Shakespeare's Birthday 2023 Supplement

I was a bit too busy over the weekend to give Shakespeare's birthday the treatment it deserves. I suspect we've all had that feeling of regret at some time: that an important anniversary went by unmarked or insufficiently celebrated. So here's a new version, revised to 2023 specifications, of a previous birthday post dating from 2009, when this old blog was new, and it seems I was trying a bit harder to inform and entertain than I have been of late.

Fair Friend

We are meaning-making creatures. Constructing random marks into faces and unexpected nocturnal noises into malevolent intruders downstairs seems to be what we do as a species. It appears to have worked well for us, in evolutionary and survival terms, although those dark, windy nights in the Ice Age must have been a trial, hunkered around the flickering fire with the more nervous and suggestible members of the tribe. "No, really, listen, what was THAT??" Religion and art may well originally have been invented as harmless distractions for those hypersensitive souls, endlessly spooked by their own imaginings.

The urge to discover hidden anagrams, cryptograms, acrostics, and the like is surely at root a similar harmless distraction, but one that gets out of hand when such "discoveries" are presumed to hint at a deep, hidden meaning, lurking like a monster pike beneath the placid surface of language. Conspiracy hunters such as those who seek to prove that William Shakespeare – grammar-school boy, actor, and theatrical impresario of Stratford on Avon – did not write the plays attributed to him – the so-called anti-Stratfordians – seem particularly prone to this obsession. As an example you might want to read this thorough debunking of some typical wishful cryptographic thinking.

Of course, cryptograms have been concealed in texts from time to time, although with nothing like the frequency or import that conspiracy hunters would like to believe. The conviction that – somehow, by persons or forces unknown – secret codes have been implanted pretty much anywhere you care to look is fundamentally misguided, to put it mildly, but it would seem that, to those who are inclined to suspect some important truth has been concealed in plain sight, this is more compelling than the more prosaic ideas that random patterns throw up random meaningless meanings or that, more often than not, it is the truth that is staring you in the face, not some fancy cloaking device. 

Discovering anagrams can be fun, of course. I like these two, for example:

Year two thousand = A year to shut down
Eleven plus two = Twelve plus one

They're both very neat, but it's clear they mean nothing in themselves: there is no hidden code, no secret agenda. They are as accidental as a run of six sixes in a dice game. But then what about this one?

"To be or not to be: that is the question, whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ..."

Familiar words. But – improbably, unbelievably, outrageously – they are an anagram of:

"In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero Hamlet queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten ..." [1]

You might think this has to mean something, surely? But it doesn't. Other than the fact that (a) whoever worked it out had far too much time on their hands, and (b) these two sentences indisputably contain the same letters; that's it. As someone reflects in Thomas Pynchon's V: "Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane". If nothing else, this elaborate but utterly meaningless meaningful coincidence – lying in wait for 500 years – should persuade us not to let the hunters for hidden signatures and cryptograms convince us that anyone but the Stratford Man wrote the plays. William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare. That's surely mystery enough for anyone.

However. Yesterday was my man Shakespeare's official birthday, so I thought I might share with any other Shakespeare enthusiasts out there my favourite piece of fun-sized, birthday-related, extra-curricular Shakespeariana, which you may not have come across before.

Shakespeare's Psalm

It has been suggested – utterly without supporting evidence, and unlikely as it seems – that Shakespeare might have lent a hand with the wording and meter of the Book of Psalms in the King James Version of the Bible. Well, OK, an awful lot hangs on that "might". But, just suppose that in 1610, when the Bible was within a year of publication, the members of the committee of translators had reason to thank and surprise him on his birthday. He would have been forty-six years old that year, so let's just pretend he was invited to examine the final text of, shall we say, Psalm 46?

So, take a deep breath, and imagine further that he was prompted to count to the forty-sixth word from the beginning, and to the forty-sixth word from the end (ignoring the title and the "selahs" – words signifying pauses or rests). Get a King James Bible, and count them for yourself, and you'll find in line three the word "shake" and in line nine the word "spear." Moreover, in the way of these numerological things, if you then add the 4 and 6 of forty six, you get 10. The tenth word of the tenth line is "will". Curious, no?

It is all nothing more than a complete coincidence, I'm sure. But that would have been quite an ingenious birthday present, even – or maybe especially – if unintended. Of course, it's not impossible that – if Shakespeare had any role in the polishing up of the Psalms (which, let me repeat, is not known and is highly unlikely) – it is a present Shakespeare might quietly have given to himself. These are often the best presents, after all. Yet another new quill is all very nice, thank you very much, but to create for yourself a personal secret hiding place in what would become one of the greatest bestsellers of all time would be rather satisfying, wouldn't it?

Here is one more intriguing fact (allegedly – I haven't had the opportunity to check for myself, and I'd be grateful for any eye-witness corroboration). Apparently, the KJV Bible on permanent display in Stratford church has been open at the pages containing Psalm 46 for as long as anyone can remember. Again, if true, it's probably nothing more than coincidence, or even the work of some conspiracy-minded or mischievous cleric. But a birthday should be the occasion for a little harmless fun, and it's nice, isn't it, to see the right name elegantly concealed in plain sight, rather than all those tedious de Veres, Bacons, and the rest?

To me, fair friend, you never can be old;
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride;
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived.
   For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred:
   Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.
Sonnet 104

Ghosts at Montacute House

1. The author of this anagram has been identified as Cory Scott Calhoun.