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n Delia Bacon may have been amongst the first to doubtnthat Shakespeare wrote the plays and that Francis Bacon may have beennresponsible for their authorship instead, but amongst the first to look fornevidence of that authorship within the plays themselves was Dr Orville WardnOwen. Dr Owen devised a ‘cipher wheel’ to assist his researches, on which henmounted pages from Shakespeare, together with other pages from the works ofnBacon, Marlowe, Burton, Greene and other Elizabethan authors. Then he set aboutnlooking for ‘key words’ and making associations in the surrounding text.
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| Francis Bacon – De Augmentis – 1624 |
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nOwennclaimed to have found evidence that Queen Elizabeth I had secretly marriednRobert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and that she had given birth to two children.nThe first was secretly fostered by Sir Nicholas and Lady Anne Bacon, and wasnraised as their own son, Francis. The second child was Robert Devereux, 2ndnEarl of Essex (later executed for treason by his own mother). By this account,nSir Francis Bacon was the rightful heir to the throne of England and so shouldnhave been made King after Elizabeth’s death. In later life, Bacon became awarenof his secret inheritance and hid a record of it in his own works and in thosenof other writers; it was this record that Owen claimed to have discovered.
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nSuchna claim was received with incredulity, unsurprisingly, and Owen’s work wasnheavily criticised after its publication. His reliance on advantageousnselectivity, his changes to the quotations he used and his dubious translationsnand alterations were all noted and his theories were largely discredited. Owenndied in virtual penury, regretting the time, money and health he had sacrificednon his ill-conceived ideas. But that didn’t stop others following his examplenand coming up with theories of their own.
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| Mrs Elizabeth Wells Gallup |
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nMrs Elizabeth Wells Gallup integratednOwen’s claims of Bacon’s parentage with her own theory that Bacon had encodednhis messages in the text of the works of Elizabethan writers. She took Bacon’snown method of the bi-literal cipher and began to look for instances of its usenin, for example, the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays. She looked at thenfonts used in the texts and identified a font-a and a font-b, divided the wordsninto blocks of five letters and according to whether the font-a or font-b had beennused she decoded each of the letters according to the alphabet set out innBacon’s own explanation of the bi-literal cipher.
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| Mrs E W Gallup – The Bi-Literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon |
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nMrs Gallup’s method soonnbegan to yield results and she discovered messages encoded not only innShakespeare but also in Bacon’s own works, Edmund Spenser’s poetry, ChristophernMarlowe’s plays, Burton’s prose and other Elizabethan writers. She confirmednwhat Owen had claimed to find – that Bacon had really been the child ofnElizabeth and Leicester, brother of Essex, and the true King of England. Here,nfor instance, is what she said was encoded in Spenser’s Complaints ofn1590-91,
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n“Our name is Fr. Bacon, by adoption, yet it shall be different.nBeing of blood roial, (for the Queene, our sov’raigne, who maried by a privatenrite the Earle Leicester – and at a subsequent time, also, as to make surernthereby without pompe but i’ th’ presence o’ a suitable number of witnesses,nbound herselfe by those hymeneall bands againe – is our mother, and wee werennot base-born or base begot) we be Tudor, and our stile shall be Francis First,nin all proper cours of time, th’- king of our realme.”n
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| Lower case Font-a and Font-b found by Gallup |
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nWhich is prettynunequivocal enough. Gallup uncovered all manner of ‘secrets’ from thenElizabethan court, the deeds and characters of Elizabeth, Leicester and Essex,nthe Essex rebellion and his execution, Bacon’s love for Marguerite of Navarrenand his plans to marry her after her divorce from the future Henry IV ofnFrance, and a number of poems and prayers. Her discoveries began to attractnothers, who added discoveries of their own.
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| Bacon – De Augmentum – The Spartan message mid-way down the page |
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nFor example, Henry Seymour lookednat the Spartan message that Bacon had used as an example in his explanation ofnthe bi-literal cipher in his De Augmentis (the one I mentionednyesterday, that begins with the word ‘Perditae’). Seymour claimed thatnif deciphered, the letters ‘EPKIEAALLSKWSAEHMI’ are revealed, and these lettersnare an anagram of ‘WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’.
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| Henry Seymour – A Cipher within a Cipher – 1896 |
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nIt seemed that Mrs Gallup had foundedna cottage industry, with further books supporting the theory appearing from MrsnHenry Potts and Mrs Gertrude Fiske. Other writers also claimed to have foundnmessages hidden by Bacon, recovered by a variety of methods of cryptography butnthere was only one problem.
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| Font-a and Font-b as found by Gallup |
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nThe messages weren’t really there. Further analysisnby modern cryptographers and code-breakers has found faults in the methodsnemployed by Gallup and the rest. Research into the methods used by Elizabethannand Jacobean printers and type-setters has shown that it was common practice atnthe time to use a variety of mixed fonts, which results in the appearance of antext that looks like it might contain a coded message, but that is exactly thenproblem.
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nIt looks like it might contain a message and when somebodynstarts to look for a hidden message, they will usually find one,neventually. It is all as much wishful thinking as that which inspires people tonseek satanic messages that can be heard if certain rock songs are playednbackwards, structures on the surface of Mars or ley-lines scattered across thenEnglish countryside.
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