The Shakespeare Code

1564-1594

Six years before William Shakespeare was born, Queen Elizabeth came to the throne… 

She was the daughter of King Henry VIII….

…and his second wife, Anne Boleyn….

Queen Elizabeth had succeeded her Roman Catholic half-sister, Mary Tudor, known to history as ‘Bloody Mary’…..

 

She had thought that the more Protestants she burnt, the more pleased God would be.

He might even make her pregnant….

Elizabeth, as Queen, moved warily at first…..

But it soon became clear to the Vatican State that she intended to eradicate Roman Catholicism from England….

For ever…

Katharine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife…..

…..had given Princess Elizabeth some much needed love…. 

…..but had also influenced her thinking….

…..profoundly…..

Katharine was a closet follower of John Calvin…..

….whose ideas about Pre-destination were taking Europe by storm…

Calvin argued that God knows everything that is going to happen….

….. so whether you are going to heaven or hell has been decided long before you were born.  

If you are going to heaven, God will show his favour by giving you wealth, position and power… 

When Bloody Mary came to the throne, she threw Princess Elizabeth into the Tower. 

Forced to enter by way of Traitor’s Gate….

 

…..the same fateful gateway her mother Anne  had passed through before she was beheaded …..

…..Elizabeth prayed to God to save her.

When, to her astonishment, she was not only freed from prison but then made Queen of England…..

●

Shakespeare’s father, John, a follower of the Old Faith, had seen it all before…

He had lived through King Henry’s break with Rome….

…..the adoption of Protestantism by his son, the boy-King Edward VI….

 

 ……then Bloody Mary’s re-establishment of full-blown Catholicism.

Elizabeth’s new Protestantism, like Edward’s, would soon blow over….

Or so he thought….

John Shakespeare was a successful glover….

…….but he did a lot of other things ‘on the side’…..

……most of them illegal…

Well known in London as a crook, he had often appeared before the Magistrates there….

But he was a man of deep faith…

He put his mark to a last will and testament so Roman Catholic it appointed the Virgin Mary to be its executor…. 

He hid the document behind the walls of his Stratford-upon-Avon home….

Had ‘The State’……

…..a handful of driven, ambitious men, making a fortune from Queen Elizabeth’s favour…

 …..found the Testament, ‘The State’ would have executed him….

Shakespeare’s mother, Mary, came from one of the oldest and most respectable Catholic families in the land – the Wilmcote Ardens….

Her relative, Edward Arden, kept a Catholic priest on his pay-roll, disguised as a gardener…

So ‘The State’ hanged, drew and quartered him….

But Edward’s real crime had been criticising the life-style of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester….

…..a. k. a. The Bear…. 

The Bear was Elizabeth’s lover….

… but that didn’t stop him from sleeping with many of her young ladies-in-waiting…

He murdered anyone who got in his way, including, it was rumoured, his young wife, Amy Robsart….

….who was discovered, with her neck broken, at the foot of a very short flight of stairs…

The Bear employed a whole retinue of astrologers, conjurers and magicians, like John Dee…

 

 …..along with Italian poisoners, alchemists and manufacturers of aphrodisiacs….

Never heard to utter a private prayer in his life, The Bear styled himself the leader of the Puritan movement in England….

….and sold his influence with the Queen for vast sums of money…

He had restored, at fabulous expense, the ruined Kennilworth Castle…..

…..not a dozen miles away from Shakespeare’s family home in Stratford-upon-Avon.

To pay for it, he increased the rents of his tenants by 1,000%……

When Queen Elizabeth and her retinue came to call, he stopped all the clocks so that his guests could devote themselves to pleasure….

….uninterrupted by time….

One of The Bear’s henchmen was the M.P. and sadist, Sir Thomas Lucy….

……licensed to raid the homes of Catholics….

 …..then torture the occupants. 

Lucy’s ambition was to find an even more painful way of executing people than chopping them up alive…

John Shakespeare’s son, William….

….an eccentric boy, full of songs and fun, who would make high dramatic speeches when butchering animals…..

….took his revenge on Lucy by poaching hares and deer from his estates…

……encouraged to do so, as a young Roman Catholic, by the Vatican State itself….

True to form, Lucy whipped him savagely and imprisoned him….

Shakespeare’s schoolteachers, all of them followers of the Old Faith, sent the lad away, for his own safety, to Lancashire….

…..to  the Hoghtons, a grand old Catholic family who lived at Hoghton Tower….

Here Shakespeare learnt how to fit in with aristocrats…..

……how to charm them….

……how to entertain them….

……and how to make himself indispensable to them….

But ‘The State’ persecuted ‘Papists’ just as effectively in Lancashire as it did in Warwickshire…. 

Shakespeare’s employer was imprisoned and, at eighteen, Shakespeare had to flee back to Stratford…..

…..where he impregnated Anne Hathaway….

….. a woman ten years older than himself ….

He did the honourable thing and married her….

…..then returned to the attack on Lucy…

Not only did he compose a scurrilous ballad about….

Lucy….

….being….

lousy…

He also hung it on the gates of Lucy’s estate….

He had to get out of town….

London was the obvious place to go….  

He shacked up with another grammar school boy…..

…..Thomas ‘Sporting’ Kyd…

Notorious for their starched beards….

……love of horse-racing….

……and patronage of brothels…..

……they scraped a living by writing ballads and pamphlets….

This earnt them the enmity of two Cambridge graduates…..

…..the huge, red-headed Robert Greene…

…..and the tiny, gat-toothed Thomas Nashe….

The Cambridge men thought it was outrageous that two mere grammar school boys should set themselves up as writers….

…..especially in competition with themselves….

They also thought it pathetic that Shakespeare should go for ‘writing lessons’ to Robert Crowley, the vicar of St. Giles’, Cripplegate….

But Shakespeare had his reasons…..

Lucy worswhipped at St. Giles’ when he was in London…

And Shakespeare still needed protection from him…..

…..protection that the Reverend Crowley could provide….

But Crowley did more than that….

He inspired Shakespeare…

People with money must give it all to the poor…..

….and they must do it of their own free will…..

They must also remove all artifice from their lives, their dress and their language…

Crowley encouraged Shakespeare to turn Bible stories into plays….

…..and set him off on a tour of the Midlands…. 

….with the blessing of  arts-loving Ferdinando, Lord Strange….

…..but not his money….

The only ‘actors’ Shakespeare could get, though, were failed, alcoholic, tradesmen….

…..often ‘subsidised’ by gay City businessmen……

….who would create chaos at the rehearsals….

Shakespeare’s repertoire was an unlikely mix of New Testament parables, fairy stories and bloody domestic murder…

The actors, too poor to ride on horses, had to walk everywhere….

…..dragging their props and costume wagon behind them…

…..sometimes sleeping in the wagon itself…..

…..sometimes playing to tiny audiences….

…..sometimes playing to an audience of one….

…..in his bedchamber…..

But running a company gave a taste of power to the young Shakespeare…

Power that was soon to be taken away….

In 1587, Queen Elizabeth, after years of hesitation,  finally signed the death warrant for her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots…..

….a seductive and enchanting woman, who had long been the object of worship for English Catholics…

They wanted Mary to replace Queen Elizabeth and lead England back to Rome…..

The following year – 1588 – the Spanish Armada attacked….

The winds famously blew….

…..and  the Spanish fleets were scattered….

It seemed as if God really was on the side of Protestantantism, England and the Queen.

Actors were redundant: the English wanted ‘real’ men.

They even tore the costumes off the backs of performers to provide clothing for soldiers…

The public, also, had grown tired of Shakespeare’s ‘moralising’….

They had much preferred the thrills and spills, corpses and revenge, gun-shots and suicide that Kyd had provided in his The Spanish Tragedy…

Shakespeare reacted by becoming boastful, drunk and arrogant…..

The strait-laced Strange ditched him….

For the moment….

●

It was impossible, for a time, for anyone to make money in the theatre….

Kyd  joined Strange’s household as tutor to his daughters…

Christopher Marlowe…..

…..who had been intriguing audiences with his God-defying tragedies….

 ….became tutor to Arbella, grandaughter of the much-married Bess of Hardwick….

….and Shakespeare, pulling Catholic strings,  joined  the household of Mary Browne, the second Countess of Southampton…

 …..who was distantly related to his mother, Mary Arden….

The Countess, a Catholic activist who hid priests in her London home, was a widow….

Her husband, the Second Earl of Southampton, had died young, imprisoned and ‘examined’ in the Tower for his support of Mary, Queen of Scots…

Countess Mary’s favourite country seat was Place House, a converted Abbey in Titchfield, Hampshire….

She needed a schoolmaster for her Grammar School at the gates of Place House…

 …..and a tutor for her wayward, gay, teenage son, Harry…

…...also known as Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton….

The Countess, whose husband had disowned her for falling in love with…

 ….a common person….

….and who had taken Harry away from her when he was only six years old…. 

… took a shine to Shakespeare….

She dressed him in smart clothes……

…….gave him a massive allowance….

…… and commissioned him to write seventeen sonnets for her son’s seventeenth birthday…. 

….in a vain attempt to get Harry interested in girls….

(Lord Burghley, Harry’s guardian, was threatening a £5,000 [£2 and a half million] fine if he didn’t marry his grandaughter.)

Shakespeare had mixed in flamboyant, theatrical circles in London….

….but he knew he had to behave himself now he was with a ‘respectable’ Catholic family….

He stated directly  in one of the ‘Birthday’ sonnets that he had no sexual interest in Harry whatsoever…

Harry, however, had other ideas….

●

The Countess of Southampton was in friendly rivalry with Mary Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke…

 ……..who lived thirty miles away from Titchfield at Wilton House….

She was the sister of the poet, soldier and courtier, Sir Philip Sidney…..

……who had died after a cavalry charge at Zutphen….

He saw that an old soldier had no thigh armour….

….so he gallantly threw off his own….

….and was instantly shot in the leg…

Seeing a common soldier in a worse condition than himself, he gave him the last of his water……

He later died while making love to his wife who was with him on the campaign….

…..according to the antiquarian and gossip John Aubrey…..

 ……who also claimed that Sidney and his sister Mary were so close that they slept together…

…..and that Mary’s sons were, in reality,  Philip’s….

●

The Countesses of Pembroke and Southampton, though Protestant and Catholic, had one thing in common…

They had both been banned from the court by Queen Elizabeth…..

….. who wanted no powerful, attractive women upstaging her…

So the two Countesses devised a revenge….

The Queen had ‘recalled’ (i.e. banned) the recently published Holinshed’s Chronicles….

…..on the grounds that they were….

 ……fondly set out….

She was worried that people might compare her reign with the reign of other Kings and Queens….

Especially the corrupt, weak, perverse or tyrannical ones….

So the Countesses commissioned Shakespeare to write history plays……

…. which obliquely attacked the Queen….

…..and her hangers-on….

….which they could stage, in lavish, pro-am productions, in the grounds of their estates….

After all, horses, armour and soldiers were on hand….

And aristocrats loved play-acting…

The men had got a taste for it at Cambridge….

…..and the women needed a distraction when they were stuck, deep, in the country…

The problem was that grammar school boy Shakespeare, snatched early from school, knew little about the Kings and Queens of England…

So he did what canny folk have always done…

He hired his enemies….

He offered Greene and Nashe money to ‘ghost’ for him down at Titchfield…

And the ‘University wits’ were in no financial position to decline…

Shakespeare hid them away at Posbrook Farm,  just outside Titchfield….

…….and supervised the research and writing of the Henry VI trilogy….

Nashe and Greene were Protestants….

…in the scenes which they wrote, Joan of Arc is a witch and a prostitute….

Shakespeare was a Catholic….

….in the scenes which he wrote, she is an angel and a saint…

Posbrook Farm was owned by one William Beeston….

…..nick-named by Nashe,  Mr Apis Lapis….

….(‘Apis’ is Latin for ‘Bee’ and ‘Lapis’ is Latin for ‘Stone’)…. 

Beeston was a  vintner  famous for his advocacy of wine, his bulk, his gluttony, his criminality, his meanness…

….and his ebullient company…

He provided the writers with cider, cheese and his three notorious ‘maids’ …

…..at a price….

Greene soon ruined himself and wandered back to London….

But Nashe stayed on, determined to wrest from Shakespeare the position he held in the Southampton entourage…

Nashe had collaborated with Marlowe…..

…. and now he collaborated with Shakespeare…..

Nashe’s natural form was prose, while Shakespeare’s was poetry…

Together they wrote Richard III…..

 

……a satire on Leicester, The Bear, who had died in Armada year….

…..poisoned, it was rumoured, by his wife, Lettice Knollys….

…….who had taken a young lover….

The death of The Bear was a relief to everyone…..

….except the Queen….

She came to visit Titchfield in 1591, along with her entire court and army….

These ‘Progresses’ as they were called, allowed her to tour her island and meet her people….

…..but they also allowed her to spy on Catholic families…

Her soldiers would  trash the houses of her ‘hosts’ as they searched for signs of priest holes and….

  ….massing…..

And as though that wasn’t enough, the Queen herself would shoot deer with a crossbow at point blank range…..

…. as they were run in front of her…

….a custom which disgusted country folk…..

….and which was started by her father, Henry VIII when he grew too fat to mount  a horse…

She would then cut off the stag’s testicles….

The Queen liked music to accompany the carnage….

At Titchfield it was provided by the Bassano family, a group of dark-skinned Hassidic Jews from Morocco….

Among them was the ravishing, wilful, mixed-race beauty, Emilia Bassano….

…..of whom no portrait remains….

Shakespeare, like many before him and many after him, fell madly in love with her.

But his passion threw him into agonies of guilt….

He was a married man, and, as a Catholic, took his marriage vows with the utmost seriousness….

But Emilia was spoken for…

Lord Hunsdon, the Queen’s cousin, a bluff old ‘sword and buckler man’,  nearly fifty years her senior…

 

……’kept’ her in jewellery, fine clothes and money to the tune of £40 a year…..

 …..the equivalent today of  £20,000….

Shakespeare, though, was not put off….

He wrote sonnets to seduce Emilia….

Then wrote a whole play to seduce her as well…

…..Love’s Labour’s Lost….. 

 It is also a satire on the Queen’s visit to Titchfield….

…..and was played on the very spot where she had shot deer….

…..’The Parke’ at Place House…

Shakespeare cast himself as the world-weary, sardonic, but highly romantic ‘Berowne’….

 

 ….a play on the Countess of Southampton’s  surname, ‘Browne’…..

…..and he cast Emilia as the sharp-tongued, black-eyed coquette, Rosaline…..

…..with whom Berowne falls reluctantly, but madly in love…

This was all too much for Harry, who….

…….fond on praise

…..wanted to be the centre of Shakespeare’s attention….

The plague was raging in London, so Harry, Emilia and Shakespeare were stuck for the summer in Titchfield…..

……in a painful, complex love-triangle….

……with Nashe hovering around the edges….

Emilia’s technique was to play hard to get….

…. promising more than she actually delivered… 

Shakespeare made the great mistake of asking Harry to plead his love-suit for him….

A handsome, rich, young aristocrat, however gay, was much more of a prize for Emilia than an ageing, balding playwright…

 

…..so she swooped.

Harry wanted to hurt Shakespeare…. 

…..so, overcoming his repugnance to women, he returned Emilia’s advances. 

Shakespeare, desperate and confused, fled from Titchfield to go on tour with Lord Strange’s Men. 

He sent a troubled, vicious sonnet to Harry, which compared him and Emilia to two spirits…

….. one good and one evil…..

……fighting for his soul…

He warns Harry that if he sleeps with Emilia, he’ll catch ‘the clap’….

●

Greene, meanwhile had died in London…..

….in conditions of utmost penury….

He’d been found lying, starving in the street….

….and taken in by a kind-hearted cobbler and his wife…

Nashe claimed he’d ‘found’ papers in Greene’s room which accused Shakespeare of plagiarism….

…..and of working with a prostitute called ‘Lamilia’ to extort money from Harry…

Shakespeare and the Southamptons went beserk….

They accused Nashe himself of writing ‘Greene’s’ attack on Shakespeare….

Nashe swore on his soul that the pamphlet had not ‘proceeded’ from his ‘pen’..

But he immediately went on to attack  Shakespeare in Sommer’s Last Will and Testament ….

…..an entertainment staged by the Southampton family for Queen Elizabeth when she came to visit Countess Mary’s dying father, Lord Montague….

Shakespeare, who was still safely away on tour, appears as the flashily dressed and arrogant ‘Sol’…. 

….who cons and exploits the entire Southampton household….

To top it all, Emilia had become pregnant and had to be married off ‘for colour’ to a ‘minstrel’ called Alphonse Lanier…..

On the road, Shakespeare was forced to examine his feelings…

He finally had to admit to himself that he was more upset at the loss of his ‘lovely boy’  than his ‘dark lady’…

And that he had fallen in love with the cross-dressing Harry the moment he had set eyes on him…

Shakespeare returned to Titchfield…

…..and finally, his affair with Harry began… 

Shakespeare released his pent-up adoration in a great love poem, Sonnet 18….

It begins with a question….

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

….to which Shakespeare reponds, sublimely, in the negative….

Thou art more lovely and more temperate….

Homosexuality, officially at least, carried the death sentence….

……so there was an illicit thrill in Shakespeare’s love…..

…….as there was an illicit thrill in celebrating the Old Latin Mass…..

…… always in secret and often after dark….

Nashe pounced again…..

He knew the Countess was half in love with Shakespeare….

So he delighted in telling her Shakespeare was sleeping with her son….

The Countess took Shakespeare aside and questioned him directly…

…….exactly as the Catholic Countess in All’s Well that Ends well questions the low-born Helena about her feelings for her son, Bertram…

…..Was Shakespeare in love with Harry?

Shakespeare, like Helena, admitted to her he was….

The Countess, whose own love for ‘a common person’ had crossed barriers of class, empathised with a love that crossed barriers of sex….

She thought Shakespeare was good for Harry….

As, in other circumstances,  he might have been good for her….

So she approved of the affair…

‘Cousin Will’ was now fully one of the family….

To celebrate their love, Harry and Shakespeare (with Nashe, forgiven once again, in tow) secretly visited Europe in the Spring of 1593….

…..as spies for Southampton’s great friend, Robert Devereux,  the second Earl of Essex…

 They travelled to Madrid where they were received by King Philip II…

…..a great family friend of the Southamptons…. 

Here Shakespeare saw two Titian paintings, owned by the King, that were to change his life….

……Venus and Adonis….

 …..and The Rape of Lucrece….

When he was back in England, Shakespeare recreated these paintings in verse….

He even used the same colours in his poems as Titian had used on his canvases…

But it was the depth of Titian’s psychology which transformed Shakespeare’s art.

Up to then, English theatre had been two-dimensional…

Shakespeare began, like Titian, to flesh it out…

The three men then travelled round Italy, journeying from city to city by a network of canals….

Sometimes Shakespeare pretended to be the Earl of Southampton while the Earl pretended to be Shakespeare…

Just like The Taming of the Shrew….

…..when the aristocratic Lucentio….

…..changes clothes with his manservant Tranio….

They visited Verona and Padua…..

And, of course, the Bassano family’s old home, Venice…

They even made it, in deadly secret, to Rome, where they saw the famous obelisk that Pope Sextus had erected in front of St. Peter’s…

Shakespeare and Southampton were profoundly moved by the sight of this Pagan monument, now embraced by the Old  Faith….

It had been the last sight that St. Peter had seen before his martyrdom….

But they arrived back in England to a shock….

Marlowe was dead….

Kyd had been racked so badly he was as good as dead…

Atheist papers had been found in their joint lodgings….

…..Marlowe had died, in a drunken brawl, in Deptford…

Kyd tried to revive his collaboration with Shakespeare, but Shakespeare didn’t want to know…

Kyd, under torture, had told the authorities that the incriminating papers had been Marlowe’s….

●

Harry was to come of age the following year – so his mother, the Countess, had to leave Titchfield….

She married one of Queen Elizabeth’s old lovers, the elegant courtier (and recent widower) Sir Thomas Heneage and moved to Copped Hall in Essex….

She commissioned Shakespeare to write an entertainment to celebrate the match….

It was to be A Midsummer Night’s Dream…..

© Stewart Trotter and Trixie the Cat. Christmas, 2011.

NOW VIEW: Shakespeare: The Movie II.