THE NEW SHAKESPEARE-BACON CONTROVERSY.
By Garrett P. Serviss.
The Cosmopolitan, New York, March, 1902.
That smoldering question which nothing seems able to extinguish, “Did Shakespeare write the Shakespeare plays?” and the related question, “Is there a cipher hidden in those plays, which not only reveals their real authorship but betrays important state secrets of the time of Queen Elizabeth?” have just been brought before the public mind in a new and startling aspect.
And this time the problem is presented in a form which renders it capable of being submitted to something like a scientific test. It is, in fact, put upon a mechanical basis, so that it becomes a mere question of distinguishing between different shapes of printers’ types.
Mrs. Elizabeth W. Gallup, of Detroit, Michigan, avers that while engaged in an examination of old editions of the works of Francis Bacon, trying to trace there a “Cipher Story,” the key to which was discovered by Dr. O. W. Owen, to whom she was acting as an assistant, she became convinced that the careful explanation which Bacon has given in his celebrated work, De Augmentis Scientiarum, of a species of secret writing, invented by him, and which he calls a “Bi-literal Cipher,” was intended to serve some other purpose besides that of a mere treatise on the subject.
This Cipher is based upon the use of two slightly different fonts of type and, as we shall presently see, has nothing whatever to do with the literary form or sense of the books in which it is alleged to be concealed.
Remembering those puzzling italicized passages that occur in the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, published in 1623, and for which no satisfactory explanation has ever been offered, Mrs. Gallup immediately examined them to see if, perchance, the bi-literal cipher described by Bacon might not be found in them. Apparently she was not confident of success, but, to her great surprise, as she affirms, the cipher was there!
She began to read it out, and if the story of what she says she found is true, nobody can wonder that she felt she had made the literary discovery of the age.
Let us say at once that it is not only in the Shakespeare Plays that the alleged cipher is hidden, but it appears also in the works that were published under Bacon’s own name, being confined, as in the plays, to the italicized portions—italicized for no discoverable reason—and also, surprising to relate, in a variety of other books of the Elizabethan period, such as Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar and Faerie Queene, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, the plays of Peele, Greene and Marlowe, and even some parts of the plays of Ben Jonson.