The Shakespeare Code

……was a brilliant poet and a brilliant critic…..

The Shakespeare Code will demonstrate in future posts that he was correct about All’s Well that Ends Well when, in lectures given in 1813 and 1818, he said that…..

[the play] as it has come down to us, was written at two different and rather distant points of the poet’s life.

……and pointed out there were….

…..very clearly two distinct styles, not only of thought but of expression…..

HOWEVER…..

…..this Post will demonstrate that….

COLERIDGE WAS WRONG ON ONE VITAL DETAIL!!!

To elaborate….

In the play, Helena……

….the daughter of an accomplished apothecary who has recently died….

…..is in love with Bertram, Count of Rossillion……

 

…..a nobleman way above her in social class.

However, using the skills her father taught her, Helena manages to cure the King of France of his fistula…..

…..and as a reward he grants her request that Bertram should be her husband.

But Bertram doesn’t want to know!

He flees the court before the marriage is consummated…..

…and Helena, disguised as a Pilgrim……

….chases after him to Florence……

She meets a Widow and her daughter Diana……

….waiting to see the army march past……

…..with Bertram in its ranks…..

•

WIDOW

Here you shall see a countryman of yours

That has done worthy service.

HELENA

His name, I pray you.

DIANA

The Count Rousillon: know you such a one?

HELENA

But by the ear, that hears most nobly of him:

His face I know not.

•

Helena DOES of course know her husband’s face…..

But she has to keep up the pretence that she is not married to him.

Coleridge was ‘in love’ with the character of Helena….

….and this lie disturbs him.

As he writes in his Lectures on Shakespeare….

Shall we say here that Shakespeare has unnecessarily made his loveliest character utter a lie? Or shall we dare think that where to deceive was necessary, he thought a pretended verbal verity a double crime, equally with the other a lie to the hearer, and at the same time a lie to one’s own conscience?

THE CODE BELIEVES THAT HELENA WAS NOT LYING AT ALL!!!

Well, at worst ‘equivocating’….

To explain why we must first look at Shakespeare’s Sonnet 7.

This was written in a sequence of seventeen sonnets…..

…..commissioned by Mary Browne, Second Countess of Southampton….

……for the seventeenth birthday of her son, Henry Wriothesley….

……aka ‘Harry Southampton’….

……to persuade him to marry Elizabeth de Vere…..

…..the grand-daughter of his guardian, Lord Burghley….

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

The trouble was that Harry was only interested in sex with other young men….

……often lower class…..

……or in masturbating alone.

Sonnet 7 predicts what will happen to Harry if he continues with this life-style….

The Code believes there is an ‘ostensible’ meaning to this Sonnet – and a ‘coded’ one.

First, the ostensible meaning……

Sonnet 7

Lo in the Orient when the gracious light,

Lifts up his burning head, each under eye

Doth homage to his new appearing sight,

Serving with looks his sacred majesty….

Ostensible Meaning:

When the flaming sun rises in the east, everyone worships it like a king by turning to look at it….

And having climb’d the steep up heavenly hill,

Resembling strong youth in his middle age,

Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,

Attending on his golden pilgrimage:

Ostensible Meaning:

When the sun climbs to the midpoint in the sky – looking young and lusty even though he is at the midpoint of his journey – he still has worshippers who admire and follow him like a king….

But when from high-most pitch with weary car,

Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,

The eyes (fore duteous) now converted are

From his low tract and look an other way:

Ostensible Meaning:

But when from this exalted position he starts to decline like an old man, no one looks at him any more and all turn their eyes away to gaze at something else…

So thou, thy self out-going in thy noon:

Unlook’d, on diest unless thou get a son.

Ostensible Meaning:

In the same way when you start to lose strength in the twilight of your life people will neglect you and ignore your death unless you have borne a son….

•

Shakespeare is issuing the same warning to Harry that others were issuing to Queen Elizabeth….

Because you have no son, courtiers will shun you as you approach death…..

…..and spend their time cultivating the new monarch…..

This is indeed what happened.

The court cold-shouldered the dying Queen while they were paying court to the new monarch-in-waiting, James VI of Scotland….

At Christmas, 1602,  Queen Elizabeth’s godson, Sir John Harington…..

…..sent to James the gift of a dark lantern with the sun and moon and the stars….

…..and told James he was the new sun rising up.

William Camden – the contemporary historian – 

….suggests that the Queen’s final melancholy might partly have been the result of rumours she had heard….

…..and the direct report of King Henri IV of France…..

…that…

…..many of the nobility did by underhand letters and messengers seek to curry favour with the king of Scots, that they adored him as the rising sun, and neglected her as now being ready to set.

Shakespeare, in Sonnet 7, is doubtless having his own dig at Elizabeth.

His Roman Catholic family had been persecuted by Elizabeth’s henchmen…

….as had the family of his Catholic patron, Mary Countess of Southampton.

He has another dig at Elizabeth in Sonnet 11:

Herein [parenthood] lives wisdom, beauty, and increase,

Without this folly, age, and cold decay:

If all were minded so, the times should cease

And threescore year would make the world away:

Let those whom nature hath not made for store,

Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish,

Look whom she best endow’d, she gave the more;

Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish.

Shakespeare is here obliquely referring to the Queen’s barreness and ugliness…..

She was also hurtling towards…..

…..three-score year…….

…..when the Birthday Sonnets were written in 1590.

But the second, CODED meaning to Sonnet 7 – as we shall see – throws complete light onto Helena’s line….

His face I know not

•

Shakespeare’s sonnets make continual reference to Harry’s masturbation.

In his very first sonnet Shakespeare writes:

But thou [Harry] contracted to thine own bright eyes,

Feed’st thy light’s flame with self substantial fuel,

Making a famine where abundance lies,

Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:

Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,

And only herald to the gaudy spring,

Within thine own bud buriest thy content,

And tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding…

The……

self-substantial fuel…..

……is a reference to the seminal fluid that Harry produces when he masturbates…..

…..semen that he won’t share with a woman and consequently creates….

…a famine where abundance lies…

The ‘bud’ where Harry ‘buries’ his ‘content’ is clearly a reference to Harry’s penis.

Reference to masturbation is made even more obvious in Sonnet 4….

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend,

Upon thy self thy beauty’s legacy?

Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,

And being frank she lends to those are free:

Then beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse,

The bounteous largesse given thee to give?

Profitless usurer [money-lender]why dost thou use

So great a sum of sums yet can’st not live?

Shakespeare often uses money as an image for semen…..

…..so ‘spending’ here clearly implies seminal emission.

The ‘bounteous largesse given thee to give’ is a bantering reference to Harry’s massive sex drive……

…… and the size of his penis itself….

‘So great a sum of sums’ is a witty reference to the frequency of Harry’s ‘self-abuse’….

So when Shakespeare refers to Harry being ‘contracted’ to his own ‘bright eyes’ in Sonnet 1, ‘eyes’ can have a sexual connotation as well…

Eyes are round and there are two of them……

…..just like testicles…

So, with all this in mind, The Code will now reveal the coded meaning of Sonnet 7…..

•

Lo in the Orient when the gracious light,

Lifts up his burning head, each under eye

Doth homage to his new appearing sight,

Serving with looks his sacred majesty….

Coded Meaning:

At dawn, when you a have a morning erection and your penis rises, each of your testicles is drawn up around its shaft…

And having climb’d the steep up heavenly hill,

Resembling strong youth in his middle age,

Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,

Attending on his golden pilgrimage:

Coded Meaning:

When your powerful throbbing penis has climbed the mons Veneris and stands erect, your testicles are still drawn up with it.

But when from high-most pitch with weary car,

Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,

The eyes (fore duteous) now converted are

From his low tract and look an other way:

Coded Meaning:

But when, after seminal emission, the penis grows flaccid again, the testicles swing loose from it.

So thou, thy self out-going in thy noon:

Unlook’d, on diest unless thou get a son.

Coded Meaning

So when you come by yourself – when your penis is erect like the hands of a clock at noon – there will be no-one there to share the sex act with you…

‘To die’ often meant to come in Elizabethan and Jacobean times.

Leontes in The Winter’s Tale,  in a fit of sexual jealousy of his wife Hermione, describes her and her supposed lover Polixenes as…

paddling palms and pinching fingers

…and sighing

as ’twere
The mort o’ the deer…..

And the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost, when she prepares to go hunting…..

….talks about spilling ‘the poor deer’s [dear’s] blood’ in a sexually ambiguous way…

See: The Princess of France IS Queen Elizabeth.

This ambiguity fills Shakespeare’s work…..

All the features of the face – the eyes, the beard, the nose – can have sexual connotations….

‘The eyes’ as we have seen can be the testicles…..

…as they are in Sonnet 56, written after Shakespeare and Harry have satiated themselves sexually.

Shakespeare invites Harry to pause and recover his potency…..

Otherwise people will say that his appetite for food is stronger than his appetite for sex....

Sweet love, renew thy force: be it not said

Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,

Which but to-day by feeding is allay’d,

To-morrow sharpen’d in his former might.

So love be thou: although to-day thou fill

Thy hungry eyes even till they wink with fulness,

To-morrow see again, and do not kill

The spirit of Love with a perpetual dullness…

‘Perpetual dullness’ = ‘long-lasting lack of sex drive.’

‘Eye’ singular can also be the penis itself……

…..as it is in Love’s Labour’s Lost when Boyet – the gay old gossip – describes the King of Navarre’s erection on seeing the beautiful Princess of France…

Why, all his [Navarre’s] behaviours did make their retire

To the court of his eye, peeping thorough desire:

His heart, like an agate, with your print impress’d,

Proud [erect] with his form, in his eye pride [sexual drive] express’d:

Methought all his senses were lock’d in his eye,

As jewels in crystal for some prince to buy;

Who, tendering their own worth from where they were glass’d,

Did point you to buy them, along as you pass’d:

There is even a bawdy implication in Shakespeare’s first meeting with the young Harry in Sonnet 104:

To me fair friend you never can be old,

For as you were when first your eye I eyde,

Such seems your beauty still….

‘Beards’ can be the pubic hair of both men and women….

In Twelfth Night Feste says to Viola – who is in disguise as a boy –

Now Jove, in his next commodity of hair, send thee a beard!

And Viola/Caesario, who is in love with Count Orsino, replies:

By my troth, I’ll tell thee, I am almost sick for
one: though I would not have it grow on my chin.

In All’s Well that Ends Well old Lafeu makes a direct comparison with the nose and the penis of Parolles….

Why dost thou garter up thy arms o’ this fashion? dost make hose of sleeves? do other servants so? Thou wert best set thy lower part where thy nose stands..

And indeed, the word ‘face’ itself can represent the genital area…..

….as it does in King Lear when the demented King says:

Behold yond simpering dame,
Whose face between her forks [legs] presages snow;
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure’s name….

And in Sonnet 3 – when Shakespeare exhorts Harry to look in his mirror…

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest

The face that Harry sees is both his ‘ostensible’ one….

…AND his ‘coded’ one….

Now is the time that face should form another….

It’s the genitals that reproduce, not the literal face! 

Shakespeare is imagining Harry standing naked in front of his looking glass….

[Pauline Kiernan in her excellent book Filthy Shakespeare (2006) even argues that ‘face’ can mean ‘arse’ as well (her word!) ‘punning on the French fesses, buttocks.]

So, when Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well claims….

His [Betram’s] face I know not….

Coleridge can relax…..

She is not lying as such….

She has not been to bed with her husband so hasn’t ‘known’ his genital area.

She is equivocating…..

….as she has to do many times in the play to get her man.

As a Roman Catholic, Shakespeare would have identified with her completely.

Catholics under Queen Elizabeth became expert at saying one thing but meaning another….

…. so that their souls would not be harmed by a lie…

But there were other reasons that Shakespeare empathised with Helena…..

These  we shall explore in subsequent posts….

(It’s best now to read: How John Dover Wilson got ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ NEARLY right.)