Not only did Drayton and Jonson invent and get these verses engraved, they also—more amazing still—inserted Bacon’s bi-literal cipher into them. Now it is to be remarked here that the deeply-engraven lines upon which so many thousands of pilgrims gaze reverently are not, in their present form, so old as they appear to be, but were recut, and the lettering greatly modified, about 1831. Not one person in ten thousand of those who come to this spot is aware of the fact, and no illustration of the original lettering exists; but George Steevens, the Shakespearean scholar, wrote of it, about 1770, as an “uncouth mixture of small and capital letters.” He transcribed it, and so also in their turn did Knight and Malone. Some slight discrepancies exist between these transcriptions, in the exact dispositions of the letters, but the actual inscription appears to have been as under—

“Good Frend for Iesvs SAKE forbeare
To diGG T-E Dvst Enclo-Ased HE.Re.
Bleste be T-E Man Yt spares T-Es Stones
And cvrst be He Yt moves my bones.”

The hyphens between the words “the” and “thes” represent the old-time habit of engraving some of the letters conjoined, as seen repeated in the existing inscription illustrated here, in which the word “bleste” forms a prominent example. In that word the letters “ste” are in like manner conjoined, leading very many of the not fully-informed among the copyists of inscriptions to read it “blese.”

Halliwell-Phillipps, the foremost Shakespearean authority of his age (whom his arch-enemy, the emphatic F. J. Furnivall delighted, by the way, to style “Hell-P”) thus refers to the re-cut inscription in his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1881—

“The honours of repose, which have thus far been conceded to the poet’s remains, have not been extended to the tombstone. The latter had by the middle of the last century (i.e. about 1750) sunk below the level of the floor, and about fifty years ago (c. 1831) had become so much decayed as to suggest a vandalic order for its removal, and in its stead to place a new slab, one which marks certainly the locality of Shakespeare’s grave, and continues the record of the farewell lines, but indicates nothing more. The original memorial has wandered from its allotted station no man can tell whither—a sacrifice to the insane worship of prosaic neatness, that mischievous demon whose votaries have practically destroyed so many of the priceless relics of ancient England and her gifted sons.”

The cipher which Donnelly, the resourceful sleuthhound, pretends he has found in the older inscription, is destroyed by the re-arrangement in the new. It was not, he says, the sheer illiteracy of the local mason who cut the original letters that accounts for the eccentric appearance of capitals where they have no business to be; for the hyphen which so oddly divides the word “Enclo-Ased”; for the full-stops in “HE.Re.” or for the curious choice that writes “Iesvs” in small letters and “SAKE” in large capitals. No; it was the necessities of the cipher which accounted for this weird “derangement of epitaphs”; and Donnelly proceeds to emulate the conjurer who produces unexpected things from empty hats, and he finally arrives at this startling revelation—

“Francis Bacon wrote the Greene, Marlowe, and Shakespeare plays.”

As Mark Twain—another Baconian—says, “Bacon was a born worker.” Yes, indeed; but he understates it, if we were to believe this revelation. To have done all this he would need to have been a syndicate.

CHAPTER X

The Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-on-Avon (concluded)—The Shakespeare grave and monument—The Miserere Seats.