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

February, signed by his solicitor George Hartopp. Some phrasings suggest these texts had been written, in the first instance, a year or more previously. 8 They are followed by a further exchange: Belott’s ‘Replication’, dated 5 May, and Mountjoy’s ‘Rejoinder’, undated. These largely echo the previous documents and perhaps served more to fatten the attorneys’ fees than to throw further light on the dispute.
    The remaining three sets of documents correspond to three separate sessions at the Court of Requests, at which witnesses testified or ‘deposed’ in answer to a prearranged list of questions. The court sat in the legal precinct of Westminster, in a first-floor chamber reached by stairs from Westminster Hall - thus John Stow, the great topographer of Shakespeare’s London: ‘By the King’s Bench is a going-up to a great chamber called the White Hall, where is now kept the Court of Wards and Liveries, and adjoyning thereunto is the Court of Requests.’ 9 At the first two sessions the witnesses (including Shakespeare) were called on behalf of Belott; at the third they were ex parte Mountjoy. All the depositions were recorded by the same clerk, on the same kind of paper, written on one side only. A courtroom scene in a seventeenth-century woodcut (see Plate 2) gives us something of the set-up - the clerk writing, the judge listening, the papers on the table.
    The first set, of 11 May, contains the statements of Joan Johnson, ‘wife of Thomas Johnson, of the parish of Ealing in the county of Middlesex, basketmaker’; Daniel Nicholas ‘of the parish of St Olphadge [Alphage] within Cripplegate, London, gent’; and William Shakespeare ‘of Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwickshire, gent’. They were examined in that order - the clerk’s hand is visibly tired by the time Shakespeare takes the stand. The papers, four folios in all, are in good condition apart from some mouldering down the lower-right edge, with some minor loss of text.
    At the second session, on 19 June 1612, there were six deponents. First up was Daniel Nicholas, again: he is the most active and involved of the witnesses. Then follow the testimonies of William Eaton or Eyton, who was Belott’s apprentice; George Wilkins, ‘victualler’, of St Sepulchre’s parish; Humphrey Fludd of St Giles, Cripplegate, who was Belott’s stepfather, and who is described as ‘one of His Majesty’s trumpeters’; Christopher Weaver, ‘mercer’; and Noel Mountjoy, ‘tiremaker’, who was the defendant’s younger brother. These last two are both of St Olave’s, Silver Street - the parish where the Mountjoys lived, where Shakespeare lodged, and where Stephen Belott married Miss Mountjoy in the parish church.
    At the third session, on 23 June, witnesses called by the defence were examined. There were just three: Christopher Weaver and Noel Mountjoy, who had both testified previously; and Thomas Flower, ‘merchant tailor’ of the parish of St Albans, Wood Street.
    Of the nine witnesses in the case, five have a specified relationship to one or other of the disputants (a brother, a stepfather, an apprentice, a lodger and a maid) and four can be summed up under the general heading of friends and neighbours. Three have artisan occupations (basketmaker, tiremaker, tiremaker’s apprentice), three are tradesmen (victualler, mercer, merchant tailor), two are in the entertainment business (playwright, trumpeter), and two are gentlemen (who do not need to have an occupation, though at least one of them has). Seven of the nine live in London, either in or immediately adjacent to the Cripplegate area; and the two that do not - Joan Johnson of Ealing and Shakespeare of Stratford - had formerly lived in the area. This is a local story: its physical boundaries can be paced in half an hour.
    Eight of the nine witnesses are men, and there are two women central to the story whose testimony one sorely misses - Christopher’s wife, Marie Mountjoy, who had