The Shakespeare Code

(Note: It is best to read ‘Irregular Passions’: The Countess of Pembroke   before this post)

Between bouts of drinking and debauchery at Titchfield, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene and George Peele (co-ordinated by William Shakespeare) managed to produce The true Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the death of good King Henry VI with the Whole Contention between the Two Houses, Lancaster and York .

 This was to end up as Henry VI Parts Two and Three. (Part One was written later.)

The plays are a warning of what would happen to England again if Queen Elizabeth did not nominate a successor: bloody Civil War.

They were commissioned by the Countess of Pembroke and the Countess of Southampton, both anxious to safeguard their dynastic line. (By 1590 it was thought that Queen Elizabeth, who had always suffered from ‘secret’ ill-health, would soon be dead).

In the play Queen Margaret (with her ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’  who has ‘stolen the breech from Lancaster’) orders her husband, King Henry VI, to leave the field of battle because she can conduct the war more successfully without him.

This was  a history lesson. The Countess of Pembroke saw herself as a schoolmistress and Wilton House a ‘school’…

Wilton House

It is also is a coded attack on Queen Elizabeth. She had tried to seize command of the Armada campaign from her generals, but skimping on gunpowder and ammunition, had nearly ruined it. In the play Richard, the Duke of York says:

A woman’s general, what should you fear?

Queen Margaret, in the play, dips her handkerchief in the blood of the son of Richard the Duke of York, presents it to the Duke, then places a paper crown on his head. York exclaims:

How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex

To triumph like an Amazonian trull

Upon his woes whom fortune captivates.’   

Margaret’s sadism is a coded critique of Queen Elizabeth’s sadism.

Elizabeth was rumoured to enjoy an erotic relationship with her chief inquisitor, Richard Topcliffe, who, between kissing her breasts and fondling her stomach, claimed to have given her detailed descriptions of how he tortured his victims.

In return Elizabeth gave him a pair of silk drawers.

The Duke of York also attacks Queen Margaret’s legitimacy by saying:

I would assay, proud Queen to make thee blush;

To tell thee of whence thou art, from whom derived,

’Twere shame enough to shame thee…’

This is also an attack upon Elizabeth. Many of her subjects, especially the Roman Catholics, thought Elizabeth was a bastard because her father, Henry VIII was never properly divorced from Catherine of Aragon….

Catherine of Aragon

The Jesuits, however made it worse. They put it about that Anne Boleyn was King Henry VIII’s illegitimate daughter!

This incestuous union had initiated the rule of Satan in England. All of Henry’s children would die young, or, if they survived, have no children themselves.

Shakespeare was to touch on this idea again in Pericles in which a king’s incestuous relationship with his daughter brings ruin on his country.

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Dame Eleanor, who in The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York tries to upstage Queen Margaret, is a satire on Lettice Knollys, the Queen’s pushy, red-headed ‘cousin’, mother of the second Earl of Essex and second wife to Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester.

In the play, Queen Margaret drops her fan, Dame Eleanor goes to pick it up and the Queen strikes her – an exact re-enactment of what Elizabeth had done to Lettice.

When Queen Elizabeth found out that Lettice had married her lover, the Earl of Leicester, she banished her, in perpetuity, from the court. Lettice took her revenge by parading round London with her entire entourage, posing as the Queen. She even plotted to set up a rival court with her husband, Leicester, across the Channel in the Lowlands.

The ruthless Warwick in the play, ‘The rampant bear chained to the ragged staff’ (who even refers to himself as ‘the bear’) is Leicester himself, then safely dead. ‘The Bear and Ragged Staff’, as every member of the audience would have known, had been part of his coat of arms.

To this day The Bear and Staff  is the name of a pub in Leicester Square in London.

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Greene soon tired of playing second fiddle to Shakespeare the ‘grammarian’ (grammar school boy) and left Titchfield for London. After a ‘banquet’ of Rhenish wine and pickled herrings with Nashe and Beeston, Greene fell sick and died, a few months later, in utter penury.

 This gave Nashe the opportunity of attacking Shakespeare under Greene’s name. He called Shakespeare an ‘upstart crow beautified with our feathers’ i.e. a plagiarist. Mis-quoting from The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York he also described Shakespeare as having ‘a tiger’s heart, wrapped in a player’s hide’.

For this attack to hit home – which it did – the original line (‘O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’) cannot have been written by Shakespeare.

From then on, Nashe continued to hint at his own hand in Shakespeare’s plays by dropping phrases from them into his own work.

The Shakespeare Code will catalogue many of these phrases.

Peele left Titchfield as well, though poverty forced him to return two years later to work on Titus Andronicus – a plot idea that Shakespeare was to bring back from Rome in 1593. (See: Shakespeare in Italy)

Nashe, however, stayed in Titchfield and was to collaborate with Shakespeare (as he had done with Christopher Marlowe and was to do with Ben Jonson) off and on till his death in 1601.

Nashe wanted to replace Shakespeare in the affection (and pay) of the Southampton family. He took every opportunity to attack Shakespeare (in code, of course) for his class, creepiness, treachery and wild, ruthless ambition.

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The Shakespeare Code believes The True Tragedy and other early Shakespeare plays were first performed in the halls and grounds of Titchfield andWilton because:

1. With their courts, processions and armies, they would benefit from huge casts. Servants and workers on the estates could be co-opted as extras. (Indeed, in real life, they had been drafted as real soldiers for the Armada campaign).

2. They all have wonderful parts for women. Aristocratic women were directly on hand, bored with country life and eager to perform.

3. Battle scenes need to be enacted. Both estates had stables full of horses and armouries full of weapons.  Place House at Titchfield was also fortified, so wall-scaling, and the exploding of maroons, was perfectly in order. (As Kevin Fraser demonstrated brilliantly when The Titchfield Festival Theatre performed at the Abbey).

But, most important:

4. Both estates teemed with frustrated young, male aristocrats, eager to win their spurs in battle. Queen Elizabeth, hating warfare, had forbidden them to fight in Europe: so they fought, in play, in Hampshire and Wiltshire instead. They had acted, as undergraduates, at their colleges at Oxford and Cambridge: now they acted at home.

The performances of plays about ‘good King Henry VI’ would have been particularly poignant at Titchfield. The King had married Margaret at Titchfield Abbey and spent his honeymoon there.  He had endowed the town with a Corpus Christi Fair and a grammar school, where, The Shakespeare Code believes, Shakespeare worked as ‘a schoolmaster in the country’. (See:The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis. )

After the initial performances of the plays, the professional players involved would adapt the plays to try to make them ‘commercial’ (many touring companies ‘broke’ i.e. went bust) put talented boys in the women’s parts and hit the road as ‘The Earl of Pembroke’s Men’…