THE GREAT CRYPTOGRAM.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9154, 8 September 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE GREAT CRYPTOGRAM.

No. 111. [By the Rev. E. H. Gulliver, M.A.)

Mr. Donnelly next takes the politics of the plays. The writer was an aristocrat, and he despised the class to which Shakespeare belonged. In support of this assertion, Mr. Donnelly quotes a list of expressions, such as—" Mechanic slaves" (" Antony and Cleopatra"), "The fool multitude" (" Merchant of Venice "), " The rude multitude" (2 Henry VI."), &c. But what does all this amount to ? That Shakespere had the art of putting the appropriate words into the mouth of each speaker. Mr. Donnelly, ever anxious to exalt his hero, quotes Bacon's words with reference to the poor, " The state of the poor and oppressed nave been precious in mine eyes. I have hated all cruelty and hardness of heart." Brave words; but the record of Bacon's life would hardly bear this out. How about Peacham's case, for example ? Mr. Donnelly again brings forward the fact that Bacon was an adherent of Essex. So was the writer of the plays, and so by the way was Sbakspere. Mr. Donnelly has something to say on the " Religion of the Plays," or of their writer. On the strength of a single tradition, dated more than 70 years after Shakespere's death, he states as an absolute fact that Shakespere was a Romanist. From this assumption he proceeds to argue that certain statements in "King John" on the Papal supremacy could nob have boon written by Shakespere. The fact is, Mr. Donnelly confuses between the Papal supremacy and the Catholic religion. That Englishmen knew the difference was shown in 15S8, when the Catholic gentlemen of England led out their retainers to do battle for their country against the Invincible Armada. But Mr. Donnelly is too fond of idle tales when they fit in with his theory. Surely all the evidence points a way from Rome so far as Shakespere is concerned, whilst the plays themselves indicate a man too great to belong to any sect or party under the sun. So far as we have gone, we maintain that Mr. Donnelly has not submitted one atom of evidence from internal sources th it will stand the test of criticism. Mr. Donnelly is so biassed in favour of his own theory that he is quite unfair. He forgets that the main strength of his position depends on the manifestation of a sense of honestyan impartiality of judgment—absolutely unimixjachable. But we must continue. Mr. Donnelly tries to unfold the purpose of the plays. According to him Bacon wrote the plays with an object, to set forth to the eyes of mankind certain sublime lessons. They inculcate patriotism for example, or they warn men against the evils of ingratitude, mob-rule, kingcraft, what not. On the other hand Mr. Donnelly asserts that they were written with a much more vulgar motive, viz., to save the writer from the sponging-house. All this seems to us somewhat irreconcilable. If Bacon flashed them off as Mr. Donnelly alleges, what becomes of the lofty scheme of teaching which Mr. Donnelly ascribes to him? How, again, are we to recognise the existence of such a scheme as this side by side with the statement that Bacon was satirising his enemies. Richard 111., for example, is the hump-backed Sir Robert Cecil, the author of much of his trouble. Let a man cherish hatred like this, and his line schemes for the amelioration of the human race will quickly disappear. Again, "Hamlet," Mr. Donnelly calmly asserts with a naivetd that is truly delicious, "is autobiographical. 11 is Bacon himself. It is the man of thought, the philosopher, the poet, placed in the midst of the necessities of a rude age." A rude age ! An age hrobbing, perhaps, with m. 3 intellectual life than any which the world had ever before witnessed ; when heart and intellect alike were being disenthralled.

" The Tempest," too, is autobiographical. Prospero, devoted to secret, arts—that cryptogram again—Miranda, " wonderful things," as Mr. Donnelly tells us, whilst he asks, does it mean these wonderful plays ? Caliban yet remains, but here we have the gem of the so-called autobiography. Our readers, unless they have had the advantage of studying tho " Croat Cryptogram," will never guess who this " freckled whelp, hag-born," is. He is, according to Mr. Donnelly, none other than our old friend William Shakespere ! Surely this is the most un kindest cut of all. After saving his reputation behind the name of Shakespere, Bacon rewards his coadjutor and helper by picturing him under the guise of

This ahhoi red slave, Which any print of goodness will not take, Being capable of all ill.

But Mr. Donnelly has in this respect a perfect craze. The very name of Shakespere drives him into Billingsgate, while even tho poor little unoffending town of Stratford is pelted with the most scurrilous muck available in respectable pages. All these discoveries of Mr. Donnelly's are really very interesting. Of course they may be true, but unfortunately they only rest on Mr. Donnelly's bare assertion, and he must excuse us if, in a somewhat sceptical age, we decline to accept his words a* a sufficient proof, more especially as Mr. Donnelly has a kind of magic powor, which enables him to draw out of ordinary language exactly what suits his purpose ; just as a conjuror produces from the same black bottle anything from champagne to gingerpop. But there is one point we had almost forgotten.

Mr. Donnelly questions if there could be at one and the same time two such minds' as Shakespere and Bacon. Is Mr. Donnelly unaware that these correspondences of great natures at one and the same time are not uncommon. We may refer him for example to Newton and Liebnitz, working independently in the same direction, and arriving at tho calculus, though in different ways. Adams and Le Verrier made the some discovery at the same time. Darwin and Wallace arrived at the same conclusions with regard to {(natural selection, each pursuing his own investigations without reference to the other. There is somewhat in the air of each century that leads men along kindred lines. As the Chinese proverb says, " A man is more like his acre than he is like his father and mother." To deny such a possibility would be absurd —as absurd as to deny the separate existence of Napoleon and Wellington. By tho way, the suggestion may bo worth working out. We have very little doubt that the received accounts of the battle of Waterloo are all a mistake, the real facts being that Napoleon was simply playing double dummy to keep his hand in. Now, we ask, having reference to the tangled mass of so-called evidence and conjectures which Mr. Donnelly has got together—remembering further tho fact that Mr. Donnelly is not to be trusted as an impartial investigator—can anyone accept his conclusions

Apart from the extreme unlikelihood that Bacon should bo the author of the plays, etc., when we consider his absorbed and busy life, we are faced by the yet greater unlikelihood that were he the author, such a secret should have remained hidden. Wc say this with no reference to the reading of the cryptogram so far as that is concerned ; the only wonder is that it should ever have been deciphered at all. But our remark has regard to the fact, which Mr. Donnelly himself admits, that several must have known that Bacon was the author. To begin with, the disreputable creature, who has hitherto been regarded as the author, would in some of his beery bouts have blurted the thing out. . In the next place, Cecil, his bitter enemy, knew it or suspected it. Had such been the case how long pray would Francis Bacon have escaped the Tower? Sir Tobie Matthew, again, was aware of it, and Homing eand Condell, the editors of the Folio of - 23, must have been in the secret as well. Is it possible that what was shared amongst so many discordant natures could have remained unknown ? There can be but one answer to this question-—! No. But'tis time to attack the citadel itself, where the Great Cryptogram rests. Here, in the first place, we must notice that Mr. Donnelly started on his travels with the assumption that there was a cryptogram. This is his initiative idea. He confesses it. This fact in itself is sufficient to shake confidence. When a man commits himself to any particular theory, we know how difficnl* it is for him to avoid reading that theory into everything. He examines writings not to find out what they really mean, but to find what he is looking for; and he generally succeeds. Thus Mr. Donnelly discovers cryptogram everywhen, whilst Bacon peeps out from every sentence. We have already given one or two instances of this; bub another

conspicuous case strikes us in this part of the work. We refer to his treatment of some of the sonnets. He takes, for example, Sonnet LV., in which these words occur :—

Not marble, not the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme ; But you shall shine more bright in their contents Than unswept stone besmeared by sluttish time.

'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth ; your praise shall still find room. Even in the eves of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom, So till the judgment that yourself arise You live in this and dwell in lovers' eyes.

Mr. Donnelly interprets this as referring to the plays. Bacon, so he asserts, is here claiming for them a sort of immortality. It is hard to write with patience on such absolute nonsense. There is no more reason to find in these love inspired linos a reference to the great plays than there is to discover in the last Public Works Statement an exposition of the Lunar Theory. This, however, is a slight digression. Let us return to the Cryptogram. Now, a cryptogram is a secret writing which conveys to the initiated information which, without a knowledge of its method, they would be unable to decipher. It is used for the benefit of those who possess the key to the secret. The method is employed constantly in affairs of State, and, as we know from the agony column of the Times, in other affairs as well. But it always presupposes a key. The man who writes has in view at least one other who possesses that key. In this asserted cryptogram of Mr. Donnelly's one half of this supposition is left out. Lord Bacon writes, so says Mr. Donnelly, in cipher ; bub he has nowhere left any indications of the key.by which alone what he wrote would or could be deciphered. This in itself is a most suspicious matter. Here we have a pretended cipher so obscure that for more than two and a-half centuries its very existence even has never been suspected— cipher so obscure that the chances are enormously against it ever being discovered at all. A cipher, moreover, whose reputed existence rests alone on the fact that Mr. Donnelly was determined at all costs to find one ; a cipher which, in spite of Mr. Donnelly's assertions, has to men of ordinary common sense no very adequate reason for coming into being at all. Even supposing that the writing of plays might throw discredit on the name of the great statesman and lawyer, yet, even so, his object would bo amply gained if the true authorship were disclosed after his death. By that time he could have no doubts as to the opinion men had formed of these plays. Their greatness and genius were universally recognised. Surely a clause in his will would have been sufficient to claim | the right which he had so wilfully ignored ; and no calumny or misunderstanding could have touched him then. Moreo\er, why should he be so tenacious of his reputation in so small a matter as this ? That reputatation had already been smirched and darkened in far sadder ways, not by the eccentricities of genius, bub by his own grave misdoing ; by the warping and perversion of justice. When a man has been branded, as Bacon was, by the highest court of the realm for misdemeanours which, in any lesser man, would have probably led to permanent imprisonment, it is absurd to pretend that he would be so careful of his reputation in this matter. His character was already ruined for ever, and the great plays could but have shed additional lustre on his name; they would only have shown him as yet more "majestic, though in ruins." Besides, even setting the plays on one side, how about " The Anatomy of Melancholy" and " Montaigne's Essays?" We must take the whole revelation oi the cryptogram. According to it, these, too, are Bacon's. How, then, in respect to their authorship, could even the fairest reputation suffer ? In regard to them, at least, it could not bo pretended that any professional etiquette interfered. Fortunately, perhaps, for Shakspere, Mr. Donnelly has discovered too much ; and even the most enthusiastic Donnellian must have a qualm of suspicion when he is called upon to swallow so monstrous a mouthful as his chief bids him digest. But let this stand for the present; we must confine ourselves to Shakspere. Mr. Donnelly gives us some specimens of cryptognuomatic art, just to whet our appetite, as it were, before the real thing comes later on. Let us, then, take a few of these instances. Mr. Donnelly is endeavouring to prove that Nicholas, the name of Bacon's father, is introduced. It is in the famous robbery scene in Henry IV. Gadshill says, "If they meete not with St. Nicholas' clarks, I'll give them this necke." On this Mr. Donnelly remarks, " Observe how Saint Nicholas is dragged in. He is represented as the patron saint of thieves, when in fact he was nothing of the kind." Mr. Donnelly is a thorough-going iconoclast. He is not satisfied with dethroning Shakespere. Saint Nicholas, too, if he stands in his way, must come down. But we must refer Mr. Donnelly to Halliwell's Dictionary of Provincial and Archaic Words." This gives a quotation from Cotgrove, "One of Saint Nicholas' clerks, an arrant thief." Mr. Donnelly should really be careful how he touches this highly respectable old gentleman. Here, then, Mr. Donnelly has what lie wants—the name "Nicholas." Sir John furnishes him with the needed title, whilst ho gets " Bacon " out of a gammon of bacon which a carrier's cart is conveying. In a similar way Mr. Donnelly drags out of the same play the word "of Kent, Master of the. Great Seal of the Commonwealth, of England. By the way, this title strikes us its being peculiar. Unless we are greatly mistaken, the term 3honld have been " Keeper," not "Master," and we suspect the phrase " Commonwealth of England." But then, as Mr. Donnelly naively admits, " the complicated exigencies of the cipher compelled Bacon to talk nonsense." Might we suggest that Bacon is not the only one whom they have compelled to talk nonsense. Mr. Donnelly cannot understand why Falstalf should call out to the travellers, "On, Bacons on." He says, " If he had called them hogs I could understand it, but to call them by the name of a piece of smoked meat!" However this be, Mr. Donnelly finds the supply of bacon run short, and so he takes refuge in the brogue and drags in under its cover "beacon" and "beckon," both of which he tells us were used in the cipher as the equivalent for Bacon. Truly necessity is the mother of invention. Mr. Donnelly tells us that " the name of Marlowe's great play, ' Tamburlaine,' appears in the ' Merry Wives of Windsor,' very ingeniously concealed." (Our readers will agree with him so far as the ingenuity is concerned.) " The Welshman says, in his broken English, ' The Tevil and his Tam.'" (Act 1., scene I.) (St. Nicholas again.) Is ext. "What would'st thou have, boor." The last syllable was probably formed by a combination of lay and in—" When the court lay at Windsor." The ins, of course, are numerous in the play. But we have given quite enough of this. Now we must come to the cryptogram par excellence. We write the word with hesitation, because we must) confess Mr. Donnelly's meaning is anything bub clear. He heads one of his chapters with the significant words, " Lost in the Wilderness." That precisely describes our position, and it is with no small amount of satisfaction that we notice that Sir William Fox is evidently in the same difficulty. The whole thing appeals to the old theological dictum, "credo quia impossible." Poor Mr. Donnelly, we are sorry for him, for he tells us the task of deciphering the cipher narrative has been an incalculable labour, reaching through many weary years. For once we can believe him. He tells us, " After a long time, by a great deal of experimentation, I discovered that the count runs not only from thebeginningsandends of acts, scenes, and columns, but also from the beginnings and ends of such subdivisions of scenes as are caused by the stage directions, such as 'enter Morton,' 'enter Falstaflf,"' etc. But to continue. Mr. Donnelly tells us that " the root numbers out of which the story grows are as follows : 505, 506, 513, 510, 523. These are the keys that unlock this part of the cipher story in the two plays Ist and 2nd Henry IV. They do not unlock it all, nor would they apply to other plays. They are the product of multiplying certain figures in the first column of page 74 by certain other figures. The explanation of the way in which they are obtained I reserve for the present." From these numbers, by roundabout methods, Mr. Donnelly has obtained the whole story of Shakespere's life, and Marlowe's as well, with a great deal more besides. But we are conscious here of a very serious difficulty. How on earth are we to compress within the short space at our command any adequate accounts of Mr. nelly's ups and down. [To be continued.]