A Taste of Bacon Sir? - The Secret of Shakespeare

[Steve Franklin]

Re A E Waite, I'm sure you know he was a member of the Golden Dawn and was a Freemason - being a member of the Societas Roscruciana in Anglia, which was the home lodge of the three founding members of the Golden Dawn (Wynn Westcott, MacGregor Mathers and William Woodman).
I would look to these two organisations for the transmission of his knowledge that led to his deck (which again, as I'm sure you know, was illustrated by another member of the Golden Dawn. Some of the teachings and techniques of the Golden Dawn were profound. Not many members of the Golden Dawn were equal to the task, however. But this is the story of humanity as a species, I would argue.

In those days, almost everything about the occult was privately published and kept secret, only being circulated amongst lodges and schools. There were almost zero open transmission. Even later in the Sixties and Seventies the amount of information publicly available was still limited and what was available was only sold in two bookshops in London, hidden away in back streets. You were unlikely to trip across them by accident (it was probably different in the US, I suspect).

Today each school still retains it's own unique information that is transmitted only to senior members and is not made public -- although so much previously secret information is now in the public domain, that a diligent researcher with a budget - and a penchant for Indian, Egyptian and Chinese lore etc - could pull the underlying techniques and aims together fairly well. Yet this would only provide you with limited understanding. Looking at a meal prepared by a Michelin star chef and knowing the ingredients and techniques used to prepare said meal is intellectually stimulating but in no way allows one to taste and participate in the meal - which is, of course, the entire purpose of it.

And I would add that, in the last analysis, the origin, transmission and discovery of knowledge, throughout history, depends entirely upon actual participation. This is the the key to the raison d'être of all genuine schools. If this were not the case they would be next to useless.

Thanks. I did take a look at Waite's biography in the interim and, yes, he does appear to have had the access, if anyone did, to the resources that could have provided him with the underlying structure of the tarot. The question remains, though: What was the actual organizational structure in Italy that could have survived for ~2 millennia and kept the tarot board/deck bottled up but intact for that long? For what it's worth, my money is still on some hidden survival of the Pythagorean school at Croton and later Metapontum, perhaps merged into some obscure Catholic sect that popped its head above water for an historical instant with the appearance of Guglielma of Bohemia and [size=12]Sister Manfreda (Maifreda) da Pirovano ("The Popess" of the Visconti-Sforza Tarot deck--partial genealogy of Manfreda here) in [/SIZE]the late 13th century, only to have it unceremoniously lopped off, so to speak, by the Italian Inquisition. This is all speculation, of course--grist for another mill.

Getting back to the problem of W. Shakespeare, though, I feel that the solution requires a close chronological analysis of the First Folio. Again, I haven't gotten very far with this, but a couple of things occur to me.

# The Folio must have been in production for a good while, what, a year or two at the least? The editors/publishers would have had to gather the various manuscripts, working scripts, and more or less corrupt quarto editions (only 16 of 36 appeared in such editions) and then reduced them to a single accurate (as far as possible) version that appeared in 1623. Remember that no manuscripts or scripts of any kind are mentioned in Shakspere's will, so it wasn't a question of simply going to the heirs and retrieving the plays.

# No other plays appeared after the First Folio, suggesting that it was some kind of memorial edition, appearing close-on to the death of the author.

Now we know that Shakspere of Stratford "retired" in 1610 or thereabouts, and died in 1616. That's 13 years from his retirement to the appearance of the First Folio, and 7 years from his death, a bit of a long time between his pen falling silent and the memorial edition. The monument, with or without a quill pen, appeared prior to the Folio--no one knows when. Edward de Vere died in June of 1604, so even less of a reason to publish a memorial edition 19 years later. Stokes, in An Attempt to Determine the Chronological Order of Shakespeare's Plays of 1878, places Henry VIII in 1613, The Tempest in 1610/1611, Winters Tale in 1610/1611, Cymbeline in 1610, and on and on. The first play clearly after de Vere's death, according to Stokes, was King Lear in 1605. Othello was in 1604. That's 9 years writing from the grave.

We have the opposite problem with some of the other candidates (except Marlowe, whose date of death, assuming he survived his "murder," is unknown). Francis Bacon didn't die until April of 1626, no reason for a memorial edition in 1621-1623. Amelia Lanier survived until 1645, yet no quarto editions after 1616 and no new published plays after 1623. Shakspere dies and Lanier decides to stop writing? She couldn't have found another alias? I haven't gone through all of the known candidates for "Shakespeare" yet, but it will be interesting to see how the other candidates fit the timeline. I am still leaning toward Marlowe, but I am not yet positive. In passing, I should note that Walsingham, Marlowe's benefactor, died in 1630, so plenty of time to assist in the publication of a memorial editon of Marlowe's plays upon his death.

[Upon further reflection, it occurs to me that if Marlowe did indeed write the plays, then Walsingham would almost certainly have retained fair copies, if not the original manuscripts, thus simplifying immensely the logistics of publishing the First Folio.]