Encrypted testimony of Ben Jonson and his contemporaries for who “William Shakespeare” really was

Abstract

Concealed messages in three authentic Early Modern English sources reveal that Ben Jonson and his contemporaries recognized “William Shakespeare” was a pen name of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604). This view is supported and augmented by new, wide-ranging cryptographic testimonial evidence based on a rigorous extension of incomplete and inexact earlier findings of U.S. Patent attorney Ralph L. Tweedale (1904–1977). Compared with their significantly lower occurrence in appropriate controls, the name-identifying block-initials EO or EOX (for Edward Oxenford or the Earl of Oxford) formed by the intersection of diagonal alignments of the letters of his name V-e-r-e or E-v-e-r (with Elizabethan era spelling variants of them) over four consecutive lines of print have been found in more than a dozen poetical tributes to “Shakespeare.” This same two-stage acrostic monogram identity device is also abundant in poetry reliably attributed to Lord Oxford as well as in poems he evidently wrote anonymously or under various pseudonyms, including the name “William Shakespeare.” By contrast, it is much less often present (by accident) in poems not written by him and in poems not written about or in tribute to him by others.