Bacon's Signature Ciphers in Shakespeare -77- VVILL; Pallas

-77-

Fun with Baconian Ciphers

Part 13

Next we’ll consider a most important usage of the Roman numeric system. Keep in mind that Francis Bacon would be familiar with gematria from his language studies beginning in his youth when he began studying Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. So we can imagine that these studies, along with his learning of cryptology, made letter/number values second nature to him.

40)  Again, I don’t know which Baconian first discovered this, but someone realized that, since the letter “w” was very often written in the First Folio and elsewhere with a double “v” as “vv” or “VV” (though just as often written with a true “W”), that each “V” could stand for the number “5”. Likewise, that the other letters in the name “Will” could also stand for numbers, as in the Roman numeral system. So that “i”= 1, and each “L” = 50. Then it’s seen that “V V I L L” adds up to “111” the Kay value for “Bacon”. When we connect this to the full name or pen name of the playwright we have a cryptic solution of “William [“Bacon I am”] Shakespeare”.  I believe I first saw this connection (along with the L=50 discussion mentioned earlier) in this article by Virginia Fellows:    http://www.sirbacon.org/links/fellows.html

This means that the name of “Will” being fully equivalent numerically to “Bacon” in the Kay alphabet, which we can see now has much substantiation, can equally represent the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon as it could for the actor from Stratford.

One other interesting fact is that in a book on the letters in all the Shakespeare plays, it turns out that the total numbers of letters counts to 111. This could be purely a coincidence but together they may just possibly contain further ciphers. Shakspeare’s Letters, by Alan Stewart, 2008.

Another interesting fact is that, according to Ros Barber, The author was obsessed with characters being wrongly thought dead. 33 of Shakespeare's characters -- in eighteen plays -- are mistakenly believed to be dead for some part of the story.

Bacon’s Muse and Pseudonym

The symbolic name of “Shakespeare” is tied to Bacon because his muse is known to have been the Greek Goddess Pallas Athena. A letter written to him from France stated “Therefore, Bacon, if it chances that my Muse praises someone, it is not because she is eloquent or learned, although your Pallas has taught me better (how to speak)..." Pallas Athena, in the book Argenis, by John Barclay (1634) had this description:

“The image of the goddess that was worshipped before the altar was fierce and suited to the arms she wore; her bended brow, what with the sharp cast of her eyes and her helm covering half her forehead, did show her to be most beautifully terrible, her face, though fierce, yet resembling a virgin. She held a golden spear, which the people oft thought the goddess had shaken, being deceived by the diversity of rays reflecting the gold’s brightness”.  This is shown on page 223:

http://books.google.com/books?id=8ySgLF4nkmAC&lpg=PA56&ots=KPMrjRw08Q&dq=Argenis%20Barcla%201634&pg=PA223#v=onepage&q=spear%20shaken&f=false

From which the pseudonym is not difficult to derive and, representing the Goddess of Wisdom, would fit Bacon perfectly. He used this goddess in the 1594 Christmas revels that he helped produce at his Grays Inn.  And we will later see that Bacon is also associated with other Spear Shakers.