“It shall be noted, indeed, when you uncover his stile, my works do not all come from mine owne penne, for I shall name to you some plays that come forth fro’ Sir F. Bacon, his worthy hand or head, I bein’ but the masque behind which he was surely hid. Th’ play entitled Sejanus was his drama, and th’ King’s, Queen’s, Prince’s Entertainments; the Queen’s Masques are his, as also th’ short Panegyre.”
SHAKESPEARE.
The Droeshout Etching, from the 1623 Folio Edition.
To the Reader.
This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the Grauer had a strife
with Nature, to out-doo the life:
O, could he but haue drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was euer writ in brasse.
But, since he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.
B. I.
But we learn that, in addition to Jonson, “my foster-brother Anthony, my owne brother Robert, Ben Jonson, my friend, adviser and assistant, and our private secretary,” were also “cogniza’t of the work,” and indeed after Bacon’s death in 1626, William Rawley, his private secretary, took up the cipher story, and completed it in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and in the 1635 editions of Sylva Sylvarum and the New Atlantis. It has been objected that Bacon could not have dropped the cipher into books published after his death, but this objection “vanishes into invisibility,” as Mr. Theobald would say, when we remember that faithful old Rawley was living long after Bacon’s work had been “cut short by th’ sickel o’ death.” He bobs up serenely in Sylva Sylvarum, drops in another thirty pages of Bacon’s cipher lamentations, and winds up with a dozen lines of his own “to speak of th’ errata.” This last instalment was, it may be assumed, written prior to 1626, and entrusted to Rawley to make use of on the first opportunity, i.e., as soon as he could obtain command of the proofs of another book.
In the first folio, published twenty years after the death of Elizabeth, Bacon still appears to be affrighted by the memory of the Queen; his life would still be forfeit if his identity were discovered, “since she is my mother;” but in his valedictory address to his decipherer, he declares that it is “not feare, but disstaste of th’ unseemly talk and much curiosity of the many who read these cipher histories, that makes him still desirous to preserving his incognito.”
“My time of feare went from me with my greatness, but I still wish to avoid many questionings—and much suspicion, perchance on the side of the King, in his owne prope’ person. I have neede of the very caution which kept these secrets from the many, when my mother made me swear secrecy, and my life was the forfeit; nor may I now speake openly, yet many men for a kingdom would break their oathes.”