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Background
The
154 texts recomposed here—the artifactual Runes
in their unedited state—are symstematically reassembled groupings
of Will’s original lines, shown just as the individual lines
occur in the printed form of the 1609 Quarto. My assumption is
that the Q lines, unedited, show authorized details, and that
printing agent Thomas Thorpe, whose initials occur twice in the
frontmatter of Q, helped Will effect his wishes, jot-and-tittle,
as Q was printed. (Incidental variants of a few lines occur in
extant copies of Q, and I discuss these slight variations elsewhere
on this site, in the context of the eleven individual sets. My
guess is that some or perhaps all of the deviations in various
copies may have been consciously manipulated at the printing stage
as part of Will’s joking scheme.)
Links
to the 11 separate set groupings—which include edited texts,
paraphrases, and comments—occur at intervals below for easy
connections.
The
first recomposed rune in each set as shown below always
takes up more space than the other 13 because its initial capitals
in Q are bigger—a printed feature whose special fallout effects
I’m sure Will—with his all-attentive mind—would
have envisioned. For one thing, the visually emphatic vertical
acrostics in these initial runes in the sets, once the runes are
recomposed, call attention to all the other acrostic alignments
in both Sonnets and Runes, especially because Rune 1 generates
AVON insistently at its bottom lefthand corner. The odds
are greatly against having such an alphabetic alignment happen
on its own.
Readers
here can see how each rune emerges “horizontally”
by looking back at the set spread that houses and automatically
generates it. The authorized system of parallelism that’s
implicit in each set makes the restoration of any runic text a
mechanical rather than a volitional process—even in the special
case of Set VIII, with its A and B variants.
In
the paste-up process I’ve recycled the Sonnet numbers in
Q as numeric rubrics for the Runes—even keeping Will’s
“erroneous” number 119, a playful inversion of 116 in
a text that ends, famously, “If this be error and upon me
proved, / I never writ, and no man ever loved.”
A
look at the frontispiece heading that precedes Sonnet 1 reminds
us that the Q punctuations are unreliable:
This
said, the punctuations in Q are nonetheless more likely to be
functional in the apparent Sonnets than in the hidden Runes. Will,
as we see now, was working—or playing—on two fronts
at once: Since the lines have different meanings in the Runes
from their meanings in the Sonnets, and since punctuation is an
indicator of syntax (and thus of the function and meaning of composed
elements), Will could not possibly have punctuated the Q lines
so that the pointings would work equally well in both the overt
and the hidden context. Of course, punctuation in Will’s
day was not rigidly standardized, even in texts where each line
had a single rather than a dual function. No editors of the Sonnets
have ever regarded Q’s punctuation as restrictive.
Before we knew of Will’s Runegame, we tended to
chalk everything up to editorial carelessness, and especially
to careless printing. (Sonnets 2, 16, 18, 35, 75, and 76 end with
commas, not periods, and others—e.g., 43 and 108—appear
to, as well; Sonnet 56 ends with a colon; and Sonnets 26 and 28
end with unpunctuated lines.) Now we may find that at least some
of Q’s “errors,” in punctuation and otherwise,
are in fact consciously functional: Sometimes a puzzling punctuation
mark in the Q lines makes much more functional sense in the hidden
Runes than in the apparent contexts.
Readers
interested in how the Runes work will need to get used to respecting
the exact forms of the Quarto lines, including their punctuation
and especially their spellings, because these jot-and-tittle details
convey much of the flexible gaminess and functional ambiguity
of the texts. Readers will also need to be ready to regard details
(including punctuation) as obfuscatory, parts of the riddlic nature
of the hidden poems. Any editorial tampering is apt to
lose much of what the poet authorized. Thus elsewhere in this
site I routinely provide an unedited line grouping along with
the edited version that automatically becomes—in its punctuated
and regularized form—an interpreted text in which
I, as one modern reader/player, have made certain choices about
meaning. (Sonnets editors, of course, also change the meanings
of the overt Q texts by selection, and editors such as Stephen
Booth have noted that Q’s punctuation system allows ambiguities
that modern pointings always lose.)
Trying to unsnarl a text and see its multiple potentialities
for sense and wit puts every reader/player in an editor's role.
The raw texts below are therefore the places to start if you want
to play the game entirely on your own.
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