Baconian Theory - History of Baconian Theory - Baconian Cryptology

Baconian Cryptology

In 1880 Ignatius L. Donnelly, a U.S. Congressman, science fiction author and Atlantis theorist, wrote The Great Cryptogram, in which he argued that Bacon revealed his authorship of the works by concealing secret ciphers in the text. This produced a plethora of late 19th-century Baconian theorising, which developed the theme that Bacon had hidden encoded messages in the plays.

Baconian theory developed a new twist in the writings of Orville Ward Owen and Elizabeth Wells Gallup. Owen's book Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story (1893–5) claimed to have discovered a secret history of the Elizabethan era hidden in cipher-form in Bacon/Shakespeare's works. The most remarkable revelation was that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth. According to Owen, Bacon revealed that Elizabeth was secretly married to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who fathered both Bacon himself and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, the latter ruthlessly executed by his own mother in 1601. Bacon was the true heir to the throne of England, but had been excluded from his rightful place. This tragic life-story was the secret hidden in the plays.

Elizabeth Wells Gallup developed Owen's views, arguing that a bi-literal cipher, which she had identified in the First Folio of Shakespeare's works, revealed concealed messages confirming that Bacon was the queen's son. This argument was taken up by several other writers, notably Alfred Dodd in Francis Bacon’s Personal Life Story (1910) and C.Y.C. Dawbarn in Uncrowned (1913). In Dodd's account Bacon was a national redeemer, who, deprived of his ordained public role as monarch, instead performed a spiritual transformation of the nation in private though his work: "He was born for England, to set the land he loved on new lines, 'to be a Servant to Posterity'". In 1916 Gallup's financial backer George Fabyan was sued by film producer William Selig. He argued that Fabyan's advocacy of Bacon threatened the profits expected from a forthcoming film about Shakespeare. The judge determined that ciphers identified by Gallup proved that Francis Bacon was the author of the Shakespeare canon, awarding Fabyan $5,000 in damages.

Orville Ward Owen had such conviction in his own cipher method that, in 1909, he began excavating the bed of the River Wye, near Chepstow Castle, in the search of Bacon's original Shakespearean manuscripts. The project ended with his death in 1924. Nothing was found.

The American art collector Walter Conrad Arensberg (1878–1954) believed that Bacon had concealed messages in a variety of ciphers, relating to a secret history of the time and the esoteric secrets of the Rosicrucians, in the Shakespearean works. He published a variety of decipherments between 1922 and 1930, concluding finally that, although he had failed to find them, there certainly were concealed messages. He established the Francis Bacon Foundation in California in 1937 and left it his collection of Baconiana.

In 1957 the expert cryptographers William and Elizabeth Friedman published The Shakespearian ciphers examined, a study of all the proposed ciphers identified by Baconians (and others) up to that point. The Friedmans had worked with Gallup. They showed that the method is unlikely to have been employed by the author of Shakespeare's works, concluding that none of the ciphers claimed to exist by Baconians were valid.