The Shakespeare Globe are currently staging ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ – and they have come to the conclusion that Bertram and Parolles are having a gay affair….
The Shakespeare Code came to this conclusion some time ago – so we thought it was time to re-post our thoughts on the play….
Enjoy!
In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson wrote:
I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.
In the twentieth century, Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote :
We hold this play to be one of Shakespeare’s worst.
Even John Dover Wilson…..
…..the eminent Shakespearean who, in 1933, first suggested Shakespeare had been a teacher, factotum and entertainer for the Southampton family in Titchfield – wrote:
In the final scene it is hard to tell whether the verse or the sentiment it conveys is the more nauseating.
So is the play a failure?
It all depends on what Shakespeare was setting out to do….
Samuel Taylor Coleridge……
……the great poet and critic, was the first to suggest (in 1813) that…
All’s Well that Ends Well as it has come down to us, was written at two different and rather distant points of the poet’s life.
Coleridge thought that there were two distinct styles, not only of thought but of expression. This, The Shakespeare Code believes, also springs from the change in Shakespeare’s INTENTION from the first play to the second.
But what was this first play? And where and when was it performed?
The clue comes from a passage in Palladis Tamia, written by Francis Meres in 1598:
…..witness his [Shakespeare’s] Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love labors lost, his Love labors wonne, his Midsummers night dream, & his Merchant of Venice…
In All’s Well that Ends Well Helena says to Bertram:
Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?
…and the whole play rests on her heroic labours to make her husband love her.
It is The Code’s belief that Love’s Labour’s Won was the first version of All’s Well that Ends Well, that it was an answer to Love’s Labour’s Lost and, like that play, was performed in 1592 by a cast of professional actors and aristocrats (women as well as men) in private performance in Titchfield – to a commission from Mary Browne, Second Countess of Southampton.
Love’s Labour’s Lost is a light hearted, satirical play in praise of heterosexual love.
But it does not resolve in marriage: the Princess of France’s father dies in the course of the action.
This is because Countess Mary’s father, Lord Montague…..
…..and twin brother Anthony were both dying when the play was first performed at Whitsun.
A joyous ending to the play would have been totally inappropriate.
By December, though, both men were dead and it is highly probable from the title (though obviously we don’t have the text) that Love’s Labour’s Won was….
a Christmas comedy
…..that ended happily in love and marriage.
Given the bitterness of All’s Well that Ends Well, this may seem hard to believe: but Shakespeare’s source for the play – William Paynter’s translation of Boccaccio’s The Story of Giletta from his Decamerone – is a warm hearted romance, a fairy-story even….
‘Giletta’, who loves the ‘aimiable and fair’ Count Beltramo, [let’s call them Helena and Bertram from now on] is the rich and beautiful daughter of a celebrated Physician who has died. Because Bertram is an aristocrat, he has to leave Rossillion and became the King’s Ward of Court.
Helena – who from childhood has loved him…..
more than is meet for a woman of her age
…..determines to follow him and win his hand in marriage.
She does this by curing the King’s fistula with one of her father’s prescriptions….
….and the help of God.
The King has promised her that she can have the husband of her choice if she succeeds in curing him, but is horrified when she chooses the aristocratic Count Bertram .
Bertram is also horrified at the thought of marrying a commoner , but obeys his King.
However, he rushes off to the wars without consummating the marriage and Countess Helena returns to Rossillion , which has fallen into disrepair because Bertram has been away.
She gains everyone’s respect by the way she restores Rossillion, then sends word to her husband that she is prepared to leave the city if her presence there means he will never return.
Bertram replies that he will only live with her when she has his ring – valued for its healing powers – in her possession and…..
…a son in her arms begotten by me.
When she hears this, Helena leaves Rossillion so that he can return and, much to her subjects distress, sets off to become a Pilgrim.
By chance she encounters Bertram, from a distance, and learns he has fallen in love with another woman, respectable but poor.
Helena persuades the woman to gain Bertram’s ring as a token of his love, then, under cover of night, sleeps with her husband, posing as the woman he loves.
God arranges it that Helena conceives and, when she knows she is pregnant, she and the woman, richly rewarded by Helena, leave the town .
Helena gives birth to twins and nurses them while Bertram, urged back by his subjects, returns to Rossillion.
One day he is about to celebrate the All Saints Festival when Helena arrives in her pilgrim’s clothes, with two sons, not one, in her arms and her husband’s ring.
Bertram is astonished at her ‘constant mind and good wit’, clothes her in a beautiful dress fit for a Countess and….
….kept great chere. From that time forth, hee loued and honoured her, as his dere spouse and wyfe.’
Bertram, in the Boccaccio story, is in a situation very similar to Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton (‘Harry Southampton’), the Countess Mary’s only son .
Harry, like Betram, had a father who had died and was a ward of court. He was eager, like Bertram, to go off to fight the wars and, also like Bertram, was being asked to wed against his will.
Lord Burghley, his guardian…….
…….wanted Harry to marry Elizabeth de Vere, his granddaughter…….
…..and was threatening to impose a tremendous £5,000 fine on the Southampton family.
But there was one major difference between Harry and the Bertram in the story:
Harry was gay!
Countess Mary had commissioned Shakespeare to write seventeen Sonnets for Harry’s seventeenth birthday in 1590, urging him to marry Elizabeth and father a son and heir.
Mary had followed this up with another commission two years later – Love’s Labour’s Lost – in which a group of aristocratic men swear to give up the company of women to pursue their studies, but one by one succumb to their charms.
Shakespeare cast the dark-skinned musician and courtesan, Amelia Bassano – whom he had met and fallen in love with on the Queen’s Progress to Hampshire in 1591 – as the dark skinned coquette, Rosaline.
He cast himself as Berowne (a play on Countess Mary’s family name) as a Lord who attempts to seduce her…
After the show Amelia stayed on at Titchfield because the plague was raging in London and, as we know from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, art turned into life.
Harry was jealous of Amelia (he wanted to be the centre of Shakespeare’s attention) and when Shakespeare asked him to plead his love-suit with Amelia, Amelia swooped on Harry. Harry (despite himself) also swooped on Amelia.
A painful love-triangle ensued which ended in Amelia’s pregnancy and marriage to a minstrel ‘for colour’. It also ended in Shakespeare’s own realisation he was more in love with the boy than he was with the girl.
But Shakespeare knew that, as an aristocrat, Harry had to get married and have a son. Shakespeare, after all, was married with children himself. So he was happy to pen Love’s Labour’s Won to please Countess Mary and celebrate the worth of women and the worth of marriage.
But why, in All’s Well that Ends Well, written fifteen years later, did Shakespeare turn Bertram/Harry into a psychopath – that is, someone displaying……
…….amoral and antisocial behaviour, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity and failure to learn from experience?
The King in the play even suspects Bertram of murder….
Why did Shakespeare turn Bertram in to a psychopath?
The answer can again be found in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
They reveal an affair between Shakespeare and Harry that lasted from 1592…..
…….to 1605…..
There were infidelities and betrayals on both sides – lots of door-slamming and walk outs.
But the love survived Harry’s sudden onset of heterosexuality when he married Elizabeth Vernon – whom he adored…..
……and the birth of daughters.
It even survived the Essex Rebellion when Harry, along with his intimate friend the Earl of Essex, tried to overthrow Queen Elizabeth.
Essex was beheaded…….
…. and Harry, under sentence of death, was locked in the Tower.
What Shakespeare’s affair with Harry couldn’t survive, though, was the birth of a son to Elizabeth in 1605.
Shakespeare writes about this in Sonnet 126…..
O thou my lovely boy, who in thy power
Dost hold time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour,
Who hast by waning grown, and therin shows
Thy lover’s withering as thy sweet self growst;
Shakespeare had used the phrase……
…..sweet self……
…..in his Birthday Sonnets, fifteen years earlier, to mean Harry’s baby boy.
By having a son, Harry is able, miraculously, to both wane and wax at the same time.
He will grow weaker as time passes, but his baby will grow stronger.
Harry, besotted with his son, had neglected Shakespeare and this had led to his…..
….lover’s [Shakespeare’s] withering’….
In fact Harry had done more than neglect Shakespeare: he had rejected him outright.
Harry had hoped to become King James’s new boyfriend when he was released from the Tower: but James preferred prettier, younger men. The Tower and illness had taken their toll on Harry’s good looks.
Pushed from the gay centre of power, Harry became bitterly homophobic. He wanted his son to grow up to be a brave, straight soldier.
Sir Philip Sidney…….
…….Harry’s hero…..
…… had demonstrated in his Arcadia that a man could dress up as a woman on one day….
……and kill a lion the next.
Prince Pyrocles – cross-dressed as the Amazon Warrior, Zalmena – prepares to kill a lion. (From Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’).
But times had changed.
Shakespeare, the Player, had to go.
In Sonnet 126 Shakespeare finally wishes death on Harry:
If nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,
As thou gowest onwards still will pluck thee back,
She keeps thee to this purpose: that her skill
May time disgrace, and wretched minute kill.
Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure:
She may detain, but not still keep her treasure!
Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.
Dame Nature might be keeping him preternaturally young and beautiful, but in the end she will have to give him over to Old Father Time and
….render….
….him – break down his body – in the grave….
The brackets at the end of the ‘Sonnet’……
….which at 12 lines isn’t a Sonnet at all…..
…..indicate that lines are missing from the poem….
…..and represent the yawning family tomb waiting for Harry in St. Peter’s Church in Titchfield.
Shakespeare then turned his attention to Love’s Labour’s Won.
He re-wrote it as an attack on his old lover.
All of Bertram’s redeeming features in the Boccaccio tale are wiped out.
He is no longer
a goodly young gentleman…
…or even…
….a courteous knight well-beloved in the city.
He becomes an unredeemed brute, snobbish, selfish, manipulative, mendacious, lustful and foolish….
…..whom even his mother condemns and disowns.
To make sure the audience would know Bertram was Harry, all the actor would have needed was to enter with a wig with long curly hair…..
But Shakespeare flashes up Bertram’s identity in the text as well….
Bertram becomes a General of Horse: Harry was a General of Horse on the Irish campaign.
Bertram woos Diana with song: Harry, in Shakespeare’s mind at least, was…..
…..music to hear……
Bertram hates cats: Harry hated cats.
He had himself painted with one in the Tower to show he had mastered his passions.
But Shakespeare’s intention wasn’t solely revenge.
He makes a fascinating change to the Boccaccio tale by introducing Bertram’s mother, the Countess of Rossillion.
Countess Mary died in 1607……
…….the year scholars now think Shakespeare wrote the play……
…..and was entombed close to her first husband, the Second Count of Southampton, in the family vault of St. Peter’s, Titchfield.
Shakespeare clearly loved Mary, who gave him his first real chances in life.
He celebrates her warmth and her wisdom and even her Roman Catholicism.
She makes a coded reference to the Virgin Mary in the play, Bertram’s only hope!
What angel shall
Bless this unworthy husband? he cannot thrive,
Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear
And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath
Of greatest justice.
This was something very dangerous for a playwright to do two years after the Roman Catholic Gunpowder Plot.
Shakespeare also acknowledges the remarkable part Count Mary played in his relationship with Harry.
In this re-write of Love’s Labour’s Won, Helena is clearly Shakespeare in drag.
Boccaccio’s Helena is rich and independent: the All’s Well Helena is poor and vulnerable….
…..just as Shakespeare was when he joined the Southampton household in 1590.
When Helena says:
Twere all one
That I should love a bright particular star
And think to wed it, he is so above me:
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere
…it could be Shakespeare himself speaking about Harry…..
….a point made by the visionary scholar Dover Wilson, in his Essential Shakespeare, as far back as the 1930s.
It is my belief that the remarkable scene in which Helena confesses her love to the Countess happened in real life….
…. and that Shakespeare confessed his love for Harry to Mary.
Early in her marriage, Countess Mary had fallen deeply in love with….
…..a common person…..
…..and her husband, Henry, the Second Count of Southampton…..
….disowned her and turned gay.
According to Countess Mary he made…
…His manservant his wife….
Mary swore in a letter to her father, Lord Montague……
…..England’s leading Roman Catholic….
…..that she had fallen in love with someone other than her husband……
…..but had never made love to him.
Helena, in the play, asks the Countess to empathise with her love for Bertram.
Had she herself ever loved passionately in her youth?
But restrained herself from acting out that love…..
….finding fulfilment in an act of non-fulfilment?
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
To her, whose state is such that cannot choose
But lend and give where she is sure to lose;
That seeks not to find that her search implies,
But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies!
The Countess, silently saying ‘yes’, gives her blessing to Helena’s liaison with her son…..
…..just as Mary gave hers to Shakespeare.
The Countess’s love had crossed barriers of class……
Shakespeare’s love crossed barriers of sex as well.
Shakespeare, in the play, was clearly examining his own feelings and behaviour.
He had often been a ‘Helena’ in his relationship with Harry…..
……besotted, passive and accepting…….
……sometimes waiting for hours for Harry to turn up.
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desires?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till your require:
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Wjhilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu. (Sonnet 57)
Had he been right to cast himself as a…
…slave..
….and Harry as his….
…sovereign….?
As he was writing All’s Well, Shakespeare was also working on A Lover’s Complaint …..
……a narrative poem which concluded the volume of his Sonnets.
Here he does something similar to All’s Well……
….he casts himself as another woman and Harry as another psychopath!
To make sure everyone knew it was Harry, he described his….
….browny locks
…..which hung…..
…..in crooked curls
And every light occasion of the wind
Upon his lips their silken parcels hurls…
The woman/Shakespeare describes her seducer’s….
…..passion
…..like Harry/Bertram’s, as
…..an art of craft…..
She/he also observes that…
When he most burned in heart-wish’d luxury
He preached pure maid, and praised cold chastity.
But at the conclusion of the poem the woman – who is ‘the lover’ of the title – claims that she would go through the whole affair again!
A Lover’s Complaint was published a year or two after the first performance of All’s Well.
Had Shakespeare reached the same, positive conclusion when he wrote the play?
Not quite.
He was still trying to establish the truth of things.
He admits that Bertram/Harry…..
……however appalling they are as lovers…..
……are brave and skilful on the field of war.
That is what redeems them.
As the First Lord, speaking in what is surely Shakespeare’s own voice, says:
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.
Also the Countess notices that, when Diana produces the ring that six generations of Bertram’s family have worn…..
…..and which he has traded in for a one-night stand with her…..
Bertram has the decency to blush.
So Harry was not entirely Satanic!
But what about Parolles?
Samuel Johnson wrote:
Parolles is a boaster and a coward, such as has always been the sport of the stage, but perhaps never raised more laughter or contempt than in the hands of Shakespeare.
Parolles – design by Osbert Lancaster.
Also:
Parolles has many of the lineaments of Falstaff and seems to be the character which Shakespeare delighted to draw, a fellow that has more of wit than virtue.
It is The Shakespeare Code’s belief that Parolles featured in the original Love’s Labour’s Won and has been re-written in All’s Well to make him darker and more loathsome.
He is sometimes similar to the braggart Spaniard, Armado, in Love’s Labour’s Lost…..
………who started off life as a satire on Sir Walter Raleigh…..
…….and even uses some of the same words and phrases.
But is the Parolles of All’s Well a satire as well?
The Code believes he is.
First of all, he is a satire on a ‘type’.
Harry Southampton had a taste for lower class young men, just as his mother had.
In his famous ‘They that have power to hurt’ Sonnet (94) Shakespeare warns Harry of the political, moral and sexual consequences of mixing with – and making love to – men outside his class.
It is better to masturbate than go to bed with a pleb!
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die
But if that flower with base infection meet
The basest weed outbraves his dignity.
‘Base infection’ here means both moral contamination and the very real chance of contracting venereal disease.
The final couplet graphically nails this idea home:
For sweetest things [!] turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Parolles contaminates Bertram.
Old Lafew describes him as…..
a snipt-taffeta fellow whose villanous saffron would have made all the unbaked and doughy youth of a nation in his colour
By the time Shakespeare came to write All’s Well, he had a real Captain in mind – Piers Edmondes.
A manuscript in the Marquis of Salisbury’s collection states:
Captain Piers Edmondes was also known to the Earl of Essex: he was so favoured as he often rode in a coach with him, and was wholly of his charges maintained, being a man of base birth in St. Clement’s Parish.
The Earl of Essex pursued a secret gay life from his own private bath house on the Strand…..
For a man to ride in a coach at the time was considered the height of effeminacy: for two men to ride together was an act of gross indecency. A….
coach-companion
…..according to Francis Bacon’s mother, was a synonym for a…..
bed-companion.
During the trial of Essex and Southampton after the Rebellion a letter was produced from William Reynolds (probably brother of Essex’s secretary, Edward) in which he…
marvelled what had become of Piers Edmondes, the Earl of Essex’s man, born in the Strand near me, who had many preferements by the Earl. His villainy I have often complained of. He was Corporal General of the Horse in Ireland under the Earl of Southampton. He ate and drank at his table and lay in his tent. The Earl of Southampton gave him a horse which Edmunds refused a hundred marks for him, the Earl of Southampton would cole and huge [embrace and hug] him in his arms and play wantonly with him. This Piers began to fawn and flatter me in Ireland, offering me great courtesy, telling me what pay, graces and gifts the Earls bestowed upon him, thereby seeming to move and animate me to desire and look for the like favour.
Just after the Rebellion, Edmondes himself had written to a Mr. Wade, explaining that….
….he had spent 20 years in the Queen’s service and when his old hurts received in that service burst out afresh, he was enforced to come to London for remedy but two days before that dismal day [the Rebellion] by which mischance, being among his Lordship’s people innocently, he stands in the like danger they do.
Hugging and kissing Harry to get presents from him, fawning and flattering Reynoldes to recruit him as a rent boy, sucking up to the two Earls for cash and favours and explaining to Wade that he may have been physically present at the Essex Rebellion but was NOT part of it, is pure, pure Parolles.
Simply the thing he was made Edmondes live…..
Two Academic Footnotes:
(1) Samuel Taylor Coleridge…..
……loved the character of Helena but was disturbed that she told a lie when she said to the widow:
His face I know not.
This was not a lie – it was an equivocation!
The word…..
face
…….for the Elizabethans and Jacobeans could mean the genital area.
As King Lear says at the height of his madness and sexual disgust…..
Behold yon simpering dame whose face between her forks presages snow….
And as Shakespeare says in his own voice in Sonnet 94, in praise of chaste people who do not sleep around:
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense [seminal emission]
They are the lords and owners of their faces
Others but stewards of the excellence.
So, as Helena had not yet been to bed with her husband at that point in the play, she was telling ‘the truth’!
(2) The Shakespeare Code has established that the text of All’s Well has NINE words or phrases that Shakespeare never uses again – but which Thomas Nashe does……
(It’s best to read Parts One and Two first. The Story continues…)
Mary Southampton summons Will…..
She has found out about the liaison between Will and Harry and is furious. But Will reminds her that her own love once crossed barriers of class.
Can’t she give her blessing to one that crosses barriers of sex?
She does – and Harry and Will travel to Europe in 1593 – as spies for the Earl of Essex and to celebrate their love.
In Spain Will and Harry see Titian’s paintings of Venus and Adonis...….
…..and The Rape of Lucrece..
They then travel on to Rome – where they see the newly erected obelisk in front of St. Peter’s…..
……and buy Italian novellas that Will transforms into plays.
When Harry and Will return to England, they find that Marlowe has been killed in a gay brawl – and that Kyd, under torture, has betrayed Marlowe’s atheism to the authorities. Mary Southampton commissions a narrative poem from Will based on Titian’sVenus and Adonis – and he uses the same colours in his verse that the artist does in his painting.
The poem has gay undertows – but basically celebrates the idea of heterosexual love – which remains unfulfilled.
Mary still hopes that her son will one day marry.
Harry is nominated for the Order of the Garter and Will warns him to be careful about his promiscuity with lower class young men, as this could be used against him politically – as indeed it was at his trial after the Essex Rebellion in 1601.
In 1594 – as we have seen – Harry commissions a poem from Will based on The Rape of Lucrece.
This is a massive chance for Will to write a serious poem – and he retires to Stratford to write it – again drawing on Titian’s original colours. But he neglects to write love-sonnets to Harry.
George Chapman…..
…….an older, impoverished poet – seizes his chance and starts to write poems to Harry that out-flatter even Will’s.
Will is desperate as he sees his source of income drying up – but Mary Southampton comes to his aid.
She commissions Will to write A Midsummer Night’s Dream to celebrate her wedding, in 1594, to Sir Thomas Heneage, at Copt Hall in Essex.
Despite the terrible summer weather, this play is such a triumph that Harry dumps Chapman and gives Will the famous present of £1,000. Will and Harry resume their affair – with lapses, it must be admitted, on both sides.
But Will finds it disturbing that Harry never shows any signs of guilt on his face…
In August 1596 Will’s son, Hamnet, dies. Will, ironically, is working on a new version of Hamlet at the Swan Theatre and has no time to mourn properly. He goes off the rails and is bound over to keep the peace – along with a bunch of low-lifers and prostitutes – after threatening violence to one William Wayte.
As a result Harry cannot be seen with Will – but in time, the two men resume their liaison, and Harry becomes Will’s surrogate son as well as his lover.
But finally Harry does fall in love with a woman – Elizabeth Vernon……
……a poor cousin of the Earl of Essex and lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Harry asks Will’s help to gain her favours by writing a love-play they can perform at Titchfield – Romeo and Juliet’
Will is ambivalent about this – and creates the disturbed figure of Mercutio for himself to play. But in the end he realises that he still has a spiritual relationship with Harry – ‘the marriage of true minds’.
Politics now take over from love. Both the Earl of Essex and Harry want to depose Queen Elizabeth because she will not name her successor – and they fear a civil war will ensue. Also Elizabeth refuses to give freedom of worship to Catholics – a cause Essex supports, though he is a Protestant.
Will is recruited into the plot – and is sent to Scotland in 1599 to persuade King James to invade England by performing Macbeth. This play prophesies – through the Three Witches – that the Stuart line will take over the throne of England as well as Scotland.
It also condemns the Macbeths for killing their royal guest – in the way Elizabeth has beheaded James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots, when she sought refuge in England.
Will, though, realises that the rebellion is lost when Essex fails to quell an uprising in Ireland. He writes Julius Caesar to show how badly rebellions can go – but Essex and Harry go ahead with theirs and have the Chamberlain’s Men put on Richard II – a play about the deposition of a King – on the eve of the Essex rebellion.
Queen Elizabeth famously says: ‘I am Richard – know ye not that?’
Will flees to Scotland in a state of suicidal despair. Essex is beheaded – but Harry’s death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment in the Tower, where he becomes so ill people fear he will die.
But Elizabeth herself dies in 1603 and everything turns round. Will comes back to London and writes sonnets to his friend King James, imploring him to release Harry from the Tower: they are sent with a ‘wooing’ portrait of Harry…
…..depicting him with his hair loose, like a bride’s, and offering his left hand to the King.
Will writes:
Ah wherefore with infection should he live
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve
And lace itself with his society?
[Why should Harry still be locked up in the Tower of London, living with ‘infection’: (1) The literal infection of the Tower with its vermin (2) The moral infection of being imprisoned with criminals and (3) The infection of his own illness – his arm is still in a sling. And why should he give the grace of his being to sinful fellow convicts and allow them to hobnob with him as equals?]
The Sonnets do the trick – and on 5th April, James VI and I writes to the Privy Council:
‘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.’
Harry is released from the Tower on 9th April, 1603 and Will writes a sonnet of pure joy.
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos’d as forfeit to a confin’d doom.
[Neither my own anxieties nor the predictions of everybody else about the future can stop the release from the Tower of my lover – whom everyone thought would die in prison]
The mortal Moon hath her eclipse indur’d,
And the sad Augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown them-selves assur’d,
And peace proclaims Olives of endless age.
[Queen Elizabeth – the Moon-Goddess – has proved to be a human being after all. She has died – and those who predicted strife and civil war at her death have been proved wrong and laugh at what they themselves prophesied. Anxieties have given way to confidence, and the peace that has greeted the accession of King James promises peace for all time].
Now with the drops of this most balmy time,
My love looks fresh and death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him I’ll live in this poor rime,
While he insults ore dull and speechless tribes;
[The accession of King James has been like a healing balm to my beloved Harry, who now looks young and well. Even death now supports my writing since I will live on in this, my second-rate verse, while death triumphs over whole swathes of dim-witted and inarticulate people].
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.
[And this poem, Harry, will be your monument – when the crests and brass tombs of tyrants like Queen Elizabeth will be in ruins].
‘Crests’ is a coded dig at Elizabeth. She once described herself as ‘cloven and not crested.’ Here Will gives her a crest and turns her into a man – a rumour about Elizabeth that had circulated for years. But even her crest – her honorary penis – will crumble into dust.
Will had met Harry in the summer of 1590. Their relationship – with all its infidelities and ups and downs – had lasted a full thirteen years.
The pasteboard obelisks set up on James’s coronation route were blown down by the wind….
– but they reminded Will of the genuine obelisk he and Harry had seen in Rome – and Will compared his love with Harry to the eternity of its stone.
But their affair was soon to end. It had survived Harry’s marriage to Elizabeth Vernon – which proved a very happy one – and had survived the birth of daughters to the couple. But in 1605 everything changed. Elizabeth produced a son.
Harry, by this time, had grown disenchanted with the gay world of James’s Court. He had hoped to become the King’s favourite – but, although only thirty, he was too old for James. The younger sons of the Countess of Pembroke – William and Philip Herbert – became the King’s favourites. Harry was marginalised.
Harry, alienated by events, wanted his son – named James after the King – to become a brave and masculine soldier.
Will, the Old Player, had to go.
So, not only had Will lost his real son – he had now lost his surrogate son as well.
He responds by writing Harry a sonnet of pure poison: the phrase ‘lovely boy’ is bitter and sarcastic.
O thou my lovely Boy who in thy power
Dost hold time’s fickle glass, his sickle’s hour:
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st
Thy lover’s withering, as thy sweet self grow’st;
[Harry, you seem to have complete control of Father Time’s hour-glass and his sickle – with which he cuts life away. You have enacted the miracle of growing bigger by diminishing: you have waned but your other ‘self’ – your baby son – has waxed. But as your baby grows – and is given all your attention – I, your lover, am withering away from your neglect].
If Nature (sovereign mistress over wrack)
As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back,
She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill
May time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill.
[If Dame Nature – who is the supreme controlling mistress of decay – keeps you unnaturally young – by preserving your ‘loveliness’ and giving you a son – her motive for doing this is to humiliate Father Time and destroy his pitiful minutes.]
Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure;
She may detain, but not still keep her treasure!
Her Audit(though delayed) answer’d must be,
And her Quietus is to render thee.
[But be very frightened of your mistress, Dame Nature – you plaything of her lust. She can hold on to objects that she values – but can’t keep them. Her final invoice to Father Time must be honoured – and when she settles her bill she will ‘render’ you in two ways. (1) By giving you back to time – and (2) by breaking your body down like meat.]
This Sonnet is NOT even a Sonnet. It is only twelve lines long – and where there should be a clinching couplet, Will has put two pairs of brackets.
I
It looks like a grave – yawning open for Harry’s body.
Will wants his old lover dead.
Will was clearly going through a crisis – a break-down even – and it led on to some of his darkest, most nihilistic plays – the bleakest being King Lear. He smashes down the play’s original happy ending – and finally mourns for his son through Lear’s grief for his dead daughter.
And he took his revenge on Harry four years later by publishing all his intimate sonnets to him.
He gets his publisher, T. T. – Thomas Thorpe – to wish Harry ‘All Happiness’ – as Will does, as we have seen, in his dedication to Lucrece– and Thorpe – by describing himself as ‘the well-wishing adventurer’ who is ‘setting forth’ – references Harry’s ship – ‘The Sea Adventure’ – which left Plymouth for Virginia on 2nd June 1609 – a fortnight after the Sonnets had been published.
But in what I believe is Will’s final sonnet – 146 – he resolves to enter on a spiritual path away from worldly excess, and, in his words….
……..feed on death
In The Tempest Prospero says: ‘Every third thought shall be my grave’– and in his final plays, Will seems to have come to accept the way things are.
William Davenant describes how, when he was a boy, Will would ‘cover his face with a hundred kisses’ when he visited him in Oxford, so perhaps Davenant had come to replace both Hamnet and Harry in Will’s heart, mind – and soul.
With the Sonnets, Will included a narrative poem ‘A Lover’s Complaint’. In this he splits himself into two – and has a conversation with himself. One half of Will is a young woman who has fallen in love with a psychotic young man whose‘browny locks hung in crooked curls’– not unlike Harry Southampton’s.
And, very much like Harry he…..
did in the general bosom reign
Of young, of old; and sexes both enchanted.
His other persona is….
A reverend man that grazed his cattle nigh– Sometime a blusterer, that the ruffle knew Of court, of city…
The O.E.D. guesses ‘blusterer’ means ‘boaster’ – but it could equally be a bombastic actor who ‘struts and frets his hour upon the stage.’
The young woman tells the older man how, like others, she fell besotted with the young man and…
Threw my affections in his charmed power, Reserved the stalk and gave him all my flower.
But the young woman finally wises up….
For, lo, his passion, but an art of craft, E’en there resolved my reason into tears; There my white stole of chastity I daff’d, Shook off my sober guards and civil fears; Appear to him, as he to me appears, All melting; though our drops this difference bore, His poison’d me, and mine did him restore.
[His passion was an artful, bogus one that transformed my rational mind into tears. There I took off my white dress of chastity, shook off my ‘sober guards’ – my moral protection and abstention – and ‘civil fears’ – fear of abandoning propriety and even the law itself – and appeared to him in same ‘melting’ – weeping and ejaculating state – as he appeared to me – with this difference: his ‘drops’ – tears and semen – poisoned me while mine made him better.]
But the Young Woman comes to a most surprising conclusion…
O, that infected moisture of his eye, O, that false fire which in his cheek so glow’d, O, that forced thunder from his heart did fly, O, that sad breath his spongy lungs bestow’d, O, all that borrow’d motion seeming owed… Would yet again betray the fore-betray’d, And new pervert a reconciled maid!
If she had her time over, she would do it all again!
At the end of the day, Will was glad he had met Harry….
********
At the end of Stewart’s talk – ‘When Will met Harry’ – there was a lively and provactive Q. and A. session – which Your Cat will report on soon in a ‘Trixie Special’.
All at Code Headquarters in West London wish you a Very Happy 2024!
Just before Christmas, the Shakespeare Code’s Chief Agent – Stewart Trotter – accompanied by Your Faithful Cat – travelled down to Titchfield in Hampshire to address a packed meeting of the august Titchfield History Society….
Here is Stewart’s talk…
Your Cat read the quotes!
‘Bye, now!
***
The BBC has just televised a three part, three hour, life of William Shakespeare – titled…
The Rise of a Genius.
It makes no mention at all of Titchfield – or even Henry Rosely, the Third Earl of Southampton.
I pronounce his surname ‘Rosely’ because that’s how the aristocratic branch of the Wriothesley family is named in the local Parish Register. The non-aristocratic branch called themselves Risley – and even spelt their surname Risley.
The Third Earl of Southampton called himself ‘Harry’ in his letters and Shakespeare called himself ‘Will’ in his Sonnets. So let’s call them ‘Harry and Will’.
For the last quarter of a century I have taken Will’s link with Titchfield and the Southampton family as a truth universally acknowledged. But clearly it isn’t. Or not by the BBC anyway. So I thought the best thing to do for this talk was to take a fresh look at the evidence to see if it really does stack up.
What it boils down to is this:
Do we believe what Nicholas Rowe says in his ‘Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear’ – …..the first ever biography of Will published in 1709?
It must be admitted, for a start, that Rowe spells ‘Shakespeare’ without the final ‘e’. Not a good sign.
Rowe writes:
‘What grace so ever the Queen conferred upon Shakespeare it was not to her only he owed the fortune which the reputation of his wit made. He had the honour to meet with many great and uncommon marks of favour and friendship from the Earl of Southampton, famous in the histories of that time for his friendship to the unfortunate Earl of Essex. It was to that noble Lord that he dedicated his Venus and Adonis, the only piece of his poetry which he ever published himself.‘
Rowe forgets that Will had also dedicated Lucreceto Harry – and in 1709 Will’s Sonnets had just been printed. Rowe had a copy – but hadn’t read them. Not a good sign either.
Rowe continues:
‘There is one incidence so singular in the magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare’s, that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D’Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not have ventured to have inserted, that my Lord Southampton, at one time, gave him [Will] a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to. A bounty very great and very rare at any time, and almost equal to that profuse generosity the present age has shown to French dancers and Italian eunuchs.’
£1,000 is thought by some to be worth half a million pounds in today’s money – or even a million.
Can we rely on this story? Rowe was a playwright himself – and had just edited an edition of Shakespeare’s plays. He got his information from Thomas Betterton…
….a hugely admired actor, famous for his Hamlet…
…..who had visited Stratford-upon-Avon toward the end of his life to gather information.
Betterton had acted for Davenant – who John Aubrey tells us – believed he was Will’s illegitimate son. Will had certainly been Davenant’s Godfather – and the teenage Davenant had written an ode on Will’s death.
Davenant also knew ‘old Mr. Lowen’ who had been directed by Will – so the story has a provenance going back to the Bard himself.
And in 1806, R.B. Wheeler provided back up evidence. He wrote in his ‘History and Antiquities of Stratford upon Avon….’
‘the unanimous tradition of this neighbourhood is that by the uncommon bounty of the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare was enabled to purchase houses and land in Stratford’.
But Edmond Malone…..
– an Irish ex-barrister with inherited wealth – was having none of it.
In 1770 he wrote:
‘that Lord Southampton gave Shakespeare a thousand pounds in order that he might complete a purchase is totally unworthy of credit since no such extensive a purchase ever appears to be made by him as will be seen when we come to make an estimate of the property which he possessed.’
Malone never even visited Stratford – but since his time, Shakespeare Scholars have simply repeated what he wrote.
Up to 2011, that is. A finance director turned academic called David Fallow wrote a Ph D for Exeter University in which he showed that purchases Will made between 1597 and 1614 cost him £1,400 – far in excess of the maximum of £60 a year he could have made in the theatre.
He must have had another source of money.
Now it has to be said that Dr. Fallow has other ideas about where the money came from. However, the facts fit Rowe’s account.
But how did Will come to meet Harry? Why did he leave Stratford in the first place?
The BBC series suggests it was simply an ambition to be a writer: but in the reign of Elizabeth that would have been suicidal.
Robert Greene…..
……whom the BBC presents as the successful ‘University Wit’ who gave Will his first writing break – ended up in the garret of a kind-hearted cobbler who found him dying of starvation in the street.
Rowe has a far more convincing story. He states that Will, on leaving school, joined the family business – butchery and gloving:
‘In this kind of settlement he continued for some time, till an extravagance that he was guilty of, forced him both out of his country and his way of living which he had taken up, and though it seemed at first to be a blemish on his good manners, and a misfortune to him, yet it afterwards happily proved the occasion of exerting one of the greatest Genius’s that ever was known in dramatic poetry.
He had by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged with them more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford.
For this he was prosecuted by that Gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him.
And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree, that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.‘
Malone, again, dismisses this story: but it is backed up by three different sources that pre-date Rowe – including a man called Thomas Jones – born in neighbouring Tarbick three years before Will died. He not only remembered the story – but remembered the ballad as well, which he sang way into his nineties! It has a refrain of:
‘Lucy is lousy’.
Joshua Barnes, a Cambridge don, reported, in the 1680s, he had heard the words of the ballad sung by his hostess at a Stratford inn – and in 1688 Richard Davies – an Oxford man – inherited notes about Will from a Gloucester clergyman called William Fullman. Davies records:
‘Shakespeare was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir — Lucy who oft had him whipped and sometimes imprisoned and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement’.
At the end of his account Davies writes:
‘He died a Papiste’.
This hits the crux. Robert Dudley, the First Earl of Leicester……
……moved to Kennilworth – a dozen miles from Stratford – when Will was twelve years old. Leicester – an intimate of Queen Elizabeth – claimed to be England’s leading Puritan and terrorised Roman Catholics. Thomas Lucy was his agent.
We know Will’s father, John, was also a Catholic because he signed a Testament of Faith which he hid in the walls of his house. The authenticity of this document was, of course, challenged by Malone. But other Testaments were later found in other places with exactly the same wording.
John Shakespeare had once been the Bailiff of Stratford and so rich he actually lent money to the Council. But his recusancy led him into direct conflict with the authorities and this ruined his business. He had to take Will out of school – but it seems a Catholic network was at hand to help.
John Cottom – a Lancashire Catholic who came to teach at Stratford – recognised Will’s talent and managed to get him a position as children’s entertainer with the Catholic Hoghton family at Hoghton Tower.
But Hoghton died, and Leicester’s thugs were circling, so Will had to return Stratford.
He wooed Anne Hathaway…..
…..eight years his senior – with ballads and songs – one of which we still have – and married her when she became pregnant. It was at this period – around 1582 – that Will began poaching Lucy’s deer – first to help feed his family, but later to take a Catholic revenge.
Leicester had accused Will’s aristocratic cousin, Edward Arden……
…….of plotting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth – and had him hanged, drawn and quartered in 1583.
When Will wrote his scandalous poem about Lucy – and according to Betterton hung it on the gates of Charlecote Park…….
……..Will had to flee. Again the Catholic network, it seems, was there to help him. It engineered a collaboration with Thomas Kyd……
…..not a University Wit as the BBC series asserted, but a fellow grammar school boy – a ‘grammarian’- from a Catholic family.
Evidence for this can be found in the pamphlets of the University Wits Robert Greene…..
…and Thomas Nashe……
…..who describe Will and Kyd as:
‘deep read Grammarians, who having no more art in their brain, than was nourished in a serving-man’s idleness, will take upon them to be the ironic censors of all, when God and poetry doth know, they are the simplest of all.’
According to the Wits, Will and Kyd, had day jobs in Westminster as ‘noverints’ – that is to say, solicitors’ clerks – which was the profession Kyd’s father followed. They would write by candlelight at night. And then….
‘for recreation, after their candle stuff, having starched their beards most curiously, make a peripatetical path into the inner parts of the City…‘
…..where Elizabethan gentlemen got up to no good.
To make sure readers knew who the grammarians were, the Wits quote the ‘kidin Aesop’ and Will’s ‘killcow conceit’ – a reference to Will’s former profession as a butcher and glover.
Will was the junior collaborator to Kyd, who was already established. Computer analysis suggests that Kyd produced early versions of Hamlet, King Lear, King John, Henry V, and The Taming of the Shrew or The Taming of a Shrew as it was then called.
According to a coded poem by Ben Jonson…..
…..Will Shakespeare….
……‘the poet-ape who would be thought our chief’…..
…..bought the rights to these plays when Kyd died in 1594 and developed them into the masterpieces they became. In the BBC series there was hardly a mention of Will’s extensive collaborations – or the fact he lifted the vast majority of his plots from other men’s work.
Richard Simpson – an Anglican priest in Queen Victoria’s reign who converted to Rome – was the first person in modern times to suggest that Will was a Catholic. But Simpson also traced – through the coded satires of Greene and Nashe – a massive influence on Will of a radical Anglican priest, poet and printer, Robert Crowley, the Rector of St. Giles Without Cripplegate.
Greene writes:
‘If they [Kyd and Will] come to publish anything, it is either distilled out of ballads or borrowed of theological poets and he that cannot write true English without the help of clerks of Parish Churches will need make himself father of interludes…in charity be it spoken, I am persuaded the sexton of St. Giles without Cripplegate would have been ashamed of such blasphemous rhetoric.
And Nashe writes:
‘I must needs send such idle wits [Kyd and Will] to shrift to the Vicar of St. Fooles….their ghostly father.’
Crowley believed that all wealth should be voluntarily re-distributed – and gave his own stipend to the poor. He believed that everything should be shared – and that everything should be simple and natural. He hated artifice in language and artifice in adornment. He hated wigs and he hated make-up. These are the massive themes of Will’s Sonnets – and the great, later plays.
But how did Will – a committed Catholic – come to meet Crowley – a priest so Protestant he refused to wear a surplice?
St. Giles without Cripplegate was the Church Sir Thomas Lucy used when he was in London. His second daughter, Margaret, who died at around 19 is buried there – and there is a memorial to his granddaughter, Constance Whjitney. It would only be natural for Will to try to enlist the priest’s support in his ongoing battle with Lucy. In return Will wrote the quasi-Biblical play The Fair Em to please Crowley – and toured the Midlands with it in Lord Strange’s Company.
So, if Rowe was right about Lucy, it could well mean that he was right about Harry and the £1,000 as well.
The Spanish Armada in 1588 spelt the death – for a time – of the theatre. The public were engaged in their own drama with Spain – and actors were seen as shirkers. Kyd joined Lord Strange’s household and Christopher Marlowe……
– whom Kyd and Will had befriended in London – joined Bess of Hardwick’s.
What happened to Will?
The great Shakespeare scholar, John Dover Wilson…..
……believed that Will joined Mary Southampton’s household in Titchfield as tutor to her teenage son, Harry – another indication that there was a Catholic network at work as the Southampton family were ardent followers of the Old Faith.
John Aubrey also states that Will…
‘understood Latin pretty well because he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country’.
But was the country Hampshire?
****
To find out read ‘When Will met Harry: Part Two’!!!
The Shakespeare Code 
