THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CYPHER.
To the Editor of the Times:
Sir:—Since you have allowed a critic of Mrs. Gallup’s interpretation of the “Bi-literal Cipher” to cast discredit on the whole of her work on the strength of having discovered (what he thinks) one flaw in it, surely you will allow a believer in “the Bacon-Shakespeare craze” to put forward a few words in reference to the “Shakespeare-Stratford superstition.”
There are two schools of thinkers in reference to that superstition, those who have studied the matter and those who have not. The former are Baconians. Talking recently with a devotee of the superstition, I said: “Surely, if you say that, you cannot have seriously considered ... such and such points.” His answer was, “I would rather hang myself than seriously consider anything so atrocious.” That is a common attitude of mind, and the reason why, as yet, only a minority of Englishmen possessing an unusual degree of culture are fully aware of the fact that Francis Bacon wrote the Plays published under the name of Shakespeare. The argument derived from the contents of thePromuscontaining 1,700 private memoranda in Bacon’s handwriting, all of which are used up by him later on in the Plays, the argument derived from the manner in which the Plays, in the order of their appearance, reflect the incidents of Bacon’s life, the little circumstance that 11 of the best known Plays were never acted, published, or heard of till seven years after Shakespeare’s death are a few of the reasons which influence the belief of those attached to “the craze.” A few of the reasons why the superstition appears so comically absurd to them have reference to the fact that there is no shadow of reason for supposing that the Stratford boy—apprenticed to his father as a butcher at 14—ever acquired the art, then very unusual among people in his rank of life—the art of writing. Neither his parents nor his children ever learned to write. He learnedin later life to scrawl something resembling a signature, not the bad writing of a literary man, but the hesitating, vague scratching of one who hardly knew how to hold the pen. After a few years spent as tradesman’s assistant in a vortex of ignorance, the boy ran away to London and, according to the superstition, immediately wroteLoves Labour’s Lost,The Taming of the Shrew, andThe Two Gentlemen of Verona, which were brought out the year he came to London. The ridiculoussoufflesof imagination presented to the world by the orthodox biographers of Shakespeare are all based upon the authors’ theories as to what “probably took place” or what “must have happened” because Shakespeare wrote the Plays.
It is impossible to deal intelligently with the cipher story till one has first of all escaped from the trammels of the superstition. Let people new to the subject be assured, to begin with, that, without touching a scrap of evidence having to do with ciphers, those who “seriously consider” the question approach the discussion of ciphers from the point of view of knowing that the Shakespeare idea is pure, idiotic nonsense, and that Bacon, of course, wrote the Plays. Then, as regards Mrs. Gallup’s Cipher, the question is simply this: Has she built up the whole of this long story out of her own head as a conscious literary fraud, or, “errors and omissions excepted,” is it to be accepted as genuine? There is no halting-place between those two views. Now Mrs. Gallup did not work alone. She was assisted by quite a group of people of unequivocal position and respectability, she was eager to invite the observation of witnesses while engagd for six months at the British Museum deciphering the present story, and the fraud hypothesis becomes, for those who will take the trouble to make themselves acquainted even in an elementary way with the facts, utterly untenable. The way to deal with it is to check Mrs. Gallup’s work. If the Cipher is verifiable to any appreciable degree—as Mr. Marston even seems to admit, as Mr. Mallock has definitely stated—its verification by a responsible committee will displace the whole subject from the region of controversy and put “the Bacon-Shakespeare craze” on a level with that which brought Galileo into so much bad odour with orthodoxy when he maintained that the earth went round the sun.
As for the curious flaw Mr. Marston has detected in theIliadtranslation, we can afford to wait for Mrs. Gallup’s explanation. If the whole problem rested on Mrs. Gallup’s good faith, the flaw might seem supicious, but it rests on the shape of letters in books at the British Museum. In itself it is the biggest literary problem ever set before the world; theprima faciecase is overwhelming, as every one who has studied the question knows full well. How is it possible that a dreary, senseless old prejudice should be allowed to stand in the way of the truth? Who among those in a position to do this effectively will undertake the duty of organizing a really competent committee (including some persons, at all events, who have studied the subject) to determine once for all to what authorship the greatest writings in the English language are to be assigned? As for little difficulties about dates, they will have to give way if the cipher story is verified.
A. P. Sinnett.
27, Leinster-gardens, W., Dec. 20, 1901.