Considering he is one of the key figures in English literature, very little is known about the life of William Shakespeare. However, we do know that in May of 1612 he gave evidence in the Court of Requests at Westminster which pertained to a period eight years earlier when he was a lodger at a house in Silver Street, in the Cripplegate area of London. Armed with this information, Nicholl’s new book investigates this period of Shakespeare’s life and brings to life the streets of Jacobean London.
The Case of Belott vs Mountjoy
The case at which Shakespeare gave his deposition was that of Belott vs Mountjoy: the plaintiff, Stephen Belott, claimed the defendant, Christopher Mountjoy, had promised him a dowry of £60 upon his marriage to Mountjoy’s daughter in 1604 – a sum that had never materialised and was now under discussion eight years later.
So how was Shakespeare, that most prolific and successful of English playwrights, caught up in such a domestic affair? The answer lies in the evidence of a maid who had worked for the Mountjoys at their home in Silver Street, and referred to “one Mr Shakespeare who laye in the house” – in other words, lived there as a lodger.
Shakespeare at Silver Street
This case raises two important pieces of evidence relating to Shakespeare’s life. First of all, it tells us where he was living in 1604, when he was aged 40 and producing some of his best known plays: Nicholl places Othello, Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well, Timon of Athens and King Lear during Shakespeare’s probable residency at Silver Street in 1603-1605. Nicholl speculates whether events at Silver Street perhaps influenced the content of these plays: whether, perhaps, the marriage of a reluctant Frenchman in All’s Well that Ends Well reflects the real-life events of Stephen Belott’s life.
Shakespeare’s Own Words
Secondly, although Shakespeare’s evidence was recorded by a clerk of the court, this deposition represents the only example we have of Shakespeare’s own words. Again, it seems remarkable that a man who bequeathed such a legacy of language through his plays should leave us only one example of his own speech. The deposition is signed in Shakespeare’s own hand – the earliest of only six surviving examples of his signature.
Nicholl deals with all this material in both a scholarly and an accessible way. His prose is highly readable and succeeds in recreating a time of which we know little, inviting us “to arrive at a certain house where a light burns dimly in an upstairs window. After 400 years the traces are faint, but he is there.” Despite this colloquial style, his research is rigorous and detailed, providing an excellent appendix containing the Belott-Mountjoy papers, and a scrupulously recorded set of sources.
The Lodger received much praise from the critics upon its publication in hardback in 2007, with Jonathan Bate of Sunday Telegraph calling it “the most absorbing work of Shakespearean biography I have ever read”. The new paperback version deserves to reach a wide audience, and should appeal to fans of literature, history or biography as well as Shakespeare scholars.
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl was published in the UK by Penguin on 3rd July 2008, priced £8.99. 378 pages, ISBN 978-0-141-02374-8.
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