SHAKESPEARE, BACON AND THE BULLROARER

In Act 2 Scene 1 of The Tempest, (right) all the characters are beginning to argue among themselves. Ariel enters, invisible, and plays music that puts everyone to sleep except Sebastian and Antonio, who discuss how advantageous it might be to kill their sleeping companions. Drawing their swords, they are just about stab the sleepers when Ariel makes Gonzalo awaken with a shout. This wakes the others, so Sebastian and Antonio concoct a ludicrous story to explain away the swords, claiming they had heard lions and were trying to protect the king. Their dialogue sounds as though they are describing the sound of a bullroarer!

Sebastian:

Whiles we stood here securing your repose,

Even now, we heard a hollow burst of bellowing.

Like bulls, or rather lions; did it not wake you?

It struck mine ear most terribly. Antonio:

O, ‘twas a din to fright a monster’s ear.

To make an earthquake: sure, it was the roar of a whole herd of lions. Gonzalo:

I heard a humming,

And that a strange one, too, which did awake me.

The question of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays has rumbled on for centuries (see FT280:32-37), the chief suspects being either ‘William Shakspere’ (variously spelled) the actor and glover’s son from Stratford, or Sir Francis Bacon the successful politician and polymath. Some Baconites claim that Sir Francis was a founding member of the Rosicrucians and a leading freemason, whose chief interests were occult philosophy and the theatre. Bacon’s high office in government and the court supposedly prevented him from openly being connected to such a low-class profession as play writing. The plays, it is claimed, were written as part of Bacon’s long-term mission to edify and spiritually transform the nation – The Great Instauration.

And naturally, they contain lots of coded information. Baconite author Mather Walker has made a detailed analysis of The Tempest,

which he regards as an allegory of the Eleusinian Mysteries of Classical Greece. The above dialogue, he claims, is literally

describing the sound of the bullroarer – or rather, the rhombos

used by the Ancient Greeks in their secret ceremonies of initiation. See “Mystery Symbolism in The Tempest”,