The Shakespeare Code

Why did William Shakespeare write Love’s Labour’s Lost?

by Stewart Trotter.

The Background.

It is my belief that Love’s Labour’s Lost was first performed, in private performance, in the grounds of Place House, Titchfield, at Whitsun in 1592.

The beautiful Mary Browne, Second Countess of Southampton……

……was the host….

…… and the dashing guest of honour was Robert Devereux, the Second Earl of Essex…..

……fresh from his ‘triumph’ at the Siege of Rouen…..

……(which in reality had been a military disaster).

The play was performed to the background of the Titchfield Whitsun Fair……

……first instituted as a four-day Corpus Christi Fair by King Henry VI in 1447…..

….and which seems to burst into the play itself….

(There are references to a dancing horse, the Morris Men’s hobby-horse…..

…..silk ribbons, jousting and gifts bought at fairs…

….fairings.

In fact the word ‘fair’ is mentioned over forty times in the play.)

Topographical features of Titchfield itself are mentioned in the pay…..

……many of which can be seen to this day.

The remains of the…..

curious knotted garden

…. in the Abbey Grounds…..

……and….

the steep up-rising of the hill…..

…opposite the Abbey Gates.

There is even the mill Berowne mentions when he hides in a tree…..

….more sacks to the mill….

……now a pub at the foot of Mill Lane.

The outlines of…..

The Parke

….which is mentioned in the play…..

…..and features in this old c. 1610 map of the area…..

 

….can still be seen….

…..as can the ruins of…..

The Place

…the alternative name for ‘Place House’…..

 

…….the converted Titchfield Abbey….

…… which Henry VIII gave as a gift to Thomas Wriothesley, the First Earl of Southampton…

 

Titchfield also provides the answer to linguistic puzzles in the play.

Holofernes, the garrulous pedant, is said to…

…..educate youth in a Charge-house…..

What is a ‘Charge-house’?

In Mill Lane is a building known as The Schoolhouse….

In its upper storey it has the remains of a secure room or safe….

Clearly the school, which is on a road, doubled as a toll house. 

But it is a Titchfield feature which no longer exists – though remembered by older local people – which holds the answer to the play’s most difficult puzzle.

Why is the dark-skinned coquette, Rosaline, described by Berowne as….

a whitely wanton?

It’s a reference to Whitely Lodge…..

…..a property owned by the Southampton family for their shadier goings on…

In the play the fantastical Spaniard Don Armado, desperately in love with the loose-living country wench, Jaquenetta, plans to visit her at….

The Lodge

But why did William Shakespeare write the play in the first place?

THERE ARE NINE MAIN REASONS!

REASON ONE: For money….

It was a commission from Countess Mary…..

She had commissioned Shakespeare two years previously, in 1590, to write seventeen sonnets for the seventeenth birthday of her son, Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton (a.k.a. ‘Harry Southampton’) to convince him to get married.

The ploy hadn’t worked – gay young Harry wasn’t interested in women…..

….so Mother Mary tried again, this time with a play…

Countess Mary was under financial pressure herself. She was a widow and her son’s guardian, Lord Burghley……

……wanted Harry to marry his granddaughter, Elizabeth de Vere.

If he refused, the Southampton family would face a massive £5,000 fine when Harry came of age – in two years’ time.

REASON TWO: To ‘heterosexualise’ Harry.

Harry’s father, the Second Earl of Southampton……

……..had accused his wife Mary of infidelity with…..

a common person

…..and thrown her out of the house.

According to Mary, he then proceeded to make his Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Thomas Dymmock….

….his wife…

…..and surrounded his son with an all-male culture……

….a whole troupe of at least a hundred well-mounted gentlemen and yeomen….

and

…tall goodly fellows that kept a constant pace.

Harry had grown up suspicious of women and preferring male companionship…..

…..especially that of the Second Earl of Essex, also a ward of Burghley, whom he worshipped.

Shakespeare echoes this situation in the play.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is about the King of Navarre and three of his aristocratic friends who swear to avoid all contact with women for three years….

…and devote themselves to study….

There are even bits of gay banter in the text….

The King claims he will

….use

…Don Armado for his…..

…..minstrelsy….

Minstrels, in Shakespeare’s day, were notorious for their homosexuality.

Berowne refers to minstrels later in the play when he mockingly quotes the King (who has just written a sonnet)

Tush! none but minstrels like of sonneting….

….and Don Armado describes how…..

……it will please his grace [the King] by the world, sometime to lean upon my poor shoulder, and with his royal finger, thus, dally with my excrement, with my mustachio…

But the play goes on to expose the folly of men trying to live without women.

The beautiful Princess of France and her Ladies-in-Waiting arrive on diplomatic business…..

….and one by one the men fall in love with them.

 Shakespeare wrote the part of  the King  of Navarre…..

…..for the nineteen year old Harry….

….in the desperate hope that some of the King’s heterosexuality might rub off on him….

(Boyet even gives a coded description of the King’s erection on first seeing the Princess of France……

His heart like an agate with your print impressed,

Proud with his form in his eye pride expressed…..)

The love sonnet the King writes to the Princess also has a reference to a rose…..

So sweet a kiss the golden Sun gives not

To those fresh morning drops upon the Rose

This is a reference both to the Southampton rose….

…and to Harry himself, whom Shakespeare refers to as…

…my Rose…

…in the Sonnets.

(The Southampton family – as we know from the Titchfield Parish Register – pronounced their family name…..

Wriothesley…..

…as….

Ryosely…..

And the….

…..fresh morning drops upon the Rose…..

…..are a coded reference to teenage Harry’s early morning seminal emissions!

Shakespeare had great fun with this subject in the Birthday Sonnets…

Unthrifty loveliness why dost thou spend

Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy….

Money was often a coded word for semen.)

Shakespeare wrote the parts of Lord Longaville and Lord Dumaine for two of Harry’s aristocratic friends….

….Charles Blount (later Lord Mountjoy)…

…and Roger Manners, Fifth Earl of Rutland….

Both were in Titchfield for the Whitsun/Essex celebrations…..

….and a plague was raging in London….

Lord Longaville in the play – as his name suggests – is tall…

Maria says to him….

The liker you; few taller are so young.

Blount was tall in real life….

Fynes Morison describes him as……….

….of stature tall and of very comely proportion.

Shakespeare also makes joking reference to the family name ‘Blount’ (pronounced ‘Blunt’)

Maria describes Longaville as having…..

….a sharp wit matched with too blunt a will….

(Shakespeare can never resist sexual innuendo!)

In the play Lord Dumaine is beardless….

He says to Katharine….

But what to me, my love? But what to me? A wife…

And she replies…

A beard, fair health and happiness…..

Roger Manners, Harry’s Cambridge friend, who played Dumaine, was sixteen at the time.

We have seen, he acquired a beard later in life.

He also acquired a wife – but never consummated the marriage.

Shakespeare also refers to the family name ‘Manners’ in the text…

Dumaine talks about……

…..the grosser manner of the world’s delights…..

…. and in a three-line exchange between Costard and Berowne, the word ‘manner/manor’ is mentioned EIGHT times….

COSTARD

The matter is to me, sir, as concerning Jaquenetta. The manner of it is, I was taken with the manner.

BEROWNE

In what manner?

COSTARD

In manner and form following, sir; all those three: I was seen with her in the manor-house, sitting with
her upon the form, and taken following her into the Park; which, put together, is in manner and form
following. Now, sir, for the manner,–it is the manner of a man to speak to a woman: for the form,–in some form.

But who was to play the Princess of France with whom Navarre falls in love?

A young actor in drag would have proved counter-productive….

Harry himself loved dressing up in women’s clothes…

…..a habit Shakespeare refers to in Sonnet 53:

On Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set

And you in Grecian tires are painted new…..

The answer was to cast a real woman…..

….the Earl of Essex’s sister….

……the ravishing Penelope Rich….

…famous for her black eyes and red hair…

….who, though married to Robert, Third Baron Rich, was the open mistress of Charles Blount.

(Women often performed in private entertainments – especially on Queen Elizabeth’s Progresses – and Penelope was to later act openly at Court in the reign of King James VI and I.)

The King of Navarre compares the Princess/Penelope’s hair to the sun…..

……flaming in the heavens….

And beauty’s crest becomes the heavens well…

But Berowne prefers his dark-skinned, dark-haired Rosaline….

…..and suggests that the Princess should dye her red hair black to resemble her…

O if in black my lady’s brows be deck’d,

It mourns that painting and usurping hair

Should ravish doters with;

And therefore is she born to make black fair.

Her favour turns the fashion of the days

For native blood is counted painting now;

And therefore red that would avoid dispraise,

Paints itself black, to imitate her brow.

Again Shakespeare plays on…

….Rich

Penelope’s married name…..

The Princess herself says:

Sweet hearts we shall be rich ere we depart…..

….and the word ‘rich’ is used seven times in the final scene.

This is the pun Sir Philip Sidney…..

…….who was in love with Penelope……..

……..had also used in his Sonnet Sequence, Astrophil and Stella…

Toward Aurora’s court a nymph doth dwell,

Rich in all beauties which man’s eye can see:

Beauties so far from reach of words, that we

Abase her praise, saying she doth excel:

Rich in the treasure of deserv’d renown,

Rich in the riches of a royal heart,

Rich in those gifts which give th’eternal crown;

Who though most rich in these and every part,

Which make the patents of true worldly bliss,

Hath no misfortune, but that Rich she is.

In his Sonnets Shakespeare also couples the names of ‘Manners’, ‘Rich’ and  ‘Blount/Blunt’…

Sonnet 52

So am I as the rich, whose blessed key,

Can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure,

The which he will not every hour survey,

For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.

Sonnet 85

My tongue-tied Muse in manners holds her still,

While comments of your praise richly compiled.

The Princess’s Ladies-in-Waiting in the play were played by Penelope’s closest female friends.

Dorothy Devereux, her sister….

…… played Maria – beloved of Longaville….

She is described in the play as wearing white…..

This was a characteristic of the whole Devereux family…..

….who often wore white to show their allegiance to Queen Elizabeth.

Frances Walsingham – the wife of Essex and widow of Sir Philp Sidney…..

 

…….played Katharine, beloved of Dumaine….

We are told in the play that Katharine’s sister had died….

The same thing had happened to Frances in real life….

Dumaine says of Katharine…

Her amber hairs for foul hath amber quoted…

In the painting we can see that not only does she have amber hair – she has an amber dress as well!

Antonio Perez who became part of the Essex entourage……

…..described Penelope, Dorothy and Frances as….

Three sisters and goddesses….

They were clearly an inseperable trio.

REASON THREE: To seduce the Dark Lady.

Rosaline – the dark-skinned coquette in the Princess’s entourage – was played by Amelia Bassano…..

…. the mixed-race singer, clavichord player…..

…..and young mistress to the Queen’s randy old cousin, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon……

.

……who later became the Lord Chamberlain…..

…….and ‘patron’ of Shakespeare’s company – the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

Amelia and her musical family of Sephardic Jews – originally from Venice – had been part of Queen Elizabeth’s progress to Cowdray and Titchfield in August and September of the previous year, 1591.

Hunsdon had attended a Privy Council meeting at Place House – and he could well have been lodged with Amelia in Whitely Lodge – another resonance to ‘whitely wanton’.

Amelia had stayed on at Titchfield to entertain Countess Mary, avoid the plague in London and have a crack at young Harry…

Shakespeare fell desperately in love with her…..

…..and wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost partly to seduce her.

He cast himself as  Lord Berowne and wrote teasing, bantering love scenes they could play together….

Art and life began to imitate each other:

Berowne sends love-sonnets to Rosaline……

Shakespeare was sending love-sonnets to Amelia in real life…..

Shakespeare writes to Amelia in Sonnet 130

My mistress when she walks treads on the ground….

Rosaline reports that in Berowne’s sonnet to her he has written, rather more flatteringly….

I were the fairest Goddess on the ground…..

Berowne claims…

Black is Beautiful

….in the play…

And Shakespeare claims…

Black is Beautiful in the Sonnets….

(That is, till he has an argument with Amelia….

….then it’s a very different matter.)

Amelia Bassano/Lanyer is the famous Dark Lady of the Sonnets……

……as A.L. Rowse brilliantly discovered in 1976…..

…..to howls of derision from Academe…

REASON FOUR: To promote himself.

Vigorous, ruthless, self-promotion was essential for actors and writers in Elizabeth’s reign.

All the Roman Catholic charities had been suspended – and the Protestants were slow to take up their work.

If you had no money, you starved to death – as many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries did.

By casting himself as Lord Berowne……

…..Shakespeare was making himself the equal of the ‘real’ lords, Harry, Blount and Manners…..

……rather in the way the South London boy, Noel Coward…..

…..turned himself into a pretend aristocrat.

In fact Berowne proves himself superior to the other Lords.

He takes the moral lead by predicting the men will not stick to their vows because…

every man with his affects [passions] is born

Not by might mastered, but by special grace [from God]…

He then proceeds to educate them into the overwhelming powers of heterosexual love…

Berowne

…to make the text work must be pronounced….

Brown

The phrase

brown studies

…..meaning…..

…. gloomy meditations

….had come into use c.1555.

Rosaline says:

Berowne they call him, but a merrier man,

Within the limit of becoming mirth,

I never spent an hour’s talk withal…

And at the end of the play Berowne says to Rosaline….

Studies my lady?

Berowne is a compliment to Shakespeare’s patron, Mary Brown.

It suggests that Shakespeare is now part of the Southampton family.

As indeed he was….

When Shakespeare’s family later acquired a crest, it incorporated the four silver falcons of the Southampton Coat of Arms….

(After the publication of the First Folio, the name ‘Berowne’ was changed to ‘Biron’.)

REASON FIVE: To flatter the audience…

The Earl of Essex – a compulsive jouster……..

…….would have taken an active part in the fair…..

But he was a member of the audience for the performance of Love’s labour’s Lost – watching his sisters, his wife and his friends perform – so he had to be acknowledged as well.

At Rouen he had fought alongside Henri, King of Navarre……

……and Armand de Gontaut, maréchal de Biron……

…….against Henri d’Orlèans, duc de Longueville……..

….. and Charles de Lorraine, duc de Mayenne….

Navarre, Biron, Longaville and Dumaine……

……a quarter of the cast had been named after Essex’s campaign a few months earlier!

Also the King of Navarre is named ‘Ferdinand’ – though his name is never mentioned in the play….

This is in compliment to Ferdinando, Lord Strange (pronounced ‘Strang’)….

…..whose Men Shakespeare had written and acted for in the Midlands….

….and who earlier in the year had put on Harey VI at the Rose Theatre in London.

REASON SIX: To satirise his enemies….

Shakespeare had become a member of the Southampton/Essex entourage – so their enemies were his enemies.

Part of the play’s function is satire……

…..directed notably at the group of scientists, mathematicians, radical thinkers and atheists who gathered round Henry Percy, the Ninth Earl of Northumberland, the Wizard Earl, at nearby Petworth……

They were people like Sir Walter Raleigh…..

……Essex’s main rival at Court….

…….a man who came from an ancient family but had no money other than what he could get from Queen Elizabeth as one of her favourites….

……He is is sent up in the play as the penniless Armado……

…..so poor he can’t even afford to buy a shirt……

….a fantastical Spaniard who sometimes breaks into Raleigh’s broad Devonshire accent.

As Holofernes the pedant observes, Armado says…

Chirrah

….instead of…..

Sirrah.

Raleigh had fallen in love with Bess Throckmorton…..

…..one of Elizabeth’s Ladies-in-Waiting…

…..to the Queen’s fury…..

…..and had started to write love poetry to her….

…just as Armado writes sonnets to the….

…..base wench….

…..Jaquenetta….

……who carried a fan just as Bess Throckmorton did….

(Costard the swain says…

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

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

Word reached Titchfield during preparations for Love’s Labour’s Lost that Raleigh had impregnated Bess – which called for a rapid – and impossible – change of plot.

Armado – who we first see besotted with Jaquenetta but rejected by her – turns out to be the father of her child. …..

…and OVERNIGHT she has become….

……two months on her way….

The text we have is a revision of the 1592 text, probably played at Elizabeth’s Court at Christmas in 1597.

By then Raleigh was back in favour. So the Braggart, Don Armado, may have been turned into a Spaniard to disguise the satire from the Queen….

By then the object of attack was most likely to have been Antonio Perez…….

…….a fantastical Spaniard in real life….

…….the meddling, homosexual, Catholic friend of Essex whom Elizabeth loathed….

As William Camden, the contemporary historian noted:

Verily she [Elizabeth] detested the man [Perez] who had contrary to his allegiance, divulged his King’s secrets; and Burghley, Lord Treasurer, scarce vouchsafed him a conference or speaking to. Indeed Essex entertained him at his house, and supplied him largely with money, using him as his counsellor, yea as an oracle, as one much versed in the secrets of the Spanish court, and a subtle politician…

Armado in the play is also referred to by Berowne as…..

…an oracle…

Also amongst the Wizard Earl’s entourage was the mystic and poet, George Chapman….

…….who becomes the lisping, flattering, effeminate Boyet who urges the Princess of France to…

…..summon up [her] dearest spirits

…..as Chapman claimed to have summoned up the spirit of Homer…..

…….and, later when he died, the spirit of Christopher Marlowe.

Again, Shakespeare works in a play on Chapman’s surname….

The Princess’s response to Boyet’s gross flattery is to say….

Good Lord Boyet, my beauty though but mean

Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:

Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,

Not utter’d by base sale of chapmen’s tongues…

Chapman was later to turn up in Shakespeare’s life as the Rival Poet of the Sonnets….

But perhaps Shakespeare’s most withering satire is reserved for someone who was part of the Southampton household….

….John Florio…..

….an Englishman in Italian

He was Harry’s Italian tutor and had ousted Shakespeare from his position as schoolmaster to the boys of Titchfield.

Dame Frances Yates…..

– the great Florio scholar – argues convincingly that Florio was placed in the Catholic Southampton household as a Protestant spy by Lord Burghley.

Bishop Warburton – writing in the eighteenth century – first records the tradition that the pedant, Holofernes, in the play is a satire against Florio.

At the time Florio was translating Montaigne – that’s why Holofernes is described by Armado as educating youth….

….on the top of a Mountaine….

He was also compiling an Italian/English dictionary, A World of Words….

……so Shakespeare makes him talk like a dictionary, never using one word when six will do.

Holofernes describes the deer that Princess shots as being……

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

Florio in his dictionary defines ‘caelo’ as

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

When Holofernes improvises a poem to celebrate the Princess’s shooting of the deer, he uses exaggerated alliteration: ‘

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

So does Florio:

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

Holofernes writes the abominable pageant entertainment for the Princess: it could well be that Florio penned the equally abominable Progress Entertainment for Queen Elizabeth…..

…..played at nearby Cowdray the previous year.

The Pilgrim in this entertainment declares that he has….

…..travelled many countries….

….and Florio’s habit was to cast himself as a Traveller, refined and cultivated in the ways of the world.

Holoferenes, in Love’s Labour’s Lost says:

I may speak of thee as the Traveller speaks of Venice….

Sir William Vaughan, in The Spirit of Detraction, certainly leaps to Florio’s defence.

He writes that if….

….an ingenuous scholar [Florio] but broach forth the barrel of his wit, which God hath given him; they cry out his brain is an empty barrel, his wit but barren, his matter borrowed out of other men’s books….

Florio could well have broached forth the barrel of his wit by writing the Cowdray Progress…..

And Shakespeare certainly cried out that Florio’s brain was empty by creating Holoferenes!

REASON  SEVEN: To examine the state of mind of Queen Elizabeth.

Queen Elizabeth had special ‘standings’ erected at Cowdray and Titchfield from which she shot rounded up deer with a crossbow….

…. at point blank range……

….a habit she adopted from her father, Henry VIII….

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

This unsporting carnage disgusted country folk.

After the Titchfield visit, Elizabeth repaid her host, Countess Mary, by hanging one of her best friends, Swithin Wells…….

……now a Catholic Saint……

……on a scaffold erected outside the Countess’s London home.

The play alludes to Elizabeth’s slaughter of deer…….

……and deer/dear can mean three things…..

(1) Literal deer….

(2) The men who fall in love with the Princess and are slain by her beauty…

(‘spilling blood’ can also be Elizabethan code for seminal emission.)

(3) Catholic martyrs…

Robert Persons…..

……the Jesuit Missionary – wrote in 1581:

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….

Shakespeare, in a speech he gives the Princess, speculates what can drive the Princess/Elizabeth – a woman of taste and discrimination – to indulge in such atrocities.

He concludes that she is pushed by outside forces – a need for fame – which turn her from her otherwise kindly nature.

Edmund Campion……..

…….the great Catholic Saint and Martyr…..

……always maintained that it was Elizabeth’s advisors who were evil – not the Queen herself.

In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare was prepared to give Elizabeth the benefit of the doubt.

But by the end of her reign he regarded her as a bloody tyrant….

REASON 8: To acknowledge death and sickness in the Southampton family.

Not to spoil it for people coming fresh to the play, it does not resolve in happiness…..

…..which adds a depth and dimension to it.

It also mirrors echoes the state of mind of the Southampton family.

As well as the shock of the execution of Swithin Wells, Mary’s twin brother, Anthony Browne, was very ill during the production of Love’s Labour’s Lost…..

And had been ill since Christmas…..

 Her father, Viscount Montague…..

…was also suffering from….

…..a tedious, troublesome and lingering kind of infirmity….

Mary’s brother died in the month following the production…

….and her father in October…..

Added to this, the Earl of Essex’s brother, Walter, had been killed a few months earlier at the siege of Rouen….

So an upbeat conclusion to the play would have been entirely inappropriate.

REASON NINE: To Prove he was a better writer than Thomas Nashe!

It is my belief that the beardless, tiny, ‘gat-toothed’ Thomas Nashe…

– the essayist and satirist –

……was also resident in Titchfield at the time……

….and often collaborated with Shakespeare….

(as he did with Ben Jonson…….

…on The Isle of Dogs….

……and Christopher Marlowe…..

…..on Dido and Aeneas….)

It is also my belief that he played the part of ‘the well-educated infant’ Moth…..

(an anagram of ‘Thom’)

…..and wrote the scenes between him and Don Armado.

Commenting upon Moth’s speech about Armado in love…..

……with [his] hat penthouse-like o’er the shop of your eyes; with [his] arms crossed on [his] thin-belly doublet like a rabbit on a spit……

……the Editor of new Cambridge University Press edition of the play says that…

The syntax and and satiric images in Moth’s speech here bring it closer than anything else in the play to the satiric prose style of Thomas Nashe….

It is ‘close’ to ‘the satiric prose style of Thomas Nashe’ because…….

THOMAS NASHE WROTE IT!!!

He has Armado call Moth….

…tender juvenal

….and

……most acute juvenal.

Later in the year, Robert Greene……

….the writer and notorious hedonist……

….who had also been part of the Titchfield writing team……

……described Nashe as…

….young Juvenal…

……in his posthumously-published A Groatsworth of Witte.

(Greene’s name is also sent up in the play. Don Armado says……

Greene indeed is the colour of lovers.)

But many people at the time thought that the pamphlet – which contains the famous

upstart crow

……attack on Shakespeare – was really written by Nashe himself.

Six years later, Francis Meeres in Palladis Tamia, Wit’s Treasury was also to describe Nashe as ‘young Juvenal’ – so the ‘young Juvenal’ trademark was Nashe’s own invention – his ‘trade-mark’….

Nashe also had every reason himself to be critical of Raleigh: he had worked for him and never been given a penny….

….hence the satire of Armado’s poverty and meanness.

Nashe writes in Pierce Penniless, published in the same year as the play…..

…..for what reason have I to bestow any of my wit upon him that will bestow none of his wealth upon me? Alas it is easy for a goodly tall fellow that shineth in his silks [Raleigh]  to come and outface a poor simple pedant in a threadbare cloak., and tell him his book is pretty.

He also refers to Raleigh as….

……an inamorata poeta…..

……who, just like Don Armado, will…..

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

The Southampton family had baled Nashe out of his money difficulties….

So Shakespeare had a talented rival in Nashe – just as he was later to have one in Chapman.

But Nashe was really only Shakespeare’s gag-man – up to his death in 1601.

Shakespeare was the poet…..

….and he makes sure he soars way above Nashe in the sublimity of the verse he writes for himself as Berowne…

Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible

Than are the tender horns of cock’ld 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.

•

FOOTNOTE: Love in the Time of Plague….

The erotic subtext of the play took over the lives of Shakespeare, Harry and Amelia…

…..and a complicated, twisted, painful love-triangle ensued…….

……in which Shakespeare finally came to realise he was more in love with Harry than Amelia….

Shakespeare left Titchfield for a bit and Amelia got pregnant and was married off to a

….minstrel..

… for

….colour….

But Nashe stayed on with….

…..my Lord…..

…as…

…..the plague’s prisoner in the country…..

Later in the year Queen Elizabeth came to visit the dying Lord Montague at West Horsley…..

Ever enigmatic, she gently fed the old Roman Catholic soup….

Nashe, alone, wrote Sommer’s Last Will and Testament  to entertain her….

….and it was played at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Summer Palace at Croydon….

But like Love’s Labour’s Lost the tone of the interlude is muted.

It moves from gentle mirth to gentle melancholy….

…..treating death as a natural progress from Summer to Winter…..

…..like the two wonderful, bitter-sweet, songs……

…..at the end of Shakespeare’s wonderful play….

© Stewart Trotter June 2016.