The Shakespeare Code

 

(It’s best to read Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five,  Six, Seven, Eight and Nine first.)

It would be natural for Aemilia Lanyer to visit Cerne Abbas in 1594….

She’d had a history of miscarriages……

……but now she had a little boy….

……and wanted a brother or sister for him….

The waters of St. Augustine’s Well were a famous aid to fertility….

Cerne Abbas now has a chalk giant on the hillside…..

….probably a seventeenth century caricature of Oliver Cromwell…..

…..which makes a blatant reference to the generative powers of the well…..

Sir Walter Raleigh was in the habit of visiting Cerne Abbas because of its famous cobbling family, the Hodges…

The Hodges Stone, Cerne Abbas, kindly supplied to The Code by George Mortimer.

And Aemilia could easily arrange for their visits to overlap…

She was in possession of something Raleigh desperately wanted…..

GOSSIP ABOUT HIS ENEMIES!!!

Raleigh was in disgrace with Queen Elizabeth for secretly marrying Bess Throckmorton……

And the Queen had exiled him from the Court……

He would do ANYTHING to discredit his rivals there…….

Especially the dashing young Earl of Essex…..

Aemilia had information on the love-life of Southampton……

……the great friend of Essex….

….which, with Raleigh’s help…..

…..i.e money….

…..she could turn into a satire…

That is how Sir Walter became Avisa’s….

…..Sire….

….and why the Four Graces ‘created’ her at St. Augustine’s well…..

….’Avisa’……

….which in the words of the 1596 version of Willobie….. ‘sounds something like’…….

…..’Aemilia’…..

….. was ‘conceived’ at Cerne Abbas….

Sir Walter then invited Aemilia to stay at Sherborne…..

…..where his beloved New Castle was being built….

…..and put her up at the George Tavern……

…..with its famous …..

……crystal well…..

Aemilia took her revenge on her erstwhile lovers by exposing their weakness…….

……their ruthlessness….

…….their ploys to seduce her….

….and their abuse of aristocratic powers……

Aemilia suggests that Hunsdon……

…….as well as being a borderline paedophile…..

……. was also a closet Papist……

She has Avisa refer to…..

Your [Hunsdon’s] high estate, your silver shrines,

Replete with wind and filty stink….

(Hunsdon had been brought up by both Mary and Anne Boleyn……

……then in a Cistercian monastery by monks who employed incense and ritual…..)

‘Henry Willobie’ [Aemilia] then goes on to describe how…..

….where age [Hundson] leaves off, there youths [Wriothesley] begin…..

….and immediately states that…..

Our English soil to Sodom’s sink

Excessive sin transform’d of late,

Of foul deceit the loathsome link

Hath worn all faith clean out of date,

The greatest sins ‘mongst greatest sort

Are counted now but for a sport…

Aemilia also closely implies a gay relationship between Shakespeare and his ‘familiar friend’ Southampton……

 She has ‘H.W. say….

I took a salve that still before

Was won’t to help, I chose me one

With whom I quenched my lust alone…

Shakespeare had used the word ‘salve’ in Sonnet 120 to represent his love making with Southampton…..

O that our night of woe might have remembered

My deepest sense how hard true sorrow hits

And soon to you, as you to me then, tendered

The humble salve which wounded bosom fits…..

BUT, as Avisa, Aemilia re-runs history……

 …..IN HER FAVOUR…

THIS TIME SHE DOESN’T SUCCUMB TO HER SUITORS….

WHY?

The answer is that Aemilia was in the throes of a profound and shattering conversion to Christianity…..

At around this time she had a dream which she recounts at the end of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum…’Hail God, King of the Jews’

Gentle reader, if thou desire to be resolved, why I give this title, Salve Rex Judaeorum, know for certain that it was delivered unto me in sleep many years before I had any intent to write in this manner, and was quite out of my memory, until I had written the Passion of Christ, when immediately it came into my remembrance, what I had dreamed long before; and thinking it a significant token, that I was appointed to perform this work, I gave the very same words I received in sleep as the fittest title I could devise for this book….

Aemilia was experiencing conversion from the very depths of her being….

She was becoming a new person…..

And Avisa is the woman she wanted to be….

That is why Avisa is conceived by a silver well in Cerne Abbas…..

…..and dwells by a  crystal well in Sherborne….

The creation of Avisa is a baptism….

In Salve Deus she even describes how women can find Christ in the

….pleasant groves

Of sweet Elisium, by the Well of Life

Whose crystal springs do purge from worldly strife.

So ‘Avisa’ both IS….

…. and ISN’T…….

….’ Aemilia’……

That’s why she gives hints that Avisa really exists….

And hints that she doesn’t….

When the book was published, one ‘Peter Colse’……..

………most likely an enemy of the Raleigh entourage……

……. twigged that Avisa was a real woman out for real revenge…..

….and writes:

…a vain-glorious Avisa (seeking by slander of her superiors to eternise her folly) is in the like verse by an unknown author described…..

Aemilia immediately replies with the denial that Avisa ever existed……

….. claims that the author ‘Henri Willobie’ is……

……of late gone to God…..

……i.e. dead…..

…and the events took place thirty-five years ago…..

In a particular swipe at Shakespeare, and his Sonnets to her, she writes:

Such others there be, who, when they have read this book, have blushed to themselves, finding, as they thought, their very words and writings which they had used in the like attempts….

Whatever money she made from Raleigh  and Willobie was soon spent….

By the time she visited Forman in 1597……

…….she was so hard up she was considering becoming a……..

…..good-fellow [prostitute]….

She had financed Alfonso to become a ‘gentleman adventurer’ on the Earl of Essex’s campaigns……..

…….in the pathetic hope that he would become a knight…..

……. so that she could re-enter society as a lady……

Forman, like all the others before him, got hooked by Aemilia’s charms…….

He set down his professional dilemma – Hamlet-like – on 11th September, 1597 in the third person:

Best to do a thing or no…A certain man [Forman] longed to see a gentlewoman [Aemilia] whom he loved and desired to halek with. [make love to] And because he could not tell how to come to her and whether he should be welcome to her or no, moved this question, whether it were best to send to her to know how she did and thereby to try whether she would bid the messenger by his mistress round to him or no. Thinking thereby what he might goodly bolden thereby to see her…..

The party [Forman] sent his servant by who she [Aemilia]  sent word that if his master came he should be welcome and he went and supped with her and stayed all night and she was familiar and friendly to him in all things. But only she would not halek. Yet he told all parts of her body willingly and kissed her often but she would not do in any wise. Whereupon…he departed friends…..

Aemilia was up to her old teasing tricks…..

In December of the following year, 1598, Aemilia had a baby daughter whom she named….

…..Odillia….

….but Odillia died the following year….

….and the year after that she was flirting with Forman again….

…probably to get his astrological services for free…

But she never totally gave in to him….

……so in his mind she became……

….. a whore [who] dealt evil with him after……

Forman was following the pattern Shakespeare set……

…..infatuation, followed by rejection and fury……

But how did Shakespeare himself react to this attack on him and his….

……familiar friend?

As usual, obliquely….

He wrote The Merchant of Venice……..

………. and invented the character of Jessica…….

……. who converts to Christianity from her father Shylock’s Judaism……

……for selfish and commercial reasons rather than spiritual ones….

……and acquires a husband, Lorenzo, who, like Alfonso, gains a fortune when he marries her….

But it is perhaps the character of Aemilia in Othello that is Shakespeare’s most interesting response…..

……..If the woman is unfaithful to the husband, she argues, then the husband is to blame….

But I do think it is their husbands’ faults

If wives do fall: say that they slack their duties,

And pour our treasures into foreign laps,

Or else break out in peevish jealousies,

Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,

Or scant our former having in despite;

Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,

Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know

Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell

And have their palates both for sweet and sour,

As husbands have.

This is ‘our’ Aemilia to the life…..

In the First Folio her name is even spelt the same way….

To read on, please click: Here!

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