Shakespeare NORTH by - MICHAEL BLANDING
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NORTH by
Shakespeare
A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for
the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work
MICHAEL BL ANDING
NEW YORK
NorthbyShakespeare_HCtext4P Also by Michael Blanding 2021-01-22 09:29:45 iiiPrologue
I t was the greatest party of Elizabeth’s reign—nineteen days of gut-
busting feasts, minstrel performances, bear-baiting, Italian acrobats,
and jaw-dropping fireworks. All of it was designed for a single purpose: to
woo a queen. When Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, planned the fes-
tivities at his estate of Kenilworth Castle in July 1575, he was getting
desperate. After fifteen years of vying for Queen Elizabeth’s hand, he was
no closer to a promise of marriage than when he’d begun.
The Kenilworth festival was his last-ditch attempt at winning the
queen’s affections, and Leicester spared no expense to impress her, spend-
ing lavishly on new gardens, gifts, and performances. As the party raged,
nobles and gentry from across the realm—as well as commoners from the
countryside—guzzled forty barrels of beer and sixteen barrels of wine a
day as they pursued wanton encounters in the surrounding woods and
fields. Leicester kept his eyes on the queen, anxiously watching for signs
that she was enjoying the elaborate masques and other entertainments he
had dreamed up in her honor.
On several nights, Leicester unleashed firework displays created by an
Italian pyrotechnician over a man-made lake that lapped against the west-
ern wall of the castle. The spectacles lasted for hours, including dazzling
dragons, fighting dogs and cats, and rockets that seemed to shoot out of
the water itself. A contemporary observer described them as a “blaze of
burning darts, flying to and fro, leams of stars coruscant, streams and hail
of fiery sparks” of such intensity “that the heavens thundered, the waters
surged, the earth shook.”
Another night, the earl staged a giant water pageant as Elizabeth was
making her way across a long bridge over the lake. An actor dressed as
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the sea-god Triton rode across the water to her on a mechanical mermaid.
Sounding a trumpet in the shape of a whelk, he commanded the seas to
still, shouting: “You waters wild, suppress your waves and keep you calm
and plain!” After his speech, another actor dressed as the fabled Greek
musician Arion serenaded her from atop a twenty-four-foot-long mechan-
ical dolphin. Music emanated eerily from the dolphin’s belly, where an
ensemble of musicians had been secreted inside.
There’s no record of how the queen received the performance—whether
she stood stony-faced, or smiled and clapped with joy, or felt a rise of
love in her heart for the man who had gone to such extravagant lengths
to please her. But the moment has been immortalized, after a fashion, in
William Shakespeare’s most beloved play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In
one scene, Oberon, King of the Fairies, reminisces to his underling Puck
while in a jealous fit over the Fairy Queen Titania. “Thou rememb’rest
since once I sat upon a promontory, and heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s
back uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath that the rude sea grew
civil at her song, and certain stars shot madly from their spheres to
hear the sea-maid’s music?” he says to Puck. “That very time I saw, but
thou couldst not, flying between the cold moon and the earth Cupid, all
armed. A certain aim he took at a fair vestal thronèd by the west, and
loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow as it should pierce a hundred
thousand hearts.”
For more than a century, those lines have been read as an allusion
to Leicester, who shot a love arrow at his own vestal—England’s famous
“Virgin Queen” Elizabeth—at a pageant complete with dolphin, mer-
maid, and fireworks. It’s less clear how Shakespeare, then a boy eleven
years old, could have witnessed the spectacle; or why he would have
included it in a play written around 1595, some twenty years after the
event. In his book Will in the World, Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt
allows that “it is certainly conceivable” that Shakespeare’s father may
have taken him from their home in Stratford-upon-Avon, fourteen miles
away, to see the display. If so, then perhaps Shakespeare stood with his
father upon a promontory overlooking the lake to catch a glimpse of the
entertainments, and perhaps the sight made such an impression on him
that he remembered it for the next two decades, and perhaps he found a
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moment to work it into a play performed before the queen to remind her
of her youthful wooing by her favorite courtier.
Those are a lot of “perhapses.” It’s not the only explanation, however,
for how the Kenilworth water pageant could have inspired Shakespeare’s
comedy. The playwright could have heard a report from someone who
attended, or read about it in a letter circulated after the event. Or there is
another possibility: perhaps, another person wrote those lines—someone
who attended the event as a guest and witnessed the pageant firsthand.
I first heard the name Thomas North in October 2015. I had been in-
vited to Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, to give a lecture about
a book I’d written about a thief of rare maps. The weather was unseason-
ably warm, and the foliage was in full array, with a spectacular red maple
lighting up the picture window of the library lecture hall. Afterward,
the lecture’s sponsors, English professor emerita June Schlueter and her
husband, Paul, a literature scholar, took me to a dinner reception. Over
a pasta buffet they introduced me to a scholar named Dennis McCarthy,
a confident fifty-three-year-old who looked a decade younger than his
age. McCarthy had attended my lecture with his adult daughter, Nicole
Galovski, and only later did I learn that the two positioned themselves
around the last remaining seats so that I would sit next to one of them.
McCarthy immediately pulled me into conversation, asking me about
my book and telling me about his own research. “I bet you are the only
other person here who knows where the words ‘Hic Sunt Dracones’ come
from,” he said. Of course, I replied—they’re on the Hunt-Lenox Globe at
the New York Public Library. Translated “Here Be Dragons,” they are the
words cartographers supposedly used to designate uncharted territory—
but McCarthy had a different theory, speculating the words marked the
location of giant lizards known as Komodo dragons. Here Be Dragons was
also the name of his book on biogeography, he told me, and before long,
we were spiritedly discussing maps and geography.
As the reception wound down, he invited me to continue talking over
drinks with his daughter and her fiancé. It took me a half a second to
decide. I was alone on a Thursday night in a small college town, and
the thought of going back to my B&B was infinitely less appealing. I
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figured I could have a few drinks and continue an enjoyable conversation.
I had no idea how this chance meeting would start me down a path to
trace a literary mystery that I’d follow, along with McCarthy, for the next
five years.
We headed to the College Hill Tavern, a bar with old sports memorabilia
framed on the walls (Go Leopards!) and students and locals drinking
liquor from plastic cups. We sat at a chipped wooden high-top, straining
to hear each other over the impromptu karaoke of nearby patrons. I don’t
know whose idea it was to order martinis, but amid conversation of maps
and Galovski’s impending wedding in the Azores, I was a bit foggy by
the time McCarthy finally leaned across the table and told me he had a
story for me.
“You know how Shakespeare used other sources to write his plays?”
McCarthy asked over the din of amateur Bon Jovi. “Sure,” I replied,
trying to remember anything about Shakespeare’s sources from my first-
year college class. “Well, I found a source no one ever knew about before,”
he said. This unknown manuscript, he continued, was a treatise by a
sixteenth-century courtier named George North. The work, he claimed,
influenced some of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, including Richard III,
Macbeth, and King Lear.
But Shakespeare never even read the manuscript, McCarthy continued,
as I struggled to follow his argument through a haze of classic rock
and booze. Instead, George’s relative, Sir Thomas North, had used it
to write his own plays. Oh, he is one of those, I thought to myself—
a conspiracy theorist who thought Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.
But McCarthy hurriedly added that in fact he believed the Bard of Avon
wrote every word attributed to him during his lifetime. He also believed,
however, that Shakespeare had used these earlier plays by Thomas North
for his ideas, his language, and even some of his most famous soliloquies.
There was something about a murder involving North’s sister, and an
affair Queen Elizabeth may or may not have had with North’s patron, the
Earl of Leicester, and a tale of familial exile uncannily like Prospero’s story
in The Tempest.
I didn’t believe any of it. Where are North’s plays now? I asked. “Lost,”
McCarthy said—but so were most manuscripts written in the Elizabethan
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era. Why hadn’t anyone discovered this before? “Because no one had the
right tools to do so,” he said, arguing excitedly that his computer-assisted
techniques had the potential to finally solve the mystery of how—
and why—Shakespeare’s plays were written. I vaguely knew about the
conspiracy theories that Shakespeare was a fraud, and the plays were really
written by the Earl of Oxford or someone else. But this was something
different. McCarthy’s theory was more akin to saying Shakespeare plagia-
rized or collaborated with another writer. The theory seemed outlandish,
but I liked McCarthy, and was somewhat amused by the lengths to which
he’d gone to pitch me. I promised to look at whatever he sent me.
In more than two decades as an investigative reporter, I’ve learned not
to dismiss any story out of hand. Years ago, as a writer at Boston Magazine,
I’d been contacted by a sixty-five-year-old man incarcerated for allegedly
setting fire to his own store. The arson investigation turned out to be
junk science, and he was freed after more than four years in prison. Soon
after I wrote my article, the prosecution dropped attempts to retry him.
More recently, I wrote an article for The New York Times about a rare copy
of the first map to name America, which was expected to sell at Christie’s
auction house for $1 million. A map dealer came to me claiming it was
fake, printed in the twentieth century on four-hundred-year-old paper.
The giveaway was a spot where the map had been printed over the
centuries-old glue that had bound the paper into a book. I contacted
Christie’s, which pulled the map from auction before my article even hit
the newsstand.
So I wasn’t opposed to considering McCarthy’s theories—though I
wasn’t inclined to believe them, either. When I finally dug into the
document he sent me six months later, I was surprised to find a persuasive
amount of evidence pointing to the use of the manuscript as a source for
nearly a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays. I was intrigued enough to order
McCarthy’s self-published book about Thomas North, titled North of
Shakespeare, and meet with him again—this time at a table by the water
in Newburyport, Massachusetts. I listened as he spelled out his theories
in a torrent of words, as if he couldn’t get them all out fast enough.
McCarthy wasn’t a trained academic scholar himself, he admitted; in
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fact, he hadn’t even graduated from college. Yet, by that point he’d
devoted more than a decade to his research on Shakespeare. Most of it
was done at home through scouring the Internet and using open-source
plagiarism software to compare the text of Shakespeare’s plays with
the works of Thomas North—an Elizabethan writer who’d translated
Plutarch’s Lives, a book well-known as the source for Shakespeare’s Roman
plays. But McCarthy saw something more in him—over an exceptional
fifty-year literary career, he claimed, North had written dozens of plays,
which Shakespeare had reworked to create the greatest canon of works
in English literature. Many of them, he said, were written on behalf of
his patron, the Earl of Leicester, as part of his never-ending quest to woo
Queen Elizabeth.
Despite a decade of trying, however, McCarthy had only gotten one
Shakespearean scholar to believe him—June Schlueter, my own patron for
the Lafayette lecture. Interested enough, I told him that I would consider
writing about him on two conditions—one, that he publish his research
with a reputable publisher; and, two, that he get at least two more scholars
to take his ideas seriously. Over the next three years, he met both those
conditions. In 2018, he and Schlueter published the George North manu-
script with the British Library as A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels,
showing how Shakespeare borrowed from it, and winning endorsements
from two prominent scholars. I wrote about that book for The New York
Times in February 2018 under the headline: “Plagiarism Software Unveils
a New Source for 11 of Shakespeare’s Plays.”
Both my article and McCarthy’s book were well-received—though
mostly by people sniggering about the fact that Shakespeare was a
plagiarist. But this was only a small part of the story. McCarthy had yet
to reveal his larger theory—that while Shakespeare used George North as
a source for some of his plays, he relied on Thomas North as a source for
nearly all of his works, and that he wasn’t using prose works, but plays.
As unorthodox as McCarthy’s ideas were, I thought that they at least
deserved an airing.
Then again, orthodox ideas become orthodox for a reason—they’ve been
analyzed, challenged, and defended by generations of scholars and stood
the test of time. A whole industry has been built around Shakespeare
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scholarship, with thousands of books, articles, classes, and professors all
arguing on behalf of the authorship of the plays by William of Stratford-
upon-Avon. What kind of new evidence would it take for a scholar who
has built a career around that Shakespeare to consider an alternative point
of view? And how would they treat the person who espouses it? As I
watched McCarthy struggle to get anyone in the Shakespeare community
to listen to him, I started conceiving of another project, a book that would
investigate and test his theories, but also examine how knowledge gets
created, and what it takes to change established ways of thinking.
We may want to believe in the idea of Shakespeare as a solitary genius—
the Bard of Avon, the Soul of the Age. While even mainstream scholars
now believe he had at least some help in writing many of his plays,
they’ve held fast to the belief that the bulk of the language and inspiration
behind them was Shakespeare’s and Shakespeare’s alone. Yet for centuries,
mysteries about William Shakespeare have gone unexplained, such as how
a glover’s son from Stratford could have had the intimate knowledge of
Italy—a country he almost certainly never visited—or how he could have
absorbed the experience of going to war, or used complex legal jargon, or
read source material in French, Italian, Latin, and Greek.
Some of the reasons proposed to explain those mysteries are just as
unsatisfying, relying on secret conspiracies in which an aristocrat such as
the Earl of Oxford or Sir Francis Bacon actually wrote the plays, which
Shakespeare then passed off under his own name. Besides the elitism
implied by the idea that only a nobleman could have written such sublime
works, such theories suffer from the obvious question of how, in the
competitive world of Elizabethan theater, such a secret could have been
held for so long. McCarthy’s contention, that Shakespeare borrowed his
material from Thomas North—a gentleman and scholar who moved in the
uppermost levels of Queen Elizabeth’s court—provides an intriguing and
wholly original solution, in which the playwright could have legitimately
put his own name on his rewritten plays, at the same time borrowing
their essence from someone who fit all of the requirements for writing
them. In addition to being a translator, North was a lawyer, soldier,
diplomat, and courtier—a sixteenth-century Zelig who participated in
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some of the most crucial events of the age, and brushed shoulders with the
brightest minds of the Renaissance. Understanding his inspirations and
motivations, McCarthy contends, reveals hidden meanings and unfolds
new depths of emotion in the familiar stories of Shakespeare’s dramas.
He even, I would come to find, developed an explanation for why
Thomas North might have sold his plays to Shakespeare to adapt for the
public stage. Over the next two years, I continued my conversation with
McCarthy begun in that Pennsylvania bar. We traveled together through
England, France, and Italy to retrace Thomas North’s footsteps. Along the
way, I began conducting my own research in overseas archives, teaching
myself English secretary hand script to read old documents in an effort
to prove or disprove McCarthy’s audacious theories. As I considered how
and why Thomas North might have written the plays that he did, I
began to glimpse a new story that could answer age-old questions about
Shakespeare and his works—if it could be believed.
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absent was the Earl of Oxford, who was still traveling in Italy.) Just
before riding out to escort the queen to the castle, he ordered the clock
stopped at two o’clock—the dinner hour, and also, perhaps, a symbol of
the union of Leicester and the queen. There it would remain throughout
the festivities, as if time itself had stopped.
Kenilworth still stands today, a historic ruin often bundled into pack-
age tours with Stratford-upon-Avon and the Cotswolds. As we approach
it on a chilly November morning, a stiff wind blows off the surrounding
fields where the artificial lake once stood, and the romantically crumbling
walls of the castle stand out against the sky overhead. The pink sandstone
edifice, however, still hints at the grandeur that greeted Elizabeth on the
night of July 9, 1575, when, one historian writes, “the castle, twinkling
with the light from thousands of candles and torches, looked like a fairy
palace rising from the lake.”
As we pass by the visitors center, I try to imagine the sultry July of 1575,
when thousands of gay revelers descended upon the palace, pregnant with
the hope or dread that Leicester would succeed in his wooing. “This was
the Earl of Leicester’s last chance to marry the queen and become King
of England, which he desperately wanted,” says McCarthy as we walk
along the wide gravel approach, “and which Thomas North was hoping
for as well.” Unlike with Roger, there’s no proof Thomas attended the
festival—as an ordinary gentleman, he would have been too insignificant
for chroniclers to note. It’s not unlikely, however, that he accompanied
his brother to the event. The North family’s early-twentieth-century
biographer Frances Bushby certainly places him there; like many writers,
she also speculates an eleven-year-old William Shakespeare also attended
from nearby Stratford and that “the poet may all have unwittingly rubbed
shoulders with Sir Thomas.”
For two centuries, Shakespeareans have been gamely placing the young
Bard at Kenilworth, given the uncanny similarities between the festival
and his magical fairytale of young lovers lost in the woods, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. McCarthy doesn’t rule out the idea that Shakespeare may
have attended—most of the entertainments were performed in the open
air, with locals allowed on the grounds at night—but he also thinks it
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more likely a gentleman with connections to Leicester attended, rather
than a glover’s son from the countryside. “As with other plays, he is using a
source play,” McCarthy says, “and the person who wrote the source play was
Thomas North, Leicester’s playwright, who was witness to these events.”
Likely the most performed of all Shakespeare’s plays, Dream has
delighted generations of audience members with its depictions of an
otherworldly fairyland. Professional theater companies and high school
productions constantly reinterpret its woodland spirits, wrapping actors,
as Leicester did, in silk or moss, or covering them in tulle, feathers,
Lycra, leather, or tie-dye. At times lyrical, lusty, and ludicrous, the play
ultimately comes down to a commentary on love. “It proposes that love
is a dream, or perhaps a vision; that it is absurd, irrational, a delusion,
or, perhaps, on the other hand, a transfiguration,” says literary critic
Catherine Belsey, “and that it constitutes at the same time the proper
foundation for a lifelong marriage.”
Scholars believe Shakespeare wrote the play sometime around 1594 or
1595, often seeing in it the beginning of Shakespeare’s maturation as a
playwright. Its sources include a mash-up of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence, Italian
novellas like Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and a healthy dash of commedia
dell’arte—with the rascally fairy Puck as the ultimate Arlecchino. Some
scholars have also identified a splash of Senecan tragedy—one calls it
“Light Seneca”—in its plunge into a sinister woodland full of darkness
and witchcraft.
Kenilworth’s own transformation into fairyland began as soon as Queen
Elizabeth approached the first gate. There, a female figure dressed in
white silk appeared—one of the Sibyls, oracles from Greek mythology.
“All hail, all hail,” she cried, prophesying a long reign for the queen. “You
shall be called the prince of peace, and peace shall be your shield.” As the
queen made her way through the tiltyard and into the castle’s base court,
a movable island floated toward her across the artificial lake, brightly
blazing with torches.
Another woman in silks stepped off and approached her, saying she was
the Lady of the Lake—the mythical enchantress who made King Arthur
monarch by giving him the magical sword Excalibur. By invoking the
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imagery of Camelot, say historians, Leicester was intentionally suggesting
“that the lord of the castle was of royal English ancestry and particularly that
he was Arthur’s heir.” The lady bowed low, saying, “The lake, the lodge,
and the lord are yours to command.” Elizabeth, however, was having none
of it. “We had thought indeed the lake had been ours, and do you call it
yours now?” she said with a smirk, reminding Leicester who really owned
the castle. “Well, we will herein commune more with you hereafter.”
We walk now, as Elizabeth did, across the castle yard, where the ruins
of Leicester’s apartments loom over us with pointed arches and crumbling
bay windows. A placard there displays an image of the earl, resplendent in
a red satin tunic, white ruff framing his confident, goateed face. Leicester
brought Elizabeth now to the castle keep, up a bridge lined with gifts
from the Greek gods—songbirds, fruit, trays of fish, and a fountain of
wine, complete with two glasses. For the next two weeks, each day came
with new surprises—musicians in boats, bear-baiting, Italian contortion-
ists, and nightly fireworks, which showered the sky above the castle with
sparks and shook the earth with thunder. “It was like Disney World,”
McCarthy says as we walk among the ruins. We climb up a stone staircase
carved with centuries of graffiti to stand now atop the ruined wall, where a
fierce wind blows off the surrounding hills. Sheep graze far below us where
the lake once stood, but I can still imagine it, stretching out, glittering
in the sun, the long bridge crossing to the hunting chase beyond.
As the queen returned from hunting by torchlight one night, she was
surprised by Gascoigne himself, who burst out of the trees as a “savage
man” covered in moss and ivy, an uprooted oak sapling in his hand. He
began by shouting for forest spirits—fawns, satyrs, and nymphs—before
addressing the queen with a verse regaling Dudley’s “true love.” The
poem, says McCarthy, is reminiscent of one of the opening scenes of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, as the fairies and sprites of the forest welcome
the Fairy Queen Titania. “He refers to dryads, and the people of the forest
welcoming the queen,” McCarthy says. “And A Midsummer Night’s Dream
has the exact atmosphere, the exact imagery.” The name Titania is even
used in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as another name for the goddess Diana—who
is often associated with Queen Elizabeth.
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Not all of Leicester’s performances ran smoothly, however. In one,
Leicester himself was to rescue the Lady of the Lake, who had been kid-
napped by an evil knight, and then implore Queen Elizabeth to revive
her. The symbolism was clear—together, Leicester and Elizabeth could
revive England. The players rigged up floating islands to make it look like
the combatants were fighting on the water, but for some reason the show
was called off, due to technical difficulties, or bad weather—or perhaps
because the queen and her censors had nixed it.
The players hastily recast the performance two nights later, planning
for King Triton on his mechanical mermaid to come directly to Elizabeth
as she was crossing the bridge, and allow her to rescue the Lady of the
Lake all by herself. As a reward, the queen received a song from a musician
on a dolphin’s back, a local singer named Harry Goldingham, playing
the Greek god Arion. Singing poorly that night, however, Goldingham
pulled off his mask in the midst of the song, exclaiming he “was none
of Arion, not he, but honest Harry Goldingham.” The queen nevertheless
clapped with delight, saying it was her favorite part of the show.
It’s this entertainment, says McCarthy, that some scholars point to as
inspiration for Oberon’s vision in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which
the fairy king tells the mischievous Puck that “once I sat upon a promon-
tory, and heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back,” who sang so beautifully
that the stars shot from the sky. Oberon went on to witness Cupid aim
his “love shaft” at a “fair vestal thronèd by the West,” launching it “as
it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts”—a fair representation of the
elaborate lengths to which Leicester went to capture the affections of
the Virgin Queen. An early-nineteenth-century scholar was the first to
associate the scene with the Kenilworth entertainments, but the theory
has since been embraced by numerous others, including Shakespeare
biographer Stephen Greenblatt.
When McCarthy first read about it, he immediately saw it as another
case in which Thomas North was re-creating one of the most important
moments of his life in the plays. No one who attended Kenilworth would
have been able to forget its magical sights. But knowing the stakes behind
Leicester’s proposal, North must have seen the scene as especially critical,
not just for the earl but for himself—but as his last chance to become
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an adviser to the king of England. The image is so specific, McCarthy
insists, that North must have sat there “upon a promontory” that very
night watching the water pageant unfold. McCarthy looks now over the
fields, using an illustration in the visitors guide to determine where the
bridge would have crossed the shallow valley, and to locate where North
must have sat. He points to a slight rise in the terrain, near a country
road cutting across the field. “It’s that hill, right there,” McCarthy says.
“That’s where he watched this extraordinary performance.”
Not everyone agrees that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is based on the
Kenilworth entertainments. Scholars point to other sources that describe
similar scenes; a passage in Seneca’s Phaedra, for example, mentions
Cupid, a dolphin, and “love’s power over the sea and stars.” Other enter-
tainments also used similar images, such as a four-day festival the queen
attended in 1591 at Elvetham, featuring a masque with a fairy queen and
a water pageant with Triton (though no dolphin). Even if Kenilworth
was the source, some argue, the playwright wouldn’t have had to attend
the festivities to write about them. Two contemporary accounts—one by
Gascoigne, and another by an attendee named Robert Langham—describe
the entertainments in detail.
As he studied Thomas North’s works, however, McCarthy identified
another connection with Oberon’s vision that had gone potentially un-
noticed for centuries. Cupid’s arrow misses the mark—“quenched in the
chaste beams of the wat’ry moon,” and instead lands on a “little western
flower, before, milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,” which he calls
“love-in-idleness,” a folk name for wild pansy. If the juice of that flower
is rubbed on a person’s “sleeping eyelids,” he tells Puck, that person will
wake up to fall in love with the first person they see. “Fetch me this herb,”
he commands, intending to play a trick on Titania. Of course, Puck does,
and sows mischief among four young lovers—Hermia, Lysander, Helena,
and Demetrius—lost in the woods who, through the fairy’s chemical
intercessions, fall hilariously in and out of love with each other.
For being such an important element in the plot, no scholar has identi-
fied a source for the magical love juice behind all the trouble. In North’s
Dial of Princes, however, McCarthy noticed a reference to an “herb called
Ilabia,” which grows in Cyprus. When cut, North writes, it “droppeth
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blood,” and if that blood is rubbed on a person while it’s hot, they will
fall in love with the person who does it; if rubbed cold, they will hate
the person. Reading the passage, McCarthy realized that this could be the
inspiration for Oberon’s flower. In North’s own copy of The Dial of Princes,
now at Cambridge University, in fact, North specifically calls out the plant
in his handwritten marginalia. “The blood-juice of this plant,” McCarthy
concludes, “is the bleeding herb from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
In the end, love is restored, and the couples take part in a group wed-
ding to end the play. Just as in Love’s Labour’s Lost, they are entertained by
a comical country cast performing a play-within-a-play (Puck dubs them
“rude mechanicals”) in the same way Leicester entertained his guests at
his own castle. “This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake
our tiring-house,” the group’s long-suffering director, Peter Quince, tells
his cast—Bottom, Snout, Flute, Snug, and Starveling—just as Leicester’s
players must have used similar arrangements to change their costumes
behind bushes and trees in the deer chase. In another potential homage
to Kenilworth, an actor playing the part of a lion at one point rips off
his mask to assure the audience that he’s only Snug the Joiner, just like
Goldingham did on his dolphin.
In an epilogue, Puck apologizes for his mischief, saying, “Give me
your hands, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.” While
Shakespeare’s play may have ended in harmony, however, the queen’s
own “Sweet Robin” found himself unable to sway her with his dream-
like entertainments. The centerpiece of Leicester’s productions was to
be a masque by Gascoigne, featuring Diana (representing chastity) and
Juno (representing marriage) fighting over a lost nymph named Zabeta,
a stand-in for Elizabeth. Of course Juno wins, promising that “now in
princely port”—Kenilworth—“a world of wealth at will, you henceforth
shall enjoy, in wedded state.”
Leicester’s men never got to perform it, however. Though they were ready
and in costume “two or three times” during her stay, Gascoigne reports
the performance was canceled due to “lack of opportunity and weather.”
Some historians, however, believe the weather was just fine; rather, the
queen caught wind of the masque’s theme from her censors (perhaps even
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her lord chamberlain, Sussex) and refused to attend. Certainly something
happened to upset Elizabeth, causing her to announce an abrupt early
departure. Elizabeth’s biographers have speculated that she might have
gotten angry over Leicester’s flirtations with her cousin Lettice Knollys,
Countess of Essex, with whom the earl would soon become romantically
involved. (Some even identify Knollys with that “little western flower”
where Cupid’s arrow falls.) It could be, however, that Elizabeth was just
tired of being wooed so publicly by a man she never had any intention
of marrying.
As she made preparations to depart, a panicked Leicester implored
Gascoigne to write a new performance. The playwright hastily donned
his “wild man” costume and ran after the queen on foot. When she wryly
asked if she should stop her horse so he could catch his breath, he protested
he could run another twenty miles by her side. Along the way, he told a
story about a courtier named Deep Desire, whom the nymph Zabeta had
cruelly turned into a holly bush. Ahead, the queen heard music and came
across an actual holly bush, from which an actor suddenly spoke. “Stay,
stay your hasty steps, O queen without compare,” it moaned, telling her
how the gods wept to see her go. “Live here, good Queen, live here, you
are amongst your friends.” Gascoigne assured the queen that it was within
her power to release Deep Desire from his prison. But there’s no record of
Elizabeth’s response; his account merely ends with the word “Finis.”
It’s a fitting epitaph to Leicester’s two decades attempting to persuade
the queen to be his wife. After Kenilworth, Leicester would still try to win
Elizabeth’s affections—or at least to prevent anyone else from winning
them—but never with the same intensity. As his eyes increasingly turned
to another woman, his thoughts turned to battlefield pursuits to cham-
pion the Puritan cause. Thomas North moved on, too, McCarthy believes,
giving up on his dream to become “English Seneca” to Leicester’s Nero.
He continued to support his patron, however, and years later, McCarthy
believes, he immortalized his wooing of the queen in an homage to a
midsummer night. Meanwhile, Thomas sought out new ways to influence
the rulers of England, as he began to embark now on the great work
of his life.
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NorthbyShakespeare_HCtext4P Chapter Nine True Love Never Did Run Smooth 2021-01-22 09:29:45 195You can also read
