[Hiram]

Hi there.

I am a new member and I have a rather specific interest in ancient cryptography. I have discovered an acrostic message in Shakespeare's Sonnets and I want to see if it is legitimate or not. The acrostic is unusual because it features a unique (as I believe) form of double encryption.

If anyone is interested in this and would like to discuss it here, they can find a link to an essay which summarises my finding (a pdf document) on a link in the following web page: http://www.masoncode.com/Cryptogram.html

Is the method of encryption too unorthodox, or does it have that measure of enormous improbability which guarantees its validity?

Hiram

[Aaron]

Welcome, Hiram! That paper is a very excellent read, I love the amount of mathematics involved. My only question is: can that phrase (or similar) be found in any other "Shakespeare" works?

[Hiram]

For the most part Shakespeare's work doesn't lend itself to that sort of a grid presentation. The plays don't have any formal symmetry and the number of poems is actually small. His two other major poems 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece' were very early (published within a year of Marlowe's death) and therefore it is unlikely that the author would have been so concerned to 'set the record straight' - and they are not strongly autobiographical like the 'Sonnets'. However, in the poem which accompanied the Sonnets 'A Lover's Complaint' I did detect a similar message 'BY THAT KIT TOO'. I believe it is authentic as well, but I think that it is likely to be of secondary importance and I haven't tied up all the loose ends yet.

[Hiram]

Now that Christmas and New Year are out of the way, does anyone want to venture an opinion on my acrostic discovery?
Is it credible and convincing, or weak and far-fetched?
Is the mathematical/geometric symbolism implied by the asymmetry of the acrostic improbable, or is it the sort of thing we would expect any random zigzag path through a grid to generate?
All feedback appreciated.

[Aaron]

There's already a historical basis to believe Marlowe may have written the works of Shakespeare. And the number connections are pretty strong, if a bit of a stretch. Doubly (perhaps triply in this case, considering the encrytpions of his name used to encrypt the numbers in the acrostic) encrypted messages are much harder to prove than singly encrypted messages. At any rate, I feel there's good reason to believe Marlowe wrote the plays, in the same way that a woman probably wrote Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.