The Shakespeare Code

(It’s best to read Parts One and Two  first.)

Queen Elizabeth died and everything turned round. Harry Southampton celebrated by throwing his hat over the walls of the Tower. Shakespeare wrote a Sonnet.

Harry, against all expectation, was now a free man, Queen Elizabeth, had suffered her own ‘eclipse’: but all the predictions about a Civil War had proved wrong. King James was about to usher in a time of peace and prosperity that would favour Harry who had risked his head to ensure the Succession.

There was much in it for Shakespeare as well. He was a friend of Harry and a friend of James. His verse, he asserts in Sonnet 107, will make Harry immortal and long outlast the dead tyrant, Queen Elizabeth, and her new brass tomb in Westminster Abbey:

 Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,

Can yet the lease of my true love control,

Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,

And the sad augurs mock their own presage;

Uncertainties now crown themselves assured,

And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

Now with the drops of this most balmy time

My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,

Since spite of him I’ll live in this poor rhyme,

While he insults oe’r dull and speechless tribes;

And thou in this shalt find thy monument,

When tyrant’s crests and tombs of brass are spent.

Shakespeare had returned from Scotland with King James. His acting company became Grooms of the King’s Chamber – entitled to wear scarlet livery and march in the Coronation Procession.

Shakespeare had the honour of holding the canopy over the King: but this meant nothing to him. It was an external glory, like the decorations which lined the route, destined for the scrap heap. The thing that mattered was Shakespeare’s love for Harry. Rock-like, eternal, like the Catholic Church itself, it had weathered every storm of Elizabethan politics.

England now had a King who positively encouraged homosexuality. During the Coronation Service in Westminster Abbey, to the shock of the Venetian Ambassador, a very handsome, and very ambitious, young English Earl kissed King James full on the cheek.

Shakespeare draws an affectionate portrait of King James as the Duke in Measure for Measure, who says of himself:

‘I never heard the absent Duke much detected for women. He was not inclined that way…’

The only worry for Shakespeare was the survival into the new reign of the Ape, the canny, diminutive Sir Robert Cecil. James, like the Roman Emperor Tiberius, would quit the city to pursue his love of hunting and sex. But whereas Tiberius went to Capri for his orgies, James went to Newmarket.

In Measure for Measure Shakespeare warns James, while he’s away, to keep an eye on the Ape  – a violent anti-Papist who, left alone in control, like Angelo in the play, might revive old Elizabethan sexual statutes – especially the one about ‘buggery’….

Next Shakespeare re-wrote Hamlet – an old play that had been knocking around since the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Shakespeare’s version plays on the war between the new Protestant way of thinking and the old Catholic one. Hamlet and his student friends from Wittenberg are the new, scientific men who cannot stomach Papist superstition.

However, a Ghost, straight from Purgatory, clunking round the battlements in full armour, appears before their very eyes. The students are forced to admit that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the new, Calvinist philosophy. Marcellus, a guard on watch, says of the Ghost…

It faded on the crowing of the cock.

Some say, that ever ’gainst that season comes

Wherein our saviour’s birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long:

And then (they say) no spirit can walk abroad,

The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,

Nor fairy talks, nor witch hath power to charm:

So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

Horatio, an intellectual, linguist and scholar, is forced to concede:

 So have I heard, and do in part believe it.

Despite all that Prince Hamlet has gone through, he still believes that God is minutely active in the universe – down to the fall of a sparrow. ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends’, says Hamlet, ‘rough-hew them how we will’.  This faith vanishes in Shakespeare’s next play, King Lear.

          Lear  was a re-write of a tawdry piece of Elizabethan propaganda, originally performed by the sycophantic ‘Queen’s Men’. Lear, in this version, also has three daughters: but the two evil ones are Roman Catholic and the good one, Cordella, a Protestant.

The deposed King, asleep and threatened with death, is awakened by a benevolent clap of thunder then restored triumphantly to his throne.

In Shakespeare’s version, man faces the universe alone. There are no spiritual powers – or, if there are any, they are malevolent and kill us for their sport. The good are crushed by the evil, who then turn on themselves. The King, is not restored to his throne: he dies howling in an agony of grief.

What had happened to Shakespeare?

To find out, we must decode Sonnet 126.

Betrayal.

In Sonnet 4 of the marriage sequence, commissioned by Countess Mary for the teenage Harry, Shakespeare uses the word ‘self’ in a particular way:

 For having traffic with thyself alone

Thou of thy self thy sweet self doth deceive.

What this ‘self’ means is made clearer in Sonnet 10:

Make me another  self for love of me

That beauty may still live in thine and thee.

‘Self’ is a code word for ‘son’. By fathering a son, Harry will create for himself another ‘self’.

Shakespeare introduces another code in Sonnet 11:

In one of th

As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow’st

In one of thine, from that which thou departests.

And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st

Thou may call thine, when thou from youth convertest.

Shakespeare says that, by having a son, Harry can wane and grow at the same time. As Harry grows older and weaker, his son will grow older and stronger. While Harry wanes, his son will wax.

Shakespeare then goes on to say that a son will also allow Harry a ‘defence’ against ‘time’s scythe’ – death – which Harry can ‘brave’- make mock of – by ‘breeding’.

In the much later Sonnet 126, Shakespeare describes how Harry has seized control of Time and performed the miracle of waning and growing simultaneously:

 O thou my lovely boy, who in thy power

Dost hold time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour,

Who hast by waning grown…

Harry has fathered a son!

A year after King James’s coronation, Harry’s wife, Elizabeth gave birth to baby James. She had previously borne Harry two daughters: but the birth of a boy to carry on the Southampton line was the thing that the couple had yearned for.

When James became King of England, everyone had assumed that Harry would become James’s favourite. But time and prison had taken their toll. James preferred younger, prettier, favourites. Left out in the cold, Harry started to turn homophobic.

Now he had a son, the process was complete. He wanted his son to see only his manly, soldierly qualities. Shakespeare, the player, had to go.

Shakespeare was experiencing Prince Hal’s rejection  of Falstaff:

I know thee not old man. Fall to thy prayers:

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!

I have long dreamed of such a kind of man,

So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so prophane:

But, being awake, I do despise my dream.

Make less thy body (hence) and more thy grace,

Leave gourmandising: know the grave doth gape

For thee thrice wider than for other men.

Reply not to me with a fool-borne jest.

Presume not that I am the thing I was,

For heaven doth know (so shall the world perceive)

That I have turn’d away my former self,

So will I those that kept me company.

Falstaff dies of a broken heart. Shakespeare was forced to live with his.

In Sonnet 126 Shakespeare goes on talk about ‘Thy lover’s withering while thy sweet self growest’: Shakespeare, the lover, is withering away.

But Shakespeare then turns poisonous. He claims that Dame Nature, by holding Harry back from the natural process of aging, is doing it simply to show her power over time:

 If nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,

As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back,

She keeps thee to this purpose: that her skill

May time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill.

Shakespeare warns Harry – now insultingly described as a ‘minion’ – to fear this process. Nature can delay death, but not stop it. Time will finally demand that Nature give Harry up to the grave….

Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure:

  She may detain, but not still keep her treasure!

Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,

And her quietus is to render thee…

Shakespeare has told Harry, in Sonnet after Sonnet, that his verse will make him immortal. Now he delights in telling him he must die.

Shakespeare had lost his real son, Hamlet, a decade earlier: now he wants to kill his surrogate son as well.

All this twisted grief wells up to form the harrowing, unendurable, masterpiece, King Lear. It ends with the old King cradling the body of his dead daughter in his arms.

Shakespeare’s grief hardened into revenge. Many of the Sonnets had been Shakespeare’s secret love letters to Harry, known only to ‘private friends’. Now Shakespeare published them, brazenly exposing the most intimate, embarrassing details of his affair with Harry. Harry might have been leaping into the closet, but Shakespeare was bursting out of his.

To accompany the Sonnets he wrote A Lover’s Complaint. Assuming, as he does in All’s Well that Ends Well, the persona of a young maid, Shakespeare attacks the ruthless, psychotic behaviour of Harry, who with his ‘browny locks’ and ‘wat’ry eyes’ caught ‘all passions in his craft of will’ and ‘sexes both enchanted’.

Outwardly Harry might have looked like an angel: inwardly he was the Devil himself.

In a climax of bile, the ‘maid’ names all her lover’s faults…

O, that infected moisture of his eye!

O, that false fire which in his cheek so glowed!

O, that forced thunder from his heart did fly!

O, that sad breath his spongy lungs bestowed!

O, all that borrowed motion seeming owed…

Suddenly there is a glorious change of tack. The maid finally asserts that these very faults –

Would yet again betray the fore-betrayed,

And new pervert a reconcilèd maid.

Shakespeare finally acknowledges the magnificence, the power and the ecstasy of his fifteen year affair with Harry. Despite what has happened, he would willingly go through the whole business again.

Shakespeare is on the way back to life. And it is life itself that will redeem him.

Reconciliation.

Shakespeare calls himself a ‘reconcilèd maid’. Reconciled then, as now, could mean ‘reconciled with Rome’ – a return to Roman Catholicism. The Jesuits were never far away from Shakespeare: Robert Southwell, before his martyrdom, had begged Shakespeare to write religious verses instead of Pagan ones. He even sent Shakespeare a copy of his own poetry to inspire him to do better.

This time the call back to Rome came from nearer home – his first daughter, Sussana, now in her twenties. So committed was her Catholicism she would prefer to pay the equivalent of thousands of pounds in fines rather than attend one Protestant service. Years later, the epitaph on her tombstone states that she was ‘witty above her sex’ and admits that there was ‘something of Shakespeare’ in this: but she herself, like her herbalist husband, was also ‘wise to salvation.’

King Lear holds within itself at least one stupendous, positive, relationship – that of Cordelia with her father.  She has been as stubborn as her father is, and as quick to take offence: but both have the capacity to love.

In the greatest scene in the whole of English drama, possibly of world drama, father and daughter, crushed and battered by those who cannot love, seek blessing from each other:

CORDELIA: How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?

LEAR: You do me wrong to take me out o’th’grave,

Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound

Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like molten lead.

CORDELIA: Sir, do you know me?

LEAR: You are a spirit, I know. When did you die?

Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight?

I am mightily abused. I should ev’n die with pity

To see another thus. I know not what to say:

I will not swear these are my hands: let’s see.

I feel this pin prick. Would I would assured of my condition.

CORDELIA: O look upon me, sir,

And hold your hand in benediction o’re me.

You must not kneel.

LEAR: Pray do not mock me: I am a very foolish fond old man,

Four score and upward, not an hour more, nor less:

And to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Do not laugh at me, for as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child, Cordelia.

CORDELIA:  And so I am! I am!

LEAR: Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not.

If you have poison for me, I will drink it:

I know you do not love me, for your sisters

Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.

You have some cause, they have not.

CORDELIA: No cause, no cause. Will’t please your highness walk?

LEAR: You must bear with me:

Pray you now forget, and forgive.

I am old and foolish.

Shakespeare found spiritual regeneration in his love for Sussana. From this point on his plays brim over with fathers and daughters.

Shakespeare, as we have seen, spent his summers in Stratford-upon-Avon – when London stank and all the young Lords were off a-hunting in the country. But now, free from all obligation to Harry, and soon to become a grandfather, Shakespeare began to make long term investments in Stratford. Investments of another kind were coming to a more immediate fruition in Oxford.

John Davenant, a vintner and broker, a ‘grave person’ who imported wine from Bordeaux, who spoke fluent French and was ‘an admirer and lover of plays and play-makers’ had a beautiful and witty wife, Jennet. But they couldn’t have children together.

Just before the death of Queen Elizabeth, the couple moved to Oxford to run a wine-tavern attached to New College. When Shakespeare was in the area, he would, with the full approval of John, sleep with Jennet.

The result for Shakespeare was a whole surrogate family of boys and girls. One of the boys, Robert, later to become a parson, described how Shakespeare would cover his face with a hundred kisses. Another boy, William, named after Shakespeare, his godfather, was later to become a poet and playwright as well.

Shakespeare, happier in himself, started to write ‘romantic tragedies’ – tragedies in which, the protagonists, though they die, completely fulfil themselves in their deaths. The story of Antony and Cleopatra had long been used as a stick to beat the old Queen Elizabeth for her promiscuity. Now Shakespeare uses it to praise relationships which dare to stray beyond the bounds of convention.

Antony and Cleopatra love each other so much they become each other’s destiny. For them, suicide and death simply open the doors to more rapture. Antony, believing Cleopatra has killed herself, says:

I come my Queen

Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand,

And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze:

Dido, and her Aeneas, shall want troops,

And all the haunt be ours.

          And Cleopatra herself recalls only the best, most generous side of Antony:

His legs bestrid the ocean, his rear’d arm

Crested the world: his voice was propertied

As all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends:

But when he meant to quail and shake the orb

He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,

There was no winter in’t. An autumn was

That grew the more by reaping: his delights

Where dolphin-like, they show’d their back above

The element they liv’d in: in his livery

Walked crowns and crownets: realms and islands were

As plates dropped from his pocket.

In the first of these three talks, I quoted Sonnet 146 in which Shakespeare contrasted his rich, outer appearance with his poor inner state. He resolved to starve his worldliness and feed his soul.  Did he succeed?

He certainly had a go in his Late Plays. Earier in his career he had been involved in two versions of King John – one for Protestant audiences and one for a Catholic.  Each play ends with the assertion that England would be safe as long as it was ‘true to itself’.  Catholics would think it meant one thing and Protestants another.

But Shakespeare was now working towards something quite different.

          In Richard II John of Gaunt describes England:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection, and the hand of war:

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone, set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Shakespeare could only have written this passage after the defeat of the Armada. Englishmen were beginning to acquire pride in their customs, their history and above all their language, which, before Elizabeth came to the throne, they had been ashamed of.

But there was also a growing sense in Shakespeare that England – and especially the English countryside – was inherently divine.

In The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare introduces a rustic sheep-shearing festival – ostensibly a Bohemian one, but as English as can be. Perdita, the old Shepherd’s adopted daughter, dressed as the Goddess of the Feast becomes the Goddess of the Feast as she hands wild flowers to the guests:

Now my fair’st friend

I would I had some flowers of the spring, that might

Become your time of day; and yours, and yours,

That wear upon your virgin-branches yet

Your maidenheads growing: O Proserpina,

For flowers now that (frighted) thou let’st fall

From Dis’s wagon! Daffodils

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets, (dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes

Or Cytherea’s breath); pale primroses,

That die unmarried, ere they can behold

Bright Phoebus in his strength (a malady

Most incident to maids); bold oxslips and

The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,

(The flower-de-luce being one). O these I lack

To make you garlands of; and my sweet friend,

To strew him o’er and o’er! Come take your flowers:

Methinks I play as I have seen them do

In Whitsun pastorals: sure this robe of mine

Does change my disposition.

The English countryside itself also transfigures Postumus in Cymbeline. He has been banished to Rome by the British King, but then returns as part of an invading Italian army.  He finds himself unable to wound his native land. He swaps his fancy Italianate clothes for the garb of an English peasant, prepared, if need be, to die for Britain

Let me make men know

More valour in me, than my habits show.

Gods, put the strength o’th’Leonati in me:

To shame the guise of the world, I will begin,

The fashion less without, and more within.

‘Less without and more within’ is a paraphrase of the ‘Within be fed, without be rich no more’ of Sonnet 146. Shakespeare, had come to realise, like Postumus, he was an Englishman first, and a Roman second.

Not that Shakespeare wanted to break with the Vatican: we know he ‘died a Papist’. But he was pursuing his own, English brand of Catholicism – as Henry VIII had done and, if the truth be known, his daughter Elizabeth as well.

At the end of Cymbeline the Ancient Britons decide to pay their tribute to Rome. But they pay because they want to pay – not because they have to. King James wanted ecumenical links with the Pope, but on Britain’s own terms. As King Cymbeline says at the end of the play:

Laud we the gods,

And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils

From our blest altars. Publish we this peace

To all our subjects. Set we forward: Let

A Roman and a British ensign wave

Friendly together: so through Lud’s town march

And in the Temple of great Jupiter

Our peace we ratify: seal it with feasts.

Set on there: never was a war did cease

(Ere bloody hands were washèd) with such a peace.

In these Last Plays Shakespeare works back towards the idea of a God. But he is a very remote God who only intervenes in human affairs with great reluctance. He much prefers men and women to work things out for themselves.

In The Winter’s Tale Leontes accuses his wife Hermione of adultery: and she appears to die of shock. It is his servant, the old Paulina, who supervises his sixteen year penance – far worse than any priest would ever impose:

But, O thou tyrant!

Do not repent these things, for they are heavier

Than all thy woes can stir: therefore betake thee

To nothing but despair. A thousand knees

Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,

Upon a barren mountain, and still winter

In storm perpetual could not move the gods

To look that way thou wert.

In the play a great artist sculpts a statue of Hermione so life-like that Leontes longs to kiss it. Paulina, insisting that the King ‘awake his faith’, brings the statue, like a miraculous Madonna, to life.  

But it’s not a Madonna. It’s not even a work of art. It is Leontes’s wife, Hermione, whom Paulina has hidden till the King’s repentance is complete.

The most precious thing we have, Shakespeare is saying, is not art. It is not even religion.  It is life itself.

When Prospero the magician quits the magic island in The Tempest, it represents Shakespeare’s desire to quit the stage. He yearns to give up the corroding powers of the director to enter humbly the day to day life of his boyhood town.

The move was not entirely successful: old theatre egos are hard to crack. Shakespeare’s war with his wife and his feisty second daughter, Judith rumbled into his graceless will which attempts to direct life from beyond the grave. And when nearly every councillor, man, woman and child in Stratford fought for the poor against the enclosures of the common land, Shakespeare sided with the rich.  After all, it was the rich who had created him.

Even ‘sided’ is too strong a word. He really did not take a position: but perhaps standing a little aside from life is the requisite of genius.

He knew he was lacking as man. He knew his art was greater than he would ever be. He knew he must forgive. And, much harder, knew he must be forgiven.

But in the epilogue to The Tempest Shakespeare openly admits all this. And his vulnerability, I believe, makes us love him all the more:

Now my charms are all ore thrown

And what strength I have’s mine own

Which is most faint: now ‘tis true

I must be here confined by you,

Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

Since I have my Dukedom got

And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell,

In this bare island, by your spell,

But release me from my bands

With the help of your good hands:

Gentle breath of yours, my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails

Which was to please. Now I want

Spirits to enforce: art to enchant,

And my ending is despair

Unless I be relieved by prayer

Which pierces so, that it assaults

Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon’d be,

Let your Indulgence set me free…..

(It’s best to read The Shakespeare Code next.)