The fourth post in a 12 day series of excerpts from my forthcoming book.
In previous posts I have made an argument that nearly all that we know of the author Shakespeare relies on a few words from Ben Jonson. Today I explore what Jonson means when he asks us to ‘read with understanding’ and consider the work of William Bellamy who suggests that Jonson may have given us hidden clues to help interpret his work. Given the limitations of typesetting, the second part may not display properly on mobile devices.
This material can also be found on my substack:
open.substack.com/...
Twelve Days of Shakespeare:
- Ben Jonson and the Arte of Shakespeare
- The
Four Five Shakespeares
- Heart of Darkness: My journey into the madness of Shakespeare Authorship
- Why Ben Jonson Writes Not of Love
- The Upstart Crow
- Jonson, the Herberts and the Folio
- To the Memory of My Beloved
- Bauds, Whores and William Basse
- Wits to Read: Francis Meres and Shakespeare’s Small Latin
- Praise to Give
- Shakespeare’s Shadow
- Women are but Men’s Shadows
Reading with Understanding
Pray thee, take care, that taks’st my Book in hand, To read it well: that is, to understand.[1]
Ben Jonson, Epigrams
When Ben Jonson implores his reader to “read it well: that is to understand” he is demanding that the reader approach the work hermeneutically, following a process of textual interpretation which dates back thousands of years but had gained renewed significance in the sixteenth century following the Reformation. Martin Luther’s sola fida, sola scriptura had denied both the intercessory function of the Church and its authority over matters of belief. It was up to the individual protestant to interpret the word of God from the textual artifacts available. This returned Christian faith to a text-based religion from an institutional one mediated by priests and their proscriptions. The new demands on readers and the social, religious and intellectual implications that spring from them pervade Renaissance thought and especially the works of Shakespeare who often explores them in the metaliterary subtexts of his plays.
At its core hermeneutics is as simple as parsing a sentence. As the reader encounters each word in turn, the specific meaning signified by the word alone is processed with the proceeding words and gains meaning from context. When the whole sentence has been parsed, an interpretation is found which respects the individual word meanings as synthesized into an organic whole and which credits the author with intention to communicate something in the context of a wider conversation. We all do this with more or less success every day.
Traditional hermeneutic practice extends these principles to entire literary texts. An initial reading offers both surface meaning and suggests richer cognitive structures through metaphor and previous texts through allusion. By considering how these additional meanings resonate with the literal meaning of the text the reader can speculate on the author’s intent to create a textual object in which all these layers function together to form a coherent work. The range of concepts and related texts within which a work is interpreted is called the interpretive horizon. The process of analysing and interpreting a text is envisioned as an iterative sequence in which initial impressions and expectations define a scope for interpretation and synthesis and further consideration of this framework identifies additional ideas and texts which expand the interpretive horizon, while discarding others as fruitless in interpreting the work. This process of alternately synthesizing and redefining the scope of the corpus under consideration is called the hermeneutic circle. The process ends when we have a unitary interpretation which we believe exhausts the intent of the work and see no reason in our interpretation to add any more to the corpus of texts and ideas being considered.
Because the choice of content for the interpretive circle can determine the final interpretation, conflicts of interpretation often reduce to disagreement about whether some idea or prior work should or should not be considered within the analysis. Indeed modern critical theory abandons the idea that a single best reading is even possible, instead emphasizing reader response, the idea that each reader encounters the work with a unique interpretive background which defines how they understand the text. Thus Marxist theory and feminist theory constitute distinct and valid interpretations that come from privileging those distinctive perspectives. Denying the availability or salience of authorial intent constitutes the ‘Death of the Author’ introduced in 1967 by Roland Barthes in his eponymous essay. Whatever the merits of Barthes’ literary theory, in trying to parse Jonson for the identity and biography of Shakespeare we are very much interested in keeping him alive. The whole point of reading literary texts for historical information is to extract from them what the author intended us to find and not to substitute our own modern perspectives. The challenge and importance of establishing the correct interpretive circle for Elizabethan texts is perhaps best illustrated by an example in which Shakespeare himself explicitly raises the question.
“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba”
Hamlet Act 2 Scene 2
Perhaps the most explicit reference to hermeutic interpretation in Shakespeare appears in Hamlet, when the prince invites the visiting player to perform a speech he had seen before, ‘Aeneas’ tale to Dido, and thereabout of it especially where he speaks of Priam’s slaughter,’ an apparent reference to Virgil. Hamlet’s interest is specific, when Polonious complains ‘this is too long,’ Hamlet directs, ‘Say on; come to Hecuba.’ As the player describes the distraught reaction of Hecuba to her husband’s death, his eyes fill with tears and Hamlet contrasts his own restrained and impotent reaction to the murder of his own father, ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba , that he should weep for her?’ While the recognizing that the actor is reacting to a literary character with no personal significance to him is enough to contrast Hamlet’s detachment, the details of Hecuba’s story offer a much richer reading.
In Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages, Tanya Pollard argues that modern critics have neglected the popularity of Greek tragedy and particularly Euripide’s Hecuba in Elizabethan England, and that ‘Hamlet acquires different meanings if one takes seriously the play’s preoccupation with Hecuba as a symbol of the moving power of tragedy.’ Euripides Hecuba offers an alternative narrative for Hamlet to follow, ‘Unlike Seneca’s Hecuba, Euripides’s Hecuba uses lament, the ritual voicing of mourning for the dead, to transform her grief into violence that is depicted as both successful and justified. After passionately lamenting, first her sacrificed daughter and then her newly discovered, murdered son, she earns the moral authority to persuade not only her sympathetic chorus, but also the ruler Agamemnon, that she must punish the murderer Polymestor. Ultimately, with the help of her female attendants, she kills Polymestor’s children in front of him, and then blinds him.’
The relevance of this story to the Danish prince contemplating the player’s speech seems obvious enough to require no additional argument, but Pollard must also establish that Euripedes was available to an English audience. She supports this assertion with a review of its history of publication, ‘It was the first Greek play to be translated into Latin, by Erasmus, who published it with Iphigenia in Aulis in 1506 — only three years after the Greek editio princeps was published by Venice’s Aldine Press’ and in vernacular translation ‘it was translated into Spanish in 1533; French in 1544; and Italian in 1543, 1550, 1563, and 1592, for a total of seven vernacular editions — again, far more than any other Greek play.’ Note the absence of English in the list. The modern academic biography of Shakespeare as a relatively uneducated actor from the Midlands with “small Latin and less Greek” has discouraged academic interpretation which considers Euripedes as a source in Shakespeare. Pollard has to argue against that consensus to validate her interpretation.
Pollard suggests the performance history made the play particularly relevant to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘It is also the first Greek tragedy with documented postclassical performances, directed by Melanchthon in the Low Countries between 1506 and 1514, and again in 1525 in Wittenberg — where Shakespeare sent Hamlet to study.’ Invoking Philip Melanchthon and Wittenberg connects with the religious subtext widely recognized in the play. The appearance of the ghost and Hamlet’s decision not to kill his uncle at prayer appear to defy Protestant teaching about purgatory and salvation. Wittenberg suggests the prince himself shared Melancthon’s irenic position, which left him theologically stranded between heaven and hell. Finally, Pollard considers the period critical response, ‘Gasparus Stiblinus, the translator and editor of the first Greek-Latin volume of Euripides’s complete works (1562), pronounced Euripides the prince of tragedy and claimed that Hecuba held the first place among the tragedies. Philip Sidney used the play as an example of the power of well-made tragedy, and Joseph Scaliger and Antonio Minturno similarly used it to illustrate proper tragic structure —compact, but with a complex variety of incidents in the plot — in their discussions of the genre.’ We will see that combination of Sidney, Scaliger and Minturno again when we consider Jonson’s first folio encomium.
Pollard’s argument seeks to bring “the predominantly female-centered canon of Greek tragedy” within the compass of Shakespeare’s works. Another source, even more closely matching the circumstance of Hamlet’s discussion with the player would bring in the world of Greek philosophy. In Plato’s dialogue Ion, Socrates explores the nature of acting with a performer of that name. Socrates asks if the actor is affecting his performance by art when he performs an emotionally charged scene – he specifically mentions Hecuba, or if he actually feels the emotions that bring his tears. Socrates inquires three times, ‘are you in your right mind’ or ‘are you not carried out of yourself’. He finishes with a question of how the actor perceives his audience respond. Ion’s answer provides a recipe for the forthcoming ‘mousetrap’, ‘for I look down upon them from the stage, and behold the various emotions of pity, wonder, sternness, stamped upon their countenances when I am speaking: and I am obliged to give my very best attention to them; for if I make them cry I myself shall laugh, and if I make them laugh I myself shall cry when the time of payment arrives.’
To my knowledge no one has ever advanced an argument that Hamlet draws upon Ion, or explored the potential significance of Plato’s philosophy expressed in the dialogue for the metatheatrical subtext of the play. Once again it is outside the box which scholars have constructed for Shakespeare based on Jonson granting him but ‘small Latin and less Greek’ and the apparent evidence from the Stratford man’s biography that he could hardly have acquired any more.
While we can, like Pollard, marshal historical and literary evidence to establish the relevance of potential literary sources, wouldn’t it be lovely if writers had left us instructions about where to look and what to consider? In my efforts to better understand Jonson I stumbled upon a relatively recent article that claims just that, that Jonson had used a three part anagram/acrostic derived from instructions in Horace to provide internal annotations to his writing, which he used to provide dates, and the names of the sources for his literary references.
Why Ben Jonson Writes Not of Love
William Bellamy: Ben Jonson and the Art of Anagram
Fowler and Bellamy argue the necessity of understanding the use of anagrams in period texts
In 2007 Alistair Fowler published an essay[2] which challenged early modern English scholars to explore the use of anagrams to encode hidden meanings and connections in the works they studied. It has long been recognized that there was a fad for encryption among Elizabethans which advanced from simple first word acrostics to increasingly subtle and complicated forms, but efforts to divine alternate Shakespeare authorship based on encrypted messages had prejudiced mainstream scholars against systematic study to understand their use in period. Fowler had previously had an enormous impact on scholarly study of English literature with articles arguing the importance of genre, form, and even numerology in interpreting period literature. With support from Cambridge University, William Bellamy took up Fowler’s challenge and in 2015 published both an essay, Ben Jonson and the Art of Anagram[3] and a book length treatment, Shakespeare’s Verbal Art. Bellamy identified a passage in the Roman poet Horace’s Ars Poetica which covertly but comprehensively explained the rules for two methods for concealing information within written works. One involved embedding the letters MDCLXVI of roman numerals to indicate dates. The other was a three-part anagram or acrostic that could encode names or other key words to internally annotate a work. In Latin texts these hidden messages were signalled with the word anagrammata or the more compelling nodus amoris, which Bellamy translates as love knots,[4] encoded into the text. Based on Horace’s instructions Bellamy was able to document both the classical use of the form, particularly by Ovid, and its widespread use among early modern English writers, reaching a peak of popularity in the late 16th and early 17th century. In both periods, these anagrams were used to embed names or entwine them in text to establish connections that reinforced or added extra dimension or hidden meaning to the overt reading of the text. Unfortunately, Bellamy died just months after the publication of his book and even an essay from Fowler endorsing the findings was insufficient to generate much interest in tackling the dense and scholarly work, or overcoming the reflexive dismissal of the use of embedded anagrams in academic analysis of period literature.
Bellamy determined that these anagrams follow a consistent three-part structure. Each instance contains a forma, a figura extensa, and a figura condensa.[5] The forma signals the presence of the anagram with a word or short phrase that begins with the first letter of the concealed name and ends with the last. The figura extensa is a broken anagram or acrostic beginning with the first letter of the forma and spelled solely from letters at the beginning and ending of subsequent words, in the correct order. Finally, the condensa is a traditional anagram formed from letters in any order but in a more compact phrase (still imperfect, allowing for some unused letters). The tripartite format and strict rules for forming valid anagrams help to reduce the chance of spurious or chance identifications, but do not eliminate them (I provide an example in a following section). Bellamy argues that while convention dictates that the writer not explicitly acknowledge the presence of hidden codes, they should be hinted at by the overt meaning of the text, contextually appropriate and productive, in the sense that they contribute to the overall impression of the text. Typically, important identifications are repeated or exist in clusters that reinforce each other and further define the relation of the work to the hidden references. In this way, these anagrams function much like traditional literary allusion and need to be evaluated in much the same way we judge whether an author really intended a potential source to inform the reader of his work. Indeed, in my experience the most reliable and productive use of identifying such anagrams in period texts is that they confirm previously suspected sources and let us see new ones that function as conventional allusion independent of any hidden message.
In 1616 Ben Jonson published a collection of plays in the prestigious folio format, the first English playwright to do so, preceding the famous Shakespeare first folio by seven years. Jonson’s folio contained nine plays, but also scripts for Masques performed by nobles at the court of King James and an anthology of poems he entitled The Forest. The second poem in The Forest is Jonson’s seminal “country house” poem, To Penshurst, perhaps his best-known work today, studied in countless English Literature classes for its insight into the patronage relationships of early modern poets and their noble supporters. Bellamy highlights the short first poem of Jonson’s The Forest as an explicit exemplar which Jonson uses to introduce nodus amoris anagrams. The title Why I Write Not of Love itself is a wordplay on Nodus Amoris and Jonson embeds the Latin phrase in the poem establishing his use of the form and its dimension of hidden meaning. He also fills the poem with entwined Ben and Mary anagrams anticipating the next several poems of the Forest in which he uses anagrams to inform his tribute to his Sidney family patrons.
Why I Write Not of Love
Some act of Loue’s bound to reherſe,
I thought to binde him in my verſe:
Which when he felt, Away quoth hee
Can Poets hope to fetter mee? I
It is enough, they once did get
Mars, and my mother, in their net:
I weare not theſe my wings in vaine.
With which he fled me; and againe,
Into my rimes could ne’re be got
By any arte. Then wonder not,
That ſince, my numbers are ſo cold,
When Loue is fled, and I grow old.
The second line signals anagrams for Mary and Ben Ionson (I and J were not distinguished in Latin and often interchanged in period typesetting). The simplest is contained in the words binde him in which provides both the forma and extensa for the name Ben. Following Bellamy’s convention, I bracket the forma and bold the letters of the figura extensa below,
I thought to [binde him in] my verſe: Ben
binde him in functions as forma as it is a short phrase beginning with the initial b and ending with n. The e at the end of binde allows the full name Ben to be formed using only initial and ending letters in order so the phrase also completes the figura extensa. Bellamy will find Ben again in the final couplet which he identifies as figura condensa for the whole poem.
My provides a forma for Mary, again the complete name can be composed from eligible first and last letters in the succeeding lines. Finally, I thought to binde him in provides a forma for Ionson
Below I provide the text of the poem as analysed by Bellamy. Forma are bracketed [ ] and letters composing the anagrams (figura extensa) capitalized, with (only) Nodus Amoris bold.[6]
Some act of Loue’s bound to reherſe,
[I thought tO [BindE him iN] [My] verſe: M B-E-N I-O
[Which] wheN he felt, Away (quoth hee) A W N
Can PoetS hope to fetteR mee? R O-R S
It is enough, theY Once did get Y T-H O
Mars, and my mother, iN their net: N
I weare [NOt theſe my wings] in vaine. NO
With which he fleD me; and [Againe, D A
Into MY rimeS] could ne’re be got I-S M M
By any arte. Then wonder nOt, O AR & B-E-N
That ſince, my numbeRs are ſo cold, R Y
When Loue IS fled, and I grow old. IS
The final couplet provides the figura condensa, from which we can form Nodus Amoris, Ben Ionson & Mary Sidney Worth
That since, my numbers are so cold, When Loue is fled, and I grow old
Nodus Amoris Ben Ionson Mary Sidney Worth
Having established the nature and presence of anagrams in Why I Write Not of Love, Jonson uses them extensively in the subsequent poems to create a more serious and substantial subtext to the playful praise overtly extended to his patrons and friends..
In To Penshurst, Bellamy finds anagrams, particularly in the last fourteen lines, that “recontextualize the overt dimension of the poem.” The entire poem echoes the biblical Psalms, both in structure and frequent allusions, and particularly the Sidney translation begun by Philip and completed by Mary after his death. Throughout are anagrams for psaltery which Bellamy asserts is “capable of comprising a covert quotation from inter alia Psalm 108.1-3 (as for example in the Authorized Version of 1611):
A song or Psalme of Dauid. O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and giue praise, euen with my glory. Awake psaltery and harpe: I my selfe will awake early. I will praise thee O Lord among the people: and I will sing praises vnto thee among the nations.”
He further singles out These, Penshurst, are thy praise, and yet not all as “a signal that the poem will culminate in a richly anagrammatic concentration of its key elements."[7] Here is Bellamy’s deconstruction of these lines which will serve as a baseline for what follows:
These, [Penshurst, are thy] praise, and yet (k)not all. P
Thy lady’S noble, fruitfull, chaste withAll. S
His children thy great Lord [MAy] call his owne: A-L MA
A fortune, in this age, buT RarelY knowne. T R-Y
They arE, and have beene taught religion: Thence E
TheiR gentler [spirits have] [Suck’d Innocence. R S-I
Each [Morne, anD eveN, thEY]] ARe taught to praY, Y M-AR-Y D-N
With the whole houshold, and [MAy], eveRY day, MA-RY E-Y
Reade, in their vertuous [ParentS noble] parts, P-S
The mysteries of [Manners, Armes, and ARts. A M-AR
Now, Penshurst, theY] that wilL pro-portion Thee L-T Y
With othER edifices, when theY see ER-Y
Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,
MAy say, theiR lords have built, but thY lord dwells. MA-R-Y
He notes that “the duplicitous use of the word knot has the effect of transforming the nested gesture into a self-referential motto,” containing Psallere, Psaltery and Sidney:
ThesE, PEnShurst Are thy PRaiSE, And YEt [k]not aLL
As many anagrams and layers of meaning as Bellamy has identified in this final passage, he does not provide a satisfactory answer to the riddle posed in the second couplet, which has puzzled readers for centuries.
His children thy great Lord may call his owne: A fortune, in this age, but rarely knowne.
The choice to praise the Lord of the house (ostensibly Robert Sidney) for good fortune in having neither been cuckolded nor fathering bastards himself has always seemed odd. Fowler acknowledges the curious nature of the complement but justifies it with “it was far from gratuitous in an age thought dissolute by more than satirists. But Jonson’s formulation is proverbial rather than satiric.”[8] The hidden context established by the Mary Sidney and Psaltery anagrams suggests that Jonson is referring to literary rather than literal children, and the general connection of the poem with the Psalms and particularly the Sidney translation offers a possible solution, that Jonson is among those who wish to see the Sidney Psalter in print. But it is not a very satisfactory explanation. Mary’s psalms were widely circulated in manuscript, widely acknowledged in print and although there were some recorded efforts to persuade her to publish them, they hardly qualify as hidden or unacknowledged works.
Jonson hints at another literary form, theatrical plays, suggesting we can read in their noble parts, the mysteries of manners, armes, and arts. He also puts the word plays on the tips of our tongues with the language of the poem –they, may, pray, day, and the overt and covert center of the passage praise.
Looking for anagrammatical confirmation, we find the word plays encoded three times (following the now familiar tripartite arrangement of figura condensa and forma [in brackets] followed by the figura extensa composed of letters in order in first and last letters of succeeding words.) But Jonson is in a revealing mood, and he also identifies which plays Mary Sidney has secretly authored.
These, [Pens]hurst, are thy praise, and yet (k)not all. P
Thy Lady’[s noble], fruitfull, chaste [Withall]. LA-YS WILL S
His children thy great Lord may call His owne: H
A fortune, in this Age, but rarely Knowne, A-K
They are, and have beene taught religion: ThencE E
Their gentler [spirits have] suck’d innocence. SHAKE SP
Each morne, and even, they ARE taught to pray, E-ARE
With the whole houshold, and may, every day,
Reade, in their vertuous [ParentS noble] parts, SP-E
The mysteries of Manners, ARmes, and arts. AR
Now, Penshurst, they that [will] pro-portion TheE P-L E WILL
[With other edifices], when they see WI
Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else, A
MAy say, theiR lords have built, but thY lord dwells. Y-S LLS
Following Bellamy, we look to the first line for a condensed anagram to summarize the concealed message. Here the implied k provided by Bellamy handily ties the (k)not:
TheSe, PENSHurST ARE thY PRAISE, AND YET [K]NOT ALL
Shakespeare Plays Sonnets Psalter Sidney
I don’t expect anyone to accept that Mary Sidney was the author Shakespeare based on a few possibly coincidental patterns of letters in an obscure Ben Jonson poem (it really is not that obscure). I didn’t. It did expand my horizon of interpretation to include the hitherto unsuspected notion that Jonson might intend to identify the Countess with Shakespeare and set me on a project to explore that idea which has consumed much of the last two years. In coming posts I will explore what Jonson actually tells us about Shakespeare, but first I will test Bellamy’s anagrams against another key source of information about Shakespeare, Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit and explore what current research tells us about the Upstart Crow.
[1] Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (Newark : University of Delaware Press ; London ; Cranbury, NJ : Associated University Presses, 1991), http://archive.org/details/benjonsons1616fo0000unse.
[2] Alastair Fowler, “Anagrams,” in Remembered Words: Essays on Genre, Realism, and Emblems, ed. Alastair Fowler (Oxford University Press, 2021), 0, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198856979.003.0017.
[3] Bellamy, William, “Ben Jonson and the Art of Anagram,” n.d.
[4] Bellamy, William, 18.
[5] William Bellamy, Shakespeare’s Verbal Art (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 5.
[6] Bellamy, William, “Ben Jonson and the Art of Anagram,” 18.
[7] Bellamy, William, 24.
[8] Alastair Fowler, “Penshurst Revisited,” in Remembered Words: Essays on Genre, Realism, and Emblems, ed. Alastair Fowler (Oxford University Press, 2021), 263, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198856979.003.0020.
