The KJV Bible versus The Shakeseare Folio

A few years ago, I was looking for a new copy of the King James Bible because my old one was so underlined that it was getting hard to read. As I was looking at the selection available, my eyes kept wandering to a copy of the original King James Version from 1611.

It was printed in old English which is hard to read so I flicked through it and put it back on the shelf. I kept looking but for some reason I went back to the old Bible for another look. On closer inspection, I found an interesting collection of drawings on the Title page that seemed a bit incongruous, so I bought the Bible instead of a more recent edition.

Once I got home, I Googled the Old Bible to see what the drawings were in reference to and discovered that they were actually Rosicrucian symbolism and some of Clergy of the of the time complained that the drawings were not Biblical and had them banned from any future publications.                

An example of the drawings was a mother pelican with her chicks (in the centre at the bottom of the picture). She is seen plucking and pecking at her chest in order to draw blood so that her chicks could peck from it. It’s supposed to represent Jesus’ death on the cross and the shedding of his blood on behalf of mankind. I’m not sure what all the other drawings represent, the pelican was enough for me and I’m not surprised that the Clergy complained.                

I wasn’t sure why I had actually bought this Bible because I have never read it. The language is hard work and it reminded me very much of Shakespeare.              

A few months later, I looked at it on the shelf and saw 1611 and realised that the Bible was actually nearly 400 years old as it was the end of 2010. It wasn’t long after that it dawned on me that The Shakespeare Folio was the same age 400 years. How Bizarre!

Once I got home, I Googled the Old Bible to see what the drawings were in reference to and discovered that they were actually Rosicrucian symbolism and some of Clergy of the of the time complained that the drawings were not Biblical and had them banned from any future publications.                

An example of the drawings was a mother pelican with her chicks (in the centre at the bottom of the picture). She is seen plucking and pecking at her chest in order to draw blood so that her chicks could peck from it. It’s supposed to represent Jesus’ death on the cross and the shedding of his blood on behalf of mankind. I’m not sure what all the other drawings represent, the pelican was enough for me and I’m not surprised that the Clergy complained.                

I wasn’t sure why I had actually bought this Bible because I have never read it. The language is hard work and it reminded me very much of Shakespeare.

A few months later, I looked at it on the shelf and saw 1611 and realized that the Bible was actually nearly 400 years old as it was the end of 2010. It wasn’t long after that it dawned on me that The Shakespeare Folio was the same age, 400 years. How Bizarre!

One day I was thinking about these two books and realized that they are probably the best-known books in the Western World and have been for all of their 400 years. While there are a lot of different versions of the Bible, the King James is still well read and Shakespeare is still taught in schools after all these years!!

For me personally, I have always found Shakespeare to be very dark and for a long time I couldn’t understand why.  The Bible on the other hand brings ‘light’ and hope. Jesus is “the light of the world” and “the entrance of His word brings light”. Shakespeare completely spooks me but the Bible brings me peace.                

I felt for a long time as though Shakespeare was my nemesis. Having failed Macbeth in Grade 10 and then having to study Julius Caesar and King Lear, he was not my favourite at all!! I didn’t need to study tragedy; my parents had experienced tragedy before I was born which sadly, infected and affected our family quite badly.                

The more I thought about the coincidence of these two influential books being the same age, it’s as though I could see one contending with the other for “dominance”, if you like.  It was as though each of them was the ‘south pole’ of a magnet trying to connect but all they were doing was in fact repelling each other.                

One day about two years late, my mother’s cousin rang to say that we might be related to King Henry VIII, completely out of the blue. I spent the next six months trying to work out how that could be. Strangely I discovered a family line that went back to Mary Boleyn. She is my 13th great-grandmother. Through her husband William Carey, my family line goes back to King Malcolm III of Scotland who was the last king standing in Macbeth.

Mary Boleyn famously had an affair with King Henry and had a son called Henry and it’s quite likely that he was, in fact, Henry’s child, because King Henry gave Queen Anne, Mary’s sister, wardship of Henry when she became Queen. That being the case it’s possible that we are descended from him.

However, even if it is not, my family is still related to Queen Elizabeth I. What most people don’t know and has been a State Secret for 450 years is that she married Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester and had two sons with him. One of whom was Sir Francis Bacon adopted by Sir Nicholas and Lady Anne Bacon at his birth and Robert Devereux who was adopted by her cousin Lettice Knollys and her husband Walter Devereux. Her family has been a State Secret for all these years.

Francis was a savant, highly intelligent like his parents and started writing plays when he was about 12. They lived next door to Queen Elizabeth, so she would visit from time to time so she could get to know him at arm’s length. While his father Robert Dudley owned a group of players/actors, they made it known that Francis was forbidden from going to the theatres and hanging out with the ruffians.

Francis loved the theatre as he could see it as vehicle for educating the masses and carrying out his great plan for the “Reformation of the Whole Wide World”.  Unfortunately, the Queen became enraged when she found one of his plays and demanded to know who was the scoundrel that had written it.

One of Francis’ friends knew of a man called William Shaksper who worked at the Globe Theatre.

His name was similar to group of writers that Francis had formed called the Knights of the Helmet who were “the Shakers of the Spear” or “Shakespeare”. They bought his name and gave him some extra money to leave town – go back to Stratford – for 12 months until the Queen’s angered abated which it eventually did.

The sad part about this for me is that Francis’ story has barely been told. He wrote under a few different names besides Shakespeare – Spenser, Greene, Peele, and Marlowe and he paid them all for the use of their names. He used his plays to conceal his identity but also to conceal his true history, in cypher.                

So, I finally had my answer to why I found Shakespeare hard to read. His voice has been crying out for 400 years, for his story to be told.

Because of the fragile political and religious state of England at the time, he developed his own belief system, the Rosicrucians/Freemasons that taught ethics and a belief system based on the Ancient Mysteries with a few Scriptures thrown in for good measure.

It would seem that what I sensed about these two books those years ago, was correct. They were in opposition to each other.

One is the Powerful Word of God and the other nonetheless is powerful because it is based on Occult practices of the ‘Ancient Mysteries’.I truly believe that Francis Bacon meant well. His heart was in the right place, but he was bitterly disappointed that he was never allowed to become king; his step cousin Robert Cecil made sure of that.