The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0553  Tuesday, 3 November 2009

[1] From:   Steve Roth <
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     Date:   Friday, 30 Oct 2009 08:05:40 -0700
     Subj:   Re: SHK 20.0547 Anagrams

[2] From:   David Frydrychowski <
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     Date:   Friday, 30 Oct 2009 11:29:39 -0400
     Subj:   Re: SHK 20.0517 Wriothesley Anagrams in the Sonnets?


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:       Steve Roth <
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Date:       Friday, 30 Oct 2009 08:05:40 -0700
Subject: 20.0547 Anagrams
Comment:    Re: SHK 20.0547 Anagrams

If I might be so bold as to respond to Arlynda Boyer using her own 
words: "if we are intellectually rigorous enough to reject the 
anti-stratfordians' silly word games, are we also so intellectually 
rigid as to reject considerations of such games out of hand, based on 
guilt by association?"

The crossword-puzzle, riddle-solving approach to Shakespeare has 
undoubtedly been many a commentator's fatal Cleopatra. (I have certainly 
risked foundering among those shoals.) But given Shakespeare's inability 
to resist specious quibbles and word-play (at least according to 
Johnson), might not a wholesale rejection of such thinking be our own 
equally perilous Charybdis?

[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:       David Frydrychowski <
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Date:       Friday, 30 Oct 2009 11:29:39 -0400
Subject: 20.0517 Wriothesley Anagrams in the Sonnets?
Comment:    Re: SHK 20.0517 Wriothesley Anagrams in the Sonnets?

With reference to Malvolio's "MOAI," I've found the idea (earlier aired 
on this list) that the hapless steward is confounded by a representation 
of "Amo ei" (read as chambermaid Latin for "My love for you doth sway my 
life") to be very convincing as a 'fustian' cloth of two languages.

I think the key thought (revealed by both the grammatical flaw in 
Maria's Latin and Malvolio's hapless misconstruction which misses the 
tin for the glass) might be that the character herself is intelligently 
employing the complex signifier as a complex tactic. It is, perhaps, 
merely the "M.O." of a good author to create such an "A.I."

Clearly, the tactic is inapposite for a sonnet-writer - but the depicted 
compulsion might not be.

David Frydrychowski

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