Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1848 in

Paris, New York Paris is a town in Oneida County, New York, United States. The town is in the southeast part of the county and is south of Utica. The population was 4,411 at the 2010 census. The town was named after an early benefactor, Colonel Isaac Paris. Hist ...

– 1934) was an American educator and exponent of the

Baconian theory The Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship holds that Sir Francis Bacon, philosopher, essayist and scientist, wrote the plays which were publicly attributed to William Shakespeare. Various explanations are offered for this alleged subterfuge ...

of Shakespearean authorship.

Early life and education

Gallup was born in 1848. She studied at Michigan State Normal College (now

Eastern Michigan University Eastern Michigan University (EMU, Eastern Michigan or simply Eastern), is a public research university in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Founded in 1849 as Michigan State Normal School, the school was the fourth normal school established in the United Sta ...

), the

Sorbonne Sorbonne may refer to: * Sorbonne (building), historic building in Paris, which housed the University of Paris and is now shared among multiple universities. *the University of Paris (c. 1150 – 1970) *one of its components or linked institution, ...

and the

University of Marburg The Philipps University of Marburg (german: Philipps-Universität Marburg) was founded in 1527 by Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, which makes it one of Germany's oldest universities and the oldest still operating Protestant university in the wor ...

Career

Gallup taught in

Michigan Michigan () is a U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the List of U.S. states and ...

for some twenty years and became a high school principal. She used her married name Gallup but retained her maiden name, Wells.Friedmans, p. 188 She was interested in the life and work of

Francis Bacon Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon led the advancement of both ...

(1561–1626) and, together with her sister Kate Wells, initially worked on the theories of Dr. Orville Ward Owen. She subsequently became convinced of the use of the " biliteral cipher" in early Shakespeare printing, believing that the use of different printing fonts was an attempt to conceal messages concerning the authorship of the works and other statements about the secret history of the times. This type of cipher, also known as

Bacon's cipher Bacon's cipher or the Baconian cipher is a method of steganographic message encoding devised by Francis Bacon in 1605. A message is concealed in the presentation of text, rather than its content. Cipher details To encode a message, each letter of ...

, had been discussed in Bacon's work. It depended on the use of two distinct

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

s within the same text to conceal messages. Gallup came to this conclusion in 1895. In subsequent years she published a large body of literature claiming to have uncovered deciphered content in the work of Bacon, Shakespeare and others. Her first book was ''The Biliteral Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in his Works and Deciphered by Mrs Elizabeth Wells Gallup'', published in 1899, and then in multiple other editions into the 20th century. In later years her work was largely sponsored by Colonel

George Fabyan "Colonel" George Fabyan (1867 – 1936) was a millionaire businessman who founded a private research laboratory.Riverbank Laboratories in Geneva, Illinois. Fabyan, who had also funded Owen's work, supported a research staff working on her theory, which initially included Elizebeth Smith (later Elizebeth Friedman). During Gallup's time at Riverbank she published many books containing decipherments of purported hidden messages in the work of Bacon and other writers. Her decipherments "discovered" that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth, heir to the throne, and the author of the works of Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, and

Robert Burton Robert Burton (8 February 1577 – 25 January 1640) was an English author and fellow of Oxford University, who wrote the encyclopedic tome ''The Anatomy of Melancholy''. Born in 1577 to a comfortably well-off family of the landed gentry, Burt ...

. Gallup also published the play ''The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn'' which was supposed to have been hidden in cipher-form in Bacon/Shakespeare's works.Elizabeth Gallup, ''Concerning the bi-literal cypher of Francis Bacon discovered in his works'', Howard publishing co., 1910. None of Gallup's decoding assistants at Riverbank were ever able to duplicate her work. Elizebeth Smith Friedman, with her husband

William F. Friedman William Frederick Friedman (September 24, 1891 – November 12, 1969) was a US Army cryptographer who ran the research division of the Army's Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) in the 1930s, and parts of its follow-on services into the 1950s. ...

, in 1957 published ''The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined'', a careful study of the various Bacon/Shakespeare theories, including that of Gallup, and concluded that there was no evidence that the biliteral cipher was used in Shakespeare's works. The Friedmans illustrated that despite Gallup's theories, the range of type forms used in the printing of the works of Shakespeare conformed to the normal printing practices of the time, meaning many different fonts were used in an apparently haphazard manner. The Friedmans also reported that outside experts examined the letter fonts used in the printing of Shakespeare's plays and concluded that, with few exceptions, it was not possible to unambiguously separate them into two groups, as the Bacon biliteral cipher requires. The Friedmans pointed out that Gallup, in attempting to use Bacon's biliteral cipher to decode Shakespeare's works, had been able to take advantage of the variable fonts to give her great freedom in arbitrarily selecting most of the letters of her message, with the result that she found "what it was she was determined to find."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gallup, Elizabeth Wells 1848 births 1934 deaths 19th-century American women writers 19th-century American writers American literary critics Women literary critics American women non-fiction writers Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship Eastern Michigan University alumni Educators from New York (state) American women educators People from Paris, New York Riverbank Laboratories Shakespeare authorship theorists University of Marburg alumni University of Paris alumni American expatriates in France American expatriates in Germany American women critics