Vincent Bridges

Original Press Release (4-5-09):

Shakespeare’s Secret Identity Revealed: New Research Shows the Bard as Spy/Alchemist

In a lecture on “Shakespeare and Dr. Dee” to be presented at the International Alchemy of Prague Conference (Prague, Czech Republic) on Friday April 10, American independent scholar and esoteric historian Vincent Bridges will reveal William Shakespeare’s secret identity during his so-called Lost Years. The result of five years of research by Bridges and his co-author Teresa Burns, the identification of William Shakespeare with the previously unidentified “Francis Garland” of Dr. John Dee’s diaries reveals a completely new perspective on the Bard’s life and work. Not only was Shakespeare an intimate of occultists and spies, but also he may have witnessed an alchemical transmutation. 

“If we make the identification of Dee’s “Francis Garland” with the rising playwright William Shakespeare then most of the mysteries surrounding Shakespeare’s life disappear like actors at the end of a play. A sudden light is thrown on the so-called lost years, and a real person, not a cipher or a mask, emerges,” comments author Vincent Bridges. “Comparing the dates when Dee notes Francis Garland in his diaries with the known dates of Shakespeare’s life shows clearly that the idea is impossible to disprove,” Bridges continues, “Francis Garland appears in Dee’s diary from December 1586 through March of 1595, and in all that time we find not a single instance of Shakespeare being somewhere else when Francis Garland was visiting 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 in Europe. Beginning in the early 1580s, Dee, along with his “scyer” or clairvoyant Edward Kelley, conducted a years long series of communications with “angelic intelligences.” In 1583, Dee, Kelley and their families embarked on a kind of apocalyptic missionary journey in which they attempted to enlisted both Stephen I and Rudolph II, the rulers of Poland and The Holy Roman Empire. Dee returned to England in 1589, leaving Edward Kelley behind in Prague. Kelley apparently died in Prague sometimes during the mid 1590s while attempting to escape from one of Rudolph II’s prisons.

Vincent Bridges is an author and esoteric historian best known as the co-author of Mysteries of the Great Cross at Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time and for his work on Nostradamus for the History Channel. Teresa Burns is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Platteville and is the author, along with Vincent Bridges, of Shakespeare, John Dee and the Hermetic Revolution: Alchemy and Espionage in the Magickal Theatre of Elizabethan England.

Related Magazine Article:

“Dee and Shakespeare,” by Vincent Bridges and Teresa Burns: Atlantis Rising No. 75 May/June 2009.

Related Posts on this Site:

“Dee and Shakespeare: The Origins of the Hermetic Revolution in the Elizabethan Theatre” 

See Also:

Francis Garland, William Shakespeare and John Dee’s Green Language by Teresa Burns

Shakespeare’s Green Garland Part Two: William Shakespeare, Spy, and a Visit to Trebona by Teresa Burns