by Jon E. Lewis
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.
Even the Society’s enemies like Sue grudgingly acknowledged its remarkable internal cohesion. Loyola had been a soldier, and ran the Jesuits in military fashion; in their own eyes, the early Jesuits were “Soldiers of Christ” in the Counter-Reformation against the Protestantism sweeping sixteenth-century Europe.
In the twenty-first century, allegations about Catholic conspiracy have tended to shift onto Opus Dei, although voices of alarm are periodically raised over the “Jesuit Oath” taken by Society members. It is damning stuff:
I do … promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons … that I will spare neither age, sex nor condition, and that I will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly I will secretly use the poisonous cup, the strangulation cord, the steel of the poniard, or the leaden bullet.
Luckily for all heretics, Protestants and Masons – and their wives and children – the oath was a forgery by one Robert Ware, aimed at stymieing the accession of the Catholic James II in England in the seventeenth century. Today, the Society of Jesuits has 20,000 members, and announces on its website: “We are still men on the move, ready to change place, occupation, method – whatever will advance our mission in the Church of teaching Jesus Christ and preaching his Good News …” The website is a little less forthcoming about one conspiracy the Jesuits have unquestionably run: a conspiracy of silence about the paedophilia practised by the Society’s priests. The old Jesuit boast “Give us the child for seven years, and we will give you the man” took on a grim twist when child abuse by Jesuit priests was uncovered in America, Germany and Latin America. In the Pacific Northwest of the USA, the Jesuit branch was required in 2011 to pay $166.1 million in compensation to 450 victims who had been sexually abused by Jesuit priests over a fifty-year period.
Further Reading
Malachi Martin, The Jesuits,1988
Edmond Paris, The Secret History of the Jesuits,1986
SOCIETY OF THE ELECT
The Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, le Cercle – all are favourites for the title of “The Secret Society That Really Runs the World”. Most of the covert cabals are either fictions in paranoid nightmares or impotent talking shops, but there is one shadowy organization that really did want to take over the globe. This is the Society of the Elect, founded by Cecil Rhodes.
Born in 1853, Rhodes was the son of an English vicar who journeyed to Africa as a young man and made a mountain of money from diamond mining. He became a major force in African politics – Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was named for him.
Now, Rhodes might have found fame and fortune on the Dark Continent but his heart belonged to Blighty – and to the expansion of Victoria’s empire so the whole map of the world would be coloured pink. In 1877, Rhodes wrote in his Confessions of Faith: “Why should we not form a secret society with but one object: the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire” (See Document, p.497).
Rhodes seems to have put his money where his belief was. One of his wills contains a provision for
… the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.
The resultant Society of the Elect was formed in 1891, and according to the respected American historian Carroll Quigley, the Society had an inner and outer membership structure. Rhodes himself was the “General” of the Society, and sitting on its executive committee was the British High Commissioner in South Africa, the journalist William T. Stead and the banker Nathan Rothschild. Serving alongside the committee in the heart of the Society were the “initiates”. The outer circle of backers was called the Association of Helpers.
Although Rhodes died in 1902 (one of his wills, incidentally, established the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford University, the recipients of which have included Bill Clinton), his vision was carried forward by Alfred Milner who founded the Round Table groups, also known as the Rhodes–Milner Round Table groups, a.k.a. the Moot. The Round Table groups – which were the Association of Helpers under another guise – spread across the English-speaking world, and gained great influence in the period after the First World War. According to historian of secret societies, Michael Streeter “They we
re closely associated with the establishment of the Union of South Africa, the British Commonwealth and the League of Nations.”
The Round Tables were also likely behind the 1917 “Balfour Declaration”, written by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild (the son of Nathan Rothschild), stating Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Aside from Milner, the dominant figure in the Society of the Elect/Round Tables in the decades after Rhodes’s demise was Lionel Curtis, who founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1920, known today as “Chatham House” after its premises in London. Although Chatham House advertises itself as nothing more sinister than a think tank on international affairs, to a large number of conspiracists Chatham House is a front for the Society of the Elect. They take their cue from Professor Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope, in which he names Chatham House as Rhodes’s secret society, no bones about it.