(It’s best to read Parts One, Two and Three first).
Mary, Countess of Southampton’s next commission for William Shakespeare….
…..and Thomas Nashe, of course….
…..was an entertainment for the 1592 Titchfield Whitsun Fair….
The Fair had been granted to the town by King Henry VI in 1447, two years after he had married Margaret of Anjou in the Abbey….
It was originally held at the Feast of Corpus Chrisit, when sacred objects from the Church were processed round the town…
But this had all been far too Papist for the boy-king Edward VI…
He banned Corpus Christi and replaced it with Whit Sunday instead….
A time for tilting, drinking Whitsun ale and morris dancing…
Much more English….
The festivities were held in Countess Mary’s ‘Parke’…. .
..and are held there to this day….
Mary wanted a comedy for the event…..
A very heterosexual comedy in which her son, Harry, could act….
And which might turn him straight….
(She faced a tremendous £5,000 fine if Harry refused to marry Lord Burghley’s grand-daughter….)
But Harry showed no interest at all in girls….
Except to dress up like them….
Mary asked Shakespeare to write heterosexual parts for Harry’s gay friends as well…
…..the Danvers brothers, who were so posh they pronounced their name ‘Davers’.
Mary was clearly hoping for a mass, Hampshire conversion….
Parts, too, were needed for her female guests who were coming to visit at Whitsun…..
…..one of whom needed no conversion to heterosexuality….
…..Penelope Rich….
She had been the muse of Sir Philip Sidney, who described her as….
…..most RICH in these and every part,
Which makes the patents of true, wordly bliss,
Hath no misfortune, but that RICH she is…
Penelope was the sister of the Earl of Essex….
…..who was the hero of the hour….
He had fought alongside Henri of Navarre at the siege of Rouen…
He was also an intimate friend of gay Harry….
(And secretly batted for both sides…)
He loved plays…..
And he loved tilting……
…..and would certainly have been invited to Titchfield for the Whitsun celebrations as the guest of honour…
But whether he made it there or not was another matter…..
The Queen, pushing sixty….
……was besotted with Essex and hardly let him out of her sight…
She often had him apprehended as he tried to escape from the Court down to Hampshire….
Just like Venus, in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, who rugby tackles her reluctant lover Adonis to the ground…
●
Shakespeare came up with the idea of Love’s Labour’s Lost…
……a re-write of an old hit he’d had for Lord Strange’s Men, The Fair Em….
….which has an identical ‘eaves-dropping’ scene….
….and a lecherous old mill-worker called Trotter….
The whole thing was to be a satire on Queen Elizabeth and her Progress the previous year to Cowdray and Titchfield…
This had been a time of enormous strain for the Roman Catholic Southampton family…
At any moment their recusancy could have been exposed….
Shakespeare knew it would be highly therapeutic for them all to have a good old laugh at it….
In the play, the King of Navarre and his courtiers (Berowne, Dumaine and Longaville) vow to give up women and devote their lives to study….
But the Princess of France and her retinue of lovely Ladies (Rosaline, Katharine and Maria) arrive at the Court of Navarre on state business….
They are forced to live in tents in the fields outside the gates…
But, one by one, the gentlemen break their vows…
Shakespeare cast the beautiful Penelope in the part of the Princess, and plays on her name the same way Sidney did…
In the final scene he has her say….
Sweet hearts, we shall be RICH ‘ere we depart…
….and then uses the word ‘rich’ FIVE more times in the same scene.
Berowne was another intellectual/romantic part for Shakespeare…
(The character’s oddly-spelt name is a coded compliment to Mary, Countess of Southampton, whose maiden name was Browne…)
The handsome King who falls hopeleslly in love with the Princess….
….was a great, masculinising part for Harry…
He was called ‘Navarre’ after Henri of Navarre, alongside whom Essex had been fighting…
And the two other courtiers were named after generals who were at the siege as well..
….Henri d’Orleans, duc de Longueville and Charles, duc de Mayenne….
This was all a compliment to Essex….
Who, in reality, had proved a disastrous commander at Rouen…
Three thousand of his men had died, including his brother Walter….
●
Love’s Labour’s Lost was written to be an outdoor ‘promenade’ performance, just like the Progresses of the Queen…
And, like the Progresses of the Queen, it was staged as a ‘serial’ over several days..
The Princess and her ladies would have arrived on horseback, just as Elizabeth and her Ladies had done…
And when the Princess of France says to the King of Navarre (who is immediately smitten by her beauty)….
The roof of this court is too high to be yours, and welcome to the wide fields too base to be mine’
…..she is referring to the real sky and to real fields….
Place House itself – and it’s great doors – would become the Court of Navarre….
…..and real tents would be pitched in real grounds…….
When the Princess asks…
Was that the King that spurred his horse so hard
Against the steep-up rising of the hill?….
….Harry would have spurred his real horse up the really steep hill outside the gates of Place House…
When the Princess goes to the standing to shoot deer, she would go to the actual standing that had been built for Elizabeth….
And when she exclaims….
But come, the bow…
….she would be given the actual bow that Elizabeth had used…
And which she had left as a memento at Cowdray….
And when Berowne climbs into a tree and sits ‘like a demi-God’…’in he sky’ and the King of Navarre hides behind a bush….
The tree was a genuine tree…
And the bush was a genuine bush….
●
The ‘fairing’ that Princess of France receives in the play is…..
A lady walled about with diamonds….’
….a clear reference, for those in the know, to the famous ‘Armada Jewel’ which Sir Thomas Heneage had given to the Queen…
The part of the Princess gives Penelope Rich – who hated the Queen almost as much as her mother, Lettice Knollys, did – a wonderful opportunity to satirise Elizabeth….
….her vanity, her bossiness and her jealousy….
But it is clear that Shakespeare was FASCINATED by the Queen….
How could a woman of such grace and sensibility behave with such cruelty?
(Please see: Queen Elizabeth, incest and sadism. )
In the speech she makes just before the shooting of the deer, Shakespeare penetrates to the depths of the Queen’s heart….
She herself questions her addicition to hunting and realises that her need for…
…Fame, an outward part….
…… is so great that it smothers her natural compassion….
So she….
spill[s] the poor deer’s blood….
This, for the Elizabethans, introduces another conundrum…
….blood could mean semen…
(Please see: The Shakespeare Code)
So ‘the poor deer’ were also her poor, hapless lovers…
Like the Earl of Essex….
Did they follow her in spite of her cruelty?
Or BECAUSE of it…
In the play the women lead the men a merry dance….
And outwit them at every turn….
But the men come back for more….
And more..
Including Berowne…..
The sceptical, wordly-wise courtier falls head-over-heels in love with the dark-skinned, skittish beauty, Rosaline…
Played, of course, by Emilia Bassano….
Shakespeare had used his Sonnets to try to seduce her…
He had praised her, mocked her, insulted her, surprised her….
And, above all, tried to make her laugh….
Now he attempts to get her into bed by writing a whole play!
But there could be no happy resolution to the entertainment….
The execution of Swithin Wells had cast a long shadow over The Comedy of Errors….
Now sickness in the Southampton family was casting an even longer shadow over Love’s Labour’s Lost….
In the play, the Princess of France’s father is ‘sick and bed-rid’…
So was Mary Southampton’s father, Lord Montague…..
And so was her twin brother, Anthony…..
Both were to die later in the year….
Artists are often prophetic in their work……
Shakespeare ends his ‘comedy’ with the arrival of Mercade….
…..who informs the Princess of the death of her father…..
The Ladies tell their adoring Lords to retreat from the pleasures of the world for a year….
Then, if they still love their ladies, make their suits again….
Berowne then famously says….
That’s too long for a play….
A sad conclusion…..
But Shakespeare and Nashe, as we shall see in our next post, had their triumphs on the way…..
(It’s best to read Part Five now.)
The Shakespeare Code 
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