THE PRINCETON ADDRESS.
In an address at Princeton on the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, Sir Henry Irving did me the honor of mention, although in rather a disparaging way, as “constructing a wonderful cipher out of the higgledy-piggledy lettering” of the First Folio and other Elizabethan books in which irregular lettering is found.
As comparatively few will recognize from the terms Sir Henry used, the actual meaning of this characterization of the peculiar printing, I beg leave to say that he refers to the two or more forms of Italic letters the printers of that day employed in the same text of many books, and that I have discovered that their use in a large number was for the purpose of embodying the biliteral cipher invented by Bacon. Much of this work has been deciphered and published as the Bi-literal Cypher of Francis Bacon, and no doubt the recent discussion of this book in England,—and the echoes, on this side, of the controversy,—was the suggestion, at least, of the theme of the Princeton address.
Sir Henry points out that by “this wondrous cipher Bacon is alleged to have written in addition to Shakespeare and Greene, the works of Ben Jonson and Marlowe, Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,” but says “its chief business is to stagger us with the revelation that Bacon was the 'legitimate son of Queen Elizabeth.’”
It is not my purpose at this time to discourse upon the discoveries I have made, which, among a great deal else equally important, most certainly reveal all that Sir Henry mentions—except that Bacon lays no claim to the greater part of Ben Jonson’s works—but I wish to throw additional light upon certain passages in the address that are presented as facts irreconcilable with the cipher disclosures. These “facts” are supposed to show that it is not in the realm of possibility that Bacon could have written the plays.
In the opening sentences, Sir Henry refers to some words of his own used as a fitting conclusion to a treatise on the Bacon-Shakespeare Question by Judge Allen of Boston. I quote: “When the Baconians can show that Ben Jonson was either a fool or a knave, or that the whole world of players and playwrights at that time was in a conspiracy to palm off on the ages the most astounding cheat in history, they will be worthy of serious attention.”
If Sir Henry Irving to-day appeared in a new play, and at the same time claimed that it was the work of his hand, it would not, probably, require “a conspiracy of the whole world of players and playwrights to palm it off” on the present age to say nothing of the future.
The writers who refer so confidently to Ben Jonson’s praise of Shakespeare, do not observe that he says:
——“he seemes to shake a Lance,
As brandisht at the eyes of Ignorance.”