CHAPTER II.

HOW I BECAME CERTAIN THERE WAS A CIPHER.

A book where men may read strange matters.

Macbeth, i, 5.

N the winter of 1878-9 I said to myself: I will re-read the Shake

IN

speare Plays, not, as heretofore, for the delight which they would give me, but with my eyes directed singly to discover whether there is or is not in them any indication of a cipher.

And I reasoned thus: If there is a cipher in the Plays, it will probably be in the form of a brief statement, that "I, Francis Bacon, of St. Albans, son of Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England, wrote these Plays, which go by the name of William Shakespeare."

The things then to be on the look-out for, in my reading, were the words Francis, Bacon, Nicholas, Bacon, and such combinations of Shake and speare, or Shakes and peer, as would make the word Shakespeare.

I possessed no Concordance at the time, or I might have saved myself much unnecessary trouble.

The first thing that struck me was the occurrence in The Merry Wives of Windsor' of the word Bacon. The whole scene is an intrusion into the play. The play turns upon Sir John Falstaff's making love to two dames of Windsor at the same time, and the shames and humiliations/he suffered therefrom. And this scene has nothing whatever to do with the plot of the play. Mistress Page, one of the Merry Wives, accompanied by her boy William, meets with Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson and schoolmaster,— old Dame Quickly being by;- and Mistress Page tells the schoolmaster that her husband says the boy William "profits nothing at his book;" and she requests him to "ask him some questions in his accidence." In the first place, it is something of a surprise to find the wife of a yeoman, or man of the middle class, who is able to

1 Act iv, scene 1.

tell whether or not the boy correctly answers the Latin questions put to him. But what, in the name of all that is reasonable, has the boy's proficiency in Latin to do with Sir John Falstaff's lovemaking? And why take up a whole scene to introduce it? The boy William nowhere appears in the play, except in that scene. He is called up from the depths of the author's consciousness, to recite a school lesson; and he is dismissed at the end of it into nothingness, never to appear again in this world. Is not this extraordinary?

We have also the older form of the play, which is only half the size of the present, and there is no William in it, and no such scene. That first form was written to play, and it has everything in it of action and plot necessary to make it a successful stage play, and tradition tells us that it was successful. But what was this enlarged form of the play written for, if the old form answered all the purposes of a play? And why insert in it this useless scene? Richard Grant White calls it "that very superfluous scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor." He acknowledges that "it has

nothing whatever to do with the plot.""

Speaking of the contemporaries of Shakspere, Swinburne says:

There is not one of them whom we can reasonably imagine capable of the patience and self-respect which induced Shakespeare to re-write the triumphantly popular parts of Romeo, of Falstaff and of Hamlet, with an eye to the literary perfection and performance of work, which, in its first outline, had won the crowning suffrage of immediate and spectacular applause."

But while these reasons might possibly account for the re-writing of the parts of Romeo, Falstaff and Hamlet, there is no literary perfection about The Merry Wives of Windsor to explain the doubling of it in size; there is very little blank verse in the comedy, and still less of anything that can aspire to be called poetry. Why, then, was it re-written? And why, when re-written, was this superfluous scene injected into it? That the reader may be the better able to judge of it, I quote the scene entire, just as it appears on pages 53 and 54 of the Folio of 1623:

ACTUS QUARTUS. SCENA PRIMA.

Enter Mistris Page, Quickly, William, Evans.

Mist. Pag. Is he at M. Fords already think'st thou?

Qui. Sure he is by this; or will be presently; but truely he is very couragious mad, about his throwing into the water. Mistris Ford desires you to come sodainely.

1 Genius of Shak., p. 28. 2 Thomas Middleton, Shakespeariana, vol. iii, No. 26, p. 61.

Mist. Pag. Ile be with her by and by: Ile but bring my yong-man here to Schoole looke where his Master comes; 'tis a playing day I see; how now Sir Hugh, no Schoole to-day?

Eva. No: Master Slender is let the Boyes leave to play.

Qui. 'Blessing of his heart.

Mist. Pag. Sir Hugh, my husband saies my sonne profits nothing in the world at his Booke: I pray you aske him some questions in his Accidence.

Ev. Come hither William; hold up your head; come.

Mist. Pag. Come-on, Sirha; hold up your head; answere your Master; be not afraid.

Eva.

William, how many numbers is in Nownes? Will. Two.

Qui. Truely, I thought there had bin one Number more, because they say od's-Nownes.

Eva. Peace, your tatlings. What is (Faire) William?
Will. Pulcher.

Qu.

Powlcats? There are fairer things than Powlcats, sure. Eva. You are a very simplicity o'man: I pray you peace. William?

Eva. No, it is Lapis: I pray you remember in your praine.

Will. Lapis.

What is (Lapis),

Eva. That is a good William: what is he (William) that do's lend articles. Will. Articles are borrowed of the Pronoune, and be thus declined. Singu lariter nominativo hic, hac, hoc.

Eva. Nominativo hig, hag, hog: pray you marke: genitivo huius. what is your Accusative-case?

Well.

Eva. I pray you have your remembrance (childe) Accusativo hing, hang, hoz. Hang-hog, is latten for Bacon, I warrant you.

Qu.

Eva.

Leave your prables (o'man). What is the Focative case (William ?)

Qu.

a whore.

Eva. Qu.

'Vengeance of Ginyes case; fie on her; never name her (childe) if she be

For shame o'man.

You do ill to teach the childe such words; hee teaches him to hic, and to hac; which they'll do fast enough of themselves, and to call horum; fie upon you. Evans. O'man, art thou Lunatics? Hast thou no understandings for thy Cases & the number of the Genders? Thou art as foolish Christian creatures, as I would desires.

Mi. Page. Pre'thee hold thy peace.

Ev.

Shew me now (William) some declensions of your Pronounes.

Will. Forsooth, I have forgot.

Ev. It is Qui, que, quod; if you forget your Quies, your Ques and your Quods you must be preeches: Go your waies and play, go.

M. Pag. He is a better scholler then I thought he was.
Ev. He is a good sprag-memory: Farewel Mis. Page.

Mis. Page. Adieu good Sir Hugh: Get you home, boy, Come we stay too long. Exeunt.

I will ask the reader, after a while, to recur to this scene, and note the unusual, the extraordinary way in which the words are bracketed and hyphenated.

It is very evident that there is nothing in this scene which has the slightest relation to the play of The Merry Wives. It is simply a schoolmaster, who speaks broken English, hearing a boy his lesson. There is no wit in the scene, and what attempts at wit there are seem to me very forced.

It was written and inserted simply to enable the author to reiterate the name William eleven times, and to bring in the word Bacon. The whole scene is built up, created, constructed and forced into the play to find an opportunity to use the word Bacon without arousing suspicion.

"Hang-hog is the Latin for Bacon," says Dame Quickly, and we know just where the pun came from. I have already quoted the anecdote in a former chapter, but I repeat it here. It was inserted by the publisher of the third edition of the Resuscitatio, 1671, together with fifteen other anecdotes:

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 to save his life; which, when nothing that he had said did avail, he at length desired his mercy on account of kindred. 'Prithee," said my lord judge, "how can 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 except you be hanged; for Hog is not Bacon until it be well hanged."

Here we have precisely the idea played upon by Dame Quickly. "Hang-hog is the Latin for Bacon," says the old woman. “Hog is not Bacon until it be well hanged," says Sir Nicholas.

Here, then, we have not only a scene forced into the play, to introduce a jest with the word Bacon in it; but we find that jest connected with Sir Francis, because it related to an incident in the life of his father.

All this is most remarkable. But, having found William repeated eleven times, I asked myself, Where is the rest of the name, Shakespeare, if there is really a cipher here, and the recurrence of William and the occurrence of Bacon are not accidents? I soon found it.

On the same page and column on which the scene I have just quoted terminates, page 54, in the next scene, Mistress Page, speaking of Ford's jealousy, says:

Why, woman, your husband is in his olde lines againe: he so takes on yonder with my husband; so railes against all married mankinde; so curses all Eves daughters of what complexion soever; and so buffettes himself on the forehead, crying peere-out, peere-out, that any madnesse I ever yet beheld, etc.

Here we have the last part of Shakespeare's name, and we will see bereafter that, in the cipher rule, the hyphenated words are, at times, counted as two separate words. It seemed to me very unnatural that any jealous man would beat his forehead and tell it to peer out; or even tell his brain to peer out. Men usually employ their eyes for purposes of watchfulness. All that Ford needed was the evidence of his eyes to satisfy his jealousy. It was not a case of intellectual eyesight of the brain peering into some complicated mental puzzle. It seemed to me, again, as if this was forced into the text.

But where was the first part of Shakespeare's name? As the last syllable was peere, the first syllable—to give the full sound would have to be shakes, and not shake. I found it on the next page but one, page 56, in the sentence which describes the ghost of Herne the hunter, in the Windsor forest:

Mist. Page. There is an old tale goes that Herne, the
Hunter (sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest),

Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,

Walk round about an Oake, with great rag'd horns,

And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,

And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain

In a most hideous and dreadful manner.

I turned to the original Merry Wives of Windsor, which I find published in Hazlitt's Shakespeare Library, "as it hath bene divers times acted by the right Honorable my Lord Chamberlaines servants, both before her Maiestie, and elsewhere;" and I found the original of this passage in the following crude and brief form:

Oft have you heard since Horne, the hunter, dyed,

That women, to affright their little children,

Ses that he walks in shape of a great stagge.