The Shakespeare Code

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

William Shakespeare’s version of the Richard III story is so much better than that of the Queen’s Men that scholars have assumed the evolutionary principle is at work.

The Queen’s Men version came first, they claim, then Shakespeare improved on it.

But this flies in the face of the facts. We have seen that Thomas Nashe quotes a line from Shakespeare’s The True Tragedy of Richard III and describes the plot of the play in his pamphlet, Pierce Pennilesse. This was printed in 1592.

The Queen’s Men’s version of The True Tragedy of Richard III ‘as it was played by the Queen’s Majesty’s Players’ was printed in 1594.

It might be that the play was performed years before it was publisheed, BUT –

The Shakespeare Code argues that the Queen’s Men version of the play was a ‘State’ reply to Shakespeare’s satire on the life of the Earl of Leicester.

The Queen’s Men version has a character called ‘Truth’ appearing in a Prologue whose job is to present a ‘Tragedy in England’ that will ‘revive the hearts of drooping minds’. It then proceeds to remove as many parallels between the lives of Richard III and the Earl of Leicester as it possibly can.

The King Richard in the Queen’s Men version:

1. Does not kill Prince Edward in order to gain his wife. (Queen Anne does not even appear in the play).
2. Does not kill his wife, Queen Anne, to marry Elizabeth.
3. Does not use ‘black magic’ to gain power over women.
4. And does not assume an air of bogus piety.

The Queen’s Men want its audience to think of King Richard as a tyrant from the past. They do not want ‘drooping minds’ to draw parallels from the present.

We see exactly the same process of ‘Establishment gagging’ at work in the Falstaff plays. Shakespeare originally named the fat knight ‘Sir John Oldcastle’, an historical figure who was the ancestor of the Brooke family. Shakespeare’s motive was to tease the Brookes, who were the arch-enemies of the Earls of Essex and Southampton, Shakespeare’s paymasters.

It was Queen Elizabeth herself, Nicholas Rowe claimed in 1709, who forced Shakespeare to change the name.

Nicholas Rowe

The Brooke family also arranged for the Rose Theatre to present a new play called Sir John Oldcastle (written by four playwrights). This is a white-wash job on the historical Oldcastle – a ‘heretic’ who rebelled against King Henry V.  In this version Oldcastle emerges as a philanthropist and patriot.

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The Queen’s Men were faced with a problem in staging their version of Richard III. Shakespeare had the huge resources of two aristocratic families to draw on for his staging.  The Queen’s Men had 14 actors. So how do you ‘do’ the eleven ghosts who appear before the Battle of Bosworth Field? Answer: you cut them out!

The Queen’s Men may have had the approbation of the Queen and Privy Council, but the public had seen good drama from the Shakespeare team and wanted more of it. The Queen’s Men waned as Shakespeare waxed. By 1596 they were no more.

The Shakespeare Code has noted how, against their political intentions, the Queen’s Men turn King Richard into a hero at the end of the play. Shakespeare’s ending, where, typically, he sides with the underdog, has been so powerful, the Queen’s Men cannot get it out of their minds. Nor can they get out of their minds Richard’s glorious cry:

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

In the hands of the Queen’s Men, it becomes:

A horse! A horse! A fresh horse!

Thank God for Shakespeare!

And the people who supported him….

And the people who performed him….

Sir Laurence Olivier as King Richard III

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

At the end of William Shakespeare’s Richard III the ghosts of the eleven people the King has murdered appear to him in a dream. They tell him to ‘despair and die’  nine times.

Thomas Nashe, in his 1592 pamphlet, Pierce Pennilesse: his Supplication to the Divell, writes:

Why is’t damnation to despair and die

When life is my true happiness disease?

The Shakespeare Code argues that Nashe collaborated with Shakespeare at Titchfield (see: The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis).  He put phrases from the plays into his own writing to hint at his hand in Shakespeare’s work. In the opening paragraph of Pierce Pennilesse he writes: ‘for all my labours turned to loss’. 

Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Code argues, was another Titchfield entertainment on which Nashe worked with Shakespeare.

Later on in the pamphlet, Nashe defends the theatre as a good alternative to ‘gaming, following of harlots’ or ‘drinking’ and describes how, in plays:

all cosenages, all cunning drifts over-gilded with outward holiness, all stratagems of war, all the cankerworms that breed on the rust of peace, are most lively anatomised: they show the ill-success of treason, the fall of hasty climbers, the wretched end of usurpers, the misery of civil dissension, and how just God is evermore in punishing of murder…they [plays] are sour pills of reprehension, wrapped up in sweet words…

This is a blow by blow account of Shakespeare’s The True Tragedy of Richard III.

It describes how King Richard disguises his villainy by pretending to be religious –‘over-gilding’ his ‘cunning drifts’ with ‘outward holiness’.

Just like the lately deceased Earl of Leicester.

And unlike the historical King Richard III who never pretended to be holy.

Nashe continues this coded attack on Leicester with his tale of  ‘The Usurper Bear’:

The Bear, on a time, being chief Burgomaster of all the beasts under the Lion, gan think with himself how he might surfeit in pleasure, or best husband his authority to enlarge his delight and contentment. With that he began to pry and to smell through every corner of the forest for prey, to have a thousand imaginations with himself what dainty morsel he was master of, and yet had not tasted: whole herds of sheep he had devoured and was not satisfied; fat oxen, heifers, swine, calves and young kids, were his ordinary viands: he longed for horse-flesh and went presently to a meadow…

Every Elizabethan reader would know that  ‘the Bear’ was Leicester and ‘the Lion’  was Queen Elizabeth.

To protect himself, Nashe claimed he had no particular individuals in mind.  The Queen was still alive, even if Leicester wasn’t, and she had once chopped off a writer’s hand for libel. However, Nashe writes:

Now a man may not talk of a dog, but it is surmised he aims at the man who giveth the dog in his crest…

Leicester famously had a bear in his crest. So, far from denying that ‘The Bear’ is a portrait of Leicester, Nashe is, in reality, pushing his point home.

Earl of Leicester's Coat of Arms

In Nashe’s story ( which is a variant on Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ story)  the Bear, seeking total supremacy, wants to eat a ‘fat Camel…a huge beast and well shod’ who displays ‘gentleness’ and ‘prowess’ has been fed in ‘plentiful pasture’.

‘The Camel’ was Thomas Howard, 4^th Earl of Norfolk, the richest man in England….

Far from showing the required ‘homage’ to the Bear, the Camel gives him a kick on the forehead with his hind legs.

[Norfolk and Leicester exchanged blows after a tennis match in 1565]

 So the Bear enlists the help of the Ape, who abhorred the Camel ‘by nature because he [the Camel] overlooked him so Lordly, and was by so many degrees greater than he was’

‘The Ape’ is the diminutive, round-shouldered Sir Robert Cecil, whose grandfather had been a tavern-keeper….

The Ape advises the Bear to dig a pit to trap ‘the goodly’ Camel and the Bear ends up ‘gorged’ with the Camel’s ‘blood’.

[‘The pit’ is the trap Leicester set up for Norfolk. He encouraged him to marry Mary Queen of Scots, hoping it would lead, as it did, to Norfolk’s beheading.]

Next the hungry Bear spies a herd of deer ‘a-ranging’ in a grove and singles out ‘one of the fairest in the company’ with whom to ‘close up his stomach instead of cheese’.

The ‘herd of deer’ are the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting, of which the ‘fairest’ was, famously, the Queen’s cousin, Lettice Knollys….

However, the Bear cannot fool or flatter the jolly Forrester and and youthful Lord of the Lawnds [glades] in charge of the deer – unlike the Lion [Elizabeth] ‘whose eyes he could blind as he list’).

‘The jolly Forrester’ is the dashing, courageous Sir Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex and Lord Lieutenant of County Stafford, who wooed and won Lettice’s hand in marriage….

The Bear decides ‘to poison the stream’ where the Forrester is ‘wonted to drink’. So, ‘all faint and malcontent (as prophesying his near approaching mishap by his languishing)’ the Forrester ‘with a lazy wallowing pace, strayed aside from the rest of his fellowship, and betook him all carelessly to the corrupted fountain that was prepared for his funeral’.

[Leicester had Essex sent to Ireland as Earl Marshall so he could pursue his affair with his wife, Lettice. He then poisoned him at Dublin Castle. Essex was ill for a month before he died in 1576].

The Bear finally settles for a diet of honey [the tax on imported sweet wines] and gets the Fox to help him. 

The Fox’ is the cunning and ambitious Sir Walter Raleigh….

The Ape and the Ape’s father, the old Chameleon, also assist. 

[The old Chameleon’ is the adroit wind-bag and long-time survivor, Lord Burghley…

The three men try to destroy the English wine-producing business so that everyone will have to import it and pay tax. But the many eyed Lynceus learns of the plot and destroys it

”Lynceus’, the eagle-eyed Argonaut, is subtle spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham…

The Bear finally dies of pure anger, being out run-by a ‘fat hind’, [The aging Lettice again, who was pursuing an affair with a man half her age..]

Shakespeare gets close to making his own ‘bear jokes’ in Richard III itself.  The young Duke of York says to Richard:

‘You mean to bear me, not to bear with me

Uncle, my brother mocks both you and me:

Because that I am little like an ape,

He thinks that you should bear me on your shoulders’

But Shakespeare is too much of an artist to write a work that is pure propaganda. He shows Richard to be a brave and gallant commander of his men at the Battle of Bosworth, much more ‘himself’ in war than he ever was in peace. Far from flying the field like the historical Richard, Shakespeare’s Richard stands his ground. 

He even goes down with truly Don Giovanni-like defiance:

‘March on! Join bravely. Let us to it pell-mell

If not to Heaven then hand in hand to Hell’.

Strangely, the Queen’s Men’s version of the play (which is strongly pro-Elizabeth) gives the King this same courageness at the end….

(It’s best to read Part Five next.)

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

Leicester’s Commonwealth attacks the tyranny of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. It compares him to Julius Caesar and the Tarquin who raped Lucretia.  

It also attacks the naivety of Queen Elizabeth. It compares her to Philip of Macedon who was killed by his lover, Attalus.  

The book also draws parallels between Elizabeth and the former Kings of England who gave too much power to their favourites and their wives – Edward II (to Piers Gaveston) Richard II (to Robert De Vere) and Henry VI (to Queen Margaret).

But, of most importance, it also compares the Earl of Leicester to another King of England, the hunch-backed Richard III.

The Shakespeare Code argues that William Shakespeare, like everyone else in England, had read this Roman Catholic attack on Leicester (The handwriting expert, Charles Hamilton, believes Shakespeare wrote out some pages of the book in manuscript).  Shakespeare drew on material from Leicester’s Commonwealth when he wrote Richard III. 

As well as being a history lesson, the play is a savage satire on the recently deceased Earl of Leicester.

The Queen’s Men’s version of the story praises Henry VII for overcoming the tyranny of Richard III and instigating the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

Shakespeare’s version suggests, that because of her blind love for Leicester, Queen Elizabeth had unleashed her own tyranny on the land – a tyranny that must never be repeated.

Again, the Countesses of Pembroke and Southampton would have been behind the anti-Elizabeth commission. The Countess of Southampton (a committed Roman Catholic who sheltered priests in her London home) hated the memory of Leicester. It was at her own country seat, Place House in Titchfield, that Leicester had encouraged the Duke of Norfolk to marry Mary, Queen of Scots and the Catholic Northern Lords to rebel against the Queen.

The Shakespeare Code argues that the play was first performed as a pageant production in the grounds of Place House. The two opposing tents required by the action could easily be pitched in ‘the Park’  there and  (with stables and armour to hand)  battles staged to spectacular effect.

 The play’s massive cast (over 60 characters, not including ‘Guards, Halbediers, Gentlemen, Lords, Citizens, Attendants and Soldiers’) would be made up of professional actors, aristocratic lords and ladies and members of the Pembroke and Southampton entourages – many of  whom would have trained as real soldiers in preparation for the Armada ‘invasion’. 

The play’s major ‘doubling’ problem – how do you bring on eleven ghosts (including a woman and two children) in the scene just before the battle? – would, with these forces, be a problem no longer. And the play’s length – over three hours of playing – wouldn’t be a problem either.  Feasting, jousting and dancing would have broken up the performance – which might, like Elizabeth’s outdoor progress entertainments, have been given over several days. 

The town of Titchfield itself explains why the ghost of King Henry VI (not seen in the play) appears at the end and why, at the beginning, Queen Anne is following King Henry’s body and not, as in the Sir Laurence Olivier film version, her husband Prince Edward.  

‘Good’ King Henry (see painting below) was a local hero who had married at Titchfield Abbey and endowed the town with a school and a fair. He was much more important to a local Titchfield audience than his son, Prince Edward.

Indeed, The True Tragedy of Richard III might have been performed in the context of King Henry’s fair itself – as, The Shakespeare Code argues – Love’s Labour’s Lost was at Whitsun in 1592.

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The similarities between Richard III and the Earl of Leicester as presented in Leicester’s Commonwealth are so numerous it will be best to table them.

1. Both men want to be King of England.

2. Both men suffer from mind-poisoning physical disabilities. Richard has a withered arm and Leicester ‘a broken belly on both sides of his bowels whereby misery and putrefaction is threatened to him daily’.

3. Both men kill anyone who gets in the way. Richard kills Henry VI, Prince Edward, Hastings, Buckingham, the Princes in the Tower, Anne, Clarence, Rivers, Grey and Vaughan. Leicester kills the first Earl of Essex, Cardinal Chatilian, Amy Robsart, the Earl of Sheffield, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the Earl of Sussex, Lady Lennox and Salvator. Leicester also tried to kill Simier, the Dauphin’s equerry.

4. Both men kill the husbands of wives they want to marry. Richard kills Lady Anne’s husband, Edward Prince of Wales and Leicester poisons Lettice Knollys’s husband, Sir Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex.

Laurence Olivieer as Richard and Vivien Leigh as Lady Anne

5. Both men kill their own wives to marry other women. Richard kills Anne to marry Elizabeth and Leicester kills Amy Robsart to be free to marry Queen Elizabeth.

6. Both men are involved in the murder of royal children. Richard kills the Princes in the Tower and the young Leicester offers his services to Princess Mary Tudor sixteen days before his father murders the boy King Edward.

7.  Both men use black magic.  Queen Anne describes Richard as a ‘fiend’ conjured up by ‘a black magician’ and Leicester keeps conjurers like John Dee in his entourage.

8. Both men are likened to animals, Richard to ‘an elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog’ and Leicester to ‘a bear with a paunch’. (The compositor of the first printing of the play even made a ‘Freudian’ slip. He set up ‘The Bear had raste his helm’ when he should have set up ‘The Boar had raste his helm’. This mistake went unnoticed for five more editions!

9. Both men overthrow the authority of the English Archbishops and, most importantly…

10. Both men assume, in the midst of their atrocities, an air of religious piety.

King Richard says:

But then I sigh, and with a piece of scripture,

Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:

And thus I clothe my native villainy

With odd ends stol’n forth of Holy Writ.’

Leicester, who was never heard to utter a private prayer in his life, appointed himself Captain General of the Puritan movement in England.

 This last point, The Shakespeare Code believes, proves that Shakespeare’s Richard III was an attack on Leicester. The historical King Richard III never pretended to be a holy man. That was Leicester’s ploy alone – which Shakespeare, in his play, lampoons.

(It’s best to read Part Four now.)

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(It is best to read Part One first.)

Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester , was the love of Queen Elizabeth’s life. He had protected (and financed) her during the reign of her step-sister, Bloody Mary Tudor, when few thought she would survive, let alone become Queen of England. 

Leicester (lying, as usual) claimed to be exactly the same age as Elizabeth, so contemporaries explained their intimacy in terms of planetary alignments. Elizabeth and Robert had even been imprisoned in the Tower at the same time.

Robert Dudley

Elizabeth, abused as a child and a teenager, only trusted those who had been kind to her before she ascended the throne, so Leicester was in a unique position. He contrtolled all access to the Queen and so made a fortune from those seeking her attention.

Realising, also, that he was above the law, he poisoned any man who got in his way (including, it was said, Sir Walter Devereux, the first Earl of Essex) and slept with any woman who took his fancy. He was rumoured to pay £300 a night (£150, 000) for the favours of Elizabeth’s beautiful ladies-in-waiting. 

At one point he had a chamber next to the Queen, so many people assumed he was her lover. Some even thought he had fathered an illegitimate child with her. But what was certain was that during the Queen’s bouts of illness, which were frequent, he would sit all night by her bedside.

And he would often dance with her….

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The Roman Catholics hated Leicester for encouraging the Duke of Norfolk to marry Mary Queen of Scots, a plot designed to destroy them both. The Papists also claimed that Leicester had acted as an agent –provocateur  at  Place House in Titchfield, where the disastrous Rebellion of the Catholic Northern Earls was planned. (Mary Queen of Scots was to be sprung from prison at Tutbury and taken to Arundel Castle, twenty miles from Titchfield).

As a consequence of the failed  rebellion, the second Earl of Southampton was imprisoned in the Tower where Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl, William Shakespeare’s patron and lover, was conceived.

Shakespeare’s own family also suffered under Leicester (whose fabulously decadent Kenilworth Castle was only a dozen miles away from Stratford-upon-Avon). Leicester’s agent, Sir Thomas Lucy, had raided the home of Edward Arden, a devout Catholic on Shakespeare’s mother’s side, who had denounced Leicester as a serial adulterer. Arden was charged with ‘treason’ and hanged, drawn and quartered. The sadistic Lucy had also whipped the young Shakespeare for poaching on his land. (Poaching was a recognised ‘revenge’ tactic on the enemies of Catholicism which the Vatican positively encouraged).

Then, in 1584, the Jesuits dropped a bombshell.

They printed vast quantities of a green-backed book in Flanders and smuggled it into England. It was called Leicester’s Commonwealth and the public leapt on it. Francis Bacon had a manuscript copy and the American handwriting expert, Charles Hamilton, believes that some of the pages are in Shakespeare’s hand.

The book claimed that Leicester had set out to destroy all the claimants to the English throne except Queen Elizabeth, whom he would then proceed to assassinate. Next he would back the Yorkist claim of his brother-in-law, Huntingdon, but only as a step towards seizing completely power for himself.

The great Regency historian Lucy Aikin writes:

The success of this book [Leicester’s Commonwealth] was prodigious; it was read universally and with the utmost avidity. All who envied Leicester’s power and grandeur, all who had smarted under his insolence, or felt the gripe of his rapacity, all who had been scandalised, or wounded in family honour, by his unbridled licentiousness, all who still cherished in their hearts the image of the unfortunate Duke of Norfolk, whom he was believed to have entangled in a deadly snare, all who knew him for the foe and suspected him for the murder of the gallant and lamented Earl of Essex – finally, all, and they were nearly the whole of the nation, who looked upon him as a base and treacherous miscreant, shielded by the affection of his sovereign and wrapped in an impenetrable cloud of hypocrisy and artifice, who aimed in the dark his impenetrable weapons against the bosom of innocence exulted in the exposure of his secret crimes, and eagerly received and propagated for truth even the grossest of the exaggerations and falsehoods with which the narrative was intermixed.’

Aikin goes on to describe how Elizabeth ordered everyone in authority to suppress the books and punish anyone who circulated them. In what became known as ‘The Whitewash Manifesto’ Elizabeth:

testified in her conscience before God, that she knew in assured certainty the books and libels against the Earl to be most malicious, false and scandalous, and such as known but an incarnate devil could dream to be true.

Elizabeth also stated that she regarded the publication of the books as an attempt to discredit her own government…

as though she should have failed in good judgement and discretion in the choice of so principal a councillor about her; or to be without taste or care of all justice or conscience, in suffering such heinous and monstrous crimes, as by the said books and libels be famously imputed, to pass unpunished, or finally, at the least, to want either good will, ability or courage , if she knew these enormities were true, to call any subject of her’s whatsoever to render sharp account of them, according to the force of her laws.  

Elizabeth’s Privy Councillors, naturally enough, supported their monarch by declaring:

to do his lordship but right, of their sincere consciences must needs affirm these strange and abominable crimes to be raised of a wicked and venomous malice against the said Earl, of whose good service, sincerity of religion, and all other faithful dealings with her majesty, they had long and true experience.

Leicester was powerful enough to survive this attack and even a disastrous military campaign in the Lowlands. Elizabeth still trusted him enough to put him in charge of the defence of England in Armada year. But when, after the victory over the Spanish, Elizabeth planned to make Leicester Lieutenant-General of England, enough was enough. He died, mysteriously, on his way to Kennilworth Castle.

The rumours were his wife Lettice had poisoned him so she could take a young lover; but he was so unpopular the entire English (and Welsh) population could have been murder suspects. Even William Camden, the contemporary historian wrote:

Nor was the public joy [at the Armada victory] anything abated by Leicester’s death (though the Queen took it much to heart).

But his death left the field wide open – and safe – for the satirists, of whom Thomas Nashe was one and William Shakespeare another….

Leicester in middle age...

 (It is best to read Part Three next.)

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Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather, Henry VII, became King of England by defeating Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Apart from that, Henry’s claim to the throne was tenuous.

Henry VII, Queen Elizabeth's grandfather.

This made Elizabeth’s own claim tenuous as well.

Princess Elizabeth, Henry VII's grand-daughter.

Many Roman Catholics also thought that Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had not been properly married to Anne Boleyn, so Elizabeth was a bastard.

The Jesuits even claimed that Anne Boleyn was Henry VIII’s own illegitimate daughter. So Elizabeth was also an incestuous bastard.

Elizabeth’s cunning spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham and her lover, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, formed a company of star actors in 1583 called the Queen’s Men. Liveried in red, and paid more than any other performers, their job was constantly tour England to shore up the position of the Queen.

To justify Henry VII’s defeat of Richard III, they turned Richard into a devil-worshipping monster. In their version of The True Tragedy of Richard III  he’s not only a serial murderer, he’s Hannibal Lector as well:

I hope with this lame hand of mine to rake out that hateful heart of Richmond, [Henry VII] and when I have it, to eat it panting hot with salt, and drink his blood luke warm though I be sure will poison me…

By defeating Richard, the play argues, Henry VII was carrying out the will of God and the whole universe:

‘The sun by day shines hotly for revenge

The moon by night eclipseth for revenge

The stars are turned to comets for revenge

The planets change their courses for revenge

The silly lambs sit bleating for revenge

The  screeking raven sits croaking for revenge

Whole heads of beasts come bellowing for revenge

And all, yea all the world I think

Cries for revenge, and nothing but revenge…’

In a preposterous act of prophesy, a character in the play even foresees the dazzling reign of Henry VII’s grand-daughter, Queen Elizabeth:

‘She is the lamp that keeps fair England light

And through her faith her country lives in peace

And she hath put proud Anti-Christ to flight

And been the means that civil wars did cease.

Then England kneel upon thy hairy knee,

And thank that God that still provides for thee…

For if her Grace’s days be brought to end

Your hope is gone, on whom did peace depend.

Did Shakespeare’s version of Richard III serve the same political

purpose as that of the Queen’s Men?

The Shakespeare Code argues emphatically ‘NO

(It’s best to read Part Two now.)

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Karen Gledhill, in her highly perceptive letter, mentions Twelfth Night at the Northcott Theatre (in which she played a striking Viola) .

Northcott Theatre, Exeter

The Shakespeare Code believes readers might be interested in how this production came about.

It came from a dream.

In 1985, following a mystical experience in 1984, Stewart Trotter kept a dream journal.  On 28 April he wrote:

Twelfth Night: winter and snow, and matter for a May morning. Fires to attract back the sun: cakes, ale and ginger hot in the mouth. The banishing of winter and the routing of the Puritan. But the final triumph of death and mortality.

On 29 April, the following day, he recorded how he could not ‘catch’ the dream of the night before (he equated ‘dreamwork’ with fishing):

The fish got away! A gleam of its tail and away!

But he then reflected further on the dream the night before:

But Twelfth Night set on a frozen river, a setting winter sun…Twelfth Night on Ice!

He followed his dream through: and on 23 October, 1985, the late B.A.Young, doyen of critics (who really could ‘paint the scene in words’) wrote in The Financial Times:

The glittering production of Twelfth Night, with which Stewart Trotter concludes his five years at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, stands on a frozen pond that occupies not only all the stage, but also the extended forestage, reaching to the front row of the stalls.

Onto the ice are slid three trucks full of scenery that, to the designs of John McMurray, and under the guide of Feste on skates, become a small fit-up stage with a loose back-drop. Strips of carpet surround it on the ice, and, farther out, braziers and lanterns glow around the banks to indicate actors waiting for their entrances.

Most of the acting takes place on the little stage, as if by an Elizabethan touring company. Now and then it overflows. The sea-coast of Illyria is on the carpet, and so are Sir Andrew’s hilarious duels with the twins. Sometimes an actor comes right downstage for a confidence, and then the dim figures from the outskirts creep forward to light him or her with their lanterns. A joke clock representing the whirligig of time – a great propeller with the sun and moon at opposite ends – is occasionally wheeled forward to indicate some specific hour. Malvolio’s dark room is just a little box-like cage with just enough room for him to lie down. It is all enchantingly picturesque.

'Rocky Sharpe' as Feste and Karen Gledhill as Viola.

This is not an occasion for great performances; it is particularly a director’s work of art. Lines are spoken with no more awareness of poetry than if they were chat between the Illyrian Sloane Rangers. This does not deprive them of poetry (and anyway, most of the play is in prose). Exceptional care is taken to ensure that the precise sense of every phrase is expressed, so that when poetry is implicit, it emerges naturally, and the jokes sound funnier and more plentiful than ever before in my experience.

Mr. Trotter throws in some jokes of his own. Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Fabian, unable to see enough of Malvolio reading his fake letter by peeping over the back-cloth, improvise instant seats on the curtain-rail, dangling puppet legs in front of them. During the interval, mulled wine is sold from the stage.

Karen Gledhill’s Viola really looks at first entrance as if she has just been dragged out of the sea and having become Cesario, she is naturally boyish and funny.

Karen Gledhiil as Viola and Terence Beasley as Orsino.

Mike Burnside is Sir Toby, well-bred and never excessively drunk, and Patrick Romer is Sir Andrew, never excessively foolish, except at fencing. Malvolio, wearing a trim courtier’s beard, is a handsome figure as Edmund Kente presents him, so all the more pitiful in his subsequent break-down.

Mike Burnside as Sir Toby with Patrick Romer as Aguecheek and Karen Gledhill as 'Caesario'.

I have a way of recommending people to make this considerable trip to Exeter to see productions at the Northcott, and I make no secret of my special admiration for Mr. Trotter’s work. I must now repeat it. This Twelfth Night is worth any journey. It still has three weeks to go, and there is not likely to be anything more colourful, comic or affecting this side of Christmas, or indeed months after.

Edmund Kente (Malvolio) Steve Bennet (Fabian) Mike Burnside (Belch) and Patrick Romer (Aguecheek)

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I first met Stewart in 1985 and was fortunate enough to be in his production of ‘Twelfth Night’ at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter.  To this day I feel that it is a privilege to have been part of this amazing production and to have worked with someone whose understanding of and instinct for Shakespeare is, in my opinion, unmatched in our profession.

Over the last 25 years I have been party to and fascinated by Stewart’s unravelling of Shakespeare through rigorous analysis of his texts and other historic documents.  Each discovery he makes is a source of excitement and seems to provide another piece of the complex puzzle of Shakespeare’s life.  My own perception of Shakespeare has changed during this time as a result of my discussions with Stewart.  My school girl’s unquestioning reverence for him has been replaced by admiration for his ability to stay alive during such dangerous times, especially as a catholic, and for his brave and sometimes outrageous political reflections in his plays.  I have learnt that his plays are highly derivative and lacking in originality, but that there are two qualities that make him unique and to be highly valued.  First his unquestionable gift of poetry, and secondly his extraordinary understanding of the human condition.  It is this second insight that makes his plays so timeless and so applicable even in today’s world.  I was delighted to see a short rendition of ‘Twelfth Night’ in an episode of the TV series ‘Skins’ (and you can’t get much more contemporary than that) the other evening, in which the love triangle on stage was playing out a similar triangle in the lives of the teenagers who were acting in it.

Stewart is relentless in his research and determination to paint a fuller picture of Shakespeare’s life and the context in which he wrote his poetry and plays.  There is no conjecture in his work – everything is supported by Shakespeare’s own texts or other documents from the period.  His conclusions may not tally with the conventional academic line on Shakespeare, (which frankly is a bit woolly and full of ‘we don’t know much about his life…..) but they are a lot more interesting – and he has shown that actually if we look hard enough we do know quite a lot about his life.  I think his version of ‘Shakespeare in Love’ would be well worth watching, should he choose to go down that route!

The Shakespeare Code thanks Karen Gledhill (who has brilliantly adaptated Shakespeare’s plays for performance, with songs, by children in schools) for her kind comments.

MISS GLEDHILL, AS WELL AS BEING A CAMBRIDGE CLASSICIST, HAS THE DISTINCTION OF HAVING PLAYED THE ROLE OF A SCIENTIST  IN THE CLASSIC ‘DR. WHO’ EPISODE WHEN THE DALEKS FIRST LEARNT TO WALK UP STAIRS!

Miss Gledhill’s name has been inscribed in The Shakespeare Code’s ROLL OF HONOUR.

On the 16th July, 2011, she was created the second Fellow of the Shakespeare Code.

IN VINCULIS INVICTUS!

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(Note: It is best to read ‘Irregular Passions’: The Countess of Pembroke   before this post)

Between bouts of drinking and debauchery at Titchfield, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene and George Peele (co-ordinated by William Shakespeare) managed to produce The true Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the death of good King Henry VI with the Whole Contention between the Two Houses, Lancaster and York .

 This was to end up as Henry VI Parts Two and Three. (Part One was written later.)

The plays are a warning of what would happen to England again if Queen Elizabeth did not nominate a successor: bloody Civil War.

They were commissioned by the Countess of Pembroke and the Countess of Southampton, both anxious to safeguard their dynastic line. (By 1590 it was thought that Queen Elizabeth, who had always suffered from ‘secret’ ill-health, would soon be dead).

In the play Queen Margaret (with her ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’  who has ‘stolen the breech from Lancaster’) orders her husband, King Henry VI, to leave the field of battle because she can conduct the war more successfully without him.

This was  a history lesson. The Countess of Pembroke saw herself as a schoolmistress and Wilton House a ‘school’…

Wilton House

It is also is a coded attack on Queen Elizabeth. She had tried to seize command of the Armada campaign from her generals, but skimping on gunpowder and ammunition, had nearly ruined it. In the play Richard, the Duke of York says:

A woman’s general, what should you fear?

Queen Margaret, in the play, dips her handkerchief in the blood of the son of Richard the Duke of York, presents it to the Duke, then places a paper crown on his head. York exclaims:

How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex

To triumph like an Amazonian trull

Upon his woes whom fortune captivates.’   

Margaret’s sadism is a coded critique of Queen Elizabeth’s sadism.

Elizabeth was rumoured to enjoy an erotic relationship with her chief inquisitor, Richard Topcliffe, who, between kissing her breasts and fondling her stomach, claimed to have given her detailed descriptions of how he tortured his victims.

In return Elizabeth gave him a pair of silk drawers.

The Duke of York also attacks Queen Margaret’s legitimacy by saying:

I would assay, proud Queen to make thee blush;

To tell thee of whence thou art, from whom derived,

’Twere shame enough to shame thee…’

This is also an attack upon Elizabeth. Many of her subjects, especially the Roman Catholics, thought Elizabeth was a bastard because her father, Henry VIII was never properly divorced from Catherine of Aragon….

Catherine of Aragon

The Jesuits, however made it worse. They put it about that Anne Boleyn was King Henry VIII’s illegitimate daughter!

This incestuous union had initiated the rule of Satan in England. All of Henry’s children would die young, or, if they survived, have no children themselves.

Shakespeare was to touch on this idea again in Pericles in which a king’s incestuous relationship with his daughter brings ruin on his country.

●

Dame Eleanor, who in The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York tries to upstage Queen Margaret, is a satire on Lettice Knollys, the Queen’s pushy, red-headed ‘cousin’, mother of the second Earl of Essex and second wife to Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester.

In the play, Queen Margaret drops her fan, Dame Eleanor goes to pick it up and the Queen strikes her – an exact re-enactment of what Elizabeth had done to Lettice.

When Queen Elizabeth found out that Lettice had married her lover, the Earl of Leicester, she banished her, in perpetuity, from the court. Lettice took her revenge by parading round London with her entire entourage, posing as the Queen. She even plotted to set up a rival court with her husband, Leicester, across the Channel in the Lowlands.

The ruthless Warwick in the play, ‘The rampant bear chained to the ragged staff’ (who even refers to himself as ‘the bear’) is Leicester himself, then safely dead. ‘The Bear and Ragged Staff’, as every member of the audience would have known, had been part of his coat of arms.

To this day The Bear and Staff  is the name of a pub in Leicester Square in London.

●

Greene soon tired of playing second fiddle to Shakespeare the ‘grammarian’ (grammar school boy) and left Titchfield for London. After a ‘banquet’ of Rhenish wine and pickled herrings with Nashe and Beeston, Greene fell sick and died, a few months later, in utter penury.

 This gave Nashe the opportunity of attacking Shakespeare under Greene’s name. He called Shakespeare an ‘upstart crow beautified with our feathers’ i.e. a plagiarist. Mis-quoting from The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York he also described Shakespeare as having ‘a tiger’s heart, wrapped in a player’s hide’.

For this attack to hit home – which it did – the original line (‘O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’) cannot have been written by Shakespeare.

From then on, Nashe continued to hint at his own hand in Shakespeare’s plays by dropping phrases from them into his own work.

The Shakespeare Code will catalogue many of these phrases.

Peele left Titchfield as well, though poverty forced him to return two years later to work on Titus Andronicus – a plot idea that Shakespeare was to bring back from Rome in 1593. (See: Shakespeare in Italy)

Nashe, however, stayed in Titchfield and was to collaborate with Shakespeare (as he had done with Christopher Marlowe and was to do with Ben Jonson) off and on till his death in 1601.

Nashe wanted to replace Shakespeare in the affection (and pay) of the Southampton family. He took every opportunity to attack Shakespeare (in code, of course) for his class, creepiness, treachery and wild, ruthless ambition.

●

The Shakespeare Code believes The True Tragedy and other early Shakespeare plays were first performed in the halls and grounds of Titchfield andWilton because:

1. With their courts, processions and armies, they would benefit from huge casts. Servants and workers on the estates could be co-opted as extras. (Indeed, in real life, they had been drafted as real soldiers for the Armada campaign).

2. They all have wonderful parts for women. Aristocratic women were directly on hand, bored with country life and eager to perform.

3. Battle scenes need to be enacted. Both estates had stables full of horses and armouries full of weapons.  Place House at Titchfield was also fortified, so wall-scaling, and the exploding of maroons, was perfectly in order. (As Kevin Fraser demonstrated brilliantly when The Titchfield Festival Theatre performed at the Abbey).

But, most important:

4. Both estates teemed with frustrated young, male aristocrats, eager to win their spurs in battle. Queen Elizabeth, hating warfare, had forbidden them to fight in Europe: so they fought, in play, in Hampshire and Wiltshire instead. They had acted, as undergraduates, at their colleges at Oxford and Cambridge: now they acted at home.

The performances of plays about ‘good King Henry VI’ would have been particularly poignant at Titchfield. The King had married Margaret at Titchfield Abbey and spent his honeymoon there.  He had endowed the town with a Corpus Christi Fair and a grammar school, where, The Shakespeare Code believes, Shakespeare worked as ‘a schoolmaster in the country’. (See:The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis. )

After the initial performances of the plays, the professional players involved would adapt the plays to try to make them ‘commercial’ (many touring companies ‘broke’ i.e. went bust) put talented boys in the women’s parts and hit the road as ‘The Earl of Pembroke’s Men’…

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Just scanning the site, and the material about Shakespeare and Italy, it may be relevant to the line you want to run that Shakespeare must have read Italian to a fairly high level. We can say this with some certainty because the prime source for ‘Othello’, Cinthio, had not been translated into English when Shakespeare wrote the play.

The Shakespeare Code would like to thank Prof. Womersley, who is also a Fellow of the British Academy, for his interest.

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Used copies of Love’s Labour’s Found – the book on which The Shakespeare Code is partly based – are being offered on the Internet at exorbitant prices ($70 dollars, in one case, PLUS p. and p.).

Love’s Labour’s Found is out of print, but please note:

1. The book is available at all copyright libraries.

2. All the relevant ideas in the book will appear, in time, in The Shakespeare Code.

3. Actual extracts from the book will also be posted.

4. Many of the ideas in The Shakespeare Code have evolved since the book was published in 2002.

So, please keep reading The Shakespeare Code – AND SAVE YOUR MONEY!

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