The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (2 page)

18. Marie Mountjoy and ‘Madam Kitson’ in Forman’s casebook,
c
. January 1598 (Bodleian, Ashmole MS 226, fol. 310V). Copyright © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

19. A woman visiting an astrologer. Seventeenth-century woodcut reproduced in
The Roxburghe Ballads
, ed. William Chappell and J. W. Ebsworth (The Ballad Society, 1871-91).

20. An unknown woman in a ballet costume,
c
. 1580, French school (Chaˆteaux de Versailles et de Trianon). Copyright © Photo RMN-Franck Raux.

21. A lady (perhaps Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford) costumed as a ‘Power of Juno’, attributed to John de Critz the elder,
c
. 1606. Woburn Abbey. By kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Bedford and the Trustees of the Bedford Estates.

22. A scene from
Titus Andronicus
by Henry Peacham,
c
. 1594. Longleat House, Warminster, Wilts (Portland Papers 1, fol. 159V). By kind permission of the Marquess of Bath.

23. Extract from Queen Anne’s household accounts, 1604-5 (PRO SC 6/JAS1/1646, fol. 29r). Copyright © The National Archives.

24. Detail from a portrait of Queen Anne by Marcus Gheeraerts the younger,
c
. 1605-10. Woburn Abbey. By kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Bedford and the Trustees of the Bedford Estates.

25. Signature of George Wilkins, 19 June 1612 (PRO REQ 4/1/4). Copyright © The National Archives.

26. Title-page of George Wilkins,
Miseries of Inforst Mariage
, 1607.

27. Customers eating in a brothel. Seventeenth-century woodcut reproduced in
The Roxburghe Ballads
, ed. William Chappell and J. W. Ebsworth (The Ballad Society, 1871-91).

28. Frontispiece to Nicholas Goodman,
Holland’s Leaguer
, 1632.

29. Detail from an allegorical scene showing Virtue confronting Vice by Isaac Oliver,
c
. 1590-95. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

30. A wherry on the Thames near London Bridge, from the ‘Album Amicorum’ of Michael van Meer, 1614. Edinburgh University Library (Laing MS III 283, fol. 408v).

31. The Three Pigeons, Brentford. Detail from
A View of the Old Market House
, engraving by G. F. Bragg, 1849. Photo: Chiswick Public Library, Hounslow Local Studies Centre.

32. A handfasting. Detail from
Supper with Betrothal
by Gerrit van Honthorst,
c
. 1625. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala, Florence.

33. Wedding of Stephen Belott and Mary Mountjoy. Marriage register of St Olave’s, Silver Street, 19 November 1604. Guildhall Library (MS 6534, fol. 7v). Copyright © Guildhall Library, London.

34. Burial of Marie Mountjoy. Burial register of St Olave’s, Silver Street, 30 October 1606. Guildhall Library (MS 6534, fol. 110). Copyright © Guildhall Library, London.

35. Will of Christopher Mountjoy, 26 January 1620. Peculiar Court of the Dean & Chapter of St Paul’s,
Registrum Testamentorum 1608-33
. Guildhall Library (MS 25626/4, fol. 179). Copyright © Guildhall Library, London.

36. Burial of Christopher Mountjoy. Burial register of St Giles, Cripplegate, 29 March 1620. Guildhall Library (MS 6419/2, unfoliated). Copyright © Guildhall Library, London.

Preface

This book looks into some aspects of Shakespeare’s life in London over a couple of years in the early seventeenth century. Larger issues of interpretation belong to the book itself. I will confine this preface to a few procedural points and some hearty thanks.

Many Jacobean documents use the ‘old style’ year, which ran from 25 March (‘Lady Day’). This is useful to know when reading them - it means that an event dated 1 January 1605 took place a month
after
an event dated 1 December 1605 - but is liable to cause confusion when quoting them. Where necessary I have amended to modern style (in the example cited I would give the first date as 1 January 1606).

On the matter of original spellings the demands of authenticity and readability pull in opposite directions. To modernize everything is to lose a certain richness - an orthographic brogue intrinsic to the period. On the other hand, quoting everything in archaic spelling can make things hard going for the reader. Inconsistency has seemed a lesser evil than either of these. I have tended to quote documents, letters, diaries and so on in original spelling, and literary texts in modern form.

Sums of money mentioned in the text cannot be correlated precisely with modern values. Based on the retail price index, it is estimated that £1 in 1604 had a purchasing power equivalent to about £144 in 2006. However, this is not always helpful as an overall conversion factor. In 1604 you could lease a large London town-house for £20 per annum, buy an unbound copy of
Hamlet
for sixpence, and drink a pint of beer for a halfpenny. A printer paid £2 (‘forty shillings and an odd pottle of wine’) for a pamphlet, and the author might get the same again for a slavish dedication to ‘my Lord What-call-ye-him’. Wages were low: a labourer might earn 5 shillings a week. There are too many anomalies to make it very meaningful, but as a rough rule of thumb I use an exchange rate of 1:200. That is, an early Jacobean pound was worth about £200 today, a shilling (1S) about £10, and a penny (1d) something under £1.

My research on this book has been greatly assisted by staff at the National Archives, British Library, Guildhall Library, London Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, French Protestant Church and Ealing Local History Centre in London, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the Bibliothèque Municipale in Amiens. I am particularly grateful to James Travers for his help in tracking down some elusive documents; to Susan North and Jenny Tiramani for advice on early Jacobean costume; and to Matt Steggle, Colin Burrow, Christiane Gould-Krieger, Elsie Hart, Kat Underwood, Thomas Dumont and the late Eric Sams for help and expertise generously given. My thanks also to my agent David Godwin, my editor Stuart Proffitt, my picture-editor Cecilia Mackay and my copy-editor Peter James, and - as ever - to my mother, my wife and my children.

For some corrections incorporated into the paperback edition I am grateful to Roger Davey, Michael Wood, Claire Preston, David Cairns, Norbert Hirschhorn and Hester Davenport.

PART ONE

‘One Mr Shakespeare’

Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live . . .
All’s Well that Ends Well,
4.3.322-3

1

The deposition

O
n Monday 11 May 1612, William Shakespeare gave evidence in a lawsuit at the Court of Requests in Westminster. His statement, or deposition, was taken down by a clerk of the court, writing in an averagely illegible hand on a sheet of paper measuring about 12 × 16 inches (see Plate 1). At the end of the session Shakespeare signed his name at the bottom. It is one of six surviving signatures, and the earliest of them (though it can hardly be called early: he was forty-eight years old and already in semi-retirement). He signs quickly and rather carelessly. The initial
W
is firm and clear, with the characteristic looping and dotting of the final upstroke, but the surname becomes a scrawl and is abruptly concluded with an omissive flourish: ‘Willm Shaks’ (or possibly ‘Shakp’).
¹
These abbreviations were not dictated by space, as they were in a mortgage-deed of 1613 (‘Wm Shakspe’), which he had to sign on a thin tag of parchment. They contribute a note of perfunctoriness, or perhaps impatience.

The signature draws the eye. It is, as the graphologists say, a ‘frozen gesture’; it touches this otherwise unlovely piece of paper with Shakespeare’s physical presence. But what makes this document special is not just - not even primarily - the signature. It is the anonymously scripted text above it, the text which the signature authenticates as Shakespeare’s sworn statement. We know the thousands of lines he wrote in plays and poems, but this is the only occasion when his actual spoken words are recorded.
²

The case in which he was testifying is listed in the court registers as Belott v Mountjoy. It was a family dispute: trivial, pecuniary, faintly sordid - standard fare at the Court of Requests, whose function was broadly equivalent to the Small Claims Courts of today. The defendant, Christopher Mountjoy, is described as a ‘tiremaker’ - a maker of the decorative headwear for ladies known generically as ‘head-tires’ or ‘attires’. The plaintiff, Stephen Belott, had once been Mountjoy’s apprentice and was now his son-in-law. Both men were French by birth but had lived for many years in London. The Mountjoys’ house was on Silver Street, in Cripplegate, close to the north-west corner of the city walls. This is the setting of the story which unfolds in the court proceedings - a story which involves William Shakespeare.

The dispute concerned a dowry: a sum of £60 which, Belott alleged, had been promised when he married Mountjoy’s daughter in 1604, and which had never been paid. (This is a good but not a huge dowry: according to the rough rule-of-thumb outlined in the Preface, it would be equivalent to about £12,000 today.) Belott also claimed that Mountjoy had promised to leave the couple a legacy of £200 when he died. Mountjoy denied both claims, and now, eight years after the event, the case was before the court.

Shakespeare was one of three witnesses called on the first day of hearings (see Plate 3). What does he have to say? Not a lot would be the short answer, though this book attempts a longer one. The ‘interrogatories’ are put to him, five in number; he answers them briefly - one cannot say curtly, because his answers are shaped to the formulae of court depositions and cannot be reconstructed as to their particular tone, but he does not elaborate much, as some of the other witnesses do, and on some points he remains a little vaguer, a little less helpful, than one feels he might have been. His statement, like the signature beneath it, is adequate and no more. He says he has known both men, the plaintiff and the defendant, ‘for the space of tenne yeres or thereaboutes’ - in other words, since about 1602. He remembers young Belott as a ‘very good and industrious servant’, one who ‘did well and honestly behave himselfe’. Yes, he was ‘a very honest fellowe’, and was accounted so by his employer. As to the particular matter in dispute, Shakespeare is sure Belott had been promised a dowry - a marriage ‘porcion’ - but he cannot remember the sum mentioned. Nor does he remember ‘what kinde of houshould stuffe’ had been given to the couple when they married.
^a

And he says - and here, amid the general blandness of his statement, there is a hint of something more - he says that he had himself been asked by the girl’s mother, Marie Mountjoy, to ‘perswade’ the apparently reluctant apprentice to go through with the marriage. In the unwieldy language of the law-courts, ‘This deponent sayethe that the said deffendantes wyeffe did sollicitt and entreat this deponent to move and perswade the said complainant to effect the said marriadge, and accordingly this deponent did move and perswade the complainant thereunto.’ This presents him as a kind of counsellor or go-between, a romantic or perhaps merely practical advocate. But another witness in the case implies that Shakespeare’s role went further than this. He says the couple was ‘made sure by Mr Shakespeare’, and speaks of them ‘giving each other’s hand to the hand’. These phrases have a precise significance. They suggest that Shakespeare formally betrothed the young couple, performing the simple lay ceremony known as a ‘troth-plighting’ or ‘handfasting’. An intriguing little scene flickers up before us.

Shakespeare does not actually say why he was involved in these family affairs
chez
Mountjoy, but the answer is not far to seek. It is provided by the Mountjoys’ former maidservant, Joan Johnson, when she refers in her deposition to ‘one Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house’. In Elizabethan and Jacobean usage to ‘lie’ in a house meant to be staying there, and in this context undoubtedly means he was the Mountjoys’ lodger. Shakespeare quibbles on this sense of the word in
Othello
-

DESDEMONA: Do you know, Sirrah, where the lieutenant Cassio lies?

clown: I dare not say he lies anywhere . . .

DESDEMONA: Go to, where lodges he? . . .

clown: I know not where he lodges, and for me to devise a lodging, and say he lies here or he lies there, were to lie in mine own throat. (3.4.1-11)

A similar pun is in Sir Henry Wotton’s famous definition of an ambassador, ‘An honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’.
³
This is one of the primary nuggets of information which the Belott-Mountjoy case offers - it gives us an address for Shakespeare in London. How long he lodged or lay in Silver Street is something to look into: he was certainly there in 1604, when the marriage in question took place.

‘One Mr Shakespeare . . .’ I think it was the marvellous banality of this phrase that first sparked my interest in the case. For a moment we see him not from the viewpoint of literary greatness, but as he was seen by the maid of the house, a woman of no literary pretensions, indeed unable to sign her name except with a rather quavery little mark. ‘Mr’ is perhaps not quite as banal as it looks, because it was at that time a contraction of ‘Master’ rather than of ‘Mister’ - it is the term of address for a gentleman, a connotation of status. But the effect is the same. We have a fleeting sense of Shakespeare’s ‘other’ life, the daily, ordinary (or ordinary-seeming) life which we know he must have led, but about which we know so little. He is merely the lodger, the gent in the upstairs chamber: a certain Mr Shakespeare.