Education: Scrambled Ciphers & Bacon

Besides the many scholars and crackpots who have used historical clues to show that someone else—usually Sir Francis Bacon—must have written Shakespeare’s plays, scores have turned to cryptology to prove that the Bard’s words were in a kind of cipher that concealed messages from their true author. Last week, in a new book called The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (Cambridge University; $5), U.S. Cryptologists William and Elizebeth Friedman gave evidence that should discredit these investigators once and for all. The Friedmans’ credentials are impressive: William led the team that broke the Japanese “purple” code a few months before Pearl Harbor (TIME, May 14, 1956).

Inner History. The first major cipher controversy began in the 1880s, when Minnesota Politician Ignatius Donnelly happened to pick up one of his children’s copies of Routledge’s Every Boy’s Annual. There he found a description of an intricate cipher invented by Sir Francis Bacon. Already convinced that Bacon was Shakespeare, Donnelly set out to prove that Sir Francis used this cipher in writing the plays. Through an elaborate series of manipulations involving key page numbers, word counts and “root numbers,” Donnelly finally “deciphered” such statements as “Seas ill (Cecil) said that More low (Marlowe) or Shak’st spurre (Shakespeare) never writ a word of them,” convinced himself that Bacon had written the plays to conceal “the inner history of his times, in cipher.” But no sooner had Donnelly published his theory than another scholar used his methods to produce the message: “Master Will I Am Shak’st spurre writ the play.”

For some other Baconians, Shakespeare’s epitaph was the source of all sorts of speculation. Using Bacon’s cipher, one man translated the inscription to read SAEHR/BAYEEP/RFTAXA/RAWAR, crossed out the letters S-H-A-X-P-E-A-R-E, and by rearranging the remaining letters got FRA BAWRT EAR AY (i.e., “Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays”). Another investigator made each capital in the inscription stand for one, and, after counting the number of letters between them, produced: 1,3,1,7,4,4,8,1,3,6,3,1,4,1, 3,3,1,1,6,4,2,2,6,3,1,1,5,1,9,1,1,2,7,1,4, By making one stand for the most frequently used letter E, and two stand for A, etc.—and then by cheating just a bit—he got the words: Elesennrela Ledelleemn Aam-leetedeeasen. After some more hocuspocus, he changed this to read: Elesennre Laede Wedge Eere Aamleet Edeeasen—which he was sure meant “Elsinore laid wedge first Hamlet edition.”

A Detroit physician named Orville Owen went so overboard on his own cipher theory that he declared Bacon was not only Shakespeare but also such authors as Marlowe, Edmund Spenser and Robert Burton. Another Baconian found his inspiration in the fact that both Bacon and Shakespeare used the word honorificabili-tudinitatibus. He divided the word into two parts, spelled the first backward (BACIFIRONOH), declared this to be an anagram for FR BACONO. From the rest of the letters, he got HI LUDI TUITI NATI SIBI, which taken all together spelled “These Plays, produced by Francis Bacon, guarded for themselves.”

33 & 46. In 1938 Economist Wallace Cunningham, who entertained the notion that the plays had been written by a group of Rosicrucians and Freemasons, including Bacon, sent a book to Doubleday, Doran purporting to prove that the plays contained hidden stories (e.g., “The Asse Will Shakespeare . . . beares sland’rous tales to Hatton”). Doubleday sent the book to Cryptologist Friedman, who used Cunningham’s own “Masonic Code” to get the message: “Dear Reader, Theodore Roosevelt is the true author of this play, but I, Bacon, stole it from him.”

Meanwhile, the onetime president of England’s Bacon Society, Frank Woodward, tried to prove his case through numerology. Assuming that A equals one and B equals two, etc., he added BACON up to 33, found it “very significant” that in one passage of Part I of Henry IV in the First Folio, the name Francis appears 33 times. Another numerologist noted that SHAKESPEAR has four vowels and six consonants. He then turned to the 46th Psalm, declared that the 46th word from the beginning was SHAKE and the 46th from the end was SPEAR. His conclusion, according to the Friedmans: “Since Shakespeare wrote the Psalms, and Shakespeare was not the real Shakespeare, the Authorized Version must show the hidden hand of Francis Bacon.”

In dealing with these various theories, the Friedmans more than once use the methods set forth to prove that William Friedman himself wrote the plays (e.g., in attacking one favorite numerological theory, they show that WM. FRIEDMAN and FRANCIS BACON both equal 100). Through a meticulous study of Elizabethan printing methods, combined with a whole series of highly technical cryptological checks, they also demolish the theories of the late Elizabeth Gallup, who in the ’20s and ’30s attracted a large following among Baconians. So far as cryptology is concerned, conclude the Friedmans sternly, Shakespeare is still Shakespeare. “We suggest that those who wish to dispute the authorship of his plays should not in future resort to cryptographic evidence, unless they show themselves in some way competent to do so.”