The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

  Part of what makes Forman’s casebooks so vivid is the fact that they were written down live, on the spot, currente calamo. He asks, he listens, he observes, he writes. The words he writes are often formulaic - thus when a woman ‘supposeth herself with child’, a frequent formula, the phrase is Forman’s not hers - but nonetheless these entries in his casebooks are redolent of the physical presence of Marie Mountjoy as she explains to him the small dramas of her life and her body: the lost rings, the freckled wench, the swimming in her head, the ever-present possibility of pregnancy.

  And then there are the revelations about her love-life. Beneath Forman’s brusque account of the missing valuables appears the name Henry Wood - a name volunteered by Marie. Was she visiting him on that September evening, when she lost those things from her purse ‘as she went’? It is not unlikely, for Wood himself soon makes an appearance in Forman’s casebooks, and one of his visits evokes a tremor of romance (see Plate 17) -

  Mr Wood p [pro] Mari M

  Vtrum gerit Amorem erga

  alterum noc [nocte] 1598 the

  20 march62

  There is no doubt that this ‘Mari M’ is Marie Mountjoy. Mr Wood comes to Forman after dark (nocte, ‘at night’), and he asks ‘whether she bears love towards the other man’ - a question which immediately suggests his own romantic involvement with her, and his fear of a rival. One perceives the hint of a narrative. In December 1597 Marie fears she is pregnant, which Forman seems to confirm - she is ten or eleven weeks gone. He also predicts she will miscarry, and as there is no evidence of any child born to Marie in 1598 we might think he was right. A few months later her lover Henry is fretting that she no longer cares for him. Perhaps the alteration in her feelings was precipitated by this narrow escape from the personal and practical difficulties of an illicit pregnancy - possibly not her first. This is speculation, but that Marie had some kind of affair with Wood seems fairly certain from the wording of his query.

  Henry Wood, as we learn from other entries in Forman’s casebooks - which concern affairs of business rather than the heart - was a ‘mercer’, by definition a general trader but in Elizabethan usage a trader in cloth. He was born on 18 August 1566, a punctilious piece of information (Forman usually only gives a querent’s age in years) which perhaps reflects a punctiliousness of Mr Wood’s. He was thus about the same age as Marie. He was himself married, so if there was an affair between them it was doubly duplicitous. The Woods lived down Swan Alley, a little sidestreet off Coleman Street too insignificant to appear on the Agas map or in Stow’s Survay. Coleman Street itself, running up from Cheapside to Moorgate, was an important street of well-to-do merchants’ houses. It could be reached from Marie’s house in about ten minutes, walking east along Addle Street and across Aldermanbury.

  We learn a little of Henry Wood’s dealings in the import- export business. In early December 1597, while Marie worries about pregnancy, Wood sails to Amsterdam with two ‘hoys’ (small trading vessels), the Paradise and the Griffin. A few weeks later he is asking Forman if he will get a good price for his ‘Holland cloth’ in France. He also asks if he should buy a consignment of ‘bay salt’ (salt from the Bay of Biscay). In the summer of 1598 he has business problems: ‘It seemeth that his goods will be attached [confiscated].’ But perhaps the malaise is personal too - Forman divines, ‘Some great enemy will proffer him friendship but treachery will follow.’ Wood was a householder and a businessman, but not a very big fish: in the Coleman Street subsidy lists of 1599 he is assessed on goods valued at £3.63

  Sometimes it is Mrs Wood who visits Forman, anxious for Henry’s safety on his trips abroad. On one occasion, she fears he has been ‘taken by the Dunkirkers’ - pirates in the English Channel. Forman reassures: ‘They away shall arrive safe, so shall himself also, & let him take heed & look well, and he shall pass very swiftly within these 3 days.’ And then there is a further twist, as Mrs Wood comes to ask Forman if she should ‘keep shop’ with Marie Mountjoy. ‘They may join,’ he opines, ‘but take heed they trust not out their wares much, or they shall have loss.’ We can surmise that the shop would combine the cloths imported by Henry Wood with the couturier skills - and perhaps the upmarket clientele - of the Mountjoy workshop. The relationship between Henry and Marie is thus commercial as well as carnal. Mrs Wood discusses a partnership with Marie, apparently unaware of any backstairs intrigue between Marie and her husband. Marie is a deceiver in this, though of course her relationship with Henry may now be over.

  On the last page of Forman’s casebook for 1597 is another brief note about Marie Mountjoy (see Plate 18).64 The contents of the page are miscellaneous - fragments of information and gossip, non-astrological, generally mundane. There are five distinct chunks of writing; the first two, which fill up most of the page, are dated early January 1598. The others, more in the nature of jottings, are not necessarily the same date, but are likely to be before 20 February, when Forman began a new casebook.

  The note on Marie consists of three words, of which two are her name. Rowse comments: ‘A tantalizing marginal note reads: “Mary Mountjoy alained” - which means concealed.’ I am unconvinced by this reading. First, ‘alain’ is not a word recognized by any dictionary I have consulted, including the OED, which sails serenely from ‘alaik’ (an obsolete form of ‘alack’) to ‘alala’ (a Greek battle-cry). Second, the orthography does not support the reading. The word is hard to read because it is written in an oddly narrow, squashed-up script, and because much of it is a series of minims almost impossible to differentiate. In my view, what Forman wrote after Marie Mountjoy’s name is not the tantalizing but non-existent ‘alained’, but something rather more prosaic - her address. The word is ‘olaive’, referring to her parish of St Olave.65 Addresses feature in other memoranda on the page.

  Immediately below this is another line, almost certainly written at the same time, so in effect Forman has written a short list, as follows:

  mari Mountioy / olaive /

  madam Kitson yellow haire /

  This ‘Madam Kitson’ may be connected to the wealthy Catholic Sir Thomas Kitson. If so she is a relative of another woman found in conjunction with Marie in the casebooks - Lady Hunsdon, who was Sir Thomas Kitson’s niece. Sir Thomas and his wife Elizabeth lived in a stately pile in Suffolk, Hengrave Hall, but they were frequently in London. Their town-house was on Coleman Street, just round the corner from Marie’s lover and business partner Henry Wood. We see them in twin portraits by George Gower, commissioned in 1573 - he black bearded and high ruffed, she haughty and handsome with a tall plumed hat and a fur-collared gown. They were noted patrons of music, and had the madrigalist John Wilbye as their resident musician in Suffolk and London.66

  Was Elizabeth herself the ‘Madam Kitson’ of Forman’s note? As the wife of a knight she was correctly addressed as Lady Kitson, so Forman’s ‘Madam’ (= ‘My Lady’) would be appropriate. It would also have been the form naturally used by a Frenchwoman: ‘Madame’. But what about the ‘yellow’ hair? If Gower’s portrait of her is accurate, Lady Kitson’s hair was ginger or auburn, and by early 1598, when she was in her early fifties, she was most likely grey.

  But Forman’s jotting does not necessarily mean that Madam Kitson had yellow hair. This was my immediate interpretation, together with a suspicion of lechery in Forman’s noting of the fact. It may rather mean that she wanted some yellow hair - in other words, a blond wig or hairpiece. The use of ‘hair’ or ‘hairs’ to mean a wig was common, as in ‘a yellow hair and another like black’ which the Queen received as New Year’s gifts from the Countess of Essex.67 Or as in this bit of London repartee from Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600) -

  MARGERY: Can’st thou tell where I may buy a good hair?

  HODGE: Yes, forsooth at the poulterers in Gracious street.

  MARGERY: Thou art an ungracious wag, perdy. I mean a false hair for my periwig. (3.4.47-50)

  This would explain Forman’s apposition of Kitson’s name with Marie Mountjoy’s. Head
-tires of the kind made by the Mountjoys often incorporated human hair, and the tiremaker’s skills included wigmaking. In Randall Cotgrave’s French dictionary of 1611, the skills are synonymous: he defines perruquière as ‘a woman who makes perriwigs or attires’. And it is also clear that blond hair was particularly prized in this respect. Shakespeare’s own references to female wigs envisage them as ‘golden’. In Sonnet 68 he writes of ‘golden tresses’ which ‘live a second life on second head’, and again, in The Merchant of Venice, ‘crisped snaky golden locks’ become ‘the dowry of a second head’ (3.2.92-5). Thomas Middleton refers to blond ‘periwigs’ worn by old courtiers, who ‘take it for a pride in their bald days to wear yellow curls on their foreheads’. Also apposite, though somewhat later, is an advertisement of 1663, in which a ‘perriwigge-maker’ announces that ‘anyone having long flaxen hayr to sell’ should ‘repayr unto him’.68

  This is an odd but I believe plausible interpretation of Forman’s puzzling little memorandum. Its nature is entrepreneurial. It names a supplier and a customer; it summarizes a potential little deal that will do a favour to both, and thus to Forman. The commodity in question is a quantity of blond hair - not quite the elixir of youth sought in his alchemical activities, but more immediately obtainable.

  13

  The me’nage

  The marvellous Forman material allows us a glimpse into the lives of the Mountjoys, and particularly of Marie Mountjoy, in the later 1590s. We hear something of the people with whom her life is entwined - the adulterous mercer, the pregnant maid, the sonneteer’s mistress, the runaway apprentice, the charismatic magicotherapist. We hear also those names floating out from the starry realm of wealth and courtly elegance to which anyone in Marie’s trade and position must aspire - Lady Hunsdon, whose servant Alice Floyd she knows; Lady Kitson, a potential customer in search of rejuvenating golden locks.

  We note too a certain flurry that Marie brings with her. In that first consultation about the missing valuables she mentions three names: shortly thereafter two of them turn up as clients of Forman’s. Next she brings to the consulting room Ellen Carrell, and not long afterwards her own husband consults, twice. She proves useful to Forman; favours are traded. We would call it ‘networking’, though to Marie a ‘networke’ meant only a kind of gauzy threaded material used in head-tires.

  This is the world Shakespeare enters when he becomes the Mountjoys’ lodger some five years later - a world of aspiration and contact-mongering, a world of amorous and commercial rendezvous.

  Forman adds also to our knowledge of the Mountjoy workshop, whose activities we have yet to look into. We learn of the otherwise unknown apprentice, Ufranke de la Coles, hired at some point before March 1598. We can correlate this with what we know of Stephen Belott’s apprenticeship. In his deposition at the Court of Requests, Humphrey Fludd says he ‘put’ Belott to be Mountjoy’s apprentice shortly after his marriage to Belott’s mother in about 1594. But Noel Mountjoy adds that Belott ‘was a year a border in the defendant’s [Mountjoy’s] house before he became the defendant’s apprentice’. We can thus date the beginning of Belott’s apprenticeship to around 1596.

  In early 1598, therefore, Christopher Mountjoy had at least two young apprentices working for him, Stephen and Ufrancke. He may well have had a third, his younger brother Noel, who was then about sixteen. Noel was certainly apprenticed at Silver Street. In his deposition, to vouch for the accuracy of his statements, he says, ‘He did serve the defendant when the plaintiff served him, and knew the truth thereof.’ For a period, in other words, his own apprenticeship overlapped with Stephen’s. Nothing further is heard of Ufrancke after his arrest in the spring of 1598. Possibly the vacancy was filled by Stephen Belott’s brother, Jean or John. The latter is described in 1612 as ‘John Blott, tiremaker’, and may have learned his craft alongside his brother at the Mountjoy workshop. John later emigrated to the Netherlands, where he died in about 1642. He is described in Stephen’s will as ‘Master John Belott, late of the city of Harlem in Holland, ffrench schoolemaster’.69

  There is another man in the house of whom we know little more than his name. On 14 January 1601, ‘Joseph Tatton, servant to Christopher Montjoye’ was buried at St Olave’s. In this sort of context ‘servant’ often means apprentice, though the household would undoubtedly have had a male servant in the more general, domestic sense, and perhaps Tatton was one such. A George Tatton, married at St Olave’s in the summer of 1599, was probably a relative.70

  This glimpse into the Mountjoy household in the later 1590s shows us eight identifiable people - father, mother and daughter, three apprentices, a manservant and a maid. The maid is a constant, though her identity changes. There was Margaret Browne, who quit (or was dismissed) in about 1597, and later there was Joan Johnson, who said in her deposition that she had known Mountjoy for eight years, and who must therefore have started work at Silver Street in about 1604. She was at that point Joan Langforde. Although she testifies at the Court of Requests as ‘Joan Johnson, wife of Thomas Johnson, basketmaker’, she was not yet his wife when she entered the Mountjoys’ service, nor when she observed the activities of the lodger, ‘one Mr Shakespeare’. The wedding of Thomas Johnson and Joan Langforde took place at St Olave’s on 8 September 1605.71

  Thus outlined the Mountjoy me’nage seems to have a compact and industrious air - a family business with some live-in employees - and this sense of solidity is confirmed by Mountjoy’s appearance in the Cripplegate subsidy rolls. In 1599 ‘Cristofer Montioy’ is assessed on goods valued at £5, a respectable sum, and the following year, now ‘Xpofer Monioye’, he is listed again for the same amount.72 The Cripplegate rolls survive only partially, so this may not have been his first appearance in them. But it marks his emergence, by the end of the century, as a fully fledged householder of St Olave’s. It confers on him and his family a certain substance - the more so now we can compare it with that earlier, lowlier appearance as a poll-tax payer in the 1582 subsidy, back in those difficult years of resettlement.

  Mountjoy was still topographically close to St Martin le Grand, but in another sense he has come a long way from that teeming enclave. There were few ‘strangers’ in the small, well-to-do parishes of St Olave and St Alphege (which were combined for purposes of tax-collection). In 1599 Mountjoy is one of only two; the other is James Moore, probably a Dutchman, who pays a poll tax of 8d. In 1600 it seems the Mountjoys are the only household of foreigners in the parish.

  The me’nage as outlined above is broadly the household that Shakespeare comes to know in around 1603. This was a year full of momentous events - the death of Elizabeth, the soaring mortality figures of the plague, the arrival of the new Scottish king, the forging of peace with Spain - but in the narrower spotlight of this study other micro-events hold centre-stage. Stephen Belott completes his apprenticeship; there is talk of marriage with the master’s daughter; there is a new lodger in the chamber upstairs.

  This is the way history happens: it is measured out in days rather than epochs. Thus on 14 April 1603 - precisely in the interregnum between the death of the Queen on 17 March and the arrival of King James on 7 May; precisely at the historical fulcrum between the Elizabethan and the Jacobean Ages - Christopher Mountjoy sets out for the French Church on Threadneedle Street, there to attend the baptism of Samuel Clincquart, son of Pierre Clincquart and Marthe n’e Pieterssen. He is there as one of the godparents, so the Clincquarts are presumably friends or business associates. In the immigrant lists is a Louis ‘Clinkolad’, also of the French Church: given the garbling of foreign names he may be of the same family. He was a hatbandmaker from Tournai. Mountjoy had business dealings with this trade - in fact he currently owed over £2 to a bandmaker in the Blackfriars, Peter Courtois, who had supplied him with specialist embroidery work. But in this year 1603 Courtois died, and the outstanding debt was passed on to his successors.73 Whether they ever got the money - blood out of a stone - is not recorded.

  These are local events, but ther
e is one rather unexpected international touch. Some time shortly after he completed his apprenticeship Stephen Belott made a journey to Spain. Mountjoy states that after Belott ‘had served this defendant the said time of six years’, he ‘was desirous to travel into Spain, and this defendant did furnish him with money and other necessaries for the journey to the value of £6 or thereabouts’. Belott confirms the journey - his ‘travaile into spayne’ - but not, predictably, the financial contribution from Mr Mountjoy. The date of this journey must be around 1603, a time when Anglo-Spanish hostilities had relaxed but not yet concluded. I can find no clue to the nature of his voyage - possibly he joined a trading expedition; possibly he was attached in some menial way to a diplomatic retinue, in the run-up to the peace negotiations, which formally opened at Somerset House in May 1604.

  We get a glimpse of broader horizons, but he is soon back on Silver Street: ‘he returned from his travel unto this defendant again, and was a suitor unto this defendant’s daughter to marry her’.

  And so we arrive at the events of 1604 - the ones with which we began, and to which we will return: the courtship of Stephen and Mary, the intercessions of Shakespeare, the wedding at St Olave’s, the non-payment of the promised ‘portion’ or dowry. But I want now to move on past them, and to look briefly at some later aspects of the Mountjoys’ story. Within the chronological focus of this book these are events in the future, but they throw further light on the Mountjoys, and thence indirectly on Shakespeare.