Francis Bacon's Signatures
In the Shakespeare Plays (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Francis Bacon's Signatures: In the Shakespeare Plays<br><br>The object with which the following pages are written is to endeavour to gain help in verifying and elucidating certain anagrams, and the records which seem to be afforded by their means, at the end of each of the Shakespeare plays in the folio of 1623.<br><br>Learned men seem to be deterred from pursuing this investigation by a notion that the whole thing is vain and purposeless. They think it inconceivable that the Sage of Verulam, or his friends, should have wasted time and money in contriving and printing mere puzzles, containing information known to those who had the key to such ciphers, and therefore, to the initiated, useless; but information, inscrutable to the uninitiated, and therefore to them also useless.<br><br>Such arguments, though plausible, ignore the point upon which the whole question of ciphers turns. The very idea of secret writing includes, and draws after it, the idea of writers and readers, as well as printers of that secret writing. This idea involves a theory or belief in the existence of a secret society, and it will readily be believed that a great expense of time, money, and trouble would not have been incurred, excepting on behalf of a very large number of initiated readers, members of a fraternity bound to hand down the knowledge and traditions (perhaps verbally) received.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.