Secret Meanings In Shakespeare Applied To Stage Performance

The Practice of Esoteric Arcana exploring the Plays' Mysteries

Wendy Jean Macphee, Susan Brock

• Publisher: M-Y Books World AMA
• eBook ISBN: 9781911124900
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

"Here is a person who shares with me a love of Shakespeare's mysterious depths of understanding. The ancient wisdom traditions underlie andsustain the incredible reflection of our souls in Shakespeare." Sir Mark Rylance, first artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, London (1995-2005).

Eight arcana – alchemy, Renaissance Platonism (including Divine Love), Renaissance magic, the Cabala, Celtic mysticism and Old World religion, initiation, theurgy and the Bible – are identified by the author inShakespeare's plays as means to uncover long misunderstood mysteries and anomalies of his playwriting. Strange and unlikely events in the stage action of his plays are elucidated as metaphors of these arcana, all readily available to Shakespeare and other playwrights of his day. For example,in The Winter's Tale Shakespeare tells of a seacoast of Bohemia on whichthe ship carrying the baby Perdita, mariners and the courtier Antigonus are wrecked in a storm, the latter being eaten by a bear. A reading of theplay as a metaphor of chemical alchemy, clearly identified by the namesof the characters and the stage action, shows how the scene is indicativeof the alchemical stage of Putrefaction taking place in a bear-shaped vessel. In As You Like It, the reported action in the Forest of Arden where Orlando rescues his brother from a lion and a snake is sourced from severaltransforming arcana leading to brotherly reconciliation.

SECRET MEANINGS IN SHAKESPEARE APPLIED TO STAGE PERFORMANCE is unique in that these meanings have been researched and developed specifically to inform stage performances by an international, professional theatre company – Theatre Set-Up (www.ts-u.co.uk). For over thirty years the author's esoteric interpretations have inspired and clarifiedthe company's productions to widespread critical and audience acclaim.

About the Author
Wendy Jean Macphee (whose doctorate in arcana in Shakespeare was taken at the Shakespeare Institute of The University of Birmingham) was a teacher and lecturer in English, drama and music from 1960 to 2012and was founder, administrator, artistic director, actor and musician forTheatre Set-Up which toured Shakespeare's plays in heritage sites in the UK and in mainland Europe from 1976 to 2011.

CHAPTER ONE: ESOTERIC ARCANA I: GENERAL ASPECTS, ALCHEMY, RENAISSANCE PLATONISM

Roots of the tradition of encoding Esoteric Arcana in art

Shakespeare’s contemporary, Sir Philip Sidney, in his An Apology for Poetry, affirms that secret meanings can be hidden in poetry in order to protect them:

Believe, with me, that there are many mysteries contained in Poetry, which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused. ¹

This statement demonstrates the need in Shakespeare’s day for writers to hide esoteric arcana in such a way that they would not be derided by ‘profane wits’ or bring trouble to the author. In all of Shakespeare’s plays, the stories and characters are so strong and attractive that, were he challenged with the illegal representation of alchemy in them (as Charles Nichol reports, this was considered an act of felony from 1404 – 1689), he could have justifiably claimed an innocent intention merely to entertain an audience with a piece of theatre presenting people in interesting stories.²

However, in his day it was the custom to entertain the public in all forms of art by encoding allegorical and disguised references to systems, people and ideas, thereby adding another dimension of pleasure in deciphering the puzzle contained therein. Archaeologists tell us that Anglo-Saxon artefacts demonstrate that their creators had a love of placing riddles and puzzles in their work. Perhaps this characteristic continued through to later generations of culture! Certainly esoteric practitioners hid their secrets in jokes and games, for example in children’s nursery songs and games. Some English pub signs are an example of this practice, such as The Red Lion and The Green Lion (alchemic references), and The White Hart (a Celtic reference to the King of the ancient pantheon of Celtic gods, but also referencing Richard II, the murdered English king whose emblem was the white hart).

An example of more high-minded allegory can be the commonly acknowledged allegorical content of medieval plays such as Everyman. This moral characteristic is continued faithfully in Shakespeare’s plays which have moral endings, often in a Christian form. For example, the final scene of Hamlet, which gives the audience a stage littered with murdered bodies, is resolved by the entrance of Fortinbras, whose swift assessment of the scene and firm commands reassure the watchers that a moral order will be restored.

Shakespeare’s debt to a much earlier work of literature, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, has long been recognised.³ This poem can be said to be an allegory of transformation, its fifteen books moving chronologically from the legendary transformation of chaos into the order of the universe, to the politically flattering supposed deification of Julius Caesar in Ovid’s own time. This work gives an example, probably learnt by Shakespeare at school where Ovid was a common text, of the use of spiritual allegory in writing, which could have inspired him.⁴

In a later period of literature in Italy, Dante in his The Divine Comedy might have provided for Shakespeare a pattern of allegory which can also be identified as polysemous, with different levels of meaning implied in the text.⁵ Another model of polysemous allegorical literature accessible to Shakespeare is given by his contemporary poet Edmund Spenser in his epic poem, The Faerie Queene. Spenser declared in its preface that it was ‘continued allegory, or darke conceit’. He made clear that in this poem the ‘general intention and meaning’ of the allegory was to ‘fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’. To distance his moral allegory from potentially politically risky contemporary references he set it in the ‘historye of King Arthur’.⁶ I suggest that this indicates the level of fear of political persecution that writers felt in this period of history following any overt criticism of powerful people or institutions in the land or inclusion in their work of suspect ideas which diverged from the accepted norm, which fuelled a need to hide them in allegory.

The allegory itself became suspect when in 1601 Sir Gelly Merrick commissioned a performance from Shakespeare’s company, The Chamberlain’s Men, of his Richard II in anticipation of a successful rebellion of Robert, Earl of Essex against Queen Elizabeth I. She recognised the parallel between the fate of the deposed King Richard II and the fate that Essex wished upon her. ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that,’ she proclaimed. Prosecutions and the beheading of Merrick for treason followed. The actors themselves were ultimately excused from punishment, as it was recognised that their inevitable need for money would occasion them to take any offered commission.⁷ However, some Freemasons nowadays claim that Shakespeare and his fellows were excused because of their Masonic connections! This was told to me by the custodian of Forty Hall in 1984 when I spoke to him about researching Freemasonry as a possible source of allegory in Shakespeare. “Shakespeare was a freemason himself, as were all his troupe,” he said. “That’s how they got off being taken to the gallows in the Richard II affair! Merrick was the scapegoat.” The custodian was a freemason himself, and the story about Shakespeare was one that was circulated with pride among his associates as an example of the benefits of membership.

Risking prosecution should any proscribed material be detected, artists nevertheless continued to boldly weave a web of meanings in their work. There lurked in Shakespeare’s England non-orthodox spiritual systems of transformation, such as alchemy, which came into prominence in his day due to the alternation of the state religion between Protestantism and Catholicism in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries depending on the monarch of the day, with violent religious persecution of dissidents. These non-orthodox systems, dangerously encoded into works of art, would have presented a thrilling challenge for artists.

Visual references in graphic art to arcana, such as the alchemical references to alchemy in Durer’s Melancholia (see fig.12), and an allegory of ‘Platonic Divine Love’ in Botticelli’s Primavera had antecedents in the pictures in the Emblem Books, such as Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1551).⁸ Shakespeare would have had access to these and Henry Green, writing in Shakespeare and The Emblem Writers, identifies specific emblems used by the playwright in The Comedy of Errors: II. i. 97 – Eagle renewing its feathers; II. ii. 167 – Elm and vine; III. ii. 27 – Sirens and Ulysses, etc.⁹ These emblems presented pictures of such varied items as: faith, folly, astrology, love, The Prince, life, death, hostility, revenge, science, marriage, ignorance, and trees.¹⁰ Whitney’s own definition of an emblem explains their attraction:

Something obscure to be perceived at the first, whereby, when with further consideration it is understood, it maie the greater delighte the behoulder, (Green, p. 6) ¹¹

Such a definition, I suggest, applies to the appeal of the allegories Shakespeare encodes in his plays, the delight he must have had in inventing them, and our pleasure in deciphering them.

The development of encoding Esoteric Arcana in plays: Shakespeare’s forerunners

Shakespeare was not alone in this puzzle-making. He was following a developing tradition of his time in England. The playwright John Lyly, a forerunner of Shakespeare, presented his masque-like plays mainly for boy actors. In plays such as Endimion, I find many elements in common with A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the lunar motifs, with the moon personified (Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cynthia in Endimion), obliquely referring to Elizabeth I. Hints of alchemic references are made in the specific use of words such as ‘earth’, ‘lead’, ‘gold’ and ‘stone’, suggesting that the hero Endimion is undergoing alchemic transformation. Other layers of meaning can be detected, such as Celtic motifs suggested by the fountain oracle in Lyly’s story, Renaissance Platonism in the interchange between the heroine Cynthia and Pythagoras, and in the transforming effect of love on Corsites, Endimion, Cynthia, Semele, Dipsas and Tellus.

Another writer, Robert Greene, presents us with a very close contact with Shakespeare early on in his career. In his Groatsworth of Wit he writes a bitter condemnation of Shakespeare whom he calls:

an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde supposes he is well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shakes- scene in a country.¹²

D. Allen Caroll and Andrew S. Cairncross have suggested an allusion in the Iohannes fac totum to the revolutionary Jack Cade (sometimes called John Mend-All), and argue that Greene’s attack refers to a speech that occurs in the scene of Shakespeare’s 2 Henry V, (III. i. 75-78) which introduces this Jack Cade and describes Gloucester:

Seems he a dove? His feathers are but borrow’d

For he’s disposed as the hateful raven:

Is he a lamb? His skin is surely lent him,

For he’s inclined as is the ravenous wolves. ¹³

If this is the case, then I suggest the possibility that Greene could also have been referring to Shakespeare’s coding of esoteric arcana in plays, and complaining that this was a custom copied from Greene and his fellow playwrights. The words ‘dove’, ‘raven’ and ‘wolf’ are key symbols in alchemy. Shakespeare based the story of his Winter’s Tale, (which I consider exemplifies chemical, exoteric Alchemy, upon Greene’s story Pandosto. Could this perhaps be revenge, or at least mockery?

In his traducing of Shakespeare, in using the term ‘our feathers’ Greene is referring to his colleague playwrights. One of these was George Peele, whose play The Old Wives Tale incorporates elements of certainly Celtic and possibly alchemic mysticism. An example of Celtic subtext lies in the scene containing a Well of Life within which are enchanted heads, the first of which offers gifts of corn and the second gold, which as it rises calls:

Gently dip, but not too deep,

For fear thou make the golden beard to weep.

Fair maid, white and red,

Comb me smooth and stroke my head,

[…] And every hair a sheaf shall be,

And every sheaf a golden tree. ¹⁴

Ann Ross, in Pagan Celtic Britain, explains Peele’s debt to Celtic tradition in this scene:

All the elements present in the Celtic tradition are here – the heads in the well of life, their powers of speech and their fertility associations… and prosperity, both mercenary and agrarian, as shown by the bestowal of gold and corn…The combing and the smo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Esoteric Arcana I: General Aspects, Alchemy, Renaissance Platonism
• Chapter Two: Esoteric Arcana Ii: Renaissance Magic, The Cabala, Theurgy And Rites Of Initiation
• Chapter Three: Esoteric Arcana III
• Chapter Four: The Winter’S Tale
• Chapter Five: Much Ado About Nothing
• Chapter Six: Cymbeline
• Chapter Seven: The Merry Wives Of Windsor
• Chapter Eight: All’s Well That Ends Well
• Chapter Nine: The Tempest
• Chapter Ten: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Chapter Eleven: The Two Gentlemen Of Verona
• Chapter Twelve: Love’s Labour’s Lost
• Chapter Thirteen: The Taming Of The Shrew
• Chapter Fourteen: Twelfth Night
• Chapter Fifteen: As You Like It
• Chapter Sixteen: The Comedy Of Errors
• Chapter Seventeen: Romeo And Juliet
• Chapter Eighteen: Antony And Cleopatra
• Chapter Nineteen: The Merchant Of Venice
• Chapter Twenty: Measure For Measure
• Chapter Twenty One: Hamlet
• Chapter Twenty Two: Conclusions
• End Notes
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Bibliography