The Shakespeare Code

In PART ONE…

……of SHAKESPEARE’S ORIGINAL ENDING TO ‘KING LEAR’…….

……The Shakespeare Code argued that the 1608 Quarto version of the play……

 

…..represents Shakespeare’s original intention.

Lear, filled with grief at the death of Cordelia, kills himself…..

……BY AN ACT OF WILL!!!

He begs his heart to break….

……and his heart obeys.

THIS POST WILL SHOW HOW SHAKESPEARE PREPARES US FOR THIS EXTRAORDINARY ENDING……

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SHAKESPEARE IN THE PLAY CONTINUALLY DRAWS OUR ATTENTION TO THE KING’S HEART….

HE USES THE WORD….

‘HEART’

…..FIFTY-NINE TIMES!!!….

………..MORE THAN IN ANY OTHER OF HIS WORKS….

Richard III

…… comes closest with 53……

….but even Romeo and Juliet..

…. has only  27….

For Shakespeare and his contemporaries………

……the heart had more of a ‘poetic’ function than it has today…..

It was the seat of the emotions…..

……and held the ‘essence’ of a man or woman’s ‘personality’.’

One of Lear’s most profound questions is about ‘the heart’ of his daughter Regan…..

Then let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?

And other characters in the play, experiencing extreme emotions…..

……CONSTANTLY REFER TO THEIR HEARTS!!!

In the storm scene, when Kent begs Lear to enter the hovel…..

…..the King says….

Wilt break my heart?

….and Kent replies….

I had rather break mine own…..

Gloucester, learning of the supposed treachery of his son Edgar, says to Regan….

O, madam, my old heart is crack’d, it’s crack’d!

And a Gentleman describes how Cordelia…..

once or twice….heaved the name of ‘father’

Pantingly forth, as if it press’d her heart.

Edgar, witnessing the spectacle of Lear’s insanity……

….says….

I would not take this from report; it is,

And my heart breaks at it….

And Albany says to Edgar….

Let sorrow split my heart, if ever I

Did hate thee or thy father!

Edgar also wishes…...

……that my heart would burst!

But for Shakespeare in this play…….

……and his contemporaries……

……there is no difference between the ‘poetic’ function of the heart……

…….AND ITS LITERAL FUNCTION AS AN ORGAN OF THE BODY.

For Shakespeare, emotions and thoughts can affect the heart just as much as disease can!!!

 Edgar describes how, when he presented himself to his father……

…….the blinded Gloucester’s…..

flaw’d heart,

Alack, too weak ,conflict to support!

‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,

Burst smilingly.

And, earlier in the play, Edgar is worried that Gloucester’s……

…… mere THOUGHT….

…….that he has jumped off a cliff…..

……would be enough to……

…..rob the treasury of life……

….i.e. kill him…..

 The play shows King Lear himself a under massive pressure…..

….both intellectual and emotional….

…….BUT IT ALSO SHOWS HIM SUFFERING FROM A POTENTIALLY FATAL DISEASE……

….CALLED…

The Mother…..

….A DISEASE WHICH ATTACKS HIS HEART!!!

 In the First Act, furious that his servant Caius (the Earl of Kent in disguise) has been put in the stocks…..

……Lear cries…..

O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Historica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below!

 ‘The Mother’…..

……was the common name for the disease…..

…..but its ‘medical’ name was generally….

…hysterica passio…..

……i.e. suffering which eminates from the womb….

….. from the Greek ὑστέρα –  hystera or uterus.

King Lear, however, in all the Quarto and later Folio editions…

……calls it…...

……historica passio….

……..because (1)…..

……hysterica passio…..

….. was a version of ‘the Mother’  which was, strictly speaking, confined to women……

…..and because (2)…

……Shakespeare wanted to imply that Lear’s illness was  a long-established one….

[Modern editors of Shakespeare, with no justification at all, have replaced ‘historica‘ with ‘hysterica‘…..

…..thereby loosing a flood of Freudian analysis on the play……]

Shakespeare, we know for certain, read about……

……the Mother……

…..in a pamphlet by Richard Harsnett entitled A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures….

……published in 1603…..

(We know this because……

….. being a ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’….

……Shakespeare lifted many words and phrases from it for King Lear)

Harsnett, a Protestant, attacks Roman Catholic exorcisms……..

…… carried out on English recusants in the mid-1580’s…….

….. by Catholic missionary priests…..

Harsnett describes how one of the exorcised, Richard Mainy……

……himself a Catholic priest manqué …..

…..had a spice of the hysterica passio, as seems, from his youth; he himself terms it the Mother (as you may see in his confession) and saith he was much troubled with it in France, and that it was one of the causes that moved him to leave his holy order whereinto he was initiated, and to return into England.  

In his Confession to the Privy Council in 1602, Mainy himself said:

Whether I do rightly name it the Mother or no , I know not. But it is well known to the Physicians of London  that may be alive and were then of any name, that my eldest brother Thomas Mainy had the same disease, and that he died of it; and Master Edmund Peckham (as I have been credibly informed) was like wise troubled with it. When I was sick of this disease in France, a Scottish Doctor of Physic  then in Paris called it , as I remember, Vertiginem capitis [Vertigo of the head]. It riseth (as he said, and I have often felt) of a wind in the bottom of the belly, and proceeding with a great swelling, causeth a very painful colic in the stomach, and an extraordinary giddiness in the head. With this disease  I am still once in four or five years troubled, and I do greatly suspect that it will end me, as it did my brother.

……Then they, the exorcists, told me what extraordinary strength I showed in one of my pangs which moved me little. For the nature of that disease is to cause one’s belly to swell in such sort as two or three are not able (using any good discretion) to keep down the wind that seeketh to ascend, as is very well known to those who have seen either a man or woman in that fit.

•

In 1602, there was also a famous witch trial……

A fourteen year old girl called Mary Glover accused an older woman, Elizabeth Jackson, of bewitching her….

….and claimed that Jackson had used her supernatural powers to give her choking and fits….

 But Edward Jorden – a Doctor – stated at the trial that Glover’s symptoms were not those of possession……

 …….they were symptoms of a disease called…..

……..Suffocation of the Mother…..

Jackson, controversially, was found guilty of witchcraft……

……..and sentenced to a year in jail…..

…….but was released shortly after her imprisonment.

Dr. Jorden, to prove he was right, published a book called……

A Brief Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother…..

……in the following year, 1603.

Jorden wrote:

The disease is called by diverse names amongst our authors, Passio Hysterica, Suffocatio Priefocatio, and Strangulatus uteri, Caducus Matricis i.e. in English, the Mother or the Suffocation of the Mother, because most commonly it takes them with choking in the throat; and it is an effect of the mother or womb, wherein the principal parts of the body by consent do suffer diversely according to the diversity of the causes and diseases therewith the matrix is offended.

He also states that the symptoms could be brought on by….

…….the stirring of the affections of the mind.

Four years after the 1608 production of Lear…..

Michael Drayton……..

……….refers to the Mother…..

…….in the VII Song of Polyolbion…

…..a topographical, anthropomorphic poem….

…..which describes Wales and England…..

…….and was going to cover Scotland as well…..

(But no trace of the Scottish section survives.)

Drayton began the work in in 1598…..

……..but the first section was not published till 1612.

According to the journal of John Ward…..

……who became the Vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1662…….

…….(less than fifty years after Shakespeare’s death)…..

…….and who mugged up on the local folklore about the Bard.

…..Drayton, he wrote, had been at the…..

…..merry meeting…..

…..with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson….

…..when the three men….….

…drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.

So, it is highly probable that Shakespeare, as a friend of Drayton, saw the Polyolbion poem in manuscript.

Drayton, in Book VII,  refers to the famous Severn Bore…..

……or…..

…higre….

……a gigantic surge wave that comes in from the sea and up the Severn river at certain times of the year…..

……and becomes ferocious and noisy as its makes its way from the estuary of the Severn…..

 

……through the narrowing channels and bends of the river….

 

Drayton describes how when the…

…….tumultuous waves……

…are…

…….shut up in narrower bounds, the higre wildly raves;

And frights the straggling flocks [of sheep] the neighbouring shores to fly,

Afar as from the main it comes with hideous cry,

And on the angry front the curled foam doth bring,

The billows ‘gainst the banks when fiercely it doth fling;

Hurls up the slimy ooze, and makes the scaly brood [fish]

Leap madding to the land affrighted from the flood;

O’erturns the toiling barge, whose steersman doth not lanch,

And thrusts the furrowing beak into her ireful panch…

The Severn Bore seems more sedate now than it was in Drayton’s time….

……but the bore on the Qian Tang River in China still erupts with terrifying fury…..

Drayton, in Polyolbion, goes on to use an epic simile to describe the Severn bore…..

…..and choses for his imagery a woman in the throws of ‘the Mother’….

As when we haply see a sickly woman fall

Into a fit of that which we the Mother call

When from the grieved womb

She feels the pain arise

Breaks into grievous sighs with intermixed cries

Bereaved of her sense: and struggling still with those

That ‘gainst her rising pain

Their utmost strength oppose

Starts, tosses, tumbles, strikes, turns, touses, spurns and sprawls

Casting with furious limbs her holders to the walls

But that the horrid pangs

Torment the grieved so

One well might muse from whence

This sudden strength should grow….

•

So, from Mainy, Jorden and Drayton we learn that ‘the Mother’…

(1) Can be brought on by situations of stress and emotion…..J.

(2) Manifests as an acute pain and swelling in the stomach or the womb….J. M. D.

(3) Travels upwards…M. J. D.

(4) Produces a suffocating sensation in the chest….J.

(5) Produces a choking sensation in the throat……M. J.

(6) Leads to acute dizziness….M. J. D.

(7) Leads to loss of reasoning powers….D.

(8) Brings on fits, groans and cries….D.

(9) Brings on an extraordinary increase in physical strength…..M. D.

….and…

(10) Often culminates in death….M.

IN ITS NEXT POST….

…..THE SHAKESPEARE CODE WILL SHOW HOW KING LEAR…..

……DISPLAYS EVERY SINGLE SYMPTOM….

……OF…..

‘THE MOTHER’

…..AND FINALLY KILLS HIMSELF BY ENLISTING…..

……THE POWER OF HIS OWN DISEASE!!!

•

To Read Part One of this Series, click: HERE!

To Read ‘The Background to ‘King Lear’, click: HERE!

To read Trixie the Cat’s review of ‘Shakespeare in Love Live Onstage’, click: HERE!

To read ‘The Code’s Top TWENTY POSTS’, click: HERE!