The Shakespeare Code

Blazing Dickens

 by

Stewart Trotter

Simon Callow’s tornado of a book……

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World…..

…..blasts for ever the heresy once taught at our Universities…..

…. that a writer’s life has nothing to do with his work.

For Dickens, his life had everything to do with his work….

His life WAS his work…

As Simon guides us expertly through Dickens’s childhood, youth and maturity…..

…..he’s played the man and knows the man….

…..the themes of the novels form before our very eyes…..

We see….

……the young Charles visiting his father in Debtors’ Prison……

……falling in love with a heartless young vixen…..

……mourning the death of an angelic young girl……

…….fighting to get a foothold on the world…..

……. and making glorious, eccentric friends…

But Simon shows it was BLIND CHANCE that Dickens transmuted these experiences into novels….

He originally wanted to be an actor….

His sympathetic observation of people – his ability to feel what they feel – could best be used, he thought, on the stage.

He even fixed an audition with the Manager of Covent Garden Theatre – only to fall ill on the day….

……an early indication of the massive power his emotions were to have over his entire being…

Dickens hated the solitary life of a writer: he wanted to be surrounded by friends.

That’s why he set up journals and newspapers and amateur theatrical companies…..

….he even knocked down the walls of his home to create his own theatre…..

…. where he staged shows of unrivalled beauty and excitement…..

…. in which, of course, he himself starred……

….. to dazzling and  sometimes chilling, effect.

Dickens expended this energy in the belief that life would give him energy in return….

Like William Wordsworth……

…….he walked for inspiration; but unlike the Lakeland poet, he sought dangerous terrains……

He even walked to the top of Vesuvius when it was erupting, delighting in the fact that his shoes and clothes were burnt…

He wanted to grasp life with both hands….

He exorcised demons with ‘mesmerism’….

He visited morgues, insane asylums, brothels and jails….

He lurked in the stinking slums of London at the dead of night….

He was a ‘doer’, not just an observer…

He despised politicians…..

…..and believed he could achieve more by working outside the system. 

With the great millionaire philanthropist, Angela Bourdett-Coutts……

……he formed a rehabilitation ‘home’ (he was the first to use the word in this context) for prostitutes.

He loathed the English class system and spent as much energy trying to stay out of the company of the great and the good as others did trying to get into it.

He longed for the democracy of America….

….that is, till he visited it….

He found there was NO freedom of speech in ‘the land of the free’…..

…..that black people were whipped…

…..that convicts were kept in solitary confinement with bags over their heads….

…..that even the President spat and……

……most unforgivable of all…..

……the people were boring.

He was to revise his opinion of America twenty-five years later……

…..but for now returned home  with the realisation that he was…..

 ….an Englishman after all….

….and  completely in favour of a….

 …..liberal monarchy.

As a father, he was a brilliant entertainer. He would dress up (and black up) as…..

.….the Unparalleled Necromancer, Rhia Rama Roos…..

 ….when….

cards burst into flames, watches found themselves in the middle of loaves of bread, dolls appeared, disapperaed and re-appeared all over the room [and] blazing plum-puddings emerged from perfectly ordinary hats…

 

Dickens celebrated Christmas and Twelfth Night (when his first son was born) with all the exuberant joy of Fezziwig in A Christmas Carol……

……laying on dancing, games, charades, punch and long country walks.

It was as  a husband he was deficient….

Simon quotes G.K. Chesterton……

….who believed that Charles had married the…..  

…..wrong [Hogarth] sister….

Catherine…

The ‘right’ sister, Mary, suffered an early, Nell-like death…..

Charles was left with a wife he called…..

 …..the donkey…

This was unkind. ….

But she did have an inordinate number of accidents……

…..(743 falls, Dickens counted, on the American tour)….

…..and even contrived to fall down the trapdoor of their home theatre.

Everything came to a head when Dickens fell in love with a seventeen year old ‘wannabe’ actress, Ellen Ternan…

Catherine was pensioned off with the not inconsiderable sum of £600 a year.

But Dickens had to keep his ‘affair’ – if it ever got to that stage – a secret from his rapturous, adoring but predominantly middle class public.

(Intellectuals despised Dickens’s work.)

Dickens’s liaison was nearly exposed when a train he was travelling in with Ellen and her mother crashed….

…..with their carriage dangling over a river….

Dickens, typically, took charge of the whole rescue operation, serving people with water from his top hat…..

…. and the bottle and a half of brandy he just happened to have with him…

But the break with his wife brought with it guilt…..

……an emotion he’d felt as a boy when he was forced to work at a blacking factory….

…..a time he never once referred to in public….

He was also beginning to suffer from ill-health: his left leg had started to swell when he walked any distance….

Life had finally let him down….

His response was to venture on a series of wildly popular, but exhausting, Reading tours….

He would bring the whole theatre of his imagination to life before an audience……

……which howled with tears and laughter….

However, Dickens made the fatal decision of including the brutal killing of Nancy in Oliver Twist….

…..which so excited him that his pulse rate rose from 72 to 174…

Soon afterwards Dickens was dead….

Simon argues that ……

Dickens was pushing himself towards extinction….

There was a massive darkness within his soul that he wrestled to control….

Spirits of the dead would come to him, as they came to Scrooge….

 

….and, like Scrooge, he battled to live a Christian life.

But his nature was to dominate others…

And not always the strong…

But, as Simon shows in this brilliant book , Dickens was acutely aware of his failings.

His character was flawed, but he knew it was flawed…..

And it could well have been this very flaw that brought him close to the public….

They embraced him as their friend and their brother.

Simon writes:

Playing Dickens, and performing his work has been like standing in front of a blazing fire. If I can convey any sense of that, I will have succeeded in my aim….

Simon, you ARE that fire…

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THIS GREAT BOOK BY CLICKING BELOW:

www.harpercollins.co.uk

To read Simon Callow’s own endorsement of Shakespeare: The Movie please click: HERE.

(It’s best to to view Shakespeare: The Movie Parts I  and II  first.)

1601-1616

Queen Elizabeth died….

 ……and everything turned round….

James, without lifting a finger, was now King of both Scotland and England….

 

Harry celebrated by throwing his hat over the walls of the Tower….

Shakespeare wrote a Sonnet…..

Then galloped back from Scotland to be re-united with his lover….

He sat with Harry in the Tower while he had his portrait painted for James…

 

…..a ‘wooing portrait’ in which, hair cascading bride-like down his shoulders, he offers the King his ‘ring’ hand…

Everyone expected he would be James’s new favourite…

After all, he had risked his life to ensure James’s succession…

James, when he arived in London, appointed Shakespeare joint-head of a theatrical company that  was to become ‘The King’s Men’…

He also appointed him a Groom of the Chamber….

……and gave him scarlet livery to wear….

At the Coronation of the King in Westminster Abbey,  Shakespeare held the ritual canopy over James…

But, compared to his love for Harry, this honour meant nothing to him…..

It was an external glory…..

……like the temporary decorations which lined the Coronation route……

……destined for the scrap heap…..

Some of these paste-board arches incorporated obelisks…..

 

……and these reminded Shakespeare of the real obelisk Harry and himself had seen in Rome in 1593….

 

For Shakespeare it now symbolised his love for Harry…..

 Strong, sacred and eternal…..

England now had a King who positively encouraged homosexuality…..

During the Coronation Service….

……to the shock of the Venetian Ambassador……

……one of the Countess of Pembroke’s sons, William….

 …..kissed King James full on the cheek….

The only worry for Shakespeare and Harry was the survival into the new reign of The Ape……

●

 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, in the figure of the Duke…..

………to keep an eye on The Ape while he’s away….

 Like Angelo in the play…….

 

………The Ape might revive some of Queen Elizabeth’s old statutes….

………especially the one outlawing  ‘buggery’….

Next Shakespeare re-wrote Kyd’s old revenge play, Hamlet….

….making the characterisations……

…..and the plot…..

…..far more complex…

…..not to say, at points, incomprehensible….

…..and endorsing one of the main tenets of  Roman Catholicism…..

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 them….

The students are forced to admit that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the new, Calvinist philosophy….

Prince Hamlet also declares that God is minutely involved in the workings of the  universe…..

…..down to the fall of a sparrow….

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will….

But things were about to happen that made Shakespeare lose his belief in God….

Indeed,  his belief in everything….

●

A year after King James’s Coronation, Harry’s wife, Countess Elizabeth……

 …….gave birth to another baby

But this time it was a boy….

The Southampton line was safe….

But Harry……

…….though he had given up his Catholicism to please the King…..

…….had not become the King’s new favourite….

Time and disease  had taken their toll…..

James preferred younger, prettier, men….

Left out in the political cold, Harry turned homophobic.

He wanted his son to know only his manly, soldierly qualities.

So Shakespeare, the actor, had to go….

Shakespeare turned poisonous….

He had delighted in telling Harry that his verse would make the young Lord immortal…

Now he delights in telling him that he will die.

Shakespeare had lost his son, Hamlet, a decade earlier….

Now he had lost his surrogate son as well….

He turned to another old Kyd play, King Leir…..

….a shameless piece of Protestant propaganda Kyd had knocked up for the sycophantic Queen’s Men….

‘Out’ goes the play’s happy ending and its caring God….

…..(so caring he sends claps of thunder to warn the sleeping King he’s about to be murdered)…

‘In’ comes a hostile universe with no God (or Gods) at all….

….who, if they do by chance exist…..

Kill us for their sport…

The King dies howling in agony,  grief and delusion….

 

….with his child, Cordelia, dead in his arms….

Shakespeare’s grief hardened into revenge…..

Many of the Sonnets had been Shakespeare’s love letters to Harry, known only to

……private friends…..

And of those Sonnets, only the ‘sugared’ ones….

Now Shakespeare published them all….

….including the obscene and bitchy ones…

…..exposing to the world the most intimate, shame-faced details of his affair with Harry…..

When Emilia attacked Harry in Willobie his Avisa she called him ‘Mr. H. W.’…..

Shakespeare now calls him ‘Mr. W. H.’…..

And makes a coded reference to Harry’s ship that was trading that year with Virginia….

The Sea-Adventure….

Harry might have been leaping into the closet, but Shakespeare was bursting out of his….

To accompany the Sonnets he wrote…..

 

Assuming 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 now 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, life-affirming reversal….

‘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.

He calls himself  a…..reconcilèd maid……….

…..because he is ‘reconciled’ to what has happened….

…..and ‘reconciled’ to Rome…

The Jesuits were always trying to recruit Shakespeare…..

One of them had even begged him to give over his….

‘Paynim [Pagan] toys’

…….i. e. his poems and plays…..

 …..to write religious verse instead….

This time the call back to Rome came from nearer home….

…..from his first daughter, Susanna, now in her twenties…..

She was still a committed Catholic….

So committed she had appeared in Court and paid a huge fine for refusing to attend Protestant services…

King Lear – bleak as it is – holds within itself a 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….

Susanna filled up the void left by Harry’s rejection….

And had taught him how to love again….

(He had long grown distant from his wife)

What’s more, Susanna was pregnant…..

Shakespeare began to make long term investments in Stratford-upon-Avon to benefit his daughter, her doctor husband and their family-to-be…

Investments of another kind were coming to fruition in Oxford…..

 ●

John Davenant, a vintner and broker who imported wine from Bordeaux, spoke fluent French and was…..……

……an admirer and lover of plays and play-makers…..

…..especially Shakespeare….

…..had a beautiful and witty wife, Jennet……

But the couple couldn’t have children.

In the year of the Essex rebellion they had moved to Oxford to run a wine-tavern attached to New College…

When Elizabeth exiled Shakespeare from London, he had made productive use of his time…

By making an alliance with King James in Scotland…

And by sleeping with Jennet at Oxford….

……with the full approval of John….

The result for Shakespeare was a whole surrogate family of boys and girls…..

One of the boys, Robert (later to become a parson) describes how Shakespeare would….

….cover [his] face with a hundred kisses….

Another, William, would rush across Oxford in excitement when he heard his ‘godfather’ was in town….

He was to become Poet Laureate……

…..but lose his nose to syphilis….

Shakespeare started to write ‘romantic tragedies’……..

…….tragedies in which, the protagonists, though they die, completely fulfil themselves in their deaths…..

The Countess of Pembroke…..

…….in an act of towering hypocrisy……

……had used the story of Antony and Cleopatra to attack Queen Elizabeth for the immorality of her private life….

Now Shakespeare uses it to praise both the Roman General, Antony…..

…..and the Egyptian Queen, Cleopatra…..

…..for committting themselves to a love relationship that flies in the face of conventional morality….

…..and which defeats death itself….

Shakespeare may have been a Catholic, but he was a very idiosyncratic one…

God for him in the Last Plays was a remote and grumpy figure……

……who would much prefer human beings to work out their destinies for themselves….

When Leontes, in The Winter’s Tale, wrongly accuses his wife, Hermione, of adultery, it is his tough, old servant Paulina….

…..who acts as his confessor, tormentor and redeemer….

Shakespeare was a also a very Pagan Catholic…..

Born a country boy, he worshipped the countryside………

In The Winter’s Tale he introduces a rustic sheep-shearing festival….

Perdita, the old Shepherd’s adopted daughter, dressed as the Goddess of the Feast…..

 ……becomes a Goddess as she hands wild flowers to the guests…..

The English countryside itself also transfigures Posthumus 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….

Like Posthumus, Shakespeare had come to realise he  was an Englishman first and a Roman Catholic second…

What mattered to him now was to be a MAN first….

…..and a WRITER second….

In The Winter’s Tale, the great artist Julio Romano……

….whose work Shakespeare had admired in Italy…..

 ……sculpts a statue of  the  ‘dead’ Hermione so life-like that her husband, Leontes, longs to kiss it…..

Paulina, insisting that the King….

 …..awake [his] faith…..

 …..brings the statue to life like a miraculous Madonna….. 

 

But it’s not a Madonna….

It’s not even a work of art….

It is Hermione herself……

The most precious thing we have is not art.

It is not even religion. 

It is life itself….

Shakespeare decided to quit the stage……

It brought out the worst in him…..

….his need to dominate, manipulate and control….

He was like Prospero upon his magic island…..

…..with total dominion over his spirits…..

….. who do his every bidding…..

…..and who are brutally punished if they don’t….

Like Prospero, Shakespeare knew that his ‘potent art’ was greater than he was….

….that he needed to forgive in his life…..

….and, more difficult, be forgiven….

In the Epilogue to The Tempest, Shakespeare bids a moving farewell to his courtly, London audience…..

And retires to Stratford-upon-Avon…..

….where every ‘third thought’ will be his ‘grave’….

●

Two years later he was back….

…….living in the Blackfriars Gatehouse…..

…….a property which he acquired….

…….(but never finished paying for)…

…….notorious for its priest holes, Catholic masses and secret passageways down to the Thames….

…….and where he started to write plays again…

Stratford-upon-Avon had been unwilling to play the role of ‘early retirement home’…

(Shakespeare, after all, was only in his late 40’s….)

Indeed, Shakespeare’s huge, draughty, rambling tavern of a house, ‘New Place’….

……bought over a decade ago at a knock-down price….

……to go along with his newly-acquired family crest…

…..was now full of quasi-relatives and their friends…..

…..in-laws, outlaws, wide-boys…

…..and ‘guests’ of the local council….

…..who all demanded beds, food and alcohol….

Susanna had just been accused of adultery by a local drunk….

And a local crook was pursuing Judith, his younger daughter’s hand in marriage…

On top of this,  ‘fellow townsmen’ kept trying to tap him for money…

Shakespeare fled back to London….

…..where he wrote more plays…….

….. (in collaboration with other playwrights)….

…. including The Famous History of  the Life of King Henry the Eighth…..

In this play Shakespeare ‘forgives’, Prospero-like, ALL the historical enemies of Catholicism…..

…..King Henry……

…..Cardinal Wolsey…….

……Anne Boleyn…..

…… and even….

QUEEN ELIZABETH HERSELF!

….who makes a guest-appearance at the end of the play as a new-born baby…

For Shakespeare, it was now the dead Queen, not Harry, who was the…..

 Bird of Wonder, the Maiden Phoenix…

There would have been more plays….

….but during a performance of Henry VIII…..

…..The Globe Theatre burnt down…..

 

The Puritans thought it was a judgement of God…..

Even Shakespeare believed that Someone was trying to tell him Something…..

So he laid down his pen…….

……. and returned to Stratford…..

…..where things had got even worse….

The Combe family, rich money-dealers, were intending to enclose the common land for sheep…

Every councillor opposed the measure which would bring misery to the poor…

…..(who gathered fuel there)….

…..and the yeomen classes…..

…..(who grazed their livestock there)….

Two of the aldermen tried to stop the Combe heavies from digging enclosure ditches……

…….but they got beaten up….

So nearly every woman and child in Stratford came at night to fill the ditches in…..

Including Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith…..

Shakespeare, however was a close friend of the Combes….

He’d bought land from them a decade before….

And when one of them died, leaving Shakespeare £5 ……

…..he had composed an affectionate, bantering  epitaph for him  in a tavern….

…..celebrating how the Devil would now claim John Combe as his own…

Shakespeare’s own land was affected by the enclosures….

….but he negotiated with the Combes to make sure he, and his descendants, would be compensated….

Then he escaped to Blackfriars with his son in law.

One of his many Stratford relations…..

……who bitterly opposed the enclosures…..

…..tracked him down at the Gatehouse…..

…..demanding a statement from him…

Backed up by his son-in-law, Shakespeare claimed that the enclosures wouldn’t begin till the Spring…..

And would probably never begin at all….

He was proved wrong on both counts…..

But did nothing….

Why should he help the people of Stratford?

He’d been forced to leave the town TWICE in his youth….

And now the Stratford Council had banned all performances of plays….

It was the RICH who had created Shakespeare….

Even his Stratford house had been bought with money from the Southampton family…

To condemn the Combes would be an act of utter hypocrisy….

●

At the beginning of the following year, Shakespeare began writing his will….

in perfect health and memory, God be praised….

This was unusual….

People, then, put off writing their wills till they felt they were going to die…

But Shakespeare had a pressing reason….

His daughter Judith had decided to marry the local crook….

And Shakespeare wanted to protect her….

He wrote a will that he could read to her while he was alive….

And more important, to his future son-in-law….

….whom he couldn’t bring to even mention in his will….

(‘Son-in-law’ is written and then crossed out).

His old inner Prospero, though, was surfacing……

As he drafted more of his will, he attempted to control the whole of his family…..

….. from beyond the grave…..

Notoriously, he left his estranged wife, Anne, his…..

 ….second-best bed……

…..to make sure she got nothing else….

And, like King Lear,  gave by far the best inheritance to his favourite daughter, Susanna…

Shakespeare the man had learnt little from Shakespeare the writer….

By favouring Cordelia above her sisters, Lear destroys Britain…

But in a glorious act of defiant honesty…..

 …..Shakespeare left the most precious thing he had….

……the most precious thing any gentleman at the time had….

His sword….

To one Thomas Combe…

●

A few months later, poet friends Ben Jonson……

… and Michael Drayton….

…..called on Shakespeare at Stratford…..

….. to celebrate his fifty-second birthday….

….with a…..

merry meeting….. 

They all drank…..

….too hard….

……as poets are apt to do….

Shakespeare contracted a ‘fever’ and died….

But not before he had been granted the full Last Rites as a Roman Catholic…….

…….. in a town, Puritan and theatreless…….

………which had done all it could to destroy the Old Faith….

 ……and had done all it could to destroy him….

THE END

© Stewart Trotter and Trixie the Cat. January, 2012.

(It’s best to view Shakespeare: The Movie I first)

1594-1601

A Midsummer Night’s Dream…..

…..proved a nightmare.

Emilia was back on the scene, making a play for young Harry…

Nashe was still doing all he could to rubbish Shakespeare….

And Kyd was pushing for Nashe’s job as Shakespeare’s collaborator….

On top of all this, Heneage, Countess Mary’s bridegroom, was a Protestant…..

So staunch a Protestant, in fact, that he had overseen the execution of Mary Queen of Scots…

There was also the problem of the Countess of Southampton’s first marriage…..

Her husband, the second Earl of Southampton, had died with their quarrel over little Harry unresolved….

He had gone to his grave hating his wife.

As a Catholic, Shakespeare believed that the first marriage needed closure before the second could properly begin…

The soul of the second Earl was probably locked in Purgatory….

And profoundly influenced by actions on Earth….

Shakespeare, the magus…….

….solved everything in a flash…..

He managed to work into the play compliments to BOTH Queen Elizabeth AND Mary Queen of Scots…

He cast – and exposed – Emilia as the scheming little dark-skinned ‘Ethiope’, Hermia…

And cast the diminutive Nashe – who famously could not grow a beard – as Francis Flute the bellows-mender, forced to play Thisbe through his lack of facial hair…

Shakespeare devalued Kyd by parodying a famous line from his big hit The Spanish Tragedy….

Hieronimo, hearing a woman pleading  for help, asks….

What outcries pluck me from my naked bed?

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Queen of the Fairies, Titania……

……hearing Bottom singing in his ass’s head….

….asks…..

What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?

Shakespeare  cast Heneage as the warrior Theseus…….

…..who admits he has ‘wooed’ Hyppolita (Countess Mary)…

 with his sword….

…and has…

Won her love by doing [her] injuries….

i.e. chopping off the head of Mary Queen of Scots…

The Countess’s quarrel with her first husband over little Harry is re-enacted in the figures of Titania and Oberon, fighting over the changeling boy….

And resolved when Oberon and Titania forgive each other and dance together…..

Shakespeare even throws in a Catholic blessing on the bridal bed and Copped Hall itself at the end of the play….

But it is spoken by fairies…….

…… in case Queen Elizabeth was in the audience…

Emilia and Nashe took their revenge….

Emilia – posing as the virtuous woman ‘Avisa’ –  penned an anonymous,  scurrilous satire……

 She claimed that  a ‘blubbing’ young Harry  – Mr. H. W. [Henry Wriothesley] and a vindictive ‘Old Player’, W. S. [William Shakespeare] had both tried to seduce her…

In vain!

Nashe, as Shakespeare’s collaborator on the play, had a big hand in the comic scenes….

 He sends ups the early touring days of Shakespeare’s company in the figure of the ‘rude mechanicals’……

……and the theatrical meglomania of Shakespeare himself in the character of Bottom the Weaver…

But Kyd was unable to exact a revenge…..

He was dead by the end of 1594….

Shakespeare bought up the rights to all his plays – including an early Hamlet, Lear and Taming of a Shrew…..

 …..rewrote them in the light of the insights he had gained on his European tour…..

….and blasted ‘famous Kyd’ from theatrical history…..

….. for ever….

●

The following year Harry, now of age, made his first appearance at Court.

He was handsome tall and gallant……

…..so everyone assumed he would be Queen Elizabeth’s new favourite…

Leicester, The Bear’s,  death had created a power vacuum – a situation the Queen was happy to exploit……

She loved to surround herself with ambitious young men of high family but low means, all fighting each other for her attention.

She could control them with money….

Apart from Essex, the two main contenders for the Queen’s favour were the tall, swart, driven, Devonshire man, Sir Walter Raleigh  a.k.a. The Fox…..

……and the short, unprepossessing, round-shouldered, but politically acute Sir Robert Cecil, a.k.a. The Ape….

No-one had ever replaced The Bear in the Queen’s affections….

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, become more popular than she was…..

……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 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 young ladies-in-waiting…

The lovely Elizabeth Vernon…..

…..an impoverished cousin of the Earl of Essex.

Essex encouraged the match as he desperately needed a spy close to the Queen when he was away…

So, to encourage Harry’s heterosexuality, Essex commissioned Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet for a private performance at Titchfield….

As part of the therapy, Harry played Romeo…..

…..who is recovering from a disastrous non-affair with the dark eyed beauty, Rosaline…..

…..a.k.a. Emilia….

Elizabeth Vernon, who, like Harry was subject to bouts of hysterical weeping, played Juliet…..

 Shakespeare, naturally, 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 the love of his life.

He dramatised this dilemma in the charged, febrile, disturbed passions of Mercutio…

 

 ……a character so close to his heart, he said, that he had to kill him off at the start of the third act.

Or Mercutio would have killed him….

In the event, Harry’s affair with Elizabeth Vernon in no way precluded an affair with Shakespeare….

Or  affairs with a lot of other people, mostly lower class young men….

Much to Shakespeare’s distress….

He worried that Harry’s penchant for rough trade would be used against him…

Shakespeare himself, though, was no angel….

He spends prodigious amounts of energy in his Sonnets trying to justify his own infidelities….

●

With Southampton gone from the Court, Essex was back in the spotlight.

He had grown to loathe his sado-masochistic affair with the ageing Queen….

 

He wanted to follow military glory abroad……

 

Elizabeth would have none of it…..

Nor would she name her successor, as Essex begged her to do….

Essex and Southampton were terrified that when she died, the Wars of the Roses would return to England….

 A plot began to form in their minds….. 

They would raise an army, eliminate the Fox and the Ape and force Queen Elizabeth to name her successor as James VI of Scotland…. 

James, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, was officially Protestant, but Catholic-friendly… 

He was bisexual, cultured, peace-loving and tolerant….

He also wanted to unite England and Scotland….

A plan first advocated by his mother who believed her son was born to bring it about…

The plotters, to steel themselves, needed a play….

What better story was there than the overthrow of Richard II?

And who better to write it than cousin Will?

Shakespeare created a Richard II who constantly changes his mind…..

Heaps gold on his favourites…..

….robs sons of their inheritances….

….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 the Queen of England……

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…..

 

Shakespeare carries on the Bollingbroke story in Henry IV Parts One and Two..

Essex wanted to attack one of his biggest enemies at the court, Henry Brooke, 11th Lord Cobham….

…..a. k. a. The Sycophant…..

One of The Sycophant’s ancestors was Sir John Hardcastle, a Protestant martyr…

Friend and moral guide to Prince Hal…..

To please Essex, Shakespeare and Nashe wanted to discredit this hero…

But how?

Step forward, Mr. Apis Lapis….

Nashe’s fat, old Titchfield landlord….

Crook, raconteur and wit…

He was the model for for Oldcastle…..

Who, on the Queen’s orders, had to be rapidly renamed…..

…….Falstaff….

…….a man who was ‘all the world’…..

……but whose great heart would crack when the young man he loved rejected him….

●

During the Henry IV plays Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died…..

……a boy of only eleven whom Shakespeare hardly knew….

He only returned to Stratford-upon-Avon in the summer months….  

Shakespeare stifled his grief and went off the rails….

He bedded down with crooks in the notorious Paris Gardens….

He lent money….

He cheated at dice…..

He slept with prostitutes…..

He was hauled up before the magistrates to keep the  peace…..

Just like Falstaff….

Just like Apis Lapis…

And just a bit like his father….

This public disgrace meant a temporary break with Harry: but no weakening of love on either side.

Harry had become his surrogate son as well as his lover….

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

And Harry remained  ‘engrafted’ to him….

But the pregnancy meant marriage and marriage meant the fury of the Queen.

Essex, because he’d set the whole thing up, was banished from the court as well….

The time was ripe for the plot and the chance came in an extraordinary way…..

Essex was forgiven and  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 instincts.

They wanted to give Essex enough rope to hang himself…..

Essex, the plan went, would quell the Irish with the English army….

…. then return with soldiers, join with the citizens of London and overthrow Elizabeth…

Cousin Will was in on the plot…..

He wrote Henry V, a patriotic tub-thumper that Queen Elizabeth would have loathed……

 

…..in which the Chorus describes how all the citizens fled out of London to welcome King Henry at Blackheath….. 

The Chorus predicts that the same welcome will be afforded to Essex when he returns from Ireland….

Bringing rebellion broach’d on his sword….

In the meantime Shakespeare was dispatched to Scotland….

His brief was to persuade King James to ride at the head of the army with Essex….

And to claim the throne of England as his own…..

Shakespeare staged the premiere of Macbeth in Edinburgh….

……a play which prophesies that fate will lead James to rule over a United Kingdom…..

…..and which demonstrates how right it is to remove bloody usurpers from the throne….

Usurpers like the Macbeths….

And usurpers like Queen Elizabeth……

But James was far too canny to rise to the bait…

Queen Elizabeth was old…..

 

James simply had to wait for a year or two and the English crown would be his…. 

The campaign in Ireland proved a disaster….. 

The Irish ran circles round poor Essex…..

And the charismatic rebel, the Earl of Tyrone….

 

…….all but persuaded Essex to join forces with the Irish instead…

And back at the Court, The Fox and The Ape were bad-mouthing Essex to the Queen…..

To defend himself, 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……

His enemies said he was like Acteon who had gazed on the naked moon-Goddess, Diana…

 …..and like Acteon, was destined to be torn apart….

Essex was put under house-arrest and Shakespeare realised the plot was doomed.

Half the Essex entourage wanted to go ahead with rebellion, 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 honourable men can be corrupted by events…

Shakespeare appealed to the Queen for clemency: he painted her as Olivia in Twelfth Night….

 

…..a beautiful, thoughtful, woman, with a heart full of love, unexpectedly running a great household after the death of her father and brother……

She is surrounded by adoring, love-sick suitors like Orsino…..

…..a.k.a. Essex….

And Sir Andrew Aguecheek….

……a.k.a. Southampton….

…….but threatened by a false-hearted Malvolio….

……a.k.a. The Fox….

This was Shakespeare’s last collaboration with Nashe…..

……who played and wrote Feste, the jester…. 

Nashe died later in the year, leaving, it was said, the treasure of his wit in…

other men’s chests…..

Ill and half mad, Essex gathered a group of hot-heads about him, as the Queen starved him of money…

The rebels burst onto the streets of the City, hoping to inspire the citizens of London to join them….

To Shakespeare’s horror, they had first paid for a special performance of Richard II at the Globe….

The citizens of London, well off under Elizabeth, 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…

Shakespeare could now get nothing from Harry….

…..stripped of his titles and his money….

…..disgraced and near death in the Tower….

But Shakespeare’s love for Harry grew in the profoundest way…..

In the Sonnets Shakespeare had often spoken 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, fabulous Phoenix……

 ……and Shakespeare by the humble, 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……

INTERMISSION

© Stewart Trotter and Trixie the Cat. January, 2012.

Now view Shakespeare: The Movie. Part III

Yes, Brothers and Sisters of the Code, The Agents are delighted to report that on….

11th January, 2012…

The Shakespeare Code received its….

17,000th View!!!

To add to our joy, Fellow of The Shakespeare Code, Eddie Linden…..

 …….has been garnering rave reviews for his dazzling new collection of poems….

 

 

……FROM THE EMERALD ISLE!!!

The celebrated Irish biographer (and Co. Clare book-seller) Gerry Harrison, wrote,  in the highly prestigious  Irish Times, on Christmas Eve….

The thrust of personal experience propels this collection. Linden’s public readings or recitals can be theatre….

 

……but his integrity shines through….

After a bravura on-stage peformance, the poems can be appreciated further by a later, quieter look at the text, such as in The Miner, in tender memory of his father:

Your face has never

moved, it still contains

the marks of toil, deep

In blue. These slag heaps

now in green have

flowers instead of dust

and many men are buried here

whose shadows linger on.

Linden insists that….

…. ‘there is nothing intellectual in my poems; I never write unless I have something to say’.

When he says it, he says it directly – but he chooses his words with care, never suffocating his emotional conviction for his subject.

This impressive collection is timely, and brings together a body of work that helps to define this idiosyncratic but sensitive man…..

Even better is the piece by the distinguished Belfast novelist, Glenn Patterson….

In the New Year edition of the Belfast Telegraph he nominated A Thorn in the Flesh as….

THE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!!

But don’t forget, Brothers and Sisters, that the FIRST review of this brilliant book was penned by our own…..

TRIXIE THE CAT….

WAY BACK IN SEPTEMBER 2011!!!

THREE MONTHS AGO!!!

 You can read her INTERNATIONALLY INFLUENTIAL review by clicking: HERE.

And her CLASSIC, NO PAWS BARRED interview with Eddie Linden, F. S. C., by clicking: HERE.

You can purchase Eddie’s beautiful book (£7.50) from his charming publishers, Hearing Eye, by clicking : books@hearingeye.org

(Tell them Trixie sent you…..)

The Shakespeare Code abhors all forms of boastfulness and self-aggrandisment….

But must, in fairness, observe that….

WHERE TRIXIE THE CAT LEADS…..

 

….. THE WHOLE WORLD FOLLOWS….

 

The Agents of The Shakespeare Code would also like to welcome…..

URUGUAY

NORTH MARIANAS ISLANDS

AMERICAN SAMOA

TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO

KENYA

GEORGIA

RWANDA

…..to its ranks, bringing the total number of participating countries to a magnificent…..

EIGHTY-FOUR!!! 

See: The Shakespeare Code Salutes the Nations!

Data rushed to The Code’s Head Office reveal that in 2011 most Brothers and Sisters of The Code lived in…..

 THE UNITED KINGDOM

But….

AMERICA

and CANADA

ARE FOLLOWING CLOSE BEHIND…..

If you haven’t yet visited the acclaimed….

SHAKESPEARE: THE MOVIE I

Then click: HERE.

To read SIMON CALLOW’S stunning review….

See DIRECTLY BELOW….

THE TRIXIE NEWSLETTER

Yes, Brothers and Sisters of The Code….

…..on the morning of….

1st January, 2012….

…..The Shakespeare Code received its..

16,000th VIEW!!!

And The Code enjoyed its BEST DAY EVER on….

…19th December, 2011…

….when The Code was happy to receive……

167 HITS!!!

The Four New Countries which have joined The Shakespeare Code are….

MAURITIUS

ECUADOR

TAIWAN

 COSTA RICA

…..which brings the number of participating countries to a heady…..

SEVENTY-SEVEN….

Please see: The Shakespeare Code Salutes the Nations.

The Agents of The Code are also proud to start 2012 with…..

 Shakespeare: The Movie I

…directly below…

 

1564-1594

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

She was the daughter of King Henry VIII….

…and his second wife, Anne Boleyn….

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

 

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

He might even make her pregnant….

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

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

For ever…

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

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

…..but had also influenced her thinking….

…..profoundly…..

Katharine was a closet follower of John Calvin…..

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

…..Elizabeth prayed to God to save her.

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

●

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

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

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

 

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

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

Or so he thought….

John Shakespeare was a successful glover….

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

……most of them illegal…

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

But he was a man of deep faith…

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

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

Had ‘The State’……

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

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

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

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

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

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

…..a. k. a. The Bear…. 

The Bear was Elizabeth’s lover….

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

….uninterrupted by time….

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

……licensed to raid the homes of Catholics….

 …..then torture the occupants. 

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

John Shakespeare’s son, William….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

……how to charm them….

……how to entertain them….

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

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

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

…..where he impregnated Anne Hathaway….

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

He did the honourable thing and married her….

…..then returned to the attack on Lucy…

Not only did he compose a scurrilous ballad about….

Lucy….

….being….

lousy…

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

He had to get out of town….

London was the obvious place to go….  

He shacked up with another grammar school boy…..

…..Thomas ‘Sporting’ Kyd…

Notorious for their starched beards….

……love of horse-racing….

……and patronage of brothels…..

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

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

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

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

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

…..especially in competition with themselves….

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

But Shakespeare had his reasons…..

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

And Shakespeare still needed protection from him…..

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

But Crowley did more than that….

He inspired Shakespeare…

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

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

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

Crowley encouraged Shakespeare to turn Bible stories into plays….

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

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

…..but not his money….

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

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

….who would create chaos at the rehearsals….

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

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

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

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

…..sometimes playing to tiny audiences….

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

…..in his bedchamber…..

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

Power that was soon to be taken away….

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

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

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

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

The winds famously blew….

…..and  the Spanish fleets were scattered….

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

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

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

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

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

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

The strait-laced Strange ditched him….

For the moment….

●

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

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

Christopher Marlowe…..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ….a common person….

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

… took a shine to Shakespeare….

She dressed him in smart clothes……

…….gave him a massive allowance….

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harry, however, had other ideas….

●

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

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

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

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

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

….so he gallantly threw off his own….

….and was instantly shot in the leg…

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

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

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

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

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

●

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

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

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

So the two Countesses devised a revenge….

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

…..on the grounds that they were….

 ……fondly set out….

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

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

So the Countesses commissioned Shakespeare to write history plays……

…. which obliquely attacked the Queen….

…..and her hangers-on….

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

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

And aristocrats loved play-acting…

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

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

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

So he did what canny folk have always done…

He hired his enemies….

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

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

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

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

Nashe and Greene were Protestants….

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

Shakespeare was a Catholic….

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

Posbrook Farm was owned by one William Beeston….

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

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

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

….and his ebullient company…

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

…..at a price….

Greene soon ruined himself and wandered back to London….

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

Nashe had collaborated with Marlowe…..

…. and now he collaborated with Shakespeare…..

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

Together they wrote Richard III…..

 

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

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

…….who had taken a young lover….

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

….except the Queen….

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

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

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

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

  ….massing…..

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

…. as they were run in front of her…

….a custom which disgusted country folk…..

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

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

The Queen liked music to accompany the carnage….

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

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

…..of whom no portrait remains….

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

But his passion threw him into agonies of guilt….

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

But Emilia was spoken for…

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

 

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

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

Shakespeare, though, was not put off….

He wrote sonnets to seduce Emilia….

Then wrote a whole play to seduce her as well…

…..Love’s Labour’s Lost….. 

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

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

…..’The Parke’ at Place House…

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

 

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

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

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

This was all too much for Harry, who….

…….fond on praise

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

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

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

……with Nashe hovering around the edges….

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

…. promising more than she actually delivered… 

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

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

 

…..so she swooped.

Harry wanted to hurt Shakespeare…. 

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

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

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

….. one good and one evil…..

……fighting for his soul…

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

●

Greene, meanwhile had died in London…..

….in conditions of utmost penury….

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

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

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

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

Shakespeare and the Southamptons went beserk….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shakespeare returned to Titchfield…

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

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

It begins with a question….

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

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

Thou art more lovely and more temperate….

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

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

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

…… always in secret and often after dark….

Nashe pounced again…..

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

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

The Countess took Shakespeare aside and questioned him directly…

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

…..Was Shakespeare in love with Harry?

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

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

She thought Shakespeare was good for Harry….

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

So she approved of the affair…

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

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

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

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

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

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

……Venus and Adonis….

 …..and The Rape of Lucrece….

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

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

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

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

Shakespeare began, like Titian, to flesh it out…

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

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

Just like The Taming of the Shrew….

…..when the aristocratic Lucentio….

…..changes clothes with his manservant Tranio….

They visited Verona and Padua…..

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

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

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

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

But they arrived back in England to a shock….

Marlowe was dead….

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

Atheist papers had been found in their joint lodgings….

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

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

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

●

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

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

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

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

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

NOW VIEW: Shakespeare: The Movie II.

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

……directed by the dashing Greg Doran…..

…..and starring the glorious David Tennant….

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

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

Dr. Paul Prescott of Warwick University also writes….

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

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

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

Please see: Celebrity Endorsement (6)

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

The book is exqusite….

Thanks again, Greg….

The Code congratulates you on your continuing success….

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

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

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

THE TRIXIE NEWSLETTER

Yes, Brothers and Sisters…..

….on 14 December, 2011….

…..The Shakespeare Code received its…..

15,000th VIEW!!!

The SEVEN new countries which have signed up are……

ARMENIA

PUERTO RICO

QATAR

BELIZE

CAMBODIA

LITHUANIA

JAMAICA

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

SEVENTY-THREE!!!

See: The Shakespeare Code Salutes the Nations!

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

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

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

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

Why was the play changed?

The answer, as usual, was politics…

●

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

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

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

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

This was a particularly chivalric act because…..

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

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

So poor, his father rented the family home…

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

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

…… financed him with lucrative monopolies.

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

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

And wore gigantic pearls in his ears…

But he stayed mean….

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

Or paid for it….

John Aubrey, the gossipy antiquarian…..

…..says that Raleigh was….

…..damnable proud….

….and….

…..loved a wench well….

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

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

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

….the lively, feisty Bess Throckmorton….

Raleigh started to write amorous verses to her…..

Then he impregnated her….

Then he married her in secret……

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

…..claiming that…..

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

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

The ladies-in-waiting were her wards….

She decided who, if anyone, would woo them…

And she decided whom they married….

And, besides, Raleigh was hers….

After all, she’d paid for him….

[Raleigh was later to say….

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

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

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

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

●

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

Nashe took his revenge in a pamphlet…..

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

He lambasts Raleigh in code as….

a buckram giant….

…..and….

an upstart…

……..and claims that he is….……

….all Italianato in his talk….

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

……and his…..

…….spade peke is sharp….

Following Fuller, Nashe claims that…..

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

….and describes him as….

….an inamorata poeta….

….who would….

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

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

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

For Nashe, Raleigh was one of…

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

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

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

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

 They included Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman…

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

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

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

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

(Please see: The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth. )

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

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

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

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

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

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

And…

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

….where his beloved walks….

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

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

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

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

He is poor….

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

And he is mean…

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

The Lords describe him as….

 an oracle…

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

 …..Queen Elizabeth took Raleigh for….

….an oracle that netted them all….

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

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

But suddenly ends up pregnant by him….

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

What had happened?

●

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

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

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

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

The Earl of Southampton even acted as Godfather….

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

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

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

But what was the original ending going to be?

Armado, in the throes of love, exclaims….

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

We never hear these sonnets….

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

The nymphs put the brand into a well….

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

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

….including Raleigh…..

….went when they had caught a venereal disease.

But the other sonnet has the line….

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

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

She was fond of saying….

I thirst for water…..

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

●

Aubrey tells us that……

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

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

Chirrah….

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

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

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

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

It is colourful and ornate….

…..’Italianato’ even….

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

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

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

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

He was a blatant, raging caricature of Raleigh…. 

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

And making political alliances with the Earl of Essex….

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

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

But why a Spaniard?

●

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

…..one Antonio Perez…

…..for her to clothe and feed….

Elizabeth was furious….

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

an old, doted, polling Papist….

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Bacon wrote to her son, Anthony….

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

Elizabeth would have nothing to do with Perez….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And ‘let him go’ in 1596…

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

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

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

That way, no-one would be offended….

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

The King of Navarre says….

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

But I protest I love to hear him lie,

And I will use him for my minstrelsy…’

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

And ‘minstrels’ were famous for their homosexuality….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ….the love triangles…

…..love squares….

…..betrayals….

…..gay ‘comings out’…

…..torture….

….. and trips to Itlay….

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

Shakespeare:the Movie.

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

 THE TRIXIE NEWSLETTER

Brothers and Sisters, it’s true…

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

14,000th VIEW!!!

Not only that…..

NINE NEW COUNTRIES HAVE JOINED THE CODE!!!

They are…..

LATVIA

PERU

PAKISTAN

EL SALVADOR

SERBIA

LEBANON

ST.  VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES

BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

VENEZUELA

 

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

Clickety-Click…..

SIXTY-SIX!!!

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

Also…..

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

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

A Thorn in the Flesh

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

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

What is it going to look

Like in forty years from now?

The pain, the fear from

day to day. Waiting for

the letter that never comes.

He sits there dropping poets’

Names until one becomes drunk and cannot hear

Or see. Will someone rid me

of this pest that lingers in our midst?

O Christ take away this painful fool…

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

…..and I’m not making this up…..

……comments on this poem…

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

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

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

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

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

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

books@hearingeye.org

www.hearingeye.org

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

Emily and Susan will know who you mean…

They have corresponded with Your Cat…

In very appreciative terms….

They openly describe The Shakespeare Code as….

 a powerful blog….

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

…. now-CLASSIC….

TRIXIE REVIEW

 Remember……

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

ESPECIALLY IF IT’S ABOUT SHAKESPEARE….

So….

FOLLOW THE CAT!!!

‘Bye now…

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

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

START HERE!

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

F. S. C….

 CLICK HERE!