The Shakespeare Code

Thomas Kyd was far more popular with the theatre-going public than William Shakespeare….

Kyd’s gory revenge play, The Spanish Tragedy…….

…….or  Hieronimo is mad again…

…….is full of vindictive ghosts, mutilations, executions, murders, suicides, corpses, gory handkerchiefs and letters writen in blood….

The…..

……of its time…..

It went through TEN editions between 1592 and 1633……

…..far more than any play by Shakespeare…..

…  and was given TWENTY-NINE performances between 1592 and 1597.

…..a huge number for the time….

In 1598, four years after Kyd’s death, Francis Meres described Kyd as….

…..our best for Tragedy…

In 1607, thirteen years after Kyd’s death, Thomas Dekker described him as…..

 ……industrious….

In 1612, eighteen years after Kyd’s death, Thomas Heywood described Kyd as…..

 ……famous….

And in 1623, in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, Ben Jonson described Kyd as…..

 ……sporting…..

NEARLY THIRTY YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH!!!

Yet, by 1675, Edward Phillips, John Milton’s nephew, was attributing The Spanish Tragedy to a ‘William Smith’

And it wasn’t till 1773 that the play was finally accepted as the work of Kyd….

What had happened?

Why does everyone remember Shakespeare but forget Kyd?

The answer is intriguing….

And disturbing….

And casts extraordinary light on A Midsummer Night’s Dream….

……and the nature of William Shakespeare himself….

●

By decoding pamphlet attacks on Kyd and Shakespeare…..

……written by the ‘University Wits’  Robert Greene….

…….and Thomas Nashe….

……..we learn that Kyd and Shakespeare………

……..both Grammar School boys……

…….. were FIRM FRIENDS AND COLLABORATORS in the 1580’s…..

They even LODGED TOGETHER in London…

……where the teenage Shakespeare had fled……

……. to escape the wrath of Sir Thomas Lucy….

…….whose hares and deer he had poached……

……. and whose personal hygiene he had lampooned in a ballad….

(See: Shakespeare: The Movie. I)

Kyd was six years older than Shakespeare……

…… and already established as a playwright for the patriotic Queens Men….

……so was very much the senior collaborator.

‘Sporting Kyd’ was addicted to horse-racing….

As, it seems, was Shakespeare…..

In Sommers’ Last Will and Testament…

………Nashe attacks Shakespeare in the figure of ‘Sol’ ……..

………the vain, selfish, insinuating, ‘richly attired’ ‘Sun’  who….

…..in the horse-race headlong ran at race…

And in the play A Knack To Know a Knave ……

…….(anonymous, but with all the signs of Nashe)…….

…….Shakespeare appears as the reluctant apprentice, Coneycatcher……

…….who wears  flashy clothes, takes scented baths and owns his own racing gelding…..

Shakespeare even writes about horses in his sonnets……..

…….. as though it were an extension of himself…..

They plod along when he is sad……………..

……..but gallop as swift as thought when he is happy.

Shakespeare even doodled in  his copy of Holinshed’s 1587 extended Chronicles…….

…… in a ‘secretary hand’……

……. (verified as Shakespeare’s by the American graphologist Charles Hamilton)…..

 Black soap, pig-meat and honey mingled together good for a horse’s leg swollen……

Kyd also wrote in a ‘secretary hand’…..

……..similar to Shakespeare’s….

….. the form of writing used by lawyers’ clerks or ‘noverints’…..

We know, from a pamphlet attack by Nashe, that Kyd was the son of a noverint……

…….. and was a lawyer’s clerk himself…….

………as, it seems, was Shakespeare.

Nashe attacks Kyd and Shakespeare as……

……..buckram gentlemen……

……..and lawyers clerks in Westminster Hall were famous for their black gowns and buckram bags…..

Hamilton has even found examples of Shakespeare’s handwriting on legal documents….

……..not only his will……

………which many literate people at the time wrote out for themselves…….

……..but also his complicated legal agreement with Replingham over the Welcome Enclosures at Statford upon Avon…..

Law may have been the day-job for Kyd and Shakespeare….

……but at night, working by candle-light, they wrote ballads, pamphlets and plays…

……encouraged by the polemicist, publisher and radical priest, Robert Crowley…..

……the Vicar of St. Giles, Cripplegate…

…….the church where Sir Thomas Lucy worshipped when he was in London…

Crowley advocated the use of plain, unadorned language in writing and in life…

…….hated the use of make-up and wigs…

…….thought wealth should be voluntarily re-distributed….

………and believed that Christ’s teaching in the Gospels could best be spread by popular culture…..

…….i.e. ballads and plays…

We know from another attack on Shakespeare…….

…….. in an another anonymous play called Histrio-Mastix…

…….which ALSO has signs of being written, in part, by Nashe……

…….that Shakespeare fell completely under the spell of the charismatic Crowley…..

Shakespeare is lampooned in the play as the boastful, actor-poet Posthast….

(Just so we don’t miss the point, one of the characters in the play describes how he…

……shakes his furious spear…..)

Posthast himself describes how his ‘Ingles’ – his gay followers – have hands….

……..as hard as battle doors, clapping at baldness….

Posthast improvises alcohol-inspired epigrams of great ‘suavity’….

……..just as Shakespeare used to do in the Bear Tavern at Stratford upon Avon….

…….where he would make up mock ‘epitaphs’ for his friends.

Posthast, with the help of a ‘learned’ scrivener…..

……..clearly a reference to Kyd….

……..forms an acting company from drunken, bisexual, ex-tradesmen….

……..just as Peter Quince and Bully Bottom do in A Midsummer Night’s Dream…

Posthast calls his company ‘Politician Players’….

……and, inspired by drinking vast quantities of alcohol, writes a play version of the parable of the Prodigal Son…

……then persuades ‘Sir Oliver Owlet, the merry knight’ to become his patron.

……’Owlet’ is code for Ferdinando, Lord Strange….

……..whose family crest was the Stanley eagle….

Shakespeare’s real life company, Lord Strange’s Men, started touring the Midlands in 1583/4….

……. with a homely repertoire of bible stories, fairy stories, morality plays and romances…

 ……including the heart-warming The Fair Em, or the Miller’s Daughter of Manchester…

…….which started life as a ballad….

It is set in Manchester, but refers to Liverpool and Chester as well…

(Lord Strange was made an Alderman of Chester in 1587 and was Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire and Chester during the Armada conflict the following year)

King Charles II’s librarian believed that The Fair Em was written by Shakespeare….

……but Edward Phillips, in 1675, thought The Fair Em was written by Greene….

BOTH MEN WERE RIGHT!

This play, like so many at the time, was a collaboration….

It consists of two entirely different stories, loosely woven together in an end scene…

It has an eavesdropping scene IDENTICAL to the scene in  Love’s Labour’s Lost where the young Lords over-hear each others’ declaration of love….

It also has a wonderful proto-Berowne part for Shakespeare…..

 …..as the honest, plain-speaking Valingford…

……who falls in love with the Miller’s beautiful daughter Em…..

……who pretends to be blind to test Valingford’s love…

……but who turns out to be an aristocrat in disguise…

This plot has all the marks of Shakespeare’s hand…

But the other plot is about William the Conqueror….

…..who falls in love with a woman painted on another knight’s shield….

This section of the play was written by Greene…..

….. who based the story-line on his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay…

Fair Em became a huge hit…..

It was even played by Strange’s Company in the ‘Honourable’ City of London…

But collaborations which turn into HUGE hits present HUGE problems…

Collaborators start to argue about who thought of what….

……especially if money is involved….

Greene grew jealous of Shakespeare…..

……and, in his 1587 pamphlet, A Farewell to Folly….

……attacks Shakespeare for being so heavily influenced by Crowley:

Shakespeare quotes DIRECTLY from the Bible instead of inventing his own dialogue:

 If they [Grammar school boys like Shakespeare] come to write, or publish anything in print, it is either distilled out of ballets [ballads] or borrowed of theological poets…..and he that cannot write true English without the help of clerks of Parish Churches [Crowley] will needs make himself the father of interludes……But to bring Scripture to prove any thing he says, and kill it dead with a text in a trifling subject of love, I tell you is no small piece of cunning. As for example, two lovers on the stage….her knight excuseth himself with that saying of the Apostle, Love covereth the multitude of sins. I think this was but simple abusing of Scripture.

‘Love covereth a multitude of sins’ is a direct quote from The Fair Em, which in turn is a quote from the Apostle, Peter (1 Peter 4:8)…..

 …….for charity shall cover the multitude of sins…..

Greene, to make sure we know EXACTLY whom he is attacking (Crowley) adds:

…….I am persuaded the sexton of St. Giles without Cripplegate would have been ashamed of such blasphemous rhetoric….

Thomas Nashe joins in the attack on Kyd and Shakespeare the following year in his The Anatomy of Absurdity [1588]:

It makes the learned sort [Greene and Nashe himself, of course] to be silent whenas they see learned sots [Kyd and Shakespeare] so insolent…..They come to speak before they come to know…[and] shrift to the vicar of S. Fooles [Crowley]

Kyd, like Shakespeare, was also enjoying huge success at this period…..

………which made Nashe all the more jealous…

 In his 1589 Preface to Greene’s Menaphon……

………pointedly dedicated……..

………to the Gentleman Students of both Universities……

………Nashe attacks The Taming of a Shrew…

…….a collaboration between Kyd and Shakespeare….

……which is a knock-about farce set in Athens at the time of Plato…..

……and which formed the basis for Shakespeare’s later The Taming of the Shrew…

Nashe warns ‘gentlemen students’ [University Graduates] not to imitate….

……vainglorious Tragedians [Kyd and Shakespeare]…thinking themselves more than initiated in a poet’s immortality, if they once get Boreas by the beard and the heavenly bull by the dewlap…

‘Boreas by the beard’ is a quote from The Taming of a Shrew:

Sweet Kate the lovelier than are Diana’s purple robe,

Whiter than are the snowy Apenines

Or icy hair that grows on Boreas chin…

Nashe then goes on to attack Hamlet…

……another early collaboration between Kyd and Shakespeare which also formed the basis for Shakespeare’s later play….

English actors toured this version in Germany – and we know from a German synopsis  (Der Bestrafte Brudermord) that this also was a bit of a knock-about farce….

The sex-crazed Ophelia chases the courtier Phantasmo round the stage…..

…….and Hamlet, having been abducted by two bandits, suddenly ducks so that the bandits shoot each other instead of the Prince…

Kyd and Hamlet clearly based the character of Hamlet, and his dithering, on the character of Queen Elizabeth…..

……… and her dithering about what to do about Mary Queen of Scots…..

William Camden, the contemporary historian, describes how….

In the midst of these doubtful and perplexed thoughts, which so troubled and staggered the Queen’s mind, she gave herself over wholly to solitariness, sat many times melancholic and mute and, frequently sighing, muttered to herself, ‘Aut fer aut feri: either bear with her or smite her.’. And ‘Ne feriare, feri – Strike lest thou be stricken…

…..which sounds very much like a Latin version of….. 

…….To be or not to be….

Elizabeth even wore black for months after Mary’s execution…

Nashe claims that Kyd and Shakespeare were only able to write Hamlet by plagiarising English translations of Seneca…..

……yet English Seneca read by candlelight yields many good sentences…. and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford whole Hamlets, I should say whole handfuls, of tragical speeches…..

But Nashe warns these literary thieves that there is a finite limit to what can be stolen…

And then goes on to make fun of Kyd’s ACTUAL NAME:

The sea exhaled by drops will in continuance be dry, and Seneca let blood, line by line and page by page, at length must die to our stage: which makes his famished followers [Kyd and Shakespeare] to imitate the Kid in Aesop….

……..who became….

….enamoured with the Fox’s newfangles and forsook all hopes of life to leap into a new occupation….to intermeddle with Italian translation…..

The newfangled fox is, of course, Shakespeare……

……and the ‘Italian translation’ is Kyd’s  1588 translation of Torquato Tasso’s The Householder’s Philosophy…Nashe then asks…..

……What can be hoped of those that thrust Elisium into Hell?….

This is a coded attack  on The Spanish Tragedy….

Poets generally equate Elisium with Heaven…..

Not Kyd!

In The Spanish Tragedy he locates…

…. Fair Elisian Green…..

 …..in the UNDERWORLD with King Pluto and Persephone!

Nashe then launches an attack on the PERSONAL habits of Kyd and Shakespeare:

For recreation after their candle stuff, [writing by candlelight] having starched their beards most curiously, to make a peripatetical path into the inner parts of the City, and to spend two or three hours in turning over French Dowdie where they attract more infection in one minute than they can do eloquence all the days of their life……

Nashe is implying that Kyd and Shakespeare would visit French prostitutes……

….. in inner city brothels…

….and catch venereal disease…..

……. TOGETHER!

Nashe goes on to talk up Greene’s part in the success of The Fair Em….

…..declaring that….

…….sundry other sweet gentlemen [i.e. Greene] have vaunted their pens in private devices, and tricked up a company of taffety fools [Shakespeare’s acting company] with their feathers with whose beauty….they [Shakespeare and the players] might have anticked it until this time up and down the country with the King of the Fairies and dined every day at the pease-porridge ordinary [inn] with Delphrigus….

Shakespeare might be enjoying great success in the rôle of King of the Fairies….

……a proto-Oberon…..

…… but the part itself, Nashe points out, was originally created by Greene….

(Delphrigus, though no-one has been able to identify the play, was clearly another role in which Shakespeare excelled – and to which Nashe was again to allude three years later…)

Shakespeare, Nashe goes on to warn, must never forget he was once a humble, touring player….

If he doesn’t, there’s every danger he’ll become one again…

‘Beggars [forget] that ever they carried their fardels [luggage] on footback….Yet let subjects [actors] for all their insolence dedicate a De Profundis [prayer] every morning to the preservation of their Caesar [the boastful, actor-manager, Shakespeare] lest their increasing indignities return them ere long to their juggling to mediocrity [performing to simple country audiences]

But Shakespeare wasn’t in the mood to listen to Nashe’s advice…..

On 6^th November, 1589, the Lord Mayor of London complained that Lord Strange’s Men…

….i.e. Shakespeare’s company…

…….take upon them to handle in their plays certain matters of Divinity and State unfit to be suffered….

(Posthast, in Histrio-Mastix, had named his company ‘Politician Players’ and, Ingle, one of his gay actors, describes politicians as ‘the falsest, subtle fellows alive’.)

Strange’s actors, told they were not allowed to play in London any more…

…….parted in a very contemptuous manner….

…….and defied the Mayor’s ban on London performances by playing at Cross Keys that very afternoon….

The Mayor had two of the actors from the company slammed into a lock-up……

One of them was certainly Shakespeare!!!

Posthast (in the play) is also arrested by a Constable…..

 He tries to pull rank on him by saying:

…….Know you our credit with Sir Oliver [Owlet]?

The Constable replies:

True, but your boasting hath cracked it, I fear.

Shakespeare, too, had ‘cracked’ his credit with Lord Strange for the very same reason….

And to add to his troubles, the invasion of the Spanish Armada had changed everything…..

Actors……

……because they were thought of as unmanly…..

……were no longer popular with the public…

In fact, the public tore the costumes off the actors’ backs to give to the ‘real men’ to wear….

……the soldiers and sailors who were defending England from the Spaniards…

The public were also beginning to tire of Shakespeare’s homespun ‘morality’ plays…

……and the London stage itself was being hijacked by Anglican Bishops who hired hack writers to make scabrous….

……and deeply unchristian….

……attacks on their enemies…

……the Puritans….

This was no place for……

 …….pleasant Willy…..

……as Edmund Spenser………..

…….. calls Shakespeare in his 1590 collection of poems…

……The Teares of the Muses….

(See:Shakespeare in Titchfield. Startling New Evidence from Edmund Spenser.)

Instead Shakespeare chose to live in what Spenser calls his ‘idle cell’….

…..the schoolhouse and tollhouse in Titchfield……

…..with its fortified room….

……where Shakespeare worked as a schoolmaster…….

 …….in the country….

……and as a Jack-of-all-trades to the aristocratic Catholic Southampton family…..

……for Mary, second Countess of Southampton…..

……and her wayward, teenage son, Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton…

……a.k.a. ‘Harry Southampton’….

In Histrio-Mastix, Posthast is also more than happy to ditch his obligations to the Mayor and citizens of the town where he has promised to play…..

……and perform before the aristocratic Lord Mavortius……..

…….whose cellars Posthast and his company drink  dry…..

……. and whose coffers they deplete by demanding more and more money to perform…

(Harry Southampton was later to make a gift to Shakespeare of £1,000 – £500,000 in our money)

In 1590 Kyd joined the household of a certain ‘Lord’ ….

Even Christopher Marlowe……..

…… followed suit……

He was employed by the formidable Bess of Hardwick………

…….. as tutor to her granddaughter, Arbella Stuart……

But from 1591, he was to share lodgings with Kyd when he was in London…..

Just as Shakespeare had done…..

Shakespeare himself was getting closer to Harry Southampton…..

….and on 27^th June, 1592, even acted as his amanuensis…….

……..writing a letter which Harry himself signed……

Like Posthast, Shakespeare now had access to aristocratic wealth……

When asked to write entertainments for the Southampton household, he was in a position to employ others to ‘help’ him……

Especially on historical entertainments…..

And plays dependent on comic scenes…..

Like Posthast, Shakespeare was primarily a poet……

……from whose pen…….

Spenser writes……

Large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow……

Shakespeare, in an outrageous act of chutzpah, employed his worst enemies, Greene and Nashe, to collaborate on his entertainments for the Countess of  Southampton….

……..and for the Countess of Pembroke…….

……..at nearby Wilton……

Both women hated Queen Elizabeth – for entirely different reasons…..

 ……so when she ‘called in’ Holished’s historical Chronicles……..

…….(she didn’t want ANYONE to compare her reign with anyone else’s)…..

…….they simply commissioned Shakespeare to DRAMATISE history itself…..

……..which is why Shakespeare had a copy of the Chronicles to doodle in…..

To be hired by the upstart Shakespeare was too much for Greene…….

………even though he was in desperate need of money……

………and he left soon after collaborating on The Troublesome Reign of King John….

But Nashe, gritting his teeth, stayed on…..

And between 1590 and the summer of 1592 collaborated with Shakespeare on…..

 The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, Richard III, The Comedy of Errors, The Play of Sir Thomas More, Edmund Ironside and Love’s Labour’s Found…..

At the end of 1591 the two men collaborated on a special entertainment about the diminutive English soldier-hero Talbot…..

……..now known as Henry VI Part One – even though it was written after the other two parts….

This was to celebrate Robert Devereux, the Second Earl of Essex…….

 ………(an intimate friend of the Earl of Southampton) – who had just returned from the disastrous siege of Rouen…

……..which was being spun as a triumph….

And to get into Lord Strange’s good books……..

…….Talbot was one of Strage’s ancestors…..

Nashe , uncharacteristically, praises this entertainment in Pierce Pennilesse for one simple reason…..

……he wrote parts of it!

How it would have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding…

But NOT being in the limelight began to wrankle with him…..

So he began to attack Shakespeare obliquely……

In the same pamphlet he warns Southampton…..

……..to whom, at the end, he offers extravagant praise as…..

……..a pillar of nobility……to whom I owe all the utmost powers of my love and duty….

……..that…..

Drudges that have no extraordinary gifts of body nor of mind, filch themselves into some nobleman’s service, either by bribes or flattery, and when they are there, they so labour it with cap and knee, and ply it with privy whisperings, that they bring themselves into his good opinion ere he be aware. Then do they vaunt themselves over the common multitude, and are ready to outbrave any man that stands by himself. Their Lord’s authority is as a rebato to bear up the peacock’s tail of their boasting….

Peasants that come out of the cold of poverty, once cherished in the bosom of prosperity, will straight forget that ever there was a winter of want or who gave them room to warm them. The son of a churl cannot chose but prove ingrateful, like his father. Trust not a villain that hath been miserable, and is suddenly grown happy…..

Virtue ascendeth by degrees of desert unto dignity….there is no friendship to be had with him that is resolute to do or suffer anything rather than endure the destiny whereto he was born, for he will not spare his own brother or father, to make himself a gentleman……

Nashe genuinely believed that a man who was suddenly elevated out of his class into a position of power and influence – like Shakespeare – would inevitably behave with ruthless cruelty….

Greene died in the summer of 1592 in the house of a kindly cobbler…..

……who found him ill and starving on the streets of London….

Nashe saw his chance…..

He could pretend that he had found unpublished papers in Greene’s room…..

 ……(not that Greene had a room, let alone papers)…..

…….and publish a scathing attack on Shakespeare directly…..

UNDER GREENE’S NAME!!!

TO READ THE NEXT POST IN THIS SERIES,

‘SHAKESPEARE’S DESTRUCTION OF THOMAS KYD: PART TWO’

PLEASE CLICK: HERE!