Interesting Parallels

Appendix K

Rycote and the soldier-wooer in Henry V

Henry’s courtship in Henry V has an earlier parallel in the entertainment given for Elizabeth at Lord Norreys’s Rycote in 1592. A soldier’s love letter, mistakenly read before the queen, opposes military action to literary courtship:

You say love cannot be in soldiers, I swear it is, only this the difference, that we prove it by the sword, others by their sonnets; theirs ink, black for cold, ours blood, red for heat.¹

Henry likewise presents himself to Katherine as a soldier unequal to a poet’s wooing:

KING HENRY Marry, if you would put me to verses or
to dance for your sake, Kate, why you undid me.
For the one, I have neither words nor measure; and
for the other, I have no strength in measure, yet a
reasonable measure in strength. If I could win a
lady at leapfrog or by vaulting into my saddle with
my armor on my back, under the correction of
bragging be it spoken, I should quickly leap into a
wife. Or if I might buffet for my love, or bound my
horse for her favors, I could lay on like a butcher
and sit like a jackanapes, never off. …²

Both passages contrast poetry with the soldier’s way of proving his love: the Rycote letter sets sword against sonnets, while Henry offers feats of strength and horsemanship instead of verses. The Neville-family connection extends to the entertainment’s expenses: a 1917 sale catalogue records a letter from Lord Norreys to Sir Henry Neville concerning payment of thirty soldiers’ wages in connection with Elizabeth’s entertainment at Rycote in 1592. The catalogue dates the letter to 1599; if 1592 was intended, its recipient was Neville’s father.³

Cuffe’s leanness and superfluity

Henry Cuffe had repeatedly approached Neville to draw him into Essex’s plans, as Neville described in his March 1601 confession. Cuffe’s The Differences of the Ages of Mans Life, published in 1607, treats nutrition in terms of the body’s proper balance. “All mixture of superfluities,” he writes, “is against nature, enemy to good digestion, and sound nutrition.” Excessive waking, by contrast, consumes the vital juice and “causeth leanness in the body.”⁴

The First Citizen turns these bodily conditions into a description of unequal distribution:

FIRST CITIZEN We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians
good. What authority surfeits on would
relieve us. If they would yield us but the superfluity
while it were wholesome, we might guess they
relieved us humanely. But they think we are too
dear. The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our
misery, is as an inventory to particularize their
abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. Let
us revenge this with our pikes ere we become
rakes; for the gods know I speak this in hunger for
bread, not in thirst for revenge.
— Coriolanus, 1.1.⁵

North also describes purging Rome’s “superfluous ill humours.” The sharper comparison with Cuffe is the pairing of superfluity and leanness: Cuffe treats them as disorders of the body; the citizen distributes them between rich and poor. Cuffe’s work on the ages of man is discussed more fully in the As You Like It chapter.

An EEBO-TCP search finds both terms in earlier medical writing: Nicholas Gyer’s The English Phlebotomy (1592) discusses leanness and the body’s discharge of superfluities. They belong to a shared vocabulary of bodily health. Cuffe uses them in separate passages about nourishment and imbalance; Shakespeare brings them together to contrast the rich’s excess with the poor’s hunger.⁶

“Absolute power”: a phrase found by comparison

Our independent study looked for phrases that Shakespeare uses repeatedly but other playwrights use rarely. “Absolute power” stood out: in the 239-play comparison set dated 1590–1615, it appears in four Shakespeare plays—Measure for Measure, King Lear, Timon of Athens and Coriolanus—but in only one play by another dramatist, Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall. Neville uses the same phrase in his diplomatic correspondence. The point is its concentration in Shakespeare’s plays and its presence in Neville’s writing.⁷

On 12 March 1600, Neville reported to Cecil on the negotiations for Henri IV’s marriage to the Princess of Florence, Marie de’ Medici. He expected the French negotiator, Sillery, to have reached Florence:

and Monsieur de Sillery is by this time I suppose at Florence, with absolute power to conclude the contract there publicly.⁸

The letter precedes all five play witnesses in the comparison. Three of the Shakespeare passages use the expression in closely related situations: authority is delegated, restored or offered to someone for a defined purpose.

In Measure for Measure, the Duke explains the authority he has entrusted to Angelo:

DUKE […]
I have delivered to Lord Angelo,
A man of stricture and firm abstinence,
My absolute power and place here in Vienna,
And he supposes me traveled to Poland,
For so I have strewed it in the common ear,
And so it is received. Now, pious sir,
You will demand of me why I do this.
— Measure for Measure, 1.3.⁹

In King Lear, Albany declares his intention to restore authority to the old king:

ALBANY […]
Shall be applied. For us, we will resign,
During the life of this old Majesty,
To him our absolute power; you to your rights,
With boot and such addition as your Honors
Have more than merited. All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings. O, see, see!
— King Lear, 5.3.⁹

In Timon of Athens, the senators offer Timon command of the city’s defence:

FIRST SENATOR
Therefore, so please thee to return with us
And of our Athens, thine and ours, to take
The captainship, thou shalt be met with thanks;
Allowed with absolute power, and thy good name
Live with authority. So soon we shall drive back
Of Alcibiades th’ approaches wild,
Who like a boar too savage doth root up
His country’s peace.
— Timon of Athens, 5.1.⁹

In Coriolanus, the phrase describes the people’s political authority in Greece:

CORIOLANUS
Though there the people had more absolute power,
I say they nourished disobedience, fed
The ruin of the state.
— Coriolanus, 3.1.⁹

“Without the form of justice”

Neville’s embassy correspondence records him insisting on the distinction between power and lawful procedure. Writing to Cecil on 28 July 1599, Neville described his protest to the French king over the seizure of an English ship by men of Marseilles. He had objected:

that it was done altogether without any form of justice, of their own authority, without any commission or letters of reprisal from the king, and without requiring justice first in England, as all the treaties, both old and new, do in that case require¹⁰

Cornwall acknowledges the same distinction between force and lawful procedure before Gloucester’s blinding in King Lear 3.7:

CORNWALL
Though well we may not pass upon his life
Without the form of justice, yet our power
Shall do a court’sy to our wrath, which men
May blame but not control.¹¹

Neville invokes lawful procedure to restrain power; Cornwall names it before setting it aside. The diplomatic protest and the dramatic speech turn on the same distinction.

Forgiveness and the rights of others

On 26 September 1599, Neville disputed an argument that the French king’s pardon of former rebels discharged claims for an English ship taken by men of Marseilles. He insisted that the injured party mattered:

Although the king might pardon for offences done against him, yet he could not pardon those that were committed against his allies; or if he will, he must of his own make good the damages.¹²

Prospero likewise separates his own forgiveness from the offence against Alonso. He can expose Antonio and Sebastian as traitors, but chooses to remain silent; he forgives Antonio while requiring his dukedom back. In The Tempest, 5.1:

PROSPERO […]
I here could pluck his Highness’ frown upon you
And justify you traitors. At this time
I will tell no tales.
[…]
[To Antonio.] For you, most wicked sir, whom to
call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault, all of them, and require
My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know
Thou must restore.
— The Tempest, 5.1

Neville’s dispute concerns maritime damages; Prospero’s concerns usurpation and attempted murder. In each, forgiving a wrong to oneself is distinct from disposing of another ruler’s claim.¹²

Amity between England and France

Reporting his protest over France’s failure to repay Elizabeth, Neville told Cecil that he had offered to withhold the French king’s unsatisfactory answer while the king reconsidered it. His purpose was to preserve relations between the two monarchs:

out of my love to the king, and desire of the continuance of good amity between their Majesties¹³

In Henry VIII, Buckingham describes the Emperor’s fear that closer relations between England and France would threaten his interests:

BUCKINGHAM […]
His fears were that the interview betwixt
England and France might through their amity
Breed him some prejudice, for from this league
Peeped harms that menaced him; […]
— Henry VIII, 1.1.¹⁴

Both passages concern amity between England and France: the same two kingdoms and the political consequences of their relationship. Neville seeks to preserve it through honourable treatment of Elizabeth; Buckingham describes the Emperor’s fear of the harm it could do him. The diplomatic relationship is viewed from opposite sides: something to protect, or something to fear.

A royal offer

In 1 Henry IV, 5.2, Worcester returns from the king’s camp determined to hide the offer of peace from Hotspur:

WORCESTER
O no, my nephew must not know, Sir Richard,
The liberal and kind offer of the King.¹⁵

Neville uses the same formulation in his account of negotiations with Villeroy on 29 June 1599. Whatever course Elizabeth chose, he said, she would

not forget to claim and embrace those kind offers of the King’s towards her.¹⁶

Both offers pass through intermediaries, though Worcester suppresses his. EarlyPrint finds the phrase in the 1598 quarto and First Folio; its only other results are a 1683 military letter and a 1700 adaptation of the play. The correspondence is distinctive, but Neville’s later letter cannot be established as the dramatic line’s source.¹⁷

When writing speaks for feeling

Writing to Salisbury on 14 January 1609, Neville explained why he had put his appeal into a letter:

finding in myself, either out of the imbecility of my nature, or the abundance of my love and respect unto your Lordship, which is ever accompanied with awe and reverence, that I cannot so freely express myself unto your Lordship by speech as my occasions require, I have adventured to do it by writing¹⁸

Sonnet 23 follows the same movement from overwhelming feeling to failed speech, then to writing:

So I for fear of trust forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.
— Sonnet 23.¹⁹

The correspondence is a sequence of thought: abundant feeling inhibits speech, and writing must carry what the speaker cannot say. Neville addresses a patron; the sonnet addresses a beloved. In both, the difficulty comes from the strength of feeling itself.

An estate disabled: land, bonds and assurances

On 6 May 1598, Neville asked Cecil to consider the danger that employment abroad would pose to his finances. He had sold land to buy part of Sir Henry Unton’s estate and faced obligations that required his attention:

I am entered into recognizances of above twelve thousand pound to be discharged within three months, and all reciprocal assurances within that time to be performed. How impossible it is for me to accomplish this if I should be employed I do assuredly know. And not accomplishing it, I foresee the overthrow of my poor estate, and shall both serve her Majesty without comfort now, and be utterly disabled to serve her in any sort hereafter.²⁰

Bassanio uses the same pairing of estate and disability to explain his financial position:

BASSANIO
’Tis not unknown to you, Antonio,
How much I have disabled mine estate
By something showing a more swelling port
Than my faint means would grant continuance.
— The Merchant of Venice, 1.1.²¹

Bassanio’s expenditure has disabled his estate; Neville fears that the loss of his estate will disable his service. The same vocabulary connects financial resources with the capacity to act.

The letter’s recognizances and assurances also belong to the world of land transactions that Hamlet evokes in the graveyard:

HAMLET […] Hum, this fellow might
be in ’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes,
his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers,
his recoveries. […]
— Hamlet, 5.1.²¹

When Horatio confirms that parchment is made from sheep and calf skins, Hamlet turns legal security into a joke:

HAMLET They are sheep and calves which seek out
assurance in that. […]
— Hamlet, 5.1.²¹

These are connected terms from the business of buying land and securing title. Neville describes the obligations that could ruin him; Hamlet asks what such elaborate securities leave their owner at death.

“O, that ‘had’”

The Countess interrupts herself while remembering Helen’s father (All’s Well That Ends Well, 1.1):

COUNTESS This young gentlewoman had a father–O,
that “had,” how sad a passage ’tis!–whose skill
was almost as great as his honesty; had it stretched
so far, would have made nature immortal, and
death should have play for lack of work.²²

John Davies of Hereford opens his poem to Henry Neville in Microcosmos (1603) with a similar interruption, this time over “was”:

There was a Time when, ah that so there was,
Whie not there is? There is and was a Time,²²

Both speakers pause over their own past tense. The Countess mourns a dead physician; Davies immediately challenges his “was” and turns to the freedom to speak and praise honestly. His Neville poem is discussed more fully in Chapter 47, “Microcosmos: Neville and Shakespeare.”²²

Counterpoise and balance

In All’s Well That Ends Well, the king overcomes Bertram’s objection to Helen’s lower rank (All’s Well That Ends Well, 2.3):

KING Take her by the hand,
And tell her she is thine, to whom I promise
A counterpoise, if not to thy estate,
A balance more replete.²³

Neville had used the pair in his dispatch of 12 March 1600. The Dutch States were seeking to stop trade through Calais from supplying their enemies. The Duke of Bouillon and Monsieur du Plessis supported the States against Villeroy’s opposition. Neville wrote that they:

do what they may to counterpoise the balance in their favour.²⁴

Both apply the weighing metaphor to power or standing. The pairing was already available in English and is not a unique expression.²⁴ The written marriage conditions are examined in Chapter 29.

“Course of justice”

“Course of justice” connects Neville’s diplomatic writing with the dispute over justice in Measure for Measure. Writing to Winwood on 23 January 1601, shortly before his own detention, Neville intended to pursue English grievances against the French “in some course of justice.” In the final scene, Angelo uses those same words to describe Claudio’s supposed death:

ANGELO
My lord, her wits, I fear me, are not firm.
She hath been a suitor to me for her brother
Cut off by course of justice.

ISABELLA, [standing] By course of justice!
— Measure for Measure, 5.1.

Isabella’s repetition strips the formula of its reassuring sound. What Angelo describes as the regular operation of justice, she knows as the outcome of a corrupt bargain. Neville’s letters show the expression in the vocabulary of diplomacy; the play makes its adequacy a matter of life and death.²⁵

“At every sentence’ end”

The Rycote entertainment of 1592 gives its final messenger a comic excuse for arriving late: lovers have detained him on the way.

… at every mile’s end a lover, at every sentence end a lie, I stayed to hear the conclusions …

In As You Like It, Orlando’s verses make the same position in a sentence the place for his beloved’s name:

But upon the fairest boughs,
Or at every sentence’ end,
Will I “Rosalinda” write,
Teaching all that read to know
The quintessence of every sprite
Heaven would in little show.²⁶

The shared phrase belongs to the language of lovers in both passages: Rycote makes each sentence end in a lie, while Orlando makes it end in Rosalind’s name. An earlier English Eunapius supplies a precedent for the wording, describing an orator clapping his hands “at every sentence end”; the courtship application brings Rycote and Shakespeare closer together.²⁷

Declarations sealed with blood

Another speaker at Rycote offers Elizabeth his life in the language of a document made binding:

For myself, I can but wish all happiness to her highness, and any occasion that what my tongue delivers, my blood may seal, the end of my service, that in her service my life may end.

Writing to Robert Cecil on 7 January 1603, Neville likewise makes blood the guarantee of his declaration of gratitude:

I shall ever hold, not only my poor fortune, but my life well spent to give your honour any testimony of my thankfulness. And with this protestation (which I will always avow, and seal with my blood, if occasion require it) …²⁸

In each passage, words become an undertaking guaranteed by the speaker’s life. The 1600 report of Anthony Sherley’s Persian journey offers a useful contemporary comparison: his oration speaks of devotion and observances “sealed with my blood,” offered to be “shed and spent” at the ruler’s command. Blood as a seal thus belongs to a wider language of personal service, as well as linking these two passages.²⁹

Blood washing away disgrace

From the Tower on 31 July 1602, Neville imagined military service as a way to remove the stain of his disgrace in Elizabeth’s eyes:

And if there be no other means to wipe away this blot wherewith I am soiled, yet it is possible that if I were at liberty, I might shed so much of my blood, in some place where she hath occasion to use men, as might serve for a laver for the crime which hath made me so ugly in her eye.³⁰

Lucrece also imagines blood washing away a stain upon her name:

My blood shall wash the slander of mine ill;
My life’s foul deed my life’s fair end shall free it.³¹

The correspondence is blood conceived as a cleansing agent for dishonour. Neville’s “laver” is a washing or cleansing: he offers to shed blood in the queen’s service to wipe away his political disgrace. Lucrece, who has been raped, imagines her death removing the slander attached to her. The circumstances differ, but both passages turn shed blood into a means of restoring a damaged name.

Wisdom and constancy

Reporting his first audience with Henri IV, Neville told Cecil on 15 May 1599 how he had praised the king’s resolve in religious policy:

I commended his wisdom and constancy therein, as the only assured means of true peace and prosperity to his kingdom.

Lafew uses the same paired virtues in his admiring account of Helen:

[…]
With one that in her sex, her years, profession,
Wisdom, and constancy hath amazed me more
Than I dare blame my weakness. […]

— All’s Well That Ends Well, 2.1, Lafew.

The same virtues carry the praise in both passages: Neville commends a king’s political judgment and persistence; Lafew finds wisdom and constancy remarkable in a young woman whose abilities have been underestimated.³²

Hollow friendship

Neville distrusted the durability of French friendship as Henri IV drew closer to Rome. On 14 May 1600 he wrote to Cecil:

For the friendship is very hollow, and will grow every day more unsound, as his combination with Rome groweth more strait […]

Edward IV likewise prefers open enemies to unreliable allies:

I rather wish you foes than hollow friends.
But if you mind to hold your true obedience,
Give me assurance with some friendly vow,
That I may never have you in suspect.

— 3 Henry VI, 4.1, Edward IV.

Both passages distrust professed friendship in a political relationship. Neville’s further opposition between hollow and sound also appears in the Duke’s examination of penitence in Measure for Measure, 2.3.³³

Arms wiping away dishonour

Savile’s translation of Tacitus gives a martial form of the blot-removal image. In Histories 3.24, Antonius urges the Pannonian legions to recover their honour, asking:

for what purpose they had now resumed arms? if to wipe away the blot of their late ignominy, here was the field where they might reintegrate themselves in their honour again

Whitmore makes the same connection between a weapon, dishonour and a blot:

Never yet did base dishonor blur our name
But with our sword we wiped away the blot.

— 2 Henry VI, 4.1, Whitmore.

Armed action wipes away a blot of dishonour and restores a damaged name. Savile’s translation and Whitmore’s speech share that complete proposition, making the comparison particularly pertinent beside Neville’s offer to remove his own disgrace through military service.³⁴

Guazzo and Ulysses’ book

The Billingbear catalogue records another Italian book: Stefano Guazzo’s La civil conversatione, Venice, 1579. Guazzo explains that people learn their own faults and qualities through the responses of others. George Pettie’s English translation puts it sharply:

the judgment which we have to know ourselves, is not ours, but we borrow it of others.³⁵

In Troilus and Cressida 3.3, Ulysses is reading when Achilles asks about his book. Their discussion turns on the same problem: a person cannot see his own qualities without their reflection in other people. Ulysses explains the author’s argument:

ULYSSES
I do not strain at the position–
It is familiar–but at the author’s drift,
Who in his circumstance expressly proves
That no man is the lord of anything–
Though in and of him there be much consisting–
Till he communicate his parts to others;
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught
Till he behold them formed in the applause
Where they’re extended; who, like an arch, reverb’rate
The voice again or, like a gate of steel
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
His figure and his heat. […]³⁶

In his 2018 article “The Conversational Turn in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare scholar John Gillies makes this comparison and asks whether Ulysses’ unnamed book might be Guazzo.³⁷

Lesser merit makes generosity greater

Asking Salisbury for help on 14 January 1609, Neville described the financial losses of his French embassy and the needs of his growing family. He ended by turning his own limited claim to reward into an argument for his patron’s generosity:

And the lesse my precedent merit hath bin, the more free and the more noble will your favour be, and bind the more heereafter.

In Hamlet 2.2, Polonius promises to treat the visiting actors according to their deserts. Hamlet insists that they should be treated better:

[…] The less they deserve, the more merit is in
your bounty. […]

— Hamlet, 2.2, Hamlet.³⁸

Both reverse the usual logic of reward: the recipient’s lesser merit increases the value of the giver’s generosity. Neville adds the obligation it creates—the favour will bind him more closely to Salisbury.

The king’s healing hand

In Macbeth, Edward the Confessor’s touch heals the sick. The rightful king’s body restores other bodies.

Neville had reported royal healing during his French embassy. Writing to Cecil on 13 July 1599, he noted:

Upon Sunday last the king healed a great many, both of Spaniards and others.³⁹

The king Neville describes is Henri IV of France.

In Macbeth, Malcolm reports the English king’s cures:

MALCOLM
[…]
The mere despair of surgery, he cures,
Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,
Put on with holy prayers; and, ’tis spoken,
To the succeeding royalty he leaves
The healing benediction. […]

— Macbeth, 4.3.⁴⁰

The practice rested on a belief that a monarch’s touch could cure the disease called the king’s evil, commonly identified as scrofula. Holinshed explicitly credits Edward with healing and prophecy and says that he left the healing virtue as an inheritance to his successors. Shakespeare had that material in his historical source.⁴¹

Wax figures and the Windsor accusations

The Windsor witchcraft accusations of 1579 brought wax images into the official responsibilities of Neville’s father, Sir Henry Neville. The printed account attributed to Elizabeth Stile a confession involving four figures of red wax pierced with hawthorn prickles. On 16 January 1579 the Privy Council instructed the elder Neville and the Dean of Windsor to investigate allegations that people had been killed through wax images. Similar devices had recently been suspected against Elizabeth I, giving the inquiry a political urgency. These were accusations the authorities investigated, not established accounts of supernatural harm.⁴²

Two Shakespeare passages turn the destruction of a wax figure into an image of human change. Proteus describes his fading love for Julia:

PROTEUS
[…]
That I did love, for now my love is thawed,
Which like a waxen image ’gainst a fire
Bears no impression of the thing it was.

— The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.4.

In King John, the wounded Melun uses the same image to explain that he is dying and therefore has no reason to deceive his hearers:

MELUN
Have I not hideous death within my view,
Retaining but a quantity of life,
Which bleeds away even as a form of wax
Resolveth from his figure ’gainst the fire?

— King John, 5.4.

The second comparison is especially close to the premise of image magic: the destruction of a figure corresponds to a person’s bodily decline and death. The Windsor pamphlet describes piercing figures, whereas both plays describe melting them. Neither scene stages a magical ritual; the interest is the imagery of wax figures in plays beside an investigation involving Neville’s father.⁴³

A related image appears in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Theseus tells Hermia that her father possesses authority over the daughter he has fashioned:

THESEUS
[…]
To whom you are but as a form in wax
By him imprinted, and within his power
To leave the figure or disfigure it.

— A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.

Here the wax figure expresses parental power to preserve or destroy a form, rather than a magical attack.⁴⁴