Ron Heisler - Shakespeare and the Ethos of the Rosicrucians The Alchemy web site on Levity.com Ron Heisler - Two Worlds that Converged: Shakespeare and the Ethos of the Rosicrucians Article originally published in The Hermetic Journal, 1990. Two Worlds that Converged: Shakespeare and the Ethos of the Rosicrucians Ron Heisler © In a 1986 article on "Shakespeare and the Rosicrucians", I dissected a late play that Shakespeare wrote jointly with John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen. Relying mainly on internal evidence, I found some very strong Rosicrucian affinities, particularly the striking scene in which a quasi-religious ceremony takes place in the temple of Diana, at which a rose plays a crucial role. Emilia declares that "a rose is best" and then explains: "It is the very emblem of a maid: For when the west wind courts her gently How modestly she blows and paints the sun With her chaste blushes! When the north comes near her, Rude and impatient, then, like chastity, She locks her beauties in her bud again And leaves him to base briars." 1 (II. ii.) The play as we know it probably was premiered in early 1613 and I felt it somewhat of a coincidence that at Christmas 1611 the great Rosicrucian Michael Maier sent a "greetings card" to James I, which expressed the cryptic hope "May the Rose not be gnawed by the Canker of the North Wind…" Since 1986 I have had some leisure to explore Shakespeare's friends and acquaintances in depth, seeking for Rosicrucian clues - and hoping against hope that for once literature's greatest, most opaque and most secretive figure will have relaxed his guard. Readers must judge the results for themselves. Richard Field Born at Stratford-on-Avon on November 16th 1561, Richard Field is presumed to have attended the local grammar school. This probably accounted for his becoming England's outstanding printer-linguist. In 1579 he came to London to be bound to the printer George Bishop; it was agreed, however, that he should serve the first six of the seven years apprenticeship with the great Huguenot printer, Thomas Vautrollier, a decision which coloured his future career greatly. In 1587 he married Vautrollier's widow, Jacqueline, acquiring a backlist of titles of considerable quality, with an evident Protestant emphasis. He prospered: not the richest of the London printer-booksellers, he was one of the more successful by the time he died in December 1624. His status is underlined by the fact that he served as Master of the Stationers' Company in 1619 and again in 1622.2 Field's relationship with Shakespeare is illuminated, alas, by a sparsity of hard facts. His father Henry died at Stratford-on-Avon in 1592; John Shakespeare, the Bard's father, helped to value Henry's goods and chattels on the 25th August.3 On the 18th April 1592 Field entered Venus and Adonis on the Stationers' Register, which he printed in a fine first edition. In 1594 he printed the first edition of The Rape of Lucrece, which was published, however, by John Harrison the elder. The quality of both first editions has been usually attributed to Field's personal interest in doing justice to the poetry of his friend. The last "hard fact" in our litany concerns Love's Martyr, or Rosalin's Complaint… by Robert Chester; published in 1601, it has appended poems by Marston, Chapman, Ben Jonson and "Ignoto" - and Shakespeare's most mysterious poem, The Phoenix and the Turtle. Sold by Edward Blount, the frontispiece shows Fields's printing device. Strangely, he was not called upon to print the Sonnets. Cymbeline was probably written in early 1610 and Shakespeare includes an allusion, which is perceived as referring to Field - a very private joke indeed. When Imogene discovers the headless corpse of what she believes to be her beloved Posthumous (IV. ii.), Caius Lucius asks her, "…say his name, good friend." She replies, "Richard du Champ" - Richard of the Field.4 The extent of the influence of Giordano Bruno on Shakespeare's thought has been debated for over a century now, principally occasioned by Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy. Unquestionably the phrases "the whips and scorns of time, the proud man's contumely" are distilled from Bruno's Oratio valedictoria on leaving Wittenberg university, where he complains of "the whips and scorns of vile and foolish men who, although they are really beasts in the likeness of men, in the pride of their good fortune, are full of evil arrogance." But many other parallels - to Bruno's general philosophical weltanschauung - have been detected in Hamlet.5 Field's apprenticeship to Vautrollier is important here, although mystery swathes the whole issue like Scotch mist. Bruno published at least four tracts in England in 1584/5, and his attack on the reactionaries of Oxford, although probably printed abroad, was surely aimed at an English market. But none of the tracts came off Vautrollier's printing presses. However, early in the 18th century Thomas Baker wrote to the great bibliographer Ames that Vautrollier "was the printer of Jordanus Brunus in the year 1584, for which he fled, and the next year being at Edinburgh in Scotland, he first taught that nation the way of good printing, and there staid until such time as by the intercession of friends he had got his pardon…" Alas, most of the papers of the Star Chamber have been destroyed for this period, and Vautrollier's actual offense is impossible to determine, although, according to the records of the Stationers' Company, Vautrollier "at the time of his decease was noe printer", and they link the matter to a Star Chamber decree. Vautrollier's offense must have been very great, since he had acquired over the years patrons of the greatest influence at court, including Lord Burghley. From the press of John Charlewood came the "English" tracts of Bruno - but perhaps to the commission of Vautrollier.6 Yet Vautrollier it was who printed the work on the "Art of Memory" by Bruno's Scottish friend, Alexander Dicson, in 1585 and who probably published Thomas Watson's tract on the same subject in the same year. Moreover, again in the same year, he published a work by yet another friend of Bruno's, the great jurist, Alberigo Gentile. I am totally sceptical towards any argument of mere coincidence as an explanation of the fact that Hamlet's great "To be or not to be" soliloquy is clearly based not merely on writings of Bruno subsequently associated with Vautrollier, but also upon a text indisputably printed by him, Dr Timothy Bright's Treatise on Melancholy (1586) which eventually inspired Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Bright is notable for more that one reason. In 1590 Rudolf Goclenius published at Marburg University, which later became a spawning ground for Rosicrucians, a compilation with a contribution by Bright. And a generation later the Yorkshireman Dr Edmund Deane published Spadacrene Anglica. Or the English Spaw-Fountaine (1626), in which he reminisced about "Doctor Timothy Bright of happy memory a learned Physitian (while he lived, my very kind friend, and familiar acquaintance)…"7 Deane was probably a Rosicrucian and almost certainly Robert Fludd's friend. He edited eight tracts by the alchemist Samuel Norton, which were published at Frankfurt on Main by Fludd's friend, William Fitzer. A letter survives in which Deane addresses Theodorus Gravius, chemical assistant to Dr Richard Napier of Lynford, the magician, as his "loveing brother". Of all Field's later publications, the most intriguing is the Janua Linguarum Quadrilinguis. Or a Messe of Tongues, which his friend Matthew Lownes printed in 1617. A polyglot dictionary of phrases, originating from the Irish college at Salamanca, it was dedicated to Prince Charles and signed "Io. Barbier Parifiensis". Behind the French pseudonym stood an Alsatian, his identity revealed only in the introduction to the Janua Linguarum Silinguis, published at Strasbourg in 1629 by Eberhard Zetzner. Isaac Habrecht lets on in his 1629 preface that he himself had contributed sections to the 1617 London version. Habrecht is an important figure in our ongoing discussion of international Rosicrucian cross-currents. A physician and mathematician, he died in 1633. Like the main author of the Rosicrucian manifestos, J.V. Andreae, he became vehemently anti-Rosicrucian, conducting attacks under the sobriquet of Hisiam sub Cruce Atheniensem. But his Eines Newen ungewohnlichen Sterns, oder Cometen… in 1618, one of a flood of works on the significance of comets, suggests to me that we should qualify our general impression of his attitude. The tract refers to the cometary observations of John Dee and Thomas Digges in 1572 and to the fall of the Earl of Somerset in the Overbury affair; it also includes three references to the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, including a comment on their interpretation of cometary phenomena of 1600 and 1604.8 The neutral tone of these suggests to me that Habrecht at the time of writing had not quite given up on the Rosicrucians. It was he who, in VIII Miraculum Artis, claimed that Robert Fludd was the model for the brother in the Fama who had cured a Duke of Norfolk of leprosy. On the 24th June 1623 Matthias Bernegger, a member of Andreae's Societas Christiana in 1620, who, like Habrecht, worked in Strasbourg, informed Zincgref that Habrecht had obtained the poems of Georg Rudolff Weckherlin.9 Weckherlin's diary of the 1630's suggests that he may have been a Rosicrucian. An Anglophile, he spent three consecutive years in England between 1607 and 1614, probably in the service of the Wurtemberg ambassador. In 1616 he again visited England, marrying an English bride; in 1624 he became an under-secretary of state at Whitehall.10 Even if Habrecht had never visited England, it is conceivable that Weckherlin may have acted as his intermediary. Field had a zest for the occasional medical book. In 1594 he published John Hester the Paracelsian's The pearl of practice… for phisicke and chirurgerie, which had been expended by John Fourestier. Hester had been Gabriel Harvey's friend. The book was dedicated to Sir George Carey, Sir Walter Ralegh's friend. Hester's Hundred and Fourteen Experiments was actually dedicated to Ralegh. In 1605 Field published Christopher Wirsung's The general practice of physicke, translated and augmented in the English by Dr James Mosan. Mosan was to become a personal physician to Moritz, the Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel; it is inconceivable that the first editions of the Rosicrucian manifestos could have been published in Kassel without Moritz's express approval, who was later rumoured to be a Rosicrucian. That Field and Dr Matthew Gwinne were friends is highly probable. Gwinne was the associate of John Florio, Giordano Bruno and Robert Fludd. In 1605 Field published Gwinne's two Gresham College lectures and in 1612 he brought out Gwinne's devastating dissection of Francis Anthony's aurum potabile, In assertorem…, done at the behest of the College of Physicians. Fludd's friend, Dr William Paddy, was one of two censors approving the book. Gwinne, incidentally, was a minor playwright. On the 27th August 1605 James I was greeted at Oxford by a Gwinne playlet in which three sibyls prophesied that the descendants of Banquo - among whom James was numbered - would reign for ever ("imperium sine fine"). Kenneth Muir accepts that this was the probable model for the prophesies of the witches in Shakespeare's Scottish play, Macbeth.11 Two other authors in Field's list cry out for special mention. In 1604 he printed a work by Robert Fludd's patron, Dr John Thornborough, lauding the union of England and Scotland under James I. But of far greater significance is his close association with William Bedwell, a fine mathematician and pioneer Arabist. Between 1612 and 1615 Field published four of Bedwell's books, three being of a mathematical nature. Bedwell is an important link with the Rosicrucian world. Of Robert Fludd, Thomas Hearne observed in 1709 that "he was much admir'd by the famous Mr [John] Selden, chiefly, I think for this reason, because he was of the Rosa-Crucian sect, and addicted himself to Chymistry, of wch Mr Selden himself was an admirer…" Now Bedwell was in the habit of borrowing books from John Selden and vice-versa. And in 1612 Bedwell lodged at Leiden at the house of Thomas and Govaert Basson, the publishers.12 It was from the Basson press that Fludd's first two tracts defending the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross poured forth. Edward Alleyn One of the two great tragedians of his age, Edward Alleyn, the founder of Dulwich College, led the Lord Admiral's Men for many years. Between 1590 and 1593, when that troupe seems either to have merged - or gone into partnership - with Shakespeare's company, Lord Strange's Men, he played the title-role in the Bard's Titus Andronicus. It was the Admiral's Men who performed Palamon and Arcite several times in 1594, of which no text survives and for which the author is unknown, and which I strongly suspect (a) was by Shakespeare and (b) was the original script from which The Two Noble Kinsmen arose. Whatever the truth, Alleyn almost certainly played one of the leads in 1594. There is a mysterious Hamlet - possibly by the Bard - being played in that year also. Alleyn probably bagged the part. An alchemist, Alleyn provided medical potions for friends. His diary record the purchase of a pewter limbeck on the 29th June 1621. He was a patient of Robert Fludd's friend, William Harvey. He bought pills made to Harvey's prescriptions in 1619 and 1620. He even dined with Harvey on the 30th May 1619. In 1619 he took a lotion prescribed by another of Fludd's close friends, Dr Gulston. On the 6th August 1620 he dined with Dr Matthew Gwinne. It is not surprising, in the light of these connections, that we find him dining on the 7th April 1620 with "doc: Fludd". Alleyn's father-in-law, again of the Lord Admiral's Men, Philip Henslowe, was paying rent to Fludd's father, Sir Thomas Fludd, on the 27th April 1599. That Alleyn was a keen Palatinist is not unexpected. His wife subscribed to the Queen of Bohemia's fund on the 8th August 1620.13 When fifty seven years of age, Alleyn shocked the social world by marrying the twenty year old daughter of a keen Palatinist, who had come under Rosicrucian influence, John Donne. The Digges Family, Thomas Russell and Sir Robert Killigrew In 1590 Richard Field produced an edition of Leonard Digges's An arithmetical warlike treatise named Stratioticos "revised, corrected and augmented" by Leonard's son, the great mathematician Thomas Digges.The Digges family were connected with the Bard over many years, it would seem. It has often been wondered where he got the obscure Danish names of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, those famous characters in Hamlet. They were in fact ancestors of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. In 1590 Brahe sent a letter to Thomas Savile, in which he desired to be remembered to John Dee and Thomas Digges. With the letter went four copies of an engraving done of his portrait - a portrait on which was to be found his ancestors' names.14 Thomas Digges died and his widow, Anne, married Thomas Russell, who acquired property near Stratford-on-Avon. Shakespeare named him as an overseer of his will. For some years Russell lived at Hartlebury, a close neighbour of the occupant of Hartlebury Castle, Dr John Thornborough, Bishop of Worcester. The bishop's daughter, Jane, married one Francis Finch - and Russell planned to make the young man his heir. Thornborough, and alchemical writer, was also a patient of Dr John Hall, the Bard's son-in-law. He was Robert Fludd's patron, Fludd visiting him at Hartlebury. A work Thornborough published is replete with references to Fludd's writings. Simon Forman, the magician-physician, had been Thornborough's servant at Oxford.15 Richard Field the printer - like members of Shakespeare's troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men - was a patient of Forman's incidentally. On the 30th August 1596 a "Richard Field", described as being 37 (actually, he was born in 1561), visited the physician: he had swallowed a gold coin which "lies in the pit of the mouth of the stomach".16 But we have digressed from the Digges family. Thomas Digges's son, Leonard, achieved immortality by contributing a good poem to the first Folio of Shakespeare's works, whilst his other son, Dudley, is of distinct Rosicrucian interest. He was a close friend of the radical Sir John Eliot, whom Charles I had goaled for his oppositional activities in parliament, and in whose handwriting there exists apparently a manuscript in English of the Rosicrucian manifesto, the Fama. When Eliot languished in the Tower, Sir Dudley Digges wrote him a letter that began with the words, "Deere Brother…" What would we not give to know for sure in what sense Eliot was Dudley's "Brother"!17 Thomas Russell's family connections were extensive, to say the least. His half-brother was the minor radical parliamentarian Sir Maurice Berkeley. Berkeley married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir William Killigrew, thus acquiring as brother-in-law Sir Robert Killigrew (1579-1633). Sir Robert leads right to the heart of English Rosicrucian activity. Given to making potions and cordials, Sir Robert had a strong scientific bent. Constantine Huygens, the Dutch savant and collector of Rosicrucian books, was frequently at Killigrew's home in 1622 and 1623, where he met the brilliant Rosicrucian inventor Cornelius Drebbel, the widow of Sir Walter Ralegh and John Donne.18 It is worth noting, in passing, that Killigrew had his youngest boy, Henry, educated in "grammar learning" by Thomas Farnaby;19 Richard Field published Lucan's Pharsalia in 1618 - and Farnaby had annotated it for him. I have recounted in some detail elsewhere the squalid scandal of Sir Thomas Overbury's murder and how Michael Maier was drawn into the affair. Sir Robert Killigrew features in the scenario. In May 1613, after visiting Ralegh in the Tower, he was hailed by the incarcerated Overbury - an old friend - from a window. James I had Killigrew committed to the Fleet prison for about a month for this illicit communication. When the scandal eventually broke into the public arena, it transpired that the principal accused, the Earl of Somerset, had obtained white powders from Killigrew for Overbury's use - and claimed that one of these had effected the murderous deed. The charge did not stand up, however.20 Some of the pathetic letters the desperate, dying Overbury had smuggled out of the Tower have survived; several reveal that Michael Maier was ministering to him. At the end of one of the latter, Overbury has forged the signature of "Robert Killigrew" - obviously a ploy to fool his captors, probably done with Killigrew's foreknowledge.21 That Killigrew knew Maier is most likely. When the storm broke in 1615 and the murder trials began, Sir Dudley Digges was ready to give evidence. Overbury had been sent to the Tower originally by James I for refusing to accept an embassy to Russia. Overbury's friends maintained that the refusal had been contrived by Somerset in order to get Overbury into James's bad books. Digges "voluntarily at the arraignment in open Court upon his oath witnessed how Sir Thomas had imparted to him his readinesse to be imployed in an Ambassage." A "Robert Killigrew" turns up in yet another Rosicrucian context. One of the more important verse compilations of the 1620's in the British Library is Sloane MS 1792. It includes many poems by John Donne, Dr Richard Corbett, Ben Jonson and others - and a good copy of the second of Shakespeare's Sonnets, which is markedly different from that published in the 1609 edition, but which is, nevertheless, wholly the Bard's composition.22 On a covering leaf is inscribed "Robert Killigrew his booke witnes by his maiesties ape George Harifon." Following the Martin Marprelate furore at the end of the 1580's a "martin" became synonymous in popular… truncated (16,880 more characters in archive)