The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (69 page)

There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls,

Doing more murders in this loathsome world

Than these poor compounds.

In a word, the Stratfordian view requires us to write our great dramatist down as a hypocrite. The attitude of William Shakspere to money matters may have had about it all the “sobriety of personal aims and sanity of mental attitude” claimed for it. In which case, the more clearly he had represented his own attitude in his works the greater would have been their fidelity to objective fact. Money is a social institution, created by the genius of the human race to facilitate the conduct of life; and, under normal conditions, it is entitled to proper attention and respect. Under given conditions, however, it may so imperil the highest human interests, as to justify an intense reaction against it, and even to call for repudiation and contempt from those moral guides, amongst whom we include the great poets, who are concerned with the higher creations of man’s intellectual and moral nature. Such, we judge, was the dramatist’s attitude to money.

The points treated so far have been somewhat on the surface; and most, if not all, might be found adequately supported by other writers. There are, however, two other matters on which it would be well to have Shakespeare’s attitude defined, if such were possible, before proceeding to the next stage of the enquiry. These are his mental attitude towards Woman, and his relation to Catholicism.

Ruskin’s treatment of the former point in
Sesame and Lilies
is well known, but not altogether convincing. He, and others who adopt the same line of thought, seem not sufficiently to discriminate between what comes as a kind of aura from the medieval chivalries and what is distinctly personal. Moreover, the business of a dramatist being to represent every variety of human character, it must be doubtful whether any characterization represents his views as a whole, or whether, indeed, it may not only represent a kind of Utopian idealism. Some deference, too, must be paid by a playwriter to the mind and requirements of his contemporary public; and the literature of the days of Queen Elizabeth does certainly attest a respectful treatment of Woman at that period. In quotations from Shakespeare on this theme, however, one is more frequently met with suggestions of Woman’s frailty and changeableness. In his greatest play,
Hamlet
, there are but two women; one weak in character, the other weak in intellect, and Hamlet trusts neither.

Shakespeare, however, is a writer of other things besides dramas. He has left us a large number of sonnets, and the sonnet, possibly more than any other form of composition, has been the vehicle for the expression of the most intimate thoughts and feelings of poets. Almost infallibly, one might say, do a man’s sonnets directly reveal his soul. The sonnets of “Shakespeare”, especially, have a ring of reality about them quite inconsistent with the fanciful non-biographical interpretation which Stratfordianism would attach to them. Examining, then, these sonnets we find that there are, in fact, two sets of them. By far the larger and more important set embracing no less than one hundred and twenty-six out of a total of one hundred and fifty-four, is addressed to a young man, and express a tenderness, which is probably without parallel in the recorded expressions of emotional attachment of one man to another. At the same time there occurs in this very set the following reference to woman:

A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted, Mistrust

Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion; and

A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted affection.

With shifting change, as is false woman’s fashion;

An eye more bright than theirs, less false unrolling.

The second set of sonnets, comprising only twenty-eight, as against one hundred and twenty-six in the first set, is probably the most painful for Shakespeare admirers to read, of all that “Shakespeare” has written. It is the expression of an intensely passionate love for some woman; but love of a kind which cannot be accurately described otherwise than as morbid emotion; a combination of affection and bitterness; tenderness, without a touch of faith or of true admiration.

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

Which, like two spirits, do suggest me still.

The better angel is a man right fair.

The worser spirit, a woman, coloured ill.

In loving thee (the woman) thou knowest I am forsworn,

And all my honest faith in thee is lost.

I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,

Who art as black as bell and dark as night.

Whether this mistrust was constitutional or the outcome of unfortunate experiences is irrelevant to our present purpose. The fact of its existence is what matters. Whilst, then, we have comparatively so little bearing on the subject, and that little of such a nature, we shall not be guilty of over-statement if we say that though he was capable of great affection, and had a high sense of the ideal in womanhood, his faith in the women with whom he was directly associated was weak, and his relationship towards them far from perfect.

To deduce the dramatist’s religious point of view from his plays is perhaps the most difficult task of all. Taking the general religious conditions of his time into consideration there are only two broad currents to be reckoned with. Puritanism had no doubt already assumed appreciable proportions as a further development of the Protestant idea; but, for our present purpose, the broader currents of Catholicism and Protestantism are all that need be considered. In view of the fact that Protestantism was at that time in the ascendant, whilst Catholicism was under a cloud, a writer of plays intended for immediate representation whose leanings were Protestant would be quite at liberty to expose his personal leanings, whilst a pronounced Roman Catholic would need to exercise greater personal restraint. Now it is impossible to detect in “Shakespeare” any Protestant bias or any support of those principles of individualism in which Protestantism has its roots. On the other hand, he seems as catholic as the circumstances of his times and the conditions under which he worked would allow him to be. Macaulay has the following interesting passage on the point:

The partiality of Shakespeare for Friars is well known. In “Hamlet” the ghost complains that he died without extreme unction, and, in defiance of the article which condemns the doctrine of purgatory, declares that he is “Confined to fast in fires,/Till the foul crimes, done in his days of nature, Are burnt and purged away.” These lines, we suspect, would have raised a tremendous storm in the theatre at any time during the reign of Charles the Second. They were clearly not written by a zealous Protestant for zealous Protestants.

We may leave his attitude towards Catholicism at that; except to add that, if he was really a Catholic, the higher calls of his religion to devotion and to discipline probably met with only an indifferent response. It is necessary, moreover, to point out that Auguste Comte in his “Positive Polity” refers to “Shakespeare” as a sceptic.

To the nine points enumerated at the end of the last chapter we may therefore add the following:

1) A man with Feudal connections.

2) A member of the higher aristocracy.

3) Connected with Lancastrian supporters.

4) An enthusiast for Italy.

5) A follower of sport (including falconry).

6) A lover of music.

7) Loose and improvident in money matters.

8) Doubtful and somewhat conflicting in his attitude to woman.

9) Of probable Catholic leanings, but touched with scepticism.

THE SHRINERS

Less well known as the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, the Shriners are a group of Freemasons fond of a drink. Seriously: the order was founded in New York City in 1871 by Doctor Walter Fleming as a club for Freemasons who liked to wine and dine at the Knickerbocker Cottage, a popular eaterie.

Numbers remained small until Fleming decided to give the Shriners an exotic makeover, and invented a long and completely specious pedigree which stretched all the way back to Arabia in the Middle Ages. He also devised a salutation (
Es Selamu Aleikum!
) and decided that members needed to wear a red fez. Offering “water from the well of ZumZum” (alcohol), fun, fraternity and dressing-up, the Shriner order expanded dramatically. A sobering up of a sort came in the late 1880s when the order, perhaps in recompense for its previous wild partying, turned to charitable works on a heroic scale. Currently, more than twenty Shriner hospitals and clinics provide free treatment for children in the USA.

Money was no object for Shriners, who tended to be well-off businessmen, willing to pay for the local Shriner Temple’s country club-like facilities, in addition to giving handsome donations to the order’s charitable projects. Unfortunately for the Shriners they, like other Masonic Orders composed primarily of WASPs, found themselves out of step with society by about 1972, and membership began to decline. To make joining easier, in 2000 the order dropped the long-standing requirement that Shriners must hold either the York Rite or high Scottish Rite degrees of Freemasonry. Still the membership dwindles.

The oddity is that the more the Shriners have lessened in real numbers, the more their role in conspiracy theory has grown. Aside from the small matter of being the
real
gang behind the
New World Order
/the
Bavarian Illuminati
, the Shriners also happen to house a working model of the Ark of the Covenant – yes, the Ark of the Covenant made by Moses to God’s specifications – in their HQ. Unsurprisingly, ownership of the Ark facsimile gives the order special powers, though Yahweh may be surprised that the Shriners use it to communicate with aliens.

Outsiders may consider this less embarrassing than the clowning around in small cars that Shriners do on parades across America, usually likened in horror to watching dads dance at weddings.

Further Reading

www.shrinershq.org

SOCIETY OF JESUS

The “Societas Jesu” was founded in Paris in 1534 by Basque priest Ignatius Lopez de Loyola, later canonized as Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Their original charter ordered them to “Enter upon hospital and missionary work in Jerusalem” – so far so good – but also “to go without questioning wherever the pope might direct”. The “extreme oath” of absolute fealty sworn by the Jesuits to an infallible pope, started up the earliest conspiracy theories about the order, namely that they were the white robed one’s personal political instruments. The accusation was not baseless; in Stuart Britain, the Jesuits were absolutely implicated in the most unChristian-like Gunpowder Plot to blow up James I in 1603.

Yet, even in Catholic countries the Jesuits ran foul of the authorities, who distrusted their missionary zeal, while the so-called Monita Secreta, a set of instructions from the Jesuits’ “Superior General” detailing how the ascetic Society could gain illicit wealth and power, condemned them as hypocrites and megalomaniacs. The Monita Secreta was almost certainly a forgery, but the damage was done; by 1773, half the national governments of Europe had successfully lobbied for the order to be suppressed. When the Jesuits were allowed to reform in 1814, allegations that the Jesuits under their “Black Pope” ran the Catholic Church – and not vice versa – went wild. The Black Pope nickname for the Superior General originally came from his dark vestments; in anti-Jesuit circles the “Black” referred to his dabbling in the devil’s arts. Murder, assassination, civil war, revolution, coups were all assumed to be the stock-in-trades of the Black Pope. And so, the Jesuits had their moment on the stage as the bogeymen of the Western world: in Eugene Sue’s 1844 novel
The Wandering Jew
, the Society was depicted as being “bent on world domination by all available means”. According to Sue, the Society was even more dangerous than … the Freemasons and the Jews.