Shatter your leaves, &c., &c.
Now in the above passages, if we except only the fact that the dots and dashes of the cypher are represented in these by italics and ordinary letters, whereas Bacon employs two slightly different forms of italics, we have the biliteral cypher exemplified completely, though with extreme simplicity. But we have not this only. As the reader will see presently, we have exemplified in them also another of the claims now made for Bacon in relation to works published under another name. It may amuse some readers to extract the cypher in these passages for themselves. They will begin thus, putting dots under the italics and dashes under the ordinary letters:
Saint Peter sat at.
._... _._.. ._. ..
They will then divide these dots and dashes into groups of five, thus: ._..., _._.., ._...; and on turning to Bacon’s code, already given, they will find that these three groups mean I. W. I. Pursuing this method, they will find that in the passage from Byron the following meaning is 'infolded:’
'I, William Wordsworth, am the author of the Byron poems. Don Juan contains my private prayers.’
In the passages from Milton, the 'infolded’ meaning is this:
'I, S. Pepys, in this and oth’r poems [Now to my Sams’n] hide my secret frailties [Now to Lycidas] lest my wife, poor fool, should know.’
The reader will see from these examples how easily, if it were not for the existence of copyright, any author might republish the works of any other, introducing a cypher into them, in which he claimed them as his own composition, and deposited in them any secrets which he wished both to record and hide. The passages taken from Milton illustrate certain farther points. The bi-literal cypher of Bacon exists, it is alleged, in the first folio of Shakespeare, in those parts only which are printed in italics, the end of one fragment of the secret writing often breaking off in the middle of a letter, which is completed at the beginning of another italic passage farther on, and sometimes in another play; and parentheses occur like those in our imagined cypher by Pepys, directing the decipherer where to look for the continuations.
The general character, then, of this biliteral cypher, and the manner in which it is alleged to have been inserted in one edition of the Shakespearian plays, must now be perfectly clear to even the most careless reader; and we may therefore pass on to another portion of our subject; for the claim of the Baconian theorists does not by any means end with what they declare they have proved with regard to the first folio of Shakespeare. They claim that the same cypher has been introduced by Bacon into early or first editions of a number of other works, some bearing his own name, and admittedly written by himself, others bearing the name of well known persons, his contemporaries. These include his own Advancement of Learning, 1605, his Novum Organum, 1620, and his History of Henry VII., 1622; the Complaints, 1591, and the Colin Clout, 1595, published under the name of Spenser, and the edition of the Faerie Queen, 1596; certain editions of certain plays ascribed to the four dramatists, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson; and the edition published in 1628 of The Anatomy of Melancholy. Some of these works, in spite of the presence of the cypher in them, it is not even claimed that Bacon wrote himself. For example, so we are told, he expressly says in his cypher that he used certain plays of Ben Jonson, with Ben Jonson’s own permission, as a vehicle for his secret writing, having had, with the exception of a few short masques, no part in the composition of any of them. Bacon does claim, however, unless his cypher is altogether an illusion, that of many of the works into which the cypher was printed, he was himself the actual author—notably The Anatomy of Melancholy, and the whole of the plays called Shakespeare’s. On this latter point he insists over and over again, declaring that he borrowed Shakespeare’s name as a pseudonym, and describing him as being nothing more than the most accomplished actor of his time.