AFTER an exhaustive study of approximately five days I’ve concluded that there is ample evidence to prove that William Shakespeare was a Swedenborgian.

According to Wikipedia, the standard of excellence for studies like this, “Emmanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, and theologian.”  He has been termed a Christian mystic by some sources, including the fusty old Encyclopedia Britannica online version and the Encyclopedia of Religion  (1987), which starts its article with the description that he was a “Swedish scientist and mystic.”  Swedenborg termed himself  “Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ” in True Christian Religion, one of his published works. Perhaps he thought he was St Paul.  It annoys some people that he lived smack in the middle of the Enlightenment.  But there you go.

Anyway, he was an extremely accomplished guy and had many radical ideas, such as the idea that the last judgement had already happened (or was happening) and that the Bible should be used as a repository of spiritual truths. Likewise, Shakespeare according to some scholars (though none come to mind except F R Leavis and he didn’t say this) was  very radical and used the Bible as a repository of quotations he could skim for his plays.  The first act of Macbeth, for example is full of biblical references and stuffed with mystical beliefs.  As my full length study, Shakespeare and Swedenborg: A Spiritually Dynamic Duo, will show, these similarities cannot be explained as mere accident.

In his book Life on Other Planets, Swedenborg stated that he conversed with spirits from Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Venus, and the moon.  He did not report conversing with spirits from Uranus and Neptune, however, which had not been discovered in his day.  This crucial piece of information lends veracity to his claim since an unscrupulous scholar might say he had conversed with spirits from undiscovered planets.

Significantly, Shakespeare’s references to planets are also well known. So is his belief in astrology, as we can see in All’s Well That Ends Well (I.i)

And, of course, references to the moon (“the inconstant moon”) abound.

No wonder Shakespeare, who was born in 1564, was an avid follower of Swedenborg, whose more scientific observations must have had their appeal in an earlier century.

Swedenborg's flying machine; cf. A Midsummer Night's Dream,' Act V. Scene I

OT only this, but Shakespeare also enjoyed writing about human beings conversing with spirits and ghosts.  If the ghost of Hamlet’s father weren’t enough proof, there’s also Banquo, Julius Caesar, probably a dozen in Richard III, and the mother of Posthumus in Cymbeline, which no one has ever read, and several in Antony and Cleopatra, which seven people have.

Geographical evidence for the “Emmanu-Will connection” is not lacking. Not coincidentally, Swedenborg lived in London for four years from 1709 until 1713, almost exactly one hundred years after the first performance of Shakespeare’s blockbuster hit, The Four Noble Kinsmen.  Circumstantially but crucially in my opinion: Shakespeare was also born in England.  One of his most famous plays is about a Scandinavian prince; and Swedenborg, as his name suggests, was also a Scandinavian.

Swedenborg’s scientific accomplishments have often been overlooked, especially his work in metallurgy.  He was a pioneer in the study of the smelting of lead and copper.   We find a similar interest in Act 2 scene 7 of Merchant of Venice, where a drawn curtain reveals three small caskets made of lead, silver and gold. In this scene Shakespeare shows his acquaintance with Swedenborg’s work in the quotation, “All that glisters is not gold” but there are equally decisive references to metals that range beyond a mere casual interest in the topic in both Macbeth and Hamlet.

After his retirement from the Board of Mines, Swedenborg was best remembered as a biblical interpreter. Usually abbreviated as Arcana Cœlestia and under the Latin variant Arcana Caelestia (translated as Heavenly Arcana, Heavenly Mysteries, or Secrets of Heaven depending on modern English-language editions) his writings on scripture swelled to eight volumes of impenetrable prose.

In a nutshell he thought thought the last judgement had begun in 1757 because the Christian church had lost faith and charity.  This is the scenario Shakespeare uses in Macbeth 1.2, when Banquo says to the hags, “If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak then to me” (1.3.60).  There are all kinds of references to the supernatural in Shakespeare’s plays, but after five days I have only been able to track down a few.  One thing is sure, however:  both men believed in heaven, hell, and the devil. To wit, the Comedy of Errors (Iv.iii)

Ant. S. Satan, avoid! I charge thee, tempt me not!
 Dro. S. Master, is this mistress Satan?
 Ant. S. It is the devil.
 Dro. S. Nay, she is worse, she is the devil’s dam; and here she comes in the habit of a light wench; and thereof comes that the wenches say, God damn me;’ that’s as much to say, ‘God make me a light wench.’ It is written, they appear to men like angels of light.” 

This is just one example of Shakespeare talking about spirits and demons.  There are lots of others that point directly to his mystical infatuation with the idea of conversing with the dead.

Finally, Swedenborg wrote that “eating meat, regarded in itself, is something profane,” and was not practiced in the early days of the human race. Swedenborg’s landlord in London, a Mr. Shearsmith, said he ate no meat but his maid, who served Swedenborg, said that he would occasionally indulge in eating eels and pigeon pie.  Similarly, Shakespeare’s vegetarianism, derived from Swedenborg”s, is evident in the Witch’s Brew of Macbeth, Act I:  According to many scholars, the “ghastly preparation” qualifies for a vegetarian repast because it avoids the flesh of newt and frogs.  This cannot be pure coincidence. According to the same calculation, Falstaff, especially in Henry V,  can be seen as an allegory of the price of a strict carnivorism.  Nor is it merely “interesting” that both Swedenborg and Shakespeare wrote a lot about marriage and conjugal love, though both seemed to have lived as bachelors for most of their lives.

T  SHOULD not surprise us that we can confidently add the name of Shakespeare to the long list of famous men who have been attracted by Swedenborg’s ideas.  Kant, William Blake, Balzac, Henry James, Emerson,  Karl Jung and Jorge Luis Borges, to name only the most turgid,  have all been admirers and disciples.  Women, not so much.

Skeptics may contend that Shakespeare cannot have been influenced by Swedenborg because the bard lived in a previous century.  That, in my view, is the sort of discriminatory, limited, and shallow thinking that has kept history the poor sister of the sciences for a long time.

By what right do we proclaim that influence only moves from antecedent to subsequent events?  In the case of Shakespeare and Swedenborg, the evidence is overwhelming that history moves in all sorts of interesting directions, unlimited, like the cosmos itself, by conventional ideas of cause and effect.