith was British Ambassador to the USSR in the 1980s - a "safe pair of hands" in situ for momentous events.

Clare Asquith isn't the only female Stratfordian writer with some interesting connections. Charlotte Stopes 'The Bacon/Shakespeare Question' is probably the worst slice of Strafordianism it's been my displeasure to read. It's like being locked in a room with Stanley Wells, Jonathan Bate and James Shapiro. The section where she tries to paint C16th Stratford as Florence-upon-Avon and Mary Arden as some sort of cross between Catherine De Medici and Jane Austen is unintentionally hilarious. Well, Stopes' daughter was no other than Mary Stopes, the insane eugenicist and Britain's answer to Margaret Sanger! Charlotte Stopes wrote as "C.C. Stopes" and CC=33.

I'm not going to rehash the evidence that Stratford Will was Catholic or Protestant. It's a classic fake binary. Authors like Asquith and Stopes will never admit (except perhaps very obliquely in code like "freethinker") that these are not the only two options - Gnostic, Luciferian, Pagan, Middle Eastern, even outright Satanism, these are all off the table in the way they're trying to shape the debate.

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The Hidden Life Is Best's avatar

WOW. Mind blowing. Desperate measures to shore up the Shakespeare Hoax facade, these high class ladies may even have done it on their own initiative, the Bardic programming runs so incredibly deep. But their connections to the deep state and the idea that the hoax is an important state secret suggest otherwise. They are, however, getting quite creative aren't they?! Stratford Will a secret Oxford graduate. RIGHT. Desperate times require desperate measures.

HILARIOUS: "Clare Asquith isn't the only female Stratfordian writer with some interesting connections. Charlotte Stopes 'The Bacon/Shakespeare Question' is probably the worst slice of Strafordianism it's been my displeasure to read. It's like being locked in a room with Stanley Wells, Jonathan Bate and James Shapiro. The section where she tries to paint C16th Stratford as Florence-upon-Avon and Mary Arden as some sort of cross between Catherine De Medici and Jane Austen is unintentionally hilarious"

🤣😆

Thanks for the details on more recent English history. Asquith huh? I have heard the name. Grim.

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Brady Nash's avatar

Ive heard it described Shakespeare has completed "negative capability", an elusiveness to his psychology,further compounded if like many of us you believe there's something pseudonymic about Shake-Speare.

During my read of the canon, it was my intimation that Shakespeare seems to take the opportunity to have a character praise pagan gods whenever he can lol

Id still like to echo Bacon predecessor Philip Sidney, who in his Defense of Poesy makes the claim the point of Poesy/fiction is hide stuff in it, "lest be abused by profane wits".

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The Hidden Life Is Best's avatar

That's a huge part of what they were doing- hiding stuff in the poetry. It keeps coming up. Which only makes it more insanely brilliant.

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Henry Solospiritus's avatar

Sacrifice, blood and death are the themes, the memes, the beasts and thrall we cannot stop our gaze from seeking. Egregores conjured by subsumed personalities, that are no longer Beings, cross screens and stages to delight and terrify those waiting for their turn to burst into flame annihilated by the Divine.

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Mari Glading-Ho's avatar

Thank you for totally enlightening me to Shakespeare's hidden language meanings. I had no idea. Yes, Romance! It is brilliant indeed.

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The Hidden Life Is Best's avatar

Thank you very much Mari.

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Tim West's avatar

Listened to all 3 hours. (I subscribed)

An amazing piece of work.

I would point about the bit with Gold being denigrated by Romeo - Gold is the sun.

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The Hidden Life Is Best's avatar

Thank you very very much sir! Coincidence - I just did a search on gold as the today! there ya go. took me looong enough- right- duh- Gold is the sun. It’s weird how important the sun always is. I mean I get it but…It’s just always the sun. Alchemy is a huge key to ShakesBacon and I’m pretty ignorant…I meant it all seems kinda silly to me…sulfur, salt, nigredo, mercury, silver, gold….It hasn’t gripped me compared to astrology say. Which is all about the sun too I guess. Hercules is the sun. Anyway alchemy is something I need to learn for the symbolism. Dew is apparently very important. ShakesBAcon is always on about ‘dew’.

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Radu's avatar

Reminds me of an obscure Romanian novel that one traditionalist critic regards also as cover for hidden alchemical meaning. In Vasile Lovinescu's exegesis of Mateiu Caragiale's work he states that out the modern authors only Dostoyevsky and Meyrinck 'knew something'. This means that our little unknown author that seems to touch so many themes 'not found in books' might be some kind of vessel. That might explain also the Shakespeare debacle, if one isn't inclined to grant him the honor of being as 'enlightened' as Dostoyevsky, he might have been one of the laymen that René Guénon speaks of in Le Saint-Graal:

“Even a layman can be chosen for the externalization of esoteric data and to serve as a spokesman for an initiatory organization, which has chosen him only for his qualities as a poet or a writer or for some other contingent reason-this organization can always guide him, without him realizing it, or through some of its members, who give him the data to be processed, or through suggestions or influences of another kind, more subtle and less tangible, but no less real or less effective. It will be easily understood that this has nothing to do with the so-called poetic "inspiration", as the moderns understand it.”

I started my SS translating/commenting on this very subject, as I found out that there was no English translation to be found, and noticing that this kind of analysis with which you also engage here is quite rare.

I can't help but wonder how many other things laying in plain sight are just like R&J carrying 'baggage'. In a way I guess it's better not to know as we are SO not ready. But nevertheless, we are prone to fuck around and find out. Maybe we are collectively Juliet.

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The Hidden Life Is Best's avatar

Fascinating. Yes I agree- it's clear they plant ideas into heads- that's what's happening in Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth and The Tempest. But Shakespeare was just a dumb front man. Maybe even Hamet when he tells the players what to play. Who would be more likely to represent what Guenon is talking about...hmmmm....not sure but I get his point.

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The Hidden Life Is Best's avatar

Alchemy is no doubt their secret language. Just getting hip to it....

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Michael Gendre's avatar

The sun fixation connects with Apollo IMHO

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The Hidden Life Is Best's avatar

Yes! Apollo called out by name a couple times. Once as ‘Phoebus’. His full name is Phoebus Apollo. Once as Phaethon his son who drove the sun chariot off course. Juliet prays to him to speed up the coming of the night.

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