The Shakespeare Code

(It’s best to read Parts One, Two and Three first.)

DECODING THE LANGUAGE OF WILLOBIE HIS AVISA….

The FIRST EVER reference in print to William Shakespeare…..

……..comes in Willobie his Avisa!!!

The Willobie author………

…….arguing that the beautiful, chaste Avisa is as faithful to her husband in ‘modern’ England………

…… as Lucrece was to Collatine in Ancient Rome…….

…..writes:

Yet Tarquin pluckt his [Collatine’s] glistering grape [his wife]

And Shake-speare, paints poor Lucrece rape….

This was a highly-topical reference……

Shakespeare’s long, narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece……

 ……had been entered on 9th May, 1594 at Stationer’s Hall………..

……just FOUR MONTHS before Willobie itself was entered on 3rd September, 1594…

But the late, great Estuary Intellectual and Bletchley Codebreaker, Eric Sams……..

…….has pointed out that Willobie also has many echoes of Shakespeare’s WRITING….

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon says to Puck……

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlipsand the noddingviolet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine

‘H.W.’ in Willobie….

…….codename for Henry Wriothesley…..

…….says to Avisa…..

I saw your gardens passing fine

With pleasant flowers lately deckt

With cowslip and with eglantine

When woeful woodbine lies reject…..

Clearly the Willobie author knew A Midsummer Night’s Dream backwards…

But the play had only recently been staged……

…..to celebrate the wedding of Henry Wriothesley’s mother, Mary, Second Countess of Southampton…….

……to Sir Thomas Heneage…..

(There are even references in A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself to the appalling summer weather of 1594……)

NO PRINTED VERSION OF A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM EXISTED WHEN WILLOBIE HIS AVISA WAS PUBLISHED…..

SO THE WILLOBIE AUTHOR MUST HAVE ATTENDED AN EARLY PERFORMANCE OF THE PLAY….

….WHICH, THE CODE BELIEVES, WAS A PRIVATE EVENT….

…..STAGED IN THE HALL AND GROUNDS OF COPPED HALL IN ESSEX…..

……AS A PRO-AM PRODUCTION….

…..WITH ARISTOCRATS PLAYING SOME OF THE PARTS…..

……INCLUDING WOMEN…..

…….AND PROFESSIONAL PERFORMERS PLAYING THE OTHER PARTS…..

…..ALSO INCLUDING WOMEN!…..

See: A MISUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM DECODED. 

And see especially, The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth…… 

……..which shows how aristocratic women would join in the entertainments, performed in the Halls and Grounds of their private estates, for the visiting Queen….

The Willobie author also makes an astonishing SEVEN direct references to the title LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST…..

(1) They find their vice by virtue crost.

Their foolish words, and labour lost.

(2) Thy love (sweet heart) shall not be lost,

How dear a price so ever it cost.

(3) Assure your self your labour’s lost.

(4) The labour’s lost that you indure.

To gorged Hawk, to cast the lure.

(5)The greater frost, the greater flame,

So frames it with my love or lost

That fiercely fries amidst the frost.

(6) If other hope you do retain,

Your labour’s lost your hope is vain.

(7) But his labour is imagined here to be lost.

The Willobie author also draws on the erotic imagery of the hunt in Love’s Labour’s Lost……

……in which the Princess of France – and her ladies-in-waiting – are out hunting for deer…….

……in the same sadistic way they are out hunting for men…..

The Princess of France, bow in hand, says…….

Now mercy goes to kill

And shooting well is then accounted ill….

I for praise alone now seek to spill

The poor deer’s blood that my heart means no ill……

To an Elizabethan, the spilling of the deer’s blood……

…….and its death…….

…….would also suggest love-making and orgasm…..

In A Winter’s Tale, the jealous Leontes…..

…….describing the imagined love-making of his wife, Hermione, with his childhood friend, Polixenes, says:

But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers,

As now they are, and making practised smiles,

As in a looking-glass, and then to sigh, as ’twere

The mort o’ th’ deer….

‘H.W.’ in Willobie also draws on the image of the wounded deer………

…….covered in blood………

…….when he describes his own sexual arousal by Avisa…..

Like wounded deer whose tender sides are bathed in blood,

From deadly wound, by fatal hand & forked shaft

So bleeds my pierced heart, for so you think it good,

With cruelty to kill that which you got by craft….

To complicate the issue even more, Queen Elizabeth……

………..as the ‘Chief Man’ at a deer hunt…….

………..would have castrated the dead stag…….

 ……to obtain his delicious and highly prized….

…….coddes….

(Sigmund Freud would have had a field day…..)

THE SHAKESPEARE CODE BELIEVES THAT THE FIRST PERFORMANCE OF LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST WAS ALSO A PRIVATE EVENT……

…..STAGED IN THE GROUNDS OF PLACE HOUSE IN TITCHFIELD AT WHITSUN IN 1592….

[Read Stewart Trotter’s Love’s Labour’s Found (2002)]

…….and see: Shakespeare in Titchfield.

The Willobie author also refers to other plays by Shakespeare……..

Richard III, in which the hunchbacked……

…..and in Lord Olivier’s performance, nasally-challenged, King….

……asks the audience…….

Was ever woman in this humour wooed?

Was ever woman in this humour won?

And Edmund Ironside……

……(which The Code believes was partly by Shakespeare)…..

…….contains the phrase…..

…….like a woman to be won with words……

 ‘W.S.’ in Willobie…

…….code for William Shakespeare……..

…… says to ‘H.W.’…..

She [Avisa] is no saint, she is no nun,

I think in time she may be won……

‘W.S.’ also says to ‘H.W.’….

The smothered flame, too closely pent,

Burns more extreme for want of vent….

…..which, as Sams points out, is very similar to Gunthranus’s line from Edmund Ironside:

Yet can she [Queen Emma] not conceal affection so

But that it breaketh forth like hidden fire……

EDMUND IRONSIDE……….

………..WITH ITS ANACHRONISTIC INTRODUCTION OF A CHIVALROUS EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON IN THE REIGN OF KING CANUTE………

………..ITS SCENES SET IN THE TOWN OF SOUTHAMPTON……..

………..(WITH THE WALLS OF SOUTHAMPTON CASTLE FORMING A BACKDROP TO THE PLAY)…….

…………WAS, THE CODE BELIEVES, WRITTEN FOR PRIVATE PERFORMANCE FOR AND BY THE SOUTHAMPTON FAMILY c. 1592…

In Edward III (c. 1593) a play which The Code also believes is part-written by Shakespeare, the King says:

The lion scorns to touch the yielding prey…….

…..and ‘H.W.’ in Willobie says:

The raging lion never rends

The yielding prey……

In Edward III, Warwick also warns his daughter, the Countess of Salisbury…..

……who, though she is married, is being wooed by the King……

……who is himself married…..

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds….

In Willobie ‘The Nobleman’…….

……another of Avisa’s unsuccessful suitors….

…. says…..

Unhappy lily loves a weed

That gives no scent that gives no glee…..

But…..

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds….

……is also, of course, the conclusion to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94……

…….which begins…..

They that have power to hurt and will do none…..

Sonnet 94 deals with the abuse of power…..

Shakespeare warns Henry Wriothesley NOT to use his status to seduce lower class young men……

He is the lily and they are the weeds…..

And if the lily meets with…..

……..base infection…..

……it smells…….

…. far worse…..

……than a weed would do….

This is EXACTLY the theme of Edward III …….

…….where the King attempts to seduce the Countess of Salisbury using his status……

And it is EXACTLY the theme of Willobie his Avisa….

……..where a corrupt old Nobleman attempts to groom the barely pubescent Avisa….

Criticising his behaviour, Avisa speaks of his ……

…..base affection….

…..which is an echo the Sonnet phrase….

…..base infection…..

The Willobie author, clearly, was not only intimately acquainted with Shakespeare’s unpublished plays….

……..HE WAS INTIMATELY ACQUAINTED WITH SHAKESPEARE’S UNPUBLISHED SONNETS…….

…..AND SHAKESPEARE’S MIND….

He must have been one of the…..

…..private friends….

…..among whom, Francis Mere said……..

…….. (four years later in 1598)……..

……… that Shakespeare circulated his….

…..suagr’d sonnets…..

……SO WHO WAS HE?

TO FIND OUT, CLICK: HERE!

TRIXIE THE CAT HAS THE ANSWER!