Two hosts: HOST A (male), HOST B (female). Target length ~7 minutes. Written to accompany the image "orifex-side-by-side.png" — the listener is assumed to be looking at it, and the hosts walk through it top to bottom, left to right. Audience: complete newcomers.
HOST A: So I'm going to show you one picture, and by the end of it you'll understand a mystery that's been sitting in storage in Montana for twenty years. Ready?
HOST B: Ready. And I should warn everyone — this starts in 1890s Detroit, of all places.
HOST A: It does. A physician named Orville Owen — respected doctor, photographic memory, had memorized all of Shakespeare for fun — became convinced that Francis Bacon had hidden an autobiography inside the printed books of the Elizabethan age. Not in invisible ink. In the words themselves. Whole sentences that could be pulled out of different books and reassembled into a hidden story.
HOST B: And here's the part I love: he didn't just theorize. He built a machine. A thousand feet of canvas, wound between two big wooden drums, like a giant reel-to-reel tape. He glued the pages of Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe — dozens of books — onto that canvas, and cranked it past his reading position, marking passages in six colors of colored pencil.
HOST A: That machine still exists. The canvas survives, in storage, never photographed properly, never digitized. And the question for a hundred and thirty years has been: was Owen's method real — a procedure anyone could follow — or was he fooling himself?
HOST B: Which brings us to the picture. This is one specimen — one small test — laid out so you can judge it with your own eyes. Look at the title: "One data nugget, side by side: the Orifex specimen."
HOST A: Start on the LEFT — the blue box, labeled SOURCE. This is a passage from Owen's published output: something he called the "Letter to the Decipherer," which he claimed to have extracted from the old books. It reads like a letter from Bacon himself, addressed to whoever would one day crack the cipher. It's even dated London, 1623 — the same year as Shakespeare's First Folio.
HOST B: Now the RIGHT side — the orange box, labeled DESTINATION. That's the First Folio itself: the famous 1623 collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. Specifically, two different scenes from one play — Troilus and Cressida.
HOST A: And here's the whole game: the colors show you where each phrase of Owen's letter actually LIVES in Shakespeare. Look at the blue highlights on both sides. On the left, Owen's letter says there is "no orifex for a point as subtle as Ariachne's broken woof to enter." On the right, in Act five, scene two of Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare wrote: "Admits no orifex for a point as subtle as Ariachne's broken woof to enter."
HOST B: Nearly word for word. And "orifex" — that strange word meaning a tiny opening — appears exactly ONCE in all of Shakespeare. Once. It's like a fingerprint. If you find "orifex" in Owen's letter, there is only one place in the entire Folio it can have come from.
HOST A: Now look at the PEACH-colored highlights — that's the second discovery. A longer run in Owen's letter: "hedge aside from the direct forthright, like to an entered tide they all rush by and leave you hindermost..." — about seven lines. That comes from a completely different scene: Act three, scene three, a speech by Ulysses.
HOST B: Seven consecutive lines, essentially verbatim, from a different act — spliced directly onto the first material. And in between, look at the GRAY italic text on the left side. That's the connective tissue: the little joining phrases that stitch the two Shakespeare passages into one flowing letter.
HOST A: So one paragraph of Owen's "hidden letter" is demonstrably woven from two separate locations in one Shakespeare play, with small connecting threads between them. That's not an opinion — you can check every word.
HOST B: Now the bottom-right box, and this is where it gets genuinely eerie. The Victorian sources tell us Owen's method used four special GUIDE WORDS — Fortune, Honour, Nature, and Reputation. The rule, written down in 1895, was: pencil around every sentence containing the guide word. The green highlights show what we found: that ONE scene — Ulysses' scene — contains all four. "Skittish Fortune's hall." "Honour travels in a strait so narrow." "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." "Case thy reputation in thy tent." All four guides, clustered in the very scene the seven-line splice was taken from.
HOST A: And the "honour" sentence? It begins three lines before the splice. The guide word sits right at the head of the extracted passage — exactly where the 1895 procedure says to draw the pencil line.
HOST B: So walk through what the picture is claiming, step by step. One: a cluster of guide words marks a zone. Two: you enclose the sentences containing them. Three: rare words like orifex act as keys, selecting other passages. Four: the pieces get extracted, labeled, and sorted. Five: like joins to like, with small connecting words smoothing the seams. That's the machine's whole procedure — and this picture shows every step leaving a visible trace.
HOST A: Time for the honest part, because this project insists on it. Does this specimen PROVE Bacon hid a letter in Shakespeare? No. There are two live explanations. Either Bacon dispersed an original text into the plays and Owen recovered it — or Owen composed the letter himself BY this method, splicing Shakespeare into new sentences. One specimen can't tell those apart.
HOST B: But here's what one specimen CAN do: it proves the correspondence is real and checkable, and it turns a Victorian mystery into a measurable question. Because those two explanations leave different fingerprints. If the plays are full of transplanted material, the writing around the insertion points should be subtly broken — seams. And modern language-analysis tools can measure "broken" numerically, across every play, without touching the fragile canvas at all.
HOST A: There's even a testable prediction on the record already: of all thirty-six Folio plays, Troilus and Cressida — the odd one out, missing from the Folio's own table of contents, added at the last minute, long considered Shakespeare's strangest play — should show the strongest signal. Both of this specimen's destinations came from it.
HOST B: And the canvas in Montana? It's the answer key. Owen's six colors of pencil, marked on the actual pages, are the working record of the method — which colors meant which guides, which keys, which threads. One careful, non-contact photographic scan would let all of this be checked against the machine's own homework.
HOST A: One picture. Two boxes. A handful of colors. And a hundred-and-thirty-year argument turned into something you can measure.
HOST B: The full drawings, documents, and methodology are published at gorhambury dot org — everything on that page may be freely shared.
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