The Electronic Edition of +The Second Cryptographic Shakespeare+ Copyright 1990 by Penn Leary Permission Is Granted to Quote Up
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The Electronic edition of +The Second Cryptographic Shakespeare+ Copyright 1990 by Penn Leary Permission is granted to quote up to 500 words, except for quotations from other writers for which I have received permissions. The GWBASIC pro- gram, shown near the end of this text, I have placed in the public domain. It is also available from Westchester House, Publishers, 218 So. 95th St. Omaha NE 68114. Cost is $5.00 postpaid on an MS-DOS DD 5 1/2" disk. The book itself is still available from the publisher, $15 postpaid. 313 pages, 16 photo illustrations, bibliography, index. Words marked with + indicate italic text. Title Page. Why how now gentleman: why this is flat knaverie to take upon you another mans's name. William Shakespeare: Taming of the Shrew, iv, 1, 127 +Wherefore let us come to+ CYPHARS. Their kinds are many as, +Cyphars simple; Cyphars intermixt with Nulloes+, or non-significant Characters; +Cyphers of double Letters under one Character; Wheele-Cyphars; Kay-Cyphars; Cyphars of words; Others.+ Francis Bacon: +The Advancement of Learning+ THE SECOND CRYPTOGRAPHIC SHAKESPEARE A MONOGRAPH WHEREIN THE POEMS AND PLAYS ATTRIBUTED TO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ARE PROVEN TO CONTAIN THE ENCIPHERED NAME OF THE CONCEALED AUTHOR, FRANCIS BACON BY PENN LEARY THE ENLARGED SECOND EDITION While supplies last, a copy of the book may be obtained from WESTCHESTER HOUSE, PUBLISHERS, 218 SOUTH NINETY-FIFTH, OMAHA, NEBR., U.S.A. 68114 Price $15 p.p. COPYRIGHT 1990 BY PENN LEARY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 90-90117 Quotations excerpted from +The Man Who Saw Through Time+ Copyright by Loren Eiseley, 1973, reprinted with permission of Charles Scribners Sons, New York City. A DEDICATION: TO MY MARVELOUS AND EXCEEDINGLY DECENT, CULTIVATED AND INDUSTRIOUS FAMILY, WITH ALL MY LOVE: MY WIFE MARIAN, MY DAUGHTER SHAWN, HER HUSBAND MICHAEL, MY SON BRIAN, MY DAUGHTER ERIN, HER HUSBAND GARY AND MY SISTER JANE. AND HOMAGE: TO THE AUTHOR OF THE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. PENN LEARY Illusions. Non semper ea sunt quae videntur. (Things are not always what they seem) --Phaedrus, A.D. 8 Chapter 1 Charles Dickens, a student of human nature, had this to say: "The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest some- thing should turn up." Something has turned up. This is a story about William Shakespeare and a few of his contem- poraries. He died 374 years ago and for almost a century he rested comfort- ably in his Stratford-on-Avon tomb. Then someone tried to write his life history. Some unimportant facts and a few apocryphal traditions were unearthed, about a dozen, so the biography had to be padded out with imaginative but transparent surmises. But, some years later, cynics arose and began to defame Shakespeare's reputation, saying that the imprinting of his name on the plays and poems was not proof that he had written them. Not long afterward a united howl of rage ascended from the univer- sities. The name of William Shakespeare must not be touched with profane hands or shamefully twitted by knaves. The scholars had what they regard- ed in law as overwhelming proof: right there they pointed, where any fool can see it, was his name printed on the first page of (some of) the Shake- speare books. They could find none of his manuscripts, or even letters, but they had the books. That was enough. On this thin, +prima facie+ case they rested; the burden of proof was hastily shifted; the critics of orthodoxy were thenceforward required to prove the negative in this debate, and to do so by documented and thor- oughly convincing Facts. The offended Schoolmen demanded that their challengers furnish contradictory evidence of a quantity and quality to be conclusive and authenticated beyond any possible doubt. The search for such vouchers has continued. Eye-witnesses for either side have been unavailable except in the hereafter. Yet one wonders: if a genuine confession of illiteracy (attested and signed with an "x" by the Bard before a High Notary with Seal) was found in the cellars of New Place or even in Ann Hathaway's attic, would that be admissible? No, probably not. It would be said, in Good William's behalf, that he must have dictated The Works to his bosom friend Ben Jonson, who surely could read and write. Soon this hypothesis would be raised to a legal presumption, a new barrier against literary doubt. The doubters are well aware of the entrenched prestige and power of the so far successful plaintiffs in this ceaseless paper-chase. The weight of the briefs filed by both sides and hauled in drays across the Thames would surely cause Old London Bridge to fall down. Until now the plaster image of this god of letters has been preserved, but it shall not be for long. Veri- fiable, determinate proof favoring the patient defendants has been found. * * * What I have drafted here is mostly a technical essay done in the manner of probative writing that I am accustomed to pursue in law briefs and sometimes in journals of applied science. Writers are told, by those who have studied the art, to write about their own experiences or to go to the original sources. Lawyers, in writing a brief, have to follow both rules. The personal experiences of their wit- nesses are elicited at the trial; the original sources that lawyers must rely upon are the bound Law Reports of previous cases that, under the maxim of +stare decisis+, the courts ordinarily follow. But the old cases that I studied in law school have not always sur- vived the changes (whether right or wrong) that have occurred in judicial and political philosophy. My "original sources" keep vanishing; the practice of law has become a fragmented, confusing, quickly changing and special- ized profession; established values, along with the private general practice of law, are fading away. No one has the memory, much less the time and reckless ambition, to attempt to grasp it all. Science, both pure and applied, has suffered the same transformation. Citations to previous work in scientific papers now refer to things done a few weeks or a few months before. The rate of change in progress now annually doubles, and doubles again. As a result, the volume of information that must be collected, recorded and disseminated has increased at an alarming rate. The unknown has been penetrated; the seals of the +arcanum+ have been broken; glimpses of the megacosm have come into view, but the observations remain in countless papers still to be cataloged. Until that task is completed and the knowledge precisely outlined much wisdom may be lost. Historians of science, even of last week's experimental papers, if well- armed with an indexed computer database, may ultimately become more important than discoverers of unforeseen or fugitive anomalies. The scientist still must work in the same exacting way; he must recount his personal experiences and then refer to previous research to show that he is on the right track, or to demonstrate that he has found some unnatural irregularity in his experiments. It has been said that scien- tific facts prove themselves by thousands and thousands of trials conducted by hundreds and hundreds of scientists. When the results of such labors agree, then both the theory and the inductive method are admitted to the registers of science. But, once in a thousand or more times, an experiment fails. And despite all precautions,the result is not the same as all scientists would, until that moment, have predicted. Many times in the history of science the unique, but failed, experi- ment has been noticed by others learned in the field. The preliminary, apparently spurious, results have been seized upon by a few individualists of this intellectually tolerant fraternity and have been proven either to have been the result of grievous error or to have made a new breach in the parapet of Nature's seemingly hostile defenses against inquisitive minds. * * * Francis Bacon has been called the father of modern science, not for his own particular scientific studies, but for his demands upon its practi- tioners to adopt inductive methods. He rebelled against the deductive "philosophic" dogmas of Aristotelian science which still remained as the curriculum of the orthodox schoolmen then teaching at Cambridge Univer- sity. He quit before he was granted a degree and spent the greater part of the rest of his life studying and communicating, and then writing and publishing his views. If he did not invent the scientific method of experi- mentation, he was the outstanding publicist of that novel and still misun- derstood way of working. Logical induction requires students of history to consider all aspects of their subject before presenting a conclusion, but some historians have been content to select an agreeable premise and then attempt to sustain it with carefully sorted evidence; the facts which do not fit their postulates are screened out, while legends are clutched at and made to seem plausible. History is a fragile and often a perishable form of merchandise. It is some- times a political image seen through multiple reflections of darksilvered mirrors placed randomly in the corners of biased or guilty minds, or filtered through fading memories. Someone has been so daring as to remark, "To study history is first to study the historian." Henry Ford who was thought by some to be an uneducated, though wildly successful, American peasant said in his thrifty manner of expression, "History is bunk." Perhaps he was anticipating what was about to be done about history in Europe before World War II by the German, Italian and Russian "Information" agencies.