We don't have a Dan Brown blockbuster this summer. For readers who need a conspiracy-theory fix, here's the subversive history that connects The Da Vinci Code (the secret descendants of Jesus) with The Lost Symbol (the cult practices of Freemasonry). The secret knowledge is all right there in The Tempest, Shakespeare's story of a marooned magician who conjures a shipwreck to confront and confound his antagonists. Though celebrated this year at the Stratford Festival (in Christopher Plummer's extraordinary turn as the sorcerer Prospero), Shakespeare's clandestine revelations lurk – in full public view – in suppressed lore known only to the cognoscenti.
Here (maybe) is the astonishing truth: Shakespeare's Prospero was a 16th-century nobleman, pagan in practice, who conjured a series of storms at sea to take the life of Scotland's King James VI – who (as England's King James I) sat in the audience for the premiere of The Tempest in 1611. The historical sorcerer: Francis Stewart, fifth Earl of Bothwell, Lord High Admiral of Scotland and cousin of the king.
This revelation comes from an improbable scholar: a retired English policeman whose work as an amateur historian led to a reasonably credible identification of one of Shakespeare's few protagonists who lacked a real-life antecedent. Brian Moffatt went public last year in a self-published book, Death, Resurrection and the Sword, but his findings caused scarcely a ripple in the tempest of establishment Shakespearean forensics.
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