(It is best to read Parts One and Two first.)
The Bassano family – a group of dark-skinned Sephardic Jews, originally from Morroco – provided the music for the Cowdray Progress in 1591….
A Bassano providing the music for Elizabeth and Leicester.
Among them was the beautiful, mixed race Emelia, the young mistress of the Queen’s cousin and Lord Chamberlain, old Lord Hunsdon…
He paid £40 a year for her services, but this did not buy him exclusive rights…
William Shakespeare saw her at Cowdray and was smitten…
She was, as the late A. L. Rowse discovered…..
…..the famous ‘Dark Lady’ of the Sonnets…
SADLY, NO PORTRAIT OF ‘THE DARK LADY’ IS AVAILABLE…
Except of course in Shakespeare’s verse…
She was a favourite of the Queen and of noble ladies in general….
She helped with their entertainments….
But to Shakespeare, she was an entertainment in herself….
In Sonnet 128 he even envies the wooden keys….
…….on her virginals….
…..because her fingers ‘walk’ over them….
with gentle gait…
Emelia stayed on at Titchfield after the Queen’s Progress and took part in the Christmas entertainment there…
An established tradition in the Southampton household….
The highly cultured (and deeply Catholic) first Countess, Jane, was described…..
…..as merry as can be with Christmas plays and masques….
And her husband, Thomas Wriothesley, the first Earl….
…..was a keen amateur actor.
(He was also a keen amateur torturer. He racked one poor woman to death….)
The Christmas show at Titchfield in 1591, full of references to the cold weather, was cousin Will’s The Comedy of Errors…
Written, of course, in collaboration with Thomas Nashe….
….who, as ever, wrote the jokes….
The play begins with the gloom of a potential execution….
Egeon, a merchant from Syracuse….
……has travelled to Ephesus, searching for his son, Antipholus, whom he’s not seen for five years…
Antipholus of Syracuse, in turn, is searching for his twin brother, Antipholus of Ephusus, lost, along with his mother (Egeon’s wife) in a storm at sea when they were babies….
He feels like a drop of water in the ocean, seeking another drop but losing itself in the process…
…..a wonderful intellectual/romantic part for Shakespeare himself….
Syracuse and Ephesus are engaged in a trade war, so Egeon is sentenced to death by the Duke of Ephesus….
This is a coded reference to the execution of Swithin Wells, barely a fortnight before the Titchfield Christmas festivities began…
He was a loved, old, literate, Roman Catholic friend of the Southampton family….
Described by the Vatican as….
…a witty man, skilled in diverse languages…
….who had adored hunting and hawking, and who had given…
…a good example to the gentry…
….Wells had lived en famille with the Southamptons at Place House…
….in whose Great Hall the Christmas play was to be performed.
Wells had also taught at the Titchfield Grammar School….
…..where he had recruited young Englishmen to train as Catholic priests…
Ordained on the continent, they returned to England as misssionaries….
And almost certain death….
They were ‘drawn and quartered’….
….(forget the token ‘hanging’)…
ALIVE!!!
Mary, second Countess of Southampton, a strong-willed, Catholic activist…
….had sheltered these ‘suicide martyrs’ in her London residence, Southampton House…..
.
…..a stone’s throw from which the ‘dangerous Papist’ Wells had been hanged….
But Shakespeare had been commissioned to write a Christmas entertainment….
So, after a melancholy start, the play develops into a light-hearted comedy….
About mistaken identity, marital infidelity and families split apart…
Mary, Countess of Southampton, had a twin brother, Anthony….
So Shakespeare plundered a Plautus plot that has not just one pair of twins…
BUT TWO!!!
The identical Antipholus twins (the sons of Egeon) have identical servant twins, Dromio of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus…
(Well, it was a Christmas show…)
Dromio of Syracuse was played by Thomas Nashe….
….as he was to play many of the ‘stand-up’ comic parts in the premieres of Shakespeare’s Comedies.
He took, of course, the opportunity to promote himself…..
He was in charge of the comic scenes and so ‘arranges’ for Antipholus of Syracuse (Shakespeare’s part) to describe Dromio of Syracuse (his part) as:
A trusty villain, sir, that very oft
When I am dull with care and melancholy,
Lightens my humour with his merry jests…
Nashe is positively telling the audience he is funny…
Later, as Dromio of Syracuse, he says…
I am an ape….
‘Ape’ was the trademark name of Nashe in ‘real life’.
(Nashe wrote, of himself, at Cambridge, that ‘I was a little ape’.)
Nashe not only promotes himself: he demeans Shakespeare in the process…
As Dromio of Syracuse, he makes unsporting fun of Shakespeare’s baldness…
Shakespeare was well aware that he was pre-maturely losing his hair….
He makes a beautiful joke of the fact in Sonnet 73 where he writes:
That time of year thou may’st in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang….
But Nashe, as Dromio of Syracuse, and talking directly to Shakespeare as Antipholus of Syracuse, mentions, for no reason at all….
the plain bald pate of Father Time….
….adds…
There’s no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by Nature…
….then goes on to elaborate this theme for another, utterly unfunny….
FORTY LINES!!!
Nashe was always accusing Shakespeare of ‘sucking up’ to the Southampton family, but he does just as much ‘sucking up himself….
To show he is Roman Catholic ‘in spirit’ (he did genuinely admire the charity work done by Catholics) he has Dromio of Syracuse exclaim….
….O for my beads….
…..meaning, of course, the forbidden Catholic rosary….
If Elizabeth’s soldier-thugs had found a rosary behind the panelling at Titchfield, the Southampton family would have followed Swithin Wells to the block….
But The Comedy of Errors was given in private performance…
In the same way the old Latin Mass was still celebrated in private at Titchfield ….
So everyone in the audience was relaxed about references to Roman Catholicism….
Indeed, one of the Old Faith’s great rites, exorcism, is affectionately sent up in the absurd figure of the schoolmaster-conjuror, Pinch….
He tries to cure ‘the possession’ of Antipholus of Ephesus, whose twin bother, Antipholus of Syracuse, has dined with his wife, Adriana…
Antipholus of Ephesus denies all knowlege of the meal.
So, everyone thinks he is possessed….
Antipholus of Syracuse, meanwhile, falls in love with Adriana’s sister, Luciana, and describes her as….
…..our earth’s wonder, more than earth divine….
Scholars have taken this to be a coded compliment to Queen Elizabeth….
But Antipholus goes on to also describe Luciana as a….
…sweet mermaid…..
….and he asks her to…..
…..Spread o’er the silver waves [her] golden hair…’
A compliment to a Queen is intended…..
But to a dead, Scottish, Catholic Queen…
Who had golden-red hair…
Mary Queen of Scots….
Her personal symbol was the mermaid….
In the Will she made before her confinement in 1566, she left her lover, the Earl of Bothwell….
….a miniature figurine of a mermaid set in diamonds, holding a diamond mirror and a ruby comb…
The following year, Bothwell (whose heraldic crest was the hare) was accused of killing Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley…
Mary was lampooned as a crowned, bare-breasted mermaid, with her hair falling down to her shoulders, defending her lover with a whip…
Later that year, Mary was imprisoned in the Black Turnpike in Edinburgh, ostensibly to save her from the mobs who were baying for her blood….
On 16th June she appeared at her window…
……with her bodice undone, her breasts exposed and her tangled hair loose, and with ‘piteous lamentations’ made a distraught appeal for help from the citizens who had gathered below…
(Alison Weir)
As a teenager, Queen Mary had made two earlier bare-breasted appearances…
One in Francois Clouet’s The Bath of Diana…
The other in his A Lady at her Toilet…
Even the long-bearded, Scottish Calvinist John Knox….
….(who had compared Mary Queen of Scots to Jezebel) had to admit that the six foot tall woman possessed….
……some enchantment whereby men are bewitched….
So when Shakespeare, as Antipholus of Syracuse, says to Luciana…
Sing, siren for thyself, and I will dote…’
….the Catholic audience in Titchfield audience would be remembering their dead queen with an erotic thrill….
And Shakespeare would be nailing his Roman Catholic colours to the Southampton mast…
●
Place House, before its conversion by the first Earl of Southampton in 1538, had been an Abbey run by Premonstratensian monks…
Indeed, the first Earl’s wife, Countess Jane, voiced concern that the chapel – where King Henry VI had married Margaret of Anjou – was to be converted to a master bedroom…
The new Gatehouse ran right through the nave……
Shakespeare makes reference to the old Catholic function of Place House by setting the last act of The Comedy of Errors in front of…
the abbey here’…
…..a phrase he uses in the play…
FIVE TIMES!!!
He uses the word ‘abbey’ itself seven times in the play….
And only uses the word ‘abbey’ five more times in his COMPLETE WORKS!!!
The Abbess even specifically mentions….
‘….the ditch behind the Abbey here…..
The Abbess – ‘a virtuous and reverend lady’ – would have been an ideal part for devout Catholic, Mary, second countess of Southampton.
Her father and step-mother, Lord and Lady Montague, had performed in public before the Queen on her Progress a few months before….
Why shouldn’t she perform in her own house, in private?
She would have loved dressing up as an Abbess!
The Abbess determines to ‘make a formal man again’ of the seemingly crazed Antipholus of Ephesus, by using….
….wholesome syrups, drugs and holy prayers….
and explains that it is…..
…a branch and parcel of mine oath,
A charitable duty of my order…..’
Pastoral care had also been the ‘duty’ of Titchfield Abbey’s white-robed monks…
By acknowledging the power of this healing process – with its reliance on prayer as well as medicine – Shakespeare is acknowledging the power of the Old Faith itself….
There is a great part for Emelia, the Dark Lady, as well….
The Courtesan who operates from ‘The Porpentine’ – a bordello in Ephusus…
She wants the money back for the ring she has given Antipholus of Ephesus and exclaims…
Forty ducats is too much to lose…’
This is a dig at Emelia’s £40 a year allowance from old Lord Hunsdon…
Another ‘Dark Lady’ in-joke occurs when we learn the name of the Abbess…
It is Emelia….
An entirely different sort of ‘nun’, of course…
●
At the conclusion of the play a family that has been split apart comes together. The Abbess turns out to be Egeon’s lost wife…
The Southampton family was also split apart. The second Earl had gone to his grave hating his wife, Mary – and her son had inherited this hatred….
Shakespeare is using his art to try to heal this spiritual rift – a process he was to take to audacious lengths in A Midsummer Night’s Dream….
●
A performance of The Comedy of Errors was later given at Gray’s Inn, London, on 28th December, 1594.
The third Earl of Southampton had been a member of this particular Inn of Court (just opposite his London residence) since he graduated from Cambridge in 1589.
The play was a catastrophe…
It was the culmination of a riotous evening, during which, through lack of space the audience sat on the stage itself…
So nothing could be properly seen or heard….
Also, the aristocratic members of Gray’s Inn were offended by the fact that the actors were ‘base and common fellows’…
These cannot have been the Lord Chamberlain’s Men who now included Burbage and Shakespeare and who had considerable prestige….
Lord Hunsdon (who had been made Lord Chamberlain in 1585) and had been managing and protecting players since the 1560’s and performers working under his name enjoyed considerable prestige…
Besides, his Men were busily entertaining the Queen down the river at Greenwich on that night….
Probably with A Midsummer Night’s Dream….
It was most likely a scratch group of actors who turned up at Gray’s Inn, put together by Southampton (who had just come of age) to show off the play his family had commissioned…
And to upstage his mother, who had commissioned The Dream as well…
The Comedy of Errors, Catholic and homely, was quite wrong for a drunken audience of ‘Hooray-Henries and Henriettas’ who seem to have taken personal offence at the play’s references to magic and conjuring…
They complained they had been ‘pinched on both sides’ – a reference to Pinch the schoolmaster exorcist….
Southampton, as far as we know, never ‘produced’ anything again…
Wise chap…
(It’s best to read ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Decoded. Part Four next.)
The Shakespeare Code 
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