The Shakespeare Code

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

At the end of William Shakespeare’s Richard III the ghosts of the eleven people the King has murdered appear to him in a dream. They tell him to ‘despair and die’  nine times.

Thomas Nashe, in his 1592 pamphlet, Pierce Pennilesse: his Supplication to the Divell, writes:

Why is’t damnation to despair and die

When life is my true happiness disease?

The Shakespeare Code argues that Nashe collaborated with Shakespeare at Titchfield (see: The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis).  He put phrases from the plays into his own writing to hint at his hand in Shakespeare’s work. In the opening paragraph of Pierce Pennilesse he writes: ‘for all my labours turned to loss’. 

Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Code argues, was another Titchfield entertainment on which Nashe worked with Shakespeare.

Later on in the pamphlet, Nashe defends the theatre as a good alternative to ‘gaming, following of harlots’ or ‘drinking’ and describes how, in plays:

all cosenages, all cunning drifts over-gilded with outward holiness, all stratagems of war, all the cankerworms that breed on the rust of peace, are most lively anatomised: they show the ill-success of treason, the fall of hasty climbers, the wretched end of usurpers, the misery of civil dissension, and how just God is evermore in punishing of murder…they [plays] are sour pills of reprehension, wrapped up in sweet words…

This is a blow by blow account of Shakespeare’s The True Tragedy of Richard III.

It describes how King Richard disguises his villainy by pretending to be religious –‘over-gilding’ his ‘cunning drifts’ with ‘outward holiness’.

Just like the lately deceased Earl of Leicester.

And unlike the historical King Richard III who never pretended to be holy.

Nashe continues this coded attack on Leicester with his tale of  ‘The Usurper Bear’:

The Bear, on a time, being chief Burgomaster of all the beasts under the Lion, gan think with himself how he might surfeit in pleasure, or best husband his authority to enlarge his delight and contentment. With that he began to pry and to smell through every corner of the forest for prey, to have a thousand imaginations with himself what dainty morsel he was master of, and yet had not tasted: whole herds of sheep he had devoured and was not satisfied; fat oxen, heifers, swine, calves and young kids, were his ordinary viands: he longed for horse-flesh and went presently to a meadow…

Every Elizabethan reader would know that  ‘the Bear’ was Leicester and ‘the Lion’  was Queen Elizabeth.

To protect himself, Nashe claimed he had no particular individuals in mind.  The Queen was still alive, even if Leicester wasn’t, and she had once chopped off a writer’s hand for libel. However, Nashe writes:

Now a man may not talk of a dog, but it is surmised he aims at the man who giveth the dog in his crest…

Leicester famously had a bear in his crest. So, far from denying that ‘The Bear’ is a portrait of Leicester, Nashe is, in reality, pushing his point home.

Earl of Leicester's Coat of Arms

In Nashe’s story ( which is a variant on Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ story)  the Bear, seeking total supremacy, wants to eat a ‘fat Camel…a huge beast and well shod’ who displays ‘gentleness’ and ‘prowess’ has been fed in ‘plentiful pasture’.

‘The Camel’ was Thomas Howard, 4^th Earl of Norfolk, the richest man in England….

Far from showing the required ‘homage’ to the Bear, the Camel gives him a kick on the forehead with his hind legs.

[Norfolk and Leicester exchanged blows after a tennis match in 1565]

 So the Bear enlists the help of the Ape, who abhorred the Camel ‘by nature because he [the Camel] overlooked him so Lordly, and was by so many degrees greater than he was’

‘The Ape’ is the diminutive, round-shouldered Sir Robert Cecil, whose grandfather had been a tavern-keeper….

The Ape advises the Bear to dig a pit to trap ‘the goodly’ Camel and the Bear ends up ‘gorged’ with the Camel’s ‘blood’.

[‘The pit’ is the trap Leicester set up for Norfolk. He encouraged him to marry Mary Queen of Scots, hoping it would lead, as it did, to Norfolk’s beheading.]

Next the hungry Bear spies a herd of deer ‘a-ranging’ in a grove and singles out ‘one of the fairest in the company’ with whom to ‘close up his stomach instead of cheese’.

The ‘herd of deer’ are the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting, of which the ‘fairest’ was, famously, the Queen’s cousin, Lettice Knollys….

However, the Bear cannot fool or flatter the jolly Forrester and and youthful Lord of the Lawnds [glades] in charge of the deer – unlike the Lion [Elizabeth] ‘whose eyes he could blind as he list’).

‘The jolly Forrester’ is the dashing, courageous Sir Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex and Lord Lieutenant of County Stafford, who wooed and won Lettice’s hand in marriage….

The Bear decides ‘to poison the stream’ where the Forrester is ‘wonted to drink’. So, ‘all faint and malcontent (as prophesying his near approaching mishap by his languishing)’ the Forrester ‘with a lazy wallowing pace, strayed aside from the rest of his fellowship, and betook him all carelessly to the corrupted fountain that was prepared for his funeral’.

[Leicester had Essex sent to Ireland as Earl Marshall so he could pursue his affair with his wife, Lettice. He then poisoned him at Dublin Castle. Essex was ill for a month before he died in 1576].

The Bear finally settles for a diet of honey [the tax on imported sweet wines] and gets the Fox to help him. 

The Fox’ is the cunning and ambitious Sir Walter Raleigh….

The Ape and the Ape’s father, the old Chameleon, also assist. 

[The old Chameleon’ is the adroit wind-bag and long-time survivor, Lord Burghley…

The three men try to destroy the English wine-producing business so that everyone will have to import it and pay tax. But the many eyed Lynceus learns of the plot and destroys it

”Lynceus’, the eagle-eyed Argonaut, is subtle spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham…

The Bear finally dies of pure anger, being out run-by a ‘fat hind’, [The aging Lettice again, who was pursuing an affair with a man half her age..]

Shakespeare gets close to making his own ‘bear jokes’ in Richard III itself.  The young Duke of York says to Richard:

‘You mean to bear me, not to bear with me

Uncle, my brother mocks both you and me:

Because that I am little like an ape,

He thinks that you should bear me on your shoulders’

But Shakespeare is too much of an artist to write a work that is pure propaganda. He shows Richard to be a brave and gallant commander of his men at the Battle of Bosworth, much more ‘himself’ in war than he ever was in peace. Far from flying the field like the historical Richard, Shakespeare’s Richard stands his ground. 

He even goes down with truly Don Giovanni-like defiance:

‘March on! Join bravely. Let us to it pell-mell

If not to Heaven then hand in hand to Hell’.

Strangely, the Queen’s Men’s version of the play (which is strongly pro-Elizabeth) gives the King this same courageness at the end….

(It’s best to read Part Five next.)