The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (33 page)

In these riverside houses and cottages converted into pleasure-dens, the idling gallants consider their options - ‘sit up at cards all night’, or ‘drink burnt wine and eggs’, or have a hot ‘sackposset’ and a ‘pipe of tobacco’, or visit the ‘hot-house’. And easily the expensive gratifications turn sour - ‘I’m accursed to spend money in this town of iniquity. There’s no good thing ever comes out of it. And it stands upon such musty ground by reason of the river, that I cannot see how a tender woman can do well in’t.’

We hear of Brentford again, in the same context of amorous escape, in Jonson’s
The Alchemist
(1610). As the plot unravels in the final act, Dr Subtle deserts his partner in crime Face, and tries to get his girlfriend, Doll Common, to run away with him -

We will turn our course
To Brainford westward, if thou sayest the word,
And take our leaves of this overweening rascal.
... My fine flittermouse,
My bird of the night, we’ll tickle it at the Pigeons
When we have all . . . (5.2.85-99)

That last comment is a reference to the famous inn in Old Brentford, the Three Pigeons. This inn has a Shakespearean connection, as it was owned by a colleague in the King’s Men, John Lowin. Lowin acted alongside Shakespeare in Jonson’s
Sejanus
in 1603, and was a company ‘sharer’ by 1604. He is listed in the First Folio, as one of the ‘principall actors’ in Shakespeare’s plays. According to an early-eighteenth-century account he played the title-role in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s
Henry VIII
(1613) - ‘The part of the King was so rightly and justly done by Mr [Thomas] Betterton, he being instructed in it by Sir William [Davenant], who had it from old Mr Lowen, that had his instructions from Mr Shakespeare himself’ - a genealogy akin to the studio lineages of Italian Renaissance painting. Lowin later lived in Southwark, and ‘carried memories of Shakespeare down to the closing of the theatres in 1642’.
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It is not known when Lowin became owner of the Three Pigeons. Another of Shakespeare’s colleagues, Augustine Phillips, owned a house at nearby Mortlake, just across the river on the south bank. This house seems to have served as a base for the company in the summer of 1603, when the plague was at its height in the city. It is quite likely Shakespeare knew the Three Pigeons, and not impossible he knew the Mountjoys’ house in Brentford. The inn was associated with the playwright George Peele - or at least with his avatar in
The Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele
(
c
. 1605) - ‘Honest George . . . is now merry at the Three Pigeons in Brainford, with sack and sugar, not any wine wanting, the musicians playing, my host drinking, my hostess dancing.’ It remained famous or infamous through the centuries: part of Oliver Goldsmith’s
She Stoops to Conquer
(1773) is set there. Nineteenth-century engravings show a rambling, teetering old building with tall chimneys and a range of rickety stables out back (see Plate 31). It was demolished in 1911.
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Court records give us the reality of this little good-time town beloved of the London playwrights. Various women in trouble with the law are identified in the records as ‘late of London, spinster’, which probably means they are prostitutes of one hue or another transiently set up here. Thus at ‘Brayneford’ on 8 November 1571, Isabell Cornewall ‘late of London, spinster’ broke into the house of Joan Parker, widow, and stole a silver ring and a purse containing 3s 8d. She pleaded guilty but asked for clemency as she was pregnant: if so, another unmarried mother. And sometimes the story is grim, as this: in the early afternoon of 12 December 1598, ‘in a room of the dwelling house of James Lovegrove at Braneford, co Middx . . . Agnes Charche, late of London, spinster, gave birth to a male infant, living at the time of birth, and forthwith then and there with her hands twisted and broke the neck of the said infant’.
⁴³

And with the prostitutes come the thieves, such as Richard Heyward, ‘late of London’, charged in 1601 with stealing 30 pounds of feathers worth 40 shillings from Michael Goodyeare of Brainford, and John Anderton ‘late of London, yeoman’, who stole various items from a woman in New Brentford, including a ‘woollen cloak of tobacco colour’ and a linen cap ‘wrought with gold and silke’. And in July 1612, just a few weeks after the Belott-Mountjoy depositions, Edward Flood of New Brentford was charged with possession of a cloak ‘feloniously taken out of the howse of the Lady Keligway without Aldgate’. One of his sureties in posting bail was one Ninus Layne ‘of St Olive’s in the city of London’ - possibly a neighbour of Christopher Mountjoy (though ‘St Olive’s’ could also refer to St Olave’s, Hart Street).
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We know, broadly speaking, why Christopher Mountjoy leased a property in Brentford. He did so to make money by sub-letting it. Thus Noel Mountjoy: ‘He hath but the lease of two houses: one lease of the house wherein he dwelleth, divided into two tenements, and a lease of a house in Brainforde, by which leases he gaineth an overplus of rent more than he payeth.’ How much he made from it is not vouchsafed - from the two properties combined he received rents of about £35 per annum. Roughly half of this covered the annual cost of the two leases, and the other half was profit ‘de claro’.

We do not know what kind of house it was, or what it was used for, but on the whole it would not be surprising if it offered chambers with sweet linen where well-breeched Londoners could ‘fleet the time carelessly’ with other men’s wives, or indeed with professional ladies of the kind who bought their ‘quaint periwigs’ and head-tires at the shop on Silver Street. There is another possibility. In her deposition in 1612, the Mountjoys’ former maidservant Joan Johnson gives her address as the ‘parish of Ealing in the county of Middlesex’. Old Brentford was part of Ealing parish, so it is possible that Joan and her husband Thomas the basketmaker were now Mountjoy’s tenants in Brentford.
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These possibilities are not mutually exclusive - to be a basketmaker’s wife does not at all disqualify a woman from running a ‘house of resort’. And so Joan Johnson - or Joan Langford as she was when Shakespeare knew her at Silver Street - becomes another of the Mountjoys’ maids to be touched with this aura of assignations and adulteries which seems a feature of life
chez
Mountjoy. But as so often in this book these are question-marks only - what, in another type of enquiry, would be called hunches.

26

‘At his game’

W
e have an idea of the simmering randiness of the age-the pliant dames at the playhouse, the prostitutes scattered through the suburbs, the ‘fine-faced’ shopkeepers’ wives in their wainscot seats, the jaunts upriver to the fleshpots of Brentford. And we have seen something of how this impinges on Shakespeare. The fictive brothels and bawds of
Measure for Measure
and
Pericles
are in part a product of literary necessity, of competitive playhouse modernity, but they are also connected with the real-life brothel-world of George Wilkins, the tavern-keeper and pimp who becomes - briefly and more or less simultaneously - a landlord of the Belotts and a playmaker for the King’s Men. With Wilkins we touch on violence and squalor. He beats up prostitutes; he receives stolen goods from them; his own wife is called a bawd in the street. These particular events occur after Shakespeare’s known involvement with him, but the kicker of women and the penner of the
Miseries
are demonstrably one and the same man.

This remains a literary relationship, a brief and ultimately unsatisfactory collaboration with a promising but deeply unstable young writer. But one wonders about the more personal side. What did Shakespeare think of Wilkins? Or more broadly - because that specific question is unanswerable - what was Shakespeare’s own relationship to the Wilkinsian world of low taverns and punks; or to the slinkier demi-monde of those upmarket courtesans with foreign accents; or indeed to that more decorously erotic milieu of desperate housewives and flirtatious shopkeepers to which his landlady might be thought to belong? What, in short, was Shakespeare’s love-life like, during the long months he spent in London, far from a marriage-bed which had anyway - if the tradition is to be believed - long ago turned cold?

Here is one answer, proposed by a young law-student at the Middle Temple, John Manningham, who on 13 March 1602 wrote down the following story in his diary:

Upon a tyme when Burbidge played Rich. 3 there was a citizen greue soe farr in liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night unto hir by the name of Ri: the 3. Shakespeare overhearing their conclusion went before, was intertained and at his game err Burbidge came. The message being brought that Rich. the 3d was at the dore, Shakespeare caused returne to be made that William the Conquerour was before Rich. the 3.

Beneath this Manningham adds helpfully: ‘Shakespeare’s name William’, and then the name, ‘Mr Curle’, signifying that he got the story from his fellow-student at the Temple, Edward Curle.
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It is a wonderful story and of course quite unverifiable: the neatness of the punchline tends to argue against its being true, yet it was obviously ‘true’ enough in another sense - credible, typical, backgrounded - to the teller of the story. It remains at the anecdotal level of the ‘jest-book’, where apocryphal stories are fathered on to real people (Dick Tarlton, George Peele, Mary Frith et al.).

That the players participated in the sexual opportunities on offer in the theatres is hardly to be doubted. The Manningham anecdote is part of a general lore about the sexual attractiveness of players to their female audience. The women did not scream and faint, or throw their underwear onstage like girls at the height of Beatlemania, but the charisma of the stage is perennial. ‘O my troth,’ cries Frank Gullman in Middleton’s
A Mad World
, as she watches the handsome Follywit deliver the prologue of a play-within-the-play called
The Slip
,

an’ I were not married, I could find in my heart to fall in love with that player now, and send for him to a supper. I know some i’ th’ town that have done as much, and there took such a good conceit of their parts into th’ two-penny room that the actors have been found i’ th’ morning in less compass than their stage, tho’ ’twere ne’er so full of gentlemen . . . (5.2.33-9)

There are the standard bawdy equivoques in ‘parts’, ‘room’ and ‘compass’.

The character-writer John Earle also notes the charisma of the actor: ‘the waiting-women spectators are over-eares in love with [him], and Ladies send for him to act in their chambers’.
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And we have hints of an actual affair between the Countess of Argyll and the player-poet Nathan Field, for a gossipy letter of 1619 relates that the Earl of Argyll ‘was privy to the paiment of 15 or 16 poundes . . . for the noursing of a childe which the worlde sayes is daughter to My Lady and N. Feild the player’. There is a portrait of Field: darkly handsome, with the look of a languid pirate. A similar frisson may be behind a reminiscence of Ben Jonson’s, recorded by William Drummond: ‘Ben being one day at table with my Lady Rutland, her husband coming in accused her that she kept table to poets.’
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(An occasion for this might be around 1606, when the Countess performed in Jonson’s masque
Hymenaei
, perhaps wearing a Mountjoy head-tire.)

Manningham’s anecdote places Shakespeare and Burbage in this world of actors and their stage-struck ‘groupies’, which is also a milieu of homosocial competitiveness in which such women are trophies. In the story Shakespeare is rather laddish: he is ‘at his game’ before Burbage gets there. It is not quite clear from the story whether the ‘citizen’ has cheerfully accepted the arrival of Shakespeare at her door, and in her bed, or whether she is still under the illusion that the visitor is Burbage. If the latter - the ‘bed-trick’, as used in various Shakespeare plays - the story would have an added biographical touch, suggesting that Shakespeare was of broadly similar build to Burbage - in other words, quite short.
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The Manningham anecdote is a well-informed topical jest, but Shakespeare’s name is linked more specifically with a woman called Jane (or Jennet) Davenant. She was the wife of a vintner in Oxford, John Davenant, and the mother of the future poet laureate Sir William Davenant. It is to the latter, ultimately, that we owe the information about Shakespeare and Mrs Davenant, though the conduit of the story is the indispensable but sometimes unreliable John Aubrey, who writes:

Sir William [Davenant] would sometimes when he was pleasant over a glass of wine with his most intimate friends, e.g. Sam: Butler (author of Hudibras) &c, say that it seemed to him that he writt with the very spirit that Shakespeare [
sc
did], and seemd contendended [
sic
] enough to be thought his son . . .

One interpretation of this is that Davenant meant he was Shakespeare’s godson, or perhaps only his ‘son’ in a metaphorical sense of poetic inheritance. But this was not Aubrey’s immediate interpretation, for he continued the sentence, ‘in which way his mother had a very light report, whereby she was called a whore’ - but he, or someone else, crossed this out. A later seventeenth-century embroidery of the story had the young William Davenant running to see his ‘godfather’ Shakespeare whenever he came to Oxford, and being told ‘not to take the name of God in vain’.
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