The Shakespeare Code

It’s best to read In Defence of the Vicar of Titchfield: (1) ‘Romeo and Juliet’ first.

 G. P. V. Akrigg continues his attack on Rev. Canon Morley by writing in his Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (1968)….

The Parish guide is incorrect in claiming that Shakespeare’s fellow actor, Beeston, was a Titchfield man……

He then states categorically that…..

 No Beestons are listed in the register during this period.

Akrigg transcribed the Parish Register from its beginning in 1587 to the burial of the Third Earl of Southampton in 1624.

How he must wish he had transcribed a few years more…..

On the 5th May, 1629 ‘Mis Elizabeth Bestenn’ was baptised at St. Peter’s. On 25th February, 1632 ‘Mary Beestone of William Beestone gener’ was married there – and on 20th March, 1633, ‘Mrs Fraunces Beestone’ baptised.

In the Second Volume of the Titchfield Parish Register (1634-1678)…….

……brilliantly transcribed by the Titchfield History Society –  there are ELEVEN references to the name ‘Beeston’ and its variants.

Akrigg attacks Morley’s scholarship……

He should have got his own house in order first….

Even the Titchfield History Society itself can’t resist a bit of Vicar-bashing….

What is it about Vicars?

Why do they bring out the worst in everybody?

In April, 1981, two Distinguished Members of the Titchfield History Society…….

….no names, no pack-drill…..

….wrote in The Hampshire Field Club Local History Newsletter 1 (3):

Morley recorded in his parish guide the ‘incontrovertible fact’ that the family of Shakespeare’s ‘great friend and fellow actor William Beeston lived in Titchfield. The actor who for a time (about 1598) was in the Lord Chamberlain’s Company was in fact Christopher Beeston; it was his son, William Beeston who knew John Aubrey of the Brief Lives . There is however no evidence that this Beeston family had any connection with a family of some standing who lived at Posbrook in Titchfield in the 1630’s….

‘NO EVIDENCE’ !!!

Chistopher Beeston – who signed himself on this occasion  Christopher ‘Hutchinson’ – completed his will on 4th October, 1638. 

He stated he was ‘sick and weak in body’.

He wrote a codicil to his will on 7th October, 1638.

TWO DAYS LATER on 9th October 1638, William Beeston, of Posbrook Farm, Titchfield signed his will….

He said he was ‘weak in body’.

Chistopher Hutchinson/Beeston was buried in St. Giles-in-the-Fields on 16th October, 1638 and William Beeston was buried at St. Peter’s, Titchfield, on 3rd December, 1638.

EITHER THIS A COINCIDENCE OF COSMIC PROPORTIONS OR THERE WAS A LINK BETWEEN THE TWO MEN!!!

The Shakespeare Code is of the firm opinion that William Beeston of Titchfield was the natural father Christopher Hutchinson/Beeston who was illegitimate – hence his two names.

By 1638 William Beeston had acquired a legitimate family as well. 

That’s why he writes……

 I bequeath to every child that God hath sent me five shillings….

The phrase ‘every child that God hath sent me’ covers his illegitimate children along with his legitimate.

By leaving Christopher et al a paltry 5 shillings each – £125 in today’s money – the wealthy William Beeston (he had just acquired a coat of arms) prevented any further claims on his estate from his illegitimate children.

The bulk of his estate he left to his….

Beloved wife Elizabeth….

The Code believes that Christopher Hutchinson/Beeston begged his natural father, Titchfield William Beeston, to visit him when he was dying.

He wanted to persuade him to leave his family some money…..

Titchfield William Beeston was infected with Christopher’s disease, probably the Plague…

The Code further believes that the Titchfield William Beeston was in fact a friend of William Shakespeare – as he was a friend of Thomas Nashe who nick-named him William ‘Apis Lapis’…

Apis= Bee and Lapis = Stone……Beestone…..

Nashe in his pamphlet Strange Newes also mentions Beeston’s illegitimate children….

And though he was not a professional actor, The Code believes Titchfield William Beeston played the part of Bacchus in Nashe’s entertainment Sommer’s Last Will and Testament……

Bacchus’s advocacy of wine was, The Code believes, Beeston’s own sales pitch…..

….he was, amongst other things, a vintner…..

And this inspired Shakespeare and Nashe to create the immortal fat knight, Falstaff…..

Brothers and Sister of The Code can read more about this in the article…..

Why Falstaff is Fat

or the longer essay……

The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis.

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In 1964, George P. V. Akrigg, of The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, visited Titchfield in Hampshire, England.

He was doing research for his book, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, which was published in London in 1968….

He called in at St. Peter’s Church, where the magnificent tomb of the Southampton family lies, and saw a ‘little guide’ to the Parish which was ‘sold at the door there’.

Written by Rev. G. Stanley Morley, M.A., it had been published in 1934, for sixpence.

Morley had graduated from Magdalen College, Cambridge in 1898, had been a Curate at Huntingdon, a Chaplain and Assistant Master at Seafield Park College in Fareham and an Inspector of Schools for the Diocese.

He became the Vicar of Titchfield in 1919 and stayed in the post till 1936. He was clearly a Shakespeare enthusiast…

Morley states that it was the Third Earl of Southampton’s……

 romance…….

…..i.e. his wooing of Queen Elizabeth’s Lady-in-Waiting, Elizabeth Vernon…

….against the express wishes of the Queen herself…..

….on which Shakespeare….

……founded his play Romeo and Juliet, which is believed to have been acted for the first time in Titchfield.

Akrigg responds:

A local tradition that Romeo and Juliet was performed at the great house by Shakespeare’s company is too late to have any authority…

But how can Akrigg possibly know WHEN the tradition started?

A Vicar who had stayed fifteen years in his post would have been given access to generations of old family stories.

Akrigg then cites Morley’s Guide, without even mentioning the author’s name, and adds:

Those who place faith in such traditions would do well to read Lord Raglan’s chapter on Local Traditions in The Hero (London, 1936).

●

Fitzroy Richard Somerset, Fourth Baron Raglan, anthropologist, self-styled debunker-of-myth, lapsed soldier and bee-keeper….

…….writes:

There are various ways in which a local tradition, so called, comes into existence. In the first place there is to be found, in most rural areas, some clergyman or schoolmaster with a smattering of history or archeology who enjoys speculating about the past and invariably ends, if he does not begin, by regarding himself as a more than sufficient authority for his own statements. He is regarded as the expert and nobody dreams of questioning what he says or of checking it, even with the most readily accessible works of reference….

One would expect Rev. Canon Morley, as a Cambridge M. A., to have had more than ‘a smattering of history’. 

And what if  ‘local tradition’ tallies exactly with known history?

Jane Wriothesley, later 1st Countess of Southampton, had hosted theatrical entertainments at Titchfield before the conversion of Titchfield Abbey to a Stately Home had even been completed.

In 1538, one of Thomas Wriothesley’s servants wrote to him….

She [Jane] also handleth the country gentlemen, the farmers and their wives to your great worship and every night is as merry as can be with Christmas plays and masques with Anthony Gedge and other of your servants…

Thomas Wriothesly himself…..

…… was a keen amateur actor. John Leland recalled how, when he acted in college plays at Cambridge…

Your beauty so shone upon your brow, your head of golden hair so glistened, the light of your keen mind was so effulgent, and your winning virtue so adorned you, that, one amongst many, you were seen to be a pattern for all.

The Code’s Chief Agent, Stewart Trotter, has also found a letter, written in 1543, from Nicholas Udall to Thomas Wriothesley, thanking him for trying to get his old job back as a schoolmaster at Eton.

Udall had been sacked for suspected theft of college plate and ‘buggery’ of one of his ex-pupils…

But Udall was also the author of one of the first English language comedies, Ralph Roister Doister. Udall scholars believe that the play was performed by schoolboys after 1541, but before 1551. They do not know, though, at which school.

It cannot have been Eton as plays were only performed in Latin there till 1560. A monitor would hold up a stick so that the boys knew when to laugh…

In his letter to Wriothesley, Udall writes…..

….since my coming from Titchfield…

….which implies that he was once living there.

There is an Old Schoolhouse in Titchfield, where, The Shakespeare Code believes, Shakespeare once taught….

It is entirely possible that Ralph Roister Doister was first performed at Titchfield by local schoolboys as another  Christmas entertainment….

●

Morley (contra Akrigg) does not say that Romeo and Juliet was performed by Shakespeare’s company or that it was performed in Place House. Indeed, one local tradition has it that Romeo and Juliet was first performed in The Great Barn…..

The Shakespeare Code has always argued that many of Shakespeare’s early plays were performed at Titchfield and Wilton and that the casts were a mixture of aristocrats (including women) and the emerging ‘professional’ players.

See: Shakespeare: The Movie

The Code believes that Morley was right.  Romeo and Juliet WAS first performed in Titchfield for the following reasons…..

1. The story had deep resonance for the Southampton family. The Third Earl of Southampton’s maternal grandfather, Antony Browne……

 ….. was one of England’s leading Roman Catholics. King Philip II of Spain (when he was King of England) first made him his  Master of Horse and then created him Viscount MONTAGUE in September, 1554

Browne had some claims to the old name of Montague, but it was chosen primarily because Henry Pole, the last ‘Baron’ Montague, had been ‘attainted’ (stripped of his title and lands) and beheaded five years earlier.

King Philip then appointed Browne the English Ambassador to the Pope and to Venice. So in 1555, the new Viscount Montague travelled to Italy…

Here the story of the rivalry between the houses of Montecchi and Capuletti went back to Dante in the fourteenth century…..

2. By 1562, when Arthur Brooke published his Romeus and Juliet – a verse translation into English from the Italian poem by Bandell – the two families were called the ‘Montagews’ and ‘Capelets’ and were said to have lived in Verona.

Indeed, Brooke states that he had by then seen…..

the same argument lately set forth on the stage with more commendation than I can look for….

This means there was already a stage version of the Romeo and Juliet story TWO YEARS before Shakespeare was born!

3. In 1572, Viscount Montague decided to hold a double wedding for two of his children, Anthony and Elizabeth. (Anthony was the twin brother of Mary Browne, mother to Shakespeare’s patron and lover, the Third Earl of Southampton). They were to marry Mary and Robert, children of Sir William Dormer.

Eight of Viscount Montague’s relatives decided it would be fun to present a Masque for the event, dressed up as Venetians. They bought…..

furniture of silks etc. and had caused their garments to be cut of the Venetian fashion.

But it suddenly dawned on them that dressing as Venetians for an English wedding….

…. would seem somewhat obscure.

…..so they asked George Gascoigne to come up with an entertainment that would explain their dress….

Gascoigne remembered Montague was an Italian name. So for the purpose of the Masque, he made Montague a….

 noble Venetian.  

The entertainment featured a ‘pretty boy’, born in England,  whose mother was from the house of Montague but whose father was from the house of Mounthermer – a branch of Viscount Montague’s family.

In the story, the boy’s father is slain fighting the Turks and the boy himself is carried off to Turkey.  However, some wandering Montagues from Venice rescue him because the boy had taken care to wear a ‘token’ in his hat….

…..which the Montacutes do bear always, for

They covet to be known from Capels when they pass

For ancient grutch which long ago  tween those two houses was.

The Montagues embrace the lad and sail back to Venice. However a storm blows them to the shores of England instead – just in time for the double wedding.

The notion that ALL the wedding guests should be dressed as Venetians was abandoned on grounds of cost….

4. The Montague and Southampton families were soon acting out the original Romeo and Juliet story for real.  The 2nd Earl of Southampton in 1577 suspected his wife, Mary (the daughter of Viscount Montague) of adultery with ‘a common person’  called Donesame. He warned her never to see the man again and snatched their eight year old son, Harry, away from her….

Then, in 1580, the Earl was told his wife had been seen with Donesame in Dogsmerfield…

….in compromising circumstances…

It was war between the  Southamptons and the Montagues.

As Gregory, the Capulet family servant, says in Shakespeare’s play:

The quarrel is between our masters and us their men

And on  23 February, 1580…..

This day Edmund Prety, servant to the Earl of Southampton was, for certain misdemeanours by him used against Mr. Anthony Browne, the eldest son of the Lord Montacute…committed to the Marshalsea….

5. Years later, at Harry Southampton’s coming of age party in 1594, his two friends, the Danvers brothers, arrived a day early and covered with blood. They had just killed Henry Long. The Long family and the Danvers family had long borne an ‘ancient grudge’ in Wiltshire.

●

The following year, 1595, Harry Southampton went to the Court of Queen Elizabeth. The Earl of Essex was tired of being the Queen’s lover and hoped the dashing Harry would take over…..

In 1592,  Harry had fallen in love with the dark-skinned beauty, Amelia Bassano, when she had played Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost at Titchfield.

This had infuriated Shakespeare. He was trying to have an affair with her himself….

But it had made him realise that he was more in love with Harry than he was with Amelia. When Amelia became pregnant and was married off ‘for colour’ to a ‘minstrel’, Shakespeare and Harry began their affair…

But, by decoding the anonymous Willobie his Avisa,  we know that Amelia was back on the scene a couple of years later, playing Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Copt Hall…

….and making another bid for Harry.

Her technique, though, was to play hard to get…..

So Harry fell in love with her all over again…..

……sighing and weeping and hiding himself away….

Then he went to the Court and proceeded to fall in love yet AGAIN – this time with one of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting, the beautiful, if highly volatile, Elizabeth Vernon….

She was a far more suitable match for Harry as she was a cousin, albeit poor, of the Earl of Essex.

It was good news for Harry’s Mother, Mary, as the Southampton line now had a chance of surviving….

It was ambivalent news for Shakespeare. He wanted Harry to procreate; but it would mean sharing Harry’s love with yet another person…

It was dreadful news for Queen Elizabeth. She was jealous of her young Ladies-in-Waiting and hated them to have love affairs – or even get married – without her permission.

In the circumstances, Essex decided that Harry and Elizabeth Vernon needed a lot of encouragement.

He commissioned Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet because:

1. The names and story had long been associated with the Montague/Southampton family and….

2. It showed that love could be stronger than the tyrannical forces opposed to it…..

…..in this case the Queen of England!

As a bisexual man, Shakespeare could also empathise with Juliet’s forbidden love for Romeo. He loads the language of the two lovers with Catholic imagery – just as he loads his own language in his love sonnets to Harry.

Shakespeare also calls Harry his ‘rose’: and Juliet famously says….

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Shakespeare expresses the turmoil of his own feelings in the figure of Mercutio – a character profoundly disturbed by the sex-life of his friend, Romeo.

John Dryden claimed that Shakespeare had to kill Mercutio before Mercutio killed him.

The Shakespeare Code believes that Shakespeare played Mercutio in the premiere of the play at Titchfield….

And that Harry and Elizabeth Vernon played the star-crossed lovers….

……as a form of therapy….

Romeo/Harry at the beginng of the play, is still tearfully in love with the dark-eyed Rosaline – the name of the character Amelia played in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

In the course of the action, Romeo/Harry transfers his love to Juliet/Elizabeth Vernon as his passion for her grows stronger….

All this would have been kept from Elizabeth for as long as possible…

(But the play, of course, went on to be a smash hit in public performance) 

There was another good reason for the play’s initial secrecy…..  

It contains a coded attack on the Queen….

Elizabeth loved to be associated with the Moon – cool, mysterious and chaste….

So Shakespeare plays with fire when he has Romeo say:

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east and Juliet is the sun!

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.

Be not her maid since she is envious,

Her vestal livery is but sick and green

And none but fools do wear it…

Richard II was written at the same time as Romeo and Juliet and given in private performance for the same reason….

Both plays fore-shadow the 1601 Rebellion, led by Essex and Southampton, against the Queen….

Please now read: In Defence of the Vicar of Titchfield: (2) ‘The Beeston Family.’

 

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…..reports Trixie the Cat….

Well, 3,997 Views if you want to be pedantic….

On 24th May, 2012, the glorious STEPHEN FRY…..

…..tweeted a link to The Shakespeare Code’s Post….

‘Just how gay was Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton?‘

To read Stephen’s witty, wicked, coded words please Google: ‘Stephen Fry’ and ‘Titchfield’.

Stephen’s endorsement has brought some fascinating responses, especially from an intriguing site called Loony Literature. See:

http://loonyliterature.com/tag/loonyliterature/

They have written to The Code:

I would live in your blog if I could. We are huge fans. We need to keep the love of our literary heritage going and that is what you are doing. If folks are not inspired by you, then there is no hope.

Now The Agents of The Code are hardened men who have seen terrible sights: but there were few dry eyes at The Code’s Head Office this morning when I read out this message after morning prayers.

Also, like all great organisations, Loony Literature is, in reality, run by a Cat called Mildred.  I have a feeling the two of us are going to be great friends…

Also, let me quote two more lovely messages.

Lisa-Marie Haugmeon writes of The Dedication to Shakespeare’s Sonnets Decoded:

I am totally enthralled! This really puts it all into place. I never liked Shakespeare until now. You have made him what he really was: a flawed human being, instead of a super human creature.

Dearest Lisa-Marie (if a Cat may call you that) you have understood ABSOLUTELY what we are all up to at The Code.

We are thrilled.

And Steve Rose, a B.A. Honours Undergraduate, writes of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Decoded. The first performance in 1594. Part One.:

Absolutely enthralling…

The Code predicts a thrilling future for Mr. Rose. Not only is he kind and imaginative enough to send us his response – he also calls himself ‘an undergraduate’ rather than ‘a student’.

The two are seldom the same….

But the last word of thanks must go to National Treasure, Stephen….

You’re the cream in my coffee…..

You’re the milk in my tea…….

‘Bye, now….

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It is with sadness that The Shakespeare Code records the death of the wonderful poet and actress, Charlotte Mitchell……

……known to her family and friends as ‘Bunty’….

At her funeral at Mortlake Crematorium (on Friday, 18th May) her well known poem ‘Possessions’ was read…..

Also a new, unpublished poem was read…..

The Thing is…

(Part One – Daughter to Mother)

The thing is, Mother

When I ring your bell with flowers

There’s a way I hope you won’t be.

– Too anxious, too interested,

asking questions, curious.

And there’s a way I hope you will be –

casual, involved elsewhere

almost as if  you’ve forgotten

I was due,

so I can slip into the old home

without any fuss

and we can be us –

Mother – please be cool

and just a bit preoccupied

when I ring the bell with flowers.

(Part Two – Mother to Daughter)

The thing is, Daughter,

when you ring my bell with flowers

there’s a way I hope you won’t be

critical

almost before you’re off the mat

looking at the way I am

my face, my hair etc.

And there’s a way I hope you will be –

overlooking my ageing,

my toenails which need cutting,

amused by my deafness

Daughter, please be cool

and just a bit preoccupied

when you ring my bell with flowers.

For many years Stewart Trotter would call on Bunty in Chiswick to treat her with Acupuncture.

At the end of the last century, he went over to Aarhus in Denmark to direct his rock version of Carmen called Carmen Latina. 

Bunty was worried that Stewart might return to working full-time in the theatre, so wrote him this poem….

Don’t go to Watford

Don’t go to Watford, better to stay

And attend to you patients’ needs,

Don’t go to Watford or Glasgow, or Leeds

Don’t talk

Of going to be a theatre bloke

In York.

Well, take a theatre bloke, why not?

He couldn’t cure my ills,

Know which Puncture points

Or pills

See to Panic, Injury or Fall

He could only see to Egos,

Casting session, lighting call.

Anyone can cast an actor

When there’s millions of them all…..

So don’t go to Watford, Penzance or Portcaul

Do not waste your wondrous skills

On Luvvie stuff and flats and frills

When you can calm the Heart and Mind….

Don’t go to Watford, or Wexford or Glynde.

Bunty’s poem certainly worked. Stewart is in Practice to this day. 

At the end of the Funeral, guests were invited to place a flower on Bunty’s wicker coffin.

The Service Sheet concluded with a simple……

‘We love you, Bunt’.

‘Gone to Devon’

If you would like to leave a word of appreciation in the box below, Stewart will pass it on to Bunty’s family.

(To read another unpublished poem by Charlotte Mitchell, please click:HERE! )

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Despite appearances to the contrary……

……Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton….

……or ‘Harry Southampton’ as he liked to be known…..

……wasn’t EXCLUSIVELY gay at all!!!

He fell deeply in love with one of Queen Elizabeth’s Ladies-in-Waiting, Elizabeth Vernon…

…..who many in Titchfield believe was the original of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet….

After a stormy, erotic courtship (Elizabeth was pregnant when Harry married her) the couple produced two daughters in the reign of Queen Elizabeth…

…..and then two sons in the reign of King James….

They also enjoyed a loving, intimate relationship…..

When Harry was fighting Ireland in 1599, a pregnant Elizabeth wrote to him:

My dear Lord and only joy of my life…I am severed from you whom I do, and ever will, most infinitely and truly love…I most infinitely long for you, my dear and only joy. I beseech you, love forever most faithfully me, that everlastingly will remain your faithful and obedient wife.

Elizabeth also asked Harry for ‘a stringer of scarlet’ to keep her body warm when she rode and said:

I send you word I grow bigger and bigger every day….

But heterosexuality had come late in the day to Harry…..

As a teenager, he had shown no interest at all in women……

His father, the Second Earl of Southampton, had snatched him away from his mother, Mary, when he was six.

He had accused his wife of adultery with ‘a common person’, made his manservant ‘his wife’, and surrounded his son with an exclusively male entourage of…..

Tall goodly fellows that kept a constant pace….

He died two years later; but had posioned his son’s mind against his mother…..

….and against women in general.

The last thing teenage Harry wanted to do was marry one…

 This spelt disaster for Countess Mary….

 

It would mean….

1. The Southampton family line would die out…..

2. The family would have to pay an enormous £5,000 fine – £2-and-a-half million in today’s money….

Harry, after his father’s death,  had become a Ward of  Queen Elizabeth’s Treasurer, Lord Burghley……

He had educated Harry at his own home with his own children….

And had kept a strict eye on him when he went to Cambridge…

As Harry approached his majority, Burghley thought his own grand-daughter, Elizabeth de Vere, would make a splendid Protestant match for the stubbornly Catholic lad….

Harry disagreed…..

So Burghley, who had the legal right to insist on the marriage, threatened to fine Harry when he came of age…

Countess Mary and his maternal grandfather, Lord Montague……

…….did everything to persuade him…..

To no avail….

In desperation, Countess Mary called on the services of Harry’s tutor, William Shakespeare…..

(To discover how Shakespeare came to be at Titchfield, please read: Shakespeare the Movie. I.)

Mary commissioned Shakespeare to write seventeen sonnets for Harry’s seventeenth birthday. Their purpose was to convince Harry to marry…

Shakespeare knew that Harry was……

 fond on praise….

……so he flattered him by calling him….

beauty’s rose…

…….a play on the Wriothesley name, which the aristocratic branch of the family pronounced…..

Ryosely…..

……suggesting the Southampton rose…..

 

However, Shakespeare warns Harry that his good looks are doomed to fade….

And that his….

youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,

Will be a tattered weed of small worth held….

Harry, Shakespeare argues, would do well to impregnate a woman. His son would then remind the world how beautiful his father had once been….

After all, Harry’s own mother, Mary, uses her son as a ‘glass’ in which she…

Calls back the lovely April of her prime….

Shakespeare reprimands Harry for indulging in wasteful masturbation…..

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend

Upon thyself thy beauty’s leagacy…. [money=semen. See The Shakespeare Code.]

Harry’s masturbation is not only wasteful: it is excessive as well….

Then beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse

The bounteous largesse [large penis and sex drive] given thee to give?

Profitless usurer, why dost thou use

So great a sum of sums [masturbate excessively] yet canst not live?

Shakespeare warns Harry that, without children, he will end up as friendless and despised as Queen Elizabeth herself.

It is only people like her….

Harsh, featureless and rude….

…..who should…..

barrenly perish…..

But Shakespeare’s heart was not in his commission…

The fact that he dwells on Harry’s  ‘self-abuse’ shows Shakespeare had a sexual interest in the young man himself….

And, quite against the Countess’s brief, he suggests another way to gain immortality apart from procreation…..

Allow yourself to be the subject of my verse – that way you will live for ever…..

…..because my verse will live for ever…..

As Time takes away from Harry, Shakespeare’s writing will…..

ingraft [him] new…

And even if Harry does succeed in impregnating a woman, the foetus will be like distilled perfume –

a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass…..

…..not an image of warmth or attraction….

Marriage and fatherhood had not brought happiness to Shakespeare.

So why should they to Harry?

●

Shakespeare makes his true feelings for Harry known in the ravishing Sonnet 18:

Here Shakespeare claims that Harry’s beauty surpasses that of Nature itself….

He won’t, like other, lesser poets, compare Harry to a summer’s day….

Even a summer’s day has its imperfections: Harry has none….

But Shakespeare is still eager to keep his relationship with Harry platonic…

Even if Harry isn’t…

Shakespeare didn’t want to upset Mother Mary, the source of his livelihood, his commissions and his flashy clothes….

So in Sonnet 20 he claims that ‘Dame Nature’ – who has created Harry…..

the master-mistress of [his] passion…..

….originally intended him to be a girl…..

….but as she created him, she fell in love with him…..

Rather like the sculptor Pygmalion fell in love with Galatea, the statue he is carving….

So Nature…..

….by addition me of thee [Harry] defeated

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing…..

What this ‘one thing’ is Shakespeare makes blindingly clear in the concluding couplet….

But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,

Mine be thy love, and they love’s use their treasure….

Shakespeare is employing all sorts of ambiguities here….

me of thee defeated…..

….can mean….

she stopped me achieving [possessing] you…

…..or….

she stopped you achieving me….

This implies that their love, if it were allowed to be expressed, would be mutual….

Dame Nature, for her own ends, has given the girl/boy a penis which she intends her/him to use to penetrate her for her ‘pleasure’.

Harry’s penis, Shakespeare insists, has been put there for heterosexual activity alone…..

BUT – this penis remains an ‘artificial’ addition…..

There is a prototype woman lurking beneath the surface of Harry that can both seduce, and be seduced by, Shakespeare….

In Sonnet 53 Shakespeare even confesses that when anyone describes Helen of Troy, he immediately thinks of Harry…..

in Grecian tires……painted new….

…..in other words, Harry in drag….

●

In the meantime, Shakespeare fell in love with The Dark Lady, Emilia Bassano, the young mistress of old Lord Hunsdon…..

She had visited Titchfield to provide music for one of Queen Elizabeth’s Progresses….

…..and had stayed on.

Emilia ‘played hard to get’ with Shakespeare as she did with everyone else. Shakespeare, in what he was later to label in Sonnet 134 as his….

unkind abuse….

…..sent Harry to plead his love case.

Emilia pounced.

A handsome young aristocrat, however gay, was better than an aging playwright who was losing his hair…

And Harry could get his revenge on an unreponsive Shakespeare by….

wilful taste….. [perverse indulgence]

of what his….

self refuseth….. [natural inclinations decline i.e, women].

Harry’s affair with the Dark Lady plunged Shakespeare into despair. He left Titchfield to go on tour with Lord Strange’s Men in the late summer of 1592.  But he kept up a sonnet correspondence with Harry and finally admitted to him in Sonnet 42…..

That thou hast her is not all my grief

And yet it may be said I loved her dearly

That she hath thee is of my wailing chief

A loss in love that touches me more nearly….

Shakespeare returned to Titchfield and began a full-blown affair with Harry.

Countess Mary heard of this and questioned Shakepeare about it…..

Shakespeare confessed to her that….

Here, upon my knee, before high heaven and you,

That before you and next unto high heaven

I love your son….

He was later to put these words into the mouth of Helena in his autobiographical Alls Well that Ends Well….

Mary, as we know, had herself fallen in love with a common person when she was a young bride: so she sympathised with another ‘unconventional’ relationship.

Shakespeare’s affair with Harry was to last for a dozen years: but it was never plain sailing. Both were highly sexed, ambitious men….

…..and fidelity was never at the forefront of either of their minds…

Shakespeare, as an actor on tour, making himself…..

a motley to the view……

……was beset with sexual temptations….

When, Harry at one point, accuses Shakespeare of having an affair, Shakespeare excuses himself by saying that it gave his…

heart another youth….[i.e. made him feel young again]….

….and that….

worse essaies prov’d thee my best of love….. [i.e. by being unfaithful, and comparing you with other people, it showed me just how great you are.  Sonnet 110]

Shakespeare asks  Harry to forgive him and ‘welcome’  him to his ….

….pure and most most loving breast…..

But there is even an ambiguity in ‘most most’ loving breast.

It can be a romantic repitition of ‘most’….

Or it can imply that Harry has had hordes of lovers.

Certainly Shakespeare calls on Harry’s promiscuity to defend his own unfaithfulness in Sonnet 120.

He states….

That you were once unkind [unfaithful] befriends me now….

…and recalls how he then….

passed a hell of time….

…..which was relieved when Harry…

tendered

the humble salve which wounded bosom fits…[i.e. made love to him]

In Sonnet 61 Shakespeare even imagines that, in his absence, Harry is indulging in orgies….

For thee I watch, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,

From me far off, with others all too near…

Harry might have woken up in his own four-poster bed with aristocratic lovers….

His close companions, the Danvers brothers, remained unmarried all their lives….

And even the Earl of Essex , Harry’s friend and hero…..

 …..had a gay side….

He had a private bath-house in the Strand and was exposed by his own doctor (in a fatal moment of drunken indiscretion) as being a passive homosexual….

[Read Martin Green’s brilliant book, Wriothesley’s Roses. And see Martin Green’s endorsement of The Shakespeare Code’]

But the odds are Harry would wake up in low dives.

Like his mother, he had a penchant for lower class men…

Shakespeare claims, early on in their affair, that Harry was

but one hour mine’

…..because, like the Sun who will

permit the basest clouds to rise

With ugly rack on his celestial face…

….so Harry will allow

the region cloud…

…to ‘mask’ him from Shakespeare.

‘Baseness’ always implied lower class people for the Elizabethans.

It also suggested lower class homosexuals….

In Sonnet 48, Shakespeare bemoans the fact that, though he has locked up all his possessions when he goes away on tour, his most precious possession, Harry, he has….

left the prey to every vulgar thief…[common homsexual]

…..because he has not ‘locked up’ Harry ‘in any chest’…..

Or, indeed, any closet…

Harry’s promiscuity makes Shakespeare jealous: it also terrifies him.

Southampton’s enemies could use Harry’s sex-life as a weaspon against him.

The English have never taken umbrage at homosexual activity amongst male aristocrats……

Witness the popularity of the television version of Brideshead Revisited….

Given that aristocrats all went to single sex boarding schools, read the Classical Greek poets and were birched by bachelor schoolmasters, homosexuality was almost a given among the upper orders….

What used to upset everyone was when sex crossed borders of class….

It wasn’t the fact that Oscar Wilde had an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas that angered people……

……it was the fact he had sex with working class ‘Telegram Boys’ in private rooms….

……in expensive restaurants…

…..to which they had no right….

Even in the twentieth century, when Harry’s descendant, Lord Montague of Beaulieu, was in the dock, the Prosecution’s main charge was that he had ‘groomed’ common soldiers  and plied them with champagne!

Officers would have been quite a different matter….

Shakespeare in Sonnet 94 warns Harry about the consequences of his promiscuity….

He uses the word ‘hurt’ the way Geoffrey Chaucr does in The Knight’s Tale  ‘to arouse others sexually’…..

They that have power to hurt and will do none…

The whole poem is,  in fact, in praise of chastity….

It even praises masturbation!

At least it can be a solitary act….

The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,

Though to itself it only love and die…[die=orgasm. See, again, The Shakespeare Code.]

But the poem goes on to warn Harry about the consequences of sleeping with lower class boys….

But if that flower with base infection meet,

The basest weed outbraves his dignity….

‘Base infection’ here suggests the moral contamination of mixing with plebeians and the resulting venereal disease.

The concluding couplet…..

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds

….is a startling image both of a diseased penis  and a ruined reputation.

In Sonnet 69 Shakespeare admits that everyone admires Harry’s beauty….

but he warns Harry that those same people will…

..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….

And the reason why….

thy odour matcheth not thy show

The soil is this, that thou dost common grow….

The consequence of this is LOSS OF POLITICAL POWER…

If some suspect of ill maskt not thy show

Then thou alone kingdoms of hearts shouldst owe….(Sonnet 70)

●

Shakespeare was the first to admit he often got his predictions wrong….

In Sonnet 107 he admits, in code, that he thought Harry would never get out of the Tower of London alive and that civil war would follow the death of Queen Elizabeth….

See: The Earl of Southampton and Trixie the Cat.

But on the political consequences of Harry’s promiscuity, he was completely correct….

When Harry was tried for High Treason for his part in the Essex rebellion against Elizabeth, a letter was produced against him….

Dated 13^th February, 1601 it was from William Reynolds (probably brother of Essex’s secretary, Edward Reynolds) who….  

marvelled what had become of Piers Edmonds, the Earl of Essex’s man, born in the Strand near me, who had many preferements by the Earl. His villainy I have often complained of. He was Corporal General of the Horse inIreland under the Earl of Southampton. He ate and drank at his table and lay in his tent. The Earl of Southampton gave him a horse which Edmunds refused a hundred marks for him, the Earl of Southampton would cole and huge [embrace and hug] him in his arms and play wantonly with him.

 Edmonds was also known to the Earl of Essex: he was….

 so favoured as he often rode in a coach with him, and was wholly of his charges maintained, being a man of base birth in St. Clement’s Parish….

Riding in a coach, for a man, was thought to be effeminate it itself. To ride in a coach with another man was practically a proclamation of homosexuality….

In April, 1594,  Lady Anne Bacon had complained to her gay son, Anthony, that his equally gay brother, Francis…

keepeth that Bloody Perez [a notorious Spanish homosexual] as I told him then, yea as a coach companion, and bed companion, a proud, profane costly fellow, whose being about him I verily fear the Lord God doth mislike….

Reynolds had been described as ‘distracted’ by Lord Burghley when, in 1593, he had written to the Queen about Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.

But Reynold’s belief that Venus in the poem  represented Queen Elizabeth….

….. and his analysis of the poem’s imagery….

 much ado of red and white

…..would be endorsed by many modern scholars…..

….if not his belief that the Queen was in love with him!

Also, Martin Green has found details of many payments paid out by Gilly Merrick (Essex’s man) to ‘Capt. P. Edmonde’ between 1599 and 1600…..

Luckily for both Harry and Shakespeare, Elizabeth died in 1603 and King James, who succeeded her, was gay-friendly….

In fact, so gay friendly that everyone thought Harry would become the King’s new favourite.

As Anthony Weldon wrote in 1603:

And now doth the king return to Windsor, where there was an apparition of Southampton being a favourite to His Majesty, by that privacy and dearness presented to the court view, but Salisbury, not liking that any of Essex his faction should come into play, made that apparition as it were in transitu, and so vanished, but putting some jealousy, that he did not much desire to be in the Queen’s company, yet love and regularity must admit of no partnership.

Indeed, it is the view of The Shakespeare Code that the famous painting of Harry in the Tower……

……is a wooing portrait that Harry sent to the King….

…..along with a couple of Shakespeare Sonnets praising Harry’s beauty…..

See, again: The Earl of Southampton and Trixie the Cat.

But James preferrred younger, prettier men……

…..so Harry was out of the loop…..

…..and began to grow  bitterly homophobic…..

When his wife Elizabeth produced his first, longed for son in 1605……

…..he dropped Shakespeare the actor.

He didn’t want his son to know just how gay his father had once been….

(For an analysis of Sonnet 126 – Shakespeare’s response to his rejection by Harry – please see:

‘Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126 Decoded.’

…..and….

Shakespeare, Love and Religion. Part Three.)

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AN ANNOUNCEMENT FROM TRIXIE THE CAT

The Code’s Chief Agent, Stewart Trotter, appeared on BBC1 Television’s……

 …..on THURSDAY, 10th MAY, 2012.

The dazzling Director and Producer, Carol White, had filmed Stewart  in conversation with the celebrated comic, writer, literateur and wit, ARTHUR SMITH….

……at the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester…..

……where Stewart showed Arthur the famous ‘1610’ map of Titchfield……

…..with features mentioned in Love’s Labour’s Lost….‘The Park’ and ‘The Place’…..

See: Shakespeare in Titchfield: a Summary of the Evidence.

Stewart also showed Arthur the will of William Beeston……

……who, The Code argues, was the original of Thomas Nashe’s ‘Mr. Apis Lapis’ and of William Shakespeare-Nashe’s Falstaff…..

See: Why Falstaff is Fat and The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis.

Carol also filmed at the ravishing, oak-beamed, Great Posbrook Farm….

….the old home of William Beeston, now in private hands….

Then, after a quick lunch at Titchfield’s Fisherman’s Rest…..

 

……it was across the road to the stunning ruins of Place House itself…..

 

….. favourite country estate of  Shakespeare’s patron, the Third Earl of Southampton….

Then cross the road again to the Old Titchfield Schoolhouse….

 …..which Stewart identified as the school where Shakespeare taught in his ground-breaking 2002 book, Love’s Labour’s Found….

See: Shakespeare was a Schoolmaster in the Country:TITCHFIELD!

The wonderful Simon Callow…..

…..also appeared on ‘The One Show’ to endorse Stewart’s Titchfield Theory….

‘Bye, now….

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Brothers and Sisters……

The Agents of The Shakespeare Code are delighted to announce that…..

…..by an act of glorious serendipity……

The Code received its 30, 000th VIEW……

And best day ever….

(225 VIEWS)

…..on 23rd April, 2012…..

ST. GEORGE’S DAY!!!

THE TRADITIONAL BIRTHDAY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE!!!

St. George’s Day was an Old Catholic Festival in England…..

……banned by Queen Elizabeth I, who cut the number of religious festivals from over 100 to a paltry 27….

Stratford upon Avon Town Council, though, hid away their George Armour – vital for the celebration of St. George’s Day – in case the Old Faith returned to the land…

We know for certain that William Shakespeare DIED on St. George’s Day…..

But there is also a tradition that he was BORN on St. George’s day as well…..

(We only know that Baby Will was baptised on 26th April, 1564).

Indeed, OUR COUSIN WILL – the play about Shakespeare’s life penned by Chief Agent Trotter – speculates that the Bard died from over-exertion at a Birthday Bash……

(For details of the play, which will be performed at The Great Barn in Titchfield from 23rd – 26th May, click: here.)

The Code is also thrilled to announce that FIVE new countries have joined the Brother and Sisterhood……

ESTONIA

MONTENEGRO

 

BRUNEI DARUSSALAM

BERMUDA

NIGERIA

This brings the number of participating countries to a dazzling……

ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT!!!

IN VINCULIS, INVICTUS….

 

 

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A TRIXIE SPECIAL

One of Chief Agent Stewart Trotter’s first jobs was to write for the Times Literary Supplement…

He started to do this when he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge….

He was passing judgement on the tomes of learned Professors before he even graduated….

But because all writing for the paper in those days was anonymous, no-one knew it was him…

He went on to write to review novels for the T. L. S….

However, a lot of his meagre reviewing fee was used up in dashing his copy (and himself) over to Printing House Square in a taxi….

There were no e-mails or even faxes in those days….

And what remained of his fee was used in drinking in the pub with the Literary Editor, the late great Ian Hamilton….

After which, the two would stagger back to the paper’s offices…..

Ian would throw him another bundle of books for the next week’s edition…

And it was back to the solitude of a bed-sit in Kilburn…

So it’s wonderful to see the luminaries at Stewart’s old paper….

CATCHING UP WITH THE SHAKESPEARE CODE!!!

In this week’s edition (20th April, 2012) Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, in a piece entitled ‘Many Hands’, state:

It is now broadly acknowledged that he [Shakespeare] collaborated ….with Nashe on 1 Henry VI in the early 1590’s.

The Shakespeare Code has been arguing from its inception that Thomas Nashe collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VI Part One….

But The Code also believes that Nashe collaborated on many other plays as well, viz…..

Henry VI Parts Two and Three, Richard III, Edmund Ironside, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s  Labour’s Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV Parts One and Two, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It…..

…..in fact right up to  Twelfth Night in 1601 in which Nashe PLAYED  and WROTE the part of Feste….

(See: Feste the Clown as Thomas Nashe)

After 1601, Shakespeare wrote NO MORE GREAT COMEDIES for one simple reason…..

THOMAS NASHE WAS DEAD!!!

We know for certain that Nashe collaborated with Christopher Marlowe…..

…..and with Ben Jonson on The Isle of Dogges…..

So why not with William Shakespeare?

Dozens of phrases in Shakespeare’s plays are IDENTICAL to phrases in Nashe’s pamphlets…

For The Code’s ACADEMIC treatment of this subject please see:

The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis.

 ……an essay that has garnered praise from no less an authority than Prof. Jonathan Bate……

……who wrote…..

It’s a terrific article and very persuasive….

All this can be read in dramatic form in The Code’s:

Shakespeare: The Movie.

 It can also be see LIVE ON STAGE  from 23rd – 26th May in the Great Barn in  Titchfield in Stewart’s new play….

OUR COUSIN WILL….

(Please CLICK HERE for more information)

NOT ONLY DOES THE T.L.S. ENDORSE THE CODE’S THEORY THAT SHAKESPEARE COLLABORATED WITH NASHE…..

It also argues that All’s Well That Ends Well……

….WAS WRITTEN AND PERFORMED IN 1609….

……A DATE THE CODE HAS BEEN ARGUING FOR FOR YEARS….

Maguire and Smith use linguistic analysis to back their case….

THE CODE, OF COURSE, USES HISTORY AND LIFE!!!

BERTRAM – the ‘lascivious boy’ in the play……

…… with his…..

his arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls…

…is exactly the same as the Aristocratic Seducer in A Lover’s Complaint…..

ALSO PUBLISHED IN 1609….

 ……with his….

browny locks….

…. which…..

hung in crooked locks…..

And, The Code, argues, both Betram and the Seducer from A Lover’s Complaint are based on…

HENRY WRIOTHESLEY, THIRD EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON!!!

But not only do Maguire and Smith endorse The Code, they endorse…..

JOHN DOVER WILSON, C. H.

 …..the Patron Saint of The Shakespeare Code….

Dover Wilson argues that in 1594 Shakespeare worked in Titchfield as the Tutor to the Third Earl….

If he’d had the same information that The Code has uncovered, Your Cat firmly believes that he would have stated that …….

SHAKESPEARE WAS A SCHOOLMASTER IN TITCHFIELD AS WELL!!!

(See: Shakespeare was a Schoolmaster in the Country: TITCHFIELD!)

Your Cat’s saucer truly runneth over….

‘Bye, now…

 

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From: The Chief Agent, the Board of Agents and Trixie the Cat.

To all Fellows, Roll of Honour Inductees and Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code.

Note: For a full list of Fellows and Roll of Honour Inductees, please click: About.

The Shakespeare Code, having received encouragement from the distinguished writer Michael Hentges, began posting in earnest from March, 2011…

Over the year, Membership has grown, and at 9.30 a.m. on the 9th April, 2012, The Code is delighted to report that it had received….

27,853 VIEWS!!!

Apart from Christmas 2011 (when, The Code was thrilled to record, its Brothers and Sisters were occupied by Seasonal Festivities, Duties and Observations) there has been a marked increase of Views each month.

In March, 2012…..

1. The Code broke the 4,000 Views a month barrier. (4,308 Views)

2. The Code broke the 1,000 Views a week barrier. (1071 Views in 14th Week of Year 2012)

3. The Code broke the 200 Views a day Barrier. (215 Views on 28th March, 2012)

NINE new Countries have recently joined The Code. They are:

MOLDOVA

PANAMA

TANZANIA

MACEDONIA

CAMEROON

PARAGUAY

LUXEMBOURG

DOMINICA

KAZAKHSTAN

THIS BRINGS THE NUMBER OF PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES TO OVER A CENTURY!!!

(103, to be precise….)

Please see: The Shakespeare Code Salutes the Nations.

The TOP TEN POSTS for 2011-2012 were……

1. 6ooo Views and the Appointment of Maggie Ollerenshaw.

2. Shakespeare in Titchfield. A Summary of the Evidence.

3. Macbeth Decoded. Part Four ‘The Witches’ (II).

4. Richard III Decoded. ‘All the King’s Men’.

5. Twelfth Night Decoded. Malvolio as Sir Walter Raleigh.

6. Twelfth Night Decoded. Olivia as Queen Elizabeth.

7. Macbeth Decoded. Part Five. The Macbeths as Queen Elizabeth.

8. Macbeth Decoded. Part Two. The Political Backdrop.

9. The Biography of The Code’s Chief Agent.

10. Twelfth Night Decoded. Sir Toby Belch as George, Lord Hunsdon.

EACH OF THESE POSTS HAS BEEN AWARDED A ‘TRIXIE’ – THE HIGHEST HONOUR THE CODE CAN BESTOW ON ANY INDIVIDUAL ARTICLE…..

TO CELEBRATE, THE CODE HAS APPROACHED, ON  TERMS OF THE UTMOST SECRECY, ANOTHER LUMINARY TO ADD TO ITS LIST OF FELLOWS….

WE SHALL BE ANNOUNCING THE NAME OF THE NEW FELLOW SHORTLY….

IN VINCULIS INVICTUS…..

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…..by TRIXIE THE CAT

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code,

The Dedication to the First Edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets….

…..is one of the greatest literary mysteries of all time….

What does ‘only begetter’ mean?

Who is ‘Mr. W. H.’?

Why is ‘all happiness’ wished to him and by whom?

What ‘eternity’ did ‘our ever-living poet’ ‘promise’ to him?

Who is the ‘ever-living poet’?

Who is the ‘well-wishing adventurer’?

Who is ‘setting forth’ and why?

And who is T.T.?

YOUR  CAT, TRIXIE, WORKING IN CLOSE COLLABORATION WITH THE AGENTS OF THE SHAKESPEARE CODE, HAS THE ANSWERS!!!

The last question – ‘Who is T.T.?’ –  is the one that  is most easily explained.

The Frontispiece to the Sonnets…

 

….states that the poems were printed by G. Eld for T.T.

Eld was the printer and  ‘T. T.’ (Thomas Thorpe) was the publisher.

The ‘ever-living’ poet, The Code believes,  is William Shakespeare…..

 By 1609 Shakespeare was so famous the publisher did not have to use his Christian name on the Frontispiece….

And Shakespeare himself  proclaims his immortality in his Sonnets….

In Sonnet 107 Shakespeare states that ‘spite of him’ [Time]…

I’ll live in this poor rhyme…

And he says of Sonnet 18….

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives life, and this gives life to thee…

But before Your Cat supplies the answers to the other, more complicated questions which the Dedication poses, she would like to draw the attention of all Brothers and Sisters to another Dedication….

…..also published by Thomas Thorpe two years earlier in 1607….

……Ben Jonson’s Dedication of his play Volpone to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge…

It reads…..

To the most noble and most equal sisters

The two famous Universities

For their love and acceptance shewn to his poem in the presentation

Ben Jonson

The grateful acknowledger

Dedicates both him and himself.

In this Dedication, Jonson names the Dedicatees first – the ‘famous’ Universities of Oxford and Cambridge…..

Then he describes them….

the most equal sisters…

He then describes what they have done to merit a Dedication…..

 For their love and acceptance shewn to his poem in the presentation

Then, as the Dedicator, he describes himself as….

the grateful acknowledger….

Put more plainly, the Dedication reads….

Ben Jonson, the grateful acknowledger, dedicates both him and himself to the two famous Universities for the love and acceptance shown to him and his poem.

The Code is of the belief that the Sonnets’ Dedication follows this formula…

Thomas Thorpe names the Dedicatee  as Mr. W. H.  and describes him as

 the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets….

….and wishes him…

all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet….

Then as Dedicator, he  describes himself as….

the well-wishing adventurer….

who is….

setting forth…

Put in a plainer way, Thorpe’s Dedication reads:

Thomas Thorpe, the Well-wishing Adventurer, in setting forth, wisheth to Mr. W. H., the only begetter of these sonnets,  all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet…

To understand who ‘Mr. W. H.’ is we must first dispel a myth….

●

Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was an early feminist and the first woman to gain the equivalent of a degree in Scotland…

…..even though she was barred from attending lectures….

She married an artist ten years younger than herself and spent a late honeymoon, pregnant, paddling down the NileRiver in Egypt…

She was the mother of the visionary, birth control advocate, Marie Stopes…..

…..who to this day has a clinic named after her in Whitfield Street in London….

Charlotte was a great Shakespearean. She was also convinced (correctly in The Code’s view) that Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton (a.k.a. Harry Southampton) was the ‘lovely boy’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets…

However, Stopes, great woman that she was, had a romantic view of how the Sonnets came to be published….

She thought that Mary Southampton, the Third Earl of Southampton’s mother, was in possession of all Shakespeare’s Sonnets in manuscript….

When she died her third husband, William Harvey, a ‘family friend’, found them and published them because he did not want to…..

…see them die…

SORRY, CHARLOTTE…..

MUCH AS TRIXIE ADMIRES YOU…..

SHE KNOWS FOR CERTAIN THAT THIS CANNOT BE TRUE….

BECAUSE….

SHAKESPEARE PUBLISHED HIS SONNETS HIMSELF!!!

Thomas Heywood, a contemporary of Shakespeare…….

……..was a writer and playwright….

He wrote  An Apology for Actors, published in 1612 and Dedicated it to…

….my good friends and fellows, the City Actors….

In a letter to one Nicholas Oake at the conclusion of the pamphlet, Heywood describes how William Shakespeare was….

….much offended with M. Jaggard (that altogether unknown to him), presumed to make so bold with his name.’

Jaggard (a publisher) had used Shakespeare’s name to promote a collection of poems called The Passionate Pilgrim without Shakespeare’s permission…..

Shakespeare, according to Heywood…

….to do himself right, hath since published them [the Sonnets] in his own name’.

William Drummond……..

…….writing c. 1614, also states….

The last we have are Sir William Alexander and Shakespeare, who have lately published their works….

But there are other flaws in Stopes’s argument……

William Harvey was NOT a ‘family friend’……

Harry Southampton hated his young step-father so much that the Earl of Essex had to intervene….

And there is no reason at all why Mary, Countess of Southampton (who left Titchfield in 1594 to live at Copped Hall in Essex)  should have a complete collection of the Sonnets….

Most were love letters written to individuals (including Mary’s son, Henry Wriothesley) and often contain homosexual banter….

In Sonnet 49, for example, Shakespeare talks about his fears that his lover, no longer sexually excited by him, will cast…

his utmost sum….

And that his love….

Converted from the thing [penis] it was

Shall reasons find of settled gravity…..

And when  Shakespeare is not writing homosexual banter in the Sonnets, he is writing heterosexual banter instead…

In Sonnet  135 he asks the Dark Lady, Emilia Bassano….

Wilt thou whose will is large and spacious

Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

Shall will in others seem right gracious,

And in my will no fair acceptance shine?….

And even more graphically in Sonnet 151, Shakespeare describes how his ‘flesh’…

….rising at thy name doth point out thee

As his triumphant prize, proud of this pride:

He is contented thy poor drudge to be,

To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.

Mary Countess of Southampton, though a committed Catholic, was a broad-minded woman of the world….

But would Shakespeare really send her Sonnets like these?

Countess Mary would, though, have had a copy of the first seventeen sonnets;  she had commissioned Shakespeare to write them for Harry’s seventeenth birthday……

 ……to try to get him interested in girls….

Lord Burghley at the time wanted Harry to marry his grand-daughter: but Harry was more interested in Shakespeare…..

Harry was 17 in 1590, two years after the Armada.  We know from the anonymous satirical play Histrio-Mastix  that theatre folk had become unfashionable during the invasion scare…..

…..they were thought of as effete and useless…..

 So many playwrights sought work as tutors in great households….

Thomas Kyd, it seems, went to work for Lord Strange and Christopher Marlowe for Bess of Hardwick.

Shakespeare, The Code believes, went to work for the Countess of Southampton….

See: Shakespeare:The Movie I

Sonnet 13 in the Birthday Sequence, refers to Harry’s dead father, the 2nd Earl….

You had a father, let your son say so…

And Sonnet 3 refers to Harry’s widowed mother, Mary….

Thou art they mother’s glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime….

In later Sonnets, Shakespeare refers to the lovely boy’s feminine beauty….

In Sonnet 20 he describes how the boy has….

A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted

…..and goes on to describe him as….

The master mistress of my passion…

This is certainly borne out by contemporary paintings of Harry Southampton….

So who is Mr. W. H.?

The Code believes that Mr. W.H.  is none other than Harry (Henry Wriothesley) himself….

In a satirical attack on Harry in the anonymous Willobie his Avisa, published in 1594, there is a description of Shakespeare and Harry’s love-triangle with the Dark Lady, Emilia Bassano.

Shakespeare is described as W. S. An Old Player….

And Henry Wriothesley as Mr. W. H…..

He is even called….

Friend Harry….

…and…

Good Harry….

He is also described as Italo-Hispalensis.

Italo-Hispalensis is a reference to the trip to Spain and Italy that Harry and Shakespeare made the year before (1593).

(See: Shakespeare in Italy.)

And in the satire, Mr. H. W. says to ‘Avisa’ (code for Emilia):

A thousand fewtures I have seen,

For traveller’s change and choice shall see,

In France, in Flanders and in Spain,

Yet none, nor none could conquer me:

 Till now I saw this face of thine,

That makes my wittes are none of thine’

So, it is not a big jump from Mr. H. W. to Mr. W. H……

Indeed, in Sonnet 2o Shakespeare himself plays on the ‘H’ and ‘W’ of Henry Wriothesley when he writes….

A man in hew all Hews [Shakespeare’s punctuation and italics] in his controlling….

Hews is code for ‘Henry Wriothesley, Earl of  Southampton’…

But to make the identity of the Dedicatee even clearer, Thomas Thorpe describes Mr. H. W.’ as the ‘only begetter’ of the Sonnets.

Time and again in the Sonnets, Shakespeare names the lovely boy as the source of his inspiration….

And in Sonnet 78 he directly states….

Yet be most proud of that which I compile [the Sonnets]

Whose influence is thine and born of thee [Trixitalics]

In others’ works thou dost but mend the style,

And arts with they sweet graces graced be;

But thou art all my art, and dost advance,

As high as learning my rude ignorance…

Shakespeare’s art is ‘born’ of Harry – that is why Harry is the ‘only begetter’ of the Sonnets.

Shakespeare also promises ‘eternity’, i.e. immortality, to Harry in Sonnet after Sonnet, particularly in the famous Sonnet 18…

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day….

….which concludes….

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee…

People in the past took this Sonnet to be addressed to a woman.  Indeed, John Benson (in his 1640 edition of the Sonnets) changed all the ‘he’s’ to ‘she’s’ in an attempt to heterosexualise Shakespeare’s verse…

Benson’s edition was the only one known to the public till 1788, when the great Irish barrister, Edmond Malone………

……. produced his monumental edition of Shakespeare’s works….

Modern scholars now take the first one hundred and twenty-six Sonnets to be addressed to the lovely boy. The remaining twenty-eight are mostly addressed to women.

This means that the Sonnets are not listed in order of composition…

In fact (apart from the opening sequence) the only three sonnets that The Code can date with total certainty are:

1. Sonnet 107 which mentions the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603…..

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured….

It also mentions the release, from the Tower of London, of Harry Southampton…..

Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom…

2. Sonnet 125 which refers to Shakespeare (as a liveried Groom of the Chamber) holding the canopy over King James at his coronation in 1604….

Were’t ought to me I bore the canopy….

This sonnet also refers to the execution of Essex after Queen Elizabeth’s withdrawal of his ‘farm’ on sweet wines….

….and his crime of bursting in to the Queen’s bedchamber before she had time to dress…

Have I  not seen dwellers on form and favour

Lose all, and more [i.e. their heads] by paying too much rent, [too much sexual servicing]

For compound sweet [farm on sweet wines] forgoing simple savour,

Pitiful thrivers, in their gazing spent…

3. Sonnet 123 which refers to the coronation obelisks (‘pyramids’) set up in 1604….

Thy [Time’s] pyramids, built up with newer might,

To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;

They are but dressings of a former sight…

●

Why does Thorpe describe himself as ‘the well wishing adventurer’ who is ‘setting forth’?

All publishing ventures are a risk and publishing a book is very much like sending it on a journey….

Geoffrey Chaucer, in the epilogue to Troilus and Criseyde, writes….

‘Go, litel, bok’…..

…..in imitation of Ovid. 

But in his Dedication Thorpe presents himself as going on the journey himself…

Why?

The answer, Your Cat believes, is to make another coded reference to the Earl of Southampton….

Southampton had been involved in the Virginia Company since 1605 and in 1609 became part of the Virginia Company Council….

The Company built a huge passenger ship which could hold 500-600 people for the purpose of emigrating to Jamestown in Virginia…

The Titanic of its time……

Which, also, almost sank….

…..and, in so doing, inspired the shipwreck scenes in The Tempest……

The ship was called the Sea Venture….

……or  Sea Adventure….

Emigrants  bound for Virginia were later described by Captain John Smith….

 ……of Pocahontas fame…..

….. as ‘Adventurers’….

The Sonnets were registered by Thorpe on 20th May 1609 and the Sea Venture left Plymouth on 2nd June, 1609….

So, by describing himself as ‘an adventurer setting forth’, Thorpe would compare his publishing adventure to this mass emigration by the Virginia Company to America…

 ….and by doing so would put his readers in mind of the Earl of Southampton…

But why does Thorpe write the Dedication rather than Shakespeare?

And why does Thorpe hope for ‘all happiness’ for Southampton and why does he wish him ‘well’?

The answer is irony.  Not to say sarcasm…..

Thorpe knew full well that Southampton would be furious that his affair with Shakespeare was being made public….

So did Shakespeare, who would  certainly have had a hand in the Dedication….

The Code firmly believes that Harry Southampton terminated his liaison with Shakespeare in 1605 when he finally produced a son.

And Shakespeare responded by wishing his former patron, not immortality now, but death….

In Sonnet 126 he writes….

Yet fear her [Time] O thou minion of her pleasure:

She may detain, but not still keep her treasure!

Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,

And her quietus is to render thee…..

(For a more detailed analysis of Sonnet 126 please see: Shakespeare, Love and Religion. Part Three.)

 ‘All Happiness’ was the last thing either Thorpe or Shakespeare wished on Harry.

 Thorpe wanted a scandal to increase sales of Shakespeare’s Sonnets….

 And Shakespeare wanted revenge…..

‘Bye, now..

 

If you were interested in theis Post, you might like:

1. Why did William Shakespeare write the Sonnets?

2. Trixie the Cat’s Guide to the Sonnets (1) Background Jottings

3. Trixie the Cat’s Guide to the Sonnets (2) The Birthday Sonnets

 

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