The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (8 page)

Payment of the tax owed on the 1596 assessment fell due the following February. But Shakespeare did not pay it. He is listed as a defaulter in a certificate dated 15 November 1597. In the default notices the ‘petty collectors’ of the parish affirm that the persons listed were ‘ether dead, [or] departed and gone out of the sayde ward, or their goodes so eloigned or conveyed out of the same, or in such a pryvate and coverte manner kept’ that the money owed could not ‘be levyed of them’. Of these possible reasons for non-payment we can discount the first: Shakespeare was not dead. Nor, it seems, had he moved out of the parish, for on 1 October 1598 he is again listed at St Helen’s, with the same assessment of £5.
⁶¹
The conclusion seems to be that he was evading payment. This is not remarkable - the system was chaotic, and evasion was common - but it is piquant to find that the first actual documentation of Shakespeare in London is as a tax-dodger.

The interest of Shakespeare’s tax affairs lies more in the company we find him in. The St Helen’s roll of 1598 shows him as one of nearly fifty names. Biographers have noted one of these, Thomas Morley - almost certainly the musician of that name, whose
First Book of Airs
(1600) has a setting of Shakespeare’s song, ‘It was a lover and his lass’, from
As You Like It
.
⁶²
But there are others of interest. One who catches my eye is Henry Mawnder. It is not a particularly common name, so it seems likely he is the same Henry Maunder who was serving a few years earlier as a ‘Messenger of the Chamber’. This rather bland job-description covered a multitude of activities, some of them shading into politically sensitive areas. It was Maunder who was despatched from court in May 1593 with a warrant for the arrest of Christopher Marlowe; he found his man down in Chislehurst, Kent, and delivered him to the Privy Council on 20 May. Marlowe died in suspicious circumstances ten days later. This may not have endeared Mr Maunder to Shakespeare, who had known and admired Marlowe, but perhaps he was able to elicit from Maunder some details of the Marlowe affair, which was still shrouded in rumour.
⁶³

Here is another name that swims out of St Helen’s in the 1590s: Anthony Elbow. He is among the ‘straungers’ of the parish assessed in the subsidy rolls. He was probably the Anthony Helbow listed a few years earlier in a census of foreigners in London - a French silk-weaver from ‘Leley’ (Lille), with a wife named Margit, and an English servant. Like Shakespeare he failed to pay up, but in his case he was exempted by ‘the fell sergeant, death’, for the St Helen’s parish register records that Anthony Elbowe ‘out of Staveley’s Alley’ was buried on 13 October 1596.
⁶⁴
It is a wonderful name, and it lodged in the capacious memory of Shakespeare, emerging some years later as Constable Elbow in
Measure for Measure
, a comic turn in that mood-shifting play, and perhaps one whose malapropisms - ‘cardinally’ for ‘carnally’, ‘Hannibal’ for ‘cannibal’, ‘respected’ for ‘suspected’ - elaborate a memory of the real Elbow’s broken English.

Shakespeare also failed to pay the tax due on that second assessment of October 1598, but in this instance his non-payment was because he had moved. The wheels of the Elizabethan bureaucracy turned slowly, but in time his arrears showed up in the Exchequer’s Pipe Rolls. There are two references to him. The first indicates that in 1599 he was resident in the county of Surrey; the second has the words ‘episcopo Wintonensi’ beside his name.
⁶⁵
From this it appears that some time after October 1598 (when he was still listed in Bishopsgate), Shakespeare moved across to the southern, Surrey side of the Thames, and more specifically to the Liberty of the Clink in Southwark, which was under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester (‘Episcopus Wintonensis’). This move can be related to the opening of the new Globe theatre, built in the early months of 1599 on a leased site in Southwark, a few hundred yards away from the Rose theatre, where the Admiral’s Men played, and the baiting-pits of Paris Gardens, where bears were chained to a stake and harried by packs of mastiffs.

These are records of Shakespeare’s lodgings or tenancies prior to his move to Cripplegate in about 1603. He is plausibly glimpsed in Shoreditch, and he is definitely recorded in Bishopsgate and Southwark. These earlier addresses place him physically close to the playhouses which are his life and livelihood, but this is not at all the case with his new lodgings
chez
Mountjoy. To reach the Globe theatre from Cripplegate he had to walk southwards right across town, and then take a wherry or water-taxi over the river to Southwark. It seems inconvenient - interestingly so.

At this time, as I have noted, Shakespeare was at the peak of his profession. With that success come stresses and pressures. He is something of a celebrity - a subject for poets (‘Honey-tongued Shakespeare . . .’) and topical comedies (‘O sweet Master Shakespeare, I’ll have his picture in my study at court!’) and Inns of Court anecdotes (as recorded in the diary of John Manningham: see Chapter 27 below).
⁶⁶
His face is known: he is an actor in his own and others’ plays. But celebrity - ‘the bubble reputation’, as Jaques calls it - is always double-edged, a burdensome illusion as much as an achievement. Is there a note of escape in his removal to Silver Street? Is this rather quieter, more respectable, more anonymous neighbourhood something of a bolt-hole from the boisterous and very public world of players and playgoers?

Aubrey’s source William Beeston gives us a hint of this, for another thing he remembered, or had heard from his father, was that Shakespeare ‘was the more to be admired q [
quia
, because] he was not a company keeper’. He ‘wouldnt be debauched, & if invited to, writt he was in paine’. This is unverifiable but has the backing of common sense. It refers us to the reclusiveness of authorship, the staking out of mental space. Instead of partying - those tempting debaucheries - he will settle down to write, by candlelight, in the silence of the city at night. How else could his output - at least thirty-seven plays, two book-length narrative poems and 154 sonnets, not to mention his involvement in acting, directing and general theatre management - have been achieved? An avoidance of ‘company’, for this more pressing purpose of composition, may be a factor in his move across town to Cripplegate.

There survives among the Cecil papers at Hatfield House a rather huffy letter from a court official, Sir Walter Cope. He writes to Robert Cecil, Lord Cranborne:

I have sent and bene all this morning hunting for players, juglers & such kind of creaturs, but find them harde to finde, wherefore leavinge notes for them to seeke me, Burbage ys come, & sayes ther ys no new playe that the Quene hath not seene, but they have revyved an old one cawled Loves Labore Lost, which for wytt & myrthe he sayes will please her excedingly.

Cope does not date the letter, but it is endorsed ‘1604’ by one of Cecil’s secretaries, and this date is confirmed by a performance of
Love’s Labours
at court in January 1605.
⁶⁷
Shakespeare would doubtless have been one of the players so fruitlessly ‘hunted’ by Cope. Was he out that morning, when Sir Walter or one of his minions called by at the Mountjoys’ house? Or was he so ‘harde to finde’ because his whereabouts were uncertain, his private address not generally available? Let others in the company deal with snobbish courtly fixers like Cope, who considers actors on a par with ‘juglers & such kind of creaturs’. Perhaps the quibbling Clown in
Othello
gives the correct answer to such enquiries: ‘I know not where he lodges, and for me to . . . say he lies here or he lies there were to lie in my own throat.’

Thanks to the Belott-Mountjoy suit we do know where the famous but elusive Mr Shakespeare lodges, and we now head for Silver Street in search of him - a metaphorical visit, of course, but with a faint lingering sense that we too come uninvited.

PART TWO

Silver Street

In the street I met him,
And in his company that gentleman.
The Comedy of Errors,
5.1.226-7

5

The house on the corner

T
he house where the Mountjoys lived is long gone, but its location can be gauged quite exactly. We learn from the deposition of William Eaton - Stephen Belott’s apprentice - that it stood on the corner of Silver Street and ‘Muggle Street’. The latter, more generally called Monkwell Street, ran northwards out of Silver Street, towards the city walls. Mountjoy’s house, therefore, was on the north side of Silver Street, just about opposite the little churchyard of St Olave’s on the south side. Muggle or Monkwell Street was also the boundary between two of the city’s administrative ‘wards’: the west side of the street was in Farringdon Ward and the east side in Cripplegate Ward. Christopher Mountjoy, as we know from taxation records, was an inhabitant of Cripplegate Ward. Thus the Mountjoy dwelling - the house where Shakespeare lodged in and around 1604 - stood precisely on the eastern corner of Silver Street and Monkwell Street.

You can see the house quite clearly in the woodcut map of Elizabethan London, formerly attributed to the engraver Ralph Agas and still known for convenience as the ‘Agas map’ (see Plate 6). It has steeply pitched gables, and a projection suggestive of a ‘pentice’ or penthouse above a shop-front, and then those four tantalizing windows upstairs - but here the map fails us, for the windows are only little blocks of printer’s ink which the magnifying-glass cannot pry into. Of course, what one sees in the map is not actually an image of the Mountjoys’ house, only a stereotypical indication of its existence. It looks much the same as all the others around it: Agas’s London, seen from a hypothetical bird’s-eye viewpoint, tends to the neat uniformity of a modern housing estate, far from the higgledy-piggledy, in-filled, architecturally opportunist reality: ‘the muddled truth of building use’.
¹
It is also not the Mountjoys’ house
per se
because the map dates from the early 1560s, some thirty years before they are first heard of on Silver Street. But this is, nonetheless, a visual record of the house, specific in location if not in detail: a limited record, but the best we have.

Importantly we see the street in its context. Not far to the south is the great commercial thoroughfare of Cheapside, and beyond that St Paul’s cathedral (still shown with its wooden steeple, destroyed by lightning in 1561). Closer in, to the north and west, lie the city walls; the neighbourhood nestles comfortably in the angle. To the east is Wood Street, leading out through the walls at the Cripple (or Creple) Gate which gives the area its name. Legends of healing the lame attach to the gate, but the name merely refers to its lack of headroom - literally, a gate which one has to creep through. Beyond the gate, and across the unsavoury city ditch, you were soon out into the greenery of Moorfields. The map shows market-gardens, hedgerows, archery butts, tenter-yards, and a pleasant prospect north to the windmills of Finsbury Fields. Some of this would already have been lost to development by the time Shakespeare was here, but London remained a city hemmed in by countryside. Nuts were gathered on Notting Hill, sheep grazed at Shepherd’s Bush, hogs were kept at Hoxton, and one went for a day out to Islington to shoot duck and ‘eat a messe of creame’.
²

The house Shakespeare knew may have survived for half a century or so after his lifetime, but it cannot have survived the cataclysm of 1666. Cripplegate was near the northern edge of the area destroyed by the Great Fire, which began at Pudding Lane in Billingsgate, and was fanned generally westwards through the tinder-dry city. It was probably on the third day of the fire, 4 September 1666, that Silver Street went up in flames. The former Mountjoy house was one of an estimated 13,000 properties razed in the conflagration.

A Restoration house arose in its place. A survey of the period shows this property having a frontage of 63 feet along Silver Street and the same going up Monkwell Street - this may or may not give us the dimensions of the original house.
³
In the mid-nineteenth century there was a public house on the site, the Coopers’ Arms. By the end of the century almost all the houses of Silver Street had been replaced by Victorian warehouses and ‘manufactories’, but the pub remained. There is a photograph of it in around 1910, taken by or for Charles William Wallace: a tall, grimy-looking building on four floors (see Plate 7). A signboard on the corner offers Meux Original London Stout, draught and bottled; handwritten signs at the doorway promise Teas and Dinners. A fire hydrant stands at the kerb. The scene has the dingy look of Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ (1917) -

The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots.

The address of the pub was No. 13 Silver Street - though there were no street-numbers in Shakespeare’s day.
⁴

That the house does not survive is unremarkable. Because of the Fire, the centre of London is almost devoid of Elizabethan and Jacobean houses. But we are still further from the physical reality of the house because Silver Street itself no longer exists. It disappeared in the second great cataclysm to hit the area - the London Blitz. A German raid on the night of 29 December 1940 reduced the entire area to rubble. During three hours the bombers dropped an estimated 130 tons of high explosives and 600 incendiary bombs on the city: a whole tract between Aldersgate and Moorgate stations to the north and Cheapside to the south was burnt out. An atmospheric pencil-and-wash drawing by Dennis Flanders shows the devastation, looking north to St Giles, Cripplegate, with the debris of Silver Street in the foreground (see Plate 8).