The Shakespeare Code

(It is best to read ‘Macbeth’ Decoded. Parts One, Two, Three  and Four first).

THE STORY THUS FAR…..

The Gang of Four – the Earls of Southampton and Essex, Lady Penelope Rich and her lover, Lord Mountjoy –  have commissioned Shakespeare to write The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Its purpose is to persuade King James VI of Scotland to invade England and seize the throne from Elizabeth. By doing so, James would…

1. Ensure his Succession.

2. Destroy the power of The Fox and The Ape (Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Robert Cecil).

3. Free the Earl of Essex from house arrest, and..

4. Free England itself from the ‘tyrannous’ reign of Elizabeth Tudor.

King James is to ride to the border of England at the head of the Scottish army. Mountjoy is to join him there with half the English army which he will bring over from Ireland.

They will then invade England…

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The main problem with the plan was James himself.

Timid and shy, he would scream if anyone drew a sword in his presence….

So, Shakespeare’s aim in writing Macbeth was to show King James that war was glorious, and that an invasion of England would be morally correct…

Shakespeare had written Henry V earlier in the year (1599) and Macbeth does for Scottish patriotism what Henry V had done for English patriotism. 

The play is not only set in Scotland: events themselves are seen from a Scottish perspective. The Norwegians are the enemy and anyone who opposes the Scottish King Duncan is automatically a ‘rebel’…

This confirms The Code’s conviction that the play was first written for a Scottish audience.

(No mention is made, of course, of King Duncan’s other true-life enemy, Denmark, as James now had a Danish wife.)

War is shown in the play as an opportunity to display both bravery and loyalty. 

Macbeth the soldier……

……without hesitation, ‘unseams’ the rebel Macdonwald ‘from the nave to the chops’ [navel to chin] then cuts off his head and fixes it on the castle’s battlements.

For this he is rewarded by King Duncan with a new title and he enjoys  (briefly, before he enters the world of politics) the ‘golden opinions’ of his countrymen and women…

By implication, these ‘golden opinions’ would also be won by King James if he were to invade England…

But Shakespeare needs to convince James of the rightness of the action: Queen Elizabeth, after all, was related to James through King Henry VII….

Elizabeth herself was also an anointed monarch and James believed in the Divine Right of Kings.

Shakespeare sets about his task by employing one of his codes…

Although Macbeth is set in the past, it is really about the present…

Scotland is really England.  And England is really Scotland…

The murder of the saintly King Duncan, when a guest in the home of the Macbeths, is a coded re-run of the execution of James’s mother, the bewitching Mary Queen of Scots….

…..when she had been a ‘guest’ in the land of Queen Elizabeth.

Lord and Lady Macbeth, as the play progresses, begin to embody many of the characteristics of Queen Elizabeth which James would have recognised instantly…

1. Her hesitation….

Macbeth hesitates before killing Duncan, weighing up the pros and cons……

He’s here  in double trust:

First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,

Strong both against the deed; then as his host,

Who should against his murtherer shut the door,

Not bear the knife myself….

Elizabeth, described by contemporary historian, William Camden, as ‘a woman naturally slow in her resolutions’….

 …..dithered about the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in the same way…

In the midst of these doubtful and perplexed thoughts, which so troubled and staggered the Queen’s [Elizabeth] mind that she gave herself over wholly to solitariness, sat many times melancholic and mute and frequently sighing muttered to herself, ‘Aut fer aut feri’ – either bear with her or smite her… And ‘ne feriare, feri’ – Strike lest thou be stricken….

 2. Her assumption of a masculine role…

Lady Macbeth asks the ‘spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts’ to ‘unsex’ her and ‘fill’ her

…from the crown to the toe, top-full

Of direst cruelty…

Elizabeth would often refer to herself as a ‘Prince’ and in 1560 said to the Swedish Ambassador…

I have the heart of a man and I am not afraid of anything…. 

Camden describes how, at the time of the Armada, ‘with a masculine spirit’ she…

….. took a view of her army and camp at Tilbury, and riding about through the ranks of armed men drawn up on both sides her, with a Leader’s truncheon in her hand, sometimes with a martial pace, another while gently like a woman, incredible it is how much she encouraged the hearts of her captains and soldiers by her presence and speech to them….

3. Her belief in fortune-telling…

Macbeth seeks out the witches to ask them more about the future…. 

He ends up by believing in their predicitons completely…

Elizabeth, to learn about the future, would often consult the Mortlake Magus, Dr. John Dee….

He calculated the most auspicious time for her coronation….

 …and interpreted her dreams for her.

In 1577 (the year he predicted the founding of the ‘incomparable British Empire’) he protected Elizabeth from the Tudor equivalent of voodoo magic. 

A Roman Catholic priest-cum-sorceror from Islington had been sticking pins into a wax image of the Queen… 

4.  Her blame-shifting….

Lord and Lady Macbeth put the blame for Duncan’s murder on the two innocent grooms who were guarding the King…

Elizabeth put the blame for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots on her innocent secretary, William Davison…

5. Her use of hit-men….

Macbeth hires two, then three, murderers to kill Banquo.

Elizabeth ordered  Sir Amias Paulet and Sir Drue Drury to murder Mary Queen of Scots in secret.

The gentlemen declined, to Elizabeth’s fury…

She claimed they were lacking in ‘zeal and care’.

6. Her fear of loud noises….

Lady Macbeth is terrified by the shrieking of an owl and Macbeth by the knocking at the gates.

He asks…

How is’t with me when every noise appals me?

Alison Weir, Elizabeth’s brilliant biographer, tells us the Queen was startled by ‘loud noises’.

(Elizabeth the Queen, p. 231.)

7. Her propensity to fits….

Macbeth suffers a fit when he sees the ghost of Banquo at the feast….

Lady Macbeth says to the guests…

…My Lord is often thus,

And hath been from his youth: pray you, keep seat;

The fit is momentary; upon a thought

He will again be well…

Elizabeth suffered, from youth, from similar fits. She would lie, unconscious and speechless, for hours on end and would often swoon through sheer rage…

On 30 June, 1586, the year before the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the Spanish Ambassador reported to Philip II how…

…when the Queen was going to Chapel, as usual in full magnificence, she was suddenly overcome with a shock of fear, which affected her to such an extent that she at once returned to her apartments, greatly to the wonder of those present…

8. Her bad dreams….

Macbeth talks about…

…these terrible dreams

That shake us nightly….

…and Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, trying to wash Duncan’s blood from her hands as she exclaims….

Out, damn’d spot….

 Elizabeth suffered from ‘terrible dreams’ before the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.

After she had sent orders to Paulet to murder the Scottish Queen….

…..she was awakened by a violent shriek from the lady who always slept in her bedchamber. The Queen asked her ‘what ailed her?’ She answered, ‘I dreamed that I saw the hangman strike off the head of the Queen of Scots; and forthwith he laid hands on Your Majesty, and was about to behead you as well, when I screamed with terror.’  The Queen exclaimed, ‘I was at the instant you awoke me, dreaming the very same dream’…

 [From The History of the Life and Death of that Excellent Princess, Queen Elizabeth; to which is added the Trial, Sufferings and Death of Mary Queen of Scots’. Quoted by the Victorian historian, Agnes Strickland.]

10. Her isolation and depression…

Macbeth seperates himself more and  more from his fellow beings – even his wife – and on hearing of her death, utters words of overwhelming despair…

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is  a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing…

Elizabeth (who would these days be described as an ‘abused child’) suffered severe bouts of depression all her life. She would stay alone in her room trying to ‘shun melancholy’  by playing the lute…

….or the virginals, which, she claimed, she had never played before a man… 

After the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587 and the deaths, in the following year, of her lover, the Earl of Leicester….

 ……and the only man who could ‘un-dumpish’ her, her jester, Richard Tarleton….

……Elizabeth’s depressions became acute.

Lord Burghley, on one occasion, had to smash down the doors of her bed-chamber to get her to eat…

And for the next seven years, Foreign Ambassadors were banned from the Court.

They might have reported on the true state of the Queen’s health….

11. Her propensity to ‘play-act’…

When the murder of King Duncan is discovered, Lady Macbeth, feigning grief and surpise, exclaims…

What! in our house?

….a response so unnatural that a suspicious Banquo remarks…..

Too cruel, anywhere…’

Lady Macbeth then proceeds to suffer a fainting fit…

Elizabeth had knowingly signed Mary Queen of Scots’s death-warrant. She had even joked about it with her secretary, Davison.

But, according to the Regency historian, Lucy Aikin, Elizabeth…

….heard the news of Mary’s death with great indignation, her countenance altered, her speech faltered and failed her and through excessive sorrow she stood in a manner astonished; insomuch that she gave herself over to passionate grief, putting herself into mourning habit and shedding abundance of tears….

The same day that the people of London heard that this Queen [Mary Queen of Scots] had been beheaded, they made bonfires as though England had gained some victory. Elizabeth, having put her head out of the window, demanded to know what the bonfires meant. She was told it was because of the death of Queen Mary; to which she replied with strange hypocrisy and as though greatly surprised. ‘What, is the Queen my sister dead? And who has put her to death? They have deceived me then’….

Kendra Baker (who gets his information from the seventeenth century satirist, Gregorio Leti) writes:

One nobleman who was present [at Elizabeth’s reaction to the execution] could not help saying, ‘See, there, the very trick of a play-actress’…

And even the loyal Camden admits he doesn’t know if Elizabeth’s tears were feigned or not. 

Neither, probably, did Elizabeth…

 12. Her tyranny…

Macbeth is referred to as a ‘tyrant’ FIFTEEN TIMES in the play…

Elizabeth was also accused of ‘a barbarous and cruel tyranny’ by an anonymous notice placed on Mary Queen of Scots’ s tomb in Peterborough Cathedral.

But, most important, Elizabeth is described as a ‘tyrant’ by Shakespeare himself…

 In Sonnet 107 Shakespeare describes how ‘the mortal moon’ [Elizabeth] has ‘endured her eclipse’ [died]…

The Earl of Southampton, however, made immortal by Shakespeare’s verse, will still have a ‘monument’…

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

Elizabeth’s tomb in Westminster Abbey was surrounded by brass railings. She was certainly one of the ‘tyrants’….

12 (a).  Her contempt for conventional medicine…

Macbeth asks the doctor about the state of health of his wife, the Queen….

The Doctor replies that it is her  ‘thick-coming fancies’ that keep her from sleeping.

Macbeth then asks the Doctor whether he can…

….minister to a mind diseas’d,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And cleanse with some sweet oblivious antitdote

Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

 To which the Doctor replies:….

Therein the patient

Must minister to himself…

Macbeth  responds by saying…

Throw physic [medicine] to the dogs…’

Elizabeth used to say that…

Abstincence [from rich food as well as wine] was the noblest part of physic…

She refused all ‘purgations’ (a standard treatment for women) and even in her final illness, William Camden tells us that…. 

….she refused all use of physic as she had always done…..

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The action of Macbeth shows that Lord and Lady Macbeth are bloodthirsty usurpers of the Scottish throne who deserve to die…

The implication is that Elizabeth is a bloodthirsty usurper of the English throne who deserves to die as well.

She had usurped it from Mary Queen of Scots…

But James not only needed convincing that an invasion of England would be morally right….

He also needed convincing it would be successful and advantageous as well….

●●●

(It’s best to read ‘Macbeth’ Decoded. Part Six‘ now.)

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The Shakespeare Code is delighted to announce that on Sunday 16 October, 2011, shortly after the transmission of Downton Abbey…..

 ….The Code received its….

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MACBETH DECODED!!!

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

THE TRIXIE LECTURES (II)

People often condemn King James VI and I for having an obsessive, prurient and superstitious interest in  witchcraft…

But when he returned to Scotland with his new Danish wife, Anne, he had to investigate it.

Otherwise he might have died….

Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, had paid witches to assassinate him, not only with magic (which might or might not have worked) but with poison as well (which certainly would!)

The riotous, drunken, Hallowe’en Sabbat at North Berwick (see Part Three) had been reported to the authorities and the usual suspects were rounded up to appear before James at Holyrood House.

Led, of course, by the oldest witch in the business, Agnes Sampson…

She denied everything, till she was stripped, shaved and tortured…

After that she would agree with anything anyone said….

At one point her confession became so ‘miraculous and strange’ that James refused to believe it, but….

….taking his Majesty a little aside, she declared unto him the very words which passed between the King’s Majesty and  his Queen at Upslo [Oslo] in Norway the first night of their marriage, with their answer each to other; whereat the the King’s Majesty wondered greatly , and swore by the living God that he believed all the Devils in Hell could not have discovered the same, acknowledging her words to be most true…

The very fact that Agnes could take the King of Scotland ‘a little aside’ shows the power she had over the young man…

Later she went on to butter him up by saying that he….

..had never come safely from the sea, if his faith had not prevailed above their intentions’…

….and that she had…

…..resolved never to confess, were [it] not [for] his Majesty’s speeches which had moved her, whereof she praised God that had wrought a repentance in her and a sense and feeling for her sins…’

Agnes played the repentance card too late. She was strangled and burned on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh on 28th January, 1591.

She knew far too much about the King’s private life to be allowed to live…

But the King ‘took a great delight to be present’ at the examination of Agnes. He even asked the witches to perform the reel they had danced at the Sabbat.

The main reason for becoming a witch, as we have seen, was the economic benefit. But there was a fun, anti-establishment side to ‘the craft’ as well – not to be sniffed at in dour, Calvinistical Scotland…

James became fascinated by witchcraft and even wrote a pamphlet about it…

 

Published in 1597, but probably written before then, it shows how witches are slaves to Satan, who, being a spirit…

….easily spies our affections, and so conforms himself thereto, to deceive us to our wrack.

James supported the witch hunts in Scotland – indeed, Demonlogie states quite clearly that witches should be burnt…

However, in 1597, the year of the publication of Demonologie, everything changed…

In April James stopped the trial of two suspected witches in Aberdeen and in August disbanded all commissions set up to try witchcraft….

What had happened?

Margaret Aitken, ‘the great witch of Balwery’, claimed to be able to spot another witch, simply by looking in her eyes. The authorities took this turncoat ‘witchfinder’ at her word and she was…

….carried from town to town to make discoveries in that kind…’

She caused the deaths of many women in Glasgow – but here she was exposed as a fraud. She was presented with the same woman on two successive days and declared her guilty on one day and innocent the next…

James, to his credit, immediately closed the entire ‘witch industry’ down. He spent the rest of his reign trying to expose the human trickery associated with witchcraft.

 But his belief in the prophetic potency of witches never left him….

●

When William Shakespeare arrived in Edinburgh in October, 1599 (see Part One. What really happened in 1599. ) he had three sources to draw on to create the witches in Macbeth.

(1) A 1592 pamphlet, News from Scotland, which gave a detailed account of the North Berwick sabbat.

(2.) King James’s own book, Demonologie, published two years before.

(3.) Oral history. (Agnes had been executed in the town only eight years before).

As a consequence, all the witches in Macbeth behave as though they were Agnes Sampson.

1. They sing and dance.

2.They use ‘familiars’ (cats and the like!) to create spells.

3. They are poor.

(One witch looks on enviously at a sailor’s wife who ‘mounch’d, and mounch’d and mounch’d’ chestnuts in her lap).

4. They sail in sieves.

5. They create storms at sea…

 

6. They use bits of human and animal remains for their spells.

But the Macbeth witches do some things that Agnes never did…

1.  They own their own winds which they buy and sell… 

(Agnes had to create storms by – shudder! – drowning cats).

2. They pervert the meaning of language…..’Fair is foul’ to them and ‘foul is fair’….

(Agnes, to give her her due, was completely direct in her statements).

3. They vanish ‘into the air’ and melt ‘as breath into the wind’.  

(Poor old Agnes couldn’t do that. If she could, she would have avoided execution…)

What – or who – is this fourth source for the witches in Macbeth?

Step forward Thomas Nashe….

As Brothers and Sisters of The Code well know, Nashe collaborated with Christopher Marlowe on Dido Queen of Carthage and with Ben Jonson on the lost Isle of Dogges…

The Code is of the firm opinion that Nashe also collaborated with Shakespeare on Macbeth especially on the witch scenes because…

HE HAD EXPERIENCED (AND WRITTEN ABOUT) WITCHES BEFORE!

The Code believes that while staying with the Earl of Southampton’s family in Hampshire, Nashe had encountered the famous ‘Witch of Upham’ who conned money out of men and humiliated them by riding on their backs..

Nashe had also encountered the case of a local Titchfield farmer who had experienced visions of demons and succubi in his bedroom….

(For a more detailed account of both examples, please see The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis )

Nashe believed (as much as he believed anything!) that….

1. Witches for gold will sell a man a wind

Which in the corner of a napkin wrapt

Shall blow him safe unto what coast he will…’

Summer’s Last Will and Testament, 1592.

2. Everything [a witch says] must be interpreted backwards as witches say their Pater Noster [Lord’s Prayer] good being the character of bad, and bad good…’

Terrors of the Night 1593.

3.  [Witches could be]…spirits of the air, which have no other bodies or forms, but such as by the unconstant glimmering of our eyes is begotten; they are, in truth all show and no substance, deluders of our imagination and nought else….to make it fair or foul when they list….to stir up tempests round about and replenish heaven with prodigies and wonders…’

From Terrors of the Night…

It is The Code’s belief that Nashe’s view of witches – that they are insubstantial spirits of the air who can delude but not control us – has profoundly influenced the portrayal of witchcraft in Macbeth.

Nashe, as we have seen, even writes that witches….

make it fair or foul when they list….

But, as we have also seen, the ‘North Berwick’ witches, the ‘Nashe’ witches and the ‘Macbeth’ witches all have one thing in common – they can predict, with complete accuracy, what is going to happen..

James firmly believed that witches had this power.

Shakespeare (with Nashe) expolited the King’s belief for political ends…

How they did this,  the  Agents of The Code will explain in their next post…

 

‘Bye now….

(It’s best to read ‘Macbeth’ Decoded . Part Five now.)

 

 

The great actor, writer, literary critic, biographer, raconteur and wit…..

SIMON CALLOW…

….has once again endorsed The Shakespeare Code’s theory that William Shakespeare lived and worked in Titchfield, Hampshire.

This theory was first proposed by The Code’s Chief Agent,  Stewart Trotter, in his ground-breaking book, Love’s Labour’s Found (2002)…..

….which Simon was kind enough to read and praise when it was published.

In ‘Guestlist’ in The Sunday Telegraph’s  Seven Magazine (9 October, 2011), under the heading Shakespearean Sightseeing Simon writes….

TITCHFIELD ABBEY, Hampshire. The Abbey’s owner, the Earl of Southampton, was a patron of Shakespeare, who is thought to have spent time here, mingling with the magnificent court of painters, philosophers and musicians and enjoying the fabulous gardens and stupendous library. The experience influenced Shakespeare’s writing, which soon became full of courtiers and sophisticated intellectual banter, and the Abbey’s ruins still give a strong sense of the glamorous new world he had entered…

Thank you, Simon, once again….

(Simon is an Inductee into The Shakespeare Code’s coveted ‘Roll of Honour’. You can read his earlier endorsements by clicking here, and here.)

Simon tours the country in Dr. Marigold and Mr. Chops until early December.

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

In January, 1607, nearly four years after he had become King of England (as well as Scotland) James granted an audience to Sir John Harington – famous for having invented the water closet and hence known by the name of Ajax (a jakes…)

The scholar King first questioned Harington about classical writers in a way that put Harington in mind of his old tutor at Cambridge…

But then the King, suddenly changing the subject…

….did much press for my opinion touching the power of Satan in matters of witchcraft; and asked me, with much gravity,  – ‘If I did truly understand, why the devil did work more with ancient women than others?

I did not refrain from a scurvy jest……

[‘Scurvy jest’ deleted]

More serious discourse did next ensue, wherein I wanted room to continue, and sometime room to escape; for the Queen his mother was not forgotten, nor Davison, neither.

[William Davison was Queen Elizabeth’s secretary who got the blame from Elizabeth for Mary Queen of Scot’s beheading]

His Highness told me her death was visible in Scotland before it did really happen, being, as he said, ‘spoken of in secret by those whose power of sight presented to them a bloody head dancing in the air’.

He then did remark much on this gift, and said he had sought out of certain books a sure way to attain knowledge of future chances…

This extract from Nugae Antiquae shows:

1. Even in 1607, when James had put an end to the wholesale persecution of witches, he still believed that Satan ‘worked with’ women, especially older women.

2. The execution of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was still an issue with him.

3. He believed that some poeple had a ‘gift’ of ‘power of sight’ [second sight] and clearly had been consulting with them before 1587 when his mother was beheaded.

James was trying to draw a distinction between witches who were ‘slaves of Satan’ and those men and women who had powers of prophesy. 

Unfortunately for James – but fortunately for Macbeth – those distinctions were often blurred….

Particularly in the case of Agnes Sampson, one of Scotland’s most talented midwives, who would heal through the power of Christian prayer….

At other times she would summon up ‘the Devil’…

To explain this conundrum, the Agents now call upon the expertise of  Trixie the Cat…

THE TRIXIE LECTURES (I)

First, Brothers and Sisters, a disclaimer . It’s true I’ve not led a blameless life. It’s true I’ve even done a stretch inside….

 

But I have never been a cat to a witch.  For one simple reason….

NO WITCH HAS EVER ASKED ME!

However, being a cat gives you ‘second sight’.  You can see into things….

The reason so many Scottish healers in Shakespeare’s time were ‘witches’ was mainly economic….

There had been famine in Scotland between 1585-7 and the currency had been completely mishandled by the King.

People were starving, not least the celebrated wise woman of Haddington, Agnes Sampson. She was in essence a ‘hired gun’ who would work both for the peasants and the nobility.

Often her clients wanted her to use her skills to do good.

But just as often they wanted her to do evil – especially her aristocratic clients who were in a power struggle with King James….

Agnes’s husband died, leaving her with children to support. It was then she made her pact with ‘the Devil…’

‘The Devil’, who could take the shape of a man, or even a black dog, ALWAYS approached a potential witch when he or she was alone. So, conveniently, there were never any witnesses…

‘The Devil’ ALWAYS offered financial secrity to his followers – and that was his great power….

If you let it be known to your clients that you had ‘the Devil’ on your side, your fees would go up.

But it was a dangerous game as your enemies could have you burnt to death….

Whether ‘the Devil’ really appeared to Agnes, whether she projected her own powers onto a man (or a dog) or whether she was conning everybody rotten, probably even Agnes, by the end, did not know…

She certainly threw a cat into the sea (how could she?) and a storm followed.  But whether the second event was dependent on the first was a question that was to intrigue James all his life…

But, as we shall see, James knew for certain Agnes had ‘second-sight’…

And it was this ‘second sight’ that has made her the secret star of Macbeth….

●

As King James approached his majority….

….people started to worry.

Young men were continually pouring from his bedchamber, but the King showed no interest in women.

Courtiers pointed out to him that without a wife, he couldn’t have children. And without children his position on the throne would become untenable.

So James agreed, reluctantly, to marry the teenage Anne of Denmark….

This was bad news for James’s cousin, the Catholic, 5th Earl of Boswell, Francis Stewart, who wanted to be King of Scotland.

He commissioned Agnes Sampson to create storms at sea so that James and Anne could not meet…

James moved to Seton, on the estuary of the Forth, where he could have a clear view of Anne’s arrival by sea. He stayed there a fortnight with his friend Robert, 6th Lord Seton, at Seton House…

But news came that storms had forced Anne to land in Norway and, having tried to sail once more, she had given up the journey.

At this point the timid, gay, bashful, stuttering James did an extraordinary thing….

He sailed through the storms to Norway to collect his bride himself…

Like a hero of romance…..

Why?

Six miles from Seton was the village of Haddington, where Agnes Sampson lived….

We know, from her later trial, that at the time the King was at Seton, Agnes was told by ‘the Sprite’ (‘The Devil’)…

that the Queen’s majesty would never come in this country except the king fetched her…

We also know that, although it was illegal, James had consulted a witch near Aberdeen in 1589…..

He’d certainly consulted in ‘secret’ with those with ‘the power of sight’ before his mother’s beheading…

So, Your Cat believes that James undertook the hazardous sea-journey because he was bolsted up by Agnes’s prophesy…

Agnes seems to have been playing the King and Bothwell off against each other…

To make more money…

James and Anne arrived back in Scotland in May, 1590.

On Lammas Eve (31 July) that year (at a Witches Sabbat at Acheson Haven) Agnes proposed the destruction of the King.  It was Bothwell’s idea and ‘The Devil’ suggested toad’s poison for the job…

Then, at All Hallows’ E’en (31 October), 140 witches, led by Agnes sailed, in sieves, to the Kirk at North Berwick….

They danced drunkenly in the graveyard and dug up bodies – bits of which they kept.

‘The Devil’ – ‘like a mickle black man’ – appeared in the pulpit and promised them a waxen image of King James which they could use to destroy him…

 

Then ‘The Devil’ stretched himself over the altar and forced each witch to kiss his bare posterior…

What really happened that night is anybody’s guess: the witches had consumed ‘flagons of wine’ and the ‘wise women’ knew all there was to know about local herbs…

 Perhaps the trip across the estuary of the Forth in sieves really was a ‘trip’…

As for ‘The Devil’ who appeared at the Sabbats and…

did greatly inveigh against the King….

The witches asked him at North Berwick…

Why he did bear such hatred to the King?….

….to which he replied…..

By reason that the King is the greatest enemy (I have) in the world…

Your Cat firmly believes that ‘The Devil’ was no other than the 5th Earl of Bothwell in disguise…

A conclusion (she discovered with delight) that was made in the 1920’s by the great (if now wildly unfashionable) anthroplogist, Margaret Murray….

 

And she should know.

She claimed she could turn herself into a cat…

‘Bye now…

(It’s best to read ‘Macbeth’ Decoded. Part Four now).

We, the Agents, are delighted to announce that on Tuesday,  4 October, 2011, The Shakespeare Code received its……

8,000th View!!!!

And on the day before….

3 October, 2011….

THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY JOINED THE SHAKEPEARE CODE!!!

It is with the greatest of pleasure that we add the flag of Germany to our list of….

24 PARTICIPATING NATIONS!!!

 If your own country is not yet featured by The Code…

(See: ‘The Shakespeare Code Salutes the Nations! )

….please let Trixie the Cat know and she will…

FLY YOUR FLAG FOR YOU!

I certainly will, Brüderlein und Schwesterlein!

Auf wiedersehen….pet.

(It is best to read ‘Macbeth’ Decoded. Part One first).

The Shakespeare Code is of the firm opinion that William Shakespeare (in collaboration with Thomas Nashe) wrote The Tragedy of Macbeth in Edinburgh in 1599.

His intention was to persuade King James VI of Scotland….

 ….to invade England and seize the throne from Queen Elizabeth…..

Shakespeare had been commissioned by ‘The Gang of Four’ – the Earls of Southampton and Essex, Penelope Rich and her lover Lord Mountjoy.

All of them had been terrified by the house-arrest of Essex on his return from Ireland..

And all of them had been communicating with James, in code, for a year or so…

Penelope (codename ‘Rialta’) had even sent him a miniature of herself…

 

James’s code name was ‘Victor’…

Victor over Elizabeth….

●

Shakespeare and Nashe would have received a warm welcome from King James. He loved English actors and had asked Elizabeth to send a troupe to Scotland in 1590 to celebrate his return with his teenage, Danish bride, Anne….

He requested actors again in 1594 to celebrate the baptism of his son, Prince Henry. He had envisaged a Court masque in which a lion appeared, pulling a chariot. He had to abandon the plan because it was thought the lion might frighten the ladies of the Court…

Shakespeare, of course, sends all this up in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Snug the joiner tells the women in the audience not to be afraid of the lion in the Pyramus and Thisbe play: it’s only him in a costume…

James had a favourite English actor called Laurence Fletcher who probably played Macbeth. When it was falsely reported Fletcher had been hanged in England, James threatened to hang Elizabeth’s agent in Scotland in retaliation.

Also, James, unlike Elizabeth, was gay-friendly…

He had suffered an appalling childhood. He was parted from his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, as a toddler….

 …..then fed milk mixed with alcohol by his drunken nurse and whipped black and blue by his sadistic, Calvinist tutor, George Buchanan…

James didn’t learn to walk till the age of five because, as King of Scotland, he was carried everywhere by flunkies.

But, as a teenager….

……he found love.

The 37 year old Catholic French aristocrat, Esmé Stuart, handsome and cultivated….

…… whisked the lonely, young King off his feet.

James created him Earl, then Duke, of Lennox and would openly kiss and embrace him.

In defiance of his tutor, Buchanan (who thought that bad Kings should be kicked out) James adopted Lennox’s French belief that the monarch’s power was absolute.

Lennox also introduced James to Catholics and Jesuits in France and Spain. This led many to suspect that James, who claimed to be a Protestant, was in reality a closet Papist. He had, after all, been baptized a Catholic by his mother….  

She had, however, forbidden the old unhygienic practice of the priest’s spitting down the baby’s thoat…

The Protestants, fearing the power of Lennox over the King, put James under house arrest at Ruthven Castle. Lennox was forced to flee from Scotland and died, the following year, back in his native France.

His embalmed heart was sent back to James who, still incarcerated, wrote the poem Ane Metaphorical Invention of a Tragedy called Phoenix about his love for the French aristocrat…  

James in the poem  compares Lennox to a lovely bird that has winged its way from Arabia to Scotland to be tamed and loved by the King. Unfortunately the other birds become jealous of the Phoenix and attack it. James defends it until he drips with blood and eventually the Phoenix flies away, to die in a foreign land…

This poem was later to inspire Shakespeare’s poem The Phoenix and the Turtle about Shakespeare’s love for another, exotic aristocrat, the Earl of Southampton…

Lennox was the first of many male lovers of James. An English envoy observed in 1588…

[James] gives to everyone that asks, even to vain youths and proud fools, the very lands of his crown or whatever falls, leaving himself nought to maintain his small, unkingly household…’

And in 1589 described James as…

 too much carried by young men that lie in his chamber and are his minions’.

James also surrounded himself with artists and musicians, known as the Castalian Band….

No wonder gay poet Christopher Marlowe wanted to emigrate to Scotland!

But James did enjoy the occasional heterosexual fling…

And he did father three surviving children….

●

The arrival of Shakespeare and the actors in 1599 helped James in his power  struggle with the Presbyterian church.

As William Guthrie of Brechin wrote in 1767…

[Shakespeare’s] drama, which finds access at this day, to the most insensible hearts, had no charms in the eyes of the Presbyterian clergy. They threatened excommunication and church censures to all who attended the playhouse [so] many forbore to attend the theatrical exhibitions.  James considered the insolent interposition of the clergy as a fresh attack upon his prerogative, and ordered those who had been most active in it to retract their menaces; which they unwillingly did: and we are told that the playhouse was then greatly crowded.’

James would have been delighted with his victory and would have paid close attention to Shakespeare’s new play, Macbeth….

He would have known it was another coded message from The Gang of Four…

●

The Gang thought there was a good chance James would go along with their invasion plan because….

1.  It would be an official ‘revenge’ for Queen Elizabeth’s execution of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, in 1587. At the time the Scottish Parliament had dropped to its collective knees to beg James to avenge the English ‘Jezebel’s’ insult to the Scottish nation…

(James had been secretly delighted by the beheading of his mother. She would always have been a threat to his kingship and had planned to have her son kidnapped and sent to Rome).

2. An invasion would fulfil Queen Mary’s hopes that her son would be the first person to unite England and Scotland. At the time of the Armada victory, James had started to write about ‘The Isle’ rather than England and Scotland.

Queen Mary had also hoped James would bring a united Britain back to Rome.

3. An invasion would allow James to escape the dour Calvinism of John Knox’s Scotland and make ‘Merrie’ (and sexually lax) England his home.

4. An invasion would stop Isabella of Spain becoming Queen of England when Elizabeth died. France and Spain had made a sinister peace in 1598…

5. An invasion would also allow James to assassinate Elizabeth – something he was rumoured to have attempted twice before, once in the previous year.

But The Gang also feared James might reject the plan because…

1. He was a coward. He would faint if anyone drew a sword from its sheath and advised his son to wear light armour in battle so he could run away.

This fear may have originated in the womb. Three months before his birth,  his mother Mary, with a gun pointed at her chest, had witnessed the frenzied stabbing (fifty-three times) of her Italian ‘secretary’, David Rizzio….

2. James believed, as a result of his affair with Lennox, in the Divine Right of Kings. Even a ‘tyrant’ like Elizabeth might be fulfilling some plan of God….

3. James had blood-ties, through King Henry VII, with Queen Elizabeth which made killing her a problem. She was ‘family’.

4. James believed that the English despised the Scots and despised him in particular. In 1596 his agent wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth complaining that actors were mocking James – and the Scottish people – on the London stage.

The English and the Scots had been enemies for centuries.

Some think they still are…

So Shakespeare (and The  Gang’s) aim was to demonstrate to James that it was GOD’S PLAN that he should:

1. Reign over both England and Scotland.

2. Unite the Protestant Church with the Catholic Church.

3. Replace Queen Elizabeth.

4. Kill her, if necessary, and…

5. Turn Scotland and England into allies.

James believed, along with many of his contemporaries, that time was cyclical.

As he wrote to his son, Prince Henry, in Basilkion Doron, in 1597….

By reading of authentic histories and chronicles, you shall learn experience by theoric, applying the by-past things to the present estate, quia nihil nunc dici aut fieri, quod non dictum and factum fit prius: [since nothing is spoken or done which has not been spoken or done before] such is the continued volubility of things earthly, according to the roundness of the world, and volubility of the heavenly circles, which is expressed in the wheels in Ezekiel’s vision, and counterfeited by the poets in rota fortunae [the wheel of fortune]…’

The Vision of Ezekiel by William Blake

So, by writing about the past, Shakespeare was commenting directly on the present.

Also, by writing about Banquo , Shakespeare was commenting directly on James.

Banquo, though never a King himself, had fathered the Stuart line….

As we shall see when we examine Macbeth itself…

 (It’s best to read ‘Macbeth’ Decoded. Part Three now.)

 

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code…

Last month (August, 2011) we were delighted to announce that The Code had broken the 1,000 views a month barrier.

This month (September, 2011) we are even more delighted to announce that we have….

DOUBLED OUR FIGURES!

This morning (29 September, 2011) our views for the month stand at 2009…

Our best ever day was two days ago (27 September) when The Code received 120 Views….

It is wonderful to know that there are so many intellectually curious men and women stretched across the globe….

For this relief, much thanks…..

IN VINCULIS, INVICTUS!

On 23rd September, 2011, The Shakespeare Code received its 7,000th View!

Thank you, Brothers and Sisters of The Code….

The Code has also learnt, through a personal communication, that it has an ESTABLISHED FRENCH READERSHIP!

This means there are now 23 PARTICIPATING NATIONS….

AT LEAST!!!

For a week or so in the Summer, Google informed The Code from which country inquiries were coming. Now, for some reason, this data is no longer passed on to us…

So, if the flag of your country does not appear on our list (see The Shakespeare Code Salutes the Nations ) let us know….

AND WE WILL FLY IT FOR YOU!

In the meantime………..

VIVE LA BELLE FRANCE!!!

Le jour de gloire est arrivé…..

William Guthrie of Brechin, the eighteenth century Scottish historian, wrote:

The King [James VI of Scotland], to prove how thoroughly he was now emancipated from the tutelage of his clergy, desired [Queen] Elizabeth to send him this year [1599] a company of English comedians. She complied, and James gave them a licence to act in his capital, and in his court.  I have great reason to think that the immortal Shakespeare was of the number….

The Shakespeare Code concurs….

It believes that William Shakespeare was in Edinburgh in the autumn and winter of 1599…

THE GANG OF FOUR  (plus Shakespeare)

As Brothers and Sisters of the Code well know, Shakespeare was deeply involved in the affairs of his patron and lover, Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton…

….who in turn was deeply involved in the affairs of his best friend, Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex….

…..whose sister, the lovely Penelope Rich….

…..was deeply involved in the affairs of her lover Charles Blount, the eighth Lord Mountjoy…

….who, as a former lover of Queen Elizabeth, was deeply involved in the affairs of all the others….

Apart from friendship, another emotion bound the Gang of Four together…

FEAR!

Queen Elizabeth refused to name her successor, and the Gang worried that when she died either…

1. Civil War would break out again or, worse…
2. A Foreigner would lay claim to the throne.

Either way, the Gang of Four would be politically vulnerable, so they wanted King James VI of Scotland (not too Foreign) to become King of England as well….

As the son of the Roman Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, James was ‘Catholic-friendly’. This suited Southampton (who was a recusant) and the rest of the Gang (who wanted religious tolerance).

In 1598, Essex and his sister Penelope started to write secretly, in code, to King James.

Queen Elizabeth became ‘Venus’ and Essex ‘the Weary Knight’ – weary of trying to satisfy the massive sexual desires of the aging queen….

To complicate matters, Essex’s arch-enemies, Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘The Fox’….

…and the round-backed Sir Robert Cecil, ‘The Ape’…

…were trying to destroy Essex’s influence over the Queen.

They encouraged Elizabeth, against her instincts, to appoint Essex as Lord Deputy of Ireland.

She wanted to keep her current lover, Essex, at Court and send her old toy-boy, Mountjoy, across the Irish Sea instead.

‘The Fox’ and ‘The Ape’ hoped that…

1. Essex would fail, as everyone else had done, to crush the ‘rebels’ in Ireland, and..
2. While he was away they could bad-mouth him at the English Court.

Essex in Ireland didn’t do himself any favours….

He appointed Southampton as his General of Horse – against Elizabeth’s express wishes – and held treasonous meetings with his Irish enemy, the charismatically devious Hugh O’Neil, the second (or some say third) Earl of Tyrone…

To crown it all, Essex abandoned his post in Ireland and rushed, unannounced and covered in mud, into the Queen’s morning bedchamber….

Essex was put under house arrest in September 1599 and the Queen appointed Lord Mountjoy as the new Lord Deputy of Ireland.

It looked as though ‘The Fox’ and ‘The Ape’ had triumphed.

The Gang of Four conceived a daring plan…

King James would march, at the head of an army, to the Borders of Scotland…

There he would publish an open letter to the English government of his right to the Succession…

If his demand was refused, he would invade….

Mountjoy would bring over from Ireland one half of the Queen’s army to support James’s troops…

To persuade James to take part in this audacious scheme, the Gang of Four sent William Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe to Edinburgh in October 1599 – along with the troupe of actors that James had so conveniently requested…

The two men wrote a Court entertainment for the Scottish king….

It was called The Tragedy of Macbeth….

Now read: ‘Macbeth’ Decoded. Part Two. The Background to ‘Macbeth’.

TRIXIE THE CAT SAYS….

If you liked this post, then why not read Shakespeare in Titchfield, or Shakespeare in Italy, or even Shakespeare, The Movie I.

But don’t forget to read Your Cat’s review of Eddie Linden, (F. S. C.‘s) fantastic new collection of verse ‘A Thorn in the Flesh’ and order it (a snip at £7.50) from its delightful publishers, Emily and Susan Johns, at Hearing Eye – books@hearingeye.org

Don’t forget to say that Trixie sent you!

Bye, now…