The Southampton family was, for many years, William Shakespeare’s meal ticket…..
….says TRIXIE THE CAT…..
In 1590, when the defeat of the Spanish Armada had made acting unfashionable, Mary, 2nd Countess of Southampton……
…..employed ‘Cousin Will’ as a ‘fac totum’ in her household at Titchfield……
…..and as the schoolmaster for the local boys….
…..and as as tutor and companion to her gay, wayward, teenage son, Henry Wriothesley…..
…..who signed himself…….
Harry Southampton.
Mary commissioned Shakespeare to write seventeen sonnets for Harry’s seventeenth birthday in a desperate attempt to get her son interested in girls….
At this point the widowed Mary had control of the family purse strings……
……and control them she did!
Shakespeare makes fun of her stinginess to her son in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Mary played Hippolyta in the premiere of the play at Copped Hall……
……and Theseus, played by her bridegroom, Sir Thomas Heneage……..
……says to her:
But o! methinks how slow this old moon wanes
She lingers my desires, like to a step-dame or a dowager,
Long withering out a young man’s revenue.
But on 6th October, 1594, Harry came of age and was in control of his own finances……
Or rather his debts…..
He had to pay £5,000 (£2 and a half million) to Lord Burghley, his guardian…….
……for refusing to marry his grand-daughter……
But Harry had lands and property he could sell off…..
…..so he was able to give Shakespeare a present of £1,000 (£500,000)
The earliest written source for this story is Nicholas Rowe…….
…..who, in his 1709 Some Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespear [sic], writes:
There is one incidence so singular in the Magnificence of this Patron of Shakespeare’s, [Southampton]that if I had not been assur’d that the Story was handed down by Sir William D’Avenant…….
……..who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not have ventur’d to have inserted, that my Lord Southampton, at one time, gave him a thousand Pounds to enable him to go through with a Purchase which he heard he had a mind to…
[Davenant, on good authority, claimed to be Shakespeare’s bastard son.]
So it is not surprising that another penniless poet had his eyes on Harry’s money……
……a man whom Shakespeare attacks in his Sonnets……
…..and who has become known as…..
The Rival Poet
●
There were no royalties for writers at this time…..
…..and, unlike her father, King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth’s budget for the arts was pitiful….
In fact, her Court was known as the most barbarous in Europe……
So unless you found a Patron, you starved……
……as Robert Greene……..
…….. one of Shakespeare’s early collaborators, found to his cost….
He was taken in by a kindly cobbler and his wife who found him bankrupt and dying in the streets of London…
Shakespeare claimed Harry’s Patronage for himself in his Dedication to Venus and Adonis…..
I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden….
He next claimed Harry’s love for himself in his Dedication to Lucrece…..
The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end…..What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours…..
However, the Rival Poet was determined to replace Shakespeare on Harry’s payroll…..
……and in Harry’s heart…..
…….by writing poems which flatterred Harry even more than Shakespeare had done.
Shakespeare set out to destroy this Rival….
He claimed that the Rival’s affection for Harry was based entirely on artifice….
……that his love was inspired by a painting of Harry rather than by Harry himself….
……and that……
stirred by a painted beauty to his verse
……he used language and imagery which was bogus and overblown…..
Who was he?
Many scholars put forward the name of Christopher Marlowe….
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 86 certainly begins……
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you…..
…..which sounds as though Shakespeare is satirising…
…..what Ben Jonson described as….
Marlowe’s mighty line…..
Marlowe would have known Harry.
Their dates crossed at Cambridge University……
……and both were attractive, out, gay men…..
Marlowe even went so far as to say……
They be mad that love not tobacco and boys…..
In his great, erotic, unfinished masterpiece, Hero and Leander, Marlowe describes how Leander nightly swims the Hellespont to sleep with his beloved Hero….
But in Marlowe’s version of this story, the naked Leander is fondled, as he swims, by the lecherous old ‘sapphire-visaged’ King Neptune who…..
……clapped his [Leander’s] plump cheeks, with his tresses played,
And smiling wantonly, his love betrayed.
He watch’d his arms, and as they opened wide
At every stroke betwixt them would he slide
And steal a kiss, and then run out and dance….
Leander himself, in Marlowe’s description, is a dead ringer for Harry himself with….
His dangling tresses that were never shorn,
Had they been cut, and unto Colchos borne,
Would have allured the ven’trous youth of Greece
To hazard more than for the Golden Fleece….
Marlowe adds:
Some swore he was a maid in man’s attire,
For in his looks were all that men desire,
A pleasant smiling cheek, a speaking eye,
A brow for love to banquet royally;
And such as knew he was a man would say,
‘Leander, thou art made for amorous play:
Why art thou not in love, and loved of all?
Though thou be fair, yet be not thine own thrall…..
That Harry resembled a girl in drag is the theme of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20……
A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion….’
And in Sonnet 53 Shakespeare writes….
On Helen’s [Helen of Troy] cheek all art of beauty set
And you in Grecian tires are painted new….
Also, Marlowe’s plea to Leander…..
……. that he fall in love with someone other than himself…..
……. exactly mirrors Shakespeare’s Birthday Sonnets to Harry…..
Countess Mary herself might have asked Marlowe to encourage Harry to go to bed with girls…
……as she had asked Shakespeare…..
But Marlowe CANNOT be the Rival Poet for FOUR reasons:
1. Marlowe died too early.
He was killed, in an argument over the bill (‘le reckenynge’), in a room in a house in Deptford, on 30th May, 1593.
The Shakespeare Sonnets that were written to Harry run from 1590 to the Coronation of James in 1604….
…. and beyond.
The Rival Poet arrived on the scene when Shakespeare was beginning to tire of writing the praise which Harry so needed.
The Rival’s outpourings force Shakespeare to excuse his own ‘silence’ on the grounds that Harry’s ‘worth’ is self-evident…..
…..so it does not need the praise of poetry….
Shakespeare acts out his love for Harry in his LIFE!
Indeed……
When others [the Rival Poet] would give life…..
….they in fact, Shakespeare claims….
bring a tomb….
In 1593, when Marlowe died, Shakespeare was just beginning his affair with Harry……
…..and dashing off Sonnet after Sonnet to him….
No rival at that time could be described as expressing ‘more’ to Harry than Shakespeare was…
…..or expressing it ‘more’ often….
…..as Shakespeare admits his Rival does in Sonnnet 21.
2. Shakespeare worshipped Marlowe……
….and so would never have criticised him as he criticises The Rival Poet….
Touchstone, in As You Like It, refers directly to Marlowe’s death when he addresses Audrey:
It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly I would the Gods had made thee poetical.
And Phebe, in love with Rosalind dressed as a boy, refers to Marlowe as the…..
Dead Shepherd
…….equating him with Christ…..
…..and quotes directly from Hero and Leander….
Whoever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight…..
At Leander’s first meeting with Hero, Marlowe describes how…..
He kneeled, but unto her devoutly prayed;
Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said:
‘Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him.
He started up, she blushed as one ashamed;
Wherewith Leander much more was inflamed.
He touch’d her hand, in touching it she trembled:
Love deeply grounded hardly is dissembled.
These lovers parléd by the touch of hands;
True love is mute, and oft amazéd stands….
Romeo’s first meeting with Juliet is identical:
He says:
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine……
……the gentle sin is this,
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth the rough touch with a gentle kiss…..
Juliet replies:
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss….
Indeed, in Sonnet 31, when Shakespeare, in his own voice, talks, Marlowe-like, about the
holy and obsequious
……tears which….
….dear religious love
……has stolen from his eyes for dead friends….
…..Your Cat believes he had Kit Marlowe in mind….
3. Marlowe didn’t need Harry’s money.
Even as an undergraduate at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, Marlowe spent more in the bar than his contemporaries.
He was paid by Lord Burghley to spy on Catholic activity at Rheims seminary…
After the Armada, when theatre work was hard to find, there is good evidence Marlowe was employed by Bess of Hardwick as a tutor to Arbella……
Just as Shakespeare was by the Countess of Southampton as tutor to Harry….
And Thomas Kyd by Lord Strange as tutor to his daughters….
And, at his death in 1593, Marlowe had his own patron……
….Thomas Walsingham…..
….whose father had been related to the great spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham….
Thomas Walsinham, a third son, had unexpectedly come into money in 1598 when he inherited the moated Scadbury Manor in Kent.
He was able to pay off his own debts……
….. and look after his friends…..
It was the year after The Armada when Marlowe, who was about the same age as Walsingham, would have been looking for support….
4. Marlowe didn’t need Harry’s love….
At his death, Marlowe was actually living with Walsingham at Scadbury, seven miles away from Deptford where he was killed…
…..a fact even known to the Privy Council who sent a messenger to Scadbury to find him…
He was by then notorious as a homosexual…..
…..and had also been accused of atheism by an enemy…..
Even the publisher and writer, Henry Chettle, writing of the ‘offence’ taken by both Shakespeare and Marlowe at the publication of A Groates-worthe of Witte, states:
With neither of them was I acquainted and with one of them [Marlowe] I care not if I ever be…..
According to Shakespeare’s publisher, Edward Blount……
……who dedicated the first printed version of Hero and Leander to Walsingham after Marlowe’s death….
……Walsingham had a completely different view of Marlowe. He….
…..bestowed many kind favours [on Marlowe] entertaining the parts of reckoning and worth which [he] found in him, with good countenance and liberal affection….
Blount also describes how, when the….
first issue of [Marlowe’s] brain should chance to come abroad….the first breath it should take might be the gentle air of [Walsingham’s] liking…..
Given this level of intimacy……
….and Marlowe’s militant gay advocacy….
…..this relationship between Patron and protégé must have included gay sex….
Indeed, gay sex (pace the Conspiracy Theorists) was the most likely cause of Marlowe’s death….
The Corononer’s Report – which the brilliant researcher, Leslie Hotson, discovered in 1925 – states that four men, including Marlowe, arrived at the widow Eleanor Bull’s house in Deptford at 10 a.m. on 30th May….
They had ‘dinner’ at 12 p.m., wandered in the garden ‘in quiet sort’ till 6 p.m. and then returned to their room and ate ‘supper’.
Afterwards Marlowe, who was lying on a bed in the room, got into an argument about the bill with one Ingram ffrysar, who was sitting with his back to Marlowe, between the other two men….
Marlowe – ‘moved with anger’ – seized ffrysar’s dagger – which was hanging behind his back and stabbed him ‘maliciously’ in the head.
ffrysar, caught between the other two men, turned, seized the dagger from Marlowe and gave him a fatal wound above his right eye….
…..of the depth of two inches and the width of one inch……
So, a group of four men are together for at least NINE hours and consume TWO meals (presumably with alcohol) in a PRIVATE ROOM WHICH CONTAINS A BED….
It needs no Sherlock Holmes come from the grave……..
….. to detect gay goings-on….
….especially when we learn that one of the men, Nicholas Skeres, was part of the Earl of Essex’s brazenly bi-sexual entourage….
…..which counted Captain Pearse Edmones, Harry’s ‘rough-trade’ lover, amongst its numbers….
And that ffrysar himself, like Marlowe, was PART OF THOMAS WALSINGHAM’S ENTOURAGE….
……and so a possible love-rival……
……and cash-rival….
……to Kit Marlowe…..
And just in case you think Your Cat is going off her head….
…….just read the words of Francis Meres…..
……the literator, priest and gossip…..
…… witten in his Palladis Tamia a mere FIVE YEARS after the events in Deptford:
[Marlowe was] stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love….
Your Cat’s case rests…..
‘Bye, now…..
TO DISCOVER THE TRUE IDENTITY OF THE RIVAL POET, PLEASE CLICK: here.
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’. (2) The Birthday Sonnets, please click: HERE
The Shakespeare Code 
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