SHAKESPEARE OR BACON?

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 7542, 12 August 1886, Page 3

SHAKESPEARE OR BACON ?

"Civis" in the Otago Daily Times ' writes :— The Shakespeare-Bacon controv ersy suddenly exhibits a new and most portentous phase. A month ago the dispute seemed, by its very nature, bot- [ tomless— a meet theme for those leisured r dialecticians who, in Milton's Inferno, j sit apart to reason high — Of Providonco, foreknowledge, will, and [ fate, 1 Fixed fate, freewill, foreknowlodgo absolute i And find no end, in wandering mazes lostl ■ Now all is changed. AMr Ignatius Doni nelly, of Hastings, Minnesota, announces * through Mr Percy M. Wallace, and the I Nineteenth Century, that he has found s the end— end definite, authentic, indubit- : able— to wit, a declaration by Francis ' Bacon himself, cipher-written, interwoven i with inlinito art in the very texture of the ■ plays, that lie, F. 8., and not the .Swan ! of "Avon, is their author. Details are 1 wanting, Mr Ignatius Donnelly keeping, ' for the present, the secret of the cipher i looked up in his own bosom. The followi ing hint of its method and plan is, however, suggestive : — i "I found that in many cases where ' somo remarkable word, such as ' St. Albans ' or ' Bacon,' is in tho text, that ' word is reached by multiplying the nnmher of .the page at which the scene begins by the number of italic words in the iirst column of that page." I Evidently Mr Donnelly'singenious labors must have" been inspired by hints supplied from Poe's " Golden Beetle." But note the words which I have taken tho liberty to italicise. The cipher arithnietic holds good " in many cases ;" not in all, then? Moreover, the datum and starting point for the count is ' ' som c remarkable word. " Conveniently va«ue, that, I fancy. Seems to me that with factors so manageable as these I could do a cryptographic sum which should prove that Shakespeare was John Knox, or— for the matter of that— Queen Elizabeth. However, Mr Donnelly promises to makG a clean breast of it shortly, and then we shall see. At present the alternative he offers us may be stated tlnis . — Either Mr Ignatius Donnelly, of Hastings, Minnesota, is a compound of fool and knave, or Francis Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare. Cornered for impalement on ono or other horn of this dilemma, I accept the first. It is likely to prove the softer ! Suppose— what is all but unsupposable —that the Donnelly discovery should succeed in getting itself verified, certain dire and distressful consequences' would follow, one of which is hinted at in tho communication given below. 'The Shakespeare busts and portraits— with what self-respect should we ever look upon them again ? How the Clitics, small aud great, have raved about that marvellous dome of thought, the Hhakesperian baldhead ! What fire of genius scintillated from those Shakesp^vian gooseberry eyes ! Take, as example of the kind of tiling that has been common, a- sentence from an article in the May Fortnightly, by "Lucus Malet," on that quintessential philosophical prig, Henri-Frederic Amiel : — " His (Ainiel's) head reminded one, in height and purity of curve, of the head of Shakespeare," but lacked "the glorious audacity and robustness of the poet's eyes." On the Donnelly theory we should probably be required to explain Shakespeare's' height of forehead by hydrocephalns, and the "glorious audacity" of his eyes by drink. Rather . than that, would not swift and final suppression of Donnelly be preferable — say beneath a feather-bed? But I make room for my correspondent : " To the Honored Civis — " Mr Irving tells a good story that when he and Mr J. L. Toolo were on tour and visited Stratford-on - Avon no resident there could tell cither of them, where Shakespeare used once to live. So they waylaid alot of boys coming ontof school, fondly hoping that the boys might know something about Shakespeare. Said Henry the tragedian to them : ' Does any of you know what Shakespeare wrote?' And the boys maintained a dead silence for a space, until one of them said as how he heard Mr Shakespeare wrote either the Biblo or the Family Herald, but he wasn't quito clear which." "It seems to tip certain that the divine Williams, with his head the shape of an egg with the big end uppermost, is a fraud —a most gigantic fraud. Mr Donnelly, of Hastings, Minnesota, is settling that question for us ; he has discovered that Bacon wrote the plays to cloak a cipher, which deciphered discloses the whole of Bacon's troubles, adventures, risks, and revenges. Vide the Nineteenth Century of May last. "This news was 'bust' to the Dunedin Savage Club on Monday evening, in appropriate tones, by Mr Powell, who invited the Savages to look into the matter at length. The first simple desideratum is che folio of 1623 (marked F.). The only full accessible copy I know anything about was in the library of the Kcforin Club, Pall Mall, which is, I believe, in London. If a hansom will take me there for money, I shall begin " looking into the matter " sine mom, otherwise, alas, must remain a Savage unenlightened and (provisionally) A Shakespearian.'