The Shakespeare Code

(It’s best to first read Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven.)

1594….

On 6th October, 1594, Henry (Harry) Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton, was to come of age……

He would then take charge of all his estates, including his beloved Titchfield, in Hampshire….

His mother, Mary, Second Countess of Southampton…..

…..would have to go….

She and Harry had never got on. When he was six years old, his father, the Second Earl, had accused Mary of adultery with…..

…..a common person…..

 ….and had taken Harry away from her…

The Second Earl had surrounded his little son with an all male, quasi-military household of….

…..tall goodly fellows, that kept a constant pace….

….and according to Countess Mary, had made his manservant, Dymock….

….his wife

All this had done irreparable damage to Harry’s relationship with his mother and, indeed, to his relationship with women in general……

Mary had commissioned William Shakespeare to write seventeen sonnets for his seventeenth birthday to encourage him to take an interest in girls…

Other than dressing up like them……

Harry’s guardian, Lord Burghley, wanted Harry to marry his grand-daughter. Harry had refused and was due to pay a massive £5,000 fine (£2 and-a-half million in modern money) when he came of age in October….

Harry did start to take an interest in girls: in 1592 he had started an affair with the mixed race courtesan, Emilia Bassano….

But this was to spite Shakespeare, who had fallen in love with her himself….

The upshot was that Harry started an affair with Shakespeare – a liaison that met with Countess Mary’s entire approval…

(See: Shakespeare. The Movie. I.)

●

Sir Thomas Heneage……

 ……had the ability to get on with everyone…….

He had long been a friend of the Southampton family, even though he was an ardent Protestant…..

……and even though he had been a member of Elizabeth’s Privy Council when Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded….

He had also been an old lover of Queen Elizabeth herself….

She had started to flirt with Heneage in 1565 to punish her long-time lover, Leicester, for paying attention to Lettice Knollys…

The two men came close to duelling with each other….

But Heneage worked to ensure that they ended the best of friends…

Heneage’s wife had died in 1593. After a decent period of mourning, he had proposed marriage to Mary Southampton….

He was 62 and she was 42  – so still capable of having children….

Heneage lived at Copped Hall, in a hilly part of Essex…

But he also owned the Savoy Palace in London…..

It was here, on 2nd May, that Mary and Sir Thomas were married….

A few days afterwards, Mary commissioned Garret Jonson of Southwark to create a fabulous alabaster and marble tomb for St. Peter’s Church, Titchfield….

Her first husband, the Second Earl, had left instructions that his tomb should be a solitary one.  He wanted it to be a constant reminder to the world of his wife’s indidelity….

Mary had ignored his instructions.  But if she did not act quickly, her son might carry them out when he came of age….

So she ordered a tomb which would depict the whole family….

Jane, First Countess of Southampton, (Mary’s mother-in-law) would lie central and raised,  in prayer…

She had been an ardent Catholic all her life and had introduced masques and revels to Titchfield.  She had also added a copy of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Complete Works to the Place House library, a volume which Shakespeare was to draw on…

On Jane’s right would lie her husband (and Mary’s father-in-law)  Thomas Wriothesley, First Earl of Southampton….

…..who had risen to high office under Henry VIII and had been given Titchfield Abbey for his loyalty…

He had been a keen amateur actor at Cambridge and brought playwright, Nicholas Udall, to work as a schoolmaster at Titchfield Grammar School….

On Jane’s left would lie her son, the Second Earl of Southampton (Mary’s deceased husband) dressed in armour to depict his fight for Catholicism…..

He had been involved in a plot (with his wife Mary’s father, Lord Montague) to replace Queen Elizabeth with Mary Queen of Scots…

Mary’s own son, Harry,  (the Third Earl of Southampton) was to be depicted on the side of the tomb, as a boy (also in armour) praying for the soul of his father….

Mary even managed to work in a discreet reference to herself in an inscription at the back of the tomb….

The Savoy wedding in May of Mary and Sir Thomas had been a legal one. Now the couple wanted it to be followed by a summer celebration for all their friends at Copped Hall…..

A celebration that would include feasting, jousting and dancing….

And continue for a good fortnight…..

They commissioned Shakespeare to write an entertainment that would stretch over several days and show off the architecture and grounds of Copped Hall….

Just like the Progress Entertainments for Queen Elizabeth….

(Please see: Part Two. The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth.)

But there was a problem…..

The summer of 1594 was appalling…..

Simon Forman tells us…

June and July were very wet and wonderful cold like winter, that the 10th day of July many did sit by the fire it was so cold, and so it was in May and June…there were many great floods this summer…

But John Stowe tells us that the weather rallied in August…..

And that’s when the wedding guests trooped down to Copped Hall…..

●

There had been many pressures on Shakespeare in 1594….

One of them was from supporters of Thomas Kyd…..

Kyd was a grammar-schoolboy like Shakespeare and had shared chambers with him…

But Kyd had also shared chambers with Christopher Marlowe……

When atheist papers were found in their lodging, Kyd, under torture, had told the authorities that they belonged to Marlowe….

Shakespeare never forgave him…

But Shakespeare had collaborated with Kyd on an early Hamlet and The Taming of a Shrew…

So friends of both men urged this collaboration to continue…..

…..rather like our own Queen Elizabeth……

 …..who tried to persuade Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber to team up again…

 

One ‘W. Har’ (whom scholars take to be the Countess of Pembroke’s son, William Herbert) wrote in the summer of 1594….

 You that have writ of chaste Lucretia,

 Whose death was witness of her spotless life,

Or penn’d the praise of sad Cornelia,

Whose blameless name hath made her fame so rife,

As noble Pompey’s most renowned wife:

Hither unto your home direct your eyes,

Whereas, unthought on, much more matter lies.

In 1594 Kyd had translated Robert Garnier’s play Cornelia and dedicated it to the Countess of Pembroke, mentioning his….

bitter times and privy broken passions….

(Shakespeare, of course, had written Lucrece….)

‘W. Har’s’ implication with ‘your home’ is that Shakespeare and Kyd belong together …..

….and that their potential to create new drama is enormous…

But Shakespeare had no intention of yielding to persuasion, even from the Pembroke family…..

He needed to find a way, though, to disperse the issue with Kyd….

Another pressure on Shakespeare in 1594 was the accusation he had plagiarised the work of the Robert Greene:

Greene, is the pleasing object of an eye:

Greene, pleased the eyes of all that looked upon him.

Greene, is the ground of every painter’s dye:

Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him.

Nay more the men, that so eclipst his fame:

Purloined his plumes, can they deny the same?

The poem is ostensibly signed by ‘R.B. Gent’ but it is much more likely to be an anonymous attack by his collaborator and gag-man, Thomas Nashe…

In 1592, Nashe, writing under the dead Robert Greene’s name in A Groatsworth of Witte, had described Shakespeare as….

…..an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers…

Another pressure on Shakespeare in 1594 was Emilia Bassano…..

She had become pregnant in 1592 and been married off to Alphonse Lanier ‘for colour’…..

She was making another bid for Harry’s attention. She had played the dark-skinned Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost and, as a favourite of Mary Southampton, demanded a part in the new entertainment….

Penelope Rich – the daughter of Letttice Knollys, the sister of the Earl of Essex and the mistress of Lord Mountjoy – also had to be given a part….

She had played the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost when Shakespeare had punned on her surname – the way Sir Philip Sidney had done in his Sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella…

Mary Southampton, who played the Abbess in The Comedy of Errors ,would need to be given a flattering, sexy part…..

…..as would her bridegroom, Heneage, whom William Camden described as….

…a man who for the elegancy of his life and pleasantness of discourse [was] born for the Court…..

Another pressure on Shakespeare was the fact that half the audience for the entertainment would be Catholic and half would be Protestant….

…..that Queen Elizabeth would certainly see the play at some time…..

…..and that Lettice Knollys – the Queen’s sworn enemy – would certainly be in the audience….

…..and, finally, that it could pour down with rain at any moment….

This densely complex situation inspired Shakespeare to produce a densely complex masterpiece….

…..A Midsummer Night’s Dream….

(The Shakespeare Code’s next A Midsummer Night’s Dream Decoded post will deal with the staging of the play at Copped Hall.)