On the Page With the Names
of all the Actors
Guest post by William S. Niederkorn
In regard to the page with “The Names of All the Principall Actors in all these Playes” in the Shakespeare folio editions, notice has been received of two apparent encryptions.
The first was found by Jones Harris, an independent researcher who, “following in the footsteps of Alden Brooks,” as he says, believes that the principal author of the Shakespeare works was Sir Edward Dyer. He noticed decades ago, but kept secret or divulged only to a short list of confidants sworn to secrecy, that “dyer” was encrypted into the last letters of the last names in the second of the two columns in which the actors names are displayed.
At some point Harris divulged his discovery to John Rollett, a physicist and independent researcher on authorship matters famed for his 6-2-4 encryption discovery in the Sonnets dedication.
Harris mentioned that he was not able to make sense of what the last letters in the names in the first column were encrypting, little realizing what he was serving up on a silver platter to Rollett, who had already decided that William Stanley, the Sixth Earl of Derby, was the principal author of the plays.
In the first column encrypted into the last letters of the actors’ last names, Rollett discovered “stenley,” about as close an approximation as could be made to “stanley,” with no actors’ names ending in ‘a’, and ‘e’ being the best phonetic substitute.
Rollett publicized his discovery but never gave away the confidence entrusted to him by Harris. He never mentioned that “dyer” was encrypted into the second column. He kept his word and divulged only his “stenley” discovery to promote his advocacy for Stanley.
As I illustrated in The Brooklyn Rail of February 2013, the encryptor of the actors page centered stenley and dyer in the columns, not only giving them added emphasis in that way but also the space accorded to dignitaries:
Such a double encryption does not happen by accident. Both names are undeniably there. Something is up.
Harris takes the “dyer” encryption to mean that the author of the Shakespeare works is Dyer. Rollett, who is deceased, took the “stenley” encryption to mean that the author was Stanley.
My first thought was that since this is a list of actors, Dyer and Stanley were included because they were actors, not authors. But in the Renaissance actors were authors. Clowns had material that was incorporated as full scenes in the plays. Actors could and did contribute words and actions to their own roles. The playwright was not an established iconic position. In the Renaissance the participation of an actor in the script of a play was far more fluid than, with exceptions, it has evolved to be.
If they were actors, Dyer and Stanley were shoo-ins to play major aristocratic roles. Dyer was a poet and courtier. Stanley, at the top tier of the aristocracy, was fingered by foreign spies as a playwright. These two whose names are encrypted in the list of actors’ names could very well have contributed lines to enhance their roles, as they played characters who spoke the same language and luxuriated in the same poetic devices they breathed in, day in and day out.
Oxfordians may wonder, Where does Edward de Vere fit in here, in a page that is rife with encryption? My own observation is that the title of the page in question offers a possible answer:
The encryptor has control only of extraneous phrases. The extraneous phrases here are “Truely set forth” and “according to their first ORIGINALL.”
One of the meanings of “set forth” is “wrote.” Ben Jonson, who put this book together, prided himself on his skills in Latin. “Truely” in Latin is “Vere.” The entire two phrases together in Latin can be rendered:
Vere scripsit, secundum quorum primum
ORIGINALE.
The extraneous phrases in the page’s title, then, unencrypted, may have been:
According to the first original scripts
Vere wrote.
September 8, 2022 at 4:44 am
Thanks to Mssrs Niederkorn and Stritmatter for this information. Needless to say, the front matter of the First Folio, including the Droeshout engraving on the title page, is rife with sly hints as to the actual author. Taking the actor list page as an example, not only are there two telestiches (Stenley & Dyer) mentioned by Niederkorn, but also the explanatory subtitle (“The Names of the Principall Actors/ in all these playes”) is in plain sight as an outright deception. Five of those plays were NOT staged when the listed actors were alive and performing, e.g., AWTEW (1741), AYLI (1669), Coriolanus (1669), 2HVI (1680), and T&C (1668). Thus the page is as packed with amusing fibs as the entire First Folio publishing venture, which intended 1) to create an ‘author’ proxy out of thin air for the future ignorant, and 2) to present patently easy revelations to the extant knowing. But the knowing like the ignorant soon died out, leaving an historical knowledge deficit where had once existed informed ambiguous irony.
May 4, 2023 at 7:13 pm
Hi William,
And apology for not responding sooner to this. You are quite right, imho, that the Folio contains numerous provocative hints at its own deceptions and fulfills the two functions you identify: 1) to create an ‘author’ proxy out of thin air for the future ignorant, and 2) to present patently easy revelations to the extant knowing.