Where it fits — the primary source: where the method actually comes from, before any modern analysis.
Mr. Sherman’s Method, Colour-Coded
His own 1895 words — with each part of the mechanism lit up
“The Bacon cipher, as discovered by Dr. Owen, consists, I find, of a series of (1) guide words. Around these guide words are clustered (2) key words, and these key words again have (3) concordant words, both single and double. The (4) sentences containing the guides, keywords, and concordants are (5) collected together, by (6) system, when it is found that the new story unrolls itself with hardly a hitch. Nothing needs to be added or taken therefrom.”
Guides are not keys
“The ‘Letter to the Decipherer’ now goes on to add to ‘the first great guide’ — Fortune — four others, Nature, Honour, Reputation, and Pan, the god of nature… Let it now be borne in mind that these five words are not keys to the hidden stories, but guides whereby to find the key words. And around every guide clusters these keys.”
Single concordant = a synonym of the key
“I will give an example of these concordant words. Let us suppose that the key words are ‘love‘ and ‘king.’ We must not look for ‘love’ and ‘king’ only… but for all synonymous words. For ‘love’s’ synonyms we find ‘devotion,’ ‘adore,’ ‘adoration‘… for ‘king’ we follow such words relating to royalty as ‘majesty,’ ‘highness,’ ‘kingdom,’ ‘court.'”
Double concordant = a compound name, coupled by “consort”
“No one can be so dull as to believe that we would set the whole name of any man open among the subject matter… we use the simple and safe plan of consort. The similarity of word with word contributes to save the whole from discovery… the method you must employ in unravelling and unlocking the double words.” — worked out in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “as he is an ass… sweet Jude… for the ass to the Jude; give it him, Jud-as away.”
The system: sort and collect
“The sorting of the papers means placing in piles by themselves all pages containing the same key words… unite and collect the dispersed and distributed matter, which is mingled up and down in combination.”
Transposition — when a line reads wrongly, flip it
“Again a sentence reads in a vague or unnatural manner. In this case the decipherer is plainly instructed to transpose it, when the true meaning is revealed at once.”
Parallel sentences — the same matter, mingled from two works
“Here may be given an illustration of parallel sentences taken from seemingly widely different sources, yet mingling like the fragrance of the very flowers described… [the flower catalogue]… Anyone who will look upon Winter’s Tale, act IV., scene 4, and the ‘Essay on Gardens,’ by Bacon, will at once see where all the flowers mentioned were taken from. In other words, the parallels, concordances and similar matter.”
The typographic marker Sherman claims
“‘We have enclosed our name without regard to safety, in the different texts,’ says Bacon, ‘in such capital letters that… he that runneth by may read.’ … Any one who will search the 1623 edition of Shakespeare… will find Bacon’s name appearing frequently, and in capital letters, as in Henry IV., ‘a gammon of Bacon.'”
Verbatim from P. J. Sherman, “The Mystery of the Bacon Cipher — Dr. O. W. Owen’s Discovery Investigated,” Baconiana, April 1895 (printed pp. 37–42), OCR lightly corrected. Colours match the reverse-engineering infographic. Footnote from the test on the faithful Bodleian TEI: in the actual Folio “Bacon” is an ordinary initial capital, not all-caps — the capital-letter marker is Sherman’s reading of normal early-modern capitalisation, not a distinctive signal. · Research by Walter H. Wilkinson · New Gorhambury · gorhambury.org