Guest Post by William S. Niederkorn.

After the recent post on Hypnerotomachia, I downloaded the first edition of that book (1499) from archive.org courtesy of the Boston Public Library and upon opening it, saw that the text block pattern of the title page looked familiar: 

It brought to mind the cypher John Rollett discovered in the Sonnets dedication, based on the number of lines (6, 2, 4) in its three isoceles triangles: 

Following words in the 6-2-4 pattern, period by period, results in a sentence, shown here with the relevant words in bold: 

TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF. 

THESE.INSUING.SONNETS. 

MR.W.H.ALL.HAPPINESS. 

AND.THAT.ETERNITY. 

PROMISED. 

BY. 

OUR.EVER-LIVING.POET. 

WISHETH. 

THE.WELL-WISHING. 

ADVENTURER.IN. 

SETTING. 

FORTH. 

The placement of periods between words, abbreviations, and initials alike facilitates decryption of  the message “THESE SONNETS ALL BY EVER” – Ever being a well-known reference to Edward de Vere (E_Ver_). The end of the message is designated by the interruption of the hyphen in “EVER-LIVING.” 

Some observers count hyphens like periods and follow the 6-2-4 sequence to an absurd degree, extending the cyphered text by adding the meaning-impaired “THE FORTH,” but an encryptor could be forgiven for making the hyphen the message’s endpoint. 

Another alternative reading is not to count the hyphen as a period and for that reason include hyphenated terms as one word, yielding, “THESE SONNETS ALL BY EVER-LIVING WELL-WISHING.” Ever-living means dead but not forgotten, and well-wishing means what it says. Both could have been reflections on Oxford in 1609 when the Sonnets were first published. 

Rollett later renounced the cypher and became an advocate for William Stanley, but his original thesis has been cited as primary evidence that the Sonnets are by Oxford. 

Could the Hypnerotomachia title page have inspired the cyphering behind the Sonnets dedication? 

There are two triangles, of 9 and 5 lines, set in good isoceles shape. 

The first triangle – six lines of text and three lines of asterisks – is the title of the work and a description of it, or title and subtitle. 

The second triangle seems to be a kind of copyright claim. Translation is complicated by the language of Hypnerotomachia. To cite Wikipedia, “The text of the book is written in a bizarre Latinate Italian . . . full of words based on Latin and Greek roots.” 1 

Including abbreviations as full words and leaving out the asterisks, as well as putting word parts together over line breaks and counting them as one word (HUMANA, COMMEMORAT, LIBRUM and IMPRIMERE), while recognizing NISI and SOMNIUM as two words, the 9-5 sequence is shown below in bold: 

HYPNEROTOMACHIA POLIPHILI, UBI HU 

MANA OMNIA NON NISISOMNIUM 

 ESSE DOCET .ATQUE OBITER 

 PLURIMA SCITU SANE 

 QUAM DIGNA COM 

MEMORAT. 

*  *  * 

*  * 

* 

CANTUM EST, NE QUIS IN DOMINIO 

ILL. S. V. IMPUNE HUNC LI 

BRUM QUEAT 

IMPRIME 

RE. 

If this is encryption, the message is “Esse scitu in impune,” translated literally as “To be by decree in impunity.” 

Is it saying that the author can do as he pleases? Or is it a happenstance of meaninglessness? 

In any case it is four words that string together to make a sentence that the writer of the Sonnets dedication, knowing the Hypnerotomachia was already famous for hidden meanings, could have read as encryption and decided to emulate. 

1 I find two translations online for the top triangle and none for the second.

The first translation is from the beginning of a paper published in February 2004 by the Glasgow University Library.

It seems that Joscelyn Godwin’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The strife of love in a dream (London: 1999), which is cited as a reference but not directly credited, is the source of the quoted translation:

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili relates the story of the dream of Poliphilo “in which it is shown that all human things are but a dream, and many other things worthy of knowledge and memory.” The tongue twisting “Hypnerotomachia” poetically translates as the “strife of love in a dream”.

The second, courtesy of Project Gutenberg EBook, is the Robert Dallington translation, London 1592, shown in the 1969 Da Capo Press reprint:

Poliphili hypnerotomachia,

Wherein he sheweth, that all humaine and

worldlie things are but a dreame, and but as vanitie it

selfe. In the setting foorth whereof many things

are figured worthie of remembrance.

One problem a translator of the second triangle immediately has to face is how to translate the abbreviation it contains: “ill. s. v.”  My conclusion, based on research into Latin abbreviations, is that it stands for “illis sub verbo,” the sense of which is “by their own authority.” For the whole triangle I take the meaning to be:

It is said that no one in the dominion by their own authority may print this book with impunity.

William S. Niederkorn has written on Shakespeare topics for The New York Times and The Brooklyn Rail.