“The fraud of men was ever so / Since summer first was leafy”

— Balthasar’s song, Much Ado About Nothing

In episode six, we look at that vexing question of whether or not Will Shakespeare was a complete and utter conman. We’ll follow those who dug up rivers, cracked codes, turned to grave-robbing, or occasionally just wrote really, really long books to find the answer. We’ll hear from Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, William Wordsworth, and learn some surprising theories as to why Queen Elizabeth I was the Virgin Queen (or was she…?). It’s a journey from the 1560s to our era and back again, and somehow I manage to bring up Golden Girls, England’s greatest treasure hunt, George W. Bush and Dame Agatha Christie!

Confused? You still will be after listening, but I hope you’ll enjoy this incredibly long investigation of the madness that is the authorship question.

You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, or by email at podcastshakespeare@gmail.com. You can listen to the podcast at iTunes or download direct from Libsyn. We also have a Spotify playlist, which will be updated each week as we work through the plays.

The website for the podcast is https://podcastshakespeare.com/. On the website, you will find an evolving bibliography.

Contents

00:00 - Introduction / searching for Shakespeare

09:33 - Delia Bacon / candidate Sir Francis Bacon

24:50 - Mark Twain / Ignatius Donnelly, codebreaker

35:05 - Dr. Owen's machine / Mrs. Gallup and Mr. Arensberg

41:45 - J. Thomas Looney / candidate Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford

1:04:40 - Other candidates / Christopher Marlowe

1:09:35 - Oxford gets another chance / "Anonymous"

1:13:41 - The "Masquerade" connection

1:18:49 - William Shakespeare

1:37:38 - The enduring appeal of theories / My theories

1:47:15 - The "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" / hail and farewell

Links mentioned:

Due to the nature of the episode, I have done a separate permanent Authorship page at https://podcastshakespeare.com/further-reading/the-authorship-question/. Some links below.

SIR FRANCIS BACON (1561 – 1626)

• on Wikipedia
• John Aubrey’s biography and details of his death in Brief Lives (1693)
• The Francis Bacon Society (“Baconiana”)

Supporters of Bacon

Delia Salter Bacon (1811 – 1859):

• at Wikipedia
• “William Shakespeare and His Plays: An Enquiry Concerning Them” in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American literature, science and art, Issue 37, January 1856
• The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, 1857
• Nina Baym, “Delia Bacon: Hawthorne’s Last Heroine“
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Recollections of a Gifted Woman” in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1863
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, unpublished letter to George P. Putnam regarding Delia Bacon, published by Vivian C. Hopkins in the New England Quarterly, vol 33 no 4, Dec 1960 (JSTOR access required)
• Catherine E. Beecher, Truth Stranger than Fiction (1850) comments on the Bacon/MacWhorter affair without using names

Walt Whitman,“Shakespeare Bacon’s Cipher”

Ignatius Donnelly, The Great Cryptogram (1888)

Elizabeth Ward Gallup:

• The Bi-Lateral Cypher (1910)
• The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn, being a discovery of the ciphered play of Sir Francis Bacon inside the Shakespeare First Folio (1911)
• [see also, this article on the play at Anne Boleyn Novels]

Dr. Orville Ward Owen, Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story (1893-95)

Mark Twain, Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909)

Henry W. Fisher, Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field, Tales they told to a fellow correspondent, (1922) – see page 49 for Twain and Fisher’s anecdote Queen Elizabeth being a man.

Walter Conrad Arensberg:

• The Cryptography of Shakespeare -(1922)
• see also The Cryptography of Dante – (1921)

EDWARD DE VERE, 17TH EARL OF OXFORD (1550 – 1604)

• at Wikipedia
• Poems at Wikisource
• Family tree and the famous fart anecdote of James Aubrey
• “Renunciation” poem from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, ed. Francis T. Palgrave, 1875

Supporters of Oxford

John Thomas Looney (1870 – 1944)

• at Wikipedia
• The Church of Humanity
• Shakespeare Identified in Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1920)

The De Vere Society of Great Britain

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