Thomas "Penn" Leary

AKA: Publishes as "Penn Leary"

Lawyer and self-taught Shakespeare scholar Leary claims to have found cryptographic evidence in Shakespeare's work that indicates that they were written by Francis Bacon. He has published several books on this theme. Critics suggest that he has indulged in "over-cryptanalysis" and extracted non-existent messages from random patterns of text. Leary seems to have won recognition as an interesting scholar from his critics, without convincing them.

Places Lived

Omaha, NE

Author Of

Nonfiction

Keywords

Shakespeare; 16th and 17th century cryptography; Literary History; Aviation

Occupation

Lawyer
Retired Judge

Bibliography

The Cryptographic Shakespeare : A Monograph Wherein the Poems and Plays Attributed to William Shakespeare Are Proven to Contain the Enciphered Name of the Concealed Author, Francis Bacon. 1987. In HR.
The Second Cryptographic Shakes Peare. 1990.
Are There Ciphers in Shakespeare? (A Supplement to the Book the Second Cryptographic Shakespeare).. 1993.
Ken Chilstrom, Test Flying At Old Wright Field. (co-author), 1995.

We appreciate corrections and additions to our information about authors, but please read the following guidelines and caveats carefully.

The Nebraska Authors database is based on publicly available sources. Unless you are the author contacting us in person, it helps us if you cite the source or sources of your information. We cannot include unsourced information in the database.
We may be appreciative of information we choose not to include in the publicly available database.
To include an image on an author profile, please send jpg attachment to nebraskaauthors@lincoln.ne.gov. A photo-release agreement is required before the image will be published on this site.
Because of the way we are staffed, expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months.
While we initially included some actual links to external URLs in the database, we will in the future no longer provide functioning links. We will instead record the presence of specific external materials in language that we hope will help intelligent users find it themselves. Web rot, in which actual materials remain online but undergo changes in their URLs, is too demanding in terms of staff time for us to hope to keep external links current.

Please copy, fill out the form below, and email it to NebraskaAuthors@lincoln.ne.gov to suggest a change.