The Shakespeare Code

PROVING AN OLD ROMANTIC MYTH TO BE TRUE….

A TRIXIE SPECIAL

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

IMPORTANT NOTICE

Lytton Strachey

…..in his attempt to discredit the story of Queen Elizabeth, the Earl of Essex and the Ring….

……writes, in Elizabeth and Essex, that it…

…….has been rejected by later writers , including the learned and judicious Ranke…

Strachey is referring to the German historian, Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)……

……who was awarded his ‘von’ in 1865…..

…… and was considered important enough to appear on a postage stamp…..

He wrote, in his History of England…..

Who has not heard of the ring which Elizabeth is said to have once given to the Earl of Essex with the promise that, if it were presented to her, she would show him mercy, whatever might have occurred: he had, so the tale runs, in his last distresses wished to send it her through the Countess of Nottingham: but she was prevented from giving it by her husband who was an enemy of Essex, and so he had to die without mercy: the Queen, to whom the Countess revealed this on her death bed, fell into despair over it. The ring is still shown, and indeed several rings are shown as the true one……as also the tradition itself is extant in two somewhat varying forms; attempts have been made to get rid of the improbabilities of the first by fresh fictions in the second. They are both so late, and rest so completely on hearsay, that they can no longer stand before historical criticism.

Who has not heard of the ring?

People living in the twenty-first century, Leopold von Ranke……..

…….because you discredited the story in the nineteenth!!!

But what ARE von Ranke’s grounds for dismissing the story?

He says that that…..

…….several rings are shown as the real one….

…..as though that in itself invalidates the story…..

As a devout Christian, von Ranke would have known that there are thousands of pieces of the ‘true cross’ on display….

….but that doesn’t invalidate the Crucifixion!

 

Von Ranke continues…

also the tradition [of the ring story] itself is extant in two somewhat varying forms; attempts have been made to get rid of the improbabilities of the first by fresh fictions in the second. They are both so late, and rest so completely on hearsay, that they can no longer stand before historical criticism.

When von Ranke says……

 They are both so late……

……he clearly has no idea that John Webster mentions the story in 1620…..

(See:Part Two.)

Von Ranke gives himself away completely when he claims that the…..

…..fictions….

….as he likes to call them….

….rest so completely on hearsay they can no longer stand before historical criticism….

Von Ranke was trying to introduce a ‘scientific’ approach to history…..

‘Hearsay’ had no place in it…..

Von Ranke even formulated the mantra:

No documents…no history

We, fortunate enough to live in the ‘television age’,  know that this document-bound approach to history…..

….DIMINISHES THE PAST….

Your Cat has stated in her Last Post that if she wants to know about the Second World War, she reads books…..

…..BUT SHE ALSO WATCHES THE WORLD AT WAR!!!

No-one dismisses the extraordinary, living testament of the participants in the programme…..

…. as…..

….hearsay….

Documents have been enhanced….

…..even replaced….

…… by film…..

HISTORY IS NOW ANECDOTAL!!!

Von Ranke goes on to write that…..

The first [version of the ring story] appears in Aubery’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Hollande 1687……Aubery asserts that he heard the history of the ring from his father’s mouth, who had heard it from Prince Maurice of Orange, to whom it had been communicated by the English ambassador Carleton……..

Again, von Ranke gives himself away by the use of the word……

 …..asserts……

It implies that Chevalier Louis Aubery de Maurier…..

…..for many years the French Minister in Holland…..

……was lying….

……also, that Aubery’s father was lying….

……also, that Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange was lying…..

…..and perhaps most important of all…..

…..the English ambassador, Sir Dudley Carelton (1574-1632)…..

…. 1st Viscount Dorchester and later Secretary of State to Charles I……

…..was lying as well!

Aubery goes out of his way to endorse Carelton as….

….un home d’un trés-grand mérite….bon et juste….

Carelton had travelled on an embassy to Paris in 1598 with the Earl of Nottingham……

…..whose wife, the Countess Katherine, was at the centre of the ring story…….

In 1603, when she made her death-bed confession to the Queen, Carleton was in his late twenties…..

…… and back in contact with the English Court as controller of the household to Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland…

In 1604 Carleton became M.P. for St. Mawes and was then appointed the English Ambassador to Venice in 1610…..

In 1616 he became Ambassador to Holland….

…..when he told Prince Maurice the story of the ring….

But perhaps Carleton’s most important contribution to history is his correspondence….

He wrote gossipy, bitchy letters about court affairs….

……often to the writer John Chamberlain…..

……and these letters now provide a guide for historians……

…..sometimes the ONLY guide……

…..to what was going on at the courts of Elizabeth and James.

We learn from them intimate details about the Essex and Southampton families……

…..and the politics (and fun) of the Court Masques in the reign of King James…

The conclusion MUST be this…….

If Carleton, instead of SPEAKING about the ring story, had WRITTEN about it in a letter….

VON RANKE WOULD HAVE TREATED THE STORY AS HISTORY…

Von Ranke continues:

According to him [Aubery] the Queen then took to her bed, dressed as she was, sprang from it a hundred times during the night, and starved herself to death. Who does not, in reading this, feel himself in a sphere of wild romance?

Von Ranke believes that the historian’s task is to tell ‘how things actually were’….

……wie es eigentlich gewesen ….

…..and to try to find the ‘essence’ of each age….

Your Cat will PROVE that Queen Elizabeth really DID behave like that…..

……that she LIVED in ‘a sphere of wild romance’…

…..and that the ‘essence’ of the Elizabethan age was its self-conscious theatricality……

THAT’S WHY IT PRODUCED SHAKESPEARE!!!

The Lutheran von Ranke wants us to find…..

…..the hand of God…..

….in history…….

…..what he calls…..

…….the holy hieroglyph……

In the blind chance, viciousness, violence and egotism of the ring story……

…..it’s hard to find God’s hand…..

And that’s one of the reasons von Ranke dismisses it……

But, as we shall see, it’s in his handling of ELIZABETH, LADY SPELMAN…..

…..that von Ranke disgraces himself completely……

(Now read: Part 5.)

‘Bye, now…