(It’s best to view Shakespeare: The Movie I first)
1594-1601
A Midsummer Night’s Dream…..
…..proved a nightmare.
Emilia was back on the scene, making a play for young Harry…
Nashe was still doing all he could to rubbish Shakespeare….
And Kyd was pushing for Nashe’s job as Shakespeare’s collaborator….
On top of all this, Heneage, Countess Mary’s bridegroom, was a Protestant…..
So staunch a Protestant, in fact, that he had overseen the execution of Mary Queen of Scots…
There was also the problem of the Countess of Southampton’s first marriage…..
Her husband, the second Earl of Southampton, had died with their quarrel over little Harry unresolved….
He had gone to his grave hating his wife.
As a Catholic, Shakespeare believed that the first marriage needed closure before the second could properly begin…
The soul of the second Earl was probably locked in Purgatory….
And profoundly influenced by actions on Earth….
Shakespeare, the magus…….
….solved everything in a flash…..
He managed to work into the play compliments to BOTH Queen Elizabeth AND Mary Queen of Scots…
He cast – and exposed – Emilia as the scheming little dark-skinned ‘Ethiope’, Hermia…
And cast the diminutive Nashe – who famously could not grow a beard – as Francis Flute the bellows-mender, forced to play Thisbe through his lack of facial hair…
Shakespeare devalued Kyd by parodying a famous line from his big hit The Spanish Tragedy….
Hieronimo, hearing a woman pleading for help, asks….
What outcries pluck me from my naked bed?
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Queen of the Fairies, Titania……
……hearing Bottom singing in his ass’s head….
….asks…..
What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?
Shakespeare cast Heneage as the warrior Theseus…….
…..who admits he has ‘wooed’ Hyppolita (Countess Mary)…
with his sword….
…and has…
Won her love by doing [her] injuries….
i.e. chopping off the head of Mary Queen of Scots…
The Countess’s quarrel with her first husband over little Harry is re-enacted in the figures of Titania and Oberon, fighting over the changeling boy….
And resolved when Oberon and Titania forgive each other and dance together…..
Shakespeare even throws in a Catholic blessing on the bridal bed and Copped Hall itself at the end of the play….
But it is spoken by fairies…….
…… in case Queen Elizabeth was in the audience…
Emilia and Nashe took their revenge….
Emilia – posing as the virtuous woman ‘Avisa’ – penned an anonymous, scurrilous satire……
She claimed that a ‘blubbing’ young Harry – Mr. H. W. [Henry Wriothesley] and a vindictive ‘Old Player’, W. S. [William Shakespeare] had both tried to seduce her…
In vain!
Nashe, as Shakespeare’s collaborator on the play, had a big hand in the comic scenes….
He sends ups the early touring days of Shakespeare’s company in the figure of the ‘rude mechanicals’……
……and the theatrical meglomania of Shakespeare himself in the character of Bottom the Weaver…
But Kyd was unable to exact a revenge…..
He was dead by the end of 1594….
Shakespeare bought up the rights to all his plays – including an early Hamlet, Lear and Taming of a Shrew…..
…..rewrote them in the light of the insights he had gained on his European tour…..
….and blasted ‘famous Kyd’ from theatrical history…..
….. for ever….
●
The following year Harry, now of age, made his first appearance at Court.
He was handsome tall and gallant……
…..so everyone assumed he would be Queen Elizabeth’s new favourite…
Leicester, The Bear’s, death had created a power vacuum – a situation the Queen was happy to exploit……
She loved to surround herself with ambitious young men of high family but low means, all fighting each other for her attention.
She could control them with money….
Apart from Essex, the two main contenders for the Queen’s favour were the tall, swart, driven, Devonshire man, Sir Walter Raleigh a.k.a. The Fox…..
……and the short, unprepossessing, round-shouldered, but politically acute Sir Robert Cecil, a.k.a. The Ape….
No-one had ever replaced The Bear in the Queen’s affections….
But Essex had a good try……
Night after night, for seven long years, he had played cards ….
or one game or other…
with the Queen….
till the birds sang in the morning…..
He much preferred to be away from the court, gaining glory at sea or on the field of battle…
The Queen, terrified that he might be killed or, worse, become more popular than she was…..
……made him the Master of the Horse.
Her horse….
So Essex was relieved when his close friend, Harry, arrived at the court……
The two men could share the exhausting demands of the Queen….
One day, however, Elizabeth publicly refused Harry’s offer of help to mount her horse….
Harry fled the court, mortified.
His crime?
Courting one of the Queen’s young ladies-in-waiting…
The lovely Elizabeth Vernon…..
…..an impoverished cousin of the Earl of Essex.
Essex encouraged the match as he desperately needed a spy close to the Queen when he was away…
So, to encourage Harry’s heterosexuality, Essex commissioned Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet for a private performance at Titchfield….
As part of the therapy, Harry played Romeo…..
…..who is recovering from a disastrous non-affair with the dark eyed beauty, Rosaline…..
…..a.k.a. Emilia….
Elizabeth Vernon, who, like Harry was subject to bouts of hysterical weeping, played Juliet…..
Shakespeare, naturally, was ambivalent about Harry’s love affair with Elizabeth Vernon.
He knew Harry needed a son to carry on the Southampton line, but he didn’t want to lose the love of his life.
He dramatised this dilemma in the charged, febrile, disturbed passions of Mercutio…
……a character so close to his heart, he said, that he had to kill him off at the start of the third act.
Or Mercutio would have killed him….
In the event, Harry’s affair with Elizabeth Vernon in no way precluded an affair with Shakespeare….
Or affairs with a lot of other people, mostly lower class young men….
Much to Shakespeare’s distress….
He worried that Harry’s penchant for rough trade would be used against him…
Shakespeare himself, though, was no angel….
He spends prodigious amounts of energy in his Sonnets trying to justify his own infidelities….
●
With Southampton gone from the Court, Essex was back in the spotlight.
He had grown to loathe his sado-masochistic affair with the ageing Queen….
He wanted to follow military glory abroad……
Elizabeth would have none of it…..
Nor would she name her successor, as Essex begged her to do….
Essex and Southampton were terrified that when she died, the Wars of the Roses would return to England….
A plot began to form in their minds…..
They would raise an army, eliminate the Fox and the Ape and force Queen Elizabeth to name her successor as James VI of Scotland….
James, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, was officially Protestant, but Catholic-friendly…
He was bisexual, cultured, peace-loving and tolerant….
He also wanted to unite England and Scotland….
A plan first advocated by his mother who believed her son was born to bring it about…
The plotters, to steel themselves, needed a play….
What better story was there than the overthrow of Richard II?
And who better to write it than cousin Will?
Shakespeare created a Richard II who constantly changes his mind…..
Heaps gold on his favourites…..
….robs sons of their inheritances….
….surrounds himself with flatterers…..
….murders his relatives…..
….detests success in others…..
… and loathes war with its ‘untun’d drums’ and ‘harsh-resounding trumpets’…..
Not unlike the Queen of England……
Cate Blanchett as Richard II.
It features a debonair rebel, Bollingbroke…..
….who doffs his cap to oyster wenches…
….bends his knee to draymen….
….plays the crowd….
….and plots to lead a movement to depose the King….
Not unlike the Earl of Essex…..
Shakespeare carries on the Bollingbroke story in Henry IV Parts One and Two..
Essex wanted to attack one of his biggest enemies at the court, Henry Brooke, 11th Lord Cobham….
…..a. k. a. The Sycophant…..
One of The Sycophant’s ancestors was Sir John Hardcastle, a Protestant martyr…
Friend and moral guide to Prince Hal…..
To please Essex, Shakespeare and Nashe wanted to discredit this hero…
But how?
Step forward, Mr. Apis Lapis….
Nashe’s fat, old Titchfield landlord….
Crook, raconteur and wit…
He was the model for for Oldcastle…..
Who, on the Queen’s orders, had to be rapidly renamed…..
…….Falstaff….
…….a man who was ‘all the world’…..
……but whose great heart would crack when the young man he loved rejected him….
●
During the Henry IV plays Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died…..
……a boy of only eleven whom Shakespeare hardly knew….
He only returned to Stratford-upon-Avon in the summer months….
Shakespeare stifled his grief and went off the rails….
He bedded down with crooks in the notorious Paris Gardens….
He lent money….
He cheated at dice…..
He slept with prostitutes…..
He was hauled up before the magistrates to keep the peace…..
Just like Falstaff….
Just like Apis Lapis…
And just a bit like his father….
This public disgrace meant a temporary break with Harry: but no weakening of love on either side.
Harry had become his surrogate son as well as his lover….
Even when Elizabeth Vernon became pregnant and produced a little girl, Shakespeare remained ‘engrafted’ to Harry.
And Harry remained ‘engrafted’ to him….
But the pregnancy meant marriage and marriage meant the fury of the Queen.
Essex, because he’d set the whole thing up, was banished from the court as well….
The time was ripe for the plot and the chance came in an extraordinary way…..
Essex was forgiven and sent to Ireland to quell the rebellion.
This was not the Queen’s idea: she thought Essex far too volatile for the job.
But The Fox and The Ape had persuaded her, against her instincts.
They wanted to give Essex enough rope to hang himself…..
Essex, the plan went, would quell the Irish with the English army….
…. then return with soldiers, join with the citizens of London and overthrow Elizabeth…
Cousin Will was in on the plot…..
He wrote Henry V, a patriotic tub-thumper that Queen Elizabeth would have loathed……
…..in which the Chorus describes how all the citizens fled out of London to welcome King Henry at Blackheath…..
The Chorus predicts that the same welcome will be afforded to Essex when he returns from Ireland….
Bringing rebellion broach’d on his sword….
In the meantime Shakespeare was dispatched to Scotland….
His brief was to persuade King James to ride at the head of the army with Essex….
And to claim the throne of England as his own…..
Shakespeare staged the premiere of Macbeth in Edinburgh….
……a play which prophesies that fate will lead James to rule over a United Kingdom…..
…..and which demonstrates how right it is to remove bloody usurpers from the throne….
Usurpers like the Macbeths….
And usurpers like Queen Elizabeth……
But James was far too canny to rise to the bait…
Queen Elizabeth was old…..
James simply had to wait for a year or two and the English crown would be his….
The campaign in Ireland proved a disaster…..
The Irish ran circles round poor Essex…..
And the charismatic rebel, the Earl of Tyrone….
…….all but persuaded Essex to join forces with the Irish instead…
And back at the Court, The Fox and The Ape were bad-mouthing Essex to the Queen…..
To defend himself, Essex rushed back, unbidden, from Ireland…..
He burst into the Queen’s morning chamber before Elizabeth had time to put on her wig or make-up……
His enemies said he was like Acteon who had gazed on the naked moon-Goddess, Diana…
…..and like Acteon, was destined to be torn apart….
Essex was put under house-arrest and Shakespeare realised the plot was doomed.
Half the Essex entourage wanted to go ahead with rebellion, the other half wanted appeasement with the Queen.
Shakespeare favoured appeasement. …..
He wrote Julius Caesar to show how all rebellions fail…..
…..and how even the most honourable men can be corrupted by events…
Shakespeare appealed to the Queen for clemency: he painted her as Olivia in Twelfth Night….
…..a beautiful, thoughtful, woman, with a heart full of love, unexpectedly running a great household after the death of her father and brother……
She is surrounded by adoring, love-sick suitors like Orsino…..
…..a.k.a. Essex….
And Sir Andrew Aguecheek….
……a.k.a. Southampton….
…….but threatened by a false-hearted Malvolio….
……a.k.a. The Fox….
This was Shakespeare’s last collaboration with Nashe…..
……who played and wrote Feste, the jester….
Nashe died later in the year, leaving, it was said, the treasure of his wit in…
other men’s chests…..
Ill and half mad, Essex gathered a group of hot-heads about him, as the Queen starved him of money…
The rebels burst onto the streets of the City, hoping to inspire the citizens of London to join them….
To Shakespeare’s horror, they had first paid for a special performance of Richard II at the Globe….
The citizens of London, well off under Elizabeth, didn’t want to know.
Essex was beheaded and Southampton, sentenced to death, was clapped in the Tower.
Shakespeare fled back to Scotland, loathed by the Queen and by many of her subjects…
Shakespeare could now get nothing from Harry….
…..stripped of his titles and his money….
…..disgraced and near death in the Tower….
But Shakespeare’s love for Harry grew in the profoundest way…..
In the Sonnets Shakespeare had often spoken of sharing one heart with Harry…..
…..now, with a physical distance between the two men, he speaks of sharing one soul….
In The Phoenix and the Turtle – Shakespeare’s great mystical poem – Harry is symbolised by the noble, fabulous Phoenix……
……and Shakespeare by the humble, work-a-day turtle dove….
The two birds have fused in a mutual flame of love…….
….and have moved on, together, to a place of peace……
INTERMISSION
© Stewart Trotter and Trixie the Cat. January, 2012.
Now view Shakespeare: The Movie. Part III
The Shakespeare Code 
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