The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (7 page)

How far this can be related to Shakespeare’s frame of mind during this period is, of course, a matter of debate. It was once fashionable to speak of Shakespeare’s output in the early seventeenth century as the product of a period of depression or illness, or what we might now call a mid-life crisis. This was energetically challenged in a famous lecture by C. J. Sisson, ‘The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare’ (1934). Sisson attacked the idea that Shakespeare wrote the tragicomedies as ‘a sufferer from pessimism and disillusionment, a victim of seventeenth century blues’. It simply does not follow, he thought, any more than ‘the proposition that tragic writing in a great creative writer is evidence of a tragic mood or personal unhappiness’. On the contrary, as Coleridge observed, ‘When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry.’ This is a corrective view, and the critical pendulum has continued to swing away from such personal interpretation of the plays (though the great modern maverick of Shakespeare studies, John Berryman, had a point when he said he was looking forward to ‘Professor Sisson’s studies of the mythical sorrows of St Paul, Villon, Dostoevsky, Father [Gerard Manley] Hopkins and Hart Crane’ - a point drastically underscored by Berryman’s own later suicide).
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It is true that biographical readings of the plays are dangerous, unregulated, prone to sentimentalization. It is absurd to cherry-pick passages of poetry, written over more than two decades, and infer from them a consistent personal attitude. Lines belong in a dramatic context, and in the psychological context of the character who utters them, and cannot be taken to reflect Shakespeare’s views. But perhaps the scepticism has swung too far in the direction of a bloodless text. Biography and literature do not fit together like Lego bricks, but they are not totally divorced either. Even E. M. W. Tillyard, a fine-toothed textual analyst who thought biographical interpretation ‘superfluous’, concludes an examination of the poetic unevenness of
All’s Well
by saying, ‘Some of these couplets are doing much what his couplets usually do; others in their strangeness point to an unusual mood in him when he wrote the play.’
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I am interested in recreating the physical and cultural circumstances of a period of Shakespeare’s life. The plays he was writing at the time are part of those circumstances. They are on his desk; they are on his mind; and it is permissible, within precise chronological boundaries, to draw links between them and the milieu in which he was living when he wrote them.

If Shakespeare had written - say - a play about a young Frenchman being pressed reluctantly into marriage, and if it could be shown that he wrote the play at a time when he was himself pressing a young Frenchman into marriage, then one might think it worth asking whether there was a connection between the fictional nuptials on stage and the actual ones he was involved in. That is in fact the case - the play is
All’s Well
- and it would be perverse to ignore these connections in the name of academic correctness. I would not call Stephen Belott a ‘model’ for Bertram, Count Roussillon, and I would not want to suggest that Shakespeare was ‘inspired’ by the small dramas of the Mountjoy household when he was writing of the troubled betrothal of Bertram and Helena. But the analogies are there. The ‘unconsidered trifles’ of domestic life are snapped up by the dramatist. They go into the mix, enriching it with secret flavours of particularity which are, for the most part, unknown to us.

4

Shakespeare in London

T
he story of Shakespeare and the Mountjoys is a small chapter in the larger and longer story of Shakespeare in London. He was not actually a Londoner, of course. He was born, married and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon, and this provincial market-town remained, in most senses of the word, his home. His parents, wife, children and most of his siblings and cousins lived there. He inherited, as an adult, the house where he had spent his childhood. In 1598 he bought his own rather grand house on the edge of town, New Place, where he spent more and more time in his later years, and where he died, at the age of fifty-two, in 1616. In these fundamental ways Shakespeare was - precisely as he says in his deposition - ‘of Stratford-upon-Avon in the countie of Warwickshire’.

But, for all this, the fact remains that the ‘sweet swan of Avon’
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spent a lot more of his adult life in London than he did in Stratford. It was his place of business, the theatrical and literary capital to which he was drawn and in which he struggled to success and eminence. He was there out of professional necessity, though this need not imply he was there unwillingly. He was, like so many other Londoners, an incomer: part of a demographic rip-tide which saw the city double its population during the sixteenth century, reaching about 200,000 at the beginning of James’s reign. Many of his literary contemporaries were also of provincial stock - Christopher Marlowe and John Lyly from Canterbury, Thomas Nashe from Lowestoft, Robert Greene from Norwich, George Chapman from Hitchin, Francis Beaumont from Leicestershire, and so on. Even Sir Walter Ralegh, the acme of courtly sophistication, ‘spake broad Devonshire to his dying day’.
⁵²

‘London, thou art the floure of cities all,’ ran the old ditty, though the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe had a different angle: ‘London, thou art the seeded garden of sinne, the sea that sucks in all the scummy chanels of the realme.’
⁵³
Perhaps both views are true - by the end of the sixteenth century London was one of the largest, liveliest and most sophisticated cities in Europe, but it was also overcrowded, squalid, corrupt, crime-ridden and plague-infested. A rich whiff of danger and pleasure blows through those narrow wood-built streets, a human profusion which for the provincial newcomer must have been intoxicating. A sense of the city’s sheer verve plays into the wonderful ‘low-life’ strata of Shakespeare’s drama - Falstaff and his cronies drinking at East Cheap, the brothel-world of Nell Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, Pompey Bum and Mistress Overdone.

It is not known when Shakespeare first came to the city. The last record of him as a young man in Stratford is the baptism of his twins, Hamnet and Judith, on 2 February 1585 (it is not
per se
a record of him, but one assumes he was there). He was then twenty years old. The first records of him in London date from mid-1592 - the appearance of ‘harey the vi’ (almost certainly the play we now call
Henry VI Part 1
) at the Rose theatre; the attack on him in Greene’s
Groatsworth of Wit
.
⁵⁴
Between these sightings lie the legendary ‘Lost Years’, a documentary desert seven years wide in which the early biographers placed unsubstantiated oases of activity - he had been a ‘schoolmaster in the country’ (John Aubrey) or a ‘lawyer’s clerk’ (Edmund Malone) - and which more recent commentators have interpreted in terms of the clandestine movements of a young Catholic.
⁵⁵
Any or all of these might be true, but a good part of the so-called lost years must be located in London. The whole tenor of Greene’s attack on him in 1592 shows he had by then acquired some success both as an actor and as a writer of plays, and was thus, in Greene’s view, an ‘upstart crow beautified with our feathers’. (‘Our’ refers to the clique of university-educated writers which also included Marlowe, Nashe, George Peele and Thomas Watson: the ‘University Wits’, as they are called.) The only place Shakespeare could have achieved this success, or notoriety, was in London, and it is generally agreed he was living there at least by the end of the 1580s.

At the close of his career he retired back to Stratford, but again the dates are vague.
The Tempest
, performed in 1611, has a valedictory note - ‘Our revels now are ended’ - but he continued to contribute work for the stage.
Henry VIII
, premiered at the Globe in the early summer of 1613, was a collaboration with John Fletcher, but the editors of the First Folio considered it (unlike
Pericles
) to have enough Shakespeare in it to merit inclusion in the canon. But two later ventures with Fletcher -
The Two Noble Kinsmen
and the lost
Cardenio
- had slighter contributions and were not included. It was during an early performance of
Henry VIII
that the Globe was burnt down, after a spark from a cannonade ignited the thatched roof. The razing of the great playhouse he had built and nurtured makes the day of the fire, 25 July 1613, a symbolic date for Shakespeare’s retirement from the city - though only a symbolic one, for he is spotted briefly in London in November 1614, when a Stratford acquaintance writes: ‘My cosen Shakspeare commyng yesterday to towne I went to see him howe he did.’
⁵⁶

If these dates are broadly accurate, Shakespeare spent about twenty-five years living and working in London, and it is with Shakespeare in - if not quite of - London that this book is concerned.

We know something of Shakespeare’s residences in London before he took up his lodgings on Silver Street. According to John Aubrey, Shakespeare had ‘lived in Shoreditch’. Aubrey is not always reliable, but he was an expert sniffer-out of information, and his informant was in this case a good one - an aged actor- manager, William Beeston, whose father Christopher had acted alongside Shakespeare in the 1590s. In a manuscript note Aubrey writes, ‘W. Shakespeare - Q [
quaere
, ask] Mr Beeston, who knows most of him’. He interviewed him in the summer of 1681, a year before Beeston’s death. Perhaps he came too late, for he got just a few scraps of reminiscence about Shakespeare, one of which was that he had lived in Shoreditch.
⁵⁷

The likelihood is that Shoreditch was an early Shakespeare residence in London, since it was here that the first purpose-built playhouses were located - the Theatre, built in 1576 by James Burbage, father of the actor Richard Burbage; and the Curtain. These predated the Bankside playhouses south of the river.

In the late 1580s, when Shakespeare was establishing himself in the theatre world, Shoreditch was little more than a shanty-town, a rampant overspill of ‘poor cottages’ and ‘alleys backward’ spreading through the fields and marshes and dissolved-monastery gardens outside the city walls. But it was also, because of that connection with the theatres, the Bohemian haunt of Elizabethan London. Along its dirt roads lived some of the greatest literary and theatrical talents of the day. Thomas Watson and Christopher Marlowe had lodgings in Norton Folgate just south of Shoreditch, and in 1589 they are glimpsed with weapons drawn in an ‘affray’ on nearby Hog Lane. The comedian Richard Tarlton lived his last days on Holywell Street (now Shoreditch High Street) with a prostitute named Em Ball. The red-bearded pamphleteer Robert Greene, author of that bitter sortie against Shakespeare, was another habitu’. His mistress, whom Gabriel Harvey describes as a ‘sorry ragged quean’, was also named Ball - her brother was a cutpurse known on the street as ‘Cutting’ Ball. She was probably related to Tarlton’s mistress Em Ball, and may have been the same woman. Their illegitimate son Fortunatus - little Lucky Greene - died in infancy and was buried in the parish church of St Leonard’s. Shakespeare’s future collaborator George Wilkins may also have spent his early years in the area: his father was buried at St Leonard’s in 1603. Actors and their families abound in the church register - Burbages, Brownes and indeed Beestons.
⁵⁸
Aubrey’s interview with William Beeston actually took place in Shoreditch, at Beeston’s house ‘on Hog Lane, six doores down’.

By the mid-1590s Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate. He is still close to the northern theatres but now inside the city gates, within the pale. We find him there in the lay subsidy rolls, which record tax assessments and payments, parish by parish, throughout the country. The subsidies were levies by the Crown, usually collected in three annual instalments. The rate of taxation was controlled by Parliament. Property-owners were taxed on the value of their ‘lands’; others, at a lower rate, on their ‘goods’. The partially surviving London rolls, preserved in the National Archives, are an invaluable resource - the nearest we have to an Elizabethan telephone directory - and I will refer to them often in the course of this book.

The earliest record of Shakespeare in Bishopsgate is in October 1596. He was assessed on goods valued at £5, on which he owed tax of 5 shillings.
⁵⁹
This immediately tells us something about his circumstances. First, his appearance in the subsidy rolls indicates that he is a ‘householder’ in the parish. This does not mean he owned a house there, which is unlikely, but suggests he had a long-term lease or tenancy agreement on a property. The assessment of £5 is a middling one. Among his fellow-parishioners, Sir John Spenser was assessed on lands worth £300, and another on £150, but the majority were assessed at £10, £5 or £3. The latter is the lowest assessment, though ‘strangers’ - in other words, immigrants - who fell below this threshold had to pay a poll tax of 4d per head. Comments in the literature of the day suggest that assessments of goods were as much an impression as a documentation of wealth. A character in John Lyly’s
Mother Bomby
(1585) says, ‘He that had a cup of red wine to his oysters was hoisted in the Queen’s subsidy books’ (2.5); and in the anonymous collection
Jack of Dover
, a man is rated at ‘five pound more than he was before’ because of his wife’s fondness for wearing expensive stockings.
⁶⁰
These exaggerate the matter, but we can infer that Mr Shakespeare was doing reasonably well for himself by the mid-1590s.