The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (52 page)

10
. Stephen Gosson,
Schoole of Abuse
(1579), ed. E. Arber (1869), 36.

11
. Robert Greene,
Disputation
, in Salg˜do 1972, 274-5.

12
. An anonymous ‘biography’,
The Life of Long Meg of Westminster
, was entered in SR in 1590, but the earliest known edn is 1620; it mainly concerns her alleged feats of strength. Her career as a prostitute or bawd is documented in Capp 1998. Marshall and Remnaunt: GL, Bridewell Hospital Court-books 1 (1559-62), fols 206-10; Capp 1998, 3.

22. The
Miseries

13
. J. Andreas Lowe, ‘Walter Calverley’ (
ODNB
2004). Calverley refused to plead, and was pressed to death at York Castle on 5 August 1605.

14
. The identities of Calverley’s sweetheart (‘Clare Hartop’ in the play) and his guardian (‘Lord Faulconbridge’) remain uncertain (Blayney 1953; Maxwell 1956, 157-69). His wife was daughter of Sir John Brooke and niece of Lord Cobham. For bibliographic evidence of revision see Blayney 1957. Among the remnants of an earlier version are two speech-prefixes, ‘Hunsd’ (324) and ‘Huns’ (453), which seem to suggest Wilkins first used the name of Shakespeare’s former patron Lord Hunsdon for Calverley’s guardian, before settling on the safely fictional ‘Faulconbridge’. Such remnants strongly suggest
Miseries
1607 was printed from Wilkins’s ‘foul papers’, though at least one garbling in the text seems the result of an aural misreporting (Matthew Steggle, ‘
Demoniceacleare
in
The Miseries of Inforst Mariage
’,
NQ
53 (2006), 514-15).

15
Chambers 1923, 4.339. The Act, issued 27 May 1606, threatened a fine of £10 for every offence. Its euphemizing effects are notoriously present in F1. The original text of
Othello
(as preserved in the 1622 Quarto) has over fifty oaths which are watered down in the Folio text (Wells 2006, 238).

16
. On
The Yorkshire Tragedy
, see Malone Society reprint, ed. Sylvia Feldman (1973); Sturgess 1969, 30-38; Lisa Hopkins, ‘
A Yorkshire Tragedy
and Middleton’s Tragic Aesthetic’,
Early Modern Literary Studies
8 (2003), 1-15. Wilkins’s redrafting of the
Miseries
may be contiguous with Middleton’s writing of
The Yorkshire Tragedy
.

17
. In
1 Henry IV
, 2.4, a drawer who habitually calls ‘Anon anon Sir’ is baited by Hal and Poins; in
Merry Wives
, the Host often uses ‘bully’ as a form of address, as Ilford does earlier in this scene: ‘A thousand good dayes, my noble bully’ (1058).

23. Prostitutes and players

18
Rendle 1882, 70-77; Johnson 1969. Stow mentions various ‘stewhouses’ on the waterfront at Southwark, with signs painted ‘on their frontes towardes the Thames’ (Stow 1908, 2.55).

19
. The pamphlet
Holland’s Leaguer
by Nicholas Goodman, the play of the same name by Shakerley Marmion, and a ballad, ‘Newes from Hollands Leaguer’, all appeared in 1632, inspired by Bess Holland’s defiance of official attempts to close her down; in December 1631 the house was briefly surrounded by armed officers. According to Goodman, the brothel had earlier been ‘kept’ by Margaret Barnes a.k.a. ‘Long Meg’ (see note 12 above). Other famous Southwark whorehouses were the Cardinal’s Hat and the Castle: the latter was attached to the Hope Inn, on the site of the present-day Bankside pub, the Anchor (Ackroyd 2000, 689-91).

20
I follow the conventional emendation of FI’s ‘barne’ to ‘bars’ (first proposed by Johnson) but ‘barn’ may be an authentic early plural, cf. ‘eyne’ for ‘eyes’. On Pickt-hatch see Sugden 1925, s.v. and commentators on
Merry Wives
2.2.17 (Falstaff to Pistol: ‘To your manor of Pickt-Hatch, go!’).

21
Munday,
Retreat from Plays
(1580), ed. Hazlitt (1869), 139; Dekker and Wilkins 1607, 64; Prynne,
Histriomastix
(1633), 391. Reports (or polemical claims) of ‘bawdy behaviour’ in the playhouses are surveyed in Cook 1977.

22
Munday,
Retreat from Plays
, 126; John Lane,
Tom Tell-troths message
(1600), 133. For the pejorative use of ‘housewife’, see also
2 Henry IV
, 3.2.311, ‘over-scutched housewives’; and
Othello
, 4.1.94-5, where Bianca is described as ‘a housewife that by selling her desires / Buys herself bread and clothes’.

23
Gosson,
Plays Confuted
(1583), sig. f1r. Cf. Dekker and Wilkins 1607, Jest 45: ‘A wench having a good face, a good body, and good clothes on, but of bad conditions, sitting one day in the two-penny room of a playhouse, & a number of yong Gentlemen about her, against all whom she maintain’d talke’. The ‘twopenny rooms’ which feature often in these accounts of venery were partitioned sections of the upper galleries, the forerunner of the theatrical ‘box’.

24
Father Hubberds Tales
(1604); Middleton 1886, 8.79-80.

25
J. W. Lever, Arden edn (1965), xxxi-xxxv.

26
The Blacke Booke
(1604); Middleton 1886, 8.16.

27
. On prunes and brothels see Panek 2005.

28
. According to John Jowett,
Measure
sometimes sounds like Middleton because it contains some later interpolations (
c
. 1621) by him (Jowett 2001).

29
. Barbara Everett, ‘A Dreame of Passion’,
LRB
25, 2 January 2003.

30
. Jonson distinguishes different types of collaboration when he says he wrote
Volpone
‘without a co-adjutor, / Novice, journeyman or tutor’ (Prologue, 17-8; cf. Wells 2006, 26-7). The play was performed by the King’s Men in
c
. 1605-6, close in time to the Wilkins-Shakespeare collaboration. In terms of text contributed one could call Wilkins a full ‘co-adjutor’, though the skilled but subordinate ‘journeyman’ is perhaps a better summary of his role.

31
. The perfunctory dialogue of 4.5, a very short scene where two unnamed ‘gentlemen’ quit the brothel unexpectedly converted (‘I’ll do anything now that is virtuous, but I am out of the road of rutting forever,’ etc), sounds to me like Wilkins. The Arden edition’s stage directions quibble unnecessarily in placing 4.2 ‘in front of’ the brothel. Lines 50 (‘Wife, take her in’) and 122 (‘Take her home’) are cited to support this, but the first phrase would distinguish the reception area from the accommodation within; and the second is probably figurative for ‘take proper control of her’. 4.6, where Marina is brought to a customer, is certainly set ‘in’ the brothel.

32
. All information in this and the following paragraph is from St Giles parish register, GL MS 6419/2.

33
. Wilkins 1953, 59;
Pericles
, 3.1.34. The phrase was first recognized as Shakespeare’s by J. P. Collier. For other lights shed on
Pericles
1609 by Wilkins’s phrasing see Massai 1997.

34
. The punchline of Jest 44 in the Wilkins-Dekker
Jests to Make you Merrie
(1607) sounds a note of bitter prophecy: ‘Do but marry with a whore, or else have to do with players, and thou shalt quickly run mad.’

24. Customer satisfaction

35
.
Father Hubberds Tales
(1604); Middleton 1886, 8.78-9.

36
. Cf. Manningham’s diary (October 1602, Sorlien 1976, 105): ‘Mr Tan-feild, speaking of a knave and his queane, said he was a little to[o] inward with hir.’

37
. Cf.
2 Henry IV
, 2.4.59, ‘Can a weak empty vessel [Doll] bear such a huge full hogshead [Falstaff]?’, and other examples in Partridge 1968, s.v. ‘bear’.

38
. Archer 2000, 186.

25. To Brainforde

39
. On seventeenth-century Brentford see Turner 1922, 35-8, 128-35; Allison 1962; Edith Jackson,
Annals of Ealing
(1898). Within Ealing parish, Old Brentford was more populous than Ealing itself. In 1664 there were 116 households in Ealing and 259 in Old Brentford; in 1795 the figures were 200 and 500. A ‘census’ of Ealing village in 1599 lists 85 households, so we might guess (at the same sort of ratio) about 190 households in Old Brentford at the time of Mountjoy’s leasehold there. I can find nothing to identify the particular house. A Southwark man, William Amery, inherited a house in Old Brentford on his father’s death in 1597 (Allison 1962, 27, 32), and was taxed on it in 1598 (PRO E179/142/239); as he also inherited a house in Southwark, it is possible he let out the Brentford property. I also note that the wealthiest resident of Ealing parish, Edward Vaughan, assessed on £20 in lands in the 1598 subsidy (PRO E179/142/239), had his town-house in St Giles, Cripplegate; in his will of 1612 he bequeathed money to the poor of St Giles, ‘where I have long dwelt’ (Allison 1962, 29). A servant listed at his Ealing household, Alice Eaton, was perhaps related to the Eatons of St Giles who include Stephen Belott’s apprentice William Eaton and Mary Byllett’s husband Richard Eaton (see Chapter 23 above). But these are shots in the dark.

40
. On the roads to Brentford see
MCR
2.89-90. The summer fair was a particular magnet for urban revellers: it is described disapprovingly by Dr Dee, who lived across the river at Mortlake, as ‘Bacchus feast at Brainford’ (
Diaries
, ed. E. Fenton (1998), 248).

41
. Martin Butler, ‘John Lowin’,
ODNB
2004; John Downes,
Roscius Anglicanus
(1708), 21; Honan 1998, 300.

42
On the Three Pigeons, see Turner 1922, 129-31; anon,
Jests of George Peele
(1627 edn), 2. A visitor in 1847 (quoted but not identified by Turner) judged the interior not much changed from Jacobean days: ‘twenty sitting or sleeping rooms; dark closets and passages and narrow staircases . . . The walls are in some places from seven to eight feet thick.’ There was also an inn at New Brentford called the Three Doves, no doubt in emulation; its innkeeper was Roger Dove (
MCR
1.146).

43
MCR
1.72 (Cornewall), 1.250 (Charche).

44
MCR
1.269 (Heyward), 2.4 (Anderton), 2.82 (Flood).

45
The Thomas Johnson who married at Ealing church on 16 February 1618 (Thomas Gurney, ed.,
Middlesex Parish Registers: Marriages
(1910), 8.11) was possibly Joan’s widower, but the name appears elsewhere in the marriage-registers. The church’s baptism and burial records do not survive.

26. ‘At his game’

46
Sorlien 1976, 208-9 (Diary, fol. 29v); cf. SDL doc. 115.

47
Microcosmographie
(1628), no. 24.

48
. Letter of Sir William Trumbull to Lord Hay, in R. F. Brinkley,
Nathan Field the Actor-Playwright
(1920), 42. Jonson and the Rutlands: Patterson 1923, 31. Jonson flattered the Countess that she ‘was nothing inferior to her father, S[ir] P[hilip] Sidney, in poesie’ (ibid., 20).

49
An anonymous ‘Funeral Elegy’ on Burbage (
c
. 1619) speaks of his ‘stature small’ (Sidney Lee,
DNB
, 1886). In Kyd’s
Spanish Tragedy
Jeronimo is described as of ‘short body’, which is sometimes taken to refer to Burbage in the part; but there is no evidence he played it. Hamlet being ‘fat and scant o’ breath’ is similarly interpreted, but Mary Edmond rejects this (‘Richard Burbage’,
ODNB
2004). She notes Elizabethan use of ‘fatty’ to mean sweaty, dramatically appropriate during the duel with Laertes, and infinitely preferable to a ‘portly prince lumbering about the small stage’.

50
Aubrey 1949, 85; Schoenbaum 1970, 101-2.

51
. A detailed account of John and Jane Davenant is in Edmond 1987, 4-26. Her visit to Forman: Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 287.

52
PRO SC6/JAS1/1646, fol. 28v. On Sheppard see Edmond 1987, 6-8, 16. His wife Ursula was another visitor to Forman in 1597-8 (Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 153, etc).

53
. A cynical coda to Emilia’s speech is in
All’s Well
, where Lavatch argues that an unfaithful wife suits the bored husband just fine: ‘The knaves come to do that for me which I am aweary of. He that ears my land spares my team, and gives me leave to in the crop; if I be his cuckold, he’s my drudge . . . Ergo he that kisses my wife is my friend’ (1.3.40-48). All that Emilia says is ironically shadowed by the fact that her husband is Iago, whose secret life is so much darker and weirder than she imagines.

54
Cf. Samuel Rowlands,
Crew of Kind Gossips
(1609), where a housewife talks of certain ‘kind gentlemen’ that lodge with her: ‘Two of them at my house in term-time lie, / And comfort me with jests and odd device / When as my husband’s out a-nights at dice.’ They ‘will not see me want’. These ‘odd devices’ (the
s
is missing for the rhyme) sound flirtatious at the least. Real-life sexual encounters in a London lodging-house are examined in Capp 1995, from a case in the Bridewell court-books involving Shakespeare’s friend Michael Drayton. In 1627 Elizabeth Hobcock, the maidservant at a lodging-house in St Clement Dane’s, deposed that she saw Mrs Mary Peters ‘hold up her clothes unto her navel before Mr Michael Drayton, and that she clapt her hand on her privy part and said it was a sound and a good one, that the said Mr Drayton did then also lay his hand upon it and stroke it, and said that it was a good one’. The accusation turns out to be false; Capp uncovers a grubby saga of sexual intrigue and blackmail. Of course, the Mountjoy establishment was not a rooming-house of this kind.