Concerning the bi-literal cypher of Francis Bacon discovered in his works

by Elizabeth Wells Gallup

I say this, let me repeat, on the supposition that the cypher is not altogether an illusion. Before considering whether this supposition is correct, let us accept it for the moment as being so, and see what are the conclusions which it forces on us. Of the four hundred and fifty pages of which Mrs. Gallup’s volume, The Bi-literal Cypher of Francis Bacon, consists, about three hundred and fifty are occupied with what purport to be secret writings of Bacon’s, deciphered letter by letter, from the passages printed in italics, in certain specified editions of certain works, some published under other names, some admittedly his own. Of these three hundred and fifty pages of secret writings, about fifteen have been extracted from Spenser, Greene, Peele, and Marlowe, and twenty-three from Ben Jonson; about a hundred and twenty-five from writings admittedly his own, such as the Novum Organum and The New Atlantis, more than ninety from Burton, and more than fifty from the first folio of Shakespeare. Much more, however, it is averred, remains to be deciphered still.

And now let us ask what, continuing to suppose them genuine, these secret writings contain, and why the author wrote them in such a way. Described generally, they are a species of diary, comparable to that of Pepys, also written in cypher—a diary to which the author confides thoughts and hopes and feelings too intimate to be revealed to contemporaries, and secrets the mere hinting of which would have placed his life in danger. Of these it is enough for our present purpose to mention a few.

Bacon declares in his cypher over and over again that he was not what he appeared to be. He was not, as the world supposed, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, but the son of the Queen of England by a private marriage with Leicester—her eldest son and rightful heir to the throne. He was ignorant of the fact till he reached his sixteenth year, when he heard the story hinted by one of the ladies of the Court. The Queen, in a fit of anger, admitted to him that it was true, the marriage having taken place secretly in the Tower of London, when the Queen, before her accession, and Leicester were both confined there. For political reasons it was necessary to keep this a profound secret, and the child was confided to Anne and Nicholas Bacon, to be brought up as their own and educated as a private person, the Queen being determined never, under any circumstances, to acknowledge him. To reveal the truth himself would, he believed, be to forfeit his life; and hence, smarting under an obstinate sense of wrong, he confided his history to the keeping of elaborate cyphers, trusting that future students would unravel them for a future age. The moment the Queen found that the boy had discovered his parentage he was sent to France under the care of Sir Amyas Paulet, and did not come back to England till the death of his foster-father. When in France he conceived an absorbing and romantic passion for Marguerite, wife of Henry of Navarre, who returned or pretended to return it. Expectations were rife at the time that she and her husband were to be divorced; and Sir Amyas Paulet attempted to arrange with Queen Elizabeth that, should the divorce take place, Marguerite and Bacon should be married. The divorce, however, was not obtained, nor would Queen Elizabeth listen to the proposal. This early romance made a profound impression on Bacon, and he wrote, long afterwards, Romeo and Juliet in commemoration of it.

Another part of the story which he tells is this. He was not, he says, the Queen’s only child by Leicester. He had a brother, and this brother was Essex; and of all the incidents of his life with regard to which he is most anxious to set forth the truth and with regard to which he fears that his memory is most likely to be wronged, those connected with his conduct towards his unfortunate brother stand foremost.

That he does not venture openly to give even a hint of the truth with regard to this matter, or his parentage and rightful position, he declares with an almost wearisome and not very dignified persistence; and he is, he says, driven to hide himself in tortuous cyphers, which will keep him safe as a coney hiding in a valley of rocks.

On the contents of the biliteral cypher, considered under their more general aspect, we need not dwell longer. Enough has been said to show that, if it be a genuine document, the author had intelligible reasons for embodying it in this singular form. What mainly concerns us here is its purely literary significance, especially as regards the authorship of the so-called plays of Shakespeare. The mere fact that this biliteral Baconian cypher is incorporated in the first collected edition of these plays does not in itself prove, as we have seen already, that Bacon was the author of King John and Romeo and Juliet, any more than it proves that he was the author of The Fox, which, though the same cypher occurs in it, is admitted to be Ben Jonson’s. The only evidence as to this point with which the biliteral cypher supplies us consists not in its existence in an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, but solely in the assertions which it contains that Bacon did actually write them, coupled with further statements relating to other cyphers—the word-cypher more particularly, also alleged to be contained in them. So far as concerns the biliteral cypher itself, the mere assertions as to authorship which Bacon makes by means of it have as much or as little value as they would have had had he made them openly. Their value depends on the value we are inclined to attach to his word, coupled with the probabilities of the case as estimated by the critic and the historian. The word-cypher, however, stands on a different footing. It depends on the text itself, not on the manner in which the text is printed; and the author of this cypher must necessarily have been the author of the plays. Now the biliteral cypher contains, if it really be a genuine document, elaborate instructions as to the word-cypher, and directions as to the method of unravelling it. That such instructions should be given if the word-cypher is a mere illusion, we need hardly say is incredible. Hence, according to all rules of common sense, our belief in the former carries with it a belief in the latter; and a belief in the latter—the word-cypher—also carries with it the further belief that Bacon actually was the author of the Shakespearian plays.

Whether such be the case or no, it is not my purpose to inquire. All that at this moment I am anxious to impress upon the reader is the fact that, in taking their stand on this new alleged discovery—this discovery of a cypher heretofore not dreamed of—a typographical cypher depending on the use of two printer’s alphabets, nearly alike but yet ascertainably different, the Baconians have shifted this controversy to wholly novel ground. The word-cypher is a cypher which, even those who believe in it admit, requires for its interpretation a certain amount of conjecture; but the biliteral cypher, if it exists at all, can be proved to exist, or, in the opposite case, it can be proved to be a mere hallucination, by the aid of a magnifying-glass applied to certain printed pages. There is no occasion here for any abstruse literary reasoning. There is no occasion for any literary reasoning at all. Either certain editions of the various books in question—the first folio of Shakespeare being the most important and the most famous of them—are, in so far as the italicised portions of them are concerned, systematically printed in letters from two different founts of type, or they are not. If, as is absolutely indisputable, two different founts are used, the letters from these founts are used in such a manner that, when separated into groups of five, and expressed as dots and dashes, each of these groups will denote a single letter, in accordance with the code set forth by Bacon himself; or else they will not do this, or will do so only by accident, most of the groups having no meaning whatsoever. And lastly, if these groups do assume a consecutive meaning, and actually give us a series of single letters, the letters will form words and intelligible sentences, or they will not. The whole case is one for simple ocular demonstration.

To make this demonstration conclusive in the eyes of the world generally would, no doubt, demand some time and labour. The question is, are there sufficient primâ facie grounds for supposing that possibly the Baconian theory is true, to make it worth while for sceptics to undertake the inquiry? For my own part, unhesitatingly I venture to say that there are. In the first place, this cypher, as no one can deny, was familiar to Bacon, who claims to have himself invented it. He has himself admittedly supplied us with our specimen page of it, a passage from Cicero, reproduced by Mrs. Gallup in photographic facsimile, together with a companion page, in which Bacon has placed side by side the two alphabets employed, so that the differences between their respective letters may be more easily realised. Thus the biliteral cypher exists in one page of Bacon’s works at all events. There is nothing, therefore, fantastic in the idea that it may exist elsewhere. The only possibility of any doubt with regard to the question is due altogether to a purely physical circumstance. The types employed in printing the specimen passage from Cicero were designedly made of such a size, and the differences between the two alphabets were accentuated in such a manner, that the ordinary eye could readily learn to distinguish the letters that stand for dashes from those that stand for dots. Even here, however, the differences are for the most part so small and delicate that, in order to perceive them, we must scrutinise the page attentively; and an hour of such attention may elapse before we cease to be puzzled. But in the first folio of Shakespeare, as in most of the other volumes in which it is contended that the same type occurs, the type is much smaller. Although even the naked eye can be soon trained to perceive that in many cases the letters belong to different founts, yet these differences are of so minute a kind that in other cases they elude the eye without the aid of a magnifying-glass; and even with the aid of a magnifying-glass—I say this from experience—the eye of the amateur, at all events, remains doubtful, and unable to assign the letters to this alphabet or to that. The majority of educated persons, therefore, in the present state of the controversy, if they give to the italicised passages of the first Shakespearian folio and the other books in question only so much time and attention as may be expected from interested amateurs, may reasonably, if not rightly, entertain the opinion that the larger part of the differences alleged to exist between the italic letters employed are entirely imaginary, since their eyes are unable to detect them; that the supposed cypher is altogether a delusion, and has been read into the texts, not out of them, by Mrs. Gallup and her coadjutors.

On the other hand, the fact that the amateur finds himself, after weeks of study, still completely bewildered in his attempt to allocate the various letters to two different founts of type, in such a way as to elicit a sentence or even a word in groups of dots and dashes, according to the Baconian code, must not be taken too hastily as a proof that the alleged cypher is imaginary. Mrs. Gallup has done much, though not so much as she might have done, to enable her readers to settle this point for themselves. She has reproduced in facsimile from the original editions Bacon’s preface to the Novum Organum, 1620; and the Epistle Dedicatory of the so-called Spenser’s Complaints, 1591, in both of which it is contended that the Baconian cypher occurs. She gives similar facsimiles also of the Epistle Dedicatory, and the Commendatory Verses prefixed to the first folio of Shakespeare. She gives also an enlarged diagram of the different forms of italics used by Bacon in the printing of the Novum Organum; and of his preface to that work, and of the Epistle Dedicatory of Spenser’s Complaints, she gives the cypher meaning extracted letter by letter, each italic being thus allocated to its own alleged fount. Is this allocation merely fanciful or not?

I have studied for some weeks Mrs. Gallup’s facsimilies myself, and I give my experience, purely as that of an amateur, for what it is worth. When I examined the facsimiles first I could make nothing out of them; and of those from the first folio I can make very little still. All the letters seemed too much alike to allow of my separating them systematically into two founts of type. Differences which I thought I had discovered at one moment altogether vanished the next, and gave place to others, which soon, in their turn, escaped me. But with regard to the facsimiles from the Novum Organum and Spenser’s Complaints the case was otherwise, and for a very simple reason. In the facsimiles from the folio the type is extremely small, the original page having been reduced so as to accommodate it to an octavo volume. But in the Bacon and Spenser facsimiles the type is of the size of the original. It is comparatively large, and a study of it is proportionately easier. In these pages I was very soon able to distinguish the different founts to which several of the letters belong. I could presently do the same with regard to several letters more; and at last I was more or less master of two-thirds of the alphabet in such a way that I was able, with some confidence, to translate them, when in one form into a dot, and when in another form into a dash. I have tried this experiment with a large number of passages, and, comparing my interpretations with that of Mrs. Gallup herself, I have found that it coincides with hers, sometimes in four cases out of seven, and not infrequently in five. Many of the letters still continued to baffle me; but with regard to some I found myself always right; and the dots or dashes into which I had resolved these have invariably coincided with the requirements of the cypher, as Mrs. Gallup interprets it. It appears to me to be almost inconceivable that multiplied coincidences such as these can be the work of chance, or that they can originate otherwise than in the fact that in these pages at all events—the preface to the Novum Organum, printed in 1620, and in the Dedication of Spenser’s Complaints, printed in 1591—a biliteral cypher exists, in both cases the work of Bacon; and if such a cypher really exists here, the probabilities are overwhelming that Mrs. Gallup is right, and that we shall find it existing in the first folio of Shakespeare also.