Man of Letters
Taking Shake(-)speare Literally
The identity of the author of the works of Shake(-)speare is a remarkable mystery. It’s astonishing that it is even an open question.
The vast majority of people who’ve entertained the question take an instinctive “Of course, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare” attitude. Few bother to engage with the issue. On its face, the idea that anyone else did the writing seems ridiculous. And if not the fellow from Stratford upon Avon, the author was evidently quite determined not to be identified.
Who was this awesome writer? A self-taught genius who left few other traces? One who wrote over a hundred poems expressing passionate love for a man? Poems that depicted their romantic triangle with a ‘dark lady’ who doesn’t seem to have been his wife? Published under his own name, at a time when adultery and sodomy could be severely punished?
There are plausible alternative candidates, but as yet no satisfyingly definitive evidence. A ferocious debate has raged since at least the mid 1800s. And suspicions had been voiced even during the life of the purported author.
Those with no particular dog in the fight have this basic curiosity: What ‘story’ makes the most sense? What actually happened?
Whoever wrote the Works was highly literate. Books and letters play significant roles as props in the plays. (They appear over a hundred times.) More significantly, the author(s) clearly had deep knowledge and experience in addition to raw literary talent. The plays and poems are full of plots, quotations, and allusions from both classical and contemporary literature. The author was comfortable with foreign places and languages. Scholars have long discerned evidence of familiarity with hundreds of books in multiple languages. The author also was closely acquainted with the vocabulary and ideas in fields as diverse as law, astronomy, botany, music, heraldry, falconry, hunting, forestry, textiles, rhetoric, and munitions.
It seems clear that the main author of the Works was a crafty linguist who drank deeply from world literature in multiple languages and loved to play with words. So perhaps it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine that he also liked to play with letters. That idea is the main focus here.
(Some material here has been adapted from my Argumentative Intelligence.)
The usual suspect
William Shakspere from Stratford upon Avon has long been the mostly unquestioned author of the works of Shake(-)speare. ‘His’ name appeared after all on most of the non-anonymous publications of those works and the First Folio appears to identify him as the author. So does the monument at the Stratford upon Avon church. He was a shareholder in an acting company. The traditional story is deeply satisfying and comforting. Commoner from the countryside arrives in London to write the world’s greatest literature. Many have written superficially credible accounts of how such a person could have done what is claimed he did.
But there are numerous reasons to suspect this attribution. Foremost are the points above about the deep learning and cosmopolitanism so evident in the works, which are hard to imagine in a man who is not known to have had any formal education, to have owned any books, or to have travelled outside England. His extant signatures suggest that he was only marginally literate. Diana Price and others have documented the utter absence of direct evidence supporting his authorship, unlike most of his literary contemporaries. Richard Roe made a convincing case that Shake(-)speare must have traveled extensively in Italy.
The famous frontispiece of the First Folio, supposedly depicting Shakspere as the author, looks suspiciously like someone’s face has been pasted over another’s, like a mask, and has other oddities that suggest it was meant as an inside joke.
I add the parenthetical hyphen in Shake(-)speare because about 40% of contemporary printed references to the ostensible author used one, including on the title page of the Sonnets discussed here. Shakspere’s family never spelled the name with a hyphen or an e after the shak.
An ecumenical collection of authorship skeptics have signed a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt, taking the position that “there is room for reasonable doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare, and that it is an important question for anyone seeking to understand the works, the formative literary culture in which they were produced, or the nature of literary creativity and genius.”
My own view is that it is highly unreasonable not to doubt. However clever and imaginative that Stratford fellow may have been, someone else is far more likely to have uniquely had the experiences, attitudes, and comfort in multilingual intertextuality that the Works exhibit. How a struggling actor could find time, energy, and illumination to write the voluminous Works in a pre-Starbucks, expensive-candles, word-processor-less world, is just part of the mystery.
Of course, Shakspere could somehow have gained all the knowledge and skills needed to have written the works, without leaving any evidence of having done so. But by that logic anyone could have.
All of the alternative author camps do an admirable job of demonstrating the high implausibility of Shakspere having been the author. But if Will from Stratford didn’t write the works, who did?
The sonnets
There’s a substantial subgenre in the authorship field around alleged cryptographic ‘clues’ in the Works. Baconians were especially adept at this, finding steganography and anagrams everywhere. Much of it is laughable, and some conferences refuse to even consider proposed papers that suggest it.
One of the more recent, and more plausible, theories concerns the Sonnets. Published in 1609, these poems of timeless beauty are prefaced by an odd, vase-like dedication:
“T.T.” is presumably Thomas Thorpe, who published the sonnets, as well as several works by Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. TTMAP are the first letters of the first five lines.
James Leyland and James Goding have proposed that this puzzling Dedication is a “map” of the sonnets. (Who Will Believe My Verse.) If you put its letters (omitting punctuation) into a 15 column grid you get:
Note that ‘HENRY’ (in red above) appears, possibly a hat tip to the author or dedicatee. There are other interesting possibilities, such as the grid serving as an index to the sonnets by noting the row and column numbers. E.g., the acrostic beginning at row 1 column 8 is ‘LETE,’ arguably the French l’été, corresponding to Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) Many have noticed that the numbers of the sonnets appear to have been intentionally selected, e.g. that the number of Sonnet 8, about music, may refer to the number of notes in an octave and that of 52 (“in the long year set”) to weeks in a year.
Another cut at the dedication
Much has been made of the ‘Mr. W.H.’ as the ‘onlie begetter’ of the sonnets. Was such a person the author, a subject, or someone who helped to make them public? Might those be the reversed initials of Henry Wriothesley, the earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare’s earlier narrative poems were dedicated, disguised as a ‘master’ despite his aristocratic status? Wriothesley also has been popularly imagined as the ‘fair youth’ immortalized in the poems.
If you put the letters of the dedication into an eighteen column grid, you get this nicely full array:
(I learned of this from the write-up of a 1998 talk by Dr. John Rollett.)
Notice “espie” in the left column (to catch sight of something. E.g.. “I espie entertainment in her.” Merry Wives of Windsor) It’s almost as though someone was saying “Look!” and asking readers to play “Where’s Wriothesley?”
Even in three disconnected fragments the occurrence of all letters of a long name, in the right order, is striking.
Could someone have been clever or determined enough to not only encode ‘henry’ and nods to numbered sonnets in a grid of one size but also ‘wr-ioth-esley’ in one of another size?
Sonnet 134
If the dedication was constructed so as to yield acrostics, might that also have been done with one or more of the sonnets themselves?
At least one sonnet (134) seems to deliver. British researcher Rosemary Warner discovered that when its letters were put into a grid, two words stand out:
I’ve bolded her finding — in the tenth column — and several other strings of possible interest. (I also underscore letters in upside-down words, and color those to which I want to draw attention.)
Note that ‘Neuille’ was one way the name of the polymathic politician/diplomat (and authorship candidate) Henry Neville was spelled (u’s and v’s were often used interchangeably), and ‘rimer’ was a common way to refer to a poet. (Sonnet 38: “Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth | Then those old nine which rimers inuocate”) More about Neville below.
I think I was the first to notice ‘sum naso’ (I am Naso) in the bottom left. Ovidius Naso (Ovid) was one of Shake(-)speare’s greatest influences. He was a famous exile, tongue-tied by authority. Naso served as Ovid’s cognomen — an extra personal name given to an ancient Roman citizen, functioning like a nickname and typically passed down from father to son. (Naso means ‘nose.’) He referred to himself by his nickname in his poetry because the Latin name Ovidius does not fit into elegiac meter.
A friend recently did a systematic search of all the sonnets across a wide range of grid widths (2 to 51 columns) and determined that this was the only occurrence of ‘neuille’ or ‘neville’ in any of the approximately 192,000 columns.
Hacking the sonnets
The above material nudged me to explore the possibility of other hidden acrostics in the Sonnets, despite my ongoing suspicion about anything that smacks of cryptology.
So I created a simple app to facilitate the process of transmuting texts into grids. It parses the input text to remove spaces and punctuation and arrays the letters in a grid of a specified width. (I display all the letters in caps and change the archaic ‘long s’ (ſ) to a regular ‘S’ for easier reading.) Some of the ensuing vertical ‘words’ are five letters or more long and eerily relevant.
I realize our statistical intuitions can be misleading, and confirmation bias is in play. Still, when things like ‘neuille’ and ‘rimer’ occur in close proximity it’s hard not to imagine some intentionality behind them. Bach, Shostakovich, and other composers used musical cryptography to spell out their names.
Intrigued by this, I set forth to explore other sonnets, using my little software program to quickly deliver grids of given widths. I am pretty much left with the view that it’s all been a fool’s errand, since (1) many grids produce several three- or more character ‘words’ as acrostics, so any finds are likely to be coincidental and cherry-picked, and (2) it’s hard to imagine how even the greatest genius could devise exquisite poems that not only are timeless literature but also provide secret meanings when stretched onto grids of various sizes. Without a computer.
Still, I noticed that several other sonnets seemed to ‘name’ people. E.g. Sonnet 113; 30 columns:
Again, arguably significant strings are bolded. Note ‘nashe’ upside down in the middle, like ‘neuille’ in the earlier example. Also ‘fish,’ ‘lent,’ ‘Brute’ (et tu?) and (almost) ‘Ulysses.’
Thomas Nashe was a fellow writer, and arguable collaborator. One of his more notorious pieces was Lenten Stuffe, or the Praise of the Red Herring. (I didn’t know that at the time I generated the above grid.)
My program reports how many characters there are when a sample text has been entered. Sonnet 72 — with the line “My name be buried where my body is” — has 324, which, like 72, is equally divisible by 18. There’s a character in Marston’s What You Will named Quadratus, who some believe is based on Neville. That could be an allusion to his portly physique, his being an ‘honest man,’ or a particular interest in rectangles with equal sides. When 18 is used as the number of columns, the resulting grid includes ‘mole’ (“Well said, old mole!”), ‘velo’ (Italian for ‘veil’), and ‘terset’ — a three-line unit of poetry, which one can imagine as a metaphor for the triangular love affair(s) thematized in the sonnets. (Such stories enthusiasts spin!)
More details about my method are below.
Naming names
The sonnets contain multiple suggestions that the poet is hiding his name (despite one being on the title page! And one sonnet saying “my name is Will.”) Sonnet 72 for instance has:
There’s also 71 (“Do not so much as my poore name reherse; But let your loue euen with my life decay”), 81 (“Your name from hence immortall life shall haue, Though I (once gone) to all the world must dye”), and 111 (“Thence comes it that my name receiues a brand, and almost thence my nature is subdu’d”)
Ben Jonson wrote an introductory poem for Cynthia’s Revenge (John Stephens, 1613) that referenced this practice:
DeVere
Edward DeVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, has been the leading non-Stratfordian candidate for the last hundred years, after British school teacher J. Thomas Looney began researching and promoting that idea. Organizations, publications, and conferences dedicated to the proposition have flourished.
Sonnet 76 has the quatrain (in modernized form):
Oxfordians point out the closeness of ‘ever’ and ‘every’ to Oxford’s name.
James Leyland recently found that ‘deuere’ shows up in a 14 column grid of that sonnet:
Neville
Educated at Oxford, comfortable in at least four foreign languages (Latin, Greek, French, and Italian), and widely traveled on the continent, Neville (1562–1615) served as a member of Parliament and Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to France. Details of his personal life and voluminous correspondence supply clues to hidden authorship. He for instance had a long relationship with Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, to whom the first published works (Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece) were dedicated, and who is generally understood to have been the subject of many of the later sonnets. The two were imprisoned in the Tower of London (in adjacent cells), and narrowly escaped execution, for their roles in the Essex rebellion. Ben Jonson praised Neville in his Epigram 109 and referred to his ‘muse,’ even though he never published any literature under his own name. His library contained some of the obscure books now widely regarded as having been sources for plays such as Hamlet, Othello, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well that Ends Well.
Neville used codes in his diplomatic correspondence. There were significant Elizabethan enthusiasms for acrostics. And that could have been a way to pass the time (or distract the mind from the possibility of torture or execution) while sitting in the Tower.
Was Henry Neville a rimer? There’s little direct evidence of that, although he travelled across Europe with Robert Sidney (brother of Philip, both known poets.)
In Sir Henry Neville was Shakespeare (2016) Casson and Rubinstein wrote that the following was “in his own hand”:
If true, perhaps Neville was competing to write the doggerel on Shakspere’s gravestone (“Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.”) or trying to throw people off his poetic trail. Or maybe this was a piece of juvenilia.
Neville seems a poor match for the shenanigans recounted in the sonnets, which describe an older writer than he would have been when they likely were written. (Of course that was true of Shakspere from Stratford as well.) Neville was married, with a dozen children, and had a busy political and business life.
Nashe
As mentioned above, ‘nashe’ jumps out in a grid of sonnet 113 at 30 columns, along with several other eerily relevant strings.
‘Nashe’ also appears, right side up, in Sonnet 14; 15 columns. (“Not from the stars do I my iudgement plucke …”)
J.J.M. Tobin refers to “Shakespeare’s use of material from Nashe’s book ‘Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem’ in his sonnets, particularly in four well-known poems, namely, Sonnets 29, 55, 116 and 144.” (“Nashe and some Shakespearian sonnets.” Notes and Queries, vol. 46, no. 2, June 1999, pp. 222+.)
Blunt
Edward Blount (or Blunt) (1562–1632) was noted for his publication, in conjunction with William and Isaac Jaggard, of the First Folio. Blunt also was involved in Love’s Martyr. Marlowe dedicated his translation of Lucan to him.
Another of that name was Charles Blount, lover of Penelope Rich, who some believe was the dark lady of the sonnets.
Sonnet 107 (“Not mine owne feares, nor the prophetick soule | Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come“) looks like this in 33 columns:
This sonnet is often assumed to be about either the defeat of the Spanish Armada or the death of Queen Elizabeth (“The mortall Moone hath her eclipse indur’de”), so the presence of ‘moone’ vertically is notable. ‘Aetreus’ (father of Agamemnon and Menelaus; brother of Thyestes, in Greek mythology) also jumps out.
Monti
Christopher (‘Kit’) Marlowe was the other top dramatist of the age and could be imagined to have penned the Shakespeare corpus had he not been killed in 1593.
But what if that had been a staged death? There’s an extensive body of scholarship arguing that it indeed was, enacted to spare a key Elizabethan secret service spy/informant from political enemies. In which case, perhaps Marlowe ‘became’ Shake(-)speare.
One theory is that Marlowe took on the identity of Gregorio de Monti and spent much of the rest of his life working in the English embassy in Venice. ‘Monti’ happens to appear as an acrostic when Sonnet 99 is put into a 29-column grid (like the one for Sonnet 134 that yields ‘neuille rimer’):
The forward violet image of this sonnet also occurs in Laertes’s advice to Ophelia:
Some believe this sonnet was inspired by a quite similar poem in Henry Constable’s Diana (1592).
99 is the only sonnet with 15 lines. A 15 column treatment produces a full grid with hero, lost, foul, pond, oars, sane, shot, and phew. (Marlowe wrote Hero and Leander.)
Satan
There is an acrostic of “SATAN” in the middle of the speech by Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet:
Here’s Sonnet 131 (“In nothing art thou blacke saue in thy deeds, And thence this slaunder as I thinke proceeds”) in 29 columns:
I wonder if there’s a connection to Thomas Nashe’s 1592 Pierce Penilesse, His Supplication to the Devil.
Notes on method
My sonnet gridder app was built using the commercial legal document automation product HotDocs. I turn the output grid into a nice table using the text-to-table feature in Word, then manually inspect it.
Often I miss ‘words’ and only notice more upon returning to a grid. Given my small Latin and less Greek I only occasionally spot possibilities in those languages. And my eyes are tuned to modern English spellings. (The wildly variant spellings back then both made hiding acrostics easier and finding them harder nowadays.)
Most combinations yield few if any discernible ‘words,’ like the following (Sonnet 73, 29 columns):
There’s one ‘nude’ (yes, that word was in use in the 1500s). But it’s almost certainly an accident, like other four-letter ones (‘tree,’ ‘shoe,’ ‘nose,’ …) that often show up. I stopped even bothering to mark 3 letter words.
There are lots of design choices in an effort like this. What punctuation to leave in, if any? How to deal with double letters? Should one first correct apparent errors in the printed sonnets, such as the ‘f’ in “euery word doth almost fel my name”?
Should we expect the acrostics to relate to the source poem, or just be arbitrary insertions? (One has to stretch for thematic connections in the examples I’ve given.)
What column widths to use? I’ve played with several options:
· Numbers like 15, 18, and 29 that seem to produce interesting results elsewhere
· Numbers that produce completely filled squares or rectangles (because they are divisors of the number of letters in the poem)
· Numbers that result in the first full line of the sonnet fully filling the first row. (That reportedly was Rosemary Warner’s method.)
Note that verticals can become diagonals and vice versa when adjacent column widths are used. So ‘neuille rimer’ may have been intended to be seen diagonally in a grid of 28 or 30 columns.
I recently changed my program to emit horizontalized versions of the columns (in both directions), which makes spotting potential words a bit easier. Here’s some of that kind of output for the famous 29 column version of Sonnet 134, with some of the strings bolded:
Columns
1 — SELMOLAEDTOESDTE
2 — OAMIRLNLTUUAAEHT
3 — NNYNTNDIHTVNKAHA
4 — ODSESOHKAESDEBIM
5 — WIETTTEETOUSSUMI
6 — IMLHIBITHFRUOSAN
7 — HYFOLESOITEEHENO
8 — ASEULFKWMHRAIHDT
9 — UEIWBRIRAYTFMIMF
10 — ELLIUENISBHRIMER
. . .
Inverse columns
1 — ETDSEOTDEALOMLES
2 — THEAAUUTLNLRIMAO
3 — AHAKNVTHIDNTNYNN
4 — MIBEDSEAKHOSESDO
5 — IMUSSUOTEETTTEIW
6 — NASOURFHTIBIHLMI
7 — ONEHEETIOSELOFYH
8 — TDHIARHMWKFLUESA
9 — FMIMFTYARIRBWIEU
10 — REMIRHBSINEUILLE
. . .
Could this be further automated? Of course, but
· The system would have to deal with long strings of untokenized letters, looking for ‘words’ of various lengths, backwards and forwards.
· The dictionary would need to be tuned to Elizabethan English, and include the many variations in spelling. It should probably also include Latin, French, Italian, and a couple other languages.
· In the event that strings in adjacent columns (like ‘sum naso’) or going around ‘corners’ are to be considered, that would require special arrangements.
Ranging further afield
Threnos
The poem known as “The Phoenix and Turtle” was printed as part of Robert Chester’s Loves Martyr or, Rosalins Complaint above the name, “William Shake-speare.” its final five stanzas, titled “Threnos” (a dirge), read as follows:
When rendered in 15 columns a full rectangle appears:
Dottore was a stock character of the Italian commedia dell’arte, and ‘doctor time’ (leftmost column) would have been an apt metaphor in a poem about death.
Other possible words here include leeway, tease, maide, naïve, cateur (French for caterer), and Niceia, an ancient Greek city in northwestern Anatolia. The Nicaean council in 325 proclaimed the equality of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the Trinity.
Imping
Christopher Brooke was a lawyer with connections to Henry Neville. Ken Feinstein regards Brooke’s Ghost of Richard the Third (1614) as “absolutely essential and ridiculously strong evidence for Henry Neville’s authorship of the works of Shakespeare.” Brooke and Neville were at the 1611 ‘Convivium Philosophicum’ dinner, along with John Donne and others.
This is one of Brooke’s stanzas, speaking in the voice of Richard III, and talking about the author who wrote the eponymous play:
‘Imp’ meant to graft or repair a wing or tail with a feather to improve a falcon’s flying capacity. (In Richard II [II, 1], the Earl of Northumberland says “If then we shall shake off our slavish yoke, Imp out our drooping country’s broken wing …”) In Greek mythology, Helicon was the site of two springs sacred to the Muses. Clio was the muse of history.
Reading this, it’s natural to wonder: Who imp’d Richard’s fame? Putting this poem into a 25-column grid produces this:
So who imp’t Richard’s fame? If we believe in hidden acrostics, the answer may be that someone with the initials HN impd (last column). And hid his name. (The semicircular ‘neuile’ in blue is probably too far a stretch.)
Note that ‘imp’ implies that there was an earlier version of Richard III that someone, perhaps HN, ‘repaired.’ That’s consistent with Dennis McCarthy’s research that strongly suggests that Thomas North wrote plays that Shake-speare used as sources.
There’s another poem in the same book, by Ben Jonson (“To his Friend the Author upon his Richard”), which has exactly the same number of characters.
It thus also yields a full rectangle at 25 columns:
Herne the Hunter was a ghost introduced in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Neville’s father was a keeper of Windsor Forest. Henry still lived in the area, was himself a forester, and his wife was Anne Killigrew. (Anne Page is a lead character in The Merry Wives.) ‘Herne’ is also a near-anagram for ‘Henry’ and would make a fun nickname for someone who ghost-wrote from near Windsor. If anyone knew who Shake(-)speare actually was, Ben Jonson did.
Perhaps “Mr. W.H” in the sonnets’ dedication was a play on Windsor Herne.
(I took a quick look at the second stanza of Brooke’s poem — “Yet if his Scoenes haue not engrost all Grace, The much fam’d Action could extend on Stage …” — at 21 and 25 columns, and noticed both ‘monti’ and ‘north.’)
Character study
Leyland and Goding posited that the T.T. at the bottom of the Sonnets’ dedication might stand for ‘twenty two,’ and noted that Sonnet 122 in print starts out with a seemingly erroneous extra T:
When that double T is included, the number of characters is 456, which is equally divisible by 19. A grid of that size looks like this:
Three ‘words’ of five or more characters appear: litera, taste, and erect. Hardly conclusive of anything, but since ‘litera’ means ‘letter’ in Latin, this might be a good way to end our literary tour of the matrices.
A woman’s letters
Emilia Lanier (née Aemilia Bassano; 1569–1645) was the first English woman to publish as a professional poet, through her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). Mark Bradbeer’s Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Co-Author makes an interesting case that she had a role in Shakespeare’s Works. Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name is a compelling novel based on that theory.
Shakespeare’s baptismal record reads “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere” and his six surviving signatures (all in documents dated in 1612 or later) appear as follows:
· Willm Shakp
· William Shaksper
· Wm Shakspe
· William Shakspere
· Willm Shakspere
· By me William Shakspeare
I recently noticed that all the letters of ‘Aemilia L’ are contained in the name ‘William Shakespeare’:
William Shakespeare
Seems unremarkable. (Although not true of many other names, such as Christopher, Edward, Francis, Henry, and Thomas.) But if you remove those letters, you get:
W Shakspere
Conversely, if you remove W Shakspere you get Aemilia L.
Imagine a scene in Richard Field’s shop, early 1593, when Venus and Adonis was about to be printed: “What name should we use as the author of this poem?” “How about my townsman from Stratford? No one will ever believe that! He’s just been buying up old plays.” “Can’t we dress it up a bit? What if we add the letters of your name, young lady? Let’s see what that might produce.”
Mysteries
There has been endless debate about when, by whom, to whom, or about whom the sonnets were written. Do they refer to real events, or imaginary ones? Who were the fair youth(s), dark lady(ies), and rival poet(s)? (There could have been more than one of any of these.) In James Joyce’s Ulysses Stephen Daedalus describes the sonnets as ‘the happy hunting ground for minds that have lost their balance.’
We know when most of the sonnets were first published (1609), but not when they were written, compiled, or numbered. Two (those eventually numbered 138 and 144) had appeared in 1599 in William Jaggard’s The Passionate Pilgrim.
In The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Helen Vendler emphasizes the considerable technical poetic artistry beneath the surface beauty of the sonnets, as well as the likelihood that some of them were intended as replies to extrinsic communications.
Steven Monte’s Secret Architecture of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2021) argues that Shakespeare was deeply engaged with other poets and carefully designed an elaborate organizational scheme for the Sonnets.
Elaine Scarry’s Naming Thy Name makes a case that the fair youth was poet Henry Constable, and that some of the sonnets were part of an epistolary conversation between him and their author. She also contends that the rival poet was King James of Scotland, but doesn’t speculate about the dark lady.
Scarry makes much of the fact that lines of Shakespeare’s and Constable’s poetry included all the letters of each other’s names. I let her know that one Constable line — “My love, my trueth, and black disdaind estate” (from a Diana sonnet) — contains all the letters of “Henry Constable,” “Aemilia Bassano,” and “Henry Neville” (the trio I’ve considered a possible match for some of the sonnet stories.)
Compared to the mysteries of the sonnets themselves, those about the potential use of acrostics are pedestrian. Would the author really have exerted so much energy to leave things for friends to find? What possible techniques or machinery might have been used? paper cutouts? printer’s letters?
If we were to discover a mechanical device, e.g. with moveable type, that made it easy that would be significant!
I haven’t written sonnets, but have found it relatively easy to tweak an existing text to produce acrostics when put into a grid. That likely was even easier when the lack of spelling standards allowed you to drop or insert an e or u to make something ‘work.’ (The sonnets themselves are full of variations like thinke/think, day/daie, rich/ritch, again/againe, hold/hould, and aboundance/abundance.)
To what end(s) would this have been done? Just self satisfaction? Clues for posterity? Elizabethan sudoku?
Did the author tell anyone? If the poems were about and addressed to romantic partners, what would have been the point of encoding extraneous names?
Perhaps the names would’ve been embedded just to amuse or impress the wiser sort who could be clued in to their presence. Like a contemporary Easter egg. Once you know the parameters, you can work things out on paper in minutes.
Authorship implications
Does any of this shed light on the authorship question?
It seems a fair assumption that the sonnets were written by the same person who had a major role in writing the plays. And no one other than the poet him or herself would likely have arranged for acrostic results. But any of the proposed candidates could have been that poet.
Conventional scholars tend to believe that the Sonnets were published unauthorized. The survival of acrostics may indicate that someone paid close attention to the type setting for the ultimate book. The sonnets presumably didn’t have numbers when they were originally written or circulated, and their texts may have changed over time, accidentally or on purpose. There seems to have been some numerological attention in their sequencing and numbering.
References to Nashe or others might help date when sonnets were written.
Rime and reason
Treasure hunts can be fun, even if most end with disappointment. This one that I’ve pursued in my idle hours isn’t over, but so far hasn’t delivered much. The results are pretty thin gruel. Are they stochastic mirages? Imaginary significance? Invisible writing and fossils, or Rorschach inkblots?
It’s simply a fact that if you take the letters of certain poems, and apply a straightforward procedure, you see results like those recounted here. No elaborate manipulations are needed. Modern technology can perform the job instantaneously. A simple decryption method that’s trivial now wasn’t back in the day (unless you were given the number of columns.) And it leaves us with these considerations:
· The presence of wr-ioth-esley, albeit in three fragments, in a grid of the Sonnets dedication hardly seems accidental in a book long assumed related to the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley.
· The presence of neuille (inverted) and rimer — a dozen letters in meaningful order — in the same column of a grid of Sonnet 134 hardly seems accidental, particularly in a set of poems Henry Neville is now thought for unrelated reasons perhaps to have written.
· The appearance of other highly relevant last names, including an alias possibly used by Christopher Marlowe, in grids of other sonnets hardly seems accidental.
· The presence of ‘hn impd’ in a poem about an unnamed dramatist who ‘impt’ Richard III’s fame, written by one of Neville’s lawyer friends, hardly seems accidental.
Anyone know a good linguistic statistician?
If even one of these were intentional, that raises the odds that others were as well. But of course all of the above could just be statistical flukes. We’re suspended among implausible conclusions, as in the authorship question generally.
So, am I imagining acrostics that signify nothing? Have I been at a great feast of languages and just stolen scraps?
I’ve only looked at a small sample — perhaps 5% — of the many possible grids, and some of those quite cursorily. My amateur sleuthing leads me to these tentative conclusions:
· I doubt that the Bard spent much energy leaving behind clues to his identity, even if he exerted considerable care to keep that information private.
· There was no grand scheme to communicate secrets, but the author may have occasionally engineered acrostics in treatments of sonnets that were circulated to those being addressed, or other private friends.
· The use of such a technique by Thorpe, Brooke, and Jonson may have been an homage to its presence in some of Shake(-)speare’s works.
· Someone thought someone named Neville was something of a poet.
· It can’t hurt to keep looking.
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to Bob Aubin, Mark Bradbeer, Barry Kenyon, Katy Kleitz, and James Leyland for helpful feedback on drafts of this article. Thanks also to several friends who prefer not to have their names associated with my reckless speculation.
