The Shakespeare Code

It’s best to read Part One first…..

4.  THE PRINCESS OF FRANCE…….

……is a Calvinist…..

……who believes in pre-destination….

The Forester says to her:

Nothing but fair is that which you inherit……

…and the Princess replies……

See, see my beauty will be saved by merit!

O heresy in fair, fit for these days!

A giving hand, though foul, shall have fair praise.

The heresy referred to is a Roman Catholic one.

The Catholics believed that good works – including charity – were one of the ways to salvation……..

…..but Calvinists believed that good works…..

….a giving hand….

….could NOT save you from Hell.

You could only enter heaven if you were one of God’s….

…..elect…

QUEEN ELIZABETH………

….like the Princess of France….

…..was  a Calvinist…..

She had been taught the doctrines of Calvin, by her stepmother, Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Katherine Parr.

When Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary Tudor….

…..had locked her in the Tower, she prayed to God top release her.

When God, in her mind, not only released her……

….. but made her Queen of England as well…..

……she was convinced that she was one of his ‘Elect’.

5. THE PRINCESS OF FRANCE……

…..is handed a cross-bow……

…..and shoots deer from a stand erected in the park of the King of Navarre.

In doing this she admits that she must….

….play the murderer….

….and ponders the paradox that, although she is the embodiment of

….mercy……

….she is prepared to take a helpless creature’s life….

In these circumstances shooting…..

…… well……

…..and killing the deer is judged to be morally

…….ill…….

……because the deer dies.

The Princes says:

But come, the bow: now mercy goes to kill,

And shooting well is then accounted ill.

She wants to be considered a good shot….

….so has her excuses ready if she fails to kill the deer.

(1) If  she doesn’t hit the deer at all……

……it was pity that stopped her from doing so…..

(2) If she wounds the deer, but does not kill it……

……it was because she would rather be praised for her shooting skills than any wish to see the deer dead.

Thus will I save my credit in the shoot:

Not wounding, pity would not let me do’t;

If wounding, then it was to show my skill,

That more for praise than purpose meant to kill.

She then goes on to explain that a desire for glory can lead people to perform dark actions that other people hate….

…..when for the sake of fame, for the praise of others, for external approval….

….we ignore our instinctive, human sympathies.

And out of question so it is sometimes,

Glory grows guilty of detested crimes,

When, for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part,

We bend to that the working of the heart.

The Princess admits that it is this need for praise which drives her to spill the blood of the deer…

….with whose plight she begins to empathise……

…..and to whom she  feels no animosity….

As I for praise alone now seek to spill

The poor deer’s blood, that my heart means no ill.

Boyet criticises………….

……and eroticises………..

….. the Princess’s hunting by comparing her to shrewish wives who also crave praise for dominating their husbands….

(Death and blood could be Elizabethan symbols for orgasm and semen)

Do not curst wives hold that self-sovereignty

Only for praise sake, when they strive to be

Lords o’er their Lords…

But  the Princess defends female dominance over men..

…..praise we may afford

To any Lady that subdues a Lord.

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NOTE

In other of his poems and plays, Shakespeare introduces characters who are HIGHLY CRITICAL of hunting……..

…….and empathise  with the suffering of the animals.

In Venus and Adonis…….

…….Venus begs her young lover Adonis not to hunt the dangerous boar….

… but to hunt the harmless hare instead….

But as the poem goes on, Venus argues against herself.

She begins to sympathise with the terror of the hare, ‘Poor Wat’….

And when thou [Adonis] hast on foot the purblind hare,
Mark the poor wretch, to overshoot his troubles
How he outruns the wind and with what care
He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles:
The many musets through the which he goes
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes…..

By this, poor Wat, far off upon a hill,
Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear,
To harken if his foes pursue him still:
Anon their loud alarums he doth hear;
And now his grief may be compared well
To one sore sick that hears the passing-bell…..

There is also a celebrated description of the death of a deer in As You Like It…

 Duke Senior says:

Come, shall we go and kill us venison?
And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,
Being native burghers of this desert city,
Should, in their own confines, with forked heads
Have their round haunches gor’d.

The First Lord replies….

To-day my Lord of Amiens and myself
Did steal behind Jacques as he lay along
Under an oak whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood!
To the which place a poor sequest’red stag,
That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt,
Did come to languish; and, indeed, my lord,
The wretched animal heav’d forth such groans
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting; and the big round tears
Cours’d one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase; and thus the hairy fool,
Much marked of the melancholy Jaques,
Stood on th’ extremest verge of the swift brook,
Augmenting it with tears.

Most Elizabethan men – especially aristocrats – were addicted to hunting……

They couldn’t wait to leave smelly, noisy London and get back to their estates….

But even though Shakespeare was a country-man……

……and his father a butcher as well as a glover…….

…….it seems Shakespeare himself was deeply disturbed by the wounding and killing of animals.

 

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QUEEN ELIZABETH………

…like the Princess of France…..

……also shot deer, with a cross-bow, from specially erected stands…….

……..both at Titchfield…….

……where the Groom of the Chamber had been instructed to build……

…..two standings for her Majesty…..

…..and at Cowdray…..

……the estate of Mary Southampton’s father, Viscount Montague……

…… which Queen Elizabeth also visited on her 1591 Progress.

The deer were rounded up and run before her into a small enclosure…..

…a degraded form of hunting devised by her father, Henry VIII….

….when he grew too fat to ride a horse…

At Cowdray music had accompanied the slaughter….

 ….a delicate bower…

…….had been prepared to house…

….her Highnesse musicians….

….(the dark-skinned Bassano family, which included Aemilia…..

….. who was shortly to become the ‘Dark Lady of the Sonnets’…)

A nymph…..

……(possibly the mixed-race Aemilia)

…..handed Elizabeth a decorated crossbow…..

…..just as the Princess in the play is handed one before her ‘Now mercy goes to kill’ speech….

[Note: Queen Elizabeth left this bow at Cowdray as a memento of her visit.

It is The Code’s belief that it was THIS VERY BOW that was used in the production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at Titchfield.

Everyone would recognise that the bow presented to the Princess in the play…..

…..when she says….

……..but come, the bow….

 …..was the bow presented to Queen Elizabeth at Cowdray.]

The nymph in the entertainment then sang…..

….a sweet song….

….which eroticises the hunt….

….as Boyet does in Love’s Labour’s Lost…..

Goddess and monarch of this happy Isle,

Vouchsafe this bow which is an huntress part ;

Your eyes are arrows though they seem to smile

Which never glanced but galled the stateliest heart [hart],

Strike one, strike all, for none at all can fly,

They gaze you in the face although they die.

‘Strike one, strike all’ is a reference to the Southampton family motto….

…..to be found on the family tomb at St. Peter’s Church in Titchfield….

Une par tout…..

…One for all….

So young Harry Southampton……

….. was certainly in attendance.

It was HIS……

…stateliest heart…

…that the song refers to…….

….. because he was being set up by his family as a future ‘favourite’ of Elizabeth….

 As in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the song equates images of hunting and death…..

….with falling in love and orgasm….

They gaze you in the face although they die….

It suggests that Elizabeth’s beauty is so great that men will reach a sexual climax just by the act of looking at her!

Elizabeth shot four deer at Cowdray…..

……..but Lord Montague’s sister had the temerity to shoot one as well.

For her impertinence she was denied a place at dinner that night…

AT HER OWN BROTHER’S TABLE!!!

Later in the week the Queen…..

….viewing my Lord’s walks…..

….. came across a Pilgrim…

…clad in a coat of russet velvet….his hat being of the same, with scallop shells of cloth of silver…

Hailing the Queen as…

…fairest of all creatures…

…he tells her of a marvellous oak tree hung with ornaments.

She follows  him and finds the tree hung with her own arms and the arms of all the….

Noblemen and gentlemen of that Shire….

A wild man appears and compares the mighty oak to Elizabeth, protected by her noblemen and gentlemen.

Abroad the Queen’s courage has made her feared: but at home it is her….

….clemency….

…which…

…the owner of this grove hath tasted….that hath made her loved……..

Montague had joined the Rebellion of the  Catholic Northern Lords against Elizabeth in 1569…..

…..but instead of chopping off his head, Elizabeth had made him a Lord Lieutenant…….

So, Montague’s entertainment for Elizabeth, like Love’s Labour’s Lost, acknowledges both the dark and light sides of Elizabeth……

……her delight in killing………

…..(once, in 1574, she had slaughtered 27 deer IN A SINGLE DAY at Berkley Castle)

But also her mercy in pardoning Lord Montague’s life……

…..mercy which was in short supply in the months leading up to the first production of Love’s Labour’s Lost…

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 To read Part Three, the conclusion,

Click: HERE!