The Shakespeare Code

It’s best to read ‘Titchfield, early 1593’ Part 18 first.

1593: THE WHISTLE-STOP TOUR OF EUROPE….The Low Counties, Spain and Italy.

It is the belief of The Shakespeare Code that Harry Southampton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe, made a whistle-stop tour of Europe in 1593.

Prof. Roger Pryor also nominates 1593 as the year Shakespeare visited Italy.

The three men were appointed as spies by Harry’s great friend, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex….

…..who had recently been appointed to the Privy Council and so could issue passports. English gentlemen and actors were often recruited as spies – and Essex wanted a spy system to rival Lord Burghley’s.

Information was power at Queen Elizabeth’s Court.

The Code believes that in Spain, Harry, Shakespeare and Nashe called on King Philip II at Madrid.

Harry’s maternal grandfather, Anthony Browne, Lord Montague….

…..had been Philip II’s Master of Horse and his Ambassador to Rome….

….and so was a close personal friend of Harry’s family.

Shakespeare saw two Titian paintings, owned and commissioned by the King…..

……Venus and Adonis….

…..and The Rape of Lucrece….

Shakespeare, when he was back in England, recreated these paintings in verse….

He even used the same colours in his poems as Titian had used on his canvases.

(See: Shakespeare in Italy)

But it was the depth of Titian’s psychology which transformed Shakespeare’s art.

Up to then, English theatre had been two-dimensional…

Shakespeare began, like Titian, to flesh the drama out…

These paintings inspired in Shakespeare a life-long fascination with ALL the plastic arts – and their relation to language and life.

54. (24)

Mine eye hath play’d the painter and hath steeld

Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart;

My body is the frame wherein ’tis held,

And perspective it is best Painter’s art.

Shakespeare claims that his eye has become like a painter painting Harry’s beautiful form in the book of his heart.

‘Eye’ could also suggest Shakespeare’s penis, becoming erect like a painter’s brush.

Shakespeare compares his body to the frame that holds a painting – gaining a new perspective on Harry’s beauty – and the art of perspective is one that Tudor artists cultivated.

For through the Painter must you see his skill,

To find where your true Image pictur’d lies,

Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,

That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes:

Harry must look through Shakespeare’s eyes – like a perspective effect in a painting – to see the image of himself which is lying in Shakespeare’s bosom – waiting as if to be bought in a shop with glass windows that have been glazed by the power of the beams coming from Harry’s eyes.

[The Elizabethans thought that rays came FROM the eyes rather than TO the eyes.]

Now see what good-turns eyes for eyes have done:

Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me

Are windows to my breast, where-through the Sun

Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee.

Shakespeare’s eyes and Harry’s eyes help each other.

Shakespeare’s eyes have behaved like a painter, capturing Harry’s likeness – and by looking into the reflection of himself in Harry’s eyes they act as the windows to Shakespeare’s breast where Harry’s image resides.

The sun itself also likes to peep through the windows of Harry’s eyes to catch a glimpse of Harry’s image.

The implication is that the Sun shines from Harry himself – with a play on ‘Sun’ and ‘son’ that Shakespeare will develop in the Sonnets.

In Sonnet 25. (130) Shakespeare has declared that his mistress Amelia’s eyes are……

…….nothing like the Sun

…….but Harry’s eyes are the Sun itself.

Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art:

They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

But eyes have their limitation: they can only see Harry’s outward form. They cannot appreciate nature of Harry’s ‘heart’ – his internal truth and worth.

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Shakespeare, Southampton and Nashe then travelled round Italy, journeying from city to city by a network of canals….

(In those days you really could sail from Milan to Verona, as Valentine does in Two Gentlemen of Verona.)

Sometimes Shakespeare pretended to be the Earl of Southampton while the Earl pretended to be Shakespeare……..which inspired the plot of The Taming of the Shrew, when the aristocratic Lucentio changes clothes with his manservant Tranio….

 

Nashe draws on the same incident for his ‘novel’ based on the Italian trip – The Unfortunate Traveller – in which the Earl of Surrey changes clothes with his manservant Jack Wilton…..

……to take more liberty of behaviour’ in Italy, the land of ‘whoring’ and ‘sodomitry

Nashe dedicated the book to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton (a dedication he was later forced to withdraw) as ‘a lover and cherisher’ ‘as well of the lovers of poets [Amelia Lanyer] as of poets themselves’ [Shakespeare].

This was a reference to the love triangle between Shakespeare, Harry and Amelia in 1591.  See Sonnets 37-47 (New Order).

The three men visited Naples,Verona, Padua, Bergamo, Venice and Mantua,

But the first and most significant place they visited, by sea from Barcelona, in absolute secrecy, was, of course….

ROME….

The Eternal City…

Shakespeare was profoundly influenced by Rome’s ruins, which were still being excavated.….

In 1586, seven years earlier, Pope Sixtus V had re-sited an Egyptian obelisk in front of St. Peter’s in Rome – an operation which took six months and involved hundreds of men and horses…..

Eighty-three foot tall, this Obelisk had a profound importance for Catholics. It had been plundered from Egypt by Caligula and erected in the Circus……

 

According to Roman Catholic doctrine, this Obelisk was the last thing St. Peter saw before he was crucified upside down….

This was thought to have given the Obelisk miraculous powers: it was one of only two left standing in Rome.

The Pope moved the Obelisk – now a holy relic – to a position in front of the Basilica of St. Peter.

First, the Obelisk had to be taken down – then the bronze orb, rumoured to contain the ashes of Julius Caesar, removed from its summit.

55. (64)

When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced

The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down rased,

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

Shakespeare talks about his feelings at looking at the ruins of Rome which are being excavated. He sees them as being vandalised by the ruthless hand of Father Time – ruins that once were stately and rich, now out of fashion and buried in the earth.

He refers to the obelisks, plundered from abroad, that now lie in ruins round Rome – and the bronze orb originally at the top of the ‘St. Peter’ obelisk which had been replaced with a Christian Cross and relics.

[The Elizabethans did not distinguish between brass and bronze].

The bronze orb was thought, erroneously, to contain the ashes of Julius Caesar (it was in fact empty when it was opened) and the ‘mortal rage’ is a Roman Catholic reference to the Protestant ‘Sack of Rome’ which occurred in 1527. The Lanquenets – Mercenary Soldiers of Charles V – slaughtered 147 of the Swiss Guard (who were defending Pope Clement VII) on the steps of St. Peter’s.

‘Blasphemous’ shots were fired at the orb on top and a lead bullet was imbedded in the metal.

By the time Shakespeare and Southampton visited in Rome the obelisk was a massive tourist attraction and holy relic…

When ships docked at Rome people RAN to see it….

When I have seen the hungry Ocean gain

Advantage on the Kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,

Increasing store with loss, and loss with store.

Shakespeare describes how the ocean gains the territory of the shore – but then the shore gains that territory back – one’s loss is the other’s gain.

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay,

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate:

That Time will come and take my love away.

The sight of the to and fro battle between the sea and the land……

……how ‘states’ are interchanged…..

(with ‘state=realm’ and ‘state=state of being” – an idea from Ovid who, in ‘The Metamorphoses’, is fascinated by the changing state of things)

…..teaches Shakespeare to ponder how Time will finally take Harry away from him.

Shakespeare has begun to intuit that there will be a huge rift of some sort between Harry and himself.

This thought is as a death which cannot choose

But weep to have, that which it fears to lose.

This idea is like a death blow to Shakespeare…..

 …..it makes him mourn over the inevitable loss of Harry…..

……in some way.

56. (65)

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,

But sad mortality ore-sways their power,

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,

Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

Shakespeare continues the theme of his previous Sonnet, that mortality and time can destroy the strongest things – as the ruins of Rome show.

He asks how beauty can resist this power – beauty that has no more strength than a flower.

O how shall summer’s honey breath hold out,

Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,

When rocks impregnable are not so stout,

Nor gates of steel so strong but time decays?

Shakespeare compares Harry to a flower with ‘honey breath’ – suggesting the odour from a flower that attracts bees to the sweet smelling breath of his lover. 

(Again, he is comparing Harry favourably to Amelia whose breath ‘reeks’ from her – Sonnet 25. (130).

Shakespeare asks how Harry’s life – his breath – can stand a chance against the battering ram of Time when it pulverises rocks and gates of steel.

The gates of steel is another reference to Rome. Virgil refers to Juno opening the Gates of Iron to initiate war. In Virgil’s time, there were Gates of Iron, dedicated to Mars, in the middle of Rome which were opened to indicate that Rome was at war with another country.

[The Elizabethans did not differentiate between iron and steel.]

O fearful meditation, where, alack,

Shall time’s best Jewel from time’s chest lie hid?

Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

Shakespeare is afraid to think these thoughts. Where can Harry – the most precious jewel that Time has created hide from Time’s chest – the coffin? Who can arrest the swift movement of Father Time? Or who can deny him his spoils of war – Harry’s beauty.

O none, unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Shakespeare concludes that no-one can conquer time – unless his writing has miraculous powers and that in black ink Harry should, paradoxically, shine brightly.

This remark about ‘black ink’ is also a reference to Amelia, whose black skin was once worshipped by Shakespeare.

To read ‘Shakespeare in Rome’ Part 20, click: HERE