In discussing the personal drama in the Sonnets, it’s conventional to speculate in terms of the interactions of four characters—1) The Poet/Speaker/Persona; 2) the unnamed beloved Friend/Auditor/Muse; 3) the so-called Rival Poet; and 4) the Dark Lady or Perverse Mistress, a figure that seems to occupy some intermediary (and therefore triangular) relationship between speaker and auditor. Other characters (such as the Friend’s friends) appear as shadowy generalities.

           The Runes do not obliterate these players in the drama, nor do they finally resolve our uncertainties. Questions about the speaker and his listener (with the latter in multiple guises discussed below) continue to dominate Q’s dramatis personae.
           In the Runes cycle, the concept of the Rival Poet may seem to be emerging in Rune 19 (with the notion that the poet’s wit is too poor to catch the friend’s beauty) and, as metonymy, in the term “every vulgar paper” (Rune 32.10), echoed as “every Alien pen” in Rune 73.8 and treated as a minor subject in several runes in Set VI, particularly, and in Rune 86—the last of which implies that many other flattering “comments” emerge besides Will’s praise of the Friend.
           Similarly, a prototype of the Dark Mistress seems to takes vague form in Rune 26.13 and eventually to emerge full-blown in the last two sets.
          Both on a large scale and in any given text—sonnet or rune—Q is indeed essentially dramatic, with scenarios, a speaker, a listener, frequently an implied setting, and others (always punning on “oathers,” that is, oath-bound coterie members), offstage bit-players—along with rival writers and the mysterious “mistress”—in typically antagonistic roles. Since the “friend” at times seems like Will’s worst enemy, an image of an isolated persona/poet who is put upon by everyone sometimes seems to dominate the situation in Q. But our finding the Runes belatedly opens up notions about the likely listeners and other referents in Q, those who interact dramatically with the Speaker.

         The Runes not only enlarge Q’s cast but also teach attentive students that the Rival Poet and Perverse Mistress are essentially fictive constructs intended to confuse, thus advancing the game. (R.P. Blackmur and perhaps others have already decided, based on more overt evidence than the Runes, that no “real” Friend existed [see Hubler, Riddle].) The Mistress most basically stands for Will’s perverse texts, his Mysteries or Mss., with “‘I’s that are nothing like the sun” (being inky black and straight rather than round and light-centered [see Sonnet 130.1]). In one poem about the indignities the “Mistress” imposes, we find that she is actually a “hymn”—a “him” (see Rune 138.8)
           Similarly, the other much-discussed figure, the “contending” writer who tries to get the auditor’s favor is, on one level certainly, Will’s own alter-ego, the Voice of the Runes—texts that rival and undercut the Sonnets with their on-going “comments,” even when Will’s muse seems inactive (see Rune 85.1). The author of the runic texts “rivals” the author of the overt ones because the Runes everywhere pervert any suave lyricism the Sonnets might attain, especially by foul-mouthing covert auditors but also by competing in every line of the Sonnets for energy, meaning, and cadence that must be at least half subverted if the Runes are to thrive.

          To a certain degree the players in the Quarto verses are also the coterie auditors. Certainly the two groups overlap, and speculating about the poet’s intended audience—and thus about the poet’s motives for publication and reasons for delaying it—helps provide an approach to deducing his larger cast.
         Whoever the auditor/friend is, Will’s frequent insistence that Q is mainly to insure this friend’s fame is hard to take seriously, especially since the friend’s name is, paradoxically, so carefully obliterated. The convention of apostrophe to a masked, idealized beloved in sonnet cycles was of course an almost necessary Renaissance convenience, creating an interaction of characters—speaker, auditor, and others (often antagonists)—that allowed lyric writing to gain the power of drama, with roles and implied scenarios from poem to poem.
           In Q’s final form, I take the pose of address as mainly obfuscation and artifice, though by addressing a body of his works to a man in the first place, when most any other Renaissance poet would have focused on some woman, Will initiated a situation that from the start might have made publication difficult in his small London society. Perhaps in some early stage—in the 1590s—Will envisioned a privately circulated work memorializing his beloved Southampton, but by 1609, in the paternal act of publishing his ink-smeared offspring, this was surely not his main motive.
          Many scholars have already concluded that the Sonnets probably “were written over a number of years” and had their origins in the 1590s, perhaps ca. 1593-96, at a time when sonnet cycles were popular, when Will’s friendship with Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, was fairly young, when Will had fairly recently dedicated poems to Southampton (his only acknowledged patron), and when the question of Southy’s decision about marriage was, at least in courtly circles, a burning one (see Akrigg 191ff., esp. 204). By the late 1590s, we know, versions of at least two sonnets (138 and 144) were already in circulation “among Will’s friends.” And finally, evidence seems pretty good that Sonnet 107 commemorates Southy’s release from the Tower on April 10, 1603 (Akrigg 254). Southampton had been imprisoned because of his role in the failed Essex Rebellion (Feb. 1601) and had served a two-year stint in The Tower that ended only with Elizabeth’s death and James I’s ascension and speedy order for Southy’s release. Shakespeare’s company, The Chamberlain’s Men, had itself very nearly been implicated in the Rebellion for having agreed to stage Richard II, a play about the deposition of a monarch, just before the event occurred and thus being subject to the charge of intentionally inciting it, in a city that the rebels saw as a powder keg ready to explode. As Elizabeth’s favorite players, however, the company was exonerated (Chute 249ff.).
          These sketchy details lay several plausible bases: that Q started out in the mid-1590s as another work—like the earlier Venus and Adonis (May or June 1593) and Lucrece (May 1594)—that Will would also dedicate to Southampton and that, in coterie fashion, would deal coyly with personal, cryptically encoded materials that both men and their close friends and peers would understand. Also in the background from this early period are Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost (before 1595?) and the unattributed Willobie His Avisa (Sept. 1594), both of which have riddlic, coterie aspects that make them puzzles for modern readers but that seem likely to allude in various ways to the Shakespeare-Southampton friendship and to Southy’s circle (see Akrigg 207ff., 216ff.)
           In this context of origin, the early sonnets that urge a handsome young man to marry and reproduce himself seem likely to have Southampton in mind. (Between 1590 and 1598, Southy, with prestige and wealth, was eminently eligible and stubbornly unmarried.) But the unparalleled explorations of male friendship in Q, with homoerotic overtones, also suggest some kind of intense, forbidden friendship—in the poet’s mind if not in actuality. Whatever the two men’s relationship, the texts probably do reveal Will’s real distress at the progressive dissolution of their intimacy and at the pain the auditor has caused the poet by his actions—including Southy’s name-staining part in a failed rebellion.
          One original motive, then, for Q was to write a series of love poems—a category in which we have always placed the Sonnets, whatever perversities we have found in them. As Will says in Rune 66.5, “It is my love that keeps mine eye awake.” As his project progressed, it became in many instances (and on one important level) a record of the strains in that relationship.
If Sonnet 107 celebrates Southy’s release from the Tower, then we can probably assume that all of the other interlinked texts in Set VIII also emerged about 1603, including not only the moving “To me, fair friend, you never can be old” (104)—Southy would have been 30 later in 1603, in October—but also other texts about the muse’s absence and the “vulgar scandal” (Sonnet 112.2) the poet has suffered.
          Singly or in combination, several facts seem likely to explain Will’s delay before 1603 in publishing Q: that it seemed unfinished to him and needed improvement; that Southy, central in its materials, had become politically unpopular so that publication would’ve been dangerous while Elizabeth lived; or that the materials as they had evolved, in which a male poet addressed intimate sonnets to another man, seemed unsavory for a married poet to broadcast, even with the red herring overlay of the Dark Lady materials at the end, suggesting as they did a kind of good-old-boy triangle of some sort, with two buddies and one woman involved in wry but seemingly “normal” interactions.
          While a fourth option is that Shakespeare had meant all along to keep his Sonnets (and, as we see now, the Runes, too) private, I doubt that that was the case—certainly not as the work grew in scope and expended energy. The complexity of Q, so difficult to have contrived, urges the new conclusion that all along, or at least fairly early, Will would have seen it as a magnum opus that needed to enter the public record—a way for a gifted poet with a clear sense of his own genius to secure lasting fame by following numerous Renaissance precedents since Petrarch and by evincing an artifact epitomizing the best features of sprezzatura or “suppressed design,” a preeminent Renaissance ideal in art. Because Will’s scattered plays were uncollected and because plays in his day must have seemed as ephemeral as TV scripts do today, the plays were certainly an iffy gamble as a basis for lasting fame. Even a few of the intricately wrought sets in Q, by contrast, might have stood as at least a decent memorial to ingenuity. The full 11-set Megasonnet—now there would be a monument indeed!
          My guess is that, at some point during the growth of Q, Will thought about making his work just 10 sets long, with 140 overt poems mirroring the syllabic structure of a regular sonnet, but decided to go himself one better, partly to make sure that, once the volume was in print, the runic plan would be adequately obscured from general detection by including what seemed like a random number of visible texts. (Perhaps one set numbered lower than X in Q was done separately, and late, and interpolated, to lengthen out the work from 140 sonnets to 154.) My guess also is that the Dark Lady sets (X and XI)—or at least the first one and the concept of the perverse mistress—may be rather early compositions, and that placing them last as a kind of perverse couplet close to the whole structure came to him as a suitable way, as I’ve suggested, to mask the residual taint of homosexuality.
           Exactly which composition blocks Will did from scratch and how much revising and rearranging he did while he was actively working toward final publication, I don’t know, but I believe that the new work after ca. 1600-1603 was probably extensive—masking but not obliterating the “old” story of Q and investing it in some measure with new focuses, sufficiently muddying it up to keep down personal embarrassment. Probably whatever old blocks of materials the poet used were already warp-and-woof, “runic” in their nature. Though old poems could, with effort, be worked into new sets, likely the sonnets as they had circulated “among private friends” of Will’s in the 1590s had been runic sets, and not all of Q. Perhaps Sets X (127-140) and the Sets I-IV (1-56) were among the earliest composed (see Akrigg 204, dating Sonnets 1-52 and 127-141 ca. 1593-1596).
         Though the conceit of the complaint, also at work in the “love poems” of Q, has made us take Will’s grumblings about how hard his “pilgrimage” to the friend was, we can now see that indeed the task was arduous, even for a man who probably could write blank verse as rapidly as you or I speak prose. One motive for doing Q, then, was as a personal challenge—and another was that pulling off such a complex feat would bring him repute, at least among the in-group who knew about the Runes, and perhaps eventually, in time, in the wide world, a phenomenon we are now in a position to watch, belatedly, unfold.
          Accepting the notion of intentional publication, rather than the widely held view that Q was pirated and set in print against the poet’s wishes, is absolutely strategic here, especially because so many scholars assume the opposite. Chute, for example, says that “the book was obviously unauthorized” (340), and Booth says “most people guess” that it was (545). Finding the Runes, however, shows us not only that we have in Q an authorized arrangement of lines, but also that even tiny details reflect witty authorization. In general, we can now see that the “errors” and oddities” that make Q look garbled and unfinished are in fact functionally playful—both pulling the leg of the “serious” reader and delighting the game-minded in-grouper.
          Other scholars, working on different evidence, have deduced with me that the poet himself probably “perform[ed] the last act of literary paternity and [saw] that somehow [the Q texts] reached the press” (Akrigg 262). Thomas Heywood’s testimony in 1612 that Shakespeare “to doe himselfe right, hath…published [his poems, an unclear reference] them in his owne name” offers qualified evidence that some (e.g., Muir and O’Loughlin, The Voyage to Illyria 14) accept as compelling (qtd. Akrigg 262-63).
         Though one logjam blocking publication of Q probably broke in April 1603 with Southy’s release and the upgrading of his reputation, the crux of my new argument about Will’s motive for publishing Q is that between that date and June 1607, Will found a new and overriding motive for seeing Q into print, in the context of Susanna Shakespeare’s courtship and eventual marriage to Dr. John Hall of Stratford. Envisioning a time frame of 1606-1609 as the main period during which Will revised and prepared Q for the press, with the close complicity of Thomas Thorpe in particular, will not be wrong except perhaps by a few years at the front end of the estimate.
            More importantly, we can see how Will could envision the work as an epithalamion group, a set of poems celebrating a marriage. As an epithalamion, Q would have been following a paradigm that was as thoroughly naturalized in Renaissance poetic practice as were cycles of love, complaints, and apostrophes to vague muses.
          Will’s father, John, had died in September 1601; his brother Edmund, a player, died in late December 1607 in Southwerk at age 27, and on the occasion of his burial at St. Savior’s, hard by The Globe, the “great bell” rang at noon on December 31—an elective event that cost money (Chute 239-40) and was perhaps paid for by Shakespeare. Will’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall, was born in February 1608, and his mother, Mary Arden, died in September of that year. Working during 1607-1608, after the “great push” during which he had finished his major tragedies, Will wove coterie references to Libbie’s birth into Q, and may well have alluded to these other personal passages, too. Sonnet 71, e.g., which mentions “the surly sullen [funeral] bell,” opens with “NOe L…,” perhaps tying it to the time frame of Edmund’s death.


          Dr. John Hall—an Oxford graduate, a bachelor, reputedly a Puritan, eventually a noted physician and scholar in his day—was almost 27 and had only recently begun his practice in Stratford at the time of the death and burial of John Shakespeare, Will’s father, in September 1601 (Halliday 89; Chambers 2.11; Chute 295ff.). If Will did not meet Dr. Hall on that occasion, at least it’s likely he would have noted the new young man in town as an eligible son-in-law. The poet’s older daughter, Susanna, was at the time several months past her eighteenth birthday; Judith, the other daughter and only living twin, was past sixteen. Shakespeare himself was 37, only a decade older than Hall but already nearing the passage of his own fortieth birthday—a preoccupation of Sonnet 2. Anne Hathaway Shakespeare was 45 and unlikely to bear more children. The couple’s only son (Hamnet) having died in 1596 at age 11, Will, living estranged from his wife in London, had no prospects for further issue of his own and was destined to go sonless unless one of his daughters produced a grandson; and his now marriageable daughter had reached the plausible age for marriage.
          Eventually, about June 5, 1607, Hall and Susanna did marry, at ages 32 and 24. Susanna was by all accounts and evidence the poet’s favorite; her epitaph describes her as “witty above her sex,” adding, “Something of Shakespeare was in that” (Chute 296). As I’ve said, the Halls’ daughter, Elizabeth, the only grandchild Shakespeare ever knew, was born in late February of 1608.
          One deduces in this budding situation, then, a second “origin” for the Sonnets that might well have revitalized a shelved and moribund cycle project. The early extant sonnets encouraging Southy toward “marriage and increase” could now focus themselves with minimal fiddling on a situation close at hand in the family, and very real. The wittily pejorative comments about a “self-consuming single life” could now be aimed at the daughter and/or potential son-in-law—with incidental relevance to the poet himself at 40, still vital and capable of siring offspring but doing nothing about perpetuating his own line now that Hamnet was dead. Strategically, the “Master/Mistress of my passion” (Sonnet 20.2) in this new context could be not a tarnished Southampton but rather the two-gendered couple Susanna Shakespeare and John Hall—without absolutely negating the original, sexually-ambivalent address to Southampton. (In the Sonnets/Runes, overlays of meanings are the unvarying norm, and singularity of meaning is absolutely nonexistent.) The motive of playful “matchmaking,” then, and of creating an epithalamion group to celebrate a family wedding plausibly becomes Will’s new impetus toward composition.
         Having a legitimate “auditor”—or actually a pair of them—in his head as he worked on revision, Will could without too many changes transform Q respectably. All of the ambivalent initial “So’s” in Q—originally linking easily with “…Thy” to pun on “Southy”—might now be heard as “Sue’s.” The “W.H.’s” that originally encoded Henry Wriothesley’s reversed initials could now be conceived of as “IN. H’s”—John Hall’s. And such a line as “SHall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?” could be heard to pun, almost magically, “S. Hall, I come [i.e., to Stratford], pair thee two a summer’s day” (Sonnet 18.1), with nice concurrent plays on “party, too,” “I come, perdito,” and “père.” Perhaps such a line, with many other changes to effect currency, was entered only after the summer wedding day had been set, with the surname “Hall” applied prematurely, in teasing fashion, to encourage the daughter toward her new role in marriage. (In any case, the quasi-fictive scenario of the Q poems thrives on having a reticent auditor whom the poet can “persuade.”) Thus the poet urges his newly constructed “Master/mistress” toward a union in which he himself has an honest interest. If Sue were not to be imagined as a literal auditor, Will could at least imagine Dr. Hall hearing them addressed to her, his wife. (The dialogue at the writing stage is all in Will’s head, anyway.) The old poems flattering Southy might now be refocused toward the new son-in-law, whom he could legitimately love, and perhaps, in his fantasy, even be physically attracted to, as he had been to Southy. (Hall was only about two years younger than Southampton, who was born in October 1573.) Even if much of the old material in Q did not exactly “fit,” at least the perverse interests inherent in earlier versions could be readily disguised or rendered adequately ambiguous to allow Q’s publication.
          Several other particular family puns, heard in Rune 1, exemplify hundreds in Q: e.g., “As fast as thou, S. Hall, twin [suggesting Judith], so fast thou grow’st” (11), and the painful play about children growing up: “…thou, S. Hall, [and] twins, O, fast thou grow’st / When I do count the clock that tells the time. / O, that you were yourself! But love you are” (11-13). The fact that Hamnet does not “grow” in 1609 adds poignancy to the lines; the form “S. Hall” suggests a composition date well after Hamnet’s death in August 1596—if the pun is a conscious one.
          In any case, I believe that as Will neared retirement and contemplated moving back to Stratford to enjoy his final years, John and Susanna Hall moved into prominence in his mind, their courtship and marriage giving him a mental green light to move ahead with publication.

          Evidence from Q’s dedicatory page, craftily signed “T.T.,” helps flesh out this scenario by offering—again, without obliterating other options—a whole new way to construe the mysterious “Mr. W.H.” of that dedication. (Puns from Rune 118.8-9 seem to comment on Thorpe’s role as the author of the dedicatory “salutation” or preface: e.g., “Assay, buyers, ye half pay Shakespeare: Alias Tommy, / Give salutation to my sportive ballad,” with the variant “…Tommy, / Give salutation to ms. poor…?” [118.8-9]. Donald Foster [42] objects to the term “dedication” to name the perplexing “W.H.” page in Q, so perhaps Will’s own word—“salutation”—is a better one.) In any case, anyone who is now in on Will’s (and Thorpe’s) game can read

TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.
Mr. W. H. ALL.HAPPINESSE. / …

as a dedication to “Mr. IN. Hall…”—with “In.” (i.e., “Jn.,” at a time when I and J were interchangeable) the common abbreviation for John. Earlier scholarly speculations about a “Mr. W. Hall” have already gone at least half way toward this conclusion by noting “Mr. …HALL” spelled out in contiguous letters on the dedication page (see Booth 548).
          Other family puns in this dedicatory texts—craftily worked out between the author and Thorpe, his printing agent—include “‘Mr. IN. Hall’ happens—see?” “John/Sue” […INSV…]; “Son”; “Ann” and “Hat.”; “Ann S.” [ET(= “and”)S]; “Will Shakespeare” [WI SH, twice]; and, notably, “To the one (wan) Libbie, getter of these…Sonnets (… ‘jetter’ of the Seine’s vin. Jeez! […Jason eats]),” depicting a peeing baby granddaughter, in effect a female “putto,” as the poet’s muse, spurting out French wine!
          Dr. Hall, incidentally, was called “Mr. Hall” in one document surviving from the day (Chute 315), clearing up one problem that some have had reading “W.H.” as Wriothesley, Henry, the Earl of Southampton—because Southy, given his rank, would not have been called “Mr.”
          One variant reading of these dedicatory puns is, “To the one Libbie, jetter of the Seine’s vin. Chasing it’s (…chasing Ann S.,) Mr. John Hall, ape-penis (…ape, an ass…)!”
          Much like the Runes that follow in Q (and in this book), the dedication encases other complex wit, including such puns as “Pyramus Ed.” [PROMISED], probably a play on “editor” and thus on Thorpe; “Burghley avenge” [BY.OVR.EVERLI VING], perhaps referring to Southy’s guardian; “summarily, penis” [S.Mr.W.H. ALL.HA PPINESSE], and so on. While it would be a bit easier to imagine Dr. Hall detecting and enjoying such wit were the good doctor not labeled “Puritan” in surviving records, we shouldn’t automatically rule out the possibility that Hall could laugh at himself, too. At least we can deduce from the existence of all the Hall-directed wit in Q that Will hoped his son-in-law would respond in spirit, perhaps after Will had helped to educate his son-in-law in the ways of wit during the leisure of his retirement back in Stratford. Since Q and its puns are imaginative, one possibility is that the whole Will/Hall interchange occurred solely in the poet’s head, never to find fruition in the realities of Stratford life.
          Another insistent “John Hall” nameplay occurs in the “Master/Mistress” text, in the much-debated line Sonnet 20.7 (Rune 21.6), a line that is the basis for the imaginative “William Hughes” theory proposed in the eighteenth century to identify Mr. W.H. (see Chute 341-42, Booth 547). Q’s line reads, “A man in hew all Hews in his controwling.” (This line position numerologically generates 27, either 20+7 or 21+6, a possible play on Hall’s age ca. 1602 and thus, perhaps, a key to dating the writing or rewriting of Sonnet 20.) With insights we now have, we can see the play “A man In. Hewall [i.e., John Hall] you see nigh…,” followed by a variety of puns: e.g., “…you see nigh cunt or howling,” “…he was in his cunt rolling,” “using his cunt…,” “…he W.S. eying [‘Iing,’ with phallic wit]…,” and “using his controlling / Witch….” (6-7). The plays “Amen, John Hall, you sin…,” “Amen, John, heal…,” and “Amen, I knew Hall, he was anus-controlling” may jokingly nod toward the auditor’s profession and his “Puritanism.” Thus we see how a witty poet might deal with a “Puritan” son-in-law, at least in his head. The truth is that if one reads Sonnet 20—the only one in Q with 154 syllables—as a unique epithalamion text, Sue and John in mind, a good bit may fall into place. The italicized Hews not only encodes “He, In. [=W=John] is” but also reverses to “Swe H.,” so that the line puns “A man, John Hall, Sue H. in his controlling,” “A man, John Hall, Sue H. ends, controlling (cunt-rolling),” etc., even as the whole teasing line seems to be a crafted rune that generates a reverse alphabetic code mostly about Susanna (and Annie):

,gnil   wort   n  ocs                                ih    ni      swe Hll      aweh ni                nam          A
Genial ward in O’s [i.e., rounds, runes] eye nigh: Sue Hall—away, nigh […of Annie]—name I.
Genial ward knows sin (sign) aye: Sue Hall, Yahweh, Annie, name I.
Genial ward Anne owes [acknowledges, is indebted to] aye: Annie, Sue Hall owing, I name aye.
Gin ill were t’ nose. Sign eye (Sinai, Sin I swell, loon eye in a May)
Genital wart nose, Annie S. we’ll (whale, wail, while) away, Annie name I.
…Annie S. will aye wane, enemy (…wail away, an enemy).

In the context of Rune 15, the line that opens Sonnet 20 generates, with its new peer (Sonnet 21.1), “A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted— / Sue, is it not…?” and “… / Sue eyes it not with me…” (Rune 15.6-7, Sonnet 20.1-2), thus offering other punning clues that in Sonnet 20 the poet has Susanna in mind—and perhaps that she is outside the coterie that views such wit.
         Another early example of witticisms in Q that Will may have directed at Hall—a play on “lawyer” (Q loue you are)—shows his tone as he “wishes” his son-in-law were a lawyer, not a doctor: “O that you were yourself—but lawyer. / Note [An odd] affront…” (13-14). Concurrent is the pun “Oathèd you were yourself, but lawyer / Not…,” alluding plausibly to Dr. Hall”s Hippocratic commitment, though “oathèd” also means “initiated in the coterie, sworn to secrecy.”
          Readers here who find such puns unconvincing can discount them as small threads—pulled or errant—in a large tapestry. The sequencing of this argument for readers even farther outside the coterie circle than I am proves, as I’ve said, rhetorically challenging, and the continuum of my own thoughts from certainty to guesswork proves hard to calibrate with clearly marked notations.

***

          Just as the upcoming family marriage gave Will a new incentive to write, to revise existing materials, to work toward publication, and to mask the sniff of scandal that publishing any sets of them earlier might have triggered, the printing deal he reached with Thomas Thorpe, the “T.T.” of the dedication page, sometime after 1603 and perhaps toward 1605-1606, also figured prominently, I think, in Will’s decision to publish. The dedication page itself shows one convincing instance of their collaboration, with every authorized “bobble” that Q retains adding to evidence that close collaboration was eventually at work during the printing stage. Thorpe, “a minor figure in the London book trade” with “neither a press nor a retail outlet” (Chute 339), was necessarily in on the game, working as the agent who arranged to have Q printed, by George Eld, and then sold in the shops of William Aspley and John Wright. (Judging from the presence of “TT” puns and the smaller number of detectable “Eld” plays, I conclude that Eld’s role may have been a lesser one, but it’s unlikely that Eld would have been out of the loop, since Q was eventually printed in his shop.) Thus Will could finish Q with assurance that, when it went to press, its coterie details would remain intact—including letterform “errors,” imprints made by filed typepieces, and intentional bobbles of many sorts. The Thorpe-addressed wit in the Q lines supports this theory further.
          With motive and method both available, Will finished the Sonnets as a family focused text—as hundreds of subtextual details in this book show—while keeping Southampton, and Thorpe, too, potentially in the reader/players’ loop, whether or not those men would ever actually choose to go seeking wit about themselves in the lines. As we read the subtextual materials of Q, I must repeat, we stay in Will’s head, with no firm assurance about how any audience ever reacted to what he was encoding. The Runes themselves often show the poet’s uncertainty on this point. Southy, if he ever did read the Runes in their finally published forms, would’ve been unearthing their private wit about himself as a married man past 30. Though Will probably did not want unsympathetic contemporaries to link Southampton easily with the “W. H.” of the preface, he could still quietly flatter his patron one more time, keeping distance for both their sakes but using a dedicatory form in which coterie readers would still hear “Henry Wriothesley”—as later critics often have, too.
         Retaining the vestige of having at least an ostensible patron might also have eased somewhat any embarrassment Will felt at pushing forward his own works, even though he’d made an effort to cover his self-publishing by involving “T.T.” as an ostensible instigator. By 1609 the poet did not have to curry favor from anyone, since his practical and financial success was effectively assured, though like everyone he surely could have used more money. Thorpe could help him on that count, and could also enjoy the Thorpe-focused wit of the texts up close as he helped set their details in type. The evidence of subtextual details in the Runes is that Thorpe, like Southampton and Hall, was a man Will thought of as a good friend—but not, certainly, a lover.
          A further family-related motive for Q, I believe, was the fatherly urge to erect a fitting “twinned” memorial to the poet’s dead son, Hamnet, an analogue for the buried Runes, and to Judith, the living twin, analogous to the Sonnets. (Hamnet, Will’s only son, died in August 1596 at age 11.) In doing so Will could figuratively replicate Hamnet’s existence and maintain it, as a poet can do through artful treatment of any subject. Plays on Ham/Hamnet and Judy/Judith in Q include, e.g., “Babble therefore two—Judy, Ham S. (our homme), muse aye bold” (123.9-10) and/or “Therefore two—Judy, Ham—form muse, aye bold (…I behold; …form me, W., a sibyl)” (123.10), and the morbid pun “Two live a second—live one, second dead; / In ‘oather’ accents do this pair aye see and sound (…peers, see Son S., O, you end)” (63.12-13). The pun “twin, my son…my female…” (145.4) draws a similar dichotomy, while the play “A Sister/Son set [of poems] fadeth in the weft [of this ‘woven’ fabric]” (76.3) may have Judith/Hamnet in mind as elegiac topics and analogues for Sonnets/Runes. In each of the two cases of “twins”—Sonnets and Runes, Judith and Hamnet—one of the pair is extant and apparent, the other is buried and lost but perhaps to be resurrected and reconstituted in due time.
          It’s more than psychobabble to assume that the poet may have felt some guilt for having left his children back home, or that the guilt compounded itself in the case of the son. A kind of mea culpa impulse probably encouraged his viewing the Q project as an act of penance, a writer’s unique brand of recompense for his failings as a father.
          Even the Master/Mistress conceit in Sonnet 20 may allude not only to the Halls but to the twins as well. Omitting Judith from consideration as a “mistress” who might “increase” to her own and the poet’s advantage would be a mistake; and certainly, in apostrophe at least, the dead Hamnet is a candidate for the role of Q’s beloved “Master,” the beautiful young man for whom the poet might wish continuity and an improved condition.
           Since the analogy between the bifurcated poem project—with one-half buried and one half viable—and the poet’s “other” twins has progressively become obvious to me from working with Q, I have no doubt that Will, with his quicker mind, sensed it and manipulated it, especially in the various puns alluding to the dead son in alliance with that other famous son, Hamlet (see the index), whose name surely is no coincidence. Judith seems to me a relatively minor subtextual figure overall in Q—sometimes satirized and linked with Anne as limited, her mother’s daughter as Susanna was apparently Will’s. In any case, she is not omitted.
         Thus, given the ultimate ambivalence about whom Q was “for,” all the poet’s family might be included in the canvass of those to be symbolically immortalized by the project: Susanna, Dr. Hall, Hamnet, Judith, even baby Libbie, the “one getter/jetter” of the poems (to quote the pun from the opening of Q’s dedication.) As we shall see, not only “Will” himself but also Anne gets her due in the Q lines—“to boot…and in overplus,” to use the term in Sonnet 135.2.

          To summarize a complex argument difficult of demonstration but plausible in outline, I believe that Will originally meant to address the Sonnets/Runes to Southampton, his patron and close friend, but found that stretched-out project stymied until events after 1601-1603 refocused his eye toward Stratford and his family, especially John and Sue Hall and eventually daughter Libbie, adding Hamnet and Judith into the mix as analogues for the Runes and Sonnets, and factoring in Thomas Thorpe as the strategic friend-expeditor of the project, a man who might help him make a little money and enter his hard-crafted masterpiece into the public record. Will’s drive to express real emotion—love, loss, guilt, inadequacy, pride, hope—merged with his delight in manipulating conventional artifices and his skill at oneupmanship. Uniquely in all of literature he had the ability to convey marginally self-revealing personal materials to coterie readers (who knew what to look for) and, concurrently, a broad range of more general materials, seemingly “marred” with frustratingly incomplete hints and teases, to readers outside the loop, including posterity.

***

The Coterie Audience: Will’s “School of Night.”

         Scholars have customarily tried to answer such questions as “Who was Will’s auditor/friend?” in singular terms. Given that the whole of Q is predicated on the principle of double entendre, however, we now deduce the futility of such an approach. In a game in which the poet effectively wanted the Q texts to be all things to all people, my best summary guess is that he imagined as potential readers some members of the constituencies listed below and hoped that individuals in each group might be able to hear his verse as having them in mind.
        While evidence that any oath-bound peer group existed at all as a “mystery” or kind of masonic order is at best inferential, hundreds of puns in Q—as well as the logic of a situation in which overt mention of the activity did not occur—help certify our deduction. This complex pun is one example of hundreds: “wicked oath peers rued,” “…peer S. rued,” “Fey Ed. enjoinèd wicked oath [that] peers rued, hell arised (erased) heavy, wearisome Judgment’s lead,” etc. (143.7-8). Since the “oath” links its practitioners in a light-hearted way with dark, perverse, and “wicked” behavior, “School of Night” may have been a kind of generic rubric for all the oath-bound Runers in London during Shakespeare’s era, though it survives as designating the Raleigh faction. Puns in Q about the coterie oath of silence occur in such forms as “Feeding on that wicked oath, peers rued hell” (143.7). The pun “When I break twin-tie, I am perjured most” (146.12) may mean, “I’d violate my coterie oath most completely if I were to reveal the connections between my Sonnets and Runes.”
          Will teasingly broaches the topic of the identity of his “muse” in Rune 99 in the punning question “W. H., Harry, art thou Muse that thou forgettest so long?” (2) and also in his “answer” later: “Alas, ‘tis true, I have John, Harry, Anne, and t’ Harry / owe form…” (12-13). Elsewhere, puns encode a litany of the names of people Will “buries” in his lines: “Still loosing (Still loving…) W. H., Annie, Sue, myself, twin… (…myself twain)” (116.7). Three of Will’s principal auditors’ names occur in the pun “T’ Hen, Jack [Hall], Tommy T.—turd-hating, feeble ed.—m’ Annie in sleep aching, bawdy waking, knows you…” (98.2-3). Rune 100A.2-3 compiles this list: “To speak (‘Two-speak’) eased Hat.-witch, Ju., Southy, Hall, Tommy….”
          At any rate, these sets of “oathers” or “peers”—to use Q’s pervasive punning epithets—in Will’s coterie seem likely or quite possible:

           1. Southampton and residual courtly friends and acquaintances. By 1606-1609, marriage and aging and the inevitably separate paths that young men take in life would have dispersed them. Much nautical imagery in Q seems to’ve had Southy the seafarer jokingly in mind, and homogenital humor and other bawdry also seems likely to be aimed at this readership. Probably much of that material is residual from the original content of at least some of the Q texts done in the 1590s.

           2. The close-knit group of London fellows in Will’s Company (see a convincing description in Chute), perhaps including Nate Field, the young actor who at some stage after 1600 joined the poet’s company, and Will’s brother Edmund, an actor who died in 1607 at age 27. Many puns in Q allude to the plays, characters, and other aspects of theatre.

           3. Thorpe and the printers’ and booksellers’ “mystery,” centered formally in the Stationers’ Guild in London, perhaps including Stratford-born Richard Field, George Eld (who owned the shop where Q was printed), and John Wright and William Apsley (booksellers mentioned on the two variants of the title page). (See Harrison 65; Booth 543.) Puns about printing and writing, of course, might appeal to this group.

           4. Lawyers, members of the Inns of Court, who would have appreciated the prolific punning in Q on matters legal, as well as much overt diction and imagery germane to that topic.

          5. University wits, apt to enjoy all the literate wit and arcane trivia. Though Chute speaks of “the contempt that most young university intellectuals felt for a popular professional writer like William Shakespeare,” she also shows that by 1601 “sweet Mr. Shakespeare” was an object of humorous discussion in a series of student-written plays put on at Cambridge (224-26).

           6. The Raleigh faction, the School of Night in a narrow sense, and quite likely other contemporary writers and artists, perhaps some of those whose names occur subtextually (see the index). Many puns in Q deal with literature, art, music, and the classics. Raleigh knew Spenser and influenced him (Norton I.529), and Spenser (as Hieatt has shown) practiced buried numerology in his art. (See Graves, “Herbert’s ‘The Collar’,” re. runic rhyme-wit.) Harrison includes in this group Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, “Wizard Earl”; Thomas Harriott, a mathematician; Matthew Roydon, a minor writer; and poets Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman (who had an “obscure” poem called The Shadow of Night [1594]). This group was rumored to engage in sacrilege. Raleigh “was no friend of the Southampton group,” but Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost may allude to this School (Harrison 395-96).

           7. The narrow circle of the poet’s own family back in Stratford, John Hall and maybe Susanna. (Sir Thomas More had had a bright daughter whom he admitted into learned activities. See comments on Rune 39 pointing to Will’s subtextual listings of family members.) Subtextually Will imagines Hall as the quick-minded “kin of our merited quietus” (see the italics rune in Set IX)—with a homoerotic play on “…coitus.” Will often addresses Hall otherwise as the putative auditor and imaginary decoder of particular puns and plays (see, e.g., the plays in items 3 and 8 of the section on numerologic wit).

          8. Some member(s) of the King James Bible Committee, perhaps Richard Edes, John Boys, and/or Michael Rabbett (see Butterworth 208).

          9. Future readers whom the poet anticipated as, long after his own death, finding and restoring Q to completeness—and particularly an unknown “friend” who might eventually restore the lost materials and “fame” the poet. (Such a punning directive as “Sh. ‘O’ [= Round], riddled fit [= stanza], convert” [12.14] may be aimed as this inclusive potential constituency.) We, of course, are in this group—I, so privileged with serendipitous latter-day inclusion in Will’s inner circle, and now all of us who wrestle playfully with the poet in the deep-set arena of his lost texts.

***

           Inside the Runes, even more so than in the Sonnets, the game hinges on being able to identify the addressed figure the poet has in mind—especially the listener but also any figure referred to by an ambiguous pronoun, and any vague “she” or “they” (the latter often a vaguely conspiratorial group of antagonists). Cherchez la femme has long been recognized as a main aspect of the Sonnet game, as scholars have tried to identify the Dark Lady. “Naming” the “rival poet” and the auditor/friend have also already become commonplaces in the activity of trying to construe the Sonnets. So in effect the runic game has been working all along, with the Sonnets as riddles to be solved. (They’ve proved to be impenetrable nuts to crack, especially because of our half-knowledge about them.)
          In the Runes, a partially new set of characters seems to emerge as dominant and also as peripheral figures, with some of them gaining life underground, purely in puns. Many are subtle and deeply suppressed, but some of these puns are of much the same order as the “Will” puns (e.g., in Sonnet 135) that are so overt and have been so universally lamented by serious scholars. Several of the dramatis personae are people whom I’ve already mentioned. Others, especially the minor figures, may be new. These characters function both as implicit actors and sometimes as the silent subjects of what is being said or as listeners to whom, as the conceit has it, the poet speaks. Often a main riddlic aspect of a text is trying to guess who the auditor (and thus the peripheral figures) might be. Hearing the “you” of a poem as Anne or Southy or Sue, e.g., can generate in essence three separate poems.
          Two traditional game elements, epithets and fliting, factor pervasively but peripherally into Will’s treatment of his dramatis personae in Q. Epithet-making—renaming a writer’s antagonists (especially) in endless, witty variety—has a long history of decorating literature entertainingly and (in the negative) can be a kind of mini-diatribe. Fliting—antagonistic verbal oneupmanship in a spirit of fun—provides one-sided “dramatic” encounters where the “intended listener” (usually a contextually ambiguous entity) is allowed no voice; these and other forms of address to a putative auditor incapable of response make the Sonnets and Runes seem like dramatic monologues. In a post-Browning age, the Runes in particular—given their associational developments and blank verse structures—seem closely linked to this form.
         The tone of complaint and of moralizing and the motive of self-rationalization frequently govern the drama of Will’s runic interchanges with his implied characters—who also help comprise his audience.
         Here, I propose, are some of the main figures (and some walk-ons, too) in Q’s newly mounted drama. I group them in fifteen categories, roughly in the order of seeming importance—as I parse the Q text. (Likely my own focus is skewed, since finding one detail predisposes me to seek others like it, and since I’m apt to be overlooking topical references out of my own ignorance of the situations that might have been on Will’s mind.)
         I’ve used color backgrounds below to separate these fifteen segments and thus help readers negotiate this link and find the beginnings of discussion points.