This strange excursion begins at a most unlikely place: the Shakespearean play, Troilus and Cressida, which is widely understood to be the least successful of the 36 plays of the First Folio. It is rarely, if ever, performed. It begins with an even more unlikable one-page ‘Prologue‘, making it only worse, a slice of nothing-pickle on top of a nothing-burger.

But we put forward the hypothesis here, that the Prologue can be understood to be the intended entranceway to a wondrous cryptographic labyrinth, one which has been hidden in plain sight for precisely 400 years.

Troilus and Cressida is the only one of the 36 plays which doesn’t appear on the First Folios’s Catalogue page.

It doesn’t appear at all in the earlier press runs of the Folio. Additional evidence points to it being the very last of the plays included into the Folio. But why bother at all if it is so woefully lacking? Scholars seem baffled by it.

But the idea put forward here resolves the oddities:

It was always intended to be the worst of the 36 plays, with the Prologue being the most insufferable page of all.

This Experiment is inextricably entangled with the work of the brilliantly accomplished American cryptographer William F. Friedman (1891 – 1969).

Friedman was one of the founders of the US National Security Agency, and many recognize him as being the foremost Cryptographer of the 20th Century. He may have coined the term “Cryptanalysis”

As a person, Friedman was erratic, complex, and a dubious character.

In a booklet (or ‘monograph’) published in 1916, while he managed the Cryptography Department set up within Riverbank Laboratories of Illinois (the nation’s first privately-funded research institute) he seems to be saying that he devoted several man years to the study of secret codes within the First Folio. (Why?)

Below is a view of his monograph, where he decodes the Prologue from Troilus and Cressida using the Biliteral Cipher of Sir Francis Bacon, which is first described in an appendix to Bacon’s magisterial classic, The Advancement of Learning (1623 edition). There, Bacon steps through the then-novel method of how to encode and decode embedded hidden messages, providing several illustrations drawn by his own pen.

Today we call it the Binary Code. It was the World’s first published description of the Binary Code, and its first real-world Application.

In the monograph, Friedman makes reference to Bacon’s cipher key, which encodes one letter of the alphabet (either upper or lower case) into a quintet of binary values, here, either an ‘a’ or ‘b’. This is equivalent to binary 1’s and 0’s.

A pair of Biformed Alphabets are also used, one each for upper and lower case. At left, the upper row of lowercase letters encode a printed letter with an ‘a’ form, while the bottom line encodes a lowercase letter into the ‘b’ form.

It can be seen that in some cases the difference between the two forms is easy to see (such as lower case ‘z’ here) but in other cases, (such as the letter ‘x’), the difference is miniscule. Readers don’t notice the two forms, however, so that blocks of text can contain roughly equal numbers of ‘a’ and ‘b’ forms; readers just pass off the lack of uniformity as Sloppy Typography.

Thus, secret messages can be concealed within a larger body of outer text.

At left is a sample of Page 7 of the monograph, showing how the original First Folio text has been divided into groups of five, with each letter (and this is the hard part) already having been decoded as being ‘a’ or ‘b’.

Beginning with Experiment Two, automating the onerous process of classifying a letter as the ‘a’ or ‘b’ form (using AI technology) will become the major focus of this project as a whole.

But as Friedman notes in the last sentence of his description (on Page 8) his monograph illustrates the classification of the Biformed Values already completed. Therefore what comes next is relatively easy.

This exactly matches the paragraph “Deciphered Message” at the bottom of the page shown above in Friedman’s 1916 Riverbank monograph.