The Shakespeare Code

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

Aemilia entered the service of Margaret, Countess of Cumberland…..

…..at a country estate in Cookham in Berkshire in 1604…..

[See Jessica Malay’s brilliant article, ‘Positioning Patronage: Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judæorum and the Countess of Cumberland in Time and Place.’ http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/XxI3CMdnAWrmK7NEsUJx/full It shows that Aemilia was at Cookham in 1604]

Aemilia’s husband hadn’t been made a knight……

…… but Aemilia was back in cultivated society……

…… helping to educate Lady Margaret’s teenage daughter…..

…….Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset……

Aemilia performed in entertainments with the women…..

……studied theology with them…..

…….enjoyed the beauties of the natural world with them….

……and formed bonds of friendship with them…

It was Countess Margaret who encouraged Aemilia to develop her writing skills…….

……and asked her to write a poem in praise of Cookham….

But by the autumn of the same year, the idyll was over…..

The women had to leave Berkshire….

And Aemilia was later to write a heart-breaking account of how she and the Countess Margaret visited their favourite oak-tree…..

…….and how her mistress spoke…..

To this fair tree, taking me by the hand,

You did repeat the pleasures which had past,

Seeming to grieve they could no longer last.

And with a chaste, yet loving kiss took leave,

Of which sweet kiss I did it soon bereave:

Scorning a senseless creature should possess

So rare a favour, so great happiness.

No other kiss it could receive from me,

For fear to give back what it took of thee…..

Suddenly Aemilia is seven years old again, craving a kiss from the Countess……

……..but having to steal it from the tree instead…..

Aemilia was back in the ‘real’ world…..

Alfonso, her husband, though, wasn’t all bad…

He had fought for the Queen and Essex on the Islands campaign and the Irish campaign……

…….and had stayed loyal to the Queen during the Essex rebellion…..

(Aemilia would have seen to that!)

……  The state had promised to reward him by giving him the land of recusants who had fled the country…..

……..but, as so often happened at this time, the state forgot about it…..

Alfonso was great friends with the music-loving Bishop of London – and later Archbishop of Canterbury – Richard Bancroft………

……….. who supported Alfonso’s application for a monopoly of hay-weighing in London…….

(This meant he would have a small cut of the money that changed hands every time hay was weighed)

This application was ALSO supported by the Earl of Southampton…..

………….who could well have believed Henry Lanyer was his natural son….

But the application took years to get through……

So by 1609, Alfonso and Aemilia had fallen on hard times and were living in Hackney…

Alfonso was borrowing money……

….and at one point had to be bound over to keep the peace….

Then Shakespeare dropped his bombshell……

He published his sonnets….

Now EVERYONE could read about his affair with the Earl of Southampton…..

……AND with Aemilia……

…….THEN a fickle courtesan……..

…… but NOW a respectable wife………

……. and mother of a teenage son…….

Southampton – when he became the father of a baby boy in 1605 –  had broken with Shakespeare……

See: The Grosvenor Chapel Talks – Part Three.

And so Shakespeare took his revenge…….

……not only by publishing his intimate sonnets………

……but by writing A Lover’s Complaint…..

……which satirises Henry Wriothesley every bit as savagely as Aemilia had done in Willobie his Avisa…..

The poem is about the seduction of a young woman…..

…..(Shakespeare in drag)….

….by a psychotic, young aristocrat whose…..

…..browny locks did hang in crooked curls

And every light occasion of the wind

Upon his lips there silken parcels hurls……

Like ‘H.W.’ in Willobie his Avisa with his…..

…..blobbered face…..

….the seducer in A Lover’s Complaint has….

…….watery eyes……

Whose sights were then were levelled at my face,

Each cheek a river running from a fount,

With brinish current down-ward flow’d apace…..

And like ‘H.W.’ who……

not able by reason to rule the raging fume of this phantastical fury, cast himself upon his bed, and refusing both food and comfort for many days together, fell at length into such extremity of passionate affections, that as many as saw him had great doubt of his health….

………the seducer in A  Lover’s Complaint is likewise made up of…….

burning blushes or of burning water,

Or swounding paleness…..

……and will….

…..blush at speeches rank [and] weep at woes

Or… turn white and swound at tragic shows…

Aemilia responded to all this by writing Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum…..

As we have seen, she begins by dedicating the poem to nine different aristocratic women……

Then moves onto  her four main topics……

‘The Passion of Christ’, ‘Eve’s Apology in Defence of Women’, ‘The Tears of the Daughters of Jerusalem’ and ‘The Salutation and Sorrow of the Virgin Mary’….

The book concludes with ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’……

Aemilia’s motives for writing this work are an extraordinary, idiosyncratic jumble of the sacred and the profane…..

(a) The Profane….

Aemilia wanted……

1. To try to make money…….

……..a dedication could bring in a reward of £2  – the equivalent of £1,000 today….

The more Dedicatees Aemilia had, the greater the chance that one at least might pay up….

…..especially Lady Margaret, Countess Dowager of Cumberland, who had suggested to Aemilia that she write in the first place…

2. To attack men…..

…..Shakespeare in particular…..

Men for Aemilia……..

…..now she has been discarded by them….

….. are…..

…..Vipers [who] deface the wombs wherein they were bred…..

As a courtesan, Aemilia had experienced men at their very worst……

…..and had suffered wounding, racist insults from Shakespeare……

……when she refused to yield to his advances.

These libels, formerly circulated among Shakespeare’s……

…..private friends…..

 ….were now in print for everyone to read…..

Aemilia retaliated…….

In Salve Deus she equates any man who attacks women with the men who attacked Christ…..

….therefore we  [women] are not to regard any imputation that they [men] lay upon us…..

Men from Adam’s time onwards, she claims, have been weak-minded villains.

Even those who didn’t crucify Christ, betrayed him…..

3. To pay back old scores…..

Aemilia reveals that her guardian, Susan Bertie (now Dowager Countess of Kent) never gave her any money…..

…..even though she was in ‘service’ to the young widow from the age of seven…..

And since no former gain hath made me write,

Nor my desertless service could have won,

Only your noble virtues do excite,

My pen they are the ground I write upon;

Nor any future profit is expected,

Then how can these poor lines go unrespected….

i.e……You never paid me before, so why should you start paying me now?

All I can hope for is that your better nature will respond to my poem…

Bertie, to the Queen’s fury, had married Sir John Wingfield in 1581…..

……and had gone abroad with her soldier husband…..

……leaving the 13 year old Aemilia to the attentions of Lord Hunsdon….

4. To promote herself as the equal of ANY woman in England…..

……aristocratic or otherwise…….

……crowned or uncrowned!

In her Dedications, Aemilia…….

…… claims acquaintanceship…..

…….or seeks acquaintanceship…….

…….with women way above her own class….

…….like a dementedly ambitious ‘Facebook’ subscriber…..

But then, by her manipulation of verse……

……..by her organisation of argument…….

……..by her knowledge of scripture and history…….

………by her learning and taste…..

…..she PROVES she is as sophisticated as any of her Dedicatees….

EVEN IF SHE IS STONY BROKE!!!

In her Dedication to Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset…….

……..Aemilia even questions the nature of aristocratic privilege itself…..

What difference was there when the world began,

Was it not virtue that distinguish’d all?

All sprang from one woman and one man,

Then how doth gentry come to rise and fall?

Or who is he that very rightly can

Distinguish of his birth, or tell at all

In what mean state his ancestors have bin,

Before some one of worth did honour win…

(b) The Sacred.

Aemilia wanted……

1.  To honour women……

By selecting her band of women Dedicatees, Aemilia is forming a sisterhood……

……united in strength and virtue……

….. who will, she hopes, always support one another…..

…..and NEVER criticise each other……..

……as they sometimes did in the past…..

(That task can be left to men…especially Shakespeare!)

For Aemilia, it was ADAM who was at fault, NOT EVE…..

Eve was….

…..simply good….

….when she gave…

….to  Adam what she held most dear…..

…i.e. the apple…

Eve was tempted by Satan himself as Adam never was…..

…and her….

…..fault was only too much love….

Women, for Aemilia, also played a crucial ‘loving’ rôle in the life of Jesus Christ. 

She explains how Christ was…..

begotten of a woman, born of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman; and that he healed women, pardoned women, comforted women: yea, even when he was in his greatest agony and bloody sweat, going to be crucified, and also in the last hour of his death, took care to dispose of a woman: after his resurrection, appeared first to a woman, sent a woman to declare his most glorious resurrection to the rest of his disciples….

2. To empathise with women…..

Aemilia KNOWS the difficulties that her main patron, Lady Margaret, Countess Dowager of Cumberland has been through….

…..and is going through……

Her husband, George Clifford, was a gambler and adulterer……

………and the two had separated in 1600……

Both of her sons died, causing her untold anguish……..

……..then husband George, for financial reasons, willed his entire estate to his brother……..

……..leaving Margaret and her daughter, Anne,  with a desperate future…..

Aemilia admits that she herself lives

…clos’d up in sorrow’s cell

Since great Eliza’s [Queen Elizabeth’s] favour blest my youth….

……And in the confines of all cares do dwell,

Whose grieved eyes no pleasure ever view’th…..

…..so she is able to empathise with Countess Margaret’s…….

…..sad soul, plunged in waves of woe…..

…..that worldly pleasures seem to thee as toys….

But this very suffering, Aemilia insists, brings women nearer to Christ…..

……….and nearer to her……

3.  To bring women to spiritual fulfilment…….

……which Aemilia does in a truly astonishing way…..

In Willobie his Avisa, Avisa has warned ‘H.W.’ about the wiles of ‘harlots’:

Beware least that your heart be tied

To fond affects by wanton sights :

Their wandering eyes, and wanton looks

Catch fools as fish, with painted hooks.

Their lips with oil and honey flow,

Their tongues are fraught with flattering guile ;

Amidst these joys great sorrows grow……

In Salve Deus this image of a lover’s lips dripping with honey is used in a much more POSITIVE way……

…..IT IS USED OF JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF!!!

His lips like scarlet threads, yet much more sweet

Than is the sweetest honey dropping dew,

Or honey-combs, where all the Bees do meet…..

His lips, like lilies, dropping down pure myhrr

Whose love before all worlds we do prefer…

Aemilia is transmuting profane love into sacred love…….

……….but retaining all the vivid sensuality of the former. 

She urges the women whom she writes to………

…….especially those who have been disappointed by their menfolk…..

………to….

Put on your wedding garments everyone

……….and accept Jesus as your Bridegroom with his…..

…..curled locks so beauteous to behold

Black as a raven in her blackest hue…

Aemilia even invites her former guardian, Susan Bertie, now a widow, to….

Take this fair Bridegroom in your soul’s pure bed….

This is the sort of dazzling, challenging theology that only a former sinner could write….

Perhaps only a former prostitute….

4. To inspire women to be inspired BY women…..

Aemilia cites example after example of women in the past who have proved superior to men in virtue and courage….

…..and asks women to take them as rôle models……

But what about women in the present?

Did Aemilia find any heroines in her own times?

And did they influence the way she behaved?

TO FIND OUT, READ ON!!!

CLICK: HERE!

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