The Shakespeare Code

It’s best to read ‘A Lover’s Complaint (III)’ Part 44 first.

The young man continues:

”Look here, what tributes wounded fancies sent me,
Of paled pearls and rubies red as blood;
Figuring that they their passions likewise lent me
Of grief and blushes, aptly understood
In bloodless white and the encrimson’d mood;

Effects of terror and dear modesty,
Encamp’d in hearts, but fighting outwardly.

People who have fallen in love with me have sent me white pearls and red rubies which symbolised their feelings for me – fear and passion fighting with each other – internal emotions which the jewels outwardly symbolise.

‘Wounded fancies’ = ‘people that have been wounded by their love for me’.

”And, lo, behold these talents of their hair,
With twisted metal amorously impleach’d,
I have received from many a several fair,
Their kind acceptance weepingly beseech’d,
With the annexions of fair gems enrich’d,
And deep-brain’d sonnets that did amplify
Each stone’s dear nature, worth, and quality.

‘Talents’ = ‘talons’. ‘Impleache’d’= ‘entwined’. ‘Annexions’= ‘additions’.

Look at these locks of hair, wrapped around metal broaches which I have receive from beautiful people who begged me to accept them – along with the addition of beautiful jewels and complex sonnets which explained the particular qualities associated with the gems.

Shakespeare here keeps the sex of the young man’s admirers ambiguous. Harry himself, as we know from the Sonnets, received sexual attentions from men – especially from the Rival Poet, George Chapman. He doubtless sent Sonnets to Harry in the same way Shakespeare did – and they were certain to be ‘deep-brained’. Chapman saw himself as an intellectual embarked on ‘a deep search of knowledge ‘who mixed with other intellectuals like ‘deep-searching Northumberland’.

The 9th Earl of Northumberland, the Wizard Earl.

”The diamond,–why, ’twas beautiful and hard,
Whereto his invis’d properties did tend;
The deep-green emerald, in whose fresh regard
Weak sights their sickly radiance do amend;
The heaven-hued sapphire and the opal blend
With objects manifold: each several stone,
With wit well blazon’d, smiled or made some moan.

Note: None of the A Lover’s Complaint editors know what ‘invis’d’ means. The OED says that the word is ‘obsolete’ and ‘rare’ and makes a guess at ?Unseen.  invisible – from the Latin ‘invisus’.

John Kerrigan makes the point that the word exists nowhere else.

The fact is the verb form of the word – ‘invise’ does exist – even though the OED makes no mention of it. And it used by George Chapman….

The child-god’s graceful paradise
They jointly purpose to invise,
And lovely emulations rise,
In note of one another’s guise.

So, the meaning of ‘invise’ is ‘imagine, picture’.

This also a coded reference to Harry’s male lovers. When, in  writing about ‘his invis’d properties’ the his can mean ‘it’s’ [the diamond’s] properties – but it can also mean the personal qualities of Chapman himself.

By using a word peculiar to Chapman, Shakespeare is making a coded reference to his affair with Shakespeare.

So the young man is describing the properties of the jewels he was given by his admirers, male and female. They symbolise the qualities and emotions of the people who are giving the gifts. Diamonds for their strength and beauty, the emerald that enhances the sight, the sapphire that is blue like the sky and the opal that takes its radiance from colours around it. So the stones are living things, representing the qualities of the wooers and enhanced by the poems that come with them.

”Lo, all these trophies of affections hot,
Of pensived and subdued desires the tender,
Nature hath charged me that I hoard them not,
But yield them up where I myself must render,
That is, to you, my origin and ender;
For these, of force, must your oblations be,
Since I their altar, you enpatron me.

‘Pensived’ = ‘thought about’. ‘Subdued’ = ‘repressed’. ‘Origin and ender’ = ‘alpha and omega, beginning and end’ i.e. God himself.

‘Render’ = (1) To give up and (2) To rot like meat. Shakespeare also uses ‘render’ in this way in his ‘Poison Pen’ Sonnet to Harry 153 (126).

‘Oblation’ = ‘offering’. The word is used in the Anglican Communion Service. ‘Enpatron’ = ‘become my Patron Saint.

The young man says that that the jewels are the outward show of the love for the young man that the wooers have nurtured deep inside themselves. Dame Nature has commanded him to give them to the young woman, who is the God he worships. The young man has been the altar on which the gifts have been given, but the young woman is the Patron Saint of the altar.

”O, then, advance of yours that phraseless hand,
Whose white weighs down the airy scale of praise;
Take all these similes to your own command,
Hallow’d with sighs that burning lungs did raise;
What me your minister, for you obeys,
Works under you; and to your audit comes
Their distract parcels in combined sums.

‘Phraseless’ = ‘that which is beyond description’. ‘Similes’ = ‘comparisons made in the sonnets the lovers have written’.

‘Hallowed’ is a quote from the Lord’s Prayer which Shakespeare also uses in a context of love in Sonnet 149 (108):

like prayers divine

I must each day say ore the very same,

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

Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name.

The young man says: Hold out your hand – whose white beauty cannot be matched by poetic words. Take all the far-fetched comparisons poets have made about me and make them your own. – the product of burning passion and sighs. I am your minister – and work only for you as my God. Take these mad gifts I have been given as part of estate.

Harry, to win Shakespeare’s love, had given him the gift of £1,000.

”Lo, this device was sent me from a nun,
Or sister sanctified, of holiest note;
Which late her noble suit in court did shun,
Whose rarest havings made the blossoms dote;
For she was sought by spirits of richest coat,
But kept cold distance, and did thence remove,
To spend her living in eternal love.

‘Device’ = (1) heraldic device (2) poem.

‘Nun’ = (1) ‘a member of a religious order’ and (2) ‘a courtesan’. The first example of ‘nun’ = ‘courtesan’ quoted by the O. E. D. was 1518. The word was also used this way by Ben Jonson and John Fletcher.

‘Noble suit’ = ‘wooing by a nobleman’. ‘Rarest havings’ = (1) unique possessions and (2) ‘unique physical endowments’. ‘Blossoms’ = ‘young men’. ‘Richest coat’ = ‘well off aristocrats’ [‘coat’=’coat of arms’] .’Eternal love’ = (1) ‘love of God’ or (2) ‘never-ending love-making.

So the passage is packed with double meanings, but can be roughly summarised as:

This present was sent to me by a nun/prostitute – or at least someone approaching the status of a nun/prostitute, who lately rejected the advances of a nobleman, whose ‘possessions’ made young men besotted with her. The richest aristocrats pursued her – but she chastely distanced herself from them and devoted herself to love.

This passage is a satirical attack on Aemilia Basanno/Lanyer – the Dark Lady of the Sonnets – who was a courtesan if not an outright prostitute. In the Comedy of Errors the Abbess is named ‘Aemilia’ – which is an in-joke. There is also a courtesan in the play who has lent a ring worth forty ducats to Antipholus and she says: ‘Forty ducats is too much to lose.’ This again in an in-joke. Aemilia was the mistress of old Lord Hunsdon…..

Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon.

….. who gave Aemilia £40 a year for her services.

So ‘the noble suit’ is Lord Hunsdon’s. She clearly did not shun him in real life – but in Willobie his Avisa – she casts herself as the chaste ‘Avisa’ – who shuns the advances of an old Nobleman. Aemilia had a religious conversion from Judaism to Christianity: so ‘eternal love’, can refer to this conversion. But it can also mean she made love to men all the time.

”But, O my sweet, what labour is’t to leave
The thing we have not, mastering what not strives,
Playing [Paling] the place which did no form receive,
Playing patient sports in unconstrained gyves?
She that her fame so to herself contrives,
The scars of battle ‘scapeth by the flight,
And makes her absence valiant, not her might.

‘Playing’ has been changed by one editor to ‘planing’ and by another to ‘paling’. The Shakespeare Code has accepted the latter.

‘Gyves’ = ‘constraints’.

It is no hardship to leave something we never possessed in the first place – exercising dominion over something that does not put up a fight, putting fences round a place that contains nothing, pretending to endure suffering when we are free to get up and go at any time. The woman who makes a name for being chaste escape the wounds of battle by fleeing from the fight and tries to make her absence from the struggle an act of bravery rather than joining in the fight itself.

”O, pardon me, in that my boast is true:
The accident which brought me to her eye
Upon the moment did her force subdue,
And now she would the caged cloister fly:
Religious love put out Religion’s eye:
Not to be tempted, would she be immured,
And now, to tempt, all liberty procured.

‘Religion’s eye’ = (1) ‘the way religion sees and judges things and (2) ‘religion’s aye’ = ‘yes’. Obeying and agreeing with the discipline of the order.

Please pardon my boasting because what I am telling you is true. I had an accidental meeting with her which destroyed her resolve. She now wishes to escape the oppression of the cloister. Erotic love – ecstatic like religion – had overthrown religious love. She had walled herself in to avoid temptation – now she breaks free so she can tempt others herself.

The Sonnets show how Aemilia seduced Harry when he was trying to advance Shakespeare’s own love-suit with her.

See Sonnet 38 (134)

”How mighty then you are, O, hear me tell!
The broken bosoms that to me belong
Have emptied all their fountains in my well,
And mine I pour your ocean all among:
I strong o’er them, and you o’er me being strong,
Must for your victory us all congest,
As compound love to physic your cold breast.

‘Fountains’ can = ‘the genital area’. ‘Congest’=’gather together’.

‘Compound’ = ‘a prescription using several ‘simples’. Up to Shakespeare’s time, herbs were used singly for healing. But it became fashionable to mix plants together into a prescription, as Chinese herbalists did. Shakespeare writes about this practice in Sonnet 85 (76) where he compares his simple, straightforward style of writing to the old-fashioned use of ‘simples’.

Think how powerful you must be, then. The waters of love that have cascaded into my well – and I pour my own love into your ocean of love. I had power over my former lovers, now you have power over me. To be a conqueror, you must gather us all together and turn us into a prescription to heal the coldness of your heart.

Shakespeare, in Sonnet 70 (31) imagines all his former lovers residing in Harry’s breast:

‘They bosom is endeared with all hearts/Which I by lacking have supposed dead.

”My parts had power to charm a sacred nun,
Who, disciplined, I [aye], dieted in grace,
Believed her eyes when they to assail begun,
All vows and consecrations giving place:
O most potential love! vow, bond, nor space,
In thee hath neither sting, knot, nor confine,
For thou art all, and all things else are thine.

‘Parts’ = (1) ‘accomplishments’ (2) ‘attractiveness’ (3) ‘penis’.

‘I’ has been amended by Kerrigan to ‘aye’ = ‘indeed’ and The Shakespeare Code has preferred this reading.

‘All things else’ can = ‘all penises’.

I was attractive enough to cast a spell over a religious nun, who had disciplined herself and subdued her passions to live in a state of grace. But when she saw me she abandoned all her vows and religious practices. Love is all powerful. Words, promises, locations have no control over you whatsoever. For you are everything and everything belongs to you.

The autobiographical power of this poem is revealed in the extraordinary use of words ‘sting, knot nor confine’ – completely idiosyncratic – and straight from Shakespeare’s heart.

The nun here also has it’s root in Chaucer’s Prioress who sported pendant with the words: ‘Amor Vincit Omnia’ – ‘Love conquers all’.

”When thou impressest, what are precepts worth
Of stale example? When thou wilt inflame,
How coldly those impediments stand forth
Of wealth, of filial fear, law, kindred, fame!
Love’s arms are peace, ‘gainst rule, ‘gainst sense,
‘gainst shame,
And sweetens, in the suffering pangs it bears,
The aloes of all forces, shocks, and fears.

‘Impressest’ = ‘make an impression on’.

When you, Love, assert your power over us, what tired old precepts from the past have any influence over us? When your flames of passion fill us, all the stumbling blocks disappear – like money, childhood duty, the laws of the land, family influence and the fame of the beloved. The great power of Love is the peace it brings in it wake and fights against custom, common sense and guilt. It sweetens the pain it brings with it and the bitter herbs of ‘forces, shocks and fears’.

To read ‘A Lover’s Complaint (V), Part 46, click: HERE