' which was driving him [Shakespeare] to despair because he was a devout Catholic.' --- +W
That is, if Shakespeare was William Shaksper, a subject that has fascinated many over the years.
Having read Alfred Dodd's Francis Bacon's Personal Life Story (Rider & Co, 1949) I no longer do, for Dodd shows evidence that Shakespeare was Sir Francis Bacon, and he was no Catholic.
William Shaksper of Stratford, Dodd reveals, was an illiterate groom who went to London to seek his fortune. There he set up a trade in holding and feeding the horses for the gentry as they attended the Globe Playhouse. Bacon, who had contacts with the theatre’s owner, and who often attended plays held there, met and made it his business to know Bill Shaksper for his name appealed to the esoterically minded Bacon. With a little adjustment he saw that this name could be tailored into the title for an author who would ‘shake the sphere (world)’ or the ‘spear-shaker,’ a reference to the tradition of the woman depicted with the helmet in a martial stance and shaking the spear of wisdom at the serpent of ignorance. This same woman was known to the Greeks as Pallas Athene and to the Romans as Minerva, a statue of which can be found even in the Vatican itself. This is the Gnostic Freemasonic profaning of Genesis 3:15, the ‘woman’ of Genesis, that divine promise revealed to man in the Scriptures in the wake of the fall and which became manifested as the Virgin Mary standing on the Earth with her foot on the serpent’s head. This reversion to restrained paganism and anti-Catholic ethos in contemporary writings, Martin Gwynne [sedevacantist] concludes, is to be found widespread throughout the works of Shakespeare.[1]
[1] M. Gwynne: Baconiana; The Francis Bacon Society Inc., December 1992.Next the reasons for Bacon’s anonymous authorship of Shakespeare’s works:‘The Reformation did nothing to aid free thought…Puritans and Romanists alike were united in their persecution of philosophy and their hatred of secular knowledge for the common people…‘Ever since Italy had been darkened by the shadow of the Inquisition, men had begun to devise means to communicate with each other, and with their public, in a style which should be intelligible to themselves without giving offence to Rome. Open revolt was impossible. They matched their wits against their persecutors and were able to say pretty nearly what they liked by a system of disguised writing. The use of double writing in serious literature was the only method of free expression open to men of letters…to write in such a manner that the authorities might assume their doctrines to be orthodox while the public for whom it was designed might readily perceive its real drift. Except by resort to this old and time-honoured device, the spirit of independent thought would have perished altogether.’[1]
[1] Gertrude Leigh: Passing of Beatrice, p.X, quoted by Dodd, op. cit., p.27.The hard fact is that there is no evidence at all to show that the peasant born William Shaksper that is now accredited with the works named after him is in fact their author. If one believes that commoner Shaksper alone, without any inspiration from high or low was capable of such a feat as depicted in the all-embracing worlds of Shakespeare, then one will believe anything. Of all the supposed writers of Shakespeare, only Bacon fits this mould, for he was of royal blood, lived in its environment, had the intellect, the esoteric Hermetic background, the understanding, the education and experience, the talent, the wealth, the occupation and authority to access the information, travelled a lot, and above all, had the motive and means to pen the vast and ingenious works of Shakespeare. Bacon’s knowledge of Hermetic, neo-Platonic and cabbalistic teaching appears by way of certain Rosicrucian themes found in Shakespeare’s As You Like It; Love’s Labour Lost; Venus and Adonis; and his Sonnets.
‘In Bacon’s New Atlantis we have a vision of a science ruled by sages of Solomon’s House (Magi) and the Father of Solomon’s house rides in a chariot surmounted by a golden sun. It is possible that the character of Berowne in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is based on Bruno perhaps also the two pedants, Don Armado and Holofernes, who are the foils of the lovers. Some of the rituals connected with Masonry may be derived from the Hermetic writings, and Mozart’s Magic Flute that is, concerned with Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ as a temple of Osiris and Egyptian priests.’[1] Shakespeare is also awash with such propaganda, symbols, allegory, coded messages and innuendos. For example, in the Comedy of Errors Act V, sc., I:
‘DUKE: One of these men is Genius to the other; and so of these: which is the natural man, and which is the spirit? Who deciphers them?’
The ‘Genius’ is of course Francis Bacon himself, and he goes on to tease the world in his Shakespeare’s ‘Comedy of Errors’ by asking who is the natural son and who is the spiritual Son, profaning the Lord Jesus when He asked the Pharisees: ‘What do you think of the Christ? Whose son is He,’ (Matt.22:42). Here Jesus was trying to draw out of them a recognition of the fact that He is the Spiritual Sonship as revealed in the opening sentence of the New Testament, where in the Melchisedech sense of (Ps 109:4) He is termed a Son of David, in contra-distinction to David’s natural son and successor Solomon in whose name the rival ‘Allegorical Temple’ was/is being built. This distinction is of such grave import that the very reality of the two kinds of sonship forms the martial backdrop to the allegory key that the former Pharisee-Adept Saul would later as Paul give to the Galatians (4:24). This affront is repeated in the inscription on the Shakespeare Monument at Stratford:
‘Why goest thou by so fast? Read, if thou canst,
WHOM envious Death hath plast within this Monument.’In other words, “Whom do men say that I am?”[2] Now why the need for a riddle if Shaksper from Stratford is indeed the great author? No, for what we are dealing with here is a man who would even mimic Christ all the while remaining invisible so as to be able to operate unhindered by criticism or impediment, thus demonstrating his occult loyalty to the esotericism of Hermetic Socinianism and Rosicrucianism. Now recall: ‘Masonry must be felt everywhere, but must be found nowhere.’
[1] J. Trusted: Physics and Metaphysics: Routledge, 1991, p.40. [2] A. Dodd: Francis Bacon’s Personal Life-Story p.23. I believe Shakespeare himself gives the game away when he acts totally out of character by his vicious attack on the integrity of (St) Joan of Arc in his play Henry VI, treating the English as having ‘God as our fortress’ and the French as being one with the ‘witches and the help of hell’ (Act.II, Sc.1) and ‘Devil, or devil's dam’ (1:5). ‘In 1576 Queen Elizabeth packed the young Bacon up and personally shipped him off to France. She wanted him to spy on foreign governments and officials in the same capacity as John Dee.’[1] The likes of Bacon would be very well aware that Joan la Puchelle was used by God in this war of Principalities and Powers. Consequently, whereas he was a man able to engage and parry as equal with anyone from King to the most lowly wretch, all of whom are manifested in the writings of Shakespeare, he could not contain himself when making reference to a superior on the Melchisedech field of combat, the soldier of Christ, Joan of Arc, now a saint, whom Diana Vaughan was pleased to invoke in her conflict against her former colleagues in proto-Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ.‘In the first part of [Shakespeare’s] Henry the Sixth, Jeanne d’Arc addresses the Duke of Burgundy in a speech of thirty-three lines. This speech is an absolutely faithful version of a letter in France written by the Maid of Orleans to the then Duke of Burgundy and dated July 17th, 1429. There is no historical authority for this letter which never saw the light of print till discovered by the Historian of the house of Burgundy in 1780. Bacon in his travels might easily have seen this letter [and certainly necver read by William Shaksper, the ilerate groom from Stratford]: in fact the author of this play must have done so. [Shaksper] was never within miles of it.’[2]
[1] Richard Allan Wagner: The Truth about Freemasons, 2015.[2] Walter Ellis’s The Shakespeare Myth, Bacon Society, 1937.There is of course lots more to do with Shakespeare and Catholicism, but the above will give some food for thought.