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The Misfortunes of Arthur


A Phoenix

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The Bacons

The persons and influences that shape our lives and minds begins early and Bacon was raised and surrounded by poets, writers and translators from his early childhood right through into adulthood and beyond. His love and extensive knowledge of the Roman philosopher, writer and playwright Lucius Annaeus Seneca was inevitable as Seneca was Sir Nicholas Bacon’s favourite author. In a poem written for his wife Lady Anne Bacon in 1558 in a time of his ‘great sickenes’ he reveals how he took great comfort in Anne reading to him from her ‘Tullye’ (Cicero) and ‘my Senecke’:

Paper: https://www.academia.edu/45006687/Francis_Bacon_and_his_First_Unacknowledged_Shakespeare_Play_The_Misfortunes_of_Arthur_and_its_Extensive_Links_to_his_other_Shakespeare_Works

Video: https://youtu.be/OvUjs6MVvtY

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In his preparatory comments to The Misfortunes of Arthur its editor J. W. Cunliffe states that it ‘seems impossible to carry the borrowing of Senecan material further’ and for F. L. Lucas in Seneca and English Tragedy it is ‘the most slavishly Senecan of all English plays’. But as the German critic Wolfgang Clemen pointed out this was no mere slavish imitation:

Paper: https://www.academia.edu/45006687/Francis_Bacon_and_his_First_Unacknowledged_Shakespeare_Play_The_Misfortunes_of_Arthur_and_its_Extensive_Links_to_his_other_Shakespeare_Works

Video: https://youtu.be/OvUjs6MVvtY

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5 hours ago, A Phoenix said:

Wonderful writing A.P. You deliver factual information with empathy and human understanding. In her "History of Gorhambury" (1821), Lady Grimston recorded these Latin verses, transcribed from a singular little book in the British Museum - as she explains:

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Any translators out there?

The history of Gorhambury / by Charlotte Grimston
[London : Privately printed, 1821]

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/yale.39002034558461

Edited by Eric Roberts
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48 minutes ago, Eric Roberts said:

Wonderful writing A.P. You deliver factual information with empathy and human understanding. In her "History of Gorhambury" (1821), Lady Grimston recorded these Latin verses, transcribed from a singular little book in the British Museum - as she explains:

image.png.7d5858d63f49dc38f675c514d41f21f1.png

image.png.c36fd51188c84bddf1ad949511ae4f7d.png

image.png.b636233320cfcb078ccd5ce1672bface.png

image.png.f04ff64f79b09c9538e324762fb6f625.png

Any translators out there?

The history of Gorhambury / by Charlotte Grimston
[London : Privately printed, 1821]

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/yale.39002034558461

Lady (Baroness) Lumley, to whom Sir Nicholas Bacon gave a book of inscriptions from the long gallery at Gorhambury, was herself a Greek and Latin translator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Lumley,_Baroness_Lumley

A brief search of the British Museum website was unsuccessful in locating the little book which Charlotte Grimston saw c. 1820. 

Edited by Eric Roberts
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The Umbilical Senecan Link

The Misfortunes of Arthur was published in 1588 around the same time as the early Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus and the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III were being written in the late 1580s. The umbilical Senecan connection linking The Misfortunes of Arthur and the most Senecan drama in the Elizabethan canon and the early Senecan Shakespeare plays ushering in the golden Shakespearean age has been strangely neglected by Seneca and Shakespeare scholars. Just has Bacon had re-wrote Seneca in The Misfortunes of Arthur rewriting situations, scenes and speeches, the modern editor of Seneca Professor Boyle states: 

Paper: https://www.academia.edu/45006687/Francis_Bacon_and_his_First_Unacknowledged_Shakespeare_Play_The_Misfortunes_of_Arthur_and_its_Extensive_Links_to_his_other_Shakespeare_Works

Video: https://youtu.be/OvUjs6MVvtY

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Professor Miola

In his Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy The Influence of Seneca Professor Miola explores Seneca’s influence on Shakespeare wherein it mainly focuses upon seven plays Titus Andronicus, Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear as well as discussing the Senecan influence on Pericles, Cymbeline, A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. And just as Seneca provided Bacon with numerous rhetorical and thematic ideas in Misfortunes of Arthur Professor Miola points out:

Paper: https://www.academia.edu/45006687/Francis_Bacon_and_his_First_Unacknowledged_Shakespeare_Play_The_Misfortunes_of_Arthur_and_its_Extensive_Links_to_his_other_Shakespeare_Works

Video: https://youtu.be/OvUjs6MVvtY

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Intertexuality of Seneca

In his groundbreaking Fated Sky The Femina Furens in Shakespeare M. L. Stapleton addresses the intertextuality of Seneca, His Tenne Tragedies containing the English translation of the Senecan tragedies with the Shakespeare canon. He explains how what he describes as the femina furens (angry woman) features in all ten of Seneca’s plays provide models found throughout the Shakespeare plays form the early plays of The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, the three Henry VI plays, Richard III as well The Merchant of Venice, through to the later plays of All’s Well That Ends Well, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline.

Paper: https://www.academia.edu/45006687/Francis_Bacon_and_his_First_Unacknowledged_Shakespeare_Play_The_Misfortunes_of_Arthur_and_its_Extensive_Links_to_his_other_Shakespeare_Works

Video: https://youtu.be/OvUjs6MVvtY

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Bacon Drew Heavily from Seneca in Shakespeare and His Own Writings

In the years immediately following The Misfortunes of Arthur just as he drew heavily on Seneca for his early Shakespeare plays during the same period Bacon made use of Seneca’s writings in several of his own diverse range of writings: the religio-political tracts An Advertisement touching the controversies of the Church of England (c.1589) and Observations Upon A Libel (1592), his dramatic device Of Tribute, or, giving that which is due (c.1592) and his legal tract Argument in Chudleigh’s Case (1594). His habit of reading and re-reading Seneca’s tragedies and prose works is evidenced in his private manuscript note-book Promus of Formularies and Elegances (1594-5) which produces a great many parallels with his Shakespeare plays. In the Promus Bacon jotted down words and phrases from several of Seneca’s prose writings and his plays Hercules Furens, Hercules Oetaeus, Troades and Oedipus, all of which were heavily drawn upon by Bacon in Misfortunes of Arthur and throughout his Shakespeare plays. Bacon also quotes and refers to a wide range of Seneca’s writings in Advancement of Learning which he was preparing and writing for publication through 1603 and 1604 the years that saw the publication of the first and second quartos of Hamlet.

Paper: https://www.academia.edu/45006687/Francis_Bacon_and_his_First_Unacknowledged_Shakespeare_Play_The_Misfortunes_of_Arthur_and_its_Extensive_Links_to_his_other_Shakespeare_Works

Video: https://youtu.be/OvUjs6MVvtY

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Revenge Drama


The Misfortunes of Arthur is arguably the first Elizabethan revenge drama with links to the greatest complex revenge drama in the whole of western literature The Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, a genre ultimately derived mainly from Seneca. The revenge tragedy is largely characterised by horrible and bloody excesses, murders and mutilations, the appearance of ghosts demanding revenge, the madness of the revenger, insanity or feigned insanity, which are evident in Seneca’s major tragedies Theystes, Medea, and Agamemnon. Some of these devices were adopted by Bacon in his Senecan saturated Misfortunes of Arthur with the theme of revenge in Hamlet the subject of his aptly titled essay Of Revenge. In her full-length study entitled Hamlet and Revenge Eleanor Prosser describes the revenge theme in the Misfortunes in some impressive detail.

Paper: https://www.academia.edu/45006687/Francis_Bacon_and_his_First_Unacknowledged_Shakespeare_Play_The_Misfortunes_of_Arthur_and_its_Extensive_Links_to_his_other_Shakespeare_Works

Video: https://youtu.be/OvUjs6MVvtY

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 Shakespeare Tragicomedies

During the period from 1607 onwards Lord Bacon turned his attention to his later Shakespeare plays, or as others prefer to describe them, Shakespeare romances, the name given to Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. We know from his Advancement of Learning published and numerous essays written during this period that Bacon was reading and re-reading Seneca’s prose and dramatic works and inevitably Seneca the philosopher and dramatist formed part of his consciousness in his prose and dramatic works. The Shakespeare tragicomedies, writes Professor Miola ‘deploy Senecan subtexts’ and draw,

Paper: https://www.academia.edu/45006687/Francis_Bacon_and_his_First_Unacknowledged_Shakespeare_Play_The_Misfortunes_of_Arthur_and_its_Extensive_Links_to_his_other_Shakespeare_Works

Video: https://youtu.be/OvUjs6MVvtY

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The Tempest

The Baconian magic-philosophical Shakespeare The Tempest, a great transformative work of art with its magician-philosophical-scientist Prospero (Bacon) orchestrating events which has been described as a ‘revenge comedy’, sets up, observes Professor Boyle, ‘the possibility for revenge and then substitutes forgiveness’:

Paper: https://www.academia.edu/45006687/Francis_Bacon_and_his_First_Unacknowledged_Shakespeare_Play_The_Misfortunes_of_Arthur_and_its_Extensive_Links_to_his_other_Shakespeare_Works

Video: https://youtu.be/OvUjs6MVvtY

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Bacon & The Jaggards

The year after The Tempest was composed and performed Bacon saw through the press the second edition of his Essays which went though a number of issues printed by and for William and John Jaggard. It is no coincidence that The Tempest described by Dr Yates as a Rosicrucian manifesto was placed first in the First Folio of the Shakespeare plays printed and published by father and son William and Isaac Jaggard in November 1623, followed shortly after, by a reprint of Bacon’s essays by John's wife Elizabeth Jaggard.

Paper: https://www.academia.edu/45006687/Francis_Bacon_and_his_First_Unacknowledged_Shakespeare_Play_The_Misfortunes_of_Arthur_and_its_Extensive_Links_to_his_other_Shakespeare_Works

Video: https://youtu.be/OvUjs6MVvtY

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The Attourneys Academy

The same year the Senecan inspired Shakespeare plays were first published to the world (eighteen of the Shakespeare play were printed here for the first time) another work, a little less known to posterity and the world, was also printed at London, which if known to Seneca, Bacon and Shakespeare scholars, has been carefully overlooked and ignored. This work (apparently) written by the lawyer, poet and author Thomas Powell entitled The Attourneys Academy is dedicated to the king, and several others, including Francis Bacon. The reason this revealing dedication to Bacon is not reproduced by his editors, biographers and commentators, is it very obviously alludes to Bacon’s secret authorship of the Shakespeare poems and plays, with its theatrical metaphor momentarily drawing the curtain back, for us to have a little peek, before promptly closing it again:

Paper: https://www.academia.edu/45006687/Francis_Bacon_and_his_First_Unacknowledged_Shakespeare_Play_The_Misfortunes_of_Arthur_and_its_Extensive_Links_to_his_other_Shakespeare_Works

Video: https://youtu.be/OvUjs6MVvtY

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4 hours ago, A Phoenix said:

Wow !!! Thank you, A Phoenix for the reminder. 🙏 I remembered the Book and the Poem you already mentionned in another threads and evidently in your academic paper, but I had completely forget its title " TO TRUE NOBILITIE ..."

This is another great proof of the link between Francis Bacon and "True" Nobility in response to the Oxfordian claiming that Nobility was the privilege of De Vere !

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4 hours ago, A Phoenix said:

That says it all, so wonderfully ! ❤️ Take 33 bows !🍾

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