The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (53 page)

55
. Obviously this list is not exhaustive. Some, thinking of the ‘Fair Youth’ of the Sonnets and of the generally homoerotic overtone of the playhouse world, would add homosexual sex.

PART SEVEN: MAKING SURE

27. A handfasting

1
. Heinrich Bullinger,
Hundred Sermons upon the Apocalypse
, trans. John Daus (1573), 23.

2
Frederick Pollock and F. W. Maitland,
History of English Law
(1923), 2.368.

3
A Treatise of Spousals or Matrimonial Contracts
(1686), 13-15.

4
Giese 2006, 120.

5
On marriage contracts see also Cook 1977a and 1991, Hopkins 1998, and (on an earlier period) Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘The Making of Marriage in Mid-Tudor England’,
Journal of Family History
10 (1985), 339-52.

6
Giese 2006, 117-19.

7
. Ibid., 123, 129. The ceremony and its wordings were ancient: ‘handfast’ is found in a MS of
c
. 1200, ‘troth-plight’ in 1303, and a bridegroom at Ripon Cathedral in 1484 says, ‘I take the Margaret to my handfest wif’ (
OED
).

8
. Museum of London, 62.121/10; Cooper 2006, no. 18. ‘Gimmel’ is from Latin
gemellus
, ‘twin’. An attenuated version of the ring’s motto is in Beaumont and Fletcher,
Wit at several Weapons
(
c
. 1616), 5.1: ‘I knit this holy hand fast, and with this hand / The heart that owes this hand ever binding.’ In Middleton’s
Chaste Maid
(
c
. 1613) Moll’s betrothal-ring from Touchwood reads, ‘Love thats wise / Blinds parents eyes’ (3.1). The other gifts listed are from Giese 2006, 133-44. Drinking, or pledging, to one another was also a common part of the troth-plight, as in the Honthorst betrothal scene (see Plate 32), and in Jonson’s famous lyric, ‘To Celia’: ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes / And I will pledge with mine’ (
Complete Poems
, ed. G. Parfitt (1973), 106).

9
Cook 1991, 158; Bullinger,
The Christen State of Matrimonye
, trans. Miles Coverdale (1541), 49.

28. ‘They have married me!’

10
. ‘Spousals
de praesenti
. . . [are] very matrimony, and therefore perpetually indissoluble except for adultery’ (Swinburne,
Treatise of Spousals
, 15). Scarborrow’s subsequent marriage would be technically adulterous, and the contract dissoluble.

11
. Mendelson and Crawford 1998, 120. The Church’s unease about the sexual implications of civil contracts was not unrealistic. In marital disputes before the Bishop’s court in Chester, ‘out of seventeen troth-plight cases, ten show us men trying to sneak out of their contracts when they have had their fill of pleasure with the woman’ (F. J. Furnivall,
Child Marriages, Divorces and Ratifications in the Diocese of Chester
(1897), 43).

12
. But note the opinion of Shakespeare’s Princess Katherine (
Henry V
, 5.2.259-60): ‘Les dames et les demoiselles pour être baissées devant leurs noces il n’est pas la coˆtume de France’ (For women and girls to be kissed before their wedding is not the custom in France). Henry dismisses this as a ‘nice [fastidious] fashion’, and kisses her anyway.

13
On marriage vows in
Measure
see Harding 1950, Schanzer 1960, Nagarajan 1963.

14
See Part 1, note 28.

15
The syntax of the subordinate clause (lines 180-81) is tightly knotted: the King apparently means that the wedding (‘ceremony’) will be best (‘seem’ = be seemly) performed swiftly (‘expedient’ = expeditious) on the authority which has just been given (‘now-born brief’) by the contract.

16
. Shakespeare’s references to troth-plights are not confined to the Silver Street plays. In
Henry V
(
c
. 1599), Nym is informed of Pistol’s marriage: ‘He is married to Nell Quickly, and certainly she did you wrong, for you were troth-plight to her’ (2.1.21). As Quickly is a prostitute the term is used sardonically to mean he was a favoured customer. In
Twelfth Night
(1601), the offstage handfasting of Olivia and Sebastian is described by the priest: ‘A contract of eternal bond of love / Confirmed by mutual joinder of your hands, / Attested by the holy close of lips, / Strengthened by interchangement of your rings, / And all the ceremony of this compact / Sealed in my function, by my testimony’ (5.1.154-9). In
Troilus and Cressida
(
c
. 1602) Pandarus’ efforts to get the eponymous couple in bed together include a kind of mock-handfasting: ‘Go to, a bargain made. Seal it, seal it. I’ll be the witness. Here I hold your hand, here my cousin’s’ (3.2.196-8). Pandarus is the prototypical ‘pandar’ or pimp (‘Let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world’s end after my name’), and what is ‘sealed’ by these actions is not a matrimonial contract but a sexual assignation involving his niece (here called ‘cousin’). In
The Winter’s Tale
(
c
. 1610) the shepherd attempts to handfast Perdita and Florizel, ‘Take hands! A bargain! / And, friends unknown, you shall bear witness to’t / . . . Come your hand, / And daughter yours’ (4.4.381-9), but the ceremony is halted by one of the witnesses, who is Florizel’s father in disguise.

17
. Johnson’s 1765 edn of Shakespeare; Wimsatt 1969, 112.

18
. Cf. John Earle’s character-sketch of an actor: ‘He is like our painting gentlewomen, seldom in his own face, seldomer in his clothes, and he pleases the better he counterfeits . . . He does not only personate on the stage, but sometimes in the street, for he is masked still in the habit of a gentleman’ (
Microcosmographie
, 1628, H3v).

29. Losing a daughter

19
. The marriage of ‘John Hall gentleman & Susanna Shaxspere’ took place at Holy Trinity, Stratford, on 5 June 1607. Their only child, Elizabeth, was born the following February. Susanna’s dowry was 107 acres of Stratford land, purchased by Shakespeare in 1602 for £320 and doubtless rising in value (Honan 1998, 291-2; Maìri Macdonald, ‘A New Discovery about Shakespeare’s Estate’,
SQ
45 (1994), 87-9). This is somewhat bigger than Mary Mountjoy’s alleged dowry of £260 (a ‘marriage portion’ of £60 and a legacy of £200), and considerably bigger than her actual dowry (£10 and some ‘houshould stuffe’).

20
. Dr Hall himself seems to have been an ‘honest fellow’ tailor-made to Shakespeare’s requirements. He was a gentleman from a well-off Bedford-shire family; a Cambridge graduate (Queens’ College, MA 1597); and a respected physician (SDL 234-8; Harriet Joseph,
Shakespeare’s Son-in-Law
, 1964). By tradition Susanna was spirited and intelligent (‘witty above her sexe’, as a contemporary epitaph complacently puts it). She signed her name in a clear, rounded hand (Honan 1998, plate 30). A year before her marriage she was fined for non-attendance at church, which may mean she had Catholic leanings; her husband, to judge from phrasings in his casebooks, was staunchly Protestant.

Epilogue

1
. Mary Edmond, ‘Henry Condell’ (
ODNB
2004); cf. Hotson 1949, 184. Mountjoy’s will (Appendix 4) has a further possible Shakespeare connection. Another of its witnesses, Raphe or Ralph Merifield, may be a son-in-law of John Heminges, whose will includes a bequest to ‘my daughter Merefeild’ (PRO Prob 10/485, 9 October 1630; Honigmann and Brock 1993, 164-9). However Ralph Merifield was a professional scrivener, ‘whose name appears frequently among the testamentary depositions of the Commissary Court’; the original will was probably in his hand (Whitebrook 1932, 94). This makes the connection with Heminges unnecessary but does not invalidate it. I have found nothing on the other two witnesses, ‘Ed: Dendye’ and Robert Walker.

2
. The baptism dates are: Anne, 23 October 1608; Jane, 17 December 1609; Mary, 9 October 1614 (buried 1 May 1615); Hester, 30 November 1617 (died before 14 April 1620); Hester, 14 April 1620; Elizabeth, 21 September 1621. The date of Anne’s marriage (apparently not at St Giles) is unknown. Jane married on 2 September 1633, aged twenty-three, and Hester on 29 June 1640, aged twenty. Jane’s son, Francis Overing junior, baptized on 23 May 1636, is Stephen and Mary’s first recorded grandchild, but he died at the age of fifteen months.

3
. See Appendix 4; similar petitions can be found in
Journal of the House of Lords
3 (1620-28). On the gold-thread monopoly see W. R. Scott,
Joint Stock Companies
(1910-12), 1.174-7; Knights 1962, 77, 229; Sidney Lee and Sean Kelsey, ‘Sir Giles Mompesson’ (
ODNB
2004). According to Thomas Wilson, the monopolists developed a ‘new alchemistical way to make gold and silver lace with copper and other sophistical materials, to cozen and deceive the people; and so poisonous were the drugs that made up this deceitful composition that they rotted the hands and arms, and brought lameness upon those that wrought it’ (
Life and Reign of James I
,
c
. 1625, 155).

4
Stow 1908, 2.28, 361; John Taylor,
Three Weeks from London to Hamburgh
(1617), 1.

5
. Belott had probably died recently when his will (Appendix 4) was proved on 25 February 1647. The registers of St Sepulchre’s parish, of which Long Lane was part, are not extant.

6
. On the Blackfriars Gatehouse: see Part One, note 56. On Susanna and Ralph Smith (a Stratford hatter, and nephew of Shakespeare’s friend Hamnet Sadler) see EKC 2.12-13; the consistory court found in favour of Susanna, 15 July 1613, and her slanderer, John Lane, was excommunicated. On the Welcombe enclosures: EKC 2.141-52, and cf. Part One, note 2.

7
. On Thomas Quiney (son of Richard, with whom Shakespeare corresponded in 1598) see SDL 238-41. Judith died in 1662, and with the death eight years later of Shakespeare’s childless granddaughter, Elizabeth Bernard
n’e
Hall, the direct line of descent from Shakespeare was extinguished.

8
. Charles Severn, ed.,
Diary of the Rev. John Ward, 1648-79
(1839), 183. The typhoid theory: Honan 1998, 406-7.

9
. The speech is followed by an eighteen-line rhymed epilogue (‘I would now ask ye how ye like the play’, etc), but this is clearly by Fletcher.

Sources

1. COLLECTIONS

Acronyms in the Notes refer to the following sources:

Manuscripts

BL - British Library, London

Bod. - Bodleian Library, Oxford

GL - Guildhall Library, London

FPC - French Protestant Church, London

HLRO - House of Lords Record Office, Westminster

LMA - London Metropolitan Archives

PRO - Public Record Office, National Archives, Kew (citations given as PRO etc are an abbreviated form of the full citation, TNA PRO etc)

Shakespeare documents

EKC - E. K. Chambers,
William Shakespeare: Facts and Problems
, 2 vols (Oxford, 1930)

SDL - Samuel Schoenbaum,
William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life
(Oxford, 1975)

SRI - Samuel Schoenbaum,
William Shakespeare: Records and Images
(London, 1981)

Serials and other collections

CSP - Calendar of State Papers (printed abstracts)

DNB
-
Dictionary of National Biography
(superseded by
ODNB
but still of use)

HMC - Historical Manuscripts Commission (printed abstracts)

HSL - Huguenot Society of London (Publications and Proceedings)

IGI - International Genealogical Index (
http://www.familysearch.org
)

LRB
-
London Review of Books

MCR
-
Middlesex County Records
, ed. John C. Jeaffreson, 4 vols (1886-92)

MLR
-
Modern Language Review

NPG - National Portrait Gallery, London

NQ
-
Notes & Queries

ODNB
-
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, 60 vols (Oxford, 2004)

OED
-
Oxford English Dictionary

RES
-
Review of English Studies

SQ
-
Shakespeare Quarterly

SR - Stationers’ Register (SR plus a date refers to the licensing of a book, usually but not always prior to publication. SR entries can be consulted in the printed transcript: see Arber 1875-94 in Sources /2)

TLS - Times Literary Supplement

2. books AND ARTICLES

Unless otherwise stated, place of publication is London.

Ackroyd 2000. Peter Ackroyd,
London: The Biography
.

Allison 1962. K. J. Allison, ‘An Elizabethan Census of Ealing’.
Ealing Local History Society Papers
2.

Arber 1875-94. Edward Arber,
A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London
. 5 vols.

Archer 1991. Ian Archer,
The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London
. Cambridge.

Archer 2000. Ian Archer, ‘Material Londoners?’ In Orlin 2000a, 174-92.

Arnold 1988. Janet Arnold,
Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d
. Leeds.

Aubrey 1949. John Aubrey,
Brief Lives
. Ed. Oliver Lawson Dick.

Baddeley 1888. Sir John James Baddeley,
An Account of the Church and Parish of St Giles Without Cripplegate
.

Baddeley 1900. Sir John James Baddeley,
The Aldermen of Cripplegate Ward, 1276-1900
.