The Shakespeare Code

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

LOVE-SICKNESS…

When William Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe re-wrote the old play What You Will and turned it into Twelfth Night, they changed the leading character’s name to Orsino.

This was to flatter Queen Elizabeth’s Twelfth Night guest, Don Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano.

But who did Orsino really represent?

At the start of the play he lies ‘love-sick’  for the Countess Olivia…

 He hopes that by listening to excessive amounts of music ( ‘the food of love’)  his appetite for it…

may sicken and so die….

When a servant suggests he goes hunting, he compares ‘the hart’ he would chase to the ‘heart’ of Olivia…

O when mine eyes did see Olivia first,

Methought she purg’d the air of pestilence;

That instant was I turned into a hart,

And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,

E’er since pursue me…

When the Court audience heard these words, they would have known immediately who Orsino was…

Orsino is comparing himself to Acteon, a hunter who stumbled upon the naked Goddess Diana when she was bathing with her nymphs….

In a fury the Goddess transformed Acteon into a stag and he was torn to pieces by his own hounds…

 The same story was told by Ben Jonson in his Cynthia’s Revels, an entertainment performed at the  Court  by the Children of the Chapel…

 On exactly the same day as Twelfth Night!!!

Jonson has the nymph Echo say

Here young Acteon fell, pursued and torn

By Cynthia’s wrath (more eager, than his hounds)

And Cynthia/Diana herself says..

For so Acteon, by presuming far

Did (to our grief) incur a fatal doom…

Seems it no crime to enter sacred bowers,

And hallowed places, with impure aspect,

Most lewdly to pollute?  Seems it no crime,

To brave a deity?  Lewd mortals learn

To make religion of offending heaven;

And not at all to censure powers divine.

To men, this argument should stand for firm,

‘A Goddess did it, therefore it was good:

We are not cruel, nor delight in blood…

The ‘sacred bowers’ Jonson refers to are Queen Elizabeth’s private chambers at Nonesuch Palace and the ‘impure aspect’ belonged to Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, when he burst into them before the Queen  had time to put on her wig and make-up.

Or, as contemporary Rowland White put it…

she not being ready, and he so full of dirt and mire that his very face was full of it…..

After the initial shock, the Queen was glad to see the man she loved. He’d returned, unannounced, from his Irish campaign to counter the rumours that were circulating about him at the Court.

But it was too good an opportunity for his enemies to miss. Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Water Raleigh poisoned the Queen’s mind against Essex. He was banished from her sight and kept for a long time under house arrest………..

….despite his illness (he had the ‘Irish flux’) and

….despite his protestations of love (for the Queen)…

He was suffering, in fact, from a very literal  form of  ‘love-sickness,’ very similar to Count Orsino’s….

Shakespeare, by giving  Orsino great verse to speak…

O it [the music] came o’er my ear like the sweet sound

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour…

…is inviting the Queen to empathise with the character of Orsino and so pity the sufferings of Essex.

Jonson, on the other hand, is stating that the Queen was right to punish Essex. He knew that if Essex was destroyed, Shakespeare his rival might be destroyed along with him.

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On Twelfth Night there was a third ‘Essex’ play performed at Court, Phaeton by Thomas Dekker. This lost piece was based on the ‘Sun-Chariot’ myth. Phaeton insists, in his arrogance, on driving his father’s sun-chariot. In the process, he nearly destroys the world….

 He certainly destroys himself. An indignant Jove dispatches him with a thunderbolt.

This play was put on byThe Admiral’s Men. The Admiral concerned was Charles Lord Howard (later Earl of Nottingham) Essex’s bitter enemy.

The punishment Jove gives Phaeton (death) is, Lord Howard suggests, the one Elizabeth should give to Essex.

Nottingham’s hatred for Essex, as The Shakespeare Code will reveal in a later post, led not only to the death of Essex, but to to the deaths of his own wife and of the Queen herself…

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Essex had finally been freed from house arrest in London to live on his country estates; but when, in 1600, he declared to the Queen…

That he kissed her royal hand and that rod which had corrected him, not ruined him: but he could never be possessed of his wonted joy till he beheld again those benign looks of hers which had been his Star to direct and guide him….

The Queen drily observed…

All is not gold that glistereth….

She was well aware that  Essex’s farm on sweet wines – his main source of income – was due for renewal.

She refused to do this. So Essex was ruined.

His relationship with the Queen had always been a sado-masochistic one.  He was half  her age – and the game was one of  who would dominate whom, Essex with his youth or Elizabeth with her power…

In 1594, Essex had  written an extraordinary  letter to her:

If my horse could run as fast as my thoughts do fly, I would as often make mine eyes rich in beholding the treasures of my love , as my desires do triumph when I seem to myself in a strong imagination to conquer your resisting will…

Now he was grovelling on the ground before her, doing a good impersonation of Sir Walter Raleigh’s cloak…

‘Consumed by silence, solitariness and sighs’,  Essex even wrote a poem to Elizabeth in which he yearned to…

…..finish forth his  fate

In some enchanted desert, most obscure

From all society, from love, from hate

Of  worldly folk, then would he sleep secure

Then wake again and yield God ever praise

Content with hips and haws and bamble berries,

In contemplation passing still his days,

 And change of holy thoughts to make him merry;

 And when he dies, his tomb may be a bush

Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush…

‘Harmless Robin’ here sounds just like Orsino who is…

Best when least in company….

But he sounds even more  like Timon of Athens who, when he ran out of money and was deserted by his ‘friends’, retreated ‘to the woods’ and lived, without husbandry, on the spontaneous produce of nature. As Timon says to a group of Banditti…

….Behold the earth hath roots;

Within this mile break forth a hundred springs;

The oak bears mast, the briar scarlet hips;

And bounteous housewife nature on each bush

Lays her full mess before you…

The Shakespeare Code believes that Shakespeare wrote Timon to try to convince Essex to take up a Stoical position to his fate. (It also believes that Shakespeare himself wrote ‘Essex’s’ poem to the Queen).

Shakespeare wanted Essex to cut all ties with London and the Court and to live in isolation in the countryside like Timon, indifferent to the world and its ways….

This was a real possibility. Essex, a dreamy, romantic country boy, loved the Welsh landscape and might never have come to the Court if his family had been wealthy.

He would certainly never have become Elizabeth’s toy-boy…

Many thought Essex, who surrounded himself with many ‘kindle-coals and make-bites’ , was, by this stage, completely mad. The Queen’s godson, Sir John Harington (who claimed to have invented the water-closet) wrote:

he [Essex] shifteth from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proveth him devoid of good reason as of right mind. In my last discourse he uttered strange words, bordering on such strange designs, that made me hasten forth and leave his presence…His speeches of the Queen become no man who hath mens sana in corpore sano[a healthy mind in a healthy body]. The Queen well knoweth how to humble the haughty spirit; the haughty spirit knoweth not how to yield, and the man’s soul seemeth tossed to and fro like the waves of a troubled sea…

But Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream declares that

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact..

Shakespeare in Twelfth Night  is trying to take a similar attitude to Essex’s ‘madness’. He is suggesting that Essex’s ravings, like Orsino’s in the play, are the expression of a thwarted love for a beautiful woman…i.e. Elizabeth.

Shakespeare also hoped there would be a ‘wisdom’  in Essex’s  ‘madness’ as there is in Timon’s. Timon develops a coherent,  philosophical indifference to the world and its ways, a true ‘contemptus mundi’.

Shakespeare also hoped that  the ‘troubled sea’ of Essex’s spirit might find the same sort of resolution as Timon’s, who hopes to make…

…..his ever-lasting mansion

Upon the beached verge of the salt flood,

Who once a day with his embossed froth

The turbulent surge shall cover…

But Shakespeare was certain of one thing:

the Earl of Essex was in no mental state to take any kind of political action himself.

We also know, from the great Regency historian Lucy Aikin, that Essex was drinking heavily…

Unfortunately there were others in the Essex entourage who were urging rebellion…

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Shakespeare was in basic support of Essex’s ideals. But there was one area in which the two men differed – sex.

Shakespeare had never been happy that Essex’s political influence resided in his liaison with the ageing, capricious Queen. In Sonnet 25 he had written:

Great Princes’ favourites, their fair leaves spread

But as the marigold at the sun’s eye,

And in themselves their pride lies buried,

For at a frown they in their glory die…

The image of the marigold evokes the image of Essex in his orange-coloured Devereux armour….

But after the Rebellion, when Essex had betrayed all his followers, Shakespeare reveals his open contempt for him in Sonnet 25:

Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour

Lose all, [Essex’s money] and more, [Essex’s head] by paying too much rent [semen]

For compound sweet, [farm on sweet wines] forgoing simple savour,

Pitiful thrivers in their gazing spent…[Essex’s ‘gazing’ on the ‘naked’ Queen]

But there was another aspect of Essex that Shakespeare despised:

he was secretive about his homosexuality.

Shakespeare, good Catholic boy that he was, was not always happy about his own bi-sexual orientation. He talks about his ‘outcast state’  in Sonnet 29 and presents the two gay Antonios in his plays (The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night) as sad, old losers.

But he was as open as possible as he could be about his overwhelming love for Southampton – even defiant about it in Sonnet 121 where, parodying God in The Book of Job,  he writes:

For why should others false, adulterate eyes

Give salutation to my sportive blood?

Or on my frailties why are frailer spies

Which in their wills [penises] think bad which I think good?

No, I am that I am, and they that level

At my abuses reckon up their own,

I may be straight though they themselves be bevel

By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown…

Queen Elizabeth was well aware of Shakepeare’s sexual inclinations: she described him to the scholar William Lambarde as a man who had ‘forgotten God’.

She would have been appalled if she had known that her lover, Essex,  had ‘forgotten God’ as well….

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The Shakespeare Code is indebted to Roll of Honour Inductee and great Shakespearean scholar, Martin Green, for his work in this area, included in his ground-breaking book Wriothesley’s Roses [Clevedon, 1993].

An endorsement from Mr. Green of The Shakespeare Code can be read in the ‘About The Shakespeare Code’ Section (click button above). He is currently putting his finishing touches to a new book on Willobie his Avisa.

Mr. Green has discovered that the moment the Earl of Essex was admitted into the Inner Temple (a month before his twenty-first birthday in 1588) he constructed a hexagonal bath in the Strand  (from an overflow from a Roman Bath) for fellow ‘Templars’.

This alone, of course, doesn’t prove that Essex was gay: but we know from John Aubrey that the homosexually-inclined Sir Francis Bacon used his Bath House at Gorhambury as a ‘stuffe’ [brothel].

Sir Francis Bacon

Bath House Devotee

Also at the time of  the Essex Rebellion Trial, one William Reynolds wrote anonymously to Sir Robert Cecil, saying:

I do marvel also what became of Pearse Edmones, called Captain Pearse or Captain Edmones, the Earl of Essex’s man, born in Strand near me, one which has had many rewards and preferments by the Earl of Essex. His villainy I have often complained of.  He dwells in London. He was Corporal General of the Horse in Ireland under the Earl of Southampton. He ate and drank at his table and lay in his tent. The Earl of Southampton gave him a horse, which Edmondes refused a 100 marks for him. The Earl of Southampton would cole and huge [embrace and hug] him in his arms and play wantonly with him.

Delving through Essex’s papers, Mr. Green has  found…

a great number of receipts in 1599 and 1600 of sums of money paid by the Earl of Essex to various persons, including ‘Captain. P. Edmonde’ who was ‘so favoured as he often rode in a coach with him [Essex], and was wholly of his charges maintained, being a man of base birth in St. Clement’s Parish..’.

Men riding together in coaches was thought highly suspect. Mrs. Bacon wrote to her son Francis:

Though I pity your brother [Anthony, also gay] yet as long as he pities not himself but keepeth that bloody Perez [Antonio Perez, a Spanish homosexual], yea, as a coach-companion and a bed-companion, a proud, profane costly fellow, whose being about him I verily fear the Lord God doth mislike, and doth less bless your brother [Francis] in credit, and otherwise in his health, surely I am utterly discouraged…

Perez, who was part of Essex’s spy-ring, reported to Essex a conversation he’d had at Windsor with Dom Antonio de Crato, the exiled half-Jewish claimant to the throne of Portugal and Rodrigo (Ruy) Lopez, the Jewish chief physician to the Queen.

According to Geoffrey Goodman (who heard the story from Sir Henry Savile) Lopez had been ‘making merry’ [i.e. getting drunk] with Crato and Perez then…

began bitterly to inveigh against the Earl of Essex, telling some secrecies, how he had cured him and of what diseases, with some other things that did disparage his honour. But as soon as Lopez was gone, they went instantly to the Earl of Essex, and, to ingratiate themselves in his favour, did acquaint him with all the several passages. Here the Earl was so much incensed, that he resolved to be revenged on him and now he began to possess the Queen that Lopez was a very villain…and did intend to poison the Queen..

Lopez, who pleaded his innocence to the end, was hanged drawn and quartered so that Essex could stay ‘in the closet’.

Even the official history of Elizabeth’s reign mentions one Essex’s young boyfriends, Henry Tracey. Essex picked him up in Dublin, made him his page and employed him as  post-boy between himself and Queen Elizabeth.  Killed during the Rebellion, Tracey was afterwards described by the historian William Camden as…

…a young gentleman whom Essex dearly loved…

Shakespeare ‘outs’ Essex in the course of Twelfth Night, but in the gentlest of ways.

 Orsino gradually  falls in love with his own beautiful page and post-boy, Caesario…

But all’s well…

As Brothers and Sisters of The Code well know, Caesario is really a girl…

(It’s best to read Part Six now.)