Part 7

“All that learne that I, who accompte th’ truth better than wicked vanitie, publish’d manie late playes under other cognomen will think the motive some distaste of the stage. In noe respect is it true....” His real reason is, firstly, that “all men who write stage-playes are held in co’tempte,” and, secondly, the plays are employed to “send out much hidden dang’rous matter.” “In my plays matters are chosen not alone for value as a subject to heare and no longer heed. Each play is the meane or th’ medium, by which cipher histories are sent forth.”

“Severall small works under no name wonne worthy praise; next in Spenser’s name, also, they ventured into an unknowne world. When I, at length, having written in diverse stiles, found three who, for sufficient reward in gold added to an immediate renowne as good pens, willingly put forth all workes which I had compos’d I was bolder....”

“Th’ evidence such plays give of being from the brayne of one who hath for manie years made himself acquainted with th’ formes and th’ methode--or art--of this dramatick or representative poetry, maketh also my claime to other workes, which have beene publisht in various names, undeniable. The worke, despight a variety of styles, is mine owne....”

“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.”

_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.

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.

Dr. Owen promises still further cipher revelations of the same startling nature, which will explain how Bacon succeeded in using his various masques during the lifetime of the alleged authors. “In the decipherings which will appear in their regular order,” he says, “I have found an epitome of the lives of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Green (he is probably referring to Greene), Burton, Peele and Spenser ... the circumstances under which they were employed, and the sums of money paid to each for the use of his name. Anthony Bacon, the foster-brother of Francis, was the unknown owner of the Globe Theatre. Shakespeare, while uneducated, possessed a shrewd wit, and some talent as an actor. He received, as a bribe, a share in the proceeds of the theatre, and was the reputed manager. Bacon, with his Court education and aristocratic associations, could not be known as the author of plays or the associate of play actors, and put Shakespeare forward as the mask which covered his greatest work.”

_The Tragical Historie of our Late Brother Robert, Earl of Essex._