Pod Insights Conspiracy Theories Shakespeare’s Encrypted Map to Freemason Treasure About this episode Shakespeare’s First Folio is an incredible historical treasure. It also might be an encrypted treasure map. According to the theories, the First Folio’s secret code reveals the “real” Shakespeare author, a royal cover-up, a Freemason conspiracy, and of course, a map to priceless buried treasure. Treasure that may still be out there.
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Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 What if I told you there's buried treasure in Canada? And we have a map to find it. Oh, and in the treasure cache, there's a supernatural object on par with the Ark of the Covenant. Well, you might say, Carter, that's the plot of the next Indiana Jones. But this map is real. Yeah, you can buy a copy online. You just have to crack the hidden code. I am talking about Shakespeare's First Folio, the oldest surviving version of his plays. Since the 1800s, three different investigators have decoded messages hidden inside the First Folio.
0:45 Speaker 00 The secret codes reveal a royal cover-up of massive proportions, Shakespeare's secret identity as a Freemason, and of course, a map leading to priceless buried treasure. Treasure still waiting to be found. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. You can watch our episodes and more on our YouTube channel, Conspiracy Theories Podcast, and check us out on Instagram, at the Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us.
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3:27 Speaker 00 Act one, scene one. In fair Detroit, where we lay our scene, Dr. Orville Ward Owen. Find something weird. Dr. Owen is a medical doctor, but a theater kid at heart. He makes a hobby of performing Shakespeare for his horses on long buggy drives. Little context, it's the late 1880s, so he's not that eccentric. Owen says that memorizing and reciting the rhythmic stanzas is great stress relief during his long days of treating patients suffering from ailments like cholera and tuberculosis.
4:04 Speaker 00 Now, repeating the same monologues gets boring, so Owen studies more and more plays, until he's committed the entire first folio to memory. That's 36 plays, over 900 pages. Quite a one-man show. Now, in the process, Owen notices something strange. Some lines repeat verbatim in different plays. Other lines seem to be out-of-context nonsense. And the whole first folio is filled with random italics and capitalization. Okay, now, if you're thinking, "Uh, Carter, I don't remember that from high school." It's because modern editions have the errors corrected, for the most part.
4:46 Speaker 00 Modern versions do keep the errors in the content of the plays, like historical inaccuracies. Julius Caesar mentions a clock in Ancient Rome. Cleopatra plays pool in Ancient Egypt. And Trojan War epic Troilus in Cressida references Aristotle, hundreds of years before his birth. William Shakespeare is one of the greatest minds in history. So to Owen, it's odd that he made these mistakes. Now, Dr. Owen's not the first person to notice all this. Some people blame printing errors. The first folio was hand typeset in 1623.
5:29 Speaker 00 But to Owen, the sheer number of oddities suggests there's something bigger going on. He claims the mistakes are intentional. A calculated pattern, placed strategically throughout the book. In other words, he believes these so-called mistakes are a secret code. So Owen makes a list of all the lines with anomalies: repetitions, historical errors, improper capitalization, etc. We'll call them the "marked lines." Reading over the marked lines, Owen realizes they can be arranged to tell a story.
6:13 Speaker 00 He sees this as a secret code, and it's been hiding for over 300 years. Now, part of the reason the code takes 300 years to find is because it's not designed for regular people. It's not like anything you'd find in the New York Times game section. Cracking the code requires understanding of British history and Elizabethan dialect. So, don't feel bad if you don't get it. It took our team a while to wrap their heads around it. I'm still wrapping my head around it. But here's a quick example to give you an idea. Owen takes a marked line from King John, a marked line from Othello, and a marked line
6:56 Speaker 00 from Twelfth Night, and he strings them together. So it reads, "So by a roaring tempest on the flood, a whole armada of convicted sail is scattered and disjointed from fellowship. My letters say a hundred and seven galleys, and mine a hundred forty, and mine two hundred, and this is he that did the tiger board." In plain English, it says, "A large armada," or fleet of ships, "was broken up and introduces the man aboard the conquering ship, the Tiger." Owen realizes the Tiger was among the English naval ships that defeated the Spanish Armada,
7:41 Speaker 00 major news in Shakespeare's time. Stringing together more marked lines, Owen assembles the full story of the naval battle. With details like specific ship names, Owen thinks it can't be a coincidence. So Owen keeps decoding, picking out lines that seem odd and rearranging them. Using the same method, he finds a second secret message.
8:10 Speaker 00 And here is where it gets wild. This message is a letter addressed to the person who deciphers the code, giving them instructions to decrypt another set of secret messages. A code within a code. And for those counting, we are up to three different coded messages, all hidden in the same book. But that's not all the letter says. It also claims that William Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's plays. The letter writer did. The writer placed the secret codes in the First Folio to preserve this truth for future generations.
8:55 Speaker 00 And that letter writer is Sir Francis Bacon. Well, this might be ringing some conspiracy bells. There is a popular theory that William Shakespeare didn't actually write the literary masterpieces credited to him. Sir Francis Bacon did. Oh, okay. Yeah, that is a lot to take in. We've got secret coded messages, codes within codes, naval battles, somebody didn't write Shakespeare, there's ciphers to who did. So let me break it down real quick. Dr. Owen thinks the out of place lines in Shakespeare's First Folio can be combined to reveal hidden messages.
9:38 Speaker 00 Those messages, when deciphered, confirm an old rumor that Sir Francis Bacon is actually the mastermind behind Shakespeare's plays. And lastly, Francis Bacon left further codes in the First Folio, hiding even more secrets. So who's Francis Bacon? And he's best known as the father of the scientific method. His catchphrase, "Knowledge is power." He lived at the same time as Shakespeare, working as a lawyer, politician, and philosopher. And while Bacon never admitted to writing plays undercover...
10:20 Speaker 00 There are clues. For example, in one surviving letter, Bacon calls himself a concealed poet. He was highly educated, familiar with the history that inspired many of Shakespeare's plays. And most importantly, Bacon loved ciphers and codes. He even invented his own cipher, Bacon's bilateral cipher, which later inspired Samuel Morse to create Morse code, the one used for telegraphs. Now, apparently Bacon learned cryptography from a young age. His parents used codes to include secrets and unpopular opinions in their letters. At the time,
11:05 Speaker 00 Queen Elizabeth I had a spy network reading her royal court's mail, monitoring for signs of rebellion. The queen also considered poems, plays, and stories to be political speech, so nobles weren't supposed to write those either. But that didn't stop them. Nobles like the Bacon's published creative writing under pseudonyms. That way, they could share their ideas without getting on the queen's bad side. But they didn't just use fake names. At the time, it was typical for nobles to pay a commoner to be the face of their work. Not just a pen name, but a pen person.
11:49 Speaker 00 This is a key element of the conspiracy theory. William Shakespeare was a real person. He lived, died, married, went to small claims court. But theoretically, he was also a paid actor who never wrote a line of his own. If Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, it changes our understanding of the most popular literature in the English language. Shakespeare's work is beloved, but so is his story that a working-class actor who quit school at 15 could create works of genius beloved for centuries.
12:34 Speaker 00 It's an underdog story.
12:37 Speaker 00 But if a wealthy nobleman with a top-tier education wrote those works, it's less inspirational. And even though Owen has some strong evidence, the idea that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays is still a fringe theory. So, not everyone is quick to believe Dr. Owen. Around the time when Owen begins sharing his theories, people from Shakespeare's hometown, Stratford-upon-Avon, are fundraising for a fancy new Shakespeare memorial. One of the fundraising organizers makes a personal visit to Detroit, planning to debunk Owen's claims. Because let's be real, no one wants to visit the hometown of the guy who didn't write Shakespeare.
13:23 Speaker 00 If Bacon was revealed as the true author, it'd kill Stratford-upon-Avon's tourism industry. So, this man has a vested financial interest in the official story being true. He comes to Detroit, and he sits down with Owen. And Owen changes this guy's mind. After Owen walks the man through the evidence step by step, the man realizes the code is real, and Bacon wrote the plays. Later, a local journalist writes a scathing article about Owen's claims. Similarly, Owen invites the journalist over for a personal demonstration. After seeing the code for himself,
14:07 Speaker 00 the journalist issues a lengthy retraction. He believes Owen too. A lot of people do. Owen ends up publishing his discovery in multiple books, and draws audiences across America for his lecture tours. He even gets investors to finance his search for more clues. Because Owen still has to crack the code within the code. Following directions from the decoded letter, Dr. Owen builds a so-called cipher wheel. This will help him crack the next code. If you're watching the video, you'll see it. If you aren't watching the video, imagine a VHS or cassette tape the size of two
14:49 Speaker 00 small children, but instead of the magnetic tapes spooled on each wheel, it has long strips of linen covered in hundreds of pages of Shakespeare plays. By turning the wheels, you can rewind or fast-forward to different sections of the plays. The wheel allows Dr. Owen to skim between hundreds of pages at a glance. Useful since for this decryption, Owen isn't only looking at the first folio. He also analyzes works officially authored by Francis Bacon and anything he thinks is written by Francis Bacon under a different pseudonym.
15:28 Speaker 00 It's a big job, so Dr. Owen hires three assistants, including a woman named Elizabeth Wells Gallup. She'll be important later, so put a pin. The decrypted letter from Francis Bacon instructs the code breaker to look for certain key words, then mark the lines around those key words. Using this method, Dr. Owen and his assistants pick out 1,001 pages of new marked lines. Like before, they rearrange these marked lines to decode secret messages. They find all kinds of information, but Owen zeroes in on the most exciting revelation.
16:11 Speaker 00 There's a hidden treasure worth millions. He says the new code reveals the location of the original handwritten Shakespeare manuscripts. Okay, now remember, the first folio is the oldest known version of Shakespeare's plays, but not the original. The common understanding is that the very first copies were handwritten by the author, but lost long ago.
16:42 Speaker 00 For anyone, recovering a hidden, original Shakespeare manuscript would be a major archaeological find. Think international news, lifelong fame, big money. Copies of the first folio have sold for nearly $10 million. A handwritten version would go for even more. For Owen, the promise of hidden manuscripts has another draw: their hard evidence proving he's right. Because if Francis Bacon was the real author, the plays will be in his handwriting, which we have preserved samples of. A side-by-side handwriting analysis would undeniably prove
17:27 Speaker 00 that Francis Bacon was the mind behind Shakespeare's plays, an earth-shattering literary discovery. So Owen starts looking. One of the chief clues is the phrase "hid under Y," W-Y-E. Another is "be of braced beams under Roman Ford." These are, um, well, vague. So Owen tests another decryption method: anagrams. That's when you rearrange letters from one word or phrase to make another. For example, conspiracy theories can be anagrammed to "a concise prehistory."
18:10 Speaker 00 Owen takes the second line of the poem on the first folio's title page: "It was for gentle Shakespeare cut," and rearranges the letters into: "Seek, sir, a true angle at Chepstow," F, F being Francis. Chepstow is a Welsh town formerly occupied by the Romans on the River Y. The manuscripts must be there. Owen just has to find them. However, he lives in Detroit, far from Wales. He'll need to fundraise for the expedition, so he continues selling books, giving lectures, and courting investors.
18:52 Speaker 00 To drum up more publicity, he publishes editorials in the Detroit Free Press. 16 years later, he's secured over $20,000, huge in 1909.
19:06 Speaker 00 He travels to Chepstow Castle, an ancient fortress. Owen and his team search the nearby cliffs, believing the manuscripts might be hidden in a riverside cave. They also dig strategic holes, in case the treasure cache was subject to a cave-in. But the caves and holes yield nothing. So Owen re-analyses his clues. A few pop out. "Boxes like eels in the mud. Make a triangle of 123 feet due north and 33 paces. I filled up the shallow water."
19:47 Speaker 00 Owen realizes "hid under Y" is literal. The manuscripts are buried "under the river." He approaches the local landowners, requesting permission to excavate the River Y. They're all on board. One duke even agrees to donate 85 pounds per week to the search. Owen buys dredging machines to trawl the river's floor, and hires over 20 locals to help. He tells them they're seeking "66 lead-lined boxes." Owen also brings his wife and kids.
20:26 Speaker 00 For six years, the family lives in rural Wales, while Owen and his team dig hole after hole. Five, 10, 13. No luck. By hole 14, they're exhausted. And that's when they find it. A set of wooden beams and boxes. It's an ancient Roman bridge and water cistern. Braced beams under Roman ford, just like the code promised. The crew searches this area for the lead-lined boxes of manuscripts and other treasure, and finds nothing. It's confusing.
21:11 Speaker 00 Everything added up until this point.
21:15 Speaker 00 Dr. Owen concludes that someone else must have found the boxes already. Out of money and goodwill, he and his family returned to Detroit. But the search isn't over. While Owen was digging, his assistant took her own stab at deciphering the folio and unveiled a royal cover-up that wouldn't only rewrite history in Great Britain, but also the USA.
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22:51 Speaker 00 If you found Dr. Owen's decryption methods confusing, you're not alone. In the early 1900s, his assistant, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, feels the same. To be clear, Gallup believes there's a secret code hidden in Shakespeare's first folio by Francis Bacon. She just thinks Owen's overcomplicating it. Remember how we mentioned that Francis Bacon invented his own code? Well, Gallup thinks that if Bacon was going to hide a cipher in Shakespeare's plays, he'd use that.
23:24 Speaker 00 It's called the bilateral cipher. Francis Bacon published it in 1623, under his own name. Not only is this code undeniably created by Bacon, it's much easier to understand, though still confusing, so bear with me for a second. We mentioned earlier that Bacon's bilateral cipher is a forerunner to Morse code, and similarly, it's a binary code, the same concept computers run on. Instead of dots and dashes, or zeros and ones, every letter is either italicized or not. The cipher resets every five letters. Gallup uses A for non-italics, and B for italics. So, A is five As in a row,
24:09 Speaker 00 B is four As and one B, C is three As, a B, and another A, and so on. It's a simple explanation for all the random italics in the folio. Like Owen, Gallup convinces people that her theory has legs, and gets paid to pursue it. She moves to Illinois, and sets up a research facility at Riverbank Lab. She even hires her own assistants. Then Gallup and her team apply Bacon's bilateral cipher to Shakespeare's first folio, starting at the beginning. Not only does she find a brand-new hidden message from Francis Bacon,
24:53 Speaker 00 that message drops a bomb on accepted history. It reads: "Queen Elizabeth is my true mother, and I am the lawful heir to the throne. Find the cipher story in my books' contain. It tells great secrets, every one of which, if imparted openly, would forfeit my life. F. Bacon."
25:25 Speaker 00 You heard that right. It claims Francis Bacon wasn't only the true author of Shakespeare, he was also the Prince of Wales. But if he revealed it publicly, he'd be killed. If Gallup's discovery is true, it means the English crown has lied to the public for centuries. But there's more. Gallup keeps decoding, revealing the full details of the cover-up, which unfolds like a telenovela. It's written in Elizabethan English, so we'll give you the Cliff Notes. It starts with Queen Elizabeth I, who reigned for most of Shakespeare's life.
26:09 Speaker 00 One of her major claims to fame is that she died a virgin. Yep. She's the namesake for Virginia and West Virginia, which began as colonies under her rule. Gallup's decoded message says the Virgin Queen was no virgin. She had a long affair with Sir Robert Dudley. Quick backstory on Dudley and the Queen, and this is all confirmed history. The Queen and Dudley had an exceptionally close relationship. She literally gave him a bedroom in her castle with a door opening directly into hers.
26:54 Speaker 00 And she gave him a special title so he could legally touch her. Hmm. But she never married him. Why not? Well, first, it'd be a bad political move. All her reign, Queen Elizabeth used her single status for diplomacy. Foreign royals treated England better when they thought they could maybe eventually marry her and take over England. And local nobles bent over backward for the chance of becoming king. Being single was concerted image control for political gain. Secondly, Sir Dudley was married. Now, in the fall of 1560, Dudley's wife suddenly died.
27:42 Speaker 00 Then, in winter 1560, Queen Elizabeth I was bedridden with a mysterious, quote, "swelling disease." The mystery illness cleared up in early 1561, oh, right around the time that, oh, Francis Bacon was born, on January 22nd, 1561. That's confirmed history, all right? But here's where we diverge from agreed-upon history to Gallup's conspiracy theory. According to Gallup's decoding, around the time that Dudley's wife mysteriously died,
28:19 Speaker 00 the Queen and Lord Dudley married in secret because she was pregnant, and her baby was Francis Bacon. Okay, how do we put all this together? Well, looking at Dudley's wife's death, the Queen's mysterious swelling disease, Bacon's birthday, the timeline adds up. Now, this secret baby conspiracy theory isn't new. It's been around since the Elizabethan era. Most scholars believe the theories emerged due to uncertainty. For most of the Queen's reign, she refused to name an heir.
29:03 Speaker 00 But Gallup thinks the Queen really was hiding her affairs and forcing the nobility to help her defraud the public. According to Gallup's decoded text, after giving birth, Queen Elizabeth I forced Lord Nicholas Bacon to secretly adopt baby Francis. Official records show that decades later, when Lord Bacon died, Francis inherited nothing.
29:33 Speaker 00 This makes sense if Bacon wasn't his son. Traditionally, royal bastards were financially supported by the crown, even if not formally acknowledged. And informally, the Queen took an unusual interest in Francis Bacon. Gallup's Decoded Story says the Queen considers making him her heir, until she discovers that he's been secretly writing Shakespeare's plays. Specifically, she's mad he wrote Hamlet. Remember, the Queen considers plays political speech, and Hamlet is about a royal coup. Well, eventually, their relationship recovers,
30:16 Speaker 00 and on her deathbed, she's about to name Francis her heir, when a lord kills her. Now, officially, the Queen's cause of death is unknown. There's no autopsy, so we can't refute Gallup's murder claim. And according to Gallup, this last-minute murder is why the Queen never acknowledged her son. But if he had a claim to the throne, why didn't Bacon act on it? Well, over the years, there were so many rumors about the Queen's secret children that in 1571, England passed an act designating claims of royal blood as treason.
30:58 Speaker 00 And back then, being convicted of treason equaled beheading. So Bacon bends the knee to the new king, James I. Now, the whole tale feels very Shakespearean. But it's not quite over. By 1623, Bacon has no crown, no inheritance, no maternal validation, and no literary recognition. So, according to Gallup's decoded text, when he's assembling the first folio of Shakespeare's plays, he hides secret codes. He hopes to preserve the truth for future generations while keeping his head.
31:40 Speaker 00 And as proof for the future decoders, he includes clues to find the original manuscripts.
31:49 Speaker 00 So around 1906, Elizabeth Wells Gallup goes treasure hunting. She seeks the same promise of riches and glory as Dr. Owen, but follows a different set of clues. First, she travels to the UK and hunts through libraries in the British Museum's archives. In the archives, she applies Bacon's bilateral cipher to first editions of books Bacon published under his own name, including "De Augmentis Schientiarum", a book about the scientific method. Here, she decodes a long Elizabethan message you'll see on screen.
32:33 Speaker 00 No worries if you're not watching, because basically it says that if she wants to find the treasure, she has to dig up graves. Specifically, the graves of Bacon's literary contemporaries: Edmund Spencer, Robert Burton, Christopher Marlowe, George Peel, and Robert Green. The trouble is, most of these graves are long gone, buried under new buildings, maintained but with tombstones replaced, or otherwise lost to time. But Gallup does decode Robert Burton's gravestone, revealing the message:
33:13 Speaker 00 "Take heed, in a box is M.S.-F.B. M.S. Manuscript, F.B. Francis Bacon." And Gallup decodes Edmund Spencer's gravestone to read: "A small inner space at the west end contains the M.S. named." She attempts to dig up the graves for these alleged boxes, until authorities stop her from grave robbing. Fearing arrest, she returns to the library and Bacon's final books. In one resuscitatio, Gallup decodes another long message in Elizabethan English that boils down to:
33:58 Speaker 00 "Go to Francis Bacon's London home, Cannonbury Tower. Sneak into the highest room, press on the false wall panel, and voila, original Shakespeare manuscripts."
34:16 Speaker 00 Except by the time Gallup decodes the message, Cannonberry Tower has been fully remodeled multiple times. Any hidden wall panels have been destroyed. But here's the thing about Cannonberry Tower. It was also used by Freemasons. And according to our next codebreaker, the Freemasons took the original Shakespeare manuscripts and buried them alongside a mystical treasure that has supernatural power. A treasure that, if found, could start a world war.
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35:59 Speaker 00 Today's drama features one final character, a Norwegian organist and ski jumper who looks for investing tips and winds up digging for buried treasure. His name is Peter Amundsen. In the early 2000s, he starts researching William Delbert Gahn, a legendary stockbroker from the early 20th century. He hopes to use Gahn's methods for his own trades. But then he comes across another book Gahn wrote involving steganography. Basically, it's secret codes hidden in plain sight. Think hostages blinking in Morse code, lemon juice and visible ink, or playing a record backwards for a secret song.
36:44 Speaker 00 Amundsen sets stock trading aside and goes down the steganography rabbit hole. He finds a theory he attributes to scholar Hugh Black, that Shakespeare's original gravestone held a code. But that's not all. The gravestone also has a pretty major typo. It lists Shakespeare's age at death as 53, when he died at 52. At this point, Amundsen knows nothing about Shakespeare, so he dives down a third rabbit hole into Shakespeare's life and finds the theory that the author was actually Francis Bacon.
37:27 Speaker 00 Amundsen wonders if Bacon might be hidden in the plays, like a secret signature. So he runs a Ctrl+F on the first folio. Bacon shows up twice. Once, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, on page 53, the number on the gravestone. Could be coincidence, except this scene doesn't appear in other versions of the play. And a few pages before, the page number skips from 46 to 49. It's only because of this error that Bacon appears on page 53.
38:11 Speaker 00 Like Owen and Gala before him, Amundsen doesn't think it's an error, just like the 53 on Shakespeare's grave isn't an error. Because 53 isn't random. It's an important number in Freemasonry. And one of their symbols is the Masonic compass. If you draw a line down the middle, the compass becomes two 53-degree triangles.
38:42 Speaker 00 Two triangles, two mentions of Bacon. Amundsen wonders, is too important. So what's on the second page of the folio? What's Scene 2 of The Tempest? And on column 2 of Page 2, he finds this. You guessed it, "two" spelled out in an acrostic. That's when the first letter of each line spells a hidden word or phrase. Drawing a straight line across the page, Amundsen finds another acrostic.
39:15 Speaker 00 Bacon.
39:17 Speaker 00 For Amundsen, that clinches it. Francis Bacon was Shakespeare and a Freemason. Now Bacon isn't confirmed to have been a Freemason, but readers have been finding Masonic references in Shakespeare for centuries. How much like the theories about Bacon being the true author and Bacon being the Prince of Wales, Shakespeare was a Freemason isn't new. In fact, the first folio is actually dedicated to the alleged Grand Master of Freemasonry at the time, William Herbert Earl of Pembroke. But the best clue comes in the play Richard III. A major plot point is a prophecy involving the letter G.
40:01 Speaker 00 And G is another major Freemason symbol. Here's one line from the play. "He hearkens after prophecies and dreams, and from the cross-row plucks the letter G, and says a wizard told him that by G his issue disinherited should be. And for my name of George begins with G, it follows in his thought that I am he." That's a lot of G's. Now you can guess what rabbit hole Peter Amundsen goes down next. He joins the Freemasons. He learns plenty he can't talk about, but here's what he does share with our team. There's no record of Francis Bacon joining the Freemasons.
40:47 Speaker 00 Because he was part of an even more secretive branch of the secret society, the Rosicrucians. Yes, a secret society within a secret society, just like the code within the code. Okay, stay with me here. It gets really cool. The Rosicrucians published anonymous manifestos in Europe in the 1600s, the same time Francis Bacon was writing. Their goals were to enlighten the common man, improving education and society. A version of Rosicrucianism still exists today, and they proudly claim Francis Bacon on their website as one of their early leaders.
41:31 Speaker 00 As for Amundsen, he finds proof in the first folio. In Act Two, Scene Five of Symbeline, he discovers another acrostic spelling out "Rosie Cross" in the shape of a 53-degree triangle. Amundsen believes that the so-called Shakespeare plays were a Rosicrucian project intended to educate the common man. Now, printed manifestos couldn't reach the illiterate, but live theater could. So Bacon and his fellow Rosicrucians hid their ideas in the plays.
42:14 Speaker 00 It was an organized conspiracy to shape people's minds and thinking without them realizing it. If this is true, the Rosicrucian plot has influenced society for centuries. They may have influenced you if you studied Shakespeare in school, but that's not all. The Rosicrucians write about a legendary figure known as Father R.C. After a long life of enlightening himself and others, Father R.C. was buried in a secret
42:52 Speaker 00 grave, along with key documents and an inextinguishable lamp. Most scholars and modern Rosicrucians think Father R.C. is an allegory, not real. But Amundsen believes Father R.C. was Francis Bacon.
43:14 Speaker 00 The documents in the myth are his original handwritten Shakespeare manuscripts, and the inextinguishable lamp is the menorah from the second temple. It's a biblical treasure akin to the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. It hasn't been seen in centuries. Amundsen says that if the menorah was found, it could kick off a world war between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish people. All three religions would want control of it.
43:53 Speaker 00 As Amundsen explains, during the crusades, the Knights Templar took the menorah. They passed it down to the Freemasons, who passed it to the Rosicrucians, who hid it in their founder's grave. And they left the clues to find that grave in Shakespeare's First Folio. And this was all planned by Francis Bacon. I cannot get enough of this conspiracy theory. Knights Templar, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, secret codes, secret societies, Shakespeare's plays, biblical artifacts.
44:35 Speaker 00 It is every conspiracy theorist's fantasy that all of this could come together and be fostered by one guy who was born to the Queen but denied his heritage, so decided to root all his truths into secret documents. I love it. But it might be getting a little complicated, so let's break it down. Peter Amundsen believes that Francis Bacon founded the Rosicrucians, secretly wrote Shakespeare's plays to promote their ideology, and hid clues to find his future grave in the First Folio. That grave includes the original handwritten Shakespeare manuscripts and lost Knights Templar treasure.
45:19 Speaker 00 Which brings us to Amundsen's treasure hunt.
45:25 Speaker 00 Theory in hand, he reconsideres those first two pages of The Tempest in the first folio, the ones with the Bacon acrostic message. Those pages mention a library, an island, and a "most auspicious star." The first character to speak is called Boatswain, but with a bizarre spelling, B-O-T-E-S-W-A-I-N-E, as opposed to, well, boat swain. Here, Amundsen takes some steps that wouldn't necessarily be intuitive to the average person, because, like the earlier codes, this isn't designed for the average person.
46:07 Speaker 00 Francis Bacon was the epitome of the Renaissance man, familiar with history, astronomy, geometry, literature, religion, all kinds of subjects. And part of his code's design was making sure the treasure could only be found by someone who'd studied as broadly as he did. You didn't just need to realize the spelling of Boatswain was odd, you needed to know astronomy and geography to realize why it was spelled that way. Specifically, you needed to know constellations, which Amundsen does. He sees this weird spelling of Boatswain
46:50 Speaker 00 and realizes it's a reference to two constellations, Bootez and Wayne. Wayne is an old name for Ursa Major, commonly called the Big Bear. Then he brings back the line from The Tempest, quote, "most auspicious star." He takes the coordinates of their most auspicious stars, the brightest ones, from Bootez and Wayne, and looks at a map to see where those same coordinates would land on Earth. And, you are not going to believe this, it is Oak Island. Now, you might have heard of it from the TV show, The Curse of Oak Island.
47:33 Speaker 00 It follows real people searching for legendary buried treasure.
47:39 Speaker 00 But the search started long before the show. For decades, people have sought the money pit, the hidden, underground treasure cache. Now, here's where Amundsen's theory comes in. One of the major clues found on Oak Island is a scrap of parchment with ink from a quill pen dating to around the time of Shakespeare. And in his later years, Francis Bacon explored the east coast of Canada right around Oak Island. Okay, to recap, the First Folio codes point to Oak Island. Legends recount hidden treasure on Oak Island,
48:22 Speaker 00 and Francis Bacon sailed around Oak Island. It all lines up. Amundsen decides to search the island. It's about 140 acres, so to narrow it down, he returns to the First Folio. He looks for more acoustic twos. In Titus Andronicus, he finds one right by a line about gold buried under a tree. The tree is yet another Freemason symbol, the Tree of Life. Okay, bear with me here. This is also a little complicated, but it does line up. The Tree of Life has 10 points, or nodes, each representing a different value,
49:06 Speaker 00 like victory, kingdom, or mercy. The tree is also used in Kabbalah, a branch of Jewish mysticism. The choice of a Jewish symbol might be a hint at the menorah. Amundsen looks for a Tree of Life symbol on Oak Island and realizes someone may have already found it. Now, one of the most famous clues to the Oak Island treasure is Nolan's Cross, an arrangement of boulders found in 1981. From an aerial view, the boulders form a cross.
49:46 Speaker 00 But what if it's not a cross? Amundsen overlays the Tree of Life on an image of Nolan's Cross. It's perfectly proportional. Each boulder on Nolan's Cross touches a node on the Tree of Life. Amundsen thinks the boulders are actually arranged in the shape of a Tree of Life. So he starts looking for the names of each node in the first folio. He finds the word "mercy" on the last page. Then, he lays the Tree of Life symbol over it.
50:23 Speaker 00 The word "mercy" is on the mercy node, right under "pierce." Pierce mercy. To pierce is to create a hole. That must mean the treasure is at the mercy point on Oak Island. That's where to dig. Okay, phew, that was a complicated journey, but we got there. Except, well, it gets a little more complicated because the mercy point is underwater. Oak Island is covered in ponds and swamps. To pierce mercy, they have to drain the water. Not an easy feat. For Amundsen, it's further confirmation he's right.
51:07 Speaker 00 He believes that while Francis Bacon made the plan, his friend Thomas Bushell, a water engineer, did the actual burial. Right after Bacon died, Bushell left England saying he had to "build Solomon's Temple." Or, in other words, "build storage for the Temple menorah." Amundsen says Bushell used a mercury coating to protect the treasure cache, which would preserve it perfectly, no matter how long it stayed underwater.
51:40 Speaker 00 Which is good, because as of 2025, no one's been able to dig it up yet. Amundsen hasn't had a chance to return to Oak Island, but another explorer's search did find a man-made hole at the Mercy Point. And because it's underwater, no one has gone down the hole. Still, it's proof that long ago, someone excavated Mercy Point, either to bury their treasure, or dig it up. Amundsen acknowledges that the treasure may have been found by an earlier decoder, or moved by the Freemasons.
52:21 Speaker 00 But it also may still be there, buried underwater. Even though Amundsen hasn't found the original Shakespeare manuscripts, or the Temple menorah, he says he found another treasure: knowledge. The hunt encouraged him to read literature, learn languages, and study geometry. He believes this is why Bacon buried the treasure in the first place. Not for personal glory, but to encourage education and self-improvement. And Amundsen isn't the only one who unexpectedly benefited from the Shakespeare treasure hunt.
53:03 Speaker 00 Remember Elizabeth Wells Gallup's assistance? After helping with her search, they joined the US military's World War II code-breaking team. One of them, William Friedman, broke the Japanese Purple Code, allowing the Allies to intercept Japanese messages. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Friedman helped crack codes that uncovered South American Nazi spy rings. They were instrumental to winning World War II. Both Friedmans said they cracked these codes, using what they learned from Gallup and her Shakespeare quest.
53:45 Speaker 00 For once, a conspiracy theory did good in the world. Well, maybe it's more than once, and it may not be done yet. A bigger dig at Oak Island's Mercy Point could still uncover hidden treasure. And the theory is so pervasive over the centuries, it feels like something must be hidden in the First Folio. To quote Shakespeare, or Bacon, "Truth will come to light. Murder cannot be hid long.
54:18 Speaker 00 A man's son may, but at the length, truth will out." Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. For more information on the codes in Shakespeare's First Folio, amongst the many sources we used, we found the documentary Cracking the Shakespeare Code and the books The Seven Steps to Mercy with Shakespeare's Key to the Oak Island Templum by Peter Amundsen
55:03 Speaker 00 and Erland Lowe, and The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined by William F. Friedman and Elizabeth S. Friedman, extremely helpful to our research. And special thanks to Peter Amundsen for giving us a personal interview and sharing several key images for this episode. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Maggie Admire, edited by Pete Ritchie, fact-checked
55:42 Speaker 00 by Sophie Kemp, and engineered, video edited, and sound designed by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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