Francis Bacon and Dido, Queen of Carthage

[A Phoenix]

Francis Bacon, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that Haunts the Shakespeare canon, the Widow Dido, and the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic play The Tempest

The connections most often discussed have been with Shakespeare, who alludes to the Dido story in nearly one third of his plays. 

[Ruth Lunney, ed., Dido, Queen of Carthage (Manchester University Press, 2025), p. 43]

 

Dido, Queen Of Carthage…which haunts Shakespeare throughout his career…Dido is omnipresent in the Shakespeare canon…Its fingerprints are everywhere… 

[Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, ‘What Is A Source? Or, How Shakespeare Read His Marlowe’, Shakespeare Survey, 68 (2015), pp. 18, 27, 28]

 

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[A Phoenix]

Francis Bacon, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that Haunts the Shakespeare canon, the Widow Dido, and the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic play The Tempest

IT is a Poeticall relation that the Gyants begotten of the Earth made warre vpon Iupiter, and the other Gods, and by the force of lightning they were resisted & ouerthrowne. Whereat the Earth being excitated to wrath, in reuenge of her children brought forth Fame, the youngest Sister of the Gyants.

   Illam, terra parens ira irritata Deorum.

                         Extremam (vt perhibent) Caeo Enceladoque sororem,

                                                    Progenuit.—

            Prouok’t by wrothfull Gods the mother Earth

         Giues Fame the Gyants yongest sister birth. 

The meaning of the Fable seemes to bee thus, By the Earth is signified the nature of the vulgar, alwaies swolne and malignant, and still broaching new scandals against superiors, and hauing gotten fit oportunity, stirres vp rebels, and seditious persons, that with impious courage doe molest Princes, and endeuour to subuert their estates: but being supprest, the same naturall disposition of the people stil leaning to the viler sort, (being impatient of peace and tranquility) spread rumors, rayse malitious slanders, repining whisperings, infamous libelles, and others of that kind, to the detraction of them that are in authority: So as rebellious actions, and seditious reports, differ nothing in kind and blood, but as it were in Sex onely; the one sort being Masculine, the other Feminine. 

[Francis Bacon, The Wisdom of the Ancients, trans., Sir Arthur Gorges (London:  printed by John Bill, 1619), pp. 49-50]

 

The “poetical relation” in question is the passage in Book IV of the Aeneid, where the goddess Fama, sister of the giants Coeus and Enceladus, spreads the news of Dido’s liaison with Aeneas, from which Bacon quotes lines 178–80. Together with Ovid’s account of the house of Fame in the twelfth book of the Metamorphoses, it was a locus classicus for the topic and had clearly fascinated Bacon from the moment he copied some adjacent lines into the early notebook known as “The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies.” In his exposition, Bacon establishes an equivalence between masculine actions and feminine reports, which are both the offspring of the “malignant” Earth, itself a figure for the “vulgar” people. However, the key point is that like the intervention of Virgil’s Fama, who only begins to do her monstrous work after Dido and Aeneas have consummated their passion, “seditious reports” are always subsequent to “rebellious actions.”

[Martin Dzelzainis, ‘“The Feminine part of every Rebellion”: Francis Bacon on Sedition and Libel, and the Beginning of Ideology’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 69 (2006), p. 141]

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[A Phoenix]

Francis Bacon, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that Haunts the Shakespeare canon, the Widow Dido, and the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic play The Tempest

It is not known when The Tragedy of Dido Queene of Carthage was written and despite the statement on its title page ‘Played by the Children of her Maiesties Chappell’ there is no record of a contemporary performance of the play. It was not entered on the Stationers’ Register prior to the publication of its only early edition with the following title page: THE Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage: Played by the Children of her Maiesties Chappell. Written by Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Nash. Gent. [List of Actors] AT LONDON, Printed, by the Widdowe Orwin, for Thomas Woodcocke, and are to be sold at his shop, in Paules Church-yeard, at the signe of the blacke Beare, 1594.

There are three surviving copies of the 1594 quarto now held at the Oxford Bodleian Library, Huntington Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library in the United States.

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[A Phoenix]

Francis Bacon, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that Haunts the Shakespeare canon, the Widow Dido, and the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic play The Tempest

Based on the statement on its title page ‘Written by Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Nash’ the authorship of Dido, Queene of Carthage has divided scholarly opinion for centuries.

In Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe (2025) Professor Greenblatt kept returning to the thorny issue ‘possibly written with the help from his Cambridge university friend Thomas Nashe’,1 ‘aided perhaps by his Cambridge friend Thomas Nashe’,² and again ‘The title page…lists the authors but whether much or even any of the writing was done by Nashe is unclear.’3

The orthodox scholar Professor Shapiro in his Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (Columbia University Press, 1991), describes Nashe as his ‘one time collaborator (if we trust the title page of Dido, Queen of Carthage)’,4 a somewhat amusing observation considering the opprobrium unloaded on authorship doubters who question the name/pseudonym on the title pages of the Shakespeare quartos!

1. Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times And Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe (London: The Bodley Head, 2025), p. 45.

2. Ibid., p. 115.

3. Ibid., p. 291. 

4. James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 27.

 

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[A Phoenix]

Francis Bacon, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that Haunts the Shakespeare canon, the Widow Dido, and the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic play The Tempest

In The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe Nicholl provided another scenario ‘Nashe’s name appeared alongside Marlowe’s on the title-page…Nashe may have had some connection with it then, more probably he prepared or edited it for publication.’¹

Professor Munson Deats in ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris’, printed in  The Cambridge Companion To Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge University Press, 2009) states ‘general consensus now accepts Nashe’s contribution as minimal, or perhaps even non-existent.’²

A detailed discussion of its ‘Authorship’ necessarily formed part of the recent Revels Plays edition (note the single attribution on its title page) of Dido, Queen of Carthage By Christopher Marlowe (Manchester University Press, 2023). Its editor Lunney presented a critical evaluation of the different studies and opinions on both sides of the authorship divide beginning with Bishop Tanner (1748), through to Hurst (1825) and in the last century down to Irving Ribner ‘There is nothing…which we have any reason to attribute to Nashe’ (1963).3 Lunney notes that ‘those who have accepted the title page at face value are few’:

The present edition challenges the case for co-authorship. It reconsiders all the evidence verbal and quantitative, old, new, and ‘available’. My investigations into verbal evidence are recorded in this edition in Appendix 1, and online in greater detail…I have also had access to computational studies by Hugh Craig in particular. Our results are presented, with more detailed analysis than is possible here, in the joint essay, ‘Who Wrote Dido, Queen of Carthage?’ We find that Dido was written by Marlowe, and that whatever Nashe’s involvement may (or may not) have amounted to-and collaboration could include various roles-he is not present in the text of the play.⁴    

It should also be noted that while modern Marlowe scholarship has questioned, prevaricated and dismissed the statement on the title of Dido, Queen of Carthage crediting the co-authorship of Thomas Nashe, modern Marlowe scholars have, starting with the statement on its title page, accepted that it was written by Christopher Marlowe (you just could not make it up)!

1. Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), p. 58.

2. Sara Munson Deats, ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris’, in The Cambridge Companion To Christopher Marlowe, ed., Patrick Cheney (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 194.  

3. Ruth Lunney, ed., Dido, Queen of Carthage By Christopher Marlowe (Manchester University Press, 2023), p. 5. 

4. Ibid., pp. 5-6.    

 

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[A Phoenix]

Francis Bacon, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that Haunts the Shakespeare canon, the Widow Dido, and the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic play The Tempest

Modern Marlowe scholars also repeatedly make the false statement that no one has questioned the authorship of this ‘Marlowe’ play or that ‘Marlowe’ play. Whereas in fact around a dozen Baconian scholars have questioned & dismissed whether Marlowe wrote any of the plays attributed to him.1

There is also another scholar E. G. Harman who carried out a full-length study of the Thomas Nashe and the writings attributed him:

All the evidence, in my opinion, points to the conclusion that the name of “Nashe” is a mask under which a concealed writer has been at work, and that writer I believe for reasons which I indicated, to have been Francis Bacon.2

 

1. See for example, Robert M. Theobald, Shakespeare Studies In Baconian Light (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co, Ltd., 1901), pp. 415-88; Parker Woodard, Tudor Problems (London: Gay and Hancock, Ltd., 1912), pp. 132-37; James Phinney Baxtor, The Greatest of Literary Problems The Authorship of The Shakespeare Works (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), pp. 480-84; Bertram G. Theobald, Francis Bacon Concealed And Revealed (London: Cecil Palmer, 1930), pp. 81-150 and for a list of 19 Baconian articles on Christopher Marlowe see A. M. Challinor, Francis Bacon Philospher, Statesman, Poet: An Index to Baconiana and its predecessors, 1886-1999 (The Francis Bacon Society, 2001), p. 115.

2. Edward George Harman, Gabriel Harvey And Thomas Nashe (London: J. M. Ouseley & Son, Ltd, 1923), p. 135. One of the plays The Isle of Dogs (now lost) attributed to ‘Nashe’ was once part of Bacon’s own collection of MSS known as the Northumberland Manuscript, see pp. 190-96 and also A. Phoenix, The Bacon-Shakespeare Manuscript (Hitherto known as the Northumberland Manuscript) which originally Contained Copies of his Shakespeare Plays Richard II and Richard III (2022), pp. 162-66. For Bacon’s authorship of the ‘Spenser’ and ‘Shakespeare’ works see Edward George Harman, Edmund Spenser And The Impersonations Of Francis Bacon (London: Constable and Company, Ltd., 1914) and Edward George Harman, The “Impersonality” Of Shakespeare (London: Haskell House Publishers, 1925, reprinted 1971).

 

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[A Phoenix]

Francis Bacon, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that Haunts the Shakespeare canon, the Widow Dido, and the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic play The Tempest

It is well-known that Dido, Queen of Carthage draws heavily on Virgil and Ovid and that the twelve book epic poem the Aeneid provides its narrative and many of its details with its story of the Trojan prince Aeneas and his fateful love affair with Dido of Carthage. After the fall of Troy Aeneas traverses the Mediterranean and fulfils his destiny as ancestor of the great Roman empire with Brutus of Troy, mythical founder of Britain also a descendant of Aeneas, linking their fabled origins and a shared heroic past. For Bacon aided by his Rosicrucian Brotherhood he envisioned a Universal Reformation of the World the title of the document which contained the first Rosicrucian manifesto the Fama Fraternitatis, a statement of intent of an empire of the human race built upon peace, love and harmony.  

 

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[A Phoenix]

Francis Bacon, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that Haunts the Shakespeare canon, the Widow Dido, and the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic play The Tempest

The most enigmatic use of the myth of Dido the central character in Dido, Queen of Carthage is found in Bacon’s late Shakespeare play The Tempest.

In his Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (University of California Press, 1981), Professor Schmidgall states The Tempest is the most Baconian play in the Shakespeare canon,¹ with the play more expansively described by Professor Holzer as a ‘dramatization’ of Bacon’s Instauratio magna (whose title page is adorned with two Masonic Pillars) published in 1620, by which Holzer adds that in the title of his work Shakespeare’s Tempest in Baconian Light, is meant to include the whole of Bacon’s prose works from Partus Temporis Maximus (1585) to New Atlantis (1626) and Sylva Sylvarum (1626),² with Dr Yates correctly describing The Tempest as a Rosicrucian manifesto.³

In his work Shakespeare Creator of Freemasonry moreover the Baconian Alfred Dodd devotes a long chapter to the play entitled ‘The Tempest: Shakespeare’s Last Masonic Play’,⁴ wherein he brought to light its Freemasonic subtext which had remained hidden for several hundred years.

1. Gary R. Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (University of California Press, 1981), pp. 247-48.

2. Gustavus Holzer, Shakespeare’s Tempest In Baconian Light (Heidelberg: 1904), p. vi.

3. Francis A. Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 130.

4.  Alfred Dodd, Shakespeare Creator of Freemasonry Being a Remarkable Examination of the Plays and Poems, which proves incontestably that these works were saturated in Masonry, that Shakespeare was a Freemason and the Founder of the Fraternity (London: Rider & Co, 1937), pp. 119-50.

 

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[A Phoenix]

 Francis Bacon, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that Haunts the Shakespeare canon, the Widow Dido, and the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic play The Tempest

The Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic masterpiece is steeped in the ancient mysteries, the subject of Bacon’s Latin De Sapientia Veterum (1609) translated into English as The Wisdom of the Ancients in 1619,¹ and Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid, described by Bacon in Advancement of Learning as the best of all the poets.

‘The moment’, points out Freemason Alfred Dodd, ‘we touch the Mysteries, we touch Freemasonry. Behind the Speculative System stands the Ancient Wisdom. This fact in itself provides a clue that Shakespeare, The Tempest, the Mysteries and Freemasonry are inextricably intermingled.’² 

The ancient mysteries and the Aeneid are the pervasive breath that infuses the living body of The Tempest.

In his original revelatory Bacon, Shakespeare and the Rosicrucians its learned author W. F. C. Wigston observes how The Tempest is a mystery play that closely corresponds with Virgil`s description of Heaven and Hell in Aeneid VI an altered parable of the mysteries received from the past and transformed by Bacon into a timeless initiation stretched across the whole of time.

While the mystery play conceals in its depths the initiatory and ceremonial rites of the ancient mysteries it not only looks backwards but it represents a continuation of Time that looks forward to a future Kingdom of Man secretly guided by the high initiates or invisible Rosicrucian Brethren to a new Golden Age, and a day when all will be revealed.3

The Tempest is a Rosicrucian mystery play which brings us in touch with Solomon’s House in New Atlantis and the early concealed beginnings of Speculative Freemasonry the outer body wrapped around the inner sanctum of the more secret Rosicrucian Brotherhood which directed it.

1. Francis Bacon, Francisci Baconi Eqvitis Avrati, Procvratoris Secvndi, Iacobi Regis Magnae Britanniae, De Sapientia Vetervm Liber, Ad Inclytam Academiam Cantabrigiensem (Londini, Excudebat Robertus Barkerus, Serenissimae Regiae Majestatis Typographus. Anno 1609) and Francis Bacon, The Wisedome Of The Ancients, Written In Latine By the Right Honourable Sir Francis Bacon Knight, Baron of Verulam and Lord Chancelour of England. Done into English by Sir Arthur Gorges Knight (London: printed by John Bill, 1619).

2. Alfred Dodd, Shakespeare Creator of Freemasonry Being a Remarkable Examination of the Plays and Poems, which proves incontestably that these works were saturated in Masonry, that Shakespeare was a Freemason and the Founder of the Fraternity (London: Rider & Co, 1937), p. 120.

3. W. F. C. Wigston, Bacon Shakespeare And The Rosicrucians (London: George Redway, 1888), passim.

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[A Phoenix]

Francis Bacon, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that Haunts the Shakespeare canon, the Widow Dido, and the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic play The Tempest

 

Wigston drew particular attention to the striking mysterious enigmatic Widow Dido passage in The Tempest and ‘its subtle and intimate relationship with Virgil’s VIth Book, and therefore with AEneas, and the Mysteries’ that are given to us ‘in the references to Carthage or Tunis, and the bringing in, in quite an apparently purposeless fashion, of Dido as Widow Dido’:¹ 

 

                                 Gon. Me thinkes our garments are now as fresh as

                            when we put them on first in Affricke, at the marriage

                            of the kings faire daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis.

                                 Seb. ’Twas a sweet marriage, and we prosper well in

                            our returne.

                                Adri. Tunis was neuer grac’d before with such a pa-

                            ragon to their Queene.

                                Gon. Not since widdow Dido’s time.

                                Ant. Widow? A pox o’that: how came that Wid-

                            dow in? Widdow Dido!

                                Seb. What if he had said Widdower Aeneas too?

                            Good Lord, how you take it?

                               Adri. Widdow Dido said you? You make me study

                            of that: She was of Carthage, not of Tunis.

                               Gon. This Tunis Sir was Carthage.

                               Adri. Carthage?           Gon. I assure you Carthage.

                               Ant. His word is more than the miraculous Harpe.

                               Seb. He hath rais’d the wall, and houses too.

                               Ant. What impossible matter wil he make easy next?                   

                               Seb. I thinke hee will carry this Island home in his

                           pocket, and giue it his sonne for an Apple.

                               Ant. And sowing the kernels of it in the Sea, bring

                           forth more Islands

                               Gon. I.                 Ant.   Why in good time.

                               Gon. Sir, we are talking, that our garments seeme

                           now as fresh as when we were at Tunis at the marriage

                           of your daughter, who is now Queene.

                               Ant. And the rarest that ere came there.

                               Seb. Bate (I beseech you) widdow Dido.

                               Ant. O Widdow Dido? I, Widdow Dido.²

1. W. F. C. Wigston, Bacon Shakespeare And The Rosicrucians (London: George Redway, 1888), p. 121.

2. Shakespeares Comedies Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies (London: printed by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), Comedy, p. 7.

 

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[A Phoenix]

Francis Bacon, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that Haunts the Shakespeare canon, the Widow Dido, and the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic play The Tempest

The multi-layered myth of the Widow Dido, the eponymous character in Dido, Queen of Carthage was incorporated by Bacon in his Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic manifesto, The Tempest as an allegory conveying the Freemasonic legend of the building of Solomon’s Temple and that of its chief architect and Master Mason Hiram Abiff which forms the key ritual found in the 3rd Degree of the raising of the Master Mason.

 

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[A Phoenix]

Francis Bacon, Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play that Haunts the Shakespeare canon, the Widow Dido, and the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic play The Tempest

The Masonic legend of Solomon and Hiram Abiff written into the dramatic ritual of the Sublime Third Degree of the Master Mason was hidden by Bacon in the Rosicrucian manifestos New Atlantis and The Tempest, who writes Manly Hall ‘wrote into the Shakespearian plays the secret teachings of the Fraternity of R.C. and the true rituals of the Freemasonic Order.’¹ The Rosicrucian manifesto The Tempest first appeared in the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio, a work Freemason Alfred Dodd rightly described as, ‘the greatest Masonic book in the world.’²

1. Manly P. Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline Of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy Being an Interpretation of the Secret Teachings concealed within Rituals, Allegories and Mysteries of all Ages (Los Angeles, California: The Philosophical Research Society, Inc., 1994), p. CLXVI.

760.  Alfred Dodd, Shakespeare Creator of Freemasonry Being a Remarkable Examination of the Plays and Poems, which proves incontestably that these works were saturated in Masonry, that Shakespeare was a Freemason and the Founder of the Fraternity (London: Rider & Co, 1937), p. 10.

 

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