Bacon and Shakespeare 13

Bacon and Shakespeare 13

The Chandos Portrait.]

 

“So few (plays) can bee put forth as first written without a slighte

revision, and many new being also made ready, my penne hath little

or noe rest. I am speaking of those plaies that were suppos’d Wm.

Shakespeare’s....”

 

“... small portions (of the cipher story) being used at one time,

sometimes in our Spenser’s name, Marlowe’s, Peele’s, and Shakespeare’s,

anon Greene’s, mine, also Ben Jonson’s, affording our diverse masques

another colour, as ’twere, to baffle all seekers, to which we shall add

Burton’s....”

 

“Th’ worke beareth the title of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and will

bee put forth by Burton.”

 

Here is Bacon’s announcement of the publication of the First Folio:

 

“In our plaies ... being in the name of a man not living, there is

still more of this secret historie.... We have not lost that maske

tho’ our Shakespeare no longer liveth, since twoo others, fellowes of

our play actor--who would, we doubt not, publish those plays--would

disguise our work as well....”

 

“Our plaies are of diverse kindes--historie, comedie, and tragedie.

Many are upon th’ stage, but those already put forth in Wm.

Shakespeare’s name, we doe nothing doubt, have won a lasting

fame,--comedy, th’ historick drama and tragedy, are alike in favour....”

 

“My best playes, at present, as William Shakespeare’s work fost’red,

will as soone as one more plaie be completed, weare a fine but yet a

quiet dresse, as is seemely in plaies of as much valew and dignity

as sheweth cleerly therein, and be put foorth in folio enlarged and

multiplyed as th’ history conceal’d within th’ comedies, histories, or

tragedies required.”

 

Then follows a number of further recapitulations of his masques:

 

“Francis of Verulam is author of all the plays heretofore published by

Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Shakespeare, and of the two-and-twenty now put

out for the first time. Some are altered to continue his history....”

 

“Next write a comedy, a quaint device for making knowne th’ men that do

give, lend, sell, or in anie othe’ waye, have put me into possession of

their names. These I have us’d as disguises that my name might not bee

seen attached to any poem, stage-play, or anie of th’ light workes o’

this day....”

 

“As I have often said ... you have poems and prose workes on divers

theames in all such various stiles, as are put before th’ world

as Greene’s, as Shakespeare’s, Burto’s, as Peele’s, Spenser’s, as

Marlowe’s, as Jonso’ dramas ... for I varied my stile to suit different

men, since no two shew th’ same taste and like imagination....”

 

“Any play publisht as Marlowe’s, came from th’ same source as all which

you will now work out....”

 

“Greene, Spense’, Peele, Shakespeare, Burton, and Marley, as you may

somewhere see it, or, as it is usually given, Marlowe, have thus farre

been my masques....”

 

“A few workes also beare th’ name o’ my friend, Ben Jonson--these are

_Sejanus_ and th’ _Masques_, used to conceale the Iliads chiefly and to

make use o’ my newe cipher....”

 

“I masqued manie grave secrets in my poems which I have publisht, now

as Peele’s or Spenser’s, now as my owne, then againe in th’ name of

authours, so cald, who plac’d workes of mixt sort before a reading

world, prose and poetry. To Robt. Greene did I entruste most of that

work....”

 

Bacon has limited our speculations upon the extent of his literary

work by definitely mentioning the works which he wrote in a cipher

discovered by Dr. Owen:

 

“We will enumerate them by their whole titles

From the beginning to the end: William Shakespeare,

Robert Greene, George Peele, and Christopher Marlowe’s

Stage plays; _The Faerie Queen_, _Shepherd’s Calendar_,

And all the works of Edmund Spenser;

_The Anatomy of Melancholy_ of Robert Burton,

_The History of Henry VII._, _The Natural History_,

_The Interpretation of Nature_, _The Great Instauration_,

_Advancement of Learning_, _The De Augmentis Scientiarum_,

_Our Essays_, and all the other works of our own.”

 

Even when we note that the _Advancement_ and _De Augmentis_ are the

English and Latin versions of the same work--a fact that Dr. Owen

appears to have overlooked--Mr. Theobald must acknowledge that this

represents a very fair literary output, but it does not form the full

list of his works. The names of his cipher or interiour works, are

enumerated by Mrs. Gallup:

 

“There are five histories as followes: _The Life o’ Elizabeth_, _The

Life of Essex_, _The White Rose o’ Britaine_, _The Life and Death of

Edward Third_, _The Life of Henry th’ Seventh_; five tragedies: _Mary

Queene o’ Scots_, _Robert th’ Earl o’ Essex_ (my late brother), _Robert

th’ Earle o’ Leicester_ (my late father), _Death o’ Marlowe_, _Ann

Bullen_; three comedies: _Seven Wise Men o’ th’ West_, _Solomon th’

Second_, _The Mouse-Trap_.”

 

 

 

 

_Bacon and “Divine Aide.”_

 

 

Bacon himself appears to have been struck with the immensity of his

production, and he cast about for some plausible explanation that

would justify it in the eyes of his twentieth century admirers. Human

endurance and fecundity would, he foresaw, be regarded as unequal to

the strain--Divine assistance alone could make so colossal a task

possible:

 

“Whosoever may question assertions that tend to shew y’ mankinde

evidences of a Divine thought interfusing th’ human minde, hath but

to prove it by experiment. He would not bee ready to cavil, or laugh

to scorn this assertion, which I may repeate anon, that Divine aide

was given me in my work. I have, at th’ least, accomplished a great

work in fewe yeares, work of such a difficult nature that no one hand

could accomplish, except other than myselfe upheld or directed it.” And

“anon,” he repeats, “surely my hand and braine have but short rest. I

firmly believe it were not in the power of humane beings to do anie

more than I have done, yet I am but partlie satisfied.”

 

These excerpts, which have been given at some length, disclose not

only the exact nature and extent of the alleged claims, but the

style and manner in which they are couched. There is nothing of the

literary polish and elegance in the cipher writing which we find in

all of Bacon’s acknowledged works, but taking into consideration the

difficulties of dropping the cipher into the books in which it is said

to appear, and the even greater difficulties of interpreting it, it

seems manifestly unfair to dismiss the entire thing as an imposture on

that account. Mr. Mallock’s contention is that Mrs. Gallup’s theory is

sufficiently plausible to merit it an unprejudiced investigation. If

the cipher proves to be altogether false, the manner in which it has

been elaborated will, Mr. Mallock submits, form a curious incident in

literary history; while should it prove true, it will be more curious

still. Apart from the cipher, Mr. Sinnett declares, there are floods of

reasons for disbelieving that Shakespeare could have written the plays.

Mr. Sinnett, and the other leaders of the Baconian cult, do not appear

to see that if their theory is to outlast the present controversy, the

cipher business must be thrown overboard forthwith.

 

As Mr. William Archer has said with reference to these ciphers, the

point at issue is as plain as a pike-staff. We are not concerned, while

we deal with this phase of the subject, in the verbal parallels between

Shakespeare’s writings and those of Bacon, nor with the vehemently

expressed conviction of students and scholars that Bacon did not write

_Shakespeare_. All we desire to know is whether the ciphers which

Mrs. Gallup and Dr. Owen contend are contained in certain books (the

_First Folio Shakespeare_ among others) really exist. Mr. Mallock says

that until an examination by experts in typography has negatived this

theory, he is inclined to believe it. His position is unassailable.

Nothing further can be argued or asserted (with conviction) until a

committee of experts have made their report. If they declare that the

cipher has no foundation in fact, the students who have carefully

perused Mrs. Gallup’s great work--great invention it will then be--and

Dr. Owen’s many volumes of badly-constructed, ridiculous plays and

poems, will give both Mrs. Gallup and Dr. Owen credit for a veritable

triumph of misapplied energy and endurance--for having conceived a

masterpiece of diabolical inventiveness, for having revealed a perfect

genius for the perpetration of literary fraud.

 

Personally, I do not expect to learn that they will be convicted of

the possession of such an exceptional gift of deception. Their labours

smack of honesty; their conclusions betray an ingenuous credulity that

calls for respect. It will, indeed, surprise most people who have made

a study of their works, if it is proved that the cipher they claim to

have discovered, and manipulated with such marvellous results, is a

myth. But assuming that a properly-constituted committee did declare

that the cipher was to be found in all the books indicated, and that

the investigation corroborated the revelations made by Mrs. Gallup and

Dr. Owen, there would still remain the question as to who concealed the

statements in the different volumes, and whether there is any truth in

them.

 

I think, nay I claim, that in the event of the cipher being verified,

and the translations being confirmed, that (_a_) The cipher could have

been introduced by no other man than Bacon; and that (_b_) The whole

of the statements found therein are false from beginning to end. In a

searching investigation into the cipher undertaken by a correspondent

of the _Times_, a single page of the cipher was tested, but the test is

not, as the _Times_ claims for it, entirely convincing. The method of

investigation employed is excellent. A greatly enlarged photograph is

taken of a page from the _Epistle Dedicatory_ to the _Ruine of Time_ in

the 1591 edition of Spenser’s _Complaints_, and the “A” and “B” letters

which Mrs. Gallup herself assigns to the parts respectively are cut

out and arranged in parallel columns. When these two sets of letters

are seen side by side it would, indeed, be difficult for the untrained

eye to distinguish any marks of dissimilarity between them. But as Mr.

Mallock tells us, “although even the naked eye can be soon trained to

perceive that in many cases the letters belong to different founts,

yet these differences are of so minute a kind that in other cases they

allude the eye without the aid of a magnifying glass; and even with

the aid of a magnifying glass, the eye of the amateur, at all events,

remains doubtful, and unable to assign the letters to this alphabet

or to that.” The correspondent of the _Times_ leads us to infer that

he has been unable to verify the existence of the cipher in the page

he has tested, and Mr. Lee has declared, without hesitation, that the

cipher does not exist in the Shakespeare First Folio. On the other

hand, Mr. Mallock had little difficulty in distinguishing the different

founts in the facsimiles from the _Novum Organum_ and Spenser’s

_Complaints_. He experimented with a large number of passages, and

comparing his interpretation with that of Mrs. Gallup, he found that

it coincided with hers, sometimes in four cases out of seven, and not

infrequently in five. “It appears to me,” Mr. Mallock writes, “to

be almost inconceivable that multiplied coincidences such as these

can be the work of chance, or that they can originate otherwise than

in the fact that in these pages at all events--the preface to the

_Novum Organum_, printed in 1620, and in the Dedication of Spenser’s

_Complaints_, printed in 1591--a bi-literal cipher exists, in both

cases the work of Bacon; and if such a cipher really exists here, the probabilities are overwhelming that Mrs. Gallup is right, and that we shall find it existing in the first folio of Shakespeare also.”