Tag Archives: Ben Jonson

In the epilogue to Shakespeare’s Last Plays Frances Yates not only reaffirms her view that Jonson’s The Alchemist and Shakespeare’s The Tempest offer two conflicting representations of the Renaissance magus, but on the pre-proto-penultimate page she introduces the ghostly figure of Bacon and links him with Shakespeare and ‘the Renaissance Hermetic tradition’. She quickly informs us that she is ‘absolutely convinced that the real author of the works of Shakespeare was Shakespeare’ and expands on her absolute conviction with a cut-and-dried full stop – which is somewhat qualified by the first word of the next sentence: ‘Yet…’. Continue reading →