The Shakespeare Code

It’s best to read The Introduction and Part One first.

SEND IN THE CLOWNS…..

Courtice Pounds as Feste in Tree’s 1901 Production of ‘Twelfth Night’.

At the beginning of Twelfth Night we learn that the jester, Feste, has been long absent from Olivia’s household. The reason for this is clear. 

Countess Olivia intends to grieve for the death of her brother for the next seven years. A household in mourning is a difficult place for a clown…

A Case of Jester Stress…

Also Olivia’s steward, the Puritan Malvolio, hates Feste and wants to get rid of him….

Olivia is furious with Feste when he does return, but gradually warms to his wit.  Feste is trying to ‘heal’ his mistress’s melancholy, persuade her to abandon her mourning and embrace the joys of life again.

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Queen Elizabeth had a jester whom she adored, and who died (like her lover, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester)  in Armada year (1588).  His name was Richard Tarleton….

Thomas Fuller wrote of him:

When Queen Elizabeth was out of good humour, he could un-dumpish her at his pleasure. Her highest favourites would, in some cases, go to Tarleton before they would go to the Queen, and he was their usher to prepare their advantageous access unto her.  In a word, he told the Queen more of her faults than most of her chaplains, and cured her melancholy better than all of her physicians…

Sometimes Tarleton made Elizabeth laugh so much she begged him to stop…

Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had a favourite jester as well…

When, in the play, Orsino’s servant, Curio describes Feste as:

a fool that the lady Olivia’s father took much delight it…

– the whole audience would have thought of King Henry’s jester,  Will Sommers. He was the only man who could make the King smile when he was in agony from a chronic ulcer on his leg…

(Even if he did once describe the little Princess Elizabeth as a ‘bastard‘)

Will Sommers

Thomas Nashe, writer and pamphleteer, had played the part of Will Sommers in his entertainment, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, performed before the Queen in 1592 at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s summer palace at Croydon.

It is The Shakespeare Code’s belief that Nashe went on to play the part of another jester, that of Feste, in the Twelfth Night entertainment for Elizabeth in 1601.

Will Sommers and Feste have many similarities. Both are ‘stand-up’ comics whose prime purpose is to make the audience laugh: but both have a melancholy side and sing sad songs about death…

Will Sommers, to his own lute accampaniment, performs the beautiful…

 Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss

The world uncertain is

Fond are life’s lustful joys

Death proves them all but toys,

None from his darts can fly:

I am sick, I must die,

Lord have mercy on us… 

And Feste sings (to Count Orsino) the equally beautiful:

Come away, come away death,

And in sad cypress let me be laid.

Fie away, fie away breath,

I am slain by a fair cruel maid….

Ever economical, Nashe converts a sublime lyric he wrote for Sommers….

Beauty is but a flower

Which wrinkles will devour…

…into a crude joke for Feste…

As there is no true cuckold but calamity, so beauty’s a flower.

Feste even makes a coded reference to Henry VIII’s jester. When, asked by Maria what he will do if Olivia throws him out, he replies:

for turning away, let summer bear it out…

[Malvolio employs a similar ‘ jester- joke’ when he claims to have seen Feste…

put down by an ordinary [i.e.tavern] fool that has no more brain than a stone…

‘Stone’ was the name of another famous Elizabethan jester mentioned by Ben Jonson in Volpone]

But there is an even greater similarity than the one between Feste and Sommers.

It is the similarity between Feste and Nashe himself!  

Both love to invent extravagant words, phrases and names.

Gabriel Harvey, Nashe’s sworn enemy….

Ajax = a jakes…

 condemned this habit in Nashe as ‘foolerism’.

 He described it as a…

fantastical emulation…to presume to forge a misshapen rabblement of absurd and ridiculous words…

Feste is certainly guilty of ‘foolerism’ when he speaks to the ‘foolish knight’  Sir Andrew Aguecheek about…

Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Quebus…

And the Twelfth Night text is littered with Nashe’s favourite words, ‘sheep biter’ ,’whirligig’ ‘Myrmidon’ and  ‘herring’…  

…Nashe wrote a whole play in praise of the red herring!!!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The Shakespeare Code would like to thank writer, musician, actress (and Roll of Honour Inductee) Karen Gledhill….

  ….for pointing out the similarities between the dense and complex language of  Nashe’s pamphlets and the similarly dense and complex language of Feste.   Miss Gledhill has direct knowledge of Twelfth Night as she played a spirited Viola in the Northcott Theatre version of the play, set on a frozen river…

And the songs themselves, wonderful as they are, do not advance the action….