The Shakespeare Code

 

It’s best to read ‘A Lover’s Complaint (IV) Part 45 first.

The Young Man in A Lover’s Complaint continues:

”Now all these hearts that do on mine depend,
Feeling it break, with bleeding groans they pine;
And supplicant their sighs to you extend,
To leave the battery that you make ‘gainst mine,
Lending soft audience to my sweet design,
And credent soul to that strong-bonded oath
That shall prefer and undertake my troth.’

Now all the people who are in love with me – feeling my heart break – groan in empathy and make you [the Young Woman] the object of their sighs, begging you stop your military attack on me. They are witnesses to my love plan and fully believe my promise to carry out my intentions of love.

‘This said, his watery eyes he did dismount,
Whose sights till then were levell’d on my face;
Each cheek a river running from a fount
With brinish current downward flow’d apace:
O, how the channel to the stream gave grace!
Who glazed with crystal gate the glowing roses
That flame through water which their hew encloses.

‘Dismount’ = ‘remove a gun from its mountings’

Having said this he stopped staring at me with eyes full of tears, which ran like a salty river down each of his cheeks. The channel gave added beauty to the stream: if you looked at his face, it was like watching roses through a crystal glass.

Note: Editors change ‘hew’ to ‘hue’ – not understanding that ‘hew’ = Henry Wriothesley Earl’. See Sonnet 19. (20):

A man in hew all Hews in his controlling

Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.

There ‘Hews ‘[Shakespeare’s spelling, capitalisation and italicising] = ‘Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton’.

‘O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies
In the small orb of one particular tear!
But with the inundation of the eyes
What rocky heart to water will not wear?
What breast so cold that is not warmed here?
O cleft effect! cold modesty, hot wrath,
Both fire from hence and chill extincture hath.

‘Cleft’ can also  = ‘pudend’. ‘Extincture’ = ‘extinction’.

The juxtaposition of ‘witchcraft’ and ‘orb’ suggests ‘witchball’ which was used to ward off evil spirits.

Father, there is massive power to bewitch in one solitary tear – but when there is a whole flood of them what heart is so rocky it won’t be worn down by them? What breast would not be warmed by this? It has a double effect. It warms up cold chastity and cools down hot anger – and destroys them both.

Shakespeare mentions Harry’s propensity to weep with love in Sonnet 72. (34)

Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheeds,

And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds.

Shakespeare, although he claims that his eyes are ‘unus’d to flow’, describes how weeping is part of his love-making to Harry in Sonnet 119. (120)

O that our night of woe might have remember’d

My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits,

And soon to you, as you to me then tender’d

The humble salve which wounded bosoms fits!

Aemilia Lanyer mocks Harry’s habit of weeping in Willobie his Avisa in the figure of ‘H.W.’ = Henry Wriothesley.

‘If I do sometimes look awry/As loth to see your blobbered face/And loathe to hear a young man cry’.

A Lover’s Complaint continues:

‘For, lo, his passion, but an art of craft,
Even there resolved my reason into tears;
There my white stole of chastity I daff’d,
Shook off my sober guards and civil fears;
Appear to him, as he to me appears,
All melting; though our drops this difference bore,
His poison’d me, and mine did him restore.

‘Resolved’ = ‘dissolved’

‘Sober guards’ = (1) ‘moral protection’ (2) ‘abstemiousness’.

‘Civil fears’ = (1) ‘fear of behaving in a civilised way’ or (2) ‘fear of contravening Queen Elizabeth’s laws against ‘buggery’

‘All melting’ = (1) weeping (2) ejaculating seminal fluid.

‘Drops’ = (1) tears and (2) semen.

His passion was an artful, bogus one that transformed my rational mind into tears. There I took off my white dress of chastity, shook off my ‘sober guards and civil fears’ and appeared to him in same ‘melting’ state as he appeared to me – with this difference: his ‘drops’ poisoned me while mine made him better.

Shakespeare is actually saying that Harry’s life-fluid – his very essence – was toxic.

It also suggests that Harry’s semen was infected – and had infected Shakespeare.

‘In him a plenitude of subtle matter,
Applied to cautels, all strange forms receives,
Of burning blushes, or of weeping water,
Or sounding paleness; and he takes and leaves,
In either’s aptness, as it best deceives,
To blush at speeches rank to weep at woes,
Or to turn white and swoon at tragic shows.

‘Plenitude’ = ‘fullness, abundance’.

‘Subtle matter’=’particles, sometimes living, that fill the universe’. Shakespeare is implying that Harry could transform himself into anything.

Was, in fact, a shape-shifter.

‘Cautels’=’tricks or deceits’. ‘Sounding’=’swooning’.

He could shape his being into anything. He could create blushes and tears and a white, swooning face at will – and he chooses the appearance that will deceive his lovers the most into thinking he is a human being: to look embarrassed at rude speeches, to weep in sympathy when people are upset or to be overcome with emotion at plays.

‘That not a heart which in his level came
Could ‘scape the hail of his all-hurting aim,
Showing fair nature is both kind and tame;
And, veil’d in them, did win whom he would maim:
Against the thing he sought he would exclaim;
When he most burn’d in heart-wish’d luxury,
He preach’d pure maid, and praised cold chastity.

‘Level’=’aim’.

‘All-hurting’ = (1) ‘harming everyone’ and (2) arousing everyone erotically. Shakespeare uses hurt in this way in Sonnet 78. (94) ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none’.

‘The thing he sought’ can = ‘penis’. This implies that the young man attacked homosexuality when he wanted to practice it.

‘Luxury’=’lechery’.

Not a single heart that came within his sights was free from his attack – psychic and sexual – which shows that good natured people are kind and trusting. The young man pretended to be kind and trusting and, hiding his true nature, he won over the people he wanted to injure. He pretended to dislike the thing he really wanted: and when he was at his most lecherous, he advocated virginity and praised people who were chaste.

This was Shakespeare’s own experience with Harry. He thought, initially, that Harry’s outward beauty mirrored his inner beauty uniquely.

In Sonnet 15. (14) he writes:

But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,

And constant stars in them I read such art

As truth and beauty shall together thrive

If from thy self, to store thou wouldst convert:

Or else of thee this I prognosticate,

Thy end is Truth’s and Beauty’s doom and date.

Shakespeare believes that in Harry, beauty and truth live side by side – and that unless Harry has a son, beauty’s union with truth will die when he does.

He states 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;

Prince Pyrocles – cross-dressed as the Amzon Warrior Zalmena – prepares to kill a lion. (From Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’).

Speak of the spring, and foison [abundance] of the year,

The one doth shadow of your beauty show,

The other as your bounty doth appear,

And you in every blessed shape we know.

In all external grace you have some part,

But you like none, none you, for constant heart.

Shakespeare is saying that other people – and even nature itself – share Harry’s beauty – but he is unique because of the moral ‘constancy’ he brings along with it.

In Sonnet 68.54. compares Harry’s truth as an adjunct to his beauty – like the odour that adds worth to the cultivated rose. 

Oh how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,

By that sweet ornament which truth doth give;

The Rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem

For that sweet odour, which doth in it live:

This is in contrast to ‘canker to ‘canker blooms’ = ‘wild dog roses’ which look every bit as attractive as cultivated roses but have no scent.

The Canker blooms have full as deep a dye

As the perfumed tincture of the Roses,

Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly,

When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses:

But it is only the look of the dog-rose that is valued. No-one values them or collects them. They die alone and unloved.

But for their virtue only is their show,

They live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade,

Die to themselves.

But it is a different case with cultivated roses. When they die they are distilled into perfume. It is the same case with Harry. When he starts to decline, his truth and honesty will have been preserved by Shakespeare’s verse.

Sweet Roses do not so,

Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:

And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,

When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth.

But, bit by bit, Shakespeare learns the truth about Harry – in exactly the same way the Young Woman learns the truth about her Lover. In Sonnet 74. (69) Shakespeare admits that the whole world is united in praising Harry’s external beauty:

Those parts of thee that the world’s eye doth view,

Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend:

All tongues (the voice of souls) give thee that due,

Utt’ring bare truth, even so as foes Commend.

But those very people who praised you, damn you as well, by penetrating your inner being. They do this by observing more than their eyes alone do.

Thy outward thus with outward praise is crown’d;

But those same tongues, that give thee so thine own,

In other accents do this praise confound

By seeing farther than the eye hath shown.

These people examine your mind, which they evaluate by observing your actions – and although they praised your beauty before, detect the stench of depravity in your nature.

They look into the beauty of thy mind,

And that, in guess, they measure by thy deeds;

Then churls their thoughts  (although their eyes were kind)

To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds.

The reason for this is that you ‘common grow’ i.e. associate with lower class gay men.

But why thy odour matcheth not thy show

The soil is this, that thou dost common grow.

In Sonnet 114.93 Shakespeare goes even further. He compares himself to a husband whose wife (Harry) is deceiving him but who keeps on supposing he is true:

So shall I live, supposing thou art true,

Like a deceived husband; so love’s face

May still seem love to me, though alter’d new,

Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place.

Shakespeare goes on to say that Harry is not like other people. Their faces reveal the inner workings of their mind and their history. But Harry is exempt from that. He looks beautiful and there is no outward sign of his inner depravity.

For there can live no hatred in thine eye,

Therefore in that I cannot know thy change;

In many’s looks, the false heart’s history

Is writ in moods, and frowns, and wrinkles strange;

But heaven in thy creation did decree

That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell,

What ere thy thoughts, or thy heart’s workings be,

Thy looks should nothing thence, but sweetness tell.

Shakespeare then compares Harry’s beauty to Eve’s apple. Satan had tempted Eve to eat of the ‘forbidden fruit’ by Satan. Now Harry’s beauty is a Satanic temptation for Shakespeare.

How like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow,

If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!

This notion of Satanic possession is picked up by the Young Woman in A Lover’s Complaint:

‘Thus merely with the garment of a Grace
The naked and concealed fiend he cover’d;
That th’ unexperient gave the tempter place,
Which like a cherubin above them hover’d.
Who, young and simple, would not be so lover’d?
Ay me! I fell; and yet do question make
What I should do again for such a sake.

‘Unexperient’=’person without experience’

‘Lovered’ = ‘provided with a lover’.

With the appearance of an angel, he disguised the naked Satan within, so that people with little experience welcomed in the Devil himself – which took the appearance of a hovering cherub. Who, being young and simple, would turn down such a lover? I fell for this deception. But the question is – what would I do if I had known then what I know now?

In Sonnet 46. 144 Shakespeare has played with the idea of demonic possession. He compares Harry and Aemelia two spirits which tempt him. One is angelic – Harry – and the other devilish – the dark-skinned Aemelia.

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

Which like two spirits do suggest me still:

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.

The evil spirit is trying to drag Shakespeare to Hell by seducing his lover – and is also trying to turn Harry into a demon.

To win me soon to hell my female evil

Tempteth my better angel from my side,

And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,

Wooing his purity with her foul pride.

By the time he gets to write A Lover’s Complaint he is convinced that Harry has turned into a demon.

But Shakespeare asks himself, in the figure of the Young Woman, what he would have done if he had known all this before about Harry – his venereal disease [‘eye’ = ‘penis’] his bogus emotions, his simulated love, his lack of spontaneity:

‘O, that infected moisture of his eye,
O, that false fire which in his cheek so glow’d,
O, that forced thunder from his heart did fly,
O, that sad breath his spongy lungs bestow’d,
O, all that borrow’d motion seeming owed,
Would yet again betray the fore-betray’d,
And new pervert a reconciled maid!’

And the answer is that he would have done it all again!

To read ‘Reconciliation’, Part 47, click: HERE