Let me give the most remarkable illustration of spirit suggestion—the immortal Shakespeare. Neither of his parents could read or write. He grew up in a small village among ignorant people, on the banks of the Avon. There was nothing in the peaceful, quiet landscape on which he looked, nothing in the low hills, the undulating fields, nothing in the lazy flowing stream, to excite the imagination. Nothing in his early years calculated to sow the seeds of subtlest and sublimest thought. There was nothing in his education or lack of education to account for what he did. It is supposed that he attended school in his home village, but of that there is no proof. He went to London when young, and within a few years became interested in Black Friars Theater, where he was actor, dramatist, and manager. He was never engaged in a business counted reputable in that day. Socially, he occupied a position below servants. The law described him as a “sturdy vagabond.” He died at fifty-two.
How such a man produced the works which he did has been the wonder of all time. Not satisfied that one with such limited advantages could possibly have written the masterpieces of literature, it has been by some contended that (Francis) Bacon was the author of all Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies.
It is a fact to be noted that in none of this man’s plays is there any mention of his contemporaries. He made reference to no king, queen, poet, author, sailor, soldier, statesman, or priest of his own period. He lived in an age of great deeds, in the time of religious wars, in the days of the armada, the edict of Nantes, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the victory of Leponto, the assassination of Henry III of France, and the execution of Mary Stuart; yet he did not mention a single incident of his day and time.
The brain that conceived Timon of Athens was a Greek in the days of Pericles and familiar with the tragedies of that century. The mind that dictated Julius Caesar was an inhabitant of the Eternal City when Caesar led his legions in the field. The author of Lear was a pagan; of Romeo and Juliet, an Italian who knew the ecstasies of love. The author of those plays must have been a physician, for he shows a knowledge of medicine and the symptoms of disease; a musician, for in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, he uses every musical term known to his contemporaries. He was a lawyer, for he was acquainted with the forms and expressions used by that profession. He was a botanist, because he named nearly all known plants. He was an astronomer and a naturalist and wrote intelligently upon the stars and natural science. He was a sailor, or he could not have written The Tempest. He was a savage and trod the forest’s silent depths. He knew all crimes, all regrets, all virtues, and their rewards. He knew the unspoken thoughts, desires, and ways of beasts. He lived all lives. His brain was a sea on which the waves touch all the shores of experience. He was the wonder of his time and ours.
Was it possible for any man of his education and experience to conceive the things he did? All the Shakespearean works were, beyond a doubt, the product of his pen, but the conceptions, the plays, the tragedies, were the work of many minds, given Shakespeare by spirit suggestion. He was the sensitive instrument through which a group of learned and distinguished scholars, inhabitants of many lands when in earth-life, gave to posterity the sublime masterpieces of the Bard of Avon (Heagerty, 1995, pp. 260–261).