Excerpt from The Cryptography of Shakespeare, Vol. 1The controversy as to the identity of the author of the Shakespeare plays and poems has involved three kinds of evidence, historical, stylistic, and cryptographic; and in the already extensive literature to which the controversy has given rise this evidence must be carefully sifted from a mass of conjecture which is sometimes plausible and sometimes not. For a general introduction to the literature that deals with the historical evidence that the poet was not the actor William Shakespere the reader may refer to G. G. Greenwood: The Shakespeare Problem Restated. For a general introduction to the literature that deals with the historical and stylistic evidence that the poet was Francis Bacon the reader may refer to Walter Begley: Is It Shakespeare? and Bacon's Nova Resuscitatio; R. M. Theobald: Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light; W. S. Booth: The Droeshout Portrait of William Shakespeare; and J. P. Baxter: The Greatest of Literary Problems.The attempts that have been made to discover cryptographic evidence that Francis Bacon was the author of the Shakespeare plays and poems have been based on a variety of cryptographic methods. Among these methods are the "arithmetical cipher", as employed by Ignatius Donnelly in The Great Cryptogram and The Cipher in the Plays and on the Tombstone; the bi-literal cipher, as employed by Elizabeth Wells Gallup in Francis Bacon's Bi-Literal Cypher; the word cipher, as employed by Orville W. Owen in Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story Discovered and Deciphered; the "progressive anagram", as employed by an anonymous "Shake-spearean" in Shakespeare Anagrams; and a variation of this method which is employed by William Stone Booth in Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon and in The Hidden Signatures of Francesco Colonna and Francis Bacon, and which Mr. Booth sometimes, as in his first title, designates inaccurately as an acrostic method, and sometimes as the method of t…