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I am a retired federal employee who occasionally self-publishes books about hidden messages in Shakespeare.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Clue From The Argument of the Frontispiece of The Anatomy of Melancholy

Awhile ago, I posted a series of overlay solutions to the puzzle of the frontispiece of The Anatomy of Melancholy showing how to find the name Bacon (i.e., Francis Bacon) as the hidden "author" of the book.

At the time I posted the solution, I had not examined The Argument of the Frontispiece that appears in the book.  I posted it a little later, but I did not examine it.  I wrote at that time that I thought there are clues to my solution in The Argument of the Frontispiece.  I believe I have found a clue in the poem, so I am reposting the images with the poem.


Here is an explanation of the images.

The first image is The Argument of the Frontispiece as it appears in the book, before I try any overlays.

The next three images show and overlay of the page on top of itself that shows a clue to the overlay of the frontispiece I found previously.  The clue is based on an overlay of two set of lines. The first lines are are in the first verses about old Democritus:

"Old Democritus under a tree...
Over his head appears the skye, 
And Saturne Lord of melancholy."

The second set of lines are at the bottom of the left-hand column:

"This Saturn's aspects signifye,
You see them portraid in the skye."

The clue is to put the word Saturn above the lines at the top of the page, so that the word Saturn appears above "the head" of old Democritus (or the words old Democritus).

The result is:

"Saturn's aspects signifye.
Are joyn'd in one by Cutters art."

The result is an instruction to overlay of the symbols for the planet Saturn in the images on the frontispiece of old Democritus and the hypochondriac, which is exactly what I did in my previous posts.

The last set of images is the overlays leading to the Bacon as the hidden author that I posted before.