Prince Tudor Theory - Background

Background

The theory that the author of Shakespeare's works was connected to a secret romance and child of the queen dates back to the writings of Orville Ward Owen and Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who believed that Francis Bacon was the true author of the plays. In his book Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story (1893–5), Owen claimed to have discovered a secret history of the Elizabethan era hidden in cipher-form in Bacon/Shakespeare's works. 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 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 C.Y.C. Dawbarn in Uncrowned (1913) and Alfred Dodd The Personal Poems of Francis Bacon (1931). 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 through his work. As he later wrote, "He was born for England, to set the land he loved on new lines, 'to be a Servant to Posterity'".

J. Thomas Looney founded Oxfordian theory in his book Shakespeare Identified (1920). Looney did not include any arguments about secret marriages or hidden children. However, his theory soon gained adherents who adapted the earlier Baconian arguments to the new Oxfordian position. Looney expressed his disapproval of the development in a letter from 1933, which states that his followers Percy Allen and Bernard M. Ward were "advancing certain views respecting Oxford and Queen Eliz. which appear to me extravagant & improbable, in no way strengthen Oxford’s Shakespeare claims, and are likely to bring the whole cause into ridicule." Ward's father had been an early supporter of Looney; Allen was a theatre critic.