by Michael Wood
So that autumn, as Troilus and Cressida enjoyed its brief and inglorious run, Shakespeare buried his father in the churchyard by the river. The town to which he had returned was a different place from the one he had known in childhood. Since the 1580s, Stratford’s old generation had been sidelined. Old friends were still there, still conscientious objectors: the Sadlers, the Badgers, the Wheelers. But new people were in charge now, aligned to the Protestant state and its local magnates, such as the Grevilles. In his father’s day the corporation had paid many acting companies to provide entertainment for the town in the guildhall. Soon they would be paid to go away. It was a sign of the times.
What an irony it was, then, that Shakespeare had bought the second biggest house in town with money made from the stage. Stratford was now in the throes of economic depression, exacerbated by the fires of 1594 and 1595 and the downturn in the economy of the country as a whole in the late nineties. The harsh winter of 1601 that hit gate receipts at the Globe affected the countryside far worse. A third of the population of Stratford were officially registered as paupers.
The mood in the town was shifting, too, in the face of growing Protestantization: there were snooping beadles, bothersome constables, creeping Sabbatarianism. Alderman Richard Quiney, a stalwart defender of his townspeople’s rights, was killed in a night brawl with men of the local lord, Fulke Greville. The view from the window of New Place was changing; in the streets there were whispers that the social fabric was disintegrating, rulership failing and nature punishing mankind. Puritan preachers especially were not slow to point these things out. For them, the problem was that the town was still not godly enough.
Looking at the events of that year, Shakespeare could have been excused for thinking, as his John of Gaunt had said, that his native land was ‘leased out like to a pelting farm’. But for his descendants he was determined to carve out his little patch of the sceptred isle. In May 1602 he paid £320 to the Combe family for 107 acres divided into about a dozen strips in the common field. And on 28 September that year he purchased a little cottage in Chapel Lane on a lease from the manor of Rowington, the village from which his paternal grandfather had probably come. Now, at the height of his career, and about to return to the bright lights of London to create his finest work, the fruition of his own personal artistic vision, Shakespeare was nevertheless investing in his roots.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE THEATRE OF THE WORLD
IN 1602 SHAKESPEARE was at the peak of his career, the foremost dramatist of late Tudor London. And now for the first time we have detailed first-hand knowledge of his private life. Indeed, our sources enable us to go right into his street, through the front door of the house in which he lived – and even to hear his voice. In this year, when it is now agreed that Othello was written, he was living once again north of the river, in a house on the corner of Silver Street and Monkwell – known to locals, with a delightful synchronicity for today’s Harry Potter fans, as Muggle Street.
Shakespeare’s neighbourhood lay just inside the city wall in its northwest corner, where crumbling bastions towered over a warren of tenements and livery halls, looking out over sewage-filled ditches to the northern suburbs. This may have been an area his father knew: the Glovers had a small hall close by at the western end of Beech Lane. Shakespeare now lodged with a French Huguenot family, Christopher and Mary Mountjoy. Their house was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, its successor in the Blitz, and the site itself vanished during post-war development under the central reservation of the carriageway at London Wall. Yet this is one of the most vividly documented corners of the old city, with wonderful detail in Tudor street maps, parish books, local court records, the archives of the guild companies and even plans of individual tenements.
The Mountjoys are often described as wigmakers but they were in fact makers of tires, fantastical court headdresses of gold and silver thread woven with pearls and jewels, the kind of thing worn only by royalty and aristocrats. One of Queen Elizabeth’s tires was described as ‘a jewel, being a ship of Mother-of-Pearl garnished with rubies and pearls’. Among the Mountjoys’ clients while Shakespeare was living with them was James I’s wife, Queen Anne. Shakespeare refers to such creations in several plays: Falstaff, for example, speaks of ‘a ship tire, the tire valiant, or any tire of Venetian admittance’ – the art came originally from Venice. So Mountjoy was an artist and craftsman of substance, tire-maker to the court and to well-to-do families who came in from the provinces for their fittings.
As its name suggests, Silver Street was known for its goldsmiths and silversmiths. The Mountjoys’ was one of the ‘divers fine houses’ described by Stow in his 1598 survey, and it is shown in the Agas map – conventionally drawn – with two big gables. Like its neighbours, it must have been of three and a half storeys with jettied upper floors. It is pleasant to imagine Shakespeare living in one of the upper front rooms that looked across to St Olave’s Church, and over undulating rooftops to the massive bulk of Old St Paul’s half a mile away. The Property Commission maps drawn up after the Great Fire show it L-shaped, with a 63-foot frontage and the same depth down Muggle Street. The ground floor would have had a shop and a workshop glittering with silk, Venice gold and silver thread and jewels, its benches covered with ‘cloth of gold’ and ‘tissue’ – gold woven on a light silk base. Although the women servants did the sewing, the male apprentices milled the gold thread and assembled the tires. These were high-quality craftspeople, working on one of the most esteemed of the upper-class decorative arts in turn-of-the-century London.
The Mountjoys’ connections were with court, country and the theatre world. Christopher’s friends included the families of Hemmings and Condell. And they were a family with tales enough to provide the plot for a domestic drama all on their own. Christopher was a difficult sort; Mrs Mountjoy had affairs. In 1597 she went to the astrologer and physician Simon Forman privately, thinking she was pregnant (by her lover Thomas Wood who lived nearby in Swan Alley?). It is intriguing to think she could have rubbed shoulders in the waiting room with the likes of Winifrid Burbage, Emilia Lanier and Philip Henslowe. The parish register for that year records the death of an infant as ‘Mrs Mountjoys child’. And before too long, the family’s ups and downs drew in their famous lodger.
A year or two after he came to live in their house, Shakespeare found himself playing a part in one of his own plots. Mountjoys apprentices lived in the house, and one of them, Stephen Belott, was a nice boy with good prospects. Mrs Mountjoy seems to have taken a shine to him and was keen to arrange a match with her daughter, but Belott was slow on the uptake and she asked Shakespeare to be a go-between (a common practice, incidentally, in Tudor marriage negotiations). Whether or not it was ‘honey-tongued’ Shakespeare who did the trick, the couple did indeed marry, in St Olave’s on 19 November 1604. Belott set up in business on his own, but quarrelled with his father-in-law over the promised dowry. The case ended up in court and has left us 26 documents that name Shakespeare, one of them with his signature, along with the depositions of household members, apprentices and servants. Among them was Joan Jonson, who told how Mrs Mountjoy ‘the defendant did send and persuade one Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house to persuade the plaintiff to marriage’. When it comes to his turn, we hear Shakespeare speaking in his own voice.
He says Belott was a ‘very honest and good fellow’ who ‘did well and honestly behave himself and was a very good and industrious servant in the said service, though he did not in [Shakespeare’s] hearing avouch that he had got any great profit and commodity by the service’. The poet remembered that Mr Mountjoy ‘did bear and show great goodwill and affection’ and had often spoken well of his apprentice ‘and did make a motion unto the complainant of marriage with Mary, and Mrs Mountjoy did solicit and entreat the said deponent [Shakespeare] to move and persuade Belott to effect the said marriage’. Shakespeare was perhaps close to Mrs Mountjoy, though to suggest he might have been responsible for her pregnancy in
1597 is perhaps to overstretch the evidence. Shakespeare says he did speak to the couple, and ‘made sure by him they gave their consent and agreed to marry’; unfortunately, however, he did not remember the terms of the marriage portion beyond a cash sum and a load of household movables and tools. In the end, since no one could agree on that crucial point, in a Solomonic judgement the court referred the case to the arbitration of the elders of the Huguenot church. They decided that both sides were a bad lot (tous pere e gendre desbauchez) and awarded Belott £6 13s 4d. Mountjoy never paid up.
For a professional anatomizer of human foibles and follies, perhaps it all raised a smile. Another idea jotted down in his notebook. But such a tale only highlights the rich web of contacts offered by his daily life in that tiny area jammed in between the city wall and the goldsmiths’ quarter. Around St Olave’s there were interesting neighbours. The musician Henry Sandon was a fellow parishioner, as was the painter William Linby. John Hemmings lived a few yards away in Addle Street in a property owned by Thomas Savage, the goldsmith who had funded the Globe deal. In the neighbourhood were several scriveners, useful for getting clean copies of plays fast. A few yards away Nicholas Hilliard lodged in Gutter Lane, in a tenement sometimes so cold in winter that he couldn’t paint his minutely observed miniatures.
LIFE IN SILVER STREET
But Shakespeare also rubbed shoulders with the poor. If he went down Muggle Street, he was in a fascinating little neighbourhood tucked into the very corner of the old city wall. Fifty yards or so up the street on the left was a gateway that led up a little lane to the hall of the Barber Surgeons, the doctor-physicians of the time. Here, four times a year, they held public lectures with autopsies on convicted felons. At least two doctors were near neighbours: Dr Gifford lived only a few yards away in Silver Street, Dr Palmer on the north side of the hall. On the other side of Muggle Street, butting on to the back of Shakespeare’s house, were twelve almshouses for ‘aged and poor’ people, their faggots and bags of charcoal stacked outside for the cold weather. And a few yards beyond them was a group of buildings owned by the Clothworkers: recent infill in the property boom of the last twenty-five years. Thanks to the guild’s site maps, we can effectively walk inside them.
If you stood at the end of the street with the city wall facing you, on your left was a narrow gate by a brick wall: head down the entry towards the corner tower and you would come out into a yard facing a three-storey tenement block that backed on to Dr Palmer’s house. This was a warren of little rooms occupied by single men – some of the vast number of domestic servants in the city. Among them was an Irishman, Patrick ‘Murfee’. Past them was Mr Beastie’s house and garden, under the city wall. To the right, across the yard, was the old medieval chapel and hermitage of St James, now known as Lambe’s chapel; and jammed up against it was Mr Speght’s grammar school, a three-storey house with a hall and parlour, a little kitchen and an outside latrine. Among Speght’s boys was John Chappell, who at this time became a member of the Chapel Children playing at Blackfriars. The sound of the school bell would have been just audible from the Mountjoys’ house.
So those were the neighbours Shakespeare rubbed shoulders with in the street or the taverns – or at Dr Palmer’s, if the venereal troubles described in the last sonnets were real ones. If he needed an alehouse that served food, there were several local ‘ordinaries’: the Mitre in Wood Street and the Dolphin in Milk Street were the best known, but there was a small inn in Silver Street itself, later known as the Coopers Arms. Such places usually had a kitchen with an oven and a taproom, and a range of small chambers and outbuildings of two or three storeys round a yard: good places to write, as food and drink could be served privately if desired, and candles were free. Lying just inside the wall at Cripplegate, on the main route out to the north, were several great carriers’ inns for long-distance travellers. North of the Mountjoys’ house, for example, by St Giles, was the White Hinde, used by Durham and Yorkshire carriers. The Maiden Head, the Worcester carriers’ base, was maybe the one used by Shakespeare, Condell and Hemmings – Midlanders all. The largest were the Swan with Two Necks, and the Castle, a fifteenth-century establishment with an inner yard 40 yards across. Bigger than theatres and, like them, galleried on all sides, the carriers’ inns occupied the entire space between Lad Lane, Wood Street and Aldermanbury. From here, trains of pack animals left bearing the produce and luxuries of London and of a wider world.
This, then, was Shakespeare’s neighbourhood when he wrote his greatest plays. Travellers and loaded pack animals were constantly crowding into the inns in the warren of narrow alleys round about, so it must have been full of noise, colour and vitality. Nothing yet regularized and therefore nothing monotonous, this was the life of a great pre-modern city that we can no longer see in the developed world. All these coaching inns had been demolished by the late nineteenth century, although until not so long ago you could still have seen the badge of a swan with entwined necks carved in the rubbed stone lintel of an old carriage gate, just round the corner from Shakespeare’s old haunts.
OTHELLO: BLACK IS FAIR
So it was probably in the Silver Street house, or at the tables of the ‘ordinaries’ where he ate in the evenings, that he wrote Othello, which out of the darkness and inwardness of Hamlet, emerges with a painful clarity and emotional intent. The story, set in sixteenth-century Venice, overtly falls in with the exotic history plays which started with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Its background is the clash of Christian and Muslim. For the Elizabethan audience its immediate historical context was the greatest political theatre of the day: the Mediterranean in the time of Philip II. But that’s only the backdrop to a story of racism and jealousy of a white man towards a black man, and of how love is destroyed by jealousy. Othello is the noble older warrior married to the beautiful white woman Desdemona. Iago is the man who destroys him, who hates Othello’s marriage with a white woman and who lays a ‘train’ to trap him whilst affecting to love him.
Venice, as we have already seen, was a place of special interest to Shakespeare: meeting place of east and west, home to his Jew and now his Moor. There was no single model for Othello – Shakespeare took the basic story from Cinthio’s popular Hundred Stories, one of his staple source books. But other reading shaped its imaginative world and the fabulously rich hinterland that he creates for his characters. Among the new books he had just read were Leo the African’s Geographical History of Africa, published in November 1600, and Lewis Lewkenor’s book on the Constitution of Venice (Lewkenor and Shakespeare could have met at Wilton in December 1603 in the company of the Venetian ambassador). Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation of Pliny’s History of the World was another source. A Coventry schoolmaster, Holland was dubbed the ‘translator general of the age’ for his great renderings of Pliny, Livy and Plutarch. Shakespeare loved his work, and for Othello he quarried it for its fabulous exotica: medicinal gum of Arabian trees, mines of sulphur, chrysolite and mandragora all come from the rich prose of Holland, whose description of the Pontic Black Sea ‘which evermore floweth and runneth out into Propontis … and never retireth back … sometimes frozen and all an yce’ Shakespeare deftly shapes into a magnificent cadence reminiscent of Marlowe:
Like to the Pontic sea
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er keeps retiring ebb but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont
‘NEGARS AND BLACKAMOORES’ IN ELIZABETHAN LONDON
But real-life encounters go into such plays too. Othello was not the only drama about Moors in the last years of Elizabeth. The fascination with the exotic ‘other’ was shared by the groundlings and the court – where soon, in a ‘masque of Blackness’, the Queen and her ladies would wear black make-up to appear as ‘Ethiopes’. A play about racism towards black people, then, was touching on a current preoccupation on the streets of London. So what was Shakespeare’s experience of black people? As we have seen, there is a tantalizing possibility that
his mistress had been a dark-skinned woman of Venetian Sephardi Jewish origin; but he must also have met ‘moors’ of North African, and even West African, origin.
He may have met black women as prostitutes, especially in nearby Turnmill Street in Clerkenwell, where the famous Lucy Negro, a former dancer in the Queen’s service, ran an establishment patronized by noblemen and lawyers; Lucy was famous enough to be paid mock homage in the lawyers’ revels at Grays Inn. Shakespeare’s acquaintance, the poet John Weever, also sang the praises of a woman whose face was ‘pure black as Ebonie, jet blacke’.
There were probably several thousand black people in London, forming a significant minority of the population. They were employed in particular as servants, but also as musicians, dancers and entertainers. In the months before Shakespeare wrote the play their presence had become a major issue since their numbers, recently increased by many slaves freed from captured Spanish ships, had caused them to be designated a nuisance. In 1601, the year Shakespeare was thinking about Othello and reading Leo the African, the Cecil papers (still held at Hatfield House) disclose the kind of government policies we have already seen in relation to gypsies and itinerants: ‘the queen is discontented at the great numbers of “negars and blackamoores” which are crept into the realm since the troubles between her Highness and the King of Spain, and are fostered here to the annoyance of her own people’. A plan was mooted to transport them out of the country. In July 1602 Cecil was dealing along these lines with merchants, one of whom wrote: ‘I have persuaded the merchants trading to Barbary, not without some difficulty, to yield to the charges of [pay for] the Moors lately redeemed out of servitude by her Majesty’s ships, so far as it may concern their lodging and victuals, till some shipping may be ready to carry them into Barbary.’