The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street

by Charles Nicholl

Acclaimed author Charles Nicholl presents a brilliantly drawn detective story with entirely new insights into Shakespeare's life. With evidence from a wide variety of sources, Nicholl creates a compelling, detailed account of the circumstances in which Shakespeare lived and worked during the time in which he wrote such plays as Othello, Measure for Measure, and King Lear.

Genres: History, Shakespeare, Biography, Nonfiction, British Literature, Biography Memoir, London

Paperback

First published December 1, 2007

About the author

Charles Nicholl is an English author specializing in works of history, biography, literary detection, and travel. His subjects have included Christopher Marlowe, Arthur Rimbaud, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Nashe and William Shakespeare. Besides his literary output, Nicholl has also presented documentary programs on television. In 1974 he was the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer Award for his account of an LSD trip entitled 'The Ups and The Downs'.

Nicholl was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has lectured in Britain, Italy and the United States. He lives in Lucchesia in Italy with his wife and children. He also lectures on Martin Randall Travel tours.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

“For reasons we do not know but which I will later guess at…”

In 1612 Shakespeare gave testimony in a court case involving a dowry that had not been paid. From Shakespeare’s deposition in the case, the only instance we have of the Bard speaking as himself, author Charles Nicholl creates for the reader a tantalizing (at times) intellectual exercise about what Shakespeare’s life might have been like from 1604-1606 in his book “The Lodger Shakespeare”.
This text is only for those who are very interested in the life and times of Shakespeare. Having an interest in just one of these two items will leave the reader bored a lot of the time.
A quibble with the book is the fact that (as the quote in my title alludes to) most of this text, at least the parts concerning William Shakespeare, is speculative. Mr. Nicholl gives us some interesting things to think about Shakespeare’s day-to-day life based on close reading of some of the plays written in the time period covered. They are fun to imagine, but not remotely factual. Which to his credit, the author acknowledges often. Ironically, the parts of the text that were most interesting to me were the parts where Nicholl creates scenarios after close reading of the literary and nonfiction texts of the period.
Part Four of this book might be more information about Elizabethan female headdresses and wigs then most people care to know. I count myself among that group.
Special note was the superb chapter 28, where Nicholls details Jacobean marriage customs and connects it to two of Shakespeare’s plays, “Measure for Measure” and “All’s Well that Ends Well”. “Part 5: Among Strangers” is another strong aspect of this text.
The book also includes the entire original documents from the 1612 court case that inspired the text in an appendix. It is a rare and interesting option for the reader if you choose to read it.
“The Lodger Shakespeare” is for a limited audience. If you fit the bill, you will enjoy it. If not, stay away.

[Lynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reads well as a history of everyday life in Jacobean England. It does not read well as a biography of Shakespeare. As is the problem with all biographies of Shakespeare, there is simply not enough known to fill out a book-length biography and the author is forced to speculate.
I did enjoy this book more than Greenblatt's "Will in the World." Bryson's "Shakespeare: The world as a stage" is an entertaining read that mocks the worst of the speculators.

[Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I pounced on this because I enjoyed/admired/appreciated Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning, about the murder of Christopher Marlowe, and because I was mad about Simon Vance's reading of Dust and Shadow. Those two, plus Shakespeare, indicated an instant win.

Well… mostly.

First of all, I'm going to try to remember not to approach histories through Audible. If an author feels maps and illustrations and charts and the like are useful, then audio is not the way to go. The Civil War series I've already bought should be all right (except maybe for want of maps) – but something like this, which according to Google Books has 36 illustrations, loses in translation.

What this is, is an examination of what can be learned or inferred about Shakespeare from his deposition in a case that involved his landlord. "On Monday 11 May 1612, William Shakespeare gave evidence in a lawsuit at the Court of Requests in Westminster. His statement, or deposition, was taken down by a clerk of the court, writing in an averagely illegible hand on a sheet of paper measuring about 12 x 16 inches (see Plate 1) [see?]. At the end of the session Shakespeare signed his name at the bottom. It is one of six surviving signatures, and the earliest of them (though it can hardly be called early: he was forty-eight years old and already in semi-retirement)." "The dispute concerned a dowry: a sum of £60 which, Belott alleged, had been promised when he married Mountjoy's daughter in 1604, and which had never been paid. … Belott also claimed that Mountjoy had promised to leave the couple a legacy of £200 when he died. Mountjoy denied both claims, and now, eight years after the event, the case was before the court." Shakespeare was to be a valuable witness, as (by then) a gentleman and, very likely, a pretty well-known fellow. He turned out not to be so very valuable, and that's part of the story.

I appreciate what I have learned from this examination of the period. Shakespeare took up lodgings over a tire-makers' workshop on Silver Street in Cripplegate. "Tire" in the seventeenth century meant not Dunlops or Michelins, but the "tire" from which "tirewoman" and (I believe) "attire" come from: headgear worn by ladies (and those pretending to be ladies on the stage, and those wanting to attract gentlemen). The house was a decent distance away from the playhouse where Shakespeare still labored – getting there involved crossing the Thames, along with a rather lengthy land-bound slog. The whys and wherefores of this decision are explored; we can't know once-and-for-all why, any more than we can know the details of anything else we are not given specifically in the court documents or other reliable sources, but this is one of the places where Nicholl exercises his well-honed art of learned supposition.

The tire-makers were Christopher and Marie Mountjoy; they had a daughter, Mary, and an apprentice named Stephen Belott, and, we learn in the course of the lawsuit, Marie had approached Mr. Shakespeare and asked him to persuade Belott to marry Mary. He did so, and the two were betrothed (hand-fasted, apparently) and married – and Mary's father was not forthcoming with what he had promised. (He was apparently a real piece of work.) From the paperwork surviving from this four hundred year old family dispute (turned up by eccentric Shakespeare fanatics Hulda and Charles William Wallace) can be gleaned a surprising amount of information.

"It is true that biographical readings of the plays are dangerous, unregulated, prone to sentimentalization. It is absurd to cherry-pick passages of poetry written over more than two decades and infer from them a consistent personal attitude. Lines belong in a dramatic context and in the psychological context of the character who utters them and cannot be taken to reflect Shakespeare's views."

There are references to Shakespeare noted throughout this book that I've never heard of before, from contemporary letters and publications. I'm not an expert – but I would have thought I had read enough to have come across some of the contemporary and slightly post-mortem mentions. Dedications, and mentions of "Prince Hamlet", notes about meeting with Shakespeare and so on – surprising.

However, this is really a great deal more "The Lodgings of Shakespeare" than "The Lodger Shakespeare". As illumination of the setting in which Shakespeare lived, it's wonderful; it explores the terrain in a fascinating, scholarly manner, and suddenly there are sights and sounds and scents, neighbors and lawsuits and voices and arguments enriching my mental image of Shakespeare. Nicholl, I already knew from The Reckoning, has the ability to milk the smallest historical mention for everything it can possibly give. His caution is exemplary; while he does draw conclusions from the historic record, he never jumps to conclusions. The assumptions he makes are logical and sensible, and hedged about with "maybe"s and "possibly"s.

In fact, from what I was able to access on Google Books, I found the following:
Likely – 29 uses of the word
Possibly – 31
Possible – 24
May be – 91
May have – 29
Could be – 53
Perhaps – 87

There are entire chapters which barely mention Shakespeare at all. But close study of the documents surrounding the Mountjoy case and the drawing in of other documented facts allows for intelligent commentary on everything from Shakespeare's sexuality, the state of his marriage, and the identity of the Dark Lady to what his surroundings were when he wrote. This is painting a portrait of Shakespeare by painting his surroundings. I remember one art school assignment being to pick your favorite shoes and to draw them in fine detail; this was, basically, a self-portrait. (Mine, if anyone's interested, were a pair of tall floppy boots, which I often wore to faire.) This works both ways, and through existing information. There is an engraving of a writer's chamber here, and a description of one there, and an average sort of a chamber elsewhere; take into account what Shakespeare's income was and what he was working on at the time and a variety of other factors, and here is what his room looked like. Here is what the house he lived in looked like. Here is what his neighborhood looked like. Here is what he was like.

I enjoyed it, for the most part; it strayed into dry areas at times, particularly when it wandered away from the topic of Shakespeare himself. I feel I know more in some ways now about the Mountjoy family than I do about Shakespeare himself. But the portrait of William Shakespeare – the Lodger – drawn through this book is one I enjoyed the evolution of. Barring time travel or miraculous discoveries of documents, we'll never know everything about Shakespeare; this pushed the boundaries of what is guessed into what might be called "known" a little further.

[Paul Frandano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put, this is a remarkable book among the thousands of Shakespeare biographies that crowd onto a crowded shelf. Although we often hear the lament that "so little is known" of WS, the fact is that more is known of him than of any other other author of the era (unless that author be James I, King of England and Ireland, also James VI, King of Scotland). Most of this lot of known things - and it is indeed quite a bit - and every documentary trace of it has been assembled by Samuel Schoenbaum in his magisterial folio, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, which contains more than 200 fascimile documents.

But those are the bare facts, about which, it's needless to say, facts cannot answer every question that might be raised about the man, his parents and rearing, his influences, his work habits, his wife - "where there's a Will, Ann Hath a way" - family and friends, connubial relations, coauthors, standing at Court, his life in London and life back in Stratford Upon Avon, his personal wealth, and on and on and on. Hence the Shakespeare Biography Industry is dedicated to wringing every single surmise from a common base of documentable, albeit variously interpretable, "fact."

What Charles Nicholl has done within this biographic tradition is, in a word, ingenious. He has taken one of the more recent documentary discoveries - a 1612 court deposition given by Shakespeare in a dowry dispute involving his London landlord and the landlord's son-in-law, which is the only instance we have of Shakespeare speaking in his own voice, as set down by a court recorder and signed by Shakespeare himself - and built out from that with dogged research into Shakespeare's life and work in the decade from 1602 to 1612, which produced Othello, Measure for Measure, and King Lear, among other plays, and moving out, with prosecutorial exploration, drawing on contemporary sources of every variety - histories, public documents, diaries, literary and theaterical  references,  paintings, sketches, maps, and more - builds mountains of plausible conjecture (and  this  is really what  all Shakeseare biography is, once it moves beyond the basic documentary facts) concerning the lives residents of Silver Street lived and, within that context, the lives and business (tiremaking: "attire" for the heads and necks of London, to include perriwigs of human hair) of the Mountjoy family, with whom Shakespeare lodged - on the corner of  Silver and Muggle (!!!) Streets - for several years during the decade, the immigrant populations of London (the Mountjoys, or Montjois, were French Huguenots) that Shakepeare seemed so knowledgeable of, the London bawdy-house scene that is so well represented in plays produced by Shakespeare's company and written by Shakespeare and other denizens of his Cripplegate neighborhood, including his infamous co-author George Wilkins.

Nicholl thus situates Shakespeare, with near anthropological "thick-description," in his London context for  the first decade of the 17th century. In doing so, after first decrying the notion that the words of the poems and plays might yield any insight into the life of the  person who produced them, Nicholl proceeds to locate, and tease out the possible connections of, every line from every play that has a possible connection to the life of "one Mr. Shakespeare" on Silver Street and thus connections back to the deposition and  the circumstances of it. Hence Shakespeare's observations, say, on inheritance and the gratitude of children from Lear, or on a city sunk in bawdiness from Measure, or on marriage and fidelity from Othello, have new resonance when stacked against events Shakespeare "must have" known or been familiar with from his own daily circumstances. In similar fashion, Nicholl also mines the works of the Bard's contemporaries and successors for additional texture into Life and Times on Silver Street in Cripplegate and, in so doing, raises the names of writers popular then but known only to Tudor-Stuart specialists today - a longish list that surprised me (as I'm a Shakespeare hobbyist with a more than casual interest in the life, times, and words).

In all, a brilliant performance from Mr. Nicholl, who apparently has done this before in books - on, e.g.,  Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Nashe (another Shakespeare co-author) - I've not read but fully intend to. He has created a tower, or a confection, of pure invention that, in the absence of countervailing documentary information - and there is none - turns out to be well within the boundaries of the script of Shakespeare's life. It's as though we're looking at one of the plays itself, in which the stagecraft or the contemporary constumery leads us to ask, "Do the bare words alone support this interpretation?" If the answer is "yes," we may be en route to a memorable evening of theater. In Nicholl's case, his glorious, informative mountain of research-drawn supposition makes the plausible even compelling. A magnificent, even indispensable, achievement indeed.

[Colin Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting deep dive into Shakespeare's tenure as a lodger on Silver Street. Readable and fascinating for anyone who enjoys biographical works related to theatre/Shakespeare/Elizabethan history.

[Elizabeth Ashworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel as if I've been on a walk through the 16th century streets of London. I've seen the rooms where Shakespeare lodged whilst he was working in the city - writing and acting in plays, corroborating with other writers and becoming involved in the personal lives of the Mountjoys 'tire' makers.

I've seen the hard working business people and their wives whose pretty faces were an additional attraction to customers, I've seen the churches, the gardens, the theatres and the seamier underworld of crooks, pimps and prostitutes.

I enjoyed having Shakespeare revealed to me as a real man in a real world. The book in fact does not say a lot about him personally, but by describing the world in which he lived and the people he knew and worked with the reader sees him from a fresh perspective. From the records of a court case, regarding the non payment of a dowry to Mary Mountjoy, in which Shakespeare was called to give evidence, the author uncovers a previously hidden world and sets William Shakespeare on his very own, real life stage.

It was a fascinating and revealing book.

[Christopher Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating snapshot of a period in Shakespeare's life when he was staying as a lodger in the house of some flemish lace-makers who made some of the elaborate head-dressses worn in Elizabethan times. He was apparently called as a character witness in a marriage dispute over the daughter' dowry. We know so little of the details of Shakespeare's later life as a successful actor and dramatist that even the facts detailed in this work start to fill in some of the gaps in the chronolgy of his life. It is interesting to think that had the Elizabethan's not been so meticulious in keeping court records, none of this aspect of his life would have come to light. A fascinating read for any Shakespeare buff, but maybe a little too dry and dtail-oriented for those with only a passing interest in the man. It seems that the more I learn about him, the more there is still to be uncovered; this gives the whole exercise the feeling akin to opening an old chest in your grandparebnts' attic and discovering unknown facts and even secrets previously unimagined!

[Cynda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Earlier this year I had read another bio of Shakespeare, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. I felt as thought I would do any moment run into Shakes in the streets of London.
This bio is based on more suppositions than any other bio I have read of Shakespeare. Charles Nicholl takes the reader to the very place of saying "oooooh and ohhhh" and then changes tracks. The last section of the book is the best, tying up all the loose ends nicely. Again I discover, as I did after reading Greenblatt's book, that I don't much like Mr Shakespeare. He was not the gentleman he so wanted to be.
I will probably continue to read Shakespeare bios because I get new visions and revisions of the plays.

[Kirsten · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wenn ich nur auf Buchtitel und Inhalt schaue, würde ich sagen, dass der Autor das Thema verfehlt oder bestenfalls angeschnitten hat. Auch wenn William Shakespeare immer wieder auftaucht, liegt der Fokus mehr seinen Vermietern, den Mountjoys und den Menschen in der gemeinsamen Umgebung. Charles Nicholl nimmt den Autor und seine Werke immer wieder zum Anlass, um Ereignisse aus der Silver Street mit Ereignissen aus den Stücken zu vergleichen. Da gibt es manchmal interessante Parallelen, aber manche wirken auch ein wenig konstruiert.

Die Geschichte der Mountjoys ist interessant und manchmal taucht darin auch William Shakespeare auf. Ich habe gelernt, dass es zu seiner Zeit ungewöhnlich war, sich bei Fremden ein Zimmer zu mieten und auch ein wenig mehr über den Prozess erfahren, der am Anfang des Buchs steht, aber insgesamt war mir das zu wenig.

[Carolyn Whitzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a strange book! Nicholl takes a 1612 court case in which William Shakespeare testifies and turns it into a social history of early 17th century London AND the grand unifying theory of Shakespeare’s life. By turns fascinating and eye-rollingly absurd, the author wants to link everything - prostitution, women’s head-dresses, immigration - into a murder board that tells us something about the famously elusive playwright. Fortunately, I have a high tolerance of conjectural social history, and I did love the little details, like stewed prunes being a common dish in brothels.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Lodger Shakespeare, by Charles Nicholl, is a perfect complement to the phrase " known, but unknown." It is difficult, if not impossible, to think of any other literary figure who is so familiar to readers, theatre goers, students and even movie goers than William Shakespeare, and yet we know virtually nothing about the man's public or private life, his true features or even his biography. Conjecture of the man is rampant; the facts are much rarer to find.

Charles Nicholl's book tries to bridge this chasm. Working from a court document that Shakespeare attests to, Nicholl takes the reader into the world of 1612. The case involved a lawsuit that concerned Shakespeare's landlord. While the details of the actual case are somewhat mundane, the fact is this document, first discovered in 1909, contains the only words that have been recorded that were spoken by Shakespeare. At the bottom of the document is found one of only six signatures know to belong to Shakespeare.

Nicholl's great strength lies in the fact that he is candid and open about his speculations, and yet is able to weave a very well-researched commentary into Shakespeare's world. Anecdotes, facts, speculations and insight all tumble from this book. The reader truly feels connected to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, his London geography and his day to day life. Nicholl liberally references Shakespeare's plays for further insight with the book.

A reader may think that Nicholl took what did exist and then proceeded to weave an entire world around a grain of sand - a petty and insignificant event in a minor courtroom. Perhaps that is, to an extent, true; however, any and every shaft of light that helps a lover of Shakespeare is most welcome. When we consider how little we know about the man, any information is welcome. Read this book and you will catch a glimpse of Shakespeare. Fleeting as it is, it will be well worth your effort.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with any investigation of Shakespeare's life, there is a lot of conjecture, guesswork, and might-have-happeneds. But this book also contains several contemporary and near-contemporary records of Shakespeare and comments about him that I haven't seen elsewhere. It gives interesting info about Shakespeare's collaborators that I hadn't seen before, and about the types of people Shakespeare associated with and would have been surrounded by, and how they and their occupations can be found in the plays of the time, by Shakespeare and his associates. The best Shakespeare bio I've read? Definitely not, but a fun, interesting read full of interesting conjectures and insights, and now and then a solid fact or two. If you like reading about Elizabethan and Jacobean life, you'll probably find this worth reading.

[John Yeoman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliantly inventive glimpse into early 17thc London. It imaginatively recreates a fictional year in Shakespeare's life - not to tell us about Shakespeare, of whom nothing reliable can be said - but to show us how people lived in that age. Nicholl does it by researching the people who lived adjacent to Shakespeare at that time, whereof we do have records. He admits: this is not historiography. I'd comment: it should be. To paraphrase Wolfgang Iser (Metahistory): all historiography is creative writing. Nicholl shows us how illuminating a creative historian can be.

[Margot Abbott · Rating 2 out of 5]

A history of the couple of years Shakespeare lived on Silver Street in London during which he wrote "Measure for Measure," "King Lear," and "Othello." Mr. Nicholl combed the archieves and hasn't really come up with anything thrilling but since I wanted to get more of an idea of what WS's life was like, it made me happy!

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book of Shakespeare scholarship. The epistemology of Shakespeare scholarship is to make educated guesses at various points, knowing that that is all they are, but still people want to speculate and know what is known. In 1909 a Nebraska English professor found the court records and Shakespeare's alleged signature. He take a photo of this moment with his wife, included in the book. What follows is a fleshing out of the French immigrants Montjoy and their business of "tire making". Attire for the head is called tire, and no relation to tierra. Noblewomen, theaters and prostitutes were all about these head adornments. Shakespeare lived near Cripplegate for 2 years and seemed to get involved in the family business by speaking to Stephen Belott to marry Mary Montjoy. The lawsuit is by Stephen Belott in an attempt to get the fifty pounds he was promised as a dowery, that the elder Montjoy withheld. The case was referred to the French Church court, where they knew the elder as having fathered children from his servants, and other dalliances, but we don't know their results. He was successful enough to buy land, but again we go into some curious background of the time. He bought a house in a notorious brothel town. It turns out too that George Wilkens, who collaborated with the first two acts of Pericles, was a pimp as well as a tavern owner. Food service was often a way of driving up the price of a prostitute. There were promises that this would be a randy book, but it only discusses various possibilities of culture, no individual acts, therefore it's all foreplay. In the end this was a book very much interesting to those who wonder about Shakespeare. I looked up the church in the paper where Shakespeare lived near earlier and it's not too far of a walk from his place in Cripplegate. The house burnt in the 1666 great fire, and the replacement was bombed out in WW2, and now to stand near it, you have to go into a car park because the streets were redrawn after WW2. Like much about Shakespeare's times, the are lost in the fog and mist of time, but there are tantalizing details which the riff of a good Shakespeare scholar can be fun.

[Toni · Rating 4 out of 5]

“This is the way history happens; it is measured out in days rather than epochs.”

Highly interesting and sideways research into a very minuscule timeframe of Shakespeare life – one that can be documented through court records and billing receipts. “…it shows [Shakespeare] living amiss the raw materials for domestic comedy“.

“the first law of forensic science is that every contact leaves traces…of proximity, of lives that touch, and the traces evidence they leave” So true today and of the people Shakespeare touched or who came in contact with him. Our emails and texts document our days – and we surely draw comedic value from it in the stories we tell, watch, or even imagine.

Would love to see updated research on Shakespeare documents as more have been or continually are discovered yearly.

Recommend Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds for another sideways researched biography (Emily Dickinson) told through the documents from a court case.

[Katheryn Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street takes as its starting point a court case, in which Shakespeare was one of the witnesses. It is an interesting approach, based on a pleasingly material trace of Shakespeare, that covers many different aspects of life in early modern London. However, this book does not need to be as long as it is, and I ended up skim-reading large parts of it that covered information I already knew. This book is more interested in Shakespeare, in finding traces of his life in his plays and the historical records, than in early modern life itself, so there is a lot of speculation (although Charles Nicholl is always reasonably self-aware in his writing), and not as much analysis as I would have liked. There are lots of interesting details in this one, but I was particularly hoping for more analysis of what it meant to be a lodger in someone else's household.

If you're looking for a book about Shakespeare, I personally preferred Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

[AndrewCurry · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death this month, so a good moment to write something about Charles Nicholl’s Shakespeare book, The Lodger. It’s about Shakespeare’s time lodging on Silver Street with the Huguenot family the Mountjoys, and I bought it on the strength of Nicholl’s fine book on the death of Marlowe, The Reckoning.

Silver Street, or Sylver Street, doesn’t exist any longer, bombed in 1940, but it ran east to west near the London Wall, close to the present Museum of London and south of the current Barbican complex. The house was destroyed earlier, in the Great Fire of London, or before.

Nicholl suggests Shakespeare was probably a lodger in the Silver Street house from 1603-1605, which would mean that he probably wrote Othello, Measure for Measure, All’s Well That End’s Well, Timon of Athens and King Lear while he was there.

Shakespeare’s stay at Silver Street is interesting to Shakespeareans because it gave rise to the one document from his lifetime that Shakespeare attested in his own voice, as a witness in a court case between the owner of the house, Christopher Mountjoy, and his daughter, Mary, and son-in-law (and former apprentice) Stephen Belott.

Weighing the evidence

It’s a slender enough thing to build a book around, as slender as the tires (Elizabethan headgear) that Mountjoy built his business on. Nicholl treads carefully; the biographer’s uncertainty in dealing with the sketchy sources of the late 16th and early 17th century is there for us to see on the page. He weighs the evidence, tries to connect the different characters, and assesses how much, or little, we can conclude. He shares the tentative nature of his research and knowledge with the reader as he goes.

In the process we learn quite a lot of Shakespeare and something more of Elizabethan and Jacobean society. Perhaps I should have known more about Shakespeare’s collaborators, but I hadn’t realised how many there were. Nor the reason: to keep his commercial reputation flying high, in the face of competition from the the more streetwise writers of the early Jacobean “city-comedies“.

The first of these collaborators was George Wilkins, on Pericles, first perfomed in 1607. It’s entirely possible that Belott and Mary Mountjoy were the route through which Shakespeare met Wilkins, for after they left the Silver Street house in 1605 they lodged with Wilkins. Shortly afterwards Wilkins was commissioned by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, to write The Miseries of Enforced Marriage. So the collaboration on Pericles was not the first connection between the two men.

City-comedies

Wilkins wasn’t much of a writer, but he certainly lived the life of the racy city-comedies that were suddenly in vogue in London. He later kept a bawdy house on the corner of Cow Cross Street and Turnmill Street, now adjacent to Farringdon Station, then on “the edge of the notorious brothel quarter of Clerkenwell.” Wilkins was in frequent trouble with the law, sometimes on charges of violence against prostitutes. In the court case, where he was also a witness, he described himself as a “victualler”, but “pimp” or “panderer” would have been more accurate.

If the connection between playwrights and prostitutes seems odd to modern eyes, not so for most of the history of the theatre, and particularly so in the early 17th century. And in the first decade of the 17th century there was a run of plays on this theme, on sex, money, and the limits of licentiousness. Shakespeare’s first contribution was Measure for Measure, a complex play but not a commercial one. The collaboration with Wilkins on Pericles, a city-comedy whose plot revolves around the heroine, Marina, being sold into prostitution, was probably fuelled by the success of Miseries.

Pericles is rarely performed now but was one of the most commercially successful of Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays. But the two men collaborated only once. Nicholl notes that Wilkins produced a “novelisation” of the play in 1608, perhaps not with the approval of the Kings Men, and most likely had something to do with the publication of a “bad folio” of the play in 1609. “[B]oth The Painfull Adventures of Pericles and the 1609 Pericles contain stolen literary goods with Wilkins fingerprints all over them.”

‘Strangers of everywhere’

There’s a second literary connection that Nicholl traces, and this is about migrants. Lodgings were plentiful in London at the time, and so Shakespeare made a choice to lodge with the Huguenot family in a period when anti-migrant feeling was running high. There were anti-immigrant riots in London in 1593, and “a vein of boisterous xenophobia runs through the playhouse comedies of the 1590s.”

Shakespeare wasn’t immune to the appearance of the comic foreigner in is work, or the opportunities for word-play that this afforded. But Nicholl argues that in his more serious work, Shakespeare has a “tendency to challenge prejudices against immigrant aliens.” This is famously the case in The Merchant of Venice, where Shylock is a rounded character when he could easily be a pantomime villain. In Othello, written while lodging in Silver Street, which departs “radically with convention,” Othello is the hero and Iago, his white subordinate, the villain.

Most of Shakespeare’s plays are set abroad, although of course all portray aspects of contemporary England to their Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. English life was shown “distorted and magnified” through a prism of foreignness.

“The foreign—the ‘strange’—is an imaginative key for Shakespeare: it opens up fresher and freer ways of seeing the people and things which daily reality dulled with familiarity.”

A longer version of this review is on my blog, Around The Edges.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took up this title after having read Charles Nicholl's "The Reckoning". His style has the feel of a crime writer looking at literary events with a reporter's eye. In "The Lodger Shakespeare" Nicholl takes on the most documented occurrence, outside the production and publication of his plays, in Shakespeare's life in London--his deposition in the suit of his landlord's daughter and son-in-law for an unpaid dowry. He had been a go-between in the marriage of the Montjoys' daughter, Mary, and their apprentice, Stephen Bellot. Nicholl uses the documentary history of each of the people involved, as well as their neighbors and neighborhood to present them as living breathing fully rounded humans and communities. The result is a compelling picture of life Jacobean London with its theatres, bull and bear-baiting dens, its brothels, and its neighborhoods and parishes with homes and families, with Shakespeare's plays only marginally where plots and scenes appear to reflect those contemporary real-life events he was living. Very rewarding read.

[P.K. Butler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book isn't a biography of Shakespeare, even one spanning a few years of his life. It is a close and intriguing look at his neighborhood, neighbors, and the society (theatrical and otherwise) of the times. In fact, we learn a lot about the people with whom Shakespeare lodged but not much about him, factually, other than what testimony he provided (in writing) specific to a court case involving his landlord and that man's son-in-law. Mostly the author speculates on domestic situations and circumstances that might have influenced Shakespeare when writing his plays during and after these years.

Overall, it is an interesting read, though perhaps too in-depth in certain areas, as in his discussion on the craft of making women's elaborate headgear, this being relevant as it was his landlord's occupation. Too, we get an unclose look into the lifestyles of actors and playwrights, especially Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's peer and competitor.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a bit of a patchwork, pieced together of tantalizing inferences and hunches from official documents and plays and poetry by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but that’s what makes it interesting. Nicholls takes as his jumping-off point the only known record of Shakespeare’s words (not written but spoken by him): testimony in a court case in which he was a witness. From this little incident—the daughter of his London landlady sues her father for failing to provide a promised dowry—the author discovers the neighborhood in which the playwright lived and wrote, its cast of characters, and his attitudes about love, property, and morals. An interesting micro history, particularly in the interlocking relationships among Shakespeare, other theatre-people, and tradespeople in the neighborhood.

[John Simmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was surprised to discover how much there was to glean from the bits of documentation about Shakespeare at this time of his life. It was much like a detective story while introducing us to characters most history books gloss over. It was very much a slice of life view with lots of detail and information. The writer knows his Shakespeare (both biographical and the plays/sonnets) and uses it to good effect, using it to enlighten us rather than to show off his knowledge. I found myself looking forward to my reading sessions.

Well worth the read for anyone who likes Shakespeare's works or Elizabethan/Jacobean history. Well documented with plenty of footnotes (that don't get in the way) and transcripts/reproductions of actual, relevant documents.

[Dean · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’d probably rate this about 3.5 overall, though it’s a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I bought this book primarily to learn some more about Shakespeare, and he hardly features beyond cameos throughout. On the other, this is an incredibly well researched look at early seventeenth century London people and places, and is at times really fascinating.
So, on balance, a very good book, but just not the book I was expecting. I did at times feel a little overwhelmed at the huge amount of information thrown at us, but I genuinely learnt a lot I was unaware of before. As I said, the research on this book was incredible, and the author deserves a lot of credit for that alone.
Recommended.

[Tinker · Rating 4 out of 5]

i would be tempted to make this a five star book, excerpt for reasons that other reviewers have noted: the title is somewhat misleading, long stretches with nothing about shakespeare himself. for me, what this IS is a rather brilliant meditation on the nature and limits of evidence from a distant time--not only written, but archaeological, the things of the world that persist, mutely and rather randomly, long into the future, their meaning largely dissolved. this book resembles moby dick as the obsessive "digressions" from the narrative almost become the main point. adds perhaps little to our knowledge of shakespeare but is a touching and often thrilling read.

[Ali Miremadi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extraordinary forensic textual examination of court records, often obscure plays, poems and pamphlets, maps, drawings and the plays themselves to build some fascinating speculations about Shakespeare in early 17th century London. The inferences about his character and actions are clearly well-researched fiction but the insight into daily life of the period is terrific. Particularly interesting to find that George Wilkins, co-author of ‘Pericles’, was such a well-documented rascal.

[Stephen Huntley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The genuinely intriguing bits on Shakespeare himself make up a handful of pages only. If you want to know scanty details of other people who he rubbed shoulders with (but how often, how closely, and sometimes if at all is uncertain) you'll be entertained. Lots of effort went into this but it really seems like an obsessive's mania for any minutia that could loosely be associated with their subject. Mildly interesting for the picture it gives of the times.

[Ken Ronkowitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hoping that it would read a bit more like a novel than an academic report and though I enjoyed the information it is more of the latter than the former.
It is interesting that he is able to take a rather small piece of information previously not delved into by scholars, and expand it so far. Along the way you do learn a lot about the man, and the plays, London and the theater folks around Shakespeare at that time.

[Bonsai · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was part of the reading list for my class.

Turned out to be a bit like my class. Tempting with promise but somehow I never had the feeling I got all the information and facts I wanted or there could have been in it.

Elizabeth's London by Liza Picard is much more rewarding on the time and for Shakespeare himself Bill Bryson is more entertaining but still gives the whole story.

[Tom Baikin-O'hayon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece of academic research. it is well written, informative and simply fun to read. Nicholl manages to uncover scenes of daily life in late Elizabethan London, collected from a vast array of fragmentary data. when he diverges into speculation, he recognizes the facts and frames possible interpretations. all this gives us the best glimpse one can have at William Shakespeare's life.

[Katedurie50 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is full of incidental detail which illuminates the milieu - and quite a small space at that - in which Shakespeare lived and worked for some years It is particularly rich on the sexual habits and business lives of these early Jacobeans. But the playwright, as ever, proves elusive, glimpsed rather than captured.