The Shakespeare Code

TRIXIE AT THE THEATRE

Your Cat’s been out and about…

To the Royal National Theatre, no less…..

As a guest of the LEGENDARY Alexander Technique teacher, Sue Laurie…..

…who has taught generations of actors at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company…

We dined first at the glorious Café at the theatre – DELICIOUS deep-fried crab….then on to ICE CREAM in the interval….

But the play was the thing:  Shakespeare’s magnificient Timon of Athens in a magnificent production by Nicholas Hytner with the magnificent Simon Russell Beale as Lord Timon…

The story of the play is quickly told:

Timon, a generous and noble-hearted patron, loses all his money and is abandoned by his ‘friends’. He rejects the town and lives in the forest on roots and berries. While digging for food, he discovers gold – but by this stage he despises money and all it stands for. He ignores the taunts of the low-born ‘philosopher’ Apemantus and the offer to join in a military revenge on Athens by Alcibiades. He also rejects the appeal from his fellow Athenians to save the town. He stoically prepares for his death and burial by ‘the very hem o’ th’ sea’ and even composes his own, misanthropic epitaph:

Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft:

Seek not my name. A plague consume you, wicked caitiffs left!

Here lie I, Timon, who, alive, all living men did hate.

Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait….

Alcibiades, at the end of the play, settles for a negotiated peace with Athens..

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Of course, in reality we DON’T get the woodlands, roots and berries…..or the…..

hundred springs….within this mile…..

We get an urban jungle instead….

…..slabs of decaying concrete, crushed plastic bottles and abandoned metallic food cartons….

…..and Simon Russell Beale as a bag person….

The distinguished theatre critic, the late D.A.N.Jones, believed that ALL modern directors HATED NATURE…

BUT Sir Nick, a true Brother of The Code, (See: Celebrity Endorsement (4) ) has realised that the play is entirely POLITICAL….

Athens IS London…..

The painter (in this production a woman, played with full mockney accent and champagne stagger by Penny Laden)…

…..IS in reality……

And, Apemantus, played by Hilton Macrae (who looks more like Paul Scofield by the hour)…

….hangs round drinks parties, cursing his establishment hosts in snarling Glaswegian accent…

….rather like The Code’s own Fellow, Eddie Linden, is wont to do….

But who were the targets of  Shakespeare’s OWN political satire?

Who precisely was HE getting at?

There is no doubt WHATSOEVER in the mind of Your Cat that Timon represents Robert Devereux,  the Second Earl of Essex……

In the autumn of 1600, the disgraced Earl was freed from house arrest in London and ordered by Queen Elizabeth to retire to the country….

(Essex, it will be remembered, had left his post in Ireland without permission and had rushed into the Queen’s bedroom before she had time to put on her wig or make-up.)

Essex writes, with typical flamboyance, that he….

kissed her [Elizabeth’s] royal hand and that rod which had corrected him, not ruined him: but he could never be possessed of his wonted joy till he beheld again those benign looks of hers which had been his Star to direct and guide him….

Essex also declares he will….

Go into the country, like Nebuchadnezzar, till he was summoned…

(Nebuchadnezzar was exiled from the Court for seven years and, believing himself to be an ox….

….ate grass….)

Essex even bursts into verse at the prospect of pastoral retreat…….

Happy were he could he finish forth his fate

In some enchanted desert, most obscure

From all society, from love, from hate

Of worldly folk, then would he sleep secure;

Then wake again and yield God ever praise,

Content with hips and haws and bamble berries,

In contemplation passing still his days

And change of holy thoughts to make him merry;

And when he dies, his tomb may be a bush,

Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush.

Essex opted for Barnes, which then was deep in the country……

….because his wife had a house there, Ewelme Lodge (now Essex Lodge)…

It had originally belonged to Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsinham, who conducted the Armada campaign from there….

(He loved to run his greyhounds along the Thames….)

Essex, though an Earl, had come fom an impoverished family; but as the Queen’s favourite, he was given the ‘farm’ on ‘sweet wines’ i.e. the tax on imported white wine. This allowed him to fulfill his obligations as a Lord, entertain lavishly and patronise painters, artists and writers – including William Shakespeare….

As a punishment, Elizabeth took all this money away on 22nd September, 1600. Essex, who had huge debts, was left penniless…

Many of his entourage deserted him. As Robert Cecil wrote:…..

…[Essex] walks alone without greeting from his summer friends.

Those who stayed loyal to Essex were divided about what to do next. One half was led by the cynical, plebeian, ‘kindle-coal and make-bate’, Henry Cuffe, who, The Code believes, was the model for Apemantus….

And, indeed, the model for Iago….

Cuffe believed that Essex could only restore his former glory if he made some ‘desperate attempt’ by saving England from ‘the corrupt managery of certain persons’. He loved quoting the words of Lucan:

arma tenenti, omnia dat qui justa negat….

…….which means….

he who denies what is wrong yields all to one that is armed…..

He taunted Essex for being faint-hearted and low-spirited…..

…..in just the way Apemantus taunts Timon for his….

……poor unmanly melancholy…..

The other half of the entourage advocated appeasement with the Queen….

Shakespeare belonged to this group and that is why he wrote Timon of Athens….

There is no record of the play ever having been performed and it is not even divided into acts or scenes. The Code believes it was intended for Essex to READ….

Shakespeare wanted to convince him that, in his current state of mind, political action would be catastrophic.

Elizabeth’s god-son, John Harington……

……inventor of the water closet…..

….  thought that Essex, at this stage, was insane:

He shifteth from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proveth him devoid of good reason as of right mind. In my last discourse he uttered strange words, bordering on such strange designs, that made me hasten forth and leave his presence…..His speeches of the Queen become no man who hath mens sana in corpore sano. He hath ill advisors and much trouble hath sprung from this source. The Queen well knoweth how to humble the haughty spirit; the haughty spirit knoweth not how to yield, and the man’s soul seemeth tossed to and fro like the waves of a troubled sea….

In Timon of Athens Shakespeare is trying to show Essex that retreat from the world has its own heroic honour. It gives Timon the ability both to observe life properly…..

……and to conquer it by naming the exact day on which he will die….

The war-like Alcibiades is Lord Mountjoy…….

 …..who was succesfully fighting the Irish at the time Shakespeare was writing the play. Mountjoy had been in on earlier plots to topple Elizabeth, so Shakespeare is using the play to advise him that a peaceful settlement would be far superior to the bloodshed of a civil war…

Mountjoy, we know…

….delighted….in reading play-books for recreation…

….so he could have read the play in Ireland…

Shakespeare continues this theme of appeasement at Christmas (1600/1)  in Twelfth Night  – with its flattering portrait of Elizabeth as Olivia and Essex as her love-sick courtier, Orsino….

See: Olivia as Queen Elizabeth and Orsino as the Earl of Essex.

But all of this had no effect whatsoever on Essex. He wrote:

The Queen hath thrust me down to a private life. I cannot serve with base obsequiousness.  I am not conscious to myself of having done amiss: I have been unjustly committed to custody: Princes have not an infinite power; they may err as well as others. I have received wounds from my adversaries all my body over. Their violence in oppressing me shall not be greater than my constancy in bearing what they can do against me. Let them triumph: I will never follow their triumphal chariot….

Five weeks after the first night of Twelfth Night Essex led a rebellion against Elizabeth.

Three weeks after that he was dead….

‘Bye now,