A MAMMOTH MARE'S-NEST.*

NOT since the days of Ireland has so gigantic and pretentious a Shakespearian forgery been placed before the public as the secret narrative revealing how Bacon wrote Shakespeare, which Mr. Donnelly professes to have discovered in the text of the First Folio. In speaking of Mr. Donnelly's work as a forgery, however, we by no means intend to impute to him a conscious attempt at deception. On the contrary, we believe Mr. Donnelly to be the most conspicuous victim of his own im- posture,—the worst deceived of all his dupes. In truth, the inventor of The Great Cryptogram has set up a literary Franken- stein the first act of which has been to puzzle, bamboozle, and befog, or, as Shakespeare himself would have said, "to shamefully abuse," its own creator. This fact, however, cannot make the narrative produced any the less a forgery. To constitute a forgery, it is not the least necessary that what is forged shall be written with a pen on a clean piece of paper. When certain words are picked out here and there on a printed page, strung together in sense, or rather in grammar, and called the work of Bacon, the result is as undoubtedly a forgery as if the author had had nothing to do with any book, but had written his copy straight out of his head. No doubt, to make the individual who picked out the words a forger, there must be an intent to deceive. Now, since of all such intent Mr. Donnelly is obviously innocent, Mr. Donnelly is no forger. The author of The Great Cryptogram is, then, in this very remarkable position. He has managed to construct a literary forgery without himself being a forger. It will take the most ingenious of Mr. Donnelly's countrymen to whip such a record as this. Perhaps, however, our readers may be disinclined to accept this notion, and may wonder how such things can be. We presume, in some such fashion as this :—Mr. Donnelly wants to find the words "Francis Bacon, Nicholas Bacon's son." With great labour he picks out these words on the pages of the folio, and then, by counting vigorously in all directions, gets what he fancies is an arithmetical principle to justify his selection. In truth, the game is much like that which used to be played with the number of the Beast, of which Macaulay said,—" If I leave out 'T' in Thomas, 'B' in Babington, and 'M' in Macaulay, and then spell my name in Arabic, I have not the slightest doubt that I can prove myself conclusively to be the Beast."

The best way of dealing with Mr. Donnelly's work is to treat it as all forgeries should be treated,—that is, by applying to it those internal tests which can hardly fail if judiciously applied, even in the case of the most carefully constructed imitations of style, to detect the true from the false. We therefore propose to take the narrative which Mr. Donnelly tells us he has discovered embedded in the text, and without asking how or where it was obtained, to try and show that it is absolutely impossible that Bacon could have used the words supposed to be his. To do so is far more satisfactory than to attempt to explain to our readers the general nature • The Great Cryptogram Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-called Shakespeare Plays. By Ignatius Donnelly. London : Sampson Low and Marston. 1888.

of the cipher, since Mr. Donnelly has only vouchsafed to give us a half-account of his methods, and has kept the last and essential secret to himself, on the ground that if he disclosed it he could not secure the copyright in the narratives which it will unfold. This being the case, it would be mere waste of breath to attempt to criticise his methods or show the fallacy in his arithmetical vagaries as far as he unfolds them to our view. That such a fallacy exists, may be surely enough predicted from one simple fact,—the deciphering process, whatever it is, makes Bacon write in nineteenth-century newspaper English. We may, however, mention, for the amusement of our readers, that the system professes to consist in developing a certain progres- sion of numbers which, when applied from fixed starting-points, pick out words on particular pages of the great folio so as to form a consecutive narrative. Let us now examine the style of this narrative, which Mr. Donnelly assures us was written by Bacon and inserted in the plays. If there is one thing strongly marked in connection with Lord Bacon, it is the extraordinary distinction of his style. Like Ruskin or Carlyle, Bacon was unable to construct the shortest sentence, even to string together a couple of phrases, without setting thereon the strong stamp of his individuality. His work, indeed, is so full of originality and character, that it is impossible to mistake it. Let us take a random instance of Lord Bacon's prose, and see whether we can conceive it possible that the same man wrote what we place beside it,—a portion of the narrative produced by the Great Cryptogram :—

"Iterations are commonly loss of time : but there is no such gain of time as to iterate often the state of the question ; for it chaseth away many a frivolous speech as it cometh forth. Long and curious speeches are as fit for dispatch as a robe or a mantle with a long train is for a race. Prefaces and passages and excusations and other speeches of reference to the person are great wastes of time ; and though they seem to proceed of modesty, they are bravery. Yet beware of being too material when there is any impediment, or obstruction in men's wills ; for preoccupation of mind ever requireth preface of speech, like a fomentation to make the unguent enter."

Here is the beginning of Mr. Donnelly's narrative, in which we learn how Cecil told the Queen that Bacon, not Shakespeare, was the author of the plays :— "Seas-ill [Cecil] said that Morelow or Shakstpur never writ a word of them. It is plain he is stuffing our ears with false reports and lies this many a year. He is a poor, dull, ill-spirited, greedy creature, and but a veil for some one else who had blown up the flame of rebellion almost into war against your Grace as a royal tyrant. I have a suspicion that my kinsman's servant, young Harry Percy, was the man to whom he gave every night half of what he took through the day at the gate."

Is it conceivable that Bacon, who above all men delighted to clothe his swift-coming and pregnant thoughts in language

exactly appropriate to every shade of his meaning, would have indulged in such shambling and ridiculous stuff as this?

The phrase I have a suspicion" may well attract attention as one which it is almost impossible to conceive being framed by Bacon. But if this is so, what shall we say as to the following sentences, which appear in different portions of the matter deciphered from the Great Cryptogram ?—" My instinct tells me something is wrong,"—" These well-known plays,"—" Running off in the greatest fright,"—" My poor young friend,"—" In the hole where he was born and bred,"—" The much-admired plays we all rate so high, and which are supposed to be his,"—" The subjects are beyond his ability,"—" It is even thought,"—" He is sub- ject to the gout in his great toe,"—" A bold, forward, and most vulgar boy,"—" I knew very well that if Shakespeare was apprehended,"—" Enough brain-power,"—" I am not an im- pudent man,"—" Her Grace is furious,"—" Royal maiden is in a great rage." Who can read this list and imagine for a moment that Bacon, who played on language as on an organ, ever employed such meaningless, conventional, vulgar pieces of nineteenth-century literary padding as these ? It would be just as probable to attribute to Bacon a sentence declaring that he telegraphed to order dinner at the Grand Hotel, as one in which he talked about " brain-power " or "vulgar boys."

We have dealt as yet chiefly with Mr. Donnelly's second volume, in which the story of the cipher is unfolded. The earlier volume is occupied with attempted proofs of the ordinary kind, that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. The so-called

"

evidence" springs from these root ideas :—Shakespeare was only a player and a poor man's son,—ergo, he could not have written the plays. Bacon was the greatest genius of his time, —ergo, Bacon wrote them. Bacon, however, was a great official,—ergo, he did not dare to:own to being a poet. Bacon wanted a fence,—ergo, he employed Shakespeare to pretend to be the author of the plays. Such is the style of logic made use of to prove the Baconian theory. The theory is certainly amusing enough in itself, and might perhaps be traced by the cynical to the love of a Lord which is instinctive in the English

race on both sides of the Atlantic. Shakespeare, the national hero, only wanted one thing to make him perfect,—to be a

Lord. This want the advocates of the Baconian theory have kindly attempted to supply by transferring Shakespeare's work to a coroneted head.

Seriously, however, it is not difficult to see how ignorant people adopt the theory. They are aghast at Shakespeare's humble origin, and forget, or rather do not know, that almost all the other Elizabethan poets were equally obscure in birth. They find no records of Shakespeare's life, no letters or manu- script in his writing, no books that had belonged to him, and conclude that this is a very suspicious fact; for they are not aware that even men of letters like Beaumont and Fletcher, both born in good circumstances—one the son of a Judge of the Common Pleas, the other of the Bishop of London—left behind them neither books, letters, papers, nor records of any kind. Though their position was so much higher, and their popularity as great or greater than his, nothing like as much is known of them as is known of Shakespeare. In truth, the wonderful thing about Shakespeare is not our ignorance of him, but the fullness of our knowledge when that knowledge is compared with what we know of any of his contemporaries except Ben Jonson. In case any readers of Mr. Donnelly's book may have been so far befogged by the feats of arithmetical legerdemain there displayed as to have had their faith in Shake- speare shaken, we will end this article by quoting some of the words which Ben Jenson used in regard to Shakespeare, and will then ask whether Ben Jonson would have spoken as he does if he had known Shakespeare to be an impostor,—for it must be remembered that it is part of the Baconian theory to assume that Jonson was aware of the secret of the plays. These are Jonson's words,—all the more striking because their praise is qualified :—

" I remember the players often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespere that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been : Would he had blotted a thousand,' which they thought a malevolent speech. I had told posterity this, but for their ignorance who choose that circum- stance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candour : for I loved the man and do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was (indeed) honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasie, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein lie flowed with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped."

Surely there is real flesh and blood beneath this, not the sort of creature fit to hide a cryptogram of so fearful a kind that it

turned Lord Bacon's mighty genius into fatuous idiotcy.