41 . Wilson 1932, 119; Rossiter 1961, 117. Rossiter also finds this grating wit in the ‘indecent sonnets’ (i.e. chiefly the ‘Dark Lady’ sequence). Some of the sonnets (first published in 1609) probably belong to the Silver Street years. Stylometric analysis assigns nos 104-26 to the early seventeenth century, and two of this group have allusions to the succession and coronation of James I (1603-4). See MacDonald Jackson, ‘Rhyme in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Evidence of Date of Composition’, NQ 46 (1999), 213-19.
42 . G. B. Guarini, Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1601). Cinthio’s Epitia (1583) was a source, via English versions, for the plot-line of Measure for Measure. It is described by Cinthio as a ‘tragedia di lieto fin’ (a potential tragedy with a ‘pleasant’ ending) - what Sir Philip Sidney called ‘mungrell Tragy-comedy’ (Apologie for Poetry, 1581).
43 . For some other responses to Hamlet in Diaphantus see Duncan-Jones 2001, 179-81.
44 . Sypher 1955, 115-17, 152-3. He discerns in Measure the hallmarks of Mannerism defined by Panowski as Spannung (‘tension’), Streckung (‘elasticity’) and Flucht ohne Ziel (‘projection without climax’). Elizabeth Yearling describes the ‘devices’ of Jacobean tragicomedy as ‘tonal contrasts, protean characters, ambiguous language and self-conscious theatricality’ (RES 34 (1983), 214).
45 . An ongoing repartee between Marston and Shakespeare is discernible in c. 1600-1601: Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge has parallels with Hamlet, and his What You Will with Twelfth Night (itself subtitled ‘What You Will’, and performed at the Middle Temple, where Marston was a member, in February 1601). Both writers appended ‘Poeticall Essaies’ to Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr (1601); Shakespeare’s contribution, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, is praised by Marston as a ‘moving epicedium’. See W. Reavley Gair, ed., Antonio’s Revenge (Manchester 1978); Duncan-Jones 2001, 137-56; Steggle 1998, 40-48.
46 . On the Timon collaboration see Wells 2006, 184-8; John Jowett, Oxford edn (2004), 1-3; Gary Taylor, ‘Thomas Middleton’ (ODNB 2004). Almost all of Act 3 is generally ascribed to Middleton, plus 1.2 and parts of 2.2, 4.2 and 4.3.
47 . On Nashe see 1 Henry VI, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1952), xxi-xxxi, though the parallels adduced are not necessarily the result of collaboration. On Peele and Shakespeare see Vickers 2002. On ‘The Booke of Sir Thomas More’ (BL Harley MS 7368) see Part Five, note 10 below.
48 . Sylvia Feldman, ed., A Yorkshire Tragedy (Malone Society, 1973), v-xvi. The entry in SR, 2 May 1608 (Arber 1875, 3.337) also describes it as ‘written by William Shakespere’. The publisher, Thomas Pavier, later produced a series of unauthorized Shakespeare quartos, some misleadingly dated.
49 . Sisson 1935; John Berryman, ‘Shakespeare’s Reality’ (1971), in Haffenden 2001, 347. Colin Burrow tilts wittily at the windmill of ‘literary biography’, where ‘explanations of literary activity . . . tend to be made up from a dash of Freud, a handful of social aspiration, a scratching from Foucault’s armpit, and a willingness to entertain simple one-to-one correspondences between fiction and life’ (‘Who Wouldn’t Buy It?’, LRB 27, 20 January 2005).
50 . Tillyard 1965, 152.
4. Shakespeare in London
51 . Ben Jonson, ‘To the memory of my Beloved, the Author Mr William Shakespeare’ (1623), line 71, in Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (1975, 265).
52 . Aubrey 1949, 255.
53 . William Dunbar (attrib.), ‘In Honour of the City of London’ (late fifteenth century); Nashe, Christs Teares (1593), sig. X3 (Nashe 1958, 2.158-9). Nashe’s diatribe earned him a brief spell in Newgate, and was substituted with a toned-down version in the 2nd edn of 1594.
54 . ‘harey the vi’, marked as a new play, first appears in Henslowe’s diary on 3 March 1592 (Foakes 2002, 16). The Groatsworth was published within a few weeks of Greene’s death on 3 September 1592 (Nicholl 1984, 135, 301).
55 . The ‘lost years’ and their legends are summarized in SDL 77-90, Sams 1995. For the Catholic narrative (which in part depends on a player in Lancashire called William Shakeshafte being the sixteen-year-old Shakespeare) see E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The Lost Years (1985); Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (2004).
56 . Diary of Thomas Greene, 17 November 1614: see note 2 above. The Blackfriars Gatehouse, purchased by Shakespeare in March 1613, was an investment rather than a residence, but may have served as a London pied-à-terre (Honan 1998, 378-9).
57 . Bod., Aubrey MS 8, fol. 45v. The lay-out of the page (see EKC 2.252) is confused, but the view that Aubrey’s interlineated note is about Beeston himself, rather than Shakespeare, deprives us unnecessarily. Beeston’s birthdate is not known: it could be as early as 1603 (his parents married in 1602), which would make him thirteen when Shakespeare died. Beeston was recommended to Aubrey by another old stager, John Lacey, who also provided him with material on Shakespeare. Lacey, born in Yorkshire in about 1615, cannot have known Shakespeare personally, but he had worked with Ben Jonson (d. 1637), furnishing northern dialect terms for his late play The Tale of a Tub.
58 . On literary Shoreditch see Mark Eccles, Christopher Marlowe in London (1934), 122-6; Nicholl 1984, 39-40; and the second of Gabriel Harvey’s Four Letters (1592). Various Balls (but not Em) feature in the Shoreditch registers.
59 . PRO E179/146/354; EKC 2.87-90; Giuseppi 1929. For an introduction to the subsidy rolls see Lang 1993. Some London rolls are available online on Alan Nelson’s website (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/ ~ahnelson/SUBSIDY/ subs.html).
60 . Hazlitt 1864, 2.317. John Manningham notes in his diary (November 1602; Sorlien 1976, 123): ‘a common phrase of subsidies and such taxes: the greate ones will not, the little ones cannot, the meane [middle-ranking] men must pay for all.’
61 . Shakespeare’s second assessment (PRO E179/146/369) resulted in a tax liability of 13s 4d; this was a new subsidy and the tax-rate was higher.
62 . Honan 1998, 322; Michael Foster, ‘Thomas Morley’ (ODNB 2004).
63 . On Maunder as Messenger of the Chamber see Nicholl 2002, 53-4, 206. Henry Maunder of St Helen’s was alive in 1603, when a man is described as his servant (Registers of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, Harleian Society 31 (1904), 260), but was probably dead by 1608 when ‘Isabell Maunder, widow’ was buried (ibid., 271). ‘Anne Maunder al[ia]s Bedwell’, a godmother in 1612 (ibid., 418), is probably his married daughter.
64 . Ibid., 260; Scouloudi 1985, 182.
65 . PRO E372/444 (Residuum London, 6 October 1599) and 445 (Residuum Sussex, 6 October 1600).
66 . Shakespeare is called ‘honey-tongued’ by both Francis Meres (Palladis Tamia, 1598) and John Weever (‘Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare’ in Epigrammes , 1599, 4.22). ‘O sweet Master Shakespeare’, spoken by a foppish fan, Gullio, in anon, Returne to Parnassus pt 1 (c. 1599), 3.1.1054-5. Manningham: see Part Six, note 46 below.
67 . HMC Salisbury 3.148; EKC 2.332; Elizabeth Allen, ‘Sir Walter Cope’ (ODNB 2004).
PART TWO: SILVER STREET
5. The house on the corner
1 . For the ‘Agas’ map see Prockter and Taylor 1979. ‘Muddled truth’: Peter Campbell, ‘In Russell Square’, LRB 28, 30 November 2006; cf. H. G. Wells on London as a ‘stupendous’ city formed of ‘incidental and multitudinous littleness’ (The New Machiavelli, 1911).
2 . Byrne 1925, 55-8. On Islington: Nashe 1958, 2.224, 4.262.
3 . Wood 2003, 267; P. Jones and T. Reddaway, eds, Surveys of Building Sites in the City of London after the Great Fire (London Topographical Society Publications 97-99, 1962-66), 3.35. A frontage of 63 ft would suggest a substantial house, similar to the known measurements of nearby Dudley Court (note 13 below). However, the surveys indicate pre-Fire property boundaries, and do not necessarily refer to individual houses. The length of Silver Street between Wood Street and Monkwell Street was about 75 metres (228 ft): see Howe and Lakin 2004, Fig 68.
4 . In 1850, the Coopers’ Arms is listed as one of seventeen public houses in Cripplegate Ward Within (Baddeley 1921
, 213-14). The property was leased, somewhat ironically, from the United Kingdom Temperance and General Provident Institution, which in turn leased it from New College, Oxford (Wallace 1910a, 506). In the Silver Street ratebooks for 1890 every building but one is a warehouse (Baddeley 1921, 77-8): the exception, rated at £38, is presumably the Coopers’ Arms, though it is described as a ‘dwelling house’. The Coopers’ Company had their livery hall not far away, between Aldermanbury and Basinghall Street.
5 . Stow 1908, 1.299, 2.344.
6 . William Maitland, History of London (1753-6), 2.905-6.
7 . On Greene’s lodgings see Gabriel Harvey, Four Letters (1592), in Works, ed. A. B. Grosart (1884), 1.170-3; his landlady, a Mrs Isam, was said to be a ‘big fatte lusty wench’ with an ‘arme like an Amazon’ (Nashe 1958, 1.289). Jonson: Aubrey 1949, 178; this is not the Elephant and Castle south of the river, but one ‘outside Temple Bar’. Roydon’s address is given in a Star Chamber deposition of 1593 (see note 27 below). Nashe refers to his lodgings in Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596): ‘all the time I have lyne in her [Mrs Danter’s] house’ (Nashe 1958, 3.114-15; Nicholl 1984, 224-6).
8 . Weaver adds that from these two properties Mountjoy ‘receiveth some eighteen pounds per annum de claro besides his own dwelling’; this is corroborated by Noel Mountjoy, who says Mountjoy ‘gaineth an over-plus of rent more than he payeth to the value of about nineteen or seventeen pounds per annum’. Thus Mountjoy sub-let part of the Silver Street property and the whole of the Brentford property for a combined total of about £35 per annum, resulting in a net profit (‘de claro’) of about £18 per annum.
9 . Stow 1908, 1.208, citing a ‘presentment’ listing 150 ‘households of strangers’ in Billingsgsate ward. His comment is formulaic: cf. the ‘Complaynt’ of London citizens, 1571: ‘the merchant straungers take upp the fairest houses in the citty, devide & fitt them for their severall uses, take into them several lodgers & dwellers’ (PRO SP12/81/29; Tawney and Power 1924, 1.308-10).
10 . Janet S. Loengard, ed., London Viewers and their Certificates, 1508- 1558 (London Record Society, 1989), No. 207, 1 April 1547. The ‘viewers’ were a group of four men commissioned to adjudicate property disputes in the city.
11 . Harington 1927, 86-7.
12 . Orlin 2000b, 350-51.
13 . GL MS 12805, Evidence Book 7; Schofield 1987, 112-13.
14 . On Jacobean privies, see Schofield 1987, 22-4; Symonds 1952, 86-9. Schofield distinguishes the privy, ‘a small chamber with structural connections to below-ground cesspits’, from ‘temporary partitions, close-stools or other non-structural and more mobile arrangements’. They were often set into an upstairs chimney, with the updraught of the flue acting as a ventilator, though Harington notes that an ‘unruly’ wind will instead ‘force the il ayres down the chimneis’ and into the lower rooms. Nashe frequently refers to the printed page ending up in the privy. The full title of Strange Newes (1592), one of his pamphlets against Dr Harvey, reads: Strange Newes of the Intercepting Certaine Letters and a Convoy of Verses [Harvey’s recently published Four Letters] as they were going privilie to victuall the Low Countries (i.e. to be used as toilet paper).
6. The neighbourhood
15 . Windsor House: Stow 1908, 1.312, 315, 2.344; Milne and Cohen 2001, 40-9. Entries in the St Olave’s parish register (GL MS 6534) are indexed in Webb 1995, vol. 6, and transcribed (up to 1625) by Alan Nelson (GL MS 52/77/3, typescript, 2000). Alice Blague: Rowse 1976, 139. Sir David Fowles’s ownership of Windsor House is inferred from the parish register, 9 February 1607 (Webb 1995, 4.541, but misread as ‘Fowler’): ‘Henry son of David Fowles, knight, baptized at the house of the said David’. All other home baptisms recorded in the register refer to Windsor House. On Fowles or Foulis, a Scottish favourite of King James, see Fiona Pogson, ‘Sir David Foulis’ (ODNB 2004).
16 . Milne and Cohen 2001, 45, and figs 47-50, 56-62.
17 . H. Harben, A Dictionary of London (1918), s.v. Olave; Milne and Cohen 2001, 126. It was from medieval times the guild-church of the Silversmiths’ Company (G. Huelin, Vanished Churches of the City of London (Guildhall Library, 1966), 22).
18 . Stow 1908, 1.306; Baddeley 1921, 43.
19 . GL MS 6534, fol. IV. Flint’s transcript covers the years 1561-93; the entries continue thereafter in his hand till 1609, when the new incumbent, Thomas Booth, took over. Flint matriculated at Cambridge as a ‘gentleman pensioner’ in March 1583, proceeded BA 1587 and MA 1590 (Venn 1922-7, 1.2, 51).
20 . Diary fol. 15-15v, February 1601; Sorlien 1976, 52-3.
21 . On Barbers’ Hall see Young 1890; http://www.barberscompany.org.uk. The earliest record of the Hall is from the 1480s; the current building was opened in 1969.
22 . Andrew Griffin, ‘John Banister’ (ODNB 2004), and see note 42 below. He was buried at St Olave’s on 16 January 1599 (Webb 1995, 4.684).
23 . Norman Moore and Sarah Bakewell, ‘Richard Palmer’ (ODNB 2004). For his property on Monkwell Street see Schofield 1987, 97-9.
24 . See Marcus Woodward, ed., Gerard’s Herball (1985); Marja Smolenaars, ‘John Gerard’ (ODNB 2004).
25 . See H. N. Ellacombe, Plant-lore and Garden-craft in Shakespeare (1878). Iago’s appositions (hyssop/thyme; nettles/lettuce) accord with contemporary ideas of ‘dry’ and ‘moist’ plants being mutually beneficial. Shakespeare writes often of the therapeutic power of herbs: ‘O mickle is the powerful grace that lies / In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities’ (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.15-16); ‘Not poppy nor mandragora, / Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world / Shall ever medicine thee’ (Othello, 3.3.334-6). And see Ophelia’s famous catalogue, ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance [etc]’ (Hamlet, 4.5.175-83).
26 . Hotson 1949, 125-7. After Savage’s death in 1607 his son Richard sold the Silver Street house to Shakespeare’s colleague John Heminges: see Eccles 1991-3, s.v. Heminges.
27 . Henry Bannister appears in the 1599 rolls for Farringdon ward (PRO E179/146/390a, fol. 1), living either in the western part of St Olave’s or in one of the three small adjoining parishes grouped with it for tax-collection purposes. I conjecture that he is the same as the goldsmith Henry Bannister, who is linked with Skeres in a loan to the poet Matthew Roydon (PRO Close Roll 1144/24, 6 January 1582; G. C. Moore-Smith, ‘Matthew Roydon’, MLR 9 (1914), 97-8). Wolfall and Skeres: PRO STAC 5, bundle S9/ 8, 26 April 1593; Nicholl 2002, 28-31, 467. Though ‘of Silver Street’ in 1593, Wolfall may be the ‘Jhon Woolfall’ whose children were baptized at nearby St Mary Aldermanbury in 1580-81 (Registers, ed. W. B. Bannerman (Harleian Society 61, 1931), 44-5).
28 . Stow 1908, 1.299. We learn from Nicholas’s will (PRO Prob 11/60, 31 May 1578) that Daniel Nicholas was a younger son. He stood to inherit certain ‘messuages and tenements’ on Bread Street in the event of his elder brother John dying without issue.
29 . Jonson’s second son, Joseph, was baptized at St Giles on 9 December 1599 (Riggs 1989, 54); Dekker is probably the Thomas Dicker or Dykers whose three daughters were baptized there between 1594 and 1602 (F. P. Wilson, ‘Three Notes on Thomas Dekker’, MLR 15 (1920), 82); on Wilkins in St Giles see Part Six above. Richard Hathaway, part-author of Sir John Oldcastle (1600), written for the Admiral’s Men as a riposte to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, is doubtless the ‘Richard Hathway, Poett’ who appears in the St Giles register in March 1601, and probably the ‘scholemaster’ and ‘Master of Arts’ of the same name who features earlier, though no record remains of his university career (MacManaway 1958, 562). On Edmund Shakespeare see EKC 2.18: ‘Edward’ is an erroneous repetition of his son’s name (‘Edward sonne of Edward Shackspeere’). He died aged twenty-seven, and was buried at St Saviour’s, Southwark, on 31 December 1607, ‘with a forenoone knell of the great bell’ for which someone (by tradition his brother) paid 20 shillings.
30 . Also at St Mary Aldermanbury lived the Digges family: the mathematician Thomas Digges had died in 1595, but Shakespeare knew his son Leonard, who later contributed a prefatory poem, ‘To
the Memorie of the deceased Authour, Maister W. Shakespeare’, to the First Folio.
31 . Nelson’s literary works included a verse epitaph on Sir Francis Walsingham, and an account of the annual pageant of the Fishmongers’ company (Eleri Larkum, ‘Thomas Nelson’, ODNB 2004). A later literary resident was the metaphysical poet Francis Quarles, buried at St Olave’s 11 September 1644.
32 . On Giffard see Foster 1891, 1.1, 563. He and Palmer treated the Prince with an infusion of Teucrium scordium (Sarah Bakewell, ‘Richard Palmer’, ODNB 2004). This plant (the water germander) ‘was at one time esteemed as an antidote for poisons, and also as an antiseptic and anthelmintic’ (Plants for a Future database, http://www.pfaf.org).
33 . Schofield 1987, 135.
34 . Baddeley 1921, 210-15. The last mail-coach left the Two Swans, bound for Dover, in 1844, and the inn was demolished in 1856 to be replaced by a depot for rail-freight.
35 . John Taylor, The Carriers Cosmographie, sig. C2: ‘The carriers of Worcester doe lodge at the Castle in Woodstreet, their dayes are Fridaies and Saturdaies.’ For Evesham, sig. B2v. Stratford itself is not in Taylor’s list.
36 . On Greenaway see Shapiro 2005, 260-61. The letter he carried was from Richard Quiney, a Stratford man then in London, to Abraham Sturley, who refers to it in his reply of 4 November 1598 (EKC 2.103). Greenaway doubtless carried others in the correspondence, though not Quiney’s earlier letter to Shakespeare (25 October 1598; Cooper 2006, no. 58) which is the only item of Shakespeare’s correspondence to survive: this was sent from Quiney’s London lodgings, the Bell in Carter Lane, and did not leave London. The sum they wished to borrow from their ‘loveinge contreyman’ was £30.
37 . Stow 1908, 1.206, 290, 2.311.
38 . Ibid., 1.115, 2.285; Salga˜do 1977, 163-82. Wilkins 1607, 1177-9, describes accommodation at the Poultry Counter: ‘the featherbed in the Maisters side . . . the flock-bed in the Knights warde . . . the straw-bed in the Hole’.
The Lodger Shakespeare Page 33
