Willobie his Avisa – or the True Picture of a modest maid and a chaste and constant wife
………was entered on the Stationer’s Register on 3rd September, 1594….
The frontispiece claims it is….
In Hexameter verse. The like argument whereof was never heretofore published. Read the preface to the reader before you enter farther…
And then quotes from Proverbs 12.4:
A virtuous woman is the crown of her husband but she that maketh him ashamed is as corruption in his bones.
Willobie his Avisa claims to be a poem left in his study by one Henry Willobie……
a young man and a scholar of very good hope, being desirous to see the fashions of other countries for a time, [who] departed voluntarily to her Majesty’s service…..
The poem was discovered by his friend, Hadrian Dorrell, to whom Henrie had entrusted a key to his study…….
Dorrell was so taken with the poem……
…….and its praise of the chaste Avisa……
…….that he decided to publish it….
…….as a moral example to all women……
(and, indeed, as a moral example to all men. Henry Willobie shows them to be either ruthless, desperate or pathetic in their attempts to seduce the ‘constant’ wife, Avisa.)
Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code will immediately recognise this formula…….
Two years earlier, Thomas Nashe……..
…….claimed to have found the manuscript of Groats-worth of Wit……
…….in Robert Greene’s study after he died.
Robert Greene writing in his shroud…
Everyone knew that it was Nashe who had written it.
He wanted a cover so he could attack other people……
………especially William Shakespeare……
……… whom he famously describes as an……
………upstart crow.
See: Greene’s ‘Groats-worth of Wit’ decoded.
‘Henry Willobie’ was a pen name….
…..but to complicate matters, there really WAS a REAL Henrie Willobie……
……….an Oxford undergraduate…….
……….who matriculated from St John’s College, Oxford, in December 1591 at the age of sixteen…..
There is no evidence that he ever left England on Queen Elizabeth’s service……
……….and, indeed, seems to have graduated as a Bachelor of Arts from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1595……
……….the year after Willobie was published….
By the 1596 edition, though, Henry Willobie is described as……
now of late gone to God
i.e. dead…..
And his…….
poetical fiction…..penned……at least for thirty and five years since [ago]
The Willobie author chose ‘Henrie Willobie’ as his pen name for one reason only:
…….the initials, ‘H.W’……
For the niche audience Willobie his Avisa was aimed at, ‘H.W.’ could suggest one person only…..
….. Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton……
……who, in Willobie his Avisa, falls hopelessly in love with Avisa……
……egged on by his……
familiar friend, W.S.
…….described as an…..
……old player…..
……in a…..
……loving comedy……
To hide his tracks the Willobie author invents other, more generalised, suitors of Avisa…..
……..lusty Cavalieros, Captains or Cutters…….
……a Frenchman (‘D.B’) and an ‘Englishman or German’ under the name of ‘Didimus Harco’……
He also portrays ‘Dorrell’ as the puzzled editor of the poem who doesn’t know if Avisa is a real person or not……
……or who ‘H.W.’ could possibly be…….
At one point ‘Dorrell’ even states that ‘H.W.’ was an Italian and a Spaniard AT THE SAME TIME!
He describes ‘H.W.’ as…….
…..Italo-Hispalensis…..
……and ‘H.W.’ himself says:
A thousand features I have seen,
For travellers change, & choice shall see
In France and Flanders and in Spain…….
– a coded reference to the secret trip Southampton, Shakespeare took to the Continent in 1593, the year before…..
Also see the work of Prof. Roger Prior who, using completely different criteria, argues that Shakespeare was in Venice in EXACTLY THE SAME YEAR!
•
Willobie his Avisa went through six editions, was constantly banned and was still being printed in 1635……
………MORE THAN FORTY YEARS AFTER IT WAS FIRST WRITTEN!
So who REALLY wrote Willobie his Avisa?
– and what was his motive?
Dr. Saul Frampton……
.
…….of the University of Westminster…….
……in a long piece in the Guardian newspaper on 10th August this year (2013) put forward John Florio as the author…..
…..but Trixie the Cat has ENTIRELY REFUTED this theory…..
The late historian Christopher Hill, followed by many others, put forward Matthew Roydon as a candidate…..
……but he was part of the homosexual Christopher Marlowe circle…….
……and his elegy to the dead soldier- hero, Sir Philip Sidney………
……is tantamount to a posthumous love poem:
Half of this heart, this sprite and will,
Died in the breast of Astrophil [Sidney]…….
To hear him speak and sweetly smile
You were in paradise a while….
Roydon would NEVER have disparaged men in favour of women the way the Willobie Author does……
…..and according to Thomas Kyd’s 1593 letter to Sir John Puckering……
[Marlowe] would persuade with men of quality to go unto the King of Scots whether I hear Roydon is gone….
So the odds are Roydon wasn’t even in England in 1594!
One Dr. Creighton, in 1904, put forward the most preposterous theory of all……..
…….that the Earl of Southampton wrote Willobie his Avisa HIMSELF……
BUT IF HE DIDN’T, WHO DID?
PLEASE READ ON!
The Shakespeare Code 
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