The Shakespeare Code

  [It’s best to read Parts One, Two and Three of Trixie the Cat’s Interview with Stewart Trotter first]

How embarrassing, Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code……

……to fall in a dead faint to the floor of the Café Laville!!!

But Your Cat was soon revived in the strong arms of Chief Agent  Stewart Trotter….

…and the divine Marco….

…also brought her a saucer of Bailey’s Cream…..

 …which she LAPPED UP.

As soon as she had her wits about her…….

……Your Cat returned to her Interview…..

…to question Stewart’s EXTRAORDINARY CLAIM!!!

TRIXIE

Shakespeare!

Evil?

Boss!!!

How can you say such a thing?

STEWART

I didn’t say Shakespeare was evil.

I said the evil in the play comes from Shakespeare’s own heart.

He has looked at his dark side with complete honesty….

…..and is trying to work out the implications of this in dramatic form.

It must be said, it’s not always to the advantage of the play….

TRIXIE

Give me an example!

STEWART

Take Lear’s great tirade on the heath against society….

…..when he has gone completely ‘mad’……

See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Change places – and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar….And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.

How, Trixie, has the King acquired this perspective on life?

He admits, in the storm, that he has taken….

…..too little care….

…..of the poor and oppressed in his Kingdom…..

….but this is a far cry from the satirical outburst of……

.…..a dog’s obeyed in office….

TRIXIE

Well, a cat certainly isn’t!

STEWART (ignoring Your Cat’s observation)

Where has this view of the world come from?

It bears only a marginal relationship……

……..if any relationship at all……

…….. to anything Lear himself has experienced in the play.

It DOES however bear a COMPLETE RELATIONSHIP to Sonnet 66……….

…….in which Shakespeare……

…….disgusted by the unfair ills of society under Queen Elizabeth….

……and her imprisonment of the Third Earl of Southampton for treason….

…….contemplates suicide……

 

As the concluding couplet tells us…….

…..the only reason Shakespeare does NOT commit suicide is that he would leave his lover…..

…..the Third Earl of Southampton….

…..alone in the Tower of London…..

…..a true case of…..

…..gilded honour shamefully misplac’d…..

Shakespeare is appalled by a system in which some people…….

……through no fault of their own……

…….are…..

….born….

….into beggary…..

……while others……

…..through no merit of their own…..

….. are born into the aristocracy…..

Shakespeare in the Sonnet describes these ‘noblemen’ as….

……needy nothing trimm’d with jollity…..

And Lear, in the play, describes them as…

……gilded butterflies….

Shakespeare is clearly using the King as a mouthpiece for his own anarchic ideas…..

……and so is stretching DRAMATIC credibility.

He stretches this even further with Lear’s ‘mad’ rants about female sexuality……

Behold yond simpering dame,

Whose face between her forks presages snow;

That minces virtue, and does shake the head

To hear of pleasure’s name;

The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to ‘t With a more riotous appetite.

Down from the waist they are Centaurs,

Though women all above:

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,

Beneath is all the fiends’…..

There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit,

Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!

Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination: there’s money for thee.

NOTHING that Lear himself experiences in the play justifies this attack on women.

He does not know, as we do, that Goneril and Regan have been lusting after Edmund…..

……..in fact Lear still believes at this stage in the play that Edmund is Gloucester’s good son.

Lear’s sexual disgust, though, is……..

….. IDENTICAL…….

…… to Shakespeare’s OWN sexual disgust in Sonnet 66…..

……when he writes about….

……maiden virtue…..

……being…..

……rudely strumpeted….

And in Sonnet 129 which begins…..

Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame…..

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight…..

And again in Sonnet 144 where Shakespeare makes……

…… EXACTLY THE SAME COMPARISON…..

……that of female genitals with Hell….

……. as Lear does in the play.

Shakespeare describes in the Sonnet how his mistress, the Dark Lady……

….. has seduced his patron and lover…….

And whether that my angel [Southampton] be turn’d fiend

Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;

But being both from me, both to each friend,

I guess one angel in another’s hell.

TRIXIE

So, Boss, you are saying Shakespeare’s……

…….. PERSONAL AGENDA……

……. threatens to wreck the play……

Are there any other examples of this?

STEWART

Yes. A very famous one. The dreadful curse of Lear……

…..on his daughter, Goneril….

…..when he asks the Goddess, Nature, to…..

…..convey sterility….

….into her womb.

You’ll need some background first…..

TRIXIE

Your Cat’s all ears!

STEWART

In my Grosvenor Chapel talk on King Lear…….

[See: The Background to ‘King Lear’]

…….I argued that in the original, ‘Armada’,  King Leir play……

 

‘Gonorill’ was a satirical portrait of Mary Tudor….

…..the Catholic ‘Bloody Mary’……

…..who burnt hundreds of Protestants to death…..

…..and who, in a desperate wish  to produce a son for her husband, King Philip II of Spain…..

…..and, indeed, King of England….

…..experienced a whole series of phantom pregnancies.

These pregnancies are referred to in the old play by King Leir……

……. who says of ‘Gonorill’….

…….poor soul, she breeds young bones,

And that is it makes her so touchy, sure.

‘Young bones’ was the phrase the Elizabethans and Jacobeans used to describe the foetus in the womb…..

I discovered in rehearsals for King Lear that…….

……GONERIL IN THE LATER PLAY IS PREGNANT AS WELL!!!

TRIXIE

Proof, Boss, proof!

STEWART

The proof shall be yours, Trixie the Cat!

In a scene with Regan and her husband Cornwall……

……Lear curses Goneril in her absence….

……and says..

All the stored vengeances of heaven fall

On her ingrateful top! Strike her young bones,

You taking airs, with lameness!

‘Young bones’ is EXACTLY the same phrase that Leir uses in the old play……

The King is WILLING Goneril to give birth to a disabled child….

To make the point clearer, I hobbled round the stage….

 TRIXIE

Did this shock the audience?

STEWART

Well it certainly shocked my son-in-law, the Duke of Cornwall…..

He responds with…..

Fie, sir, fie!

TRIXIE

Hang on a minute! 

This must mean that when Lear calls on Nature to sterilise Goneril….

……or at least to make any child born to her….

A thwart disnatured torment to her…..

…..HE KNOWS SHE IS ACTUALLY PREGNANT!!!

STEWART

Yes. And to point up the horror, I struck her across the womb with my whip….

TRIXIE

That is truly horrible….

STEWART

I agree, Trixie….

….but it seemed something Lear……

…..in his highly charged state……

….would do.

But NOTHING in the play has justified……

…..or remotely provoked….

…. this extreme behaviour.

…..Goneril has simply asked him to…..

…..disquantity…..

…..his train of a hundred knights!

HE IS NOT ONLY CURSING HIS OWN DAUGHTER…..

……HE IS ALSO CURSING HIS OWN POTENTIAL GRANDCHILD…..

HE IS, IN FACT, CURSING THE WHOLE WORKINGS OF NATURE!!!

Lear’s……

……strong emotions….

….in the words of T.S. Eliot….

…….in an essay he wrote about Hamlet……

…..exceed the facts of the play…….

And they exceed ‘the facts of the play’  because they proceed from Shakespeare himself…..

As I explained in the SECOND PART  of my Grosvenor Chapel talk on Lear……

……Shakespeare’s heart had been broken in 1605……

……when the Third Earl of Southampton’s wife, Elizabeth Vernon……

……gave birth to a son.

Fifteen years before, working to a commission from The Third Earl’s mother, Mary Southampton….

…..Shakespeare had written seventeen sonnets on the Third Earl’s seventeenth birthday……

…..to encourage him to get married and have an heir……

See: THE BIRTHDAY SONNETS.

But, following a love triangle with the Dark Lady……..

……Shakespeare had embarked on a passionate affair with the Third Earl himself.

This affair survived Southampton’s courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Vernon……

……and survived the birth of daughters to the Countess…….

But the arrival of a BABY BOY led to Southampton’s rejection of Shakespeare.

Southampton had hoped to be King James’s lover when he came to the throne in 1603…..

….and had even sent him a wooing portrait…..

See: THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON AND TRIXIE THE CAT.

But when he was rejected…..

…..and excluded from the King’s gay inner circle….

……Southampton turned bitterly homophobic.

He wanted to set a ‘manly’ example to his son….

So Shakespeare, the player, had to go.

Shakespeare responded with the poisonous  Sonnet 126………

…….which I decoded in my Grosvenor Chapel talk……

(See: The Background to ‘King Lear’. Part Two.)

…..in which Shakespeare describes how Southampton’s affection…….

….. and pre-occupation with his baby boy…….

…… had led to Shakespeare’s own…..

…..withering….

……while Southampton’s…..

……sweet self…..

……his son….

……grow’st…..

Shakespeare is so devastated by this neglect that he wishes Southampton dead…..

…..and rotting in his grave…..

….. like meat that has been….

…..rendered….

…..by Nature herself….

For a dark, bleak period in Shakespeare’s life, Shakespeare became…..

AN ENEMY TO LIFE……

AND TO ALL THE FUNCTIONS OF LIFE.

TRIXIE

Knowing this, do you still love Shakespeare?

STEWART

If anything, Trixie, I love him even more…..

The great American playwright Tennessee Williams……

….admitted that all great artists were……….

…. monsters….

And Shakespeare has acknowledged his own monstrosity.

As  the great magus, Prospero, says of Caliban…..

…This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine….

 

Shakespeare has looked at himself with devastating honesty…..

…..AND MADE HIS BRUTALITY WORK FOR HIM IN HIS ART…..

……AS PROSPERO MAKES CALIBAN WORK FOR HIM ON HIS ISLAND…..

TRIXIE

So do you think we need to reconsider ‘Shakespeare the Man’?

STEWART

Yes. 

When Charles Darwin………

…….challenged conventional religious belief in the nineteenth century……..

……..people needed a new divinity. 

Shakespeare fitted the bill.

He  became the guru who……..

…….in the words of Matthew Arnold…..

…out-topped knowledge…..

….like a great mountain whose top could never be seen.

And if you look at Shakespeare’s statue in Stratford-upon-Avon….

…….you see a man contemplating life from afar…..

…….as though he were a philosopher rather than a playwright…..

But anyone who has read the Sonnets finds a man completely engaged with life…..

 …..full of contradiction, lust, obsession, self-doubt, loyalty, violence, tenderness and jealousy…….

…..just like the characters in his plays…

……and just like humanity itself….

He was probably the most fully HUMAN writer that has ever lived…..

TRIXIE

But how did the audience respond to your own performance as King Lear?

Could you keep their sympathy AT ALL as you hit your pregnant daughter with a whip?

STEWART

I only acted the part, Trixie!

I’m in no position to judge….

 Just then there was a roar of a Harley Davidson outside….

…..then Tom ‘X’ came bounding into the caff…….

….. brandishing a piece of paper in the air…..

Tom ‘X’

Chief, guess what?

You’ve just had an e-mail about King Lear…..

……from the Revd. Susan Allman!!!

(Susan, as many will know, is the highly respected and dynamic Vicar…….

…..of  the thriving St. Peter’s Church in Titchfield)

You Cat grabbed the e-mail before Stewart could take it……..

…. read it….

……. then said……

We have the answer to my question here, Boss!

And what a glorious answer it is!!!

Susan writes…..

I don’t know whether you realised but we were sitting right at the front at the Great Barn, partly because I forgot my long-distance specs. We did enjoy the intimacy of the performance and had a real sense of being transported back to the Shakespearean era. I studied Lear for my A-Levels many years ago but had forgotten some of the subterfuge and sexual jealousy which was so vivdly portrayed. When you carried in Cordelia at the end it was truly heart-rending and brought a tear to my eye. I always had a soft spot for her. 

Your Lear was very human; infuriating at times but mostly lovable, with occasional glimpses of the powerful bearing he once had.

Our local community is truly blessed to be able to access drama of this high standard – and in such a special place!

 

After such an endorsement…….

……. from such a person……

……. there was little left for Your Cat to do…..

……..except bring this Interview with Stewart to a tactful, silent, close……

‘Bye, now….