Bacon, Francis

Bacon, Francis, 1561-1626, English philosopher, essayist, and statesman, b. London, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at Gray's Inn. He was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper to Queen Elizabeth I. Francis Bacon was a member of Parliament in 1584 and his opposition to Elizabeth's tax program retarded his political advancement; only the efforts of the earl of Essex led Elizabeth to accept him as an unofficial member of her Learned Council. At Essex's trial in 1601, Bacon, putting duty to the state above friendship, assumed an active part in the prosecution—a course for which many have condemned him. With the succession of James I, Bacon's fortunes improved. He was knighted in 1603, became attorney general in 1613, lord keeper in 1617, and lord chancellor in 1618; he was created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St. Albans in 1621. In 1621, accused of accepting bribes as lord chancellor, he pleaded guilty and was fined £40,000, banished from the court, disqualified from holding office, and sentenced to the Tower of London. The banishment, fine, and imprisonment were remitted. Nevertheless, his career as a public servant was ended. He spent the rest of his life writing in retirement.

Bacon belongs to both the worlds of philosophy and literature. He projected a large philosophical work, the Instauratio Magna, but completed only two parts, The Advancement of Learning (1605), later expanded in Latin as De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), and the Novum Organum (1620). Bacon's contribution to philosophy was his application of the inductive method of modern science. He urged full investigation in all cases, avoiding theories based on insufficient data. However, he has been widely censured for being too mechanical, failing to carry his investigations to their logical ends, and not staying abreast of the scientific knowledge of his own day. In the 19th cent., Macaulay initiated a movement to restore Bacon's prestige as a scientist. Today his contributions are regarded with considerable respect. In The New Atlantis (1627) he describes a scientific utopia that found partial realization with the organization of the Royal Society in 1660. Noted for their style and their striking observations about life, his largely aphoristic Essays (1597-1625) are his best-known writings.

Bacon, Francis, 1910-92, English painter, b. Dublin. A self-taught artist, Bacon rejected abstraction in painting to explore a repertoire of strange, fractured, and often bizarre figurative images, many replete with homosexual, sadomasochistic, and fetishistic undertones. He became the center of a storm of controversy with his breakthrough painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944; Tate Gall., London), which portrayed carcasslike figures on crosses. He painted a series of variations on figural themes, e.g., Van Gogh Goes to Work, Velázquez's Innocent X. Often large in scale, Bacon's works, which frequently use photographs or printed materials as sources for their imagery, focus on shockingly grotesque and brutally satiric themes. From the 1950s—the era of his famously grim screaming popes—onward his images became increasingly distorted and abstract, sometimes merging human and animal forms.

(born Oct. 28, 1909, Dublin, Ire.—died April 28, 1992, Madrid, Spain) Irish-British painter. He lived in Berlin and Paris before settling in London (1929) to begin a career as an interior decorator. With no formal art training, he started painting, drawing, and participating in gallery exhibitions, with little success. In 1944 he achieved instant notoriety with a series of controversial paintings, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. His mature style emerged completely with the series of works known as “The Screaming Popes” (1949–mid-1950s), in which he converted Diego Velázquez's famous Portrait of Pope Innocent X into a nightmarish icon of hysterical terror. Most of Bacon's paintings depict isolated figures, often framed by geometric constructions, and rendered in smeared, violent colours. His imagery typically suggests anger, horror, and degradation.

Learn more about Bacon, Francis with a free trial on Britannica.com.

Bacon's cipher or the Baconian cipher is a method of steganography (a method of hiding a secret message as opposed to a true cipher) devised by Francis Bacon. A message is concealed in the presentation of text, rather than its content.

To encode a message, each letter of the plain text is replaced by a group of five of the letters 'A' or 'B'. This replacement is done according to the alphabet of the Baconian cipher, shown below.

a   AAAAA   g     AABBA   n    ABBAA   t     BAABA

b   AAAAB   h     AABBB   o    ABBAB   u-v   BAABB

c   AAABA   i-j   ABAAA   p    ABBBA   w     BABAA

d   AAABB   k     ABAAB   q    ABBBB   x     BABAB

e   AABAA   l     ABABA   r    BAAAA   y     BABBA

f   AABAB   m     ABABB   s    BAAAB   z     BABBB

The writer must make use of two different typefaces for this cipher. After preparing a false message with the same number of letters as all of the As and Bs in the real, secret message, two typefaces are chosen, one to represent As and the other Bs. Then each letter of the false message must be presented in the appropriate typeface, according to whether it stands for an A or a B.

To decode the message, the reverse method is applied. Each "typeface 1" letter in the false message is replaced with an A and each "typeface 2" letter is replaced with a B. The Baconian alphabet is then used to recover the original message.

Any method of writing the message that allows two distinct representations for each character can be used for the Bacon Cipher. Bacon himself prepared a Biliteral Alphabet for handwritten capital and small letters with each having two alternative forms, one to be used as A and the other as B. This was published as an illustrated plate in his De Augmentis Scientiarum (The Advancement of Learning).

Because any message of the right length can be used to carry the encoding, the secret message is effectively hidden in plain sight. The false message can be on any topic and thus can distract a person seeking to find the real message.

Bacon and Shakespeare

Some people have suggested that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were in fact written by Francis Bacon, and that the published plays contain enciphered messages to that effect. Both Ignatius L. Donnelly and Elizabeth Wells Gallup attempted to find such messages by looking for the use of Bacon's cipher in early printed editions of the plays.

A further theory based on Bacon's cipher was published by Edward Clark referring to an inscription on Shakespeare's funerary monument which used a mixture of letter-shapes. Unfortunately the stone had crumbled and been replaced more than half a century earlier, so Clark had to rely on copies. He was building on an article by Hugh Black suggesting that the inscription concealed the sentence, "FRA BA WRT EAR AY", an abbreviation of "Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays."

References

• Francis Bacon's Ciphers at the Philosophical Research Society website.
• William Friedman and Elizabeth Friedman, The Shakespearian ciphers examined, Cambridge University Press, 1957

External links

• Baconian Cipher Tool (Purple Hell)
• Bacon's Cipher Information/Examples

• Excerpts from Bacon's writing and cipher illustrations