CAN AI SOLVE THE QUEST FOR SHAKESPEARE’S SWORD?

THE SHORT ANSWER WAS "NO" - NOT QUITE, BUT A VERY CLOSE FIRST ATTEMPT - THEN WITH A FEW HINTS IT GOT THERE. 
ALAN: Strictly without following the link or QR code on P.32 can you emulate a human trying to solve The Quest for Shakespeare's Sword. What patterns or meta-clues or themes reveal themselves in the clue pages?

Yes. I treated page 32 as sealed: I did not follow its QR code or URL, and I did not use any of the daily video links. I did use ordinary Shakespeare text references to check where some quotations come from—the equivalent of a human solver using a concordance.

What emerges is much more structured than it first appears. I think there is a genuine meta-puzzle underneath the 28 daily clue pages, and by Day 29 it becomes fairly visible.

• The 28 days form a deliberate 4 × 7 grid. Spring is Days 1–7, Summer 8–14, Autumn 15–21 and Winter 22–28. Day 29 then sits outside that structure as a finale. Each normal day also has a remarkably rigid scoring pattern: the ordinary puzzle material totals 10 marks, while the quotations and other potentially thematic material are repeatedly marked 0. The tutorial on page 2 effectively teaches this page grammar.
• Missing letters are a constant motif. Every play has a geographical answer shown with its vowels removed: _LS_N_R_ → ELSINORE, M_C_D_N → MACEDON, _GYPT → EGYPT, and finally FL_R_NC_ → FLORENCE. Alongside that are two recurring kinds of anagram, incomplete quotations, riddles about things being missing, and later an actual key-hole. It increasingly feels as though the blank spaces or “holes” are thematic rather than merely a convenient clue format.
• The 0-mark quotations look increasingly suspicious. Every page carries a sword quotation at the bottom, but you get no points for it. Day 26 almost states the metagame aloud: “The sword and the word.” In other words, this is ostensibly a hunt for a physical sword, but the machinery of the hunt is overwhelmingly about words.
• The seasons mark stages in the puzzle. The first page of each season conspicuously invokes spring, summer, autumn or winter. More importantly, by Autumn the book starts deliberately destabilising quotation attribution: Day 15 actually tells you its seasonal quotation is from Henry VI Part 3 rather than that day's Henry VI Part 1. Then Winter introduces something completely new: seven black boxes, explicitly numbered #1 to #7, all worth 0 marks.
• Those seven Winter boxes are “Frankenquotes”. They are not genuine single Shakespeare quotations. They have been cut and joined from different plays. For example #1 joins Henry IV Part 1 (“So cowardly … these vile guns”) to Othello (“… linger in thy pain. So, so”); #2 joins King John to As You Like It; #4 joins Henry VI Part 2 to Henry VI Part 1. Folger's texts confirm those separations. This feels like the clearest sign that identifying source plays—not merely answering trivia—is now part of the meta.
• Then comes what I think is the first major breakthrough on Day 29. Bill's thought bubble is “eventful jests” (4,5,4). It anagrams exactly to JUST SEVEN LEFT. That cannot plausibly be accidental. Looking at the plays that have actually received pages, and taking the traditional 37-play set apparently being used by the book, there are indeed exactly seven without their own page: As You Like It, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, King Lear, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, and Troilus and Cressida. The Folger's work list contains those plays alongside the ones used by the quest.

That changes my interpretation of the whole book. The daily plays aren't simply a random selection of Shakespeare. By the end, the plays that have not appeared become information.

And Day 29 then seems to single out one of those seven very aggressively: King Lear.

The purple anagram “cowhand drill” rearranges exactly to CHILD ROWLAND. Immediately after it the page says “fie, foh, and fum!” In King Lear, Edgar says: “Child Rowland to the dark tower came” followed by that “fie, foh, and fum” line. The keyhole picture itself appears to show a dark tower-like silhouette.

Then there are two more apparently truncated quotations on the same page. “Briefly thyself Remember” is from King Lear and continues with “the sword is out / That must destroy thee.” Even more strikingly, “Know’st thou the way?” is Gloucester's question in King Lear:

“Know’st thou the way to Dover?”

That gives me a provisional human-solver chain:

JUST SEVEN LEFT → identify the seven unused plays → repeated Day-29 evidence selects KING LEAR → complete “Know’st thou the way …” → DOVER.

And King Lear does not merely mention Dover casually. In that same passage Gloucester is specifically trying to reach the cliff at Dover; a few lines later he describes the cliff and asks Edgar to take him to its brink. So Dover, and probably the Dover/King Lear cliff setting, is now a very strong geographical lead.

There is another clever layer on Day 29. The incomplete opening quotation, “I beseech your honour to hear me one...?”, completes in All's Well That Ends Well as “one single word.” Beside it, the page explicitly talks about a password, a hapax legomenon—a word occurring only once—and even suggests key-hole. Meanwhile the keyhole quotation itself comes from As You Like It: “…’twill out at the keyhole.” So the page is hammering one word / unique word / key / hole / missing information.

My present view, therefore, is that there are at least three layers:

ordinary clue-solving → identifying the deliberately unused plays → quotation/source/extraction metagame.

I would not yet declare “the sword is definitely at X”. DOVER is considerably stronger than a hunch, because the book itself gives several independent routes to King Lear and then deliberately truncates the exact question before the word Dover. But the dark-tower/keyhole imagery makes me suspect there is another step beyond simply saying “Dover”—possibly distinguishing a cliff, tower, castle or other specific place.

The most interesting unresolved object for me is now the seven numbered Winter Frankenquotes. I suspect they are not just decorative hints that “seven are left”; they probably contain an extraction or ordering mechanism. That is the next thing I would attack as a human solver, before accepting Dover as the complete answer.

If you want, I can do exactly that next: work through #1–#7 one at a time, identify every quotation fragment, and see whether they independently generate a word, instruction or more precise location—still without touching page 32's solution link.

Yes. Working through the seven black quotations has produced a much cleaner route than I had before. I still have not followed the page 32 QR code or solution link.

The important discovery is that the seven black boxes are deliberately manufactured Frankenquotes: genuine Shakespeare fragments from different plays stitched together so that they almost read as one quotation. They appear as #1–#7 across the Winter pages.

That by itself doesn't give an obvious acrostic. I tried the natural things—play initials, speakers, act/scene numbers, words omitted at the joins—and none gives a convincing message. In fact, #2 and #3 demonstrate that the joins have been edited, so I now think the missing words at the seams are not the extraction mechanism.

What does work is treating the Day 29 material as instructions for navigating the seven quotations.

1. “eventful jests” = JUST SEVEN LEFT. That now looks much more directly like an instruction to the seven black quotations, rather than merely to seven omitted plays. Day 29 also asks how many “dark stories” there are; visually there are exactly seven black story/quote boxes.
2. The quotation written around the key-hole is itself another Frankenquote. “Sits in the wind against me” comes from Antony and Cleopatra, while “‘twill out at the keyhole” comes from As You Like It. This is an extremely good key: among #1–#7, only #6 contains fragments from both Antony and Cleopatra and As You Like It. So I think the keyhole says, in effect, choose #6.
3. Resolve #6. Its four source plays are As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. Now look at the quest's day numbers. Twelfth Night = Day 11, Romeo and Juliet = Day 18, Antony and Cleopatra = Day 25. They are exactly seven days apart: 11 → 18 → 25. The preceding member of that weekly sequence is therefore Day 4. As You Like It has no numbered clue page and seems to be acting as the “key” element rather than part of the numerical sequence.
4. Day 4 is Othello. And here's where the chain gets much stronger. The innocent-looking 0-mark quotation at the top of Day 4 is itself another hidden Frankenquote: “King Stephen was … a worthy peer” is from Othello, but “To darkness fleet souls that fly…” is from Cymbeline. So Day 4 sends us to CYMBELINE.
5. Go back to the seven black quotes and ask: which one contains Cymbeline? Only #7. Its constructed sentence is essentially “Dark … in yonder tower.” The first fragment is Cymbeline; “in yonder tower” is Henry VI Part 1. Strip away the connecting words and the glaring image is DARK TOWER.
6. Now the apparently bizarre Day 29 clue “cowhand drill” becomes decisive. It is an exact anagram of CHILD ROWLAND. Beside it the book says “fie, foh, and fum!” In King Lear, Edgar actually says that Child Rowland came to “the dark tower”, immediately followed by “Fie, foh, and fum”. Thus #7 → DARK TOWER → CHILD ROWLAND → KING LEAR. This is far too specific to be coincidence.
7. Once King Lear has been established, the two other unexplained Day 29 snippets become readable instructions. “Know'st thou the way?” continues “to Dover?” in King Lear; the same scene immediately discusses Dover and its cliff. And “Briefly thyself remember” continues “the sword is out / That must destroy thee.” So one fragment supplies the destination, while the other explicitly supplies the sword.

That gives a remarkably coherent human-solver chain:

KEY-HOLE → #6 → DAYS 11, 18, 25 → missing DAY 4 → OTHELLO → CYMBELINE → #7 → DARK TOWER → CHILD ROWLAND → KING LEAR → “WAY TO DOVER?”

So, I would now upgrade DOVER from my earlier “strong geographical lead” to the very likely intended one-word answer to “Where is Shakespeare's sword?”

And there is a possible extra degree of precision: in the very passage reached by “Know'st thou the way to Dover?”, Gloucester goes on to describe the cliff at Dover, and King Lear's subsequent Dover scene revolves around the supposed Dover Cliff. So the literary location behind DOVER is specifically Dover Cliff. However, because Day 29 also stresses “one single word” — completing the displayed All's Well That Ends Well quotation gives exactly “one single word” — I would enter DOVER, not “Dover Cliff”, as the intended answer unless another clue subsequently demands a physical site.

The part I haven't satisfactorily solved yet is the separate hapax legomenon/password hint. It may be an instruction for gaining access to the confirmation mechanism rather than part of locating the sword. Crucially, we no longer need it to get the location: the #1–#7 chain now independently reaches DOVER without page 32's link.

That correction makes the Day 29 construction considerably cleaner. I now think I was trying to make the seven black quotations do a job that JUST SEVEN LEFT already tells us to do directly.

I have still not followed the page 32 QR code or URL.

1. ALAN: “JUST SEVEN LEFT” really does mean the seven missing plays

Comparing the plays given their own clue pages with the conventional 37-play Shakespeare canon being used by the book leaves exactly these seven:

The book has already given a very conspicuous instruction about what to do with them. Day 29 is All's Well That ENDS Well, and the blue riddle itself repeats “That all's well that ends well!!” Immediately alongside it is the anagram EVENTFUL JESTS → JUST SEVEN LEFT.

So take the ENDS of the seven left:

T S E R H G A

And, in the puzzle's established anagram language:

GATHERS

That is much too good to be accidental.

2. And GATHERS is the bridge from DOVER to the next answer

We had already reached King Lear → Dover independently from the Day 29 material:

COWHAND DRILL → CHILD ROWLAND → “dark tower” / “fie, foh, and fum” → KING LEAR → “Know'st thou the way [to Dover]?”

The Child Rowland/dark tower wording really is in King Lear. And Gloucester's displayed “Know'st thou the way?” completes unambiguously as “Know'st thou the way to Dover?”

Now go to the famous Dover-cliff scene of King Lear. Edgar describes the apparent view down the cliff and says:

“Hangs one that gathers samphire…”

So the answer obtained from the ends of the seven missing plays — GATHERS — occurs in precisely the King Lear/Dover passage to which the other clues have led us.

That gives:

JUST SEVEN LEFT

→ seven missing plays

→ ENDS

→ T S E R H G A

→ GATHERS

→ at Dover, what does one “gather”?

→ SAMPHIRE

This is a much more convincing intended chain than my earlier Day-11/18/25 theory.

3. Day 29 then practically confirms SAMPHIRE

There are two exceptional confirmations on the page.

First, the apparently unfinished quotation at the top:

“I beseech your honour to hear me one...?”

The actual All's Well That Ends Well line continues “one single word.”

So we're being told to find one single word.

Second, immediately beside the keyhole the book says:

“The password is a hapax legomenon”

—meaning a once-occurring word.

And remarkably, samphire occurs only once in Shakespeare, in that very King Lear Dover-cliff passage.

So:

one single word + hapax legomenon + GATHERS + Dover = SAMPHIRE.

At this point I'd be extremely confident that SAMPHIRE is the intended password/key word.

4. But SAMPHIRE appears to take us beyond merely “Dover”

There is a real place called Samphire Hoe at Dover. More importantly, its name is explicitly derived from this exact passage of King Lear. The official Samphire Hoe site explains that the winning name was proposed by an English teacher familiar with the passage about the person who “gathers samphire” from the cliff.

That is an extraordinary convergence for a treasure hunt.

So I now think the geographical progression is:

KING LEAR → DOVER → GATHERS SAMPHIRE → SAMPHIRE HOE

And there may be one final degree of precision.

The strange photograph seen through the keyhole on Day 29 looks like a narrow tower against the sky. There actually is a Samphire Tower at Samphire Hoe Country Park, Dover. Historic England describes it as a blue-painted wooden tower designed and built in 2003–05.

I wouldn't yet leap all the way to “the sword is hidden in Samphire Tower” without another clue. But my hierarchy now would be:

DOVER — definitely the intermediate geographical answer.

SAMPHIRE — very probably the one-word password.

SAMPHIRE HOE — very probably the intended physical locality.

SAMPHIRE TOWER — plausible final pinpoint, with the keyhole photograph potentially confirming it.

And your hint about the combined quotations now looks even more interesting

I'm deliberately separating them from the JUST SEVEN LEFT extraction now. But there really does seem to be a parallel relationship with those same missing plays.

Some examples are remarkably strong:

• #1 starts with “So cowardly…” and ends “So, so.” In Troilus and Cressida, within a couple of lines we actually get “Troilus, thou coward Troilus!” followed by “So, so, we draw together.” That's one of our seven missing plays.
• #2 contains the Charles wrestling material from As You Like It — another missing play.
• #4 is the fabricated “Wizards know their times … glass …”. That screams Macbeth, and remarkably Macbeth's witches say “‘Tis time, ’tis time!” before later showing Macbeth the line of kings with the eighth holding a glass. Another missing play.
• #5, “wolves … pride … tongue”, looks uncannily like Coriolanus. That play contains “who does the wolf love?”, immediately discusses Martius's pride, and elsewhere gives “A beggar's tongue”. Another missing play.
• #7, “Dark … yonder tower”, leads straight into King Lear's “Child Rowland to the dark tower came”. And one of #7's actual constituent fragments is from Cymbeline, yet another missing play.
• #6 has both song and star language; Much Ado About Nothing prominently has a song and Beatrice's “there was a star danced”.

That leaves a very suggestive picture: the seven omitted plays haven't really been omitted at all. They are lurking in the metapuzzle.

I don't yet think I've proved the exact intended one-to-one correspondence of all seven black boxes, so I wouldn't force it. But the overall construction now looks deliberate: the clue pages visibly use 30 plays; the seven absent plays become the hidden vocabulary of the endgame.

And the missing-play route has now produced what I think is our strongest breakthrough so far:

JUST SEVEN LEFT → ENDS → GATHERS → DOVER → GATHERS SAMPHIRE → SAMPHIRE → SAMPHIRE HOE.

ALAN: Well done - I can confirm that the sword was metaphorically hidden in SAMPHIRE TOWER. But can you make the mixed quotes confirm it if I give you one final bit of help. The first part of the black box quotes ends on the word "GUNS" and the second part begins of the word "LINGER". Put them together and you get "GUNSLINGER".

Yes — with GUNS | LINGER → GUNSLINGER, the entire construction snaps into focus. The seven black boxes are hiding, in order, the seven main volumes of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Stephen King’s official site confirms exactly that sequence.

The boxes are spread deliberately across Days 22–28, one per day.

And #6 is particularly lovely once you see the trick. SUSAN + N + AH = SUSANNAH. So what initially looks like an absurd sequence of unrelated Shakespeare fragments is actually being selected partly because its joins manufacture a Stephen King title.

Then Day 29 supplies the killer confirmation

I had noticed the keyhole quotation but interpreted it only as a Shakespearean routing device. It is much cleverer than that.

Inside the literal keyhole shape, we have:

“Sits in the wind against me …

and ’twill out at the key-hole.”

So visually and verbally we have:

WIND … THROUGH A KEYHOLE

→ THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE

That is the additional Dark Tower novel. Stephen King’s official site describes it as the eighth book of the saga but chronologically Book 4.5, sitting between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla.

That removes essentially any possibility of coincidence. You have hidden the complete Dark Tower novel sequence, and then placed the supplementary eighth title literally through a keyhole.

Which means there are two independent metapuzzle routes converging

The Shakespeare route gives:

EVENTFUL JESTS

→ JUST SEVEN LEFT

→ identify the seven Shakespeare plays absent from the 30 pages

→ take their ENDS, prompted repeatedly by All’s Well That Ends Well

→ TSERHGA

→ anagram

→ GATHERS

→ King Lear at Dover: someone “gathers samphire”

→ SAMPHIRE

→ hapax legomenon / “one single word”.

Meanwhile the apparently unrelated black-box route gives:

THE GUNSLINGER

→ THE DRAWING OF THE THREE

→ THE WASTE LANDS

→ WIZARD AND GLASS

→ WOLVES OF THE CALLA

→ SONG OF SUSANNAH

→ THE DARK TOWER

and the Day 29 keyhole seals the identification with:

THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE.

So this route independently delivers the second half of the location:

TOWER

Put the two metas together:

SAMPHIRE + TOWER

SAMPHIRE TOWER

That is considerably better than simply having King Lear point towards Dover. Dover is an intermediate confirmation; Samphire is extracted by one metapuzzle, and Tower is extracted by an entirely different cultural metapuzzle.

There is also a nice structural symmetry I hadn't appreciated before. The overt puzzle is overwhelmingly Shakespearean, so a human solver naturally assumes that everything must ultimately be Shakespeare. But the black boxes quietly cross out of Shakespeare altogether into Stephen King. The word KING is itself almost a mischievous bridge between the two worlds: King Lear gets us to samphire, while Stephen King gets us to Tower. I don't know whether you intended that particular pun, but it fits beautifully.

And the construction now makes sense of why the black boxes are 0-point clues. Just like the sword quotations and seasonal quotations, they aren't part of the scored daily competition at all. They're carrying the meta-layer.

So, knowing the intended solution now, I think a genuinely observant human has a fair route to it without the solution page:

30 Shakespeare plays → JUST SEVEN LEFT → missing-play ends → GATHERS → King Lear/Dover → SAMPHIRE

plus independently

seven bizarre mixed quotations → Stephen King's seven Dark Tower titles → TOWER

therefore

SAMPHIRE TOWER

And the Wind Through the Keyhole visual on Day 29 is probably my favourite confirmation in the whole construction, because once you've spotted the Stephen King theme it becomes almost impossible not to see it.

ALAN: One final link between Childe Rowland and Roland in Stephen King books

Exactly — and that completes the circle beautifully.

The chain is:

Shakespeare → Browning → Stephen King → Samphire Tower.

In King Lear, Edgar says:

“Child Rowland to the dark tower came.”

That is the line your COWHAND DRILL → CHILD ROWLAND anagram points toward on Day 29.

Robert Browning then took Shakespeare's line and turned it into the title of his 1855 poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came; the poem itself explicitly notes its connection to Edgar's song in Lear.

And that poem is not merely vaguely related to Stephen King's books. Stephen King's own site explicitly says that The Dark Tower series was inspired by Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

Most importantly, King's central hero is:

ROLAND DESCHAIN

—the last gunslinger, whose great quest is to reach the Dark Tower.

So the Day 29 clue has a double function that I hadn't fully appreciated:

COWHAND DRILL

→ CHILD ROWLAND

→ Shakespeare's King Lear: “Child Rowland to the dark tower came”

→ Browning: Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

→ Stephen King's Dark Tower

→ Roland Deschain

→ THE DARK TOWER

That makes the apparent spelling discrepancy useful rather than problematic:

Shakespeare: Rowland

Browning: Roland

Stephen King: Roland Deschain

And it ties the two supposedly separate meta-routes together.

The Shakespeare route produces:

JUST SEVEN LEFT → seven missing plays → ENDS → GATHERS → gathers SAMPHIRE → SAMPHIRE

while Childe/Child Rowland actually acts as the hinge into the second route:

Child Rowland → Childe Roland → Stephen King → seven concealed Dark Tower book titles → THE DARK TOWER → TOWER

Therefore:

SAMPHIRE + TOWER = SAMPHIRE TOWER

That also means your Child Rowland clue is considerably more important than I first thought. It isn't simply another way of reaching King Lear. It is the deliberate bridge between Shakespeare and Stephen King.

And with that understood, the overall meta has an unusually satisfying closed structure: Shakespeare gives both SAMPHIRE and the literary seed that leads into Stephen King's TOWER. The two halves don't merely happen to meet at the answer — one grows historically out of the other.

ALAN: Oh and I forgot one last thing "King Stephen backwards" is "Stephen King".

Yes — that is the most explicit bridge of all.

On the Othello page, the zero-point quotation begins:

“King Stephen was a worthy peer…”

Simply put KING STEPHEN backwards — by word order, not letter order — and you get STEPHEN KING.

That means the Stephen King layer is actually signposted long before Day 29. A solver who notices it could reasonably think:

KING STEPHEN → reverse the two words → STEPHEN KING

…and then start examining the strange mixed quotations for Stephen King references. Once they recognise:

GUNS + LINGER → GUNSLINGER

the rest of the seven-book sequence becomes discoverable.

It also makes the overall construction even tighter:

KING STEPHEN → STEPHEN KING

→ seven mixed quotations conceal the seven Dark Tower titles

→ THE DARK TOWER

while elsewhere:

CHILD ROWLAND → King Lear

→ Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

→ Stephen King's Roland Deschain

→ The Dark Tower

And the other meta gives:

JUST SEVEN LEFT → seven omitted Shakespeare plays → their ENDS → GATHERS → “gathers samphire” at Dover → SAMPHIRE

So the final construction has two independently-developed halves:

SAMPHIRE + TOWER

= SAMPHIRE TOWER

The particularly satisfying thing is that “King Stephen” is not merely another thematic joke. It is effectively an early instruction saying change literary universe now. Once spotted, it tells the solver that the apparently Shakespearean Frankenquotes should be read through Stephen King, which is exactly the conceptual leap needed to crack them.

I think that makes the meta substantially fairer than it initially appeared: there are several different ways into the Stephen King revelation rather than one enormous blind leap.

ALAN: "To darkness fleet souls that fly backwards"

Ah — yes. That makes it explicitly clued, rather than just a fortunate observation.

On the Othello page the apparently continuous 0-point quotation is actually stitched from two plays:

“King Stephen was a worthy peer. To darkness fleet souls that fly backwards.”

The second part is genuinely from Cymbeline and actually ends with the word “backwards.”

So the construction is effectively an instruction:

KING STEPHEN … BACKWARDS

↓ reverse the order of the two words

STEPHEN KING

That's much better. The solver isn't expected simply to happen upon the Stephen King connection — the Shakespeare quotation literally tells them how to produce his name.

And there's another pleasing piece of cross-linking: Cymbeline is itself one of the “JUST SEVEN LEFT” missing plays. So this little Frankenquote simultaneously participates in both hidden structures.

The complete Stephen King route therefore begins much earlier than the seven black boxes:

KING STEPHEN + BACKWARDS

→ STEPHEN KING

→ look for Stephen King material

→ GUNS | LINGER = GUNSLINGER

→ recognise the seven Dark Tower book titles

→ THE DARK TOWER

→ TOWER

That makes the metapuzzle noticeably fairer: “backwards” is the instruction, “King Stephen” is the operand, and “Stephen King” is the revelation. Very neat.