The Shakespeare Code

1. SHAKESPEARE AND TITCHFIELD

© Stewart Trotter, 3rd February, 2018.

A Talk given by Stewart Trotter and Karen Little at St. Peter’s Church, Titchfield on Saturday, 3rd February, 2018 at 7.30 p.m. The event was sponsored by the Friends of St. Peter’s.

 

It is often said that we know nothing about the life of William Shakespeare. The fact is, we know more about him than any person who has ever lived. He wrote 154 Sonnets – not counting the Sonnets which feature in his plays – in which, William Wordsworth said, he….

unlock’d his heart

So why don’t we hear more about them? Well for a start they are densely written and complicated. John Dover Wilson – the great, intuitive Shakespeare scholar, said they required more than one life-time to understand.

Well, I’ve been working on them since I was nineteen!

Also, Shakespeare did not publish them in chronological order. There are simply two disordered piles – sonnets for him and sonnets for her – and the ‘for him’ is by far the larger.

But, more particularly, people shy away from the Sonnets because of what they reveal. We have been brought up with the idea of Shakespeare that has its origins in the nineteenth century. Up to then Shakespeare was taken for granted and amazingly popular with the public. But people then had no illusions: they knew the plays were imperfect – and so they re-wrote them – sometimes, as in case of ‘King Lear’ – giving them happy endings when they had tragic ones. People firmly believed, for example, that if you performed ‘The Tempest’ in the way Shakespeare wrote it, it would be a disaster. So, in the Restoration version, Miranda acquires a sister.

But in the nineteenth century there was a crisis of religious faith. People had believed the literal truth of the Bible – that God had created the world in seven days. Now Charles Darwin, along with others, was putting forward the case for evolution.

Christ, in many minds, was no longer Divine. A new divinity was needed – and Shakespeare fitted the bill. Matthew Arnold describes him as a mighty mountain, unknowable, like a God, way above the humans below….

Others abide our question. Thou art free.

We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,

Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,

Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,

 

Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,

Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,

Spares but the cloudy border of his base

To the foil’d searching of mortality….

 

The Sonnets, when they are read, reveal a far more human Shakespeare, one all too ready to fall in love then out of love again, one who starts off idolizing people then grows to hate them, a jealous man, an insecure man, a man who wants revenge, a depressive, self-dramatising, suicidal man but one who, on his day, experiences peaks of sublime, rapturous joy. A man who has gone through every emotion the characters in his plays go through – who is no more in control of life, or distanced from it, than they are. Romeo, Mercutio, Lear, Prospero, Hamlet – they are all Shakespeare.

 

For this talk I have arranged the Sonnets in the order in which I believe they were written. Some Sonnets we know for certain were written at a particular time – the sonnets, for example, celebrating the Succession of King James.

 

Some we have to guess at. But I believe an extraordinary story emerges. I shall sketch out this story in the first half of the talk – quoting not only from the Sonnets but also from people who knew him.

William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to John and Mary Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. John was a glover, wool-dealer, butcher and money lender, who was so well-off he lent his own cash to the Stratford Council. Queen Elizabeth had been on the throne for six years, but was only just starting her serious persecution of Roman Catholics. In a stroke of ill luck, Elizabeth’s lover, Robert Dudley – later the Earl of Leicester…….

 

…….was gifted Kennilworth Castle by her – only eleven miles away from Stratford.

 

Dudley used the Castle to entertain his many mistresses – and used agents like the sadistic, cold-hearted Sir Thomas Lucy……

….. to harass and torment local Catholics – like the Shakespeares in Stratford and the Ardens – Shakespeare’s mother’s family – in Warwick. John Shakespeare went from being the Mayor of Stratford to a bankrupt in a matter of months. He was so hard up that he had to take away his son from the Grammar School. Will was an outspoken, extrovert boy – who, according to the antiquarian John Aubrey…..

 

 

….when he killed a calf would do it in high style and make a speech.

It was only a matter of time before Will would clash with Lucy. A new Catholic schoolmaster – John Cottam – came to Stratford and secured a place for Will in the household of the Hoghton family in Lancashire.

 

Here Will worked as a children’s entertainer, actor and singer. But Hoghton himself was arrested for recusancy, so Will had to return to Stratford at eighteen – hungry for experience. And indeed, hungry for Anne Hathaway – a beautiful, well off woman eight years his senior.

It was Will who did the chasing – and included in Shakespeare’s Sonnets – though it’s not technically a sonnet – is a ballad he used to woo her which plays on her family name. In it he casts himself in the role of what he actually was – a desperate, love-sick young man trying to seduce an older woman – who doesn’t want to know….

Those lips that Love’s own hand did make,

Breath’d forth the sound that said ‘I hate’

 

To me that languisht for her sake:

But when she saw my woeful state

Straight in her heart did mercy come,

Chiding that tongue that ever sweet,

Was us’d in giving gentle doom:

And taught it thus anew to greet

‘I hate’ she alter’d with an end

That follow’d it as gentle day,

Doth follow night who like a fiend

From heaven to hell is flown away

‘I hate’ from hate away she threw,

And sav’d my life saying ‘Not you’.

‘Hate away = ‘Hathaway.

 

The seduction ploy was all too successful. Ann became pregnant and in a hastily arranged marriage, she and Will became man and wife. Their daughter, Susanna, was born in 1583. Two years later they had twins, Judith and Hamnet.

It was at this time that the Earl of Leicester’s persecution of the Arden family reached its peak. Edward Arden was High Sheriff of the County – but refused to wear Leicester’s livery and was disgusted by the immorality and licence of Kenilworth Castle. Leicester – whose crest was a bear chained to a ragged staff …..

– was known as the Bear for his viciousness.

 

He raised the rents of his tenants ten times over and seized back private property on the authority of an old document he claimed he had found in the castle wall. He discovered that Arden had a Catholic priest pretending to be a gardener on his payroll and accused Arden of plotting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. Arden was hanged, drawn and quartered.

Shakespeare took what revenge he could: he poached rabbits and deer from Lucy’s property. Lucy had him whipped and he was only saved from jail by friends who pleaded his cause with The Bear. Shakespeare, however, could not contain himself. He got drunk and wrote a scurrilous attack on Lucy which he pinned on his gates.

A parliament member, a justice of peace,

At home a poor scarecrow, at London an ass,

If lousy is Lucy, as some volke miscall it,

Then Lucy is lousy whatever befall it.

He thinks himself great, yet an ass in his state

We allow by his ears but with asses to mate.

If Lucy is lousy as some volke miscall it

Sing lousy Lucy whatever befall it.

Will had to get out of town – and London was the obvious place. It was smelly, noisy and infected – but it was the best place to lose yourself in. He teamed up with Thomas Kyd – another grammar school boy slightly older than he was – and the two men shared a lodging, scratching a living from translations and working on plays. It was at this time they collaborated on early versions of ‘King Lear’, ‘Hamlet’ ‘Taming of the Shrew’ and ‘Henry IV and V’ and Kyd wrote the wildly popular blood and thunder revenge play – ‘The Spanish Tragedy’.

Kyd and Shakespeare had a wild night-life according to the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe……

– starching their beards, going on pub crawls and ending up in French brothels. Christopher Marlowe…..

– an out, campaigning, gay man – who famously said….

They be mad that love not tobacco and boys

…..also befriended Shakespeare and later shared lodgings with Kyd. Marlowe liberated Shakespeare’s gay side and the two men had a brief, but loving, affair which Shakespeare was later to recall, with affection, in the sonnets.

Marlowe, in ‘Hero and Leander’ wrote:

Who ever loved who loved not at first sight.

This became Shakespeare’s own creed, both in his life and his work. To protect himself from Lucy, Shakespeare befriended Robert Crowley – the Rector of St. Giles, Cripplegate ……

…….surplices and thought all wealth should be voluntarily re-distributed. He liked plainness in all things – including language and make-up. He was a publisher as well as a priest – and wanted to popularise Christianity through ballads. He wrote:

Let thine apparel be honest;

Be not decked past thy degree

Neither let thou thine head be dressed

Otherwise than beseemeth thee.

Let thine hair bear the same colour

That nature gave it to endure;

Lay it not out as doeth a whore

That would men’s fanatasies allure.

Paint not thy face in any wise

But make thy manners for to shine

And thou shalt please all such men’s eyes

As do to Godliness incline.

These Protestant ideas – so much at war with Catholic ones – were to stay in Shakespeare’s mind all his life.

Inspired by Crowley’s populism, Shakespeare set up a touring company – with Lord Ferdinando Strange as its nominal patron……

– to tour Biblical, Morality and Fairy Story plays round the Midlands. It was back-breaking work: the actors, according to a satirical play Histriomastix, mostly out of work alcoholic tradesmen supported by rich, gay lovers, had to push a cart up and down hills, laden with props and costumes. Sometimes they even had to sleep in the cart itself. They made a pittance as the public wasn’t interested in Morality Plays. They wanted Kyd’s horror shows. Also, the Armada made actors unpopular.

The public wanted manly men – not effeminate actors – and tore the costumes off the players backs to give to soldiers and sailors.

Everything came to a head in 1589. Lord Burghley – the Secretary of State for Elizabeth…..

……..banned the playing of all plays in London. And when the Lord Mayor tried to enforce this ruling, Shakespeare….

parted from him in a very contemptuous manner….

……and played at Cross Keys that very afternoon. The Lord Mayor had Shakespeare arrested and imprisoned. His touring days were over. For the moment at least.

But the Catholic network came to his rescue again. And this is where Titchfield comes in.

The widowed Mary Countess of Southampton….

……..commissioned the magnificent tomb you see in the Church……..

 

 

…….needed a tutor for her teenage son, Henry, the Third Earl of Southampton…….

……who would soon be leaving Cambridge. (You can see him kneeling in prayer on the left side of the tomb).

She also needed a schoolmaster for the Titchfield Grammar School………

 

……..a secretary, an entertainer, a factotum and a generally nice person to have around – a perfect job for Shakespeare, who Aubrey says was….

A handsome, well-shaped man – very good company and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit.

Shakespeare’s first job for Mary Southampton was to write seventeen sonnets for Henry’s seventeenth birthday to persuade him to get married. Henry – or Harry as he liked to be called – was Lord Burghley’s ward and Burghley wanted him to marry his grand-daughter. If he refused, the Southampton family would have to pay a colossal £5,000 fine – five million pounds in today’s money.

But there was a problem. Like his father, the Second Earl, lying in armour to the left of the tomb……

 

Harry didn’t care for women. The Second Earl, also a Henry, believed his wife, Mary, had been unfaithful to him with….

….a common person……

He had thrown her out of the house, denied her access to Harry and, in Mary’s words….

Made his manservant his wife.

Mary didn’t want history to repeat itself. So she gave Shakespeare the task of flattering and threatening Harry into heterosexuality….

……This was like putting an alcoholic in charge of a brewery.

Shakespeare starts off his sonnet sequence by describing Harry as ‘beauty’s Rose’ – a reference both to the Southampton rose (which decorates the arch of the tomb)

……and the preposterous way the family pronounced their name – ‘Ryosely’. The less posh branch of the family pronounced it ‘Risley’.

Shakespeare’s argument is that if Harry has a son (no-one is interested in whether he has a daughter) he will be able to recall his youthful beauty the way his mother does now:

Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime.

Harry has been born beautiful – so it is his duty to pass on his good looks to his son. Shakespeare asks Harry to…

Make thee an other self ….

…..that is a baby boy….

for love of me,

That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

After all, that’s what his father had done……

Harry with a child would be like a miraculous moon that can wax and wane at the same time. He warns Harry that if he doesn’t do this, he will end up ugly, neglected and childless – just like Queen Elizabeth – who was hitting a hollow-cheeked sixty….

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.

It is also Harry’s moral duty to have a son. He is exceptional because he is both beautiful AND truthful – qualities that rarely go together…Harry is obliged to hand them on…

In the fifteenth sonnet of the series, Shakespeare suddenly veers wildly off-message. Harry doesn’t need to father a son to become immortal…. Shakespeare will do it with his verse!

But he rapidly withdraws this cheeky idea – and suggests it might be safer to have a son as well…

But were some child of yours alive at that time,

You should live twice: in it and in my rhyme.

All well and good. But in writing the sequence Shakespeare betrays his own pre-occupations. He makes detailed, coded reference to Harry’s masturbation in eight out of the seventeen poems…

Harry went back to Cambridge, completely unconverted, and Shakespeare set to work on his next piece of propaganda….

The Countess of Southampton had teamed up with the Countess of Pembroke…..

……..at nearby Wilton.

 

Mary Southampton was an ardent Catholic – she ran a network of Catholic priests – and Mary Pembroke was a staunch Protestant – she had supported her late brother, Sir Philip Sidney’s plans for a Protestant Empire of Europe.

 

But the two Mary’s were united on one thing: hatred for Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth had executed Mary Southampton’s friend, a Catholic teacher, Swithin Wells, at Christmas, 1590, just outside her London house……Elizabeth had also destroyed the career of Mary Pembroke’s brother, Sir Philip, by banning him from the Court. The Mary’s retaliated by setting up their own rival courts. Their menfolk much preferred to be in the country because they could hunt: but how did the women spend their time

Amateur theatricals!

Women were not allowed to act on the public stages – but they could do what they liked in their own homes and grounds. The reason why Shakespeare wrote such great parts for women in his early plays was that real women would act in them – intelligent, highly sophisticated and often aristocratic women at that.

The two Marys conceived of an epic project. To stage the Wars of the Roses in their own grounds. They had the horses, the men and the armour. Now they had a promising young playwright as well.

But why the Wars of the Roses? For a start, Queen Elizabeth hated people reading history. It meant they might compare historical reigns with her own. In 1590 she even recalled Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles on the ludicrous grounds that they were…

…..fondly set out….

So the two Marys staged history itself. And they chose the Wars of the Roses as a dreadful warning. Elizabeth refused to name her successor on the understandable grounds that she would be assassinated. So everyone feared a return of Civil War when she died.

Shakespeare knew he needed help from University Men for this project – and installed Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene as a writing team at Posbrook Farm – which also doubled as a brothel.

The Wars of the Roses series of plays is less history than political satire. With its boy kings, ferocious women and sycophantic favourites, it is a parody of the Tudor Reign itself. Indeed Tom Nashe – who collaborated with Shakespeare on many plays (he did the jokes) – went on later in the year to write ‘Richard III’ with him.

Far from being a piece of Tudor propaganda, it is in fact is a satire on the Earl of Leicester who had died in Armada year. Like the hunchback king, Leicester had murdered husbands to seduce their wives, poisoned people and masked his villainy under a cloak of Puritan piety. In an early printing of the play the compositor even makes an unconscious slip. He sets up ‘The Bear’ when he should have set up ‘The Boar’.

Harry was soon down from Cambridge: and set his cap at the brilliant new playwright. Shakespeare had prematurely aged from touring in the Midlands. He writes about himself:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves or none or few do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare-ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang…..

Shakespeare’s hair was falling out……

But that didn’t put Harry off at all. He had been brought up to worship Sir Philip Sidney – who was both a gallant soldier and a gender-bender. Because he was banned from politics, Sidney had become a poet instead – and invented Arcadia – a mythical land where beautiful young men cross-dressed and the King and the Queen could fall in love with the same person. The long-haired Harry……….

….. based his whole identity on Arcadia’s two Princes, Musidorus with his…

….fair auburn hair, which he wore in great length…….

And Prince Pyrocles who is…

……of a pure complexion, and of such cheerful favour as might seem either a woman’s face on a boy or an excellent boy’s face on a woman….

Shakespeare realised an affair with Harry would NOT be a good idea – so he thought of a way out. He wrote a sonnet that starts by praising Harry’s Arcadian nature:

A Woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted,

Hast thou the Master Mistress of my passion,

A woman’s gentle heart but not acquainted

With shifting change as is false women’s fashion;

An eye more bright then theirs, less false in rolling:

Gilding the object where-upon it gazeth;

A man in hew all Hews in his controlling,

Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.

Shakespeare excuses himself from an affair with Harry by arguing that, although Harry looks like a woman, he is in fact a man….with all that that implies…

And for a woman wert thou first created,

Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,

And by addition me of thee defeated,

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she prickt thee out for women’s pleasure,

Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.

Shakespeare is offering a Jesuit compromise. When the young Catholics of England were groomed to be missionaries, they were actively encouraged to form passionate friendships – as long as sex was not involved. This is the chaste romance which Shakespeare offers to Harry – and which Harry is forced to accept.

The rest of 1591 was taken up with plans for the visit of the Queen to Cowdray and Titchfield. These Progresses were terrifying affairs. The Queen brought hundreds of courtiers and soldiers with her – all of whom had to be lodged and fed – and she forced her hosts to vacate their homes so she could stay in them with her Privy Council. Houses would be ransacked for priest holes and signs of massing – especially in Hampshire, notorious for its recusancy and conversions to Catholicism.

Elizabeth visited Cowdray first – the home of Mary Southampton’s father, Lord Montague…..

……one of the country’s leading Catholics. The Privy Council strongly suspected he kept Catholic priests on his payroll. What they didn’t know was that one of his footmen was called Guy Fawkes.

At Cowdray and later at Titchfield, Elizabeth engaged in her own perverse form of hunting. Deer were captured and run at point-blank range in front of her as she shot them with a cross-bow from a standing. Shakespeare was to satirise – and examine – this dark event in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ the following year.

But most important for Shakespeare were the Queen’s musicians who accompanied this slaughter: the Basanno Family, a group of black, Sephardic Jews from Venice. Amongst them was the beautiful, young Amelia – a mixed race singer and keyboard player.

Shakespeare loved her at first sight.

But there was a problem: she was the mistress of old Lord Hunsdon, the Queen’s Cousin…….

…..who payed her £40 a year for her services. And Lord Hunsdon was in attendance as a member of the Privy Council.

But there was a Plague raging in London, so Amelia stayed on at Titchfield as an entertainer and companion for Mary Southampton – a role she had performed for many aristocratic women, including the Queen.

Shakespeare leapt into action – praising her beauty in the way he had praised Harry’s. In the old day’s a black skin was thought of as ugly – but now ‘Black is Beautiful!’

In the old age black was not counted fair,

Or if it were it bore not beauty’s name:

But now is black beauty’s successive heir,

And Beauty slander’d with a bastard shame….

The ‘bastard shame’ is the make-up and wigs white women use to enhance their beauty. Rector Crowley would have approved…..

For since each hand hath put on Nature’s power,

Fairing the foul with Art’s false borrow’d face,

Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower

But is profan’d, if not lives in disgrace…

Shakespeare also follows Crowley’s insistence that language should be plain as well. He writes a love poem to Amelia, seeming to criticise her, but in reality criticising love poets who use extravagant and unnatural metaphors.

My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the Sun;

Coral is far more red, then her lips red.

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen Roses damaskt, red and white,

But no such Roses see I in her cheeks,

And in some perfumes is there more delight,

Than in the breath that from my Mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That Music hath a far more pleasing sound:

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My Mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,

As any she beli’d with false compare.

Shakespeare wrote the part of the dark-skinned Rosaline for Amelia in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ – and cast himself as her wooer, Berowne – a compliment to Mary Southampton’s family name, ‘Browne’.

But though Amelia was prepared to make love to everyone else, she drew the line at Shakespeare…

In desperation Shakespeare wrote:

Wilt thou whose will is large and spacious,

Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

Shall will in others seem right gracious,

And in my will no fair acceptance shine….

Amelia completely dis-orientates Shakespeare. He knows she is morally worthless and that his own wife is a far better woman. But he just cannot stop himself from falling in love with her despite her faults…..

……perhaps BECAUSE of them…

Oh from what power hast thou this powerful might,

With insufficiency my heart to sway,

To make me give the lie to my true sight,

And swear that brightness doth not grace the day?

Amelia’s habit – which many prostitutes have – is not to look the clients directly in the eye……

Tell me thou lov’st else-where; but in my sight,

Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside:

What need’st thou wound with cunning when thy might

Is more than my ore-prest defence can bide?

Shakespeare knows that Amelia wants to bed young Harry. Better a rich, handsome young aristocrat, however gay, then a balding, penniless playwright.

Shakespeare in one sonnet likens Amelia to a housewife chasing after a chicken – Harry with his feathers and plumes – who puts down a baby – Shakespeare. Amelia is chasing after Harry who has no interest in her. And Shakespeare is chasing after Amelia who has no interest in him….

Shakespeare then makes the mistake of his life: he asks Harry to plead his love-suit with Amelia – just as in the plot of ‘Twelfth Night’.  And just as in the plot of ‘Twelfth Night’ the lady makes a play for the messenger….only this time it succeeds.

Harry goes to bed with Amelia simply to spite Shakespeare….

Shakespeare chides Harry for stealing his mistress. He understands that it is natural for a young handsome man to have sex – but not with the mistress of his friend…

Aye me, but yet thou mightst my seat forbear,

And chide thy beauty, and thy straying youth,

Who lead thee in their riot even there

Where thou art forst to break a two-fold truth:

Hers by thy beauty tempting her to thee,

Thine by thy beauty being false to me.

But Shakespeare can only go so far in criticising Harry. The Southampton family, after all, is Shakespeare’s meal-ticket. Amelia, on the other hand, is not….

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

Clearly black is no longer beautiful. In an agony of jealousy, Shakespeare goes on the road again. He thinks of Harry and Amelia as two spirits – one good and the other bad…..

To win me soon to hell my female evil

Tempteth my better angel from my side,

And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,

Wooing his purity with her foul pride

Shakespeare is far away from both of them on tour – so he has no idea if they are making love to each other. But in his imagination they are….

And whether that my angel be turn’d fiend,

Suspect I may, yet not directly tell,

But being both from me, both to each friend,

I guess one angel in an other’s hell.

Yet this shall I ne’er know but live in doubt,

Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

The only way he will know for certain is if Harry contracts venereal disease…..

Tossing and turning at night, exhausted by his travelling and exhausted by his dreams, Shakespeare makes a break-through revelation. He writes to Harry:

That thou hast her it is not all my grief,

And yet it may be said I lov’d her dearly….

That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,

A loss in love that touches me more nearly.

Shakespeare realises he is more in love with the boy than the girl. At this point Dame Nature steps in to resolve things: Amelia becomes pregnant and is married ‘for colour’ to a ‘minstrel’ called Lanier. She calls her son ‘Henry’ – whether after Harry or after her provider, Lord Henry Hunsdson, we may never know.

Amelia might not have known herself….

Shakespeare is free to declare his love for Harry. Other poets describe their lovers as being like a summer’s day. But this isn’t enough for Shakespeare. Harry is more perfect….

Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,

And every fair from fair some-time declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:

But thy eternal Summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou wandr’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Shakespeare goes back triumphantly to the idea so tentatively put forward in the Birthday Sonnets – that he can make Harry immortal with his verse. Harry may have the cash, but Shakespeare has the talent.

There was a problem, of course, in all this. Mother Mary. Shakespeare wasn’t exactly filling his job description. Someone told the Countess and she summoned Shakespeare:

COUNTESS:

Do you love my son?

SHAKESPEARE

Your pardon noble mistress?

COUNTESS

Love you my son?

SHAKESPEARE

Do you not love him, madam?

COUNTESS

Go not about. My love hath in’t a bond,

Whereof the world takes note. Come, come, disclose

The state of your affection, for your passions

Have to the full appeach’d.

SHAKESPEARE

Then I confess

Here on my knees, before high heaven and you,

That before you, and next unto high heaven,

I love your son. My dearest madam,

Let not your hate encounter with my love,

For loving where you do…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 Diane

Was both herself and love – o then give pity

To him whose state is such that cannot choose….

COUNTESS:

You have my leave and love….

 

This is a slightly edited scene from ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ which I believe Shakespeare wrote after ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and was originally called ‘Love’s Labour’s Won’. It celebrates the Countess’s acceptance of the love between the lower class Helena and her noble son Bertram – code for Mary Southampton’s acceptance of the love between Shakespeare and Harry.

To celebrate, Harry and Shakespeare went on a whistle-stop tour of Europe. They called on Philip II…….

……..a great friend of the Countess’s family – her father, had been his Master of Horse when he was King of England – and he showed them Titian’s masterpieces – ‘Venus and Adonis’……..

and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’…….

 

Shakespeare later turned them into narrative poems, using the same colours in his poems as Titian had used in his paintings.

They also visited Italy – Venice, Florence and Rome – where they saw the famous obelisk of red marble which Sextus V had re-erected in front of St. Peter’s.

It was reputed to be the last thing St. Paul had seen before he was crucified by Nero in the Circus Maximus. It was incorporated into the design of the Southampton tomb which Mary Southampton was about to commission..

They travelled round Italy by canal – you really could travel by ship from Verona to Milan in those days as Valentine does in ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’……..

……..and returned to England for Easter in 1593

Shakespeare then wrote a sonnet to Harry, admitting that he had been in love with him from the moment they met three years ago…..

When first your eye I eyed….

Marlowe again!

But tragedy was about to strike. Atheistical papers were found in Marlowe and Kyd’s lodgings. Under torture, Kyd claimed they were Marlowe’s not his – and Marlowe himself died in a gay brawl at Deptford. Shakespeare would never forgive Kyd for his treachery to his friend.

By now Shakespeare was obsessed with Southampton: even when he was with his family each summer at Stratford, he could think of nothing but him…..

My eye no form delivers to the heart

Of bird, of flow’r, or shape which it doth latch;

Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,

Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch:

For if it see the rud’st or gentlest sight,

The most sweet-favour or deformed’st creature,

The mountain, or the sea, the day, or night,

The Crow, or Dove, it shapes them to your feature.

When people talk about Adonis, Shakespeare thinks of Harry. Even when people talk about Helen of Troy, he thinks about Harry in drag. But this obsession, however unfair to Shakespeare’s family, helped Shakespeare cope with the death of Marlowe. He believed the soul of Marlowe had entered the body of Harry – along with all his other past lovers.

Shakespeare idealised Harry – so it came as a terrible shock to him to discover that Harry had been unfaithful. Like his mother, Harry had a taste for lower class men.

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day

And make me travail forth without my cloak

To let base clouds oe’rtake me in my way

Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?

Harry was about to enter the snakepit of Elizabeth’s court – and Shakespeare warns him that his promiscuity could be the finish of him politically….

They look into the beauty of thy mind,

And that, in guess, they measure by thy deeds;

Then churls their thoughts (although their eyes were kind)

To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds.

But why thy odour matcheth not thy show

The soil is this, that thou dost common grow.

But Shakespeare was now pre-occupied with writing ‘Lucrece’ – and stopped sending sonnets to Harry. His rival, the poet and medium George Chapman……….

 

…..who claimed to be in nightly contact with the spirits of Homer and Marlowe – and whom Shakespeare had satirised as the lisping, fawning flatterer, Boyet, in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’……..

……saw his chance and made a bid for Harry’s patronage. He nearly succeeded….Harry, after all, was very….

Fond on praise…..

Shakespeare attacked Chapman for his elaborate and ornate use of language – and said that Chapman did not need Harry’s help as he was an established writer anyway. Shakespeare, on he other hand, would be nothing without Harry – both as his inspiration and his source of cash….

Yet be most proud of that which I compile,

Whose influence is thine and born of thee;

In others’ works thou dost but mend the style,

And Arts with thy sweet graces graced be:

But thou art all my art, and dost advance

As high as learning my rude ignorance

But Shakespeare was to secure his position in the Southampton household not by his flattery but by his genius. To another commission from Mary Southampton, he wrote the blinding, soaring masterpiece ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ which hurled him to the top of the tree. This entertainment was to celebrate Mary’s marriage to Thomas Heneage – and the play was performed at Copt Hall.

Harry was about to come of age and Mary had to get out of Titchfield. Mother and son loathed each other.

Mary had requested the return of her favourite Amelia – now Amelia Lanyer – a married mother and convert to Christianity – to play the dark-skinned Hermia………

……The love triangle started up all over again. But Amelia – with her …..

Bed-vow broke and new faith torn….

…was rather more accommodating to Shakespeare this time round. Shakespeare describes how his body…..

…….rising at thy name, doth point out thee,

As his triumphant prize, proud of this pride;

He is contented thy poor drudge to be

To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.

No want of conscience hold it that I call,

Her love, for whose dear love I rise and fall.

Shakespeare was on a roll. Harry, now in control of his own finances, gave Shakespeare the gift of £1,000 – a million pounds in today’s money – and Shakespeare went on to create his most popular creation – Falstaff.

But at the height of all this success, tragedy struck. Hamnet his son died at the age of eleven.

But instead of grieving properly, Shakespeare turns Harry into a surrogate son –

As a decrepit father takes delight

To see his active child do deeds of youth,

So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite,

Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.

There were to be consequences in this denial. Later in the year Shakespeare, along with others, threatened murder to a man called Wayte. He was arrested and bound over to keep the peace. Harry dropped him for a bit, feeding Shakespeare’s fear that Harry would one day drop him for good…

The relationship was starting to go wrong anyway: Shakespeare and Harry began to tire of each other sexually and, on tour, Shakespeare was unfaithful to Harry in the way Harry had been unfaithful to him.

Shakespeare makes all the usual excuses – that it made him love Harry all the more – but Shakespeare was starting to resent the cavalier way he was treated by Harry – having to wait hours for him, if he bothered to turn up at all.

The big test came when Harry finally fell in love with a woman – Elizabeth Vernon.

Shakespeare was ambivalent. He wanted Harry to have children – indeed he had written seventeen sonnets urging him to do so. But he didn’t want to lose Harry’s love. He dramatized his dilemma in the character of Mercutio.

Indeed, John Dryden said that Shakespeare had to kill Mercutio or Mercutio would have killed him.

But in the end Shakespeare realised that he and Harry had a ‘marriage of true minds’ – a spiritual union now rather than a physical one – which would last until the end of time.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments: love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his higth be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me prov’d,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

Politics now took over and there was no time for Sonnets. Harry joined with his great friend the Earl of Essex……

…… to overthrow Queen Elizabeth and replace her with King James. Shakespeare went along with this at first – and wrote ‘Macbeth’ to try to persuade James to invade England.

He was to lead an army that Essex would bring over to England after he had crushed the Irish.

But Ireland was a disaster: the Irish crushed him. Shakespeare now changed his mind. Harry and Essex should seek appeasement with the Queen. He wrote ‘Julius Caesar’ to demonstrate the horrors that would ensue if the rebellion went ahead.

But it did.

Essex was executed and Harry – under sentence of death – imprisoned in the Tower. Shakespeare went through bleak despair – and like Hamlet – considered suicide.

He fled to Scotland and became part of King James’s gay-friendly court. But Dame Nature stepped in again. Queen Elizabeth died and it was all change. Harry was now a hero. He firmly expected to become King James’s new lover.

But James preferred younger men – and Harry had lost his looks in the Tower. He was marginalised by the gay group at the centre of power – and started to become bitterly homophobic.

 

Events came to a head when in 1605 Harry had a son. He’d had daughters and that hadn’t affected his relationship with Shakespeare. But a son was different. He gave him all his attention – and dropped Shakespeare. He wanted to deny all his past gay experience.

The effect on Shakespeare was shattering. He wrote a sonnet to Harry which again wasn’t a sonnet. It was a twelve line poison pen letter. Before he had used his verse to promise Harry immortality: now he used it to promise him death. However ‘lovely’ Harry has been, Dame Nature will make sure that he rots in a grave.

Shakespeare had a complete nervous breakdown. He re-wrote ‘Lear’ – taking away its original happy ending and having it culminate in the death of Lear’s child.

Nearly a decade later, he was finally facing the death of his son.

He decided on revenge – and his revenge was to publish all his love sonnets to Harry. He wanted the whole world to know Harry’s true nature.

He also included a satire on Harry in ‘A Lover’s Complaint’. Here he paints the picture of a psychopath that everyone would recognise as Harry:

His browny locks did hang in crooked curls,
And every light occasion of the wind
Upon his lips their silken parcels hurls,
What’s sweet to do, to do will aptly find….

Shakespeare casts himself, again, as a woman – seduced and abandoned by her artful, Satanic young lover….

That not a heart which in his level came
Could ‘scape the hail of his all hurting aim,
Showing fair Nature is both kind and tame:
And veil’d in them did win whom he would maim,
Against the thing he sought, he would exclaim,
When he most burnt in heart-wisht luxury,
He preacht pure maid, and prais’d cold chastity.

So Shakespeare ends up publicly exposing and attacking the man with whom he was once so deeply in love.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel….

The maid is asked what she would have done if she had known what they know now? She replies:

O that infected moisture of his eye,
O that false fire which in his cheek so glow’d:
O that forc’d thunder from his heart did fly,
O that sad breath his spongy lungs bestow’d,
O all that borrow’d motion seeming owed,
Would yet again betray the fore-betray’d,
And new pervert a reconciled Maid.

Shakespeare would have done it all over again!

At this point Shakespeare put down his pen…….

……and never wrote directly about himself again.

© Stewart Trotter 3rd Feb 2018