THE SHAKESPEARE PESHER¹ .
by Michael Buhagiar

www.michaelbuhagiar.com

Amongst the toilers in the Baconist vineyard there are many more or less accomplished scholars, but very few philosophers, and even fewer poets. Although not a Baconist, the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes was all three; and his book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (faber, 1992) was an epochal breakthrough, with its demonstration of the psycho-allegorical dimension of the tragedies, and the ground for a proper understanding of the First Folio as a whole.

Should the reader bear an antipathy toward depth psychology - and an adherence to Sir Francis Bacon is not necessarily a preventative against such a view - then he may find what is to come distasteful. For I will argue here that Sir Francis Bacon was the first to study the psyche in the way of Freud and Jung, and to apply his knowledge to a therapeutic end, namely the healing of Will Shakspere; and that the First Folio as allegory forms the hitherto presumed lost or abandoned Part Four of Instauratio Magna, in which he intended to apply his scientific method to the human mind.

Hughes showed the tragedies to be, beyond all doubt, allegories of a colossal nervous breakdown which befell Will Shakspere after he had been in thrall for some time to Puritanism. The chief culprit is the libido which, anathematised by the Puritan, returns to savage him and plunge him into psychic turmoil, in a typically Freudian way. The libido, or will-to-eros, is represented by the boar, which plays a central role in Venus and Adonis, and will charge many times throughout the plays, to plunge the hero into crisis; or the disease process will be studied elsewhere with clinical detachment, from the point of view of the theorist. Sometimes the boar is named implicitly, as in Troilus and Cressida in the name of Diomed, who is closely associated with the Calydonian boar in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde; at other times explicitly, as here, near the crisis of Richard the Third (III.ii):

Hastings: Come on, come on, where is your boar-spear man?
Fear you the boar, and go so unprovided?

This illustrates another point: that the 'Speare' in 'Shakespeare' refers to the spear of Athena, certainly, but specifically in the plays to her boar spear, the weapon provided by Bacon to his patient Shakspere to overcome his nemesis.

The tragic heroes then are all Puritan analogues. Hughes also isolates the Queen of Hell (Venus, Cordelia, Ophelia, and their kin), who represents the unseen world of nature, specifically here the unconscious, which is denied by the Puritan. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece represent the two halves of the 'tragic equation', and illustrate Freud's theory of repression: the first portraying the subject's psychological wounding by knowledge of the libido, its sequel the libido's resurgence, having been suppressed by the subject in his defensive assumption of Puritanism, to precipitate the breakdown.

I spent the year of 1995 absorbing Hughes' work, and closely reading the tragedies. Looking for something new to read, I picked up a cheap edition of King John; and it seemed to me that the character of Phillip the Bastard was behaving as the boar, and that the same allegorical process as Hughes had described was at work. Fascinated, I then examined Richard the Third, and formed the same suspicion. This was the genesis of my book Ugly Dick and the Goddess of Complete Being: The Death and Resurrection of William Shakespeare, in which I extend Hughes' approach to every play in the corpus, and find the First Folio to obey a strict pesher, in the way of Wolfram's Parzival, one of Bacon's key sources and inspirations; of the New Testament, as so memorably explicated by Barbara Thiering in her Jesus series; and of the rituals of the thirty-three degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite (of Freemasonry)(footnote 1).

Cipher theories of course abound in Bacon studies. The categorical refutation of some of them by orthodox analysis has done enormous harm to the studies of real weight and value, and has made the Baconists' task that much harder. Only one approach was possible for my work: to examine in detail every significant episode in every play of the corpus without exception, and to demonstrate the pesher to work, strictly and invariably, throughout all. I indeed find each and every character to be yoked to his pesher value at his every appearance without exception, and similarly every place and thing, both within the same play and between the different plays in which they may appear, to provide an utterly consistent and relevant story. I could have done little more: the pesher has been demonstrated.

The challenge for Bacon was to portray the aetiology, pathogenesis, crisis and his successful treatment of Shakspere's psychiatric illness as allegory, on the stage. He presents his strategy in Richard's great speech in Richard the Second (V.i):

Richard: I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world;
And, for because the world is populous,
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father; and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts;
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humors like the people of this world…

Here, 'little world' refers on the literal plane to the prison cell, but on the allegorical to the microcosm, the inner world of Man.

Before giving an overview (necessarily superficial within the limits of this forum) of the pesher itself, and then looking in more detail at arguably the greatest of the tragedies, let us first answer the question of why it was necessary to go through the colossal labour of encrypting the argument as allegory. The villain of the first Folio is Puritanism, with its denial of the unseen world of nature, and to have denounced the ascendant Puritan world-view in explicit terms as vehemently and thoroughly as Bacon does, would have been to risk, in the prevailing political climate, the suppression and destruction of the plays, and quite possibly the exposure and execution of their author, who, from the very inception of his writing career, had gone to such immense pains to keep his identity secret. A general failing of the Stratfordian camp, and occasionally the Baconian, is a lack of real appreciation of the philosophical climate of the age. Bacon and his circle feared nothing less of Puritanism than the destruction of Western civilization, and he alluded to this implicitly in On the Interpretation of Nature:

Nor is my resolution diminished by foreseeing the state of these times, a sort of declination and ruin of the learning which is now in use… [And] from civil wars, which, on account of certain manners not long ago introduced, seem to me about to visit many countries, and the malignity of sects, and these compendiary artifices and cautions which have crept into the place of learning, no less a tempest seems to impend over letters and science.

Bacon himself had personal experience of the Puritanism-mental illness nexus in the person of his mother (or foster-mother) Lady Anne Bacon; and, further, he may have sensed something like this process at work behind the far less severe infirmity that struck his own mind from time to time.

Bacon identifies the suppression of the visual imagination as the defining pathogenetic trait of the Puritan. Certain Stratfordians interpret him as decrying the imagination as a source of error, but they confuse imagination and fancy, the former of which recreates the outer world in the inner, as the basis of dealing with nature and bending her to Man's will; while the latter rather is the true potential problem, with its de novo creation of forms and relations. The reading and writing of the written word as acted upon by the reasoning imagination was in truth the principal plank of Bacon's treatment of Will Shakspere, who had fled to London in 1587 after suffering his breakdown; and the imagination is represented in the plays by the many torches, flares, and Watches. This is the point, for example, of the entry of the Watch late in Act V of Romeo and Juliet, after Romeo's death in the tomb, which represents the 'charge of the boar', the catalyst to Shakspere's transformation through the magic of the written word.

Let us look briefly at a beautiful example of the pesher at work. The written word itself is betokened by the innumerable letters and parchments, and woods, groves, forests, and even single trees throughout the plays, the source most plausibly being the Druid grove, on the barks of which were nicked their sacred texts. (Antony and Cleopatra especially shows the author's familiarity with the Druidic tree alphabets.) Thus, Ariel's birth from the tree in The Tempest portrays the generation of Gnostic wisdom by the reasoning imagination out of the written word. Prospero is Bacon only in so far as one becomes like the god one worships; but he is principally Shakspere, now armed with the psychological weaponry, given him by Bacon, to ward off the boar. (I produce compelling evidence, based on an invariable nexus of style and allegorical content in the plays, to support the contention of Rev. Walter Begley in his Is It Shakespeare? (1903) that Shakespeare made a significant contribution to the writing of them, albeit in a low-grade way). The isle is Shakspere's Gnostically-informed ego; the ship, the complex of his breakdown; Ariel's bringing of it ashore, the action of wisdom in lifting the elements of the complex into the conscious ego where they can be dealt with. Amongst the ship's passengers, Alonso, King of Naples, is the boar: for in the geographico-symbolic language of the plays, Milan (a northern city) is related to Naples (southern) as mind is to body, or idea to will, or virtue to the boar. Here, he is the blind will-to-eros hastening to wound the ego. We have met Sebastian before, in Twelfth Night, where he bears precisely the same allegoric value, of the ego tormented by knowledge of the libido, the reference being to the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a common theme of Renaissance artists, who depicted him lashed to a crucifix and transfixed by arrows, the phallic symbolism of which is clear. Most fascinatingly, Francisco is Francis Bacon himself, now reduced to a bit part, for his job has been long since done. That this is so is confirmed by his little gem of a speech in the otherwise pedestrian II.i. There can be absolutely no doubt as to the authorship of the following:

Francisco I saw him beat the surges under him,
And ride upon their backs: he trod the water,
Whose enmity he flung aside, and breasted
The surge most swoln that met him: his bold head
'Bove the contentious waves he kept, and oar'd
Himself with his good arms in lusty stroke
To the shore, that o'er his wave-worn basis bow'd,
As stooping to relieve him…

Just so did he add his signature - as a master will to the productions of his atelier - to the largely Marlovian Henry the Sixth I, a play otherwise totally lacking the famed high style, with Exeter's marvelous cameo to close III.i. The histories in fact describe in chronological order Shakspere's own case history, in a way familiar to us from the works of Freud and Jung, with the beheading of Hastings in Richard the Third (Richard is the boar, the 'Ugly Dick' of the title of my book) representing the moment of the breakdown. Mistress Shore in the same play is a Venus figure who, recreated in the imagination of the Puritan subject (a Tarquin analogue) will precipitate the coup. She is among the first of her kind, which will come to include Portia, Helen, Helena, Desdemona, Ophelia, Cordelia, and so on: all Queens of Hell, and also Grail queens, for the realm they guard is the source of the Holy Grail of the hero's questing, which Bacon defines throughout as the wisdom to be gained from the action of the gnostically reasoning imagination upon the unseen world as described in the written word.

Henry the Eighth (1613) is a retrospective of Shakspere's creative life in London, and is thus a companion piece to The Tempest (1611). Remarkably, the characters that reappear here after a lapse of a decade and a half (Henry the Fifth dates to 1598-9) are found to bear exactly the same pesher values as they do in the earlier histories. Thus Norfolk ('north-folk') is, like Milan, mind/idea/virtue, while Suffolk ('south-folk') is, like Naples, body/will/boar, and Buckingham is the unconscious. Hence the subject's rebirth into Gnostic nobility in Richard the Third (death of Richard-->ascendancy of Richmond) is predicated on Buckingham's execution; while Buckingham's imprisonment in Henry the Eighth I.i, when 'Those suns of glory, those two lights of men,/ Met in the vale of Andren', bears precisely the same meaning: for Shakspere's creativity and mental stability in his London phase has been predicated on the victory over the unconscious, as imparted to him by Bacon.

Let us look very briefly then at the historical cycle, in chronological order. Richard the Second records the defensive espousal, by the pubertal Will Shakspere, of the shield of the ascetic heresy against the shower of arrows from his newly-surgent libido, as cast in negative aspect by Roman Catholicism, the source of which was most plausibly the fervent faith of his mother. One of the great philosophic achievements of the First Folio is Bacon's location of the source of the Puritan error in the Roman Catholic world-view. In this play, the moribund John of Gaunt represents the Roman Catholic aspect of the young Shakspere's ego; while Richard is that ego under sway of the troublesome libido. In Henry the Fourth I & II, Bolingbroke is Shakspere in his new phase of bookish asceticism when, although erotically continent in the ascetic way, he fell into company with a rough crowd. Finally the libido became too much for him, and he succumbed, to plunge him again into crisis. The last defense mechanism available to him was the Puritan world-view, with its suppression of the imagination and of the libido; and HVI 1-3 and RIII (in which Richard is the boar) record the progress and collapse of that phase, which lasted for approximately eight years aet. 15-23. Every one of the remaining plays will deal in some way with this theme.

This necessarily superficial summary of course begs many questions. Let us now then examine in a little more detail King Lear, which I have always felt to be the most powerful and successful of the tragedies, in an attempt to illustrate more clearly the pesher at work.

King Lear is, like almost all the other tragedies, an allegory of psychic collapse and rebirth (the sole exception being Hamlet, in which there is no resurrection for the subject), the final reference being to Will Shakspere's case history. Lear is another in the line of doomed Puritan heroes, of which Adonis was the first. Gloucester is, on the other hand, a representation of the Gnostic ideal, a kind of Solomon/Alexander/Gnostic Christ, and his blinding will further serve to identify him as a Teiresias type, a master of the inward vision, that faculty which, as we have seen, the Puritan suppresses to his ruin. Gloucester is, in this phase, an aspect of Lear - his true and noble self which is struggling to be reborn. Ted Hughes brilliantly analyses 'Cordelia' to the 'heart of Lear' (Cor-de-lia [Lear]). One thinks also of Portia's identification with Antony's heart in The Merchant of Venice; and both Portia and Cordelia are Queens of Hell-Grail Queens. Lear's banishment of Cordelia portrays the Puritan's denial of the unseen world, finally his own deepest self. Regan and Goneril represent the Puritan's vision of nature, which is inadequate, as not predicated, as it must be, on the dimension which lies in beneath it. The 'charge of the boar' can be precisely located in Lear's moment of madness when he discovers Goneril's disloyalty to him. This corresponds, like all the other 'charges of the boar' throughout the plays, to the moment in 1587 when Shakspere succumbed, after some eight years enthrallment by Puritanism, to an act of auto-erotism upon reading, as seems likely (there is strong evidence for it), the vividly described seduction of Fotis by Lucius in Apuleius' The Golden Ass.

Do I sense some raised eyebrows? A too fantastical scenario perhaps, product of the fevered imagination of the author? The centrality of eros to so many cases of psychosis is of course a commonplace of psychoanalytical theory - let the sceptic only read Freud, Jung, or R.D. Laing, for example; and to find it occupying centre stage in a work of Bacon's should not surprise us in the least, so unflinching and startlingly modern an innovator was he. He surely would have endorsed Rev. Walter Begley's spirited comment in Bacon's Nova Resuscitatio (1905), that, 'There seems no reason why this subject should not be discussed scientifically as well as other sexual subjects of a so-called "abnormal" nature.' (III.141)

Ted Hughes interpreted Cordelia's silence throughout much of King Lear in a positive way, as signifying her status as the eternal principle lying beneath all speech and forms. This was a misjudgment, however; for I show her silence, as well as that of Hero and Hippolyta, to signify that the unseen world is not speaking to the Puritan; or, more precisely, that she is screaming at him to listen, but he closed his ears to her. Hughes was also mistaken in supposing that there is in King Lear no redemption for the subject. On the contrary, his resurrection is figured in the final Act in the ascendancy of Edgar, son of Gloucester, as the Gnostic ideal reborn. Bacon employs the familiar 'rival brothers' theme (Jacob and Esau is the best known example) to intensify and elaborate the allegory; and the pesher value of Edmund, usurping brother of Edgar, is of the subject possessed by blind and physical knowledge of the libido, which torments him, as cast in negative aspect by Puritanism. He is, that is to say, the subject possessed by the boar.

The storm in The Tempest represents, as I have hinted at above, the 'brainstorm' of Gnostic reason by which the empowered subject (finally, London-phase Shakspere, now possessed of the boar spear) can arrest the boar in its charge. And so here, where Lear on the heath portrays the ego in the process of transformation. It is remarkable that Lear is accompanied by the Fool, for the Fool card of the Tarot Major Arcana, a Templar psycho-transformative innovation, betokens the first stage of the transformation of the initiate into Gnostic nobility. Freemasonry was born from the ashes of the Knights Templar, and the fact of Bacon's Freemasonry is not in doubt.

Let us examine more closely the central sequence of events. Edgar's appearance from the hollow of a tree late in Act Two depicts (likes Ariel's birth from a tree: see above) the elicitation of Gnostic wisdom from the written word. This should mark the beginning of the ego's rebirth; and, sure enough, Lear departs soon after for the heath. The name 'Kent' is one of the less spectacular examples of Bacon's nomenclaturic technique, which often betrays his wide reading and mastery of many foreign languages, but it is valid nonetheless. As a near homophone of a colloquialism for the female pudenda, it represents the Goddess; and Kent's volubility on the heath means that nature is now beginning to speak to the subject. Kent's gift of a ring - yet another in the plays - to Cordelia reminds us that the First Folio is of the nature of a Grail saga, for the Ring and Grail traditions are essentially the same (footnote 2).

The hovel on the heath, as occupied by Lear, Kent, the fool, and Edgar in disguise (for the rebirth has not yet been effected) betokens the ego-in-transformation. Gloucester's entry into it with a torch is wholly consistent with the pesher values of the torch as the visual imagination, and of Gloucester himself, although not yet blinded, as master of the inward vision. The location of the hovel near Gloucester's castle, and his prospering of their journey to Dover, the scene of the typical death-and-rebirth episode to come, need no further comment.

Gloucester being guided to Dover by the Old Man portrays the Gnostic ideal following the spoor of the truths of nature: for the Old Man is a reference here, like all the other Adams and old men in the plays, to the 'Knight of the Sun' degree of the Ancient and Accepted Rite of Freemasonry, which features 'Thrice Perfect Father Adam', and whose purpose is the indoctrination of truth (footnote 3). That Dover itself represents the unseen world through which the subject will be reborn is confirmed by yet another instance of a peculiar allegorical technique of Bacon's, of which I have detailed innumerable instances in the First Folio (and one must go to the Folio itself to find them). This is the substitution of 'I' for the expected 'Ay', as in the following (IV.i.73):

Gloucester: Dost thou know Dover?
Edgar: I Master.

- Where 'I' is symbolic as always, like the blade, of the phallos, an expression of the unseen world in the seen. Bacon never fails to employ this technique with great precision and power. Gloucester's 'fall' from the cliff, from which he of course emerges unscathed, is a vivid portrayal of the Gnostic ideal's delving into the unseen world of nature. As the ego-in-healing (Edgar) follows him through the written word, he too makes this journey. Gloucester's insistence that Edgar is 'better spoken' as they reach Dover indicates the word as descriptive of the unseen world of nature as the medium and expression of the subject's nascent nobility.

An apparent objection to this interpretation of King Lear is Cordelia's death by hanging. If she is the subject's self renewed, and the ascendant Edgar represents himself reborn, then how is her death not a logical inconsistency? Let us see. The Captain bears here, as always, the value of the faculty of reason; and Edmund's sending of him to hang Cordelia portrays the potential denial of the unseen world by the Puritan, in his fear of the boar. Lear's dagger-wounding of the Captain signifies, however, that reason is now being informed by knowledge of the unseen world (the pesher value of the innumerable blades throughout the plays). Juliet's blade-wounding means that the subject's old world-view is similarly being transformed; and her death represents the death of the old, flawed world-view, only to be reborn: and so here. Edmund finally sends his sword to vouch for her reprieve, but too late. Had she lived, that is to say, she would have remained identified with the old unseen world as cast in negative aspect by the Puritan. The Captain's promised high advancement would represent, in that case, the re-ascendancy of Puritanism (for Edmund at no stage orders the death of Lear). So that Bacon has found here a typically adroit solution to a potential technical problem. The Puritan tyranny is overthrown, just as it was in the life of Will Shakspere, never to return.

The dagger or sword or other blade bears then the value of the unseen world. Let us see how this knowledge can help solve perhaps the most famous conundrum in Shakespearean scholarship, namely Hamlet's procrastination of the murder of King Claudius. Hamlet is, as I have shown, a clinical treatise, as art, of the disease which is now called paranoid schizophrenia, that most tragic and destructive of psychiatric illnesses; and it is the one tragedy in which there is no rebirth of the psyche. The name 'Claudius' means 'the limper'(< Latin claudeo); and the reference here is to the mythic birth of Dionysius from the thigh of Zeus, which Bacon discusses at some length in The Wisdom of the Ancients (cf. also the thigh wound of Adonis). Dionysius represents here of course, as does his incarnation Falstaff, the libido; and Claudius is the subject, with his pathological superego, tormented by the will-to-eros. The location of the pain in the thigh is of course highly allegorically significant. Hamlet himself is that same subject - he and Claudius are two aspects of him - now hardening in his Puritanism, assumed as a defense against the libido. We have seen that the stabbing of Juliet represents her activation as the properly Gnostic conception of nature, as centred on the unseen world. Claudius moans as he kneels, 'My words fly up, my thoughts remain below;/Words without thoughts, never to heaven go'. This is an expression of the Puritan's suppression of the imagination, and therefore of a sense of beauty, to remove sensuality as a temptation. Hamlet does not stab him, for the subject can never again allow himself to be penetrated by knowledge of the blind libido; and his means of achieving this is by suppression of the imagination.

One further episode in Hamlet begs to be examined, namely Hamlet's stabbing of Polonius through the arras. Polonius bears the value of the libido (yet another identification regrettably unsupportable in this forum). The arras betokens the psychological defense mechanism of repression; and this is, remarkably, the first isolation of this mechanism in Western literature, to anticipate Freud by three centuries. The self-concealments behind an arras of Borachio in Much Ado About Nothing, Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the Executioner in King John, are to be interpreted in the same way. (Bacon derived the name 'Borachio', for example, from the Spanish boracho, 'drunk', 'inflamed by passion', and drunkenness betokens always in the First Folio the state of possession by the libido.) The Puritan anathematises Woman (Hamlet damning Gertrude as a whore), and keeps his own libido firmly locked away in the unconscious (Polonius hiding behind the arras). The basic pathological mechanism described in the play is the continual breaking through, time and time again, of the libido into the Puritan's conscious ego, to drive him clinically insane. And this is the event portrayed here, where the blade is the phallos resurgent against the subject's will, to activate (cf. the stabbing of Juliet) the blind libido, and drive it into consciousness. The upstairs 'lobby' where Polonius' body is stowed represents - a typical instance of Bacon's refined topographical symbology - the conscious mind.

A brief final point with regard to the historical plays. I often take pains to identify Bacon's variations from the sources - principally Plutarch or Holinshed - to show precisely how the changes were made to benefit the allegory. This is most thoroughly so in Julius Caesar, where I examine in detail each and every variation, which are shown thereby to be not at all indications of Shakespeare's negligence (as argued especially by John Julius Norwich in his Shakespeare's Kings), but of Bacon's genius. I call them 'scepticides', because no sceptic could possibly withstand their collective withering blast. To take just one brief example: In Julius Caesar IV.ii, one Lucius Pella is charged with taking a bribe from the Sardians. Yet Plutarch in his Life of Marcus Brutus states explicitly that Lucius Pella was guilty of 'robbery, and pilfery in his office'. Bacon has it as bribery though, as initiated by the other side, for the process being described here is the elicitation of the Goddess, and consequently the will-to-eros, by the reader from the written word.

This piece must finish here, at about 1.5 percent the length of the book; and it may have been for some of you, I fear, about the same percentage as convincing. Yet I hope it may have been stimulating and provocative nonetheless, and have given an inkling at least of the rigour and unimpeachable internal consistency of Ugly Dick and the Goddess of Complete Being. It was equally tremendous a privilege as a challenge to engage with a mind of the extreme sophistication of Bacon's over the three-and-a-half years of its writing. The reader of my work can expect it also to be challenging; and yet, its argument will prove not really so hard to follow, once the elements of the pesher language be learnt. The Bacon-Shakspere story is a wonderful one, of a hero's journey from debasement to glory, and surely worth the expense of time and effort - not crippling, after all - to come to grips with.

Footnotes
1. Knight C. and Lomas R., The Second Messiah, Arrow Books, 1998.
2. Laurence Gardner, Realm of the Ring Lords, Viking, 2000.
3. Knight C. and Lomas R., ibid, 285-6.

Editor's note: Pesher is a Hebrew word meaning, (approximately), interpretation or exegesis.