Orville Ward Owen

Dr. Orville Ward Owen (January 1, 1854 – March 31, 1924) was an American physician, and exponent of the Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship. Owen claimed to have discovered hidden messages contained in the works of Shakespeare/Bacon. He deciphered these using a device he invented called a "cipher wheel". The alleged discoveries were published in Owen's multi-volume work Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story (1893-5).

Owen's "cipher wheel" was a device for quickly collating printed pages from the works of Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and other authors, combining passages that appeared to have some connection with key words or phrases. Owen described this as the word cipher. A one thousand long strip of canvas had on it pasted the works of Shakespeare as well as samples by Christopher Marlowe and other contemporaries. When the wheels turned, key words were highlighted.

The method was examined by cryptologists William and Elizebeth Friedman, who conclude that it has no cryptographic validity. In addition, Dr. Frederick Mann, a close friend of Owen, published a severe critique soon after Owen's book first appeared. Mann wrote that Owen's method means that "we are asked to believe that such peerless creations as Hamlet, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet were not prime productions of the transcendent genius who wrote them, but were subsidiary devices which Bacon designed for the purpose of concealing the cipher therein." He also noted that Owen and his assistants gave themselves considerable freedom in choosing and altering passages as they saw fit, even though the cipher-text was supposed to be identified by keywords; "in one instance the keyword is 47 lines away from the quotation taken, and in a large number of instances it is not even to be found on the same page".

Owen drew on the works normally attributed to Bacon, Shakespeare, Robert Greene, George Peele, Edmund Spenser and Robert Burton, all of which he believed had been written by Bacon.

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