• Show transparency and repeatability.
• Demonstrate a sufficient technology platform for upcoming experiments, using Google Colab.
• Provide a provisional proof of the project’s main premise.

Future Experiments will focus more on Technology and less on background information.

The illustration below shows a digital reflection of the Bodleian Library Prologue page onto this website. It can be maximized and paged:

The illustration below shows a digital reflection of the page from Friedman’s 1906 monograph. It can be maximized and paged:

The sample above from the Prologue clearly shows the two forms of upper case ‘T’. At the same time the lower case ‘h’s are nearly identical.

The following provides documentation of a simple program which reads the spreadsheet file and processes it to reveal the hidden message, exactly, in principle, as documented in The Advancement of Learning. Using current technology, though.

Details of the technical setup in use are given in the Colophon Page.

The kind of document presented here (a Jupyter Notebook) records both the source code of the program (using the Python computer language), and also the output results produced by one execution of the program.

In the paragraphs below, note that what Bacon called, “The Biliteral Cipher” is what we now call “The Binary Code”. And instead of illustrating it with 1’s and 0’s (as we do currently), he used a’s and b’s.

Especially please note the third row of the output at Out[61]:

And lower down the page, with every third row combined into the Raw Decoded Message:

Sir Francis occasionally chose from a wide variety of name-variants with which to identify himself, but “Francis St Alban” would appear to be his most favored moniker, and the one he chose to make official.

So in the very first line of the decoded text, he covertly identifies himself as Author. Crucially, an intrinsic limitation of this steganographic method is that the inner and outer messages are directly coupled: the author of one also has to be the author of the other. Isn’t this proof?

Alternately, is there some kind of fakery that would be humanly possible to apply here, and produce the same result?

Experiment Four will endeavor to show how unlikely that is, preferably in a way which will be, if, as envisioned, nearly obsessively quantitative. This is in contrast to (it would seem) every other approach attempted so far, which was always giving deniers material to work with.

View the Jupyter Notebook: the experimental commands used here, and the results recorded.

View and download the Python source code from Github.

Independently run this experiment on Google Colab, or create a clone of it to run on a Colab account of your own.

How’s this for Transparency and Repeatability?

Notes for this page:

• You don’t actually need Google Colab for a program like this, only Microsoft Excel (if you can stoop that low, I can’t). Next experiment, however, we begin Object Recognition using Convolutional Neural Networks on Colab to perform the Folio decoding for us.
• The bizarre and seemingly inexplicable later work on this subject by W.F.F is the subject of this video by A.Px, and is foundational to this project.
• One of the additional security features Fr.B built in was that the Cipher only lives within specific areas of the text of any public page; the Prologue to Troilus and Cressida is an exception, so it sticks out like a sore thumb. Within the Prologue, the cipher is present from beginning to end, including the heading, “The Prologue.” Many self-proclaimed “debunkers” overlook this key point.
• So it appears that the Prologue page was inserted right at the very end, the last page added to the Folio, and was the last of an escalating spiral of hints and clues from Fr.B, who saw the decades passing by, and was facing Eternity, with no one apparently yet penetrating even the shallow layers of his multi-tier cipher system. The Prologue page therefore, is expected to be (by design) the simplest and easiest to decode of any of the 900+ pages of the Folio. It’s as though the owner of the hedge labyrinth was urgently pointing to the entrance, while there still was time.
• The cunning design makes it easiest to decode the Prologue page, and also makes the decoded message to be found there, entirely scandal-free. So the expected initial message, if intercepted, is on one level, a sweet-and-light love-gift to the Queen (who was also secretly his biological mother). And also it was she who would have had him executed in a moment if any of the scandalous entries of his Secret Biography fell into her hands. Thus it is set up to offer her a sweet confection initially, “just in case”.
• Put another way, it could have served him as an Early Warning signal that the lower levels of the cipher-system had been decoded, earlier than he was counting on.
• After Elizabeth died in 1602, Fr.B was less in danger, and for this reason, he may have accelerated working even more hints and clues into the later editions of his works.
• W.F.F may have plagiarized the decoding from the work of E.W.G., which, as mentioned, is the Hard Part.
• E.W.G describes the result of her work on the play Trolious and Cressida as being a disappointment, there was no History-changing scandal revealed in the decode. Some have chided the formidable E.W.G as being blind to the big picture, since, what if it were true that the works of Fr.B contain (in summary) the poems of Homer and Virgil, steganographically? Wouldn’t that comprise a seemingly superhuman literary feat?
• While the embedding of Homer and Virgil (if it is real) might appear to be a superhuman feat, there is something even eerier: notice that from the Bodleian Prologue page that the language is quintessentially Elizabethan, nearly incomprehensible to modern readers. Yet the decoded message which pops out (“Francis St Alban, revering…”) is modern, grammatically correct and perfectly spelt English. A worthwhile experiment would be to submit the decoded text to an English instructor for routine grading, not telling them in advance where it came from. How was Fr.B able to look into the future to know, exactly, how readers, centuries in the future, would be reading?
• A key clue left by Fr.B is that his Cipher will appear especially in places where italickes are in use. The stage-directions of the scripts are one place. The Prologue is notably in line with this, the cipher lives within it from beginning to end.
• The first book available to the public about the NSA was James Bamford’s, The Puzzle Palace in 1983. The existence of the NSA had remained a secret until then! In his book he says that the NSA’s main auditorium was named the William Friedman Auditorium.
• The following links provide special express-service to the Riverbank monograph which delves most deeply into decoding the First Folio Biliteral Cipher, focuses on the Prologue:
• 27/108 to 28/108
• 95/108 to 99/108
• A subtlety of the Cunning Design is that the line width of the of grid enclosing the Decoded message is 14 characters, exactly the width of “FrancisStAlban”. This is a hint that this name-variant was his most favored signature. If there is even a difference of one character in the undecoded outer text, this signature will not appear in the decoded text.

The Tudor Rose

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