The Shakespeare Code

It’s best to read Part One and Part Two first…..

•

The dark side of Queen Elizabeth was very much in the minds of Catholics in the months leading up to Love’s Labour’s Lost….

In the same month that she visited Titchfield (September, 1591) Richard Topcliffe – Elizabeth’s hangman – told Thomas Pormont….

…….(a Catholic priest he was torturing on a rack set up in his own home)..

……that he was so great and familiar with her Majesty that he many times putteth his hands between her breasts and paps, and in her neck; that he hath not only seen her legs and knees, but feeleth them with his hands above her knees; that he hath felt her belly, and said unto Her Majesty that she hath the softest belly of any womankind…..

 Topcliffe also claimed that Elizabeth  had said:

…….Be not these the arms legs and body of King Henry?……..

To which he had answered…..

…….Yea…

Topcliffe also said that Elizabeth….

…..gave him for a favour a white linen hose wroughte with white silk etc.

Topcliffe also claimed that he that he was……

……so familiar with her that when he pleaseth to speak with her he may take her away from any company, and that she is as pleasant with every one that she doth love…..

……and……

……that he did not care for the Council, for he had his authority from Her Majesty.

Pormont managed to record and smuggle out these notes to his fellow Catholics…..

…….including the Jesuit missionary and propagandist Robert Persons…..

……who was to have a big influence on Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Indeed, he is even mentioned by name in the play!

Jaquenetta, the wench, brings a letter she believes Don Armado has sent her, to Sir Nathaniel, the curate, to read….

She says:

God give you good morrow M. Person….

To which Nathaniel replies:

Maister Person, quasi Person? And if one should be perst, which is the one.

(Note: In modern additions, this line is give to Holoferenes – but in the Quarto and First Folio editions it is given to Holofernes.)

Jaquenetta, as can be seen from the above, then switches names for the curate:

Good M. Parson be so good as read me this letter….

This, The Shakespeare Code believes, was a dangerous in-joke for the Catholic recusants in the audience….

ROBERT PERSONS LATEER CHANGED HIS NAME TO ROBERT PARSONS!!!

In 1592 he was to write a pseudonymous attack, in Latin, on Sir Walter Raleigh………

…….entitled………

An Advertisement Written to a Secretary of my Lord Treasurers of England, by an English intelligencer as he passed through Germany towards Italy.

The English summary, which was published alongside it, claims that Raleigh presided over………

……..a school of atheism………….

…. in which, under direction of the astronomer and mathematician Thomas Harriot….

…….whom the book describes as a ‘conjurer’…

……..both Moses and our Saviour, the old and the new testament are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backward…..

In Love’s Labour’s Lost ‘the school of atheism’ becomes, in the King of Navarre’s words…..

……The school of Night…..

……..and the blasphemy of writing…..

….God backward…

(…to produce…

….Dog….)

…..is satirised in an exchange between the educated infant, Moth….

……and Holofernes…..

MOTH

Yes, yes; he teaches boys the hornbook. What is a,
b, spelt backward, with the horn on his head?

HOLOFERNES

Ba, pueritia, with a horn added.

MOTH

Ba, most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his learning.

Persons also wrote his Responsio later in November 1591…..

This was a reply to Elizabeth’s famous 1591……

……Declaration of Great Troubles Pretended against the Realm by a number of Seminary Priests and Jesuits…..

……written on 18th October, by Lord Burghley, but not published till November….

In the ‘Declaration’ the designs of Spain and Rome on England were exposed and it was asserted that….

………the Jesuits form the nests and lurking places of those who are in rebellion against [Elizabeth’s] person, that their General has  been to Spain and armed its King against her, that Parsons who taught amongst them and was the general of the English seminary at Rome has done the same and that the Jesuits as a Society has been the life and soul of the enemies which had been raised against England.

Persons/Parsons, replying to this personal attack, countered by describing Elizabeth as…….

……the defender of the Calvinian heresy….

…..and pointed out that King Philip of Spain……

….. had saved her life when she had been imprisoned in the Tower by her half-sister, Mary Tudor……….

Persons claimed that Elizabeth’s Anglican priests were…..

…..the dregs of mankind….

…..whereas the young Catholic missionaries, who were accused by Elizabeth of being traitors, were often from noble English families.

Persons chose as his text……

……And I saw a woman drunk with the blood of saints and the blood of martyrs of Jesus.

The events of the next month were to suggest Persons was right……

On 10th December, Swithin Wells….

……a great friend of the Southampton family who had taught at Titchfield…..

…… had recruited Catholic missionary priests…..

…..was hanged outside the Southampton family home in London….

…..together with Edmund Genings…..

……a young man who had been fast-tracked to a priesthood at Rheims…..

……who was also drawn and quartered…..

At Genings’s hearing……….

…..to make him a scoffe to the people………..

…….the authorities had………..

………….vested him again, not with his priestly garments, but (almost as King Herod and Pilates soldiers did our Saviour) with a ridiculous  fool’s coat, which they found in Mr. Wells his house, and when they had so altered him, they laughing told him, he was more fit in that attire to be presented to the Queen for a jester, then to a Nun for a Confessor.

The Shakespeare Code believes that it was this incident that caused Shakespeare to describe the Catholic martyrs in Sonnet 124 as……

………..the fools of time,
Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.

See: Shakespeare in Italy

But there was another Jesuit missionary who also had a profound effect on Shakespeare…..

……..whom he describes as his…..

…….loving cousin, W.S……

He  influenced Shakespeare’s imagery, vocabulary and thought.

He was Robert Southwell.

[See Shakespeare, the Earl and the Jesuit (2008) a brilliant book by the distinguished American Shakespeare scholar, John Klause.]

In 1587 Southwell wrote his Epistle of Comfort for the wife of Philip Howard, 20th Earl of Arundel…..

…….a Catholic convert who from 1585 had been under sentence of death in the Tower.

In it Southwell writes about the glory of martyrdom…..

……BUT HE DOES NOT ATTACK ELIZABETH PERSONALLY….

He writes:

Then as regards to the Queen (to whom I have never done nor wished any evil) I have daily prayed for her and now with all my heart do pray that from his great mercy, through the wounds and most worthy merits of Christ his son, He may grant that she may use the ample gifts and endowments wherewith He has endowed her to the immortal glory of her name, the prosperity of the whole nation and the eternal welfare of her whole soul and body……

Southwell also responded to Elizabeth’s 1591 Declaration with……..

…..An Humble Supplication to Her Majesty………..

……..never published, but circulated in manuscript.

 Southwell makes the same point about the Anglican clergy that Persons made…..

…..that though the Catholic priests numbered only one tenth of the Protestant priests, they had….

……….happily more gentlemen than in all the other clergy of the whole realm.

He vividly describes the torture Elizabeth’s officers use……….

……sleep deprivation and mutilation of….

………….those parts that it is almost a torture for Christian ears to hear it. Let it then be judged what it was to chaste and modest men to endure it the shame being no les offensive to their mind than the pain, though most excessive to their bodies.

But, unlike Persons, Southwell firmly believed that Elizabeth was opposed to such cruelties herself. He addressed the Queen with…. 

…..the most formal respect, acknowledging her as an anointed sovereign, and presenting his arguments as if she knew nothing of the barbarous treatment ordered by her ministers.

He called her…….

………most merciful Princess………

……and made a direct, personal appeal to her……..

……gracious self……………….

……to bring her back to Catholicism.

In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare, like Southwell, gives Elizabeth the benefit of the doubt.

The Princess of France is not a sadist…..

…..drunk with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.

She is simply morally compromised by her pursuit of fame.

She kills deer because she wants to be recognised as a skilled hunter.

We have seen how

…..the poor deer……..

……which is spelt…..

……the poore Deare…

…..in the 1599 Quarto version of the play…

 

…..can symbolise…..

(1) …the literal deer which Elizabeth slew on her Progresses….

…and….

(2) ….the men who are ‘slain’ by the beauty of Elizabeth.

…..as the song in the Cowdray Progress demonstrates….

See Part Two

But it is the view of The Shakespeare Code that there are……

 …….THREE MORE CODED MEANINGS TO ‘DEARE’!!!

……MEANINGS THAT ONLY A ROMAN CATHOLIC WOULD HAVE SPOTTED!!!

FIRST, THOUGH, WHAT WAS THE ‘FAME’ THAT QUEEN ELIZABETH SOUGHT?

Elizabeth once discussed her posthumous fame – her legacy – with her ladies-in-waiting…………..

…..and said on the subject of her epitaph:

I am no lover of pompous title, but only desire that my name may be recorded in a line or two, which shall briefly express my name, my virginity, the years of my reign, the reformation of religion under it, and my preservation of peace.

And the inscription on her actual tomb begins with:

Sacred to memory: Religion to its primitive purity restored….

So the fame that Elizabeth most earnestly sought was as the reformer of religion…..

 ………and it was this longing….

……for praise, an outward part….

…….that caused her to….

….spill

The poore Deare’s blood….

So what or who was the ‘poore Deare’?

MEANING (3).

In August 1581, Robert Persons was working as a missionary in England, disguised as a soldier.

He wrote:

It is the custom of the Catholics themselves to take to the woods and thickets, to ditches and holes even, for concealment, when their houses are broken into at night.

Sometimes when we are sitting at table quite cheerfully, conversing familiarly about matters of faith or piety…it happens that someone rings at the front door a little more insistently than usual, so he can be put down as an official.

Immediately, like deer that have heard the voice of hunters and prick their ears and become alert, all stand to attention and stop eating and command themselves to God in the briefest of prayers; no word or sound of any sort is heard  until the servants report what is the matter….

The deer as an image of  Roman Catholics was an old one….

…….as can be seen in one of Rome’s earliest basilicas…….

……..of deers drinking from the waters of spiritual truth…..

…….in reference to Psalm 41………

…As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee……..

So spilling….

…..the poore Deare’s blood….

…..is a reference to Elizabeth’s bloody execution of Catholic Martyrs…..

….the fools of time….

…..like Wells and Genings.

MEANING (4).

When John Dryden……

….. recorded his conversion to Catholicism, he did so in a poem entitled…..

The Hind and the Panther…………

….where….

A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged

………represented the Catholic Church…….

…….. and the  panther, the Church of England.

Dryden was drawing on a on a long tradition of equating the deer with Christianity…….

………..which before the reformation meant only Catholicism.

So spilling….

…..the poore Deare’s blood….

….can also mean destroying the Roman Catholic Church….

….which is exactly what Elizabeth intended to do.

MEANING (5).

But the deer was also thought to kill snakes….

It miraculously drew them out of holes with its breath…..

 

……and trampled them underfoot.

So the deer was also an image of Christ himself….

…..(destroying the Devil and all his works)….

…..and often appeared with a crucifix between his horns……

George Herbert……

………born the year after the premiere of Love’s Labour’s Lost…..

……in his great poem Love….

Lover bade me welcome

But my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin……….

……uses the phrase………..

……..my dear……..

….when he is addressing Christ….

…..and this equation of the deer and Christ has its roots in the Christianised interpretation of The Song of Solomon…..

My lover is like a swift gazelle or a young dear….

So when the Princess of France….

….spills the poore Deare’s blood….

…..it can also refer to Elizabeth’s re-crucifying Christ himself……

….. when she kills his Catholic followers…..

……and tries to destroy the Old Faith….

We can never know how many Catholics in Shakespeare’s audience picked up these coded references…..

……but they seem to have been forgotten by the time the First Folio was published in 1623…..

….or deliberately suppressed after the Catholic Gunpowder Plot.

Here the spelling of…..

…..Deare….

….is changed back to its more usual spelling…..

….Deere…..

By then, Catholicism in Britain was seen as a lost cause….

•

ENVOI

Robert Southwell was himself arrested the month after the first performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost.  

Topcliffe tortured  him ten times, then hanged him in 1595.

He had intended to draw and quarter him alive as well: but Southwell cut a figure of such dignity and bravery on the scaffold that the crowd, led by Charles Blount, recently created Lord Mountjoy, insisted that Southwell be hanged till he was dead.

Some accounts say Mountjoy – who played Longaville in the play…..

See: ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ revisited: Aristocratic Actors.

…..pulled on Southwell’s legs himself.

If Mountjoy was in the crowd, it is highly likely that Southwell’s ‘loving cousin, W.S.’ was there as well.

Southwell prayed for the Queen on the scaffold.

We don’t know if he still believed that Elizabeth was unaware of the tortures that Topcliffe inflicted: but he would have been horrified by the letter about him Topcliffe sent to the Queen in June, 1592, for her….

…. pleasure.

He describes how Southwell would be manacled at the wrists….

…….his feet standing upon the ground and his hands, but as high as he can reach against the wall. It will be as though he were dancing a trick or a figure at trenchmore.

Trenchmore was a lively dance….

THE END

 

 Brothers and Sisters of the Code might be interested in reading:

‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’: The Background.
‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’: The Original Cast.
‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’: Aristocratic Actors.