With Israel increasingly isolated and losing support among Americans, the prospect of nuclear conflagration looms. This proposal, admittedly a long shot, is offered in the hope that disaster can be averted; all that is required is an open mind and the humility to embrace change. I cannot see another way out of the situation, and I hope it will be generally agreed that a little embarrassment, on all sides, is better than seeing the world burn.
Briefly, there is a hidden chapter of history, which, if opened to the educated public, would change our entire intellectual paradigm. The story is known to many professors, but a false consensus has been imposed on academia with the force of taboo. Initially it was hidden to protect the English monarchy; later for economic and geopolitical reasons, in the interest of colonialism, which has shaped (or rather warped) the Western mind to a considerable extent. It is the story of the birth of modernity; it is the story of Shakespeare; and it is a new example of the heroic archetype from mythology. To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? G-d has used a scribe called Bacon to establish Christianity as the final monotheism (pork being forbidden in Judaism and Islam) and to resolve the conflict between science and religion.
Writers of the French Enlightenment revered Bacon as their inspiration; the Encyclopédie “owe[s] most to the Chancellor Bacon” (Diderot), “the father of the experimental philosophy” (Voltaire), “the greatest, the most universal, and the most eloquent of philosophers” (D’Alembert).1
However, Bacon’s academic reputation suffered drastically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as his name began to be associated with Shakespeare; today he is often forgotten in the roll of scientific pioneers.
The first History of the Royal Society (1667), which records the founding of the world’s oldest scientific body, depicts Bacon as Artium Instaurator, “Restorer of the Arts,” and proclaims
Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last. The barren wilderness he past,
“Did on the very border stand Of the blest promis’d land,
And from the mountain’s top of his exalted wit, Saw it himself and shew’d us it.”
Bacon’s Bi-Literal Cipher, invented when he was living with the English embassy in France as a means to send secret messages back home, was the first binary code, over a century before Leibniz.
Neither is it a small matter these cypher- characters have, and may perform: for by this art a way is opened, whereby a man may express and signify the intentions of his mind, at any distance of place, by objects which may be presented to the eye, and accommodated to the ear: provided these objects be capable of a twofold difference only; as by bells, by trumpets, by lights and torches, by the report of muskets, and any instruments of like nature.
—Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning
Discussing the vicissitudes of Bacon’s status, an editor in the ongoing sixteen-volume Oxford Francis Bacon wondered “Lord Verulam, once regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the Western tradition, was relegated to an intellectual salon des refusés from which he has been hard put to escape. How did this state of affairs come about?”2
The change in Bacon’s legacy began with an influential biographical essay published by Lord Macaulay in 1837. Macaulay did not attack Bacon’s work—admittedly, “the most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men”—however his motives and character were portrayed as base and callous. Many of the essay’s charges were answered by James Spedding and more recently by Nieves Mathews in Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination (1996).
The historical context of Macaulay’s essay is interesting. He wrote the article while in India serving on the Supreme Council of the colonial government; an ardent proponent of Western cultural superiority, he had written two years previously.
All the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England . . . a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.3
In reality, the civilizing mission of British colonialism—always to some degree a source of insecurity—was faced with an ideological challenge. Philologists had determined that Sanskrit and European languages derive from the same source; as this knowledge spread, concerns arose that Britain’s role in India, the crown jewel of their empire, could be seen as less tenable.4 If the Shakespeare problem was not enough, Macaulay may have regarded Bacon with additional concern because he blurs the distinction between Western “Greek rationalism” and Eastern “Oriental superstition”; this is not a widely held view of Bacon’s psychological makeup, but as Macaulay tells us,
“In truth, much of Bacon’s life was passed in a visionary world, amidst things as strange as any that are described in the Arabian Tales, or in those romances on which the curate and barber of Don Quixote’s village performed so cruel an auto-da-fe, amidst buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin, fountains more wonderful than the golden water of Parizade, conveyances more rapid than the hippogryph of Ruggiero, arms more formidable than the lance of Astolfo, remedies more efficacious than the balsam of Fierabras.
This is a very strange passage, not only for its claim that Bacon was prone to visionary states, but also for its repeated hyperbolic allusions to Don Quixote and the Thousand and One Nights, the best-known example of Macaulay’s much-detested Arabian literature. As a stylistic flourish it is excessive, calling attention to itself; perhaps Macaulay regretted the article, and is telling us why he felt compelled to write it. In any case, he seems to be saying that while Bacon is regarded as the paragon of rational empiricism, “in truth” he had an “Eastern” or mystical side as well.
In 1657, William Rawley edited a collection of Bacon’s previously unpublished speeches and miscellaneous works, entitled Resuscitatio. A “Life of the Honourable Author” prefixed to the book states “This lord was religious: for though the world be apt to suspect and prejudge great wits and politiques to have somewhat of the atheist, yet he was conversant with G-d.” If anyone, Rawley was in a position to know; he had been Bacon’s trusted amanuensis and chaplain (later he was chaplain to Charles I and Charles II); Bacon left him £100, then a substantial sum. In recent times Bacon’s writings, with their many references to G-d and scripture, have occasionally been interpreted as a pious cover to advance an (atheist) scientific agenda; but in fact he went so far as to state “all knowledge is to be limited by religion” and “the least part of knowledge is subject to the use for which God hath granted it, which is the benefit and relief of the state and society of man.”5
Bacon’s rumored royal lineage
“It is not my meaning to treat him as a ward: Such a word is far from my Motherly feeling for him. I mean to do him good.” – Lady Anne Bacon in a letter to Anthony Bacon, April 18th, 1593.
Rawley’s biographical sketch of Bacon was the first of its kind in English; previously a similar thing had appeared in Pierre Amboise’s Histoire Naturelle de Mre. Francois Bacon (1631). Amboise wrote that Bacon was “born in the purple and brought up with the expectation of a great career,” purple of course being the color reserved for royalty. Rawley begins his account, “Francis Bacon, the glory of his age and nation, the adorner and ornament of learning, was born in York House, or York Place, in the Strand, on the two and twentieth day of January, in the year of our Lord 1560 [1561].”
The question of Bacon’s birthplace, whether York House or York Place, imports more than might appear; York House was the London home of Sir Nicholas and Lady Anne Bacon, next door stood York Place or the palace of Whitehall, main residence of Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. At the time, a rumor that Elizabeth was pregnant bruited abroad; in August of 1560 one Anne Dowe of Brentwood, a sixty-eight-year-old widow, was the first of several arrested for speaking thus publicly. Soon after, the Spanish ambassador met with William Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief counselor (soon to be Francis Bacon’s uncle), and wrote of the encounter, “[Cecil] said that the Queen was going on so strangely that he was about to withdraw from her service . . . Lord Robert had made himself master of the business of the state and of the person of the Queen, to the extreme injury of the realm, with the intention of marrying her, and she herself was shutting herself up in the palace to the peril of her health and life. That the realm would tolerate the marriage, he said he did not believe . . . Last of all, he said that they were thinking of destroying Lord Robert’s wife. They had given out that she was ill, but she was not ill at all; she was very well and taking care not to be poisoned . . . Since writing the above, I hear the Queen has published the death of Robert’s wife.6
Amy Dudley was found at their home near Oxford with a broken neck. Dudley did not attend the funeral and the court ruled it an accident; four months later, Francis Bacon was born.
Writers who ascribe the Shakespeare works to Bacon often claim he was the son of Elizabeth and Dudley, and that the couple had another son, Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex, born four years later. Before the possibility of such outrageous fortune is dismissed out of hand, it is worth reflecting that it would help explain the emotional power of Hamlet and Macbeth, otherwise thought to have originated in Shakespeare’s imagination. Bacon has been criticized for his prosecution of Essex, his friend and patron, for treason in 1601; this was one of Macaulay’s principal points of attack.
But if Bacon and Essex had the same parents, it would mean Francis Bacon was born of a “virgin,” a born king (but as it turned out, not of this world—his library was dukedom enough), and he prosecuted his rebellious brother who attempted to take the throne by force. Perhaps an awareness of these parallels with Jesus gave Bacon the boldness to proclaim that he was more than a man:
Now if the utility of any single invention so moved men, that they accounted more than man him who could include the whole human race in some solitary benefit, that invention is certainly much more exalted, which by a kind of mastery contains within itself all particular inventions, and delivers the mind from bondage, and opens it a road, that under sure and unerring guidance it may penetrate to whatever can be of novelty and further advancement.7
Bacon’s unorthodox biography also parallels certain features of the mythological hero archetype outlined in Otto Rank’s Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909) and Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939): conception in secret, royal birth attended with grave difficulties, adoption by those of a lesser station, fears that the child will be a danger to the state. These similarities are the more striking, as the myths deal with an abandoned prince who returns to overcome his father, and Bacon gave us modern science, the tool with which humanity challenges our common Father. Rank, like Freud, questioned the authorship of the Shakespeare works, and in Art and Artist (1932) he conjectured (without noting that Hamlet was published just after Elizabeth died):
About Shakespeare, it seems to me not improbable that the inspired poet portrayed himself in the Danish prince, so that he might with impunity utter high treason . . . the participation of Hamlet in his entrapping play might be explained from the fact that powerful opponents of Elizabeth did really use the poet as a means to attack her and stir her conscience. In this case, we should have a reflection, in Hamlet’s editing of the “play,” of the part important friends of the poet actually had in his work.8
The Story of the Learned Pig contains a subtle allusion to Bacon’s royal descent, plainly stating he was behind the Shakespeare works.
My parents, indeed, were of low extraction; my mother sold fish about the streets of this metropolis, and my father was a water-carrier celebrated by Ben Jonson in his comedy of Every Man in his Humour . . . I soon after contracted a friendship with that great man and first of geniuses, the ‘Immortal Shakespeare,’ and am happy in now having it in my power to refuse the prevailing opinion of his having run his country for deer-stealing, which is as false as it is disgracing. The fact is, Sir, that he had contracted an intimacy with the wife of a country Justice near Stratford, from his having extolled her beauty in a common ballad; and was unfortunately, by his worship himself, detected in a very awkward situation with her. Shakespeare, to avoid the consequences of this discovery, thought it most prudent to decamp. This I had from his own mouth. With equal falsehood has he been father’d with many spurious dramatic pieces. Hamlet, Othello, As You Like It, the Tempest, and Midsummer’s Night Dream, for five; of all which I confess myself to be the author.
References
1. Durant, Will. The Story of Philosophy. New York: Simon & Schuster 1926 p. 182
2. Rees, Graham. “Reflections on the Reputation of Francis Bacon’s Philosophy.” Huntington Library Quarterly 65, no. 3/4 (2002): 379–94
3. Minute on Education, 1835
4. McEvilley, Thomas. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Allworth, 2001
5. Valerius Terminus, or Of the Interpretation of Nature (~1603)
6. Letter to the Duchess of Parma, dated 11 September 1560
7. Thoughts concerning the Interpretation of Nature, Tr. Basil Montagu The Works of Francis Bacon. London: William Pickering 1834
8. Rank, Otto. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1959 p. 236-7
