The Shakespeare Code

( A Programme Note for the production of the play by the Titchfield Festival Theatre)

In 1964, George P. V. Akrigg, a Canadian academic, visited Titchfield. He was doing research for his book, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, and called in at St. Peter’s Church, where he noticed a ‘little guide’ to the Parish which was ‘sold at the door there’.   Written by Rev. G. Stanley Morley – the Vicar of Titchfield for nineteen years – it had been published in 1934, cost sixpence and put all of Akrigg’s research into doubt.

Morley reported there was a tradition at Titchfield that the Third Earl of Southampton’s ‘romance’ with Elizabeth Vernon – a Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Elizabeth……

…….had inspired William Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet’ and that it ‘was acted for the first time in Titchfield.’

Akrigg wrote that this story was ‘too late to have any authority’ and cites the anthropologist, Lord Raglin, who pours scorn on ‘local traditions’ offered by ‘rural’ clergymen with only a ‘smattering of history’. What Akrigg didn’t mention was that Morley was a Cambridge M.A. and an Inspector of Schools – and what Akrigg didn’t know was that there was a long established tradition of staging plays at Titchfield.

Jane Wriothesley, 1^st  Countess of Southampton……

……hosted Christmas entertainments for the local people even before the Abbey had been converted and her husband, Thomas Wriothesly, later 1^st Earl of Southampton, had been a keen amateur actor at Cambridge.

Their son, the 2^nd Earl of Southampton……

……..married Mary Browne…….

……the daughter of Anthony Browne – who in 1554 had been created Viscount Montague by Philip of Spain, then also King of England.

Lord Montague was sent to Italy the following year on diplomatic service – and here he would certainly have learnt about the family feuds of ‘I Montecchi’ and ‘I Capuletti’ which stretched back to Dante in the fourteenth century.

By 1562, an English translation of the Italian tale had turned the families into the ‘Montagews’ and ‘Capalets’ – and when Lord Montague’s son and daughter (twin brother and half-sister of Mary Browne/Southampton) married in a double wedding, George Gascoigne wrote a masque for the event based on the old feud story. But he turned the Veronese Montagew into a Venetian for the duration because the family had ‘bought furniture of silks, etc., and had caused their costumes to be cut of the Venetian fashion’.

As Queen Elizabeth’s reign progressed, Place House in Titchfield became a centre of the arts and learning. Elizabethan aristocrats disliked living in smelly, crowded London – and the men were addicted to hunting deer, boar and hare on their estates. The women needed something to occupy their minds – so they many of them engaged in amateur acting, employing professional actors and writers – like William Shakespeare – to up their game.

Mary Southampton also employed Shakespeare as tutor to her teenage son, the 3^rd Earl, Harry Southampton……

…..and commissioned him to write seventeen sonnets to celebrate her son’s seventeenth birthday and encourage him to marry Elizabeth Vere – the grand-daughter of his guardian, Lord Burghley. But there was a problem: Harry wasn’t interested in women. And there was another problem: Harry was interested in Shakespeare. We know all this from reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets – which tell us that Shakespeare wanted to keep the relationship with Harry Platonic. It seems Shakespeare had been initiated into gay life by Christopher Marlowe in London……..

……..but an affair with Harry would have clashed, to say the least, with his working brief from Mary Southampton.

Queen Elizabeth – and all her court and soldiers – went on one of her Progresses to Hampshire in 1591. Lord Montague staged an entertainment for her – in which he and his wife took part – over several days in the grounds of Cowdray Castle. In the Queen’s entourage was the beautiful, dark-skinned, mixed race musician – Aemilia Basanno – who forms the subject of the plays in the Great Barn’s Shakespeare Season. It was with her that Romeo and Juliet had its beginnings…..

Shakespeare fell madly in love with her – even though she was the mistress of the Queen’s cousin, old Lord Hunsdon…….

Shakespeare made a play for her at Titchfield by casting her as the coquettish, black-eyed Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost and himself as her wooer Berowne – an anagram of the Browne family name.

But Rosaline/Aemilia was having none of it: her cap was set at young Lord Harry – and she teased and flirted with him till he fell in love with her as well. Shakespeare in an agony of jealousy went off on tour – imagining the two of them in bed together, in the way Othello does with Desdemona and Cassio. But, in a torment of passion, he came to realise that he was more in love with the boy than the girl. Aemilia became pregnant and was hurriedly married off to a ‘minstrel’ and Shakespeare declared his love for Harry in the great sonnet, ‘Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?’.

Mary Southampton soon twigged what was going on – but Shakespeare reminded her that she, in her youth, had loved in an unconventional way. She had fallen in love with ‘a common person’ and her husband had snatched her son Harry away from her. There was war between the Southampton and Montague families – and their servants took part in street brawls so seriously they were put in jail. Compare this with the first scene of Romeo and Juliet.

When he came into his early 20s, Harry was expected to reside at Queen Elizabeth’s Court – and everyone assumed he would take over the Earl of Essex’s role as the Queen’s lover. Essex – codename ‘The Weary Knight’ – was more than happy to hand over to his younger friend. But Harry fell in love with one of Elizabeth’s beautiful, young, Ladies-in-Waiting, Elizabeth Vernon. As a consequence:

1. Mary Southampton was thrilled as it meant the Southampton family name would continue.
2. Essex was delighted because Elizabeth V. was his poor cousin.
3. The Queen was furious because she was being upstaged by one of her attendants.
4. Elizabeth V. was uncertain because she was highly strung and uncertain about her feelings and..
5. Shakespeare was downright ambivalent. He wanted Harry to marry – but he didn’t want Harry to marry.

The combined forces of Mary Southampton and Essex persuaded Shakespeare to write a play to persuade Elizabeth V. to accept Harry as her lover. So Romeo and Juliet was born. Harry played Romeo, Elizabeth V. played Juliet, Shakespeare played Mercutio and the whole thing was staged as a wooing game at Place House.

THE VICAR OF TITCHFIELD WAS RIGHT!

P.S. Half a Dozen Things to Look Out for in Romeo and Juliet.

1. Everyone was worried that Harry might still have some vestigial love for Aemilia/Rosaline. That’s why Romeo is presented at first as being in love with Rosaline – but then becomes convinced that Rosaline/Aemilia is, in fact, ‘a crow’.

2. There is a coded attack on Queen Elizabeth in the play. The Virgin Queen was referred to as ‘the Moon’ so when Romeo/Harry says to Juliet/Elizabeth V. ‘Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon/Who is already sick and pale with grief/That thou her maid art far more fair than she’ it is a reference to the Queen’s jealousy of her Ladies-in-Waiting – and the beginnings of the Essex/Southampton plot to overthrow the Queen.

Romeo/Harry then goes on to advise Juliet/Elizabeth V. to give up her her position as attendant to the Queen: ‘Be not her maid since she [Queen Elizabeth] is envious/Her vestal livery is but sick and green/And none but fools do wear it’.

3. Juliet/Elizabeth V. famously says: ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’. Shakespeare, in his Sonnets calls Harry ‘my rose’ – a reference to the Southampton rose and the way Harry pronounced his family name ‘Wriothesley’. The cadet members of the family pronounced it ‘Risley’ and used this spelling in their letters. But we know from the Titchfield Parish Register that Harry pronounced it ‘Ryosely’ – and possibly even ‘Rosely’

4. Christopher Marlowe who had been killed by the time Romeo and Juliet was written – had a tremendous influence on Shakespeare’s notions of love. In his poem Hero and Leander he writes|: ‘Whoever loved who loved not at first sight?’ and Shakespeare’s play makes this idea central. Shakespeare himself, in his Sonnets, writes about the moment his ‘eye’ first ‘eyed’ young Harry.

5. Elizabeth V.’s emotional turbulence was to prove a problem for the next few years – and the relationship was nearly broken off at one point when Harry thought she was having an affair with another man. So Shakespeare creates a woman in Juliet who is CERTAIN of her love – and her passion – for Romeo in the hopes that it might rub off on Elizabeth V. herself. It did. She proved a warm and loving wife to Harry.

6. John Dryden reports that Shakespeare said that he had to kill Mercutio off or Mercutio would have killed him. Shakespeare IS Mercutio – with all his wild, dark fantasy and over-whelming love for Romeo/Harry. There are times when Shakespeare’s sonnets are filled with despair and desire for death – and the play itself – written at time of political turbulence when the Queen had imposed Martial Law – deals with a society that is consumed with violence and betrayal. Shakespeare in the play seems to be saying the only thing that is real in life is your emotions. To be authentic, you must follow them to the very end.

P.P.S. The moment this Programme Note was submitted, the most important idea came into my head! I have argued that, as a Roman Catholic, Shakespeare believed that the living could influence the fate of the dead – that’s why Requiem Masses were celebrated and the well-being of souls were prayed for. Mary Southampton and her husabnd the 2nd Earl of Southampton were ardent Catholics – but they died with their quarrel unresolved: the Houses of Montague and Southampton were still, spiritually, at war. The 2nd Earl had snatched away their son, Harry, in 1580 – and banished Mary from their house. My belief is that A Midsummer Night’s Dream – with its war between Oberon and Titania over the little changeling boy, reflects the war between Mary and her husband. And that the reconciliation of the Fairy King and Queen represents Shakespeare’s attempt at a spiritual reconciliation between the dead husband and a living wife. Similarly, I know feel that by resolving the family feud of the Montagues and Capulets, Shakespeare is attempting the same spiritual reconcilaition of the houses of the Montagues and Southamptons.

S.T.