According to Christopher Booker and Richard North’s The Great Deception: The Secret History of the European Union, which I’ve been reading lately,
“William Penn, who gave his name to Pennsylvania, proposed an ‘Assembly of the United Europe’, taking its decisions by what would later be called ‘qualified majority voting’, weighted according to national population sizes and economic importance.”
Unlike the vision Dante put forth in De Monarchia of a supranational world state based on the Holy Roman Empire, Booker and North write that Penn’s idea was “‘intergovernmental’, based on the willing cooperation of sovereign states.” In Penn’s 1693 An ESSAY towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe by the Establishment of an European DYET, PARLIAMENT, or ESTATES, he writes of war that,
“The Remedy is almost ever worse than the Disease: The Aggressors seldom getting what they seek, or performing, if they prevail, what they promised.”
Despite his war criticism and notable leniency as proprietor of his Sylvania, Penn (whose dad, Sir William was born on 04/23/1621) was still the Man of his day. This essay by Murray Rothbard tells of Penn’s failed attempts to turn a buck off PA and to get those wily anarchist Quakers to participate in the processes of government in the 1680s.
Given all that, I was amused last May when Pitt snagged the EU depository collection, making Pittsburgh home to the most extensive collection of public EU documents in North America.
Anyhow, Shakespeare of Stratford was also born on this date in 1564 and died, again on 4/23, in 1616. I’ve always been fond of the theory that Shakespeare was a nom de plume of Francis Bacon & co. as well as an actual goofball, who, Sam Clemens tells us in “Is Shakespeare Dead?”
died young–he was only fifty-two. He had lived in his native village twenty-six years, or about that. He died celebrated (if you believe everything you read in the books). Yet when he died nobody there or elsewhere took any notice of it; and for sixty years afterward no townsman remembered to say anything about him or about his life in Stratford. When the inquirer came at last he got but one fact–no, legend–and got that one at second hand, from a person who had only heard it as a rumor, and didn’t claim copyright in it as a production of his own. He couldn’t, very well, for its date antedated his own birth-date. But necessarily a number of persons were still alive in Stratford who, in the days of their youth, had seen Shakespeare nearly every day in the last five years of his life, and they would have been able to tell that inquirer some first-hand things about him if he had in those last days been a celebrity and therefore a person of interest to the villagers. Why did not the inquirer hunt them up and interview them? Wasn’t it worth while? Wasn’t the matter of sufficient consequence? Had the inquirer an engagement to see a dog-fight and couldn’t spare the time?
Of Shakespeare of Stratford’s only surviving poem, Clemens says,
He commanded that this work of art be engraved upon his tomb, and he was obeyed. There it abides to this day. This is it:
Good frend for Iesus sake forbeare
to digg the dust encloased heare!
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones.
Thomas ‘Penn’ Leary sheds light on the authorship question and the ciphers Bacon used, which also appear in Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes, of whom no historical record has been discovered and supposed to have been another masque of Bacon, is also claimed to have died on this date. Here’s a clip from Terry Gilliam’s unfinished The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (in which Johnny Depp was to play a guy from the present Don Quixote mistakes for Sancho Panza), from the documentary about why it was never finished, Lost in La Mancha.
Were I to keep digging, the links between Penn, Shakespeare, world government, and so forth would likely keep proliferating, as is their wont, but I’ve got other stuff on my slate for the afternoon.
Birthday/deathday wishes to all folks real and fictitious and all points in between.
Tags: anarchy, April 23, Assembly of the United Europe, Christopher Booker and Richard North, Cryptographic Shakespeare, Curse of William Penn, De Monarchia, EU, EU depository collection, Francis Bacon Cervantes, Francis Bacon Shakespeare, Is Shakespeare Dead?, Lost in La Mancha, Mark Twain, NAU, Penn Leary, Pennsylvania's Anarchist Experiment, Quakers, Shakespeare of Stratford, Sir William Penn, The Great Deception: The Secret History of the European, Thomas 'Penn' Leary, William Penn, world government
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