Bacon is Shake-Speare. Durning-Lawrence Edwin

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СКАЧАТЬ in fact it is a cunningly drawn cryptographic picture, shewing two left arms and a mask.

      The back of the left arm which does duty for the right arm is shewn in

      Plate 10, Page 26.

      [Illustration: Plate X. The Back of the Left Arm, from Plate VIII]

      Every tailor will admit that this is not and cannot be the front of the right arm, but is, without possibility of doubt, the back of the left arm.

      [Illustration: Plate XI. The Front of the Left Arm, from Plate VIII]

      [Illustration: (not included in list of plates) The Front of Left Arm.

      From Plate VIII. The Back of Left Arm From Plate VIII. Arranged

      Tailor fashion, shoulder to shoulder, as in the Gentleman's TailorMagazine, April, 1911]

      Plate 11 shews the front of the left arm, and you at once perceive that you are no longer looking at the back of the coat but at the front of the coat.

      [Illustration: Plate XII. The [Mask] Head, from the [so-called]

      Portrait, by Droeshout, in the 1623 Folio]

      Now in Plate 12, Page 32, you see the mask, especially note that the ear is a mask ear and stands out curiously; note also how distinct the line shewing the edge of the mask appears. Perhaps the reader will perceive this more clearly if he turns the page upside down.

      [Illustration: Plate XIII. Sir Nicholas Bacon, from the Painting by Zucchero]

      Plate 13, Page 33, depicts a real face, that of Sir Nicholas Bacon, eldest son of the Lord Keeper, from a contemporary portrait by Zucchero, lately in the Duke of Fife's Collection. This shews by contrast the difference between the portrait of a living man, and the drawing of a lifeless mask with the double line from ear to chin. Again examine Plates 8, Pages 20, 21, the complete portrait in the folio. The reader having seen the separate portions, will, I trust, be able now to perceive that this portrait is correctly characterised as cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask.

      While examining this portrait, the reader should study the lines that describe it in the Shakespeare folio of 1623, a facsimile of which is here inserted.

      To the Reader.

      This Figure, that thou here seest put,

        It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;

      Wherein the Grauer had a strife

        with Nature, to out-doo the life:

      O, could he but haue drawne his wit

        As well in brasse, as he hath hit

      His face; the Print would then surpasse

        All, that was euer writ in brasse.

      But, since he cannot, Reader, looke

        Not on his Picture, but his Booke.

                                       B.I.

      Plate IX.

VERSES ASCRIBED TO BEN JONSON, FROM THE 1623 FOLIO EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS

      B.I. call the ridiculous dummy a "portrait" but describes it as the "Figure put for" (that is "instead of") and as "the Print," and as "his Picture"; he likewise most clearly tells us to "looke not on his (ridiculous) Picture, but (only) his Booke." It seems, therefore, evident that he knew the secret of Bacon's authorship and intended to inform those capable of understanding that the graver had done out the life when he writes, "Out-doo the life." In the New English Dictionary, edited by Sir J.A.H. Murray, there are upwards of six hundred words beginning with "Out," and every one of them, with scarcely a single exception, requires, in order to be fully understood, to be read reversed. Out-law does not mean outside of the law, but lawed out by a legal process. "Out-doo" was used only in the sense of "do out"; thus, in the "Cursor Mundi," written centuries before the days of Elizabeth, we read that Adam was out done [of Paradise]; and in Drayton's "Barons' Wars," published in 1603, we find in Book V. s. li.

      "That he his foe not able to withstand,

      Was ta'en in battle and his eyes out-done."

      The graver has indeed done out the life so cleverly that for hundreds of years learned pedants and others have thought that the figure represented a real man, and altogether failed to perceive that it was a mere stuffed dummy clothed in an impossible coat, cunningly composed of the front of the left arm buttoned on to the back of the same left arm, as to form a double left armed apology for a man. Moreover, this dummy is surmounted by a hideous staring mask, furnished with an imaginary ear, utterly unlike anything human, because, instead of being hollowed in, it is rounded out something like the rounded outside of a shoe-horn, in order to form a cup which would cover and conceal any real ear that might be behind it.

      Perhaps the reader will more fully understand the full meaning of B.I.'s lines if I paraphrase them as follows: —

      To the Reader.

                The dummy that thou seest set here,

                Was put instead of Shake-a-speare;

                Wherein the Graver had a strife

                To extinguish all of Nature's life;

                O, could he but have drawn his mind

                As well as he's concealed behind

                His face; the Print would then surpasse

                All, that was ever writ in brasse.

                But since he cannot, do not looke

                On his mas'd Picture, but his Booke.

      Do out appears in the name of the little instrument something like a pair of snuffer which was formerly used to extinguish the candles and called a "Doute." Therefore I have correctly substituted "extinguished" for "out-doo." At the beginning I have substituted "dummy" for "figure" because we are told that the figure is "put for" (that is, put instead of) Shakespeare. In modern English we frequently describe a chairman who is a mere dummy as a figurehead. Then "wit" in these lines means absolutely the same as "mind," which I have used in its place because I think it refers to the fact that upon the miniature of Bacon in his 18th year, which was painted by Hilliard in 1578, we read: – "Si tabula daretur digna animum mallem." This line is believed to have been written at the time by the artist, and was translated in "Spedding": – "If one could but paint his mind."

      In March, 1911, the Tailor and Cutter newspaper stated that the Figure, put for Shakepeare in the 1623 folio, was undoubtedly clothed in an impossible coat, composed of the back and the front of the same left arm. And in the following April the Gentleman's Tailor Magazine, under the heading of a "Problem for the Trade," shews the two halves of the coat as printed on page 28a, and says: "It is passing strange that something like three centuries should have been allowed to elapse before the tailors' handiwork should have been appealed to in this particular manner."

      "The special point is that in what is known as the authentic portrait of William Shakespeare, which appears in the celebrated first folio edition, published in 1623, a remarkable sartorial puzzle is apparent."

      "The tunic, coat, or whatever the garment may have been called at the time, is so strangely illustrated that the right-hand side of the forepart is obviously the left-hand side of the backpart; and so gives a harlequin appearance to the figure, which it is not unnatural to assume was intentional, СКАЧАТЬ