Labyrinth of Ruins

The Hekatompathia (1582), the first English sonnet sequence, surprises its readers with a cryptographic puzzle at a critical juncture in the text. The puzzle’s instructions, enumerated in five points, promise that a message can be deciphered using a specific set of published cryptographic tables. This odd, indeed unique, interruption of a poetic text has long baffled critics. Some have dismissed the puzzle as esoterica; one critic argued that the puzzle is unsolvable because its construction is flawed; what no one has previously done is to solve the puzzle. And so, until now, the mystery has remained. However, by applying both cryptographic and literary skills, Labyrinth of Ruins uncovers the solution to this extraordinarily elaborate 7-stage puzzle, in which each stage produces a cryptographic message. Even more surprising, in its grand finale, the seventh stage’s cryptographic message reveals that the work’s author is not actually he whose name appears on the title page, Thomas Watson, but rather the philosopher, statesman, and harbinger of scientific progress, Francis Bacon.

Past scholarship quite naturally accepted the authority of the Hekatompathia’s title page and its authorial attribution to Thomas Watson. However, scholars recognize that a culture of literary anonymity was cultivated in Elizabethan England, especially among lyric poets. One form of anonymity is to write under a pseudonym, either a fictional name or the borrowed name of an actual person.  Thus, even though Watson’s authorship appears to be supported by contemporary documents, the purpose of writing under a pseudonym is often to mislead one’s contemporaries, which the Hekatompathia seems to have successfully done.

Unfortunately, specious claims of cryptographic messages embedded in Elizabethan texts constitute almost a cottage industry. Shakespearean texts seem to particularly attract such illusory notions. However, none of these pseudo-cryptographic claims are based on an actual cryptographic system; instead, they rely on a fanciful and unsystematic extraction of letters to produce the message that the “decipherer” anticipated at the start. In fact, in most of these pseudo-cryptographic claims, there is usually no reason to suspect that the examined text contains a hidden message in the first place. Given this history of pseudo-cryptographic claims, readers will naturally be skeptical of the validity of the claim made here. However, my hope is that readers will recognize the categorical differences between the cryptographic arguments made in Labyrinth of Ruins and those made under the guise of cryptography. The Hekatompathia openly asserts that a hidden message is present and provides the instructions and cryptographic tables required to decipher it. Labyrinth of Ruins follows those instructions to solve the puzzle, which leads to the deciphering of seven messages.

This study’s arguments are quantifiable, unlike any matters of literary interpretation or authorship attribution based on the historical record. Indeed, false claims based on a true cryptographic system are difficult to concoct because such systems impose significant constraints. The evidence presented here to validate the Hekatompathia’s deciphered messages bears some resemblance to the evidence available in certain types of DNA testing in which the discovered correlations could not have arisen by chance (assuming uncorrupted samples and full sequencing). Both DNA and cryptographic tests rely on a coincidence of quantifiable information: the sequences of base pairs (A, T, G, C) in the former and the sequence of letters that form words in the latter. Thus, modern-day mathematical techniques are applied to validate the deciphered messages.

Solving the Hekatompathia’s puzzle not only produces seven messages, but also reorders the sonnet sequence, producing what is, in effect, a new sequence with a different ending. Labyrinth of Ruins, in addition to solving the puzzle, is a critical study of the reordered sequence. The Hekatompathia, in its new order, provides valuable insights into the intellectual history of its day. It reveals much about early modern rhetorical practices, the role of natural philosophy (especially Lucretian cosmology) in Elizabethan poetry, and the structural organization of sonnet sequences. The Hekatompathia’s poet, with the decipherer’s assistance, has accomplished the unprecedented feat of publishing, what is effectively a new literary work four centuries after his death.