Elizabeth Wells Gallup
Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1848–1934) was an American educator who supported the idea that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays. She was born in Paris, New York, and studied at Michigan State Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University), the Sorbonne, and the University of Marburg. She taught in Michigan for about twenty years and became a high school principal. She used her married name Gallup but kept her maiden name Wells.
Gallup became interested in Francis Bacon. With her sister Kate Wells, she initially followed the theories of Orville Ward Owen. She then became convinced that a biliteral cipher, or Baconian cipher, was used in early Shakespeare printing to hide messages about authorship and royal secrets, using two different typefaces in one text. She announced this conclusion in 1895.
She published many books claiming to decipher messages in Bacon, Shakespeare, and others. Her first book, The Biliteral Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in his Works and Deciphered by Mrs Elizabeth Wells Gallup, appeared in 1899 and was reissued in later editions.
Gallup’s work was funded in her later years by Colonel George Fabyan at Riverbank Laboratories in Geneva, Illinois. There her research team, including Elizebeth Smith (later Elizebeth Friedman), produced numerous decipherments claiming Bacon authored the works of Marlowe, Peele, and Burton, and even that a play called The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn was hidden in cipher form in Shakespeare’s works.
But none of her assistants could duplicate her results. In 1957, Elizebeth and William Friedman published The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, which argued there was no evidence for the biliteral cipher in Shakespeare. They showed Shakespeare’s printing used a wide range of fonts that could not be cleanly divided into two groups, and that Gallup had exploited font variation to fit messages to what she expected to find.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 06:24 (CET).