The Shakespeare Code

It’s best to read ‘A Lover’s Complaint (II)’ Part 43 first.

A Lover’s Complaint continued.

The young woman speaks:

‘Yet did I not, as some my equals did,
Demand of him, nor being desired yielded;
Finding myself in honour so forbid,
With safest distance I mine honour shielded:
Experience for me many bulwarks builded
Of proofs new-bleeding, which remain’d the foil
Of this false jewel, and his amorous spoil.’

‘Foil’ = ‘settings for a jewel’.

But unlike some of my contemporaries I did not try to seduce him – nor did I succumb to his sexual approaches. Honour stopped me from doing it. I kept my distance from him and so retained my honour. Also my experience of those he had seduced and destroyed were a defence for me. They were like a setting which shows off the beauty of a jewel – or animals that had been hunted and killed.

Shakespeare here is talking of his own situation. His ‘equal’ was Christopher Marlowe……

……who had attempted to seduce Harry by writing Hero and Leander with a flattering description of Leander/Harry:

‘Some swore he was a maid in man’s attire,

For in his looks were all that men desire,

A pleasant smiling cheek, a speaking eye,

A brow for love to banquet royally;

And such as knew he was a man, would say,

“Leander, thou art made for amorous play.

Why art thou not in love, and loved of all?

Though thou be fair, yet be not thine own thrall.’

Harry loved dressing as a girl – as we can see from this painting……

Also Shakespeare himself describes Harry in drag in Sonnet 67 (53):

Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit

Is poorly imitated after you;

On Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set,

And you in Grecian tires are painted new…

Marlowe also describes Leander/Harry’s….

‘……dangling tresses, that were never shorn,

Had they been cut, and unto Colchos borne,

Would have allured the vent’rous youth of Greece

To hazard more than for the golden fleece.’

In the poem a gay Old King Neptune tries to seduce Leander/Harry while he is swimming the Hellespont.

Shakespeare – like the young woman – was bound by ‘honour’ not to sleep with Harry. He was employed his mother – Countess Mary – to try to get Harry interested in women – by writing sonnets and Love’s Labour’s Lost – a great paean to heterosexual love.

Also Shakespeare had the example of Aemilia Bassano – the Dark Lady of the Sonnets – whom Harry abandoned when she fell pregnant. She was the proof ‘new-bleeding’ – new-bleeding from (1) heartache and (2) having given birth to a son in 1593 whom she named Henry.

‘But, ah, who ever shunn’d by precedent
The destined ill she must herself assay?
Or forced examples, ‘gainst her own content,
To put the by-past perils in her way?
Counsel may stop awhile what will not stay;
For when we rage, advice is often seen
By blunting us to make our wits more keen.

‘Assay’ = ‘test out by experience’.

But who ever allowed what had happened to others in the past to deflect them from the destiny they must experience for themselves? Advice might stop us for a little while but cannot have a lasting impression on us. If we are sexually excited, advice to desist often makes us more determined and resourceful to get our way.

With ‘blunting’ Shakespeare plays again on the name of Harry’s great friend, Charles Blount, [pronounced ‘blunt’] 6th Baron Mountjoy,….

…….as he does in Sonnets 49 (19), 83 (105), 109 (52), 116 (56) and 143 (115)

‘Nor gives it satisfaction to our blood,
That we must curb it upon others’ proof;
To be forbod the sweets that seem so good,
For fear of harms that preach in our behoof.
O appetite, from judgment stand aloof!
The one a palate hath that needs will taste,
Though Reason weep, and cry, ‘It is thy last.’

This is very similar to the argument in Sonnet 43 (129) : ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ in which Shakespeare catalogues the horror of being seized by physical passion: but concludes that sex is so attractive no-one can resist it.

‘All this the world well knows, yet none knows well/To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.’

‘For further I could say ‘This man’s untrue,’
And knew the patterns of his foul beguiling;
Heard where his plants in others’ orchards grew,
Saw how deceits were gilded in his smiling;
Knew vows were ever brokers to defiling;
Thought characters and words merely but art,
And bastards of his foul adulterate heart.

‘Adulterate heart’ = (1) A heart set on adultery and (2) A heart that has been debased. (adulterated)

The young woman admits she knew her seducer’s history: heard how he had made married women pregnant – and how his smiles were false, seductive and guileful. His promises were simply a means to seduce others – and what he wrote and what he said were completely bogus – the products of his evil, corrupted nature.

The ‘plants’ which grew ‘in others orchards’ is a reference again to Harry’s affair with Amelia. When she became pregnant, she was married off, on 18th October 1592, ‘for colour’ – to a ‘minstrel’ Alphonse Lanier.

The imagery orchards and fertility echoes the imagery of Sonnet 17 (16) to Harry, written for his 17th Birthday in 1590:

‘And many maiden gardens yet unset,/With virtuous wish would bear your living flowers.’

‘And long upon these terms I held my city,
Till thus he gan besiege me: ‘Gentle maid,
Have of my suffering youth some feeling pity,
And be not of my holy vows afraid:
That’s to ye sworn to none was ever said;
For feasts of love I have been call’d unto,
Till now did ne’er invite, nor never woo.’

The young woman says that she resisted the seducer’s advances for a long time – like a city under siege. The young man asked her to pity him and claimed that his vows were holy ones. He said that what he was saying to her was the first time he had spoken like this to anyone. He had been invited to make love to others – but had never before wooed a woman.

Here there is again a fusion between Shakespeare and Harry. When Shakespeare was wooing Anne Hathaway, he managed to gain her pity for his love-suit. See Sonnet 1 (145)

Also the young man’s use of the word ‘holy vows’ echoes Shakespeare’s use of religious imagery in describing his love for Harry. In Sonnet 70 (31) Shakespeare writes:

How many a holy and obsequious tear

Hath dear religious love stol’n from mine eye

Shakespeare, in Sonnet 149 (108), even quotes the language of the Lord’s Payer when he describes his love for Harry:

like prayers divine

I must each day say ore the very same

Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,

Even as when I first  I hallowed thy fair name.

And in Sonnet 152 (124) Shakespeare fuses sex and religion by turning the obelisk outside St. Peter’s – the last thing St. Peter was said to have seen before he was crucified, and consequently sacred to Catholics – into a phallic symbol of his love for Harry.

See: Shakespeare in Italy.

”All my offences that abroad you see
Are errors of the blood, none of the mind;
Love made them not: with acture they may be,
Where neither party is nor true nor kind:

They sought their shame that so their shame did find;
And so much less of shame in me remains,
By how much of me their reproach contains.’

‘With acture they may be’ = ‘they may be enacted’.

The young man claims that all the sexual sins I have committed were instinctive – not calculated. They were not born out of love: in fact good sex can occur with people who lie and are cruel. He blames women for shamelessly making love to him – and asserts the more they blame him, the more innocent he is.

There is here another ‘fusion’ of Harry with Shakespeare. In Sonnet 120 (121) Shakespeare defends his own gay sexuality with the same bravura as the young man:

For why should others’ false adulterate eyes

Give salutation to my sportive blood?

Or on my frailties why are frailer spies

Which in their wills count bad what I think good?

No, I am that I am, and they that level

At my abuses reckon up their own;

I may be straight, though they them-selves be bevel:

By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown.

‘I am that I am’ is a quotation from Exodus 3. 14 in the Geneva translation which Shakespeare used. It is God describing himself to Moses. So Shakespeare, here, is obliquely comparing himself to God.

‘Nor true nor kind’ is also reminiscent of Sonnet 84 (105) where Shakespeare writes to Harry:

Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument,

Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words,

And in this change is my invention spent.

Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.

Fair, kind, and true, have often liv’d alone,

Which three till now, never kept seat in one.

A Lover’s Complaint (cont)

”Among the many that mine eyes have seen,
Not one whose flame my heart so much as warm’d,
Or my affection put to the smallest teen,
Or any of my leisures ever charm’d:
Harm have I done to them, but ne’er was harm’d;
Kept hearts in liveries, but mine own was free,
And reign’d, commanding in his monarchy.

‘Teen’ = ‘injury’. ‘Harm’ = ‘injure with love’.

The young man describes how of all the people he has seen, not a single one has excited his passions. He has sexually ‘injured’ others – but has never been injured himself. Other people’s hearts were his servants – but he has never been injured himself. His heart has been an unchallenged emperor.

In Sonnet 78 (94) Shakespeare advises Harry NOT to arouse others sexually with the same hurt/harm idea:

They that have power to hurt, and will do none.

So the young man is doing the opposite of Shakespeare advised Harry not to do: he callously exploits his good looks.

Also, when Shakespeare was in Harry’s entourage, he would literally have worn the Southampton Family livery.

To read ‘A Lover’s Complaint (IV), Part 45, please click: HERE