The Queen's Cipher (36 page)

Once the audience had settled down and stopped coughing, the beeswax candles were gutted and the Lord Chamberlain rapped his cane on the oak floor. The curtain rose to reveal painted flats of a well-stocked library. Four players dressed as French noblemen entered stage right and bowed before the Queen. One figure stood out. Richard Burbage, leading actor in the Chamberlain’s Men, was playing Ferdinand, King of Navarre. Unlike his companions who were clad in ivory satin, Burbage wore a green silk doublet inlaid with pearls and other precious stones. His costume and his false nose and beard left no one in doubt as to his true identity. He was the Green Gallant, Henry of Navarre. The play was going to mock France and the French king. The audience clapped their hands and howled with delight while de Maisse shuffled uncomfortably on his stool.

“Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,” Burbage declaimed. “Live registered upon our brazen tombs, and then grace us in the disgrace of death.” Apparently the King of Navarre and his companions were planning to conquer their passions and lead a chaste, scholastic existence for three years. What a joke that was. In the real world, King Henry couldn’t keep his hands off women for three minutes let alone three years and already had the royal bastards to prove it. This was not lost on a sniggering Whitehall audience.

Elizabeth’s mind was elsewhere. Shakespeare’s idea of a stage-managed fame appealed to her. Now in her sixty-fifth year she daydreamed about her own state funeral. There would be a long procession through the streets of London to Westminster Abbey with a coffin drawn by four black horses. The coffin would be draped in purple velvet with a life-like effigy of herself on top of it to make people marvel.

A sixth sense brought her back to the play where one of the lords was asking, “What is the end of study, let me know?”

Burbage thought about this for a moment, stroking his great beard. “Why, that to know which else we should not know,” he replied.

“Things hid and barred, you mean, from common sense,” the lord flashed back at him.

Burbage nodded his head. “Aye, this is study’s god-like recompense.”

His noble companion appeared to be satisfied by this. “Come on, then, I will swear to study so to know the thing I am forbid to know.”

Beneath her canopy Elizabeth was frowning. What a strange definition of learning to be sure. Was this a play about some kind of hidden truth? It certainly sounded like it.

10 JUNE 2014

“That was the best tutorial I’ve ever had,” said Cheryl, tucking her blouse into her skirt as her teacher unlocked the study door. “But there are one or two points I’d like to make.”

“And what would they be?”

She picked her paperback copy of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
off the floor. “Have you noticed how the play begins with a pretty radical definition of learning? No sooner does King Ferdinand announce that he and his pals have agreed to study in hermetic isolation for three years than Lord Biron upsets the apple cart. He goes like, ‘what is the end of study?’ and won’t take the oath until the King agrees that study will give him access to ‘things hid and barred from common sense,’ meaning he’ll learn what he’s not supposed to know about.”

Things hid and barred from common sense
. He had seen those words before. Freddie closed his eyes and let his photographic memory take over. First, the context: an eager young man reading by torchlight because the electricity had gone out in his student lodgings. Then textual retrieval: ploughing through Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, an incredibly long Latin poem with a semi-mythical structure that was hugely popular in Elizabethan England, particularly with Shakespeare who copied wholesale from it. Ovid chronicled the history of the world from its creation to the dictatorship of Julius Caesar in fifteen books and, in the last of these, Freddie recalled the poet’s description of the legendary king of Rome’s journey to Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy, to meet the philosopher-mathematician Pythagoras who taught his silent followers ‘what shakes the earth: what law the stars do keep their courses under and whatsoever other thing is hid from common sense.’ Biron’s words had been cribbed from Ovid.

He explained this to Cheryl, telling her Shakespeare had based Navarre’s philosophical academy - ‘still and contemplative in living art’ - on the Pythagorean secret brotherhood whose members had to study for three years in silence, eat frugally and stay chaste. In the play Ferdinand expected his friends to study silently for three years and to fast without female company. It was exactly the same story.

“That’s what
Love’s Labour’s Lost
is about,” he said excitedly, “the acquisition of secret knowledge. And it’s expressed figuratively in Ovid’s poem as the law governing the stars. That too is somewhere in the play.”

He picked up her paperback edition of the play and thumbed through its pages. “Here we are,” he said with obvious satisfaction. “Act 5 Scene 2, Biron rails against affectation and insincerity. He starts off by saying ‘Thus pour the stars down plagues for perjury’ and ends with ‘And to begin, wench, so God help me, law!’ He is talking about the law of the stars, Ovid’s earth-shaking hidden truth.”

“And what might that be within the context of the play?”

“Who knows? Biron promises to speak honestly in future rather than in affected hyperboles. He talks about being ‘full of maggot ostentation.’” 

Cheryl peered at the page. “But he also says, ‘Here stand I, lady. Dart they skill at me,’ which sounds like a challenge.”

“That’s where it gets interesting. Taken at face value, he is standing before the woman he loves, ready to be rebuked for courting her as a masked Muscovite. But Biron is an autobiographical character – scholars agree on that - so perhaps it’s the dramatist who is stripping off his fictional mask in order to communicate with one particularly clever woman.”

“And who might that be?”

Freddie shrugged his shoulders. He wasn’t prepared to tell her what was in his mind.

“Well, whatever the author is trying to say, he’s expressing it numerically.”

“How do you mean?”

“You must have noticed that everything in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
comes in threes, starting with the title of the play: three L’s, a three year study period, three lords supporting the King of Navarre, three ladies escorting the French princess.”

Freddie smote his forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that? It’s glaringly obvious and no, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. The Pythagoreans believed number was at the heart of everything and three was venerated because it had a beginning, middle and an end. The figure three stood for wisdom.”

Cheryl sat on the edge of his desk and stretched out her long legs. “It’s as if something bright and shiny was being dangled in front of our noses. What if the number three is a cipher key?”

He looked at her sharply. “Why do you say that?”

She took the paperback off him and flicked back towards the beginning. “You mentioned the crossword clue in the
Folio
Dedication, well, there’s something similar here in the second scene. I found it when I was reading the play in bed last night. The figure three is said to be a cipher.”

“This I must see,” he said.

She pointed to an exchange between the comic Spaniard Don Armado and his page.

Mote: How many is one, thrice told?

Armado: I am ill at reckoning; it fitteth the spirit of a tapster.

Mote: You are a gentleman and a gamester, sir.

Armado: I confess both. They are both the varnish of a complete man.

Mote: Then I am sure you know how much the gross sum of deuce-ace amounts to.

Armado: It doth amount to one more than two.

More: Which the base vulgar do call three.

Armado: True.

Moth: Why, sir, is this such a piece of study? Now here is ‘three’ studied ere ye’ll thrice wink; and how easy it is to put ‘years’ to the word ‘three,’ and study three years in two words, the dancing horse will tell you.

Armado: A most fine figure.

Mote: To prove you a cipher.

“According to the footnote, there was a performing horse called Marocco on the London stage in the 1590s that could indicate how many coins had been collected from members of the audience by stamping with its hooves,” Cheryl told him. “Don’t laugh at me, Freddie, if I sound as crazy as you, but I reckon there is cipher in the play and, in some shape or form, it’s signposted by the number three.”

“I’m not laughing. Not yet at least.”

“Right,” she said, sounding more confident. “We’re looking for triplication in the play. It might take the form of a word or phrase repeated three times.”

“And what do you think is being signposted?”

Cheryl puffed out her cheeks. She’d never played detective before. “The play is full of what Bacon calls allusive poetry. By that he means fables, allegories and riddles that invite playgoers to look beyond the poetic imagination to the underlying meaning of words. He likened it to a drawn curtain that could be used to veil state mysteries; in other words, a kind of cipher.  I read about this in my lonely bed last night. Just so you know what I get up to when you’re not around.”

His eyes narrowed. “Let me get this clear: you’re suggesting that the obscure poems and riddles in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
are linked by the figure three and have the same subsurface meaning.”

“Yeah, and if I’m right, it all kicks off in Act Three.”

*

Once the candles and oil lamps had been lit in the Great Chamber the Chamberlain’s Men began the third act. An exquisite Spanish grandee, armed to the teeth with sword and daggers and wearing a false spade beard, lounged against an imitation tree and began a short soliloquy. He spoke with a decided lisp sprinkling his words with extra ‘e’s.

“Most e-rude melancholy, valour gives thee e-place,” he told his royal audience.

Most eyes were not on him but on the boy actor who was miming the unlocking of a trapdoor. The clown in the play, Costard, who had been imprisoned for breaking the country’s chastity edict was about to be released. Clowns were headline acts on the Elizabethan stage and Will Kemp was the most famous of them all. There was a roar of approval as he clambered bleary-eyed onto the stage and broke into one of his trademark jigs. He was a big man who could dance, pull faces and make up his lines as he went along. Dressed in a patchwork coat and tights with different coloured legs he capered around to the general amusement. Finally, he over-balanced and fell onto the stage holding his ankle, allowing Armado’s page to quip “A wonder, master – here’s a costard broken in a shin.”

These words were greeted with prolonged laughter. Theatre audiences loved puns. Costard was a humorous slang word for the human head and the idea that a head could have a sprained ankle was an anatomical impossibility. But as Elizabeth rapidly realised, there was more to it than that. Figuratively, a ‘broken shin’ conveyed disappointment in love and this was what the playwright was hinting at here.

Armado began to talk about an obscure event in the past that needed an explanation and sought to illustrate it with a riddling verse. The Queen could see through this comic artifice. She had been right all along. The play had a hidden meaning and it was seditious.

She scanned the sea of faces around her and realised she was the only person in the audience to understood its coded message. Just her and the man who thought he was her son.

*

Cheryl wanted to do a victory dance. “The rule of three, Freddie,” she said in a voice choked with emotion. “No sooner does the third act begin than the number three is repeated three times.” 

In the act’s opening scene Mote cracked a joke about ‘a costard broken in a shin’ and Armado called for the riddle’s ‘envoi’ or meaning. When his page misunderstood this affectation the pompous Spaniard turned teacher, coming up with a weird verse about three creatures being at odds.

Mote: Is not l’envoi a salve?

Armado: No, page, it is an epilogue or discourse to make plain

Some obscure precedence that hath tofore been sain.

I will example it.

The fox, the ape, and the humble-bee

Were still at odds, being but three.

There’s the moral. Now the l’envoi.

Mote: I will add the l’envoi. Say the moral again.

Armado: The fox, the ape, and the humble-bee

Were still at odds, being but three.

Mote: Until the goose came out of door,

And stayed the odds by adding four.

Now will I begin your moral, and do you follow with my l’envoi.

The fox, the ape, and the humble-bee

Were still at odds, being but three.

Armado: Until the goose came out of door,

Staying the odds by adding four.

“It’s a number riddle all right,” said Freddie emphatically.

Cheryl was mystified. She had been so keen to show off her powers of deduction that she had never stopped to think what the verse actually meant. “Where’s the riddle?” she asked. “Mote is saying the goose added a fourth, thereby turning an odd number into an even one.”                            

“That’s what Shakespeare editors say but I believe they may be wrong.”