Shakespeare presumed-to-be-Shakspere biography

[Christie Waldman]

I've just read A Phoenix's piece on Samuel Schoenbaum's biography of Shakespeare (1970, revised 1991). It made me wonder if there had been any more-recent attempts to write a Shakespeare biography. Has anyone read Paul Menzer's William Shakespeare: A Brief Life, Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2023)? Reviewed by Bruce E. Brandt in Shakespeare Quarterly, vol 76, issue 1, Spring 2025, pub. 13 March 2025, pp. 73-75,  https://academic.oup.com/sq/article-abstract/76/1/73/8074990  

[Christie Waldman]

On 6/13/2026 at 3:30 PM, Christie Waldman said:

Paul Menzer's William Shakespeare: A Brief Life, Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2023)

I bought it. I will read it.

[Christie Waldman]

On 6/13/2026 at 3:30 PM, Christie Waldman said:

Paul Menzer's William Shakespeare: A Brief Life, Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2023)

 

On 6/24/2026 at 12:09 PM, Christie Waldman said:

I bought it. I will read it.

I must be a little bit psychic. 

Folger Shakespeare Library Announces Paul Menzer Selected as Inaugural Folger Chair in Shakespeare Studies

Press release: June 24, 2026 — Washington, DC

https://www.folger.edu/about-us/press/folger-shakespeare-library-announces-paul-menzer-selected-as-inaugural-folger-chair-in-shakespeare-studies/

There is also this: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/william-shakespeare-a-brief-life-9781350156753/ which links to Menzer's blogpost, “Shakespeare? There’s not that much to know, but plenty to say.” (regarding William Shakespeare: A Brief Life)

I finished the book. I like the cover a lot. The book is 237 pages, 19 chapters, with index and chapter notes. Menzer is Provost of Mary Baldwin College. He says he wrote much of the book with a sleeping baby strapped to his chest. We have to give him credit for that. I know someone who studied Shakespeare at Mary Baldwin College. 

[Christie Waldman]

Menzer's book, like all orthodox Shakespeare biographies, is made up of relatively few facts linked by lots of conjecture. He assumes an entertaining tone. He had just one reference to Francis Bacon, a bare quotation: "Truth is the daughter of time," which he mentioned in discussing Shakespeare's plays featuring father-daughter relationships (p. 194 (of 257 total), in ch 17, "Shakespeare's Daughters"). He did not provide the Spedding citation. (Novum Organum, book 2, aphorism 84, Spedding 4: 82; in Latin, Spedding 1:191). Ironically, it is in Bacon's passage where he begins by observing how "men have been kept back by a kind of enchantment from progress in the sciences by reverence for antiquity, by the authority of men accounted great in philosophy, and then by general consent."  Bacon concludes, "And with regard to authority, it shows a feeble mind to grant so much to authors and yet deny time his rights, who is the author of authors, nay rather of all authority. For rightly has truth been called the daughter of time, not of authority. It is no wonder therefore if those enchantments of antiquity and authority and consent have so bound up men's powers that they have been made impotent (like persons bewitched) to accompany with the nature of things." 

 

[A Phoenix]

Hi Christie,

257 is, of course, Francis Bacon (100)Fra Rosicrosse (157) in simple cipher!

Somewhat interesting since The Folger Shakespeare Library is a Secret Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic Institution:

See A. Phoenix, 'The Folger Shakespeare Library A Secret Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic Institution', (2022), pp. 1-45

https://www.academia.edu/83873203/The_Folger_Shakespeare_Library_A_Secret_Baconian_Rosicrucian_Freemasonic_Institution

Phoenix.

[Christie Waldman]

Hi Phoenix, 

Since you brought it up, I looked into this a bit more. It's true, 257 is the last of the arabic-numbered pages. I like that number! That is how I always thought you were supposed to count book pages.

However--the Amazon page for the book states 280 pages. I had not counted front matter (16 pp) or empty blank pages at the back (7)--which brings it to 280 pages. The University of Rochester Rush Rhees Library catalog also states 280 pages. Apparently the rule is "go by what the publisher says."

Dr. Edi Bilimoria's recent book, Consciousness Came First, Collective Ink, counted front matter and numbered pages to reach the 244 pages as stated on its Amazon page. I think that is the more common way, though I have not made a complete study!

 

[A Phoenix]

Hi Christie,

In my recent full-length work Francis Bacon, The Rosicrucian-Freemasonry Brotherhood & the Secret Authorship of the Shakespeare Works (2025) I showed that: 

The secrets of the life and writings of Francis Bacon were from the very beginning known to his invisible Rosicrucian-Freemasonry Brotherhood which have been secretly passed down (to use his own words) through a private succession and are known to the high initiates of its inner sanctum to the present day.

These secrets include Bacon as the concealed royal son of Queen Elizabeth, Founding Father of the Rosicrucian-Freemasonry Brotherhood and the anonymous author of its Rosicrucian manifestos, and the author of the Shakespeare works. 

For the first time the above work presented an unbroken factual and evidential chain revealing that the Shakespeare First Folio, the Stratford Shakespeare Monument, the Bacon and Shakespeare editors, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Folger Shakespeare Library, have been secretly overseen by Bacon and his invisible Rosicrucian-Freemasonry Brotherhood for the last four hundred years.

Many of the publications set forth authored by seventeenth century Shakespeare scholars through to our own twentieth first century carried Baconian-Rosicrucian ciphers including the number 257 Francis Bacon (100)/Fra Rosicrosse (157) in simple cipher. 

https://www.academia.edu/130303599/Francis_Bacon_The_Rosicrucian_Freemasonry_Brotherhood_and_the_Secret_Authorship_of_the_Shakespeare_Works

The prolific Brian Vickers, Professor of English Literature and Director of the Centre for Renaissance at ETH Zurich, is the only internationally recognised Bacon and Shakespeare authority.

He is widely regarded as the greatest living authority on Bacon and Shakespeare in the world.

He has published numerous works on Bacon and Shakespeare including Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge University Press, 1968) and Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford University Press, 1996), Appropriating Shakespeare Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993) and Returning to Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). 

The last of these runs to 257 pages: 257 Francis Bacon (100)/Fra Rosicrosse (157).

In 2005 Julie Robin Solomon and Catherine Gimelli Martin, ed., set forth Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought Essays to Commemorate The Advancement of Learning (1605-2005):

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), this collection examines Bacon's recasting of proto-scientific philosophies and practices into early modern discourses of knowledge. Like Bacon, all of the contributors to this volume confront an essential question: how to integrate intellectual traditions with emergent knowledges to forge new intellectual futures. The volume's main theme is Bacon's core interest in identifying and conceptualizing coherent intellectual disciplines, including the central question of whether Bacon succeeded in creating unified discourses about learning. Bacon's interests in natural philosophy, politics, ethics, law, medicine, religion, neoplatonic magic, technology and humanistic learning are here mirrored in the contributors' varied intellectual backgrounds and diverse approaches to Bacon's thought.

The work runs to 257 pages: 257 Francis Bacon (100)/Fra Rosicrosse (157).

Francis Bacon, The Founding Father of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood and Head of the English Secret Service (forerunner of British Intelligence, MI5 and MI6, etc), set in motion the future direction of humanity in perpetuity.

From the beginning members of his Rosicrucian Brotherhood were also members of the English Secret Service and at its very highest point controlled and directed by it, which evolved into current day British Intelligence. 

Nor is its secret invisible power confined by borders.

At its apex the Rosicrucian Brotherhood directs the Secret Intelligence Services of the United States of America, with its invisible power and influence extending over several trans-national institutions, including the European Union, NATO and United Nations, a grand design whose secret engines were set in motion by its great mastermind several centuries earlier.

The influence of these secret invisible Baconian-Rosicrucian institutions extends to the major international publishing houses and prestigious university presses in the UK and USA who publications on Bacon and Shakespeare incorporate secret Baconian-Rosicrucian ciphers.

The presence of these secret ciphers in Bacon-Shakespeare works published by the authoritative & prestigious Oxford Clarendon, and Oxford and Cambridge University presses in the UK, and Harvard University and Yales presses in the US, and some of the international publishing houses, reinforce and confirm the invisible guiding influence of Bacon’s divine Rosicrucian-Freemasonry Brotherhood.

The complex labyrinthine reasons for the enduring secrecy surrounding Bacon’s hidden legacy goes far beyond the authorship of his Shakespeare poems and plays, with it being all part of his long deeply laid plans for a universal reformation of the whole world.

[Light-of-Truth]

On 7/1/2026 at 9:19 AM, Christie Waldman said:

Since you brought it up, I looked into this a bit more. It's true, 257 is the last of the arabic-numbered pages. I like that number! That is how I always thought you were supposed to count book pages.

Counting pages can mean different ways. 😉

[Christie Waldman]

There are coincidences with numbers. When you are aware of the significance of numbers, you may see them where you otherwise not pay any attention to them. My boyfriend's sails on his boat have the number "257" on them. Why, I don't know.