The Shakespeare Code

It’s best to read ‘Marlowe’s Ghost’ Part 30 first.

1594 Titchfield

Harry Southampton’s adoption of George Chapman as his poet and lover was finally too much for Shakespeare.

He walked out of Titchfield and walked out of his job. This Sonnet is his abrasive resignation letter.

96.87

Farewell! Thou art too dear for my possessing,

And like enough thou know’st thy estimate;

The Charter of thy worth gives thee releasing,

My bonds in thee are all determinate.

Shakespeare tells Harry that he is too ‘dear’ for Shakespeare to own. ‘Dear’ = (1) Loved and (2) Expensive – fi

This is another attack on Chapman – ‘Chapman’ = ‘Merchant’. According to Shakespeare, Chapman ‘merchandises’ his love for Harry as though it were a commodity. See Sonnet 82. (102).

Shakespeare had also attacked Chapman by satirising him as the lisping, fawning effeminate, Boyet, in Love’s Labour’s Lost……

…….whom the Princess of France rebukes….

Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,

Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:

Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,

Not utter’d by base sale of chapmen’s tongues.

Shakespeare believes that Chapman cheapens love by treating it as a commodity that can be praised, bought and sold – as a merchant (‘Chapman’) does.

Shakespeare, in the Sonnets,  equates Chapman’s love with merchandising, and in this Sonnet tells Harry that Harry is fully aware of his own value – and it’s this value that gives Harry every reason to break off his affair with Shakespeare.

For how do I hold thee but by thy granting,

And for that riches where is my deserving?

The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,

And so my patent back again is swerving.

Shakespeare says he is totally subject to Harry’s power: he can only ‘possess’ Harry as a lover if Harry agrees – and what does Shakespeare possess – physically and financially – that deserves Harry’s love and patronage? Shakespeare lacks the qualities that would justify Harry’s gift of himself and so Shakespeare’s special privilege has come to an end.

‘Riches’ is another oblique reference to Lady Penelope Rich.

Thy self thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing,

Or me to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking,

So thy great gift upon misprision growing,

Comes home again, on better judgement making.

When Harry ‘gave’ himself to Shakespeare – sexually as well as emotionally – Harry was unaware of his own value: either that, or he mistook who or what Shakespeare was. So Harry takes back the great gift of himself as he starts to despise Shakespeare (‘misprision’ =’ contempt or scorn’, 1592) and can see what the true situation is.

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter:

In sleep a King, but waking no such matter.

Shakespeare compares his relationship with Harry to a wish-fulfilling dream in which he believes he is a king – but wakes to find he is a pauper.

Shakespeare cast himself as Lord Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost – playing opposite Harry as the King of Navarre.

‘Berowne’ is a re-working of ‘Browne’ – the Countess of Southampton’s family name.  But this was play-acting. Shakespeare has to face the fact that he is now back as a penniless, lower-class man.

This is the similar to the situation Christopher Sly finds himself in in The Taming of the Shrew. He is a tinker, who gets drunk then awakes to find himself treated like a Lord…

Shakespeare has been treated as a King by Harry – but it has all been a dream  in the same way that Sly has been tricked.

Shakespeare had been working on The Taming of the Shrew – reworked from an older play The Taming of a Shrew which is set in Ancient Athens – after his return from Italy in 1593.

This Sonnet is full of ‘feminine ending’ – a double syllable at the end of each line. Katharine Duncan-Jones suggests that repeated ‘ing’ sound = ‘Ingle’ – ‘passive young homosexual’, (1592). So this is a coded attack on Harry’s sexuality – and his affair with the older Chapman.

Walking out is a massively bold step for Shakespeare at a time when, if you had no money, you starved…..

……as Robert Greene did when he walked out of Titchfield in 1592.

Robert Greene, writing in his shroud.

But, as one door closes, another opens….

Harry was to come of age in 1594 – so his mother, Mary Southampton, who had a fractious relationship with her son, had to get out of Titchfield. 

She married an old family friend and old lover of Queen Elizabeth, Sir Thomas Heneage…..

……and moved to the Savoy Palace in London….

…. Copt Hall in Essex….

Mary commissioned Shakespeare to write A Midsummer Night’s Dream to celebrate her marriage to Sir Thomas – a play which celebrated the topography of Copped Hall the way Love’s Labour’s Lost celebrated Place House and grounds at Titchfield.

After Amelia had fallen pregnant in 1592, she had been married off, ‘for colour’, to the ‘minstrel’ Alphonse Lanyer. ‘Minstrel’ was code for ‘homosexual. The couple had been married at St. Botolph’s Aldgate on 18th October, 1592.

Amelia had played the dark-skinned, coquettish Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost…….

……which Mary Southampton had commissioned. Amelia got on well with aristocratic women – and so Mary asked Shakespeare to write a part for Amelia in the new play.

Amelia played the dark skinned Hermia…

A modern day Hermia…

In the course of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lysander addresses Hermia as an ‘Ethiope’ and a ‘tawny tartar.’ Penelope Rich…….

……. played the long-legged Helena – teaming up again with Amelia. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Lady Penelope had played the Princess of France.

Amelia was in a very different frame of mind from the ‘love-triangle year’, 1592, when she played ‘prick-teasing’ games with Shakespeare and never went to bed with him.

We know from her astrological consultation with Simon Forman three years later (1597) that her husband, Alphonse, ‘dealt hardly with her’ and quickly squandered the money from the jewels that her keeper, old Lord Hunsdon, had given her.

Amelia was now lonely and vulnerable and when she met up with Shakespeare again at Copped Hall she wanted a full love affair with him…..

To read ‘The Return of the Dark Lady’, Part 32, click: HERE