The Shakespeare Code

Notes for the Programme of….

HENRY V

The Making of a King

……Stewart Trotter’s adaptation of the anonymous Armada play The Famous Victories of Henry V, and William Shakespeare’s King Henry IV Parts One and Two and King Henry V.

For more information about the production (24th June – 4th July, 2015) in the Great Barn, Titchfield, Hampshire, click: http://www.titchfieldfestivaltheatre.com/store/p40/Henry_V_-_The_making_of_a_King.html

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Why did Shakespeare write the ‘King Henry’ Plays?

The Elizabethans saw history very differently from us….

For them, time was cyclical rather than linear……..

 

 

……and they believed that the same patterns in life came round again and again.

King James VI of Scotland…….

…..writing in 1599, the same year as the first production of Henry V, gave this advice to his five year old son, Prince Henry…

By reading of authentic histories and chronicles, you shall learn experience by theoric, applying the by-past things to the present estate, quia nihil nunc dici aut fieri, quod non dictum and factum fit prius [since nothing is said or spoken which has not been said or spoken before].

It is The Code’s belief that Shakespeare was also…….

….applying the by-past things to the present estate…….

…..when he wrote the King Henry plays……

And that Titchfield, in Hampshire, holds the key….

In his 2002 book – Love’s Labour’s Found…..

……Stewart Trotter first argued that William Shakespeare…..

…. joined the aristocratic Southampton family in Titchfield in 1590…….

….. as what ‘Robert Greene’….

…..in reality Thomas Nashe….

…..described as the rôle of……

…. fac totum…..

…..an entertainer, secretary, tutor, schoolmaster, resident poet and generally nice person to have around.

[See: ‘Shakespeare in Titchfield’.]

Theatre work was thin on the ground after the Armada.

Christopher Marlowe…..

……and Thomas Kyd also joined aristocratic households as tutors.

But what made Shakespeare’s association with the Southamptons different was that Shakespeare came from a deeply Roman Catholic family…..

The Southamptons were also committed Catholics and had been part of the 1567 plot to oust Queen Elizabeth…….

…… and put Mary Queen of Scots….

…….on the throne of England.

Mary, 2nd Countess of Southampton……..

…..commissioned Shakespeare to write seventeen sonnets for the seventeenth birthday of her only son, Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton…….

…….known as ‘Harry’ just as Prince Henry is in the play.

It was getting time for Harry to marry – but there was a problem. 

He wasn’t interested in girls……

……so Shakespeare’s sonnets were intended to introduce him to the joys of heterosexual love and fatherhood.

[See: ‘Trixie the Cat’s guide to the Birthday Sonnets.’]

This must have been the most counter-productive commission of all time.

Shakespeare became involved in the complicated emotional life of Harry and finally fell in love with him.

Harry was the……

….thee…..

….of……

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

…….the greatest love poem ever written.

[See:‘Just how gay was the Third Earl of Southampton?’]

Harry gave Shakespeare the gift of £1,000 (the equivalent to £500,000 pounds today) and Shakespeare’s affair with him lasted into the reign of King James.

The Southamptons, mother and  son, were Shakespeare’s meal-ticket at a time when writers routinely starved to death.

So their interests automatically became his interests……

…..and the Southamptons  still wanted to get rid of Elizabeth.

They also wanted Mary Queen of Scot’s son, James VI of Scotland, to ascend the English throne. They thought he would give freedom of worship to Catholics.

Many people, in fact, thought he was a Catholic…

But it wasn’t only Catholics who wanted to get rid of Elizabeth……

Many Protestants did as well…….

…..people like Southampton’s great friend, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex……..

…..Lady Penelope Rich, Essex’s beautiful, politically-acute, dark-eyed sister….

……Charles Blount, later Eighth Baron Mountjoy, the married Penelope’s dashing lover…

……and Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke…….

….. at Wilton which was only thirty miles away from Titchfield.

This group of powerful people wanted to conquer Europe and start a British Empire.

But Elizabeth was having none of it…..

She wanted only to be the Protestant Queen of a Protestant island.

She thought the cult of martial chivalry – championed by the Countess of Pembroke’s dead brother, Sir Philip Sidney…….

 

…….was a complete waste of time.

To make things worse, Elizabeth refused to name her successor…..

….. so many people feared that, on her death, England would revert to civil war.

Elizabeth hated it when people studied the past. She worried, rightly, that if people read history, they would make comparisons of other monarchs’ reigns to her own.

So when Raphael Holinshed….

……published his revised Chronicles in 1587…….

…….a copy of which Shakespeare had in his possession…….

…….and made doodles in….

…..Elizabeth had them…

…..called in…..

…. three years later on the spurious grounds that they were…..

…..fondly set out….

This was the cue for the theatre-loving Countesses of Southampton and Pembroke to strike…..

If people weren’t allowed to read history they could watch it acted out in the grounds of the stately homes of Titchfield and Wilton……

…..with all the aristocratic resources of men, horses and armour…..

….and women – often aristocratic women……

….. and often Lady Penelope Rich…….

…..to play the female parts……

[See: ‘Penelope Rich plays the Princess of France’. ]

Aemilia Lanyer……

…..Shakespeare’s and Harry Southampton’s fiery, artful, brilliant, mixed race girlfriend…..

…..would play the dark-skinned rôles……

……like Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost…..

……and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream…..

[See: ‘How Shakespeare’s Dark Lady found God.’]

These original productions would have looked something like present day re-enactments by THE SEALED  KNOT…

Afterwards the plays would have been toured in cut down productions for the general public…..

…..with boys playing the part of women, on….

….unworthy scaffolds…

…..with…..

…..four or five most vile and ragged foils…..

These early history plays were written to demonstrate that when weak, vacillating Kings come to the throne, civil strife will follow.

Shakespeare shows that it  is right to depose them – however painful the process or how dire the consequences.

In The Making of a King we see how usurpation of King Richard II’s throne lies heavy on the soul of Bolingbroke….

But it paves the way for the more legal succession of his son, the heroic King Henry V….

And the audience, watching  the effeminate, petulant King Richard II…….

…….would automatically have made comparisons with Elizabeth…….

…….a woman trying to dominate men in a men’s world.

Indeed, Richard II was staged at the Globe on the eve of the Essex rebellion against her rule.

Elizabeth herself then famously said, after Essex had been beheaded:

…..I am Richard II: know ye not that?

And it’s the rebellion of Essex that brings us right to the heart of The Making of a King.

When the Chorus describes how the citizens of London…..

…..pour out……

….. to greet King Henry V on his return from Agincourt, Shakespeare has given him lines that are invariably cut because they are so topical:

As, by a lower but loving likelihood,
Were now the general of our gracious empress,
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit,
To welcome him!

‘The general of our gracious empress’ is the Earl of Essex.

When Shakespeare was writing Henry V in 1599, Essex was in Ireland, putting down the rebellion of the Earl of Tyrone.

The plan was then for Essex to march with the English army from Ireland…..

…..bringing rebellion broach’d on his sword….

….and join up with Lord Mountjoy and the Scottish army.

Then, with King James the VI of Scotland at their head, they would march to London, rouse its citizens, storm Whitehall, remove Elizabeth from the throne and replace her with James.

The Chorus in Henry V was priming the audience for the rebellion…..

……and the triumph of Henry V in the play was pre-figuring the triumph of Essex.

Like Hal, Essex had moved on from being a dissolute youth……..

……..(he had his own louche bath-house, situated in the Strand, and a very gay entourage)…….

……..to a supreme statesman, politician and soldier.

At Cadiz – like King Henry V at Harfleur – Essex had inspired his troops with his rhetoric…..

He had thrown his hat into the sea, crying…

…Entramos….

….. and had been the first to leap over the walls of Cadiz.

When he returned to England, his descendant, Walter Devereux, writes:

….[Essex] assumed an entirely new character; he became sober, religious and devoted to his wife; regularly attending prayers and preachings, and using language so replete with moral sentiments, with humility and self-distrust, as greatly to edify the astonished courtiers….

Shakespeare intended King Henry V to be a rôle-model for both Essex and his co-rebels, Southampton and Mountjoy.

He shows how a leader needs to be utterly ruthless at times……

……as Henry is with Falstaff and even more so with the ‘Southampton’ traitors and Bardolph……

……but he must never lose……

….the common touch……

He must give his troops…….

……a little touch of Harry in the night……

……as though he were his own human sacrifice.

We live through Hal’s transformation into King of England……..

……with the coded implication that Essex could become King of England as well…..

It’s what a lot of  Catholics wanted.

Essex promised religious freedom for England…

……and even allowed the old Latin Mass to be celebrated at Essex House in the Strand…..

However, in real life things weren’t going well for Essex.

In Ireland he certainly commanded with ruthlessness……

……and once decimated a whole platoon for cowardice.  

But Tyrone was running circles round him…..

….and at one point nearly persuaded Essex to join forces!

In Scotland, King James VI refused to play ball…..

Shakespeare had been sent up to Edinburgh after the opening of Henry V…….

……..and had written Macbeth to convince James that the murderous usurper, Queen Elizabeth…….

…….who had chopped off the head of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots……

…….(when she had been Elizabeth’s ‘guest’ in England)……

…….should be overthrown…….

….. as the Macbeths……

……who had assassinated Duncan…..

……(when he had been a guest in their own castle)….

 ……are overthrown in the play…..

 destined right to assume the throne of England….

[See: ‘Shakespeare in Scotland: ‘Macbeth’ Decoded.]

But canny James was having none of it…..

He knew he only had to wait a year or two for Elizabeth to die and the throne would probably be his anyway.

So why should he take a risk on rebellion?

Besides, he had a pathological hatred of warfare…….

………and would faint away if anyone so much as drew a sword in front of him.

Essex, knowing that his enemies, Sir Walter Raleigh…..

….and Henry Brooke, the 11th Lord Cobham…..

………were busily destroying his reputation at Court while he was away…..

………returned from Ireland without permission…….

……..and rushed into Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom at Nonesuch Palace….

…..before she had time to put on her wig and make-up…….

Essex was put under house arrest for deserting his post………

…… his treasonable parleying with Tyrone…

…….and his insult to the Queen’s vanity.

Half of Essex’s followers thought that Essex should continue the rebellion against Elizabeth….

……half that he should give up.

Shakespeare was now definitely in the latter camp.

He wrote Julius Caesar……..

…..to show how even a high-principled  rebellion against a tyrant could fail hopelessly……

[See: ‘Julius Caesar’ Decoded.]

…… and Timon of Athens………

……. to demonstrate how stoicism and retreat from political life could be a wise and noble course of action for Essex to take.

[See: ‘Timon of Athens’ Decoded.]

Essex, however, wasn’t in the listening mood…..

…..and ended up on the scaffold…..

Southampton who, unlike Mountjoy, backed the rebellion to the end, was imprisoned in the Tower, under sentence of death.

But was Shakespeare EVER fully committed to the rebellion? 

Or even to the cause of empire in Europe?

A serial, bisexual adulterer, who hoarded malt, evaded tax and gave fudged evidence in court, Shakespeare didn’t always get things right…..

For example, he said that the enclosures of the land at Stratford-upon-Avon would never be carried out……

…..but they were.

He does  gives King Henry V………

……..and the Chorus in the play…..

……….wonderful, stirring, patriotic language in praise of warfare…….

……….speeches that Queen Elizabeth I would have loathed…..

……….but which inspired Winston Churchill…….

………. to his own flights of rhetoric in the Second World War.

Churchill’s tribute to the fighter pilots of the Battle of Britain….

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

……is very similar to Henry’s speech to his troops before Agincourt…..

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

However, Henry in the play is by no means perfect.

He nearly come to blows with the common soldiers who question the King’s motives……

…….and this leads on to a great, nihilistic speech in which he questions the whole nature and point of kingship…..

He even comes to the conclusion that peasants are happier than he is…..

Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread;
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,
Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,
And follows so the ever-running year,
With profitable labour, to his grave:
And, but for ceremony, such a wretch,
Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep,
Has the fore-hand and vantage of a king.

The Duke of Burgundy gives a vivid description of how the fecund landscape of France has been ravaged and destroyed  by war……

Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unpruned dies; her hedges even-pleach’d,
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,
Put forth disorder’d twigs; her fallow leas
The darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory
Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts
That should deracinate such savagery;
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,
Losing both beauty and utility.
And as our vineyards, fallows, meads and hedges,
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness…..

But Shakespeare was now completely associated with the rebellion in the eyes of Queen Elizabeth. Hating him, his disloyalty and his bisexuality, she described him in 1601 as a man who had…..

…forgotten God….

Three years earlier, Francis Meere’s had compared Shakespeare to Ovid in his Palladis Tamia, going so far as to say that….

……the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare….

And in the same year as the Queen’s criticism of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson……

…….. wrote a satire on the poetry establishment called The Poetaster.

 He also cast Shakespeare as Ovid, who was mysteriously banished from Rome by Caesar Augustus for….

….a poem and a mistake……

In the play Ovid/Shakespeare takes part in the performance of a bisexual orgy with Julia, Augustus’s daughter……..

…….and with his own daughter, played by Chloe ‘the Moor’……..

…….(a coded reference to Aemilia Lanyer)……….

………and with Ganymede and Thetis and so on….

Augustus banishes ‘Ovid’ and locks his……

…..mis-begotten love….

 ‘Julia’……

…..code for the long-haired Southampton…..

……into a prison tower…..

……i.e., the Tower of London…..

Augustus says:

 Licentious Naso,[Ovid] for thy violent wrong,

In soothing the declin’d affections

Of our base daughter we exile thy feet

From all approach to our imperial court

On pain of death: and thy mis-begotten love

Commit to patronage of iron doors

Since her soft-hearted sire cannot contain her.

Jonson wickedly shows ‘Ovid’s’ tearful farewell to ‘Julia’….

……who is locked up high in a turret…..

……just like Juliet on her balcony………

The two are so in love with each other that they are unable to say goodbye….

……and keep calling each other back.

……just like Romeo and Juliet…..

The obvious place for Shakespeare to go was James VI gay-friendly court in Scotland – just as Marlowe had intended to do…..

James had written a gay love poem called The Phoenix in memory of his beloved Esmé Stuart…..

…..now Shakespeare replied with a gay love poem to Harry Southampton called The Phoenix and the Turtle.

Harry, like Stuart, was the fabulous Phoenix…..

Shakespeare was the common or garden Turtle Dove….

But both birds are consumed in a mutual fire of love….

But two years later, in 1603, the Wheel of Fortune turned…. 

Elizabeth died, Southampton was released from the Tower and Shakespeare was a hero again.  

He rode down from Scotland with King James…….

….. and became a leader of the prestigious – and very well funded – King’s Men.

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How does Falstaff fit into all this political intrigue? 

Well, for a start, Shakespeare didn’t call him Falstaff in the first performance of Henry IV. Part One.

He was Sir John Oldcastle – a true figure from history who was companion to Prince Hal.

But he was also the ancestor of  Essex’s arch-enemy – Henry Brooke, 11th Lord Cobham……

…….who Essex nick-named….

…..The Sycophant…

Oldcastle, who had married Joan Cobham in 1408, had been a Protestant Lollard who had been executed as a heretic rebel by the Catholic regime…..

But by the time of Elizabeth’s Protestant reign, he had been transformed into a martyr.

Shakespeare took great delight in transforming him further into a penniless, fat, lying, drunken, old crook.

So outraged were the Cobham family that Elizabeth herself had to intervene and Shakespeare was forced to publicly aplogise and re-name him.

But he is still referred to by Prince Hal as……..

….the old lad o’th’castle…..

…..and Henry Brooke gained a new nick-name….

He was known to the Essex entourage for ever more as ‘Sir John Falstaff’.

But where does the character of Falstaff come from?

Did Shakespeare just invent him – or did he draw him from life?

Well, Thomas Nashe – who, The Code believes, collaborated with Shakespeare on the Henry IV plays – as he collaborated with Jonson and Marlowe……..

……….dedicates his pamphlet Strange Newes………

……. to a fat, criminally inclined, vintner, womaniser and lover of verse……….

…….famous for his advocacy of alcohol………

…….and famous for being  terminally hard-up.

Nashe called him……….

….Mr. Apis-Lapis…..

….which is Latin for ‘Bee’ and ‘Stone’……

……….Beestone…..

Now there was a true life ‘William Beeston’ whose illegitimate, actor son, Christopher, gave John Aubrey, the antiquarian….

…..the information that…..

……..in his younger years……..

……Shakespeare had been…..

..a schoolmaster in the country…..

[See: ‘Shakespeare was a schoolmaster in the country.’]

 This William Beeston was a close friend of the Southampton family…….

…..and he lived at Great Posbrook Farm………

……..just outside Titchfield!!!

[See: The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis.]

 

© Stewart Trotter May 2015.