nn
n
n
n
n The philosopher Jagger was quite right when he said,n“You can’t always get what you want,” but the thing is that, sometimes,nyou do get what you want. And when that happens, there is always andanger that you will want even more. Ignatius Loyola Donnelly got what henwanted. He found a cipher hidden in the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays, sonhe set about looking for more of the same.
n
n
n
 |
| Ignatius Donnelly |
n
n
n
nThat’s where the trouble starts. Asnhe says himself,
n
n
n
n“I invented hundreds of ciphers in trying to solve thisnone. Many times I was in despair. Once I gave up the whole task for two days.”n
n
n
nAnd there is the clue. He was determined to find something else, no matternwhat. Now, sometimes, determination is a Good Thing, you need a littlenapplication to keep things ticking over, but sometimes determination tips overninto obsession, and that’s a Bad Thing. That Donnelly gave up for two wholendays sounds to me like he was just a wee bit obsessed, if he couldn’t leave itnalone for longer than that. That, and the ‘hundreds of ciphers’ business.nAnyway, Donnelly rolled up his sleeves and applied himself to his task like henwas being paid for it. He reasoned that Francis Bacon might refer to a ‘volume’nor ‘the volume’ if he was talking about a book and on page 75 of the Histories,nsure enough,
n
n
n
n“Yea, this man’s brow, like to a title-leaf,n
nForetells thennature of a tragic volume.”n
n
n
n
n
n
n
 |
| Shakespeare First Folio – Page 74 |
n
n
n
nThen, it was back to the counting. In the firstncolumn of page 74 of the first folio, there were 284 words, in the secondncolumn on the same page there were 248 words, and the word ‘volume’ wasnword number 208 in the first column of page 75. 284 + 248 + 208 = 740. And onnpage 74, there are ten words in italics – 740 divided by 10 = 74, the number ofnthe page! Donnelly’s ingenuity now goes into overdrive. If one deducts 10 fromnthe number of words in the first column on page 75, (447 words) and counts downnthe column, the 437th word is ‘doing’ whereas if one countsnup from the bottom of the column, the tenth word is ‘me’; thus, reasonednDonnelly, if one is to use the reverse count, one needs to add an extra word tonreveal the coded word.
n
n
n
 |
| Ignatius Donnelly |
n
n
n
nUsing this logic, Donnelly counted back up the firstncolumn and found that the 208th word is ‘mask’. Surely annindication that something is hidden. He continues this counting forwards and backwards,nadding and subtracting, marking and noting, beginning at the top and bottom ofnthe columns but also counting from the breaks caused by the various stagendirections in the text. He also considers the original publication of thenplays, that they were first printed in quarto editions, so that the pagennumbering and word counts on the pages were necessarily different.
n
n
n
nThis is allnpart of Bacon’s cunning plan, says Donnelly, because even if there werensuspicions that a message might be hidden in the plays, the code would benimpossible to discover as the numbering combinations needed to decode thenmessage did not exist. So for twenty years, Francis Bacon sat on the plays andnwaited until any suspicion had fallen away and many of the people involved (ElizabethnI, Leicester, Cecil etc) were long dead. Then, in 1623, the first folio wasnissued and Bacon could re-issue the familiar plays in the version he had longnintended. If all that sounds wildlynimplausible, then you too have fallen for Bacon’s cunning plan and you havenalso been duped by his superior intellect.
n
n
n
 |
| Donnelly’s Diagram showing how his method works |
n
n
n
nYou can also get some idea of thencomplicated nature of the cipher by the diagram that Donnelly uses to explainnhis findings, with the relationships between the assorted ratios of words pernpage, words per column and the differences between them shown alongside thenpage set outs. Eventually, and he does not reveal in his book how he arrived atnthem, Donnelly comes up with the core code of his decipherment – the numbersnare 505, 506, 513, 516 and 523 – and by assorted combinations of multiplying,nadding, subtracting, ratios and factors, Donnelly reveals the secret messagesnhidden in the plays.
n
n
n
 |
| Seas Ill Said That More Low or Shak’st Spur Never Writ A Word Of Them |
n
n
n
nYou can see his numerical jiggery-pokery in this example,nwhere he shows us how Cecil (his name created from seas and ill)nreveals that neither Marlowe (more low) nor Shakespeare (shak’st spur)ndid not write a single word of the plays. The numbers on the left arenDonnelly’s core numbers with the various additions and subtractions and sonforth worked out. See how simple it all is?
n
n
n
 |
| It Is Even Thought Here That Your Cousin Of St Albans Writes Them. |
n
n
n
nUsing his convoluted calculations,nDonnelly untimely rips a variety of stories out of the plays – how Marlowe wasnkilled, how Shakespeare left his wife in Stratford and went to London, hownElizabeth suspected that the play Richard II was treasonous and so onnand so forth. When Donnelly finished all his adding and subtracting, henpublished The Great Cryptogram in 1888, and, unsurprisingly, the criticsnbattered it. One writer, Joseph Pyle, went so far as to publish his own TinynCryptogram, and by using Donnelly’s own method of calculation revealed thatnwithin the play Hamlet was hidden the message,
n
n
n
n“Donnelly, writer,npolitician, and a charlatan, revealed the secret of this play.”n
n
n
n
n
 |
| Ignatius Donnelly – The Cipher In the Plays and on the Tombstone – 1899 |
n
n
n
nUndeterred,nDonnelly went on and published another book, The Cipher in the Plays and onnthe Tombstone (1899) but like its predecessor, this book also failed tonsell. It’s another barmy construction in which Donnelly’s loonometer is turnednall the way up to eleven as he turns his gaze onto Shakespeare’s tombstone andnthe Sonnets, revisits Bacon and the plays and throws some Rosicrucianism intonthe mix, just for good measure. If you like your bonkers served hot and strong,nIgnatius Loyola Donnelly might just be the very crackpot that is your cup ofntea.
nnn
n
nnn
