Bacon and Shakespeare 14

Bacon and Shakespeare 14

Shakespeare and Bacon in Collaboration._

 

 

Bacon’s ciphers, which were, according to the evidence adduced from the

bi-literal, six in number, grew one out of the other. Bacon evidently

expected the bi-literal to be discovered first, for in this cipher he

explains the word-cipher, in which his hidden, or “interiour” works are

concealed. Dr. Owen discovered this word-cipher without the aid of the

bi-literal, and by following its directions he has deciphered over a

thousand pages of blank verse, comprising _Letters to the Decipherer_,

_A Description of Queen Elizabeth_, a poem entitled _The Spanish

Armada_, _An Account of Bacon’s Life in France_, and several plays. In

the _Epistle to the Decipherer_, Bacon says, “For thirty-three years

have we gone in travail, with these, the children of our wit,” and

proceeds to adjure the unknown to

 

“Sware by my sword never to speak of this

That you have found while we do live;”

 

and again--

 

“Sweare never to publish that we conceal under the names

Of others our own till we are dead,

Sweare never to reveal the secret cipher words

That guide your steps from part to part,

Nor how it is gathered, joined or put together,

Till we be dead, so help you God!”

 

The chief point to be noted about these cipher stories, biographies

and plays is that they are built up of quotations from the works of

all the authors whose writings Bacon claims to be his own. Dr. Owen

asks us, in all seriousness, to believe that Bacon composed the plays

of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Peel, and Greene, and the poems by Spenser,

as they appear in the cipher translation, and that he subsequently

“decomposed and composed them again” for circulation in his own day,

under the names of the various authors who acted as his masques. “When

deciphered and replaced in their original form,” Dr. Owen asserts,

“they _mean something_ which they _do not_ in the plays.” Such a

statement, as anyone can prove by turning to these curious deciphered

books, is both fallacious and absurd.

 

Let us see what these passages which _mean nothing_ in the plays mean

in the cipher stories. The pledge which Hamlet imposes upon Horatio and

Marcellus after the interview with the ghost is a serviceable case in

point. Hamlet’s words are almost too familiar to need repeating:

 

“So help you mercy, that how strange

Or odd soe’er I bear myself--

As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meet

To put an antic disposition on--

That you, at such times seeing me, never shall,

With arms encumber’d thus, or this head shake,

Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,

As ‘Well, well, we know;’--or ‘We could, and if we would;’

Or ‘If we list to speak;’--or, ‘There be, an if they might:’--

Or such ambiguous giving out, to note

That you know aught of me;--This not to do,

So grace and mercy at your most need help you,

Swear.”

 

No one can question the fitness and perfect appropriateness of the

foregoing passage in _Hamlet_, but it is doubtful if anybody, other

than Dr. Owen, will recognise their cogency when they are addressed by

Bacon to his unknown decipherer.

 

Bacon declares that Bottom’s recital of his dream, which commences,

 

“The eye of man hath not heard,

The ear of man hath not seen,”

 

is

 

“Simply and plainly, the ingenious means of writing

Without creating suspicion;”

 

and he goes on to explain that the decipherer can, by changing

 

“The words from one end to another, make it read aright.”

 

Bacon heartens his timorous decipherer with the words, “Be thou not,

therefore, afraid of greatness”--the greatness that he will attain as

the reward of his decipherations. “Some,” he assures the unknown, in

the memorable words, “have greatness thrust upon them,” and he further

reminds him that

 

“There is a tide in the affairs of man,

Which taken at the flood,

Leads on to glorious fortune.”

 

“Nature and fortune joined to make you great,” Bacon tells his

decipherer, from the text of _King John_, and one can almost imagine

Dr. Owen blushing with conscious pride, as he translated this borrowed

gem. He implores the modest unknown to free his (Bacon’s) name from the

disgraceful part he had in the death of the Earl of Essex, and cries--

 

“Oh, if I could

I would make a willow cabin at your gate,

And call upon your soul within the house....

You should not rest

Between the elements of earth and air,

But you should pity me----”

 

Words full of passion and beautiful imagery when spoken by Viola, on

behalf of Orsino, to the haughty and unresponsive Lady Olivia, but

sheer drivel when taken as Bacon’s exhortation to the discover of his

wrongs.

 

But one travels in this precious cipher from foolishness to

foolishness--from destruction to damnation, in quick, long strides. In

the _Spanish Armada_, Elizabeth receives and answers the ambassadors of

the King of Spain in the words that Henry V. employs in parley with the

messengers of the Dauphin. She proclaims her physical superiority to

her sister in the braggart language of Faulconbridge before King John

beginning

 

“An’ if my brother had my shape....

If my legs were two such riding rods,”

 

and the next dozen pages are a literal transcription of the first act

of _Henry V._ A hundred pages further on we are introduced to Bacon’s

brother Anthony. The brothers meet during the progress of a storm--the

storm that is described in Act I. Sc. III. of _Julius Cæsar_. The scene

is placed in Dover, and Bacon who

 

“... never till to-night, never till now,

Did I go through a tempest dropping fire,”

 

happened in the streets upon

 

“A common slave,” who

“Held up his left hand, which did flame and burn

Like twenty torches joined; and yet his hand,

Not sensible of fire, remained unscorched.

Against the _Citadell_ I met a lion,

Who glared upon me, and went surly by

Without annoying me.”

 

Bacon, in his normal moods, employs the royal style of “we” and “us”

when referring to himself, but in moments of agitation, when, for

instance, slaves and lions promenade the thoroughfares of Dover, he

drops, instinctively, like a Scotchman into his native manner. “Whilst

walking thus,” he continues:

 

“Submitting me unto the hideous night,

And bared my bosom to the thunderstone,”

 

“I met foster-brother Anthony,” who said,

 

“O Francis, this disturbed city is not to walk in,

Who ever knew the heavens menace so?...

Let’s to an inn.”

 

It might be thought that the foregoing instances have been carefully

sought out and employed to italicise the foolishness of Dr. Owen’s

statement that the plays were first composed in this form, and that in

this form alone is their true meaning and relevancy fully demonstrated.

Such, however, is far from being the fact. If the reader will take the

trouble to wade through the mass of incoherent commonplace, illuminated

as it is by passages of Shakespeare’s brilliant wit and inspired poesy

which make up these five volumes, he will find scores upon scores of

such meaningless and inopportune mis-quotations.

 

[Illustration: THE BUST OF SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON.]

 

Dr. Owen himself concedes that “some parts of the deciphered

material”--viz., those parts which have not their origin in

Shakespeare, Spenser, and the works of the other masques--“are not

equal in literary power, poetic thought, nor artistic construction

to the well-known efforts of Shakespeare,” but he accounts for this

inequality on the ground that “the necessities for concealment were

so great as to make the difficulties of the cipher serious, and

artistic re-construction impossible.” If it be granted, for the sake

of argument, that the quotations from the plays, which appear in these

“interiour” works, were from the pen of Shakespeare, and that the

original parts are the product of Bacon, then Spedding’s contention

that there are not “five lines together to be found in Bacon which

could be mistaken for Shakespeare, or five lines in Shakespeare which

could be mistaken for Bacon, by one who was familiar with their several

styles, and practised in such observations,” is proved up to the hilt.

Indeed, and without any such concession being allowed, it is impossible

to compare the original lines with the pirated passages in these

cipher books, and accept the two as the work of the same hand. Dr.

Owen, who is evidently neither “familiar with the several styles” of

Shakespeare and Bacon, nor “practised in such observations,” invites

his readers “to set aside the different names upon the title pages, and

ask themselves whether two or more men could have written so exactly

alike.” His conclusions are equally destitute of logic or critical

acumen: “Either Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare were the same

man, at least so far as the writings are concerned; or else, for once

in the history of mankind, two men, absolutely dissimilar in birth, in

education, and in bringing up, had the same thoughts, used the same

words, piled up the same ideas, wrote upon the same subjects, and

thought, wrote, talked, and dreamed absolutely alike.” It is true that

Shakespeare, in cipher, bears an amazing likeness to Shakespeare in the

plays, but if the Shakespeare in the cipher is to be compared with the

Bacon either here or in his recognised works, Dr. Owen’s conclusions are palpably absurd.