Shakespeare: A Life (54 page)

recalled, as a parson in a small parish, that Shakespeare had once
given him as a boy'a hundred kisses'. Born in 1606, her next boy
became the poet and dramatist Sir William Davenant, who was helped by
Dryden in an adaptation of
The Tempest
, and there is no reason
to doubt the Oxford tradition that Shakespeare was his godfather.
According to John Aubrey who knew him, Sir William in later life over a
glass of wine would sometimes say to his cronies 'that it seemed to
him that he writt with the very spirit that [did] Shakespeare, and was
contendended [
sic
] enough to be thought his Son'.
³
This in time -- with other rumours -gave rise to stories about
William's running to see his famous godfather, when the latter visited
Oxford, and being told not to take the name of God in vain. Jennet was
'very beautiful!', and so, as people felt, why not believe
Stratford's poet had bedded her?

Happily, the room of Shakespeare's supposed dalliance with Jennet at
last came to light in 1927, when alterations at No. 3 Cornmarket
exposed a painted chamber. It was rapidly guessed that this was the
'best bedroom', an assumption echoed by Schoenbaum, who supposes that if
the poet took Jennet to bed, this was the place. 'There the best
bedroom had a great fireplace', he tells us; 'the walls were decorated
with an interlacing pattern of vines and flowers'. A pretty spot for
adultery -- but, in fact, a New College inventory of 1594 clearly
shows that this and other rooms at the tavern were covered with
wainscoting well before the Davenants arrived.
⁴

The reality of Shakespeare's visits at Oxford does not quite correspond
with myth. John Aubrey, who reported accurately on what he
heard,
was able to consult two of the Davenant sons; he was also acquainted
with their daughter Jane ( 1602-67), who, first with her husband, and
then after 1636 on her own, ran the Cornmarket tavern until
Restoration days. On his way up to Warwickshire 'once a yeare', Aubrey
states, Shakespeare'did com
m
only in his journey lye at this house in Oxon: where he was exceedingly respected'.
⁵
The Wine Act of 1553 had allowed Oxford three wine-taverns, and,
unlike an inn, the large building which Shakespeare knew did not offer
public accommodation, so if he stayed there at all he stayed as his
friends' guest.

The university's system of common rooms had not yet been developed: in Shakespeare's day the Oxford colleges were using

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wine-taverns as their common rooms, and because as clientele the
academic ranks from the colleges often drank and dined separately from
one another, the Davenants and their servants had to busy themselves
in many chambers. Far from knowing quiet, idyllic rooms painted with
vines and flowers, Shakespeare on arriving would have entered a smoky,
well-lighted building filled with the din of Masters, Bachelors, and
undergraduates. Among her infants Jennet was amenable -- 'of very good
witt' or intelligence, says Aubrey, 'and of conversation extremely
agreable'. Her husband was conversant with French, alert to literature
and drama, and had civic interests that led him to become Mayor of
Oxford.

But his mood contrasted with
his wife's. Others confirm that Davenant as Aubrey says, was 'a very
grave person' -- as if he had given up London for a reason he could
not forget. He remembered the deaths of six children there; and one
might note that his mood corresponds with an underlying gravity in his
visitor's Sonnets -- but in any case, having lost his son Hamnet,
Shakespeare had something in common with the Davenants. What is
unmistakable is that, as a 'respected' guest, he was warmly received,
and no doubt he had his reasons for covering their first healthy,
surviving son with a storm of 'kisses'.
⁶

Shakespeare was very loyal to John and Jennet; they received him over
a period of years. As for his choice of London lodgings, he was not
especially consistent. Five documents now in the Public Record Office,
although they concern his defaulting on taxes, tell us a little more
about his London locales and acquaintances than we have already seen.
First, a Certificate in the Subsidy Roll of 15 November 1597 lists
Shakespeare as one who had failed to pay 'the second payment of the
last Subsydye' or 5
s.,
due on goods rated at £5 in St Helen's parish, The next four documents all concern his failure to pay 13s. 4
.d.
(not a large sum, or about half of his basic weekly profit as an
actor) on goods again valued at £5 at St Helen's, in an assessment of 1
October 1598. The fact that the last tax was referred to the Bishop
of Winchester (for collection in the liberty of the Clink in Surrey)
suggests that he had moved south of the river by the winter of 1596-7,
or, anyway, not later than 1599. The whole sum of taxes collected by
the bishop was within 4
d.
of what he
had
to collect in 1600-1, so it is

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probable that Shakespeare paid the 13
s.
4
d.
tax when he had to, or by the time the authorities caught up with him. It is not known that he ever paid the 5
s.
due, a slight amount; he could have evaded payment (there were many
evasions), but the data we have about his taxes is extremely meagre.
⁷

At St Helen's he had been living close to -- possibly in the same
tenement with -- Thomas Morley, who was given exactly the same tax
assessment.
⁸
It is amusing to speculate that, if the poet in his St Helen's rooms
had quills, ink, and a writing-desk (as is likely), he heard music,
some days, as he wrote. His neighbour Morley was obliged to practise:
he was a skilled musician, who had trained with a boys' troupe (the
Children of Paul's). Also it is interesting to find Shakespeare
surrounded by
émigré
families at St Helen's, or by those whose
names often suggest France, or the Lowlands, such as 'Meringe', 'de
Bewly', 'de Clarke', 'de Boo', 'Varhagen', 'Vandesker', 'Vegleman',
'Vander Stylt'. In fact, an unusual number of those in Shakespeare's
circle, whether friends, associates, or casual acquaintances, were of
Dutch, Flemish, or French origin. Coincidence does not quite account for
this. Apparently, he found himself comfortable with 'strangers', and
the respect he had for London's
émigrés
was to be returned. He
knew very well Peter Streete, a joiner of Dutch origin, who built the
Globe. The printer Richard Field, the poet's Stratford schoolmate, had
married his employer's widow Jacqueline Vautrollier of the close-knit
French Protestant community. Misconceptions about the Fields are
plentiful. They certainly lived in the Blackftiars until about 1610,
but at some point before 1615 moved to a new shop, in Great Wood
Street in St Michael's parish, so they could not have been living at '
Wood Street, close to the Mountjoy house' when Shakespeare lodged with
the Mountjoys, as has been supposed.
⁹
The Protestant Vautrollier, who dedicated a book to his Catholic
patron the Earl of Arundel, and later supplied James VI of Scotland
with texts, was no more bigoted in religion than his widow Jacqueline.
Her own French Protestant Church tolerated marriages with Catholic
émigrés
more easily than it condoned its members marrying Londoners who were
not of French descent. The Fields, inevitably, printed Anglican texts,
but held no narrow line, and in fact,

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in 1599, were among printers listed by the archbishop as all too likely to offend episcopal authority.

Shakespeare also made contacts with imigris through the theatre.
Although related to people at Burmington near Stratford, Nicholas
Tooley, his fellow actor and shareholder with the King's men, was born
in Antwerp to a Flemish mother, whose husband died there ill 1583 in
the house of Hans Lanquart. Having returned to London, the Flemish
mother thereafter was wed to Thomas Gore, whose own mother, Ellen
Davenant, was John Davenant's aunt. The Davenants and Gores, in turn,
had
émigré
friends among the city's prominent wine traders and
brewers. At least one brewer of Dutch descent, the wealthy and
unmarried Elias James, who owned a 'great Brewhouse' (as Stow says)
near the Blackfriars theatre, is of special interest to us, since this
bachelor has been linked with Shakespeare in two ways. We know that
Elias's brother's widow married a John Jackson, who seems to be the
man of that name who joined Shakespeare in purchasing the Blackfriars
gatehouse in 1613.
¹⁰
Also a brief epitaph written on the death of Elias James -- he died
in his early thirties -- is attributed in a seventeenth-century MS
(now at the Bodleian) to 'W
^m
: Shakespeare':

When God was pleas'd, (the world unwilling yet)
Elias James, to Nature paid his debt,
And here reposeth: As he liv'd, he died,
The saying strongly in him verified,
Such life, such death: then a knowne truth to tell,
He liv'd a godly life, and died as well.
¹¹

It is highly probable that the dramatist wrote these lines, which say
no more than what an epitaph on an honest brewer ought to say, and
that he knew when to write
less
than brilliant verse (as Elsie
Duncan-Jones has noted). At any rate, ge knew the Blackfiriars
bachelor, Elias, and his acquaintance with
émigrés
from the
Lowlands has a particular importance: this is the matter of what
Shakespeare in his late thirties or early forties looked like.

Someone from a Dutch family of artists, or known to them, must have
sketched his portrait with care. One's interest focuses on the
well-known copper engraving of Shakespeare on the title-page of the

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1623 Folio which is signed ' Martin Droeshout sculpsit London'.
Baptized on 26 April 1601, Martin Droeshout was only 15 when the poet
died (at the age of 52), so the engraving which shows a younger
Shakespeare was not made from the life; so far as we can tell it would
have been commissioned in 1623 when the artist was 21 or 22. Droeshout
belonged to a third generation of Flemish artists residing in London:
his grandfather John was a painter from Brussels (then in the South
Netherlands); his uncle Martin was a painter, his father Michael an
engraver. In most respects the engraving is amateurish, but other
experts tend to agree with M. H. Spielmann that Droeshout based his
work on a very competent miniature or a limning -- a careful drawing
showing 'perhaps delicate flat washes of colour' -- which was made in
Shakespeare's late thirties or early forties.
¹²
That the engraving of the head is accurate is supported by the bust
at Holy Trinity which has comparable skull proportions and the same
famous perpendicular forehead. Even if we dismiss Ben Jonson's strong
approval of the 1623 engraving (he could have approved it
conventionally, perhaps, before seeing it), still, that likeness of
Shakespeare's face would have had to satisfy the syndicate which at
financial risk published the costly Folio of thirty-six plays.

In popular mythology, Shakespeare is a witty and tavern-haunting poet
who writes of famous Dark Ladies whom he takes to bed, and hardly has
time for plays. The engraving suggests a different side of him, for
which there is plenty of evidence. 'Not a company keeper', as Aubrey
heard from the actor son of Shakespeare's fellow player Beeston,
'wouldnt be debauched, and if invited to [be, ] writ that he was in
Paine.'
¹³
The Poet of the Sonnets regrets he makes of himself 'a motley to the
view' on the stage, and none of Pembroke's or Southampton's friends
ever reports a sight of him at any locale among
littérateurs.
Droeshout's engraving portrays a thoughtful man with delicate if not
fastidious features, an observer who, though 'of an open and free
nature', is most unlikely to have impressed anyone as a flamboyant
extrovert. If the portrait lacks the 'sparkle' of a witty poet, it
suggests the inwardness of a writer of great intelligence, an
independent man who is not insensitive to the pain of others, and who
could have written
Timon of Athens
,
Macbeth
, or
King Lear
.

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Shakespeare was skilful and natural in his habits of ingratiation and
self-preservation: he had learned to protect and save himself among
egotists. In his forties he was largely proof against temptation, and
his indiscretions -- to the extent that we can know of them from
Stratford records or the Sonnets -- were half-regretted ones of youth
or early manhood. He was not ravished by sensual enjoyments, nor is it
clear that he was eager to live as long as he could; but he 'loved
the surface of the earth and the process of life', as George Orwell
has said.
¹⁴
He had curiosity. He admired the self-disciplined Davenants, as he
did the businesslike Condell, and he could have found few in London
more diverse in background or unusual in their viewpoints than the
skilled
émigrés
-- whose energy and success aroused popular envy.

Plague in the suburbs made Bankside alleys less attractive: and
married actors, with children to raise, went north. So did a few others.
By 1604 at the latest, he was living in north-west London between
St Paul's and Cripplegate. Here, in St Olave's parish, he had taken
rooms in a double tenement at the north-east corner of Mugwell (later
Monkswell) and Silver Streets; the former street had not taken its
name, after all, from monks, but from Algarus de Muchewella, who had
held a deed to its land in the twelfth century (the street is
'Mukewellestrate' in 1277, and ' Mugwell streete' as late as the 1570s).
¹⁵
The premises here were leased by Christopher Mountjoy, a French
Protestant who, with his wife Marie and only daughter Marie or Mary,
manufactured ladies' wigs and ornamental headgear. From Crécy where he
was born Mountjoy had fled with other Huguenots after the St
Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572; in England he had waited for years
before paying a denization fee and becoming naturalized, but had
still prospered, not least because the Mountjoys, with apprentices,
supplied headwear to the royal court.

Their shop was on the ground floor. Apprentices often roomed in
garrets, and it is likely that Shakespeare had ample space (perhaps one
flight up) in a double tenement. John Stow refers to 'divers fayre
houses'on Silver Street which afforded a respectable neighbourhood;
nearby on Monkswell Street were the large, well-built stone and timber
premises of Neville's inn and the great Hall of the Barber Surgeons,
with Holbein's celebrated painting of Henry VIII granting the

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