The Shakespeare Code

AN IMPORTANT STATEMENT FROM TRIXIE THE CAT

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code….

It is now some time since I had the pleasure of addressing you all, but Your Cat has not been idle……

Nor has our Chief Agent – Stewart Trotter…..

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We have been at work on a spectacular production which, at the moment, is hush-hush……

….BUT WHICH WILL TAKE THE WORLD BY STORM!!!

In the meantime, The Shakespeare Code has joined forces with…….

…….which performs the plays of William Shakespeare every summer in the Great Barn….

……under the auspices of its renowned Artistic Director Kevin Fraser…..

This season, The Shakespeare Code has provided streamed interval talks for three of the Shakespeare productions –

‘The Comedy of Error’, ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and ‘The Taming of the Shrew’……

…..and over the next three posts, we shall give you the texts of all three talks. The series is entitled –

THE INSIDE STORY

……and we start with……

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

It is our belief that ‘The Comedy of Errors’  was first performed in the Great Hall of Place House, Titchfield, during the Christmas period of 1591/2, as an entertainment for family and friends.

There are references in the play to the cold weather and when Adriana invites her supposed ‘husband’ to dine with her ‘above’, the Minstrels Gallery of the Hall would be an ideal setting.

There was already a tradition of Christmas entertainments. The highly cultured, and devoutly Catholic, first Countess of Southampton, Jane, was described in 1538 as….

merry as can be with Christmas plays and masques….

And her husband, Thomas Wriothesley, the first Earl of Southampton was a keen amateur actor at Cambridge.

We believe William Shakespeare, as a fellow-Catholic, had joined the Southampton entourage in the Spring of 1590, hired by the widowed 2^nd Countess of Southampton, Mary.

He was to be a tutor and friend to her sixteen year old son, Harry……..

……and work as a schoolteacher for the local children in the schoolroom, still standing, opposite the gates of Place House.

Lord Burghley, the Secretary of State, who was Harry’s Guardian, became suspicious that Catholics were grouping together, and placed John Florio in the household as a spy.

He replaced Shakespeare as the schoolmaster and Shakespeare took his revenge by satirising Florio as the pompous, voluble schoolmaster Holofernes in the play ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost – also premiered at Place House two years later.

Mary kept Shakespeare busy, though, by commissioning him to write seventeen sonnets for Harry’s seventeenth birthday in 1590 which urge him to take an interest in girls and marriage. She also commissioned plays from Shakespeare – as did another Mary, the Countess of Pembroke, at nearby Wilton.

The Countess of Pembroke was a Protestant, but the two women were united in their hatred for Queen Elizabeth – Mary Southampton because she persecuted Catholics and Mary Pembroke because she had destroyed the military career of her brother, Sir Philip Sidney.

Queen Elizabeth refused to name her successor – so the two Marys wanted historical plays to show the horror of the Civil War which would result. For this the country-educated Shakespeare needed help…. 

The idiosyncratic phrase….

A rag of money

……appears in ‘The Comedy of Errors’ It also appears in Thomas Nashe’s pamphlet, ‘Four Letters Confuted’. Scholars have argued for years whether Nashe stole from Shakespeare or Shakespeare stole from Nashe. The truth is neither stole from the other.  They collaborated. Shakespeare wrote the poetry and Nashe – gat-toothed, smooth chinned and tiny like a child – wrote the jokes.

In the autumn of 1591, Queen Elizabeth herself made one of her terrifying visits to the area. She lodged, first at Cowdray Castle – the home of Mary’s father, Lord Montague…….

…..then at Place House with the Southamptons. Both families were forced to vacate their homes so Elizabeth could lodge there and her soldiers smash up the wainscot in their search for ‘Papist trash’ – rosaries, crucifixes and statues of the Virgin Mary.  We know for certain Lord Montague celebrated illegal Latin Masses – so it is highly probable that his daughter did the same – and that both were in mortal danger.

Queen Elizabeth repaid father and daughter’s hospitality by tightening the rules against Catholics and by hanging one of Mary Southampton’s best friends – Swithin Wells – outside her London home in Holborn on 10^th December.

Wells had also been a Titchfield schoolmaster. He had recruited young men to train as Catholic Priests. He had described Queen Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, as a cow….

So, when Mary Southampton commissioned a 1591 Christmas entertainment from Shakespeare and Nashe, they felt obliged to acknowledge this sad, harrowing, family event. That is why ‘The Comedy of Errors’ – unlike the source play by Plautus – starts with the looming threat of the execution of Egeon, the Merchant from Syracuse.

But Christmas for the Elizabethans wasn’t all jollity in any case.  It lasted the full Twelve Days from Christmas Day to Epiphany and the arrival of the Three Wise Men. On Christmas Day itself, Queen Elizabeth would often retire from company to pray.

‘The Comedy of Errors’ was probably performed on the 28^th December, Holy Innocents Day, which commemorated King Herod’s slaughter of the little children.

So while we acknowledge Shakespeare and Nashe wrote a lively, often hilarious comedy about two identical pairs of twins (Mary Southampton herself had a twin brother, Anthony Browne who lived at West Horsley) we believe it is also a deeply Christian – and indeed Roman Catholic – work.

The writers set the play in Ephesus – unlike Plautus, who set it in Epidamnum. Ephesus was well known to a Christian audience as the place where St. Paul went to convert the inhabitants to Christianity – but found the country full of magicians, witches and conjurers.

He ordered the Ephesian Christians, in a famous letter, to be kind to one another. Husbands should honour their wives and wives should honour and obey their husbands. Slaves should work hard for their masters and masters should treat their slaves with respect. If these Christian directives are not followed, Satan and the forces of darkness would triumph.

This is what seems to happen in the play. As the ‘errors’ pile up, wives insult their husbands, husbands cheat on their wives, masters savagely beat their slaves and former friends act with horror and violence as they seem to lose their money and their property. When ‘Antipholus’ is declared possessed, it looks as though Satan really has taken over Ephesus.

All of this, of course, is instantly resolved when the mistaken identities are sorted out. But for many Catholics, Ephesus in its state of dark delusion, represented Elizabeth’s Protestant England.  The Jesuits believed – or at least said they believed – that the kingdom had been taken over by Satan when Henry VIII…..

……married Anne Boleyn……

…….whom many recusants believed to be his illegitimate daughter. And when Elizabeth came to the throne, many thought it was against Paul’s teaching for a woman to rule both a country and her male lovers – and positively blasphemous for her to declare herself ‘Head’ of the English church.  In the end, she settled for ‘Supreme Governor’.

What made the play even more immediate to its first audience was its topography. In those days the sea wall hadn’t been built at Titchfield Haven – so Titchfield really was like the Bay of Ephesus – with ships docking all the time, and countless pubs and prostitutes.

An Abbey features prominently in the play and the whole audience would know Place House had originally been a French Premonstratension Abbey before it was dissolved by King Henry. Jane Southampton, the formidable First Countess…..

……found it sacrilegious that the Abbey chapel was converted into a Master Bedroom. So they converted the Chapter House to her own private chapel.

The writers take the characters in the play on an extraordinary SPIRITUAL journey. People don’t know if they are in heaven or hell, or alive or dead. Lost brothers, husbands and wives feel they are drops bound together in a vast sea – but a sea that threatens to overwhelm them.

They all have to lose themselves and their loves – have false identities thrown upon them – before they can find their true selves and their true loves.  This is pure Catholic mysticism, as far removed from Elizabeth’s Calvinism – where everything had been predetermined by God – as could possibly be. 

There is blatant Catholic flag-waving in the play when Dromio of Syracuse says:

Oh my beads! O cross me for a sinner.

If rosary beads had been found by Queen Elizabeth’s soldiers at Titchfield, the Southamptons would have been in big trouble. But Shakespeare reaches out to fellow Catholics in the play with an even more daring piece of code.

Antipholus of Syracuse, when he falls in love with Adriana’s sister, Luciana, describes her as

our earth’s wonder, more than earth divine.

Scholars have taken this to be a compliment to Queen Elizabeth.  But Antipholus goes on to describe Luciana as a….

sweet mermaid…..

……and he asks her to…..

spread o’er the waves her golden hair

A compliment to a Queen is intended, but to a dead, Scottish, Catholic Queen who also had golden coloured hair – Mary Queen of Scots….

…….whose personal symbol was the mermaid.

In the will she made before her confinement in 1566, she left her lover, the Earl of Bothwell…..

a miniature figurine of a mermaid set in diamonds, holding a mirror and a ruby comb

The following year, Bothwell (whose heraldic crest was the hare) was accused of killing Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley.

Mary was lampooned in a poster as a crowned, bare-breasted mermaid, with her hair falling down to her shoulders, defending her lover with a whip.

Later that year, Mary was imprisoned in the Black Turnpike in Edinburgh, ostensibly to save her from the mobs who were baying for her blood.

On 16th June she appeared at her window ‘with her bodice undone, her breasts exposed and her tangled hair loose, and with ‘piteous lamentations’ made a distraught appeal for help from the citizens who had gathered below’. Even the dour Scottish Calvinist John Knox……

………(who had compared Mary Queen of Scots to Jezebel) had to admit she possessed ‘some enchantment whereby men are bewitched’.

Antipholus of Syracuse also finds Luciana’s presence ‘enchanting’ and says:

Sing, siren for thyself and I will dote;

Spread o’er the silver waves thy golden hairs

And as a bed I’ll take thee and there lie

And in that glorious supposition think

He gains by death that hath such means to die;

Let love, being light, be drowned if she sink

This is a tribute to the erotic, feminine, beauty of Mary Queen of Scots as well as Luciana.

‘Die’ for the Elizabethans was ambiguous – it could mean death or orgasm – both are here implied.  To have made love to Mary would have been bliss for a man: but to have died for her would have been bliss as well. Shakespeare here is referring to the death of hundreds of Northern Catholics in the rebellion against Elizabeth in 1569.

A plot had been hatched to spring Mary Queen of Scots from Tutbury and base her and her forces at nearby Arundel Castle……

– and the plot had largely been hatched at Place House.

So who performed the play? It is our belief that it was a mixture of professional players and aristocratic amateurs. It was customary for women to perform in private entertainments even if actresses were banned from the public stages.

Luciana would most probably have been played by the beautiful Penelope Rich……

…..the muse of Sir Philip Sidney, the great friend of the Southampton family and blessed with her famously golden hair.

Antipholus of Syracuse would have been a great, poetic part for William Shakespeare – and there are many references to his famously bald pate!  And little Nashe would have made a stunning Dromio of Syracuse. Dromio says:

I am an ape

And in ‘Strange News’ Nashe writes:

I was a little ape at Cambridge

The Courtesan in the play is flatteringly described as:

of excellent discourse,

Pretty and witty: wild, and yet too, gentle

We believe that there WAS a courtesan staying at Place House – Aemelia Bassano – who was the mistress of the Queen’s cousin, old Lord Hunsdon, who paid her forty pounds a year for her services.

She – with her family of musicians – Sephardic Jews originally from Morocco – had played on the Queen’s Progress to Cowdray and Titchfield – and had stayed on at Titchfield because the plague was raging in London.

In the 1970s A. L. Rowse identified her as the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He was derided at the time, but more and more scholars are concluding that he was right.

We believe that Aemilia played the Courtesan – and would have raised a big laugh when she declares: ‘Forty ducats is too much to lose’.

Forty ducats is too much to lose.

The Abbess would have made an excellent part for Mary Southampton – warm, and strong and healing, who finally is re-united with her husband. Catholics believed there was traffic between the living and the dead and many of Shakespeare’s plays, like ‘Hamlet’, advance the belief. The Abbess has ‘lost’ her husband and Mary has ‘lost’ hers – both in life and in death. The Second Earl of Southampton……

……had accused her of infidelity with a ‘common person’ and thrown her out of Place House. Shakespeare wanted to suggest a reconciliation between the two souls – one dead and one still living – by his ‘most potent art’. The Abbess and Egeon meet and their relationship is restored.

The same, Shakespeare implies, will happen to the 2^nd Countess and the 2^nd Earl when they meet in heaven. 

But, even here, Shakespeare can’t resist a bawdy joke. Brothels were called ‘nunneries’ in Elizabethan days – as in ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ – and ‘nuns’ were (and still are in some people’s minds) prostitutes. The Abbess’s name turns out to be Aemilia, spelt (in the First Folio at least if not the Arden edition) in the same unusual way as Aemilia Bassano.

Scholars have long thought that the part of Pinch was played by John Sinclo – a character actor with a scrawny body and comically ugly face – and it has been assumed that the part was created specially for him.

But there is a puzzle. Why is Pinch called ‘a schoolmaster’ in the stage directions when there is no reference to his profession in the play?

A new study of John Florio – ‘Italus Ore, Anglus Pectore’ – by an Italian Academic, Carla Rossi – has unwittingly thrown up the answer.  Pinch in the play is described as having a ‘saffron face’ – which scholars – if they comment at all – have taken to be his skin colouring.

But Rossi, working on the Italian community in Elizabethan London, shows that when Florio returned to England at the age of 19 (his Protestant father – a convert from both Judaism AND Catholicism – had fled the persecution of Mary Tudor’s reign) he not only worked as an Italian teacher in London – he became a servant and apprentice to Michel Baynard and Gaspari Gatti – both of them silk dyers.

Saffron, of course, is used in the dyeing process and in Sonnet 111 Shakespeare describes how having to work in the theatre has ‘stained him’ in the way a dyer’s hands are stained:

Almost my nature is subd’ud

To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.

If a dyer’s hands are stained, then why not his face as well? We’ve all been made very aware by the Covid Pandemic how often we touch our faces.

Frances Yates, the great Florio scholar, shows that Florio gives his address as ‘Woster House’ – but she is unaware of the implications. Worcester House is right by the Thames (needed for water) in the parish of St. James, Garlickhythe in the heart of silk-dyeing trade

But the plot thickens! In the 1580s, before he came to Titchfield, Yates tells us he acquired a house in Shoe Lane in the parish of St. Andrews, Holborn, opposite Saffron Hill.  

Now we don’t know if it was called ‘Saffron Hill’ in Shakespeare’s day as it is not named on the famous contemporary ‘Agas map’. But John Stow later called it ‘Gold Lane’ and it is clear saffron was grown there. The Fleet River also ran nearby, in case Florio wanted to do a bit of dyeing. Dyers often worked from home.

So Pinch’s occupation as ‘schoolmaster’ didn’t need to be mentioned in the text. Everyone would have recognised who he was from his clothes and appearance. And like Holofernese, the schoolmaster in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, his face and physique is the butt of many cruel jokes. Antipholus of Ephesus describes Pinch as:

A hungry lean-fac’d villain

A mere anatomy, a mounterbank

A thread-bare juggler and a fortune teller

A needy hollow-eyed sharp-looking wretch…

Yates quotes John Eliot in his ‘Fruits’ describing Florio directly as:

an Italian Harlequin…He is crump-shouldered and crooked and hath a hawk’s nose.

But why is a schoolmaster conducting an exorcism? And why is the office sent up if we are in a Roman Catholic milieu?

Well, the simple fact is neither of the Antipholi is possessed – Pinch simply mis-diagnoses. And Pinch is not a priest. In the Catholic world, only priests can perform exorcisms, and specialised priests at that. In Elizabethan England, Protestant ‘conjurers’ like John Dee were allowed to perform this ceremony for the simple reason they spoke the language of ghosts – Latin.

Pinch ends up bound to a chair with his beard ‘sing’d off with brands of fire and ‘great pails of puddled mire’ thrown over him’ to quench [his] hair.’ Dromio of Ephesus meanwhile ‘nicks’ his hair with scissors to give him the haircut of a fool – which was identical to the haircut of a monk. There is a real danger that between the two of them, Antipholus of Ephesus and his man, will….

Kill the conjurer….

A present day audience might well find this brutal rather than funny. But we believe that the original audience would have thought that Pinch, an un-ordained interloper – and in real life a spy for Lord Burghley – had only been given his due.

The play went on to be performed, with professional actors and boys replacing the aristocratic women. The first performance we know of was at Gray’s Inn – the Inn of Court to which Harry, 3^rd Earl of Southampton belonged – and just by Southampton House in Holborn – again on Holy Innocents’ Day, 28^th December, 1594.

It was a night of chaos and confusion and the actors, which probably included Shakespeare, were dismissed as:

base and common fellows

The next performance we know about was ten years later for King James – again on Holy Innocents’ Day in 1604. Shakespeare was writing his plays at this time initially for aristocrats – royalty even.

They seemed to bring the best out of him – so we should be eternally grateful for the patronage he received at Titchfield.

© Stewart Trotter June 2021.