CHAPTER VI.

THE CIPHER FOUND.

If circumstances lead me, I will find

Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed

Within the center.

Hamlet, ii, 2.

W

HILE such evidences as the foregoing satisfied me of the existence of a cipher, I was still but at the beginning of

my task.

What words followed found out? Found out what? Who found out? Was I to look on the next column, the next page, the next scene, or the next play?

The creator of the cipher was master of his work, and could throw the sequent words where he pleased. He might match a play in the Histories with one in the Comedies, and thus the words would be separated by hundreds of pages. Nothing was impossible to the ingenuity manifested in that checker-work of found out. All I knew was that the cipher words held an arithmetical relation to the numbers of the pages on which, or near which, they occurred, but beyond that all was conjecture. I was as if one had taken me into a vast forest, and told me that, on certain leaves of certain trees, was written a narrative of incalculable importance to mankind; and had given me a clew to know the especial trees on which the words were to be found. climbed into and searched the branches of these trees, and collected, with infinite care, the words upon them, I was still at my wits' end. How was I to arrange them? As I did not know a single sentence of the story, nor the rule by which it was constructed, I might have the very words I needed before me and would not recognize them.

If I had

It seems to me that the labors of Champollion le Jeune and Thomas Young, in working out the Egyptian hieroglyphics from the tri-lingual inscription on the Rosetta stone, were simple compared with the task I had undertaken. They had before them a

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stone with an inscription in three alphabets the hieroglyphic, the demotic and the Greek; and the Greek version stated that the three inscriptions signified the same thing. The problem was to translate the unknown by the known. It was observed that a certain oval ring, inclosing a group of hieroglyphic phonetic signs, stood in a corresponding place with the name of Ptolemy in the Greek; and the same group was found, often repeated, over sitting figures of the temple of Karnak. The conclusion was inevitable, therefore, that that group signified Ptolemy. Furthermore, the word king occurred twenty-nine times in the Greek version of the Rosetta inscription, and a group holding corresponding positions was repeated twenty-nine times in the demotic. Another stone gave the phonetic elements which constituted the word Cleopatra. Champollion and Young thus had acquired the knowledge of numerous alphabetical signs, with the sounds belonging to them, and the rest of the work of translation was easy, for the Egyptian language still survived in a modified form in the mouths of the Coptic peasants.

But in my case I knew neither the rule nor the story. I tried to obtain a clue by putting together the words which constituted the name of the old play, The Contention between York and Lancaster, as found in the end of 1st Henry IV. and the beginning of 2d Henry IV.; but, unfortunately, Contention occurs twice (73d word, second column, page 74, 2d Henry IV., act i, scene 2, and the 496th word, second column, page 75), while York and Lancaster are repeated many times.

Even when I had progressed so far, by countless experimentations, as to guess at something of the story that was being told, I could not be certain that I had the real sense of it. For instance, let the reader write out a sentence like this:

And then the infuriated man struck wildly at the dog, and the mad animal sprang upon him and seized him by the throat.

Then let him cut the paper to pieces, so that each slip contains a word, jumble them together, and ask a friend, who has never seen the original sentence, to reconstruct it. He can clearly perceive that it is a description of a contest between a man and a dog, but beyond this he can be sure of nothing. Was the dog mad or the man? Which was infuriated? Did the dog spring on the man, or

the man on the dog? Which was seized by the throat? Did the man strike wildly at the dog, or the dog spring wildly at the man?

Every word in the sentence is a new element of perplexity. In fact, if you had handed your friend three slips of paper, containing the three words, struck, Tom, John, it would have been impossible for him to decide, without some rule of arrangement, whether Tom struck John or John struck Tom; and the great question, like that of the blow inflicted on Mr. William Patterson, would remain forever unsettled.

My problem was to find out, by means of a cipher rule of which I knew little, a cipher story of which I knew less. A more brain-racking problem was never submitted to the intellect of man. It was translating into the vernacular an inscription written in an unknown language, with an unknown alphabet, without a single clue, however slight, to the meaning of either. I do not wonder that Bacon said that there are some ciphers which exclude the decipherer. He certainly thought he had constructed one in these Plays.

I. THE HEART OF THE MYSTERY.

The central point upon which the cipher turns is the dividing line between the two plays, the first part of Henry IV., and the second part of Henry IV.; and the essentials of the rule are found on the last page of the former play and the first page of the latter play. Observe how cunning this is.

Here was a puzzle the solution of which depended upon putting together the two ends of two plays. Neither alone would give the rule or solve the problem.

And Bacon published Part 1 of Henry IV. in 1598 and Part 2 in 1600. Why? Because he was not sure that the artificial character of the text might not arouse suspicion in that age of ciphers, and he desired to test it. He submitted it with curious interest to the public. But if it had aroused suspicion; if "Francis" "bacon" (printed with a small b), "Nicholas" "bacons" (also with a small b")," son," "St. Albans," etc., etc., had caught the suspicious eyes of any of Cecil's superserviceable followers, then he would have held back the second part, and it would have been simply impossible for any person to have worked out the cipher story; because

it turned upon pages 73 and 74 of an intended folio, while the quarto copy of the play began with page 1.

The original sheets of the author's manuscript, arranged in pages, as we have them in the great Folio of 1623, which paging alone could have revealed the treasonable story, were doubtless inclosed in some box or coffer, and carefully buried at St. Albans or Gray's Inn; for in that age of absolute power no man's private papers or desks were safe from a visitation of the myrmidons of the law. We will see that when Nash, the actor, was arrested for writing a seditious play, the Council ordered his papers to be at once examined.

Delia Bacon said:

We know that this was an age in which not the books of the learned only were subjected to "the press and torture which expulsed from them all those particulars that point to action "— action, at least, in which the common weal of men is most concerned; that it was a time when the private manuscript was subjected to that same censorship and question, and corrected with those same instruments and engines which made them a regular part of the machinery of the press; when the most secret cabinet of the statesman and the man of letters must be kept in order for that revision; when his most confidential correspondence, his private note-book and diary, must be composed under these restrictions; when in the church not the pulpit only, but the secrets of the study, were explored for proofs of opposition to the power then predominant; when the private desk and drawers of the poor, obscure country clergyman were ransacked, and his half-formed studies of sermons, his rude sketches and hypothetical notes of sermons yet to be- put down for private purposes, perhaps, and never intended to be preached — were produced by government as an excuse for subjecting him to indignities and cruelties to which those practiced upon the Earl of Kent and the Earl of Gloster in the play [of Lear] formed no parallel.'

And in 1600, after the first part of the play of Henry IV. had stood the test of two years of criticism, and the watchful eyes and ears of Francis Bacon could see or hear no sign or sound to indicate that his secret was suspected, he ventured to put forth the second part of the play. But this, like the other, began with page 1, and detection was almost impossible.

And for twenty years scarcely any of the Plays known by the name of Shakespeare were put forth, because to the keen eyes of the author they were peppered all over with suspicious words and twistings of the text, which might arouse suspicion and betray the fact that they were cipher-work. And when at last all the Plays were published in the great Folio, in 1623, arranged in their

The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, p. 568.

due order, there was, as I have heretofore said, little risk of discovery. And in this Folio all the Plays were matched together, as I infer, just as these two parts of Henry IV. are; that is, the cipher of each group of two plays depended upon the last page of one and the first page of the other. Thus there was but little risk in putting out Othello alone, or Troilus and Cressida by itself, not only because the paging of the quarto was not the same as that of the Folio, but because these plays were not accompanied by their cipher-mates, so to speak. They were like those curious writings we have read of in romances, where the paper was cut in half and each half secreted by itself, the writing not to be read and the secret revealed until they were put together.

II. THE DIAGRAM ON WHICH THE CIPHER DEpends.

If the reader will study the fac-similes of pages 73 and 74 of the Folio of 1623, herewith given, he will find that the following diagram gives the skeleton, or construction, of the pages and columns, without the words. And as the entire cipher-story in the two plays, the first and second parts of Henry IV., radiates out from this diagram and extends right and left to the beginning of the First Part and the last word of the Second Part, it will be well for the reader to consider it closely.

The figures in the middle of the parts of the diagram give the number of words in each subdivision. The figures on the margin give the number of words from one point of departure to another. The abbreviation "hy," in this diagram, means hyphenated: it indicates that there are double words in the text, like ill-spirited, which are to be counted as one word or as two words, according to the requirements of the cipher rule. The sign "(3)" signifies that, in addition to the regular number of words in the text, there are three additional words in brackets: like "(as we heare)," in the second column of page 73.

Throughout the cipher story, the abbreviations h and will be used to save printing in full "hyphenated words" and "words in brackets," respectively.