1. Theory
The Shakespeare Code will argue that between March and June of 1593, Shakespeare, Southampton and Nashe travelled to Italy to escape from the Plague in London, spy for the Earl of Essex – and enjoy themselves.
2. The Background
1592 was the beginning of Shakespeare’s love-triangle with the dark-skinned beauty Amelia Bassano and Henry Wriothesely (Harry, third Earl of Southampton). Along with Thomas Nashe, they were all ‘detained in the country’ – Titchfield – through ‘fear of infection’ from the virulent plague in London.
They put on plays and entertainments, like Love’s Labour’s Lost and Edmund Ironside: but in the boredom of the pandemic summer their greatest amusement was themselves.
Shakespeare reveals in the Sonnets how he fell in love with Amelia, Harry became jealous, Amelia seduced Harry, Harry slept with Amelia to upset Shakespeare and Shakespeare came to realise that he was more in love with Harry than he was with Amelia. In confused despair, Shakespeare left Titchfield in July 1592 to join a tour of Lord Strange’s Men.Nashe – resentful of Shakespeare’s wealth, fame and friendship with Southampton – set out to destroy his rival.
‘For all my labours turned to loss’ Nashe writes in Pierce Pennilesse, hinting at his hand in the composition of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Later he adds ‘If my destiny be such to lose my labour everywhere’ for those who missed the point first time round.
He proceeds with an oblique attack on Shakespeare as one of the ‘drudges’ with ‘no extraordinary gifts of body or mind’ who ‘filch themselves into some nobleman’s service’ and ‘labour it with cap and knee and ply it with privy whisperings’.
His chance to launch a full-frontal attack came in September. Robert Greene died, destitute, in London. Nashe could steal his name.
Pretending to find A Groatsworth of Wit among the dead man’s papers, Nashe penned ‘Greene’s’ famous attack on Shakespeare:
There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his ‘Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide’ supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute ‘Johnannes factotum’, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
‘Greene’ reveals how it was Shakespeare, a nouveau-riche, dandified, ruthless, talentless mediocrity, who bribed him with the promise of ‘pleasure’ and ‘money’ to write plays for him and ‘lodged him at the town’s end in a house of retail’ – Mr. Apis-Lapis’s notorious Posbrook Farm, with its three ‘serving-maids’ outside Titchfield. (See The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis)
‘Greene’ also suggests Amelia (codename ‘Lamilia’) seduced Harry (codename ‘Luciano’) for his money, that Shakespeare (codename ‘Roberto’) acted as pander for his ‘brother’ and demanded a cut of Amelia’s fee.
Nashe now became the Titchfield pander himself. He wrote blatant pornography to excite Harry who responded by impregnating Amelia. She was married to the ‘minstrel’ Alphonse Lanier ‘for colour’ on 10th October.
Her son was called Henry.
Shakespeare, meanwhile, had been sent a copy of A Groatsworth of Wit.
On the 8th December the publisher, fat Henry Chettle, printed a retraction. He claimed he had ‘seen’ [Shakespeare’s] ‘demeanour’ and it was ‘no less civil than he excellent in the qualities he professes’. More to the point he adds that:
divers of worship have reported ‘uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, which approves his art.
The Southamptons had pulled rank.
Though absent on tour, Shakespeare had kept up a sonnet correspondence with Harry in which he finally acknowledged his love for the young man – a love which Harry’s mother, Mary, second Countess of Southampton, finally encouraged. (See Shakespeare, Love and Religion Part One).
Nashe swore on his immortal soul that he was not the author of A Groatsworth of Wit. Shakespeare, unconvinced, took a long-term revenge.
Nashe’s observation in Pierce Pennilesse that a particular fault in man can destroy all his good qualities re-appears in the 1604 Hamlet.
Unacknowledged. By then Nashe was dead.
1593
Lord Strange’s Men, though they had nearly ‘broken’ [gone bankrupt] on tour, managed to play the Christmas season at the Court. Early in 1593 they were performing at the Rose.
In February 1593 Nashe, forgiven by the Southamptons, says in Terrors of the Night he was ‘in the country some three-score mile off from London’ in a ‘low, marish terrain’ – with mists ‘as thick as mould butter’. (Titchfield, on the River Meon, is a few miles from the Solent – at sea-level and subject to sea-fogs). Using a pun that Shakespeare was to lift for Much Ado about Nothing Nashe observes in Strange News:
For the order of my life, it is as civil as a Seville orange; I lurk in no corners, but converse in a house of credit, as well governed as a college, where there be more rare qualified men and selected good scholars than in any nobleman’s house that I know in England.
John Florio, satirised as Holofernes the pedant in Love’s Labour’s Lost, was compiling his Italian-English dictionary World of Words at Titchfield. Posted there as Burghley’s Protestant spy, Florio was Harry’s Italian tutor. Harry spoke perfect Italian so it was natural for him to want to try it out in Italy. As a Catholic, groomed from childhood by the Vatican itself, it was also natural for him to want to make a secret pilgrimage to Rome.
Shakespeare was learning Italian. He quotes from Florio’s Italian-English phrasebook, First Fruits, in Love’s Labour’s Lost (‘Venetia, chi no ti vede, non ti pretia’) and more famously in The Merchant of Venice ‘Tutto quelche luce, non é ora’ – ‘All that glisters is not gold’.
On the 1st February all the theatres in London were closed by the Plague. They were to stay ‘dark’ till Christmas.
On the 25th February Essex was made a member of the Privy Council. He now had the authority to issue passports.
Southampton was desperate to serve Essex.
Shakespeare was out of work.
Nashe would go anywhere for a meal.
It was at this moment that the three men sailed, as gentlemen-spies, to Europe…
(It’s best to read Part 1. now.)
The Shakespeare Code 