The Shakespeare Code

In 2002, Stewart Trotter…….

……The Shakespeare Code’s Chief Agent…

…….published Love’s Labour’s Found…..

This book has formed the foundation of The Shakespeare Code…..

…..and its ideas have been examined, developed, enhanced……

…..and sometimes changed…

…..in 200 + Posts.

THE SHAKESPEARE CODE BELIEVES….

William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost was first performed, at Whitsun in 1592, in the park and grounds of Place House….

…..the stately home of the Southampton family in Titchfield, Hampshire…….

…..to whose topography the play makes reference….

See: ‘Shakespeare in Titchfield – a Summary of the Evidence’ and ‘Shakespeare was a Schoolmaster in the Country – Titchfield.’

The play had been commissioned by Mary, the widowed Second Countess of Southampton…..

…..a committed and politically active Roman Catholic…..

….. to honour the return to England of Robert Devereux, the Second Earl of Essex……

…..the close friend of her son, Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton…….

 

 

…..also known as Harry Southampton….

Although Essex wanted freedom of worship for English Catholics, he had been fighting against the Catholic League at the siege of Rouen in France…..

(The siege had been a catastrophic failure – for which Essex had been partly responsible: but it was being spun in England as a triumph.)

Two years before the Countess had also commissioned Shakespeare to produce seventeen sonnets for the seventeenth birthday of her son, Harry….

 ….to try to persuade him to marry Elizabeth de Vere…..

…  grand-daughter of William Cecil, Lord Burghley…..

 

(See:‘Trixie the Cat’s Guide to the Birthday Sonnets.’)

Burghley was Harry Southampton’s guardian……..

…..(and had been guardian to the Earl of Essex)……

……so he had the legal right to name the woman Harry should marry.

Harry, though, preferred male company……..

See: ‘Just how Gay was the Third Earl of Southampton?’

If Harry were to refuse Elizabeth’s hand, the Southampton family faced a tremendous £5,000 fine….

So Love’s Labour’s Lost tries to do what the Sonnets tried to do…..

…..TURN HARRY STRAIGHT!!!

……..by praising heterosexual love……

In the play, Fedinand, the King of Navarre, and his young aristocratic friends, Berowne, Longavill and Dumaine……

…..take an oath to cut themselves off from women in order to devote themselves to study…..

Ferdinand, King of Navarre…

….is Shakespeare’s compliment to two different noblemen….

Henri of Navarre….

…….under whose command Essex had fought the siege at Rouen.

….and Ferdinando, Lord Strange…..

…..for whose ‘Men’ Shakespeare had acted, written and collaborated before he joined the Southampton household in 1590…..

…..and who was also a cousin of Mary Southampton…..

(Earlier in the year, Shakespeare had obliquely complimented Lord Strange in the figure of the gallant Lord Talbot in what is now Henry VI Part One. One of Talbot’s titles mentioned in the play is ‘Lord Strange of Blackmere’. )

Berowne….

……is a play on…….

Browne

……the maiden name of Mary, Second Countess of Southampton…..

…….daughter of Sir Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montague…..

……..one of England’s leading Roman Catholics…..

We know that the character’s name was pronounced like the colour  brown…….

……..with an extra syllable after the ‘B’……

……..because Berowne says to Rosaline:

Studies my lady? mistress, look on me;

Behold the window of my heart, mine eye,

What humble suit attends thy answer there:

Impose some service on me for thy love.

Studies

……here is a reference to…..

Brown studies

……defined by Samuel Johnson as…..

…gloomy meditations

……and was a phrase which was in  use by 1555……

The author of Manifest Detection Diceplay wrote….

Lacke of company wyll son lead a man into a brown study.

(The character is still called ‘Berowne’ in the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays.  But in later editions – when the topical reference had been lost – the name is changed to……

 …….Biron…..

…..a reference to Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron

…..who was also fighting at the siege of Rouen)

The name……

Longavill

……is a reference to Henri d’Orleans, duc de Longueville…..

……and…..

Dumaine

…..to Charles, duc de Mayenne……..

….who ALSO fought at the Siege of Rouen…..

…..but on the other side!!!

In the play the beautiful Princess of France arrives with her entourage,  Rosaline, Katherine and Maria…….

……in a parody of Queen Elizabeth I’s progress to Cowdray and Titchfield the year before (1591)….

……when, like the Princess in the play, Elizabeth shot deer from a specially erected….

stand….

 

 See: ‘The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth.’

 The vows of celibacy the young men take in the play are soon forgotten…..

……….and in a scene identical to the eaves-dropping scene in The Fair Em…….

…….a play Shakespeare collaborated on with Robert Greene for Lord Strange’s Men…..

 …..the Lords catch each other out writing love poetry to their mistresses…..

……and finally give in to the power of love….

As Berowne, echoing the Birthday Sonnets, says in one of the finest passages in the whole of Shakespeare….

But love, first learned in a lady’s eyes,

Lives not alone immured in the brain;

But, with the motion of all elements,

Courses as swift as thought in every power

And gives to every power a double power,

Above their functions and their offices.

It adds a precious seeing to the eye;

A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind;

A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound,

When the suspicious head of theft is stopp’d:

Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible

Than are the tender horns of cockl’d snails;

Love’s tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste:

For valour, is not Love a Hercules,

Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?

Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical

As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair:

And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods

Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.

The Code believes Love’s Labour’s Lost was written by Shakespeare in collaboration with Thomas Nashe……

…..who wrote the jokes…..

…..and, being beardless and tiny….

also played the part of the……

…… well-educated infant……

…..Moth….

Shakespeare himself played the  witty and lyrical part of Berowne…..

See: ‘Shakespeare as Berowne and Nashe as Moth’.

The Shakespeare Code believes that many of the characters in Love’s Labour’s Lost were lampoons of the ‘enemies’ of the Southampton and Essex….

…..as well as ‘enemies’ of Shakespeare and Nashe.

 The boastful lover, Don Armado, who is in love with a country wench, Jacquenetta, was a satire on Sir Walter Raleigh…..

……who at the time of the first production of the play was in love with Elizabeth (‘Bess’) Throckmorton…..

Shakespeare and Nashe even have Costard, the Clown, refer to Bess’s fan….

…….shown in the painting above…..

Armado o’ th’ one side, O, a most dainty man!

To see him walk before a lady and to bear her fan!

…and Nashe, writing by himself in his pamphlet Pierce Pennilesse, had also referred to Raleigh in code as an…

….inamorata poeta…..

…..who would….

…..sonnet a whole quire of paper in praise of Lady Swine-Snout, his yellow-faced Mistress [Bess Throckmorton] and wear a feather of her rain-beaten fan for a favour, like a fore-horse….

Raleigh married Bess without the Queen’s permission….

And so was banished from the Court.

When news came that Elizabeth Throckmorton was pregnant, the plot of the play had to be changed…..

Instead of being rejected by Jacquenetta……..

…..as he is at the beginning of the play….

….by the end of it Armado has managed to impregnate her!!!

Raleigh was a major rival with the Earl of Essex for the Queen’s affections….

And he had angered Nashe by not coming up with the money he had promised him for a commission….

NOTE

The edition of the play that has come down to us is one that had been…

……..presented before her Highness this last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere…

‘Last Christmas’ was probably 1597 – and Raleigh was back at Court and back in favour.

The Code has argued how Shakespeare ‘adapted’ the part of Armado to suggest a attack on Antonio Pérez….

 

……a conniving gay Spaniard who was part of Essex’s entourage….

….and who was hated by the Queen.

(See:‘Thomas Nashe’s revenge on Sir Walter Raleigh.’)

Boyet….

…..the lisping sycophant fac totum to the Princes, was a satire on the Rival Poet to whom Shakespeare makes coded reference in the Sonnets…..

…..George Chapman….

See:‘Boyet – Shakespeare’s revenge on George Chapman’. 

Chapman was a practising occultist……..

…..part of ….

…The School of Night…..

…. mentioned in the play….

…..which the Jesuits described as….

….the School of Atheism….

……a group of ‘scientific’ free-thinkers whose numbers included ‘The Wizard Earl’ Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland……

…….who lived at nearby Petworth….

…..Sir George Carey….

…..a rioter and gourmet who was later to be Shakespeare’s model for Sir Toby Belch….

See: ‘Sir Toby Belch as George Carey, the Lord Hunsdon’

…and who lived across the water from Titchfield on the Isle of Wight….

Ferdinando Strange was associated with the School……

(Sir Nathaniel, the Curate in the play, uses the coded phrase ‘Strange without heresy’)

…..as was Raleigh…..

…and as was Christopher Marlowe.

(Marlowe might well have written the séance-obsessed Doctor Faustus for the group, in collaboration with Nashe – who again supplied the jokes…

We know for certain that Nashe collaborated with Marlowe on Dido, Queen of Carthage – a satire on Queen Elizabeth’s infatuation with the Earl of Essex)

 Chapman would regularly summon up the spirit of Homer….

…..and, later on....

……after he had been stabbed in Deptford in 1593……

…. Christopher Marlowe himself…..

(For Chapman’s rôle in the Sonnets, please see:‘Chapman talks to Marlowe’s Ghost.’)

The pedantic schoolmaster in the play, Holofernese, was first identified as a satire on John Florio…..

….by William Warburton(1698-1779) The Bishop of Gloucester.

Florio was part of the Southampton household at the time of the play, tutoring young Harry in Italian, translating the Essays of Montaigne into English and compiling an Italian/English dictionary…..

Florio defines…

…caelo…

…as…

…the heaven, the sky, the firmament or welkin…..

Holofernes describes the deer that Princess shoots as…

…ripe as the pomewater [a whitish apple] who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven….

Florio employs heavy alliteration….

Proverbs are the pith, the properties, the proofs, the purities of language….

So does Holofernes…..

The preyful Princess pierc’d and prick’d a pretty, pleasing pricket….

Dame Frances Yates……..

…… believed Florio was placed in the Catholic household by Lord Burghley as part of his spy network…..

The Code believes he replaced Shakespeare as the local schoolmaster in the Titchfield Grammar School….

As Love’s Labour’s Found also argues, Florio could well have written the Progress Entertainment which Mary Southampton’s father, Lord Montague, put on at nearby Cowdray for Queen Elizabeth the previous year….

And which Shakespeare lampoons in the entertainment Holofernes put on for the Princess of France….

See: ‘Shakespeare in Titchfield – a Summary of the Evidence’ and ‘Shakespeare was a Schoolmaster in the Country – Titchfield.’

 Love’s Labour’s Lost was clearly a coterie play…….

…..intended for an aristocratic, coterie audience…..

…..with an aristocratic, coterie cast.

The next Post reveals who these people were…..

PLEASE CLICK: HERE!