The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

  15 Chambers 1923, 4.339. The Act, issued 27 May 1606, threatened a fine of £10 for every offence. Its euphemizing effects are notoriously present in F1. The original text of Othello (as preserved in the 1622 Quarto) has over fifty oaths which are watered down in the Folio text (Wells 2006, 238).

  16 . On The Yorkshire Tragedy, see Malone Society reprint, ed. Sylvia Feldman (1973); Sturgess 1969, 30-38; Lisa Hopkins, ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy and Middleton’s Tragic Aesthetic’, Early Modern Literary Studies 8 (2003), 1-15. Wilkins’s redrafting of the Miseries may be contiguous with Middleton’s writing of The Yorkshire Tragedy.

  17 . In 1 Henry IV, 2.4, a drawer who habitually calls ‘Anon anon Sir’ is baited by Hal and Poins; in Merry Wives, the Host often uses ‘bully’ as a form of address, as Ilford does earlier in this scene: ‘A thousand good dayes, my noble bully’ (1058).

  23. Prostitutes and players

  18 Rendle 1882, 70-77; Johnson 1969. Stow mentions various ‘stewhouses’ on the waterfront at Southwark, with signs painted ‘on their frontes towardes the Thames’ (Stow 1908, 2.55).

  19 . The pamphlet Holland’s Leaguer by Nicholas Goodman, the play of the same name by Shakerley Marmion, and a ballad, ‘Newes from Hollands Leaguer’, all appeared in 1632, inspired by Bess Holland’s defiance of official attempts to close her down; in December 1631 the house was briefly surrounded by armed officers. According to Goodman, the brothel had earlier been ‘kept’ by Margaret Barnes a.k.a. ‘Long Meg’ (see note 12 above). Other famous Southwark whorehouses were the Cardinal’s Hat and the Castle: the latter was attached to the Hope Inn, on the site of the present-day Bankside pub, the Anchor (Ackroyd 2000, 689-91).

  20 I follow the conventional emendation of FI’s ‘barne’ to ‘bars’ (first proposed by Johnson) but ‘barn’ may be an authentic early plural, cf. ‘eyne’ for ‘eyes’. On Pickt-hatch see Sugden 1925, s.v. and commentators on Merry Wives 2.2.17 (Falstaff to Pistol: ‘To your manor of Pickt-Hatch, go!’).

  21 Munday, Retreat from Plays (1580), ed. Hazlitt (1869), 139; Dekker and Wilkins 1607, 64; Prynne, Histriomastix (1633), 391. Reports (or polemical claims) of ‘bawdy behaviour’ in the playhouses are surveyed in Cook 1977.

  22 Munday, Retreat from Plays, 126; John Lane, Tom Tell-troths message (1600), 133. For the pejorative use of ‘housewife’, see also 2 Henry IV, 3.2.311, ‘over-scutched housewives’; and Othello, 4.1.94-5, where Bianca is described as ‘a housewife that by selling her desires / Buys herself bread and clothes’.

  23 Gosson, Plays Confuted (1583), sig. f1r. Cf. Dekker and Wilkins 1607, Jest 45: ‘A wench having a good face, a good body, and good clothes on, but of bad conditions, sitting one day in the two-penny room of a playhouse, & a number of yong Gentlemen about her, against all whom she maintain’d talke’. The ‘twopenny rooms’ which feature often in these accounts of venery were partitioned sections of the upper galleries, the forerunner of the theatrical ‘box’.

  24 Father Hubberds Tales (1604); Middleton 1886, 8.79-80.

  25 J. W. Lever, Arden edn (1965), xxxi-xxxv.

  26 The Blacke Booke (1604); Middleton 1886, 8.16.

  27 . On prunes and brothels see Panek 2005.

  28 . According to John Jowett, Measure sometimes sounds like Middleton because it contains some later interpolations (c. 1621) by him (Jowett 2001).

  29 . Barbara Everett, ‘A Dreame of Passion’, LRB 25, 2 January 2003.

  30 . Jonson distinguishes different types of collaboration when he says he wrote Volpone ‘without a co-adjutor, / Novice, journeyman or tutor’ (Prologue, 17-8; cf. Wells 2006, 26-7). The play was performed by the King’s Men in c. 1605-6, close in time to the Wilkins-Shakespeare collaboration. In terms of text contributed one could call Wilkins a full ‘co-adjutor’, though the skilled but subordinate ‘journeyman’ is perhaps a better summary of his role.

  31 . The perfunctory dialogue of 4.5, a very short scene where two unnamed ‘gentlemen’ quit the brothel unexpectedly converted (‘I’ll do anything now that is virtuous, but I am out of the road of rutting forever,’ etc), sounds to me like Wilkins. The Arden edition’s stage directions quibble unnecessarily in placing 4.2 ‘in front of’ the brothel. Lines 50 (‘Wife, take her in’) and 122 (‘Take her home’) are cited to support this, but the first phrase would distinguish the reception area from the accommodation within; and the second is probably figurative for ‘take proper control of her’. 4.6, where Marina is brought to a customer, is certainly set ‘in’ the brothel.

  32 . All information in this and the following paragraph is from St Giles parish register, GL MS 6419/2.

  33 . Wilkins 1953, 59; Pericles, 3.1.34. The phrase was first recognized as Shakespeare’s by J. P. Collier. For other lights shed on Pericles 1609 by Wilkins’s phrasing see Massai 1997.

  34 . The punchline of Jest 44 in the Wilkins-Dekker Jests to Make you Merrie (1607) sounds a note of bitter prophecy: ‘Do but marry with a whore, or else have to do with players, and thou shalt quickly run mad.’

  24. Customer satisfaction

  35 . Father Hubberds Tales (1604); Middleton 1886, 8.78-9.

  36 . Cf. Manningham’s diary (October 1602, Sorlien 1976, 105): ‘Mr Tan-feild, speaking of a knave and his queane, said he was a little to[o] inward with hir.’

  37 . Cf. 2 Henry IV, 2.4.59, ‘Can a weak empty vessel [Doll] bear such a huge full hogshead [Falstaff]?’, and other examples in Partridge 1968, s.v. ‘bear’.

  38 . Archer 2000, 186.

  25. To Brainforde

  39 . On seventeenth-century Brentford see Turner 1922, 35-8, 128-35; Allison 1962; Edith Jackson, Annals of Ealing (1898). Within Ealing parish, Old Brentford was more populous than Ealing itself. In 1664 there were 116 households in Ealing and 259 in Old Brentford; in 1795 the figures were 200 and 500. A ‘census’ of Ealing village in 1599 lists 85 households, so we might guess (at the same sort of ratio) about 190 households in Old Brentford at the time of Mountjoy’s leasehold there. I can find nothing to identify the particular house. A Southwark man, William Amery, inherited a house in Old Brentford on his father’s death in 1597 (Allison 1962, 27, 32), and was taxed on it in 1598 (PRO E179/142/239); as he also inherited a house in Southwark, it is possible he let out the Brentford property. I also note that the wealthiest resident of Ealing parish, Edward Vaughan, assessed on £20 in lands in the 1598 subsidy (PRO E179/142/239), had his town-house in St Giles, Cripplegate; in his will of 1612 he bequeathed money to the poor of St Giles, ‘where I have long dwelt’ (Allison 1962, 29). A servant listed at his Ealing household, Alice Eaton, was perhaps related to the Eatons of St Giles who include Stephen Belott’s apprentice William Eaton and Mary Byllett’s husband Richard Eaton (see Chapter 23 above). But these are shots in the dark.

  40 . On the roads to Brentford see MCR 2.89-90. The summer fair was a particular magnet for urban revellers: it is described disapprovingly by Dr Dee, who lived across the river at Mortlake, as ‘Bacchus feast at Brainford’ (Diaries, ed. E. Fenton (1998), 248).

  41 . Martin Butler, ‘John Lowin’, ODNB 2004; John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (1708), 21; Honan 1998, 300.

  42 On the Three Pigeons, see Turner 1922, 129-31; anon, Jests of George Peele (1627 edn), 2. A visitor in 1847 (quoted but not identified by Turner) judged the interior not much changed from Jacobean days: ‘twenty sitting or sleeping rooms; dark closets and passages and narrow staircases . . . The walls are in some places from seven to eight feet thick.’ There was also an inn at New Brentford called the Three Doves, no doubt in emulation; its innkeeper was Roger Dove (MCR 1.146).

  43 MCR 1.72 (Cornewall), 1.250 (Charche).

  44 MCR 1.269 (Heyward), 2.4 (Anderton), 2.82 (Flood).

  45 The Thomas Johnson who married at Ealing church on 16 February 1618 (Thomas Gurney, ed., Middlesex Parish Registers: Marriages (1910), 8.11) was possibly Joan’s widower, but the name appears elsewhere in the marriage-registers. The church’s baptism and burial records do not survive.

  26. ‘At his game’

 
46 Sorlien 1976, 208-9 (Diary, fol. 29v); cf. SDL doc. 115.

  47 Microcosmographie (1628), no. 24.

  48 . Letter of Sir William Trumbull to Lord Hay, in R. F. Brinkley, Nathan Field the Actor-Playwright (1920), 42. Jonson and the Rutlands: Patterson 1923, 31. Jonson flattered the Countess that she ‘was nothing inferior to her father, S[ir] P[hilip] Sidney, in poesie’ (ibid., 20).

  49 An anonymous ‘Funeral Elegy’ on Burbage (c. 1619) speaks of his ‘stature small’ (Sidney Lee, DNB, 1886). In Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy Jeronimo is described as of ‘short body’, which is sometimes taken to refer to Burbage in the part; but there is no evidence he played it. Hamlet being ‘fat and scant o’ breath’ is similarly interpreted, but Mary Edmond rejects this (‘Richard Burbage’, ODNB 2004). She notes Elizabethan use of ‘fatty’ to mean sweaty, dramatically appropriate during the duel with Laertes, and infinitely preferable to a ‘portly prince lumbering about the small stage’.

  50 Aubrey 1949, 85; Schoenbaum 1970, 101-2.

  51 . A detailed account of John and Jane Davenant is in Edmond 1987, 4-26. Her visit to Forman: Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 287.

  52 PRO SC6/JAS1/1646, fol. 28v. On Sheppard see Edmond 1987, 6-8, 16. His wife Ursula was another visitor to Forman in 1597-8 (Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 153, etc).

  53 . A cynical coda to Emilia’s speech is in All’s Well, where Lavatch argues that an unfaithful wife suits the bored husband just fine: ‘The knaves come to do that for me which I am aweary of. He that ears my land spares my team, and gives me leave to in the crop; if I be his cuckold, he’s my drudge . . . Ergo he that kisses my wife is my friend’ (1.3.40-48). All that Emilia says is ironically shadowed by the fact that her husband is Iago, whose secret life is so much darker and weirder than she imagines.

  54 Cf. Samuel Rowlands, Crew of Kind Gossips (1609), where a housewife talks of certain ‘kind gentlemen’ that lodge with her: ‘Two of them at my house in term-time lie, / And comfort me with jests and odd device / When as my husband’s out a-nights at dice.’ They ‘will not see me want’. These ‘odd devices’ (the s is missing for the rhyme) sound flirtatious at the least. Real-life sexual encounters in a London lodging-house are examined in Capp 1995, from a case in the Bridewell court-books involving Shakespeare’s friend Michael Drayton. In 1627 Elizabeth Hobcock, the maidservant at a lodging-house in St Clement Dane’s, deposed that she saw Mrs Mary Peters ‘hold up her clothes unto her navel before Mr Michael Drayton, and that she clapt her hand on her privy part and said it was a sound and a good one, that the said Mr Drayton did then also lay his hand upon it and stroke it, and said that it was a good one’. The accusation turns out to be false; Capp uncovers a grubby saga of sexual intrigue and blackmail. Of course, the Mountjoy establishment was not a rooming-house of this kind.

  55 . Obviously this list is not exhaustive. Some, thinking of the ‘Fair Youth’ of the Sonnets and of the generally homoerotic overtone of the playhouse world, would add homosexual sex.

  PART SEVEN: MAKING SURE

  27. A handfasting

  1 . Heinrich Bullinger, Hundred Sermons upon the Apocalypse, trans. John Daus (1573), 23.

  2 Frederick Pollock and F. W. Maitland, History of English Law (1923), 2.368.

  3 A Treatise of Spousals or Matrimonial Contracts (1686), 13-15.

  4 Giese 2006, 120.

  5 On marriage contracts see also Cook 1977a and 1991, Hopkins 1998, and (on an earlier period) Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘The Making of Marriage in Mid-Tudor England’, Journal of Family History 10 (1985), 339-52.

  6 Giese 2006, 117-19.

  7 . Ibid., 123, 129. The ceremony and its wordings were ancient: ‘handfast’ is found in a MS of c. 1200, ‘troth-plight’ in 1303, and a bridegroom at Ripon Cathedral in 1484 says, ‘I take the Margaret to my handfest wif’ (OED).

  8 . Museum of London, 62.121/10; Cooper 2006, no. 18. ‘Gimmel’ is from Latin gemellus, ‘twin’. An attenuated version of the ring’s motto is in Beaumont and Fletcher, Wit at several Weapons (c. 1616), 5.1: ‘I knit this holy hand fast, and with this hand / The heart that owes this hand ever binding.’ In Middleton’s Chaste Maid (c. 1613) Moll’s betrothal-ring from Touchwood reads, ‘Love thats wise / Blinds parents eyes’ (3.1). The other gifts listed are from Giese 2006, 133-44. Drinking, or pledging, to one another was also a common part of the troth-plight, as in the Honthorst betrothal scene (see Plate 32), and in Jonson’s famous lyric, ‘To Celia’: ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes / And I will pledge with mine’ (Complete Poems, ed. G. Parfitt (1973), 106).

  9 Cook 1991, 158; Bullinger, The Christen State of Matrimonye, trans. Miles Coverdale (1541), 49.

  28. ‘They have married me!’

  10 . ‘Spousals de praesenti . . . [are] very matrimony, and therefore perpetually indissoluble except for adultery’ (Swinburne, Treatise of Spousals, 15). Scarborrow’s subsequent marriage would be technically adulterous, and the contract dissoluble.

  11 . Mendelson and Crawford 1998, 120. The Church’s unease about the sexual implications of civil contracts was not unrealistic. In marital disputes before the Bishop’s court in Chester, ‘out of seventeen troth-plight cases, ten show us men trying to sneak out of their contracts when they have had their fill of pleasure with the woman’ (F. J. Furnivall, Child Marriages, Divorces and Ratifications in the Diocese of Chester (1897), 43).

  12 . But note the opinion of Shakespeare’s Princess Katherine (Henry V, 5.2.259-60): ‘Les dames et les demoiselles pour être baissées devant leurs noces il n’est pas la coˆtume de France’ (For women and girls to be kissed before their wedding is not the custom in France). Henry dismisses this as a ‘nice [fastidious] fashion’, and kisses her anyway.

  13 On marriage vows in Measure see Harding 1950, Schanzer 1960, Nagarajan 1963.

  14 See Part 1, note 28.

  15 The syntax of the subordinate clause (lines 180-81) is tightly knotted: the King apparently means that the wedding (‘ceremony’) will be best (‘seem’ = be seemly) performed swiftly (‘expedient’ = expeditious) on the authority which has just been given (‘now-born brief’) by the contract.

  16 . Shakespeare’s references to troth-plights are not confined to the Silver Street plays. In Henry V (c. 1599), Nym is informed of Pistol’s marriage: ‘He is married to Nell Quickly, and certainly she did you wrong, for you were troth-plight to her’ (2.1.21). As Quickly is a prostitute the term is used sardonically to mean he was a favoured customer. In Twelfth Night (1601), the offstage handfasting of Olivia and Sebastian is described by the priest: ‘A contract of eternal bond of love / Confirmed by mutual joinder of your hands, / Attested by the holy close of lips, / Strengthened by interchangement of your rings, / And all the ceremony of this compact / Sealed in my function, by my testimony’ (5.1.154-9). In Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602) Pandarus’ efforts to get the eponymous couple in bed together include a kind of mock-handfasting: ‘Go to, a bargain made. Seal it, seal it. I’ll be the witness. Here I hold your hand, here my cousin’s’ (3.2.196-8). Pandarus is the prototypical ‘pandar’ or pimp (‘Let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world’s end after my name’), and what is ‘sealed’ by these actions is not a matrimonial contract but a sexual assignation involving his niece (here called ‘cousin’). In The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610) the shepherd attempts to handfast Perdita and Florizel, ‘Take hands! A bargain! / And, friends unknown, you shall bear witness to’t / . . . Come your hand, / And daughter yours’ (4.4.381-9), but the ceremony is halted by one of the witnesses, who is Florizel’s father in disguise.

  17 . Johnson’s 1765 edn of Shakespeare; Wimsatt 1969, 112.

  18 . Cf. John Earle’s character-sketch of an actor: ‘He is like our painting gentlewomen, seldom in his own face, seldomer in his clothes, and he pleases the better he counterfeits . . . He does not only personate on the stage, but sometimes in the street, for he is masked still in the habit of a gentleman’ (Microcosmographie, 1628, H3v).

  29. Losing a daughter

  19 . The marriage of ‘John
Hall gentleman & Susanna Shaxspere’ took place at Holy Trinity, Stratford, on 5 June 1607. Their only child, Elizabeth, was born the following February. Susanna’s dowry was 107 acres of Stratford land, purchased by Shakespeare in 1602 for £320 and doubtless rising in value (Honan 1998, 291-2; Maìri Macdonald, ‘A New Discovery about Shakespeare’s Estate’, SQ 45 (1994), 87-9). This is somewhat bigger than Mary Mountjoy’s alleged dowry of £260 (a ‘marriage portion’ of £60 and a legacy of £200), and considerably bigger than her actual dowry (£10 and some ‘houshould stuffe’).

  20 . Dr Hall himself seems to have been an ‘honest fellow’ tailor-made to Shakespeare’s requirements. He was a gentleman from a well-off Bedford-shire family; a Cambridge graduate (Queens’ College, MA 1597); and a respected physician (SDL 234-8; Harriet Joseph, Shakespeare’s Son-in-Law , 1964). By tradition Susanna was spirited and intelligent (‘witty above her sexe’, as a contemporary epitaph complacently puts it). She signed her name in a clear, rounded hand (Honan 1998, plate 30). A year before her marriage she was fined for non-attendance at church, which may mean she had Catholic leanings; her husband, to judge from phrasings in his casebooks, was staunchly Protestant.

  Epilogue

  1 . Mary Edmond, ‘Henry Condell’ (ODNB 2004); cf. Hotson 1949, 184. Mountjoy’s will (Appendix 4) has a further possible Shakespeare connection. Another of its witnesses, Raphe or Ralph Merifield, may be a son-in-law of John Heminges, whose will includes a bequest to ‘my daughter Merefeild’ (PRO Prob 10/485, 9 October 1630; Honigmann and Brock 1993, 164-9). However Ralph Merifield was a professional scrivener, ‘whose name appears frequently among the testamentary depositions of the Commissary Court’; the original will was probably in his hand (Whitebrook 1932, 94). This makes the connection with Heminges unnecessary but does not invalidate it. I have found nothing on the other two witnesses, ‘Ed: Dendye’ and Robert Walker.