The Shakespeare Code

 Stewart Trotter writes….

On page 146 of my book, Love’s Labour’s Found…..

…..published in 2002…

…..I wrote:

At the same time John Clapham, [Lord] Burghley’s secretary, was writing Narcissus, another poem on an Ovidian theme – also dedicated to [Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of] Southampton and printed in 1591. It deals with the legend of Narcissus, a young man fed on ‘the warm milk of error’ (Catholicism) who mounts a steed called Lust and dies in the spring of Self Love – infatuated with his own reflection. Shakespeare’s poem [Venus and Adonis] is about the Goddess Venus’s unrequited love for the beautiful Adonis who refuses her embraces and dies in a boar hunt. Although the poem is dedicated to Southampton, Mary Southampton still controlled his finances and Burghley was his guardian. I believe they commissioned Shakespeare , as Burghley commissioned his secretary, to continue to put pressure on Harry [Southampton] to marry and warn him of the deadly consequences of pursuing a homosexual life….

In the 20th May, 2015 edition of Country Life Mark Griffith……

…. writes:

In 1591, Burghley’s secretary John Clapham had tried and failed to teach the 17 year-old Earl [of Southampton] the error of his ways with Narcissus, a long Latin poem on the perils of self-love.When Shakespeare’s turn came, [with Venus and Adonis] he kept something of that earlier identification. Far from the usual he-man lover and hunter, his Adonis is an effeminate, petulant, self-obsessed and woman spurning youth – in other words, more like Narcissus and just like Southampton..

..Because Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are dedicated to Southampton in warm and dutiful terms, it’s widely assumed that he was Shakespeare’s patron. But a dedicatee is not necessarily a patron, and neither sent the head-strong Earl a message he wanted to hear. No, Shakespeare was acting for Burghley; the Lord Treasurer was his mysterious early backer…..

In some ways, Mr. Griffiths and I are very close……

He clearly subscribes to the theory I first put forward in Love’s Labour’s Found thirteen years ago….

……that William Shakespeare was discovered, created and financially assisted by a powerful patron….

……who commissioned him to write…..

(1) Poetry to persuade the Earl of Southampton to get married….

(2) Plays to support the Patron’s political position…

(3) Open air country house entertainments which brought him to the attention of Queen Elizabeth I…

….and….

(4) A Midsummer Night’s Dream to celebrate a family wedding…..

The only difference is that Griffiths believes this Patron to be William Cecil, Lord Burghley….

……while I argued in my book…..

……and subsequent blog The Shakespeare Code…..

….. that…..

……SHAKESPEARE’S MAIN PATRONS WERE THE SOUTHAMPTON FAMILY!!!

….namely…

……(1) Mary Browne, Second Countess of Southampton…..

….who financed Shakespeare from 1590 (when he joined the Titchfeld household) till 1594……

….and (2) Her son, Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield……

…. who then took over the patronage of Shakespeare when he came of age in 1594…..

….. till 1605, when he broke all ties.

(To read about this break, click: ‘Shakespeare, Love and Religion, Part Three.’)

Mr. Griffiths rejects these ideas and writes:

Forget the often-repeated tale, first set down at the start of the eighteenth century, that Southampton gave Shakespeare the vast sum of £1,000.

(£1,000 would be the equivalent of £500,000 today.)

But WHY should we forget it?

The story comes from Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 Some Account of the Life  etc. of Mr. William Shakespear. [sic]

….and Rowe meticulously records:

[Shakespear] had the honour to meet with many great and uncommon marks of favour and friendship from the Earl of Southampton, famous in the histories of that time for his friendship to the unfortunate Earl of Essex..

..There is one instance so singular in the magnificence of this patron of Shakespear’s, that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D’Avenant……

…. who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not have ventured to have inserted, that my Lord Southampton, at one time, gave him a thousand pounds, to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to….

D’Avenant claimed…..

….with some plausibility….

….according to Charles Nicholl……

…..who edited Rowe’s Life..

….to be one of Shakespeare’s illegitimate sons….

The actor, Sir Thomas Betterton……

…..was the lead actor in D’Avenant’s company…..

…..did his own investigations into Shakespeare by visiting Stratford-upon-Avon….

….and passed on his information to Rowe.

The Southampton…..

….. tale….

….(Griffiths’s word)

…..has an excellent provenance……..

….. stretching back to the time of Shakespeare himself.

Now it is true that in the excerpt from Love’s Labour’s Found that I quoted, I stated that….

I believe they [Burghley and Mary Southampton] commissioned Shakespeare [to write Venus and Adonis] , as Burghley commissioned his secretary….

….but I do not think Burghley actually PAID for the poem.

That was Mary Southampton’s task….

Burghley, working with Mary….

…and her father, Anthony Browne, Lord Montague….

….merely suggested the Ovidian subject matter.

Burghley was Southampton’s guardian….

He wanted Harry to marry his grand-daughter Elizabeth de Vere….

……so that his family would make another association with an aristocratic family……

…… (Burghley himself came from a relatively humble background)

…….and to prevent Southampton……

……..who, like all his family, was a Roman Catholic recusant……

……..from marrying a Catholic girl.

Burghley was a committed Protestant…..

…….who had worked with Queen Elizabeth to establish the Church of England…..

He was also notoriously tight-fisted….

….(even his secretaries like Clapham were paid in kind rather than money)….

….and had no interest at all in ‘contemporary’ English literature.

(Clapham’s poem to Southampton was in Latin)

Burghley was a classicist who, when asked by Queen Elizabeth…….

……..to grant Edmund Spenser…….

…..£100 for writing The Fairie Queen, famously said….

…..What? All this for a song….

And in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Wallace T. Macaffery writes….

Writers in the literary genre, however, found little favour from the Treasurer [Lord Burghley]. He showed no interest in the contemporary outpouring of poetry and drama. In fact he seems to have preferred to read continental authors.

Also Burghley, as Southampton’s guardian, had the legal right to DEMAND the marriage….

…..and stood to gain a colossal £5,000 in fines if Southampton refused….

…..£1,000 more than his annual salary as Treasurer….

…..and the equivalent today of £2.5 million.

Either way, Burghley would win…..

So why waste money on…

…..songs..

……from Shakespeare….?

……..especially as Shakespeare came from a recusant background.

It was in Mary’s INTEREST to pay Shakespeare to persuade Harry to marry because….

(1) Harry was an only son and it would continue the Southampton line….

(2) Marriage might get him to turn his interest from young men to young women.

His father, Mary’s dead husband, the Second Earl of Southampton…..

…..had been homosexual.

He had made, in Mary’s words……

…..his manservant his wife.

(3) It would release her from the ruinous fine Burghley was about to impose.

And even in the unlikely event that Burghley DID share in the expense of Venus and Adonis…..

……he would have been horrified by the result…

……and would certainly never have employed Shakespeare again!!!

Shakespeare might well have INTENDED the poem to be a ‘moral’ work like Clapham’s….

…..to show that when Adonis refuses the heterosexual love of Venus…..

….and insists on hunting the boar…..

…..with certain of his friends…..

…..he ends up dead.

But, as so often happens in Shakespeare’s work…….

……Shakespeare’s own feelings get in the way.

By the time he wrote Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare was in love with Harry Southampton….

…so he EROTICISES the death of Adonis….

Tis true, tis true, thus was Adonis slain:

He ran upon the boar with his sharp spear,

Who did not whet his teeth at him again

But by a kiss thought  to persuade him there;

And nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine

Sheath’d unaware the tusk in his soft groin….

And far from being a cautionary tale, the image of the sprawled Adonis, exposing…

The wide wound that the boar had trench’d

In his soft flank…

….with blood covering every….

….grass, herb, leaf or weed…

….suggested to the Elizabethans (for whom …..

…..death…..

….could symbolise orgasm, and….

… blood…..

….could symbolise semen)

…..sublime, exhausted, homosexual orgasm.

The very……

…..effeminate, petulant, self-obssessed…….

……qualities that Griffiths disparages in Adonis/Southampton……..

…… were the very qualities that turned Shakespeare on!!!

In Sonnet 53, Shakespeare even imagines Southampton IN DRAG….

Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit
Is poorly imitated after you;
On Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set,
And you in Grecian tires are painted new……

But the major objection to  the theory of Burghley as Patron of Venus and Adonis……

……and any further works by Shakespeare……

……is a political one.

Venus in the poem is a strong-willed, sexually rampant woman  who, trying to prevent Adonis from hunting, rugby-tackles him to the ground….

She even wishes that Adonis….

…were’t as I am and I a man….

At least one contemporary reader interpreted this as a portrait of Queen Elizabeth…..

…..who dominated men in a men’s world….

…..who wore a breastplate at the time of the Armada….

….and who, like Venus, was doing everything to keep her young lover, Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex…….

…….by her side….

…….to stop him running away to physical dangers…

……..(in Essex’s case, war in Europe).

The deeply loyal Burghley would NEVER have willingly commissioned a satire on the Queen….

And he would have run a mile from The Rape of Lucrece…..

For a start, its Dedication to Southampton is not, as Griffiths would have us believe…..

……warm and dutiful…..

It is an outright declaration of gay love!

The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness.

[By then Mary Southampton knew all about her son’s affair with Shakespeare – and even welcomed it. To read more about this, click: ‘Shakespeare, Love and Religion: Part One’]

The poem’s depiction of violent sex and suicide…..

…….which, in my view, could NEVER have been written to persuade a camp young man to marry…..

 …..is a coded, Roman Catholic work……

It is an attack on……

..The Bear….

…Queen Elizabeth’s lover who had died six years before….

…Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester…..

…….the serial rapist and poisoner….

……who had terrorised and killed Roman Catholics….

…..including Edward Arden, a member of Shakespeare’s own family….

……whom he hanged, drew and quartered.

In an anonymous Catholic work, finally called called Leicester’s Commonwealth……

…..which was originally published in 1584 under the title A Copy of a Letter from a Master of Arts of Cambridge…

……Leicester……

……whom the pamphlet accuses of paying up to £300 a night to sleep with Elizabeth’s young Ladies-in-Waiting…..

…..is compared to villains from history….

…..including Sextus Tarquinius……

THE RAPIST IN SHAKESPEARE’S POEM!

 

Leicester’s Commonwealth also compared the religious hypocrite and wife-murderer, Leicester to King Richard III….

….and Shakespeare obliged by writing a play of that name……

 

(In one Quarto copy of the play,  the compositor makes an unconscious slip: King Richard is called ‘the Bear’ instead of ‘the Boar’!)

[See: ‘Richard III Decoded.’]

Leicester’s Commonwealth even attacks Queen Elizabeth herself for favouring Leicester…..

….and shows how the indulgence of favourites……

… by otherwise good Kings and Queens….

… led on to the Wars of the Roses.

Shakespeare again obliges Catholics with his Richard II and Henry VI plays….

……which deal with the horrors of Civil War…..

I’ve argued that Mary Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke…..

…. also acted as a sponsor for these plays….

……and they were sometimes acted in the grounds of Place House at Titchfield….

…..and Wilton House in Salisbury…….

…..a day’s horse-ride from Titchfield…

The Countess of Pembroke was a Protestant, but was as hostile to Elizabeth as the Southampton family because of the Queen’s foreign policy….

…..and because Elizabeth had excluded her from the Court.

[See: ‘Why did Shakespeare write the ‘King Henry’ plays?’ ]

But one thing is certain….

THE PATRON FOR THESE SUBVERSIVE PLAYS CANNOT HAVE BEEN BURGHLEY!!!

Griffiths writes:

Despite Shakespeare’s efforts, Southampton rejected Burghley’s grand-daughter Elizabeth Vere. She found herself a more willing suitor, William Stanley 6th Earl of Derby……

… and they were married on January 26, 1595. The Queen attended the festivities at Cecil House. It was for these celebrations that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was composed….

THERE IS NO EVIDENCE FOR THIS WHATSOEVER!!!

It is much more likely that Mary, Second Countess of Southampton, commissioned Shakespeare to write the play to celebrate her wedding to Sir Thomas Heneage…..

….on 2nd May in 1594…..

…..(the year that England experienced the dreadful summer that is mentioned in the play)….

….and it was later performed, when the weather improved, in the grounds of Copped Hall in Essex….

The play had probably been staged before 3rd September, 1594…..

…..because the satire Willobie his Avisa was entered on the Stationer’s Register on that date…..

…..and, as Bletchley Park Code-Breaker, Eric Sams…..

….. has pointed out……

…..there are strong verbal parallels between the two works.

[It is my belief that Willobie his Avisa was written by Aemilia Bassano/Lanyer – Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’ – and that she played Hermia in the play. See: ‘Willobie his Avisa Decoded.’]

In Willobie his Avisa, ‘H. W.’ ……

…….a not very disguised code for Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton…..

…….says:

I saw your gardens passing fine

With pleasant flowers lately deckt

With cowslip and with eglantine

When woeful woodbines kiss reject;

Yet these in weeds and briars meet,

Although they seem to smell so sweet

This is very close to Oberon’s….

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine….

Because Heneage was a Protestant, half the wedding guests would be Protestant…..

…….so Shakespeare….

……through the character of Oberon….

……slips in a compliment to Queen Elizabeth…..

That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all arm’d: a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;
But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

But the other half of the wedding guests were Roman Catholic…..

…and so Shakespeare caters for them as well…….

My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememberest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid’s music.

The Mermaid

…….as Bishop William Warburton…

……. pointed out in 1747…………

…….was the symbol for Mary Queen of Scots….

….the….

….dolphin…

….was the French Dauphin Francis whom Mary married…

(the Elizabethans sometimes spelt ‘dauphin’ as ‘dolphin’)

……and the…

…certain stars….

…..which…….

….. shot madly from their spheres…..

…….were the Lords who took part in the 1569 Northern Rebellion  to put Mary on the throne of England…..

………among whom were Mary’s late husband, the Second Earl of Southampton.

(See: ‘Shakespeare, Love and Religion, Part Two.’ )

Burghley, who had been instrumental in ensuring that Mary Queen of Scots had her head chopped off……

….and who had been banished from the Court by Queen Elizabeth for four months for so doing….

….would never have tolerated a compliment to the Scottish Queen in any play that he commissioned.

(See: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream Decoded’.)

We don’t know if Queen Elizabeth visited Copped Hall for the performance as all Privy Council records for 1594 were burnt in a fire….

But we DO know that Heneage entertained the Queen at Savoy Palace…..

….. his London home, on 7th December of that year….

…..that Henry Car, Lord Hunsdon’s……..

……..’The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’ played at Court that Christmas for the first time….

……and that on 15th March 1595, Shakespeare went to Whitehall, along……

……with Richard Burbage……

…… and Will Kempe……

 

…….to be paid for their Christmas performances.

It is my guess that Southampton, who came of age on 6th October, 1594, gave Shakespeare the gift of £1,000 on his birthday to………

….purchase……..

a share in the Lord Chamberlain’s Company.

•

Perhaps the weakest aspect of Griffiths’s theory is that at no point does he mention Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

They are – as William Wordsworth said……

 

…..The key,

with which Shakespeare unlocked his heart…..

The first seventeen sonnets are addressed to…..

……beauty’s rose…..

….. Harry Southampton…..

……and they were written to him as a seventeenth birthday present….

….. in an attempt to persuade him to marry.

They include a reference in Sonnet 13 to Southampton’s dead father, the Second Earl….

You had a father: let your son say so.

……and in Sonnet 3 a compliment to Harry’s mother….

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime……

MARY SOUTHAMPTON WAS CLEARLY THE COMMISSIONER OF THE BIRTHDAY SONNETS!!!

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

The later Sonnets…..

……which Shakespeare wrote off his own back…..

……trace Shakespeare’s growing intimacy with Harry…..

…..and his final falling in love with him in the great sonnet…..

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

But they tell us all sorts of other things as well…..

…..including Shakespeare’s feelings for Burghley!

Burghley’s nick-name was….

…..Old Saturnus….

And Shakespeare refers to it in Sonnet 98…..

….which suggests that the Spring is so powerful it has even made ‘heavy’ old Burghley feel young again….

From you I have been absent in the spring

When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim

Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing

That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.

Shakespeare also satirises Burghley in Titus Andronicus in the figure of

…..Saturninus….

….a name and character he made up….

….as he makes up……..

…..Aemilius……

….. and…….

…..Bassianus……….

……as a tease to his mistress, Aemilia Bassano….

Saturninus is the unscrupulous henchman who advances the sadistic Goth Queen Tamora…..

…..who was forced to kneel in the streets….

…..just as the Princess Elizabeth was forced to kneel in front of the Tower….

…..and who rides….

….a snow-white goodly steed…

….just as Queen Elizabeth did on her visit to Tilbury during the Armada….

Tamora’s equally blood-thirsty sons chop off Lavinia’s hands….

……just as Elizabeth chopped off the right hand of John Stubbs in 1579…..

….. for daring to write a pamphlet criticising her proposed marriage to Anjou…..

(The Catholics claimed that Elizabeth had watched the event from her bedroom window.)

Later in his career, when Burghley was dead, Shakespeare, was to have a full revenge on him in the character of Polonius in Hamlet …

When Polonius says….

My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief……

…..it is a parody of the pompous, long-winded style that Burghley adopted in his speaking and writing….

…..for instance, in his 1579 letter to the Queen…

The clock that stond so long hath now so weighty plummets of favour and courage put on that it striketh still, a clock not to tell how this day passeth only, but how days and time passeth like river streams, whose waves return no more….

Shakespeare scholars, like Mark Alexander, have also pointed out the similarities between Polonius’s advice to Laertes and Burghley’s own written advice to his son, Robert Cecil….

ENVOY

Griffiths’s coup de grâce is to reveal that the figures on the frontispiece of John Gerald’s Herball…

…..engraved by William Rogers…

 

……are drawn from life……

….. and are the  likenesses of living…..

……or recently departed….

…… men.

As we only know what they looked like through other paintings and engravings….

….this is a proposition difficult to prove.

It’s certainly possible that the older figure on the left plinth is Lord Burghley…..

…….after all the work was dedicated to him……..

…….and he has been depicted in his garden holding flowers before…..

 And the two top figures……

…. COULD be the herbalist Rembert Dodoens on the right and John Gerard on the left…….

………though it seems unlikely that Gerard would have himself depicted as a garden labourer  with a spade……

….especially as in subsequent editions of the Herball he appears in full ruff…..

But Griffiths’s identifications of the other frontispiece figures are more problematical….

…….He claims that the woman shown walking in the garden……

 

…..is Queen Elizabeth…..

…..accompanied by Gerard…..

The idea that Gloriana would allowed herself to be depicted walking along in terms of complete equality with a commoner…..

…..WHO KEEPS HIS HAT ON…..

…..in a garden where both the gardeners…..

….ARE TURNING THEIR BACKS ON HER…

…..is unhistorical to say the least!

Even Knights of the Garter removed their hats when they were in procession with the Queen….

….and less illustrious folk knelt bareheaded….

But it is the claim that Griffiths makes for….

….the fourth man….

….man on the right hand plinth…..

…..that is truly preposterous….

The claim that….

…….IT IS WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE HIMSELF!!!

The only ‘authenticated’ portrait we have of Shakespeare is the Martin Droeshout engraving in the First Folio…..

 

…..of which Ben Jonson…..

….. wrote….

This figure, that thou here seest put

It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;

Wherein the graver had a strife

with Nature to out-do the life:

O, could he but have drawn his wit

In well as brass, as he hath hit

His face, the print would then surpass

All that was ever writ in brass.

But since he cannot, Reader, look

Not on his picture but his book….

Jonson is admitting that it is not a very good engraving….

….but that it accurately depicts how Shakespeare looked in life….

You don’t need to be a Shakespeare scholar to realise that…..

…..while the Gerard engraving shows a man with a head full of hair….

…..DROESHOUT’S SHAKESPEARE IS BALD AS A COOT!!!

……as is the Shakespeare memorial bust in Stratford-upon-Avon….

……as is the Chandos portrait……

…..as is the Davenant bust in the Garrick Club….

……or even the 1588 Grafton portrait….

Shakespeare, in fact, was FAMOUS for his baldness….

In 1601 Shakespeare’s company commissioned Thomas Dekker……

….. to write a satire on the literary world called Satiro-Mastix….

 

Shakespeare appears as……

…… Sir Adam Prickshaft…..

…….the potent wooer of a beautiful widow, who….

……shoots his bolt seldom, but when Adam lets go, he hits…

Sir Adam is bald….

So one of the rival wooers of the widow commissions ‘Horace’………

……..in reality Ben Jonson……..

…….to attack baldness as……………

……ugly base and vile…..

But ‘Crispinus’……

 …….in reality John Marston……

…….ensures that Sir Adam becomes……….

….the first man………..

……..with his paeon to baldness……………..

….. which even manages to work in a reference to Shakespeare’s theatre………..

A head and face o’regrown with shaggy dross

O ‘tis an orient pearl hid all in moss,

But when the head’s all naked and uncrowned,

It is the world’s Globe, even, smooth and round;

Baldness is Nature’s butt, at which our life

Shoots her last arrow: what man ever lead

His age out with a staff, but had a head

Bare and uncovered? He whose years do rise

To their full height, yet not bald, is not wise….

On this strong tower shall my opinion rest

Heads thick of hair are good, but bald the best…..

But perhaps it’s best to leave the subject of Shakespeare’s baldness to the Bard of Avon himself……..

In Sonnet 73 he writes:

That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

If only Mark Griffiths had read the Sonnets, none of this might have happened……

© Stewart Trotter June 2015.