Who Wrote Shakespeare? Astrology Lifts the Veil

by Phoebe Wyss

An original rectified chart of the Bard’s nativity is cast (based on many observations of the man by contemporaries and biographers) to examine an enduring literary mystery.

Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare? For years conspiracy theories have raged round the authorship of his plays. Could these dramatic masterpieces so dense in meaning, so rich in allusions, exhibiting such deep wisdom and extensive life experience, have been written by the son of a country tradesman with little education? Cases have been made for more qualified authors – for example, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and the Earl of Oxford – because the whole quandary arises largely from a lack of solid facts about the Bard’s life.

For a starter his exact date of birth is unknown which has always flummoxed astrologers. And none of his personal papers, including any manuscripts of plays, have ever been found, which is highly unusual in the case of a writer who was already recognised in his lifetime as a great poet. Before he died did Shakespeare intentionally make a bonfire of all evidence of his private life and if so why? Because he wished to be known to posterity through his works rather than his biography? Perhaps he had secrets to hide and sought anonymity to protect his public reputation.

Or maybe he never wrote those wonderful plays and poems in the first place!

Literary researchers on the trail of Shakespeare the man turn to his sonnets, hoping to hear his personal voice in them and glimpse the face behind the mask. And there they find evidence of an emotional rollercoaster suffered during two parallel relationships – a love affair with a blond Adonis of a youth and a passionate addiction to a dark Plutonic lady. There have been centuries of speculation about the identity of these two characters, though critics have pointed out that the feelings expressed in these poems are not necessarily those of the poet. Shakespeare earned his living by his pen and they could have been commissioned by wealthy patrons to send to lovers of their own. If only we had a reliable birth chart, then the question could be resolved once and for all by investigating Shakespeare’s natal Venus and its transits – which could also cast a light on the fraught question of Will’s sexual orientation.

My rectified Shakespeare chart

It was worth a try. I drew up a birth chart for the Bard using the archetypal, top-down method of rectification that I’ve developed over the years, which I’ll now share. My first step was to read a good, up-to-date life so I chose Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: the Biography.(1)There I discovered many comments and anecdotes by people who had known him (or knew people who had known him) that have come to light since I studied Shakespeare at uni back in the 1960s. And I used this material to define Will’s main character traits and behaviour patterns, which I could then employ as pointers to an appropriate rising sign.

(birth place) Starting with the fact of his baptism on Wednesday 26 April 1564 in Stratford parish church, I noted that, due to the high infant mortality rate in those days, it was customary to baptise infants within a few days of their birth but not on the same day unless in times of plague. Records show that there was no plague in Stratford in April 1564 (though it spread there later that summer). I also learned about the high degree of social conformity in Elizabethan country towns where traditions had to be observed. Thus, Will’s father would have carried him to church to be christened, accompanied by the godparents, while his mother remained confined to the birthing chamber.

It’s almost certain that Shakespeare was born on 23, 24 or 25 April (remembering of course that this was before the reform of the calendar, which is why his adjusted Sun falls on 12-14 degrees Taurus). Today we celebrate the Bard’s birthday on the 23rd because it’s St George’s Day and thus appropriate for a national treasure. It also happens to be the day of his death fifty-two years later, which joins up the ends of his life into a neat circle. But is it correct?

The Solar Fire ephemeris informed me that the only planet to change signs during the three days in question was the Moon, which moved from Libra to Scorpio. All the other planets kept their signs and aspects. Before deciding between Libra and Scorpio, however, I decided to tackle the question of Will’s rising sign, as knowing the position of the Moon on the wheel of the houses would be helpful. By the way, I use the Equal House system in my work, which I’ve found best suits my archetypal approach to a birth chart, as justified in my book Inside the Cosmic Mind: Archetypal Astrology and the New Cosmology.(2)

I started by investigating the balance of elements in Will’s chart to see whether any of the four were under-represented – yes, air! Then I considered whether airy qualities come over strongly in his writing and in the biographical snippets. I remembered reading that a literary statistician has discovered sixty different species of birds mentioned in his work, along with multiple descriptions of birds in flight and evidence that Will couldn’t bear the idea of trapping and encaging them. Well that was airy for a start!

Then the 17th century writer John Aubrey, who knew a family who’d known Will in his youth, describes him as “quick and nimble” with “a very ready and pleasant smooth wit”. Lightness, communication skills and verbal fluency belong, of course, to the air archetype. And not only do we find many articulate and witty characters in his plays, but Will himself, it seems, was admired for his verbal dexterity and quick repartee.(3)

You’ve noticed, perchance, that we’re steering towards Gemini, whose mutability also fits with what we’ve discovered so far. Ackroyd notes that in his plays Shakespeare “delights in pairs, in doubleness, in oppositions”.(4) We often find scenes where debates are set up between characters with opposing opinions. Is there a writer in the English language with a larger vocabulary? His writing is so wordy it’s become a problem in our age of text messaging; huge chunks of verbiage are regularly cut out of his plays in modern theatre productions. What better description of a Gemini poet could we have than the following quotations from Ackroyd? “The images of his plays are filled with flight and swift action, with movement and lightness”.(5) He was “the poet of speed and agility”, and “in love with movement in all of its forms, as if only in that quick sway and acceleration could he catch the vital life of things.’(6) 

Further support for Gemini as a dominant archetype in Will’s makeup is the fact that his first child, Susanna, had her Sun in Gemini, and signs run in families as astrologers know. They also know that archetypal qualities are expressed on multiple levels. Thus, the duality principle, fundamental to Gemini, also manifested when Will, not long after Susanna’s birth, fathered the twins Hamnet and Judith. Later it also inspired the creation of many memorable pairs of twins in his comedies.

Finally, very typical of Gemini psychology, Shakespeare had two souls in his breast, each with diametrically opposed needs that could only be satisfied through living a double life. For thirty years he maintained a fixed, Taurean home in Stratford, where he lived conventionally and respectably with his wife Anne née Hathaway – when he was there!  Otherwise he pursued the mutable Gemini lifestyle of a travelling player while his troupe was on tour; and, when not, lived in rented lodgings in London. There is evidence of him living at various addresses, some in the scruffier, bawdier districts of town, where he had unhindered freedom to explore the rich variety of experiences offered by the metropolis.

Could all this weight in Gemini be contributed by his Venus-Neptune conjunction in that sign? I thought not because Neptune’s effect on Venus here would be to blur the clarity of the Gemini qualities and prevent them coming through. Therefore, Will must have a Gemini Ascendant – it was the only explanation. And Venus and Neptune’s presence in that sign could be used to establish an Ascendant degree, as there’s a huge difference between how they would express in the 1st and 12th houses.

For example, with a 1st-house Venus, Will would be Venusian in appearance and manner, and there’s evidence for this. Contemporaries have described him as a “handsome, well-shaped man”, “affable and convivial”, with considerable charm.(7) Neptune in his 1st house, however, though gifting him with a Garbo-like magical aura, could undo the strengths of his Gemini Venus and make a dreamy, feckless impression. But in the 12th house, especially when conjoining the Ascendant, Neptune would work well for poetic composition – empowering his imagination, deepening his emotional understanding and connecting him with his muse. Its aspects to Pluto and Uranus would enrich his verse with powerful archetypal imagery drawn from the ocean of the collective psyche.

In house twelve it would also support Will’s Sun, which, if an early Gemini Ascendant, is chosen, would also be in the 12th. Shakespeare must have possessed the chameleon-like talents exhibited by good actors who can take on and shed personalities at the drop of a hat according to their roles. And having a 12th-house Sun could also explain his anonymity, as it would weaken his sense of having a separate, personal self. Also, although an identity problem can be debilitating, experiences of merging with the boundless whole only serve to empower a poet, giving him glimpses of deeper mysteries lying beneath life’s shallow surface.

Libra Moon people: charm and good looks

If we take, say, 7 degrees Gemini as his Ascendant and consult the ephemeris for the three days in question, we find that on 23 April the Moon is on 6 degrees Libra in the 4th house. On the 24th it’s on 18 degrees Libra in the 5th and on the 25th on 0 degrees Scorpio and still in the 5th. Is there evidence for a Libra Moon for Will? Nicholas Rowe, his first biographer, called him “a good-natured man of great sweetness in his manners, and a most agreeable companion”, and records how Will’s noble acquaintance were impressed by the fact that, in spite of his humble birth, he was “civil, gentle, always courteous and had a natural grace”.(8) That sounds like Libra to begin with!

In my experience Libra Moon people make friends easily, perhaps because they try so hard to be liked by everybody. This talent would have been of great help to Will when he first arrived in London. Aided by his good looks and attractive manners, and with his budding acting and writing skills shining through, it seems he easily found a niche in the highly competitive theatre world of his day. As one of his contemporaries put it, “His appearance led to enquiry and then patronage”. Hence, perhaps, Bernard Shaw’s opinion, reported by Ackroyd, that Shakespeare “got round” men of all classes, which implies he used his charm and good looks for his advancement. (9)

If born on the 23rd, Will’s Libra Moon would be in house 4 (Cancer: home, family, origins, ancestry) near the cusp of the 5th house (Leo: creativity, theatre, performance). It would trine Venus and sextile Jupiter, indicating a good relationship with his mother Mary Arden, and possible advantages through her family. The Ardens of Warwickshire were landed gentry and a cut above his father’s family, who farmed land leased from the Ardens. Perhaps Will enjoyed career advantages through his mother’s family connections, though their Catholic persuasion put him later at risk. The Moon also is trine his MC on the 23rd; and Mary Arden, who may have had a smattering of education, must have recognised her oldest son’s talents and encouraged them. Also, her good breeding would have rubbed off which may explain Will’s air of refined gentility in spite of his humble birth that later so impressed his aristocratic friends.

But on the 23rd the Libra Moon was also sextile Uranus on his Descendant, opposing Mercury and squaring Mars, presaging domestic strife. This must have erupted heavily in the Shakespeare household when the teenage Will got Anne Hathaway pregnant. And, after they were respectably married, such aspects don’t bode well for peace and harmony at home. There was little hope of that anyway with three infants under two, and possibly sharing quarters with Will’s parents and younger siblings. His Uranus-sextile-Moon aspect then kicked in, triggering a probably sudden, unpremeditated abandonment of wife and children. And, seeing his Uranus in Sagittarius sextile his MC, I’d say it’s very likely he ran away with a theatre troupe who were passing through Stratford at the time, though this is not historically documented.

By the 24th the Moon had moved to 18 degrees Libra and was in the 5th house (Leo: creativity, speculation, theatre) which is appropriate for an actor and playwright who later went on to clinch some clever deals with property. But this Moon is not as well aspected. Although the trine to Venus is still in orb, the sextile to Jupiter that blessed his achievements the day before has been lost. On the 24th the Moon also squared Chiron and was in quincunx to Pluto while keeping its argumentative opposition to Mercury – aspects I cannot reconcile with the charmed life Will seems to have lived, though he did lose his son Hamnet who died at the age of eleven, which must have been a heavy blow.

On the 25th the Moon reached 0 degrees Scorpio and made a square both to Will’s Jupiter-Saturn conjunction and his MC, which for me disqualifies this day as his possible birthday. I find no evidence in the comments on his character and behaviour to support him having a Scorpio Moon. In the light of his brilliant career and general good fortune in life, I’m going to put my money on the birth chart for 23 April 1564, 5.35 am in Stratford (see chart) which I’ll now investigate in more detail to check whether it successfully mirrors the major themes in Shakespeare’s life.

A Taurus Sun in the 12th house, in a triangle with Mars in Cancer on the cusp of the 2nd, and Pluto in Capricorn in the 10th house, symbolises a prominent pattern in Will’s male side foreshadowed in the life of his father. John Shakespeare came from a farming family but moved to Stratford and learned the trade of a glover. And Will grew up in a house in the town’s main street which included a shop where the gloves were sold. (Taurus = country/farming; Gemini = town/shop/gloves/hands). John Shakespeare, ambitious for more money and status, had other irons in the fire. On the side he dealt in wool, then a lucrative business, he lent money – there were no banks in those days – and he also traded in home-made malt.

At first things went well. He made a small fortune through speculating on wool. He stood for public office becoming an alderman and then Mayor of Stratford (Mars in 2nd house trine Pluto in 10th, Saturn-Jupiter on the IC in Will’s chart). This allowed him to send his sons to the grammar school and to apply for a coat of arms that would raise his rank to that of gentleman; but the application failed. Perhaps it was known that John Shakespeare had a rogue side. He’d been hauled before the magistrates several times for charging illegal rates on money lending, and for doing dodgy deals with wool (Sun in the secretive 12th house, sextile Pluto in the public 10th house of law and order, Mars in the 2nd house trine Pluto).

Then, when Will was thirteen, his dad was thrown off the council and forced to mortgage a property to pay the debts he’d accrued (Saturn-Jupiter conjunction in the 2nd house opposite the MC = success/expansion and failure/contraction). The sudden descent into poverty and loss of social status must have been keenly felt by the adolescent Will with his Chiron in Capricorn in the 8th house opposing Saturn in Cancer in the 2nd (wounds around shame/ public reputation/debts). And I suggest this trauma was the driving force behind Shakespeare’s strong resolve to acquire wealth and honours and thus redeem his family’s reputation.

As soon as he’d established himself in the London theatre world and was earning serious money, Will re-applied for a family coat of arms which this time was granted. The shield he had designed with its spear and falcon was a public confirmation of his family’s gentility and respectability. Then in 1598 he bought New Place – the largest most prestigious house in Stratford – to be the family home (Jupiter in Leo in house 2). However, in spite of his increasing affluence, Will (or maybe it was his wife Anne) continued the businesses of making and selling malt and lending money up to the end of their days. (Taurean fixity plus Saturnian penny-pinching!)

Shakespeare a harsh moneylender

James Shapiro presents shocking evidence of Will’s harsh attitude towards his Stratford neighbours whom he would prosecute for defaulting on relatively minor debts,(10) and Ackroyd reveals that Will was charged on several counts with tax evasion - and that long after he’d become wealthy. All of which speaks for the rightness of my hypothetical chart in which Shakespeare’s Saturn is found in the 2nd house! 

But Saturn in this placement also gifted Will with keen business acumen. It was a clever move for the twenty-five-year-old Will to buy a share in his theatre company entitling him to a portion of the box office receipts, as play-going was rising then in popularity. And he continued to co-own and co-manage the other theatre companies he worked for later, including the Globe Theatre, while investing his considerable profits in land and property.
However, a Saturn in Cancer can also indicate aloof or even cold feelings towards close family, and Will must have seemed very unloving and uncaring to his wife when he left her with three young children. In those days the journey from London to Stratford took two days on horseback, so it’s unlikely he came home often, though Saturn would have seen that he did his duty towards his dependents by regularly sending them an agreed sum of money – though not a penny more.

This harsher side of the Bard’s nature seems incongruous with the sweet, gentle face he presented to his friends and lovers. But this contradiction that a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction symbolises can’t be expressed together. Will’s harder feeling nature is likely to have emerged in his family relationships while his generous Jupiter-in-Leo side appeared when he was out carousing with his friends – a favourite pastime say his biographers – and I can imagine that Will had a very free purse when paying for rounds of drinks.

It’s my experience of a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction (I have one myself) that this brings congenial social circumstances and promises sustained growth as long as we’re willing to work hard for it – and Will was. When he arrived in London in the 1580s, he found himself in just the right place at the right time for his talents to blossom. Social mobility was increasing and opening paths for talented commoners to ascend the social ladder. The London theatre scene was poised to boom, due to the increasing demand for entertainment by the newly affluent middleclass. New theatres were opening in different areas of town. New plays were continually in demand.

Will’s ascent was swift. By 1594 he’d become actor, scriptwriter and shareholder in the most prestigious London theatre company – the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – who were often invited to perform at court. Will would have acted in his own plays before the Queen and received her applause. And James I, who succeeded her, was also a drama buff. It’s said that Shakespeare was his favourite dramatist, and a note survives written in the monarch’s hand recommending him for special remuneration. Will’s success was due to his exceptional talent and much hard work, boosted by the fortunate opportunities indicated by his Uranus in Sagittarius on his Descendant trine his Jupiter and sextile his MC, which brought him the backing of a rich, influential patron or two.

A magnet to gay poets and dramatists

When Will arrived in London in his early twenties, with his good looks, quick wit and sex appeal, he must have been attractive as a potential lover to the gay poets and dramatists in the theatre scene, such as Christopher Marlowe and Michael Drayton. And he would have soon crossed paths with an older gay playwright and impresario, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who wrote comedies and owned a troupe of boy actors. Fourteen years Will’s senior and of very high birth, Oxford’s life story is one of spectacular decline from great wealth and power to disgrace and ruin. And there are many today who claim he was the ghostwriter of Shakespeare’s complete dramatic works.

A glance at their synastry (see biwheel chart) reveals they have enough in common astrologically to warrant a strong attraction between them. And, if they’d became lovers, Oxford could have been at Will’s side during his early London years, helping him learn his trade and providing him with the right connections.Perhaps they composed some of the early comedies together – Love’s Labour’s Lost for example, which contains scenes from the lives of the nobility whose speech and manners were then beyond the range of Will’s experience.

Otherwise, on the authorship claim in relation to Oxford’s natal chart, I’d say he was incapable of turning out thirty-six plays of world-class standard. I see him as a weak-willed Neptunian dreamer who lacked the application and perseverance needed for such an outstanding achievement. Also, those who can judge quality in poetry maintain that we only need to read a few lines of his poems to see how far they fall short of the high standard set by Shakespeare’s verse.(11)

But the two may have become friends or even lovers. And, if this was the case, Oxford could have supported Will financially during his early London years. The Earl, we know, was very free with his money which he also spent on patronage of the arts. And this could explain why, in a contemporary portrait thought to be of the youthful Shakespeare, Will is wearing very fashionable and costly clothes such as aristocrats then wore, which normally would have been beyond his means. And how did the twenty-five-year-old Will get together that £50 to buy a share in his theatre company? Maybe Oxford coughed it up.

Homosexuality was illegal in Elizabethan England and punishable by hanging. But there were very few convictions until the Puritans gained power. Does Will’s chart suggest he was gay? With his Gemini Venus (duality/possible bisexuality) conjoining Neptune (veils/deception) square Pluto in the 10th house (public reputation/law enforcement/ taboos) and opposing Uranus on the Descendant (unconventional love affairs), I’d say yes. But his youthful dallying with Anne Hathaway and his consuming passion for the dark lady of the sonnets suggests he was also into women. In other words, he was bi.

Will’s dominant Pluto in the 10th house indicates taboo areas in his life. If he had male lovers, this would have been kept under wraps. He couldn’t risk sullying his reputation with the middleclass theatre audiences and causing scandal back home in prudish Stratford (Venus conjunct Neptune square Pluto in house 10). So, does this explain why Shakespeare tried to keep his private life private?

In the early 1590s, when he was coming up to his Saturn return, there was an outbreak of plague in London which raged for two years and closed all the theatres. This must have mightily frustrated Will who’d just grown his wings and was impatient to fly.(12) Needing to fill his coffers and ambitious to become known in wider circles, he used this slack time to write two long narrative poems – Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. They explore the theme of erotic love in the stories of Venus seducing Adonis, and the rape of a loyal Roman wife followed by her suicide. Both became bestsellers. Will successfully demonstrated his prowess as a lyrical poet, and these poems may have also secured a new, sexually attractive patron.

By the early 1590s Oxford was spent – exhausted, bankrupt and pursued by debtors and scandals – and Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (possibly the “lovely boy” immortalised in the sonnets) was approached to become Will’s new patron. Both narrative poems were dedicated to him. And in the time between their composition, the relationship between poet and patron seems to have deepened because, while the dedication prefacing Venus and Adonis reads like the conventional flattering of a patron by an Elizabethan poet, that of The Rape of Lucrece sounds like a passionate love declaration. “The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end…What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours”.(13)

From Wriothesley’s biography we learn that, though married, he preferred male lovers; and, if the Elizabethan miniature (shown) is his portrait, as is widely believed, then the beauty Will saw in him and praised in the sonnets was of a feminine type, warranting these well-known lines from Sonnet 20, “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted, Hast thou, the Master-Mistress of my passion”.

As a patron, Wriothesley proved financially generous towards Will (in their synastry his Jupiter falls on Will’s Ascendant and Neptune). Rowe reported that “my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to”,(14) which confirms the suspicion that Will used his Venusian charms for financial gain. Their affair seems to have occurred while his relationship with the fair youth was ongoing, creating a typical Venus-in-Gemini love triangle!(15) Shakespearean scholars have always had a problem with dating the sonnets. But astrology suggests that this Plutonic emotional drama occurred during the winter of 1603-4. At that time there was a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Sagittarius on Will’s Uranus and Descendant, while Uranus in transit was conjoining his natal Sun, and Neptune was square his natal Neptune-Ascendant conjunction – enough to screw anyone up.(16) At the same time he was also writing Othello, his drama of passionate love, insane jealousy and connubial murder.

Thirteen thousand sexual allusions in his plays

It’s not surprising, looking at Will’s chart, to find that love in all its versions is central in his work (1st-house Venus conjunct Neptune, sextile Mercury, trine a Libra Moon and, last but not least, square Pluto). The oft-quoted lines of Sonnet 116 that proclaim his faith in the existence of an eternal spiritual love are sublime.(17) And mere human love is presented in almost all of plays. A fellow playwright called Will “the most passionate among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of love”.(18) He also seems fascinated by sex. A diligent researcher has counted 13,000 sexual allusions in his plays, including the repeated use of obscene sexual slang that’s mostly obsolete today. Did the Bard have a one-track mind? Or did he simply know what best sells plays and poems?

Will’s natal Jupiter-Saturn conjunction is a special one as it straddles two elements – fire and water – being the final conjunction before a great mutation into fire.(19) He was also born during an applying Uranus-Pluto square – the same aspect that has held our generation in its violent thrall for the last ten years. When Will was born, however, Neptune was also involved in this configuration, creating a rare t-square between the three outer planets which falls in the upper hemisphere of Will’s chart. It marks the historical period he lived through as one of radical change and bloody conflict, but also one that offered bold, exciting creative opportunities that Will was astrologically well equipped to seize.

Pluto in Pisces is the pivotal planet in the t-square, symbolising the religious conflict at the centre of the social crisis of his day. The earthquake of the Reformation was still rumbling below ground and would later erupt in bloody civil war. Under the constant threat of Catholic insurrections, the Queen had become paranoid and her spies were everywhere. Will’s Pluto in the 10th house reflects the totalitarian regime under which he lived with its conspiracies, informers and beheadings of those branded traitors and heretics. And this points to another side of Will’s life that he’d have tried to keep secret.

Will’s mother came from an old Catholic family, the Ardens. Will is likely to have been brought up by her in the Catholic faith. With Taurean fixity he could have remained a covert Papist all his life, secretly sympathising with the Catholic cause while outwardly feigning Protestant conformity. When a foiled Catholic plot led to the beheading of some distant Arden relatives, Will must have come under suspicion. And when the 1602 rebellion of the Earl of Essex failed, and a number of Will’s Catholic friends lost their heads for being involved, he was in serious peril. Henry Wriothesley, who had supported the coup, was committed to the Tower. That Shakespeare survived unharmed could only mean he was protected by admirers of his work in high places – perhaps by the Queen herself. 

We find in the chart several reasons why Will could have obliterated traces of his private life in order to be known by his work alone. His Chiron in Capricorn in the 8th house, for example, points to his concern about how the world will see him – not only in his lifetime but also posthumously. Will was supremely confident that his plays and poems would endure and be prized by posterity, boldly proclaiming in Sonnet 55:

Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

Are you convinced my hypothetical birth chart belongs to Shakespeare? We’ll never know for sure because astrological interpretation is not about ascertaining facts but about discriminating between strong and weak probabilities. In the end it may all be surmise, and that’s okay as I know Will would prefer to keep us all guessing.