Oxford Journals - Shakespeare

“Loe, here in one line is his name twicewrit”: Anagrams, Shakespeare’s Sonnets,and the Identity of the Fair FriendR. H. W I N N I C K*

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 itali-

cized 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 loue�t 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

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.

*Princeton, New Jersey. E-mail: [email protected] 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.

Literary Imagination, volume 11, number 3, pp. 254–277doi:10.1093/litimag/imp049

� The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: [email protected] Access publication October 4, 2009

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the thirteen once-italicized, always capitalized instances of “Ro�e,” or “Ro�es,” 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 “Ro�es 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 ro@e 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, androgy-

nously 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

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 Rye-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 reher@e 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 witne��e 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—

Wriothe@ley—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 Wriothe@ly or Wriothe@lie. 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).

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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 li�t” in sonnet 58 contains all the letters needed to

form Be U Wriothe@ley 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

twi�e 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—twi@e.

In a third, sonnet 39, twelve of the first thirteen letters in the phrase “thy �oure lei�ure”

(including its two u’s combined to form w, a common and permissible anagrammatic

substitution) can also be transposed to form Wriothe@ley. If this name is inserted into the

poem in place of that phrase, the result is a pair of lines—“Oh ab�ence what a torment

would�t thou proue, / Were it not Wriothe@ley 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 mu�t dye.”

Perhaps not by accident, “the world mu�t dye” contains all the letters needed to form

Wriothe@ley except the first-person pronoun I, which, once gone, mu@t 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 indi-

cates) 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

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 Wriothe@ley anagrams occur about as often at the start of a line (“in the

Beginning”) as at line-end.

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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 li�t,” “thy �oure lei�ure,”

“the world mu�t dye,” any of the dozen other phrases discussed below, or even in the

two “double-Wriothe@ley” lines in sonnet 17, because it cannot be shown that Shakespeare

must have intended these or any such phrases to be transposed into Wriothe@ley, 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 wa�te of �hame” contains a pun on waist?)

Nevertheless, there is a case to be made for the Wriothe@ley 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 con-

tain. Partly on the Wriothe@ley anagrams’ general compliance with anagrammatic con-

ventions 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 Wriothe@ley anagrams

simply make sense—that they give the appearance of having been consciously and care-

fully 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 Wriothe@ley 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

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 a

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 Wriothe@ley

anagrams.

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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 Ro@e—

is apparently nowhere to be found.15

1

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

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.14Vendler, 4.15Another 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 Ro�e”; and for such lines as 95.1–3: “How �weet and louely do�t thou

make the �hame, / Which like a canker in the fragrant Ro�e, / 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 Wriothe@ley 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.


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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 �hall offend in dedicating my vnpoli�ht lines to your Lord�hip, nor how

the worlde will cen�ure mee for choo�ing �o �trong a proppe to �upport �o weake a burthen,

onelye if your Honour �eeme but plea�ed, I account my �elfe highly prai�ed, and vowe to

take aduantage of all idle houres, till I haue honoured you with �ome grauer labour. But if

the fir�t heire of my inuention proue deformed, I �hall be �orie it had �o noble a god-father :

and neuer after eare �o barren a land, for feare it yeeld me �till �o bad a harue�t, I leaue it

to your Honourable �uruey, and your Honor to your hearts content, which I wi�h may

alwaies an�were your owne wi�h, and the worlds hopefull expectation.

Your Honors in all dutie,

William Shake�peare.17

By the following year, the relationship between peer and poet had advanced consider-

ably, 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�hip is without end : whereof this Pamphlet without

beginning is but a �uperfluous Moity. The warrant I haue of your Honourable di�po�ition,

not the worth of my vntutord Lines makes it a��ured of acceptance. What I haue done

is yours, what I haue to doe is yours, being part in all I haue, deuoted yours. Were my

worth greater, my duety would �hew greater, meane time, as it is, it is bound to your

Lord�hip; To whom I wi�h long life �till lengthned with all happine��e.

Your Lord�hips in all duety.

William Shake�peare.

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, autobio-

graphically documented) in Q.

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.

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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 Wriothe@ley 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 Wriothe@ley 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 Wriothe@ley anagrams themselves.

2

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 Arsinoe, 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 Arsinoe. 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.

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.


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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 po@ie

tran@po@ed,” he observed, is

a thing if it be done for pa�time and exerci�e of the wit without �uper�tition commendable

inough and a meete �tudy for Ladies, neither bringing them any great gayne nor any great

lo��e vnle��e it be of idle time. They that v�e it for plea�ure is to breed one word out

of another not altering any letter nor the number of them, but onely tran�po�ing of the

�ame, wherupon many times is produced �ome grateful newes or matter to them for who�eplea�ure and �eruice it was intended : and bicau�e there is much difficultie in it, and

altogether �tandeth vpon hap hazard, it is compted for a courtly conceit no le��e then the

deuice before remembred.21

Among the handful of examples gathered by Puttenham, two were French. Francois de

Vallois (Francis I), who had ruled France until mid-century, had been honored with the

anagram DE FACON SUIS ROY (which Puttenham glossed as “who in deede was of

fa�hion countenance and �tature, be�ides 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 Eli@@abet 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 al�o is worth the noting, and I will a��ure you of it, that after the fir�t �earch whereupon

this tran�po�e was fa�hioned[,] [t]he �ame letters being by me to��ed & tran�laced fiue

hundreth times, I could neuer make any other, at lea�t of �ome �ence & conformitie to

her Maie�ties e�tate and the ca�e. If any other man by triall happen vpon a better omination,

or what �oeuer els ye will call it, I will reioyce to be ouermatched in my deui�e, and renounce

him all the thankes and profite of my trauaile.22

Gathered 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

20Vendler, 95.21Anonymously published, The Arte of Engli@h Poe@ie (London, 1589), 90.22Puttenham, 92.23So titled in most modern editions but first published as Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning

Britaine, the Inhabitants thereof, their Languages, Names, Sur-names, Empre@es, Wi@e @peeches, Poe@ies, and

Epitaphes (London, 1605). Camden’s discussion of anagrams occupies pp. 150–57 of that edition.

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“O Englands Soueraigne, thou ha�t made vs happy”), and a total of eight other laudatory

anagrams. For “the late Queene of Scotland, his Maie�ties 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 Wriothe@leius : 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 Uriothe@leus :

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-

e@@ence that hitherto the Alchimy of wit coulde draw out of names, is Anagrammati@me

or Metagrammati@me,” which he defined as “a di��olution of a Name truly written into

his Letters, as his Elements, and a new connexion of it by artificiall tran�po�ition, without

addition, �ub�traction, or chang[e] of any letter into different words, making �ome

perfect �ence appliable to the per�on named.”

He continued: “The preci�e in this practice �trictly ob�erving 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 licentiou�ly le�tthey �hould preiudice poeticall libertie, will pardon them�elves for doubling or reiecting

a letter, if the �ence fall aptly, and thinke it no iniury to v�e E for Æ, V for W, S for Z, and

C for K, and contrariwi�e.”

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 admitteth �ome Exceptions, which is, That �ome one or other Letter may be omitted;

but with great Judgment, That that Letter be no eminent principal Letter of the Name, which

is omitted: But �uch, without which the Name may con�i�t. For when the �ame Letters occur

many times in the Name, then the Omi��ion of one or more is pardonable; e�pecially for

�ome excellent Sen�e that agreeth to the Per�on, as in that of Auratus PIERRE DE

RONSARD. ROSE DE PINDARE, of four R’s, two are omitted.

A Letter may ea�ily be omited, without who�e Help, the Name by it �elf may �tand; as H,

which placed behind, after Con�onants, �eemeth not much to alter the Power of the Name;

which Letter �ome of the Latins have aboli�hed, thinking it rather an A�piration than a Letter.

24Anagrammata T. Egertoni (S. T. C. 6165), quoted and cited by Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of

Southampton, 138.


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It was �aid, that no Letter �hould be taken away ; yet, if there be any great Rea�on, a Letter

may be added as relligio, repperit; or rather a Letter may be doubled, as when two Letters

occur in the Name, one may be aboli�hed, �o one of Nece��ity may be doubled.

He continued, in part:

It is �ometimes lawful to change one Letter into another, That is, for one Letter to put

another, which is the admitting of one, and omitting of another.

But the Conclu�ion is, The Anagrammati@m is �o much the more perfect, the farther it

be from all Licence.

And concluded:

Now for the U�e of the Anagram,

1. We may u�e it as an Apophthegm, mo�tly if it contain any �harp Sentence. It may be

the Title or In�cription of a Tomb, the Word of an Impre�a, the Chyme of Ver�es, that

e�pecially which admitteth of Explication.

An Anagram, which turneth in an Hemi�tich or half Ver�e, is mo�t plea�ant. However it

be, in an Epigram or Sonnet it fitly cometh in mo�tly in the Conclu�ion, but �o that it

appeareth not indented in, but of it �elf naturally.

2. The Rea�on of Anagrams appeareth to be vain ; for in a good Man’s Name ye �hall find

�ome Evil, and in an evil Man’s Good, according to the Searcher.

3. One will �ay, it is a frivolous Art and difficult, upon which that of Martial is current.

Turpe e@t difficiles habere nugas

Et @tultus labor e@t ineptiarum.25

The practical application of some of these “laws” can be seen in several of the anagram-

matic 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@t veritas, Eli@@abet Anglorum Regina,

Elizabeth Regina, Maria Steuarta, Charles Iames Steuart and Henricus Uriothe@leus.

But in Francois de Vallois : DE FACON 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.)

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.”

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In Henricus Wriothe@leus : 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 sanc-

tioned 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 Wriothe@ley anagrams, then, we ought not to

hold Shakespeare to a higher standard of anagrammatic perfection than his contempor-

aries 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 Wriothe@ley anagrams a lower standard of anagram-

matic 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 con-

ventions 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 (a) 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?

26See note 50.27Barnfield, Cynthia. With Certaine Sonnets (London, 1595).


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3

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�e in time to come

If it were fild with your mo�t high de�erts?

Though yet heauen knowes it is but as a tombe

Which hides your life , and �hewes not halfe your parts:

If I could write the beauty of your eyes,

And in fre�h numbers number all your graces,

The age to come would �ay this Poet lies,

Such heauenly touches nere toucht earthly faces.

So �hould my papers (yellowed with their age)

Be �corn’d,like old men of le��e truth then tongue,

And your true rights be termd a Poets rage,

And �tretched miter of an Antique �ong.

But were �ome childe of yours aliue that time,

You �hould liue twi�e in it,and in my rime.

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 twi@e 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 twi@e into the poem as a whole but twi@e into each of two

of the sonnet’s lines.

28Vendler, 134.

R. H. Winnick 265

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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,

twi@e 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 Wriothe@leys. 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-Wriothe@ley lines—

17.9, “So �hould my papers (yellowed with their age)”—seventeen of the twenty-two

letters needed to form that line’s two Wriothe@leys occur in the Conclusion, as high-

lighted, 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 Wriothe@ley 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,

Doe�t hould times fickle gla��e,his �ickle,hower:

Who ha�t by wayning growne,and therein �hou’st,

Thy louers withering,as thy �weet �elfe grow’�t.If Nature(�oueraine mi�teres ouer wrack)

As thou goe�t onwards �till will plucke thee backe,

She keepes thee to this purpo�e, that her skill

May time di�grace,and wretched mynuit kill.

Yet feare her O thou minnion of her plea�ure,

She may detaine,but not �till keepe her tre�ure!

Her Audite(though delayd)an�wer’d mu�t be,

And her Quietus is to render thee.

( )

( )

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��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 other-

wise 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 Wriothe@ley

29See note 9.30Vendler, 538.


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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 Wriothe@ley 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 Wriothe@ley,

@weet [email protected]

How rare is it for a sonnet line to contain all twenty-two of the letters needed to

form Wriothe@ley 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-Wriothe@ley 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 twi�e in it,and in my rime”? Or that Q’s only other

double-Wriothe@ley 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-Wriothe@leys 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

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.

R. H. Winnick 267

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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

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 faire�t creatures we de�ire

increa�e”), in whose fifth line, “But thou contracted to thine owne bright eyes,” ten of

the eleven letters needed to form Wriothe@ley 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 �ub�tantiall

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 Wriothe@ley, 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 Wriothe@ley “�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 ha�t 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 [email protected]

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

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 Wriothe�lie (see note 8).

Four other TGV lines also have the letters needed to twice write Wriothe@ley or Wriothe@lie, 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.”


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be thy loue and thy loues v�e their trea�ure.” For when ten of the eleven letters (including

its v and u combined to form w) in the phrase “thy loues v�e” are joined by the last two

letters of the next word, “their,” they too can be transposed to form Wriothe@ley. If that

name and the unused letters the are placed back into the line at the point from which “thy

loues v�e 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 plea�ure, / Mine be thy loue and Wriothe@ley the trea�ure.”

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 lei�ure,” including its two u’s joined to form

w, may also be transposed to form Wriothe@ley. As such, lines 39.9–10, “Oh ab�ence

what a torment would�t thou proue, / Were it not thy �oure lei�ure 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 ab�ence what a torment would�t thou proue, / Were it

not Wriothe@ley gaue �weet leaue.”37

Sonnet 22 may contain further anagrammatic wit in its ninth, tenth and eleventh lines:

O therefore loue be of thy �elfe �o wary,

As I not for my �elfe,but for thee will,

Bearing thy heart which I will keepe �o chary

In line 9, ten of the eleven letters needed to form Wriothe@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

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 Wriothe@ley and (with a nearby i) permits the line’s

transformation from “Who for thy �elfe art �o vnprouident” into “Wriothe@ley art �o vnprouident.” In

line 12.5, “When lofty trees I �ee barren of leaues” becomes “Wriothe@ley �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 Wriothe@ley 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 Wriothe@ley (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 “Wriothe@ley

remembred �uch welth brings” etc. In a rare instance of a possible Wriothe@ley 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 Wriothe@ley.” Given Shake-

speare’s interest in dilated anagrams (see note 15), it is perhaps noteworthy that in line 39.10—“Were it

not thy �oure lei�ure gaue �weet leaue”—as the highlighting indicates and with the exception of a final y,

the letters needed to form Wriothe@ley occur dilated across the line in word order.

R. H. Winnick 269

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be transposed to form Shake@pere or Shake@peare, 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 Shake@peare.

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,

Of Princes �hall out-liue this powrefull rime,

But you �hall �hine more bright in the�e contents

Then vn�wept �tone, be�meer’d with �lutti�h time.

When wa�tefull warre �hall Statues ouer-turne,

And broiles roote out the worke of ma�onry,

Nor Mars his �word, nor warres quick fire �hall burne:

The liuing record of your memory.

Gain�t death,and all obliuious emnity

Shall you pace forth, your prai�e �hall �til finde roome,

Euen in the eyes of all po�terity

That weare this world out to the ending doome.

So til the iudgement that your �elfe ari�e,

You liue in this,and dwell in louers eies.

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 “�hine more bright in the�e con-

tents”? 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 po�terity”? 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 po@terity—we

find, in the Conclusion of the couplet’s first line, that from “that your �elfe ari�e” there

ari@e all the letters needed to form Wriothe@ley, 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 Wriothe@lie—or Wriothe@ley 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 fir�t your �laue,

I �hould in thought controule your times of plea�ure,

Or at your hand th’account of houres to craue,

Being your va��ail bound to �taie your lei�ure.

Oh let me �uffer(being at your beck)

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.


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Th’impri�on’d ab�ence of your libertie,

And patience tame,to �ufferance bide each check,

Without accu�ing you of iniury.

Be where you li�t,your charter is �o �trong,

That you your �elfe may priuiledge your time

To what you will,to you it doth belong,

Your �elfe to pardon of �elfe-doing crime.

I am to waite,though waiting �o be hell,

Not blame your plea�ure be it ill or well.

Even 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�t” not

only contains all the letters needed to form Wriothe@ley (which can be formed entirely

from “where you li�t”), but all the letters needed to form Be U Wriothe@ley 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 Wriothe@ley:

Those parts of thee that the worlds eye doth view,

Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend:

All toungs(the voice of �oules)giue thee that end,

Vttring bare truth,euen �o as foes Commend.

Their outward thus with outward prai�e is crownd,

But tho�e �ame toungs that giue thee �o thine owne,

In other accents doe this prai�e confound

By �eeing farther then the eye hath �howne.

They looke into the beauty of thy mind,

And that in gue��e they mea�ure by thy deeds,

Then churls their thoughts(although their eies were kind)

To thy faire flower ad the rancke �mell of weeds,

But why thy odor matcheth not thy �how,

The �olye is this,that thou doe�t common grow.

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,

39That the word “li�t” 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 ana-

grammatic as well as semantic considerations. Also supporting the reading Be [you] Wriothe@ley, 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 deare�t unto me, as doth en�ue”; and George Herbert’s “IESU,” in which the poet-speaker

discovers that for his broken heart IESU signifies “I ea�e you.”40R. H. Winnick, “Anagrammatic Patterns in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 69,” Notes and Queries n.s. 52 (2005):

198–200.

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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 @olye to @oyle, meaning solution, as to a riddle), “The �oyle is this, that thou doe�tcommon 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 tho@e parts of

thee—needed to form Wriothe@ley. Similarly, “[To] thy faire flower” in the Beginning

of line 12 contains the letters needed to form another Wriothe@ley, 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 Wriothe@ley ad the rancke �mell of weeds.”

While not among the most famously baffling of Q’s poems, sonnet 70 presents some-

thing 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’d �hall not be thy defect,

For �landers marke was euer yet the faire,

The ornament of beauty is �u�pect,

A Crow that flies in heauens �weete�t ayre.

Also noteworthy is the seemingly gratuitous capitalization of the c in “Crow,” which—

like Q’s always-capitalized Ro@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

Wriothe@ley. 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

�weete�t 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 I �hall liue your Epitaph to make,

Or you �uruiue when I in earth am rotten,

From hence your memory death cannot take,

Although in me each part will be forgotten.

Your name from hence immortall life �hall haue,

Though I ( once gone) to all the world mu�t dye,

The earth can yeeld me but a common graue,

When you intombed in mens eyes �hall lye,

Your monument �hall be my gentle ver�e,

Which eyes not yet created �hall ore-read,

And toungs to be, your beeing �hall rehear�e,

When all the breathers of this world are dead,

You �till �hall liue (�uch vertue hath my Pen)

Where breath mo�t breaths,euen in the mouths of men.


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But 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 �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 mu�t dye.” For, in the Conclusion of line 6, “the world mu�t dye” contains

all the letters needed to form Wriothe@ley 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 Wriothe@ley, which word then, anagrammatically

speaking, mu@t 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 mu@t 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 Wriothe@ley-bearing, Wriothesley-eternizing poems the former has been dutifully

writing will cease and Wriothesley’s name, in turn, to all the world mu@t 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:

Thy �weet beloued name no more �hall dwell,

Lea�t I(too much prophane)�hould do it wronge:

Although “Thy �weet beloued” in the Beginning of line 10, and a nearby r, supply ten

of the letters needed to form Wriothe@ley, the eleventh letter, i, is nowhere to be found

in the line—and the next line may provide both an anagrammatic- and narrative-level

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.

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explanation reminiscent of sonnet 81: “Lea�t 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,

Which hath not figur’d to thee my true �pirit,

What’s new to �peake,what now to regi�ter,

That may expre��e my loue,or thy deare merit?

Nothing �weet boy,but yet like prayers diuine,

I mu�t each day �ay ore the very �ame,

Counting no old thing old,thou mine,I thine,

Euen as when fir�t I hallowed thy faire name.

So that eternall loue in loues fre�h ca�e,

Waighes not the du�t and iniury of age,

Nor giues to nece��ary wrinckles place,

But makes antiquitie for aye his page,

Finding the fir�t conceit of loue there bred,

Where time and outward forme would �hew it dead,

What may be going on here, I believe, primarily involves line 108.8, “Euen as when fir�tI 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,

Wriothe@ley. 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. Wriothe@ley, as anagrammatically realized, may be the name in

the poet-speaker’s braine that Inck may character, in loues fre@h ca@e [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 regi@ter and thereby expre@@e his loue and Wriothesley’s deare merit,

by which he fir@t hallowed and had continued to hallow, and halloo, Wriothesley’s faire

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 Wriothe@lie, can (as highlighted or

otherwise) also be formed entirely from “when fir�t 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

vi�ibly 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.


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name, in a witty conceit of loue there bred, though time and outward [narrative-level,

uttered] forme would @hew it dead.46

5

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 pre-

sented—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,

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.”

Malvolio labors to decipher the message:

“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

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).

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“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.47

It should also be noted that, as sonnet 20 indicates, Shakespeare or his poet-persona

was clearly and quite powerfully drawn to “the Ma�ter Mi�tris of my pa��ion”:

And for a woman wert thou fir�t created,

Till nature as �he wrought thee fell a dotinge,

And by addition me of thee defeated,

By adding one thing to my purpo�e nothing.

But �ince �he prickt thee out for womens plea�ure,

Mine be thy loue and thy loues v�e their trea�ure.

Even 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.

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

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 Shake@peare, 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).


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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.51

Without 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.

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.

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