William Shakespeare did not write tile plays that have been
attributed to him. The plays contain too much accurate detail about
distant places of affairs at court to have been written by someone of as
low social standing as Shakespeare, goes one argument. The plays
display too wide a range of style, goes another. Shakespeare was not
educated enough and Stratford-on-Avon was too backward a place to have
produced a playwright of such caliber, goes a third. And so, almost
every prominent Elizabethan has been suggested at one time or another as
the author of one or more of Shakespeare's plays: Ben Jonson,
Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of
Southampton, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh and of course,
FranciBacon is a favorite candidate because he wrote some of the earliest
modern works on codes and ciphers, and so generations of effort have
been wasted trying to find hidden ciphers in the Bard's plays that would
prove them to be Bacon's work. Why Bacon, or anyone else, would be
content to ghost write plays and remain silent while they were receiving
acclaim is a mystery the Baconians do not
really address properly; it certainly does not fit the personalities of
most Elizabethan court celebrities I've seen the argument that writing plays was considered a low-class
occupation beneath the dignity of the aristocracy, or that the author needed to
remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, but surely if Shakespeare's plays were
on target enough to make such measures necessary, Elizabethan society would have
been abuzz with speculation as to who the "real" author was. We need
only recall the flap over the novel
Primary Colors to see that It must be admitted that there are literary works with hidden codes
and messages. An anonymous Latin work of 1616 uses the first letters of
each of its 53 paragraphs to spell "Franciscus Godwinvvs Landavensis
Episcopus hos conscripsit Francis Godwin, Bishop of Llandalf,
wrote these lines". The spelling and grammar are flawless. A Spanish
history of New Mexico published in 1812 was supposedly written by Don
Pedro Baptista Pino, Count of Torene, but the real ghost-writer slipped
his identity in anyway. The first letters of each sentence in three
particular paragraphs spell out Juan Lopez Cancelada. In both these
cases there is no doubt the hidden message is real; a simple rule brings
out a straight-forward, error-free message. The same cannot be said for
any of the alleged Shakespearean ciphers A central figure in the Shakespeare-Bacon theory is the redoubtable
Ignatius Donnelly, who has been aptly dubbed "The Prince of U.S.
Cranks Donnelly found time to pursue a career in politics as well as
develop not one but three major crank theories: Ragnarok, a catastrophe
myth very similar in many ways to the ideas of Velikovsky, the Lost
Continent of Atlantis, and the existence of a hidden message in
Shakespeare's plays. The latter idea he developed in 1888 in a massive
two-volume work,
The Great Cryptogram. According to Donnely's own account, he had
been working for a long time on proofs that Bacon was really the author
of Shakespeare's plays. Quite by accident, he found a reference to
Bacon's cipher in a book belonging to his young son, a book of
children's amusements of the sort popular in the late 19th century.
Here we see in sharp clarity the essential shallowness of the
psaudoscientist. Donnelly had supposedly been studying the
Bacon-Shakespeare question for a long time, yet he was entirely unaware
of Bacon's well-known interest in ciphers until he stumbled accidentally
across a reference to it in a child's puzzle book.As William Friedman notes in
The Shakesperean Ciphers Examined,
Donnelly completely misunderstood Bacon's method. The cipher Donnelly
was so entranced by actually depended on embedding a message in a longer
dummy text using different type
faces. Obviously such a cipher
could only be decoded from the original printing of
Shakespeare's/Bacon's plays. Donnelly eventually developed complex
numerical schemes for working out the hidden messages, but Donnelly's
methods left enormous latitude for varying the rules to make the message
come out right. Friedman actually reproduced some of Donnelly's
analysis of Act II, Scene I from Henry IV; it is a maze of complexity
that would awe Rube Goldberg. Donnelly's rules were so flexible that one
could literally use them to obtain any desired text. One of Donnelly'
rules was that names could be spelled approximately or phonetically.
Joseph Gilpin Pyle used Donnelly's methods to obtain this message from
Hamlet: "Don nil hee (Donnelly) the author, politician and mountebanke,
will work out the secret of this play. The Sage is a Daysie"! A British
clergyman, A. Nicholson, found "Master Will I Am Shak'st spurre writ the
play and was engaged at the curtain" using Donnelly's rules and the
same text that Donnelly used to work out his system Incidentally, one can also "prove" that Shakespeare helped produce
the King James Bible. When the King James Bible came out in 1611,
Shakespeare was 46 years of age. The 46th word of Psalm 46 is shake",
and the 46th word from the end of Psalm 46 is "spear"! Actually, there
is no real evidence that Shakespeare collaborated in translating the
King James Bible. The 46th Psalm looks impressive, but is pure
coincidence.Never spoof pseudoscience. You'll be taken seriously every time. An
American, Herbert Janvrin growne, published a pamphlet in 1887 that
purportedly deciphered Shakespeare's epitaph, using rules that were a
good deal simpler than Donnelly's, and found the message "Francis Bacon
wrote
Shakespeare's plays". Although Browne repeated on a number of occasions
that the pamphlet was intended as satire, it was taken seriously by
Baconians for some time. This makes a good deal of sense. A sense of
humor is a sense of the ridiculous. A person who falls for ridiculous
ideas is not likely to recognize satire. Small wonder most
pseudoscientists and extremists in general (the political equivalents of
pseudoscientists are humorless except when it comes to ridiculing
their opponents. One of Donnelly's more pointed critics wrote: "When men
like Donnelly are born, they are given a kind of intellectual armor
which will protect them from ridicule at the same time as it insulates
them from reason. Perhaps it is just as well; to be at once ridiculous
and sensitive to ridicule would be far more harrowing.
