Shakespeare's Verbal Art is a profoundly important study examining the newly re-discovered anagrams that lie hidden below the surface of all Shakespearean texts, and explains the essential role played by these concealed figures in Classical and Renaissance poetry. It approaches this subject through the close analysis of a wide range of examples, demonstrating the revelatory function of anagram, and exploring Shakespeare's use of the device to clarify meaning and intention. The focus is first on Shakespeare's Sonnets of 1609, and secondly on Othello, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night, all of which are found to be composed around the concealed anagrams that render these works self-interpreting. As such, a new kind of language use is revealed, in which pre-Enlightenment text is envisaged as existing in two distinct dimensions--the overt and the covert--both of which must be read if any particular poem or play is to be fully understood. In effect, a wholly new set of Shakespearean texts is made available to the reader, who will find Shakespeare's Verbal Art an essential guide to the new discoveries. The book will also be indispensable in the fields of linguistics, poetics, rhetoric, literary history, Classical Latin and Renaissance literature, and in relation to pre-Enlightenment text in general, and will interest any language-lover.