Shakespeare's Rosicrucian Sources

Now, in the 21st century, we can decipher the clues left for us in paintings, suspicious death reports, poetry, plays, and 20th century analyses of 16th century documents. They are like a time capsule intended to be discovered at a later time.
    We can find many Freemason and Rosicrucian clues in the 1603 portrait of Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated “Venus and Adonis” in 1593.  It is called the “Tower Portrait” for its setting in the Tower Prison, from which Southampton had just emerged after serving a sentence for supporting the Essex Rebellion. Why was he eager to inform future generations that he was both a Rosicrucian and a Freemason? Is our present generation those “eyes not yet created” that Shakespeare predicted (in Sonnet 81) would make the “Fair Youth” immortal? 
    Was the Earl of Southampton Shakespeare’s patron, or was he the “Fair Youth” -- the natural son the poet could not acknowledge?  Shakespeare’s poems and plays show that he was a Freemason and a Rosicrucian. Yet there is a problem when we try to apply this knowledge to the Stratford resident, who had no connections to the secret societies. Research of the past century has identified the most probable user of the pen name “Shakespeare” as Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.  Oxford had an affair with Elizabeth in 1572-73, leading to gossip that they had a child being raised as the Third Earl of Southampton. To protect Elizabeth’s political persona of “Virgin Queen,” Oxford used pen names. His enemies tried to destroy all his manuscripts, and they quickly suppressed the 1609 edition of the Sonnets. But Freemasons and Rosicrucian friends hid the documents and preserved them until after the would-be censors were dead.
      The love Oxford felt for Elizabeth and his son are presented dramatically in the movie Anonymous directed by Roland Emmerich, and in Helen Heightsman Gordon’s The Secret Love Story in Shakespeare’s Sonnets [2008]. Though fictional, Emmerich’s movie was based on ten years of solid research. Gordon’s literary criticism interprets the sonnets as they relate to the life experiences of Edward de Vere, based on 20 years of research on Shakespeare’s authorship.
      Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to refute other theories of Shakespearean authorship, a brief explanatory note follows the conclusion.

Από την παρουσίαση στο οπισθόφυλλο του βιβλίου) "...Ένας αρχετυπικός μύθος. Μια εσωτερική παράδοση αιώνων που επιβίωσε και εξελίχτηκε παράλληλα με την επίσημη Ιστορία. Ένα μοναδικό στο είδος του βιβλίο που είχε εξαντληθεί και τώρα επανακυκλοφορεί σε αναθεωρημένη έκδοση... Παράλληλα με τη γνωστή ιστορία της Ευρώπης, στο βάθος, μια «άλλη» ιστορία υφαίνεται από τα πανάρχαια χρόνια μέχρι σήμερα, εξίσου σημαντική: η εξέλιξη του αρχετυπικού μυητικού μύθου. Από τις αρχαίες τελετές του Διόνυσου, του Ορφέα και της Μεγάλης Θεάς, μέχρι τον Χιράμ, τους Ναΐτες, τους Ροδόσταυρους, τους Τέκτονες, τους μυημένους στη Βασιλική Αψίδα και τους άλλους «Αγγέλους της Απώλειας», ο συγγραφέας ξετυλίγει το ιστορικό νήμα της απόκρυφης παράδοσης της Ευρώπης και αποκαλύπτει πώς επηρέασε το ιστορικό γίγνεσθαι της γηραιάς ηπείρου. Μέσα από άγνωστες ιστορίες αναζήτησης και πολυθρύλητα χαμένα μυστικά μας παρουσιάζει μια εξαιρετικά εμπεριστατωμένη μελέτη που έλλειπε από την ελληνική βιβλιογραφία!..

A Morten St. George Investigation. This essay will provide a hundred instances of multiple thematic parallels between short segments (typically a range of five to thirty words) of the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe on the one hand and equally short segments of the Nostradamus prophecies on the other. It will also be shown that the Nostradamus connection was widespread, stretching across all plays of both playwrights, irrespective of play classification as drama, history, or comedy. It could be a noteworthy discovery: though numerous Shakespearean sources have been identified by experts across the centuries, Nostradamus-to our knowledge-was never mentioned by anyone.

One of the less familiar dramas in the Shakespeare canon Measure for Measure has at its heart the God-like Rosicrucian figure of Duke Vincentio one akin to Prospero in The Tempest described by Dr Yates as a Rosicrucian manifesto. The role of the Duke is one of the longest roles in the Shakespeare canon. He is seen by many Shakespeare scholars as a surrogate of the dramatist himself with the joint Arden editors of Measure for Measure correctly maintaining that its author ‘sets up the correspondences between himself and the duke…extensively’, and that, Measure for Measure ‘persistently hints that the Duke is a playwright made in Shakespeare’s image’. Or put another way the secretive, complex and enigmatic character of Duke Vincentio, who adopts multiple masks, disguises and identities in Measure for Measure represents Shakespeare, that is to say, the true author of the play, who himself outside of the play itself, also adopts multiple identities and disguises behind his various literary living masks including the pseudonym of Shakespeare. The Duke is a complex dramatic portrait of his creator Francis Bacon, the supreme head of the Rosicrucian-Freemasonry Brotherhood, with the Duke in the play watching over Vienna just like Bacon, reflected in his Rosicrucian utopia New Atlantis, watches over the world and the future of mankind. In the play the Duke seeks to build a new, fair, and just society one based upon love just as Bacon with his Rosicrucian Brotherhood set in motion a plan for A Universal Reformation of the Whole World.
The intertwined themes of law and justice, sex and death, and the Rosicrucian-Freemasonry Brotherhood that are threaded all the way through Measure for Measure are mirrored and reflected in more than twenty of Bacon’s acknowledged writings and works, among them: unpublished manuscripts, private letters and speeches; his Meditationes Sacrae , Of Colours of Good and Evil, various essays including Of Judicature, Of Seditions and Troubles, and Of Death, one of the central themes of the play; as well as An Inquiry Concerning the Ways of Death and The History of Life and Death; the Gesta Grayorum and other dramatic devices; religious and political tracts including  A Confession of Faith and A Brief Discourse Touching the Happy Union of the Kingdom of England and Scotland; his major philosophical and scientific treatises The Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum and De Augmentis Scientiarum ; and several of his obscure or relatively unknown and unread legal treatises A Proclamation Touching the Marches, The Charge of Owen Indicted for High Treason, A Proposition Touching the Compiling and Amendments of Law, and Touching the Office of Constable; as well as his Rosicrucian utopia New Atlantis (or, The Land of the Rosicrucians) and the first Rosicrucian manifesto the Fama Fraternitatis.