Contested Will (19 page)

After dinner that first evening Macy announced that he had brought along galley proofs of a forthcoming book, written by an English friend, William Stone Booth, called
Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon
. Isabel Lyon observed that ‘the King was instantly alert'. The following day the conversation returned to the authorship question and Macy announced that Booth had found in every one of the plays published in the First Folio an acrostic, hidden there by Francis Bacon. To prove the point, he pulled out some page proofs and showed the ciphers to Twain, including one from the closing lines of
The Tempest
, where Booth had underlined a dozen key words in the facsimile of Prospero's Epilogue as they appeared in the 1623 Folio. Booth believed that the hidden signature in this play was especially convincing, coming as it did from the play's closing lines, ‘the playwright's last word to his audience, and the place where he would be likely to sign his name in cipher if writing either under a pseudonym or anonymously'.

Macy couldn't have chosen a better example to pique Twain's interest – or indeed that of most admirers of Shakespeare's works at the time, since Prospero's departure from the stage was nearly universally read as Shakespeare's own, the most transparently autobiographical moment in the canon. Twain had trouble identifying Booth's seemingly random string cipher. With Macy's help,
he was finally able to follow it from the bottom of the page to the top, singling out the first letter of each key word and successfully spelling out the encoded signature: ‘FRANCISCO BACONO'. Macy confidently announced that Booth's book was ‘going to make a complete establishment of the fact that Shakespeare never wrote the plays attributed to him'.

Those quick to dismiss the possibility that a hidden acrostic signature could be overlooked for centuries may be unaware that a leading scholar had made such a find in a canonical work just a few years before Booth had begun his search.
The Testament of Love
was a medieval prose narrative that had been accepted without question as Chaucer's – by the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and Coleridge – since its inclusion in the 1532 edition of his collected works. By the early nineteenth century, biographers such as William Godwin were drawing on key details in
The Testament of Love
to flesh out their story of Chaucer's life. Then, in 1897, while freshly editing this work, Cambridge professor Walter Skeat discovered that the first letter of the first word of each chapter formed an acrostic that spelled out: ‘MARGARETE: OF VIRTW, HAVE MERCI ON THSKNVI.' ‘Margaret of virtue, have mercy' made sense enough to Skeat, but who was ‘Thsknui'? The puzzle was solved by his friend Henry Bradley, who pointed out that the order of the closing chapters had been rearranged. The acrostic originally read ‘THIN VSK' – ‘thine Usk.' After three and a half centuries of false attribution,
The Testament of Love
was at last revealed to have been written not by Chaucer but by his fellow writer and admirer Thomas Usk. If one of Chaucer's works was now shown to have been written by somebody else, why not one or more of Shakespeare's?

A fierce race was on to see who would be the first to prove that Bacon's authorship was encoded in Shakespeare's plays. Booth was a relative newcomer to the contest; his formidable competitors and their teams of assistants had already devoted years of their lives to scanning Folio pages for word ciphers and biliteral ciphers.
By 1909 two of Booth's main rivals had already sailed to England, convinced they were on the verge of finding Bacon's long-buried manuscripts of the plays. For those invested in the authorship question, the excitement was intense. In July 1909, the official Baconian journal,
Baconiana
, excitedly announced ‘The Goal in Sight' and held up publication through the autumn to be the first to break the news of the great discovery.

It was Delia Bacon's friend Samuel Morse who had set in motion the age's fascination with codes and ciphers. The effect of the telegraph and Morse code, not only on the popular appreciation of encryption, but also on how knowledge was now imagined as an act of decoding, was profound. Even as readers were searching texts for encoded clues, writers like Edgar Allan Poe (in stories like ‘The Gold Bug') were beginning to produce fiction that turned on deciphering codes. At a moment when even children could send coded messages and governments and businesses regularly encrypted communications, the notion that earlier writers had hidden codes in their works no longer seemed far-fetched. And as the world-wide popularity of
The Da Vinci Code
attests, these Victorian assumptions have, if anything, become more deeply entrenched.

A few years after Mark Twain established the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Company in 1884 he had a chance to publish what promised to be the definitive deciphering of Shakespeare's works. Its author, Ignatius Donnelly – former Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota, then three-term congressman, and a lifelong political reformer – had already won a wide following as a writer with his wildly popular
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
in 1882, in which he argued that there really had been a lost world of Atlantis hinted at by the ancients. Donnelly followed up that success a year later with
Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel
, which claimed that a great comet had
smashed into the Earth aeons ago, almost destroying the planet. Even before these books came out, Donnelly had turned to a new project: ‘I have been working … at what I think is a great discovery,' he wrote in his diary, ‘a cipher in Shakespeare's Plays … asserting Francis Bacon's authorship of the plays … I am certain there is a cipher there and I think I have the key.' It took Donnelly six years of exhausting labour to work out the code and publish his findings in the thousand-page
The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays
(1888).

 Cipher Wheel, frontispiece to vol. 2 of Orville Ward Owen's
Sir Francis
Bacon's Cipher Story
(Detroit, 1894)

Twain later recalled that when ‘Ignatius Donnelly's book came out, eighteen or twenty years ago, I not only published it, but read it'. That's not quite true. Twain had initially decided against taking it on, but then changed his mind and condemned his partner for failing to publish it. Twain had read Donnelly's book closely and found it ‘an ingenious piece of work'. In the end, though, he didn't find the acrostics convincing enough: ‘a person had to work his imagination rather hard sometimes if he wanted to believe in 
the acrostics', and, as a result, the book ‘fell pretty flat'. But Twain heartily endorsed Donnelly's argument that writers drew upon what they experienced first-hand, not what ‘they only know about by hearsay'.

Donnelly had stumbled onto the authorship question by accident. Flipping through the pages of a volume his son was reading –
Every Boy's Book
– he came across a chapter on cryptography, where he learned that the ‘most famous and complex cipher perhaps ever written was by Lord Bacon'. What ‘followed, like a flash' for Donnelly was the question: ‘Could Lord Bacon have put a cipher in the plays?' He immediately turned to Bacon's late work,
De Augmentis Scientiarum
, to learn more about Baconian ciphers, and was hooked. It didn't take long for Donnelly to conclude that Bacon had embedded ‘in the plays a cipher story, to be read when the tempest that was about to assail civilization had passed away'. The story was already taking on the apocalyptic dimensions of Atlantis and Ragnarok. Donnelly supposed that if Bacon had encoded a message, it would read along the lines of ‘I, Francis Bacon, of St. Albans, son of Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England, wrote these Plays, which go by the name of William Shakespeare.' Lacking a concordance, he set about reading through the complete works in search of something like it.

Having come up empty-handed, Donnelly decided that the encoding must have been far more sophisticated, so complex that Bacon had to have written the code first and the plays almost as an afterthought. As he later explained:

Donnelly didn't have a clue about how compositors worked in Elizabethan printing houses, where such a scheme would have been unimaginable and the layout he describes impossible to reproduce. Even with his complex arithmetical scheme, Donnelly had to fudge his word cipher, which was based on the numerical distance between his arbitrarily chosen key words. Worse still, he constantly miscounted in order to arrive at satisfying results. Cryptologists who have examined his method have concluded that he ‘described Bacon's own cipher without understanding it' and ‘showed a fatal inclination to seize on whole words which happen to be in both the vehicle and the message to be deciphered'. It also turned out that his cipher could produce virtually any message one wanted to find. Donnelly nevertheless remained confident ‘beyond a doubt' that ‘there is a Cipher in the so-called Shakespeare Plays. The proofs are cumulative. I have shown a thousand of them.'

Donnelly is notable less for his cryptographic skills than for his belief that there was a grander, autobiographical story buried in the plays. He saw, especially in
The Tempest
, a self-portrait of ‘the princely, benevolent and magnanimous' Francis Bacon, who, ‘like Prospero, had been cast down'. What began with a disguised author's hidden life blossomed into far-reaching and revisionist history: ‘the inner story in the plays', Donnelly writes, makes visible ‘the struggles of factions in the courts; the interior view of the birth of religions; the first colonization of the American continent, in which Bacon took an active part, and something of which is hidden in
The Tempest
'.

In the end, finding a disguised signature or an embedded autobiography or even rewriting world history wasn't enough, not for Donnelly and not for most cipher hunters. Like many other doubters, he went in search of that Holy Grail, the lost manuscripts of the plays. He suspected that they were ‘buried probably in the earth, or in a vault of masonry, a great iron or brass coffer'. While promoting his book in England he tried and failed to persuade the Earl of Verulam, Bacon's descendant, to allow him to
excavate at the estate in hopes of unearthing the long-lost manuscripts, following hints in the cipher.

We can smile at all this now, but in his own day, Donnelly's work won many admirers, among them the poet Walt Whitman, who recommended the book to friends and was inspired by it to write a brief poem – ‘Shakespeare Bacon's Cipher' – later included in his
Leaves of Grass
:

The poem initially bore the subtitle ‘A Hint to Scientists'. For Whitman, there was something not dreamt of in the philosophy of those supposed experts; he found deeply appealing the idea of a hidden, mystical meaning in all things, in all poetry – unseen by the rigid and doctrinaire.

Twain, too, was inspired by Donnelly's approach, enough to try his own hand at deciphering a literary work that had long fascinated him: John Bunyan's 1678 classic,
The Pilgrim's Progress
– though he never developed these ideas beyond a notebook sketch. Even as Donnelly and others had been troubled by the fit between the provincial man from Stratford and the greatness of the plays attributed to him, Twain became convinced that
The Pilgrim's Progress
could never have been written by someone with Bunyan's limited life experience. Twain concluded that
The Pilgrim's Progress
, with its account of the ‘Eternal City', could only have been written by somebody who had actually been to Rome; Bunyan, who Twain joked, had never seen ‘anything but a canal boat', assuredly hadn't. So Twain reassigned the work to a writer he knew had travelled widely, John Milton, whose ‘great Continental Tour enabled him to imagine the travel in the Dream – and no stay-at-home could ever have done it'. Milton, Twain
added, ‘was a clandestine duck' who ‘used to always jerk a public poem to divert attention from what he meant to do some day' in
The Pilgrim's Progress
; ‘not knowing' that Milton ‘was riddling', readers ‘took him at his word' and misread his intentions. Once down the conspiratorial road, it was hard to stop. Twain also suspected that Milton also became involved in the Shakespeare conspiracy, and supposed that the ‘furtive Bacon got him and Ben Jonson to play into his hand', persuading Milton to contribute an enthusiastic poem on ‘Shakespeare' for the 1632 Second Folio. Knowing and admiring ‘Bacon's secret', Twain writes, Milton ‘afterward borrowed the idea without credit'. As tempting as it is to dismiss this sketch as a parody on Twain's part, he seems far too invested, researched it too thoroughly and draws too many connections for it to simply be a joke:
The Pilgrim's Progress
, he concludes, ‘must be read between the lines'. ‘This has never been suspected before,' he concludes, but ‘the cipher makes it plain'.