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Those quick to dismiss the possibility that a hidden acrostic signature could be overlooked for centuries may be unaware that a leading scholar had made such a find in a canonical work just a few years before Booth had begun his search. The Testament of Love was a medieval prose narrative that had been accepted without question as Chaucer’s – by the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and Coleridge – since its inclusion in the 1532 edition of his collected works. By the early nineteenth century, biographers such as William Godwin were drawing on key details in The Testament of Love to flesh out their story of Chaucer’s life. Then, in 1897, while freshly editing this work, Cambridge professor Walter Skeat discovered that the first letter of the first word of each chapter formed an acrostic that spelled out: ‘MARGARETE: OF VIRTW, HAVE MERCI ON THSKNVI.’ ‘Margaret of virtue, have mercy’ made sense enough to Skeat, but who was ‘Thsknui’? The puzzle was solved by his friend Henry Bradley, who pointed out that the order of the closing chapters had been rearranged. The acrostic originally read ‘THIN VSK’ – ‘thine Usk.’ After three and a half centuries of false attribution, The Testament of Love was at last revealed to have been written not by Chaucer but by his fellow writer and admirer Thomas Usk. If one of Chaucer’s works was now shown to have been written by somebody else, why not one or more of Shakespeare’s?
A fierce race was on to see who would be the first to prove that Bacon’s authorship was encoded in Shakespeare’s plays. Booth was a relative newcomer to the contest; his formidable competitors and their teams of assistants had already devoted years of their lives to scanning Folio pages for word ciphers and biliteral ciphers. By 1909 two of Booth’s main rivals had already sailed to England, convinced they were on the verge of finding Bacon’s long-buried manuscripts of the plays. For those invested in the authorship question, the excitement was intense. In July 1909, the official Baconian journal, Baconiana, excitedly announced ‘The Goal in Sight’ and held up publication through the autumn to be the first to break the news of the great discovery.
It was Delia Bacon’s friend Samuel Morse who had set in motion the age’s fascination with codes and ciphers. The effect of the telegraph and Morse code, not only on the popular appreciation of encryption, but also on how knowledge was now imagined as an act of decoding, was profound. Even as readers were searching texts for encoded clues, writers like Edgar Allan Poe (in stories like ‘The Gold Bug’) were beginning to produce fiction that turned on deciphering codes. At a moment when even children could send coded messages and governments and businesses regularly encrypted communications, the notion that earlier writers had hidden codes in their works no longer seemed far-fetched. And as the world-wide popularity of The Da Vinci Code attests, these Victorian assumptions have, if anything, become more deeply entrenched.
Cipher Hunters
A few years after Mark Twain established the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Company in 1884 he had a chance to publish what promised to be the definitive deciphering of Shakespeare’s works. Its author, Ignatius Donnelly – former Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota, then three-term congressman, and a lifelong political reformer – had already won a wide following as a writer with his wildly popular Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882, in which he argued that there really had been a lost world of Atlantis hinted at by the ancients. Donnelly followed up that success a year later with Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, which claimed that a great comet had smashed into the Earth aeons ago, almost destroying the planet. Even before these books came out, Donnelly had turned to a new project: ‘I have been working … at what I think is a great discovery,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘a cipher in Shakespeare’s Plays … asserting Francis Bacon’s authorship of the plays … I am certain there is a cipher there and I think I have the key.’ It took Donnelly six years of exhausting labour to work out the code and publish his findings in the thousand-page The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888).
Cipher Wheel, frontispiece to vol. 2 of Orville Ward Owen’s Sir Francis
Bacon’s Cipher Story (Detroit, 1894)
Twain later recalled that when ‘Ignatius Donnelly’s book came out, eighteen or twenty years ago, I not only published it, but read it’. That’s not quite true. Twain had initially decided against taking it on, but then changed his mind and condemned his partner for failing to publish it. Twain had read Donnelly’s book closely and found it ‘an ingenious piece of work’. In the end, though, he didn’t find the acrostics convincing enough: ‘a person had to work his imagination rather hard sometimes if he wanted to believe in the acrostics’, and, as a result, the book ‘fell pretty flat’. But Twain heartily endorsed Donnelly’s argument that writers drew upon what they experienced first-hand, not what ‘they only know about by hearsay’.
Donnelly had stumbled onto the authorship question by accident. Flipping through the pages of a volume his son was reading – Every Boy’s Book – he came across a chapter on cryptography, where he learned that the ‘most famous and complex cipher perhaps ever written was by Lord Bacon’. What ‘followed, like a flash’ for Donnelly was the question: ‘Could Lord Bacon have put a cipher in the plays?’ He immediately turned to Bacon’s late work, De Augmentis Scientiarum, to learn more about Baconian ciphers, and was hooked. It didn’t take long for Donnelly to conclude that Bacon had embedded ‘in the plays a cipher story, to be read when the tempest that was about to assail civilization had passed away’. The story was already taking on the apocalyptic dimensions of Atlantis and Ragnarok. Donnelly supposed that if Bacon had encoded a message, it would read along the lines of ‘I, Francis Bacon, of St. Albans, son of Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England, wrote these Plays, which go by the name of William Shakespeare.’ Lacking a concordance, he set about reading through the complete works in search of something like it.
Having come up empty-handed, Donnelly decided that the encoding must have been far more sophisticated, so complex that Bacon had to have written the code first and the plays almost as an afterthought. As he later explained:
before Francis Bacon put pen to paper to write these plays, he had mapped out the cipher story; and had his pages blocked off in little squares, each square numbered according to its place from the top to the bottom of the page. He next adjusted the length of his columns, and their subdivisions, to enable him to pursue significant words like ‘written,’ ‘playes,’ ‘shakst,’ ‘spur,’ etc., over and over again, and when all this was in place, he proceeded to write out the plays; using his miraculous ingenuity to bring the right words in the proper positions.
Donnelly didn’t have a clue about how compositors worked in Elizabethan printing houses, where such a scheme would have been unimaginable and the layout he describes impossible to reproduce. Even with his complex arithmetical scheme, Donnelly had to fudge his word cipher, which was based on the numerical distance between his arbitrarily chosen key words. Worse still, he constantly miscounted in order to arrive at satisfying results. Cryptologists who have examined his method have concluded that he ‘described Bacon’s own cipher without understanding it’ and ‘showed a fatal inclination to seize on whole words which happen to be in both the vehicle and the message to be deciphered’. It also turned out that his cipher could produce virtually any message one wanted to find. Donnelly nevertheless remained confident ‘beyond a doubt’ that ‘there is a Cipher in the so-called Shakespeare Plays. The proofs are cumulative. I have shown a thousand of them.’
Donnelly is notable less for his cryptographic skills than for his belief that there was a grander, autobiographical story buried in the plays. He saw, especially in The Tempest, a self-portrait of ‘the princely, benevolent and magnanimous’ Francis Bacon, who, ‘like Prospero, had been cast down’. What began with a disguised author’s hidden life blossomed into far-reaching and revisionist history: ‘the inner story in the plays’, Donnelly writes, makes visible ‘the struggles of factions in the courts; the interior view of the birth o
f religions; the first colonization of the American continent, in which Bacon took an active part, and something of which is hidden in The Tempest’.
In the end, finding a disguised signature or an embedded autobiography or even rewriting world history wasn’t enough, not for Donnelly and not for most cipher hunters. Like many other doubters, he went in search of that Holy Grail, the lost manuscripts of the plays. He suspected that they were ‘buried probably in the earth, or in a vault of masonry, a great iron or brass coffer’. While promoting his book in England he tried and failed to persuade the Earl of Verulam, Bacon’s descendant, to allow him to excavate at the estate in hopes of unearthing the long-lost manuscripts, following hints in the cipher.
We can smile at all this now, but in his own day, Donnelly’s work won many admirers, among them the poet Walt Whitman, who recommended the book to friends and was inspired by it to write a brief poem – ‘Shakespeare Bacon’s Cipher’ – later included in his Leaves of Grass:
I doubt it not – then more, far more;
In each old song bequeathed – in every noble page or text,
(Different – something unrecked before – some unsuspected author,)
In every object, mountain, tree, and star – in every birth and life,
As part of each – evolved from each – meaning, behind the ostent,
A mystic cipher waits infolded.
The poem initially bore the subtitle ‘A Hint to Scientists’. For Whitman, there was something not dreamt of in the philosophy of those supposed experts; he found deeply appealing the idea of a hidden, mystical meaning in all things, in all poetry – unseen by the rigid and doctrinaire.
Twain, too, was inspired by Donnelly’s approach, enough to try his own hand at deciphering a literary work that had long fascinated him: John Bunyan’s 1678 classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress – though he never developed these ideas beyond a notebook sketch. Even as Donnelly and others had been troubled by the fit between the provincial man from Stratford and the greatness of the plays attributed to him, Twain became convinced that The Pilgrim’s Progress could never have been written by someone with Bunyan’s limited life experience. Twain concluded that The Pilgrim’s Progress, with its account of the ‘Eternal City’, could only have been written by somebody who had actually been to Rome; Bunyan, who Twain joked, had never seen ‘anything but a canal boat’, assuredly hadn’t. So Twain reassigned the work to a writer he knew had travelled widely, John Milton, whose ‘great Continental Tour enabled him to imagine the travel in the Dream – and no stay-at-home could ever have done it’. Milton, Twain added, ‘was a clandestine duck’ who ‘used to always jerk a public poem to divert attention from what he meant to do some day’ in The Pilgrim’s Progress; ‘not knowing’ that Milton ‘was riddling’, readers ‘took him at his word’ and misread his intentions. Once down the conspiratorial road, it was hard to stop. Twain also suspected that Milton also became involved in the Shakespeare conspiracy, and supposed that the ‘furtive Bacon got him and Ben Jonson to play into his hand’, persuading Milton to contribute an enthusiastic poem on ‘Shakespeare’ for the 1632 Second Folio. Knowing and admiring ‘Bacon’s secret’, Twain writes, Milton ‘afterward borrowed the idea without credit’. As tempting as it is to dismiss this sketch as a parody on Twain’s part, he seems far too invested, researched it too thoroughly and draws too many connections for it to simply be a joke: The Pilgrim’s Progress, he concludes, ‘must be read between the lines’. ‘This has never been suspected before,’ he concludes, but ‘the cipher makes it plain’.
*
While The Great Cryptogram failed to resolve the authorship question, there were those who believed that its premise was sound; it was only Donnelly’s grasp of Baconian ciphers that was faulty. Orville Ward Owen, a prosperous physician from Detroit who had most of Shakespeare committed to memory, took up the challenge in the 1890s. Like Donnelly, he was convinced that Bacon had probably employed a word code, though one based on a different set of ‘guide’ or ‘key’ terms, including ‘fortune’, ‘honour’, ‘nature’ and ‘reputation’.
Owen had a great advantage over Donnelly, for in his search for how to discover Bacon’s cipher, he claimed he had stumbled upon a forty-three-page instruction manual, in verse, that Bacon had left for his future ‘decipherer’. Owen never elaborated on this discovery, nor did he ever explain how he managed to decode the manual (a critic complained that it was a bit ‘like picking the lock of a safe, only to find inside the key to the lock you have already picked’). Bacon, Owen wrote, had instructed his decipherer to
Take your knife and cut all our books asunder,
And set the leaves on a great firm wheel
Which rolls and rolls, and turning the
Fickle rolling wheel, throw your eyes
Upon FORTUNE, that goddess blind, that stands upon
A spherical stone, that turning and incessant rolls,
In restless variation.
Owen faithfully followed Bacon’s instructions and built a decoding machine consisting of two large drums on which revolved a two-foot-wide and thousand-foot-long canvas sheet. He pasted onto this long loop the pages of each book attributed to Bacon –which, the cipher told him, included not only Bacon and Shakespeare’s works, but also those written under Bacon’s other masks: Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Edmund Spenser, Robert Burton and George Peele. Owen and his capable assistants would spin the drums and as the cut-and-pasted writing revolved, key words would reveal themselves. Adjacent lines or phrases would then be transcribed and textual messages reconstructed. Since his key terms appeared over ten thousand times on the pasted script, and the coded message could appear dozens of lines away from that word, there was a good deal of interpretive latitude about which phrases or lines Owen could claim as part of the cipher message.
The story that emerged in the six volumes he and his assistants produced – Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story – was breathtaking, and explained why Bacon had been so careful to conceal his story in code. Embedded within the plays (and the other works attributed to Bacon) was an autobiography that overturned a great deal of received wisdom and made Donnelly’s discoveries seem tame in comparison. Queen Elizabeth was no virgin queen and Francis Bacon no son of Lady Anne and Sir Nicholas Bacon. Bacon only belatedly learned that he was the bastard child of the Earl of Leicester and Elizabeth herself – making him the rightful heir to the English throne. Hamlet could now be properly read as the poet’s lament at being denied the throne. Elizabeth had taken the play as a personal attack by her natural son and banished Bacon to France after telling him:
I am thy mother.
Thou mightst be an emperor but that I will not
Bewray whose son thou art;
Nor though with honourable parts
Thou art adorned, will I make thee great
For fear thyself should prove
My competitor and govern England and me.
But before Elizabeth had a chance to acknowledge Bacon as her son and heir, Robert Cecil strangled her to death. The plays, for Owen, were clearly the by-product of their author’s tumultuous life and, once again, a key to the suppressed history of the age.
One of Owen’s most capable assistants, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, now entered the competition. While sympathetic to Owen’s word cipher and to the autobiographical account he had uncovered, she also believed that Bacon had embedded a biliteral cipher in his writing – the type of cipher Bacon had himself described at length in 1622. This ingenious code depended on the writer using two fonts that looked alike but that a practised eye could see were not identical. Convinced that Bacon had used this cipher in the First Folio and other works and eager to make fresh discoveries, Gallup abandoned the Cipher Wheel in favour of close and meticulous analysis of alternating fonts. George Fabyan, a wealthy Bostonian who had supported Owen’s research, now financed hers as well.
Another ally, Kate Prescott, leaves behind a revealing portrait of Gallup at work, overcoming a parti
cularly knotty decoding problem:
One morning I entered the room where Mrs. Gallup was working and found her ‘floored.’ She had gone far enough to feel convinced that she had made no mistake, that her alphabet was working, but here she had eleven consonants without one vowel: W S G P S R B C M R G. It was some days before she solved the riddle. The letters resolved themselves into the initials of the names William Shakespeare, George Peele, Spenser, Robert Burton, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene – Bacon’s masks … From then on all was clear sailing.
Prescott’s account of Gallup piecing together names from a string of letters recalls nothing so much as the scene in Twelfth Night in which Malvolio is spied on as he decodes an unsigned letter with its cryptic message ‘M.O.A.I. doth sway my life’. Malvolio gets off to a promising start – ‘“M.” Malvolio. “M” – why that begins my name’. But he runs into trouble when he sees that ‘there is no consonancy in the sequel’, since ‘“A” should follow, but “O” does’. Malvolio, the patron saint of hopeful decipherers, resolves the matter in his own favour by fiddling with the anagram: ‘yet to crush this a little, it would bow to me,’ for ‘every one of these letters are in my name’. The first decoder of Shakespeare’s words, Malvolio would not be the last to crush an anagram to fit the name he so badly wanted to find.
The biliteral cipher revealed secrets denied to Owen. While Gallup, like her former employer, found evidence confirming that Bacon was Queen Elizabeth’s son, she was able to add a crucial biographical detail: the Earl of Essex was also Elizabeth’s child and therefore Bacon’s younger brother (making far more poignant the clash between the two, when Bacon had to prosecute his brother after Essex’s abortive coup in 1601 – a source of ‘unhappiness and ever-present remorse’ forever after for Bacon). There would be even greater revelations, for the plays turned out to contain, like a set of Chinese boxes, still other plays encoded in them. These were truly plays-within-plays, unlike their pale shadows in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet.
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