Terry Ross
2004-11-24 20:54:51 UTC
A few weeks ago, in a post that has disappeared from my server, Peter Bull
posted that he was now convinced that the message he thought he had found
in *Shakespeare's Sonnets* "has no validity as a cipher." See
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=***@posting.google.com
I held off responding here in order to give people a chance (if they so
desired) to try their luck at Peter's Marlowe "cipher"; since nobody has
chimed in, I guess I may as well have my say.
Peter found "KIT MARLOWE WROTE THIS" in the first letters of the lines of
*Shakespeare's Sonnets*, and he believed that what he had found was a
genuine cipher. I looked at Peter's methods, and I was able to satisfy
myself that what he had found was NOT a genuine cipher, but when I told
Peter of my findings I was very surprised to hear him say that he agreed.
This is a very rare occurrence; in my experience, once a person has
persuaded himself that he has found a genuine Baconian or Oxfordian or
Marlite cipher in Shakespeare, he finds it almost impossible to surrender
his belief, even if his proposed cipher fails to meet the standards
described by William and Elizebeth Friedman in *The Shakespearean Ciphers
Examined*, and even if he himself claims to accept the soundness of the
Friedmans' methods.
I have put up a page showing what Peter found:
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/cipher/bmarlowe1.html
This page contains an array of the first letters of each line of the
sonnets. The header row lists the numbers of the sonnet lines from 1 to
15 (Shakespeare's 99th sonnet is 15 lines long), and the first column
gives the number of each sonnet in descending order, from 154 down to 1.
If you look in the line for sonnet 132, in the column for sonnet-line 2,
you will see a red "K"; this is the first letter in Peter's message.
Let's call this position 132.2 (i.e., the position containing the first
letter of the second line of sonnet 132). At 126.5 there is an "I"; at
120.8 there is a "T"; at 114.11 there is an "M". Notice that the letters
K-I-T-M are separated by the same interval; for any letter, the next one
is 6 rows down and 3 columns to the right.
The interval now changes. The next letter is the "A" at 107.8, which is 7
columns down and 3 to the left of the "M" at 114.11; then comes "R" at
100.5 and "L" at 93.2. Then the interval changes again. Here are all the
letters in Peter's message and their locations in the array:
K 132.2
I 126.5
T 120.8
M 114.11
A 107.8
R 100.5
L 93.2
O 88.7
W 83.12
E 70.10
W 57.8
R 44.13
O 39.9
T 34.5
E 32.8
T 30.11
H 29.10
I 28.9
S 27.9
The resulting message is KIT MARLOWE WROTE THIS.
Why is this not a valid cipher? There is no unambiguous rule or key that
determines the location of the letters that are selected. Rather, Peter
arbitrarily changes the intervals between the letters he is selecting in
order to force the kind of result he wishes to find. Peter speaks of the
"sections" of the "zigzag" that comprises his message as having equally
spaced intervals, but the sections are very short. "KITM" and "MARL," at
4-letters in length, are the longest "sections" in Peter's message. The
minimum possible length for any section is 2, so a 4-letter maximum does
not seem extraordinary, and two of Peter's sections are at the minimum
possible length. Here are his sections with their respective lengths:
4 KITM
4 MARL
3 LOW
3 WEW
2 WR
3 ROT
3 TET
3 THI
2 IS
The message is 19 letters long, but since the letters at the ends of the
sections within the message are counted twice, the sum of the zigzag
section lengths is 27. There are 9 sections in Peter's message, giving
him an average section length of 3.00.
Peter's loosest "rule" or "key" -- the one used to choose the final "S" --
seems to allow picking any letter at any interval so long as it is in a
row below the previous one. Peter had 29 different S's to choose from
that were below the "I" in "THIS". Using his loosest "rule" it would be
possible to construct many kinds of messages. Given that the minimum
average section length is 2, an average of 3.00 seems unimpressive. In
fact, the average length declines throughout Peter's zigzag; each segment
after the second one reduces the average further.
message that was comparable in overall length but had a slightly lower
average section length - say 2.80 to Peter's 3.00. On what basis would
his be declared the on that had been intentionally placed into the
*Sonnets* by their author or arranger? Still, I thought I could meet his
challenge without too much difficulty.
I thought the easiest way would be to find a word or phrase to add to the
beginning or end of Peter's message that would change its meaning.
Peter's final word "this" seemed open-ended: "this" what? There could be
a noun or noun phrase that could be added after "this" that would turn the
message around. On the other hand, it might be possible to find something
to insert before his message that would turn it into indirect discourse;
something such as "You'd have to be a fool to believe that ..."
I wrote a little script that searched for strings, and I played around
with the array; the result may be seen here:
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/cipher/bmarlowe2.html
Where Peter had found "KIT MARLOWE WROTE THIS," I found "TWITS WISH" to
stick at the head of his message, revealing that what he had found was
merely a subset of the true message:
TWITS WISH KIT MARLOWE WROTE THIS.
Here are the locations for the letters I inserted before Peter's:
T 148.12
W 146.12
I 144.12
T 142.12
S 138.7
W 137.7
I 136.7
S 135.7
H 134.7
Here are the sections and their lengths for the full message:
4 TWIT
2 TS
5 SWISH
2 HK
4 KITM
4 MARL
3 LOW
3 WEW
2 WR
3 ROT
3 TET
3 THI
2 THIS
My message is at least as meaningful as Peter's, but it is 47% longer (28
letters compared to his 19), and it has a longer average section length
(40 letters in 13 sections gives an average length of 3.08, compared to
Peter's 3.00). What Peter had declared was a "virtual impossibility"
proved to be easy to do, and within a day of Peter's sending me the
details of his proposed "cipher," I had sent him my refutation.
The news for me was not that Peter had failed to find a demonstrably valid
cipher. As I told the members of the Shakespeare Fellowship when I spoke
at their conference in October, one useful notion to keep in mind whenever
one is faced with a proposed Shakespearean "cipher" is that the "cipher"
is probably not valid. There have been innumerable claims to have found
Shakespearean ciphers in the last 120 years or so, and I don't know of any
one of them that can be shown to be valid. Similar claims will continue
to be made, and it is very likely that most if not all of the proposed
ciphers will also turn out not to be valid.
Thus even before I looked at Peter's "cipher," I thought it was likely
that it was not valid; I also thought it would not be hard to show the
invalidity; but I thought it was extremely doubtful that I could ever
persuade Peter. Instead, to my surprise, he made a very gracious
concession. The usual reaction I get from people who think they have
found valid ciphers, and whose methods I have looked at and found wanting,
is that I must be blind, that I lack imagination, or that I have an
insufficient appreciation of the Elizabethan fondness for something or
other.
Let me not overestimate the extent of Peter's concession. He still thinks
he has found SOMETHING, and he will send me more details of the "special
form of cryptogram" (albeit not a demonstrably valid cipher) that he
thinks lurks in the *Sonnets*. I doubt he has found anything other than
what he has projected onto an innocent set of letters, but I will take a
look. I think the shift from "cipher" to "cryptogram" is probably an
attempt to avoid having to make a case; Peter may think the rules for
"cryptograms" are so loose that he can get away with whatever he wants,
but this dodge will not save him, and it demonstrates a fundamental
misunderstanding of cryptography.
I have taken a look at Peter's page wherein he used to make these claims
about his "cipher":
"This message is authentic and verifiable by standard techniques of
cryptology."
"The form of the message is cryptologically sound in its own right."
The page has since been revised, but Peter says nothing about his now
knowing that his earlier claims were false. In fact, one would never know
that Peter had ever changed his mind at all. Peter now says this:
"A sensational cryptogram is revealed by means of an acrostic letter grid,
in which 'Kit Marlowe' claims authorship of the Sonnets. The text of the
message is explicitly signalled and it also embodies cabalistic features
that prove its intentionality beyond doubt. The acrostic grid also has
other underlying patterns pointing to Marlowe's claim to authorship."
http://www.masoncode.com/Marlowe%20wrote%20Shakespeare's%20Sonnets.htm
This is, of course, utter tosh, and more than a little misleading, since
Peter knows that there is an even more "sensational cryptogram" that
characterizes those who think Marlowe wrote the *Sonnets* as "twits."
Why does he hide this news from visitors to his site?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry Ross Visit the SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP home page
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
posted that he was now convinced that the message he thought he had found
in *Shakespeare's Sonnets* "has no validity as a cipher." See
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=***@posting.google.com
I held off responding here in order to give people a chance (if they so
desired) to try their luck at Peter's Marlowe "cipher"; since nobody has
chimed in, I guess I may as well have my say.
Peter found "KIT MARLOWE WROTE THIS" in the first letters of the lines of
*Shakespeare's Sonnets*, and he believed that what he had found was a
genuine cipher. I looked at Peter's methods, and I was able to satisfy
myself that what he had found was NOT a genuine cipher, but when I told
Peter of my findings I was very surprised to hear him say that he agreed.
This is a very rare occurrence; in my experience, once a person has
persuaded himself that he has found a genuine Baconian or Oxfordian or
Marlite cipher in Shakespeare, he finds it almost impossible to surrender
his belief, even if his proposed cipher fails to meet the standards
described by William and Elizebeth Friedman in *The Shakespearean Ciphers
Examined*, and even if he himself claims to accept the soundness of the
Friedmans' methods.
I have put up a page showing what Peter found:
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/cipher/bmarlowe1.html
This page contains an array of the first letters of each line of the
sonnets. The header row lists the numbers of the sonnet lines from 1 to
15 (Shakespeare's 99th sonnet is 15 lines long), and the first column
gives the number of each sonnet in descending order, from 154 down to 1.
If you look in the line for sonnet 132, in the column for sonnet-line 2,
you will see a red "K"; this is the first letter in Peter's message.
Let's call this position 132.2 (i.e., the position containing the first
letter of the second line of sonnet 132). At 126.5 there is an "I"; at
120.8 there is a "T"; at 114.11 there is an "M". Notice that the letters
K-I-T-M are separated by the same interval; for any letter, the next one
is 6 rows down and 3 columns to the right.
The interval now changes. The next letter is the "A" at 107.8, which is 7
columns down and 3 to the left of the "M" at 114.11; then comes "R" at
100.5 and "L" at 93.2. Then the interval changes again. Here are all the
letters in Peter's message and their locations in the array:
K 132.2
I 126.5
T 120.8
M 114.11
A 107.8
R 100.5
L 93.2
O 88.7
W 83.12
E 70.10
W 57.8
R 44.13
O 39.9
T 34.5
E 32.8
T 30.11
H 29.10
I 28.9
S 27.9
The resulting message is KIT MARLOWE WROTE THIS.
Why is this not a valid cipher? There is no unambiguous rule or key that
determines the location of the letters that are selected. Rather, Peter
arbitrarily changes the intervals between the letters he is selecting in
order to force the kind of result he wishes to find. Peter speaks of the
"sections" of the "zigzag" that comprises his message as having equally
spaced intervals, but the sections are very short. "KITM" and "MARL," at
4-letters in length, are the longest "sections" in Peter's message. The
minimum possible length for any section is 2, so a 4-letter maximum does
not seem extraordinary, and two of Peter's sections are at the minimum
possible length. Here are his sections with their respective lengths:
4 KITM
4 MARL
3 LOW
3 WEW
2 WR
3 ROT
3 TET
3 THI
2 IS
The message is 19 letters long, but since the letters at the ends of the
sections within the message are counted twice, the sum of the zigzag
section lengths is 27. There are 9 sections in Peter's message, giving
him an average section length of 3.00.
Peter's loosest "rule" or "key" -- the one used to choose the final "S" --
seems to allow picking any letter at any interval so long as it is in a
row below the previous one. Peter had 29 different S's to choose from
that were below the "I" in "THIS". Using his loosest "rule" it would be
possible to construct many kinds of messages. Given that the minimum
average section length is 2, an average of 3.00 seems unimpressive. In
fact, the average length declines throughout Peter's zigzag; each segment
after the second one reduces the average further.
It also needs to be pointed out that with nine sections of zigzag there
is an average of exactly three equally spaced letters on each section -
I maintain that it is a virtual impossibility to find any other such
highly ordered message in the grid using the same method. It might be
possible to concoct some rather weird, meaningless and short message -
but even so, there is no way the average number of letters per section
would anywhere close to three.
Peter's requirements seemed arbitrary. Suppose I had found an alternativeis an average of exactly three equally spaced letters on each section -
I maintain that it is a virtual impossibility to find any other such
highly ordered message in the grid using the same method. It might be
possible to concoct some rather weird, meaningless and short message -
but even so, there is no way the average number of letters per section
would anywhere close to three.
message that was comparable in overall length but had a slightly lower
average section length - say 2.80 to Peter's 3.00. On what basis would
his be declared the on that had been intentionally placed into the
*Sonnets* by their author or arranger? Still, I thought I could meet his
challenge without too much difficulty.
I thought the easiest way would be to find a word or phrase to add to the
beginning or end of Peter's message that would change its meaning.
Peter's final word "this" seemed open-ended: "this" what? There could be
a noun or noun phrase that could be added after "this" that would turn the
message around. On the other hand, it might be possible to find something
to insert before his message that would turn it into indirect discourse;
something such as "You'd have to be a fool to believe that ..."
I wrote a little script that searched for strings, and I played around
with the array; the result may be seen here:
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/cipher/bmarlowe2.html
Where Peter had found "KIT MARLOWE WROTE THIS," I found "TWITS WISH" to
stick at the head of his message, revealing that what he had found was
merely a subset of the true message:
TWITS WISH KIT MARLOWE WROTE THIS.
Here are the locations for the letters I inserted before Peter's:
T 148.12
W 146.12
I 144.12
T 142.12
S 138.7
W 137.7
I 136.7
S 135.7
H 134.7
Here are the sections and their lengths for the full message:
4 TWIT
2 TS
5 SWISH
2 HK
4 KITM
4 MARL
3 LOW
3 WEW
2 WR
3 ROT
3 TET
3 THI
2 THIS
My message is at least as meaningful as Peter's, but it is 47% longer (28
letters compared to his 19), and it has a longer average section length
(40 letters in 13 sections gives an average length of 3.08, compared to
Peter's 3.00). What Peter had declared was a "virtual impossibility"
proved to be easy to do, and within a day of Peter's sending me the
details of his proposed "cipher," I had sent him my refutation.
The news for me was not that Peter had failed to find a demonstrably valid
cipher. As I told the members of the Shakespeare Fellowship when I spoke
at their conference in October, one useful notion to keep in mind whenever
one is faced with a proposed Shakespearean "cipher" is that the "cipher"
is probably not valid. There have been innumerable claims to have found
Shakespearean ciphers in the last 120 years or so, and I don't know of any
one of them that can be shown to be valid. Similar claims will continue
to be made, and it is very likely that most if not all of the proposed
ciphers will also turn out not to be valid.
Thus even before I looked at Peter's "cipher," I thought it was likely
that it was not valid; I also thought it would not be hard to show the
invalidity; but I thought it was extremely doubtful that I could ever
persuade Peter. Instead, to my surprise, he made a very gracious
concession. The usual reaction I get from people who think they have
found valid ciphers, and whose methods I have looked at and found wanting,
is that I must be blind, that I lack imagination, or that I have an
insufficient appreciation of the Elizabethan fondness for something or
other.
Let me not overestimate the extent of Peter's concession. He still thinks
he has found SOMETHING, and he will send me more details of the "special
form of cryptogram" (albeit not a demonstrably valid cipher) that he
thinks lurks in the *Sonnets*. I doubt he has found anything other than
what he has projected onto an innocent set of letters, but I will take a
look. I think the shift from "cipher" to "cryptogram" is probably an
attempt to avoid having to make a case; Peter may think the rules for
"cryptograms" are so loose that he can get away with whatever he wants,
but this dodge will not save him, and it demonstrates a fundamental
misunderstanding of cryptography.
I have taken a look at Peter's page wherein he used to make these claims
about his "cipher":
"This message is authentic and verifiable by standard techniques of
cryptology."
"The form of the message is cryptologically sound in its own right."
The page has since been revised, but Peter says nothing about his now
knowing that his earlier claims were false. In fact, one would never know
that Peter had ever changed his mind at all. Peter now says this:
"A sensational cryptogram is revealed by means of an acrostic letter grid,
in which 'Kit Marlowe' claims authorship of the Sonnets. The text of the
message is explicitly signalled and it also embodies cabalistic features
that prove its intentionality beyond doubt. The acrostic grid also has
other underlying patterns pointing to Marlowe's claim to authorship."
http://www.masoncode.com/Marlowe%20wrote%20Shakespeare's%20Sonnets.htm
This is, of course, utter tosh, and more than a little misleading, since
Peter knows that there is an even more "sensational cryptogram" that
characterizes those who think Marlowe wrote the *Sonnets* as "twits."
Why does he hide this news from visitors to his site?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry Ross Visit the SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP home page
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------