The Name is the Cover

For some reason, every time I fall down a literary rabbit hole this week, Bacon is there.

I turn a page: Bacon. Follow a theory: Bacon again. Start asking who really wrote the thing, and there’s another Bacon being pulled into the story. Another hidden author. Another name that might be covering for somebody else.

At some point, you have to stop and ask: How many Bacons are in this literary mystery, and what did they supposedly write?

The Voynich Manuscript has a Bacon in its origin story.

Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century friar and scholar, was once named as its author. A letter that traveled with the manuscript says Emperor Rudolf II reportedly bought it for 600 ducats, believing it was Roger’s work. The story is irresistible: an emperor, an impossible price, a book full of strange plants and naked figures, and a script no one can read.

There’s just one problem. The parchment dates to 1404–1438. Roger Bacon died in 1292. The manuscript could not have been written on parchment that did not yet exist. Did a Bacon also invent time travel? Probably not. So the old attribution cannot be right. Either way, the story stuck.

Then a Bacon turns up again, this time in the question of who wrote Shakespeare.

The proposed authors change: William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe, Mary Sidney, and sometimes a whole committee. But the argument often starts with the same assumption: a man from Stratford couldn’t possibly have written work this learned, worldly, and politically knowing.

I feel a little bad for the actor, William Shakespeare. Imagine leaving a paper trail, having fellow writers identify you, and seeing your name on the plays, only to have people decide you must be a front because your life and upbringing don’t match their idea of what a genius is supposed to look like.

Still, the question has a strange, compelling shape. What if “William Shakespeare” was not an invented name at all, but a real person whose name was used by someone else? A living actor, a public figure, a name already attached to the theater. Not a blank pseudonym, but a human being who could stand in the light while another writer stayed in the shadows.

One of the people who opened this particular rabbit hole was Delia Bacon. In the 1850s, she argued that Shakespeare’s plays were written by a group of educated thinkers, including Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, and Edmund Spenser. In her version, they hid a radical political philosophy inside the plays and wrote behind the name “Shakespeare.” Delia and Francis were not related. Their shared surname is coincidence, which seems almost too neat for this story. But can you have too much Bacon?

Francis Bacon makes a tempting figure for a hidden-author theory. He was a philosopher, statesman, lawyer, and writer. He believed knowledge could be concealed and revealed through signs. He actually devised a biliteral cipher, a method for hiding a message inside an ordinary-looking text through differences in its letters or type.

His name also lives on in the Baconian method, his approach to building knowledge through observation, experiment, and evidence. That’s a different Baconian trail from the Shakespeare authorship theory, but the two are easy to braid together: a man who taught people to investigate the world and who devised a way to hide messages becomes a natural suspect whenever a text seems to be speaking in two voices.

The Baconian case points to more than ciphers. Advocates draw attention to Francis Bacon’s education and access to court life, to parallels between his commonplace book, the Promus, and language in the plays, and to the Northumberland Manuscript, whose cover bears Bacon’s name alongside titles associated with Shakespeare. These are the kinds of clues that make the theory feel less like a random guess and more like a trail worth following. Whether they establish authorship is another question. The evidence is disputed.

Then the theory finds a royal trapdoor.

Some later Baconian writers claimed Francis Bacon was the secret son of Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. In that version, he was quietly raised by Sir Nicholas and Lady Anne Bacon, and the plays’ hidden messages could reveal not only their author but a concealed royal lineage and a dangerous history of the court.

It is a claim without credible historical proof. But as a story, it is almost impossibly compelling: a queen, a secret child, an adopted name, coded works, and a writer whose public identity might itself be part of the concealment. The theory gives every silence a possible meaning and every coincidence another door to open.

Behind door number one: Why would Francis Bacon use William Shakespeare’s name? The theory apparently has answers ready.

A courtier might protect his political ambitions by keeping his name off the public stage.

Dangerous ideas might travel more safely under another person’s identity.

A hidden royal son might need a mask.

And if the name belonged to a real actor, perhaps the disguise could pass as ordinary theater business.

It is a beautiful machine of a theory. Each answer creates another locked door.

The evidence-backed account remains that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the works attributed to him, sometimes in collaboration with other playwrights. His name appeared on published plays during his lifetime. Fellow writers and actors connected him to the work. The First Folio, assembled by his fellow actors after his death, presented the plays as his. The record is incomplete, as records often are. Incompleteness leaves room for questions, but it doesn’t make every answer equally likely.

Maybe we’re drawn to a hidden-author theory because it feels more satisfying than accepting that a real person can exceed the story we’ve made up about what kind of person gets to write masterpieces. Or maybe mysteries make us want a famous name to pin to the wall.

Either way, the Bacon name keeps surfacing wherever a text and its author refuse to settle neatly together.

Roger almost certainly didn’t write the Voynich Manuscript. Francis may or may not have written Shakespeare. William Shakespeare was probably not a pen name.

But a code does not always want to be broken.

Sometimes the point is to keep the meaning from traveling any farther than its maker intends. Sometimes a book is not a puzzle left for the world, but a private room built for the one person or group of people who know what every mark means. Maybe the Voynich is waiting for us to read it. Maybe it was never written for us at all. Maybe some books aren’t meant to be read.

That changes the question from “Who can solve this?” to “Who was allowed to understand it?”

The manuscript stays open. Its meaning stays private. The author is present and withheld at once.

And somewhere on the cover, there may be a name.

A signature. A disguise. A person asked to stand in for a story that belonged to someone else.

Follow this rabbit hole further into the Voynich Manuscript in Lore Lassen’s notebook.