Also much thumbed is his copy of Plutarch’s Lives, in Sir Thomas North’s vigorous English version: the first edition was 1579, but perhaps the edition in Shakespeare’s chest was that of 1595, published by his old Stratford friend Richard Field. He first used North’s Plutarch extensively for Julius Caesar, which opened the new Globe theatre in 1599. The Life of Mark Antony was of particular interest, and as he read it for Caesar other stories were lit on the back burner - not just Antony and Cleopatra but also Timon, whose life is sketched there en passant. Another trusty was Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), the mother-lode of Shakespeare’s history plays, not much consulted of late but soon to be of use again in its account of the reign of an eleventh-century Scottish king, Macbeth.
Two books published in 1603 are soon to be found on his desk. One is an expos’ of supposed exorcisms performed by Catholic priests, unsnappily titled A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures . . . under the pretence of casting out devils, practised by Edmunds alias Weston a Jesuit, and divers Romish priests his wicked associates. Its author, Samuel Harsnett, was rector of St Margaret’s on New Fish Street Hill, and chaplain to the Bishop of London (and thereby involved in the licensing of books for the press). Some think Shakespeare’s interest in it relates to his own involvement in the clandestine Catholic world of the Midlands, but I would relate it more to authorial opportunism. He found in Harsnett’s tract an arcane and archaic language of religious mania, which proved decisive in one of his strangest and greatest stage-creations, the possessed beggar ‘Poor Tom’ in King Lear. Many of the demons and familiars invoked by Tom - Flibbertigibbet, Smulkin, Modo, Mahu, Hoppedance, Obidicut and the rest - come straight from the pages of Harsnett.48
Also published in 1603 was an influential book which reflects and perhaps partly inspires the questioning temper of the problem plays or tragicomedies. This was the handsome folio edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, translated from the French by John Florio. The Montaigne motto, ‘Que scays-je’ - ‘What do I know?’, as distinct, perhaps, from ‘What do I erroneously assume that I know?’ - echoes through these plays, which interrogate and indeed ‘assay’ (the original sense of the Montaignian ‘essai’) the philosophical and ethical assumptions of the age. Isabella’s words in Measure are an attenuated echo of this motto - ‘Go to your bosom, / Knock there, and ask thy heart what it doth know’ (2.2.137-8).
Shakespeare doubtless knew the translator Florio, twelve years his senior, Italian by blood but English born - a brilliant linguist, a prickly and proud figure. They may have met in the circle of the young Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated two poems in 1593-4. Florio was a tutor to the Earl in the early 1590s. It is sometimes said that the pedant Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost is a caricature of Florio, done for the enjoyment of the Southampton set - this overstates the case, but it is true Holofernes quotes from Florio’s book of Italian proverbs, the Gardine of Recreations (1591).49 At any rate, Florio is a man Shakespeare knows - for a writer in Jacobean London there is this dimension of acquaintance in his reading. The literary circuit was small and crowded; they knew one another’s voices.
His reading of Montaigne seeps identifiably into the Silver Street tragicomedies. ‘To embrace all the rules of our life into one’, writes Montaigne, ‘is at all times to will, and not to will, one same thing.’ This is the shuttling, contradictory mentality of Measure for Measure, in which characters find themselves ‘at war ’twixt will and will not’. And when Montaigne observes that ‘Man all in all is but a botching and party-coloured work,’ and that ‘the best good I have hath some vicious taint’, we hear a foretaste of the famous line in All’s Well, ‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.’ The plays’ shifts of tone and uncertainties of message reflect Montaigne’s drastic disclaimer, ‘I have nothing to say, entirely, simply and with solidity of myself, without confusion, disorder, blending, mingling.’50
Shakespeare read Florio’s Montaigne, and may well have owned a copy, but if he did it is not the copy now in the British Library which bears on the verso of the endpaper the signature ‘Willm Shakspere’. This is now held to be a forgery, though a competent one, probably dating from the late eighteenth century.51
Some other books which might be seen in his room on Silver Street include Richard Knolles’s History of the Turkes (1603), used in Othello for detail about the Turkish invasion of Cyprus; George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (1578) and Cinthio’s Epitia (1583), both sources of Measure for Measure; and an unspecified Latin edition of the works of Lucian containing the story of ‘Timon the Misanthrope’, originally written in Greek in the second century AD.
The chief narrative source of All’s Well was a story from Boccaccio’s Decameron. Shakespeare used an English translation of the story, found in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566), a popular collection of tales. But linguistic traces suggest that for this French-set play Shakespeare also made use of a French version of the Decameron by Antoine de Ma¸on, published in 1545 and frequently reprinted.52 The textual evidence is not conclusive, but Shakespeare’s presence in a French household makes it plausible - perhaps it was a book owned by one of the Mountjoys.
Amid this small jumble of books one might note also a pair of publications, dated 1603 and 1604 - not de-luxe editions like the Montaigne folio, but rather shoddily printed quartos. The earlier of the two title-pages reads: ‘THE / Tragicall Historie of / HAMLET / Prince of Denmarke / By William Shake-speare. / As it hath beene diverse times acted by his Highnesse ser- / vants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two U- / niversities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where.’ This book, ‘printed for N.L [Nicholas Ling] and Iohn Trundell’, is the first edition of Hamlet. It is nowadays generally known as the ‘bad quarto’ (or to bibliographers, ‘Q1’). It was swiftly supplanted by the ‘good quarto’ of 1604 (‘Q2’), which is described on the title-page as ‘Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie’. The latter is the play we know: the text in the First Folio (‘F1’) is based on it. The earlier quarto has some interesting variations, but is generally a corrupt or impoverished text, drained of much of the complex poetry and quick philosophical skirmishing which are the hallmarks of Hamlet. Thus Q1’s version of the Prince’s best-known soliloquy begins:
To be or not to be, I there’s the point.
To die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes . . .
To the casual reader this may look like gibberish. It is not - ‘I’ was a common spelling of ‘aye’ - but it is clearly an inferior version of the soliloquy. The language is blunted (‘there it goes’ instead of ‘there’s the rub’) and the speech is drastically truncated by the loss of seven famous lines (which should come immediately after the first), beginning ‘Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer . . .’, and ending with that wonderful synopsis of the human condition - ‘The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to’ (3.1.58-65).
Of course, to say that Q1 has truncated a speech which ‘should’ be longer and richer is already to make assumptions about the relation of the two quartos. The standard hypothesis is that Q1 is a ‘memorial reconstruction’ by an actor who had performed in the play (possibly the one playing Marcellus). An alternative theory is that it represents an early version of the play by Shakespeare himself, with Q2 a later rewrite. There certainly was an earlier Hamlet (sometimes called, with a professorial twinkle, the ‘Ur-Hamlet’). It is referred to punningly by Nashe as early as 1589 - ‘he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches’ - and a performance was seen by the author Thomas Lodge at one of the Shoreditch playhouses some time before 1596.53
These textual mysteries make it hard to know the status of the 1603 quarto in Shakespeare’s mind, but that he was irritated by its publication seems inevitable. Whether the product of an amnesiac actor or of Shakespeare�
��s own rougher skills in his prentice-years, the text was purloined and the publication of it unauthorized. It is one of various piracies of Shakespeare playscripts - plays such as Romeo and Juliet and The Merry Wives first appeared in corrupt editions. The supplanting of such texts was one of the guiding editorial principles of the First Folio: ‘Where before you were abus’d with diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious imposters that expos’d [published] them, even those are now offered to your view cur’d and perfect in their limbes.’
This indignation at rapacious publishers was likely shared by Shakespeare himself. There are two reported instances of him in a temper with someone, and in each case the cause is a publication. The first, already mentioned, is the spat with Henry Chettle in 1592, further to the slurs against ‘Shakescene’ in Greene’s Groatsworth. The second followed the publication of a poetry collection, The Passionate Pilgrim, in 1599. The title-page announced it as ‘by W. Shakespeare’, though only five of the poems in it were his, two of them previously unpublished sonnets and all of them printed without permission. The publisher was William Jaggard. The existence of Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’ had been mentioned in print the previous year, and this may have sharpened Jaggard’s appetite. Shakespeare’s reaction is recorded by Thomas Heywood in 1612, when a new edition of The Passionate Pilgrim was published, still ‘by’ Shakespeare - ‘The author I know much offended with Mr Jaggard that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name’.54
Publishers, said the poet Michael Drayton, ‘are a company of base knaves whom I both scorn and kick at’, and perhaps there were times when Shakespeare thought the same.55 Ironically, it was the piratical Mr Jaggard who was one of the prime movers of the posthumous First Folio, and we might think he has thereby made amends for his earlier ‘boldness’ with Shakespeare’s name. The Folio includes eighteen previously unpublished plays - among them masterpieces like Macbeth, Twelfth Night and The Tempest - which might otherwise have been lost for ever.
PART THREE
The Mountjoys
HELENA: Which is the Frenchman?
DIANA: He - that with the plume.
All’s Well that Ends Well, 3.5.77-8
9
Early years
We have an idea of Shakespeare’s habitat in these years in Cripplegate - the furnished room, the businesslike street, the neighbours whose faces he knew, the mansions split up into tenements, the little parish church with its peal of bells - but we have so far only a passing acquaintance with the most important figures in this landscape: the family he lived with. What is their story, and how does it come to intersect with Shakespeare’s?
Of the Mountjoys’ origins there is only fragmentary information. We know where Christopher Mountjoy was born but not when, and we know when Marie Mountjoy was born but not where.
In his act of ‘denization’ or naturalization (of which more later) Christopher is described as ‘a subject of the French King and born in the town of Cressey’.1 ‘Cressey’ is presumably the English clerk’s spelling of Cr’cy. There is more than one Cr’cy in France, but most probably Mountjoy was from Cr’cy-en-Ponthieu. This is certainly the Cr’cy that Englishmen had heard of, being the site of the famous battle of 26 August 1346, when Edward III’s English archers routed the French army during the Hundred Years War. It lies in Picardie, in north-western France, in the fertile flat-lands of the lower Somme, which flows into the English Channel about 12 miles west of it. Mountjoy calls it a ‘town’ (or perhaps this is the clerk’s phrasing) but today it is little more than a large village, population about 1,500.
No record of the birth of Christophe Montjoi or Montjoie is to be found in the registres d’état civil for Cr’cy-en-Ponthieu, but the sixteenth-century registers are by no means complete.2 For reasons I will give a little later it is likely he was born in the mid-1550s or early 1560s.
Various larger market-towns and trading centres were within easy reach of Cr’cy. The nearest was Abbeville, 10 miles away, but the most important one was Amiens, the regional capital of Picardie, famed for its Gothic cathedral (the largest in France) and its medieval water-gardens, Les Hortillonnages. Amiens was a centre for clothworking, part of that densely populated belt of northern France and Flanders which produced high-quality textiles: wool, cotton, silk and linen. In the 1593 ‘Return of Strangers’, a detailed listing of foreigners in London, there are twenty-five immigrants from Amiens, living in fourteen households. All of those whose employment is given are clothworkers - the majority are silk-weavers; there are also two ‘taffety-weavers’, a silk-winder and a silk-twister, a dyer and a bobbin-maker. Another nearby town was Arras, famous for those embroidered hangings. From here came more silk-weavers, two wool-combers and a feltmaker.3
Christopher Mountjoy’s future trade of tiremaking is grounded in the textile industry of his native Picardie. He doubtless served an apprenticeship, though we do not know where or in what. The creation of a head-tire involved various craft skills, among them silk-twisting, threadmaking, wire-drawing and embroidery. It also involved wigmaking, and I note the name Montois or Montoyes - possibly a variation of Montjoie - in a seventeenth-century list of maˆtres perruquiers (master-wigmakers) in Amiens.4
The name could be of Norman origin, connected with the town of Montjoie in La Manche. But William Arthur’s Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names suggests a grander origin - that it may have been adopted by a French crusader, recalling a mountain near Jerusalem, which (according to that mysterious medieval globetrotter Sir John Mandeville) ‘men clepen Mount-Joye, for it gevethe joye to pilgrymes hertes, because that there men seen first Jerusalem’. Arthur also suggests a military connection, for in old French dictionaries ‘mont-joie’ is defined as ‘a heap of stones made by a French army, as a monument of victory’. Another authority tells us that ‘Montjoy St Denis!’ was ‘the French king’s war cry’.5 Related to this, perhaps, is the fact that Montjoi(e) was from medieval times the title of the Chief Herald of France. These military and heraldic associations may suggest that Christopher Mountjoy was a descendant or offshoot of a family of substance.
In Shakespeare’s Henry V the French herald is indeed called ‘Montjoy’:
A tucket sounds. Montjoy approaches.
MONTJOY: You know me by my habit [uniform].
king: Well then, I know thee: what shall I know of thee?
king: What is thy name? I know thy quality.
MONTJOY: Montjoy.
king: Thou dost thy office fairly. (3.6.111-12, 135-7)
Some biographers have wondered about this, but as there is a purely historical reason for the name, it is hard to argue any in-joke reference to Christopher Mountjoy. There is also Shakespeare’s own statement that he first knew Mountjoy in about 1602, which makes it unlikely, prima facie, that he referred to him in a play performed three years earlier. On the other hand, it is possible to know of someone without having actually met them. It is in general worth remembering that Shakespeare’s statement in the Court of Requests refers only to his acquaintance with Christopher. He was not asked for, and did not volunteer, any information about how long he had known other members of the household - Marie Mountjoy, for instance.
One should not discount the presence of private allusions and in-jokes in Shakespeare. Plays like Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merry Wives and Twelfth Night, all written for specific courtly or aristocratic audiences, are full of them. In this case it is just about possible that the ‘Montjoy’ of Henry V has some ulterior reference to the real Mr Mountjoy of Silver Street, but I doubt it. If it does, nothing much is made of it, though there was perhaps a titter at the Globe when Henry says to him, ‘Thou dost thy office fairly’ - a joke at the herald’s expense, in that to do one’s ‘office’ meant to go to the privy, often called the ‘house of office’.
We know nothing of the origins of Marie Mountjoy. She may have been Christopher’s ch
ildhood sweetheart in Picardie, or they may have met in London, in which case she could be from another part of France entirely. We do not even know for sure she was born in France - she could have been the daughter of French immigrants already settled in England.
What we do have is her approximate date of birth. According to her own statement, made to the astrologer-physician Simon Forman, she was thirty years old in November 1597. This useful precision is rendered less precise by her statement to the same doctor two weeks later that she was twenty-nine.6 According to the laws of arithmetic at least one of these statements is false, and that one of them is false makes me wonder ungallantly if both might be slight understatements. The older of her two ages would mean she was born in 1567 or late 1566, and perhaps we might think the latter year more likely. She was thus two or three years younger than Shakespeare, and was in her mid-thirties when he became her lodger. It is worth bearing this in mind. In the biographies she is almost invariably called ‘Mrs Mountjoy’, which is correct and convenient, but which tends - especially in conjunction with the faintly comic overtones of ‘landlady’ - to give an older image of her than is right.
New evidence, shortly to be presented, shows that the Mountjoys were a married couple by 1582. Marie was then only fifteen or sixteen, so the marriage must have been quite recent (brides under fifteen are unusual at this time, though the legal minimum age was twelve).7 They were by then living in London, so it is possible they were married there. The marriage registers of the French Church in London might have enlightened us, but they are lost - the earliest that survive date from 1600.
The approximate date of their marriage helps to define the otherwise unknown age of Christopher Mountjoy. As he was married by 1582 he must by then have completed his apprenticeship. The conventional age to be ‘freed’ of apprenticeship was twenty-one - this is variable, but I would say eighteen is a practical minimum age for a married craftsman. Mountjoy was born, therefore, no later than c. 1564, the same year as Shakespeare. He was probably older than this, but he cannot have been that much older, as his brother Noel was born in about 1582.8 Allowing their mother a maximum child-bearing span of twenty-five years (and assuming Noel was not a half-brother, in which case the argument collapses) we could say speculatively that Christopher was born some time between c. 1557 and c. 1564. These are porous arguments, but I have the feeling that, like Marie, Christopher is probably rather younger than the inferred picture of him given in Shakespeare biographies. There is no real warrant for Schoenbaum calling him an ‘old man’ at the time of the lawsuit in 1612.
The Lodger Shakespeare Page 10
