Elizabeth Wells Gallup

Who was Elizabeth Wells Gallup?

Elizabeth Wells Gallup was an American educator and exponent of the Baconian theory of Shakespearian authorship.

She was born Elizabeth Wells, and studied at Michigan State Normal College, 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.