So, knocked off horse again, I checked my wounds, got back on, scanned the horizon, and found that if you had a college degree you could substitute teach for the county. Went through the background checks, got the vaccine shot, and I started subbing. From Kindergarten to 12th Grade, whatever class needed a sub that day, that’s where I went. Of all the grades, 5th and 6th Graders were the worst: too old to listen like those younger, not old enough to be more composed—that wild, chaotic moment of self-awareness before puberty. When I’d get assigned in the morning, and it was a 5th or 6th grade class, I always took an espresso shot in a can. Kids can be exhausting.
So I’m subbing, and it turned out there was a stretch where the high-schoolers were learning Shakespeare—which to English speakers today, it’s like having to learn a foreign language. You have to do something painful before finding out what the stories are, so you can have the fun of discussion about what happens. Most English speakers are traumatized with Shakespeare in grade school, and hope to never hear about it again. Yet, anyone today who can competently talk about Shakespeare and the stories told, and how many of the characters can be used to model and explain contemporary persons and situations—at a bar or dinner table, that person is deferred to. What most don’t know, is that if you just knew the story, you yourself might have a more valid take than a modern scholar, or at the least agree with anyone who already got it right. Most of us hear the name and count the minutes until the subject is moved away from.
What I taught them is that every lyric, poem, play, novel, or any other text is composed of two things: sound and sense. How does it sound and what does it say? Some writing sounds beautiful but makes little sense—or is not meant to—just language to open the imagination. Some writing is informative and instructional—aimed at nothing but sense—without a purposefully accentuated rhythm of vowels and consonants. Shakespeare is known for combining both sound and sense, but translations are academic, paraphrase, alter what doesn’t need not be, and aren’t script theatre and film professionals can build something on, so I decided to write a translation that could be produced, and which in classrooms—the story—what actually happens—could be gotten to without banging into footnotes. I didn’t care if they knew much about Shakespeare, I just cared if they knew a couple of the stories, and what they thought the stories said about life. So I took the two most important plays, Hamlet and Macbeth, and translated them. Took three years to complete, where I left as much as possible unaltered, so the audience will feel like they're experiencing Elizabethan speech but actually comprehend the sense of what the character is saying. Prince Hamlet is a character whose life gets upended when his father is murdered. He’s next if he doesn’t put on a disguise—an antic disposition—to baffle the murderer and keep from getting killed. He is a character on a stage of corruption, and because the world is still corrupt, means we are all Prince Hamlet—we are all figuring out how to survive to this day.
Macbeth to me is about what happens when you lose sight of the Stoic precept that there’re only two things in life: those that you can control, and those that you can’t; and all you can control is what you say and what you do.
The translation of Shakespeare led me to the lair of a giant monster. I finally found out why the political science had failed, and why I might try again.
There might be a chance to get them produced and somehow close to my muse—who by that point was so far away removed in both time and space, that she should have faded from my spirit.
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In the British Museum is a notebook dating to 1594, containing one and a half thousand entries of words, phrases, salutations, turns of speech, proverbs, metaphor, aphorism, and various moral/philosophical observations, drawn from the Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew and English; also lines and verse from poets and dramatists such as Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Horace, and others.
In 1883 a scholar published a work which reproduces a full transcript of the notebook—passages from the poems and plays of Shakespeare. To an impartial mind it confirms beyond doubt that Francis Bacon used his private literary storehouse for literary works.
The Northumberland Manuscript 1596-97
The Northumberland manuscript is a contemporary Elizabethan document containing both the names of Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare. It was discovered 1867 in a bundle of writings and works belonging to Bacon. It’s the only manuscript where the names Bacon and Shakespeare appear together in a contemporary document. Various forms of Bacon, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare and William Shakespeare are written across its cover. No part of the manuscript was written after 1597, yet William Shakespeare was not yet publicly known as a dramatist, as the pseudonym Shakespeare first appeared on the 1598. Before Shakespeare was known as a dramatist, appear references to plays and poems by Shakespeare in a manuscript belonging to Francis Bacon.
Then there’s the copy of a 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles, a vast history of Britain with and undisputed source for many Shakespeare plays. It’s what Stratfordians claim as proof, that the uneducated person from Avon had read it, then dreamt up and wrote the works. In 1938 orthodox Shakespeare scholar Dr. Clara Longworth de Chambrun announced a momentous discovery, ‘Shakespeare’s Own Copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles’. She had been contacted by Captain Jaggard who told her he had a copy of the 1587 Holinshed Chronicles and after seeing several marginal annotations, surmised it had been Shakespeare’s own personal copy. The copy was from the library of a relation of the Bacons, and examined was in no doubt it was used as source for Shakespeare’s history plays. She consulted The Northumberland Manuscript, and says, ‘. . .on the tattered index which once served as a cover to several manuscripts, we find quantities of notes, scribblings and pen trials in the same hand as on the colophon page of Shakespeare’s Holinshed [where]…the poets name is repeatedly inscribed both abbreviated and in full. . . a glance at the page suffices to convince any one familiar with the Skipwith Holinshed that book and paper belonged to the same man.’ The ornamental monograms that appear on the Holinshed and the Northumberland Manuscript and explains they, ‘are more individual than a mere signature, and. . .might well indicate Shakespeare as the possessor of both.’ So, in 1938 we have an orthodox Shakespeare scholar emphatically confirming that the unique Shakespeare’s Holinshed and the Northumberland Manuscript originate from the same person.
When Henry Seymour, of The Francis Bacon Society saw the Holinshed monograms he knew they were, ‘Bacon’s hall-marks and have always been associated with books and manuscripts belonging to or written by Francis Bacon.’ Les Tenures de Monsieur Littleton 1591 is just one work annotated by Francis Bacon.
So where is Shakespeare’s Holinshed today? A work reputably belonging to our poet Shakespeare with very distinctive, unusual markings that also appear on Bacon’s Northumberland manuscript and works owned by Bacon is seemingly missing. The question is, where is it and why is it missing? This is currently an ongoing investigation.
Dering Manuscript (c.1596)
It is little known that there exists an early manuscript version of the play Henry IV. This manuscript is the earliest extant manuscript of a Shakespeare play. Discovered in 1844 in the collection part of the library of Sir Edward Dering, an antiquarian with an interest in literature and drama, and patronized by Francis Bacon’s mother Lady Anne Bacon. Dering was a close friend and relative of Francis Bacon. The so-called Dering manuscript is a single-five act Shakespeare play of Henry IV, earlier than the first printed quarto issued in 1598 and the quarto edition of The Second part of Henrie the fourth printed in 1600. The mauscript represents the play as Bacon originally composed it when it was one play before developing the original version into two separate parts.
The Shakespeare First Folio 1623
On 8th November 1623 Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard entered on the Stationers’ Register sixteen Shakespeare plays which had not been previously published. Another twenty previously published plays were added giving a total of thirty-six dramas in the First Folio, divided into Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, an enormous volume of more than nine hundred pages, the greatest secular publication in the history of English literature.
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