No, we have no evidence to believe that William Shakespeare had any kind of personal relationship with John Dee or Edward Kelley. Speculations about Shakespeare's relationship with Dee and his companions likely derive from the text of The Tempest, with its figure bearing some resemblance to Dee in the character of Prospero. These specific claims of a teaching relationship appear to stem from the works of self-described esoteric historian Vincent Bridges, who posited that Dee served as both book-dealer and occult mentor to Shakespeare. He co-authored a book on the subject with the English professor Teresa Burns, Shakespeare, John Dee and the Hermetic Revolution: Alchemy and Espionage in the Magickal Theatre of Elizabethan England. I intend to get my hands on it as soon as possible, but to be blunt, neither Teresa Burns nor Vincent Bridges is a scholar of Early Modern English drama. Burns is a scholar of post-Civil War English literature and Renaissance Hermeticism; I'm coming at Early Modern Hermeticism and occultism from the exact opposite POV, as an EM Drama person first and foremost. I have no beefs with their respective knowledge of Dee and Kelley's lives and work, only where they allege these things to intersect with Shakespeare's career.

The pocket-sized version of Bridges and Burns' argument, and the version to which I'll be responding, is as stated in the 2009 essay "Dee and Shakespeare: The Origins of the Hermetic Revolution in the Elizabethan Theatre "

But that agreement [that William Shakespeare must necessarily have been familiar with the occult] raises the vexing question of how did even a well-educated young provincial with a definite gift for language come by such a wealth of occult knowledge? This question opens the door to the issue of Shakespeare’s identity; and, while it doesn’t prove that the Bard was really someone else (Bacon, or de Vere or even Marlowe) it does suggest that Shakespeare had some kind of secret life, one that brought him into contact with a mentor who could provide him with sources from Holinshead to Aggripa. If we follow the trail of Shakespeare’s esoteric themes and their sources we come to the conclusion that only one library, one knowledgeable teacher, existed for the necessary range of subjects: that of Dr. John Dee.

Secret life, occult mentor, esoteric knowledge. I'll allow right off the bat that Shakespeare was a wide reader and book-collector. I doubt his collection ranged as widely as John Dee's, but as literary contemporaries the two men would likely have read some of the same books at one point or another, just as I've probably read some of the same books as Hilary Mantel. Bridges frames "Shakespeare’s knowledge of esoteric wisdom" -- that is, the thesis that WIlliam Shakespeare possessed a deep knowledge of esoteric wisdom, and evidenced it in his plays -- as a statement with which "everyone" agrees, based on a cursory Google search turning up lots of people talking about Shakespeare in conjunction with the occult. As a historian, I don't agree with this assertion, any more than I agree with assertions that Shakespeare possessed uncommonly deep knowledge of botany, or falconry. I see no evidence of unusual (let alone esoteric) magical knowledge in Shakespeare's writings; Elizabethan England was overflowing with textual sources and traditions regarding magic and alchemy from which Shakespeare might have drawn his depictions of the same, all of which would have been readily available to an educated man with money to buy a book or friends to loan it to him. Like practically every subject about which Shakespeare writes, his familiarity with contemporary (that is, Early Modern) esoteric occultism is relatively superficial -- he writes like a man writing from books touching on witchcraft as it intersects with folklore and alchemy as it intersects with contemporary sciences, rather than from initiation into high-level occult societies, whatever that might read like. Enthusiastic readers can attribute to Shakespeare deep firsthand subject-matter expertise in just about everything -- botany, falconry, theology, international geography --, but such assertions are pretty big reaches. They are often based on absolutely torturous interpretations of the texts of Shakespeare's plays and poems, and are hard if not impossible to to back up with how little we know about the life of the man himself. (There are abundant references to leatherworking, however, as a random aside.)

Bridges admits that during the years in which both John Dee and William Shakespeare would have been living in London, Dee made no mention of the man in his otherwise meticulous papers, but since this would conflict with his thesis that Shakespeare and Dee were in close contact during Shakespeare's peak writing years, he concludes that Shakespeare must have necessarily been using an alias -- an alias for which we have no other proof other than that Shakespeare wasn't mentioned in Dee's papers by that name and other men with other names (like Francis Garland) were. His evidence for a relationship with Kelley and Shakespeare is equally tenuous, relying on one of Kelley's alchemical poems being dedicated to a man with the initials G.S. Furthermore, Bridges sketches out a speculative history for what Shakespeare might have been up to before the publication of his most famous works that benefits from the wealth of information available regarding the comings and goings of Dee and Kelley as well as the lack of sources regarding the comings and goings of Shakespeare himself.

Comparing the dates when Dee notes Francis Garland in his diaries with the known dates of Shakespeare’s life shows clearly that the idea is impossible to disprove. Most of the dates for Francis Garland fall in what is known as the “Lost Years” of Shakespeare. We know that Shakespeare left Avon around 1585, probably soon the birth of the twins Hamnet and Judith, and we know nothing of what he was doing until the early 1590s when some of his plays were produced. The next firm date we have is April 18, 1593, when his poem Venus and Adonis was registered in London. Francis Garland appears in Dee’s diary from December 1586 through March of 1595, and in all that time we find not a single instance of Shakespeare being somewhere else when Francis Garland was visiting Dee.

I'm going to be honest: this part is extremely silly. Shakespeare's "lost years" are so called because there are extremely scanty recorded details regarding where he was during that time, what he was doing there, and how he made his money. Is it any surprise therefore that there's no abundance of hard proof stating where he was and when to contradict the Garland-Shakespeare/Dee/Kelley thesis? He might have been studying under Dee during these years; he might also have been operating as a theater-hating pamphleteer under an assumed name, or he might have been serving as Elizabeth I's secret hairdresser. Any of those things could fit into the void of Shakespeare's lost years with as little contradiction of hard-and-fast dates and locations as "Shakespeare was a secret courier for, and initiate of, the occultist John Dee", because they are equally unsupported. At this stage Burns and Bridges are writing historical fiction to connect their own area of study (Early Modern English occultism) with the life of Shakespeare. Historical fiction is all well and good, but the assertions they make range pretty far out of the arena of accepted historical fact. I'm more sympathetic to Bridges and Burns than I am to Antistratfordian theorists, who use similarly tenuous evidence to argue equally massive claims about Shakespeare's works and the identity of their author, but they are clearly playing around in at least the same ballpark of balls-out speculation.

Bridges and Burns takes refuge in the idea that this theory of a Shakespeare/Dee/Kelley friendship would be impossible to disprove, at least using the historical sources generally understood to be certainties -- in 1594, Shakespeare wasn't dead, for instance, or generally understood to be living in France. The three men were alive during overlapping time periods, and living in the same general part of the same country as one another. But this combination of facts is no more persuasive than the sum of its parts. If it takes multiple levels of supposition to "prove" a thesis already grounded upon a major assumption, that proof is pretty weak. Both Shakespeare and Dee read and enjoyed books. Both Shakespeare and Kelley wrote and enjoyed poetry. From these basic biographical facts, there is no unambiguous indication that they ever met one another, that they had a sustained relationship of any kind, or that Dee and Kelley collaborated with Shakespeare in writing, for instance, Venus & Adonis. An argument that relies on multiple levels of conjecture -- as well as never-before-acknowledged pseudonyms, secret societies, and cryptic textual allusions -- is not a sound historical argument.