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Comments
The striking
verses of Rune 26 comment on how a covertly “antique/antic”
text of Will’s, with its far-fetched figures, can bring the poet’s
beloved subject/muse immortality of a sort different from anything the
“eternal lines” of the visible Sonnets can achieve. (Scholars
agree that “antique” (Q3) puns on “antic.”)
“Antique/antic” in the hidden cycle suggests the runic tradition
(which my own studies trace back in England to the early Middle Ages)
while anticipating that posterity will be “peeping” into the
darkness of these old lines for a long time, as indeed we are still doing.
The text figuratively
represents Will’s listener and muse (1) as a snug babe in a darkened
room, with the poet being like an old nurse who “peeps” at the
babe and loses all other realities. The cribbed babe is also like this
hidden poem, absorbing the poet’s full attention; the nurse’s
eyes are like “twiring” (blinking) stars.
The
text as usual is full of all sorts of jokes. By the magic of
puns, it can “change [the muse’s] day of youth to ‘sullied
Knight’” (1)—a pun echoed as “Black Knight” (13).
Puns also hint at “sullied” diapers that might be “changed.”
An “antic song” may be a nursery tune, with “stretched
miter” (Q3) a pun about a straining, grunting tot—a
“mite[r].” Other scatological clues hint at elongated, golden
“creations,” laboriously “expressed” (9) and “coiled”
(eyepun 11); thus the “new face” of the nurse (13) might well
show a nose wrinkling at a stench. Crotch-focused wit about “one
thing” and “no thing” (6) seems to call the babe’s
gender into question. (Puns on male “things” and female “no-things,”
of course, occur routinely in Renaissance texts.)
The idea that
Will’s tongue has “More expressed” is a likely
pun about the unfinished, unpublished Play of Sir Thomas More that scholars
believe the Bard had a hand in (see E. M. Thompson, Shakespeare’s
Handwriting [Oxford, 1916; Folcraft, 1970]). Puns in 8-13 may gesture
toward More’s beheading, his jesting on the scaffold, and the poet’s
role as a spokesman for a blank-eyed figure who has lost his head.
“To
guild the even[ing]” (14) may pun about a “guild”
of darkness—a “School of Night.” (In the 1590s a London
coterie of that name included Sir Walter Raleigh. Its members were rumored
to indulge in impieties such as spelling “God” backwards.)
We note a kind
of theatrical stage emerging in the rune as we remember that Will’s
expressive tongue (9) and “stretched meter” (3)—his enjambed
blank verse—can “change day to night” (1) under a canopy
of the heavens (7), and that the “tender nurse” (8) is a stock
stage figure. “Forgot” (11) suggests lost lines.
Formally,
the poet imitates the “stretched meter” of his “antic
song” with an attenuated 9th line, which is “More thin....”
The hag-like nurse with “twiring” eyes (8, 13-14) seems an incipient
version of the Dark Lady or perverse mistress, whose presence pervades
Q’s last two sets, X and XI, comprising the visible sonnets 127-154.
Letterstring
wit in Q’s lines always houses encyclopedic possibilities.
Here, I think, such wit even plays on the name F. Sandells, encoded as
candells[,] f...(7). Fulk Sandells was a Stratford man
who signed Will’s marriage bond; I deduce (from several implicit
jokes in Q) that Will sees him as having helped stage a kind of shotgun
wedding binding the poet to a pregnant bide, Anne Hathaway. One decoding
of 6-7 is Will’s sarcastic pun: “...Guest of ‘eagle’
Sandells, F., I exit anew...” (code: ...g.Ast hof egould candells
f I xt inheau...).
Line 8 encodes
medical puns—“nerve,” “syringe,” and “ill”—that
I think Will designed for his Stratford-based son-in-law, Dr. John Hall,
to enjoy as an early (and primary) reader/player. Dr. Hall would have
been in the poet’s mind ca. 1608 as Will finished preparing the
Q ms. for publication. Likely the period involved revision as much as
original composition.
Subtextual
wit, as usual, houses an encyclopedic array of possibilities:
cough, bivouac, spatter, ostent, Rome, argot, Doll, Zurich, forage, and
heckled. Examples below illustrate fuller expansions of potentialities
in the line letterstrings.
The dateline
in the acrostic code that “locates” this poem at 1:00 a.m.,
10 February 1608 (see below) will seem less conjured to readers who consider
it in the context of many other authorized clues about the time frame
in which the Q texts grew.
Sample Puns
1)
Token; Toucan jaw; Touch Anne, Jew, ready “O” is [that] you’d
hit, awful “I’d” knight (offal-eyed night); change,
sullied [scatological, suggesting diapers]; O, Southy, O Sullied
Knight [cf. “Dark Knight,” 25.13-14]
2)
See Anne, make [mate], you live; See Anne, my cue; lore (lure) of elf;
livers love, eye nice “O,” semen; seamen; lower; loo;
eyes phallic
2-3) John
“Eeiis!” O feminine distress he’d meet (mete)
3) Anne,
deaf to wretched meter
3-4) Anne
deaf, red (deferred) shit made her ass an antique, sanguine end; head
made her often antic, sanguine; Antique Son, Jew; W., Hen., eye, neat
urn, “awl” I an ass
4-5)
eye meat, how gross (huge roast, arose), tough; grow tougher body as pattern
to f--k, seeding men
5)
urn to f--k, seeding m’ end; Four, bawdy, spatter Nate (knight)
5-6)
to suck seeding men (to suck seed, inch-men), biting wand-thing
6) tome
(tomb) ye propose; no thing; biting wand, injure “O,” my pure,
puffing O
6-7) th’
inches t’ hose gold see
7)
F--k old Sandells, F., aye X’d [obliterated, honored as a constellation)
in heaven’s air; Ass thou see, gold candles, 16 [inches], heavy,
sour; I X’d any Eve, Annie’s heir
8) Ostent
rune, your fare be a baser Rome faring ill; Ass tender
9) Mordant
[biting] Hat.-tongued Hat., m’ whore, Hath more expressed; Moor;
more, tongue [bawdy]; m’ “O” Rex pierced
9-10)
th’ Moor expressed delight; Hath., m’ whore, expressed delights
to pee-pee, to gaze at Harry jaunty
10) Delhi;
two [eyes]; reign
10-11) Indian
delta; anoint handle; Stop a bit. August Harry anointing dolt—Harry
S. ’tis argot for which he toiled; witch; coiled; John
11) Anne,
Hall, the rest forgot; And Doll there Shakespeare forgot; “Four,
go to Zurich,” he called; or go to forage, heckled
11-12) for
Witch he toiled to show me worthy of th’ heir’s wittier aspect;
Did “O” show me worthy?
12) toss home
(homme) two foamy, warty “O’s,” their feud
rough, pieced; ass pissed; wart—high, austere, wittier if pieced
(I’ve pissed)
12-13) Aspect;
Respect, my kiss, be jacking “I,” jet beauteous
13) Ma[t]e
S., Black Night Beauteous, Anne, her old face new [cf. the Dark Mistress
of Sets X-XI]
13-14) Knight
body; innate bawdy, I owe you, Sandells, ass new, W.H., in his park lying,
fitter ass t’ worry (earn, “urn”) 14)
O titty huge you awl, steady, even; t’ worry not, thou guild, fit
th’ eave (Eve) in; knot; gildest [scatological], re infant’s
feces—cf. gold candles (7), coiled (11) and line
1
Acrostic Wit
The
downward acrostic code—T CAWF BAAM DAT MW—suggests,
e.g., “T’ see a wife be (T’ see awe, fop), I A.M. date
mew,” “T[om?], cough, bay, m’ day t’ mew,”
“T’ say ‘Wife, be Ham dead,’ hymn W.,” “Take
a wife. Bam! Dead m’ w[ife, whore],” “’Tis off-beamed
item [cf. the directive to the “guild” in 14 about the “eave”].
W. [suggesting an inverted roof],”and “’Tis I (T’
see aye, T’ say), 10 Feb., 1 A.M., ’O8, I’m W.”
This
codeline seems to be crafted to suggest that it hides a date, given that
its code elements suggest “date-mew” (DAT MW), that is,
“date hiding place” (OED) along with “A.M.” (AM) and
“Feb.” (FB). Such “datelines,” common in the Runes,
tend to set players off on wild goose hunts because the lettercodes are
typically ambiguous. Here, e.g., both “AT” and “B”
may encode “8.” “A” may mean “I” (= 1);
AW or D = 0; and several ciphers are Roman numerals. One plausibly decoded
variant is “’Tis aye 10 [= VV] Feb., 1:00 A.M., ‘08....”
Certainly 1608 “works,” given Q’s publication date, 1609.
The
upward reverse codeline letterstring—WM TAD MA A B FWACT—conveys
such potentialities as “Wm. dead may aye be f--ked”—with
plays on “A.D.” and “May,” “fact,”
“of 10 act[s],” “maybe few act.” Other readings,
e.g., include “Wm. t’ A.D. may be fused [i.e., sonnets/runes
joined],” “Wm. t’ Adam, A/B fact,” “Whimmed,
Adam a bee f--ked,” and “Wm. to Adam: Eye a bivouac. Tee!”
The letterstring FWACT is insistently bawdy.
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