網頁圖片
PDF
ePub 版

sense, grammar or rhetoric; in fact, it is very rarely that three can be found to agree together in proper order.

To prove this, let me take this very page 53 of 1st Henry IV., on which Nicholas Bacon is found, and try the tenth, twentieth, fiftieth and hundredth words:

The tenth words are:

To,-it,-bids,-a,-can,—and,-found-how,-looks-on,-1,-— ripe,-loe,- once,-beare,-we,- thrive,-short, Heigh, etc.

The twentieth words are:

It,-a,-and, -how,-on,-ripe,-once-we,- short,hanged,Tom,-of-give,- since,-in,-in,-a,-away, etc.

The fiftieth words are:

Can,-on-beare,- hanged,

as,―in,—your, · never,— 1,— go,—

picking,-of-it,-me-mad,-pray, etc.

The hundredth words are:

On, hanged,-in,- never,-He,-wild,-if,-then, etc.

The liveliest imagination and the vastest ingenuity can make nothing of such sentences as these, twist them how you will. The presence of order, and the coherence of things in the visible universe, prove the Creator. The existence of a regular, rhetorical, grammatical, reasonable sentence, occurring at stated and unvarying intervals in the texture of a work, proves conclusively that some mind so prearranged it. The man who would believe otherwise has just cause of complaint against the God who so miserably equipped him for the duties of life. He would be ready to believe, as Bacon himself has said, and as I have quoted elsewhere, that you could write the separate letters of the alphabet on a vast number of slips of paper, and then, by mixing and jumbling them together, they would accidentally assume the shape of Homer's Iliad!

A consecutive thought demonstrates a brain behind it.

If this prove false,

The pillared firmament is rottenness,

And earth's base built on stubble.

After many weary months of this self-imposed toil, trying every kind and combination of numbers that I could think of, I gave it up in despair. I did not for one instant doubt that there was a cipher in the Plays. I simply could not find it.

I wrote my books Atlantis and Ragnarök. After these were off my hands, my mind kept recurring to the problem of the cipher. At length this thought came to me:

The common editions of the Plays have been doctored, altered, corrected by the commentators. What evidence have I that the words on these pages are in anything like their original order? The change of a word, of a hyphen, would throw out the whole

count.

I must get a copy of the play as it was originally published. I knew there were fac-simile copies of the great Folio of 1623. I must procure one. At first I bought a copy, octavo form, reduced, published by Chatto & Windus. But I found the type was too small for the kind of work I proposed. I at length, July 1, 1882, procured a fac-simile copy, folio size, made by photo-lithographic process, and, therefore, an exact reproduction of type, pages, punctuation and everything else. It is one of those "executed under the superintendence of H. Staunton," and published in 1866 by Day & Son, London.

[ocr errors]

CHAPTER IV.

THE GREAT FOLIO EDITION OF 1623.

Look, Lucius, here's the book I sought for.

Julius Caesar, iv, 3.

IN

N 1623 Shakspere had been dead seven years; Elizabeth had long before gone to her account; James was king; the Plays had ceased to appear more than twelve years before. In that time Bacon had mounted to the highest station in the kingdom. But a great tempest was arising-a tempest that was to sweep England, Ireland and Scotland, and bring mighty men to the surface; and its first wild gusts had hurled the great Lord Chancellor in shame and dishonor from his chair.

In 1623 Bacon, amid the wreck of his fortune, was settling up his accounts with his own age and getting ready for posterity. He said, in a letter to Tobie Matthew:

It is true my labors are most set to have those works, which I formerly published, as that of Advancement of Learning, that of Henry VII., that of the Essays, being retractate, and made more perfect, well translated into Latin by the help of some good pens, which forsake me not. For these modern languages will, at one time or another, play the bankrupt with books; and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad, as God shall give me leave, to recover it with posterity.

After speaking, in a letter to the Bishop of Winchester, of the examples afforded him by Demosthenes, Cicero and Seneca, in the times of their banishment, he proceeds:

These examples confirmed me much in a resolution, whereunto I was otherwise inclined, to spend my time wholly in writing, and to put forth that poor talent, or half talent, or what it is, that God has given me, not, as heretofore, to particular exchanges, but to banks or mounts of perpetuity, which will not break.

The De Augmentis was published at the same time, in the same year, as the Folio, and in it, as I have shown, is contained the chapter on ciphers, and a description of that best of all ciphers— omnia per omnia, where one writing is infolded in another. Thus the cipher narrative and the key to it went out together in the same year.

The Novum Organum was published, incomplete, in the autumn of 1620; and he gave as a reason for sending it forth unfinished that "he numbered his days and would have it saved."

In the same way he desired to save Macbeth, Julius Cæsar, Henry VIII, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, etc., from the oblivion that would fall upon them unless he published them; for the man in whose name they were to be given out had taken no steps to secure their rescue from the waters of Lethe.

And he speaks of them, as I take it, enigmatically in the following:

As for my Essays, and some other particulars of that nature, I count them but as the recreation of my other studies, and in that sort I propose to continue them, though I am not ignorant that those kind of writings would, with less pains and embracement, perhaps yield more luster and reputation to my name than those other which I have in hand. But I count the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings, before his death, to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, not to go along with him.'

We have seen him describing poetry as a recreation, as something that "slipped" from one like gum from the tree; and we have seen him, in his letters to Tobie Matthew, referring to certain "works of his recreation," which no one was to be allowed to copy, and to unnamed “works of the alphabet." And now he says that he proposes to publish these works, and "continue them down to posterity. And he believes that these works would yield more luster and reputation to his name than those which he has in hand, to-wit, his philosophical and prose works. Surely the Essays and the acknowledged fragments he left behind would not yield. more "luster and reputation" than the Vorum Organum and the De Augmentis. He must refer, then, to some great works. And how purposely obscure is that last sentence!

I count the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings before his death to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, not to go along with him.

He is taking the utmost pains to publish his writings before his death, "remembering his days, and that they must be saved,” and yet he tells us that this is an untimely anticipation of what must follow him. That is, if the works are not published they will be lost; and it is better they should be lost; and then the glory of

1 Letter to the Bishop of Winchester.

them will follow the author's death! Bacon is never obscure unless he intends to be so. And in this I think he means as follows:

As for my Essays and the Shakespeare Plays, I will continue them preserve them for posterity. I am aware that those plays would give more luster and reputation to my name, if I acknowledged them, than my philosophical writings; but I think there is a certain glory which should follow a man, by rising up long after his death, rather than accompany him by being published in his own name before his death.

If he does not hint at this, what does he mean? Surely there is no great distinction between a man publishing his writings a year before his death, and having his executors publish them a year after his death; and why should the one be an "untimely anticipation of the other"? And just about this period Bacon writes to Sir Tobie that "it is time to put the alphabet in a frame;" and we will see that the cipher depends on the paging of the great Folio, and the paging is as a frame to the text.

And side by side with the Novum Organum and the De Augmentis, mighty pillars of his glory, appears, at the same time, this noble Folio, which, as Collier says, does credit to the age, even as a specimen of typography.”1

[ocr errors]

And at the same time Lord Bacon sends some "great and noble token" to Sir Tobie Matthew, and Sir Tobie does not dare to name the work in his letter of thanks, but, in the obscure way common to the correspondence of these men, says: "The most prodigious wit that ever I knew, of my nation and of this side of the sea, is of your lordship's name, though he be known by another." That is to say, Sir Tobie, writing probably from Madrid, says: "Your lordship is the first of wits you are the greatest wit I have ever known, either in England, ' my nation,' or Europe,' on this side of the sea,' though you have disguised your greatness under an assumed name.”

And " a great and noble token," indeed, is this Folio. The world has never seen, will never see such. another. It is more lustrous than those other immortal books, the Novum Organum and the De Augmentis, and its columnar light will shine through all the ages. It is another Homer - more vast, more civilized, more varied, more complicated; multiplied in all forms and powers a 1 English Dramatic Poetry, vol. iii, p. 313.

« 上一頁繼續 »