The Shakespeare Code

An Extract from ‘The Book that Never Was….’

Titian, in 1554, had painted a version of the myth which shows Venus, sitting naked and vulnerable with her back to us, throwing her arms round a hesitating Adonis as the sun comes up. 

Shakespeare’s poem opens with this scene:

‘Even as the sun with purple-coloured face

Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn,

Rose-cheek’d Adonis hied him to the chase;

Hunting he lov’d, but love he laughed to scorn.

          Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,

          And like a bold-fac’d suitor gins to woo him’.

In both the poem and the painting, events are seen through Venus’s eyes.

In 1590, when Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis, Titian’s painting was in Philip II’s collection in Madrid….

……but it had originally been painted to celebrate Philip’s marriage to Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary Tudor.

It had been sent to England in September 1554.

In a letter written on 6^th December, 1554, Philip complains to Titian that the painting had been damaged in transit. English painters would have repaired the canvas and English painters would have copied it. Prints of the painting existed, but Shakespeare’s description of colours – purples, reds and whites – suggests he was evoking the painting itself.

Shakespeare also drops hints at what he is doing by having Venus compare the passionless Adonis to a ‘lifeless picture’ and ‘painted grapes’. Shakespeare also writes:

‘Look when a painter would surpass the life

In limning out a well-proportioned steed,

His art with nature’s workmanship at strife,

As if the dead the living should exceed.’

Philip II had created Lord Montague, Harry’s fiercely Catholic maternal grandfather, Master of Horse and Ambassador to Rome in 1554. 

We know that in 1777 copies of paintings by Giulio Romano, an artist lauded in The Winter’s Tale, were catalogued at Cowdray, Lord Montague’s home near Titchfield. A copy of Titian’s painting probably hung there as well. The poem could be another coded reference to Mary Southampton’s family.

It is certainly a coded reference to Queen Elizabeth.

The death of Leicester had created a power vacuum at the Court.

Raleigh…….

…….and Cecil…….

…….fought hard to fill it, but Elizabeth already had someone in place, the highly-strung, depressive, patrician but utterly charming, brave and charismatic Robert Devereux, 2^nd Earl of Essex, officially Leicester’s step-son but in reality his blood-son.

A dreamy, country boy brought up in Wales, Essex had not wanted to go to court; but mother Lettice had other plans. Her son was completely broke. At Leicester’s death Elizabeth had called in all of her favourite’s debts. Essex had to win a highly paid court position or disgrace his title. Elizabeth made him Master of Horse.

Though hitting a hollow-cheeked sixty, Elizabeth’s infatuation with Essex, thirty-three years her junior, was more like a teenager’s.

She would play at cards (or ‘one game or another’) with Essex all night and wanted him constantly by her side – even when he was trying to lead military campaigns in Europe. She would send courtiers chasing after him when he tried to sneak away to his friends in Hampshire.

Venus, in the poem, is doing to Adonis what Elizabeth was doing to Essex: but, as we know from his later Sonnet confessions, it was what Shakespeare would have liked to be doing to Southampton.

Shakespeare’s own ambivalent sexuality has been aroused by Titian’s erotic genius and Queen Elizabeth’s extraordinary behaviour. In many of his plays women would come to symbolise, and celebrate, the feminine side of his own nature as well as the Queen’s.

●

The 17 Sonnets and Venus and Adonis circulated in manuscript and, in aristocratic circles, made Shakespeare’s name. It caused Edmund Spenser, who visited Hampshire in 1590, to write in praise of ‘pleasant Willy’ from whose pen ‘large streams of nectar and sweet honey flow’.

They provoked a very different response, however, from Shakespeare’s handsome young Jesuit ‘cousin’ Robert Southwell (codename ‘Cotton’) hiding, and secretly ‘massing’, at nearby Arundel Castle.

He thought Shakespeare, by ‘stilling Venus’ rose’, was producing ‘paynim toys’ which were the work of the Devil. Southwell sent Shakespeare his own religious poems in the hope they would inspire his cousin to do better.

Shakespeare, ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’, ‘borrowed’ Southwell’s ‘burning babe’ image for MacBeth. Southwell’s priggish observation that ‘a poet, a lover, and a liar, are by many reckoned but three words of one signification’ gets re-cycled into the magnificent ‘The lunatic, the lover and the poet/Are of imagination all compact’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Shakespeare’s immediate response to these dangerous accusations of Paganism was to remove himself from what Spenser called his ‘idle cell’ and return to playwriting. The Southampton family had a long tradition of play-acting at Titchfield and for them he wrote a new, pro-Catholic version of The Troublesome Reign of King John, the anti-Catholic, pre-Armada piece Kyd and he had shamelessly knocked up for the Queen’s Men. The play, like many he was to write for initial private performance, was afterwards recycled for professional performance.

Following a Jesuit interpretation of history, Shakespeare makes King John, vacillating about the death of Prince Arthur, a symbol of Elizabeth, vacillating about the death of Mary Queen of Scots:

‘The colour of the king doth come and go

  Between his purpose and his conscience,

  Like heralds twixt two dreadful battles set:

His passsion is so ripe it needs must break’

Like Elizabeth, King John (who has appointed himself Head of the Church) tries to blame the murder on someone else.

The Catholic envoy Pandulph in King John is no longer a villain: he is presented as peace-maker who gives Englishmen a handy rationale for breaking vows of allegiance to the King. If the vow was mistaken, it no longer applies.

Shakespeare, though, was incapable of writing propaganda. The King John play, like all of Shakespeare’s works, asks more questions than it answers. Should you remain loyal to a king who is weak and tyrannous, or should you oppose him? If you do oppose him, can you ever benefit from your actions?

Even ‘Bad’ King John, when the chips are down, talks like an angel: ‘Aye, marry, now my soul hath elbow room….Comfort me with cold….’

Shakespeare writes a marvellous part to promote himself again, the Bastard, a ‘good blunt fellow’ from the country who is advanced by the aristocrats – in the same way Shakespeare had been advanced at Titchfield. Good-hearted and loyal, despising abuse of language and abuse of trust, the Bastard knows all morality is relative. When he is poor he will rail against riches and when he is rich he will rail against beggary. ‘Bell book and candle shall not drive me back’ he asserts, ‘When gold and silver becks me to come on.’

This opportunism is mirrored in the very ending of the play itself. Both The Troublesome Reign and King John conclude with the Bastard’s exhortation that England be true to itself. For the London audience of the first play, this would mean ‘Be Protestant’. For the Hampshire audience of the second, ‘Stay Catholic’.

Even cheekier is Shakespeare’s coded attack in the play on John Florio. Florio, Harry’s Italian tutor, had been placed by Burghley as a spy in the Titchfield household.

Shakespeare sends Florio up in the character of the boastful, sycophantic ‘traveller’ who talks of ‘the Alps and Appenines,/The Pyrnean and the river Po’ – the Grison cantons of Switzerland where Florio had spent his youth.

●

The Countess of Pembroke was also busy re-writing plays across the way in Wiltshire.

Banned, like all beautiful and intelligent women, from Elizabeth’s court, the Countess had set up her own rival version. With musicians, poets and actors on the payroll, she staged tournaments and entertainments to honour the memory of her brother, Sir Philip……..

And to annoy the Queen.

Elizabeth had utterly opposed Sidney’s imperialistic, expansionist foreign policy and despised his cult of the soldier. She had kept Sidney under virtual house arrest at Wilton where he ‘followed the arts’ because he had nothing else to do.

The Countess of Pembroke had challenged Elizabeth by emerging from mourning at the Armada celebrations with a power parade of forty gentlemen on horseback, two coaches full of women, a litter for her children, four ladies on horseback and a retinue of fifty liveried servants.

A couple of years later the Countess, who numbered ‘The Ape’ and ‘The Fox’ and even, according to Aubrey, her brother amongst her lovers, went into full, hypocritical attack. She translated Garnier’s play Antonius which showed how Cleopatra’s ‘irregular passions in forsaking Empire to follow sensuality’ had brought ruin and civil war to the State.

This was rich coming from a woman who, again according to Aubrey, secretly watched, through a ‘vidette’ in the wall of her house, stallions mounting mares in the mating season. The episode in Venus and Adonis when a ‘breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud’ is mounted by Adonis’s steed with his ‘melting buttock’ was written to catch the eye of the Countess.

She commissioned Fulke Greville, her brother’s old friend and lover, to follow up her attack on Elizabeth with an Antony and Cleopatra.

Greville tore up his manuscript, terrified it would be ‘construed or strained to a personating of vices in the present governors and government.’ 

When Elizabeth withdrew Holinshed, the Countess commissioned Samuel Daniel to write a verse version…….

…..and her neighbour, ‘the man Shakespeare’, a play version, of ‘The Civil Wars’ – what we now call ‘The Wars of the Roses’. Wanting to warn people of the chaos that would ensue if Elizabeth did not name a successor, the Countess formed a company of actors to disseminate these ideas, employing her estranged husband’s name and money.

This was a huge undertaking. Grammar-schoolboy Shakespeare needed help. He paid Greene and Nashe, both desperate for the cash, to come down to Titchfield to help him. They were to lodge with the mysterious Mr. Apis Lapis….

●

Trixie the Cat says….

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code….

First, thank you for all your clicks and ‘likes’! Please keep them rolling in!

Just to say that Stewart went on to develop the idea that Shakespeare saw Venus and Asonis and The Rape of Lucrece when he viisited Madrid with the Earl of Southampton in 1593……

See: https://theshakespearecode.blog/2011/03/14/shakespeare-in-italy-and-spain-the-titian-connection/

And also: https://theshakespearecode.blog/2018/07/21/shakespeares-sonnets-re-ordered-by-trixie-the-cat-part-22/

All of this information about Shakespeare is catalogued in Stewart’s beautiful new Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded, at £12.95 from Magic Flute Publishing….

Click below the cover for more information….

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded – Magic Flute Publishing

God willing, we shall move on to our Next Post – The Strange Case of Mr Apis Lapis – next Monday evening – 24th August….

So see you all then!

‘Bye, now!

An Extract from ‘The Book that Never Was…’

         William Beeston, the son of Christopher Beeston who had acted with Shakespeare in Every Man in his Humour, told John Aubrey that Shakespeare in his ‘younger years’ had been ‘a schoolmaster in the country’.

          ‘The country’ was Titchfield in Hampshire which stands on the River Meon near the Solent. For three hundred years the Premonstratensian Abbey had organised the sea-passage for travellers to Europe. Henry V had meditated there before the Agincourt invasion……

…..and Henry VI had married Margaret of Anjou in the Chapel.

Thomas Wriothesley, the first Earl of Southampton…….

…to whom Henry VIII had presented the Abbey in 1537, had also been Bailiff of Snitterfield, where Shakespeare’s father had been born.

His daughter in law, the beautiful, wilful widowed Mary Browne, 2^nd Countess of Southampton…..

……was distantly related to Shakespeare’s mother. The Countess, a recusant Catholic, was in need of a replacement schoolmaster for her estate.

She was also in need of a tutor for her homosexual, wayward son, Harry.

As a teenager Shakespeare had worked as a servant, musician and entertainer for the Roman Catholic Hesketh family at Hoghton Hall in Lancashire. 

The Heskeths were friendly with the Catholic Percys and the Percys were friendly with the Catholic Southamptons. They had all plotted together to replace Queen Elizabeth with Mary Queen of Scots in 1569. The plan to marry Mary to the Duke of Norfolk had been hatched at the Southampton’s ‘right stately home’, The Place.

The ‘handsome, well-shaped’ Shakespeare who was also, according to Aubrey, ‘very good company and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit’, landed the schoolmaster job. He became house-poet, entertainer, ‘johannes fac totum’ and, according to a later scandalous attack by Nashe, Mary Southampton’s secret lover.

Mother and son Harry had never got on. Mary’s husband, the suicidally Catholic 2^nd Earl of Southampton…..

……..believing his wife had fallen in love with ‘a common person’, had thrown her out of the house.  Converting his manservant into ‘his wife’, he surrounded son Harry, aged 6, with an all-male entourage of a hundred ‘tall goodly fellows who kept a constant pace.’

 After the 2^nd Earl’s early death, brought on by imprisonment in the Tower and state ‘examination’, his son had become ward to Lord Burghley, the Lord Chancellor…

.

Now turning seventeen, Harry was allowed back home to Titchfield.

Burghley had ordered Harry, stubbornly Roman Catholic like his father, to marry his Protestant grand-daughter or pay an enormous £5,000 (£2½ million) fine. Harry, who had become intimate friends with the Earl of Essex, another Burghley ward….

…. was having none of it.

Mary’s first commission for adopted ‘cousin Will’ was seventeen sonnets for Harry’s seventeenth birthday, celebrating the joys of heterosexual love, marriage and parenthood…

Sonnet sequences were all the rage in the southern Shires. The Countess of Pembroke……

……..a day’s horse-ride away at Wilton in Wiltshire, had set Samuel Daniel ‘to school’ to write his Delia sequence in praise of her own ‘unattainable beauty’. Her brother, Sir Philip Sidney, before his recklessly chivalric death at Zutphen, had also written his Astrophil and Stella sequence at Wilton, in praise of ‘Stella’s’ ‘unattainable beauty’.

Harry’s beauty, on the other hand, was very attainable…..

Shakespeare later admitted that he was attracted to him the moment he first ‘eyed’ his ‘eye’ (code word): but enjoying money, fine clothes and security, he did not want to upset the Countess. His ‘sugared’ sonnet sequence, profoundly influenced by Daniel whose manuscript he saw, contains a beautiful compliment to her:

‘Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime.’

Shakespeare is harder on Harry. He acknowledges the young man, looking almost like a girl with his shoulder-length hair, possesses great beauty: but he admonishes him in code for his habit of masturbation:

‘Unthrifty loveliness why dost thou spend

Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy’.

He warns him not to end up like Queen Elizabeth, old, ugly, unwed, childless and abandoned. If everyone were to behave like her, he argues, then ‘threescore year would make the world away.’

Shakespeare was always too self-willed to stay strictly within the terms of his commissions. Towards the end of the sequence he makes the outrageous suggestion that Harry does not need to have a son.  He has achieved immortality already. 

Shakespeare has written about him.

●

In the companion piece to the Sonnets, the narrative poem Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare makes a true break-through.

In the poem Venus wants to make love to the handsome, young Adonis, who, like Harry, had a ‘tender spring’ upon his ‘tempting lip’ and who, also like Harry, would prefer to be off hunting with his young male friends. Following the thought of the sonnets, Venus argues that it is Adonis’s duty to have children and refers again to Mary Southampton:

‘O had thy mother borne so hard a mind

She had not brought forth thee, but died unkind’.

Wishing she were ‘a man’ and Adonis ‘wert as I am’, Venus rugby-tackles a reluctant Adonis to the ground to make love to him. Adonis ‘dies’ after a wild boar gores him in the groin and makes a ‘wide wound’ in ‘his soft flank’. Adonis’s blood covers ‘every grass, herb, leaf or weed’ – all code for ecstatic, homosexual orgasm.

Venus is a complex, tragi-comic figure whose hypocrisy Adonis exposes. She does not want to people the world; she wants to satisfy her own lust. But she is tender hearted: when she suggests that Adonis hunt the hare rather than the boar, she starts to empathise with the hare’s panic. On discovering the corpse of Adonis, the shock to her senses is compared to a snail whose ‘tender horns’ have been ‘hit’. Shakespeare achieves true sublimity with her final departure:

‘Thus weary of the world, away she hies,

And yokes her silver doves, by whose swift aid

Their mistress mounted through the empty skies,

In her light chariot quickly is convey’d,

          Holding their course to Paphos, where their queen

          Means to immure herself and not be seen.’

Shakespeare, in his dedication of the poem to Southampton, describes Venus and Adonis as the ‘the first heir of my invention’. This new, rich, ambiguous, shifting work has no literary antecedent. In Ovid Venus does not even appear to Adonis.

          It does, however, have a pictorial one……

●

[Note: The Southampton Family Tomb photographs were taken by Ross Underwood.]

An Important Statement from Trixie the Cat!

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code,

As you will know, the above Post was part of a Book Proposal our Chief Agent, Stewart Trotter, was asked to submit by a famous editor of a famous publishing house in 2007.

It was rejected – but many of its ideas are now accepted – especially with the use of Artificial Intelligence.

For example: Stewart has always maintained that it was Thomas Nashe who wrote the ‘Upstart Crow’ attack on Shakespeare…..

– and not Robert Greene.

This idea was validated last year by a team of scholars working at Universities of Leeds, Sussex and Durham – using AI!

Stewart also believes that Aemilia Bassano/Lanyer – as well as being the Dark Lady of the Sonnets – an idea first proposed by A.L. Rowse…..

…….was also the secret author of the satire against (among others) Shakespeare and the Third Earl of Southampton – Willobie his Avisa.

This idea will be validated soon, Your Cat believes, by AI – comparing the writing styles of Aemilia Lanyer’s book of poems Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum with Willobie.

See: https://theshakespearecode.blog/willobie-his-avisa-decoded/

(Although Stewart is far too modest to say so – his ideas were light years ahead of their time – including the realisation that Shakespeare was bisexual – a claim he made in his Finals Essay at Cambridge in 1971!)

In 2007, when Stewart was asked to submit his book outline, Your Cat hadn’t joined The Code – indeed The Code had not yet been formed. It came into being in 2012 when Stewart started his blog – which so far has received a staggering 413,910 Views.

Your Cat then joined The Code as part of her Rehabilitation Programme..

So she was unaware of the existence of Shakespeare Decoded. She came upon it quite by chance when she was scouring the office for a lost, old password.

She read it and shrieked – in the way only Your Cat can do – and rushed into Stewart’s office.

‘We MUST publish this!’ she cried – and handed it to our Chief Agent…..

Brothers and Sisters, you’re not going to believe the next bit:

Stewart had entirely forgotten he had written the book proposal!

Not only that, he had forgotten many of the brteak-through ideas he had proposed in the book.

He glanced through it and said: ‘Trixie, burn it!’

A veil will be drawn over what happened next. Suffice it to say that Your Cat still has a life or two left in her.

We will post the book proposal exactly as it was written nineteen years ago.

At the end, Your Cat has agreed to Stewart will reviewing his old ideas – commenting on them if he needs to.

There are a dozen more chapters – and, God Willing – we shall publish them once a week on Monday Evenings.

The next Post will be……

The Titian Connection

If you enjoy The Shakespeare Code why not read Stewart’s new book……

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded

….. a beautiful volume published by the Magic Flute company at only £12.95

Click the link below for details:

 Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded – Magic Flute Publishing

So Brothers and Sisters, look forward to seeing you all in the evening of next Monday 17th August at 7 p.m. – BST!

‘Bye, now!

An Extract from ‘The Book that Never Was….’

After recklessly libelling Sir Thomas Lucy, as well as poaching his deer, Shakespeare had to flee from Stratford-upon-Avon, leaving behind his older wife, Anne, and his three young children.An E

In London, as we learn from the pamphlets of Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe,  Shakespeare sought the protection of the only man who could help him, the eccentric Vicar of St. Giles, Cripplegate, Robert Crowley ‘the vicar of St. Fools’ who numbered Lucy amongst his parishioners and whose friend and fellow-preacher at the church, John Foxe the martyrologist, had been Lucy’s tutor.

          Crowley, an ardent Protestant who had refused to wear a surplice when he celebrated communion, wrote and printed religious ballads which profoundly influenced Shakespeare. They advocated plain-speaking, the avoidance of affectation, abandonment of all adornment (including make-up for women) and the voluntary redistribution of wealth.

         The tension between this new ‘intellectual’ Protestantism and the old ‘magical’ Catholicism of Shakespeare’s youth was to underlie all of Shakespeare’s work. In Hamlet, for example, the ‘advanced’ Wittenberg students are astonished to find a Purgatorial ghost clunking round the battlements at Elsinore. They are forced to concede that folklore might be true.

Under Crowley’s guidance Shakespeare wrote homespun plays based on ballads, the Bible and mythology, lost plays with names like Delphrigus, The Prodigal Son, Dives and Lazarus and The King of the Fairies which allowed Shakespeare to ‘thunder terribly’ upon the stage.

Shakespeare, though, had another, very different mentor, the playwright Thomas Kyd.

‘Famous’ Kyd  wrote sensational, wildly popular ‘revenge’ plays, like The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda, where ghosts regularly cry out for vengeance, people go mad and suicide is presented as a triumph over fate. Kyd was also happy to write anti-Catholic pamphlets and turn his hand to patriotic rubbish for the Queen’s Men.

‘Sporting’ Kyd and Shakespeare could well have met at a race-meeting along the shore of the Thames. We know from a later attack by Nashe that, in addition to writing ballads and legal-clerking, the young Shakespeare would run ‘headlong in the horse-race’. Kyd, like Shakespeare, was a grammar school boy, and a noverint. The two naturally bonded, theatrically starched their beards and lodged together in promiscuous chaos.

The University Wits fresh from Oxford and Cambridge, like Greene, with his ‘ruffianly hair’,…..

‘gag-toothed’ Nashe…….

and the ‘lecherous animal’ Peele, all trying to earn a crust in London, despised these ungowned rivals. The Wits thought culture was at risk from men who knew the classics only in translation and who, if catapulted from their class, would prove ruthlessly vindictive.

●

In 1586 a group of actors, including Will Kemp, returned from playing at Elsinore, bearing news about Danish drinking customs, the topography of its castle and stories of its ghost. Kyd, with Shakespeare as junior collaborator, set about writing the first version of Hamlet with its personified ‘Fates’, slapstick humour, jokes about false teeth and an Ophelia who, having fallen in love with a courtier called Phantasmo, chases him round the stage. Hamlet himself escapes death at the hands of the pirates by ducking: his captors shoot each other instead.

Queen Elizabeth, at this time, was at the height of her indecision about her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary had been plotting against her, but did this give Elizabeth the right to execute her? Should she kill a blood relative?

William Camden, a contemporary historian, describes how ‘in the midst of these doubtful and perplexed thoughts, which so troubled and staggered the Queen’s mind, she gave herself over wholly to solitariness, sat many times melancholic and mute and, frequently sighing, muttered to herself, ‘Aut fer aut feri: either bear with her or smite her. And ne feriare, feri – Strike lest thou be stricken…’’

This is the questioning, arguing voice of Prince Hamlet. Elizabeth even took to wearing black after Mary’s execution.

Less satisfying for Shakespeare was the work with Kyd for the Queen’s Men. In their version of King Leir Goneril quotes the parliamentary speeches of Queen Elizabeth, the wicked sisters are Roman Catholics and Leir himself, divinely protected from all harm, represents old England happily restored to Protestantism.

Shakespeare, with a life-long inability to compromise, had to get out of London. He gathered a company of four or five actors, ex-tradesmen like the players in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and toured the provinces.  With his rehearsals plagued by well-off ‘ingles’ (homosexuals), the penurious, balding, exhausted, foot-slogging, fardel-bearing Shakespeare was more like a pub-entertainer, singing his ballads and drunkenly improvising bits of doggerel verse. His company, often forced to sleep under canvas in their props and costumes cart, would even perform in your bed-chamber if you could pay.

Shakespeare had wanted to call his men ‘The Politician Players’ but by law he had to have a patron. ‘Sir Oliver Owlet’ (code for Lord Strange, later Earl of Derby)…..

…allowed Shakespeare to use his name and his money. With help from Greene, who was not above collaborating with ‘the buckram gentleman’ if he could pay, Shakespeare wrote the The Fair Em, based on a ballad and set in Lancashire and Cheshire where Strange was Lord Lieutenant.

Shakespeare created a sympathetic, aristocratic lead rôle for himself – Valingford, who falls in love with the beautiful miller’s daughter, Em. She pretends to be deaf and blind to test Valingford’s integrity. When he triumphantly proves his worth, she reveals that she is secretly aristocratic as well.

With Greene, Shakespeare also gave us, in Armada year, a ‘shabby little shocker’: The Lamentable and True Tragedy of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent who was most wickedly murdered, by the means of his disloyal and wanton wife, who for the love she bare to one Mosbie, hired two desperate ruffians Blackwill and Shakebag, to kill him. Wherein is shown the great malice and dissimulation of a wicked woman, the unsatiable desire of filthy lust and the shameful end of all murderers.

‘Shakebag’ is a coded in-joke: the real life villain was called Loosebag. The other ‘baddie’ in the play is called ‘Greene’. Even in this questionable piece there are ideas that Shakespeare was to develop in his later plays. Ales, the wicked wife, cannot wipe the blood from the floor when she kills her husband (MacBeth) and his corpse bleeds when she comes near it (Julius Caesar).

Shakebag also daringly refers to Leicester’s murder of Amy Robsart:

                    ‘But whether she would or no, I got me by

                    And as she followed me I spurned her down the stairs

                    And broke her neck’.

 Leicester, to almost everyone’s relief, had died in 1588, a few weeks after the Armada.

People said his wife, Lettice, in love with a younger man, had poisoned him.

The nationalistic fervour provoked by the fight with Spain made theatre unfashionable. Actors were viewed as parasites whose playing costumes should be torn off their backs and given to the ‘real men’, the soldiers fighting the Spanish. People were beginning to tire of Shakespeare’s naïve morality plays, written in ‘Old England’s mother words’. On top of that, Strange’s patronage had gone to Shakespeare’s head.

When Shakespeare’s company toured to Cross Keys in November 1589, the Lord Mayor forbad the actors to perform. Their repertoire consisted of plays about ‘Divinity and State’ which the mayor thought ‘unfit to be suffered’. ‘Caesar’ Shakespeare, ‘the absolute interpreter to the puppets’, ‘parted from him [the Mayor] in a very contemptuous manner’ and his men played that very afternoon. Shakespeare ended up in jail, minus a patron and with state censorship even more firmly in place.

Shakespeare and Kyd were forced into a change of career. They teamed up again and, between forays into City brothels, scraped a living translating stories and brokering shady money deals. Kyd, however, cut and ran in 1590. Strange had offered him a job as tutor to his daughters.

Shakespeare, deeply scarred by poverty and betrayal, knew that to survive he had to make an alliance with the rich….

He got back in touch with his old Catholic network……

●

If you have enjoyed this Post, why not read Stewart Trotter’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded published by Magic Flute Publishing at £12.95?

 Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded – Magic Flute Publishing

         

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code…..

What is it about men and their studies? They can be neat, efficient and tidy in the rest of their lives – but enter their studies (if you are allowed to) and the place is a bombsite – books and papers all over the place – desks, beds, floors. You half expect them on the ceiling.

Stewart Trotter – our Chief Agent – is no exception – and we have an agreement I hardly ever go into his room in Maida Vale. But yesterday I had to – none of us could find a ten year old password for something or other that was vital.

Now Your Cat is good at finding things – and I did. But I also found an outline for a book Stewart had written that he’s never mentioned – called ‘The Shakespeare Code’ no less!

Your Cat flicked through it and was hookeed.

Why had I not read it before?

Stewart told me the story. In 2008 – yes EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO! – a distinguished Editor got interested in Stewart’s ideas about William Shakespeare – and asked him to submit a book proposal to his equally distinguished publishing house. The Editor loved it – but no-one else did!

Well, it was eighteen years ago…

Stewart – instead of submitting it elesewhere just let it rest – and began to get interested in the Internet. This is where ‘The Shakespeare Code’ blog comes in – as does Your Trixie the Cat!

Stewart and I have been working on it together since 2011 – and we’ve chalked up 411, 374 Views…

I’ve persuaded Stewart to post his book – EXACTLY as he wrote it in 16 installments – with the opportunity for him to comment, if he wants to, as we go along.

So, Brothers and Sisters, Your Cat is proud to present ‘The Shakespeare Code’ –

The Book that Never Was!

(1) The Theory

William Shakespeare had to write in code.

Elizabeth I was not the liberal cinema has made her out to be.  She loathed free speech, even from her Parliament, and if you libelled her, or ‘the State’ (which could mean anyone or anything) you could be imprisoned, racked, hanged, drawn and quartered.

Elizabeth believed that God had freed her from the Tower and placed her on the throne of England for one purpose only: to turn the whole country Protestant. She had no interest in conquering other lands. She simply wanted to be shepherdess to her island flock. Fearing that diversity of belief would lead to Civil War, she wanted everyone in England to think the same way that she did.

This would be a challenge to any writer: but it was a particular challenge to Shakespeare, who had inherited from his wheeler-dealer father a mischievous, anarchic streak. From his teenage years any figure of authority had been fair game. He began with the powerful persecutor of Catholics, Sir Thomas Lucy, whose sex-life and personal hygiene he lampooned in a ballad. He ended up with Elizabeth herself.

Fascinated by politics, Shakespeare knew that to stay alive he needed to find new ways of saying the unsayable. He had to develop a series of codes which his audience would understand but which would bamboozle the authorities. If challenged, Shakespeare must be able to throw up his hands and say:

‘What on earth are you talking about? It’s all in your mind!’

One of his most powerful weapons was history. The Tudors thought the world was in irreversible decline and likely to end soon. They considered their ancestors to be every bit as clever, and wicked, as they were. The past was an inspiration to them. And a caution.

For Elizabeth it was also a threat. Obsessed with her place in history, she did not want her subjects to judge her by history. So she span it. In 1590 she recalled Holinshed’s recently published historical Chronicles on the grounds they were ‘fondly set out’. She ordered her players, the Queen’s Men, to perform Pro-Tudor historical propaganda instead.

One of the plays was a risible version of Richard III (‘A horse! A horse! A fresh horse!). It portrays the hunch-backed King, enemy of Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII, as a cannibal. At the end of the piece a messenger miraculously prophesies the glory of Elizabeth’s reign:

‘She is the lamp that keeps fair England light

And through her faith her country lives in peace

And she hath put proud Anti-Christ to flight

And been the means that civil wars did cease.

Then England kneel upon thy hairy knee, [sic]

And thank that God that still provides for thee.’

The real historical challenge to Elizabeth came from an anonymous book, published in 1584, called Leicester’s Commonwealth. Francis Bacon possessed a manuscript copy and several pages are in Shakespeare’s hand.

It is a demolition job on Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, a childhood friend of Elizabeth who had given her money, love and hope during the dark days of her sister Mary’s reign. 

When Elizabeth became Queen he became the most powerful man in England.  Two years later his teenage bride, Amy Robsart, was found with her neck broken at the bottom of a short flight of stairs.

Detested for his greed, his lust, his murders, his adultery, his lies and his hypocrisy, Leicester was given Kenilworth Castle, a dozen miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, around the time that Shakespeare was born. Claiming, preposterously, to lead the Puritan religious cause, Leicester oppressed all Warwickshire Catholics, including Shakespeare’s family.

Leicester’s Commonwealth  compares Leicester and Elizabeth with all the weak or villainous figures from the past: Richard II, Richard III, Richard of York, Henry VI, Warwick, Queen Margaret, her lover the Earl of Suffolk and even the Ancient Roman rapist, Tarquinus Superbus…..

All of them feature heavily in Shakespeare’s plays and poems.

Many of Elizabeth’s subjects thought it was perverse for a woman to rule over them. It was even more perverse for Leicester to submit to one. When Shakespeare writes about feeble kings, boy kings, tyrannical kings, over-bearing mothers and adulterous lovers from history, his audience would know he was really talking about ‘now’.

Mythical, pre-Christian settings were a way of dealing with taboo subjects like religion. Though born and brought up a Catholic, the worldly, hedonistic, malt-hoarding, tax-avoiding, litigious Shakespeare was never a fanatical follower of the Old Faith. He was a ‘political’ Catholic.

He had seen his own family members suffer for their belief and one relative had even been executed. So Shakespeare actively supported the movement for religious toleration, equating it with freedom of speech.

In 1605, as the result of a devastating emotional crisis which the book will de-code from Sonnet 126, Shakespeare lost all his faith: but he fought hard to regain it and, mixing Paganism with Christianity in his later plays, he ‘died a Papist.’

Symbols are also a vital part of the Shakespeare Code. Queen Elizabeth, for example, loved to be compared to the moon. Shakespeare has great fun sending up this idea…

It was well known that Elizabeth was violently jealous of her young Ladies-in-Waiting. She forbad them to flirt with any of her courtiers, put them in the Tower if they married without her consent and forced them to wear black and white dresses to set off the splendid colours of her own. One of these ladies was Elizabeth Vernon…….

……a cousin of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex.

She had caught the eye of Henry Wriothesley, (‘Harry Southampton’) 3rd Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, friend and lover.

Essex, the book will argue, knowing that the tentatively heterosexual Harry would need encouragement, commissioned Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet. So when Romeo says:

‘But soft! What light through yonder window breaks

It is the East and Juliet is the sun.

Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon

Who is already sick and pale with grief,

That thou her maid are far more fair than she’

– Shakespeare really was playing with fire.

Even more outrageous is the line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed when Elizabeth was in her sixties: ‘But O! methinks how slow this old moon wanes…’

          Animals could also be a code for people. Sir Robert Cecil, Burghley’s son, small and round-shouldered, became ‘The Ape’……

……..the ruthlessly crafty Sir Walter Raleigh ‘The Fox’…..

………and Leicester, who inherited the Warwick family’s heraldic device of the Bear and Ragged Staff, ‘The Bear’…..

Shakespeare’s most potent code, though, was the English language itself. When he began writing, English was despised, even by the English themselves, as barbarous; by the time of his death it was celebrated as the glory of Europe. Shakespeare and his contemporaries had so refined, developed and enriched the language that a complex ambiguity was the inevitable outcome. Ambiguity breeds code. Shakespeare needed that code to protect his life.

          Like many men in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare led what we would now call a ‘bisexual’ love-life. In 1563, the year before his birth, Elizabeth had made what she called ‘buggery’ punishable by death. Her father Henry VIII had introduced anti-homosexual laws, but her Catholic sister Mary had rescinded them when she came to the throne.  Elizabeth reintroduced them because ‘diverse evil-disposed persons have been more bold to commit the said most horrible and detested vice of buggery, to the high displeasure of almighty God.’

And, of course, the high displeasure of Elizabeth who insisted on being the heterosexual centre of everyone’s attention. She teased the homosexual men, like Francis Bacon, at her Court; but she exercised control by the existence of the law. It could be enforced at any time.

The book will show that for fifteen years, from 1590 to 1605, Harry Southampton was the overwhelming love of Shakespeare’s life.  Shakespeare wanted to express that love in words that would last for ever, but did not want to be executed. So he developed a code which Harry and his friends would understand but which other people might miss. He was so successful in this that for over three hundred years scholars did not realise that Shakespeare was bisexual. Some do not till this day.

          The code uses the imagery of wounding, hunting, death and blood to represent falling in love, love-play and orgasm. The vocabulary of the face can also represent the genitals: ‘beard’, for example, can mean pubic hair and ‘eye’ the testicle or penis. Money, in all its forms, can symbolise semen, and spending money, ejaculation. Abstract words (‘largesse’ or ‘excellence’) can also be bantering references to the genitals.    

For example, Sonnet 94 begins: .

‘They that have power to hurt, and will do none,

          That do not do the thing they most do show

          Who moving others are themselves as stone,

          Unmoved cold and to temptation slow.’

The ‘power to hurt’ has the additional Chaucerian meaning of ‘the power to arouse others sexually’. ‘The thing they most do show’ is a joking reference to a penis in an elaborate cod-piece.

So the opening lines really mean:

‘Those that have the ability to arouse love in others and refrain from doing so; who do not engage in making love, no matter how much their cod-pieces show off their manliness, who, although they excite others, remain stone-like themselves, unroused, cool and reluctant to rise to temptation…’

‘They rightly do inherit nature’s graces

And husband nature’s riches from expense

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence’

‘Nature’s riches’ is semen which chaste young men conserve through refraining from sex. ‘Faces’ means ‘genitals’ and implies that these pure men are really the ‘lords and owners’ of their bodies.  Young men who sleep around are merely the stewards, not the possessors, of ‘their excellence’.

‘The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet

Though to itself it only live and die,

But if that flower with base infection meet,

The bravest weed outbraves his dignity’.

The flower here also symbolises the penis and ‘dying’ is code for orgasm. Shakespeare is praising masturbation: it is better to satisfy yourself alone than meet with ‘base infection’, that is, consort with lower class men who will contaminate you both by their lack of breeding and their venereal disease.

‘For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’

This is a graphic description of a penis poisoned with disease and a soul poisoned by association with unworthy companions. The moral and physical collapse of an aristocrat (the lily) is more total than it is for a ‘base fellow’ (the weed) for whom there are no high expectations. ‘Base’ itself was often code for ‘homosexual’.

Shakespeare employed code to attack other people. Other people used code to attack him.

Re-naming Shakespeare ‘upstart crow’, ‘ignorant ale-knight’, ‘unlearned sot’, ‘brainless buzzard’, ‘unlearned idiot’, ‘rude rhymer’, ‘idleby’, ‘peaking pageanter’, ‘scoffing fool’, ‘artless idiot’, ‘babble book-monger’, ‘upstart antiquary’, ‘father of interludes’, ‘Posthast’, ‘Roberto’, ‘poet ape’, ‘mimic ape’, ‘base groom’, ‘ragged groom’, ‘hostler’, ‘buckram gentleman’, ‘country author’, ‘Caesar’, ‘johannes fac totum’, ‘absolute interpreter of the puppets’, ‘Old Player’, ‘broking Pander’, ‘unkind gent’,  ‘usurping Sol’, ‘saucy upstart Jack’, ‘base insinuating slave’, ‘son of parsimony and disdain’, ‘dunghill brat’, ‘trencher slave’, ‘drone’, ‘self-conceiving breast’, ‘Sir Simon two shares and a half’, ‘gloomy Juvenal’, ‘Cuthbert Coney-Catcher’, ‘petulant poet’, ‘malicious papist’, ‘Sir Adam Prickshaft’, ‘Ovidius Naso’, ‘Fungoso’ and the not very subtle ‘W.S.’, ‘Shake-bag’, ‘Shake-rag’ and ‘Shake-scene’, jealous writers lambasted Shakespeare’s class, his lechery, his drunkenness, his meanness, his ingratitude, his boastfulness, his plagiarism, his ruthlessness, his ambition and, obliquely, his brilliant, immortal talent.

A consistent picture of Shakespeare emerges from the attacks, and sometimes praise, of his contemporaries Greene, Nashe, Peele, Chettle, Marston, Jonson, Spenser, Weever, Barnfield, Meeres, Amelia Bassano/LanyerLanyer, Will Kempe and the anonymous authors of poems, the play Histrio-Mastix, The Parnassus Plays and the pamphlet Ratsei’s Ghost.

These insults give us vital information about Shakespeare’s life. By cracking all the codes we can build up a complete and detailed story.

The ‘lost years’ were never really lost at all.

End of Part 1.

Stewart says…..

‘At the time I submitted this outline, the cinema was full of praise for Queen Elizabeth – and her darker, sadistic side was hardly touched on. I had forgotten that Shakespeare sends her up so dangerously as ‘The Moon’ in his plays. It was also still a bit early for the public to accept that the Bard was bisexual – even though I’d been saying it since 1971!’

I also now think that at the beginning of his life, Shakespeare was more than a ‘political’ Roman Catholic. I think he ardently believed.

Trixie says:

‘The next installment is called ‘The Lost Years Found’ – and if you want know what Stewart thinks of the Sonnets, do try his latest book – ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded’. Click the link!

 Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded – Magic Flute Publishing

Bye, now!

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code…..

As most of you know, the Code’s Chief Agent, Stewart Trotter, has written a book, published by Magic Flute Publishing….

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded

In the book, Stewart shows how George Chapman, the poet, was a medium as well – and would hold seances with the Third Earl of Southampton in which he would summon up the spirits of Homer and Christopher Marlowe!

Let’s do the same thing with William Shakespeare! Let’s summon him up to tell the True Story of his life – in the language of today.

Is there anybody there?

Yes! There is!

‘Bye now..

To be a great writer, they say, you must be born into great misery. Well I was born into great happiness. My father John and mother Mary had lost two baby daughters before me – so were delighted I survived. On top of that I was nearly born on St. George’s’ Day – a great Feast Day for us Roman Catholics.

I was followed by Gilbert – who became a haberdasher in London – and Joan who married a local hatter. My father was the Bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon and so successful as a glover he lent money to the Stratford Council.

But all this changed when I was eleven. The Earl of Leicester – Queen Elizabeth’s lover……

– had bought Kenilworth Castle twelve miles away – and by 1575 had transformed it into a love-nest.

But someone had to pay for it – and that someone was the Roman Catholics. Leicester – nicknamed ‘the Bear’ – claimed to be a Puritan – and with his henchman, Sir Thomas Lucy……

…….terrorised us all. There was even a new term of abuse for us – ‘recusants’.

Leicester and Lucy ruined my father’s business and Dad had to take me out of school.

But we ‘recusants’ had learnt to stick together. A schoolmaster from Lancashire came to Stratford – a great friend of the Hoghton family – and he got me the job of teaching the children at Hoghton Hall.

But the Bear soon came after the Hoghtons as well – and at the age of eighteen I returned to Stratford – where I fell in love with Anne Hathaway – an old family friend.

Not that she herself was old – well not very old. She was 26 and not the slightest bit interested in me. Hostile, in fact. But I had written songs for the Hoghton children – and now I wrote a love song for her. It worked so well we had to get married.

But then horror hit the family. Lucy found that Edward Arden, the loved cousin of my mother Mary, employed a gardener who was really a ‘Papist Priest’. So Edward was hanged, drawn and quartered in London.

In grief and rage I slaughtered the deer in Lucy’s park. Of course I got caught and Lucy whipped me. I got drunk and wrote a poem about him and hung it on |his gates. Its title was ‘Lucy is lousy’.

I then had to get out of town…..

The Catholic network in London swung into action. They paired me with another writer – Thomas Kyd – and we lodged together. Tom’s father was a devout Catholic – but what the network didn’t know was that his son was an atheist. At first I was shocked – but then became intrigued…

We worked as lawyer’s clerks by day, wrote pamphlets and plays by night, then starched our beards in the latest fashion and sought out French brothels in the City.

Tom introduced me to Kit Marlowe…..

……and Kit introduced me to the gay life of the docks.

The network came up with an idea. If I was to return to Stratford, I must appease Lucy, who, when he was in London, would worship at St. Giles, Cripplegate. The rector there was Robert Crowley – a radical puritan and poet who loathed all artifice and believed in the redistribution of wealth. If I could get Crowley onside, he could plead my case with Lucy.

We strangely got on. In fact, his views almost became my own. He agreed to work on Lucy – but in return insisted I tour the Midlands with a company of actors, spreading the Word of God. We were to put on Biblical stories and morality plays.

The public didn’t want to know. Then the Armada came and the public didn’t want to know even more. Real men wouldn’t be in costume and make-up. They would be fighting the Spanish.

The network came to the rescue yet again and sent me down to Titchfield in Hampshire, the country seat of the Southampton family. The Second Earl of Southampton was dead……

(Photo by Hugh Ross)

…….having been imprisoned in the Tower by Queen Elizabeth for following the Old Faith. He left a beautiful widow, Mary……

……and a teenage whom everyone called Harry…..

Kit Marlowe wrote ‘whoever loved who loved not at first sight’ and that’s what happened to me when I first met Harry. And that’s what happened to Harry when he first met me. But this was neither the time nor the place.

I had been hired, not only to be Harry’s friend and tutor – but to persuade him to get married. He needed to have a son for the Southampton line to continue – but  had shown no interest in girls.

In this he was following his father – who had left his mother when he found out she had fallen in love with a ‘common person’ – and proceeded to make ‘his manservant his wife’.

Lady Mary suddenly asked me to write seventeen sonnets for Harry’s seventeenth birthday in an effort to turn him straight…

Sonnets were all the rage in this part of the country. Sir Philip Sidney…..

……. had lived at Wilton, a day’s horse-ride away. He had written a whole cache of sonnets to Penelope Rich…..

…….playing on her surname.

All sonnets have fourteen lines – but one of Sir Philip’s sonnets rhymed in an ab ab, cd cd, ef ef, gg form – and this was the form I was attracted to. I used it 154 times over the next fifteen years. If I hadn’t been placed in Titchfield, I don’t think I’d have written a single sonnet.

In my Birthday Sonnets I flattered Harry’s beauty, urging him, as his duty, to pass it on. I called him my ‘Rose’ which was a reference to the way his family pronounced their surname – not ‘Risley but ‘Rosely’. I also referred obliquely to the family motto – ‘Ung par tout’ – ‘all for one’ or ‘all is one’. Now you know about it, you’ll see it everywhere in my poetry.

I wrote that if Harry had a son, he would become immortal – but in the penultimate sonnet suggested – cheekily – that I could make him immortal with my verse alone. Thus began the great theme of our relationship: Harry had the looks – but I had the talent.

The sonnet commission had the opposite effect of what was intended: it made Harry keener to have an affair. He even started to cross dress.

He had done this before, it seems. In Sir Phlip’s romance, ‘Arcadia’ Pyrocles dresses up as a woman to gain access to the King’s court – and the King falls in love with him – or her.

Followers of Sir Philip would often act out scenes from this story. Harry had long hair……

……and played Pyrocles to perfection.  I played along with all this and described Harry as ‘the Master Mistress of my passion’. But I also told him all I could offer was Platonic love.

Soon there were other things to worry about. Queen Elizabeth announced she was coming to stay…….

…..with all her court and with all her soldiers and with all her musicians from Morocco…

They included the beautiful clavichordist – and courtesan – Aemilia Bassano – mistress to old Lord Hunsdon…….

………the cousin of the Queen.

The Roselies were thrown out of their house and the Queen and Privy Council took up residence there – while their soldiers smashed up the wainscot in their search for signs of ‘massing’ – another word invented to denigrate Catholics.

On top of that the Queen insisted on shooting deer, but not by hunting them. She would have them rounded up, then led before her, one by one, as she shot them at point blank range.

The royal caravan finally moved on – but Aemilia stayed – and I fell in love with her. I wrote a sonnet proclaiming that ‘black was beautiful’ but Aemilia wasn’t interested in me. She was interested in young Lord Harry…

Then I had an idea. I would send up the Queen’s visit in a play, cast Aemilia as Rosaline, a dark-skinned beauty – and myself as her witty, aristocratic lover. Berowne – a reference to Countess Mary’s maiden name, ‘Browne’. Thus ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ was born.

All the Wilton crowd were in the play as well – including Penelope Rich whose name I played on just as Sir Philip had done. Harry’s friends, Roger Manners……

….. and Christopher Blount…….

…….were also in the production – and I played on their names as well, both in the play and in my sonnets.

I also sent up my arch enemy – George Chapman……

– in the shape of the limp-wristed, sycophant, Lord Boyet. Chapman was a poet even more impoverished than I was. He was also after the money – and the body – of Lord Harry.

But my seduction of Aemilia – onstage and offstage – did not work. I had tried everything – flattery, humour, teasing and insults – and was reduced, in the end, to what this age would see as racial abuse.

Aemilia was after Harry – but Harry was after me.

But then it all changed. In my desperation I begged Harry, if he truly loved me, to plead my case with Aemilia. He did. Aemilia seized her chance and swooped. Harry complied.

I was in hell, so asked leave of the Countess to go on tour with Lord Strange’s Men. It was then, in my bed at night, that I realised that I was more in love with the boy than the girl.

Aemilia got pregnant and was married off to a musician called Alfonso Lanyer. I returned to Titchfield and told Harry he was lovelier than a summer’s day….

The Countess found out about our affair and was furious: but I wrote a play I called ‘Love’s Labour’s Won’ in which I portrayed myself as Helena, in love with a nobleman far above her. Helena reminds his mother, the Countess Rousillon, that she had once loved chastely a man far beneath her – as Countess Mary had done in real life. I argued, as Helena, that if Mary’s love had crossed barriers of class, couldn’t mine cross barriers of sex as well? Countess Mary conceded – and gave her blessing to our love.

To celebrate Harry and I went to Italy – working as spies for Harry’s great friend, the Second Earl of Essex…..

En route we visited Philip of Spain’s court in Madrid – Philip had been a great friend of Countess Mary’s father – and we saw Titian’s paintings ‘Venus and Adonis’

and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’……

I would later transmute them into narrative poems. I even used the same colours and perspectives as Titian…

We then went on to Rome – and gazed at the Obelisk Pope Sixtus V had raised in front of St. Peter’s Basilica.

It had been the last thing St. Peter had gazed on before his martyrdom – and it became the symbol of our love. But perhaps the greatest gift Italy gave me were its novellas – which I rapidly turned into plays.

But we returned to England to terrible news. Kit Marlowe had been killed in a tavern brawl in Deptford – and Tom Kyd – who had become Kit’s room-mate in place of me – had betrayed Kit’s atheism to the authorities.

I coped with the loss of Kit by finding him afresh in Harry.

Of course, Harry was an attractive, rich young man – and many young aristocrats – men and women alike – were infatuated with him. But Harry, like his mother, had a penchant for lower class young men. Harry had just been nominated as a Knight of the Garter – and his sexual predilections could be used against him. Queen Elizabeth had made homosexuality illegal.

I would visit my family in the summer – I now had twins – a boy Hamnet and girl Judith – as well as my first born daughter, Susanna. But my thoughts were always more with Harry – and the summer in Stratford seemed more like winter. But I wrote Sonnets to him to keep him close to me.

But one summer I devoted all my writing to composing ‘Lucrece’. I wanted to produce a masterpiece, like Ovid – so focused all my energies on the poem and not on Harry. This was a mistake. When I returned to Titchfield, I found George Chapman had taken my place.

It was Chapman who was now writing sonnets to Harry – as well as conducting seances in which he summoned up the spirits of Homer – and even of Kit. I tried every trick to dislodge Chapman – I even used my sonnets to send up his poetic style. But it was no good – Harry was hooked.

I wrote a goodbye letter in verse and stormed off to penury. But as one door slams…

Harry had come of age so Countess Mary had to leave Titchfield – mother and son had never really got on. Mary had married Thomas Heneage – and wanted a play to celebrate it in Coprt Hall, her stately home and grounds in Essex….

She also demanded a part for Aemilia – who she thought us boys had treated badly.

So now ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ was also born – and Aemelia returned to my life. We had a brief, loving affair.

‘The Dream’ was a hit – and Harry wanted to be where the action was. So Chapman was given the heave-ho and Harry and I were in business again. He made it up to me by giving me a gift of £1,000 – yes, £1,000! – with which I bought my way in to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men often had to tour – and so with Harry and myself there were infidelities on both sides. Harry gave me a miniature of himself that I could gaze on when I missed him. It was painted on the reverse side of an Ace of Hearts playing card – and showed Harry touching his heart.

But I had a fear Harry would one day leave me.

When I was back in London – and acting at the Swan Theatre in the Paris Gardens……

…..word came that my son, Hamnet had died. It took two or three days to ride from Stratford to London, so he would be buried by the time I got to Stratford. Besides I was playing a Ghost at the time in – yes – ‘Hamlet’ – an early version of the play I had written with Tom Kyd.

So I buried my grief, the show went on and I turned Harry into my surrogate son.

But my grief turned to violence and heavy drinking – and I was up before the Magistrates for taking part in a brawl – involving prostitutes – in the grounds of the Paris Gardens. For a while I was in such disgrace I couldn’t be seen with Harry.

Harry then went to the Court and the inevitable happened: he fell in love. But this time with a woman – Elizabeth Vernon. a poor cousin of Lord Essex. Like Mercutio in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ I felt ambivalent about it. I wanted Harry to be happy but I wanted him to be mine. In the end I coped by convincing myself that Harry and I had what I called a marriage of true minds.

So our love survived Harry’s marriage. It even survived the arrival of little daughters.

But politics were about to take over. To us Queen Elizabeth was a monster. She delighted in the torture of Roman Catholics and refused to let us worship in our own way. Essex wasn’t a Catholic, but he wanted freedom of worship for everyone. So we all plotted to dethrone the Queen.

The plan was for Essex and Harry to go to Ireland to quell the rebels there, then return with the army, join up with King James VI of Scotland……

……and march on London. I was sent to Scotland to stage ‘Macbeth’ to persuade the King to invade England – as Malcolm invades Scotland – to overthrow a tyrannous rule.

But James knew that the Queen was old.

To take over all he had to do was wait. Also the Ireland campaign – though bravely fought by Essex and Harry – was a disaster. I knew the rebellion would fail and tried to warn everyone by writing ‘Julius Caesar’ where the rebellion fails big time. But it went ahead.  On the eve of the rebellion they even staged a production of ‘Richard II’ at the Globe – which Queen Elizabeth, rightly, took to be about her.

In the play King Richard is over-thrown….

I had to flee to Scotland. Essex had his head chopped off and Harry was imprisoned for life in the Tower.

I became deeply depressed – but I did get on with James. We found we had both written poems that compared our male lovers to the fabulous Phoenix.

Elizabeth died and everything turned round. I galloped down to England to find Harry still incarcerated in the Tower, waiting for the new King’s pardon. He was having his portrait painted with his cat, hoping to woo James.

I pushed matters along by writing a couple of Sonnets to the King about Harry…

Finally Harry was freed – and James was in England. I wrote a sonnet to celebrate this wonderful event – the death of Elizabeth…..

…..the freeing of Harry and the advent of peace.

But Harry did not become the King’s new lover. He was too old for James by now – and looked too ill. I, though, was doing fine. James loved my plays – especially the darker ones….

His coronation was delayed till the next spring because of the plague. As the leader of the King’s Men I carried a canopy over James in the procession. The pasteboard arches on the coronation route…..

….. reminded me of the obelisk in Rome. But these arches were blown about by the wind whereas the obelisk in Rome was as strong and eternal as the love between Harry and myself.

Harry was edged out of the gay coterie surrounding the King and became a touch homophobic, but everything between us was fine. That is until 1605 when Harry’s wife suddenly produced a boy.

Harry was no longer gay. Shakespeare the Old Player had to go.

Now I had not only lost my real son – I had lost my surrogate son as well.  This was the time I finally mourned for Hamnet – nearly a decade after his death.

My grief, literally, drove me mad. I returned Harry’s portrait with a black spear – a black Shakes-peare – through Harry’s heart.

I wished him dead.

I lashed out with a re-write of an old play I wrote with Kyd – ‘King Lear’ – which had a happy ending. Not any more. Cordelia, the old king’s beloved daughter is hanged and Lear enters with her dead in his arms….

To me, God was dead as well.

Grief hardened into revenge. Harry was denying his gay past but I certainly wasn’t. And I wasn’t going to throw all my love poems to him – and even to her – into the bin. I shuffled them up so the story wasn’t too obvious – and turned Mr. Henry Rosely into Mr Rosely Henry – and wrote a dedication – under the publisher’s name – full of heavy hints….

But I also wrote a new poem – ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ – in which I split myself into two parts – my older self – in the form of an old man and my younger self in the form of a young girl, jilted by her psychotic lover. She tears apart his character in the same way she tears apart the bogus love letters he sent her.

But at the end she admits, however much she suffered, however much she was destroyed, however much she was driven insane – she would willingly re-live the whole affair again.

She ends up as ‘a reconciled maid’ – and I was now reconciled to my Old Faith…..

You see a miracle had happened the year after my split with Harry. At the request of a man in Oxford who was impotent I had impregnated his wife – and she had bore me a son.

So my final sonnet was a prayer to my withered soul, beseeching it to grow strong and great again.

I was on the road, with Prospero, to forgiveness.

© Stewart Trotter Easter 2026

For more than a century, the prevailing orthodoxy among Shakespeare scholars has been that the 154 sonnets resist narrative coherence. The 1609 quarto, with its erratic ordering and opaque dedication, has been treated as a textual cul‑de‑sac: a miscellany of occasional poems, loosely grouped by theme but fundamentally resistant to biographical reconstruction. Stewart Trotter’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded enters this field with a boldness that will strike some readers as exhilarating and others as heretical. He argues not only that the sonnets form a coherent emotional arc, but that they encode a private autobiographical drama centred on Shakespeare’s relationship with Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton. The claim is not new; what is new is the confidence, granularity, and narrative force with which Trotter pursues it.

The book’s central gesture is a complete reordering of the sonnets into a chronological sequence. Trotter’s method combines tonal analysis, biographical inference, and a close attention to the shifting dynamics of patronage in the 1590s. The result is a Shakespeare who is neither the impersonal craftsman of New Critical fantasy nor the anguished cipher of post‑structuralist theory, but a recognisably human figure negotiating desire, betrayal, reconciliation, and the precarious economics of early modern authorship. Trotter’s Shakespeare is a man in love, and the sonnets are the record of that love’s evolution.

This is, of course, a deeply unfashionable position. Since the mid‑twentieth century, the biographical reading of the sonnets has been treated with suspicion, if not outright disdain. The fear—sometimes justified—is that biography invites wishful thinking, circular reasoning, and the projection of modern sensibilities onto early modern texts. Trotter is fully aware of this history, and he meets it head‑on. His argument is not that the sonnets are transparent autobiography, but that they are structured by a logic of emotional progression that makes little sense in the quarto’s arrangement. When read in his proposed order, the poems trace a movement from infatuation to intimacy, from jealousy to rupture, and finally to a chastened reconciliation. The Dark Lady poems, often treated as an anomalous appendix, become part of the same emotional current rather than a separate puzzle.

One of the book’s strengths is its refusal to treat the sonnets as purely literary artefacts. Trotter situates them within the lived networks of the 1590s: the Southampton circle, the politics of patronage, the theatrical economy, and the shifting moral codes of the Elizabethan court. His Shakespeare is not the solitary genius of Romantic myth but a working dramatist navigating the demands of a powerful patron. The emotional intensity of the sonnets is thus inseparable from the social structures that shaped their production. This contextual grounding gives the book a solidity that many biographical readings lack.

Trotter is particularly persuasive when discussing the theatricality of the sonnets. He suggests that they may have been performed privately within the Southampton household, functioning as a kind of intimate drama. This is not as implausible as it may sound. The Elizabethan elite were accustomed to private entertainments, and the boundary between poetry and performance was porous. Trotter’s reading restores a sense of embodied immediacy to the sonnets, reminding us that they were written by a man whose primary medium was the stage.

The book is also notable for its attention to tonal modulation. Trotter has a keen ear for the emotional shifts that mark the sequence: the sudden chill of suspicion, the warmth of reconciliation, the bitterness of betrayal. His close readings are often illuminating, particularly when he traces the recurrence of certain images—time, decay, renewal—as markers of Shakespeare’s changing emotional state. At times, the argument risks over‑precision, as if the poet’s feelings could be plotted on a graph. But even when one disagrees with a particular placement, the overall trajectory remains compelling.

Inevitably, the book will attract criticism. Some will object to the biographical claims; others will question the methodological leap from tonal analysis to chronological certainty. The TLS-type readership, trained to distrust anything that smacks of narrative imposition, may bristle at the confidence with which Trotter rearranges the sequence. Yet it is worth remembering that the quarto’s ordering is itself arbitrary, and that scholars from Malone to Kerrigan have attempted to impose coherence on it. Trotter’s intervention is simply the most ambitious—and the most narratively satisfying—of these attempts.

What distinguishes Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded from earlier reordering projects is its sense of dramatic inevitability. The sequence Trotter proposes feels less like an imposition than a revelation. The emotional logic is persuasive, the transitions smooth, the narrative arc coherent. One may quibble with individual placements, but the overall structure has the ring of psychological truth. Whether this truth corresponds to historical reality is another matter, but Trotter’s point is that the sonnets themselves invite such a reading.

The book’s impact is already being felt beyond the world of scholarship. A theatrical adaptation is planned by The Titchfield Festival Theatre, presenting the sonnets in Trotter’s order, framing them as a dramatic monologue charting Shakespeare’s emotional journey. That a scholarly argument should so quickly reshape performance practice is unusual, and it speaks to the imaginative power of Trotter’s reconstruction. Whatever one thinks of the biographical claims, the narrative he proposes is undeniably stageworthy.

The prose is clear, confident, and occasionally wry. Trotter writes with the assurance of someone who has lived with these poems for decades, and his enthusiasm is infectious. The book is handsomely produced, with colour illustrations that situate the sonnets within their cultural and architectural milieu. Magic Flute Publishing has given the work the kind of visual and typographic care that scholarly editions often lack.

In the end, the question is not whether Trotter is right in every detail—no biographical reading could ever meet that standard—but whether his reconstruction deepens our understanding of the sonnets. The answer is yes. By restoring the poems to a narrative and emotional context, he invites us to read them not as isolated artefacts but as parts of a living drama. He reminds us that Shakespeare was not only a poet of universal truths but a man entangled in the particularities of love, loyalty, and loss.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded is a provocative, ambitious, and deeply felt book. It will not settle the debates surrounding the sonnets, but it will certainly reshape them. For that alone, it deserves attention. Whether one ultimately accepts Trotter’s chronology or not, his work compels us to look again at poems we thought we knew. In a field often paralysed by caution, such boldness is refreshing.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Re-ordered

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code…

First can Your Cat congratulate Jessie Buckley for winning an Oscar?

Her performance as Agnis Hathaway carried force and sincerity.

(Please, though, let’s call her ‘Anne’ rather than ‘Agnis’!)

To be honest, Your Cat saw the film twice – and found Miss Buckley less convincing the second time.

In fact a touch irritating.

The moral? Don’t watch the film a second time!

And certainly don’t listen to her Oscar speeches!

As The Code has said before, the film’s heart is in the right place: but it flies in face of the facts.

‘What facts?’ Your Cat hears you cry. ‘We know nothing of the life of William Shakespeare!’

The fact is we know more about William Shakespeare than any man who ever lived.

And how? Through his Sonnets.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Re-ordered

---

The author and director of the film know about the Sonnets. They even have Shakespeare’s daughter, Susanna, reading one.

(Sonnet 12 – Sonnet 13 in the Order Stewart Trotter puts them in in his New Book – Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded )

But Susanna does not read the poem’s conclusion – where it is clear that the poem is addressed to a man….

Henry Wriothesley, in fact, the ‘lovely boy’ who became Will’s long term lover…

But Anne Hathaway was Will’s first love and Sonnet 145 (Sonnet 1 in the New Order) tells us exactly how Will courted her.

Yes – he courted her – by singing to a lute!

But that’s not how Hamnet presents it! Here, for ‘objectivity’, is an AI account: of how Will met Anne in the movie:

‘It’s crafted not as a conventional courtship but as a meeting of two unusual sensibilities—one restless, thwarted, and hungry for escape; the other preternaturally attuned, solitary, and grounded in the natural world. The film reframes their relationship so that the future playwright is not the gravitational centre; Anne is. Their wooing becomes a study in perception, intuition, and the quiet recognition of possibility.

The essence is that Anne chooses him first, and Will responds with a mixture of awe, longing, and the relief of being truly seen.

Their relationship begins not with Will as the pursuer but with Anne as the one who perceives him—his restlessness, his imaginative hunger, his need for escape from his father’s violence. Will’s wooing is therefore less an act of conquest and more an act of surrender to someone who understands him before he can articulate himself.’

Let’s start with ‘his father’s violence’. This is entirely invented. When Will was a boy, John Shakespeare was the Bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon – so rich he even lent money to the Council. He was a great friend of Anne Hathaway’s father – and even paid off his debts.

The entire Shakespeare family was close to the Hathaways. That’s how Will knew Anne.

John only became impoverished when the Earl of Leicester moved into the district.

He was the Leader of the Puritans, and the Shakespeares were Roman Catholic. Leicester ruined John Shakespeare financially – and Will had to leave school. But a Roman Catholic network came into play – and Will was hired by the Hoghton Family at Hoghton Hall in Lancashire to keep their children entertained.

However the Puritans went after the Hoghtons as well – and as a teenager Will had to return to Stratfortd.

That’s when he met Anne Hathaway. Yes, as a teenager.

With the best will in the world Paul Mescal doesn’t look eighteen…

Anne Hathaway herself was around 26 – eight years older than Will.

But it was Will who did all the chasing!

How do we know? From Sonnet 135 – Sonnet 1 in the New Order.

Anne was around eight years older than Will, but that didn’t stop him.

Anne, however, wasn’t interested – so Will wrote a ballad to seduce her:

Those lips that Love’s own hand did make,
Breath’d forth the sound that said ‘I hate’,
To me that languisht for her sake.

The ‘lips’ referred to are Anne’s, and Will is suggesting that they have
been created by the hands of love itself. But although Will is languishing
for Anne, she tells him she hates him.

But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet,
Was us’d in giving gentle doom:

[Doom is like the Day of Doom – Day of Judgement.]

But because Will is in such pain, when Anne looks at him, mercy enters
her heart. Mercy rebukes Anne’s tongue for saying ‘I hate’. Her tongue
usually gives gentle judgements on things and people.

And taught it thus anew to greet:
‘I hate’ she alter’d with an end,
That follow’d it as gentle day,
Doth follow night who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away.

Mercy takes over the education of Anne’s tongue and forces it to give
a new ending to the sentence. It’s like a gentle dawn that follows a hellish
night, one that flees from light as a demon flies from heaven and back to
hell.

‘I hate’, from hate away she threw,
And sav’d my life saying ‘Not you’.

Will plays on Anne’s family name. ‘I hate from hate away she threw’ =
‘I hate from Hathaway she threw’. So in the end Anne, through the power
of mercy, changes what she was about to say to Will from ‘I hate you’ to ‘I
hate not you.’

The ‘real’ Anne Hathaway coulddn’t be further away from witchy, Earth-mother Jessie Buckleyt if she tried!

Will’s seduction succeeded all too well. Anne became pregnant
and Will had to marry her…..

Read all about it in Stewart’s new book!

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Re-ordered

Just for the record, Your Cat thought that the real star of the film was Hamnet himself – Jacobi Jupe…..

…light years beyond his parents in the film…..

But it’s all a matter of taste!

‘Bye now,

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code….

Happy to tell you that copies of Stewart Trotter’s new book – Shakespeare’s Sonnmets Decoded – are flying off the shelves at Magic Flute Publishing!

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded

The question Stewart often gets asked is: ‘How did you discover the Sonnets?’

Here – with the Publisher’s permission – is the answer – in the first chapter of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded.

CAMBRIDGE

Sidney Sussex – Stewart’s old college…

It was in an exam, of all things, that I first encountered William
Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It was my English Prelims at Cambridge University
and Sonnet 138 had been set for analysis. It begins:

When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies

In this Shakespeare – or ‘Will’ as he calls himself in the Sonnets, and
I’ll call him that as well – explains why he accepts the lies of his lover. He
wants her to think that he is naïve and, by implication, younger than he
really is. But why don’t they both admit the truth? That she is a liar and
he’s getting long in the tooth?

Because love works best when people seem to trust each other and ‘age
in love loves not to have years told’ – spoken of – or tolled like a funeral
bell. The consequence of all this?

I lie with her and she with me
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

The lies lead on to love making – so both of them are happy in their
falsehood. If lies make you happy, then the truth is stupid.

I could hardly believe that something so warm, tender, wise, honest
and above all human had ever been written. So I went out and bought the
Sonnets and read them through the night…

It soon became clear that not all the Sonnets were warm-hearted – quite
the opposite.

William Wordsworth wrote in 1827 that Will unlocked his
heart in the Sonnets – and unlock it he certainly did. Many of the poems
are romantic and ecstatic, but many of them are poisonous and vindictive.
Some display sublime optimism – others suicidal despair.

At one point Will wants his ‘Lovely Boy’ to live for ever – and at another can’t wait
for him to die. Sometimes his Mistress is beautiful – at other times she is
ugly as sin. Sometimes love-making is bawdy and joyful – at other times
it provokes jealousy and guilt. It became clear to me that there was not a
single emotion the characters in Will’s plays go through that Will hadn’t
gone through himself.

Or had he?

My Prelim exam was in 1969 and the English Faculty was still in the grip
of the New Criticism. This maintained that a writer’s life had nothing to
do with his work and warned against students falling into ‘the biographical
fallacy’. The characters in fictional works are not ‘real’- they are ‘imagined’
and should be treated as such.

Or as Roger Prior described it in 1995: ‘Modern criticism is dedicated to
removing the author from the text. The author’s thoughts and intentions,
it is claimed, can never be known and are in any case quite irrelevant to
our understanding of his work…The literary work of art has nothing to
do with the world.’

Cambridge is particularly prone to intellectual viruses. In the reign
of Queen Elizabeth I, St. John’s College became the breeding ground for
Calvinism.

In the 1930s Trinity College and Kings College became hotbeds
of Marxism.

Even in my time, Cambridge had a late, brief flowering of
Marxist thought, following ‘Les événements’ in Paris in 1968.

Will, it seemed to me, was writing about – and to – three real people:
‘The Lovely Boy’, ‘the Dark Lady’ and ‘Rival Poet’. They were not ‘imaginary
friends’ and the Sonnet sequence was not a ‘literary construct.’ If it were a
construct, it would have made more aesthetic sense.

As it is we have 154 Sonnets in random order – random except that
they seem to be in two piles – one to ‘to him’ and one ‘to her’ – with far
more in the ‘to him’ pile.

But it was not only the New Criticism that was preventing a true
appreciation of the Sonnets – it was the year 1969 itself. In the Sonnets
Will writes love letters to the Lovely Boy – but homosexual love in Britain was a criminal offence until 1967. To suggest that our National Poet wasgay – or even bisexual – caused outrage.

I know this personally. For my Finals I wrote a 5,000 word essay on two
Sonnets. The first was Sonnet 94 ‘They that have power to hurt and will
do none’ which I interpreted as Will’s advice to the Lovely Boy to refrain
from sex with lower class young men.

The second was Sonnet 7 ….

Lo in the Orient when the gracious light/Lifts up his burning head

……which I took to
be a light-hearted attack on the Lovely Boy’s masturbation. My Director of
Studies was horrified and ordered me not to submit my essay.
I had nothing else, so I had to….

But a couple of years later I was listening to the radio and heard the
historian A.L. Rowse put a name to the Dark Lady.

She was Aemilia Bassano. The whole Eng Lit Establishment – led by Stanley Wells – jumped
on him – as they had jumped, to a much smaller degree, on me.

Wells had pounced on two trivial mistakes Rowse had made in his rush
to get his discovery into print. As a consequence the whole theory – which
completely fits the facts – was dismissed. Wells had put back Shakespeare
scholarship a quarter of a century.

But this broadcast re-ignited my passion for the Sonnets. I wanted to
find out who everyone was and what their stories were. Even in 1969 New
Criticism heretics were whispering in corners that the Lovely Boy might
be Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton.

What I didn’t know then was that Nathan Drake had come up with same idea in 1817.
Artificial Intelligence hadn’t been invented then.

Southampton signed his letters ‘Harry Southampton’ – so from now on
he shall be ‘Harry’.

The identity of the Rival Poet suggested itself in a moment of truly
Jungian synchronicity. For many years I had been fascinated by Love’s
Labour’s Lost and directed a student production of it in Clare Gardens.
A great friend of mine called Gerald Chapman played the Arch Flatterer,
Boyet.

His extravagant praise of the Princess of France earns a rebuke from her:

Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise.
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye
Not uttered by base sale of chapmen’s [merchants] tongues’.

This got a laugh from the audience because they knew Gerald’s surname.
I believe there was an identical laugh in the original production. I hope to show that Boyet was a caricature of the poet and medium, George Chapman……

…..and that Chapman is the Rival Poet of the Sonnets. William
Minto came to the same conclusion in 1874.

I later did a professional production of the play at the Northcott
Theatre in Exeter where I was Artistic Director. In the same way I thought
the Sonnets were about real people, I began to think Love’s Labour’s Lost
was about a real place, with its ‘curious knotted garden’ and it’s ‘steep
uprising of the hill’.So, towards the end of the last century, my teenage
daughter Amy and I went for a picnic to the ruins of Harry’s stately home
at Titchfield in Hampshire

We found ourselves on the set of the play.

I wrote a book called Love’s Labour’s Found (published 2002) which
argued that Harry was the Lovely Boy, Aemilia was indeed the Dark Lady
and there was a whole love-triangle played out at Titchfield. Meridian
turned the theory into a T.V. documentary.

Having written Love’s Labour’s Found I had a detailed Elizabethan/
Jacobean time line, so I started to commit the ultimate Cambridge
heresy – of fitting the Sonnets into ‘real’ time and place. I posted them,
with ‘translations’ into modern English, on my blog The Shakespeare
Code, which, over the years, has had over 400,000 Views.

In Science, you are allowed to present a theory to be tested. I want to do
the same with the Sonnets. I will say directly what I think happened and
base my evidence on the Sonnets themselves. So ‘probably’ and ‘perhaps’
will be banned. My hope is that people will test these ideas with the help
of computers.

It is already starting to happen. In 2013 I first suggested on my blog
that the famous attack on Will as ‘an upstart crow’ by Robert Greene was
in reality written by Thomas Nashe. This year, 2025, the theory has been
‘proved’ true by the team work of Shakespeare Scholars and Computer
Programmers.

I have assumed the reader can have access to AI, so instead of footnotes
I’ll give names and dates in the text which can be checked.

But back to the Sonnets and, briefly, what I think Will got up to before he wrote them…

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded

If you want to find out what Will got up to click the link above!

Happy reading!

‘Bye now

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code…

Your Cat is happy to announce that the paperback version of Stewart Trotter’s…..

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded

…..is now available to purchase from Magic Flute Publishing.

Here is the link!

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded

‘Bye now!

Trix at the Flix!

Brothers and Sisters of the Shakespeare Code….

Let Your Cat say right away that Hamnet’s heart is in the right place. The film attempts to relate William Shakespeare’s life to his work.

‘But that’s the most obvious thing to do!’ Your Cat hears you cry. But believe me it’s not. When our Chief Agent, Stewart Trotter, was studying English at Cambridge – some time in the last century – students were forbidden to draw on a writer’s life when analysing his work.

This was called the New Criticism – and right in its centre was T. S. Eliot.

He knew he’d behaved badly in his private life – and in his politics he was borderline Fascist. His fear was that when people found out what he was like, they would reject his poetry. So he put it about that the quality of a man’s verse had nothing to do with the quality of the man himself.

Hamnet shows how Shakespeare – a man violent and autistic – poured out his grief for his son when he died by writing Hamlet. His wife – Agnes in this version rather than Anne – divines that her husband can only be fulfilled by leaving their village – Stratford-upon-Avon – and going to London. Husband and wife are two of a kind – wild, original loners who can only fit in with each other…

As I’ve said, the film’s heart is in the right place. It’s its brain that is the problem.

It hasn’t got one….

There is a huge problem with the central idea. An early version of Hamlet was already in existence when Hamnet died, aged 11, in 1596 – and there is a strong possibilty that Will was actually playing the Ghost in the Paris Gardens at the time of his son’s death.

The film also ignores Nicholas Rowe – Will’s first biographer in 1709 – who says he fled from Stratford because he was caught poaching deer belonging to Sir Thomas Lucy – and then writing an obscene ballad about him which he hung on Lucy’s park gates.

The film is also highly questionable in its presentation of Will’s father, John, as a violent, debt-ridden, alcoholic. In reality he was at one time the Bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon, so successful as a glover that he actually lent money to the Council. He even paid off the debts of Anne Hathaway’s father who – despite what the film says – was a close friend. John was also an ardent, committed, Roman Catholic who risked imprisonment or even death by putting his mark on a Testament of Faith. He did at one point have debts, but that was because the Earl of Leicester moved near Stratford when Will was a teenager – and proceeded to harass and ruin followers of the Old Faith. Sir Thomas Lucy was his agent…

So how did Will process his grief? And did it feature in other works by him?

The clue, strangely, is in the film itself. At one point Sussana, Will’s older daughter, reads a poem to her sister Judith her father has written about her mother. He describes how even beautiful people have to die along with everything else in Nature.

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver’d ore with white:
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And Summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard:

[When I witness the ticking of a clock, the transformation of day into
night, a fading violet, trees bereft of leaves that once gave shade to cattle
and the green corn transformed into sheathes with white beards like old
men…]

Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do them-selves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow

[Then I question the very nature of your beauty, as it will be subject to
time and decay. All beautiful things depart from their original natures and
fade as quickly as they see other beautiful things come into being.]

What the film doesn’t give us is the conclusion:

And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defense
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

Will is saying the only solution is to have children you can leave behind.

But Anne already has children – so what is this all about?

The fact is that this poem is a Sonnet. Not only is it a Sonnet, but it was written to a young man – to be precise, the seventeen year old Harry, Third Earl of Southampton – Will’s long-term patron and lover.

Harry’s mother had commissioned Will to write seventeen Sonnets for his seventeenth birthday, urging him to get married and have a son.

He was Will’s true love – and though John Aubrey tells us Will spent his summers with his family at Stratford, we know from his Sonnets that all Will could think about was Harry. Summer without him was Winter.

[The poem that follows is Sonnet 97 in the sequence published in 1609. In his upcoming book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded, Stewart has re-arranged the sequence in chronological order – and this becomes Sonnet 61. The ‘translations’ in square brackets are posted by permission of Magic Flute Publishing.]

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded

How like a Winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen?
What old December’s bareness every where?

[My absence from you has been like winter. You are like the most
pleasant part of the year. I have felt cold, the days have been dark and the
natural world is stripped of its colour.]

And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time,
The teeming Autumn big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widowed wombs after their Lords’ decease.

[In reality it was the summer time and the abundant autumn – full of
the fruits of the spring – was like a pregnant widow with her womb swollen
with the offspring of her dead husband.]

Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of Orphans, and un-fathered fruit;
For Summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute.

[But the abundant produce of the spring seems to resemble the
hopelessness of an orphan without his or her father, or infertile fruit
because the Summer is your servant. When you are away, even the birds
stop singing.]

Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the Winter’s near.

[And even if they do sing, it is with total lack of joy as if they are
dreading the approach of winter.]

Shakespeare was so obsessed with the handsome young aristocrat he hardly noticed his family at all. And when he wasn’t writting Sonnets to him he was writing long narrative poems for him instead.

So how did Shakespeare cope with his grief if he didn’t write Hamlet ?

He coped with it by turning Harry, Earl of Southampton, into a replacement son….

Sonnet 127 New Order. Sonnet 37 Old Order.

As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.

[As an infirm, old father takes pleasure in seeing his son engage in
youthful, athletic activities, so I, having suffered the worst that fate can do
to a man, to have his son taken away from him by death, I now delight in
your moral worth and honesty.]

For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more
Intitled in thy parts do crowned sit,
I make my love engrafted, to this store:

[I do not know which is your crowning glory – your good looks, your
aristocratic birth, your wealth or your intelligence. Perhaps it’s one of
these, or all of them or others that I don’t know about. Whatever the truth,
I intend to join with these qualities for all time, the way we graft one plant
onto another.]

So then I am not lame, poor, nor despise’d,
Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give
That I in thy abundance am suffic’d,
And by a part of all thy glory live:

[This stops me being wounded by the grief for my son, or impoverished
or unappreciated while this act of imagination gives such substantial
benefits. I am nurtured by the multiplicity of your gifts and bask in your
glory.]

Look what is best, that best I wish in thee;
This wish I have, then ten times happy me.

[Whatever is best, I wish it for you. As it belongs to you – and you
belong to me – I am overwhelmed with happiness.]

Will in the next few Sonnets becomes obsessed with death – and imagines how his death will effect Harry – with no consideration how Hamnet’s death has affected his wife. He even counsels Harry to forget all about him.

But his grief also turns to violence….

Leslie Hotson – the brilliant Canadian literary historian and sleuth
– discovered in 1931 that in November, 1596 Will was up before the
Magistrates and bound over to keep the peace.

In November, 1596, William Wayte petitioned ‘ob metum mortis’ (for
fear of death) in a suit for sureties of the peace against William Shakespeare,
Francis Langley, Dorothy Soer, wife of John Soer and Anne Lee. Will also
figures in a retaliatory law-suit on the side of Langley.

We don’t know for certain who the women were, but there were most
likely prostitutes and Langley, who owned the Swan Theatre and tenements
in the area, was a known crook and moneylender.

Will, in mixing with low life and prostitutes in the Paris Gardens, was
behaving again like his new creation, Falstaff.

Because of the ‘shame’ of Will’s Court Appearance, Harry dropped Will for a bit.
Will feared that this rejection might one day become a permanent one
– as it was for Falstaff.

Sonnet 136. (36)
Let me confess that we two must be twain
Although our undivided loves are one:
So shall those blots that do with me remain,
Without thy help, by me be borne alone.

[I have to acknowledge that we have to live apart till the scandal of my
court appearance blows over – although we still love one another as though
we were one person. So all the shame will be borne by me, without any help from you.]

In our two loves there is but one respect,
Though in our lives a separable spite,
Which though it alter not love’s sole effect,
Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love’s delight.

[Though we are two separate men, we are lovers and look at life the
same way – even if circumstances at the moment force us to be apart. This
won’t interfere with our love for each other, but it steals time away from us
which we could have enjoyed together.]

I may not ever-more acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,
Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name:

[I cannot acknowledge you as my provider and patron because my
appearance in the Magistrates’ Court would bring shame to your family
name. And you can’t show me favour in public without detracting from
the family honour.]

But do not so; I love thee in such sort
As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

[Don’t honour me publicly. I love you in such a way that you are in
fact myself and I can be honoured in your honour.]

In his new book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded, Stewart argues that Shakespeare did mourn for his son and his grief did affect his plays….

But this was almost a decade later – and happened in an extraordinary and violent way.

Your Cat will reveal all in her next post….

‘Bye now….

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded