Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

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  barber surgeons a new charter. Farther up the street were almshouses lately founded by a former Lord Mayor, Sir Ambrose Nicholas, whose son Daniel when testifying in a lawsuit, mentioned his talks with the playwright.

  That lawsuit reveals Shakespeare's role in a nuptial agreement made when he was lodging with Marie and her husband; it shows us how they regarded him, and also introduces us to the minor playwright George Wilkins. It is rather inaccurately said that Shakespeare lived in a parish 'adjoining' that of his fellows Heminges and Condell: neither was far away, but they lived to the east beyond St Alphage's and St Alban's parishes, at St Mary Aldermanbury's, 16 and other theatre men such as Jonson, Dekker, and Munday at about this time lived to the north, outside the city's walls at St Giles. Shakespeare did not have actors or poets breathing down his neck, but a short walk would have taken him to the watermen for a ride across the river, so he could possibly have reached the Globe in less than half an hour.

  In 1604 at any rate his landlady made good use of him. About six years earlier, Marie Mountjoy had welcomed a new apprentice in Stephen Belott, a young man of French descent who seemed personable and competent. Just before that, Marie had worriedly consulted Simon Forman who diagnosed her as pregnant as a result of indiscretions with the mercer Henry Wood of Swan Alley, but that had proved a false alarm, and a less risky amorous prospect began to appeal. Clearly, her respectable assistant was keen on her daughter Mary, though young Belott hesitated to propose marriage. After consulting with her husband, Marie implored her 40-year-old lodger, Shakespeare, to persuade Stephen Belott to wed Mary with a promise of a sum of money for Belott if he did. No one else, apparently, was trusted with this mission: Christopher Mountjoy also urged Shakespeare to help. As a go-between like his Pandarus, the playwright did his best to move the apprentice to take the Mountjoy girl, with the result that Belott and Mary were wedded at St Olave's church on 19 November 1604. 17,

  Christopher Mountjoy, however, fell short of his promises. His relations with his son-in-law soured, and less than eight years later a summons in the Court of Requests (dated 7 May 1612) demanded that

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  Shakespeare and others give evidence in a civil action of Stephen Belott, plaintiff, versus Christopher Mountjoy, defendant.

  The key issue in the civil action was whether Mountjoy had ever pledged to give the young man £60 on marrying and also to leave him a legacy of £200, as Belott claimed. None of the witnesses had a remembrance at all of the legacy or an exact memory of the £60, so Shakespeare's failure to remember those sums was not unusual. What was said of the characters of the plaintiff and defendant, however, could be crucial, and in his own comments Shakespeare's evenhandedness is truly impressive (possibly this was not the first time he avoided trouble by approving all parties). In his depositions, he rather blandly characterizes the two contenders, finding them both admirable, yet he delicately avoids implying that his own approval of Belott could mean that Mountjoy had felt, or ever said, that the young man was a profitable employee.

  The poet has known the plaintiff and defendant, alike, 'for the space of tenne yeres or thereabouts', he gladly admits. Belott, as Shakespeare recalls, 'did well and honestly behave himselfe', and 'was A very good and industrious servant'. On the other hand, to his, perhaps, imperfect remembrance, he 'hath not heard the deffendant [ Mountjoy] confesse that he had gott any great proffitt and comodytye by the said service' of this Stephen Belott. And yet for that matter, Mountjoy did 'beare and shew great good will and affecceon towardes' this servant. In fact, at divers and sundry times, Shakespeare has heard the defendant and his wife report that Belott was 'a very honest fellowe'. So far, so good. In another response, Shakespeare conjures up what must have been a rather fraught scene at Silver Street with Marie, then in her late thirties, begging her gentlemanly lodger to persuade Belott to accept the girl, though the legal form of the report is dry, enough: Shakespeare'sayeth that the said deffendantes wyeff [Marie] did sollicitt and entreat [him] to move and perswade the said Complainant to effect the said marriadge and accordingly this deponent did move and perswade the complainant thereunto'. 18

  That scene had occurred in 1604, or about the time he was endorsing the view, in All's Well and in Measure for Measure, that reluctant bachelors need to be nudged into marriage. It is just possible that

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  Marie's dilemma gave him ideas for Helena and Duke Vincentio of Vienna, as Ernst Honigmann suggests, 19 but perhaps the important point is only that he had succeeded as a persuader where others might have failed, since that in a small way has a relation to his habits as a dramatist. He projects himself into viewpoints not his own, and here, interestingly, he has not done so without talking over, with his acquaintances, Marie's dilemma and the behaviour and characters of persons. Daniel Nicholas, Sir Ambrose's son, testified for example that he heard

  one William Shakespeare saye that the defendant [ Mountjoy] did beare A

  good opinnion of [Belott] and affected him well when he served him. And did

  move [Belott] by him the said Shakespeare to have a marriadge betweene his

  daughter Maryc Mountjoye [and] the plaintiff . . . as Shakespeare tould him

  this deponent [ Nicholas] which was effected and Solempnized uppon

  promise of A porcion with her. 20

  Nicholas's phrase, 'make suer' (make sure), indicates that Shakespeare had even brought about a troth-plight between Stephen and Mary in his presence:

  And in Regard Mr Shakespeare hadd tould them [Stephen and Mary] that

  they should have A some of monney for A porcion from the father they weare

  made suer by in, Shakespeare by gevinge there Consent, and agreed to

  Marrye,

  And did Marrye 21.

  Unable to reach a verdict on hearsay evidence, the court, not finding itself vastly clarified on any point by any witness, referred the Belott-Mountjoy suit rather wearily to 'Elders of the french Church', who at last ordered Mountjoy to pay Belott twenty nobles (£6.13s. 4d.), far less than he had sought, and later excommunicated Mountjoy for 'sa vie desreglée & desbordée'. So the legal part of the wrangle ended. Shakespeare, if one may speculate, perhaps moved out of the house in October 1606 when Marie died, and before the Belotts returned to Silver Street for renewed fighting.

  One of the oddest witnesses in the case had been the minor writer George Wilkins, with whom Belott and Mary lived when they left Silver Street. In touch with the underworld and reputedly a brothel-

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  keeper, Wilkins, in his late twenties, clearly had some acquaintance with Shakespeare. He was a troubled young man, bitterly hostile to women. In all of his work he is obsessed with sin and misery as if displaying his guilt. He brutally kicked a pregnant woman in the belly; he beat another woman, and then stamped on her so that she had to be carried home. We know of his behaviour from legal records, and two allusions to the kicking of women occur in Wilkins's plays. 22 His novella The Painfull Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre ( 1608) was not a 'source' for Shakespeare's drama as is assumed in a modern study, 23 but is based on Pericles.

  Did Wilkins himself write two acts of Pericles? If he did, he presumably saw the older poet at Silver Street or in its environs more than once. Living to the south-west of his friend Stephen Belott, Wilkins aspired to respectability in the days before he was arraigned for petty crime. Shakespeare is not to be blamed for the company he kept, and, at any rate, just how well he knew the younger poet is unknown. Wilkins's worst days were ahead of him. But some of his attitudes and habits, including his brutal 'kicking', may have been clear to Shakespeare, who observed what he could of wealthy and of seedy London; we shall meet Wilkins again.

  Time's perpetuity: Macbeth and King Lear

  Groups of royal swans, once the delight of Queen Elizabeth, still floated in calm indifference on the river Thames. These creatures could be seen among low, flat-bottomed barges and high-masted vessels on the smooth surfa
ce of the water. Many an actor living in the city must have stepped into a waiting, upholstered wherry and crossed within sight of the swans to Bankside -- to hear news or gossip at the Rose or Globe. In the late summer of 1605 there was news of the royal patron. King James had reached Oxford on 27 August. He had been made to wait outside St John's College's gates for Matthew Gwinn's brief, pretty welcoming pageant. Three young boys, in the dress of female prophets or Sibyls, had hailed him as a descendant of the Scottish warrior Banquo. 'Nec tibi, Banquo', they told the King of England and of Scotland,

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  Not to thee, Banquo! but to thy descendants

  Eternal rule was promised by immortals.

  Happily not linked with the bloody usurper Macbeth, the King was next treated to Oxford's learning. 24 For two days he listened to Latin 'disputations' in theology, medicine, law, and other topics. One question debated at the college was, 'An imaginatio possit producere reales effectus?' (Whether imagination can produce actual effects?). The King's players, reaching Oxford on 9 October, may have seen the academic questions which were printed as a broadsheet. The 'imaginatio' one, by coincidence or not, is answered in Macbeth when the killer's imagination alone creates a dagger in the air before Duncan's murder.

  Oxford's events may not have inspired Shakespeare's play, but they perhaps reminded him of Macbeth and Banquo in Holinshed Chronicles. The new reign's mythology elevated Scottish history, and, by chance, regicide became a topic of talk in November in London. A horrific plan had come to light. Guido or Guy Fawkes, a Yorkshireborn soldier, had carried twenty barrels of gunpowder and many iron bars into a vault under the House of Lords with the aim of blowing up the King, the Queen, Prince Henry, the bishops, nobles, and knights, 'all at one thunderclap'.

  Interestingly, Guy Fawkes was attached to a web of conspiracy which led up to the Warwickshire gentry and included Catholics known to the Shakespeares -- such as Robert Catesby, whose father had held land in Stratford, Bishopton, and Shottery, and John Grant, a Snitterfield landowner. So many sympathizers and plotters were local men that a board of jurors, including July Shaw -- later a witness to the dramatist's will -- met at Stratford in February 1606 to investigate the Gunpowder Plot. Like Macbeth in confusing foul and fair, the plotters cannot have seemed very remote to Shakespeare. Trials and hangings meanwhile took place in London. Father Henry Garnet, the Jesuit Superior, was hanged on 3 May. His defence of the right to 'equivocate' at his trial puts one in mind of the Porter in Macbeth who thinks of himself at Hell's gate after Duncan is killed: 'Knock, knock. . . . Faith, here's an equivocator that could swear in both scales

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  against either scale, who committed treason enough . . . yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator' (11. iii. 7-11).

  A few public events, then, may be traceable in Macbeth, but was the Scottish tragedy played for two kings in the summer of 1606? Or was it written as a 'royal play' for their sakes? In August the bristling, beflagged warship Tre Kroner touched Gravesend with King James's brother-in-law Christian IV of Denmark aboard. Having come over mainly to see his sister Anna, he was very well entertained. After all this was the first state visit to England by a foreign ruler in eighty-four years. A tall and almost stout, whitish-blond Dane of 29, Christian IV had an ability to drink most ordinary mortals under the table -- his gentle mother is said to have worked her way 'through two gallons of Rhine wine a day' -- but he had a weak grasp of his host's language. Anyway, the King's men performed three times for the two jovial monarchs. There is no hint as to which plays were staged, and no sign that Macbeth was one of them. 25 (Later, the tipsy shipboard scene on Pompey's yacht in Antony and Cleopatra is said to have recalled a shipboard feast of James and Christian, but nowhere else does the author so foolishly risk mocking his patron.)

  Nevertheless Macbeth was sooner or later acted at James's court, and its relation to the royal patron is fascinating. In Holinshed Chronicles, Shakespeare had found Banquo himself involved in a conspiracy to kill King Duncan, and this he may have changed to avoid implying that James I's ancestor was guilty of treason. Yet to have shown Macbeth and Banquo in league to murder a king would also have been faulty in dramatic terms: he clears Banquo of complicity, so that Macbeth is deprived of any excuse for killing Duncan.

  At the same time he refuses to whitewash Banquo, or to give James I an ancestral paragon. Banquo in the play admits to an 'indissoluble tie' with Macbeth, and accepts the latter's accession, though fearing he played'most foully for't'. He hopes the witches will help him, too. 'Why by the verities on thee made good', Banquo says of the Witches' aid,

  May they not be my oracles as well,

  And set me up in hope? But hush, no more.

  (111. i. 8-10)

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  That 'hush, no more' signifies no assault of his robust Scottish conscience, and Banquo is murdered before he can reveal other 'cursed thoughts' about his own or his descendants' prospects. Though innocent of treason he is culpable in condoning Macbeth's rule and guilty in his desire. This aspect of Macbeth is biographically interesting in that Shakespeare's dramatic interests, his political realism, his concern for history, psychology, and truth, are really uppermost in his mind. He does not tailor a Scottish play to suit Scottish James; he knows he must take risks, and so he takes them without being foolhardy. Later on, he apparently salutes his patron briefly in Act IV when the Witches offer a vision of Banquo's heirs (who will include James 1). Macbeth in horror sees the royal line 'stretch out to th' crack of doom' (iv. i. 133). That echoes a popular notion of Shakespeare's time that James's noble line of descendants would endure to the world's end.

  Otherwise Macbeth has rather little to do with James I, though his book Daemonology ( 1597) has remarks on witches similar to Banquo's comments. The playwright, no doubt, has read his patron's books. But Shakespeare's Witches are complex, ambiguous creatures who relate to medieval habits of mind. They undermine Macbeth. In one critic's view they become 'heroines' of the play in subverting the evil order which demonizes them, 26 fbut they are also mysterious and unknowable icons, images of fate, demonic tempters, and malevolent, ugly old hags with living counterparts in the 'wise women', witches, and sorcerers one might consult for a fee at London Bridge, Whitechapel, or Bankside. The author used what he saw and heard at Bankside or in the city. His friend Richard Field, for example, had printed in 1593 the Sermons of Henry Smith -- Nashe's superb 'Silvertongued Smith' -- whose preaching at St Clement Danes in the Strand includes pungent images which often remind one of the play: 'You are not like hearers, but like ciphers, which supply a place but signify nothing' -- or, 'As if we were night-black ravens, which cannot be washed clean with all the soap of the Gospel' -- or, 'All his lights are put out at once' -- or, our life has been compared to 'a player which speaketh his part upon the stage, and straight he giveth place to another'. 27

  None of this of course proves Shakespeare had known or read Silver-tongued Smith, but habits of his own mind are relevant. For all

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  his originality, the dramatist had an idiosyncrasy which might be ascribed to modesty, to caution, or perhaps to his having been a hireling and then a major actor. He often looked for the grain of sand, or the phrase, the simple authentic remark or known situation uninvented by himself on which his imagination could set to work. He might have found slender hints for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, idiosyncratic as they are, even in the eager, aspiring, and slightly aloof French émigrés whom he knew. Supplying Anna at the royal court, cajoling Shakespeare, and plotting to advance her daughter, Marie of Silver Street is a far cry from Lady Macbeth. But it is after he had begun to know the elder Mountjoys well that Shakespeare created, in part from his whole experience of London, the most horrifying wedded couple in his dramas.

  Nothing he had picked up adventitiously, all the same, really accounts for Macbeth's atmosphere, or its enormous suggestiveness, its stunning compression and economy of means, and its complex panoply of images. Inv
olved here is more than its author's prudent husbandry. To a degree this tragedy was made out of his other plays, such as Richard II with its state murders or 2 Henry VI with its equivocating prophecies and witch-scenes. But in a more subtle way the author's emotional conservatism, even his constancy, loyalty, and selfrespect are responsible for Macbeth: he kept continually in touch with his past. He did not ransack his older plays to make a new one, but had in mind what he had profitably learned about dramaturgy: the channels to his past experience of the theatre were wide open and quickrunning. Macbeth is the quintessence of his career.

  Even for his Scottish usurper, he had one model close at hand, inasmuch as he himself is in all of his heroes, just as he is, in another sense, in none of them. Macbeth's own moral awareness is surprising: he is oddly self-conscious for a rough Scottish field general who, in facing a rebel, 'unseamed him from the nave to th' chops'(1. ii. 22). With mayhem in his sword, he has the imagination and critical self-regard of a model schoolboy, although Macbeth is also that tissue of complexities which his wife helps to illuminate.

  'I fear thy nature', Lady Macbeth tells him goadingly. 'It is too full o'th' milk of human kindness' (1. v. 15-16). Not only her sexuality but

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  his own yieldingness abet their role-playing in Act I as they collude to realize themselves. Shakespeare seems to have known such interdependence. Lady Macbeth is at first the more compelling player with her lurid charm, but Macbeth's empathy gives her leave to act out his zealous discontent -- which is of a kind which might drive a man to unusual crime, political victory, or success in some nearly impossible double endeavour in a profession. For all her nerve at first, Macbeth's wife is lacking in vanity as if she had little to gain in becoming queen. Her feeling for her husband is nearly that of a mother living almost wholly for her child.