Recently the Chief Agent of ‘The Shakespeare Code’, with Trixie the Cat on his arm, attended a performance of Being Shakespeare at the Trafalgar Studios in London.
The script is by Jonathan Bate….
and it is performed by Simon Callow….
The Agent and the Cat were so moved by the show that they told Simon afterwards over a glass of wine (and a saucer of milk) that his SUBLIME performance was even better than Robert Speight’s!!!
(For the significance of Speight, please click on the ‘Biography’ button at the top of the page).
What made the evening particularly thrilling was that the first half closes with an evocation of Shakespeare’s life with the Earl of Southampton in Titchfield!!!
THE CODE’S THEORIES ARE STARTING TO PERMEATE MAINSTREAM THOUGHT!
How 'Place House' (Titchfield Abbey re-built) looked in Shakespeare's time.
To quote Prof. Bate’s script…
The Earl of Southampton’s household was at Titchfield Abbey in rural Hampshire. Here, the brilliant twenty-year-old, with his deep dark eyes, his tumbling locks, his earrings and his slashed doublet and hose, liked to hold court, entertaining poets, painters and philosophers in high style. It must have seemed a million miles away from plague-infested London: a huge formal garden in which to walk and think; limitless supplies of food and drink; servants; witty banter; access to a great library. One of Southampton’s guests was his language tutor, the formidable John Florio, who at that time was translating the work of the most modern thinker in Europe, Michel de Montaigne, who in his essays questioned everything, placing man, not God, at the centre of the universe. “What a piece of work is a man!”, Montaigne might have cried, had he been an English dramatist of genius, “How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”
Hamlet was still only a glint in Shakespeare’s eye, of course, but already, almost overnight, his writing has changed. The plays are filled with new voices: courtship and courtiership, intellectual banter and philosophical speculation. Sonnets and love songs are woven into the their very texture. He’s already mastered barnstorming tragedy and knockabout comedy, sword fights and bawdy jokes for the gaping groundlings; but now he mixes it all together. Now he learns how to put the whole world on the stage. This is the moment, if there is a moment, at which Shakespeare becomes Shakespeare…
(At this point in the evening Trixie passed out in pleasure).
The Code thanks Simon and Jonathan, Roll of Honour Inductees.
Both gentlemen were kind enough to read Love’s Labour’s Found – the basis of The Shakespeare Code – when it was published in 2002.
To read Prof. Bate’s endorsement of The Code’s ‘Apis Lapis’ Theory, click here.
To read Simon Callow’s endorsement of the The Code’s ‘Titchfield’ and ‘Apis Lapis’ Theories, click here.
The Shakespeare Code 
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