The Shakespeare Code

PROVING AN OLD ROMANTIC MYTH IS TRUE….

A TRIXIE SPECIAL

(It’s best to read Part One first)

 

Simon Adams……..

……in his article in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography…….

….. on Catherine Howard, Countess of Nottingham….

…..writes:

the story that on her deathbed she [Countess of Nottingham] revealed to Elizabeth that in 1601 she and her husband had deliberately destroyed the earl of Essex, by secreting a ring he had sent the queen to save his life, is apocryphal, as Lytton Strachey proved…..

 

STRACHEY HAS DONE NO SUCH THING!!!

Let’s look at what Strachey actually wrote in his 1928 Elizabeth and Essex…

Afterwards [after the execution of Essex] a romantic story was told, which made the final catastrophe the consequence of a dramatic mishap. The tale is well known: how, in happier days, the Queen gave the Earl a ring, with the promise that, whenever he sent it back to her, it would always bring forgiveness; how Essex, leaning from a window in the Tower, entrusted the ring to a boy, bidding him take it to Lady Scrope, and beg her to present it to her Majesty; how the boy, in mistake, gave the ring to Lady Scrope’s sister, Lady Nottingham, the wife of the Earl’s enemy; how Lady Nottingham kept it, and said nothing, until, on her deathbed two years later, she confessed all to the Queen, who, with the exclamation ‘God may forgive you, Madam, but I never can!’ brought down the curtain on the tragedy. Such a narrative is appropriate enough to the place where it was first fully elaborated – a sentimental novelette; but it does not belong to history. The improbability of its details is too glaring, and the testimony against it is overpowering.

Your Cat would like to make the following three points:

1. Just because an event is described in a novel, it doesn’t make it untrue….

 …….ask Hilary Mantel about Wolf Hall…..

2. In a footnote to this passage, Strachey informs us that the ‘sentimental novelette’ is called The Secret History of the most renowned Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex, by a Person of Quality and……

….. published in 1695.

THIS IS NOT TRUE!

It was a translation of Le Comte d’Essex. Histoire angloise by Claude Barbin – a Parisian publisher who edited the works of Molière, La Fontaine, Charles Perrault and Corneille – and who printed the book in Paris in 1678……

It was first published in English in 1680…….

…. FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER THAN STRACHEY SAYS!!!

3. Strachey states that it was in the novel that the…..

….. narrative….

…. was…..

…first fully elaborated

 

THIS IS AGAIN NOT TRUE!

There is NO MENTION of Philadelphia, Lady Scrope in the novel…..

…..or of Essex giving the ring to a boy…..

….or the boy mistaking Katherine, Countess of Nottingham, for her sister.

THIS PART OF THE STORY CAME MUCH LATER……

…….FROM AN IMPECCABLE SOURCE…..

…….WHOM YOUR CAT WILL NAME IN SUBSEQUENT POSTS!!!

What Barbin has done in his novel is EMBELLISH the DETAILS of the story…

 …..the way a Hollywood writer would do……

He makes the Countess of Nottingham fall in love with Essex….

……but makes Essex fall in love with a sixteen year old ‘widow’, the Countess of Rutland…..

This motivates the Countess to take her revenge…..

…….and the Queen herself to explode in a paroxysm of jealous, Bette Davis-type rage…

 

But Barbin has the BASICS of the story…..as far as he knows it… correct……

…….Elizabeth gives the ring to Essex……

……..the Countess of Nottingham doesn’t pass it on to Queen….

……..on her deathbed, the Countess confesses all….

……..and the Queen…..

………cries out, with looks full of indignation, ‘Wretch! What remorse hast thou exposed me to? Whether heaven will pardon thy crimes, I know not: sure I am I shall never forget them…..’

Strachey then adds, in the same footnote to Elizabeth and Essex:

A reference to the legend in its rudimentary form occurs in The Devil’s Law Case (circa 1620) Cf. The Works of John Webster, ed. Lucas, ii.343.

Again, by using the word…..

….legend….

……and the phrase….

….rudimentary form….

….Strachey asserts……..

……….WITHOUT EVIDENCE…….

……….that the story is in the process of being INVENTED…..

But if you look at Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case…..

…..first performed, scholars believe, around 1620….

…..the story is not in a ‘rudimentary form’ at all….

IT IS MORE COMPLETE THAN THE NOVEL!!!

In the play, the sixty year old Leonora conceives a passion for a much younger man……

…….her daughter’s suitor, the noble Contarino….

…….just as Queen Elizabeth conceived a passion for the young, noble, Earl of Essex…..

When Contarino asks for her….

….picture…..

….meaning her daughter, Jolenta, as well as her portrait….

Leonora replies…..

My looking glass is a true one, and as yet it does not terrify me….

This would put Webster’s audience in mind of Queen Elizabeth…….

……who famously called for a ‘true glass’ at the end of her reign….

When a false report comes of Contarino’s death, Leonora falls into a mad rage….

…..as Elizabeth also did at the end of her reign…..

…..when many thought she had gone insane….

…o that my care,

And absolute study to preserve his life,

Should be his absolute ruin…..

[Just as Elizabeth’s gift of the ring – which had meant to preserve Essex’s life – had been the cause of his death ……]

O I shall run mad,

For as we love our youngest children best:

So the last fruit of our affection,

Wherever we bestow it is most strong,

Most violent, most unresistable,

Since ’tis indeed our last Harvest-home,

Last merriment for winter; and we widows

As men report of our best picture-makers

We love the piece we are in hand with better

Then all the excellent work we have done before…..

And to point the parallel with Elizabeth even further, Webster has Leonara make direct reference to the Queen and the story of the ring..

…let me die

In the distraction [madness] of that worthy princess, [Queen Elizabeth]

Who loathed food, and sleep, and ceremony,

For thought of losing that brave gentleman,

She would fain have saved, had not a false conveyance

Exprest him stubborn-hearted.

Clearly Webster….

……(who was in his early twenties when Elizabeth died in 1603)….

…..and Webster’s public……..

….knew all about the story of the ring in 1620!!!

And, from the phrase……

….false conveyance….

ALSO KNEW THAT THE RING HAD BEEN DELIVERED TO THE WRONG PERSON!!!

Strachey continues…..

It [the ring story] is implicitly denied by Camden, the weightiest of contemporary historians….

William Camden……

…..makes clear in his History of the most renowned and victorious Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of England that he has no intention of covering the private life of the Queen.

For example, Camden refuses to speculate about what happened when, in 1579, the Duc D’Anjou came to Greenwich and saw Elizabeth privately.

He states clearly that….

……the Secrets of Princes are an inextricable labyrinth….

……so he wouldn’t have discussed the ring story ANYWAY…..

…..EVEN IF HE HAD KNOWN IT TO BE TRUE!!!

Strachey goes on to state that the story….

……is explicitly contradicted by Lord Clarendon, who, writing in the succeeding generation, was in a position to know the facts……

‘Know the facts’?

Watch Trixie make CATSMEAT of this sycophantic Lord…..

……..in her next….

….. GAME-CHANGING POST….

NOW READ Part Three.

‘Bye now…