Sir Sydney Lee has written[43]:—"As a specimen of typography, the First Folio is not to be commended. There are a great many contemporary folios of larger bulk far more neatly and correctly printed. It looks as though Jaggard's printing office was undermanned. The misprints are numerous, and are especially conspicuous in the pagination." In the same year was published "The Theater of Honour and Knighthood," translated from the French of Andreu Favine. William Jaggard was the printer. It is a large folio volume containing about 1,200 pages, and is referred to as being issued by Jaggard as an example of the printer's art to maintain his reputation, which had suffered from the apparently careless manner in which the Shakespeare Folio was turned out. Both books contain the same emblematic head-pieces and tail-pieces. There are, however, some considerable mispaginations in "The Theater of Honour." Mispaginations were not infrequent in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, but it is quite possible that they were not unintentional. The most glaring instance is to be found in the first Edition of "The Two Bookes of Francis Bacon—Of the Proficience and Advancement in Learning, Divine and Humane," published by Henrie Tomes (1605). Each leaf (not page) is numbered. The 45 leaves of the first book are correctly numbered. In the second book there is no number on leaf 6. Leaf 9 is numbered 6, the right figure being printed upside down; 30 is numbered 33; from 31 to 70 the numbering is correct, and then the leaves are numbered as follows:—70, 70, 71, 70, 72, 74, 73, 74, 75, 69, 77, 78, 79, 80, 77, 74, 74, 69, 69, 82, 87, 79, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99, 97, 99, 94, 100, 99, 102, 103, 103, 93, 106, and on correctly until the last page, 118, except that 115 is numbered 105.
It is impossible to attribute this mispagination to the printer's carelessness. This was the first work published bearing Bacon's name, excepting the trifle of essays published in 1597. There does not appear to have been any hurry in its production. It is quite a small volume, and yet the foregoing remarkable mispaginations occur. There must be some purpose in this which has yet to be found out.
The 1623 Shakespeare Folio will be found to be one of the most perfect examples of the printer's art extant, because no work has been produced under such difficult conditions for the printer. There are few mistakes in pagination or spelling which are not intentional. The work is a masterpiece of enigma and cryptic design. The lines "To the Reader" opposite to the title-page are a table or code of numbers. The same lines and the lettering on the title-page form another table. The ingenuity displayed in this manipulation of words and numbers to create analogies is almost beyond the comprehension of the human mind. The mispaginations are all intentional and have cryptic meanings. The acme of wit is the substitution of 993 for 399 on the last page of the tragedies; a hundred has been omitted in "Hamlet," 257 following 156, and other errors made in order to obtain this result on the last page. The manner in which the printer's signatures have been arranged with the pages is equally wonderful. The name William Shakespeare must have been created without reference to him of Stratford, who possibly bore or had assigned to him a somewhat similar name. A great superstructure is built up on the exact spelling of the words William Shakespeare. The year 1623 was specially selected for the issue of the complete volume of the plays, because of the marvellous relations which the numbers composing it bear to the names William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, to the year 1560, in which the birth of Bacon is registered, and to 1564 and 1616, the reputed dates of the birth and death of the Stratford man. Nor do the wonders end here. The use of numerical analogies has been carried into the construction of the English language. All this, and much more, will be made manifest when the work of Mr. E. V. Tanner comes to be investigated and appreciated. He has made the greatest literary discovery of all time. The wonder is how it has been possible for anyone to pierce the veil and reveal the secrets of the volume. The value of the Shakespeare Folio 1623 will be enhanced. It will stand alone as the greatest monument of the achievements of the human intellect.
To any literary critic who should honour this book by noticing it, it is probable the foregoing statements may seem extravagant and untrustworthy. To such the request is now made that before making any comment he will inspect the proof of the foregoing statements which are in the writer's possession. The dramas of Shakespeare are, by universal consent, placed at the head of all literature. The invitation is now put forth in explicit terms, and facilities are offered for the investigation of the truth, or otherwise, of every statement made in the foregoing paragraph.
Chapter XVII.
THE AUTHORIZED VERSION OF THE BIBLE, 1611.
Is it not strange that there is no mention of any connection of Francis Bacon with this work? There was a conference held at Hampton Court Palace before King James on January, 1603, between the Episcopalians and Puritans. John Rainoldes urged the necessity of providing for his people a uniform translation of the Bible. Rainoldes was the leader of the Puritans, a person of prodigious reading and doctrine, and the very treasury of erudition. Dr. Hall, Bishop of Norwich, reports that "he alone was a well furnished library, full of all faculties, of all studies, of all learning—the memory and reading of that man were near a miracle." The King approved the suggestion and commissioned for that purpose fifty-four of the most learned men in the universities and other places. There was a "careful selection of revisers made by some unknown but very competent authority." The translators were divided into six bands of nine each, and the work of translation was apportioned out to them. A set of rules was drawn up for their guidance, which has happily come down to modern times—almost the only record that remains of this great undertaking. These concise rules have a homogeneity, breadth and vigour which point to Bacon as their author. Each reviser was to translate the whole of the original allocated to his company; then they were to compare their translations together, and, as soon as a company had completed its part, it was to communicate the result to the other companies, that nothing might pass without the general consent. If any company, upon the review of the translation so sent, differed on any point, they were to note their objection and state their reasons for disagreement. If the differences could not be adjusted, there was a committee of arbitration which met weekly, consisting of a representative from each company, to whom the matter in dispute was referred. If any point was found to be very obscure, letters were to be addressed, by authority, to learned persons throughout the land inviting their judgment. The work was commenced in 1604. Rainoldes belonged to the company to whom Isaiah and the prophets were assigned. He died in 1607, before the work was completed. During his illness his colleagues met in his bedroom so that they might retain the benefit of his learning. Only forty-seven out of the fifty-four names are known. When the companies had completed their work, one complete copy was made at Oxford, one at Cambridge, and one at Westminster. Those were sent to London. Then two members were selected from each company to form a committee to review and polish the whole. The members met daily at Stationers' Hall and occupied nine months in their task. Then a final revision was entrusted to Dr. Thomas Bilson and Dr. Miles Smith, and in 1609 their labours were completed and the result was handed to the King. Many of the translators have left specimens of their writing in theological treatises, sermons, and other works. A careful perusal of all these available justifies the assertion that amongst the whole body there was not one man who was so great a literary stylist as to be able to write certain portions of the Authorised Version, which stamp it as one of the two greatest examples of the English language. Naturally the interest centres on Dr. Thomas Bilson and Dr. Miles Smith, to whom the final revision was entrusted. There are some nine or ten theological works by the former and two sermons by the latter. Unless the theory of a special divine inspiration for the occasion be admitted, it is clear that neither Bilson nor Miles Smith could have given the final touches to the Bible. And now a curious statement has come down to us. In 1609 the translators handed their work to the King, and in 1610 he returned it to them completed. James was incapable of writing anything to which the term beautiful could be applied. What had happened to the translators' work whilst it was left in his hands?
James had an officer of state at that time of whom a contemporary biographer wrote that "he had the contrivance of all King James his Designs, until the match with Spain." It will eventually be proved that the whole scheme of the Authorised Version of the Bible was Francis Bacon's. He was an ardent student not only of the Bible, but of the early manuscripts. St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and writers of theological works, were studied by him with industry. He has left his annotations in many copies of the Bible and in scores of theological works. The translation must have been a work in which he took the deepest interest and which he would follow from stage to stage. When the last stage came there was only one writer of the period who was capable of turning the phrases with that matchless style which is the great charm of the Shakespeare plays. Whoever that stylist was, it was to him that James handed over the manuscripts which he received from the translators. That man then made havoc of much of the translation, but he produced a result which, on its literary merits, is without an equal.
Thirty years ago another revision took place, but, notwithstanding the advantages which the revisers of 1880 had over their predecessors of 1611, their version has failed to displace the older version, which is too precious to the hearts of the people for them to abandon it.