The Shakespeare Code

1564-1594

Six years before William Shakespeare was born, Queen Elizabeth came to the throne… 

She was the daughter of King Henry VIII….

…and his second wife, Anne Boleyn….

Queen Elizabeth had succeeded her Roman Catholic half-sister, Mary Tudor, known to history as ‘Bloody Mary’…..

 

She had thought that the more Protestants she burnt, the more pleased God would be.

He might even make her pregnant….

Elizabeth, as Queen, moved warily at first…..

But it soon became clear to the Vatican State that she intended to eradicate Roman Catholicism from England….

For ever…

Katharine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife…..

…..had given Princess Elizabeth some much needed love…. 

…..but had also influenced her thinking….

…..profoundly…..

Katharine was a closet follower of John Calvin…..

….whose ideas about Pre-destination were taking Europe by storm…

Calvin argued that God knows everything that is going to happen….

….. so whether you are going to heaven or hell has been decided long before you were born.  

If you are going to heaven, God will show his favour by giving you wealth, position and power… 

When Bloody Mary came to the throne, she threw Princess Elizabeth into the Tower. 

Forced to enter by way of Traitor’s Gate….

 

…..the same fateful gateway her mother Anne  had passed through before she was beheaded …..

…..Elizabeth prayed to God to save her.

When, to her astonishment, she was not only freed from prison but then made Queen of England…..

●

Shakespeare’s father, John, a follower of the Old Faith, had seen it all before…

He had lived through King Henry’s break with Rome….

…..the adoption of Protestantism by his son, the boy-King Edward VI….

 

 ……then Bloody Mary’s re-establishment of full-blown Catholicism.

Elizabeth’s new Protestantism, like Edward’s, would soon blow over….

Or so he thought….

John Shakespeare was a successful glover….

…….but he did a lot of other things ‘on the side’…..

……most of them illegal…

Well known in London as a crook, he had often appeared before the Magistrates there….

But he was a man of deep faith…

He put his mark to a last will and testament so Roman Catholic it appointed the Virgin Mary to be its executor…. 

He hid the document behind the walls of his Stratford-upon-Avon home….

Had ‘The State’……

…..a handful of driven, ambitious men, making a fortune from Queen Elizabeth’s favour…

 …..found the Testament, ‘The State’ would have executed him….

Shakespeare’s mother, Mary, came from one of the oldest and most respectable Catholic families in the land – the Wilmcote Ardens….

Her relative, Edward Arden, kept a Catholic priest on his pay-roll, disguised as a gardener…

So ‘The State’ hanged, drew and quartered him….

But Edward’s real crime had been criticising the life-style of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester….

…..a. k. a. The Bear…. 

The Bear was Elizabeth’s lover….

… but that didn’t stop him from sleeping with many of her young ladies-in-waiting…

He murdered anyone who got in his way, including, it was rumoured, his young wife, Amy Robsart….

….who was discovered, with her neck broken, at the foot of a very short flight of stairs…

The Bear employed a whole retinue of astrologers, conjurers and magicians, like John Dee…

 

 …..along with Italian poisoners, alchemists and manufacturers of aphrodisiacs….

Never heard to utter a private prayer in his life, The Bear styled himself the leader of the Puritan movement in England….

….and sold his influence with the Queen for vast sums of money…

He had restored, at fabulous expense, the ruined Kennilworth Castle…..

…..not a dozen miles away from Shakespeare’s family home in Stratford-upon-Avon.

To pay for it, he increased the rents of his tenants by 1,000%……

When Queen Elizabeth and her retinue came to call, he stopped all the clocks so that his guests could devote themselves to pleasure….

….uninterrupted by time….

One of The Bear’s henchmen was the M.P. and sadist, Sir Thomas Lucy….

……licensed to raid the homes of Catholics….

 …..then torture the occupants. 

Lucy’s ambition was to find an even more painful way of executing people than chopping them up alive…

John Shakespeare’s son, William….

….an eccentric boy, full of songs and fun, who would make high dramatic speeches when butchering animals…..

….took his revenge on Lucy by poaching hares and deer from his estates…

……encouraged to do so, as a young Roman Catholic, by the Vatican State itself….

True to form, Lucy whipped him savagely and imprisoned him….

Shakespeare’s schoolteachers, all of them followers of the Old Faith, sent the lad away, for his own safety, to Lancashire….

…..to  the Hoghtons, a grand old Catholic family who lived at Hoghton Tower….

Here Shakespeare learnt how to fit in with aristocrats…..

……how to charm them….

……how to entertain them….

……and how to make himself indispensable to them….

But ‘The State’ persecuted ‘Papists’ just as effectively in Lancashire as it did in Warwickshire…. 

Shakespeare’s employer was imprisoned and, at eighteen, Shakespeare had to flee back to Stratford…..

…..where he impregnated Anne Hathaway….

….. a woman ten years older than himself ….

He did the honourable thing and married her….

…..then returned to the attack on Lucy…

Not only did he compose a scurrilous ballad about….

Lucy….

….being….

lousy…

He also hung it on the gates of Lucy’s estate….

He had to get out of town….

London was the obvious place to go….  

He shacked up with another grammar school boy…..

…..Thomas ‘Sporting’ Kyd…

Notorious for their starched beards….

……love of horse-racing….

……and patronage of brothels…..

……they scraped a living by writing ballads and pamphlets….

This earnt them the enmity of two Cambridge graduates…..

…..the huge, red-headed Robert Greene…

…..and the tiny, gat-toothed Thomas Nashe….

The Cambridge men thought it was outrageous that two mere grammar school boys should set themselves up as writers….

…..especially in competition with themselves….

They also thought it pathetic that Shakespeare should go for ‘writing lessons’ to Robert Crowley, the vicar of St. Giles’, Cripplegate….

But Shakespeare had his reasons…..

Lucy worswhipped at St. Giles’ when he was in London…

And Shakespeare still needed protection from him…..

…..protection that the Reverend Crowley could provide….

But Crowley did more than that….

He inspired Shakespeare…

People with money must give it all to the poor…..

….and they must do it of their own free will…..

They must also remove all artifice from their lives, their dress and their language…

Crowley encouraged Shakespeare to turn Bible stories into plays….

…..and set him off on a tour of the Midlands…. 

….with the blessing of  arts-loving Ferdinando, Lord Strange….

…..but not his money….

The only ‘actors’ Shakespeare could get, though, were failed, alcoholic, tradesmen….

…..often ‘subsidised’ by gay City businessmen……

….who would create chaos at the rehearsals….

Shakespeare’s repertoire was an unlikely mix of New Testament parables, fairy stories and bloody domestic murder…

The actors, too poor to ride on horses, had to walk everywhere….

…..dragging their props and costume wagon behind them…

…..sometimes sleeping in the wagon itself…..

…..sometimes playing to tiny audiences….

…..sometimes playing to an audience of one….

…..in his bedchamber…..

But running a company gave a taste of power to the young Shakespeare…

Power that was soon to be taken away….

In 1587, Queen Elizabeth, after years of hesitation,  finally signed the death warrant for her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots…..

….a seductive and enchanting woman, who had long been the object of worship for English Catholics…

They wanted Mary to replace Queen Elizabeth and lead England back to Rome…..

The following year – 1588 – the Spanish Armada attacked….

The winds famously blew….

…..and  the Spanish fleets were scattered….

It seemed as if God really was on the side of Protestantantism, England and the Queen.

Actors were redundant: the English wanted ‘real’ men.

They even tore the costumes off the backs of performers to provide clothing for soldiers…

The public, also, had grown tired of Shakespeare’s ‘moralising’….

They had much preferred the thrills and spills, corpses and revenge, gun-shots and suicide that Kyd had provided in his The Spanish Tragedy…

Shakespeare reacted by becoming boastful, drunk and arrogant…..

The strait-laced Strange ditched him….

For the moment….

●

It was impossible, for a time, for anyone to make money in the theatre….

Kyd  joined Strange’s household as tutor to his daughters…

Christopher Marlowe…..

…..who had been intriguing audiences with his God-defying tragedies….

 ….became tutor to Arbella, grandaughter of the much-married Bess of Hardwick….

….and Shakespeare, pulling Catholic strings,  joined  the household of Mary Browne, the second Countess of Southampton…

 …..who was distantly related to his mother, Mary Arden….

The Countess, a Catholic activist who hid priests in her London home, was a widow….

Her husband, the Second Earl of Southampton, had died young, imprisoned and ‘examined’ in the Tower for his support of Mary, Queen of Scots…

Countess Mary’s favourite country seat was Place House, a converted Abbey in Titchfield, Hampshire….

She needed a schoolmaster for her Grammar School at the gates of Place House…

 …..and a tutor for her wayward, gay, teenage son, Harry…

…...also known as Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton….

The Countess, whose husband had disowned her for falling in love with…

 ….a common person….

….and who had taken Harry away from her when he was only six years old…. 

… took a shine to Shakespeare….

She dressed him in smart clothes……

…….gave him a massive allowance….

…… and commissioned him to write seventeen sonnets for her son’s seventeenth birthday…. 

….in a vain attempt to get Harry interested in girls….

(Lord Burghley, Harry’s guardian, was threatening a £5,000 [£2 and a half million] fine if he didn’t marry his grandaughter.)

Shakespeare had mixed in flamboyant, theatrical circles in London….

….but he knew he had to behave himself now he was with a ‘respectable’ Catholic family….

He stated directly  in one of the ‘Birthday’ sonnets that he had no sexual interest in Harry whatsoever…

Harry, however, had other ideas….

●

The Countess of Southampton was in friendly rivalry with Mary Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke…

 ……..who lived thirty miles away from Titchfield at Wilton House….

She was the sister of the poet, soldier and courtier, Sir Philip Sidney…..

……who had died after a cavalry charge at Zutphen….

He saw that an old soldier had no thigh armour….

….so he gallantly threw off his own….

….and was instantly shot in the leg…

Seeing a common soldier in a worse condition than himself, he gave him the last of his water……

He later died while making love to his wife who was with him on the campaign….

…..according to the antiquarian and gossip John Aubrey…..

 ……who also claimed that Sidney and his sister Mary were so close that they slept together…

…..and that Mary’s sons were, in reality,  Philip’s….

●

The Countesses of Pembroke and Southampton, though Protestant and Catholic, had one thing in common…

They had both been banned from the court by Queen Elizabeth…..

….. who wanted no powerful, attractive women upstaging her…

So the two Countesses devised a revenge….

The Queen had ‘recalled’ (i.e. banned) the recently published Holinshed’s Chronicles….

…..on the grounds that they were….

 ……fondly set out….

She was worried that people might compare her reign with the reign of other Kings and Queens….

Especially the corrupt, weak, perverse or tyrannical ones….

So the Countesses commissioned Shakespeare to write history plays……

…. which obliquely attacked the Queen….

…..and her hangers-on….

….which they could stage, in lavish, pro-am productions, in the grounds of their estates….

After all, horses, armour and soldiers were on hand….

And aristocrats loved play-acting…

The men had got a taste for it at Cambridge….

…..and the women needed a distraction when they were stuck, deep, in the country…

The problem was that grammar school boy Shakespeare, snatched early from school, knew little about the Kings and Queens of England…

So he did what canny folk have always done…

He hired his enemies….

He offered Greene and Nashe money to ‘ghost’ for him down at Titchfield…

And the ‘University wits’ were in no financial position to decline…

Shakespeare hid them away at Posbrook Farm,  just outside Titchfield….

…….and supervised the research and writing of the Henry VI trilogy….

Nashe and Greene were Protestants….

…in the scenes which they wrote, Joan of Arc is a witch and a prostitute….

Shakespeare was a Catholic….

….in the scenes which he wrote, she is an angel and a saint…

Posbrook Farm was owned by one William Beeston….

…..nick-named by Nashe,  Mr Apis Lapis….

….(‘Apis’ is Latin for ‘Bee’ and ‘Lapis’ is Latin for ‘Stone’)…. 

Beeston was a  vintner  famous for his advocacy of wine, his bulk, his gluttony, his criminality, his meanness…

….and his ebullient company…

He provided the writers with cider, cheese and his three notorious ‘maids’ …

…..at a price….

Greene soon ruined himself and wandered back to London….

But Nashe stayed on, determined to wrest from Shakespeare the position he held in the Southampton entourage…

Nashe had collaborated with Marlowe…..

…. and now he collaborated with Shakespeare…..

Nashe’s natural form was prose, while Shakespeare’s was poetry…

Together they wrote Richard III…..

 

……a satire on Leicester, The Bear, who had died in Armada year….

…..poisoned, it was rumoured, by his wife, Lettice Knollys….

…….who had taken a young lover….

The death of The Bear was a relief to everyone…..

….except the Queen….

She came to visit Titchfield in 1591, along with her entire court and army….

These ‘Progresses’ as they were called, allowed her to tour her island and meet her people….

…..but they also allowed her to spy on Catholic families…

Her soldiers would  trash the houses of her ‘hosts’ as they searched for signs of priest holes and….

  ….massing…..

And as though that wasn’t enough, the Queen herself would shoot deer with a crossbow at point blank range…..

…. as they were run in front of her…

….a custom which disgusted country folk…..

….and which was started by her father, Henry VIII when he grew too fat to mount  a horse…

She would then cut off the stag’s testicles….

The Queen liked music to accompany the carnage….

At Titchfield it was provided by the Bassano family, a group of dark-skinned Hassidic Jews from Morocco….

Among them was the ravishing, wilful, mixed-race beauty, Emilia Bassano….

…..of whom no portrait remains….

Shakespeare, like many before him and many after him, fell madly in love with her.

But his passion threw him into agonies of guilt….

He was a married man, and, as a Catholic, took his marriage vows with the utmost seriousness….

But Emilia was spoken for…

Lord Hunsdon, the Queen’s cousin, a bluff old ‘sword and buckler man’,  nearly fifty years her senior…

 

……’kept’ her in jewellery, fine clothes and money to the tune of £40 a year…..

 …..the equivalent today of  £20,000….

Shakespeare, though, was not put off….

He wrote sonnets to seduce Emilia….

Then wrote a whole play to seduce her as well…

…..Love’s Labour’s Lost….. 

 It is also a satire on the Queen’s visit to Titchfield….

…..and was played on the very spot where she had shot deer….

…..’The Parke’ at Place House…

Shakespeare cast himself as the world-weary, sardonic, but highly romantic ‘Berowne’….

 

 ….a play on the Countess of Southampton’s  surname, ‘Browne’…..

…..and he cast Emilia as the sharp-tongued, black-eyed coquette, Rosaline…..

…..with whom Berowne falls reluctantly, but madly in love…

This was all too much for Harry, who….

…….fond on praise

…..wanted to be the centre of Shakespeare’s attention….

The plague was raging in London, so Harry, Emilia and Shakespeare were stuck for the summer in Titchfield…..

……in a painful, complex love-triangle….

……with Nashe hovering around the edges….

Emilia’s technique was to play hard to get….

…. promising more than she actually delivered… 

Shakespeare made the great mistake of asking Harry to plead his love-suit for him….

A handsome, rich, young aristocrat, however gay, was much more of a prize for Emilia than an ageing, balding playwright…

 

…..so she swooped.

Harry wanted to hurt Shakespeare…. 

…..so, overcoming his repugnance to women, he returned Emilia’s advances. 

Shakespeare, desperate and confused, fled from Titchfield to go on tour with Lord Strange’s Men. 

He sent a troubled, vicious sonnet to Harry, which compared him and Emilia to two spirits…

….. one good and one evil…..

……fighting for his soul…

He warns Harry that if he sleeps with Emilia, he’ll catch ‘the clap’….

●

Greene, meanwhile had died in London…..

….in conditions of utmost penury….

He’d been found lying, starving in the street….

….and taken in by a kind-hearted cobbler and his wife…

Nashe claimed he’d ‘found’ papers in Greene’s room which accused Shakespeare of plagiarism….

…..and of working with a prostitute called ‘Lamilia’ to extort money from Harry…

Shakespeare and the Southamptons went beserk….

They accused Nashe himself of writing ‘Greene’s’ attack on Shakespeare….

Nashe swore on his soul that the pamphlet had not ‘proceeded’ from his ‘pen’..

But he immediately went on to attack  Shakespeare in Sommer’s Last Will and Testament ….

…..an entertainment staged by the Southampton family for Queen Elizabeth when she came to visit Countess Mary’s dying father, Lord Montague….

Shakespeare, who was still safely away on tour, appears as the flashily dressed and arrogant ‘Sol’…. 

….who cons and exploits the entire Southampton household….

To top it all, Emilia had become pregnant and had to be married off ‘for colour’ to a ‘minstrel’ called Alphonse Lanier…..

On the road, Shakespeare was forced to examine his feelings…

He finally had to admit to himself that he was more upset at the loss of his ‘lovely boy’  than his ‘dark lady’…

And that he had fallen in love with the cross-dressing Harry the moment he had set eyes on him…

Shakespeare returned to Titchfield…

…..and finally, his affair with Harry began… 

Shakespeare released his pent-up adoration in a great love poem, Sonnet 18….

It begins with a question….

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

….to which Shakespeare reponds, sublimely, in the negative….

Thou art more lovely and more temperate….

Homosexuality, officially at least, carried the death sentence….

……so there was an illicit thrill in Shakespeare’s love…..

…….as there was an illicit thrill in celebrating the Old Latin Mass…..

…… always in secret and often after dark….

Nashe pounced again…..

He knew the Countess was half in love with Shakespeare….

So he delighted in telling her Shakespeare was sleeping with her son….

The Countess took Shakespeare aside and questioned him directly…

…….exactly as the Catholic Countess in All’s Well that Ends well questions the low-born Helena about her feelings for her son, Bertram…

…..Was Shakespeare in love with Harry?

Shakespeare, like Helena, admitted to her he was….

The Countess, whose own love for ‘a common person’ had crossed barriers of class, empathised with a love that crossed barriers of sex….

She thought Shakespeare was good for Harry….

As, in other circumstances,  he might have been good for her….

So she approved of the affair…

‘Cousin Will’ was now fully one of the family….

To celebrate their love, Harry and Shakespeare (with Nashe, forgiven once again, in tow) secretly visited Europe in the Spring of 1593….

…..as spies for Southampton’s great friend, Robert Devereux,  the second Earl of Essex…

 They travelled to Madrid where they were received by King Philip II…

…..a great family friend of the Southamptons…. 

Here Shakespeare saw two Titian paintings, owned by the King, that were to change his life….

……Venus and Adonis….

 …..and The Rape of Lucrece….

When he was back in England, Shakespeare recreated these paintings in verse….

He even used the same colours in his poems as Titian had used on his canvases…

But it was the depth of Titian’s psychology which transformed Shakespeare’s art.

Up to then, English theatre had been two-dimensional…

Shakespeare began, like Titian, to flesh it out…

The three men then travelled round Italy, journeying from city to city by a network of canals….

Sometimes Shakespeare pretended to be the Earl of Southampton while the Earl pretended to be Shakespeare…

Just like The Taming of the Shrew….

…..when the aristocratic Lucentio….

…..changes clothes with his manservant Tranio….

They visited Verona and Padua…..

And, of course, the Bassano family’s old home, Venice…

They even made it, in deadly secret, to Rome, where they saw the famous obelisk that Pope Sextus had erected in front of St. Peter’s…

Shakespeare and Southampton were profoundly moved by the sight of this Pagan monument, now embraced by the Old  Faith….

It had been the last sight that St. Peter had seen before his martyrdom….

But they arrived back in England to a shock….

Marlowe was dead….

Kyd had been racked so badly he was as good as dead…

Atheist papers had been found in their joint lodgings….

…..Marlowe had died, in a drunken brawl, in Deptford…

Kyd tried to revive his collaboration with Shakespeare, but Shakespeare didn’t want to know…

Kyd, under torture, had told the authorities that the incriminating papers had been Marlowe’s….

●

Harry was to come of age the following year – so his mother, the Countess, had to leave Titchfield….

She married one of Queen Elizabeth’s old lovers, the elegant courtier (and recent widower) Sir Thomas Heneage and moved to Copped Hall in Essex….

She commissioned Shakespeare to write an entertainment to celebrate the match….

It was to be A Midsummer Night’s Dream…..

© Stewart Trotter and Trixie the Cat. Christmas, 2011.

NOW VIEW: Shakespeare: The Movie II.

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The Shakespeare Code is delighted to report that the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008  production of Love’s Labour’s Lost….

……directed by the dashing Greg Doran…..

…..and starring the glorious David Tennant….

…..used many of the ideas in Chief Agent Stewart Trotter’s 2002 book….

The production suggested that Berowne was Shakespeare and the ‘whitely wanton’  Rosaline was the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Emilia Bassano….

Dr. Paul Prescott of Warwick University also writes….

From the very moment Armado and Boyet enter the stage of Gregory Doran’s production the resemblances to contemporary illustrations of Raleigh and Chapman are blatantly obvious, from Raleigh’s feathered hat, impresssive beard and huge ruff….

….to Chapman’s signature bald patch and beard as well as his ‘antiquing’ clothes reminding us of his major souce of fame, his translation of Homer….

As Brothers and Sisters of The Code well know, Greg Doran’s name is inscribed in the coveted ‘Roll of Honour’…..

Please see: Celebrity Endorsement (6)

Greg was kind enough to write of Love’s Labour’s Found in 2004…..

The book is exqusite….

Thanks again, Greg….

The Code congratulates you on your continuing success….

To read about The Code’s current thinking on Boyet as Chapman, please click: here.

And for Raleigh as Don Armado, please click: here.

To find out why the dark-skinned Rosaline is described as ‘a whitely wanton’, please click: here.

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THE TRIXIE NEWSLETTER

Yes, Brothers and Sisters…..

….on 14 December, 2011….

…..The Shakespeare Code received its…..

15,000th VIEW!!!

The SEVEN new countries which have signed up are……

ARMENIA

PUERTO RICO

QATAR

BELIZE

CAMBODIA

LITHUANIA

JAMAICA

This brings the number of participating countries to a staggering…..

SEVENTY-THREE!!!

See: The Shakespeare Code Salutes the Nations!

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(It’s best to read Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and  Six first.)

The text that we have of Love’s Labour’s Lost is not the same as the original version which was played at Titchfield at Whitsun in 1592.

As we can see from the frontispiece of the ‘Quarto’ edition…

…the play was ‘newly corrected and augmented’ for a performance before Queen Elizabeth at Christmas 1597….

Why was the play changed?

The answer, as usual, was politics…

●

Sir Walter Raleigh was over six foot high, of a swarthy complexion and with a beard which turned up naturally….

He’d had a distinguished career as a soldier in Ireland, but first gained the attention of Queen Elizabeth by laying down his cloak in front of her….

……so that (according to the Churchman and historian, Thomas Fuller, 1608-61)…..

…… she could walk over ‘a plashy place’……

This was a particularly chivalric act because…..

…his clothes were then a considerable part of his estate….

Raleigh’s family, though old and distinguished, was poor….

So poor, his father rented the family home…

But Raleigh made up for it when Elizabeth, taking a shine to this handsome soldier…..

…..she always had a soft spot for tall men….

…… financed him with lucrative monopolies.

He wore a hat with a pearl band and a jewelled feather and shoes encrusted with jewels worth thousands of pounds….

He even jousted in a suit of armour made of silver which glittered with gems….

And wore gigantic pearls in his ears…

But he stayed mean….

He never, for example, returned the cloak he had ‘borrowed’ from a fellow student at Oxford…..

Or paid for it….

John Aubrey, the gossipy antiquarian…..

…..says that Raleigh was….

…..damnable proud….

….and….

…..loved a wench well….

Aubrey recounts how Raleigh engaged in casual, vertical sex against a tree with one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting who…

….seemed at first boarding to be something fearful of her honour [and] cried ‘Sweet Sir Walter, what do you ask me? Will you undo me? Nay sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter!’ At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cried in the ecstasy ‘Swisser Swatter, Swisser Swatter…..’

But in 1591 Raleigh fell madly in love with another of Elizabeth’s ladies….

….the lively, feisty Bess Throckmorton….

Raleigh started to write amorous verses to her…..

Then he impregnated her….

Then he married her in secret……

Then, in a letter, he denied the whole business to little round-backed Robert Cecil….

…..claiming that…..

….if any such thing were, I would have imparted it unto your self before any man living…

The Queen, of course, found out and went into one of her rages….

The ladies-in-waiting were her wards….

She decided who, if anyone, would woo them…

And she decided whom they married….

And, besides, Raleigh was hers….

After all, she’d paid for him….

[Raleigh was later to say….

…..that minions were not so happy as vulgar judgements thought them, being frequently commanded to uncomely and sometimes unnatural employments.]

Raleigh was too proud to seek Elizabeth’s pardon….

So he was exiled from the Court for five years….

He returned, forgiven, in 1587, the year of the Christmas production of Love’s Labour’s Lost….

●

Raleigh commissioned Thomas Nashe to write a book for him – but when Nashe finished it, Raleigh, typically, never paid up…

Nashe took his revenge in a pamphlet…..

……in which he suggests that the Devil himself would be a better patron than Raleigh…

He lambasts Raleigh in code as….

a buckram giant….

…..and….

an upstart…

……..and claims that he is….……

….all Italianato in his talk….

.i.e. elaborate and artificial, like his clothes…..

……and his…..

…….spade peke is sharp….

Following Fuller, Nashe claims that…..

…..the weaver’s looms first framed the web of his [Raleigh’s] honour’….

….and describes him as….

….an inamorata poeta….

….who would….

…sonnet a whole quire of paper in praise of Lady Swine-Snout, his yellow-faced Mistress [Bess Throckmorton] and wear a feather of her rain-beaten fan for a favour, like a fore-horse….

He declares he will never write for Raleigh again, asking…

….what reason have I to bestow any of my wit upon him that will bestow none of his wealth upon me? Alas it is easy for a goodly tall fellow that shineth in his silks, to come and outface a poor simple pedant in a threadbare cloak, and tell him his book is pretty, but at this time he is not provided for him; marry about two or three days hence if he come that way, his page shall say he is not within, or else he is too busy with my Lord……

For Nashe, Raleigh was one of…

…our English peacocks that, painting themselves with church spoils, like mighty men’s sepulchres have nothing but atheism, schism, hypocrisy and vain glory, like rotten bones, lie lurking within them….

At the beginning of 1592, Queen Elizabeth had made Raleigh a gift of Sherbourne – which she had ‘alienated’ (i.e. stolen) from the Bishop of Salisbury…

And later in the same year the Jesuits accused Raleigh of belonging to a ‘School of Atheism’…

These were a loose group of free-thinkers, financed by the ‘Wizard Earl’, Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland….

 They included Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman…

Nashe would have known all about them as we know, for certain, from the frontispiece to Dido and Aeneas, that he collaborated with Marlowe on his plays….

In the summer of 1591 the ‘School of Atheism’ would have gathered at Petworth…..

…..Northumberland’s stately home, a day’s ride from Titchfield…

…..to greet the Queen and entertain her on her Progress to the South East…..

(Please see: The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth. )

This gave Shakespeare the idea of lampooning them collectively as ‘The School of Night’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost…

And Nashe (collaborating with Shakespeare and playing Moth) of lampooning Raleigh as Don Adriano di Armado…

Armado, like Raleigh, is a soldier, but a ‘damnable proud’ one…

(He is called ‘Braggart’ in the stage directions of the Quarto and Folio edition of the play…)

He  falls passionately in love with the loose country wench Jaquenetta (Bess Throckmorton) and writes poetry to her…

Just as Raleigh wrote love-poetry to Bess Throckmorton….

And…

  ‘….affects (loves) the very ground….

….where his beloved walks….

….just as Raleigh had laid his cloak down on the ground for Queen Elizabeth to walk on…

Costard, the swain, describes how Armado, like Raleigh, uses the fan of his lady as a ‘favour’…

….To see him [Armado] walk before a lady and to bear her fan…

Like Raleigh, Armado calls Moth/Nashe ‘pretty’…..

He is poor….

(He can’t even afford to wear a shirt…)

And he is mean…

(He gives Costard a paltry three farthings to deliver a letter while Berowne gives him nearly a shilling….)

The Lords describe him as….

 an oracle…

According to  the historian and politician Sir Robert Naunton, (1563-16350)…..

 …..Queen Elizabeth took Raleigh for….

….an oracle that netted them all….

But the Love’s Labour’s Lost story has one, huge inconsistency….

Jaquenetta, unlike Bess, rejects Don Armado’s advances…..

But suddenly ends up pregnant by him….

By rights, the potential father should be Costard the swain, who, at the beginning of the play, has been discovered making love to Jaquenetta….

What had happened?

●

The Shakespeare Code believes that, when Shakespeare and Nashe began writing Love’s Labour’s Lost, it was not known that Bess Throckmorton was pregnant….

All that was known was that Raleigh had fallen for Bess in 1591 and was writing poetry to her….

Raleigh, as an enemy and rival of Essex, was an ideal figure to send-up….

But in the course of writing the play, word came that Bess had given birth to a child on 29th March, 1592…..

The Earl of Southampton even acted as Godfather….

So a hasty – and not very convincing – re-write to the show was made…

Don Armado suddenly becomes the father to Jacquenetta’s baby…

(He does the decent thing and marries her, gives up soldiering and becomes a farmer…)

But what was the original ending going to be?

Armado, in the throes of love, exclaims….

Assist me, some extemporal God of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise wit, write pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio….

We never hear these sonnets….

But there are two very odd sonnets at the end of Shakespeare’s own collection – all about Cupid, the love god, having his flaming brand stolen by nymphs while he sleeps….

The nymphs put the brand into a well….

And the brand heats up the waters to provide a perpetual ‘remedy’ for venereal disease….

One sonnet talks of  ‘the help of bath’ – which is a coded reference to the city of Bath, where Tudor gentlemen….

….including Raleigh…..

….went when they had caught a venereal disease.

But the other sonnet has the line….

Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love…..

‘Water’ was Queen Elizabeth’s pet name for Raleigh….

She was fond of saying….

I thirst for water…..

It is The Code’s belief that in the original draft of the play, Armado seduces Jaquenetta and ends up, still love-lorn, but with ‘the clap’ as well….

●

Aubrey tells us that……

….he [Raleigh] spoke broad Devonshire to his dying day…..

Don Armado greets the pedant Holofernes and the curate, Sir Nathaniel, with the cheery West Country salutation….

Chirrah….

What is a Spaniard doing using a Devonshire word……?

This raises the whole question of Armado’s ‘Spanishness’….

It is true that Raleigh often wore black and was said to have a ‘Spanish’ heart….

But Spanishness seems singularly lacking in the LANGUAGE of Armado….

It is colourful and ornate….

…..’Italianato’ even….

…..strange in someone to whom English was supposed to be, at best, a second language…

When Shakespeare wants to point up the ‘foreigness’ of a character – such as Dr. Caius the French doctor in The Merry Wives of Windsor – he shows them MANGLING the English language….

And Armado is referred to as ‘Braggart’  far more often in the stage directions than he is as ‘Don Armado’….

It is the belief of The Shakespeare Code that in the first Titchfield script, Don Armado wasn’t even Spanish….

He was a blatant, raging caricature of Raleigh…. 

However, by the time the Queen ordered the play to be presented at Court, Raleigh was back in favour….

And making political alliances with the Earl of Essex….

So a direct attack on Raleigh would not go down well….

When Shakespeare ‘newly corrected and augmented’ the script, he turned the Braggart into Don Armado….

But why a Spaniard?

●

In 1593, King Henri of Navarre sent to Elizabeth, without consulting her….

…..one Antonio Perez…

…..for her to clothe and feed….

Elizabeth was furious….

Perez was, in the language of Francis Bacon’s mother….

an old, doted, polling Papist….

He had once worked as secretary for Philip II of Spain and was now betraying Spanish secrets to anyone who would buy them….

On top of all this, he was a notorious homosexual who’d enjoyed affairs with young men in Spain and France…..

….and was about to begin all over again in England…

….with Anthony Bacon (Francis’s brother) who was secretary to the Earl of Essex.

Mrs. Bacon wrote to her son, Anthony….

I pity your brother [Francis] yet as long as he pities not himself but keepeth that bloody Perez, yea, as a coach-companion and a bed-companion, a proud, profane costly fellow, whose being about him I verily fear the Lord God doth mislike, and doth less bless your brother in credit, and otherwise in his health, surely I am utterly discouraged….

Elizabeth would have nothing to do with Perez….

She despised him for betraying the secrets of Philip II….

But Essex, wide and tolerant in his sexual tastes, thought Perez could provide useful information….

He lodged him in Essex House (along with his lover Anthony Bacon) and allowed him to celebrate the old Catholic Mass….

He even asked Perez to keep an eye on his sexually wayward sister, Penelope Rich….

….and so, according to contemporary Anthony Standen…..

….. provided him[Perez] here with the same office those eunuchs have inTurkey, which is to have the custody of the fairest dames…..

Even Essex finally had to admit that Perez usefulness was limited….

And ‘let him go’ in 1596…

But up to that point, contemporary historian William Camden says….

[Essex] entertained him at his house, and supplied him largely with money, using him as his counsellor, yea as an oracle….

It is The Code’s belief that the word ‘oracle’ (used of both Raleigh and Perez) triggered the idea in Shakespeare’s mind of turning the Braggart into the fantastical Spaniard, Don Armado…..

That way, no-one would be offended….

So, to all the other flamboyant characteristics of the Braggart, Shakespeare now tacks on homosexulaity…

The King of Navarre says….

How you delight my lords, I know not, I,

But I protest I love to hear him lie,

And I will use him for my minstrelsy…’

The Lie was a famous poem by Sir Walter Raleigh….

And ‘minstrels’ were famous for their homosexuality….

So the actor playing Don Armado has to fuse ‘wench-loving’ Sir Walter Raliegh with ‘coach-riding’ Antonio Perez…..

He has to be camp and straight at the same time!!!

Something the brilliant young actor, Paul Ready, achieved magnificently……

…..when he played a lisping, virile  Don Armado in the production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Globe in London…

 Love’s Labour’s Lost was first performed at Titchfield in 1592….

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first performed at Copped Hall in 1594….

To find out the extraordinary events that happened between these two years….

 ….the love triangles…

…..love squares….

…..betrayals….

…..gay ‘comings out’…

…..torture….

….. and trips to Itlay….

…..Brothers and Sisters of The Code can do no  better than to turn to…

Shakespeare:the Movie.

But if you wish to follow the A Midsummer Night’s Dream story, please click: HERE.

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 THE TRIXIE NEWSLETTER

Brothers and Sisters, it’s true…

On 3  December, 2011, The Shakespeare Code received its…..

14,000th VIEW!!!

Not only that…..

NINE NEW COUNTRIES HAVE JOINED THE CODE!!!

They are…..

LATVIA

PERU

PAKISTAN

EL SALVADOR

SERBIA

LEBANON

ST.  VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES

BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

VENEZUELA

 

This puts the number of participating countries at……..

Clickety-Click…..

SIXTY-SIX!!!

 (Please see: The Shakespeare Code Salutes the Nations.)

Also…..

 Eddie Linden, F.S.C. (Fellow of The Shakespeare Code)…

 …..has garnered rave reviews for his new collection of poems…..

A Thorn in the Flesh

Karl Miller, F.R.S.L. (Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature)….

….,writing in the highly prestigious Scottish Review of Books,  quotes Eddie’s poem ‘Court Jester’…

What is it going to look

Like in forty years from now?

The pain, the fear from

day to day. Waiting for

the letter that never comes.

He sits there dropping poets’

Names until one becomes drunk and cannot hear

Or see. Will someone rid me

of this pest that lingers in our midst?

O Christ take away this painful fool…

Miller, a distinguished literary editor and academic, who first sprang to fame as a schoolboy-egghead on B.B.C. Steam Radio’s Top of the Form….

…..and I’m not making this up…..

……comments on this poem…

God is one of those editors whose judgement can be suspect and who doesn’t always do that you want. But I’d like to think that this moving account of the literary life is already up there in his library awaiting it’s author…[sic]

Sebastian Barker, F.R.S.L. (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature)….

….writing in the equally prestigious Sofia poetry magazine, states….

We do not often get genuine nuggets of poetry placed in our hands, but we do with this book. The simplicity of conception I mentioned is not to be construed as as naivety or lack of depth. Such simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve in the arts. It is akin to the simplicity of being struck by the arrows of adult love. But with Eddie Linden [Fellow of The Shakespeare Code] this is the love of God, of man, and of individual poems. That this love also embraces a wide and thorough grasp of life in the ecclesiastical and political arenas is simply one more credit to this wholly exceptional man…

Barker is a poet and editor in his own right and has written a biography of Eddie,  Who is Eddie Linden…

You can order a copy of Eddie’s book – a snip at £7.50 – from the delightful publishers, Emily and Susan Johns, at Hearing Eye….

books@hearingeye.org

www.hearingeye.org

Don’t forget to tell them that Trixie the Cat sent you….

Emily and Susan will know who you mean…

They have corresponded with Your Cat…

In very appreciative terms….

They openly describe The Shakespeare Code as….

 a powerful blog….

….And ALSO don’t forget that it was YOUR CAT TRIXIE who first brought Eddie’s new collection of poetry to the attention of the world in her…

…. now-CLASSIC….

TRIXIE REVIEW

 Remember……

YOU WILL ALWAYS HEAR IT FIRST ON THE SHAKESPEARE CODE!!!

ESPECIALLY IF IT’S ABOUT SHAKESPEARE….

So….

FOLLOW THE CAT!!!

‘Bye now…

P. S.  Are you reading our great new series, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream Decoded’?

If not, and yearn for a life-changing experience……

START HERE!

 P.P.S.  To read Your Cat’s ‘no-claws-barred’ interview with Eddie Linden,….

F. S. C….

 CLICK HERE!

 

 

 

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 (It’s best to read Parts One, Two,  Three,  Four and Five first).

In the early 1590’s the Southampton family was William Shakespeare’s meal-ticket…

There was no copyright on a writer’s work – so the only way a playwright could make money was by becoming a ‘sharer’ in a theatrical company….

This meant paying out a lump sum which Shakespeare did not have…

Harry, third Earl of Southampton (when he came of age in 1594) was to give Shakespeare the £1,000 (£500,000) to buy his way into the Lord Chamberlain’s Men….

But, in the meantime, he was totally dependent on Harry’s mother, Mary, Countess of Southampton….

…..who suppported Shakespeare in style….

Thomas Nashe was jealous of Shakespeare and wanted the Southampton money for himself….

But he was no threat to Shakespeare….

 Small and buck-toothed…..

……he was never able to gain the affections of Mary or her son….

However, a rival poet suddenly appeared on the scene, openly wooing Harry with his verse….

He was George Chapman…..

An accomplished poet,  he was a real danger to Shakespeare, who admitted he was still learning his craft…

Chapman was part of a group of free-thinking writers, philosophers and scientists, led by the ‘Wizard Earl’, Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland…..

……who was based at Petworth,  thirty miles from Titchfield….

 And Sir Walter Raleigh….

….who was based at Durham House in London…

The Jesuits called them the ‘School of Atheism’ and claimed that….

….both Moses and our Saviour, the Old and the New testament are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backward…

The Jesuits, as usual, were exaggerating….

If not blatantly lying….

But the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost also calls them ‘The School of Night’….

This was largeley because of Chapman’s philosphical verse….

He praised the cool, rational night over the hot, lustful day…

In his Hymnus in Cynthiam he casts Elizabeth as the moon-queen….

And implores her to stay isolated from the sunny glare of Europe….

That was all reasonable….

But Chapman claimed to have psychic abilities…..

When he was translating Homer’s works, the spirit of Homer appeared to him, he said….

In Hitchin…

This was all Shakespeare needed to launch an attack….

In Sonnet 86 he lampoons Chapman as being….

….by spirits taught to write…

….and even describes the spirit of Homer himself as an….

….affable familiar ghost….

Which nightly gulls him [Chapman] with intelligence….

FALSE intelligence that is!

Shakespeare then goes on to remind the devout Catholic, Southampton, that Chapman is funded by a dodgy, ‘atheist’ source…

…his compeers by night [The Wizard Earl’ and his cronies]

……who give him….

..aid…

Shakespeare’s then goes on to attack  Chapman for the affectedness of his verse….

…and parodies it to devastating effect…

‘Stars’, in Chapman’s hands, become…

…those gold candles fixed in heaven’s air…

And ‘the earth’ becomes….

…..this huge rondure….’

Although he was a Catholic, Shakespeare was often very plain in his tastes…

….a  legacy from his radical Protestant mentor, the priest and writer Robert Crowley at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, who hated artificial hair….

……artificial make-up…..

……and artificial language….

 Shakespeare insists that he always addresses Harry….

….in true, plain words….

….because they are the only things a…

….a true-telling friend….

…..would ever use… 

(Sonnet 82)

Shakespeare’s next target for attack, though, is completely unfair…..

Chapman’s name!

A ‘chapman’ in Shakespeare’s day, meant a ‘pedlar’…

So in Sonnet 102 Shakespeare asserts….

That love is merchandised , whose rich esteeming

The owner’s [Chapman’s] tongue doth publish everywhere…

And concludes Sonnet 21  with…

I will not praise [Harry] that purpose not to sell [him]…..

…..as a pedlar would!

When Shakespeare came to write Love’s Labour’s Lost, he continued the attack on Chapman by creating the monstrous, mincing, pederast, Boyet…

His very first line to his mistress, the Princess of France…

Now madam, summon up your dearest spirits….

…would instantly put the coterie Titchfield audience in mind of Chapman’s seances….

Boyet follows this with  a massive, over the top, Chapmanesque compliment….

Be now as prodigal of all dear grace

As nature was in making graces dear

When she did starve the general world beside

And prodigally gave them all to you…

And if the penny still hadn’t dropped with the audience, it certainly would with the Princess’s next line…

Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,

Not uttered by base sale of chapmen’s tongues…’

Later Berowne, in a vicious attack on Boyet’s plagiarism, decribes him directly as…

 wits pedlar….

…who…

….retails his wares

At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs…

Boyet – ingratiating, lisping, effeminate –  is most at home with gossipy girls….

As we see here…

And here, still in Elizabethan times…

And here, in Regency times…

 

And here, in Edwardian times….

Shakespeare hates him for his insincerity, his sycophancy and his smiling teeth….

…..’as white as whales’ bone….

But most of all he hates him for his….

CRUELTY TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE!!!

His choice of words is so affected that no-one can understand a word he says…

In final exasperation, the Princess screams at him….

Avaunt, perplexity…

….and….

Speak to be understood….

…..and this introduces the most important theme in the play….

Shakespeare has attacked Chapman in his Sonnets because his language is corrupt…

If language is corrupt, then we cannot trust the feelings BEHIND the language….

They could be corrupt as well….

The integrity of language is tested to the full in Love’s Labour’s Lost when Mercade announces to the Princess the death of her father…

Can the Lords express their feelings simply and truly?

They try hard, but fail….

However, they accept the women’s challenge…

Let’s have action instead of words…

The Lords will retreat from the world and perform acts of charity for a year and a day….

Then, when they return, chastened, the ladies will give them their hearts…

Of course, we don’t know if the men keep these new promises….

They have, after all, broken their vows before….

And Berowne says, ominously, that a ‘twelvemonth’ is….……

….too long for a play….

But Shakespeare, in the ambiguity of  this light comedy, is starting to work towards the conclusion of his great, dark masterpiece, King Lear….

If life is to have any meaning in the face of death, we must all….

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say….

●

With the creation of Boyet, Shakespeare faced his hatred for Chapman face on – and so faced his hatred for himself face-on….

Shakespeare had to do a lot of the things Boyet had to do – amuse, flatter, entetain and win over the ladies…

It is fascinating that Berowne/Shakespeare describes Boyet as….

honey-tongued…

Two years earlier, the poet Edmund Spenser…

 ……who was staying in Hampshire, compared ‘pleasant Willy’s’  verse to ‘honey’…

Deep down, Shakespeare realised that he and Chapman were very alike….

Indeed, in the play Berowne finally admires Boyet’s wit…

Well said, old mocker, I must needs be friend with thee…

This has echoes of Prospero’s final realisation in The Tempest of his kinship with the monster Caliban….

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine…

 ●

Please note: some material in this post first appeared in Stewart Trotter’s Love’s Labour’s Found  (2002) ISBN No. 1 873953 35 6.

(It’s best to read Part Seven now: ‘Thomas Nashe’s Revenge on Sir Walter Raleigh’!)

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(It’s best to read Parts One, Two,  Three and Four first).

What, apart from money, did William Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe gain from writing  Love’s Labour’s Lost?

Three things:

1. Self-promotion

2. Self-justication, and…

3. Revenge

1. Self-promotion.

(a) Shakespeare.

Shakespeare wrote the part of Berowne…

He also played it…

Berowne is witty, sceptical, romantic and loyal…..

By playing him, Shakespeare is implying….

 I am witty, sceptical, romantic and loyal as well….

In fact, the coterie audience at Titchfield would assume that Berowne was Shakespeare and that Shakespeare was Berowne.

In the same year as Love’s Labour’s Lost (1592) Henry Chettle wrote….

……my self have seen his [Shakespeare’s] demeanour  no less civil than he excellent in the qualities he professes: besides, divers of worship [ie. the Southampton family] have reported his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, which approves his art….

John Aubrey, in the following century, was to write…

…he [Shakespeare] was a handsome, well-shaped man: very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit….

Shakespeare was using the play to project an image of himself…..

Exactly the way Sir Noël Coward was to do four centuries later…..

Coward was a South London, lower class boy who passed himself off as a toff….

Shakespeare was a Warwickshire, yeoman class boy who passed himself off as a Lord..

By using the name ‘Berowne’ (after Mary Browne, the second Countess of Southampton) Shakespeare suggests that he is part of the Wriothesley family….

(He was related to them through his mother – but only distantly.)

Shakespeare even went on to purloin the silver falcon from the Wriothesley coat-of-arms for use on his own family crest….

(Please see: Shakespeare in Titchfield. A Summary of the Evidence. )

(b) Nashe.

By writing and playing the part of the ‘well-educated infant’ , Moth….

….. (which is NEARLY ‘Thom’ backwards)…..

……Nashe was projecting his comic persona as….

(a) witty,

(b) diminutive,  and

(c) beardless….

……(Nashe, famously, could not grow facial hair)….

When he had played Dromio of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors he had used his ‘trademark’ name…..

…ape….

As Moth he uses another of his ‘trademark’ names….

 ….juvenal….

This was a play on the name of the Roman satirist, ‘Juvenal’…..

…..(a reference to Nashe’s satires)….

…..and the word ‘juvenile’….

…..(a reference to Nashe’s boyish appearance).

(Six years later, in 1598, Francis Meeres was to describe Nashe as ‘young Juvenal’, so clearly the self-promotion had worked….)

At one point Moth describes, to his penniless Spanish master,  Don Armado..

…the best way of dressing when he comes to woo  ‘the country wench’ Jaquenetta…

…..with your hat penthouse lik o’er the shop of your eyes, with your arms crossed on your thin-belly doublet like a rabbit on a spit, or your hands in your pocket, like a man after the old painting…..

The Editor of the handsome new Cambridge University Press edition of the play says that…

The syntax and and satiric images in Moth’s speech here bring it closer than anything else in the play to the satiric prose style of Thomas Nashe….

The Shakespeare Code would like to suggest that the speech is close to ‘the satiric prose style of Thomas Nashe’  because…

THOMAS NASHE WROTE IT!!! 

2. Self-justification.

(a) Shakespeare.

At the beginning of Love’s Labour’s Lost the King and his Lords make a solemn vow that they will abjure the society of women and devote the next three years to fasting and study….

Then the lovely ladies turn up….

One by one, the men decide that there are other things they’d prefer to be doing rather than studying… 

One of the main differences between Elizabethan Englishmen and Modern Englishmen is that vast majority of Elizabethan Englishmen believed they had a soul…

…..and to break a vow was to put your soul in danger….

Shakespeare, a Catholic and a married man, had fallen in love with ‘the dark lady’,  Emilia Bassano….

He was therefore breaking his marriage vow….

……something which pre-occupies him in Sonnet 152….

In loving thee thou know’st I am foresworn….’

In Sonnet 142 he goes so far as to describe ‘loving’  Emilia as ‘sinful’….

(His gay sex with the Earl of Southampton doesn’t seem to have struck him as ‘sinful’ at all. Rather the reverse…)

So when Berowne concocts an elaborate justification for the Lords breaking their vows, he is also justifying  his own infidelity….

Everyone in Titchfield would have known he was married to Anne…

But there was another vow that the Love’s Labour’s Lost audience had all made….

Their Vow of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth….

Also there was the Earl of Leicester’s 1584   ‘Bond of Association’ which thousands of gentlemen had signed….

In this they swore to protect the Queen from any rebellion…

Many were starting to turn to think, now, about rebelling against Elizabeth themselves…

So they needed a strong justification for going back on their word….

Years ago the Pope had absolved Catholics who broke their Vows of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth…..

In fact he actively encouraged them to do so…

But Shakespeare, in the play, was now giving a justification to Catholics and Protestants alike..

His basic argument was that if you swear to a course of action on a mis-guided principle, that vow becomes invalid….

Shakespeare, by offering this argument, was also obliquely explaining why, though he was a Catholic, he could never become a fanatical one…

…nor could he write the religious verse that the Jesuit Robert Southwell…..

 ……was begging him to write….

When the Lords in the play set up their rules for their ‘Academy’ –  abstinence, chastity and mortification of the flesh – they are very similar to the rules of the Jesuit seminaries set up at Douai and Rheims…

Brave young English Catholics were sent there in secret, fast-tracked to ordination and returned to England and almost certain death…

But Berowne explains that the Lords of Navarre are not cut out  for that sort of life…

Only God can chose his martyrs…

And even his ascetics…

As Berowne says….

…..every man with his affects [passions] is born,

Not by might mastered but by special grace….

i.e. the grace of God….

Shakespeare is admitting that he could never be celibate…

In fact he goes on to say in Sonnet 121….

I am that I am, and they that level at my abuses

Reckon up their own…

…..an open declaration of his complex sexuality….

….which Meeres confirms when he describes Shakespeare as…

…..one of the most passionate among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of love…

Shakespeare later developed into a great tragedian…

 But at the time of Love’s Labour’s Lost,  he was loved by his aristocratic public for being in love….

And for advocating love’s power in his play…

And when love speaks, the voice of the Gods

Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony…

Playing Berowne also gives Shakespeare the chance to score one over on his collaborator – and deadly rival – Nashe.

Nashe was always condemning Shakespeare, in code,  for being a mere grammar school boy with no real learning at all….

Berowne demonstrates that you can learn more from life – and from being in love  – than you can ever learn from a book….

Small have continual plodders ever won

Save base authority from others’ books….

(b) Nashe.

Nashe, everyone agreed, was ‘famous’….

But the other thing they all agreed on, was that he was ‘poor’…

So poor that once he and a friend had only one pair of trousers between them…

They had to take it in turns to leave the house….

Nashe needed to justify his poverty…..

And did so by blaming others….

He was poor, not because he was untalented….

No….

 He was poor because his patrons were mean…

In the play, the pageboy Moth is brilliant, quick and precocious….

But his master, Don Armado, is innumerate, stupid and impoverished…

He is holding Moth back….

Just the way Nashe’s patrons were all holding him back…

Who they were….

And how he got his revenge on his enemies…

And how Shakespeare got his revenge on his…

We  shall see in the next post….

 

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It is with over-whelming joy we report…..

….that on its first day of democratic freedom…..

….28 November, 2011…..

…..that great cradle of spirituality, EGYPT…..

….joined The Shakespeare Code….

In honour of this event, the Agents of The Code call on Trixie the Cat to recite Enobarbus’s sublime description of Cleopatra, on the Nile, in her barge…..

THE TRIXIE RECITATION

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster,

As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,

It beggar’d all description: she did lie

In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,

O’er-picturing that Venus where we see

The fancy out-work nature. On each side her

Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,

With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem

To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,

And what they undid, did…

There are now FIFTY-SEVEN participating nations in The Shakespeare Code…

‘Bye, now….

 

 

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In August, 2011, The Shakespeare Code received over 1,000 Views….

In September, 2011, it received over 2,000 Views….

The Shakespeare Code is delighted to announce that in November, 2011, it received over….

3,ooo VIEWS!!!

Also FOURTEEN new countries  joined The Code….

They are:

ICELAND

JAPAN

KOREA

ROMANIA

UKRAINE

ISRAEL

ARGENTINA

SRI LANKA

NICARAGUA

VIET NAM

IRELAND

SLOVAKIA

SLOVENIA

FINLAND

 

This means there are now…….

FIFTY-SIX PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES!!!

(Please see: The Shakespeare Code Salutes the Nations!)

THE WORLD LOVES WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE….

 …….AND THE SHAKESPEARE CODE LOVES SERVING THE WORLD…..

As Trixie the Cat says…..

STAY TUNED TO YOUR STATION OF THE STARS…..

‘Bye now….

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(It’s best to read Parts One, Two and Three first).

Mary, Countess of Southampton’s next commission for William Shakespeare….

 …..and Thomas Nashe, of course….

…..was an entertainment for the 1592 Titchfield Whitsun Fair….

The Fair had  been granted to the town by King Henry VI in 1447, two years after he had married Margaret of Anjou in the Abbey….

It  was originally held at the Feast of Corpus Chrisit,  when sacred objects from the Church were processed round the town…

But this had all been far too Papist for the boy-king Edward VI…

He banned Corpus Christi and replaced it with Whit Sunday instead….

A time for tilting, drinking Whitsun ale and morris dancing…

Much more English…. 

The festivities were held in Countess Mary’s ‘Parke’…. .

..and are held there to this day….

Mary wanted a comedy for the event…..

A very heterosexual comedy in which her son, Harry, could act….

And which might turn him straight….

(She faced a tremendous £5,000 fine if Harry refused to marry Lord Burghley’s grand-daughter….)

But Harry showed no interest at all in girls….

Except to dress up like them….

Mary asked Shakespeare to write heterosexual parts for Harry’s gay friends as well…

…..the Danvers brothers, who were so posh they pronounced their name ‘Davers’.

Mary was clearly hoping for a mass, Hampshire conversion….

Parts, too, were needed for her female guests who were coming to visit at Whitsun…..

…..one of whom needed no conversion to heterosexuality….

…..Penelope Rich….

She had been the muse of Sir Philip Sidney, who described her as….

…..most RICH in these and every part,

Which makes the patents of true, wordly bliss,

Hath no misfortune, but that RICH she is…

Penelope was the sister of the Earl of Essex….

…..who was the hero of the hour….

 He had fought alongside Henri of Navarre at the siege of Rouen…

He was also an intimate friend of gay Harry….

(And secretly batted for both sides…)

He loved plays…..

And he loved tilting……

…..and would certainly have been invited to Titchfield for the Whitsun celebrations as the guest of honour…

But whether he made it there or not was another matter…..

The Queen, pushing sixty….

 

……was besotted with Essex and hardly let him out of her sight…

She often had him apprehended as he tried to escape from the Court down to Hampshire….

Just like Venus, in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, who rugby tackles her reluctant lover Adonis to the ground…

●

Shakespeare came up with the idea of  Love’s Labour’s Lost…

……a re-write of an old hit he’d had for Lord Strange’s Men, The Fair Em….

….which has an identical ‘eaves-dropping’ scene….

….and a lecherous old mill-worker called Trotter….

The whole thing was to be a satire on Queen Elizabeth and her Progress the previous year to Cowdray and Titchfield…

This had been a time of enormous strain for the Roman Catholic Southampton family…

At any moment their recusancy could have been exposed….

Shakespeare knew it would be highly therapeutic for them all to have a good old laugh at it….

In the play, the King of Navarre and his courtiers (Berowne, Dumaine and Longaville) vow to give up women and devote their lives to study….

But the Princess of France and her retinue of lovely Ladies (Rosaline, Katharine and Maria) arrive at the Court of Navarre on state business….

They are forced to live in tents in the fields outside the gates…

But, one by one, the gentlemen break their vows…

Shakespeare cast the beautiful Penelope in the part of the Princess, and plays on her name the same way Sidney did…

In the final scene he has her say….

Sweet hearts, we shall be RICH ‘ere we depart…

….and then uses the word   ‘rich’  FIVE more times in the same scene.

Berowne was another intellectual/romantic part for Shakespeare…

(The character’s oddly-spelt  name is a coded compliment to Mary, Countess of Southampton, whose maiden name was Browne…)

The handsome King who falls hopeleslly in love with the Princess….

….was a great, masculinising part for Harry…

He was called ‘Navarre’ after Henri of Navarre, alongside whom Essex had been fighting…

And the two other courtiers were named after generals who were at the siege as well..

….Henri d’Orleans, duc de Longueville and Charles, duc de Mayenne….

This was all a compliment to Essex….

Who, in reality,  had proved a disastrous commander at Rouen…

Three thousand of his men had died, including his brother Walter….

●

Love’s Labour’s Lost was written to be an outdoor ‘promenade’ performance, just like the Progresses of the Queen…

And, like the Progresses of the Queen, it was staged as a ‘serial’ over several days..

The Princess and her ladies would have arrived on horseback, just as Elizabeth and her Ladies had done…

And when the Princess of France says to the King of Navarre (who is immediately smitten by her beauty)….

The roof of this court is too high to be yours, and welcome to the wide fields too base to be mine’

…..she is referring to the real sky and to real fields….

Place House itself – and it’s great doors – would become the Court of Navarre….

 …..and real tents would be pitched in real grounds…….

When the Princess asks…

Was that the King that spurred his horse so hard

Against the steep-up rising of the hill?….

….Harry would have spurred his real horse up the really steep hill outside the gates of Place House…

When the Princess goes to the standing to shoot deer, she would go to the actual standing that had been built for Elizabeth….

And when she exclaims….

But come, the bow…

….she would be given the actual bow that Elizabeth had used…

And which she had left as a memento at Cowdray….

And when Berowne climbs into a tree and sits ‘like a demi-God’…’in he sky’ and the King of Navarre hides behind a bush….

The tree was a genuine tree…

And the bush was a genuine bush….

●

The ‘fairing’ that Princess of France receives in the play is…..

A lady walled about with diamonds….’

….a clear reference, for those in the know, to the famous ‘Armada Jewel’ which Sir Thomas Heneage had given to the Queen…

The part of the Princess gives Penelope Rich – who hated the Queen almost as much as her mother, Lettice Knollys, did –  a wonderful opportunity to satirise Elizabeth….

….her vanity, her bossiness and her jealousy….

But it is clear that Shakespeare was FASCINATED by the Queen….

How could a woman of such grace and sensibility behave with such cruelty?

(Please see: Queen Elizabeth, incest and sadism. )

In the speech she makes just before the shooting of the deer, Shakespeare penetrates to the depths of the Queen’s heart….

She herself questions her addicition to hunting and realises that her need for…

 …Fame, an outward part….

…… is so great that it smothers her natural compassion….

So she….

 spill[s] the poor deer’s blood….

This, for the Elizabethans, introduces another conundrum…

….blood could mean semen…

(Please see: The Shakespeare Code)

So ‘the poor deer’ were also her poor, hapless lovers… 

Like the Earl of Essex….

Did they follow her in spite of her cruelty?

Or BECAUSE of it…

In the play the women lead the men a merry dance….

And outwit them at every turn….

But the men come back for more….

And more..

Including Berowne…..

The sceptical, wordly-wise courtier falls head-over-heels in love with the dark-skinned, skittish beauty, Rosaline…

Played, of course, by Emilia Bassano….

Shakespeare had used his Sonnets to try to seduce her…

He had praised her, mocked her, insulted her, surprised her….

And, above all, tried to make her laugh….

Now he attempts to get her into bed by writing a whole play!

But there could be no happy resolution to the entertainment….

The execution of Swithin Wells had cast a long shadow over The Comedy of Errors….

Now sickness in the Southampton family was casting an even longer shadow over Love’s Labour’s Lost….

In the play, the Princess of France’s father is ‘sick and bed-rid’…

So was Mary Southampton’s father, Lord Montague…..

And so was her twin brother, Anthony…..

Both were to die later in the year….

Artists are often prophetic in their work……

Shakespeare ends his ‘comedy’ with the arrival of Mercade….

 …..who informs the Princess of the death of her father…..

The Ladies tell their adoring Lords to retreat from the pleasures of the world for a year….

Then, if they still love their ladies, make their suits again….

Berowne then famously says….

That’s too long for a play….

A  sad conclusion…..

But Shakespeare and Nashe, as we shall see in our next post, had their triumphs on the way…..

(It’s best to read Part Five now.)

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