AA Headpiece

The ‘AA’ headpiece to Hugh Holland’s dedicatory poem ‘Upon the Lines and Life of the Famous Scenicke Poet, Master William Shakespeare’ prefacing the Shakespeare 1st Folio (1623). This particular version of the ‘AA’ headpiece is also used in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1609) and in Daemonology (1603).

Many of the finest examples of English literature in the 16th-17th century Elizabethan-Jacobean period carried the ‘AA’ device in one form or another, the authors or pseudonymous authors of which included Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sydney, Thomas Lodge, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon, amongst others. Altogether there were at least six basic designs for the ‘AA’ headpiece, with several significant variations of these basic designs.

Information concerning this key emblem of the Mystery schools can be read in the book Arcadia by Peter Dawkins, published by the FBRT (see Publications).

FBRT members receive regular essays and discussion papers on these and other subjects.