At the Q. and A. session after The Shakespeare Code’s talk to the Titchfield History Society, there was one question on everybody’s lips…..
How could Titchfield – and the Earl of Southampton – have been so airbrushed from The Rise of a Genius – the BBC T.V. biography of Shakespeare?
Why was there no mention of the man to whom Will had dedicated, in respectful and loving terrms, two, long, narrative poems?
Several theories were put forward…..
The first was power. Stratford-upon-Avon was in no mood to yield its supremacy in the Shakespeare story.
The Code’s Chief Agent revealed that Melvyn Bragg…..
……..had written a letter to him (at the start of the century!) which said:
‘Watch out, Stratford-upon-Avon!’.
Also there are two modern assumptions which blinded the BBC to the truth:
(1) A genius is a lone figure producing masterpieces in solitude.
What the Titchfield Theory offers is the idea of a collective genius – a group of people coming together with like aims and ambitions – one of whom, at least, is very talented……
……and one of whom, at least, is very rich!
(2) Good art will always make money.
You only have to run a theatre, as The Code’s Chief Agent has done, to realise this is simply not true. The public are reluctant to attend anything that’s new or strange – and writers producing challenging scripts needs all the financial aid they can muster.
Southampton not only supplied Shakespeare with £1,000 – he provided him with an appreciative, intelligent, educated and daring public….
….the Elizabethan…..
…….and Jacobbean…….
…….royalty and aristocracy.
But there is another factor – which we have named ‘Swift Syndrome’.
Johnathan Swift…….
…….wrote:
‘When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him’.
We have observed, in our research for this talk, this phenomenon occurring time after time.
For example….
In 1709 Nicholas Rowe sleuths out two great stories about Shakespeare….
1. He poached deer from Sir Thomas Lucy’s park.
2. Harry gave him a gift of £1,000.
Edmond Malone – who never once visits Stratford – comes along seventy years later and rubbishes these discoveries.
Scholars then parrot what Malone said for the next 150 years!
Dover Wilson – linking literature with history – posits the theory in the 1920s and 30s that Will was a tutor to Harry at Titchfield, got involved in the Essex Rebellion and travelled to Scotland to persuade King James to invade England.
Dover Wilson’s nemesis, W.W. Greg, the editor of the Malone Society no less, describes Dover Wilson’s theories as…..
‘the careerings of a not too captive balloon in a high wind.’
Sadly, Dover Wilson, a sensitive man, takes this criticism to heart, and rescinds many of his theories.
He even follows fashion by declaring that ‘the lovely boy’ is in fact William Herbert.
This fashion comes largely from E. K. Chambers…….
…..(the first President of the Malone Society) who had originally thought ‘the lovely boy’ was Harry – but changes his mind in 1930 and names him as William Herbert, the Third Earl of Pembroke.
Many of the scholar-lemmings follow.
As late as 2010, Katharine Duncan-Jones – in her updated Arden edition of the Sonnets – writes:
‘Dover Wilson’s speculations are attractive. He suggested that the Countess of Pembroke ‘asked [Shakespeare] to meet the young lord at Wilton, on his seventeenth birthday’ and commissioned him to compose an appropriate number of pro-marriage sonnets for the occassion’. This would locate sonnets 1-17 in April 1597.’
But the Herbert Theory can be demolished in a second…..
In Sonnet 13 Will writes to the young man:
You had a father – let your son say so.
William Herbert’s father, though ill, was still alive in 1597.
Harry Southampton’s father in 1590 – the year of Harry’s seventeenth birthday – had been dead for nearly a decade!
[The Second Earl of Southampton – Photo Ross Underwood]
The Shakespeare Code sincerely hopes that it will hear no more about William Herbert as ‘the lovely boy’.
He was clearly Harry Southampton!
To return to ‘Swift Syndrome’….
The distinguished Cornish historian, A. L. Rowse….
……discovers in 1973 that the Dark Lady of the Sonnets was Amelia Bassano/Lanyer.
She fits the role to perfection – down to her musicianship, her flirtations and even the way she ‘rolls’ her eyes….
Rowse writes an article for The Times, makes a couple of unimportant technical mistakes and Stanley Wells rubbishes the whole theory on BBC radio…..
……..putting back Shakespeare Studies by at least fifty years.
Prof. Roger Prior – who believes, along with the Shakespeare Code, that Amelia was the Dark Lady and Harry the ‘lovely boy’ and that Will visited Italy in 1593 – puts Wells’s response down partly to the ‘New Criticism’ – a movement that came from America in the 1920s and 30s – which….
‘…removes the author from the text.The author’s thoughts and intentions, it is claimed, can never be known, and are in any case quite irrelevant to our understanding of his work. A Shakespeare sonnet may seem to be addressed to the Earl of Southampton, but this may be no more than a clever fictional trope…the literary work of art has nothing to do with the world…..’
This movement was inspired by an essay written by T.S. Eliot….
…..over a hundred yhears ago!
He wrote:
‘The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.’
The reason Eliot wrote this is that he was afraid that when people discovered how appalling he was in his private life, they would shun his poetry.
But F. R. Leavis – a Cambridge, bicycling don…..
…….was flattered by Eliot’s attention – and taken in by him – even if his wife Queenie wasn’t.
So Eliot’s beliefs swamped the whole of Academic life in Britain and America – up to Rowse’s ‘Dark Lady’ discovery in 1973.
But Stanley Wells is still everywhere….
Even the Code’s Chief Agent has been attacked by him!
He wrote Love’s Labour’s Found in 2000…
…….and appeared in a Meridian TV documentary – developing Dover Wilson’s theory that Love’s Labour’s Lost was first performed at Titchfield.
Wells – now the Director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Institute no less – describes the book as….
……’charming’….
…..but finally dismisses the book as….
‘semi-fiction’.
At least Stanley used the word ‘semi’!
He promised to write his own book on Will and Harry – but it has never seen the light of day.
*********
On the way back to West London on the train, Stewart shared an amazing coincidence with Your Cat.
His mother had been a talented tailoress – and had worked in the rag trade at Malone’s old house in London W1.
She managed to get a flat round the corner for her son – where he lived for seven years.
Now the extraordinary thing is that Malone’s house was in Langham Street –
….which was on property once owned by the Earl of Southampton…..
(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’.
(It’s best to read ‘When Will met Harry – a Riposte to the B.B.C’ – first.)
John Aubrey………
….. got his information about Will being country schoolmaster from the actor William Beeston – whom John Dryden described as ‘the chronicle of the age’. William in turn got the information from his father Christopher Beeston – who had been apprenticed to the actor Augustine Phillips, and who later acted with Will in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
We know that there is a schoolhouse at the gates of Titchfield Abbey…..
The question is: did Will teach there?
There was an earlier William Beeston – who became part of the Southampton entourage – who died in Posbrook Farm in 1638.
The question is – was he related to Christopher Beeston? The almost universal cry has been ‘No’ – but let’s briefly examine the timeline for October 1638:
On 4th October Christopher Beeston – writing he is ‘sick and weak in body’, has ‘many great debts’ and is ‘engaged for great sums of money’ – completes his will – but signs it:
‘Christopher Hutchinson’.
7th October: Christopher Beeston/Hutchinson writes a codicil to his will.
Two days later – on 9th October – William Beeston of Posbrook Farm – stating he is ‘weak in body’ and bequeathing ‘to every child that God hath sent me five shillings a piece for their portions’ signs his will.
Seven days later – on 17th October – Christopher Beeston/Hutchinson is buried in St. Giles-in-the-Fields in London.
Seven weeks later, on 3rd December, William Beeston of Posbrook Farm is buried at St. Peter’s, Titchfield.
Either this is a coincidence of cosmic proportions or there is a link of some sort between the two men….
Let The Shakespeare Code propose one!
Christopher Beeston had an alternative name ‘Hutchinson’ – which suggests he might have been illegitimate. William Beeston of Posbrook Farm writes about the children ‘that God hath sent him’ which sounds to us like a euphemism for children born out of wedlock.
William Beeston of Posbrook fathers Christopher out of wedlock. Christopher studies at the Titchfield Grammar School and is briefly taught by Will, who encourages him to become the boy actor known as Kitt.
William Beeston of Posbrook becomes respectable because of his association with the Southampton family. He even marries a much younger wife in the 1630s, fathers legitimate children and 1637 even acquires a Coat of Arms.
Christopher, on the other hand, after acting with Will in The Chamberlain’s Men, gets wilder and wilder – he runs a brothel, gets accused of rape and sometimes uses an alias – ‘Christopher Hutchinson’.
William Beeston of Posbrook disowns him. But Christopher gets very ill and begs his natural father to visit him – and he does so out of humanity.
Christopher, completely impoverished, asks his father to help his son, named William after him, financially – but William Beeston of Posbrook – who by now has his own little William – refuses. Christopher cuts himself off completely from his father by using his Christopher Hutchinson name when he signs his will, and even refers to his son as ‘William Hutchinson’. William Beeston of Posbrook gives five shillings to all his children – legitimate and otherwise – as a blocking bequest to stop them from claiming any more. He leaves everything to his wife.
Unfortunately Posbrook Beeston catches the plague from his son and dies soon afterwards.
We cannot (at the moment at least) prove this theory – but The Code believes that forming a credible story from the known facts is a legitimate way of investigating the truth.
What we know for certain is that Harry Southampton graduated from St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1589 and was in residence in Titchfield in 1590. He was to turn 17 that year and massive pressure was being put on him by his guardian, Lord Burghley……
…….Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State – to marry his grand-daughter Elizabeth de Vere.
Harry was refusing – so his family faced an enormous £5,000 fine.
But Harry wasn’t interested in girls. His father, the Second Earl of Southampton…..
[Photo by Ross Underwood]
…..had accused his mother, Mary, of adultery with ‘a commonperson’ and had snatched his son away from her at the age of 6. In the words of Mary, the Second Earl ‘made his manservant hiswife’ and surrounded himself with….
‘a whole troupe of at least a hundred well-mounted gentlemen and yeomen and tall goodly fellows that kept a constant pace.’
The Second Earl had died when Harry was eight – and Harry became part of Lord Burghley’s household where he met the young Earl of Essex…..
….who had also lost his father.
Greene’s famous attack on Will suggests he did much more for the Southampton household than simply tutor Harry. Greene described him as….
‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of us: and being an absolute Iohannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.’
A word of warning. It is highly unlikely Greene wrote these words. Nashe claimed to have found the manuscript in Greene’s garret after he died – but many people – including Will – thought that Nashe himself had written the libel, passing it off as off as Greene’s dying curse.
Nashe swore his innocence, but ‘divers of worship’ – most likely the Southampton family – complained to the publisher of the pamphlet, Henry Chettle, who issued a grovelling retraction and described Will’s…
‘uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, which approves his art’.
To add to the complication, Nashe might well have been in Titchfield at the time – collaborating with Will when he wasn’t stabbing him in the back.
Intriguingly, Nashe dedicated his pamphlet ‘Strange Newes’ to a Mr. William Apis-Lapis.
‘Apis’ is Latin for ‘Bee’ and ‘Lapis’ Latin for ‘Stone’. Bee Stone. Mr William Bee-Stone – Mr. William Beeston. Posbrook Beeston even had bees on his coat of arms!
But back to the other Will…
As a ‘fac totum’ Will might well have taught the local schoolboys – and an American hand-writing expert – Charles Hamilton – discovered a letter signed by Harry that he believes to be in Will’s hand.
But Will was also the Southampton family poet. We know this for certain because of the Dedication of his two narrative poems to the Earl of Southampton – neither of which is mentioned by the B.B.C.’s ‘Rise of a Genius’.
The one to Venus and Adonis in 1593 is formal and tentative: this is because Harry’s mother had commissioned it. Harry had not yet come of age:
‘I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden’.
But the next dedication – to Lucrece – was written in 1594 when Harry was in full control of his finances . Will let’s his feelings fly:
‘THE love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness’.
This outpouring of love for Harry brings us naturally to Will’s Sonnets…
There are 154 of them. Some of them are letters, some of them reflections, some of them flatter, some of them insult, some of them seduce, some of them reject, some of them glory in life, some of them despair of it. In short, Will reveals there is not a single emotion that characters go through in his plays that he has not gone through himself.
We might say we know more about him than any man who has ever lived were it not for one thing. Will – when he published the Sonnets in 1609 – did not print them in chronological order – rather in two piles – ‘to him’ and ‘to her’. The ‘to him’ pile is much, much bigger than the ‘to her’ pile.
Using a data base built up over the years, The Shakespeare Code has put all the poems into chronological order – and we believe a tremendous story emerges which involves a Lovely Boy, a Dark Lady and a Rival Poet.
Can we assume, for the moment, that Nathan Drake was right in 1817 and Dover Wilson in 1932 when they named Harry as the Lovely Boy?
And can we also assume, for the moment, that A. L. Rowse was right in 1973 when he named Amelia Lanyer, nee Basanno, as the Dark Lady?
Can we also assume that the Rival Poet was the Spirit Medium George Chapman….
…..who would summon up the ghost of Christopher Marlowe at the drop of a hat.
So here is the story – drawing on history and anecdote, along with Will’s plays and sonnets.
Mary Southampton commissions Will to write seventeen sonnets to celebrate Harry’s seventeenth birthday in 1590 – urging him to marry and have a son. She chooses the fourteen-line sonnet form because it has been perfected by the late Sir Philip Sidney……
….who lived at Wilton – a day’s horse-ride away – whom young Harry worships because of his bravery and chivalry.
Will argues that a son will give Harry another ‘self’ – his son – who will ‘wax’ like the moon while he himself ‘wanes’.
But Will – stepping way outside his brief – hints that he could also make Harry immortal by the power of his verse alone.
But these seventeen sonnets have the reverse effect of what Mary intended. Harry becomes attracted to his tutor – and though Will has been introduced to same-sex love by Marlowe in London, and admits to finding Harry, with his shoulder length hair, even more attractive than a woman, denies any physical interest in the boy. Will wants their love to be platonic.
In 1591 Queen Elizabeth arrives on her progress to Cowdray and Titchfield. In her entourage is the Basanno family – dark-skinned Sephardic Jews who are renowned for their music making. Among them is the beautiful young clavichord player, Amelia Basanno, who is the mistress of the Queen’s cousin – old Lord Hunsdon…….
Plague is raging in the city – so Amelia stays in Titchfield as an entertainer and companion to Mary Southampton. Will falls desperately in love with Amelia – and writes the part of the dark-skinned Rosaline for her in Love’s Labour’s Lost – a play which satirises Queen Elizabeth and which Harry and his aristocratic friends perform in the Park of Place House at Whitsun in 1592.
Will attempts to seduce Amelia by playing Rosaline’s lover, Berowne, and sending her sonnets which flatter her and tease her. But Amelia has no interest in the balding, prematurely aged, playwright. In desperation, Will asks Harry to plead his case with Amelia – but Amelia takes the opportunity to seduce young Harry – and Harry plays along because it will upset Will.
Will, indeed, is distraught – and goes on tour with Lord Strange’s Men. As he thinks about things, he realises that he is more in love with the boy than the girl. Amelia gets pregnant and is married off to a minstrel. Will returns to Titchfield and declares his love for Harry in Sonnet 18 – one of the greatest poems ever written….
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
[Do you want me to compare you to a summer’s day as other poets might? You are much more beautiful and even-keeled than that! In England even in May harsh winds can shake the buds of the flowers and summer is so quickly over- like a short lease on a property.]
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair, from fair, sometime declines
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
[Sometimes the sun is too hot and often it is covered with clouds – and everything beautiful on a summer’s day will at some point lose its beauty – either by chance events or simply the unaided workings of nature.]
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wandr’st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
[But you will not be subject to this change – nor will you fade as the summer flowers fade, nor will you lose your beauty. Nor will you even die. Your summer will be an eternal because I am writing about you in verse.]
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
[This poem will survive as long as men are still alive to recite it or read it – and this will give you eternal life.]
Will has started off with praise of Harry – but ends up with lashings of praise for himself!
Mother Mary…..
…….finds out about Harry’s liaison with Will.
And mother Mary isn’t pleased….
*****
To find out what happened next, read When Will met Harry – Part Three…
To be published, Deo Volente, at midnight (G.M.T.) on Monday, 8th January, 2024.
The Shakespeare Code 