A FLAWED ATTEMPT AT EXPLAINING HENRY PEACHAM'S CHRONOGRAM?
Current interest in the chronogram on the Peacham Document, and its potential for resolving the question of Shakespeare's authorship in favour of Edward de Vere, has brought to the forefront a previous but different attempt at dating this document. In the Shakespeare Bulletin of spring 1999, Professor Herbert Berry claimed to have arrived at a date for the Peacham Document using a method hitherto unknown to any previous civilization. In plain English, Berry claimed that Peacham's chronogram should be read as moqoqqto and that this represented 1594, thus coinciding with the date that Titus Andronicus was first published. The fact that the Peacham Document illustrates a scene from the play that does not appear in the published version, and that the dialogue attendant to the characters illustrated in the drawing differs from what was printed, were both carefully avoided by the professor.
Had Berry been a mathematician, and therefore better informed upon the history of numbers, he would have realized that no society on earth has ever added a combination of tens and units to another combination of tens and units to arrive at a partial date in tens and units. Professor Berry cannot therefore have learned his system of dating from an earlier society, because no previous civilization ever practised that system. He must therefore either have invented it himself, to dispose of the awkward problem connected with dating the Peacham Document, or he misunderstood the Roman system of numbering. 1594 in Roman Numerals would have originally been written as: MDLXXXXIIII. It was medieval scholars who shortened this by subtractions, so as to read: MDXCIV. If Professor Berry's misunderstanding was accidental, it may be because he mistakenly believed that 90 = XC = 100 – 10 was sufficient justification for writing moqoqqto = 1000 + 500 + 50 + 44 = 1594. In Roman Numerals this appears as MDLXLIV and is quite obviously ambiguous, since it can also be interpreted as 1000 + 500 + 60 + 54 = 1614.
Incidentally, 1614 is also a date favoured by Professor Jonathan Bate. However he arrived at his conclusion by reading the Peacham Document as moqogqto which he then claimed to be representative of 1000 + 500 + 100 + 14 = 1614 (millesimo quingentesimo centesimo decimo quarto). Like Professor Berry, he too had been forced to amalgamate two adjacent columns to give a single number, although this time it involved the hundreds. But it did enable him to arrive at a preconceived result, even though no precedent for this method of dating by amalgamation exists within any known civilization. Jonathan Bate also took it upon himself to translate g as co.
In his article, Professor Berry gives the Latin equivalent for his preference of 1594 as "Anno millesimo quingentesimo quinquaginta quadragintaquarto". To understand the error contained in this phrase, one must understand that numbers may be cardinal or ordinal. The Latin language has separate words for both sets of numbers. For example - Unus, Duo Tres, and Primus, Secundus, Tertius are One, Two, Three in cardinals and ordinals respectively. What Berry has done in order to achieve a date of 1594 is to mix together both cardinal and ordinal numbers; that is, quite apart from amalgamating tens and units with tens and units to arrive at his desired result in tens and units. A literal translation of this hotchpotch reads as follows: In the year one thousand five-hundred 50 40-in the fourth.
Although Professor Berry admits to uncertainty that the writer of the chronogram, Henricus Peacham, was male - presumably the fault lay in his failure to recognize that Henricus is in the masculine declension - he did recognize an urgent need to account for the admixture of cardinal and ordinal numbers. Fortunately, one cannot libel the dead, so Henry Peacham was given the blame for having performed the absurdity of mixing these two types of number. It should, however, be remembered that Henry Peacham junior associated with the leading mathematicians of his day, and was "ever naturally addicted to … proportion and number". Had he been the Peacham who copied the Document, then, as a Cambridge graduate, a classicist and an amateur mathematician, he would never have committed the blunders that Professor Berry requires from him in order to justify his own preferred date of 1594.
It is perhaps needless to bury the professor even deeper in a grave of his own digging, but it may yet be instructive to examine, in detail, the basis upon which Berry's system for dating Peacham's chronogram has been constructed. To begin with, he has identified a need to distinguish between quartus and quintus. This happens to be his first error. For he had already correctly stated that Latin dates were given in the ablative case. The need is therefore to distinguish between quarto and quinto. Professor Eugene Waith, following consultations with Professor Clarence Miller, had already settled this problem: quarto = qrto, quinto = qto. But Berry has his own agenda to follow. He asserts that the tail of the letter q is shorthand for 'n' or 'm'. He therefore proposes that qo = qno = q[ui]n[gentesim]o = 500. But this suggestion is pure nonsense, since by using the same 'logic' qno could just as easily equal q[ui]n[t]o = 5.It is also useless for Berry to appeal to the letter's placing in the 'hundreds' column because his method is supposedly independent of dating. And in any case, he has destroyed that argument by incorporating tens in the 'units' column (i.e. qto = 44).
Ignorant of this ambiguity in his system of dating, Berry
proceeds to the next q whose tail, but no superscript, evinces from him the
conclusion that q = q[ui]n[quaginta] = 50. Again, why not q = q[ui]n[que] = 5;
or perhaps
q = q[ui]n[decim] = 15? Berry's shorthand explanation leaves him
without an answer. The professor's final attempt at explaining qto
is not without humour. The manner in which the tail of the q has been written
allows him to see this as yet another piece of medieval shorthand for 'ra'. He
then asserts that the final superscript, to, actually means
rto. From this he produces, and I quote:
q[uad]ra[gintaqua]rto = 44. Alas, Professor Berry's knowledge of
Latin does not seem to extend to an awareness that quadraginta is the
cardinal number for 40, where as quarto is the ordinal number for 4 in
the ablative case. By combining these two disparate types of number into a
single unit, he has finally descended to the level of farce. 44 should be
written as either quadragesimo quarto in ordinal form or quadraginta
quattuor in cardinal form.
In his Introduction to Titus Andronicus, Professor Waith wrote, concerning the chronogram, " … 'q' (as it has sometimes been read) makes no sense." It is to be hoped that all persons of a discerning intelligence would now agree with that statement.