A three-part series for the 400th anniversary commemoration of Sir Francis Bacon (1626–2026)
By Dr Edi Bilimoria
With warm acknowledgement to the Francis Bacon Society for their unwavering dedication to Bacon’s life, works and legacy.
From Concealed Authorship to Enduring Purpose
If Part I challenged inherited assumptions, and Part II disclosed the hidden work, Part III turns to the question that concerns us most directly: why does this matter now?
The return to Bacon is not antiquarian. We live amid unprecedented technical power accompanied by moral disorientation – information without wisdom, innovation without ethical depth, and knowledge increasingly divorced from meaning. Properly understood, the Baconian project offers a counter-current: a vision of disciplined reason allied to reverence, and imagination understood not as illusion, but as a mode of truth.
It is in this light that the Shakespearean corpus must finally be approached. Not as a literary curiosity, nor as a battlefield of attribution, but as one of the most refined instruments ever fashioned for the education of the evolving human soul.
Esotericism in the Shakespeare Plays
At the time ‘Shakespeare’ was writing, the esoteric tradition was strong in England and part of the atmosphere that ‘Shakespeare’ breathed. There was an esoteric society, sometimes known as the School of Night, consisting of noblemen, occultists and poets, that met in London in the 1590s. George Chapman, the translator of Homer, and Sir Walter Raleigh were both associated with it. ‘Shakespeare’ was also writing as the dawn of the Rosicrucian Enlightenment was breaking. We have no way of knowing whether Shakespeare of Stratford studied in an esoteric school or whether he gave much credit to them.
There is light to be shed, but it comes from another direction. There is esoteric meaning in the Shakespeare Plays. Rudolf Steiner said that all genuine art is a reflection of the human experience of the divine. That means that the Author of those immortal Plays, the most genuine of artists, can light up our understanding of the esoteric.
While the Plays represent human nature more universally than any other writer, the characters are so individual that we often feel we know them better than we do some of our friends. There are dozens that we recognize as themselves after only a few lines. Characters in most plays are definite personalities, and they simply unfold as we watch them. In Shakespeare, there is an immediate recognition of character. It is alive. In the mature soliloquies, for instance, we see not just the exposition of someone’s thought, but the moving, forming process of Thinking itself. The men and women in the Plays look back on themselves, contradict themselves, re-conceive themselves, and even re-create themselves.
No one embodies better than the Author the paradox that the more individual you are the more universal you are. This is a mystery that, if touched imaginatively, can direct us to true individuality, to the source of the self. It can take us back, as T. S. Eliot said, ‘to where we started and know the place for the first time.’ But there is another reason why the Author sheds light on the esoteric. He lived from 1561 to 1626 at the sunrise of the Renaissance, of the Modern Age, of what Rudolf Steiner has termed the Consciousness Soul Age. The Consciousness Soul is the part of us by virtue of which we acquire a separate and independent consciousness, a separate mental existence, a self-consciousness.
This whole experience of the Consciousness Soul is present just below the surface of the Author’s waking consciousness. As the British philosopher and poet Owen Barfield said, his imagination was ‘secretly pregnant with the whole nature and history of the age that was to follow him. He was unconsciously the bearer of consciousness.’
It is in the mood, the whisperings, the vapours, that we find the Consciousness Soul in Shakespeare, never in exposition or analysis. There is no ‘occult doctrine’. Shakespeare has nothing to ‘teach’ us himself.
This is what Keats meant by negative capability, the ability to inhabit other persons, other places, and other ideas while remaining in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without any irritable reaching out after fact and reason. Without judging. Without giving in to the seductions of reductionism, of one-dimensional thinking. It means a turning, a reversal of the will from grasping to receiving, enabling it to touch a universal sphere. It embodies the qualities of wonder and reverence which Rudolf Steiner sets as a precondition for knowledge of the spirit in How To Know Higher Worlds. It is artistic selflessness to the highest degree.
The Consciousness Soul is a living idea, and so it is always being revealed in different ways. Those very differences disclose its actual unity, its universality, what it is always coming to be.
There is a very general sort of trajectory in the sequence of Shakespeare’s plays. His genres are the remnants of the myths that long ago replaced direct perception of the spiritual world. In Shakespeare and others, they survive as narrative arcs, or one might say, musical keys.
The plays are generally placed in one of four categories: histories, comedies, tragedies and romances. The recurring theme of the histories, represented by the symbol of the crown, is the effort to transcend the confines of the lower self and to realise the higher self. This is the project of the Consciousness Soul. The shadow side of that theme is the question of the legitimacy of the wearers of the crown and the burden of loneliness that the crown brings.
The comedies generally follow the pattern of the Christian myth of loss and recovery. Laughter marks the first stirring of escape, the self from the ego. The suddenness of the transition is crucial, because laughter is a quick experience in every sense of the word. The freedom of that transition is at once what Rudolf Steiner termed the expansion of the astral body, and the aesthetic distance we enjoy in the theatre.
Owen Barfield once said that even if you can only see one small part of reality, but that part is presented with absolute accuracy and without saying anything that is not meant, what is suggested is the whole truth holographically presented. In the great tragedies, that is what happens. In writing so starkly of despair and death, Shakespeare cannot help suggesting, but only suggesting, transcendence and resurrection. When one leaves a great performance of King Lear, one is exhausted, having witnessed the most heartbreaking final scene in all drama. One has looked into the abyss, and yet sensed a mystery that surpasses understanding.
To approach that entrance, the Author had to find another form. After 1608 he wrote no more tragedies. From 1608 to 1611 there were four plays, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, usually known as the Late Romances. Their final resolution is not death but reconciliation. Not the reconciliation of earlier comedies, designed to satisfy, but one that challenges the boundaries of reality itself. The new themes are recognition, repentance, renunciation, reunification, renewal and resurrection.
The drama moves into a consciously unreal, deliberately theatrical realm of wonder. Vision and music displace exposition. Song and spectacle abound. Yet the Author is not merely pleasing an audience. He is grappling with the fundamental question of the transforming Consciousness Soul: in what way is imagination true?
Rudolf Steiner showed that every true ascent is preceded by renunciation. At the heart of imaginative truth reached through renunciation lies forgiveness. When forgiveness is unexpectedly granted, it produces a strange, sweet shock. It suspends the old law of cause and effect and inaugurates a new one. The instinct for blame and revenge is relinquished. Forgiveness is not a prescription but a reality recognised as truth. It is the mysterious alchemy of the late plays.
Esoteric meaning is cold and dry without the touchstone of life. As Ben Jonson observed, the Shakespeare plays are ‘rammed with life’. Life emerges in art when the artist can put aside ego and see clearly what was formerly hidden. Because the Author was able to do this more intensely than any other writer, his meanings are esoteric in the most genuine of senses.
Extracts from the Shakespeare Plays Convey Universal Meaning
The following extracts have been chosen, necessarily arbitrarily, from the mass of plays to illustrate that their wisdom and universal meaning could not have arisen from a mediocre theatre-actor, but are the mature fruits of a mind steeped in Rosicrucian esotericism.
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
On the burden of living and the uncertainty of what death may bring
‘To grunt and sweat under a weary life
But that the dread of something after death
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?’
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
On the moral legitimacy of suicide in an unbearably painful world
‘To be, or not to be, that is the question.’
King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1
On the heartless ingratitude shown toward those who refuse flattery in favour of truth
‘Nothing will come of nothing.’
Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3
On the seductive nature of evil, which works through half-truths, deception, and seemingly harmless promises
‘And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray us
In deepest consequence.’
We close with another quote from that redoubtable humourist that seals the myth of ‘the Bard’ from Stratford for all time:
Whenever we have been furnished with tar baby ostensibly stuffed with jewels, and warned that it will be dishonourable and irreverent to disembowel it and test the jewels, we keep our sacrilegious hands off it. We submit, not reluctantly, but rather gladly, for we are privately afraid we should find, upon examination, that the jewels are of the sort that are manufactured at North Adams, Mass [i.e. out of cheap plastic].
Mark Twain
Conclusion
These passages are not offered as proofs in the narrow sense, nor as demonstrations designed to settle an academic quarrel. They are gestures toward a mode of understanding that works inwardly, not by accumulation of facts, but by the awakening of perception. Taken together, they disclose a drama of consciousness unfolding through image, conflict, renunciation and moral choice.
If the Baconian project has any enduring significance, it lies here. Not in the resolution of authorship debates for their own sake, but in the recognition that the Shakespearean corpus constitutes a disciplined education of the human soul, precisely suited to an age struggling to reunite knowledge with meaning. In a world of unprecedented technical power and increasing moral disorientation, this marriage of imagination and truth remains not only relevant, but necessary.
Portrait of Sir Francis Bacon – 17th Century
