THE ITALIAN PLAYS


Among the plays being performed, this summer, at Colorado University's 2019 Colorado Shakespeare Festival are 'Romeo and Juliet', 'Twelfth Night,' and 'As You Like It', plays that are set in Italy and seem to be written by someone who was able to speak Italian, and was knowledgeable, and had experience of Italian geography, art, culture and theatre.

The abiding mystery of the Italian plays is that William Shakespeare did not speak Italian, there is no evidence that he ever went to Italy, and ever experienced Italian Culture or Italian Theatre.

Yet, scholars have recently uncovered clues to the collaborative writing of Shakespeare and Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe, who spoke Italian and probably knew Italy, intimately.

In November, 2016, Oxford University Press released its new edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare and credited Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe as being a co-author of the three Henry VI plays. This conclusion is based on scholarship and 21st-century computerized tools to analyze texts. The edition’s international scholars say Shakespeare’s collaboration with other playwrights was 'extensive'.

Marlowe was a spy in the Elizabethan Secret Service. He spied in France and possibly in Italy and Spain.

And yet, there is certainly mystery concerning Marlowe's involvement in the writing of the Italian plays.

Historians say Marlowe was killed in a brawl, stabbed in the eye, on May 30, 1593. The Italian Plays were written and performed after this.

And yet, there is evidence that Marlowe's death was faked and he continued to write and spy for England.

In these playwrights' time England was in the midst of the bloody religious wars of the Reformation. Pope Pius V had ordered the excommunication, overthrow and murder of Elizabeth I.

The Privy Council/Star Chamber, became England's version of the Inquisition. People accused of being religious or political opponents of Elizabeth I, The Church of England, the established order, were horribly tortured, broken, executed, or imprisoned for life.

Shakespeare and his London playwright contemporaries, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, lived in fear of the police knock on the door in the middle of the night, the dungeon, the torture chamber, the 'justice' of the Privy Council/Star Chamber.

Thomas Kyd was one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama. Some scholars believe he was the author of a Hamlet play pre-dating Shakespeare's, which is now known as the Ur-Hamlet.  The play Edward III is included in the Second Edition of the Complete Oxford Shakespeare (2005), where it is attributed to "William Shakespeare and Others". In 2009, Brian Vickers published the results of a computer analysis using a program designed to detect plagiarism, which suggests that 40% of the play was written by Shakespeare with the other scenes written by Kyd.

On May 12, 1593, Kyd, was arrested for allegedly posting "divers lewd and mutinous libels" around London.

He would later say he had been the victim of an informer.

His lodgings, which he had shared with Marlowe, were searched. A tract was found that was said to be "vile heretical conceits denying the eternal deity of Jesus Christ..."

Kyd was tortured, and he broke.

He told his torturers the tract belonged to Marlowe. He said Marlowe was a blasphemous traitor, an atheist who believed Jesus Christ was a homosexual, and his mother was a 'whore'.

Kyd died from his injuries less than a year after being tortured.

Marlowe was summoned by the Privy Council/Star Chamber.

He was born in 1564, the same year Shakespeare was born. When Shakespeare arrived in London and the city's world of theater, sometime around 1590, Marlowe was the most prominent, celebrated, business-adept playwright in town.

At the very least he was Shakespeare's biggest literary influence. And yet, there are prominent Shakespearean scholars who claim Marlowe was much more than this.

Elizabeth’s spymaster was Francis Walsingham, outwardly a diplomat and adviser to the queen, and yet, more importantly, Elizabeth's fixer who made the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1584, happen.

For foreign covert missions, he preferred to use Englishmen rather than foreigners. Often the cover for these spies was that they were Catholic exiles. He preferred to recruit his spies from among the poor undergraduates at the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Marlowe would have been an ideal candidate.

He took many extended, unexplained leaves of absence from the university He spent much more money than a poor student on a scholarship would have.

University authorities found out that during an extended leave of absence he had gone to a Catholic English College in Douai, France (a school established on the continent for the education of English Catholic exiles by Philip II of Spain). There, students were recruited and trained to be Catholic secret agents in England.

Marlowe was rumored to be planning to convert to Catholicism.

He was only able to graduate because of a letter received from the Privy Council (of which Walsingham was a member) commending Marlowe for performing an unspecified “good service” for the Crown.

This "service" probably involved revealing the identity of Catholic secret agents sent to England.

After Kyd's torture induced confession in May 1593, Marlowe was taken before the privy chamber. He was released. But he was commanded to report to the authorities, "each day there after until licensed to the contrary".

On the night of May 30, 1593, Marlowe was staying in a boarding house, in Deptford, outside of London.

This boarding house was a “safe house” for British secret agents.

He was probably preparing to flee England. The three people he met at the boarding house would have been the right people to arrange this. They were Robert Poley (a diplomatic courier), Ingram Frizer (another agent of Walsingham) and Nikolas Skeres (a con man and associate of Frizer).

At this time Marlowe, was a tried and proven British secret agent. And yet, he was also an atheist, and homo-sexual. He knew members of the British Aristocracy who were also atheists and homosexuals.

The official story is that there was an argument about the bill. Marlowe drew Frizer’s knife and attacked him with it. Frizer struggled with him in self defense, and as a result Marlowe was fatally stabbed in the eye.

He was 29.

Fizer, admitted killing Marlowe. Yet he was acquitted of the murder.

And the coroner’s report is suspect.

Rules of investigation were not followed, and the body was never independently identified by someone other than the three people at the scene of the crime, all secret agents.

The body was buried before anyone, other than the coroner, could get a close look at it. And the body that was buried in the graveyard at Deptford could have been the corpse of a Catholic priest who was hung the previous evening.

Scholars have not found any record of the hung priest’s body being buried.

Since the 18th Century theories have been proposed that Marlowe's death was faked.

Some believe he went to Italy and continued to be a playwright and secret agent until he died in Padua, Italy in 1627.

There is evidence that Marlowe lived in hiding in Padua for 34 years after his supposed death.

Calvin Hoffman was an American theater critic, press agent and writer who popularized in his 1955 book, 'The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare,' the theory that Marlowe was the actual author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare. He published the account of Pietro Basconi, who claimed to have nursed an exiled recluse called Christopher Marlowe when he was terminally ill in Padua in 1627.

Hoffman's theory is controversial and disputed. And yet, there is much in 'Romeo and Juliet,' 'Twelfth Night, ' As You Like It,' and the other Italian Plays that indicate the author knew Italy intimately.

The author accurately names churches, canal routes, and pilgrimage sites. In 'Julius Caesar' he describes the kind of summer storm which is common to Rome, but doesn't happen in England.

The place where Juliet dies is a real 13th-century Franciscan convent - the only one outside the city walls - at the time when the events were supposed to have taken place.

Throughout the Italian Plays there is geographic, and cultural accuracy.

The Italian plays are often about exiles, false identity, gender confusion, people who are believed to be dead who are very much alive.

These are the themes that Marlowe would have lived with in Italy.

The Italian Plays would be the further collaboration of Shakespeare and Marlowe, the kind of collaboration that scholars and computer analyze have begun to uncover.

Marlowe could have sent his manuscripts to Walsingham the same way he sent his spy information. Walsingham would deliver the manuscripts to Shakespeare and he would send Marlowe the money that Shakespeare paid.

 Shakespeare would then edit and rewrite the plays - anyway he wanted.

CONSPIRACY THEORY
Belief in conspiracy theory, the belief that real history is nothing but a series of evil conspiracies is mass mental illness that has degraded our public/political discourse to the point where Donnie Pee Pee/Pussy-Grabber has become the first blackmailed, Russian Puppet/traitor/rapist president of the United States of America.
My father was one of the earliest victims of this mass psychosis.
Shortly after the Warren Commission Report on the JFK assassination was released in the mid-1960's my father began to passionately, vehemently claim the official government report was a lie.
Back then people called my father 'totally insane'.
And there was some truth to this.
He was an early, active opponent of the Vietnam War. It infuriated him, maddened him that the majority of the American People were so powerless to stop this senseless carnage.
And there were some post-modern, personal issues that he had about lack of control over a rapidly changing, very confusing world.
His political madness was ahead of his times.
Now - if you don't believe JFK was killed by dark, nefarious, overarching, evil conspiracy, if you believe JFK was killed by a lone gunman - Lee Harvey Oswald, you are considered to be totally, dangerously insane.
Conspiracy theory is the never-ending whining of those who perceive themselves as being weak, totally powerless in the face of conspiring evil.
This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
All conspiracy theory goes to the same place.
The People are weak, powerless, condemned to be oppressed, victims of invincible evil. And there is nothing that can be done about it.
THIS IS NOT TRUE!!!!
If you really study history - real history. You will find there were other times in United States history when The People were faced with run-away kleptocracy (rule by thieves) and fascism.
During the 1890's, the United States was ruled by the robber barons and their run-away kleptocracy. Anti-monopoly laws were passed. U.S. Capitalism was reformed. Conditions were created that nurtured a middle-class.
After the collapse of U.S. Capitalism in the 1930's, and the rise of fascism in the United States and Europe, Franklin Delano Roosevelt reformed capitalism and again created the conditions that nurtured a middle-class, that defined the U.S. until the 1970's.
And FDR and The People did whatever was necessary to defeat fascism.
And eventually, The People created the political conditions that ended the senseless carnage of Vietnam.
These are - no doubt - dark times.
I can't help but to refer to the history of Germany in the 1930's.
After the Nazi's won the 1934 election and took total political control of Germany, they began to face vehement, passionate political opposition. Their response to this was to burn down the Reichtag, the German Parliament, and scape-goat a psychotic, Communist, Jewish refugee.
There is no telling what Donnie Pee Pee/Pussy-Grabber is capable of as his regime crumbles.
Perhaps he is, right now, contemplating the unthinkable. Something like staging a bio-terrorism attack and then circumventing the November elections by declaring martial law.
And yet, I'm not saying that The People are weak, powerless, condemned to be oppressed victims of evil. And there is nothing we can do about it.
U.S. History demonstrates that when The People were faced with fascism and kleptocracy in the past - THEY PREVAILED.
AND WE MUST PREVAIL AGAIN!!!!

THE OTHER SHAKESPEAREAN WRITERS

Last summer, as part of the Colorado Shakespeare Festivals “Original Practices” there was a production of Henry VI Part 3.

Original Practice's Production are plays done as Shakespeare would have done them. There is no artificial sound or lighting, no amplification, and with whatever costumes are on hand. Actors are given only their lines and cues, rather than complete scripts, and a mere 20 hours of rehearsal.

In November, 2016, Oxford University Press released its new edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare and credited Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe as being a co-author on the three Henry VI plays based on scholarship and 21st-century computerized tools to analyse texts. The edition’s international scholars say Shakespeare’s collaboration with other playwrights was extensive.

This year as its Original Practices play CSF will perform “Edward III” for the first time in the festivals history.

Many scholars accept both Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd had a hand in writing the play. And yet, scholars dispute which playwright wrote the biggest part of it.

In these playwrights' time England was in the midst of the bloody religious wars of the Reformation. Elizabeth I. Pope Pius V had ordered the excommunication, overthrow and murder of Elizabeth I.

The Privy Council/Star Chamber, became England's version of the Inquisition. People perceived as religious or political opposition to Elizabeth I, The Church of England, the established order, were horribly tortured, broken, imprisoned for life.

Shakespeare and his London playwright contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, lived in fear of the police knock on the door in the middle of the night, the dungeon, the torture chamber, the 'justice' of the Privy Council/Star Chamber.

Thomas Kyd was one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama. Some scholars believe he was the author of a Hamlet play pre-dating Shakespeare's, which is now known as the Ur-Hamlet.

On May 12,1593, Kyd, was arrested for allegedly posting "divers lewd and mutinous libels" around London.

He would later say he had been the victim of an informer.

His lodgings, which he had shared with Marlowe, were searched. A tract was found that was said to be "vile heretical conceits denying the eternal deity of Jesus Christ..."

Kyd was tortured, and he broke.

He told his torturers the tract belonged to Marlowe. He said Marlowe was a blasphemous traitor, an atheist who believed Jesus Christ was a homosexual.

Kyd died from his injuries less than a year after being tortured.

Marlowe was summoned by the Privy Council/Star Chamber.

He was born in 1564, the same year Shakespeare was born. When Shakespeare arrived in London and the city's world of theater, sometime around 1590, Marlowe was the most prominent, celebrated, business-savy playwright in town.

At the very least he was Shakespeare's biggest literary influence. And yet, there are prominent Shakespearean scholars who claim Marlowe was much more than this.

Elizabeth’s spymaster was Francis Walsingham, outwardly a diplomat and adviser to the queen, and yet, more importantly, Elizabeth's fixer who made the the legal execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1584, happen.

For foreign covert missions, he preferred to use Englishmen rather than foreigners. Often the cover for these spyies was that they were Catholic exiles. He preferred to recruit his spies from among the impoverished lower class undergraduates at the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Marlowe would have been an ideal candidate.

He took many extended, unexplained leaves of absence from the university He spent much more money than a poor student on a scholarship would have.

University authorities found out that during an extended leave of absence he had gone to a Catholic English College in Douai (a school established on the continent for the education of English Catholic exiles by Philip II of Spain). There, students were recruited and trained to be Catholic secret agents in England.

Marlowe was rumored to be planning to convert to Catholicism.

He was only able to graduate because of a letter received from the Privy Council (of which Walsingham was a member) commending Marlowe for performing an unspecified “good service” for the Crown.

This "service" probably involved revealing the identity of Catholic secret agents sent to England.

After Kyd's torture induced confession in May 1593, Marlowe was taken before the privy chamber. He was released. But he was commanded to report to the authorities, "each day there after until licensed to the contrary".

On the night of May 30, 1593, Marlowe was staying in a boarding house, outside of London.

This boarding house was a “safe house” for British secret agents.

He was probably preparing to flee England. The three people he met at the boarding house there would have been the right people to arrange this. They were Robert Poley (a diplomatic courier), Ingram Frizer (another agent of Walsingham) and Nikolas Skeres (a con man and associate of Frizer).

At this time Marlowe, was a tried and proven British secret agent. And yet, he was also an atheist, and homo-sexual. He knew members of the British Aristocracy who were also atheists and homosexuals.

The official story is that there was an argument about the bill. Marlowe drew Frizer’s knife and attacked him with it. Frizer struggled with him in self defense, and as a result Marlowe was fatally stabbed in the eye.

He was 29.

Fizer, admitted killing Marlowe. Yet he was acquitted of the murder.

And the coroner’s report is suspect. Rules of investigation were not followed, and the body was never independently identified by someone other than the three people at the scene of the crime.

The body was buried before anyone, other than the coroner, could get a close look at it.

Since the 18th Century theories have been proposed that Marlowe's death was faked.

Some believe he went to Italy and continued to be a playwright and secret agent until he died in Padua, Italy in 1627.

The plays he wrote couldn't be signed by Christopher Marlowe. He sold these plays to William Shakespeare, who would heavily edit and rewrite Marlowe's plays, sign them and produce them at the Globe Theatre.

Some things supporting this theory is that Shakespeare received no more than the equivalent of a seventh or eighth grade education, He was taught Latin. And yet, Shakespeare's plays seem to be written by a very educated person who had a knowledge of Latin, French, Italian and Greek, such as Marlowe.

Shakespeare never went to Italy. Yet a lot of the plays are set in Italy. The author of the Shakespearean plays set in Italy had a detailed knowledge of Italy's geography, art and culture.

The author of these plays, set in Italy, was also influenced by Italian Theater.

The Shakespearean Italian plays are often about exiles, false identity, people who are believed to be dead who are very much alive.

'Love's Labour Lost, is a play set in Italy being performed by the CSF 2018.

In this play is a reference to the 'School of Night'.

The School of Night was a intellectual coterie led by Sir Walter Raleigh. It was also called the 'School of Atheism'. The group was said to include poets and scientists such as George Chapman, Thomas Harriot, and Christopher Marlowe.

Many of its members were said to be homosexuals.

In Act IV, scene III of William Shakespeare's play Love's Labour's Lost, the King of Navarre says "Black is the badge of hell / The hue of dungeons and the school of night."

Some scholars believe this passage reveals the hand of playwright/secret agent Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe.

NEW/OLD THINGS UNDER THE MEXICAN SUN

I arrived in Cabo in the middle of November. My Mexican friends immediately took me to their favorite beach, Playa Palmilla.
They pointed out the place where, in August, three men were gunned down, shot to pieces by automatic weapons, as they were sitting in the shade.
Two Mexican tourists were wounded.
On December 19, tourists catching early planes at the Cabo and La Paz airports saw the bodies of six men hanging from three different bridges.
Two bodies were found hanging from a bridge in Las Veredas, near Los Cabos International Airport. Two bodies were found hanging on a bridge on the highway between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo. Two other bodies were found hanging on a third bridge near the La Paz airport.
January and February saw the assassination of a police commandant, the assassination of the Human Rights Commission in La Paz and three police officers on the La Paz Malecon in front of a large number of residents and tourists.
In early April, tourists returning to Mulege from Coyotes and Burros Beaches passed the bodies and heads of two decapitated young men and the body of a third young man who was shot in the back of the head and kicked out of a rapidly moving vehicle, and left on the side of the Baja Peninsula’s main highway.
As recently as July, 2014, Baja California Sur had the lowest homicide rate in all of Mexico. In 2017 Baja California Sur became the state with the highest rate of homicide per capita. There were 701 homicides or 110 per 100,000 inhabitants giving Baja California Sur more homicides per capita than any non-warring nation.
This year looks like more of the same.
Gringos are not in danger from the cartel violence.
The total number killed on vacation in all of Mexico has declined to the point you are statistically more likely to be murdered at home by a family member.
And yet, the tourist industry’s and government response to cartel violence in Baja California Sur puts everyone, including gringos, in danger.
They have flooded the area with police, soldiers and marines.
This has done absolutely nothing to stem cartel violence.
But now there are thousands and thousands of uniformed thugs extorting everyone who looks like they’re carrying/using cannabis.
Most of the gringos and locals look like they’re carrying/using cannabis.
I was stopped and extorted by Baja California Sur state police, in La Paz.
And, inevitably, in times of cartel massacre, it’s almost impossible for everybody and anybody to buy mota/cannabis.

In early January I was crossing the plaza in front of the old mission church in downtown La Paz when I saw way too many pictures of their young, hopeful, and yet, doomed faces.
They’re young Mexicans, some only children, who have been arbitrarily detained and disappeared while going about their daily lives.
At least 30,000 people are missing in Mexico.
Criminal groups in Mexico kidnap, torture, dismember and even dissolve their victims in acid, and the remains are often dumped in clandestine graves.
The police and government claim that these people disappeared because they were involved in drug trafficking, or prostitution.
This is a lie.
Recent investigations have shown police, army and marines are disappearing more people than the cartels.
They do this to terrorize the people of Mexico. They do this in the hope that the Mexican people will be too scared to rise up.
I had stumbled on a demonstration by family members of of the disappeared in Baja California Sur.
There were three Pacenos (people of the city of La Paz) with a simple, cheap public address system who denounced the government and police of Mexicans for abducting, raping, torturing, killing, disappearing their children.
As they spoke to a crowd of about 100 people the police and military SUV’s with uniformed thugs with automatic weapons circled the plaza, their numbers steadily increasing, until the vast majority of vehicles circling the plaza were military and police.
The people speaking faced the police, soldiers and marines and denounced them for being criminal thugs, complicit in daily atrocities.
They denounced them for depriving their loved ones of a grave, a grave they could visit, a place they could be with their loved ones on the days of the dead.
They denounced the government for refusing internation assistance in the exhuming of mass graves and the identification of the dead.
They denounced the government for making the families search for the disappeared and making the families pay for costly DNA identification.
They denounced the police and army for threatening them when they refuse to end their search for their loved ones.
They said the police, army and marines are always threatening to make them disappear.
And yet, they say they will continue the fight until there is justice.
And I believe them.
There is, now, a new/old thing under the Mexican Sun.
In September, 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College, in the state of Guerrero commandeered a bus to attend a protest in Iguala - an annual event that commemorates the 1968 massacre of students and civilians in Mexico City by government forces.
The students' bus was reportedly intercepted by police.
According to Mexican federal authorities, members of the Guerrero Unidos drug gang allegedly slaughtered the students, who were delivered to them by the police, or according to other indications, state actors themselves disappeared the students," a report (PDF) by the Open Society Foundations (OSF), a global network of pro-democracy and human rights organizations, said.
The families of the 43 students, people with nothing further to lose have entered Mexican politics.
The families of all the disappeared are entering politics.
They demand justice.
They confront the police, the army, the marines, the government – fearlessly.
Their movement has a life of its own.
There is no telling where it will go.

Often it seems that Christianity has run its course in Mexico, and the country has become post-Christian.
It seems that way when you watch Mexican Television.
It seems that way when you pass La Paz’s main cathedral, on the edge of La Paz’s Centro, on Christmas Eve.
Mexicans still comply with the forms. They’ll cross themselves when passing a church or religious shrine.
And yet, church attendance has been steadily declining.
The main cathedral of La Paz was never finished.
It never will be finished.
It is already a huge, monumental ruin.
On Christmas Eve it was massively, mostly empty.

My friends in Cabo are Shivis Gay Tan, and Jorge Delgadillo.
She’s a psychologist. He’s an anthropologist..
They do sweats, temezcals at the big hotel.
Many of the big hotels have built sweat lodges/temezcals.
They’ve also done this in Cancun.
And yet, Jorge says the ones in Cancun are a lot more theatrical than the ones that Shivis and Jorge do in Cabo.
In Cancun it’s all about who’s wearing the biggest, flashiest Indian head dress. Who’s wearing the most ostentatious American Indian outfit, he says.
The sweats\temezcals in the big hotels, inevitably have something of theatre to them. And yet, Shivis and Jorge bring their authenticity.
Every Sunday evening at Temazcal Tonantzin Tlalli, Shivis’ and Jorge’s own sweat in their own sweat lodge way out in the desert, they have fierce sweats, they have their own archaic revival.
Terrence McKenna wrote of the archaic revival.
When civilization/modern life becomes nothing but a thing of death and disease, the Human impulse is to find/revert to a way of life that is in alignment with our evolutionary history, a way of life that is closer to the heart.
In the sweat lodge of Shivis and Jorge there is shamanism, song and the medicine we are longing for.
Shivis and Jorge also sing their medicine songs at the peyote ceremonies.
On a very beautiful beach, somewhere between Cabo San Lucas and Todos Santos there are all-night peyote ceremonies conducted by a Huichol, (Wixaritari) Maracame (shaman).
For the Wixaritari, Peyote symbolizes life, and the acquisition of transcendent, shamanic and artistic powers.
It appears in most all Wixaritari art.
Peyote is true, traditional medicine.
It heals
Peyote is a gift from the gods.
With peyote humans can enter into mystical realms.
With peyote humans can be more than human.
With the Maracame were about a dozen young women and men who attended to the about 100 people attending the ceremony.
They distributed the medicine. They attended to those who vomited from the medicine. They accompanied those who sang their peyote songs with an ancient water drum.
And the peyote songs were so beautiful - sung with fervor - sung with hope
And I wept.

Book Review - I See Dead People: A Personal Voyage

Book Review: 'I See Dead People: A Personal Voyage

A starting premise of this book, “I See Dead People: A Personal Voyage,” by Anna Gilchrist (Available at Amazon), is that humans are spiritual beings having a physical experience.
And death is definitely not the end of spiritual and personal existence.
When we die we are, either, immediately, guided to the light by light beings (angels). Or if we are still so entangled in materiality, physicality - unable to accept the existential change presented by death - we linger as ghosts.
Entering ‘the light’ we go to a place where we again exist as spiritual beings.
We can reflect on/contemplate our life times and life lessons.
And whenever we choose we can enter into life again. Again be thrown into Birth/Death, the maelstrom of life.
And it is in the maelstrom we have the best opportunities to progress as spiritual beings.
Anna Gilchrist describes helping ghosts to go into the light.
She also describes the work of bringing people into contact with their dead loved ones, so the dead can assure the living that they’re all right and will be with them again.
This view of Life/Death is not new.
After the mega-death of the United States Civil War, a spiritualist movement arose in the United States .After the mega-death of World War I, and the Spanish Influenza, the movement spread.
The famed magician and escape-artist, Harry Houdini, investigated and revealed charlatans trying to profit from peoples’ grief.
And this book notes that people who really have the gift, do not use it for profit or material gain.
The book notes that people who have attained higher consciousness reveal themselves in the way they live.
Those who live for the acquisition of material things, material comforts, don’t get it.
Those who choose simplicity, those who choose to live on little, to live as little tangled in materiality as possible – they do.
This book postulates that this is a basically benign universe/cosmos, where all souls aspiring to the light will, ultimately, attain ‘the light.’
And yet, it seems to me, that this universe/cosmos is a much darker kind of place.
I see a Gnostic Universe
Being an Agnostic means you don’t know.
Being a Gnostic means you know.
You know this universe/cosmos is a fallen universe/cosmos ruled by a fallen, insane spiritual entity, the demi-urge, who erroneously believes that it is GOD.
And yet, this demi-urge, the god of the old and new testament is not the TRUE GOD.
Humans are higher spiritual beings then the god of the Bible, the demi-urge, in that we have a spark of TRUE DIVINITY and the demi-urge doesn’t.
In Gnosticism, the Human Condition also begins with a Fall.
The demi-urge created what we know as Nature.
It showed its creation to its fellow spiritual entity – The Human.
The Human Spiritual Entity is fascinated by Nature. Although the Human is a spiritual entity, the Human has vanity.
It desires to see how it would appear in Nature.
As soon as the Desire is formed – it becomes Reality.
The Human manifests itself in Nature
It becomes entangled, imprisoned in Nature, Materiality, Physicality.
Human History is the struggle to escape this fallen universe/cosmos, and return to the Humans’ original condition of Spiritual Beings.
We are Spiritual Beings imprisoned in a fallen, physical world.
The demi-urge is the warden of the prison. The angels are the guards and the prison administrators.
When we die, the angels work against us to keep us lingering as ghosts, to keep us entangled, imprisoned in the physical world.
When we die and return to our original spiritual condition, we are immediately thrown back into the maelstrom of birth/death, of life-its-own-self. And the demi-urge and his colleagues work against us to keep us imprisoned, to keep us entangled.
And yet, because we have a spark of true divinity, we have a fighting chance to rise above Nature, to dis-entangle ourselves from the material, to escape this fallen, physical world.
There are individual Humans who have done this.
They are our true spiritual teachers/liberators.
The beauty of this book is that it gives the reader the opportunity to reach a vantage point from which it is possible to see the big picture.

The Great Murals of Baja California

The dead are very much alive in Mexico.
Take, for instance, Baja California.
Humans have been in Baja for at least 12,000 years, perhaps much longer. And the people who painted the rock murals 7,500 to 4,000 years ago, these people who left their mark are, still, very much with us.
Over 300 different painted caves or rock shelters have been discovered in the Baja.
Many of the paintings’ rock surfaces have crumbled, and collapsed. Many paintings have been reduced to ruined traces.
And yet, thousands of images survive.
When you stand in the presence of the Painters’ intact works, you are challenged with cryptic, and yet amazingly vivid communications from the dead.
Harry W. Crosby’s exploration and discovery, in the 1960’s and 70’s is described in his book, “Cave Paintings of Baja California: Discovering the Great Murals of an Unknown People.”
It is the authoritative work on the Painters.
According to Crosby the Painters lived on little.
They had no agriculture, no permanent buildings, no fixed pueblos, no agriculture, no basketry, no pottery.
They didn’t even have dogs.
They were always moving to collect available edible plants and fruit, moving to the coast to fish, and hunt marine animals. They were always moving in the interior highlands to hunt deer, sheep and antelope.
The Painters lived in close contact with all the large animals of the peninsula.
The paintings show this.
They hunted with bow and arrow, spears, throwing sticks.
They traveled light.
And yet, for thousands of years, this materially poor culture supported a large group of people who did no food production for long periods of time.
The Painters had to make long trips to collect the colored rocks from which the paints were made. They had to spend a lot of time grinding the rock. And they had to make the elaborate scaffolding and ladders to paint the rock surfaces chosen by some shamanic authority.
The way Crosby sees it the altars of the Painters’ shamanism/spirituality were the rock surfaces that were painted.
The rock surfaces chosen were not chosen on the basis of accessibility, or their suitability for painting.
At the rock painting sites, there are perfect, easily accessible rock surfaces at ground level. And yet, the rock surfaces chosen for painting are 30 feet, or more, above the ground, requiring the construction of scaffolding and ladders.
The far less accessible rock surfaces were, evidently, chosen because they were judged to be the right places to paint.
These rock surfaces were judged to be the interfaces that accessed the on-going creation of the universe, the interfaces that allowed human artistry to be part of the on-going creation of the universe.
Most of the rock paintings are painted over previous works, and that previous work was painted over a pre-existing work, and so on. In some case there are as many as five painted over images beneath the surviving visible one.
Most of the time, the Painters had no concern about the longevity or preservation of their creations.
The act of painting, the spiritual practice of painting seems to have been the point.
And yet, there are large, sweeping masterpieces done by a single artist.
There are large, sweeping masterpieces that are collaborative works involving many generations of Painters, over thousands of years, who created a single, meaningful work of art.
All the images began with white stylized outlines.
The outlines of animals and plants render naturalistic, observable detail.
But inside of the outline there is no attempt to depict the observable physical world, to depict nature.
Inside the outline it is all abstract imagining and magic.
The spiritual/shamanic beliefs and practices of the Painters are unknown.
The Cochimi are the people who lived in the Great Mural Region when Europeans arrived in the 16th Century.
They said the Painters, were giants, and they were, definitely, not related.
And there is no reason to disbelieve them.
The remains of tall people, over six feet tall, like the relatively nearby, modern Yaquis, (on the other side of the Sea of Cortez) have been found in the great mural region.
And yet, the images of the great murals, deer, humans, deer and humans impaled or overlaid by arrows and spears, human images and deer images superimposed on each other, deer hoofs that look like human hands, humans with outstretched arms in a posture of adoration/transcendence are the mythic images of the Huichol or Wixáritari (the people).
In the rugged, remote Western Sierra Madre Mountains the Wixaritari resisted the conquistadores and the Catholic missionaries.
They never surrendered.
The Wixaritari maintain their mythology, spirituality/shamanism, language and culture into the 21st Century.
Their belief system could be similar to the Painters’.
The Wixaritari believe when deer are hunted in a sacred manner, the deer willingly surrender their lives, so the human can live.
And yet, after deer are hunted and killed it is necessary to honor and appease the spirits of the dead deer.
Perhaps that’s most of the explanation of the multitude of images of deer and deer with arrows in them.
But to the Wixaritari deer and peyote are one.
Each year around the time of Semana Santa, Wixaritari make a 500 mile pilgrimage to their sacred mountain (where the sun first rose), and their peyote rich holy land in the vicinity of Real Catorce in the state of San Luis Potosi.
Carrying bows and arrows, in a crouched low hunting posture the pilgrims are metaphorically guided to their destination by deer.
Peyote and deer are a single, sacred symbol. When the sacred deer moves, it creates the peyote in its hoof prints.
At the end of the pilgrimage, each pilgrim shoots an arrow at a peyote cactus before gathering the disk-shaped buttons.
By shooting the arrow the pilgrims metaphorically release the spirit of peyote, the spirit of the deer from its materiality, its physicality.
The White Shaman rock mural near the confluence of the Pecos and the Rio Grande Rivers in South West Texas is a different indigenous groups’ very different rock mural.

It was done about 4,000 years ago.

It is also a beautiful, prehistoric work of art.

The White Shaman Mural has been interpreted as depicting the same mythic peyote/deer hunt of the Wixaritari.

It too has images of arrow impaled deer. There are also fringed black dots that are believed to be images of peyote.

These are also impaled with arrows and spears.

There is also an image of a human with deer antlers.

This image is believed to be ‘Our Elder Brother Deer,’ one of the Wixaritari’s principle gods.

In the at least 4,000 year-old, (perhaps much longer) spirituality/shamanism maintained by the Wixaritari not only are peyote and deer one and the same, deer and humans are one in the same.

Black dots on Our Elder Brother Deer’s antlers have been interpreted to represent the just-sprouted peyote.

Not only is deer and peyote one,

as is deer and the human.

The human and peyote is one.

At Cave of the Palm, in the great mural region, there are 15 human images. Four of the humans have a black disc about the size of the images’ head suspended over the figures’ biceps.

The black discs are similar to the fringed dots in the White Shaman Mural.

The discs could also be depictions of peyote.

For the Wixaritari Peyote symbolizes life, and the acquisition of transcendent, shamanic and artistic powers.

It appears in most all Wixaritari art.

Peyote is a gift from the gods.

With peyote humans can enter into mystical realms.

With peyote humans can be more than human.

There is peyote in Baja California, in the great mural region.

The Wixaritari’s pilgrimage is a re-enactment of this story:

There was a time of sickness, starving, dying of thirst in an unending drought.

Four young men each with bow and arrows were sent forth.

They represented fire, water, air, and earth.

They walked for long days.

Then they saw a deer and gave chase.

They gave chase for hundreds of mile.

They chased the deer to the vicinity of the sacred mountain.

One of the hunters shot an arrow.

But the deer disappeared.

The arrow landed in a deer image on the ground composed of peyote.

The hunters harvested the peyote and brought it back to the people.

The people were healed, and fed, and were no longer thirsty.

‘Our Elder Brother Deer’/the human with deer antlers represents the power of peyote to feed, to enlighten the spirit, to bring artistic and shamanic inspiration.

He is the transcendent power.

In the great murals of Baja there are images of deer with what seem to be human hands, there are images of deer superimposed on humans, images of humans superimposed on deer.

Wixaritari call peyote the ‘divine flesh of Elder Brother Deer.’
When Elder Brother Deer is depicted in some Wixaritari art he is impaled or covered with arrows.
In his house/temple, where his spirit abides, there is an altar, floor and ceiling covered with votive arrows.
And yet, even though he is impaled or covered with arrows,

he is the death transcending power.

He is the inspiration of the great murals.

They are suffused with his power.

JOHN WAYNE IN MULEGE

Midway between the fall equinox and the winter solstice, it is
believed by many cultures, that the cosmic membrane separating the
living from the dead, weakens and becomes less impermeable.

The dead may come into the realm of the living, the living into the
realm of the dead.

In the first moments of November 1, 2017, the first day of the dead, I
was soundly sleeping, on the bus from Ensenada to Mulege in Baja
California, Mexico. And then a window of the bus slowly, and yet,
inevitably shattered.

It had probably been hit with a rock that had been kicked up by a
passing truck. And yet, the window disintegrated in a weird, scary
way, accompanied by a sound that made my hair stand, all over my body.

We had to wait three hours in the moonlit Baja desert night for the
next bus to come. And while we waited the dead were, no doubt, with
us.

When I arrived in Mulege, I realized that something of Marion
Morrison; May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979, known to the world as John
Wayne, nicknamed Duke, had crossed the barrier, and was with me.

In Mulege there are the ruins of a hotel Wayne stayed at. I went to
the ruins of the Hotel Loma Linda, also known as the old Hotel Mulege.
There were surveyors, there was heavy equipment being moved to the
site. The demolition of the ruins and the conversion of the site into
a gravel pit had begun.

This is the surviving monument of what some call Baja's Golden Age.
The likes of John Wayne, Fred Astaire, Jayne Mansfield, Edgar Bergen,
Jacque Costeau, Oliva Newton John came to Mulege. The town had the
best sport fishing in the world.

The demolition, of these ruins, of this monument was about to happen
unremarked, unnoticed.

And yet, Wayne is more powerful dead than he was alive. He is a
polarizing symbol in this time of resurgent 'white nationalism'.

In the game of thrones, in the campaign that got Donald Trump elected,
a pilgrimage was made to the John Wayne Birthplace Museum in
Winterset, Iowa.

In January 2016, early in the campaign, Trump was introduced by
Wayne's daughter, Aissa Wayne, as they stood in front of Wayne's
larger-than-life statue. Aissa Wayne told the gathered reporters " if
John Wayne were still alive, he'd be endorsing Trump's campaign, too.

"The reason that I'm here to support Mr. Trump is because America
needs help," she said. "And we need a strong leader. And we need
someone like Mr. Trump with leadership qualities, somebody with
courage, someone that's strong like John Wayne."

Trump said he was a "longtime fan" of John Wayne.

And yet, son, Ethan Wayne, quickly refuted any family endorsement of
Trump and said he didn't think his father would endorse Trump, if he
were alive.

"John Wayne Enterprises and John Wayne Cancer Foundation wish to state
that Aissa Wayne acted independently of both organizations and the
Wayne family in her endorsement of Donald Trump," he said.

The presidency of Donald Trump, the role Trump is playing is an
unending, horrible parody of Wayne.

It is true that Wayne's political career started with his presidency
of the Motion Picture Alliance for American Ideals and the
blacklisting/the purging of Hollywood leftist who were mostly Jews.

There's also a 1971 Playboy interview.

Duke said, "With a lot of blacks, there's quite a bit of resentment
along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can't all
of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the
leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the
blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in
giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to
irresponsible people."

And as for American Indians he said, "I don't feel we did wrong in
taking this great country away from them...."Our so-called stealing of
this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great
numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly
trying to keep it for themselves..."what happened 100 years ago in our
country can't be blamed on us today."

In his movies he was always killing American Indians, killing
Mexicans, killing Japanese.

And yet, in real life, Wayne, like Trump was a draft-dodging chicken-hawk.

Wayne was 31-years-old when Pearl Harbor happened.

As a result of his chronic infidelity, his torrid (even by Hollywood
standards) affair with Marlene Dietrich, his first marriage to
Josephine Saenz was crumbling.

And yet, he had three children.

His career was just beginning to take off. He was just beginning to
make money. Established stars such as Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and
Clark Gable, enlisted. Wayne saw the opportunity.

He specialty was war movies. He rationalized his draft-dodging,
claimed he could do more for the war effort by doing the movies that
were his specialty.

Wayne obtained 3-A status, "deferred for [family] dependency reasons."
He told friends he'd enlist after he made just one or two more movies.

Wayne made thirteen movies during the war. He became an established
Hollywood star. There is some evidence he made attempts to enlist.

And yet, it never happened.

In late 1943 and early 1944 he appeared at USO shows in the South
Pacific and Australia. Men who had served in hard combat were
contemptous of the man who spent the war on movie sets, wearing
make-up and firing blanks. He had fights with men who served.

In 1944, Wayne received a 2-A classification, "deferred in support of
[the] national … interest." A month later the Selective Service
decided to revoke previous deferments and reclassified him 1-A. But
Wayne's studio appealed and got his 2-A status reinstated until after
the war.

Wayne was tormented by his failure to serve in the military. Like
Trump, Wayne tried to wrap himself in an American flag, present
himself as an unflinching patriot. And yet, they both had the chance
to do more than just act the part, and in the end they did no more/do
no more than act the part.

And yet, unlike Trump, Wayne did have his authenticity. At his
cinematic best he evoke's D.H. Lawrence's description of James
Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo/Deerslayer/ Hawkeye/ Pathfinder, of
'The Leatherstocking Tales.

"And Natty, what sort of a white man is he?" asks Lawrence. "Why, he
is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as
he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a
killer...

"This is Natty, the white forerunner. A killer...

"He lets his consciousness penetrate in loneliness into the new
continent. His contacts are not human. He wrestles with the spirits of
the forest and the American wild, as a hermit wrestles with God and
Satan...

"...True myth concerns itself centrally with the onward adventure of
the integral soul. And this, for America, is Deerslayer. A man who
turns his back on white society. A man who keeps his moral integrity
hard and intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who
lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white.

"This is the very intrinsic — most American. He is at the core of all
the other flux and fluff. And when this man breaks from his static
isolation, and makes a new move, then look out, something will be
happening."

There is something of this in Wayne when he is at his cinematic best,
and when he is at his cinematic best it was, most often, under the
direction of director John Ford.

The actor John Wayne was a creation of Ford.

Ford first noticed Wayne in 1928. He was herding a flock of geese on
the set of Mother Machree. He seemed innocent, he was a college
football player working as a property boy, an extra. Ford judged him
as being unready, said he needed some pain in his face to offset the
innocence. He was cast in his first lead role, in The Big Trail,
released in 1930. He changed his name to John Wayne.

The Big Trail bombed, big league. For the next decade Wayne made
mediocre or downright bad movies.

Then Ford saw Wayne fishing off of a pier in Long Beach. He made Wayne
a part of his inner circle, his drinking club.

Wayne, with actors Henry Fonda, Ward Bond accompanied Ford in
drunken, whoring, fishing trips on Ford's motor yacht, the Araner.

That's how Wayne first came to the Sea of Cortez/Gulf of California.
That's how he first came to Mulege.

Ford was appointed a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Naval
Reserve in September 1934. And used the Araner and the drinking,
whoring, fishing trips as cover for espionage missions.

In December, 1934, Ford, Wayne, Fonda, and Bond cruised to Mazatlan,
purportedly to go marlin fishing. On December 31, they drunkenly
cruised the bars, and whorehouses wearing clothes splatted with fish
blood, with a mariachi band that was paid to follow them They were
arrested and thrown into jail twice. And then told to get out of town.

Between 1935 to 1939 Ford spied on the Japanese shrimp fishing fleet
in the Sea of Cortez. He reported that the crews of Japanese shrimp
boats off the Mexican coast were spying and constituting “a real
menace” to national defense. Ford reported there were Imperial Navy
officers aboard the trawlers and that the Japanese were familiar with
every cove and inlet of the Gulf of California, a potential invasion
route into Arizona.

Ford was commended for his “unselfish and patriotic work,” by the U.S.
Navy in 1940.

Some say Wayne knew of and assisted Ford's espionage work. Some say he
did serve his country by being part of these drinking, whoring, sport
fishing trips. And yet, there is no evidence Ford told any of his
drinking buddys of his spying missions

And yet, perhaps in these voyages of the Araner there were mythic
things happening to Wayne. Perhaps in these voyages he began, "the
onward adventure of the integral soul...Became "...a man who turns his
back on white society..."

Wayne was married three times. All his wives were Latinas. Wayne
seemed to prefer being in Hispanic culture
over American Anglo-Saxon Culture.

It was after one of these voyages of the Araner in 1938, that Ford
offered Wayne the lead in Stagecoach. Stagecoach launched Wayne's
career as a Hollywood star.

At it's best the Ford, Wayne collaboration brought mythic themes into cinema.

Ford's films with Wayne as the leading man portrayed the history of
the United State's as a mythic thing. He made Wayne the
personification of the national myth, of the white, American male.

Wayne brought a reluctant power to these roles. Ford came to believe
that Wayne's portrayal of this reluctant power was the personification
of America's mythic greatness.

The responsibility of being the personification of America's mythic
greatness was an intolerable burden for Wayne. This and his guilt
about dodging military service drove Wayne into his lunatic
right-wing, racist, chicken hawk politics.

Trump, on the other hand, has no excuse for his lunatic right wing,
racist, chicken hawk politics.

John Wayne used only one match each day, to light his first cigarette.
He lit all his other cigarettes with the one he was putting out. From
his early teens he smoked between three and six packs daily. In 1964,
when he was 57. Barely able to get through a scene of Otto Preminger’s
In Harm’s Way without a coughing fit, he went for a medical
examination that revealed a golf-ball-sized tumor on his left lung.

He had surgery to remove most of the diseased lung. The surgeon had to
go in through his back, and removed parts of four ribs.

He kept on smoking, but switched to cigars.

He became a frequent visitor to Mulege. He would visit on his motor
yacht, the Wild Goose or fly into town. He made plans to move to
Mulege. He took Spanish lessons. He delighted in the sport fishing,
the killing of the great creatures of the sea.

Wayne is said to have coined the phrase, the Big C. After his lung
cancer operation he claimed to have beaten the Big C. But the Big C
was back. This time it was stomach cancer.

He was an alcoholic. Directors would try to film all of Wayne's scenes
in the morning because by the afternoon he was often a mean, surly
drunk.

In 1969 he made True Grit. It won him his only Academy Award. In 1975
he revived his character, Reuben "Rooster" J. Cogburn in the sequel
Rooster Cogburn which co-starred Katherine Hepburn.

There is much of the dying Wayne in Cogburn, and this is the John
Wayne that Mulege got to know.

Like Cogburn, Wayne never had an alcohol free day in his adult life.
They were both alcoholics. In his lifetime cinematic work Wayne was
defined as a killer, as is Cogburn's life. They were both fat, old,
and determinately killing themselves in their failure to change really
bad lifestyles. The real Wayne was ruthlessly cruel, part of a
ruthlessly cruel thing in his persecution of his political enemies,
his Jewish leftist purge of Hollywood. Cogburn had served under
Confederate General William Quantrill, infamous for his atrocities.

They both fought for white supremacy.

And yet, in the end, you still can't help liking them, for their grit
in the face of death, for their compassion, and kindness, as their
lives were ending. For their perseverance in finding a kind of
redemption.

They both were cultural explorers who preferred living in other
cultures. Cogburn lived in Fort Smith, Arkansas in the back of a
Chinese dry-goods store, along with the proprietor, his friend and
gambling buddy Chen Lee. Wayne, as he was dying spent a lot of time in
Mulege.

Natty Bumppo died high in the Rocky Mountain among the Pawnees, who in
the end were his people.

Wayne came to Mulege for the fishing. He came here for the towns authenticity.

He is remembered for his kindness, generosity, for getting to know
many people in town, being interested in their lives.

He is remembered for his last fight - his fight with cancer, his fight
with his death.

Wayne wanted to be buried under a tomb stone with three Spanish words
- and nothing else.

FEO (ugly)

FUERTE (strong)

FORMAL (dignified)

And that's how he's remembered in Mulege.

He was ugly and bloated by sickness. A lot of pain had come into the
face of the young man herding ducks that John Ford had seen.

And yet, he was strong and dignified in the face of death

Shakespeare's world, like our world, was/is a very dangerous place.

The bubonic plague swept through London in 1563, 1578-9, 1582, 1592-3, and 1603. The outbreaks in 1563 and 1603 killed as much as a quarter of London's population of about 500,000.


Each outbreak of the plague brought the development of the city's young, burgeoning theater industry to screeching halts.

England was in the midst of the Religious Wars of the Reformation. Elizabeth I, the Protestant British Monarch of Shakespeare's London was in constant danger after Pope Pius V issued the Bull Regnans in Excelsis of Excommunication and Deposition - a green light for Catholics to rise against and kill her.

The Privy Council/Star Chamber, became England's version of the Inquisition. People perceived as religious or political opposition to Elizabeth I, The Church of England, the established order, were horribly tortured, broken, imprisoned for life.

Shakespeare and his London playwright contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, lived in fear of the police knock on the door, the dungeon, the torture chamber, the 'justice' of the Privy Council/Star Chamber.

Thomas Kyd was one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama. Some scholars believe he was the author of a Hamlet play pre-dating Shakespeare's, which is now known as the Ur-Hamlet.

On May 12,1593,  Kyd, was arrested for allegedly posting "divers lewd and mutinous libels" around London. He would later say he had been the victim of an informer.

His lodgings, which he had shared with Christopher Marlowe, were searched. A tract was found that was said to be "vile heretical conceits denying the eternal deity of Jesus Christ..."

Kyd was tortured, and broken.

He told his torturers that the tract belonged to his fellow dramatist and former room mate. He said Marlowe was a blasphemous traitor, an atheist who believed Jesus Christ was a homosexual”.

Kyd died from his injuries, less than a year after being tortured.

Marlowe was summoned by the Privy Council/Star Chamber.

Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe, was born in 1564, the same year Shakespeare was born. When Shakespeare arrived in London's world of theater sometime around 1590, Marlowe was the most prominent, celebrated playwright.

At the very least he was Shakespeare's biggest literary influence. And yet, there are prominent Shakespearean scholars who claim Marlowe was much more than this.

Last November, Oxford University Press released its new edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare. It credited Marlowe as a co-author on the three Henry VI plays.

Marlowe was released. But he was commanded to report to the authorities, "each day there after until licensed to the contrary".

Ten days later, he was stabbed to death by Ingram Frizer, a government secret agent.

Henry VI was one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. And yet it clearly states his perennial themes of political overthrow, legitimate vs. illegitimate princes, usurpation and tyranny, power and it's abuse, the ways in which ambitious men plot to gain power, usually the throne, by illegitimate means.

Henry VI, Part 3, is the latest of Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s (CSF) 2017 “Original Practices” productions in the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre. These productions attempt to duplicate the practices and performances of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.

With the performances of Henry VI, Part 3, the final play in Shakespeare’s War of the Roses chronicle  (an inspiration for HBO's Game of Thrones series), August 6-8, CSF completes the 37-play Shakespeare canon for a second time.

Why Shakespeare wasn't arrested, tortured, imprisoned for life for writing another play 'Richard II' (which was performed by CSF in 2013) is a historical mystery.

The play tells of Henry Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV, the founder of the Tudor dynasty.

To become king Bolingbroke usurps the rule of a weak, effeminate king.

Some scholars say the play demonstrates Shakespeare's support of the Essex Rebellion against Elizabeth I.

"...let us sit upon the ground/And tell sad stories of the death of kings,” says Shakespeare's Richard II, shortly before he is himself murdered; “How some have been deposed; some slain in war, …/Some poisoned by their wives; some sleeping killed;/All murdered.”

In February 1601, on the eve of a failed rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I. The Earl of Essex, a former favorite of the queen, paid for a special public performance of “Richard II. When the queen found out about these performances she recognized, “I am Richard II; know ye not?” 

“This tragedy,” she noted, “was forty times played in open streets and houses.”

And, though Essex was beheaded, Shakespeare suffered no known consequences for seemingly writing something that supported Essex's rebellion.

And yet, 416-years later, Shakespeare is again in political trouble.

New York City's  Public Theater’s production of “Julius Caesar” in Central Park depicts the assassination of an aspiring dictator, much like Donald Trump.

Two corporate sponsors of 'Shakespeare in the Park,' Delta Air Lines and the Bank of America, withdrew their support. President Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., has asked about the "taxpayer-funded" support of Central Park's free Shakespeare.

CSF 2017 is also performing Julius Caesar. The production is said to be about "Lies, scheming and scandal."

And yet, there is nothing about 'Julius Caesar' that is subversive that advocates political violence/assassination.

The message of 'Julius Caesar' is that political violence - no matter how well-intentioned - no matter if it's done to protect democracy from tyranny - will backfire and will undermine democracy and bring tyranny.

Hamlet, which will also be performed at the CSF 2017, has a much more dangerous message for this time.

The message of Hamlet is there is no compromise, no negotiating with illegitimate, unnatural, rulers.

They must be revealed for what they are.

They must be killed.

 And you must be willing to die in the struggle.