What's New at SirBacon.Org

by SirBacon.org

In honor of SirBacon.org’s 25th Anniversary we wish to acknowledge Maureen Ward-Gandy, and her work as England’s leading Graphologist until her passing in 2019.

Maureen Ward-Gandy B Ed CDE BCFE
Professional Consultant in Forensic Documents and Handwriting Specialist
(registered with the British Law Society)

Related Documents:

• Letter from Christina Waldman to Lawrence Gerald – Mareen Ward-Gandy credentials
• Table of Contents of Gandy Report – Originally Examined 24 July 1992, Reviewed for Mr Lawrence Gerald 2 July 1994
• ELIZABETH ERA WRITING COMPARISON FOR IDENTIFICATION OF “COMMON AUTHORSHIP” – Full Original Report

In Christina Waldman’s book, “Francis Bacon’s Hidden Hand in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, A Study of Law, Rhetoric and Authorship,” the full Maureen Gandy Handwriting report can be found.

by SirBacon.org

Today, October 10, 2022, 25 years after SirBacon.org was launched, we thought we’d share some of our oldest work. The What’s New Page has been a key part of SirBacon.org and is still today. When we rebuilt the website we included What’s New content from 2016 forward, but today we are offering a glimpse of the past with the What’s New on SirBacon.org Archives containing everything from 1998 through 2015. (Keep in mind websites, links, and email addresses are not permanent. We’ll aim to clean up outdated links in time.)

Enjoy!

Celebrate SirBacon.org turning 25 with us in October 2022

Deadline: Midnight September 30, 2022.

Purpose: To collect memories, antidotes, or other thoughts from Baconians on how Sir Francis Bacon or SirBacon.org has impacted or influenced you. Your thoughts may be personal, professional, spiritual, none of the above or all of the above. Graphics can be included.

If you are a Baconian, as I am, and Sir Francis Bacon and SirBacon.org has meaning or is important for you, please contribute a sentence or two, an essay, or more if you wish. Graphics and artwork will be accepted as well. We’ll try to put something nice together for us all to enjoy.

Send contributions to 25years@SirBacon.org

For ideas you can view submissions and read the full essays from 2004:

A Selection of Contributors answer the Question: “What does Francis Bacon Mean To You?”

Please pass on this information to Baconians and fans of SirBacon.org.

Thank you!

Video By Kate Cassidy

If you are interested in codes and cipher, this video is for you. Sometimes a message has been staring us in the face. We just need the key. This is a further video following on from:

Part 1 https://youtu.be/nrsacG8L90w
Part 2 https://youtu.be/xa5VrlxbLMc
Part 3 https://youtu.be/WXdRXUTQFLQ

All the videos discuss the true authorship of the works of Shakespeare, as we approach the 400th anniversary of the First Folio in 1623. This video looks at the Sonnets printed separately in 1609.

These are the links to which I refer in the video:

William C Marshall YouTube Video https://youtu.be/4C9phKLx2vU

How to Make Anything Signify Anything https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issue…

The new paper on the cryptanalysts: The Friedmans and Cipher in the Shakespeare Works https://aphoenix1.academia.edu/research.

Cryptomenytices et cryptographiae https://archive.org/details/gustavise…

and https://sirbacon.org/

For a PDF on Baconian Ciphers in Shakespeare, see https://www.fbrt.org.uk/wp-content/up…

by A. Phoenix

The Henry IV plays are some of the most Baconian in the whole of the Shakespeare canon and are replete with references and allusions not only to their author Francis Bacon but to several members of the Bacon family and his St Albans home at Gorhambury, the Bacon family estate.

by A. Phoenix

This is the Holy Grail of the Shakespeare World: an original manuscript of a Shakespeare play corrected in the hand of its secret concealed author Francis Bacon

126 page Academic Paper  https://aphoenix1.academia.edu/research  

It is little known to virtually all Shakespeare scholars, the ordinary schoolmen, and the rest of the world that there exists an early manuscript version of the play Henry IV. This manuscript is the earliest extant manuscript of a Shakespeare play ever discovered, an historical landmark of the utmost importance, that one might be forgiven for thinking that it would not only be well-known and minutely scrutinised by Shakespeare scholars around the globe, as well as known to all and sundry with only the remotest interest in Shakespeare, but celebrated for what it is: a unique artefact of world-wide significance.

The reason this is not the case is because the manuscript itself conceals an explosive secret which it would be difficult to overestimate of the most far-reaching consequences which completely collapses the fiction and illusion William Shakspere of Stratford wrote the Shakespeare works and at the same time confirms the truth that Francis Bacon is our supreme poet and dramatist Shakespeare.

This manuscript was discovered in 1844 preserved in the collection of the eighth Baronet Sir Edward Dering (1807-96) at Surrenden Hall near Pluckley in Kent. It had previously formed part of the library of the first Sir Edward Dering (1598-1644), an antiquarian with an interest in literature and drama, named after his uncle the Puritan preacher Edward Dering patronised by the Cooke sisters Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, Lady Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell, Lady Mildred Cooke Cecil and Lady Cooke Killigrew. The relatively obscure Sir Edward Dering (1598-1644) about whose early life very little is known was-here revealed for the first time-a close friend and relative (twice over) of the author of Henry IV Francis Bacon.

To the present day the so-called Dering manuscript is presented to the world as a handwritten version of an abridgement of I and 2 Henry IV mainly written by a scribe, with revisions in the hand of Sir Edward Dering, possibly for a court performance at the court of James I or a private performance at his house in Kent c.1623. It is said that the manuscript is or is apparently based on the 1613 quarto edition of I Henry IV and 1600 quarto edition of 2 Henry IV meaning the manuscript dates from no earlier than 1613 and as Dering’s revisions appear to incorporate some emendations in the First Folio, the MS or parts of the MS, may be dated sometime between 1622 to 1624.

One hundred and twenty years after the so-called Dering MS was first discovered which was afterwards purchased in  great secrecy by Henry Folger, who secreted it away in the Folger Shakespeare Library, a Secret Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic Institution, a facsimile edition of it was published in 1974.

The edition entitled The History of King Henry The Fourth as revised by Sir Edward Dering published by the Folger Shakespeare, edited by George Walton Williams and Gwynne Blakemore Evans, is not generally well known and remains unfamiliar to the ordinary schoolmen and casual student, and is not quite what it appears to the uninstructed eye.

Its joint editor G. Blakemore Evans worked for US Intelligence serving in the Army Signal Corps alongside William Friedman at Bletchley run by British Intelligence, the centre of allied cipher and code-breaking during the Second World War. In their book The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined the Fraudulent Friedmans falsely maintained that there were no Baconian ciphers used in the Shakespeare works, in perpetrating one of the greatest academic and literary frauds of all time.

However as the present writer demonstrated in The Fraudulent Friedmans: The Bacon Ciphers in the Shakespeare Works their fraudulent book The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined is itself an elaborate cryptogram containing hidden Baconian ciphers conveying the concealed cryptographic message that Francis Bacon, Brother of the Rosy Cross, is Shakespeare. The Friedmans knew there were Baconian ciphers present in the Shakespeare works, a secret cryptically incorporated throughout their work aided by the Folger Shakespeare Library, revealing and confirming Bacon is Shakespeare.

Similarly, while in the open plain text of The History of King Henry The Fourth as revised by Sir Edward Dering its editors George Walton Williams and Gwynne Blakemore Evans himself an expert in cryptography, maintained the fiction of the so-called Dering manuscript, its title page incorporated a number of hidden Baconian ciphers, revealing and confirming that the manuscript of Henry IV was of Baconian origin and likewise that Bacon is Shakespeare.  

In contrast to Williams and Evans and several other Shakespeare scholars who have maintained and repeated the fiction of the so-called Dering manuscript, the orthodox scholar Professor Hardin Craig observed that the MS contains a number of differences and peculiarities which remain unchanged by any contact with the fifth 1613 quarto of I Henry IV. He further observes that it was written in a normal Elizabethan hand with no discernible Jacobean intermixtures, and most importantly, concludes it may be older than the earliest 1598 quarto edition of I Henry IV, and that it is a manuscript of Shakespeare’s play when it was originally one and not two plays.

This whole illusory house of cards rests entirely on the presence of Dering’s hand in the manuscript. If his hand is not present, Dering self-evidently had nothing whatsoever to do with its composition, or its revision, cuts, its division into acts and scenes, its numerous additions of fifty lines and half lines, the introduction of original material in prose and verse, or its wholesale and extensive corrections. All from a person who never wrote a single drama in his entire life or is known to have heavily revised and amended any other play, never mind a Shakespeare play, in the same fashion or manner. The very premise on which this theory rests is self-evidently absurd and more importantly demonstrably false.

The large formatted edition of The History of King Henry The Fourth as revised by Sir Edward Dering totals two hundred and thirty-eight pages, comprising an introduction, a Note on the Transcription and Textual Notes, The Names of All the Characters, a facsimile and transcription with textual notes of the manuscript itself, and a Descriptive and Historical Collation. There is however one absolutely critical piece of evidence missing, namely a facsimile of Dering’s handwriting.

There is no reasonable and rational explanation whatsoever why Evans and Williams did not reproduce what constitutes the most important evidence in their whole Dering theory. By now the intelligent and alert reader will probably strongly suspect or more likely readily realise there is something wrong, something very wrong when the modern authorities on the Dering manuscript have unmistakably and very deliberately not reproduced facsimiles of Dering’s handwriting in this standard edition of the so-called Dering manuscript.

What was it then they wanted to conceal from other ordinary scholars and the rest of the Shakespearean world? Simple, the hand of Dering is nowhere present in the so-called Dering manuscript, a very simple fact which at a stroke completely and incontrovertibly exposes and collapses this whole charade and irrefutably demolishes a fraud or illusion (secretly known to some for more than a century) once and for all.    

The known and undoubted examples of Dering’s hand bears no resemblance whatsoever to the handwriting (including its corrections) to any of the handwriting in the so-called Dering manuscript, or the handwriting in the obverse and reverse of the scrap of paper. It fact not only is it manifestly plain that Dering’s known hand and the hands in the so-called Dering MS do not even remotely resemble each other, it is difficult to conceive of any other specimens of handwritings, being more different.

What then is the reason for the fraud and the false insistence on Dering’s handwriting being present in the so-called Dering MS? The reason is because it masks and conceals its true status, provenance and date. In other words it misdirects the eye away from a great historical secret, one known to some since it was first discovered, and others who were made privy to the secret afterwards.

The so-called Dering manuscript is a single-five act Shakespeare play of Henry IV and is earlier than the first printed quarto of The Historie of Henrie the fourth issued in 1598 and the quarto edition of The Second part of Henrie the fourth printed in 1600. The MS represents the play as Bacon originally composed it when it was one play and not two before developing his original version into two separate parts. Furthermore, we can be reasonably precise regarding the date of the manuscript. It is widely agreed Henry IV followed closely upon Richard II as not only is Henry IV next chronologically its predecessor Richard II clearly points to a sequel. The earlier Richard II is believed to date to around late 1595 or early 1596, and Henry IV was probably composed shortly after, sometime in 1596.

There appears to be three hands in the so-called Dering MS two of which were scribes. It appears the manuscript was copied from another MS now lost. The so-called Dering MS was begun by one scribe who copied out the whole of page one and for some unknown reason after he had completed the first page the task was turned over to a second scribe, who copied out the rest of the manuscript.

The manuscript is intimately connected to Bacon’s literary workshop of writers, scribes and copyists that produced Bacon’s Northumberland MSS, which once contained his Shakespeare plays Richard II and Richard III, that dates from around 1596/7. On the outside cover of the Northumberland MSS in a contemporary hand there are more than a dozen examples of various forms of the name Bacon or Francis Bacon and his literary mask Shakespeare or William Shakespeare. Above the entry for the Shakespeare play Richard II is written ‘By Mr. ffrauncis William Shakespeare’ and where the name ‘William Shakespeare’ has been written further down the page the word ‘Your’ is written twice across it, so thus reads ‘Your William Shakespeare’. The writing on the outer cover of the manuscript is chiefly in one hand with occasional words in another, and a few words written at angle, possibly by a third. One of the hands was undoubtedly Bacon who was also responsible for the monogram signature ‘W.S.’ at the top right hand corner. As with the so-called Dering manuscript, the main content of Bacon’s Northumberland MSS is written in two or more hands. One of the works contained within it generally referred to by the title Leicester’s Commonwealth is itself written by two different scribes whose identity remains unknown. On examining the facsimiles of the so-called Dering MS and the aforementioned work in Bacon’s Northumberland MSS it appears that one of the scribes who copied out Leicester’s Commonwealth was also responsible for copying out the so-called Dering MS from the second page onwards. It appears that in producing the so-called Dering manuscript one of these scribes was most likely working from Bacon’s original (‘foul papers’) manuscript of I Henry IV, producing an authorial fair copy of the play, which Bacon later gifted to his friend and relative Sir Edward Dering.

The so-called corrector’s hand in the so-called Dering manuscript is Bacon’s own cramped hand, as one would expect, from the author of the play.

It is now more than fitting that instead of it being referred to as the Dering manuscript it is hereafter known by its right and proper designation as Francis Bacon’s 1596 manuscript of Henry IV, the unique and earliest known extant manuscript of a Shakespeare play, the holy grail of Shakespeare scholarship.    

by Christina G. Waldman

Dedicated to the memory of Brian McClinton, author of
The Shakespeare Conspiracies Part One: Thirteen Points of Evidence

Download PDF

by A. Phoenix

THE FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY SYNOPSIS

The unique and greatest Shakespeare repository in the world the Folger Shakespeare Library is to the present day still shrouded in secrecy and mystery with an untold secret history which stretches back to Elizabethan and Jacobean England to the time of the publication of the Shakespeare First Folio the bedrock on which the library is founded.

The Folgers trace their colonial descent directly back to Peter Folger (1617-1690) translator and government official born in Norwich, England, in 1617, the son of John Folger and Meriba Gibbs. His father John Folger was born in 1594 in the county of Norfolk and his wife Meriba Gibbs two miles east of the county of Norfolk, England in 1600. Virtually nothing is known about either John and Meriba Gibbs Folger and the early years of their son Peter. There is however every likelihood that the Folgers knew members of the Bacon family. The twin counties of Suffolk and Norfolk of East Anglia were the political strongholds of the prominent Bacon family, whose wide and extensive private and social circles, extended across the whole region. The great scion of the family the philosopher-poet Francis Bacon, concealed author of the Shakespeare works, the inspiration of Henry and Emily Folger for the Folger Shakespeare Library, successively served as the Member of Parliament for Ipswich in the county of Suffolk in 1597, 1601, 1604 and 1610.

This was the period of the great expansion into North America secretly directed by Francis Bacon and his Rosicrucian Brotherhood that was to forever change the future direction of the modern world. In 1606, the Virginia Company was formed to organize and promote the colonisation of Virginia and shortly after the first permanent English speaking settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, the seed which grew and evolved into the first modern constitutional and federal republic, the United States of America.

It is conceivable that through knowledge of the activities of Francis Bacon and the London Virginia Company and the first permanent English settlement in Jamestown, followed by Bermuda (1609), Newfoundland (1610), and afterwards Massachusetts, founded by the Pilgrims transported across the Atlantic in the Mayflower in 1620, that the Folger family developed the idea of emigrating to the New World.

The elusive John Folger and his eighteen year old son Peter Folger emigrated to Massachusetts in 1635. During his voyage to America on the vessel Abigail, Peter first met Mary Morrill, whom he married in 1644. Their youngest daughter Abiah, was the mother of the great writer, scientist, and philosopher Benjamin Franklin, the most important Rosicrucian-Freemason of his time and one of the Founding Freemasonic Fathers of the United States of America. Franklin was also a member of the Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic Royal Society and for several years he regularly corresponded with the great eighteenth-century Shakespearean actor David Garrick and Dr Samuel Johnson, editor of the Shakespeare works.

It was Freemason David Garrick who organized the Grand Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 which put Stratford-upon-Avon, home of William Shakspere, as the false centre of the Shakespeare world on the map, a Rosicrucian-Freemasonic ludibrium, that still fools and deceives nearly all and sundry around the Shakespearean globe to the present day.

In homage to his great ancestor Benjamin Franklin, the originator of the magnificent and unique Folger Shakespeare Library, Henry Clay Folger said that he had not collected Shakespeareana he would have collected Frankliniana.

In her recent work The Millionaire and the Bard on the obsessively secretive Henry Folger and the Shakespeare Folger Library its author Andrea Mays states that ‘The Folger Library maintains the culture of modesty and secrecy established by its founders’ and told how Henry and Emily Folger filled the Folger Shakespeare library with all kinds of ‘sophisticated and obscure symbols and images’ as well as ‘secret words and signs’ that ‘formed a silent composition’ that only ‘a time traveller or a scholar could comprehend’.

She did not however provide an explanation that would shed light on or explain the meaning of all the secret, arcane signs, images, symbols, and the ubiquitous so-called ‘Tudor Rose’, that all formed part of the silent composition encoded into the Folger Shakespeare Library; and thus far, no one has hitherto been able to comprehend, decipher, and decode them.

Disclosed here for the first time, the Folger Shakespeare Library is a complex Baconian-Rosicrucian-Freemasonic cryptogram that when decoded conveys the explosive far reaching secret known to the Folgers, namely, the concealed identity of the true author of the Shakespeare works, Francis Bacon.

PDF – https://aphoenix1.academia.edu/research

By the Late and Great Brian McClinton

1. The Shakespeare Paradox

Shakespeare is widely regarded not only as the world’s supreme poet but also as its most ordinary. A prosaic man of the world, he apparently cared little for his own manuscripts, which are all missing, and even less for books in general, of which not one owned by him has ever been found. He penned no letters to family or friends, no prose works on contemporary events and no poems in memory of his dead son or in praise of his wife, daughters, friends or fellow writers. In fact, apart from six dubious signings, he left not a single word in his own hand. Nor did anyone ever report him as having said anything of any note. In terms of the life of the mind, he was truly William the Silent. Apart from acting, his everyday affairs were preoccupied with the mundane and mercenary externals of tax evasion, property ownership, money lending and selling corn and malt. Yet in the midst of this life so ordinary he is said to have written the world’s greatest poetry and drama. He is, we might say, the most famous nonentity in history.

Read more:
The Shakespeare Conspiracies : Untangling a 400 Year Web of Myth and Deceit

Video By Kate Cassidy

“This is a short addendum to my Part One and Part Two videos about the Shakespeare authorship question and the Mystery Schools.

Part One https://youtu.be/nrsacG8L90w

Part Two https://youtu.be/xa5VrlxbLMc

Video By Kate Cassidy

“Be the first to hear this information. More codes and ciphers in the works of Shakespeare revealed. Some never seen before.”

Find Part One at https://youtu.be/nrsacG8L90w and Part Three at https://youtu.be/WXdRXUTQFLQ

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 Love’s Labour’s 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.

Video By Kate Cassidy

Kate Cassity, a valued member of SirBacon’org’s B’Hive Community, produced a fascinating video for us. It is one to watch through to get the most from it. Kate is a Baconian to pay attention to. Watch the entire video!

De Vere, Bacon or Shakespeare? You Decide!

“The Shakespeare authorship question has been one of the enduring mysteries of our time. Hear the evidence. See the evidence and you decide.

This video also contains reference to planetary cycles, little known to those outside of astronomy and astrological circles and shows secret cipher in the First Folio and Sonnets.”

by Ryan Murtha

The writings of Francis Bacon contain numerous discussions of esotericism. In a general sense, the essay “Of Simulation and Dissimulation” stresses the importance of knowing “what things are to be laid open, and what to be secreted, and what to be showed at half lights, and to whom and when.” In New Atlantis, members of the scientific fraternity “take all an oath of secrecy, for the concealing of those [inventions and discoveries] which we think fit to keep secret.” In The Advancement of Learning Bacon distinguishes between “disclosed” (exoteric) and “enigmatical” (esoteric) writing, the latter allowing the author “to remove the vulgar capacities from being admitted to the secrets of knowledges, and to reserve them to selected auditors, or wits of such sharpness as can pierce the veil.” In Valerius Terminus he again extols the practice of esoteric writing “both for the avoiding of abuse in the excluded, and the strengthening of affection in the admitted.” Hence it is possible that we do not yet fully understand Bacon; the first serious attempt to investigate his religious opinions was Steven Matthews’s excellent 2008 book Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon. In the present essay, I argue that Bacon was prone to visionary or religious experiences, about which he wrote in the form of alchemical tracts published under a number of pseudonyms.

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by A. Phoenix

Both Bacon and Shakespeare (obviously treated separately by orthodox scholars) have very largely been presented as conservative political thinkers whereas more recently several modern scholars have finally begun to partly recognise the republican themes running through both the canons, which completely revolutionises and transforms our understanding of the first philosopher-poet of the modern world.

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by Richard Allan Wagner

Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” speech is, possibly, the last place people would expect to find a line from Masonic ritual—yet, word-for-word, there it is—hiding like an “undiscovered” treasure as countless actors throughout the centuries have unwittingly spoken the words without gleaning the full measure of their meaning or origin.

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By Deslie McClellan

An Enlightened Spirit : Authorship Question Part 4 : A Chapter from Deslie McClellan’s uplifting book : Prince of Our Dreams : Young Shakespeare

“The most compelling proof that Bacon was Shakespeare is the enlightened–one might say, luminous–spirit of the author. The Bard has a matchless understanding of the moral beauty of life and its diviner mysteries. His spirituality is exquisite. Dr. Bucke, cited earlier, calls it cosmic consciousness, whereby the author palpably feels the radiance of heaven’s wisdom and heaven’s love in his own awareness, and inevitably must express it, so wholly compelling is that “muse” of divine inspiration within him.”

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An Enlightened Spirit : Authorship Question Part 4

By Eric Roberts

“The purpose of this gallery of portraits is to provide a visual complement to the countless written texts by and about Sir Francis Bacon. We can be fairly certain that Francis himself commissioned at least ten of the fourteen pictures in this inventory of portraits produced during his lifetime. It is also certain that he wanted future generations to be able to see what the man behind the words actually looked like. During the course of research, it soon became evident that the only digital copies of Francis Bacon’s portraits available online were of small size and low resolution, and that there was a genuine need to provide public access to better quality images. Only then could the subtle details and facial expressions captured in these portraits be appreciated.Thus, the decision to purchase and assemble the best images available on behalf of all Baconians and admirers of the life and works of Francis Bacon was a ’no brainer’. This project would not have been realized without the help of Lawrence Gerald, Rob Fowler, Peter Dawkins, Gary Keegan, A. Phoenix, and The Francis Bacon Society.”

View the Gallery: Francis Bacon’s Portraits from Life

by Richard Allan Wagner

When I was initiated into the Freemasonic Fraternity, I was immediately struck by the uncanny similarity between the words in Masonic Ritual and the words in the Shakespearean plays and sonnets. It’s as if those words had been forged in the same crucible. Furthermore, many parallels of Masonic language and symbolism, as well as specific bits of business in Masonic Ritual, show up again-and-again throughout the pages of Shakespeare, the most important of which is to be found in Sonnet 55. Actually, the wording of Sonnet 55, unlike the other 153 sonnets, is designed to serve as a bridge connecting Freemasonry with Shakespeare.

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See more on Hiram Abiff :https://sirbacon.org/hiramlegend.htm

by Peter Dawkins

Peter Dawkins has wriTTen an Illuminating article about the Shakespeare monument in Stratford while describing some very interesting ciphers embedded  in the inscription. It is a must read for any of us.

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