Abstract
T he year is 1858. S pring G rove H ospital , near Hartford, Maryland. A new patient is delivered to the psych ward: She is 47 years old, has a habit of cocking her head to one side, and exhibits paranoid—even bizarre—delusions, disorganized speech, and thinking. She once tried to dig up a grave. Diagnosis: démence précoce, or what we call paranoid schizophrenia. In an effort to calm her mind, physicians administer liberal doses of narcotics, stimulants, emetics, and purgatives, subject her to cold and hot baths, and, when she turns violent, confine her to a bed or a “holding chair” with mechanical restraints.1 All this because of a belief that Shakespeare did not pen the plays and poems of Shakespeare. The patient’s name is Delia Bacon.
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Notes
Delia Bacon, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1857), xxii. 4. Ibid., xix
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Recollections of a Gifted Woman,” in Our Old Home (London: Smith, Elder, 1864), 78–105; 91–92. Delia Bacon believed that Providence was guiding her work, even setting up tests of her faith
(Vivian C. Hopkins, Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959], 265).
Mrs. John Farrar, Recollections of Seventy Years (Boston: Ticknor and Field, 1865), 320–21. This might be an appropriate moment to point out that Henry James argued that doubters of Shakespeare’s authorship underwent a crisis of faith. On James,
see Charles Laporte, “The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question,” ELH 74 (2007): 609–28; esp. 623. As this chapter attests, quite the opposite was true: Doubters of Shakespeare’s authorship relied upon Spiritual faith as a form of evidence.
Delia Bacon was an inmate at Bloomingdale Asylum, New York, from mid-April to late-July 1859 (Hopkins, Prodigal Puritan, 259). See also Theodore Bacon, Delia Bacon: A Biographical Sketch (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888), 12;
and John Michell, Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions, 2nd ed. (New York: Black Dog and Leventhal, 1999), 184–91.
Edmund Routledge, ed. Every Boy’s Book: A Complete Encyclopædia of Sports and Amusements (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1881), 769.
Walter Begley, Is it Shakespeare? The Great Question of Elizabethan Literature (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1903), 305.
Larry Richard Peterson, Ignatius Donnelly: A Psychohistorical Study in Moral Development Psychology, Dissertations in American Biography (PhD Thesis, University of Minnesota, 1977; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1982), 90–91.
Gerald W. Johnson, The Lunatic Fringe (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1957), 137; and Peterson, Ignatius Donnelly, 151–52. On insults of Donnelly: Algernon Charles Swinburne renamed Ignatius Donnelly as “Athanasius Dogberry”—St. Athanasius (ca. 296–373) is known among Protestants as “Father of The Canon”; Dogberry is a comical character in Shakespeare who misuses words
(Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Study of Ben Jonson [London: Chatto and Windus, 1889], 181).
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 5.5.48. All subsequent citations of Shakespeare’s texts, unless otherwise indicated, are from this source.
Ignatius Donnelly, The Cipher in the Plays and on the Tombstone (Minneapolis, MN: Verulam, 1899), 335. In 1899 Horace Howard Furness argued, perhaps seriocomically, that Shakespeare wrote Bacon-at least his magisterial Advancement of Learning. According to Furness, Bacon then came to believe that he actually wrote the book, a wish-fulfillment that then led to his later claim that he was actually the author of Shakespeare’s plays: ‘he [Bacon] thought, he would make sure of a posthumous revenge should the [supposed] anagram [placed on the prefatory material of the First Folio] be deciphered: “If Shakespeare succeeds in claiming my philosophy, I will take his plays in exchange”’
(Horace Howard Furness, “The Argument for Shakespeare as Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare and His Rivals: A Casebook on the Authorship Controversy, ed. George McMichael and Edgar M. Glenn [New York: Odyssey Press, 1962], 225–30; 228).
J. Henderson, “A Remarkable Seance,” Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult, and Mystical Research 10 (June 7, 1890): 278–79.
See the advertisement at the end of volume 2 of Orville Ward Owen, Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story (Detroit, MI: Howard, 1893). Fact check: In 1576, Queen Elizabeth appointed Sir Amias Paulet ambassador to Paris and put the young Francis Bacon under his charge. That hardly sounds like banishment. Besides, Bacon was only 15 years old at the time, so it’s difficult to imagine him having committed a crime worthy of exile. On the creation of the Bacon cipher while the author was in Paris, see Baxter, The Greatest of Literary Problems, 530.
G. Ward Price, Extra-Special Correspondent (London: G. Harrap, 1957), 21, 22. A similar latent violence informs Penn Leary’s The Second Cryptographic Shakespeare (Omaha, NE: Westchester House, 1990), in which Shakespeare is an eternal vampire that must be destroyed so that the text may be freed: “Through the leaded, dusty glasswork of our illusory casement window we may glance into Stratford Church itself. There, where it has anonymously rested upon the floor of the Chancel since 1616, is Mr. Shake-speare’s purported gravestone. We intend to pursue this plebeian to the edge of the hereafter; we shall hound him into his very tomb; we shall drive our cryptographic quill into his rustic heart” (4–5).
On Owen as fraudster, see William E Friedman and Elizabeth S. Friedman, The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined: An Analysis of Cryptographic Systems Used as Evidence that Some Author Other Than William Shakespeare Wrote the Plays Commonly Attributed to Him (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 69–71.
Elizabeth Wells Gallup, The Bi-literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon, Discovered in His Works rev. ed. (Detroit, MI: Howard, 1910), 1:22. On authorial attributions for Jonson, see 2:62–71; for Greene, 2:80, 175; for Marlowe, 2:173; for Spenser, 2:180; for Sir John Oldcastle, 2:15–16; and for Yorkshire Tragedy, 2:78–79. The aforementioned plays are often grouped as part of the Shakespeare Apocrypha. More recently, the Yorkshire Tragedy has been regularly attributed to Thomas Middleton.
Elizabeth Wells Gallup, The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn: A Drama in Cipher Found in the Works of Sir Francis Bacon (Detroit, MI: Howard, 1901), 135. See Elizabeth Wells Gallup, “Announcement,” in The Bi-literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon, Discovered in His Works, 3:136–37.
Christopher Isherwood, Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951, ed. Katherine Bucknell (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 29–30.
Herbert Silberer, Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1917), 228.
S. L. MacGregor, Kabbala Denudata: The Kabbalah Unveiled, Containing the Following Books of the Zohar (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926), 117.
Walter Conrad Arensberg, The Shakespearean Mystery (Pittsburgh: self-published, 1927), 24.
Walter Conrad Arensberg, The Secret Grave of Francis Bacon at Lichfield (San Francisco: John Howell, 1923), 38–39, 40.
Walter Conrad Arensberg, Burial of Francis Bacon and His Mother in the Lichfield Chapter House (Pittsburgh, PA: self-published, 1924), 20.
Arensberg, The Secret Grave of Francis Bacon at Lichfield, 17–18. Arensberg was not alone in the belief that the official tomb did not house Bacon’s bones. See C. Le Poer Kennedy, Notes and Queries, 2nd ser., 9 (February 1918): 132,
cited in David Ovason, Shakespeare’s Secret Booke: Deciphering Magical and Rosicrucian Codes (Forest Row, East Sussex: Clairview, 2010), 43. On other theories as to Bacon’s final resting place, see Maria Bauer, who supported Owen’s contention that Bacon was the true heir of Queen Elizabeth but believes that Bacon’s remains were placed in a Virginian vault-the territory named after his supposed mother-along with his manuscripts; however, she explained that “vested money interests have thus far prevented the actual opening of the vault”
(Margaret Storm, Return of the Dove [Baltimore, MD: Margaret Storm, 1957], 267).
See also Maria Bauer, Francis Bacon’s Great Virginia Vault (self-published, 1939) and her Foundations Unearthed (Glendale, CA: Veritas Press, 1944).
Alfred Dodd, The Immortal Master (London: Rider, [1943]), 45–49; 48.
The foundation stone was laid in 1929. Alfred Dodd, Shakespeare: Creator of Freemasonry (London: Rider, [1937], 267.
Alfred Dodd, The Marriage of Elizabeth Tudor (London: Rider, 1940), 169–70.
Alfred Dodd, Sir Francis Bacon’s Diary (London: George Lapworth, 1947), 21.
Dodd, The Secret History of Francis Bacon (Our Shake-speare) The Son of Queen Elizabeth, 7th ed. (1931; repr., London: C. W. Daniel, 1941), 12.
Alfred Dodd, The Martyrdom of Francis Bacon (London: Rider, [1945?]), 139.
Rudyard Kipling, “The Judgment of Dungara,” in The Works of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1899), 2:226–37; 236.
For this and other code systems, I consulted three handbooks: Stephen Pincock, Codebreaker: The History of Codes and Ciphers, from the Ancient Pharaohs to Quantum Cryptography (New York: Walker, 2006)
Sybil Leek, Numerology: The Magic of Numbers, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1969)
and Geoffrey Hodson, The Hidden Wisdom in the Holy Bible, 3 vols. (Wheaton, IL.: Theosophical Publishing, 1967), esp. vol. 2.
Charles Singer, From Magic to Science: Essay on the Scientific Twilight (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), 144–45.
See also Thomas Taylor, The Theoretic Arithmetic of Pythagoreans (Los Angeles: Phoenix Press, 1934), vii-viii.
On Pythagorean harmonies, see O. B. Hardison Jr., “A Tree, a Streamlined Fish, and a Self-Squared Dragon: Science as a Form of Culture,” in Poetics and Praxis, Understanding and Imagination: The Collected Essays of O. B. Hardison, Jr., ed. Arthur E Kinney (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 328–60; 332–33.
Quoted in Marilynn Hughes, The Mysteries of the Redemption: A Treatise on Out-of-Body Travel and Mysticism (Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com, 2003), 149.
Quoted in Alan Silver, Jews, Myth and History: A Critical Exploration of Contemporary Jewish Belief (Leicester: Matador/Troubadour, 2008), 41.
See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Equatorie of the Planets, ed. Derek J. Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 156–63, 182–87; and
Kari Anne Rand Schmitt, The Authorship of The Equatorie of the Planetis (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer/Boydell and Brewer, 1993), 3–54.
The messages were intercepted and decoded by England’s master code-breaker, Thomas Phelippes. See John Bossy, Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 20, 37;
Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage (New York: Viking, 2005), 145–46;
Derek Wilson, Sir Francis Walsingham: A Courtier in an Age of Terror (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007), 210;
and Robert Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spymaster: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007), 267–68.
Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, eds., introduction to Richard II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–117; 4. A variety of “Caesar Shifts” and substitutions were also used in private correspondences during the English Civil War. See Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. 40–41.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 4: 126.
Walter Conrad Arensberg, The Magic Ring of Francis Bacon (Pittsburgh, PA: self-published, 1930), 7.
Walter Conrad Arensberg, The Cryptography of Shakespeare (Los Angeles: Howard Brown, 1922), 1:3.
Ironically, Arensberg was aware of the limitations of this sort of thinking, though he was only able to see the flaw in the writings of others. While sure that his system was correct, he was critical of Ignatius Donnelly’s attempt to decipher Shakespeare. While sure that his system was correct, he was critical of Ignatius Donnelly’s attempt to decipher Shakespeare: “Many of the so-called discoveries in the Shakespeare plays, as, for instance, Donnelly’s Great Cryptogram, are cases in point. They are not cryptograms at all, but merely arbitrary readings foisted into the text by mistaken ingenuity.” See Walter Conrad Arensberg, The Cryptography of Dante (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 5.
Walter Conrad Arensberg, The Baconian Keys, rev. ed. (Pittsburgh, PA: selfpublished, 1928), 11.
Margaret Barsi-Greene, I, Prince Tudor, Wrote Shakespeare: An Autobiography From His Two Ciphers in Poetry and Prose (Boston: Branden Press, 1973), 24.
Wallace McCook Cunningham, ed., The Tragedy of Sir Francis Bacon Prince of England (Los Angeles: Philosopher’s Press, 1940), 88. On this point, see also Margaret Barsi-Greene, who argues that “secret chronicle, repeated over and over again, is like a broken record” scattered throughout the First Folio (Barsi-Greene, I, Prince Tudor, Wrote Shakespeare, 12). Lastly, we might here note that Bacon’s Advancement of Learning has “frequent and extensive press corrections.” See Michael Kiernan’s introduction to Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 4: LXXVIII.
Alfred Dodd, Who Was Shake-speare? Was He Francis Bacon, The Earl of Oxford or William Shaksper? (London: George Lapworth, 1947), 20.
Edward D. Johnson, The First Folio of Shake-speare ([London]: C. Palmer, [1932]), 10–11. Johnson uses the same logic, by the way, to “prove” that Bacon is also the “true” author of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, though that book was published, of course, in Spain-their common errors do not reveal common print house accidentals but are signs that Bacon and his friends left for careful readers (71).
W. B. Venton, Analyses of Shake-speares Sonnets Using the Cipher Code (London: Mitre Press, 1968), 36–37.
Jane W. Beckett, The Secret of Shakespeare’s Doublet (Hampton, NH: P. E. Randall, 1977), passim; and Ovason, Shakespeare’s Secret Booke, 53.
Jeffrey Kaplan and Heléne Lööw go on to note that “the ideas generated within the cultic milieu may eventually become mainstream, but before they come to the attention of the dominant culture, they will have to be thoroughly vetted, debated, reformulated” (Jeffrey Kaplan and Heléne Lööw, introduction to The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization [Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press/Roman and Littlefield, 2002], 1–11; 3–4).
Stritmatter is quoted in Jennifer Howard, “A Shakespeare Scholar Takes on a ‘Taboo’ Subject,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2010,http://chronicle.com/article/A-Shakespeare-Scholar-Takes-on/64811. Relatedly, Shane McCorristine argues that Spiritualistic thought operates as an “institute of cultural disembarrassment” (Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking About Ghosts and Ghost-seeing in England, 1750–1920 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 134).
On this point, I am indebted to Shawn James Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 153.
Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1–2, emphasis my own.
James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 40. Shapiro dates this practice to Malone’s 1790 edition of Shakespeare. Malone’s practice is, arguably, still older. As discussed in Chapter 1, the first systematic attempt to understand Shakespeare by visiting Stratfordupon-Avon was undertaken by John Aubrey.
See Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 195.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 8e.
Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 4.
Sinfield adds: “it is the mismatch with present-day assumptions that allows us to make what we will of them [the plays].” Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics— Queer Reading (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 4. One must admire such honesty.
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (New York: Methuen, 1980), 116, 117; emphasis my own.
Both Hawkes and Belsey are practitioners of a game set by Paul De Man (1986), who offers the following definition of ideology: “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.” See Paul De Man, The Resistance to Theory, ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 11. On second reading, we can see the imprecision of this seemingly precise statement. Remove the extraneous phrases and we read, “Ideology is precisely the confusion”; remove the adverb and we strike at the heart of the sentence: “Ideology is the confusion.”
Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 3–23;
and Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 211. Montrose cleverly argues that the players and even the playwrights themselves might have been innocent of seditious intent, although the audience might have read the situation differently (70).
Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 10.
Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005), title page and 289.
Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 144.
Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Max Müller (1781; repr., Garden City, NY: Anchor Books/Double Day, 1966), 362. The quotation is Kant’s, though the example of the piecemeal body is my own.
Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: New York: Routledge, 1996), 227.
Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 204.
H. R. Coursen, Shakespeare: The Two Traditions (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 239.
Granville C. Cuningham, Bacon’s Secret Disclosed in Contemporary Books (London: Gay and Hancock, 1911), 33. On the plays as pointless, Wallace McCook Cunningham, writes that they are “botched by the coded burden, by the sacrifice of the cover play in the true play” (Cunningham, The Tragedy of Sir Francis Bacon Prince of England, 65).
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© 2013 Jeffrey Kahan
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Kahan, J. (2013). Crypts and Crypto-Graphology. In: Shakespiritualism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313553_3
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