The Shakespeare Code

 

It’s best to read: How Coleridge got ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ right AND wrong!

….and: How John Dover Wilson got ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ NEARLY right! (Part One)

and

How John Dover Wilson got ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ NEARLY right! (Part Two)

and

Thomas Nashe was Shakespeare’s collaborator on ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’

and

Why did Shakespeare write ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ Part One.

FIRST!!!

Why did Shakespeare turn Bertram in to a psychopath?

The answer can again be found in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

They reveal an affair between Shakespeare and Harry that lasted from 1592…..

…….to 1605…..

There were infidelities and betrayals on both sides – lots of door-slamming and walk outs.

But the love survived Harry’s sudden onset of heterosexuality when he married Elizabeth Vernon – whom he adored…..

……and the birth of daughters.

It even survived the Essex Rebellion when Harry, along with his intimate friend the Earl of Essex, tried to overthrow Queen Elizabeth.

Essex was beheaded…….

…. and Harry, under sentence of death, was locked in the Tower.

What Shakespeare’s affair with Harry couldn’t survive, though, was the birth of a son to Elizabeth in 1605.

Shakespeare writes about this in Sonnet 126…..

O thou my lovely boy, who in thy power

Dost hold time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour,

Who hast by waning grown, and therin shows

Thy lover’s withering as thy sweet self growst;

Shakespeare had used the phrase……

…..sweet self……

…..in his Birthday Sonnets, fifteen years earlier, to mean Harry’s baby boy.

By having a son, Harry is able, miraculously, to both wane and wax at the same time.

He will grow weaker as time passes, but his baby will grow stronger.

Harry, besotted with his son, had neglected Shakespeare and this had led to his…..

….lover’s [Shakespeare’s] withering’….

In fact Harry had done more than neglect Shakespeare: he had rejected him outright.

Harry had hoped to become King James’s new boyfriend when he was released from the Tower: but James preferred prettier, younger men. The Tower and illness had taken their toll on Harry’s good looks.

Pushed from the gay centre of power, Harry became bitterly homophobic. He wanted his son to grow up to be a brave, straight soldier.

Sir Philip Sidney…….

 

…….Harry’s hero…..

…… had demonstrated in his Arcadia that a man could dress up as a woman on one day….

……and kill a lion the next.

But times had changed.

Shakespeare, the Player, had to go.

In Sonnet 126 Shakespeare finally wishes death on Harry:

If nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,

As thou gowest onwards still will pluck thee back,

She keeps thee to this purpose: that her skill

May time disgrace, and wretched minute kill.

Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure:

She may detain, but not still keep her treasure!

Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,

And her quietus is to render thee.

Dame Nature might be keeping him preternaturally young and beautiful, but in the end she will have to give him over to Old Father Time and

….render….

….him – break down his body – in the grave….

The brackets at the end of the ‘Sonnet’……

….which at 12 lines isn’t a Sonnet at all…..

…..indicate that lines are missing from the poem….

…..and represent the yawning family tomb waiting for Harry in St. Peter’s Church in Titchfield.

 

See: Sonnet 126 Decoded.

Shakespeare then went on to write his great, nihilistic masterpiece King Lear, in which an old King is thrown out of his Kingdom…..

……as Shakespeare had been thrown out of the Southampton household….

……and is left hurling impotent insults at the universe.

The play proclaims that nothing in life has worth.

Or if it does, it will be brutally snatched away…..

Shakespeare’s despair distilled into revenge…

He decided to publish all his private Sonnets to Harry……

…..the abusive ones as well as the loving ones……

…..and made sure that everyone knew that Harry was the recipient….

See: The Dedication to Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded

Shakespeare then turned his attention to Love’s Labour’s Won.

He re-wrote it as an attack on his old lover.

All of Bertram’s redeeming features in the Boccaccio tale are wiped out.

He is no longer

a goodly young gentleman…

…or even…

….a courteous knight well-beloved in the city.

He becomes an unredeemed brute, snobbish, selfish, manipulative, mendacious, lustful and foolish….

…..whom even his mother condemns and disowns.

To make sure the audience would know Bertram was Harry, all the actor would have needed was to enter with a wig with long curly hair…..

 

But Shakespeare flashes up Bertram’s identity in the text as well….

Bertram becomes a General of Horse: Harry was a General of Horse on the Irish campaign.

Bertram woos Diana with song: Harry, in Shakespeare’s mind at least, was…..

…..music to hear……

Bertram hates cats: Harry hated cats.

He had himself painted with one in the Tower to show he had mastered his passions.

See: The Earl of Southampton and Trixie the Cat.

But Shakespeare’s intention wasn’t solely revenge.

He makes a fascinating change to the Boccaccio tale by introducing Bertram’s mother, the Countess of Rossillion.

Countess Mary died in 1607……

…….the year scholars now think Shakespeare wrote the play……

…..and was entombed close to her first husband, the Second Count of Southampton, in the family vault of St. Peter’s, Titchfield.

 

Shakespeare clearly loved Mary, who gave him his first real chances in life.

He celebrates her warmth and her wisdom and even her Roman Catholicism.

She makes a coded reference to the Virgin Mary in the play, Bertram’s only hope!

What angel shall

Bless this unworthy husband? he cannot thrive,

Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear

And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath

Of greatest justice.

This was something very dangerous for a playwright to do two years after the Roman Catholic Gunpowder Plot.

Shakespeare also acknowledges the remarkable part Count Mary played in his relationship with Harry.

In this re-write of Love’s Labour’s Won, Helena is clearly Shakespeare in drag.

Boccaccio’s Helena is rich and independent: the All’s Well Helena is poor and vulnerable….

…..just as Shakespeare was when he joined the Southampton household in 1590.

When Helena says:

Twere all one

That I should love a bright particular star

And think to wed it, he is so above me:

In his bright radiance and collateral light

Must I be comforted, not in his sphere

…it could be Shakespeare himself speaking about Harry…..

….a point made by the visionary scholar Dover Wilson, in his Essential Shakespeare, as far back as the 1930s.

It is my belief that the remarkable scene in which Helena confesses her love to the Countess happened in real life….

…. and that Shakespeare confessed his love for Harry to Mary.

Early in her marriage, Countess Mary had fallen deeply in love with….

…..a common person…..

…..and her husband, Henry, the Second Count of Southampton…..

….disowned her and turned gay.

According to Countess Mary he made…

…His manservant his wife….

Mary swore in a letter to her father, Lord Montague……

…..England’s leading Roman Catholic….

…..that she had fallen in love with someone other than her husband……

…..but had never made love to him.

Helena, in the play, asks the Countess to empathise with her love for Bertram.

Had she herself ever loved passionately in her youth?

But restrained herself from acting out that love…..

….finding fulfilment in an act of non-fulfilment?

but if yourself,

Whose aged honour cites a virtuous youth,

Did ever in so true a flame of liking

Wish chastely and love dearly, that your Dian

Was both herself and love: O, then, give pity

To her, whose state is such that cannot choose

But lend and give where she is sure to lose;

That seeks not to find that her search implies,

But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies!

The Countess, silently saying ‘yes’, gives her blessing to Helena’s liaison with her son…..

…..just as Mary gave hers to Shakespeare.

The Countess’s love had crossed barriers of class……

Shakespeare’s love crossed barriers of sex as well.

Shakespeare, in the play, was clearly examining his own feelings and behaviour. 

He had often been a ‘Helena’ in his relationship with Harry…..

……besotted, passive and accepting…….

……sometimes waiting for hours for Harry to turn up.

 

Being your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desires?

I have no precious time at all to spend,

Nor services to do, till your require:

Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour

Wjhilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,

Nor think the bitterness of absence sour

When you have bid your servant once adieu. (Sonnet 57)

Had he been right to cast himself as a…

…slave..

….and Harry as his….

…sovereign….?

As he was writing All’s Well, Shakespeare was also working on A Lover’s Complaint …..

……a narrative poem which concluded the volume of his Sonnets. 

Here he does something similar to All’s Well……

….he casts himself as another woman and Harry as another psychopath!

To make sure everyone knew it was Harry, he described his….

….browny locks

…..which hung…..

…..in crooked curls

And every light occasion of the wind

Upon his lips their silken parcels hurls…

The woman/Shakespeare describes her seducer’s….

…..passion

…..like Harry/Bertram’s, as

…..an art of craft…..

She/he also observes that…

When he most burned in heart-wish’d luxury

He preached pure maid, and praised cold chastity.

But at the conclusion of the poem the woman – who is ‘the lover’ of the title   – claims that she would go through the whole affair again!

A Lover’s Complaint was published a year or two after the first performance of All’s Well.

Had Shakespeare reached the same, positive conclusion when he wrote the play?

Not quite.

He was still trying to establish the truth of things.

He admits that Bertram/Harry…..

……however appalling they are as lovers…..

……are brave and skilful on the field of war.

That is what redeems them.

As the First Lord, speaking in what is surely Shakespeare’s own voice, says:

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.

Also the Countess notices that, when Diana produces the ring that six generations of Bertram’s family have worn…..

…..and which he has traded in for a one-night stand with her…..

Bertram has the decency to blush.

So Harry was not entirely Satanic!

But what about Parolles?

To find out, click: HERE!