The Shakespeare Code

(It’s best to read The Introduction and Part 1. first.)

EXHIBIT (3)

Harry Southampton’s Letter.

The Earl of Southampton preparing to joust.

A letter exists written by Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, to Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex from Dieppe.

It is dated 2March.

The full text reads:

Though I have nothing to write about worth your reading, yet can I not let pass this messenger without a letter, be it only to continue the profession of service which I have heretofore verbally made unto your Lordship, which howsoever in itself it is of small value, my hope is, seeing it wholly proceed from a true respect born to your own worth, and from one who hath no better present to make you than the offer of himself to be disposed of by your commandment, your Lordship will be pleased in good part to accept it, and ever afford me your good opinion and favour, of which I shall be exceedingly proud, endeavouring with myself always with the best means to deserve it. As I shall have opportunity to send into England I will be bold to trouble your Lordship with my letter, in the mean time wishing your fortune may even prove answerable to the greatness of your own mind, I take my leave &c…

Southampton did not record the year.

Historians have given two possible dates, 1591 and 1598.

The first date (1591) has now been dismissed because the eighteen year old aristocratic Southampton would never have been allowed by the Privy Council to travel to France at a time of war.

However, the second date (1598) is equally unlikely. Southampton writes about his ‘profession of service’ to Essex having been ‘verbally made unto your Lordship’ and consequently ‘of small value’.

By 1598 Southampton had fought gallantly for Essex on the Islands Campaign and so his loyalty had been already proved by action rather than words.

The Earl of Essex was keen to form a spy network round the world so he could be first with the news, and so first with the power, at Elizabeth’s Court where he had many enemies.

When Harry Southampton writes –

As I shall have opportunity to send into England I will be bold to trouble your lordship with my letter.

– this is a coded way of saying that he will send back regular spy reports to Essex.

On 25February, 1593, Essex was made a member of the Privy Council with the power to grant passports.

So the date of 2March, 1593, fits the contents of the Third Earl of Southampton’s Letter perfectly.

EXHIBIT (4) Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller.

On 27^th June, 1593, on his return to England, Nashe entered The Unfortunate Traveller on the Stationer’s Register.

The prototype of the picaresque novel, it chronicles Jack Wilton’s adventures in Europe with his master the Earl of Surrey – code for Nashe and Southampton.

Nashe dedicates the book to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton (a dedication he was later forced to withdraw) as ‘a lover and cherisher’ ‘as well of the lovers of poets [Amelia Bassano/Lanier] as of poets themselves’ [Shakespeare].

The Earl changes places with Jack ‘to take more liberty of behaviour’ in Italy, the land of ‘whoring’ and ‘sodomitry’. This is exactly the same plot device Shakespeare was to use in his re-write of The Taming of a Shrew: Lucentio, studying at the University of Padua, changes place with his adoring servant Tranio.

Given Harry Southampton’s taste for lower class men, this is what really happened. Southampton pretended to be his own servant so he could have more fun.

Many of Nashe’s details suggest direct observation. Jack/Nashe describes how his long hair, light–coloured clothes and dagger with unblunted tip were all forbidden in Rome.

He writes:

The name of the place I remember not, but it is as one goes to St. Paul’s Church not far from the Jews’ piazza.

Nashe, describing a beautiful garden in Rome, refers to the music of the spheres which we cannot hear because of ‘the grossness of our senses’…an idea to re-surface in The Merchant of Venice.

EXHIBIT (5)

Shakespeare and the Obelisk at Rome.

Brass eternal slave to mortal rage…

In Sonnet 123 Shakespeare writes:

‘No! Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change;

Thy pyramids built up with newer might,

To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;

They are but dressings of a former sight’

On 15^th March 1604, King James processed through the City of London. Shakespeare – as a Groom of the Chamber – was given 4 and a half yards of scarlet material to march in livery.

Lining the route were tall constructions of wood and plaster – the tallest of which was ninety foot high. Ben Jonson describes a huge rainbow in the Strand supported by ‘two magnificent pyramids of 70 foot in height, on which were drawn his Majesty’s several pedigrees of Eng and Scot.’

What Jonson calls a pyramid we would now call an obelisk. 

Triumphal arch with pyramids constructed above the Cheapside Conduit in the City of London.

In 1586 Pope Sixtus V re-sited an Egyptian obelisk in front of St. Peter’s in Rome.

It was the ‘former sight’ of this Obelisk that Shakespeare describes in Sonnet 123.

Eighty-three foot tall, this Obelisk had a profound importance for Catholics. It had been plundered from Egypt by Caligula and erected in the Circus, where, in the reign of Nero, St. Peter was said to have been crucified upside down.

According to Catholic doctrine, this Obelisk was the last thing the Saint saw before he died.

This brush with sanctity was thought to have given the Obelisk miraculous powers: it was one of only two left standing in Rome.

The Pope wanted to move the Obelisk – now a holy relic – to a position in front of the Basilica of St. Peter. The commission for moving the monument – which Michelangelo passed over as too terrifying – was hotly contested by the most brilliant of Rome’s engineers. The job, surprisingly, went to the youngest bidder, Domenico Fontana, who devised a scheme that would take six months and involve hundreds of men and horses…

First, the Obelisk had to be taken down – then the bronze orb, rumoured to contain the ashes of Julius Caesar, removed from its summit.

This famous event was celebrated by Shakespeare in Sonnet 64. It begins by evoking in code the topography of Rome (Shakespeare could not openly admit he had been there):

‘When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced

The rich, proud cost of outworn buried age’

It continues:

‘When sometime lofty towers I see down razed,

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage.’

The ‘lofty tower’ was the Obelisk and the ‘brass eternal’ the gilt orb on its summit.

‘Mortal rage’ is a Roman Catholic reference to the Protestant ‘Sack of Rome’ which occurred in 1527. The Lanquenets – Mercenary Soldiers of Charles V – killed 147 of the Swiss Guard (who were defending Pope Clement VII) on the steps of St. Peter’s. 

‘Blasphemous’ shots were fired at the orb on top of the Obelisk (sacred to Catholics) and a lead bullet was imbedded in the metal.

Shakespeare would have seen this famous orb on his trip to Rome: it is on show, as a Catholic relic, to this day.

Sonnet 125 picks up the theme of James’s Coronation Obelisks. Shakespeare warns Southampton no more to trust in temporal power than to believe that the plaster board Obelisks lay ‘great bases for eternity’ the way the ‘sanctified’ original did. The ‘great base for eternity’ also suggests St. Peter, the ‘rock’ upon which Christ built his ‘eternal’ Catholic Church.

In the Sonnet previous to this (124) Shakespeare has declared his love ‘all alone stands hugely politic/That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers’

Shakespeare loved to intertwine the religious and the erotic. ‘Hugely politic’ suggests the phallic as well as the sacred nature of the Obelisk.

Elsewhere in the Sonnets, Shakespeare talks of his homosexuality as ‘dear religious love’ and offers his passion as an ‘oblation’ to Southampton.

 In As You Like It Rosalind says of Orlando, who, like Harry Southampton, had ‘chestnut’ coloured hair:

His kissing is full of sanctity as the touch of holy bread.

Shakespeare, like many of his contemporaries, seemed to thrive on danger. He would have adored standing in front of the Pagan-Christian Obelisk with Harry Southampton, his forbidden love, in a forbidden city, following  a forbidden faith.

To endorse his love he even has the audacity, in the final couplet of the Sonnet, to summon up for ‘witness’ ‘the fools of time’ Catholic Martyrs like St. Peter himself, who ‘die for goodness, who have lived for crime’.

That is, martyrs whose only crime was to be alive and to be Catholic.

Like homosexual men, condemned to death in Elizabeth’s time, just for being what they were.

Caligula's Obelisk in 1875

 (It’s best to read Part 3.  next.)

(It’s best to read The Introduction first.)

The Shakespeare Code will present NINE new pieces of evidence to prove that William Shakespeare, Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton and Thomas Nashe visited Italy in 1593.

EXHIBIT (1)

Willobie his Avisa

In this anonymous satire, ‘W.S.’ ‘an old player’ (code for William Shakespeare) tries, unsuccessfully, to seduce Avisa – a chaste, idealised, woman.

‘W.S.’ then encourages his ‘familiar friend’ ‘H.W.’ (Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton) to woo her, so that he will fail as well.

‘H.W.’ is described in Willobie his Avisa as ‘Italo-Hispalensis’ (Italian/Spanish) and Italian phrases from John Florio are scattered throughout the work. 

In Canticle XLIX ‘H.W.’ says to Avisa:

A thousand features I have seen,

For traveller’s change and choice shall see,

In France, in Flanders and in Spain,

Yet none, nor none could conquer me:

Till now I saw this face of thine,

That makes my wittes are none of thine.

Willobie his Avisa was published in 1594.  For the satire to hit, Southampton must have visited Flanders, France, Spain and Italy before this date, i.e. 1593.

EXHIBIT (2)

The Parnassus Plays

These were satires, rather like the modern Cambridge Footlights Revues performed at St. John’s College in December 1601, but written, in part, by Thomas Nashe before his death earlier in the year.

 Ingenioso – Nashe’s flattering version of himself – introduces a character called Gullio:

Now gentlemen you may laugh if you will, for here comes a gull  

The four silver falcons on Henry Wriothesely, the thir d Earl of  Southampton’s crest – one of which Shakespeare used on his – were often described as sea-gulls….

Wriothesley/Southampton crest, 1611

Gullio, with his ‘becoming’ hair, his leg ‘better’ than Sir Philip Sidney and his ‘amiable face’ is a satire on Southampton.

Like Southampton, Gullio had just come back from Ireland, was boastfully proud of his military conquests, had a great quarrel with a ‘puling Liteltonian’ (code for Southampton’s enemy Lord Grey) and worshipped ‘sweet Mr. Shakespeare’ whose Venus and Adonis he lays under his pillow and whose picture he will have in his ‘study at the Court’.

Gullio refers to:

This rapier I bought when I sojourned in the University of Padua

And boasts:

My Latin was pure Latin, and such as they speak at Rheims and Padua.

So it was clearly known to the coterie audience that Gullio/Southampton had, by 1601, travelled and studied in Italy.

Rheims, a Catholic seminary, is also a dig at Southampton’s adherence to ‘the Old Faith’.

●

This portrait of Gullio is also very similar to Aguecheek in Twelfth Night (which, The Shakespeare Code will argue, is also a coded satire on Southampton).

Maria, in Twelfth Night, desribes Aguecheek as ‘a fool and a great quarreller’. And Aguecheek has the same vanity about his long hair as Gullio:

Sir Toby: Then thou hadst had an excellent head of hair

Sir Andrew: Why would that have mended my hair?

Sir Toby:  Past question, for thou seest it will not curl by nature.

Sir Andrew:  But it becomes me well enough, does’t not?

Sir Toby:  Excellent, it hangs like flax on a distaff; and I hope to see a housewife take thee between her legs, and spin it off.’

In The Parnassus Plays, Gullio says:

I stood stroking up my hair, which became me very admirably….

And Sir Toby Belch describes Aguecheek as:

An ass-head and a coxcomb and a knave, a thin-faced knave, a gull

 

Below is Nicholas Hilliard’s minature of the third Earl of Southampton:

Or is it Sir Andrew Aguecheek!

(It’s best to read Part 2. next.)

1. Theory

The Shakespeare Code will argue that between March and June of 1593, Shakespeare, Southampton and Nashe travelled to Italy to escape from the Plague in London, spy for the Earl of Essex – and enjoy themselves.

2. The Background

1592 was the beginning of Shakespeare’s love-triangle with the dark-skinned beauty Amelia Bassano and Henry Wriothesely (Harry, third Earl of Southampton).  Along with Thomas Nashe, they were all ‘detained in the country’ – Titchfield – through ‘fear of infection’ from the virulent plague in London.

 They put on plays and entertainments, like Love’s Labour’s Lost and Edmund Ironside: but in the boredom of the pandemic summer their greatest amusement was themselves.

Shakespeare reveals in the Sonnets how he fell in love with Amelia, Harry became jealous, Amelia seduced Harry, Harry slept with Amelia to upset Shakespeare and Shakespeare came to realise that he was more in love with Harry than he was with Amelia. In confused despair, Shakespeare left Titchfield in July 1592 to join a tour of Lord Strange’s Men.Nashe – resentful of Shakespeare’s wealth, fame and friendship with Southampton – set out to destroy his rival.

‘For all my labours turned to loss’ Nashe writes in Pierce Pennilesse, hinting at his hand in the composition of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Later he adds ‘If my destiny be such to lose my labour everywhere’ for those who missed the point first time round.

He proceeds with an oblique attack on Shakespeare as one of the ‘drudges’ with ‘no extraordinary gifts of body or mind’ who ‘filch themselves into some nobleman’s service’ and  ‘labour it with cap and knee and ply it with privy whisperings’.

 His chance to launch a full-frontal attack came in September. Robert Greene died, destitute, in London. Nashe could steal his name.

Pretending to find A Groatsworth of Wit among the dead man’s papers, Nashe penned ‘Greene’s’ famous attack on Shakespeare:

There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his ‘Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide’ supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute ‘Johnannes factotum’, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.

‘Greene’ reveals how it was Shakespeare, a nouveau-riche, dandified, ruthless, talentless mediocrity, who bribed him with the promise of ‘pleasure’ and ‘money’ to write plays for him and ‘lodged him at the town’s end in a house of retail’ – Mr. Apis-Lapis’s notorious Posbrook Farm, with its three ‘serving-maids’ outside Titchfield. (See The Strange Case of Mr. Apis Lapis)

‘Greene’ also suggests Amelia (codename ‘Lamilia’) seduced Harry (codename ‘Luciano’) for his money, that Shakespeare (codename ‘Roberto’) acted as pander for his ‘brother’ and demanded a cut of Amelia’s fee.

Nashe now became the Titchfield pander himself. He wrote blatant pornography to excite Harry who responded by impregnating Amelia. She was married to the ‘minstrel’ Alphonse Lanier ‘for colour’ on 10^th October.

Her son was called Henry.

Shakespeare, meanwhile, had been sent a copy of A Groatsworth of Wit.

On the 8^th December the publisher, fat Henry Chettle, printed a retraction. He claimed he had ‘seen’ [Shakespeare’s] ‘demeanour’ and it was ‘no less civil than he excellent in the qualities he professes’. More to the point he adds that:

 divers of worship have reported ‘uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, which approves his art.

The Southamptons had pulled rank.

 Though absent on tour, Shakespeare had kept up a sonnet correspondence with Harry in which he finally acknowledged his love for the young man – a love which Harry’s mother, Mary, second Countess of Southampton, finally encouraged. (See Shakespeare, Love and Religion Part One).

Nashe swore on his immortal soul that he was not the author of A Groatsworth of Wit. Shakespeare, unconvinced, took a long-term revenge.

Nashe’s observation in Pierce Pennilesse that a particular fault in man can destroy all his good qualities re-appears in the 1604 Hamlet.

Unacknowledged. By then Nashe was dead.

1593

Lord Strange’s Men, though they had nearly ‘broken’ [gone bankrupt] on tour, managed to play the Christmas season at the Court. Early in 1593 they were performing at the Rose.

In February 1593 Nashe, forgiven by the Southamptons, says in Terrors of the Night he was ‘in the country some three-score mile off from London’ in a ‘low, marish terrain’ – with mists ‘as thick as mould butter’. (Titchfield, on the River Meon, is a few miles from the Solent – at sea-level and subject to sea-fogs). Using a pun that Shakespeare was to lift for Much Ado about Nothing Nashe observes in Strange News:

 For the order of my life, it is as civil as a Seville orange; I lurk in no corners, but converse in a house of credit, as well governed as a college, where there be more rare qualified men and selected good scholars than in any nobleman’s house that I know in England.

John Florio, satirised as Holofernes the pedant in Love’s Labour’s Lost, was compiling his Italian-English dictionary World of Words at Titchfield. Posted there as Burghley’s Protestant spy, Florio was Harry’s Italian tutor. Harry spoke perfect Italian so it was natural for him to want to try it out in Italy. As a Catholic, groomed from childhood by the Vatican itself, it was also natural for him to want to make a secret pilgrimage to Rome.

Shakespeare was learning Italian. He quotes from Florio’s Italian-English phrasebook, First Fruits, in Love’s Labour’s Lost (‘Venetia, chi no ti vede, non ti pretia’) and more famously in The Merchant of Venice ‘Tutto quelche luce, non é ora’ – ‘All that glisters is not gold’.

On the 1^st February all the theatres in London were closed by the Plague. They were to stay ‘dark’ till Christmas.

On the 25^th February Essex was made a member of the Privy Council.  He now had the authority to issue passports.

Southampton was desperate to serve Essex.

Shakespeare was out of work.

Nashe would go anywhere for a meal.

It was at this moment that the three men sailed, as gentlemen-spies, to Europe…

(It’s best to read Part 1. now.)

Simon Callow, the great actor, writer, biographer, raconteur and Gladiator for Truth, writes:

I have read your blog. I entirely accept the Titchfield connection with Shakespeare and equally buy your association of Beeston with Falstaff. I much enjoyed Love’s Labour’s Found. Warmest and best.

Warmest and best to you, Simon.  And thanks.

Mr. Callow’s name has been inscribed in The Shakespeare Code’s ROLL OF HONOUR.

Maggie Ollerenshaw, celebrated actress, author and wit, renowned for her portrayal of ‘Wavy Mavis’ in Open All Hours, writes to Shakespeare Code Agent, Karen Little, about the Shakespeare blog:

Fascinating! And I’ve only got as far as reading Stewart’s biography.

The biography, (click at the top of the Home Page) will gradually evolve….

Miss Ollerenshaw’s name has been inscribed in The Shakespeare Code’s ROLL OF HONOUR.

Greg Doran, Chief Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company  and described by the Sunday Times as ‘one of the great Shakespeareans of his generation’, writes of Love’s Labour’s Found:

The book is exquisite. Thank you.

Mr. Doran’s name has been inscribed in The Shakespeare Code’s ROLL OF HONOUR.

Jane Howell, doyenne director of Shakespeare for stage and television (her production of the Henry VI trilogy for the B.B.C. is legendary) writes about Love’s Labour’s Found, the basis for The Shakespeare Code:

It’s got such verve, excitement and gusto in it. It just races along and pulls you with it. It’s light, exciting, fascinating and interesting. You somehow get soaked up into the life of those times. It’s a wonderful piece of work. I hope it gets people stirred up and arguing. It’s brilliant!

The Shakespeare Code will quote extensively from  Love’s Labour’s Found, updating it as the new theories evolve.

Miss Howell’s name has been inscribed in The Shakespeare Code’s ROLL OF HONOUR

Nicholas Hytner, radical, scintillating, Director of the Royal National Theatre, writes:

Your theory is fascinating and seductive. It rings of truth. I never understand those who say they are uninterested in Shakespeare’s life; the creation of life for the writer of the playsseems an emotional necessity to me. Yours moves me and convinces me. I hope you have a huge success.

Sir Nicholas’s name has been inscribed in The Shakespeare Code’s ROLL OF HONOUR

Melvyn Bragg, brilliant novelist, philosopher, cultural commentator and Chief Guardian of Intellectual Life in Britain, writes:

What great ideas! Wonderfully interesting! Intriguing! Watch out Stratford-upon-Avon!

Lord Bragg’s name has been included in The Shakespeare Code’s ROLL OF HONOUR.

Shakespeare’s Curious Knotted Garden.

 At the beginning of Shakespeare’s early comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Don Adriano de Armado, a fantastical Spaniard, writes an outraged letter to the King of Navarre. Costard, the swain, and Jacquenetta the country wench have been copulating in the King’s own Park!

The Place where? It standeth north-north-east and by east from the west corner of thy curious knotted garden

Later the Princess of France, visiting the King on state business, asks:

Was that the King that spurr’d his horse so hard

Against the steep-uprising of the hill?

I have directed Love’s Labour’s Lost twice, once in Clare College gardens as an undergraduate and once as Artistic Director of the Northcott Theatre in Devon.

Both times I had the feeling that Shakespeare was writing about a real place.

But where?

Shakespeare dedicated his poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to Henry Wriothesley (‘Harry Southampton’ as he liked to be known) the young third Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield. The obvious place to start was his country estate, if it was still there. I phoned the Hampshire Tourist Board:

Yes, the ruins of Titchfield Abbey were still standing, but no, there was no garden. The locals burn an effigy of the third Earl each year because he built a sea-wall which cut off the sea. They also believe that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet at Titchfield – a lot of nonsense of course.

That was enough for me to pack a picnic hamper and persuade my teenage daughter Amy that a Whitsun outing to Titchfield Abbey was worth it.

Amy Trotter as she is now...

Secretly I feared we would find a super-market car-park. On the train down to the South Coast we skimmed the tourist bumph:

In 1232, Henry III granted the estate of Titchfield to the Premonstratensions, a French, white robed order of monks. Because ships at that time could sail right round the Isle of Wight and right up to Titchfield Harbour, it became an important embarkation point for France. Henry V stayed there in 1415 before setting off with his army for Agincourt and Henry VI married Margaret of Anjou in the Abbey Church in 1445. On his break with Rome, Henry VIII dissolved the monastery in 1537 and gave it to Thomas Wriothesley (1505-1550), later first Earl of Southampton, who converted it into a ‘right stately house’ called The Place. The second Earl, his son, a ‘fanatical papist’, was imprisoned in Tower of London for trying to overthrow Queen Elizabeth. The third Earl (1545-1581), his son, also an ardent Catholic in his youth, was patron to several writers, including William Shakespeare. He also was imprisoned for rebelling against the Queen, but freed in the reign of James VI and I. The line died out with the fourth Earl.

The taxi from Fareham swung past the The Mill Pub – built on the remains of an old cornmill – and into the magnificent ruins of the Abbey.

Titchfield Abbey, Hampshire.

True, there was no garden, but I looked down in amazement at an overgrown, sunken patch of ground, grass waist high, that would have once made a perfect knot garden, that geometrical Tudor creation of interwoven flower beds. A beaten path through a garden led to a picnic table that seemed to be waiting for us.

I climbed into a stunted apple tree and, to my daughter’s embarrassment, declaimed some lines from the play:

Like a demi-God, here sit I in the sky,

And wretched fools’ secrets heedfully o’er-eye.

More sacks to the Mill! O heavens I have my wish

Dumaine transformed: four woodcocks in a dish

‘More sacks to the Mill!’

 Could that be the Mill we had just passed in the taxi?

The Mill Pub, Titchfield

I turned to songs of Spring and Winter that end the play. Could all the people mentioned, Tom, who bears logs into the Hall, Dick, the Shepherd who blows his nail, Marian whose nose looks red and raw and Greasy Joan who keels the pot all be people who once lived and worked in this great household?

I noticed a line in the Spring Song: And Maidens bleach their Summer Smocks. The night before  our Titchfield trip, Amy had spilt coffee over her dress. It had spent the night in very non-Tudor bleach. The spirits of the household seemed to be laughing with us.

Not sure if I was in 1590’s or the present, in a garden or a set, in life or in a play, I packed the picnic hamper. As we were leaving, something made me turn round.

There, beyond the garden wall, was the steep up-rising of the hill…

 An extract from Love’s Labour’s Found.

If you are new to this blog,  start with Shakespeare, Love and Religion

 a three part overview of the life and work of Shakespeare, posted earlier.