1. Coterie Features
in the Bible; the Shakespeare name cipher in Psalm 46; the ancient fish
symbol as an arcane acrostic. Treating “the entire book
of Genesis as a long cryptographic string” (Satinover 30), scholars
including mathematical statisticians within the last two decades have
detected hundreds of word-pairs systematically embedded as numerologically
arranged acrostic letterstrings in the Hebrew text, pairs that appear
to encode “prophetic” information by generating allusive terminology
the researchers believe would not have been accessible to the author(s)
at the time the texts originated. These vertical, horizontal, and diagonal
letterstrings comprise contiguous and/or equidistant series of letters
on pages that show the text arranged in “letter-box” forms
(like crossword puzzle grids) with an equal number of letters per line
and no spaces between words. For example, researchers found “Zedekiah”
(the name of Judah’s last king, ca. 6th century B.C.E.) in close
association with “Mantanya” (Zedekiah’s name before
he became king). Other embedded word-pairs even seemed to point to prominent
Jewish figures who thrived into the Common Era, some as late as the 19th
century. The researchers thus conclude that they may have found “a
second, hidden level of embedded meaning” behind “the surface
meaning of the Hebrew” (Satinover 29). In its most provocative form,
such research has yielded Michael Drosnin’s controversial book The
Bible Code (1997), which claims to find textual clusters of these
numerologically encoded acrostics in the Hebrew texts that “predict”
precise details about such future events as the Wright Brothers’
invention of the airplane, the Gulf War, the assassinations of John Kennedy
and Yitzhak Rabin, and Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma
City Federal Building in 1995.
While the
methods of acrostic analysis and cryptographic decoding that Drosnin explains
loosely parallel some of the deciphering modes rune-players use, I make
no claims for prophetic capabilities in Q (or in the Bible either). 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 personally
choose to be skeptical that such retrospective “readings”
of texts show any genuine prophetic capabilities in them, just as I remain
skeptical of any “single” occurrence of what appears to be
particular information buried in punning fashion in the Q letterstrings.
My own decision not to accept Biblical texts as genuinely magical, prophetic,
or “supernatural” leads me to think that they may embed authorizations,
phonic or alphabetic letterstrings equivalents to Hebrew “words,”
but that the word elements themselves are highly subject to hindsight
readings. Too, some topical embeddings might have resulted from scribal
manipulation of letter elements long after the original date of composition
of the original Biblical materials. And language itself cooperates playfully
to generate what appear to be meaningful coincidences. In some measure,
as the researchers admit, one finds what one looks for; and interpretation
of “predictions” depends on hindsight readings. The researchers
fail to find parallels in certain control exercises (analyses, e.g., of
War and Peace), suggesting that some kind of consciously authorized
embedding is at work in the Torah (Satinover).
The
bifurcated Shakespeare name cipher in the King James Version
of Psalm 46 is a contemporary Renaissance instance strikingly parallel
to these paired ciphers in Genesis, since “shake” occurs as
the 46th element from the beginning of the text, and “spear”
occurs in the 46th word position from the end (Interpreter’s
Bible). (One omits “Selah,” closing the Psalm, for the
pattern to work.) In the Geneva Bible (1560), the text that Shakespeare
himself would have known and used and one that influenced the wording
of the KJB heavily (see Butterworth 231), the two name-components occur
by my count in the 47th and 44th word positions, respectively, so they
were already extant textual components and thus would have been
rather easy to maneuver into numerologically parallel slots by any KJB
translator who wanted to effect that shift.
Once
the nameplay “Shakespeare” becomes active in a reader/player’s
mind, the possibility of a coterie “date play”—on Shakespeare’s
age, 46, in 1610, the last year before the KJV’s 1611 publication—emerges.
Too, a player detects further elements in the nameplay, as in verse 10:
“Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among
the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth” (my emphasis).
Further humor emerges, whether authorized or the result of contextual
happenstance and inherited diction from earlier textual variants: e.g.,
“Therefore Will, an oat, we fear,” “…Will-knot
we fear” (2); “S. Hall may cage lad, this eye, tease God (the
sight is good)” (4); “She, S. Hall, Ann, aught, be m’
Ovid, he uttered his voice” (5); “She, Hath.-maid, eye ’neath
earth” (8); “Ham. acheth, whores, to kiss you” (9);
“Boned, see Judith, the Spear-in’ son dear” (9); and
“Bestial Ann, know that I am God, I, Will….” (10). Readers
intent on finding sacrilege can read the opening verse as “God,
aye sour (sore) or f--king, dost rune” or “God’s whore,
f--king dust, runeth.” Those looking for Southy wit may hear “T’
Harry S., whore will not waver, dowdy, ‘eared,’ bare (…Hebrew,
m’ Ovid, Ann did haughty mount, Ann S.…)” (2).
In itself,
then, the rather easily effected authorization of the numerological nameplay
triggers a domino effect: the coterie player hunts for further wit, which,
once sought, is likely to emerge in the minds of those willing to seek
out playful—i.e., runic—decodings of the letterstring text.
Along with
the very number of the text, the innocent-looking epigraphic inscription
of Psalm 46 “To the chief musician” may have helped suggest
that psalm as a fit locale for the Shakespeare nameplay to the encoder—some
member of the translation committee who was “in” on Will’s
coterie game. In coterie argot, the epigraph translates “preeminent
lyric poet,” thereby associating “Shake-spear” with
the sweet singers Hermes (see just below) and Orpheus, “underworld”
figures.
Shakespeare’s
own extensive use of the Psalms—in almost every play (Rowse
42, citing R. Noble’s Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge)—may
have also factored into the particular placement of the KJV “tribute”
to him.
The coterie
aspects of the Bible, of course, remain familiar to this day to those
of us who grew up hearing fundamentalist preachers try to decode the arcane
symbols and numerology of the book of Revelation (in particular). The
television evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong once called the serpent in
Genesis a “whispering, enchanting creature of glorious aspect”—not
a bad description of the “whispering” Runes. Surely the Whore
of Babylon is one of numerous “bad women” antecedents for
Will’s Dark Lady.
The Runes
encode hundreds of possible allusions to Biblical topics. (See the index.)
The
fish as an early Christian symbol. As Bible Professor Milton
P. Brown (Retired, Rhodes College) explains in a letter to The
[Memphis] Commercial Appeal (6 December 2003: B6), even the ancient
fish symbol used by early Christians for “covert self-identification”
was likely to have been a coy acrostic: As Prof. Brown says, “The
word in Greek for fish was ichthys, which provided an acrostic
arrangement of five initial letters of Greek words meaning ‘Jesus
Christ, Son of God, Saviour’.... In Greek the I (iota)
was the initial letter of Iesous (Jesus), the ch (one
letter, chi) the initial for Christos (Christ), the th
(one letter, theta) initial for Theou (of God), they y
(or u=upsilon) for uios (Son), and the s (sigma)
for the word Soter (Saviour).” Thus the fish symbol, standing
for its alphabetic string, encoded “a kind of creedal affirmation.”
I’m
conscious that this discussion groups diverse kinds of connections between
the Bible (and Christian use of text) and the Q Runes; the possible historical
precedent of scribal acrostics encoded in early scriptural texts is the
most important parallel—but the Psalm 46 incident and the ichthys
acrostic share the same basic impulses.
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2. The Hermetic
Tradition as Influence or Analogue. “Hermetic” writings,
the Hermetica, comprise a body of early texts attributed to Thoth,
the Egyptian god of wisdom—a name translated as Hermes Trismegistus
(“Throth the thrice great”) and thus associated with Hermes,
the Greek god of eloquence (and so on) and reputed inventor of the lyre.
Treating “magic, astrology, and alchemy,” these books were
“particularly influential… in France and England in the 17th
century” (Chernow and Vallasi) after their translation by the Italian
scholar Marcilio Ficino into Latin in 1471. The Sonnets may have been
directly influenced by the emphasis of this tradition on “magical”
language and occultism, especially as these patterns were transmitted
in such Italian Renaissance works as Giordano Bruno’s Heroic
Enthusiasms, which was also known and imitated by other writers in
Shakespeare’s London (see Jones).
Hermetic influences
(as traditionally recognized) were mainly on literary content and attitudes;
they were not narrowly formal, and they pointed toward seriousness rather
than wit. But the shared pattern of cabalistic in-groupiness makes hermeticism
relevant, as precedent and analogue, to Shakespeare’s coterie practices.
The Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) effected the union
of the Hermetica and the Cabala, a body of arcane Jewish
lore that appeared in the Middle Ages, and thereafter the two lines of
mystical thought often merged (see Hudibras 1.i.523-524, and
John Wilder’s line notes). The hermetic interest in alchemy parallels
Shakespeare’s own; Q often discusses “alembics” or stills
used for transmutation (see, e.g., Sonnet 119, and Booth 398ff.). Indeed,
the whole Q process is itself a kind of alchemical transformation of Sonnets
into Runes, and vice versa.
Closely associated
are the Rosicrucian cultists, first mentioned openly ca. 1614-15;
this group’s “secret learning deals with occult symbols—notably
the rose and the cross” (Chernow and Vallasi). Shakespeare’s
interest in both symbols in Q is perhaps incidental, perhaps not: The
“cross” and “acrostics” are closely interwoven,
and “Wriothesley” (see Rose-ly) is associated with “Rose,”
always a pun on “rows” in Q. (Q’s “But’s”
all allow puns on “bud,” too.) Such a pun as the one in 53.10-13
might have a “Rosy-Cross” brotherhood in mind: e.g., “Special
be lofty oath, our azure-bounded oath appeared, eye totem of elves, sweet
Roses’ dough-knot, sown in the eyes of all posterity.”
The important
point is that the cabalistic spirit of the Hermetic tradition parallels
coterie attitudes underlying the happenings of Q, even though hermeticism
and its offshoots are ostensibly more “serious” and “philosophical.”
Whether such seriousness covers leg-pulling activity is, for this outsider,
impossible to assess, but the question is worth considering.
Possible plays on “Hermes” occur subtextually in the Runes.
(See the index.)
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3. Precedents
and Parallels in Latin. Like Chaucer, Shakespeare drew most heavily
from Ovid of all the classical Latin writers; in particular he used the
first book or so of the Metamorphoses (Chute 16, Rowse 38), whose
15 books comprise a “rhetorical tour de force…illustrating
a great variety of poetic, linguistic, and stylistic tricks” (Wilkie
and Hurt 1105). We can now see how the large, magical “transformation”
that Will effects in Q—metamorphosing one set of texts into another—parallels
the expressed theme of that poem, which opens, “My intention is
to tell of bodies changed / To different forms…” (1143, trans.
Rolfe Humphries).
Ovid’s
assertion in his Art of Love that “art lies in concealing
art” (Ars est celare artem) may just refer to subtle craftsmanship,
not to coterie tricksterism. Perhaps he had both in mind. In any case,
this aesthetic principle helped sway Renaissance artists toward sprezzatura
or “suppressed design” (see below) as an ideal; certainly
Will’s achievement in Q meets Ovid’s requirement, where the
amusing, licentious, worldly tone of Q is also adequately Ovidian. Indeed,
contemporaries recognized Will’s close association with Ovid. In
1598, for example, Francis Meres wrote in his verse collection Palladis
Tamia, “[T]he sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues
in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes…his
sugred Sonnets…” (Harrison 12). By 1601 a low character in
a student-written play performed at Cambridge linked Shakespeare jokingly
with “that writer Ovid and that writer Metamorphosis” (Chute
225).
Indications
that runic patterns—that is, systematic, genuinely covert coterie
practices rather than merely restrained artfulness—may have
thrived in Latin verse generally, if not in Ovid’s writings particularly,
come from several sources. Notebooks ca. 1906-09 of the famed linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure, for example—published eventually in French
under the title Les mots sous les mots, and in English as Words
over Words (Yale UP, 1979)—tediously investigate buried anagrams
or “hypograms” (roughly, piecemeal phonic “theme words”)
in Greek and Latin verse from early times through 1810-1820 (in the case
of late Latin inscriptions) and in fact right up until 1909! “Like
a permanent manufacturer’s secret,” conventionally subtextual
“theme words” seemed to de Saussure to name the public subjects
of literary works, though literary history is totally silent about the
practice. In more than 140 notebooks, de Saussure explored such buried
artfulness in Saturnian verse, Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Seneca, Horace,
Ovid, “other Latin authors,” Carmina epigraphica, Angelo Politanus,
and Vedic (early Sanskrit) texts—coining and defining such terms
as “hypogram,” “paratext,” “syllabogram,”
and “mannequin” to try to identify what he was finding (Starobinski,
esp. vii, xi, 41, 101, 107ff.). De Saussure’s editor remains skeptical,
suggesting that the theme words may generate themselves in some twilight
realm halfway between the conscious will of the writer(s) and the nature
of language itself—while de Saussure had tried to force an absolute
dichotomy between “chance” and “conscious deliberation”
to explain their presence (122-23). Though at least one confidant urged
publication of the findings and pointed out parallels in French literature
(127-28), it seems that de Saussure refrained from doing so because he
couldn’t conclude absolutely that the patterns he found were consciously
authorized.
Perhaps the
present discovery of another fully elaborated instance of hidden coterie
composition calls for reexamination of de Saussure’s body of evidence.
As a functional non-Latinist, I have no good basis for judging whether
de Saussure’s exercises in early texts were self-delusional or not.
More
certain is the truth that Latin verse consistently played subtextual
games with its readers. We know, for example, that in the 4th century
C. E. at the court of Constantine, one Publius Optatianus Porfyrius wrote
“an ingenious acrostic poem, dedicated to a high-ranking senator,
that contained in its midst the letters of the name of the current lover
of that high gentleman's wife” (Brown). And we know that the tradition
of anagrammatic composition persisted in the Romance tradition into English
practice. As O. B. Hardison commented in 1979, while he was director of
The Folger Shakespeare library, “Much medieval verse had acrostic
and other [similarly arcane] 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” (Hardison).
The Grands
Rhétoriqueurs (see below), active in France in the decades
ca. 1500, are known to have produced “Latin poems that have a second
meaning if read as if they were French” (McFarlane 37).
One contemporary
instance of literate gameplaying in late Latin occurs in a 1603 tribute
to Henry Wriothesley (Shakespeare’s patron, Southampton) that wrests
the Latin anagram “THESEUS NIL REUS HIC RUO” from the form
“HENRICUS URIOTHESLEUS,” with appended verses illuminating
otherwise obscure topicality by explaining how “because of a false
charge brave Theseus (Southampton) had come to grief though not a criminal”
(Akrigg 138). Another kind of coy Latinate wordplay that Shakespeare would
have known is the chronogram, “an inscription, sentence, or phrase
in which certain numeral letters usu. made specially conspicuous express
a particular date or epoch on being added together (as in the motto of
a medal struck by Gustavus Adolphus in 1632—ChrIstVs
DVX; ergo trIVMphVs—the
capitals of which, added as numerals, make 1632)” (Webster’s
3rd).
Discussing
traditional “Tricks in Writing” that he disapproved of, the
neoclassicist Joseph Addison attributes a diversity of playful genres,
overt and subtle, to Ancient writers, both Roman and Greek. These genres
include “Poems in Picture,” poems that intentionally banish
a given letter from the alphabetic canon, rebuses, echo poems, limited-word
exercises, acrostics, anagrams, chronograms, puns, and so on (Spectator
Nos. 58-61). Aristotle’s (approbative) commentary on puns in his
Rhetoric (3.11.7) employs the now unfamiliar term paragram
—“a kind of play upon words, consisting in the alteration
of one letter or group of letters of a word” (OED). The game elements
Addison mentions were in their day “open” practices. Caesar
wittily used a rebus-like “Figure of an Elephant upon the Reverse
of the publick Mony” because “the Word Caesar signif[ies]
an Elephant in the Punick Language” and because it would
have been technically illegal for him (then a master of the mint and “private
Man”) to have stamped his own figure on Commonwealth coins (Spectator
No. 59; see Bond I:244ff.).
Addison
theorizes that certain word and composition games “vanished
in the refined Ages of the World” only to “discover themselves
again in the Times of Monkish Ignorance,” and for this he blames
medieval monks “who wanted Genius for higher Performances”
but spent “many Hours in the Composition of such Tricks in Writing
as required much Time and little Capacity” (No. 60). The commonplace
that Latin was the chief language of Europe’s (and England’s)
literate population—notably clerical—during the long Middle
Ages leads us to conclude that most of the gamy writing in the West, much
of it no doubt lost or forgotten, must have been exercised in the language
of the Romans (see Bond I:253-54).
Addison’s
reductio ad absurdum example of the “false wit” he personally
deplored in verse is a late Latin example, the eight-word line “Tot,
tibi, sunt, Virgo, dotes, quot, sidera, Coelo”—”Thou
hast as many Virtues, O Virgin, as there are Stars in Heaven”—that
closes “the Epigrammatum selectorum libri v (Antwerp 1616)
of the Jesuit poet Bernard van Bauhuysen (or Bauhusius).” “[A]ccording
to its author [the line] could be arranged in 1,022 ways without impairing
the sense or metre” (Bond I:254).
George Puttenham,
a literary critic and contemporary of Shakespeare’s whom the young
poet may well have read, writes in The Arte of English Poesie
(1589) about earlier poets who composed in Latin. Puttenham believes,
perhaps mistakenly, that “Latines of the ciuiller ages” such
as Ovid cultivated rhyme and not much else in the way of formal invention,
and that later Latin poets “had leasure as it seemes to deuise many
other knackes in their versifying that the auncient and ciuill Poets had
not vsed before.” Puttenham’s examples include “Hugobald
the Monke who made a large poeme to the honour of Carolus Caluus,
euery word beginning with C,” and another poet who composed “a
verse of such wordes as by their nature and manner of construction and
situation might be turned backward word by word” to make another
“perfit verse, but of quite contrary sence.” His example of
the latter is a full couplet that can be inverted word-by-word. Puttenham—vague
about dates and venues—says “they called [this technique]
Verse Lyron” (Puttenham 14-15). Whether the close parallel
with “Le rune” here is coincidental or not is an interesting
question to me.
Ben Jonson’s
famous backhanded compliment mentioning Shakespeare’s “small
Latin and less Greek” overstates the case, since Will “had,
by modern standards, a very adequate command of Latin”—as
well as French and Italian (Abrams 1227). In Will’s day, of course,
Latin practices would still have influenced vernacular writers both directly
and indirectly, since Latin persisted as a functional academic and clerical
idiom.
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4. Precedents
in Old English. The Anglo-Saxon or Old English period (ca. 450-1100)
ended not very long after 1066 with the infusion of Norman French—which
is, of course, a Latin-based or Romance language—into English, from
birth a Germanic tongue. The linguistic and literary patterns and conventions
that Will inherited 500 years later had, during the Middle English period
(ca. 1100-1500), blended the two traditions into Early Modern English.
Although Anglo-Saxon used the Latin or Roman alphabet (plus a few other
characters), various inscriptions in England and western Europe employed
another, already archaic alphabet designated “runic” or “futhark”—the
latter an acrostic name (like “ABCs”) comprising its first
seven letters, FUTHA[or O]RK. A “rune,” then, in the OE period,
was most basically a single character in the futhark alphabet. Like the
ABCs but more so, the runes were vestigially pictographic: Each letter
had a name—like Deor or Thorn—that seemed to animate it with
mythic identity. Angular and easy-to-carve, the runes were “never
a literary script” but were connected with “cult and secret
forms of writing” and used “mainly on memorial stones, or
on objects such as weapons, rings, and clasps” (Gaur 128). “In
the 7th century Irish and Roman missionaries went to considerable pains
to suppress this script—no doubt because of its association with
heathen practices—and replace it by the Roman alphabet” (128).
Surprisingly,
there’s no agreement that the runes are a “primordial Germanic
script”; among many theories of origin, the “majority view”
is that futhark “arose from a North Italian, Etruscan-based alphabet
probably sometime in the lst century BC” (128). The common impression
that the Runes must have originated in Northern Europe no doubt grows
from the etymology of the “name (Old Saxon run—secret;
Old Irish run—secret; Middle High German rune—secret,
whispering)” and also from the relative prevalence of runestones
in Northern (rather than Southern) Europe, from the assimilation of incidental
runic characters into OE riddles and poems, and from the eventual development
of the verb forms runian (OE), later “to roun/rown/round,”
meaning “to whisper.” The word “rune,” having
effectively died out except in combination forms (e.g., runestone
1151, rune stave OE) well before the Renaissance, was
reintroduced into English (OED 1690) to name the alphabetic characters
of what is now called futhark.
The
coy runic “signatures” embedded by the OE hagiographer
Cynewulf in four poems seem to prove that coterie composition existed
in some measure among Anglo-Saxon writers, and his use of futhark characters
suggests some latter-day alliance with time-honored literary mysteries.
The fact that Cynewulf’s inside game was found only in the 19th
century—in four works that had been known about and studied since
the Renaissance—reminds us that things new under the sun can sometimes
be found in old texts, and that our discovery of earlier English literature
is ongoing. Two mid-19th century scholars simultaneously disinterred most
of Cynewulf’s known canon, and a third added to it some decades
later. Jakob Grimm, in his edition of Elene (1840), reported
quite matter-of-factly his discovery of the identity of Cynewulf:
At line 1258 eight runes are inserted and woven into the
poem which conceal for us the name of the poet and which put together
clearly give CYNEVULF. That among the Anglo- Saxons letters were used
for such playful purposes as early as the seventh and eighth centuries
is evident in Aldhelm’s Latin poems. (qtd. Calder 13)
With more excitement and in more personal terms, J. M. Kemble
explains the process by which in the same year he found the embedded CYNEWULF
in not one but three poems—Elene, Christ, and Juliana
—and deduced that the runic sequences were “signatures”
(see Calder 13-14). And “in 1888 Arthur Napier managed to see ‘the
familiar runes of a Cynewulf acrostic’” in yet a fourth ms.
text, The Fates of the Apostles, extant only in a “mutilated
and illegible” text that had made earlier deciphering difficult
(Calder 15, quoting a 1957 article on the discovery).
Since medieval
literature was routinely anonymous, the personal impulse to “sign”
the work secretly as Maker must have been strong. (Shakespeare in effect
does the same in Q—with his “Will” poems, and in hundreds
of more covert gestures.)
Despite our
sober stereotypes—which may grow largely from the preeminence of
Beowulf, a serious epic—and despite their heavy emphasis
on religious subjects, Anglo-Saxon writers did compose playful and even
delicately arcane works. Prominent in The Exeter Book or Codex
Exoniensis, where three of the Cynewulfian texts occur, are a large body
of anonymous riddles of intriguing complexity. Indeed, the Anglo-Saxons
“liked riddles, and poems which went in circles,” and they
combined in their art “a certain deviousness” with the cultivation
of “an air of plain bareness.” Such “love of ambiguity,
innuendo and word-play… remains a distinguishing characteristic
of the English language to this day” (McCrum and others 62).
The
literate early coteries after the advent of Christianity in England
and throughout the scribal period surely would have centered themselves
in the clerical houses and scriptoria—the writing and book producing
“factories” of the day—though courtly patrons and other
privileged aristocrats must have enjoyed their works, too. The theory
that the monks whiled away their time with private writing games for their
own and other monks’ amusement is in fact a debated commonplace.
(Pearl editor Charles Moorman wrote me in 1977, responding to
the Pearl Rune and related material, that it “strikes me
as esoteric” and that personally he had “just never been convinced
that authors [or…scribes?] left messages in cypher.”)
The recognized
capacity of medieval art to embrace sacred and secular matter coevally
and without apology would have allowed a broad intermixture of gameplaying
with genuinely felt (or at least not necessarily spurious) devotion in
literary works. In many cases—as in most of the Riddler’s
pieces in The Exeter Book—the overt materials are themselves
secular, even frank. Riddle 73, for example, embeds (in reverse order)
futhark characters that form the consonant frame for PISS, a suitable
“answer” to the riddle about a man “going on the way
swiftly” and a woman “sitting alone” (Williamson). The
“Rhyming Poem,” a late and elaborate OE work, shows “playfully
erudite poetic obscurantism, both formal and linguistic—that is,
poetry of intense and intentional difficulty, in both the composing and
the deciphering.” The work is a kind of hybrid, with mainly Latin
precedents, employing the “experimental poetics of the Irish and
Carolingian Latinists, the so-called hisperic style, and the supremely
mannered, ‘hermeneutic’ style of the tenth-century Anglo-Latin
poets.” The poem shows signs that the writer “relished all
the alphabet poems, acrostics and double acrostics, pattern poems (or
carmina figurata), …obsessive alliteration, new rhythmic
meters, rhyming, and multilanguage wordplay.” From “Old Norse
Skaldic poetry” the author may have also known precedents of “strict
forms and puzzling diction.” And in earlier Irish poetry, had he
been familiar with it, the author would have enjoyed “intricate
patterns of rhyme and alliteration, and…obscurity.” All in
all, this difficult OE poem “is really quite typical of the formal
rigor and obscurantism that characterize the neighboring poetic traditions.”
It has “playfully erudite obscurantism,” is written in a “language-obsessed,
elusive, riddling, and punning style,” and in effect “bursts
with meaning—many meanings” (Earls, 188-89, 195). Such details
refute “many Anglo-Saxonists” who “resist the idea of
genuine punning in Old English poems” (193).
My own findings
before 1979 expand what has previously been known or postulated about
the covert complexity of Anglo-Saxon literary artifacts by showing that,
in the case of the Riddles of The Exeter Book, some of them (at
least) embed their own ambiguously concurrent “answers,”
scenarios rather than single-term solutions, and thus show elaborate suppressed
design and other cryptic features that elevate them from naive snippets
to the status of works exhibiting tediously detailed craftiness (see The
Runic Beowulf). Briefly, I have found that in certain cases one
can decipher a riddle’s hidden “answers” by taking the
authorized lines of the text and stretching them onto a letterbox grid,
flush left. Reading “down,” one extrapolates an acrostic linestring
code to be deciphered. And then one goes at it—a tedious, frustrating,
and finally open-ended process with ambiguous outcomes that are authorially
framed and guided.
Deciphering
the runic codelines in the Riddles, one treats the letterstrings
exactly as one does in the process of detecting the punning “hidden
meanings”—as I have illustrated above—in the letterstrings
generated by Will’s wordings in the Q lines. As parts of subtextual
or runic codes, alphabetic symbols take on broader potentialities than
conventionally spelled wordstrings allow. Runic codes, in other words,
comprise letterstrings rather than wordstrings. Punctuation
(which of course operates to signal syntax) thus takes a back seat; in
medieval use, in fact, punctuation is hardly operative—is random
at best. (Even the separation of letter-groups into word units was a progressive
scribal refinement in universal practice: Scribes penning very early mss.
did not space between words.) In Shakespeare’s day, punctuation
was of course still far less rule-bound and prescriptive than it has since
become, and spellings were flexible; thus a trickster writer could still
maintain a concurrent mental focus on overlaid wordstrings and letterstrings
more easily then than he or she might today.
The precedent
in the Riddles, as I have said, and the pattern they provided was one
key that helped me unriddle the Quarto. A segment of an academic paper
I presented in Tempe at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Society conference in February 1996 offers one example of the cornucopic
materials encoded in a very small segment of the Exeter Book
Riddles:
Riddle 68 (Krapp and Dobbie, p. 231;
Thorpe, VII, 483; see K&D No. 36, p. 198; Thorpe XXXVII, p. 418)
I C p A W I H T
G E S E A H O
N W E G F E R
A N
H E O WÆS WRÆT
L I C E W
U N D RU M G E G I E R W E D
The riddle translates, “I saw the creature / going on the way.
It
was curiously, / wondrously equipped.”
The five scenarios below emerge from the acrostic code
and provide “answers”:
1) An ice-bound
ship, decorated with ice like a Christmas tree—with irony in the
fact that it is stuck, not moving on its way. 2) A rat,
eying cheese greedily. 3) An obese glutton. 4)
A knife-wielding wife trying to castrate her husband. 5) One
or more squinty-eyed riddle solvers, people like us:
I. I H C E O p A W Æ W S I H
W T R Æ G T E L S I E C A E H O W N U N W D E R G U M F EG R E A
G N I E R W E D
Is-ea pa wæs.
Ic wat rewet æl-isig [seoc]. Æghwanon
weder ym. Fierr ea ge-nierwede.
The Ice-Bound ship: Then
was the sea ice. I observed a vessel covered with ice.
From
all sides, weather surrounded. Ahead, the sea closed in.
II. I
H C E O p A W Æ W S I H W T R Æ G T E L S I E C A
E H O W N U N W D E R G U M F EG R E A G N I E R W E D
Ic seah pa wawa si hiwed
[siht(re)], ræt æl ciesæ hogian [ghogienne?] wider ym
feorh, eage nierwede.
The Rat: I saw then misery
be fashioned, a rat
eternally
intent on all cheese, slit-eyed.
III. I H C E O p A W Æ
W S I H W T R Æ G T E L S I E C A E H O W N U N W D E R G U M F
EG R E A G N I E R W E D
Ic seah pah æwis-æter(e),
æt til
cies, æg-hwa nun wider ym. Fær [Fearh] eage nierwede.
The Glutton: I saw the
notorious eater thriving. He ate until he was choosy.
None
was wider around. The fare narrowed the eye.
IV. I H C E O p A W Æ
W S I H W T R Æ G T E L S I E C A E H O W N U N W D E R G U M F
EG R E A G N I E R W E D
Ic seah pe æw(e) si hiwed riht,
æl ciew æg-hwanon wod ear ym. Fyran [Fyrian,…Fær
eagan…] ierre-wedd.
The Irate Wife: I saw the
lawful wife be married right. Every kind of strife raged
from
all sides, the earth over. (Her) angry pledge, to castrate (him).
V. I H C E O p A W Æ
W S I H W T R Æ G T E L S I E C A E H O W N U N W D E R G U M F
EG R E A G N I E R W E D
Ic seah pa wea, suht, rædel-seoc,
æg-hwa, nun witter. Ymb-fer [far? cf. ymb-faran, ymb-feran] eage,
nierwede.
The Riddle-Solver(s): Then
I saw woe, sickness, each one riddle-sick, none wise.
The
eye goes (went?) round and round, squinted.
The anagrammatic reading in solution II
that produces “cheese” from the string SIECAE is strongly
suggested by its context. Though anagrams may seem more “far-fetched”
than sequential phonic strings, they appear to be active in the Riddler’s
set of tricks—as they are in Cynewulf’s. (Contextually, no
gamy reading is really too playful. Though one can hardly insist
on strict syntax, a player must try hard to respect it.)
***
An alternate arrangement of
the implicit codebox in Riddle 68—comprising four half-lines, rather
than two full lines—looks like this:
I C p
A W I H T G E S
E A H
O N W E G F
E RA N
H E O WÆ S W
RÆ T L I C E
WUN D R U M G E G I E R W E
D
Phonically
clustered to help the eye unsnarl it, the inherent acrostic codeline is
as follows:
IOHW CNE UONp WDAEW R GÆUW SM IF HEW GT RREAÆGGN
TIELE S IRE CWAEEHD
The opening
vertical acrostic string IOHWC seems to tell us that we are on track here
because it suggests OE geoc (yoke) and also a Latinate pun on
“joke.” The “wondrous creature” that “moves
along the track” of a scripted line here, indeed, is on one level
the poet’s own riddlic witticism.
Below are
two readings of this codeline. Each reading occurs first in OE, and then
as an expanded translation, with comments.
1) IOHW CNE UONp WDA EWR GÆUW SM IF
HEW GT RREAÆGGN TIELE S IRE CWAEEHD
[O] eow cine geonap, wita eower. Giwie
same gif eow giet run tell [tilie], is ierre-cwead.
…widuwe-ar
[i.e., a messenger bereft, like a widow with a dead husband]
Forever a folded sheet of parchment, your councilor, opens its yawning
mouth to speak to all of you. I ask whether even now the rune, in this
manner, might be speaking to you […is still working you over]. Is
it still a raging shit?
Here one seems
to hear the Riddler’s voice, coming across as if by medieval FAX.
The kenning
ierre-cwad, ire-dung, suggests “verbal diarrhea” from
some distressed, free-flowing source, either the Riddler or us—likely,
both. My “translation,” I think, is not licentious.
A second decoding
effort unearths newfound shards of the Riddler’s scholarly polyglot
wit, however one sorts out its inherent syntactic potentialities:
2) IOHWC NEU
ONp WDA
EW
Geoc(e) [“Yoke,” “Rescue”;
cf. “joke,” L. jocus] nu onywep [aegnep] Wita
[,] eow [,…eower…]
…RGÆUW S
MI FHEWGTRRE AÆ GGNTIELE
S I RECWAEEHD
raew
is me fugitare [L.],
a gentilis
[L. adj.], a (?) requieta
[L. adj.]
…E r o s [L., punning on errare,
to err] …cf.
gentil [OF], genitalis [L]
cf. “error” [OF, L]
cf. Jesus,
giu [OF, cf. L]
cf. Eric… …Eric,
vade [L.].
At this point the Sage unveils (claims as his own) a joke (…yoke
that links you to me, a burden;… rescue or help): [This alphabetic]
row is for me to keep running away (from you) […is always speeding
away from me (to you)], forever as intimately linked with you as family,
forever rested up [i.e., showing no sign of strain from the “chase,”
with a pun on the sense “dead forever”].
Who is running
from whom, and who or what stays perpetually rested—the facts seem
vague in this iohwc neu. The syntactic ambivalence of “you/your”
(code EWR) allows various “swing” readings. The ending
code-clusters suggest “Eric the Gentile—born, gone,”
or some such. Concurrent puns on “Jew,” “Jesus,”
“Eros,” and “error” compound the joke, as do plays
on “gentility” and “genital[s].” In one alternative,
the Wita calls himself a Jew—suggesting Eros and Jesus as alternate
possibilities!—and seems to talk of “running from the Jew,”
putting himself among the “unrequiet[ed],” those perpetually
seeking rest. Puns on “quiet” and “quit” (cf.
L., OF) lie in the codeline terminus CWAEEHD, and the play “eerie
quiet” is not out of range. A “code” pun (ME, cf. L.
codex, “book”) may also inhere.
In any case,
the codeline phonics insistently adumbrate the Latinate forms fugitare,
gentilis (an adjective that has to do with kinship), requieta,
and vade, plugged into the OE string. Though “joke”
is anachronistic, my belief is that here we see a witty OE scholar moving
toward expanding the English lexicon with inkhorn nonce words (esp. from
Latin and OF), much as Shakespeare and other creative geniuses did later.
The letterstrings
EWR and IOHWC, heightened in the codestring, seem likely
to be yet another nameplay—a two-part anagram, EWR/IOHWC, “Eric.”
Together these strings may also pun “Eower [Your] Joke,” with
the pun on “yoke” (linkage, burden). The “yoking”
of all the possible names here expands the Riddler’s “yoke.”
The name “Eric” appears to recur in the codeline as RREAÆGG,
and also near the end of the codestring in IREC WAEEHD (cf. “Eric,
vade [L. go]…”). Among many readings, the end of
the code might mean “Eric the Gentile, aye [forever] requited.”
It seems possible
that the codeboxes incorporate puns not only “Eric” but also
on the place name “Chelsea.” In both the two- and the four-line
forms, the visually linked endings ECIL… [l. 3, reversed] and …SEAH
[l. 1] may play on that place name (OE Ceal-chyd ). (My explorations
of Riddle 38 reinforce this possibility to point hypothetically toward
one Eric of Chelsea as the Riddler—or one of the Riddlers—whose
works the Exeter Book preserves.
Riddle
68 must stand for a number of other OE riddles I’ve explored
and at least partly decoded.
***
Another
nexus of suppressed, previously undetected coterie wit lurks,
I believe, in the emphatic scribal characters heading the Beowulf manuscript.
The one-line opening
HWÆT WE GARDE
has traditionally been ignored as the scribe’s purely decorative
calligraphic flourish. My own, original suggestion is that the line, concurrent
with its meaning in the continuing phrase, communicates as a coterie pun
on the order of “Hwæt Weard! “ (“Behold the Lord!”)
and “Hwæt Wyrd!” (“Lo, the Mystery!” “Observe
Fate!”)
Additionally,
the opening textual segment may encode the authorized signature of Æthridge
(Ethelridge, Hedric), naming the lost Beowulf poet—much
the way the name Cynewulf is encoded elsewhere: The opening lines, I believe,
pun Hwæt wyrhta Ædhrycg, witega… (Behold, the
writer, Æth’ridge, seer…). (See my monographs “The
Runic Beowulf,” [1979] and “Bardic Wit in the Bold-Faced
Beginnings of Beowulf: HWÆT WE GARDE…” [1997]).
|
5.
A Precedent in Middle English: The Pearl Rune. The hidden
foyer that led me circuitously into the Great Lost Chamber of the Quarto
was, almost by happenstance, the medieval poem Pearl (ca. 1360-95
[Gordon]), mentioned earlier. “The Pearl Rune,” the
21-line runic poem that I discovered inside the larger ms. of Pearl
and restored to what I believe is its authorized form, was for me the
key template that helped outline the general patterns of medieval runic
practice which Shakespeare eventually inherited as centuries-old conventions.
This poem, circulated here for the first time in hard print, is the only
instance from the late Middle Ages that I have firsthand knowledge of—uniquely
original knowledge, as it happens—and so I use it here as a primary
example of runic practice from this period. (The practices already mentioned
that occurred in Latin verse and other verse in the early scriptoria can
be presumed to have persisted concurrently through the scribal period
and until the advent of printing.)
The instance
below also allows a chance to support and clarify my working hypothesis
that one Hugh-John Massey of the Royal Hall may be the great lost poet
of Chaucer’s era—perhaps a historical truth perpetuated by
oral tradition inside the runic coteries, right up until Shakespeare’s
own day. I have no absolute sense that Q demonstrates knowledge of Hugh-John
and/or John or Hugh Massey, but some patterns of puns (see the index)
do suggest that possibility, and so I offer the theory for further study.
The
runic text as it occurs below comprises in reverse order the
21 emphatic ms. lines in Pearl. It reads, first, as a kind of discrete
lyric poem, with features of a dramatic dialogue; when understood, it
becomes on one level the “lost pearl” of the poem’s
allegory, a carefully crafted “gem”—with layered accretions
adding to its luster—that the dreamer/speaker has “buried”
in the process of serving God’s higher purpose. Though the reverse
sequence seems to me to make more sense that the straightforward string
of emphatic lines in the ms., I think it likely that the author intended
the string to be playfully “reversible,” line-by-line.
The modestly
edited version below punctuates scribal lines and heightens what I think
may be an inherent numerological structure, with a 13-line center section
housing the conversation between the dreamer/poet—who denigrates
himself as “the jeweler, little to praise”—and his designated
auditor, the Queen of Heaven. (In the full text of Pearl she
is identified with the “lost pearl” of the main narrative.
Various conventional interpretations include the idea that the poem is
a lament for a dead daughter who, in the Dreamer/speaker’s vision,
becomes a bride of Christ, serving his greater glory.) One notable pattern
is the tendency to accumulate and catalog kennings that rename the Maiden
listener—”matchless maid,” “His mild,” “Grace
enough,” “that damsel,” and so on. Such epithetic decoration,
conventional since the age of Homer, occurs in the early OE lyric “Cædmon’s
Hymn.” In Q, Shakespeare adapts the pattern by proliferating abusive
names for Ann and (to a lesser degree) for other players in his personal
drama.
As we can
now see, the “pearl” that has been “buried” and
sacrificed to a higher good is, in one important sense, the elaborately
crafted poem itself, which we are now observing and hearing; thus all
the epithets take on double meaning everywhere they occur by describing
what is “made”:
The Pearl Rune
Delyt me drof in y3e & ere, [l.
1153]
Ry3t as pe maynful mone con rys. [l.
1093]
As John hym wryte3 3et more I sy3e, [l.
1033]
If I pis mote pe schal vn hyde. [l.
973]
“Motele3 may, so meke & mylde,
[l. 961]
Neuer-pe-lese cler I yow by-calle, [l.
913]
‘Thys Jerusalem Lonbe hade neuer pechche’.”
[l. 841]
“Maskelles,” quod pat myry quene, [l.
781]
“Ihsuc con calle to hym hys mylde. [l.
721]
Grace in-nogh pe mon may haue [l.
661]
Of more & lasse in Gode3 ryche.
[l. 601]
The date of pe daye pe Lorde con knaw [l.
541]
That cortayse is to fre of dede.”
[l. 481]
“Blysful,” quod I, “may pys be trwe.”
[l. 421]
Thenne demed I to pat damyselle, [l.
361]
“I halde pat iueler lyttel to prayse.
[l. 301]
O perle,” quod I, “in perle3 py3t.”
[l. 241]
More pen me lyste, my drede aros.
[l. 181]
The dubbement dere of dou & dale3—
[l. 121]
Fro spot my spyryt per sprang in space,
[l. 61]
Perle plesaute to prynces paye.
[l. 1]
An
interpretive paraphrase, which necessarily sacrifices interesting
ambiguities, shows the hidden poem’s coherence and rhetorical force.
The restatement below attempts to retain the sense of the original, along
with its connotative flavor, tone, and imagery—and wherever possible,
to keep the four-stressed, caesura-marked alliterative line. While “you”
in line 4 may be the Maiden auditor who converses in the center part of
the poem, the poet also seems to address any reader—including modern
auditors who need to have the poet’s “spot,” his hiding
place, revealed to us.
Delight overcame me,
eye and ear,
As powerfully as a rising moon;
I saw even more than John writes
down—
4 Whether I can disclose this spot
to you.
“Spotless Maiden, so meek
and mild,
Clearly I call to you nevertheless.”
“This Lamb of Jerusalem had
never a flaw—
8 Was Matchless,” said that
Joyful Queen.
“Jesus can call to himself
all his meek.
There is grace enough for man to
partake,
Great and small, in the Kingdom
of God.
12 The Lord can foresee exactly the day
Such heavenly grace works too lavishly.”
“Blest One,” I answered,
“may all this be true.”
Then to that Damsel I declared,
16 “I consider the jeweler little to praise,
O Pearl,” I said, “in
pearls adorned.”
More than I wished, my fears revived.
The dear adornment of downs and
dales,
20 From that spot my spirit sprang up in due
time,
A pleasing pearl, fit for a Prince.
Glosses:
3) John i.e., [in Revelation]; 4) spot = mote = walled
city, debate, flaw(ed work); 11) Great and small = more &
lasse, maybe a pun on “Moor and lass”; 14) be
trwe may pun on bete rawe, i.e., “amend [the]
row [i.e., the verse line]”; 18) my fears revived = my
drede aros, maybe the ambig. figurative pun “mid red
arrows” (sunrise?); 20) From that spot = Fro spot,
maybe the pun “from stain (i.e., sin), from disputation.”
Of course,
other readings and constructions of these somewhat ambiguously related
lines are possible. For example, the “drede” that “arose”
(l. 18) may be ironically the “dear adornment” of earthly
life (l. 19)—for fear is at once “costly,” “difficult,”
and “precious” for being an aspect of earthly existence (see
OED).
Astoundingly,
the Pearl Rune seems to be alphabetically “reversible,”
in the sense that a letter-by-letter code admits a phonic reading.
In this part of the game, the scribe’s shorthand (including superscripts,
customary short forms—e.g., for “Jesus” and “Jerusalem”—and
the ampersand) help the author find the “right” letters to
accomplish alphabetic reversibility. A reader/player becomes a gamester
who cooperates with the cipher-maker or Runemaster in trying to find sense
in the sequence, so what is below must be regarded as an attempted “playthrough”
that incorporates some conjectural details (reading of codestrings as
representing certain names and place names) which tend toward the hypothesis
that the author of Pearl was one “Massey.”
In doing so
my work ties in with and is partly responsive to various conjectures about
“Hugh or John Massey” as the great “missing author”
of Chaucer’s era. (See below.)
The reverse
alphabetic code below, in piecemeal units, shows my attempts at medieval
decipherings and modern interpretations. Some gamy peripheral side-readings
occur along the way:
ERE & E3Y I FOR DEM TYLED
Euer & ay I for deme [Dame,The Virgin] tiled.
Euer & ay In. [ = Jn. = John] for deme tiled.
Ere & y3e in fordeme
tiled.
Forever and ever I, John (?), pursued intellectual labors,
reason, wisdom—and worked in the Virgin’s service. (The ear
and eye [of author and reader/player] toiled in condemnation.)
…SYR NO CEN OM LUF N YAME pS
AT3YRE3
Sir, no synne homme luf in gome [gome] pis atire3
Siren [L.] o3te (?) nome [gnome] lufian…
Sire, the man who cloaks this in a game does not exalt
sin. (Let man not praise the sinful aspects, or the errors, in the game—or
man—that attires this.) (The charmer ought to praise the gnome-like
protector of treasure, or the gnomic maxim, that cloaks this.)
…YS I ER OM TE3 3ET Y RWYHN HO J SAED
3ys, I euer homme tech. 3et I rune who [hu, hwo] Jesus saued.
3e, sire, homme tech.
I, Sir, …
I rune “Hosea…”
Yes, [Lord,] I am always instructing man; even now I
who[m] Jesus saved whisper (…even now I whisper how [that] Jesus
saved).
…Y HNVLAHCSE pE TOM SIp I FIED
LYM & [AND?] EKE MOSY AM
Y3e vn-loks [vn-lachches] re tom sir’ I fede lym—& eke
Massey [?] am.
…pe
toumbe…
?Johnny lease [i.e., “Lying John”]… fede [“decay”]
…mosse [“bog”] I am.
?Johnny lyke3 pe toumbe… fade [“wither”]
leman [lemon]-Dick…
Th’ eye unlocks the [burial place housing these]
leisure times, long after I fed limb and existed as Massey—or …existed
as a slough to sink into. [? I am “False John,,” “Dick
the lover,…,” etc. The line seems clearly to play on names:
Yhn, Tom, Deke, and perhaps Mosy. Earlier the encoded strings Nom and
Nyame signaled that a part of the puzzle is to be to find the poet’s
buried name.]
… 3ELE TO M ELLAC Y B WO YI R ELCE SELE pREUEN
3elde to me [?Massey], elle3 I be wo, 3e are elle3 sely, pryuen.
“Yellow Tom” alakay [i.e., soldier] be, warrior—ilke
[i.e., the same]. Sely th’ rune!
Give me your leisure, or else I will be grieved. Otherwise
(that is, if you do not “yield to me”) you will be blessed
and prosperous. (The rune is impoverished, repeating words like “warrior”
in different forms to describe a cowardly man, and repeating “rune,”
and also resorting to all these bad nameplays.)
… EHCH CEP REUENE DAHE B N OL
ME LASURE JSY pE NEU Q Y RYM TA p
Eke keep rune, daye be—in al my lesure—esy pe.
Knew quo I rime ta3t…
null
[OF]
Jesu… Enoch…
…Dobbin…
innogh
The rune can embed an addition (like a reinforcement
of troops); the day can be full of leisure for me, and easy for thee.
Those whom I taught how to versify have known…
…Q SELLEK S A MEDLY MSYH MYHOT ELL AC N OCC US
HI EUAH
…quo sely is a medle Massey, my3te hele, ake innogh vus, hi3e
euer.
“Silly Sammy”
“Sammy”
JHSU [reversed] EUER
…to whom a “Massey Medley” (cf. “melee,”
implying struggle) seems sacred—both vigorous health and ache enough
for us, forever to be exalted.
…Y AM NOME pH GO NI EC AR GEH CYR3E D O G
I am (g)nome pat go ne esy or gay, Sire 3e Duke.
I am a name (a spirit guarding a treasure, a maxim)
that does not go easy or gay, Milord. [Here DOG reverses to “God.”
Possibly Massey (?) plays on “Duke of Ghent/Gaunt,” though
the term was not commonly used in Lancaster’s lifetime. The joke
“Ye Dog” seems aimed at a primary courtly auditor, in on this
civilized game. The reiteration of “Name” emphasizes all the
nameplays in the code.]
…NIE S SAL & [DNA, a reverse of AND] ER OM
FOW AN KNOC ED ROLE
Nie3 Salden ar
hommes, fo, & knaw hed rol.
Nys selden ar…
Men approaching Salden [? Or, Seldom dumb] are the enemy,
so they expect to see heads roll. (A possible allusion here to Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight.)
…pEY A DEr FOET A DE pE DED
FOERFOT SIES [Y…]
pey a dere fo3t,
aye de pe did forfete siese.
pe y3e… …a
death…
Is aisy…
They fought to the death [The eye struggled vainly but
was overcome], and death—as usual—did seize the forfeit. (Or,
They fought a death, and forfeited a death. Is easy….)
…Y AT ROC TAHTE WRTE B SY p Y AM I Q LUF SYLBELLES
3et rokke to3t
Writ be, syp I am I[ohn?] quo luf sillables.
I at ROC [a place name?] tau3te…
Even now (as you can witness), my writings (like Holy
Writ) are a Solid Rock—like an invulnerable fortress—since
I am John (with a pun on the Scripture’s “I am That I Am”
and an implicit comparison of the John of Revelation and other Biblical
Johns) who might “love syllables.”
…Y MADT A pOT I DEMED ENNEHT [p?]
I made aye pat I
demed innate,
I always created what I judged to be natural, inherent
in my materials and part of my inner nature,
…ESYAR POT LETTYL RELEU I TA
pE DLAHIT3 Y P3EL
REP
Es3er, put littel relef [a pun on “scraps”], y3e [pun: aye]
to pe delyt3. Ye pale. R.I.P.
…and included easier bits and pieces; the eye
also delights you. I see that you turn pale. Requiescat in Pace.
Rest in peace.
…NI I QEL REPOS OR AE DER DYME T SYLEMNE
Ne I quelle repos ouer aye dare, deme to solemne.
Nigh… R.I.P., aye, sore y3e…
(Sarcastically:) Of course I would not dare to come
near you and kill your repose forever—much too serious a fate to
contemplate.
…pER OM 3E LAD & U OD FOERED TEME
per hommes 3e lad & yow at forehed teme
hommes y3e-lyd… ?O, Duke…
There you and the men (whom) you led put your heads
together (“team at the foreheads”)
…B BU DEpE CAP SIGNAR PS REp T YR Y
Be but dep escape [cuppe], Seignior, rys rest [erp]
to your y3e.
This rest to your eye [This earth you see…] is
only a (temporary) escape from death [only the bitter cup of death], My
Lord.
…PS YM TO P S OR FEYAP
ps hym to P[earl] is oure fayr.[The reading holds if code “P”
= p = “th.”]
P. S. Um(b) top is Oure Fayr.
Passim (OED 1830, from L., “Scatteredly”): Topasye (cf.
Pearl, l. 1012)
Piss ye, MetaPisser, Fey Ape.
This hymn to Pearl represents our faith. Note in closing—here
at the bottom—that Our Faith is On High (“Around the Top”).
Is this a gem (a Topaz) or a doomed wild animal? (Go on and piss, you
Big Pisser, you Doomed Monkey.)
…SEC NYR POT ET UASELPE L REP
Sech ner pat
it yourself schal R.I.P. [Requiescat
in Pace].
Siese neuer…
Sese…
May you never cease, so that it [this “hymn to
our faith”] will eventually bring you eternal rest.
A
reasonably focused capsule version of the “hidden message”
encoded in the alphabetic reverse of “The Pearl Rune”—one
that cuts out some of the static of alternative readings but also pursues
alternative possibilities that occur concurrently in the code, yields
the following statement from the Pearl Poet to his Lordly auditor,
and also to any one of us as a current reader. One senses a recurring
“battle” motif: For the Runemaster is in control, and any
reader (including, ironically, his “Lord”) is cast in an adversarial
role:
Always
I, John (?), have pursued intellectual labors and the Doom of Christians.
(Both my ears and eyes and yours are condemned to toil.) Sire, the man
who cloaks this in a game does not exalt sin. Men should not praise the
sinful aspects in the game—or man—that attires this. Yes,
My Lord, I am always instructing man; even now I whom Jesus saved whisper
the message of salvation. Th’ eye unlocks the burial place housing
these leisure times of mine, long after I fed my body and existed as Massey
[?]. Though I will be grieved if you do not give me your leisure, you
must resist me to be blessed and prosperous.
My rune
can embed an addition—like a reinforcement of troops; the day can
be full of leisure for me, and can also seem pleasant for thee. Those
whom I taught how to versify have known to whom a challenging “Massey
Medley” seems sacred—both vigorous health and ache enough
for us, forever to be exalted. I am a name that does not go easy or gay,
My Lord. Men approaching Salden, your stronghold, are the enemy, so one
can expect to see heads roll. They have fought to the death, and death—as
usual—seized the forfeit. Even now you witness that my writings
(like Holy Writ) are a Solid Rock—an invulnerable fortress—for
I am John who loves syllables, just as the Biblical Johns loved the Word.
I have always created what I judged to be natural and inherent in my materials,
and a part of my inner nature, but I have also included easier bits and
pieces; your own eye adds delight.
I see that
you turn pale. Rest in peace. Would I dare come near you and kill your
repose forever? Surely that’s much too serious a fate to contemplate!
I see that you and your loyal men have put your heads together, to confront
the present challenge. Remember that this rest to your eye—the leisure
of this game—is only a temporary escape from death, My Lord. This
hymn represents our faith. I remind you in closing that Our Faith in On
High. May you never cease your work. May my message, even here, eventually
help bring you to eternal rest.
Other
acrostic codelines and “gameboard” elements emerge
in the gemlike text of “The Pearl Rune” when, following a
clue laid in a textual pun about “smooth sides,” a player
stretches the lines onto a letterboard grid measuring 21 x 33 characters,
using an arrangement with justified margins and medial hiatuses in the
lines that vary in width from one to a number of characters (see the monograph).
The Hugh-John Massey Hypothesis and the Quarto
During
1977-79, variant puns I was unearthing on the name “Massey”
in Pearl including those suggested in the decoding above led me to try—in
privately published monographs but not in journal articles—to consolidate
disparate bits of information and extant scholarly theories with my own
observations and deductions so as to generate this hypothesis: One “Hugh-John
Massey of the Royal Hall,” the Pearl/Gawain author, is
the lost “Huchown” who was once much discussed (e.g., in the
Cambridge histories) as the romance writer to whom many unattributed works
clustering around 1400 might be credited; he is also “Maister Massy”
whom Thomas Hoccleve—a student of Chaucer’s—mentions
and praises in a poem ca. 1411-14 as a poet “fructuous…of
intelligence,” prudent and benevolent, and mysteriously arcane.
Hoccleve says, “For rhetoric hath hid from me the key / Of his treasure,
nat deigneth his nobility / To deal with none so ignorant as me”
(see my monographs “John Massey Un-hyd” and “Hugh-John
Massey of the Royal Hall,” and cf. Greenwood, Nolan and Farley-Hills,
and Peterson). The fact that the place name “Salden” (cf.
the decoding above) occurs in connection with a “William Massey”
in 1426 (see Wilson) helps explain why I “kept” it once it
emerged from the code—though Wilson mentions the place name in the
context of an argument that runs counter to the Hugh-John theory.
The names
“Hugh” and “John” Massey have both been proposed,
then—along with William. Gardner, apparently following others without
reinvestigation or clarification, discusses John of Massey as the Pearl/Gawain
poet, and his “brother…the muralist Hugo of Massey.”
“Huchown of Aule Rial”—i.e., “Hugh-John of the
Royal Hall” is a shadowy figure 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….”
One original
addition of mine to the Massey argument is to note provocative references
in the Chaucer Life-Records to Johanni Meise—along with
John de Massyngham, Johanne Meysinger, and Hughonis Bast. I’ve also
argued that Chaucer’s tribute to the “strange knight”
named Gawayne [i.e., John] in “The Squire’s Tale” (ll.
89-109) might be a tribute to Massey, with these italicized words punning
on “massey” and on “hugh”: “He
with a manly voys seith his message,
/ After the forme used in his langage, Withouten vice
of silable or of lettre [i.e., with ‘letter-perfect’ composition,
but with a pun on unheard’]” (lines 99-101). Other puns in
the Chaucer passage include “You eyed a man live, O yes, see it,
H.I. [cf. Hugh-Ion] is Massey, jester, the ass, our Massey denies language
witty, hooting vice of syllable or of letter.” The early part of
the pun on the name may encode “Hugh I., the man live…”
and “Hugh I. (…eye), th’ M eye inly, oyssei,
this Massey jester, this whore mused….”—where M…oyssei
and Message may play on “Massey.” Some phallic play
on “He with (Hugh ‘eyed’…) a manly 5 [inches],
O, yes…” may also be active.
These
admittedly inconclusive materials about the great “missing
author” of Chaucer’s era seem at least to merit further exploration,
though the question is at best tangential here—introduced to establish
the context of discovery in which I first went searching for runic gaminess
in Q.
As to the
relevance of this lost arcane poet to Q, I remain unsure about whether
Q’s subtextual puns—such as the one above in the epigraph
to this section, the ones indexed, and those explored below as examples—are
convincing enough collectively to support the conclusion that Will worked
with consciousness of the name (in any of its forms) and of Huchown of
the Royal Hall (or John Massey) as an antecedent Runemaster (cf. index).
The theory deserves exploration, especially because the gap between Will
and Huchown would have only been about 200 years and because a famous
conundrum in the Sonnets occurs in the perplexing pun “A man in
hew all Hews in his controlling” (Sonnet 20.7, the “Master/Mistress”
text). Though subject to many analyses, this string may pun “Amen,
John, Hugh, all Hugh is John” and “A man, John Hugh, all Hughs
in his controlling (…Hall using his cunt, rolling).” Close
by is the pun “women’s souls eye Massey, the handy form, aye
(…anew)” (Sonnet 20.8-9).
Q’s
routine form Heauen (as above, or, e.g., in Sonnet 29.12) also
may encode Hugh-John—as “Heau-en.” Similarly, Q’s
routine Muse (e.g., Rune 29.10) may encode “Massey.”
And “…in my seeing…” (see, e.g., Rune 121.2) offers
a purer pun on “John Massey eying (…in jellies wise, erring
oftimes).” I have admittedly approached Q with the assumption that
this figure may be the medieval Godfather of the Runes and perhaps am
merely finding what I’m looking for.
Other
examples of possibly relevant nameplays may help readers form
judgments on this matter:
1. “How can my Muse want subject to
invent, O, Hugh, thy worth, witty man, near as Massey in jet” (Rune
29.10-12), with plays on Hugh (how, hyw, hw) and “Massey,
John” (mayIs in) in 11. “O, Hugh, thy worth witty
may interest, Massey, John” is a variant (29.11). Construed as below,
lines 8-11 are plausibly a covert apostrophe to Hugh John Massey: “As
a decrepit father takes delight, / Hugh—seen, my Massey wan—’Tis
you, becked to invent. / O, Hugh, thy worth with manners, Massey, John,
je/t I….”
2. Component forms of Hugh John Massey
occur as Heaue, ine, w [=IN], and
may s in Rune 42.5—a line about “heauens sun”
that is “stained” with what may be a mea culpa error.
3. “Massey, Massey, all see in this
(…Hall scents; …lacing this)” (79.2, code may seeme
ƒalce in this,).
4. “Aye fey their antique pen, wood
[crazy] Hugh expressed incertainties in O’s rown [rune], the Massey
leaves azured (…as you read),” with variants (105A.8-9).
5. “Wry John Massey eye in gales
(galls, gules) wise, erring ofttimes t’ irony” (121.2-3).
Concurrent puns include “In Massey aye (I) enjoy loss (…John
Massey, aye enjoy loss…), wiser in ghosty ms.’d irony.”
6. The pun “The Morning Son of Hugh-John
Mas., our homme, myself” (131.6-7).
A possible play on “sage Huchown” can be decoded (or perhaps
fabricated) from the acrostic preface to Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist
(see below).
|
6.
Other Late Medieval Precedents. Various other instances before
the Renaissance show possible links with runic practice.
A. The
Second Shepherd’s Play (ca. 1425).
A narrow example of period word-magic, combined with wit, occurs in the
anonymous Second Shepherds’ Play as the mischievous Mak
“prays” in Latin the blasphemous prayer, “Thy hands
I commend to Pontius Pilate” and then draws “a circill, as
round as a moon” to proscribe and transfix the other shepherds while
he steals a sheep of theirs (ll. 265-295; cf. Abrams I:315ff.). Such spell-casting
is a pattern linked with the magic ring or “round,” residual
in many games to this day and (I think) archetypally in the background
of the “endless” runes. The incident antedates “diabolical”
practices among coteries of Shakespeare’s day and also anticipates
a similar but more melodramatic scene in Dr. Faustus (see below).
B.
Christine de Pizan (1364-c. 1430). Somewhat
before the Rhétoriqueurs, this “first professional
writer in Europe” (Wilkie and Hurt 1701)—and Chaucer’s
younger contemporary— imitated Deschamps when she composed “strange”
poems in French including a “ballade rétrograde”
that “can be read equally well either forward or backward.”
Biographer Willard reflects a typical modern bias against mixing game
with poem—a post-Enlightenment either/or mindset that is
not of the period—when she says, “These must, of course, be
considered poetic games and not be taken seriously as poetry” (56).
C.
Coterie aspects in music. Late medieval music proliferates examples
of tediously covert wit and arcane craftsmanship. Program notes at a concert
I once attended explained that works by late 14th century composers in
Southern France, near Avignon, hid puzzles and anagrams and alluded to
secret societies—called, I believe, “smokers.” According
to Sachs, a music historian, the stereotype in “cheap music ‘history’”
is that “the later Middle Ages…strangled the soul of music
in contrapuntal tricks and artifices.” (Sachs sees the bias as a
nearly absolute post-Romantic scorn of “structure” in favor
of expressive emotion.) “Contrapuntal tricks and artifices”
were common in Franco-Netherlandish music of the period, which was often
“calculated and constructed” to include palindromic (or “crab”)
and “mirror” canons of intricate variety, and secret directions
for performance that read like puzzles and riddles; these “last
fulfillment[s] of the architectural, constructivistic mind that ruled
the later Middle Ages” gave “works of art a secret meaning
behind the outer, perceptible appearance and…reserve[d] the key
to the free-masonry of those initiated.” Composers carried out “intricate
attempts at unity in variation, at variation in unity,” all “in
an obvious disdain of sensuous perceptibility” (Sachs 96-98).
Early musical
counterpoint even offers an analogy for developing two concurrent sequences
of materials such as those—the Sonnets and Runes—that Shakespeare
constructs as running overlays in Q: “[Medieval] musicians considered
a contrapuntal composition to be the simultaneous progress [my
emphasis] of individual melodic lines. Even as late a man as Glareanus
(1547) defined the Church modes of such individual lines, but never of
a polyphonic composition as a whole” (96).
***
As
I have said, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose gives a
vivid (if melodramatized) glimpse into a medieval scriptorium full of
closely guarded literary secrets at the time of the Great Schism, 1387-1417,
roughly the era of Chaucer and the Pearl poet. The concern at
the top of the hierarchy in Eco’s fictive monastery for preempting
the infectious influence of Aristotle’s “lost” treatise
on Comedy—a companion to his influential Poetics (which
is, of course, about tragedy)—surely reflects in some manner the
real-world pulls that monks must have felt toward secular entertainment
and away from piety. How to keep the secularity of the runes—where
the language code itself, construed freely and punningly, persistently
proffered the enticement of intrusive bawdry—from undermining the
seminal sacred impulses in writings such as Pearl must have been
an archetypal dilemma for devout writers in the runic coteries.
Somewhere
in my early studies of the runes—I can’t now reconstruct the
context—I recall finding a codeline suggesting that “only
God can read the Runes.” For language, as wielded by the Runemasters,
seems indeed to have a magical, mysterious power to generate a baffling
multiplicity of meanings and to play God by creating its own dynamic and
infinitely fruitful microcosms.
|
7. Renaissance Precedents
and Analogues. So many parallels with Shakespeare’s runic
practice exist in Renaissance art that any summary must be as list-like
as possible, lest this unit expand itself into volumes. Below I mention
the practices of some writers and artists outside the English circle close
to Shakespeare. Much went on in plain sight, though some instances—which,
of course, we have vaguer knowledge of—show exclusiveness and coterie
features. The workshop arrangement by which paintings were produced through
the Renaissance, a medieval inheritance designating roles of Master and
apprentice, tended in itself to encourage in-group secrecy and even jealous
cultishness as artists sought to guard their trade secrets. In any case,
rarified practices always tend to shut out popular audiences and create
in-group effects. Most practices listed here are page-based—not
oral/aural—and presume not only literacy but visual interaction
with the encoded materials. (One sees an acrostic, e.g., but
generally does not hear it in a play without special verbal underscoring
or visual aids such as placards.)
A.
Numbers. In Renaissance art and thought—with Biblical and
medieval precedents—numbers routinely had mystical and substantive
significance. Dante (1265-1321), Petrarch (1304-1374), and Boccaccio (1313-1375),
especially, set the precedent for using numerological architectonics to
build cyclic works. Dante’s Divine Comedy, e.g., shows
the pattern 33 + 33 + 33 + 1 = 100 and is elaborately “governed,
texturally and architecturally, by the numbers 3, 9, and 10” (Wilkie
and Hurt 1382). Boccaccio’s Decameron, as its title hints,
formally embodies two equations: 7 (women) + 3 (men) = 10 (tellers), and
10 (tellers) x 10 (days) = 100 (stories). Numerological theory—e.g.,
in astrology—was commonplace, and thousands of instances might be
adduced where artists before 1600 toyed with numbers. The sonnet form
itself, popularized by Petrarch, is a closed number system, really a numbers
box, sensitive to patterns of 2, 4, 6, and 8. Petrarch’s Rhymes
house 366 poems, with 99 of them in Part II; Petrarch’s Sonnet V
embeds a form of “Laura” as an acrostic anagram (Armi 6-7).
“Numbers”
to Shakespeare actually denoted “metrical periods or feet; hence,
lines, verses” (OED 1588). A Renaissance poet by definition dealt
in numbers. Will’s titles are numerical, and each composition in
Q is a “number.” Professionally, as he puns, Will was both
an “adder” and a “summer” who tallied verses in
the process of generating poems.
B. The
“Grands Rhétoriqueurs” (late 15th
century, France). A close analogue to Shakespeare’s runic inventiveness
exists collectively in the patterned verse games of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs,
a school of French lyricists now critically denigrated as mere tricksters
and little read, perhaps mainly because they seem too hard. Even their
religious poems show preoccupations with “considerations of rhyme
and metrical dexterity” and “a fondness for acrostic and pattern
verses” (McFarlane 84-85). “The exercise [in a given poem]
may be…complicated by acrostic, word-play with numerals (xi
doit montrer xii et gent…), texts that ‘make sense’
also if read backwards. There are Latin poems that have a second meaning
if read as if they were French, rondeaux capable of being read in twelve
fashions…” (37).
Morris Bishop
describes the work of the Rhétoriqueurs this way:
They took the difficult forms of the Middle Ages, ballade, rondeau, etc.,
and made them more difficult, with the invention of fantastic refinements.
They wrote poems with one syllable to a line, and others which had one
meaning if read in the ordinary way, and an opposite meaning if one read
the first halves of each line and then returned to read the second halves.
They pushed the rhyme forward from the line’s beginning and back
from its end until rhyme almost met in the middle. Their work is to medieval
poetry what flamboyant architecture is to high Gothic. Their craftsmanship
is still fascinating as ingenious verbal whimsy…. (84-85)
C. The
Columbus Cipher. Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) signed his
name using a cipher whose symbology has not been conclusively read. Biographer
Samuel Eliot Morrison discusses the Italian-born explorer’s four-line
acrostic signature:
—S—
S—A—S
X M Y
Xpo FF RENS
The last line is a Greco-Latin rendering of “Christopher.”
Morrison tentatively decodes the form as “Servant am I of the Most
High Saviour, Christ Son of Mary” (National Geographic).
D. The
Visual Arts. I recall reading about the fairly recent discovery
that Michelangelo (1475-1564) craftily hid the shape of a human brain
in a cloud form he painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling—presumably
to symbolize human reason as the Creator’s gift. Instances of sly
embeddings of “hidden messages,” “signatures,”
artists’ self-images, and various tricks and arcane symbols in European
art before 1600 are not at all rare, and contemporary discoveries of lost
details that have been right before our eyes all along will surely be
on-going. Renaissance art, in other words, was often playful, both in
conventional ways taken for granted and in privately inventive ways known
only to artists or within their coteries. Painters who coyly included
images of themselves in their artworks reflect a mindset much like that
of the prankish, egocentric Rune-writers who were playing games with their
once and future audiences.
Barolsky discusses
other aspects of Michelangelo’s playfulness, noting that he parodied
“not only the conventions of the Petrarchan tradition but also his
own Petrarchism” (59) and that in his art he “was constantly
dealing with or commenting on” the “conventions” of
art itself (65). Both aspects are also true of Shakespeare in Q, where
the project itself, and doing it, becomes one of the main subjects in
the cycle and its separate components.
One of Michelangelo’s
sketches, a study that “convert[s] the architectural profile [of
the base of a column] into a human one by indicating the eye of a human
face” (61, cf. 63) parallels Shakespeare’s conversion of his
own medium—letterforms and typeforms, lines and spaces—into
playful pictographs, including the “empty couplet” parentheticals
closing Sonnet 126.
E. Sprezzatura.
Baldassare Castiglione’s famous book The Courtier (1528,
translated 1561), widely influential in the Renaissance, established ideals
of gentlemanly behavior that stressed sprezzatura or “suppressed
design”—doing hard things (often varied and concurrently)
and making them look easy, hiding complexity of effort behind an underworked-looking
facade. Implicit in this notion is a combination of artful craftiness
with good-natured deception and mildly dishonest manipulation of any observing
audience—in short, with oneupmanship. (Will’s persona often
worries that the surface of the Q texts is being overly marred by obvious
“errors” that betray the strenuous effort going on in his
bifurcated concurrencies; his “solution” is sometimes to lament
his flawed craftsmanship publicly, while subtextually “blaming”
somebody else—most often Thorpe, his printer.)
F. Music.
Renaissance and post-Renaissance music continued medieval conventions
that included covert games, arcane exclusiveness, and inaudible textual
intricacies. German composers practiced Augenmusick, using witty
visual tricks that employed, e.g., whole notes wittily to represent “eyes.”
J. S. Bach (1685-1750) sometimes wrote “bass progressions whose
letter-notes form a signature or tribute” (Starobinski). As late
as 1770, Mozart heard the Sistine Chapel choir “singing a Miserere
by Allegri, a ‘secret’ piece whose written text was not allowed
outside the chapel.” (Mozart perversely memorized it on the spot,
wrote it down, went back once “to check his manuscript against another
performance,” and corrected the “few minor errors” he’d
made) (Jacobson).
Shakespeare
routinely puts music in his plays, is a skillful librettist, seems to
allude to contemporary musicians in Q’s subtext (see Dowland, etc.,
in the index), uses musical terms in Q, and shows an interest in instruments
of all sorts. Self-consciously, his poems are his music, and
various overt and subtextual terms (song, chantey, ground, key, ode, note)
and blatant conceits (e.g., in Sonnet 128) emphasize that reality. As
a composer he probably absorbed much from the formalistic, numbers-based,
and playfully exclusive ethos that permeated musical practices in his
day, practices inherited through the system of Mysteries by which the
arts and crafts persisted. Such practices, anyway, were consistent with
attitudes that also governed literary production and that shaped its formal
principles.
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8. Contemporary
Coterie Practices in English. Though evidence is skimpy, by virtue
of the subject itself, literary coteries and subtextual activities seem
to have thrived during Will’s own area in variously documented forms.
A. The
School of Night. Literary coteries were noted phenomena
in Shakespeare’s day, as before and after—however ambiguous
the conclusions one can draw from contemporary evidence. The “school
of night”—alluded to obscurely in Chapman’s poem The
Shadow of Night (1594), in Love’s Labor’s Lost (4.3.255),
and maybe in Rune 91.2 (as “compeers by night”; cf. the index)—comprised
a “coterie of intellectuals [including Raleigh, Marlowe, and Chapman]
who were accused of discussing obscure and forbidden topics” during
the 1590s; their rumored profane activities including spelling “God”
backwards (Harrison 396).
Raleigh’s
purported affiliation with the School, incidentally, makes one wonder
if somehow the famous rune-like “message” CROATOAN—all
that remained after the Lost Colony disappeared on Roanoke Island, Virginia—might
have been some kind of attempt at coterie communication. The word, however,
is a variant spelling of a local place name, so perhaps only the lack
of a syntactic context makes this tree-inscribed message cryptic.
B. Marlowe’s
Mumbo-jumbo. Turning “G-O-D” into “D-O-G”
seems today a laughably innocuous form of word-magic but would have been
more serious in an age that affirmed the presence of witches and prosecuted
people for heresy. (One traditional test for witches was having them say
the Lord’s Prayer backward.) Marchette Chute observes, “It
would have been difficult to find anyone in the audiences at the Globe
who did not believe in the powers of darkness” (273). Thus the Latinate
incantations uttered by Christopher Marlowe’s hell-bent protagonist
in Dr. Faustus (ca. 1592-93) show an instance of black magic
and “concealèd arts” (1.1.103) colored, surely, by
the titillating fact that in 1591 Marlowe’s former roommate Thomas
Kyd, another playwright, had accused Marlowe of atheism—and treason,
too. Thus Faustus must have seemed Marlowe’s alter ego when the
character remarked that “necromantic books are heavenly: / Lines,
circles, signs, letters, and characters—/ Aye, these are those that
Faustus most desires” (1.1.50-52). Later, drawing a magic circle
on the ground, Faustus comments, “Within this circle is Jehovah’s
name / Forward and backward anagrammatized” (1.3.8-9). Mephistophilis
refers to this inversion as “racking” the name.
C.
Love’s Labor’s Lost (perhaps 1594-95). Perhaps
Shakespeare’s most “overt” coterie composition, this
play pushes humor even beyond what a typical contemporary public audience
“who knew all the latest jokes with words” (Chute 103) would
have picked up on. Editor Harrison comments on the play’s “inexplicable
lines, allusions, topicalities, jokes, and personalities so obscure and
unintelligible that they bewilder even the most erudite of commentators”
and—broaching again a very modern dichotomy and critical bias—notes
that these elements have tended to make critics “leave the play
to those who are more interested in literary puzzles than in poetry”
(394, my emphasis). The play may have first been performed at “some
great private house” (Harrison 395, quoting A. T. Quiller Couch
and J. Dover Wilson), likely with Southampton a central courtly figure
in its first audience. Such characters’ names as Berowne, Rosaline
(cf. “Rows-align” “Risley nigh,” “‘Wriothesley!’
neigh”), and Dumaine (cf. “Deux main,” suggesting
double-handedness) would have been heard, I think, as in-group allusions
to runes, acrostic “rows,” “Wriothesley,” and
“duplicitous writing.” The play’s origins seem likely
to be linked with early, 1590s versions or sections of what eventually
became the Q text—both angled in great measure toward a group of
“private friends.”
D.
Willobie His Avisa (1594). This notorious and
controversial book of verse offers a well-documented but still puzzling
instance of contemporary coterie composition—and evidence for the
popularity of the genre in Shakespeare’s London. Attributed to an
Oxford student named Henry Willoughby, the work comprises “dialogues
in which the chaste Avisa, in mediocre verse, rejects her would-be seducers.”
The preface hints at an arcane subtexture when it states that “though
the matter be handled poetically, yet there is some thing under these
fained names and showes that hath bene done truely.” Elizabethan
readers “must have found hidden meanings behind the poem’s
bland repetitive moralizings, for Willobie His Avisa went through
five editions in fifteen years, even though the authorities tried to suppress
it in 1599” (Akrigg 216). The book’s “unriddling…has
a particular interest for Shakespeareans” because of a passage that
mentions “H. W.” (cf. Henry Wriothesley, i.e., Southampton)
and “his familiar friend W. S.” in the context of theatrical
references—and also because its prefatory verses contain the earliest
allusion to The Rape of Lucrece. The “Avisa riddle”
has led different interpreters to equate the book’s female moralist
with Shakespeare’s Dark Lady and to detect in its pages “an
attack launched against Southampton by Raleigh’s friends”
(Akrigg 217). Possibly the poem may “represent[s] the next round
after Love’s Labor’s Lost in a continuing literary
battle” (Akrigg 216-19).
When Shakespeare
puns “The brand [my mistress] quenched in Asshole Willoughby”
(Rune 149.14), he may have in mind the Avisa author—or
possibly Ambrose Willoughby, “one of the Queen’s gentlemen
who…[early in 1598] evicted [Southampton] from the Presence Chamber
and led to Southampton’s temporary exclusion from the Queen’s
court” (Akrigg 68).
E. Numbers
in Spenser’s Epithalamion. Instances of Edmund
Spenser’s elaborate coterie gameplaying and numerological preoccupations
in Epithalamion (1595) show long-lost coterie practices at work
in Renaissance literature that we’ve only recently found (cf. Hieatt)
and begun to try to fathom (see, e.g., Graves’ “Two Newfound
Poems”). A. Kent Hieatt’s conclusions are now fully accepted
and have been assimilated into current views of Spenser’s formalism
(see, e.g., Abrams I:771). The patterns in Epithalamion, as Hieatt
discovered, use numeric details from the calendar in structural ways.
My own conclusion
is that such numerologic preoccupations may govern certain other poems
as well, including not only Prothalamion but also The Ruines
of Time and Ruines of Rome, whose titles pun on “runes.”
Another of Spenser’s titles, The Shepheardes Calender,
may be a long unheard coterie clue, I think, about his arcane numerological
interests; my guess is that the Ruines titles operate similarly
as in-group puns. Since his meeting with Raleigh in Ireland in 1590 was
a decisive incident in Spenser’s literary career (Abrams I:529),
one wonders whether the two were mutually involved in literate mysteries.
Spenser (1552-1599) was dominant in the English literary scene, a figure
Shakespeare could not have ignored. Spenser’s practices, of course,
are fully congruent with the conventional Renaissance expectation that
great art show formalistic undergirding and sprezzatura.
F. The
Southamptons’ Coded Communication. In 1599, when Southy
was in Ireland, his wife sent him a “code” letter that combined
a puzzling reference to “Sir John Falstaff” with another to
a “miller’s thumb.” To decode the message requires that
“miller’s thumb” be read as “a small fish with
a big head known also as a ‘cob’” and, in turn, that
“cob” be heard as a reference to Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham.
Critic Leslie Hotson finally “broke the Countess’s code”—in
1949 (Akrigg 248). (As I mention elsewhere, one Francis Davison laboriously
anagrammatized the name HENRICUS URIOTHESLEUS into a Latin verse as part
of a published tribute to Southampton in 1603 [Akrigg 138].)
G. Twelfth
Night (1601). This play is known to have been performed
in 1602 in the Middle Temple (Harrison 846)—one of the four Inns
of Court in London, exclusive guilds for training young lawyers before
admission to the bar (Chernow and Vallasi). Twelfth Night 2.5,
which hinges ambiguously and playfully on an “M.O.A.I.” riddle
included in a lady’s letter, offers insight into Shakespeare’s
interest in letter-based puns and their pictographic potentialities and
individual “personalities.” The scene thus shares features
with the famous “wooden ‘O’” metaphor for a “round”
theatre (Henry V prologue) and with Kent’s disparagement
of the “whoreson Zed,” that “unnecessary letter”
(Lear 2.2.69-70).
Wit emerges
in Twelfth Night 2.5 as Malvolio reads in a versified letter
the quatrain “I may command where I adore, / But silence…
/ With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore. / M, O, A, I, doth sway my
life.” A servant calls this “A fustian [common, bombastic]
riddle!” and the two—with Sir Toby Belch—proceed to
try to decode it, with no definitive success. “What should that
alphabetical position [arrangement] portend?” Malvolio asks. Even
before opening the letter, Malvolio makes crude remarks whose humor is
letter-based: “By my life, this is my lady’s hand. These be
her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s; and thus makes she
her great P’s…” Here “cut” is pudendal bawdry—unconscious
on the character’s part—that links with a suggestive play
on “pee.” Ingenuously punning on the “O, A, I”
in the riddle, Sir Toby joins in the discussion with “O, aye…,”
and the three characters then proceed to explore various possible decodings
of the letterstring riddle, broaching a subtle analogy between an “O”
and a hangman’s noose (2.5.116, see note, Greenblatt et al
1792), and so on. Shakespeare’s coterie peers would probably have
heard in this innocent-seeming instance echoes of certain patterns of
runic (and partly pictographic) letter-wit that they were used to dealing
with in the (page-based) Runes.
Modern critics
have already suspected coterie wit in the letterstring “M.O.A.I.”
An unnamed peer reader, for instance, in rationalizing his rejection of
a paper on Shakespeare’s Runes that I’d submitted for journal
publication in the 1980s, remarked, “That there was in Elizabethan
times a good deal of writing for coteries is certain. On this point, Prof.
Graves’s argument is sound. I have for years held the opinion that
Twelfth Night was written by Shakespeare with a coterie in mind:
the students of the Middle Temple. The still-mysterious ‘M.O.A.I.’
is, I think, an ‘inn-joke’.”
H. Herbert’s
Rhyme Scheme Game. In his ostensibly serious lyric “The
Collar,” a minor classic, the devotional poet George Herbert (1593-1633)
plays an entertaining coterie game undetected until Miami-Dade Community
College student Cary Ader began to unriddle it in 1992 as he analyzed
the poem’s complex rhyme scheme, using conventional abc symbols
to label the lines. Ader found that the intrinsic alphabetic gloss on
the rhyme scheme generates a lost “NO, NO,” encoded with appropriate
relevance at the very end of the poem where God is tongue-wagging the
poet/persona for his childish, undisciplined rant. Norbert Artzt, Ader’s
professor, passed Ader’s discovery on to me, and the result is published,
collaborative evidence of a previously unknown paradigm by which English
poets—and surely not just Herbert in this one instance—could
embed implicit syntactic wit in their rhyme schemes, using the
abc letter code for marking serial sequences (see Graves, “Herbert’s
‘The Collar’,” Explicator).
In fact, as
I’ve shown in further explorations of the pattern, the whole rhyme-scheme
lettercode implicit in “The Collar” can be read as peripherally
authorized edgewit. One reading is “A busy body (Aye busy, bawdy…),
I deceive, (I deceived ye…) give (gave) hid, edged (aged) jig; cudgel
be minimal (…be my mill), be none, O!” Further, because one
rhyme-pair in the poem is ambiguously connected, Herbert actually bifurcates
the rhyme scheme, with one letterstring ending “No, No,” (code
NO NO) and the other, “Amen, Amen” (code MN, MN). Other Herbert
poems illustrate similar patterns, previously undetected. All traditional
English poems with complex rhyme schemes, I propose, are now potentially
suspect of having been read ingenuously (see Explicator). Herbert’s
A/B bifurcation parallels that in Q’s Set VIII, where a gamy bifurcation
also challenges a player with two valid options. Too, Herbert uses “letters”
in the same way that musicians like Bach used A-G, the notes in the scale,
to encode audibly undetectable strings that spelled out meaningful messages.
Herbert expands his alphabetic range to 14 or 15 characters by adding
new rhymes, repeated in variations that are sometimes so widely spaced
that the auditor’s ear is unlikely to detect them. Thus, the manipulation
of the non-notated letters is doubly hidden in the published poem: A player
must first add the notation, using the eye to search out the
rhymes.
Again, the
ideal of formal sprezzatura governs such works, the existence of which
has remained hidden over centuries, a lost type of literate coterie wit.
I. Ben
Jonson’s Acrostic Verses. An ostensibly face-forward form
of literate gameplaying employed by the Renaissance poet/dramatist Ben
Jonson (1572-1637) occurs in acrostic verses that preface his Volpone
(1606) and The Alchemist (1610). The initial letters of
the 12-line Argument that opens the latter spells out THEALCHEMIST—unheard
by the audience unless the string was somehow underscored for effect.
I believe that we may have underestimated these conventional acrostic
verses. My guess is that those among the “Tribe of Ben” (a
school, if not a coterie) might have enjoyed looking for arcane puns in
the acrostic codeline, which compresses such overlaid plays as “T’
hell, game hissed,” “They’ll see hymn, eye saint,”
“Tail-gem hissed,” "Theology misty (ms.’d),”
“Th eel see, misty,” “The eel, quay misty,” “Th’
eel came, iced,” “The eel-game hissed,” “Teal
sea misty,” and so on. (My experience with OE runes is that “eel”
is a recurrent conceit for the slippery codelines; here “the eel-game”
indeed “hisses.”) The codestring CHE suggests not only “key”
(needed to unlock the riddle) but also Gk. Chi and thus “Christ.”
Because “St.” represents “Saint,” one detects
“Thee, All, Christ, My Saint” and “T’ heal, Christ
[came?], my Saint ” (cf. “Tell grace misty”)—or
contrarily, “T’ hell, Christ, He missed!” MIST suggests
“Mystery” and “Master,” implying a continuation
that makes one suspect that the whole written acrostic verse text may
be an extended phonic codeline to decipher. Thus, whether any overall
meaning is authorized or not, the runeplayer is pulled into an arduous
deciphering project instigated by the author. Given the way language itself
cooperates to generate non-authorized puns, Shakespeare’s coterie
members playing the game would even be likely to hear “To Hall came
aye Shakespeare [=ST=∫t],” “T’ hell…,”
and “They’ll see him, eye Shakespeare.”
By covert
and previously unnoted means, Jonson’s gamelike preface thus seems
to effect “alchemical” transformations that must have delighted
in-group reader/players. Various game elements are possible. Perhaps an
overall acrostic grid is at work to generate one long codeline. Or, if
one omits the initial letters bound into the acrostic, the remaining
first-word components will yield the following codestring that allows
(and thus seems to encode) readings such as these:
he is ase Cheater
eaving oz’ners ouse
ach uch
n elling ill
1) He says, “Cheater, Heaven Ghost
nears. O, you see ache, you see Handling
Ill .”
2) He—Isaiah—see, heed, e’er Eve, in gauze, nears (in
cousin errs). Isaac you see, annealing ill.
3) I see, sequitur, Heaven Ghost, nurse, houses huge, (…Isaac
you see… ) and Ealing ill.
4) Isis etched, e’er Eve in gauze, near (in “ear”) sausage
[phallic] you see, ‘handling’ Jill.
5) Hisses heed, a rune goes in ear, saw [cf. “repeat old ‘saws’”]
you Sage Huchown, lingual hell.
“Handling
Ill”—pretty much what we’re undergoing as runeplayers—varies
the title of Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s book of metrical homilies
Handlyng Synn (1303).
The “Sage
Huchown” (code seach uchn[e]) here seems in context reasonably
convincing.
The reverse
acrostic codeline, TS I MEHCLAEHT, suggests, e.g., “Dizzy maze laid
(lead),” “’Tis I, Massey, late,” “’Tis
J. Massey, late [i.e., now dead],” “Tee! seamy clit,”
“’Tis I, Missal 8,” “Tee! some heckled,”
and “T’s I mislaid.” And if the preface is construed
as two columns of six lines each, a zigzag “code” emerges
in the acrostic: THHEE MAIL SCT, suggesting “The Male Sect.”
“Sect” was “sometimes applied spec. to parties that
are regarded as heretical” (OED, late ME) and more generally meant
“a school of opinion in politics, science, etc.” (1605). (Cf.
also “The male Scot,” “The male’s caught [God].”)
The prefatory
acrostic verses of Volpone can be similarly explored. One obvious
reading is “Vol[ume] punny.” (“Pun” [OED 1662]
has obscure origins.) The second- and third-column vertical lettercode
in the acrostic letterbox (in a modern English version of the text) is
ofirt ealƒe ehw c pesse…, suggesting “…overt
all is…” and “…offered (overt) eels, you see piss….”
More serious (but still playful) study of the text, of course, would require
that we consult an authorized text, if one is known to exist.
(My space here is limited, my life short.)
However far
one wishes to go in ferreting out Jonson’s game, it seems possible
that the most “classical” of Shakespeare’s contemporaries
may have practiced what would later be called “false wit”
for an in-group readership much narrower than his public audience. With
the newly emerging insights about coterie composition that finding the
Runes gives us, we may begin to understand the degree of Jonson’s
in-jokes about such learned “swindlers” as Subtle and also
may be able to open up some of the whys and wherefores of the “bonding”
that occurred within the “Tribe of Ben.”
J. Shakespeare’s
Shield and Family Coat of Arms. One known, conventional instance
of arcane inscription occurred when Shakespeare himself made a contribution
to the celebration of the King’s accession day, March 24, 1613,
by collaborating with Richard Burbage to design a paper shield for one
Francis Manners, Earl of Rutland. Evidence suggests that Shakespeare was
paid to make up the motto, and Burbage—a gifted designer—to
paint the illustration. Such shields, called impresa, were carried by
the knights in the tournament and afterward were displayed in Whitehall;
conventionally each knight’s shield featured “a picture and
a motto that united to hint at his identity or his state of mind, and
the guessing of these little courtly riddles was part of the fun of going
to a tournament.” No record exists of the teasing slogan the poet
came up with (Chute 305-06). More generally speaking, all the emblematic
practices of heraldry show us cousins—several times removed—of
the runes, and so the well-known story of the Shakespeare family’s
protracted struggle to secure a coat of arms is distantly germane: The
iconography of a silver-tipped gold spear or of a falcon supporting a
spear (see Chute 184ff.) indulges in visual punning on the poet’s
patronymic that parallels the pattern in the ∫t name cipher
that I have deduced in Will’s routine runic practices. Whether Will
or his father instigated the effort to obtain a family crest, the parallels
with heraldry remain.
K.
The “Shake-spear” Play in Psalm 46 (King James Bible,
1611). “Shake” occurs 46 words into the psalm, and “spear”
46 words from the bottom, and—as I’ve already tried to show—other
possible plays within the KJB text complement the key nameplay. If encoded
in No. 46 in 1610, the year before the KJB appeared, “46”
is a complex play on Will’s age, and the instance is a name-and-date
play, a runic convention.
L. Freeman’s
Runne and a Great Cast (1614). Thomas Freeman’s
sonnet “To Master W. Shakespeare” (1614) is Epigram 92 from
a work suspiciously titled Runne and a Great Cast. Chambers identifies
Freeman as “of Magdalen, Oxford.” My own analysis, partly
shown below and published here for the first time, suggests that the poem
exemplifies gamelike embedding; Isuspect it’s a routine hack example
from contemporary practice. Though other games may lurk in the text, the
one I detect is recoverable in the sequence of 11 italicized
words that the poem embeds.
S h a k e s p e a r e
M e r c u r y
A r g u s
h o r s e - ƒ o o t e
L u c r e c e
V e n u s
A d o n i s
M e a n d e r :
T e r e n c e
P l a u t u s
M e n a n d e r
Accessible suggestions of authorized runic craftiness lurk in 1) the obvious
tone of the poem; 2) the 11 x 11 dimensions of the letterbox; 3) A.M.
and P.M. in the lefthand acrostic; 4) the line-up of “hero”
in column 2 (1-4); and 5) the double-panhandle play “…eare/…oote…”
(cf., e.g., arete, Herod, aret [reckon, ascribe], error, tee!)
in the upper righthand “long lines”—which become the
tailend of the overall acrostic letterstring code (down the columns, left-to-right
in turn).
The lefthand first-line down/up acrostic code—a “hairpin code”—suggests
these authorized (or authorially encouraged) puns:
SMAhLVAMTPMMPTMAVLhAMS
Semele you, A.M. t’ P.M. empty, may (my!) you lay a miss.
Smell you, A.M. t’ P.M., empty—my offal, a mess (…my
“oval” amiss).
Smell “V” [i.e., crotch, groin] A.M. t’ P.M., my “pit”
may you lay, my ass.
Small “V,” empty pee hymned my Oval [cf. Round], a ms.
Small, vamped [shoe part, therefore “footed”], th’ [=thorn,
p] hymn, [an] empty male “ha-ms.”
Small [Smell, Detect] 5 [=S=Ass]: AM T’ PM [five letters], my pet,
my “oval,” aye, my ass.
Simile—empty, pimped—may veil a ms.
Small 5 [inches], aye empty pee, m’ empty male aims.
Is my lamb (limb, lam, loom, iamb) t’ pimp Tommy, lay miss?
Ishmael, you eye him to pimp, t’ mawl aye my ass.
And so on.
The allusion to Semele, the mother of Bacchus, calls to mind the myth
in which she seeks “proof” of an Epiphany that turns out to
be false—for her skeptical position is much like ours here. Other
provocative vertical acrostic line-ups in the letterbox encourage exploration
of the fuller vertical code: e.g., hero, deele, noa, oar, ran, c us
[see us], runne, neu, see, sr-c [Circe], cud, eor. The acrostic term
“runne” (col. 4, 5-9 down) reiterates exactly the spelling
in Freeman’s title, while the forms lear, rank, and seeor
occur at run-on points. Funny “theatrical” scenarios emerge
from the full code, including plays on Lear and Noah and
phonic equivalents of wrote, cues, scene, aside—and even
a joke about an intermission break to “ese” a “py[s]er.”
The incipient Noah scenario is a variant of one that I’ve found
occurring often in the runes (from OE onward) and that seems fairly “easy”
to encode. Other vaguely allusive forms—Circe, Cynara, Semele—occur,
and the place names Jersey and Angus catch the eye. Perhaps “sinner
Angus” is an in-grouper who, as Freeman jokes, outshines Herod.
Here is a
limited exploration of a primary acrostic lettercode:
SMahLV AM T
PM he rouede e lear gr
c n o a
rank c us
Simile (Smelly), A.M. t’ P.M., he wrote a larger scene, O [cf.
Globe, round], eye rank queues,
…he
wrote a Lear
Grecian o’er [i.e., about] Ann-kisses
Small lamb t’ B.M. here ode [i.e., praise], a larger scene owe [acknowledge],
our Angus…
…he
rode a larger sea, Noah, rank
seas run new…
Hero
you deli[v]er, Jersey Noah— rank, see us rune…
…jeer [did y hear?] Cynara…
Small you aimed th’ hymn: Herod a larger sinner, Angus, ruins…
…hero,
you dally, our Jersey know, our Angus rune you eye…
[code cont.] runne u a
u see
sid n tn s r-cs
ec ud py ƒer ese eor aor tee
[cont.] … rune you eye (ruin you aye), you see sight intenser
ceases. You’d pisser ease hardy.
…
you see Satan, ten Circes each, you’d pay for easy art. Eee!
…seaside,
end nice o’er seas easy, you’d pay for…
…ruin
you eye, you cease (…you see, sudden, “tennis” rises
easy…) …erase you rarity.
seaside
intense or seas easy you’d piss…
…
aside entend …could be y’ fare easy or hardy.
…our anus (Eunice) is eyed, entend, sirs… …you’d
pay for easy arete [excellence].
…Circes easy you’d pay, Pharisee, “oar”
hard(y).
Readers who
pursue the gridgame in this little “unlocked treasure” may
find such encoded diagonal plays as Log ce [cf. “log
see”]; Md nr eye [cf. “empty in her ‘eye’,”
“M.D. in ’er eye,” “maiden wry”]; Pean
sc∫r [“pain seize ’er,” “paeon’s
Caesar,” “paeons see, sir”—where the 4-syllabled
foot, or “paeon,” alludes to the 4-syllabled code unit itself];
Mlr n ie oe [“Miller, nigh O”]; nun et; Ae run;
V daetd; Leon nue; hunnd csr [cf. “Hunn’d Caesar,”
“hunt see, sir”]; and ero [in an “E Row”
(fifth line) position]. “Horse-foot” (overt in line 4) suggests
4-footed and alludes both to “Mercury” and more covert “paeons”
of the grid; it also might be a “Horseford” pun. The element
“Meander” suggests, of course, what one does in trying to
follow the lines of the game.
M. Possible
“Hypograms” in Shakespeare. See Jakobson, who applies
de Saussure’s idea of the hypogram (separated phonic strings embedded
as anagrams) to Shakespeare’s texts.
N. Absey
Books and Christ-cross Rows. Young Shakespeare would have called
his primer or horn book an “ABC” or “Absey”—signifying,
in part, “an alphabetical acrostic” (OED 1597). “Shakespeare
has several references to the Absey book with its rows of letters and
syllables, the first row beginning with a cross—hence ‘Christ-cross
row’ for the alphabet—and the Lord’s Prayer.”
Will’s fixed memory of the visual arrangement of these crisscrossed
“rows” shows, e.g., in Richard III as “King
Edward, suspicious of his brother George, ‘from the cross-row plucks
the letter G’” (Rowse 35). Both Will’s puns in Q on
“rows” and his interest in the plays in the “characters”
of various letters seem more understandable with these alignment practices
in view as patterned archetypes that would have been formative in Will’s
childhood experiences.
O. “Rounds.”
Coterie readers would have heard not only “ruin” but also
“round” as a pun on “rune.” Where “round”
occurs to mean “a circular dance” (OED 1513), a round of drinks
(1633), or possibly a polyphonic song (1683), the punning coterie meaning
may also be present.
I suspect
a coterie allusion to “round” not only in “wooden [cf.
‘crazy’] ‘O’,” an epithet for a round theatre,
but also in Hamlet’s famous term “mortal coil”—something
burdensome and all-enveloping to be “shuffled off.” Coterie
ears would probably have heard routine puns on “O” as “round”
in Shakespeare’s dramatic works. Touchstone’s comment about
poetry as ideally a “feigning art,” used as an epigraph for
this introduction, opens with the pun, e.g., “In ‘O’
true lies ore: The truest poetry aye Southy must find in candle averse
or Jew (…gondola-verse, or June)….”—with many
other variants to mine, including “In ‘O’ truly sordid
are you….”
Will must
have enjoyed the irony in the fact that one meaning of “round,”
as he used the word, was “straightforward and direct” (e.g.,
Hamlet 3.1.19).
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