The Queen's Cipher (23 page)

“Read Homer, my boy,” he advised Randolph. “Revel in such epithets as ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ and ‘swift-footed Achilles.’ Learn what epic poetry is all about.”

“Talking of epic poetry, what think you of Shakespeare’s use of the rhyme royal in The Rape of Lucrece?” Robert Herrick asked innocently. “Is it not exceedingly well done?”

“The seven line stanza has gone out of fashion, Herrick, or hadn’t you noticed,” he boomed.

Herrick flushed as the tribe laughed dutifully at Jonson’s jibe. “Given your own humble background Master, you must admire the way William Shakespeare managed to write so many Roman plays without the benefit of a classical education.”

His cocky Cheapside protégé was testing him. He wasn’t too drunk to realize that. Shakespeare’s name had once acted as a red flag to a bull but not anymore.

“As you well know, Herrick, I was one of Shakespeare’s sternest critics, finding him glib and wanting in art, but now I have a much higher opinion of his worth.  It is truly amazing what can be achieved by people from plebeian backgrounds.”

The room fell silent. Everyone knew Ben had been jealous of Shakespeare’s stage successes and had taken every opportunity to disparage his rival, dismissing him as a ‘poet-ape’ who ‘ramped after gentility.’ Death was supposed to extinguish envy but that hadn’t been true in Ben’s case. Long after Shakespeare’s death, when his own fame was at its zenith, he was still complaining about the actor’s loose tongue and lack of serious purpose. Then suddenly the criticism ended, mystifying Ben’s many followers who thought he must be going soft in his old age.

Ben looked at his fellow drinkers through bloodshot eyes. “Drink up, my sons, drink up,” he bellowed, “to warm you for your cold departure.” In truth it was a bad time to be abroad. The Thames had frozen over. Londoners shivered in the snow and complained bitterly as food prices soared and the streets were littered with filth.

“You must have encountered weather like this, Ben, on your long walk to Scotland and back?” The question came from an older man with a long, cavernous face whose religious duties and brood of motherless children made him almost a stranger in their midst. John Donne had once been an erotic poet of uncommon merit but since taking holy orders his verse had changed.

“No, now you mention it, I don’t recall such ice flows and blizzards on the road to Scotland,” Jonson replied. “But I was younger then and had stouter shoes.”

“Whatever possessed you to make such a journey when built on such generous proportions?”

“I wanted to meet my family for I am descended from a celebrated Borders clan.”

A loud voice rang out from the back of the room. “Harry Hunks is a Scotsman!”

Jonson frowned. References to London’s most celebrated fighting bear were not welcome. But he quickly rallied and started to tell the tribe what one of his closest friends had said about his eight-hundred-mile adventure. “Lord Bacon informed me he loved not to see poesy go on other feet than poetical dactyls and spondees.”

He could see by their expressions that he had told them this before. His unbounded admiration for the Lord Chancellor was almost as mystifying as his Shakespeare conversion. Only last week he had attended a York House banquet to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of the newly ennobled Viscount St Alban.

Dining at T-shaped tables had been some of Europe’s most influential figures. His patron William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlain and Grand Master of the Lodge of York, was seated next to Bacon while his brother, the Earl of Montgomery, was deep in conversation with the Rosicrucian physician Michael Maier and the Landgrave Moritz of Hesse-Kassel. Further off, another Rosicrucian doctor Robert Fludd was discussing circulation of the blood with the wild-haired Cornelius Drebbel, the Dutch inventor whose navigable submarine was undergoing its sea trials. Representing the arts, Ben counted playwright John Fletcher, the poet George Herbert and jack-of-all-trades Henry Peacham.

Once the feasting was over, St Alban called for silence and passed his wreath to the Poet Laureate who had written an ode in honour of their host. Rising somewhat self-consciously to his feet Jonson recited his poem.

Hail, happy genius of this ancient pile!

How comes it all things so about thee smile?

The fire, the wine, the men! And in the midst,

Thou stand’st as if some mystery thou didst!

Now, in the Apollo Room, as the chill winter winds blew against the sash windows and the night drew in, Ben had a sudden urge to repeat his ode for the tribe’s benefit but thought better of it. Some bright spark like Herrick might want to know what kind of mystery Lord Bacon had performed.

5 MAY 2014

“It’s not only Ben Jonson who identifies Shakespeare as the author of the
First Folio
,” Sam said emphatically. “Lionel Digges does so too and the Folio editors Heminge and Condell also acknowledge their fellow actor.”

She could hear the kettle simmering on the stove. The stillness in the room was almost unbearable. Why does he have this effect on me, she asked herself, winding me up like a clock spring. It’s a form of control yet I doubt if he even knows he’s doing it.

“That’s a perfectly logical way of looking at things,” Freddie eventually replied, “if the actors edited the
First Folio
.”

Not that old chestnut again, she thought. Heminge and Condell’s role in the production of the
First Folio
had been thoroughly debated in academic circles: one was a grocer with a stammer, the other a fishmonger’s son and they both left school in their early teens. As stage actors they had to be able to read but there was no evidence of them writing anything apart from the
Folio
’s Preface and Dedicatory Epistle. The
First Folio
, it was argued, had been the literary event of the year, a huge nine hundred page volume dedicated to the Lord Chamberlain, and, therefore, hardly the project on which novices would cut their teeth. But the argument was flawed. If the untutored Shakespeare could write the plays surely his acting friends could edit them. To think otherwise was a form of snobbery.

“If you’re going to put cipher in the
Folio
,” Freddie said, “this is the right place for it.”

“Why is the Dedication the right place? Explain that to me.”

He gave her a lopsided grin. “Follow the money.”

“Come on! That’s what Deep Throat said to Woodward and Bernstein.”

“And it’s the best way of looking at the problem. Ask yourself who financed the
Folio
. It was such a large project it required a publishing syndicate. Think of it, thirty-six plays, half of which hadn’t been seen before. The publishers had to pay for the new ones as well as acquiring the rights to the plays already in print. That’s why a couple of rights-owning stationers were part of the syndicate. Add to that the printing costs. The book’s quality rag paper had to be imported from France and there was such a shortage of type in London that eleven different fonts were used.”

“Alright then, who could afford the
Folio
’s capital costs?” she asked. “What about the lead publisher Edward Blount?”

“You’re missing the point. What do Jonson and Digges have in common? Follow the money.”

The penny dropped. “I see what you mean. They had the same benefactor.”

William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, was the richest nobleman in England and leading patron of the arts. He surrounded himself with poets and paid them stipends. Jonson and Digges were hired guns, ready to do his bidding, and the same could be said for the publisher. The Sidney-Herbert literary circle, with all its connections and influence, kept Blount in business.

“So you’re saying Pembroke funded the Folio and employed Jonson, Digges and Blount to work on the project.”

“I think so. In 1616 Jonson was receiving twenty pounds a year. Five years later, when work began on Shakespeare’s folio edition, Ben’s salary increased tenfold. Two hundred pounds was a lot of money then – about sixty thousand in modern currency.”

Freddie grinned. Facts were like muscle. The more information he imparted, the stronger he seemed to grow physically. Sam looked at him, leaning over the kitchen table, exuding enthusiasm and positive energy. He reminded her of a predatory beast crouching over its prey.

“And Pembroke wasn’t Jonson’s only sponsor. After his fall from power Francis Bacon wanted his philosophical works translated into the international language of Latin and obtained the services of ‘three esteemed masters in the Roman eloquence’ including the ‘learned and judicious poet’ Benjamin Jonson. That too was in 1621.”

She listened to this with an increasingly heavy heart. He was actually suggesting that Jonson had two masters, Pembroke and Bacon, and that the three of them had somehow conspired to produce the
Folio
. There was an old saying in the academic world that it did no harm to have an original mind. Nothing could be further from the truth. If repeated in public, Freddie’s theory would almost certainly do him an immense disservice.

Sam delved into her shoulder bag and came up with a packet of Marlboros. She hated the smell of cigarettes, how it got into her clothes and lingered there, stale and sickly, but she kept a packet for emergencies. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked in a small, scarcely recognizable voice.

“Go ahead. You can use a saucer as an ashtray.”

“Are you seriously suggesting that William Herbert and Francis Bacon collaborated over the Shakespeare
Folio
? By then Viscount St Alban, to give him his full title, was a corrupt ex-Chancellor guilty of taking bribes and heavily in debt. Not the ideal partner for a belted earl.”

“Possibly not, but they had joint business ventures and belonged to the same social set.”

He ran through the facts. Herbert and Bacon were founding investors in the Virginia Company and the Newfoundland Company and also principal shareholders in an iron foundry. Socially, they moved in the same milieu and had similar political thoughts, siding with Essex in his power struggle with the Cecil family, backing war with Spain and supporting exploration to create colonies and trade.

Sam drew deeply on her cigarette. “This is sounding more and more like a plot in which Ben Jonson was the middle man. I suppose you think he edited the
First Folio
.”

“That’s right” he said. “I do think that.”

She sent a smoke ring up to the ceiling. “Okay, give me your reasons?”

“One, Ben was the best man for the job. He was the royal poet, the cultural dictator of his age, the only writer to collect and publish his works in a folio edition. By including drama as well as poetry in his anthology he advanced the novel proposition that plays were worth preserving for posterity. Two, the language used in the
Folio
Preface and Dedicatory Epistle would seem to have come from the pen of a learned man steeped in the classics rather than a couple of players. Lastly, as a contributor to the Folio, Ben was the obvious suspect. That was pretty much the accepted truth until the authorship controversy blew up with theorists highlighting Shakespeare’s limited education and lack of a cultural background. After that, the literary establishment shut up shop. Shakespeare wrote his plays and Heminge and Condell edited the
Folio
. End of story.”

Her eyebrows shot up. In studying gender politics she had read scores of class-ridden, misogynistic texts. “I’m not comfortable with this,” she told him. “Those early Shakespeare critics were snobs. They treated actors as second-class citizens, just like women.”

“This isn’t a class thing,” he retorted hotly. “The next folio collection, the 1647 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, had a Dedicatory Epistle signed by ten of the King’s Men but they had nothing to do with it. By then, ghost writing had become the norm.”

Sam stubbed out her cigarette. “All right, accepting what you say, Ben Jonson edits Shakespeare’s
Folio
and uses his position to plant a cipher in its Dedication. Why would he do that?”

Two bottles of Pinot Noir later, they were still arguing about it. “I think you’re wrong,” she was telling him, “Jonson wasn’t a devious man. He was big and boisterous, touchy and opinionated, as rapid with the sword as with the tongue. His nickname was ‘Honest Ben’ not ‘Slippery Sid.’”

“No, you’re wrong. Jonson was a social climber, eager to get on in the world. If flattery was needed, Ben could be as obsequious as any courtier but he was also willing to dip his pen in venom.”

“A man for all seasons,” Sam concluded.

“And all religions too: a Calvinist who converted to Catholicism before renouncing his faith after the Gunpowder Plot and adopting the court religion. Ben went with the tide.”

“If he was such a self-seeker, why didn’t he desert Bacon when he fell from power?”

“Good question. He idolized Bacon, saying he ‘filled up all numbers, and performed that in our language which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome.’”

“Numbers are verses, aren’t they?”

“That’s right. Shakespeare used the term frequently.”

“So it’s a reference to the poetry Bacon didn’t write,” she said tartly.

“It’s also what Jonson said about Shakespeare in his
Folio
eulogy – ‘Leave thee alone, for the comparison of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome sent forth.’ But that wasn’t what he had said about him earlier.”

In his play
Every Man out of his Humour
, Jonson created a character called Sogliardo who, like Shakespeare, desperately wanted to be thought a gentleman. Sogliardo was said to be ‘ramping to gentility’ and told that the motto on his coat-of-arms should be ‘not without mustard.’ Shakespeare’s motto was ‘not without right.’ A few years later, Jonson wrote a bitter epigram about a ‘Poet-Ape’ who stole other people’s ideas which most literary critics saw as an attack on Shakespeare.