BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 IN SHAKE-SPEARE 
 
 'A 
 
 77?
 
 They said they would not hear of Verulam ; 
 Forbad my tongue to speak of Verulam; 
 But I 'will find them 'when they are asleep, 
 And in their ears I'll holla Verulam ! 
 Nay, 
 
 I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak 
 Nothing but Verulam, and give it them, 
 To keep their anger still in motion.
 
 BACON 
 CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 in 
 
 SHAKE-SPEARE 
 
 AND OTHER STUDIES 
 
 By ISAAC HULL PLATT 
 
 Boston 
 
 Small, Maynard and Company 
 1905
 
 Copyright, 1905, by 
 
 ISAAC HULL PLATT 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Published August, 
 
 Rose Valley Press 
 Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, U. S. A.
 
 In this band of scholars, dreamers and enquirers, appears the most 
 comprehensive, sensible, originative of the minds of the age, Francis 
 Bacon, a great and luminous intellect, one of the finest of this poetic 
 progeny, vuho, like his predecessors, vjas naturally disposed to clothe 
 his ideas in the most splendid dress ; in this age, a thought did not seem 
 complete until it had assumed a form and color. But <what dis- 
 tinguished him from the others is, that 'with him an image only serves 
 to concentrate mediation. He reflected long, stamped on his mind all 
 parts and joints of his subject; and then, instead of dissipating his com- 
 plete idea in a graduated chain of reasoning, he embodies it in a com- 
 parison so expressive, exact, transparent, that behind the figure <we 
 perceive all the details of the idea, like a liquor in a fair crystal vase. 
 
 This is his mode of thought, by symbols, not by analysis ; instead of 
 explaining his idea, he transposes and translates it translates it entire, 
 to the smallest details, enclosing all in the majesty of a grand period, 
 or in the brevity of a striking sentence. Thence springs a style of 
 admirable richness, gravity and vigor, novj solemn and symmetrical, 
 nonu concise and piercing, alvoays elaborate and full of color. There 
 is nothing in English prose superior to his diction. 
 
 Shakespeare and the seers do not contain more vigorous or expressive 
 condensations of thought, more resembling inspiration, and in Bacon 
 they are to be found everywhere. In short, his process is that of the 
 creators; it is intuition, not reasoning. When he has laid up his store 
 of facts, the greatest possible, on some vast subject, on some entire 
 province of the mind, on the nuhole anterior philosophy, on the general 
 condition of the sciences, on the po*wer and limits of human reason, he 
 casts over all this a comprehensive vievu, as it vjere a great net, 
 brings up a universal idea, condenses his idea into a maxim and hands 
 it to us nuith the vjords, " Verify and profit by it." 
 
 TAINE. 
 
 2032474
 
 PREFACE 
 
 So many and so startling have been the revela- 
 tions promised to an expectant world under the 
 title of Baconian ciphers and cryptograms, and so 
 far have they fallen short of realization, that it is 
 not to be wondered at if the world is somewhat 
 weary of the subject. Nevertheless, there are 
 Bacon cryptograms, and in this little book I have 
 attempted to demonstrate some of them. They 
 are very simple and innocent. They raise no 
 social question they pump no hidden shame. 
 They deal with no secret marriages in the Tower 
 or elsewhere, nor do they throw the slightest 
 cloud on the title of the present reigning family of 
 England to the throne. They may be merely 
 curiosities of literature. They are that at least 
 and as such I bespeak for them attention. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke as a prophet, 
 when, fifty years ago, he declared that Miss Ba-
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 con's book had opened the question so that it 
 could never again be closed. Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes spoke as a prophet when, in 1883, he 
 said that the wonderful parallelisms in Shake- 
 speare and Bacon must and will be wrought out 
 and followed out to such fair conclusions as they 
 shall be found to force honest minds to adopt. 
 
 I do not care to follow a bad example and call 
 names not even tu quoque but when Mr. Sidney 
 Lee applies such terms as fools and madmen to 
 all who even give a serious hearing to the Baconian 
 hypothesis a group including not only such men 
 as Emerson and Holmes, but Lord Palmerston, 
 Gladstone, Bismarck and John Bright; and, by 
 implication, those who have expressed doubts as 
 to the orthodox views regarding the authorship of 
 the Plays: Hallam, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, 
 Lowell and many other famous men and famous 
 scholars, to say nothing of such eminent jurists as 
 Judge Webb and Lord Penzance, who on the 
 ii
 
 PREFACE 
 
 simple ground of evidence have declared for the 
 Baconian authorship of the Plays when Mr. Sid- 
 ney Lee consigns all these to the madhouse, and 
 calls them fools, what shall we say of Sidney Lee ? 
 Nothing. We will observe the Amenities of Lit- 
 erature and let Echo answer. But that madhouse ! 
 As a club it would rival The House-Boat on the 
 Styx. 
 
 A short time since I wrote a brief biography of 
 Walt Whitman. Among the notices it received 
 there is one I cherish as a gem. It is this : 
 
 A recent unfortunate literary incident will go a 
 good ways toward nullifying the respect with 
 which Isaac Hull Platt's Walt Whitman, in Small, 
 Maynard and Company's admirable Beacon Biog- 
 raphies, will be greeted. In the November num- 
 ber of The Conservator Mr. Platt expresses 
 the opinion that the astonishing " fake " word 
 " honoriricabilitudinitatibus," in Love's Labour's 
 Lost, may be interpreted to mean that Francis 
 Bacon wrote the so-called Shakespearean dramas.
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Such conduct is a rude shock to one's critical 
 faith. If Mr. Platt proposes to stand as the spon- 
 sor for that kind of rubbish, why may not his 
 biography of Walt Whitman prove equally silly ? 
 Any new defense of the Baconian theory puts a 
 man in the position of the ingenious Ignatius 
 Donnelly or the still more cryptic Dr. Beven. 
 
 The remarkable aspect of the situation, how- 
 ever, has now to be unfolded. Mr. Platt is at the 
 same time deluded and sane. If common sense 
 will peremptorily ridicule the absurd Shakespeare 
 anagram it cannot do aught but applaud Mr. 
 Platt's temperate, loyal, vivid and vastly interest- 
 ing biography of the "good gray poet." The 
 author is an avowed and enthusiastic Whitmanite 
 and yet has not permitted his ardor to interfere 
 with the plain truth. Considering its noteworthy 
 brevity, his account of the life of the author of 
 Leaves of Grass leaves little to be desired. It is 
 singularly complete. When Mr. Platt writes of 
 Whitman he is apparently just as sensible as he 
 is foolish when igniting the Bacon-Shakespeare 
 fuse.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 I rather like that last expression, "igniting the 
 Bacon-Shakespeare fuse." Twenty years ago I 
 was called a lunatic for lending an attent ear to 
 Whitman. So the whirligig of Time brings in his 
 revenges, and who can name the lunatics of twenty 
 years to come ? 
 
 In regard to the " ab spelled backward " con- 
 undrum in Love's Labour's Lost, I will quote 
 the note from Dr. Furness's Variorum : 
 
 Ba] Halliwell : This dialogue is constructed on 
 the actual mode of the elementary education of 
 the time, which has been partially continued to 
 the present day. That this is the case is seen by 
 the following instruction given in the Ludus Liter- 
 arius or the Grammar Schoole, 1627, p. 19 ft Then 
 teach them to put the consonants in order before 
 every vo well and to repeate them oft over together; 
 as thus : to begin with b, and to say ba, be, bi, bo, 
 bu. So d, da, de, di, do, du. . . . When 
 they can doe all these, then teach them to spell 
 them in order, thus ; What spells b-a ? If the
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 childe cannot tell, teach him to say thus ; b-a, ba ; 
 b-e, be ; b-i, bi. . . . Then aske him againe 
 what spels b-a, and he will tell you ; so all the rest 
 in order." 
 
 This is unquestionable as far as it goes but it 
 does not give the answer to Moth's conundrum, 
 and I have yet to hear of any spelling book or any 
 treatise on pedagogy that touches the subject of 
 spelling ab backward with the horn on his head. 
 The answer to the conundrum may be found on 
 page thirty-two of the present brochure. 
 
 The Northumberland MSS., mentioned in these 
 pages, were discovered in 1867, but they have re- 
 mained in the seclusion of the library of the Duke 
 of Northumberland, at Alnwick Castle, in North- 
 umberlandshire, and of course inaccessible to the 
 general public until, in 1904, they were reproduced 
 in collotype facsimile under the direction of Mr. 
 Frank J. Burgoyne, Librarian of the Lambeth 
 Public Libraries. This document Dr. Appleton
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Morgan, in New Shakespeareana, calls the Ro- 
 setta Stone of the Baconian controversy, and it 
 would seem that the orthodox Shaksperians them- 
 selves recognize and are afraid of the startling and 
 revolutionary character of its evidence. It was 
 reviewed in The London Athenaeum for August 
 27, 1904, to the extent of three pages, the reviewer 
 going to the minuteness of analyzing the editor's 
 sources of information, which he claims in some 
 cases were extraneous to the MSS. themselves, 
 but the fact of prime importance, the juxtaposition 
 of the names of Bacon and Shakespeare and the 
 names of their productions, which is the truly 
 surprising thing about the book, its sole claim to 
 importance and the raison d'etre of its reproduc- 
 tion, he slurs over with bare mention in a single 
 line. This is an example of scholarly, orthodox 
 criticism where the Verulam problem is concerned. 
 If any one phenomenon similar to these men- 
 tioned in these pages in regard to Shake-speare,
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 but not connecting his name with that of Bacon, 
 had been noted, the commentators would have 
 vied with one another to trace out its final ramifi- 
 cations, but the mere mention of Bacon's name is 
 treated with derision and not, as it should be, with 
 an honest attempt to examine and weigh evidence. 
 This is surely not the true critical spirit. It is not 
 necessary to assume at present that " Bacon wrote 
 Shake-speare," but it certainly is necessary in the 
 interest of honest criticism and fair play to make 
 a strenuous effort to determine the reason for this 
 continual association of their names. It is to this 
 spirit of honest criticism and fair play that I make 
 my appeal. 
 
 The chapter on the cryptograms in Love's 
 Labour's Lost and that on the probable relation of 
 William Shaksper to the Plays have appeared dur- 
 ing the last year in The Conservator, Philadelphia. 
 
 So much confusion exists in regard to the spell- 
 ing of the name Shake-speare that a word in 
 
 VIII
 
 PREFACE 
 
 reference to the system I have adopted may not 
 be out of place. The actor spelled his name 
 Shaksper ; in the records of Stratford it is spelled 
 in various ways, Shaxpur, Shacksper, &c., but 
 always with the first syllable short. On title-pages, 
 the name of the author is invariably spelled 
 Shakespeare or Shake-speare, except in the case 
 of Love's Labour's Lost, where it is spelled 
 Shakespere ; but always the first syllable is long. 
 I therefore spell the name of the actor-manager 
 Shaksper, and the name of the author Shake-speare, 
 and use the corresponding derivatives, Shaksper- 
 ian and Shakespearean. By this I neither affirm 
 nor deny the identity of the actor and author. 
 That is the question at issue ; but so long as it 
 is at issue I shall not consider that any ref- 
 erence on the part of contemporaries or others to 
 Plays or Poems of Shakespeare or Shake-speare 
 is any evidence of the identity of the author with 
 the actor. It is a pen name in any case.
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Since the first part of this book was written I 
 have learned that the reviewer in the Quarterly 
 Review, referred to on page seventeen, is Mr. 
 Andrew Lang, who has since elaborated his review 
 into a rather long essay which is the subject of my 
 final chapter. 
 
 I have not attempted to give a synopsis of the 
 pro-Bacon argument ; that is too voluminous for 
 the limits which I have assigned to myself. I 
 have undertaken simply to present certain facts 
 which I have observed, with mention, when it 
 seemed necessary, of correlated facts observed by 
 others. The literature of the subject is volumin- 
 ous enough already. The case on its merits is 
 sufficiently well stated in the works of Judge 
 Holmes, Mr. Edwin Reed, Judge Webb and 
 others ; I only add my mite in the interest of fair 
 play. 
 
 My attention has been called to a new work by 
 Mr. Tudor Jenks, In the Days of Shakespeare.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Mr. Jenks seems to be quite orthodox, yet he 
 makes the concession that "young men in need 
 of money and with a taste for writing worked for 
 the theaters then as they work for the periodical 
 press now. . . . Francis Bacon was very likely 
 to have been one of these. We know that he pre- 
 pared masques and pageants and revels for Grays' 
 Inn festivities ; we know he was long a barrister 
 in need of money and with little practice. No 
 doubt he did what so many men of his time are 
 known to have done, used his pen to earn money 
 from theatrical managers. . . . Gray's Inn was 
 famous for its masques and revels. Francis Ba- 
 con, we are told, was long the presiding genius of 
 the Inn, and wrote masques for their festivities 
 besides directing them. Here, then, is a locality 
 where Shakespeare may have come in contact with 
 the great philosopher." Now there, for once, is 
 an honest way of treating the matter. Some more 
 concessions of that kind may lead to the highway
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 to the truth. With such concessions it is only a 
 matter of degree. But how many of the Verulam 
 jewels got imbedded and which are they ?
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Introductory .... . . . . 1 
 
 The Bacon cryptogram in Love's Labour's Lost ... 16 
 
 The Bacon cryptogram in the Shake-speare Quartos . . 41 
 A suggestion as to the probable relation of William Shaksper 
 
 to the Shake-speare plays . , : . .< ? . . 51 
 
 Testimony of the First Folio . . . . ' . . . 62 
 
 An orthodox defense . . . . . . . 88 
 
 Did Marston and Hall read the Quarto monograms ? . . 105 
 
 An afterword . 117
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 What I am about to say in the following pages 
 I do not regard as controversial. I shall not con- 
 tend that "Bacon wrote Shake-speare" nor offer 
 any argument in the Bacon-Shake-speare contro- 
 versy unless a plain statement of facts of easy 
 verification shall be considered an argument. I 
 have used the expression "Bacon-Shake-speare 
 controversy " because it is generally accepted, but 
 I am in doubt whether that can be properly called 
 a controversy in which one side presents evidence 
 and the other only calls names. Whether or not 
 the believers in the Baconian authorship of the 
 Plays ought to be inside or outside of the mad- 
 house may be the subject of an interesting dis- 
 cussion on its own merits but it does not seem 
 likely to give us any information as to who wrote 
 Hamlet and Lear. 
 
 What I here offer is simply the result of obser- 
 l
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 ration. I shall offer no attempt at explanation, 
 and, in order to avoid controversy at present 
 irrelevant, I wish distinctly to deny that what I am 
 about to present proves Bacon's authorship of the 
 Plays. What I do claim, and I think in reason, is 
 that they seem to constitute grounds for a very 
 strong suspicion that he was in some manner con- 
 cerned in their production or associated with them. 
 If I am right in this it would appear to open a 
 reasonable and interesting field of investigation to 
 students of English literature. 
 
 The odium scholasticum of today seems to follow 
 very closely in the tracks of the odium theologicum 
 of a generation or two ago. Nobody today even 
 hints at burning, hanging, or even putting into 
 a madhouse, those misguided people who have 
 doubts that the apparent motion of the sun was 
 stayed awhile at Joshua's command or that the 
 whale made a meal upon Jonah, but to the mad-' 
 house with those who have doubts in regard to the 
 2
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 truth of a literary tradition decidedly less well 
 authenticated ! 
 
 My presentation of the facts orvagaries which 
 follows may show me to be more puzzled in ignor- 
 ance than the Egyptians in their fog, but that is 
 beside the point ; what I want to know is what it 
 all means. 
 
 Before pointing out any of my own discoveries 
 or vain imaginings I shall call attention to a few 
 of like nature which have already been pointed 
 out, because in dealing with a case which in its very 
 nature depends upon circumstantial evidence, the 
 more that can be adduced in corroboration the 
 better. I shall not, however, go into any discus- 
 sion of the Donnelly and Gallup ciphers, for the 
 reason that they are at present in too chaotic a 
 state to yield any satisfaction. As for Mrs. Gal- 
 lup's, no one but she seems to be able to distinguish 
 the differentiation of type upon which it is founded, 
 and her cipher story is so improbable in itself as 
 3
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 to require an absolute demonstration to warrant 
 belief in it. On the other hand, however, in the 
 book called Baconiana, or Certain genuine Remains 
 of Sir Francis Bacon, &c., &c., published in 1679, 
 in the Introduction, by Thomas Tenison, Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury, it is distinctly inferred that 
 a cipher such as is described by Mrs. Gallup fol- 
 lowing Bacon's own description does exist in 
 Bacon's Advancement of Learning, edition of 
 1623. The passage from Dr. Tenison's Introduc- 
 tion is as follows: "The fairest, and most correct, 
 Edition of this Book in Latine, is that in Folio, 
 printed at London, Anno 1623. And whoever 
 would understand the Lord Bacon's Cypher, let 
 him consult that accurate Edition. For, in some 
 other Editions which I have perused, the form of 
 the Letters of the Alphabet, in which much of 
 the Mystery consisteth, is not observed: But 
 the Roman and Italic shapes of them are con- 
 founded." 
 
 4
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 In regard to Mr. Donnelly's cipher the case is 
 somewhat different. His failure to give an intel- 
 ligent interpretation of it has caused it to pass 
 almost out of notice, but nevertheless, in the 
 course of his investigations, he did show some 
 curious facts, which have never been gainsaid, 
 about the arrangement of the text of the First 
 Folio, in reference to the pagination and the posi- 
 tion of certain words, and their numerical relation, 
 which are strongly suggestive of a cryptic signifi- 
 cance. The talk about "mere coincidence" is 
 mere nonsense. If a pistol bullet, removed from 
 the body of a murdered man, is found to fit an 
 empty chamber of the prisoner's revolver, nobody 
 dismisses the matter as "mere coincidence." It 
 may not be proof, but it is evidence. 
 
 That "was a time," as Miss Bacon says, " when 
 
 the cipher, in which one could write omniaper omnia, 
 
 was in request when even 'wheel ciphers' and 
 
 * doubles' were thought not unworthy of philo- 
 
 5
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 sophic notice. It was a time, too, when the phon- 
 ographic art was cultivated and put to other uses 
 than at present, and when a nom de plume was re- 
 quired for other purposes than to serve as the 
 refuge of an author's modesty or vanity or caprice. 
 It was a time when puns and charades and enigmas 
 and anagrams and monograms and ciphers and 
 puzzles were not mere sport and child's play : when 
 they had need to be close and solvable only 
 to those who should solve them." I suppose 
 no one will venture to deny it; nor, I suppose, 
 will anyone deny that the brothers Anthony and 
 Francis Bacon were proficient in the invention and 
 use of cryptic writing, and that they carried on 
 correspondence with its aid ; so that if they or 
 either of them had anything to do with the produc- 
 tion of the Shake-speare plays there is no improb- 
 ability but exactly the reverse in the proposition 
 that cryptograms were used there, and that propo- 
 sition would not be invalidated by the fact that 
 
 6
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 unsuccessful attempts have been made to discover 
 and read them. If cryptic allusions are actually 
 found in the Plays and Poems they would seem to 
 be matters for explanation rather than for ridicule 
 and sneers. That there are such allusions I shall 
 attempt to show, and I shall begin with a very 
 brief review of some of the allusions to "Bacon" 
 in the Plays and Poems which have already been 
 pointed out and which suggest the idea that they 
 may have a cryptic meaning. 
 
 The word " Bacon" itself occurs only twice in 
 the Plays and both times under suspicious circum- 
 stances. The passages are as follows: 
 
 Mrs. Quickly Hang-hog, is latten for Bacon, I 
 warrant you. Merry Wives, IV, /. 
 
 Second Carrier I have a Gammon of Bacon, and 
 two razes of Ginger, to be delivered as farre as 
 Charing-crosse. 1st Henry, IV, II, I. 
 
 Mr. Donnelly showed the curious fact that in 
 the Folio "Hang hog is Latin for Bacon" occurs 
 
 7
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 on the 53d page of the Comedies, and "gammon 
 of Bacon" on the 53d page of the Histories ; also, 
 that the word " Bacon," in "gammon of Bacon/' is 
 the 371st word on the page, excluding from the 
 count words in parentheses, and that this number 
 is equal to the number of the page, 53, multiplied 
 by 7, the number of italicized words in the first 
 column, 7x53=371. Apparently, however, he 
 did not notice that the word " Bacon," in " Latten 
 for Bacon," in the Merry Wives, is the 795th 
 word on the page, excluding from the count words 
 in parentheses, that there are 15 italicized words 
 in the first column and that 15x53=795. 
 
 The passage in the Merry Wives occurs in a 
 short scene, having no connection with the plot of 
 the play. It did not appear in the Quarto of 1602, 
 but for the first time in the Folio of 1623. It con- 
 tains a pun on Bacon's name which, strange to say, 
 reappears in a story related by himself which 
 was not published until after his death, which 
 8
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 occurred ten years after Shaksper's death. It is as 
 follows : 
 
 Sir Nicholas Bacon being appointed a judge for 
 the Northern Circuit, and having brought his trials 
 that came before him to such a pass, as the passing 
 of sentence on malefactors, he was by one of the 
 malefactors mightily importuned for to save his 
 life ; which, when nothing that he said did avail, 
 he at length desired his mercy on account of kin- 
 dred. " Prithee," said my lord judge, " how came 
 that in ? " "Why, if it please you, my lord, your 
 name is Bacon and mine is Hog, and in all ages 
 Hog and Bacon have been so near kindred that 
 they are not to be separated." " Ay, but," replied 
 Judge Bacon, "you and I cannot be kindred ex- 
 cept you be hanged, for Hog is not Bacon until it 
 be well hanged." Bacon's Apothegms, No. 36. 
 
 The passage in Henry IV contains a pun equally 
 obvious; "a gammon of Bacon" being equivalent 
 to a hoax or humbug on the part of Bacon. 
 
 On the 53d page of the Comedies, in the other 
 
 9
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 column, nearly opposite the words, " Hang hog is 
 latten for Bacon," is this: "Well I will proclaim 
 myself what I am;" and on the 53d page of the 
 Histories, in the other column, opposite the 
 words, " I have a Gammon of Bacon," occur the 
 words : " We have the receit of Fern-seed, we walk 
 invisible." 
 
 It has been said that the two passages referred 
 to are the only ones in the Plays in which the 
 name "Bacon" appears. It may be well to add 
 that " Bacon-fed " and " Bacons " both occur in 
 the First Part of Henry Fourth, but I fail to dis- 
 cover any reference to the proper name in either, 
 at least any sufficiently distinct to be worth men- 
 tioning in this connection. 
 
 In that exceedingly clever and entertaining book 
 called, Is it Shakespeare ? which is based especially 
 upon a study of the Sonnets, and the evidence of 
 Bacon's hand in them, the ingenious author calls 
 attention to the twenty-sixth Sonnet : 
 10
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Lord of my loue, to whom in vassalage 
 
 Thy merrit hath my dutie strongly knit; 
 
 To thee I send this written ambassage 
 
 To witness duty, not to show my wit. 
 
 Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine 
 
 May make seeme bare, in wanting words to show 
 
 it; 
 
 But that I hope some good conceit of thine 
 In thy souls thought (all naked) will bestow it : 
 Til whatsoever star that guides my mouing, 
 Points to me graciously with faire aspect, 
 And puts apparrell on my tottered louing, 
 To show me worthy of their sweet respect, 
 Then may I dare to boast how I doe love thee, 
 Til then, not show my head where thou maist 
 
 proue me. 
 
 " This Sonnet," the author goes on to say, " as 
 all critics admit, has an interesting and remarkable 
 resemblance to the dedication of Lucrece to the 
 Earl of Southampton in 1594, which was signed by 
 William Shakespeare. This Sonnet is certainly 
 11
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 addressed to some one in high position ; the words 
 vassalage and ambassage settle that. It also seems 
 to be the concluding Sonnet (L'envoi) of a 
 sequence (XVIII-XXVI), where deep love and 
 admiration are expressed for a high-born youth, 
 and where the author, although he rather auda- 
 ciously claims immortality for his verse (S. XVII), 
 still for 'fear of trust' does not go the whole 
 length of expressing his love, or, as it appears, 
 even his name as yet, but the verses or * books' 
 that he sends are to be the ' dumb presagers ' of 
 his ' speaking breast' (S. XXIII). And he fin- 
 ishes, in this last Sonnet of the sequence (XXVI), 
 by hoping that his young friend will have such a 
 'good conceit' of the bare verses sent, that he 
 will take them in and cherish them in their 
 nakedness; and then, the author hints, if his 
 stars lend auspicious help to his future move- 
 ments 
 
 Then may I dare to boast how 1 do love thee, 
 12
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Till then not show my head where thou may'st 
 prove me. 
 
 Now we shall see how the author lets out the 
 great secret in those words show my head. This 
 Sonnet (XXVI) naturally leads us to make a 
 closer examination of the dedication of Lucrece, 
 with which it is evidently connected. The dedica- 
 tion reads as follows : 
 
 THE RAPE OF LUCRECE 
 
 TO THE 
 RIGHT HONOURABLE HENRY WRIOTHESLEY 
 
 Earle of Southampton, and Baron of Titchfield 
 The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without 
 end : wherefore this Pamphlet without beginning 
 is but a superfluous Moity. The warrant I have 
 of your Honourable disposition, not the worth of 
 my untutored Lines, makes it assured of accept- 
 ance. What I have done is yours, what I have to 
 do is yours, being part in all I have, devotedly 
 yours. Were my worth greater, my duety would 
 show greater ; meane time, as it is, it is bound to 
 13
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 your Lordship: to whom I wish long life still 
 lengthened with all happiness. 
 
 Your Lordship's in all duety, 
 
 William Shakespeare. 
 
 Now all this seems plain and straightforward 
 enough, except the apparently unmeaning and un- 
 necessary remark about 'this Pamphlet without be- 
 ginning' being 'but a superfluous Moity.' Such 
 a statement naturally leads one to examine the 
 'beginning' of the Pamphlet in its first edition as 
 presented and dedicated to Southampton, and lo ! 
 Bacon ' shows his head ' at once, for the first two 
 lines are headed by this monogram 
 
 F B R 
 
 /. e. Fr. B., which may well be called also a super- 
 fluous moity of Fr. Bacon, Fr. representing one 
 half of his name with the superfluous B flowing 
 over from the other half." 
 
 The first two lines of the poem are printed thus : 
 14
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 FRom the besieged Ardea all in post 
 Borne by the trustless wings of false desire. 
 
 Not only does this cryptogram, Fr. B., appear 
 at the beginning of the Poem, but the signature, 
 F. Bacon, at the end, by a certain peculiar arrange- 
 ment of the letter F in " Finis " and the syllables 
 "ba" and "con" in the last two lines. Of course 
 the italics are mine, but the F, ba and con are so 
 arranged as to be in an absolutely straight line in 
 original : 
 
 The Romans plausibly did give consent 
 To Tarquin's everlasting banishment 
 
 FINIS 
 
 For a full explanation of these curiosities and 
 others of a like character the reader is referred to 
 the original work. They are mentioned here 
 merely to show that those which are about to be 
 described do not stand alone. 
 
 15
 
 THE BACON CRYPTOGRAM IN LOVE'S 
 LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 In 1897 I sent a note to The Conservator 
 showing that the curious Hog Latin word Honor- 
 ificabilitudinitatibus in act V scene 1 of Love's 
 Labour's Lost, is an anagram of the Latin 
 sentence, "Hi ludi, tuiti sibi, Fr. Bacono nati" 
 which may be translated, " These plays, origina- 
 ting with Francis Bacon, are protected for them- 
 selves," or " entrusted to themselves." I stated 
 at the time that as the word had been used before 
 the appearance of the play, in the Lament for 
 Scotland, for instance, the existence of the anagram 
 would seem to have little significance were it not 
 for certain concurrent facts. Some of those facts 
 I set forth at the time and to some others my atten- 
 tion has been called since. It is for the purpose 
 of setting these forth and bringing all together that 
 I again recur to the subject. In order to present 
 16
 
 IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 the evidence properly it will be necessary to re- 
 capitulate, which I shall do very briefly. 
 
 Before proceeding I might say that the note was 
 rather extensively quoted at home and abroad and 
 commented upon mainly in the way of ridicule 
 and, as usual in such cases, garbled. The Quar- 
 terly Review did me the honor to notice it with 
 the remark that the anagramatic sentence " is mag- 
 nificent but it is not Latin." In this my critic was 
 mistaken. I do not make this statement on the 
 ground of any scholarship of my own, but on the 
 authority of eminent Latinists in England, Ire- 
 land, Canada and the United States. It is some- 
 what unusual but perfectly correct Latin. But 
 there is no need to discuss Latin grammar ; the 
 meaning is clear enough. 
 
 The play opens with lines strikingly suggestive 
 
 of a sentence in a letter from Bacon to Bishop 
 
 Andrews, which, not only in this connection but 
 
 in itself, is significant. " But I count the use that 
 
 17
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 a man should seek of the publishing of his own 
 writings before his death to be an untimely antici- 
 pation of that which is proper to follow a man and 
 not go along with him." And they are almost 
 equally suggestive of a passage in Bacon's Ad- 
 vancement of Learning. " The pretense thereof is 
 to remove vulgar capacities from being admitted 
 to the secrets of knowledge, and to reserve them 
 to selected auditors, or wits of such sharpness as 
 can pierce the veil." Moreover, the main intent 
 of the play seems to be to ridicule the peculiar 
 scholastic learning which, it is well known, Bacon 
 held in extreme contempt. These of course are 
 but hints. 
 
 I shall proceed at once to the consideration of 
 the scene which claims our attention, the first of 
 the last act ; and will note here that for the pur- 
 poses of our investigation a modern edition, 
 amended, corrected and improved by the various 
 editors, is of no value whatever. We must go to 
 18
 
 IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 the Quarto of 1598 or to the Folio of 1623 which 
 is printed practically verbatim from the 1598 
 Quarto or to a reprint of one of them. 
 
 The following, which is as much of the scene in 
 question as we shall have to do with, is reprinted 
 verbatim from the Quarto of 1598, which is the 
 earliest publication of any play bearing the name 
 William Shakespeare on the title-page. The 
 Folio of 1623 which is the next edition differs 
 from this only in the correction of a few obvious mis- 
 prints. The quotations following are from the Folio. 
 
 Enter the Pedant, the Curat, and Dull. 
 
 Pedant. Satis quid sufficit. 
 
 Curat. I prayse God for you sir, your reasons 
 at Dinner haue been sharp & sententious : pleasant 
 without scurillitie, wittie without affection, auda- 
 cious without impudencie, learned without opinion, 
 and strange without heresie : I did conuerse this 
 quandam day with a companion of the kings, who 
 is intituled, nommated, or called, Don Adriano de 
 Armatho. 
 
 19
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Fed. Noui hominum tanquam te y His humour is 
 loftie, his discourse peremptorie : his tongue fyled, 
 his eye ambitious, his gait maiestical, and his 
 generall behauiour vaine, rediculous, & thrasoni- 
 call. He is too picked, to spruce, too affected, 
 to od as it were, too peregrinat as I may call 
 it. 
 
 Curat. A most singular and choyce Epithat, 
 Draw-out his Table-booke 
 
 Peda. He draweth out the thred of his verbositie, 
 finer then the staple of his argument. I abhorre 
 such phanatticall phantasms, such insociable and 
 poynte deuise companions, such rackers of ortag- 
 riphie, as to speak dout fine, when he should say 
 doubt; det, when he shold pronounce debt; 
 debt, not det : he clepeth a Calfe, Caulfe : halfe, 
 haulfe : neighbour vocaturnebour ; neigh abreuiated 
 ne : this is abhominable, which he would call ab- 
 bominable, it insinuateth me of infamie : ne inteligis 
 domine, to make frantique lunatique ? 
 
 Curat. Laus deo, bene intelligo. 
 
 Peda. Borne boon for boon prescian, a litle scratcht, 
 twil serue. 
 
 20
 
 IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 Enter Braggart, Boy. 
 
 Cur at. Vides ne quis venit? 
 
 Peda. Video, et gaudio. 
 
 Brag. Chirra. 
 
 Peda. Quari Chirra, not Sirra ? 
 
 Brag. Men of peace well incontred. 
 
 Ped. Most millitarie sir salutation. 
 
 Boy. They have been at a great feast of Lan- 
 guages, and stolne the scraps. 
 
 Clow. O they haue lyud long on the almsbasket 
 of wordes. I maruaile thy M. hath not eaten thee 
 for a worde, for thou art not so long by the head as 
 honorificabilitudinitatibus : thou art easier swal- 
 lowed then a flapdragon. 
 
 Page. Peace, the peale begins. 
 
 Brag. Mounsier, are you not lettred ? 
 
 Page. Yes yes, he teaches boyes the Horne- 
 booke : What is Ab speld backward with the 
 home on his head ? 
 
 Poda. Ba, peuricia with a home added, 
 
 Pag. Ba most seely Sheepe, with a home: you 
 heare his learning. 
 
 Peda. Quis Quis thou Consonant ? 
 21
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Pag. The last of the five Vowels if You repeate 
 them, or the fift if I. 
 
 Peda. I will repeate them : a e I. 
 
 Pag. The Sheepe, the other two concludes it o u. 
 
 Brag. Now by the sault wane of the meditara- 
 nium, a sweete tutch, a quicke vene we of wit, 
 snip snap, quick and home, it reioyceth my intel- 
 lect, true wit. 
 
 Page. Offerd by a child to an old man : which 
 is wit-old. 
 
 Peda. What is the figure ? What is the figure ? 
 
 Page. Homes. 
 
 Peda. Thou disputes like an Infant : goe whip 
 thy Gigg. 
 
 Pag. Lende me your Home to make one, and 
 I will whip about your Infamie unu cita a gigge of 
 a Cuckolds home. 
 
 Clow. And I had but one peny in the world thou 
 shouldst haue it to buy Ginger bread : Holde, 
 there is the verie Remuneration I had of thy 
 Maister, thou halfepennie purse of wit, thou 
 Pidgin-egge of discretion. O and the heavens 
 were so pleased, that thou wart but my Bastard ; 
 22
 
 IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 What a ioyfull father wouldst make me ? Go to, 
 thou hast it ad dungel at the fingers ends, as they 
 say. 
 
 The scene begins with a conversation be- 
 tween the schoolmaster and the curate and the 
 first words are, " Satis quidsufficit." Why " quid " 
 is printed instead of " quod " I do not know. The 
 text is full of apparent errors of this kind, all of 
 which have been carefully corrected by modern 
 editors. The words "Satis quid sufficit" are 
 printed in italics, and, interspersed through the 
 first half of the scene, are a number of other 
 Latin sentences, each distinguished from the body 
 of the text by being printed in italics. Including 
 the one already mentioned they are in translation 
 as follows : "That which suffices is enough." " I 
 know the man as well as I know thee." "Do 
 you understand me, sir ? " " Praise God ! I un- 
 derstand well." Then comes a series of vocables 
 they cannot be called words and cannot be trans- 
 23
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 lated, because they are meaningless as follows: 
 " Borne boon for boon prescian" This has been in- 
 terpreted by various editors, each to suit his own 
 fancy, some changing it to make Latin, some to 
 make French, some giving it up as hopelessly cor- 
 rupt and abandoning it altogether. It will be re- 
 ferred to again further on, but to continue the 
 Latin phrases in italics : " Do you see who comes ? " 
 " I see and rejoice." " Wherefore ? " Then comes 
 the long word, honorificabilitudinitatibus, which, 
 while not exactly classic Latin, is easily enough 
 translated thus : " By the power of the making for 
 honor," and it is the anagram of this Latin sen- 
 tence which, translated, is : " These plays, origi- 
 nating with Francis Bacon, are protected for them- 
 selves," maugre The Quarterly Review. 
 
 As has frequently been pointed out, the word 
 
 in a slightly different and shorter form honorifica- 
 
 bilitudino or honorificabilitudine, probably the latter ; 
 
 the final letter is not very clear occurs on the 
 
 24
 
 IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 cover of the famous Northumberland manuscripts, 
 which consist of a part of a manuscript book dis- 
 covered in Northumberland House in 1867, and 
 are admitted to have been in Bacon's library. The 
 part of the book remaining contains a number of 
 Bacon's acknowledged works. On the cover is a 
 table of contents. In this table, in addition to the 
 names of the papers by Bacon, which the book 
 actually contains, there are listed the names of two 
 Shake-speare plays, Richard II and Richard III. 
 These are near the end of the list ; unfortunately 
 the corresponding part of the book is missing, " as 
 rare things will, it vanished," and, as usual when 
 we seem to be approaching anything directly con- 
 nected with the relation of Bacon and Shake- 
 speare, we are left in mystery. 
 
 On the blank spaces of the cover of the 
 Northumberland MSS. there are written, in a con- 
 temporary hand, a number of sentences, phrases, 
 words and parts of words, including the names 
 25
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Bacon and William Shakespeare, several times 
 repeated, and oddly mixed, in one case actually 
 reading, " By Mr. Francis William Shakespeare 
 Bacon, Rychard the second, Rychard the third." 
 There are some lines of Latin verse as follows : 
 
 Multis annis jam transacts y 
 Nulla fides est in pactis, 
 Mell in ore, Verba lactis, 
 fell in corde, ffraus in factis. 
 
 " Many years having now passed, the compact 
 is no longer binding Honey in the mouth, words 
 of milk, bitterness in the heart, fraud in the deed." 
 It may be noted here, for whatever it is worth, 
 that on the second of April, 1597, Rodolphe Brad- 
 ley wrote to Anthony Bacon : " Your gracious 
 speeches concerning the getting of a prebend- 
 shippe for me ... be the words of a faith- 
 full friende and not of a courtiour, who hath Mel 
 in ore et verba lactis, sed fel in corde et fraus in 
 factis." 
 
 26
 
 IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 Then there is aline from Shake-speare's Lucrece, 
 but with a variant in the last word : " Reveal- 
 ing day through every cranny peeps," followed 
 by the words, " and see your William Shakespeare." 
 And there is the long word already mentioned 
 (honor ificabilitudine} which in this form is an ana- 
 gram of " Initio hi ludi Fr. Bacone," " These plays 
 [are] in their inception, Francis Bacon's." This 
 book has recently been published in a photographic 
 facsimile reproduction which presumably can be 
 seen at any of the large libraries. 
 
 The Northumberland MSS., as has been said, 
 are known to have been in Bacon's library and are 
 in the handwriting of his secretaries. The words 
 on the cover are supposed to have been written by 
 John Davies of Hereford, he who about 1610 ad- 
 dressed to Bacon this sonnet: 
 
 Thy bounty and the Beauty of thy Witt 
 Comprisd in Lists of Law and learned Arts, 
 Each making thee for great Imployment fitt 
 27
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Which now thou hast, (though short of thy deserts) 
 Compells my pen to let fall shining Inke 
 And to bedew the Bates that deck thy Front; 
 And to thy health in Helicon to drinke 
 As to her Eellamour the Muse is wont: 
 For thou dost her embosom ; and, dost use 
 Her company for sport twixt grave affairs : 
 So vtterest Law the liuelyer through thy Muse. 
 And for that all thy Notes are sweetest Aires ; 
 My Muse thus notes thy worth in ev'ry Line! 
 With yncke which thus she sugars ; so, to shine. 
 
 Here we have a direct statement (by one in a 
 position to know) that Bacon was beguiling himself 
 with the Muse during the intervals of his profes- 
 sional and philosophic labors a statement prob- 
 ably by the very man who wrote those curious items 
 on the MSS. cover, or, to be rid of probabilities, 
 certainly either by him or by one of his fellow sec- 
 retaries. The allusion in the last line of this son- 
 net to Shake-speare's "sugared sonnets among his 
 private friends," seems very obvious. 
 28
 
 IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 Now, to go back to the combination of syllables, 
 Borne boon for boon prescian. Immediately following 
 it, in Roman text, are the words, " a little scratcht, 
 'twill serve." It is well known that in the print- 
 ing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a 
 short dash or " scratch " over a letter indicated 
 the elision of a letter or letters which should follow 
 it. All printed matter of that era shows it on 
 almost every page. Some time after the publica- 
 tion of my former paper on this subject the Rev. 
 William J. Sutton, of Mungret College, Limerick, 
 Ireland, made a suggestion in The New Ireland 
 Review which he has since embodied in his book, 
 The Shakespeare Enigma. It is this : The inex- 
 plicable line, " Borne boon for boon prescian" is an 
 anagram of " Pro bono orbis F. Bacon e nemo" 
 which makes no sense. But " a little scratcht, 
 'twill serve." We put the little scratch over the e 
 making it esfznd it reads : "Pro bono orbis F. Bacon e 
 [est] nemo" "For the good of all, F. Bacon is 
 
 29
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 nameless." Taking the italicised words, and, in- 
 cluding the two anagrams, they read thus : " That 
 which suffices is enough." " I know the man as 
 well as I know thee." " Do you understand me, 
 sir ? " " Praise God ! I understand well." " For 
 the good of all, F. Bacon is nameless." " Do you 
 see who comes ? " "I see and rejoice." " Where- 
 fore ! " " [ By the power of the making for hon- 
 or. ] " " These plays, originating with Fr. Bacon, 
 are protected for themselves." "Who is it? Who 
 is it?" So far we have a remarkable concatena- 
 tion of enigmas, but we have by no means finished. 
 The speech of Costard to Moth, the pert little 
 page, and his reply, are as follows : 
 
 Clown [ Costard} O they have liv'd long on the 
 almes-basket of words. I marvell thy M. hath 
 not eaten thee for a word, for thou art not so long 
 by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus : Thou 
 art easier swallowed than a flapdragon. 
 
 Page [ Moth ] Peace, the peale begins. 
 30
 
 IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 The story we have been told may be hard to 
 swallow, but not so hard as a flapdragon. A flap- 
 dragon was a raisin or some other dainty, floating 
 on ignited brandy, and the sport was to catch it in 
 the mouth and swallow it while the brandy was 
 still burning. The game was one peculiar to Hal- 
 loween or Christmas or Twelfth Night ; I will not 
 specify which, because in the first place I do not 
 know, and in the second place if I were to make 
 a mistake I should be held up to ridicule and all 
 my statements overthrown. And I do not like 
 ridicule ; if I did I should write advocating the 
 Baconian authorship of the Plays. But to proceed : 
 
 Eragart iArmado to Holofemes.] Mounsier, 
 are you not lettred ? 
 
 Page [ Moth ] Yes, yes, he teaches boyes the 
 Horne-booke: What is Ab speld backward with 
 the horn on his head? 
 
 Pedagogue [ Holofemes ] Ba, puericia with a home 
 added. 
 
 31
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Page [ Moth ] Ba most seely Sheepe, with a home : 
 you heare his learning. 
 
 Holofernes' reply does not seem to be a very 
 satisfactory answer to the conundrum, and I doubt 
 if I should have guessed it if the hint had not 
 been dropped in a letter which was sent to me by 
 my friend, the late Dr. Bucke, from Mr. A. Ans- 
 combe, suggesting that the horn might refer to 
 some mark of abbreviation. I take this occasion 
 to thank Mr. Anscombe never having had op- 
 portunity of doing so before for his very sug- 
 gestive hint, for I soon found that a horn-shaped 
 mark at the beginning of a word on the head in 
 Elizabethan writing and printing, stood for the 
 syllable con; thus 3clave=conclave. Any diction- 
 ary of printing will verify this statement. Then 
 Ab with the horn on its head is 3ab and back- 
 ward it is, as I have shown in New Shakespeareana, 
 ba;3=Bacon. " Coincidences " seem to be galling 
 one another's kibes but they will not hold off yet. 
 32
 
 IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 Next comes : 
 
 Pedagogue [Holof ernes 1 Quis quis, [who is it 
 who is it ? ] thou Consonant ? 
 
 Why was Moth called a " consonant ? " I have 
 sometimes thought perhaps [con sonansl because 
 he was sounding with or interrupting the school- 
 master ; on the other hand it may be because he 
 sounded "con" on the head of ab backward, 
 thereby furnishing a somewhat obscure answer to 
 the question. Then follows this : 
 
 Page [ Moth ] The last of the five Vowels if You 
 repeat them, the fift if I. 
 
 Pedagogue [Holofernes] I will repeat them : a e I. 
 
 Page The Sheepe, the other two concludes it o u. 
 
 Braggart [Armado] Now by the salt wave of 
 the medeteranium, a sweet tutch, a quick venewe 
 of wit, snip snap, quick & home, it rejoyceth my 
 intellect, true wit. 
 
 Page Offered by a childe to an old man : which 
 is wit-old. 
 
 33
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Pedagogue What is the figure? What is the 
 figure ? 
 
 Page Homes. 
 
 Pedagogue Thou disputes like an Infant: goe 
 whip thy Gigge. 
 
 Page Lend me your Home to make one, and 
 I will whip about your Infamie unum cita a gigge 
 of a Cuckolds home. 
 
 We will stop with unum cita, which the editors, 
 pitying Shake-speare's ignorance and trying to 
 throw a cloak over it, have changed to circum circa. 
 Possibly, however, Shake-speare meant what he 
 said, unum cita, which I will render, rather freely, 
 " name the man. " You have had your puzzle put 
 to you who is it? 
 
 For myself I cannot tell, but in reviewing the 
 scene it has occurred to me that perhaps if the 
 play appeared as the offspring of another than its 
 real father, this fact might account for the refer- 
 ences to the cuckold and explain why the horn- 
 34
 
 IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 shaped mark of abbreviation on the head of a b is 
 called a "cuckold's horn." Being only an Ameri- 
 can and half educated and standing in dread of 
 being classed with " a certain wretched group of 
 dilettanti who swarm over Europe and America " 
 ( with compliments to Mr. Sidney Lee, Dr. Brandes 
 and other recent critics) I refrain from making any 
 answer, though the greatest fool even an Ameri- 
 can fool can ask questions that sometimes puzzle 
 the wisest scholars to answer. I only ask the 
 questions. Will the wise men answer? Unum 
 cita! Quis? Quis? 
 
 Since the publication of the foregoing paper in 
 The Conservator of November and December, 
 1904, two objections have been suggested to the 
 belief that these cryptograms in Love's Labour's 
 Lost are not the result of accident. The first ap- 
 plies to the anagram noticed by Father Sutton in 
 "Borne boon for boon prescian" and is to the effect 
 
 35
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 that the usual explanation is quite sufficient: 
 namely, that Prescian, or rather Priscian, being the 
 name of a Roman grammarian, "Prescian a little 
 scratched " would mean that there was an error in 
 grammar. But this view is hardly borne out by 
 the text of either the Quarto or Folio, which, 
 except for corrections in spelling, is the same. 
 "Borne boon for boon prescian, a little scratcht, twil 
 serve." Both the italics and the comma make the 
 word "prescian" part of the supposed Latin 
 phrase ; moreover, it is not printed with a capital 
 as it should be if the proper name were intended. 
 The other objection applies to the whole sub- 
 ject, and is that the play is one of the earliest, per- 
 haps the very earliest, of the Shakespearean col- 
 lection, and at that early date Bacon, supposing 
 that he had anything to do with it, could scarcely 
 have anticipated the celebrity and permanence that 
 would attach to the dramas. Therefore, he would 
 have had no reason for this cryptic self-assertion, 
 36
 
 IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 .nor would he anticipate any curiosity that might 
 arise as to its interpretation. In answer to this I 
 would say that while this play is undoubtedly one 
 of the earliest of those known as Shake-speare's, it 
 was not published till 1598, and then is described 
 as being " newly corrected and augmented." The 
 first part of this scene, in which these curiosities 
 occur, is probably one of the augmentations, as it 
 has nothing to do with the plot of the play. In 
 the same year, 1598, there appeared Francis Meres' 
 Palladis Tamia, Wit's Treasury, in which he says : 
 
 As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best 
 for comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so 
 Shakespeare, among the English, is the most ex- 
 cellent in both kinds for the stage ; witness his 
 Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love 
 Labour's lost, his Love Labour's Wonne, his 
 Midsummer's Night Dreame, and his Merchant 
 of Venice : for tragedy, his Richard the 2, Rich- 
 ard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus An- 
 dronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet. 
 37
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Meres' book, Palladis Tamia, bears the imprint, 
 "At London. Printed by P. Short for Cuthbert 
 Burbie, 1598." Love's Labour's Lost, "At Lon- 
 don by W. W. for Cuthbert Burby, 1598." Here, 
 then, are two books, issued in the same year by 
 the same publisher, one making for the first time 
 the claim that the twelve dramas mentioned in the 
 above list are Shake-speare's, the other being the 
 first play ever printed, so far as we know, bearing 
 Shake-speare's name upon the title-page. The two 
 are the first public announcements of Shake-speare 
 as a playwright. For the four years previous that 
 name had been well known as that of the author of 
 Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, 
 poems which had been received with applause by 
 literary men and the public alike. During these 
 four years, and probably even before, plays now 
 known as Shake-speare's had appeared and be- 
 come familiar to the play-going public but they 
 had all appeared anonymously. Not until this 
 38
 
 IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 year, 1598, had a distinct claim been made that 
 their author was the well known poet, and then it 
 was made almost simultaneously by the publica- 
 tion of Meres' list and by the appearance of the 
 name " William Shakespeare " for the first time 
 on the title-page of any play, and that one of those 
 mentioned by Meres. 
 
 Meres' list, then, having identified the author of 
 Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece with 
 the author of the twelve plays mentioned by him, 
 all of which by this time had become popular, this 
 would appear to be the very time and place of all 
 for the true author to make his claim, if such claim 
 was ever to be made, and would seem to make it 
 quite clear what plays were designated by "hi 
 ludi." 
 
 39
 
 DESIGN ONE 
 
 DESIGN TWO 
 
 DESIGN THREE 
 
 40
 
 THE BACON CRYPTOGRAM IN THE 
 SHAKE-SPEARE QUARTOS 
 
 The three figures on the opposite page are re- 
 productions of the headpieces of the Quartos of : 
 I. A Pleasaunt Conceited History, called The 
 Taming of a Shrew. Printed at London by 
 Peter Short, 1594. 
 
 II. The First Part of the Contention betwixt the 
 two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, 
 &c. London. Printed by Thomas Creed 
 for Thomas Millington, 1594. 
 III. The Tragedy of King Richard the second. 
 London. Printed by Valentine Simmes for 
 Andrew Wise, 1597. 
 
 I fail to find the first form of headpiece in any 
 of the Quartos other than The Taming of a Shrew. 
 The second appears in The First Part of the Con- 
 tention, as mentioned above, and in the following : 
 The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth, Lon- 
 41
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 don, Printed by Thomas Creede, 1598 ; The Most 
 Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and 
 luliet, London, Printed by Thomas Creed for 
 Cuthbert Burby, 1599; The Chronicle History 
 of Henry the fift, London, Printed by Thomas 
 Creed, 1600 ; The Tragedy of King Richard the 
 third, Newly augmented by William Shakespeare, 
 London, Printed by Thomas Creede, 1602 ; A 
 Most pleasaunt and excellent conceited Comedy 
 of Syr John Falstaffe and the merrie Wives of 
 Windsor &c., By William Shakespeare, London, 
 Printed by T. C. for Arthur Johnson, 1602. The 
 third appears not only in Richard II., but also in 
 The Tragedy of King Richard the third, London, 
 Printed by Valentine Sims, for Andrew Wise, 
 1597; The second part of Henry the fourth, 
 Written by William Shakespeare, London, Printed 
 by V. S. for Andrew Wise and William Aspley, 
 1600 ; The Tragicall History of Hamlet Prince of 
 Denmarke by William Shake-speare, At London 
 42
 
 IN THE SHAKE-SPEARE QUARTOS 
 
 printed for N. L. and lohn Trundell 1603; and 
 Shake-speare's Sonnets, Never before Imprinted, 
 At London By G. Eld for T. T. 
 
 Upon comparing the three devices it will be 
 seen that they are essentially alike, differing only 
 in their outward flourishes. 
 
 DESIGN FOUR 
 
 Each is distinctly a cryptogram or monogram 
 of the letters B-A-C-O-N. By turning the figures 
 so that the left hand end is down the B is suffi- 
 ciently apparent, occupying the middle of the 
 space. The upright is formed by the top of the 
 vase and the branches growing from it. While the 
 loops of the B do not come quite together and the 
 character is not as distinctly formed as the other 
 43
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 four it clearly represents a B. The AC on the 
 left hardly needs pointing out. The O and N are 
 on the right, the O formed by the reversed C, the 
 ends of the loop of which are united by a twig and 
 leaf. It may be objected that a 
 similar arrangement of twig and leaf 
 obtains in the C on the left, which 
 is true, and it seems to be so de- 
 signed that it may be read as either 
 C or O. But it is hardly to be 
 supposed that if a cryptogram were 
 intended the readingwould be made 
 DESIGN FIVE perfectly obvious. Symmetry had 
 to be preserved or the secret would have been ex- 
 posed at once. The character on the right is 
 clearly an O, or if it is insisted that we disregard 
 the connecting twig and leaf because we have done 
 so on the left, then the symbol represents the C 
 reverse, which as has been shown stands for con, 
 and we have B-A-C-O-N, anyhow, or at least 
 44
 
 IN THE SHAKE-SPEARE QUARTOS 
 
 B-A-C-C-O-N, as the name was sometimes spelled. 
 The N is formed by the same loop, the long curved 
 arm reaching out to the right and the twig and 
 flower on top. There are the letters B-A-C-O-N 
 in direct order and with no more confusion or ob- 
 scurity than usually appears in monograms printed 
 by stationers on letter paper. 
 
 But this is not all. If the figures are held with 
 the right hand end downward at the beginning 
 or what will then be the top in each emerges the 
 letter F, and if they are reversed, then in what 
 in that position be- 
 comes the top, ap- 
 pears the letter R. 
 Now strip them of 
 their appendages and 
 they appear thus : 
 FR. BACON. I 
 confess I am not 
 any too certain about 
 
 45
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 the R ; it seems a little weak in the back. Perhaps 
 for that I may have drawn slightly upon my imagi- 
 nation, so I shall not insist upon it ; but to make 
 six letters fall together so as to spell F. Bacon is 
 surely enough to ask of any " mere coincidence." 
 So far my investigations have been confined to 
 such of the Shake-speare Quartos as appear in the 
 Griggs-Praetorius photo-lithographic reproduc- 
 tions. In what other books of the period this 
 monogram may be found I cannot say. I am told 
 that somewhat similar designs appeared in books 
 of a later date after Bacon's death but I have 
 seen none in which I could find all the letters 
 of " Bacon." At that late period they would 
 have little if any significance anyhow, and as 
 the matter stands it is sufficiently curious that 
 in twelve of the forty-three Shake-speare Quartos 
 reproduced by Messrs. Griggs and Praetorius 
 Bacon's name should appear distinctly at the 
 top of the first page. I am quite well aware 
 
 46
 
 IN THE SHAKE-SPEARE QUARTOS 
 
 that of several of the plays mentioned, the author- 
 ship is not usually attributed to Shake-speare, but 
 this does not remove or lessen the mystery, and 
 they are all in one way or another connected with 
 his work. How did the name Fr. Bacon get there 
 and what does it signify ? It did not happen by 
 accident. Simply a printer's device, someone will 
 say. But here are five different printers and at 
 least three different blocks. But if it is a printer's 
 device, why should it spell Fr. Bacon ? Why 
 should five different printers each put his name at 
 the beginning of his books unless Bacon had some- 
 thing to do with them ? Is it possible that he was 
 a special partner in five different printing houses ? 
 It does not seem likely but perhaps it is worth in- 
 vestigating. Anyhow the fact remains that here is 
 the name Fr. Bacon staring us in the face from 
 the top of the first page of twelve of the Shake- 
 speare Quartos. 
 
 To recapitulate and classify ; the Roman num- 
 47
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 erals in the last column indicating the design ac- 
 cording to the arrangement above : 
 
 Play Printer Date Design 
 
 1 Shrew. Short 1594 I 
 
 2 Contention. Creed 1594 II 
 
 3 Rich. II. Sims 1597 III 
 
 4 Rich. III. Sims 1597 III 
 
 5 Fam. Vic. Creed 1598 II 
 
 6 R. & J. Creed 1599 II 
 
 7 II. Hy. IV. Sims 1600 III 
 
 8 Henry V. Creed 1600 II 
 
 9 Rich. III. Creed 1602 II 
 
 10 Mer. W. Creed 1602 II 
 
 11 Hamlet. for N. L. & I. T. 1603 III 
 
 12 Sonnets. Eld 1609 III 
 Design One then appears only once and that in 
 
 one of the two earliest of the series and was used 
 by Short in 1594. 
 
 Design Two appears to have been used only by
 
 IN THE SHAKE-SPEARE QUARTOS 
 
 Creed and was used by him in six books of dates, 
 from 1594 to 1602. 
 
 Design Three seems to have been used by three 
 printers by Sims three times and by the printer 
 of the 1603 Hamlet and Eld each once. For any 
 thing that 1 can see these five prints may all be 
 from the same block. 
 
 Now, how is all this to be accounted for? Did 
 Creed copy Short's design or Short Creed's ? and 
 then did Sims copy from both and pass his block 
 on to the nameless printer of Hamlet and he to 
 Eld ? And if so why, unless it had some cryptic 
 meaning which was sought to be perpetuated ? It 
 would appear to be a very interesting problem to 
 students of early printing. I am not one, and I 
 pass the question on to them. 
 
 I am perfectly aware of an objection that will be 
 made to what I have pointed out : that it is possi- 
 ble to form any letter or combinations of letters out 
 of any design by removing what one pleases. My 
 
 49
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 answer is, let the objector try to form the letters of 
 any other name from these designs without impair- 
 ing their structural anatomy. One might say that 
 we have no proof that there are arteries in the hu- 
 man body because a skilful dissector might carve 
 their semblance out of an amorphous mass with his 
 dissecting knife. When fossil remains were first 
 discovered throwing a doubt on the orthodox 
 opinions about the creation of the world the na- 
 tural inference drawn by men of a scientific and ra- 
 tional habit of mind was met in two different ways 
 in two different quarters. Voltaire said they were 
 shells dropped from pilgrims' hats. Holy monks 
 said they were put there by God to test men's 
 faith. Perhaps one of the explanations will apply 
 to these fossils. 
 
 The question whether the significance of this 
 monogram was known to any contemporary of 
 Shake-speare will be considered in the final chap- 
 ter. 
 
 50
 
 A SUGGESTION AS TO THE PROBABLE 
 
 RELATION OF WILLIAM SHAKSPER 
 
 TO THE SHAKE-SPEARE PLAYS 
 
 As long ago as 1880, Appleton Morgan, in his 
 masterly work, The Shakespearean Myth, which 
 with all his pains he has never since been able to 
 refute, advanced the theory that the Shake-speare 
 plays as they come to us today, through the First 
 Folio, are the joint product of at least two men, one 
 the anonymous master poet and dramatist whom 
 we know as Shake-speare, the other some business 
 man connected with a playhouse, probably Will- 
 iam Shaksper, the play broker, actor and manager. 
 
 In the book already referred to, Is it Shake- 
 speare ? by A Cambridge Graduate, the proposi- 
 tion is somewhat elaborated. This author says 
 that there seems to be a strong evidence that the 
 shrewd actor-manager was always ready to use, for 
 his stage purposes, any suitable plays, new or old, 
 51
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 that came into his hands that he would change 
 them by the addition of gags and the omission of 
 what he deemed unsuitable for his purpose as he 
 saw fit ; which in fact is about what any theatrical 
 manager does today. 
 
 If this should prove to be the case it would ac- 
 count for most of those discrepancies of style and 
 manner which have given the commentators so 
 much trouble and led to the invention by them of 
 all those whimsical "tests" to determine which 
 particular lines were written by Shake-speare and 
 which by Johannes Factotum. 
 
 That plays were mutilated in this fashion in those 
 days is clear from the testimony of Ben Jonson. 
 In his address To the Readers, prefixed to Sejanus, 
 he says with his own delightful sarcasm : " Lastly, 
 I would inform you this book, in all numbers, is 
 not the same with that which was acted on the pub- 
 lic stage ; wherein a second pen had good share ; 
 in place of which, I have rather chosen to put 
 52
 
 A SUGGESTION 
 
 weaker and no doubt less pleasing of my own than 
 to defraud so happy a genius of his right by my 
 loathed usurpation." 
 
 The instances of internal evidence pointing to 
 William Shaksper, or any Stratford-on-Avon man, 
 as the author, seem to be only two that in the 
 Induction to the Taming of the Shrew and that 
 in the first scene of the first act of the Merry 
 Wives of Windsor. I shall attempt to show in 
 both cases that the condition and history of the 
 text is more in accord with the theory of Dr. 
 Morgan and the Cambridge Graduate than with 
 that of a Stratford-on-Avon authorship. 
 
 In the Induction to the Taming of the Shrew 
 the drunken tinker is named Christopher Sly ; he 
 is "old Sly's son of Burton-Heath"; he refers for 
 identification to " Marian Racket, the fat ale-wife 
 of Wincot"; he speaks of "Cicely Hacket," 
 "Stephen Sly," "John Naps of Greece," "Peter 
 Turph" and " Henry Pimpernell "; all these names 
 53
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 of people and places being, as is well known, 
 associated with the neighborhood of Stratford-on- 
 Avon. 
 
 Now, as early as 1594, there was " Printed at 
 London by Peter Short " The Taming of a Shrew. 
 It is an amplification of this that appears in the 
 First Folio as The Taming of the Shrew. The 
 former is believed by no one to be the work of 
 Shake-speare ; it is wholly un-Shakespearean ; and 
 yet furnishes the outline of the story and con- 
 tains a sketch of the Induction with the character 
 of Sly. This, in the Folio play, is developed and 
 expanded in a truly Shakespearean manner. Per- 
 haps there is nothing in all Shake-speare that shows 
 more conclusively the work of two different writers 
 than this very Induction, and the local allusions 
 are clearly traced to some other hand than that of 
 the great dramatist. There is nothing in the ear- 
 lier form of the play that might not easily be the 
 work of any fairly clever hack writer of plays, and 
 54
 
 A SUGGESTION 
 
 yet Sly, who carries us to Warwickshire and 
 Gloucestershire, is his creation. It may easily be 
 that here is where Mr. Manager Shaksper shows 
 his hand. To be sure the local names, other than 
 that of Sly, do not appear in the Quarto but only 
 in the Folio version, but this does not affect the ar- 
 gument as mere names of course could have been 
 readily supplied by the actor-manager with the in- 
 tent of carrying out the local coloring first sug- 
 gested by the name Christopher Sly. 
 
 It is generally conceded that the first scene of 
 The Merry Wives of Windsor refers to Shaksper's 
 deer stealing adventure and that Justice Shallow 
 stands for Sir Thomas Lucy. This scarcely ad- 
 mits of a doubt. The discussion about the "dozen 
 white luces " in the coat of a Gloucestershire jus- 
 tice leaves little to the imagination on this score, 
 and thus we find, for the second and last time, the 
 Plays in touch with the man Shaksper. How- 
 ever it may be, this story seems as if it may 
 
 55
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 have some connection with one in Holinshed's 
 Chronicles : 
 
 Sir William Wise having lent to the king, Henry 
 VIII, his signet to seal a letter, who having pow- 
 dered eremies engray'd in the scale, the king 
 paused and lookit thereat, considering. " Why, 
 how now, Wise?" quoth the king. "What! 
 hast thou lice here? " "An, if it like your majes- 
 tic," quoth Sir William, " a louse is a rich coat ; 
 for by giving the louse I part arms with the French 
 king, in that he giveth the flour-de-lice '." Whereat 
 the king heartily laugh'd, to hear how prettily so 
 byting a taunt was so suddenly turned to so pleas- 
 aunte a conceite.* 
 
 The Quarto of The Merry Wives, 1602, the 
 only Quarto worth noticing, for that of 1619 was 
 merely a reprint of it, is a poor abortive thing, 
 containing less than two-thirds in mass and less 
 than a tenth in matter of the finished play as we find 
 it in the Folio. The commentators have always 
 
 The Rosicracisuis, by Hvcrave Jennings, page 50. 
 
 56
 
 A SUGGESTION 
 
 been at war as to whether it was an early sketch or a 
 mangled version a needless war, for it is plainly 
 both a mangled version of a first sketch, as the 
 very first page shows. Shallow says : " Never 
 talke to me. He make a star-chamber matter of it. 
 The councell shall know it." Know what ? With- 
 out another word on the subject, the discussion of 
 Mr. Slender's pretensions to the hand of Miss 
 Page is opened. This surely was not to be made 
 a star-chamber matter. The Folio makes it clear 
 that it is Falstaff's deer stealing that provokes Shal- 
 low's threat. I do not mean to say that the story 
 of the poaching is not mentioned in the Quarto. 
 It is, but the reference to it, explaining the initial 
 speech of Justice Shallow and which contained the 
 supposed allusion to Lucy, is omitted. 
 
 Conceding, then, that the incident of Shaksper's 
 deer stealing exploit forms the thesis of this pas- 
 sage of the play, the question of how it came there 
 still remains open. It by no means follows that 
 
 57
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 the poacher was the author. Grant White says : 
 " The text of that edition ( 1602) contains evidence 
 that it was written after the production of Henry 
 IV, and it probably represents a play written has- 
 tily (in a fortnight to please the queen, tradition 
 says) by Shake-speare, with the help of some other 
 playwright, whose work was rejected on a revision 
 of the comedy, to which we owe the version 
 printed in the Folio of 1623." * The Quarto shows 
 plainly the evidence of a hurried, bungled com- 
 position, and it tends to confirm the tradition that 
 it was hastily produced for the stage, and it must 
 have been mangled somewhere between the au- 
 thor's hands and those of the printer. Not only 
 are there omissions that leave the fragmentary pas- 
 sages meaningless but there are passages as hope- 
 lessly un-Shakespearean as anything in The Tam- 
 ing of a Shrew ; witness the dialogue between Fen- 
 ton and Anne Page in Act III, scene 4. Hence, 
 
 * Introduction to The Merry Wives, second edition. 
 58
 
 A SUGGESTION 
 
 taking all things into consideration, it is impossi- 
 ble to say in all cases exactly what Shake-speare 
 wrote. It might not be unreasonable to claim that 
 this caricature of Sir Thomas is a gag, especially 
 as it does not appear in the Quarto. However, I 
 do not accept that explanation, but believe it to 
 have been written by Shake-speare himself, and 
 this for three reasons : first, because, while it does 
 not appear in the Quarto, the sentence introducing 
 it does, showing that something has been omitted, 
 presumably that which appears in the correspond- 
 ing place in the Folio ; second, because it is a typical 
 example of Shakespearean wit, and third, because I 
 do not believe that Shake-speare was Shaksper. 
 
 Nearly all the commentators accept the tradi- 
 tion that the play was produced very hastily in re- 
 sponse to some kind of order from court in 
 fourteen days it is said ; be that as it may, it shows 
 signs of haste. Now, if a play broker needing, in 
 a hurry, a play with Falstaff as the principal char- 
 59
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 acter, had gone to his favorite playwright with his 
 commission, what is more likely than that he 
 should have suggested what appeared to be an 
 amusing incident in his own career as good ma- 
 terial to work up what is more likely than that 
 the playwright should have said : " Very good, 
 indeed, but the joke will be on you, for you must 
 be Falstaff " ? What is more unlikely than that 
 the dramatist should have burlesqued himself as 
 Falstaff ? But if there is anything at all in the 
 story Falstaff is as surely Shaksper as Shallow is 
 Lucy. However this may be, that there is one 
 caricature in the play under consideration it seems 
 impossible to doubt. The author has not even 
 taken the trouble to disguise the name of his vic- 
 tim. Dr. John Caius was a professor at Cambridge 
 until 1573 when he died. He was of a very iras- 
 cible and quarrelsome temper, continually in 
 broils with the students who hated and ridiculed 
 him. He had some of them whipped and put 
 
 60
 
 A SUGGESTION 
 
 into the stocks. He continually engaged in per- 
 sonal altercation with them. He had an especial 
 antipathy to Welshmen. All of which character- 
 istics go to identify him with his namesake of the 
 play. The students finally appealed to Lord 
 Treasurer Burleigh, whose nephew, Francis Bacon, 
 was then a student at Cambridge.* This does not 
 seem to be a reminiscence that Mr. Manager 
 Shaksper would have been likely to suggest. 
 
 Ford and Page are, 1 believe, Stratford, or at 
 least Warwickshire, names, but they may very eas- 
 ily have been supplied by the manager, and tak- 
 ing all these things into consideration they would 
 seem to indicate that William Shaksper's connec- 
 tion with the Plays was managerial rather than au- 
 thorial. 
 
 ' See Francis Bacon OUT Shakespeare, br Edwin Reed. Also Dictionary of National 
 Biography. 
 
 61
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 In his recent interesting but somewhat conjec- 
 tural Life of Shakespeare, Dr. Rolfe argues that 
 it is absurd to suppose that Bacon had anything 
 to do with the editing of the Shake-speare Folio 
 of 1623 on the ground that the many typographical 
 errors in that volume show "beyond the possibil- 
 ity of a doubt, that the plays in the Folio could 
 not have been carefully revised or seen through 
 the press by any person who had had experience 
 in editing, printing or publishing." He adds : 
 " That Francis Bacon could have edited them or 
 supervised their publication is inconceivable ex- 
 cept to a fool or a Baconian." It is to be hoped 
 that the Baconians are duly appreciative of this 
 differentiation it is a very unusual courtesy. 
 
 In reply to this a believer in the Baconian editor- 
 ship of the First Folio might in the first place quote 
 Spedding to the effect that many of Bacon's early 
 
 62
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 works, published during his lifetime and presum- 
 ably under his supervision, are quite as badly 
 printed as is the Shake-speare First Folio. Next, 
 he might show that, at the time of the appearance 
 of the Folio, Bacon was suffering from the mental 
 distress following what is known as his "fall", and 
 that he was very deeply occupied in matters which 
 probably to him, at that period of his life, ap- 
 peared of much greater consequence, and that 
 whatever share he might have had in the matter 
 was undoubtedly delegated to secretaries. He 
 might also suggest that if Bacon wished to remain 
 unknown in the matter he would have been care- 
 ful not to have allowed his hand to appear in it, 
 thereby providing Dr. Rolfe with his argument. 
 He might also call attention to the fact that the 
 only literary man who is known to have had any 
 connection with the publication of the Folio was 
 Ben Jonson, and he could show on the authority 
 of William Drummond and Archbishop Tenison 
 
 63
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 that Jonson was at or about this time one of 
 Bacon's secretaries, which would seem to be bring- 
 ing the matter pretty closely home to Bacon's 
 door. He might also ask Dr. Rolfe to join him 
 in a guessing match as to who wrote the very re- 
 markable Dedication of the Folio and the Ad- 
 dress to the Great Variety of Readers. Surely 
 not Heminge and Condell ! 
 
 It may be fairly said that the only evidence 
 connecting the Shake-speare plays with William 
 Shaksper as their author is the first collected edi- 
 tion, published in 1623, seven years after Shaks- 
 per's death, and known as the " First Folio." 
 
 The spelling Shaksper is used to designate the 
 player. That appears to be his own spelling as 
 far as his autographs are legible and it was the 
 most common spelling of the name of the Strat- 
 ford family. The name Shakespeare makes its 
 first appearance in English annals appended to the 
 dedication of Venus and Adonis in 1593 ; with all 
 64
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 the sixty-seven, more or less, ways in which the 
 name of the Stratford family was spelled, that 
 never occurs. The first syllable was always short 
 and the pronunciation appears to have been Shax- 
 pur, probably a corruption of Jacques Pierre, al- 
 though Dr. Rolfe says this derivation is absurd. 
 
 It is true that between 1597 and 1611 forty-two 
 plays were published as having been written by 
 William Shakespeare orShake-speare. Langbaine, 
 in his English Dramatic Poets (1691), enumerates 
 forty-six plays. This list of forty-two contains 
 such plays as The Merry Devil of Edmonton and 
 The Puritan or the Widow of Watling Street, 
 plays which no one ever has, since the beginning 
 of Shakespearean criticism, supposed for an in- 
 stant came from the master's hand. This list of 
 forty-two comprises only the plays published as 
 Shake-speare's, though many others were attributed 
 to him. Shaksper was a popular theatrical man- 
 ager, and it is very likely that plays produced 
 65
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 on the stage by him were spoken of as his or 
 as Shake-speare's without a very distinct idea 
 as to authorship. Hence if the testimony ended 
 here the natural and only supposition would be 
 that during those years " William Shake-speare " 
 was a popular pseudonym used by anyone who 
 chose to append it to any anonymous play, and 
 that there must have been two, if not more, authors 
 who thus used it or the publishers of the plays 
 used it for them. In 1616 William Shaksper died 
 at Stratford on Avon, leaving a most circumstan- 
 tial will, which enumerated his possessions down 
 to his " silver gilt bowl " and his famous "second 
 best bed," but which contained no mention of any 
 books, manuscripts or any interest in any literary 
 property whatever. Nor has any evidence been 
 produced dating from his lifetime that he at any 
 time had any such interest. So the matter rested 
 till 1623, so it probably would have rested till this 
 day, and the author of the wonderful dramas 
 
 66
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 would be still regarded as the great unknown if it 
 had not been for the publication of the Folio. 
 This purported to be, as its title page declares, 
 " Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories 
 and Tragedies, published according to the True 
 Originall Copies, London, printed by Isaac lag- 
 gard and Ed. Blount, 1623." 
 
 This volume contains thirty-six plays, which 
 may be classified in three groups : First, eighteen 
 selected from the forty-two already mentioned as 
 having been published during Shaksper's lifetime 
 as by William Shakespeare or Shake-speare ; sec- 
 ond, one, Othello, which had been published in like 
 manner in 1622, six years after Shaksper's death ; 
 third, seventeen, which had not been previously 
 published, six of which, according to Dr. Halli- 
 well-Phillips, we now hear of indisputably for the 
 first time. These thirty-six plays, with Pericles, 
 which later editors have added, constitute the 
 canon as we have it to-day. 
 
 67
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Several of the Plays as they appear in the Folio 
 are revised versions of the texts of the Quartos. 
 This is especially noticeable in the case of Othello, 
 the first edition of which appeared in 1622 six 
 years after the actor's death and yet it underwent 
 a thorough revision with additions, thoroughly 
 characteristic of Shake-speare, before its appear- 
 ance in the Folio the next year. Richard III 
 likewise was revised and augmented between 1621 
 and 1623. 
 
 Three names besides those of the printers are 
 prominently connected with this publication, those 
 of John Heminge, Henry Condell and Ben Jon- 
 son. Heminge and Condell were fellow actors 
 with Shaksper and they sign the dedication, which 
 is to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomerie, 
 and the address "to the Great Variety of Readers." 
 These are very curious documents. While un- 
 doubtedly designed to convey the idea that the 
 Plays are the work of the Stratford player, they 
 68
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 avoid an explicit statement to that effect. More- 
 over, they are written in a style indicating the 
 hand of a master of English. They suggest 
 thorough classical scholarship and a richness of 
 metaphor and skill in its use, and withal a grace 
 of diction not to be expected, and, in fact, incon- 
 ceivable in such unlearned men as Heminge and 
 Condell are known to have been. Moreover, 
 they are very much in the style of many of the 
 prose passages of the Plays themselves. Part of 
 the dedication is almost a translation of the dedica- 
 tion of one of Pliny's works to the Emperor 
 Titus. Here is an example of the diction: 
 " Country hands reach forth milk, cream, fruits 
 or what they have, and many nations, we have 
 heard, that had not gums and incense, obtained 
 their requests with a leavened cake. It was no 
 fault to approach their gods by what means they 
 could, and the most, though meanest of things, are 
 made more precious when dedicated to Temples." 
 
 69
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Now, if manner, style, diction mean anything, 
 this dedication was written by no other than Fran- 
 cis Bacon. It is, of course, useless to argue about 
 style, but anyone sufficiently interested can com- 
 pare the dedication as a whole with Bacon's Essays. 
 Two other points should be noted in regard to 
 this dedication. One is that it adopts an air of 
 familiarity which it would have been impossible 
 for men in the position of Heminge and Condell 
 to use in addressing two noble lords at that day, 
 and the other is that it fairly bristles with legal 
 terms, as do the Plays. " To procure his orphans, 
 guardians," " We cannot go beyond our own 
 powers " (the legal phrase ultra vires), " We have 
 deprived ourselves of the defense of our dedica- 
 tion," " Prosecuted their author," "To be execu- 
 tor of his own writing." It has been suggested 
 that this dedication was written by Jonson. If it 
 was written by him he wrote it in a very different 
 and more poetic style than is shown in any of his 
 70
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 acknowledged prose that has come down to us. 
 
 In regard to the "Address to the Readers " the 
 case is not so clear. It might have been written 
 by Jonson ; its badinage somewhat resembles that 
 of some of his introductions, but the wit is more 
 sprightly. I believe this also to be by Bacon for 
 one reason, that it also is top-heavy with legal 
 phrases not a peculiarity of Jonson's " Had 
 their trial already and stood out all appeals " and 
 "Come forth acquitted by a decree of Court" are 
 examples. 
 
 We now turn back to the title page and find it 
 disfigured by the horrible Droeshout "portrait," 
 " a hard, wooden, staring thing," as Grant White 
 calls it, that bears no resemblance, except by way 
 of caricature, to anything human, least of all a 
 poet. This is confronted by Ben Jonson's enig- 
 matical verse : 
 
 This Figure, that thou here seest put, 
 It was for gentle Shakespeare cut ; 
 71
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Wherein the Graver had a strife 
 With Nature, to outdo the Life : 
 O could he but have drawn his wit 
 As well in brass, as he hath hit 
 His face, the Print would then surpass 
 All that was ever writ in brass. 
 But since he cannot, Reader, look 
 Not on his Picture, but his book. 
 
 We know how Browning parodied this : 
 
 This figure that thou seest tut ; 
 Was it for gentle Shakespeare put ? 
 
 But what does Jonson mean ? One meaning of 
 "for" is "in place of." In place of gentle Shake- 
 speare was put this thing, and if the artist had 
 been a little more successful "the print would 
 then surpass all that was ever writ in brass." But 
 under the circumstances we are instructed to look 
 not at the picture but at the book. This seems a 
 very curious way of commending the picture, and 
 suggests a hoax a brazen hoax. 
 
 72
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 A contributor to Notes and Queries, 10th S. III., 
 January 28, 1905, who writes from the Middle 
 Temple, London, paraphrases these verses thus : 
 
 The figure or portrait opposite was cut (en- 
 graved) and inserted here for (instead, or in place, 
 of) the Gentle Shakespeare (the Shakespeare of 
 the following Plays Francis Bacon, who was 
 "gentle "both in birth and disposition). 
 
 In executing it the engraver endeavored to pro- 
 duce a likeness more lifelike than nature. 
 
 O could he have drawn his wit (the Gentle 
 Shakespeare's ) as well in brass as he has hit his 
 face (the features of the other), the print would 
 have surpassed in beauty any engraving before 
 produced. 
 
 But, since he cannot (or could not), Reader, 
 look ( for that wit ) not at his picture ( the Strat- 
 ford man's picture), but his book (the Gentle 
 Shakespeare's book). 
 
 But Jonson's connection with the Folio does not 
 end here. Following the Address to the Read- 
 
 73
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 ers comes his splendid trumpet blast : " To the 
 Memory of my Beloved Master, William Shake- 
 speare, and what he has left us." 
 
 " I confess," he says, " thy writings to be such 
 as neither man nor muse can praise too much," 
 and again : 
 
 Leave thee alone for the comparison 
 
 Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughty Rome 
 
 Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. 
 
 These lines are addressed, of course, to " Shake- 
 speare," that is, to the author of the Plays. It 
 will be remembered that, at or about the time of 
 the publication of the First Folio, Jonson was one 
 of Bacon's private secretaries, or " good pens," as 
 he calls them, and in a position to know what was 
 going on. This seems to bring Bacon pretty 
 close to, at least, an editorial association with the 
 Folio. 
 
 At Jonson's death he left a book in manuscript 
 
 74
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 called Timbre, or Discoveries Made upon Men 
 and Nature. It contains two passages which 
 should be compared with this poem. The first 
 refers to Francis Bacon, and he says of him that 
 " he filled up all numbers, and performed that in 
 our tongue which may be compared or preferred 
 either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome . . . 
 so that he may be named and stand as the mark 
 and acme of our language ; " exactly, it will be ob- 
 served, what he had previously said about the au- 
 thor of the Shake-speare plays, while of William 
 Shaksper, the player, he said that he "loved the 
 man and honored his memory," but that "he 
 flowed with that facility that sometimes it was 
 necessary that he be stopped snuffed out." " But 
 he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There 
 was ever more in him to be praised than par- 
 doned." In the same volume he enumerates the 
 greatest " wits " of his time. The list is: More, 
 Wyatt, Surrey, Challoner, Smith, Eliot, Gardiner, 
 
 75
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Philip Sidney, Hooker, 
 Essex, Raleigh, Savile, Sandys, Egerton and Fran- 
 cis Bacon. Has he omitted him whom he de- 
 clared to be the greatest of all, or has he mentioned 
 him by another name ? 
 
 In Discoveries the headline to the note on 
 Shaksper is De Shakespeare Nostrafre] our fellow, 
 or companion, Shakespeare. In the lines facing 
 the portrait the designation is " The Gentle Shake- 
 speare ; " so it seems that in Ben Jonson's mind 
 there were two " Shakespeares," the " Gentle 
 Shakespeare" and our crony, the actor, and how 
 differently they are described ! Look on this pic- 
 ture and on this. 
 
 Nevertheless the tendency shown by some ad- 
 vocates of the Baconian theory to disparage the 
 personal character of William Shaksper is to be 
 deprecated as tending to provoke unnecessary 
 hostility and as not being founded on known facts. 
 Jonson's description of him is practically the only 
 
 76
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 contemporary evidence we have. In full it is as 
 follows : 
 
 De Shakespeare nostrat. Augustus in Hat. I re- 
 member, the players have often mentioned it as 
 an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing 
 (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a 
 line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted 
 a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent 
 speech. I had not told posterity this, but for 
 their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to 
 commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted ; 
 and to justify mine own candor ; for I loved the 
 man and do honor his memory, on this side idol- 
 atry, as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, 
 and of an open and free nature ; had an excellent 
 phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions ; 
 wherein he flowed with that facility, that some- 
 times it was necessary he should be stopped : Suf- 
 flaminandus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius. 
 His wit was in his own power, would the rule of 
 it had been so too. Many times he fell into those 
 things, could not escape laughter : as he said in 
 
 77
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, " Caesar 
 thou dost me wrong." He replied, " Caesar did 
 never wrong but with just cause," and such like 
 which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices 
 with his virtues. There was ever more in him to 
 be praised than to be pardoned. 
 
 This would not indicate that he was either dis- 
 honest or ignorant. He appears to have been a 
 genial companion, a shrewd business man, and a 
 most skilful theatrical manager. If Bacon, or some 
 other, was the author of the Plays, Shaksper was 
 certainly his confidential agent, and it is very prob- 
 able that it is chiefly by his agency that the Plays 
 have been preserved to us and, even if he did not 
 write them, as associated with their production 
 and preservation, his name should be forever held 
 in honor. 
 
 In the Address to the Readers Heminge and 
 Condell or whoever wrote the address signed by 
 them say that they have so published the Plays 
 78
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 that " as where before you were abused with divers 
 stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and de- 
 formed by the frauds and stealths of injurious im- 
 postors, that exposed them ; even those are now 
 offered to your view, cured and perfect of their 
 limbs and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, 
 as he conceived them . . . and what he 
 thought he uttered with that easiness that we have 
 scarce received from him a blot in his papers." 
 
 Now, whatever that means, it does not mean, 
 literally, what it says, as is shown by the fact that 
 the printers of the Folio followed as their copy, 
 in many cases, the Quartos the " stolen and sur- 
 reptitious copies" even to repeating their mis- 
 prints, and Ben Jonson in his introductory poem 
 says: " He who casts to write a living line must 
 sweat (such as thine are) and strike the second 
 heat upon the Muses' anvil," and he speaks of his 
 " well turned and true filed lines." This is hardly 
 consistent with the idea that the Plays were struck 
 79
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 off at a white heat without a blot an erasure or 
 emendation and, besides, we know in the cases 
 of Plays that ran through a number of editions 
 that they were worked over many times. 
 
 On January 22, 1621, Bacon celebrated his six- 
 tieth birthday. Jonson was present and read a 
 poem beginning thus : 
 
 Hail, happy Genius of this ancient pile! 
 How comes it all things so about thee smile ? 
 The fire, the wine, the men ! And in the midst 
 Thou stand'st as if some mystery thou didst! 
 Pardon, I read it in thy face 
 
 What was the " mystery ? " 
 
 In connection with this matter of Ben Jonson's 
 testimony, I will call attention to one other matter 
 which, while it has been sometimes noticed, has 
 never seemed to be treated as fully as it deserves. 
 In or about 1601, appeared Ben Jonson's burles- 
 que play, The Poetaster, in which some contem- 
 porary is held up to ridicule in the character of 
 
 80
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 Ovid the Younger. This Ovid is a young lawyer 
 or law student of Rome in the time of Augustus, 
 but instead of applying himself to the law he 
 devotes his time to writing poetry and stage plays 
 in opposition to the wishes of his father and other 
 friends and to their great disgust. This caricature 
 is a palpable hit at young Francis Bacon, whose 
 lighter literary pursuits were strenuously opposed 
 by his mother, his uncle, Lord Burleigh, and by 
 his friend Sir Thomas Bodley, the founder of the 
 Bodleian Library, who excluded from it all English 
 dramatic works. Bacon presented Bodley with a 
 copy of his Cogita et Visa in 1607, and Bodley, in 
 replying, congratulated Bacon on having at last 
 made choice of a fit subject of study, "which 
 course," he added, " would to God to whisper as 
 much into your ear you had followed at the first, 
 when you fell to the study of such a study as was 
 not worthy such a student." Moreover, The 
 Poetaster is filled with broad or covert allusions to 
 81
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 the earlier Shake-speare plays, one scene in parti- 
 cular being a broad burlesque of the balcony scene 
 in Romeo and Juliet. Ovid makes love to Julia, 
 the daughter of the Emperor Augustus, who ap- 
 pears at a window above. Ovid quotes, with only 
 slight variations, from Romeo and Juliet and from 
 Hamlet and other Shake-speare plays. In another 
 place he is represented as writing, in the course of 
 his poetic effusions, the very lines that appear on 
 the title-page of Venus and Adonis, though they 
 are of course given in English translation : 
 
 Kneele hindes to trash ; me let bright Phoebus swell, 
 With cups full flowing from the Muses' well. 
 
 No explanation has been given of this burlesque 
 except on the theory that Francis Bacon or some- 
 one situated exactly as he was wrote the Plays 
 and Poems. A fuller account of this curious play 
 and its application to the theory of Baconian au- 
 thorship may be found in that extremely interest- 
 82
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 ing little volume, Bacon-Shakespeare, an Essay, by 
 E. W. S. (Smithson). It is the opinion of the 
 author of Is It Shakespeare ? that Bacon as the au- 
 thor of poems and plays is also referred to in the 
 character of Sir John Daw in Jonson's Silent 
 Woman. All these are matters which Shaksper- 
 ians tacitly agree to ignore. 
 
 Jonson's attitude, in these early years, seems to 
 have been anything but well disposed toward Ba- 
 con, to whom there can be but little doubt he in- 
 tended his " Cheveril" Epigrams to apply: 
 
 ON CHEVERIL 
 
 Cheveril cries out my verses libels are ; 
 And threatens the Star-chamber and the bar. 
 What are thy petulant pleadings, Cheveril, then, 
 That quit'st the cause so oft, and rail'st at men. 
 
 ON CHEVERIL THE LAWYER 
 
 No cause, nor client fat, will Cheveril leese, 
 But as they come, on both sides he takes fees, 
 83
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 And pleaseth both ; for while he melts his grease, 
 For this; that wins, for whom he holds his 
 peace. 
 
 A Cheveril conscience is one easily stretched 
 like a kid glove. Jonson probably had the pro- 
 fessional jealousy toward the amateur intruder into 
 the domain of the playwright. His feeling for 
 Bacon, however, underwent a great change in later 
 years, before the time when he wrote of him that 
 "he hath filled up all numbers, and performed 
 that in our tongue, which may be compared or 
 preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty 
 Rome. . . . Now things daily fall, wits grow 
 downward, and eloquence grows backward ; so 
 that he may be named and stand as the mark and 
 acme of our language." 
 
 Among contemporary allusions to Shake-speare 
 
 or Shaksper there is only one, so far as I can 
 
 learn, that seems to tend to identify them, and 
 
 that is in The Return from Parnassus, a play 
 
 84
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 acted at St. John's College, Cambridge, about 
 1601, in which Burbage and Kemp, Shaksper's 
 fellow-players, appear and discuss theatrical and 
 other matters, including the talents of the " Uni- 
 versity Pens." Kemp says: "Why here's our 
 fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, ay and 
 Ben Jonson too. O that Ben is a pestilent fellow ; 
 he brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill,* 
 but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge 
 that made him beray his credit." The author of 
 Is It Shakespeare? believes this " purge " to be 
 the play of Troilus and Cressida. 
 
 Now here does seem, for once, to be a positive 
 identification of Shaksper, "our fellow Shake- 
 speare," with the poet, and the Shaksperians make 
 the most of it. The Baconians reply that there is 
 no question that Shaksper and Shake-speare were 
 identified in the popular mind at the time. The 
 Plays were known as Shakespeare's plays and 
 
 * An allusion to a scene in Jonson's The Poetaster. 
 
 85
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Shaksper or his company owned and presented 
 them. The dialogue in The Return from Parnas- 
 sus proves nothing more than that the author 
 shared the common delusion or, knowing better, 
 preferred to keep his own counsel. 
 
 If Ben Jonson's Epigram, On Poet-ape, applies 
 to Shaksper the actor-manager, as is usually con- 
 ceded, it shows very clearly what Shaksper's part 
 was in the production of the Plays. 
 
 Poor Poet-ape that would be thought our chief, 
 Whose works are e'en the frippery of wit, 
 From brokerage is become so bold a thief, 
 As we the robb'd, leave rage, and pity it. 
 At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean, 
 Buy the reversion of old plays ; now grown 
 To little wealth and credit in the scene, 
 He takes up all, makes each man's wit his own, 
 And told of this he slights it. Tut, such crimes 
 The sluggish gaping auditor devours. 
 He marks not whose 'twas first, and aftertimes 
 May judge it to be his, as well as ours. 
 86
 
 TESTIMONY OF THE FIRST FOLIO 
 
 Fool ! as if half eyes will not know a fleece 
 From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole 
 piece. 
 
 He was a play-broker, he bought up the rever- 
 sions of old plays, he appropriated the wit of each, 
 and, when remonstrated with, showed perfect in- 
 difference as well he might if he had Bacon 
 behind him. Jonson at least thought that he, 
 with half an eye, could distinguish the shreds 
 and patches of the manager and adapter from 
 "the whole piece" of the supreme poet. And 
 who was in a better position to know than Ben 
 Jonson?
 
 AN ORTHODOX DEFENSE 
 
 Mr. Andrew Lang, in the Study called The 
 Shakespeare-Bacon Imbroglio, one of those in- 
 cluded in the book called The Valet's Tragedy 
 and other Studies, commences his defense of the 
 orthodox Shaksperian position by quoting with 
 approval a certain " sage " to the effect that "there 
 are foolisher fellows than the Baconians those 
 who argue against them;" whereupon Mr. Lang 
 proceeds to argue against them to the extent of 
 forty-five pages, thus giving the Baconians the 
 satisfaction of resting in the assured conviction 
 that they are less foolish than Mr. Lang, which as 
 a rule is not foolish at all. It should be a great 
 consolation to them either to receive this spon- 
 taneous tribute or to welcome Mr. Lang into their 
 fellowship of "foolish fellows." 
 
 He next declares that " on the other hand, ig- 
 norance has often cherished beliefs which science 
 88
 
 AN ORTHODOX DEFENSE 
 
 has been obliged reluctantly to admit. The exis- 
 tence of meteorites and the phenomena of hypno- 
 tism were familiar to the ancient world and to 
 modern peasants while philosophy disdained to 
 investigate them. In fact, it is never really prudent 
 to overlook a widely spread opinion." 
 
 This has been my main contention through this 
 series of papers, but it leads Mr. Lang to a most 
 curious non sequitur. " Thus," he says, " a light is 
 thrown on the nature of popular delusions " like 
 the existence of meteorites and the phenomena of 
 hypnotism, we are left to suppose. 
 
 The fact is leaving "modern peasants" out 
 of account, as they probably have no views on the 
 subject whatever that in many subjects, like the 
 one at present under discussion, the generally well 
 informed man of the world, who draws his infor- 
 mation from all available sources, is in a better 
 position to come to a just conclusion than is the 
 professional scholar or other specialist. The pro- 
 
 89
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 fessional scholar is a specialist. He is set apart 
 for a certain purpose, which is to investigate cer- 
 tain facts and phenomena and report his results. 
 It is to him other men must go to get these facts 
 as they need them. If the "scholar" or other 
 specialist cannot pass his information on he is in 
 that capacity at least useless. Mr. Lang thinks 
 that none but scholars should venture to pro- 
 nounce on Shake-speare's scholarship. Well, Mr. 
 Churton Collins is a scholar in the strictest sense 
 of the word and he has shown conclusively in his 
 elaborate Studies in Shakespeare that the author 
 of the Plays was thoroughly familiar with the 
 Greek and Latin classics ; it is not necessary to 
 suppose that he was in the strict sense of the word 
 a " scholar ; " nobody claims that for Bacon in 
 fact, but what he thought he might require he 
 went and took, and he always seemed to know 
 where to find it. 
 
 It appears that it was Mr. Lang who said that 
 90
 
 AN ORTHODOX DEFENSE 
 
 "Hi ludi, tuiti sibi, Fr. Bacono nati" " is magnifi- 
 cent but it is not Latin." Of course there is no 
 question that Mr. Lang understands Latin, but 
 observe what queer things he says about it. Mr. 
 Donnelly, in trying to establish a certain parallel 
 the precise parallel is of no consequence, no 
 single parallel is translated three lines from Cat- 
 ullus 
 
 Soles occidere et redire possunt ; 
 Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, 
 Nox est perpetuo una dormienda 
 thus: 
 
 The lights of heaven go out and return ; 
 When once our brief candle goes out, 
 One night is to be perpetually slept. 
 
 But, says Mr. Lang, " soles are not lights and brevis 
 lux is not a candle." They are not ? I had al- 
 ways supposed, when I read in the first chapter of 
 Genesis that " God made two great lights ; the 
 greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to 
 91
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 rule the night," that the " greater light " referred 
 to was the sun, but now we are told that suns are 
 not lights ! As for brevis lux, I suppose it will be 
 admitted that lux is a flame and that when Mac- 
 beth said, " Out, out brief candle," he contem- 
 plated extinguishing the flame, not throwing the 
 candle bodily out of the window. This is really 
 presuming too much on the ignorance of the Ba- 
 conians. Having now discovered Mr. Lang's 
 method of dealing with Latin, I can breath freely 
 once more about my anagramatic sentence. But 
 now comes another beautiful example of the dis- 
 ingenuousness with which this controversy is 
 conducted. Mr. Lang says: "Dr. Platt, by ma- 
 nipulating the scraps of Latin in Love's Labour's 
 Lost, extracts 'Hi ludi, tuiti sibi, Fr. Bacono 
 nati.' " Dr. Platt did nothing of the sort as any- 
 body can see by referring to page twenty-four of this 
 book. The sentence was "extracted " from a sin- 
 gle word containing twenty-seven letters and every 
 92
 
 AN ORTHODOX DEFENSE 
 
 single one of them was used and used only once. 
 Now, as I cannot suppose that Mr. Lang would 
 intentionally deceive any one, I am driven to the 
 conclusion that on this occasion he did not take 
 the trouble to inform himself about the matter of 
 which he was talking which is the very same 
 laches he is so fond of fastening upon his oppo- 
 nents. I hope that this is the retort courteous. 
 
 Bacon's Promus or Commonplace book has 
 been discussed so much that further mention of it 
 would seem to be unnecessary if it were not for a 
 curious perversion which Mr. Lang makes of an 
 argument which has been drawn from it. The 
 book, as is well known, is a commonplace or 
 memorandum book kept by Bacon, and in it 
 occur thousands of words, phrases and sentences 
 which appear again in the Plays. Whether they 
 appear elsewhere is beside the present discussion. 
 The point is that when Mrs. Pott edited the 
 book in 1883, she called attention to one single 
 
 93
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 page, page 111, on which there occur these 
 entries : Rome, Golden sleep, Uprouse, The 
 Larke ; and that these entries were suggestive of 
 notes for Romeo and Juliet, two passages of which 
 will occur to anyone : 
 
 But where unbruised youth with unstuff'd brain 
 Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign : 
 Therefore thy earliness doth me assure, 
 Thou art up-rous'd by some distemperature. 
 
 and 
 
 It was the nightingale and not the lark, 
 That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear. 
 
 Mr. Lang's treatment of this proposition is to 
 ignore it and in place of it to give an impression 
 that Mrs. Pott's argument is that the common oc- 
 currence of "golden sleep" and "up-rouse" in 
 Bacon's note book, and in Romeo and Juliet, is a 
 proof that Bacon wrote the play, which assumed 
 contention he then laughs out of court. Of course 
 
 94
 
 AN ORTHODOX DEFENSE 
 
 no such contention was ever made. The point is 
 the curious juxtaposition of the words beginning 
 with Rome which word Mr. Lang entirely ig- 
 nores. Rome with the mark of elision spells 
 Romeo. As William D. O'Connor showed years 
 ago, in Hamlet's Note-Book, it can spell nothing 
 else no known word nor known proper name. 
 This is easily tested by placing each of the letters 
 of the alphabet in succession after Rome. All of 
 this Mr. Lang ignores. It is easy to combat your 
 opponents' arguments if you supply them for 
 yourself. In this case there was no particular 
 argument. Attention was called to a curious co- 
 incidence and the coincidence is still unaccounted 
 for. For all I know Bacon may have attended a 
 performance of Romeo and Juliet and taken notes, 
 but what strange notes to take ! It is another 
 thing to be accounted for, that is all. 
 
 According to Mr. Lang, the Baconian theory 
 implies the belief that Bacon would for five or six 
 95
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 pounds patch up and revamp an old play, which 
 he thinks is very absurd. Well, at the time when 
 Bacon was imprisoned for debt it is probable that 
 he would have found five or six pounds very con- 
 venient. But the Baconian theory does not re- 
 quire any such assumption. That Shake-speare 
 produced the immortal dramas by patching up the 
 work of old forgotten playwrights is an assump- 
 tion of the orthodox Shaksperians though they 
 have never been able to find the old playwrights. 
 The Baconians believe that when the Plays show 
 evidence of revision that the author has revised 
 his own work, the work of his apprentice years, 
 which would be the natural view to take in any 
 such case. An examination of Love's Labour's 
 Lost shows in two places very clearly and very in- 
 terestingly just what the revision was, by reason 
 of the copyist or printer having left in the old 
 version while adding the new. Here is one ex- 
 ample :
 
 AN ORTHODOX DEFENSE 
 
 FIRST VERSION 
 
 From women's eyes this doctrine I derive : 
 They are the ground, the books, the academes 
 From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. 
 
 REVISED VERSION 
 
 From women's eyes this doctrine I derive : 
 They sparkle still the right Promethean fire ; 
 They are the books, the arts, the academes 
 That show, contain and nourish all the world. 
 
 Does this look like patching up and revamping 
 the work of another playwright ? It is hardly fair 
 for the Shaksperians to foist their theories off on 
 the Baconians and expect the Baconians to account 
 for them. This revamping theory seems to have 
 been invented in order to try and get the known 
 career of the actor within planetary distance of the 
 author. That Shaksper, as manager of the theater, 
 adapted plays may readily be admitted, but that is 
 an entirely different matter. Besides, why the as- 
 sumption that the Plays were written for money ? 
 97
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 The Baconians are not responsible for that. Says 
 Grant White and he is only expressing the gen- 
 erally received opinion : 
 
 All that we know of his life and of his domestic 
 career leaves us no room for doubt that, if his pub- 
 lic had preferred it, he would have written thirty 
 seven plays like Titus Andronicus, just as readily, 
 though not as willingly, as he wrote As You Like 
 It, King Lear, Hamlet and Othello. 
 
 He wrote what he wrote only to fill the theater 
 and his own pockets. 
 
 It is not unlikely that in the days that Bacon 
 was in the hands of the " Lombards", the five or 
 six pounds the sum Mr. Lang has fixed upon 
 would have been very acceptable and would most 
 undoubtedly have been an inducement to write ; 
 but in viewing the Plays en masse it is quite evi- 
 dent that the man who could write them could not 
 help writing them and that the true and sufficient 
 motive was the glory of the Creator and the relief 
 98
 
 AN ORTHODOX DEFENSE 
 
 of man's estate and the bestowal of a priceless and 
 immortal legacy upon all the sons of men. 
 
 Then our critic thinks the Baconian theory is 
 reduced to an absurdity because Bacon would 
 never have entrusted his precious compositions to 
 a raw country lout. Of course not, but who 
 painted that picture ? Not the Baconians but the 
 orthodox Shaksperian biographers themselves. 
 Grant White said: 
 
 The biographer of Shakespeare must record 
 these facts, because the literary antiquaries have 
 unearthed, produced and pitilessly printed them 
 as new particulars in the life of Shakespeare. We 
 hunger and we receive these husks ; we open our 
 mouths for food and we break our teeth against 
 these stones. 
 
 The Baconians, so far as they have accepted the 
 story, accepted it as they found it. The probabil- 
 ity to be deduced from the evidence seems to be 
 that Shaksper was rather deficient in book-learn- 
 99
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 ing, which is not in the least incompatible with his 
 being a shrewd business man and good theatrical 
 manager and a suitable agent for Bacon if Bacon 
 was indeed the author but is hardly consistent 
 with his writing Hamlet and Lear. Besides 
 think of it the author of Hamlet allowing his 
 daughters to be brought up without being taught 
 to write ! That fact alone is sufficient to put Mr. 
 William Shaksper out of court. 
 
 Mr. Lang thinks it is presumptuous for those 
 who are not " scholars " to form or express opin- 
 ions on the matter of the authorship of the Plays. 
 This leads him into a curious paradox that it re- 
 quires scholarship to form an opinion of plays 
 which he thinks it required no scholarship to 
 write. 
 
 I have not selected Mr. Lang's Study for criti- 
 cism from any ill will to Mr. Lang nor because I 
 consider it more unfair or unreasonable than others 
 but because it is recent and typical. The argu- 
 
 100
 
 AN ORTHODOX DEFENSE 
 
 ment for the Baconian authorship depends upon a 
 vast mass of circumstantial evidence. It is not 
 a chain but a bundle of rods. Whether Jupiter 
 can break it or not remains to be seen ; " but to 
 pull out one or two of the weakest of the rods 
 from the bundle and triumphantly proclaim their 
 weakness does not materially effect the strength of 
 the case. What ought to be sought in the matter 
 is the truth, not mere controversial success. 
 
 When Bacon's Promus was edited by Mrs. 
 Pott, in 1883, it was with a preface by Dr. E. A. 
 Abbott, who has never been suspected of heretical 
 ideas on the subject. In this preface, while not 
 accepting the editor's views, he claimed for the 
 book the greatest value and interest as throwing 
 light on the growth and development of our 
 language during the most important period of its 
 evolution and illustrating Bacon's connection with 
 them, as well as the development of his own won- 
 derful power of expression. In spite of all this 
 101
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 and of Dr. Abbott's endorsement of the Promus 
 as a most important document entirely apart from 
 the question of the authorship of Shake-speare, it 
 was received by the " Scholars " with a unanimous 
 burst of ridicule and abuse, expressed for the most 
 part in terms showing that they had not even ex- 
 amined the book and had entirely mistaken its 
 purport and purpose. This abuse they even ex- 
 tended to Bacon himself. Only last year, in his 
 Studies in Shakespeare, Mr. Churton Collins as- 
 serts Bacon to have been a man " without a spark 
 of genial humor ; that in his voluminous works 
 there is no trace of any light play of wit and fancy, 
 of any profound passion, of any esthetic enthus- 
 iasm." 
 
 If it had not been for the acrimony and petulant 
 peevishness which the danger threatening their 
 settled teachings provokes would Mr. Collins or 
 any other man of letters write thus of one of whom 
 Macaulay declared : " The poetic faculty was pow- 
 102
 
 AN ORTHODOX DEFENSE 
 erful in Bacon's mind, but not, like his wit, so 
 powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his 
 reason and to tyrannize over the whole man. 
 Much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary 
 world " ? Of whom it was said by Shelley : " Lord 
 Bacon was a poet. His language has a sweet and 
 majestic rhythm which satisfies the sense no less 
 than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philos- 
 ophy satisfies the intellect. It is a strain which 
 distends and then bursts the circumference of the 
 reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with 
 it into the universal element with which it has 
 perpetual sympathy " ? Of whom Lord Lytton 
 said : " Poetry pervaded the thoughts, it inspired 
 the similes, it hymned in the majestic sentences of 
 the wisest of mankind " ? 
 
 But let us listen a moment to the great Verulam 
 himself : 
 
 But howsoever these things are thus in men's de- 
 praved judgements and affections, yet Truth, which 
 103
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of 
 Truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it ; the 
 knowledge of Truth, which is the presence of it ; and 
 the belief of Truth, which is the enjoying of it ; is the 
 sovereign good of human nature. 
 
 It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore and to see 
 ships tossed upon the sea : a pleasure to stand in the 
 window of a castle and to see a battle and the adven- 
 tures thereof below but no pleasure is comparable to the 
 standing upon the vantage ground of Truth, a hill not 
 to be commanded, and where the air is always clear 
 and serene, and to see the errors and wanderings and 
 mists and tempests in the vale below ; so always that 
 this prospect be with pity and not with swelling or 
 pride. Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a 
 man's mind move in charity, rest in providence and 
 turn upon the poles of Truth. 
 
 104
 
 DID MARSTON AND HALL READ THE 
 QUARTO MONOGRAMS? 
 
 In 1598, John Marston published two books, 
 one known as Pigmalion's Image and Certain 
 Satyrs, the other, The Scourge of Villainie, the 
 latter consisting of another series of satires. Mars- 
 ton and Hall, as it is needless to say, were the 
 rival satirists of the time, attacking each other and 
 most of the contemporary writers and other prom- 
 inent people. It is generally conceded that a 
 number of passages in the Satires refer to Shake- 
 speare. That Marston was familiar with Shake- 
 speare's work and impressed by it is evident 
 almost at a glance. Pygmalion's Image is written 
 in the unusual meter of Venus and Adonis and, 
 in some appended verses, that poem is directly 
 referred to : 
 
 So Labeo did complaine his love was stone, 
 Obdurate, flinty, so relentlesse none ; 
 105
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Yet Lynceus knowes, that in the end of this, 
 He wrought as strange a metamorphosis. 
 
 This seems to be a sufficiently clear allusion to the 
 lines in Venus and Adonis, 199-200 
 
 Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel, 
 
 Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth ? 
 
 and to the strange metamorphosis at the end, that 
 of Adonis into a flower. The name Labeo, thus 
 becomes a key to various allusions to the author 
 of the Shake-speare works in the satires of both 
 Marston and Hall. A fuller discussion of this 
 interesting subject may be found in the second 
 chapter of a book which I advise all interested to 
 read, the Cambridge Graduate's Is It Shakespeare? 
 Marston's familiarity with Shake-speare is also 
 shown in his plays. His Antonio's Revenge, pub- 
 lished in 1602, may almost be said to be founded 
 on Hamlet, much of the plot and many of the inci- 
 dents being taken directly from it. 
 106
 
 MARSTON AND HALL 
 
 In Shakespeariana for February and March, 
 1884, Mr. Fleay showed that Marston drew from 
 or alluded to Shake-speare in eleven of his plays 
 to say nothing of his other writings. 
 
 His allusions to Shake-speare are as a rule 
 satirical, but the satire is not so virulent as that 
 directed to some other contemporary writers, Ben 
 Jonson for instance, who was so incensed that he 
 beat Marston and took away his pistol. Shake- 
 speare took a gentler but perhaps a more efficient 
 vengeance by caricaturing Marston as Malvolio. 
 Marston's abbreviated signature was IO: MA. 
 Malvolio, in Twelfth Night, act II, scene v, after 
 rinding the letter dropped in his way by Maria, 
 reads : 
 
 I may command where I adore ; but silence, like 
 
 a Lucrece knife 
 With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore : M, 
 
 O, A, I, doth sway my life. 
 
 Marston is represented as having been exceed- 
 
 107
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 ingly vain and pragmatical. He was continually 
 taking to task other writers for alleged indecencies 
 and immoralities qualities in which his own writ- 
 ings excelled. In devising the plot against Mal- 
 volio, Maria says : " Marry sir, sometimes he is 
 a kind of a puritan," and presently adds : " The 
 devil a puritan that he is, or anything constantly 
 but a time-pleaser ; an affectioned ass, that cons 
 state without book and utters it by great swarths ; 
 the best persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he 
 thinks, with excellences, that it is his grounds of 
 faith that all that look on him love him." " Some- 
 times a kind of a puritan," would seem to apply 
 to Marston very well. Sir Andrew's threat to 
 beat him may refer to the beating he had from 
 Jonson ; anyhow the " consonancy of the sequel " 
 is sufficiently clear. 
 
 Several of the allusions to the Shake-speare works 
 in the Satires of both Marston and Hall seem to 
 hint at a concealed authorship of the Plays and 
 108
 
 MARSTON AND HALL 
 
 Poems, and that the true author was a lawyer. In 
 one line, the seventy seventh of Marston's Satire 
 IV, somebody, apparently the true Shake-speare, 
 is referred to as Mediocria firma, which is about 
 equivalent to spelling out Bacon in so many let- 
 ters, as Mediocria firma was Bacon's family motto 
 and can be seen under his coat of arms surmount- 
 ing most of his portraits. This is in what appears 
 to be a reply on the part of Marston to the attack 
 of Hall and was published shortly after. The 
 passage is as follows : 
 
 Fond censurer ! why should those mirrors seeme 
 So vile to thee, which better judgements deeme 
 Exquisite then, and in our polish'd times 
 May run for sencefull tollerable lines ? 
 What, not mediocria firma from thy spight ? 
 
 In that same year, 1598, Hall, in the first Satire 
 of Book IV, had written : 
 
 Labeo is whip't and laughs me in the face : 
 Why ? for I smite and hide the galled-place. 
 
 109
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Gird but the Cynick's helmet on his head, 
 Cares he for Talus, or his flayle of lead ? 
 Long as the crafty Cuttle lieth sure 
 In the black Cloud of his thicke vomiture, 
 Who list complaine of wronged faith or fame, 
 When he may shift it to another's name ? 
 
 Marcus Antistius Labeo was a prominent law- 
 yer in Rome, mentioned by Horace, who offended 
 the Emperor Augustus by his too frank speech. 
 Now Bacon was a lawyer, and, as is well known, 
 had given offence to his sovereign by his defence 
 of the privilege of Parliament in the matter of the 
 subsidies bill in 1593. So far as this goes the 
 name applies very well to Bacon. To be sure it 
 does not go very far, but what follows is sug- 
 gestive. He girds on the Cynic's helmet and 
 throws out, like the cuttlefish, a cloud that ob- 
 scures himself and shifts what he has done or 
 written to another's name. Now The Honourable 
 Order of The Knights of the Helmet was the 
 
 110
 
 MARSTON AND HALL 
 
 title assumed by the Gray's Inn revelers. In 
 their revels Bacon was known to have a promi- 
 nent part, and it was during the Christmas cele- 
 bration in 1594 that the Comedy of Errors was 
 attempted to be performed at Gray's Inn at the 
 time when, by reason of overcrowding, so much 
 confusion ensued that the Ambassador from the 
 Inner Temple withdrew with his train in discon- 
 tent, " so that the night was begun and continued 
 to the end in nothing but confusion and errors : 
 whereupon it was ever afterwards called the Night 
 of Errors." 
 
 Some critics have tried to identify Hall's Labeo 
 with Marston himself, but this seems impossible 
 because at that time Marston had published noth- 
 ing and it is certainly reasonable to suppose that 
 by Labeo Hall and Marston referred to the same 
 person. If this is so, how does it happen that the 
 Labeo whom we found associated with Venus and 
 Adonis is spoken of as girding on the Cynic's 
 ill
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Helmet, hiding himself like a cuttlefish and shift- 
 ing what he has done to another's name ? 
 
 I have refrained from treating this branch of 
 the subject more fully because the Cambridge 
 Graduate has already done so, but I have referred 
 to it as introductory to a phase of the matter of 
 which he does indee,d speak but to which he gives 
 an interpretation which to me at least seems 
 less satisfactory than the one presently to be of- 
 f erred. 
 
 In The Scourge of Villainy, Satire IX, which 
 carries the headline, "Here's a Toy to mocke an Ape 
 indeede" occur these lines : 
 
 My soule adores judiciall schollership ; 
 But when to servile imitatorship 
 Some spruce Athenian pen is prentized, 
 Tis worse than apish. Fie ! be not flattered 
 With seeming worth ! Fond affectation 
 Befits an ape, and mumping Babilon. 
 O what a tricksie, lerned, nicking strain 
 112
 
 MARSTON AND HALL 
 
 Is this applauded, senseless, modern vain ! 
 When late I heard it from sage Mutius lips, 
 How ill, methought, such wanton jiggin skips 
 Beseem'd his graver speech. "Farre fly thy fame, 
 Most, most of me beloved ! whose silent name 
 One letter bounds. Thy true judiciall stile 
 I ever honour ; and, if my love beguile 
 Not much my hopes, then thy unvalued worth 
 Shall mount faire place, when apes are turned forth." 
 
 Praise from Marston for anyone is very rare 
 indeed, but who can be the subject of this eulo- 
 gium blended with reproof ? Well, he evidently 
 has the following characteristics: He has "judi- 
 cial scholarship " and a " spruce Athenian pen " 
 that is, the pen of a university man but is "pren- 
 ticed" to " imitatorship," which is "worse than 
 apish." His "wanton jiggin skips," so Marston 
 thought, did not beseem " his graver speech ; " 
 but unless the writer's hopes were beguiled by 
 his love, 
 
 113
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 " then thy unvalued worth 
 Shall mount faire place, when apes are turned forth." 
 
 Apes was a frequent term of reproach for play- 
 actors, so it is here pretty evident that the person 
 addressed, one of judicial scholarship and having 
 a university education, is debasing his talents by 
 writing for the stage in a manner which fails to 
 meet Marston's full approval, and his name is 
 silent, /'. e., concealed. If Bacon were writing for 
 the stage it would fit him very well, but of course 
 we know there were others writing for the stage 
 whom it would fit except as to the " silent name." 
 But we know of Marston's allusions to Shake- 
 speare and to Mediocria frrna, so we naturally 
 think of them. But what about that " silent name 
 one letter bounds ? " Marston is nothing if not 
 sphynx-like. The Mediocria firma puzzle was 
 comparatively easy. Let others make their guesses 
 at this. Here is mine : The silent name Mutius 
 again suggests silence bounded by one letter is 
 114
 
 MARSTON AND HALL 
 
 nothing else than Bacon's monogram in the Quar- 
 tos. For what is a monogram but a single letter 
 or character bounding a name ? " Monos alone : 
 gramma a letter. A character consisting of sev- 
 eral letters in one." That is the way it is given 
 in the Century Dictionary. 
 
 The Cambridge Graduate suggests that this 
 may refer to the F in the monogram 
 
 F B R 
 
 at the beginning of Lucrece, but the F can hardly 
 be said to bound the name in that case, whereas 
 in the Quarto monograms the name is entirely 
 bounded or enclosed in a single character. 
 
 Perhaps somebody better versed in the literary 
 gossip of those days my ignorance has no bear- 
 ing on the problem can make a better guess, but 
 until I hear of it, I shall adhere to mine, and if my 
 guess is right, one man at least, as early as 1598, 
 had read this particular cryptogram. 
 115
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 In fact, unless the monograms in the Quartos 
 are mere accidental combinations of letters it would 
 appear that the passage quoted is a most evident 
 reference to it. Of course some other explanation 
 may be found, but there are so many things in 
 need of explanation. 
 
 116
 
 AN AFTERWORD 
 
 I am told by a correspondent that there is no 
 need for the orthodox Shaksperians to answer 
 questions ; that they are in full possession and 
 that any child can ask puzzling questions. Well, 
 the Shaksperians are in possession, but not in 
 undisturbed possession, and it does not indicate 
 much confidence in one's title to refuse to permit 
 it to be examined. As for the proposition in re- 
 gard to the child's questions, it reminds me of a re- 
 cent newspaper story. A little boy's mother says 
 to him : " Willie, you must stop asking your father 
 questions. Don't you see they annoy him ? " To 
 which the boy replies : " No'm, it ain't my ques- 
 tions that annoy him. It's the answers he can't 
 give that make him mad." Perhaps, after all, 
 children's questions blaze the way to human en- 
 lightenment, and we have long ago heard out of 
 whose mouths wisdom is ordained. 
 
 117
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 In this little book I have endeavored to set 
 forth some of the facts encountered in the course 
 of my reading, tending to connect the name of 
 Francis Bacon with the Plays and Poems known 
 as Shake-speare's. Their meaning, their interpre- 
 tation, their bearing upon the authorship of those 
 immortal works, I leave to the reader. They are 
 not offered in jest but they resemble a jest in that 
 their prosperity lies in the ear of him w r ho hears 
 them, never in the tongue of him who utters them. 
 The question raised is one not to be dismissed by 
 taunts nor scoffs nor jeers. I have no personal 
 sensitiveness, but taunts, scoffs and jeers do not 
 aid in the elucidation of the problem and we want 
 the truth. 
 
 The world will not be forever satisfied with 
 those two putforths of Pope rf The brightest, 
 wisest, meanest of mankind," and " For gain, not 
 glory, winged his roving flight and grew immortal 
 in his own despite." They have been repeated 
 118
 
 AN AFTERWORD 
 
 parrot-like ad nauseum. We want the truth. We 
 want to know the mighty mind behind the mighty 
 work. " Cui bonol" says one, "we have the 
 Plays." Yes, thank God ! we have the Plays, but 
 we want more. We want to know whence they 
 came, what mind they represent, in what granite 
 their foothold is tenoned and mortised, whether 
 they represent a successful attempt to pack the 
 theater and acquire a competency and a coat of 
 arms ; or whether they are the outpourings of a 
 soul bent upon the glory of the Creator and the 
 relief of Man's estate. 
 
 Unseen, in the great minster-dome of time, 
 Whose shafts are centuries, its spangled roof 
 
 The vaulted universe, our Master sits, 
 And organ-voices, like a far-off chime, 
 
 Roll through the aisles of thought ; the sunlight flits 
 From arch to arch, and as he sits aloof, 
 Kings, Heroes, Priests, in concourse vast, sublime, 
 119
 
 BACON CRYPTOGRAMS 
 
 Glances of love and cries from battle field, 
 His wizard power breathes on the living air. 
 
 Warm faces gleam and pass ; child, woman, man y 
 In the long multitude, but he, concealed, 
 
 Our bard eludes us ; vainly each face we scan, 
 It is not he, his features are not there, 
 But being thus hid his greatness is revealed* 
 
 * F. G. Scott in Shattifrariana, Novtmktr, rS&S 
 
 120
 
 NOTES 
 
 PAGE 16. " Honorificabilitudinitatibui . " 
 
 Concerning the translation of the anagram, a correspondent writes 
 to me from the Middle Temple, London. " I think tuiti sibi may 
 be rendered freely but legitimately, 'their own guardians,' and so 
 the whole passage may be read : ' These plays, the offspring [or 
 children] of Francis Bacon [are] their own guardians.' Now please 
 compare this with the phrase in the Epistle Dedicatorie of the Folio : 
 ' W^e have done an office to the dead to procure his orphans guard- 
 ians ' his orphans, the children, to which before there were no 
 guardians not having been acknowledged by their parent. There 
 seems a close connection between the two phrases, and this point, I 
 think, strengthens your position." The trouble in the mind of 
 Mr. Lang and others probably arises from the use of "-tuitpf " as a 
 passive and not a deponent verb, but I am quite sure that this usage > 
 has classical authority. 
 
 PAGE 31. " What is Ab speld backward ivitA a horn on his 
 head? " 
 
 As I am seeking information and not trying to uphold a thesis, I 
 will offer a suggestion as to a possible but to my mind a very im- 
 probable explanation of the occurrence of this riddle in the text. 
 A writer in Shakespeariana for December, 1883, suggested that 
 Holofernes was intended as a caricature of Bacon. If that were a 
 fact of course it would account for the bringing in of his name in 
 this connection. The resemblance, however, seems to be limited 
 to the facts that Bacon was a learned man and that Holofernes pre- 
 tended to be one, and the suggestion is so very far-fetched that I 
 can hardly think that the writer made it in earnest, but rather that 
 he meant it as a joke on the Baconians. 
 
 121
 
 That Bacon associated the word " horn " with a curved line is 
 manifest from his Sylva Sylvarum, section 132 : " It would be tried 
 how, and with what proportion of disadvantage, the voice will be 
 carried in an horn, which is a line arched." 
 
 PAGE 64. " That Jonson ivas at or about this time one of Bacon's 
 secretaries.'''' 
 
 Mr. John Churton Collins is a scholar. That is admitted by all. 
 In his Studies in Shakespeare, 1904, pp. 351-2, he says : " Equally 
 unwarrantable and baseless are Dr. Webb's assertions about the 
 relations between Ben Jonson and Bacon. ' It is probable,' he says, 
 ' that Jonson assisted Bacon in the preparation of the Novum Or- 
 ganum.* It is improbable, and in the highest degree improbable, 
 that Ben Jonson had anything to do with the Novum Organum. 
 'It is an undoubted fact,' continues Dr. Webb, 'that the Latin of 
 the De Augmentis, which was published in 1623, was the work of 
 Jonson.' . . . There is not a particle of evidence that Jonson 
 gave the smallest assistance to Bacon in translating any of his works 
 into Latin." And in a footnote he adds : " Probably the explana- 
 tion is given by Tenison, Baconiana, p. 25, namely, that Bacon 
 had assistance in translation, re-writing, or, at least, carefully revis- 
 ing it himself. The only translator named is Herbert. Hobbes is 
 also said to have assisted him." 
 
 Turning to Archbishop Tenison's Introduction to Baconiana to 
 which Mr. Collins refers we find, on p. 25, nothing related to the 
 subject ; on p. 24, however, is this : " Afterwards he enlarged 
 the second of those two discourses, [ The Advancement of Learn- 
 ing] which contained especially the above said Partition, and di- 
 vided the matter into eight books, and, knowing that this work was 
 desired beyond the Seas, and being also aware that books written 
 in a modern language, which receiveth much change, in a few years, 
 
 122
 
 were out of use ; he caused that part of it which he had written in 
 English, to be translated into the Latin tongue, by Mr. Herbert, and 
 some others, who were esteemed masters in the Roman eloquence." 
 On p. 60, of the same Introduction, we find, referring to Bacon's 
 Apothegms and Essays, this : " His Lordship wrote them in the 
 English tongue, and enlarged them as occasion served, and at last 
 added to them the Colours of Good and Evil, which are likewise 
 found in his book De Augmentis. The Latin translation of them 
 was a work performed by divers hands ; by those of Doctor Hacket 
 (late Bishop of Lichfield), Mr. Benjamin Johnson (the learned and 
 judicious poet) and some others whose names I once heard from 
 Dr. Ranvley, but I cannot recal them." 
 So much for Mr. Collins' ipse dixit \ 
 
 123
 
 NO LONGER MOURN FOR ME WHEN I AM DEAD 
 
 THAN YOU SHALL HEAR THE SURLY SULLEN BELL 
 
 GIVE WARNING TO THE WORLD THAT I AM FLED 
 
 FROM THIS VILE WORLD, WITH VILEST WORMS TO DWELL: 
 
 NAY, IF YOU READ THIS LINE, REMEMBER NOT 
 
 THE HAND THAT WRIT IT; FOR I LOVE YOU SO, 
 
 THAT I IN YOUR SWEET THOUGHTS WOULD BE FORGOT 
 
 IF THINKING ON ME THEN SHOULD MAKE YOU WOE. 
 
 O, IF, I SAY, YOU LOOK UPON THIS VERSE 
 
 WHEN I PERHAPS COMPOUNDED AM WITH CLAY, 
 
 DO NOT SO MUCH AS MY POOR NAME REHEARSE, 
 
 BUT LET YOUR LOVE EVEN WITH MY LIFE DECAY; 
 
 LEST THE WISE WORLD SHOULD LOOK INTO YOUR MOAN, 
 
 AND MOCK YOU WITH ME AFTER I AM GONE. 
 
 SHAKE-SPEARE.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
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