The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (60 page)

24. Queen Anne by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger,
c
. 1605-10.

25. Signature of George Wilkins.

26. First edition of Wilkins’s
Miseries
, performed by the King’s Men in
c
. 1606.

27. ‘A punk after supper’. Customers eating in a Jacobean brothel.

28. The famous Southwark brothel called Holland’s Leaguer, in a woodcut of 1632.

29. Tire-wearing courtesan from a painting by Isaac Oliver,
c
. 1590-95.

30. A wherry on the Thames near London Bridge, 1614. These water-taxis took playgoers across to the Globe and adulterers upriver to Brentford.

31. The Three Pigeons at Brentford, owned by Shakespeare’s colleague John Lowin, seen here in a nineteenth-century engraving.

32. A handfasting. Detail from Gerrit van Honthorst’s
Supper with Betrothal
,
c
. 1625.

33. Wedding of Stephen and Mary at St Olave’s, 19 November 1604.

34. Burial of Marie Mountjoy at St Olave’s, 30 October 1606.

35. Register copy of Christopher Mountjoy’s will, 26 January 1620.

36. Burial of Christopher Mountjoy at St Giles, Cripplegate, 29 March 1620.

a

All depositions and other documents in the Belott-Mountjoy suit are fully transcribed in the Appendix. Quotations from them in the text are sometimes pruned of repetitious legalisms.

b

In Nicholas’s second deposition (19 June) these computations are, more plausibly, given the other way round.

c

In the margin beside Interrogatories 3, 4 and 5 are written the names, respectively, of Humphrey Fludd, William Shakespeare and George Wilkins. They were expected to testify on these particular questions - but Shakespeare did not appear at the second session. Interrogatory 4 has phrasings attributed to Shakespeare by Daniel Nicholas.

d

This entry is written in what Wallace calls a ‘flourished court-hand of Gothic-Roman very difficult to read’. I have followed his transcription and given a rather speculative translation.