Shakespeare's The Tempest, read as Bacon's own working model of power.
You are looking at a school built on a premise most institutions would hedge. We do not hedge it. Within these walls, it is settled that I wrote the plays that carry another man's name upon their title pages — not because the outside debate has ended, but because a school has to stand somewhere to teach anything at all. The tradition you'd be joining is not new: it has been argued in earnest since 1857, by serious minds, and it will likely still be argued a century and a half from now. I find I do not mind this. A man who spent his life testing the received doctrines of his own age can hardly object when a later age declines to take his own authorship on faith either.
If you accept that premise, even provisionally, a second thing follows from it that is not optional: you must read this play differently than a student reads it elsewhere. I did not write Prospero's island as an allegory to be decoded once and set aside. I wrote it as a working model — of how authority is actually built, isolated, tested, and eventually handed off. Your Laboratory sessions are the plainest possible reading of what I actually put there.
Read the aphorism at the top of each week first. Let the Laboratory work follow from it. I did not build my case for a thing and then hunt for a clever line to decorate it — I built the line first, from having lived it, and only later found the case that proved it out.
— F.B.
Bacon's own opening to the course — where the play actually came from, and what he wants you watching for across the fifteen weeks ahead.
Read His Account →Here is what this course is actually for, said plainly. You are going to spend fifteen weeks learning to recognize a small number of patterns — isolation, manipulated appetite, timed leverage, mercy used as strategy — inside a 400-year-old play. That is not the point. The point is what happens the first time you notice one of those same patterns somewhere real: a boss who cuts you out of a meeting right before a decision that affects you, a group project where someone controls what everyone else knows, a negotiation where the other side is clearly waiting for something before they'll move. You will have seen the shape of that before. You will know it has a name, and that it has been used this way for as long as people have organized themselves into anything at all. Recognizing the pattern doesn't tell you what to do about it — that depends on the situation, and on you — but it means you are choosing your response instead of being surprised by it.
Here is what's genuinely expected of you at this stage, and what isn't. You are not expected to master these mechanics the way an adult with a decade of work experience would. Nobody in this room has run a company, negotiated a real merger, or led people through a genuine crisis yet. What's expected is recognition, not mastery — that by the end of the semester you can look at a real situation, even one you don't fully understand, and correctly name what kind of thing is happening in it. That skill compounds. You will re-encounter every mechanic in this course many times over the next twenty years, in situations with real stakes, and each time you'll understand it a little more completely than the last. This course is the first time, not the only time. Bacon himself wrote "I have taken all knowledge to be my province" as a young man who hadn't built anything yet — the claim was aspiration, not accomplishment. You're allowed to be in the same position he was.
Set the authorship premise aside for a moment — practically, this is a course in reading systems of power accurately, arguing about them rigorously, and defending an original position under real questioning. By the end of the semester, a student should be able to:
A conventional literature unit tests whether a student read the play and can summarize a theme. That's a lower bar than this course is aiming for. The Laboratory model asks a harder question of the same material: can the student use it? Reading comprehension is necessary here but not sufficient — the actual assessment, week over week, is whether a mechanic identified in Act II can be found again in a real corporate takeover or a real historical conspiracy. That transfer is the skill. It doesn't show up on a reading quiz, and it barely shows up in a five-paragraph essay — it shows up when a student is asked to defend a plan they built themselves, live, to people who are allowed to push back.
Fifteen weeks spent naming isolation tactics, monopoly, manipulated appetite, and timed leverage could easily produce a student who finds these mechanics clever rather than one who can recognize them being used on them. That risk is why the course's own architecture doesn't stop at Week 12's checkmate — it deliberately continues through mercy and institutionalization in Weeks 13 and 14, and the Capstone Rubric enforces this with a hard structural gate: a final strategy that ends at victory, with no plan for what happens after, cannot pass at the top tier no matter how sharp the tactics were. The course is teaching what power costs to hold, not just how to take it.
Each week follows the same five-phase cadence, and — not coincidentally — a standard school week has five days. One phase, one day:
Days are not built around lecture. Each opens with a short framing input — five or ten minutes, often that week's aphorism read aloud — followed by the actual work of the day: reading, mapping, building, arguing, or writing. A course whose own premise is "take nobody's word for it" would undercut itself by asking students to spend their days taking the instructor's word for it instead.
The dismantling of inherited authority and the establishment of a controlled environment.
Students analyze the shipwreck to prove that authority derived from nature (competence) outlasts authority derived from men (titles). Case studies of sudden macroeconomic or historical disruptions where consensus collapsed against physical reality.
"Nobility of birth commonly abateth industry; and he that is not industrious, envieth him that is."
I sat among men in Parliament who inherited their seats and men who earned theirs, and I will tell you plainly which sort did the actual work of governing. A title tells you what a man's father accomplished. It tells you nothing about the man standing in front of you. When your ship goes down, rank does not float.
Once Prospero wrecks the ship, he purposefully separates the survivors into distinct groups. The mechanics of isolation — students study how separating a leader from their established network destroys their leverage and alters their perception of reality.
"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
I did not coin that line — I borrowed it from Aristotle to argue with it, because it is mostly wrong and worth arguing with. A man cut off from counsel does not become godlike; he becomes worse at seeing his own situation, because the light a man receives from another's counsel is drier and purer than that which comes from his own understanding.
Prospero does not rule the whole island; he controls the vital nodes. Mapping strategic monopolies — students analyze how controlling a single critical resource (knowledge, water, or capital) allows a minority to govern a majority.
"Neither the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done."
Prospero does not need to hold every acre of this island. He needs to hold the few things through which everything else must pass. Power does not come from the size of a man's hand but from what his hand controls the passage of.
Ariel is not a spirit; Ariel is an intelligence apparatus. Students chart how information flows through a system and how controlling the speed of information dictates the outcome of a conflict.
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible."
I built an island of my own once, on paper — Bensalem, with a house of science whose purpose was to learn the hidden causes that move visible events. Ariel is such a hidden cause given a temper and a voice.
Caliban represents base labor and the resentment of the governed. Students analyze why Prospero's failure to integrate Caliban into the island's equity structure creates a perpetual security threat.
"For the rebellions of the belly are the worst."
A grievance rooted in the belly does not stay quiet the way a grievance rooted in pride does. Caliban knows this island's springs and berry patches better than Prospero ever will; what he lacks is any stake in what that knowledge is worth.
Mapping political factions, populism, and the stress-testing of human psychology.
Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban plot a rebellion fueled by alcohol and false promises. Students model how populist movements are engineered through manipulated language and promised resources — "the Idols of the Marketplace."
"There are also Idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other... it is by discourse that men associate; and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding."
Stephano and Trinculo do not organize a rebellion with any real plan; they organize it with a bottle and a few borrowed phrases that sound like conviction. Separate the actual grievance, which may be real, from the language used to weaponize it, which is almost always cheaper.
Prospero presents a feast to the royals, only to make it vanish. Students study how controlling an adversary's hopes and appetites is more effective than direct confrontation.
"A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure."
Truth, unadorned, is a plain morning light; men prefer candlelight because it is kinder to what isn't there. Prospero controls hope and appetite instead of bodies — a cheaper and more precise weapon than confrontation.
Prospero forces the rival Prince to carry logs, not to punish him, but to break his ego and rebuild him as a loyal son-in-law — transforming a rival into a vested stakeholder through shared struggle and earned equity.
"The mind of man is more cheered and refreshed by profiting in small things, than by standing at a stay, in great."
A man handed everything values nothing; a man who earns even a small thing values it far past its size. Prospero is converting a rival into a stakeholder, one log at a time.
Ariel's omnipresence allows Prospero to preempt every plot before it matures. Students examine how the perception of total awareness — the architecture of deterrence — prevents rebellion.
"Printing, gunpowder, and the mariner's needle — these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world."
None of those three are weapons of force — they are instruments of reach. Prospero does not need to physically stop every plot, because the belief that he already knows about it does the stopping for him.
Students build a multi-agent simulation framework, inputting the opposing forces of the island (Prospero's control vs. Caliban's rebellion) and stress-testing these variables against Hegelian dialectics.
"Princes are like to heavenly bodies, which cause good or evil times; and which have much veneration, but no rest."
Prospero's control, Ariel's network, and Caliban's resentment are three permanent offices, each pressing against the other, none of them ever fully at rest. Find the actual breaking point — don't tune the model until it just looks stable.
Consolidation, the calculation of mercy, and institutionalizing the architecture.
Prospero summons spirits to perform a highly structured cultural dance for Ferdinand and Miranda. Students analyze how leaders use art, tradition, and narrative to encode loyalty and civil order.
"These things are but toys, to come amongst such serious observations. But yet, since princes will have such things, it is better they should be graced with elegancy than daubed with cost."
I write of masques as a man who staged them himself, and I thought them toys even while building them elaborately — a toy, well made, still tells a court exactly what it should feel about its ruler.
Prospero gathers all factions into a single geographic node to reveal his hand. Students study how to consolidate separated assets for a decisive, irreversible victory — the timing of leverage.
"Fortune is like the market; where many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall."
Most men are undone not by lacking power but by spending it at the wrong hour. Find the moment Prospero could have acted and chose to wait — and what the delay gained him that speed could not have.
Prospero forgives his brother, not out of moral purity, but because vengeance would destabilize his return to power in Milan — mercy as political utility.
"Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out."
I do not believe Prospero's anger vanished. I believe he calculated, coldly, that mercy ended the conflict where revenge would only extend it one generation further. This is the harder arithmetic, not the softer heart.
Prospero drowns his book and breaks his staff, abandoning direct control. Students analyze the transition from founder-led control to a self-sustaining system that survives without the architect.
"Nature cannot be ordered about, except by obeying her."
You do not govern a system by standing over it forever. You govern it once, correctly, at the level of its own nature, and after that it no longer requires your hand.
Students select a modern, real-world conflict — a corporate hostile takeover, a geopolitical crisis, a macroeconomic failure — and orally defend a multi-step "Prospero Strategy" to disrupt, isolate, and synthesize the opposing forces, citing specific mechanics from the text.
"I have taken all knowledge to be my province."
I wrote that line as a young man who had built nothing yet, only wanted to. Your students are about to make a claim nearly as large. Let them feel the size of it before they make it.
Session facilitation, a 3-tier calibration rubric, week-by-week teaching notes, and the tone guardrails for the whole unit.
Read →One worksheet per week, matched to that week's specific Laboratory exercise.
Read →The Week 15 Prospero Strategy defense — five scoring categories and a hard gate on the Epoch III requirement.
Read →Every week's modern term traced back to Bacon's own coinage — including where the two genuinely diverge.
Read →All 75 days mapped from the 5-phase weekly cadence — what happens Monday through Friday, every week.
Read →Short introductions to the scholars who built the authorship case, pointing into their dossiers in the Bacon Research Center.
Read →