Did Shakespeare Write The King James Bible?
Just glancing at the title of this post may cause many to wonder – what has this to do with prophecy? But, as most readers will have realised by now, the contents of this Blog embrace a wide variety of topics ranging from the Bible to Quantum Mechanics.
But the reason why I chose to write about Shakespeare is actually the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. As we read in the gospel of St. Luke: “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid, that shall not be known and come abroad”. (Luke 8:17)
Very few people today know the truth about the life of William Shakespeare. And because they do not know, I thought it was time to add this to the public record in order to help correct this misunderstanding before I “shuffle off this mortal coil”! (Hamlet)
So, in response to the question posed in the title of this post, my answer is NO…. and YES.
And the reason for this ambivalence is because most readers do not know that the historical Shakespeare never wrote a single play in his life. And that is because he was totally illiterate. He could neither read nor write.
Because Shakespeare owes his fame to the world of theatre, I thought it only just that the best person to expose him for the person he was, or to be more precise, the person he was not, would be a student of the theatre himself.
That man is the accomplished Canadian actor, writer, director and scholar Keir Cutler. Keir has an M.A. and Ph.D. at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and has been performing in theatre since the beginning of the century. He has even taught Shakespeare.
I will let him speak for himself in the following video.
It is worth repeating the verified facts about the life of William Shakespeare outlined in the above video.
- He was born in April 1564 in the small town of Stratford on the banks of the Avon river in central England. His parents could not read or write.
- No record exists of the first 18 years of Shakespeare’s life.
- In November 1582 he took out a marriage certificate for Anne Whateley.
- The next day he took out another licence to marry Anne Hathaway.
- He married Anne Hathaway and six months later their first child was born.
- In 1587, Shakespeare left Stratford for London where his first job was to hold horses outside a theatre.
- In 1593, he was listed as an official actor.
- In 1610 or so he returned to Stratford. There he was engaged in various pursuits such as lending money and trading in land and houses.
- He later made out his will and died on April 23, 1616. Not a single book was mentioned among his possessions that were listed in his will.
Based on the facts outlined above it is clear that Shakespeare was not capable of writing any of the plays linked to his name. Among the notable people who also doubted his authorship were Mark Twain, who wrote a book about it, and many others.
They included Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, William and Henry James, Charles Dickens, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Coleridge, Otto von Bismarck, Benjamin Disraeli, James Joyce, Helen Keller, John Gielgud and Daphne du Maurier, to name but a few.
As Keir Cutler points out, what is ignored by people in general, and academics in particular, is the breadth of Shakespeare’s knowledge of law, philosophy, classical literature, ancient and modern history, mathematics, music, medicine, art, astronomy, military and naval terminology, English, French and Italian court life, and especially his comprehension of multiple languages.
Shakespeare added hundreds of new words to the English language: all these words culled from other languages, both ancient and modern. And Shakespeare did all this without leaving a single trace of his skill? Nothing? No play, no poem, no letter in his own hand? And no mention of any writing is his long and detailed will? (Source)
The complete works of Shakespeare contain 29,066 different words. So if Shakespeare himself did not write any of his poems and plays, then who did? Among the list of possible contenders, three are considered the most likely candidates. They are Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere and Sir Francis Bacon.
Christopher Marlowe – (1564-1593)
As an accomplished playwright, poet and translator, Marlowe was a star of the Tudor age. His intellectual ability saw him gain both a Bachelor as well as a Master’s degree at Cambridge University. Unfortunately, in 1593 at the tender age of 29, he was murdered in a Deptford tavern as a result of a row over “the reckoning” (the bill).
However, this has not daunted members of the Marlowe Society who continue to insist that their playwright was not murdered, but was spirited away to France where, for the next twenty years or so, he wrote plays attributed to Shakespeare and smuggled them back to London.
Edward de Vere – the 17th Earl of Oxford – (1550-1604)
Edward de Vere was a poet, dramatist and patron of the arts, whose wealth and title made him a prominent celebrity in Tudor times. Supporters of his claim to the authorship of his plays, who call themselves the “Oxfordians”, argue that he used the name Shakespeare as a “pen name” in order to protect his identity.
However, the major factor challenging this claim is the fact that de Vere died in 1604. This was before Shakespeare published the following plays: King Lear, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Tempest, Henry VIII, Othello and All’s Well that Ends Well.
Sir Francis Bacon – (1561-1626)
Francis Bacon was born three years before Shakespeare, and died ten years after his death. At the age of twelve he attended Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where his studies were conducted mostly in Latin. It was at Cambridge that he first met Queen Elizabeth, who was so impressed with his precocious intellect that she used to refer to him as “the young lord keeper”.
He was the first recipient of the title of Queen’s Counsel at the age of thirty-two, when the Queen retained him as her personal legal advisor. As a lawyer, statesman, philosopher and master of the English tongue, Bacon was recognised for his sharp worldly wisdom and intellectually as a man who claimed “all knowledge as his province”.
He later went on to serve as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I. He was knighted in 1603 and given the title of Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St. Alban in 1621. He had no heirs, and so both titles became extinct when he contracted pneumonia and died at the age of sixty-five.
He left a legacy of written works in both natural philosophy and science that remained influential even in the late stages of the scientific revolution that began with Copernicus in 1543. His written works can be divided into three categories:
- Science and scientific methodology
- Religious and literary works
- Judicial works concerning English law
King James 1
Following the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, James I was crowned King of England. One of the first projects he undertook was to was to create a new translation of the English Bible. In January 1604 he summoned a group of scholars and churchmen to attend a conference at Hampton Court, where he was based at the time to avoid the plague that had afflicted most of London.
Following this conference, a committee was struck under the supervision of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It consisted of 54 translators made up of the most learned men in the country. They were divided into six committees called “companies”. Three companies were responsible for the Old Testament, two for the New Testament and one for the Apocrypha.
The work of these committees was completed in 1608. However, it took another three years before the entire work was published. And although there are no records of the actions taken by King James during this period, it is clear that he needed to turn to someone else for help in completing the task of combining these different sections into one consistent body of work.
In recognition of his past intellectual accomplishments, and the fact that he was already a member of his government, the King turned over the translators’ manuscripts to Francis Bacon, for the purpose of checking, editing and revising them where necessary. But instead of merely revising them, Bacon turned them into a literary triumph that transformed the entire English language.
Now you may be thinking, that may sound like an interesting theory, but where’s the proof?
The King James Bible
One of the most telling factors in determining the true author of the King James Bible can be found in Psalm 46. If you count the words starting at verse one, you find that the 46th word is “SHAKE’. And if you count the words backwards from the last verse, the 46th word is “SPEAR” as can be seen below.
Psalm 46
1] God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
[2] Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;
[3] Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains SHAKE with the swelling thereof. Selah.
[4] There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High.
[5] God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early.
[6] The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.
[7] The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.
[8] Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made in the earth.
[9] He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the SPEAR in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.
[10] Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.
[11] The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
The fact that there should be a reference to William Shakespeare in a work that had nothing to do with him can only be attributed to a coded link between the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. As Dr. H. Spencer Lewis, Imperator of the Rosicrucian Order, wrote in 1930:
“The Bible which all of us read and admire from a literary point of view because of it’s peculiar and beautiful English was written in that form by Bacon who invented and perfected that style of English expression”. (Source)
In reviewing his life, the English poet Alexander Pope wrote: “Lord Bacon is the greatest genius that either England or perhaps any other country ever produced”. And Lord Macaulay said that “he had the most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men”.
And as gratifying as it is to know that there is a city on the river Avon devoted to the memory of the greatest writer of the English language, where pilgrims can still go to pay homage, it is a sad irony that Sir Francis Bacon is commemorated today only by a small statue in an alcove of a forgotten church in St. Albans, Hertfordshire.
So to clarify the answer that I gave at the beginning of this post, NO, Shakespeare did not write the King James version of the Bible, simply because there is no record of him having written ANYTHING at all.
Yet, ironically, he DID write this because the plays attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by Sir Francis Bacon, and Bacon was the true author of the King James version of the Bible.
