eawley

Updated: May 15, 2025

Eawley to cast in his symbol, which was 'so considerable an appendage. For though the very smallest circle sometimes represents it, it was none other than the symbol that gave name to the theatre in which the illustrated works of this school were first exhibited; the theatre which hung out for its sign on the outer wall, 'Hercules and his load too. At a time when 'conceits' and 'devices in letters, when anagrams and monograms, and charades, and all kinds of 'racking of orthography' were so much in use, not as curiosities merely, but to avoid another kind of 'racking, a cipher referred to in this philosophy as the 'wheel cipher, which required the letters of the alphabet to be written in a circle to serve as a key to the reading, supplies a clue to some of these symbols.

Delia Bacon - The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded