Abstract

I recently came across this JSE book review comment on David Roper's website (Roper 2012): Roper has provided in this book primary evidence relevant to an enigma of over 400 years standing: The actual identity of "William Shakespeare." (Desper 2009:375) While it is correct that his book provides this "primary relevance," I actually made this discovery in 2008 (Ferris 2008), where it was and has been in the public forum for a number of years. As you probably know, codes and ciphers are highly suspect in the Shakespeare Authorship debate-even by some (if not most) of those who acknowledge themselves as "Oxfordians." Codes and ciphers, however, have been making headway in scholastic and in popular forums for a while now; progress is somewhat slow, but is picking up some momentum-thanks to David Roper's wonderful contributions. I thought you might enjoy (or rather, I hope you will enjoy!) my personal graphic (Figure 1) of just one of the finds I have made in Sonnet 76. Using a skip/shift of one transposition equidistant letter sequence (ELS) technique, I placed Sonnet 76 into several arrays, but the particular array I am drawing your attention to is Array 14 (Figure 1). Although the raw probabilities noted below are rough or approximate calculations of deliberate placement with the plaintext of the sonnet, numbers exceeding one million deserve critical attention. As you can see, the word "DEVERE" attached/connected/touching the words: "MY NAME'S" is strong support for probable placement within the plaintext (i.e. put there by intelligent design, or, encrypted, if you will) as well as implying the true writer of Sonnet 76 was Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.