Sonnet 136

  If thy soul check thee that I come so near, 
  Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy 'Will',
  And will thy soul knows is admitted there,
  Thus far for love, my love-suit sweet fulfil.
  'Will', will fulfil the treasure of thy love,
  Ay fill it full with wills, and my will one,
  In things of great receipt with case we prove,
  Among a number one is reckoned none.
  Then in the number let me pass untold,
  Though in thy store's account I one must be,
  For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold,
  That nothing me, a something sweet to thee.
    Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
    And then thou lov'st me for my name is Will.  

Shakespeare, in Sonnet 136, tells us very plainly that his name is "Will."
This is the most obvious location for a cipher clue in the entire Sonnets collection.
In fact a cipher in this one particular place
should be considered as an important Key to the rest of the Sonnets.


Look at what we find here if we add up the number totals of "WILL SHAKESPEARE"
and compare to the totals of the first letters* of all 14 lines of the Sonnet:

I S A T W A I A T T F T M A

Notice that the Simple Cipher of the first 14 letters of Sonnet 136 is 155, and the Kaye Cipher is 337:

Notice that the Simple Cipher of: "WILL SHAKESPEARE" is 155, and the Kaye Cipher is 337:

This is an obvious signature cipher for "WILL SHAKESPEARE" in an obvious location
where Shakespeare actually tells us that his name is "Will".
This is a demonstration that clearly instructs us to use this cipher method
that we know John Dee used in the Title of his 1564 mystical book "Monas Heiroglyphica".
This demonstration along with Dee's example begins to establish the special relationship
that the Simple and Kaye Ciphers have with one another.
Many times we see how the two cipher methods give a double cipher combination for names and dates.

Of course a Truth Seeker must ask at this point why Shakespeare
would have any reason to use ciphers in the first place.
What could his motivation be in taking the valuable time to add up a series of letters
and manipulate them to create predetermined totals for the soul purpose of telling what his name is,
especially when he just comes right out and tells us anyway that his name is "Will"?

For a possible answer to this question,
click here to find out what Shakespeare tells us by using the same cipher method in other key places.

Or you can go back to the Homepage.

IMPORTANT UPDATE NOTE: Read this:

* The 14 letters used in this cipher example were taken from a modernized version of the Sonnet. I recently noticed that in the 1609 facsimile edition of the Sonnets, line 6 is "I fill it full with wils,and my will one," as opposed to the modern version which says, "Ay fill it full with wills, and my will one,". I checked the facsimile of the 1640 edition of the Sonnets and the line also begins with an "I". The changing of the "A" to an "I" does change the cipher totals which would at first glance seem to discredit this cipher example, however upon further study it may not actually be so cut and dry. Stephen Booth in his book "Shakespeare's Sonnets", compares the "Ay fill" to "I fill" with an example from a pun in Romeo and Juliet, act III, scene ii, lines 45-50, with Juliet speaking:

45  Hath Romeo slaine himselfe? say thou but I,
46  And that bare vowell I shall poyson more
47  Than the death-darting eye of Cockatrice,
48  I am not I, if there be such an I.
49  Or those eyes shot, that make thee answere I:
50  If he be slaine say I, or if not, no.

This is clearly a pun in which "I" is in truth meaning "ay", or "yes". 

On the website, Shakespeare's Sonnets, there is note referring to line 6 of Sonnet 136 which also suggests that "I" is being used as "ay":

Note also that the Q spelling of Ay is 'I', giving momentarily the meaning 'I alone am capable of shafting you to your satisfaction'. The Renaissance spelling of I for aye was usual and context decided the meaning. Compare: I! I! O I may say that she is mine. Sidney A&S.69. where the meaning 'Aye' is also intended for the first two Is.

Line 9 of Sonnet 136 says, "Though in thy stores account I one must be," which is the next time the lone letter "I" appears in the Sonnet. This of course may refer to the pun where "I" means "Ay", because the "A" is a "one" in the Simple Cipher code, "Though in thy stores account I 'A' must be." If this was Shakespeare's sly intent, then the "I" becomes an "A", and the cipher totals add up to 155 Simple and 337 Kaye. These are the Simple and Kaye Cipher of "WILL SHAKESPEARE".  

I present another level of meaning in regards to the words "I one must be" a little further on in this article. We must realize that Shakespeare uses puns and multiple meanings for words quite often in his works. As a seeker of Truth myself, I have pondered this particular Sonnet many hours. At first when I realized that the 1609 version did not contain the same first letters as the modern version that I used in preparing this presentation, I was at a loss for an explanation. Upon further investigation of my error, the results of my research began to reinforce my original interpretation as opposed to weakening it. This is partly due to the puns and hidden meanings that have been noticed and described by scholars long before I ever looked into this Sonnet. It would seem that Shakespeare may be silently pointing at the "I" causing us to question his real meaning, and then leading us to discover more about it in the lines that follow. Perhaps the "I" was changed to "Ay" some years after the death of "Shakespeare" as deliberate clue for future ages to decipher the numbers of this Sonnet. Certainly there were those who knew the Secrets of the day, and also those who knew the methods of the ciphers. 

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