-23-
Fun with Baconian Ciphers
Part 5
Most of the
best Baconian cipher/code evidence is related to, and often dependent upon,
certain significant numbers. Most of these have now been mentioned in those
numbers representing the first, last, and full name of Francis Bacon. Another
one, which at first I was going to ignore but found I could not is the
number 287. This number was asserted to have been found in nearly every
Shakespeare work and many others of the same time period but not all by the
same author. But how the number was obtained in various counting methods in all
these works is very much open to question. Still disregarding all, or nearly
all, of the clearly ambiguous counts for this number, it still stands out
from the rest of the numbers not directly associated with Bacon’s name. The Friedmans
disparagingly called it a “magic number”. But the Baconian researchers never
said there was anything “magic” about it. They merely found it as significant
in that they kept encountering it. What we can fault them for is what appears
to be an excessive eagerness to find it such that they didn’t seem to develop
rigid rules for their counting methods that would stand up to scrutiny in each
of their assertions.
So let’s look
at this number. It may have been first found in the examination of the long
word
H O
N O R I
F I C A B I L I
T
U D I N I T A T I B U
S
8 14
13 14 17 9 6 9 3 1 2 9 11 9 19 20
4 9 13 9 19
1 19 9 2
20 18 = 287
This word is
on page 136 of the First Folio in Love’s Labor’s Lost, Act V, scene 1.
An abridged
version of it is also found on the Northumberland manuscript (which is shown
later), the document that mainstream scholars seem to try to ignore, and which
has the name of Francis Bacon on it along with the name William Shakespeare
which is preceded twice by the word “your”. Several references to Shakespeare
works are also listed on the document. Here again, the Friedmans, like many
others, were quick to dismiss this extremely important document of the period
despite the many connections between it and Francis Bacon. Without
acknowledging any of the important connections to Bacon and Shakespeare in it,
they just say “a scrivener linked the
names (both pretty well known to Londoners) of Bacon and Shakespeare on a page
of rough notes,…” Too many of those in positions of authority have taken the
easy out of dismissing a highly interesting finding when what should be done is
to examine it carefully in great detail to learn all we can about how it came
to be. This has been a problem with much of the evidence touching on the
Shakespeare authorship question.
The form of
the long word in the MS is abbreviated as honorificabilitudini. Now, neither
Bacon nor Shakespeare invented this word. It’s been around in one form or
another since at least 1187, though it seems that either Bacon or Shakespeare
was the first to use it in the Elizabethan period. There were a few Baconian
researchers that early on had a fascination with anagrams and would try making
various phrases out of the word’s letters, the most infamous being: “Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi” meaning
“These plays, the offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world.” But
other researchers showed little or no interest in such an anagram and focused
on the word’s other properties.
No comments:
Post a Comment