Elizabeth Wells Gallup

Elizabeth Wells Gallup (1848, Paris, New York – 1934) was an American educator and exponent of the Baconian theory of Shakespearian authorship.

Elizabeth Wells was born in 1848. She studied at Michigan State Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University), the Sorbonne and the University of Marburg. She taught in Michigan for some twenty years and became a high school principal. She used her married name Gallup but retained her maiden name, Wells.

She was interested in the life and work of Francis Bacon and, together with her sister Kate Wells, initially worked on the theories of Dr. Orville Ward Owen. She subsequently became convinced of the use of the "biliteral cipher" in early Shakespeare printing to conceal messages concerning the authorship of the works and other statements about the secret history of the times. This type of cipher, also known as Bacon's cipher, had been discussed in Bacon's work. It depended on the use of two distinct typefaces within the same text to conceal messages.

Gallup came to this conclusion in 1895. In subsequent years she published a large body of literature claiming to have uncovered deciphered content in the work of Bacon, Shakespeare and others.

In later years her work was largely sponsored by Colonel George Fabyan at his Riverbank Laboratories in Geneva, Illinois. Fabyan, who had also funded Owen's work, supported a research staff working on her theory, which initially included the cryptographers William Friedman and Elizabeth Friedman. During her time at the laboratories she published many books containing decipherments of hidden messages in the work of Bacon and other writers. Her decipherments "discovered" that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth and the heir to the throne. He was also discovered to be the author of the works of Christopher Marlowe, George Peele and Robert Burton. Gallup also published the play The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn which was supposed to have been hidden in cipher-form in Bacon/Shakespeare's works.

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