The Shakespeare Code

(It’s best to to view Shakespeare: The Movie Parts I  and II  first.)

1601-1616

Queen Elizabeth died….

 ……and everything turned round….

James, without lifting a finger, was now King of both Scotland and England….

 

Harry celebrated by throwing his hat over the walls of the Tower….

Shakespeare wrote a Sonnet…..

Then galloped back from Scotland to be re-united with his lover….

He sat with Harry in the Tower while he had his portrait painted for James…

 

…..a ‘wooing portrait’ in which, hair cascading bride-like down his shoulders, he offers the King his ‘ring’ hand…

Everyone expected he would be James’s new favourite…

After all, he had risked his life to ensure James’s succession…

James, when he arived in London, appointed Shakespeare joint-head of a theatrical company that  was to become ‘The King’s Men’…

He also appointed him a Groom of the Chamber….

……and gave him scarlet livery to wear….

At the Coronation of the King in Westminster Abbey,  Shakespeare held the ritual canopy over James…

But, compared to his love for Harry, this honour meant nothing to him…..

It was an external glory…..

……like the temporary decorations which lined the Coronation route……

……destined for the scrap heap…..

Some of these paste-board arches incorporated obelisks…..

 

……and these reminded Shakespeare of the real obelisk Harry and himself had seen in Rome in 1593….

 

For Shakespeare it now symbolised his love for Harry…..

 Strong, sacred and eternal…..

England now had a King who positively encouraged homosexuality…..

During the Coronation Service….

……to the shock of the Venetian Ambassador……

……one of the Countess of Pembroke’s sons, William….

 …..kissed King James full on the cheek….

The only worry for Shakespeare and Harry was the survival into the new reign of The Ape……

●

 James, like the Roman Emperor Tiberius……

 

…..would quit the city to pursue his love of hunting and sex…….

But whereas Tiberius went to Capri for his orgies…..

James went to Newmarket.

In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare warns James, in the figure of the Duke…..

………to keep an eye on The Ape while he’s away….

 Like Angelo in the play…….

 

………The Ape might revive some of Queen Elizabeth’s old statutes….

………especially the one outlawing  ‘buggery’….

Next Shakespeare re-wrote Kyd’s old revenge play, Hamlet….

….making the characterisations……

…..and the plot…..

…..far more complex…

…..not to say, at points, incomprehensible….

…..and endorsing one of the main tenets of  Roman Catholicism…..

Hamlet and his student friends from Wittenberg are the new, scientific men who cannot stomach Papist superstition….

However, a Ghost, straight from Purgatory…….

……clunking round the battlements in full armour…..

……appears before them….

The students are forced to admit that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the new, Calvinist philosophy….

Prince Hamlet also declares that God is minutely involved in the workings of the  universe…..

…..down to the fall of a sparrow….

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will….

But things were about to happen that made Shakespeare lose his belief in God….

Indeed,  his belief in everything….

●

A year after King James’s Coronation, Harry’s wife, Countess Elizabeth……

 …….gave birth to another baby

But this time it was a boy….

The Southampton line was safe….

But Harry……

…….though he had given up his Catholicism to please the King…..

…….had not become the King’s new favourite….

Time and disease  had taken their toll…..

James preferred younger, prettier, men….

Left out in the political cold, Harry turned homophobic.

He wanted his son to know only his manly, soldierly qualities.

So Shakespeare, the actor, had to go….

Shakespeare turned poisonous….

He had delighted in telling Harry that his verse would make the young Lord immortal…

Now he delights in telling him that he will die.

Shakespeare had lost his son, Hamlet, a decade earlier….

Now he had lost his surrogate son as well….

He turned to another old Kyd play, King Leir…..

….a shameless piece of Protestant propaganda Kyd had knocked up for the sycophantic Queen’s Men….

‘Out’ goes the play’s happy ending and its caring God….

…..(so caring he sends claps of thunder to warn the sleeping King he’s about to be murdered)…

‘In’ comes a hostile universe with no God (or Gods) at all….

….who, if they do by chance exist…..

Kill us for their sport…

The King dies howling in agony,  grief and delusion….

 

….with his child, Cordelia, dead in his arms….

Shakespeare’s grief hardened into revenge…..

Many of the Sonnets had been Shakespeare’s love letters to Harry, known only to

……private friends…..

And of those Sonnets, only the ‘sugared’ ones….

Now Shakespeare published them all….

….including the obscene and bitchy ones…

…..exposing to the world the most intimate, shame-faced details of his affair with Harry…..

When Emilia attacked Harry in Willobie his Avisa she called him ‘Mr. H. W.’…..

Shakespeare now calls him ‘Mr. W. H.’…..

And makes a coded reference to Harry’s ship that was trading that year with Virginia….

The Sea-Adventure….

Harry might have been leaping into the closet, but Shakespeare was bursting out of his….

To accompany the Sonnets he wrote…..

 

Assuming the persona of a young maid, Shakespeare attacks the ruthless, psychotic behaviour of Harry, who with his

browny locks….

….and….

wat’ry eyes

…..caught….

 all passions in his craft of will….

….and…

sexes both enchanted….

Outwardly Harry might have looked like an angel…..

…..inwardly he was now the Devil himself.

In a climax of bile, the ‘maid’ names all her lover’s faults…

O, that infected moisture of his eye!

O, that false fire which in his cheek so glowed!

O, that forced thunder from his heart did fly!

O, that sad breath his spongy lungs bestowed!

O, all that borrowed motion seeming owed…

Suddenly there is a glorious, life-affirming reversal….

‘The maid’ finally asserts that these very faults….

Would yet again betray the fore-betrayed,

And new pervert a reconcilèd maid.

Shakespeare finally acknowledges the magnificence, the power and the ecstasy of his fifteen year affair with Harry…..

Despite what has happened, he would willingly go through the whole business again.

He calls himself  a…..reconcilèd maid……….

…..because he is ‘reconciled’ to what has happened….

…..and ‘reconciled’ to Rome…

The Jesuits were always trying to recruit Shakespeare…..

One of them had even begged him to give over his….

‘Paynim [Pagan] toys’

…….i. e. his poems and plays…..

 …..to write religious verse instead….

This time the call back to Rome came from nearer home….

…..from his first daughter, Susanna, now in her twenties…..

She was still a committed Catholic….

So committed she had appeared in Court and paid a huge fine for refusing to attend Protestant services…

King Lear – bleak as it is – holds within itself a stupendous, positive, relationship….

…..that of Cordelia with her father….. 

 

She has been as stubborn as her father is, and as quick to take offence…….

…….but both have the capacity to love….

Susanna filled up the void left by Harry’s rejection….

And had taught him how to love again….

(He had long grown distant from his wife)

What’s more, Susanna was pregnant…..

Shakespeare began to make long term investments in Stratford-upon-Avon to benefit his daughter, her doctor husband and their family-to-be…

Investments of another kind were coming to fruition in Oxford…..

 ●

John Davenant, a vintner and broker who imported wine from Bordeaux, spoke fluent French and was…..……

……an admirer and lover of plays and play-makers…..

…..especially Shakespeare….

…..had a beautiful and witty wife, Jennet……

But the couple couldn’t have children.

In the year of the Essex rebellion they had moved to Oxford to run a wine-tavern attached to New College…

When Elizabeth exiled Shakespeare from London, he had made productive use of his time…

By making an alliance with King James in Scotland…

And by sleeping with Jennet at Oxford….

……with the full approval of John….

The result for Shakespeare was a whole surrogate family of boys and girls…..

One of the boys, Robert (later to become a parson) describes how Shakespeare would….

….cover [his] face with a hundred kisses….

Another, William, would rush across Oxford in excitement when he heard his ‘godfather’ was in town….

He was to become Poet Laureate……

…..but lose his nose to syphilis….

Shakespeare started to write ‘romantic tragedies’……..

…….tragedies in which, the protagonists, though they die, completely fulfil themselves in their deaths…..

The Countess of Pembroke…..

…….in an act of towering hypocrisy……

……had used the story of Antony and Cleopatra to attack Queen Elizabeth for the immorality of her private life….

Now Shakespeare uses it to praise both the Roman General, Antony…..

…..and the Egyptian Queen, Cleopatra…..

…..for committting themselves to a love relationship that flies in the face of conventional morality….

…..and which defeats death itself….

Shakespeare may have been a Catholic, but he was a very idiosyncratic one…

God for him in the Last Plays was a remote and grumpy figure……

……who would much prefer human beings to work out their destinies for themselves….

When Leontes, in The Winter’s Tale, wrongly accuses his wife, Hermione, of adultery, it is his tough, old servant Paulina….

…..who acts as his confessor, tormentor and redeemer….

Shakespeare was a also a very Pagan Catholic…..

Born a country boy, he worshipped the countryside………

In The Winter’s Tale he introduces a rustic sheep-shearing festival….

Perdita, the old Shepherd’s adopted daughter, dressed as the Goddess of the Feast…..

 ……becomes a Goddess as she hands wild flowers to the guests…..

The English countryside itself also transfigures Posthumus in Cymbeline….

He has been banished to Rome by the British King, but then returns as part of an invading Italian army. 

He finds himself unable to wound his native land.

He swaps his fancy Italianate clothes………..

 

…… for the garb of an English peasant…….

……prepared, if need be, to die for Britain….

Like Posthumus, Shakespeare had come to realise he  was an Englishman first and a Roman Catholic second…

What mattered to him now was to be a MAN first….

…..and a WRITER second….

In The Winter’s Tale, the great artist Julio Romano……

….whose work Shakespeare had admired in Italy…..

 ……sculpts a statue of  the  ‘dead’ Hermione so life-like that her husband, Leontes, longs to kiss it…..

Paulina, insisting that the King….

 …..awake [his] faith…..

 …..brings the statue to life like a miraculous Madonna….. 

 

But it’s not a Madonna….

It’s not even a work of art….

It is Hermione herself……

The most precious thing we have is not art.

It is not even religion. 

It is life itself….

Shakespeare decided to quit the stage……

It brought out the worst in him…..

….his need to dominate, manipulate and control….

He was like Prospero upon his magic island…..

…..with total dominion over his spirits…..

….. who do his every bidding…..

…..and who are brutally punished if they don’t….

Like Prospero, Shakespeare knew that his ‘potent art’ was greater than he was….

….that he needed to forgive in his life…..

….and, more difficult, be forgiven….

In the Epilogue to The Tempest, Shakespeare bids a moving farewell to his courtly, London audience…..

And retires to Stratford-upon-Avon…..

….where every ‘third thought’ will be his ‘grave’….

●

Two years later he was back….

…….living in the Blackfriars Gatehouse…..

…….a property which he acquired….

…….(but never finished paying for)…

…….notorious for its priest holes, Catholic masses and secret passageways down to the Thames….

…….and where he started to write plays again…

Stratford-upon-Avon had been unwilling to play the role of ‘early retirement home’…

(Shakespeare, after all, was only in his late 40’s….)

Indeed, Shakespeare’s huge, draughty, rambling tavern of a house, ‘New Place’….

……bought over a decade ago at a knock-down price….

……to go along with his newly-acquired family crest…

…..was now full of quasi-relatives and their friends…..

…..in-laws, outlaws, wide-boys…

…..and ‘guests’ of the local council….

…..who all demanded beds, food and alcohol….

Susanna had just been accused of adultery by a local drunk….

And a local crook was pursuing Judith, his younger daughter’s hand in marriage…

On top of this,  ‘fellow townsmen’ kept trying to tap him for money…

Shakespeare fled back to London….

…..where he wrote more plays…….

….. (in collaboration with other playwrights)….

…. including The Famous History of  the Life of King Henry the Eighth…..

In this play Shakespeare ‘forgives’, Prospero-like, ALL the historical enemies of Catholicism…..

…..King Henry……

…..Cardinal Wolsey…….

……Anne Boleyn…..

…… and even….

QUEEN ELIZABETH HERSELF!

….who makes a guest-appearance at the end of the play as a new-born baby…

For Shakespeare, it was now the dead Queen, not Harry, who was the…..

 Bird of Wonder, the Maiden Phoenix…

There would have been more plays….

….but during a performance of Henry VIII…..

…..The Globe Theatre burnt down…..

 

The Puritans thought it was a judgement of God…..

Even Shakespeare believed that Someone was trying to tell him Something…..

So he laid down his pen…….

……. and returned to Stratford…..

…..where things had got even worse….

The Combe family, rich money-dealers, were intending to enclose the common land for sheep…

Every councillor opposed the measure which would bring misery to the poor…

…..(who gathered fuel there)….

…..and the yeomen classes…..

…..(who grazed their livestock there)….

Two of the aldermen tried to stop the Combe heavies from digging enclosure ditches……

…….but they got beaten up….

So nearly every woman and child in Stratford came at night to fill the ditches in…..

Including Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith…..

Shakespeare, however was a close friend of the Combes….

He’d bought land from them a decade before….

And when one of them died, leaving Shakespeare £5 ……

…..he had composed an affectionate, bantering  epitaph for him  in a tavern….

…..celebrating how the Devil would now claim John Combe as his own…

Shakespeare’s own land was affected by the enclosures….

….but he negotiated with the Combes to make sure he, and his descendants, would be compensated….

Then he escaped to Blackfriars with his son in law.

One of his many Stratford relations…..

……who bitterly opposed the enclosures…..

…..tracked him down at the Gatehouse…..

…..demanding a statement from him…

Backed up by his son-in-law, Shakespeare claimed that the enclosures wouldn’t begin till the Spring…..

And would probably never begin at all….

He was proved wrong on both counts…..

But did nothing….

Why should he help the people of Stratford?

He’d been forced to leave the town TWICE in his youth….

And now the Stratford Council had banned all performances of plays….

It was the RICH who had created Shakespeare….

Even his Stratford house had been bought with money from the Southampton family…

To condemn the Combes would be an act of utter hypocrisy….

●

At the beginning of the following year, Shakespeare began writing his will….

in perfect health and memory, God be praised….

This was unusual….

People, then, put off writing their wills till they felt they were going to die…

But Shakespeare had a pressing reason….

His daughter Judith had decided to marry the local crook….

And Shakespeare wanted to protect her….

He wrote a will that he could read to her while he was alive….

And more important, to his future son-in-law….

….whom he couldn’t bring to even mention in his will….

(‘Son-in-law’ is written and then crossed out).

His old inner Prospero, though, was surfacing……

As he drafted more of his will, he attempted to control the whole of his family…..

….. from beyond the grave…..

Notoriously, he left his estranged wife, Anne, his…..

 ….second-best bed……

…..to make sure she got nothing else….

And, like King Lear,  gave by far the best inheritance to his favourite daughter, Susanna…

Shakespeare the man had learnt little from Shakespeare the writer….

By favouring Cordelia above her sisters, Lear destroys Britain…

But in a glorious act of defiant honesty…..

 …..Shakespeare left the most precious thing he had….

……the most precious thing any gentleman at the time had….

His sword….

To one Thomas Combe…

●

A few months later, poet friends Ben Jonson……

… and Michael Drayton….

…..called on Shakespeare at Stratford…..

….. to celebrate his fifty-second birthday….

….with a…..

merry meeting….. 

They all drank…..

….too hard….

……as poets are apt to do….

Shakespeare contracted a ‘fever’ and died….

But not before he had been granted the full Last Rites as a Roman Catholic…….

…….. in a town, Puritan and theatreless…….

………which had done all it could to destroy the Old Faith….

 ……and had done all it could to destroy him….

THE END

© Stewart Trotter and Trixie the Cat. January, 2012.