Bacon's Signature Ciphers in Shakespeare -93- Monument

-93-

54)  Shakespeare’s Monument

Now, after just seeing on the previous page how we found a numerical signature cipher for ‘Francis’ after a line saying ‘Seek not my name’, we could be reminded of a similar phrase in the Shakespeare Monument in Holy Trinity Parish Church in Stratford upon Avon.

http://churchmonumentssociety.org/Monument%20of%20the%20Month%20Archive/2010_03.html

One of the intriguing aspects of this monument is the unusual plaque beneath the bust which, in a different way than Timon’s epitaph, challenges the reader to pause and “read if thou canst, whom envious death hath plast [placed]”within it.

Like the Timon epitaph it makes the curious authorship sleuth want to find some hidden name. And I know that one has already been proposed for Edward De Vere that’s quite interesting. It can be read about here:

 http://www.wjray.net/shakespeare_papers/shakespeare-monument.htm

Yet I wondered if there might be something from the numerical code signature perspective that Bacon may have used. Knowing from past cipher candidate examples that these hidden ciphers are often advertised in various clever ways and that Shake-Speare was a master of word play, I was attracted to the part in the plaque that suggested the ‘Whom’ could be found placed within ‘this Monument’. The surface interpretation, of course, is that William Shakspeare of Stratford is the one whom Death hath placed within the monument. But notice that the whole physical structure is not the only monument to hide a secreted author. There is the word ‘Monument’ itself, and actually that is where the plaque precisely says we could read whom is within it and it may be the reason the name Shakspeare doesn’t precede and directly modify the word ‘monument’. So with this clue I found that the simple count for ‘monument’ equaled 108:

M=12, O=14, N=13, U=20, M=12, E=5, N=13, T=19 = 108

And though this number isn’t significant in the Simple cipher alphabet, it is so in the Reverse alphabet in which it’s equivalent to the name ‘Francis’. Now, I haven’t hardly mentioned or used the Reverse alphabet because I wanted to make it more difficult to find any significant numerical codes. It’s only been used in a supporting role in the word ‘Free’ and as a possible additional explanation for the connecting of the word ‘Fool’ with a hidden name or code. But here it works nicely. Still, by itself I think it would be weak. Also, we had to resort to the speculation that a double enciphering was used in that the 108 count was found with the Simple alphabet and its significance only being associated with the Reverse alphabet. I argued earlier, with cipher candidate #6 on page 35, that this is quite possible, so it can’t be rejected just because there might be this connected use of separate alphabets. But it does weaken it I think. So, with the possible clue that we should employ the reverse alphabet further, which is here:

I found that the word Monument in this Reverse alphabet has a count of:

M=13, O=11, N=12, U=5, M=13, E=20 N=12, T=6 = 92 which equals the same value as ‘Bacon”

And these two numerical codes both being exactly where the plaque said we could read whom had been placed and hid within it, we have another cipher candidate that I think will be difficult to prove as a coincidence.