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The Fraudulent Friedmans

by A. Phoenix


THE FRAUDULENT FRIEDMANS BY A PHOENIX.

We have produced a 340 page book entitled The Fraudulent Friedmans (supported by 81 illustrations and 756 references) accompanied by a I hour and 40 minutes video. Given the length of the book in the following days and weeks we will be providing extracts highlighting important pieces of evidence and information relating to the lives and writings of the Friedmans and their involvement in the greatest literary fraud in history concerning Francis Bacon’s concealed authorship of the Shakespeare works.

Here are the links for the video trailer, the full video and the book:

For the video trailer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I-hIZPortXAgMupMTs89bcmlq4zzxO2D/view

For the video that explores the full story see: https://youtu.be/fc2ErlSmmjI

For a detailed paper on ‘The Friedman Fraud’ see: https://aphoenix1.academia.edu/research

Please find a synopsis below:

SYNOPSIS OF THE FRAUDULENT FRIEDMANS: THE BACON CIPHERS IN THE SHAKESPEARE WORKS

 By A Phoenix 

For over sixty years deluded Bacon and Shakespeare scholars supported by universities around the four corners of the globe, fanned by the international news media, have deceived the rest of the world into believing that the Friedmans, the two greatest cryptographers of the twentieth century, had once and for all in their book The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined put an end to the notion of Baconian ciphers being present in the Shakespeare plays, a falsehood which continues to deceive the world to the present day.

This is a story about one of the greatest literary frauds of all time fully revealed here for the first time that will absolutely shock Shakespeare scholarship and the rest of the world and necessitate a complete re-assessment of Francis Bacon’s true authorship of the Shakespeare works.

From a very early age Francis Bacon was given a baptism into ciphers and codes and other arcane cryptic devices for concealing and communicating secret and hidden information. His father Lord Keeper and de facto Lord Chancellor of England Sir Nicholas Bacon and his uncle Secretary of State Sir William Cecil were the twin pillars of the Elizabethan Reformation and effectively the heads of the secret state. The lifeblood of the Elizabethan state and the English Secret Service headed by Sir Francis Walsingham were secret ciphers and codes and its three principal pillars Bacon, Cecil and Walsingham went to extraordinary lengths to maintain a cryptographic hegemony over their dangerous European rivals and the domestic enemies of the English government. Early in the Elizabethan reign Sir William Cecil and Sir Nicholas Bacon directed the great mathematician and cryptographic expert Dr John Dee to seek out a rare manuscript copy of Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia. The spy, intelligencer and secret government agent Dr Dee had a profound and extensive interest in cryptology and after tracking down a prized manuscript of Steganographia on the continent he returned with it to England, where a copy of it was placed in the hands of his political masters. He was afterwards a mentor to the young Francis Bacon who possessed an all-consuming and profound fascination for all ciphers and codes and other cryptographic devices necessary for a life in the English Secret Service.

In 1576 a fifteen year old Francis Bacon travelled in the train of the Ambassador-elect Sir Amias Paulet for a three year stay at the English Embassy in Paris which stood at the very centre of European intrigue and espionage where he was joined by the great English cryptographer Thomas Phelippes with the two of them occupied with ciphers and other areas of cryptography on an almost daily basis. It was during his time in Paris that Bacon later recalled how he invented his famous bi-literal cipher, a cipher system he later secretly inserted into his Shakespeare works. Living in Paris at the time when Bacon was busy working with and inventing new ciphers was the diplomat and cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère with whom Bacon is believed to have collaborated on his Traicte des Chiffre or secret ways of writing.  

In 1591 there appeared in London a Latin edition of a milestone work on cryptology by the Italian polymath and playwright Giambattista della Porta entitled De Fvtivis Literarvm Notis printed by John Wolfe, and dedicated to Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Some two centuries later there was discovered at Northumberland House (at the time in the ownership of his ancestor Earl Percy, afterwards the Duke of Northumberland) what has come to be known as the Northumberland MSS that originally contained several of Bacon’s writings among them his Shakespeare plays Richard II and Richard III. On the outer-cover of The Northumberland Manuscript the name of Bacon/Francis Bacon and his pseudonym Shakespeare/William Shakespeare are scribbled on more than a dozen occasions. Down the left side appears Honorificabiletudine a variant of the long word honorificabilitudinitatibus in Loves Labours Lost (5:1:41). Further down the page we are met with the entry ‘revealing day through every crany peepes and see Shak’, line 1086 of The Rape of Lucrece ‘revealing day through every cranny spies’. In particular above the entry for Bacon’s Shakespeare play Richard II appears the entry ‘By Mr. ffrauncis William Shakespeare’ and further down the word ‘Your’ is twice written across his pseudonym William Shakespeare-so it reads ‘Your William Shakespeare’.

With the spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham now dead the headquarters of the English Secret Service had been transferred to Essex House on the Strand the grand stately residence of the royal favourite Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex. Under the roof of Essex House, Francis and Anthony Bacon ran a vast domestic and foreign intelligence network of spies and intelligencers operating across the European continent. Working out of Gray’s Inn and Essex House, Francis and Anthony also set up a literary workshop with connections to English printers and publishers employing writers, translators, and scribes for distribution of private manuscripts, books, plays, masques and other entertainments. This Bacon-Essex circle included the Earl of Southampton to whom Bacon dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and to whom many of his Shakespeare sonnets were addressed.

Francis and Anthony Bacon were the joint heads of the foreign and domestic arms of the English Secret Service that evolved into British Intelligence in other words the equivalent of MI5 and MI6. They were in charge of gathering intelligence domestically and from all over Europe for which they employed a highly organised network of secret agents and spies whose important intelligence and information was conveyed through secret codes and ciphers and the interception of ciphered correspondence of enemy agents, deciphered by Francis, Anthony, and Thomas Phelippes.

In his first major acknowledged work The Advancement of Learning Bacon sets out a series of cipher systems which he named Simple Cipher, Kay Cipher, Wheel Cipher and his Bi-literal Cipher, that he secretly incorporated into the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio. Shortly before the publication of the First Folio in November 1623 there appeared in Latin Bacon’s truly monumental De Augmentis Scientiarum Libri IX which included a much more expansive and detailed explanation of his Bi-literal Cipher. Soon after the publication of the De Augmentis and the Shakespeare First Folio there appeared the extremely rare work on cryptology entitled Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae Libri IX by one Gustavus Selenus, a pseudonym for Augustus, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg, a near five hundred page work published at Luneburg early in 1624. The revealing title page of the Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae contains a pictorial cryptogram depicting Francis Bacon giving a figure holding a spear dressed in actor’s boots, representing the actor William Shakspere, a quarto or book of plays, who is shown carrying them off into the distance toward a building representing the Globe Theatre.

Some three centuries later the discovery of the presence of Bacon’s Biliteral Cipher was announced to the world in a series of volumes published by the remarkable Elizabeth Wells Gallup entitled The Bi-literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in his Works. On examining the prefatory material of the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio Gallup deciphered a series of revelations about Francis Bacon’s secret life and enormous corpus of writings revealing that not only was he the secret author of the Shakespeare works but also the works published in the names of among others Spenser, Greene, and Marlowe, and that he was the concealed royal son of Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

News of these revelations soon reached the ears of Colonel George Fabyan who had had set up his  Riverbank estate located west of Chicago which is still shrouded in secrecy and mystery to the present day. It was here that Colonel Fabyan provided Gallup with a staff and extensive resources to continue her investigations into the Bacon Bi-literal Cipher and its presence in the Shakespeare works and other Baconian publications set forth anonymously or in the names of others. She was afterwards joined at Riverbank by William F. Friedman and his future wife Elizebeth Smith, the widely acclaimed duo who went on to become the two greatest cryptographers of the twentieth century and the authors of The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined.

The years spent by the Friedmans at Riverbank are not well-documented and what we know or believe of their time there almost entirely derives from the story told by the Friedmans themselves in a series of unpublished manuscripts and lectures and their book The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined.   

For the next few years the Friedmans worked closely alongside Elizabeth Wells Gallup assisting her in a complex and minute study of the Bacon Bi-literal Cipher and its links to the Shakespeare First Folio and soon after the Friedmans were appointed the joints Heads of the Riverbank Department of Ciphers.

During this period the Riverbank Cipher Department headed by the Friedmans produced a series of pamphlets known as the Riverbank Laboratories Publications on Cryptography. These comprise of a series of important ground-breaking technical monographs dealing with cryptography and cryptanalysis and several dealing with Gallup’s work on the Bacon Bi-literal Cipher. A number of the volumes on the Bacon Bi-literal Cipher were issued anonymously and the identity of their author (s), who were of course known to the Friedmans, remain unknown to the world at large to the present day.

For more than half a century the Friedmans had every opportunity to reveal the identity of the authors of these anonymous Riverbank publications on the Bacon Bi-literal Cipher but repeatedly refused to do so. The reason why, is the Friedmans themselves, were the anonymous authors of these tracts in which it is emphatically stated that the presence of Bacon’s cipher system identified by Elizabeth Wells Gallup has been repeatedly tested and dissected, and was and is, demonstrable beyond any and all doubt.

In 1997 there appeared a still virtually unknown work entitled The Sabines at Riverbank: Their Role in the Science of Architectural Acoustics by John W. Kopec. The book issued by the Acoustical Society of America was limited to only a thousand copies on a subject which falls outside the ordinary scope of literary scholarship and largely for this reason still remains unknown to Baconian and Shakespearean scholarship.

In researching the work Kopec fully immersed himself in the history of Riverbank, a history which has barely been glanced at. Virtually all of what little is known of the Riverbank Cipher Department has come down to us through the lens of the Friedmans. Their three main repositories (two unpublished) where they discussed their time at Riverbank provide us with only a very carefully edited version of the circumstances and events surrounding it and their parts played in the authorship of the Riverbank publications on the Bacon Bi-literal Cipher. Their various accounts about their time at Riverbank are marked by inconsistency, factual discrepancy, deliberate omissions, falsehoods, and deceit. Now here for the very first time was a book on Riverbank by an author who had spent more than two decades on site with unlimited access to what records remained of its secret, obscure and hidden past. Kopec’s book is dedicated to Don Williams, son of Fabyan’s chauffeur Bert Williams, who drove the limousine that picked up Elizebeth Smith Friedman from the Newberry Library in Chicago, marking the beginning of her career at Riverbank from 1916 to 1920.

The long-time Riverbank chauffeur Bert Williams knew the Friedmans well and for the years the couple lived on the estate he was in almost daily contact with them, as he was with Elizabeth Wells Gallup, providing him with first-hand inside information about the Riverbank publications on the Bacon Bi-literal Ciphers and their authorship.  

Outside of the records Don Williams ‘Mr. Riverbank’ who was born there in 1920 was a critical source of information for Kopec. Don ‘Mr Riverbank’ Williams, worked at Riverbank for 35 years before retiring in 1985, and knew more about it than any other person alive. In the main body of the text Kopec devoted several pages to the period spent by the Friedmans at the Riverbank estate. His informative discussions with Don Williams included the explosive and far-reaching statement of enormous historical importance to Baconian and Shakespearean scholarship and the truth about Lord Bacon’s authorship of the Shakespeare works: namely, the anonymous The Greatest Work of Sir Francis Bacon issued by the Riverbank Cipher Department was written by the Friedmans, confirming the presence of the Bacon Bi-literal Cipher in the Shakespeare canon.                 

For the rest of their lives the Friedmans remained silent about their authorship of The Greatest Work of Sir Francis Bacon endorsing the presence of the Bacon Bi-literal Cipher in the Shakespeare works and decades later when both Fabyan and Elizabeth Wells Gallup were long dead wrote The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined wherein they fraudulently pretended in the open plain text that no Bacon ciphers were used in the Shakespeare poems and plays in one of the greatest academic and literary frauds of all time. However revealed and demonstrated here for the first time The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined is itself one very elaborate cryptogram containing hidden secret Bacon ciphers repeatedly conveying the concealed cryptographic message that Francis Bacon, Brother of the Rosy Cross, is Shakespeare.

The Friedmans knew there were Bacon ciphers present in the Shakespeare works and that Bacon is the true secret author of the Shakespeare works, a secret which at a single stroke completely collapses the Stratfordian fiction and illusion that the illiterate/semi-illiterate William Shakspere was the author of the Shakespeare plays. It was a secret they took to the graves but not beyond it. For on the tombstone of William and Elizebeth Friedman, one designed by themselves, the two greatest cryptographers of the twentieth century, left a secret cryptographic message:

FRANCIS BACON IS SHAKESPEARE.