Shakespeare Cipher Stories, Part 1
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- April 6th, 2009 |
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Did Shakespeare compose Shakespeare? Many people doubt that, for different reasons&ndashthe most obvious one being that a barely literate actor from the asleep community of Stratford-on-Avon could not possibly have written with much accuracy and familiarity the many scenes in the plays that invoke the classics or the pomp of nobility and royal courts. Furthermore, no manuscripts by Shakespeare were ever found, and only cardinal Shakespeare signatures are known to exist. The signatures all look different and give the impression they were written by a man who was not old to holding a pen. Any invest that others’ hands may have guided his own as he wrote them.
If individual other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems published low his name, who was it? And did this arcanum author insert clues as to his real identity in his works? These are cardinal abstracted questions, and one does not necessarily imply the other. Different bright Elizabethans have been championed as trueness author simply based on their literary abilities, their fitting educational and cultural background, and plausible motives for deficient to conceal their authorship&ndashamong them Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford; Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland; William Stanley, Earl of Derby; and Sir Francis Bacon.
In the last few centuries, quite a few people in the old and the new class alike have undertaken the examine for hidden messages in Shakespeare’s works that would prove much authorship. Anagrams, acrostics, morpheme ciphers, add ciphers, letter ciphers, they’ve all been found. But are they all for real?
Anyone interested in the different ciphers said to have been found in Shakespeare’s works should read The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined by William and Elizebeth Friedman. This good researched book from 1957 is out of print but copies can be found in libraries or on the Internet. Mr. Friedman, a professional cryptologist who helped decode the inviting Enigma ciphers employed by the Nazis during Class Action II, has been called one of America’s foremost cryptographers.
The Friedmans investigated dozens of ciphers allegedly discovered in the works of Shakespeare and analyzed them according to professional criteria of what constitutes a binding cipher. It’s fair to have that in the process, little of the different cipher claims was left standing. One of the better-known efforts they showed to be bad was that by Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly, an attorney and politician, published The Great Cryptogram in the late 1880s. He revealed an elaborate and real impressive mathematical group of “root numbers,” “multipliers” and “modifiers” that produced messages much as “…that More low [Marlowe] or Shak’st encourage [Shakespeare] never instrument a morpheme of them.” The numerical film to identify the morpheme “More” on that particular given page ran like this: [root number] 516-16=349-22b&h=327-254=73-15b&h=58. 448-58=390+1=391.
However impressive Donnelly’s mathematical sequences, any who proved to reproduce his efforts came up with startling results. The Friedmans cite a Rev. A. Nicholson who took the same matter passages that Donnelly started from and, beginning with the same root number and employing the same intricate method, came up with a message of his own: “Master Will I am [William] Shak’st spurre [Shakespeare] instrument the play and was engaged at the Curtain.” Thusly, the personal nature of the group rendered it invalid.
The Friedmans dedicate a large portion of their book to the bi-literal cipher discovered by Mrs. Elizabeth Gallup Wells, who believed that Francis Bacon was trueness author of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. This part of the book is especially fascinating because the Friedmans themselves worked for Mrs. Gallup for various years. Once Mrs. Gallup’s decoding activity gained notoriety, she attracted a benefactor, Colonel Fabian, who so employed a large research body employed on decoding the different texts. Elizebeth Friedman joined the group in 1915, William followed in 1916. They remained with her almost uninterruptedly until 1920.
Mrs. Gallup started out on earth, since she worked with the bi-literal cipher invented by Francis Bacon himself. Bacon published this cipher in October of 1623, just a month before the First Folio of Shakespeare’s complete works appeared. The bi-literal cipher is based on mixing cardinal identify fonts that are different enough to be distinguishable yet not also different to draw general attention. The First Folio is set in a curious mixture of italics and roman identify styles, which quite naturally led to the distrust that it may be hiding Bacon’s bi-literal cipher.
Mrs. Gallup believed, fairly arbitrarily, that the cipher was embedded in the italic words in the plays, and deciphered lengthy passages that revealed Bacon’s authorship as advantageously as his hidden life account. Once the Friedmans became involved in this activity, they gradually came to the realization that Mrs. Gallup was the only one at the research center who could distinguish between the cardinal fonts and produce meaningful messages. Everyone else invariably failed. Furthermore, Mrs. Gallup herself was ineffective to reproduce passages she had previously deciphered without considerable deviations. She also frequently omitted or added letters to make the cipher activity. An FBI expert consulted by the Friedmans in the 1950s proved that thither was much activity between individual italic letters in the Folio and that thither were no characteristics that backed the exact classification into cardinal fonts.
Since Mrs. Gallup’s activity could not be reproduced independently by other decipherers, the Friedmans concluded that although Bacon’s bi-lateral cipher itself is a channel cipher, Gallup’s activity was biased and exceptionable. That is not to have thither couldn’t be a bi-literal cipher hidden in Shakespeare’s works; it only means that if thither is one, it hasn’t been found yet.
References
Bacon, Francis &ndashDe Augmentis Scientiarum (1623)
Donnelly, Ignatius, The Great Cryptogram (1888)
Friedman, William F. and Elizebeth S., The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined. (Cambridge Lincoln Press, 1957)
Wells Gallup, Elizabeth &ndash The Biliteral Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in His Works and Deciphered by Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1899)
Accompany William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid.