The Little Cryptogram: A Literal Application to the Play of Hamlet of the Cipher System of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly.
1888
The Little Cryptogram: A Literal Application to the Play of Hamlet of the Cipher System of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly.
1888
In the 1880s, a literary scandal consumed the Anglophone world. Ignatius Donnelly had announced that hidden within Shakespeare's plays lay a secret cipher proving Francis Bacon authored Hamlet, Macbeth, and the rest. The claim ignited newspapers, lecture halls, and drawing rooms across two continents. Joseph Gilpin Pyle's witty, devastating critique arrived as the definitive debunking. With razor-sharp logic and abundant sarcasm, Pyle dissects Donnelly's "The Great Cryptogram," walking readers through the labyrinthine mathematical gymnastics required to extract his "hidden messages" and revealing them as elaborate self-delusion. He shows how any text, subjected to sufficiently creative number-crunching, will yield any message you seek. Part Victorian nail-biting thriller, part rigorous intellectual autopsy, this book captures a moment when serious people believed the greatest works in the English language concealed secret codes. It endures as a fascinating artifact of literary paranoia, and a reminder that the temptation to uncover hidden meaning where none exists is timeless.
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Pyle, Joseph Gilpin. The Little Cryptogram: A Literal Application to the Play of Hamlet of the Cipher System of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly.. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-little-cryptogram-a-literal-application-to-the-play-of-hamlet-of-the-cipher--12ad1dcf-d270-48bc-9bb3-4d2cceb032bb.Pyle, J. G. (1888). The Little Cryptogram: A Literal Application to the Play of Hamlet of the Cipher System of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly.. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-little-cryptogram-a-literal-application-to-the-play-of-hamlet-of-the-cipher--12ad1dcf-d270-48bc-9bb3-4d2cceb032bbPyle, Joseph Gilpin. The Little Cryptogram: A Literal Application to the Play of Hamlet of the Cipher System of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly.. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-little-cryptogram-a-literal-application-to-the-play-of-hamlet-of-the-cipher--12ad1dcf-d270-48bc-9bb3-4d2cceb032bb.
