By guest Adam Laceky
Doug Dorst said from the outset that “S.” is partly inspired by the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare’s works. This blog has already shown how a famous Shakespearean scholar and his daughter are invoked in SoT.
The Shakespeare connection doesn’t end there.
Interlude is loaded with references to Shakespeare. It’s a good bet that whatever cipher is hidden in Interlude, Shakespeare holds a clue to its solution.
Here are the most obvious allusions to Shakespeare. In keeping with the “beginnings and endings” theme of Ship of Theseus, they all occur at the beginning or the ending of the plays.
P. 301: “Good night, foul prince.” This is a play on the line from Hamlet, “Good night, sweet prince.”
[NOTE: “Prince” is a recurring theme in Interlude: Gavril Princip, Principality of Rumor.]
P. 323: “Star-crossed lovers… so very Shakespearean!”
This is an obvious reference to Romeo and Juliet.
- Jen Haywood reminisces about studying King Lear
- No other references to King Lear have been found
P. 328: The “mediated writing” that S scratches into the orlop walls alludes to the Prologue to Shakespeare’s King Henry V.:
SHAKESPEARE:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention…
S.’s SCRAWLING:
O Sola! O for you to
transcend this brightest
bedlam of invention!
Eric says of the above passage: “Invocation of the muse…”
This is interesting, because Shakespeare invokes the muse, but Eric seems unaware of the Henry V allusion. I think Dorst uses Eric and Jen to drop clues to the reader. Jen writes about studying King Lear. I admit I haven’t studied King Lear, but I bet there’s a clue in there.
Other Shakespearean connections in SoT include Shakespeare’s play “Coriolianus,” whose name is more than a little similar to Straka’s book “Coriolis.” Add to that “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” whose main character is Theseus.
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The word “rumor” occurs four times in the Interlude. It seems pretty important.
Let’s look at the Prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, part 2.
“Enter RUMOUR, painted full of tongues” (RUMOUR proceeds to tell of his sowing of fear and false security…)
The Shakespeare Concordance lists 19 instances of the word “rumour.” The spelling “rumor” appears twice. This is a possible example of the “19+2” pattern throughout Ship of Theseus.
Shakespeare’s works were first published in small books called “quartos.” The quartos were of dubious origin. Many of them appeared to have been pieced together from the actors’ memories, and from audience members transcribing the lines during the play. They were the Elizabethan equivalent of bootlegs. This ties in with the authorship controversy surrounding Ship of Theseus and Shakespeare’s works.
In 1623*, the First Folio was published: the first official publication of Shakespeare’s plays.
What’s interesting about this is that before the First Folio, 19 quartos were published. After the First Folio, another two quartos were published. They were supposedly collaborations between Shakespeare and another playwright. Another authorship controversy. And another instance of the 19+2 pattern.
(As an irrelevant, non-Shakespearean aside, a third example of the 19+2 pattern appears on page 318 in Interlude. The second paragraph begins “It’s not so much the killing…” and then lists 18 more participles (words ending in -ing) before the first comma, and then there are two more participles before the end of the paragraph.)
*In 1623, Arquimedes de Sobreiro was in Stockholm, and Jan Carstenszoon landed in Australia on an exploration that eventually produced the first widely used world map that showed any portion of Australia.
It’s easy to find details in Shakespeare that look like they pertain to SoT.
For instance, Henry V led the battle at Agincourt, where archers were 80% of the army, thus changing warfare forever. Plots of some Shakespeare plays seem relevant to SoT. Some of these connections might be valid. It’s easy to fall into the trap of assigning significance to every correlation.
Hi. i think the question here is if any clues we might find here are only to include and support the Shakespeare Identity controversy and thereby create a relationship between Straka and Shakespeare, or if this goes further and enciphers a message. The first option would be enough in my opinion. there are some winks that there could be more, but is this for flair or actual hints?
In latter case, the most common Cipher associated with Shakespeare is the Baconian Chiper. if this were employed, the visible Ciphertext should show up as combinations of a and b. e.g. aabaa or the like. any character, symbol or number could code for each of these. so perhaps there is something like this in the mediated writing, or something else, or nothing.
perhaps the 19+2 is a clue. i still am not one step further into understanding the significance of the overabundance of 19, other than being the initials for the protagonist, society and author, and letter-number code (or even for the 19th century). i find it hard to reconcile the number 19 with the significant number in Theseus myth, being 14 and representing the members on the ship being sacrificed to minos bull and the labyrinth (7female, 7 male). why are there 5 additional ones? why complicate this again with additional 1 for Maelstrom (do you think he counts towards the number, making it 19×1?).
Would there not be a whole lot more of we include other relevant characters too? like Signe or Desjardins?
And should the 19+2 pattern not better be a 19+1+2 pattern to include the First Folio?
Shakespeare being relevant is without question, but i’d really be interested in what Mr.Dorst would recommend as essential reading for an easy understanding of S. I’d ask him how much help the knowledge of “The King Must Die” by Mary Renault would be, but that seems more like a question towards the meaning of the “Loveletter of the written word” quote.
The Baconian cipher is an interesting possibility. I’ll give a good thinkin’.
Right off the bat there’s a possible clue that a form of the Baconian cipher is in use in Interlude.
The cipher uses groups of 5 letters. It did not use the number 0, because Bacon was using the Roman alphabet and numbers (not Roman numerals). Romans didn’t have 0.
As I’ve already mentioned, the numbers 5 and 0 are missing from the Agent numbers, but are implied by 9+41.
I’m going to walk the dog and ponder this intriguing new lead.
Here’s a good link that explains the cipher clearly:
http://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2012/12/shakespeares-secrets-a-hidden-cipher-in-literatures-greatest-works.html
i tried Baconian on the numbers 4 34 26 47 8 9 41 2. converted into Binary and the checked both outcomes (0=a and 1=a). Results are AQRBULYI BEUQ or POLUHX LP. if i add 9+41 it changes to AQRBULYI GIB or POHLUX ZX. can you suggrst other math. alterations? Otherwise this does not look super revealing, at least for this sample.
Having thoroughly walked the dog, I have a couple of thoughts on the Bacon Cipher:
First, I remembered this bit from the Prologue to Henry V (which also begins with the inspiration for the mediated writing):
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Then there’s this:
The principal cipher Bacon used, according to Leary, is based on a 21-letter alphabet: “ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVY.” This alphabet omits the letters “JUWXZ,” but, as Leary explains, in Elizabethan times the letters “I” and “J” were often used interchangeably, as were the letters “U” and “V,” and “W” was often printed as “VV.”
Since the Roman alphabet did not use “X” and “Z,” Bacon, according to Leary, omitted those letters. In addition, the numerals from “1” to “9” could be expressed as the letters from “A” to “K” (remember, there is no “J” in this alphabet), while the numeral “0” may be omitted, since the Romans had no zero. Given this 21-letter alphabet, Leary believes Bacon then replaced each letter with the one that comes four places later. Thus “A” becomes “E,” “B” becomes “F,” and so on. Here is the 21-letter alphabet, and beneath it in lowercase is the cipher equivalent of each letter.
ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVY
efghiklmnopqrstvyabcd
21 letters. 19+2.
Obviously, if the Baconian Cipher is used in Interlude, it’s not Bacon’s original cipher, but a variation.
The power of the cipher is that you can encode anything into any body of text, as long as the text is at least five times the length of the encrypted message. Straka wouldn’t have had to carefully choose which words to use; he could write freely and then go back and encrypt the message. However, we don’t see any indication that he did that. If it’s there, the original Baconian Cipher was modified to, for instance, use groups of words instead of groups of letters. This would require careful planning, however, and defeat the elegance of the cipher.
Here’s a quote from https://shakespeareauthorship.com/bacpenl.html :
If a message contained only strings of a’s and b’s, it would be quite obvious to a cryptologist that some sort of cipher was used. Francis Bacon’s genius lies not in this simple substitution cipher, but in the fact that his cipher could be wielded to make, in Bacon’s own words, “anything mean anything” (Sherman, 2010). With the extra twist of steganography, which is concealing messages through deception, a-form and b-form can be two types of anything, from black and white to plus and minus, not just text.
So, the trick is to detect the presence of the cipher. How could Straka have modified it?
On another note: I haven’t ruled out the possibility that the Mnemonic Major system is used in Interlude. If it’s there, the goal is to derive numbers from words, as it was originally intended.
Since the Baconian Cipher is inherently binary, maybe those binary numbers are used along with the Major system.
has anyone tried to compare each line, align similar words, subtract these similar ones and see if the resulting two lines of remaining letters are of equal lenght? if they were, we would have a few venues to test.
i began this but am somewhat occupied with reading up on history of black hand, apis etc, and a, not sure how or if to subtract in non obvious cases (e.g. 1:rApidS 2:mAdnesS.. does the first A stay or go, same with last S ).