The Shakespeare Code

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

Leicester’s Commonwealth attacks the tyranny of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. It compares him to Julius Caesar and the Tarquin who raped Lucretia.  

It also attacks the naivety of Queen Elizabeth. It compares her to Philip of Macedon who was killed by his lover, Attalus.  

The book also draws parallels between Elizabeth and the former Kings of England who gave too much power to their favourites and their wives – Edward II (to Piers Gaveston) Richard II (to Robert De Vere) and Henry VI (to Queen Margaret).

But, of most importance, it also compares the Earl of Leicester to another King of England, the hunch-backed Richard III.

The Shakespeare Code argues that William Shakespeare, like everyone else in England, had read this Roman Catholic attack on Leicester (The handwriting expert, Charles Hamilton, believes Shakespeare wrote out some pages of the book in manuscript).  Shakespeare drew on material from Leicester’s Commonwealth when he wrote Richard III. 

As well as being a history lesson, the play is a savage satire on the recently deceased Earl of Leicester.

The Queen’s Men’s version of the story praises Henry VII for overcoming the tyranny of Richard III and instigating the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

Shakespeare’s version suggests, that because of her blind love for Leicester, Queen Elizabeth had unleashed her own tyranny on the land – a tyranny that must never be repeated.

Again, the Countesses of Pembroke and Southampton would have been behind the anti-Elizabeth commission. The Countess of Southampton (a committed Roman Catholic who sheltered priests in her London home) hated the memory of Leicester. It was at her own country seat, Place House in Titchfield, that Leicester had encouraged the Duke of Norfolk to marry Mary, Queen of Scots and the Catholic Northern Lords to rebel against the Queen.

The Shakespeare Code argues that the play was first performed as a pageant production in the grounds of Place House. The two opposing tents required by the action could easily be pitched in ‘the Park’  there and  (with stables and armour to hand)  battles staged to spectacular effect.

 The play’s massive cast (over 60 characters, not including ‘Guards, Halbediers, Gentlemen, Lords, Citizens, Attendants and Soldiers’) would be made up of professional actors, aristocratic lords and ladies and members of the Pembroke and Southampton entourages – many of  whom would have trained as real soldiers in preparation for the Armada ‘invasion’. 

The play’s major ‘doubling’ problem – how do you bring on eleven ghosts (including a woman and two children) in the scene just before the battle? – would, with these forces, be a problem no longer. And the play’s length – over three hours of playing – wouldn’t be a problem either.  Feasting, jousting and dancing would have broken up the performance – which might, like Elizabeth’s outdoor progress entertainments, have been given over several days. 

The town of Titchfield itself explains why the ghost of King Henry VI (not seen in the play) appears at the end and why, at the beginning, Queen Anne is following King Henry’s body and not, as in the Sir Laurence Olivier film version, her husband Prince Edward.  

‘Good’ King Henry (see painting below) was a local hero who had married at Titchfield Abbey and endowed the town with a school and a fair. He was much more important to a local Titchfield audience than his son, Prince Edward.

Indeed, The True Tragedy of Richard III might have been performed in the context of King Henry’s fair itself – as, The Shakespeare Code argues – Love’s Labour’s Lost was at Whitsun in 1592.

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The similarities between Richard III and the Earl of Leicester as presented in Leicester’s Commonwealth are so numerous it will be best to table them.

1. Both men want to be King of England.

2. Both men suffer from mind-poisoning physical disabilities. Richard has a withered arm and Leicester ‘a broken belly on both sides of his bowels whereby misery and putrefaction is threatened to him daily’.

3. Both men kill anyone who gets in the way. Richard kills Henry VI, Prince Edward, Hastings, Buckingham, the Princes in the Tower, Anne, Clarence, Rivers, Grey and Vaughan. Leicester kills the first Earl of Essex, Cardinal Chatilian, Amy Robsart, the Earl of Sheffield, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the Earl of Sussex, Lady Lennox and Salvator. Leicester also tried to kill Simier, the Dauphin’s equerry.

4. Both men kill the husbands of wives they want to marry. Richard kills Lady Anne’s husband, Edward Prince of Wales and Leicester poisons Lettice Knollys’s husband, Sir Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex.

Laurence Olivieer as Richard and Vivien Leigh as Lady Anne

5. Both men kill their own wives to marry other women. Richard kills Anne to marry Elizabeth and Leicester kills Amy Robsart to be free to marry Queen Elizabeth.

6. Both men are involved in the murder of royal children. Richard kills the Princes in the Tower and the young Leicester offers his services to Princess Mary Tudor sixteen days before his father murders the boy King Edward.

7.  Both men use black magic.  Queen Anne describes Richard as a ‘fiend’ conjured up by ‘a black magician’ and Leicester keeps conjurers like John Dee in his entourage.

8. Both men are likened to animals, Richard to ‘an elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog’ and Leicester to ‘a bear with a paunch’. (The compositor of the first printing of the play even made a ‘Freudian’ slip. He set up ‘The Bear had raste his helm’ when he should have set up ‘The Boar had raste his helm’. This mistake went unnoticed for five more editions!

9. Both men overthrow the authority of the English Archbishops and, most importantly…

10. Both men assume, in the midst of their atrocities, an air of religious piety.

King Richard says:

But then I sigh, and with a piece of scripture,

Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:

And thus I clothe my native villainy

With odd ends stol’n forth of Holy Writ.’

Leicester, who was never heard to utter a private prayer in his life, appointed himself Captain General of the Puritan movement in England.

 This last point, The Shakespeare Code believes, proves that Shakespeare’s Richard III was an attack on Leicester. The historical King Richard III never pretended to be a holy man. That was Leicester’s ploy alone – which Shakespeare, in his play, lampoons.

(It’s best to read Part Four now.)