Bacon's Signature Ciphers in Shakespeare -57- This Figure

-57-

24)  This seems a good point to bring in the very first page of the First Folio. This is the one beginning “To the Reader” and signed B.I. The authors of Secret Shakespearean Seals found the letter count of this passage to equal 287.

One challenge might be that the count inconsistently counts a ‘w’ as either one letter or as two letters consisting of two ‘v’s. But in this enlarged passage, the two v’s in the 9^th line are clearly separated with gaps while the other w’s show no such gap. So the letter count is accurate. Then the word “Figure”, referring ostensibly to the accompanying drawing of the author Shakespeare, is prominent. Peter Dawkins, in his book “The Shakespeare Enigma” pointed out that this word ‘Figure’ happens to be the 67^th word counting from the end of the passage, beginning with the word ‘Booke’, the hyphenated ‘out-doo’ in this instance counting as one word. If a fixed rule on hyphenation was made one way or the other then still a highly unlikely result is obtained, either in this instance or with the long word as the 151^st word on Folio page 136 as discussed earlier which involved a count of 287. Then considering only the non-indented lines, the word ‘Figure’ becomes the 33^rd word from the end, beginning with the word ‘looke’. Thus we see encoded the name of ‘Francis Bacon’ as “This Figure”. This being the first page in the First Folio with the word Figure associated with both numbers 33 and 67 along with the letter count for the significant number 287 also associated with Bacon would all seem to be part of the cipher key for decoding his authorship. Note also that the word ‘hit’ in “hit His face” could also be read as ‘hid’ just as the word Herald is spelt ‘Herault’ on page 106, col 2, of Much Ado about Nothing.

Note we've had a couple variations already relating to this theme of a 'hidden' face:
"His face I know not" P. 38
"Who saw Cesario?" P. 44