The Shakespeare Code

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

In the early 1590’s the Southampton family was William Shakespeare’s meal-ticket…

There was no copyright on a writer’s work – so the only way a playwright could make money was by becoming a ‘sharer’ in a theatrical company….

This meant paying out a lump sum which Shakespeare did not have…

Harry, third Earl of Southampton (when he came of age in 1594) was to give Shakespeare the £1,000 (£500,000) to buy his way into the Lord Chamberlain’s Men….

But, in the meantime, he was totally dependent on Harry’s mother, Mary, Countess of Southampton….

…..who suppported Shakespeare in style….

Thomas Nashe was jealous of Shakespeare and wanted the Southampton money for himself….

But he was no threat to Shakespeare….

 Small and buck-toothed…..

……he was never able to gain the affections of Mary or her son….

However, a rival poet suddenly appeared on the scene, openly wooing Harry with his verse….

He was George Chapman…..

An accomplished poet,  he was a real danger to Shakespeare, who admitted he was still learning his craft…

Chapman was part of a group of free-thinking writers, philosophers and scientists, led by the ‘Wizard Earl’, Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland…..

……who was based at Petworth,  thirty miles from Titchfield….

 And Sir Walter Raleigh….

….who was based at Durham House in London…

The Jesuits called them the ‘School of Atheism’ and claimed that….

….both Moses and our Saviour, the Old and the New testament are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backward…

The Jesuits, as usual, were exaggerating….

If not blatantly lying….

But the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost also calls them ‘The School of Night’….

This was largeley because of Chapman’s philosphical verse….

He praised the cool, rational night over the hot, lustful day…

In his Hymnus in Cynthiam he casts Elizabeth as the moon-queen….

And implores her to stay isolated from the sunny glare of Europe….

That was all reasonable….

But Chapman claimed to have psychic abilities…..

When he was translating Homer’s works, the spirit of Homer appeared to him, he said….

In Hitchin…

This was all Shakespeare needed to launch an attack….

In Sonnet 86 he lampoons Chapman as being….

….by spirits taught to write…

….and even describes the spirit of Homer himself as an….

….affable familiar ghost….

Which nightly gulls him [Chapman] with intelligence….

FALSE intelligence that is!

Shakespeare then goes on to remind the devout Catholic, Southampton, that Chapman is funded by a dodgy, ‘atheist’ source…

…his compeers by night [The Wizard Earl’ and his cronies]

……who give him….

..aid…

Shakespeare’s then goes on to attack  Chapman for the affectedness of his verse….

…and parodies it to devastating effect…

‘Stars’, in Chapman’s hands, become…

…those gold candles fixed in heaven’s air…

And ‘the earth’ becomes….

…..this huge rondure….’

Although he was a Catholic, Shakespeare was often very plain in his tastes…

….a  legacy from his radical Protestant mentor, the priest and writer Robert Crowley at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, who hated artificial hair….

……artificial make-up…..

……and artificial language….

 Shakespeare insists that he always addresses Harry….

….in true, plain words….

….because they are the only things a…

….a true-telling friend….

…..would ever use… 

(Sonnet 82)

Shakespeare’s next target for attack, though, is completely unfair…..

Chapman’s name!

A ‘chapman’ in Shakespeare’s day, meant a ‘pedlar’…

So in Sonnet 102 Shakespeare asserts….

That love is merchandised , whose rich esteeming

The owner’s [Chapman’s] tongue doth publish everywhere…

And concludes Sonnet 21  with…

I will not praise [Harry] that purpose not to sell [him]…..

…..as a pedlar would!

When Shakespeare came to write Love’s Labour’s Lost, he continued the attack on Chapman by creating the monstrous, mincing, pederast, Boyet…

His very first line to his mistress, the Princess of France…

Now madam, summon up your dearest spirits….

…would instantly put the coterie Titchfield audience in mind of Chapman’s seances….

Boyet follows this with  a massive, over the top, Chapmanesque compliment….

Be now as prodigal of all dear grace

As nature was in making graces dear

When she did starve the general world beside

And prodigally gave them all to you…

And if the penny still hadn’t dropped with the audience, it certainly would with the Princess’s next line…

Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,

Not uttered by base sale of chapmen’s tongues…’

Later Berowne, in a vicious attack on Boyet’s plagiarism, decribes him directly as…

 wits pedlar….

…who…

….retails his wares

At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs…

Boyet – ingratiating, lisping, effeminate –  is most at home with gossipy girls….

As we see here…

And here, still in Elizabethan times…

And here, in Regency times…

 

And here, in Edwardian times….

Shakespeare hates him for his insincerity, his sycophancy and his smiling teeth….

…..’as white as whales’ bone….

But most of all he hates him for his….

CRUELTY TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE!!!

His choice of words is so affected that no-one can understand a word he says…

In final exasperation, the Princess screams at him….

Avaunt, perplexity…

….and….

Speak to be understood….

…..and this introduces the most important theme in the play….

Shakespeare has attacked Chapman in his Sonnets because his language is corrupt…

If language is corrupt, then we cannot trust the feelings BEHIND the language….

They could be corrupt as well….

The integrity of language is tested to the full in Love’s Labour’s Lost when Mercade announces to the Princess the death of her father…

Can the Lords express their feelings simply and truly?

They try hard, but fail….

However, they accept the women’s challenge…

Let’s have action instead of words…

The Lords will retreat from the world and perform acts of charity for a year and a day….

Then, when they return, chastened, the ladies will give them their hearts…

Of course, we don’t know if the men keep these new promises….

They have, after all, broken their vows before….

And Berowne says, ominously, that a ‘twelvemonth’ is….……

….too long for a play….

But Shakespeare, in the ambiguity of  this light comedy, is starting to work towards the conclusion of his great, dark masterpiece, King Lear….

If life is to have any meaning in the face of death, we must all….

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say….

●

With the creation of Boyet, Shakespeare faced his hatred for Chapman face on – and so faced his hatred for himself face-on….

Shakespeare had to do a lot of the things Boyet had to do – amuse, flatter, entetain and win over the ladies…

It is fascinating that Berowne/Shakespeare describes Boyet as….

honey-tongued…

Two years earlier, the poet Edmund Spenser…

 ……who was staying in Hampshire, compared ‘pleasant Willy’s’  verse to ‘honey’…

Deep down, Shakespeare realised that he and Chapman were very alike….

Indeed, in the play Berowne finally admires Boyet’s wit…

Well said, old mocker, I must needs be friend with thee…

This has echoes of Prospero’s final realisation in The Tempest of his kinship with the monster Caliban….

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine…

 ●

Please note: some material in this post first appeared in Stewart Trotter’s Love’s Labour’s Found  (2002) ISBN No. 1 873953 35 6.

(It’s best to read Part Seven now: ‘Thomas Nashe’s Revenge on Sir Walter Raleigh’!)

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

What, apart from money, did William Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe gain from writing  Love’s Labour’s Lost?

Three things:

1. Self-promotion

2. Self-justication, and…

3. Revenge

1. Self-promotion.

(a) Shakespeare.

Shakespeare wrote the part of Berowne…

He also played it…

Berowne is witty, sceptical, romantic and loyal…..

By playing him, Shakespeare is implying….

 I am witty, sceptical, romantic and loyal as well….

In fact, the coterie audience at Titchfield would assume that Berowne was Shakespeare and that Shakespeare was Berowne.

In the same year as Love’s Labour’s Lost (1592) Henry Chettle wrote….

……my self have seen his [Shakespeare’s] demeanour  no less civil than he excellent in the qualities he professes: besides, divers of worship [ie. the Southampton family] have reported his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, which approves his art….

John Aubrey, in the following century, was to write…

…he [Shakespeare] was a handsome, well-shaped man: very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit….

Shakespeare was using the play to project an image of himself…..

Exactly the way Sir Noël Coward was to do four centuries later…..

Coward was a South London, lower class boy who passed himself off as a toff….

Shakespeare was a Warwickshire, yeoman class boy who passed himself off as a Lord..

By using the name ‘Berowne’ (after Mary Browne, the second Countess of Southampton) Shakespeare suggests that he is part of the Wriothesley family….

(He was related to them through his mother – but only distantly.)

Shakespeare even went on to purloin the silver falcon from the Wriothesley coat-of-arms for use on his own family crest….

(Please see: Shakespeare in Titchfield. A Summary of the Evidence. )

(b) Nashe.

By writing and playing the part of the ‘well-educated infant’ , Moth….

….. (which is NEARLY ‘Thom’ backwards)…..

……Nashe was projecting his comic persona as….

(a) witty,

(b) diminutive,  and

(c) beardless….

……(Nashe, famously, could not grow facial hair)….

When he had played Dromio of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors he had used his ‘trademark’ name…..

…ape….

As Moth he uses another of his ‘trademark’ names….

 ….juvenal….

This was a play on the name of the Roman satirist, ‘Juvenal’…..

…..(a reference to Nashe’s satires)….

…..and the word ‘juvenile’….

…..(a reference to Nashe’s boyish appearance).

(Six years later, in 1598, Francis Meeres was to describe Nashe as ‘young Juvenal’, so clearly the self-promotion had worked….)

At one point Moth describes, to his penniless Spanish master,  Don Armado..

…the best way of dressing when he comes to woo  ‘the country wench’ Jaquenetta…

…..with your hat penthouse lik o’er the shop of your eyes, with your arms crossed on your thin-belly doublet like a rabbit on a spit, or your hands in your pocket, like a man after the old painting…..

The Editor of the handsome new Cambridge University Press edition of the play says that…

The syntax and and satiric images in Moth’s speech here bring it closer than anything else in the play to the satiric prose style of Thomas Nashe….

The Shakespeare Code would like to suggest that the speech is close to ‘the satiric prose style of Thomas Nashe’  because…

THOMAS NASHE WROTE IT!!! 

2. Self-justification.

(a) Shakespeare.

At the beginning of Love’s Labour’s Lost the King and his Lords make a solemn vow that they will abjure the society of women and devote the next three years to fasting and study….

Then the lovely ladies turn up….

One by one, the men decide that there are other things they’d prefer to be doing rather than studying… 

One of the main differences between Elizabethan Englishmen and Modern Englishmen is that vast majority of Elizabethan Englishmen believed they had a soul…

…..and to break a vow was to put your soul in danger….

Shakespeare, a Catholic and a married man, had fallen in love with ‘the dark lady’,  Emilia Bassano….

He was therefore breaking his marriage vow….

……something which pre-occupies him in Sonnet 152….

In loving thee thou know’st I am foresworn….’

In Sonnet 142 he goes so far as to describe ‘loving’  Emilia as ‘sinful’….

(His gay sex with the Earl of Southampton doesn’t seem to have struck him as ‘sinful’ at all. Rather the reverse…)

So when Berowne concocts an elaborate justification for the Lords breaking their vows, he is also justifying  his own infidelity….

Everyone in Titchfield would have known he was married to Anne…

But there was another vow that the Love’s Labour’s Lost audience had all made….

Their Vow of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth….

Also there was the Earl of Leicester’s 1584   ‘Bond of Association’ which thousands of gentlemen had signed….

In this they swore to protect the Queen from any rebellion…

Many were starting to turn to think, now, about rebelling against Elizabeth themselves…

So they needed a strong justification for going back on their word….

Years ago the Pope had absolved Catholics who broke their Vows of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth…..

In fact he actively encouraged them to do so…

But Shakespeare, in the play, was now giving a justification to Catholics and Protestants alike..

His basic argument was that if you swear to a course of action on a mis-guided principle, that vow becomes invalid….

Shakespeare, by offering this argument, was also obliquely explaining why, though he was a Catholic, he could never become a fanatical one…

…nor could he write the religious verse that the Jesuit Robert Southwell…..

 ……was begging him to write….

When the Lords in the play set up their rules for their ‘Academy’ –  abstinence, chastity and mortification of the flesh – they are very similar to the rules of the Jesuit seminaries set up at Douai and Rheims…

Brave young English Catholics were sent there in secret, fast-tracked to ordination and returned to England and almost certain death…

But Berowne explains that the Lords of Navarre are not cut out  for that sort of life…

Only God can chose his martyrs…

And even his ascetics…

As Berowne says….

…..every man with his affects [passions] is born,

Not by might mastered but by special grace….

i.e. the grace of God….

Shakespeare is admitting that he could never be celibate…

In fact he goes on to say in Sonnet 121….

I am that I am, and they that level at my abuses

Reckon up their own…

…..an open declaration of his complex sexuality….

….which Meeres confirms when he describes Shakespeare as…

…..one of the most passionate among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of love…

Shakespeare later developed into a great tragedian…

 But at the time of Love’s Labour’s Lost,  he was loved by his aristocratic public for being in love….

And for advocating love’s power in his play…

And when love speaks, the voice of the Gods

Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony…

Playing Berowne also gives Shakespeare the chance to score one over on his collaborator – and deadly rival – Nashe.

Nashe was always condemning Shakespeare, in code,  for being a mere grammar school boy with no real learning at all….

Berowne demonstrates that you can learn more from life – and from being in love  – than you can ever learn from a book….

Small have continual plodders ever won

Save base authority from others’ books….

(b) Nashe.

Nashe, everyone agreed, was ‘famous’….

But the other thing they all agreed on, was that he was ‘poor’…

So poor that once he and a friend had only one pair of trousers between them…

They had to take it in turns to leave the house….

Nashe needed to justify his poverty…..

And did so by blaming others….

He was poor, not because he was untalented….

No….

 He was poor because his patrons were mean…

In the play, the pageboy Moth is brilliant, quick and precocious….

But his master, Don Armado, is innumerate, stupid and impoverished…

He is holding Moth back….

Just the way Nashe’s patrons were all holding him back…

Who they were….

And how he got his revenge on his enemies…

And how Shakespeare got his revenge on his…

We  shall see in the next post….

 

It is with over-whelming joy we report…..

….that on its first day of democratic freedom…..

….28 November, 2011…..

…..that great cradle of spirituality, EGYPT…..

….joined The Shakespeare Code….

In honour of this event, the Agents of The Code call on Trixie the Cat to recite Enobarbus’s sublime description of Cleopatra, on the Nile, in her barge…..

THE TRIXIE RECITATION

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster,

As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,

It beggar’d all description: she did lie

In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,

O’er-picturing that Venus where we see

The fancy out-work nature. On each side her

Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,

With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem

To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,

And what they undid, did…

There are now FIFTY-SEVEN participating nations in The Shakespeare Code…

‘Bye, now….

 

 

In August, 2011, The Shakespeare Code received over 1,000 Views….

In September, 2011, it received over 2,000 Views….

The Shakespeare Code is delighted to announce that in November, 2011, it received over….

3,ooo VIEWS!!!

Also FOURTEEN new countries  joined The Code….

They are:

ICELAND

JAPAN

KOREA

ROMANIA

UKRAINE

ISRAEL

ARGENTINA

SRI LANKA

NICARAGUA

VIET NAM

IRELAND

SLOVAKIA

SLOVENIA

FINLAND

 

This means there are now…….

FIFTY-SIX PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES!!!

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

THE WORLD LOVES WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE….

 …….AND THE SHAKESPEARE CODE LOVES SERVING THE WORLD…..

As Trixie the Cat says…..

STAY TUNED TO YOUR STATION OF THE STARS…..

‘Bye now….

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

Mary, Countess of Southampton’s next commission for William Shakespeare….

 …..and Thomas Nashe, of course….

…..was an entertainment for the 1592 Titchfield Whitsun Fair….

The Fair had  been granted to the town by King Henry VI in 1447, two years after he had married Margaret of Anjou in the Abbey….

It  was originally held at the Feast of Corpus Chrisit,  when sacred objects from the Church were processed round the town…

But this had all been far too Papist for the boy-king Edward VI…

He banned Corpus Christi and replaced it with Whit Sunday instead….

A time for tilting, drinking Whitsun ale and morris dancing…

Much more English…. 

The festivities were held in Countess Mary’s ‘Parke’…. .

..and are held there to this day….

Mary wanted a comedy for the event…..

A very heterosexual comedy in which her son, Harry, could act….

And which might turn him straight….

(She faced a tremendous £5,000 fine if Harry refused to marry Lord Burghley’s grand-daughter….)

But Harry showed no interest at all in girls….

Except to dress up like them….

Mary asked Shakespeare to write heterosexual parts for Harry’s gay friends as well…

…..the Danvers brothers, who were so posh they pronounced their name ‘Davers’.

Mary was clearly hoping for a mass, Hampshire conversion….

Parts, too, were needed for her female guests who were coming to visit at Whitsun…..

…..one of whom needed no conversion to heterosexuality….

…..Penelope Rich….

She had been the muse of Sir Philip Sidney, who described her as….

…..most RICH in these and every part,

Which makes the patents of true, wordly bliss,

Hath no misfortune, but that RICH she is…

Penelope was the sister of the Earl of Essex….

…..who was the hero of the hour….

 He had fought alongside Henri of Navarre at the siege of Rouen…

He was also an intimate friend of gay Harry….

(And secretly batted for both sides…)

He loved plays…..

And he loved tilting……

…..and would certainly have been invited to Titchfield for the Whitsun celebrations as the guest of honour…

But whether he made it there or not was another matter…..

The Queen, pushing sixty….

 

……was besotted with Essex and hardly let him out of her sight…

She often had him apprehended as he tried to escape from the Court down to Hampshire….

Just like Venus, in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, who rugby tackles her reluctant lover Adonis to the ground…

●

Shakespeare came up with the idea of  Love’s Labour’s Lost…

……a re-write of an old hit he’d had for Lord Strange’s Men, The Fair Em….

….which has an identical ‘eaves-dropping’ scene….

….and a lecherous old mill-worker called Trotter….

The whole thing was to be a satire on Queen Elizabeth and her Progress the previous year to Cowdray and Titchfield…

This had been a time of enormous strain for the Roman Catholic Southampton family…

At any moment their recusancy could have been exposed….

Shakespeare knew it would be highly therapeutic for them all to have a good old laugh at it….

In the play, the King of Navarre and his courtiers (Berowne, Dumaine and Longaville) vow to give up women and devote their lives to study….

But the Princess of France and her retinue of lovely Ladies (Rosaline, Katharine and Maria) arrive at the Court of Navarre on state business….

They are forced to live in tents in the fields outside the gates…

But, one by one, the gentlemen break their vows…

Shakespeare cast the beautiful Penelope in the part of the Princess, and plays on her name the same way Sidney did…

In the final scene he has her say….

Sweet hearts, we shall be RICH ‘ere we depart…

….and then uses the word   ‘rich’  FIVE more times in the same scene.

Berowne was another intellectual/romantic part for Shakespeare…

(The character’s oddly-spelt  name is a coded compliment to Mary, Countess of Southampton, whose maiden name was Browne…)

The handsome King who falls hopeleslly in love with the Princess….

….was a great, masculinising part for Harry…

He was called ‘Navarre’ after Henri of Navarre, alongside whom Essex had been fighting…

And the two other courtiers were named after generals who were at the siege as well..

….Henri d’Orleans, duc de Longueville and Charles, duc de Mayenne….

This was all a compliment to Essex….

Who, in reality,  had proved a disastrous commander at Rouen…

Three thousand of his men had died, including his brother Walter….

●

Love’s Labour’s Lost was written to be an outdoor ‘promenade’ performance, just like the Progresses of the Queen…

And, like the Progresses of the Queen, it was staged as a ‘serial’ over several days..

The Princess and her ladies would have arrived on horseback, just as Elizabeth and her Ladies had done…

And when the Princess of France says to the King of Navarre (who is immediately smitten by her beauty)….

The roof of this court is too high to be yours, and welcome to the wide fields too base to be mine’

…..she is referring to the real sky and to real fields….

Place House itself – and it’s great doors – would become the Court of Navarre….

 …..and real tents would be pitched in real grounds…….

When the Princess asks…

Was that the King that spurred his horse so hard

Against the steep-up rising of the hill?….

….Harry would have spurred his real horse up the really steep hill outside the gates of Place House…

When the Princess goes to the standing to shoot deer, she would go to the actual standing that had been built for Elizabeth….

And when she exclaims….

But come, the bow…

….she would be given the actual bow that Elizabeth had used…

And which she had left as a memento at Cowdray….

And when Berowne climbs into a tree and sits ‘like a demi-God’…’in he sky’ and the King of Navarre hides behind a bush….

The tree was a genuine tree…

And the bush was a genuine bush….

●

The ‘fairing’ that Princess of France receives in the play is…..

A lady walled about with diamonds….’

….a clear reference, for those in the know, to the famous ‘Armada Jewel’ which Sir Thomas Heneage had given to the Queen…

The part of the Princess gives Penelope Rich – who hated the Queen almost as much as her mother, Lettice Knollys, did –  a wonderful opportunity to satirise Elizabeth….

….her vanity, her bossiness and her jealousy….

But it is clear that Shakespeare was FASCINATED by the Queen….

How could a woman of such grace and sensibility behave with such cruelty?

(Please see: Queen Elizabeth, incest and sadism. )

In the speech she makes just before the shooting of the deer, Shakespeare penetrates to the depths of the Queen’s heart….

She herself questions her addicition to hunting and realises that her need for…

 …Fame, an outward part….

…… is so great that it smothers her natural compassion….

So she….

 spill[s] the poor deer’s blood….

This, for the Elizabethans, introduces another conundrum…

….blood could mean semen…

(Please see: The Shakespeare Code)

So ‘the poor deer’ were also her poor, hapless lovers… 

Like the Earl of Essex….

Did they follow her in spite of her cruelty?

Or BECAUSE of it…

In the play the women lead the men a merry dance….

And outwit them at every turn….

But the men come back for more….

And more..

Including Berowne…..

The sceptical, wordly-wise courtier falls head-over-heels in love with the dark-skinned, skittish beauty, Rosaline…

Played, of course, by Emilia Bassano….

Shakespeare had used his Sonnets to try to seduce her…

He had praised her, mocked her, insulted her, surprised her….

And, above all, tried to make her laugh….

Now he attempts to get her into bed by writing a whole play!

But there could be no happy resolution to the entertainment….

The execution of Swithin Wells had cast a long shadow over The Comedy of Errors….

Now sickness in the Southampton family was casting an even longer shadow over Love’s Labour’s Lost….

In the play, the Princess of France’s father is ‘sick and bed-rid’…

So was Mary Southampton’s father, Lord Montague…..

And so was her twin brother, Anthony…..

Both were to die later in the year….

Artists are often prophetic in their work……

Shakespeare ends his ‘comedy’ with the arrival of Mercade….

 …..who informs the Princess of the death of her father…..

The Ladies tell their adoring Lords to retreat from the pleasures of the world for a year….

Then, if they still love their ladies, make their suits again….

Berowne then famously says….

That’s too long for a play….

A  sad conclusion…..

But Shakespeare and Nashe, as we shall see in our next post, had their triumphs on the way…..

(It’s best to read Part Five now.)

It is with great pleasure that the Agents of The Shakespeare Code announce that on…..

23rd November, 2011

The Code received its 13,000th VIEW!!!

Not only that….

SIXTEEN NEW COUNTRIES HAVE JOINED THE SHAKESPEARE CODE!!!

They are, in no particular order….

THE REPUBLIC OF BULGARIA

THE REPUBLIC OF LEBANON

THE KINGDOM OF THAILAND

COLOMBIA

THE KINGDOM OF NORWAY

THE REPUBLIC OF CHILE

 

THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

THE PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES

THE NETHERLANDS

DENMARK

CZECH REPUBLIC

ITALY

MALTA

BELGIUM

INDONESIA

SWEDEN

 

This means there are now……

FORTY TWO PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES!!!

(Please see: The Shakespeare Code Salutes the Nations )

IN VINCULIS INVICTUS!!!

 

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

The Bassano family – a group of dark-skinned Sephardic Jews, originally from Morroco – provided the music for the Cowdray Progress in 1591….

Among them was the beautiful, mixed race Emelia, the young mistress of the Queen’s cousin and Lord Chamberlain, old Lord Hunsdon…

He paid £40 a year for her services, but this did not buy him exclusive rights…

William Shakespeare saw her at Cowdray and was smitten…

She was, as the late A. L. Rowse discovered…..

…..the famous ‘Dark Lady’ of the Sonnets…

SADLY, NO PORTRAIT OF ‘THE DARK LADY’ IS AVAILABLE…

Except of course in Shakespeare’s verse…

She was a  favourite of the Queen and of noble ladies in general….

She helped with their entertainments….

But to Shakespeare, she was an entertainment in herself….

In Sonnet 128 he even envies the wooden keys….

 …….on her virginals….

…..because her fingers ‘walk’ over them….

with gentle gait…

Emelia stayed on at Titchfield after the Queen’s Progress and took part in the Christmas entertainment there…

An established tradition in the Southampton household….

The highly cultured (and deeply Catholic) first Countess, Jane, was described…..

…..as merry as can be with Christmas plays and masques….

And her husband, Thomas Wriothesley, the first Earl….

 …..was a keen amateur actor.

(He was also a keen amateur torturer.  He racked one poor woman to death….)

The Christmas show at Titchfield in 1591, full of references to the cold weather,  was cousin Will’s The Comedy of Errors…

Written, of course, in collaboration with Thomas Nashe….

….who, as ever, wrote the jokes….

The play begins with the gloom of a potential execution….

Egeon, a merchant from Syracuse….

……has travelled to Ephesus, searching for his son, Antipholus, whom he’s not seen for five years…

Antipholus of Syracuse, in turn, is searching for his twin brother, Antipholus of Ephusus, lost, along with his mother (Egeon’s wife) in a storm at sea when they were babies….

He feels like a drop of water in the ocean, seeking another drop but losing itself in the process…

…..a wonderful intellectual/romantic part for Shakespeare himself….

Syracuse and Ephesus are engaged in a trade war, so Egeon is sentenced to death by the Duke of Ephesus….

This is a coded reference to the execution of Swithin Wells, barely a fortnight before the Titchfield Christmas festivities began…

He was a loved, old, literate, Roman Catholic friend of the Southampton family….

Described by the Vatican as….

 …a witty man, skilled in diverse languages…

….who had adored hunting and hawking, and who had given…

 …a good example to the gentry…

….Wells had lived en famille with the Southamptons at Place House…

….in whose Great Hall the Christmas play was to be performed.

Wells had also taught at the Titchfield Grammar School….

…..where he had recruited young Englishmen to train as Catholic priests…

Ordained on the continent, they returned to England as misssionaries….

And almost certain death….

They were ‘drawn and quartered’….

….(forget the token ‘hanging’)…

ALIVE!!!

Mary, second Countess of Southampton, a strong-willed,  Catholic activist…

….had  sheltered these ‘suicide martyrs’  in her London residence, Southampton House…..

 

…..a stone’s throw from which the ‘dangerous Papist’ Wells had been hanged….

But Shakespeare had been commissioned to write a Christmas entertainment….

So, after a melancholy start,  the play develops into a light-hearted comedy….

 About mistaken identity, marital infidelity and families split apart…

Mary, Countess of Southampton,  had a twin brother, Anthony….

So Shakespeare plundered a Plautus plot that has not just one pair of twins…

BUT TWO!!!

The identical Antipholus twins (the sons of Egeon) have identical servant twins, Dromio of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus…

(Well, it was a Christmas show…)

Dromio of Syracuse was played by Thomas Nashe….

….as he was to play many of the ‘stand-up’ comic parts in the premieres of Shakespeare’s Comedies.

He took, of course, the opportunity to promote himself…..

He was in charge of the comic scenes and so ‘arranges’ for Antipholus of Syracuse (Shakespeare’s part) to describe Dromio of Syracuse (his part) as:

A trusty villain, sir, that very oft

When I am dull with care and melancholy,

Lightens my humour with his merry jests…

Nashe is positively telling the audience he is funny…

Later, as Dromio of Syracuse, he says…

I am an ape….

‘Ape’ was the trademark name of Nashe in ‘real life’.

(Nashe wrote, of himself, at Cambridge, that ‘I was a little ape’.)

Nashe not only promotes himself: he demeans Shakespeare in the process…

As Dromio of Syracuse, he makes unsporting  fun of Shakespeare’s baldness…

Shakespeare was well aware that he was pre-maturely losing his hair….

He makes a beautiful joke of the fact in Sonnet 73 where he writes:

That time of year thou may’st in me behold,

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang….

But Nashe, as Dromio of Syracuse, and talking directly to  Shakespeare as Antipholus of Syracuse, mentions, for no reason at all….

the plain bald pate of Father Time….

….adds…

There’s no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by Nature…

….then goes on to elaborate this theme for another, utterly unfunny….

FORTY LINES!!!

Nashe was always accusing Shakespeare of ‘sucking up’ to the Southampton family, but he does just as much ‘sucking up himself….

To show he is Roman Catholic ‘in spirit’ (he did genuinely admire the charity work done by Catholics)  he has Dromio of Syracuse exclaim….

….O for my beads….

…..meaning, of course, the forbidden Catholic rosary….

If  Elizabeth’s soldier-thugs had found a rosary behind the panelling at Titchfield, the Southampton family would have followed Swithin Wells to the block….

But The Comedy of Errors was given in private performance…

In the same way the old Latin Mass was still celebrated in private at Titchfield ….

So everyone in the audience was relaxed about references to Roman Catholicism….

Indeed, one of the Old Faith’s great rites, exorcism, is affectionately sent up in the absurd figure of the schoolmaster-conjuror, Pinch….

 

He tries to cure ‘the possession’ of Antipholus of Ephesus, whose twin bother, Antipholus of Syracuse, has dined with his wife, Adriana…

 

Antipholus of Ephesus denies all knowlege of the meal.

So, everyone thinks he is possessed….

Antipholus of Syracuse, meanwhile, falls in love with Adriana’s sister, Luciana, and describes her as….

…..our earth’s wonder, more than earth divine….

Scholars have taken this to be a coded compliment to Queen Elizabeth….

But Antipholus goes on to also describe Luciana as a….

…sweet mermaid…..

….and he asks her to…..

…..Spread o’er the silver waves [her] golden hair…’

A compliment to a Queen is intended…..

But to a dead, Scottish, Catholic Queen…

Who had golden-red hair…

Mary Queen of Scots….

 

Her personal symbol was the mermaid….

In the Will she made before her confinement in 1566, she left her lover, the Earl of Bothwell….

….a miniature figurine of a mermaid set in diamonds, holding a diamond mirror and a ruby comb…

The following year, Bothwell (whose heraldic crest was the hare) was accused of killing Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley…

Mary was lampooned as a crowned, bare-breasted mermaid, with her hair falling down to her shoulders, defending her lover with a whip…

 Later that year, Mary was imprisoned in the Black Turnpike in Edinburgh, ostensibly to save her from the mobs who were baying for her blood….

On 16th June she appeared at her window…

……with her bodice undone, her breasts exposed and her tangled hair loose, and with ‘piteous lamentations’ made a distraught appeal for help from the citizens who had gathered below…

(Alison Weir)

As a teenager, Queen Mary had made two earlier bare-breasted appearances…

One in Francois Clouet’s The Bath of Diana…

 The other in his A Lady at her Toilet…

 Even the long-bearded,  Scottish Calvinist John Knox….

….(who had compared Mary Queen of Scots to Jezebel) had to admit that the six foot tall woman possessed….

……some enchantment whereby men are bewitched….

So when Shakespeare, as Antipholus of Syracuse, says to Luciana…

Sing, siren for thyself, and I will dote…’

….the Catholic audience in Titchfield audience would be remembering their dead queen with an erotic thrill….

And Shakespeare would be nailing his Roman Catholic colours to the Southampton mast…

●

Place House, before its conversion by the first Earl of Southampton in 1538,  had been an Abbey run by Premonstratensian monks…

Indeed, the first Earl’s wife, Countess Jane, voiced concern that the chapel – where King Henry VI had married Margaret of Anjou – was to be converted to a master bedroom…

The new Gatehouse ran right through the nave……

Shakespeare makes reference to the old Catholic function of Place House by setting the last act of The Comedy of Errors in front of…

the abbey here’…

…..a phrase he uses in the play…

FIVE TIMES!!!

He uses the word ‘abbey’ itself seven times in the play….

And only uses the word ‘abbey’ five more times in his COMPLETE WORKS!!!

The Abbess even specifically mentions….

‘….the ditch behind the Abbey here…..

The Abbess  – ‘a virtuous and reverend lady’ – would have been an ideal part for devout Catholic, Mary, second countess of Southampton.

Her father and step-mother, Lord and Lady Montague, had performed in public before the Queen on her Progress a few months before….

Why shouldn’t she perform in her own house, in private?

She would have loved dressing up as an Abbess!

The Abbess determines to ‘make a formal man again’ of the seemingly crazed Antipholus of Ephesus, by using….

….wholesome syrups, drugs and holy prayers….

and explains that it is…..

…a branch and parcel of mine oath,

A charitable duty of my order…..’

Pastoral care had also been the ‘duty’ of Titchfield Abbey’s white-robed  monks…

By acknowledging the power of this healing process – with its reliance on prayer as well as medicine  – Shakespeare is acknowledging the power of the Old Faith itself….

There is a great part for Emelia, the Dark Lady, as well….

The Courtesan who operates from ‘The Porpentine’ – a bordello in Ephusus…

She wants the money back for the ring she has given Antipholus of Ephesus and exclaims…

Forty ducats is too much to lose…’

This is a dig at Emelia’s £40 a year allowance from old Lord Hunsdon…

Another ‘Dark Lady’ in-joke occurs when we learn the name of the Abbess…

It is Emelia….

An entirely different sort of ‘nun’, of course…

●

At the conclusion of the play a family that has been split apart comes together. The Abbess turns out to be Egeon’s lost wife…

The Southampton family was also split apart. The second Earl had gone to his grave hating his wife, Mary – and her son had inherited this hatred….

Shakespeare is using his art to try to heal this spiritual rift – a process he was to take to audacious lengths in A Midsummer Night’s Dream….

●

A performance of The Comedy of Errors was later given at Gray’s Inn, London, on 28th December, 1594.

The third Earl of Southampton had been a member of this particular Inn of Court (just opposite his London residence) since he graduated from Cambridge in 1589.

The play was a catastrophe…

It was the culmination of a riotous evening, during which, through lack of space the audience sat on the stage itself…

 So nothing could be properly seen or heard….

Also, the aristocratic  members of Gray’s Inn were offended by the fact that the actors were ‘base and common fellows’…

These cannot have been the Lord Chamberlain’s Men who now included Burbage and Shakespeare and who had considerable prestige….

Lord Hunsdon (who had been made Lord Chamberlain in 1585) and had been managing and protecting players since the 1560’s and performers working under his name enjoyed considerable prestige…

Besides, his Men were busily entertaining the Queen down the river at Greenwich on that night….

Probably with A Midsummer Night’s Dream….

It was most likely a scratch group of actors who turned up at Gray’s Inn, put together by Southampton (who had just come of age) to show off the play his family had commissioned…

And to upstage his mother, who had commissioned The Dream as well…

The Comedy of Errors, Catholic and homely, was quite wrong for a drunken audience of ‘Hooray-Henries and Henriettas’ who seem to have taken personal offence at the play’s references to magic and conjuring…

They complained they had been ‘pinched on both sides’ – a reference to Pinch the schoolmaster exorcist….

Southampton, as far as we know, never ‘produced’ anything again… 

Wise chap…

(It’s best to read ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Decoded. Part Four next.)

 

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code…

It is with great pleasure that we announce that on Tuesday,  15 November, 2011, The Code received its….

12,000th VIEW!!!!

Not only that….

This week Switzerland abandoned its neutrality……

IT JOINED THE SHAKESPEARE CODE!!!

 This means that there are now….

TWENTY-SIX PARTICIPATING NATIONS….

 in……

THE SHAKESPEARECODEZONE….

Please see: ‘The Shakespeare Code Salutes the Nations’.

If your country does not feature in the list, let us know and we will be proud to fly your flag for you!!!

As Trixie the Cat says……….

We’ve got more flags than the exterior of Harrods!

YO-DA-LAY-EE-DOO!!!

(It is best to read Part One first.)

To decode A Midsummer Night’s Dream we must first decode Love’s Labour’s Lost.

And to decode Love’s Labour’s Lost we must first decode the Progresses of Queen Elizabeth….

The specialist subject of Trixie the Cat….

The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth

A Trixie Lecture

Every summer, unless there was a Plague, Queen Elizabeth would hit the road…

Taking her entire Court with her…

That is, between two or three hundred people…

They would stay as ‘guests’  in the homes and grounds of her wealthy subjects…

Who would have no say in the matter whatsoever…

Her motives for doing so were as varied and complex as she was…

They were….

1. To escape bad smells….

Elizabeth’s witty godson, John ‘Ajax’ Harington…

………had invented the water-closet, but it was not in general use…

So, every summer the latrines in the royal Palaces had to be cleared….

This produced a stink of terrifying proportions….

Elizabeth, who couldn’t even stand the smell of cooking, sought the refuge of the open air…

2. To see the countryside…..

Elizabeth loved travelling through the English counties, even through what Lord Burghley called…

the dangerous rocks and valleys….in the wilds of Kent and Sussex….

She would travel, masked, on horseback….

Unless the varicose ulcer on her leg was playing up, in which case she was carried  in a litter.

If she liked a place she would stay much longer than she intended…

A great, if expensive, honour for that region…

3. To show her love for her subjects….

A Progress gave Elizabeth the chance to ‘play’ the crowd….

She had no standing army, simply two hundred ‘Pensioners’….

NOT Chelsea Pensioners!!!

These were young, tall and aristocratic, clad in tight white velvet and chosen solely for their good looks…

(Elizabeth was NOTORIOUS for picking up dishy men…)

But with no proper  ‘army’ as such, she needed to stay popular if she were to remain Queen….

If a  poor person in the streets gave her a bunch of wild flowers, she would clasp it to her bosom as though it were the greatest treasure on earth…

If children wanted to sing for her, she would stand listening for hours in the pouring rain…

And when people threw their hats in the air in her honour, she would throw her hat in the air as well…

In Norfolk, in 1578, the Master of the Grammar School was so overcome with nerves he could hardly deliver his speech of welcome to the Queen…

She called him over and told him…

Not to be afeared….

Afterward she said that his speech was….

….the best that ever I heard…..

And took off her glove so he could kiss her hand…

(However, she couldn’t bear to see ugly or disabled people. Her Pensioners always pushed them to the back of the crowd…)

 3. To have fun…..

Elizabeth’s subjects would put on lavish feasts, dances and entertainments for her, often in the open air to show off the grounds of their estates….

(Mind you, she was nobody’s fool….she always took her own cook with her.)

4. To show her subjects she was in good health…

Rumours of  Elizabeth’s ill health – death, even – persisted throughout her reign.

So, by travelling through the countryside, she proved to everyone she was still alive…

She might drive the point home by dancing a spirited galliard or two…

And indulging in a spot of deer carnage….

She loved to shoot deer with a crossbow (from a specially constructed ‘standing’) as they were run past her….

 At point-blank range….

4. To destroy her enemies….

If you had crossed Elizabeth, you were expected to be particularly generous when you were her host.

Poor Lord Hertford, described as….

…of very small stature and of timid and feeble character…

….had angered Elizabeth by marrying Lady Jane Grey’s sister….

She produced a son, Lord Beauchamp, who technically at least, had a stronger claim on the throne than Elizabeth…

Elizabeth threw Hertford and his wife into the Tower…

Not wanting to be incarcerated again, Hertford spent a fortune when Elizabeth came to visit him at Elvetham….

He dug a ‘great pond’ (more like a lake) in his grounds in the shape of a crescent moon….

 

…..this was to flatter ‘The Moon Queen’.

Aquatic ballets and battles were staged,  at the climax of which a ‘sea-nymph’ presented Elizabeth with a ‘costly sea-jewel’…

So costly it bankrupted Hertford….

And the entertainment didn’t do him any good…

Five years later he was back in the Tower again…

 5. To check on the faith of her subjects….

Elizabeth had vowed to eradicate Roman Catholicism from England….

She had kept the stoles, vestments, candles and church bells of the Catholic faith….

But they were only to be used to celebrate HER!!!

Church bells were to be rung as she passed by on her Progresses and the priests and their choirboys were to greet her in all their finery….

Families had to vacate their homes during a Progress, ostensibly so that the Privy Council could meet there….

In reality, Elizabeth’s soldiers would smash up the panelling in their houses to search for signs of ‘massing’…

Or ‘priest-holes’….

On the Norfolk Progress, Elizabeth’s soldiers found a wooden Madonna, hidden in one of her host’s hay-lofts….

They burnt it in the fire-place of the Great Hall…..

…to the unspeakable joy of everyone…

Except the host…

He was sent to Norfolk jail where he died, still incarcerated, twenty years later…

6. To save money….

For ten weeks of the year, some-one else had to pay for all of Elizabeth’s hangers-on….

●

But the Progress that will be of most interest to Brothers and Sisters of The Code is one that occured in 1591….

When the Queen visited Cowdray and Titchfield….

Cowdray was owned by Anthony Browne, first Viscount Montague….

 …..the father of Mary Browne, second Countess of Southampton…

 …..who was the mother of Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton….

Lord Montague, one of the leading Catholics in the land, had been a close friend of Philip II when he had been King of England….

He had been Philip’s Master of Horse and his Ambassador at Rome….

Montague had plotted with his son-in-law, the Second Earl of Southampton, and the Northern Lords, to free Mary Queen of Scots from jail…

…..and overthrow Queen Elizabeth….

Montague and Southampton were lucky to escape with their heads. She despised Southampton, but realised that Montague had a genuine faith and was a good man….

So she appointed him Lord Lieutenant of the Shire….

Montague reponded with completely loyalty, except in matters of faith….

He held secret Masses and harboured two Catholic priests….

They wore livery ‘with chains of gold about their necks’ and posed as members of his household staff….

They probably tended on Elizabeth when she came to visit….

●

We have a complete pamphlet account of Elizabeth’s six day stay at Cowdray…..

She arrived at 8 p.m. on Saturday 15th August, on horseback, accompanied by ‘a great train’. As soon as she was spotted, a band struck up which suddenly stopped when she arrived at Cowdray Bridge…

A Porter dressed in armour then informed her that, like Thebes, the Castle would only stand as long as music was playing…..

UNLESS….

the wisest and fairest and most fortunate of all creatures should by her first step make the foundation staid and by the glance of her eyes make the turret steady….

The porter then presented the Queen with a large wooden key, the key to Lord Montague’s heart…

Assuming her role as the saviour of Cowdray, Elizabeth took the key, saying…

…..she would swear for him there were none more faithful…. 

Then, alighting from her horse, Elizabeth embraced Lady Montague, who, in a well-scripted response…

..weeping, as it were, in her bosom….

….exclaimed…

Oh happy time! O joyful day…

On Sunday: Montague’s cooks roasted ‘three oxen and and a hundred and forty geese…’

On Monday: The Queen was given a cross-bow by a singing nymph….

Then shot deer from a standing, accompanied by the music of the dark-skinned Bassano family, sheltered in ‘a delicate bower’.

Lord Montague’s sister shot one deer to the Queen’s four, so she was not invited to dine that evening on Her Majesty’s table.

The Queen left her cross-bow at Cowdray as a memento of her visit….

On Tuesday: Viewing ‘my Lord’s walks, ‘ the Queen stumbled across a Pilgrim, who told her of a wonderful oak, guarded by ‘a rough-hewed ruffian’ armed with a stave…

The Pilgrim led her to the oak, which fond hung with her own arms and those of the Nobles and Gentlemen of thet Shire’.

In her presence, the ruffian became less rough, and told the Queen that though her courage has made her feared abroad, it is her clemency that has made her loved at home…

Thus he thanks her for sparing Lord Montague’s head…

That night the Privy Council met again in Montague’s house…

On Wednesday:  Montague dined his Queen al fresco at a table twenty-four yards long…

She encountered yet another allegorical figure, this time an Angler fishing in ‘a goodly fish pond’. He moralised on the state of this ‘nibbling’ world’ and blamed his fishless state on the presence of the Queen….

She shone so brightly, like the sun, that the fish could see his hooks through the bait….

However, with much play on ‘carp’ and ‘carping’, a fishermen then appeared, dragging fish in a net which he deposited at the foot of the Queen…

…an unworthy present for a Prince to accept…

On Thursday: The Queen dined with all the Lords and Ladies of the Shire at a table that had grown to forty-eight yards in length…

That evening the country folk presented themselves to the Queen…

..in a pleasant dance with tabor and pipe: and the Lord Montague and his Lady among them, to the great pleasure of all the beholders, and gentle applause of Her Majesty…

Then, at the beginning of September,  progressed on to Titchfield, where she had ordered two standings to be built….

In October she returned to her Richmond Palace. She appointed Commissioners for every Shire in England…

…..to enquire of all personsas to their attendance at Church, their receiving of seminarists and priests and Jesuits, their devotion to the Pope or King of Spain, and to give information as to suspicious changes of residence….

●

William Shakespeare, who was certainly present at the Cowdray and Titchfield Progresses, sends all this up in Love’s Labour’s Lost…

But not before he had written The Comedy of Errors….

(It’s best to read Part Three now.)