The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded: Must Read Classics

by Delia Bacon

This work is designed to propose to the consideration, not of the learned world only, but of all ingenuous and practical minds, a new development of that system of practical philosophy from which THE SCIENTIFIC ARTS of the Modern Ages proceed, and which has already become, just to the extent to which it has been hitherto opened, the wisdom,—the universally approved, and practically adopted, Wisdom of the Moderns.

It is a development of this philosophy, which was deliberately postponed by the great Scientific Discoverers and Reformers, in whose Scientific Discoveries and Reformations our organised advancements in speculation and practice have their origin;—Reformers, whose scientific acquaintance with historic laws forbade the idea of any immediate and sudden cures of the political and social evils which their science searches to the root, and which it was designed to eradicate.

The proposition to be demonstrated in the ensuing pages is That the new philosophy which strikes out from the Court—from the Court of that despotism that names and gives form to the Modern Learning,—which comes to us from the Court of the last of the Tudors and the first of the Stuarts,—that new philosophy which we have received, and accepted, and adopted as a practical philosophy, not merely in that grave department of learning in which it comes to us professionally as philosophy, but in that not less important department of learning in which it comes to us in the disguise of amusement,—in the form of fable and allegory and parable,—the proposition is, that this Elizabethan philosophy is, in these two forms of it,—not two philosophies,—not two Elizabethan philosophies, not two new and wondrous philosophies of nature and practice, not two new Inductive philosophies, but one,—one and the that it is philosophy in both these forms, with its veil of allegory and parable, and without it; that it is philosophy applied to much more important subjects in the disguise of the parable, than it is in the open statement; that it is philosophy in both these cases, and not philosophy in one of them, and a brutish, low-lived, illiterate, unconscious spontaneity in the other.

366 pages, Hardcover

Published March 13, 2022

About the author

Delia Bacon was an American writer of plays and short stories, best known for her work on the Shakespeare authorship question.

She promoted the theory that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were written by a group of men, including Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh and others, which may have included Edmund Spenser, Lord Buckhurst and the Earl of Oxford.