Fun with Baconian Ciphers
Clayton Buerkle, Ph.D. 2013
Part 1
This paper
presents major breakthrough discoveries for the Shakespeare Authorship question.
This research started out as what was going to be “fun” material for my
Shakespeare authorship blog. I had avoided delving into possible cipher
evidence for Bacon’s involvement in the authorship mystery for several reasons.
For one, there was already plenty of evidence connecting Francis Bacon to the
Shakespeare works outside of any possible ciphers. Some of this evidence, based
on its multifaceted uniqueness to Shakespeare and Bacon, has even been offered
as proof of his authorship. Second, many early Baconians got into a cipher
mania and were seeing ciphers pretty much everywhere they looked. It took the
development of the science of cryptology, especially in the work of William and
Elizebeth Friedman, specialists in the field, to take a disciplined look at
these Baconian ciphers and provide expert analysis resulting in their rejection
of them. That was back in the 1950s and was a major blow to the Baconian movement. However, this setback was
mainly in the public’s mind. Many officers of the Bacon Society didn’t endorse
some of the most popular ciphers, as the Friedmans pointed out. And a couple
Baconians, one a mathematics professor at Cambridge University, reported that
they discussed the topic with William Friedman later and reviewed some more of
the evidence, and according to them, he regretted taking the hard stance that
he did. Unfortunately, they never revised their book so we’ll never know their
final thoughts on the subject.
The Baconian
Authorship movement still existed and continued its research. Peter Dawkins has
been one of the mainstays of the movement and has done extensive research on
Bacon’s connection to the Shakespeare works along with their connections to
what are considered esoteric literature and groups, notably Freemasonry and
Rosicrucianism. He wrote The Shakespeare
Enigma, 2004. Retired barrister Nigel Cockburn’s spent some 20 years
writing what is considered a scholarly tome on the authorship topic—The Bacon Shakespeare Question, 1998.
And Baconian researcher Barry Clarke has significantly extended this evidence
for the academic market and has written The
Shakespeare Puzzle: A Non-Esoteric Baconian Theory, 2007. Dawkins and
Clarke had previously examined and contributed to the Baconian cipher
literature.
Over the
years I’ve come across several Baconian ciphers that I thought were especially
interesting and so I tried to keep tabs in the back of my mind about this
angle. And then I came across a couple more that seemed too unlikely to be by
chance. So I started to review the matter, including reading the Friedman’s
published work The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined, 1958.
In the course
of my review I found some more of the early offered ciphers for Bacon’s
authorship that stood out from the rest, at least to me. And when I
looked to see what the Friedmans had said about them I found that, for the most
part, they never discussed them at all. And for a group of them they just
dismissed them on what I thought were unsatisfactory grounds. I think they
did an excellent job, generally, in their analysis. But they admitted they only
reviewed a relatively small sample of the extant proposed ciphers around,
though they were the ones they thought were most popular. And they didn’t
dismiss the possibility that there might be genuine ciphers in the Shakespeare
works. They also didn’t take a stand on who the true author may indeed have
been. Nor did they look for any possible ciphers or codes themselves in
the Shakespeare works. They acknowledged that “… some anti-Stratfordians have
been learned and distinguished.” And that
“ … it [the authorship question] cannot be simply dismissed without
examination”.
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