Secret Societies and Classic Literature

John T. Caswell

• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781638602125
• eBook ISBN: 9781638602156
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Secret Societies and Classic Literature is about much more than the connections between some of the greatest authors in literary history and the covert organizations they were associated with. It also encompasses sacred geometry, science, the ancient wisdom those authors drew on for their inspiration, and how that wisdom is so relevant in contemporary society. It is about prophets, their visions, and the probable stimulus for their vivid imaginations and creative genius. It is also about political intrigue and upheaval, outlaws, outcasts, sexual scandals, espionage, and hallucinogenic substances. Why does the number nine indicate the possible intelligent design of the universe? Why are snakes worshiped in ancient cultures that were separated by thousands of miles? How did Jonathan Swift predict Mars's two moons a century and a half before their existence was confirmed? Did Christopher Marlowe plot to overthrow Queen Elizabeth, and how and why was he killed? Did William Blake's vision of the universe's creation mirror that of lost Gnostic texts that were undiscovered until 1945? What was Francis Bacon's true relationship to William Shakespeare and his works? This book takes a closer look at all these questions and reveals much more about the authors and the intriguing lives they led en route to literary immortality.

Bakespeare

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), William Shakespeare (1564–1616).

To all of you William Shakespeare disciples who consider any disparagement of the Bard or debasement of his august reputation (and I once was included among you) to be abject heresy, I am going to present, as fairly and objectively as possible, both sides of the Bacon-Shakespeare true-authorship controversy. There is no harm or heresy intended. This is merely a search for the truth which, frankly, will probably never be known, just like the presence of extraterrestrials among us, the true builders of the pyramids and the methods they used, the President Kennedy assassination, and the Malcolm Butler benching in Super Bowl LII. (For those of you who are not New England Patriots’ fans, the mystery behind Head Coach Bill Belichick’s benching of Butler is at least as significant as the other examples.) Moreover, there are those who believe Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, or maybe John Donne wrote the Shakespeare plays. The New Oxford Shakespeare Series, published in 2016, credits Marlowe with collaborating with the Bard on the three Henry VI plays.

The first time I disagreed with Mark Twain, my intellectual lodestar, was after I read Is Shakespeare Dead? His essay arguing for Francis Bacon as the true author of the Shakespearean canon failed to move me. Like a true Shakespeare disciple, I believed strongly that the Bard was a singular literary genius worthy of his title as the greatest English (probably the world’s greatest) playwright. I wanted to cling to my cherished beliefs, even if Twain, my favorite author and the one I credit for teaching me to question everything, explained that a man with the historical William Shakespere’s (historical figure’s proper spelling) humble background could not have possibly had the depth and breadth of knowledge it would have taken to be the author of the plays and sonnets attributed to him.

Twain writes of Shakespeare, “Isn’t it odd, when you think of it, that you may list all the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern times, clear back to the first Tudors, and you can go to the histories, biographies, and, encyclopedias and learn the particulars of the lives of every one of them except one—the most famous, the most renowned—by far the most illustrious of the all—Shakespeare! About him you can find out nothing of even the slightest importance.”

Shakespeare’s youthful years are a mystery. He came from a working-class background. His father was an alderman (elected member of a municipal council) and a bailiff who suffered financial setbacks. Shakespeare presumably attended a Stratford-upon-Avon grammar school where he may or may not have acquired some knowledge of Latin, the language of aristocratic London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to his contemporary, the playwright Ben Johnson, Shakespeare understood “small Latin and less Greek.”

Shakespeare did not attend Oxford or Cambridge or any educational institution beyond grammar school. Manly P. Hall writes, “It is quite evident that William Shakespeare did not possess that necessary literary culture, for the town of Stratford where he was reared contained no school capable of imparting the higher forms of learning reflected in the writings ascribed to him. In his early life, he evinced a total disregard for study.”

There are no real documented facts about his teenage years until he married Anne Hathaway in 1582. They had a daughter and then twins—a boy and a girl. In the seven years between the official record of his marriage and his association with the troupe of actors known as Lord Chamberlain’s Men, soon to become the King’s Men, there is no information about Shakespeare. Robert Greene, a popular writer at the time, described Shakespeare as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.”

After Lord Chamberlain’s Men built the Globe Theatre in 1599, Shakespeare’s reputation as a playwright and actor became known, and he became prosperous enough as a stockholder and manager of two theaters to warrant the title of “gentleman.” According to Twain, after his retirement, Shakespeare “busied himself in lending money, trading in tithes, trading in land and houses, suing debtors for shillings and coppers, and acting as a confederate to a neighbor who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain common and did not succeed.” Twain adds, “When Shakespeare died in Stratford, it was not an event. It made no more stir in England than any other forgotten theater actor would have made.”

Historians and writers have made much of Shakespeare’s will, in which he left his wife his “second-best bed” and which bears three of the six extant examples of the Bard’s handwriting. According to Twain, Shakespeare’s will “named in minute detail every item of property he owned in the world, but it mentioned not a single book.” (The italics are Twain’s). According to Manly P. Hall, “There are in existence but six known examples of Shakespeare’s handwriting. All are signatures, and three of them are in his will. There is no record that Shakespeare ever possessed a library, nor does he make any mention of books in his will.”

Despite Twain’s body of evidence and his characteristically irreverent tone, I did not, for several years, agree with him. That changed when I started immersing myself in literature about ancient wisdom, secret societies, and ultimately, Francis Bacon. Among the many facts I learned about Bacon was that he was a principal founder and sponsor of the Virginia Company of London, a group that invested in the voyage to and settlement of the Virginia colony in the New World. After reading how an actual shipwreck near Bermuda served as a model for The Tempest and subsequently reading passages in that play that evoked ancient wisdom, I started to believe that Bacon was the true author. Thereafter, the more I read Shakespeare’s work, the more convinced I became that I was reading Bacon or, at the very least, Bacon’s strong influence.

The Tempest shipwreck is based on the flagship Sea Adventure, which headed a group of nine vessels that set sail from England to Virginia in June of 1609. It carried the new deputy governor of Virginia Sir Thomas Gates, Admiral George Somers, and Captain Christopher Newport as well as authors Richard Rich, Silvester Jourdan, and a man named William Strachey. The Sea Adventure washed ashore in Bermuda on July 28, but everybody survived. Prospero’s spirit in The Tempest, Ariel, speaks of Bermuda in Act I, scene ii, lines 228–229:

Thou call’dst me up at mi...

Table of contents

• Sacred Geometry and Digital Root 9
• Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)
• John Milton (1608–1674)
• Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
• John Donne (1572–1631)
• Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
• George Gordon, Sixth Baron Byron (1788–1824)
• Mary Shelley (1797–1851)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
• William Blake (1757–1827)
• Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
• William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
• James Joyce (1882–1941)
• Bakespeare