Review: The Lodger by Charles Nicholl
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street
by Charles Nicholl
378pp, Allen Lane, £20
It's the kind of real-life story Jacobean playwrights deftly turned into crowd-pleasing citizen comedy. The setting: a crowded household at the corner of Silver and Muggle Streets in Cripplegate Ward, north of Cheapside in London. Four of the main characters are French: the "mean and rather crabby" Christopher Mountjoy ; his wife Marie; their only child, Mary; and her suitor and the Mountjoys' apprentice, Stephen Belott. The Mountjoys leased the house and ran their business in it, producing elaborate headpieces ("tires") admired and purchased by everyone from Queen Anne to courtesans eager to imitate the latest in fashion. The other main character in the story is an Englishman, an upstairs lodger named William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare may not have written a citizen comedy but he played a part in one. Sometime around October 1604, Marie Mountjoy sought her lodger's help. Bellot was getting cold feet. Could Shakespeare speak with him and perhaps manoeuvre the young couple towards marriage? The obstacle, as so often in romantic comedy, was the father. He was a tightwad and the dowry a sticking point. Shakespeare successfully intervened, assured the young lovers that "they should have a sum of money for a portion from the father", and then united them in a handfast - the kind that Rosalind and Orlando playfully enact in As You Like It. Formally joining hands and swearing one's commitment was enough in Shakespeare's day to make a couple husband and wife; a church ceremony typically followed, but a handfast was legally binding. The plot would take one more turn. Mountjoy refused to hand over the promised dowry and in 1612 Belott belatedly took his father-in-law to court. Once again, Shakespeare makes a cameo appearance, for he was asked to testify about the terms Mountjoy and Belott had agreed upon eight years earlier.
We know what Shakespeare said and did because in 1909, while trolling through the bundles of Court of Request papers in the Public Record Office, a pair of tireless American researchers, Charles and Hulda Wallace, came upon this case. It was a huge find, arguably the last great discovery about Shakespeare, and it included a sheet of "coarse-grained paper which Shakespeare once handled" before affixing his signature. While this episode is duly noted in most Shakespeare biographies, for the past century nobody has freshly examined the evidence or followed up on promising leads and connections.
Enter Charles Nicholl, a dogged researcher and author of some of the most absorbing books written about Elizabethan England, including The Reckoning (on the death of Christopher Marlowe) and The Creature in the Map (on Sir Walter Raleigh's search for Eldorado). Part biography, part detective story, Nicholl's latest work is a triumph and ranks among the finest books ever written about Shakespeare's life.
The multistorey house in which Shakespeare lodged no longer stands. It was probably torn down before the great fire of 1666 and the area where it stood was destroyed by a German air raid in 1940. The closest that literary pilgrims can now get to the site is the London Wall underground car park, off the A1211. The rest of us will have to make do with Nicholl's reconstruction.
Nicholl is something of an alchemist; he has taken scattered archaeological remains, maps, parish registers, subsidy rolls, casebooks, woodcuts, wills and inventories, and turned them into a vivid portrait of a time and place. Shakespeare, we learn, lodged "in a quiet, well-to-do street, an urban backwater, though as always in London you were not far from the more pungent life of the city: the taverns and inn-yards of Wood Street, the girls down Love Lane, the penury of the Hole at the Counter". We see the neighborhood through Shakespeare's eyes: "small and scruffy" St Olave's Church, which he attended; his local, the "Talbot," a "run of the mill tavern"; and the grounds of the Barber-Surgeons' Company on Muggle Street where he may have observed anatomies and where the great horticulturalist of the age, John Gerard, kept a physic garden.
Nicholl leads us up the dark stairs of Shakespeare's lodgings, past the workshop where he would have glimpsed skilled labourers turning silk on a twisting wheel (the kind of detail that finds its way into Pericles, which describes one who "weav'd the sleided silk / With fingers long, small, white as milk"). The climb upstairs ends at Shakespeare's chamber, a "low-ceilinged and ill lit" room, perhaps 400sq ft, with a four-poster to sleep in and a writing desk near the window. The room would also have contained books he was reading at the time, including Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays and Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures
But it wasn't books that inspired Shakespeare so much as what was going on around him. Take All's Well that Ends Well, which "features a young Frenchman being pressed into marriage, written at a time when the author was himself pressing a young Frenchman into marriage". Nicholl makes a strong case for how Shakespeare's growing interest in problem comedy in the early years of King James's reign coincided with his time on Silver Street. After finishing The Lodger it will be impossible to read Measure for Measure, All's Well, and especially Pericles as before.
Nicholl also traces how the lives of his characters intersect in unexpected ways. Marie Mountjoy, like Shakespeare, is paid for her work at court. She also visits Simon Forman, a physician and regular playgoer who has left behind the best contemporary accounts of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays. When Stephen and Mary move out of the Mountjoy household in 1605 they take lodgings under the roof of George Wilkins, a violent low-life with literary pretensions who wrote and sold a play to Shakespeare's company that year (The Miseries of Enforced Marriage), and was soon collaborating with him on Pericles
Nicholl convincingly suggests how Shakespeare got to know Wilkins and why he chose to work with him. He chalks it up to "mutual literary opportunism": "What Shakespeare likes about George Wilkins - 'likes' in a purely professional talent-spotting sense - is precisely that double curriculum vitae: the playwright and the pimp rolled into one". Those who fantasise that someone other than Shakespeare was Wilkins's co-author (Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford, or the latest suggestion, Fulke Greville), will have their work cut out explaining away these findings.
Nicholl devotes a good deal of attention to seduction, prostitution and sexual intrigue, all of which admittedly saturate the plays Shakespeare was writing at this time. But his emphasis comes at a cost, and some of the grimmer aspects of life in Jacobean London don't get quite the attention they deserve. Nicholl imagines that Shakespeare moved to Silver Street from Southwark around 1603 because he sought privacy; I suspect that the severity of plague on Bankside may have had more to do with it - and outbreaks recurred for the next seven years. What's largely missing from Nicholl's portrait of Shakespeare's residence on Silver Street is what it felt like to walk the streets of a city in which over 30,000 souls, or roughly one in six Londoners, had recently been swept off by plague. Shakespeare himself described it well in a knotty passage in Macbeth, written in 1606: "violent sorrow seems / A modern ecstasy. The dead-man's knell / Is there scarce asked for who, and good men's lives / Expire before the flowers in their caps".
It would be nice to conclude that when Shakespeare was deposed in 1612 he did the right thing - told the court what he had earlier confided in Daniel Nicholas, that Mountjoy had originally promised his daughter and son-in-law "about the sum of fifty pounds". But Shakespeare did no such thing. Instead, he told the court that he didn't remember. For Nicholl, "in his failure to remember, his shrug of non-involvement, he sides with the unforgiving father and against the spurned daughter," so "the deposition, a unique record of Shakespeare speaking, contains also this faintly sour note of silence". For this unvarnished judgment, and for much else in this fluently written and handsomely illustrated book, we stand in Charles Nicholl's debt.
· James Shapiro's most recent book is 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, published by Faber