Bacon's Dial in Shakespeare; A Compass-Clock Cipher (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in the time of Elizabeth heavy and substantial things, and a certain warrant for drawing them out on the Dial may perhaps be given in Measure for Measure, when the Duke speaks of "Making practise on the Times, To draw with idle spiders' strings Most ponderous and substantial things?" This is Question 241, Hour 1. The compass Dial joined to the clock Dial carries out another of Bacon's expressed ideas. In the Advancement of Learning, he writes; "Of these (ciphers) there are many kinds: simple ciphers; ciphers mixed with non-significant characters; wheel-ciphers; key-ciphers; word-ciphers; and the like. But the virtues required in them are three: that they be easy and not laborious to write; that they be safe, and impossible to be deciphered; and lastly that they be, if possible, such as not to raise suspicion." He adds, "Thoughts may be communicated at any distance or place by means of objects perceptible either to the eye or ear, provided only that those objects are capable of two differences, as by bells, trumpets, gunshots and the like." (Sped- ding's Philosophical Works of Lord Bacon, Vol. IV, page 444.) Bacon has a long treatise on the compass and the history of the winds, full of cipher hints. The union of clock and compass forms a case of "two differences" in a visible thing. But of course one cannot expect to set a compass face down upon a clock face and have both behave as if nothing had happened. There arereadjustments to be made. It is the clock, not the compass, that gets pushed about, for the last Hour, 12, coincides with the first Hour, 1, on the Dial, and the three compass divisions belonging rightfully to Hour 12 are thus set behind the letters in Hour 1. Alpha is a visible hour on the Dial, but Omega is "invisible," and many references to "invisible" thing...