The Shakespeare Code

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

 On 7 February, 1601, on the eve of their Rebellion against Queen Elizabeth, the followers of the Earls of Essex and Southampton paid for a revival of William Shakespeare’s politically explosive The Life and Death of King Richard II at the Globe Theatre.

At the height of the Rebellion, the Earl of Southampton quoted from the play itself. He called Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Robert Cecil –

caterpillars

 – exactly the word Bolingbroke uses in Richard II to describe his enemies, Bushy and Bagott.

Queen Elizabeth was well aware that the play was a satire on herself. Later on that year (1601) she said to the old scholar, William Lambarde:

I am Richard II, know ye not that?

Even Lambarde,  a gentle, unambitious antiquarian, described Shakespeare as ‘wicked’ and ‘unkind’.

Shakespeare, now hated by the Queen and those still  loyal to her, had to get out of town….

(The Code will cover this period in a later post ‘Shakespeare in Scotland and Oxford’)

On the death of Elizabeth, Shakespeare rushed back to London to greet his patron and lover, the Earl of Southampton, in the Tower. The Shakespeare Code believes Shakespeare saw the ‘wooing portrait’ in Southampton’s cell….

He dashed off two Sonnets to accompany the painting on its horse-back journey to King James in Scotland.  James was an openly bisexual man for whom Shakespeare had written and performed.

The two Sonnets are numbers 67 and 68 – the only Sonnets in which the Earl of Southampton is referred to in the third person!

The first Sonnet begins by begging James for Southampton’s release from prison:

Ah wherefore with infection should he live

And with his presence grace impiety,

That sin by him advantage should achieve,

And lace itself with his society?

The ‘infection’ Shakespeare writes about is:

1. The disease that Southampton is recovering from.
2. The unhygienic conditions of the Tower.
3. The moral depravity of the other ‘impious’ prisoners in the Tower.

Southampton, by contrast to them, enjoys the ‘grace’ of God – that is why he is pictured with a Bible adorned with his family coat of arms. The cross on the crest, in this positioning, becomes a Christian cross as well.

The implication is that Southampton, in God’s eyes, is without sin and so should be released from his sentence. His Rebellion, to ensure James’s succession, was inspired by God.

Shakespeare describes the sin surrounding Southampton in the Tower as ‘lacing’ itself with his ‘society’. This draws attention to the black cross-lacing in Southampton’s gloves, which takes the form of a St. Andrew’s Cross, the symbol of Scotland.

The artist  has positioned the St. Andrew’s cross-lacing strategically close to the ‘George’s’ Cross on the cover of Southampton’s Bible.

The unification of Scotland and England had been the ambition  of James’s Roman Catholic mother, Mary Queen of Scots.

It was now the ambition of James himself.

Sonnet 67 continues:

Why should false painting imitate his cheek

And steal dead feeling of his living hue?

Why should poor beauty indirectly seek

Roses of shadow since his Rose is true?

‘False painting’ refers to:

1. The use of cosmetics to make women (and some men!) more beautiful than they really are.
2. The ‘wooing portrait’ of Southampton itself which can never hope to match Southampton’s true beauty.

The beauty of the painting can only be a ‘shadow rose’. Southampton is the ‘true rose’.

Shakespeare here is punning on the ‘Wriothesley’ family name. ‘Rosely’, as we know from the Titchfield Parish Register, was the grandiose way the aristocratic branch of the family pronounced its name (while the less aristocratic settled for ‘Risley’!)

The phrase His Rose is true means:

1. Southampton is morally trustworthy and loyal to James.

2. Southampton’s cheek has a natural blush. It is not produced artificially by cosmetics.

Sonnet 67 continues:

Why should he live, now nature bankrupt is,

Beggar’d of blood to blush through lively veins,

For she hath no exchequer now but his,

And, proud of many, lives upon his gains?

Nature is ‘beggar’d of blood’ – robbed of blood – for a very good, literal reason. Essex has been beheaded. Nature’s supply of blood (or, rather, ‘noble’ blood) has dried up.

But  ‘blood’ is often associated with ‘semen’ in Shakespeare’s mind. So is ‘money’.  (See the earlier posting The Shakespeare Code)

When Shakespeare describes Nature as ‘bankrupt’, he is suggesting She has no life-force. And when Shakespeare describes Southampton as Nature’s only remaining ‘exchequer’ he is suggesting, now Essex is dead, Southampton is the only source of Dame Nature’s vitality.

Southampton has made ‘gains’ by not expending  his semen.  (Well, not with women anyway. He has been locked up in prison! )

Shakespeare uses the same idea in the famous Sonnet 94 when he writes that chaste young men, by not engaging in sexual activities, ‘harbour nature’s riches from expense’. They preserve their semen which consequently becomes more powerful.

(This idea is very close to the Ancient Chinese idea that too much sexual activity depletes the body’s preserves of energy in the kidneys).

So Nature, which adores producing a multiplicity of forms, (‘proud of many’) has survived by living off Southampton’s stored, pent-up energy.

But how can Southampton himself survive if Nature is draining his own life-force?

The answer is that Nature has not utilised this energy: she has simply stored it away in the Tower as an example of what vibrant, bursting, beautiful ‘wealth’ had once existed a long time ago….

O him she stores, to show what wealth she had,

In days long since, before these last so bad…

The implication is that King James himself should snatch this prize (a healthy, virile, beautiful young man) from the clutches of Nature. He should release Southampton from the Tower…

In the second sonnet (68), Shakespeare refers again to the ‘wooing portrait’.  He compares Southampton’s unrouged cheek and natural, cascading hair to a map that points, again, to an earlier, simpler, more innocent age:

Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,

When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,

Before these bastard signs of fair were borne,

Or durst inhabit on a living brow;

Before the golden tresses of the dead,

The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,

To live a second life on second head;

Ere beauty’s dead fleece made another gay.

‘The bastard signs of fair’ is a reference to the growing fashion, led by Queen Elizabeth, for wigs which were often made from hair taken from dead bodies. ‘The Bastard’ was the standard Roman Catholic insult for Elizabeth. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, in Rome’s eyes, had not been properly married to her father, King Henry VIII.

Shakespeare now makes an audacious leap. Southampton’s naturalness has been compared to ‘days long since’ and ‘days outworn’ when beauty ‘lived and died’ as naturally as a flower. The scholarly King James would have thought of classical ‘pagan’ times and the myth of the ‘golden age’.

But Shakespeare suddenly challenges this assumption:

In him those holy antique hours are seen,

Without all ornament, itself and true,

Making no summer of another’s green,

Robbing no old to dress his beauty new

The ‘antique’ hours are ‘holy’ ones, so they cannot be pre-Christian.

THEY ARE PRE-REFORMATION!

Shakespeare presents Southampton as a glorious reminder of the ‘natural’ days of Roman Catholic England, before the artificial doctrines of John Calvin corrupted it and before men and women started to wear make-up and wigs.

At this time many believed that James was a Roman Catholic and James, who needed Catholic support for his succession to the throne of England, did nothing to discourage the assumption.

Shakespeare, like many others, hoped that James would restore the ‘Old Faith’ and lead England back to Rome.

Sonnet 69 concludes:

And him as for a map doth nature store

To show false art what beauty was of yore.

Again, Nature stores Southampton in the Tower – this time like a map, which James is invited to unroll….

The Earl of Southampton was released from the Tower on 9th April, 1603,  a few days after Shakespeare wrote these two Sonnets.  He wrote another Sonnet (107) to celebrate the event:

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,

Can yet the lease of my true love control,

Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.

Shakespeare now admits he was worried that Southampton was ‘doomed’ to die in the Tower – which nearly happened. But, thankfully, Elizabeth herself has died and all the doom-mongers have been proved wrong:

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,

And the sad augurs mock their own presage;

All the worries about the succession have proved groundless and James’s predilection for peace promises a time of certainty and security:

Uncertainties now crown themselves assured,

And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

With the love and favour of the new King, dropping on him like a sexy, soothing, ‘balm’, Southampton looks more beautiful than ever. And there’s something in it for Shakespeare.  By writing this Sonnet he will achieve a victory over death – a triumph denied those without his ability…

And now with drops of this most balmy time

My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,

Since ‘spite of him I’ll live in this poor rhyme,

While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes.

And there’s something in it for Southampton.  Shakespeare, by writing about him, will make him immortal as well. Unlike the talentless, tyrannical ‘Virgin Queen’ who will leave nothing behind her but a decaying tomb…

And thou in this shall find your monument,

When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.

On 16 May, 1603 King James granted Southampton a general pardon for his crimes. On 2 July he created him a Knight of the Garter.

But this euphoria was to be short-lived…

(It’s best to read Part Four now.)