I

CHAPTER III.

THE CIPHer explaINED.

Give me the ocular proof.

Othello, iii, 3.

AM aware that nine-tenths of those who read this book will

turn at once to that part of it which proves the existence of a Cipher in the Shakespeare Plays. That is the all-important question: that is the essence and material part of the work.

Is there or is there not a Cipher in the Plays? A vast gulf separates these two conclusions. Are the Plays simply what they are given out to be by Heminge and Condell, untutored outpourings of a great rustic genius; or are they a marvelously complicated padding around a wonderful internal narrative?

I am sorry to see that some persons seem to think that this whole question merely concerns myself, and that it is to be answered by sneers and personal abuse. I am the least part, the most insignificant part, of this whole matter.

The question is really this: Is the voice of Francis Bacon again speaking in the world? Has the tongue, which has been stilled for two hundred and sixty years, again been loosened, and is it about to fill the astonished globe with eloquence and melody?

If it were announced to-morrow that from the grave at Stratford there were proceeding articulated utterances, muffled, if you please, but telling, even in fragments, a mighty and wonderful story, how the millions would swarm until all the streets and lanes and fields and farms of Stratford were overflowed with an excited multitude; how the foremost ranks would sink upon their knees, around the privileged persons who were at the open tomb; how every word would be repeated backward, from man to man, with reverent mien and bated breath, to be, at last, flashed on the wings of the lightning to all the islands and continents; to every habitation of civilized man on earth.

I ask all just-minded men to approach this revelation in the

same spirit. Abuse and insults may wound the individual: they cannot help the untruth nor hurt the truth.

I. THE CIPHER A REALITY.

That the Cipher is there; that I have found it out; that the nar.rative given is real, no man can doubt who reads this book to the end. There may be faults in my workmanship; there are none in the Cipher itself. All that I give is reality; but I may not give all there is. The difficulties are such as arise from the wonderful complexity of the Cipher, and the almost impossibility of the brain holding all the interlocking threads of the root-numbers in their order. Some more mathematical head than mine may be able to do it.

I would call the attention of those who may think that the results are accidental to the fact that each scene, and, in fact, each column and page, tells a different part of the same continuous story. In one place, it is the rage of the Queen; in another, the flight of the actors; in another, Bacon's despair; in another, the village doctor; in another, the description of the sick Shakspere; in another, the supper, etc.—all derived from the same series of numbers used in the same order.

II. THE NICKNAMES OF THE ACTORS.

In the Cipher narrative, the actors are often represented by nicknames, probably derived from the characters they usually played. And Henry Percy is sometimes called Hotspur, because that was the title given to the great Henry Percy, of Henry IV.'s time.

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It is an historical fact that Francis Bacon had a servant by the name of Henry Percy. His mother alludes to him, in one of her letters, as, that bloody Percy." His relations to Bacon were very close. He seems to have had charge of all Bacon's manuscripts at the time of his death. It is possible Bacon may have intended, at one time, to authorize the publication of an avowal of his authorship of the Plays. He said in the first draft of his will:

But toward the durable part of memory, which consisteth in my writings, I require my servant Henry Percy to deliver to my brother Constable all my manu

script compositions, and the fragments also of such as are not finished; to the end that if any of them be fit to be published, he may accordingly dispose of them. And herein I desire him to take the advice of Mr. Selden, and Mr. Herbert, of the Inner Temple, and to publish or suppress what shall be thought fit.1

It is also evident that Bacon held Henry Percy in high respect. In his last will he says:

I give to Mr. Henry Percy one hundred pounds."

He was not a mere servant; he was "Master Henry Percy." Did this tender and respectful feeling represent Bacon's gratitude to Henry Percy for invaluable services in a great crisis of his life? We see exemplified the habit of the actors in assuming the names of the characters they acted on the stage, in Shakspere's remark in the traditional jest that has come down to us: "William the Conqueror comes before Richard III.;" representing himself as William the Conqueror, and Burbage by the name of his favorite rôle, the bloody Duke of Gloster.

As illustrating still further how the names of the actors became identified with the names of the characters they impersonated, I would call attention to the following fact:

Bishop Corbet, writing in the reign of Charles I., and giving a description of the battle of Bosworth, as narrated to him on the field by a provincial tavernkeeper, tells us that when the perspicuous guide

Would have said, King Richard died,
And called, a horse! a horse! he Burbage cried.3

III. QUEEN ELIZABETH'S VIOLENCE.

It may be objected by some that the scene in which the Queen beats Hayward was undignified and improbable; but he who reads the history of that reign will find that Queen Elizabeth was a woman of the most violent and man-like temper. We find it recorded that she boxed Essex' ears, and that he half-drew his sword upon her, and swore "he would not take such treatment from Henry VIII. himself, if he were alive." And Rowland White records:

The Queen hath of late used the fair Mrs. Bridges with words and blows of

anger.

1 Spedding, Life and Works, vol. vii, p. 540.

2 Ibid., p. 542.

Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, p. 96.

Mrs. Bridges was one of the Queen's maids-of-honor who had offended her.

IV. THE LANGUAGE OF THE PERIOD.

I would touch upon one other preliminary point before coming to the Cipher story. Some persons may think that the sentences which I give as parts of the internal narrative sound strangely, and are strained in their construction; but it must be remembered that the English of the sixteenth century was not the English of the nineteenth century. The powers of our tongue have been vastly increased. It is curious to note how many words, now in daily use, cannot be found at all in the Shakespeare Plays. Here are some of them:

To illustrate the difference in the style of expression, between that day and this, let us take this brief letter, written by Bacon in 1620:

I went to Kew for pleasure, but I met with pain. But neither pleasure nor pain can withdraw my mind from thinking of his Majesty's service. And because his Majesty shall see how I was occupied at Kew, I send him these papers of Rules for the Star-Chamber, wherein his Majesty shall erect one of the noblest and durablest pillars for the justice of this kingdom in perpetuity that can be; after by his own wisdom and the advice of his Lords he shall have revised them, and established them. The manner and circumstances I refer to my attending his Majesty. The rules are not all set down, but I will do the rest within two or three days.

Or take this sentence from a letter written by Bacon, in 1594, to the Lord Keeper Puckering:

I was wished to be here ready in expectation of some good effect; and therefore I commend my fortune to your Lordship's kind and honorable furtherance. My affection inclineth me to be much your Lordship's; and my course and way, in all reason and policy for myself, leadeth me to the same dependence; hereunto if there shall be joined your Lordship's obligation in dealing strongly for me as you have begun, no man can be more yours.

I need not say that no person to-day would write English in that fashion. And that we do not so write it is partly due to Bacon himself, because, not only in the Plays, but in his great philosophical works, he has infinitely polished and perfected our language. He studied, in the Promus, the "elegancies" of speech; in the Plays he elaborated "the golden cadence of poesy;"1 and in The Advancement of Learning he gave us many passages that are perfectly modern in their exquisite smoothness and rhythm.

If the Cipher sentences are quaint and angular, the reader will therefore remember that he is reading a dialect three hundred years old.

V. OUR FAC-SIMILES.

Since the discussion arose about my discovery of the Cipher in the Plays, one of those luminous intellects which occasionally adorn all lands with their presence, and which, I am happy to say, especially abound in America, has made the profound observation that probably I had doctored the Plays of Shakespeare, and changed the phraseology, so as to work in a pretended Cipher!

That rasping old Thersites of literature, Carlyle, said, in his

'Love's Labor Lost, iv, 2.