The Shakespeare Code

It’s best to read ‘Love Triangle’ Part Fourteen First.

1592. Titchfield. Shakespeare has sent Harry to plead his love-suit with Amelia – and Amelia has taken the opportunity to seduce Harry.

39. (41) Shakespeare remonstrates with Harry.

Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits,

When I am some-time absent from thy heart,

Thy beauty, and thy years full well befits,

For still temptation follows where thou art.

Shakespeare says that when Harry’s love for Shakespeare – a Platonic one – does not fill his heart, he is tempted to find attractive sexual partners. This is completely natural because he is young and beautiful – temptation will follow him wherever he goes.

Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,

Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;

And when a woman woos, what woman’s son

Will sourly leave her till he have prevailed?

Harry is an aristocrat and so a great prize. He is also handsome – and so people will chase after him. And when its a woman who is doing the chasing, what self-respecting man will turn her down until he has had his way with her?

[Shakespeare has already written seventeen sonnets urging him to go to bed with women.]

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 begs Harry to draw the line at invading Shakespeare’s own ‘property’ – Amelia – and keep close control of his beauty and youth which prompt him to invade Shakespeare’s own land. If he doesn’t, it will result in two promises being broken because of Harry’s beauty:

(1) Amelia’s promise of fidelity to her keeper, Lord Hunsdon (who, after paying out £40 a year for her services, doesn’t want to catch venereal disease)

(2) Harry’s promise of friendship with Shakespeare.

40. (133) To Amelia.

Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan

For that deep wound it gives my friend and me;

Is’t not enough to torture me alone,

But slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be?

Shakespeare curses Amelia’s heart because it makes his own heart groan – (1) in pain (2) in sexual desire – at the love-wound it has inflicted on Harry and himself. Isn’t it enough, Shakespeare asks, to torture me? Do you have to go on and enslave my friend?

Me from my self thy cruel eye hath taken,

And my next self thou harder hast ingrossed:

Of him, my self, and thee I am forsaken,

A torment thrice three-fold thus to be crossed:

Shakespeare says that Amelia’s cruel ‘eye’ – which also means her pudend – has stopped Shakespeare from being his true self. But Harry – so close to Shakespeare he calls him his ‘next self’ – has been gobbled up even more. Shakespeare has been deserted by Harry, Shakespeare’s own true nature, and Amelia – so his torment is tripled.

Prison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward,

But then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail,

Whoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard,

Thou canst not then use rigour in my Jail.

Shakespeare bargains with Amelia: he offers his heart as a ransom. Let it be locked up as a prisoner in Amelia’s bosom of steel: but let it act as bail for Harry whom my heart will guard. Amelia won’t then be able to tyrannise Harry as he will be in my prison.

And yet thou wilt, for I, being pent in thee,

Perforce am thine and all that is in me.

But you will. Because I will be prisoned by you, you control me and all that is in me – that is, Harry.

LOVE MADNESS

41. (40) To Harry.

Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all:

What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?

No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call,

All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more:

Shakespeare exhorts Harry to take all of his loves, including Amelia: but then asks him what he has gained by this. It isn’t a love that is true – Amelia is, after all, a courtesan, and everything that he had was Harry’s before he gained Amelia.

Shakespeare is also punning on ‘more’ and ‘moor’ – referring to  Amelia’s Moroccan, Sephardic roots.

Then if for my love, thou my love receivest,

I cannot blame thee, for my love thou usest.

But yet be blam’d, if thou this self deceivest

By wilful taste of what thy self refusest.

Then if you love Amelia because you love me, I cannot fault you for sleeping with her. But I will blame you if you deceive Amelia – who is a part of me – by perversely making love to someone whom you do not, in your inner being (‘self’ = ‘penis’) feel attracted to.

I do forgive thy robb’ry, gentle thief

Although thou steal thee all my poverty:

And yet love knows it is a greater grief

To bear love’s wrong, then hate’s known injury.

Shakespeare forgives Harry for stealing Amelia away from him – even though she is worthless. But it is much worse to be wronged by someone you love than to be hurt by someone who hates you.

Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,

Kill me with spites, yet we must not be foes.

Harry is a mixture of licentiousness and kindness whose good looks mask his bad deeds. Shakespeare invites Harry to injure him – as long as they do not become enemies.

Shakespeare has started to notice that, although he is beautiful, Harry is capable of ugly behaviour. He has made sexual overtures to Shakespeare which Shakespeare has refused, in favour of a Platonic love. Harry takes his revenge by sleeping with Shakespeare’s ‘mistress’ in place of Shakespeare himself – going against his true nature.

42. (147)

To Amelia. The Plague is raging in London and Shakespeare’s passion for Amelia is like a plague fever – with Amelia herself the source of the disease.

My love is as a fever longing still,

For that which longer nurseth the disease,

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please:

My love for you, Amelia, is like a longing for something that makes me all the more ill. I’m like a sick man whose appetite is weak and who opts to eat the very thing that upsets him.

My reason, the Physician to my love,

Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,

Hath left me, and I desperate now approve

Desire is death, which Physick did except.

My reason is like a Doctor who is trying to cure my infatuation with you, who has become angry that I do not follow his prescriptions and has left me to my own devices. I now realise he was right and realise that my desire to make love to you – something which my doctor forbade – has a deadly result.

Past cure I am, now Reason is past care,

And frantic mad with ever-more unrest;

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

At random from the truth vainly exprest:

Now Dr. Reason has abandoned me I cannot recover – and will go insane with anxiety. My thoughts and speech are like a madman’s – veering wildly from the truth and to no purpose whatsoever.

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

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

For I have thought you were fair – both in looks and character – and like a bright light when in fact you are ‘black as hell and dark as night’.

Black, for Shakespeare, is no longer beautiful.

43.  (129)

Shakespeare privately reflects on the destructive powers of lust….how it can drive a man mad.

Th’expense of Spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action, and till action, lust

Is perjur’d, murd’rous, bloody full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight,

Past reason hunted, and no sooner had

Past reason hated as a swallow’d bait,

On purpose laid to make the taker mad.

Orgasm and seminal emission in a woman of shameful morality (‘waste’ also =’waist’) is lust made a real – but till that moment, it is a turbulent activity in the mind which drives the man who experiences it to distraction. He goes to unreasonable lengths to achieve it, but the moment it is achieved, it is despised in an equally unreasonable way.

Mad in pursuit and in possession so,

Had, having, and in quest, to have extreme,

A bliss in proof and prov’d a very woe,

Before a joy propos’d behind a dream.

Shakespeare repeats the ideas in a fragmented language that imitates the workings of lust – pleasure followed by immediate pain.

All this the world well knows, yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Shakespeare says the whole world knows the truth of what he is saying. But no man knows how to give up the ecstatic bliss of sex – however much it leads to horror and despair.

To read ‘On Tour’, Part 16, click: HERE