A Warning from Trixie the Cat.
THIS POST MIGHT OFFEND PURITANS!!!
When William Shakespeare was writing……
….Puritanism was the new kid on the block…..
It taught that everything had been pre-determined by God….
….(even whether you were going to heaven or hell)…
….that all sex outside marriage was sinful….
….and that some sex WITHIN marriage was sinful….
…..if you enjoyed it too much…
Shakespeare hated Puritanism….
He came from the Old Catholic tradition of sin and repentance….
….where man was fallible and needed to be forgiven…..
….again and again and again….
Puritans in Shakespeare’s plays…..
…..like Angelo in Measure for Measure….
….come to sticky ends…
They are too good to be true….
Shakespeare’s work is filled with redemption….
Character after character in his plays finally sees the light….
….about himself and the situation he is in…..
….even if, in worldly terms……
….the light comes too late…..
Man, for Shakespeare, comes as a package:
As the First Lord says in All’s Well that Ends Well…
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not, and crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues…
Shakespeare was also writing before the Industrial Revolution……
…..and before the prudery of Victorian England……
…..so he was more in touch with the natural world….
Anyone who had watched a bull mounting a cow……
…….couldn’t get too hot under the collar about human sex….
And anyone who had seen a cow mounting another cow….
….couldn’t get too hot under the collar about gay sex either…
Geoffrey Chaucer….
…..was the ENGLISH writer who most influenced Shakespeare…..
…..and Ovidius Naso…..
….Ovid….
……was the ROMAN one….
In fact , Francis Meres, writing in 1598, went so far as to say…..
…the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in the mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare…..
Both Chaucer and Ovid NOTORIOUSLY wrote about sex…..
Meres goes on to describe Shakespeare as:
one of the most passionate anong us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of love
But, as we shall see, Brothers and Sisters of The Code, Shakespeare bewails and bemoans it in a way that is UTTERLY HIS OWN!!!
●
THE BIRTHDAY SONNETS
As we know from…..
Trixie the Cat’s Guide to The Sonnets: (1) Background Jottings
…..Mary Southampton, 2nd Countess of Southampton……
…..commissioned Shakespeare to write seventeen Sonnets for her son, Henry Wriothesley – Harry Southampton’s – seventeenth birthday….
…….to convince him to get married.
The Countess Mary’s motive was largely political….
Harry’s guardian, Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Lord Burghley….
…..was threatening a £5,000 fine if Harry did not consent to marry his grand-daughter……
…..the Lady Elizabeth de Vere…..
SHAKESPEARE’S CHALLENGES
In carrying out Countess Mary’s commission, Shakespeare was faced with FOUR problems….
1. He had never written a Sonnet before!!!
Sonnets were all the rage at Wilton House………
….run by Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke……
…….a day’s horse-ride away from Titchfield…..
The Countess’s brother, the late Sir Philip Sidney…….
……had developed the Sonnet form…..
…..brought into England from Italy by English aristocrats…..
…..in his Astrophil and Stella Sequence…….
…..in praise of Penelope Rich…….
Samuel Daniel……
…….the Countess’s protégé, had just produced his Delia Sequence….
…….in praise of the Countess of Pembroke….
So Shakespeare knew that his work would be judged by…..
THE HIGHEST POSSIBLE STANDARDS….
Also….
2. Shakespeare knew that his work would be read by a wide circle of aristocrats……
……AND ROYALTY!!!
Mary had commissioned Shakespeare to show Lord Burghley she was taking his side on the marriage proposal….
So she would send him a copy….
…….and he would show it to the Queen….
She wanted the long-haired Papist, Harry, married off to a nice Protestant girl…..
Mary Southampton would also be unable to resist the temptation of sending a copy to Mary Herbert……
….. to show that Titchfield had ‘out-Sonneted’ Wilton….
3. Shakepeare was a social inferior to Harry…..
……..and wouled be forced to tell him…..
……THINGS HE DIDN’T WANT TO HEAR!!!
This brings us on to the fourth…..
…..and biggest problem for Shakespeare……
4. HARRY DIDN’T LIKE GIRLS!!!
….even though he looked like one…
Shakespeare solved these problems……
IN A FLASH!!!
By using…..
FLATTERY,
CODE
and CHUTZPAH!!!
1. FLATTERY…..
The most important person to flatter was Mary, Countess of Southampton…..
So Shakespeare compliments her in Sonnet 3…..
Thou [Harry] art they mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime……
Mary hated her dead husband, the 2nd Earl, but Harry adored him……
So the 2nd Earl gets a brief , neutral nod in the conclusion to Sonnet 13….
You [Harry] had a father; let your son say so….
But it was Harry who needed the most flattery….
Shakespeare couldn’t use the NORMAL argument used to persuade men to marry…
….the attractiveness of the opposite sex…
….because Harry WASN’T NORMAL!
So Shakespeare had to invert the argument…
Harry MUST get married…..
BECAUSE HE HIMSELF WAS SO ATTRACTIVE!!!
His beauty must NOT be allowed to go to waste…
…..and it goes to waste because Harry spends his time…..
….. either having gay sex….
…..or ‘abusing’ himself….
But how can Shakespeare address these issues in a Sonnet……
…..especially one that is going to be read by the Queen of England?
Answer?
He employs…..
2. CODE…
…..of which there are four rules…..
(a) Money can symbolise semen….
(b) Dying can symbolise orgasm…
(c) The face (and its features) can symbolise the genitals…
……..both male and female….
……..as can…..
(d) ANY EUPHEMISTIC SYMBOL drafted in for the purpose….
…..often in a witty way….
In the very first Sonnet, Shakespeare writes…
Thou [Harry] that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content….
What is Harry’s ‘bud’?
How is he ‘burying his content’?
In the second line of the Sonnet, Shakespeare calls Harry…
beauty’s rose…
This is a reference to the heraldic roses of the City of Southampton….
…….whose freedom Southampton was about to be given….
It’s also a reference to the extraodinary way the aristocratic branch of the Wriothesley family pronounced its name…..
Wriothesley….
…became…
Ryosely
The cadet branch of the family made do with ‘Risley’….
‘Bud’ obviously picks up the rose imagery….
But, for Shakespeare’s well-educated readers…..
…….a rose would suggest something else as well.…
In the Medieval French The Romance of the Rose…..
……which Chaucer had translated…
……the lover enters a symbolic garden……
……to pluck a rose….
…….which symbolises his lover’s pudend…..
So ‘bud’ would be taken as a euphemism for Harry’s own penis…
This explains the paradox the Sonnet puts forward in its next line…..
And, tender churl, [Harry] makes waste in niggarding….
How can you make ‘waste’ by being ‘niggardly’ [mean]?
If money represents semen, then….
….the answer is……
by masturbating…
By emitting semen without utilising it…
….i.e. using it to impregnate a woman…..
….you ‘waste’ it….
Sonnet 4 develops this idea….
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy….
Shakespeare also makes another reference to Harry’s sex organ….
…..with yet another euphemism….
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largesse given thee to give…
‘Bounteous largesse’ is a flattering, oblique reference to the size of Harry’s organ…
Shakespeare then goes on to imply that Harry masturbates excessively:
Profitless usurer [moneylender] why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums yet can’st not live….
Shakespeare continues…
For having traffic with thyself alone
Thou of thyself, thy sweet self doth deceive….
The ‘sweet self’ here is a coded reference to the son that Harry might……
…….in other circumstances……
……father…..
And in Sonnet Three, Shakespeare starts to bring in parallels between orgasm and death…
Die single and thine image dies with thee….
‘Die single’ can literally mean ‘die alone’…..
……..but it can also mean ‘masturbate by yourself’.
Shakespeare also associates death with self-abuse in Sonnet 9:
No love towards others in that bosom sits
That on himself such murd’rous shame commits…
Shakespeare uses the vocabulary of ‘the face’ to symbolise the genitals in Sonnet 3:
Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another.
Helena uses this secondary meaning of ‘face’ in All’s Well That Ends Well…..
She is in disguise……
…. when she says to the Old Widow of her husband, Bertram…
But by the ear, that hears most nobly of him:
His face I know not…
Commentators often say that Helena here is lying to keep up her disguise….
But in all her other dealings she is saintly in her honesty….
….so is not the sort of person who would lie directly…
She is, in fact, ‘equivocating’…..
She has not, at this stage, slept with Bertram …..
….who, ungallantly, fled from her….
So she is using ‘face’ to mean ‘genitals’…
…..which she has genuinely never ‘known’.
The ‘face vocabulary’/genitals’ correspondence completely underpins Sonnet 7….
Lo, in the Orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty….
This is a description of the sun rising…..
……but the ‘burning head’ can again represent the male organ starting to become erect….
And each ‘under eye’….
…. as well as people literally gazing at the sun…..
…..can also represents the testicles….
…..which move upwards as they are drawn upwards.…
Shakespeare continues…..
And having climbed the steep-up heavenly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage….
The ‘heavenly hill’ is a reference to the ‘mons Veneris’….
…..the hill of Venus….
But when from high-most pitch with weary car
Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,
The eyes, fore-duteous, now converted are
From his low tract and look another way….
Shakespeare here describes both the setting of the sun….
…..and the detumescence after emission….
He concludes….
So thou, thyself out-going in thy noon,
Unlook’d on diest, unless thou get a son…
‘Noon’ was often used as a symbol of erection…..
……from the position of the hands of a clock at midday….
As Mercutio says to the Nurse….
The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon…
Again ‘diest’ at the end of the Sonnet suggests both ejaculation and death….
But there is a secondary political strand to this poem……
The notion that people turn their (literal) eyes away from a dying sun….
….and turn their eyes to a new one….
…..was an image that was being used about the aging Queen Elizabeth….
…..from whom people were beginning to turn their eyes….
…..to the new sun on the horizon…..
…..King James VI of Scotland………
John Harington, Queen Elizabeth’s godson, later sent James the New Year gift of a ‘dark lantern’ depicting a rising sun…..
And William Camden, the contemporary historian, records how ‘whispereings’ reached the Queen…..
that many of the nobility did by underhand letters and messengers seek to curry favour with the king of Scots, that they adored him as the rising sun, and neglected her as now being ready to set.
Even though Shakespeare KNEW Elizabeth would probably read the Sonnets….
…..he cannot stop himself from making coded attacks on her…..
In Sonnet 11 he advises Harry to have a son so that he can enjoy his son’s youth and energy as his own starts to decline…..
Herein lives wisdom, beauty and increase;
Without this, folly, age and cold decay.
If all were minded so….
….i.e. to live without having children…..
…….the times should cease,
And threescore year would make the world away…..
In 1590, Queen Elizabeth was approaching 60…..
…….and, as ‘The Virgin Queen’, had dedicated herself……
…….officially at least…..
…….to a single life.
Shakespeare then puts the knife in…..
Let those whom nature hath not made for store,
Harsh, feautureless and rude, barrenly perish….
He is wishing death on the ugly old queen…..
Now this is clearly a case of …..
3. CHUTZPAH……
……a characteristic Shakespeare displays as he introduces to these Sonnets another theme quite contrary to his brief….
Having a son will make Harry immortal, he claims…..
BUT SO WILL SHAKESPEARE’S VERSE!!!
And all in war with Time for love of you [Harry]
As he [Time] takes from you, I engraft you new….
Here is Shakespeare……
…..still a tyro-poet with a….
pupil pen…..
…..claiming……
…..along with Ovid…..
…. that his verse can defeat the process of time…
He realises he has over-stepped the mark…..
In the next Sonnet….
……in a bi-polar moment, typical of artists….
……he talks about his…..
barren rhyme…
However, he concludes the whole sequence with a challenging compromise…..
…..Harry can achieve immortality BOTH by having a son….
….AND by being written about by Shakespeare….
But were some child of yours alive at that time
You should live twice: in it and in my rhyme….
Psycho-analytically inclined Brothers and Sisters, though, will have realised that Shakespeare has been contradicting Mary Southampton’s brief….
FROM THE VERY BEGINNING OF THE SEQUENCE!!!
Mary wants Harry to take up an interest in girls….
But Shakespeare seems much more interested in Harry’s ‘manhood’….
You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to realise that Shakespeare…..
……unconsciously perhaps…….
….. was in love with young Harry….
Indeed, in Sonnet 104 describes his FIRST meeting with Harry as the moment…..
When first your eye I eyed….
Your Cat’s case rests….
‘Bye, now…
If you liked Trixie’s Post, you might like….
To read ‘The Dedication to Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded’, please click: HERE
To read ‘Why did Shakespeare write The Sonnets?’, please click: HERE
To read ‘Trixie the Cat’s Guide to the Sonnets. (1) Background Jottings, please click: HERE
To read ‘Trixie the Cat’s Guide to the Sonnets. (3) Was Christopher Marlowe the Rival Poet?, please click: HERE.
To read ‘Trixie the Cat’s Guide to the Sonnets (4) The Rival Poet Revealed!’ please click: HERE.
To read ‘Amazing New Light on Sonnet 86’, please click: HERE.
To read ‘The Bath Sonnets Decoded’, please click: HERE.
To read ‘Sonnet 126 Decoded’, please click: HERE.
The Shakespeare Code 
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