The Shakespeare Code

Between Midnight on Friday, 10th June (British Summer Time) and dawn on 11th, 2011, The Shakespeare Code received its 3,000th View!!! 

The Code hopes this was from the Americas….

The entire Code Team (including Trixie the Cat) would like to thank the INTELLECTUALLY CURIOUS ands OPEN-MINDED Brothers and Sisters of the Code, from all over the world, who have made this possible.

The Code is also delighted to have received the following message from the dashing scholar and actor (and Roll of Honour Inductee) Simon Callow….

Bravo! Stuardo!!

APPOINTMENT OF THE FIRST ‘FELLOW OF THE CODE’

As Brothers and Sisters of The Code will know, it has always been the sworn intention of The Code to create, on its 3,000th view, the first:

FELLOW OF THE CODE

A Luminary was approached by an Agent of the Code in conditions of the utmost secrecy.

 The Fellowship was offered.

The Fellowship was accepted.

And The Fellow is…

Janet St. John-Austen.

(It is an entirely happy coincidence that The Code is bestowing its Honour on the same day Her Majesty the Queen is bestowing hers…)

Miss St. John-Austen is now entitled to use the designated letters F.S.C. after her name (Fellow of the Shakespeare Code). 

Note: A secret ‘Fellows’ Handshake’ will be inaugurated as soon as another Fellow is appointed. That will be when the next thousandth milestone has been reached.

Miss St. John-Austen’s reaction to being offered the Fellowship was:

It’s awesome! I’m speechless! My mind goes immediately to appropriate headgear for such an honour…

Here is an account, in her own words, of Miss St. John-Austen’s life…

 Her earliest memories are of air raid shelters: sleeping in a Morrison and hiding in an Anderson.

 Childhood influences were Bach, the Church of England, The Goon Show and H-H-Hancock’s Half Hour.

 The rest of her life has been far from sheltered.  During and after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution she visited China many times and became something of a bore by batting on about catties per mou. 

Chairman Mao

At the same time, she began to bore excessively on the Middle East & North Africa (fromIraq in the East to Mauritania in the west, she’s been there).  Sadly for friends and acquaintances her knowledge is extensive.

 Her passion in life is the utterly sublime and divinely exquisite voice of the counter-tenor James Bowman, whom she first saw suffused in a gold-lamé leotard, bare chest bedecked with a garland and a ruby glinting from his navel. Her life has never been the same since.

James Bowman as Oberon in Benjamin Britten's masterly 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.

 In her dotage, she has become addicted to The Shakespeare Code, the wit and wisdom of which saves her from going totally bonkers.  Well, that and the odd glass or two of fizz administered at frequent intervals.

 Born indolent and devoid of ambition, her greatest success is to have achieved absolutely nothing.

 Rarely seen without a hat, she is severely domestically challenged.

 Trixie the Cat says….

Well done Janet! Everyone at The Code thinks you really deserve your Fellowship. You gave us your full support when The Code was a mere handful of people – when all we had was our dreams…

Your intellectual vigour is exactly what the world needs – but most of all, it needs your bravery, honesty, fun and sense of the absurd.

Janet, we all love you at The Code….

 A Fellow of The Shakespeare Code has his or her name automatically inscribed into

The Roll of Honour.

To celebrate the happy occasion of the appointment of its first Fellow, The Shakespeare Code will now unfurl its….

ROLL OF HONOUR

Janet St.John-Austen, F.S.C.

Michael Hentges

Martin Green

Alan Samson

Lord Bragg of Wigton

Sir Nicholas Hytner

Jane Howell

Greg Doran

Maggie Ollerenshaw

Simon Callow

Prof. David Womersely (Thomas Wharton Professor of English at Oxford University)

Karen Gledhill

Prof. Jonathan Bate (Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies at Warwick University)

Dr. James Kelly (Senior Tutor at Queen’s College, Cambridge)

China Miéville

Martin Jarvis

At Trixie’s inspired suggestion, The Shakespeare Code has decided to adopt the motto which sustained both the Earl of Southampton and Trixie during their two year incarceration in the Tower of London….

‘IN VINCULIS, INVICTUS’

(The Shakespeare Code is considering a Crest…)