Essay Online

Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare? Many people doubt that, for various reasons&ndashthe most obvious one being that a barely literate actor from the sleepy village of Stratford-on-Avon could not possibly have written with such accuracy and familiarity the many scenes in the plays that invoke the classics or the pomp of nobility and royal courts. Furthermore, no manuscripts by Shakespeare were ever found, and only six Shakespeare signatures are known to exist. The signatures all look different and give the impression they were written by a man who was not used to holding a pen. Some speculate that others’ hands may have guided his own as he wrote them.

If someone other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems published under his name, who was it? And did this secret author insert clues as to his real identity in his works? These are two separate questions, and one does not necessarily imply the other. Various bright Elizabethans have been championed as the true author simply based on their literary abilities, their fitting educational and social background, and plausible motives for wanting to conceal their authorship&ndashamong them Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford; Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland; William Stanley, Earl of Derby; and Sir Francis Bacon.

In the last few centuries, quite a few people in the old and the new world alike have undertaken the search for hidden messages in Shakespeare’s works that would prove such authorship. Anagrams, acrostics, word ciphers, string ciphers, letter ciphers, they’ve all been found. But are they all for real?

Anyone interested in the various ciphers said to have been found in Shakespeare’s works should read The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined by William and Elizebeth Friedman. This thoroughly researched book from 1957 is out of print but copies can be found in libraries or on the Internet. Mr. Friedman, a professional cryptologist who helped decode the tantalizing Enigma ciphers employed by the Nazis during World War II, has been called one of America’s foremost cryptographers.

The Friedmans investigated dozens of ciphers allegedly discovered in the works of Shakespeare and analyzed them according to professional criteria of what constitutes a valid cipher. It’s fair to say that in the process, little of the various cipher claims was left standing. One of the better-known efforts they showed to be unsound was that by Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly, an attorney and politician, published The Great Cryptogram in the late 1880s. He revealed an elaborate and very impressive mathematical system of “root numbers,” “multipliers” and “modifiers” that produced messages such as “…that More low [Marlowe] or Shak’st spur [Shakespeare] never writ a word of them.” The numerical sequence to identify the word “More” on that particular given page ran like this: [root number] 516-16=349-22b&h=327-254=73-15b&h=58. 448-58=390+1=391.

However impressive Donnelly’s mathematical sequences, some who tried to reproduce his efforts came up with startling results. The Friedmans cite a Rev. A. Nicholson who took the same text passages that Donnelly started from and, beginning with the same root number and employing the same intricate method, came up with a message of his own: “Master Will I am [William] Shak’st spurre [Shakespeare] writ the play and was engaged at the Curtain.” Thus, the subjective nature of the system rendered it invalid.

The Friedmans dedicate a large portion of their book to the bi-literal cipher discovered by Mrs. Elizabeth Gallup Wells, who believed that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. This part of the book is especially fascinating because the Friedmans themselves worked for Mrs. Gallup for several years. Once Mrs. Gallup’s decoding work gained notoriety, she attracted a benefactor, Colonel Fabian, who then employed a large research staff working on decoding the various texts. Elizebeth Friedman joined the team in 1915, William followed in 1916. They remained with her almost uninterruptedly until 1920.

Mrs. Gallup started out on solid ground, since she worked with the bi-literal cipher invented by Francis Bacon himself. Bacon published this cipher in October of 1623, just a month before the First Folio of Shakespeare’s complete works appeared. The bi-literal cipher is based on mixing two type fonts that are different enough to be distinguishable yet not too different to draw general attention. The First Folio is set in a curious mixture of italics and roman type styles, which quite naturally led to the suspicion that it may be hiding Bacon’s bi-literal cipher.

Mrs. Gallup believed, somewhat arbitrarily, that the cipher was embedded in the italic words in the plays, and deciphered lengthy passages that revealed Bacon’s authorship as well as his hidden life story. Once the Friedmans became involved in this work, they gradually came to the realization that Mrs. Gallup was the only one at the research center who could distinguish between the two fonts and produce meaningful messages. Everyone else invariably failed. Furthermore, Mrs. Gallup herself was unable to reproduce passages she had previously deciphered without considerable deviations. She also frequently omitted or added letters to make the cipher work. An FBI expert consulted by the Friedmans in the 1950s proved that there was much variation between individual italic letters in the Folio and that there were no characteristics that supported the strict classification into two fonts.

Since Mrs. Gallup’s work could not be reproduced independently by other decipherers, the Friedmans concluded that although Bacon’s bi-lateral cipher itself is a sound cipher, Gallup’s work was biased and unacceptable. That is not to say there couldn’t be a bi-literal cipher hidden in Shakespeare’s works; it only means that if there is one, it hasn’t been found yet.

References

Bacon, Francis &ndashDe Augmentis Scientiarum (1623)

Donnelly, Ignatius, The Great Cryptogram (1888)

Friedman, William F. and Elizebeth S., The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined. (Cambridge University Press, 1957)

Wells Gallup, Elizabeth &ndash The Biliteral Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in His Works and Deciphered by Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1899)

See William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid.

Few people know that many of William Shakespeare’s plays were published posthumously. Virginia Fellows’ Shakespeare Code includes an intriguing discussion of works attributed to Shakespeare that appeared after his passing in 1616. Shakespeare had been dead for seven years when the First Folio of his collected works was published. This celebrated Folio edition contained 36 plays, half of which had never been seen before. According to Fellows, many of the previously unpublished plays “were entered into the Stationer’s Register on November 8, 1623, just in time for publication” a little later that same month.

More fascinating still, a number of plays published previously were altered. There were deletions as well as new additions. Fellows writes: “In the First Folio, The Merry Wives of Windsor has twelve hundred more lines than it had in 1602, Titus Andronicus has a whole new scene, and Henry V is double the length of the 1600 edition.”

Given the fact that Shakespeare was long gone and had left not a single manuscript behind, legitimate questions arise: Who edited the old plays? Where did the new plays come from, and why were they written?

Fellows, a firm supporter of the theory that Sir Francis Bacon rather than Will Shakespeare wrote the plays, looks to the field of cipher writing for an answer to these questions. She emphasizes a fact that may provide a plausible link between the works of Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare. In October 1623, a month before the release of the First Folio, Bacon published a new Latin edition of his 1605 treatise The Advancement of Learning. In this revised and expanded edition, entitled De Augmentis Scientiarum, he openly discussed a method of code writing, the Bi-Literal Cipher, which he had devised when still in his teens.

Coincidence? Bacon advocates don’t think so, and have used Bacon’s own Bi-Literal Cipher to hunt for hidden messages in Shakespeare’s works and a number of publications by several contemporaries that exhibited the same odd typesetting features as the First Folio. (For a detailed description of the Bi-Literal Cipher and quotations of deciphered materials on Bacon’s hidden life as the unrecognized oldest son of Queen Elizabeth I, see Fellows’ captivating book.)

Bacon’s Bi-Literal Cipher requires a substantial volume of text: it’s designed in such a way that for each encrypted letter, five “outer” letters are needed. Furthermore, cipher-sleuths such as Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup concluded, rightly or wrongly, that only italic letters were used in the bi-literal cipher believed to be embedded in Shakespeare’s works&ndashwhich would rapidly multiply the volume of outer or “enfolding” text needed to contain the hidden messages. Fellows reasons that this demand for extensive cover text could well account for the adding of sections to old plays and the production of new ones.

While this may be the case, I think it’s only one of several possible answers, and by no means the most important one. The quality of the outer texts&ndashthe plays themselves&ndashis simply too exquisite to have been produced merely for the benefit of hiding secret stories&ndashwhose quality, if the various decoded segments are correct, is often inferior to the outer text. Let me offer another explanation instead: I believe that the plays were essential to Bacon’s life work, which he summarized as The Great Instauration.

Early in his life, after much disappointment in the stultified state of learning he encountered at Trinity College, Bacon, the young genius, set himself to the monumental task of bringing about a scientific, literary and cultural revolution&ndashboth in England and in the world at large. All his future research and writings contributed in one way or another to this all-encompassing goal. In 1620 he finally disclosed this vision for a new golden age of peace, prosperity and enlightenment in The Great Instauration, and a few years later he painted an enticing picture of this new kind of society in his little book The New Atlantis.

The method he conceived of to bring about the Instauration consisted of six parts or steps. The three first steps were dedicated to an inventory of the state of knowledge and to employing a new scientific method&ndashthat of experimentation and inductive reasoning&ndashthat would replace the fruitless dialectical reasoning prevalent at the time. His various natural histories were examples as well as components of the inventory process, and his classic Novum Organon&ndashthe “New Method”&ndashexplained the methodology he devised for this huge and far-reaching endeavor.

The fourth step, which he called “The Ladder of the Intellect,” was the first in the next tier of the process&ndashthat of attaining philosophical illumination. Bacon described this step as demonstrating the various insights and principles found in the first three steps “before the eyes” so that people could understand and absorb them&ndashsuch as in art, literature and hands-on education. He wrote: “For I remember that in mathematics it is easy to follow the demonstration when you have a machine beside you, whereas without that help all appears involved and more subtle than it really is.”

Francis Bacon discovered the power of theatre when, at twelve years of age, he wrote and starred in a little play called The Philosopher King, performed before the Queen herself. He learned that drama was a moving, effective means by which philosophical and moral principles could be set “before the eyes” of rich and poor, educated and uneducated alike. Thus, some Baconian scholars have come to the conclusion that by writing the immortal plays published under the mask of Shakespeare, packed with their profound life lessons, he showed us a powerful way to implement Step 4 of his Great Instauration.

References

Bacon, Francis &ndashThe Advancement of Learning (1605); The Great Instauration (1620); De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623); The New Atlantis (1624)

Fellows, Virginia M. &ndash The Shakespeare Code (Snow Mountain Press, 2006)

Wells Gallup, Elizabeth &ndash The Biliteral Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in his Works and Deciphered by Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1899)

For a brief overview of the many controversies surrounding the ciphers said to have been discovered in Shakespeare’s works, see my article entitled “Shakespeare Cipher Stories.”

The fifth step was dedicated to determining temporary or intermediate statements of truth, and the last one to arriving at the ultimate statements of truth regarding God, Nature and Man.