Elegy.” The poem describes a sexual encounter in a brothel whereby the man is so excited that he is unable to “do his duty” and how the girl “helps herself”. - We don’t know if Nashe meant to amuse and entertain or if the poem was intended as a provocation.
In his book “Wriothesley’s Roses” (1993) Martin Green shows us how SHAKESPEARE never tired of making plays on Wriothesley’s name and its association with roses. The associations were programmatic right from the first sonnet of the cycle.
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
Sonnet 54 compares the virtues of the youth with the sweet scent of a rose:
O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour, which doth in it live.
In Sonnet 95 the poet chides the youth and speaks of “the beauty of thy budding name”:
How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame,
which like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
O in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!
Shakespeare copiously plays on the young man’s flowery name: “Why should poor beauty indirectly seek, / Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?” (67). – “More flowers I noted, yet I none could see, / But sweet, or colour it had stol’n from thee.” (99). – “For nothing this wide universe I call, / Save thou my rose, in it thou art my all.” (109).
The class system of the sixteenth century forbade that a commoner should speak to an aristocrat in the second person singular (thou art etc.) and thereby write a poem that made reference to his penis (Nr. 20: “And for a woman wert thou first created, / Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting, / And by addition me of thee defeated, / By adding one thing to my purpose nothing”), that he publicly criticises Wriothesley’s deceitful behaviour when he had sex with another man’s girl-friend. (Nr. 40: “I cannot blame thee, for my love thou usest, / But yet be blamed, if thou thy self deceivest / By wilful taste of what thy self refusest. / I do forgive thy robbery gentle thief / Although thou steal thee all my poverty.” – Nr. 41: “Ay me, but yet thou mightst my seat forbear, / And chide thy beauty, and thy straying youth, / Who lead thee in their riot even there / Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth:/ Hers by thy beauty tempting her to thee, / Thine by thy beauty being false to me.”)
It would have been unthinkable for an actor and his girl-friend to enter into a three-way relationship with an Earl. If the actor had then deliberately made the relationship public, he would have been guilty of a serious offence. (Nr. 133, to the Dark Lady: “Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan / For that deep wound it gives my friend and me; / Is’t not enough to torture me alone, /But slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be?/ Me from my self thy cruel eye hath taken, / And my next self thou harder hast engrossed, / Of him, my self, and thee I am forsaken, / A torment thrice three-fold thus to be crossed.”)
In order to come to the gigantic misconception that William Shaksper, the actor, could possibly have moved so freely in the house and in the company of Henry Wriothesly only to betray him with such verses; one must be totally ignorant of the political and social situation of the times.
The Stratfordians’ most desperate argument is that the “author” William Shaksper invented these most singular relationships: the man and the woman- the woman and the other man- the man and the man- as an imaginary trio in a hypothetical situation- devoid of any auto-biographical substance.
Are we really being asked to believe that the greatest, the most explicit author of all times should write so passionately and vehemently about three imaginary friends; that he lied to us and the youth in question! That he said “Me” without being “Me”?!
Any scholar who propagates such theories is better advised to consider a change of career.
3. The Author of the Plays.
Who, if not Shaksper, could have written the Shakespearian works? Was it the sharp-minded Bacon; the dead poet, Marlowe? the much-travelled Earl of Derby? the sensitive Earl of Oxford? or perhaps the linguistically talented Queen Elizabeth?
In order to establish a profile of the missing author (Six hundred Characters in Search of an Author), we have to know what he read, what he quoted, what historical events he did refer to. Furthermore we have to work out from which social position he was writing.
Since I am not the first to question the authorship of Will Shaksper, I have meticulously gathered all the facts that have survived the passage of time. I have only allowed hard facts to be part of my theory and I have left speculation to those who enjoy parlour games.
3.1 Titus Andronicus
As the first pale eerie light dawns over the grave yard the story teller relates of blood baths of the ghosts of murdered children, of how the Duke of Cornwall had both eyes gauged out of his head on an open stage and how his tormentor stamped on the eyes with the heels of his shoes like a flamenco dancer; of the daughter of a Roman general whose tongue is cut out and whose hands are cut off, after she has been raped; of how everything comes to a head with a banquet where an offended, one armed father-the other arm having been hacked off by his wife’s lover- disguised as a cook, serves a pie made of the flesh of her children, skewered like pigs at a village wedding, to the Queen of the Goths.
Alejo Carpentier, Concert baroque
“Titus Andronicus” is generally regarded as being Shakespeare’s first drama, or at least one of the first. Anything that could help us to date the piece would be of great interest. This very date is indeed available to us; not in the usual way as a date on a copy of the first edition but on an illustrated publication of extracts from Titus Andronicus signed and dated by the artist, a certain Henricus Peacham.
Henricus Peacham, Tamora pleading for her sonnes
This document from Henry Peacham (Harley Papers, Marquess of Bath at Longleat, Vol. 1. f.159) throws up difficult questions for the experts. The first question being: Who did it? Was the illustration done by the learned curate Henry Peacham (1546-1634), author of “The Garden of Eloquence conteyning the figures of Grammar and Rhetorick” (1577), or was it done by Henry Peacham, the younger (1578-c.1643), a learned writer, author of “The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and the Art of Living in London” (1622) ?
T.M. Parrott writes in 1950: „There is a temptation to identify this Henricus with Henry Peacham the Younger.” Speaking of the illustrations, he goes on to say: “These, however, are in the opinion of good judges so different in style from and so inferior to the Titus picture, as to make a common origin unlikely if not impossible.” Joseph Quincy Adams remarks in his foreword to the facsimile edition of the first Quarto of Titus Andronicus: „The faces in Peacham’s work [Emblemata Varia] are entirely without character, the details often clumsy in execution, and the whole drawing lacking in vitality.”
