Are There Ciphers in Shakespeare Essay Example For Students

Are There Ciphers in Shakespeare? Essay Introductory Note: his is an introduction to an ingenious and creative cipher system to be found in the works of William Shakespeare. Here it is necessary to explain that cryptography is a very old technique. Even in antiquity the rule was, whenever the name of a place or person must be repeated in a message, it must always be misspelled. Therefore Baconquot;s name is never spelled correctly, and there are many alternate forms, but see the 25 letter solution to the dedication of the 1623 Folio which includes BEKAANBACON adjoining. Sometimes the name is preceded by F or FS, as he abbreviated his first name in his signature. Bacon was himself a cryptographer, if not a cryptanalyst as his brother Anthony was. Proofs by cryptanalysis, such as are shown here, do not depend upon comparing styles, or vocabulary counts, or literary opinions. If a cipher be found in such ancient works, and the name of the author is included, proof of authorship must be regarded as conclusive. The probable word attack is most useful in breaking a monoalphabetic cipher. A cryptanalyst, suspecting that the name Bacon might appear in the plaintext, can use that as a useful tool to solve a cipher. Thus, misspelling of this name, and in as many ways as possible, must be done in order to attempt to defeat a solution. Baconquot;s ciphers were steganographic, that is they were designed to be concealed. One artifice was to hide the signifigant letters in the capital letters of a verse or text. This type of cipher is called acrostic and it was a popular method in his day. It may be complicated by substitution. A substitution cipher is a very simple device. Substitute the letter B for the letter A, substitute C for B, substitue D for C and so on. It may be complicated by a key whereby the alphabet is reversed or scrambled, or altered in some other way. And the substitution may be more extreme such as G for A, H for B, I for C, etc. Baconquot;s way was not so simple. Bacon explains, by the use of the Dyersquot;s Hand metaphor in Sonnet 111, why his name except for one instance is always misspelled, but it still belongs to him. All of which brings us to a short article about Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, and many examples of the name of the author hidden in the ciphertext. Penn Leary, July 1, 1995 Are there Ciphers in Shakespeare? Copyright 1993 By Penn Leary t is considered by some yet certainly not by all academicians that it is a lunacy to question the authorship of the Works of William Shakespeare a comical 1984 thought-crime, a preposterous and radical and specious view of the obvious, a conspicuous deviation from a normal and Politically Correct academic opinion. But Charles Dickens, a student of human nature, had this to say: The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest something should turn up. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: As long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. . . The Egyptian verdict of the Shakespeare societies comes to mind that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. John Greenleaf Whittier said, Whether Bacon wrote the wonderful plays or not, I am quite sure the man Shakspere neither did nor could. James M. Barrie put it more whimsically: I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his lifetime. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, Ask your own hearts, ask your own common sense, to conceive the possibility of the author of the Plays being the anomalous, the wild, the irregular genius of our daily criticism. What! are we to have miracles in sport? Does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man? And there yet remains a band of doubters. If someone else wrote the plays and poems, then who? Let us consult a calendar of years: |-Publication of the Plays| 1560 1570 1580 1590| 1600 1610 1620 | 1626 The Reign of Queen Elizabeth I 1558-1603 Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford 1550-1604 Christopher Marlowe 1564-1593 William Shaksper, of Stratford 1564-1616 Francis Bacon 1561-1626The 1623 edition of the First Folio contained twenty new plays. At that time Shakespeare had been dead for seven years, Edward De Vere for nineteen and Christopher Marlowe for thirty. Only Francis Bacon survived the 1623 publication. This is hardly enough to credit the authorship to Bacon, but it arouses skepticism upon the claims of the other three leading contenders. There is also considerable doubt about the facts of Shakespearequot;s own life. Let us read what Mark Twain had to say about that From Is Shakespeare Dead? 1909: He was born on the 23rd of April, 1564. Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write, could not sign their names. At Stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was shabby and unclean, and densely illiterate. Of the nineteen important men charged with the government of the town, thirteen had to make their mark in attesting important documents, because they could not write their names. Of the first eighteen years of his life nothing is known. They are a blank. On the 27th of November 1582 William Shakespeare took out a license to marry Anne Whateley. Next day William Shakespeare took out a license to marry Anne Hathaway. She was eight years his senior. William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. In a hurry. By grace of a reluctantly granted dispensation there was but one publication of the banns. Within six months the first child was born. About two blank years followed, during which period nothing at all happened to Shakespeare, so far as anybody knows. Then came twins1585. February. Two blank years follow. Then1587he makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family behind. Five blank years follow. During this period nothing happened to him, as far as anybody actually knows. Then1592there is mention of him as an actor. Next year1593his name appears in the official list of players. Next year1594he played before the queen. A detail of no consequence: other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five of her reign. And remained obscure. Three pretty full years follow. Full of play-acting. Then. In 1597 he bought New Place, Stratford. Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he accumulated money, and also reputation as actor and manager. Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become associated with a number of great plays and poems, as ostensibly author of the same. Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made no protest. Then1610-11he returned to Stratford and settled down for good and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading in tithes, trading in land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one shillings, borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his family; suing debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued himself for shillings and coppers; and acting as a confederate to a neighbor who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain common, and did not succeed. He lived five or six yearstill 1616in the joy of these elevated pursuits. . . Musee Des Beaux Arts EssayPerhaps they are unaware of these quotations collected by Mrs. Henry Pott Francis Bacon and his Secret Society, Schulte Co. , Chicago 1891: It is he that filled up all numbers , and performed that which may be compared or preferred to insolent Greece or haughty Rome Ben Jonson. His Lordship was a good poet, but concealed, as appears by his letters John Aubrey. The author of The Great Assises Holden in Parnassus ranks Lord Verulam next to Apollo . The poetic faculty was strong in Baconquot;s mind. No imagination was ever at once so strong and so subjugated. In truth, much of Baconquot;s life was passed in a visionary world. . . magnificent day-dreams. . . analogies of all sorts Macauley. Few poets deal in finer imagery than is to be found in Bacon. . . His prose is poetry Campbell. The varieties and sprightliness of Baconquot;s imagination, an imagination piercing almost into futurity, conjectures improving even to prophecy. . . The greatest felicity of expression and the most splendid imagery Basil Montagu. The Wisdom of the Ancients. . . a kind of parabolical beauty. . . To the Advancement of Learning he brings every species of poetry by which the imagination can elevate the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying of its own essence. . . Metaphors, similitudes and analogies make up a great part of his reasoning. . . Ingenuity, poetic fancy, and the highest imagination and fertility cannot be denied him Craik. The creative fancy of a Dante or Milton never called up more gorgeous images than those suggested by Bacon, and we question much whether their worlds surpass his in affording scope for the imagination. His extended over all time. His mind brooded over all nature. . . unfolding to the gaze of the spectator the order of the universe as exhibited to angelic intelligences Devey. The tendency of Bacon to see analogies is characteristic of him, the result of that mind not truly philosophic but truly poetic, which will find similitudes everywhere in heaven and earth Dr. Abbott. I infer from this sample that Bacon had all the natural faculties which a poet wants: a fine ear for metre, a fine feeling for imaginative effect in words, and a vein of poetic passion. . . The truth is that Bacon was not without the fine phrensy of a poet Spedding. Sir Tobie Matthew, writing to his friend Francis Bacon in 1618, states: The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation, and of this side of the sea, is of your Lordshipquot;s name, though he be known by another. In the Scourge of Folly, John Davies of Hereford 1565-1618 wrote this epigram: To the Royall Ingenious and All-learned Knight Sr Francis Bacon Thy bounty and the Beauty of thy Witt Comprisquot;d in Lists of Law and the learned Arts, Each making thee for great Imployment fitt, Which now thou hast, though short of thy deserts Compells my pen to let fall shining Inke And to bedew the Baies that deck thy Front ; And to thy health in Helicon to drinke As to her Bellamour the Muse is wont; For thou dost h er embozom; and dost vse Her company for sport twixt graue affaires. So vtterquot;st Law the liuelyer through the Muse . And for that all thy Notes are sweetest Aires ; My Muse thus notes thy worth in evquot;ry Line. With ynke which thus she sugers; so, to shine. Thus John Davies in 1610 states plainly that Francis Bacon was a poet and that he had woven into his works spirited illustrations of the law. John Davies was the same man to whom Bacon had written a letter which concluded, so desiring you to be good to concealed poets. Francis Bacon had a great respect and affection for poetry; here are his words: Poesy cheereth and refreshes the soule; chanting things rare, and various, and full of vicissitudes. So as Poesy serveth and conferreth to Delectation, Magnaminity, and Morality; and therefore it may seem deservedly to have some Participation of Divinenesse, becauwse it doth raise the mind, and exalt the spirit with high raptures, by proportioning the shewes of things to the desires of the mind; and not submitting the mind to things, as Reason and History doe. Why might Bacon have concealed his creations? George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie 1589 wrote, I know many notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably, and suppressed it agayne, or else suffered it to be publisht without their owne names to it, as if it were a discredit for a Gentleman to seem learned, and to shew himself amorous of any learned Art. In addition, the Plays were written during a very dangerous period. The airing of some political doctrine might offend a royal sensibility, and death or mutilation was the penalty. In 1591 Greene, in his Farewell to Folly, sneers at the practice of concealing the authorship of plays under other names. Others, he says, if they come to write or publish anything in print, which for their calling and gravity being loth to have any profane pamphlets pass under their hands, get some other to set his name to their verses. And he that cannot write true English without the aid of clerks of parish churches will needs make himself the father of interludes. What did Baconquot;s contemporaries think of his poetic talents? Here is a statement made by Edmund Howes in 1615: Our moderne, and present excellent poets which worthely florish in their owne workes, and all of them in my owne knowledge lived togeather in this Queenes raigne, according to their priorities as neere as I could, I have orderly set downe viz George Gascoigne, Thomas Churchyard, Edward Dyer, Edmond Spencer, Philip Sidney, John Harrington, Thomas Challoner, Frauncis Bacon, John Davie, Iohn Lillie, George Chapman, W. Warner, Willi Shakespeare, Samuell Daniell, Michaell Draiton, Christopher Marlo, Benjamine Johnson, Iohn Marston, Abraham Frauncis, Frauncis Meers, Joshua Siluester, Thomas Deckers, John Flecher, John Webster, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton, George Withers. Thus did Edmund Howes rank Frauncis Bacon with Shakespeare among these twenty-seven contemporary excellent Poets. He put him six names ahead of Willi. Edmust Howes was not alone among Baconquot;s contemporaries to acknowledge his poetic capability. John Stowe 1525-1605 collected manuscripts and books. He published and edited many works, particularly The Chronicles. In a 1615 edition he enumerated twenty-four of Our modern and excellent poets which worthely flourish in their own workes in the Queenquot;s reign. Amongst them he listed: Edmond Spencer, Esq. ; Sir Philip Sidney, Knight; Sir Francis Bacon, Knight; Maister George Chapman, Gentleman; Mr. William Shakespeare, Gentleman; Michael Draiton, Esquire, and Mr. Benjamin Johnson, Gentleman. Bacon spoke of himself and was spoken of by others as a concealed poet. In 1600 Bacon received a visit from Queen Elizabeth at his lodge at Twickenham. At which time, he says, I had, though I profess not to be a poet, prepared a sonnet directly tending and alluding to draw on her Majestyquot;s reconcilement to my Lord .