Besides the many scholars and crackpots who have used historical clues to show that someone else—usually Sir Francis Bacon—must have written Shakespeare's plays, scores have turned to cryptology to prove that the Bard's words were in a kind of cipher that concealed messages from their true author. Last week, in a new book called The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (Cambridge University; $5), U.S. Cryptologists William and Elizebeth Friedman gave evidence that should discredit these investigators once and for all. The Friedmans' credentials are impressive: William led the team that broke the Japanese "purple" code a few months before Pearl Harbor (TIME, May 14, 1956).
Inner History. The first major cipher controversy began in the 1880s, when Minnesota Politician Ignatius Donnelly happened to pick up one of his children's copies of Routledge's Every Boy's Annual. There he found a description of an intricate cipher invented by Sir Francis Bacon. Already convinced that Bacon was Shakespeare, Donnelly set out to prove that Sir Francis used this cipher in writing the plays. Through an elaborate series of manipulations involving key page numbers, word counts and "root numbers," Donnelly finally "deciphered" such statements as "Seas ill (Cecil) said that More low (Marlowe) or Shak'st spurre (Shakespeare) never writ a word of them," convinced himself that Bacon had written the plays to conceal "the inner history of his times, in cipher." But no sooner had Donnelly published his theory than another scholar used his methods to produce the message: "Master Will I Am Shak'st spurre writ the play."
For some other Baconians, Shakespeare's epitaph was the source of all sorts of speculation. Using Bacon's cipher, one man translated the inscription to read SAEHR/BAYEEP/RFTAXA/RAWAR, crossed out the letters S-H-A-X-P-E-A-R-E, and by rearranging the remaining letters got FRA BAWRT EAR AY (i.e., "Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays"). Another investigator made each capital in the inscription stand for one, and, after counting the number of letters between them, produced: 1,3,1,7,4,4,8,1,3,6,3,1,4,1, 3,3,1,1,6,4,2,2,6,3,1,1,5,1,9,1,1,2,7,1,4, By making one stand for the most frequently used letter E, and two stand for A, etc.—and then by cheating just a bit—he got the words: Elesennrela Ledelleemn Aam-leetedeeasen. After some more hocuspocus, he changed this to read: Elesennre Laede Wedge Eere Aamleet Edeeasen—which he was sure meant "Elsinore laid wedge first Hamlet edition."
A Detroit physician named Orville Owen went so overboard on his own cipher theory that he declared Bacon was not only Shakespeare but also such authors as Marlowe, Edmund Spenser and Robert Burton. Another Baconian found his inspiration in the fact that both Bacon and Shakespeare used the word honorificabili-tudinitatibus. He divided the word into two parts, spelled the first backward (BACIFIRONOH), declared this to be an anagram for FR BACONO. From the rest of the letters, he got HI LUDI TUITI NATI SIBI, which taken all together spelled "These Plays, produced by Francis Bacon, guarded for themselves."