“Sware by my sword never to speak of this
That you have found while we do live;”
and again—
“Sweare never to publish that we conceal under the names
Of others our own till we are dead,
Sweare never to reveal the secret cipher words
That guide your steps from part to part,
Nor how it is gathered, joined or put together,
Till we be dead, so help you God!”
The chief point to be noted about these cipher stories, biographies and plays is that they are built up of quotations from the works of all the authors whose writings Bacon claims to be his own. Dr. Owen asks us, in all seriousness, to believe that Bacon composed the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Peel, and Greene, and the poems by Spenser, as they appear in the cipher translation, and that he subsequently “decomposed and composed them again” for circulation in his own day, under the names of the various authors who acted as his masques. “When deciphered and replaced in their original form,” Dr. Owen asserts, “they mean something which they do not in the plays.” Such a statement, as anyone can prove by turning to these curious deciphered books, is both fallacious and absurd.
Let us see what these passages which mean nothing in the plays mean in the cipher stories. The pledge which Hamlet imposes upon Horatio and Marcellus after the interview with the ghost is a serviceable case in point. Hamlet’s words are almost too familiar to need repeating:
“So help you mercy, that how strange
Or odd soe’er I bear myself—
As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on—
That you, at such times seeing me, never shall,
With arms encumber’d thus, or this head shake,
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,
As ‘Well, well, we know;’—or ‘We could, and if we would;’
Or ‘If we list to speak;’—or, ‘There be, an if they might:’—
Or such ambiguous giving out, to note
That you know aught of me;—This not to do,
So grace and mercy at your most need help you,
Swear.”
No one can question the fitness and perfect appropriateness of the foregoing passage in Hamlet, but it is doubtful if anybody, other than Dr. Owen, will recognise their cogency when they are addressed by Bacon to his unknown decipherer.
Bacon declares that Bottom’s recital of his dream, which commences,
“The eye of man hath not heard,
The ear of man hath not seen,”
is