| Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets: A Restoration
of the Runes Some Post-Renaissance Analogues |
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Since
my purpose is to try, by piecing together fragmented evidence,
to set a context that might clarify Shakespeare’s coterie practices,
any discussion of post-Renaissance exemplars may seem irrelevant. Still,
understanding the reaction that occurred later in the 17th and especially
in the 18th century against strained forms of “false wit”
may help show how and why runic practice declined—if indeed it did—and
for practical purposes got lost and also may clarify how present-day attitudes
(and antipathies in particular) have evolved. For one thing, grammars,
dictionaries, spellers, and the “rules” of English are all
post-Renaissance inventions that tended to curb the licentious, chaotic,
personalized writing and printing habits that had helped make runic encoding
possible through the Renaissance. (Conversely, numbers-based formalism
in verse was also a facilitator, one that is mostly lost in modern times,
when “freer,” non-metrical verse is the norm.) Certainly a
desire to astound audiences and a flexible alphabetic code system had
both empowered the Runegame, and moral suasion against these would have
inhibited it. My own initial suspicion in 1979, in fact, was that the
Runegame probably did not even survive the transition from scribal
into printed practices, but Shakespeare soon proved me absolutely
wrong about that guess.
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Jonson’s
speaker goes on to contemplate—and implicitly decry— “Merlin’s
marvels, and his cabal’s loss, / With the chimera of the Rosy-Cross,
/ Their seals, their characters, hermetic rings, / Their gem of riches,
and bright stone, that brings / Invisibility, and strength, and tongues”
(43.71-75). The fraternity of Rosicrucians had “produced much writing…from
about 1616, and…Jonson knew of them after 1618” (Parfitt 532).
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2. Samuel Butler. The widely-popular Hudibras (1663-78), partly a satire on contemporary literary practice, explains, for one thing, that the “Wild Irish” are of all peoples the most “addicted to…occult Philosophy” and cabalistic learning (cf. 1.1.532 and note) and also has a speaker (with bawdy innuendo) tell of a “strange Riddle of a Lady” who could love only a man who hated her: “He that gets her by heart must say her / The back-way, like a Witche’s prayer” (1.3.335-44). Butler’s satiric allusions to “the Circle of the Arts” (2.3.215) and more generally to the “mystick Learning” of hermeticism, the Gnostics, the Cabala (1.1.523ff.), and the secret society of the Rosicrucians (1.1.539ff.) all show interest in cabalistic art, combined with ridicule of it. The speaker’s extended discussion of oaths and oath-breaking among peers (2.2.102ff.) may address, indirectly, the contractual nature of oathbound allegiance within literate coterie groups. Butler’s satire against hermeticism perhaps portrays Thomas Vaughn but may be more general (Wilders 332). No evidence shows that Butler has Shakespeare’s practices in mind as a direct target. |
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5. Addison. Discussed above in the context of a consideration of runic antecedents in Latin, Joseph Addison, especially in his Spectator Nos. 58-61, was an influential voice condemning “trick writing” practices in English (cf. Bond I:244ff.). In his Spectator No. 61 (1711), Addison—like others—mentions “a little Epigram called the Witches Prayer, that fell into Verse when it was read either backward or forward, excepting only, that it Cursed one way and Blessed the other.” Such folklore about “witch’s prayers”—and, incidentally, about a tradition of obscurity in Irish writers that one sees still persisting as late as the time of Yeats—was commonly shared by post-Renaissance writers. As I’ve said, Addison blamed English monks with too little talent and too much time on their hands for reinventing trick writing. Addison says that “true” wit in literature can always be translated into another language, while anything that cannot be translated is false—and that, of course, would include almost all word play. More generally, Addison attacks the gamester writers Ancient and Modern who purvey their brands of “false wit”: Shaped verse writers; lipogrammatists or “letter-droppers” (who omit specific alphabetic characters in given compositions); rebus-writers; composers of “echo-poems” (like Butler); poets who write poems varying limited lists of words; anagrammatists; acrostic writers—including those who write “Compound Acrostics, where the principal Letters stand two or three deep,” or where “Verses have not only been edged by a Name at each Extremitys, but have had the same Name running down like a Seam through the Middle of the Poem” (No. 60); chronogram writers; writers whose verses grow from “Bouts Rimez ,” externally prescribed lists of rhyming words that versifiers employ in exact order to show their ingenuity; and, above all, punsters, whose writing “consists in a Jingle of Words” (Bond I:244ff.). The criticisms in The Spectator are especially important because they remind us how prevalent such practices—now almost uniformly lost—were through the 17th century in English. Addison’s example from Hudibras of echo poems includes a play on “Bruin” (cf. Biron, Berown) and/or “Ruin” that makes one think a conscious runic joke may be embedded—especially because any runic subtext of a poem is functionally like an echo to the main text, and because Edmund Spenser introduces the conceit of the “echo” in the refrain of Epithalamion , a work embedding a covert subtext (see Graves, “Two Newfound Poems…”). |
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Similarly, the “false wit” that Johnson condemns in Abraham
Cowley (and others like him) is congruent with what we now find in the
Runes. Johnson says that these poets’ “thoughts are often
new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just
[exact, proper]; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them,
wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever
found.” Defining “wit” oxymoronically as “a kind
of discordia concors [or ‘harmonious discord’], a
combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances
in things apparently unlike,” Johnson, in a famous passage, condemns
writers who take witty practices to the extreme: “The most heterogeneous
ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for
illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and
their subtlety surprises; but the reader…is seldom pleased”
(Abrams I:2419). *** |
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Literary
gameplaying for private readers or for specialized groups with
arcane interests didn’t die, of course, with neoclassicism and rationalism.
One of the best-known hoaxes in English letters, in fact, occurred when
Dr. Johnson’s contemporary James Macpherson (1736-96), a Scotsman,
published several books (1761-65, partly concurrent with a stint in colonial
West Florida!) that purportedly translated ancient Gaelic works by a 3rd
century Irish bard, Ossian. Though Dr. Johnson and others challenged their
validity and though, after Macpherson’s death, an expert panel concluded
the works were spurious, the Ossianic forgeries proved popular and influential
in the Romantic era. The fifteen short discussions below treat this range of topics:
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| 1. Black spirituals and quilt patterns. The need for coded communication before Emancipation in the American South triggered a range of conscious art that whites would typically take one way and coterie insiders—that is, black slaves—another. Songs like “I’ll Fly Away” or “This Train Am Bound for Glory,” for example, ostensibly comment on death and heavenly release while also speaking seditiously to the in-group about hopes and possibilities of temporal freedom. Some black folk narratives, with recurring “trickster” figures, have shown similarly artful capabilities for fooling ingenuous listeners. According to public reports early in 1999 in a PBS documentary and other popular media and on an Oprah show, blacks may also have used conventional quilt-block patterns (such as Log Cabin, Drunkard’s Path, and Flying Geese) in the Underground Railroad as parts of an elaborate code system; quilts would be hung outside, and symbolism in the designs would carry secret messages about safety, danger, and modes of proceeding to those trying to escape northward (Tobin and Dobard). |
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| 2. Walt Whitman. A poet who might seem unlikely to perpetrate tricksterism in his verses, given his ostensibly serious idealism, Walt Whitman (1819-92) nonetheless writes “A Riddle Song” (Whitman 365), a teasing text encoding a previously undiscovered acrostic that ambiguously aligns “…A NUT,” offering various “solutions” to the vague riddle the text poses. The reverse initial-letter acrostic code ATHORHHHHWHHHHTTHA OOIIC B IIWWW C OW A NUT suggests decipherings such as “Authority wise be: You saw a nut,” “Author hewed, this be hickory-nut,” “Authority wise be you, see ‘O’ [round?], a nut [i.e., a puzzle to ‘crack’],” “…this be you, weakened,” and “…this be (Thisby eye…) you, cunt.” Whitman elsewhere speaks of the “inmost lore of poets” (in “To Get the Final Lilt of Songs” [394]) and, like Melville and Yeats, is fascinated with “masks.” His late poems, especially, seem preoccupied with “the unexpressed,” with things “rounded,” with “unseen buds, infinite, hidden.” His poem “Shakspere-Bacon’s Cipher” (407) ends, “A mystic cipher waits infolded” (cf. Graves, “Walt Whitman,” Explicator). |
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3. Emily Dickinson (1830-86) embedded some 500 poem-like compositions, at least, in her letters (cf. Shurr; Graves, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” Explicator)—“hidden verses” that are not included in the definitive T. H. Johnson edition of her poems. The occurrence of these “poems” probably does not mean that she was intentionally duplicitous but rather than her thoughts almost automatically found expression in the ballad stanza (hymn or common meter) that she used routinely in her verse. ” My further suggestion (which I’ve not previously commented on in public) is that much playful bawdry, however consciously it was contrived, lurks in Dickinson’s innocent-looking texts: e.g., “I love to sate, lap the males, / and lick the valley-sup…”; “A root of even essence, / a rush of cock, an eel…, / the male-formed tons probe ably, / a ‘kneesy’ morning’s ride,” and so on. “A narrow fellow in the grass” (as phallic wit) and “Pink, small, and punctual” (as pudendal double entendre) offer other examples of patterns that I think may be widespread in her work, either conscious instances of bawdry or vaguely subconscious constructs—with the former being more likely, in my view. (Dickinson’s late handwriting began to use separately spaced letters, as if on an acrostic grid; and the customary dashes—her routine punctuation marks in the more finished poems—would have made convenient “spacers” if indeed she were working to embed implicit vertical acrostic alignments inside her short texts.) But herein lies another book. |
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| 4. Henry James. It took over a half century for scholars to begin to ferret out the conundrum in Henry James’ novella “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), where a ghost, in effect, tells a ghost story. The story has not only riddlic but also coterie features, especially since one must not only detect the mystery itself but must first deduce that a mystery exists. In short, though some critics want to read the story in strictly psychological terms, James seems to be pulling a reader’s leg. As editor Willen suggests (xi-xii), James’s story, which has a narrative frame, is craftily constructed to equate its narrator, Douglas, with the character Miles, who dies at the end of the narrative—a technical impossibility. Carvel Collins, in a 1955 Explicator article, was first to advance the formula Douglas = Miles (cf. Willen viii), and other essayists now included in Willen’s assemblage of discussions have since explored the theory. Before discovering ca. 1961-62 that the first edition of Willen’s casebook had preempted my argument as an original finding, I had deduced independently that James means us to equate Douglas with Miles: He not only underscores several clear parallels between the two young men, he even has his narrator pun about his own descent from heaven: “I was at Trinity, and I found her [the governess] at home on my coming down the second summer…” (cf. Willen 5, my emphasis). These bad puns about heaven, I believe, may be minuscule contributions of my own to this body of abstruse lore—a field that others had mined rather thoroughly before I found the vein. |
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5. Thomas Hardy. In his poem “The Convergence of the Twain” (1912), Thomas Hardy compares the union of the Titanic and the iceberg to an ironic marriage. In the tradition of “shaped verse” or the eyepoem, each tercet stanza looks like a sinking ship—and also shows a witty “union” of two short lines into one longer one, so that the poem is not only pictographic but doubly exemplifies “imitative form” that echoes Hardy’s topic. (Hardy uses the phrase “intimate welding,” appropriate to such a merger.) But the genuinely covert joke lurks in the last line—“And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres”: The two “hemispheres” may be labia or buttocks, shaken by the ramrod motion of sex (cf. Graves, “Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’,” Explicator). Thus bawdy punning undercuts an ostensible “serious” poem. |
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6. Raymond Roussel. Some of the homophonic ciphers of Roussel (1877-1933) that he explicates in How I Wrote Certain of My Books recall Shakespeare’s heavily elided puns in the Runes. As one method of generating ideas to write about, Roussel “would take a randomly chosen phrase and transform it into a string of homophonic words: ‘Tu n’en aura pas’ (‘you won’t have any’) would become ‘Dune en or a pas’ (‘golden dune bearing footprints’).” At this stage “the fortuitous character of the extracted second phrase would make the basis for a story.” Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions has been called “a logical puzzle, something like three-dimensional chess” (Sante 16). This mode loosely parallels “automatic writing,” which has fascinated Yeats and other moderns, though in some senses the tedious craftiness of Q moves away from happenstance or randomness, I think, and toward jot-and-tittle selection of elements for effect. |
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7. John Peale Bishop. Bishop’s “A Recollection” (1934)—a pretty, innocent-looking Italian sonnet by this poet of gentlemanly demeanor, a 1917 Princeton graduate who in late life was briefly affiliated with the Library of Congress—embeds the emphatic initial-letter acrostic FUCK YOUH ALF ASS (Bishop 71-72), an inherent wordstring scarcely likely to have created itself. Ostensibly “a response to Titian’s “Danaë,” the lushly metered text engulfs one in a sensuous texture of “red hair / Unbound and bronzed” and “Young breasts, slim flanks and golden quarries.” Finding the acrostic message, one reconsiders the author’s meaning when he says, “All loveliness demands our courtesies. / Since she was dead I praised her as I could / Silently, among the Barberini bees” (ll. 12-14). One asks, too, whether Allen Tate—whose personal memoir prefaces Bishop’s Collected Poems—and other cronies weren’t likely to’ve been in on Bishop’s game: Bishop was friends, e.g., with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and MacLeish in Paris in the late 1920s and had tangential connections with the Algonquin Round Table group. His subtextual bit of authorized deconstructionism—which should in time encourage revisionist views of a decidedly minor poet—renders the entire volume suspect, just as the Runes turn the Sonnets inside out. In both cases, as it happens, the authors mock Petrarchan conventions. “Metamorphoses of M” (Bishop 20) provides an example of how one can find and decipher other, less overt acrostics lurking elsewhere in Bishop’s volume. On the surface an apostrophe to a virginal female who has “lain / A thousand nights upon my bed,” this poem encodes the acrostic comment “I, naked (…in Kate), wasted jism today (…y’ ass empty, I witty; …yes, empty, I wait aye)” (code I NKIHT WA(TTAT YAASM TIWTTA). Using the lefthand parenthesis mark as phonic “C,” I’ve concluded, is an inherited convention in runic practice that dates to the Renaissance if not earlier (cf. Graves, “Bishop’s ‘A Recollection’,” Explicator). |
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8. Vladimir Nabokov. The ending of Nabokov’s story “The Vane Sisters,” written in English in 1951, is a riddle or mystery worth examining: The initial letters of the last paragraph spell out the “answer”—“IciclEs by cyntHia, meter from mE, sybil.” Though nothing in the story overtly points a reader toward the buried materials, the immediate context of the last two paragraphs houses such clues as “I set myself to reread my dream—backward, diagonally, up, down—trying to unravel something Cynthia-like in it, something strange and suggestive that must be there,” and “her inept acrostics…formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost” (Nabokov 631). The last comment, indeed, might describe the Runes generally. So far as I know, no one has yet explored Nabokov’s acrostic series for its potentialities if set in the form of an alphabetic grid and then read as a letterbox code that might house “backward” and “diagonal” readings; the embedded clues (perhaps red herrings) hint that a reader/player might well undertake such an approach. |
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| 9. Sylvia Plath. “Metaphors” (1960), Plath’s unrhymed, non-metrical poem, is nine lines long and has “nine syllables” (the phrase occurs in line 1) per line. It uses syllabics (formal syllable counting as a structural mode in verse) and numerical form in a riddlic if not radically obscure way to link its subject, the persona’s pregnancy, to its form. Only careful readers will unriddle the text, and the clue “9” is key in figuring it out. The poem is a relatively easy example of riddling in modern verse. (My students tend to see all of modern poetry as somehow arcane, much like coterie compositions written for other poets and academicians.) The pattern of syllabics or syllable counting, which many other modern poets have adapted off and on, shows how “numbers” have persisted as a formal element, even in what “reads” like free verse because it is not overtly governed by recurring accents. Syllable-counting is for the eye, not the ear, and thus remains a kind of sprezzatura or “suppressed design” appealing to poets who want to distinguish their works from “mere prose.” The haiku, a syllable-counting form borrowed from oriental practice and popular in 20th century verse, allows strict numeric form to operate unheard. |
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10. Allen Ginsburg. In “The Rune” (1977), from Contest of the Bards, Ginsburg incorporates vaguely Old English manipulations of caesuras and adds a series of short lines toward the right to create a 3-columned arrangement that invites reading downward as well as across. |
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| 11. Hirschfeld’s drawings. According to a PBS special which aired in 1999, it’s now an open secret that drawings by famed illustrator Al Hirschfeld routinely and systematically hide curvaceous forms of the letterstring NINA, his daughter’s name, in their linear textures. A numeric code after the artist’s signature conventionally tallies just how many “Nina’s” hide in a given drawing. (Hirschfeld started the practice privately and added this “numbers” feature later at the request of certain sharp-eyed sleuthers, to help them achieve authorized closure.) Though the coterie element is now diminished by the artist’s candor about the practice, most viewers over many decades, included attentive admirers, have probably responded to the drawings ingenuously. Meanwhile, insiders have enjoyed being among those “in the know” as one mark of their urbane sophistication, New York style. |
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12. Campus graffiti. When someone at UT-Martin scratched the cipher below onto a restroom wall in the 1980s, my teenage son confirmed the suspicion of this aging outsider that the acrostic device was a coterie sign for “Led Zeppelin”—not quite Columbus’s signature, but of the same order and mirroring the same arcane impulses:
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| 13. Personalized auto license plates. “Messages” encoded in vanity license plates seen commonly on United States highways use letters (with some numbers) in essentially runic ways: The character-string is the code the observer is to decipher. These, essentially, continue the patterns of such old saws as “U R 2 Sweet 2 B 4-gotten” and (a Southern roadside favorite) “Jesus Is Coming, R-U Ready?” |
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Other
subtextual, coterie materials include such puns on “I foster injurious
terrain” (1, F=S); “I put foot in the eating place”
(2); “Daring cunt hid” (3); “Muse, ascend, hell is t’
end in chapels” (4); “I indent, helpless ed., name of that
rune” (5); “My cat aligned my dear runes”; “My
cat-land (Caitlin) mother wants” (7); “Ended Hell our kiss,
aiding hearse on” (8); “Her Son coughed enough t’ end
often” (8-9); “Ghosty Christ I need, (innate) history injures
Jews (…Jew, I see)” (10, 12). And so on.
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| The modern interest in word games persists—in acrostics, palindromes (such as “Able was I ere I saw Elba”), and witty letter manipulations. Scrabble, crossword puzzles, and “find the word in the letterbox” games all thrive. Coincidental alignments that I find in crossword puzzles make me think that some modern puzzle makers may still routinely perpetrate runic tricks on their consumers, enjoying the semi-overt ways they can parade “low” wit, without any sure way to attribute the materials to conscious craftsmanship. Strings of emphatic capitals—such as the boldfaced first-letter highlights in magazines and the opening string of capital letters in sections of books—still allow in-group editorial manipulation, exactly as they did in the medieval scriptoria when such emphatic letters, with the appearance of random decorativeness, could be manipulated to “communicate.” The language code, of course, will play its own “automatic” games. (Maybe this is partly what Yeats meant by “automatic” writing.) Every STOP sign reads POTS in reverse. The UT-Martin athletic center, dubbed (for short) the ELAM CENTER after the benefactors who helped fund it, proclaims (again in reverse) in bold capitals on its facade RET NEC MALE. Not quite “red-neck male,” but close. As I discovered while looking through the rearview mirror of my truck at a decal decorating the back window of the camper top, the name of my son’s alma mater, Wesleyan, spells out in reverse his parents’ names—Neil, Sue—in a pretty convincing hillbilly nasal: NAYEL[,] SEW. Our individually lackadaisical reactions in modern times to such rumored esoterica as “back-masking” in the record business, subliminally autosuggestive advertising in films, “satanic” devices in the Proctor and Gamble (moon and stars) logo, ritually-sacrificed cows in Texas fields, the Kennedy assassination “conspiracy,” UFO kidnappings, Elvis sightings, and so on—our typically skeptical or detached reactions to such merely-possible realities—should help us envision how citizens of earlier and presumably less enlightened times could have gone on about their business while runic practices in the arts persisted, with or without “verification,” around them. Omertà , the code of silence, can operate as effectively among relatively closed groups of literati as it does among such diverse, vestigial in-groups as Masonic Orders, college fraternities, and underworld organizations. Perpetuating motives include the urges to control, to display superiority to, or to denigrate those outside (and, traditionally, women in particular); the pleasure of exclusiveness along with the sense of importance that that may bring; and the satisfaction that comes with obtaining especially meritorious status and regard among one’s peers when one does something clever. One of the effective and practical safeguards against the betrayal of coterie groups has always been the fact that insiders have little to gain and very much to lose—notably, the regard of peers—by revealing coterie secrets. Even more powerful safeguards of in-group lore include the pervasive lack of interest among outsiders in any body of arcane trivia not of their own (or of their own in-group’s) making and, concurrently, the difficulty of cracking it or “proving it”—sometimes a seemingly pyrrhic victory, even if it’s possible. While much ambiguous modern art is surely devoid of conscious tricksterism, all of the modern instances wherein we, the general reading public, have been consciously duped by witty writers have certainly not yet been exposed. |