Bacon = Shakespeare, 2009 remix…

A modern day Baron Frankenstein (actually, a mild-mannered Norwegian) has wired up the electrodes to a monstrous-looking zombie most thought long dead. It rises! It stands! It lives! It liiiiives!!!!!

I’m referring, of course, to the whole idea of using wobbly cryptography to prove that Francis Bacon = William Shakespeare, that David Kahn somewhat derisively called “enigmatology”. Note that I’m not saying the end result is wrong (even though I personally suspect that Shakespeare collaborated rather more thoroughly than his “solo genius” biographers tend to claim), but rather that the kind of reconstructive Renaissance pseudo-cryptography usually employed to try to prove that end result is usually pants central highly questionable guff.

So… what of church organist Petter Amundsen’s “Sweet Swan of Avon – The Shakespeare Treasure” claims (which I found via the forum posts here)? It’s a pretty chunky bit of TV: four 50 minute episodes, of which part 1, part 2 and part 3 are available for viewing online (mostly in Norwegian).

It all (somewhat inevitably) starts with the original version of “Good frend for Iesus SAKE forbeare…” (the start of Shakespeare’s Stratford plaque, much loved by Shakespeare conspiracy novelists), with its camelcase and extraneous dots, all good grist to Renaissance cryptographers’ mills (they also loved hiding things with doubled letters). Only in this case, Amundsen reads them as our old friend the Baconian biliteral cipher:-

BAAAB - AAAAA - AABAA - AABBB - BAAAA
  S       A       E       H       R
AAAAB - AAAAA - BABBA - AABAA - AABAA - ABBBA
  B       A       Y       E       E       P
BAAAA - AABAB - BAABA - AAAAA - BABAB - AAAAA
  R       F       T       A       X       A
BAAAA - AAAAA - BABAA - AAAAA - BAAAA
  R       A       W       A       R

…which leaves him with the letters…

S A E H R
B A Y E E P
R F T A X A
R A W A R

…where he arbitrarily transposes the two coloured groups into “W SHAXPEARE” (blue) and “FR(ancis) BA(con)” (red). But what to make of the mysterious “YETA” in the middle? After some (frankly rather kabbalistic) meditation, Amundsen decides to add “DUST” to “YETA” (modulo 24, I think) to get:-

+   Y E T A
    D U S T
    C A N V

 …thus filling out the middle of his letter rectangle even further…

S A E H R
B A C A E P
R F N V X A
R A W A R

 …i.e. “FR(ancis) BACAN V(erulam)”.

OK, I’ll admit it: we’re only halfway through the first episode of four and my patent-pending “pants-o-meter” is already shrieking like a robotic pig fed AC rather than DC… not a good start. It goes on to talk about the School of Night, the importance of the number 53, freemason plots, Oak Island, la-la-la.

Ultimately, it comes down to the age-old question: cryptographically, do I think Amundsen is (a) onto something or (b) on something? Sadly for Baconian enigmatologists everywhere, I have to say that (b) is looking far more likely. But please feel free to watch all four episodes yourself, don’t let me stop you making up your own mind. 🙂