Bacon's DictionaryAppendices

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The exhibits and miniatures of which are found in this section, are designed to assist the serious student and reader in following the path of the Authorship Controvesy that has been so laboriously persued by many authors and researchers during its commence.

These exhibits have been placed here as not to interrupt the flow of reading in the Baconian Dictionary sections, being a finding list of Bacon’s works, his history, his thoughts and his aims, which are a subject of study and discussion.

Authorship Controversy

The attempts that have been made to discover cryptographic evidence that Francis Bacon was the author of the Shakespeare plays and poems have been based on a variety of cryptographic methods. Among these methods are the arithmetical cipher, as employed by Ignatius Donnelly in The Great Cryptogram and The Cipher in the Plays and on the Tombstone; the Bi-literal cipher, as employed by Elizabeth Wells Gallup in Francis Bacon’s Bi-Literal Cypher; the word cipher, as employed by Orville W. Owen in Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story Discovered and Deciphered; the progressive anagram, as employed by an anonymous Shakespearean in Shakespeare Anagrams; and a variation of this method which is employed by William Stone Booth in Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon and in The Hidden Signatures of Francesco Colonna and Francis Bacon, and which Mr. Booth sometimes, as in his first title, designates inaccurately as an acrostic method, and sometimes as the method of the string cipher.

None of the methods to which above referred has been proved to have been employed by Francis Bacon in the works of Shakespeare. Other attempts to discover cryptographic evidence have been based on the methods of the common anagram and the common acrostic. The only spellings of interest that have been obtained in the Shakespeare plays and poems in accordance with these methods are some common acrostics deciphered by W.S. Booth; they include, among some acrostic spellings of words not the name, one incomplete acrostic spelling of the name of Francis Bacon: F. BACO. This incomplete acrostic spelling of the name, which appears in the First Folio in The First Part of Henry the Fourth, Act 1, Scene 1, lines 102–106, is simply part of an acrostic spelling of the complete form of the name, F. BACON, which may be deciphered in accordance with the method which defined and illustrated may be a potential key to the cryptography of Shakespeare and which may be called the compound anagrammatic acrostic. Another acrostic discovered by Booth, which is of value in connection with the question of the poet’s identity, is the acrostic IAMON, the Spanish word for ham and an allusion to Bacon, which may be read on the opening lines of Richard III. In Is It Shakespeare? Begley shows, as the discovery of an anonymous German publisher and bookseller, an acrotelestic BACON at the end of Lucrece. The signature in this position, the structure of which is inadequately defined by Begley, is decipherable as F. BACON in accordance with the method of the compound anagrammatic acrostic. In connection with the riddle in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “What is Ab speld backward with the horn on his head?” Isaac Hull Platt in his Bacon Cryptograms in Shakespeare sets the evidence that the horn may be understood as the letter C.