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Shakespeare & Beyond

"An elegant collection of enigmas"

“You have not the Book of Riddles about you, have you?” So Slender asks Simple in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Riddles have been around since ancient times, and are present in many cultures: from Babylonian and Sanksrit texts, to Norse and Anglo-Saxon kennings, to Yoruba and Bantu oral traditions. As early as the sixteenth century, riddles were included in published anthologies, and they appeared in print steadily. During the nineteenth century, an “extraordinary explosion”1 of books devoted to riddles and puzzles were published. The book shown below is The New ‘Sphinx’: an elegant collection of enigmas puzzles charades transpositions rebusses anagrams logogriphs conundrums &c. &c.

It’s a collection of riddles, logographs (picture puzzles), and word puzzles such as rebuses (where the reader must combine syllables from a set of words to produce an entirely new word) and charades (where the reader must guess a historical or literary figure from a clue or verse). The title refers to the mythological creature who questioned travelers entering the ancient Greek city of Thebes with a seemingly unsolvable riddle.

  1. Hecimovich, Gregg A. Puzzling the Reader: Riddles in Nineteenth-century British Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 7.