Dee and Shakespeare:
The Origins of the Hermetic Revolution in the Elizabethan Theatre
© 2009 by Vincent Bridges and Teresa Burns
In 1921, The Occult Review, a British illustrated monthly journal, ran an insightful article entitled “Shakespeare and the Occult” that quite plausibly concluded that many of his plays were unintelligible without an understanding of the esoteric subjects they featured. Today, if you google the words Shakespeare plus Occult, you’ll find over half a million hits. Included are modern Rosicrucian claims that: “No one familiar with esoteric doctrines can have any question as to Shakespeare’s familiarity with the wisdom of the Illuminati.” You’ll also find Jewish community groups studying “Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult.” Dozens of books explore similar connections. From this, we can be fairly safe in concluding that the consensus on Shakespeare’s knowledge of esoteric wisdom is almost unanimous, from scholars to the public.
But that agreement raises the vexing question of how did even a well-educated young provincial with a definite gift for language come by such a wealth of occult knowledge? This question opens the door to the issue of Shakespeare’s identity; and, while it doesn’t prove that the Bard was really someone else (Bacon, or de Vere or even Marlowe) it does suggest that Shakespeare had some kind of secret life, one that brought him into contact with a mentor who could provide him with sources from Holinshead to Aggripa. If we follow the trail of Shakespeare’s esoteric themes and their sources we come to the conclusion that only one library, one knowledgeable teacher, existed for the necessary range of subjects: that of Dr. John Dee.
John Dee was the Einstein of the era, a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and occultist, who collected the largest library in England and one of the best (more…)
