-73-
36) Later in the same
play, on page 131 there is a short simple song or poem (a ditty) playing on the
words “Sore”, “ell”, and “Sorell”. While there may be more encrypted
or played with in the ditty that I can see, what is obvious is another play on
the letter “L”, this time to refer to the Roman numeral “50”. The playwright
first adds one L to “Sore” and makes “50 sores of sorrel”. Then another “L” is
added to make a hundred. If the double “L” is meant as a cryptic code for the
number 100 it wouldn’t seem that witty since the word “hundred” is part of the
riddle. However, the following dialogue again speaks of a “foolish extravagant
spirit, full of forms, figures,….” so maybe a number riddle is meant after all.
What interests me more is that we have evidence that the playwright actually
used Roman numerals identified as regular English letters.
Also of interest, though not related to ciphers, is this text following the Sorrell ditty which is:
There’s a
quote from Bacon’s “De Augmentis”
that fits with this Shakespeare passage. He wrote: “Neither again is that arrangement of the
intellectual faculties (imagination, reason, and memory) according to
the respective ventricles of the brain, destitute of error.” We see that
both Shakespeare and Bacon had read of memory being in a ventricle of the
brain.
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