Plays, Plays And More Plays
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- September 9th, 2008 |
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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 VII 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 According to Fellows, many of the previously unpublished plays “were entered into the Stationer’s Register on November 8, 1623, just in time for publication” a little later that same month.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 allay, a number of plays published previously were altered. Thither were deletions as advantageously as new additions. Fellows writes: “In the First Folio, The Merry Wives of Windsor has XII hundred more lines than it had in 1602, Titus Andronicus has a entire new environment, 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 band of the hypothesis 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 allay in his teens.
Coincidence? Bacon advocates don’t believe so, and have old Bacon’s own Bi-Literal Cipher to hunt for hidden messages in Shakespeare’s works and a number of publications by various 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 unacknowledged oldest son of Queen Elizabeth I, accompany Fellows’ captivating book.)
Bacon’s Bi-Literal Cipher requires a considerable intensity of matter: it’s designed in much a artifact that for each encrypted letter, five “outer” letters are needed. Furthermore, cipher-sleuths much as Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup concluded, rightly or wrongly, that only italic letters were old in the bi-literal cipher believed to be embedded in Shakespeare’s works&ndashwhich would rapidly multiply the intensity of outer or “enfolding” matter needed to contain the hidden messages. Fellows reasons that this demand for extensive cover matter could advantageously account for the adding of sections to old plays and the production of new ones.
Piece this may be the case, I believe it’s only one of various possible answers, and by no means the most important one. The quality of the outer texts&ndashthe plays themselves&ndashis simply also exquisite to have been produced merely for the benefit of hiding arcanum stories&ndashwhose quality, if the different decoded segments are correct, is often inferior to the outer matter. Let me offer another explanation instead: I believe that the plays were essential to Bacon’s life activity, which he summarized as The Great Instauration.
Early in his life, after much disappointment in the stultified country of learning he encountered at Trinity College, Bacon, the adolescent genius, set himself to the monumental chore of bringing about a technological, literary and cultural revolution&ndashboth in England and in the class at large. All his future research and writings contributed in one artifact or another to this all-encompassing goal. In 1620 he finally disclosed this modality 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 elite in his little book The New Atlantis.
The method he conceived of to bring about the Instauration consisted of cardinal parts or stairs. The III first stairs were dedicated to an inventory of the country of knowledge and to employing a new technological method&ndashthat of experimentation and inductive reasoning&ndashthat would replace the fruitless dialectical reasoning prevalent at the time. His different natural histories were examples as advantageously as components of the inventory process, and his classic Novum Organon&ndashthe “New Method”&ndashexplained the methodology he devised for this huge and far-reaching endeavor.
The fourth block, which he called “The Ladder of the Intellect,” was the first in the next worker of the process&ndashthat of attaining philosophical illumination. Bacon described this block as demonstrating the different insights and principles found in the first III stairs “before the eyes” so that people could believe and absorb them&ndashsuch 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 impalpable than it really is.”
Francis Bacon discovered the power of house when, at XII 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 ignorant alike. Thusly, any Baconian scholars have come to the conclusion that by writing the immortal plays published low the mask of Shakespeare, packed with their profound life lessons, he showed us a powerful artifact to implement Block 4 of his Great Instauration.
References
Bacon, Francis &ndashThe Advancement of Learning (1605); The Great Instauration (1620); De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623); The New Atlantis (1624)
Fellows, Virginia M. &ndash The Shakespeare Code (Snow Mountain Press, 2006)
Wells Gallup, Elizabeth &ndash The Biliteral Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in his Works and Deciphered by Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1899)
For a brief overview of the many controversies surrounding the ciphers said to have been discovered in Shakespeare’s works, accompany my article entitled “Shakespeare Cipher Stories.”
The fifth block was dedicated to determining temporary or intermediate statements of actuality, and the last one to arriving at the crowning statements of actuality regarding God, Nature and Man.