The Shakespeare Code

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

The existence of Titus Andronicus is one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have that Harry, Third Earl of Southampton……..

……and William Shakespeare……..

…..visited Europe in the Spring of 1593.

The play’s first mention is in London Theatre Manager Henslowe’s diary as a ‘new’ play on 23^rd January, 1594. At that time the story only existed in a chap-book, written in Italian and only available in Rome. The most simple and obvious deduction is that Shakespeare picked up the book when he was in the Eternal City – along with a lot of other Italian novellas that he recycled, uncredited, into plays.

Titus Andronicus might have been ‘new’ to Henslowe, but the Shakespeare Code believes it is one of the plays that had its first performances in Titchfield. With its pit, elder tree, horse-riding and arrow shooting, it is more suited to ‘outdoor’ performance than ‘indoor’. It is also full of references to the Earl of Southampton’s entourage.

For example, there is no ‘Aemilius’ mentioned in the source of the play, nor is there a ‘Bassianus’. But there was a dark-skinned, Jewish musician who had been involved in a love-triangle with Shakespeare and Southampton at Titchfield –  and her name was Aemilia Bassano.

Similarly, there is no ‘Saturninus’ in the source – but ‘Old Saturnus’ was the nick-name given to Southampton’s pompous guardian, Lord Burghley……..

…….who was Queen Elizabeth’s right-hand man. Shakespeare even makes a mocking reference to him in Sonnet 98:

‘Old Saturnus’ had helped Princess Elizabeth rise to the top, as Saturninus helps Tamora, Queen of the Goths, to do the same.

The play also mirrors the political pressures on the Southampton entourage. Queen Elizabeth had refused to name her successor and people were terrified civil war would break out on her death – as it does at the beginning of Titus Andronicus.

The Countess of Southampton…….

…… and the Countess of Pembroke…….

……(at nearby Wilton) pooled resources to commission plays and poems which examined the situation – and criticised the conduct of the Queen. The Southamptons were committed Catholics and so the natural enemies of Elizabeth – but the Protestant Countess of Pembroke – who had been banned from the Court – hated Elizabeth for another reason: the Queen had destroyed her brother, Sir Philip Sidney’s, career as a soldier and politician……

…….He had been forced into the humiliation of becoming a poet….

There can be no doubt that Tamora, who is compared in the play to Phoebe and Diana and who rides a white horse – is a savage caricature of Queen Elizabeth – who was also compared to Phoebe and Diana and who also rode a white horse.

Both Tamora and Elizabeth had also experienced public humiliation: Tamora at the beginning of the play has ‘to kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain’ while Elizabeth, when a Princess, had to sit on a stone, in the rain, outside the Tower of London. Tamora takes vengeance on the Andronicus family when Titus kills her son – and Elizabeth took vengeance on the Roman Catholics in England who had tried to chop off her head.

There is also – in Catholic eyes at least – a similarity in the sexual tastes of the two Queens. Aaron describes how, when he told Tamora he had sent back the two heads of his sons to Titus…

Tamora is sexually excited by violence in the way Catholics claimed Elizabeth was. Elizabeth had ordered two men (who had written and circulated pamphlets criticising her) to have their right hands amputated. She had set up  the block beneath the window of her bedchamber.

A Jesuit Priest called Thomas Pormont had also reported how Elizabeth’s hangman – Richard Topcliffe – boasted to him that he would fondle the Queen’s breast and ‘belly’ as he described the tortures he had inflicted on Catholics. As a reward, the Queen had presented him with ‘white linen hose wrought with white silk’.

Tamora pretends to be good-hearted but slaughters her enemies. Elizabeth – who claims she wants ‘to make no windows into men’s hearts’- does exactly the same. Her victims included Edward Arden, a relative of Shakespeare’s mother, and the Jesuit Robert Southwell, who described Shakespeare as his ‘cousin’. Elizabeth even hanged the Southampton family’s old friend and Titchfield schoolmaster, Swithin Wells, right outside the Countess’s London home.

So if the play seems overly violent it is partly because the times were overly violent. And the most violent character of all is Aaron the Moor – a caricature of Elizabeth’s lover and henchman, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester……

…… known as ‘the Gipsy’ because of his dark skin.

Leicester had died in Armada year, six years before the play – so Shakespeare was able to lampoon him without ending up hanged, drawn and quartered. For, according to a Jesuit book – Leicester’s Commonwealth – Leicester had done everything that Aaron does. He poisoned rivals, he poisoned their wives and used magic spells to get his way. He rose to power by nailing his colours to Princess Elizabeth’s mast – as Aaron does in the play to Tamora’s:

I will be bright and shine in pearls and gold,

To wait upon this new made empress.

One of the Gipsy’s poison victims had been the First Earl of Essex…….

….. who, like Titus, had been fighting for his country abroad.  His son, the Second Earl of Essex…….

…..was a close friend of Harry Southampton and his entourage – so would certainly have seen Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare portrays him in the play as Lucius, the son of murdered Titus – and when he shows Lucius attacking Rome it’s a hint to Essex that he should do the same in London – and over-throw Elizabeth with a foreign army.

Rome – ‘a wilderness of tigers’ – was often used in Elizabethan times as a satirical name for ‘London’ – but where in the play does the satire end and the ‘tragedie’ begin?

When Shakespeare returned to England in 1593 he encountered two more real life horrors – the murder of Christopher Marlowe in a drunken brawl in Deptford……

…… and the brutal torture of Thomas Kyd in the Tower on suspicion of atheism. Both playwrights were friends who had a pronounced influence on Shakespeare – Marlowe with his passion and his violence and Kyd with his suicides and revenge. There are whole passages in Titus Andronicus that could have been written by either of these men. But we see in the play Shakespeare struggling to find his own voice. He wanted to create a more mature form of tragedy than had existed before.

The German philosopher, Hegel……

…… thought that true tragedy springs from the conflict of two irreconcilable ‘rights’. Titus is ‘right’, in terms of his Pagan religion, to sacrifice Tamora’s son to liberate the souls of his own sons: but Tamora is also ‘right’ to seek revenge for the murder of hers.

We know from his Sonnets that Shakespeare was not above seeking revenge in real life – but his plays were ‘better’ than he was. His characters often struggle hard to forgive others and to empathise with them. Titus, for example, displays a dark certainty and terrifying grandeur as he slits the throats of Tamora’s sons and bakes their heads in a pie. But he transforms into a sublime force of nature itself when he pities his mutilated daughter:

I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow;

She is the weeping welkin, I the earth:

Then must my sea be moved with her sighs

Then must my earth with her continual tears

Become a deluge, over-flow’d and drown’d;

For why my bowels cannot hide her oes,

But like a drunkard I must vomit them.

And even Aaron realises that the loving, loyal Lucius has a spirituality he lacks:

Yet for I know thou [Lucius] art religious

And hast a thing within thee called conscience,

With twenty popish tricks and ceremonies

Which I have seen thee careful to observe…

And though Aaron hates the whole of mankind, he adores the baby he has produced with Tamora. Even the most evil of people can be touched by the love for their own flesh and blood – and that, for Shakespeare, dignifies and ennobles the worst of human kind. They are, in some way, redeemable.

Shakespeare is striving to invent Christian Tragedy.

But the play has a huge, perhaps irredeemable, flaw for a modern audience. When Aaron says…..

Aaron will have his soul black like his face

…..he is equating ‘black’ with ‘bad’. And so, it seems, is Shakespeare.

But, when he was in love with the dark skinned Aemilia Bassano, he argued that ‘black was beautiful’.

He acknowledges, in Sonnet 127, that in the olden times, a black skin was not thought of as ‘fair’ – but now white skinned women so ‘slander’ their beauty with wigs and make-up that the purity of a black skin, brows and eyes has become the new ‘fair’ – and….

 ….every tongue says beauty should look so.

Aemilia was much more interested in handsome, young, rich Harry Southampton and so dumped Shakespeare. In a hurt fury, Shakespeare started to use black in the Sonnets as a term of abuse.

But the fact that Shakespeare invents an Aemilius and a Bassianus – and even gives the Moor Aaron a Jewish name – shows that Aemilia was still very much on his mind – or at least his unconscious mind.

And that part of him still found her the most beautiful woman on earth.