The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

The depositions of Daniel Nicholas have an interesting twist, for they supply a kind of secondary recording of Shakespeare’s comments on the matter. It seems Nicholas visited Shakespeare at Belott’s request, presumably within the context of the impending lawsuit. As there is evidence that the litigation began some while before the case came to court, this visit might be around 1610 or so. Belott, says Nicholas,

  did request him this deponent to go with his wife to Shakespeare, to understand the truth how much and what the defendant did promise to bestow on his daughter in marriage with him the plaintiff, who did so. And asking Shakespeare thereof, he answered that he [Mountjoy] promised if the plaintiff would marry with Mary his only daughter, he would by his promise, as he [Shakespeare] remembered, give the plaintiff with her in marriage about the sum of fifty pounds in money and certain household stuff.

  One notes a discrepancy here. When he was asked by Daniel Nicholas what dowry Mountjoy had promised, Shakespeare said it was about £50; but when he was asked the same question in court, under oath, he said he could not remember the figure. Does this tell us something? Was his memory - that miraculously agile and sensitive instrument - beginning to fail? The vagueness of his statements in court has been interpreted this way, but it seems that his memory was, in this instance, more selective than defective. It is an anomaly, a little fault-line in Shakespeare’s testimony, and I will return to it later.

  Nicholas also adds to the small store of Shakespearean utterances we have gleaned from his own deposition. ‘Shakespeare told this deponent’, Nicholas says, ‘that the defendant told him that if the plaintiff . . . did not marry with Marye and she with the plaintiff she should never coste him the defendant her father a groat.’ Given the lapse of time, those last words are more likely to be Shakespeare’s paraphrase than Mountjoy’s exact words in 1604. So here again, among the tiresome exactitudes of legal-speak, nestles an authentic Shakespeare phrasing: ‘She should never cost him a groat.’ As we might say, ‘She wouldn’t get a penny out of him.’

  We might have had another quotation, courtesy of Belott’s apprentice William Eaton, but all that remains is a curtailed half-sentence: ‘And Mr Shakespeare tould the plaintiff . . .’. For whatever reason, the court considered this inadmissible. The words were immediately crossed out, and replaced with the formulaic conclusion, ‘And more he cannot depose.’ Whatever it was that Shakespeare had said to Stephen Belott remains off the record.

  Finally, on 30 June 1612, the court handed down its judgment. Or rather, it failed to reach a judgment, but referred the ‘matter of varyance’ to the French Church, of which both parties were - nominally, at least - members:

  It is by His Majesty’s said counsel of this Court, in presence of the said parties and of counsel learned on both sides, ordered by and with the full consent of the said parties, that the same matter shall be referred to the hearing, ordering and final determination of the reverend & grave overseers and elders of the French Church in London.

  The ledgers of the French Church, which was then on Threadneedle Street and is now in Soho Square, have some fragmentary records of the case.11 On 30 July four representatives of the Church were assigned to argue the matter, two for each of the disputants. But of more interest - to the prying biographer, at least - is a disparaging note at the end of the entry: ‘Tous 2 père & gendre débauchez’ (‘Both the father and the son-in-law are debauched’). One suspects the Calvinist elders of the French Church had a pretty inclusive idea of ‘debauchery’, but in the case of Mountjoy more explicit charges are found in later entries:

  Montioye fut censuré d’avoir eu 2 bastardes de sa servante . . . Montioye, ayant souvent esté exhorté d’estre pieux, de sa vie dereglée & desborde’e . . . [et] ayant esté tiré au Magistrat pour ses paillardises & adulte‘res . . . [est] suspendu publiquement pour ses scandales.

  According to this, Mountjoy had been censured by the Church elders for having fathered two bastards by his serving-maid; had been often exhorted to piety because of his irregular and outlandish lifestyle; had been hauled before the magistrate for his lewd acts and adulteries; and had been publicly suspended from the Church on account of these scandals. We may not be as aghast as the elders were - Mountjoy was by this stage a widower, and cohabiting with his maid does not seem very heinous. Nonetheless, these perceived sexual irregularities - ‘paillardises & adultères’ - are noted as we embark on our enquiry into the Silver Street milieu.

  The case was adjudicated at a meeting of the consistoire or Church council in December. They found in favour of Stephen Belott, but the sum they ordered Mountjoy to pay was only 20 nobles (£6 13s 4d), scarcely a tenth of what Belott claimed was owed to him. Thus the long-awaited judgment managed to satisfy neither party. Some months later it is noted that Mountjoy has still not paid up. The case peters out; nothing much is resolved.

  The events narrated in the Belott-Mountjoy suit are part of the story I want to tell, but they are not the story itself. Rather, these documents are a way into the little world of Silver Street, and to Shakespeare’s living presence within it. For Charles William Wallace, they revealed Shakespeare as ‘a man among men’ (and indeed women). For Samuel Schoenbaum, the Belott-Mountjoy suit is unique because alone among the Shakespeare records it ‘shows him living amidst the raw materials for domestic comedy’. 12 These are splendid invitations, and it is curious that no one has fully responded to them. The broader story that emerges from the case has not been told; this unexpected little window into Shakespeare’s life remains to be opened.

  The Mountjoys themselves are a tantalizing quarry. Since Wallace there have been some additions to our knowledge of them - important new material was published by Leslie Hotson in 1941 and by A. L. Rowse in 197313 - but there is more to come out. The court case itself has details about them which have been ignored, and others have lain unnoticed in parish registers, subsidy rolls, probate records and medical casebooks. The evidence remains fragmentary, but we begin to know the Mountjoys a little better - and one of them in particular, whose personality has begun faintly to glow as my researches have progressed.

  Other interesting characters hover at the periphery of the story. There is Belott’s stepfather, the trumpeter Humphrey Fludd: a professional entertainer, a man on the outer fringes of the royal court, and sounding in that brief synopsis not unlike Shakespeare himself. There is Henry Wood of Swan Alley, whose business as a cloth merchant brings him into professional contact with the Mountjoys, but whose relationship with Marie goes a good deal further than that.

  And then there is the difficult figure of George Wilkins, another of the witnesses in the case. In his deposition he calls himself a ‘victualler’, which is true up to a point. He would hardly describe himself as a ‘brothel-keeper’, though this would convey more precisely the nature of his establishment; ‘pimp’ would also be correct. He was frequently in trouble with the law, some of the charges involving acts of violence against prostitutes. But there is a further twist to Wilkins: he was also a writer. Shakespeare knew this dangerous and rather unpleasant character - indeed it is almost certain Wilkins wrote most of the opening two acts of Pericles.14 Written in c. 1607-8, Pericles was notably absent from the great collection of Shakespeare’s plays, the ‘First Folio’ of 1623, probably because of Wilkins’s extensive contribution; it was first included in the Third Folio of 1664. In this book I explore Shakespeare’s relations with this underworld figure. Though his literary career was brief and minor, Wilkins is a writer of considerable bite, as best seen in his play The Miseries of Enforced Marriage , loosely based on a real-life murder case, and performed by Shakespeare’s company in c. 1606.

  The first law of forensic science, otherwise known as Locard’s Exchange Principle, is that ‘every contact leaves traces’.15 I cannot call this book a ‘forensic’ study - the word refers to criminal investigations - but it is animated by a similar idea of proximity: of lives that touch, and the traces of evidence they leave. To find out more about the Mountjoys and their
world has seemed to me worthwhile in itself, but is primarily a means to find out more about their lodger, the famous but so often obscure Mr Shakespeare, with whom they were in casual daily contact. His deposition is a beginning: a few curt sentences of reminiscence. From there the paperchase leads on, through the dark streets and alleys of Jacobean London, to arrive at a certain house where a light burns dimly in an upstairs window. After 400 years the traces are faint, but he is there.

  2

  Turning forty

  Of the house where Shakespeare lived, and the people he knew there, I will give a full account in later chapters, but to begin with it is important to know when he was there - to place this slice of his life in a precise chronological context.

  Though the deposition dates from 1612, the testimony it gives takes us back to the early years of the century. On his own evidence Shakespeare first knew Christopher Mountjoy in about 1602. There may be some imprecision in the recollection, but without evidence to the contrary this is the earliest possible date - the terminus post quem - for his presence in the Mountjoys’ house. He may have moved in to the house in that year, or in 1603. The latter was a disrupted year: the death of Queen Elizabeth, a savage outbreak of plague, the closure of the theatres. The last two are reasons - and there are others - for thinking Shakespeare was not in London at all during the summer of 1603, so we are more likely to find him on Silver Street in the later months of the year. One should not, anyway, think of his presence in the house as continuous. This was rented accommodation; he came and went as he wished.

  We can be sure, at least, that he was lodging there in mid-1604. The wedding of Stephen and Mary took place in November that year. It was some time before that, obviously, that Shakespeare ‘persuaded’ them to marry. Probably, as I will show, it was not very long before, a few weeks or a couple of months at the most. At that point - as Joan Johnson tells us - Mr Shakespeare ‘laye in the house’, and indeed his status as the lodger, in a sort of provisional intimacy with the family, seems intrinsic to the part he plays.

  How long after this he remained with the Mountjoys is difficult to say. The court case offers no hint, and we know little of Shakespeare’s whereabouts in the later stages of his London career. The death of Marie Mountjoy in the autumn of 1606 may have made the arrangement less congenial to him. His collaboration with George Wilkins in 1607 may be the fruit of an earlier connection within the Mountjoy ambit, but does not presuppose he was then still living on Silver Street. There is one bit of evidence which suggests Shakespeare was not there in the later years of the decade. It is a document dated 6 April 1609, which lists him among the ‘inhabitants’ of Southwark being assessed for ‘weekely paiment towards the relief of the poore’.16 This seems to show that Shakespeare was living in Southwark by 1609, though it is possible he features on the list as a representative of the Globe theatre, which was located there.

  The exact termini of Shakespeare’s tenancy must remain vague, but within that vagueness there is a point of chronological certainty centred on the year 1604, when he is identifiably present in the house. And while the ups and downs of the Belott-Mountjoy marriage may be ‘raw materials for domestic comedy’, one does not require Mr Shakespeare to hurry in immediately prior to the marriage negotiations, and rush out again as soon as the church bells chime at St Olave’s, so it seems legitimate to express the known period of his tenancy as c. 1603-5. It is this period which is the focus of my book - the years when Shakespeare approached, and passed, the age of forty.17

  Shakespeare in 1603 was a man at the peak of his profession. He had written many of the plays by which he is known today - Romeo and Juliet and Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, the Falstaff comedies, Julius Caesar, Hamlet. The latter, staged in about 1601, had plumbed its hero’s psyche with a subtlety and complexity never before seen on the Elizabethan stage. It was a watershed, and he was now in that ambivalent stage after the production of a masterpiece - his reputation assured by it, but the way forward from it unmapped. The period which follows Hamlet is characterized by those awkward, paradoxical, noirish works often called the ‘problem plays’, two of which - Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well - belong to the Silver Street years.

  Uncertainty was anyway the keynote of his profession - his profession, that is, as a man of the theatre: not just a writer of plays, but an actor and company ‘sharer’ or shareholder. The theatre companies operated in a crowded, competitive market; some prospered but many went to the wall. They were prey to the hostility of officialdom, which saw the playhouses as a civic nuisance - a potential for riotous assembly, for prostitution and pickpocketing, for the transmission of infectious diseases and (no less dangerous) of dissident ideas. Shakespeare’s company was the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, founded in 1594, under the patronage of the Queen’s Chamberlain and first cousin, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon. By the end of the decade they were established as London’s leading troupe, performing at the newly built Globe theatre. But the road was never smooth - patrons died, theatres were summarily closed, irate grandees protested at impertinences real or imagined. A performance of Richard II at the Globe in February 1601 earned the ire of the Queen herself. The play was already controversial - its deposition scene (‘deposition’ in the other sense of toppling a ruler) does not appear in early editions - and it was even more so when requested by followers of the Earl of Essex, and played on the eve of Essex’s futile uprising; Shakespeare’s colleague Augustine Phillips was summoned before the Privy Council to explain matters.18 Two years later Ben Jonson was up before the Council after his Sejanus - in which Shakespeare acted - was accused of ‘popery and treason’. Jonson was twice imprisoned for overstepping the mark of political comment. On the second occasion, in 1605, ‘the report was’ that he and his fellow-authors ‘would have their ears cut, and noses’.19 Controversy was the element they lived in, and the shadow of punishment hung unpredictably over the playhouse.

  For the company’s chief playwright - ‘our bending author’, as he styles himself in the epilogue to Henry V - professional worries become also a literary pressure. The tides of theatrical fashion changed quickly. There were younger authors coming up: Jonson, John Marston, Thomas Middleton and others, bringing a new brash mood, satirical and salacious. And there was competition from the boys’ companies - the Children of St Paul’s, the Children of the Chapel Royal, and so on - those ‘little eyasses’, as Hamlet calls them, who ‘so berattle the common stage’. (An ‘eyass’ is a fledgling hawk, but there is doubtless an indecorous pun about young boys’ orifices.) Rivalry between the play-companies spilt over into a fad of abusive mud-slinging between authors (the ‘War of the Theatres’) in which it seems Shakespeare participated. In the gossipy Cambridge comedy The Return from Parnassus (Part 2, c. 1602), actors playing the real-life actors Kemp and Burbage discuss this. ‘O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow,’ says Kemp, ‘but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.’ From the context, this literary laxative would be a caricature of Jonson onstage. Perhaps it is big, morose Ajax in Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602) - ‘churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant, a man in whom nature hath so crowded humours that his valour is crushed into folly’ (1.2.21- 3) - though there are other candidates.20 These were the rough imperatives of theatrical fashion: to be aloof from it all (as he is sometimes said to have been) was not really an option.

  In this context of professional uncertainty and cut-throat rivalry, the year 1603 brought Shakespeare a new promise of stability. On 19 May, just twelve days after King James’s arrival in London from Scotland, letters patent were issued licensing the Chamberlain’s Men as ‘His Majesty’s Players’. Nine actors are named, including Shakespeare, Burbage, John Heminges, Henry Condell, Augustine Phillips, William Sly and the comic actor Robert Armin. They are authorized ‘to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing comedies, tragedies, histories, enterludes, morals, pastorals,
stage-plays and such others like . . . as well for the recreating of our loving subjects as for our solace and pleasure when we shall think good to see them for our pleasure’.21 Henceforth Shakespeare’s company was called the King’s Men. This translation was timely, for just a few days earlier the company’s current patron - George Carey, 2nd Lord Hunsdon - had been forced to resign as Lord Chamberlain due to ill-health; by September he was dead, according to the rumours from syphilis.22

  The company’s new status assured them of prestige and a measure of royal protection - indeed it made them, nominally at least, members of the royal household. In James’s coronation procession Shakespeare and his fellows are ranked as Grooms of the Chamber, though the listing of them under the subsection ‘Fawkeners [falconers] &c’ indicates their not very grand status.23 They also had the promise of court performances (‘when we shall think good to see them’). These they would need, for on the same day their letters patent were issued the theatres were closed down due to the plague. The court decamped hurriedly from London, and the King’s Men went on the road. Their first known performance under their new royal name was at Bath; they received 30 shillings. The beginning is anti-climactic but the company’s new solidity is real, and it will last.

  We see in this brief résumé something of what Shakespeare would mean to the Mountjoys - a man pre-eminent in the theatrical world, with which they were themselves probably connected; a man with a minor foothold in the new court of King James, to which they doubtless aspired. It is possible that the appearance of ‘Marie Mountjoy, tyrewoman’ in the royal accounts of 1604-5 (see Plate 23) is a direct result of her contact with Shakespeare. She supplied the new Queen - James’s Danish-born wife, Anne or Anna - with head-tires, and perhaps other items, for which she received payments totalling £59.24 One of the payments is dated 17 November 1604, just two days before the wedding of Mary and Stephen which Shakespeare had helped to bring about.