What Shakespeare’s view was we do not know, though some lines in the late romance The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610) are suggestive. Ranting about his wife’s supposed infidelities, Leontes says:
My wife’s a hobby horse, deserves a name
As rank as any flax-wench that puts to
Before her troth-plight . . . (1.2.276-8)
The ‘flax-wench’ - the flax-worker, who combed and spun the plant for linen and thrashed it for linseed - is here a general pejorative for a low, sluttish girl. She has a bad reputation because she ‘puts to’ - has sex - before her troth-plight. The logic of the phrasing suggests that having sex after her troth-plight would have been acceptable. Many families interpreted it this way, and what we know of the Mountjoys does not suggest they would be sticklers for sexual abstinence.12
A particular phrasing in Shakespeare’s deposition may reflect on this. He says that ‘afterwards’ - in other words, after the betrothal - the marriage of Stephen and Mary was ‘consummated and solemnized’. The order of those two verbs could suggest that sexual consummation preceded the church wedding. So perhaps there was a ‘bancket’ that night in Silver Street - Mr Mountjoy’s narrow-necked purse permitting - and afterwards Stephen and Mary were ‘layed together’ in a chamber upstairs, quite possibly in that ‘old feather-bed’ which was later part of their meagre inventory of household goods.
The play of Shakespeare’s which reflects precisely on this matter of prenuptial sex is Measure for Measure, which we know Shakespeare was writing in 1604, and which was first performed at court on St Stephen’s Night, 26 December 1604, a few weeks after the wedding of Stephen and Mary at St Olave’s. In Measure there are two troth-plights; they both occur before the action of the play begins, but they are both important fulcrums of the plot, and like so much in the play they balance each other out. The first is between Claudio and Julietta. As Claudio is dragged off to prison under the new morality-laws of Vienna, he complains of injustice because his supposed crime of ‘lechery’ was actually committed with his betrothed fiance’e:
Upon a true contract
I got possession of Julietta’s bed:
She is fast my wife
Save that we do the denunciation lack
Of outward order: this we came not to
Only for propagation of a dower
Remaining in the coffer of her friends. (1.2.134-40)
Claudio’s crime is precisely that he has sexually consummated a de praesenti contract before it was solemnized by a church wedding. This particular twist was introduced by Shakespeare - the equivalent couple in his source-plays was not betrothed - and is ideal for his purposes, since it makes Claudio technically but not morally guilty. Many in the audience would sympathize with his view that he was married to Julietta in all but the ‘outward order’ of the church wedding, and was therefore free to take ‘possession’ of her bed.13
At the other end of the play, the hypocritical Deputy, Angelo, having attempted to get Isabella to give him sex in return for her brother’s pardon, is tricked into bed with his own former fianc’e, Mariana, to whom he was plighted some while previously. He is Mariana’s ‘husband on a pre-contract’, the Duke explains, and this is confirmed by the lady herself: ‘I am affianced this man’s wife as strongly / As words could make up vows’; and, speaking to Angelo himself, ‘This is the hand which with a vow’d contract / Was fast belock’d in thine.’ He is forced to marry her at the end, having rendered their de futuro contract indissoluble by his unwitting consummation of it.
The language of these scenes - ‘contract’, ‘affianced’, ‘hand . . . fast’, ‘vows’ - is precisely the language Shakespeare was using at Silver Street in his role as marriage-broker and betrother. One notes also the ‘dower remaining in the coffer’ - faintly prophetic of the withheld dowry that will dog the marriage of Stephen and Mary.
All’s Well that Ends Well is linked in theme and tone with Measure and was probably written shortly after it in c. 1604-5. This is in many ways the classic Silver Street play - subtle, haunting, ambiguous, autumnal. It is set in southern France - the old Navarre romance again - and centres on the relationship between Bertram, the young Count of Roussillon, and the physician’s daughter Helena, a lowly figure in his household. Her love for him is hidden until, having healed the dying King with an old ‘recipe’ of her father’s, she is rewarded with a free choice of the young beaux at court for a husband. She chooses Bertram, to his horror, and despite his reluctance they are betrothed immediately by the King. This is not just a play which uses a betrothal as a plot-fulcrum. It is a play wholly about the betrothal - it is the story of what leads up to it, of how it comes about, of how it is tested to the utmost, and degraded, and finally - through complex entanglements and trickeries: that ‘fictive knot’ of tragicomedy - of how it leads to a true loving union.
I remarked earlier that a play which features a young Frenchman being pressed into marriage, written at a time when the author was himself pressing a young Frenchman into marriage, is likely to carry some kind of resonance between the fictional and the biographical. In the play it is the King who persuades Bertram to marry, and who performs the handfasting of the young couple. (A contemporary speaks of Shakespeare playing ‘kingly parts’,14 so it is not impossible he actually played the King in All’s Well.) His words are a compressed poetic synopsis of actual words spoken by Shakespeare in the late summer of 1604 -
Here, take her hand,
Proud, scornful boy, unworthy this good gift,
That dost in vile misprision shackle up
My love and her desert . . .
Check thy contempt.
Obey our will which travails in thy good.
. . .
Take her by the hand
And tell her she is thine.
And the scornful boy complies unwillingly: ‘I take her hand.’ The couple are thus betrothed or plighted -
Good fortune and the favour of the King
Smile upon this contract, whose ceremony
Shall seem expedient on the now-born brief,
And be perform’d tonight . . . (2.3.150-82)15
‘O my Parolles,’ cries Bertram afterwards to his dubious hanger-on, Monsieur Parolles. ‘They have married me!’
Around this central betrothal runs an undercurrent of more dubious marriage-advice supplied by the wonderfully dreadful Parolles. To Helena he offers the demeaning but not entirely unrealistic counsel that it is better to get herself a husband while she is young, and her virginity is still ‘vendible’.
Keep it not; you cannot choose but lose by’t. Out with’t! Within the year it will make itself two, which is a goodly increase, and the principal itself not much the worse . . .’Tis a commodity will lose the gloss with lying; the longer kept, the less worth. Off with’t while ’tis vendible; answer the time of request. Virginity like an old courtier wears her cap out of fashion, richly suited but unsuitable . . . Your old virginity is like one of our French wither’d pears: it looks ill, it eats drily - marry, ’tis a wither’d pear: it was formerly better. (1.1.143-58)
The extended comic metaphor of her virginity as capital, and sex as a productive investment of it (a very city-comedy formulation), shades uncomfortably into an imagery of desiccated female genitalia. He concludes bluntly, ‘Get thee a good husband and use him as he uses you.’
But to Bertram Parolles is a counsellor against marriage. He quotes the old proverb, ‘A young man married is a man that’s marred,’ and (with more off-colour vaginal imagery) speaks in favour of the manly pursuits of soldiery:
PAROLLES: He wears his honour in a box unseen
That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home,
Spending his manly marrow in her arms
. . .
To other regions!
France is a stable, we that dwell in’t jades.
Therefore to th’ war!
BERTRAM: It shall be so . . .
Wars is no strife
To the dark house and t
he detested wife. (2.3.275-88)
Then later Parolles is a broker and witness of Bertram’s false offer of marriage to Diana - ‘I did go between them . . . I was in that credit with them, at that time, that I knew of their going to bed, and of other motions, as promising her marriage’ (5.3.253-9). Compare the phrasing used by Noel Mountjoy: ‘Mr Shakespeare was employed . . . to make a motion to him of a marriage.’
This ‘equivocal companion’ Parolles, discoursing with cynical eloquence on the pro and contra of marriage, is another reflection of Shakespeare’s role as a marriage counsellor in the Mountjoy household - a somewhat sour version of it.16
Parolles is pure Shakespeare - there is not a trace of him in the source-books. As Dr Johnson notes, he ‘has many of the lineaments of Falstaff and seems to be the character which Shakespeare delighted to draw, a fellow that had more wit than virtue’.17 He is an elaboration of the braggart or miles gloriosus of the old Roman comedies - a phoney, vacuous, meddling figure, yet like the cynical wastrel Lucio in Measure he seems central to the play, or rather to our involvement in it. These rogues have a charm which is deliberately withheld from the protagonists; they express the ‘mingled yarn’ of experience. Our first introduction to Parolles suggests this idea, as Helena says:
I know him a notorious liar,
Think him a great way fool, solely a coward,
And yet these fix’d evils sit so fit in him
That they take place where virtue’s steely bones
Looks bleak i’ th’ cold wind. (1.1.98-102)
Parolles is indeed exposed as a liar, fool and coward. The scene of his shaming is painful, but is swiftly cancelled by his defiantly resilient soliloquy at the end of it -
If my heart were great
’Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more,
But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft
As captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live . . . (4.3.319-23)
This Monsieur Parolles - ‘Mr Words’ - is a man of loud opinions and big gestures, but no substance. As Lafeu says of him, ‘There can be no kernel in this light nut: the soul of this man is in his clothes - trust him not.’ I sometimes think he is Shakespeare’s own mocking self-portrait: the actor with nothing inside him.18
29
Losing a daughter
Autumn comes in. The stars are for a moment in benevolent alignment over Silver Street. On 1 November the King’s Men begin their winter season at court with a performance of Othello at the Banqueting House at Whitehall. On 17 November Marie Mountjoy receives payment of £18 13s 7d from the Queen’s accountants. On 19 November, the young couple ‘made sure’ by Mr Shakespeare are married at St Olave’s, the little parish church which Stow calls ‘a small thing without any noteworthy monuments’. Perhaps Shakespeare was present. Perhaps there was a peal of bells, though it was just a Monday in November, nothing special.
Good fortune and the favour of the King
Smile upon this contract . . .
But this good fortune will not last. All will not end well. Within a few months relations have broken down within the house. The father and the son-in-law at loggerheads, and between them the daughter, caught up in the warfare. Shouted words float upstairs to the chamber where Shakespeare writes. He is at work on King Lear. The deluded father, blind to the meaning of affection, rages at his daughter Cordelia, ‘Better thou hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better.’ More precisely, the father vents his displeasure by withholding the daughter’s promised dowry. Cordelia’s ‘price has fallen’, he tells her suitor, the Duke of Burgundy. She is now ‘dowered with our curse’ and nothing more. This ‘dowerless daughter’ is taken instead by her other suitor, the King of France: ‘she is herself a dowry,’ he says (1.1.187-241). Again we hear the echoes of Silver Street, the sublimation into high drama of what is casually there at hand. The Duke’s plaintive plea to Lear, ‘Give but that portion which yourself proposed’, is virtually a synopsis of the argument going on downstairs in the early months of 1605, and later picked over, with Shakespeare’s assistance, at the Court of Requests.
Shakespeare had daughters himself, back in Stratford. They were around the same age as Mary - Susanna born in 1583, and Judith, the twin of the lost boy Hamnet, in 1585. As his elder daughter reaches the age of twenty-one, the nominal and legal age of adulthood, the question of her marriage prospects starts to gnaw at him. For a man without a son, for a man seemingly tense about his social status, his substance as one who lived and worked in the insubstantial realm of the theatre, it is a worry. Susanna turned twenty-one in late May 1604, very close to the time her father was negotiating this other marriage down in London. Whether she had already met her future husband, Dr John Hall, is not certain - they would be married in 1607.19
Perhaps the troth-plighting of Mary Mountjoy carried some psychological freight in the mind of Mr Shakespeare, himself the father of marriageable but unmarried daughters. Perhaps there was an aspect of wish-fulfilment in it - even a kind of dramatic enactment. The brief ritual of the Silver Street betrothal becomes a little piece of theatre - let us call it ‘The Handfasting’ - in which the daughter is betrothed to an ‘honest fellow’ with prospects, and all is ‘made sure by Mr Shakespeare’. (This in ironic contrast to the actual plays he was writing at the time, which pursue the Montaignian agenda of making everyone unsure about things.)20
In his later plays Shakespeare keeps returning to the theme of the daughter. More precisely the daughter lost or banished, then arduously found: a rhythm of breakdown and reconciliation, expressed in the magico-mystical imagery which is the language of the late plays or ‘romances’. Helena in All’s Well is a kind of prologue to this. She is not the King’s daughter, yet in her healing of the King, in her steadfastness through ‘dismal’ difficulties, and in the imagery of regeneration which surrounds her, with a sudden and heart-wrenching shift of tone, at the end of the play -
DIANA: Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick.
So there’s my riddle: one that’s dead is quick.
And now behold the meaning.
Enter Helena
- she prefigures the father-daughter relations of the later plays: Lear and Cordelia, Pericles and Marina, Cymbeline and Imogen, Leontes and Perdita, Prospero and Miranda.
I have been teased by the possibilities of Shakespeare’s relationship with the charming Mrs Mountjoy, but perhaps the person at the heart of the story is her daughter Mary, of whom we know next to nothing until she steps into the limelight of the Belott- Mountjoy suit. Her life touches Shakespeare’s in this circumstantial way, but seems also to touch his imagination. She is betrothed to a reluctant husband, as Helena is in All’s Well; she is banished ‘dowerless’ by her father, as Cordelia is in King Lear; she is lodged in the house of a pimp, as Marina is in Pericles. She is not the ‘model’ for these characters, any more than Stephen is the model for the recalcitrant bridegroom Bertram, but there are traces of her in them: a real young woman, living in the house where Shakespeare writes, and in the house of his co-author Wilkins. Was it Mary’s hands Shakespeare saw in his mind’s eye when he wrote in Pericles of a girl weaving silk ‘with fingers long, small, white as milk’?
I have spoken of Shakespeare’s ‘opportunism’ but the word is perhaps too pragmatic. What one means is his capacity to include so much, all the allusions and associations that are somehow drawn down into the dramatic moment, some instantly recognizable, some explained by scholarly exegesis, but much of it remaining as a kind of mist of ulterior meanings, too vaporous - and too personal to the author - for us to catch, though partly recoverable in this case from the recesses of the Belott-Mountjoy papers.
I look again through the depositions given at the Court of Requests in 1612, and my eye alights not on the brusque testimony of Mr Shakespeare himself, but on that account of the visit to Shakespeare by Daniel Nicholas, made some time before the case came to court, perhaps around 1610 or so. Here once again i
s what Nicholas says:
The plaintiff did request him this deponent to go with his wife to Shakespeare, to understand the truth how much and what the defendant did promise to bestow on his daughter in marriage with him the plaintiff, who did so. And asking Shakespeare thereof, he answered that he [Mountjoy] promised if the plaintiff would marry with Mary his only daughter, he would by his promise, as he [Shakespeare] remembered, give the plaintiff with her in marriage about the sum of fifty pounds in money and certain household stuff.
I note Nicholas’s wonderfully unwitting phrase - he went ‘to Shakespeare to understand the truth’: something that many have done since, though not quite in the sense he means it.
But there is something else, an unnoticed clue - indeed unnoticeable without recourse to the original document. ‘The plaintiff did request him this deponent to go with his wife to Shakespeare . . .’ In Wallace’s transcription it sounds like Daniel Nicholas was accompanied by his own wife when he visited Shakespeare. But in the original one sees that the clerk first wrote, ‘The plaintiff did requeste him this deponent to goe with him to Shakespeare,’ but then - presumably corrected by Nicholas - changed that last ‘him’ to ‘his wyffe’. It is clear, therefore, that the person who accompanied Daniel Nicholas on his visit to Shakespeare was not the otherwise unmentioned Mrs Nicholas, but Mary Belott. Indeed Nicholas now takes a subsidiary role in this little scene, which is essentially a meeting between Shakespeare and Mary, this girl whom he once knew well, and whom he handfasted to her husband, for better or worse, and who is now in need of his help.
The Lodger Shakespeare Page 27
