The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (27 page)

20

Dark ladies

‘
I
n the old age black was not counted fair...’There is another Shakespearean exotic we have not yet considered: the ‘Dark Lady’ of the Sonnets.
²²
Whether or not she is based on a real woman, with whom Shakespeare had a real and guilt-ridden affair, she is certainly a character in a kind of drama, and she is given identifying physical features. Her eyes are ‘raven black’, her breasts are ‘dun’, her hair resembles ‘black wires’. She is a ‘woman coloured ill’. The invited visualization is of a foreign-looking woman, perhaps Mediterranean. The wiry hair could suggest a black woman, though ‘dun’ to describe her skin-tone suggests a brown or olive complexion. That Shakespeare talks of her as ‘black’ does not mean she was a negress, but gives her that frisson of dangerous otherness which the African ‘blackamoor’ represented in English minds.

The ‘Dark Lady’ is an accurate enough summary of her, though ‘lady’ begs some unintended questions about her social rank. It is, anyway, our name for her, not Shakespeare’s. Neither word occurs in the twenty-eight sonnets about her, in which she is either addressed as ‘thou’ or referred to as ‘my mistress’ or ‘my love’.

Shakespeare is again playing with stereotypes - the mistress of these poems is explicitly dark in apposition to ‘fair’ (and thus to the ‘Fair Youth’ to whom the majority of the Sonnets are addressed), and the speaker’s intense sexual attraction towards her upends familiar sonneteering tropes of beauty. The opening lines of Sonnet 130 -

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red,
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun . . .

- are specific bouleversements of well-known bits of amorous poetry. Sir Philip Sidney’s Stella has ‘eyes like morning sun on snow’, and Shakespeare’s own Lucrece has ‘coral lips’ and a ‘snow-white dimpled chin’, and his Venus a ‘sweet coral mouth’.
²³
Thus the sonnet echoes canonical images from the early 1590s, including his own, in order to reverse them. Despite this woman’s failure on all the cliche’d romantic criteria she is irresistibly attractive to him - ‘And yet by heaven I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.’

The date of the ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets is uncertain, but at least two of them (138 and 144) had been written by 1599, when they appeared unauthorized in Jaggard’s piratical collection,
The Passionate Pilgrim
. Two other sonnets in that volume were lifted bodily from the text of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
,
²⁴
and it is perhaps no coincidence that this play also features an amorous dark lady, Rosaline, one of the French gentlewomen attending the Princess. Berowne falls for her hopelessly, despite his vow of abstinence. He describes her, with attempted nonchalance, as:

A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes,
Ay and by heaven one that will do the deed
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard. (3.1.191-4)

Her darkness is of colouring rather than complexion, which is ‘whitely’, in other words pale or sallow (see
OED
and Cotgrave, s.v.
blanchastre
). Her eyebrows and eyes are intensely black, compared to velvet and pitch, and like the ‘Dark Lady’ she has an air of sensuousness, of sexual appetite - ‘one that will do the deed’.

Also like the ‘Dark Lady’, Rosaline’s darkness is praised for its natural, as distinct from cosmetic, beauty:

O if in black my lady’s brows be deck’d,
It mourns that painting and usurping hair
Should ravish doters with a false aspect;
And therefore is she born to make black fair.
Her favour turns the fashions of the days . . . (4.3.253-7)

This argument is very close to Sonnet 127: ‘In the old age black was not counted fair . . . / But now is black beauty’s successive heir.’

An extended bout of compliment and insult follows, in which Rosaline is disparaged by Berowne’s friends as ‘black as ebony’, and is compared to ‘chimney-sweepers’ and ‘colliers’, and even to ‘Ethiops’ - thanks to her, says the King, ‘Ethiops of their sweet complexion crack [boast].’ This is comic hyperbole, but as in the ‘Dark Lady’ sequence there is a metaphorical linking between a dark-complexioned woman and that figure of alien danger, the blackamoor. Interestingly, the Frenchman Dr Caius is also humorously called an ‘Ethiopian’, which strengthens Shakespeare’s playful association between French darkness and African blackness. Perhaps the actor playing Dr Caius wore a noticeably black wig and beard.

In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, which also belongs to the mid-1590s (and perhaps specifically to the wedding of Elizabeth Carey to Sir Thomas Berkeley), the contrast between two girls, one tall and fair (Helena) and one small and dark (Hermia), again links to the Sonnets. Hermia is called a ‘tawny Tartar’, a ‘raven’, and (again) an ‘Ethiop’. Each girl gets her man, but not before a mix-up with love-potions causes midsummer mayhem. As in
Love’s Labours
there is bantering debate on the relative merits of brunettes and blondes. To Duke Theseus it seems a kind of madness - the madness of infatuation - to prefer the dark lady:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains . . .
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold -
That is the madman. The lover all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt . . . (5.1.4-11)

The last line offers a double opposition - between fair Helena and gipsy-like Hermia (‘gipsy’ = Egyptian), and between Helen of Troy and Cleopatra.

These genial comedies of the 1590s discuss the delights of sultry black-browed women, and their exciting difference from conventional ideals of fairness - ideas explored more sourly and obsessively in the ‘Dark Lady’ sequence. Is this a genuine predilection of Shakespeare’s? The ‘I’ of the Sonnets is not exactly William Shakespeare, and the poems are not just a protracted emotional diary, but to divest them of all personal meaning makes them a bloodless set of literary variations, which they are palpably not.
²⁵
Then there is Cleopatra herself, the embodiment of sultriness, described as ‘tawny’ and ‘gipsy’ and ‘riggish’ (highly sexed) in the late tragedy
Antony and Cleopatra
(
c
. 1607-8) - now an ageing ‘Dark Lady’, but still full of erotic ‘witchcraft’. And it seems that, in the author’s imagination, the impeccably English Alice Ford in the
Merry Wives
is also dark-haired, for Falstaff woos her somewhat indelicately as ‘my white doe with the black scut’. The scut is the hindquarters of a female deer, and here stands for the triangle of pubic hair.

We seem to find that Shakespeare was sexually drawn to dark, foreign-looking women, and one could say that the idea of foreignness was sparky and exciting to him in other ways.

There is a question in the quiz-game Trivial Pursuit: ‘What is the most common name in the plays of Shakespeare?’ The answer is Antonio, which occurs seven times. It is a curious fact about the greatest playwright of Elizabethan and Jacobean England that not a single one of his thirty-seven canonical plays is set in Elizabethan or Jacobean England. There are plays set in ancient Britain (
Lear
,
Cymbeline
), and the histories are perforce set in medieval and early Tudor England, though they come no nearer in time than the birth of the future Queen Elizabeth, which occurred in 1533, a generation before Shakespeare’s birth.
²⁶
Otherwise they are set abroad, or as the Elizabethans would say, ‘beyond sea’. They are set in Verona (twice), Venice (twice) and Sicily (twice), in Athens and Vienna, in Navarre and Roussillon, in Illyria, Bohemia and Denmark.
As You Like It
is partly set in the Forest of Arden, which is a real English location - the family of Shakespeare’s mother, Mary
ne’e
Arden, was from there - but this ‘Arden’ is textually the Ardennes, for the play (following its chief source, Thomas Lodge’s
Rosalynde
) is nominally set in northern France, and has minor characters called Le Beau and Amiens, and the melancholy Jaques, whom the metre demands that we pronounce bisyllabically (‘Jay-quis’ or possibly ‘Jah-quis’) but who is really no more than a Jacques.

In another sense, of course,
all
these plays are set in contemporary England. The characters speak Elizabethan English, display a spectrum of contemporary attitudes and foibles, wear contemporary English costume, and are as likely to have English names as foreign ones. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not really Danish, and Sir Toby Belch not a jot Illyrian (i.e. Croatian).

In Shakespeare, and particularly in Shakespearean comedy, real English life as it was experienced by his audience was shown to them through a prism of foreignness, by which process it was subtly distorted and magnified. In this sense the foreign - the ‘strange’ - is an imaginative key for Shakespeare: it opens up fresher and freer ways of seeing the people and things which daily reality dulled with familiarity. It is his way into the dream world of comedy. He did not, as far as we know, ever leave the shores of England. Attempts to argue that his Italian settings were the product of first-hand knowledge founder precisely on the vagueness and carelessness of those settings. He travels in imagination. ‘Verona’ is not a place but a magical name, an ‘Open Sesame’ to a liberating idea of difference. In Shakespeare’s mind, one might say, a foreign country was a kind of working synonym for the theatre itself - a place of tonic exaggerations and transformations; a place where you walk in through a door in Southwark and find yourself beached up on the shores of Illyria.

In the great melting-pot of London Shakespeare could hear half the languages of Europe in half an hour’s stroll through the dockyards. But to breathe this tonic air of difference, what better ploy than to live in a house full of foreigners? Their voices float up into the thin-walled room, adding a touch of strangeness to the familiar sounds of the street. ‘Then begins a journey in my head . . .’

PART SIX

Sex & the City

Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall . . .

Measure for Measure
, 2.1.38

21

Enter George Wilkins

A
mong the witnesses called on behalf of Stephen Belott in the early summer of 1612 was George Wilkins, ‘victualler’, of the parish of St Sepulchre. He gives his age as thirty-six; he says he has known the plaintiff and the defendant, Belott and Mountjoy, ‘about seaven yeares’ - that is, since
c
. 1605. His appearance is brief: he has no knowledge of the events leading up to the wedding, and is not questioned on those points. The purpose of his testimony, it seems, is to confirm the poor quality of those items of ‘houshould stuffe’ which Mountjoy had given the newly-weds. This Wilkins duly does. ‘This deponent sayth’ - writes the clerk -

that after the plaintiff was married wth Marye the defendant’s daughter he and his wyffe came to dwell in this deponents house in one of his chambers. And brought wth them a fewe goodes or houshould stuffe whch by report the defendant her father gave them, for which this deponent would not have geven above ffyve poundes yf he had bene to have bought the same.

This opens up another episode in the story. After their marriage Stephen and Mary left the house on Silver Street, and lived in a ‘chamber’ at the house of George Wilkins. Wilkins dates this to 1605, and we find this corroborated by Christopher Mountjoy in his original answer to Belott’s bill of complaint, where he notes that after their marriage ‘the Complainant and his wife had stayed in the house of this defendant the space of halfe a yeare or thereabouts’, and then ‘did depart’. Relations had deteriorated to the point where Belott ‘refused to stay there any longer, and would need take other courses for his better preferment, as he then pretended’. They remained away for a year or so: ‘After the Complainant was gone from the house of this defendant about a yeare, this defendaunts wife dyed, and then the Complainant and his wife came again and lived with this Defendant as partners in their said trade of Tyeringe.’

From these corroborating statements we infer that Stephen and Mary were absent from Silver Street between the summer of 1605 (‘half a year’ after the wedding) and the autumn of 1606 (death of Marie Mountjoy), and that for at least part of that time, and perhaps for all of it, they were living in the house of George Wilkins. This may be an act of hospitable friendship on Wilkins’s part, but I doubt it. As the word ‘victualler’ implies, and as other evidence confirms, Wilkins kept a tavern. He is known to have had an establishment on Cow Cross Street, on the edge of the notorious brothel quarter of Clerkenwell, but the earliest record of this is in 1610. Other evidence shows that prior to this Wilkins was living in the parish of St Giles, Cripplegate. It was probably there that the Belotts moved, in 1605, into a rented chamber in what may well have been some kind of lodging-house. It was a convenient location - close enough to the Mountjoys, and even closer to Belott’s family, his stepfather Humphrey Fludd (and other Fludds) being resident in St Giles parish.
¹

This addition to the Belott-Mountjoy story comes freighted with curious significance. As we know, the ‘victualler’ George Wilkins was also a writer. He was, or became, a literary associate of Shakespeare - for a while a collaborator with Shakespeare - and so his brief appearance at the Court of Requests opens up something rather rare: a specific biographical context for a Shakespeare play.