The Shakespeare Code

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

Queen Elizabeth died and everything turned round. Harry Southampton celebrated by throwing his hat over the walls of the Tower. Shakespeare wrote a Sonnet.

Harry, against all expectation, was now a free man, Queen Elizabeth, had suffered her own ‘eclipse’: but all the predictions about a Civil War had proved wrong. King James was about to usher in a time of peace and prosperity that would favour Harry who had risked his head to ensure the Succession.

There was much in it for Shakespeare as well. He was a friend of Harry and a friend of James. His verse, he asserts in Sonnet 107, will make Harry immortal and long outlast the dead tyrant, Queen Elizabeth, and her new brass tomb in Westminster Abbey:

 Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,

Can yet the lease of my true love control,

Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,

And the sad augurs mock their own presage;

Uncertainties now crown themselves assured,

And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

Now with the drops of this most balmy time

My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,

Since spite of him I’ll live in this poor rhyme,

While he insults oe’r dull and speechless tribes;

And thou in this shalt find thy monument,

When tyrant’s crests and tombs of brass are spent.

Shakespeare had returned from Scotland with King James. His acting company became Grooms of the King’s Chamber – entitled to wear scarlet livery and march in the Coronation Procession.

Shakespeare had the honour of holding the canopy over the King: but this meant nothing to him. It was an external glory, like the decorations which lined the route, destined for the scrap heap. The thing that mattered was Shakespeare’s love for Harry. Rock-like, eternal, like the Catholic Church itself, it had weathered every storm of Elizabethan politics.

England now had a King who positively encouraged homosexuality. During the Coronation Service in Westminster Abbey, to the shock of the Venetian Ambassador, a very handsome, and very ambitious, young English Earl kissed King James full on the cheek.

Shakespeare draws an affectionate portrait of King James as the Duke in Measure for Measure, who says of himself:

‘I never heard the absent Duke much detected for women. He was not inclined that way…’

The only worry for Shakespeare was the survival into the new reign of the Ape, the canny, diminutive Sir Robert Cecil. James, like the Roman Emperor Tiberius, would quit the city to pursue his love of hunting and sex. But whereas Tiberius went to Capri for his orgies, James went to Newmarket.

In Measure for Measure Shakespeare warns James, while he’s away, to keep an eye on the Ape  – a violent anti-Papist who, left alone in control, like Angelo in the play, might revive old Elizabethan sexual statutes – especially the one about ‘buggery’….

Next Shakespeare re-wrote Hamlet – an old play that had been knocking around since the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Shakespeare’s version plays on the war between the new Protestant way of thinking and the old Catholic one. Hamlet and his student friends from Wittenberg are the new, scientific men who cannot stomach Papist superstition.

However, a Ghost, straight from Purgatory, clunking round the battlements in full armour, appears before their very eyes. The students are forced to admit that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the new, Calvinist philosophy. Marcellus, a guard on watch, says of the Ghost…

It faded on the crowing of the cock.

Some say, that ever ’gainst that season comes

Wherein our saviour’s birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long:

And then (they say) no spirit can walk abroad,

The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,

Nor fairy talks, nor witch hath power to charm:

So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

Horatio, an intellectual, linguist and scholar, is forced to concede:

 So have I heard, and do in part believe it.

Despite all that Prince Hamlet has gone through, he still believes that God is minutely active in the universe – down to the fall of a sparrow. ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends’, says Hamlet, ‘rough-hew them how we will’.  This faith vanishes in Shakespeare’s next play, King Lear.

          Lear  was a re-write of a tawdry piece of Elizabethan propaganda, originally performed by the sycophantic ‘Queen’s Men’. Lear, in this version, also has three daughters: but the two evil ones are Roman Catholic and the good one, Cordella, a Protestant.

The deposed King, asleep and threatened with death, is awakened by a benevolent clap of thunder then restored triumphantly to his throne.

In Shakespeare’s version, man faces the universe alone. There are no spiritual powers – or, if there are any, they are malevolent and kill us for their sport. The good are crushed by the evil, who then turn on themselves. The King, is not restored to his throne: he dies howling in an agony of grief.

What had happened to Shakespeare?

To find out, we must decode Sonnet 126.

Betrayal.

In Sonnet 4 of the marriage sequence, commissioned by Countess Mary for the teenage Harry, Shakespeare uses the word ‘self’ in a particular way:

 For having traffic with thyself alone

Thou of thy self thy sweet self doth deceive.

What this ‘self’ means is made clearer in Sonnet 10:

Make me another  self for love of me

That beauty may still live in thine and thee.

‘Self’ is a code word for ‘son’. By fathering a son, Harry will create for himself another ‘self’.

Shakespeare introduces another code in Sonnet 11:

In one of th

As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow’st

In one of thine, from that which thou departests.

And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st

Thou may call thine, when thou from youth convertest.

Shakespeare says that, by having a son, Harry can wane and grow at the same time. As Harry grows older and weaker, his son will grow older and stronger. While Harry wanes, his son will wax.

Shakespeare then goes on to say that a son will also allow Harry a ‘defence’ against ‘time’s scythe’ – death – which Harry can ‘brave’- make mock of – by ‘breeding’.

In the much later Sonnet 126, Shakespeare describes how Harry has seized control of Time and performed the miracle of waning and growing simultaneously:

 O thou my lovely boy, who in thy power

Dost hold time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour,

Who hast by waning grown…

Harry has fathered a son!

A year after King James’s coronation, Harry’s wife, Elizabeth gave birth to baby James. She had previously borne Harry two daughters: but the birth of a boy to carry on the Southampton line was the thing that the couple had yearned for.

When James became King of England, everyone had assumed that Harry would become James’s favourite. But time and prison had taken their toll. James preferred younger, prettier, favourites. Left out in the cold, Harry started to turn homophobic.

Now he had a son, the process was complete. He wanted his son to see only his manly, soldierly qualities. Shakespeare, the player, had to go.

Shakespeare was experiencing Prince Hal’s rejection  of Falstaff:

I know thee not old man. Fall to thy prayers:

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!

I have long dreamed of such a kind of man,

So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so prophane:

But, being awake, I do despise my dream.

Make less thy body (hence) and more thy grace,

Leave gourmandising: know the grave doth gape

For thee thrice wider than for other men.

Reply not to me with a fool-borne jest.

Presume not that I am the thing I was,

For heaven doth know (so shall the world perceive)

That I have turn’d away my former self,

So will I those that kept me company.

Falstaff dies of a broken heart. Shakespeare was forced to live with his.

In Sonnet 126 Shakespeare goes on talk about ‘Thy lover’s withering while thy sweet self growest’: Shakespeare, the lover, is withering away.

But Shakespeare then turns poisonous. He claims that Dame Nature, by holding Harry back from the natural process of aging, is doing it simply to show her power over time:

 If nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,

As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back,

She keeps thee to this purpose: that her skill

May time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill.

Shakespeare warns Harry – now insultingly described as a ‘minion’ – to fear this process. Nature can delay death, but not stop it. Time will finally demand that Nature give Harry up to the grave….

Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure:

  She may detain, but not still keep her treasure!

Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,

And her quietus is to render thee…

Shakespeare has told Harry, in Sonnet after Sonnet, that his verse will make him immortal. Now he delights in telling him he must die.

Shakespeare had lost his real son, Hamlet, a decade earlier: now he wants to kill his surrogate son as well.

All this twisted grief wells up to form the harrowing, unendurable, masterpiece, King Lear. It ends with the old King cradling the body of his dead daughter in his arms.

Shakespeare’s grief hardened into revenge. Many of the Sonnets had been Shakespeare’s secret love letters to Harry, known only to ‘private friends’. Now Shakespeare published them, brazenly exposing the most intimate, embarrassing details of his affair with Harry. Harry might have been leaping into the closet, but Shakespeare was bursting out of his.

To accompany the Sonnets he wrote A Lover’s Complaint. Assuming, as he does in All’s Well that Ends Well, the persona of a young maid, Shakespeare attacks the ruthless, psychotic behaviour of Harry, who with his ‘browny locks’ and ‘wat’ry eyes’ caught ‘all passions in his craft of will’ and ‘sexes both enchanted’.

Outwardly Harry might have looked like an angel: inwardly he was the Devil himself.

In a climax of bile, the ‘maid’ names all her lover’s faults…

O, that infected moisture of his eye!

O, that false fire which in his cheek so glowed!

O, that forced thunder from his heart did fly!

O, that sad breath his spongy lungs bestowed!

O, all that borrowed motion seeming owed…

Suddenly there is a glorious change of tack. The maid finally asserts that these very faults –

Would yet again betray the fore-betrayed,

And new pervert a reconcilèd maid.

Shakespeare finally acknowledges the magnificence, the power and the ecstasy of his fifteen year affair with Harry. Despite what has happened, he would willingly go through the whole business again.

Shakespeare is on the way back to life. And it is life itself that will redeem him.

Reconciliation.

Shakespeare calls himself a ‘reconcilèd maid’. Reconciled then, as now, could mean ‘reconciled with Rome’ – a return to Roman Catholicism. The Jesuits were never far away from Shakespeare: Robert Southwell, before his martyrdom, had begged Shakespeare to write religious verses instead of Pagan ones. He even sent Shakespeare a copy of his own poetry to inspire him to do better.

This time the call back to Rome came from nearer home – his first daughter, Sussana, now in her twenties. So committed was her Catholicism she would prefer to pay the equivalent of thousands of pounds in fines rather than attend one Protestant service. Years later, the epitaph on her tombstone states that she was ‘witty above her sex’ and admits that there was ‘something of Shakespeare’ in this: but she herself, like her herbalist husband, was also ‘wise to salvation.’

King Lear holds within itself at least one stupendous, positive, relationship – that of Cordelia with her father.  She has been as stubborn as her father is, and as quick to take offence: but both have the capacity to love.

In the greatest scene in the whole of English drama, possibly of world drama, father and daughter, crushed and battered by those who cannot love, seek blessing from each other:

CORDELIA: How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?

LEAR: You do me wrong to take me out o’th’grave,

Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound

Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like molten lead.

CORDELIA: Sir, do you know me?

LEAR: You are a spirit, I know. When did you die?

Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight?

I am mightily abused. I should ev’n die with pity

To see another thus. I know not what to say:

I will not swear these are my hands: let’s see.

I feel this pin prick. Would I would assured of my condition.

CORDELIA: O look upon me, sir,

And hold your hand in benediction o’re me.

You must not kneel.

LEAR: Pray do not mock me: I am a very foolish fond old man,

Four score and upward, not an hour more, nor less:

And to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Do not laugh at me, for as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child, Cordelia.

CORDELIA:  And so I am! I am!

LEAR: Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not.

If you have poison for me, I will drink it:

I know you do not love me, for your sisters

Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.

You have some cause, they have not.

CORDELIA: No cause, no cause. Will’t please your highness walk?

LEAR: You must bear with me:

Pray you now forget, and forgive.

I am old and foolish.

Shakespeare found spiritual regeneration in his love for Sussana. From this point on his plays brim over with fathers and daughters.

Shakespeare, as we have seen, spent his summers in Stratford-upon-Avon – when London stank and all the young Lords were off a-hunting in the country. But now, free from all obligation to Harry, and soon to become a grandfather, Shakespeare began to make long term investments in Stratford. Investments of another kind were coming to a more immediate fruition in Oxford.

John Davenant, a vintner and broker, a ‘grave person’ who imported wine from Bordeaux, who spoke fluent French and was ‘an admirer and lover of plays and play-makers’ had a beautiful and witty wife, Jennet. But they couldn’t have children together.

Just before the death of Queen Elizabeth, the couple moved to Oxford to run a wine-tavern attached to New College. When Shakespeare was in the area, he would, with the full approval of John, sleep with Jennet.

The result for Shakespeare was a whole surrogate family of boys and girls. One of the boys, Robert, later to become a parson, described how Shakespeare would cover his face with a hundred kisses. Another boy, William, named after Shakespeare, his godfather, was later to become a poet and playwright as well.

Shakespeare, happier in himself, started to write ‘romantic tragedies’ – tragedies in which, the protagonists, though they die, completely fulfil themselves in their deaths. The story of Antony and Cleopatra had long been used as a stick to beat the old Queen Elizabeth for her promiscuity. Now Shakespeare uses it to praise relationships which dare to stray beyond the bounds of convention.

Antony and Cleopatra love each other so much they become each other’s destiny. For them, suicide and death simply open the doors to more rapture. Antony, believing Cleopatra has killed herself, says:

I come my Queen

Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand,

And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze:

Dido, and her Aeneas, shall want troops,

And all the haunt be ours.

          And Cleopatra herself recalls only the best, most generous side of Antony:

His legs bestrid the ocean, his rear’d arm

Crested the world: his voice was propertied

As all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends:

But when he meant to quail and shake the orb

He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,

There was no winter in’t. An autumn was

That grew the more by reaping: his delights

Where dolphin-like, they show’d their back above

The element they liv’d in: in his livery

Walked crowns and crownets: realms and islands were

As plates dropped from his pocket.

In the first of these three talks, I quoted Sonnet 146 in which Shakespeare contrasted his rich, outer appearance with his poor inner state. He resolved to starve his worldliness and feed his soul.  Did he succeed?

He certainly had a go in his Late Plays. Earier in his career he had been involved in two versions of King John – one for Protestant audiences and one for a Catholic.  Each play ends with the assertion that England would be safe as long as it was ‘true to itself’.  Catholics would think it meant one thing and Protestants another.

But Shakespeare was now working towards something quite different.

          In Richard II John of Gaunt describes England:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection, and the hand of war:

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone, set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Shakespeare could only have written this passage after the defeat of the Armada. Englishmen were beginning to acquire pride in their customs, their history and above all their language, which, before Elizabeth came to the throne, they had been ashamed of.

But there was also a growing sense in Shakespeare that England – and especially the English countryside – was inherently divine.

In The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare introduces a rustic sheep-shearing festival – ostensibly a Bohemian one, but as English as can be. Perdita, the old Shepherd’s adopted daughter, dressed as the Goddess of the Feast becomes the Goddess of the Feast as she hands wild flowers to the guests:

Now my fair’st friend

I would I had some flowers of the spring, that might

Become your time of day; and yours, and yours,

That wear upon your virgin-branches yet

Your maidenheads growing: O Proserpina,

For flowers now that (frighted) thou let’st fall

From Dis’s wagon! Daffodils

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets, (dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes

Or Cytherea’s breath); pale primroses,

That die unmarried, ere they can behold

Bright Phoebus in his strength (a malady

Most incident to maids); bold oxslips and

The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,

(The flower-de-luce being one). O these I lack

To make you garlands of; and my sweet friend,

To strew him o’er and o’er! Come take your flowers:

Methinks I play as I have seen them do

In Whitsun pastorals: sure this robe of mine

Does change my disposition.

The English countryside itself also transfigures Postumus in Cymbeline. He has been banished to Rome by the British King, but then returns as part of an invading Italian army.  He finds himself unable to wound his native land. He swaps his fancy Italianate clothes for the garb of an English peasant, prepared, if need be, to die for Britain

Let me make men know

More valour in me, than my habits show.

Gods, put the strength o’th’Leonati in me:

To shame the guise of the world, I will begin,

The fashion less without, and more within.

‘Less without and more within’ is a paraphrase of the ‘Within be fed, without be rich no more’ of Sonnet 146. Shakespeare, had come to realise, like Postumus, he was an Englishman first, and a Roman second.

Not that Shakespeare wanted to break with the Vatican: we know he ‘died a Papist’. But he was pursuing his own, English brand of Catholicism – as Henry VIII had done and, if the truth be known, his daughter Elizabeth as well.

At the end of Cymbeline the Ancient Britons decide to pay their tribute to Rome. But they pay because they want to pay – not because they have to. King James wanted ecumenical links with the Pope, but on Britain’s own terms. As King Cymbeline says at the end of the play:

Laud we the gods,

And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils

From our blest altars. Publish we this peace

To all our subjects. Set we forward: Let

A Roman and a British ensign wave

Friendly together: so through Lud’s town march

And in the Temple of great Jupiter

Our peace we ratify: seal it with feasts.

Set on there: never was a war did cease

(Ere bloody hands were washèd) with such a peace.

In these Last Plays Shakespeare works back towards the idea of a God. But he is a very remote God who only intervenes in human affairs with great reluctance. He much prefers men and women to work things out for themselves.

In The Winter’s Tale Leontes accuses his wife Hermione of adultery: and she appears to die of shock. It is his servant, the old Paulina, who supervises his sixteen year penance – far worse than any priest would ever impose:

But, O thou tyrant!

Do not repent these things, for they are heavier

Than all thy woes can stir: therefore betake thee

To nothing but despair. A thousand knees

Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,

Upon a barren mountain, and still winter

In storm perpetual could not move the gods

To look that way thou wert.

In the play a great artist sculpts a statue of Hermione so life-like that Leontes longs to kiss it. Paulina, insisting that the King ‘awake his faith’, brings the statue, like a miraculous Madonna, to life.  

But it’s not a Madonna. It’s not even a work of art. It is Leontes’s wife, Hermione, whom Paulina has hidden till the King’s repentance is complete.

The most precious thing we have, Shakespeare is saying, is not art. It is not even religion.  It is life itself.

When Prospero the magician quits the magic island in The Tempest, it represents Shakespeare’s desire to quit the stage. He yearns to give up the corroding powers of the director to enter humbly the day to day life of his boyhood town.

The move was not entirely successful: old theatre egos are hard to crack. Shakespeare’s war with his wife and his feisty second daughter, Judith rumbled into his graceless will which attempts to direct life from beyond the grave. And when nearly every councillor, man, woman and child in Stratford fought for the poor against the enclosures of the common land, Shakespeare sided with the rich.  After all, it was the rich who had created him.

Even ‘sided’ is too strong a word. He really did not take a position: but perhaps standing a little aside from life is the requisite of genius.

He knew he was lacking as man. He knew his art was greater than he would ever be. He knew he must forgive. And, much harder, knew he must be forgiven.

But in the epilogue to The Tempest Shakespeare openly admits all this. And his vulnerability, I believe, makes us love him all the more:

Now my charms are all ore thrown

And what strength I have’s mine own

Which is most faint: now ‘tis true

I must be here confined by you,

Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

Since I have my Dukedom got

And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell,

In this bare island, by your spell,

But release me from my bands

With the help of your good hands:

Gentle breath of yours, my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails

Which was to please. Now I want

Spirits to enforce: art to enchant,

And my ending is despair

Unless I be relieved by prayer

Which pierces so, that it assaults

Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon’d be,

Let your Indulgence set me free…..

(It’s best to read The Shakespeare Code next.)

Read Full Post »

(It’s best to read Part One  first)         

          When Harry came of age, his mother, Countess Mary, had to get out of Titchfield.

          Mother and son had never got on since her husband accused her of adultery. She had used the six year old Harry to send a letter to him protesting her innocence. He had sent back the letter but kept his son. Denying her all access to the child, and leaving all he possessed to his manservant, he went to his grave loathing her.

          Countess Mary soon overturned the will, but kept Harry’s hands off the money till he reached his majority. This was probably just as well: as we have seen, as soon as he could, he gave his friend and lover William Shakespeare a gift of £1,000 – half a million in today’s money.

          Harry was now the boss. Countess Mary’s exit strategy was to marry Sir Thomas Heneage of Copped Hall in Essex – and old favourite of Queen Elizabeth’s.

          There was to be a massive celebration at Copped Hall, the Queen, of course, was to be invited – and who better to write the nuptial celebration than cousin Will?

          Shakespeare had two problems. First, the Queen loathed weddings – especially weddings of her old favourites. She seemed to take them as an affront to her virginity.

          Second was the bridegroom. Heneage was a campaigning Protestant who had supervised the execution of the Papist Mary Queen of Scots.

          Countess Mary’s first husband, a fanatical Catholic, had plotted with a number of other Earls to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and the Queen of Scots on the throne of England.

 Half of Countess Mary’s wedding guests would be Catholic and half would be Protestant. Half would hate Queen Elizabeth and half would hate Queen Mary. What could Shakespeare do in these impossible circumstances?

He could have fun.

He could write A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Subversive Essex Fairies.

The play was performed over several days, between bouts of feasting, dancing and jousting. Aristocrats, then as now, loved dressing up: so Shakespeare cast and costumed Heneage as Theseus and Countess Mary as Hyppolita – taking care, of course, not to upstage the elaborate frocks of the Virgin Queen. Raised and canopied on a throne, hitting a rouged and hollow-cheeked sixty, Elizabeth loved to be compared to the chaste moon…

Heneage strode into the Great Hall with the most audacious opening to a play ever written:

Now fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

Draws on apace; four happy days bring in

Another moon: but o methinks how slow

This old moon wanes!

Having mocked the Queen’s age, Shakespeare goes on to mock Countess Mary’s parsimony:

She lingers my desires

Like to a step-dame or a dowager

Long withering out a young man’s revenue.

Shakespeare then forces Heneage to apologise to Countess Mary for his brutality to her fellow Catholics:

Hippolyta I wooed thee with my sword

And won thy love doing thee injuries;

But I will wed thee in another key,

With pomp, with triumph and with revelling.

Theseus later warns Hermia that if she refuses her father’s choice of husband, she must live a life of chastity – not unlike the supposed life-style of the Queen:

For aye to be in shady cloister mew’d

To live a barren sister all your life

Chanting faint hymns to the cold, fruitless moon.

Thrice blessèd they that master so their blood

To undergo such maiden pilgrimage.

But earthlier happy is the rose distill’d

Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,

Grows lives and dies in single blessèdness.

The pro-Queen Elizabeth faction in the audience would hear the words ‘thrice blessèd’ ‘master so their blood’ ‘maiden pilgrimage’and ‘single-blessedness’. The pro-Queen Mary faction would hear ‘barren’ ‘faint’ ‘cold’ ‘fruitless’ ‘withering’ and ‘dies’.

Later Oberon, the King of the Fairies, in the moonlit grounds of Copped Hall, addresses his attendant spirit:

 My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememb’rest

Since once I sat upon a promontory

And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back

Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath

That the rude sea grew civil at her song

And certain stars shot madly from their spheres

To hear the sea-maid’s music…

Catholics in the audience would know that the mermaid was the personal symbol of Mary Queen of Scots. They would interpret ‘the ‘dulcet and harmonious breath’ of the mermaid as Queen Mary’s ambition to unite England and Scotland.

‘The rude sea’ was the historic contention between the Scots and the English which Queen Mary intended to ‘civilise’ with her ‘song’ of national unity. The ‘certain stars’ which ‘shot madly from their spheres’ were the English Lords who rebelled against Elizabeth – including the Countess Mary’s first husband.

Protestants, however, would hear the passage differently. They would take ‘mermaid’ as the Tudor slang for ‘prostitute’ – ‘the dolphin’ that the mermaid sits on as the Dauphine, Queen Mary’s French Catholic husband.

As for the stars that shot ‘madly’ from their spheres, Catholics would interpret ‘madly’ as ‘ecstatically’ and Protestants as ‘insanely’. And both groups would be rightBut Catholicism has the last word in the play. Calvinists insisted there could be no intercourse between the living and the dead, Purgatory was a myth, and all fairies, ghosts and spirits were tricks of Satan to damn us.

As a cradle-Catholic, country boy, Shakespeare would have thought differently. All rural folk have their stories to tell and the Catholic Church in England had been clever enough to incorporate folk-lore, instinct and imagination into its liturgical practices.

Catholics in Shakespeare’s audience would have believed that the soul of Mary’s first husband was in Purgatory. It would be profoundly affected by what happened on Earth.

The toxic row between his wife and himself had to be resolved before the new marriage could go forward. And before the soul of the Earl could enter into heaven.

When Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the Fairies, fight for possession of ‘a little changeling boy’ they are re-enacting the fight between Countess Mary and her first husband for possession of little Harry.

Shakespeare shows, in the wild disturbance of nature, the cosmic repercussions such a bitter conflict can have: 

The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,

The ploughman lost his seat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ‘ere his youth attained a beard;

The fold stands empty in the drownèd field

And crows are fatted with the murrion flock

The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green

For lack of tread are undistinguishable.

The human mortals want their winter cheer:

No night is now with hymn or carol blest….

Oberon and Titania, after pain and humiliation, are finally reconciled with a stately dance in the wood. The old Southampton marriage has been symbolically closed and the new one can begin.

Officially at least, Anglican priests could no longer bless bed-chambers and houses the way the old Catholic priests had done: so Shakespeare has fairy folk do the job inste

Now until the break of day

Through the house each fairy stray.

To the best bride-bed will we

Which by us shall blessèd be.

And the issue there create ever shall be fortunate.

So shall all the couples three

Ever true in loving be…

With this field dew-consecrate,

Every fairy take his gait;

And each several chamber bless

Through this palace with sweet peace;

And ever shall in safety rest

And the owner of it blest.’

The blessing worked. The marriage between Countess Mary and Heneage, though short, was very happy. The redoubtable Mary was to get through yet another husband before she died – one half her age. But in her final will she asked to be interred ‘as near as may be to the body of my dearly loved husband, Henry, late Earl of Southampton, in the church at Titchfield.’

Shakespeare had healed an old family wound with poetry.

Courtly Intrigue.

Later in the year, Harry Southampton made his first appearance at Queen Elizabeth’s court. He was handsome and gallant with shoulder length hair – so everyone assumed he would be Elizabeth’s next favourite.

The hated Earl of Leicester, the Queen’s long term companion, had died six years before, poisoned, it was rumoured, by his second wife.  Her son, Robert Devereux, 2^nd Earl of Essex, was a dreamy, romantic boy who loved the Welsh countryside: but on step-father Leicester’s death, the Queen had seized all the family money. Essex, for the honour of his family name, had to seek his fortune at court.

Leicester’s death had created a power vacuum there – a situation the Queen was happy to exploit. She loved to surround herself with ambitious young men of high family but low means, who would fight each other, literally, for her attention. She could control them with huge sums of money tax money raised from her long-suffering subjects.

Apart from Essex, the two main contenders for the Queen’s favour were the tall, swart, driven, Devonshire man, Sir Walter Raleigh, nicknamed The Fox, and the short, unprepossessing, round-shouldered, Sir Robert Cecil, nicknamed The Ape.

No-one ever replaced Leicester in the Queen’s affection: but Essex had a good try.  Night after night, for seven long years, he had played cards – ‘or one game or other’ – with the Queen ‘till the birds sang in the morning’.

He much preferred to be away from the court, gaining glory at sea or on the field of battle. The Queen, terrified that he might be killed or, worse, that he might become more popular, made him the Master of the Horse. Her horse.

So Essex was relieved when his close friend Harry arrived at the court: the two men could share between them the exhausting demands of the Queen.

One day, however, Elizabeth publicly refused Harry’s offer of help to mount her horse: Harry fled the court, mortified. His crime? Courting one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting…

Elizabeth had excluded all attractive and powerful older women from her court: but, as a supreme test of loyalty to her favourites (and as a masochistic torment to herself) she surrounded herself with a gaggle of nubile young beauties. These she would dress in black and white so she could dazzle all the more in colour.  

Elizabeth would scream at her ladies, strike them and even break their fingers if they so much as looked at one of her admirers. But the ladies got their revenge. The Queen, fearful of time’s inroads, had banned all true looking glasses from the court. When her ladies did her make-up, they would often paint her nose bright red.

The lady who had attracted Harry’s attention was Elizabeth Vernon, an impoverished cousin of the Earl of Essex. Essex encouraged the match as he desperately needed a spy close to the Queen. Countess Mary encouraged the match as she desperately needed a grandson.

So, to encourage Harry’s tentative heterosexuality, Essex and Mary commissioned Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet for a private performance at Titchfield. As part of the therapy, Harry played Romeo and Elizabeth Vernon Juliet.

Shakespeare couldn’t resist another ‘moon’ joke. Romeo, seeing Juliet at her balcony window, exclaims:

 But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east and Juliet is the sun!

Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon

Who is already pale and sick with grief

That thou her maid are far more fair than she.

Be not her maid since she is envious,

Her vestal livery is but sick and green

And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off!

Shakespeare was ambivalent about Harry’s love affair with Elizabeth Vernon. He knew Harry needed a son to carry on the Southampton line, but he didn’t want to lose Harry, the love of his life. He dramatised this dilemma in the charged, febrile passions of Mercutio – a character that was so close to his heart, he said he had to kill him off at the start of the third act.

In the event, Harry’s stormy affair with Elizabeth Vernon did not preclude a stormy affair with Shakespeare. Or stormy affairs with a lot of other people as well, mostly lower class young men.

Shakespeare, mind you, was no angel himself. In Sonnet 110 he confesses to Harry that he has been unfaithful. It’s all part of the touring actor’s life, he protests: you meet new people and you have to go to bed with them. But these affairs, he argues, made him feel young again and made him realise just how important Harry was:

Alas ‘tis true, I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view,

Gor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,

Made old offences of affections new.

Most true it is, that I have look’d on truth

Askance and strangely: but by all above,

These blenches gave my heart an other youth,

And worse essays prov’d thee my best of love.

Now all is done, have what shall have no end.

Mine appetite I never more will grind

On newer proof to try an older friend,

A God in love, to whom I am confin’d.

Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,

Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.

Rebellion.

It wasn’t just the Catholics who were critical of Elizabeth: many Protestants were as well, especially ambitious young soldiers like Essex, who wanted to go to war with the Spanish in Europe and create an Empire in the New World.

Elizabeth would have none of it. God had put her in charge of an island and that was enough. She wanted to be a Protestant shepherdess to a Protestant flock. Warfare, unless it was used to defend her realm, was a waste of time.

Piracy of Spanish ships was, of course, an entirely different matter.

Every Catholic, though, could unite with every Protestant on one thing: fear of the future. What would happen when Queen Elizabeth, who resolutely refused to name her successor, died? Would England revert to the horrors of civil war?

A plot began to form in the minds of Essex and Southampton.  They would raise an army, eliminate the Fox and the Ape and force Queen Elizabeth to name her successor as James VI of Scotland.  The son of Mary Queen of Scots, he was Protestant, but Catholic friendly. He was bisexual, cultured, peace-loving and tolerant. He wanted, as his mother had done, to unite England and Scotland.

To steel themselves to action, the plotters needed a play. What better story was there than the overthrow of Richard II? And who better to write it than cousin Will?

Shakespeare gives us a Richard II who changes his mind, heaps gold on his favourites, robs sons of their inheritance, surrounds himself with flatterers, murders his relatives, detests success in others and loathes war with its ‘untun’d drums’ and ‘harsh-resounding trumpets’. Not unlike Queen Elizabeth.

It features a debonair rebel, Bollingbroke, who doffs his cap to oyster wenches, bends his knee to draymen, plays the crowd and plots to lead a movement to depose the King. Not unlike the Earl of Essex.

But Shakespeare was incapable of writing pure propaganda. At the end of the play, when Richard, deposed and humiliated, is imprisoned at Pomfret Castle, he receives a surprise visit from his groom.

The groom has seen Bollingbroke, at his coronation as King Henry IV, riding on King Richard’s beloved horse, Roan Barbary. He anticipates how upset the King will be when he learns of this, so seeks him out to share his grief:

Groom: Hail royal prince.

Richard: What art thou? And how com’st thou hither?

Where no man ever comes but that sad dog

That brings me food, to make misfortune live?

Groom: I was a poor groom of thy stable, King,

When thou were’t King, who travelling towards York

With much ado, at length hath gotten leave

To look upon my (sometime royal) master’s face.

Oh how it yearned my heart, when I beheld

In London streets, that coronation day,

When Bollingbrooke rode on Roan Barbary,

That horse that thou so often hast bestrid,

That horse that I so carefully have dressed.

Richard:Rode he on Barbary? Tell me gentle friend

How went he under him?

Groom:So proudly as if he had distained the ground.

Richard: So proud that Bollingbrooke was on his back?

That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand.

This hand hath made him proud with clapping him.

Would he not stumble? Would he not fall down

(Since pride must have a fall) and break the neck

Of that proud man, that did usurp his back?

Forgiveness, horse: why do I rail on thee,

Since thou, created to be awed by man,

Was’t born to bear?  I was not made a horse

And yet I bear a burden like an ass,

Spur-gall’d and tir’d by jaunting Bollingbroke.

Keeper: Fellow give place, here is no longer stay.

Richard:If thou love me ‘tis time thou wert away.

Groom: What my tongue dares not, that my heart shall say.

Forget Catholic and Protestant. Only a Christian could have written this scene and, given the horse involvement, an English Christian at that.

Shakespeare carries on the Bollingbroke story in Henry IV Parts One and Two, and creates one of his most loved characters, the fat knight, Falstaff. Sir John adores the young Prince Hal, but leads him astray in the taverns of Eastcheap. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

For Hal read Harry, for Falstaff, Shakespeare. Or at least an aspect of him. In the Sonnets Shakespeare warns Harry time and time again against liaisons with lower class men. Somehow he forgets that he is a lower class man himself.

But Shakespeare’s unconscious never forgets. In the play Shakespeare dramatises his deepest fear: Hal rejects Falstaff when he becomes King. Plump Jack withers away…

It was during the Henry IV plays that Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died – a boy of only eleven whom Shakespeare, though he spent his summers at Stratford, can hardly have known.

He had wanted a boy so much he continued sexual relations with his hated wife till she provided him with one. Then he stopped. Now it was too late for more.  

Shakespeare stifled his grief – which was to surface overwhelmingly a full decade later – and, like so many men, went clear off the rails the rails instead.

          He became Falstaff. Dressed in flashy Italianate clothes, he bedded down with crooks, lent money, cheated at dice, slept with prostitutes, smoked, swore and ran girls in the notorious Paris Gardens on the South Bank where his company were playing.

He was hauled up before the magistrates for a violent gang attack and bound over to keep the peace.

This public disgrace meant a temporary break with Harry: but no weakening of love on either side. In fact, Harry had become his surrogate son as well as his lover:

As a decrepit father takes delight

To see his active child do deeds of youth,

So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite

Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.

For whether beauty, birth, or wealth or wit,

Or any of these, or all, or more

Intitled in their parts do crowned sit,

I make my love engraftèd to this store.

Even when Elizabeth Vernon became pregnant and produced a little girl, Shakespeare remained ‘engrafted’ to Harry – and Harry ‘engrafted’ to him.

But the pregnancy meant marriage and marriage meant the fury of the Queen – not only with Southampton but with Essex as well. Both men were banished from the court. The time was coming for their plot – and the chance came in an extraordinary way. Essex was sent to Ireland to quell the rebellion.

This was not the Queen’s idea: she thought Essex far too volatile for the job. But the Fox and the Ape had persuaded her, against her legendary instincts. They wanted to give Essex enough rope to hang himself.

The plot developed: Essex would lead a victorious English army to quell the Irish then return and join with the citizens of London to overthrow Elizabeth. If King James VI would consent to lead the army, so much the better.

Cousin Will was in on the plan. He went to Scotland and staged Macbeth for King James – a play which demonstrated how fate would lead James to rule over a United Kingdom and how right it was to remove bloody minded usurpers from the throne. Like the Macbeths. Like Elizabeth Tudor.

Then Shakespeare returned to England for Henry V – a tub-thumper that Queen Elizabeth would have loathed. A Chorus mentions how all the citizens fled out of London to welcome Henry V at Blackheath  – and predicts the same thing will happen for Essex:

 But now behold

In the quick forge and working – house of Thought,

How London doth pour forth her citizens.

The mayor and all his brethren in best sort,

Like to the senators of th’antique Rome,

With the plebeians swarming at their heels,

Go forth and fetch their conqu’ring Caesar in.

As by a lower but no less loving likelihood

Were now the general of our gracious empress,

As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,

Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,

How many would the peaceful city quit

To welcome him!’

The campaign was a disaster. Harry proved a brave and resolute commander, but the Irish ran circles round poor Essex. The charismatic rebel, Tyrone, surrounded by wild, half-naked boys, all but persuaded Essex to join forces with the Irish instead.

Shakespeare realised the plot was doomed. Half the Essex entourage wanted to go ahead with it, the other half wanted appeasement with the Queen.  Shakespeare favoured appeasement. He wrote Julius Caesar to show how all rebellions fail – and how even the most honest men can be corrupted by events.

Essex rushed back, unbidden, from Ireland. He burst into the Queen’s morning chamber before Elizabeth had time to put on her wig or make-up. He was likened by his enemies to Acteon who had gazed on the naked moon-Goddess, Diana: and like Acteon, he was destined to be torn apart.

Shakespeare appealed to the Queen for clemency: he painted her as Olivia in Twelfth Night – a beautiful young girl, with a heart full of love, unexpectedly running a great household after the death of her father and brother, surrounded by adoring, love-sick suitors, like  Orlando Essex and  Aguecheek Southampton – but threatened all around by false-servant Malvolio Foxes.

Ill and half mad, Essex gathered a group of hot-heads about him, as the Queen stripped him of all honours and finance. The rebels burst onto the streets of the City, hoping to inspire the citizens of London to join them. Fatally for Shakespeare, to hype themselves up, they had first paid for a special performance of Richard II at the Globe.

The citizens of London didn’t want to know. Essex was beheaded and Southampton, sentenced to death, was clapped in the Tower. Shakespeare fled back to Scotland, loathed by the Queen and by many of her subjects.

 A few months later Elizabeth gave an audience to an old scholar, William Lambarde who recorded their conversation verbatim: Elizabeth was as repelled by Shakespeare’s private life as she was his politics:

Elizabeth:  I am Richard II know ye not that?

Lambarde:  Such a wicked imagination was determined and attempted by a most unkind gent. The most adorned creature that ever your Majesty made.

Elizabeth: He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was played 40 times in open streets and houses. Now the wit of the fox is everywhere on foot, so as hardly a faithful or virtuous man may be found. Farewell, good and honest Lambard.’

Love Birds.

Shakespeare could now get nothing from Harry, stripped of his titles and his money, disgraced and near death in the Tower: but his love grew in the profoundest way.

In the Sonnets Shakespeare often speaks of sharing one heart with Harry: now, with a physical distance between the two men, he speaks of sharing one soul.

In The Phoenix and the Turtle – Shakespeare’s great mystical poem – Harry is symbolised by the noble Phoenix and Shakespeare bythe work-a-day turtle dove: the two birds have fused in a mutual flame of love – and have moved on, together, to a place of peace.

So they lov’d, as love in twain

Had the essence but in one

Two distincts, division none;

Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;

Distance, and no space was seen

‘Twixt this turtle and his queen;

But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine

That the turtle saw his right

Flaming in the Phoenix sight;

Either was the other’s mine.

Beauty, truth and rarity,

Grace in all simplicity,

Here, enclos’d, in cinders lie.

Death is now the Phoenix nest,

And the turtle’s loyal breast

To eternity doth rest.

Truth may seem but cannot be;

Beauty brag, but ‘tis not she;

Truth and beauty buried be.

To this urn let those repair

That are either true or fair:

For these dead birds sigh a prayer.

Good times, though, were just around the corner…..

(It’s best to read Part Three now.)

Read Full Post »

A Series of Three Talks given at the Grosvenor Chapel, Mayfair, London, W.1. in 2009.

Towards the end of his comparatively short life, William Shakespeare took a look at his soul.

Then he took a look at his body.

 The contrast shocked him.  

He’d spent a fortune on his outward appearance – and on food and drink – but his soul was wasting away.

Why bother, he asks, to slap paint onto a building that’s falling apart?

Why gorge on food? It will only give the worms a feast after you’re dead.

In Sonnet 146 Shakespeare, like many of us here, resolves to go on a diet. But this diet was spiritual as well as physical:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth

Feeding those rebel powers that thee array

Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,

Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?

Why so large cost, having so short a lease,

Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?

Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,

Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?

Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss

And let that pine to aggravate thy store;

Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross

Within be fed, without be rich no more.

So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men

And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

Shakespeare could never resist a joke: ‘dyeing’ refers to cloth and hair as well as body and soul.

          Did Shakespeare succeed in his physical diet?  Judging from his bust in the Stratford-upon-Avon Church, it would appear not.

But what about his spiritual diet?

From Birth to the Armada.

Queen Elizabeth came to the throne six years before Shakespeare was born.  She succeeded her hated half-sister, Queen Mary, otherwise known as ‘Bloody Mary’. A Roman Catholic, she thought the more Protestants she could burn, the more pleased God would be.

Elizabeth moved warily at first: but it soon became clear to Vatican spies that she intended to eradicate Catholicism from the shores of England.  For ever.

Katherine Parr – Henry VIII’s sixth wife – had given Elizabeth some much needed love.  But Katherine was a secret Calvinist who profoundly influenced her step-daughter’s thinking. 

John Calvin was taking the Continent by storm with his ideas about predestination: God knows everything in advance, so whether you’re going to heaven or hell has been decided way before you were born.  And 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 Elizabeth into the Tower.  Forced to enter by way of Traitor’s Gate – the same fateful gateway her mother Anne Boleyn had passed through – Elizabeth prayed to God to save her. When, to her astonishment, she was not only freed from prison but made Queen of England, she was convinced she was one of God’s ‘Elect’.

Shakespeare’s father, John, a Catholic, had seen it all before. He had lived through King Henry’s break with Rome, King Edward’s adoption of the English Prayer Book then Bloody Mary’s re-adoption of full-blown Catholicism. Elizabeth’s new Protestantism, like Edward’s, would soon blow over. Or so he thought…

John Shakespeare was a butcher, a glover, a wool-brogger, a money-lender, a wheeler-dealer and a notorious crook: but he was also a man of faith.  He put his mark – he couldn’t write – to a last will and testament, so Roman Catholic it even appointed the Virgin Mary as its executor.  He hid the document behind the walls of his Stratford home.  Had the State found it, the State would have executed him.

Shakespeare’s mother, Mary, came from one of the oldest Catholic families in the land – the Ardens.  Her relative, Edward Arden, was hanged, drawn and quartered for keeping a Catholic priest, disguised as a gardener. But, worse, he’d had the audacity to criticise the Earl of Leicester….

Leicester, reputed to be Elizabeth’s lover, had restored Kennilworth Castle, not a dozen miles away from the Shakespeare home. He lived a life there that shocked Catholics and Protestants alike.

He was said to poison anyone who got in his way (including his young wife), use black magic to seduce women and take massive bribes which bought his influence with the Queen.  Never heard to utter a private prayer in his life, he styled himself the leader of the Puritan movement in England.

One of Leicester’s henchmen was Sir Thomas Lucy, M.P. and sadist, licensed to raid the homes of Catholics and torture them.  The young Shakespeare, an eccentric boy, full of songs and fun, who would make high, dramatic speeches when butchering animals, poached deer and hares from Lucy’s estate – an activity positively encouraged by the Vatican. Lucy, true to form, whipped and imprisoned him.

Shakespeare’s schoolteachers, all of them Catholic, sent the lad away, for his own safety, to a grand old Catholic family in Lancashire. But the State persecuted ‘Papists’ just as effectively in Lancashire as it did in Warwickshire.  At eighteen Shakespeare was forced to flee back home.

He celebrated his return by impregnating a woman ten years his senior and by composing – probably late at night in a pub – a ballad about Lucy which he hung on the gates of his estate:

A parliament member, a justice of peace,

At home a poor scarecrow, at London an ass,

If lousy is Lucy, as some volke miscall it

 Then Lucy is lousy whatever befall it.

 He thinks himself great, yet an ass in his state

We allow by his ears but with asses to mate.

If Lucy is lousy as some volke miscall it

Sing lousy Lucy whatever befall it.

Shakespeare had to get out of town. He did the honourable thing and married the pregnant Anne Hathaway: but in his plays his characters give dire warnings against sex before marriage.

London was the obvious place to go.  And the obvious place to seek sanctuary was St. Giles Church in Cripplegate.  Lucy worshipped there when he was in town – and the young Shakespeare could get the vicar to plead on his behalf.  But the vicar, an eccentric old Protestant called Robert Crowley, did more than that: he managed to tame the boy’s dark, wild talent.

Crowley, (who refused to wear a surplice – ‘the Devil’s conjuring robe’) composed songs and ballads to popularise his own radical theology. The rich must give up their wealth, women must give up their make-up and all must give up their fine clothes, food and drink and distribute the money to the poor.  Crowley said ‘It is better to die poor with a clear conscience than to have mountains of gold and a guilty conscience.’

These are exactly Shakespeare’s thoughts in the Sonnet we began with.  The voice of Crowley, often at war with the voice of the Vatican, resonates through the whole of Shakespeare’s work – but never more beautifully than in King Lear’s prayer to the dispossessed – in the middle of a heath, in the middle of a storm:

Poor, naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your lopped and window’d raggedness defend you

From seasons such as these? O I have ta’en

Too little care of this: Take physic, pomp,

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou may’st shake the superflux to them,

And show the heavens more just.

Man, by his charity, can rise above the blind cruelty of the universe.

Encouraged by Crowley to turn Biblical stories into plays, Shakespeare set off on a tour of the Midlands, using as his actors a bunch of alcoholic, bisexual, failed tradesmen. His repertoire was an unlikely mix of New Testament parables, fairy stories and lurid accounts of wives murdering their husbands.

But then the Spanish Armada came.  And the Armada changed everything.  The winds famously blew and it seemed that God was truly on the side of Protestantism, Elizabeth and England.

Actors were suddenly redundant: the English wanted ‘real’ men and tore the costumes off the actors’ backs for uniforms for the soldiers.  Vatican spies had predicted that the Catholics in England would rise up to overthrow Elizabeth: but in the event, the Catholics realised that they loved England more than Spain. Possibly even more than Rome.

But there was an old Catholicism lurking in the new Anglican Church because there was an old Catholicism lurking in the strange, divided soul of the Queen.

Elizabeth, whose beloved father, Henry, had remained a Catholic till his death, said the Mass in Latin for months after she herself had banned it.  She insisted on candles for her altars and beautiful vestments for her priests.  So, to celebrate the Armada victory, the priests dug out the old, far more splendid, Catholic robes.

How Shakespeare really fell in love…. 

Many playwrights at this time left the theatre and joined aristocratic households as tutors.  Shakespeare, pulling Catholic strings, went to Place House in Titchfield, to teach the teenage 3^rd Earl of Southampton, ell in love.known to everyone as ‘Harry Southampton.’ It was here, in Hampshire, that Shakespeare’s life changed.

The Earl’s attractive, widowed, mother, the Countess Mary Browne, commissioned Shakespeare to write seventeen sonnets to celebrate Harry’s seventeenth birthday and to encourage him, as her only son, to carry on the family line.  But there was a problem: Harry had no interest in girls.  He wore his hair down to his shoulders, loved to have his beauty praised and, from the evidence of a newly attributed painting, was up for a bit of cross-dressing.

Shakespeare had mixed in flamboyant circles in London: but he was now part of a grand, crypto-Catholic family, so knew he had to behave.  Countess Mary, whose late husband had disowned her because of her love for ‘a common person’, took a shine to the lower class Shakespeare and lavished clothes and jewels on him.  He adopted the pose of a detached, cynical wit – a sort of Tudor Noel Coward.

In Sonnet 20 Shakespeare eulogises the girlish beauty of young Harry, suggesting he has all the best attributes of a woman but none of the faults. Echoing Crowley, he praises Harry for not needing make-up and suggests that Dame Nature intended him to be a woman, but falling in love with him, turned him into a man instead:

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

Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;

A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted

With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;

An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,

Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;

A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,

Which steals men’s hearts and women’s souls amazeth;

And for a woman wert thou first created,

Till nature as she wrought thee fell-adoting,

And by addition me of thee defeated….

Shakespeare, in language not entirely appropriate for Sunday morning at the Grosvenor Chapel, completes this sonnet with the assertion that he has no physical interest in Harry.    

Harry, though, who like his mother was attracted to lower class men, had other ideas…

The following year Queen Elizabeth came to visit Hampshire – along with her entire court and army. These ‘progresses’ as they were called, allowed her to tour her isle and meet her people: but they also allowed her to spy on Catholic families.  In Norfolk her troops had found a wooden Madonna hidden in a hayloft.  Elizabeth burned it in the fireplace of the Great Hall – and imprisoned her hosts for life.

At Titchfield the Queen outraged country folk by shooting deer, at point blank range, from a stand – a custom started by her father when he grew too fat to mount a horse.

The Queen liked music to accompany the carnage and this was provided by the famous Bassano family, a group of dark-skinned Hassidic Jews from Morocco.  They had travelled to Venice and become Catholics and then travelled to England and become Protestants. Among them was the ravishing, wilful, beauty, Emilia Bassano.

Shakespeare, like many before him and many after him, fell in love with her. But she 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 was not the man to be put off by details like these: he not only wrote sonnets to seduce Emilia – he wrote a whole play as well.  Love’s Labour’s Lost is a parody of the Queen’s visit to Titchfield, originally played on the very spot she had shot deer, the park at Place House.    Shakespeare cast Emilia as the sharp-tongued, black-eyed coquette, Rosalind and himself as the world-weary, sardonic, ‘Berowne’ – a play on Countess Mary’s surname, ‘Browne’:

‘BEROWNE: Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?

ROSALIND: Did I not dance with you in Brabant once?

BEROWNE: I know you did.

ROSALIND: How needless was it then to ask the question.!

BEROWNE: You must not be so quick.

ROSALIND: ‘Tis long of you to spur me with such questions.

BEROWNE: Your wit’s too hot, it speeds too fast, ‘twill tire.

ROSALIND: Not till it leave the rider in the mire.

BEROWNE:  What time of day?

ROSALIND: The hour that fools should ask.

BEROWNE: Now fair befall your mask.

ROSALIND: Fair fall the face it covers.

BEROWNE: And send you many lovers.

ROSALIND: Amen so you be none.

BEROWNE: Nay then will I be gone.’

Rosalind’s coolness heats Berowne up:

 O! And I forsooth in love!

 I that have been love’s whip!

A very beadle to a humorous sigh: a critic,

Nay, a night-watch constable,

A domineering pedant o’er the boy…

What I love? I sue? I seek a wife?

A woman that is like a German clock,

Still a re-pairing, ever out of frame,

And never going aright, being a watch:

But being watch’d that it may still go right.

Nay, to be perjur’d, which is worst of all.

And among the three to love the worst of all,

A whitely wanton with a velvet brow

With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes,

Aye, and by heaven, one that will do the deed,

Though Argus were her Eunuch and her guard…

Berowne, giving in to his feelings, celebrates heterosexual love in a passage of exquisite beauty:

But love first learned in a lady’s eyes,

Lives not alone immured in the brain:

But with the motion of all elements

Courses as swift as thought in every power

And gives to every power a double power

Above their functions and their offices.

It adds a precious seeing to the eye:

A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind

A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound

When the suspicious head of theft is stopped.

Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible

Then are the tender horns of cockled snails.

Love’s tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste,

For valour, is not love a Hercules

Still climbing trees in the Hesperides,

Subtle as sphinx, as sweet and musical

As bright Apollo’s lute strung with his hair,

And when love speaks, the voice of all the Gods,

Make heaven drowsy with the harmony….’

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.

Emilia’s technique was to play hard to get, promising more than she delivered.  Shakespeare made the great mistake of asking Harry to plead his love-suit.  A handsome, rich young aristocrat was much more of a prize for Emilia than an ageing, balding playwright – so she swooped.

Harry wanted to hurt Shakespeare.  Overcoming his repugnance to women, he returned Emilia’s advances.  Shakespeare, desperate and confused, fled from Titchfield to go on tour.  He sent a troubled, vicious sonnet to Harry, comparing him and Emilia to two spirits, one good and one evil, fighting for his soul:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

Which, like two spirits, do suggest me still:

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.

To win me soon to hell my female evil

Tempteth my better angel from my side,

And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,

Wooing his purity with her foul pride;

And whether that my angel be turned fiend

Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;

But being both from me, both, to each, friend,

I guess one angel in another’s hell.

Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt

Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

Shakespeare’s agonised suspicion – that Harry and Emilia have been to bed together – will only be confirmed when he learns that Harry has become diseased.

Away from Titchfield, and on the road, Shakespeare was forced to examine his feelings. He had to admit that he was more upset at the loss of his ‘lovely boy’ than his ‘dark lady’ – and that, like Romeo with Juliet, he had fallen in love with Harry the first time their eyes had met.

Emilia, on this occasion, did deliver – so much so she became pregnant and was married off to a minstrel called Alphonse Lanier. But she was soon back on the scene, converted to Christianity and with a whole new set of wedding vows to break.

But Shakespeare and Harry were together. Rejecting conventional poetic imagery in the same way as he rejected conventional sexual morality, Shakespeare released his pent-up adoration in the greatest expression of love the world has ever known:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ows’t,

Nor shall death brag thou wanders’t in his shade

When in eternal lines to time thou grows’t:

So long as men can breath or eyes can see,

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

Coming Out to the Countess.

Homosexuality – though the Tudors never used the word – carried the penalty of death in Elizabeth’s reign. Henry VIII had instituted laws against ‘buggery’ which King Edward endorsed. But Bloody Mary, though intolerant of Protestants, was accepting of homosexuals. She rescinded the laws.

Elizabeth, threatened in her rôle as ‘Queen Bee’ by the numbers of men taking advantage of this change, soon had the laws back on the statute book. They were rarely invoked: but they were a background threat to her sexually ambivalent enemies.

So there was an illicit thrill in Shakespeare’s love for Harry – as there was an illicit thrill in celebrating the Old Latin Mass, always in secret and often after dark. Shakespeare’s genius was to fuse the two. In As You Like It Rosalind says of Orlando: ‘And his kissing is as full of sanctity/As the touch of holy bread’ and Romeo, calling Juliet his ‘holy shrine’, compares his lips to ‘two blushing pilgrims’.

Speaking in his own voice Shakespeare talks about his ‘dear religious love’ for Harry, comparing the treat of seeing him with Church ‘feasts’ which are all the more enjoyable because they are spread throughout the year. He even describes his love for Harry as ‘the sin of self-love’ because to love Harry is to love himself.

Shakespeare appropriates the language of the Wedding Service in Sonnet 116 in which he suggests that his relationship with Harry is superior to a heterosexual marriage. It is spiritual in nature and so avoids any earthly ‘impediments’. It is an absolute force which time cannot touch, which cannot be dissolved at death and which will survive right up to the day of ‘Doom’ – the Day of Judgement itself:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks ,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

          If this be error and upon me proved

          I never writ nor no man ever loved.

In Sonnet 121 Shakespeare draws on the language of the Bible itself to justify his sexual orientation – even to celebrate it. If people think you’re immoral you might as well be immoral. Why get all the blame and miss out on the fun?

Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,

When not to be, receives reproach of being,

And the just pleasure lost, which is so deem’ed

Not by our feeling, but by other’s seeing.

For why should others’ false adulterate eyes

Give salutation to my sportive blood?

Or on my frailities why are frailer spies,

Which in their wills count bad what I think good?

No, I am that I am, and they that level

At my abuses reckon up their own…

‘I am that I am’ is exactly the phrase God uses when he speaks to Moses in Exodus.

Was Shakespeare being blasphemous?  I believe not.  He found his love for Harry so overwhelming, so sublime, and so ultimately pure he reaches naturally for the language of religion. He often describes his love for Harry as second only to heaven.  And in Sonnet 124 he describes his love as ‘builded far from accident’ – like the Catholic Church built on the rock of St. Peter.  Shakespeare even calls on the English Catholic martyrs, ‘the fools of time’, to stand witness for his love for Harry. They have died because of their ‘goodness’.  Their faith, like Shakespeare’s love, was a ‘crime’ in Elizabeth’s England. 

But what did the Countess think of her son’s relationship with Shakespeare?  All’s Well that Ends Well gives the answer.  Helena, like Shakespeare, comes from the lower classes and falls in love with the aristocratic Bertram who, like Harry, has ‘arched brows’ a ‘hawking eye’ and ‘curls’.  Bertram’s mother in the play, also a Countess, also a Catholic and who has also fallen in love with ‘a common person’, comes to hear of Helena’s infatuation with her son – and cross-examines her:

COUNTESS:  Do you love my son?

HELENA: Your pardon noble mistress?

COUNTESS: Love you my son?

HELENA:  Do you not love him, madam?

COUNTESS: Go not about. My love hath in’t a bond,

          Whereof the world takes note. Come, come, disclose

The state of your affection, for your passions

Have to the full appeach’d.

HELENA:  Then I confess

Here on my knee, before high heaven and you,

That before you, and next unto high heaven,

I love your son….’

The Countess, recognising the worth and sincerity of Helena, gives her blessing to the match – as the Countess Mary gave hers to Shakespeare.  Mary’s own love had crossed borders of class. Why couldn’t love cross borders of gender? 

Shakespeare was set up for life. He was accepted into the Southampton household, commissions were tumbling in and Harry, on his majority, gave Shakespeare a present of £1,000 – half a million in today’s money.

But there are bad fairies at every feast. And the most important of them, as we shall find out in Part Two of this talk, was the Fairy Queen herself.

Elizabeth!

(It’s best to read Part Two now.)

 

Read Full Post »