The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street Read Free

‘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