HOW TO READ SHAKESPEARE
William Shakespeare had to write in code.
Elizabeth I was not the liberal cinema has made her out to be. She loathed free speech, even from her appointed Parliament, and if you libelled her, or ‘the State’ (which could mean anyone or anything) you could be imprisoned, racked, hanged, drawn and quartered.
Elizabeth believed that God had freed her from the Tower and placed her on the throne of England for one purpose only: to turn the whole country Protestant. She had no interest in conquering other lands. She wanted to be the shepherdess to her simple island flock. Fearing that diversity of belief would lead to Civil War, she wanted everyone in England to think the same way that she did.
This would be a challenge to any writer: but it was a particular challenge to Shakespeare, who had inherited from his wheeler-dealer, rogue-trader father a mischievous, anarchic streak. From Shakespeare’s teenage years, any figure of authority was fair game. He began with the powerful persecutor of Catholics, Sir Thomas Lucy, whose sex-life and personal hygiene he lampooned in the famous ‘Lucy is lousy’ ballad. He ended up with Elizabeth herself.
Fascinated by politics, Shakespeare knew that to stay alive he needed to find new ways of saying the unsayable. He had to develop a series of codes which his audience would understand but which would bamboozle the authorities. If challenged, Shakespeare must be able to throw up his hands and say:
What on earth are you talking about? It’s all in your mind!
One of his most powerful weapons was history. The Tudors thought the world was in irreversible decline and likely to end soon. They considered their ancestors to be every bit as clever, and wicked, as they were. History was on a loop, so the past was an inspiration to them. And a caution.
For Queen Elizabeth it was also a threat. Obsessed with her place in history, she did not want her subjects to judge her by history. So she span it. In 1590 she recalled Holinshed’s recently published historical Chronicles on the grounds they were ‘fondly set out’. She ordered her players, the Queen’s Men, to perform Pro-Tudor historical propaganda instead.
One of their plays was a risible version of Richard III ….
A horse! A horse! A fresh horse!
It portrays the hunch-backed King, enemy of Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII, as a cannibal as well as a child-killer. At the end of the piece a messenger miraculously prophesies the glory of Elizabeth’s reign:
She is the lamp that keeps fair England light
And through her faith her country lives in peace
And she hath put proud Anti-Christ to flight
And been the means that civil wars did cease.
Then England kneel upon thy hairy knee, [sic]
And thank that God that still provides for thee.’
The real historical challenge to Elizabeth came from an anonymous book, published in 1584, called Leicester’s Commonwealth. Francis Bacon possessed a manuscript copy and several pages are in Shakespeare’s hand.
It is a demolition job on Robert Dudley, later the Earl of Leicester, a childhood friend of Elizabeth who had given her money, love and hope during the dark days of her sister Mary’s reign. When Elizabeth became Queen he became, naturally enough, the most powerful man in England.
Two years later his teenage bride, Amy Robsart, was found with her neck broken at the bottom of a short flight of stairs. The way was then open to him to share the throne of England.
Detested for his greed, his lust, his murders, his adultery, his lies and his hypocrisy, Leicester was given, as a gift from Elizabeth, KenilworthCastle, a dozen miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, around the time that Shakespeare was born. Claiming, preposterously, to lead the Puritan religious cause, Leicester oppressed all Warwickshire Catholics, including Shakespeare’s family.
Leicester’s Commonwealth compares Leicester and Elizabeth with all the weak or villainous figures from the past: Richard II, Richard III, Richard of York, Henry VI, Warwick, Queen Margaret, her lover the Earl of Suffolk and even the Ancient Roman rapist, Tarquinus Superbus.
All of them feature heavily in Shakespeare’s plays and poems.
Many of Elizabeth’s subjects thought it was perverse for a woman to rule over them – even more perverse for Leicester to submit to one. When Shakespeare writes about feeble kings, boy kings, tyrannical kings, over-bearing mothers and adulterous lovers from history, his audience would know he was really talking about ‘now’.
Mythical, pre-Christian settings were a way of dealing with taboo subjects like religion. Though born and brought up a Catholic, the worldly, hedonistic, malt-hoarding, tax-avoiding, litigious Shakespeare was never a fanatical follower of the Old Faith. He was a ‘political’ Catholic.
He had seen his own family members suffer for their belief and a relative executed. Shakespeare actively supported the movement for religious toleration, equating it with freedom of speech.
In 1605, as the result of a devastating emotional crisis, Shakespeare lost all his faith: but he fought hard to regain it and, mixing Paganism with Christianity in his later plays, he famously ‘died a Papist.’
Symbols are also a vital part of the Shakespeare Code. Queen Elizabeth, for example, loved to be compared to the moon. Shakespeare has great fun sending up this idea…
It was well known that Elizabeth was violently jealous of her young Ladies-in-Waiting. She forbad them to flirt with any of her courtiers, put them in the Tower if they married without her consent and forced them to wear black and white dresses to set off the splendid colours of her own. One of these ladies was Elizabeth Vernon, a cousin of the dashing Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. She had caught the eye of Henry Wriothesley, (‘Harry Southampton’) 3rd Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, friend and lover.
Essex, knowing that the tentatively heterosexual Harry would need encouragement to pursue the affair, commissioned Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet. So when Romeo says:
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks
It is the East and Juliet is the sun.
Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid are far more fair than she
Shakespeare really was playing with fire.
Even more outrageous is the line from the earlier A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed when Elizabeth was in her sixties:
But O! methinks how slow this old moon wanes…’
Animals could also be a code for people. Sir Robert Cecil, Burghley’s small, round-shouldered son, became ‘The Ape’, the ruthlessly crafty Sir Walter Raleigh ‘The Fox’, and Leicester, who inherited the Warwick family’s heraldic device of the Bear and Ragged Staff, ‘The Bear’.
Shakespeare’s most potent code, though, was the English language itself. When he began writing, English was despised, even by the English themselves, as barbarous; by the time of his death it was celebrated as the glory of Europe. Shakespeare and his contemporaries had so refined, developed and enriched the language that a complex ambiguity was the inevitable outcome. Ambiguity breeds code. Shakespeare used that code to protect his life.
Like many men in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare led what we would now call a ‘bisexual’ love-life. In 1563, the year before his birth, Elizabeth had made what she called ‘buggery’ punishable by death. Her father Henry VIII had introduced these anti-homosexual laws, but her Catholic sister Mary had rescinded them when she came to the throne. Elizabeth reintroduced them because, she claimed, ‘diverse evil-disposed persons have been more bold to commit the said most horrible and detested vice of buggery, to the high displeasure of almighty God.’
And, of course, the high displeasure of Elizabeth who insisted on being the heterosexual centre of everyone’s attention. She teased the homosexual men, like Francis Bacon, at her Court; but she exercised control by the existence of the law. It could be enforced at any time.
This blog will show that for fifteen years, from 1590 to 1605, Harry Southampton was the overwhelming love of Shakespeare’s life. Shakespeare wanted to express that love in words that would last for ever, but, at the same time, did not want to die. So he developed a code which Harry and his friends would understand but which other people might miss. He was so successful that for over three hundred years scholars did not realise that Shakespeare was bisexual.
Some do not till this day.
The code uses the imagery of wounding, hunting, death and blood to represent falling in love, love-play and orgasm. The vocabulary of the face can also represent the genitals: ‘beard’, for example, can mean pubic hair and ‘eye’ the testicle or penis. Money, in all its forms, can symbolise semen, and spending money, ejaculation. Abstract words (‘largesse’ or ‘excellence’) can also be bantering references to the genitals.
For example, Sonnet 94 begins:
They that have power to hurt, and will do none
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who moving others are themselves as stone,
Unmoved cold and to temptation slow.’
The ‘power to hurt’ has the additional Chaucerian meaning of ‘the power to arouse others sexually’. ‘The thing they most do show’ is a joking reference to a penis in an elaborate cod-piece.
So the opening lines really mean:
Those that have the ability to arouse love in others and refrain from doing so; who do not engage in making love, no matter how much their cod-pieces show off their manliness, who, although they excite others, remain stone-like themselves, unroused, cool and reluctant to rise to temptation…
They rightly do inherit nature’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
‘Nature’s riches’ is semen which chaste young men conserve through refraining from sex. ‘Faces’ means ‘genitals’ and implies that these pure men are really the ‘lords and owners’ of their bodies. Young men who sleep around are merely the stewards, not the possessors, of ‘their excellence’.
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 bravest weed outbraves his dignity’.
The flower here also symbolises the penis and ‘dying’ is code for orgasm. Shakespeare is praising masturbation: it is better to satisfy yourself alone than meet with ‘base infection’ – that is, consort with lower class men who will contaminate you both by their lack of breeding and their venereal disease.
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’
This is a graphic description of a penis poisoned with disease and a soul poisoned by association with unworthy companions. The moral and physical collapse of an aristocrat (the lily) is more total than it is for a ‘base fellow’ (the weed) for whom there are no high expectations. ‘Base’ itself was often code for ‘homosexual’.
Shakespeare employed code to attack other people. Other people used code to attack him.
Re-naming Shakespeare ‘upstart crow’, ‘ignorant ale-knight’, ‘unlearned sot’, ‘brainless buzzard’, ‘unlearned idiot’, ‘rude rhymer’, ‘idleby’, ‘peaking pageanter’, ‘scoffing fool’, ‘artless idiot’, ‘babble book-monger’, ‘upstart antiquary’, ‘father of interludes’, ‘poet ape’, ‘mimic ape’, ‘base groom’, ‘ragged groom’, ‘hostler’, ‘buckram gentleman’, ‘country author’, ‘Caesar’, ‘johannes fac totum’, ‘absolute interpreter of the puppets’, ‘Old Player’, ‘broking Pander’, ‘unkind gent’, ‘usurping Sol’, ‘saucy upstart Jack’, ‘old Jack of Paris Garden’, ‘base insinuating slave’, ‘son of parsimony and disdain’, ‘dunghill brat’, ‘trencher slave’, ‘drone’, ‘self-conceiving breast’, ‘Sir Simon two shares and a half’, ‘gloomy Juvenal’, ‘Cuthbert Coney-Catcher’, ‘petulant poet’, ‘malicious papist’, ‘Sir Adam Prickshaft’, ‘Fungoso’ and the not very subtle ‘W.S.’, ‘Shake-bag’, ‘Shake-rag’ and ‘Shake-scene’, jealous writers lambasted Shakespeare’s class, lechery, drunkenness, meanness, ingratitude, boastfulness, plagiarism, ruthlessness, ambition and, obliquely, his brilliant, immortal talent.
A consistent picture of Shakespeare emerges from these attacks. By cracking the code of his enemies, we can build up a detailed picture of his life….
The ‘Lost Years’ were never lost at all….
Sexual innuendos are rife in Shakespeare’s work, especially in the sonnets…but I am wary of claims made regarding supposed hidden codes and messages. I am intrigued, however, by these bold assertions and look forward to reading more.
In good time for your blog, it’s just what I wanted. Keep working hard to come great results. You’re too big.
Shakespeare’s works are not short of ambiguities. He deliberately cultivated them, and not just for his clowns, because he wanted to reveal himself as little as possible. Taken as a whole his works can never be shown definitively to support any particular idea, theory, policy, or cause. Whatever point of view may be claimed to be advanced, the opposite will be seen to be put forward elsewhere.
‘But O methinks how slow this old moon wanes’, quoted above, can, if one wishes, be taken to refer Queen Elizabeth but equally it may simply refer to the actual moon and Theseus’s impatience at its changing. There is no way of finally deciding which is meant. Though one would have thought Shakespeare’s inclination would have been stronger to avoid offending the Queen than to write something which would annoy her. It is entirely possible that Shakespeare never intended, or never even thought of, many of the meanings later commentators have loaded his words with.
Thank you for this, John. A lot of what you say I agree with. Shakespeare sheltered in ambiguity. But I do think he was writing for a coterie audience as well as the general public – and that coterie wanted to replace Elizabeth’s rule with that of King James VI. Also many of the contradictions in the play arise, I believe, from his habit of collaborating. Many of his collaborators, like Thomas Nashe in my view, held views very different from Shakespeare’s. That[‘s what makes so many of the plays complex and rich. Best wishes to you.
Well, Stewart, I don’t agree that Shakespeare had as you say a habit of collaborating. There is certainly some evidence of collaborating with another writer in The Two Noble Kinsmen with John Fletcher, Henry VIII also possibly with Fletcher, presumably the lost play Cardenio, and the Henry VI plays with a variety of writers though Shakespeare possibly only revised the Henry VI plays. There is evidence that Macbeth and Pericles were revised by another hand but for most of the plays it is my belief that they were Shakespeare’s work alone. The quality of the writing would seem to exclude any other writer whose work is known to us. Regards, John.
John, yours is certainly the accepted view – but it is my belief that Shakespeare’s collaboration was more extensive. He was known mostly as a ‘poet’ and often compared to Ovid. He was not known as a joke-writer – whereas Thomas Nashe was. Please just look at the number of times the Arden text writes ‘c.f. Nashe’ in the footnotes. It is my belief that Nashe was for a time part of the Southampton/Pembroke/Hunsdon circle: he was certainly friendly with George Carey with whom he stayed on the Isle of Wight and I believe he wrote ‘Sommer’s Last Will and Testament’ for the Southampton family when Elizabeth visited them shortly before Lord Montague’s death. I believe there was a rivalry between Shakespeare and Nashe – and that Nashe penned the attack on Shakespeare ascribed to Greene. (It seems that’s what Shakespeare and the Southampton family thought as well.) Best wishes, Stewart. (P.S. Dover Wilson once thought that both Greene and Nashe were involved in some of the early history plays – and my belief is that Thomas Kyd also had a profound effect on Shakespeare’s output. In fact, I believe that Kyd and Shakespeare – both grammar school men – shacked up with each other and collaborated until Marlowe shared chambers with Kyd instead.)
Hello Stewart. Kyd died in 1594, well before Shakespeare really got going. If they did collaborate it could only be on one or two of Shakespeare’s early plays,
possibly the Henry VI plays which are generally acknowledged to have mixed authorship. Kyd is reputed to have written a Hamlet play on which Shakespeare is supposed by some to have based his Hamlet but this is hardly collaboration. Most of Shakespeare’s plays were based on other plays, novels, legends, histories, etc., but his strength lay not so much in plots but in his people.
He decided early on that true-to-life and sympathetic characterisation was more important than plots in plays. He wanted characters playgoers could imagine meeting in the taverns or on the streets or in the courts or even in the prisons. Although they were the same age, Marlowe was on the theatrical scene long before Shakespeare and died in 1593. It’s hard to see Shakespeare and Kyd sharing lodgings then Marlowe coming along taking Shakespeare’s place.
Regards, John
Shakespeare was hugely successful by 1594! As well as the ‘Henry VI’ plays he had written ‘King John’, ‘Richard III’, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, ‘Venus and Adonis’ – and 1594 was an annus mirabilis in which he not only wrote ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ but ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ as well!. My belief is that Shakespeare purchased the ‘rights’ to Kyd’s plays when he died (Kyd’s parents didn’t want to know) – and proceeded to re-write the plays they had worked on when he was junior collaborator. These include ‘Hamlet’ ‘Lear’ ‘The Taming of a/the Shrew’ and ‘The Famous Victories of Henry V’. Shakespeare and Kyd were both grammar school boys – and were mocked as such by the University Wits. Shakespeare never forgave for giving evidence to the state – under torture – of Marlowe’s atheism – and mocked him mercilessly in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. As with many who work in the theatre, there was a dark side to Shakespeare and he ‘buried’ his collaborators and those who has fashioned the plots of the plays. As a theatre man, Shakespeare knew the radi9cal importance of a plot to a play – but had little skill in that area. In fact the plays that Shakespeare re-wrote from Kyd often have superior structure – ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ being a case in point. However, Kyd’s ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ was more successful than any play by Shakespeare – and continued to hold the boards way after his death. He was in fact described as ‘famous Kyd’.
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