Bacon's Signature Ciphers in Shakespeare -64- Draw the Curtain

-64-

Fun with Baconian Ciphers

Part 11

30)  The next example again comes from the play Twelfth Night.  Again, outside of the text, is the same page 259 we were just looking at, with the Kay value for “Shakespeare”. In the first column, beginning on the lower half of the page, we have a scene where the character Olivia, with face hidden behind a curtain, talking with Viola who wants to see her as she delivers a message. The dialogue is:

Vio.  Good Madam, let me see your face.

Ol.   Have you any Commission from your Lord, to
negotiate with my face : you are now out of your Text :
but we will draw the Curtain, and shew you the picture.
Looke you sir, such a one I was this present : Ist not well done?
Vio.  Excellently done, if God did all.

http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/sceti/printedbooksNew/index.cfm?TextID=firstfolio&PagePosition=277

Portraits at this time were left behind curtains and so Olivia is literally about to reveal her portrait. But it isn’t clear where to look for “your face” if there is a hidden bard about that would justify the page number coincidence. But in the line directly across (similar to the Tempest acrostic that used adjoining columns and also like the “Anthony Bacon” and “lord Bacon” candidates) and contiguous to the line “But we will draw the Curtain, and shew you the picture” we have a line with a count of 33. This line is “Even so quickly may one catch the plague?” 

This can then be interpreted from the hidden figure/cipher point of view as - Bacon’s is the hidden face. Other than its letter count the line itself isn’t meaningful in our searches, but the text following it is more suggestive:

“Me thinks I feele this youths perfections

With an invisible, and subtle stealth
To creepe in at mine eyes. Well, let it be.”