The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (20 page)

In the case of Marie Mountjoy, sadly, there is not much later story to tell. She died in the autumn of 1606: her burial took place at St Olave’s on 30 October (see Plate 34). We know nothing of the cause or circumstances, or indeed of Shakespeare’s reaction. If the age she volunteered to Dr Forman is broadly correct she was about forty when she died.

The behaviour of her husband in the years following her death does not make very edifying reading. His intransigence on the matter of Mary’s dowry we know from the lawsuit, but other evidence points up what seems a total breakdown of relations with his daughter.

First there is the matter of Mountjoy’s ‘denization’ or naturalization. By becoming a denizen the immigrant acquired certain rights - in particular, he could buy and bequeath freehold property - but he did not attain full parity with native citizens, and he continued to be taxed at the alien’s double rate. Two routes were available, both of them expensive: one could acquire a Patent of Denization, or one could get Parliament to grant an Act of Naturalization. Most foreigners did not bother with either. In the whole of Elizabeth’s reign there were 1,762 patents issued, but most of those were in the early years: between 1580 and her death in 1603 there were just 293 patents, an average of about a dozen a year. Under James the numbers rose, most of the applicants being Scotsmen.

‘Christofer Monioy’ received his Letter of Denization on 27 May 1607. He is described in the patent roll as ‘a subject of the French king and born in the town of Cressey’. He is one of thirty-one denizens created in that regnal year; also listed is another man with a connection to Shakespeare - ‘Martin Droeshout, painter, born in Brabant’, of whom more later.
⁷⁴

Mountjoy had by now been in England for at least twenty-five years, and one wonders what motivated him to apply for denizenship at this point. The cynical but plausible answer would connect it with the death of Marie. In late 1606 Mountjoy becomes a widower, which also means he becomes marriageable again. A few months later he acquires the rights of denizenship, including the right to buy property, thus increasing his eligibility in the marriage-market. This is in itself no more than pragmatic, but there is a further implication concerning inheritance. The denizen could bequeath any real estate he had bought, but with one broad qualification - only children born to him
after
he became a denizen were eligible to inherit. One of the implications of his denization, therefore, is a desire to disinherit his daughter Mary.

In fact it was another eight years before Mountjoy remarried. In the interim, as we learn from the scandalized comments in the ledgers of the French Church, he lived in sin with his maidservant. Mountjoy’s second wife was one Isabel Dest. They were married on 21 August 1615, at another St Olave’s, the one on Hart Street, possibly Isabel’s parish.
⁷⁵
She sounds French (probably Isabelle d’Est) but I have not found her family. A connection with the famous Italian dynasty, the d’Este of Ferrara, is extremely unlikely. It may be further to his marriage that Mountjoy left Silver Street, for when he came to draw up his will he was living outside the walls, in the neighbouring parish of St Giles, Cripplegate.

Mountjoy’s will, dated 26 January 1620, survives in a contemporary register-copy; it is published here for the first time (see Plate 35). It names Isabel as his sole executrix. It makes no mention of freehold property, only his ‘goods and chattels’, which are unfortunately not further specified. It contains this extraordinary bequest:

Three third parts of my goods and chattels (the whole being divided into four third parts) I give and bequeath unto my well-beloved wife Isabel. And one other third part of the said four third parts I do hereby give and bequeath unto my daughter Mary Blott the wife of Stephen Blott.
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It appears that this surreal arithmetic, in which his estate is divided into four ‘thirds’, is designed once more to diminish the inheritance of his daughter and son-in-law. To avoid interminable contestings, the City of London customs (which charged duty on inheritances) directed that a testator should allot at least a third of his estate to his widow, and a third to his surviving children, leaving the last third to be disposed of elsewhere if he wished. Faced with the prospect of the detested son-in-law getting a third of his goods and chattels, Mountjoy and his solicitors hit on this brilliant or half-mad solution of making the thirds smaller than they should be, for the only proper definition of Mountjoy’s ‘thirds’, since there are four of them, is that they are quarters. A quarter by any other name doth weigh the same, and these last recorded words of Christopher Mountjoy are a further attempt to defraud his own daughter. Fifteen years after the wedding, seven years after the lawsuit, he cannot climb down. It is as he had said, in the hearing of the mercer Christopher Weaver: ‘he would rather rott in prison than geve them any thinge more than he had geven them before’.

These later documents confirm what both the plaintiff and the witnesses keep telling us in the lawsuit of 1612 - that Christopher Mountjoy could have paid up the dowry, and the reason that he did not was that he was a hard, mean, stubborn man: what Thomas Nashe calls a ‘pinchfart penny-father’. It may be there was some specific falling-out which caused him to withhold the money in the first place, but to continue to withhold it so long and so doggedly makes him seem flint-hearted: a man incapable of giving; an uncaring father whose feelings for his daughter were subordinate to his own material comforts.

We learn a little more about Christopher Mountjoy, and none of it encourages us to like him. We might sympathize with the upheavals he has been through, we might admire him as an immigrant ‘success story’, we might furnish him with several layers of Gallic charm to which the record gives no clue - but as it stands we just cannot like him. This matters little to us, and even less to him - its more interesting corollary is to wonder how much Shakespeare liked him. But Shakespeare’s dealings would mostly have been with his landlady. It is she, typically, who oversees the circumstances and the day-to-day requirements of the lodger; and it is she, in this particular case, who is more probably the one that Shakespeare liked.

PART FOUR

Tiremaking

Any silk, any thread,
Any toys for your head . . .
The Winter’s Tale
, 4.4.319-20

14

Tires and wigs

W
e have learned something of the Mountjoys’ story - such traces as remain - but what of the ‘trade of Tyermakeinge’ which was their livelihood? In the Belott-Mountjoy papers he is ‘Christopher Mountjoy of London, tiremaker’; in the Queen’s accounts she is ‘Marie Mountjoy, tyrewoman’. This is their professional identity, almost as primary to them as their national identity - in contemporary eyes, the two go naturally together: they are French and they are in the fashion business.

Head-tires came in many shapes and sizes. The word ‘tire’ - then also written ‘tyre’, ‘tier’ and ‘tyer’ - is simply an abbreviated form of ‘attire’, and is similarly generic. Any adornment for the head that was not an actual hat or hood could be called a tire. It was a dressing for the hair, and in the original sense of the word Marie Mountjoy was a hairdresser. (‘Tires’ in the plural was also used in the broader sense of attire - garments, costumes, etc - which is why the dressing room of an Elizabethan theatre was called the ‘tiring-house’ and the man in charge of it the ‘tireman’.
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It is usually clear which sense is meant, but there are occasional ambiguities, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 53, where ‘You in Grecian tires are painted new’ could refer to either robes or headgear.)

By the late sixteenth century, a particular style of head-tiring had evolved. It was a French import, associated with the glittery
cours de ballet
of the Valois court (see Plate 20): the Mountjoys were marketing a continental ‘look’ as much as a product.
²
The full-blown tire was an assemblage rising up some inches above the head, based on a framework of silver or gilt wire, embroidered with silk and lace and gauze and gold thread, decorated with pearls, gems and spangles, and often topped off with a feather or two. ‘Tire’ has no etymological link with ‘tiara’, though these creations could be described as complicated tiaras. It was a sumptuous and expensive item, worn by queens, noblewomen and female courtiers, and thence by imitation percolating down the social scale - as complained of by two fretful ladies of fashion onstage in 1600:

PHILAUTIA: What? Ha’ you chang’d your head-tire?

PHANTASTE: Yes faith; th’other was so near the common, it had no extraordinary grace . . . I cannot abide anything that savours [of] the poor over-worn cut . . .

PHILAUTIA: And yet we cannot have a new peculiar court-tire, but these retainers will have it, these suburb Sunday-waiters, these courtiers for high days, I know not what I should call ’em -

PHANTASTE : O aye, they do most pitifully imitate.
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In texts of the day we hear of a ‘tyre of gold adorned with gemmes and owches’ (an ‘ouch’ is a gold or silver setting for a precious stone); of a ‘tyer of netting’; of an ‘attyre . . . in form of two little ships made of emeralds, with all the shrouds and tackling of clear saphyres’; of a ‘mourning tire such as gentlewomen wear at the time of funerals’; of toweringly tall ‘Turkish tires’; and, humorously, of a ‘tire [of] four squirrels’ tails tied in a true-love knot’.
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The Mountjoys did not necessarily supply the gemstones that adorned the tire: these would typically be part of the wearer’s own collection. When Christopher describes himself as a tiremaker he probably means he is a manufacturer of the basic unit - the delicately wrought framework into which various adornments could be fitted - though he no doubt put together complete, ready-to-wear tires as well.

The writer George Chapman laments the fate of a fashionable woman’s hair - ‘tortured with curling bodkins, tied up each night in knots, wearied with tires’.
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This reminds us that the more elaborate tires must have been heavy to wear - or, by analogy, that part of the tiremaker’s skill was to get volume without weight: an art of finesse, of
leggiadr’a
; a visual confection.

As noted, ‘tiremaker’ serves also to mean a wigmaker. They were not called wigmakers because the word ‘wig’ did not yet exist - ‘periwig’ (from which it comes) was still in a malleable state, and is found as ‘perwycke’, ‘perewincle’ and ‘periwinke’. The fashion for wigs was associated with the French immigration: ‘Perwigs . . . were first devized and used in Italy by courtezans, and from thence brought into France, and there received of the best sort for gallant ornaments, and from thence they came into England about the time of the Massacre of Paris.’
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False hair - human at best, also horse-hair and hemp - was used in the tire itself. It provided a bedding for the tire to sit on, and matched for colour it created an illusion that the whole edifice was an extension of the wearer’s own hair. This bed of hair might be a ‘hair-caul’, which fitted close over the head, or a more substantial bouffon.
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A periwig or peruke - a full wig completely covering the head - is not the same as a tire, but if an Elizabethan wished to purchase one, she or he might well go to the tiremaker. I have suggested that Dr Forman’s note about ‘Madam Kitson’ proposes such a journey to Mrs Mountjoy’s shop in St Olave’s.

Possibly this wigmaking side of their business is referred to in a joke of Ben Jonson’s. In
Epicoene
(1609) the elderly and vain Mistress Otter is described as an assemblage of artificial parts: ‘All her teeth were made in the Blackfriars, both her eyebrows i’ th’ Strand, and her hair in Silver Street - every part of the town owns a piece of her!’ (4.2.81-3). These places are named for punning purposes - her teeth are black, her eyebrows strands, her periwig silver - but there is surely a glance at the actual wigmaker of Silver Street, Christopher Mountjoy, whom Jonson undoubtedly knew through their mutual friend Shakespeare. Being mentioned - or even half mentioned - in a Jonson comedy cannot have been bad for business, though as Mrs Otter is earlier described as wearing ‘a peruke that’s like a pound of hemp made up in shoe-threads’, the publicity is not all good.

No tires or wigs survive from the period of the Mountjoys’ production.
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The chief culprit is physical decomposition. Anything in contact with the head comes also into contact with human hair-oil, and material impregnated with bodily secretions is particularly attractive to moth, beetle and micro-organisms. Wigs made of human hair or horse-hair are anyway vulnerable because of natural oils in them. Over time these oils also cause an unpleasant brownish staining. For these reasons the principle of benign neglect - clothes put away in a chest in the attic and forgotten, which has resulted in some historic survivals - is less likely to happen with headwear and underwear. Another reason for the non-survival of tires is that anything embellished with costly materials was likely to be destroyed and recycled.

We cannot see an Elizabethan or Jacobean head-tire in the flesh, but we can see them in many paintings. Almost all the ceremonial portraits of Queen Elizabeth show her head lavishly attired. In the famous ‘Ermine’ portrait at Hatfield House (1585) she wears a tire of large pearls and coloured gems arranged in sprigs; one can see the wire framework and the padded hairpiece on which it sits. The ‘Ditchley’ portrait (1592) features a mighty Wurlitzer of pearls and diamonds several inches high.
⁹
The provenance of these tires is unclear - perhaps they were gifts. There is no mention of ‘tiremakers’ in the accounts and inventories of the Queen’s wardrobe so meticulously analysed by the late Janet Arnold. The dressing of the royal head was one of the tasks of the Gentlewomen of the Bedchamber, better known as the ‘Maids of Honour’ - an account-entry shows Blanche Parry, the overseer of the Maids, receiving ‘satten of sundrye colours to be used about the attyre of our hedde’. Also involved in her headwear were the Queen’s ‘silkmen’ and ‘silkwomen’, of whom the most frequently mentioned are Roger Mountague and Dorothy Speckard. In 1586 Mountague was paid for ‘translating [altering] & mending of an attyer for the hed of white nettworke florished with Venice silver’ and for ‘silver lase to edge the same rounde aboute’.
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