Literary Imagination, volume 11, number 3, pp.

254277
doi:10.1093/litimag/imp049

Loe, here in one line is his name twice

writ: Anagrams, Shakespeares Sonnets,
and the Identity of the Fair Friend
R. H. WINNICK*

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: rhwinnick@gmail.com.
1
SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. Neuer before Imprinted (London, 1609). Quotations from the Sonnets
herein follow Qs text as reproduced in facsimile in various works including Helen Vendler, The Art of
Shakespeares Sonnets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Shakespeares 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.
2
Wilde, 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.
3
See Vendler, 12829 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.
4
Gurr, Shakespeares First Poem: Sonnet 145, Essays in Criticism 21 (1971): 2216.

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It has long been recognized that Shakespeares Sonnetsfirst published in 1609 in a

quarto volume today commonly known as Qcontains 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 latters Make but my name
thy loue,and loue that
till, / And then thou loue
t me for my name is Will; sonnet 57s
So true a foole is loue,that in your Will, / (Though you doe any thing)he thinkes no ill;
and sonnet 20s 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 Friends name.3 Among
other such examples are the possible pun on Hathaway, I hate,from hate away
he
4
threw, in sonnet 145, thought by Andrew Gurr to be Shakespeares first poem; and

R. H. Winnick

255

See Greens The Pronunciation of Wriothesley, English Studies 86 (2005): 13360, and his
Wriothesleys Roses in Shakespeares 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 Wriothesleycoined 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
surnamewas 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.
6
See Booth (p. 431) on the graphic similarity of fickle and
ickle in 126.2; and Vendler (p. 111), on
Shakespeares use of
ullied in 15.12 based partly on its graphic overlap with youthfull (15.7) and
wastfull (15.11).
7
Among 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 twicerepeated 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.
8
My analysis is based, except as noted, on the form of the family name as it generally appears
Wriothe@leyincluding in the first editions of both Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, the only editions
likely to have been based on Shakespeares 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. xixvi, 5 (Venus), and 113 (Lucrece).

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the thirteen once-italicized, always capitalized instances of Ro

e, or Ro
es, beginning
with sonnet 1s 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 Vendlers work in The Art of Shakespeares 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
horne, howers, others and
tore, noted
occurs) and 68, in
tores, flowers,
by Vendler, are representative examplesto which I would add 67.1s 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 68.1s daies out-worne.7
Close inspection of Qs orthographic patterns suggests, however, that there may be
a previously unrecognized, significant nexus binding Qs onomastic and anagrammatic
wit. As discussed in more detail below, a dozen or more of the 126 sonnets comprising
Qs main sequencethose addressed to, or about, the unnamed, narcissistic, androgynously beautiful Fair Friendcontain 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 thencurrent anagrammatic preferences, nearly all of these phrases fall neatly within one or

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Anagrams, Shakespeares Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend

That 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): 11146 (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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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, fourteencharacter 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 poemand phraseabjectly bemoans the
Friends 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 sonnets 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 Wriothesleytwi@e.
In a third, sonnet 39, twelve of the first thirteen letters in the phrase thy
oure lei
ure
(including its two us 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 linesOh ab
ence what a torment
would
t thou proue, / Were it not Wriothe@ley gaue
weet leaueseemingly 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 Examinedwhich (as its subtitle indicates) analyzed cryptographic systems used as evidence that some author other than
William Shakespeare wrote the plays commonly attributed to himproving 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

R. H. Winnick

257

10
William 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 Shakespeares plays.
11
An 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 cryptologists 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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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 Wriothesleys 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 129s
Thexpence 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 contain. Partly on the Wriothe@ley 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 Wriothe@ley anagrams
simply make sensethat 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 Wriothe@ley anagrams are real. It will perhaps be granted,
however, after due consideration, that the anagrams achieve in the aggregate a cumulative
plausibilityto borrow a phrase from T. S. Eliotthat no smaller set of examples might

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Anagrams, Shakespeares Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend

command alone.12 If, in the aggregate, they are deemed plausible, they would provide
a new perspective on Qs poems as (to borrow another, from W. H. Auden) verbal
contraptions,13 and (to borrow a third, from Helen Vendler), as a writers 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 nameunless it be the putative
William Hughes or some other person whose name sounds something like Ro@e
is apparently nowhere to be found.15

That Henry Wriothesley (15731624), the third Earl of Southampton and Baron of
Titchfield, was for a time Shakespeares literary patrona time during which
Shakespeare and Wriothesley came to be personally and cordially acquaintedis clearly
indicated in the public, the published, record. In 1593, Shakespeare, a then-twenty-nineyear-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 latters death in 1581.16 The poems dedicatory epistle to
12

The phrase appears in Eliots 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 19091917, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), an
edition of Eliots hitherto unpublished poetry, in the Preface to which Ricks observes (p. xxviii): As so
often in literaryincluding editorialmatters, 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.
13
Auden, The Dyers Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), 5051. See also
Vendlers discussion (pp. 1012) of Audens phrase as it relates to Q.
14
Vendler, 4.
15
Another possible explanation, not (I believe) previously suggested, for Qs foregrounding of Rose
through italicization, capitalization and repetition; for the words association with the Fair Friend in
such phrases as 109.14s thou my Ro
e; and for such lines as 95.13: 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 othersone notable instance of which is the name Polonius dilated across the line
Politic, cautious and meticulous in Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrocksee Ricks, 116 and
passim.
16
For discussions of Wriothesleys life and role as the possible original of the Sonnets Fair Friend, see,
for example, Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, 3133, esp. 2340, and 22839; S.
Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987), 15983, esp. 1709; Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), esp. 16981; Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
(New York: Norton, 2004), 22655; and Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare, rev. ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 4654.

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R. H. Winnick

259

Wriothesley, reminiscent of countless others to prospective patrons by aspiring poets

in the Elizabethan period, suggests that they barely knew one anotherif at all. Right
Honourable, it reads,

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 Shakespeares next narrative poem, Lucrece, by a dedication whose tonebeginning
with the bold, even brash familiarity of its first sentencecould 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 Qwhose 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.SONNETSthere were no more
dedications of Shakespearean works to Wriothesley (or anyone else) during
Shakespeares 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 poemsmuch 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.
17

Quoted, 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: 5434. The dedication
of Lucrece immediately below, similarly emended, is quoted from Chambers, I: 546.
18
See, for example, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Was the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets Really
Unauthorized? RES n.s. 34 (1983): 15171. Duncan-Jones concludes, based on the available evidence,
that Shakespeare probably authorized Qs publication.

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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

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Anagrams, Shakespeares Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend

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 (Heras 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 Pilates 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.

19

Drake, Shakespeare and His Times (London, 1817), II: 6271. Drakes 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: 18695.

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Beyond the two dedications, such evidence as there is of a continuing ShakespeareWriothesley relationship and of its nature is largely circumstantial, principally including
the seeming parallels, first noted by Nathan Drake in 1817, between known facts
of Wriothesleys life and implied facts of the Fair Friends: the fathers death in his
sons youth, the sons 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 Qs 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
Shakespeares time, and to what extent did Qs 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 Wriothesleys name in certain of the sonnets, why
might he have chosen to do it so secretly, so subtly, that the names presence would
remain unremarked for four centuriesand, 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.

R. H. Winnick

261

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

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 FAC
ON 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)23composed of materials not used in

his magnum opus Britannia (1586)most of the historian William Camdens numerous
anagrammatic samples were relatively recent and closer to home. For our late Queene
of happy memory, Elizabetha Regina : ANGLI HERA, BEASTI (glossed by Camden as
20

Vendler, 95.
Anonymously published, The Arte of Engli@h Poe@ie (London, 1589), 90.
22
Puttenham, 92.
23
So 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). Camdens discussion of anagrams occupies pp. 15057 of that edition.
21

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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
e
plea
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

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Anagrams, Shakespeares Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend

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 Rs, 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.

24
Anagrammata T. Egertoni (S. T. C. 6165), quoted and cited by Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of
Southampton, 138.

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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, LTUS, VI
VIRENS (Heroic, glad, green with strength). Another anagram, written in 1603 and
not part of Camdens 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 Quinte@@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
t
they
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 , 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:

R. H. Winnick

263

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.

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 Mans Name ye
hall find

ome Evil, and in an evil Mans 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 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
exchangesoften seen as well in non-anagrammatic settingsof 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 FAC
ON SUIS ROY, in addition to its v-for-u and i-for-y
substitutions, one of the two as present in the name is omitted in the anagrammatized
phrase based on it; and both of the formers ls are dropped in the latter. (Camdens
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 names sole o be doubled.)
As for Puttenhams Henry de Vallois : ROY DE NULZ HAY, it requires, along with
three exchanged letters, that the names second e and second l both be dropped in the
anagram based on it. (Camdens version comes closer to perfection, requiring only
the exchange of v for u: Henry de Valoys : ROY ES DE NUL HAY.)

25

Excerpted from The Works of William Drummond, of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, 1711), 23031. The
Latin, from Martials Epigrams ii.lxxxvi.910, was translated by Isaac DIsraeli as Tis a folly to sweat
oer a difficult trifle / And for silly devices invention to rifle.

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And concluded:

264

Anagrams, Shakespeares Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend

26

See note 50.

Barnfield, Cynthia. With Certaine Sonnets (London, 1595).

27

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In Henricus Wriothe@leus : HEROICUS, LTUS, VI VIRENS, in addition to its e-for-

substitution, the w in the Earls surname becomes two vs in the resulting anagram,
and one of the formers two hs 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 Qs Wriothe@ley anagrams, then, we ought not to
hold Shakespeare to a higher standard of anagrammatic perfection than his contemporaries observed or would have expected of himany more than we would dismiss, as
less than poetry, verse by Shakespeare or anyone else that employed off-rhymes or eyerhymes. Nor need we apply to the Wriothe@ley anagrams a lower standard of anagrammatic perfection, for the phrases Shakespeare may have crafted out of the letters
of Wriothesleys 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 Herberts couplet on the anagram Mary :
ARMY; Thomas Cars tribute to his late friend Richard Crashaw, Crashawe, The
Anagramme. HE WAS CAR; and Ben Jonsons verse observation, upon the publication
of his friend Alice Sutcliffes Meditations of Mans Mortalitie, that she who had suppd so
deepe of this sweet Chalice, / Must CELIA be, the anagram of ALICE are three that come
to mind. The name of Samuel Daniels eponymous sonnet lady, Delia, is a perfect
anagram both of Ideal and of the poets 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 someoneHenry Wriothesley
himself, and perhaps a handful of his, or Shakespeares, priuate friends26who 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 Qs 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
Wriothesleys 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?

R. H. Winnick

265

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
cornd,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 poems 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 selfjust 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 Shakespeares tendency, as noted by Vendler, to literalize conceits,28 it
appears that the Friend does liue twi@e in sonnet 17if 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 names 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 sonnets lines.

28

Vendler, 134.

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Qs 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 17with which the initial sub-sequence of begetting poems endsthe
poet-speaker again asserts the eternizing power of his verse, which now, as represented,
offers the Friend the prospect of twofold immortality:

266

Anagrams, Shakespeares Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend

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
houst,
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
werd mu
t be,
And her Quietus is to render thee.
(
)
(
)

Among the poems principal stylistic features is its pattern of verbal repetition. O Thou,
the sonnets opening words, recur in line 9. Sharing line 2 with fickle (gla

e) is the
nearly identical
ickle (hower). Line 3s growne is echoed by line 4s grow
t;
line 2s times by lines 8s time; line 7s keepes by line 10s 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 poems 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
29

See note 9.
Vendler, 538.

30

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The first of the lines in which Wriothesleys 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 Wriothesleys name are present,
twi@e overno 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 lines two Wriothe@leys. In the Conclusion, the highlighted
hewes not halfe your parts comprise ten of the eleven needed, along with a
letters in
nearby i, to form the other. In the second of the poems 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 lines two Wriothe@leys 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 Qs 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:

R. H. Winnick

267

31

Shakespeares 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.
32
Conjecturally dated 159091 by Gary Taylor in Wells, Taylor et al., eds., William Shakespeare: A
Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 109; and, also conjecturally, 159293 by Clifford
Leech in his Arden TGV (London, 1969), p. xxxv.

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twice: once, in the Beginning, entirely from the letters in Thy louers witheringin fact,
once entirely from ten of the phrases 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 lines 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 mans @weet @elfe grow@t as the line asserts, a way also consistent with the sonnets
verbal pattern of twofold repetition, one may form in its entirety the phrase Wriothe@ley,
@weet Wriothe@ley.31
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 reviewedtwo among
the 108 sonnets of Sidneys Astrophel and Stella (1591), three among the fifty sonnets
of Daniels Delia (1592), one in the fifty-one sonnets of Draytons Ideas Mirrour (1594),
none in the eighty sonnets of Constables Diana (1594), and two among the eighty-nine
sonnets of Spensers Amoretti (1595).
How rare for the same twenty-two letters to occur in each of two lines of the
same sonnet? More than rareunknown. Of the 532 sonnets (by Sidney, Daniel,
Drayton, Constable, Spenser and Shakespeare), comprising 7,449 verse lines, reviewed
for this study, Qs sonnet 17 is the only one with two double-Wriothe@ley lines.
How likely does it then seem that of Qs 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 Qs only other
double-Wriothe@ley line would randomly occur in the last poem of the main sequence,
the last addressed to the Fair Frienda line asserting the growth of that Friends @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
Shakespeares early comedy The Two Gentlemen of Veronathought, like at least some
of the Sonnets, to have been written sometime between 1590 and 159332Julia, 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

268

Anagrams, Shakespeares Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend

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

33

Quotations 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.
34
While commentaries on the Sonnets generally gloss contracted as betrothed or shrunken, another
relevant sense of the word, given the lines possible anagrammatic content, is drawn together, collected;
combined, united, the earliest OED-cited use of which is from 1609.
35
On this point, see Ricks, passim.
36
As noted by Ricks, pp. 1334, the use of shiftsas in transposes lettersalso hints at, or confirms,
nearby anagrammatic content in Donnes 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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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
Wriothesleys 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 ls, seven in all, Feed
t thy lights flame with
elfe
ub
tantiall
fewellmore ls than in all but five of Qs 2,156 other sonnet lines. (Here and elsewhere
in Q, nouns and verbs related to seeing and lookingin this instance, the phrase owne
bright eyes itselfmay 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 poems third line, Thy youthes proud liuery
o gazd on nowas we
should see if we now gazd 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 gazd on now, / Wil be
a totterd weed of
mal worth held should he fail to father a son.
In sonnet 9, midway through the initial begetting sub-sequence, the poet-speakers
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 910). 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 behindthereby privately
revealing or confirming that unthrifts identityis the name Wriothe@ley.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

R. H. Winnick

269

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 waryevery 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 Friends heart into the poetspeakers body that the line narratively assertsthe 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

37
At 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 lines
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 lines 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 speakers 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 Shakespeares interest in dilated anagrams (see note 15), it is perhaps noteworthy that in line 39.10Were it
not thy
oure lei
ure gaue
weet leaueas 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.

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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 sonnets 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 us joined to form
w, may also be transposed to form Wriothe@ley. As such, lines 39.910, 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:

270

Anagrams, Shakespeares Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend

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 poets
anagrammatic signature: I, Will Shake@peare.
No poem in Q more memorably asserts the eternizing power of the poet-speakers
verse than sonnet 55:

Like many of Qs 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 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 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. Therevisible by the eyes of all po@teritywe
find, in the Conclusion of the couplets 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 couplets
second line, there liue and dwell in this and louers eies, with another doubled u, the
letters needed to form Wriothe@lieor 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 poetspeaker 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 thaccount of houres to craue,
Being your va

ail bound to
taie your lei
ure.
Oh let me
uffer(being at your beck)
38

Line 55.14s last word is spelled eye/eyes seventy-eight of the ninety-six times it occurs among Qs
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
Shakespeares Sonnets, 1609, The Library, fifth series, 30 (1975), 124.

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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
meerd 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.

R. H. Winnick

271

Thimpri
ond 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.

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 poems one
hundred twenty-three words no fewer than forty-six instances of the digraph th,
39

That the word li

t with the sense of wish (including its cognates) occurs nowhere else in Qan
insight I owe to Stephen Balchfurther suggests that its use here may have been dictated by anagrammatic as well as semantic considerations. Also supporting the reading Be [you] Wriothe@ley, the
sonnet contains eight instances of the word or consecutive letters beBeing (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 youra 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 Barnfields sonnet 19, which reads: Even
o of all the vowels, I and
U, / Are deare
t unto me, as doth en
ue; and George Herberts IESU, in which the poet-speaker
discovers that for his broken heart IESU signifies I ea
e you.
40
R. H. Winnick, Anagrammatic Patterns in Shakespeares Sonnet 69, Notes and Queries n.s. 52 (2005):
198200.

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Even as the poet-speaker bemoans his powerlessness to controule the Friends comings
and goings, it appears that Shakespeare himself manages in thought to do just that, and
quite handilyfor, in the Beginning of the poems 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:

272

Anagrams, Shakespeares Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend

That thou are blamd

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 Qs always-capitalized Ro@eboth 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 lines anagrammatic subtext may be that, although the Friend
is susceptible to slanderto 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 81s 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.
hall haue,
Your name from hence immortall life
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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at least once and up to five times per linewhich, along with the poems profusion of
ous and ows, orthographically, phonetically and wittily enact its final line (emending the
sonnets @olye to @oyle, meaning solution, as to a riddle), The
oyle is this, that thou doe
t
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 lettersall tho@e parts of
theeneeded 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 fs 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 Qs poems, sonnet 70 presents something of a mystery, in that the syntax of its first quatrain clearly but incongruously
suggests that the ornament of beautya metaphor one would expect to refer to the
Fair Friendis A Crow, albeit one that flies in heauens
weetest ayre.

R. H. Winnick

273

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

41

Tending 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 Qs
sonnets (namely, in line 66.14) is it spelled dye. Without reference to any such wit in 81.6, Booth notes
(p. 277) the lines 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.
42
Booth 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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But like all of Qs other sonnets, this poem also fails to indicate what that name is.
Or does it? Ifprompted by each part, intombed in mens eyes and eyes not yet
created
hall ore-readwe 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 ia letter that occurs only once, as
the second of the lines 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 81.6s last four words to
sound like the word mu@t dye.42 As such, they may have provided another, aural clue to
the lines 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 lines
possible anagrammatic play: to warn obliquely that, should the relationship between
the poet-speaker and the Fair Friend continue to worsen, ultimately causing the poetspeaker to go away or the Friend to send him awayboth implied by I ( once gone)
the Wriothe@ley-bearing, Wriothesley-eternizing poems the former has been dutifully
writing will cease and Wriothesleys 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 89.1011) even utter the Friends name:

274

Anagrams, Shakespeares Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend

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 may be going on here, I believe, primarily involves line 108.8, Euen as when fir
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,
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
Wriothesleys 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-speakers 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 figurd to the Fair Friend his
true @pirit, by which to regi@ter and thereby expre@@e his loue and Wriothesleys deare merit,
by which he fir@t hallowed and had continued to hallow, and halloo, Wriothesleys faire

43

Anticipating, foregrounding, and tending to confirm the possible anagrammatic play related to the
deliberately withheld I in lines 89.1011 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.
44
The 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.
45
The 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.34: Who art the Table wherein all my thoughts / Are
vi
ibly Characterd, and engraud. 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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Whats in the braine that Inck may character,

Which hath not figurd to thee my true
pirit,
Whats 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,

R. H. Winnick

275

name, in a witty conceit of loue there bred, though time and outward [narrative-level,
uttered] forme would @hew it dead.46

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. SoftlyM.O.A.I.

He finally concludes, as the conspirators intendedand in what may be a parodic version

of the onomastic wit I have claimed for Qthat M.O.A.I. is a kind of truncated
anagram, denoting him:
M. Malvolio. Mwhy, 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
46
Line 108.12s 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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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, eternizeby name but
in a singularly oblique waya 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 presentedon which the case for Qs Wriothe@ley anagrams must ultimately restsome
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.80133),
Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Fabian and Maria conspire to place in Malvolios
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 belovd, Malvolio reads aloud after finding the letter, this,
and my good wishes:

276

Anagrams, Shakespeares Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend

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:

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-speakers 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 reasonnot to mention
the social chasm separating the player-poet from the great lord who was his early patron
and perhaps his loverin 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 Meress phrase) priuate friends,50 any
47

Quoted from Twelfth Night, ed. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994), 14549, with speeches by Fabian and Sir Toby replaced by ellipses. Peter J. Smith has argued that,
notwithstanding Malvolios 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 Shakespeares audience as an
acrostic of the title of Sir John Haringtons 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): 1199224.
48
See Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeares England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991), 22870, esp. 24854; Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeares Sonnets
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 3041; Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of
Everyday Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 50224; and Martin Green, The Labyrinth of
Shakespeares Sonnets: An Examination of Sexual Elements in Shakespeares Language (London: Charles
Skilton, 1974), 5981.
49
As discussed by Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeares England, 4153; Green, The Labyrinth of
Shakespeares Sonnets, 5960; and Martin Seymour-Smith in his edition of the Sonnets (London:
Heinemann, 1963), 2637, esp. 3031.
50
Francis 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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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.

R. H. Winnick

277

anagrammatic wit involving the Fair Friends name would not have needed to be overt,
as a textual or other hint or two would have sufficed to direct an initiated readers
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:

Without question, Shakespeares poetry is the essential thing. But the dismissal of the Fair
Friends 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.

51

From Stracheys 1905 Spectator review of H. C. Beechings edition of the Sonnets; repr. in James
Strachey, ed., Spectatorial Essays of Lytton Strachey (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), 71, 745. The
phrase from Browne occurs in his Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial (1658), chapter V.

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The belief that the sonnets contain the clue which leads straight into the hidden penetralia
of Shakespeares 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 Shakespeares friend is a matter of only secondary
importance. It is Shakespeares poetry which is the essential thing.51