William and Elizebeth Friedman were both researchers in cryptography at The Riverbank Laboratories. This 1957 book is the result of an insightful report that won the Friedmans the Folger Shakespeare Library literary prize. Within it, the Friedmans address theories, which, through the identification of hidden codes, call the authorship of Shakespeare's plays into question. As ciphers were abundantly used in the sixteenth century, such coding is far from impossible. Accordingly, this work gives a fair and scientific hearing to those anti-Stratfordians whose theories were often dismissed...