Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on October 4, 2009
Literary Imagination 2009 11(3):254-277; doi:10.1093/litimag/imp049
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
"Loe, here in one line is his name twice writ": Anagrams, Shakespeare's Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend
*Princeton, New Jersey. E-mail: rhwinnick{at}gmail.com.
It has long been recognized that Shakespeare's Sonnets—first published in 1609 in a quarto volume today commonly known as Q—contains several instances of onomastic wit involving proper names, words punning on proper names, and words or phrases possibly signifying proper names.1 These include, for example, the capitalized and italicized Wills of sonnets 135 and 136, among which is the latter's "Make but my name thy loue,and loue that 
till, / And then thou louet me for my name is Will"; sonnet 57's "So true a foole is loue,that in your Will, / (Though you doe any thing)he thinkes no ill"; and sonnet 20's "A man in hew all Hews in his controwling," out of which Oscar Wilde hewed a tale positing an otherwise unknown but fetching boy-actor named Willie Hughes as the Fair Friend of the Sonnets,2 and based on which Helen Vendler and others have similarly suspected a possible connection between Hews and that Friend's name.3 Among other such examples are the possible pun on Hathaway, "I hate,from hate away he threw," in sonnet 145, thought by Andrew Gurr to be Shakespeare's first poem;4 and the thirteen once-italicized, always capitalized instances of "Roe," or "Roes," beginning with sonnet 1's "That thereby beauties Ro
e might neuer die," believed by Martin Green to evoke phonetically and otherwise the surname of Henry Wriothesley, long a leading candidate for the role of Fair Friend.5
Thanks in particular to Vendler's work in The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997), it is also well-established that the Sonnets contain numerous instances of anagrammatic wit, of which the "Roes of haddow" shadily planted in sonnets 67 (where the phrase occurs) and 68, in "tores," "flowers," "horne," "howers," "others" and "tore," noted by Vendler, are representative examples—to which I would add 67.1's "wherefore" and, a total of three times in the two poems, "before," the lowercase letters f and (long s) looking similar enough in Renaissance typography, as first noted by Stephen Booth, to serve as ocular puns;6 as well as the roe planted even more shadily, dilated and in reverse order, within 68.1's "daies out-worne."7
Close inspection of Q's orthographic patterns suggests, however, that there may be a previously unrecognized, significant nexus binding Q's onomastic and anagrammatic wit. As discussed in more detail below, a dozen or more of the 126 sonnets comprising Q's main sequence—those addressed to, or about, the unnamed, narcissistic, androgynously beautiful Fair Friend—contain short, semantically discrete phrases, most not more than a dozen or so characters long, in which occur the letters needed to form the name Wriothesley with few or none missing or left over.8 Consistent with then-current anagrammatic preferences, nearly all of these phrases fall neatly within one or the other hemistich of the lines in which they occur, nearly always at line-beginning or line-end.9 Moreover, and also consistent with those preferences as articulated by such late Elizabethan and early Jacobean observers as George Puttenham, William Camden and William Drummond of Hawthornden, these phrases appear to comment, sometimes wryly but always aptly within the context of the poem, on the person so named.
In one instance, previewed here and further discussed below, the four-word, fourteen-character phrase "Be where you lit" in sonnet 58 contains all the letters needed to form Be U Wriotheley without a single letter left over; and, as such, seems wittily to demonstrate that Shakespeare may (as the poem puts it) "in thought controule" the Fair Friend even as his poet-persona, in the same poem—and phrase—abjectly bemoans the Friend's uncontrollability.
In another, sonnet 17 promises that should the Friend father a son he "hould liue twie in it,and in my rime." Two of the sonnet's lines, uniquely in Q and unduplicated in a control group of nearly four hundred other sonnets, each contain all twenty-two letters needed to form the name Wriothesley—twie.
In a third, sonnet 39, twelve of the first thirteen letters in the phrase "thy oure leiure" (including its two u's combined to form w, a common and permissible anagrammatic substitution) can also be transposed to form Wriotheley. If this name is inserted into the poem in place of that phrase, the result is a pair of lines—"Oh abence what a torment wouldt thou proue, / Were it not Wriotheley gaue weet leaue"—seemingly designed to accommodate it both semantically and metrically, and thereby to reveal or confirm specifically whom the poet has in mind.
A fourth, sonnet 81, uniquely in Q, explicitly assures the Fair Friend that "Your name from hence immortall life hall haue, / Though I ( once gone) to all the world mut dye." Perhaps not by accident, "the world mut dye" contains all the letters needed to form Wriotheley except the first-person pronoun I, which, once gone, mut cause that word to dye.
As discussed a half-century ago by cryptologists William F. and Elizebeth S. Friedman in their classic study The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined—which (as its subtitle indicates) analyzed "cryptographic systems used as evidence that some author other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays commonly attributed to him"—proving authorial intent with regard to any anagram or set of anagrams may be difficult or impossible. This, they explain, is because "the number of possible rearrangements of any given word or phrase is often surprisingly high; and though Dryden exaggerated when he suggested [in Mac Flecknoe] that by anagramming one could ‘torture one poor word ten thousand ways’, it remains true that there is an element of indeterminacy in forming anagrams." As for the method itself, they continue, it "involves unkeyed transposition and therefore is very flexible; it is only a matter of juggling with the letters to form a new sequence. There need be no system in the rearrangement, and no fixed rules."10
So it cannot be proven by statistical means that Shakespeare purposefully embedded the letters needed to form Wriothesley's name in "Be where you lit," "thy oure leiure," "the world mut dye," any of the dozen other phrases discussed below, or even in the two "double-Wriotheley" lines in sonnet 17, because it cannot be shown that Shakespeare must have intended these or any such phrases to be transposed into Wriotheley, into some other name, word or phrase, or into anything at all. (Nor can it be proven that any of the countless other instances of paranomasic, anagrammatic and onomastic wit in Q were conscious and deliberate. Can it be proven, for example, that sonnet 129's "Th'expence of Spirit in a wate of hame" contains a pun on waist?)
Nevertheless, there is a case to be made for the Wriotheley anagrams as previously unremarked, significant instances of Shakespearean wit. It is a case based partly on the profusion of onomastic and anagrammatic wit the Sonnets are already thought to contain. Partly on the Wriotheley anagrams’ general compliance with anagrammatic conventions as practiced and articulated in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times. Partly on the anagrams’ orthographic density, formed as they are largely or entirely from letters occurring within short, semantically discrete phrases at the extremities of specific sonnet lines. Partly on the handful of instances in which the name Wriothesley, if inserted into a line in place of the phrase supplying the letters needed to form it, not only works semantically and metrically but would appear to be strikingly relevant. Partly on a speech in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, one line of which forms the main title of this essay, which, as discussed below, appears to confirm the anagrammatic wordplay in sonnet 17. Above all, on the number of times and ways that these possible Wriotheley anagrams simply make sense—that they give the appearance of having been consciously and carefully designed to enhance the ability of the phrases, lines, quatrains or couplets, and poems in which they occur to engage, amuse, praise, censure, warn, instruct, mean.11
One, or two, or three proffered examples neither may nor should convince a duly skeptical reader that the Wriotheley anagrams are "real." It will perhaps be granted, however, after due consideration, that the anagrams achieve in the aggregate a cumulative plausibility—to borrow a phrase from T. S. Eliot—that no smaller set of examples might command alone.12 If, in the aggregate, they are deemed plausible, they would provide a new perspective on Q's poems as (to borrow another, from W. H. Auden) "verbal contraptions,"13 and (to borrow a third, from Helen Vendler), as "a writer's projects invented to amuse and challenge his own capacity for inventing artworks."14 They would also provide a possible new answer to a question that has vexed Shakespeare scholarship for two centuries: how it is that, in a set of poems which so emphatically proclaim their ability to eternize the Fair Friend and his name, that name—unless it be the putative William Hughes or some other person whose name sounds something like Roe—is apparently nowhere to be found.15
 |
1 |
|---|
 TOP 1 2345 |
|---|
That Henry Wriothesley (1573–1624), the third Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield, was for a time Shakespeare's literary patron—a time during which Shakespeare and Wriothesley came to be personally and cordially acquainted—is clearly indicated in the public, the published, record. In 1593, Shakespeare, a then-twenty-nine-year-old actor, playwright and would-be gentleman-poet, dedicated Venus and Adonis, his first narrative poem, to the then-nineteen-year-old Earl, heir to the considerable fortune his grandfather, the first Earl, had amassed by looting Catholic monasteries during the reign of Henry VIII, and only partly depleted by his recusant father, the second Earl, before the latter's death in 1581.16 The poem's dedicatory epistle to Wriothesley, reminiscent of countless others to prospective patrons by aspiring poets in the Elizabethan period, suggests that they barely knew one another—if at all. "Right Honourable," it reads,
I know not how I
Your Honors in all dutie,
William Shake
By the following year, the relationship between peer and poet had advanced considerably, as the formality and tentativeness of the dedication of Venus were succeeded in Shakespeare's next narrative poem, Lucrece, by a dedication whose tone—beginning with the bold, even brash familiarity of its first sentence—could not have been more different:
The loue I dedicate to your Lord
Your Lord
William Shake
After 1594, with the possible but doubtful exception of Q—whose publication may or may not have been authorized by the poet,18 and whose lapidary inscription, signed not by Shakespeare but by publisher T[homas] T[horpe], famously refers to "Mr. W. H." as "THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.THESE.ENSUING.SONNETS"—there were no more dedications of Shakespearean works to Wriothesley (or anyone else) during Shakespeare's lifetime. Nor is there any direct, incontrovertible factual evidence that whatever relationship Shakespeare and Wriothesley had formed even continued beyond the year or two during which Shakespeare wrote, dedicated and published the two narrative poems—much less that it deepened, took on, early or late, a homoerotic, even homosexual, dimension, and was reflected (even, as some would have it, autobiographically documented) in Q.
Beyond the two dedications, such evidence as there is of a continuing Shakespeare-Wriothesley relationship and of its nature is largely circumstantial, principally including the seeming parallels, first noted by Nathan Drake in 1817, between known facts of Wriothesley's life and implied facts of the Fair Friend's: the father's death in his son's youth, the son's androgynous beauty, an early refusal to marry, a later period of imprisonment, and the like.19 But as to that, one must keep in mind that even when the protagonists of sonnet sequences are based on, inspired by, or idealized or parodic versions of, real people, they are not, for all the verisimilitude, themselves real people, nor do the situations in which sonneteers place them necessarily correspond to any real situations. The degree, if any, to which Q is autobiographical is, then, both unknown and unknowable. More important, with respect to the present study, it is largely irrelevant, because even if Q's dramatis personae and implied plot are largely or entirely fictive, the Wriotheley anagrams could still be there.
What is relevant, beyond the question of the anagrams’ intrinsic plausibility, are several related questions whose answers may have some bearing on that plausibility: What anagrammatic conventions did writers of onomastic anagrams typically follow in Shakespeare's time, and to what extent did Q's possible Wriotheley anagrams comply with them? Q aside, did Shakespeare engage in name-based anagrammatic wit? If he did seek to record and eternize Wriothesley's name in certain of the sonnets, why might he have chosen to do it so secretly, so subtly, that the name's presence would remain unremarked for four centuries—and, once found, be difficult or impossible to prove?
Each of those questions will be addressed in due course. Before that, however, a brief review of what those anagrammatic conventions were; and then, as the core of the argument, a detailed examination of the possible Wriotheley anagrams themselves.
|
2 |
|---|
|
TOP12345 |
|---|
The first known practitioner of onomastic anagrams was the third century BCE Greek poet Lycophron, who won the favor of his royal patrons, Ptolemy II of Egypt and his sister-queen Arsinoë, by rearranging into flattering phrases the characters comprising the Greek forms of their respective names: apo melitos (made of honey) from Ptolemaios, and Ion eras (Hera's violet) from Arsinoë. After Lycophron, interest in anagrams seems largely to have waned until the Middle Ages, when such providential discoveries were made as that the letters comprising the words of the Annunciation, Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum (Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you) could be rearranged to form VIRGO SERENA, PIA, MUNDA ET IMMACULATA (Virgin serene, holy, pure and immaculate); and that Pontius Pilate's seemingly rhetorical question to Jesus, Quid est veritas? (What is Truth?), contained within it the letters needed to fashion a perfect and pious answer: EST VIR QUI ADEST (It is the man before you). Anagrammatism had gained a European foothold in the post-classical world.
Perhaps partly because of a continuing, post-Gutenberg fascination, noted by Vendler,20 with how words and letters looked in print, and how readily they could be rearranged using movable type, English interest in onomastic anagrams, especially in court circles, reached a level of intensity by the late sixteenth century that rivaled and would later surpass sonnet mania.
"One other pretie conceit we will impart vnto you and then trouble you with no more," George Puttenham wrote in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), one of the first full-length works of literary criticism written in England. The "Anagrame, or poie tranpoed," he observed, is
a thing if it be done for paAmong the handful of examples gathered by Puttenham, two were French. François de Vallois (Francis I), who had ruled France until mid-century, had been honored with the anagram DE FAÇON SUIS ROY (which Puttenham glossed as "who in deede was of fa
hion countenance and tature, beides his regall vertues a very king"); and his son, Henry de Vallois, with ROY DE NULZ HAY ("a king hated of no man"). In his own first attempt at anagram writing, Puttenham reported, he had found it surprisingly easy to transpose Eliabet Anglorum Regina into both MULTA REGNABIS ENSE GLORIA ("By thy word halt thou raigne in great renowne") and MULTA REGNABIS SENE GLORIA ("Aged and in much glorie hall ye raigne")—and later, surprisingly difficult to do it again:This alGathered in his Remains Concerning Britain (1605)23—composed of materials not used in his magnum opus Britannia (1586)—most of the historian William Camden's numerous anagrammatic samples were relatively recent and closer to home. "For our late Queene of happy memory," Elizabetha Regina : ANGLIÆ HERA, BEASTI (glossed by Camden as "O Englands Soueraigne, thou ha
t made vs happy"), and a total of eight other laudatory anagrams. For "the late Queene of Scotland, his Maieties mother," Maria Steuarta : VERITAS ARMATA (Armed truth). For the new King, several Latin examples and one in English: Charles Iames Steuart : CLAIMES ARTHURS SEATE.
Among the twenty other English notables honored by the anagrams Camden collected was the Earl of Southampton, with Henricus Wriotheleius : HEROICUS, LÆTUS, VI VIRENS (Heroic, glad, green with strength). Another anagram, written in 1603 and not part of Camden's collection, had also honored Wriothesley : Henricus Uriotheleus : THESEUS NIL REUS HIC RUO (Theseus, guilty of nothing, here falls), signifying, as explained in an accompanying verse by its author, Francis Davison, that brave Theseus (Wriothesley) had been brought low by a false charge (of involvement in the Essex rebellion, for which he spent two years in the Tower after narrowly escaping execution) but was no criminal.24
Made clear by Puttenham, Camden, and the Scottish poet Drummond of Hawthornden, and confirmed by their examples, the conventions of anagrammatism permitted a certain amount of doubling, omission and substitution of letters. Camden, for his part, began his chapter on "Anagrammes" by observing that "The onely Quint-eence that hitherto the Alchimy of wit coulde draw out of names, is Anagrammatime or Metagrammatime," which he defined as "a diolution of a Name truly written into his Letters, as his Elements, and a new connexion of it by artificiall tranpoition, without addition, ubtraction, or chang[e] of any letter into different words, making ome perfect ence appliable to the peron named."
He continued: "The precie in this practice trictly oberving all the parts of the definition, are only bold with H either in omitting or retaining it, for that it cannot challenge the right of a letter. But," he added, "the licentiats omewhat licentiouly let they hould preiudice poeticall libertie, will pardon themelves for doubling or reiecting a letter, if the ence fall aptly, and thinke it no iniury to ve E for Æ, V for W, S for Z, and C for K, and contrariwie."
Similarly, Drummond of Hawthornden observed in his essay on the "Character of a perfect Anagram," first collected in 1711 but thought to have been written around 1615, that "the Law of an Anagram" was "That no Letter be added, nor any taken away." But, he continued:
This admittethHe continued, in part:
A Letter may ea
It was
It isAnd concluded:
But the Conclu
Now for the UThe practical application of some of these "laws" can be seen in several of the anagrammatic samples just cited. Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum : VIRGO SERENA PIA MUNDA ET IMMACULATA is, technically, a perfect anagram: all the letters in the phrase to be anagrammatized appear in the resulting anagram with no letters repeated, omitted, or substituted. Also perfect or close to perfection (with occasional exchanges—often seen as well in non-anagrammatic settings—of u for v, i for y or j, s for z and the like) are the anagrams of Quid e
1. We may u
An Anagram, which turneth in an Hemi
2. The Rea
3. One will
Turpe e
Et
t veritas, Eliabet Anglorum Regina, Elizabeth Regina, Maria Steuarta, Charles Iames Steuart and Henricus Uriotheleus. But in François de Vallois : DE FAÇON SUIS ROY, in addition to its v-for-u and i-for-y substitutions, one of the two a's present in the name is omitted in the anagrammatized phrase based on it; and both of the former's l's are dropped in the latter. (Camden's version of the same anagram is also imperfect. Francis de valoys : DE FACON SUIS ROYAL requires, in addition to an exchange of v for u, that the name's sole o be doubled.)
As for Puttenham's Henry de Vallois : ROY DE NULZ HAY, it requires, along with three exchanged letters, that the name's second e and second l both be dropped in the anagram based on it. (Camden's version comes closer to perfection, requiring only the exchange of v for u: Henry de Valoys : ROY ES DE NUL HAY.)
In Henricus Wriotheleus : HEROICUS, LÆTUS, VI VIRENS, in addition to its e-for-æ substitution, the w in the Earl's surname becomes two v's in the resulting anagram, and one of the former's two h's is dropped in the latter.
The point being: even the exemplary anagrams collected by Puttenham, Camden and Drummond of Hawthornden were often technically imperfect, often required the doubling, omission or exchange of letters to achieve the desired anagrammatic phrase. And the commentaries of Puttenham, Camden and Drummond of Hawthornden sanctioned such imperfection, in part by differentiating between perfect anagrams and those which, while still formally acceptable, fell short of that perfection.
In considering the plausibility of Q's Wriotheley anagrams, then, we ought not to hold Shakespeare to a higher standard of anagrammatic perfection than his contemporaries observed or would have expected of him—any more than we would dismiss, as less than poetry, verse by Shakespeare or anyone else that employed off-rhymes or eye-rhymes. Nor need we apply to the Wriotheley anagrams a lower standard of anagrammatic perfection, for the phrases Shakespeare may have crafted out of the letters of Wriothesley's name do generally conform, as will be seen, to the anagrammatic conventions articulated and practiced in his time.
Still, the Wriothesley anagrams are in some respects sui generis. Onomastic anagrams in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were often openly built into poems and poems openly built around them. George Herbert's couplet on the anagram Mary : ARMY; Thomas Car's tribute to his late friend Richard Crashaw, "Crashawe, The Anagramme. HE WAS CAR"; and Ben Jonson's verse observation, upon the publication of his friend Alice Sutcliffe's Meditations of Mans Mortalitie, that she who "had supp’d so deepe of this sweet Chalice, / Must CELIA be, the anagram of ALICE" are three that come to mind. The name of Samuel Daniel's eponymous sonnet lady, Delia, is a perfect anagram both of Ideal and of the poet's surname, the latter if its a is provided with a tilde (ã) to imply the missing n. But the creation of onomastic anagrams based on a proper name that is itself suppressed, and the incorporation of those anagrams into lines of verse in ways not likely to be remarked except by someone—Henry Wriothesley himself, and perhaps a handful of his, or Shakespeare's, priuate friends26—who had been told they were there, was certainly unusual, perhaps unprecedented.
But then, much about Q was unusual: the amatory poems addressed by a man to a man, very rare except for the even more obviously homoerotic sonnets published by Richard Barnfield in the mid-1590s;27 the portrayal of Q's sonnet "lady" not as chaste and unattainable but as a whore; the profusion of onomastic and orthographic wit; not to mention the often astonishing power and beauty of the poems themselves. Can it then be doubted that if Shakespeare had the will to record and thereby eternize Henry Wriothesley's name in his sonnets, and the wish to do so in a way that would escape detection by all but one, or a select few, of his first readers, he also had the wit to carry it off?
|
3 |
|---|
|
TOP12345 |
|---|
Q's first seventeen sonnets comprise a distinct sub-sequence principally concerned with urging, flattering, warning, shaming, cajoling and otherwise convincing the Fair Friend to beget a son to whom he would pass on his beauty and, albeit vicariously, preserve and perpetuate his being. Not, however, until the couplet of sonnet 15 does the poet-speaker assert the power of his verse itself to overcome the depredations of time, to achieve by an act of poetic creation what he has been urging his Fair Friend to achieve by an act of procreation: "And all in war with Time for loue of you / As he takes from you,I ingraft you new." Sonnet 16 qualifies and retreats from that bold assertion by urging the Friend to fortify himself in his decay "With meanes more ble
ed then my barren rime." But then, in sonnet 17—with which the initial sub-sequence of "begetting" poems ends—the poet-speaker again asserts the eternizing power of his verse, which now, as represented, offers the Friend the prospect of twofold immortality:Who will beleeue my ver
If it were fild with your mo
Though yet heauen knowes it is but as a tombe
Which hides your life , and
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fre
The age to come would
Such heauenly touches nere toucht earthly faces.
So
Be
And your true rights be termd a Poets rage,
And
But were
You
It is certainly possible to construe the poem's couplet as saying: "Should you father a child you will live twice in it, for it will be as a second self; and also live twice in my poem, for by portraying and eternizing you it too will be as a second self." But another way to construe the couplet is: "Should you father a child you will live twice in it, for it will be as a second self—just as you will live twice in my poem."
Of the two readings (which are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive), the first is clear enough, the second far less so. After all, what could Shakespeare possibly mean by saying the Friend will live twice in this poem? But anagrammatically speaking, and reflecting Shakespeare's tendency, as noted by Vendler, to "literalize conceits,"28 it appears that the Friend does liue twie in sonnet 17—if his name is Wriothesley; if the life in question is that conferred by preserving that name in verse; and if the mode of preservation is anagrammatically to weave the name's eleven constituent parts (line 4), or letters, not just twie into the poem as a whole but twie into each of two of the sonnet's lines.
The first of the lines in which Wriothesley's name may anagrammatically hide is, appropriately, 17.4, "Which hides your life , and hewes not halfe your parts," a line that hewes not halfe your parts because all the parts of Wriothesley's name are present, twie over—no halfe measures here! In the Beginning29 of the line, the highlighted letters within the phrase "Which hides your life" comprise ten of the eleven needed, along with a nearby t, to form one of the line's two Wriotheleys. In the Conclusion, the highlighted letters in "hewes not halfe your parts " comprise ten of the eleven needed, along with a nearby i, to form the other. In the second of the poem's two double-Wriotheley lines—17.9, "So hould my papers (yellowed with their age)"—seventeen of the twenty-two letters needed to form that line's two Wriotheleys occur in the Conclusion, as highlighted, within the four-word phrase "yellowed with their age," with the other five letters found elsewhere in the line.
A coincidence? The accidental conjunction of common letters? Perhaps. But consider this: the only other instance among Q's 154 sonnets in which all the letters needed to form Wriotheley twice occur in a single line is sonnet 126, with which, on a bittersweet note evoking the happier days (and echoing the diction) of sonnet 20 ("A Womans face with natures owne hand painted"), the poems focusing on the Fair Friend come to an end:
O Thou my louely Boy who in thy power,Among the poem's principal stylistic features is its pattern of verbal repetition. "O Thou," the sonnet's opening words, recur in line 9. Sharing line 2 with "fickle" (gla
Doe
Who ha
Thy louers withering,as thy
If Nature(
As thou goe
She keepes thee to this purpo
May time di
Yet feare her O thou minnion of her plea
She may detaine,but not
Her Audite(though delayd)an
And her Quietus is to render thee.
( )
( )
e) is the nearly identical "ickle" (hower). Line 3's "growne" is echoed by line 4's "grow’t"; line 2's "times" by lines 8's "time"; line 7's "keepes" by line 10's "keepe"; lines 6 and 10 both contain "till." In place of the usual abab, cdcd, efef, gg rhyme scheme, the poem is composed of six rhymed couplets (aa, bb, cc, etc.). And it ends with a double set of "eloquently silent parentheses," as Vendler puts it, where a final couplet would otherwise be.30
An analysis of the poem's orthographic content reveals that the sonnet also contains a line, 126.4, that, like 17.4 and 17.9, has all of the letters needed to form Wriotheley twice: once, in the Beginning, entirely from the letters in "Thy louers withering"—in fact, once entirely from ten of the phrase's first eleven characters, if the first e is doubled; again, in the Conclusion, with ten of the letters in "thy [weet] elfe grow’t," plus a nearby i; and neither Wriotheley requiring any letters from the word "weet." As such, using twenty-seven of the line's thirty-six letters, with no letter missing or having to be used more than once, in a way that would anagrammatically enact how the young man's weet elfe grow’t as the line asserts, a way also consistent with the sonnet's verbal pattern of twofold repetition, one may form in its entirety the phrase Wriotheley, weet Wriotheley.31
How rare is it for a sonnet line to contain all twenty-two of the letters needed to form Wriotheley twice, with no substitutions? Very rare. A systematic review of the orthography within a control group of 378 sonnets by five Elizabethan poets other than Shakespeare found only eight such lines out of the 5,292 reviewed—two among the 108 sonnets of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591), three among the fifty sonnets of Daniel's Delia (1592), one in the fifty-one sonnets of Drayton's Ideas Mirrour (1594), none in the eighty sonnets of Constable's Diana (1594), and two among the eighty-nine sonnets of Spenser's Amoretti (1595).
How rare for the same twenty-two letters to occur in each of two lines of the same sonnet? More than rare—unknown. Of the 532 sonnets (by Sidney, Daniel, Drayton, Constable, Spenser and Shakespeare), comprising 7,449 verse lines, reviewed for this study, Q's sonnet 17 is the only one with two double-Wriotheley lines.
How likely does it then seem that of Q's total of three such lines, two would randomly occur in the same poem, and that poem the very one with which the initial sub-sequence ends? Or that it would randomly be the one poem in Q promising that by begetting a son the Fair Friend "hould liue twie in it,and in my rime"? Or that Q's only other double-Wriotheley line would randomly occur in the last poem of the main sequence, the last addressed to the Fair Friend—a line asserting the growth of that Friend's weet elfe and a poem marked throughout by a pattern of twofold repetition?
And how likely this, in light of the double-Wriotheleys of sonnet 17 (and, if as yet written, 126) to be other than a private reference to them: In Act I, scene ii, of Shakespeare's early comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona—thought, like at least some of the Sonnets, to have been written sometime between 1590 and 159332—Julia, in a show of indifference for the benefit of Lucetta, her waiting-woman, tears to bits the love note she has just received from Protheus (who only later will prove to be a cad); then gathers up the pieces, including one bearing his "poore wounded name"; bids the good wind be calm so as to "blow not a word away / Till I haue found each letter, in the Letter"; and, of one of the pieces, declares: "Loe, here in one line is his name twice writ."33
|
4 |
|---|
|
TOP12345 |
|---|
Less rare but no less telling than the double-Wriothe
ley lines in sonnets 17 and 126 are the dozen or so instances in which most or all of the letters needed to form Wriothesley's name once occur within short, thematically relevant, intralinear phrases. The first such phrase may be found in the first sonnet ("From fairet creatures we deire increae"), in whose fifth line, "But thou contracted to thine owne bright eyes," ten of the eleven letters needed to form Wriotheley are orthographically contracted,34 in the Conclusion, in "owne bright eyes." The eleventh letter, l, is absent from the line—an anagrammatic flaw of which the poet-speaker seems aware, for he provides the next line with a surfeit of l's, seven in all, "Feed’t thy lights flame with elfe ubtantiall fewell"—more l's than in all but five of Q's 2,156 other sonnet lines. (Here and elsewhere in Q, nouns and verbs related to seeing and looking—in this instance, the phrase "owne bright eyes" itself—may signal nearby anagrammatic content, reflecting that anagrams, onomastic or otherwise, are orthographic structures more readily seen than heard.35)
More such wit may follow in sonnet 2, where two words, "youthes" and "liuery," in the Beginning of the poem's third line, "Thy youthes proud liuery o gaz’d on now"—as we should see if we now gaz’d on it —also spell Wriotheley, when the u in "youthes" and the u (medial v) in "liuery" are combined to form w. As such, it would appear that in hiding within, and perfectly consistent with, the periphrastic phrase youthes proud liuery may be a far more direct warning: that proud Wriotheley "o gaz’d on now, / Wil be a totter’d weed of mal worth held" should he fail to father a son.
In sonnet 9, midway through the initial "begetting" sub-sequence, the poet-speaker's stern warning of the "murdrous hame" (line 14) the Friend would commit if "thou no forme of thee hat left behind" (line 6) includes "Looke what an vnthrift in the world doth pend / Shifts but his place,for till the world inioyes it" (lines 9–10). If we looke, in the Conclusion, at the phrase "the world inioyes [it]," we find that when eleven of its letters hift in their place into the proper order, the forme left behind—thereby privately revealing or confirming that unthrift's identity—is the name Wriotheley.36
In addition to its cryptic reference to the Fair Friend as "A man in hew all Hews in his controwling," sonnet 20 may more directly identify that Friend in its final line, "Mine be thy loue and thy loues ve their treaure." For when ten of the eleven letters (including its v and u combined to form w) in the phrase "thy loues ve" are joined by the last two letters of the next word, "their," they too can be transposed to form Wriotheley. If that name and the unused letters the are placed back into the line at the point from which "thy loues ve their" was removed, the sonnet's couplet not only continues to make sense but, in the Conclusion, makes a new kind of sense (and also scans): "But ince he prickt thee out for womens pleaure, / Mine be thy loue and Wriotheley the treaure."
A similar pattern may be found in the tenth line of sonnet 39, where twelve of the first thirteen letters in the phrase "thy oure leiure," including its two u's joined to form w, may also be transposed to form Wriotheley. As such, lines 39.9–10, "Oh abence what a torment wouldt thou proue, / Were it not thy oure leiure gaue weet leaue," also take on a new and apposite dimension of meaning (and also scan) when the name is substituted for the phrase: "Oh abence what a torment wouldt thou proue, / Were it not Wriotheley gaue weet leaue."37
Sonnet 22 may contain further anagrammatic wit in its ninth, tenth and eleventh lines:
O therefore loue be of thyIn line 9, ten of the eleven letters needed to form Wriothe
As I not for my
Bearing thy heart which I will keepe
ley occur, in the Conclusion, in the phrase "thy elfe o wary"—every needed letter except i, which is nowhere present in the line. But in line 10, it appears that the poet-speaker orthographically and symbolically donates the missing i by crafting and signing the line "As I not for my selfe, but for thee will." And in line 11, by means of that orthographic I-transplant—corresponding to the metaphysical transplanting of the Fair Friend's heart into the poet-speaker's body that the line narratively asserts—the line gains the ability to form, hence bear, the name Wriothesley using eleven letters all but one of which (t) occurs, in the Conclusion, in the phrase "will keepe o chary." Capping this possible anagrammatic tour de force, ten of the twelve letters in "keepe o chary," with s, or s and a, doubled, can also be transposed to form Shakepere or Shakepeare, resulting in a line whose last five words, with only three of their total of seventeen letters omitted, may constitute the poet's anagrammatic signature: I, Will Shakepeare. No poem in Q more memorably asserts the eternizing power of the poet-speaker's verse than sonnet 55:
Not marble, nor the guilded monument,Like many of Q's sonnets, however, this one invites questions that it then appears to leave unanswered: In what sense will the Fair Friend "
Of Princes
But you
Then vn
When wa
And broiles roote out the worke of ma
Nor Mars his
The liuing record of your memory.
Gain
Shall you pace forth, your prai
Euen in the eyes of all po
That weare this world out to the ending doome.
So til the iudgement that your
You liue in this,and dwell in louers eies.
hine more bright in thee contents"? Will the poem be "The liuing record of your memory"? Will the Friend "pace forth," his praise still finding room "Euen in the eyes of all poterity"? Will he "liue in this,and dwell in louers eies"?
Of course, the power and grandeur of this extraordinary poem do not depend on the literal realization of any of these assertions. Nevertheless, the assertions do appear to be realized, on the anagrammatic level. There—visible by the eyes of all poterity—we find, in the Conclusion of the couplet's first line, that from "that your elfe arie" there arie all the letters needed to form Wriotheley, with a doubled u; and that, in the couplet's second line, there liue and dwell in "this" and "louers eies," with another doubled u, the letters needed to form Wriothelie—or Wriotheley if eies is spelled, as it commonly is in Q, e-y-e-s.38
Another example of possible anagrammatic wit occurs in sonnet 58, where the poet-speaker abjectly portrays himself as a laue who would not dare even in thought to controule the Fair Friend as he indulges his inferentially profligate impulses:
That God forbid,that made me firEven as the poet-speaker bemoans his powerlessness to controule the Friend's comings and goings, it appears that Shakespeare himself manages in thought to do just that, and quite handily—for, in the Beginning of the poem's ninth line, "Be where you li
I
Or at your hand th’account of houres to craue,
Being your va
Oh let me
Th’impri
And patience tame,to
Without accu
Be where you li
That you your
To what you will,to you it doth belong,
Your
I am to waite,though waiting
Not blame your plea
t" not only contains all the letters needed to form Wriotheley (which can be formed entirely from "where you lit"), but all the letters needed to form Be U Wriotheley without a single letter repeated or omitted.39 Shakespeare may thereby achieve the delectable irony of capturing Wriothesley, anagrammatically speaking, in the very phrase purporting to acknowledge his freedom to be wherever he likes.
Sonnet 69 contains another short phrase with the parts needed to form Wriotheley:
Those parts of thee that the worlds eye doth view,In this sonnet, as I have written elsewhere,40 Shakespeare deploys among the poem's one hundred twenty-three words no fewer than forty-six instances of the digraph th, at least once and up to five times per line—which, along with the poem's profusion of ou's and ow's, orthographically, phonetically and wittily enact its final line (emending the sonnet's
Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend:
All toungs(the voice of
Vttring bare truth,euen
Their outward thus with outward prai
But tho
In other accents doe this prai
By
They looke into the beauty of thy mind,
And that in gue
Then churls their thoughts(although their eies were kind)
To thy faire flower ad the rancke
But why thy odor matcheth not thy
The
olye to oyle, meaning solution, as to a riddle), "The oyle is this, that thou doet common grow" (emphasis added).
Anagrammatically speaking, there may, however, be more going on in sonnet 69. If, in its first line, the word eye (that word again, and the poem has two more of them, plus view, seeing and looke) is allowed to double as the letter i, the phrase "the worlds eye" (alongside "doth view," in the Conclusion) contains all the letters—all thoe parts of thee—needed to form Wriotheley. Similarly, "[To] thy faire flower" in the Beginning of line 12 contains the letters needed to form another Wriotheley, with a nearby or with one of its two f's serving here, as elsewhere, as an ocular pun on the needed letter. Add Wriothesley to the line in place of the phrase and the result, again, seems apposite: "To Wriotheley ad the rancke mell of weeds."
While not among the most famously baffling of Q's poems, sonnet 70 presents something of a mystery, in that the syntax of its first quatrain clearly but incongruously suggests that the "ornament of beauty"—a metaphor one would expect to refer to the Fair Friend—is "A Crow," albeit one "that flies in heauens weetest ayre."
That thou are blam’dAlso noteworthy is the seemingly gratuitous capitalization of the c in "Crow," which—like Q's always-capitalized Ro
For
The ornament of beauty is
A Crow that flies in heauens
e—both foregrounds the word and suggests that it somehow denotes the Fair Friend. And so it may do, for, in the Beginning, "A Crow that flies," with a y borrowed from "ayre," has all the letters needed to form Wriotheley. As such, the line's anagrammatic subtext may be that, although the Friend is susceptible to slander—to being called "a Crow" by jealous rivals or other enemies—it is no crow but Wriothesley, that "ornament of beauty," who "flies in heauens weetet ayre." Sonnet 81's fifth line is, as noted above, the only place in Q in which the poet-speaker explicitly vows to immortalize not just the Fair Friend but his name:
Or IBut like all of Q's other sonnets, this poem also fails to indicate what that name is. Or does it? If—prompted by "each part," "intombed in mens eyes" and "eyes not yet created
Or you
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortall life
Though I ( once gone) to all the world mu
The earth can yeeld me but a common graue,
When you intombed in mens eyes
Your monument
Which eyes not yet created
And toungs to be, your beeing
When all the breathers of this world are dead,
You
Where breath mo
hall ore-read"—we look for nearby anagrammatic content, we may find it in the line that immediately follows the promise, and that completes the sentence with which it begins: "Your name from hence immortall life hall haue, / Though I ( once gone) to all the world mut dye." For, in the Conclusion of line 6, "the world mut dye" contains all the letters needed to form Wriotheley except i—a letter that occurs only once, as the second of the line's first four words, "Though I ( once gone)." If, taking those words as an orthographic hint, we remove from the line its only i, the line loses a letter crucial to the formation of Wriotheley, which word then, anagrammatically speaking, mut dye.41
As Booth notes in discussing the same poem, the pronunciation of world and word in Elizabethan English may have been similar enough for line 81.6's last four words to sound like the word mut dye.42 As such, they may have provided another, aural clue to the line's anagrammatic content. Given that its only i occurs as a first-person pronoun denoting the poet-speaker, there may also have been a serious purpose to the line's possible anagrammatic play: to warn obliquely that, should the relationship between the poet-speaker and the Fair Friend continue to worsen, ultimately causing the poet-speaker to go away or the Friend to send him away—both implied by "I ( once gone)"—the Wriotheley-bearing, Wriothesley-eternizing poems the former has been dutifully writing will cease and Wriothesley's name, in turn, to all the world mut dye.
A deliberately withheld i may also figure in sonnet 89, where the poet-speaker vows that if his Fair Friend chooses, or has chosen, to abandon him for some actual or perceived offense, he will neither deny the charge, defend himself, publicly indicate that they know one another, frequent the same places, nor (as he vows in lines 89.10–11) even utter the Friend's name:
ThyAlthough "Thy
Lea
weet beloued" in the Beginning of line 10, and a nearby r, supply ten of the letters needed to form Wriotheley, the eleventh letter, i, is nowhere to be found in the line—and the next line may provide both an anagrammatic- and narrative-level explanation reminiscent of sonnet 81: "Leat I(too much prophane)hould do it wrong."43 As a final example, sonnet 108 drops repeated hints of something going on, anagrammatically or otherwise, but again seemingly fails to indicate what that might be:
What's in the braine that Inck may character,What may be going on here, I believe, primarily involves line 108.8, "Euen as when fir
Which hath not figur’d to thee my true
What's new to
That may expre
Nothing
I mu
Counting no old thing old,thou mine,I thine,
Euen as when fir
So that eternall loue in loues fre
Waighes not the du
Nor giues to nece
But makes antiquitie for aye his page,
Finding the fir
Where time and outward forme would
t I hallowed thy faire name," in which, in the Conclusion, the highlighted portion of the phrase "hallowed thy faire name," with the f in "faire" serving, as before, as an ocular pun on —provides the eleven letters needed to form that faire name, Wriotheley. If the "hal" in "hallowed" is taken as an oblique reference to "Henry," line 108.8 would anagrammatically, hence literally, both hallow and halloo Henry Wriothesley's name, which would then be fully represented in "hallowed thy faire [name]" with only two superfluous letters.44
As such, in this sonnet at least, the promises made or implied on the narrative level may be promises kept. Wriotheley, as anagrammatically realized, may be the name in the poet-speaker's braine that Inck may character, in loues freh cae [typographic], on the printed page.45 Anagrammatically ensconcing that name in this and other sonnets may be the means by which Shakespeare or his poet-persona figur’d to the Fair Friend his true pirit, by which to regiter and thereby expree his loue and Wriothesley's deare merit, by which he firt hallowed and had continued to hallow, and halloo, Wriothesley's faire name, in a witty conceit of loue there bred, though time and outward [narrative-level, uttered] forme would hew it dead.46
|
5 |
|---|
|
TOP12345 |
|---|
How plausible is it, then, that some or all of these possible instances of anagrammatic wit are deliberate; that they reflect the orthographic ingenuity of a poet determined variously to engage, amuse, praise, censure, warn, instruct and, above all, eternize—by name but in a singularly oblique way—a particular young man known to have been his patron; and not merely the ingenuity of a reader finding in accidental conjunctions of common letters an intent and inventiveness that are simply not there? Beyond the examples presented—on which the case for Q's Wriothe
ley anagrams must ultimately rest—some other, ancillary evidence may be worth considering. It should be noted, for example, that besides transposing the letters of canibal to form Caliban in The Tempest, and beyond the graphically overlapping names (Olivia, Viola, Malvolio et al.) of several characters in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare built a key scene in the latter play on name-based anagrammatic wit. In that "box-tree" scene (II.v.80–133), Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Fabian and Maria conspire to place in Malvolio's path a forged love note designed to convince the pompous steward that it was written by his beautiful and wealthy employer, Countess Olivia, and that she intended it for him. "‘To the unknown belov’d,’" Malvolio reads aloud after finding the letter, "‘this, and my good wishes’":
"Jove knows I love,Malvolio labors to decipher the message:
But who?
Lips, do not move;
No man must know."
* * *
"I may command where I adore,
But silence like a Lucrece knife
With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore.
M.O.A.I. doth sway my life."
"I may command where I adore." Why, she may command me. I serve her, she is my lady. Why, this is evident to any formal capacity. There is no obstruction in this. And the end—what should that alphabetical position portend? If I could make that resemble something in me. Softly—"M.O.A.I."He finally concludes, as the conspirators intended—and in what may be a parodic version of the onomastic wit I have claimed for Q—that "M.O.A.I." is a kind of truncated anagram, denoting him:
"M." Malvolio. "M"—why, that begins my name. ... "M." But then there is no consonancy in the sequel. That suffers under probation: "A" should follow, but "O" does. ... And then "I" comes behind. ... "M.O.A.I." This simulation is not as the former; and yet to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name.47It should also be noted that, as sonnet 20 indicates, Shakespeare or his poet-persona was clearly and quite powerfully drawn to "the Ma
ter Mitris of my paion":And for a woman wert thou firEven without granting the homosexual or bisexual readings of this sonnet and of the Sonnets generally by Bruce R. Smith, Joseph Pequigney, Marjorie Garber and others, it is hard to imagine that the poet-speaker's expressions of love, longing, jealousy and the like in sonnet after sonnet do not convey at least a hint of some such passion.48 To the extent that the love expressed by the poet-speaker for the Fair Friend could be construed or portrayed as contra naturam by literary rivals, political enemies or others in positions of authority, the consequences for both Shakespeare and any actual friend linked to that fictive one could have been grave, as sodomy in Elizabethan times, though rarely prosecuted, remained a capital crime.49 For that reason—not to mention the social chasm separating the player-poet from the great lord who was his early patron and perhaps his lover—in either the Elizabethan or modern senses of that word—Shakespeare would have had ample grounds to make any reference to Wriothesley in Q difficult to detect and, if necessary, easy plausibly to deny.
Till nature as
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpo
But
Mine be thy loue and thy loues v
Moreover, if Shakespeare wrote the Sonnets for an audience of one or, at most, that one plus a small group of his or their (in Francis Meres's phrase) "priuate friends,"50 any anagrammatic wit involving the Fair Friend's name would not have needed to be overt, as a textual or other hint or two would have sufficed to direct an initiated reader's attention to any onomastic anagrams hidden in particular poems, passages, lines, or phrases within those lines, and to afford such readers the challenge and pleasure of finding them.
Just over a century ago, Lytton Strachey, writing in The Spectator, spoke for many before and since when he said, in effect, that the identity of the Fair Friend was a matter of great curiosity but no great consequence:
The belief that the sonnets contain the clue which leads straight into the hidden penetralia of Shakespeare's biography is at the root of most of the investigation that has been spent upon them. ... Whether the veil will ever be lifted which now shrouds the mysterious figure of "Mr W.H." is a question which Sir Thomas Browne would doubtless have pronounced to be "above antiquarism"; but we may console ourselves with the thought that, after all, the identity of Shakespeare's friend is a matter of only secondary importance. It is Shakespeare's poetry which is the essential thing.51Without question, Shakespeare's poetry is the essential thing. But the dismissal of the Fair Friend's identity as a topic worthy of serious inquiry has long been predicated on its presumed irrelevance to how the Sonnets work, and what the Sonnets mean, as poems. If, on the basis of the evidence I have presented, the Wriothe
ley anagrams are deemed cumulatively plausible, it may be time to reconsider that presumption.
|
Footnotes |
|---|
For their comments and encouragement while this study took shape over the past nine years I am pleased to acknowledge my wife, Catherine Harper; Stephen Balch; Peter Wood; and, most recently and most generously, Christopher Ricks.
1SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. Neuer before Imprinted (London, 1609). Quotations from the Sonnets herein follow Q’s text as reproduced in facsimile in various works including Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); in the photographic images of Q currently available at www.octavo.com; and as faithfully transcribed in the Renaissance Electronic Texts edition prepared by Hardy M. Cook and Ian Lancashire, currently available at www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/shakespeare/1609inti.html. 
2Wilde, The Portrait of Mr W. H. (London, 1889). That a William Hughes might be the Sonnets’ Fair Friend was first proposed in 1766 by the English classicist Thomas Tyrwhitt, who supposed him to be a musician.
3See Vendler, 128–29 and 366. One theory regarding Hews, mentioned dismissively by C. M. Walsh in his 1908 edition of the Sonnets but perhaps not out of the question, is that it is an acrostic anagram of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton.
4Gurr, "Shakespeare's First Poem: Sonnet 145," Essays in Criticism 21 (1971): 221–6.
5See Green's "The Pronunciation of Wriothesley," English Studies 86 (2005): 133–60, and his Wriothesley's Roses in Shakespeare's Sonnets, Poems and Plays (Baltimore: Clevedon Books, 1993), passim. G. P. V. Akrigg, in Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), surmised (p. 3) that the name Wriothesley—coined in 1509 by Sir Thomas Writh or Wrythe (d. 1534), a Garter King of Arms, to give his upwardly mobile family a more aristocratic-sounding surname—was probably pronounced R
e-ose-ley or Rise-ly. No one now living knows for sure how it was pronounced, but there is general agreement that it hovered somewhere between two and three syllables.
6See Booth (p. 431) on the graphic similarity of "fickle" and "ickle" in 126.2; and Vendler (p. 111), on Shakespeare's use of "ullied" in 15.12 based partly on its graphic overlap with "youthfull" (15.7) and "wastfull" (15.11).
7Among other examples of anagrammatic wit discussed by Vendler are the permutations of the letters s-t-a in sonnet 15; the anagrammatic and phonetic play on warre, ward and drawne in sonnet 16; the overlapping letters of rehere and heare-ay (not to mention, as Christopher Ricks does, the twice-repeated heauens ayre/ayer) in sonnet 21; the multiple instances of the character string w-i-t in sonnet 26, which Shakespeare (through his earnest but at times rather wit-less poet-persona) drolly asserts was written "To witnee duty, not to hew my wit"; and the "anagrammatic game of words-inside-words" in sonnet 81. See Vendler, passim; and, for Ricks, note 9.
8My analysis is based, except as noted, on the form of the family name as it generally appears—Wriotheley—including in the first editions of both Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, the only editions likely to have been based on Shakespeare's autograph or scribal copy. Reflecting the instability of English Renaissance orthography and/or compositorial carelessness, some subsequent editions of both works have Wriothely or Wriothelie. For details, see Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938), pp. xi–xvi, 5 (Venus), and 113 (Lucrece).
9That an anagrammatic turn occurs most happily within a hemistich, preferably at a line-ending ("in the Conclusion"), is among the stylistic conventions discussed by William Drummond of Hawthornden in his "Character of a perfect Anagram" (see below, and note 25). See also Christopher Ricks, "Shakespeare and the Anagram," Proceedings of the British Academy 121 (2003): 111–46 (hereinafter, "Ricks"). In Q, as will be seen, the possible Wriotheley anagrams occur about as often at the start of a line ("in the Beginning") as at line-end.
10William F. Friedman and Elizebeth S. Friedman, The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 93. The Friedmans reviewed the long history of Shakespearean cryptographic frauds and delusions, focusing on purported ciphers "proving" that Sir Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays.
11An observation of the Friedmans (p. 20) on evaluating possible ciphers, including anagrams, is à propos: "The experienced cryptologist looks for two things, and they are equally important. First, the plain-text solution [the deciphered message] must make sense, in whatever language it is supposed to have been written; it must be grammatical (‘Hearts green slow mud’ would not do) and it must mean something (‘Pain is a brown Sunday’ would not do either). It does not matter whether what the solution says is true or not; it may be a pack of lies, but that is not the cryptologist's business. The important thing is that it must say something, and say it intelligibly." As would do the possible Wriotheley anagrams.
12The phrase appears in Eliot's 1928 review (in TLS for April 5, 1928) of a study by Percy Allen on poets’ borrowings from themselves, in which review Eliot wrote that Allen had gathered many apparent examples of such borrowings, "each slight in itself, but having a cumulative plausibility." See Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), an edition of Eliot's hitherto unpublished poetry, in the Preface to which Ricks observes (p. xxviii): "As so often in literary—including editorial—matters, the case is altered incrementally. Any particular instance, say, of a likeness [of Eliot] to Symons may seem or be uncogent, but the pattern and the frequency start to strain coincidence and to indicate convergence."
13Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), 50–51. See also Vendler's discussion (pp. 10–12) of Auden's phrase as it relates to Q.
15Another possible explanation, not (I believe) previously suggested, for Q’s foregrounding of Rose through italicization, capitalization and repetition; for the word's association with the Fair Friend in such phrases as 109.14’s "thou my Roe"; and for such lines as 95.1–3: "How weet and louely dot thou make the hame, / Which like a canker in the fragrant Roe, / Doth pot the beautie of thy budding name?" (emphasis added) is that its letters appear in proper order, as highlighted, anagrammatically and symmetrically dilated within the name Wriotheley and, as such, may serve as a proxy for it. For several examples of such anagrammatic dilation in the poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Keats, Byron, Housman, Eliot and others—one notable instance of which is the name Polonius dilated across the line "Politic, cautious and meticulous" in Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"—see Ricks, 116 and passim.
16For discussions of Wriothesley's life and role as the possible original of the Sonnets’ Fair Friend, see, for example, Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, 3–133, esp. 23–40, and 228–39; S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 159–83, esp. 170–9; Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 169–81; Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), 226–55; and Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 46–54.
17Quoted, with minor emendations based on a facsimile of the first edition, from E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930) I: 543–4. The dedication of Lucrece immediately below, similarly emended, is quoted from Chambers, I: 546.
18See, for example, Katherine Duncan-Jones, "Was the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets Really Unauthorized?" RES n.s. 34 (1983): 151–71. Duncan-Jones concludes, based on the available evidence, that Shakespeare probably authorized Q’s publication.
19Drake, Shakespeare and His Times (London, 1817), II: 62–71. Drake's case for Wriothesley, which also included the purportedly striking similarity of the dedication of Lucrece to sonnet 26, is summarized and discussed in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944), II: 186–95.
21Anonymously published, The Arte of Englih Poeie (London, 1589), 90.
23So titled in most modern editions but first published as Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine, the Inhabitants thereof, their Languages, Names, Sur-names, Emprees, Wie peeches, Poeies, and Epitaphes (London, 1605). Camden's discussion of anagrams occupies pp. 150–57 of that edition.
24Anagrammata T. Egertoni (S. T. C. 6165), quoted and cited by Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, 138.
25Excerpted from The Works of William Drummond, of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, 1711), 230–31. The Latin, from Martial's Epigrams ii.lxxxvi.9–10, was translated by Isaac D’Israeli as "’Tis a folly to sweat o’er a difficult trifle / And for silly devices invention to rifle."
27Barnfield, Cynthia. With Certaine Sonnets (London, 1595).
31Shakespeare's choice of "render thee" as the last two words in the sonnet and in the main sequence was particularly apt, as indicated by several OED-listed senses of the word render, all of which are apposite: repeat (something learned); say over, recite; surrender, resign, relinquish; and reproduce or represent, esp. by artistic means.
32Conjecturally dated 1590–91 by Gary Taylor in Wells, Taylor et al., eds., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 109; and, also conjecturally, 1592–93 by Clifford Leech in his Arden TGV (London, 1969), p. xxxv.
33Quotations from TGV follow the First Folio. "Loe, here in one line is his name twice writ" (I.ii.120) is a line that itself contains all twenty-two letters needed to twice write the name Wriothelie (see note 8). Four other TGV lines also have the letters needed to twice write Wriotheley or Wriothelie, none in ways suggesting anagrammatic intent.
34While commentaries on the Sonnets generally gloss "contracted" as betrothed or shrunken, another relevant sense of the word, given the line's possible anagrammatic content, is "drawn together, collected; combined, united," the earliest OED-cited use of which is from 1609.
35On this point, see Ricks, passim.
36As noted by Ricks, pp. 133–4, the use of "shifts"—as in transposes letters—also hints at, or confirms, nearby anagrammatic content in Donne's "Elegy XII: His parting from her," where "Rend us in sunder" is followed three lines later by "Love never wanteth shifts."
37At least five other sonnets may contain similar examples. In the Beginning of line 10.2, "Who for thy elfe" supplies ten of the letters needed to form Wriotheley and (with a nearby i) permits the line's transformation from "Who for thy elfe art o vnprouident" into "Wriotheley art o vnprouident." In line 12.5, "When lofty trees I ee barren of leaues" becomes "Wriotheley ee barren of leaues" when, in the Beginning, eleven letters in the line's first four words are transposed. Line 19.9, "O carue not with thy howers my loues faire brow," becomes "O carue not Wriotheley my loues faire brow" when nine of the letters in "with thy howers" (including a doubled e) plus a nearby l are similarly transposed. In the Beginning of line 29.13, the first four words, "For thy weet loue," supply ten of the eleven letters needed to form another Wriotheley (with a nearby i) and to transform the couplet, "For thy weet loue remembred uch welth brings, / That then I skorne to change my tate with Kings," into "Wriotheley remembred uch welth brings" etc. In a rare instance of a possible Wriotheley anagram within the Dark Lady sub-sequence, line 137.3 says, of the speaker's eyes, "They know what beautie is,ee where it lyes"; the last three words plus a nearby o contain the letters needed to form the name with only the third e not employed, permitting the formation of "They know what beautie is,ee Wriotheley." Given Shakespeare's interest in dilated anagrams (see note 15), it is perhaps noteworthy that in line 39.10—"Were it not thy oure leiure gaue weet leaue"—as the highlighting indicates and with the exception of a final y, the letters needed to form Wriotheley occur dilated across the line in word order.
38Line 55.14’s last word is spelled eye/eyes seventy-eight of the ninety-six times it occurs among Q’s sonnets, and Shakespeare may have intended it to be so spelled here. That Compositor A, who is thought to have set the type of sonnet 55, spelled the word eie/eies as often as eye/eyes (versus one-fifth of the time for Compositor B) is among the findings in MacD. P. Jackson, "Punctuation and the Compositors of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1609," The Library, fifth series, 30 (1975), 1–24.
39That the word "lit" with the sense of wish (including its cognates) occurs nowhere else in Q—an insight I owe to Stephen Balch—further suggests that its use here may have been dictated by anagrammatic as well as semantic considerations. Also supporting the reading Be [you] Wriotheley, the sonnet contains eight instances of the word or consecutive letters be—Being (4), being (5), beck (5), libertie (6), Be (9), belong (11), be (13), be (14)—a count equaled or exceeded only five times in Q; and, as noted by Vendler, seventeen instances of you and your—"a sardonic fantasia on the words." (Vendler, 277) The phonetic pun of U for you, if it is such here, is not unique to Shakespeare; among other instances are the couplet of Richard Barnfield's sonnet 19, which reads: "Even o of all the vowels, I and U, / Are dearet unto me, as doth enue"; and George Herbert's "IESU," in which the poet-speaker discovers that for his broken heart IESU signifies "I eae you."
40R. H. Winnick, "Anagrammatic Patterns in Shakespeare's Sonnet 69," Notes and Queries n.s. 52 (2005): 198–200.
41Tending to confirm the anagrammatic wit in line 81.6, the word meaning "to expire" is usually spelled die; in only one of the fifteen other instances of the word and its cognates (dies, diest, died) among Q’s sonnets (namely, in line 66.14) is it spelled dye. Without reference to any such wit in 81.6, Booth notes (p. 277) the line's "gratuitous complexity whereby once gone is used metaphorically to mean ‘once dead,’ while die, whose literal sense echoes the metaphorical meaning of gone, is itself used metaphorically to mean ‘be forgotten’." Here, as elsewhere, gratuitously complex language may be among the "red flags" signaling nearby anagrammatic wit.
42Booth discusses the apparent phonetic similarity of world and word in his notes on lines 81.12, 112.5 and 112.14, 138.4, and 140.11.
43Anticipating, foregrounding, and tending to confirm the possible anagrammatic play related to the deliberately withheld "I" in lines 89.10–11 is the similar wordplay in 89.8, "I will acquaintance trangle and looke trange," where the removal of an I-like l from "trangle" creates a word that does itself looke (like) "trange."
44The same names (nick- and sur-), with the variant spelling Wriothelie, can (as highlighted or otherwise) also be formed entirely from "when firt I hallowed" with no f-for- substitution, and without using any of the letters in the next three words, "thy faire name."
45The earliest (1591) OED-cited use of character as a verb meaning "to engrave, imprint; to inscribe, write" is by Shakespeare himself, in TGV II.vii.3–4: "Who art the Table wherein all my thoughts / Are viibly Character’d, and engrau’d." The earliest OED-cited use of case as a printing term denoting "the receptacle or frame in which the compositor has his types, divided into compartments for the various letters, figures, and spaces" is dated 1588.
46Line 108.12’s "aye his page" may be a double pun in which the poet-speaker directs the reader to eye his page (written or printed).
47Quoted from Twelfth Night, ed. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 145–49, with speeches by Fabian and Sir Toby replaced by ellipses. Peter J. Smith has argued that, notwithstanding Malvolio's efforts to crush "M.O.A.I." into an anagram of his name, another joke on him is that the letters would readily have been recognized by many in Shakespeare's audience as an acrostic of the title of Sir John Harington's "popular satirical tract on the flushing toilet, The Metamorphosis of A IAX" (1596). See Smith, "M.O.A.I. ‘What Should That Alphabetical Position Portend?’ An Answer to the Metamorphic Malvolio," Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 1199–224.
48See Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 228–70, esp. 248–54; Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 30–41; Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 502–24; and Martin Green, The Labyrinth of Shakespeare's Sonnets: An Examination of Sexual Elements in Shakespeare's Language (London: Charles Skilton, 1974), 59–81.
49As discussed by Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England, 41–53; Green, The Labyrinth of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 59–60; and Martin Seymour-Smith in his edition of the Sonnets (London: Heinemann, 1963), 26–37, esp. 30–31.
50Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (London, 1598). The complete sentence reads: "As the oule of Euphorbus was thought to liue in Pythagoras: o the weete wittie oule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakepeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his ugred Sonnets among his priuate friends, &c." (Quoted from Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, II: 194).
51From Strachey's 1905 Spectator review of H. C. Beeching's edition of the Sonnets; repr. in James Strachey, ed., Spectatorial Essays of Lytton Strachey (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), 71, 74–5. The phrase from Browne occurs in his Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial (1658), chapter V.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||