The Shakespeare Code

Martin Jarvis, famous for (among much else) his radio broadcasts of Richmal Compton’s sublime William Stories, has been inducted into The Shakespeare Code’s  ROLL OF HONOUR.

His brilliant  production of Sir Terence Rattigan’s great play The Browning Version (starring Michael York) was  broadcast on the B.B.C.’s  Radio 4  at 2.30 p.m. Saturday, 11th June.

At the end of the broadcast, he gave a short talk describing how, in 1976, Sir Terence visited the King’s Head Theatre in Islington to see the revival of the play which re-established his reputation in the English speaking world.

The play was produced by the late, great Dan Crawford.

It was directed by The Shakespeare Code’s chief reporter,  Stewart Trotter, who was given the Hugh Beaumont Award for his production by the London Theatre Critics.

Simon Callow (whose name is also inscribed on The Code’s ROLL OF HONOUR) on hearing of this award immediately dubbed it:

A BINKIE!!!

Congratulations on the website, which is clearly garnering attention….I stare in awe from the outside, without much knowledge, but with admiration…

 The Shakespeare Code would like to thank Dr. Miéville for his kind comments, congratulate him, in turn, for the rave reviews his fiction is garnering and record how proud it was to canvas for him, and the Socialist Workers Party, in the 2001 British election.

Dr. Miéville’s  name has been inscribed in The Shakespeare Code’s

ROLL OF HONOUR

(It is best to read Part One first)

Not everybody likes cats.

There are, in fact, three names for ‘cat phobia’:

galeophobia, ailurophobia and elurophobia.

William Shakespeare had observed this phenomenon at first hand.

In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock, asked why he hates the merchant Antonio, replies:

Some men there are love not a gaping pig

Some that are mad if they behold a cat,

And others, when the bagpipe sings i’ the nose,

Cannot contain their urine: for affection,

Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood

Of what it likes or loathes…

Shylock can find no logical reason why he loathes Antonio, any more than there is a logical reason why some men will hate a ‘harmless, necessary cat’: it is simply:

 a lodg’d hate and a certain loathing.

The only character in William Shakespeare’s works who expresses an aversion to cats is Bertram, the Count of Rossillion, in All’s Well that End’s Well.  He falls under the malign influence of Paroles, a corrupt and selfish captain. When Bertram learns the full extent of his captain’s treachery, he exclaims:

I could endure anything before but a cat;  and now he’s a cat to me!

Then, as he discovers more and more about Paroles, Bertram adds:

He’s more and more a cat!

And again:

A pox on him, he’s a cat still!

The Shakespeare Code believes that Bertram, with his ‘arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls’ is a  ‘warts and all’  portrait of Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton.

The Code’s reasons for this belief are:

1. Both Bertram and Southampton are wards of court
2. Both are sons of a widowed Roman Catholic Countess
3. Both are ambitious to shine in the Wars
4. Both end up as Captains of Horse, and
5. Both treat their ‘lower class’ lovers appallingly.

In the great scene of the play, the Countess of Rossillion questions her adopted ‘daughter’ Helena (whose father, a poor, but skilled herbalist, has recently died) as to whether she is in love with her aristocratic son, Bertram.

After an attempt at prevarication, Helena confesses her love:

Then I confess,

Here on my knee, before high heaven and you,

That before you, and next to high heaven,

I love your son…

Helena later adds:

But if yourself,

Whose aged honour cites a virtuous youth,

Did ever in so true a flame of liking,

Wish chastely and love dearly, that your Dian

Was both herself and love – O then give pity….

The Countess of Southampton (Henry Wriothsley’s mother, Mary) had, in real life, fallen in love with ‘a common person’ when she was married to the second Earl. But, like the Countess of Rossillion in the play, she did not give way to her feelings. She remained as chaste as the goddess Diana.

Allegedly.

The Code believes that: 

1. Helena is William Shakespeare in drag.

2. The Countess of Rossillion in the play is the Countess of Southampton.

3. The Countess of Southampton, like the Countess of Rossillion, approved of the liaison between her son, (Henry) and a member of the (relatively!) lower classes (Shakespeare).

If Betram suffered from ‘galeophobia, ailurophobia and elurophobia’ then the Earl of Southampton must have suffered from them as well!

Southampton was an excitable, spoilt young man who was always getting into quarrels. His experience of being sentenced to death after the rebellion (then living through Essex’s botched execution) had a sobering effect on him.

For a time, at least.

He wrote to the Privy Council from the Tower about his ‘lowly and penitent heart’ and his ‘true penitent soul’ and his wish to ‘prostrate [himself] at Her Majesty’s princely feet’.

This is the ‘contrite’ image Southampton now wishes to project to  King James in the ‘wooing portrait’  he sends to him. The inscription, written above the dates of his incarceration, reads:

IN VINCULIS

INVICTUS.

This could mean a defiant ‘In chains, but unbeaten’ or ‘Bloodied, but unbowed’. However, the Latin ‘sed’ (‘but’) does not appear in the inscription.

The implication is that Southampton is unbeatable BECAUSE he is in chains.

‘The chains’, could of course, refer to literal imprisonment in the Tower and all the Earl has learnt from his disgrace.

Equally, ‘the chains’ could refer to the sling he has to wear in order to recover from his illness, from which he has also learnt.

But the most likely reading of  ‘in chains’  is that the Earl has

CHAINED HIS OWN PASSIONS!!!

The Tower has turned him into a Stoic.

Southampton is now so completely master of himself that he can even tolerate the presence of a cat, a creature that, like Bertram, he could not ‘endure’ before his imprisonment.

So the cat is, in reality, a symbol – a symbol of passion tamed.

It might have been based on a real ‘harmless, necessary cat’  kept in the Tower to chase off mice and rats: but it cannot be Southampton’s ‘favourite cat, Trixie’.

Southampton hated cats!

But why is the cat looking out of the picture? And what is the cat looking at?

Like the Earl of Southampton, the cat is looking out at the man for whom the portrait was painted – King James.

The cat is exercising the inalienable right of every cat (symbolic or otherwise) first recorded by Shakespeare’s friend, John Heywood, in 1562:

What! A cat may look on a King, ye know.

●

The cat is  black and white. The Earl is pictured in black and white.

The Code has established that the Earl of Southampton is in mourning for the dead hero, the Earl of Essex.

But black and white were also the ‘signature’ colours of the Earl of Essex, to show his loyalty to Queen Elizabeth….

The Earl of Essex in black and white

So the ‘black-and-white’ theme of the painting would also evoke, for James, the soul of his  ‘martyr’, the Earl of Essex.

Southampton is presenting himself as a ‘substitute Essex’,  a glorious remnant of the now glorious revolution against the wicked Queen Elizabeth.

●

Did the Third Earl of Southampton include a letter to King James along with his portrait?  His right hand, after all, was not in a sling.

This, The Code believes, was not Southampton’s style. He would dictate his letters (which his secretary would pen in a ‘secretary hand’:)  he would then sign them, with a flourish, ‘H. Southampton’.

The late, great maverick Shakespeare scholar (and war-time Bletchley code-breaker) Eric Sams discovered that a letter to Lord Burghley, and signed by Southampton, is written –

IN SHAKESPEARE’S HAND!

(a discovery confirmed by the American hand-writing expert, Charles Hamilton)

The Code has examined this letter in manuscript at the British Museum and believes Mr. Sams’s and Mr. Hamilton’s claims to be true.

[Lansdowne MS LXX.72. The letter is dated 27^th June, 1592]

The Code also believes that Shakespeare wrote another letter for Southampton in his cell to accompany the portrait.

BUT THE LETTER WAS IN THE FORM OF TWO SONNETS!

The Numbers of the Sonnets will be revealed in:

‘The Earl of Southampton and Trixie the Cat. Part Three’.

(It’s best to read Part Three next.)

In Boughton House (the Northamptonshire home of the Duke of Buccleuch) there hangs a painting of Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron and lover.

He is shown as a prisoner in the Tower of London – accompanied by a black and white cat.

The Earl of Southampton’s presence in the Tower is easily explained.

On 8 February, 1601, along with his intimate friend, Sir Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex (and two hundred of their hot-headed followers) Southampton had rebelled against Queen Elizabeth.

The men wanted Elizabeth to name King James VI of Scotland as her successor. They feared that, if she did not, civil war would break out when she died.

The Queen, for her part, feared that, if she did name James as her successor, she would be assassinated.  She had, after all, executed King James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots.

Another aim of the rebellion was to kill Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Robert Cecil who had plotted against Essex while he was away from the Court, fighting in Ireland.

But the attempt (after divine service on a Sunday morning) to raise the citizens of London had fallen flat.  Everyone had prospered too well under Elizabeth.

Essex was beheaded and Southampton imprisoned in the Tower. Southampton had also been sentenced to death, but his mother and his wife had pleaded for mercy. Queen Elizabeth agreed to transmute the death sentence to life imprisonment.

She despised the long-haired, quarrelsome Southampton, but realised he was no real threat to her. Also, the beheading of Essex had proved very unpopular with her subjects. The London mob had tried to lynch Essex’s executioner who had taken three blows to sever his head.

The Cat in the Tower is more difficult to explain.

A legend has grown up, first reported in 1793 by Thomas Pennant in Some Account of London:

After he [the third Earl of Southampton] had been confined there [the Tower] a small time, he was surprised by a visit from his favourite cat, which had found its way to the Tower; and, as tradition says, reached its master by descending the chimney of his apartment. I have seen at Bulstrode, the summer residence of the late Duchess of Portland, an original portrait of this Earl, in the place of his confinement, in a black dress and cloak, with the faithful animal sitting by him.

Pennant, at least, has the good grace to add:

Perhaps this picture might have been the foundation of the tale.

Even the great Southampton scholar, C.C. Stopes (mother of Marie)  joins in the cat speculation by suggesting that Southampton’s wife brought the cat with her on a ‘prison visit’  to her husband  ‘to help to comfort, and to help calm the excitement of meeting again after such a long and anxious separation.’

In our time, Southampton’s ‘favourite cat’  has even acquired a name:

‘TRIXIE’

 To celebrate its 2,000^th view, The Shakespeare Code has sworn to eliminate Trixie the Cat with EXTREME PREJUDICE.

●

The third Earl of Southampton, stripped (officially, at least) of his title and signing himself plain ‘H. Wriothesley’, was incarcerated on 8 February, 1601. He was ill from the start of his imprisonment and on 22 March the Privy Council allowed a doctor in to treat his ‘quartern ague’ which produced ‘swelling in his legs and other parts’.  

In August the following year (1602) the Lieutenant of the Tower transferred the ‘weak and very sickly’  Southampton to a more salubrious lodging, but warned the Privy Council that:

Without some exercise, and more air than is convenient for me to allow without knowledge from your honours of her Majesty’s pleasure, I do much doubt of his recovery.

Southampton’s mother, Mary, was allowed in to see him later that month, then, in October, his wife, Elizabeth.

In February of the following year (1603) the Jesuit Father Rivers noted that: ‘

The Earl of Southampton in the Tower is newly recovered of a dangerous disease…but in no hope of liberty.

Then, on 24 March, 1603, Queen Elizabeth died.

James became King of England as well as King of Scotland and everything turned round. The traitors of Elizabeth’s reign became the heroes of James’s.

●

When Southampton heard that Elizabeth had died, he threw his hat, for sheer joy, over the walls of the Tower. He expected King James would release him and pardon him.

He also hoped James would make him his lover.

However, many other handsome young aristocrats (including the Countess of Pembroke’s two sons) were vying for this  powerful position.

How could Southampton, imprisoned in the Tower, catch the King’s eye before his rivals?

He could commission a portrait and rush it to King James in Scotland!

●

The painting is heavily coded:

1. The book on the window ledge (gilt-edged and most likely a Bible) has the Southampton family crest of four silver falcons embossed on the cover. This shows the painting was executed after Southampton’s title was restored by the House of Peers on 26  March,  1603.
2. Southampton is dressed in black with a ring prominently displayed on his left finger. He is  in mourning (in a ‘suit of woe’) for his friend, the second Earl of Essex who, in James’s eyes at least, was a ‘martyr’.  The ring is a memorial tribute to Essex.
3. A pane of glass in the window is smashed. This symbolises the violent, untimely death of the youthful Essex.
4. Southampton’s arm is in a sling. This shows that Southampton is still recovering from his illness and so needs freedom and fresh air. It also allows Southampton (a) to show off the beauty of his long, elegant fingers and (b) offer his ‘submissive’ left hand to James as a lover.
5. Red threads (holding tiny red gemstones) are wrapped round Southampton’s wrist. This indicates (a) that Southampton was recovering from a form of rheumatism (red thread round the wrist was an old folk-remedy) and (b) that Southampton was offering his love to James (red gems were all named ‘rubies’ at the time and symbolised passion).
6. Southampton’s hair cascades, unadorned, round his shoulders. This shows (a) the unaffected truth and straightforwardness of his nature, (b) his hatless deference to the new King into whose presence the portrait would be taken and (c) his readiness to symbolically ‘wed’  James. Brides at this period wore their hair, plainly brushed, down to their shoulders for the wedding ceremony.

 [See the painting (also now at Boughton House) of the Earl of Southampton’s bride, Elizabeth Vernon, combing her shoulder-length hair in preparation for the wedding service which will make her a Countess]

7.  There is a painting (within the painting) of the Tower of London with four white swans swimming in its moat.  These swans represent the faithful lovers who will greet Southampton when he is released from the Tower.

8.  Beneath the painting of the Tower is the exact date of Southampton’s incarceration, ‘FEBRUA: 8 1600:’ (The New Year  at this time, started on 31 March). This date is followed by:  ‘601: 602: 603: APRI:’

There is no exact date after ‘APRI’ as there is after ‘FEBRUA’.  If the painting had been executed after the Earl of Southampton’s release, the exact date would have been included.

This painting, the Shakespeare Code believes, is an invitation to King James to fill in the exact date in April by ordering Southampton’s release from the Tower.

The painting was a rushed job, executed over six days and nights (26  March to 1 April) then sent, by horseback courier, to James at Holyrood House in Edinburgh.

King James, smitten with the painting of the Earl, responded on 5 April with a letter to the ‘Peers, Nobility and Council’  of England:

Although we are now resolved, as well in regard of the great and honest affection borne unto us by the Earl of Southampton as in respect of his good parts enabling him for the service of us, and the state, to extend our grace and favour towards him….we have thought meet to give you notice of our pleasure….which is only this : Because the place is unwholesome and dolorous to him to whose body and mind we would give present comfort, intending unto him much further grace and favour, we have written to the Lieutenant of the Tower to deliver him out of prison presently to go to any such place as he shall choose in or near our city of London, there to carry himself in such quiet and honest form as we know he will think meet in his own discretion, until the body of our state, now assembled, shall come unto us, at which time we are pleased he shall also come to our presence, for that as it is on us that his only hope dependeth, so we will reserve those works of further favours until the time he be-holdeth our own eyes, whereof as we know the comfort will be great unto him so it will be contentment to us to have opportunity to declare our estimation of him…

The painting had clearly worked at every possible level.

But what is ‘Trixie’ doing in the Tower?  And why is she staring out of the painting?

For the answer to this question, we must turn to….

The Swan of Avon….

William Shakespeare….

(it’s best to read Part Two now.)

The Shakespeare Code announced that on 28^th April, 2011, the eve of the Royal Wedding) it received its –

TWO THOUSANDTH VIEW!!!

 The Codethanked all those eminent men and women who sent endorsements and encouragements to the site. In recognition, The Shakespeare Code recorded their names or titles on its coveted:

ROLL OF HONOUR

 They are, in chronological order:

Michael Hentges

Martin Green

Alan Samson

Lord Bragg of Wigton

Sir Nicholas Hytner

Jane Howell

Greg Doran

Maggie Ollerenshaw

Simon Callow

Prof. David Womersely (Thomas Wharton Professor of English at Oxford University)

Karen Gledhill

Prof. Jonathan Bate (Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies at Warwick University)

Dr. James Kelly (Senior Tutor at Queen’s College, Cambridge)

China Miéville

Martin Jarvis

The Shakespeare Code also thanked the hundreds of intellectually curious and open-minded  people from all over the world who have clicked onto the site, The Brothers and Sisters of The Code…

Professor Jonathan Bate writes of The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis ( The Shakespeare Code, 17th February, 2011):

 It’s a terrific article and very persuasive that Beeston [of Posbrook Farm, Titchfield] is Apis Lapis… All very interesting….’

The Shakespeare Code would like to thank Prof. Bate for his interest and support. He is a Commander of the British Empire, a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies at the University of Warwick and a Governor and Board Member of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

To read ‘The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis’, click here.

To read Prof. Bate’s endorsement of The Code’s ‘Titchfield Theory’, click here.

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

Queen Elizabeth hated warfare. She thought it was a waste of money and a waste of life. She had no interest in attacking other countries and would only allow armies to be mobilised if England itself was attacked.

The Earls of Essex and Southampton hated peace. They thought it made men ‘hate one another’ because they ‘less need one another’. ‘It begot plenty, plenty pride, pride distain and disdain strife’. War, they believed, was ‘an agent of civilization’ and ‘the school of tolerance’.

So when Richard III, in his opening soliloquy, criticises the effeminacy of peacetime (when ‘grim-visaged war’ is reduced to capering ‘nimbly in a lady’s chamber’), many Elizabethans would have agreed with him. And not just the men.

War is ‘grim-visaged’ and so is King Richard himself. That’s why he feels at home on the field of battle. (He has already proved himself  a valiant warrior at Tewksbury before the play starts).

But peace, he thinks, makes him look like a monster. So he behaves like one. 

Shakespeare’s genius is to show, at the Battle of Bosworth Field, all Richard’s positive qualities flooding back: his courage, comradeship, defiance and wit. He cheers the hearts of his soldiers, is utterly professional in his preparations and in battle ‘enacts more wonders than a man’.

Indeed, if Richmond (later Henry VII, Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather) had not filled the battle field with look-alike ‘Richmonds’ (five of whom King Richard slays) the Battle could well have gone the other way.

Note: Shakespeare himself invents these sneaky ‘look-alikes’. Would he have done that if the intention of the play was to justify the Tudor claim to the throne?

The Death of Richard III - Olivier as the King

War even brings out a poetic sensibility in the hunch-backed King. On the eve of battle he urges the Duke of Norfolk to make sure he is safely guarded in his tent, then adds:

Stir with the lark tomorrow, gentle Norfolk

To which the Duke, with loyalty and affection, responds:

I warrant you, my lord…

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

‘Richard III’ Decoded  is a series of five short articles which argue that William Shakespeare’s The True Tragedy of Richard III was not a piece of pro-Tudor propaganda.

It was, in fact, a coded attack on Queen Elizabeth herself.

It was a satire on the life of Sir Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth’s lover and friend, who had died just a couple of years earlier (1588).

In 1584, the Jesuits had published Leicester’s Commonwealth, a savage attack on Leicester which Shakespeare draws on to create his portrait of the hunch-backed king.

The King Richard of Shakespeare’s play

1. Murders a husband to get his wife.

2. Murders his wife to get another wife.

3. Uses black magic (or seems to!) to get his way with women.

4. Assumes, in the midst of his atrocities, an air of religious piety.

The historical King Richard was never accused of these crimes: but the Earl of Leicester was.

The Shakespeare Code argues that the original, lavish production of Richard III was staged in the grounds of Place House in Titchfield.

It was here that Leicester, acting as agent-provocateur, had destroyed the Catholic cause in England. He had encouraged the Duke of Norfolk to marry Mary Queen of Scots and the Earl of Southampton’s family to rebel against Queen Elizabeth.

It was also at Place House (when it was an Abbey) that King Henry VI had married Margaret of Anjou.

Henry VI marries Margaret of Anjou in Titchfield

That is why Henry VI – as a corpse and a ghost – plays such a prominent part in Richard III. He was a local hero at Titchfield and had granted, in 1447,  the village a school and a fair. It was against the background of this fair that the play – with its horses, armour, tents and armies – was originally performed.

The fair at Titchfield is held to this day:

Titchfield Fair

The Shakespeare Code also argues that the pro-Tudor version of the Richard III story, performed by the Queen’s Men, was a government reply to Shakespeare’s subversive one.

It was the beginning of the hostility that was to grow between Queen Elizabeth and one of the most brilliant of her subjects, the Catholic homosexual, William Shakespeare.

(It’s best to read ‘Richard III’ and War next.)

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

William Shakespeare’s version of the Richard III story is so much better than that of the Queen’s Men that scholars have assumed the evolutionary principle is at work.

The Queen’s Men version came first, they claim, then Shakespeare improved on it.

But this flies in the face of the facts. We have seen that Thomas Nashe quotes a line from Shakespeare’s The True Tragedy of Richard III and describes the plot of the play in his pamphlet, Pierce Pennilesse. This was printed in 1592.

The Queen’s Men’s version of The True Tragedy of Richard III ‘as it was played by the Queen’s Majesty’s Players’ was printed in 1594.

It might be that the play was performed years before it was publisheed, BUT –

The Shakespeare Code argues that the Queen’s Men version of the play was a ‘State’ reply to Shakespeare’s satire on the life of the Earl of Leicester.

The Queen’s Men version has a character called ‘Truth’ appearing in a Prologue whose job is to present a ‘Tragedy in England’ that will ‘revive the hearts of drooping minds’. It then proceeds to remove as many parallels between the lives of Richard III and the Earl of Leicester as it possibly can.

The King Richard in the Queen’s Men version:

1. Does not kill Prince Edward in order to gain his wife. (Queen Anne does not even appear in the play).
2. Does not kill his wife, Queen Anne, to marry Elizabeth.
3. Does not use ‘black magic’ to gain power over women.
4. And does not assume an air of bogus piety.

The Queen’s Men want its audience to think of King Richard as a tyrant from the past. They do not want ‘drooping minds’ to draw parallels from the present.

We see exactly the same process of ‘Establishment gagging’ at work in the Falstaff plays. Shakespeare originally named the fat knight ‘Sir John Oldcastle’, an historical figure who was the ancestor of the Brooke family. Shakespeare’s motive was to tease the Brookes, who were the arch-enemies of the Earls of Essex and Southampton, Shakespeare’s paymasters.

It was Queen Elizabeth herself, Nicholas Rowe claimed in 1709, who forced Shakespeare to change the name.

Nicholas Rowe

The Brooke family also arranged for the Rose Theatre to present a new play called Sir John Oldcastle (written by four playwrights). This is a white-wash job on the historical Oldcastle – a ‘heretic’ who rebelled against King Henry V.  In this version Oldcastle emerges as a philanthropist and patriot.

●

The Queen’s Men were faced with a problem in staging their version of Richard III. Shakespeare had the huge resources of two aristocratic families to draw on for his staging.  The Queen’s Men had 14 actors. So how do you ‘do’ the eleven ghosts who appear before the Battle of Bosworth Field? Answer: you cut them out!

The Queen’s Men may have had the approbation of the Queen and Privy Council, but the public had seen good drama from the Shakespeare team and wanted more of it. The Queen’s Men waned as Shakespeare waxed. By 1596 they were no more.

The Shakespeare Code has noted how, against their political intentions, the Queen’s Men turn King Richard into a hero at the end of the play. Shakespeare’s ending, where, typically, he sides with the underdog, has been so powerful, the Queen’s Men cannot get it out of their minds. Nor can they get out of their minds Richard’s glorious cry:

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

In the hands of the Queen’s Men, it becomes:

A horse! A horse! A fresh horse!

Thank God for Shakespeare!

And the people who supported him….

And the people who performed him….

Sir Laurence Olivier as King Richard III

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

At the end of William Shakespeare’s Richard III the ghosts of the eleven people the King has murdered appear to him in a dream. They tell him to ‘despair and die’  nine times.

Thomas Nashe, in his 1592 pamphlet, Pierce Pennilesse: his Supplication to the Divell, writes:

Why is’t damnation to despair and die

When life is my true happiness disease?

The Shakespeare Code argues that Nashe collaborated with Shakespeare at Titchfield (see: The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis).  He put phrases from the plays into his own writing to hint at his hand in Shakespeare’s work. In the opening paragraph of Pierce Pennilesse he writes: ‘for all my labours turned to loss’. 

Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Code argues, was another Titchfield entertainment on which Nashe worked with Shakespeare.

Later on in the pamphlet, Nashe defends the theatre as a good alternative to ‘gaming, following of harlots’ or ‘drinking’ and describes how, in plays:

all cosenages, all cunning drifts over-gilded with outward holiness, all stratagems of war, all the cankerworms that breed on the rust of peace, are most lively anatomised: they show the ill-success of treason, the fall of hasty climbers, the wretched end of usurpers, the misery of civil dissension, and how just God is evermore in punishing of murder…they [plays] are sour pills of reprehension, wrapped up in sweet words…

This is a blow by blow account of Shakespeare’s The True Tragedy of Richard III.

It describes how King Richard disguises his villainy by pretending to be religious –‘over-gilding’ his ‘cunning drifts’ with ‘outward holiness’.

Just like the lately deceased Earl of Leicester.

And unlike the historical King Richard III who never pretended to be holy.

Nashe continues this coded attack on Leicester with his tale of  ‘The Usurper Bear’:

The Bear, on a time, being chief Burgomaster of all the beasts under the Lion, gan think with himself how he might surfeit in pleasure, or best husband his authority to enlarge his delight and contentment. With that he began to pry and to smell through every corner of the forest for prey, to have a thousand imaginations with himself what dainty morsel he was master of, and yet had not tasted: whole herds of sheep he had devoured and was not satisfied; fat oxen, heifers, swine, calves and young kids, were his ordinary viands: he longed for horse-flesh and went presently to a meadow…

Every Elizabethan reader would know that  ‘the Bear’ was Leicester and ‘the Lion’  was Queen Elizabeth.

To protect himself, Nashe claimed he had no particular individuals in mind.  The Queen was still alive, even if Leicester wasn’t, and she had once chopped off a writer’s hand for libel. However, Nashe writes:

Now a man may not talk of a dog, but it is surmised he aims at the man who giveth the dog in his crest…

Leicester famously had a bear in his crest. So, far from denying that ‘The Bear’ is a portrait of Leicester, Nashe is, in reality, pushing his point home.

Earl of Leicester's Coat of Arms

In Nashe’s story ( which is a variant on Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ story)  the Bear, seeking total supremacy, wants to eat a ‘fat Camel…a huge beast and well shod’ who displays ‘gentleness’ and ‘prowess’ has been fed in ‘plentiful pasture’.

‘The Camel’ was Thomas Howard, 4^th Earl of Norfolk, the richest man in England….

Far from showing the required ‘homage’ to the Bear, the Camel gives him a kick on the forehead with his hind legs.

[Norfolk and Leicester exchanged blows after a tennis match in 1565]

 So the Bear enlists the help of the Ape, who abhorred the Camel ‘by nature because he [the Camel] overlooked him so Lordly, and was by so many degrees greater than he was’

‘The Ape’ is the diminutive, round-shouldered Sir Robert Cecil, whose grandfather had been a tavern-keeper….

The Ape advises the Bear to dig a pit to trap ‘the goodly’ Camel and the Bear ends up ‘gorged’ with the Camel’s ‘blood’.

[‘The pit’ is the trap Leicester set up for Norfolk. He encouraged him to marry Mary Queen of Scots, hoping it would lead, as it did, to Norfolk’s beheading.]

Next the hungry Bear spies a herd of deer ‘a-ranging’ in a grove and singles out ‘one of the fairest in the company’ with whom to ‘close up his stomach instead of cheese’.

The ‘herd of deer’ are the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting, of which the ‘fairest’ was, famously, the Queen’s cousin, Lettice Knollys….

However, the Bear cannot fool or flatter the jolly Forrester and and youthful Lord of the Lawnds [glades] in charge of the deer – unlike the Lion [Elizabeth] ‘whose eyes he could blind as he list’).

‘The jolly Forrester’ is the dashing, courageous Sir Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex and Lord Lieutenant of County Stafford, who wooed and won Lettice’s hand in marriage….

The Bear decides ‘to poison the stream’ where the Forrester is ‘wonted to drink’. So, ‘all faint and malcontent (as prophesying his near approaching mishap by his languishing)’ the Forrester ‘with a lazy wallowing pace, strayed aside from the rest of his fellowship, and betook him all carelessly to the corrupted fountain that was prepared for his funeral’.

[Leicester had Essex sent to Ireland as Earl Marshall so he could pursue his affair with his wife, Lettice. He then poisoned him at Dublin Castle. Essex was ill for a month before he died in 1576].

The Bear finally settles for a diet of honey [the tax on imported sweet wines] and gets the Fox to help him. 

The Fox’ is the cunning and ambitious Sir Walter Raleigh….

The Ape and the Ape’s father, the old Chameleon, also assist. 

[The old Chameleon’ is the adroit wind-bag and long-time survivor, Lord Burghley…

The three men try to destroy the English wine-producing business so that everyone will have to import it and pay tax. But the many eyed Lynceus learns of the plot and destroys it

”Lynceus’, the eagle-eyed Argonaut, is subtle spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham…

The Bear finally dies of pure anger, being out run-by a ‘fat hind’, [The aging Lettice again, who was pursuing an affair with a man half her age..]

Shakespeare gets close to making his own ‘bear jokes’ in Richard III itself.  The young Duke of York says to Richard:

‘You mean to bear me, not to bear with me

Uncle, my brother mocks both you and me:

Because that I am little like an ape,

He thinks that you should bear me on your shoulders’

But Shakespeare is too much of an artist to write a work that is pure propaganda. He shows Richard to be a brave and gallant commander of his men at the Battle of Bosworth, much more ‘himself’ in war than he ever was in peace. Far from flying the field like the historical Richard, Shakespeare’s Richard stands his ground. 

He even goes down with truly Don Giovanni-like defiance:

‘March on! Join bravely. Let us to it pell-mell

If not to Heaven then hand in hand to Hell’.

Strangely, the Queen’s Men’s version of the play (which is strongly pro-Elizabeth) gives the King this same courageness at the end….

(It’s best to read Part Five next.)