The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (28 page)

The play is
Pericles
, probably first performed in early 1608, and published the following year. The broad consensus among literary historians is that Wilkins wrote most of the first two acts and Shakespeare almost all of the rest. (Other authors have been proposed as the collaborator - notably John Day, who himself collaborated with Wilkins on other plays - but the evidence is overwhelmingly in Wilkins’s favour.)
²
It has always been thought rather odd that a mediocre writer like Wilkins should have made such a large contribution to this late Shakespeare play - large enough for it to be excluded from the First Folio of 1623, though later instated in the more capacious Third Folio of 1664. In my view Wilkins’s best writing is better than most critics allow, but I am thinking of certain lines or images, certain intensities of atmosphere, particularly ‘low-life’ atmosphere; overall, in broader terms of character, structure, insight and so on, he is pedestrian - a voluble but unsophisticated hack.

It is also the case that Wilkins’s career as a writer was very brief. All his extant work appeared on the page or the stage within a three-year span, 1606-8, so it seems he was unpublished - a would-be writer - when the Belotts came to stay in 1605. Only three single-authored works are definitely his: an undistinguished pamphlet,
Three Miseries of Barbary
(
c
. 1606); a play which might just about be called a tragicomedy,
The Miseries of Enforced Marriage
(1607); and a novelized version of
Pericles
, published in 1608 while the play was still onstage. He may also be the ‘G.W.’ who wrote a translation from Justinian,
The Historie of Justine
(1606) - some doubt that he knew enough Latin to be the translator, but the fact that much of the volume is plagiarized from an earlier translation by Arthur Golding sounds more like him. To these can be added his collaborations - a jest-book,
Jests to Make you Merrie
(1607), written with Thomas Dekker; a picturesque play,
The Travells of the Three English Brothers
(1607), with John Day and William Rowley; and
Pericles
, with Shakespeare. He may also have contributed to John Day’s
Law Tricks
(1608).
³

The bibliographical ins and outs of the
Pericles
text have been closely studied elsewhere. My interest here is in teasing out a biographical context, a vestigial pathway that leads up to the text, so let us stick for a moment with George Wilkins the victualler or tavern-keeper, the landlord for a while of the newishly wed Stephen and Mary Belott, and perhaps through this very connection first known to Shakespeare.

In his deposition at the Court of Requests Wilkins gives his age as ‘36 years or thereabouts’, but in another deposition two years later he says he is about forty. The best we can say is that he was born in the mid-1570s, and was at least ten years Shakespeare’s junior. He could possibly be George son of Walter Wilkins, baptized at St Botolph’s without Aldgate on 2 March 1577, but a more attractive proposition is that he was the son of ‘George Wilkins the poet’, who lived on Holywell Street in Shoreditch, and who was buried at St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, on 19 August 1603. This is plausible in itself, and is made more so by the younger George’s echoing description of himself, at the baptism of his own son, as ‘George Wilkens, Poett’. There is no trace of any printed work by George Wilkins senior - was he perhaps a ‘poet’ in the oral tradition: a balladeer or tavern entertainer? No trace of him, either, in the Shoreditch subsidy rolls, so he was not apparently a householder.
⁴

In early 1602, in his mid-twenties, Wilkins married one Katherine Fowler. It is also in this year that his first tangle with the law is recorded: he was bound over to keep the peace, further to what we might call ‘threatening behaviour’ - a minor matter but prophetic of later delinquencies. His father’s death the following year may have brought him something, for by 1605 he has a house, in a chamber of which the Belotts are living. This was probably in St Giles, Cripplegate, where the parish register records the baptism of Wilkins’s daughter Mary on 13 December 1607, and her burial on 11 September 1609, and the baptism of his son Thomas on 11 February 1610. Wilkins’s briefly prolific literary career belongs to these years at St Giles. He is begetting children, and he is hectically writing.

The abrupt curtailment of his literary career - for reasons we do not know but which I will later guess at - does not remove him from view, however. Various later episodes in his life are known, though they are always a particular kind of episode, because they are recorded in the rolls and registers of the Middlesex Sessions - essentially the magistrates’ court - before which he appeared frequently, usually in the dock facing charges, and sometimes as a witness or surety for someone else facing charges.
⁵
The earliest such record is from 1610, but one should resist the tempting narrative arc which suggests that Wilkins’s criminal career begins
after
his literary career stops. For various reasons there are few detailed Sessions records prior to 1608, so there may have been earlier cases against Wilkins of which no record remains. One needs only to glance at his
Miseries of Enforced Marriage
, written in late 1605, to know that the murky milieu in which his police-record places him was one he already knew intimately.

Here is a bald summary of George Wilkins in the magistrates’ court, usually in Clerkenwell and sometimes at the Old Bailey:

4 April 1610 - Wilkins is bound over to keep the peace towards Anne Plesington, elsewhere described as a ‘noted queane’ and ‘comon harborer of lewd persons’ - in other words, a prostitute.

22 April 1610 - Wilkins puts up surety of £10 for John Fisher, ‘cordwainer’ (leather-worker), who had ‘unlawfullye begotten one Grace Saville with child’.

23 September 1610 - Wilkins [‘Wilkeson’] gives surety for Thomas Cutts, butcher, bound over for ‘woundinge one John Ball in the head with a Welshe hooke’.

3 March 1611 - Wilkins is charged with ‘abusing one Randall Berkes and kicking a woman on the belly which was then great with childe’. It is the gruesome act of violence which catches the eye, but it is also worth noting a couple of literary connections in this case. Berkes, whom Wilkins abused, was a bookseller. And one of Wilkins’s sureties for bail was ‘Henry Gosson of St Lawrence Poulteney, gent’, who was the publisher of Wilkins’s
Three Miseries of Barbary
, and more recently of the Shakespeare-Wilkins
Pericles
, issued in 1609, and now, in 1611, reprinting for a new edition.

2 September 1611 - Wilkins is bound over to answer charges of compounding a felony by ‘convayinge away of Mawline Sames who committed the fellonye’. Magdalen Sames or Samways was accused of ‘the felonious stealing of 50s from one William Usurer’. She is referred to by her maiden name though she was married to a glover named Thomas Morris. Earlier in 1611 she was in gaol for living ‘incontinently’ with another man; in later cases she is charged with being a cutpurse and a whore. In a fascinating twist we learn that she had recently borrowed money from the theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe.
⁶
Her last repayment to him was due around the time of her alleged theft from the moneylender called William.

20 September 1611 - Wilkins is bound over ‘for abusing Mr Barnes, constable of Clerkenwell, in the execution of his office’. Perhaps this is connected with the Samways affair - in the earlier charge he had ‘conveyed’ her away (helped her to escape) and now perhaps he is obstructing a policeman trying to arrest her.

26 March 1612 - Wilkins is charged with another act of violence: ‘he hath outrageously beaten one Judyth Walton & stamped upon her, so that she was caryed home in chayre’. This woman is elsewhere described as a ‘common bawd’.

2 July 1612 - Wilkins is accused of an ‘extreame outrage’ - a physical attack - on Martin Fetherbye, ‘headborough’ or constable of Charterhouse Lane. This perhaps occurred at Wilkins’s tavern, since it resulted in the loss of his licence: ‘imposterim non cusodet tabernam’ (in future he may not keep a tavern). He is ‘put downe from victualling’, though this loss of business proves temporary. One notes that his appearance at the Court of Requests on behalf of Stephen Belott (19 June 1612) comes sandwiched between these two court appearances for acts of violence.

25 August 1614 - Wilkins’s wife Katherine sues a neighbour, Joyce Patrick, for slander. Joyce had called her a ‘bawd’ and said, ‘Thy husband may goe horne by horne with his neighbours’ (meaning he was a cuckold). Among the insults Joyce hurled at her, in ‘angry and vehement manner’, was this: ‘You, Mistress Sweetmeat, you will do more with an inche of candell then some will doe with a whole pound - Wilkinses wiefe I speak to thee.’ A witness on Katherine’s behalf says she had ‘never byn reputed or accounted a bawd’, but another says their house is frequented by ‘lewd women’, and that he has sometimes spent twenty shillings in one night there.

3 December 1614 - Wilkins is again accused of abusing an officer of the law, this time John Sherley, constable of Clerkenwell.

21 December 1614 - Wilkins testifies in a Chancery suit in which a moneylender, Thomas Harris, is accused of defrauding a dissolute young heir, John Bonner, now deceased. This is not a charge against Wilkins, though he witnessed their dealings, probably at his tavern, and his collusion with the crooked Harris is not unlikely. His testimony allows us to eavesdrop for a moment. He heard Bonner accuse Harris of selling him ‘a nagge or geldinge for the sum of xx
^tie
markes [£13 6s 8d]’ though it was ‘not worth half the money’, and of having ‘cosened and over reached him’ in various ‘bargens passed betwixt them’. Harris, he says, ‘answered little or nothing to the contrary, but hath often in laughing sort confessed soe much’.

5 September 1616 - Wilkins is ‘charged to have taken a cloke and a hatt from the person of John Parker feloniously’. The cloak was valued at 30 shillings, and the ‘blacke felt hatt’ at 3s 4d. Parker was said to have been ‘in great fear and peril of his life’ (though this is formulaic).

6 August 1618 - Wilkins is charged with having ‘feloniously received, harboured and comforted Anne Badham, against the King’s Peace and dignity’. He did so knowing she had committed a felony - she had picked a man’s pocket, and ‘carried off 55 shillings and fourpence halfpenny which was in the pocket’. Both the theft and Wilkins’s harbouring of her are said to have taken place ‘at Cow Cross’, which probably means at Wilkins’s tavern. This case echoes the earlier one involving Magdalen Samways. Perhaps Anne was a prostitute working in the tavern, who stole from one of her clients, and did so with the connivance of the tavern-keeper Wilkins.

This last case moved slowly. Wilkins appeared on 3 September, but the trial was remanded. A month later, on 2 October, the clerk of the sessions recorded that Wilkins was discharged from the obligations of his bail because he was dead - ‘exoneratus q[uia] mortuus est’. An appropriate epitaph, in that it appears in the crabbed Latin of the law-courts, where Wilkins was such a familiar face. He was in his early forties when he died.

Two themes emerge with obsessive regularity from Wilkins’s police-record: violence and prostitution, and sometimes they combine in acts of violence against women who are said or inferred to be prostitutes. Even his wife Katherine is accused of being a ‘bawd’, though of course she denies it. Those vicious assaults on women - the ‘kicking’ and ‘stamping on’ - are characteristic of the pimp who asserts his authority with physical aggression. This atmosphere of violence is found in his writings. Here is the profligate young gallant Sir Frank Ilford bullying his new wife (whom he has been tricked into marrying) to give him her jewels -

ILFORD: Nay, ’sfoot, give ’em me, or I’ll kick else.

WIFE: Good, sweet -

ILFORD: Sweet with a pox, you stink in my nose. Give me your jewels! Nay, bracelets too.

WIFE: Oh me, most miserable!

ILFORD: Out of my sight, aye and out of my doors, for now what’s within this house is mine. (
Miseries
, 2185-91)

The threat to kick, and the whole aggressive timbre, sounds much like the real-life cases glimpsed through the Sessions records.
⁷
A graphologist might note a further echo of all this in the curiously boot-shaped formation seen in Wilkins’s signature (see Plate 25).

In many of these records Wilkins is specified as ‘victualler’, as he also is in the Court of Requests. His establishment is usually described as on Cow Cross Street and sometimes on Turnmill Street, and was perhaps at the junction of those two streets - a house on the corner like the Mountjoys’. Turnmill (often Turnbull) Street was axiomatically associated with brothels. It is mentioned in Shakespeare’s
2 Henry IV
, when Shallow prates of ‘the wildness of his youth, and the feats he has done about Turnbull Street’ (3.2.288-300), and is described succinctly in Sugden’s
Topographical Dictionary
as ‘the most disreputable street in London, a haunt of thieves and loose women’.
⁸

All the evidence points to Wilkins’s establishment being some kind of a brothel. That word is not always helpful: the vaguer legalistic formula, a ‘bawdy house’, might be better. The dedicated brothel with a woman’s face in every window certainly existed, but as always prostitution was in the main less formalized, more diffuse and opportunistic.
⁹
At Wilkins’s tavern, let us say, there were women available, as there was food, wine, dice and tobacco, and there were ‘chambers’ upstairs or near by which could be hired for the business of pleasure. It is a situation familiar to commentators such as the playwright-turned-preacher Stephen Gosson: