Francis Bacon as the True Author of Shakespeare

Overview

Before the Oxfordians, before the Marlovians, before the Derby and Rutland and Neville theories and the sixty-odd other candidates who have been proposed as the “real” Shakespeare, there was Bacon. Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St Alban, Lord Chancellor of England, philosopher, essayist, father of the scientific method, and — according to a theory that has persisted for over 250 years — the author of the most celebrated body of literature in the English language.

The Baconian theory is the original Shakespeare conspiracy. It was the first alternative authorship argument to be formally proposed, the first to attract serious intellectual attention, and the first to generate the kind of obsessive, code-breaking, pattern-hunting detective work that characterizes the authorship debate to this day. At its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Baconianism attracted Mark Twain, Henry James, and numerous other prominent figures. It spawned an entire cottage industry of cipher-hunting, with dedicated researchers spending decades extracting hidden messages they believed Bacon had embedded in the plays.

The theory has largely been eclipsed by the Oxfordian theory, which proposes Edward de Vere as the true author and has a more active contemporary advocacy community. But the Baconian theory retains a persistent following, and its history offers a fascinating window into the psychology of conspiracy thinking: how brilliant people can become convinced of something that the evidence does not support, and how the desire to find hidden meaning can transform any text into a palimpsest of secrets.

Origins & History

The First Doubts

The earliest known suggestion that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays appears in a 1769 biographical study by Herbert Lawrence, who noted parallels between Bacon’s philosophical writings and themes in the plays. But the idea remained a curiosity until the mid-nineteenth century, when it exploded into a full-blown literary controversy.

The unlikely catalyst was an American woman named Delia Bacon (no relation to Francis), a brilliant, self-educated lecturer from Ohio who became convinced that Shakespeare’s plays were the product of a secret intellectual circle led by Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, and Edmund Spenser. Delia Bacon spent years researching in England, receiving encouragement from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne (who wrote a preface to her book despite his own skepticism).

In 1857, she published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, a dense, sprawling, frequently impenetrable work that argued the plays contained hidden political and philosophical messages too dangerous for any single author to claim. The book was a commercial disaster, and Delia Bacon — already mentally fragile — suffered a breakdown and was committed to an asylum, where she died in 1859.

Her tragedy overshadowed her argument, but she had planted a seed. The authorship question was now public property.

The Cipher Hunters

The Baconian theory’s most distinctive feature — and ultimately its downfall — was the cipher obsession. Starting in the 1880s, successive researchers claimed to have found encrypted messages in Shakespeare’s texts proving Bacon’s authorship. The three most prominent cipher hunters were:

Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901): A former U.S. congressman and prolific writer (he also authored books arguing that Atlantis was real and that a comet had destroyed ancient civilizations), Donnelly published The Great Cryptogram in 1888, claiming to have discovered a numerical cipher in the First Folio that spelled out messages including “Shak’st spur never writ a word of them.” The book was a bestseller but was demolished by reviewers who showed that Donnelly’s method could produce any desired message.

Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1848-1934): Gallup claimed to have discovered a “biliteral cipher” — based on a genuine cipher system described in Bacon’s own De Augmentis Scientiarum — hidden in the typefaces of the First Folio. According to Gallup, variations in letter forms (slightly different versions of ‘a’ and ‘b’, for example) constituted a binary code spelling out Bacon’s confession of authorship, plus a wealth of secret history including the revelation that Bacon was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I.

Gallup’s claims were more sophisticated than Donnelly’s, and her method was based on an actual Baconian cipher system. But independent typesetters and cryptographers could not replicate her results, and it was demonstrated that the typeface variations she identified were the normal, random inconsistencies of early-modern printing rather than deliberate encoding.

Orville Ward Owen (1854-1924): A Michigan physician who built an elaborate mechanical device — the “Cipher Wheel” — consisting of long strips of text from Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s works wound around a pair of drums. By rotating the drums and reading text that appeared through a window, Owen claimed to extract hidden narratives. His methods were so idiosyncratic that no one else could replicate them, and his results — which included the location of buried manuscripts in the bed of the River Wye in England — produced nothing when tested (he actually traveled to England and dredged the river; no manuscripts were found).

The Friedmans’ Verdict

The definitive assessment of the Baconian ciphers came from two of the twentieth century’s most accomplished cryptographers: William and Elizebeth Friedman. William Friedman was the chief cryptanalyst of the U.S. Army, the man who broke the Japanese PURPLE code in World War II. His wife Elizebeth was a pioneering codebreaker in her own right.

In their 1957 book The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, the Friedmans systematically analyzed every major Baconian cipher claim and concluded that none of them met basic cryptographic standards. The “ciphers” were illusory — products of flexible methods that could be used to extract virtually any message from any sufficiently long text. The Friedmans’ verdict was devastating precisely because their credentials were unimpeachable: if anyone could recognize a genuine cipher, it was them.

The Non-Cipher Case

Stripped of the ciphers, the Baconian theory rests on circumstantial arguments:

Intellectual range: Bacon was one of the most learned men of his age, with extensive knowledge of law, philosophy, natural science, classical languages, and political theory. The plays demonstrate comparable breadth. Shakespeare of Stratford, by contrast, has no documented formal education beyond grammar school.

Legal knowledge: The plays contain extensive and sophisticated legal language and concepts. Bacon was one of England’s foremost lawyers, eventually becoming Lord Chancellor. This parallel has been cited since the earliest Baconian arguments.

Philosophical depth: Bacon’s philosophical writings — particularly his emphasis on empirical observation, his taxonomy of human cognitive biases (“Idols”), and his vision of knowledge as power — find echoes in the plays’ treatment of perception, illusion, and the natural world.

Political sensitivity: Bacon was deeply embedded in Elizabethan and Jacobean court politics. Publishing plays under his own name — particularly plays with political content (the history plays, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus) — could have been dangerous. A pseudonym would have been prudent.

Rosicrucian connection: Some Baconians have connected Bacon to the Rosicrucian movement, a secret philosophical society dedicated to hidden knowledge. If Bacon was a Rosicrucian, concealing his authorship would be consistent with the society’s emphasis on secrecy.

Key Claims

The Baconian theory encompasses several types of claims:

• Authorship: Francis Bacon wrote some or all of the works attributed to Shakespeare, using “William Shakespeare” as a pseudonym or front
• Intellectual match: Bacon’s documented knowledge, education, and interests match the intellectual requirements of the plays far better than Shakespeare’s documented biography
• Hidden ciphers: Bacon embedded coded messages in the texts confirming his authorship (this claim has been largely abandoned by serious Baconians)
• Political necessity: Bacon’s high government position made public playwriting impossible, requiring a pseudonym
• Group authorship: Some Baconians propose that Bacon led a writing circle (including Raleigh, Spenser, and others) rather than writing alone
• Rosicrucian mission: The plays served a secret philosophical and political purpose connected to Bacon’s involvement with esoteric societies
• Shakespeare as front man: William Shakespeare of Stratford was a willing (or unwitting) participant who lent his name to works he did not write

Evidence

For the Baconian Position

• Bacon’s documented intellectual range matches the plays’ breadth of knowledge
• His legal expertise is consistent with the plays’ sophisticated use of legal concepts
• His philosophical works contain ideas that parallel themes in the plays
• His political position provided motive for anonymity
• Contemporary references describe Bacon as a writer of “concealed poetry”
• The plays’ treatment of natural philosophy aligns with Bacon’s empirical method
• Some verbal parallels exist between Bacon’s prose works and Shakespeare’s texts

Against the Baconian Position

• No direct evidence: No letter, diary entry, financial record, or contemporary statement links Bacon to the plays. Bacon’s own extensive correspondence and personal papers never mention Shakespeare or playwriting
• Stylistic differences: Bacon’s prose style — formal, Latinate, methodical — is markedly different from Shakespeare’s dramatic verse, which is colloquial, metaphorical, and emotionally dynamic. Computational stylometry (statistical analysis of writing style) consistently distinguishes the two
• Timeline difficulties: While less severe than the Oxfordian death-date problem (Bacon died in 1626, after all Shakespeare plays were written), there are periods when Bacon was intensely occupied with government business during years when Shakespeare was most productive as a playwright
• Contemporary attribution: Ben Jonson, who knew both Bacon and Shakespeare personally, attributed the plays to Shakespeare in unambiguous terms in the First Folio preface (1623). Jonson also wrote about Bacon in his notebooks (Timber) without mentioning any connection to Shakespeare
• Cipher failure: Every major Baconian cipher claim has been debunked by professional cryptographers. The Friedmans’ 1957 analysis is considered definitive
• Competing candidates: The rise of the Oxfordian theory demonstrated that the Baconian “fit” — education, travel, aristocratic knowledge — applies equally well (or better) to other candidates, undermining the specificity of the case
• Bacon’s own literary ambitions: Bacon published extensively under his own name (The Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, The New Atlantis, Essays). He was not shy about authorship. The idea that he simultaneously published major philosophical works openly while hiding a massive literary output as Shakespeare requires significant explanation

Debunking / Verification

The Baconian theory is classified as unresolved within the broader Shakespeare authorship question, but it occupies a weaker evidential position than the Oxfordian theory:

• The cipher claims, which were once the theory’s most distinctive feature, have been conclusively debunked
• Stylometric analysis does not support common authorship of Bacon’s prose and Shakespeare’s plays
• No direct evidence links Bacon to the plays
• Ben Jonson’s testimony explicitly attributes the plays to Shakespeare and separately discusses Bacon without connecting them

The circumstantial case — intellectual range, legal knowledge, political motive — remains interesting but does not constitute evidence of authorship. These same arguments can be (and have been) applied to multiple other candidates.

Cultural Impact

The Baconian theory’s cultural impact is primarily historical: it launched the Shakespeare authorship debate, a controversy that has persisted for over 250 years and shows no signs of resolution.

Template for authorship theories: Every subsequent alternative candidate has been argued using the framework Delia Bacon and the early Baconians established: biographical parallels, intellectual fit, and the argument from Shakespeare’s “insufficient” education and experience.

Cipher culture: The Baconian cipher hunt created a template for pattern-finding in literary texts that extends well beyond Shakespeare. The same impulse — the conviction that great texts contain hidden messages accessible only to determined seekers — drives Bible code theories, Beatles “Paul is dead” investigations, and countless other decoding projects.

Literary celebrity: The authorship question has made “who wrote Shakespeare?” one of the most famous unsolved questions in literary history, generating an endless stream of books, articles, documentaries, and academic conferences.

Class politics: The Baconian theory, like the Oxfordian theory, carries implicit class assumptions: the notion that a commoner from Stratford could not have produced works of aristocratic sophistication. This framing has been criticized as elitist, though Baconians counter that their argument concerns specific knowledge (legal training, classical languages), not innate ability.

In Popular Culture

• Mark Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909) — Twain’s humorous but serious examination of the authorship question, explicitly arguing the Baconian position
• The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined (1957) — The Friedmans’ definitive debunking of the cipher claims, itself a remarkable piece of cryptographic writing
• Henry James’s support — The novelist expressed sympathy with the Baconian theory, adding literary prestige to the movement
• Delia Bacon’s tragic story — Her life and breakdown have been the subject of several biographical works, including The Woman Who Read Too Much by Christy Desmet
• Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography (2001) — Diana Price’s examination of the documentary record, touching on the Baconian and other alternative theories

Key Figures

• Francis Bacon, Viscount St Alban (1561-1626) — The candidate himself: philosopher, statesman, essayist, Lord Chancellor of England, and one of the founders of modern scientific method
• Delia Bacon (1811-1859) — American lecturer who effectively launched the authorship question with her 1857 book, paying for her obsession with her sanity
• Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901) — Former congressman and polymath who claimed to have found numerical ciphers in the First Folio
• Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1848-1934) — Claimed to have discovered Bacon’s biliteral cipher in the typefaces of the First Folio
• Orville Ward Owen (1854-1924) — Built the “Cipher Wheel” and dredged the River Wye searching for buried manuscripts
• William and Elizebeth Friedman — World-class cryptographers whose 1957 analysis demolished the Baconian cipher claims

Timeline

Sources & Further Reading

• Bacon, Delia. The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded. Groombridge and Sons, 1857.
• Donnelly, Ignatius. The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays. R.S. Peale, 1888.
• Friedman, William F., and Elizebeth S. Friedman. The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined. Cambridge University Press, 1957.
• Shapiro, James. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Simon & Schuster, 2010.
• Twain, Mark. Is Shakespeare Dead? Harper & Brothers, 1909.
• Price, Diana. Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem. Greenwood Press, 2001.
• Pogue, Kate. The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Authorship Theories. McFarland, 2019.

Related Theories

• Edward de Vere (Oxfordian) Shakespeare Theory — The dominant contemporary alternative authorship theory
• Shakespeare Authorship Question — The broader umbrella debate over who wrote the plays