The Shakespeare Code

It’s best to read ‘Shakespeare’s Gay Infidelity’ Part 35 first.

1595/6.

Shakespeare discovers that Harry has fallen in love with Elizabeth Vernon…

…..a poor cousin of the Earl of Essex.

Shakespeare’s reaction is ambivalent. He wants Harry to have a son – and has written a Sonnet Sequence to persuade him to do so.

But like Mercutio’s reaction to Romeo’s love for Juliet, Shakespeare has been massively disturbed by the liaison.

However, he realises that his spiritual love for Harry will never diminish – and writes this Sonnet to express this love.

126. (116)

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.

Harry, you may be planning to marry Elizabeth Vernon, but we have our own marriage – a spiritual one – that no-one can object to or destroy. My love wouldn’t be love at all if it changed just because you have changed. Or if I removed my love for you just because you have removed it from me.

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.

My love is an eternal marker which ships use to guide them to land and which cannot be destroyed by stormy weather. It is also the Pole Star which guides ships at sea, whose value cannot be calculated but whose position in the sky can be.

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:

Love isn’t a jester at the beck and call of Father Time – though Time cuts down young beauty with his scythe. Love does not alter with the brevity of Time: rather it lasts beyond Time till the Day of Judgement itself.

If this be error and upon me prov’d,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

If I’m making a mistake in saying this then I never wrote a line of verse – and no man in all history has ever fallen in love.

Clearly Shakespeare has written verse – in particular this Sonnet to Harry – and so he obliquely claims that what he says is completely true.

GRIEF AND MELANCHOLY 1596/7.

Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died at the age of eleven and was buried in Stratford-upon-Avon on 11th August, 1596.

He was a twin – his sister was called Judith – and he probably died of bubonic plague and would have been buried instantly.

Shakespeare turns Harry into his surrogate son – and his mind dwells on death and melancholy.

127. (37)

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.

As an infirm old father takes pleasure in seeing his son engage in youthful, athletic activities, so I – having suffered the worst that fate can do to a man – to have his son taken away from him by death – I now take delight, Harry, in your moral worth and honesty.

Hamnet was Shakespeare’s only son. Now Shakespeare turns Harry into his surrogate son.

For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,

Or any of these all, or all, or more

Intitled in thy parts do crowned sit,

I make my love engrafted, to this store:

I do not know which is your crowning glory – your good looks, your aristocratic birth, your wealth or your intelligence – perhaps it’s one of these, or all of them or others that I don’t know about – whatever the truth, I intend to join with these qualities for all time, the way we graft one plant onto another.

So then I am not lame, poor, nor despis’d,

Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give

That I in thy abundance am suffic’d,

And by a part of all thy glory live:

This stops me being wounded by the grief for my son, or impoverished or unappreciated while this imaginary act gives such substantial benefits. I am nurtured by the multiplicity of your gifts – and bask in your glory.

Look what is best, that best I wish in thee;

This wish I have, then ten times happy me.

Whatever is best, I wish it for you. As it belongs to you – and you belong to me – I am overwhelmed with happiness.

128. (32)

If thou survive my well contented day,

When that churl death my bones with dust shall cover

And shalt by fortune once more re-survey

These poor rude lines of thy deceased Lover:

If you survive me – when Father Time comes for me, eager for his prey, and Death covers my body with dust – and you happen by chance to look at these lines of verse I – your dead lover – have written for you….

Compare them with the bett’ring of the time,

And though they be out-stript by every pen,

Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,

Exceeded by the height of happier men.

See how they stand in comparison with more recent, better, verse – and though they will be outclassed by every poet then writing, keep them not because of their rhyme – which will be exceeded by men who are ‘happier’ than I am – but as a memento of me.

‘Happy’ = (1) Cheerful and (2) Lucky. The death of Hamnet was an unlucky stroke of fortune that robbed Shakespeare of his joy.

Oh then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:

Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age,

A dearer birth than this his love had brought

To march in ranks of better equipage;

But give me the benefit of this thought: if my ‘Muse’ (my poetic invention) had improved with the times, it might have produced a more worthy poem than this is – and kept up with the march of poetic progress.

But since he died and Poets better prove,

Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love’.

But since I’ll be dead and poets better, read other poets for their style – but mine for my love for you.

129. (71)

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell

Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:

Shakespeare tells Harry not to mourn for him longer than his passing bell tolls – and tells the world that Shakespeare is leaving this ‘vile’ world to live with ‘vilest worms’ in the earth.

Although we describe the Elizabethan Age as ‘Golden’ this is not the way the Elizabethans saw it. Many thought the world could not get any worse and was fast heading towards its end.

Nay if you read this line, remember not

The hand that writ it, for I love you so

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,

If thinking on me then should make you woe.

If you read this poem don’t remember the man who wrote it. Because I love you so much, I would prefer you to forget all about me rather than be sad at my death.

O if (I say) you look upon this verse,

When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,

Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,

But let your love e’en with my life decay:

If you read this poem when I am mixed up with the clay in the earth, do not even say my name, but let your love for me rot along with my body.

Lest the wise world should look into your moan,

And mock you with me after I am gone.

Otherwise the clever-clever world will see you sighing with grief and make fun of you for having loved me.

130. (72)

O lest the world should task you to recite

What merit liv’d in me that you should love,

After my death (dear love) forget me quite,

For you in me can nothing worthy prove;

In case people ask you, after I am dead, what you saw in me, forget me completely – as I have nothing in myself of any worth.

Unless you would devise some virtuous lie

To do more for me than mine own desert,

And hang more praise upon deceased I

Than niggard truth would willingly impart:

Unless you make up white lies about me, pretending I was more valuable than I actually am and adorn me with more praise than bare Truth would allow.

‘I’ can also = ‘eye’ which can = ‘genitals’. Shakespeare is saying that Harry might exaggerate the ‘quality’ of Shakespeare’s penis.

O lest your true love may seem false in this,

That you for love speak well of me untrue,

My name be buried where my body is,

And live no more to shame nor me, nor you.

To prevent people thinking that your love for me causes you to make fake claims about my worth, (I am a truly flawed character) let my reputation be buried in the grave with my body and not live on to shame the two of us.

For I am sham’d by that which I bring forth,

And so should you, to love things nothing worth.

I am ashamed of what I produce – and so should you be, to love things that are worthless.

Shakespeare here is talking about (1) His plays and poems when they are read and produced and (2) His penis (‘thing’) which he produces when he and Harry make love.

131. (63)

Against my love shall be as I am now

With time’s injurious hand crusht and ore-worn,

When hours have drain’d his blood and fill’d his brow

With lines and wrinkles……

Preparing for the time, Harry, when you look like me, worn and defeated by time, when the hours have drained the blood away from your cheeks and stamped wrinkles and lines all over your brow…

…..when his youthful morn

Hath travail’d on to Age’s steepy night,

And all those beauties whereof now he’s King

Are vanishing, or vanisht out of sight,

Stealing away the treasure of his Spring.

When your youthful morning has transformed, with the workings of time, into ‘steepy night’.

‘Steepy night’ means (1) Night which engulfs you, the way rushes are ‘steeped’ in water to soften them. (2) Night which is steep and hard to climb (because one is older and frailer).

Shakespeare warns that all those beauties of intellect and body, which Harry owns like a King, will be vanishing – or will have vanished completely, stealing with them the treasures of his ‘spring’ – his youth.

For such a time do I now fortify

Against confounding Age’s cruel knife,

That he shall never cut from memory

My sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life.

In making preparations for this coming time, against obliterating Age’s savage ‘knife’, Shakespeare asserts that this scythe will never be able to cut the memory of Harry’s beauty away, even though it will kill Harry himself.

His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,

And they shall live, and he in them, still green.

Harry’s beauty will be seen in these lines of black ink – lines which shall continue to exist – and Harry will continue to exist in them, ‘still green’ = (1) Still fresh and young (2) Naïve and ignorant.

Cleopatra talks about her ‘salad days’ when she was ‘green in judgement.’

132. (73)

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 ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

Shakespeare says if he were to compare the progress to his life to the progress of the year, he is in the autumn period when the leaves are falling from the trees. There are few leaves, if any, and those that are left are yellow.

The bare branches of the trees are compared to the ruined choirs of the dissolved monasteries and chapels – and the birds that have deserted the trees are like the choirboys who once sang in the choir-stalls.

The leaves falling from the trees is an image of Shakespeare’s hair falling from his head. His baldness was often attacked in satires about him.

Shakespeare was still in his thirties when he wrote this Sonnet, but he had prematurely aged touring with Lord Strange’s company in the 1980’s….

…and when Amelia Bassano had attacked him in Willobie his Avisa in 1594, she had described him as ‘W.S. An Old Player’.

In me thou see’st the twi-light of such day

As after Sun-set fadeth in the West,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self that seals up all in rest.

Shakespeare says that if he were to compare himself to the progress of a day, he would be twilight when the sun is setting in the west and night – a metaphor for death which envelopes everything – steals the sun from the sky.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie

As the death bed, whereon it must expire,

Consum’d with that which it was nourisht by.

Shakespeare compares himself to the dying embers of a fire with the ashes representing his burnt out youth, lying on its death-bed, destroyed by the very thing that gave it life.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

You can see this Harry, which should make you love me the more because you will be obliged to leave me – my dead body – before very long.

133. (74)

But be contented when that fell arrest

Without all bail shall carry me away,

My life hath in this line some interest,

Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.

But be satisfied when that terrible arrest by death will carry me off, these lines of poetry might remain to remind you of me.

When thou reviewest this, thou dost review

The very part was consecrate to thee;

The earth can have but earth, which is his due,

My spirit is thine, the better part of me.

When you look at this sonnet, you look at the part of me that was dedicated to you. The earth can only have my body – but you have the better part of myself – my spirit.

So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,

The prey of worms, my body being dead;

The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,

Too base of thee to be remembered.

So you will have only lost the basest part of my life, destined to be eaten by worms – my body – mown down by the all-powerful scythe of the cowardly Father Time – too unimportant to be remembered by you.

The worth of that is that which it contains,

And that is this, and this with thee remains.

The only thing valuable about my body is what is inside it – and that is this poem which stays with you after I am dead.

134. (62)

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,

And all my soul, and all my every part;

And for this sin there is no remedy,

It is so grounded inward in my heart.

I am guilty of the sin of loving myself – my eyes and my soul and every part of me. And this sin cannot be remedied because it is so innate.

Me thinks no face so gracious is as mine,

No shape so true, no truth of such account,

And for myself mine own worth do define,

As I all other in all worths surmount.

I think I have the most handsome face in the world, my physique is perfect – and there is no other perfection like mine. And I define my own worth in such a way that it outstrips all others.

‘Face’ can = ‘genital area’ and ‘shape’ can = ‘penis’.

But when my glass shows me my self indeed

Beated and chopt with tann’d antiquity,

Mine own self love quite contrary I read:

Self, so self loving, were iniquity.

But when my mirror shows me what I really look like – old, sunburnt and raddled – I come to a different evaluation of my self-love: to love myself, looking as I do, would be a crime.

Note: ‘Self’ can = ‘Penis.’

‘Tis thee (my self) that for my self I praise,

Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

It is you Harry, my true self, which I am praising – putting the make-up of your youthful beauty on my old wrinkled face.

135. (22)

My glass shall not persuade me I am old

So long as youth and thou are of one date;

But when in thee time’s furrows I behold

Then look I death my days should expiate.

I will take no notice of what my mirror tells me – that I am old – so long as you, Harry, stay young. But the moment I see that your brow is lined, then I know I will die soon.

For all that beauty that doth cover thee

Is but the seemly raiment of my heart

Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me,

How can I then be elder than thou art?

All the beauty of your body is really just a covering for my heart – which is lodged in your bosom as yours is in mine. So how can I then be older than you?

O therefore love, be of thyself so wary

As I not for my self, but for thee will,

Bearing thy heart which I will keep so chary

As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.

So, Harry, look after yourself – as I will look after myself – not for my own sake but for yours – and I’ll look after your heart the way a loving nurse looks after a child.

Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain:

Thou gav’st me thine not to give back again.

And don’t think you will get your heart back when I die. You gave your heart to me on the understanding that it would never be returned.

To read ‘Scandal – Shakespeare in Court’, Part 37, click: HERE