Shakespeare's Weak Signature in Sonnet 76

A half-effaced authorial signature may have been placed within Shakespeare's Sonnet 76. The ‘code’ is steganographic: a hiding in plain sight.

This occurs in line 8, just after a poet-speaker claims in line 7 that in his poetry ‘euery word doth almost fel my name’.¹ A typographical error in the 1609 edition of the Sonnets is always emended to make ‘fel’ read ‘tell’ (or ‘tel’). Then, arguably, two words in the next line do ‘almost tell’ Shakespeare's name, if we see that the beginnings of the first and last words of 76.8 begin respectively with ‘Sh’ and ‘pr’, letter pairs that make up together ‘Sh … pr’.

...

And in fact line 8 of Sonnet 76, ‘Shewing their birth, and where they did proceed?’, does allude to naming, in that its metaphors are...