The Shakespeare Code

(It is best to read The Introduction and Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five first)

I WAS ADORED ONCE,TOO…

Maria calls him ‘a foolish knight’ and Sir Toby ‘a gull’. He is barely aware of what is going on and joins in with jokes without understanding why they are funny.

2. Rich.

Sir Toby says Sir Andrew has ‘three thousand ducats a year’. (A ducat was a third of a pound, a pound was worth a modern £500: so Aguecheek’s annual income was £500,000).

3. Prodigal.

We see Sir Andrew tip Feste when  Sir Toby has already tipped him and when he’s aleady sent Feste a sixpence the night before.

Sir Toby claims to have made ‘two thousand strong’ from him. If  ‘strong’ = ‘stirling’ then Sir Toby has pocketed a cool £1 million from Sir Andrew.

In the course of the play, Sir Toby tells Sir Andrew to:

 Send for money, knight…

4. ‘Musical’.

Sir Toby says that Sir Andrew plays the viola di gamba and Sir Andrew himself says: ‘

I am dog at a catch…

5. Polyglottal.

Sir Toby claims Sir Andrew speaks ‘three or four languages, word for word, without book’. (But when it comes down to it, Sir Andrew cannot even translate ‘pourquoi’).

6. Vain

Sir Andrew says of his hair:

It becomes me well enough, does’t not…

And of his leg:

It does indifferent well in a dam’d coloured stock….

7. Quarrelsome.

Maria says of Sir Andrew:

 he’s a great quarreller…. 

and Sir Andrew certainly works himself up into a lather when he challenges ‘Caesario’.

8. Cowardly.

Maria says Sir Andrew has…

the gift of a coward to allay the gust he hath in quarrelling…

And Sir Toby says:

 if Sir Andrew were opened and you find so much blood in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I’ll eat the rest of th’anatomy…

9. Maladroit with women.

Sir Andrew wants to win the Countess Olivia, but he doesn’t even know how to chat up her serving-woman, Maria.

10. Plagiaristic.

Sir Andrew writes down in his commonplace book words from ‘Caesario’s’ address to the Countess Olivia.

11. Deluded.

Sir Andrew believes he is in with a chance with Countess Olivia.

He also believes that he:

 was adored once, too…

(It is possible, The Code admits, that his mother loved him…)

12. Manipulable.

Aguecheek succumbs immediately to flattery and does exactly what everyone tells him to do.

●

At Christmas, 1601, the students of St. John’s College, Cambridge, put on a three part, satirical ‘revue’ – The Pilgrimage to Parnassus and The Return from Parnassus. It had been delayed from Christmas 1600  because of the tense  political situation at the Court.

One of the characters in the play is called Ingenioso.

He makes his money from writing pamphlets, complains about the meanness of patrons and the inevitable poverty of scholars. 

The character is clearly based on Thomas Nashe – and, The Shakespeare Code believes – was written by him.

It would also have been played by him had he not died in the course of 1601.

Another of the characters in the entertainment is called Gullio, who, The Shakespeare Code believes, is also based on a real person. 

Gullio can be described with exactly the same dozen adjectives as Sir Andrew Aguecheek!

1. Foolish.

Ingenioso introduces Gullio with:

Now gentleman you may laugh if you will, for here comes a gull…

2. Rich.

Gullio says to Ingenioso:

 I have restored thy dylaniated [torn to pieces] back and ruinous estate to those pretty clothes whererin thou now walkest…

He also claims to maintain other ‘poetical spirits’ that live upon [his] ‘trenchers’.

3. Prodigal

I am never seen at the court twice in one suit of apparrel: that’s base. As for boots, I never wore one pair above two hours…

4. ‘Musical’

How often of yore  have I sung my sonnets under her window to a consorte of music, I myself playing upon my ivory lute most enchantingly.

5. Polyglottal

My Latin was pure Latin, and such as they speak at Rheims and Padua.

And:

 It is  my custom in my common talk to make use of my reading  in the Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish poets…

6. Vain

I had in my days not unfitly been likened to Sir Phillip Sidney, only with this difference, that I had the better leg, and more amiable face….

He adds:

 I stood stroking up my hair, which became me very admirably….

7.  Quarrelsome

Since my arrival in England (which is now six months I take sithens) I have been the death of one of our puling Liteltonians for passing by me in the Moor fields unsaluted, but that there was no historiographer by to have recorded it…..

8. Cowardly.

Ingenioso says of Gullio:

He never heardest the report of a gun without trembling –

9. Maladroit with women.

 He steals articles of women’s clothing (the ‘humble retainer to [a] busk’ and a ‘shoe-string’) to satisfy his ‘luxuriousness’.

He also demonstrates how he makes love to women by making love to Ingenioso!

10. Plagiaristic.

Ingenioso says Gullio ’

never spok’st witty thing but out of a play…[his] body is nothing a but a fair inn of fairer guests that dwell therein…

He has used William Shakespeare’s verse to seduce his Lesbia and says to Ingenioso that he…

will bestow on them [the ladies of the court] the precious stones of my wit, a diamond of invention that shall be above all value and esteem. Therefore, sithens I am  I am employed in some weighty affairs of the court, I will have thee, Ingeniosos to mke them, and, when thou hast done, I will peruse, polish and corrrect them.

11. Deluded.

He claims that ‘many dainty cout nymphs’ have ‘with petitioning looks’ ‘sued ‘ for his love’ and he has had  a great affair with a ‘Lady Lesbia’ of the court.

12. Manipulable.

Ingenioso, by flattering Gullio and promising to make him immortal, gains a commission from him.

●

OTHER SIMILARITIES….

In Twelfth Night Sir Andrew accepts the fact that other people describe him as a ‘fool’.

Malvolio says (quoting the letter): Besides you waste the treasure of your time with a foolish knight.

Sir Andrew: That’s me, I warrant you.

Malvolio: One Sir Andrew…

Sir Andrew: ‘I knew ’twas I , for many do call me fool’

Like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Gullio also accepts the fact that other people describe him as a ‘fool’.

Igenioso, quoting Lesbia, says: ‘What? Gullio, that known fool?’ said she.

Gullio: Why that’s very true, my fame is spread far and near.

Brothers and Sisters of The Code will realise that….

THESE JOKES ARE EXACTLY THE SAME BECAUSE THEY ARE WRITTEN BY THE SAME PERSON:

THOMAS NASHE.

SIMILARLY….

In Twelfth Night Sir Andrew, asking about his hair, says:

It becomes me well enough, does’t not?

Sir Toby replies with:

Excellent, it hangs like flax on a distaff; and I hope to see a housewife take thee between her legs, and spin it off…

In The Return to Parnassus, Gullio says:

 I stood stroking up my hair, which became me very admirably….

 And a character called Sir Roderick says:

 Her viol de gamba is her best content

For twixt her legs she holds her instrument….

●

Gullio, we also learn, claims to be well-travelled and worships the work of William Shakespeare.

Let this duncified world esteem of Spencer and Chaucer, I’ll worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare, and to honour him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillow…I’ll have his picture at my study in the court…

The Chandos Portrait of William Shakespeare

In the course of the play, Ingenioso offers himself to Gullio as the poet who can make him immortal:

You have gotten a suppliant poet that will teach mossy posterity to know how that this earth in such a reign was blest with a young Jupiter.

But left alone, Igenioso’s true feelings about Gullio come out. He lambasts himself that, in his need for money, he’s had to creep around Gullio, listen to his lies, applaud his boasts and feed his lust by writing pornography for him:

He starts  with the line:

Farewell base carle clothed in a satin suit,

This is a parody of  Robert Greene’s death-bed attack on Shakespeare (which, as Brothers and Sisters of The Code well know, was really written by Nashe)

A tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide

 This, in turn, is a parody of Queen Margaret in the Henry VI plays:

A tigers’ heart wrapped in a woman’s hide..

Ingenioso continues:

Farewell guilty ass, base broker’s post. 

Too oft have I rubbed o’er thy mule’s dead head,

Fed like a fly on thy corruption:

Now had I rather live in poverty

Than be tormented with the tedious tales

Of Gullio’s wench and of his luxuries,

To hear a thousand lies in one short day

Of his false wars at Portingale or Calls.

My freer spirit did lie in tedious woe

Whiles it applauded bragging Gullio

Applied my vein to sottish Gullio

Made wanton lines to please lewd Gullio.

Attend henceforth on Gulls for me who list,

For Gullio’s sake I’ll prove a Satirist.

So, if Ingenisos is Thomas Nashe, who is Gullio?

 Here are two more clues:

Clue A:  Thomas Nashe wrote a pornographic poem, The Choice of Valentines, which he dedicated to:

The Right Honourable, the Lord S.

It begins:

Pardon, sweet flower of matchless Poetry,

And fairest bud the red rose ever bare…

Clue B:  There was an English Earl whose crest contained four silver falcons: but many people mistook them for sea-gulls as his favourite estate was near to the coast.

 In 1618 one ‘ H.G.’ wrote in The Mirrour of Majestie:

 No storm of troubles, or cold frosts of friends,

Which on free greatnesss too too oft attends

Can, (by presumption), threaten your free state;

For these presaging sea-birds do amate

 Presumption’s greatness; moving the best minds

By their approach, to fear the future win

Of all calamity, no less than they

Portend to sea-mean a tempestuous day;

 Which you forseeing, may beforehand cross

 As they do them, and so prevent the loss….

ANSWERS.

Clue A:  The Shakespeare Code believes that the right Honourable the Lord S. is Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton.

Charles Nicholl has shown that Nashe must have written his Valentines  poem by April 1593. This is because Gabriel Harvey, in an attack on Nashe, threatened to:

 decipher thy [Nashe’s] unprinted packet of bawdy and filthy rhymes’ and denounce the ‘ruffianism of thy brother muse’. 

Southampton in 1593 was nineteen years old. His mother, Mary, the second Countess of Southampton, had commissioned Shakespeare to write seventeen poems for his seventeenth birthday to try to get him interested in girls.

Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece both border on the pornographic and both were dedicated to Southampton.

Nashe was simply carrying on a family tradition…

‘The fairest bud the red rose ever bore’ also refers to Southampton.

In his Sonnets, Shakespeare refers to him as ‘my rose’ – an allusion to the family name Wriothesley (which we know from the Titchfield Parish Register was pronounced ‘Riosely’ ) and the emblem of the town of Southampton.

The only other contender for the ‘Lord S.’ title would be Ferdiando Stanley, Lord Strange.

But by 1593 he was in his mid-thirties and with three daughters – scarcely in need, The Code would have thought, of  ‘wanton lines’ from Nashe…

Clue B: The crest with ‘gulls’ that ‘H.G.’ is describing belonged to the Southampton family.

So Gullio, The Shakespeare Code firmly believes, is:

 Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton.

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The Code has learnt that the great German scholar, Dr. Gregor Sarrazin (1854-1915) was also of the opinion that Gullio was the third Earl of Southampton, and wrote so in:

Shakespeare Jahrbuch, XXXI, 217 ff.

If Gullio is the Earl of Southampton, then by implication, Sir Andrew Agueecheek is the Earl of Southampton as  well…..

(It’s best to read Part Seven now).