Steiner traced Baconism, Shakespeare's drama, Jakob Boehme's mysticism and Jacobus Baldus's poetry to one initiate personality transmitting a single supersensible inspiration into modern civilization.
The One Inspirer of Bacon, Shakespeare and Boehme in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's designation for the single initiate personality who, at the dawn of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, carried one supersensible inspiration into four apparently unrelated cultural streams: the empirical science of Francis Bacon, the drama of William Shakespeare, the mysticism of Jakob Boehme, and the Latin poetry of Jacobus Baldus of Ingolstadt. Steiner set out this esoteric genealogy in the ninth lecture of Spiritual and Social Changes in the Development of Humanity (GA 196), delivered in Dornach on 1 February 1920. The source itself, he taught, is extraterrestrial, yet it was represented on earth in a single human being, so that Baconism and Shakespearianism took one path into Western civilization while the currents of Boehme and Baldus flowed into Central Europe. The concept explains, without endorsing, the stubborn modern intuition behind the Bacon-Shakespeare authorship theory: readers sense a real unity, but its ground is inspirational rather than literary.
The One Inspirer of Bacon, Shakespeare and Boehme names the hidden common origin Steiner assigned to the founding voices of the modern age. Empirical science, Elizabethan drama, the mysticism of a Görlitz shoemaker and Bavarian Latin verse look like four separate births around 1600. Steiner read them as one impulse, poured through one initiate into different vessels, each formed by the people who received it: England turned it outward toward nature, Central Europe inward toward the soul.
In Steiner's Own Words
In the Western world, we have, in addition to Bacon, a personality in Shakespeare who has a great influence on modern civilization. For those who are able to study spiritual life, Baconism and Shakespearianism point to the same extraterrestrial source, but one that is represented in the earthly. Both take the same path into the newer development, and it is known that the inspiration for Bacon and Shakespeare comes from the same source. In modern times, when everything is taken roughly, this has even led to the well-known Bacon theory being put forward, which, of course, is complete nonsense as it has been put forward. But the source from which the inspiration of Bacon and Shakespeare originates for Central Europe is the same, and the same initiates personality is the source of the spiritual currents of Jakob Böhme and the South German Jacobus Baldus.
What it Means Today
The strangest afterlife of this lecture belongs to the Shakespeare authorship question. In Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (Simon and Schuster, 2010), the Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro traces how the Baconian theory, launched in earnest by Delia Bacon's 1857 book The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, drew Mark Twain and Helen Keller into the Baconian camp and later carried Sigmund Freud toward the Earl of Oxford. Shapiro's diagnosis: doubters sense a unity of mind behind the plays and the Novum Organum that the documented biographies cannot supply, and they resolve the tension by merging the men.
Steiner stood inside the same tension and resolved it the other way. He told his Dornach audience that the Bacon theory is complete nonsense as literary history, yet the perception feeding it is accurate: the two currents really do share one source, an inspiration standing behind both men rather than a quill passing between them. The Thalira synthesis: authorship doubt is a materialist reading of a genuine spiritual perception, the sensed kinship of works that were inspired together yet written apart. Set the four streams side by side, an essay of Bacon, a late Shakespeare romance, a chapter of Boehme's Aurora, an ode of Baldus, and attend to the common gesture beneath their very different surfaces. Steiner's claim then becomes a discipline of comparative reading rather than an article of belief.
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