The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

  The case in which he was testifying is listed in the court registers as Belott v Mountjoy. It was a family dispute: trivial, pecuniary, faintly sordid - standard fare at the Court of Requests, whose function was broadly equivalent to the Small Claims Courts of today. The defendant, Christopher Mountjoy, is described as a ‘tiremaker’ - a maker of the decorative headwear for ladies known generically as ‘head-tires’ or ‘attires’. The plaintiff, Stephen Belott, had once been Mountjoy’s apprentice and was now his son-in-law. Both men were French by birth but had lived for many years in London. The Mountjoys’ house was on Silver Street, in Cripplegate, close to the north-west corner of the city walls. This is the setting of the story which unfolds in the court proceedings - a story which involves William Shakespeare.

  The dispute concerned a dowry: a sum of £60 which, Belott alleged, had been promised when he married Mountjoy’s daughter in 1604, and which had never been paid. (This is a good but not a huge dowry: according to the rough rule-of-thumb outlined in the Preface, it would be equivalent to about £12,000 today.) Belott also claimed that Mountjoy had promised to leave the couple a legacy of £200 when he died. Mountjoy denied both claims, and now, eight years after the event, the case was before the court.

  Shakespeare was one of three witnesses called on the first day of hearings (see Plate 3). What does he have to say? Not a lot would be the short answer, though this book attempts a longer one. The ‘interrogatories’ are put to him, five in number; he answers them briefly - one cannot say curtly, because his answers are shaped to the formulae of court depositions and cannot be reconstructed as to their particular tone, but he does not elaborate much, as some of the other witnesses do, and on some points he remains a little vaguer, a little less helpful, than one feels he might have been. His statement, like the signature beneath it, is adequate and no more. He says he has known both men, the plaintiff and the defendant, ‘for the space of tenne yeres or thereaboutes’ - in other words, since about 1602. He remembers young Belott as a ‘very good and industrious servant’, one who ‘did well and honestly behave himselfe’. Yes, he was ‘a very honest fellowe’, and was accounted so by his employer. As to the particular matter in dispute, Shakespeare is sure Belott had been promised a dowry - a marriage ‘porcion’ - but he cannot remember the sum mentioned. Nor does he remember ‘what kinde of houshould stuffe’ had been given to the couple when they married.a

  And he says - and here, amid the general blandness of his statement, there is a hint of something more - he says that he had himself been asked by the girl’s mother, Marie Mountjoy, to ‘perswade’ the apparently reluctant apprentice to go through with the marriage. In the unwieldy language of the law-courts, ‘This deponent sayethe that the said deffendantes wyeffe did sollicitt and entreat this deponent to move and perswade the said complainant to effect the said marriadge, and accordingly this deponent did move and perswade the complainant thereunto.’ This presents him as a kind of counsellor or go-between, a romantic or perhaps merely practical advocate. But another witness in the case implies that Shakespeare’s role went further than this. He says the couple was ‘made sure by Mr Shakespeare’, and speaks of them ‘giving each other’s hand to the hand’. These phrases have a precise significance. They suggest that Shakespeare formally betrothed the young couple, performing the simple lay ceremony known as a ‘troth-plighting’ or ‘handfasting’. An intriguing little scene flickers up before us.

  Shakespeare does not actually say why he was involved in these family affairs chez Mountjoy, but the answer is not far to seek. It is provided by the Mountjoys’ former maidservant, Joan Johnson, when she refers in her deposition to ‘one Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house’. In Elizabethan and Jacobean usage to ‘lie’ in a house meant to be staying there, and in this context undoubtedly means he was the Mountjoys’ lodger. Shakespeare quibbles on this sense of the word in Othello -

  DESDEMONA: Do you know, Sirrah, where the lieutenant Cassio lies?

  clown: I dare not say he lies anywhere . . .

  DESDEMONA: Go to, where lodges he? . . .

  clown: I know not where he lodges, and for me to devise a lodging, and say he lies here or he lies there, were to lie in mine own throat. (3.4.1-11)

  A similar pun is in Sir Henry Wotton’s famous definition of an ambassador, ‘An honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’.3 This is one of the primary nuggets of information which the Belott-Mountjoy case offers - it gives us an address for Shakespeare in London. How long he lodged or lay in Silver Street is something to look into: he was certainly there in 1604, when the marriage in question took place.

  ‘One Mr Shakespeare . . .’ I think it was the marvellous banality of this phrase that first sparked my interest in the case. For a moment we see him not from the viewpoint of literary greatness, but as he was seen by the maid of the house, a woman of no literary pretensions, indeed unable to sign her name except with a rather quavery little mark. ‘Mr’ is perhaps not quite as banal as it looks, because it was at that time a contraction of ‘Master’ rather than of ‘Mister’ - it is the term of address for a gentleman, a connotation of status. But the effect is the same. We have a fleeting sense of Shakespeare’s ‘other’ life, the daily, ordinary (or ordinary-seeming) life which we know he must have led, but about which we know so little. He is merely the lodger, the gent in the upstairs chamber: a certain Mr Shakespeare.

  Shakespeare’s deposition in the Belott-Mountjoy case has been known for nearly a hundred years, but has been oddly neglected as a biographical source. It was found in 1909, along with others in the case, at the Public Record Office in London. Its discoverer was a forty-four-year-old American, Dr Charles William Wallace, Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. If you have an image of the archival scholar Wallace is not it. There is a photograph of him, taken around the time of the discovery (see Plate 5). He is black-bearded, glossy-haired, elegantly dressed; his wife Hulda stands beside him, her hair primly braided. They might be minor characters from an Edith Wharton novel, but instead they are standing in the fusty surrounds of the old Record Office on Chancery Lane, with a fat bundle of old parchments on the table before them.

  The Wallaces - they were very much a team - had been sleuthing in the archives for some years, and had already made some Shakespeare-related finds. They had turned up some legal documents relating to the Blackfriars Gatehouse, purchased by Shakespeare in 1613, and some lawsuits involving two of his closest theatrical colleagues, Richard Burbage and John Heminges.4 Wallace had also experienced the sniffiness of the British academic establishment, which regarded him as a brash American intruder. He has ‘boomed’ his discoveries ‘in true Transatlantic manner’, wrote one critic. His prose-style, winced a reviewer in the Athenaeum , ‘does not always economize the reader’s attention’. Wallace particularly clashed with C. C. Stopes, doyenne of Edwardian Shakespeare studies (and mother of the birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes), whom he suspected of cajoling Record Office employees to show her documents he had ordered up.5

  Wallace’s earlier discoveries touched on Shakespeare, but none of them had the sheer archival glamour of the deposition. Acting on certain clues, he tracked it down among the then uncalendared Court of Requests proceedings - ‘great bundles of miscellaneous old skins and papers’, some still pristine, some ‘mouldered’ and ‘grimed’, some still tied up with hempen rope ‘harsh to handle’.6 His account breathes the thrill of the chase but the reality was dogged labour. Even today the Court of Requests collection is something of a jungle, especially for the Jacobean and Caroline periods when the court was at its busiest. In some private notes, Wallace describes his paradoxical feelings when he finally came upon the sheet of paper he was hunting. He felt ‘glad, but disappointed in measure’. ‘We were aware of the bigness of what we had’ - not only Shakespeare’s signature, but ‘a personal expression from him’ - but it ‘was so much less than we had wished!’ They felt a strange anti-climactic calm: ‘We exchanged a few words
over the document, but no-one in the room might have guessed that we had before us anything more important or juicy than a court-docket.’ Perhaps this sang-froid was in part the paranoia of the document-hunter, for whom primacy of discovery is everything. Nothing was given away, no cries of ‘Eureka!’ - the spies of Mrs Stopes were everywhere. And anyway there was work to do. ‘We saw that we had only a part of the documents in the case: we must find the rest.’7

  Wallace announced his discovery the following year, in an article in Harper’s Monthly (March 1910). He had by then recovered a total of twenty-six documents relating to the Belott- Mountjoy suit, some merely administrative, and some very ‘juicy’ indeed. Twelve contain some kind of reference to Shakespeare. He published a complete transcript in the October 1910 issue of Nebraska University Studies. This choice of periodical does not now make for easy availability, but seems commendable as one in the eye for the Athenaeum.

  Shakespeare’s deposition was exhibited for a while in the Record Office Museum, mounted under glass, but is now back where it ought to be, safely and unceremoniously stored in a stout cardboard box at the National Archives’ new headquarters in Kew. There, duly vetted, one may consult it. Ensconced behind two locked doors in the Safe Room, I carefully extract from the box this sheet of greyish, coarse-grained paper which Shakespeare once handled, rather less carefully, on a Monday morning nearly four centuries ago. It is hard to say quite what the page has which the photographic reproductions of it do not. The signature is clearer, of course. That dot inside the arcade of the W is very sharp: it stares out like a beady eye. The ill-formed k is perceivable as a sudden blotching of ink - a malfunction of the unfamiliar courtroom pen, perhaps. Beyond this one has to resort to vaguer sensations. This bit of paper has presence, or anyway pedigree - an unbroken lineage back to Shakespeare’s writing hand.

  After some moments of cargo-cultish reverence, and some futile speculation about fingerprints and DNA traces, I turn to the other papers in the box, also found by Wallace, most of which have never been reproduced. There are four sets of documents. The first set consists of four parchments - or ‘skins’, as Wallace liked to call them - fastened at the upper-left corner with a grubby white cord. These are the initial pleadings of the case. There is the Bill of Complaint lodged by Stephen Belott, through his solicitor Ralph Wormlaighton, dated on the verso 28 January 1612, and then the ‘Answeare of Christopher Mountioy’, of 3 February, signed by his solicitor George Hartopp. Some phrasings suggest these texts had been written, in the first instance, a year or more previously.8 They are followed by a further exchange: Belott’s ‘Replication’, dated 5 May, and Mountjoy’s ‘Rejoinder’, undated. These largely echo the previous documents and perhaps served more to fatten the attorneys’ fees than to throw further light on the dispute.

  The remaining three sets of documents correspond to three separate sessions at the Court of Requests, at which witnesses testified or ‘deposed’ in answer to a prearranged list of questions. The court sat in the legal precinct of Westminster, in a first-floor chamber reached by stairs from Westminster Hall - thus John Stow, the great topographer of Shakespeare’s London: ‘By the King’s Bench is a going-up to a great chamber called the White Hall, where is now kept the Court of Wards and Liveries, and adjoyning thereunto is the Court of Requests.’9 At the first two sessions the witnesses (including Shakespeare) were called on behalf of Belott; at the third they were ex parte Mountjoy. All the depositions were recorded by the same clerk, on the same kind of paper, written on one side only. A courtroom scene in a seventeenth-century woodcut (see Plate 2) gives us something of the set-up - the clerk writing, the judge listening, the papers on the table.

  The first set, of 11 May, contains the statements of Joan Johnson, ‘wife of Thomas Johnson, of the parish of Ealing in the county of Middlesex, basketmaker’; Daniel Nicholas ‘of the parish of St Olphadge [Alphage] within Cripplegate, London, gent’; and William Shakespeare ‘of Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwickshire, gent’. They were examined in that order - the clerk’s hand is visibly tired by the time Shakespeare takes the stand. The papers, four folios in all, are in good condition apart from some mouldering down the lower-right edge, with some minor loss of text.

  At the second session, on 19 June 1612, there were six deponents. First up was Daniel Nicholas, again: he is the most active and involved of the witnesses. Then follow the testimonies of William Eaton or Eyton, who was Belott’s apprentice; George Wilkins, ‘victualler’, of St Sepulchre’s parish; Humphrey Fludd of St Giles, Cripplegate, who was Belott’s stepfather, and who is described as ‘one of His Majesty’s trumpeters’; Christopher Weaver, ‘mercer’; and Noel Mountjoy, ‘tiremaker’, who was the defendant’s younger brother. These last two are both of St Olave’s, Silver Street - the parish where the Mountjoys lived, where Shakespeare lodged, and where Stephen Belott married Miss Mountjoy in the parish church.

  At the third session, on 23 June, witnesses called by the defence were examined. There were just three: Christopher Weaver and Noel Mountjoy, who had both testified previously; and Thomas Flower, ‘merchant tailor’ of the parish of St Albans, Wood Street.

  Of the nine witnesses in the case, five have a specified relationship to one or other of the disputants (a brother, a stepfather, an apprentice, a lodger and a maid) and four can be summed up under the general heading of friends and neighbours. Three have artisan occupations (basketmaker, tiremaker, tiremaker’s apprentice), three are tradesmen (victualler, mercer, merchant tailor), two are in the entertainment business (playwright, trumpeter), and two are gentlemen (who do not need to have an occupation, though at least one of them has). Seven of the nine live in London, either in or immediately adjacent to the Cripplegate area; and the two that do not - Joan Johnson of Ealing and Shakespeare of Stratford - had formerly lived in the area. This is a local story: its physical boundaries can be paced in half an hour.

  Eight of the nine witnesses are men, and there are two women central to the story whose testimony one sorely misses - Christopher’s wife, Marie Mountjoy, who had died before the case came to court; and their daughter, Mary Belott, who was not called to testify, presumably because she was the plaintiff’s wife. That the mother and daughter have the same forename is a small inconvenience. The name is often written ‘Marye’. To avoid the nuisance of ‘senior’ and ‘junior’, I use Marie for the mother and Mary for the daughter (which is vaguely logical, as Marie was almost certainly born in France and Mary in England). Many immigrant families Anglicized their names, as this one seems to have done - hence Christopher Mountjoy rather than Christophe Montjoi or Montjoie. This is not to deny their foreignness, an intrinsic aspect of the story, nor their sense of themselves as French. They lived the immigrant’s double-life. After half a century in London Stephen Belott would sign his will, ‘Par moy Etiene Belot’.10

  In these depositions we make our first acquaintance with some of the protagonists of this book - people personally known to Shakespeare: his landlord and landlady, the apprentice Belott and others. We get an impression of them, though conscious that a lawsuit can give a distorted, or anyway narrow, view of those involved.

  Our first impression of Christopher Mountjoy is that he is a mean and rather crabby sort of man. The meanness is apparent in the whole case, which hinges on his refusal to pay his daughter’s dowry (his refusal is not in doubt: the matter before the court was whether he was breaching a promise to pay). That Mary was his only child compounds this impression, as does the opinion of witnesses that he was a man of ‘good estate’, in other words well off enough to pay up. We are also told that in the time of Belott’s apprenticeship Mountjoy was ‘strict unto’ him - ‘strict’ meaning tight or stingy - and that Stephen’s mother and stepfather had to find him ‘sutes of apparel’, and ‘were fain many times . . . to pay the barber for cutting the hair of his head’ (deposition of Humphrey Fludd). Later, as litigation approaches, we hear Mountjoy’s blustering tone. He said that ‘if he were condemned in this sui
t undeserved he would lye in prison before he would give the plaintiff anything’ (Noel Mountjoy). And in similar vein - or perhaps the same occasion differently reported - that ‘he would rather rott in prison than geve them any thinge more than he had geven them before’ (Christopher Weaver).

  His antagonist Stephen Belott is no less intransigent but the tone is cooler. Some of the witnesses had tried to patch up the ‘unkindnes’ between them before the matter came to court. They went to talk to Belott - who had left Mountjoy’s house, with Mary, for the last time in about 1607 - but could get no concession from him. ‘Where I have a penniworth of anything, I would I had more of his,’ he told Thomas Flower, ‘and if I owe him anything let him come by it as he can.’ This is, unusually, given as direct speech, as if verbatim.

  In contrast, one gets a gentler, more amenable note from the late Mrs Mountjoy. Her encouragement of the hesitant young couple is recalled by the maidservant Joan Johnson - ‘There was a shewe of goodwill’ between Stephen and Mary, ‘which the defendant’s wife did give countenance unto and thinke well of.’ And then later, when everyone was falling out over the dowry, she tries to mollify the situation: ‘Marye, the late wife of Christopher Mountjoy the defendant, did in her lifetime urge him to give something more unto Belott and his wife than he had done’ (Christopher Weaver). To which Mountjoy retorted: ‘He would never promise them anything, because he knew not what he should need himself.’