Shakespeare and the Anagram

Abstract

This lecture attempts to make a good claim on behalf of anagrams as capable of being a true assistance to art. This claim asks what the lecture proffers to be something of an anthology. It recollects that a particular period, the Shakespearian moment, is the heyday of the anagram, especially in its religious intimations. The lecture also tries to illustrate from Shakespeare's Sonnets the secular felicities to which the anagrammatic may variously give rise.