The String Cipher of William Stone Booth: 
How Bacon's name is enfolded in the First lines of the 36 Plays of the First Folio
(and the Epilogue to The Tempest)

Perhaps the most extraordinary of all the Bacon signatures in the First Folio is the "string-cipher" discovered by William Stone Booth in the 1920s. It reveals the name enfolded into the first letters of the words of the first lines of the 36 plays, according to a simple algorithm which Booth presented in his book. This cipher was examined, discussed, found wanting and then completely discreditted in William and Elizabeth Friedman's 1957 book The Shakespearan Ciphers Examined, and there the matter, along with much of the momentum of the Baconian cause, appeared to come to a conclusive end.

In 2001 however, Ken Patton's internet essay, The Vindication of William Stone Booth reopened the case for the string cipher. In trademark take-no-prisoners style, Ken did an excellent job in showing not only that this cipher signature is, contra the Friedmans, certainly valid  and unquestionably present in the First Folio as Booth claimed, but also that The Shakespearan Ciphers Examiners makes false claims and knowingly misrepresents Booth's work in attempting to disprove it . There can be no question that the Friedmans had been caught out, at the very least in the case of the William Stone Booth's "string-cipher".

Sadly, Ken passed away in 2002, but his work in vindicating Booth's discoveries remains as a testament to this feisty Baconian.

It must be conceded however that the overall effect of Patton's essay is slightly marred by a couple of typographical and descriptive errors which had unfortunately crept into the text. While his overall description of the workings of the Booth cipher is accurate and correct, the specifics of how the name is spelt out in the first lines suffers from one or two inadvertent omissions and emendations. It must be stressed that the errors do not invalidate the working of the Booth strong-cipher, or even Patton's description and defense of it, which is correct other than in these relatively minor slips of transcription. However, admittedly, they do make it a little harder to follow what is already a quite complex argument. 

With the greatest of respect for Ken Patton's work, and one hopes with his blessings, I have taken the liberty of making the corrections to his data, and presenting them here below. 

I would stress that the intention of this short note therefore is certainly not to disagree with Mr Pattons findings, but merely to attempt to assist to clarify his description of the Booth cipher in order that any possible obstacles to understanding the importance of what he has found be taken away. 

I present below therefore a revised and corrected table of the first lines of the 36 plays of the First Folio, showing how the name "Francisci Baconi" is enfolded into the text according to the rules of the string-cipher. These rules may be briefly summarised as follows:

Objective: To conceal a given name (in this case the Latin form of Bacon's name, FRANCISCI BACONI), by incorporating it into a string of letters (in this case the initial letters of the words of the first lines of the 36 plays of the Shakespeare 1623 First Folio) according to the following requirements.
First Requirement: The initials of the two names (which will of course be the starting points for spelling out the letters of the first and last names) must be placed in prominent positions. In this case, the prominent positions chosen are the first and last letters, respectively B and F.
Second Requirement: Starting at the first B, look for the next letter in the name (A) by taking the initial letter of each word in turn. Initial letters other than A are ignored (implications discussed below). It is found at the word "a" in the third line of the table, the opening line of Merry Wives of Windsor). Now look for the next letter (C), again ignoring all other letters, and so on, until the final letter "I" of the word BACONI is found (in the line sixteenth line "Old Iohn of Gaunt"). Proceed now to the end of the poem, and beginning on the initial F or Frownes, spell the name FRANCISCI according to the same rule as above, but this time working through the initial letters of the words in reverse order. It will be found that the final I of FRANCISCI falls on the same word "Iohn" in the sixteenth line.
Conclusion: Both of the names ending on the same letter signals that the text has been intentionally arranged to achieve this result. 

For a full description of the workings of the cipher, it is essential to read Ken Patton's original essay. Perhaps the easiest way to understand it however is simply to look at the chart below. In the left hand columns are listed the first lines of the play, as they appear in the First Folio. The column at right headed (1) identifies in red the letters to be used to spell BACONI forwards from Bote-swaine. Column (2) highlights in blue the letters used for FRANCISCI in reverse from Frownes. Columns (3) and (4) show that the name (taken now as the string BACONICSICNARF) may also be spelt straight through in both forwards and reverse directions. I have kept to the convention that letters used reading in forwards directions are red and in reverse blue. 

Table of First Lines of the 36 Plays of the Shakespeare First Folio

Above is the table of first lines of the First Folio plays. The letters used to construct the name Francisci Baconi are highlighted in coloured, bold font.  The columns at right show explicitly the letters used to construct the name reading in four different ways. A detailed explanation follows the table.

The initial letters used in the acrostic are in shown within the lines in bold font, and coloured either red or blue. Red indicates that the letters are used in spelling out the string to be read moving forward through the text; while blue indicates letters to be read while reading the string moving in reverse order.

The acrostic spells out the name Francisci Baconi, according to the rules given above, in three different but valid ways, as shown in the columns at right, above, as follows:

(1) Firstly, beginning on the first B in Bote-swaine. Spell the word "Baconi", using the red letters as shown, by moving forward through the text to end on the I of Iohn.

(2) Then, beginning on the final word, with the F of Frownes, spell the word "Francisci", using the blue letters as shown above, by moving in the reverse direction through the text, to end, once again, on the same I of Iohn.

Here we have spelt Francisci Baconi, working from both ends towards the middle, with both Francisci and Baconi ending on this same I of Iohn. This is the evidence of intentionality.

To put it another way, we have spelt out the string of letters BACONICSICNARF, by spelling Baconi in one direction, and Francisco in the other, but ending on the same letter.

One can also spell out this string reading straight through from the beginning reading forward (3) , or straight through from the end, reading in reverse (4) . Note that in both cases a slightly different set of letters is used to make up the string. Reading from beginning to end, the BACONI section will be made up of the same letters, but in the spelling out the remaining letters of the string, CSICNARF, there are two letters, the "I" and the "N", which fall on different words. These are indicated in red and bold in the table above, with the remaining letters of CSICNARF remaining blue.

Finally, the reverse applies when reading the string from the end, in reverse, to the beginning. In this case the string will now be FRANCISCINOCAB. The FRANCISCI section reads the same, starting from F of Frownes, as described above. The NOCAB section uses two letters, "C" and "A", which are different from the red letters making up the BACONI string read forward. These "C" and "A" have been coloured blue therefore to indicate they are used for reading in reverse order.

Thus there are three valid and consistent ways to read the Francisci Baconi name; from the beginning and end towards the middle; from the beginning straight through, and from the end straight through in reverse order. Note that in each case, the string begins and ends on the first and last letters, "B" and "F" of the table of first lines.

Criticism of the Booth cipher, including the Friedman's, rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the clear difference in design and intent between the string-cipher and the traditional acrostic. In an acrostic, a name or word is contrived to be spelled out in the first letters of successive lines. There are many examples in Elizabethan poetry: here is a typical acrostic poem written by Ben Jonson. In such a case, the name which has been "concealed" in the text, may easily be read off, once the eye has noticed the word written vertically at the margin, or if it has been pointed out. The important point to note is that the letters making up the desired name are arranged in accordance with an unambiguous rule, namely, that the first letter of each line be taken in turn.

Names could also be hidden by choosing some other regular order by which to hide the name less obviously; for example, the initial letter of every sixth word, or twelfth word in a passage could be carefully chosen to spell out a hidden name or word. This variation has the advantage of making the name harder to notice by chance or casual reading. To find the hidden name, one must either learn or deduce the applicable rule in a given situation; then, in possession of the rule, one counts out every sixth letter, or twelfth as the case may be, and one can reconstruct the message which has been thus enfolded into the text. All of this is possible and non-controversial. The Friedman's cover this territory in the relevant chapter of their book, and give examples of such constructions. Note again that the common factor in all such schemes is that there is a strict rule which dictates the position of certain letters within the text. By applying this rule to the text, the concealed name or word can be recovered by someone in possession of the rule. Given the rule, the unknown message may be recovered.

Now we turn to Booths string-cipher. The purpose of this cipher is quite different: rather than permitting the recovery of a coded word or name once a prescriptive rule is known, as in the examples discussed above, the string cipher requires the decipherer to know in advance the key word , which he then applies whether or not it is present enfolded into the text. It might seem on first reflection that this is a perfectly useless cipher, but this is not so at all. A recipient in possession of the keyword, who receives such a message, is able to unambiguously determine, by the presence or absence of the keyword, hidden according to the string-cipher rules, whether the message is authenticated via the method, or not. In short: its a method which permits verification of a document's identification.

In this case, there will be no unique prescriptive rule, and, naturally, this will In this case, the requirement for order is relaxed but, note, not completely abandoned. The encoder must choose or contrive a passage which begins and/or ends prominently with the first and last letters of the name or word he wishes to enfold. He then must choose or contrive the word order in the passage so that the name or word may be spelt through, the letters taken in consecutive order, beginning and ending with first and last letters. Other than the first and last letters then, the remaining letters must occur in order, but can have any number of "null" values in between.

The key point to realise about the Booth string cipher is that it does not permit someone to retrieve an unknown name as in the example above. However, while this certainly implies that it is of no use whatever for encoding an unknown message designed to be "read" or deciphered, this does not by any means render the method useless as a cipher, as Friedman claims. Simply, the point of the Booth string-cipher method is in providing authentification of identification. Given a name, and thats the the essential step, it provides a rigorous test for determining whether the name is present or absent. The name is perfectly hidden from even the most ingenious decipherer; but immediately demonstrable as present and retrievable once the name is given and known. This is equivalent to a verification of a signature.

The string cipher is also present in the final speech of The Tempest, shown above as it appears in the First Folio of 1623. In this case, the prominent letters F and B may be found as the initial letters of the final words of the two final lines (be and free). The details of how the names of both Bacon and Ben Jonson are encoded are given in Ken Patton's article, together with other examples.

http://www.polybiblio.com/jrwindle/1335.html

http://www.getcited.org/pub/103145299