Reviewed by James North

The reprint of Virginia Fellows' work The Shakespeare Code (first edition 2000) is among the most significant Baconian publications of recent years. The story it tells is not new: the original writings on which The Shakespeare Code is based caused a sensation in the early 20th century. Their intriguing but controversial claims, based on the apparent deciphering of Baconian texts, left an indelible mark upon the Shakespeare Authorship Question. Even Baconians themselves disagreed both over the validity of the methods used to uncover the story and the plausibility of the information revealed. The great, timely virtue of Virginia Fellows' new work is that it re-tells the cipher story succintly and entertainingly. The book is attractively produced and highly readable. It is also furnished with a generous selection of photographs and a very useful appendix on cipher written by the editors at Summit University Press. Fellows herself died shortly before the book's publication and it surely stands as a worthy testatement to her Baconian endeavours.

The content of Fellows' book is drawn from Francis Bacon's Cipher Story by the Detroit-based Dr Orville Owen (5 vols. beginning in 1893) and The Bi-literal Cipher (1899) of Owen's assistant and later co-worker Elizabeth Wells Gallup. The bare bones of the 'cipher story' as presented by its champions are as follows. The vital fact in Bacon's biography, necessarily unknown to superficial history, is that he was in fact the unacknowledged, illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester. They are claimed to have had a second secred son, known to history as Robert Devereaux the (Second) Earl of Essex, who was thus Bacon's natural brother. Bacon'is long and hopeless quest for succession or even a position fitting his birth, formed the tragic background to his life's work. He chanelled his frustrated right to rule into unprecedented literary activity, all of his writings except philosophy appearing under others' names. Thus, not only did he create the Shakespeare Plays, but also the works of Spenser, Marlowe and others. This plethora of pseudonymously authored literature formed an outlet for Bacon's genius while languishing in political obscurity until his mid-40s when Elizabeth died, but also enabled him to encode his true life-story, using Shakespeare and other works as 'cover-texts'.

If all this were true, Francis Bacon would surely be accepted as the greatest genius in human history. But the maximalist, seeimngly preposterous nature of these claims was bound to outrage those who might grudgingly concede Bacon's involvement in Shakespeare but find the demolition of almost all other Elizabethan poets intolerable.

Owen's method used Shakespeare and other cover texts as 'cut-ups' - by linking lines from different Plays or even different books, he generated new poems. To aid this process, he constructed a unique machine (pictured below) which is surely the single most interesting artifact in the Authorship Question. Owen's method was original and although sceptics were apparently distressed to find that following Owen's system they were corroborating his findings, the suspicions lingers that what Owen actually created was, at best, a kind of divinatory machine, a 'wheel of fortune' used analogously to Tarot cards or I Ching, but more likely a William Burroughsesque cut-up that in effect wove a new story out of archetypes of the Elizabethan Unconscious, as Jungians might suggest. His methods have, of course, been critiqued, but they may be due for re-examination.

By contrast, Wells-Gallup followed the most rational (cynics would say the only rational) approach in the history of Baconian decipherments. Her work was based on a real cipher, and moreover one that Francis Bacon himself had created and described in his 1623 work De Augmentiis Scientiarum. Known as the Bi-literal cipher, it formed the basis of what we call Morse Code and further, of the binary code used by all computers. It requires the use two subtly-differing alphabets grouped in groups of five characters. (More details can be found in the editors' appendix). Unfortunately, only Wells-Gallup seemed able to discern meaningful font differences in the Elizabethan books consulted. Devastatingly, she was in some cases unable to repeat her own previous decipherments of the same original text, which seems to be a definitive refutation of her methodology, if not her principles. Those interested in phenomena such as spiritualism and automatic writing may suspect that Wells-Gallup was actually, unknown to herself, a psychic in the notable tradition of 19th century mediums following the contemporary explosion of interest in spiritualism, rather than a mere cryptographer.

In any case, Fellows' book wisely avoids controversy and simply tells the story. As such, this book is of immediate interest to several kinds of reader. The writings of Owen and Gallup are obviously central to the history of Baconianism, for good or bad. But their writings also stand as a unique phenomenon in the history of literature. Those interested in modernist and later literary techniques will see Owen and Gallup as (perhaps unwitting) antecedents, whilst enthusiasts for psychic research will be motivated to study the methods and biographies of these two individuals at greater length. The cipher story is also of particular interest to adherents of esoteric religious movements such as Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and Theosophy, because they were endorsed by Rosicrucians and Masons such as Manly Palmer Hall and the Baconian, Alfred Dodd.

Lastly, the book itself is enjoyable (at times riveting) and coherent even as a work of fiction, reading very much like a Victorian, nostalgic romance: whether true or not, it is very much of its late 19th-century milieu. There is a great irony in that Bacon memorably identified the tendency of the human mind to accept self-consistent unverifiable stories on the basis of their appeal, naming them Idols of the Theatre. Certainly, we all use our imagination as a kind of theatre where our own creativity is reponsible for what we see, but though this makes for fine poetry it may lead to questionable science. If there is one lesson to be learned from the Authorship Question it is that many theorists of all creeds, Stratfordian, Baconian and other, are in love with their inner Theatrical Idol, which is why they become violently upset at rival doctrines. As Bacon said in Novum Organum "The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called 'sciences as one would.' For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes". To apply 'dry light' to this emotionally-engaging story, scholars must continue to test the plausibility of the cipher story as an alternative history, and to come to a clearer understanding of the phenomenon of the Baconian cipher literature.

Whatever the reader's background and motivation, Virginia Fellows' book is thoroughly enjoyable and destined to form a permanent part of heterodox Shakespearean literature. Bacon advised us "Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider". The Shakespeare Code will surely spark re-weighing and reconsideration of the Baconian cipher story.

View The Shakespeare Code at the Summit University Press website

For more detail on Dr Orville Owen and Elizabeth Wells-Gallup see the following books by John Michell:
"Who Wrote Shakespeare"
"Eccentric Lives"