Shakespeare Code Book

At what may be the single most obsessive activity related to Shakespeare study is the creation of the cipher wheel built by Dr. Orville Owen. The man would paste pages from the folio into to decipher the 'code' used to write the plays.

The Shakespeare Code puts forth the idea that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were actually written as political messages by Francis Bacon and relate a biographical history of the man. The entire output of the plays according to the author is a complete history of Bacon's youth, education and position in England and secrets about the workings of the political machinery of Elizabeth's England.

According to the author Virginia Fellows, this history can only be gleaned from the complicated machine designed and built and utilized by Dr. Orville Owen to physically feed pages of Shakespeare text into in order to receive a de-coded message. Fellows establishes a convincing argument that Francis Bacon wrote the plays as coded history, play scripts that document a wealth of political and personal information.

This would be a great film for someone who specializes in obsessive characters- Robert Deniro could pull out his best moves from The Fan to show what kind of mind of a professional medical doctor could motivate him to actually build a contraption to read supposed codified text from Shakespeare. A few questions pop up regarding the editions being used to cut and pasted into the machine, like is the first folio preferred, or later versions? Why does Bacon go out of his way to write plays with coded messages that only a live theatre audience will experience since publishing and books and reading was an exclusive habit for the upper class?

As with so many of the other theories this one succeeds on the absence of other hard facts about the Bard of Avon. The marketing blurb for The Shakespeare Code reads like a great international mystery but the book reads like a biography of Francis Bacon from his youth through old age, and some of it is banal stuff which seems to have little significance in regards to English political history.

The premise sounds like science fiction, with convincing documentation such as photos of Dr. Orville Owens cipher wheel. The invention of this wheel has drawn ridicule as well as wonderment from critics. The photo of the cipher wheel shows it to be an enormous contraption with two immense wheels upon which pages from the folio of Shakespeare plays would be pasted.

The sheets from the plays are sorted on the cipher wheel according to key words at the top of each page. The result is fascinating. According to Fellows the entire biographical information of Francis Bacon is located in the text of Shakespeare coded in dramatic writing.

It is interesting how the good Dr. Orville discovered the 'code' in the texts. A professional man, the good doctor obsessed on Shakespeare to the point of memorizing all of his plays, and because of this activity noticed repeated patterns of identical lines in the plays. One wonders just how involved he was in the actual illnesses of his patients that he expended so much energy in memorizing the complete works of the Bard of Avon.

Reading further, the good doctor looks up all the nautical references in all the plays of the folio and notices that there seems to be a narrative from beginning to end concerning the Spanish Armada and believes there is an alternate story being told.

Dividing all the word groups into classifications the good doctor decides that there is a code being used that tells stories above the dramatic tales in the plays. Amazon.com has the book for $14.96 and is should be good reading for anyone interested in the various codes surrounding the identity question of William Shakespeare.