The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

  55 . On the identity of the engraver see Edmond 1991, Schuckman 1991. Martin Droeshout senior, born in Brussels in the late 1560s, came to England in about 1584 (Kirk 1910, 3.179, 183; Edmond 1991, 341). He was created denizen in 1608, appearing on the same patent roll as Mountjoy (Shaw 1911, 11), and was a freeman of the Painter-Stainers’ company. He is last heard of, living at St Olave’s, Hart Street, in 1641. Martin Droeshout junior, son of Michael and nephew of Martin senior, was born in London in 1601. It has been thought that he was the engraver, primarily because Martin senior is described in contemporary documents as a ‘painter’ or ‘limner’ (miniature portraitist) but never as an engraver. This line of reasoning is challenged by Edmond: the word ‘painter’, she shows, was used loosely to convey a general idea of ‘picture-maker’. The Dutch artist Remegius Hogenberg, who was certainly an engraver, appears eight times in the register of St Giles, Cripplegate: only once is he described as a ‘graver’; on all the other occasions he is called a ‘picture-maker’ or ‘painter’. The nomenclature, in short, does not preclude the painter Martin senior from also being the ‘graver’ of Shakespeare’s portrait.

  56 . Strong 1969, 283; Cooper 2006, 48. Some thought the original was the ‘Flower’ portrait (Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford; formerly owned by Edgar Flower), an atmospheric oil-portrait, demonstrably similar to the Droeshout, and inscribed with the date 1609. However, recent technical analysis (2005; Cooper 2006, 72-5) has shown that, as many suspected, it is a nineteenth-century fabrication.

  57 . Spielmann 1924, 34-5. The poor quality of this prestigious commission is mysterious: Richard Vaughan’s portrait of Ben Jonson (c. 1622-7) shows how much more vivid and expressive an engraving could be (Riggs 1989, 281). One plausible conjecture is that the editors of F1 were obliged to commission Droeshout, because it was he who had painted the original portrait on which the engraving was based (Honigmann 1985, 146-8). Honigmann is one of the engraving’s apologists: its ‘withdrawn and fastidious features’ convey ‘the thoughtfulness of a reserved and private man, not the tavern-haunting, overflowing poet of popular mythology’.

  58 . On the Stratford monument see SRI 158-63. The Janssen family, Dutch immigrant sculptors and ‘tomb-makers’, have various connections with Shakespeare: their workshop was in Southwark, close to the Globe; their clientele included the Earls of Southampton and Rutland, both patrons of Shakespeare, and the Combe family of Stratford, his neighbours.

  59 . Cooper 2006, 48. The style of the doublet is after c. 1610, tending to confirm its absence from the original portrait.

  60 . Stubbes 1879, 1.52. ‘The underpropper or supportasse was a wire frame ... spread out behind from the doublet collar, to which it was fixed, supporting the ruff, which was pinned to it’ (Cunnington 1970, 113). OED notes that ‘supportasse’, found only in Stubbes, may derive from a printer’s error. It was also known as a ‘pickadil’ (originally a cutwork border for a collar, and probably the origin of the London street name, Piccadilly). Some underproppers were made of stiffened card, pasteboard, etc; an example in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Accession no. 192-1900) is discussed by Susan North in Cooper 2006, 120.

  61 . Arnold 1988, 226.

  62 . The supporter is associated with wigs and tires by William Warner: ‘Buskes, perriwigs, maskes, plumes of feathers fram’d, supporters’ (Albion’s England, 1592, 9.47).

  PART FIVE: AMONG STRANGERS

  18. Blackfriars and Navarre

  1 . Kirwood 1931; David Kathman, ‘Richard Field’, ODNB 2004. It has been suggested that Field was a source of books used by Shakespeare, such as Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1589) and North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives (1595), in all of which he had a hand as printer or publisher.

  2 . In his will (8 June 1591, PRO Prob 11/77; PCC Sainberbe) Dutwite calls himself a merchant. He is not listed among the ‘strangers’ of St Martin le Grand in 1582 (see Part Three, note 15), unless he is James ‘Detewe’, taxed on £3 and described as a ‘bugler’ (probably a maker of bugles, ‘tube-shaped glass beads’ for decorating garments, rather than a musician). A James Detwitt, pursemaker, became a denizen in 1550 (Kirk 1910, 2.350): if he was Jacqueline’s father it is likely she was born in England.

  3 . Greg and Boswell 1930, 11. See W. R. Lefanu, ‘Thomas Vautrollier, Printer and Bookseller’, HSL Proceedings 20 (1964), 12-25; Andrew Pettegree, ‘Thomas Vautrollier’, ODNB 2004. Two of their four sons (Manassas and James) were alive in 1624, when they are mentioned in Field’s will.

  4 . Another possible Frenchwoman known to Shakespeare was ‘Dorothy Soer, wife of John Soer’, named in a legal document of 1596 in which William Wayte swore out ‘sureties of the peace’ against her and three others, one of them Shakespeare (Hotson 1931). French families named Soeur, Soir, Soyer, Sohier, etc, are found in immigrant lists of the period (Honigmann 1985, 150-51) but Dorothy has not yet been identified.

  5 . Burghley was probably behind Field’s first publication, The Copie of a Letter Sent out of England to Don Bernardin Mendoza (1588): this piece of anti-Spanish propaganda was ostensibly the work of a Catholic priest, Richard Leigh, but manuscripts survive in Burghley’s hand (Pettegree, ‘Thomas Vautrollier’, ODNB 2004). The following year Field wrote a fulsome dedication to Burghley, calling himself ‘a printer alwaies ready and desirous to be at your Honourable commaundement’ (George Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 1589, sig. A3v).

  6 . Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. R. David (Arden edn, 1956), xxix-xxx; A. Lefranc, Sous le masque de William Shakespeare (1918).

  7 . The Huguenot language-teacher G. de la Mothe, whose French Alphabet was published by Field in 1592, may have been a conduit of information. For what little is known of him see Lambley 1920, 161-2; Frances Yates, A Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost (1936), 61-4. He may possibly be the De la Mothe found by Lefranc in a contemporary list of Navarre court officials.

  8 . SDL 130. The printing of Venus probably began soon after Field’s licensing of the copy (SR 18 April 1593).

  9 . The entry in Stonley’s account book (Folger Shakespeare Library; SDL no. 93) is the first recorded purchase of a book by Shakespeare. On John Eliot (who is not included in ODNB) see John Lindsay, ed., The Parlement of Prattlers (1928); Lever 1953, 79-80; Nicholl 1984, 177-9. On Shakespeare’s use of his language manual Ortho-epia Gallica (1593) see note 15 below.

  10 . On ‘The Booke of Sir Thomas More’ (BL Harley MS 7368) see W. W. Greg’s introduction (1911) and Harold Jenkins’s supplement (1961) to the Malone Society edn; T. H. Howard-Hill, Shakespeare and ‘Sir Thomas More’ (Cambridge, 1989); and SRI 109-16, with reproductions of the three pages attributed to Shakespeare (fols 8r-9r). Much of fol. 8 was damaged in a botched nineteenth-century restoration. The hands of Munday, Chettle and Dekker have also been identified in the MS. Various dates are proposed for the playscript, of which c. 1593 is the earliest. In the Shakespeare passage, ‘spurn you like dogs’ is close to Merchant of Venice (c. 1596), 1.3.113; and ‘Friends, masters, countryman’ to Julius Caesar (c. 1599), 3.2.78. But self-echoings are not necessarily close in time.

  19. Shakespeare’s aliens

  11 . Haughton 1598, A4v. A useful survey of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical representations of foreigners is in Hoenselaars 1992, 50-75, 108-43 (on Haughton’s play: 54-8).

  12 . Nashe 1958, 1.365. Some forty foreign surgeons and physicians appear in Tudor denization lists, most of them French (Page 1893, l). Sisson relates Caius to Dr Peter Chamberlain, a French gynaecologist in London, but it is not certain he was in practice by 1597 (Essays & Studies 13 (1960), 10-11). French doctors were associated with the ‘chymicall physick’ of Paracelsus (Nashe’s quack is a ‘mettle-bruing Paracelsian’); there is no indication that Caius is a vehicle for satire on this, though I note elsewhere (Nicholl 1980, 76-80) that Falstaff’s ordeal in the laundry basket (3.5.90-125) is comically expressed in terms of Paracelsian chemistry (he is ‘stopt in like a strong distillation’, etc).

  13 . Like Cai
us, Haughton’s Delion is a ‘clipper of the King’s English, and ... eternall enemie to all good language’ (Haughton 1598, B2v). Dr Johnson comments, à propos Caius, on the limited comic appeal of ‘language distorted and depraved by provincial or foreign pronunciations’ (Johnson’s Shakespeare, 1773 edn; Wimsatt 1969, 110-11). On broken English on the Elizabethan stage: Clough 1933.

  14 . Henry V, ed. J. Dover Wilson (1947), 152. The French in Merry Wives is also mangled in transmission, e.g. ‘Il fait fort ehando’ (1.4.46-7), where a compositor has mistranscribed chaude, ‘hot’.

  15 . Shakespeare’s use of Ortho-epia is elegantly demonstrated in Lever 1953. In Henry V, Pistol’s French boy says: ‘ce soldat icy est dispos’e tout asture de couppes vostre gorge’ (4.4.35-6). The unusual contraction ‘asture’ (for à cette heure, ‘immediately’) is found in similar context in Eliot’s dialogue, ‘The Thief’ (Eliot 1593, 104-7): ‘Je vous couperay la gorge . . . Il est bien garrott’ asteure.’ Most interesting is the seepage of Ortho-epia into the Dauphin’s praise of his horse (3.7.11-29). Perusing Eliot’s dialogue, ‘The Horseman’ (pp. 87-9), Shakespeare’s eye strayed to the top of page 87, which contains the last few lines of the previous dialogue, ‘The Apothecary’. From this come the nutmeg, ginger, hares and flying horses which appear in the Dauphin’s speech. See also Jean Fuzier, ‘ “I quand sur le possession de Fraunce”. A French Crux in Henry V Solved’, SQ 32 (1981), 97-100; Timothy Billings, ‘Two New Sources for Shakespeare’s Bawdy French in Henry V’, NQ 52 (2005), 202-4.

  16 . Shapiro 1995; Dominic Green, The Double Life of Dr Lopez (2003); Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England (1941), 139-44.

  17 . William Rowley, A Search for Money (1609).

  18 . Shakespeare’s more compassionate treatment of the outsider in the Merchant anticipates a comparable trend discerned by Hoenselaars in early Jacobean comedy, which moves away from hostile stereotyping of foreigners to a ‘strategy of surprise’ in which ‘the foreigner who used to be the butt of comedy is converted into its agent to gull the English and expose their folly’ (Hoenselaars 1992, 114; cf. Leinwand 1986, 46-8). Examples are in Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho! (1604), Edward Sharpham’s The Fleire (1607) and Jonson’s Alchemist (1610). But the (Jewish) playwright Arnold Wesker thinks the effect of the Merchant (whatever its intention) was ‘irredeemably anti-Semitic’. The ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ speech was ‘so powerful a piece of special pleading that it dignified the anti-Semitism’; the audience came away with its prejudices ‘confirmed but held with an easy conscience’ (The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel, 1997, xv-xvi).

  19 . On racial issues in Othello, see Cowhig 1985, Bartels 1990, and (with reflection on the play’s fortunes in Apartheid-era South Africa) Martin Orkin, ‘Othello and the “Plain Face” of Racism’, SQ 38 (1987), 166-88. For a panoramic background see Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (1965) and The Elizabethan Image of Africa (Charlottesville, 1971). ‘Little black husband’: Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex (1928), 279.

  20 . Forbes 1971, 3-4; Picard 2003, 123-4; Edward Scobie, Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain (1972), 5-11.

  21 . Bartels 1990, 451: Iago attempts ‘to demonize and disempower Othello’ by luring him into a ‘self-incriminating display of “alien” behaviour’.

  20. Dark ladies

  22 . This cryptic lady has been variously identified. Mal Fitton was proposed by Frank Harris (The Man Shakespeare, 1909); Jacqueline Field by C. C. Stopes (Shakespeare’s Environment, 1918); Jane Davenant by Arthur Ache-son (Shakespeare’s Sonnet Story, 1922); Lucy Morgan, a.k.a. ‘Black Luce’ or ‘Lucy Negro’ by G. B. Harrison (Shakespeare under Elizabeth, 1933), Leslie Hotson (Mr W. H., 1964) and Anthony Burgess (Nothing like the Sun, 1964); and Emilia Bassano by A. L. Rowse (Rowse 1973). I do not intend to add Marie Mountjoy to this list (the ‘Dark Landlady’?), though her credentials are no worse than any of these.

  23 . Astrophil and Stella (1591), 8.9; Lucrece (1594), 420; Venus and Adonis (1593), 542. Other parallels are noted in Duncan-Jones 1997, 374. Eliot’s Ortho-epia has a similar assemblage of sonneteering clich’s: ‘her eyes twinkling stars . . . her mouth coral . . . her throat of snow’ etc (Eliot 1593, 159).

  24 . Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.3.56-69 (Jaggard no. 3) and 4.2.100-113 (Jaggard no. 5). The play was published in 1598 (according to the title-page not the first edition), but the Jaggard texts have variants that may come from an independent MS. There are also variants in his versions of Sonnets 138 and 144. According to F. T. Prince (The Poems, Arden edn, 1960, 153) they are ‘of the kind that might be expected in an inaccurate report’, but some critics argue that the 1609 texts represent Shakespeare’s own revisions of the earlier versions. Jackson 1999, using statistical analysis of rhyme schemes, places the ‘Dark Lady’ sequence as ‘mainly written in the 1590s’.

  25 . Another literary dark lady is Diamante, the Venetian courtesan in Nashe’s novella The Unfortunate Traveller (1594): a ‘pretty, round-faced wench . . . with black eye-brows’ (Nashe 1958, 2.261). The book was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, with whom both the Sonnets and Love’s Labours are traditionally (though conjecturally) linked.

  26 . The nearest Shakespeare gets to a contemporary English setting is in the Merry Wives. Though nominally medieval, as an offshoot of 1 Henry IV, the play has specific references to Elizabethan Windsor, uses actual locations (Datchet Mead, the ‘Pittie Ward’, etc), and lodges Falstaff in the Garter Inn (see Chapter 8), still in business today though the building Shakespeare knew was burned down in 1681 (information from Hester Davenport).

  PART SIX: SEX & THE CITY

  21. Enter George Wilkins

  1 . Wilkins was certainly in St Giles by late 1607, when his daughter was baptized there (parish register, GL MS 6419/2, 13 December 1607). He is first recorded as ‘of Cow Cross’ in a court case of April 1610 (Prior 1972, 144, 152). Fludd is described as of St Giles in his deposition of 1612, and in December 1616 ‘Humphrey son of Humphrey Flood, trumpeter’ was baptized there. Thomas Floudd of St Giles, assessed at £20 in lands and fees in 1582 (PRO E179/251/16, fol. 286), may be a father or brother; the registers also have a Cadwallader Fludd, ‘yeoman’.

  2 . See Part One, note 14.

  3 . There is no critical edition of Wilkins’s works, but see Glenn Blayney’s introduction to the Malone Society reprint of The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1964) and other articles by Blayney listed in Sources/2. The nearest thing to a biography is Roger Prior’s incisive sixteen-page ‘Life’ (Prior 1972), supplemented by Eccles 1975; Prior 1976; Anthony Parr, ‘George Wilkins’ (ODNB 2004). William Boyd’s A Waste of Shame (BBC4, 2005) featured a memorable portrayal of Wilkins by Alan Williams.

  4 . The Wilkinses are sometimes claimed as the authors of two sonnets, signed ‘G. W. Senior’ and ‘G. W. I[unior]’, in Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), but it is hard to imagine a teenaged Wilkins writing pastoral knick-knacks like this (‘Ah! Colin, whether on the lowly plain / Piping to shepherds . . .’, etc). The sonneteers are more plausibly the emblem-writer Geoffrey Whitney and his father, also Geoffrey.

  5 . The Middlesex Sessions cases (first spotted by Mark Eccles) are described in Prior 1972, 144-9, and the Chancery suit of December 1614 in Prior 1976.

  6 . G. Warner, Catalogue of the Manuscripts at Dulwich College (1881), 134; Prior 1976, 33-4. She owed Henslowe £2.

  7 Cf. John Day, Law Tricks (1608), to which Wilkins may have contributed: ‘Ile . . . give her a kicke a the lips, and a pipe of Tobacco be my witnesse, that’s all the love I beare her’ (431-6).

  8 . Cow Cross Street (still extant) ran west out of the top end of Smithfield market (Prockter and Taylor 1979, map 6). That Wilkins was of the parish of St Sepulchre’s (as in the Belott-Mountjoy deposition) rather than St James, Clerkenwell, confirms that his tavern was at the western end of the street. Present-day Farringdon Station marks the approximate site of it. On Turnmill Street (named after a water-mill on the Fleet
river), see also Ackroyd 2000, 463-4.

  9 . On the structure of the London sex-trade at this time see Griffiths 1993; Shugg 1977; Haynes 1997, 61-71 et passim. In cases studied by Griffiths, many brothel-owners took short-time ‘rents’ from independent prostitutes requiring a room. Anne Smith told the bench at Bridewell that she used ‘Wattwood’s, Marshall’s, Jane Fuller’s, Martyn’s, Shaw’s, and other naughty houses’; the last-mentioned, John Shaw, owned five houses and had recorded dealings with twenty-three prostitutes. A client might pay up to 10 shillings for a session in the relative comfort of a bawdy house; ambulant alley-girls charged as little as 6d.

  10 . Stephen Gosson, Schoole of Abuse (1579), ed. E. Arber (1869), 36.

  11 . Robert Greene, Disputation, in Salg˜do 1972, 274-5.

  12 . An anonymous ‘biography’, The Life of Long Meg of Westminster, was entered in SR in 1590, but the earliest known edn is 1620; it mainly concerns her alleged feats of strength. Her career as a prostitute or bawd is documented in Capp 1998. Marshall and Remnaunt: GL, Bridewell Hospital Court-books 1 (1559-62), fols 206-10; Capp 1998, 3.

  22. The Miseries

  13 . J. Andreas Lowe, ‘Walter Calverley’ (ODNB 2004). Calverley refused to plead, and was pressed to death at York Castle on 5 August 1605.

  14 . The identities of Calverley’s sweetheart (‘Clare Hartop’ in the play) and his guardian (‘Lord Faulconbridge’) remain uncertain (Blayney 1953; Maxwell 1956, 157-69). His wife was daughter of Sir John Brooke and niece of Lord Cobham. For bibliographic evidence of revision see Blayney 1957. Among the remnants of an earlier version are two speech-prefixes, ‘Hunsd’ (324) and ‘Huns’ (453), which seem to suggest Wilkins first used the name of Shakespeare’s former patron Lord Hunsdon for Calverley’s guardian, before settling on the safely fictional ‘Faulconbridge’. Such remnants strongly suggest Miseries 1607 was printed from Wilkins’s ‘foul papers’, though at least one garbling in the text seems the result of an aural misreporting (Matthew Steggle, ‘Demoniceacleare in The Miseries of Inforst Mariage’, NQ 53 (2006), 514-15).