The Shakespeare Code

(Note: It is best to read The Introduction and Parts One and Two first)

CAKES AND ALE…

Lionel Brough as Sir Toby in Tree's 1901 Production of 'Twelfth Night'.

Twelfth Night , in a version similar to the one that has come down to us, was first performed before Queen Elizabeth, and her guest, Don Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano, at The Royal Palace of  Whitehall, on 6th January, 1601.

On 10th May that year, the Privy Council reported that:

Certain players at the Curtain in Moorfields do represent in their interlude the persons of some gentlemen of good desert and quality that are yet alive, under obscure manner but yet in such sort that all the hearers may take notice both of the matter and the persons that are meant thereby.  All are to be examined….

If the Privy Council had ‘examined’  (i.e tortured) The Lord Chamberlain’s Men to find out whom they were satirising in Twelfth Night, what would they have said?

What ‘matter and person’ did hey have in mind with, say….

Sir Toby Belch…

Richard James Lane as Sir Toby Belch

 Sir Toby, as Brothers and Sister of The Code will well know, is the Countess Olivia’s drunken, raucous, but very loving uncle.

Like Feste, he thinks it’s wrong for Olivia to persist in her mourning for her brother. He believes life is to be celebrated – and does so every night of the week.

And sometimes during the day as well.

This drives his young niece, the Countess Olivia, to distraction….

His main enemy, though, is the Puritan steward, Malvolio…

Beerbohm Tree as Malvolio

….who hates all fun and laughter, wants complete control of the household and lusts after Belch’s niece,  Olivia.

Matters come to a head with a drunken sing-song in the middle of the night with Toby, Feste and  the ‘foolish knight’ Sir Andrew Aguecheek.  

Watch out, lads! Malvolio's on his way....

Malvolio arrives with the message from Countess Olivia that, unless Sir Toby mends his ways he must leave the household…

Sir Toby’s instinct is to challenge Malvolio to a duel (or rather to get Sir Andrew to challenge him). But Olivia’s witty waiting-gentlewoman, Maria, convinces Sir Toby to play a joke on him instead…

William Evans Burton and his wife as Sir Toby and Maria

He is prepared to risk his position in Olivia’s household to expose the truth about Malvolio and  does not hesitate to draw his sword on Sebastian, a much younger man.

But, most important, he so relishes the genius of Maria that during the course of the play he falls deeply in love with her and finally marries her…

●

If The Shakespeare Code is right and we take Countess  Olivia to represent Queen Elizabeth, then…

IT TAKES NO ‘SHERLOCK HOLMES’ TO DE-CODE SIR TOBY BELCH…

Queen Elizabeth’s only remaining family were the Careys – descended from her mother Anne Boleyn’s sister, Mary, now famously known as:

 the Other Boleyn Girl.

But rumour had it that Mary’s son, Henry Carey, was the bastard son of Queen Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII. This would explain a lot…

Henry also supported his own company of players, ‘Lord Hundson’s Men’. Later, when he was appointed Lord Chamberlain, these actors became known as the ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’, one of whom was Shakespeare…

Thomas Nashe wrote that the actors felt ‘settled’ under Henry’s patronage. He gave them freedom to be critical of the government and even allowed them to stage Richard II – a play he knew the Queen would interpret as an attack on herself.

He even went to so far as to write…

I was never one of Richard II’s  men…’

… meaning, of course, Elizabeth.

For, though he was ‘family’ he wasn’t close to her. He was a ‘sword and buckler man’, a plain-speaking, no-nonsense soldier who earned the affection of his troops and who took more pleasure in hanging ‘Scotch thieves’ than he did in hunting or hawking.

However, during the Rebellion of the Roman Catholic Northern Lords, he was prepared to risk his life to protect his kinswoman, the Queen.

The great Regency historian, Lucy Aikin, records how, even on his death-bed, Henry was prepared to tell Elizabeth where to get off. Hearing of his illness, she…

finally resolved to grant him the title of Earl of Wiltshire[and making] him a gracious visit, caused the patent and robes of an Earl to be brought and laid upon his bed; but the old man, preserving to the last the blunt honesty of his character, declared, that if her majesty had accounted him unworthy of that honour while living he accounted himself unworthy of it now he was dying, and with this refusal he expired…

But the FIRST Lord Hunsdon was not the direct model for Sir Toby. It was his son, the SECOND Lord Hunsdon, Sir George Carey, a true chip off the old block…

Sir George, like his father, was a gallant soldier who had been knighted, by the Earl of Sussex, on the field of battle.

In 1583 he was given the stewardship of Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, a few miles from Titchfield. 

It was here that Sir George began to morph into  Sir Toby…

 He quarrelled so badly with a local gentleman that it reached the ears of the Privy Council and, as Sir John Oglander noted:

any attorney coming to settle in the island was, by his [Sir George’s]command with a pound of candles hanging at his breech lighted, with bells about his legs, hunted out of the island…

Sir George entertained sumptuously with, as Oglander again noted:

 the best hospitality at the castle as ever was or will be.

He protected and supported Thomas Nashe when he was in trouble with the Privy Council and (as The Shakespeare Code has discovered) even sent some of his ‘precious’ Paracelsean medicine to a simple husbandmen in Titchfield who was ill. (See ‘The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis’).

In 1593 a ‘storm of discord’  broke out between Sir George and Sir Robert Cecil – one of the most powerful of Elizabeth’s courtiers and an ally of Sir Walter Raleigh.

In 1596, when his father died, Sir George became the second Lord Hunsdon, but did not immediately become the Lord Chamberlain. This position fell to William Brooke, 10th Lord Cobham.

This was disaster for the first Lord Hunsdon’s actors. Through Shakespeare they were closely associated with the Earl of Southampton and through him with the Earl of Essex.

Essex and the Brooke family were mortal enemies!

Essex called William Brooke’s son, Henry, The Sycophant because he despised the way he crept around Queen Elizabeth.

William Brooke, 10th Lord Cobham, with his family.

Sir George leapt to the defence of the endangered actors. He revived the title ‘Lord Hunsdon’s Men’  and supported them in a tour of Kent. But ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’ were still appearing at the Court, heavily overseen by Brooke…

So what did Shakespeare do?

With the full support of Sir George, he wrote the Falstaff plays!

As Brothers and Sisters of The Code will know, the fat knight was first named ‘Sir John Oldcastle’,

This was one of Brooke’s most honoured ancestors. He had been a Lollard – a heretic in the days of King Henry V but now, in Protestant Elizabeth’s reign, a hero and martyr. Shakespeare had turned him into a liar, coward and thief…

The furious Brooke family immediately demanded that the character be re-named – and commisioned their own hagiographic Oldcastle play.

In March, 1597, William Brooke died. The position of Lord Chamberlain passed back to theCarey family…

So  Sir George was now in control of Court entertainment.

He immediately commissioned his men to write and perform The Merry Wives of Windsor….

The first performance, like Twelfth Night, was given, (amidst much feasting) at Sir George’s expense, in the Royal Palace in Whitehall to celebrate his investiture as a Knight of the Garter.

Shakespeare still wouldn’t let go. He took the opportunity to satirise a living Cobham instead of a dead one!

In the play, Ford, in disguise, describes how:

I have long loved her and, I protest to you, bestowed much on her; followed her with a doting observance; engrossed opportunities to meet her; fee’d everyslight occasion that could but niggardly give me sight of her; not only bought many presents to give her, but have given largely to many to know what she would be given: briefly, I have pursued her as love hath pursued me; which hath been on the wing of all occasions…

This sycophantic behaviour would have reminded everyone in the  audience of The Sycophant himself, Henry Brooke, who would lavishly entertain the Queen at his Blackfriars’ House.

But for anyone in the audience who was a bit slow on the uptake, Ford calls himself ‘Brook’.

(Again, Shakespeare was asked to change the name….)

The play not only pleased Sir George, it pleased ‘cousin’ Elizabeth as well.  According to Nicholas Rowe, The Queen had wanted to see the fat knight fall in love….

But two years later, Sir George (like Sir Toby and his niece Olivia) was to have a major bust up with the Queen…

Lord Semple of Beltreis,the Scottish Ambassador in London, wrote to to James VI of Scotland:

 At her Majesty’s  [Elizabeth’s] returning from Hampton Court, the day being passing foul, she would (as her custom is) go on horseback, although she is scarce able to sit upright, and my Lord Hunsdon [Sir George Carey] said, ‘It was not meet for one of her Majesty’s years to ride in such a storm.’ She answered, in great anger, ‘My years! Maids, to your horses quickly’; and so she rode all the way, not vouchsafing any gracious countenance to him for two days.

Lord Semple is too discreet to mention how much the second Lord Hunsdon had to drink that day…

The same year, though, Sir George leapt to the protection of Elizabeth. He warned the Privy Council that the Earl of Essex, with an army in Ireland, was a threat to the Queen’s safety. Sir George was right: Essex was having secret talks with the rebel  Tyrone who was tempting him to sieze the English Crown…

So, two years later, when Sir George asked his company  to prepare another  production for the Royal Palace at Whitehall he had no intention of provoking another quarrel with Elizabeth.

He requested that the entertainment  be…

 of a subject that may be most pleasing to her Majesty

What he’s really saying is:

Flatter the old boot…

He needed to appease Elizabeth as much as Shakespeare and Nashe did.

By 1601, Sir George’s life of excess was taking its toll. Sir George had often taken the waters at Bath, where he had entertained the Queen, but now his sister was secretly buying him mercury cures for his venereal disease…

If the King of Scotland knew all about Sir George’s quarrel with the Queen, we can be sure the coterie, first night audience to Twelfth Night would have known about it as well. They would also have been primed by a scurrilous ditty going round the court  about  Sir George’s  palsey, fornication, syphilis, mercury posioning,  hair loss and stupidity…

Chamberlain, chamberlain,

He’s of her grace’s kin [Queen Elizabeth’s]

Fool hath he ever been

With his Joan silverpin (prostitute)

She makes his cockscombe thin

And quake in every limb

Quicksilver is in his head

But his wit’s dull as lead..

In Twelfth Night,  Sir Toby gets into all the same drunken scrapes and anarchic practical jokes that Sir George got into – and both men hate pompous authority. When, after getting into a fight with her lover ‘Caesario’ (a real boy this time!) the Countess Olivia finally screams at Belch:

……Ungracious wretch

Fit for the mountains and the barb’rous caves

Where manner ne’er were preach’d! Out of my sight!

The audience would have been reminded of Elizabeth’s huge row with her cousin Sir George.

They might even have been reminded of the ‘barb’rous caves’ of the Isle of Wight…

The Countess Olivia forgives Sir Toby because he is ‘family‘

Also,  because he has a big heart…

Throughout the play, Sir Toby, for all his faults,  is redeemed by his love for his ‘metal of India’,  his ‘excellent devil of wit’, Maria, whom he finally marries.

Sir George was lucky enough to have his own ‘witty piece of Eve’s flesh’, his wife Elizabeth nee Spencer of Althorp  (the same family as the late Princess Diana). 

Elizabeth was a great patron of the arts, translated Petrach, and appears to have been an author in her own right. Edmund Spenser writes coded praise of her as Phyllis in Colin Clout comes Home:

Phyllis the flower of rare perfection

Fair spreading forth her leaves [her compositions] with fresh delight

That with their beauty’s amorous reflexion

Bereave of sense each rash beholder’s sight..

She seems to have loved the old reprobate, Sir George, and he seems to have worshipped her as much as Sir Toby ever did Maria…

When, a couple of years after Twelfth Night, Sir George finally died, he had described his wife in his will as..

‘the sweetest companion that ever man hath found in this life….’

Zeffie Tilbury in Tree's 1901 Production of 'Twelfth Night'.

(It’s best to read Part Four now.)

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The Swan Theatre in Paris Gardens

In 1596 a Dutch tourist, Johannes de Witt, travelled to London and wrote a Latin account, now lost, of his journey. 

One of the things de Witt saw was the splendid new Swan Theatre in the Paris Gardens. He made his own sketch of it, and, though the original (like the book) was lost, Arendt van Buchell had made a copy of it.

 It depicts the best theatre in London, one that held 3,000 spectators and boasted columns so beautifully painted one would swear they were made of marble, just like the Theatre at Rome…

De Witt also drew a scene from one of the productions.  It is clearly the moment in Twelfth Night when Malvolio shows off his cross-gartering to the Countess Olivia and her waiting-woman, Maria….

Swan Theatre

Except it cannot be Twelfth Night.

Shakespeare hadn’t written it in 1596.

Or had he…?

The Shakespeare Code believes it has solved this puzzle. 

The Twelfth Night that has come down to us from the 1623 First Folio is not the original version played by William Shakespeare’s company.

The original was the play at the Swan which de Witt sketched.

It was called What You Will – the sub-title to Twelfth Night. The only sub-title in the whole of Shakespeare…

How the play ended up at the Paris Gardens is a story in itself….

●

What You Will started life as an Italian play called Gl’Ingannati (The Deceived Ones) written and presented in Siena in 1531 by the Academy of the Intronati.

In 1543, one C. Estienne translated the work into French as Le Sacrifice.

In 1546/7, The Fellows and Scholars of Queen’s College, Cambridge translated the play into Latin and performed it at the College as Laelia Modenas. (Laelia is the original name of Viola).

On 1st March, 1595, two Fellows of Queens’ (George Meriton and George Mountaine) produced a new version of the play, probably in English, for the visit to the College of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex . He stayed at the President’s Lodge, one of the most beautiful buildings in the world…

Essex stayed here in 1595

Laelia was performed  ‘after dinner’ [i.e. our ‘lunch’] ‘the day being turned into night..’ [i.e. a dark, wet, March, fenlands afternoon…]

John Weever, a Queens’ man (and one of Shakespeare’s first champions) wrote in his book of Epigrams that:

 ‘far-famed’ Laelia [had made Queens’] the ‘Queen of Colleges’…

John Weever, Shakespeare fan, with hand on skull...

The Shakespeare Code  believes that  Shakespeare would have seen this College production for the following reasons:

1. He was part of the Essex/Southampton entourage, acting sometimes as amanuensis and secretary to both Earls.

2. He was starting, especially through his narrative poetry, to be famous in the two Universities.

3. Just two Epigrams after his Epigram on Laelia, Weever writes a Sonnet in praise of  ‘Honey-tongued Shakespeare’ (iv.22).

4. The book of Epigrams itself was dedicated to ‘the Right Worshipful and worthy honoured gentleman, Richard Houghton of Houghton Tower’ – the same Roman Catholic Houghton family that had sheltered Papist Shakespeare in Lancashire when he was a teenager.

Weever clearly knew Shakespeare both as a writer and a man. So Shakespeare (through Weever) had his own strong links with Queens’ College.

Thomas Nashe would also have been at the performance because:

a.  He was a Cambridge man.

b. He was Shakespeare’s collaborator.

c. He would go anywhere for a free lunch.

The Shakespeare Code believes that Shakespeare and Nashe re-wrote the Laelia play, named it What You Will and took it to the new Swan Theatre in London.

The reasons for this belief are as follows:

a.  The Weever Epigram placed directly after the Sonnet in praise of Shakespeare mentions the new ‘Thames’s Swan’ [theatre] which Weever claims has eclipsed the Theatre at Rome.

b. Shakespeare’s habit (and that of his company) was to ‘utilise’ the work of university scholars.

See…

i. ‘Robert Greene’s’  Groats-worth of Wit  ‘upstart crow’ pamphlet [penned, in reality, by Thomas Nashe] which accuses Shakespeare of plagiarising the writings of University Scholars i.e. Nashe himself.

'Robert Greene' i.e. Thomas Nashe, penning his attack on Shakespeare's plagiarism in his shroud...

ii.  The Parnassus Plays, performed at St. John’s College, Cambridge Christmas/New Year, 1601/2 which have a scene showing  Burbage and Kemp plotting to employ Cambridge students as writers ‘at a low rate’.

c. Shakespeare’s  company was, at the time, playing at the Swan Theatre in the Paris Gardens.

The Code believes this because:

(i) Shakespeare’s name, in 1596, was closely and indeed criminally attached to that of  the crook  Francis  Langley, who built the Swan Theatre and owned the Paris Gradens.

1596 restraining order issued to Shakespeare and Langley to 'keep the peace'.

(ii) Thomas Lodge, in 1596, in Wit’s Miserie writes about..

the visard of the ghost which cried so miserably at the Theatre like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, Revenge..

(iii) In 1601/2, Thomas Dekker (in Satiro-Mastix ) has the character Tucca say:

My name’s ‘Hamlet,  revenge’. Thou hast been at Paris Garden, hast thou not?

The Ghost of Hamlet's father.

(iv) In 1596, Henry Carey, the first Lord Hunsdon (and Lord Chamberlain) died. William Brooke, 10th Lord Cobham became the Lord Chamberlain in his place.

The Lord Chamberlain was automatically in charge of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men of which Shakespeare was a member.  And the Lord Chamberlain was also automatically in charge of the entertainment at Court.

Brooke was the mortal enemy of the Earl of Essex – and consequently a mortal enemy of the Earl of Southampton and Shakespeare. 

Sir George Carey, the first Lord Hunsdon’s son, leapt in to protect the group, as his father had done. 

 He’d had a furious row with Sir Robert Cecil in 1593 and hated the ‘Cecil faction’ at the Court of which Brooke was a leading member.  

As ‘Lord Hunsdon’s Men’ (the name they had used before the first Lord Hunsdon, Sir George’s father, had become Lord Chamberlain) they toured Kent.

They also played a season at the Swan to assert their independence of Brooke and the Court. They even provoked Brooke’s enmity by staging the ‘Falstaff’ plays.

The fat knight was originally called Sir John Oldcastle, one of Brooke’s revered ancestors…

Sir John - Falstaff or Oldcastle?

Luckily for Shakespeare – and for British drama – Brooke died the following year (1597) and Sir George Carey, second Lord Hunsdon, became the Lord Chamberlain…

Sir George Carey, second Lord Hunsdon and bon viveur.

●

On Christmas Day, 1600, the Court learnt that Don Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano was going to visit England. He would be at the Court for the Twelfth Night celebrations on 6 Janaury, 1601.

Sir George Carey realised there was no time to produce a completely new play for the occasion, so he asked his acting company to make, from their existing repertoire…

a choice of play that shall be furnished with rich apparel, have great variety and change of music and dances, and of a subject that may be most pleasing to Her Majesty…

So, as usual, William Shakespeare and his team (i.e. Thomas Nashe) tarted up an old play….

But, in the same way that Hamlet puts a political spin on The Mousetrap, so did Shakespeare and Nashe when they turned What you Will into Twelfth Night…

(It’s best to read Part One now.)

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(It is best to read The Introduction first)

The French Connection.

The Earl of Essex was certainly not invited to the new vesion of What You Will ( Twelfth Night) played before Queen Elizabeth on Twelfth Night in 1601. Her  former lover was sick, impoverished and in disgrace…

 He had returned from leading the Irish Campaign without the Queen’s permission, and had burst into her morning chamber before she had time to put on her make-up and wig…

Essex’s many enemies at Court, especially Sir Walter Raleigh (‘The Fox’) and Sir Robert Cecil (‘The Ape’) had used this incident to poison the Queen’s mind against her favourite. She took away his ‘farm’ on sweet wines, his main source of income, and refused to see him.

Essex’s entourage was split as to what to do next.

Half favoured rebellion:

Stir up the citizens of London, march on Whitehall, kill Cecil and Raleigh and force the Queen to name King James VI of Scotland as her successor!!!

Half favoured appeaesment:

Fall on your knees, lads, and beg Elizabeth’s forgiveness…

William Shakespeare favoured appeasement. He knew his life was in danger. His play, The Life and Death of King Richard II – a coded attack on Elizabeth’s waywardness and favouritism – was being played as a piece of ‘agit-prop’ in the streets and houses of London.

If Essex, as an aristocrat, were to have his head cut off, there was a good chance Shakespeare, as a commoner, would be hanged, drawn and quartered.

With the re-hashing of What You Will (more frocks! more dancing!) came the chance for flattery…

Her Majesty’s guest, Don Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano, was ‘honoured’ by having the leading character, Orsino (sexy, handsome, powerful) named after him.

The Shakespeare Code believes that Elizabeth was also ‘honoured’ by having the character Olivia, (sexy, beautiful, powerful)  embody all of the Queen’s very best aspects…

Olivia 'unveiling'

When Viola says to Olivia…

I bring no overture of war, no taxation of homage; I hold the olive in my hand: my words are full of peace as matter…

….it is Shakespeare addressing Elizabeth herself .

When Shakespeare re-creates Olivia, he paints a portrait of her bravery, self-control, femininity, vulnerability and sense of fun.

Twenty years previously, Catherine de’ Medici had suggested a marriage between her son, the Duc d’Alencon and the much older Queen Elizabeth. The dashing Jean de Simier….

 a choice courtier, a man thoroughly versed in love-fancies, pleasant conceits and court dalliances…

….was sent to plead Alencon’s love-cause, and Elizabeth had fallen head over heels in love with him. As Edmund Bohun wrote…

The Queen danced often then, and omitted no sort of recreation, pleasant conversation, or variety of delights for his [Simier’s] satisfaction: at the same time the plenty of good dishes, pleasant wines, fragrant ointments and perfumes, dances and masques, and variety of rich attires, were all taken up, and used, to show him how much he was honoured..

Elizabeth was even rumoured to be secretly sleeping with her ‘Monkey’ in the bedroom of one of her Ladies-in-Waiting….

‘The Bear’  (Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s old lover) became so jealous of Simier he claimed the Frenchman was using magic and love-potions on the forty-five year old Queen.  He even tried to assassinate him..

When Alencon himself arrived things got even worse….or better!

One day the Queen greeted her five-foot high, pock-marked, but very sexy ‘Frog’, at the door of her own bedchamber,  dressed only in a nightgown…

A three-hour ‘private audience’ ensued.

After which she gave the Frog a ring….

In Twelfth Night, the love-sick Orsino sends his page, ‘Caesario’ (Viola dressed as a boy) t0 plead his love-cause to Olivia, just as the Monkey had pleaded for the Frog to Queen Elizabeth…

And  Olivia gives ‘Caesario’ a ring as a love token, just as Elizabeth gave one to the Frog…

But, again just like Olivia in the play, Elizabeth did not want to ‘match above her degree’.

So, like  ‘Caesario’s’ supposed ‘dead sister’ in the play, Queen Elizabeth…

never told her love,

But let concealment like a worm i’ th’ bud

Feed on her damask cheek; she pin’d in thought,

And with a green and yellow melancholy

She sat like Patience on a monumnet,

Smiling at grief….

After Alencon’s departure in 1582, the Queen expressed identical feelings in an identical way in a beautiful poem she wrote…

I grieve and do not show my discontent;

I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate;

I do, yet dare not say I ever meant;

I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate.

I am and not; I freeze and yet am burned,

Since from myself, another self I turned.

 My care is like my shadow in the Sun –

Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,

Stands, and lies by me, doth what I have done;

His too familiar care doth make me rue it.

No means I find to rid him from my breast,

Till by the end of things it be suppressed.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,

For I am soft and made of melting snow;

Or be more cruel love, and so be kind.

Let me or float or sink, be high or low;

Or let me live with some more sweet content,

Or die, and so forget what love e’er meant

When, two years later, Elizabeth learnt that Alencon had died, she dressed in black and wept openly for three weeks. Each year she commemorated the day of his death.

Twelfth Night celebrates this ‘gentle’ quality in the Queen….

As ‘Caesario’ says of Olivia (and herself):

How easy is it for the proper false

In women’s waxen forms to set their hearts!

Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we,

For such as we are made of, such we be…

This version of the play empathises completely with the pressures on Olivia. She was not born to Stewardship and has to take over the running of the household after the deaths of her dearly beloved father and brother.

Similarly, Elizabeth was not born to be Queen. She only took over the running of England after the deaths of her own dearly beloved father and brother, Kings Henry VIII and Edward VI. (And Bloody Mary, of course. But she’s the monarch nobody mentioned….)

Olivia, one of Orsino’s servants tells us…

will veiled walk

And water once a day her chamber round

With eye-offending brine…

just as Elizabeth did after the death of Alencon….

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The Shakespeare Code has discovered that the great Canadian researcher, scholar, Quaker and First World War pacifist (though he fought in the Second) Dr. Leslie Hotson, takes exactly this view of Olivia in his ground-breaking, 1954 book, The First Night of Twelfth Night.

He even quotes the same poem by Queen Elizabeth…

The Code is always delighted to acknowledge pre-emption.

Especially from a Cambridge man.

(Hotson was a Fellow of King’s College from 1954-60).

It’s best to read Part Two now.

And: Viola’s ‘Willow Cabin’ speech Decoded.

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It’s best to read The Introduction and Part One first.

SEND IN THE CLOWNS…..

Courtice Pounds as Feste in Tree’s 1901 Production of ‘Twelfth Night’.

At the beginning of Twelfth Night we learn that the jester, Feste, has been long absent from Olivia’s household. The reason for this is clear. 

Countess Olivia intends to grieve for the death of her brother for the next seven years. A household in mourning is a difficult place for a clown…

A Case of Jester Stress…

Also Olivia’s steward, the Puritan Malvolio, hates Feste and wants to get rid of him….

Olivia is furious with Feste when he does return, but gradually warms to his wit.  Feste is trying to ‘heal’ his mistress’s melancholy, persuade her to abandon her mourning and embrace the joys of life again.

●

Queen Elizabeth had a jester whom she adored, and who died (like her lover, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester)  in Armada year (1588).  His name was Richard Tarleton….

Thomas Fuller wrote of him:

When Queen Elizabeth was out of good humour, he could un-dumpish her at his pleasure. Her highest favourites would, in some cases, go to Tarleton before they would go to the Queen, and he was their usher to prepare their advantageous access unto her.  In a word, he told the Queen more of her faults than most of her chaplains, and cured her melancholy better than all of her physicians…

Sometimes Tarleton made Elizabeth laugh so much she begged him to stop…

Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had a favourite jester as well…

When, in the play, Orsino’s servant, Curio describes Feste as:

a fool that the lady Olivia’s father took much delight it…

– the whole audience would have thought of King Henry’s jester,  Will Sommers. He was the only man who could make the King smile when he was in agony from a chronic ulcer on his leg…

(Even if he did once describe the little Princess Elizabeth as a ‘bastard‘)

Will Sommers

Thomas Nashe, writer and pamphleteer, had played the part of Will Sommers in his entertainment, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, performed before the Queen in 1592 at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s summer palace at Croydon.

It is The Shakespeare Code’s belief that Nashe went on to play the part of another jester, that of Feste, in the Twelfth Night entertainment for Elizabeth in 1601.

Will Sommers and Feste have many similarities. Both are ‘stand-up’ comics whose prime purpose is to make the audience laugh: but both have a melancholy side and sing sad songs about death…

Will Sommers, to his own lute accampaniment, performs the beautiful…

 Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss

The world uncertain is

Fond are life’s lustful joys

Death proves them all but toys,

None from his darts can fly:

I am sick, I must die,

Lord have mercy on us… 

And Feste sings (to Count Orsino) the equally beautiful:

Come away, come away death,

And in sad cypress let me be laid.

Fie away, fie away breath,

I am slain by a fair cruel maid….

Ever economical, Nashe converts a sublime lyric he wrote for Sommers….

Beauty is but a flower

Which wrinkles will devour…

…into a crude joke for Feste…

As there is no true cuckold but calamity, so beauty’s a flower.

Feste even makes a coded reference to Henry VIII’s jester. When, asked by Maria what he will do if Olivia throws him out, he replies:

for turning away, let summer bear it out…

[Malvolio employs a similar ‘ jester- joke’ when he claims to have seen Feste…

put down by an ordinary [i.e.tavern] fool that has no more brain than a stone…

‘Stone’ was the name of another famous Elizabethan jester mentioned by Ben Jonson in Volpone]

But there is an even greater similarity than the one between Feste and Sommers.

It is the similarity between Feste and Nashe himself!  

Both love to invent extravagant words, phrases and names.

Gabriel Harvey, Nashe’s sworn enemy….

Ajax = a jakes…

 condemned this habit in Nashe as ‘foolerism’.

 He described it as a…

fantastical emulation…to presume to forge a misshapen rabblement of absurd and ridiculous words…

Feste is certainly guilty of ‘foolerism’ when he speaks to the ‘foolish knight’  Sir Andrew Aguecheek about…

Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Quebus…

And the Twelfth Night text is littered with Nashe’s favourite words, ‘sheep biter’ ,’whirligig’ ‘Myrmidon’ and  ‘herring’…  

…Nashe wrote a whole play in praise of the red herring!!!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The Shakespeare Code would like to thank writer, musician, actress (and Roll of Honour Inductee) Karen Gledhill….

  ….for pointing out the similarities between the dense and complex language of  Nashe’s pamphlets and the similarly dense and complex language of Feste.   Miss Gledhill has direct knowledge of Twelfth Night as she played a spirited Viola in the Northcott Theatre version of the play, set on a frozen river…

And the songs themselves, wonderful as they are, do not advance the action….