The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (47 page)

4
. In 1850, the Coopers’ Arms is listed as one of seventeen public houses in Cripplegate Ward Within (Baddeley 1921, 213-14). The property was leased, somewhat ironically, from the United Kingdom Temperance and General Provident Institution, which in turn leased it from New College, Oxford (Wallace 1910a, 506). In the Silver Street ratebooks for 1890 every building but one is a warehouse (Baddeley 1921, 77-8): the exception, rated at £38, is presumably the Coopers’ Arms, though it is described as a ‘dwelling house’. The Coopers’ Company had their livery hall not far away, between Aldermanbury and Basinghall Street.

5
. Stow 1908, 1.299, 2.344.

6
. William Maitland,
History of London
(1753-6), 2.905-6.

7
. On Greene’s lodgings see Gabriel Harvey,
Four Letters
(1592), in
Works
, ed. A. B. Grosart (1884), 1.170-3; his landlady, a Mrs Isam, was said to be a ‘big fatte lusty wench’ with an ‘arme like an Amazon’ (Nashe 1958, 1.289). Jonson: Aubrey 1949, 178; this is not the Elephant and Castle south of the river, but one ‘outside Temple Bar’. Roydon’s address is given in a Star Chamber deposition of 1593 (see note 27 below). Nashe refers to his lodgings in
Have with you to Saffron Walden
(1596): ‘all the time I have lyne in her [Mrs Danter’s] house’ (Nashe 1958, 3.114-15; Nicholl 1984, 224-6).

8
. Weaver adds that from these two properties Mountjoy ‘receiveth some eighteen pounds per annum de claro besides his own dwelling’; this is corroborated by Noel Mountjoy, who says Mountjoy ‘gaineth an over-plus of rent more than he payeth to the value of about nineteen or seventeen pounds per annum’. Thus Mountjoy sub-let part of the Silver Street property and the whole of the Brentford property for a combined total of about £35 per annum, resulting in a net profit (‘de claro’) of about £18 per annum.

9
. Stow 1908, 1.208, citing a ‘presentment’ listing 150 ‘households of strangers’ in Billingsgsate ward. His comment is formulaic: cf. the ‘Complaynt’ of London citizens, 1571: ‘the merchant straungers take upp the fairest houses in the citty, devide & fitt them for their severall uses, take into them several lodgers & dwellers’ (PRO SP12/81/29; Tawney and Power 1924, 1.308-10).

10
. Janet S. Loengard, ed.,
London Viewers and their Certificates, 1508- 1558
(London Record Society, 1989), No. 207, 1 April 1547. The ‘viewers’ were a group of four men commissioned to adjudicate property disputes in the city.

11
. Harington 1927, 86-7.

12
. Orlin 2000b, 350-51.

13
. GL MS 12805, Evidence Book 7; Schofield 1987, 112-13.

14
. On Jacobean privies, see Schofield 1987, 22-4; Symonds 1952, 86-9. Schofield distinguishes the privy, ‘a small chamber with structural connections to below-ground cesspits’, from ‘temporary partitions, close-stools or other non-structural and more mobile arrangements’. They were often set into an upstairs chimney, with the updraught of the flue acting as a ventilator, though Harington notes that an ‘unruly’ wind will instead ‘force the il ayres down the chimneis’ and into the lower rooms. Nashe frequently refers to the printed page ending up in the privy. The full title of
Strange Newes
(1592), one of his pamphlets against Dr Harvey, reads:
Strange Newes of the Intercepting Certaine Letters and a Convoy of Verses
[Harvey’s recently published
Four Letters
]
as they were going privilie to victuall the Low Countries
(i.e. to be used as toilet paper).

6. The neighbourhood

15
. Windsor House: Stow 1908, 1.312, 315, 2.344; Milne and Cohen 2001, 40-9. Entries in the St Olave’s parish register (GL MS 6534) are indexed in Webb 1995, vol. 6, and transcribed (up to 1625) by Alan Nelson (GL MS 52/77/3, typescript, 2000). Alice Blague: Rowse 1976, 139. Sir David Fowles’s ownership of Windsor House is inferred from the parish register, 9 February 1607 (Webb 1995, 4.541, but misread as ‘Fowler’): ‘Henry son of David Fowles, knight, baptized at the house of the said David’. All other home baptisms recorded in the register refer to Windsor House. On Fowles or Foulis, a Scottish favourite of King James, see Fiona Pogson, ‘Sir David Foulis’ (
ODNB
2004).

16
. Milne and Cohen 2001, 45, and figs 47-50, 56-62.

17
. H. Harben,
A Dictionary of London
(1918), s.v. Olave; Milne and Cohen 2001, 126. It was from medieval times the guild-church of the Silversmiths’ Company (G. Huelin,
Vanished Churches of the City of London
(Guildhall Library, 1966), 22).

18
. Stow 1908, 1.306; Baddeley 1921, 43.

19
. GL MS 6534, fol. IV. Flint’s transcript covers the years 1561-93; the entries continue thereafter in his hand till 1609, when the new incumbent, Thomas Booth, took over. Flint matriculated at Cambridge as a ‘gentleman pensioner’ in March 1583, proceeded BA 1587 and MA 1590 (Venn 1922-7, 1.2, 51).

20
. Diary fol. 15-15v, February 1601; Sorlien 1976, 52-3.

21
. On Barbers’ Hall see Young 1890;
http://www.barberscompany.org.uk
. The earliest record of the Hall is from the 1480s; the current building was opened in 1969.

22
. Andrew Griffin, ‘John Banister’ (
ODNB
2004), and see note 42 below. He was buried at St Olave’s on 16 January 1599 (Webb 1995, 4.684).

23
. Norman Moore and Sarah Bakewell, ‘Richard Palmer’ (
ODNB
2004). For his property on Monkwell Street see Schofield 1987, 97-9.

24
. See Marcus Woodward, ed.,
Gerard’s Herball
(1985); Marja Smolenaars, ‘John Gerard’ (
ODNB
2004).

25
. See H. N. Ellacombe,
Plant-lore and Garden-craft in Shakespeare
(1878). Iago’s appositions (hyssop/thyme; nettles/lettuce) accord with contemporary ideas of ‘dry’ and ‘moist’ plants being mutually beneficial. Shakespeare writes often of the therapeutic power of herbs: ‘O mickle is the powerful grace that lies / In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities’ (
Romeo and Juliet
, 2.2.15-16); ‘Not poppy nor mandragora, / Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world / Shall ever medicine thee’ (
Othello
, 3.3.334-6). And see Ophelia’s famous catalogue, ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance [etc]’ (
Hamlet
, 4.5.175-83).

26
. Hotson 1949, 125-7. After Savage’s death in 1607 his son Richard sold the Silver Street house to Shakespeare’s colleague John Heminges: see Eccles 1991-3, s.v. Heminges.

27
. Henry Bannister appears in the 1599 rolls for Farringdon ward (PRO E179/146/390a, fol. 1), living either in the western part of St Olave’s or in one of the three small adjoining parishes grouped with it for tax-collection purposes. I conjecture that he is the same as the goldsmith Henry Bannister, who is linked with Skeres in a loan to the poet Matthew Roydon (PRO Close Roll 1144/24, 6 January 1582; G. C. Moore-Smith, ‘Matthew Roydon’,
MLR
9 (1914), 97-8). Wolfall and Skeres: PRO STAC 5, bundle S9/ 8, 26 April 1593; Nicholl 2002, 28-31, 467. Though ‘of Silver Street’ in 1593, Wolfall may be the ‘Jhon Woolfall’ whose children were baptized at nearby St Mary Aldermanbury in 1580-81 (
Registers
, ed. W. B. Bannerman (Harleian Society 61, 1931), 44-5).

28
. Stow 1908, 1.299. We learn from Nicholas’s will (PRO Prob 11/60, 31 May 1578) that Daniel Nicholas was a younger son. He stood to inherit certain ‘messuages and tenements’ on Bread Street in the event of his elder brother John dying without issue.

29
. Jonson’s second son, Joseph, was baptized at St Giles on 9 December 1599 (Riggs 1989, 54); Dekker is probably the Thomas Dicker or Dykers whose three daughters were baptized there between 1594 and 1602 (F. P. Wilson, ‘Three Notes on Thomas Dekker’,
MLR
15 (1920), 82); on Wilkins in St Giles see Part Six above. Richard Hathaway, part-author of
Sir John Oldcastle
(1600), written for the Admiral’s Men as a riposte to Shakespeare’s
Henry IV
, is doubtless the ‘Richard Hathway, Poett’ who appears in the St Giles register in March 1601, and probably the ‘scholemaster’ and ‘Master of Arts’ of the same name who features earlier, though no record remains of his university career (MacManaway 1958, 562). On Edmund Shakespeare see EKC 2.18: ‘Edward’ is an erroneous repetition of his son’s name (‘Edward sonne of Edward Shackspeere’). He died aged twenty-seven, and was buried at St Saviour’s, Southwark, on 31 December 1607, ‘with a forenoone knell of the great bell’ for which someone (by tradition his brother) paid 20 shillings.

30
. Also at St Mary Aldermanbury lived the Digges family: the mathematician Thomas Digges had died in 1595, but Shakespeare knew his son Leonard, who later contributed a prefatory poem, ‘To the Memorie of the deceased Authour, Maister W. Shakespeare’, to the First Folio.

31
. Nelson’s literary works included a verse epitaph on Sir Francis Walsingham, and an account of the annual pageant of the Fishmongers’ company (Eleri Larkum, ‘Thomas Nelson’,
ODNB
2004). A later literary resident was the metaphysical poet Francis Quarles, buried at St Olave’s 11 September 1644.

32
. On Giffard see Foster 1891, 1.1, 563. He and Palmer treated the Prince with an infusion of
Teucrium scordium
(Sarah Bakewell, ‘Richard Palmer’,
ODNB
2004). This plant (the water germander) ‘was at one time esteemed as an antidote for poisons, and also as an antiseptic and anthelmintic’ (Plants for a Future database,
http://www.pfaf.org
).

33
. Schofield 1987, 135.

34
. Baddeley 1921, 210-15. The last mail-coach left the Two Swans, bound for Dover, in 1844, and the inn was demolished in 1856 to be replaced by a depot for rail-freight.

35
. John Taylor,
The Carriers Cosmographie
, sig. C2: ‘The carriers of Worcester doe lodge at the Castle in Woodstreet, their dayes are Fridaies and Saturdaies.’ For Evesham, sig. B2v. Stratford itself is not in Taylor’s list.

36
. On Greenaway see Shapiro 2005, 260-61. The letter he carried was from Richard Quiney, a Stratford man then in London, to Abraham Sturley, who refers to it in his reply of 4 November 1598 (EKC 2.103). Greenaway doubtless carried others in the correspondence, though not Quiney’s earlier letter to Shakespeare (25 October 1598; Cooper 2006, no. 58) which is the only item of Shakespeare’s correspondence to survive: this was sent from Quiney’s London lodgings, the Bell in Carter Lane, and did not leave London. The sum they wished to borrow from their ‘loveinge contreyman’ was £30.

37
. Stow 1908, 1.206, 290, 2.311.

38
. Ibid., 1.115, 2.285; Salga˜do 1977, 163-82. Wilkins 1607, 1177-9, describes accommodation at the Poultry Counter: ‘the featherbed in the Maisters side . . . the flock-bed in the Knights warde . . . the straw-bed in the Hole’.

39
. Nelson 2006, 63.

7. ‘Houshould stuffe’

40
. Milne and Cohen 2001, 1-8; Howe and Lakin 2004.

41
. Howe and Lakin 2004, 95-8, and fig. 88 showing the location of the sites.

42
. On the transmission of Paracelsian ideas into England see Nicholl 1980, 65-9. Among early advocates of the controversial ‘chymicall physick’ was the Silver Street surgeon John Banister (C. Webster, ‘Alchemical and Paracelsian medicine’, in Webster 1979, 327).

8. The chamber

43
. ‘T. M.’,
The Blacke Booke
(1604), in Middleton 1886, 8.24-6.

44
. Donne 1912, 1.11.

45
. John Dickinson,
Greene in Conceipt
, 1598, t-p; Aubrey 1949, 178.

46
. Francis Beaumont, ‘To Mr B:J’ (Ben Jonson), 15-21, first printed in EKC 2.224 from a MS in Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

47
. Frank Kermode, ed.,
The Tempest
(Arden edn, 1954), 147-50; Baldwin 1944, 2.443-52. Middleton has a version of the Ovid passage, spoken by Hecate, in
The Witch
,
c
. 1616 (Middleton 1886, 5.443).

48
. On Shakespeare’s use of Harsnett see John Murphy,
Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and
King Lear (Athens, Ohio, 1984). Many of the devils’ names come from the testimony of Sara Williams, a chambermaid in a Catholic household, whose supposed possession in 1586 was investigated by Harsnett (Murphy 1984, 182 ff).

49
. Florio’s connection with the play was first mooted by William Warburton,
Works of Shakespear
, 1747, 2.227-8, and explored by Frances Yates,
A Study of
Love’s Labour’s Lost (1936).

50
. Montaigne 1603, 2.184, 195, 185. Taylor 1925 finds hundreds of echoes in plays subsequent to 1603, though some are tenuous. See also Robert Ellrodt, ‘Self-consciousness in Shakespeare and Montaigne’,
Shakespeare Survey
28 (1975), 37-50. Gonzalo’s ideal commonwealth (
Tempest
, 2.1.143-64) is closely based on Montaigne’s essay ‘On Cannibals’. Hugh Grady,
Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from
Richard II
to
Hamlet (Oxford, 2002) argues Montaigne’s influence prior to the Florio translation, an influence certainly found in Francis Bacon’s
Essays
(1597) and William Cornwallis’s
Essays
(1600).

51
. BL shelfmark C.21.e.17; SRI 102-4. Ben Jonson’s copy of the book does survive, with an inscription dated 1604; it cost 7 shillings. Jonson also knew Florio, and inscribed a copy of
Volpone
, ‘To his loving Father & worthy Freind Mr John Florio: the Ayde of his Muses, Ben: Jonson seales this testemony of Freindship & Love’. See David Mcpherson, ‘Ben Jonson’s Library and Marginalia’,
Studies in Philology
71 (1974), 72-3.