UGLY DICK AND THE GODDESS OF COMPLETE BEING
The Death and Resurrection of William
Shakespeare
INTRODUCTION
The Journey of the Hero is the jewel
in the crown of world culture. Thus, we read of the Twin War Gods of the Navaho
in quest of their father the Sun, with the help of Spider Woman and her magic
amulets; of Aeneas and his underworld journey with, as mystagogue and guide,
the Cumaean Sybil; of Dante and his harrowing of hell, and ascent into glory,
with Virgil as guide; of Faust, journeying with Mephistopheles; of Bilbo Baggins,
with Gandalf; and so on. Thus we, or our children, sit enthralled by the story
of Luke Skywalker, questing under the tutelage of Obi-Wan Kenobi. This is the
story of the hero’s journey of William Shakespeare with, as his protector and
guide, one of the towering figures of world culture, a magician of the written
word, who yet had much to learn from his pupil about the human heart, to enable
the creation of the greatest work of art in the Western tradition.
A book appeared toward the end of
the last century that got to the heart of Shakespeare as no other before. It
was written by one of the greatest of modern poets, now departed, who was
steeped in the mythic tradition of world culture, and had long raided its
treasure chest with wonderfully successful results, to place him, in this
regard, in the company of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Thomas Mann. Ted Hughes’
mastery of the great myths and their wisdom gave him also a piercing insight
into the creative strategy of William Shakespeare, who was, like Sir Francis
Bacon and the other great Elizabethans, constantly elbow-deep in the richness
of this tradition, which is far older and deeper than the well-known
Graeco-Roman myths, which the writer of the second rank would too easily invoke
in ignorance of their provenance and philosophical weight: millenia older, in
truth, than the Greeks, and stretching back into the Goddess cultures of
Mycenae and Crete, and through them to Egypt and Sumer and the Black Sea
region, and thence, searching the depths of the well of the past, to the
beginnings of world religion.
Ted Hughes in his Shakespeare and
the Goddess of Complete Being isolated and analysed the mythic and symbolic
constants of the tragic sequence – the fifteen plays from As You Like It
to The Tempest – with the understanding of, not only a great poet (for
Auden, Eliot, Joyce, and countless others have had their say on Shakespeare),
but also of someone who was no stranger to tragedy himself, - the most
shattering, appalling tragedy, not once, but twice, - and had been forced as a
consequence to make, as a means to self-survival, the “emergency flight of the
shaman” (his own term), or Journey of the Hero, or Ring/Grail Quest, to
the pit of the world that lies unseen below the surface of things. The great
achievement of SGCB was to show the tragedies to point unmistakeably to
a catastrophic psychological event in Shakespeare’s life, in which the main
culprit was the libido, or will-to-eros, as cast in negative aspect by
Puritanism, whose irruption into the ego which had thought to defeat it was the
precipitating event of the breakdown. This event is represented in the First
Folio by the “charge of the Boar”, the tusked black pig who had gored the
Goddess-rejecting Puritan figure Adonis in the poem Venus and Adonis,
and repeats the dose in so many of the plays. The long line of Shakespeare’s
tragic heroes are Puritan Adonis-analogues: all have spurned the Goddess of
Love, with Her constant underworld aspect of the Queen of Hell-Grail Queen, and
will pay for it in the same way. Amongst many of Hughes’ very great
achievements in SGCB were the isolation of the “Shakespearean moment”,
when the negative libido irrupts into consciousness to incite the “double
vision”, with its new perception of the loved one as a whore (e.g. “What sense
had I of her stol’n hours of lust?”: Othello III, iii, 183) ; and
his recognition of the utter centrality of the Augustan myth of Aeneas and his
rejection of Dido to Shakespeare’s personal mythos. The libido will stand, throughout
the plays, more broadly for the unseen world, to create a philosophical work of
tremendous depth and range.
An extraordinary thing happens,
which Hughes seems to have suspected, albeit obscurely, when the mythic
constants of the tragedies – the Boar, the Goddess, Her Adonis-like rejector,
and so on – together with the psychic properties familiar to us from depth
psychology and art – the libido, the unconscious, the conscious ego, the
faculty of reason, the visual imagination, and so on – are isolated and yoked
to individual characters and places of the historical cycle. In the pages to
come it will be shown, as rigorously as is reasonably possible, that the nine
plays from Henry the Sixth Part 1 to Henry the Eighth are not
primarily about history at all, any more than Orwell’s Animal Farm is
about animals; rather, that they form a single allegory, strict and consistent
in its every line, of the trauma inflicted by the bitter conflict between
Pauline (Roman) Catholicism and Protestant Puritanism on the one hand, and the
broadly Gnostic tradition (lately Renaissance Neoplatonic or Christian
Cabalist) on the other, - on the broader society, the human psyche in general,
and on Shakespeare’s in particular, for whose progress they provide a record
from earliest childhood to his return to Stratford at the end of his career.
They will be revealed to accord with the Gnostic tenet of “As without, so
within”, as a vehement yet surgically precise exposition of the corruptive
effects of the Catholic and Puritan errors on the macrocosm of society – felt
particularly strongly in Elizabethan England - and the microcosm of
Shakespeare’s own psyche. The crucial question of why this encryption was
necessary will be answered shortly.
This conflict, and in most cases its
resolution, will be revealed as the subject of every play in the First Folio,
as well as Pericles and the extra-canonical Mr. Arden of Feversham,
all of which will be examined in detail. This is the point made in the very
last speech of FF, by Cymbeline in the eponymous play, where the peace
concluded between Britain and Rome after the decisive victory of the former,
and his agreement to pay tribute to Augustus, represent the victory by William
Shakespeare over the Puritan tyranny which had enthralled him aet.15-23, to
bring him to the brink of psychosis, and his subsequent revival of it as idea,
and description of its defeat, in the pages of the First Folio. This emphasis
on FF is of the highest importance: for it will be shown in the argument to
come to be a livre composé, the definitive text of a great unified work,
which alone holds the many keys to its meaning.
In many of the plays a ring plays a
vital part; while a diamond appears, to complement the ring, in 2HVI,
and CYM, the final play of FF. The reference is undoubtedly to King
Solomon’s Ring and precious stone, the Schamir. It is evident that FF is
itself a Ring saga (equivalent to a Grail quest: the two immensely venerable
traditions being the same, which is the point of the dominance of the Fisher
King theme in Act I of All’s Well That Ends Well, then of the Ring theme
in the remainder), - the greatest in all literature. The hero of the quest will
be shown to be Shakespeare himself; with, as his guide and teacher, - a Gandalf
to his pupil-patient’s Bilbo Baggins, or Virgil to his Dante, – none other than
Sir Francis Bacon: the magic he wields being that of the written word as vector
of the Gnostic tradition, and acted upon by reason in concert with the visual
imagination. The primacy of this latter faculty in the attainment of Gnostic
nobility is stressed continually throughout the plays, as represented – an
excellent example of the kinds of allegorical techniques that pervade FF - by
the various Watches, torches, flares, and so on. The goal of Shakespeare’s
quest would be the Holy Grail, which is repeatedly identified in FF as the
wisdom derived from knowledge of the of the unseen world – that aspect of
Nature lying below the apparent surfaces of things – as described in the
written word. This is the dimension explored and mastered by the great modern
scientists, artists, and depth psychologists. Juliet, Cordelia, Helena,
Desdemona, Perdita, and all the other Queens of Hell of the plays, are in
truth, as Goddesses of the Invisible World, all Grail Queens, guardians of the
Holy Grail itself, the quest for which has been denied by the Puritan
Goddess-scorning Adonis-figure – Romeo, Lear, Othello, and all their kin.
It is therefore the contention of
this work that both Hero and Magician contributed to the Complete Works of
Shakespeare: that they were, in truth, collaborators, with Bacon as the senior
partner; and a vast amount of evidence to this end will be provided. In Chapter
44, Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, the first complete Grail romance,
will be shown to have been the principal inspiration and model for the
allegoric strategy of FF, as conceived and directed by Bacon, who will emerge
in new light as, as much as a brilliant innovator, an inheritor of an immensely
old esoteric tradition, via the Gnostic Church, the Knights Templar, and
Freemasonry. Remarkably, the rituals of the thirty-three degrees of the Ancient
and Accepted Rite of Scotland, - the authentic form of Freemasonry, as
prevailed before its suppression by the Grand Lodge of England in the early
eighteenth century, - will be shown to provide much of the philosophical
backbone of FF (see especially Chs.1, 26, 44). These were in truth the
teachings of Jesus himself, - the Church of Rome being a confection of St.
Paul’s, - as we now know, thanks to the brilliant work of Christopher Knight
and Robert Lomas in their much acclaimed The Hiram Key and The Second
Messiah.
Each play’s variations from the
source – principally Plutarch or Holinshed – are of vital importance for the
allegory, and their analyses are scepticidal agents of great potency. They fall
into two main groups: those invented de novo for the purpose of the
allegory; and the given characters, places, or events, adopted for the same
purpose. An excellent example of the former is the character of Sir Walter
Whitmore, invented by the playwright as murderer of Suffolk in 2HVI IV,
i, and accompanied by a gloss on his first name, which serves to direct our
attention to his key allegorical significance, as representing the ithyphallic
principle in negative aspect, more broadly the unseen world, as anathematised
by Puritanism; of the latter, the character of Dorset in RIII, who
appears in this context in Holinshed, and whose name I have glossed with
reference to the Druidic tree alphabet,[1] with which FF
gives elsewhere evidence of the author’s deepest familiarity.
Only one play steps beyond the theme
of the severe anxiety/depression neurosis which had stricken down Shakespeare
in 1587, and its extirpation at the hands of Sir Francis Bacon. Hamlet
will be shown to be an examination of untreatable paranoid schizophrenia, that
most destructive and tragic of all human psychiatric illnesses. Richard the
Third in particular makes it clear that Shakespeare at no time descended
into psychosis, the defining characteristic of which is a loss of touch with
reality. Yet he must have come terrifyingly close; and that vision of the pit
of hell evidently stayed with him, to make the theme of Hamlet a ready
extrapolation from his own condition. The principal causal agent in the
development of schizophrenia, and of the germane condition of Shakespeare’s
disabling neurosis – from which he was delivered through the ministry of Sir
Francis Bacon and the Gnostic tradition – FF identifies consistently and
repeatedly, in play after play, as the Puritan world-view. Further, the soil of
the fleur du mal of Puritanism is firmly identified as the Pauline
(Roman) Catholic tyranny (see especially 3HVI III). The modern
philosopher, - such as Joseph Campbell, who summarised so memorably the state
of play in this area in his wonderful essay on schizophrenia in Myths to
Live By, - would put it more broadly than that, to include any instructional
system which denies engagement with the unseen or Faustian world, the plane of
tragedy, to leave the subject inane of the resources and symbols needed to deal
in any effective way with both the outer world and the microcosm of his own
psyche. Nevertheless, the Puritan error may be taken as a typical causal agent,
and it was this insult to the innate nobility and divinity of Man that bulked
so large in the apprehension of Bacon and his contemporaries. The immediately
apparent (inner/outer) world in which we move every day is represented in FF by
characters such as Bianca Minola in TOS; the unseen world, on engagement
with which is predicated the ego’s understanding of the apparent world, by such
as her sister Kate. This begs the question of why not all Puritans – and they
still abound - are disabled by mental illness; - which will be answered in due
course.
With regard to Shakespeare’s
condition, FF will be shown, in the pages to come, to comprise, in the now
familiar way of books by Jung and his kind, both a graphic, unmediated account
in the patient’s own words (histories and some other plays), and a clinical
commentary by the therapist. Remarkably, these two aspects will be shown to
have different authors. Firstly, the histories and many of the other plays
contain descriptions of episodes in Shakespeare’s life of such intimacy and
detail, that their ascription to any other hand than his must be out of the
question.
Equally indisputable are the
findings of William Moore in his 1934 masterpiece “Shakespeare” (sic),
which demonstrated with the utmost rigour the existence in the nonsense lines
of Love’s Labour’s Lost, a multiplicity of hidden statements along the
lines of “William Shakespeare is Francis Bacon”. The relevant chapter will
present a summary of his findings, and an appendix the detailed proof of one of
them, from which I trust it will become obvious that the total eclipse of his
work by the fruitless gropings of the modern critic has done a massive
disservice to LLL and broader Shakespearean scholarship. The allegorical
content of LLL and the early comedies does not touch, consistently with
Moore’s findings, in any way upon the milieu intérieur, as do the
contemporaneous histories. The multifarious evidence for allocations of
authorship of the individual passages and plays, - of style, allegorical
content, date of composition, and so on, - will be discussed fully in the pages
to come, wherein it will be found to paint a wholly consistent picture. In
particular, style and allegorical content will be shown invariably to be linked
– the “high style” of Bacon never conveying, for example, intimate details such
as the adolescent erotic experiences described in the tavern scenes in 1&2HIV.
Remarkably, Bacon will emerge from the argument come as the true father of
modern depth psychology, some three centuries before Freud and Jung.
A certain scenario demands to be
constructed from FF as allegory. The reader may find certain aspects of it
unpleasant, and many a lover and scholar of Shakespeare may be repelled; but
they should come as no surprise at all to the student of depth psychology and
art. A tragedy is being incubated here, and the author will omit no significant
detail of its growth, for wit and infinite wisdom must prevail over delicacy of
sensibility. This is the sort of honesty we have become used to in great modern
authors such as James Joyce. The well-known Stratford traditions (in square
brackets below) of the adolescent escapades of Will Shaksper (as he was then:
the significance of his nom de plume will be revealed in due course)
integrate seamlessly with it, as follows.
The tabula rasa ofWill
Shaksper’s childhood psyche becomes deeply imprinted, under the influence of
the Christian puritanism of his parents, with the familiar connexion of eros
and sin (RII). The libido, thus cast in negative aspect, surges at
puberty, to drive him to the defence of bookish asceticism, which is marked by
wide reading, solitariness and aloofness, and the development of a
rationalistic world-view (Bolingbroke phase: RII, 1HIV). This
first coping mechanism collapses under weight of the libido, expressed as
auto-erotism (Gads Hill robbery in 1HIV). A rebound into a period of
gregarious gentility then follows, with denial of the underworld, during which the
early adolescent Shakespeare now mixes more freely, and expatiates widely on
politics, religion, literature, and so on, while still being tormented by his
troublesome libido (2HIV; HV I). The flow of life-blood through this
gaping psychic wound is finally staunched in a Tavern or pseudo-Alexandrian
phase, which will prove to be, however, no more than a band-aid solution (HV).
His inspiration in this phase is the young Alexander the Great, whom Plutarch
describes, in his Life of Alexander, as being celibate, and fond of wine
(in moderation) and conversation. He haunts the tavern, and becomes an instant
guru to his friends on the subject of the libido, with intense spiritualisation
(visual imagining) of the Journey of the Hero, without ever in truth making it
himself, to leave him still vulnerable to the Boar.
Shaksper is now aet.15, and in the
phase of his third defence mechanism against the Boar. Inevitably the libido
re-irrupts (Timon of Athens I, ii, 120), to shatter his peace and
demoralise him [and the social drinking now becomes heavier, and is accompanied
by a declension into petty crime]. [He is responsible for the nailing of
satirical verses to the gates of the noted Puritan Sir Thomas Lucy, and
participates in an act of poaching from his estate, for which he is prosecuted
and forcibly separated from the tavern crowd and sent, in lieu of gaol, to work
in London, or possibly as a master in a Puritan school]. Now the fourth and
final coping mechanism takes hold, with his espousal of Protestant Puritanism (1-3
HVI), with its total suppression of Nature and the reasoning imagination.
In his self-contempt, and half-consciousness of the absence of the
Goddess-principle from his psyche, he seduces and marries the Aphrodite-figure
Anne Hathaway (RIII). He now finds himself cohabiting with Woman as ianus
diaboli (“Gateway to the devil”), as anathematised by Puritanism, and is
tormented thereby. His Puritanism hardens in a desperate attempt to cope.
Finally, aet.23, he suffers a catastrophic breakdown, with intense anxiety and
depression, yet stopping just this side, by the narrowest of margins, of
psychosis (RIII).
He flees Stratford and his
torturous marriage to seek healing in the metropolis. Distraught and stricken,
he heads for the theatres [where he works for a time minding horses for the
patrons, ultimately progressing to a higher position backstage], and comes upon
the great philosopher and writer Sir Francis Bacon, whom he soon recognises as
his saviour. As their relationship deepens, Shaksper opens up to him
unreservedly, and Bacon accepts with alacrity the challenge of restoring him to
health, and leading him out of his Puritan hell to the highest realms of
Gnostic enlightenment. His central therapeutic strategy would be the reading
and writing of the written word, and Shaksper soon shows himself a responsive
patient; and after two years of intensive reading (Melancholy Jacques phase) he
embarks on his creative career (Orlando phase), with Pericles I&II,
and Mr. Arden of Feversham. Bacon hits upon the stratagem of preserving
for posterity his insights into his patient’s condition, by encrypting them
into a series of plays. He encourages Shaksper to write the story of his
breakdown into a cycle of histories; with considerable help from himself and Christopher
Marlowe (and possibly others of his “good pens”); while he himself sets about
examining the principles involved in the aetiology, pathogenesis, crisis, and
treatment of the condition in his own series of plays, the first of which is The
Two Gentlemen of Verona, soon to be followed by Titus Andronicus and
the remaining early comedies. Bacon contributes much to the histories in the
way of planning, details of Courtly life and the Law, noble speeches,
philosophical speculations, symbols, language, and so on. Shaksper now becomes
Shakespeare, the new name referring to the Boar spear, symbol of his new
intellectual weaponry against the foe that had almost destroyed him.
As the historical cycle is
completed, Shakespeare revisits (with Bacon) his Tavern or pseudo-Alexandrian
phase in Timon of Athens and Julius Caesar, having already
treated this period in The Merry Wives of Windsor. He examines his final
breakdown once more in Much Ado About Nothing; and in Troilus and
Cressida his creative life in London, during which the Boar (libido in
negative aspect) continued to haunt him, though without the dire results of
before. Consistently with his need to be continually at work, to keep the Boar
at bay –or rather, to convert it from a demon to a god – he now sets out, with
Bacon, on the great tragic sequence. Some of these, such as Othello, Hamlet,and
King Lear, will be collaborations; while Pericles will be
entirely from the pen of Shakespeare, and The Tempest almost entirely
so; with Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale,
and Cymbeline, almost entirely from Bacon. Finally, as the great work
approaches its natural end, he forces himself to come to terms with the Boar
once and for all, to enable his return to his wife in Stratford (HVIII;
TT), - the immediate cause of the coup of 1587, through absolutely
no fault of her own. Now Prospero’s books – the Baconesque mentation of his
London phase – would be drowned, his magician’s wand broken, and Ariel, the
intellectual activity invoked by Shakespeare to deal with the Boar, - set free.
This all begs the question: Why
exactly was it necessary to undergo the colossal and exhausting labour of all
this encryption? The answer is that FF as allegory is a vehemently anti-Puritan
tract; and Bacon was filled with anxiety for the future of Western culture
under the Puritan ascendancy:
Nor is my resolution diminished by foreseeing
the state of these times, a sort of declination and ruin of the learning which
is now in use… [And] from civil wars, which, on account of certain manners not
long ago introduced, seem to me about to visit many countries, and the
malignity of sects, and from these compendiary artifices and cautions which
have crept into the place of learning, no less a tempest seems to impend over
letters and science.[2]
In this
context, FF would have been, in an unencrypted state, as a snowflake in hell,
and the timeless wisdom therein destroyed for all time. So much for the theme
of FF; but why exactly did he have to encrypt his name? There are, of course,
many secondary reasons, such as the low status of the theatre, so that his
association with it would have been a huge barrier to the public career he
coveted; a desire not to offend his high-minded mother (or foster-mother) Lady
Anne Bacon; and so on. Yet the principal reason must be that he feared the
discovery of the allegory in his own lifetime. Certainly, the oddities
necessary for it (such as the nonsense lines in LLL, and their
encryption is often light) obtrude remarkably in many places. Explosive
devices such as FF are liable to go off accidentally, and Bacon wanted to be
far away if it did. In fact, in a well-documented episode involving RII,
he escaped the volcanic wrath of Elizabeth by the skin of his teeth, thanks to
the occlusion of his name as author. Intense cryptographic activity of this
kind is often a feature of times of greatest crisis. Thus, the Old Testament
atbash cipher was almost certainly conceived during the Jewish captivity in
Babylon; while the development of the Enigma machine, and the breaking of its
power by the English cryptanalysts, forms one of the greatest stories of WWII.
Sir Francis Bacon was faced, similarly, with the obliteration of his culture,
nothing less; and he had taken up the sacred sword of battle on its behalf.
The
recognition of Bacon as heir to a pre-existing tradition serves to explain the
sudden appearance in the very first plays, fully-formed, apparently out of
nowhere, of key creative symbols such as the Queen of Hell-Grail Queen, the
Fool, the Ring, and so on. The influence on FF of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass
will be shown to have been massive, far beyond what the critics have suspected.
Yet it is surpassed in importance by Wolfram’s Parzival, which provided
the fundamental architectonic strategy of the ego’s engagement with the unseen
world (e.g. Petruchio’s marriage to Kate in TOS), as a preliminary to
his new understanding of the phenomenal world (Lucentio’s marriage to Bianca).
(Chapter 44 will examine this influence in more detail). Parzival is in
truth a Templar text, as Graham Hancock has shown in his The Sign and the
Seal; while Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas have established, in their The
Second Messiah, the clear line of inheritance of Egypt→King
David→Jerusalem Church→Jesus Christ→Rex Deus
tradition→Knights Templar→ Freemasonry. Sir Francis Bacon was
formally inducted into Freemasonry by King James in 1603; and it is fascinating
to find the principles enshrined in the rituals of the thirty-three degrees of
the Ancient and Accepted Rite of Scotland, – the authentic form of Freemasonry,
rather than the travesty that has prevailed since the early 18th
century, - as retrieved from oblivion by Knight and Lomas, appearing in FF (see
especially Chs.1, 26, 44). Further, they show the Tarot deck to have been a
Templar innovation, for the education into Gnostic nobility of its members; and
the corresponding cards of the Tarot Major Arcana will be shown, remarkably, to
have provided symbols such as the Tower (Gnostic tradition), Fool, Wheel of
Fate, and so on.
The
Shakespeare-Bacon story is a wonderful one, and their First Folio the greatest
Ring saga in literature. Shakespeare owed everything to his Gandalf, who gave
him a life, instructed him in the Gnostic tradition, and supplied him with so
many of the symbols, words, and philosophies of the plays he would write. Yet
there remains an extra dimension in great art, which Schopenhauer memorably
termed the “x” factor. This is finally the will, or unseen world, the substrate
of all phenomena whatsoever, and the source of tragedy. It is felt, for
example, most powerfully in Wuthering Heights, and not at all in the
novels of Henry James. In this light, the principal reason for the
solo-authorship Bacon camp’s failure to prevail thus far, in spite of a
plethora of really solid evidence, is surely the difficulty of conceiving the
great tragedies, as nonpareils of “x” factor art in the Western
tradition, as having proceeded from a mind like Bacon’s, whose inner life was a
triumph of the intellect, and who had apparently succeeded so completely in
distancing himself from the “x” factor as a problem in his own life. The
genesis of great tragic art is rightly thought to require a different soil to
this; and Bacon’s is certainly not the riven psyche so memorably revealed by
Ted Hughes.
Bacon gave
his patient a life as a writer and thinker; but detailed knowledge of the “x”
factor at work, derived from the pain and horrific authenticity of his own
experience, is surely what Shakespeare gave in return, to enable the conception
and birth of FF. Both camps have been partly right, finally wrong. The
Stratfordians accuse their opponents of snobbery,[3]
which is often confused with true nobility by those with no absolutely
knowledge of the latter. The words “noble” and “know” are derived from the same
Greek root; and, while his followers may be no more or less noble than the
general population, Sir Francis Bacon must be counted the noblest man that ever
lived: a conviction that I hope will grow in you as it has in myself, as this
argument progresses. I prefer to think of them rather as unshakeable idealists,
sometimes romantic, at worst a touch blinkered, and with an understandable
attachment to certainly the greatest Englishman of all. The predominance of the
Stratford position may rightly be regarded as a triumph of poetic values;
however, the failure of the academy to deign to engage with the really solid
evidence produced by their opponents, and their almost total neglect of the
timeless philosophy of Bacon, which obtrudes so obviously at every turn in FF,
redounds to their eternal shame and discredit.
Finally, it
must be acknowledged that the truth could have been available to no-one, myself
included, in the pre-Ted Hughes era; so that the note struck here should be one
of reconciliation, not blame. This book will sail a middle way between the
Scylla and Charybdis of the opposing camps, with gaze fixed firmly on the
Island of the Sun, whose boon is the timeless and wonderful story of one man’s
Death and Resurrection.
*
In the last
great speech of the first quincunx of histories (1-3HVI, RIII, RII,
written in that order) Bacon gives an apologia for just what he has been
on about:
Richard I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world;
And, for because the world is populous,
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out.
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father; and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts;
And these same thoughts people this little
world,
In humors like the people of this world…
RII, V, v
Bacon’s
allegorical method was to attach to each character a principle, or “humor”, as
he calls it here. In the histories for example, - which we will examine first,
as the basis for the subsequent argument, - Richard the Third represents the
libido, more broadly the unseen world, as cast in negative aspect by
Puritanism; Richmond, that world in positive aspect, as described in the
Gnostic written word; Buckingham, the unconscious; Queen Margaret, the Goddess
of the Invisible World (Queen of Hell-Grail Queen); Suffolk, the ithyphallic
principle as will; Norfolk, that principle as idea; Elizabeth, the sham Goddess
of Puritanism; and so on. As with Watson and Crick’s theory of the molecular
double helix, where each base has a mate to which alone it can bind, if any
character were to be found to fail to represent his principle at his every
appearance, then the theory would be shown to be inadequate. This will be
found not to be the case, however; and in fact with every blind alley of the
vast magical city connected, every transient given a home, every old friend
recognised, every tremor detected, every hushed conversation understood, the
double helix will be shown to bind together ever more tightly, to spiral the
receptive mind to the womb of Bacon’s creativity.
This then
is the basis of the proof of the allegorical nature of the histories: that
every character be found to bind to his particular principle at his every
appearance without exception (bearing in mind that characters of the same
name appear in several plays of the relevant group). A helpful analogy may be
with the alphabetical decryption of a message of 200 words (approximate number
of episodes in the nine histories) of 5 letters each (number of characters in
each episode) based on an alphabet of 100 letters (number of characters in
cycle)(note that all of these numbers are underestimations). If then a value is
assigned to each of the 200 letters, based on previous experience, context,
probability, and so on, and a hidden message is revealed thereby which is not
only in perfect English, but of the utmost relevance in the context of the
broader investigation, - then the probability of this result occurring by
chance must be conceded to be infintesimally small.
Norrie
Epstein, in his The Friendly Shakespeare, takes the typical line when he
dismisses the “arbitrary” systems of investigators such as Moore. Granted, in
the absence of a key provided by the author, then intuition and trial-and-error
must play a huge part in determining the conditions of a cipher; but once the
correct allocations have been found, then the decryption runs of itself, like a
computer program, to strict parameters, beyond all question of intervention. A
good example is the character of Peter, who will be found to bear the allegoric
value of the Roman (Pauline) Church. This allocation was clearly based on
intuition, St. Peter being one of the best-known Biblical figures in the
Western cultural inheritance. Yet, far from having a different principle
arbitrarily yoked to him at his every new entry, he bears this value at his
every appearance without exception. So does each and every character with
whom he comes in contact always represent his principle, to weave a consistent
and utterly convincing story.
Another
analogy of the theory of the Baconian Double Helix is with the theory of
evolution. The Bible belt preacher implores: “Isn’t it [Creationism] simpler to
believe?” At the most superficial level the answer may be yes; but as soon as
one drills down to detail, then Creationism is found to be a seething mess of
inconsistencies, - like a landscape by Cristo, perhaps, where a huge white
tarpaulin is fitted over a landscape to which it does not belong; whereas the
theory of evolution grows out of the facts as does a membrane, contiguous and
deep-rooted, from the organ beneath. Just so does the First Folio as allegory
form organically from the text, following its every contour, however
microscopic; whereas the current state of Shakespearean theory, which the
solo-authorship Stratford camp overwhelmingly predominates, is beset by a
multitude of intractable problems, a vast number of which will be solved in the
pages to come.
A similar
story is revealed beyond the historical sequence. For example, the horse or
horse-and-rider will be shown to bear the value of the libido in action, as
sourced by Bacon from Socrates’ famous metaphor in Plato’s Phaedrus; the
figure hidden behind an arras (Falstaff, Polonius, Boracho, torturer of Arthur
in KJ), - the libido suppressed from the Puritan ego, to anticipate
Freud by some centuries; Augustus Caesar, as patron of Virgil, creator of
Aeneas, the archetypal Goddess-rejector of the plays, - the Puritan ego;
Mantua, as birthplace of Virgil, - similarly, the Puritan ego; the many woods,
forests, groves, and trees, - the written word, undoubtedly sourced from the
Druid grove, on the barks of which were nicked their sacred works; the
innumerable letters and Pages, - similarly, the written word; the handkerchiefs
or napkins, often blood-stained, or in Othello woven with strawberries, as
referring to menstruation, - the Goddess as Woman, Who is anathematised by the
Puritan, and will storm back into the vacuum to claim Her rightful place, to
precipitate the breakdown; the many Katherines, - the Queen of Hell-Grail
Queen, whose realm is the world which lies unseen below the surface of things;
and so on: all at their every appearance without exception. The argument
to follow will shirk nothing. If a character or place, or passage, line, word,
or even single letter, stands out as demanding attention, then it will be
given, with bells on, until the meaning be revealed.
Not the
least fascinating aspect of the First Folio as Ring Quest is the author’s
extensive mining of Plutarch and the other sources for the raw material of
symbols. For example, Dame Frances Yates and others have shown[4]
the tremendous influence on John Dee and the other great Elizabethans of the
new Christian Cabalism, or Renaissance Neoplatonism, which forged a synthesis
of Christianity and the magic of the ancient world. Indeed, Christian symbolism
abounds in the plays: for example, in Hubert’s carriage of the dead Arthur in
his arms in KJ IV, iii (mater dolorosa: Michelangelo’s Pieta);
or the hauling of the dying Antony up to Cleopatra’s cell (Resurrection of
Christ). Alexander the Great (from Plutarch’s Life) will be shown to
bear throughout the plays the allegoric value of the Gnostic Christ; Demetrius,
of the Puritan sham Christ, as sourced from Plutarch’s Life of Pyrrus,
which describes a conflict between Demetrius and Pyrrus (an Alexander figure).
This is also undoubtedly the source of the Pyrrhus who slays Priam (King of
Troy, whence Aeneas, and therefore a Puritan figure) in Hamlet: the
defeat of the Puritan disease by the Gnostic tradition, as represented in the
Player’s speech, the part that Hamlet (incipient schizophrenic) has forgotten.
Countless other examples of this sort of symbolic strategy will be found
throughout the plays.
*
The great
Renaissance mages regarded Clio, the Muse of history, as the lowest of the
sisterhood (fig.2); Stephen Daedalus declared, famously, that “History is a
nightmare from which I am trying to escape”; but Schopenhauer said it best:
The poet comprehends the Idea, man’s inner
nature apart from all relations, outside all time… and therefore, however
paradoxical it may sound, far more actual genuine inner truth is to be imputed
to poetry than to history… Anyone who wants to know Man in his inner nature,
identical in all its phenomena and developments, to know him according to the
Idea, will find that the works of the great, immortal poets present a far
truer, clearer picture than the historians can ever give.[5]
The genesis
of this book lay in my first reading of King John. The precision and
power of its symbolism, and its utter consistency with the tragic sequence as
explicated by Ted Hughes, whose epochal revelations I had been pondering for
some years, suggested to me that, as in this least of the histories, so it must
be in the remainder: and the conviction established itself that the matchless
artist of the tragedies and tragi-comedies could not possibly have been
satisfied with the writing of mere history.
Schopenhauer
also drew attention, tantalisingly, to the consistency of the characterisation
throughout the histories of the Earl of Northumberland in his poetical rather
than historical sense. The meaning of the characterisations of Northumberland
and the vast company of others can now be illumined, and the poetical
significance of their kaleidoscopic interactions revealed. Let us begin, as a
gentle introduction, with the early HVI trilogy; before grappling with
the magnificent Richard the Third, which will be shown to hold a supreme
place in the Western canon, as an autobiographical fragment wrought in a spirit
of incorruptible patience, unwearying tenacity, and the most brutal honesty,
and more vividly recollective of the ego progressing toward breakdown than any
other Life in literature. The path at first may seem unfamiliar, the moon
veiled by cloud, the only light a flickering star; but, patience… patience…
return to top
index
home
contact me
order links
[1] Robert Graves’ The White Goddess
is the classic modern text on this subject.