Preface to “SHAKESPEARE THE PROOF”
The prototype of this work was started in the winter of 1999, and almost parts of it were finished in Japanese by the end of 2000. In March 2003, the Japanese version has appeared on some Japanese website. Its English version was made in the summer of 2005 and uploaded on the same website. This is an abridged and revised version of it.
Perhaps all deciphering except one are my original. I certainly have heard the words: “Shake Bacon”, “ill w if c ran”, “cedilla”, and “all idem”, from TV which had been left on, in more than thirty years ago. Unfortunately I had not watched it properly. But when I encountered the words during the deciphering, I remembered it.
This cipher, differs from well known techniques like biliteral cipher, is not so simple. We may call this rather a toy-model of the inductive method than a cipher. Though we treat names Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare, and the identity of these two is important hypothesis, it is just a part of the cipher. So this article will be troublesome for one who expects only simple proof, but must be very fascinating for lovers of mathematics.
Everyone knows the author of “Romeo and Juliet” even if he/she couldn’t spell the name of the Bard of Avon. In Shakespeare’s dramas we see foreign words in italics. Some of the researchers say that there are some ciphers behind theses conspicuous words. They believe that the ciphers tell us the true author of the dramas. Among such un-Stratfordians, the researchers holding up Francis Bacon (1561-1626) are called Baconians. They assert Francis Bacon is also a secret child of Elizabeth Tudor (i.e. Queen Elizabeth Ⅰ), though some of the authorities of military codes or of statistics are their powerful enemies denying these rumours.
It is understandable that our confidence in great power of computers, or in modern method of statistics, seems to ease our minds. But we are likely to forget to test carefully the validity of each way of using the powerful machines or modern techniques.
How and what shall you do to make some historical ciphers burrow into your writings without any super-computer? First, your writings must be so valuable as to be preserved through the generations. Second, your cipher must be difficult to decipher, or your child will find and solve it in your lifetime. Third, about 100 years later, your clever descendant, who has found the ciphers in your writings and deciphered that, must be able to ascertain that his/her deciphering is correct. You may think that no one can do so. But the principle of such cipher is not so complicated. It suffices to make plural writings, each of which possesses a cipher containing as well as main message, such sub-information as it coincides with each other. If you use three ciphers, for instance, you can prepare three writings A,B,C as follows :
A : first message ＋“PARIS”
B : second message ＋“TOWER”
C : third message ＋“EIFFEL”
Coincidence of three sub-informations “PARIS”, “TOWER”, and “EIFFEL” will give your descendant the assurance. In this article, we’ll encounter many coincidences like this, which had made by William Shakespeare, and by Francis Bacon. And we’ll know that two geniuses are identical.
We will gain the results in sequence. First result will become one of the keys to decipher the second, and then we can apply the first and second results to the third deciphering, and so on.
Although the title of this article is “SHAKESPEARE THE PROOF”, our proof is different from that of mathematics. Our deciphering means the discoveries of the exceedingly artificial and intelligent signatures, called coincidences, which give us the assurances that the ciphers certainly have been built there and that our deciphering of the ciphers are correct. So our descriptions need the style of the induction, rather than the style of mathematical logic. (For the inductive method, Francis Bacon is the most famous person.) We will get the consistent links of many coincidences. Since the coincidences link each other like the network, the whole result has stability under slight corrections, if they were required. Our deciphering progresses with the induction, just like the natural sciences. The natural sciences are the deciphering of the nature, by the coincidences between the theories and the data obtained by the experiments or the observations.
We may say that our ciphers are great legacy from Francis Bacon to us, from which we should learn the great power of the induction.
The world of our ciphers is full of puns and jokes, by which one word can be reborn as an aggregation of many informations. Please don’t be angered by these puns and jokes which seem to be ill-suited to the great philosopher. These gaps are constructive for our trials in order not to be deluded by the “idolas” he has warned.