Dr Orville Ward Owen (January 1, 1854 – March 31, 1924) was an American physician and exponent of the Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship. Owen's "cipher wheel" was a device for quickly collating printed pages from the works of Bacon and other authors, combining passages that appeared to have some connexion with key words or phrases. Owen described this as the word cipher. The method is discussed by the Friedmans who conclude that it has no cryptographic validity. Indeed Dr Frederick Mann, a close friend of Owen, published a severe critique soon after Owen's book first appeared. Owen drew on the works normally attributed to Bacon, Shakespeare, Robert Greene, George Peele, Edmund Spenser and Robert Burton, some of which did not appear until over 20 years after Bacon's death. He believed that these revealed a secret history of the Elizabethan period, in which Bacon, the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had written the works attributed to the other authors. Owen was led to the belief that original manuscripts were hidden at Chepstow Castle, and made several expeditions to attempt to recover them in 1909-10. Unfortunately nothing was found. Owen's cipher wheel was discovered in a warehouse in Detroit [1] by Virginia Fellows (1910-2006), a supporter of Owen's theory, who presented it to her publisher.
References
- Virginia M. Fellows, The Shakespeare Code, Snow Mountain Press, 2006. ISBN 1932890025.
- William Friedman and Elizebeth Friedman, The Shakespearian ciphers examined, Cambridge University Press, 1957.
- O.W. Owen, Sir Francis Bacon's cipher story I-V, Howard Publishing, 1893-5. Reprinted 1995, ISBN 1564595919.
