The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

  In Measure for Measure we find Shakespeare in the city-comedy terrain of Marston, Middleton and Dekker - the topical tone, the interest in prostitution, the louche, scoffing gallant Lucio and his cronies. But the play is also very different. With its awkward conundrums and knotted verse-style - that ‘special density of broken wit’, as Barbara Everett calls it29 - Measure was hardly a crowd-pleaser in the way that Dekker’s Honest Whore was. No sequel was rushed out to satisfy public interest or titillation, and there was no published edition of the play before the First Folio.

  So here is a question that might have been aired among the ‘sharers’ of the King’s Men around the beginning of 1605. How well is their chief poet Shakespeare keeping up with the new brash fashion of the city comedies? Can he deliver this blend of sex, satire and sharp urban reportage for which the public is clamouring? If Measure for Measure is an attempt to do so, it may have been judged a failure. It is a work of great sublety and intellectual power, but is it also bums on seats? Business is business, at the Globe and elsewhere, and the answer is probably not.

  In this scenario we might find a more specific context for Shakespeare’s association with the redoubtable Wilkins, who swims into his view in the early summer of 1605. In Wilkins, he finds not only intimations of literary talent, not only the chafing ambition of the unpublished writer - he finds also a man who knows this seedy brothel world from the inside, a man who lives this world which the other writers only look in on. He is the real thing. What Shakespeare likes about George Wilkins - ‘likes’ in a purely professional, talent-spotting sense - is precisely that double curriculum vitae: the playwright and the pimp rolled into one. If the company wants ‘Sex and the City’ plays, this is the man to write them.

  The detail can only be invented, but we have some ingredients for the scene. The location: a lodging-house of low repute outside Cripplegate. The characters: the shady landlord Wilkins; his new lodgers Stephen and Mary; and their friend Mr Shakespeare, a famous man of the theatre. Wilkins, improbably but factually, nurses ambitions to be a poet; Mr Shakespeare is on the look-out for new talent. On the table we see some cups of wine, a dish of fly-blown pippin pie, and a copy of a new pamphlet, Two Unnatural Murthers, with its true story of drunkenness, degradation and senseless violence just crying out to be adapted for the stage by someone - Mr Shakespeare glances around the dingy parlour; from an upstairs chamber come shouts and shrill laughter - by someone who understands these things.

  However it really was, we know that Wilkins wrote his play, and the King’s Men performed it in 1606. It uses the Calverley story but also rewrites it with an abruptly manufactured happy ending - a tragicomedy of sorts, as the fashion required and as the success of the play doubtless justified.

  This skeletal and partly speculative narrative - a story of mutual literary opportunism - is a kind of prelude to Pericles, for it was doubtless the success of the Miseries, still onstage in 1607, that led to Wilkins’s collaboration with Shakespeare on Pericles. The play is based on the story of Apollonius of Tyre, as told in John Gower’s medieval poem Confessio Amantis and more recently in Lawrence Twine’s Patterne of Painefull Adventures (1576). A new edition of Twine’s book appeared in 1607, and was perhaps the particular spur, though the authors’ debt to Gower is advertised by putting him onstage as the play’s Chorus. They had completed the play some time before 20 May 1608, when it was registered at Stationers’ Hall.

  As noted, the consensus view of Pericles - backed up more recently by computer-aided ‘stylometric’ studies - is that Wilkins was responsible for the first two acts, and Shakespeare for most of the rest. It is not known whether Wilkins wrote a whole play which Shakespeare decided partly to rewrite, or whether Shakespeare took over the play at the point where the story interested him. He comes in at a pivotal moment of high drama - Pericles on the ‘storm-tost’ ship bound for Tyre; the death of his wife Thaisa in childbirth, and her burial at sea:

  A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear.

  No light, no fire: th’unfriendly elements

  Forgot thee utterly. Nor have I time

  To give thee hallow’d to thy grave, but straight

  Must cast thee scarcely coffin’d in the ooze,

  Where for a monument upon thy bones

  And e’er remaining lamps, the belching whale

  And humming water must o’erwhelm thy corpse,

  Lying with simple shells . . . (3.1.56-64)

  After the dull but efficient scaffolding of the Wilkins acts, the play is injected with rich Shakespearean melody.30

  This being the kind of story it is - a ‘romance’, as it is generally called; a ‘mouldy tale’, as Ben Jonson called it - Thaisa is not really dead, and will be reunited with Pericles; and their daughter Marina, ‘whom for she was born at sea I have nam’d so’, will suffer many vicissitudes before she too is found again by her father. Among her tribulations she is captured by pirates and sold into prostitution in Myteline, an episode much expanded by Shakespeare from the sources (or perhaps expanded by Wilkins and rewritten by Shakespeare). Part of Act 4 is set in the brothel - uniquely in Shakespeare: the brothel in Measure is only reported to us.31 The scenes feature an unnamed bawd and pandar, and the pandar’s servant, Boult. At odds with the generally stylized tone of the play, the brothel is evoked in a brisk, businesslike way, and one might think the expertise of Wilkins is a contributory factor in this. It is a low-grade place with three resident girls well past their best -

  BAWD: We were never so much out of creatures. We have but poor three . . . and they with continual action are even as good as rotten.

  PANDAR: Therefore let’s have fresh ones, whate’er we pay for them . . .

  BOULT: Shall I search the market?

  BAWD: What else, man? The stuff we have, a strong wind will blow it to pieces, they are so pitifully sodden.

  PANDAR: Thou say’st true. There’s two unwholesome, a’conscience. The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage. (4.2.6-21)

  The solution to their problems, they hope, is the beautiful and virginal Marina, sold to them by the pirates. But this is romance, and her virtue triumphs over the customers’ desires - ‘Fie upon her! She’s able to freeze the god Priapus and undo a whole generation . . . She would make a Puritan of the devil if he would cheapen a kiss of her.’

  We are back in the fictive brothel-world of Measure and the city comedies, which is also the real world of Shakespeare’s co-author Wilkins. But the vulnerable and virtuous presence of the romance-princess Marina casts a different light over it. It occurs to me that Marina in the bawdy house at Myteline might have some traces of a real person in a real situation - Mary Belott in the house of Wilkins. Her arrival there marks the first known connection between Shakespeare and Wilkins, and her presence there may have had a similar aspect of sexual vulnerability, of innocence cast among the wolves - or anyway may have been construed that way by Shakespeare, who cared about her and who perhaps felt some pangs of avuncular anxiety about the rackety circumstances in which she now found herself.

  Stephen and Mary Belott began this excursion into the Wilkins- Shakespeare partnership, and we can follow their lives a little at this point. They were probably not living with Wilkins in 1607- 8, when Pericles was being written, but they were his neighbours in St Giles. As we saw, they had returned to Silver Street in late 1606, after the death of Marie Mountjoy, and Stephen had worked with his father-in-law ‘as partners in their said trade of Tyeringe’. But this rapprochement did not last, and after about six months they packed up once more and left, probably for the last time. They set up business on their own, and took on an apprentice, William Eaton, who deposed at the Court of Requests that he had known Belott since 1607. All further records of the couple, up into the 1620s, show they were living in St Giles - quite possibly with Belott’s stepfather, Humphrey Fludd.

  The first such record is a happy event.32 On 23 October 1608 their daughter Anne was baptized at St Giles. This is the firs
t child of the marriage that we know of - she comes nearly four years after the wedding. Another daughter, Jane, was baptized just over a year later, 17 December 1609. A few weeks later George and Katherine Wilkins were at the church to baptize their son Thomas. Also living at St Giles, probably in partnership with Stephen, was his brother John, who appears in the register in 1612 and is described as a ‘tiremaker’.

  The Belotts settle into anonymity: another artisan family in the narrow lanes of St Giles. But the faint aroma of sexual scandal which hangs over this everyday story of tiremakers, pimps and playwrights is not entirely absent from the Belotts’ lives either. Looking through the registers of St Giles I was interested - indeed startled - to see the name Mary Byllett: interested because ‘Byllett’ could easily be a variation of Belott, and startled because she appears there as the mother of an illegitimate child, ‘Anne Byllet daughter of Edward Skemish and Mary Byllett’, baptized 16 May 1610. Could she be Mary Belott ne’e Mountjoy? It soon becomes apparent she is not: her child was born only five months after Mary Belott’s daughter Jane; also, Mary Byllett must have been single, for a few months later, on 30 January 1611, she was at the altar at St Giles getting married. She was not, therefore, the wife of Stephen Belott, but she could have been his sister. This possibility is somewhat strengthened by the fact that her husband was one Richard Eaton, who is later described as a ‘bodymaker’ (bodicemaker), and who may well be related to Stephen Belott’s apprentice, William Eaton. A possible scenario from this: Stephen’s sister, a fallen woman with an illegitimate child, is married off to his apprentice’s brother, thus relieving her of a difficulty faced by many young women in Jacobean London, bluntly defined by the Bawd in Pericles as ‘the bringing up of poor bastards’.

  As for Wilkins, we might call Pericles the apex of his literary career - his most prestigious piece of work, though not his best. The play was extremely popular, but his response to its popularity is characteristically erratic. In 1608 he issued a novelized treatment of the story, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles, which he advertises on the title-page as ‘the true history of the play of Pericles, as it was lately presented’. Part of the book is lifted bodily from one of the source-books, Twine’s Patterne of Painefull Adventures , and part of it is based on the play - though whatever source Wilkins used for these sections, it was often rather different in its phrasing from the copy used for the first printed edition of the play, which appeared the following year. This printing of the play was probably unauthorized, and is full of textual fudgings and corruptions: it is another ‘bad quarto’, but as the play was not included in the Folio it is the only text of Pericles we have.

  We are on the edge of a bibliographical minefield which I do not wish to enter. The details are obscure, but there is an undeniable whiff of underhand dealing. Playscripts were owned by the company which performed them, so in legal terms these unauthorized texts of Pericles are thefts or misappropriations of property belonging to the King’s Men. Wilkins’s novelization is a grey area: it is not quite a piracy, perhaps, but it involves some plagiarism of his co-author’s work. (This has a positive side, for sometimes Wilkins records a Shakespearean phrase not found in the 1609 quarto: the resonant ‘poor inch of nature’, describing the baby Marina in the storm, is almost certainly Shakespeare’s and is reinstated in modern editions of the play.)33 It is probable Wilkins also had something to do with the unauthorized quarto of Pericles. Its publisher, Henry Gosson, had earlier published Wilkins’s Three Miseries of Barbary, and in 1611, two years after the appearance of Pericles, we find him providing sureties for Wilkins in one of his scrapes with the law. In short, both The Painfull Adventures of Pericles and the 1609 Pericles contain stolen literary goods with Wilkins’s fingerprints all over them.

  We have seen before that Shakespeare grew testy when his work was purloined - those ‘stolne and surreptitious copies’ to which the Folio editors refer. The Painfull Adventures of Pericles is Wilkins’s last known work. After a brief swagger of literary success a chill settles over his career, and the next we hear of him is at the Middlesex Sessions in Clerkenwell, bound over for aggression towards the ‘quean’ or prostitute Anne Plesington - and so begins the dark and violent tragicomedy inscribed in his police-record.34

  24

  Customer satisfaction

  Somewhere between the ‘sixpenny drab’ in the backstreets and the high-class ‘courtesan’ cruising for custom in her new-fangled coach, there was a hinterland of what one might almost call ‘genteel prostitution’, in which respectable-looking young - and not so young - women traded sexual favours for money or goods.

  We have seen these women at the playhouse - the ‘Cheapside dame’, the ‘light huswife’ and others - on the look-out for sexual assignations that may or may not be also commercial ones. We find them also in these plays and pamphlets of 1604-5. Thus Middleton tells us that the discerning young gallant of 1604 likes his ‘harlot’ to be a woman of class: ‘They should be none of these common Molls neither, but discontented and unfortunate gentlewomen . . . poor squalls with a little money which cannot hold out long without some comings-in; but they will rather venture a maidenhead than want a head-tire’ (the tire here epitomizing - as it often does - the expensive and unnecessary fashion-accessory).35 And in Marston’s Dutch Courtesan, the broad-minded Freevill speaks sympathetically of wives who seek paid sex as a solution to economic problems -

  A poor decayed mechanical man’s wife: her husband is laid up, may not she lawfully be laid down, when her husband’s only rising is by her falling? A captain’s wife wants means: her commander lies in open field abroad, may not she lie in civil arms at home? A waiting gentlewoman that had wont to take say [a kind of fine cloth] to her lady, miscarries or so: the court misfortune throws her down, may not the city courtesy take her up? Do you know no alderman would pity such a woman’s case? (1.1.102-9)

  These amateurs were viewed with predictable suspicion by professional working girls. In Dekker’s Honest Whore 2, the upmarket Penelope Whorehound, who pretends to gentility - ‘I come of the Whorehounds’ - and wears a ‘costly gown’, says: ‘If I go amongst citizens’ wives, they jeer at me; if I go among the loose-bodied gowns [prostitutes] they cry a pox on me because I go civilly attired, and swear their trade was a good trade till such as I am took it out of their hands’ (2729-32). And in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) the prostitute Alice - ‘your punk of Turnbull, Ramping Alice’, a true ‘mistress of the game’ - complains to the flirtatious Mrs Overdo the judge’s wife (who is not to be confused with Shakespeare’s Mistress Overdone): ‘A mischief on you, they are such as you that undo us and take our trade from us, with your tuff-taffety haunches . . . The poor common whores can ha’ no traffic for the privy rich ones. Your caps and hoods of velvet call away our customers, and lick the fat from us’ (4.3.283-9).

  A particular aspect of this is the idea of tradesmen’s and shopkeepers’ wives who offer sexual favours, or least promising flirtations, to customers. We find this with Mistresses Mulligrub and Burnish, the wives respectively of a vintner and a goldsmith, in Marston’s Dutch Courtesan. Here is what Mistress M says of Mistress B -

  I know her very well. I have been inward with her and so has many more . . . She has been as proper a woman as any in Cheap. She paints [uses cosmetics] now, and yet she keeps her husband’s old customers to him still. In truth, a fine fac’d wife in a wainscot carved seat is a worthy ornament to a tradesman’s shop, and an attractive, I warrant. Her husband shall find it in the custom of his ware, I’ll assure him.

  The word ‘inward’ is used doubly: the line broadly means, ‘I have been socially intimate with her and others sexually intimate with her.’36 ‘Proper’ in the next sentence is probably also duplicitous. No longer in the first blush of youth, Mrs Burnish continues to use her physical charms as an ‘attractive’ to her husband’s male customers. And Mrs Mulligrub, it seems, does much the same - ‘I do keep as gallant and as good company, though I say it, as any she in London. S
quires, gentlemen and knights diet at my table.’ She offers them credit, and perhaps something more: ‘Full many fine men go upon my score, as simple as I stand here . . . [They] promise fair, and give me very good words, and a piece of flesh when time of year serves . . . My silly husband, alas, he knows nothing of it; ’tis I that bear, ’tis I that must bear a brain for all.’ (3.3.2-13, 17-27). There is more Marstonian innuendo in this. That ‘piece of flesh’ which her favoured customers offer her is ostensibly a joint of meat for feast days like Christmas, but has an obvious bawdy reading as well. And ‘ ’tis I that bear’ puns on ‘bear’ = carry the weight of a man on top, and perhaps also on ‘bare’.37