The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

  LEAR: Give the word.

  EDGAR: Sweet marjoram.

  LEAR: Pass. (4.5.92-4)

  Our foster-nurse of nature is repose

  The which he lacks. That to provoke in him

  Are many simples [herbs] operative, whose power

  Will close the eye of anguish. (4.3.12-15)

  Shakespeare’s own knowledge of herbs is acute: a countryman’s knowledge. It has been shown that Iago’s herbicultural metaphor in Othello - ‘our bodies are our gardens’, in which we may ‘plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many’ (1.3.320-26) - makes perfectly good sense in terms of contemporary gardening practice.25

  Many other livery companies had their headquarters round here - this is one of the features of the neighbourhood which contributes to an idea of its respectability. Just off Monkwell Street by the walls was Bowyers’ Hall. Nearby were Curriers’ Hall (they ‘curried’ or drubbed leather), and Plasterers’ Hall (formerly the site of Pinners’ Hall), and Brewers’ Hall on Addle Street. Further south, towards Cheapside, stood Haberdashers’ Hall, Embroiderers’ Hall and the most opulent of all, Goldsmiths’ Hall.

  Goldsmiths - the epitome of flashy Jacobean success - were plentiful in the area. There was at least one, William Pierson, living on Silver Street itself. He leased his house from Thomas Savage of Addle Street, also a goldsmith - and a man known to Shakespeare, as he was one of the sureties of the land-lease for the Globe theatre.26 Another goldsmith on or near Silver Street was Henry Bannister, probably a relative of John Banister the surgeon. This Bannister was also a ‘broker’ or moneylender, as was John Wolfall, a skinner by trade, whose extortionate dealings resulted in a Star Chamber suit in 1593, in which he is described as ‘of Silver Street’. Both of them employed a shady character called Nicholas Skeres as a tout to wind in ‘young gents’ in need of cash. Conman, spy and sometime employee of the Earl of Essex, Skeres has a dubious place in literary history - he was one of the companions of Christopher Marlowe on the night he was killed.27

  Continuing up Monkwell Street, you passed on your right a neat row of alms-houses. Thus Stow: ‘On the said east side of Monkeswell street be proper Almeshouses, 12 in number, founded by Sir Ambrose Nicholas.’ Accommodated there, rent-free, were a dozen ‘poore and aged’ people, ‘having each of them seven pence the week, and once the year each of them five sackes of charcoales, and one quarter of a hundreth of faggots, of his gift forever’. Occupants are designated ‘almsman’, ‘almswidow’, etc, in the St Olave’s registers. The charitable founder, Sir Ambrose Nicholas, a salter by trade, served as Lord Mayor in 1575-6. He died a couple of years later, so Shakespeare would not have known him, but he certainly knew his son, Daniel Nicholas (born about 1560).28 This was the friend of Stephen Belott, who testified in 1612 that he had visited Shakespeare ‘to understand the truth’ about the disputed dowry.

  At the top of the street, close to the city gate, was a former chapel or ‘hermitage’, St James-by-the-Wall. It was now converted into tenements, one of which housed a private school run by one Thomas Speght. Near by was an old well, formerly belonging to the hermitage. Stow suggests this as the origin of the name Monkwell or Monkswell Street but it seems he is wrong. The earliest records of the street, from the twelfth century, call it ‘Mukewelle’ or ‘Mogwelle’ Street. The first syllable is probably a family or clan name. Thus the rougher-sounding Muggle Street - as used by the apprentice William Eaton in his deposition, and also found on the Agas map - is more correct.

  Immediately outside the gate was the extramural parish of St Giles, Cripplegate - the tall-towered church still stands, despite the efforts of fire and bombs, and can be seen clearly from the site of Silver Street. In this parish there were writers living at one time or another - Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and Shakespeare’s future collaborator George Wilkins. Here too lived an actor who appears in the St Giles registers as ‘Edward Shakespeere, player’, but who is more probably the dramatist’s younger brother, Edmund. This was in 1607, the occasion the burial of an illegitimate child. Sixteen years younger than Shakespeare, it seems he had followed his big brother into the glamorous but uncertain world of the London theatres.29 Also near by, in the parish of St Mary Aldermanbury east of Wood Street, lived two of Shakespeare’s closest colleagues in the King’s Men - John Heminges and Henry Condell, the future editors of the First Folio. A monument in the former churchyard notes that Heminges lived in the parish ‘for upward of 42 years’, and Condell for over thirty; between them they had twenty-one children baptized and ten buried at the church, where both served as churchwardens.30

  Thus there were fellow-writers and actors living in the vicinity, though none, it seems, living in St Olave’s itself. Other than Shakespeare, Silver Street’s only literary resident was a publisher, Thomas Nelson, who is described on a title-page of 1592 as ‘dwelling in Silver streete, neere to the signe of the Red Crosse’. Nelson also turned his hand to writing, mostly ballads and other topical verse, and so is a minor harbinger of Shakespeare’s presence. That book of 1592, a pamphlet by Shakespeare’s rival Robert Greene, is his last known venture as a publisher, and he was probably one of the two Thomas Nelsons buried at St Olave’s in 1594.31 It seems the street was free of writers - a fractious trade - when Shakespeare took his lodgings here.

  Turning eastwards up Silver Street towards the busy thoroughfare of Wood Street you would pass the house of Dr Giffard - he was either the Mountjoys’ neighbour, or possibly next door but one. He is referred to respectfully in the registers as ‘Master John Giffard, doctor of physic’. He was a Wiltshire man of about the same age as Shakespeare; his relationship to the troublesome Giffords of late Elizabethan politics - the spy Gilbert Gifford, the Catholic exile Dr William Gifford, the courtier and adventurer George Gifford - is not proven. He studied at New College, Oxford, and was licensed by the Royal College of Physicians in 1596. Like his neighbour Richard Palmer, Dr Giffard was a respected practitioner, and on 5 November 1612 we find the pair of them in august consultation at the bedside of Henry, Prince of Wales. The cordial they administered to him had no effect, for the Prince died the following day.32

  Next door to Dr Giffard’s house was Dudley Court, of which I have already given some account from Ralph Treswell’s survey of it. The date of that survey is c. 1612, thus around the time of the Belott-Mountjoy litigation, but the tenant in the main part of the house, John Cowndley or Cownley, was living there at least ten years earlier and may have been known to Shakespeare. His first wife, Joan, died in the plague summer of 1603, but the following spring he was at the altar again. His wedding to Elizabeth Greenham was on 19 April 1604; their daughter Elizabeth was baptized exactly nine months later, on 20 January 1605. These are the rhythms of parish life within a radius of yards around Shakespeare’s rooms on Silver Street.

  Behind Dudley Court, entered via a passageway from Wood Street, was a tavern and wine-shop called the Talbot.33 As far as the evidence remains this was the nearest watering-hole to the Mountjoys’ house. It is Shakespeare’s local. He is more famously associated with the Mermaid on Bread Street - the evidence is anecdotal, but it is plausible he was among the ‘sireniacall fraternitie’ of wits and poets who met there, among them Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont and Thomas Coryate; and plausible also that the William Johnson who was one of Shakespeare’s sureties when he purchased the Blackfriars Gatehouse in 1613 was the man of that name who ran the Mermaid. The Talbot was not a literary club, just a run-of-the-mill tavern, which may at times be a considerable advantage. The host there was one Francis Wright. He rented the building from the Clothworkers’ Company. It had formerly been a ‘callendring house’ - a ‘calender’ was a weighted box placed on top of rollers, used to press finished cloth. This mechanism was powered by horses, so the building had stables, convenient for its new use as a tavern.

  Also close by was the Castle on Wood Street, but this was an inn rather than a tavern, and chiefly offere
d bed, board and stabling for travellers. There were many such in this neighbourhood at the edge of the city - the Axe in Aldermanbury, the Cock in Philip Lane, and most famously the Swan with Two Necks, which rambled almost the entire length of Lad Lane (now Gresham Street), an alley running east off Wood Street to the top of Milk Street. (The inn’s curious name is still found in English pubs. ‘Necks’ was originally ‘nicks’: it was a privilege of vintners to keep swans, which were otherwise the preserve of the sovereign, and to distinguish them their swans had their beaks marked with two nicks.) This Swan was in business by 1556 when the diarist Henry Machyn noted that a woman had drowned herself in a well near ‘the Swane with the ii Nekes at Mylke Street end’. Around the turn of the century the innkeeper was Richard Bolton. In 1598 he delivered a quarter load of hay to ‘the Muze’ (the Royal Mews): these were the ‘hay dues’ levied from inns. The Swan survived into the nineteenth century. An engraving of 1831 shows the enormous inn-yard, with entrances on three sides, and galleried accommodation on two upper floors.34

  These were carriers’ inns - they would later be called coaching inns, but there were as yet no regular stage-coach services. Coaches were essentially covered carts, unsprung, and were not much used for longer journeys (though increasingly fashionable as an urban vehicle). The common mode of travel was on horseback, preferably in the company of the carriers, who travelled the country delivering goods and letters. In 1 Henry IV there is a scene with two carriers, set in an inn-yard in Rochester (2.1). One has ‘a gammon of bacon and two razes [roots] of ginger to be delivered as far as Charing Cross’; the other carries live turkeys in his ‘pannier’. They are saddling up their horses, and waiting for certain gentlemen who ‘will along with company for they have great charge’ - in other words, travellers carrying valuables who will accompany the carriers for safety.

  These nearby inns suggest another aspect in favour of the area in Shakespeare’s mind - they are a boarding-point for travel and postage upcountry. Aubrey says, sensibly enough, that Shakespeare ‘was wont to goe into his native country once a yeare’, and here at Cripplegate he was well placed for the journey. The wherryman and rimester John Taylor, known as the ‘Water Poet’, tells us in his Carriers Cosmographie (1637) that the Castle Inn on Wood Street was the place to find carriers for (among other places) Worcester and Evesham.35 This run would also serve Stratford, branching off north after Oxford (where Shakespeare was reputed to stay at the Davenants’ tavern, the Crown).

  The well-known Stratford carrier was William Greenaway. It is likely Shakespeare had accompanied him on journeys to and from London, but he did so no longer, for Greenaway retired or died around 1601. On one occasion he carried up to Stratford a letter referring to Shakespeare. Its recipient replied, ‘Yr letter of the 25 October [1598] came to mi handes the laste of the same att night, per Grenwai, which imported that our countryman Mr Wm. Shak. would procure us money.’ In that case the letter took up to six days to reach its destination, but perhaps there were particular delays. The customary journey-time from London to Stratford (just under a hundred miles) was three days. For a horse for the journey Greenaway charged 5 shillings.36

  At Wood Street one met the noise and bustle of a large London street. I have referred to the modern London Wall as a ‘traffic-road’, and that is exactly what Jacobean Wood Street was. And together with the travellers’ inns and their transitory population were other associated amenities. The first turning left off Wood Street as you walked south was an alley called Love Lane - ‘so called of wantons’, Stow says, which presumably means sex was on sale there. (Another Love Lane, in Billingsgate, had a ‘stuehous’ or stew-house in it: though technically a steam-room, this invariably means a brothel.)37 It is a discreet presence, perhaps - this was not a red-light district like the notorious Clerkenwell, to the north of the city walls, or indeed Southwark across the river, where the theatres stood cheek by jowl with ‘bawdy houses’.

  Further down Wood Street, nearing the great commercial hub of Cheapside, stood another monument to the seamier side of Jacobean life - the Wood Street Counter, one of various prisons in the city known as Counters or Compters. Others were in Bread Street, Poultry, and Southwark. These were primarily (but not exclusively) debtors’ prisons; chronic insolvents could live there for years. A charitable bequest of 1592 provides for the relief of ‘poore Prisoners in the Hole or Twopenny Wardes’ of the Counters. These were the two lowest, darkest ‘wards’ or quarters of the prison. Posher prisoners were accommodated in relative comfort in the Master’s Ward and the Knights’ Ward.38 It was not as dire in underworld lore as the ‘Limboes’ in Newgate, or the ‘Pit’ and the ‘Little Ease’ at the Tower, but life in the Hole cannot have been pleasant. The one at the Poultry Counter was less than 20 feet square, and sometimes held more than forty inmates. The prisons were notorious for their smell - ‘To walk by the Counter gate’, says Falstaff in the Merry Wives, ‘is as hateful to me as the reek of a lime-kill’ (3.3.71-3). This stench contrasts in Shakespeare’s mind with the finest of London smells, mentioned by Falstaff a few lines earlier - ‘Bucklersbury in simple time’, Bucklersbury being a street full of grocers and apothecaries, and ‘simple time’ being spring and early summer when medicinal herbs (‘simples’) were on sale there.

  This was Shakespeare’s London habitat - or one of them - in the first years of King James. We find it a leafy neighbourhood, with secretive walled gardens. Birdsong mingles with the noises of trade, the aroma of medicinal herbs vies with chimney-smoke, cooking-smells and cesspits. We note the area’s association with doctors and surgeons and the macabre arts of anatomy. We scent prosperity - goldsmiths and usurers and grave-looking guildsmen on their way to the livery hall. Shakespeare lodges in a quiet, well-to-do street, an urban backwater, though as always in London you were not far from the more pungent life of the city: the taverns and inn-yards of Wood Street, the girls down Love Lane, the penury of the Hole at the Counter.

  And between the upper and lower echelons of the neighbourhood there is the middle rank of tradesmen, artisans and servants who perhaps give more acurately the tone of this rather middling London parish. We get a blueprint of trades carried on in the parish from the burial register. In the plague year of 1603 - whether by coincidence, or because of the sudden spate of mortalities - the vicar John Flint decided to add the extra information of a trade to the names of adult males being buried. Living (or at any rate dying) in the parish during the ten years 1603-12 were: Henry Sandon, minstrel; John Smith, porter at Barbers’ Hall; William Linby, painter; John Hely, weaver; Richard Lardinge, tailor; Anthony Spenser, cook; William Burton, needlemaker; William Lightwoode, scrivener; John Browne, scrivener; Nicholas Sharpe, porter; John Dodson, scrivener; Nicholas Cooke, pewterer; William Tailer, embroiderer; William Allen, jeweller; William Smith, salter; William Rieve, salter; Roger Turner, saddler; Richard Roberts, clothworker; and John Walker, porter.

  Of these forgotten people who lived in Shakespeare’s vicinity there is one who might be shown to have had some kind of interaction with him - the embroiderer William Tailer or Tailor. He may have known the Mountjoys in a professional context: their tire-business required a supply of embroidered work. On 1 December 1605 a daughter of Tailor’s was baptized at St Olave’s. She was christened Cordelia.39 The name - spelt thus in the register - was still unusual, and was more often found in the Celtic form, Cordula (or Cordell). The most famous Cordelia, of course, is the fictional one - the daughter of King Lear. The Tailors could not yet have seen or read the play: it was first performed in 1606, and first printed in 1608. Just possibly they got the name from the author himself, lodged around the corner and then at work on the play - asked him, sensibly enough, for a nice name for their new daughter, and received from him the beautiful gift of Cordelia.

  7

  ‘Houshould stuffe’

  One of the few compensations for the obliteration of Silver Street and its environs is that the area has been thoroughly studied by archaeologists. Most of t
he excavation took place in the 1950s, under the aegis of W. F. Grimes, Keeper of the London Museum. His work, done before the wholesale redevelopment of the area, has been supplemented by more recent, small-scale digs under Elizabeth Howe and David Lakin.40 Finds relating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are sparse, because this stratum was disturbed during the Victorian era, when cellars and basements were dug beneath existing properties. The sparseness of evidence may also relate to the social status of the area, for it suggests that most household rubbish was hauled away, rather than dumped in the yards behind properties - a desirable state of affairs for the Jacobean resident but disappointing to the later archaeologist.

  Two sites have been excavated just to the south of Silver Street, one between St Olave’s churchyard and Oat Lane, and the other near the churchyard of St Mary Staining.41 Most of the finds that belong at least broadly to our period are the usual relics - shards of pottery, including bowls, jugs, cups, cauldrons and cooking-pots. The pottery is of various kinds popular in the city - ‘post mediaeval redware’ (fired from clay with a high presence of iron, giving it a reddish-brown tinge), ‘Tudor green ware’, ‘Cheam whiteware’ and ‘coarse border ware’ originating from the Surrey-Hampshire border. But among these fragments were found some objects which offer a more intimate glimpse of daily life in this corner of Cripplegate - a knife with a spirally decorated bone handle; a tobacco pipe; a porringer; and, in the back-fill of a brick-lined pit, a complete seventeenth-century chamber-pot.