Contested Will (20 page)

While
The Great Cryptogram
failed to resolve the authorship question, there were those who believed that its premise was sound; it was only Donnelly's grasp of Baconian ciphers that was faulty. Orville Ward Owen, a prosperous physician from Detroit who had most of Shakespeare committed to memory, took up the challenge in the 1890s. Like Donnelly, he was convinced that Bacon had probably employed a word code, though one based on a different set of ‘guide' or ‘key' terms, including ‘fortune', ‘honour', ‘nature' and ‘reputation'.

Owen had a great advantage over Donnelly, for in his search for how to discover Bacon's cipher, he claimed he had stumbled upon a forty-three-page instruction manual, in verse, that Bacon had left for his future ‘decipherer'. Owen never elaborated on this discovery, nor did he ever explain how he managed to decode the manual (a critic complained that it was a bit ‘like picking the lock of a safe, only to find inside the key to the lock you have already picked'). Bacon, Owen wrote, had instructed his decipherer to

Owen faithfully followed Bacon's instructions and built a decoding machine consisting of two large drums on which revolved a two-foot-wide and thousand-foot-long canvas sheet. He pasted onto this long loop the pages of each book attributed to Bacon –which, the cipher told him, included not only Bacon and Shakespeare's works, but also those written under Bacon's other masks: Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Edmund Spenser, Robert Burton and George Peele. Owen and his capable assistants would spin the drums and as the cut-and-pasted writing revolved, key words would reveal themselves. Adjacent lines or phrases would then be transcribed and textual messages reconstructed. Since his key terms appeared over ten thousand times on the pasted script, and the coded message could appear dozens of lines away from that word, there was a good deal of interpretive latitude about which phrases or lines Owen could claim as part of the cipher message.

The story that emerged in the six volumes he and his assistants produced –
Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story
– was breathtaking, and explained why Bacon had been so careful to conceal his story in code. Embedded within the plays (and the other works attributed to Bacon) was an autobiography that overturned a great deal of received wisdom and made Donnelly's discoveries seem tame in comparison. Queen Elizabeth was no virgin queen and Francis Bacon no son of Lady Anne and Sir Nicholas Bacon. Bacon only belatedly learned that he was the bastard child of the Earl of Leicester and Elizabeth herself – making him the rightful heir to the English throne. Hamlet could now be properly read as the poet's lament at being denied the throne. Elizabeth had taken the
play as a personal attack by her natural son and banished Bacon to France after telling him:

But before Elizabeth had a chance to acknowledge Bacon as her son and heir, Robert Cecil strangled her to death. The plays, for Owen, were clearly the by-product of their author's tumultuous life and, once again, a key to the suppressed history of the age.

One of Owen's most capable assistants, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, now entered the competition. While sympathetic to Owen's word cipher and to the autobiographical account he had uncovered, she also believed that Bacon had embedded a biliteral cipher in his writing – the type of cipher Bacon had himself described at length in 1622. This ingenious code depended on the writer using two fonts that looked alike but that a practised eye could see were not identical. Convinced that Bacon had used this cipher in the First Folio and other works and eager to make fresh discoveries, Gallup abandoned the Cipher Wheel in favour of close and meticulous analysis of alternating fonts. George Fabyan, a wealthy Bostonian who had supported Owen's research, now financed hers as well.

Another ally, Kate Prescott, leaves behind a revealing portrait of Gallup at work, overcoming a particularly knotty decoding problem:

Prescott's account of Gallup piecing together names from a string of letters recalls nothing so much as the scene in
Twelfth Night
in which Malvolio is spied on as he decodes an unsigned letter with its cryptic message ‘M.O.A.I. doth sway my life'. Malvolio gets off to a promising start – ‘“M.” Malvolio. “M” – why that begins my name'. But he runs into trouble when he sees that ‘there is no consonancy in the sequel', since ‘“A” should follow, but “O” does'. Malvolio, the patron saint of hopeful decipherers, resolves the matter in his own favour by fiddling with the anagram: ‘yet to crush this a little, it would bow to me,' for ‘every one of these letters are in my name'. The first decoder of Shakespeare's words, Malvolio would not be the last to crush an anagram to fit the name he so badly wanted to find.

The biliteral cipher revealed secrets denied to Owen. While Gallup, like her former employer, found evidence confirming that Bacon was Queen Elizabeth's son, she was able to add a crucial biographical detail: the Earl of Essex was also Elizabeth's child and therefore Bacon's younger brother (making far more poignant the clash between the two, when Bacon had to prosecute his brother after Essex's abortive coup in 1601 – a source of ‘unhappiness and ever-present remorse' forever after for Bacon). There would be even greater revelations, for the plays turned out to contain, like a set of Chinese boxes, still other plays encoded in them. These were truly plays-within-plays, unlike their pale shadows in
A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet
.

The fantasy of extending the canon, a dream that had led young William-Henry Ireland to forge Vortigern, had at last been legitimately realised. Five long-buried tragedies, all drawn from the author's circle –
Mary Queen of Scots, Robert the Earl of Essex,
Robert, Earl of Leicester, The Death of Marlowe
and
Anne Boleyn
– confirmed that embedded within Shakespeare's art was a personal
story as well as a necessarily suppressed history of his times. Unfortunately, Gallup only provides plot summaries and the occasional extract of these encoded works. But based on her findings she was able to conclude that Bacon had used these works as ‘a receptacle of his plaints' and ‘the escape valve of his momentary passions'. Collectively, they provided a rich biographical record of ‘his lost hopes, and the expression of those which he still cherished for the future'.

The discoveries did not end there, nor could they, for there was still the matter of the lost manuscripts. Here, too, Gallup got ahead of Owen, after decoding Bacon's message that the hidden manuscripts could be found in ‘certain old panels in the double work of Canonbury Tower' in Islington. To find their exact location, Bacon instructed: ‘take panel five in B's tower room, slide it under fifty with such force as to gird a spring. Follow A, B, C, therein. Soon will the Mss. so much vaunted theme of F's many books be your own.' In sole possession of this revelation, Gallup set sail for England in 1907 and made her way directly to Islington.

She soon faced renewed competition from Owen, who had temporarily returned to his medical practice but was drawn back into the fray when forwarded a copy of a decoded transcription that Kate Prescott and her husband had made of a 1638 edition of Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia
(it's not entirely clear how or why Bacon embedded this message in a book published long after he was dead and buried). Owen wrote back excitedly with ‘“an astounding message” that he had decoded their material and he now knew “where the manuscripts are!”' What enabled his discovery was a new kind of decoding, the ‘King's Move Cipher', by which Owen began at one letter and moved from there in any direction, one space, much as a king moves in chess. This cipher soon revealed where Bacon had hid his literary treasures: ‘two and a half miles above where the Wye River joins the Severn' near the Welsh border. There the decoder would find a ‘pretty dell' near ‘Wasp Hill', a cave and a castle. With the financial backing of the
Prescotts, Owen sailed to England to oversee the final stage of his great find – the unearthing of Bacon's books and manuscripts. His great Cipher Wheel was nothing compared with the dredging machinery rented by Owen to search the bottom of the Severn River for the buried manuscripts, sealed in waterproof lead containers. His search was international news, and stories and photos of his venture appeared in the British and American press. It was an exhilarating time for Baconians. It remained to be seen who would be the first to strike gold – he near Wales, or she in Islington.

Helen Keller chose this promising moment to add her voice to the growing chorus of sceptics. Five weeks after her visit to Twain in January 1909, she wrote to her long-time publisher at
Century Magazine
, Richard Watson Gilder, explaining that for ‘months I have been interested in a subject of great moment, it seems to me, in the history of the literary world, and I write to ask if you would care to publish an article on Shakespeare and Baconian authorship'. She had been won over, she wrote, by Booth's string cipher, and hoped to be in print by the time his book would appear in April: the ‘signatures are perfect, unmistakable, obvious acrostics. I have some right under my fingers in braille. I have traced and checked them, and I know that there is no accident, no imposture, no conjecture about them. No evidence given and sworn to in court could be more overwhelming than this.' She put it even more vividly in the article she was now drafting:

Keller was sure, she wrote to Gilder, that Booth's book ‘will be the talk and the wonder of the literary world. It will surely make the ears of men tingle! My fingers tingle indeed at the mere thought
of it. The beloved poet of Avon is dissolving in a mist.' Keller was not ignorant of the resistance she faced:

Gilder's response to the article she forwarded to him was disheartening: ‘The whole subject is one which grieves me beyond words', he wrote, ‘to think of your devoting your beautiful mind to.' The last thing he wanted was for Keller to take such a stance: ‘For you to come out with a partisan article on the subject will not be impressive to the public mind and only involves you in controversy which alienates you for the time being from a true literary career.' Gilder, in his patronising way, was trying to protect a very successful product, the steady and profitable supply of autobiographical works from Helen Keller, which the reading public couldn't get enough of.

But Keller was fed up with churning out autobiographical chapters and with being ‘utterly confined to one subject – myself', and felt that she had already ‘exhausted it'. The previous summer, in the preface to her latest book,
The World I Live In
, she had confessed as much to her readers: ‘Every book is in a sense autobiographical. But while other self-recording creatures are permitted at least to seem to change the subject, apparently nobody cares what I think of the tariff, the conservation of natural resources, or the … Dreyfus' case. Her ‘editorial friends' had met her every attempt to reach beyond memoir with the words, ‘“That is interesting. But will you please tell us what idea you had of goodness and beauty when you were six years old.”'

Keller was also irked by Gilder's insinuation that her interest in Bacon had been foisted on her by others. It was the same old story: those who didn't really know her or what she was capable of
assumed that because she couldn't see or hear for herself, she couldn't think for herself either. She already had to deal with reviewers who claimed that the works published under her name were ghosted, could never have been written by someone who hadn't seen or heard what she described. Keller was uncharacteristically sharp with Gilder: ‘Evidently you think I have been unhappily misled into this controversy. I do wish editors and friends could realize that I have a mind of my own.' She added, for good measure, that if ‘there is anything to be troubled about, it is the ignorance of the public at large concerning the genuine data of Shakespeare's life, and this ignorance can be dispelled if an editor and teacher will examine the matter'.