As Winkler repeatedly shows, they - and Oxfordians in particular - tend to see themselves as evangelicals on a mission, tirelessly spreading their persecuted gospel to benighted unbelievers.The subplot had several purposes it is a contextual and dramatic device, adds comedy, is a metaphorical parallel of the main plot and is a satire on the Puritanical hold on contemporary society. Still, there is one difference: Irregulars regard such playful ingenuity as merely an intellectual game, a literal jeu d’esprit.

This same approach to a body of writing as a coded text, needing to be deciphered and reinterpreted, characterizes anti-Stratfordians. Watson was married five times or that Professor Moriarty was really Count Dracula. Members of the latter have produced reams of scholarship, all based on minute analysis of the Holmesian canon, to prove - for example - that Dr. Anti-Stratfordians also offer what is, in effect, a shared-world fandom, like that among Trekkies or Baker Street Irregulars. Why? Partly because we admire rebels and freethinkers, those who give a Bronx cheer to the stuffy power elite in any field. Nonetheless, all sorts of people find it fascinating. Smith notes that setting up the elaborate “spatio-verbal” patterning that Donnelly’s theory requires is quite impossible, given the vagaries of Renaissance printing. Having acquired a facsimile of the First Folio, Donnelly detected coded messages throughout, all of them proclaiming lawyer and philosopher Francis Bacon as the true author of the plays. The other is “The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays” (1888) by Ignatius Donnelly, a Wisconsin politician and author of the pseudoscience classic “Atlantis: The Antediluvian World” (1882).

One is Charlton Hinman’s “The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare” (1963), which used a machine - the now famous Hinman collator - to gain new understanding of the 1623 volume by comparing pages from multiple copies. Much of this excellent book tracks what individual copies of the First Folio meant to various “owners, dealers, forgers, collectors, actors” and “scholars.” But in the chapter titled “Decoding,” Smith zeroes in on two groundbreaking volumes in Shakespeare studies, both obsessed with numbers.

William shakespeare 12th night