The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (51 page)

3
. Greg and Boswell 1930, 11. See W. R. Lefanu, ‘Thomas Vautrollier, Printer and Bookseller’,
HSL Proceedings
20 (1964), 12-25; Andrew Pettegree, ‘Thomas Vautrollier’,
ODNB
2004. Two of their four sons (Manassas and James) were alive in 1624, when they are mentioned in Field’s will.

4
. Another possible Frenchwoman known to Shakespeare was ‘Dorothy Soer, wife of John Soer’, named in a legal document of 1596 in which William Wayte swore out ‘sureties of the peace’ against her and three others, one of them Shakespeare (Hotson 1931). French families named Soeur, Soir, Soyer, Sohier, etc, are found in immigrant lists of the period (Honigmann 1985, 150-51) but Dorothy has not yet been identified.

5
. Burghley was probably behind Field’s first publication,
The Copie of a Letter Sent out of England to Don Bernardin Mendoza
(1588): this piece of anti-Spanish propaganda was ostensibly the work of a Catholic priest, Richard Leigh, but manuscripts survive in Burghley’s hand (Pettegree, ‘Thomas Vautrollier’,
ODNB
2004). The following year Field wrote a fulsome dedication to Burghley, calling himself ‘a printer alwaies ready and desirous to be at your Honourable commaundement’ (George Puttenham,
Arte of English Poesie
, 1589, sig. A3v).

6
.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, ed. R. David (Arden edn, 1956), xxix-xxx; A. Lefranc,
Sous le masque de William Shakespeare
(1918).

7
. The Huguenot language-teacher G. de la Mothe, whose
French Alphabet
was published by Field in 1592, may have been a conduit of information. For what little is known of him see Lambley 1920, 161-2; Frances Yates,
A Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost
(1936), 61-4. He may possibly be the De la Mothe found by Lefranc in a contemporary list of Navarre court officials.

8
. SDL 130. The printing of
Venus
probably began soon after Field’s licensing of the copy (SR 18 April 1593).

9
. The entry in Stonley’s account book (Folger Shakespeare Library; SDL no. 93) is the first recorded purchase of a book by Shakespeare. On John Eliot (who is not included in
ODNB
) see John Lindsay, ed.,
The Parlement of Prattlers
(1928); Lever 1953, 79-80; Nicholl 1984, 177-9. On Shakespeare’s use of his language manual
Ortho-epia Gallica
(1593) see note 15 below.

10
. On ‘The Booke of Sir Thomas More’ (BL Harley MS 7368) see W. W. Greg’s introduction (1911) and Harold Jenkins’s supplement (1961) to the Malone Society edn; T. H. Howard-Hill,
Shakespeare and ‘Sir Thomas More’
(Cambridge, 1989); and SRI 109-16, with reproductions of the three pages attributed to Shakespeare (fols 8r-9r). Much of fol. 8 was damaged in a botched nineteenth-century restoration. The hands of Munday, Chettle and Dekker have also been identified in the MS. Various dates are proposed for the playscript, of which
c
. 1593 is the earliest. In the Shakespeare passage, ‘spurn you like dogs’ is close to
Merchant of Venice
(
c
. 1596), 1.3.113; and ‘Friends, masters, countryman’ to
Julius Caesar
(
c
. 1599), 3.2.78. But self-echoings are not necessarily close in time.

19. Shakespeare’s aliens

11
. Haughton 1598, A4v. A useful survey of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical representations of foreigners is in Hoenselaars 1992, 50-75, 108-43 (on Haughton’s play: 54-8).

12
. Nashe 1958, 1.365. Some forty foreign surgeons and physicians appear in Tudor denization lists, most of them French (Page 1893, l). Sisson relates Caius to Dr Peter Chamberlain, a French gynaecologist in London, but it is not certain he was in practice by 1597 (
Essays & Studies
13 (1960), 10-11). French doctors were associated with the ‘chymicall physick’ of Paracelsus (Nashe’s quack is a ‘mettle-bruing Paracelsian’); there is no indication that Caius is a vehicle for satire on this, though I note elsewhere (Nicholl 1980, 76-80) that Falstaff’s ordeal in the laundry basket (3.5.90-125) is comically expressed in terms of Paracelsian chemistry (he is ‘stopt in like a strong distillation’, etc).

13
. Like Caius, Haughton’s Delion is a ‘clipper of the King’s English, and ... eternall enemie to all good language’ (Haughton 1598, B2v). Dr Johnson comments, à propos Caius, on the limited comic appeal of ‘language distorted and depraved by provincial or foreign pronunciations’ (Johnson’s
Shakespeare
, 1773 edn; Wimsatt 1969, 110-11). On broken English on the Elizabethan stage: Clough 1933.

14
.
Henry V
, ed. J. Dover Wilson (1947), 152. The French in
Merry Wives
is also mangled in transmission, e.g. ‘Il fait fort ehando’ (1.4.46-7), where a compositor has mistranscribed
chaude
, ‘hot’.

15
. Shakespeare’s use of
Ortho-epia
is elegantly demonstrated in Lever 1953. In
Henry V
, Pistol’s French boy says: ‘ce soldat icy est dispos’e tout asture de couppes vostre gorge’ (4.4.35-6). The unusual contraction ‘asture’ (for
à cette heure
, ‘immediately’) is found in similar context in Eliot’s dialogue, ‘The Thief’ (Eliot 1593, 104-7): ‘Je vous couperay la gorge . . . Il est bien garrott’ asteure.’ Most interesting is the seepage of
Ortho-epia
into the Dauphin’s praise of his horse (3.7.11-29). Perusing Eliot’s dialogue, ‘The Horseman’ (pp. 87-9), Shakespeare’s eye strayed to the top of page 87, which contains the last few lines of the previous dialogue, ‘The Apothecary’. From this come the nutmeg, ginger, hares and flying horses which appear in the Dauphin’s speech. See also Jean Fuzier, ‘ “
I quand sur le possession de Fraunce
”. A French Crux in
Henry V
Solved’,
SQ
32 (1981), 97-100; Timothy Billings, ‘Two New Sources for Shakespeare’s Bawdy French in
Henry V
’,
NQ
52 (2005), 202-4.

16
. Shapiro 1995; Dominic Green,
The Double Life of Dr Lopez
(2003); Cecil Roth,
History of the Jews in England
(1941), 139-44.

17
. William Rowley,
A Search for Money
(1609).

18
. Shakespeare’s more compassionate treatment of the outsider in the
Merchant
anticipates a comparable trend discerned by Hoenselaars in early Jacobean comedy, which moves away from hostile stereotyping of foreigners to a ‘strategy of surprise’ in which ‘the foreigner who used to be the butt of comedy is converted into its agent to gull the English and expose their folly’ (Hoenselaars 1992, 114; cf. Leinwand 1986, 46-8). Examples are in Dekker and Webster’s
Westward Ho!
(1604), Edward Sharpham’s
The Fleire
(1607) and Jonson’s
Alchemist
(1610). But the (Jewish) playwright Arnold Wesker thinks the effect of the
Merchant
(whatever its intention) was ‘irredeemably anti-Semitic’. The ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ speech was ‘so powerful a piece of special pleading that it dignified the anti-Semitism’; the audience came away with its prejudices ‘confirmed but held with an easy conscience’ (
The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel
, 1997, xv-xvi).

19
. On racial issues in
Othello
, see Cowhig 1985, Bartels 1990, and (with reflection on the play’s fortunes in Apartheid-era South Africa) Martin Orkin, ‘Othello and the “Plain Face” of Racism’,
SQ
38 (1987), 166-88. For a panoramic background see Eldred Jones,
Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama
(1965) and
The Elizabethan Image of Africa
(Charlottesville, 1971). ‘Little black husband’: Lytton Strachey,
Elizabeth and Essex
(1928), 279.

20
. Forbes 1971, 3-4; Picard 2003, 123-4; Edward Scobie,
Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain
(1972), 5-11.

21
. Bartels 1990, 451: Iago attempts ‘to demonize and disempower Othello’ by luring him into a ‘self-incriminating display of “alien” behaviour’.

20. Dark ladies

22
. This cryptic lady has been variously identified. Mal Fitton was proposed by Frank Harris (
The Man Shakespeare
, 1909); Jacqueline Field by C. C. Stopes (
Shakespeare’s Environment
, 1918); Jane Davenant by Arthur Ache-son (
Shakespeare’s Sonnet Story
, 1922); Lucy Morgan, a.k.a. ‘Black Luce’ or ‘Lucy Negro’ by G. B. Harrison (
Shakespeare under Elizabeth
, 1933), Leslie Hotson (
Mr W. H.
, 1964) and Anthony Burgess (
Nothing like the Sun
, 1964); and Emilia Bassano by A. L. Rowse (Rowse 1973). I do not intend to add Marie Mountjoy to this list (the ‘Dark Landlady’?), though her credentials are no worse than any of these.

23
.
Astrophil and Stella
(1591), 8.9;
Lucrece
(1594), 420;
Venus and Adonis
(1593), 542. Other parallels are noted in Duncan-Jones 1997, 374. Eliot’s
Ortho-epia
has a similar assemblage of sonneteering clich’s: ‘her eyes twinkling stars . . . her mouth coral . . . her throat of snow’ etc (Eliot 1593, 159).

24
.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, 4.3.56-69 (Jaggard no. 3) and 4.2.100-113 (Jaggard no. 5). The play was published in 1598 (according to the title-page not the first edition), but the Jaggard texts have variants that may come from an independent MS. There are also variants in his versions of Sonnets 138 and 144. According to F. T. Prince (
The Poems
, Arden edn, 1960, 153) they are ‘of the kind that might be expected in an inaccurate report’, but some critics argue that the 1609 texts represent Shakespeare’s own revisions of the earlier versions. Jackson 1999, using statistical analysis of rhyme schemes, places the ‘Dark Lady’ sequence as ‘mainly written in the 1590s’.

25
. Another literary dark lady is Diamante, the Venetian courtesan in Nashe’s novella
The Unfortunate Traveller
(1594): a ‘pretty, round-faced wench . . . with black eye-brows’ (Nashe 1958, 2.261). The book was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, with whom both the Sonnets and
Love’s Labours
are traditionally (though conjecturally) linked.

26
. The nearest Shakespeare gets to a contemporary English setting is in the
Merry Wives
. Though nominally medieval, as an offshoot of
1 Henry IV
, the play has specific references to Elizabethan Windsor, uses actual locations (Datchet Mead, the ‘Pittie Ward’, etc), and lodges Falstaff in the Garter Inn (see Chapter 8), still in business today though the building Shakespeare knew was burned down in 1681 (information from Hester Davenport).

PART SIX:
SEX
&
THE CITY

21. Enter George Wilkins

1
. Wilkins was certainly in St Giles by late 1607, when his daughter was baptized there (parish register, GL MS 6419/2, 13 December 1607). He is first recorded as ‘of Cow Cross’ in a court case of April 1610 (Prior 1972, 144, 152). Fludd is described as of St Giles in his deposition of 1612, and in December 1616 ‘Humphrey son of Humphrey Flood, trumpeter’ was baptized there. Thomas Floudd of St Giles, assessed at £20 in lands and fees in 1582 (PRO E179/251/16, fol. 286), may be a father or brother; the registers also have a Cadwallader Fludd, ‘yeoman’.

2
. See Part One, note 14.

3
. There is no critical edition of Wilkins’s works, but see Glenn Blayney’s introduction to the Malone Society reprint of
The Miseries of Enforced Marriage
(1964) and other articles by Blayney listed in Sources/2. The nearest thing to a biography is Roger Prior’s incisive sixteen-page ‘Life’ (Prior 1972), supplemented by Eccles 1975; Prior 1976; Anthony Parr, ‘George Wilkins’ (
ODNB
2004). William Boyd’s
A Waste of Shame
(BBC4, 2005) featured a memorable portrayal of Wilkins by Alan Williams.

4
. The Wilkinses are sometimes claimed as the authors of two sonnets, signed ‘G. W. Senior’ and ‘G. W. I[unior]’, in Spenser’s
Amoretti
(1595), but it is hard to imagine a teenaged Wilkins writing pastoral knick-knacks like this (‘Ah! Colin, whether on the lowly plain / Piping to shepherds . . .’, etc). The sonneteers are more plausibly the emblem-writer Geoffrey Whitney and his father, also Geoffrey.

5
. The Middlesex Sessions cases (first spotted by Mark Eccles) are described in Prior 1972, 144-9, and the Chancery suit of December 1614 in Prior 1976.

6
. G. Warner,
Catalogue of the Manuscripts at Dulwich College
(1881), 134; Prior 1976, 33-4. She owed Henslowe £2.

7
Cf. John Day,
Law Tricks
(1608), to which Wilkins may have contributed: ‘Ile . . . give her a kicke a the lips, and a pipe of Tobacco be my witnesse, that’s all the love I beare her’ (431-6).

8
. Cow Cross Street (still extant) ran west out of the top end of Smithfield market (Prockter and Taylor 1979, map 6). That Wilkins was of the parish of St Sepulchre’s (as in the Belott-Mountjoy deposition) rather than St James, Clerkenwell, confirms that his tavern was at the western end of the street. Present-day Farringdon Station marks the approximate site of it. On Turnmill Street (named after a water-mill on the Fleet river), see also Ackroyd 2000, 463-4.

9
. On the structure of the London sex-trade at this time see Griffiths 1993; Shugg 1977; Haynes 1997, 61-71 et passim. In cases studied by Griffiths, many brothel-owners took short-time ‘rents’ from independent prostitutes requiring a room. Anne Smith told the bench at Bridewell that she used ‘Wattwood’s, Marshall’s, Jane Fuller’s, Martyn’s, Shaw’s, and other naughty houses’; the last-mentioned, John Shaw, owned five houses and had recorded dealings with twenty-three prostitutes. A client might pay up to 10 shillings for a session in the relative comfort of a bawdy house; ambulant alley-girls charged as little as 6d.