TO . THE . ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF .

THESE . INSVING . SONNET S .

Mr .W. H . ALL . HAPP INESSE .

AND . THAT . ETERNITIE .

PROMISED .

BY .

OVR . EVER-LIVING . POET .

WISHETH .

T HE .WELL-WISHING .

ADVENTVRER . IN .

SETTING .

FORTH .

Above: A transcript of the Dedication which accompanied the first edition of the Sonnets.

The final words of the Dedication (SETTING FORTH) provided the keywords and method necessary for rearranging the order of the letters – in fact the Dedication became a classic transformation code.

SETTING FORTH, also turned out to be a pun, because it was in the FOURTH SETTING of this transformation code that the message THE WISE THORP HID THY POET actually appeared. (Thomas Thorpe was the publisher of the Sonnets.) This could not have happened by chance, and one reviewer of the book - Dr. John Casson - noticed something else: the words THE WISE THOTH also appeared right across the page, and John knew immediately that Thoth was actually the Egyptian god of writing. James found that Neville’s name was revealed when the code was transformed four times again - but in a different way. The words HE ONLIE BE OF THE SEIN, HENRY, POET appeared - symmetrically, just as the first message had done. And underneath the word POET, the name NEWELL was formed in two separate clusters of letters.” (The spelling of his name is just as it appears on Neville’s baptismal record.)

James did not immediately realise the significance of the name in the code - she had not set out to find an alternative authorship ‘candidate.’ However, Neville’s birth and death dates (1564 - 1615) were virtually identical to those of Shakespeare and further research revealed the details of Sir Henry’s life – they corresponded step by step with the concerns in Shakespeare’s plays. This was too much to be mere coincidence: research now began to support the Code’s statement that Henry Neville was the true poet. Sir Henry Neville was primarily a politician and linguist, and he ran an ironworks from the 1580s to 90s - a business which he inherited from h is great uncle, Sir Thomas Gresham (who had been shipping cannons to the King of Denmark for use at Elsinor - the setting for Shakespeare’s Hamlet) [Hamlet contains more references to cannons than any other Shakespeare play.] Neville had been the Ambassador to France, (hence the reference to the Seine in the code) for fifteen months before his imprisonment in the Tower of London, alongside his friend, the Earl of Southampton, following the Essex uprising. And at this time – under the stress of imprisonment – the plays suddenly turn to tragedy...

Every other aspect of Neville’s life and knowledge also substantiated the Code’s claims: the comp rehensive list of circumstantial, experential and educational ‘overlapping’ between Neville’s life and the interests and knowledge encapsulated in the Shakespeare plays is overwhelming. No one else matches the Shakespeare footprint so comprehensively as Sir Henry Neville. The book outlines James’ investigation and previously unpublished material, after her trail of primary sources through Record Offices up and down the country, and through Sir Henry’s travels on the continent. A plethora of circumstantial and documentary evidence surfaced.

As James remarks, “The circumstantial evidence on its own - which is much more weighty than that mentioned briefly here - is already great enough for George Orwell to ‘call the secret service’, but when it is coupled with documentary evidence, plus the Code’s decipherment, then it is well-nigh impossible to ignore or gainsay. Logically and topologically speaking, Neville is Shakespeare.”

 One example of Neville's name found in one 'setting' of the Dedication Code is shown below .

The Dedication contains 144 letters. The first logical 'setting' of these is therefore in a 12 x 12 matrix. This produced a second line which is a perfect anagram of TEST THE FORGE. [Neville inherited and ran the Mayfield Iron works in Sussex.] When the columns of the matrix are re-arranged to form this sentence, then the name HENRY NEVIL appears in the shape of a hammer. It is hard to imagine that mere coincidence could be so elastic, especially when Henry Neville's name had already appeared in other, mathematically-determined layouts too, as is fully explained in the book.)