The Shakespeare Code

Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke lived at Wilton in Wiltshire, thirty miles away from the Countess of Southampton at Titchfield.

Like all beautiful talented women, she had been banned from Queen Elizabeth’s court. So she set up her own rival version, in friendly competition with the Countess of Southampton.

With musicians, poets and actors (often shared with Titchfield) on the payroll, she staged tournaments and entertainments to honour the memory of her dead soldier-brother, Sir Philip Sidney.

And to annoy the Queen.

Elizabeth had opposed Sidney’s imperialistic, expansionist foreign policy and despised his cult of chivalry. In an act of bravado, he had thrown off his leg armour at the Battle of Zutphen (1586) because the much older Marshall of the Camp was only lightly armed. Sidney was immediately shot in the thigh.

According to John Aubrey, he later died on the campaign while making love to his wife.

Elizabeth had kept Sidney under virtual house arrest at Wilton where he ‘followed the arts’ because he had nothing else to do. He was in love with the sister of the Earl of Essex, the beautiful Penelope Rich, a married woman who was, in private performance, to play many of Shakespeare’s heroines. By her life, and her all-consuming love for Lord Mountjoy, she was also to inspire Shakespeare to create the part of Cleopatra in his great, ‘romantic tragedy’ Antony and Cleopatra. 

Sidney wrote the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella about her: Stella is the ‘star’ and he is Astrophil the  ‘lover of the star’.  Sidney plays plays on her married name ‘rich’: in Canto 37 he writes:

‘Though most rich in these and every part

Hast no misfortune but that Rich she is.’

Shakespeare does the same thing in Love’s Labour’s Lost when he has the Princess, originally played by Penelope,  say in the last scene of the play:

Sweet hearts, we shall be rich ere we depart… 

Shakespeare plays on the word ‘rich’ five times more before the play ends.

With the help of his sister, Sidney wrote his Arcadia, in which a handsome young knight dresses up as a woman to gain access to a guarded princess. The knight’s male friend falls madly in love with him, followed by the Princess’s own father!

Scenes from the poem were acted out by Sidney and the Countess at Wilton and the young, impressionable, Henry Wriothseley, third Earl of Southampton, was clearly present. He cultivated his long hair so that he could look as beautiful as Sir Philip in drag. Shakespeare at one point even addresses the third Earl as ‘the master-mistress’ of his ‘passion’. 

The Third Earl of Southampton in drag?

The Countess of Pembroke had challenged Elizabeth by emerging from mourning for her brother 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 (Robert Cecil) and The Fox (Walter Raleigh) and even, according to  Aubrey, her brother Philip, amongst her lovers, went into full, hypocritical attack.

She translated Robert Garnier’s play Antonius which showed how Cleopatra’s (i.e. Elizabeth’s)  ‘irregular passions in forsaking Empire to follow sensuality’  had brought ruin and civil war to the State.

This was a case of the pot calling the kettle: according to Aubrey the Countess 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 her eye.

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, in 1590, Elizabeth withdrew Holinshed’s history Chronicles, on the grounds that they were ‘fondly set out’ (she wanted no-one to judge her reign by comparing it to others) the Countess of Pembroke commissioned Samuel Daniel (a poet in her employ) to write a verse version of ‘The Civil Wars’,  now known as ‘The Wars of the Roses’.  She turned to her neighbour, ‘the man Shakespeare’ as she was later to call him, to provide a theatrical version of the same events.

She wanted to warn people of the chaos that would ensue if Elizabeth did not name a successor. She formed a company of actors to disseminate these ideas, employing her estranged husband’s name and money. (The Earl of Pembroke’s Men)

This was a huge undertaking. Grammar-schoolboy Shakespeare needed help.  He paid University Men, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe and George Peele, all desperate for the cash, to come down to Titchfield to help him. And to lodge with Mr. Apis Lapis, and his three maids, at Posbrook Farm. (See The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis. )

The Countess of Pembroke would have approved of Mr. Apis Lapis. Both were addicted, amongst other things, to alchemy.

(It’s best now to read Queen Elizabeth, incest and sadism. )