This presentation demonstrates that Ben Jonson's First Folio poem "To the Reader," the Shakespeare funerary monument at Stratford, and three other texts concerning Shakespeare were encrypted by the Renaissance polymath John Dee using a previously unknown variant of a Cardano Grille cipher. Lyle Jennings Colombo has discovered that Dee's name is encoded three times in each of these texts, and presents multiple proofs that his signatures do not occur randomly but by design. Moreover, four of the texts contain an encryption rule that explicitly instructs us to look for "three Dees."

The signatures do not merely identify Dee as the cryptographer but they also form an essential part of the cryptograms' infrastructure with each signature strategically positioned to demarcate the messages concealed in the works. The messages unambiguously state that the author of Shakespeare's works was Edward de Vere. Any one of these encryptions would be enough to take the case for Edward de Vere's authorship of the plays and poems beyond simply evidence and into the realm of definitive proof. The discovery of these multiple texts in which the same unique cryptographic system is used to encode the same messages is difficult to ignore.

Lyle's handout is available here: https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.o...

Bio: Lyle Jennings Colombo did her doctoral studies in philosophy at Tulane University and the Free University of Berlin. She taught philosophy at Loyola University, New Orleans, and currently lectures on creative writing and literature in Tulane University's First Year Experience and Honors Scholars programs. Her publications include articles in the journals Existentia and Heidegger Studies, as well as translations from German into English. She has presented papers on 20th century German philosophy and archaeological theory in the US and Europe. Fairly new to the authorship question, she is now a member of both the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship and the De Vere Society. Dr. Colombo also organized this week’s interdisciplinary panel discussion on the authorship question sponsored by Tulane’s Newcomb Institute.