Talks on Poetry

TALK FORTY-ONE

1

In talking of poetry from the subtle physical plane we took care to point out that the apparent lowest position of this plane in the hierarchy of worlds did not preclude its producing the greatest poetry. The excellence of poetry as such does not depend on the position of a plane: it depends on the intensity of vision and word and rhythm and on the faithfulness with which we transmit this intensity from whatever source.

Today, before proceeding to the next plane, I may point out that even mystical and spiritual poetry does not need to be from planes which seem proper to mysticism and spirituality: the Psychic and the Overhead. If there is a turn towards the Infinite, the Eternal, the Divine by a poet drawing upon any source for his inspiration, spiritual poetry will break forth. If one goes below the surface of things into the inner consciousness, mystic poetry will emerge with its subtleties and shadows from any level. No doubt, the Psychic will yield the sweetest secrets of the spiritual and the mystic, and the Overhead the amplest. But genuine stuff of intense mystic or spiritual power is possible to every plane.

The poets of the Rigveda drew their inspiration from the Overhead — often the highest Overhead from where the Mantra in its most divine form hails. But you must be aware that many Indian interpreters have had a very curious attitude to them. The Rigveda has been regarded as a sacred book and its hymn-makers as Rishis — that is, seers and hearers of Truth, Yet these seers and hearers of Truth have been taken to be concerned all the time with material things. A ritual of sacrificial prayer to mighty supra-terrestrial Gods for the sake of cattle and gold and children and intoxicating drinks and the defeat of enemies: this is the essence of the Rigveda for Sayana and his school. On the basis of the word "pusti", a Rishi has even been taken to have prayed: "May I grow fat!" Sri Aurobindo has swept away all this nonsense as well as the nonsense of the European scholars who look on the Rishis as mostly a crew of semi-barbaric Aryan priests deifying natural objects like the sun, moon, sky, water, fire and invoking them for physical benefits and for victory over Dravidian aborigines who are said to be "noseless", anas, which is taken to be an exaggeration for "flat-

Page 378

---

nosed". Sri Aurobindo understands the epithet as an-as, meaning "without the force of breath" to utter sacred words and has proved the hymns to be the speech of an occult tradition and experience which veils its spirituality and mysticism with symbols that convey their true meaning only to the initiate. But, mark you, the symbols are such that the most external objects seem to attract the Rishis — objects that would bulk in the mind of a poet writing from the subtle physical plane. If there had been less externality in the symbolism, Sayana's interpretation would have been impossible.

In a letter to me, dated 20th October 1936, Sri Aurobindo wrote: "The Vedic times were an age in which men lived in the material consciousness as did the heroes of Homer. The Rishis were the mystics of the time and took the form of their symbolic images from the material life around them." What are we to conclude from this? We may be sure of one thing: the Vedic poets, if they had not been mystics, would have written with the subtle physical plane as their common poise of expressive consciousness. From this we may hazard the guess that when the luminosity of the Overhead heights which Sri Aurobindo has found in them became vocal in their poetry it took up at times the same plane and transmuted its turns and tones into channels of revelation from those heights. We may also declare that if the Overmind luminosity had not worked directly in the mystics of the Vedic times, their mystical poetry itself would have grandly expressed occult realities with the inspiration of nothing else than the subtle physical plane, though certainly in a style different from Chaucer's or Homer's.

Just as mysticism can throb out from the subtle physical, so too it can erupt from the next plane, the vital. One of the literary prodigies of our Ashram, Nishikanta, is in his Bengali work a mystic poet par excellence of the vital, and in the boldness of his imagination he can match any Vedic seer just as in pure poetic quality he is not to be outdone by any Vishwamitra or Vasishtha. But his astounding apocalypses are not Overhead like theirs. Although these apocalypses pass over the head of many a reader they do not come directly from over the head of Nishikanta himself. When the Gods speak through him, it is through his beatific belly. Don't fancy that because you have to lower your eyes a little in looking at this belly, you can afford to look down on it. The poetry that comes from this particular paunch and knocks you out by a blow on your solar plexus is not only wonderful mysticism but a

Page 379

---

most original and powerful literary creation. In sheer quality if not yet in quantity and in organised universality it can bump with absolute right against the creation by that most famous of belly-bards who is also the world's greatest poetic dramatist, Shakespeare!

We have already compared Shakespeare's speech of the Life Force with Chaucer's of the subtle physical and, en passant, with Dryden's of the poetic intelligence, but not with the last-named at its best, nor with the best the poetic intelligence itself is capable of. A time was when Shakespeare himself was hailed as a mighty thinker, a paragon of the poetic intelligence, because again and again he starts reflecting on things: the quotable passages in his work, serving as appropriate "messages" for life's various occasions, impressed the critics with what came to be called Shakespeare's "myriad mind". And with extreme reverence he was spoken of not as a bard but as The Bard. Perhaps the one man who brought about a reversal of the common verdict on him as a thinker is that other celebrated name in the English theatre — G. Bernard Shaw.

Not that Shaw can stand anywhere near Shakespeare as a creator of character or as a maker of imaginative literature. I would call him more playwright than dramatist, thus distinguishing his versatile cleverness and effective constructiveness from Shakespeare kaleidoscopic vision and organic elan. But Shaw's plays and Shaw's personal criticism threw into clear relief Shakespeare's lack of intellectuality. Picking up the title "The Bard", he coined the contemptuous term "Bardolatry" to designate the blind worship accorded to Shakespeare. Of course, Shaw never denied that the Elizabethan dramatist was a lord of language and a creator of figures charged with overabundant vitality. But Shakespeare's deficiency in thought as such was hammered into Bardolaters by Shaw through a piece of jocular impudence. He said: "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his."

Instead of accepting some amount of truth in the statement while deprecating its cheekiness, Englishmen fell upon Shaw much more indignantly than they had done when he had flouted their conventional religious notions about God. They exclaimed: "This fellow was bad enough when he criticised Jehovah and his thunder

Page 380

---

and brimstone, but Blake and others had done similar things and in any case we can't exactly say that God is an Englishman. Nobody has uttered a cross word about Old Shakespeare, our English Shakespeare. This Irish heretic is going too far!"

We may smile at such a reaction as we may smile at Shaw's own exaggeration of Shakespeare's intellectual inferiority to him. But we must try to understand it no less than the provocative heresy. Shakespeare is both Godlike in his own self and Godlike in relation to the Englishman. Sri Aurobindo has remarked: "More than any other poet Shakespeare had accomplished the legendary feat of the impetuous sage Vishwamitra." You may recall that Vish-wamitra, in a fit of rage against Indra, created a rival universe. Well, the English dramatist has done something of the same sort. To quote Sri Aurobindo again: "His power of vision has created a Shakespearian world of his own." Not only that; this world is in a sense superior to the world which the Bible makes God create in seven days: it is, as Sri Aurobindo says, "a world of the wonder and free power of life and not of its mere external realities, where what is here dulled and hampered finds a greater enlarged play of beauty, curiosity and amplitude." Of course, this world of the wonder and power of life derives from the plane of the Life Force which no less than the material plane is the work of the Divine. But the average Englishman cannot be expected to look into the hierarchy of planes: to him the earth is the most concrete, almost the only, reality and Shakespeare seems to have made a more vibrant, more life-thrilled universe where even clowns have genius just as in the novels of Balzac even cooks have it. Shakespeare and Balzac are colossal creators — equal in so far as the putting forth of living beings in a complicated pattern of interrelations is concerned. But while every Frenchman, though excited about Balzac's creativity, does not feel entirely happy over this novelist's multifarious "Comedie Humaine", every Englishman is carried off his feet by Shakespeare's tragi-comic-melodramatic pageant of humanity. And there is a sound reason for it.

The typical Frenchman is a blend of warm sentiment and cool intellect: a clear-seeing, accurately organising idea-force is an important part of the Frenchman's nature side by side with emotional enthusiasm and aesthetic feeling. So Balzac does not answer the whole or even the central need of the Frenchman's being. The typical Englishman in the matter of coolness is not guided by

Page 381

---

intellect but by a commonsense hold on solid earth: his extravert disposition gives him a kind of balance. In the matter of warmth, what leads him is not so much the heart's sentiment as some dynamic expansive life-instinct. And as the characteristic of instinct is to be at the same time forceful and practical, swift-flashing and concretely effective, it stands in very good relation to the extravert disposition, and even naturally produces it out of itself, so that we may consider the life-instinct the central thing in the Englishman. You must have recognised in the two elements the face of Chaucer and the face of Shakespeare and realised that Shakespeare can take up Chaucer into himself and serve as the one sufficient face. The life-instinct can even lose itself in externalities as it does often enough in much of Elizabethan drama outside Shakespeare. Shakespeare keeps the extravert disposition in its right place and sits in the life-core to create. He is the Englishman in the finest essence and because it is he who makes the Englishman's essence the Englishman has always the potentiality of a supreme poetry behind the rather stolid appearance of John Bull. But on the average it is not the poetic potentiality that distinguishes the Shakespearian Englishman: it is the sovereign life-instinct. This sovereign life-instinct has helped him to create the greatest empire the world has known and to be a success in various spheres of activity not by a planned methodical manoeuvre but by a subtle energetic tact of things and of movements — a masterful muddling-through which produces, to the producer's own surprise, admirable structures by an almost magically thoughtless sweeping together of a multitude of striking separate parts: in short, as Shakespeare himself seems to build up his dramas. So Shakespeare answers almost the whole, at least the central, need of the Englishman's being, and any attack on him is tantamount to an attack on Englishness itself, and on Englishness too as seen in its aspect of Godhead.

Naturally, Shaw's "debunking" of the Bard was much resented, and there is indeed a touch of wrong-headedness in the importance Shaw attached to what he called the realistic and intellectual drama, the drama of social problems and their discussion. Ibsen and Strindberg were to Shaw more momentous dramatists than Shakespare because they challenged conventional values and dealt with situations that could occur in contemporary life, whereas Shakespeare was a romanticist. The drama of ideas applied to

Page 382

---

problems of society was Shaw's ideal, and he exemplified in his own long string of plays what exactly he meant by it, plays in which every character — be it man, woman or child — is G.B.S. himself talking brainily in various voices. Extremely stimulating these plays are, for the brain finding tongue in them is an extremely brilliant one. But they have neither the imaginative adventurous-ness nor the verbal splendour nor the bursting vitality of the Shakespearian drama. A good deal of Shaw's braininess is rather cocky, too self-confident, as if he alone knew what was wrong with the world. There is also a fine and acute humbug-proof element in his cleverness, and this is excellent and salubrious, but the other thing — the "sab-janta" ("all-knowing") attitude — is somewhat jading. The Bardolaters would be pleased to hear of a little passage of arms between Shaw's cockiness and his own wife's quiet irony. Once he was holding forth to a company of friends on the comparative merits of man's mind and woman's. The argument had arisen from a remark of his wife's. At the end of a coruscating monologue Shaw said that male judgment was always superior to female judgment. "Of course," Mrs Shaw coolly replied, "after all, you married me and I you." It was the one time the old battering-ram was silenced. As Shakespeare's Hamlet would have put it: the engineer was hoist with his own petard.

It is doubtful whether Ibsen and Strindberg will last as long as Shakespeare: it is certain that Shakespeare will outlast Shaw. But Shaw is perfectly correct in thinking himself superior to Shakespeare in intellectuality. And this is not because Shakespeare is a poet and intellectuality has no place in poetry. The point is whether he has an intellectuality to leave out of his poetry. Men with intellects can be intense poets if they know how to put into their poems not their intellectuality but the passion of thought that often goes with it. Lucretius and Dante were such men, Milton also in his own manner. Shelley was another. Wordsworth too. In them thought was passionate, in Shakespeare passion was thinking. He seems time and gain to set up fireworks of ideas, but actually we have ideas thrown up by a seethe of sensation and emotion, the Life Force surging heaven-high and catching on its crests the light of the sky of mind. Sri Aurobindo well observes: "While he has given a wonderful language to poetic thought, he yet does not think for the sake of thought, but for the sake of life; his way indeed is not so much the poet himself thinking about life,

Page 383

---

as life thinking itself out in him through many mouths, in many moods and moments, with a rich throng of fine thought-effects, but not for any clear sum of intellectual vision or to any high power of either ideal or spiritual result." Even when there is ostensibly a judgment on life such as a reflective intellect might pass, it is not really a product of the thinking mind at work in its own right: it is really a throw-forth from the passionate being. Sri Aurobindo has instanced that "thought" which we have already cited from Macbeth. He picks out its most pronounced ideative phrases:

Life's but a walking shadow;...

...it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Then he sets it beside Shelley's voicing of a kindred idea of transience:

Heaven's light for ever shines, Earth's shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments...

Sri Aurobindo's comment is: "The one has the colour of an intuition of the life-soul in one of its intense moods and we not only think the thought but seem to feel it even in our nerves of mental sensation, the other is the thought-mind itself uttering in a moved, inspired and illuminative language an idea of the pure intelligence."

You may say that Macbeth is a character of storm and stress and is not meant by Shakespeare to be philosophic. Well, let us turn to Hamlet. Here surely Shakespeare tries to mirror the intellect. Hamlet is his closest vision of the thinking mind. Critics have declared that the whole tragedy of Hamlet's irresolution comes of his thinking too much. I do not deny that Hamlet thinks in a manner and to a degree that no other character in Shakespeare does: he thinks puissantly, curiously, multifariously, yet always through the Life Force. To realise the dissimilarity of note in the very stuff of the utterance we have only to compare Hamlet's

Page 384

---

Who would fardels bear

To grunt and sweat under a weary life?

with Worthworth's

The heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world.

Worthsworth is speaking, as it were, from the grey cells: they are changing the urgencies of an oppressed existence to philosophic values. Shakespeare is speaking from his guts: they stir the brain only to render coherent the being's instinctive shout of recoil and rebellion. Again, Hamlet talks of passing away from the turmoil of life:

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil...

A quiver of the entrails is felt in the midst of the idea. How different is the accent of Keats talking of dying away with the nightingale's song a final music falling on deaf ears:

To thy high requiem become a sod.

Once more take Hamlet on release from the obstructive tangibilities of earth-existence by a dissolution of the body:

O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Respond now to Shelley's utterance of the thought of reaching safety from life's ravage:

From the world's bitter wind

Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.

Perhaps we can mark the most sustained distinction between the creative Life Force and the creative Intelligence in their intensities of reflection if we first tune in to two soliloquies from Shakespeare and then get the wave-length of a passage from Milton. Hamlet's most celebrated speech, out of which we have already detached that verse about "this mortal coil", contains the lines:

Page 385

---

To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There's the respect, That makes calamity of so long life... The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of! Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought...

A vivid speech on death and after-life occurs also in another play: a character named Claudio is speaking:

Ay, but to die and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrillling region of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendant world.

Keep the typical turns and vibrations of these two speeches in your mind and appreciate their difference from those in the oration of Belial, one of Satan's followers, in Paradise Lost:

Our final hope

Is flat despair; we must exasperate

The Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,

And that must end us; that must be our cure,

To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose,

Though full of pain, this intellectual being,

Those thoughts that wander through eternity,

To perish rather, swallowed up and lost

Page 386

---

In the wide womb of uncreated Night,

Devoid of sense and motion?

2

Apropos of Shakespeare's repeated victorious seizure of the intuitive word with the leap of the elan vital in a vast variety of moods and situations, we may touch on a problem that has long vexed his scholars: "Was Shakespeare the real author of the dramas that now pass under his name?" I believe that the solution can be found if we keep steadily our sense of this elan vital that is the creator of those dramas.

Let me sketch to you the problem in general terms and introduce the most notable name put up as a rival. We are told: "Shakespeare was comparatively an uneducated man. He had little Latin, less Greek and not much schooling even in his own language. He was also a man who never travelled abroad. At home he had no special occasion to be familiar with the higher circles of society. How then are we to explain not only the quality of supreme literature in his dramas but also their teeming versatile learning? When we look around in the Elizabethan world there is just the man there who has a very powerful expressive genius, a consummate education and scholarship, a familiarity with all kinds of superior vocations: Francis Bacon. He is the author of Essays, The Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum and several other works. He was Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, parliamentarian and statesman, Lord Chancellor in Elizabeth's Government. If Shakespeare the man as we know him is unlikely to be the author of such dramas as are before us, nobody can be a better claimant to their authorship than this outstanding literary figure of the times."

Against this argument we have only to drag Bernard Shaw in. Not that Shaw has written on behalf of Shakespeare as the author of the dramas. But Shaw in his own way is precisely what Shakespeare could have been. Shaw has himself said that he had no proper school-education, leave aside a university degree. In fact, when he was once invited to lecture at Oxford he said that the best suggestion he could make was the total demolition of the University and the use of the building-stones for a better purpose. Without academic training Shaw has shone out in the field of

Page 387

---

letters. Furthermore, he has not only written plays which are the delight of all acute minds: he has expressed himself scintillatingly as well as learnedly on an abundance of subjects. Playwright, dramatic critic, judge of the fine arts, authority on Socialism: all these roles he has filled with credit. He has also shown keen insight into the medical psychology, assimilated with a fine force biological science into his world-message, and even discoursed in a most competent vein on Education itself. Why should we refuse to Shakespeare a possibility that Shaw has proved under our very noses? We know that Shakespeare had long experience of stage-life, and this could easily put him into contact with fellow-craftsmen acquainted with Classical tags and themes. The same stage-life could also make him rub shoulders with money-grubbers and their calculating clerks who were haunting theatre-land: from traffic with this group he could pick up all sorts of legal points and write knowingly about them. In addition, he was an Elizabethan in the heart of London where the very air was astir with thoughts of colonial adventure, where all eyes were coloured by the constant processions of picturesque heroes and glittering courtiers, where every head was humming with diplomatic questions raised by unsettled thrones and touch-and-go balances of power in a Europe torn between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, well-established Spain and ambitious England. There was every opportunity for him to get an understanding of military science and court-life and political practice. Given an all-absorbing curiosity and an extraordinary genius, both of which any man could be born with if the Gods are kind to him, Shakespeare could undoubtedly develop into what the dramas prove their author to be. There is absolutely no inherent impossibility in his penning them.

On the other hand, there are three strong points against Bacon. He is well known to have felt extremely apprehensive about the lasting value of English: he wished all his works to be written in Latin. How then could he have spent years creating masterpieces in a tongue he underrated and even half-despised? A more decisive and perhaps the strongest point is the difference of psychological make-up and of style-vibration. Shakespeare is, as we have seen, termed myriad-minded: he wrote like a book-worm, a lawyer, a commander-in-chief, a courtier, a politician: he wrote, it is said, even as if he were a woman! But the one thing he could not do was to introduce into his work the genuine philosophical ac-

Page 388

---

cent. Vital gusto and ingenuity are his characteristic, while, if Bacon was anything, he was an intellectual. Shakespeare put into his dramas all that he was or knew: why is the typical Baconian note utterly absent, the note of intellectual contemplation, the note of philosophico-scientific thinking? Surely, a writer creates out of himself: how is it that Bacon in writing Shakespeare left his own essential nature out? Some pressure of the truly detaching intellect or of the search for a world-view through the eyes of the inspired reason should inevitably have got into the dramas. The absence of such pressure rules out Bacon completely.

The third and final argument is related to the second and it is phrased by Sri Aurobindo himself. "There is," he begins, "often more thought in a short essay of Bacon's than in a whole play of Shakespeare's." Then, referring to a poem that is known to have been composed by Bacon, Sri Aurobindo remarks: "As he showed when he tried to write poetry, the very nature of his thought-power and the characteristic way of expression of the born philosophical thinker hampered him in poetic expression." The clear indication from the one poem admittedly from Bacon's pen is, according to Sri Aurobindo, conclusive evidence against his authorship of the dramas. As Sri Aurobindo is so very positive, let us glance at Bacon's un-Shakespearian perpetration in verse:

LIFE

The World's a bubble, and the Life of Man

Less than a span:

In his conception wretched, from the womb

So to the tomb;

Curst from the cradle, and brought up to years

With cares and fears.

Who then to frail mortality shall trust,

But limns the water, or but writes in dust.

Yet since with sorrow here we live opprest,

What life is best?

Courts are but only superficial schools

To dandle fools:

The rural parts are turn'd into a den

Of savage men:

Page 389

---

And where's a city from all vice so free,

But may be term'd the worst of all the three?

Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed,

Or pains his head:

Those that live single, take it for a curse,

Or do things worse:

Some would have children: those that have them moan

Or wish them gone:

What is it, then, to have, or have no wife,

But single thraldom, or a double strife?

Our own affections still at home to please

Is a disease:

To cross the sea to any foreign soil,

Perils and toil:

Wars with their noise affright us; when they cease

We are worse in peace:

What then remains, but that we still should cry

Not to be born, or, being born, to die?

The last two lines of stanza 1 have a somewhat imaginative turn, and the closing couplet of the final stanza has some power, but the whole of its second line is virtually borrowed from a famous passage of Sophocles and cannot be credited to Bacon. In the rest we have two phrases of a slight felicity: "Curst from the cradle" and "To dandle fools." In a couple of places there is a weak wit. All else is coinage of the reflective prose-mind, a sort of poor anticipation of eighteenth-century semi-didactic verse. Not a trace of the vivida vis that breathes in any pronouncement on life and death we may pick out from the Shakespearian corpus.

Sri Aurobindo, in drawing his conclusion against Bacon, says that not even a hundred cryptograms could counterweigh it. This brings us to a species of argument that some Baconians have indulged in to the bewilderment of most readers. They have traced in the works of Shakespeare various hidden messages, several declarations of Bacon's authorship put in the form of ciphers. One cryptogram proved this authorship perfectly — except that by ill luck it did so in nineteenth-century English! Recently a book by two professional cryptologists, William and Elizabeth Friedman,

Page 390

---

went into a thorough examination of all the claimed ciphers and cryptograms and proved them spurious. Reading the reviews of this book I wondered if one particular cyptogram had been commented upon. At least no reviewer specifically alluded to it. It is the shortest of all and is evolved directly from a word occurring in Shakespeare. The word is "honorificabilitudinitatibus."

In Love's Labour's Lost, Act V, Scene 1, you will find this verbal whale. In the Oxford edition it is in line 45. It is the semi-jocular form of a word which actually exists in English, though it is archaic now: honorificabilitudinity. (The accent is on "-di-".) It means "honourableness". The semi-jocular form comes from the ablative plural of the Latin original of the English term. It occurs not only in Shakespeare but in another Elizabethan dramatist: Nashe. By the way, among monosyllabic words in English, the longest are: "strength" and "straight". Both have eight letters. Among polysyllabic words, the longest is "honorificabilitudinity" — twenty-two letters. The form used by Shakespeare has been pounced upon by the Baconians and they have juggled out of its twenty-seven letters a variety of Latin sentences, the most plausible of which is: "Hi ludi orbi tuiti F. Baconis nati." The sentence translates: "These plays preserved for the world (are) born of F. Bacon." The Shakespearians are expected to be impressed into dumbfounded defeat.

Unfortunately, they are not so easily cowed down. They may well ask: "What about the word's occurrence in Nashe? Should we make Bacon the author of all of Nashe's plays?" I suppose the Baconians would gnash their teeth on hearing this impertinent query. But there is more unpleasantness in store for them. The Latin form "Baconis" is the genitive case of "Baco". Now it is an extremely inconvenient fact that Bacon never wrote his name in Latin as "Baco": he always wrote "Baconus", whose genitive form would be "Baconi". So there will be an s going a-begging in the interpretation offered us.

All cryptograms are reeds to lean upon: they are bound to break in some part or other. But they make a fascinating game. I myself am tempted to set before you a cryptogram I have traced in Shakespeare. It definitely shows that those great dramas could never have been written by Shakespeare for the simple reason that they do not belong to the time of Elizabeth. So Bacon too is put out of court. My cryptogram confers an unsolicited honorifica-

Page 391

---

bilitudinitatibus on a writer who would have protested vehemently against it.

I shall pick out a small set of plays and arrange their titles under each other according to a coherent plan. An arbitrary hotchpotch cannot be called a cryptogram in any sense. I'll start with four titles and follow up with half that number. In the first four consisting of a couple of tragedies and a couple of comedies, their fourth letters will count as significant. In the last two, comprising a single tragedy and a single comedy, the second letters, will be taken as meaningful. I'll write the whole list on the blackboard with the important letters standing out from the rest. Read off all that falls in vertical line with the big letter of the first title:

KING LEAR MACBETH

MEASURE FOR MEASURE MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

HAMLET

TWELFTH NIGHT

Isn't the result a bit of an eye-opener? So cryptograms can prove anything. And to this over-ingenious sample, even more than to any other, the most appropriate response from us should be the dismissive interjection: "Pshaw!"

Page 392

---