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Assuming an Elizabethan fascination with the anagram, recent commentators (R. H. Winnick, Helen Vendler, Christopher Ricks) have proposed its influence on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. This article argues that the revival of the anagram in France and its introduction to England in the 1560s by Charles Utenhove resulted in an aversion to the form for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign. The French anagram was associated with cabalistic ideas which define by contrast a plain-speaking ‘Englishness’ in writers such as Nashe and John Harvey (Puttenham's account of the anagram is taken to refer to the 1560s). An attempt is made to discuss all known uses before 1603 of the word ‘anagram’ and its cognates. The anagram did know some success when it was introduced in Scotland in the 1590s; when James succeeded Elizabeth in England, it became respectable there too. Recent arguments for anagrammatic elements in Shakespeare's Sonnets are considered in detail alongside the historical evidence and Saussure’s attempts to rationalize their presence in earlier poetry. They are shown to bear little relation to the actuality of the sixteenth-century anagram.
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