Codes and Ciphers from the Renaissance to Today

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.8 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2015

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions..." —HAMLET (4.5.83) It's a striking comment that occurs late in this podcast—and by the time you hear it, you may well agree: "Without Bacon and Shakespeare, we might not have won the war in the Pacific," says Bill Sherman, head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum and professor of Renaissance studies at the University of York. Rebecca Sheir, host of our Shakespeare Unlimited series, talks with Sherman about the flowering of codes, ciphers, and secret message systems during the Renaissance—including a brilliant cipher devised by Francis Bacon—and their surprising influence on modern cryptography. As Sherman explains, William Friedman, the top US cryptographer whose team broke the Japanese diplomatic code before World War II, had once been a junior staffer on a team that sought to find Bacon's real-life cipher embedded in the plays of Shakespeare (a once-popular notion that he and his wife and fellow cryptographer Elizebeth later debunked). That early exposure to Renaissance cryptography shaped Friedman's career, as he soon became the founder of modern American cryptography. Listen to learn more about why you might say that Bacon and Shakespeare—through their influence on Friedman—did indeed help to win the war. --------------- From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. Produced for the Folger Shakespeare Library by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is associate producer. Edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Recorded by Toby Schreiner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore,
0:09.0	the Folgers director. This podcast is called Not Single Spies, but in Battalions. In it, we look at
0:15.9	new research done here at the Folger. Its subject and the subject of this podcast is spies. The need to know what
0:23.8	your enemies are doing is as old as human animosity, and that goes back pretty far. But surprisingly,
0:30.1	as you'll hear, the principal tools of spycraft, including ones we still use today, reached new heights
0:36.4	during the time of Shakespeare.
0:38.3	Ciphers, concealed writing, codes, invisible ink, and writing about them flourished,
0:44.3	like so many other things we take for granted today during the time of the English Renaissance.
0:50.3	Here to talk about all this is Bill Sherman, a professor of Renaissance studies at the University
0:55.6	of York in York, England, and head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
1:01.9	Bill has also been an Andrew W. Mellon fellow here at the Folger.
1:06.6	He's interviewed by Rebecca Shear.
1:09.2	So, Bill, this idea of ciphers, you know, making one set of letters
1:12.1	or symbols stand in for another set of letters, that idea goes way back, right? Isn't there
1:16.3	something called the Caesar cipher that goes back to Julius Caesar?
1:19.4	Absolutely. It goes way back to ancient Greek and Roman military strategy. It's even
1:25.7	mentioned in the Bible. So it's known to ancient Greece and Rome,
1:30.9	but it doesn't seem to be a systematic practice, things that people write about and write textbooks
1:36.0	about or invent machines for until the Renaissance period. What would you say were some of the
1:42.3	factors that led to the changes in how information was
1:45.0	gathered and used then? Well, there are a couple of big factors. The first is just technology,
1:50.9	and the fact that you suddenly have so much more communication, partly thanks to the birth of
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