PAINTING TWO
THE BORE of the MATTER
The bore of the matter, Oil on linen, 30 x 40 x 7/8 in (76.20 x 101.60 x 2.222 cm), Click on image for lightbox view.
The read-through of a play usually occurs on the first day of rehearsal. It’s an opportunity for the cast and creative staff to hear the play read out loud and to get an initial impression of how each of the actors might embody their roles.
This painting is an allusion to two different scenes from Hamlet that involve letters - Act III Scene I and Act IV, Scene VI. Around the table are arranged the actors playing the characters from these scenes. From left to right Polonius (also double cast as the gravedigger), Gertrude, Claudius, Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
In the first of these two scenes, Claudius requests that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spy on Hamlet and report back to him, as they make their way to England. There Claudius has secretly planned to have his step-son / nephew killed by the English King, based on his request in a letter the two are carrying. In the second scene alluded to, Horatio is given a letter by sailors informing him that Hamlet’s ship had been boarded by pirates; a direct correlation to an instance in de Vere’s life in which he was taken hostage by Dutch pirates on his return sail to England from his trip to the continent. Thus this painting is a conflation of the initial betrayal of Hamlet and of the manifestations arising from it.
In the foreground, the viewer sees the arm of the director making notes in his script. On those pages we see the dialogue between Horatio and the sailor leading into Hamlet’s letter. In the margins and on the scenic floorplan at the bottom are notes on blocking, accompanied by many small illustrative marks. These marks are taken directly from Edward de Vere’s Geneva bible, which is now housed in the Folger Library. In the margins of which, de Vere scribbled small hands (called manicules), flowers and other symbols, as well as underlining hundreds of verses, many of which serve as allusive literary inspirations for passages in the Shakespeare canon.
In order to show that theatre production is a cumulative process of conception, design, rehearsal and making, symbolic elements are repeated from the first painting: the cup and saucer, the copy of Hamlet, and the scenic model in the background. This device of repeating elements from one painting to a subsequent one continues throughout. In this painting too, all of the items on the table cast two shadows (from the dispersed overhead light), much as Oxford casts two shadows as outward Earl and concealed author.
On the yellow post it pad, the viewer sees Mente Videbor(i)- latin for by the mind I shall be seen, a coded message about de Vere from the cover page of Henry Peacham’s Minerva Brittana (a wonderful book full of enigmatic riddles, coded images and poetry). Below it, Stockpile Her Arts, an anagram of my own name, is also a clue as to what Oxford had been likely been paid by the Queen to do, and why many of the plays were not seen outside of court performances, until the First Folio. The Post-its sticking out of the script all contain numerical references to Oxford’s codenames.
Central motif from title page of Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna
Oxford related easter eggs in this painting include Moxie, Hydrox cookies. The apples signify the fruits of de Vere’s literary work, and it’s connection to Elizabeth (her’s being Tudor rose red, his being green (or vert) . The 17th costume sketch contains the sentries with spears - an allusion to the numerically coded method Elizabethan writers used to say Shakespeare when they meant de Vere; Shakespeare was often placed seventeenth in lists of multiple writers; a device occurring in myriad contemporaneous texts by different authors.
Costume Sketches by character:
Top row: Hamlet, Ghost of Hamlet’s father, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, Horatio; Middle Row: First Player, Second Player, Player King, Player Queen, Lucianus, Reynaldo, Voltimand, Gravediggers Bottom row: Marcellus, Bernardo etc, Fortinbras, Fortinbras Captain, Cornelius. Priest, Sailor, Torchbearer