The primary purpose of this web site is to post lost primary works, with Shakespeare the Maker of its core materials. Its thrust is to reveal and establish for the first time a body of 154 lost sonnet-length poems that he authorized concurrently with his Sonnets.

           Secondary materials are here to help make the primary materials clear and to offer contexts for them. Given the unprecedented nature of the project that this site records, my approaches are is admittedly unconventional, my sources eclectic.

          In the role of first editor and interpreter of the Runes, I’ve drawn selectively—within the limits of my knowledge and as time has allowed in a too-short life—on existing historical and critical scholarship. Often I’ve gone looking for particular kinds of outside information; and several colleagues who’ve known about my work have pointed out known parallels.

          Adding to the heavy accumulation of discussions and speculations about the “problems” of the 1609 Quarto and its texts and lines, my findings associate authors and materials in unconventional permutations and encourage revisions of views. My discussions of other game-playing authors besides Shakespeare seem to me in various measures relevant, perhaps more so in the cases of Renaissance writers such as Spenser and Herbert, and less so in the cases of moderns. But part of my job is to naturalize what seems at first a totally foreign and therefore unlikely business. In fact I can draw no sharp line to mark where the runes stop and other kinds of wit, coterie behavior, and subtextual leg-pulling in literature start.

           Much remains hidden and speculative, given the intrinsic nature of coterie activity as an aspect of literary production. I make no claims for inclusiveness, and I acknowledge my own ingenuousness and wonder.

          Because so many primary Shakespearean texts also offer indispensable editorial commentary, and because all involve editorial choices and apparatuses, my lists below do not separate primary from critical sources. In truth, the edited works of Shakespeare are among the better sources for accurate—not speculative—information about those works. Under topical headings I’ve included all the sources I’ve consciously appropriated, alongside some other works that offer further information on aspects of Shakespeare’s Runes and their backgrounds. Though my findings are essentially original, I acknowledge gratefully and humbly the wealth of prior scholarship that has effectively allowed and expedited my own, particularly the works of editors and compilers of reference volumes. Shakespeare’s mind was encyclopedic, but mine isn’t.

         For thoroughness’ sake I’ve listed my own articles, self-published monographs, and public presentations on the Runes and related topics, along with an inventory of previous publications of individual runic texts. I’ve also sorted out publications since 1977 about the Runes in a narrow sense—my writings and others’—in lists toward the bottom. Though these catalogs overlap each other to some degree, each may prove separately useful for the record, perhaps saving later researchers some time and effort. Hence I include them. Though other press notices may have appeared in 1984 or since, based on wire services accounts and on press releases, the notices listed below are all that I’m aware of.

         Where I’ve duplicated entries, I include the annotation with the title the first time it appears and don’t repeat it thereafter. Some self-explanatory entries aren’t annotated. Uses of source materials in this site, of course, expand (and sometimes repeat) what I enter here. My monographs on Shakespearean Runes and their antecedents—in various ways outdated but reflective of the evolution of my findings—as well as the Tennessee Governor’s School for the Humanities anthologies where some of the runes first appeared as edited primary texts are available through interlibrary loan from The Paul Meek Library, The University of Tennessee at Martin, Martin, TN 38238, phone 731-587-7068, OCLC symbol THM, FAX 731-587-7074.

          I’ve credited my sources parenthetically within the various components of this site, using last names and/or short titles as keys. My choices about including and characterizing individual sources have all been aimed at trying to accommodate a broadly inclusive readership.

Shakespeare and the Sonnets, with Background and Reference Sources

Abrams, M.H., gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vols. I and II. 5th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986. A handy, reputable, broad-ranging source.

Akrigg, G. P. V. Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton. Harvard UP, 1968. I’ve relied heavily on this well-indexed work, since the life of Southampton—Will’s only known patron—is much more thoroughly documented than Will’s. With many others, I deduce that Southy’s relationship with Will is in some measure a background source for Q.

Art of the Printed Book: 1455-1955. New York: The Pierpont Morgan Library, 1974. Useful for confirming standard page sizes in the Renaissance. After trimming, a single page in the KJB was 10 5/8 x 15 3/8 inches (27 x 39 cm.)—a size that would also have served Shakespeare’s needs in his First Folio holograph. Webster's 3rd defines “folio post” as “a certain size (as
17 x 22 inches) of a sheet of esp. writing or ledger paper.” Traditional paper sizes ran as large as 74 x 50 cm. (about 40 x 30 inches).

Bartlett, John. A Complete Concordance…of Shakespeare. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1956. Allows, e.g., overall canvasses of Shakespeare’s use of particular words (e.g., round, run, ruin) and of subtextual terms that occur in the Runes and that are listed in my index.

Bond, Donald F., ed. The Spectator. Vol. I. Oxford UP, 1965. Joseph Addison’s Spectator papers, especially Nos. 58-62 (244ff.), ca. 1711, represent the Enlightenment rejection of the “false wit” of “trick writing”—tracing its hypothetical origins in ancient practice and its “reinvention” by shallow medieval monks, and cataloging its multifarious forms. Addison offers susceptibility of “translation” in a work as a test of its “true” literary wit. His enumerations of “false” wit—which do not mention runic practice—at least serve to show the pervasiveness through the 1600s of many playful, now-lost artifices and forms.

Booth, Stephen. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Edited with Analytic Commentary. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977. A singularly invaluable help in this project and a sensible entrance point to the Sonnets for readers seeking an overview of received opinion before the Runes were known about. Includes a reproduced facsimile of the 1609 Quarto text (Huntington-Bridgewater copy) and a useful summary of “facts and theories” about the Sonnets (543-49). Though Booth consistently resists seeing the Sonnets as riddlic and gamelike, many of his observations and notes about such incipient features are, I think, perfectly congruent with the discovery of the lost, gamy side of Q. He offers many “far-fetched” precedents for punning uses in the Q lines that—as we can now see—the Runes routinely engage in.

Chernow, Barbara A., and George A. Vallasi, eds. The Columbia Encyclopedia. 5th ed. Columbia UP, 1993. My routine guide to general information about people, places, things.

Chute, Marchette. Shakespeare of London. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1949. A highly readable and fully researched life story of the playwright, the most rounded portrait I know, depicting Will as a successful and practical entrepreneur, thriving in his trade.

Foster, Donald W. “Master W. H., R.I.P.” PMLA 102.1 (Jan. 1987): 42-54. Foster explores the W.H. of the Q dedication (he prefers “epigraph”) by looking at other “epigraphs of the same vintage” and reaches skeptical conclusions.

Frye, Roland Mushat. Shakespeare’s Life and Times: A Pictorial Record. Princeton UP, 1967. Uses period illustrations, with many engravings, to ground a factual discussion..

Gayley, Charles Mills. The Classic Myths in English Literature and in Art. Boston: Ginn and Co., 1939. An old stand-by helpful for checking allusions to Greek and Roman materials.

Gaur, Albertine. A History of Writing. New York: Scribners, 1985. Illustrates early mss. without spacings between words and with rudimentary punctuation (e.g., 168); depicts the Franks Casket, inscribed with a perimeter band of continuous Futhark characters (128); discusses secret scripts, the Kabbalah, and cryptography (186ff.).

Graves, Roy Neil. Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets: The 154 Runic Poems Reconstructed and Introduced. Martin, TN, 1979. This initial homemade monograph establishes the 154 unedited Runes and explains the basic plan by which Q embeds them.

—. “Suppressed Design in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Toward Envisioning the Lost ‘First Folio’.” The Upstart Crow 15 (1995): 115-35. One of a two-step pair of long expository essays about the Runes, this “first half” describes the suppressed numerological design in Q, including the Megasonnet scheme and the implicit page-spread arrangements. The complexity of exposition and reluctance of readers to absorb too much “new reality” at once encouraged me toward this two-stage presentation as a rhetorical means of trying to be clear and credible.

—. “Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets: Eleven Examples of the 154 Runic Poems Embedded in the 1609 Quarto.” Upstart Crow 17 (1997): 108-42. This second half of my two-stage exposition includes edited texts, with paraphrases and commentary, of Runes 1, 17, 33, 54, 65, 82, 92, 104A, 117, 136, and 153—one rune from each of the 11 sets. The first full public presentation of a large body of evidence about the Runes.

Greenblatt, Stephen, et al, eds. The Norton Shakespeare. Norton, 1997. Offers carefully edited texts and historical backgrounds.

Halliday, F. E. Shakespeare and His World. Singapore: Thames and Hudson, 1979. Establishes a readable narrative background with visual clarification, using copious illustrations.

Hammond, Gerald. The Reader and Shakespeare’s Young Man Sonnets. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1981. Points to uneven quality and “degrees of inspiration”—from “the most trivial of occasional verses to poems in which a whole range of important emotions is involved” (2, quoting L. C. Knights). Finds that Q’s order is “substantially right and that all the sonnets have the same young man [the ‘chief reader’ (12)] as their subject” (3). Discusses difficulty of determining tone, since the “poet’s irony or sarcasm or bitterness” coexists with “the lover’s pose” (12). Interested in analysis of the “organised, coherent, and developing sequence of poems” addressing “the young man” (2).

Harrison, G. B., ed. Shakespeare: The Complete Works. New York: Harcourt, 1968. The background source that I’ve consulted, perhaps, more than any other—especially about the poet’s life and his plays. Harrison thinks it “most probable” that the More fragment (see Thompson, below) is a sample of Shakespeare’s own hand.

The Holy Bible. King James Version. Oxford. With Index and Concordance. An indexed source for checking allusions to Biblical names and places—and the Psalm 46 nameplay.

Hubler, Edward, ed. The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1962. The Sonnets themselves, with an overview of critical history by Hubler and critical essays by Northrop Frye, Leslie A. Fiedler, Stephen Spender, and R. P. Blackmur—and with Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” Blackmur—once a teacher of mine in a poetics class—says, “There was no real ‘young man’ in the Sonnets,” but, rather, that Shakespeare addresses “one of his unaccomplished selves” (134).

—. The Sense of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Princeton, l952; New York, l962. Late in his career, Hubler, whose undergraduate Shakespeare class at Princeton I took after this book came out—discusses the obscurity of the Sonnets.

Ingram, W. G., and Theodore Redpath. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978. Noting that some 30 “substantial editions” of the Sonnets have appeared since ca. 1900, Ingram and Redpath see the Sonnets as problematic and focus especially on “textual difficulties” (ix). They “doubt whether even experts have exhausted all the finer points of these poems” (xiv). Pages 360ff. treat typical word-play and lost meanings.

Jakobson, Roman, with Lawrence C. Jones. Shakespeare’s Verbal Art . Mouton, 1970. Suggests that de Saussure’s “hypogram”—a form of anagram—may clarify or apply to some of Will’s practices.

Kökeritz, Helge. Shakespeare’s Pronunciation. New Haven, 1953. Helpful for checking phonic readings of acrostic codelines. Says “gun” sounded like “goon,” helping us to hear “round” and “rune” as phonically close. Says “and” was routinely pronounced “an” (271). If the equation “And = Anne” applies anywhere, of course, it may apply everywhere.

Landry, Hilton. Interpretations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1964, rpt. 1976. Gives history of reception and criticism of the Sonnets, noting that they were little read through the eighteenth century, and recording Wordsworth’s comment on their “heavy” faults (“sameness, tediousness, quaintness, and elaborate obscurity”) and his description of 127ff.—the Dark Lady poems—as “abominably harsh, obscure, and worthless.” Landry says modern appreciation of ambiguity allows us to see the poems as frequently “complex, agile, and subtle” in their use of language (2).

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “The Sonnets, Treated as Terra Incognita.” Review of Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets [see below].” The New York Times, 10 Nov. 1997, E6. My means of access to Vendler’s book.

McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil. The Story of English. New York: Viking, 1986. “A Muse of Fire,” Part III of the book and its companion television series, stresses the influence of Shakespeare and the Bible during the period when English spread and first began to become a world language.

Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979. Focuses on order, groupings, and thematic linkages. Without knowing of Q’s buried structure, Muir, in effect, describes several of the 11 set groups that I have detected and recomposes; in other instances, he recognizes starting or stopping points or unified portions of the sets.

The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles. 1955 ed. Cited as OED, this handy one-volume abridgement of the Oxford English Dictionary has served my purposes by showing meanings of words at historical points. The OED also reveals Shakespeare’s astoundingly prolific role in word-formation—which the Runes reveal as on-going. OED’s record of first uses tends to be conservative, of course, since verbal and especially “impolite” use of terms historically precedes their written use. Thus the OED can show that a word was indeed current in a given year, but cannot prove that it wasn’t extant. Many playful words with “origins obscure” may in fact have had coterie beginnings. (On occasion I’ve consulted the multi-volumed OED, which houses much more detailed information.)

Parfitt, George, ed. Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975. Jonson was Shakespeare’s contemporary and “classical” rival.

Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy. A Literary & Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948. A standard, groundbreaking work that makes it unnecessary for me to have to show that Shakespeare liked “low” humor and used vulgar puns and conceits cornucopically—conventionally and ingeniously—in his “public” works.

Ramsey, Paul. The Fickle Glass: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New York: AMS Press, 1979. A work by a fellow Tennessean and thoughtful critic who notes a “web of connectedness” among the apparent Q texts.

—. “The Literary Evidence for Shakespeare as Hand D….” The Upstart Crow 11 (1991): 131-55. Reaches a skeptical conclusion about whether Shakespeare penned the surviving fragment of More that Thompson (cf. below) attributes to him.

Robertson, J.M. The Problems of the Shakespeare Sonnets. London: George Routledge & Sons., Ltd., 1926. Rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1973. A survey of competing theories and an attempt to see which approaches seem most profitable. Robertson thinks that “Mr. W. H.” is William Hervey, that Q is pirated, that the poems are not all from one hand, and that some are “un-Shakespearean.” He tries to determine which are genuine.

Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets. Vols. I and II. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1944. As opening comments, Rollins quotes Knox Pooler (“ No theory or discovery has increased our enjoyment of any line in the Sonnets or cleared up any difficulty”) and James Joyce (“Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance”). In a massive undertaking, Rollins collates the 13 known copies of Q—along with later editions and emendations that are not of much interest to me in the present study. Almost no significant differences exist among the 13 copies, though two forms of the title page do exist—one “to be ∫olde by William Aspley [sic],” the other “…by Iohn Wright, dwelling at Christ Church gate.” Several minor but apparently conscious changes indicate that in those few details Q did undergo “correction”: e.g., Sonnet 47.10 shows Thy seife or Thy selfe; Sonnet 87.3 shows Charter or Cha ter; Sonnet 89.11 shows proface or prophane; and the “incorrect” number for 116 (i.e., 119) is “corrected” in one copy. (Why Booth’s 1978 facsimile page, in my copy at least, shows hou for thou in Sonnet 74.9, I’m not sure; I believe the “t” was there in his 1977 printing, and neither Rollins nor Booth mentions a variant .) The preeminent point is that we have a single jot-and-tittle text to deal with. Given Will’s delight in A or B variants (e.g., in Set VIII, in Sonnets/Runes, and indeed in every pun), even the “corrections,” I think, might be part of his game: e.g., Cha ter creates “chatter”; proface creates “prophecy”; and the other changes also generate alternate sets of puns that vary subtextual wit. Rollins’ Vol. II is a tome housing appendices regarding textual authenticity, date of composition, arrangement, sources, autobiographical aspects, the dedication to “Mr. W.H.,” the “Dark Woman,” “Rival Poet, Willobie His Avisa, musical settings, a history of the “vogue” of the Sonnets (separated by country), and other criticism and theories—including a discussion of homosexuality. With Rollins in hand, one need hardly examine anything else done before ca. 1942. Rollins summarizes views and avoids making judgments about their value. The result is ponderous and intimidating.

Rowse, A. L. William Shakespeare: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Rowse finds the Sonnets “the most autobiographical ever written” (161) and sees in them adequate information to allow a restatement of much that transpired between the poet and his patron Southampton during the early 1590s (161-200).

Sams, Eric. The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-1594. Yale UP, 1995. Has a chapter on the Sonnets and a catalog of life documents through 1594.

Spevack, Marvin. The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1973. See Bartlett (above).

Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge UP, 1958. An influential statistical study of images in the Sonnets and plays, classified by type (animals, domestic, body, daily life, learning, arts, imaginative). Treats, e.g., birds, color, death, time, love in the Sonnets. As my comments and glosses often show, the Runes (like the Sonnets) also reveal Will’s carefully crafted use of motific linkages as means of technical unity—in figures, diction, and puns, both overt details and subtextual contrivances. But Booth’s (puzzled) reservation about the Sonnets applies as well to the Runes: a typical Q text of either ilk houses concurrent patterns of linked images, not just one focal cluster, and it routinely has tangential and spin-off figures, so the general effect often seems divergent, not focused. (We can now understand how writing two texts at once automatically encouraged “confused” overlays of figurative patterns—indeed, made such conglomerations inevitable.)

Thompson, Edward Maunde. Shakespeare’s Handwriting. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916; rpt. Folcroft Library Editions, 1970. Thompson, a paleographic expert who examined the “Hand D” addition in Harleian MS. 7368 (British Museum) and compared it with Shakespeare’s known signatures, concludes, “Personally we feel confident that in this addition…we have indeed the handwriting of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE” (54). Appends three facsimile pages (following p. 63) showing Hand D. For a 14-line sample of Hand D, a nearly minuscule script, see this link: How Will Wrote the Runes. (A page from More in Hand D is illustrated in Halliday 63.)

Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1997. Noting how little most of the Sonnets are studied or read, Vendler approaches the overt texts as “verbal contraptions” (Auden’s term) to be experienced aesthetically, particularly for their wordplay and rhetorical details. Her commentaries on the 154 texts—each 3-4 pages long—offer close readings of technical elements and discuss, e.g., parallels, antitheses, image patterns. (Vendler notes that Sonnet 20 in each of its lines incorporates the letters of h- e-w-s or h-u-e-s.)

Wilkie, Brian, and James Hurt. Literature of the Western World. Vol. I: The Ancient World Through the Renaissance. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1997. A useful compendium of information and a handy reference source on early writers outside England.

Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life. New York: Collier Books/Macmillan, 1957. Eugene Gant’s phrase “woven density” (278) describes the knotty difficulties of the Sonnets and seems prescient for implying the warp-and-woof patterns in the 11 sets of Q texts.

Biblical, Latin, and Hermetic Practices

Brown, Peter. “Brave Old World.” The New York Review of Books 34.4 (12 March 1987): 24ff. Discusses “an ingenious acrostic poem” in Latin from the 4th century C.E.

Butterworth, Charles C. The Literary Lineage of the King James Bible, 1340-1611. New York: Octagon Books, 1971. Lists the make-up of the KJB committee, a group that may have included some of the contemporary reader/players Will addressed in the Runes.

Drosnin, Michael. The Bible Code. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Studies numerological acrostic codes in the Hebrew texts that, Drosnin claims, have—in textual clusters that seem to link elements—“predicted” precise details about such future events as the Gulf War, the assassinations of John Kennedy and Yitzhak Rabin, the Wright Brothers’ invention of the airplane, and Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. While the methods of acrostic analysis and cryptographic decoding loosely parallel some of the deciphering modes rune-players use, I personally make no claims for prophetic capabilities in the Bible—or in Q. Given the tendency to find what we go looking for in such codes and given the diverse ways acrostic letterboxes can seem to convey meaning, I myself choose to be skeptical that such “readings” of texts—mostly retrospectively—reveal any genuine prophetic capabilities, just as I try to remain skeptical of any “single” occurrence of what appears to be particular information buried in punning fashion in the Q letterstrings.

The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1969. The Bible translation Shakespeare would have known. Used here for comparison with Psalm 46 in the King James Bible, as a means of trying to understand whether the buried “Shakespeare” nameplay there might be authorized (by somebody) or just happenstance.

Hardison, O. B., Jr., director, The Folger Shakespeare Library. Personal letter to me July 5, 1979, accepting Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets for the library collection. While initially skeptical, after cursory examination of my monograph, that I could ever “prove” authorization of Q’s other set of texts “because of the tendency of almost any sequence of words (even, of letters) to assume some sort of pattern in the mind,” Hardison noted, “You are quite right that much medieval verse had acrostic and other patterns. As I recall, a good deal of Irish classicizing verse of the sixth to eighth centuries illustrates this tendency. I ran across some of it in the Patrologia Latina several years ago. It’s mostly in Latin, with frequent use of Greek, and it’s entirely written by monks…. David Dumville had an article in the Journal of Theological Studies some years back identifying an acrostic in the Book of Cerne.” I’m grateful for Mr. Hardison’s courtesy and don’t mean to trade on it here. His attention to my homemade pamphlet went beyond what I could have expected at the time, and his scholarly caution seemed then, as it does now, a reasonable first reaction of a busy man.

The Holy Bible. King James Version. Oxford. With Index and Concordance. This 1611 version of the Scriptures reflects the literary English of Shakespeare’s day. If Psalm 46 embeds a name-and-age play on “Shake-spear,” it was presumably executed by someone else (and not by Will himself) as an in-group joke.

The Interpreter’s Bible. Ed. George Arthur Buttrick and others. Vol. IV. New York, Abingdon Press, 1955. Mentions the numerological nameplay on “Shakespeare”—keyed to 46—in Psalm 46, KJV. Says that finding the play doesn’t prove Shakespeare’s authorship and merely shows that “these great lines have been pored over by all sorts of readers, from monks to mountebanks.”

Jones, Thomas O. Renaissance Magic and Hermeticism in the Shakespeare Sonnets: Like Prayers Divine. The Edwin Mellen Press, 1994. Argues for the direct influence of the hermetic tradition—as transmitted through the Italian Renaissance—on the Sonnets, and more generally in Shakespeare’s London. Summarizes the 200-year search for “real” figures to match those the Sonnets address.

Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie [1589]. Ed. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: The UP, 1936, rpt. 1970. A historical critic and contemporary of Shakespeare reports on the arcane poetic practices of monkish writers of Latin verse (15).

Satinover, Jeffrey B. “Divine Authorship? Computer Reveals Startling Word Patterns.” Bible Review, October 1995: 28-31, 44-45. Reports on 1988 paper by Jewish statisticians who found paired, meaningfully related “equidistant letter sequences” in Genesis that seemed to generate, in acrostic fashion, information about events in the distant future. (See Drosnin, above).

Starobinski, Jean. Words upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure. Trans. Olivia Emmet. Yale UP, 1979. Originally titled Les mots sous les mots, this work reports on the famed linguist de Saussure’s unpublished notebooks, ca. 1906-09, investigating buried anagrams in Latin verse from early times right up until 1909. De Saussure consistently found what he took to be “theme word” anagrams hidden by writers of a wide-ranging variety of Latin works—apparently conventionally, but in ways that had never been openly acknowledged or discussed. Starobinski (who believes de Saussure to have been mistaken in thinking that these buried elements were consciously crafted) adduces analogies with “the art of Bach and his bass progressions whose letter-notes form a signature or tribute” and alludes to Michel Foucault’s Raymond Roussell (Gallimard, 1963) and to Roman Jakobson’s Shakespeare’s Verbal Art (with Lawrence C. Jones, Mouton, 1970), the last of which “expressly call[s] on the Saussurian idea of the hypogram” (129).

The Futhark Runes, Old English Riddles, and Other Anglo-Saxon Works

Anderson, James E. Two Literary Riddles in the Exeter Book: Riddle 1 and The Easter Riddle. Norman: U of Okla. P, 1986.

Calder, Daniel G. Cynewulf. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981. Basic information on the Old English poet whose name occurs in anagram forms in works now attributed to him on the basis of the occurrence of those anagrams.

Chambers, R. W., Max Förster, and Robin Flower. Chapters on the Exeter Book. 1933, Folcroft Lib. Eds., 1972. The Exeter Book is the source for the OE Riddles, which are much in the spirit that the runes of Shakespeare (and antecedent runemasters) perpetuate.

Earl, James W. “Hisperic Style in the Old English “Rhyming Poem.” PMLA 102.2 (March 1987): 187-96. Explores a complex Anglo-Saxon work with many gamelike features.

Elliott, Ralph W. V. Runes: An Introduction. Manchester UP, 1959, 1971. Background on the futhark alphabet.

Graves, Roy Neil. “The Runic Beowulf” and Other Lost Anglo-Saxon Poems. Martin, Tenn., 1979. A self-published monograph that explores buried, vertically implicit acrostic codelines and other kinds of suppressed design, wit, and communication in early texts. Illustrates how some OE poems and riddles encode their own “answers” (ambiguous scenarios, not single-word solutions) and discovers other lost game elements.

—. “Bardic Wit in the bold-faced Beginnings of Beowulf: HWÆT WE GARDE….” Unpublished paper developed as a proposal for a conference presentation at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies conference in 1997 but not used. Suggests Æthridge, Ethelridge, or Hedric as the name of the Beowulf poet, on the basis of a pun in the opening letterstring: Hwæt wyrhta Ædhrycg, witega… (Behold, the writer, Æth’ridge, seer…).

Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Exeter Book. Morningside Heights, N.Y.: Columbia UP, 1936, 1961. The ms. source of the OE Riddles. Cf. esp. the extensive bibliography (through 1935), lxxxix-cxvii.

Thorpe, Benjamin, ed. Codex Exoniensis: A Collection of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: The Society of Antiquaries of London, 1842. Includes modern English translations.

Williamson, Craig, ed. The Old English Riddles of the “Exeter Book.” Chapel Hill: U of N.C. Press, 1977. The best single-source work on the Riddles. Full and interesting discussion of the standard ways the Riddles can be (and have been) decoded to yield one-term solutions, often ambiguous. One riddle—about a man “going on his way” and a woman “sitting alone”—is conventionally solved with “Piss” (352ff.) Includes an extensive bibliography (467ff.).

Pearl and Other Middle English Works and the Later Medieval Context

Andrew, Malcolm, and Ronald Waldron, eds. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Berkeley: U of Calif. P, 1978, 1982. Fully annotated primary texts of these linked works.

Bishop, Morris. A Survey of French Literature: Vol. I, The Middle Ages to 1800. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955. Discusses the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, the late 15th century school whose playful modes anticipate Shakespeare’s formal inventiveness and runic obscurantism (84-85).

Graves, Roy Neil. See below, re. Huchown and The Pearl Rune.

Kean, P. M. “Numerical Composition in ‘Pearl’.” Notes and Queries 12 (Jan. 1965): 49-51.

Konick, Marcus. “Numerical Symbolism in Dante and the Pearl.” Modern Language Notes 54 (April 1939): 256-59.

McFarlane, I.D. A Literary History of France: Vol. II, Renaissance France, 1470-1589. London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1974. Discusses the Grands Rhétoriqueurs.

Pearl. Ed. E. V. Gordon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953, 1974. The poem, a long dream vision, in which I first found a runic composition. Indeed the 21-line Pearl Rune is, in one sense at least, the lost “pearl” of the title and of the work’s allegory, suppressed at great personal cost and after much labor by the author, ostensibly a sacrifice to serve God’s greater glory.

Ransom, Daniel J. Poets at Play: Irony and Parody in the Harley Lyrics. Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1985. Deals with other medieval poems in English.

Sachs, Curt. Our Musical Heritage: A Short History of Music. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Describes the elaborately artificial and secretive patterns of musical practice in the late Middle Ages (96ff.).

Tuchman, Barbara W. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Alfred A Knopf., 1978. Discusses “verbal games” and “more or less impolite” verse compositions as evening entertainments for the nobility (234).

Willard, Charity Cannon. Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works. New York: Persea Books, 1984. Describes—and denigrates as puerile—gamelike poems by Chaucer’s younger contemporary, including a “reversible” ballade rétrograde (56).

Hugh-John (Huchoun, Huchown) of the Royal Hall, “Mr. Massey,” and the Hypothetical Hugh John Massey

Amours, F. J., ed. Scottish Alliterative Poems, in Riming Stanzas. Edinburgh: For the Scottish Text Society by Wm. Blackwood and Sons, 1897. Has a long introduction on Huchown.

Crow, Martin M., and Clair C. Olson. Chaucer Life-Records. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. Shows “Johanni Meise” listed alongside “Galfrido Chaucer” (104) as among the “King’s Esquires and Sergeants” in the royal household who on September 10, 1385, received black funereal cloth, “liveries of mourning,” on the occasion of the king’s mother’s death.

Gardner, John. The Life and Times of Chaucer. Discusses John of Massey as the Pearl / Gawain poet, and his “brother…the muralist Hugo of Massey” (14), essentially following Nolan and Farley-Hills (below).

Graves, Roy Neil. Hugh John Massey of the Royal Hall: The Lost Master Poet of Fourteenth-Century England and the Lost Runes [self-published monograph]. Martin, Tenn., 1977. Attempts to establish scores of lost emphatic-line runes buried in medieval texts and to consolidate existing theories of authorship for Pearl (and probably many other texts) by arguing that “Hugh John Massey of the Royal Hall” is not only the lost Hugh (or John) Massey but also the lost “Huchown [i.e., Hugh-John] of Aule Rial” praised in Andrew of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle (ca. 1420?) as “curyousse in his stille, / Fayr of facunde and subtile, / And ay to pleyssance hade delyte, / Mad in metyr meit his dyte….” Notes a reference in Chaucer Life-Records to Johanni Meise. Suggests that Chaucer’s tribute to the “strange knight” named Gawayne [i.e., John] in “The Squire’s Tale” (lines 89-109) might be a tribute to Massey.

—. “John Massey Un-hyd: The Lost Runic Poems in Pearl, Sir Gawain, Cleanness, Patience, & St. Erkenwald” [self-published monograph]. University, Miss., 1977. Attempts to establish lost, authorized runic texts latent in these works; argues that embedded nameplays in these suppressed compositions strengthen the case for Massey’s authorship.

Greenwood, Ormerod, ed. and trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. London: 1956. Proposes Massey as author of Cotton Nero A.x works (pp. 6-12).

MacCracken, Henry Noble. “Concerning Huchown.” PMLA 25 (1910): 507-34. Tries to refute a wide range of generally accepted attributions of medieval alliterative titles to Huchown.

Matthews, William. The Tragedy of Arthur: A Study of the Alliterative “Morte Arthure.” Berkeley: U of Calif. Press, 1960. Attempts to identify this Morte Arthure with Huchown. Discusses George Neilson’s attempts in Huchown of the Awle Ryale (Glasgow, 1902) to attribute a wide body of 14th century alliterative poems to Huchown.

Nolan, Barbara, and David Farley-Hills, “The Authorship of Pearl: Two Notes,” in The Review of English Studies, ns 22 (1971): 295-302. Supports Greenwood by explicating buried anagrams and numerological keys, finding hidden versions of “John Massey.”

Peterson, C. J. “Pearl and St. Erkenwald: Some Evidence for Authorship.” RES, ns 25 (1974): 49-53. Adds discussion of numerologically embedded forms of “Massey” in St. Erkenwald, the fifth poem often attributed to the Pearl Poet.

—. “The Pearl-Poet and John Massey of Cotton, Cheshire.” RES, ns 25 (1974): 257-66. Cites a poem ca. 1411-14 by Thomas Hoccleve mentioning “Maister Massy” as intelligent and inaccessibly arcane.

Robinson, F. N., ed. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957. I have no certain evidence that Chaucer played the Runegame, but my hypothesis is that he would have been in on its coterie patterns as a witty contemporary and likely colleague, mentor, or rival of “Mr. Massey” in the royal household ca. 1390-1400. (Massey apparently lived longer.) In one poem, Chaucer playfully berates Adam, his “own” scribe, for “negligence and rape” that marred his mss. and forced re-writing (534).

Turville-Petre, Thorlac. “Maister Massy.” RES, ns 26 (1975): 130-31.

Ward, A. W., and A. R. Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature. Vol. I: From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907. Includes several relevant essays. P. Giles (100ff.) treats Huchoun, “one of the most mysterious figures in our early literature” (115), under the topic of “Scottish Literature,” tracing “Hucheon of the Awle Realle” to Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil (ca. 1520). Says that “the weight of evidence” goes against attributing Pearl and Sir Gawain to Huchown (372).

Wilson, Edward. “The Anagrams in ‘Pearl’ and ‘St. Erkenwald’.” RES, ns 26 (1975): 133-43. Replies to the Nolan and Peterson arguments, arguing against their cryptographic approaches, but also noting: “…if the poet were writing for a coterie or local audience, and…if his name really were I. (de) Massi, then those ‘in the know’ might be able to solve puzzles which others could not” (143).

Artful and Literate Gameplaying in the Renaissance and Since

Arp, Thomas R. Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. 7th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998. Contains Sylvia Plath’s “Metaphors” (630) and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (693), both playful but not “runic.”

Barolsky, Paul. Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor in Italian Renaissance Art. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1978. Discusses playful, anti-Petrarchan and anti-Neoplatonic elements, especially in the visual arts, looking at Bacchic, priapean, and erotic elements.

Bishop, John Peale. Collected Poems. Ed. Allen Tate, with a preface and a personal memoir. New York: Octagon Books, 1975. Bishop’s “A Recollection” (1934)—a pretty, innocent- looking sonnet by this poet of gentlemanly demeanor—embeds the emphatic initial-letter acrostic FUCK YOUH ALF ASS (71-72), a letterstring unlikely to’ve authored itself and also one suggesting the existence of some coterie of insiders among Bishop’s acquaintances, many of them famous in literary circles of the 1920s-1930s.

Butler, Samuel. Hudibras. Ed. John Wilders. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. This verse work in three parts (1663-78) attacks “outmoded literary ideals and conventions” (Wilders xxvii).

Cahill & Company Reader’s Catalogue. Spring 1987, and loose pages from others. A Division of Regnery Gateway, Inc., 405 West 114 Street, New York, NY 10025. Two undated pages (pre-1987?) include the full text of the “Rune of Hospitality,” sold as an illustrated broadside.

Graves, Roy Neil. “ ‘And all flesh shall see it together’: The Hidden Signature in Handel’s Messiah.” The Norris Bulletin, 6 December 2001, 11, illustrated. See also Bartholomew Sullivan, “Scholar Sees Bit of a Messiah Complex in Handel’s Score,” The [Memphis] Commercial Appeal, 8 December 2001, B1+, illustrated. See also Wendy Isom, “UTM Professor Finds Pun in Handel's ‘Messiah’.” The Jackson [Tennessee] Sun, C1+, illustrated. See also “Class Notes: Sixties.” Unionite: The Union University Magazine, 53.3(Summer 2002): 28.

— . “Bishop’s ‘A Recollection’.” The Explicator 57.4 (Summer 1999): 229-33. See Bishop (above).

—. “Dickinson’s Letters 263 and 271.” The Explicator 53.3 (Spring 1995): 152-55. “Outs” two independently discovered metrical lyrics buried in these letters, building on William Shurr’s approach. See Shurr (below).

—. “Hardy’s ‘Convergence of the Twain’.” The Explicator 53.2 (Winter 1995): 96-99. Shows subtextual bawdry in the close of this poem about marital consummation.

—. “Herbert’s ‘The Collar’.” The Explicator 54.2 (Winter 1996): 73-77. Builds on a 1992 discovery by Miami-Dade student Cary Ader (unpublished, privately communicated) to explain a bifurcated rhyme-code by which Herbert buries acrostic edgewit, heretofore lost. Establishes a paradigm for further exploration of Renaissance poems with complex rhyme schemes.

—. “Nowlan’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’.” The Explicator 55.2 (Winter 1997): 107-11. Discusses riddlic and perhaps “runic” elements in poems by the modern Canadian poet Alden Nowlan.

—. “Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126.” The Explicator 54.4 (Summer 1996): 203-07. Discusses the “empty couplet” lines in No. 126 as a gamelike, purposeful “quietus”; also looks at acrostic elements in the text.

—. “Two Newfound Poems by Edmund Spenser: The Buried Short-Line Runes in Epithalamion and Prothalamion.” Spenser Studies VII (AMS Press, 1987): 199-238. A modest follow- up to Hieatt’s discoveries of buried numerological structure; attempts to illustrate various lost elements of suppressed design, especially in Spenser’s series of “short lines,” which Hieatt thought might be meaningful but could not explain.

—. “Whitman’s ‘A Riddle Song’.” The Explicator 55.1 (Fall 1996): 22-25. Discusses acrostic and riddlic elements in this and other late poems (especially) by Whitman.

Hieatt, A. Kent. Short Time’s Endless Monument: The Symbolism of the Numbers in Edmund Spenser’s "Epithalamion.” New York: Columbia UP, 1960; rpt. Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972. Hieatt discovered a complex numbers scheme long buried in the architecture of Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion (1595). See Abrams I:771.

Hutchin, Peter. Games Authors Play. Methuen, 1984. Applies the concept of “game” to literature and looks at games involving language, structure, puzzles, and deception of readers.

Jacobson, Robert. Wolfgang Mozart; His Life and Times, 1756-1782. Program Notes for the Piano Concerto in B Flat, etc. New York, Funk Wagnalls, Inc., n.d. Mentions arcane practices in music ca. 1770.

Jaen, Didier T. Borges’ Esoteric Library: Metaphysics to Metafiction. Univ. Press of America, 1992. Connects Borges to the “esoteric tradition” in literature.

Kahn, John Ellison. “Polysemania, Semantic Taint, and Related Conditions.” Verbatim: The Language Quarterly 12, no. 3 (Winter 1986): 1-3. Discusses the “modern word-conscious mind” with its “abnormal awareness of possible ambiguity” that “bring[s] to mind the inappropriate or unintended sense of a word in any context.” Much here seems reminiscent of the playful Renaissance attitude toward language that one finds in Q.

Nabokov, Vladimir. “The Vane Sisters.” The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Vintage International, 1997. 619-31. Written in English in 1951, the story ends with a mystery whose presence is not overtly signaled, one that is “answered” by what the initial letters of the words in the last paragraph spell out.

National Geographic. Nov. 1975, p. 625. Discusses Christopher Columbus’ signature cipher.

Nicholson, Mervyn. “Reading [Wallace] Stevens’ Riddles.” College English, January 1988, 13-31.

Petrarch: Sonnets and Songs. Trans. A. M. Armi. NY: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968. Petrarch established the sonnet, the (numerologically structured) sonnet cycle, and many lyrical conceits as patterns that became standard in the Renaissance; Shakespeare both drew on and perverted these conventions.

Sachs, Curt. Our Musical Heritage: A Short History of Music. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1955. Discusses coterie practices among early composers.

Sante, Luc. “Scientist of the Fantastic.” The New York Review of Books 32.1 (31 Jan. 1985): 16. Discusses the homophonic ciphers of Raymond Roussel[l] (1877-1933). See also Michel Foucault’s Raymond Roussell (Gallimard, 1963).

Shurr, William H., ed., with Anna Dunlap and Emily Grey Shurr. New Poems of Emily Dickinson. Chapel Hill: The U of N.C. P, 1993. Recomposes 498 short “lost poems” buried in Dickinson’s letters. Finds a previously unconnected continuum between her “verse” and her “prose.”

Tobin, Jacqueline, and Raymond Dobard. Hidden in Plain View. Amazon.com, 1999. Pre- publication information on PBS and Oprah summarizes the authors’ thesis that quilt-block patterns such as Monkey Wrench, Flying Geese, and North Star functioned to convey coterie communication among blacks during the era of slavery. Quilts hanging in plain sight could be “message maps” encoding conventionalized symbolic information, e.g., about safety and danger and functioning as part of the Underground Railroad.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: New American Library, 1964. Includes “A Riddle Song” and other “suspicious” texts that seem surprising in the body of writings by a poet usually regarded as “serious” and “public” in his rhetoric.

Willen, Gerald. A Casebook on Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” 2nd ed. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, Co., Inc., 1969. Willen (xi-xii) suggests that James’s story (1898), a conundrum in the ghost-story tradition that opens with a narrative frame, is craftily constructed to equate its narrator, Douglas, with the character Miles, who dies at the end of the narrative—a set of technical impossibilities. Willen’s 2nd ed. credits Carvel Collins’s 1955 Explicator article as being first to advance the argument (Willen viii) and includes other essayists who explore this theory. (Before discovering that Willen had preempted my argument in print, I had deduced independently ca. 1962 that James meant us to equate Douglas with Miles—underscoring several clear parallels and even having the narrator pun about his own descent from heaven: “I was at Trinity, and I found her [the governess] at home on my coming down the second summer” [see Willen 5, my emphasis].) The story has riddlic and coterie elements, especially since one must ferret out not only the mystery itself but also (and first) the fact that any mystery exists.

Woodman, Leonora. Stanza My Stone: Wallace Stevens and the Hermetic Tradition. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue UP, 1983. Discusses Hermetic and Rosicrucian thought and the alchemical metaphor and applies these—as serious philosophical aspects, not gameplaying influences—to Stevens’ poems.

Publications about the Runes, 1977-2010 (Chronological)

Roy Neil Graves. “Hugh John Massey of the Royal Hall: The Lost Master Poet of Fourteenth-Century England and the Lost Runes” [self-published monograph]. Martin, Tenn., 1977.

—. “John Massey Un-hyd: “The Lost Runic Poems in Pearl, Sir Gawain, Cleanness, Patience, & St. Erkenwald” [self-published monograph]. University, Miss., 1977.

—. “The Runic ‘Beowulf’ and Other Lost Anglo-Saxon Poems, Reconstructed and Annotated” [self-published monograph]. Martin, Tenn., 1979.

—. Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets: The 154 Runic Poems Reconstructed and Introduced [self- published monograph]. Martin, Tenn., 1979.

“Graves Claims Discovery of Lost Poems.” The Oxford [MS] Eagle, Jan. 20, 1984, 12.

Riley, Harriet. “Shakespeare Scholar Finds Hidden Sonnets.” The [Memphis] Commercial Appeal, Jan. 20, 1984, B2.

“Prof Says ‘Hidden Sonnets’ of Shakespeare Discovered.” The Miami Herald, Jan. 22, 1984, 3B.

[Nanney, Robert]. “UTM Professor Claims Rare Literary Discovery.”The Weakley County [Tenn.] Press, Jan. 26, 1984, 1, with an edited version of Rune 1 titled “Sample New Sonnet From First Lines.”

McDaniel, William. “UTM Professor Makes Shakespearean Discovery.” The Jackson [Tenn.] Sun, Jan. 29, 1984, 5D, including an edited version of “Round [Rune] One.”

Higgins, Richard. “Was the Bard Playing Tricks?” The Boston Globe, March 9, 1984, l. Includes a staff art pasteup recomposition of “Round [Rune] 1.

“Hidden Poems Emerge.” Torchbearer [The Univ. of Tenn., Knoxville] 23.2 (1984): 4.

Ivins, Jon. “New Shakespearian Poems Found Claims Graves.” The [UT-Martin] Pacer, Feb. 2, 1984, 3, with an edited version of “Round [Rune] One.”

Princeton University Class of 1961, Twenty-Fifth Reunion Yearbook. Princeton, N.J., June 1986, 102. Reprints Round [Rune] 1, with brief background comment.

Graves, Roy Neil. “Two Newfound Poems by Edmund Spenser: The Buried Short-Line Runes in Epithalamion and Prothalamion.” Spenser Studies VII (1987): 199-238.

—. “A Facsimile of the ‘First Folio’ Ur-Text Arrangement of William Shakespeare’s 154 Sonnets, Sets I-XI.” Martin, Tenn., 1989. This monograph establishes the hypothetical 14-sonnet arrangement on the holograph set leaves, in a 4-4-4-2 pattern mimicking the sonnet itself.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 80.” Yearbook/Directory of the 1991 Governor’s School for the Humanities. Martin, Tenn., 1991. 172. As a teacher in the Governor’s School, I used “my page” from 1991 to 1996 for initial publications of selected runes, one a year, with brief background comments 1992ff. The directories are variously, sometimes whimsically titled.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 117.” 1992 Yearbook Directory, The Tennessee Governor’s School for the Humanities. Martin, Tenn., 1992. 175.

—. “Suppressed Design in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Toward Envisioning the Lost ‘First Folio’” [abstract]. Tennessee Philological Bulletin 30 (1993): 65-66. An abstract of a paper with the same title, read at the 88th annual meeting of the Tennessee Philological Association, Carson- Newman College, Jefferson City, Tenn., Feb. 26, 1993. The abstract epitomizes a few main points that are more fully developed in the 1995 Upstart Crow essay with the same title (see below). This paper, read in a sparsely attended session at a conference almost closed by a blizzard, was in effect a warm-up for the longer essay.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 104A.” Yearbook/Directory of the 1993 Governor’s School for the Humanities. Martin, Tenn., 1993. 171.

—. A handout to accompany “George Herbert’s ‘Double Pleasures’: Suppressed Design and Rhyme-Scheme Wit in ‘The Collar’.” South Central Conference on Christianity and Literature, Shreveport, La., Feb. 4, 1994.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 82.” 1994 GSH Yearbook/Directory. Martin, Tenn., 1994. 171.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 59.” Yearbook of the 1995 Governor’s School for the Humanities. Martin, Tenn., 1995. 171.

—. Shakespeare’s Sonnets Upside Down. Martin: UTM Dept. of English, 1995. Establishes the 154 reversed variants of the Sonnets that—if early samplings prove indicative—may be authorially manipulated and merit eventual exploration. (To start this cycle, one begins at Sonnet 154.12 and works backwards or “upward,” initially ignoring the last couplet in Q, i.e., Sonnet 154.13-14; thus each reversed sonnet recomposition “looks like” a sonnet and closes with a couplet. The last reversed text “takes on” the leftover couplet from the end of the cycle.) This publication also lays the basis for the eventual exploration of the 154 Reversed Runes, another potential runic variant.

—. A handout to accompany “The Pearl Rune, a Lost Example of Suppressed Design in a Medieval Manuscript,” read at The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) conference, Ariz. State Univ., Tempe, Feb. 18, 1995.

—. “Suppressed Design in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Toward Envisioning the Lost ‘First Folio’.” The Upstart Crow 15 (1995): 115-35.

—. “Two Newly Formatted Poems by Emily Dickinson: Verses Embedded in Letters 263 and 271 [abstract].” Tennessee Philological Bulletin 32 (1995): 104-05. A one-page handout accompanied the paper, showing segments of letter materials formatted as poems.

—. “Dickinson’s Letters 263 and 271.” The Explicator 53.3 (Spring 1995): 152-55.

—. “Hardy’s ‘Convergence of the Twain’.” The Explicator 53.2 (Winter 1995): 96-99.

—. A handout to accompany the paper “New Answers to the Old English Riddles: Runic Embeddings and Acrostic Codelines in The Exeter Book,” read at the Ariz. Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) conference, Ariz. State Univ., Tempe, Feb. 17, 1996.

—. “Subtextual Wit in Alden Nowlan’s Poem ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” [abstract]. Tennessee Philological Bulletin 33 (1996): 94-95. An abstract of a paper titled “Alden Nowlen as Runemaster…,” read at the 91st annual meeting of the Tenn. Philological Assoc., David Lipscomb Univ., Nashville, Feb. 23, 1996. A 4-pp. handout exploring decodings of acrostic wit clarified the paper presentation.

—. “Herbert’s ‘The Collar’.” The Explicator 54.2 (Winter 1996): 73-77.

—. “Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126.” The Explicator 54.4 (Summer 1996): 203-07.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 19.” The Yearbook/Directory of the Tenn. Governor’s School for the Humanities. Martin, Tenn., 1996. 154.

—. “Whitman’s ‘A Riddle Song’.” The Explicator 55.1 (Fall 1996): 22-25.

—. A handout to accompany the paper “Shakespeare’s Rune 55: A First Reading of the ‘Call It Winter’ Subtext in the 1609 Sonnets Quarto,” read at the Ariz. Center for Medieval and Renaissance (ACMRS) Studies, Ariz. State Univ., Tempe, Feb. 14, 1997. Includes Rune 55.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 69: A First Reading of the ‘Will-I-am’ Subtext in the 1609 Sonnets Quarto.” Tennessee Philological Bulletin 34 (1997): 79-81 [abstract]. Includes the text. A 3- pp. handout clarified the paper when it was presented.

—. “Nowlan’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’.” The Explicator 55.2 (Winter 1997): 107-11.

—. “Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets: Eleven Examples of the 154 Runic Poems Embedded in the 1609 Quarto.” Upstart Crow 17 (1997): 108-42. Edited texts, with paraphrases and commentary, of Runes 1, 17, 33, 54, 65, 82, 92, 104A, 117, 136, and 153.

Phelps, Jennifer. “Professor Finds Lost Poems in Shakespearean Sonnets.” The [UT-Martin] Pacer, Oct. 29, 1998, 4, 8.

Thomas, Kathy D. “Professor Uncovers 154 ‘Hidden’ Sonnets.” The Jackson [Tenn.] Sun, Jan. 13, 1999, 4A.

Graves, Roy Neil. “Bishop’s ‘A Recollection’.” The Explicator 57.4 (Summer 1999): 229-33. See Bishop (above). Thomas, Kathy D. “Professor Uncovers 154 ‘Hidden’ Sonnets,”The Jackson [Tenn.] Sun, 13 January 1999, 4A. 

The Unionite [of Union University, Jackson, TN], Summer 1999, p. 29. 

Sullivan, Bartholomew. “If Eye Be True, Bard Hid Sonnets We Never Knew.” The [Memphis] Commercial Appeal [Memphis], 19 May 2001: A1-A2, including recomposed texts of Runes 19, 30, and 82 in edited forms, with artwork by Penny Wolfe.

—. “Sonnets Within Sonnets. Shakespeare: Scholar Finds Lines of Hidden Poetry.” From Scripps Howard News Service. Spartanburg [SC] Herald-Journal, 27 May 2001: C2.

—. “ ‘You yourself here live’: A First Reading of Shakespeare’s Rune 2, Another Authorized ‘Lost Sonnet’ in the 1609 Quarto” [abstract]. Tennessee Philological Bulletin 38(2001): 85-86.

—. “Shakespeare's Rune 61,” with contextual discussion. Princeton University Class of 1961: 40th Reunion Yearbook.  Princeton, NJ, 2001. 104.

[Paquette, Robert Eric.] “Last Issue.” Unsigned editorial. The Norris [Tennessee] Bulletin, 25 October 2001, 2.

Graves, Roy Neil. “ ‘And all flesh shall see it together’: The Hidden Signature in Handel’s Messiah.” The Norris Bulletin, 6 December 2001, 11, illustrated.

Sullivan, Bartholomew. “Scholar Sees Bit of a Messiah Complex in Handel’s Score,” The [Memphis] Commercial Appeal, 8 December 2001, B1+, illustrated.

Isom, Wendy. “UTM Professor Finds Pun in Handel’s ‘Messiah’.” The Jackson [Tennessee] Sun, 22 Dec. 2001, Religion sec., C1+, illustrated.

“Class Notes: Sixties.” Unionite: The Union University Magazine, 53.3(Summer 2002): 28.

Robert Eric Paquette, "Shakespeare, Neil Graves, and The Norris Bulletin." The Norris [Tennessee] Bulletin, 4 November 2004, 1. And see the letter to the editor on p. 2.

Graves, Roy Neil. Shakespeare's Lost Sonnets: The Norris Bulletin Essays (June 2001-November 2004). Martin, TN, 2005.

Bud Grimes. "The Da Vinci Code of Shakespeare: Was Shakespeare Hiding Something?" UT Martin's Campus Scene 41 (Summer/Fall 2005): 4-6.

—, "Was Shakespeare Hiding Something?" Tennessee Alumnus 85.4 (Fall 2005): 34-37.

Brian Kindle, "Mini-Profile: Roy Neil Graves A.M. '61, Discovering Shakespeare's Secret Sonnets." Duke Magazine 94.2 (March-April 2008): 62. Web. 11 May 2010 <http:www.dukemagazine.duke.edu...>.

Conference Papers and Public Presentations on the Runes,
including some discussions of the visible 1690 Quarto cycle and
of related aspects of literate gameplaying in non-Shakespearean texts (Chronological)

Graves, Roy Neil. “Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets: ‘Round One.’” Miss. Philological Assoc., Oxford, Jan. 20, 1984.

—. Ten-minute phone interview. The John Gilbert Show, CKO News and Information Network (Canada), Jan. 1984, about the discovery of the “lost sonnets.”

—. “Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets.” Virginia Highlands Festival, Abingdon, Aug. 5, 1984.

—. “Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets: ‘Round One.’” Tenn. Governor’s School for the Humanities, UT-Martin, July 1985.

—. “Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets.” Annual Muriel Tomlinson lecture, sponsored by Phi Kappa Phi, UT-Martin, Jan. 9, 1991.

—. “Suppressed Design in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Toward Envisioning the Lost ‘First Folio’.” Tenn. Philological Assoc., Carson-Newman College, Jefferson City, Feb. 26, 1993.

—. “George Herbert’s ‘Double Pleasures’: Suppressed Design and Rhyme-Scheme Wit in ‘The Collar’.” South Central Conference on Christianity and Literature, Shreveport, La., Feb. 4, 1994.

—. “The Pearl Rune, a Lost Example of Suppressed Design in a Medieval Manuscript.” The Ariz. Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) conference, Ariz. State Univ., Tempe, Feb. 18, 1995.

—. “Two Newly Formatted Poems by Emily Dickinson: Verses Embedded in Letters 263 and 271.” Tenn. Philological Assoc., UT-Martin, Feb. 25, 1995.

—. “New Answers to the Old English Riddles: Runic Embeddings and Acrostic Codelines in The Exeter Book.” Ariz. Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) conference, Ariz. State Univ., Tempe, Feb. 17, 1996.

—. “Alden Nowlan as Runemaster: Subtextual Wit in ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” Tenn. Philological Assoc., Lipscomb Univ., Nashville, Feb. 23, 1996.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 55: A First Reading of the ‘Call It Winter’ Subtext in the 1609 Sonnets Quarto.” Ariz. Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) conference, Ariz. State Univ., Tempe, Feb. 14, 1997.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 69: A First Reading of the ‘Will-I-am’ Subtext in the 1609 Sonnets Quarto.” Tenn. Philological Assoc., UT-Chattanooga, Feb. 21, 1997.

—. “ ‘My outcast state’':  A First Reading of Shakespeare’s Rune 30, One of the 154 Lost Coterie Authorizations in the 1609 Sonnets Quarto.” Tennessee Philological Association, Cookeville, 25 February 2000. 

—. “‘You yourself here live’: A First Reading of Shakespeare’s Rune 2, Another Authorized ‘Lost Sonnet’ in the 1609 Quarto.”  Tennessee Philological Association, Johnson City, 23 February 2001.

—. “Toward Cracking the Acrostic Code in Blake’s ‘London’.” Tennessee Philological Association, Nashville (Trevecca Nazarene Univ.), 22 Feb. 2002.

—. “‘Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die’: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Thomas Thorpe, and the Unpublished Play Sir Thomas More.” Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) conference, Tempe, AZ, Arizona State University, 14 February 2003.

—“‘Abraham took Ilium’: Emily Dickinson as Punster.” Tennessee Philological Association, Columbia (Columbia State Community College), 27 Feb. 2004.

—. "Who's in Charge Here? Acrostic Bawdry and Its Import in Raleigh's 'The Nimphs reply to the Sheepheard'." The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) conference, Arizona State University, 16 February 2008.

—. "Hearing with Hungry Eyes: Synesthesia in Shakespeare's Sonnets." The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) conference, Arizona State University, 13 February 2009.

—. "'How like a winter': The Seasons in Shakespeare's Sonnets." Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) conference, Arizona State University, 12 February 2010.

Media Discussion by Others of Shakespeare’s Runes (Chronological)

“Graves Claims Discovery of Lost Poems.” The Oxford [Miss.] Eagle, Jan. 20, 1984, 12.

Ivins, Jon. “New Shakespearian Poems Found Claims Graves.” The [UT-Martin] Pacer, Feb. 2, 1984, 3, with an edited version of “Round [Rune] One.”

Riley, Harriet. “Shakespeare Scholar Finds Hidden Sonnets.” The [Memphis] Commercial Appeal, Jan. 20, 1984, B2.

“Prof Says ‘Hidden Sonnets’ of Shakespeare Discovered.” The Miami Herald, Jan. 22, 1984, 3B.

[Nanney, Robert]. “UTM Professor Claims Rare Literary Discovery.” The Weakley County [Tenn.] Press, Jan. 26, 1984, 1, with an edited version titled “Sample New Sonnet from First Lines.”

McDaniel, William. “UTM Professor Makes Shakespearean Discovery.” The Jackson [Tenn.] Sun, Jan. 29, 1984, 5D, including an edited version of “Round [Rune] One.”

Ten-minute phone interview. The John Gilbert Show, CKO News and Information Network (Canada), Jan. 1984.

Higgins, Richard. “Was the Bard Playing Tricks?” The Boston Globe, March 9, 1984, l. Includes a staff art pasteup recomposition of Round [Rune] 1. [Article is archived under title, 1984, and available for a small fee.]

“Hidden Poems Emerge,” Torchbearer [The Univ. of Tenn., Knoxville] 23.2 (1984): 4.

Thomas, Kathy D. “Professor Uncovers 154 ‘Hidden’ Sonnets,”The Jackson [Tenn.] Sun, 13 January 1999, 4A. 

The Unionite [of Union University, Jackson, TN], Summer 1999, p. 29. 

Bartholomew Sullivan, “Sonnets Within Sonnets. Shakespeare: Scholar Finds Lines of Hidden Poetry.” From Scripps Howard News Service. Spartanburg [SC] Herald-Journal, 27 May 2001: C2.

Bartholomew Sullivan, “If Eye Be True, Bard Hid Sonnets We Never Knew.” The [Memphis] Commercial Appeal [Memphis], 19 May 2001: A1-A2. [Check archives.]

[Paquette, Robert Eric.] “Last Issue.” Unsigned editorial. The Norris [Tenn.] Bulletin, 25 October 2001, 2.

—. "Shakespeare, Neil Graves, and The Norris Bulletin." The Norris [Tennessee] Bulletin, 4 November 2004, 1. And see the letter to the editor on p. 2.

Bud Grimes. "The Da Vinci Code of Shakespeare: Was Shakespeare Hiding Something?" UT Martin's Campus Scene 41 (Summer/Fall 2005): 4-6.

—. "Was Shakespeare Hiding Something?" Tennessee Alumnus 85.4 (Fall 2005): 34-37.

Brian Kindle, "Mini-Profile: Roy Neil Graves A.M. '61, Discovering Shakespeare's Secret Sonnets." Duke Magazine 94.2 (March-April 2008): 62. Web. 20 May 2010.

Publications and Authorized Reprintings of the Primary Texts of Shakespeare’s Runes (Chronological)

Graves, Roy Neil. Shakespeare's Lost Sonnets: The 154 Runic Poems Reconstructed and Introduced. Martin, Tenn., 1979. This groundwork, self-published booklet includes all 154 of the texts in unedited forms and establishes copyrights on them. Additionally, the volume includes edited versions (and some discussion) of Runes 1, 2, 9, 19, 20, 25, 32, 49, 65, 73, 80, 82, 99A, 99B, 100A, 100B, 101A, 101B, 102A, 102B, 103A, 103B, 104A, 104B, 106A, 106B, 110A, 110B, 112A, 112B, 127, 128, and 154. Showing the A/B bifurcation in Set VIII was particularly important at this early stage because that set, opening with Sonnet 99 (which has an “extra,” 15th line), is aberrational.

[Nanney, Robert]. “UTM Professor Claims Rare Literary Discovery.” The Weakley County [Tenn.] Press, Jan. 26, 1984, 1. Includes an edited text of Rune 1, titled “Sample New Sonnet from First Lines.”

McDaniel, William. “UTM Professor Makes Shakespearean Discovery,” The Jackson [TN] Sun, Jan. 29, 1984, 5D, including an edited version of Round [Rune] 1.

Higgins, Richard. “Was the Bard Playing Tricks?” The Boston Globe, March 9, 1984, l. Includes a staff art pasteup recomposition of Round [Rune] 1.

Ivins, Jon. “New Shakespearian Poems Found Claims Graves.” The [UT-Martin] Pacer, Feb. 2, 1984, 3, with an edited version of “Round [Rune] One.”

Princeton University Class of 1961, Twenty-Fifth Reunion Yearbook. Princeton, N.J., June 1986, 102. Reprints Round [Rune] 1.

Graves, Roy Neil. “Shakespeare’s Rune 80.” Yearbook/Directory of the 1991 Governor’s School for the Humanities. Martin, Tenn., 1991. 172.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 117.” 1992 Yearbook Directory, The Tennessee Governor’s School for the Humanities. Martin, Tenn., 1992. 175.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 104A.” Yearbook/Directory of the 1993 Governor’s School for the Humanities. Martin, Tenn., 1993. 171.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 82.” 1994 GSH Yearbook/Directory. Martin, Tenn., 1994. 171.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 59.” Yearbook of the 1995 Governor’s School for the Humanities. Martin, Tenn., 1995. 171.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 19.” The Yearbook/Directory of the Tennessee Governor’s School for the Humanities. Martin, Tenn., 1996. 154.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 69: A First Reading of the ‘Will-I-am’ Subtext in the 1609 Sonnets Quarto.” Tennessee Philological Bulletin 34 (1997): 79-81 [abstract]. Includes Rune 69.

—. Shakespeare’s Sonnets Upside Down. Martin: UTM Dept. of English, 1995.

—. A handout to accompany the paper “Shakespeare’s Rune 55: A First Reading of the ‘Call It Winter’ Subtext in the 1609 Sonnets Quarto.” Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance (ACMRS) Studies conference, Ariz. State Univ., Tempe, Feb. 14, 1997. Includes Rune 55.

—. “Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets: Eleven Examples of the 154 Runic Poems Embedded in the 1609 Quarto.” Upstart Crow 17 (1997): 108-42. Includes Runes 1, 17, 33, 54, 65, 82, 92, 104A, 117, 136, and 153.

—. Rune 82 was made available for reprinting in October 1998 in a UT-Martin press release.

— “ ‘My outcast state’: A First Reading of Shakespeare’s Rune 30, One of the 154 Lost Coterie Authorizations in the 1609 Sonnets Quarto” [abstract]. Tennessee Philological Bulletin 37(2000): 72-73.

—. “ ‘You yourself here live’: A First Reading of Shakespeare’s Rune 2, Another Authorized ‘Lost Sonnet’ in the 1609 Quarto” [abstract]. Tennessee Philological Bulletin 38(2001): 85-86.

—. “Shakespeare’s Rune 61,” with contextual discussion. Princeton University Class of 1961: 40th Reunion Yearbook.  Princeton, NJ, 2001. 104.

Sullivan, Bartholomew. “If Eye Be True, Bard Hid Sonnets We Never Knew.” The [Memphis] Commercial Appeal [Memphis], 19 May 2001: A1-A2, including recomposed texts of Runes 19, 30, and 82 in edited forms, with artwork by Penny Wolfe.

—. “Sonnets Within Sonnets. Shakespeare: Scholar Finds Lines of Hidden Poetry.”  Spartanburg [SC] Herald-Journal, 27 May 2001: C2, including recomposed texts of Runes 19, 30, and 82 in edited forms, with artwork by Penny Wolfe. From Scripps Howard News Service. 

Bud Grimes, "Was Shakespeare Hiding Something?" Tennessee Alumnus 85.4 (Fall 2005): 34-37, with Rune 82 in recomposed, paraphrased, and edited forms.

---. "The Da Vinci Code of Shakespeare: Was Shakespeare Hiding Something?" UT Martin's Campus Scene 41 (Summer/Fall 2005): 4-6, with artwork by Kara Hooper showing a recomposition of Rune 1, along with Rune 82 in recomposed, paraphrased, and edited forms.

—. Shakespeare's Lost Sonnets: The Norris Bulletin Essays (June 2001-November 2004). Martin, TN, 2005. This oversized collection, now available in various libraries, compiles articles published in The Norris [Tennessee] Bulletin over a three and one-half year period. In mid-2001, after reading Bartholomew Sullivan’s article on my project (see above), editor Eric Paquette got in touch and asked me to begin a weekly series of articles for his paper, The Norris Bulletin. On 4 July 2001, he published an initial background essay as a separate flyer, and on 12 July 2001 he ran an editorial introduction titled “Unriddling Shakespeare's Sonnets.” Thereafter the series ran weekly, typically featuring in each issue a previously unpublished sonnet-length text—one example of Shakespeare’s 154 Runes. Each article in the series, except for a few pieces that provide general background includes a recomposed text in three forms—a paste-up, an edited version, and a paraphrse—with background commentary on the text.

—. This website posting of all the Runes. Initial posting 23 May 2003, with succeeding alterations and updatings. Last updating of this page 20 May 2010.