The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1887) ebook

by Ignatius Donnelly

Ignatius Donnelly History and Criticism English

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616, Bacon, Francis, 1561-1626.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616, Bacon, Francis, 1561-1626. ian frederick-rothwell.

Read various fiction books with us in our e-reader. Contents: The Argument: William Shakespeare did Not Write the Plays; Francis Bacon the Real Author of the Plays; Parallelisms; The Demonstration: The Cipher in the Plays; The Cipher Narrative; Conclus.

Contents: The Argument: William Shakespeare did Not Write the Plays; Francis Bacon the Real Author of the Plays; Parallelisms; The Demonstration: The Cipher in the Plays; The Cipher Narrative; Conclusion.

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Start by marking The Great Cryptogram; Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-called Shakespeare Plays as Want to Read: Want to Read savin. ant to Read. exultantly does ne depict his own country-"that little body with a mighty heart," as he calls it elsewhere: This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text.

The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in Shakespeare's Plays (1888), in which he maintained he had discovered codes in the works of Shakespeare indicating that their true author was Francis Bacon. Caesar's Column (1890), a science fiction novel set during 1988 about a worker revolt against a global oligarchy.

The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-called Shakespeare Plays, Том 2. Ignatius Donnelly. The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-called Shakespeare Plays, Том 2 Books for college libraries The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-called Shakespeare Plays, Ignatius Donnelly.

By Ignatius Donnelly. Contents: The Argument: William Shakespeare did Not Write the Plays; Francis Bacon the Real Author of the Plays; Parallelisms; The Demonstration: The Cipher in the Plays; The Cipher Narrative; Conclusion. Home Categories Esoteric & Occult.

The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-called Shakespeare Plays, Том 1. The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-called Shakespeare Plays, Том 1 Books for college libraries The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-called Shakespeare Plays, Ignatius Donnelly. S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1888.

Online version: Donnelly, Ignatius, 1831-1901. William Shakspere did not write the plays ; Francis Bacon the real author of the plays ; Parallelisms - v. 2. Book II, The demonstration

Online version: Donnelly, Ignatius, 1831-1901. London : S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1888 (OCoLC)894084825. Named Person: William Shakespeare; William Shakespeare. All Authors, Contributors: Ignatius Donnelly. Find more information about: Ignatius Donnelly. OCLC Number: 4245568. Book II, The demonstration. The cipher in the plays ; The cipher narrative. Book III, Conclusions. Responsibility: by Ignatius Donnelly.

The Great Cryptogram; Francis Bacon's Cipher in the so-called Shakespeare Plays. The Cipher in the Plays and on the Tombstone. Chicago, 1888, pp. 998. Minneapolis, 1899, pp. 372. Ben Jonson's Cipher. It was Ignatius Donnelly's self-indicated distinction to have enjoyed th most violent political career of any man since the time of Robispierre. And he used to say, facetiously, that his opponent always seemed to be the Devil himself. He was nominated for the Pennsylvania Legislature as early as 1855, when but twenty-four years of age.

Windworker

I've read several books over the years on the question of who truly authored the Shakespearean plays, and recall an interview in which Sir Derek Jacobi stated he thought de Vere wrote the plays, not Shakespeare. Mark Twain wrote a brilliant monograph on this question entitled Is Shakespeare Dead? From my autobiography. in which Twain argues Sir Francis Bacon was the actual author of the plays. That essay immediately convinced me the traditional orthodox assignation of the plays to the man from Stratford who never wrote a single letter in his life could not be correct. I subsequently read two other interesting books that confirmed me in my new-found prejudice: Edwin Reed's Bacon vs. Shakespeare: brief for plaintiff, and Penn Leary's The Second Cryptographic Shakespeare.

Ignatius Donnelly here invokes considerable circumstantial evidence, as do the three authors above, that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare. The reason for secrecy would have been the highly hazardous and politically charged climate of Elizabethan England: "It was an age of plots and counter-plots." For example, the contemporary Elizabethan playwrights Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, and Christopher Marlowe were imprisoned, racked, and assassinated, respectively. Likewise, in 1597 Queen Elizabeth had given order "to tear down and destroy all the theaters of London, because one Nash, a play-writer, had, in a play called The Isle of Dogs, brought matters of state upon the stage; and Nash himself was thrown into prison, and lay there until the August following". As Dr. Keir Cutler puts it: "There was more torture in Elizabethan England than there was in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition". Merry Old England.

"That the Cipher is there; that I have found it out; that the narrative given is real, no man can doubt who reads this book to the end. There may be faults in my workmanship; there are none in the Cipher itself. All that I give is reality; but I may not give all there is. The difficulties are such as arise from the wonderful complexity of the Cipher, and the almost impossibility of the brain holding all the interlocking threads of the root-numbers in their order. Some more mathematical head than mine may be able to do it" (p. 640).

A huge book of nearly one thousand pages, it's typically divided into two parts. At the conclusion of part one, Donnelly states: "In conclusion I would say that I have in the foregoing pages shown that, if we treat the real author of the Plays, and Francis Bacon, as two men, they belonged to the same station in society, to the same profession - the law; to the same political party and to the same faction in the state; that they held the same religious views, the same philosophical tenets and the same purposes in life. That each was a poet and a philosopher, a writer of dramatic compositions, and a play-goer. That Bacon had the genius, the opportunity, the time and the necessity to write the Plays, and ample reasons to conceal his authorship" (p. 293). Or, as a pundit once put it, "if Sir Francis Bacon didn't write the plays, he missed the opportunity of a lifetime".

In the second part, Donnelly examines what he claims is a *mind-bogglingly* complex numerical cipher system encoded in The First Folio of Shakespeare 1623 conveying secret messages regarding both Sir Francis Bacon's authorship and behind-the-scenes accounts of power struggles at the Elizabethan court. I want to emphasize "*mind-bogglingly* complex". The clear (albeit incomplete) explication of the cipher in so far as Donnelly was able to work it out, begins at page 639. There are certainly some truly bizarre orthographies in the 1623 Folio, but that said no cipher work to date has conclusively proven authorship of the plays (to my knowledge); therefore the first book of this two book set is probably your best bet unless you're an ambitious cryptanalyst looking for a potential Ph.D. topic.

For an appraisal by two cryptanalysts, see The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined: An analysis of cryptographic systems used as evidence that some author other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays commonly attributed to him. For the lighter side, see The Shakespeare Authorship Question: A Crackpot's View. For those favoring the 17th Earl of Oxford hypothesis, see the films Last Will. & Testament [HD] and Anonymous. And for a seminal work on the topic, see "Shakespeare" Identified in Edward De Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, and the Poems of Edward De Vere (2 vols).

If this question interests you, Donnelly's work is a very worthwhile and thought-provoking read (available online as a free pdf download).

Ielonere

Of the 19th century Baconians, Ignatius Donnelly --- utopian, progressive politician, primordial New Age-r --- was surely the hardest working. And "The Great Cryptogram" (nearly 1,000 pages in its entirety) is the most convincing argument against Shakespeare's authorship of the Plays. The first part of this opus, not included in the edition under review, reprises other Baconians' claims against Shakespeare: that his lack of education, low moral character and rural background rendered it impossible that he could have written the masterworks attributed to him.

Donnelly goes further, claiming to have discovered by serendipity a sort of "Bible code" in the Folio edition of 1623, printed after Shakespeare's death. Donnelly's hunch --- that if Bacon, an expert on cryptography, wrote the Plays he would have left clues for posterity --- led to the discovery of a cipher. Based on the complex interplay of certain key numbers, Donnelly found an internal narrative that relates the history of Bacon's deception, why it was necessary (self preservation), and explictly stating that "Will Shak'st-spur" was his useful idiot in the intrigue. Donnelly answered accusations that he was simply plucking words out of the Plays to create the narrative with the argument that the words were extracted according to a fairly consistent arithmetical scheme, and the resulting coherence couldn't be pure chance.

It is human nature to cling to the orthodox explanation no matter the facts (how many Americans still believe Oswald was a lone gunman?), and perhaps because of this, Donnelly's conspiracy theory never achieved acceptance. It may not have helped his credibility that his other blockbuster book sought to prove the existence of Atlantis. In the 1950s, a CIA crytographer shredded Donnelly's work.

Nevertheless, this is a fine work of scholarship by an honest broker of information with much interesting detail about the life and times of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Elizabethan England.

Modifyn

This is a fascinating book, and one of the greatest crackpot theories of all time.

Unfortunately, it's nonsense.

Whether Bacon wrote the plays or not I can't speak to, but the so-called cryptographic evidence is a brilliant exercise in self-delusion, as was clearly explained by William Friedman:

https://www.amazon.com/Shakespearean-Ciphers-Examined-Elizabeth-Friedman/dp/B000OL9CAE

Zyangup

I really liked this book, because it was packed full of so much information. I used it for an English project on Shakspearen authorship and Francis Bacon played a huge role in Shakespeares life. I will refer this book to anyone.