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And what make you from *Württemberg* Horatio?
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Arthur Neuendorffer
Jul 30, 2016, 1:04:06 PM7/30/16
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. Hamlet (Quarto 2, 1604) Act I, Scene ii
.
King: Doe I impart toward you for your intent
. In going back to schoole in *Wittenberg*,
. It is most retrogard to our desire,
. And we beseech you bend you to remaine
. Heere in the cheare and comfort of our eye,
. Our chiefest courtier, cosin, and our sonne.
.
Quee. Let not thy mother loose her prayers Hamlet,
. I pray thee stay with vs, goe not to *Wittenberg*.
.
Ham. I shall in all my best obay you Madam.
...............................................
Enter Horatio,Marcellus, and Bernardo.
Hora. Haile to your Lordship.
Ham. I am glad to see you well; Horatio, or I do forget my selfe.
Hora. The same my Lord, and your poore seruant euer.
Ham. Sir my good friend, Ile change that name with you,
. And what make you from *Wittenberg* Horatio?
. Marcellus.
Mar. My good Lord.
Ham. I am very glad to see you, (good euen sir)
But what in faith make you from *Wittenberg*?
Hora. A truant disposition good my Lord.
--------------------------------------------------------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Valentinus_Andreae
<<Johannes Valentinus Andreae (August 17, 1586 – June 27, 1654), a.k.a. Johannes Valentinus Andreä or Johann Valentin Andreae, was a German theologian, who claimed to be the author of an ancient text known as the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459 (published in 1616, Strasbourg, as the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz). This became one of the three founding works of Rosicrucianism, which was both a legend and a fashionable semi-cult across Europe in this period.
Andreae was a prominent member of the Protestant utopian movement which began in Germany and spread across northern Europe and into Britain under the mentorship of Samuel Hartlib and John Amos Comenius. The focus of this movement was the need for education and the encouragement of sciences as the key to national prosperity. But like many vaguely-religious Renaissance movements at this time, the scientific ideas being promoted were often tinged with hermeticism, occultism and neo-Platonic concepts. The threats of heresy charges posed by rigid religious authorities (Protestant and Catholic) and a scholastic intellectual climate often forced these activists to hide behind fictional secret societies and write anonymously in support of their ideas, while claiming access to "secret ancient wisdom".
Andreae was born at Herrenberg, *Württemberg*, the son of Johannes Andreae (1554–1601), the superintendent of Herrenberg and later the abbot of Königsbrunn. His mother Maria Moser went to Tübingen as a widow and was court apothecary 1607–1617. The young Andreae studied theology and natural sciences 1604–1606. He befriended Christoph Besold who encouraged Andreae's interest in esotericism. Ca. 1605 he wrote the first version of "The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosekreutz". He was refused the final examination and church service, probably for attaching a pasquill (offensive, libelous note) to the chancellor Enzlin's door, on the occasion of his marriage. After that, he taught young nobles and hiked with his students through Switzerland, France, Austria and Italy. He visited Dillingen, a bastion of the Jesuits, whom he regarded as the Antichrist. In 1608 he returned to Tübingen. He came to know Tobias Hess, a Paracelsian physician with an interest in apocalyptic prophecy. From 1610 till 1612 Andreae traveled.
In 1612 he resumed his theological studies in Tübingen. After the final examination in 1614, he became deacon in Vaihingen an der Enz, and in 1620 priest in Calw. Here he reformed the school and social institutions, and established institutions for charity and other aids. To this end, he initiated the Christliche Gottliebende Gesellschaft ("Christian God-loving Society"). In 1628 he planned a "Unio Christiana". He obtained funds and brought effective help for the reconstruction of Calw, which was destroyed in the Battle of Nördlingen (1634) by the imperial troops and visited by pestilence. In 1639, he became preacher at the court and councillor of the consistory (Konsistorialrat) in Stuttgart, where he advocated a fundamental church reform. He became also a spiritual adviser to a royal princess of *Württemberg*.
Among other things, he promoted the Tübinger Stift, a hall of residence and teaching which was a seminary owned and supported by the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in *Württemberg*, in South West Germany. The Stift was originally founded as an Augustinian monastery in the Middle Ages, but after the Reformation (in 1536), Duke Ulrich turned the Stift into a seminary which served to prepare Protestant pastors for *Württemberg*. A prominent student of the Stift during this period was Johannes Kepler.
In 1646, Andreae was made a member of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft ("Fruitbearing Society"), where he got the company-nickname der Mürbe ("the soft"). In 1650, he assumed direction of the monasterial school Bebenhausen. and in 1654, he became abbot of the evangelical monasterial school of Adelberg. He died in Stuttgart.
Rosicrucianism
His role in the origin of the Rosicrucian legend is controversial. In his autobiography he claimed that the Chymische Hochzeit ("Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz") was one of his works—as a "ludibrium", possibly meaning "lampoon". He said in old age that he wrote this fake document in his youth (circa 1605). In his later works, alchemy is treated as a subject of ridicule and is placed with music, art, theatre and astrology in the category of the 'less serious' sciences.
Andreae was a pious, orthodox Lutheran theologian who probably had nothing at all to do with the two great manifestoes of this so-called "secret" society—the Fama fraternitatis or the Confessio fraternitatis His lifelong commitment appears to have been to found a Societas Christiana or utopian learned brotherhood of those dedicated to a spiritual life, in the hope that they would initiate a second Reformation.
His writings and efforts provided a potent stimulus to Protestant intellectuals at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and he appears to have inspired the foundation of The Unio Christiana which was established in Nuremberg during 1628 by a few patricians and churchmen under the impetus of Johannes Saubert the Elder. This utopian society was later revived in Stuttgart in the early 1660s and another utopian brotherhood known as Antilia ( a communal society reminiscent of the monastery) developed in the Baltic during the Thirty Years' War. The founders were inspired by both Baconian belief in experimental science and by Andreae's tracts. They later attempted to establish a colony on a small island in the Gulf of Riga, and considered immigrating to Virginia.>>
--------------------------------------------------------------
. *JOHANN VALENTINE ANDREAE*
--------------------------------------------------------
. 1597, Richard III (Q1 STC 22314):
. Printed by *VALENTINE Sims* , for *ANDREW Wise* ,
. dwelling in Paules Church-yard, at the
________ Signe of the *ANGELl* 1597.
-------------------------------------------------------------
. *Confederatio Militae vANGELicae*
-------------------------------------------------------------
___ *ANDREW* W.(ise)
. *VALENTINE* S.(ims)
The Knights of Saint *JOHN* in England
-------------------------------------------------------------------
<<By 1567 the only English Knights of Saint *JOHN*
remaining on Malta were the titular Grand Prior Richard SHELLEY
(who was an active participant in several plots against Elizabeth)
& Oliver Starkey (commander of Quenington),
___ later titular Bailiff of Egle (from 1569).>>
[John Shakspere : Bailiff of Stratford (from 1568).]
.
. THE KNIGHTS OF SAINT JOHN IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND & IRELAND
. http://www.saintjohn.org/priory.htm
.
. <<Starkey, who had been La Valette's Latin Secretary
. and was the only Englishman at the Great Siege,
. died in 1588 & SHELLEY in 1590, when a French knight
. was appointed to the titular Grand Priory.
.
This appointment was challenged by an Irish knight resident
in the convent, one *ANDREW WISE* from Waterford who, after
complaining, was appointed Bailiff of Egle but, still unsatisfied,
appealed to the Pope. In 1593 Wise was appointed titular Grand Prior,
a dignity he held until his death in 1631. From thenceforth the
offices of Grand Prior of England, Turcopilier, Bailiff of Egle
and Prior or Grand Prior of Ireland became honorifics given to
knights whom the Grand Master & Council wished to honor with
the grand cross & membership of the Chapter-General.>>
-------------------------------------------------------------
Chap. 8, _THIS STAR OF ENGLAND_ by Dorothy & Charlton Ogburn
. http://www.sourcetext.com/sourcebook/Star/ch08.html
.
<<IN JANUARY 7, 1575, Lord Oxford set forth with his retinue,
consisting, as Burghley noted in his diary, of "two gentlemen,
two grooms, one payend, a harbinger, a housekeeper & a trenchman."
.
Before the end of May the traveller reached Venice, where he
declined a generous offer on the part of [titular Grand Prior]
*Sir RICHARD SHELLEY* of a furnished house, to continue his journey.>>
--------------------------------------------------------------
____ Priors & Grand Priors of English Langue,
. Sovereign Order of St. JOHN of Jerusalem and of Malta.
.
. THOMAS TRESHAM 1557-1559
. RICHARD SHELLEY 1557-1590
--------------------------------------------------------
. 1597, Richard III (Q1 STC 22314):
. THE TRAGEDY OF / King Richard the third. Containing,
. His teacherous Plots againft his brother Clarence:
. the pittiefull murther of his iunocent nephewes:
. his tyrannicall vfurpation: with the whole courfe
. of his detefted life, and moft deferued death.
. As it hath beene lately Acted by the
. Right honourable the Lord Chamber-laine his feruants.
.
. Printed by *VALENTINE Sims* , for *ANDREW Wise* ,
.
__ dwelling in Paules Church-yard, at the
________ Signe of the *ANGELl* 1597.
----------------------------------------------------------
THE CREST OF JOHANN VALENTIN ANDREÆ.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/img/14000.jpg
....................................................
<<The reference to four red roses and a white cross in the Chymical
Marriage of Christian Rosencreutz identified Johann Valentin Andreæ as
its author, for his family crest, shown above, consisted of four red
roses and a white cross.>>
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/sta33.htm
.
<<A great number of scholars and philosophers,
among them Sir Francis Bacon & Wolfgang von Goethe,
have been suspected of affiliation with the R(osicrucian) O(rder)>>
-----------------------------------------------------------
____*OXENFORD*
.
____*R.O. : FOX DEN*
____*R(osicrucian) O(rder) : FOX DEN*
-------------------------------------------------------
__ \_*_/
__ _\_/
__ * _X * Edward de Vere, Erle of Oxenford was buryed
__ _/_\ __________ the 6th daye of Julye Å 1604
__ _/ *_\ ____________ [ *St. PROSPERO's EVE* ]
.
<<The strange, large 'X' type symbol appears to have been put there
much later. According to Paul Altrocchi, this must have happened
many decades later "...since pencils withsuch a sharp point did
not appear until the late 1600's." It really is anybody's guess
who put it there - perhaps an over-enthusiastic Oxfordian?>>
- _The Death of Edward de Vere_ by Michael Llewellyn
-----------------------------------------------
1604 WHITgift dies on February 29th.
1604 1000th anniversary of St.Augustine's death.
1604 Tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz discovered.
1604 Hamlet published
1604 FAMA Fraternitatis published
1604 Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (V1) published
1604 Oxford dies on the Feastday of John the Baptist.
1604 Oxford buried on *St. PROSPERO's EVE*
1604 Kepler's NOVA/AVON.
1604 Susan marries Pembroke on the Feastday of John the Devine
--------------------------------------------------
<<The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (Chymische Hochzeit
Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459) was edited in 1616 in Strasbourg
(annexed by France in 1681), and its anonymous authorship is attributed
to Johann Valentin Andreae. It is the third of the original manifestos
of the mysterious "Fraternity of the Rose Cross" (Rosicrucians). It is
an allegoric romance (story) divided into Seven Days, or Seven
Journeys, like Genesis, and tells us about the way Christian Rosenkreuz
was invited to go to a wonderful castle full of miracles, in order to
assist the Chymical Wedding of the king and the queen, that is, the
husband and the bride. This manifesto has been a source of inspiration
for poets, alchemists (the word "chymical" is an old form of "chemical"
and refers to alchemy - for which the 'Sacred Marriage' was the goal)
and dreamers, through the force of its initiation ritual with
processions of tests, purifications, death, resurrection, and ascension
and also by its symbolism found since the beginning with the invitation
to Rosenkreutz to assist this Royal Wedding. There is some resemblance
between this alchemic romance and some parables in the Bible:
.
. * The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a
marriage for his son, and And when the king came in to see the guests,
he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: (Matthew 22:2,11
KJV)
. * And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from
God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
(Revelation 21:2)
.
Another rich source of imagery from the Bible are the Song of Solomon
and the Book of Proverbs>> - (From Wikipedia)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
<<Andreae was born in 1586, of a family already eminent for learning.
He distinguished himself at several universities, and then for some
years traveled all over Europe as tutor to various pupils of noble
families. Returning to Würtemberg he came under the influence of the
pious and venerable Arndt Winkworth, and he became an earnestly
religious man. For many years he was the chief clergyman at Calw, where
during the earlier period of the thirty years war, when Würtemberg was
as yet untouched, he organized a system of relief and succour to the
sufferers elsewhere, which was so energetically carried out, that
within five years 11,000 persons had received from it essential
assistance. But Calw's own turn came in 1634 when it was stormed and
given up to plunder. Andrea, who was particularly obnoxious to the
Imperialists for the part he had taken, fled into the forests with some
of his friends. They were hunted for days with bloodhounds, but
finally, after undergoing fearful hardships, escaped by the aid of
friendly country-people. As soon as the way was open he returned to his
charge, where he was received with tears of joy. When the storm rolled
away from that region of Germany, Andrea consented to leave Calw and
accept the post of court preacher at Stuttgart. Here he had to cope
with difficulties of another and less congenial type. He was a man of
fervid and strict piety, with high ideas of church discipline, and the
court of Würtemberg was given up to luxury and amusement as if the
country were not bleeding at every pore. He did contrive to make his
own house a refuge for the poor, especially those of his own order, to
found a theological college, and to inspire new life and better order
into the churches more immediately under his influence. But the court
disliked him and he had many annoyances and failures to endure, and at
last his weakened health furnished a good excuse for getting rid of him
by an honourable promotion. He died in 1654 as prelate of Adelberg. His
greatest influence was as a Church reformer and a prose writer; he
wrote many theological, controversial, and satirical works, both in
Latin and German, which earned for him an important place in the
religious literature of his day, sparking a revival in the mystical and
occult aspects of Christianity, through alchemy and hermetic
philosophy.
.
These three very rare first editions of his early works are:
.
(1) The Menippus, his most hazardous of his books, comprising an attack
on the current abuses in the church and the literary world, advocating
free will and free thought as well as the utmost tolerance in religious
matters. Some parts are almost literally taken over from Sebastian
Franck's Narrenschif. The book was immediately forbidden and It caused
him much trouble and hatred. It also yielded many adversaries among
which Caspar Bucher, professor of rhetorics at the University of
Tübingen is the most well known. He published his Antimenippus in
1617.
.
(2) The Turbo is a comedy in five acts in which Turbo, a wealthy young
man, throws himself into one folly after another. He is accompanied
throughout by the worldly-wise Harlequin who provides a cynical
commentary on the action. Between the five acts of the play there are
four interludes, each of which explores a more general theme:
(a) a comic disputation between scholars, includes mock examination
questions and a Rabelaisian list of imaginary book titles;
(b) the examination of candidates for admission to the Worshipful
Society of Skinflints, detailing money-grabbing schemes; and
(c) Prince Hermaphroditus makes proclamations to his followers about
the behaviour of various classes - the clergy, the government, the
populace, the court, the army. The comedy satirizes those who let
themselves be guided by their prejudices and the opinion of others. In
fact it is no less than a text on the Faust-problem: the search in
pursuit of wisdom. The comedy has a high literary value and was
translated in German in 1909.
..
(3) His Herculis christiani luctae XXIV is an allegorical text on the
works of Hercules, fighting the vices of his time.>>
http://www.forum-hes.nl/forum/main_stocklist.phtml/subject/446/1/Strasbourg.html
-------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Heisler - The Forgotten English Roots of Rosicrucianism
Article originally published in The Hermetic Journal, 1992.
...............................................
<<Michael Maier, according to his own statement, first heard of the
Rosicrucian brotherhood when in England. Leaving Prague in the spring of
1611, he spent some time in Amsterdam before, we can reckon, arriving in
London in the winter of that year. Presumably it was in December 1611
that he wrote the Rosicrucian "greetings card", featuring a rose, which
was sent to James I. The wording carries a very strong echo of a
powerful speech in the play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, which bears the
unmistakable imprint of William Shakespeare's unique poetic talent. This
familiarity with the Bard's play is unlikely to have been purely
accidental, particularly, as I have shown elsewhere, Maier had a
significant connection with Shakespeare's circle of friends.1 The
question inevitably arises, therefore, of what clear evidence exists to
indicate that the traditional Germanocentric reading of the history of
early Rosicrucianism - which depicts the movement as mainly gestating in
the strivings of J.V. Andreae's personal circle - oversimplifies the
movement's origins to the point of gross distortion?
Francis Thynne, whose cousin was Sir John Thynne of Longleat House,
Wiltshire, was born c. 1545 and died in 1608. Not a literary figure of
either the first or second rank, he is remarkably interesting, however,
for the ethos his erratic life and interests evoke. Entering Lincoln's
Inn in 1561, he made there a life-long friend in Thomas Egerton, who
later rose to positions of the highest importance in both law and state.
Improvidence and mental illness seem to have afflicted Thynne in his
early years. At the end of 1573 he was imprisoned in the White Lion at
Southwark for a debt of £lOO, his precious books being sold off. His
pleas for help to Lord Burleigh survive among the Salisbury letters.
After two years he was released from confinement, coming under the
hospitality of cousin Sir John at Longleat. Sir John's first marriage,
incidentally, was to the sister of Sir Thomas Gresham, a masonic Grand
Master in the south, says James Anderson. In 1602 Francis was to offer a
long discourse on the admirals of England to Charles Howard, the Lord
Admiral, another Grand Master.2
.
Thynne's manuscripts are numerous, and they reveal a man who not only
was a heraldic enthusiast, becoming Lancaster herald, but was an ardent
delver into alchemical texts, which exist to this day in the British
Library, in Longleat House and in the Ashmole collection in the
Bodleian.3 At Longleat are to be found Ripley's Compendium of Alchemy,
Thomas Norton's Ordinal of Alchemy, the obscure Stella Alchymiae, dated
1384, of "Joanne Bübelem de Anglia" and a disputation between the father
and son, Merline and Marian, concerning the marriage between Sylos and
Anul (Sol and Luna).4 A member of the Society of Antiquaries, Thynne was
a hack historian, who worked with John Stow and Abraham Fleming for the
editor John Hooker in expanding and revising Holinshed's famous
Chronicle. Thynne's "A Treatise of the Lord Cobhams" was left out by
order of the Privy Council.
.
Thynne's occultic preoccupations become very evident in the "Homo Animal
Sociale", a manuscript treatise, dated 20th October 1578, which he
presented to Lord Burleigh.5 He discusses Egyptian hieroglyphics and the
Druids, the "notes, signes, tokens, caracters or signes of the voyce
whereby there are made generall differences of soundes", and, with
evident relish, kabbalah, the "most profounde knowledge" being lost to
us, as "the learned Cabaliste Mr Dee" observed in his book "entituled
monas heroglyphica". He tells how Hebrew letters were unwritten before
the "sonnes of Adam", who before "the generall floode were the Junitors
of the same, for the sonnes of Sethe as speketh Josephus did write on
the pillers all the knowledge of the celestiall things". He also refers
to "the confused Kingdome of trayters[?] at the Towere of Babilone" -
the masons who built badly and were deprived of the original pure tongue.
.
Thynne's poetry is far from great; but its content is fascinating and
revealing. His Emblemes and Epigrammes were written out c. 1600. "White
heares" is a description of some sort of society meeting at the Rose
tavern :
.
"At the Rose within newgate, ther friendlie did meete,
fower of my ould frends, ech other for to greete:"6
.
Thynne's poem "Societie" is suspiciously ambiguous: we are never quite
sure whether he is lauding mutuality and social bonds in society in
general, or whether he is talking of a very specific, very exclusive
fraternity - a club. Dated December 20 1600, the poem is dedicated to
Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. The poet tells of,
.
"The purple Rose which first Damasco bredd,
adorn'd with cullor gratefull to the sight"
.
He links the image of a society to the image of the rose:
.
"Soe two faire dowries which mann doth enioye -
true perfect love, and suer fidelitie -
firmelie preserve humane societie,
their frends assisting in ech hard annoye,
when want of ech brings noe securitie;
both which, this damask rose doth well unfoulde,
as honest hart, which fayth and love doth houlde."
.
Thynne concludes:
.
"soe our societie, without love and fayth
is never perfect, as true reason sayth;
ffor where is perfect love, there trustie fayth is found,
and where assured trust doth dwell, there must needs abound."7
.
So from all this we have learned that there was a group of friends
meeting at the Rose Tavern in Newgate, which almost surely included
Egerton. The damask rose was their emblem. From Thynne's papers, we can
guess that one of the topics their conversations regularly ran to was
alchemy. But that London had at least one tavern called the Rose is
unsurprising, the rose being perhaps the most popular symbol of Tudor
England.
.
A little more need be said on Sir Thomas Egerton, who eventually became
Lord Chancellor. A man of considerable intellect, he ceaselessly
encouraged young men of the highest calibre. In the 1590s he was a
vigorous promoter of the career of Sir Francis Bacon. John Donne the
poet became his secretary. Another of his secretaries, George Carew, was
presented with a copy of Arcana arcanissima by Michael Maier and
probably provided hospitality to Maier whilst serving as ambassador in
France. In 1610, when Egerton's son James was killed in a duel, Robert
Fludd and his servant were interrogated by a law officer for the light
they could throw on the affair. Presumably Fludd had been in attendance
on the dying man. Egerton's third wife, the shrewish Alice, was the
widow of Ferdinando, 5th Earl of Derby, whom Professor Honigmann argues
with some trenchancy had been an early patron of the Bard. A fierce
Protestant, if not quite a Puritan, Egerton ? originally a good friend
to the Earl of Essex before his fall from grace ? was to bind himself
strongly in alliance with William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, and the
Earl of Southampton, both famous patrons of Shakespeare.8
.
The Bard's poem The Phoenix and the Turtle was published in Love's
Martyr (1601). Dedicated to Sir John Salusbury of Lleweni, many of the
poems relate to Salusbury's marriage. Honigmann skilfully argues that
Sir John had been an early patron of Shakespeare and that the Bard's
poem had been occasioned before 1590. Now it happens that Sir Robert
Salusbury of Rug, Sir John's cousin, on contemplating his imminent
departure from this world, asked Sir Thomas Egerton to become guardian
to his son. Honigmann concludes that during his last illness, Sir Robert
"could probably be considered to be in the hands" of the faction in the
county of Denbighshire led by Sir John of Lleweni.9 The Egerton of the
Newgate "Rose" society, we can surmise, was on the most intimate terms
with Shakespeare's best known patrons.
.
We must now seek for the antecedents of the crucial Rosicrucian scene in
The Two Noble Kinsmen, which depicts a ceremony in the temple of Diana
at which a rose falls from its tree as a sign to the vestal virgin
Emilia that she may marry.10 The origin of this scene is to be found in
the story of Palamon and Arcite as related in "the knight's tale" in
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer tells how,
.
"The fires flamed up upon the altar fair
And clear while Emily was thus in prayer;
But all at once she saw a curious sight,
For suddenly one fire quenched its light
And then rekindled; as she gazed in doubt
The other fire as suddenly went right out;
As it was quenched it made a whistling sound
As of wet branches burning on the ground.
Then, from the faggot's tip, there ran a flood
Of many drops that had the look of blood."
(Coghill translation)
.
Diana the huntress appears and explains to the bewildered Emily that,
.
" ? the fires of sacrifice that glow
Upon my altar shall, before thou go,
Make plain thy destiny in this for ever."
.
The seeds of the idea of associating Emilia with the imagery of the rose
are also planted by Chaucer:
.
"... one morning in the month of May
Young Emily, that fairer was of mien
Than is the lily on its stalk of green,
And fresher in her colouring that strove
With early roses in a May-time grove
- I know not which was fairer of the two -"
.
Shakespeare's ritual scene has also somewhat more immediate precursors
in the tilt yard entertainments that constituted such a prominent
feature of the annual round of the Elizabethan court. Numerous
descriptions of these have survived in print and in manuscript; many
more have been irretrievably lost.
.
Fortunately, we have a good account of the 1575 events at Woodstock. We
are told that Hemetes the hermit went to the temple of Venus at Paphos
and was stricken blind there as a punishment for maintaining divided
allegiances: he had been a delighter in learning as well as a servant of
love. Edward Dyer, alchemist and possible freemason, whom years after
his death was reputed to have been a Rosicrucian of sorts (he seems to
have had a connection with the Rosicrucian Cornelis Drebbel), composed
the "Song in the Oak" for the entertainment, for it is ascribed to "Mr
Dier" in a manuscript now lingering in the Bodleian Library. It has been
speculated that Hemetes' tale may in fact be an allegorical projection
of Dyer himself. What is certain is that according to a letter from the
autumn of 1575, Dyer stayed on at Woodstock after the court had left.11
.
Our next relevant description turns up in Sir William Segar's Honor,
Military and Civill (1602). Segar's brother, Francis, it is worth
noting, was to serve the great patron of the Rosicrucians, Moritz,
Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, in the capacities of captain, counsellor and
English agent. William Segar paints the picture on Accession Day (17th
November) 1590 at Westminster. Her Majesty "did suddenly heare a musicke
so sweete and secret, as euery one thereat greatly maruelled .... the
earth as it were opening, there appeared a Pauilion made of white
Taffata, .... being in proportion like vnto the sacred Temple of the
Virgins Vestall. This Temple seemed to consist vpon pillars of
Pourferry, arched like vnto a Church, ... Also, on the one side there
stood an Altar .... Before the doors of this Temple there stood a
crouned Pillar, embraced by an Eglantine tree, whereon hangd a Table" An
eglantine is a variety of rose with five petals (the sweet-brier). Sir
Henry Lee, says Segar in describing more of the ceremony, "himselfe
disarmed" and "offered vp his armour at the foot of her maiesties
Crowned Pillar ...."12 The equation had been made between Elizabeth I
and a goddess.
.
Glynne Wickham has noted the strong connection between A Midsummer
Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen - how characters in one text
turn up again in the other. He remarks, "How singular .... that when
Shakespeare was again called upon to write a play in celebration of a
marriage, he should have chosen another aspect of the same story of
Theseus and Hyppolita, and begun it at the very point where the earlier
play had ended". Wickham then acutely observes that Hymen's song at the
opening of the Kinsmen play echoes the sentiments of Oberon's song at
the end of the Dream.13
.
But when was the Rosicrucian play written? To answer this we must first
date the Dream. Professor Honigmann comprehensively explores the
question of for what marriage the latter was run up and comes down in
favour of the Derby marriage - William Stanley, 6th Earl, to Elizabeth
Vere - which took place on January 26 1595.14 The Dream may have already
played on stage a little while and been polished up somewhat for the
Derby wedding, with some topical allusions fed into the text to enliven
the occasion. If the writing of the Kinsmen text followed that of the
Dream, we are probably talking about the second half of 1594 as the
moment of composition. We have a major clue at hand, however, in
Henslowe's diary. Philip Henslowe was the most successful theatrical
impresario of his day, and his diary contains a section for 1594 when
entries cover the performances of both the Lord Admiral's Men and the
Lord Chamberlain's, the Bard's company. Whether the companies acted
together in effect, or performed separately, we cannot tell from these
entries. For the 17th September 1594 Henslowe wrote "ne - Rd at palamon
& arsett ljs".15 "Ne" has attracted much comment over the years in
Henslowe's usage. Most commonly, it is taken to be an abbreviation for
"new" - to represent a premiere performance. Could this premiere of
September 1594 have been of the Bard's original text for The Two Noble
Kinsmen? An older play of Palamon and Arcite certainly existed. As far
back as 1566 the now lost play by Richard Edwardes, Master of the
Children of the Chapel, had been performed at Christ Church Hall, Oxford.16
.
There is a second clue, whose import is equally difficult to determine.
The Kinsmen text includes a ballad, "The George Aloe". On March 19 1611
there was entered on the Stationers' Register, in the name of the
publisher Richard Jones, "the seconde parte of the George Aloe and the
Swiftestake, beinge both ballades". We can search in vain through the
Register for anything called the "first part of the George Aloe" - or
the "George Aloe", for that matter. However, on January 14 1595 an entry
was made in the Register for the publisher Thomas Creede (who published
the first Quarto of King Lear): "the Saylers ioye, to the tune of ?heigh
ho hollidaie'". In the manuscript of the Percy Papers several decades
later a ballad was entered "from an ancient black-letter [printed] copy
in Ballard's collection", with the following description: "The Seamans
only Delight: Shewing the brave fight between the George Aloe, the
Sweepstakes, and certain French Men at sea. Tune, The Sailors Joy,
etc."17 Our 1595 Register entry, it would seem, is none other than the
first part of the "George Aloe". The closeness of this January 1595 date
to Henslowe's "ne" entry of September 1594 adds weight to the claims of
Henslowe's Palamon and Arcite to be the torso from which The Two Noble
Kinsmen was quarried.
.
There is a further riddle tied up with the ballad of "The George Aloe".
The music was composed by the great lutenist, John Dowland. Diana
Poulton identified this music in three surviving manuscripts: in William
Trumbull's Lute Book, now in the British Library, where it probably was
written in after 1613 at Brussels, where Trumbull was the English envoy;
in the Euing Lute Book of c. 1600, now at Glasgow University; and in a
Cambridge University manuscript containing three copies of the piece,
convincingly dated at c. 1595-1600.18 Those who claim The Two Noble
Kinsmen as a definite late work of the Bard have scrupulously refrained
from tackling the question of the early date of Dowland's song in
relation to dating the play. Dowland seems to have associated with the
Bard in the 1590s, if we are to believe some manuscript notes by Sir
William Oldys written in the mid-18th century. Oldys comments that
"Shakespeare was deeply delighted with the singing of Dowland the
Lutenist, but Spencer's deep conceits he thought surpassed others. See
in his Sonnets The Friendly Concord. That John Dowland and Thos. Morley
are said to have set several of these Sonnets to musicke ...."19 That
the Bard and Dowland, the brightest stars in their respective
firmaments, knew each other well would not be surprising. Both shared an
illustrious patron in Ferdinando, Lord Strange. Dowland's "Ferdinando
Earle of Darby, his Galliard" and "Lord Strangs March" survive to this
day.20
.
Dowland's personality is almost as puzzling as Shakespeare's, although
at least with Dowland we have some personal letters to refer to. Despite
the massive biographical and musical profile given in Diana Poulton's
well known study, and subsequent analyses published in Early Music and
elsewhere, I believe there is a hitherto unrecognized pattern running
through his life, whose unravelling can throw substantial light on the
mentalité in which thrived one of the leading exponents of Renaissance
melancholy. Dowland's esotericism has already attracted some critical
attention; but one facet of his esoteric life has up to now been
completely overlooked: the recurrent interaction of his career with the
lives of personalities conspicuously associated with Rosicrucianism.
.
We must first consider Dowland's illustrious patron, Moritz, Landgrave
of Hessen-Kassel. Brought up a Lutheran, Moritz converted to Calvinism
in 1604. Marburg, which he established as Germany's first Calvinist
university, with its brilliant chemistry and medical faculties became
the powerhouse of academic Rosicrucianism in Europe. It had a
particularly close association with Exeter College, the only Calvinist
college at Oxford. Bruce T. Moran's researches have uncovered the
systematic way in which Moritz organized and controlled an extensive
hermetic alchemical circle focussed on what were probably Europe's best
laboratories at Kassel, some of whom were leading Rosicrucians. The
Danish scientist Wormius discussed in a letter of the 18th August 1616
the rumour that Moritz was a Rosicrucian. On the 17th April 1604 Moritz
wrote a letter mentioning the livery "made in the form of a rose" worn
by many young gentlemen at Kassel and remarking that it was "plutost
signe d'une bonne amitié entre eux, que de quelques autre
consequénce[s]."21 Karl Widemann, a physician, was to send Moritz
cosmological Rosicrucian writings some years later.22 Finally, it is
hard to believe that the first editions of the Rosicrucian manifestoes
could have been printed in so small a town as Kassel without Moritz's
explicit knowledge and consent.
.
An Anglophile, who assiduously pursued connections with England and
maintained a company of English "comedians" at his court for years,
Moritz was in a strong position to steer the marriage of Prince
Frederick of the Rhine with James I's daughter, Elizabeth, an event
which finally took place at the start of 1613. This marriage was
intended to cement the alliance of German Protestant princes with
England against Hapsburg supremacy in Europe. A skilful public relations
campaign was mounted to promote the claims of Prince Frederick for
Elizabeth's hand, and I would suggest that we look at the book, the
Varietie of Lute-Lessons of 1610, in this context. Edited allegedly by
Dowland's son, Robert, it features a pavan attributed to Moritz himself
? although Anthony Rooley believes it is good enough to have been the
product of John Dowland's genius. I am sure that its aim was to spread
Moritz's "fame" at the English court. We learn in the book that the
first "Pavin" was "made by the most magnificent and famous Prince
Mauritius, Landgrave of Hessen, and from him sent to my father, with
this inscription following, and written with his GRACES owne hand." This
was surely a "pièce d'occasion", a minor political act in itself.
.
Dowland 's relationship with Moritz went back to the 1590s. On March 21
1595 Moritz wrote to the Prince of Brunswick comparing Dowland's ability
as a lutenist with those of Gregorio Howet. Dowland was still working
for Moritz when Henry Noel wrote to him on December 1 1596. On February
9 1598 the Landgrave wrote to Dowland offering the post at his court the
musician had relinquished a year before.23 After that nothing further is
known of their relationship until the music book of 1610.
.
Of Michael Maier, I have said much elsewhere. To my earlier comments
should be added the thought that he most probably served as an
intermediary with Dowland, for it was about the time of his first
English visit that he became personal physician to the Landgrave. One
thing is pretty certain. In the autumn of 1613 there must have been some
interaction between Maier and the dedicatee of the Varietie of
Lute-Lessons, Sir Thomas Monson. Sir Thomas Overbury, whose murder was
to rock society at its highest levels, had been gaoled in the Tower at
the behest of James I, whose governor (Master of the Armoury) was Sir
Thomas Monson. Traditionally, the historians of the Overbury affair have
assumed that Overbury was attended in the Tower by the physician Sir
Turquet de Mayerne, who signed himself "Mayernus". A careful scrutiny of
letters in the British Library shows Overbury referring to the physician
"Mayerus" on several occasions, which is the way Maier signed himself .
Independent evidence exists to confirm that Maier was in England in May
1613.24 James had insisted that no doctor see Overbury without his
personal approval, and it is inconceivable that Maier could have got to
Overbury without going through Monson. We can envisage, perhaps, a
friendship circle consisting of Monson ? a fanatical music lover ? Maier
and Dowland .
.
If we cast our minds back to the probable premiering of the Ur- Two
Noble Kinsmen in September 1594 and the first mention of Dowland's
appearance at the Kassel court in late March 1595, we have good grounds
to conjecture that it was Dowland himself who first brought news of
Palamon and Arcite, to which he had contributed, to the ears of Moritz
the Landgrave. No-one better, apart from the Bard himself, could have
explained the play's esoteric rose symbolism, one would have thought.
Other than Shakespeare, no creative mind of the period invoked the
imagery of the rose so frequently as Dowland.
.
But what of The Two Noble Kinsmen as we know it, in which Shakespeare's
evident contribution runs to no more than perhaps forty percent of the
playing time - one hour of the 150 minutes it ran to in the recent Royal
Shakespeare Company production? The surviving script is a hodge-podge
that must have been assembled in a hurry. The joins certainly show. It
even borrows its morris dance scene from The Masque of Grays Inn and
Inner Temple, written by Fletcher's usual partner, Francis Beaumont, and
presented earlier in 1613 in celebration of the Palatinate marriage.
Beaumont and Fletcher had made three admiring references to Dowland in
The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607?). Fletcher alone made a
reference to him in The Bloody Brothers (1617) and a further one ? in
collaboration, it is usually thought, with Philip Massinger - in The
Fair Maid of the Inns (1626).25 This all tends to suggest an ongoing
friendship between Fletcher and Dowland at a time when Dowland's
contemporary reputation in England was on a definite slide. Could
Dowland have actually been the organizing genius responsible for getting
the King's Men to take Palamon and Arcite out of the prompt copy chest
where it lay gathering dust and to commission a rewrite at the nimble
hands of John Fletcher? We should not rule out the possibility.
.
Why did the play's "George Aloe" music get into the Trumbull Lute Book?
I doubt it was for purely musical reasons, for William Trumbull seems to
have had Rosicrucian associations. A friend of his, acting as secretary
to the English ambassador at Paris in the years 1611-13, was Thomas
Floyde. On December 15 1609 Floyde wrote to Trumbull that "Dr. Lloyd, my
brother Jeffreys and my cousin Yonge have often remembered you." On
February 23 1610 Floyde concluded a letter with "My good friend and
yours, my brother Jeffreys, Doctor Floud, my cousin Floud, my cousin
Yonge and myself .... kiss your hands." One presumes that "Dr. Lloyd"
was "Doctor Floud"; and I suspect strongly that "Doctor Floud" was none
other than Dr Robert Fludd, the most famous of English Rosicrucians.26
.
By January 17 1610 a relationship between Trumbull and Moritz of
Hessen-Kassel was well established, for on that day Moritz commended Dr
Mosanus "unto you and your favour." And on October 17 1611 Moritz wrote
to thank Trumbull for the kindness he had shown to his son Otto at
Brussels.27
.
Trumbull's daughter Elizabeth married George Rudolph Weckherlin
(1584-1653), a distinguished German poet, who was appointed an
under-secretary of state at Whitehall in 1624 and was a keen Palatinist.
Weckherlin's diary reveals that Weckherlin knew Robert Fludd and bought
a house from him. It also gives the chronology of some mysterious
transactions between the poet and Lewis Ziegler, agent to Lord Craven,
the main financial backer of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, which appear
to partly relate to Weckherlin's initiation into Rosicrucianism.28
.
The poet's grand-son, Sir William Trumbull (1639-1716), was a devoted
friend of Alexander Pope's about the year 1706; and quite uninformed of
an earlier Rosicrucian affinity in the family, it has been suggested
that Pope's knowledge of Rosicrucianism was garnered through this
particular friendship. Sir William was said to have received his early
instruction in Latin and French from Weckherlin.29
.
Another manuscript collection of lute pieces with Rosicrucian
implications is that belonging to Philip Hainhofer, which is held today
in the library at Wolfenbuettel. Hainhofer (1578-1647), who came from
Augsburg, was well known both as a diplomat and as an art connoiseur.
His manuscript compilation appears to have been begun in 1603 or 1604.
That it contains three unique items attributed to Dowland suggests a
personal link between Hainhofer ? or his transcriber ? and Dowland at
some point in time.30 Daniel Stolcius produced two of the classic
Rosicrucian emblematic texts in The Pleasure Garden of Chemistry (1624)
and The Hermetic Garden (1627), the first largely derived from engraved
plates originally printed in works by the Rosicrucians Michael Maier and
J.D. Mylius. Stolcius, who studied at Oxford after fleeing from Bohemia
in 1620, dedicated The Hermetic Garden to Hainhofer, who was described
as counsellor to the Duke of Pomerania. Coincidentally, the younger
Dowland, Robert, spent time working at the court of the Duke of Wolgast
in Pomerania, where he asked permission to return to England on August
30 1623.31 Stolcius was indebted to Hainhofer, who "inspired me with
your gentle conversation, even to the extent of thoroughly showing me
your storehouse of philosophy [science and alchemy], the like of which I
have never seen in my travels ..."32 Hainhofer signed the album amicorum
of the Rosicrucian Joachim Morsius and ?years later - was mentioned in a
letter from the Herzog August von Braunschweig to the greatest
Rosicrucian (or ex-Rosicrucian) of all, Johann Valentin Andreae.
Hainhofer even owned a manuscript copy of one of the manifestoes, the
Fama, taken from an early draft that must have been in existence before
1613.33
.
Henry Peacham (1578-1644) was a prolific literary jack of all trades,
who even published the occasional musical composition of his own.34 His
drawing of a scene from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is the earliest
illustration of a Shakespeare play known. Done in 1595, it found its way
to the library of Longleat House, the temporary home of Francis Thynne.
Peacham's friendship with John Dowland was clearly a strong one. He
dedicated an emblem to Dowland in Minerva Britanna (1612) and mentions
their friendship in The Compleat Gentlemen of 1622. Peacham also
dedicated an emblem to the Landgrave Moritz in Minerva Britanna, to
which he appended a marginal note: "This most noble Prince beside his
admirable knowledge in all learning, & the languages, hath excellent
skil in musick. Mr Dowland hath many times shewed me 10 or 12 several
sets of Songes for his Chappel of his owne composing."35
.
Could Peacham have known Michael Maier, introduced through the agency of
John Dowland? His Minerva Britanna, presumed to have been published at
the beginning of 1612, having been entered on the Stationers' Register
on August 9 1611, contains a surprising nugget, which evokes
recollection of Michael Maier's Christmas "greetings card" of 1611 to
James I as well as the Bard's great rose speech in the Kinsmen play. In
a poem dedicated to John Dowland, Peacham writes:
.
"Heere, Philomel, in silence sits alone,
In depth of winter, on the bared brier,
Whereas the Rose, had once her beautie showen;
Which Lordes, and Ladies, did so much desire:
But fruitles now, in winters frost and snow,
It doth despis'd and unregarded grow."
.
It is poor verse and worse syntax, but all the same the poem seems to
draw nourishment from Shakespeare's explication of why "a rose is best":
.
"It is the very emblem of a maid:
For when the west wind courts her gently
How modestly she blows and paints the sun
With her chaste blushes! When the north comes near her,
Rude and impatient, then, like chastity,
She locks her beauties in her bud again
And leaves him to base briars." (T.N.K. II.ii.)
.
Was Peacham an actual Rosicrucian or a member of a rose society? The
question is unanswerable, but prompted by a provocative passage in his
posthumously published The Truth of our Times (1638). He describes a
tavern tradition: "in many places, as well in England, as the Low
Countries, they have over their Tables a rose painted, and what is
spoken under the Rose, must not be revealed; the reason is this; The
Rose being sacred to Venus, whose amours and stolen sports that they
might never bee revealed, her sonne Cupid would needes dedicate to
Harpocrates, the god of Silence".36
.
Moritz of Hessen-Kassel, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the evidence of Henry
Peacham, William Trumbull and Philip Hainhofer, the hermeticist tendency
of many of Dowland's greatest melancholic compositions: ? all these
pointers combined tell us of a man in close, knowing proximity to that
typical Baroque expression of Protestant mysticism: the Rosicrucian
movement. And that movement claimed its own. Alongside J.V. Andreae,
Fludd and Maier, Johann Daniel Mylius ranked as one of the most eminent
Rosicrucian writers. Son-in-law of Johannes Hartmann, the great
professor of chemistry at Marburg University, Mylius eventually became
Moritz's personal physician. Robert Fludd prescribed pills according to
his prescriptions in England. In 1620 Mylius published his Thesaurus at
Frankfurt. No printed copies appear to have survived. But there is a
manuscript copy in Germany, in which Mylius pays tribute to Dowland by
featuring his "Farewell" on page one under the heading "Grammatica
illustris Douland." "A Fancy" by Dowland turns up on page eighteen.
Undoubtedly Dowland was the favourite composer of the Rosicrucians.37
.
Our story is almost complete and it would be timely for me to set it in
a broader framework. The symbolism of the rose had evolved into a rich
tradition in the culture of Tudor England, and began to develop new
ideological forms in late Elizabethan times in response to court
politics (tilt day entertainments) and the fashionable hermetic and
alchemical ideas that the quickening English Renaissance was
disseminating. The literary culture ran in tandem with the
scientific-esoteric revolution. Thus Shakespeare's Palamon and Arcite
paralleled the formation in London of Francis Thynne's "Rose" society ?
almost certainly an alchemical talking-shop. Alchemical societies named
"the Rose" are known to have been founded on the Continent a few years
later, as in France, probably in imitation of the London society, whilst
Moritz of Hessen-Kassel bragged of a society at Kassel wearing "the
livery" of a rose as early as 1604 and a brotherhood of the "Rose"
apparently existed at Tuebingen in 1607.38
.
The central role of England in the Protestant struggle with Catholicism
and the Hapsburgs of Spain and Austria had long been appreciated.
England and Wales constituted one state, and a wealthy one at that;
German Protestantism was divided over many states, most of them
relatively impoverished. It was therefore almost inevitable, because of
the dynamic of Elizabethan England, that fresh winds generated in
Britain would sweep abroad, changing the climate for the torpid German
states and their mainly timid princes. The sudden brilliant outpouring
of the English drama that began in the 1580s was to have unexpected
political consequences overseas. By the mid-1590s, English actors ?
usually called "comedians" ? were touring widely on the Continent. This
unprecedented cultural offensive spread English influence and ideas in
Germany to enthusiastically receptive audiences. Moritz of
Hessen-Kassel's Anglophilism led him at this time to set up a permanent
company of English actors at his court; although drawn mainly from the
Lord Admiral's Men, some of the principals had previously acted in
Shakespeare's productions.39 With the musicians who so often accompanied
them, including the young Dowland, they were the couriers of English
ideas as much off-stage, we can assume, as on-stage. At least two plays
with strong masonic content were acted abroad by the English companies;
one for certain was performed at Kassel in the winter of 1606/7.40
Whether the choice of these dramas reflected a widening interest,
expressed even abroad, in matters masonic, I cannot say. But, as I show
in a work currently in course of completion, speculative freemasonry was
a far more vigorous plant in late Elizabethan England than had
previously been suspected. And this very fact, combined with the
thriving "underground" culture of the Family of Love, implies that a
fully institutionalized "secret society" tradition had already broken
ground that the Rosicrucian brotherhood, in process of establishment
well before the publication of the manifestoes in 1614, would seek to
occupy also.
.
There has been a tendency to view the early history of Rosicrucianism
through a religious prism to the exclusion of a variety of seemingly
autonomous cultural influences ? such as the literary and musical ?
which moulded the imaginative arena in which the movement took flight.
What I hope to have demonstrated is that these influences have their
place ? and their importance; and that to understand the preliminaries
to Rosicrucianism proper we should think in terms of a dialectic between
the capitals of London and Kassel that spanned all of two decades.
------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
. Hamlet (Quarto 2, 1604) Act I, Scene ii
.
King: Doe I impart toward you for your intent
. In going back to schoole in *Wittenberg*,
. It is most retrogard to our desire,
. And we beseech you bend you to remaine
. Heere in the cheare and comfort of our eye,
. Our chiefest courtier, cosin, and our sonne.
.
Quee. Let not thy mother loose her prayers Hamlet,
. I pray thee stay with vs, goe not to *Wittenberg*.
.
Ham. I shall in all my best obay you Madam.
...............................................
Enter Horatio,Marcellus, and Bernardo.
Hora. Haile to your Lordship.
Ham. I am glad to see you well; Horatio, or I do forget my selfe.
Hora. The same my Lord, and your poore seruant euer.
Ham. Sir my good friend, Ile change that name with you,
. And what make you from *Wittenberg* Horatio?
. Marcellus.
Mar. My good Lord.
Ham. I am very glad to see you, (good euen sir)
But what in faith make you from *Wittenberg*?
Hora. A truant disposition good my Lord.
--------------------------------------------------------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Valentinus_Andreae
<<Johannes Valentinus Andreae (August 17, 1586 – June 27, 1654), a.k.a. Johannes Valentinus Andreä or Johann Valentin Andreae, was a German theologian, who claimed to be the author of an ancient text known as the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459 (published in 1616, Strasbourg, as the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz). This became one of the three founding works of Rosicrucianism, which was both a legend and a fashionable semi-cult across Europe in this period.
Andreae was a prominent member of the Protestant utopian movement which began in Germany and spread across northern Europe and into Britain under the mentorship of Samuel Hartlib and John Amos Comenius. The focus of this movement was the need for education and the encouragement of sciences as the key to national prosperity. But like many vaguely-religious Renaissance movements at this time, the scientific ideas being promoted were often tinged with hermeticism, occultism and neo-Platonic concepts. The threats of heresy charges posed by rigid religious authorities (Protestant and Catholic) and a scholastic intellectual climate often forced these activists to hide behind fictional secret societies and write anonymously in support of their ideas, while claiming access to "secret ancient wisdom".
Andreae was born at Herrenberg, *Württemberg*, the son of Johannes Andreae (1554–1601), the superintendent of Herrenberg and later the abbot of Königsbrunn. His mother Maria Moser went to Tübingen as a widow and was court apothecary 1607–1617. The young Andreae studied theology and natural sciences 1604–1606. He befriended Christoph Besold who encouraged Andreae's interest in esotericism. Ca. 1605 he wrote the first version of "The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosekreutz". He was refused the final examination and church service, probably for attaching a pasquill (offensive, libelous note) to the chancellor Enzlin's door, on the occasion of his marriage. After that, he taught young nobles and hiked with his students through Switzerland, France, Austria and Italy. He visited Dillingen, a bastion of the Jesuits, whom he regarded as the Antichrist. In 1608 he returned to Tübingen. He came to know Tobias Hess, a Paracelsian physician with an interest in apocalyptic prophecy. From 1610 till 1612 Andreae traveled.
In 1612 he resumed his theological studies in Tübingen. After the final examination in 1614, he became deacon in Vaihingen an der Enz, and in 1620 priest in Calw. Here he reformed the school and social institutions, and established institutions for charity and other aids. To this end, he initiated the Christliche Gottliebende Gesellschaft ("Christian God-loving Society"). In 1628 he planned a "Unio Christiana". He obtained funds and brought effective help for the reconstruction of Calw, which was destroyed in the Battle of Nördlingen (1634) by the imperial troops and visited by pestilence. In 1639, he became preacher at the court and councillor of the consistory (Konsistorialrat) in Stuttgart, where he advocated a fundamental church reform. He became also a spiritual adviser to a royal princess of *Württemberg*.
Among other things, he promoted the Tübinger Stift, a hall of residence and teaching which was a seminary owned and supported by the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in *Württemberg*, in South West Germany. The Stift was originally founded as an Augustinian monastery in the Middle Ages, but after the Reformation (in 1536), Duke Ulrich turned the Stift into a seminary which served to prepare Protestant pastors for *Württemberg*. A prominent student of the Stift during this period was Johannes Kepler.
In 1646, Andreae was made a member of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft ("Fruitbearing Society"), where he got the company-nickname der Mürbe ("the soft"). In 1650, he assumed direction of the monasterial school Bebenhausen. and in 1654, he became abbot of the evangelical monasterial school of Adelberg. He died in Stuttgart.
Rosicrucianism
His role in the origin of the Rosicrucian legend is controversial. In his autobiography he claimed that the Chymische Hochzeit ("Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz") was one of his works—as a "ludibrium", possibly meaning "lampoon". He said in old age that he wrote this fake document in his youth (circa 1605). In his later works, alchemy is treated as a subject of ridicule and is placed with music, art, theatre and astrology in the category of the 'less serious' sciences.
Andreae was a pious, orthodox Lutheran theologian who probably had nothing at all to do with the two great manifestoes of this so-called "secret" society—the Fama fraternitatis or the Confessio fraternitatis His lifelong commitment appears to have been to found a Societas Christiana or utopian learned brotherhood of those dedicated to a spiritual life, in the hope that they would initiate a second Reformation.
His writings and efforts provided a potent stimulus to Protestant intellectuals at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and he appears to have inspired the foundation of The Unio Christiana which was established in Nuremberg during 1628 by a few patricians and churchmen under the impetus of Johannes Saubert the Elder. This utopian society was later revived in Stuttgart in the early 1660s and another utopian brotherhood known as Antilia ( a communal society reminiscent of the monastery) developed in the Baltic during the Thirty Years' War. The founders were inspired by both Baconian belief in experimental science and by Andreae's tracts. They later attempted to establish a colony on a small island in the Gulf of Riga, and considered immigrating to Virginia.>>
--------------------------------------------------------------
. *JOHANN VALENTINE ANDREAE*
--------------------------------------------------------
. 1597, Richard III (Q1 STC 22314):
. Printed by *VALENTINE Sims* , for *ANDREW Wise* ,
. dwelling in Paules Church-yard, at the
________ Signe of the *ANGELl* 1597.
-------------------------------------------------------------
. *Confederatio Militae vANGELicae*
-------------------------------------------------------------
___ *ANDREW* W.(ise)
. *VALENTINE* S.(ims)
The Knights of Saint *JOHN* in England
-------------------------------------------------------------------
<<By 1567 the only English Knights of Saint *JOHN*
remaining on Malta were the titular Grand Prior Richard SHELLEY
(who was an active participant in several plots against Elizabeth)
& Oliver Starkey (commander of Quenington),
___ later titular Bailiff of Egle (from 1569).>>
[John Shakspere : Bailiff of Stratford (from 1568).]
.
. THE KNIGHTS OF SAINT JOHN IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND & IRELAND
. http://www.saintjohn.org/priory.htm
.
. <<Starkey, who had been La Valette's Latin Secretary
. and was the only Englishman at the Great Siege,
. died in 1588 & SHELLEY in 1590, when a French knight
. was appointed to the titular Grand Priory.
.
This appointment was challenged by an Irish knight resident
in the convent, one *ANDREW WISE* from Waterford who, after
complaining, was appointed Bailiff of Egle but, still unsatisfied,
appealed to the Pope. In 1593 Wise was appointed titular Grand Prior,
a dignity he held until his death in 1631. From thenceforth the
offices of Grand Prior of England, Turcopilier, Bailiff of Egle
and Prior or Grand Prior of Ireland became honorifics given to
knights whom the Grand Master & Council wished to honor with
the grand cross & membership of the Chapter-General.>>
-------------------------------------------------------------
Chap. 8, _THIS STAR OF ENGLAND_ by Dorothy & Charlton Ogburn
. http://www.sourcetext.com/sourcebook/Star/ch08.html
.
<<IN JANUARY 7, 1575, Lord Oxford set forth with his retinue,
consisting, as Burghley noted in his diary, of "two gentlemen,
two grooms, one payend, a harbinger, a housekeeper & a trenchman."
.
Before the end of May the traveller reached Venice, where he
declined a generous offer on the part of [titular Grand Prior]
*Sir RICHARD SHELLEY* of a furnished house, to continue his journey.>>
--------------------------------------------------------------
____ Priors & Grand Priors of English Langue,
. Sovereign Order of St. JOHN of Jerusalem and of Malta.
.
. THOMAS TRESHAM 1557-1559
. RICHARD SHELLEY 1557-1590
--------------------------------------------------------
. 1597, Richard III (Q1 STC 22314):
. THE TRAGEDY OF / King Richard the third. Containing,
. His teacherous Plots againft his brother Clarence:
. the pittiefull murther of his iunocent nephewes:
. his tyrannicall vfurpation: with the whole courfe
. of his detefted life, and moft deferued death.
. As it hath beene lately Acted by the
. Right honourable the Lord Chamber-laine his feruants.
.
. Printed by *VALENTINE Sims* , for *ANDREW Wise* ,
.
__ dwelling in Paules Church-yard, at the
________ Signe of the *ANGELl* 1597.
----------------------------------------------------------
THE CREST OF JOHANN VALENTIN ANDREÆ.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/img/14000.jpg
....................................................
<<The reference to four red roses and a white cross in the Chymical
Marriage of Christian Rosencreutz identified Johann Valentin Andreæ as
its author, for his family crest, shown above, consisted of four red
roses and a white cross.>>
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/sta33.htm
.
<<A great number of scholars and philosophers,
among them Sir Francis Bacon & Wolfgang von Goethe,
have been suspected of affiliation with the R(osicrucian) O(rder)>>
-----------------------------------------------------------
____*OXENFORD*
.
____*R.O. : FOX DEN*
____*R(osicrucian) O(rder) : FOX DEN*
-------------------------------------------------------
__ \_*_/
__ _\_/
__ * _X * Edward de Vere, Erle of Oxenford was buryed
__ _/_\ __________ the 6th daye of Julye Å 1604
__ _/ *_\ ____________ [ *St. PROSPERO's EVE* ]
.
<<The strange, large 'X' type symbol appears to have been put there
much later. According to Paul Altrocchi, this must have happened
many decades later "...since pencils withsuch a sharp point did
not appear until the late 1600's." It really is anybody's guess
who put it there - perhaps an over-enthusiastic Oxfordian?>>
- _The Death of Edward de Vere_ by Michael Llewellyn
-----------------------------------------------
1604 WHITgift dies on February 29th.
1604 1000th anniversary of St.Augustine's death.
1604 Tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz discovered.
1604 Hamlet published
1604 FAMA Fraternitatis published
1604 Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (V1) published
1604 Oxford dies on the Feastday of John the Baptist.
1604 Oxford buried on *St. PROSPERO's EVE*
1604 Kepler's NOVA/AVON.
1604 Susan marries Pembroke on the Feastday of John the Devine
--------------------------------------------------
<<The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (Chymische Hochzeit
Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459) was edited in 1616 in Strasbourg
(annexed by France in 1681), and its anonymous authorship is attributed
to Johann Valentin Andreae. It is the third of the original manifestos
of the mysterious "Fraternity of the Rose Cross" (Rosicrucians). It is
an allegoric romance (story) divided into Seven Days, or Seven
Journeys, like Genesis, and tells us about the way Christian Rosenkreuz
was invited to go to a wonderful castle full of miracles, in order to
assist the Chymical Wedding of the king and the queen, that is, the
husband and the bride. This manifesto has been a source of inspiration
for poets, alchemists (the word "chymical" is an old form of "chemical"
and refers to alchemy - for which the 'Sacred Marriage' was the goal)
and dreamers, through the force of its initiation ritual with
processions of tests, purifications, death, resurrection, and ascension
and also by its symbolism found since the beginning with the invitation
to Rosenkreutz to assist this Royal Wedding. There is some resemblance
between this alchemic romance and some parables in the Bible:
.
. * The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a
marriage for his son, and And when the king came in to see the guests,
he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: (Matthew 22:2,11
KJV)
. * And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from
God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
(Revelation 21:2)
.
Another rich source of imagery from the Bible are the Song of Solomon
and the Book of Proverbs>> - (From Wikipedia)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
<<Andreae was born in 1586, of a family already eminent for learning.
He distinguished himself at several universities, and then for some
years traveled all over Europe as tutor to various pupils of noble
families. Returning to Würtemberg he came under the influence of the
pious and venerable Arndt Winkworth, and he became an earnestly
religious man. For many years he was the chief clergyman at Calw, where
during the earlier period of the thirty years war, when Würtemberg was
as yet untouched, he organized a system of relief and succour to the
sufferers elsewhere, which was so energetically carried out, that
within five years 11,000 persons had received from it essential
assistance. But Calw's own turn came in 1634 when it was stormed and
given up to plunder. Andrea, who was particularly obnoxious to the
Imperialists for the part he had taken, fled into the forests with some
of his friends. They were hunted for days with bloodhounds, but
finally, after undergoing fearful hardships, escaped by the aid of
friendly country-people. As soon as the way was open he returned to his
charge, where he was received with tears of joy. When the storm rolled
away from that region of Germany, Andrea consented to leave Calw and
accept the post of court preacher at Stuttgart. Here he had to cope
with difficulties of another and less congenial type. He was a man of
fervid and strict piety, with high ideas of church discipline, and the
court of Würtemberg was given up to luxury and amusement as if the
country were not bleeding at every pore. He did contrive to make his
own house a refuge for the poor, especially those of his own order, to
found a theological college, and to inspire new life and better order
into the churches more immediately under his influence. But the court
disliked him and he had many annoyances and failures to endure, and at
last his weakened health furnished a good excuse for getting rid of him
by an honourable promotion. He died in 1654 as prelate of Adelberg. His
greatest influence was as a Church reformer and a prose writer; he
wrote many theological, controversial, and satirical works, both in
Latin and German, which earned for him an important place in the
religious literature of his day, sparking a revival in the mystical and
occult aspects of Christianity, through alchemy and hermetic
philosophy.
.
These three very rare first editions of his early works are:
.
(1) The Menippus, his most hazardous of his books, comprising an attack
on the current abuses in the church and the literary world, advocating
free will and free thought as well as the utmost tolerance in religious
matters. Some parts are almost literally taken over from Sebastian
Franck's Narrenschif. The book was immediately forbidden and It caused
him much trouble and hatred. It also yielded many adversaries among
which Caspar Bucher, professor of rhetorics at the University of
Tübingen is the most well known. He published his Antimenippus in
1617.
.
(2) The Turbo is a comedy in five acts in which Turbo, a wealthy young
man, throws himself into one folly after another. He is accompanied
throughout by the worldly-wise Harlequin who provides a cynical
commentary on the action. Between the five acts of the play there are
four interludes, each of which explores a more general theme:
(a) a comic disputation between scholars, includes mock examination
questions and a Rabelaisian list of imaginary book titles;
(b) the examination of candidates for admission to the Worshipful
Society of Skinflints, detailing money-grabbing schemes; and
(c) Prince Hermaphroditus makes proclamations to his followers about
the behaviour of various classes - the clergy, the government, the
populace, the court, the army. The comedy satirizes those who let
themselves be guided by their prejudices and the opinion of others. In
fact it is no less than a text on the Faust-problem: the search in
pursuit of wisdom. The comedy has a high literary value and was
translated in German in 1909.
..
(3) His Herculis christiani luctae XXIV is an allegorical text on the
works of Hercules, fighting the vices of his time.>>
http://www.forum-hes.nl/forum/main_stocklist.phtml/subject/446/1/Strasbourg.html
-------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Heisler - The Forgotten English Roots of Rosicrucianism
Article originally published in The Hermetic Journal, 1992.
...............................................
<<Michael Maier, according to his own statement, first heard of the
Rosicrucian brotherhood when in England. Leaving Prague in the spring of
1611, he spent some time in Amsterdam before, we can reckon, arriving in
London in the winter of that year. Presumably it was in December 1611
that he wrote the Rosicrucian "greetings card", featuring a rose, which
was sent to James I. The wording carries a very strong echo of a
powerful speech in the play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, which bears the
unmistakable imprint of William Shakespeare's unique poetic talent. This
familiarity with the Bard's play is unlikely to have been purely
accidental, particularly, as I have shown elsewhere, Maier had a
significant connection with Shakespeare's circle of friends.1 The
question inevitably arises, therefore, of what clear evidence exists to
indicate that the traditional Germanocentric reading of the history of
early Rosicrucianism - which depicts the movement as mainly gestating in
the strivings of J.V. Andreae's personal circle - oversimplifies the
movement's origins to the point of gross distortion?
Francis Thynne, whose cousin was Sir John Thynne of Longleat House,
Wiltshire, was born c. 1545 and died in 1608. Not a literary figure of
either the first or second rank, he is remarkably interesting, however,
for the ethos his erratic life and interests evoke. Entering Lincoln's
Inn in 1561, he made there a life-long friend in Thomas Egerton, who
later rose to positions of the highest importance in both law and state.
Improvidence and mental illness seem to have afflicted Thynne in his
early years. At the end of 1573 he was imprisoned in the White Lion at
Southwark for a debt of £lOO, his precious books being sold off. His
pleas for help to Lord Burleigh survive among the Salisbury letters.
After two years he was released from confinement, coming under the
hospitality of cousin Sir John at Longleat. Sir John's first marriage,
incidentally, was to the sister of Sir Thomas Gresham, a masonic Grand
Master in the south, says James Anderson. In 1602 Francis was to offer a
long discourse on the admirals of England to Charles Howard, the Lord
Admiral, another Grand Master.2
.
Thynne's manuscripts are numerous, and they reveal a man who not only
was a heraldic enthusiast, becoming Lancaster herald, but was an ardent
delver into alchemical texts, which exist to this day in the British
Library, in Longleat House and in the Ashmole collection in the
Bodleian.3 At Longleat are to be found Ripley's Compendium of Alchemy,
Thomas Norton's Ordinal of Alchemy, the obscure Stella Alchymiae, dated
1384, of "Joanne Bübelem de Anglia" and a disputation between the father
and son, Merline and Marian, concerning the marriage between Sylos and
Anul (Sol and Luna).4 A member of the Society of Antiquaries, Thynne was
a hack historian, who worked with John Stow and Abraham Fleming for the
editor John Hooker in expanding and revising Holinshed's famous
Chronicle. Thynne's "A Treatise of the Lord Cobhams" was left out by
order of the Privy Council.
.
Thynne's occultic preoccupations become very evident in the "Homo Animal
Sociale", a manuscript treatise, dated 20th October 1578, which he
presented to Lord Burleigh.5 He discusses Egyptian hieroglyphics and the
Druids, the "notes, signes, tokens, caracters or signes of the voyce
whereby there are made generall differences of soundes", and, with
evident relish, kabbalah, the "most profounde knowledge" being lost to
us, as "the learned Cabaliste Mr Dee" observed in his book "entituled
monas heroglyphica". He tells how Hebrew letters were unwritten before
the "sonnes of Adam", who before "the generall floode were the Junitors
of the same, for the sonnes of Sethe as speketh Josephus did write on
the pillers all the knowledge of the celestiall things". He also refers
to "the confused Kingdome of trayters[?] at the Towere of Babilone" -
the masons who built badly and were deprived of the original pure tongue.
.
Thynne's poetry is far from great; but its content is fascinating and
revealing. His Emblemes and Epigrammes were written out c. 1600. "White
heares" is a description of some sort of society meeting at the Rose
tavern :
.
"At the Rose within newgate, ther friendlie did meete,
fower of my ould frends, ech other for to greete:"6
.
Thynne's poem "Societie" is suspiciously ambiguous: we are never quite
sure whether he is lauding mutuality and social bonds in society in
general, or whether he is talking of a very specific, very exclusive
fraternity - a club. Dated December 20 1600, the poem is dedicated to
Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. The poet tells of,
.
"The purple Rose which first Damasco bredd,
adorn'd with cullor gratefull to the sight"
.
He links the image of a society to the image of the rose:
.
"Soe two faire dowries which mann doth enioye -
true perfect love, and suer fidelitie -
firmelie preserve humane societie,
their frends assisting in ech hard annoye,
when want of ech brings noe securitie;
both which, this damask rose doth well unfoulde,
as honest hart, which fayth and love doth houlde."
.
Thynne concludes:
.
"soe our societie, without love and fayth
is never perfect, as true reason sayth;
ffor where is perfect love, there trustie fayth is found,
and where assured trust doth dwell, there must needs abound."7
.
So from all this we have learned that there was a group of friends
meeting at the Rose Tavern in Newgate, which almost surely included
Egerton. The damask rose was their emblem. From Thynne's papers, we can
guess that one of the topics their conversations regularly ran to was
alchemy. But that London had at least one tavern called the Rose is
unsurprising, the rose being perhaps the most popular symbol of Tudor
England.
.
A little more need be said on Sir Thomas Egerton, who eventually became
Lord Chancellor. A man of considerable intellect, he ceaselessly
encouraged young men of the highest calibre. In the 1590s he was a
vigorous promoter of the career of Sir Francis Bacon. John Donne the
poet became his secretary. Another of his secretaries, George Carew, was
presented with a copy of Arcana arcanissima by Michael Maier and
probably provided hospitality to Maier whilst serving as ambassador in
France. In 1610, when Egerton's son James was killed in a duel, Robert
Fludd and his servant were interrogated by a law officer for the light
they could throw on the affair. Presumably Fludd had been in attendance
on the dying man. Egerton's third wife, the shrewish Alice, was the
widow of Ferdinando, 5th Earl of Derby, whom Professor Honigmann argues
with some trenchancy had been an early patron of the Bard. A fierce
Protestant, if not quite a Puritan, Egerton ? originally a good friend
to the Earl of Essex before his fall from grace ? was to bind himself
strongly in alliance with William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, and the
Earl of Southampton, both famous patrons of Shakespeare.8
.
The Bard's poem The Phoenix and the Turtle was published in Love's
Martyr (1601). Dedicated to Sir John Salusbury of Lleweni, many of the
poems relate to Salusbury's marriage. Honigmann skilfully argues that
Sir John had been an early patron of Shakespeare and that the Bard's
poem had been occasioned before 1590. Now it happens that Sir Robert
Salusbury of Rug, Sir John's cousin, on contemplating his imminent
departure from this world, asked Sir Thomas Egerton to become guardian
to his son. Honigmann concludes that during his last illness, Sir Robert
"could probably be considered to be in the hands" of the faction in the
county of Denbighshire led by Sir John of Lleweni.9 The Egerton of the
Newgate "Rose" society, we can surmise, was on the most intimate terms
with Shakespeare's best known patrons.
.
We must now seek for the antecedents of the crucial Rosicrucian scene in
The Two Noble Kinsmen, which depicts a ceremony in the temple of Diana
at which a rose falls from its tree as a sign to the vestal virgin
Emilia that she may marry.10 The origin of this scene is to be found in
the story of Palamon and Arcite as related in "the knight's tale" in
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer tells how,
.
"The fires flamed up upon the altar fair
And clear while Emily was thus in prayer;
But all at once she saw a curious sight,
For suddenly one fire quenched its light
And then rekindled; as she gazed in doubt
The other fire as suddenly went right out;
As it was quenched it made a whistling sound
As of wet branches burning on the ground.
Then, from the faggot's tip, there ran a flood
Of many drops that had the look of blood."
(Coghill translation)
.
Diana the huntress appears and explains to the bewildered Emily that,
.
" ? the fires of sacrifice that glow
Upon my altar shall, before thou go,
Make plain thy destiny in this for ever."
.
The seeds of the idea of associating Emilia with the imagery of the rose
are also planted by Chaucer:
.
"... one morning in the month of May
Young Emily, that fairer was of mien
Than is the lily on its stalk of green,
And fresher in her colouring that strove
With early roses in a May-time grove
- I know not which was fairer of the two -"
.
Shakespeare's ritual scene has also somewhat more immediate precursors
in the tilt yard entertainments that constituted such a prominent
feature of the annual round of the Elizabethan court. Numerous
descriptions of these have survived in print and in manuscript; many
more have been irretrievably lost.
.
Fortunately, we have a good account of the 1575 events at Woodstock. We
are told that Hemetes the hermit went to the temple of Venus at Paphos
and was stricken blind there as a punishment for maintaining divided
allegiances: he had been a delighter in learning as well as a servant of
love. Edward Dyer, alchemist and possible freemason, whom years after
his death was reputed to have been a Rosicrucian of sorts (he seems to
have had a connection with the Rosicrucian Cornelis Drebbel), composed
the "Song in the Oak" for the entertainment, for it is ascribed to "Mr
Dier" in a manuscript now lingering in the Bodleian Library. It has been
speculated that Hemetes' tale may in fact be an allegorical projection
of Dyer himself. What is certain is that according to a letter from the
autumn of 1575, Dyer stayed on at Woodstock after the court had left.11
.
Our next relevant description turns up in Sir William Segar's Honor,
Military and Civill (1602). Segar's brother, Francis, it is worth
noting, was to serve the great patron of the Rosicrucians, Moritz,
Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, in the capacities of captain, counsellor and
English agent. William Segar paints the picture on Accession Day (17th
November) 1590 at Westminster. Her Majesty "did suddenly heare a musicke
so sweete and secret, as euery one thereat greatly maruelled .... the
earth as it were opening, there appeared a Pauilion made of white
Taffata, .... being in proportion like vnto the sacred Temple of the
Virgins Vestall. This Temple seemed to consist vpon pillars of
Pourferry, arched like vnto a Church, ... Also, on the one side there
stood an Altar .... Before the doors of this Temple there stood a
crouned Pillar, embraced by an Eglantine tree, whereon hangd a Table" An
eglantine is a variety of rose with five petals (the sweet-brier). Sir
Henry Lee, says Segar in describing more of the ceremony, "himselfe
disarmed" and "offered vp his armour at the foot of her maiesties
Crowned Pillar ...."12 The equation had been made between Elizabeth I
and a goddess.
.
Glynne Wickham has noted the strong connection between A Midsummer
Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen - how characters in one text
turn up again in the other. He remarks, "How singular .... that when
Shakespeare was again called upon to write a play in celebration of a
marriage, he should have chosen another aspect of the same story of
Theseus and Hyppolita, and begun it at the very point where the earlier
play had ended". Wickham then acutely observes that Hymen's song at the
opening of the Kinsmen play echoes the sentiments of Oberon's song at
the end of the Dream.13
.
But when was the Rosicrucian play written? To answer this we must first
date the Dream. Professor Honigmann comprehensively explores the
question of for what marriage the latter was run up and comes down in
favour of the Derby marriage - William Stanley, 6th Earl, to Elizabeth
Vere - which took place on January 26 1595.14 The Dream may have already
played on stage a little while and been polished up somewhat for the
Derby wedding, with some topical allusions fed into the text to enliven
the occasion. If the writing of the Kinsmen text followed that of the
Dream, we are probably talking about the second half of 1594 as the
moment of composition. We have a major clue at hand, however, in
Henslowe's diary. Philip Henslowe was the most successful theatrical
impresario of his day, and his diary contains a section for 1594 when
entries cover the performances of both the Lord Admiral's Men and the
Lord Chamberlain's, the Bard's company. Whether the companies acted
together in effect, or performed separately, we cannot tell from these
entries. For the 17th September 1594 Henslowe wrote "ne - Rd at palamon
& arsett ljs".15 "Ne" has attracted much comment over the years in
Henslowe's usage. Most commonly, it is taken to be an abbreviation for
"new" - to represent a premiere performance. Could this premiere of
September 1594 have been of the Bard's original text for The Two Noble
Kinsmen? An older play of Palamon and Arcite certainly existed. As far
back as 1566 the now lost play by Richard Edwardes, Master of the
Children of the Chapel, had been performed at Christ Church Hall, Oxford.16
.
There is a second clue, whose import is equally difficult to determine.
The Kinsmen text includes a ballad, "The George Aloe". On March 19 1611
there was entered on the Stationers' Register, in the name of the
publisher Richard Jones, "the seconde parte of the George Aloe and the
Swiftestake, beinge both ballades". We can search in vain through the
Register for anything called the "first part of the George Aloe" - or
the "George Aloe", for that matter. However, on January 14 1595 an entry
was made in the Register for the publisher Thomas Creede (who published
the first Quarto of King Lear): "the Saylers ioye, to the tune of ?heigh
ho hollidaie'". In the manuscript of the Percy Papers several decades
later a ballad was entered "from an ancient black-letter [printed] copy
in Ballard's collection", with the following description: "The Seamans
only Delight: Shewing the brave fight between the George Aloe, the
Sweepstakes, and certain French Men at sea. Tune, The Sailors Joy,
etc."17 Our 1595 Register entry, it would seem, is none other than the
first part of the "George Aloe". The closeness of this January 1595 date
to Henslowe's "ne" entry of September 1594 adds weight to the claims of
Henslowe's Palamon and Arcite to be the torso from which The Two Noble
Kinsmen was quarried.
.
There is a further riddle tied up with the ballad of "The George Aloe".
The music was composed by the great lutenist, John Dowland. Diana
Poulton identified this music in three surviving manuscripts: in William
Trumbull's Lute Book, now in the British Library, where it probably was
written in after 1613 at Brussels, where Trumbull was the English envoy;
in the Euing Lute Book of c. 1600, now at Glasgow University; and in a
Cambridge University manuscript containing three copies of the piece,
convincingly dated at c. 1595-1600.18 Those who claim The Two Noble
Kinsmen as a definite late work of the Bard have scrupulously refrained
from tackling the question of the early date of Dowland's song in
relation to dating the play. Dowland seems to have associated with the
Bard in the 1590s, if we are to believe some manuscript notes by Sir
William Oldys written in the mid-18th century. Oldys comments that
"Shakespeare was deeply delighted with the singing of Dowland the
Lutenist, but Spencer's deep conceits he thought surpassed others. See
in his Sonnets The Friendly Concord. That John Dowland and Thos. Morley
are said to have set several of these Sonnets to musicke ...."19 That
the Bard and Dowland, the brightest stars in their respective
firmaments, knew each other well would not be surprising. Both shared an
illustrious patron in Ferdinando, Lord Strange. Dowland's "Ferdinando
Earle of Darby, his Galliard" and "Lord Strangs March" survive to this
day.20
.
Dowland's personality is almost as puzzling as Shakespeare's, although
at least with Dowland we have some personal letters to refer to. Despite
the massive biographical and musical profile given in Diana Poulton's
well known study, and subsequent analyses published in Early Music and
elsewhere, I believe there is a hitherto unrecognized pattern running
through his life, whose unravelling can throw substantial light on the
mentalité in which thrived one of the leading exponents of Renaissance
melancholy. Dowland's esotericism has already attracted some critical
attention; but one facet of his esoteric life has up to now been
completely overlooked: the recurrent interaction of his career with the
lives of personalities conspicuously associated with Rosicrucianism.
.
We must first consider Dowland's illustrious patron, Moritz, Landgrave
of Hessen-Kassel. Brought up a Lutheran, Moritz converted to Calvinism
in 1604. Marburg, which he established as Germany's first Calvinist
university, with its brilliant chemistry and medical faculties became
the powerhouse of academic Rosicrucianism in Europe. It had a
particularly close association with Exeter College, the only Calvinist
college at Oxford. Bruce T. Moran's researches have uncovered the
systematic way in which Moritz organized and controlled an extensive
hermetic alchemical circle focussed on what were probably Europe's best
laboratories at Kassel, some of whom were leading Rosicrucians. The
Danish scientist Wormius discussed in a letter of the 18th August 1616
the rumour that Moritz was a Rosicrucian. On the 17th April 1604 Moritz
wrote a letter mentioning the livery "made in the form of a rose" worn
by many young gentlemen at Kassel and remarking that it was "plutost
signe d'une bonne amitié entre eux, que de quelques autre
consequénce[s]."21 Karl Widemann, a physician, was to send Moritz
cosmological Rosicrucian writings some years later.22 Finally, it is
hard to believe that the first editions of the Rosicrucian manifestoes
could have been printed in so small a town as Kassel without Moritz's
explicit knowledge and consent.
.
An Anglophile, who assiduously pursued connections with England and
maintained a company of English "comedians" at his court for years,
Moritz was in a strong position to steer the marriage of Prince
Frederick of the Rhine with James I's daughter, Elizabeth, an event
which finally took place at the start of 1613. This marriage was
intended to cement the alliance of German Protestant princes with
England against Hapsburg supremacy in Europe. A skilful public relations
campaign was mounted to promote the claims of Prince Frederick for
Elizabeth's hand, and I would suggest that we look at the book, the
Varietie of Lute-Lessons of 1610, in this context. Edited allegedly by
Dowland's son, Robert, it features a pavan attributed to Moritz himself
? although Anthony Rooley believes it is good enough to have been the
product of John Dowland's genius. I am sure that its aim was to spread
Moritz's "fame" at the English court. We learn in the book that the
first "Pavin" was "made by the most magnificent and famous Prince
Mauritius, Landgrave of Hessen, and from him sent to my father, with
this inscription following, and written with his GRACES owne hand." This
was surely a "pièce d'occasion", a minor political act in itself.
.
Dowland 's relationship with Moritz went back to the 1590s. On March 21
1595 Moritz wrote to the Prince of Brunswick comparing Dowland's ability
as a lutenist with those of Gregorio Howet. Dowland was still working
for Moritz when Henry Noel wrote to him on December 1 1596. On February
9 1598 the Landgrave wrote to Dowland offering the post at his court the
musician had relinquished a year before.23 After that nothing further is
known of their relationship until the music book of 1610.
.
Of Michael Maier, I have said much elsewhere. To my earlier comments
should be added the thought that he most probably served as an
intermediary with Dowland, for it was about the time of his first
English visit that he became personal physician to the Landgrave. One
thing is pretty certain. In the autumn of 1613 there must have been some
interaction between Maier and the dedicatee of the Varietie of
Lute-Lessons, Sir Thomas Monson. Sir Thomas Overbury, whose murder was
to rock society at its highest levels, had been gaoled in the Tower at
the behest of James I, whose governor (Master of the Armoury) was Sir
Thomas Monson. Traditionally, the historians of the Overbury affair have
assumed that Overbury was attended in the Tower by the physician Sir
Turquet de Mayerne, who signed himself "Mayernus". A careful scrutiny of
letters in the British Library shows Overbury referring to the physician
"Mayerus" on several occasions, which is the way Maier signed himself .
Independent evidence exists to confirm that Maier was in England in May
1613.24 James had insisted that no doctor see Overbury without his
personal approval, and it is inconceivable that Maier could have got to
Overbury without going through Monson. We can envisage, perhaps, a
friendship circle consisting of Monson ? a fanatical music lover ? Maier
and Dowland .
.
If we cast our minds back to the probable premiering of the Ur- Two
Noble Kinsmen in September 1594 and the first mention of Dowland's
appearance at the Kassel court in late March 1595, we have good grounds
to conjecture that it was Dowland himself who first brought news of
Palamon and Arcite, to which he had contributed, to the ears of Moritz
the Landgrave. No-one better, apart from the Bard himself, could have
explained the play's esoteric rose symbolism, one would have thought.
Other than Shakespeare, no creative mind of the period invoked the
imagery of the rose so frequently as Dowland.
.
But what of The Two Noble Kinsmen as we know it, in which Shakespeare's
evident contribution runs to no more than perhaps forty percent of the
playing time - one hour of the 150 minutes it ran to in the recent Royal
Shakespeare Company production? The surviving script is a hodge-podge
that must have been assembled in a hurry. The joins certainly show. It
even borrows its morris dance scene from The Masque of Grays Inn and
Inner Temple, written by Fletcher's usual partner, Francis Beaumont, and
presented earlier in 1613 in celebration of the Palatinate marriage.
Beaumont and Fletcher had made three admiring references to Dowland in
The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607?). Fletcher alone made a
reference to him in The Bloody Brothers (1617) and a further one ? in
collaboration, it is usually thought, with Philip Massinger - in The
Fair Maid of the Inns (1626).25 This all tends to suggest an ongoing
friendship between Fletcher and Dowland at a time when Dowland's
contemporary reputation in England was on a definite slide. Could
Dowland have actually been the organizing genius responsible for getting
the King's Men to take Palamon and Arcite out of the prompt copy chest
where it lay gathering dust and to commission a rewrite at the nimble
hands of John Fletcher? We should not rule out the possibility.
.
Why did the play's "George Aloe" music get into the Trumbull Lute Book?
I doubt it was for purely musical reasons, for William Trumbull seems to
have had Rosicrucian associations. A friend of his, acting as secretary
to the English ambassador at Paris in the years 1611-13, was Thomas
Floyde. On December 15 1609 Floyde wrote to Trumbull that "Dr. Lloyd, my
brother Jeffreys and my cousin Yonge have often remembered you." On
February 23 1610 Floyde concluded a letter with "My good friend and
yours, my brother Jeffreys, Doctor Floud, my cousin Floud, my cousin
Yonge and myself .... kiss your hands." One presumes that "Dr. Lloyd"
was "Doctor Floud"; and I suspect strongly that "Doctor Floud" was none
other than Dr Robert Fludd, the most famous of English Rosicrucians.26
.
By January 17 1610 a relationship between Trumbull and Moritz of
Hessen-Kassel was well established, for on that day Moritz commended Dr
Mosanus "unto you and your favour." And on October 17 1611 Moritz wrote
to thank Trumbull for the kindness he had shown to his son Otto at
Brussels.27
.
Trumbull's daughter Elizabeth married George Rudolph Weckherlin
(1584-1653), a distinguished German poet, who was appointed an
under-secretary of state at Whitehall in 1624 and was a keen Palatinist.
Weckherlin's diary reveals that Weckherlin knew Robert Fludd and bought
a house from him. It also gives the chronology of some mysterious
transactions between the poet and Lewis Ziegler, agent to Lord Craven,
the main financial backer of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, which appear
to partly relate to Weckherlin's initiation into Rosicrucianism.28
.
The poet's grand-son, Sir William Trumbull (1639-1716), was a devoted
friend of Alexander Pope's about the year 1706; and quite uninformed of
an earlier Rosicrucian affinity in the family, it has been suggested
that Pope's knowledge of Rosicrucianism was garnered through this
particular friendship. Sir William was said to have received his early
instruction in Latin and French from Weckherlin.29
.
Another manuscript collection of lute pieces with Rosicrucian
implications is that belonging to Philip Hainhofer, which is held today
in the library at Wolfenbuettel. Hainhofer (1578-1647), who came from
Augsburg, was well known both as a diplomat and as an art connoiseur.
His manuscript compilation appears to have been begun in 1603 or 1604.
That it contains three unique items attributed to Dowland suggests a
personal link between Hainhofer ? or his transcriber ? and Dowland at
some point in time.30 Daniel Stolcius produced two of the classic
Rosicrucian emblematic texts in The Pleasure Garden of Chemistry (1624)
and The Hermetic Garden (1627), the first largely derived from engraved
plates originally printed in works by the Rosicrucians Michael Maier and
J.D. Mylius. Stolcius, who studied at Oxford after fleeing from Bohemia
in 1620, dedicated The Hermetic Garden to Hainhofer, who was described
as counsellor to the Duke of Pomerania. Coincidentally, the younger
Dowland, Robert, spent time working at the court of the Duke of Wolgast
in Pomerania, where he asked permission to return to England on August
30 1623.31 Stolcius was indebted to Hainhofer, who "inspired me with
your gentle conversation, even to the extent of thoroughly showing me
your storehouse of philosophy [science and alchemy], the like of which I
have never seen in my travels ..."32 Hainhofer signed the album amicorum
of the Rosicrucian Joachim Morsius and ?years later - was mentioned in a
letter from the Herzog August von Braunschweig to the greatest
Rosicrucian (or ex-Rosicrucian) of all, Johann Valentin Andreae.
Hainhofer even owned a manuscript copy of one of the manifestoes, the
Fama, taken from an early draft that must have been in existence before
1613.33
.
Henry Peacham (1578-1644) was a prolific literary jack of all trades,
who even published the occasional musical composition of his own.34 His
drawing of a scene from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is the earliest
illustration of a Shakespeare play known. Done in 1595, it found its way
to the library of Longleat House, the temporary home of Francis Thynne.
Peacham's friendship with John Dowland was clearly a strong one. He
dedicated an emblem to Dowland in Minerva Britanna (1612) and mentions
their friendship in The Compleat Gentlemen of 1622. Peacham also
dedicated an emblem to the Landgrave Moritz in Minerva Britanna, to
which he appended a marginal note: "This most noble Prince beside his
admirable knowledge in all learning, & the languages, hath excellent
skil in musick. Mr Dowland hath many times shewed me 10 or 12 several
sets of Songes for his Chappel of his owne composing."35
.
Could Peacham have known Michael Maier, introduced through the agency of
John Dowland? His Minerva Britanna, presumed to have been published at
the beginning of 1612, having been entered on the Stationers' Register
on August 9 1611, contains a surprising nugget, which evokes
recollection of Michael Maier's Christmas "greetings card" of 1611 to
James I as well as the Bard's great rose speech in the Kinsmen play. In
a poem dedicated to John Dowland, Peacham writes:
.
"Heere, Philomel, in silence sits alone,
In depth of winter, on the bared brier,
Whereas the Rose, had once her beautie showen;
Which Lordes, and Ladies, did so much desire:
But fruitles now, in winters frost and snow,
It doth despis'd and unregarded grow."
.
It is poor verse and worse syntax, but all the same the poem seems to
draw nourishment from Shakespeare's explication of why "a rose is best":
.
"It is the very emblem of a maid:
For when the west wind courts her gently
How modestly she blows and paints the sun
With her chaste blushes! When the north comes near her,
Rude and impatient, then, like chastity,
She locks her beauties in her bud again
And leaves him to base briars." (T.N.K. II.ii.)
.
Was Peacham an actual Rosicrucian or a member of a rose society? The
question is unanswerable, but prompted by a provocative passage in his
posthumously published The Truth of our Times (1638). He describes a
tavern tradition: "in many places, as well in England, as the Low
Countries, they have over their Tables a rose painted, and what is
spoken under the Rose, must not be revealed; the reason is this; The
Rose being sacred to Venus, whose amours and stolen sports that they
might never bee revealed, her sonne Cupid would needes dedicate to
Harpocrates, the god of Silence".36
.
Moritz of Hessen-Kassel, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the evidence of Henry
Peacham, William Trumbull and Philip Hainhofer, the hermeticist tendency
of many of Dowland's greatest melancholic compositions: ? all these
pointers combined tell us of a man in close, knowing proximity to that
typical Baroque expression of Protestant mysticism: the Rosicrucian
movement. And that movement claimed its own. Alongside J.V. Andreae,
Fludd and Maier, Johann Daniel Mylius ranked as one of the most eminent
Rosicrucian writers. Son-in-law of Johannes Hartmann, the great
professor of chemistry at Marburg University, Mylius eventually became
Moritz's personal physician. Robert Fludd prescribed pills according to
his prescriptions in England. In 1620 Mylius published his Thesaurus at
Frankfurt. No printed copies appear to have survived. But there is a
manuscript copy in Germany, in which Mylius pays tribute to Dowland by
featuring his "Farewell" on page one under the heading "Grammatica
illustris Douland." "A Fancy" by Dowland turns up on page eighteen.
Undoubtedly Dowland was the favourite composer of the Rosicrucians.37
.
Our story is almost complete and it would be timely for me to set it in
a broader framework. The symbolism of the rose had evolved into a rich
tradition in the culture of Tudor England, and began to develop new
ideological forms in late Elizabethan times in response to court
politics (tilt day entertainments) and the fashionable hermetic and
alchemical ideas that the quickening English Renaissance was
disseminating. The literary culture ran in tandem with the
scientific-esoteric revolution. Thus Shakespeare's Palamon and Arcite
paralleled the formation in London of Francis Thynne's "Rose" society ?
almost certainly an alchemical talking-shop. Alchemical societies named
"the Rose" are known to have been founded on the Continent a few years
later, as in France, probably in imitation of the London society, whilst
Moritz of Hessen-Kassel bragged of a society at Kassel wearing "the
livery" of a rose as early as 1604 and a brotherhood of the "Rose"
apparently existed at Tuebingen in 1607.38
.
The central role of England in the Protestant struggle with Catholicism
and the Hapsburgs of Spain and Austria had long been appreciated.
England and Wales constituted one state, and a wealthy one at that;
German Protestantism was divided over many states, most of them
relatively impoverished. It was therefore almost inevitable, because of
the dynamic of Elizabethan England, that fresh winds generated in
Britain would sweep abroad, changing the climate for the torpid German
states and their mainly timid princes. The sudden brilliant outpouring
of the English drama that began in the 1580s was to have unexpected
political consequences overseas. By the mid-1590s, English actors ?
usually called "comedians" ? were touring widely on the Continent. This
unprecedented cultural offensive spread English influence and ideas in
Germany to enthusiastically receptive audiences. Moritz of
Hessen-Kassel's Anglophilism led him at this time to set up a permanent
company of English actors at his court; although drawn mainly from the
Lord Admiral's Men, some of the principals had previously acted in
Shakespeare's productions.39 With the musicians who so often accompanied
them, including the young Dowland, they were the couriers of English
ideas as much off-stage, we can assume, as on-stage. At least two plays
with strong masonic content were acted abroad by the English companies;
one for certain was performed at Kassel in the winter of 1606/7.40
Whether the choice of these dramas reflected a widening interest,
expressed even abroad, in matters masonic, I cannot say. But, as I show
in a work currently in course of completion, speculative freemasonry was
a far more vigorous plant in late Elizabethan England than had
previously been suspected. And this very fact, combined with the
thriving "underground" culture of the Family of Love, implies that a
fully institutionalized "secret society" tradition had already broken
ground that the Rosicrucian brotherhood, in process of establishment
well before the publication of the manifestoes in 1614, would seek to
occupy also.
.
There has been a tendency to view the early history of Rosicrucianism
through a religious prism to the exclusion of a variety of seemingly
autonomous cultural influences ? such as the literary and musical ?
which moulded the imaginative arena in which the movement took flight.
What I hope to have demonstrated is that these influences have their
place ? and their importance; and that to understand the preliminaries
to Rosicrucianism proper we should think in terms of a dialectic between
the capitals of London and Kassel that spanned all of two decades.
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Art Neuendorffer
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