SHAKESPEARE LECTURE

Shakespeare and the Anagram

Professor Christopher Ricks FBA, Boston University

23 April 2002

The anagram, which may be seen and not heard, may be seen as a historical phenomenon, as a religious intimation, and as a poetic device. Shakespeare's sonnets are one place to look for and at anagrams. This, not in the interests of showing that A.N. Other wrote the sonnets or that they are coded, but because the anagram - for which the late sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century mode was fervid (Donne, Jonson, Herbert) - may be understood as one form that metaphor may take, like rhyme in its bringing together likeness and unlikeness revelatorily.

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