Bacon is Shake-Speare | Page 7

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, and done with express object and purpose."
"Anyhow, it is pretty safe to say that if a Referendum of the trade was
taken on the question whether the two illustrations shown above
represent the foreparts of the same garments, the polling would give an
unanimous vote in the negative."
"It is outside the province of a trade journal to dogmatise on such a
subject; but when such a glaring incongruity as these illustrations show
is brought into court, it is only natural that the tailor should have
something to say; or, at any rate, to think about."
This one simple fact which can neither be disputed nor explained away,
viz., that the "Figure" put upon the title-page of the First Folio of the
Plays in 1623 to represent Shakespeare, is a doubly left-armed and

stuffed dummy, surmounted by a ridiculous putty-faced mask, disposes
once and for all of any idea that the mighty Plays were written by the
illiterate clown of Stratford-upon-Avon.
"He hath hit his face"
It is thought that hit means hid as in Chaucer's Squiere's Tale, line 512
etc.
"Right as a serpent hit him under floures Til he may seen his tyme for
to byte"
If indeed "hit" be intended to be read as "hid" then these ten lines are
no longer the cryptic puzzle which they have hitherto been considered
to be, but in conjunction with the portrait, they clearly reveal the true
facts, that the real author is writing left-handedly, that means secretly,
in shadow, with his face hidden behind a mask or pseudonym.
We should also notice "out-doo" is spelled with a hyphen. In the
language of to-day and still more in that of the time of Shakespeare all,
or nearly all, words beginning with out may be read reversed, out-bar is
bar out, out-bud is bud out, out-crop is crop out, out-fit is fit out, and so
on through the alphabet.
If therefore we may read "out-doo the