This explanation of the real meaning to be derived from the long word
honorificabilitudinitatibus seems to be so convincing as scarcely to
require further proof. But the Author of the plays intended when the
time had fully come for him to claim his own that there should not be
any possibility of cavil or doubt. He therefore so arranged the plays
and the acts of the plays in the folio of 1623 that the long word should
appear upon the 136th page, be the 151st word thereon, should fall on
the 27th line and that the interpretation should indicate the numbers
136 and 151, thus forming a mechanical proof so positive that it can
neither be misconstrued nor explained away, a mechanical proof that
provides an evidence which absolutely compels belief.
The writer desires especially to bring home to the reader the manifest
fact that the revealed and revealing sentence must have been constructed
before the play of "Loues Labor's lost" first appeared in 1598, and that
when the plays were printed in their present form in the 1623 folio the
scenes and the acts of the preceding plays and the printing of the
columns in all those plays as well as in the play of "Loues Labour's
lost" required to be arranged with extraordinary skill in order that the
revealing page in the 1623 folio should commence with the first word of
the revealing page in the original quarto of 1598, and that that page
should form the 136th page of the folio, so that the long word
"Honorificabilitudinitatibus" should appear on page 136, be the 151st
word, and fall upon the 27th line.
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