The Shakespeare Code

(Note: It is best to read The Introduction and Parts One and Two first)

CAKES AND ALE…

Twelfth Night , in a version similar to the one that has come down to us, was first performed before Queen Elizabeth, and her guest, Don Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano, at The Royal Palace of  Whitehall, on 6th January, 1601.

On 10th May that year, the Privy Council reported that:

Certain players at the Curtain in Moorfields do represent in their interlude the persons of some gentlemen of good desert and quality that are yet alive, under obscure manner but yet in such sort that all the hearers may take notice both of the matter and the persons that are meant thereby.  All are to be examined….

If the Privy Council had ‘examined’  (i.e tortured) The Lord Chamberlain’s Men to find out whom they were satirising in Twelfth Night, what would they have said?

What ‘matter and person’ did hey have in mind with, say….

Sir Toby Belch…

 Sir Toby, as Brothers and Sister of The Code will well know, is the Countess Olivia’s drunken, raucous, but very loving uncle.

Like Feste, he thinks it’s wrong for Olivia to persist in her mourning for her brother. He believes life is to be celebrated – and does so every night of the week.

And sometimes during the day as well.

This drives his young niece, the Countess Olivia, to distraction….

His main enemy, though, is the Puritan steward, Malvolio…

….who hates all fun and laughter, wants complete control of the household and lusts after Belch’s niece,  Olivia.

Matters come to a head with a drunken sing-song in the middle of the night with Toby, Feste and  the ‘foolish knight’ Sir Andrew Aguecheek.  

Malvolio arrives with the message from Countess Olivia that, unless Sir Toby mends his ways he must leave the household…

Sir Toby’s instinct is to challenge Malvolio to a duel (or rather to get Sir Andrew to challenge him). But Olivia’s witty waiting-gentlewoman, Maria, convinces Sir Toby to play a joke on him instead…

He is prepared to risk his position in Olivia’s household to expose the truth about Malvolio and  does not hesitate to draw his sword on Sebastian, a much younger man.

But, most important, he so relishes the genius of Maria that during the course of the play he falls deeply in love with her and finally marries her…

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If The Shakespeare Code is right and we take Countess  Olivia to represent Queen Elizabeth, then…

IT TAKES NO ‘SHERLOCK HOLMES’ TO DE-CODE SIR TOBY BELCH…

Queen Elizabeth’s only remaining family were the Careys – descended from her mother Anne Boleyn’s sister, Mary, now famously known as:

 the Other Boleyn Girl.

But rumour had it that Mary’s son, Henry Carey, was the bastard son of Queen Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII. This would explain a lot…

Henry also supported his own company of players, ‘Lord Hundson’s Men’. Later, when he was appointed Lord Chamberlain, these actors became known as the ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’, one of whom was Shakespeare…

Thomas Nashe wrote that the actors felt ‘settled’ under Henry’s patronage. He gave them freedom to be critical of the government and even allowed them to stage Richard II – a play he knew the Queen would interpret as an attack on herself.

He even went to so far as to write…

I was never one of Richard II’s  men…’

… meaning, of course, Elizabeth.

For, though he was ‘family’ he wasn’t close to her. He was a ‘sword and buckler man’, a plain-speaking, no-nonsense soldier who earned the affection of his troops and who took more pleasure in hanging ‘Scotch thieves’ than he did in hunting or hawking.

However, during the Rebellion of the Roman Catholic Northern Lords, he was prepared to risk his life to protect his kinswoman, the Queen.

The great Regency historian, Lucy Aikin, records how, even on his death-bed, Henry was prepared to tell Elizabeth where to get off. Hearing of his illness, she…

finally resolved to grant him the title of Earl of Wiltshire[and making] him a gracious visit, caused the patent and robes of an Earl to be brought and laid upon his bed; but the old man, preserving to the last the blunt honesty of his character, declared, that if her majesty had accounted him unworthy of that honour while living he accounted himself unworthy of it now he was dying, and with this refusal he expired…

But the FIRST Lord Hunsdon was not the direct model for Sir Toby. It was his son, the SECOND Lord Hunsdon, Sir George Carey, a true chip off the old block…

Sir George, like his father, was a gallant soldier who had been knighted, by the Earl of Sussex, on the field of battle.

In 1583 he was given the stewardship of Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, a few miles from Titchfield. 

It was here that Sir George began to morph into  Sir Toby…

 He quarrelled so badly with a local gentleman that it reached the ears of the Privy Council and, as Sir John Oglander noted:

any attorney coming to settle in the island was, by his [Sir George’s]command with a pound of candles hanging at his breech lighted, with bells about his legs, hunted out of the island…

Sir George entertained sumptuously with, as Oglander again noted:

 the best hospitality at the castle as ever was or will be.

He protected and supported Thomas Nashe when he was in trouble with the Privy Council and (as The Shakespeare Code has discovered) even sent some of his ‘precious’ Paracelsean medicine to a simple husbandmen in Titchfield who was ill. (See ‘The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis’).

In 1593 a ‘storm of discord’  broke out between Sir George and Sir Robert Cecil – one of the most powerful of Elizabeth’s courtiers and an ally of Sir Walter Raleigh.

In 1596, when his father died, Sir George became the second Lord Hunsdon, but did not immediately become the Lord Chamberlain. This position fell to William Brooke, 10th Lord Cobham.

This was disaster for the first Lord Hunsdon’s actors. Through Shakespeare they were closely associated with the Earl of Southampton and through him with the Earl of Essex.

Essex and the Brooke family were mortal enemies!

Essex called William Brooke’s son, Henry, The Sycophant because he despised the way he crept around Queen Elizabeth.

Sir George leapt to the defence of the endangered actors. He revived the title ‘Lord Hunsdon’s Men’  and supported them in a tour of Kent. But ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’ were still appearing at the Court, heavily overseen by Brooke…

So what did Shakespeare do?

With the full support of Sir George, he wrote the Falstaff plays!

As Brothers and Sisters of The Code will know, the fat knight was first named ‘Sir John Oldcastle’,

This was one of Brooke’s most honoured ancestors. He had been a Lollard – a heretic in the days of King Henry V but now, in Protestant Elizabeth’s reign, a hero and martyr. Shakespeare had turned him into a liar, coward and thief…

The furious Brooke family immediately demanded that the character be re-named – and commisioned their own hagiographic Oldcastle play.

In March, 1597, William Brooke died. The position of Lord Chamberlain passed back to theCarey family…

So  Sir George was now in control of Court entertainment.

He immediately commissioned his men to write and perform The Merry Wives of Windsor….

The first performance, like Twelfth Night, was given, (amidst much feasting) at Sir George’s expense, in the Royal Palace in Whitehall to celebrate his investiture as a Knight of the Garter.

Shakespeare still wouldn’t let go. He took the opportunity to satirise a living Cobham instead of a dead one!

In the play, Ford, in disguise, describes how:

I have long loved her and, I protest to you, bestowed much on her; followed her with a doting observance; engrossed opportunities to meet her; fee’d everyslight occasion that could but niggardly give me sight of her; not only bought many presents to give her, but have given largely to many to know what she would be given: briefly, I have pursued her as love hath pursued me; which hath been on the wing of all occasions…

This sycophantic behaviour would have reminded everyone in the  audience of The Sycophant himself, Henry Brooke, who would lavishly entertain the Queen at his Blackfriars’ House.

But for anyone in the audience who was a bit slow on the uptake, Ford calls himself ‘Brook’.

(Again, Shakespeare was asked to change the name….)

The play not only pleased Sir George, it pleased ‘cousin’ Elizabeth as well.  According to Nicholas Rowe, The Queen had wanted to see the fat knight fall in love….

But two years later, Sir George (like Sir Toby and his niece Olivia) was to have a major bust up with the Queen…

Lord Semple of Beltreis,the Scottish Ambassador in London, wrote to to James VI of Scotland:

 At her Majesty’s  [Elizabeth’s] returning from Hampton Court, the day being passing foul, she would (as her custom is) go on horseback, although she is scarce able to sit upright, and my Lord Hunsdon [Sir George Carey] said, ‘It was not meet for one of her Majesty’s years to ride in such a storm.’ She answered, in great anger, ‘My years! Maids, to your horses quickly’; and so she rode all the way, not vouchsafing any gracious countenance to him for two days.

Lord Semple is too discreet to mention how much the second Lord Hunsdon had to drink that day…

The same year, though, Sir George leapt to the protection of Elizabeth. He warned the Privy Council that the Earl of Essex, with an army in Ireland, was a threat to the Queen’s safety. Sir George was right: Essex was having secret talks with the rebel  Tyrone who was tempting him to sieze the English Crown…

So, two years later, when Sir George asked his company  to prepare another  production for the Royal Palace at Whitehall he had no intention of provoking another quarrel with Elizabeth.

He requested that the entertainment  be…

 of a subject that may be most pleasing to her Majesty

What he’s really saying is:

Flatter the old boot…

He needed to appease Elizabeth as much as Shakespeare and Nashe did.

By 1601, Sir George’s life of excess was taking its toll. Sir George had often taken the waters at Bath, where he had entertained the Queen, but now his sister was secretly buying him mercury cures for his venereal disease…

If the King of Scotland knew all about Sir George’s quarrel with the Queen, we can be sure the coterie, first night audience to Twelfth Night would have known about it as well. They would also have been primed by a scurrilous ditty going round the court  about  Sir George’s  palsey, fornication, syphilis, mercury posioning,  hair loss and stupidity…

Chamberlain, chamberlain,

He’s of her grace’s kin [Queen Elizabeth’s]

Fool hath he ever been

With his Joan silverpin (prostitute)

She makes his cockscombe thin

And quake in every limb

Quicksilver is in his head

But his wit’s dull as lead..

In Twelfth Night,  Sir Toby gets into all the same drunken scrapes and anarchic practical jokes that Sir George got into – and both men hate pompous authority. When, after getting into a fight with her lover ‘Caesario’ (a real boy this time!) the Countess Olivia finally screams at Belch:

……Ungracious wretch

Fit for the mountains and the barb’rous caves

Where manner ne’er were preach’d! Out of my sight!

The audience would have been reminded of Elizabeth’s huge row with her cousin Sir George.

They might even have been reminded of the ‘barb’rous caves’ of the Isle of Wight…

The Countess Olivia forgives Sir Toby because he is ‘family‘

Also,  because he has a big heart…

Throughout the play, Sir Toby, for all his faults,  is redeemed by his love for his ‘metal of India’,  his ‘excellent devil of wit’, Maria, whom he finally marries.

Sir George was lucky enough to have his own ‘witty piece of Eve’s flesh’, his wife Elizabeth nee Spencer of Althorp  (the same family as the late Princess Diana). 

Elizabeth was a great patron of the arts, translated Petrach, and appears to have been an author in her own right. Edmund Spenser writes coded praise of her as Phyllis in Colin Clout comes Home:

Phyllis the flower of rare perfection

Fair spreading forth her leaves [her compositions] with fresh delight

That with their beauty’s amorous reflexion

Bereave of sense each rash beholder’s sight..

She seems to have loved the old reprobate, Sir George, and he seems to have worshipped her as much as Sir Toby ever did Maria…

When, a couple of years after Twelfth Night, Sir George finally died, he had described his wife in his will as..

‘the sweetest companion that ever man hath found in this life….’

(It’s best to read Part Four now.)