The Shakespeare Code

(It’s best to read The Introduction and Parts 1. 2. and 3. first.)

Shakespeare dedicated the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and Lucrece to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. The first was published in September, 1593 and the second in 1594.

In Willobie his Avisa  (as we have seen) ‘H.W.’ is described as Italo-Hispalensis – and ‘H.W.’ himself recalls seeing beautiful women ‘in France and Flanders and in Spain’.

Harry Southampton’s maternal grandfather, Lord Montague, (one of the leading Catholics in England) had been King Philip II of Spain’s Master of Horse when, married to Bloody Mary Tudor, Philip had been King of England. The Montague family were thus on intimate terms with the Spanish monarch.

The Shakespeare Code will argue that Southampton, who had been ‘groomed’ by the Vatican since boyhood, went to Madrid to pay secret respects to fellow Catholic and family friend, King Philip of Spain.

EXHIBIT (7). Venus and Adonis.

In 1554, when he was King of England, Philip commissioned Titian to paint Venus and Adonis, a work which was badly damaged on the sea voyage to London.

By 1593, the painting was in Madrid, along with another of Philip’s commissions from Titian, The Rape of Lucrece.

The Shakespeare Code will suggest that Shakespeare, accompanying his patron, Southampton, saw the two paintings at Philip’s Court. They inspired Shakespeare to write the two poems.

Richard Field, the publisher, entered Venus and Adonis at the Stationers’ Register on 18 April, 1593. This was often a device to ‘copyright’ an idea and stop any other writer from using it. The actual text of the poem was presented to the Stationers by John Harrison on 25^th June, 1594 (though letters from William Renoldes prove that the printed book was in circulation by September, 1593).

But if Shakespeare was in Madrid around March/April of 1593, how could he have his idea entered in the Register?

It was exactly at this time that the flamboyant homosexual Spaniard Antonio Pérez, former secretary to King Philip of Spain and now spy for the Earl of Essex, arrived in England from the Continent.  He lodged at Essex House, where he was encouraged to celebrate the Latin Mass, and was on intimate terms with the Essex and Southampton entourages. Shakespeare lampooned him as the fantastical Spaniard Don Armado in his later (1599) version of Love’s Labour’s Lost. (Both Perez and Armado were nick-named ‘The Oracle’)

As part of Essex’s growing spy ring, Perez would have met with Southampton, Shakespeare and Nashe on the continent. The Shakespeare Code argues that Shakespeare gave Perez the blocking order on Venus and Adonis to give to Richard Field when he arrived in London. Southampton, as patron, had clearly given the go-ahead to the project. So there was money to be made for writer and publisher.

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 Titian’s painting of the Venus and Adonis story (which is still in Madrid) shows Venus throwing her arms round a hesitant Adonis as the sun comes up…

 This is exactly the way Shakespeare’s poem opens:

‘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’.

Venus has her back to us (as though we ourselves, the audience, are implicated in her feelings for Adonis) and the poem is largely from Venus’s standpoint. A contemporary, William Renoldes, took Venus to be a portrait of Queen Elizabeth and certainly, as she rugby-tackles Adonis to he ground, Elizabeth’s shameless pursuit of Essex would have come to mind.

 But Shakespeare’s great gift is empathy: Elizabeth’s passion for Essex becomes mixed with Shakespeare’s for Southampton.

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Shakespeare drops coded hints that his poem has been inspired by a painting. Venus insults the passionless Adonis as a ‘lifeless picture’ and as ‘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.’

EXHIBIT (8): Lucrece.

Shakespeare’s poem Lucrece has been criticised for being ‘static’; but this is Shakespeare’s intention. He wants to evoke, in words, Titian’s painting Tarquin and Lucretia, which depicts the famous rape.

Titian painted three versions around 1570; but the one now housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (provenance unknown) corresponds to the poem exactly.

Shakespeare writes:

‘Without the bed her [Lucrece’s] other fair hand was

On the green coverlet whose perfect white

Show’d like an April daisy on the grass….’

In the Fitzwilliam version, Lucretia has an identical green coverlet on the bed.

Shakespeare also refers to Tarquin’s  scarlet lust.

In the Fitzwilliam version, Tarquin is wearing scarlet hose.

Tarquin in the poem, as in the Fitzwilliam painting, holds his knife ‘like a falcon tow’ring in the skies’ over Lucretia and, as also in the Fitzwilliam version, ‘her pity-pleading eyes are sadly fixed/In the remorseless wrinkles of his face.’

There are two other versionsof Tarquin and Lucretia by Titian.

One is in Bordeaux and shows Tarquin threatening Lucretia with his knife pointing upwards while Lucretia looks away….

The other is in Vienna, and though it shows Tarquin threatening Lucretia with a raised knife, Lucretia is looking at the knife rather than his face…

The Shakespeare Code argues that the Fitzwilliam ‘Tarquin and Lucretia’ is the one which originally hung at King Philip’s Court at Madrid – and which Shakespeare saw and described in verse.

Thomas Nashe also saw the Titian painting. When he describes a rape in The Unfortunate Traveller he says:

Therewith he flew upon her and threatened her with his sword…..and used his knee as an iron ram to beat ope the two lead gates of her chastity…

Just as Tarquin does to Lucrece.

(It’s best to read Part 5. next.)