The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (12 page)

Another interesting discovery was part of an alembic, or, as Shakespeare spells it in
Macbeth
, a ‘limbeck’. This was a vessel used in distillation: a domed container with a long spout near the rim. Its presence could be connected with metal-working in the area, or possibly with the medical profession. The use of distillation and sublimation in preparing medicines was part of the controversial new ‘chymicall physick’ proposed by the followers of the German mystic and healer Paracelsus - mercury preparations for syphilis were especially popular.
⁴²
An alembic was also an essential part of the alchemist’s laboratory.

Also suggestive is the skeleton of a female peregrine falcon, found in a stone-lined cesspit off Oat Lane. The peregrine - ‘the most spectacular and prestigious bird used in falconry’ - is an indicator of high status. Elsewhere were found remains of a goshawk and three sparrowhawks. These were birds kept for hunting and sport - the open land beyond the city walls was used for falconry. Shakespeare was knowledgeable about hawking (as about so much else), and deploys his knowledge in over forty separate images in his plays, as in the marvellous lines from
Othello
likening an unfaithful wife to a ‘haggard’ or untrained falcon -

If I do prove her haggard,
Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings,
I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind
To prey at fortune. (3.3.264-7)

These random relics come from the kitchens, bedrooms, work-shops and bird-roosts of houses close to Silver Street, at a time close to Shakespeare’s residence there. We could guess at hundreds of other objects that might have been there, but these things were actually there. There are not very many of them, and most are only fragments, but they are authentic in the way that a guessed object - the costume-drama prop - is not.

They belong to the community of which Shakespeare was briefly a part, but they do not take us into the Mountjoy house. To cross that threshold we have to turn not to the preserved contents of the parish’s tips and middens, but back once more to the papers and parchments of the Belott-Mountjoy suit. Shakespeare could not remember ‘what implementes and necessaries of houshould stuffe the defendant gave the plaintiff in marriadge’, but the plaintiff himself remembered well enough, and they are listed in the first set of interrogatories. We are thus privileged with a brief inventory of some of the furnishings - though by no means the best or smartest of them - in the Mountjoy house in 1604:

One old featherbed
One old feather bolster
A flock bolster
A thin green rug
Two ordinary blankets woven
Two pair sheets
A dozen of napkins of coarse diaper
Two short tablecloths
Six short towels & one long one
An old drawing table
Two old joined stools
One wainscot cupboard
One twisting wheel of wood
Two pair of little scissors
One old trunk and a like old trunk
One bobbin box

The list is precise - the furnishings go from the bedroom to the dining room to the workroom - and somewhat bitter in its phrasing: things are ‘old’ or ‘little’ or ‘thin’ or ‘coarse’, when they might have been new, large, plush and soft. Belott refers to them at one point as ‘some few trifles’ (deposition of Thomas Flower). The list has an agenda - how stingy the provisions of the father-in-law for the new couple setting up together - though it also offers a broader sociological point. These meagre furnishings - these few ‘parcells of goodes’ - convey the bareness, the unaccoutredness, of the great majority of rooms in Jacobean London.

This is lumber from the house on Silver Street - not the actual stuff in Shakespeare’s rooms, but something very similar: the featherbed, the green rug, the wainscot cupboard.

8

The chamber

W
e are almost at the door of Mr Shakespeare’s ‘chamber’ - the habitual word of the day for a person’s private room or rooms - but for what lies the other side we must resort once more to guesswork and generalization. I do not want to mock up a room full of early-Jacobean furnishings (and anyway early-Jacobean rooms were not exclusively filled with early-Jacobean furniture) but it may be instructive to look into some furnished rooms through the eyes of contemporary writers and artists.

We have a vivid description of a professional writer’s lodgings, published in 1604. The lodgings are unlike Shakespeare’s in that the writer described is a down-and-out pamphleteer, ‘Pierce Pennyless’ (a fictionalized version of the late Thomas Nashe, author of
Pierce Penniless
), and the passage is a vignette of squalor in a rented room in London’s Pickt-hatch. But the author of the passage is Thomas Middleton, soon to embark on his collaboration with Shakespeare, and on the principle of proximity it seems a good place to start. Pruned of its foliage of extended comic similes it gives the following account of visiting Pierce’s chamber -

I stumbled up two pairs of stairs in the dark, but at last caught in mine eyes the sullen blaze of a melancholy lamp that burnt very tragically upon the narrow desk of a half bedstead . . . The bare privities of the stone walls were hid with two pieces of painted cloth, but so ragged and tottered that one might have seen all nevertheless . . . The testern or shadow over the bed was made of four ells of cobwebs, and a number of small spinners’ ropes hung down for curtains . . . The coverlet was made of pieces a’ black cloth clapt together . . . On this miserable bed’s head lay the old copy of his Supplication [
Pierce Penniless
] in foul-written hand.
⁴³

In this exaggerated but essentially realistic interior shot of a writer’s chamber we see a bed, a fold-down desk, a wick-lamp, and some ‘painted cloth’ hanging over an unplastered wall. One notes that even in these forsaken circumstances the bed is expected to be a four-poster, with a canopy (‘testern’) and curtains, though in Pierce’s case these are formed entirely of cobwebs. Another writer who dodged in and out of debtors’ prison was Thomas Dekker, and we have an actual picture of him in bed - a woodcut of 1620 illustrating his pamphlet,
Dekker his Dreame
(see Plate 11). It shows a bearded man in a nightcap with an upturned brim; the bed is again a four-poster, with a simple wood-framed canopy, heavy-looking curtains, and sturdy rather than elaborate posts. This is not, of course, Dekker’s bed, but it is the type of bed which a contemporary artist envisaged him as having.

The four-poster nowadays is given a rather rakish, aristocratic air, and one can forget how very practical it was. It offered warmth in winter and protection from flying insects in summer, and its enclosure made it a kind of compartment, a moveable bedroom within a larger multi-use room: the Jacobean bed-sit. On such a bed Othello suffocates Desdemona - ‘Soft, by and by, let me the curtains draw’ - and in such a bed lie the lovers importuned by daylight in Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’:

Busie old foole, unruly sunne,
why dost thou thus
Through windowes and through curtaines call on us?
⁴⁴

Shakespeare no doubt slept in one in his room at Silver Street, ‘cribbed’ and ‘confined’ but not unpleasantly so, though we do not know if his nights in this musty cocoon were always peaceful - ‘I could be bound in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams’ (
Hamlet
, 2.2.255-7) - or if sleep always came easily to him: ‘My thoughts . . . keep my drooping eyelids open wide, Looking on darkness’ (Sonnet 27). Nor do we know if he always slept there alone. That he was entirely faithful - in other words, celibate - during his long absences in London seems improbable, and some contemporary anecdotes suggest he was not.

Here are two ‘chambers’ visualized by Shakespeare. The first is brief - Sir John Falstaff’s room at the Garter Inn in Windsor, as described by the innkeeper: ‘There’s his chamber, his house, his castle, his standing-bed and truckle-bed. ’Tis painted about with the story of the Prodigal, fresh and new’ (
Merry Wives
, 4.5.5-7). Again the four-poster, together with a smaller camp-bed (‘truckle’ means on wheels) for a servant. The paintings featuring the story of the Prodigal Son could be wall-hangings or bed-curtains. In Middleton’s
Mad World
(
c
. 1605), the same story is embroidered on the bed-curtains in Sir Bounteous Progress’s guest-bedroom, where the bed has ‘cambric sheets’, a ‘cloth o’ tissue canopy’ and curtains ‘wrought in Venice with the story of the Prodigal Child in silk and gold’ (2.2.4-6).

There is more detail in Imogen’s well-appointed ‘bed-chamber’, viewed furtively by the flame of a taper by the wicked Iachimo in
Cymbeline
(
c
. 1609). It is a woman’s chamber, but Shakespeare’s visualizing is itself interesting:

To note the chamber - I will write all down:
Such and such pictures, there the window, such
The adornment of her bed, the arras, figures,
Why, such and such, and the contents o’ th’ story . . . (2.2.24-7)

The scene is nominally set in Roman Britain, but the room is in all aspects Jacobean. The ‘adornment’ of the bed is once again the canopy and curtains of the four-poster. The ‘arras’ is a wall-hanging, named after the northern French weaving town of Arras. This particular one is later specified as a ‘tapestry of silk and silver’, and the ‘story’ represented in it is ‘proud Cleopatra when she met her Roman’ (i.e. Antony, thus discreetly plugging a recent Shakespeare production). An arras is distinct from the ‘painted cloths’ that hang in Pierce’s dingy chamber - its design is woven rather than painted - but serves the same basic need to cover the ‘bare privities’ of untreated interior walls. In
Merry Wives
an arras hangs in the Fords’ parlour, and serves as a hiding-place for Falstaff - ‘I will ensconce me behind the arras.’ Characters hide behind one in
Much Ado
(‘I whipt me behind the arras’), and fall asleep behind one in
1 Henry IV
. Most famously, Hamlet hears ‘something stir’ behind the arras, and stabs at it crying, ‘A rat! A rat!’, thus killing the eavesdropping Polonius. That to fit unseen behind an arras is considered credible, even for the corpulent Falstaff, confirms what common sense suggests, that these tapestries were hung from the ceiling or from brackets, rather than attached to the wall, leaving air-space - and a hiding-place for rats or snoops - behind.

Iachimo also notes the fireplace in Imogen’s chamber, with its ‘figures’ carved on the chimney-piece, and a pair of silver andirons or firedogs sculpted in the form of ‘two winking Cupids’. It is a key feature of his description - it orientates the room (‘the chimney is south the chamber’); its accoutrements are more noticeable than the pictures on the wall, which are mentioned but not described. The fireplace was the heart (or ‘hearth’, originally synonymous) of a room: the defence against the enemies of cold and damp. Damp - on the walls, in the air, in the bed - was one of the elements Englishmen lived in; colds, catarrhs and ‘rheums’ were chronic.

To the bed, the wall-hangings and the fireplace we must add two further items of furniture necessary to the writer - a desk or table, and a chair. A woodcut of the pamphleteer Robert Greene shows him writing at a table covered with a cloth, on which rest an ink-well (or ‘standish’), a paper-knife and a mysterious object which could either be a dust-box (for sprinkling powder over wet ink) or a fat book with a clasped binding. The woodcut is fanciful - it shows the ‘ghost’ of Greene, complete with shroud - but is useful for its casual enumeration of the tools of the writer’s trade. He sits on a straight-backed wooden chair with curved arms, not very comfortable looking. According to Aubrey, Ben Jonson favoured something with more give in it - ‘I have seen his studyeing chaire, which was of strawe, such as olde woemen used.’
⁴⁵

If commodious by the standards of the day, the room was doubtless low ceilinged and ill lit, so I mentally place the writing-desk close to a window, and then immediately start wondering what the window looks out on to. Do we look down into the Mountjoys’ backyard, or out across the roofs and chimneys of Silver Street? Do we see pleasant suburban treetops? From a high window there might be a view down to the garden of Dudley Court, shown in the Treswell survey, or to Lord Windsor’s walled garden to the west. Perhaps one of these gave him the features of Angelo’s garden in
Measure for Measure
- ‘A garden circummur’d with brick, / Whose western side is with a vineyard back’d’. There is a ‘planched gate’ into the vineyard, and then a more secretive ‘little door / Which from the vineyard to the garden leads’ (4.1.28-33). In the dramatic context this is certainly a town-garden he is describing, and it is plausible that the lines were written in his room on Silver Street in 1604.

On Shakespeare’s desk, and round about it, there are books, manuscripts and notebooks, ‘foul papers’ and ‘fair copies’: the comfortable loam of literature. There is a traditional view of Shakespeare as a thoroughly unbookish sort of writer: intuitive, flowing, ‘natural’, drawing his material from life rather than books - ‘Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child’ who ‘warble[s] his native wood-notes wild’ (John Milton, ‘L’Allegro’). This view was contemporary with him and must to some extent be based on truth. ‘His mind and hand went together,’ wrote the editors of the First Folio, Heminges and Condell, who knew as much about his working methods as any, ‘and what he thought he uttered with that easinesse that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’ This is the famous comment, but an earlier version of the same idea is found in a verse-letter by Francis Beaumont, written in about 1615 - thus during Shakespeare’s lifetime: