Bacon's Signature Ciphers in Shakespeare -5- The Hidden Bard

-5-

Another site that can be used is this one:

http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/book/SLNSW_F1/140/?work=LLL

A third site can be found here:

http://isebeta.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/book/SLNSW_F1/

Most of the time readers will not need to visit any of these sites since I used screen shots for most examples. Sometimes they are a problem to add to this blog and if that becomes a problem then links may have to suffice. And a few times it may be necessary to visit the site itself to review the evidence discussed.

First, a note to those unfamiliar with Elizabethan spelling. The letter ‘s” often looks like an “f” to us. And when it’s italicized it can be quite elongated. The letter “j” can look like the letter “i” to us, as in the word “iest” at the end of the first line above. The letter “v” is often spelt with the letter “u”. And the capital letter “U” may be spelt with a “V”. And a “w” is often spelt with two “v”s. Most of the time these strange spellings won’t be an issue in understanding this paper.

The ‘common sense’ meaning in the play selection of the last blog post is for the actors to swear to study to know what otherwise they would remain ignorant of. And what are these things which else they should not know? Things that are ‘hid’ and ‘bard’. Notice the spelling isn’t ‘barred’, but ‘bard’ like the spelling for a poet of epic tales. Interestingly also is that the phrase “hid & bard” sounds like “hidden bard”. Of course, this completely goes against ‘common sense’ and may just be a complete coincidence, even though it’s found in a context arguing for the searching of hidden things. Skeptics will naturally scoff loudly and insultingly at the very thought of it possibly suggesting this secondary meaning. However, from the alternate authorship perspective it does look suspicious.

So here’s my point for readers to keep in mind – Bacon worked on his philosophical works for decades and so he had a mindset of the natural world as a kind of maze that needed clues for it to be “decrypted”. If this mindset was an everyday mental world for him, then, if he wrote the Shakespeare works, not only would we see the numerous ideas and language of his in them, as has already been shown elsewhere by Baconian researchers, but it’s also quite possible that he would leave such clues in them to be someday ‘decrypted’ for the world to learn of his hidden authorship. At least one Baconian has suggested that he may have done this as a kind of ‘test’ for scholars or ‘wits’ of the future to use the inductive method to reveal his authorship in which he had otherwise covered his tracks “keeping the author out of sight” so that it could be ‘plausibly denied’ if challenged in his time, which might occur with writing something like the deposition scene in Richard II (which some think could have cost Shakespeare his freedom or even his life) or other controversial political or scientific ideas of his day.

With this understanding in mind we’ll now introduce some basics and then begin our look at some such possible authorship ‘clues’ he may have left behind in the Shakespeare works. I will be numbering the cipher candidates as well as the significant allusions or connections mentioned.