The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

  66 . Joy Rowe, ‘Kitson family’, ODNB 2004; Hearn 1995, nos 53-4; John Gage, History and Antiquities of Hengrave (1822), 175-85. A spirited glimpse of Lady Kitson is in a letter of Philip Gawdy, c. 1594: ‘My L. Kytson is well recovered & in token of thankesgyving danced all this last night as long as she was able to go’ (Jeayes 1906, 79-80). Two of her cousins were frequent visitors to Forman in the late 1590s: Anne Brock n’e Jerningham, who was the niece and namesake of Lady Kitson’s mother; and Anne’s daughter, Alice Blague, wife of the Dean of Rochester. Mrs Blague was a particular confidante, and for a while the lover, of Forman. She recruited clients for him, including, in 1601, Lady Kitson’s father, Sir Thomas Cornwallis. Among her friends at court were Lord Hunsdon’s sisters, Lady Hoby and Lady Scrope, and she doubtless knew Lady Hunsdon as well. She visited Forman at least twice in January 1598, the probable date of Forman’s memo concerning ‘Madam Kitson’.

  67 . New Year’s Gift Roll 1578, in Nichols 1823, 2.68.

  68 . The Blacke Booke (1604), Middleton 1886, 8.37. ‘Flaxen hayr to sell’: George Gray, news-sheet advertisement, 4 February 1663, cited in OED s.v. periwig 3.

  13. The m’nage

  69 . Registers of St Giles, Cripplegate (GL MS 6419/2), 5 April 1612: baptism of ‘Martha daughter of John Blott, tiremaker’. In his will of 3 October 1642 he left Stephen 900 guilders to be paid after the death of his widow, Maijlie.

  70 . Webb 1995, 4.684, 644.

  71 . Ibid., 4.646. Her husband may be the Scottish basketmaker Thomas ‘Johnsonne’, a native of Moffat, who came to London in about 1590, and was living in the Castle Baynard district of the city in 1593 (Scouloudi 1985, 186). If this is the same man he was a widower when he married Joan, for in 1593 he had a wife, Isabel. But the name is extremely common.

  72 . PRO E179/146/390, fol. 32 (1599); E179/146/409, fol. 3 (1600). On his nominal assets of £5 he has to pay tax of 26s 8d: the double tax-rate for foreigners in Shakespeare’s London.

  73 . Mountjoy as godfather: FPC, Marriage Register 1600-39, fol. 43; Moens 1896, 48. Clinkolad: Scouloudi 1985, 160. Courtois: Whitebrook 1932, 93.

  74 . Mountjoy’s denization: see note 1 above. For denization figures see Scouloudi 1985, 5; Shaw 1911.

  75 . W. Bruce Bannerman, ed., Registers of St Olave, Hart Street 1563-1700, Harleian Society Registers 46 (1916), 260.

  76 . See Appendix 4.

  PART FOUR: TIREMAKING

  14. Tires and wigs

  1 . The tireman of the Globe, unnamed, is humorously presented onstage in the prologue written by John Webster for Marston’s The Malcontent (1604). More generally OED gives ‘tireman’ = a dresser or valet, or a tailor; and ‘tirewoman’ = a lady’s maid, or a dress-maker or costumier. The tiring-house is shown (marked ‘mimorum aedes’) in the De Witt sketch of the Swan theatre (1596); it was also used for backstage effects: ‘drummers make thunder in the tiring house’ (Melton 1620, sig. E4r), referring to a production of Dr Faustus.

  2 . The French courtly head-tire in turn echoed Renaissance Italian costume for feste and pageants, on which see Newton 1975. The influence is discernible in Vecellio 1598, a handbook of French and Italian costume written by the brother of the painter Titian. Extravagant tires designed by Inigo Jones for the Masque of Queenes (1610) were adapted from Ren’ Boyvin’s engravings of head-dress designs by Rosso Fiorentino for court festivals at Fontainebleau in the 1530s (Peacock 1984; Hearn 1995, 161).

  3 . Ben Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels (1601), 2.4.51-61. Phantaste’s new head-tire is also based on continental models: ‘ ’Tis after the Italian print we look’d on t’other night.’ See also Jonson’s Alchemist (1610): one of the ‘pleasures of a countess’ is to have ‘citizens gape at her and praise her tires’ (4.2.50-51). Those tires could be robes, however.

  4 . ‘Tyre of gold’: Edmund Spenser, Faerie Queene (1590), 1.10.32. ‘Tyer of netting’: Michael Drayton, Muses Elisium (1630), 2.113. ‘Ship tire’: Jorge de Montemayor, Diana, trans. Bartholomew Yong (1598), in Hotson 1949, 178. ‘Mourning tire’: will of 1639 in Wills and Inventories of Bury St Edmunds 1470-1650 (Camden Society, 1850), 183. ‘Turkish tires’: John Hall, Paradoxes (1650), 67. ‘Squirrels’ tails’: John Marston, Histriomastix (1599), 2.117. In Jonson’s Everyman in his Humour (1598), 3.2.37-8, Kitely’s decree that his wife ‘shall no more/Wear three-pil’d acorns to make my horns ache [cuckold him]’ certainly refers to headgear and perhaps to a head-tire.

  5 . George Chapman, A Justification of a Strange Act of Nero (1629), in M. R. Ridley, ed., Antony and Cleopatra (Arden edn, 1954), 67n.

  6 . John Stow, Annales, ed. E. Howe (1631), 1038; Stow’s spelling ‘perwig’ is also found in Hamlet Q1. Joseph Hall has ‘th’ unruly winde blowes off his periwinke’ (Satires, 1598, 3.5 line 8). For other spellings see OED, s.v. periwig. Philemon Holland uses ‘perrucke’ in his translation of Suetonius (Historie of Twelve Caesars, 1606); his marginal explanation (‘a counterfeit cappe of false hair’) suggests the word was still unfamiliar.

  7 . On hair-cauls (‘nets made of knotted human hair’) see Arnold 1988, 204. One decorated with pearls is visible in a portrait of Queen Elizabeth (Pollok House, Glasgow, c. 1590; Arnold 1988, figs 46, 296). Her hoodmaker, Margaret Sketts or Schetz, supplied these items. The tiremaker would also use ‘rolls’: tightly packed hair held together inside nets, used to bolster up the natural hair.

  8 . I am grateful to Susan North, Curator of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, for information in this paragraph and elsewhere.

  9 . In the ‘Armada’ portrait (1588) she wears a ‘halo of pearls’ surrounding a ‘bodkin topped with feathers and a diamond fleur de lys’ (Scarisbrick 1995, 15). See also head-tires in portraits of Mary Fitton (c. 1585, Arbury Hall); Princess Elizabeth (Robert Peake, 1603, National Maritime Museum); and the Countess of Arundel (Daniel Mytens, c. 1618, NPG).

  10 . Maids of Honour: Arnold 1988, 202. The same document records one of the Maids, Dorothy Abington, receiving lengths of black and orange sarcenet ‘to lyne cawles’. Mountague’s payment: BL Egerton 2806, fol. 216, 27 September 1586.

  11 . Norris 1938, 2.609. The German traveller Leopold von Wedel, who saw her at Hampton Court in 1585, writes: ‘on either side of her crisp hair hung a great pearl as large as a hazel-nut’ (Klarwill 1928, 322-3). This ‘crisp’ or curled hair was a wig. An earlier report (Pierre Ronsard, Le Boccage royal, 1567) refers to her ‘longues tresses blondes’, but these may have been her own tresses.

  12 . PRO LC5/36, fols 212-13, 6 June 1592; LC5/37, fol. 90, 29 April 1595. Cf. LC5/37, fols 222, 257, 288. The ‘heads of hair’ are distinct from periwigs; they were conveniently sheaved bundles of hair to be used for making hair-cauls, hair-lace, etc.

  13 . Mary wore wigs twenty years earlier, as witnessed by Sir Francis Knollys: ‘Mystres Marye Ceaton [Seaton], who is . . . the fynest dresser of a woman’s heade and heare that is to be seen in any countrye . . . did sett sotche a curled heare upon the Queen [Mary] that was said to be a perewycke that shoed very delicately’ (letter to Sir William Cecil, 28 June 1568, BL Stowe MS 560, fol. 24v). Knollys seems to have been particularly taken with this, for early the following year Nicholas White wrote of Mary: ‘Her hair of itself is black, and yet Mr Knollys told me that she wears hair of sundry colours’ (Norris 1938, 3.2.515-16).

  14 . Marie’s payment: see Part One, note 24. Weaver had already known the Mountjoys for some time (since c. 1596 according to his Court of Requests deposition). On the Sheppards see Chapter 26.

  15 . The headwear shown by Van Somer (NPG) is ‘an attire of royal pear-shaped pearls standing up at the back of her head on a wire covered with red ribbon’, set off by a large ‘table-cut diamond bodkin in the centre of her head, with pear-pearl and ruby drops hanging from it, and a tuft of feathers behind’ (Scarisbrick 1995, 21, 67).

  16 . Erondell 1605, sigs E1v-E3v.

  17 . The carcanet, often a collar or necklace, is here a head-ornament (cf. Cotgrave 1611, s.v. fermaillet: �
�a carkanet or border of gold etc such as Gentlewomen wear about their heads’). Erondell’s last dialogue, ‘Of the going to bed’, has more on Madame de Rimelaine’s headwear: a ‘white hayre-lace to binde my haires’, a ‘white fillet [hair-band] for to raise up my haires’, a ‘little linnen coyffe’, and an under-cap.

  18 . In modern French atour is used mainly in the plural, and with a jocular note: a woman dans ses atours = dressed up in her finery.

  19 . Byrne 1930, xiii-xv; J. Maclean, Lives of the Berkeleys (1883).

  20 . Christs Teares, sigs S3-S4v; Nashe 1958, 2.137-40. ‘Frounzed’ = frizzed, curled (OED ‘frounce’, sense 2). ‘Streetwalkers’: Robert Greene, A Notable discovery of cozenage (1591), in Salga˜do 1972, 180.

  21 . Bod., Ashmole MS 208, fol. 121v, c. 1593; Kassell 2005, 160.

  22 . Microcynicon, 1599, Satire 3; Middleton 1886, 8.123-7. He refers again to hair-extensions in A Mad World, my Masters (c. 1605), where women who ‘wear half-moons made of another’s hair’ are said to be ‘against kind’ (i.e. unnatural).

  23 . Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; Hearn 1995, no. 78 (cat. entry by Tabitha Barber); Strong 1983, 155-7.

  24 . CSP Venetian 1617-19, 67-8.

  25 . Satyres and Satyricall Epigrams, with certain Observations at Blackfryers (1617), sig E8v; Gurr 1987, 231. However, the ‘tittle’ may be a small hat, or even (as Matthew Steggle suggests to me) a beauty spot. Wearing expensive headgear to the theatre had its dangers, as in Sir John Harington’s vivid anecdote (c. 1595) in which two muggers try to snatch a jewelled ‘border’ off a woman’s head as she walks up the ‘dark and private’ playhouse stairs (Letters and Epigrams, ed. Norman McLure (1930), 245-6; Gurr 1987, 210).

  15. The ‘tire-valiant’

  26 . Chambers 1923, 1.372. On the costs and logistics of theatrical costuming see also Cerasano 1994; Bentley 1984; Carson 1988, 35.

  27 . Two inventories of Admiral’s Men costumes survive: one dated 10 March 1598, transcribed from a lost original by Edmund Malone in his 1790 edn of Shakespeare (Wells 2006, 234-6); and one c. 1602 (Dulwich College MS1/90; Cooper 2006, no. 35).

  28 . Longleat House, Wilts., Portland Papers 1, fol. 159. The folio, which also contains an elegantly scripted excerpt from the play, is signed ‘Henricus Peacham’; the date, in abbreviated Latin, may be 1594 or 1595. Titus was in repertoire at the Rose, performed by Sussex’s Men, in the winter of 1593-4. Peacham, later the author of The Art of Drawing (1606) and The Compleat Gentleman (1623), was then a sixteen-year-old student at Cambridge. The costuming implications of the sketch are discussed in Cerasano 1994. See also June Schlueter, ‘Rereading the Peacham Drawing’, SQ 50 (1999), 171-84, though her central thesis (that the sketch is not of Shakespeare’s play, but of a scene from the anonymous Tragaedia von Tito Andronico, performed in Germany by English actors, and known only in a German translation published in 1620) may struggle for acceptance.

  29 . Platter 1937, 166-95; Wotton to Edmund Bacon, 2 July 1613, in L. Pearsall Smith, ed., Life and Letters of Henry Wotton (1907), 2.32.

  30 . Stallybrass 1996, 295.

  31 . The Blacke Booke (1604), in Middleton 1886, 8.13; Melton 1620, sig. E4r. For a general survey of headgear worn onstage see Linthicum 1936, 216-37.

  32 . The author is sometimes identified as William Parrat. Two ballads on the burning of the Globe were registered the day after the fire (SR 26 July 1613; Arber 1875-94, 3.528), one of them by Parrat, but it does not have the same title as this one, which was first published in 1816 (Gentleman’s Magazine 86, 114) from a MS found in York. See Chambers 1923, 2.420; Peter Beale, ‘The Burning of the Globe’, TLS 20 June 1986. On Heminges’s managerial role, see Mary Edmond, ‘John Heminges’ (ODNB 2004).

  33 . See note 27 above.

  34 . Foakes 2002, 185, 198 (Diary, fols 95v, 104). William Gosson of St Olave’s, Southwark, is listed in subsidy rolls from 1593 (PRO E179/146/ 349 etc); he may or may not be Stephen Gosson’s brother of that name, later described as ‘gentleman and drum-major to James I’. Another possible husband for Mrs Gosen is Lianard Gawson, a Polish tailor from Danzig (Gdansk) listed in the 1593 return (Scouloudi 1985, 178), though he was at that point unmarried.

  35 . Foakes 2002, 221 (Diary, fol. 118v).

  36 . The story of Proteus and Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1590) suggests Shakespeare’s knowledge of Diana. It was translated from the Spanish by Bartholomew Yong in the early 1580s; possibly Shakespeare knew this translation in MS, as it was not published till 1598.

  37 . Merry Wives (1602), sig. D4v: ‘The arched bent of thy brow / Would become the ship tire, the tire vellet, / Or anie Venetian tire.’ On the Quarto text see Gerald Johnson, ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor Q1: Provincial Touring and Adapted Texts’ (SQ 38 (1987), 154-65). ‘Tire-volant’: see Steevens’s edn of Shakespeare (1793), vol. 3.

  38 . Feuillerat 1908, 241; Korda 2002, 212-14. Also in the 1573-4 accounts are an ‘Italian woman’ and her daughter, paid £1 13s 4d for ‘hier of womens heares for the Children’, and for attending the Children ‘to dresse their heades’; and a ‘Mistris Swegoo’, who also sounds foreign, paid to ‘garnishe ix heades . . . for the ix Muzes’ (Feuillerat 1908, 219, 156).

  39 . Jonson 1925-51, 7.205-41; Orgel and Strong 1973, 1.101-5; Hearn 1995, 190.

  40 . Belvoir Castle accounts, 4 March and 18 May 1606 (HMC Rutland 4.457-8). The other ‘Powers of Juno’ were the Countesses of Bedford and Montgomery, Ladies Berkeley and Knollys, and three Maids of Honour, Dorothy Hastings, Blanche Somerset and Cecily Sackville. The earlier Masque of Blackness (described in the Revels accounts as the Queen’s ‘Maske of Moures’) had parts for eleven ‘Ladies of Honour’, who ‘came in great shows of Devises wch they satt in, wth exzselent Musike’ (PRO AO3/ 908/13, fol. 2v; Streitberger 1986, 9).

  41 . For Jonson’s costume notes see Jonson 1925-51, 7.230-31; for a discussion of the paintings, see ibid., xv-xix. The third painting (Welbeck Abbey; Hearn 1995, no. 129) was first catalogued at Titchfield House in 1731 as ‘A Turkish Lady’. One of Inigo Jones’s earliest surviving costume designs (Chatsworth House; Hearn 1995, no. 106) has similarities to these costumes and may be for Hymenaei; the head-tire has been compared to Italian models in a Florentine intermezzo of 1589 and in Vercellio 1598.

  42 . Pory to Sir Robert Cotton, 7 January 1606 (BL Cotton MS Jul Caes 3, fols 301-2); Jonson 1925-51, 10.466.

  16. In the workshop

  43 . See Mountjoy’s ‘Answer’ (Appendix 1). On the movements of Stephen and Mary Belott in the years after their marriage see Chapter 21. There was a similar disagreement over an unpaid brewer’s bill.

  44 . Whitebrook 1932, 93. A more precise explanation of Courtois’s ‘purled work’ is found in the unlikely location of Henry Ainsworth’s Annotations on the Book of Psalms (1622). Glossing Psalm 45.13-14, ‘Her clothing is of wrought gold . . . [a] raiment of needlework’, Ainsworth suggests the garment is made of ‘purled works or grounds, closures of gold such as precious stones are set in’. This would be apt for Mountjoy’s requirements: a form of gilded embroidery to house the gems that featured in a tire.

  45 . Sleny Georghiou, quoted in Sunday Times (‘Talking Heads’, 2 July 2006). Cf. Victoria Beckham on ‘bad extensions’: ‘You can see the glue holding the bonds in at the scalp, [and] the extensions themselves look all frizzy because they’re made out of nylon instead of real hair’ (That Extra Half an Inch, 2006, 290). Such or similar disasters were doubtless avoided by the expert stylists of Silver Street.

  46 . Glover 1979, 1-12.

  47 . Randle Holme, The Academy of Armory (1688), 3.21.

  48 . OED, s.v. sleave silk. Webster’s Dictionary defines it as ‘(a) The knotted or entangled part of silk or thread. (b) Silk not yet twisted; floss’. ‘Sleave’ is cognate with Swedish slejf and German Schleife, a knot. Fishing flies were made out of it: ‘Sleave-silk flies / Bewitch poor fishes’ wand’ring eyes’ (John Donne, ‘The Bait’, 23-4; Donne 1912, 1.47).

  49 . Chamber’s Cyclopaedia 1727-41, s.
v. See Gina M. Barrett, ‘Metallic Threads: A Background to their Use in Textile Work’ (http://www.et-tu.com/soper-lane).

  50 . See Epilogue and Appendix 4. The petition is mentioned (misdated and with no source) in Hotson 1949, 179; I am grateful to James Travers for his help in tracking it down.

  51 . This document, also mentioned without source in Hotson 1949, 179, and described only as ‘a lawsuit’, remains elusive.

  52 . Cunnington 1970, 224; Feuillerat 1908, 23, 82.

  53 . For ‘ravelled’ = frayed, see OED, s.v. ravel, citing Bishop Fuller, ‘To hem the end of our history so it ravel not out . . .’.

  17. The underpropper

  54 . In a commendatory poem opposite the engraving in F1 (below it in editions subsequent to F3, 1664), Ben Jonson writes: ‘This figure that thou here seest put, / It was for gentle Shakespeare cut; / Wherein the Graver had a strife / With Nature, to out-doo the life.’ That Jonson really thought the portrait accurate and expressive (or that he had even seen it when he wrote the poem) cannot be guaranteed. See Spielmann 1924, 27.