The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

  These sentences to sugar or to gall,

  Being strong on both sides, are equivocal. (1.3.216-17)

  To paraphrase prosaically - these sentences tend equally to sweetness or to bitterness, both of these qualities being powerfully present in them. The lines are spoken by Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, and have their own business within the dramatic moment, but extracted they serve as a kind of emblem or motto for Shakespeare’s tragicomedies.

  If the tragicomedies balance, more or less measure for measure, their helpings of sugar and gall, Timon of Athens is pure gall. It is the bleakest of all Shakespeare’s plays, and vies with Cymbeline (though for different reasons) as the least staged work of Shakespeare’s mature years. It dramatizes a story he found in Plutarch’s Lives, of a rich Athenian whose followers and flatterers deserted him when the money ran out, and who turned his back on the world and lived wild in the woods: ‘Timon misanthropos’. The play has some magnificent patches of poetry, but the overall tone is harsh.

  As it comes down to us - in the only contemporary text available, that of the 1623 Folio - Timon seems still in parts rough, unpolished, with loose ends ungathered. One reason for this irregularity is that the play was a collaboration. Shakespeare’s co-author was Thomas Middleton, a Londoner in his early twenties: a rising young star.46 He had begun as a poet in the satirical vein of Marston. His Microcynicon (1599), with its ‘six Snarling Satyres’, had been among the ‘unseemly’ works called in by the Archbishop’s censors in 1599. In the new century he began to work in the theatre, initially for the Admiral’s Men, chief rivals of Shakespeare’s company. Henslowe records payment to him in May 1602 for his contribution to a lost historical drama (‘Caesar’s Fall’, also called ‘Two Shapes’), a patchwork collaboration that also involved Dekker, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday and the young John Webster. Then comes the wonderful series of brash, smutty ‘city comedies’ that made his name - The Phoenix was performed at court at Christmas 1603, followed over the next few years by The Family of Love, A Trick to Catch the Old One, A Mad World, my Masters, The Puritan (also called The Widow of Watling Street), Your Five Gallants and others, mostly written for the children’s companies. Jonson called Middleton a ‘base fellow’, but the list of authors he disliked was a long one. Versatile, prolific and full of promise, Middleton was a prize catch for the King’s Men.

  Shakespeare was no stranger to collaboration, but he did not, one suspects, take naturally to it, and as far as the evidence remains his partnership with Middleton was the first for about a decade. Early in his career he had tacked and botched with other writers: the hand of Nashe has been discerned in the Henry VI plays, and that of Peele in Titus Andronicus. In around 1593-4 he contributed to ‘Sir Thomas More’, a play which survives only in manuscript and was perhaps never performed.47 But once his career gets going he is remarkably solo. Over at the Rose - on the evidence of Henslowe’s accounts and diaries - it was the norm for a play to be written by anything from two to five writers. Few of the collaborations listed by Henslowe made it into print - we have lost such plays as Ben Jonson’s Hot Anger Soon Cooled, written with Henry Chettle - but among the younger writers in the new century collaborations were frequently printed as such - Eastward Ho! by Chapman, Jonson and Marston; Westward Ho! and Northward Ho! by Dekker and Webster; The Honest Whore and The Roaring Girl by Dekker and Middleton; and many works by Beaumont and Fletcher. It seems to have become a selling point - two or three talents (often very different kinds of talent) for the price of one.

  Though Timon cannot be called an unqualified success, the passages now assigned to Middleton - which include almost all of Act 3 - are powerfully written, and it seems his connection with the King’s Men prospered. In about 1606 he turned out two fine tragedies for them: The Revenger’s Tragedy (published anonymously in 1607) and the short, topical A Yorkshire Tragedy (published in 1608). The title-page of the latter credits the play to ‘W. Shakspeare’.48 Similarly the first edition of Middleton’s comedy The Puritan (1607) is attributed to ‘W.S.’. These are opportunistic title-pages, marketing ploys, but they express accurately a new literary twinning. It is possible Shakespeare contributed some passages to the Yorkshire Tragedy.

  Shakespeare may have been edged into this collaboration by professional pressure. He may have felt (or others in the company may have felt) that he needed the input of younger, sharper-edged writers like Middleton and, a little later, George Wilkins, who was sharp-edged in an altogether more dangerous way.

  These are, in broad outline, the literary aspects of Shakespeare on Silver Street - the ‘bitter and complex music’ of the tragicomedies; the flawed collaboration with Middleton; the impending mental tempest of King Lear. It is a period of transition, of experiment, of paradox and contradiction: ‘a mingled yarn, good and ill together’ (All’s Well, 4.3.67).

  How far this can be related to Shakespeare’s frame of mind during this period is, of course, a matter of debate. It was once fashionable to speak of Shakespeare’s output in the early seventeenth century as the product of a period of depression or illness, or what we might now call a mid-life crisis. This was energetically challenged in a famous lecture by C. J. Sisson, ‘The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare’ (1934). Sisson attacked the idea that Shakespeare wrote the tragicomedies as ‘a sufferer from pessimism and disillusionment, a victim of seventeenth century blues’. It simply does not follow, he thought, any more than ‘the proposition that tragic writing in a great creative writer is evidence of a tragic mood or personal unhappiness’. On the contrary, as Coleridge observed, ‘When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry.’ This is a corrective view, and the critical pendulum has continued to swing away from such personal interpretation of the plays (though the great modern maverick of Shakespeare studies, John Berryman, had a point when he said he was looking forward to ‘Professor Sisson’s studies of the mythical sorrows of St Paul, Villon, Dostoevsky, Father [Gerard Manley] Hopkins and Hart Crane’ - a point drastically underscored by Berryman’s own later suicide).49

  It is true that biographical readings of the plays are dangerous, unregulated, prone to sentimentalization. It is absurd to cherry-pick passages of poetry, written over more than two decades, and infer from them a consistent personal attitude. Lines belong in a dramatic context, and in the psychological context of the character who utters them, and cannot be taken to reflect Shakespeare’s views. But perhaps the scepticism has swung too far in the direction of a bloodless text. Biography and literature do not fit together like Lego bricks, but they are not totally divorced either. Even E. M. W. Tillyard, a fine-toothed textual analyst who thought biographical interpretation ‘superfluous’, concludes an examination of the poetic unevenness of All’s Well by saying, ‘Some of these couplets are doing much what his couplets usually do; others in their strangeness point to an unusual mood in him when he wrote the play.’50

  I am interested in recreating the physical and cultural circumstances of a period of Shakespeare’s life. The plays he was writing at the time are part of those circumstances. They are on his desk; they are on his mind; and it is permissible, within precise chronological boundaries, to draw links between them and the milieu in which he was living when he wrote them.

  If Shakespeare had written - say - a play about a young Frenchman being pressed reluctantly into marriage, and if it could be shown that he wrote the play at a time when he was himself pressing a young Frenchman into marriage, then one might think it worth asking whether there was a connection between the fictional nuptials on stage and the actual ones he was involved in. That is in fact the case - the play is All’s Well - and it would be perverse to ignore these connections in the name of academic correctness. I would not call Stephen Belott a ‘model’ for Bertram, Count Roussillon, and I would not want to suggest that Shakespeare was ‘inspired’ by the small dramas of the Mountjoy household when he was writing of the troubled betrothal of Bertram and Helena. But the analogies are there. The ‘unconsidered trifles’ of domes
tic life are snapped up by the dramatist. They go into the mix, enriching it with secret flavours of particularity which are, for the most part, unknown to us.

  4

  Shakespeare in London

  The story of Shakespeare and the Mountjoys is a small chapter in the larger and longer story of Shakespeare in London. He was not actually a Londoner, of course. He was born, married and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon, and this provincial market-town remained, in most senses of the word, his home. His parents, wife, children and most of his siblings and cousins lived there. He inherited, as an adult, the house where he had spent his childhood. In 1598 he bought his own rather grand house on the edge of town, New Place, where he spent more and more time in his later years, and where he died, at the age of fifty-two, in 1616. In these fundamental ways Shakespeare was - precisely as he says in his deposition - ‘of Stratford-upon-Avon in the countie of Warwickshire’.

  But, for all this, the fact remains that the ‘sweet swan of Avon’51 spent a lot more of his adult life in London than he did in Stratford. It was his place of business, the theatrical and literary capital to which he was drawn and in which he struggled to success and eminence. He was there out of professional necessity, though this need not imply he was there unwillingly. He was, like so many other Londoners, an incomer: part of a demographic rip-tide which saw the city double its population during the sixteenth century, reaching about 200,000 at the beginning of James’s reign. Many of his literary contemporaries were also of provincial stock - Christopher Marlowe and John Lyly from Canterbury, Thomas Nashe from Lowestoft, Robert Greene from Norwich, George Chapman from Hitchin, Francis Beaumont from Leicestershire, and so on. Even Sir Walter Ralegh, the acme of courtly sophistication, ‘spake broad Devonshire to his dying day’.52

  ‘London, thou art the floure of cities all,’ ran the old ditty, though the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe had a different angle: ‘London, thou art the seeded garden of sinne, the sea that sucks in all the scummy chanels of the realme.’53 Perhaps both views are true - by the end of the sixteenth century London was one of the largest, liveliest and most sophisticated cities in Europe, but it was also overcrowded, squalid, corrupt, crime-ridden and plague-infested. A rich whiff of danger and pleasure blows through those narrow wood-built streets, a human profusion which for the provincial newcomer must have been intoxicating. A sense of the city’s sheer verve plays into the wonderful ‘low-life’ strata of Shakespeare’s drama - Falstaff and his cronies drinking at East Cheap, the brothel-world of Nell Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, Pompey Bum and Mistress Overdone.

  It is not known when Shakespeare first came to the city. The last record of him as a young man in Stratford is the baptism of his twins, Hamnet and Judith, on 2 February 1585 (it is not per se a record of him, but one assumes he was there). He was then twenty years old. The first records of him in London date from mid-1592 - the appearance of ‘harey the vi’ (almost certainly the play we now call Henry VI Part 1) at the Rose theatre; the attack on him in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit.54 Between these sightings lie the legendary ‘Lost Years’, a documentary desert seven years wide in which the early biographers placed unsubstantiated oases of activity - he had been a ‘schoolmaster in the country’ (John Aubrey) or a ‘lawyer’s clerk’ (Edmund Malone) - and which more recent commentators have interpreted in terms of the clandestine movements of a young Catholic.55 Any or all of these might be true, but a good part of the so-called lost years must be located in London. The whole tenor of Greene’s attack on him in 1592 shows he had by then acquired some success both as an actor and as a writer of plays, and was thus, in Greene’s view, an ‘upstart crow beautified with our feathers’. (‘Our’ refers to the clique of university-educated writers which also included Marlowe, Nashe, George Peele and Thomas Watson: the ‘University Wits’, as they are called.) The only place Shakespeare could have achieved this success, or notoriety, was in London, and it is generally agreed he was living there at least by the end of the 1580s.

  At the close of his career he retired back to Stratford, but again the dates are vague. The Tempest, performed in 1611, has a valedictory note - ‘Our revels now are ended’ - but he continued to contribute work for the stage. Henry VIII, premiered at the Globe in the early summer of 1613, was a collaboration with John Fletcher, but the editors of the First Folio considered it (unlike Pericles) to have enough Shakespeare in it to merit inclusion in the canon. But two later ventures with Fletcher - The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio - had slighter contributions and were not included. It was during an early performance of Henry VIII that the Globe was burnt down, after a spark from a cannonade ignited the thatched roof. The razing of the great playhouse he had built and nurtured makes the day of the fire, 25 July 1613, a symbolic date for Shakespeare’s retirement from the city - though only a symbolic one, for he is spotted briefly in London in November 1614, when a Stratford acquaintance writes: ‘My cosen Shakspeare commyng yesterday to towne I went to see him howe he did.’56

  If these dates are broadly accurate, Shakespeare spent about twenty-five years living and working in London, and it is with Shakespeare in - if not quite of - London that this book is concerned.

  We know something of Shakespeare’s residences in London before he took up his lodgings on Silver Street. According to John Aubrey, Shakespeare had ‘lived in Shoreditch’. Aubrey is not always reliable, but he was an expert sniffer-out of information, and his informant was in this case a good one - an aged actor- manager, William Beeston, whose father Christopher had acted alongside Shakespeare in the 1590s. In a manuscript note Aubrey writes, ‘W. Shakespeare - Q [quaere, ask] Mr Beeston, who knows most of him’. He interviewed him in the summer of 1681, a year before Beeston’s death. Perhaps he came too late, for he got just a few scraps of reminiscence about Shakespeare, one of which was that he had lived in Shoreditch.57

  The likelihood is that Shoreditch was an early Shakespeare residence in London, since it was here that the first purpose-built playhouses were located - the Theatre, built in 1576 by James Burbage, father of the actor Richard Burbage; and the Curtain. These predated the Bankside playhouses south of the river.

  In the late 1580s, when Shakespeare was establishing himself in the theatre world, Shoreditch was little more than a shanty-town, a rampant overspill of ‘poor cottages’ and ‘alleys backward’ spreading through the fields and marshes and dissolved-monastery gardens outside the city walls. But it was also, because of that connection with the theatres, the Bohemian haunt of Elizabethan London. Along its dirt roads lived some of the greatest literary and theatrical talents of the day. Thomas Watson and Christopher Marlowe had lodgings in Norton Folgate just south of Shoreditch, and in 1589 they are glimpsed with weapons drawn in an ‘affray’ on nearby Hog Lane. The comedian Richard Tarlton lived his last days on Holywell Street (now Shoreditch High Street) with a prostitute named Em Ball. The red-bearded pamphleteer Robert Greene, author of that bitter sortie against Shakespeare, was another habitu’. His mistress, whom Gabriel Harvey describes as a ‘sorry ragged quean’, was also named Ball - her brother was a cutpurse known on the street as ‘Cutting’ Ball. She was probably related to Tarlton’s mistress Em Ball, and may have been the same woman. Their illegitimate son Fortunatus - little Lucky Greene - died in infancy and was buried in the parish church of St Leonard’s. Shakespeare’s future collaborator George Wilkins may also have spent his early years in the area: his father was buried at St Leonard’s in 1603. Actors and their families abound in the church register - Burbages, Brownes and indeed Beestons.58 Aubrey’s interview with William Beeston actually took place in Shoreditch, at Beeston’s house ‘on Hog Lane, six doores down’.

  By the mid-1590s Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate. He is still close to the northern theatres but now inside the city gates, within the pale. We find him there in the lay subsidy rolls, which record tax assessments and payments, parish by parish, throughout the country. The subsidies were levies by the Crown, usually collecte
d in three annual instalments. The rate of taxation was controlled by Parliament. Property-owners were taxed on the value of their ‘lands’; others, at a lower rate, on their ‘goods’. The partially surviving London rolls, preserved in the National Archives, are an invaluable resource - the nearest we have to an Elizabethan telephone directory - and I will refer to them often in the course of this book.

  The earliest record of Shakespeare in Bishopsgate is in October 1596. He was assessed on goods valued at £5, on which he owed tax of 5 shillings.59 This immediately tells us something about his circumstances. First, his appearance in the subsidy rolls indicates that he is a ‘householder’ in the parish. This does not mean he owned a house there, which is unlikely, but suggests he had a long-term lease or tenancy agreement on a property. The assessment of £5 is a middling one. Among his fellow-parishioners, Sir John Spenser was assessed on lands worth £300, and another on £150, but the majority were assessed at £10, £5 or £3. The latter is the lowest assessment, though ‘strangers’ - in other words, immigrants - who fell below this threshold had to pay a poll tax of 4d per head. Comments in the literature of the day suggest that assessments of goods were as much an impression as a documentation of wealth. A character in John Lyly’s Mother Bomby (1585) says, ‘He that had a cup of red wine to his oysters was hoisted in the Queen’s subsidy books’ (2.5); and in the anonymous collection Jack of Dover, a man is rated at ‘five pound more than he was before’ because of his wife’s fondness for wearing expensive stockings.60 These exaggerate the matter, but we can infer that Mr Shakespeare was doing reasonably well for himself by the mid-1590s.

  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.