The Art of Ciphering and the Early Modern Literary Imagination

Abstract

Abstract It is well-established, both by scholarship and in the public awareness, that early modern England was replete with secret forms of writing. Scholarly works have extensively investigated the use of so-called substitution systems in the period, which were used to encrypt sensitive political and diplomatic correspondence during the Henrician, Elizabethan, and Jacobean periods; at the same time, public programming, such as a 2014 exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library entitled “Codes and Ciphers from the Renaissance to Today,” has made the allure and intrigue of early modern cryptographic objects and methods available to the public. However, notwithstanding the general fascination with early modern cryptography, scholarship has not yet fully explored the capacious use of ciphers or their influence in early modern England. This work begins to fill this gap in scholarly work. While the vast majority of scholarship on early modern cryptography focuses on its political forms and uses, the present work seeks to expand that definition by cognizing previously under-recognized forms and uses of early modern ciphers and their literary and intellectual influences. Specifically, it argues that monogram ciphers, steganographic encryption, and even the evolving meanings of the word “cipher” in the period illustrate that ciphers were used to negotiate personal as well as political identities. In addition to being tools of exigent concealment, ciphers were also tools of self-fashioning that operated perversely by often putting hidden information on display, even before the eyes of the readers they sought to exclude. The result is that cryptographic modes of making meaning encompass the defiant as well as the subtle and challenge the humanist assumption that to read is to know. The implications of this study include broadening the ambit of traditional early modern literary studies to include discovery as well as traditional modes of rereading and reinterpretation. Ciphers provide us both with a new set of texts to interpret, and new ways to read them.