The Shakespeare Code

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code……

BEWARE, BEWARE…..

Just when you thought the dread movie……

….. Shakespeare in Love…..

 

….was dead and buried….

….it morphs into an even more dreadful….

…..PLAY FOR THE STAGE!!!

TWENTY-EIGHT actors and musicians have been hired to tell the story…..

…….first told by Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon in their 1941 novel, No Bed for Bacon….

……..repeated by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard in the movie, Shakespeare in Love….

 

……..and now repeated AGAIN by Lee (Billy Elliot) Hall in his stage adaptation of the movie….

……..of Shakespeare’s affair with the stage-struck aristocratic Lady Viola…….

……..who dresses up as a boy and acts in Romeo and Juliet…..

What’s wrong with that, Trixie?

 …..Your Cat hears you cry…..

What’s wrong with a bit of romantic tosh in the West End of London?

NOTHING!!!

……except for one thing…..

…..the Producers are palming the whole thing off as an……

…. EDUCATIONAL EVENT……

…..as though the whole preposterous story were somehow…..

 REAL!!!

They are even producing Educational Packs for schools…..

…..and have inveigled a SERIOUS ACADEMIC, Dr. Natalie Mears….

……a Senior Lecturer at Durham University….

…..to produce an essay for the programme……

….. portentously entitled……

 Elizabeth I and the World of Shakespeare in Love….

(THE WORLD OF SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE!!!)

The programme also provides us with a thumb-nail gallery of

 The REAL LIFE FIGURES AND PLACES in Shakespeare in Love…..

‘

But perhaps the story IS real, Trixie!

……Your Cat hears you desperately cry…..

Let’s examine the facts….

Dr. Mears tells us that the play is set in 1593…..

……something the programme itself confirms….

…..and adds that it’s LONDON, 1593….

It HAS to be 1593……..

……because that is the year in which Christopher Marlowe….

…..who plays a big part in the evening’s proceedings…..

…..was killed in a tavern brawl in Deptford….

(In the movie version, Shakespeare is responsible for Marlowe’s death……

In the stage version, he is more honestly exonerated……

The Producers must have been thinking about their Education Packs)

But by FIXING the date as 1593……

…which neither the novel nor the play does….

……you are IMMEDIATELY into problems….

As Dr. Mears admits, there was a plague raging in London which killed thousands of people….

What she DOESN’T say is that……..

 ALL THE THEATRES WERE CLOSED!!!

NONE OF THESE EVENTS COULD HAVE HAPPENED IN LONDON AT THAT TIME!!!

Worse, we are shown a Shakespeare writing Romeo and Juliet……

BUT NO SERIOUS SCHOLAR PUTS THE PLAY BEFORE 1595……

TWO YEARS AFTER MARLOWE WAS STABBED!!!

Poetic Licence!…..

…..Your Cat hears you cry….

…..with even more desperation….

But believe her, it gets even worse….

Shakespeare isn’t writing Romeo and Juliet …..

He is writing Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter…

(Big laugh from knowing groundlings….)

It is Marlowe who gives Shakespeare the idea for the play we now have…..

But as ANY Shakespeare Scholar knows..

…..and most A-Level students…

SHAKESPEARE WAS RE-WRITING AN ALREADY ESTABLISHED STORY…..

Arthur Brooke had written HIS version……

…… called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet……

…….in 1562.

And William Painter had written his……

…….included in The Palace of Pleasure……

……..sometime before 1580.

Shakespeare’s habit was to work from old plots…..

….and even from old plays…..

But though he was in the habit of collaborating

…..Shakespeare in Love….

…..(or this play version, anyway)…..

…..DOES SHAKESPEARE A MASSIVE, PHILISTINE DISSERVICE.

IT IMPLIES HIS SONNETS

WERE WRITTEN BY CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE!!!

No-one can BEGIN to understand the complex nature of Shakespeare’s emotional life without reading his 154 Sonnets……

…..indeed, William Wordsworth……

……said the Sonnets were….

…..the key with which Shakespeare unlocked his heart…..

So to have the sublime love Sonnet 18…..

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day……

…..presented on the stage as a piece of plagiarism…..

…..is a vulgarity of such wickedness…..

YOUR CAT IS ALMOST SPEECHLESS…..

EDUCATIONAL PACKS INDEED!!!

YOUR CAT WOULD SEND THEM PACKING!!!

And it gets WORSER….

The Sonnet, in both the play and the film, is inspired by the beauty of Lady Viola…..

……and addressed to her….

There is not a serious Shakespeare scholar ON EARTH who believes that Sonnet 18 was written to a woman…..

It was written to a man…..

…..or at least a….

….lovely boy

…..and MORE and MORE Scholars…….

…..around the world….

…. are coming to agree with The Shakespeare Code…….

….that this man was……

Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton

 

a.k.a.Harry Southampton…….

See: Just how gay was the third Earl of Southampton.

Harry was Shakespeare’s patron….

And on good evidence gave him the colossal gift of £1,000 to….

make a purchase

Dr. Mears has the good grace to write:

There is no evidence of court ladies having affairs with poor players…..

…….and at least she mentions the Earl of Southampton…….

…….even if she does claim…….

……. WITH NO EVIDENCE AT ALL…….

……..that Elizabeth Vernon deliberately made herself pregnant……..

…..to MAKE Southampton marry her.

Indeed, there is every evidence that Harry and Elizabeth adored each other…..

…..so much so that there is an oral tradition in Titchfield……

…..the Earl of Southampton ‘s stately home….

 ……that their love was the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet….

….and the ambiguity of Mercutio’s reaction to the events in the play……..

….. would certainly have mirrored Shakespeare’s OWN ambiguity about the courtship of his lover, Harry, and Elizabeth….

See: Shakespeare in Titchfield.

But there is also LITERARY evidence that links the Southampton family to Romeo and Juliet……

  …..an entertainment for a wedding celebration in 1572……

….written by George Gascoigne.

Harry Southampton’s mother was Mary Browne, the 2nd Countess of Southampton…..

Her father was Anthony Browne…..

…..who became Lord Montague when he was elevated to the House of Peers in 1554.

Two of his children got married in 1572 ……

…..Anthony, Mary Browne’s twin brother –

…..and Elizabeth, her half sister…..

…..and Lord Montague commissioned Gascoigne to produce an entertainment……

…..BASED ON THE MONTAGUES…..

….AND THE CAPULETS…..

Two Famous Italian Families…

In the story, a Lord Montague……

……who in this version of events lives in Venice rather than Verona…..

 ……saves a little boy……..

……..(who wears a token of the Montacutes in his cap)……

……  from the clutches of the Capulets…..

……and a wind blows them to England and the wedding celebration…..

As the ‘pretty boy’ says:

This grave Venetian….

Gan straight with many courteous words in arms me to embrace.

And kissed me on the cheeks, and bade me make good cheer

And thanked the mighty hand of God, for that which happened there…

Originally all the wedding guests were to dress as Venetians…..

But this proved too costly, even for the Montagues…..

So the Romeo and Juliet story was dear to the Southampton family…

….especially the Countess of Southampton……

…..who may even have commissioned it…..

…..and it was, in all likelihood, first performed at Titchfield….

…..as local legend says.

It was, after all, Mary Browne who commissioned Shakespeare to write seventeen sonnet for her son’s seventeenth birthday….

TO TRY TO GET HIM INTERESTED IN GIRLS!!!

See: The Birthday Sonnets.

She could well have re-inforced the message of the Birthday Sonnets with a decidedly HETEROSEXUAL play!!!

 

At the end of Shakespeare in Love, Queen Elizabeth………

….. commands Shakespeare to write Twelfth Night…..

Shakespeare must have suffered another writer’s block…..

In reality, Twelfth Night did not appear till eight years later…….

…. in 1601!!!

But by this stage in the evening, reality is abandoned altogether……

The entire company perform a patriotic jig to the words of…..

…Vivat Regina….

….Long live the Queen…..

…..to the roaring delight of the modern groundlings….

Again, pure hokum……

Dr Mears insists that…..

Shakespeare in Love does not obviously reflect many of the tensions and problems of Elizabeth’s later years…

But as Brothers and Sisters  of The Shakespeare Code well know….

Shakespeare, a Catholic, loathed Elizabeth, a Protestant……

…..even in 1593!!!

But if Shakespeare COULDN’T have been in London in 1593…..

….because of the Plague which claimed 20,oo0 lives….

(thanks for this figure, Dr. Mears)

– …..where was he?

Click: SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY  to find out!

Bye, now.

 

To read about equally dazzling, subsequent reviews of Shakespeare in Love: the Play by Tim Walker and Ben Brantley –  please click: HERE!

THE SMART MONEY FOLLOWS TRIXIE THE CAT!!!

Note: To read Part Two of ‘The Original Ending to ‘King Lear’ – ‘The King’s Disease’ – click: HERE.

To read The Shakespeare Code’s new ‘Top Twenty Posts’…..

….click: HERE!