Shakespeare's Lions of Sicily
The Sixth Earl of Derby and the Isle of Man.
Shakespeare has three characters whose names begin LEON with the next consonant T and the next consonant, if any, S. All three are highborn and associated with Sicily.
LEONATO, Governor of Messina, Much Ado About Nothing.
Posthumus LEONATUS, son of Leonatus Sicilius. Cymbeline.
LEONTES, King of Sicily, The Winter's Tale.
The soothsayer in Cymbeline emphasises the importance of names:
“Thou, Leonatus, art the lion's whelp;
The fit and apt construction of thy name,
Being Leo-natus, doth import so much.”
Leo-natus means Lion-born, Leonato would appear to mean the same thing and Leontes can be derived from Leonatus. Thus we might understand these three names as meaning ‘Lion-born’.
In the second century CE Claudius Ptolemy associated Sicily with the zodiacal sign of Leo. A symbol of Sicily is the triskelion, a three-legged figure which is also a symbol of the Isle of Man, an island situated between England and Ireland in the Irish Sea.
On 7th July 1609 William Stanley sixth Earl of Derby became Lord of Mann, a title held by his predecessors but in abeyance since 1594 following the death of his brother the fifth Earl.1 William was baptised on Sunday 20th July 1561.2 It was customary for an infant to be baptised on the Sunday after birth and if this was so he was born between the 13th and 19th July. In the unreformed calendar the Sun entered Leo ten days earlier than now, in 1561 at around midday so that he was most likely born with the Sun in Leo.
The next two plays to appear after he recovered his title in 1609 are those with LEON-T-S characters Cymbeline (1610) and The Winter's Tale (1611). The next play, The Tempest, (1611) is set on an island close to Sicily and features Ariel whose name means ‘Lion’ in Hebrew.
Until the middle of the 16th century it was customary to refer to dates by saints’ day rather than by month and day and Shakespeare seems here to have continued this tradition. 7th July, the day and month on which William Stanley recovered his title is the feast day of St Prosper of Aquitaine. 3 Prospero is a variant of Prospero and the ruler of the island in The Tempest is Prospero. There is very good reason therefore to think that these ‘Lion-born’ characters celebrate William Stanley as Lord of Mann.
In the next post I will show how Posthumous Leonatus's wife Imogen in Cymbeline represents William Stanley's wife Elizabeth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_Mann. Assurance of the Isle of Man Act 1609
https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2032636. Date of Baptism
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Prosper-of-Aquitaine.