THE GREAT CRYPTOGRAM.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9130, 11 August 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE GREAT CRYPTOGRAM.

A REVIEW.

[iiY hill WILLIAM FOX.]

We have now to tell our readers what the Great Cryptogram is. The word is Greek, and means a hidden or concealed writing. It is commonly known as cipher writing. At the time when Bacon and Shakspere lived cipher writing was quite a common thing. Two great religious and political parties wore contending for supremacy all over Europe; and nowhere more keenly than in England, while governed by Elizabeth and JameS I. To the u.. uccessful, the dungeon, the scaffold, the stake, or the halter was the award ; and those who took an active part in the strife found it desirable, in order to escape detection, to do much of their work in tlie dark. Hence the necessity for cipher writing, which enabled the writer of a letter to convey to his correspondent, who had the key, a meaning totally different from that which was convoyed on its surface. The practice was universal among politicians and statesmen. It is on record that both Bacon and his brother Anthony, when young, used habitually to decipher letters for their patron and party leader, the Earl of Essex, whose political plotting ultimately cost him his head.

Mr. Donnelly h not the originator of the idea that Bacon wrote Shakspere's plays. The subject had been under discussion for .'lO years before he took it up, of which he gives full particulars towards the close of his work. But the idea of there being a hidden writing enveloped in tho plays, which would reveal the authorship, was entirely his own. How the idea originated, and how lie worked it out, we shall now proceed to state. Having satisfied himself that Bacon was the author of the plays, the question naturally occurred to him, "How is it possible that he would disown them, with no hope of ever reclaiming them? How could he consent that the immortal honours which belonged to him should be heaped on an unworthy impostor?" This question constantly recurred, and lie could give it no answer. One day he chanced to open a "Boy's Book" belonging to one of his children, in which there was a chapter on "Cryptography, or Cipher Writing," and in which it was stated that the most famous and complex cipher ever invented was by Lord Bacon ; and a copy of it was given at length, it not being, however, that which Mr. Donnelly has discovered. This was the little clue which originated the idea that Bacon had possibly put a cipher in his plays, which might reveal the authorship. It sent him off to Bacon's other works. He remembered that Basil Montagu, in his " Life of Bacon," had said that " he prepared a work upon ciphers, which lie afterwards published." This proved not quite accurate ; but. he found in Bacon's book, "De Augment-is," a very learned dissertation on ciphers, giving an account of the various kinds, literal, verbal, and others, and exhibiting a thorough and original acquaintance with the whole subject. In another of Bacon' works, " The Advancement of Learning," are further hints of a very suggestive character, which were not lost on Mr. Donnelly. But in all this there was nothing to show whether there was a cipher in the plays : or what sort of a cipcr it was ; only it strengthened the probability that there might be. In the winter of IS7S-9, however, ho undertook the task of re-reading Shakspere's plays, with his eyes directed to discover whether there was or was not any indication of a cipher. "If there is such a tiling," he argued, " it will probably be found in some such form as this : —' I, Francis Bacon, of St. Albans, son of

Nicholas Bacon, wrote these plays which go by the name of Slink spore.'" The result was that, though he did not find the key, lie was more satisfied than ever that there was a cipher there. There was an occurrence of words that looked that way, but no such local concurrence between I lie words as would show that what more lit; sought was also there. For instance, he was able to pick out the severed word.* Francis, Bacon, Nicholas, Bacon's, Son, in one act of tho play of Henry IV.; but there was nothing to bring the words together, and there he stuck fast. All this time he had been using the ordinary edition of the plays. For days and weeks lie toiled over this. lie tried every possible way to establish some arithmetical connexion between these significant words, which might form the key to others, but all in vain. He took every filth word, every tenth, every twentieth, every fiftieth, and every hundredth, but the result was nothing but incoherent nonsense. lie counted from the top to the bottom, from the bottom to the top, from the beginning to the ends of scenes, from the ends to the beginnings, across the pages, hop, skip, and jump in every direction; but still nothing but dire nonsense, lie gives instances, and shows how ridiculous it is to suppose that any amount of ingenuity, without a, preconcerted key, could construct rational sentences out of such material, twist it how he might. The fact is that the cipher was not. there, and, therefore, neither he nor anyone else cculd find it there.

At last, however, and when almost in despair, Mr. Donnelly obtained a photographically reduced copy of the celebrated folio editions of Shaekspeare's plays, published in 1023, seven years after Shakspete's death, not by his own relations, but by John lleminge and Henry Condell, two professional London actors. This edition differs greatly from those published in Shakspere's lifetime, both in the way of omissions and additions, some of the plays having nearly twice as much in them as in the earlier editions, and important passages being left out. It is ono of the finest specimens of typography of the age, evidently printed with the utmost care that the most skilful printers could bestow. And yet it contains some features which at first sight appear the grossest and most careless blunders, and some of the most unaccountable eccentricities, in which it differs from all other editions. For instance, the simple process of the paging is all in confusion unexplained, a circumstance which could scarcely have occurred unintentionally in the hands of the most, skilful printers. The "eccentricities" are still more remarkable. One of these is the vast number of instances in which (often without tho smallest apparent reason) several words are bracketed together. Another is the use of the hyphen, conjoining two or even three words in one, which are generally printed separately, and for joining which there is no necessity. Another is the capricious use of elisions —th' for the, or the e in plural or genitive terminations ; another the altogether capricious use of italics, chiefly for proper names, while even on the same line some will be in italics and others in Roman characters. (All these eccentricities, as well as the defective paging, have since been found by Mr. Donnelly to be the principal factors in the construction of the cipher.) None of these peculiarities ot the "noble folio" escaped the notice of Mr. Donnelly. He logically inferred that where there were so many departures from the usual course of printing, the man who corrected the proofs, and not the man who had set up the type, had designedly made them. The paging meant something ; so did the hyphens ; so did the abnormal brackets, the italics, and elisions; but what did they

mean? He was still, as lie expresses it, "in the wilderness." "Many times," he tells us, " I struck upon clues which held out for two or three points, and then failed me. I was often reminded of our Western story of the lost traveller, whose highway changed into a waggon road, his waggon road disappeared into a bridle path, his bridle path into a cow path, and his cowpath at last degenerated into a squirrel track, which ran up a tree. So my hopes came to naught many a time, against the hard face of inflexible arithmetic." How lie wandered up and down he records at l<i._ih, with numerous instances. How ultimately he gob "into the clear" it is quite impossible to tell our readers in the brief space at our disposal. Nor is the method by which he discovered the cipher altogether clear in his account, further than that it. was effected by the most persevering industry and by the constant and almost inexhaustible working out of arithmetical sums, which he thought would effect his purpose. At last, in this way, he did accomplish the work, and got possession of the formula which opened up the whole mystery. It was, as he observes himself, very much in the same manner as Young and Champillion recovered the interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics which had been lost to the world for more than 2000 years, when, by the ascertainment of the mystical figures which meant "Cleopatra," they got the key to the whole hieroglyphic and cursive alphabets of ancient Egypt, the rest beyond that one word being worked out by the most patient and exhaustive industry. "My problem," says Mr. Donnelly, " was to find out by means of a cipher rule of which I knew a little, a cipher story of which 1 knew less. A more brain-racking problem was never submitted to the intellect of man." And now he claims to have solved the difficulty, and has given us this book to prove the fact, and laid before the reader some extensive details of his work. For this, involving, as it does, thousands of sums in multiplication, addition, and subtraction, we can only refer to the book itself. One fact, however, we must call attention to, as tending to prove the genuineness of Mr. Donnelly's discovery. When he undertook the work, he expected to discover nothing more than the bare announcement that Bacon wrote the plays. But the cipher has already developed whole chapters of the contemporary history of the period, of which some bear directly on the question of authorship; others open far larger matters of the greatest interest, to the historical student. It is to be hoped that nothing will prevent Mr. Donnelly from continuing his work till the whole wealth of the mine he has discovered has been " brought to bank." Flippant critics, both in England and America, have tried hard to " sit upon" Mr. Donnelly, some of whom have evidently not read his book. They give reasons, such as they are, why the thing cannot be. Mr. Donnelly's reply is that which the countryman in the stocks gave to his sympathising friend, who assured him that there was no law to put a man in the stocks for getting beery at the fair. "I don't know about the law," was his reply, " but here I be." It is impossible to deny that Mr. Donnelly has got out of certain of the plays most remarkable stories by means of a fixed arithmetical formula. He may be well content to reply to his critics, " Here it

We may here anticipate an objection which we have heard more than once. The objector will offer to take up a copy of the Times or any other newspaper, and out of •ib to write any story you may please. Possibly he might. A double number of the Times contains as much printing as a whole Xew Testament, probably about half as many words as there are in the dictionary. Of course, if you are at liberty to take your words at discretion, you may piece up almost, anything you please. " But Air. Donnelly had no such liberty. He was tied down by a ricritl arithmetical formula, which he had laboriously worked out, and could only take such words as it indicated. Applied to the Times, or any other publication, except the folio Shakespeare, it would give no result but disconnected nonsense. Nor, in Mr. Donnelly's hands, would it develop from the folio anything that, was not there. It is not his preconceived story which he tells, but the story of whoever put it info th». folio, quite "unbeknown"' to him.

The complicated character of Mr. Donnelly's formula is also greatly in its favour. .Suppose that we .should take a ten-line paragraph in to-day's Hf.ralp, containing local news ; and that, after a little experimenting, we discovered that, by picking out every tenth word, we had a copy of the Lord's Prayer, we should undoubtedly and reasonably conclude that the words did not so arrange themselves by accident, but that some ingenious person who composed the paragraph had put them there. Suppose that instead of every tenth word, however, the words of the Lord's Prayer came in a series of (10th, ISth, 29th), 'Kith, ISth, 29th), and so on, the possibility of accident would bo negatived a thousandfold. Now, how much more impossible is it that there can be any accident. in the result of Mr. Donnelly's work ? He will be found, for instance, in one case to have taken page 74 to work upon, lie will have multiplied 7-4 by 12, the number of italic words found in a portion of the page, fixed by tho formula, or by the bracketed words simply, or the bracketed words 4- 1 ; he will have "modified" the result, subtracting by the number of words in one of the divisions of the page caused by the stage directions, and lie will have found that every word so indicated, counted from the start point, grew out of the same " root number" of his formula ! Could there be any accident in the allocation of the words which, selected by this complicated process, arranged themselves, grammatically and continuously, into a section of an historical story? The supposition is simply ridiculous. Wo must, however, in conclusion, caution our readers against the idea that they will, after having read the book, find themselves in a position to perform the work which Mr. Donnelly has performed, and to unearth for themselves the "hidden writing - ' of other parts of the plays beyond those of which ho has given the details. For reasons which he has given in pages 583 and 584, he has for the present kept back the "primary root number" from which arc extracted the working, modified root numbers (which he gives); nor does he explain how he got the "primary root number." That he will, however, see the expediency of taking his readers into his confidence on these points we have reason to believe. In the meantime, what he must do is to complete his investigations into other pages beyond those on which he lias operated, and let the world have the whole story of the Great Cryptogram. If the labour be too great for one brain, he could easily train a few assistants, who, with the complete key, primal and secondary roots confided to them, could work out all that remains to be revealed of the secret history of a period on the imaginary history of which other false reputations besides that of Will Shakspere's have been built up.