The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

  In early 1602, in his mid-twenties, Wilkins married one Katherine Fowler. It is also in this year that his first tangle with the law is recorded: he was bound over to keep the peace, further to what we might call ‘threatening behaviour’ - a minor matter but prophetic of later delinquencies. His father’s death the following year may have brought him something, for by 1605 he has a house, in a chamber of which the Belotts are living. This was probably in St Giles, Cripplegate, where the parish register records the baptism of Wilkins’s daughter Mary on 13 December 1607, and her burial on 11 September 1609, and the baptism of his son Thomas on 11 February 1610. Wilkins’s briefly prolific literary career belongs to these years at St Giles. He is begetting children, and he is hectically writing.

  The abrupt curtailment of his literary career - for reasons we do not know but which I will later guess at - does not remove him from view, however. Various later episodes in his life are known, though they are always a particular kind of episode, because they are recorded in the rolls and registers of the Middlesex Sessions - essentially the magistrates’ court - before which he appeared frequently, usually in the dock facing charges, and sometimes as a witness or surety for someone else facing charges.5 The earliest such record is from 1610, but one should resist the tempting narrative arc which suggests that Wilkins’s criminal career begins after his literary career stops. For various reasons there are few detailed Sessions records prior to 1608, so there may have been earlier cases against Wilkins of which no record remains. One needs only to glance at his Miseries of Enforced Marriage, written in late 1605, to know that the murky milieu in which his police-record places him was one he already knew intimately.

  Here is a bald summary of George Wilkins in the magistrates’ court, usually in Clerkenwell and sometimes at the Old Bailey:

  4 April 1610 - Wilkins is bound over to keep the peace towards Anne Plesington, elsewhere described as a ‘noted queane’ and ‘comon harborer of lewd persons’ - in other words, a prostitute.

  22 April 1610 - Wilkins puts up surety of £10 for John Fisher, ‘cordwainer’ (leather-worker), who had ‘unlawfullye begotten one Grace Saville with child’.

  23 September 1610 - Wilkins [‘Wilkeson’] gives surety for Thomas Cutts, butcher, bound over for ‘woundinge one John Ball in the head with a Welshe hooke’.

  3 March 1611 - Wilkins is charged with ‘abusing one Randall Berkes and kicking a woman on the belly which was then great with childe’. It is the gruesome act of violence which catches the eye, but it is also worth noting a couple of literary connections in this case. Berkes, whom Wilkins abused, was a bookseller. And one of Wilkins’s sureties for bail was ‘Henry Gosson of St Lawrence Poulteney, gent’, who was the publisher of Wilkins’s Three Miseries of Barbary, and more recently of the Shakespeare-Wilkins Pericles, issued in 1609, and now, in 1611, reprinting for a new edition.

  2 September 1611 - Wilkins is bound over to answer charges of compounding a felony by ‘convayinge away of Mawline Sames who committed the fellonye’. Magdalen Sames or Samways was accused of ‘the felonious stealing of 50s from one William Usurer’. She is referred to by her maiden name though she was married to a glover named Thomas Morris. Earlier in 1611 she was in gaol for living ‘incontinently’ with another man; in later cases she is charged with being a cutpurse and a whore. In a fascinating twist we learn that she had recently borrowed money from the theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe.6 Her last repayment to him was due around the time of her alleged theft from the moneylender called William.

  20 September 1611 - Wilkins is bound over ‘for abusing Mr Barnes, constable of Clerkenwell, in the execution of his office’. Perhaps this is connected with the Samways affair - in the earlier charge he had ‘conveyed’ her away (helped her to escape) and now perhaps he is obstructing a policeman trying to arrest her.

  26 March 1612 - Wilkins is charged with another act of violence: ‘he hath outrageously beaten one Judyth Walton & stamped upon her, so that she was caryed home in chayre’. This woman is elsewhere described as a ‘common bawd’.

  2 July 1612 - Wilkins is accused of an ‘extreame outrage’ - a physical attack - on Martin Fetherbye, ‘headborough’ or constable of Charterhouse Lane. This perhaps occurred at Wilkins’s tavern, since it resulted in the loss of his licence: ‘imposterim non cusodet tabernam’ (in future he may not keep a tavern). He is ‘put downe from victualling’, though this loss of business proves temporary. One notes that his appearance at the Court of Requests on behalf of Stephen Belott (19 June 1612) comes sandwiched between these two court appearances for acts of violence.

  25 August 1614 - Wilkins’s wife Katherine sues a neighbour, Joyce Patrick, for slander. Joyce had called her a ‘bawd’ and said, ‘Thy husband may goe horne by horne with his neighbours’ (meaning he was a cuckold). Among the insults Joyce hurled at her, in ‘angry and vehement manner’, was this: ‘You, Mistress Sweetmeat, you will do more with an inche of candell then some will doe with a whole pound - Wilkinses wiefe I speak to thee.’ A witness on Katherine’s behalf says she had ‘never byn reputed or accounted a bawd’, but another says their house is frequented by ‘lewd women’, and that he has sometimes spent twenty shillings in one night there.

  3 December 1614 - Wilkins is again accused of abusing an officer of the law, this time John Sherley, constable of Clerkenwell.

  21 December 1614 - Wilkins testifies in a Chancery suit in which a moneylender, Thomas Harris, is accused of defrauding a dissolute young heir, John Bonner, now deceased. This is not a charge against Wilkins, though he witnessed their dealings, probably at his tavern, and his collusion with the crooked Harris is not unlikely. His testimony allows us to eavesdrop for a moment. He heard Bonner accuse Harris of selling him ‘a nagge or geldinge for the sum of xxtie markes [£13 6s 8d]’ though it was ‘not worth half the money’, and of having ‘cosened and over reached him’ in various ‘bargens passed betwixt them’. Harris, he says, ‘answered little or nothing to the contrary, but hath often in laughing sort confessed soe much’.

  5 September 1616 - Wilkins is ‘charged to have taken a cloke and a hatt from the person of John Parker feloniously’. The cloak was valued at 30 shillings, and the ‘blacke felt hatt’ at 3s 4d. Parker was said to have been ‘in great fear and peril of his life’ (though this is formulaic).

  6 August 1618 - Wilkins is charged with having ‘feloniously received, harboured and comforted Anne Badham, against the King’s Peace and dignity’. He did so knowing she had committed a felony - she had picked a man’s pocket, and ‘carried off 55 shillings and fourpence halfpenny which was in the pocket’. Both the theft and Wilkins’s harbouring of her are said to have taken place ‘at Cow Cross’, which probably means at Wilkins’s tavern. This case echoes the earlier one involving Magdalen Samways. Perhaps Anne was a prostitute working in the tavern, who stole from one of her clients, and did so with the connivance of the tavern-keeper Wilkins.

  This last case moved slowly. Wilkins appeared on 3 September, but the trial was remanded. A month later, on 2 October, the clerk of the sessions recorded that Wilkins was discharged from the obligations of his bail because he was dead - ‘exoneratus q[uia] mortuus est’. An appropriate epitaph, in that it appears in the crabbed Latin of the law-courts, where Wilkins was such a familiar face. He was in his early forties when he died.

  Two themes emerge with obsessive regularity from Wilkins’s police-record: violence and prostitution, and sometimes they combine in acts of violence against women who are said or inferred to be prostitutes. Even his wife Katherine is accused of being a ‘bawd’, though of course she denies it. Those vicious assaults on women - the ‘kicking’ and ‘stamping on’ - are characteristic of the pimp who asserts his authority with physical aggression. This atmosphere of violence is found in his writings. Here is the profligate young gallant Sir Frank Ilford bullying his new wife (whom he has been tricked into marrying) to give him her jewels -

  ILFORD: Nay, ’sfoot, give ’em me, or I’ll kick else.
<
br />   WIFE: Good, sweet -

  ILFORD: Sweet with a pox, you stink in my nose. Give me your jewels! Nay, bracelets too.

  WIFE: Oh me, most miserable!

  ILFORD: Out of my sight, aye and out of my doors, for now what’s within this house is mine. (Miseries, 2185-91)

  The threat to kick, and the whole aggressive timbre, sounds much like the real-life cases glimpsed through the Sessions records.7 A graphologist might note a further echo of all this in the curiously boot-shaped formation seen in Wilkins’s signature (see Plate 25).

  In many of these records Wilkins is specified as ‘victualler’, as he also is in the Court of Requests. His establishment is usually described as on Cow Cross Street and sometimes on Turnmill Street, and was perhaps at the junction of those two streets - a house on the corner like the Mountjoys’. Turnmill (often Turnbull) Street was axiomatically associated with brothels. It is mentioned in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, when Shallow prates of ‘the wildness of his youth, and the feats he has done about Turnbull Street’ (3.2.288-300), and is described succinctly in Sugden’s Topographical Dictionary as ‘the most disreputable street in London, a haunt of thieves and loose women’.8

  All the evidence points to Wilkins’s establishment being some kind of a brothel. That word is not always helpful: the vaguer legalistic formula, a ‘bawdy house’, might be better. The dedicated brothel with a woman’s face in every window certainly existed, but as always prostitution was in the main less formalized, more diffuse and opportunistic.9 At Wilkins’s tavern, let us say, there were women available, as there was food, wine, dice and tobacco, and there were ‘chambers’ upstairs or near by which could be hired for the business of pleasure. It is a situation familiar to commentators such as the playwright-turned-preacher Stephen Gosson:

  Every vaulter [prostitute] in one blind taverne or other is tenant at will, to which she tolleth resorte, and plays the stale to utter their victualls, and to help them empty their musty cakes. There she is so entreated with wordes and received with curtesie that every back-roome in the house is at her commaundement.10

  This connection between sex and snacks is also described by Robert Greene, who knew whereof he spoke. In his Disputation between a He-connycatcher and a She-connycatcher (1592), a tart called Nan explains how they encourage customers to eat the overpriced sweetmeats in the ‘trugging-house’ or brothel -

  First we feign ourselves hungry, for the benefit of the house, although our bellies were never so full; and no doubt the good pandar or bawd she comes forth like a sober matron, and sets store of cates [sweetmeats] on the table, and then I fall aboard on them, and though I can eat little, yet I make havoc of all. And let him be sure every dish is well-sauced, for he shall pay for a pippin-pie that cost in the market fourpence, at one of the trugging-houses eighteen pence.11

  That name given disparagingly to Katherine Wilkins, ‘Mistress Sweetmeat’, may contain a pun on ‘cate’ and Kate; it may also refer to her serving of sweetmeats in the Wilkins brothel.

  Law-reports confirm the set-up. Margaret Barnes, a Westminster prostitute known for her statuesque physique as ‘Long Meg’, also ran a tavern or ‘victualling house’ in Rotherhithe where prostitutes plied their trade. There, on a day in 1562, were discovered a scrivener from Westminster and a broker from Holborn, ‘who makinge merye at dinner had eche of them a chamber and a woman’. The trouble arose when a young man called Zachary Marshall fell in love with one of Meg’s girls, Ellen Remnaunt, and proposed to her. Marshall was, ironically, the son of the matron of Bridewell, the correctional institute for prostitutes and vagrants, a place known for savage punishment and endemic sexual corruption.12 A writer of Jacobean ‘city comedies’ could not have invented a better plot.

  This gives us pretty clearly the business-profile of ‘George Wilkins, victualler’. One might fare at Wilkins’s much as Fustigo does in Dekker’s Honest Whore (1605) - ‘Troth, for sixpence a meal, wench, as well as heart can wish, with calves chaldrom and chitterlings, besides I have a punk after supper, as good as a roasted apple’ (3.1.12-13). A pungent menu - ‘chaldrom’ or chawdron is a spiced dish of calves’ entrails, ‘chitterlings’ are fried pigs’ intestines, and the ‘punk’ is, of course, a prostitute.

  22

  The Miseries

  This was George Wilkins, the man in whose house Stephen and Mary Belott came to live, in the summer of 1605, bringing with them that meagre cartload of ‘houshould stuffe’ for which - he later asserted - he would not have given a fiver. We do not know if he already ran the tavern-cum-brothel on Turnmill Street, which is first referred to in 1610: it is anyway unlikely that the Belotts would be lodged there. The more likely location, for reasons already given, is St Giles parish (which was only ten minutes’ walk from Clerkenwell - all this story is tightly confined). But, wherever it was, we have a strong suspicion it was a seedy or shady sort of house where women of negotiable virtue could be found and hired.

  The arrival of the Belotts in Wilkins’s house marks the first known connection between Wilkins and Shakespeare. They may have known one another before, but this is the first visible link. The connection is a simple, human one. Two young people well known to Shakespeare - his landlord’s apprentice, his landlady’s daughter - have gone to live with Wilkins. But it has complications. They are young people in whose welfare Shakespeare has been involved. The circumstances are unhappy. One thinks particularly of Mary, exiled from her family home, caught in this terrific cross-fire of antagonism between her father and husband, and now insalubriously lodged in the house of a pimp.

  And here is a synchronicity. It is more or less exactly at this time, in the summer of 1605, that there begins an identifiable literary connection between Wilkins and Shakespeare. At this point, as far as the evidence remains, Wilkins was an unknown and unpublished author. But some time in or shortly after June 1605 he began work on a play for Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men.

  The play was Wilkins’s best and most characteristic work, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (see Plate 26). We can be fairly sure about the dating because the play was based on real events - a shocking murder-case in Yorkshire, in which two young children were killed by their father, Walter Calverley, a well-born man who had spiralled into debt and dissipation and, it seems, insanity. Calverley also attempted to murder his wife, Philippa, but she survived. The killings happened on 23 April 1605, and public interest in the case was further whetted by a news-pamphlet, Two Unnatural Murthers, which gave a detailed account of the affair.13 This pamphlet, registered at Stationers’ Hall on 12 June and published shortly afterwards, was certainly used by Wilkins when writing the Miseries.

  One of the things that emerged from the Unnatural Murthers pamphlet was that as a young man Calverley had been betrothed, but had been unwillingly forced by his guardian to marry another woman. Thus the glimmerings of a love-story lie behind the grim facts of his decline and fall. In the final version of Wilkins’s play - there was more than one - it is this back-story which holds centre-stage. It becomes a study (if that is not too spruce a term for a Wilkins play) of a man sinking into drunkenness and vice to escape the ‘miseries’ of an unhappy and enforced marriage.14

  Wilkins wrote fast (and, as some bungled lines in the printed text suggest, none too legibly). The play was probably onstage at the Globe in early 1606. In May of that year an Act to Restrain Abuses of Players came into force, forbidding use of the names of God, Christ, etc, onstage. Oaths and casual blasphemies are scattered liberally through the Miseries, suggesting that it had been performed before this clean-up.15 The play was apparently still packing them in when it was published the following year - the title-page of the 1607 quarto reads, ‘The Miseries of Inforst Mariage. As it is now playd by his Maiesties Servants’. This long run shows it was a success, and three further editions (1611, 1629, 1637) show that it continued to be popular.

  The Miseries is one of a series of hotly topical plays of the time which gave the stage an edge of journalistic repor
tage. And it seems the King’s Men had a particular interest in the Calverley case - or thought their public would have a particular interest in it - for there is another dramatic treatment of it in their repertoire, the brief and bleak Yorkshire Tragedy. This was published in 1608. It belongs in lists of the ‘Shakespeare apocrypha’, being ascribed to him on the title-page of two early editions, and in the entries relating to them in the Stationers’ Register. The publisher, Thomas Pavier, was a noted pirate, and the play was not included in the Folio, so this attribution is not generally credited. Shakespeare may have added some touches, but the main authorship was not his. Various authors have been proposed - Thomas Heywood, John Day, Wilkins himself - but the most plausible candidate is Thomas Middleton, who was collaborating with Shakespeare on Timon in c. 1605.16

  The Miseries does not have the intensity of the Yorkshire Tragedy but its lack of artistry makes it valuable in another sense - we hear Wilkins and his world throughout it. The central character is not so much the Calverley figure, William Scarborrow (Scarborough), as the parasitic ‘gallant’ Sir Francis Ilford, one who, in his own words, ‘live[s] by the fall of young heirs as swine by the dropping of acorns’ (1054-5). There is every sign that the play was printed from Wilkins’s ‘foul papers’ - his working draft of the play - and so I give a representative scene in original spelling - Wilkins’s spelling. It is a tavern scene, nominally in the Mitre in Bread Street, but it has the rough timbre of Wilkins’s own tavern as we discern it in those court cases listed above. This is how Sir Frank Ilford orders his drinks -