Looking for some codes in Shakespeare’s First Folio as proposed by Petter Amundsen. In his book, The Organist, Amundsen presents several hidden references to Francis Bacon and The Rosicrucians (see also this document). Here’s what I’ve found so far.
Page 49 from The First Part of King Henry the Fourth. The acrostics BOWTIS and FBACO(An) are described in Amundsen’s book. The line was not discovered though. It passes through the page’s only two “Lord”s, intersects the upper left corner, and has a 37 degrees angle. The probability of FBACO in the margin (assuming uniform distribution of letters, case insensitivity and two directions) is 2*2939*4117*11216*1819*3349/77311^5 which is less than 1:1,600,000. Of course, this doesn’t prove anything by itself as there probably are many meaningless improbable strings (more improbable the longer they are).
Page 122, in The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, has the following beautiful cross (X). There is one “Rose” on the page, and the line crosses through it. Notice how the lines tangent certain letters and words, for example the line ending in “France”, the w of owne, between A and w of Away, the N of Nay, and the A of Aboue. See also that opposite the R in Rose, the line passes a C (in Chaire).
Page 110, from The First Part of Henry the Sixth has a lot of “Lord”s. Many of these can be aligned, three or four on a line. Most lines intersect in a “Lord”, but two lines cross just to the left of the page’s only occurence of “Rose”. I read this as “X Rose”, or “Rose Cross“. Two lines above, a bit to the left, one can also find the page’s only occurence of “Cross(ing the Sea)”. Another sign is that one of the lines has a 53 degree angle. Maybe there is more to this page, perhaps something to do with Lord Francis Verulam Bacon, Noble birth, Crowne, Honourable Order, or Swaine?
A possible 3-4-5 (with 37, 53, and 90 degree angles) triangle. Is the one “Rose” relevant? (37th last word on the page.)
Another interesting page is page 346 of The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. There is a very clear “BOwTHS” (=Bootes), a “TWO” and a “FBACa”.
Page 143 of Comedies, Loue’s Labour’s lost, has a “BAeON” ~= “BAcON”, or “BA[three]ON” => “BACON”. This was found by Jørgen Friberg. I also drew some lines between “Loue” words.
How unlikely is three words on a straight line? Page 143 of Comedies has 66 lines and approximately 78 positions per line (word of length 4). If a page has exactly three instances of word X and we assume that the words are randomly placed, we get p=65/66*64/66*1/78~=1.2% probability that they are on a (non-horizontal) line. The real number should be lower because many lines will not pass all of the 66 text lines. On the other hand, 78 might be too detailed. The probability of at least one three-word-line, if the word in question appears 7 times, would be 1-(1-0.012)^C(7,3) = 1-0.988^35 = 35%. I also did a manual test with other words, in which 5 of 6 tests had few lines. These calculations are very rough, and I should investigate more.
Other finds that could be nothing:
