'True face of Shakespeare' appears in botany book?

This article has a bit more information about the specific "code" that has supposedly been cracked:

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/may/19/shakespeare-w...

I wish this were true but it doesn't even come close to passing Occam's razor to me. Shakespeare, as we know well by now, was not particularly famous in his lifetime (indeed, our contemporary concept of "fame" or "celebrity" didn't exist at the time). Short of some new discovery that Gerard (the author of the herbal) was personally associated with Shakespeare, I don't see why we should be convinced by the evidence available. A lot of it is a huge stretch, like the AW / OR lettering in the image being interpreted as a reference to the golden background ("or") of Shakespeare's father's coat of arms, or the fact that Shakespeare mentions corn at one point in his plays and the figure here is holding an ear of sweetcorn - "corn" could refer to any grain in Elizabethan times so it's hardly surprising that the word shows up in his work. At any rate, here's a high res scan of the actual image for anyone interested:

http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/109874#page/1/mode/1...

Edit: this guess that it's actually Sir Francis Drake strikes me as being much more likely, though still impossible to prove:

http://www.historyneedsyou.com/blog/the-language-of-flowers-...