would not even have “survived as puzzles”. Thus far does a study of the typography of Shakespeare take one. The lesson of this for modernist poetry is an appreciation of the difficulties of a poet with a large audience to whom his meanings are mysteries and for the most part must remain mysteries. The modernist poet handles the problem by trying to get the most out of his audience; Shakespeare by trying to get the most out of his poem. Logically, the modernist poet should have more readers than Shakespeare with an elementary understanding of his poems, and Shakespeare only a few readers, but these with an enlarged understanding of his poems. The reverse, however, is true because the reading public has been so undertrained on a simplified Shakespeare and on anthology verse generally, that modernist poetry seems as difficult as Shakespeare really ought to seem. Typography, we see, then, is really the subject of the fate of poetry with its audience. Since it is, even at its worst, the least disturbing method of communication, both for the ideas communicated and for the audience, it is still the surest guide to the understanding of a poem that we have--even when the typography of a poem has been through a whole history of misunderstanding. Only a few points in sonnet 129 have been left uncovered in our typographical survey of the poem, and these occur principally in the first few lines; for these suffer less from emendations than the rest of the poem. The very delicate interrelation of the words of the first two lines should not be overlooked: the strong parallelism between _expense_ and _waste_ and _Spirit_ and _shame_ expressing in the very first line the terrible quick-change from lust as lust-enjoyed to lust as lust-despised; the double meaning of _waste_ as ‘expense’ and as ‘wilderness’, the _waste_ place in which the Spirit is _wasted_; the double meaning of _expense_ as ‘pouring out’ and as the ‘price paid’; the double meaning of _of shame_ as ‘shameful’, _i.e._ ‘deplorable’ and as _ashamed_, _i.e._ ‘self-deploring’; the double meaning of _shame_ itself as ‘modesty’ and ‘disgrace’; again the double meaning of _lust in action_ as ‘lust’ unsuspected by man ‘in his actions’ because disguised as ‘shame’ (in either sense of the word) and condemned by him because he does not recognize it in himself, and as ‘lust in progress’ as opposed to ‘lust contemplated’. All these alternate meanings acting on each other, and even other possible interpretations of words and phrases, make as it were a furiously dynamic cross-word puzzle which can be read in many directions at once, none of the senses being incompatible with any others. This intensified inbreeding of words continues through the rest of the poem. _Periurd_ is another obvious example, meaning both ‘falsely spoken of’ and ‘false’. Again, _heaven_ and _hell_ have the ordinary prose meaning of ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’, but also the particular meanings they had in Shakespeare’s poetic vocabulary.