Even texts of the first class are not as exciting as we’d like to think. True secret codes are boring and practical. They have historically been limited to the correspondence of criminals, alchemists, businessmen, diplomats, diarists, gossipers, and military commanders. There isn’t really any such thing as a literary code, for the simple reason that absent a clef possessed by the reader alone, there is no practical way to ensure that a mystery interpretable by your friends won’t also be interpretable by your enemies. Most of the allegories and secrets supposedly buried in our literature are therefore either the coy pretences of authors or the tendentious speculations of readers.
Tendentious speculations— if a text is obscure or badly understood, then its interpretation is unfortunately prey to any scholar who longs to discover any sort of hidden meaning in it. These midrashic enchanters are happy to let a type-II mystery be converted into a type-I mystery, because it gives their rash hypotheses an hieratic aura.
No one has been more mangled by these savants than Shakespeare. For one, proponents of the theory that somebody else wrote Shakespeare’s plays have sucked on the obscurities in his works like lampreys on a shark. But even worse than these are the neoteric literary critics who gloss every obscurity in the texts with their own unphilological interpretations, reasoning that if the text is fundamentally mysterious, then nobody will mind very much if yet another equipollent opinion is added to the pile. Anything to fill up the pages of a tenure-qualifying book.
The only defence against uninformed speculation is to supply solid philological explanations, and to do away with all appearance of mystery. To that end let’s explain two supposedly cryptic inscriptions associated with Shakespeare.
I.
The first edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609, has a curious dedication at the beginning. With its capital letters and interpuncts, it is made to resemble an inscription on a Roman tomb:
With its clauses unknotted into a more idiomatic oder, it can be read: ‘Thomas Thorpe, the well-wishing adventurer, wisheth in setting forth all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living Poet to Mr. W. H., the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets.’
‘Our ever-living Poet’ is God, the creator – ποιητής – of men, to whom He promises happiness and eternity. The eternity enjoyed by successful poets is of course of a different kind to that enjoyed by the souls whom God has saved, but conflating the two concepts is Thorpe’s joke.
(So much I figured out on my own while falling asleep a little while ago, and I was sad the next morning to find that I’d been beaten to the punch. See Donald W. Foster, ‘Master W. H., R.I.P.’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America CII, no. 1 (January 1987): pp. 42–54.)
There is only one point of real difficulty. Who is W. H.? Oscar Wilde proposed that it was Willie Hughes, Shakespeare’s lover and the ‘fair youth’ who inspired the sonnets, hence ‘begetting’ them from a certain point of view. One woman writing for the British Library asserted that W.H. was definitely Shakespeare’s homosexual lover, but that aside from Willie Hughes he might have been one of half a dozen other men whose names can sort of be read as W. H. I remember my high-school teacher (who encouraged us to use Shakespeare’s works as a sort of ouija-board for ruminations on power/gender/sexuality) running through all the possibilities, and then telling us with sick glee that the mystery was the whole point.
The only sensible theory that I’ve ever seen in print holds that W. H. was a misprint for W. S., and referred to William Shakespeare. Misprint or not, W. H. must be Shakespeare. The ‘only begetter’ of the Sonnets can only comfortably refer to their author, not the person who inspired their author. And even if a person who inspired an author might in an extremely left-handed way be called the book’s begetter, then surely in the case of the Sonnets the Dark Lady shares that title with the Fair Youth, and neither one can be called the only begetter. Besides, it would have been appropriate for a publisher to dedicate a book to his book’s author. It would have been strange to dedicate it to a third person, and stranger still to call that third person the book’s ‘only begetter.’
All the same, I think that the misprint-theory is unlikely, even if it’s not altogether impossible. The dedication is laid out primly and with great care, and to print the single most important letter incorrectly would have been a bizarre mistake.
Consider, however that Thorpe, who had already made his dedication resemble a Latin inscription, might also have given Shakespeare a classical name, akin to Melanchthon for Schwarzerdt or Peter for Cephas. Now, Hastatus, hastifer, hastifragus, and hastiger are all plausible calques on Shakespeare. More than plausible: they are by far the most likely learned renditions of the English name. (Matthew Paris even tells us of one Nicholas Breakspeare, alias Hastifragus.) Thus W. H. might stand for some variant of Wilelmus Hastiger. Shakespeare is not attested anywhere else by any name of the kind, but it’s perfectly plausible that this was a private and occasional conceit of Thorpe’s.
Thus we have a dedication by the publisher Thorpe to the author Shakespeare. Learned, clever, coy, but not anymore enthrallingly mysterious.
II.
Here is Shakespeare’s epitaph in Stratford-on-Avon, subscribed to an effigy of him and placed above his grave:
Iudicio Pylium genio Socratem, arte Maronem,Terra tegit, populus mæret, Olympus habet.Stay passenger, why goest thou by so fast,Read if thou canst, whom envious Death hath plastWith in this monument, Shakspeare: with whomeQuick nature dide whose name doth deck this TombeFar more then cost: Sieh all, that He hath writt,Leaves living art, but page, to serve his witt.
Obiit anno domini 1616
ÆTATIS 53 die 23 Ap.
The Latin distich means The earth covers, the people mourn, and Olympus possesses one who was a Nestor [Pylius] in his judgment, a Socrates in his spirit, and a Virgil [Maro] in his art. Unfortunately the lines are malformed: the o in ‘Socrates’ is long and does not fit the hexameter. But that’s nothing compared to the loopy badness of the English poem, which has to be explained point-by-point:
Read] Either it is intransitive, and which makes the whole opening sentence read ‘Siste viator et lege hæc, si quidem potes.’ Or else it it takes ‘Shakespeare’ for an object, and means ‘recognize Shakespeare [in this effigy] if thou canst’. (Cf. Spenser’s ‘Such ugly monstrous shapes elsewhere may no man read’.)
With whome quick nature dide] This is reminiscent of Cardinal Bembo’s epitaph for Raphael in the Pantheon, written a century earlier:
With whome quick nature dide] This is reminiscent of Cardinal Bembo’s epitaph for Raphael in the Pantheon, written a century earlier:
Ille hic est Raphaël timuit quo sospite vinci
Rerum magna parens et moriente mori
This man here is Raphael: when he lived Nature feared to be surpassed, and when he died she feared to die.
Name] That is, ‘reknown’. The word in this sense (and, in fact, the sentiment of this inscription) is to be found in Ecclesiastes 7:1 – a good name is better than good ointment. Or else Ovid. Met. XV.876, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum.
Cost] ‘Sepulchral pomp’. Shakespeare himself used it famously in this sense (S 64):
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defacedThat is, ‘when I have seen the proud tombs of the dead destroyed by time’.
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age
The whole phrase ‘whose name doth deck this Tombe / Far more then cost’ means that Shakespeare’s true tomb consists in his writings, not any visible monument. This conceit is classical (cf. Horace C. III.xxx Exegi monumentum and the end of Ovid’s Metamorphoses), and it was also applied in other contemporary eulogies of Shakespeare. Here are Leonard Diggs and John Milton, in the First and Second Folios respectively:
Sieh all that he hath writt] Sieh could an archaic or Germanizing spelling of ‘see’, and thus have the meaning lo! On the other hand, sich, since, and sith have been conjectured since the eighteenth century. They are easier readings, but not supported by the monument itself or the contemporary sketch of it.
Leaves living art, but page, to serve his witt] Probably the idea is that the art of all living men is henceforth only a lowly servant to the eternal genius of Shakespeare, with a pun on ‘page’, leaf, and ‘page’, servant.
With all this in mind, the best sense I can make of the whole inscription is:
Stop, traveller, why goest thou by so fast? Read this if thou canst: Envious Death has placed Shakespeare in this monument; with whom living Nature died. His renown adorns this tomb far more than funereal pomp. Lo, all that he wrote leaves the art of living men as nothing more than an apprentice to his genius.
