Few people know that many of William Shakespeare’s plays were published posthumously. Virginia Fellows’ Shakespeare Code includes an intriguing discussion of works attributed to Shakespeare that appeared after his passing in 1616. Shakespeare had been dead for seven years when the First Folio of his collected works was published. This celebrated Folio edition contained 36 plays, half of which had never been seen before. According to Fellows, many of the previously unpublished plays “were entered into the Stationer’s Register on November 8, 1623, just in time for publication” a little later that same month.
More fascinating
still, a number of plays published previously were altered. There were deletions
as well as new additions. Fellows writes: “In the First Folio, The Merry Wives
of Windsor has twelve hundred more lines than it had in 1602, Titus Andronicus
has a whole new scene, and Henry V is double the length of the 1600 edition.”
Given the fact that
Shakespeare was long gone and had left not a single manuscript behind,
legitimate questions arise: Who edited the old plays? Where did the new plays
come from, and why were they written?
Fellows, a firm
supporter of the theory that Sir Francis Bacon rather than Will Shakespeare
wrote the plays, looks to the field of cipher writing for an answer to these
questions. She emphasizes a fact that may provide a plausible link between the
works of Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare. In October 1623, a month before
the release of the First Folio, Bacon published a new Latin edition of his 1605
treatise The Advancement of Learning. In this revised and expanded edition,
entitled De Augmentis Scientiarum, he openly discussed a method of code
writing, the Bi-Literal Cipher, which he had devised when still in his teens.
Coincidence? Bacon
advocates don’t think so, and have used Bacon’s own Bi-Literal Cipher to hunt
for hidden messages in Shakespeare’s works and a number of publications by
several contemporaries that exhibited the same odd typesetting features as the
First Folio. (For a detailed description of the Bi-Literal Cipher and
quotations of deciphered materials on Bacon’s hidden life as the unrecognized
oldest son of Queen Elizabeth I, see Fellows’ captivating book.)
Bacon’s Bi-Literal
Cipher requires a substantial volume of text: it’s designed in such a way that
for each encrypted letter, five “outer” letters are needed. Furthermore,
cipher-sleuths such as Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup concluded, rightly or
wrongly, that only italic letters were used in the bi-literal cipher believed
to be embedded in Shakespeare’s works—which would rapidly multiply the volume
of outer or “enfolding” text needed to contain the hidden messages. Fellows
reasons that this demand for extensive cover text could well account for the
adding of sections to old plays and the production of new ones.
While this may be
the case, I think it’s only one of several possible answers, and by no means
the most important one. The quality of the outer texts—the plays themselves—is
simply too exquisite to have been produced merely for the benefit of hiding
secret stories—whose quality, if the various decoded segments are correct, is
often inferior to the outer text. Let me offer another explanation instead: I
believe that the plays were essential to Bacon’s life work, which he summarized
as The Great Instauration.
Early in his life,
after much disappointment in the stultified state of learning he encountered at
Trinity College, Bacon, the young genius, set himself to the monumental task of
bringing about a scientific, literary and cultural revolution—both in England
and in the world at large. All his future research and writings contributed in
one way or another to this all-encompassing goal. In 1620 he finally disclosed
this vision for a new golden age of peace, prosperity and enlightenment in The
Great Instauration, and a few years later he painted an enticing picture of
this new kind of society in his little book The New Atlantis.
The method he conceived
of to bring about the Instauration consisted of six parts or steps. The three
first steps were dedicated to an inventory of the state of knowledge and to
employing a new scientific method—that of experimentation and inductive
reasoning—that would replace the fruitless dialectical reasoning prevalent at
the time. His various natural histories were examples as well as components of
the inventory process, and his classic Novum Organon—the “New Method”—explained
the methodology he devised for this huge and far-reaching endeavour.
The fourth step,
which he called “The Ladder of the Intellect,” was the first in the next tier
of the process—that of attaining philosophical illumination. Bacon described
this step as demonstrating the various insights and principles found in the
first three steps “before the eyes” so that people could understand and absorb
them—such as in art, literature and hands-on education. He wrote: “For I
remember that in mathematics it is easy to follow the demonstration when you have
a machine beside you, whereas without that help all appears involved and more
subtle than it really is.”
Francis Bacon
discovered the power of theatre when, at twelve years of age, he wrote and
starred in a little play called The Philosopher King, performed before the
Queen herself. He learned that drama was a moving, effective means by which
philosophical and moral principles could be set “before the eyes” of rich and
poor, educated and uneducated alike. Thus, some Baconian scholars have come to
the conclusion that by writing the immortal plays published under the mask of
Shakespeare, packed with their profound life lessons, he showed us a powerful
way to implement Step 4 of his Great Instauration.
References
Bacon, Francis –The
Advancement of Learning (1605); The Great Instauration (1620); De
Augmentis Scientiarum (1623); The New Atlantis (1624)
Fellows, Virginia
M. – The Shakespeare Code (Snow Mountain Press, 2006)
Wells Gallup,
Elizabeth – The Biliteral Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in his
Works and Deciphered by Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1899)
The fifth step was
dedicated to determining temporary or intermediate statements of truth, and the
last one to arriving at the ultimate statements of truth regarding God, Nature
and Man.
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