Brothers and Sisters of the Shakespeare Code…
This is the third and final Interval Talk this season – a collaboration between The Shakespeare Code and….
The Season has been a huge success and has given us the opportunity of presenting entirely new material online.
We hope that this will be the start of manny collaborations with the remarkable Kevin Fraser.
‘The Taming of THE Shrew’ – the Inside Story.
On Valentine’s Day, 1598, Sir Gilly Merrick……
made a very great supper
…….at Essex House in the Strand….
Present were the Second Earl of Essex, his mother, his sisters, Lord Mountjoy and many ‘other Lords’.
Two plays were performed which kept everyone up till 1 a.m. The Titchfield Festival Theatre and The Shakespeare Code believes they were the premieres of Much Ado about Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew.
THE Shrew – not A Shrew. The Taming of a Shrew is an earlier play, written at the time of the Spanish Armada, by Thomas Kyd and William Shakespeare. We know this because Thomas Nashe tells us so, in code, in his Preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon, published in 1589.in code, in his Preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon, published in 1589. Nashe attacks the writers – both mere ‘grammarians’ – that is, grammar school boys – for writing a line in A Shrew about…
the icy hair that grows on Boreas chin…..
Boreas was the North Wind, and Nashe found it ridiculous that wind could have a chin.
We also know that the two grammarians were Kyd and Shakespeare because Nashe writes in his Preface about…
the Kyd in Aesop
…and…
kill-cow conceit.
John Aubrey…..
…records how Shakespeare, as a boy…..
when he killed a calf would do it in a high style and make a speech…
Nashe also tells us that Kyd and Shakespeare lodged together at Westminster……
………worked during the day as lawyers’ clerks, and wrote pamphlets and plays in the evening by candlelight. They would then starch their beards – just as Bottom does in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and make their way along the Strand into the City.
Here they would….
turn over French dowdie.
Some scholars think ‘French dowdie’ means French books.
Others, French women.
The Taming of A Shrew has a different setting to The Taming of The Shrew. We are in Ancient Athens, in the age of Plato and Aristotle, and time scheme is over two days.
Christopher Sly appears…..
….with the same name, but stays to the end of the play. He is put back into his old clothes when he is asleep and believes he has had….
the best dream he ever had in his life
He also now knows…..
how to tame a shrew.
Structurally, the old version of the play is better than the new, where Sly slips out of the action.
The Shrew is also called ‘Kate’, but her suitor is called ‘Ferando’. She decides to marry him because…
she has lived too long a maid…
….but determines to….
match him too.
She plays the lute and threatens to strike her serving-maid, Valeria.
Queen Elizabeth also famously played the lute……
…and famously struck her Ladies-in-Waiting. It soon becomes clear that the battle of wills between Kate and Ferando is a satire on the fights between Elizabeth and her first lover, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester….
Ferando feeds Kate meat from his dagger – as Tamburlaine does to a conquered king in Christopher Marlowe’s play….
….and decides to divide power between Kate and himself. She will rule one day – and he the next.
One bystander believes the two are well-matched – but another predicts Ferando will never tame Kate…
for when he has done she will do what she list..
A third adds….
her manhood is good
….promoting the ideas that Elizabeth was really a man.
But Kate does tread her cap underfoot when asked to and gioves a |Biblical rason why every woman should obey her husband:
Then to his image did God make a man,
Old Adam, and from his side asleep
A rib was taken of which the Lord did make,
The woe of man so termed by Adam then,
Woman for that, by her came sin to us,
And for her sin was Adam doomed to die,
As Sara to her husband, so should we,
Obey them, love them, keep and nourish them…
This is very much a criticism of Elizabeth. Many men, especially Roman Catholics, believed that by ascending the throne of England, and then creating herself the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Elizabeth was usurping the power and authority God had given to males.
A lot of women thought the same – including the Countess of Pembroke, living at Wilton….
She was a Protestant, but hated Elizabeth because she had destroyed the political career of her brother, Sir Philip Sidney…
Under her older husband’s name and title, she ran a company of players who performed anti-Elizabeth plays and who toured The Taming of a Shrew right up to 1596.
When Shakespeare came to re-write The Taming of a Shrew in 1598 he changed the setting of the -play from Ancient Greece to contemporary Italy.
Why?
Well, one of the reasons, we believe, was he had been there.
Henry Wriothesley – or ‘Harry Southampton’ as he signed himself –
……..wrote a letter from Dieppe to the Earl of Essex, offering his services to him. It is dated 2nd March but with no year marked.
We believe that year to be 1593 – and that Harry, Shakespeare and little Tom Nashe – now on board as a collaborator rather than a critic – travelled to the Lowlands, Spain and Italy as secret spies for Essex. This isn’t as odd as it might appear: Christopher Marlowe….
……openly gay and openly atheist – had already worked as a spy for the government and Harry Southampton was was to be officially recruited as a spy by Lord Burghley in 1598.
This trip changed Shakespeare’s life. He saw Titian’s Venus and Adonis……
and Rape of Lucrece…..
…….in Madrid and thei9r depth and psychological complexity inspired him to write two long, narrative poems based on them. He even used the same colours in his verse as Titian had used in his paitings.
Before 1593, Shakespeare hadn’t set a single play in Italy: by 1616 there were eight of them. He lifted sixteen of his plots from Italian novellas, one, at least, only available in Rome, and referred to Italy more than 800 times.
He also filled his plays with local detail – detail so accurate people thought they were mistakes. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona Valentine sails from Verona to Milan. Both cities are inland – but it was perfectly possible to do this as the two cities were linked by canals. Canals made journeys quicker and safer – and Harry later dug one at Titchfield….
……only the second canal in England.
Similarly in The Taming of the Shrew Tranio is described as the son of a sail-maker in Bergamo. Bergamo is land-locked – but it contains two lakes and three rivers. A glance at Google will show that Bergamo boasts of ship-building industries to this day….
Shakespeare knows Lombady was called…
the garden of Italy
…as it is by the Italian Tourist Board to this day – that Padua was close to Venice and in its protection – which Mantua was not.
But the other more pressing reason for re-writing the play was the personal and polical pressure Shakespeare and Harry were under in 1598.
When the trio got back to England, they heard that Marlowe had moved in with Kyd into Shakespeare’s old Westminster lodgings. But the next thing they heard was that Marlowe was dead – killed in a gay brawl in Deptford – and that Kyd was all butm dead, tortured on the rack in the Tower of London…
An anonymous author had penned an anti-immigrant poem and pasted it on the doors of the Dutch Church in London. The secret police had ransacked the Westminster lodgings to see if Marlowe or Kit were the author. They found no evidence of this – but they did find…..
atheistical papers.
Kyd confessed on the rack that they belonged to Marlowe. This we now know to be true, but Shakespeare never forgave Kyd. The Countess of Pembroke tried to reconcile the two men, but Shakespeare was having none of it. He even mocked lines from Kyd’s big hit The Spanish Tragedy when he came to write A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1594.
Kyd died at the end of the year, with many debts unpaid. Ben Jonson…..
……who was ambivalent about Kyd to say the least – published a poem which described as….
the poet-ape who would be thought our chief
He describes how Shakespeare would….
pick and glean
…from other men’s works and….
and buy the reversion of old plays…
…that is, buy the rights to them.
It is our belief that Shakespeare bought the rights to Kyd’s plays from his family – plays that included early versions of King Lear, Hamlet, Henry V and, of course, The Taming of the Shrew.
‘Famous Kyd’ as he was known at the time and whose plays at the time were far more popular than Shakespeare’s, became entirely forgotten until he was ‘re-discovered’ by a scholar in 1773.
1594 was also the year when Henry came of age and was expected to attend Elizabeth’s court. This was an expensive business – but it gave him access to the Queen. Essex had become Elizabeth’s lover when the Earl of Leicester died in Armada year, but the two were tiring of each other – so Essex was setting Harry up as his successor.
The gentle and debonair…
….Harry soon caught the Queen’s eye – but one of her young Ladies-in-Waiting caught his. As we have seen, Harry changed the habit of a lifetime and in 1595 began to court the beautiful, but highly-strung, Elizabeth Vernon….
…a poor cousin of the Earl of Essex – with what a gossipy courtier, Rowland Whyte, described in a coded letter as…
too much familiarity.
The Queen found out and flew into a jealous fury. When Harry attempted to help her mount her horse, she refused his help. Harry flounced out of the court. He soon returned, but was never in the Queen’s full favour again.
Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet as part of Harry’s wooing-process – and urged Elizabeth Vernon – in code – to leave the service of the Queen…
since she is envious [that] thou her maid are fr more fair than she.
But things between the lovers started to go wrong. Harry – who was an expert jouster – wanted fame and honour which could only be truly gained in battle. The Queen did not want to risk the lives of her handsome young men – and nor didElizabeth Vernon want to risk that of her Harry. The Queen forbad Harry to accompany Essex on the Cadiz expedition in 1596: but she relented and allowed him to go on the Islands Campaign the following year.
Harry distinguished himself: he took part in a daring expedition to cut the ropes of the harbouring Spanish ships and managed to sink a man of war. He was knighted at sea by Essex – but on return received no thanks or honours from the Queen. In fact she ordered him to leave the court at the end of 1597.
But circumstances changed completely at the beginning of 1598. Whyte writes on 14th January, again in code….
I hear my Lord Southampton goes with Mr. Secretary to France and so onward in his travels; which course of his doth extremely grieve his mistress that passes her time in weeping and lamenting…
Things got much worse five days later. Whyte writes:
I heard of some unkindness should be between the Earl of Southampton and his mistress occasioned by some report of Mr. Ambrose Willoughby. The Earl of Southampton called him to account for it, but the matter was made known to the Earl of Essex and my Lord Chamberlain, who had them under examination; what the cause is I could not learn for it was but new; but I see the Earl of Southampton is full of discontentments.
Willoughby was suggesting Elizabeth Vernon was seeing another man….
In a letter to Sir Robert Sidney, Whyte describes – how after a card game with the Queen, Southampton and Willoughby – Southampton struck Willoughby near the tennis court. Willoughby responded by snatching a lock of Southampton’s shoulder-length hair.
The Queen took Willoughby’s side and banished Harry from the court – but he was back by 28th January.
On 1st February Whyte writes:
My Lord of Southampton is much troubled at her Majesty’s strange usage of him. Somebody hath played unfriendly parts with him. Mr. Secretary hath procured him Licence to travel. His mistress doth wash her fairest face with many tears. I pray God his going away bring her no such infirmity which is, as it were, hereditary to her name.
Dorothy Vernon – whose Roman Catholic father had been Elizabeth’s grandfather – had defied her parents and eloped, on horseback, with John Manners – a second son and a Protestant.
Whyte is implying that with Harry away, Elizabeth might ride off with somebody else.
By 2nd February, things had changed a bit…
it is secretly said that my Lord Southampton shall be married to his fair mistress, but he asked for a little respite…
On 6th February, the Queen gave Harry permission to travel for two years, with ten servants, six horses and £200. On 10th February he left with Robert Cecil on a diplomatic mission to Henri IV in France.
On 12th February Whyte writes:
My Lord of Southampton is gone and left behind him a very desolate Gentlewoman that almost wept out her fairest eyes. He was at Essex House with the Earl of Essex and there had been much private talk with him for two hours in the court below.
Two days later, Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew were performed in the very same place. It is our view that that Harry and Elizabeth had seen run-throughs of the plays before Harry left for France – and that Shakespeare, by writing them, intended to influence the course of events. The very titles suggest what Shakespeare thought of the situation- and what the solution should be!
Shakespeare had attempted to influence Harry many times before. His first seventeen sonnets were written as a commission from Mary, 2nd Countess of Southampton…
…to persuade young Harry to marry. Romeo and Juliet had been a continuation of that process.
There was ambivalence on Shakespeare’s part: part of him wanted to keep Harry for himself. But he knew that, as an aristocrat, Harry needed to produce a son and heir. Also Shakespeare’s own son, Hamnet, had died less than two years before – so Shakespeare knew how valuable family life was. In his grief, Shakespeare had even turned Harry into his own surrogate son.
Much Ado – which editors agree was first performed in 1598 – is almost a blow by blow reconstruction of what had been happening in court. Like Essex, Don Pedro and his men have returned from the wars and are trying to adjust to a peace. There is little to do and there are spies everywhere.
Like Harry, Claudio has distinguished himself in the wars – and, like Harry, falls in love. But there is a villain who wants to upset things and who persuades him that his loved one is untrue….
The play is critical of Claudio’s gullibility – as Shakespeare is of Harry’s – and the play is partly a reprimand to him. Benedick is described as Don Pedro’s jester….
…and Shakespeare also takes up this role – speaking truth to power.
But the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick is also a gloss on the Harry/Elizabeth V. relationship. Both have been engaged in a war of words and both are independently minded. Shakespeare wants to show that, happy as they claim they are, they would be much happier together.
Their love is tested by Beatrice’s order to Benedick to…
Kill Claudio!
…but it holds and play ends in festival, merriment and fulfilment. It is a world where even incompetent policemen make the right arrests.
With The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare transforms a political satire into a profound examination of the battle of the sexes. Katherine and Beatrice are sides of the same coin – and both believe they are destined to….
lead apes in Hell…
….that is, die childless. Beatrice thinks he is happy about this – but Katherina knows she is not. She is clearly miserable with life and is jealous of the love her father gives to Bianca.
Petruchio knows he can make Katherina happy – but has to take her to a deep and dark place first. Shakespeare is advising Harry not to…
seek a little respite
…..from Elizabeth – that would be fatal. But to confront her head on. He must smash the carapace she has grown around herself so she can transform and grow.
This control of a woman’s destiny by a man – however lovingly intended – horrified the Feminists in the 1970s….
And when Petruchio compares Katherina to a falcon he must tame, the past really is another country. But before we dismiss this part of the play as hopelessly chauvinistic, remember that Elizabethan men loved hunting – and the animals they hunted with – beyond life and death. To train a falcon, you had to make it part of your whole being…
Falcons even appeared in the Southampton family crest…..
…..and in the Shakespeare.
Equally problematic is Kate’s last speech when she speaks about the…
painful labour both by sea and land…
…that men do while women lie….
warm at home, secure and safe.
But again it must be remembered that she is talking about a pre-industrial age when brute strenght was often a pre-requisite of work. And when Kate argues for female subservience to men, she is not, as in A Shrew, making a theological point.
She is making an erotic one.
When she describes a woman putting her hand beneath a man’s foot….
to do him ease….
….’foot’ had a sexual meaning lost on us today.
But when, in Franco Zefirelli’s masterly film of the play, you watch Elizbath Taylor kneeling before Richard Burton…..
something of this comes across.
It is impossible to say who is dominating whom….
But the important question to ask is: What effect did these plays have on Harry and Elizabeth?
Life-changing. Literally…
On 8th November, 1598, Elizabeth, by then 3rd Countess of Southampton….
…gave birth to a little girl.
Harry and Elizabeth must have made love directly after seeing the plays….
© Stewart Trotter September, 2021.
The Shakespeare Code 
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