The action of the theatre… was carefully watched by the ancients…. and, indeed, many wise men and great philosophers have thought it to the mind as the bow to the fiddle: and certain it is that the minds of men in company are more open to affections and impressions than when alone. Francis Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning” 1605.
Disguising The True Author Was Critical To Success Of “Shakespeare”
If it had been known that the real author of the Shakespeare plays was not a country rustic with little education, but an extremely educated and powerful Tudor insider who spoke multiple languages, served at the pinnacle of the Tudor and Stuart governments, had close ties to Queen Elizabeth and King James, became Attorney General and Lord Chancellor, and was known to every single person of stature in London and famous throughout Europe during his lifetime (and now) as a philosopher of Science, then it follows as night follows day that the plays would have been experienced in a completely different way.
The cover story that the author of the plays was a glover’s son from the Stratford-upon-Avon hinterlands, three days travel from London made the playwright and the plays themselves Mythic: “Such astonishing creations from a rustic!! A man of the people! As if from the English soil itself! Surely divinely inspired!”” This story/myth and it’s implications prevent a real and true understanding and analysis of the plays.
All art is based largely on biography and the life experience of the artist. As such, scholars have spent centuries trying to tie the plays to Stratford-upon-Avon and to William Shakespeare’s personal life, only to be left scratching their heads and coming up very, very short, because astonishingly, there is literally zero evidence of a connection of William Shakespeare’s life to the plays. Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was born, lived and died, today the largest tourist attraction in all of England, is not mentioned a single time in any of the plays or poems.
The story that all academic Shakespeare scholars still believe, somehow, is this: that the a man with no evidence of any education named William Shakespeare, born of illiterate parents, sire of illiterate children, raised far from London in backwater desolation Stratford-upon-Avon where few could read, a place with few books, managed nonetheless, after coming to London, to create unparalleled works of profoundly learned, densely layered plays with such a felicity with language and the meaning of words that he changed the English language forever, inventing hundreds of new words and phrases we use daily, enthralling audiences world-wide, giving rise to an entire industry of PhD academics who write and argue about the plays. leaving behind nothing in his handwriting, not a single manuscript of the plays or a single poem, not even a single letter to anyone, including to wife and children. Oh right! They couldn’t read.
Which means then that his works could have only been made possible by a great, unparalleled genius bestowed by divine intervention. A natural born, out of the cradle God-given genius, that’s the only explanation scholars make for the plays and poems, because they all admit to the above biographical facts.
This myth-story of Shakespeare is of such incredible power that it made the man Mythic, of such mysterious and profound greatness that he became a source of great national pride, which then doubled the capacity of the plays for stirring up an enormous patriotic fervor.
A ‘national poet’ was born, a key component for any Empire, as Homer was to the Greeks and Virgil was to the Romans. The adulation of William Shakespeare eventually became so intense, with a worship that remains to this day, that it can legitimately be called a secular religion. This apotheosis of the poet was intentional. The coming Empire needed a poet of the people.
The Shakespeare plays contain systematic distortions of history that glorify the Tudor regime, and monarchy/aristocracy in general. This is a new-ish understanding of the plays, first put forward in the 1940’s, but that is now a staple of Shakespeare scholarship. This fact of the play’s creation of the Tudor Myth, coupled with the the play’s glorification of war and intense ennobling of England herself, as “This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise, this fortress built by Nature for herself”, are only a few examples among many for the contention that Shakespeare was an operation, a creation of and for Empire.
Knowing who the real author(s) of plays are reveals a vast new world waiting to be discovered, dare I say colonized, in these landscapes of poetry so powerful the plays themselves have beome our ‘modern’ myths. Hamlet. Macbeth. Lear. Romeo and Juliet. A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Francis Bacon, to whom the overwhelming evidence points as mastermind of the Shakespeare operation, was indeed hot for Empire as Professor Perez Zagorin notes in his excellent recent study of Bacon and his work, sans-Shakespeare, in Francis Bacon, (p 153-61). A new Empire would certainly need new myths sprung from a national heart-center, from a national idol. A front man would be needed for this idol, because nobody worships a scheming, aristocratic, homosexual lawyer-politician. In other words, nobody would have worshipped Francis Bacon.
The Mythic man from Stratford was such a profound creation that he actually became a symbol of England herself. The rise of the brilliant small town boy from the heart of “this precious stone set in the silver sea” to become the greatest poet and dramatist some say in the history of the entire world would and could be the destiny of an entire nation. British exceptionalism was born.
Therein lies the power of theater, the power of the word, the
power of poetry and the power of Myth.
Right This Way To The Way Of The World
