I was recently gifted The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, and a companion book came along with it that provides the citation for the origin of the Latin anagram derived from honorificabilitudinitatibus. Here's the complete passage for context (bringing this thread back up because it's short enough):
>The anti-Stratfordian traditon began with the champions of Francis Bacon, who in their heyday a century ago specialized in finding cryptograms and anagrams claiming Bacon's authorship buried in the plys. The first renowned Baconian, coincidentally aptly named Delia Bacon, is renowned for her attempt to dig up Shakespeare's bones in hope of proving her namesake's title to the works. From there it only got wilder. The cipher craze began with a fiery American congressman and utopian reformer named Ignatius Donnelly, who in 1888 published a thousand-page tome called The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays. Donnelly also credited Bacon with the so-called works of Marlowe, Montaigne, and many others--780 plays in all. Others followed suit, in the apparent conviction that Hamlet and King Lear were less interesting as tragedies than as braintasers. One erudite Baconian, Sir Edward Durning-Lawrence, discovered that the playfully pendantic word honorificabilitudinitatibus in Love's Labor Lost could be rearranged to read Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi, or "These plays, F. Bacon's offsrping. are preserved for the world." Rarely has classical learning been put to such ingenious use.<
--from The Authorship Debate, by Joseph Sobran; included in The QPB Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Brand Geist, 2002
I noticed our resident Latin scholar hasn't checked in on this one. ["alert"--aside--non-white font](hi, Faldage!) [/"alert"] Wonder if you can corroborate that translation for us?
