The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street Read Free Page A

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