The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

  These roomy tradesmen’s houses were a popular choice for writers’ lodgings. We hear of Robert Greene living, and dying, in the house of a ‘cordwainer’ (leather-worker) in Dowgate; of Ben Jonson lodged ‘at a comb-maker’s shop about the Elephant and Castle’; of Matthew Roydon ‘making his abode’ at a shoemaker’s house in the Blackfriars; of Nashe billeted with the catchpenny printer John Danter in Hosier Lane.7 Shakespeare was typical, then - except that none of those hard-up writers owned houses elsewhere. They were lodgers by necessity, not for professional convenience. Shakespeare has an apartment in town, which is a different matter.

  We have a broad guideline to the value of the house. Mountjoy was not the owner of the property: he leased it. In 1612, according to Noel, he had recently renewed the lease: ‘He hath a time in his lease of the house wherein he dwelleth of some thirty years to come, which he renewed but lately.’ He also had the leasehold of another house, out in ‘Brainforde’ - Brentford in Middlesex - which he sub-let to tenants. (This second Mountjoy property will be of interest to us later: see Chapter 25.) We have a figure for the two leaseholds combined. Mountjoy ‘payeth yearly rent for those leases some seventeen pounds per annum’ (Christopher Weaver).8 We cannot know the proportioning of this figure, but might guess that the London house was worth more than the Brentford house (though, as I will show, Brentford could be an expensive area). Perhaps something between £10 and £12 per annum is a reasonable estimate for the house in Silver Street.

  This suggests a good-sized house but not a grand one. Speaking of Dutch immigrants in Billingsgate John Stow says, ‘In the chief and principall houses, they give twentie pound the yeare for a house latelie letten for foure marks [£2 13s 4d].’ The discrepancy sounds exaggerated but we gather that around the beginning of the seventeenth century the lease on a large London house could be as much as £20 a year.9 Stow’s comment reminds us that immigrants were often charged extortionate rents, so our estimated £10 to £12 rent for the Silver Street house may exaggerate its market value.

  The house was probably a timber-framed building. Freestone houses were a rarity in the city: in medieval times, says Stow, ‘the houses in London were builded in stone for defence of fire . . . but of later time for the winning of ground taken downe, and houses of timber set up in place’. Ground was won - in other words, space saved - because it was easier to build timber houses tall: five storeys were not uncommon. We see these houses in contemporary paintings and engravings, and we know them from many fine examples scattered around the country, in a style we generically call ‘Tudor’, though the black and white look they often have today is not authentic. The colours of a typical London street were softer - the silvery grey of untreated oak, the beiges and umbers of unpainted loam. Resting on a shallow foundation of brick and stone, the framework consisted of horizontal, load-bearing beams - the ‘sill beams’ at the base and the ‘bessamers’ above - into which upright and diagonal timbers were slotted. The bessamers had to be particularly strong to bear the weight of the overhanging jetties (or ‘jutties’) which projected out from the front of the house, giving it that stacked, teetering look. These were often a source of dispute: they cut out light from the narrow streets, they invaded others’ privacy, and they altered the ground-area on which house values were partly based. A larger upper-floor protrusion was the pentice or penthouse, a storage space with a sloping roof, as possibly seen on the house in the Agas map. Shops like Mountjoy’s often had one: in the Dekker- Webster comedy Westward Ho! (1607) we hear of ‘penthouses which commonly make the shop of a mercer or a linen-draper as dark as a room in Bedlam’ (1.1).

  The fabric of such a house can be broadly gauged from the tenancy conventions of the time. The tenant (or lessee, like Mountjoy) was responsible for repairing ‘stone, brick and tiling where need is’; for the upkeep of timbers, floorboards, glass windows and gutters; for providing planks for stable doors and ‘quarters for pentices’; and for ‘daubing of the walls with lathe, nail, loam and quarters whereas the walls be broken’. The tenant was also responsible for ‘cleansing of the sieges and withdraughts’ (cesspits and drains).10 The days of the flushing lavatory were far in the future, though a prototype was discussed in Sir John Harington’s half-serious, half-scurrilous Metamorphosis of Ajax, published in 1596 (Ajax = ‘a jakes’ = a privy). He exaggerates - but not by much - the particular stench of shared urban drains:

  What with the fish-water coming from the kitchens, blood & garbage of fowl, washing of dishes, and the excrements of the other houses, and all these in moist weather stirred a little with some small stream of water . . . these thus meeting together make such a quintessence of a stink that if Paracelsus were alive, his art could not devise to extract a stronger.11

  An account survives of the emptying of a cesspit in Elizabethan London. The owner of the house paid 32 shillings for two ‘night-men’ and their crew; sixteen barrels of night-soil were carted away. Other costs were bread, cheese and beer for the workers; bricks and mortar to make good the ‘funnels’ or downpipes from the privy; and threepence for ‘juniper to refresh the pit’.12

  By good fortune we have a more detailed insight into the structure and measurements of one of those ‘fair’ houses on Silver Street. It was called Dudley Court. It stood on the north side of the street a couple of doors down from the Mountjoys’ place. It had once belonged to the priory of Holy Trinity in Aldgate, but in the mid-sixteenth century it was owned by John Dudley of Hackney, who held the tasty-sounding post of Sergeant of the Pastry to Queen Elizabeth. In 1599 Dudley Court was purchased by Christ’s Hospital - considerable landowners in London - and a few years later it was surveyed for them by Ralph Treswell. His precise and elegant plan of it survives, along with many others he did, in the Hospital’s ‘Evidence Books’.13

  The house was by then split into three tenements - one large and two small - but is still recognizably a single house. It is set back from the street, with entry via a courtyard. The house is on three floors, with an irregular frontage of about 60 feet; part of the frontage is ‘jettied’, with projections of 2 feet on the first floor and a few inches on the second. In the main part of the house there are four rooms on the ground floor, including a kitchen and a ‘parlour’. The two largest rooms, at the back of the house, are about 15 feet by 15; they have windows looking on to a narrow garden, 44 by 30 feet. There is a well in a corner of the yard.

  The dimensions may be similar to those of the Mountjoys’ house along the street, though the lay-out would be different, as Dudley Court was purely residential. Many of the houses surveyed by Treswell have a front room or rooms designated ‘shoppe’, opening straight on to the street, and this would probably be the case at the Mountjoys’.

  This being a ground-plan there is no view of the upper floors, but they are described in an accompanying note. Across the whole property there are eight upstairs rooms. Two are designated as ‘garrets’ - low-ceilinged rooms up under the eaves of the house. Garrets are often associated with poverty-stricken poets, but we are unlikely to find Mr Shakespeare accommodated in one at the Mountjoys’. He could afford better. The biggest upstairs room in Dudley Court, ‘a chamber over the parlour with a chimney’, measures about 20 by 17 feet. This is not a bad-sized room but in general the Treswell surveys confirm what one knows from surviving Jacobean houses - that rooms were on the whole small, and ceilings low, and window-light not overly generous due to the expense of glass, not to mention the extra heating incurred.

  Upstairs also, not far from the main bedroom, is the privy or ‘house of office’. They are often found upstairs in the houses surveyed by Treswell: the fall was better. They were narrow closets, seldom more than 5 by 7 feet. If the literary jokes are to be believed, old pamphlets and manuscripts met an ignominious end here.14 It was unusual for a household to have more than one privy, so it is likely Shakespeare shared this facility with the family.

  6

  The neighbourhood

  What would you have seen, and who migh
t you have met, if you were walking in and around Silver Street on a day in 1604?

  Standing at the front door of the Mountjoys’ house there were three directions in which you might go (that is one of the desirable things about corner-houses). To your right, across the other side of Muggle or Monkwell Street, was the last western stretch of Silver Street, before it veered off southwards into Noble Street. Here stood the grandest house in the immediate neighbourhood, Windsor House, formerly known as Neville’s Inn. Stow calls it a ‘great house builded of stone and timber’. The Neville family, Earls of Westmorland, had owned it in medieval times, before it passed to the Windsor family by marriage. Henry, 5th Lord Windsor was the incumbent in Shakespeare’s day - he features as Lord ‘Windser’ or ‘Windzer’ in the parish register. His wife Ann was a Wiltshire squire’s daughter. Baptisms of some of their children are recorded, but it is noted they were ‘baptized in his house’, rather than at the church: there was probably a small chapel there. In June 1600 an infant daughter, Grizzel - the contemporary form of Griselda - was buried at the church. Lord Windsor does not seem to have done anything very memorable. In 1600 an amorous clergyman’s wife, Alice Blague, had hopes of becoming his mistress. In 1601 he was one of the peers who sat at the arraignment of the Earl of Essex. On his death in 1605, aged about forty-three, Parliament ordered the sale of some of his lands to pay his debts. Windsor House was probably sold, for it seems it was later owned by Sir David Fowles.15

  To the south of Windsor House was a large walled garden. At the top of Noble Street, says Stow, ‘ye come to the stone wall which incloseth a garden plot before the wall of the city’. He gives its length as ‘95 elles’ - an ell (an old English word for the arm, still discernible in ‘elbow’) was about 45 inches, so Lord Windsor’s garden was over a hundred yards long. This stone wall is shown in the Agas map. Looking west down Silver Street from the Mountjoys’ front door it would seem you were in a cul-de-sac. You were not, because you could turn south down Noble Street, but that is how it would seem, as your eye met His Lordship’s garden wall built across the line of the street.

  We touch here an older part of the street’s story, for this wall was only the latest of the obstructions blocking the western end of the street. Excavations have shown that in Saxon and early medieval times Silver Street led out through the city walls: a minor gateway between the proper city gates of Cripplegate and Aldersgate. Around the twelfth century this exit was progressively blocked off. It was first made impassable to wagons, then later to pedestrians.16 The street became quieter, no longer a thoroughfare. It was after this closure, probably, that it became known as Silver Street - the earliest record of the name, ‘Selvernstrate’, dates from 1279. Before that it was merely the western continuation of Addle Street, the derivation of which is from Anglo-Saxon adel, ‘cow dung’. It was a drover’s road, a short-cut leading west to the great cattle-market of Smithfield. With the blocking of the exit through the walls this usage desisted, making the street more desirable to residents and craftsmen, among them the metal-workers who give the street its new name, and whose presence in the medieval period is evident from archaeological remains. This is the first rise in the respectability of the street that was once just a stretch of Dung Street.

  Across the street from the Mountjoys’ house stood the small churchyard of St Olave’s.17 Its area was about 330 square yards, considerably less than Lord Windsor’s garden across the way. The combination of the two makes the immediate prospect from the Mountjoys’ front door a pleasantly leafy one. The church itself stood at the western end of the churchyard, abutting on to Noble Street. The dedication, sometimes miswritten ‘Olive’s’, is to the Norwegian king Olaf II, or Olaf Haraldsson, who fought in England against the Danes in the early eleventh century, and was canonized for converting Norway to Christianity. This suggests a Viking origin for the church, though the earliest record of it is twelfth century. There were other St Olaves in the city (on Hart Street and Bread Street, and in the Jewry) and another across the river in Southwark.

  Stow passes the church with scarcely a glance - ‘the parish church of St Olave in Silver Streete, a small thing and without any noteworthy monuments’. This insignificance tends to be confirmed by the Agas map, which does not specify the church at all (most of the city churches are represented with a tower, and some are identified by a keyed numeral). The church was perhaps in poor repair when Shakespeare knew it, for in 1609 it was demolished and rebuilt.18 But though it was small and scruffy, St Olave’s possessed a peal of bells: there are records of payments for ringing the bells on Queen Elizabeth’s birthday.

  Shakespeare would have worshipped there - a statement which says nothing about his religious feelings or lack of them: regular attendance at church was compulsory, and shirkers were fined. The minister was John Flint, a Cambridge graduate a few years younger than Shakespeare. His college, Christ’s, had a strong tinge of Puritanism, and his reputation there as a ‘great preacher’ suggests he was of that tendency. It was Flint who officiated at the wedding of Mary Mountjoy, and at the burial of her mother, and it is his fluent hand which records these events in the parish register, on the cover of which he wrote shortly after his arrival:

  St Olave in Sillver streete

  The Register of this Parishe, truely

  transcripte, or copied out by me John

  fflinte minister and Parson thereof

  in the yeare of our L. God 159319

  Opposite the churchyard the narrower Monkwell Street ran northwards towards Cripplegate. You might turn this way if you were in search of fresh air and leisure activities beyond the walls, or indeed if you were headed for the playhouses and pleasure-dens of Shoreditch, north-east across Moorfields (though Shakespeare’s own connection with the northern playhouses was now past).

  On the left-hand side, Monkwell Street was dominated by the hall and gardens of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company. In medieval times the barber and the surgeon (or ‘chirurgeon’) were one and the same - a man skilled with a razor and other cutting accessories. Gradually the occupations separated, as surgery became more ambitious in the wake of Renaissance anatomical study, but barbers continued to perform minor surgical and dental operations, particularly ‘blood-letting’ or phlebotomy. The red and white barber’s pole, still seen outside old-fashioned hairdressers, refers to the blood and tourniquet of phlebotomy. Actual surgery, with little in the way of antiseptic or anaesthetic, was alarmingly hit-or-miss. Here is the procedure for removing a bladder-stone, as described by the diarist John Manningham in 1601:

  There is a seame in the passage of the yard [penis] neere the fundament, which the surgeons searche with a crooked instrument concaved at one end (called a catheter), whereinto they make incision and then grope for the stone with another toole which they call a duckes bill. Yf the stone be greater than may be drawne forth at the hole made by the seame, the partie dyes for it.20

  In Shakespeare’s day the Barbers’ Hall, as it was generally called, lay further east than its later manifestations (post-Fire and post-Blitz), and more or less fronted on to Monkwell Street. It consisted of a large single room, or hall, with a kitchen and other domestic offices for the serving of dinners. In 1605 the company bought up land behind the Hall, formerly let to Lord Windsor, and added a courtroom. The famous circular anatomy theatre next to the city walls, designed by Inigo Jones on the model of the teatro at Padua, was not built until the 1630s, but dissections were performed at the Hall long before that.21 A painting of about 1580 (see Plate 10) shows the Elizabethan surgeon John Banister delivering the ‘Visceral Lecture’ - one of four lectures held at the Hall every year, open to freemen of the Company and their guests. He points to a skeleton, beside which there is an open medical text; in front of him there is a body undergoing dissection. Banister himself lived on Silver Street, as he tells us in the preface of his Antidotarie Chyrurgicall (1589), but as he died in 1599 he was not co-resident with Shakespeare.22 The burials of bodies used for dissection - traditionally
the cadavers of executed criminals - are recorded in the St Olave’s register: Henry Stanley, ‘anatomized by the chirurgeons’; Katherine Whackter, ‘anatomised by Dr Pallmer’, and so on. One thinks of King Lear:

  Let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart ... (3.6.34-5)

  Let me have surgeons!

  I am cut to th’ brains . . . (4.5.188-9)

  The Dr Pallmer who dissected the body of Katherine Whackter on 17 June 1600 is Richard Palmer, a leading physician of the day. A former Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, he was licensed by the Royal College of Physicians in 1593, elected a Fellow in 1597, and Censor in 1599 (and several times thereafter). ln a Treswell survey of 1612 he is shown as the owner of a property on Monkwell Street adjoining the Barber-Surgeons’ lands; it was perhaps here that these anatomies were performed. In that year Dr Palmer was one of the physicians attending the dying Prince Henry, along with his neighbour Dr John Giffard, of whom more below. He died in 1625, his will describing him as a resident of St Olave’s parish.23

  There was another fine garden at Barbers’ Hall. It is first mentioned in the Company annals in 1555, when the clerk was given an allowance for maintaining it. A later entry refers to purchases of a hundred sweet briars for a hedge, together with strawberries, rosemary, violets and vines. The latter were probably for producing verjuice (juice from unripe grapes for pickling and cooking) rather than wine.

  The Barber-Surgeons’ garden is of special interest because of its connection with the great horticulturalist John Gerard. He was a surgeon by training, and held a number of official positions in the Company, culminating in the Mastership in 1607, but he was better known for his green fingers than for his dexterity with catheter and duck-bill. He had designed gardens for the great Lord Burghley, and his own garden in Holborn, off Chancery Lane, was a lush acreage of ‘trees, fruits and plants both indigenous and exotic’. In 1597 he published his famous Herball, which remains a landmark in botanical description and classification. It is illustrated with over 1,800 woodcuts, though many of them were plagiarized from an earlier continental work.24 Gerard was also curator of the ‘physic garden’ of medicinal plants at the Royal College of Physicians (similar to the Apothecaries’ Garden still extant in Chelsea), and in the late 1590s he was urging the Barber-Surgeons to plant a similar garden at the Hall. On 2 November 1602 a ‘committee for Mr Gerrard’s garden’ had a meeting. It is not clear what was planted, or where, but it is likely that when Shakespeare lived here there was a physic garden designed by Gerard round the corner from him. Again it is Lear that springs to mind.