The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined
The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined
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William and Elizebeth Friedman were both researchers in cryptography at The Riverbank Laboratories. This 1957 book is the result of an insightful report that won the Friedmans the Folger Shakespeare Library literary prize. Within it, the Friedmans address theories, which, through the identification of hidden codes, call the authorship of Shakespeare's plays into question. As ciphers were abundantly used in the sixteenth century, such coding is far from impossible. Accordingly, this work gives a fair and scientific hearing to those anti-Stratfordians whose theories were often dismissed completely. The Friedmans document the history and foundations of such theories, before thoroughly examining and critiquing a great number of them. Indeed, it has even been suggested that this text itself contains ciphers, making it of even greater interest to scholars of literary codes and cryptography, as well as those wishing to discover more about the various debates surrounding the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.
Product details
- Published: April 2011
- Format: Paperback
- ISBN: 9780521141390
- Length: 334 pages
- Dimensions: 216 × 140 × 19 mm
- Weight: 0.43kg
- Availability: Available
Table of Contents
- Preface
- List of illustrations
- Introduction
- 1. The great controversy
- 2. Cryptology as a science
- 3. Ignatius Donnelly and the The Great Cryptogram
- 4. The cipher in the epitaph
- 5. Dr Owen and his Word Cipher
- 6. A miscellany
- 7. Acrostics and anagrams
- 8. The long word and other anagrams
- 9. The String Cipher of William Stone Booth
- 10. Walter Conrad Arensberg
- 11. The strange story of Dr Cunningham and Maria Bauer
- 12. Odd numbers
- 13. The Biliteral Cipher and Elizabeth Wells Gallup
- 14. Mrs Gallup and Colonel Fabyan
- 15. Elizabethan printing and its bearing on the Biliteral Cipher
- 16. A study of the Gallup decipherments
- 17. General Cartier and the Biliteral Cipher
- 18. The Biliteral Cipher: experiments and deductions
- 19. Conclusion
- Index.
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