by Dan Falk
LIFE ON SILVER STREET
Of all of Shakespeare’s London residences, the one we can pin down with the greatest precision is the home on Silver Street in Cripplegate. There we find him, beginning about 1603, renting a room from a man named Christopher Mountjoy. Mountjoy was a Huguenot—a French Protestant—and like many Huguenots, he had fled France to escape religious persecution. Apparently he did quite well for himself in London, manufacturing ladies’ ornamental headpieces and wigs from his workshop in his London home. He lived there together with his wife, his daughter, and a number of apprentices and servants.
Fig. 7.3 A memorial to the First Folio, topped with a bust of Shakespeare, stands just off Love Lane, not far from the Museum of London and the Barbican complex. Shakespeare once rented rooms in a house a few blocks away. Author photo
Where, exactly, was the Mountjoy house? As is so often the case, legal documents provide the answer. It seems that Mountjoy’s daughter, Mary, became involved with one of her father’s apprentices. There was a courtship, then an engagement—and then something went terribly wrong. Mountjoy had been obligated to pay a dowry, but refused, and the matter ended up before the courts. (Maybe stinginess was something Mountjoy and Shakespeare bonded over? The playwright didn’t like paying taxes; his landlord didn’t like paying dowries.) The court case would be of minimal interest, except that Shakespeare, who apparently encouraged the pair in their romantic pursuits, was called on as a witness. At any rate, the court documents mention that the Mountjoys lived at the northeast corner of Silver Street and Muggle Street. Don’t bother looking for either of these thoroughfares in your current A-Z; sadly, neither street exists today. And “Muggle” was actually just an alternative name for “Monkwell,” a street that ran northward from Silver Street, near the ancient city walls. Charles Nicholl, who pieced together the clues in his delightful book The Lodger (2007), concludes that the Mountjoy house—likely a timber-framed structure—was just across the street from the church of St. Olave’s, which stood on the south side of Silver Street. This is the church where Shakespeare would have worshipped, though as Nicholl reminds us, this says nothing about his religious views, as church attendance was mandatory, and those who failed to attend services could be fined. Unfortunately, the Great Fire of 1666 leveled much of the neighborhood, destroying the church as well as the Mountjoy home. Silver Street itself lingered on for another 274 years, until a German bombing raid during the Second World War reduced the entire neighborhood to rubble. Postwar redevelopment of the area yielded the sprawling Barbican complex, just to the north; the Museum of London, immediately to the west; and the major east-west thoroughfare known as London Wall (part of the A1211 highway). About all that’s left from Shakespeare’s time is St. Olave’s churchyard, now a small park (where London Wall meets Noble Street—two streets that you can find in your A-Z). Because street level has risen over the years, Nicholl’s best guess is that the Mountjoy house occupied what is now an underground car park beneath London Wall. It is hard not to think of the neighborhood’s transformation as something of an indignity. “An underground car-park is unmistakably an underground car-park,” Nicholl writes, “whether or not Shakespeare once lived on the site of it.” Nonetheless, a visitor to the neighborhood today may want to pause on the pedestrian footbridge that straddles the busy road adjacent to the Museum of London, and gaze out at this depressingly ordinary corner of Europe’s busiest city: As thoroughly transformed as it may be, this was, at least for a few years, the center of Shakespeare’s world.
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It was the Digges’ neighborhood, too. As Leslie Hotson has noted, the Digges family home was on Philip Lane—two streets to the east of Monkwell Street. But they were more than just neighbors. As it turns out, the connections between Shakespeare and the Digges family, already strong when Shakespeare arrived at Silver Street, would only grow: A few years after Thomas Digges’s death, his wife, Anne—now a wealthy and much-pursued widow in her mid-forties—married Thomas Russell, a landowner from the playwright’s native Warwickshire. Shakespeare and Russell must have been close; after Shakespeare’s death, Russell, together with Stratford attorney Francis Collins, would serve as the executors of Shakespeare’s will. Meanwhile, the Digges’s older son, Dudley (later Sir Dudley), would become a member of the Virginia Company, which established the colony at Jamestown in 1607. Although Dudley Digges never visited the New World himself, he would certainly have heard reports from those who did, and Shakespeare may have heard the tales from Dudley. By the same route, scholars have speculated, Shakespeare could have heard about the wreck of the Sea Venture off Bermuda in 1609, an event often seen as part of the inspiration for The Tempest. Much later, in 1655, Dudley’s son, Edward Digges, would be appointed governor of the Virginia colony. But it is Leonard, not Dudley, whose life was transformed by his acquaintance with Shakespeare. As he would write in the First Folio, “This book, / when brass and marble fade, shall make thee look / fresh to all ages.” The twenty-two-line verse concludes: “Be sure, our Shakespeare, thou canst never die, / But, crown’d with laurel, live eternally.”
Let’s recap the Shakespeare–Digges connection: Shakespeare was likely a regular visitor to Thomas Digges’s neighborhood, and was friendly with at least one of his two sons. In the late 1590s, while searching for plausibly Danish-sounding names for two of his characters, he may have stumbled on the engraving of Tycho Brahe’s relatives and has a flash of insight; the names are perfect, problem solved. Perhaps, as Leslie Hotson suggests, he saw the engraving on a visit to Thomas Digges’s house. (As Hotson puts it, there is “little doubt that from 1590 Digges had a copy of his learned friend’s portrait, bearing the names Rosenkrans and Guildensteren, at his house in Heminges’ parish. Perhaps Shakespeare saw [the names] there.”) The death of Thomas Digges in 1595 need not sink this theory: It is possible that Digges’s sons, or his widow, kept the picture after his death, a treasured keepsake, perhaps, of Thomas Digges’s far-reaching influence and interests. (We know the family continued to live in the same house, in Cripplegate, for several more years.) However the playwright may have chanced upon the image, Shakespeare scholars seem at least willing to entertain the notion that he saw the Tycho engraving with his own eyes. If Shakespeare could have seen Tycho’s astronomical letters, might he have also seen Digges’s own writings? In particular, might he have perused Digges’s updated edition of his father’s almanac—the one featuring the now-famous diagram of an infinite cosmos? If he did, perhaps it can illuminate yet another remarkable passage in Hamlet.
THE UNIVERSE IN A NUTSHELL
The scene in question comes in the play’s second act, where we find the prince conversing with his old schoolmates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Prince Hamlet, as usual, is feeling a bit melancholy. More specifically, he feels trapped in his own country, which he feels is like a prison:
GUILDENSTERN:
Prison, my lord?
HAMLET:
Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ:
Then is the world one.
HAMLET:
A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’th’ worst.
ROSENCRANTZ:
We think it not so, my lord.
HAMLET:
Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ:
Why, then your ambition makes it one: ’tis too narrow for your mind.
HAMLET:
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.
(Hamlet 2.2.242–256)
We all have bad dreams on occasion, but where did Shakespeare come up with this striking phrase, “king of infinite space”? The scholarly editions are of little help; most of them simply let it pass without comment. Even the venerable Arden editions (Jenkins, 1982, and Thompson and Taylor, 2006) allow the phrase to slip
by without a footnote—and the Ardens have footnotes up the wazoo. (Don’t be alarmed if your own edition of Hamlet doesn’t contain the “infinite space” remark—it occurs only in the folio text of 1623, and not in the various quarto editions, so it depends on which text your edition was based on.) Shakespeare does use the phrase “infinite” or “infinity” about forty times in the canon, but, with the exception of this scene from Hamlet, it is never invoked for the purpose of describing spatial extent.* Of the remaining cases, the most beguiling is the soothsayer’s line from Antony and Cleopatra: “In nature’s infinite book of secrecy / A little I can read” (1.2.10–11).
The phrase “infinite space” was certainly not in common use in Shakespeare’s time—though, as we’ve seen, there were a handful of thinkers who were giving the matter serious consideration. Digges, of course; and before him, Nicolas of Cusa. And then there was Giordano Bruno, who lectured in England in the 1580s. Bruno tackled the subject in one of his dialogues, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584), writing that “There is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void.… This space we declare to be infinite.” Bruno was an ardent Copernican; so, too, was Digges. Might one of these thinkers have sparked a thought on the nature of the infinite as Shakespeare was working on Hamlet? Did he perhaps get the idea from looking at Thomas Digges’s diagram of the cosmos (figure 3.3)—a diagram in which the stars, for the first time, are depicted as extending outward to infinity?
As we’ve seen, Digges’s book, A Prognostication Everlasting, was published in 1576, and reprinted seven times before 1605, always with the fold-out diagram of the infinite cosmos. There were thousands of copies in circulation during Shakespeare’s most productive years in London. Digges, as mentioned in Chapter 3, embraced Copernicanism wholeheartedly, and told his readers that he included excerpts of Copernicus’s own treatise, translated into English, “so that Englishmen might not be deprived of so noble a theory.”
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It would be easier to tell what Shakespeare thought of this “noble theory” if his characters were a bit more plainspoken when discussing the cosmos. Consider Hamlet’s peculiar love poem to Ophelia:
Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt that I love.
(Hamlet 2.2.115–18)
The astronomy alluded to in the passage is that of Ptolemy, but is Hamlet endorsing it, or urging Ophelia to question it? The usual interpretation is that Hamlet is telling Ophelia that his love is more reliable and more dependable than whatever she had been taught about the workings of the cosmos. Roughly: “Question the unquestionable, but don’t question my love.” (The third line is the trickiest of the bunch: Here the meaning of the word “doubt” seems to change from “question” to “suspect.”) The play was written at a time when a handful of philosophers were indeed questioning whether the Earth moved. Is there any trace of Copernicanism in Hamlet’s poem? In 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), James Shapiro writes, “The Ptolemaic science on which Hamlet’s prognostications are grounded, as Shakespeare knew, was already discredited by the Copernican revolution. The stars aren’t fire, the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth. In such a universe, the truth may well turn out to be a liar.” (Indeed, the sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth, but I’m not sure about the other half of Shapiro’s statement—after all, stars are certainly like fire.*) Harold Jenkins, in the 1982 Arden edition, seems to share Shapiro’s view. The poem, taken at face value, refers “to the orthodox belief of the Ptolemaic astronomy that the sun moved around the earth,” but Jenkins adds that there is also a hint of Shakespeare’s possible awareness of Copernicanism: “Since each of the poem’s first two lines assumes the certainty of what had now begun to be doubted, there is an irony of which Shakespeare (though not, I take it, Hamlet) must have been aware.” Even T. J. B. Spencer, who suggested that the star “westward from the pole” was a planet, shares the suspicion that the shadow of Copernicus may loom over the play: Hamlet’s poem “is a clever epitome of some of the poetical tendencies of the 1590s: cosmological imagery, the Copernican revolution, moral paradoxes, all illustrating amorous responses.” Shakespeare’s characters often speak in riddles, Hamlet above all. Perhaps the biggest riddle of the time was whether the universe was small, comfortable, and human-centered—or whether, as a handful of bold thinkers had suggested, it was enormous, with mankind a mere speck and our planet, on the cosmic scale, little more than a dot. No wonder Hamlet sees “this goodly frame the earth” as nothing more than a “congregation of vapours,” a “sterile promontory” (2.2.298–303).
THE BRUNO CONNECTION
Digges had pondered the possibility of an infinite universe—and so had Giordano Bruno. The connections between Shakespeare and Bruno are perhaps more speculative that those that connect him to Digges, but they are worth exploring. The Shakespeare–Bruno link runs through a key middleman—a Londoner with Italian roots by the name of John Florio. We know that Florio became close friends with Bruno, having met his countryman while working as a tutor for the French ambassador. At a dinner party in Whitehall Palace, he is said to have told the assembled guests about Bruno’s theory of multiple inhabited worlds. The Italian thinker, who was both a Copernican and an atomist, seems “to have left a mark on some of the most cultured people in England” living at that time, according to Hilary Gatti. The usual argument is that Shakespeare, eager to make the acquaintance of learned men from diverse backgrounds (and perhaps especially Catholics), would have befriended a number of Italians in London, with the eloquent (and bilingual) Florio at the top of the list. Shakespeare and Florio had at least one more connection: Florio had served as a tutor to one of Shakespeare’s patrons, the Earl of Southampton. (Certainly Shakespeare knew of the Italian’s work: He clearly read Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. More on that in Chapter 13.) It is through Florio and his circle of friends that Shakespeare supposedly became acquainted with Italian ways and customs of Italy—material that he would make much use of in his plays, thirteen of which were set partially or entirely in Italy. Perhaps he also acquired a basic comprehension of the Italian language, allowing him to gloss the Italian texts identified as source material for many of his dramas. (As we’ve seen, another theory—a more tenuous one—is that Shakespeare visited Italy, perhaps before settling in London, a claim for which there is no solid evidence.)*
The Shakespeare–Bruno connection has had its ups and downs: In the late nineteenth century, a number of Shakespeare scholars argued that the playwright was deeply influenced by Bruno’s philosophy, acquired via Florio—a view that has since fallen out of favor. “The Bruno-Shakespeare discussion has become a historical curiosity,” writes Gatti, “of which many Shakespearean scholars of today are no longer even aware.” A degree of skepticism is in order. As Gatti notes, given the time frame of Bruno’s visit to England, a meeting between Bruno and Shakespeare is “extremely improbable”—still, he may well have heard something of Bruno’s ideas. (And, as mentioned in Chapter 5, we have a loose connection between Shakespeare and Bruno via the printers Richard Field and Thomas Vautrollier.) At the very least, Shakespeare would have read the favorable mention of Bruno in the preface to Florio’s translation of Montaigne. Perhaps he read Bruno’s only dramatic work, a comedy called Candelaio—echoes of which, Gatti argues, can be found in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost as well as in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Gatti concludes, “A convincing basis for knowledge of Bruno on the part of Shakespeare, probably mediated through John Florio, thus undoubtedly exists.”
Looking for traces of Bruno’s philosophy in Hamlet, one might begin with the prince’s love poem, with its obsession over the issue of “doubt.” Bruno writes passionately on the question of doubt in one of his final works, De triplici minimo (The Triple Minimum), published in Frankfurt in 1591:
Whoever wishes to philosophise, doubting all things at first, must never assume a position in a debate before having listened to the opinions on all sides, and before carefully weighing the arguments for and against. He must judge and take up a position not on the basis of what he has heard said, according to the opinion of the majority, their age or merits, or their prestige. But he must form his own opinion according to how persuasive the doctrine is, how organically related and adherent to real things, and to how well it agrees with the dictates of reason.
Bruno, as we’ve seen, was as much a mystic as a scientist—but in this passage we see a glimpse, and perhaps more, of the modern scientific approach. It was also a way of thinking that was seen, at the time, as dangerous—which is part of the reason Bruno was eventually deemed “a particularly obstinate heretic … author of a number of enormously dangerous opinions.” For Hilary Gatti, the parallel to Hamlet is profound, beginning with the doubts concerning the ghost’s identity, and continuing with Prince Hamlet’s quest to find the truth behind the story of his father’s death while at the same time uncovering Polonious’s scheming and the double-dealing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. “Thus Hamlet, like Bruno, finds comfort in a systematic exercise of skepticism,” Gatti writes. “The truth must be pursued, and nothing lie hidden in the obscure shadows of deceit.… What lies at the center of Shakespeare’s drama is not so much the murder of a king as the murder of truth itself.”
