Notes

PART ONE: ‘ONE MR SHAKESPEARE’

1. The deposition

1 . The last letter looks like a p, possibly in the modified form which stands for Latin per, thus giving ‘Shakp[er]’. But this seems to garble the name rather than merely abbreviate it: the middle s is a constant in all known variant spellings (except where ks is written x, as in ‘Shaxper’, etc). The other signatures are two relating to his purchase of the Blackfriars Gatehouse (conveyance, 10 March 1613, Guildhall Library; mortgage-deed, 11 March 1613, BL Egerton MS 1787); and three on his will, 25 March 1616 (PRO Prob 1/4). On various spurious autographs see SRI 93-109.

2 . A comparable text is the reported conversation about land-enclosures in the diary of Thomas Greene, Stratford town clerk, 17 November 1614: ‘My cosen Shakespeare . . . told me that they assured him they ment to enclose noe further then to Gospell Bushe [etc]’ (SRI no. 37). But this is more a précis than a recording of what Shakespeare said. His will doubtless relates to oral instructions but cannot usefully be called a record of his spoken words.

3 . Izaak Walton, Life of Sir Henry Wotton (1651), in Lives (1956), 120-21. The bon mot was recorded ‘at his first going ambassador into Italy’, i.e. in 1604. A clown’s punning reply to the question ‘Does Master Scarberow lie here?’ (Wilkins 1607, A2v) may be a feeble reminiscence of the exchange in Othello.

4 . For the earlier finds (Keyser v Burbage et al., Court of Requests, February 1610; Ostler v Heminges, King’s Bench, October 1615; Witter v Heminges and Condell, Court of Requests, April 1619) see Wallace 1910b, EKC 2.52-71.

5 . Schoenbaum 1970, 645-56.

6 . Wallace 1910a, 490.

7 . Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., Wallace Papers Box 11, Envelope 27; Schoenbaum 1970, 650-51.

8 . Both submissions describe Belott’s marriage (19 November 1604) as ‘about five yeares past’. However, Noel Mountjoy’s deposition (23 June 1612) refers to a meeting with Belott ‘about a yere since, wch he thinketh is neere about or since this suyte began’. With a little stretching these approximations meet to suggest a date around late 1610 or early 1611 for the initiation of the suit.

9 . Stow 1908, 2.118-20. Belott’s Bill also refers to ‘Yr Highnes Court of White Hall, comonlie called the Court of Request’. This White Hall (or White Chamber) was part of Westminster Palace, and has no connection with the nearby Whitehall Palace.

10 . For Belott’s will (25 July 1646) see Appendix 4.

11 . FPC MS 4; see Appendix 3.

12 . Wallace 1910a, 489; SDL 213.

13 . L. Hotson, ‘Not of an Age’, Sewanee Review 39 (1941), reprinted in Hotson 1949, 161-84; it was originally a lecture at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 23 April 1940. A. L. Rowse, ‘The Secrets of Shakespeare’s Landlady’, The Times, 23 April 1973, expanded in Rowse 1976, 107-10.

14 . That Pericles was only partly Shakespeare’s was noted in the prologue to George Lillo’s adaptation, Marina (1738): ‘We dare not charge the whole unequal play / Of Pericles on him.’ On evidence both external (see Chapters 21-23) and internal (see Jackson 2001, Vickers 2002) Wilkins is overwhelmingly the most plausible co-author, though F. Hoeniger (Arden edn, 1963, lii-lxiii and Appendix B) mounts a case for John Day, himself a collaborator with Wilkins. For biographical and critical sources on Wilkins see Part Six, note 3 below.

15 . Formulated by the Lyonnais investigator Dr Edmond Locard in his Manuel de technique policière (Paris, 1923), ch 3.

2. Turning forty

16 . Dulwich College MS I/49; Foakes 1977, vol. 2, no. 49. The eighteenth-century scholar Edmund Malone possessed a ‘curious document’ which he thought afforded the ‘strongest presumptive evidence’ that Shakespeare was living in Southwark in 1608 (An Inquiry into the Authenticity of certain Miscellaneous Papers (1796), 215; EKC 2.88). He intended to publish it in his Life of Shakespeare, but died before he reached that stage of the story. This mysterious item may have been a copy of the poor-relief list of 1609, though the dates do not quite match. Malone refers to another document (also unidentified) which showed that Shakespeare was in Southwark in 1598 - this was perhaps the Pipe Rolls entry relating to his unpaid tax (see note 65 below). Malone’s inference that Shakespeare lived continuously in Southwark between 1598 and 1608 is invalidated by the sojourn on Silver Street, which he did not know about.

17 . According to traditional reckoning, Shakespeare’s fortieth birthday fell on 23 April 1604. In fact his birthdate is not known: he was baptized on 25 April 1564, and so may have been born on any day between about 20 and 24 April; the choice of the 23rd - St George’s Day - is a jingoistic convenience, first mooted in the early eighteenth century. Thomas De Quincey suggested that the wedding-day of Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth, 22 April 1627, commemorated his birthday. See SDL 20-24.

18 . EKC 2.323-7. William Lambarde records the Queen’s dramatic utterance a few months later: ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’ (326). Blair Worden questions whether the play was Shakespeare’s (‘Which Play was Performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?’, LRB 25, 10 July 2003).

19 . Jonson refers to these travails in conversations with the Scottish poet William Drummond, 1618-19: see Patterson 1923, 25-7. The offending play was Eastward Ho! Letters written from prison by Jonson and his co-author George Chapman survive in contemporary copies. The authors were ‘hurried to bondage and fetters’, Jonson says, ‘without examining, without hearing, or without any proof but malicious rumour’ (C. Petter, ed., Eastward Ho! (1973), Appendix 3). Jonson was also imprisoned in the Marshalsea in 1597, as part-author (with Thomas Nashe) of the lost satire The Isle of Dogs (Nicholl 1984, 243-9); and in Newgate in 1598, charged with killing the actor Gabriel Spenser in a swordfight on Hoxton Fields (Riggs 1989, 49-53).

20 . Leishman 1949, 369-71. The plays were performed at St John’s College, Cambridge, c. 1598-1602; the author was possibly Edmund Rishton, a student at St John’s (BA 1599, MA 1602), whose name appears on the outer leaf of the extant MS (Bod., Rawlinson MS D.398). On the War of the Theatres or Poetomachia (‘Poets’ Quarrel’) of c. 1599-1602, see Steggle 1998. On the Shakespearean ‘purge’ see Honigmann 1987, 42-9; Riggs 1989, 63-85; Duncan-Jones 2001, 118-25.

21 . SDL doc. 157.

22 . For the dates see the section on George Carey in Wallace T. MacCaffrey, ‘Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon’, ODNB 2004. For the disease see the anonymous court lampoon on him - ‘Fool hath he ever bin / With his Joan Silverpin. / Quicksilver’s in his head / But his wit’s as dull as lead’ (C. C. Stopes, Life of Henry, Third Earl of Southampton (1922), 235-7). Joan Silverpin was a generic name for a prostitute, and mercury preparations a supposed cure for syphilis.

23 . Accounts of Sir George Home, Master of the Great Wardrobe, for the ‘royall proceeding through the Citie of London’, 15 May 1604 (PRO LC2/ 4/5, fol. 78). Each of the named players received 4 yards of red cloth for a cloak.

24 . PRO SC6/JASI/1646, fol. 28r (original numbering) or 29r (new numbering).

25 . SDL 148-50, citing eighteenth-century sources (Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edn of Shakespeare for Hamlet senior, Samuel Johnson and George Steevens’s 1778 edn for Adam). John Davies (note 28 below) says Shakespeare played ‘kingly parts’. Cast lists in Ben Jonson’s Works (1616) name Shakespeare as an actor in Everyman in his Humour (1598) and Sejanus (1603) but do not specify the parts.

26 . For an overview of the portraits, including recent technical analyses, see Cooper 2006, 48-75. On the lost original of the Droeshout engraving see Chapter 17.

27 . On the Shakespeare coat of arms and attendant controversies, see Duncan-Jones 2001, 85-103; Cooper 2006, 138-42. ‘Not without mustard’: Ben Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour (1600), 3.1.205, though the phrase was current earlier (Nashe 1958, 1.171). ‘Shakespeare ye player’ is in a list drawn up in 1602 by Ralph Brooke, York Herald (Folger Library, Washington, MS V.a.350, fol. 28).

28 . John Davies, ‘To our English Terence, Mr Will. Shake-speare’, in The Scourge of Folly (c. 1610), Epigram 159.

29 . EKC 2.67-71, 95-127; SDL 155-6; Honan 1998, 236-44, 290-94.

30 . Ratsey’s Ghost (Shakespeare Association Facsimiles 10, 1935), sigs BI-BIv. The book was the sequel to The Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey (1605). Ratsey, a highwayman, was executed at Bedford on 26 March 1605; the pamphlets recount his supposed ‘madde prankes and robberies’.

31 . Hamnet was named after his godfather, Hamnet or Hamlet Sadler, a Stratford baker and lifelong friend of Shakespeare’s. The forename, a diminutive of the Norman name Hamon, is found elsewhere in the Stratford registers (EKC 2.3-4). It has no etymological connection with the fictional Hamlet (an Anglicized form of the Scandinavian Amleth) but there is surely an emotional assonance, especially if (as Rowe asserts) Shakespeare played Hamlet’s father.

32 . Kind Harts Dreame (1592), sig. A4.

33 . On Chettle’s possible authorship see W. B. Austin, A Computer-aided Technique for Stylistic Discrimination: The Authorship of ‘Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit’ (Washington, DC, 1969); John Jowett, ‘Notes on Henry Chettle’, RES 45 (1994), 385-8. The ‘upstart crow’ (Groatsworth, 1592, sig. FIV) refers to Shakespeare as a mimic, i.e. actor, but carries also the imputation of plagiarism. In the Epistles of Horace a plagiarizing poet is described as a ‘little crow’ decked with ‘stolen colours’. As Chettle’s phrasing shows, Shakespeare felt his ‘honesty’ had been impugned, as well as his ‘art’.

34 . Microcosmos (1603), 215. ‘Generous’ carries an overtone of generosus, the legal Latin term for a gentleman.

35 . Scoloker 1604, ‘Epistle’, sig. E4v. The author’s name is a bibliographic convenience. The poem was formerly attributed to Anthony Scoloker or ‘Skolykers’, an immigrant printer and translator, but the discovery that he died in 1593 makes this unlikely; his son, also Anthony, predeceased him. There is actually no reason to associate ‘An. Sc.’ with this family at all. See Janet Ing Freeman, ‘Anthony Scoloker, translator’ and P. J. Finkelpearl, ‘Anthony Scoloker, poet’ (ODNB 2004).

36 . Aubrey 1949, 85; Edmond 1987, 13-21.

37 . J. L. Borges, ‘Todo y nada’, in El Hacedor (Buenos Aires, 1960), trans. J. E. Irby, ‘Everything and Nothing’, in Labyrinths (1970), 284-5.

3. Sugar and gall

38 . Othello 1.3 takes information about the Turkish invasion of Cyprus from Richard Knolles’s History of the Turks (SR 30 September 1603). On Measure’s topical allusions referring to 1603-4 see J. W. Lever, Arden edn (1965), xxxi-xxxv, and Chapter 23 above.

39 . All’s Well is dated c. 1603 by Alexander Leggatt (New Cambridge edn, 2003, 11); c. 1603-4 by G. K. Hunter (Arden edn, 1959, xviii-xxv); and c. 1604-5 by Susan Snyder (Oxford edn, 1993, 24). Schrickx 1988 argues that political alliances mentioned in the play point to a performance during celebrations of the Anglo-Spanish peace treaty (July-August 1604). The frequency of rhymed couplets (a feature of Shakespeare’s early work) may suggest he reworked an earlier version of the play. The mysterious ‘Loves Labours Wonne’, mentioned in a list of Shakespeare’s plays in 1598 (Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, fol. 282r), could conceivably be a reference to it.

40 . G. B. Shaw, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898), Preface, ix.

41 . Wilson 1932, 119; Rossiter 1961, 117. Rossiter also finds this grating wit in the ‘indecent sonnets’ (i.e. chiefly the ‘Dark Lady’ sequence). Some of the sonnets (first published in 1609) probably belong to the Silver Street years. Stylometric analysis assigns nos 104-26 to the early seventeenth century, and two of this group have allusions to the succession and coronation of James I (1603-4). See MacDonald Jackson, ‘Rhyme in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Evidence of Date of Composition’, NQ 46 (1999), 213-19.

42 . G. B. Guarini, Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1601). Cinthio’s Epitia (1583) was a source, via English versions, for the plot-line of Measure for Measure. It is described by Cinthio as a ‘tragedia di lieto fin’ (a potential tragedy with a ‘pleasant’ ending) - what Sir Philip Sidney called ‘mungrell Tragy-comedy’ (Apologie for Poetry, 1581).

43 . For some other responses to Hamlet in Diaphantus see Duncan-Jones 2001, 179-81.

44 . Sypher 1955, 115-17, 152-3. He discerns in Measure the hallmarks of Mannerism defined by Panowski as Spannung (‘tension’), Streckung (‘elasticity’) and Flucht ohne Ziel (‘projection without climax’). Elizabeth Yearling describes the ‘devices’ of Jacobean tragicomedy as ‘tonal contrasts, protean characters, ambiguous language and self-conscious theatricality’ (RES 34 (1983), 214).

45 . An ongoing repartee between Marston and Shakespeare is discernible in c. 1600-1601: Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge has parallels with Hamlet, and his What You Will with Twelfth Night (itself subtitled ‘What You Will’, and performed at the Middle Temple, where Marston was a member, in February 1601). Both writers appended ‘Poeticall Essaies’ to Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr (1601); Shakespeare’s contribution, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, is praised by Marston as a ‘moving epicedium’. See W. Reavley Gair, ed., Antonio’s Revenge (Manchester 1978); Duncan-Jones 2001, 137-56; Steggle 1998, 40-48.

46 . On the Timon collaboration see Wells 2006, 184-8; John Jowett, Oxford edn (2004), 1-3; Gary Taylor, ‘Thomas Middleton’ (ODNB 2004). Almost all of Act 3 is generally ascribed to Middleton, plus 1.2 and parts of 2.2, 4.2 and 4.3.

47 . On Nashe see 1 Henry VI, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1952), xxi-xxxi, though the parallels adduced are not necessarily the result of collaboration. On Peele and Shakespeare see Vickers 2002. On ‘The Booke of Sir Thomas More’ (BL Harley MS 7368) see Part Five, note 10 below.

48 . Sylvia Feldman, ed., A Yorkshire Tragedy (Malone Society, 1973), v-xvi. The entry in SR, 2 May 1608 (Arber 1875, 3.337) also describes it as ‘written by William Shakespere’. The publisher, Thomas Pavier, later produced a series of unauthorized Shakespeare quartos, some misleadingly dated.

49 . Sisson 1935; John Berryman, ‘Shakespeare’s Reality’ (1971), in Haffenden 2001, 347. Colin Burrow tilts wittily at the windmill of ‘literary biography’, where ‘explanations of literary activity . . . tend to be made up from a dash of Freud, a handful of social aspiration, a scratching from Foucault’s armpit, and a willingness to entertain simple one-to-one correspondences between fiction and life’ (‘Who Wouldn’t Buy It?’, LRB 27, 20 January 2005).

50 . Tillyard 1965, 152.

4. Shakespeare in London

51 . Ben Jonson, ‘To the memory of my Beloved, the Author Mr William Shakespeare’ (1623), line 71, in Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (1975, 265).

52 . Aubrey 1949, 255.

53 . William Dunbar (attrib.), ‘In Honour of the City of London’ (late fifteenth century); Nashe, Christs Teares (1593), sig. X3 (Nashe 1958, 2.158-9). Nashe’s diatribe earned him a brief spell in Newgate, and was substituted with a toned-down version in the 2nd edn of 1594.

54 . ‘harey the vi’, marked as a new play, first appears in Henslowe’s diary on 3 March 1592 (Foakes 2002, 16). The Groatsworth was published within a few weeks of Greene’s death on 3 September 1592 (Nicholl 1984, 135, 301).

55 . The ‘lost years’ and their legends are summarized in SDL 77-90, Sams 1995. For the Catholic narrative (which in part depends on a player in Lancashire called William Shakeshafte being the sixteen-year-old Shakespeare) see E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The Lost Years (1985); Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (2004).

56 . Diary of Thomas Greene, 17 November 1614: see note 2 above. The Blackfriars Gatehouse, purchased by Shakespeare in March 1613, was an investment rather than a residence, but may have served as a London pied-à-terre (Honan 1998, 378-9).

57 . Bod., Aubrey MS 8, fol. 45v. The lay-out of the page (see EKC 2.252) is confused, but the view that Aubrey’s interlineated note is about Beeston himself, rather than Shakespeare, deprives us unnecessarily. Beeston’s birthdate is not known: it could be as early as 1603 (his parents married in 1602), which would make him thirteen when Shakespeare died. Beeston was recommended to Aubrey by another old stager, John Lacey, who also provided him with material on Shakespeare. Lacey, born in Yorkshire in about 1615, cannot have known Shakespeare personally, but he had worked with Ben Jonson (d. 1637), furnishing northern dialect terms for his late play The Tale of a Tub.

58 . On literary Shoreditch see Mark Eccles, Christopher Marlowe in London (1934), 122-6; Nicholl 1984, 39-40; and the second of Gabriel Harvey’s Four Letters (1592). Various Balls (but not Em) feature in the Shoreditch registers.

59 . PRO E179/146/354; EKC 2.87-90; Giuseppi 1929. For an introduction to the subsidy rolls see Lang 1993. Some London rolls are available online on Alan Nelson’s website (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/ ~ahnelson/SUBSIDY/ subs.html).

60 . Hazlitt 1864, 2.317. John Manningham notes in his diary (November 1602; Sorlien 1976, 123): ‘a common phrase of subsidies and such taxes: the greate ones will not, the little ones cannot, the meane [middle-ranking] men must pay for all.’

61 . Shakespeare’s second assessment (PRO E179/146/369) resulted in a tax liability of 13s 4d; this was a new subsidy and the tax-rate was higher.

62 . Honan 1998, 322; Michael Foster, ‘Thomas Morley’ (ODNB 2004).

63 . On Maunder as Messenger of the Chamber see Nicholl 2002, 53-4, 206. Henry Maunder of St Helen’s was alive in 1603, when a man is described as his servant (Registers of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, Harleian Society 31 (1904), 260), but was probably dead by 1608 when ‘Isabell Maunder, widow’ was buried (ibid., 271). ‘Anne Maunder al[ia]s Bedwell’, a godmother in 1612 (ibid., 418), is probably his married daughter.

64 . Ibid., 260; Scouloudi 1985, 182.

65 . PRO E372/444 (Residuum London, 6 October 1599) and 445 (Residuum Sussex, 6 October 1600).

66 . Shakespeare is called ‘honey-tongued’ by both Francis Meres (Palladis Tamia, 1598) and John Weever (‘Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare’ in Epigrammes , 1599, 4.22). ‘O sweet Master Shakespeare’, spoken by a foppish fan, Gullio, in anon, Returne to Parnassus pt 1 (c. 1599), 3.1.1054-5. Manningham: see Part Six, note 46 below.

67 . HMC Salisbury 3.148; EKC 2.332; Elizabeth Allen, ‘Sir Walter Cope’ (ODNB 2004).

PART TWO: SILVER STREET

5. The house on the corner

1 . For the ‘Agas’ map see Prockter and Taylor 1979. ‘Muddled truth’: Peter Campbell, ‘In Russell Square’, LRB 28, 30 November 2006; cf. H. G. Wells on London as a ‘stupendous’ city formed of ‘incidental and multitudinous littleness’ (The New Machiavelli, 1911).

2 . Byrne 1925, 55-8. On Islington: Nashe 1958, 2.224, 4.262.

3 . Wood 2003, 267; P. Jones and T. Reddaway, eds, Surveys of Building Sites in the City of London after the Great Fire (London Topographical Society Publications 97-99, 1962-66), 3.35. A frontage of 63 ft would suggest a substantial house, similar to the known measurements of nearby Dudley Court (note 13 below). However, the surveys indicate pre-Fire property boundaries, and do not necessarily refer to individual houses. The length of Silver Street between Wood Street and Monkwell Street was about 75 metres (228 ft): see Howe and Lakin 2004, Fig 68.

4 . In 1850, the Coopers’ Arms is listed as one of seventeen public houses in Cripplegate Ward Within (Baddeley 1921, 213-14). The property was leased, somewhat ironically, from the United Kingdom Temperance and General Provident Institution, which in turn leased it from New College, Oxford (Wallace 1910a, 506). In the Silver Street ratebooks for 1890 every building but one is a warehouse (Baddeley 1921, 77-8): the exception, rated at £38, is presumably the Coopers’ Arms, though it is described as a ‘dwelling house’. The Coopers’ Company had their livery hall not far away, between Aldermanbury and Basinghall Street.

5 . Stow 1908, 1.299, 2.344.

6 . William Maitland, History of London (1753-6), 2.905-6.

7 . On Greene’s lodgings see Gabriel Harvey, Four Letters (1592), in Works, ed. A. B. Grosart (1884), 1.170-3; his landlady, a Mrs Isam, was said to be a ‘big fatte lusty wench’ with an ‘arme like an Amazon’ (Nashe 1958, 1.289). Jonson: Aubrey 1949, 178; this is not the Elephant and Castle south of the river, but one ‘outside Temple Bar’. Roydon’s address is given in a Star Chamber deposition of 1593 (see note 27 below). Nashe refers to his lodgings in Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596): ‘all the time I have lyne in her [Mrs Danter’s] house’ (Nashe 1958, 3.114-15; Nicholl 1984, 224-6).

8 . Weaver adds that from these two properties Mountjoy ‘receiveth some eighteen pounds per annum de claro besides his own dwelling’; this is corroborated by Noel Mountjoy, who says Mountjoy ‘gaineth an over-plus of rent more than he payeth to the value of about nineteen or seventeen pounds per annum’. Thus Mountjoy sub-let part of the Silver Street property and the whole of the Brentford property for a combined total of about £35 per annum, resulting in a net profit (‘de claro’) of about £18 per annum.

9 . Stow 1908, 1.208, citing a ‘presentment’ listing 150 ‘households of strangers’ in Billingsgsate ward. His comment is formulaic: cf. the ‘Complaynt’ of London citizens, 1571: ‘the merchant straungers take upp the fairest houses in the citty, devide & fitt them for their severall uses, take into them several lodgers & dwellers’ (PRO SP12/81/29; Tawney and Power 1924, 1.308-10).

10 . Janet S. Loengard, ed., London Viewers and their Certificates, 1508- 1558 (London Record Society, 1989), No. 207, 1 April 1547. The ‘viewers’ were a group of four men commissioned to adjudicate property disputes in the city.

11 . Harington 1927, 86-7.

12 . Orlin 2000b, 350-51.

13 . GL MS 12805, Evidence Book 7; Schofield 1987, 112-13.

14 . On Jacobean privies, see Schofield 1987, 22-4; Symonds 1952, 86-9. Schofield distinguishes the privy, ‘a small chamber with structural connections to below-ground cesspits’, from ‘temporary partitions, close-stools or other non-structural and more mobile arrangements’. They were often set into an upstairs chimney, with the updraught of the flue acting as a ventilator, though Harington notes that an ‘unruly’ wind will instead ‘force the il ayres down the chimneis’ and into the lower rooms. Nashe frequently refers to the printed page ending up in the privy. The full title of Strange Newes (1592), one of his pamphlets against Dr Harvey, reads: Strange Newes of the Intercepting Certaine Letters and a Convoy of Verses [Harvey’s recently published Four Letters] as they were going privilie to victuall the Low Countries (i.e. to be used as toilet paper).

6. The neighbourhood

15 . Windsor House: Stow 1908, 1.312, 315, 2.344; Milne and Cohen 2001, 40-9. Entries in the St Olave’s parish register (GL MS 6534) are indexed in Webb 1995, vol. 6, and transcribed (up to 1625) by Alan Nelson (GL MS 52/77/3, typescript, 2000). Alice Blague: Rowse 1976, 139. Sir David Fowles’s ownership of Windsor House is inferred from the parish register, 9 February 1607 (Webb 1995, 4.541, but misread as ‘Fowler’): ‘Henry son of David Fowles, knight, baptized at the house of the said David’. All other home baptisms recorded in the register refer to Windsor House. On Fowles or Foulis, a Scottish favourite of King James, see Fiona Pogson, ‘Sir David Foulis’ (ODNB 2004).

16 . Milne and Cohen 2001, 45, and figs 47-50, 56-62.

17 . H. Harben, A Dictionary of London (1918), s.v. Olave; Milne and Cohen 2001, 126. It was from medieval times the guild-church of the Silversmiths’ Company (G. Huelin, Vanished Churches of the City of London (Guildhall Library, 1966), 22).

18 . Stow 1908, 1.306; Baddeley 1921, 43.

19 . GL MS 6534, fol. IV. Flint’s transcript covers the years 1561-93; the entries continue thereafter in his hand till 1609, when the new incumbent, Thomas Booth, took over. Flint matriculated at Cambridge as a ‘gentleman pensioner’ in March 1583, proceeded BA 1587 and MA 1590 (Venn 1922-7, 1.2, 51).

20 . Diary fol. 15-15v, February 1601; Sorlien 1976, 52-3.

21 . On Barbers’ Hall see Young 1890; http://www.barberscompany.org.uk. The earliest record of the Hall is from the 1480s; the current building was opened in 1969.

22 . Andrew Griffin, ‘John Banister’ (ODNB 2004), and see note 42 below. He was buried at St Olave’s on 16 January 1599 (Webb 1995, 4.684).

23 . Norman Moore and Sarah Bakewell, ‘Richard Palmer’ (ODNB 2004). For his property on Monkwell Street see Schofield 1987, 97-9.

24 . See Marcus Woodward, ed., Gerard’s Herball (1985); Marja Smolenaars, ‘John Gerard’ (ODNB 2004).

25 . See H. N. Ellacombe, Plant-lore and Garden-craft in Shakespeare (1878). Iago’s appositions (hyssop/thyme; nettles/lettuce) accord with contemporary ideas of ‘dry’ and ‘moist’ plants being mutually beneficial. Shakespeare writes often of the therapeutic power of herbs: ‘O mickle is the powerful grace that lies / In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities’ (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.15-16); ‘Not poppy nor mandragora, / Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world / Shall ever medicine thee’ (Othello, 3.3.334-6). And see Ophelia’s famous catalogue, ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance [etc]’ (Hamlet, 4.5.175-83).

26 . Hotson 1949, 125-7. After Savage’s death in 1607 his son Richard sold the Silver Street house to Shakespeare’s colleague John Heminges: see Eccles 1991-3, s.v. Heminges.

27 . Henry Bannister appears in the 1599 rolls for Farringdon ward (PRO E179/146/390a, fol. 1), living either in the western part of St Olave’s or in one of the three small adjoining parishes grouped with it for tax-collection purposes. I conjecture that he is the same as the goldsmith Henry Bannister, who is linked with Skeres in a loan to the poet Matthew Roydon (PRO Close Roll 1144/24, 6 January 1582; G. C. Moore-Smith, ‘Matthew Roydon’, MLR 9 (1914), 97-8). Wolfall and Skeres: PRO STAC 5, bundle S9/ 8, 26 April 1593; Nicholl 2002, 28-31, 467. Though ‘of Silver Street’ in 1593, Wolfall may be the ‘Jhon Woolfall’ whose children were baptized at nearby St Mary Aldermanbury in 1580-81 (Registers, ed. W. B. Bannerman (Harleian Society 61, 1931), 44-5).

28 . Stow 1908, 1.299. We learn from Nicholas’s will (PRO Prob 11/60, 31 May 1578) that Daniel Nicholas was a younger son. He stood to inherit certain ‘messuages and tenements’ on Bread Street in the event of his elder brother John dying without issue.

29 . Jonson’s second son, Joseph, was baptized at St Giles on 9 December 1599 (Riggs 1989, 54); Dekker is probably the Thomas Dicker or Dykers whose three daughters were baptized there between 1594 and 1602 (F. P. Wilson, ‘Three Notes on Thomas Dekker’, MLR 15 (1920), 82); on Wilkins in St Giles see Part Six above. Richard Hathaway, part-author of Sir John Oldcastle (1600), written for the Admiral’s Men as a riposte to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, is doubtless the ‘Richard Hathway, Poett’ who appears in the St Giles register in March 1601, and probably the ‘scholemaster’ and ‘Master of Arts’ of the same name who features earlier, though no record remains of his university career (MacManaway 1958, 562). On Edmund Shakespeare see EKC 2.18: ‘Edward’ is an erroneous repetition of his son’s name (‘Edward sonne of Edward Shackspeere’). He died aged twenty-seven, and was buried at St Saviour’s, Southwark, on 31 December 1607, ‘with a forenoone knell of the great bell’ for which someone (by tradition his brother) paid 20 shillings.

30 . Also at St Mary Aldermanbury lived the Digges family: the mathematician Thomas Digges had died in 1595, but Shakespeare knew his son Leonard, who later contributed a prefatory poem, ‘To the Memorie of the deceased Authour, Maister W. Shakespeare’, to the First Folio.

31 . Nelson’s literary works included a verse epitaph on Sir Francis Walsingham, and an account of the annual pageant of the Fishmongers’ company (Eleri Larkum, ‘Thomas Nelson’, ODNB 2004). A later literary resident was the metaphysical poet Francis Quarles, buried at St Olave’s 11 September 1644.

32 . On Giffard see Foster 1891, 1.1, 563. He and Palmer treated the Prince with an infusion of Teucrium scordium (Sarah Bakewell, ‘Richard Palmer’, ODNB 2004). This plant (the water germander) ‘was at one time esteemed as an antidote for poisons, and also as an antiseptic and anthelmintic’ (Plants for a Future database, http://www.pfaf.org).

33 . Schofield 1987, 135.

34 . Baddeley 1921, 210-15. The last mail-coach left the Two Swans, bound for Dover, in 1844, and the inn was demolished in 1856 to be replaced by a depot for rail-freight.

35 . John Taylor, The Carriers Cosmographie, sig. C2: ‘The carriers of Worcester doe lodge at the Castle in Woodstreet, their dayes are Fridaies and Saturdaies.’ For Evesham, sig. B2v. Stratford itself is not in Taylor’s list.

36 . On Greenaway see Shapiro 2005, 260-61. The letter he carried was from Richard Quiney, a Stratford man then in London, to Abraham Sturley, who refers to it in his reply of 4 November 1598 (EKC 2.103). Greenaway doubtless carried others in the correspondence, though not Quiney’s earlier letter to Shakespeare (25 October 1598; Cooper 2006, no. 58) which is the only item of Shakespeare’s correspondence to survive: this was sent from Quiney’s London lodgings, the Bell in Carter Lane, and did not leave London. The sum they wished to borrow from their ‘loveinge contreyman’ was £30.

37 . Stow 1908, 1.206, 290, 2.311.

38 . Ibid., 1.115, 2.285; Salga˜do 1977, 163-82. Wilkins 1607, 1177-9, describes accommodation at the Poultry Counter: ‘the featherbed in the Maisters side . . . the flock-bed in the Knights warde . . . the straw-bed in the Hole’.

39 . Nelson 2006, 63.

7. ‘Houshould stuffe’

40 . Milne and Cohen 2001, 1-8; Howe and Lakin 2004.

41 . Howe and Lakin 2004, 95-8, and fig. 88 showing the location of the sites.

42 . On the transmission of Paracelsian ideas into England see Nicholl 1980, 65-9. Among early advocates of the controversial ‘chymicall physick’ was the Silver Street surgeon John Banister (C. Webster, ‘Alchemical and Paracelsian medicine’, in Webster 1979, 327).

8. The chamber

43 . ‘T. M.’, The Blacke Booke (1604), in Middleton 1886, 8.24-6.

44 . Donne 1912, 1.11.

45 . John Dickinson, Greene in Conceipt, 1598, t-p; Aubrey 1949, 178.

46 . Francis Beaumont, ‘To Mr B:J’ (Ben Jonson), 15-21, first printed in EKC 2.224 from a MS in Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

47 . Frank Kermode, ed., The Tempest (Arden edn, 1954), 147-50; Baldwin 1944, 2.443-52. Middleton has a version of the Ovid passage, spoken by Hecate, in The Witch, c. 1616 (Middleton 1886, 5.443).

48 . On Shakespeare’s use of Harsnett see John Murphy, Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and King Lear (Athens, Ohio, 1984). Many of the devils’ names come from the testimony of Sara Williams, a chambermaid in a Catholic household, whose supposed possession in 1586 was investigated by Harsnett (Murphy 1984, 182 ff).

49 . Florio’s connection with the play was first mooted by William Warburton, Works of Shakespear, 1747, 2.227-8, and explored by Frances Yates, A Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost (1936).

50 . Montaigne 1603, 2.184, 195, 185. Taylor 1925 finds hundreds of echoes in plays subsequent to 1603, though some are tenuous. See also Robert Ellrodt, ‘Self-consciousness in Shakespeare and Montaigne’, Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975), 37-50. Gonzalo’s ideal commonwealth (Tempest, 2.1.143-64) is closely based on Montaigne’s essay ‘On Cannibals’. Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford, 2002) argues Montaigne’s influence prior to the Florio translation, an influence certainly found in Francis Bacon’s Essays (1597) and William Cornwallis’s Essays (1600).

51 . BL shelfmark C.21.e.17; SRI 102-4. Ben Jonson’s copy of the book does survive, with an inscription dated 1604; it cost 7 shillings. Jonson also knew Florio, and inscribed a copy of Volpone, ‘To his loving Father & worthy Freind Mr John Florio: the Ayde of his Muses, Ben: Jonson seales this testemony of Freindship & Love’. See David Mcpherson, ‘Ben Jonson’s Library and Marginalia’, Studies in Philology 71 (1974), 72-3.

52 . H. G. Wright, ‘How Did Shakespeare Come to Know the Decameron?’ (MLR 50 (1955), 45-8), argues his use of Mac¸on’s version. See also Howard Cole, The ‘All’s Well’ Story from Boccaccio to Shakespeare (Urbana, Ill., 1981).

53 . Nashe’s preface, ‘To the Gentleman students’, in Robert Greene, Menaphon (1589): Nashe 1958, 3.312. Thomas Lodge, Wit’s Miserie (1596), sig. H4v: ‘as pale as the vizard of the ghost which cried so miserably at the Theator, like an oister wife, Hamlet, revenge’. The ‘revision’ theory championed by Eric Sams (Sams 1995, 121-35, and ‘Taboo or Not Taboo? The Text, Dating and Authorship of Hamlet, 1589-1623’, Hamlet Studies 10, (1988), 12-46) is not generally accepted, though questions remain about ‘memorial reconstruction’ as the source of bad quartos: see Maurice Charney, ed., ‘Bad’ Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon (Rutherford, NJ, 1988).

54 . Thomas Heywood, Apologie for Actors, 1612; EKC 2.218.

55 . Letter to William Drummond, 14 April 1619, referring to problems with the printing of the second part of Poly-Olbion (Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Michael Drayton’, ODNB 2004).

PART THREE: THE MOUNTJOYS

9. Early years

1 . PRO C66/1750 (Patent Rolls 5 Jas I, Roll 30); Shaw 1911, 11.

2 . Information provided by Fre’de’rique Hamm, Director of the Archives Départementales de la Somme, Amiens.

3 . Scouloudi 1985, 223-31, lists places of origin stated in the 1593 return, cross-referrable to her index of named individuals (147-221).

4 . Bibliothèque Municipale, Amiens, MS HH 749; I am grateful to the archivist, Thomas Dumont, for this reference. Some vaguer genealogical trawling finds a Monguiot family living in Le Harcourt in 1612; a Pierre Montjoie at Aubervilliers in 1658; and several Montjoies in Namur, Belgium, in the eighteenth century.

5 . W. Arthur, Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names (New York, 1857), s.v. Mountjoy. He notes that the name ‘is still retained in a division of the hundred of Battle, not far from the remains of the majestic pile reared by William the Conqueror’. War cry: T. Wylie, The Reign of Henry V (1914-29), 2.178.

6 . Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fols 254v, 263v; see Chapter 12.

7 . On Elizabethan marrying ages, see Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450-1700 (1984), 63ff.; Laurence Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy (1965), 656-7. Shakespeare’s Juliet is fourteen, and her father thinks ‘two more summers’ should pass before she is ‘ripe to be a bride’ (Romeo and Juliet, 1.2.9-11); cf. Bruce Young, ‘Haste, Consent, and Age at Marriage: Some Implications of Social History for Romeo and Juliet’, Iowa State Journal of Research 62 (1987), 459-74. In Samuel Rowlands’s ’Tis merry when gossips meet (1602) a fifteen-year-old ‘mayde’ is urged to marry: ‘Your mother is to blame / To wish so womanly a wench to stay. / She knows fifteene may husband justlie clame’ (sig. D3). Rebecca Edwards was fourteen when she married the actor William Knell, and a widow at fifteen; she subsequently married John Heminges, and was a long-term acquaintance of Shakespeare. The average marriage age was, of course, much higher. Houlbrooke gives twenty-six as the mean age for Elizabethan women, twenty-eight for men; the figures were similar across western Europe.

8 . In his deposition of 1612 Noel gives his age as ‘thirty years or thereabouts’.

10. St Martin le Grand

9 . The origin of ‘Huguenot’ is debated: an early form, ‘eiguenot’, found in the Chronique de Genève (1550), suggests a derivation from German Eidgenosz, ‘confederate’.

10 . Alfred Sornan, ed., The Massacre of St Bartholomew: Reappraisals and Documents (1974); Leonie Frieda, Catherine de Medici (2003), 248-72. Among those sheltered at the English embassy were Sir Philip Sidney and Timothy Bright; the latter relived their experience, ‘which my mind shudders to recall and flees from in grief’, in a letter to Sidney in 1584 (Alan Stewart, Sir Philip Sidney (2000), 86-8).

11 . Henry Gaymer of Rye is thus described, when in 1586 he detained the assassin of the Queen of Navarre, René’ or Renato, trying to enter the country (BL Lansdowne MS 48, no. 70).

12 . Nashe 1958, 3.158.

13 . Scouloudi 1985, 80, 129. On Huguenots in London see also Scouloudi 1987; Yungblut 1996; Picard 2003, 123-37.

14 . Stow 1908, 1.308, 2.342-3.

15 . PRO E179/251/16, fols 23-4.

16 . Kirk 1910, 2.338, 410; Scouloudi 1985, 173. Harman Dewman, tailor, also living in St Anne’s in 1582, is probably a brother.

17 . Hatfield House, Cecil MS 208/8; Kirk 1910, 2.349-50.

18 . Lang 1993, xlii-li.

19 . Stow 1908, 1.307.

20 . PRO E179/146/390; Kirk 1910, 2.244.

21 . Foster 1887, 951.

22 . GL MS 4515/1; PRO E179/147/494.

23 . St Dunstan’s marriage register (LMA Mf X024/068), 1 May 1627. Later Mountjoys in Stepney are recorded in IGI.

24 . On the French Church see Beeman 1905; Lindeboom 1950, 7ff. It remained on Threadneedle Street until 1840. The current church at Soho Square, designed by Aston Webb in ‘late Franco-Flemish Gothic with Romanesque overtones’ (N. Pevsner, London (1952), 6.394), opened in 1893.

25 . Picard 2003, 128.

26 . Scouloudi 1985, 81, 233-7.

11. Success and danger

27 . Scouloudi 1985, 196-7, 209. She considers Daniel Morrell and Samuel Morrell (listed one after the other in the 1593 return, with identical attributes) to be the same man erroneously duplicated. He had come to England in c. 1584; in 1593 he had no servants or apprentices. Swanston’s was a larger operation, employing five ‘stranger women’ and five English workers.

28 . PRO SP12/81/29; Tawney and Power 1924, 1.308-10.

29 . For the statutory restrictions invoked by the petitioners, see Scouloudi 1985, 49-50. For attempts to encourage immigrants in trades not practised by locals (e.g. silk-working) see Luu 2005.

30 . Richard Verstegan to Robert Persons, 27 [i.e. 17] May 1593; Petti 1959, 155. Verstegan uses continental dating (‘stilo novo’), ten days later than English reckoning.

31 . Strype 1824, 4.167. ‘Vyle ticket’: Privy Council directive to Mayor of London, 16 April 1593 (Dasent 1890-97, 24.187).

32 . Arthur Freeman, ‘Marlowe, Kyd and the Dutch Church Libel’, English Literary Renaissance 3 (1973), 44-52; Nicholl 2002, 47-53, 347-52. The full text of the libel, in a copy of c. 1600, was discovered in 1971 among the ‘residual’ MSS of the nineteenth-century collector Sir Thomas Phillips.

33 . Petti 1959, 155, 163. Verstegan’s unnamed correspondent in England was probably the Jesuit Henry Garnet.

34 . Scouloudi 1985, 73-80; Strype 1824, 4, no. 107. Detailed returns survive in a MS owned by the Dugdale family (Merevale Hall, Warwickshire): it is damaged from being used as scrap-paper by Sir William Dugdale when compiling his Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656). Extracts and summaries of the census are in Huntington Library, Ellesmere MS 2514, and BL Lansdowne MS 74/31.

35 . BL Egerton MS 2804, fol. 90; Jeayes 1906, 77-8. The letter is addressed to Gawdy’s elder brother Bassingbourne.

36 . GL MS 6534, fol. 106.

37 . In the burial register the other three are: ‘——Seamer, child of Joan Seamer’ (24 September 1593); ‘an infant murdered by the mother, a servant to J. Sayers’ (14 November 1599); ‘—Pierte, infant of Elizabeth, in Jonas Scot’s house, imputed to the E of Desmond’ (11 May 1602). In the baptismal register (where the naming of the parent is only standard from 1600 onwards) the five entries are: ‘Lawrence Morrise, son of Olive by one Laurence Williams in Coleman Street’ (22 April 1604); ‘Sarah Hely, daughter of Ann, widow, illegitimate’ (3 October 1604); ‘Judith Gardner, daughter of Elizabeth or as was said one William Gardner in J. Gates’s house’ (19 June 1605); ‘Thomasine Gaber, daughter of Elizabeth with Mr Buckle’ (10 January 1605); ‘Jane Basket daughter of Jane, sojourner with Nicholas Terrell’ (30 March 1606).

12. Dr Forman’s casebook

38 . Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 254r. I read the date of the incident as 10 September (rather than the 16th, as read by Rowse and repeated by others). Forman’s zero has an embryonic upstroke where the pen completes the circle; his actual ‘6’ is much more pronounced. On Forman see Kassell 2005, Traister 2000 and (more generically) Melton 1620.

39 . Bod., Ashmole MS 411, fols 101-2. Other charges were 2s for a ‘purge’, 3s for a ‘comfortable drink’, 5s for a call-out, and 20 nobles (£6 13s 4d) for a regime (‘the Diet’) lasting twenty-four days. Payment was sometimes dependent on results: in 1601 a patient agreed to pay £6 down and the same again when cured, but ‘if she be not well at all I must give her £5 again’ (Rowse 1976, 215).

40 . W. Lilly, History of his Life and Times (1715), 16; Nashe 1958, 3.83. Nashe’s satirical portrait of the cunning-man in Terrors of the Night (1594) is in part suggestive of Forman: see Nashe 1958, 1.363-7; Nicholl 1984, 197-200.

41 . The story in Manningham’s diary (June 1602; Sorlien 1976, 77) was from ‘Ch Da’, i.e. Charles Danvers, a Wiltshire gentleman almost certainly acquainted with Forman. His father had intervened on Forman’s behalf in 1586: ‘The Bishop [of Salisbury] and I were made friends by . . . Sir John Danvers’ (Rowse 1976, 47). On Savory see Eccles 1991-3, s.v.

42 . Foakes 2002, 39 (Diary, fol. 17); Cerasano 1993, 150-53. Henslowe consulted Forman on 6 August 1596 (Bod., Ashmole MS 234, fol. 85), and again on 5 February 1597 (Ashmole MS 226, fol. 13v), suffering from ‘pain in the reins [kidneys]’ and ‘water in the stomach’, for which he was prescribed a purgative. Forman had other theatre people in his clientele, and was a keen playgoer. His ‘Bock of plaies’ (Ashmole MS 208, fols 200-213; SRI 3-20) describes productions of Macbeth, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale seen at the Globe in 1611; he also saw a Richard II but it does not seem to be Shakespeare’s version.

43 . The six extant casebooks provide a continuous record from March 1596 to November 1601. Statistical analysis of the first two (Kassell 2005, 129-30) shows 2,760 consultations, of which 60 per cent were by women.

44 . Bod., Ashmole MS 802, fol. 133; Kassell 2005, 98.

45 . Jonathan Bate, Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2001; John Bossy, ‘Haleking’, LRB 23, 22 February 2006. Kassell (2005, 130-1) counts fifty-six records of sexual intercourse in Forman’s papers. A similar overtone of predation is found in the case of a surgeon, Tristram Lyde: ‘He would have caused the women to have stript themselves naked in his presence, and himselfe would have annoynted them [with quicksilver]’ (Manningham’s diary, February 1601; Sorlien 1976, 53). In 1599, aged forty-seven, Forman married the sixteen-year-old Anne Baker, whom he refers to in sexual notes as ‘Tronco’.

46 . These errors (Rowse 1973, 106) were pointed out by Stanley Wells (TLS 11 May 1973) and silently revised in later editions.

47 . Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 278v. Variant forenames: see Mary Edmond, ‘John Heminges’, ODNB 2004; Rowse 1976, 306. Thomas Middleton’s wife, Magdalen n’e Marbeck, is also sometimes documented as Mary.

48 . E.g. ‘Joan, servant of Mr Borace of Radcliffe’, who was pregnant by him when she consulted Forman in 1598, and feared he was trying to poison or bewitch her ‘that she should die’ (Bod., Ashmole MS 195; Rowse 1976, 213). Margery Browne’s husband was Christopher Laughlin of St Botolph’s, Aldersgate (Webb 1995, 4.644).

49 . Schoenbaum erroneously names her as Michelle Art (SRI 39). The entry relating to her and Mountjoy (FPC MS 4, fol. 501) refers to ‘Michel Art son ancien’. He was the church elder responsible for Mountjoy, and it was his evidence which led to Mountjoy being ‘censured’. See Appendix 3.

50 . Bod., Ashmole MS 226, 17 May 1597, reproduced in Rowse 1973.

51 . The widow of the 1st Lord Hunsdon, Lady Anne, was still alive, but Forman would have distinguished her as the ‘old’ Lady Hunsdon (as her husband is ‘my old Lord’ in the reference above). On Elizabeth Carey, see Wallace T. MacCaffrey, ‘Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon’, ODNB2004; Nicholl 1984, 182-4. Nashe calls her an ‘excellent accomplisht court-glorifying lady’; Dowland’s tune, ‘My Lady Hunsdon’s Puffe’, was written for her. Forman himself had been patronized by Carey: ‘the 22nd of December [1587] I rode to Sir George Carey’s’ (Rowse 1976, 289). On the intellectual ambience of the family see Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Bess Carey’s Petrarch’ (RES 50 (1990), 304-19), ‘Bess’ being the Hunsdons’ daughter Elizabeth, later Lady Berkeley.

52 . Hotson 1931, 111-22; H. J. Oliver, ed., Merry Wives (Arden edn, 1971), xliv-lii. The plausible but undocumented tradition that the play was a royal command is first mentioned in the preface to John Dennis’s adaptation, The Comical Gallant (1702). That Shakespeare wrote it fast is also plausible, though Dennis’s ‘fourteen days’ is surely an exaggeration.

53 . PRO PROB 11/102, 10 May 1599. ‘Teesye’ is probably a diminutive of Prothesia.

54 . William Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (1988), 4-8; Rowse 1976, 29-30, 251-2.

55 . Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 263v.

56 . Laura, sigs A4v, D1; Alba, sig. E3v. On the life and writings of Tofte (1562-1620) see A. B. Grosart’s edn of Alba (1880); Williams 1937; L. G. Kelly, ‘Robert Tofte’ (ODNB 2004). I am very grateful to Matt Steggle for alerting me to the possibilities explored here.

57 . Love’s Labours was written earlier (perhaps c. 1593-4: see Chapter 18), but the 1598 quarto is described as ‘newly corrected and augmented’. The play was performed before the Queen during Christmas 1597-8, but there is nothing to suggest that Tofte moved in courtly circles, or that the performance remembered or imagined in Alba was a royal one. There are Carrells in the subsidy rolls, any (or none) of which might be connected with Ellen. One is the seriously wealthy Edward Carrell, esq, who is assessed on £200 in lands and fees in 1599 (PRO E179/146/393, fol. 6). He lived near the Mountjoys at St Botolph’s, Aldersgate.

58 . The book was seen and described by the Tofte expert Franklin Williams in the 1930s. Though it has marginalia in Tofte’s hand, and the cropped remains of his signature, an inscription on the title-page shows that in 1597 the book was given by Lady Margaret Radcliff to Sir George Buc, the future Master of the Revels; it is not known whether Tofte owned it before or after this, so his praise of ‘Marie M—’ cannot be dated (Williams 1937, 296). Tofte lived in the parish of St Andrew’s, Holborn; his landlady, whom he mentions in The Blazon of Jealousie (1615), was the wife of a barber-surgeon, Thomas Goodall.

59 . Bod., Ashmole MS 195, fol. 8.

60 . Ibid., fols 16, 24. It is hard to tell if the final mark in the name is an s or an oblique punctuation. ‘Gui d’ Asture’ was exorcized by R. E. Alton (NQ 223 (1978), 456-7).

61 . Scouloudi 1985, 160.

62 . Bod., Ashmole MS 195, fol. 15v. This transcription differs from the one I gave in the first edition. I am grateful to Roger Davey, whose expert readings of Forman’s Latin I have incorporated; they alter some of the wording, but not the overall implication, of the entry. All the Latin words are in contracted form, with a suspension-mark for the final letter or syllable.

63 . Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 258; Rowse 1976, 192; PRO E179/146/ 325, fol. 2.

64 . Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 310v.

65 . ‘Alained’: Rowse 1976, 109. The initial letter, unconnected to the others, is too blotted to read with any certainty, but compare the poorly formed o of ‘yellow’ in the line below. The tall ungainly upstroke which follows is not Forman’s usual l (which has a pronounced rightward curve, somewhat like a modern capital C), but there is a parallel formation on the same page (‘lefte’ in the top line of the second piece of writing), and also in the l of ‘glob[e]’ in Forman’s report of a performance of Richard II (see note 42 above). The fifth letter could be n, as Rowse reads it, but Forman’s n, invariably open at the top, is identical with his u (see the juxtaposed u and n of ‘Mountioy’), and in the orthographic convention of the time u and v are the same, so it could as well be a v. The last letter is not a d. Forman uses an Italic-type d with a pronounced looping curve. In my view it is a poorly formed secretary e, paralleled by the equally loose e of ‘dore’ a couple of lines above. The formation is echoed at the end of ‘Madam’ in the line below, but there it is a gratuitous upstroke after the final m. I have wondered if the word is ‘olavum’ (referring to the Latin name of the parish, ‘Sanctus Olavus’) but ‘olaive’ is the more likely reading.

66 . Joy Rowe, ‘Kitson family’, ODNB 2004; Hearn 1995, nos 53-4; John Gage, History and Antiquities of Hengrave (1822), 175-85. A spirited glimpse of Lady Kitson is in a letter of Philip Gawdy, c. 1594: ‘My L. Kytson is well recovered & in token of thankesgyving danced all this last night as long as she was able to go’ (Jeayes 1906, 79-80). Two of her cousins were frequent visitors to Forman in the late 1590s: Anne Brock n’e Jerningham, who was the niece and namesake of Lady Kitson’s mother; and Anne’s daughter, Alice Blague, wife of the Dean of Rochester. Mrs Blague was a particular confidante, and for a while the lover, of Forman. She recruited clients for him, including, in 1601, Lady Kitson’s father, Sir Thomas Cornwallis. Among her friends at court were Lord Hunsdon’s sisters, Lady Hoby and Lady Scrope, and she doubtless knew Lady Hunsdon as well. She visited Forman at least twice in January 1598, the probable date of Forman’s memo concerning ‘Madam Kitson’.

67 . New Year’s Gift Roll 1578, in Nichols 1823, 2.68.

68 . The Blacke Booke (1604), Middleton 1886, 8.37. ‘Flaxen hayr to sell’: George Gray, news-sheet advertisement, 4 February 1663, cited in OED s.v. periwig 3.

13. The m’nage

69 . Registers of St Giles, Cripplegate (GL MS 6419/2), 5 April 1612: baptism of ‘Martha daughter of John Blott, tiremaker’. In his will of 3 October 1642 he left Stephen 900 guilders to be paid after the death of his widow, Maijlie.

70 . Webb 1995, 4.684, 644.

71 . Ibid., 4.646. Her husband may be the Scottish basketmaker Thomas ‘Johnsonne’, a native of Moffat, who came to London in about 1590, and was living in the Castle Baynard district of the city in 1593 (Scouloudi 1985, 186). If this is the same man he was a widower when he married Joan, for in 1593 he had a wife, Isabel. But the name is extremely common.

72 . PRO E179/146/390, fol. 32 (1599); E179/146/409, fol. 3 (1600). On his nominal assets of £5 he has to pay tax of 26s 8d: the double tax-rate for foreigners in Shakespeare’s London.

73 . Mountjoy as godfather: FPC, Marriage Register 1600-39, fol. 43; Moens 1896, 48. Clinkolad: Scouloudi 1985, 160. Courtois: Whitebrook 1932, 93.

74 . Mountjoy’s denization: see note 1 above. For denization figures see Scouloudi 1985, 5; Shaw 1911.

75 . W. Bruce Bannerman, ed., Registers of St Olave, Hart Street 1563-1700, Harleian Society Registers 46 (1916), 260.

76 . See Appendix 4.

PART FOUR: TIREMAKING

14. Tires and wigs

1 . The tireman of the Globe, unnamed, is humorously presented onstage in the prologue written by John Webster for Marston’s The Malcontent (1604). More generally OED gives ‘tireman’ = a dresser or valet, or a tailor; and ‘tirewoman’ = a lady’s maid, or a dress-maker or costumier. The tiring-house is shown (marked ‘mimorum aedes’) in the De Witt sketch of the Swan theatre (1596); it was also used for backstage effects: ‘drummers make thunder in the tiring house’ (Melton 1620, sig. E4r), referring to a production of Dr Faustus.

2 . The French courtly head-tire in turn echoed Renaissance Italian costume for feste and pageants, on which see Newton 1975. The influence is discernible in Vecellio 1598, a handbook of French and Italian costume written by the brother of the painter Titian. Extravagant tires designed by Inigo Jones for the Masque of Queenes (1610) were adapted from Ren’ Boyvin’s engravings of head-dress designs by Rosso Fiorentino for court festivals at Fontainebleau in the 1530s (Peacock 1984; Hearn 1995, 161).

3 . Ben Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels (1601), 2.4.51-61. Phantaste’s new head-tire is also based on continental models: ‘ ’Tis after the Italian print we look’d on t’other night.’ See also Jonson’s Alchemist (1610): one of the ‘pleasures of a countess’ is to have ‘citizens gape at her and praise her tires’ (4.2.50-51). Those tires could be robes, however.

4 . ‘Tyre of gold’: Edmund Spenser, Faerie Queene (1590), 1.10.32. ‘Tyer of netting’: Michael Drayton, Muses Elisium (1630), 2.113. ‘Ship tire’: Jorge de Montemayor, Diana, trans. Bartholomew Yong (1598), in Hotson 1949, 178. ‘Mourning tire’: will of 1639 in Wills and Inventories of Bury St Edmunds 1470-1650 (Camden Society, 1850), 183. ‘Turkish tires’: John Hall, Paradoxes (1650), 67. ‘Squirrels’ tails’: John Marston, Histriomastix (1599), 2.117. In Jonson’s Everyman in his Humour (1598), 3.2.37-8, Kitely’s decree that his wife ‘shall no more/Wear three-pil’d acorns to make my horns ache [cuckold him]’ certainly refers to headgear and perhaps to a head-tire.

5 . George Chapman, A Justification of a Strange Act of Nero (1629), in M. R. Ridley, ed., Antony and Cleopatra (Arden edn, 1954), 67n.

6 . John Stow, Annales, ed. E. Howe (1631), 1038; Stow’s spelling ‘perwig’ is also found in Hamlet Q1. Joseph Hall has ‘th’ unruly winde blowes off his periwinke’ (Satires, 1598, 3.5 line 8). For other spellings see OED, s.v. periwig. Philemon Holland uses ‘perrucke’ in his translation of Suetonius (Historie of Twelve Caesars, 1606); his marginal explanation (‘a counterfeit cappe of false hair’) suggests the word was still unfamiliar.

7 . On hair-cauls (‘nets made of knotted human hair’) see Arnold 1988, 204. One decorated with pearls is visible in a portrait of Queen Elizabeth (Pollok House, Glasgow, c. 1590; Arnold 1988, figs 46, 296). Her hoodmaker, Margaret Sketts or Schetz, supplied these items. The tiremaker would also use ‘rolls’: tightly packed hair held together inside nets, used to bolster up the natural hair.

8 . I am grateful to Susan North, Curator of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, for information in this paragraph and elsewhere.

9 . In the ‘Armada’ portrait (1588) she wears a ‘halo of pearls’ surrounding a ‘bodkin topped with feathers and a diamond fleur de lys’ (Scarisbrick 1995, 15). See also head-tires in portraits of Mary Fitton (c. 1585, Arbury Hall); Princess Elizabeth (Robert Peake, 1603, National Maritime Museum); and the Countess of Arundel (Daniel Mytens, c. 1618, NPG).

10 . Maids of Honour: Arnold 1988, 202. The same document records one of the Maids, Dorothy Abington, receiving lengths of black and orange sarcenet ‘to lyne cawles’. Mountague’s payment: BL Egerton 2806, fol. 216, 27 September 1586.

11 . Norris 1938, 2.609. The German traveller Leopold von Wedel, who saw her at Hampton Court in 1585, writes: ‘on either side of her crisp hair hung a great pearl as large as a hazel-nut’ (Klarwill 1928, 322-3). This ‘crisp’ or curled hair was a wig. An earlier report (Pierre Ronsard, Le Boccage royal, 1567) refers to her ‘longues tresses blondes’, but these may have been her own tresses.

12 . PRO LC5/36, fols 212-13, 6 June 1592; LC5/37, fol. 90, 29 April 1595. Cf. LC5/37, fols 222, 257, 288. The ‘heads of hair’ are distinct from periwigs; they were conveniently sheaved bundles of hair to be used for making hair-cauls, hair-lace, etc.

13 . Mary wore wigs twenty years earlier, as witnessed by Sir Francis Knollys: ‘Mystres Marye Ceaton [Seaton], who is . . . the fynest dresser of a woman’s heade and heare that is to be seen in any countrye . . . did sett sotche a curled heare upon the Queen [Mary] that was said to be a perewycke that shoed very delicately’ (letter to Sir William Cecil, 28 June 1568, BL Stowe MS 560, fol. 24v). Knollys seems to have been particularly taken with this, for early the following year Nicholas White wrote of Mary: ‘Her hair of itself is black, and yet Mr Knollys told me that she wears hair of sundry colours’ (Norris 1938, 3.2.515-16).

14 . Marie’s payment: see Part One, note 24. Weaver had already known the Mountjoys for some time (since c. 1596 according to his Court of Requests deposition). On the Sheppards see Chapter 26.

15 . The headwear shown by Van Somer (NPG) is ‘an attire of royal pear-shaped pearls standing up at the back of her head on a wire covered with red ribbon’, set off by a large ‘table-cut diamond bodkin in the centre of her head, with pear-pearl and ruby drops hanging from it, and a tuft of feathers behind’ (Scarisbrick 1995, 21, 67).

16 . Erondell 1605, sigs E1v-E3v.

17 . The carcanet, often a collar or necklace, is here a head-ornament (cf. Cotgrave 1611, s.v. fermaillet: ‘a carkanet or border of gold etc such as Gentlewomen wear about their heads’). Erondell’s last dialogue, ‘Of the going to bed’, has more on Madame de Rimelaine’s headwear: a ‘white hayre-lace to binde my haires’, a ‘white fillet [hair-band] for to raise up my haires’, a ‘little linnen coyffe’, and an under-cap.

18 . In modern French atour is used mainly in the plural, and with a jocular note: a woman dans ses atours = dressed up in her finery.

19 . Byrne 1930, xiii-xv; J. Maclean, Lives of the Berkeleys (1883).

20 . Christs Teares, sigs S3-S4v; Nashe 1958, 2.137-40. ‘Frounzed’ = frizzed, curled (OED ‘frounce’, sense 2). ‘Streetwalkers’: Robert Greene, A Notable discovery of cozenage (1591), in Salga˜do 1972, 180.

21 . Bod., Ashmole MS 208, fol. 121v, c. 1593; Kassell 2005, 160.

22 . Microcynicon, 1599, Satire 3; Middleton 1886, 8.123-7. He refers again to hair-extensions in A Mad World, my Masters (c. 1605), where women who ‘wear half-moons made of another’s hair’ are said to be ‘against kind’ (i.e. unnatural).

23 . Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; Hearn 1995, no. 78 (cat. entry by Tabitha Barber); Strong 1983, 155-7.

24 . CSP Venetian 1617-19, 67-8.

25 . Satyres and Satyricall Epigrams, with certain Observations at Blackfryers (1617), sig E8v; Gurr 1987, 231. However, the ‘tittle’ may be a small hat, or even (as Matthew Steggle suggests to me) a beauty spot. Wearing expensive headgear to the theatre had its dangers, as in Sir John Harington’s vivid anecdote (c. 1595) in which two muggers try to snatch a jewelled ‘border’ off a woman’s head as she walks up the ‘dark and private’ playhouse stairs (Letters and Epigrams, ed. Norman McLure (1930), 245-6; Gurr 1987, 210).

15. The ‘tire-valiant’

26 . Chambers 1923, 1.372. On the costs and logistics of theatrical costuming see also Cerasano 1994; Bentley 1984; Carson 1988, 35.

27 . Two inventories of Admiral’s Men costumes survive: one dated 10 March 1598, transcribed from a lost original by Edmund Malone in his 1790 edn of Shakespeare (Wells 2006, 234-6); and one c. 1602 (Dulwich College MS1/90; Cooper 2006, no. 35).

28 . Longleat House, Wilts., Portland Papers 1, fol. 159. The folio, which also contains an elegantly scripted excerpt from the play, is signed ‘Henricus Peacham’; the date, in abbreviated Latin, may be 1594 or 1595. Titus was in repertoire at the Rose, performed by Sussex’s Men, in the winter of 1593-4. Peacham, later the author of The Art of Drawing (1606) and The Compleat Gentleman (1623), was then a sixteen-year-old student at Cambridge. The costuming implications of the sketch are discussed in Cerasano 1994. See also June Schlueter, ‘Rereading the Peacham Drawing’, SQ50 (1999), 171-84, though her central thesis (that the sketch is not of Shakespeare’s play, but of a scene from the anonymous Tragaedia von Tito Andronico, performed in Germany by English actors, and known only in a German translation published in 1620) may struggle for acceptance.

29 . Platter 1937, 166-95; Wotton to Edmund Bacon, 2 July 1613, in L. Pearsall Smith, ed., Life and Letters of Henry Wotton (1907), 2.32.

30 . Stallybrass 1996, 295.

31 . The Blacke Booke (1604), in Middleton 1886, 8.13; Melton 1620, sig. E4r. For a general survey of headgear worn onstage see Linthicum 1936, 216-37.

32 . The author is sometimes identified as William Parrat. Two ballads on the burning of the Globe were registered the day after the fire (SR 26 July 1613; Arber 1875-94, 3.528), one of them by Parrat, but it does not have the same title as this one, which was first published in 1816 (Gentleman’s Magazine 86, 114) from a MS found in York. See Chambers 1923, 2.420; Peter Beale, ‘The Burning of the Globe’, TLS 20 June 1986. On Heminges’s managerial role, see Mary Edmond, ‘John Heminges’ (ODNB 2004).

33 . See note 27 above.

34 . Foakes 2002, 185, 198 (Diary, fols 95v, 104). William Gosson of St Olave’s, Southwark, is listed in subsidy rolls from 1593 (PRO E179/146/ 349 etc); he may or may not be Stephen Gosson’s brother of that name, later described as ‘gentleman and drum-major to James I’. Another possible husband for Mrs Gosen is Lianard Gawson, a Polish tailor from Danzig (Gdansk) listed in the 1593 return (Scouloudi 1985, 178), though he was at that point unmarried.

35 . Foakes 2002, 221 (Diary, fol. 118v).

36 . The story of Proteus and Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1590) suggests Shakespeare’s knowledge of Diana. It was translated from the Spanish by Bartholomew Yong in the early 1580s; possibly Shakespeare knew this translation in MS, as it was not published till 1598.

37 . Merry Wives (1602), sig. D4v: ‘The arched bent of thy brow / Would become the ship tire, the tire vellet, / Or anie Venetian tire.’ On the Quarto text see Gerald Johnson, ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor Q1: Provincial Touring and Adapted Texts’ (SQ 38 (1987), 154-65). ‘Tire-volant’: see Steevens’s edn of Shakespeare (1793), vol. 3.

38 . Feuillerat 1908, 241; Korda 2002, 212-14. Also in the 1573-4 accounts are an ‘Italian woman’ and her daughter, paid £1 13s 4d for ‘hier of womens heares for the Children’, and for attending the Children ‘to dresse their heades’; and a ‘Mistris Swegoo’, who also sounds foreign, paid to ‘garnishe ix heades . . . for the ix Muzes’ (Feuillerat 1908, 219, 156).

39 . Jonson 1925-51, 7.205-41; Orgel and Strong 1973, 1.101-5; Hearn 1995, 190.

40 . Belvoir Castle accounts, 4 March and 18 May 1606 (HMC Rutland 4.457-8). The other ‘Powers of Juno’ were the Countesses of Bedford and Montgomery, Ladies Berkeley and Knollys, and three Maids of Honour, Dorothy Hastings, Blanche Somerset and Cecily Sackville. The earlierMasque of Blackness (described in the Revels accounts as the Queen’s ‘Maske of Moures’) had parts for eleven ‘Ladies of Honour’, who ‘came in great shows of Devises wch they satt in, wth exzselent Musike’ (PRO AO3/ 908/13, fol. 2v; Streitberger 1986, 9).

41 . For Jonson’s costume notes see Jonson 1925-51, 7.230-31; for a discussion of the paintings, see ibid., xv-xix. The third painting (Welbeck Abbey; Hearn 1995, no. 129) was first catalogued at Titchfield House in 1731 as ‘A Turkish Lady’. One of Inigo Jones’s earliest surviving costume designs (Chatsworth House; Hearn 1995, no. 106) has similarities to these costumes and may be for Hymenaei; the head-tire has been compared to Italian models in a Florentine intermezzo of 1589 and in Vercellio 1598.

42 . Pory to Sir Robert Cotton, 7 January 1606 (BL Cotton MS Jul Caes 3, fols 301-2); Jonson 1925-51, 10.466.

16. In the workshop

43 . See Mountjoy’s ‘Answer’ (Appendix 1). On the movements of Stephen and Mary Belott in the years after their marriage see Chapter 21. There was a similar disagreement over an unpaid brewer’s bill.

44 . Whitebrook 1932, 93. A more precise explanation of Courtois’s ‘purled work’ is found in the unlikely location of Henry Ainsworth’s Annotations on the Book of Psalms (1622). Glossing Psalm 45.13-14, ‘Her clothing is of wrought gold . . . [a] raiment of needlework’, Ainsworth suggests the garment is made of ‘purled works or grounds, closures of gold such as precious stones are set in’. This would be apt for Mountjoy’s requirements: a form of gilded embroidery to house the gems that featured in a tire.

45 . Sleny Georghiou, quoted in Sunday Times (‘Talking Heads’, 2 July 2006). Cf. Victoria Beckham on ‘bad extensions’: ‘You can see the glue holding the bonds in at the scalp, [and] the extensions themselves look all frizzy because they’re made out of nylon instead of real hair’ (That Extra Half an Inch, 2006, 290). Such or similar disasters were doubtless avoided by the expert stylists of Silver Street.

46 . Glover 1979, 1-12.

47 . Randle Holme, The Academy of Armory (1688), 3.21.

48 . OED, s.v. sleave silk. Webster’s Dictionary defines it as ‘(a) The knotted or entangled part of silk or thread. (b) Silk not yet twisted; floss’. ‘Sleave’ is cognate with Swedish slejf and German Schleife, a knot. Fishing flies were made out of it: ‘Sleave-silk flies / Bewitch poor fishes’ wand’ring eyes’ (John Donne, ‘The Bait’, 23-4; Donne 1912, 1.47).

49 . Chamber’s Cyclopaedia 1727-41, s.v. See Gina M. Barrett, ‘Metallic Threads: A Background to their Use in Textile Work’ (http://www.et-tu.com/soper-lane).

50 . See Epilogue and Appendix 4. The petition is mentioned (misdated and with no source) in Hotson 1949, 179; I am grateful to James Travers for his help in tracking it down.

51 . This document, also mentioned without source in Hotson 1949, 179, and described only as ‘a lawsuit’, remains elusive.

52 . Cunnington 1970, 224; Feuillerat 1908, 23, 82.

53 . For ‘ravelled’ = frayed, see OED, s.v. ravel, citing Bishop Fuller, ‘To hem the end of our history so it ravel not out . . .’.

17. The underpropper

54 . In a commendatory poem opposite the engraving in F1 (below it in editions subsequent to F3, 1664), Ben Jonson writes: ‘This figure that thou here seest put, / It was for gentle Shakespeare cut; / Wherein the Graver had a strife / With Nature, to out-doo the life.’ That Jonson really thought the portrait accurate and expressive (or that he had even seen it when he wrote the poem) cannot be guaranteed. See Spielmann 1924, 27.

55 . On the identity of the engraver see Edmond 1991, Schuckman 1991. Martin Droeshout senior, born in Brussels in the late 1560s, came to England in about 1584 (Kirk 1910, 3.179, 183; Edmond 1991, 341). He was created denizen in 1608, appearing on the same patent roll as Mountjoy (Shaw 1911, 11), and was a freeman of the Painter-Stainers’ company. He is last heard of, living at St Olave’s, Hart Street, in 1641. Martin Droeshout junior, son of Michael and nephew of Martin senior, was born in London in 1601. It has been thought that he was the engraver, primarily because Martin senior is described in contemporary documents as a ‘painter’ or ‘limner’ (miniature portraitist) but never as an engraver. This line of reasoning is challenged by Edmond: the word ‘painter’, she shows, was used loosely to convey a general idea of ‘picture-maker’. The Dutch artist Remegius Hogenberg, who was certainly an engraver, appears eight times in the register of St Giles, Cripplegate: only once is he described as a ‘graver’; on all the other occasions he is called a ‘picture-maker’ or ‘painter’. The nomenclature, in short, does not preclude the painter Martin senior from also being the ‘graver’ of Shakespeare’s portrait.

56 . Strong 1969, 283; Cooper 2006, 48. Some thought the original was the ‘Flower’ portrait (Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford; formerly owned by Edgar Flower), an atmospheric oil-portrait, demonstrably similar to the Droeshout, and inscribed with the date 1609. However, recent technical analysis (2005; Cooper 2006, 72-5) has shown that, as many suspected, it is a nineteenth-century fabrication.

57 . Spielmann 1924, 34-5. The poor quality of this prestigious commission is mysterious: Richard Vaughan’s portrait of Ben Jonson (c. 1622-7) shows how much more vivid and expressive an engraving could be (Riggs 1989, 281). One plausible conjecture is that the editors of F1 were obliged to commission Droeshout, because it was he who had painted the original portrait on which the engraving was based (Honigmann 1985, 146-8). Honigmann is one of the engraving’s apologists: its ‘withdrawn and fastidious features’ convey ‘the thoughtfulness of a reserved and private man, not the tavern-haunting, overflowing poet of popular mythology’.

58 . On the Stratford monument see SRI 158-63. The Janssen family, Dutch immigrant sculptors and ‘tomb-makers’, have various connections with Shakespeare: their workshop was in Southwark, close to the Globe; their clientele included the Earls of Southampton and Rutland, both patrons of Shakespeare, and the Combe family of Stratford, his neighbours.

59 . Cooper 2006, 48. The style of the doublet is after c. 1610, tending to confirm its absence from the original portrait.

60 . Stubbes 1879, 1.52. ‘The underpropper or supportasse was a wire frame ... spread out behind from the doublet collar, to which it was fixed, supporting the ruff, which was pinned to it’ (Cunnington 1970, 113). OED notes that ‘supportasse’, found only in Stubbes, may derive from a printer’s error. It was also known as a ‘pickadil’ (originally a cutwork border for a collar, and probably the origin of the London street name, Piccadilly). Some underproppers were made of stiffened card, pasteboard, etc; an example in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Accession no. 192-1900) is discussed by Susan North in Cooper 2006, 120.

61 . Arnold 1988, 226.

62 . The supporter is associated with wigs and tires by William Warner: ‘Buskes, perriwigs, maskes, plumes of feathers fram’d, supporters’ (Albion’s England, 1592, 9.47).

PART FIVE: AMONG STRANGERS

18. Blackfriars and Navarre

1 . Kirwood 1931; David Kathman, ‘Richard Field’, ODNB 2004. It has been suggested that Field was a source of books used by Shakespeare, such as Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1589) and North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives (1595), in all of which he had a hand as printer or publisher.

2 . In his will (8 June 1591, PRO Prob 11/77; PCC Sainberbe) Dutwite calls himself a merchant. He is not listed among the ‘strangers’ of St Martin le Grand in 1582 (see Part Three, note 15), unless he is James ‘Detewe’, taxed on £3 and described as a ‘bugler’ (probably a maker of bugles, ‘tube-shaped glass beads’ for decorating garments, rather than a musician). A James Detwitt, pursemaker, became a denizen in 1550 (Kirk 1910, 2.350): if he was Jacqueline’s father it is likely she was born in England.

3 . Greg and Boswell 1930, 11. See W. R. Lefanu, ‘Thomas Vautrollier, Printer and Bookseller’, HSL Proceedings 20 (1964), 12-25; Andrew Pettegree, ‘Thomas Vautrollier’, ODNB 2004. Two of their four sons (Manassas and James) were alive in 1624, when they are mentioned in Field’s will.

4 . Another possible Frenchwoman known to Shakespeare was ‘Dorothy Soer, wife of John Soer’, named in a legal document of 1596 in which William Wayte swore out ‘sureties of the peace’ against her and three others, one of them Shakespeare (Hotson 1931). French families named Soeur, Soir, Soyer, Sohier, etc, are found in immigrant lists of the period (Honigmann 1985, 150-51) but Dorothy has not yet been identified.

5 . Burghley was probably behind Field’s first publication, The Copie of a Letter Sent out of England to Don Bernardin Mendoza (1588): this piece of anti-Spanish propaganda was ostensibly the work of a Catholic priest, Richard Leigh, but manuscripts survive in Burghley’s hand (Pettegree, ‘Thomas Vautrollier’, ODNB 2004). The following year Field wrote a fulsome dedication to Burghley, calling himself ‘a printer alwaies ready and desirous to be at your Honourable commaundement’ (George Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 1589, sig. A3v).

6 . Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. R. David (Arden edn, 1956), xxix-xxx; A. Lefranc, Sous le masque de William Shakespeare (1918).

7 . The Huguenot language-teacher G. de la Mothe, whose French Alphabet was published by Field in 1592, may have been a conduit of information. For what little is known of him see Lambley 1920, 161-2; Frances Yates, A Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost (1936), 61-4. He may possibly be the De la Mothe found by Lefranc in a contemporary list of Navarre court officials.

8 . SDL 130. The printing of Venus probably began soon after Field’s licensing of the copy (SR 18 April 1593).

9 . The entry in Stonley’s account book (Folger Shakespeare Library; SDL no. 93) is the first recorded purchase of a book by Shakespeare. On John Eliot (who is not included in ODNB) see John Lindsay, ed., The Parlement of Prattlers (1928); Lever 1953, 79-80; Nicholl 1984, 177-9. On Shakespeare’s use of his language manual Ortho-epia Gallica (1593) see note 15 below.

10 . On ‘The Booke of Sir Thomas More’ (BL Harley MS 7368) see W. W. Greg’s introduction (1911) and Harold Jenkins’s supplement (1961) to the Malone Society edn; T. H. Howard-Hill, Shakespeare and ‘Sir Thomas More’ (Cambridge, 1989); and SRI 109-16, with reproductions of the three pages attributed to Shakespeare (fols 8r-9r). Much of fol. 8 was damaged in a botched nineteenth-century restoration. The hands of Munday, Chettle and Dekker have also been identified in the MS. Various dates are proposed for the playscript, of which c. 1593 is the earliest. In the Shakespeare passage, ‘spurn you like dogs’ is close to Merchant of Venice (c. 1596), 1.3.113; and ‘Friends, masters, countryman’ to Julius Caesar (c. 1599), 3.2.78. But self-echoings are not necessarily close in time.

19. Shakespeare’s aliens

11 . Haughton 1598, A4v. A useful survey of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical representations of foreigners is in Hoenselaars 1992, 50-75, 108-43 (on Haughton’s play: 54-8).

12 . Nashe 1958, 1.365. Some forty foreign surgeons and physicians appear in Tudor denization lists, most of them French (Page 1893, l). Sisson relates Caius to Dr Peter Chamberlain, a French gynaecologist in London, but it is not certain he was in practice by 1597 (Essays & Studies 13 (1960), 10-11). French doctors were associated with the ‘chymicall physick’ of Paracelsus (Nashe’s quack is a ‘mettle-bruing Paracelsian’); there is no indication that Caius is a vehicle for satire on this, though I note elsewhere (Nicholl 1980, 76-80) that Falstaff’s ordeal in the laundry basket (3.5.90-125) is comically expressed in terms of Paracelsian chemistry (he is ‘stopt in like a strong distillation’, etc).

13 . Like Caius, Haughton’s Delion is a ‘clipper of the King’s English, and ... eternall enemie to all good language’ (Haughton 1598, B2v). Dr Johnson comments, à propos Caius, on the limited comic appeal of ‘language distorted and depraved by provincial or foreign pronunciations’ (Johnson’s Shakespeare, 1773 edn; Wimsatt 1969, 110-11). On broken English on the Elizabethan stage: Clough 1933.

14 . Henry V, ed. J. Dover Wilson (1947), 152. The French in Merry Wives is also mangled in transmission, e.g. ‘Il fait fort ehando’ (1.4.46-7), where a compositor has mistranscribed chaude, ‘hot’.

15 . Shakespeare’s use of Ortho-epia is elegantly demonstrated in Lever 1953. In Henry V, Pistol’s French boy says: ‘ce soldat icy est dispos’e tout asture de couppes vostre gorge’ (4.4.35-6). The unusual contraction ‘asture’ (for à cette heure, ‘immediately’) is found in similar context in Eliot’s dialogue, ‘The Thief’ (Eliot 1593, 104-7): ‘Je vous couperay la gorge . . . Il est bien garrott’ asteure.’ Most interesting is the seepage of Ortho-epia into the Dauphin’s praise of his horse (3.7.11-29). Perusing Eliot’s dialogue, ‘The Horseman’ (pp. 87-9), Shakespeare’s eye strayed to the top of page 87, which contains the last few lines of the previous dialogue, ‘The Apothecary’. From this come the nutmeg, ginger, hares and flying horses which appear in the Dauphin’s speech. See also Jean Fuzier, ‘ “I quand sur le possession de Fraunce”. A French Crux in Henry V Solved’, SQ 32 (1981), 97-100; Timothy Billings, ‘Two New Sources for Shakespeare’s Bawdy French in Henry V’, NQ 52 (2005), 202-4.

16 . Shapiro 1995; Dominic Green, The Double Life of Dr Lopez (2003); Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England (1941), 139-44.

17 . William Rowley, A Search for Money (1609).

18 . Shakespeare’s more compassionate treatment of the outsider in the Merchant anticipates a comparable trend discerned by Hoenselaars in early Jacobean comedy, which moves away from hostile stereotyping of foreigners to a ‘strategy of surprise’ in which ‘the foreigner who used to be the butt of comedy is converted into its agent to gull the English and expose their folly’ (Hoenselaars 1992, 114; cf. Leinwand 1986, 46-8). Examples are in Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho! (1604), Edward Sharpham’s The Fleire (1607) and Jonson’s Alchemist (1610). But the (Jewish) playwright Arnold Wesker thinks the effect of the Merchant (whatever its intention) was ‘irredeemably anti-Semitic’. The ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ speech was ‘so powerful a piece of special pleading that it dignified the anti-Semitism’; the audience came away with its prejudices ‘confirmed but held with an easy conscience’ (The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel, 1997, xv-xvi).

19 . On racial issues in Othello, see Cowhig 1985, Bartels 1990, and (with reflection on the play’s fortunes in Apartheid-era South Africa) Martin Orkin, ‘Othello and the “Plain Face” of Racism’, SQ 38 (1987), 166-88. For a panoramic background see Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (1965) and The Elizabethan Image of Africa (Charlottesville, 1971). ‘Little black husband’: Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex (1928), 279.

20 . Forbes 1971, 3-4; Picard 2003, 123-4; Edward Scobie, Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain (1972), 5-11.

21 . Bartels 1990, 451: Iago attempts ‘to demonize and disempower Othello’ by luring him into a ‘self-incriminating display of “alien” behaviour’.

20. Dark ladies

22 . This cryptic lady has been variously identified. Mal Fitton was proposed by Frank Harris (The Man Shakespeare, 1909); Jacqueline Field by C. C. Stopes (Shakespeare’s Environment, 1918); Jane Davenant by Arthur Ache-son (Shakespeare’s Sonnet Story, 1922); Lucy Morgan, a.k.a. ‘Black Luce’ or ‘Lucy Negro’ by G. B. Harrison (Shakespeare under Elizabeth, 1933), Leslie Hotson (Mr W. H., 1964) and Anthony Burgess (Nothing like the Sun, 1964); and Emilia Bassano by A. L. Rowse (Rowse 1973). I do not intend to add Marie Mountjoy to this list (the ‘Dark Landlady’?), though her credentials are no worse than any of these.

23 . Astrophil and Stella (1591), 8.9; Lucrece (1594), 420; Venus and Adonis (1593), 542. Other parallels are noted in Duncan-Jones 1997, 374. Eliot’s Ortho-epia has a similar assemblage of sonneteering clich’s: ‘her eyes twinkling stars . . . her mouth coral . . . her throat of snow’ etc (Eliot 1593, 159).

24 . Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.3.56-69 (Jaggard no. 3) and 4.2.100-113 (Jaggard no. 5). The play was published in 1598 (according to the title-page not the first edition), but the Jaggard texts have variants that may come from an independent MS. There are also variants in his versions of Sonnets 138 and 144. According to F. T. Prince (The Poems, Arden edn, 1960, 153) they are ‘of the kind that might be expected in an inaccurate report’, but some critics argue that the 1609 texts represent Shakespeare’s own revisions of the earlier versions. Jackson 1999, using statistical analysis of rhyme schemes, places the ‘Dark Lady’ sequence as ‘mainly written in the 1590s’.

25 . Another literary dark lady is Diamante, the Venetian courtesan in Nashe’s novella The Unfortunate Traveller (1594): a ‘pretty, round-faced wench . . . with black eye-brows’ (Nashe 1958, 2.261). The book was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, with whom both the Sonnets and Love’s Labours are traditionally (though conjecturally) linked.

26 . The nearest Shakespeare gets to a contemporary English setting is in the Merry Wives. Though nominally medieval, as an offshoot of 1 Henry IV, the play has specific references to Elizabethan Windsor, uses actual locations (Datchet Mead, the ‘Pittie Ward’, etc), and lodges Falstaff in the Garter Inn (see Chapter 8), still in business today though the building Shakespeare knew was burned down in 1681 (information from Hester Davenport).

PART SIX: SEX & THE CITY

21. Enter George Wilkins

1 . Wilkins was certainly in St Giles by late 1607, when his daughter was baptized there (parish register, GL MS 6419/2, 13 December 1607). He is first recorded as ‘of Cow Cross’ in a court case of April 1610 (Prior 1972, 144, 152). Fludd is described as of St Giles in his deposition of 1612, and in December 1616 ‘Humphrey son of Humphrey Flood, trumpeter’ was baptized there. Thomas Floudd of St Giles, assessed at £20 in lands and fees in 1582 (PRO E179/251/16, fol. 286), may be a father or brother; the registers also have a Cadwallader Fludd, ‘yeoman’.

2 . See Part One, note 14.

3 . There is no critical edition of Wilkins’s works, but see Glenn Blayney’s introduction to the Malone Society reprint of The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1964) and other articles by Blayney listed in Sources/2. The nearest thing to a biography is Roger Prior’s incisive sixteen-page ‘Life’ (Prior 1972), supplemented by Eccles 1975; Prior 1976; Anthony Parr, ‘George Wilkins’ (ODNB 2004). William Boyd’s A Waste of Shame (BBC4, 2005) featured a memorable portrayal of Wilkins by Alan Williams.

4 . The Wilkinses are sometimes claimed as the authors of two sonnets, signed ‘G. W. Senior’ and ‘G. W. I[unior]’, in Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), but it is hard to imagine a teenaged Wilkins writing pastoral knick-knacks like this (‘Ah! Colin, whether on the lowly plain / Piping to shepherds . . .’, etc). The sonneteers are more plausibly the emblem-writer Geoffrey Whitney and his father, also Geoffrey.

5 . The Middlesex Sessions cases (first spotted by Mark Eccles) are described in Prior 1972, 144-9, and the Chancery suit of December 1614 in Prior 1976.

6 . G. Warner, Catalogue of the Manuscripts at Dulwich College (1881), 134; Prior 1976, 33-4. She owed Henslowe £2.

7 Cf. John Day, Law Tricks (1608), to which Wilkins may have contributed: ‘Ile . . . give her a kicke a the lips, and a pipe of Tobacco be my witnesse, that’s all the love I beare her’ (431-6).

8 . Cow Cross Street (still extant) ran west out of the top end of Smithfield market (Prockter and Taylor 1979, map 6). That Wilkins was of the parish of St Sepulchre’s (as in the Belott-Mountjoy deposition) rather than St James, Clerkenwell, confirms that his tavern was at the western end of the street. Present-day Farringdon Station marks the approximate site of it. On Turnmill Street (named after a water-mill on the Fleet river), see also Ackroyd 2000, 463-4.

9 . On the structure of the London sex-trade at this time see Griffiths 1993; Shugg 1977; Haynes 1997, 61-71 et passim. In cases studied by Griffiths, many brothel-owners took short-time ‘rents’ from independent prostitutes requiring a room. Anne Smith told the bench at Bridewell that she used ‘Wattwood’s, Marshall’s, Jane Fuller’s, Martyn’s, Shaw’s, and other naughty houses’; the last-mentioned, John Shaw, owned five houses and had recorded dealings with twenty-three prostitutes. A client might pay up to 10 shillings for a session in the relative comfort of a bawdy house; ambulant alley-girls charged as little as 6d.

10 . Stephen Gosson, Schoole of Abuse (1579), ed. E. Arber (1869), 36.

11 . Robert Greene, Disputation, in Salg˜do 1972, 274-5.

12 . An anonymous ‘biography’, The Life of Long Meg of Westminster, was entered in SR in 1590, but the earliest known edn is 1620; it mainly concerns her alleged feats of strength. Her career as a prostitute or bawd is documented in Capp 1998. Marshall and Remnaunt: GL, Bridewell Hospital Court-books 1 (1559-62), fols 206-10; Capp 1998, 3.

22. The Miseries

13 . J. Andreas Lowe, ‘Walter Calverley’ (ODNB 2004). Calverley refused to plead, and was pressed to death at York Castle on 5 August 1605.

14 . The identities of Calverley’s sweetheart (‘Clare Hartop’ in the play) and his guardian (‘Lord Faulconbridge’) remain uncertain (Blayney 1953; Maxwell 1956, 157-69). His wife was daughter of Sir John Brooke and niece of Lord Cobham. For bibliographic evidence of revision see Blayney 1957. Among the remnants of an earlier version are two speech-prefixes, ‘Hunsd’ (324) and ‘Huns’ (453), which seem to suggest Wilkins first used the name of Shakespeare’s former patron Lord Hunsdon for Calverley’s guardian, before settling on the safely fictional ‘Faulconbridge’. Such remnants strongly suggest Miseries 1607 was printed from Wilkins’s ‘foul papers’, though at least one garbling in the text seems the result of an aural misreporting (Matthew Steggle, ‘Demoniceacleare in The Miseries of Inforst Mariage’, NQ 53 (2006), 514-15).

15 Chambers 1923, 4.339. The Act, issued 27 May 1606, threatened a fine of £10 for every offence. Its euphemizing effects are notoriously present in F1. The original text of Othello (as preserved in the 1622 Quarto) has over fifty oaths which are watered down in the Folio text (Wells 2006, 238).

16 . On The Yorkshire Tragedy, see Malone Society reprint, ed. Sylvia Feldman (1973); Sturgess 1969, 30-38; Lisa Hopkins, ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy and Middleton’s Tragic Aesthetic’, Early Modern Literary Studies 8 (2003), 1-15. Wilkins’s redrafting of the Miseries may be contiguous with Middleton’s writing of The Yorkshire Tragedy.

17 . In 1 Henry IV, 2.4, a drawer who habitually calls ‘Anon anon Sir’ is baited by Hal and Poins; in Merry Wives, the Host often uses ‘bully’ as a form of address, as Ilford does earlier in this scene: ‘A thousand good dayes, my noble bully’ (1058).

23. Prostitutes and players

18 Rendle 1882, 70-77; Johnson 1969. Stow mentions various ‘stewhouses’ on the waterfront at Southwark, with signs painted ‘on their frontes towardes the Thames’ (Stow 1908, 2.55).

19 . The pamphlet Holland’s Leaguer by Nicholas Goodman, the play of the same name by Shakerley Marmion, and a ballad, ‘Newes from Hollands Leaguer’, all appeared in 1632, inspired by Bess Holland’s defiance of official attempts to close her down; in December 1631 the house was briefly surrounded by armed officers. According to Goodman, the brothel had earlier been ‘kept’ by Margaret Barnes a.k.a. ‘Long Meg’ (see note 12 above). Other famous Southwark whorehouses were the Cardinal’s Hat and the Castle: the latter was attached to the Hope Inn, on the site of the present-day Bankside pub, the Anchor (Ackroyd 2000, 689-91).

20 I follow the conventional emendation of FI’s ‘barne’ to ‘bars’ (first proposed by Johnson) but ‘barn’ may be an authentic early plural, cf. ‘eyne’ for ‘eyes’. On Pickt-hatch see Sugden 1925, s.v. and commentators on Merry Wives 2.2.17 (Falstaff to Pistol: ‘To your manor of Pickt-Hatch, go!’).

21 Munday, Retreat from Plays (1580), ed. Hazlitt (1869), 139; Dekker and Wilkins 1607, 64; Prynne, Histriomastix (1633), 391. Reports (or polemical claims) of ‘bawdy behaviour’ in the playhouses are surveyed in Cook 1977.

22 Munday, Retreat from Plays, 126; John Lane, Tom Tell-troths message (1600), 133. For the pejorative use of ‘housewife’, see also 2 Henry IV, 3.2.311, ‘over-scutched housewives’; and Othello, 4.1.94-5, where Bianca is described as ‘a housewife that by selling her desires / Buys herself bread and clothes’.

23 Gosson, Plays Confuted (1583), sig. f1r. Cf. Dekker and Wilkins 1607, Jest 45: ‘A wench having a good face, a good body, and good clothes on, but of bad conditions, sitting one day in the two-penny room of a playhouse, & a number of yong Gentlemen about her, against all whom she maintain’d talke’. The ‘twopenny rooms’ which feature often in these accounts of venery were partitioned sections of the upper galleries, the forerunner of the theatrical ‘box’.

24 Father Hubberds Tales (1604); Middleton 1886, 8.79-80.

25 J. W. Lever, Arden edn (1965), xxxi-xxxv.

26 The Blacke Booke (1604); Middleton 1886, 8.16.

27 . On prunes and brothels see Panek 2005.

28 . According to John Jowett, Measure sometimes sounds like Middleton because it contains some later interpolations (c. 1621) by him (Jowett 2001).

29 . Barbara Everett, ‘A Dreame of Passion’, LRB 25, 2 January 2003.

30 . Jonson distinguishes different types of collaboration when he says he wrote Volpone ‘without a co-adjutor, / Novice, journeyman or tutor’ (Prologue, 17-8; cf. Wells 2006, 26-7). The play was performed by the King’s Men in c. 1605-6, close in time to the Wilkins-Shakespeare collaboration. In terms of text contributed one could call Wilkins a full ‘co-adjutor’, though the skilled but subordinate ‘journeyman’ is perhaps a better summary of his role.

31 . The perfunctory dialogue of 4.5, a very short scene where two unnamed ‘gentlemen’ quit the brothel unexpectedly converted (‘I’ll do anything now that is virtuous, but I am out of the road of rutting forever,’ etc), sounds to me like Wilkins. The Arden edition’s stage directions quibble unnecessarily in placing 4.2 ‘in front of’ the brothel. Lines 50 (‘Wife, take her in’) and 122 (‘Take her home’) are cited to support this, but the first phrase would distinguish the reception area from the accommodation within; and the second is probably figurative for ‘take proper control of her’. 4.6, where Marina is brought to a customer, is certainly set ‘in’ the brothel.

32 . All information in this and the following paragraph is from St Giles parish register, GL MS 6419/2.

33 . Wilkins 1953, 59; Pericles, 3.1.34. The phrase was first recognized as Shakespeare’s by J. P. Collier. For other lights shed on Pericles 1609 by Wilkins’s phrasing see Massai 1997.

34 . The punchline of Jest 44 in the Wilkins-Dekker Jests to Make you Merrie (1607) sounds a note of bitter prophecy: ‘Do but marry with a whore, or else have to do with players, and thou shalt quickly run mad.’

24. Customer satisfaction

35 . Father Hubberds Tales (1604); Middleton 1886, 8.78-9.

36 . Cf. Manningham’s diary (October 1602, Sorlien 1976, 105): ‘Mr Tan-feild, speaking of a knave and his queane, said he was a little to[o] inward with hir.’

37 . Cf. 2 Henry IV, 2.4.59, ‘Can a weak empty vessel [Doll] bear such a huge full hogshead [Falstaff]?’, and other examples in Partridge 1968, s.v. ‘bear’.

38 . Archer 2000, 186.

25. To Brainforde

39 . On seventeenth-century Brentford see Turner 1922, 35-8, 128-35; Allison 1962; Edith Jackson, Annals of Ealing (1898). Within Ealing parish, Old Brentford was more populous than Ealing itself. In 1664 there were 116 households in Ealing and 259 in Old Brentford; in 1795 the figures were 200 and 500. A ‘census’ of Ealing village in 1599 lists 85 households, so we might guess (at the same sort of ratio) about 190 households in Old Brentford at the time of Mountjoy’s leasehold there. I can find nothing to identify the particular house. A Southwark man, William Amery, inherited a house in Old Brentford on his father’s death in 1597 (Allison 1962, 27, 32), and was taxed on it in 1598 (PRO E179/142/239); as he also inherited a house in Southwark, it is possible he let out the Brentford property. I also note that the wealthiest resident of Ealing parish, Edward Vaughan, assessed on £20 in lands in the 1598 subsidy (PRO E179/142/239), had his town-house in St Giles, Cripplegate; in his will of 1612 he bequeathed money to the poor of St Giles, ‘where I have long dwelt’ (Allison 1962, 29). A servant listed at his Ealing household, Alice Eaton, was perhaps related to the Eatons of St Giles who include Stephen Belott’s apprentice William Eaton and Mary Byllett’s husband Richard Eaton (see Chapter 23 above). But these are shots in the dark.

40 . On the roads to Brentford see MCR 2.89-90. The summer fair was a particular magnet for urban revellers: it is described disapprovingly by Dr Dee, who lived across the river at Mortlake, as ‘Bacchus feast at Brainford’ (Diaries, ed. E. Fenton (1998), 248).

41 . Martin Butler, ‘John Lowin’, ODNB 2004; John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (1708), 21; Honan 1998, 300.

42 On the Three Pigeons, see Turner 1922, 129-31; anon, Jests of George Peele (1627 edn), 2. A visitor in 1847 (quoted but not identified by Turner) judged the interior not much changed from Jacobean days: ‘twenty sitting or sleeping rooms; dark closets and passages and narrow staircases . . . The walls are in some places from seven to eight feet thick.’ There was also an inn at New Brentford called the Three Doves, no doubt in emulation; its innkeeper was Roger Dove (MCR 1.146).

43 MCR 1.72 (Cornewall), 1.250 (Charche).

44 MCR 1.269 (Heyward), 2.4 (Anderton), 2.82 (Flood).

45 The Thomas Johnson who married at Ealing church on 16 February 1618 (Thomas Gurney, ed., Middlesex Parish Registers: Marriages (1910), 8.11) was possibly Joan’s widower, but the name appears elsewhere in the marriage-registers. The church’s baptism and burial records do not survive.

26. ‘At his game’

46 Sorlien 1976, 208-9 (Diary, fol. 29v); cf. SDL doc. 115.

47 Microcosmographie (1628), no. 24.

48 . Letter of Sir William Trumbull to Lord Hay, in R. F. Brinkley, Nathan Field the Actor-Playwright (1920), 42. Jonson and the Rutlands: Patterson 1923, 31. Jonson flattered the Countess that she ‘was nothing inferior to her father, S[ir] P[hilip] Sidney, in poesie’ (ibid., 20).

49 An anonymous ‘Funeral Elegy’ on Burbage (c. 1619) speaks of his ‘stature small’ (Sidney Lee, DNB, 1886). In Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy Jeronimo is described as of ‘short body’, which is sometimes taken to refer to Burbage in the part; but there is no evidence he played it. Hamlet being ‘fat and scant o’ breath’ is similarly interpreted, but Mary Edmond rejects this (‘Richard Burbage’, ODNB 2004). She notes Elizabethan use of ‘fatty’ to mean sweaty, dramatically appropriate during the duel with Laertes, and infinitely preferable to a ‘portly prince lumbering about the small stage’.

50 Aubrey 1949, 85; Schoenbaum 1970, 101-2.

51 . A detailed account of John and Jane Davenant is in Edmond 1987, 4-26. Her visit to Forman: Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 287.

52 PRO SC6/JAS1/1646, fol. 28v. On Sheppard see Edmond 1987, 6-8, 16. His wife Ursula was another visitor to Forman in 1597-8 (Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 153, etc).

53 . A cynical coda to Emilia’s speech is in All’s Well, where Lavatch argues that an unfaithful wife suits the bored husband just fine: ‘The knaves come to do that for me which I am aweary of. He that ears my land spares my team, and gives me leave to in the crop; if I be his cuckold, he’s my drudge . . . Ergo he that kisses my wife is my friend’ (1.3.40-48). All that Emilia says is ironically shadowed by the fact that her husband is Iago, whose secret life is so much darker and weirder than she imagines.

54 Cf. Samuel Rowlands, Crew of Kind Gossips (1609), where a housewife talks of certain ‘kind gentlemen’ that lodge with her: ‘Two of them at my house in term-time lie, / And comfort me with jests and odd device / When as my husband’s out a-nights at dice.’ They ‘will not see me want’. These ‘odd devices’ (the s is missing for the rhyme) sound flirtatious at the least. Real-life sexual encounters in a London lodging-house are examined in Capp 1995, from a case in the Bridewell court-books involving Shakespeare’s friend Michael Drayton. In 1627 Elizabeth Hobcock, the maidservant at a lodging-house in St Clement Dane’s, deposed that she saw Mrs Mary Peters ‘hold up her clothes unto her navel before Mr Michael Drayton, and that she clapt her hand on her privy part and said it was a sound and a good one, that the said Mr Drayton did then also lay his hand upon it and stroke it, and said that it was a good one’. The accusation turns out to be false; Capp uncovers a grubby saga of sexual intrigue and blackmail. Of course, the Mountjoy establishment was not a rooming-house of this kind.

55 . Obviously this list is not exhaustive. Some, thinking of the ‘Fair Youth’ of the Sonnets and of the generally homoerotic overtone of the playhouse world, would add homosexual sex.

PART SEVEN: MAKING SURE

27. A handfasting

1 . Heinrich Bullinger, Hundred Sermons upon the Apocalypse, trans. John Daus (1573), 23.

2 Frederick Pollock and F. W. Maitland, History of English Law (1923), 2.368.

3 A Treatise of Spousals or Matrimonial Contracts (1686), 13-15.

4 Giese 2006, 120.

5 On marriage contracts see also Cook 1977a and 1991, Hopkins 1998, and (on an earlier period) Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘The Making of Marriage in Mid-Tudor England’, Journal of Family History 10 (1985), 339-52.

6 Giese 2006, 117-19.

7 . Ibid., 123, 129. The ceremony and its wordings were ancient: ‘handfast’ is found in a MS of c. 1200, ‘troth-plight’ in 1303, and a bridegroom at Ripon Cathedral in 1484 says, ‘I take the Margaret to my handfest wif’ (OED).

8 . Museum of London, 62.121/10; Cooper 2006, no. 18. ‘Gimmel’ is from Latin gemellus, ‘twin’. An attenuated version of the ring’s motto is in Beaumont and Fletcher, Wit at several Weapons (c. 1616), 5.1: ‘I knit this holy hand fast, and with this hand / The heart that owes this hand ever binding.’ In Middleton’s Chaste Maid (c. 1613) Moll’s betrothal-ring from Touchwood reads, ‘Love thats wise / Blinds parents eyes’ (3.1). The other gifts listed are from Giese 2006, 133-44. Drinking, or pledging, to one another was also a common part of the troth-plight, as in the Honthorst betrothal scene (see Plate 32), and in Jonson’s famous lyric, ‘To Celia’: ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes / And I will pledge with mine’ (Complete Poems, ed. G. Parfitt (1973), 106).

9 Cook 1991, 158; Bullinger, The Christen State of Matrimonye, trans. Miles Coverdale (1541), 49.

28. ‘They have married me!’

10 . ‘Spousals de praesenti . . . [are] very matrimony, and therefore perpetually indissoluble except for adultery’ (Swinburne, Treatise of Spousals, 15). Scarborrow’s subsequent marriage would be technically adulterous, and the contract dissoluble.

11 . Mendelson and Crawford 1998, 120. The Church’s unease about the sexual implications of civil contracts was not unrealistic. In marital disputes before the Bishop’s court in Chester, ‘out of seventeen troth-plight cases, ten show us men trying to sneak out of their contracts when they have had their fill of pleasure with the woman’ (F. J. Furnivall, Child Marriages, Divorces and Ratifications in the Diocese of Chester (1897), 43).

12 . But note the opinion of Shakespeare’s Princess Katherine (Henry V, 5.2.259-60): ‘Les dames et les demoiselles pour être baissées devant leurs noces il n’est pas la coˆtume de France’ (For women and girls to be kissed before their wedding is not the custom in France). Henry dismisses this as a ‘nice [fastidious] fashion’, and kisses her anyway.

13 On marriage vows in Measure see Harding 1950, Schanzer 1960, Nagarajan 1963.

14 See Part 1, note 28.

15 The syntax of the subordinate clause (lines 180-81) is tightly knotted: the King apparently means that the wedding (‘ceremony’) will be best (‘seem’ = be seemly) performed swiftly (‘expedient’ = expeditious) on the authority which has just been given (‘now-born brief’) by the contract.

16 . Shakespeare’s references to troth-plights are not confined to the Silver Street plays. In Henry V (c. 1599), Nym is informed of Pistol’s marriage: ‘He is married to Nell Quickly, and certainly she did you wrong, for you were troth-plight to her’ (2.1.21). As Quickly is a prostitute the term is used sardonically to mean he was a favoured customer. In Twelfth Night (1601), the offstage handfasting of Olivia and Sebastian is described by the priest: ‘A contract of eternal bond of love / Confirmed by mutual joinder of your hands, / Attested by the holy close of lips, / Strengthened by interchangement of your rings, / And all the ceremony of this compact / Sealed in my function, by my testimony’ (5.1.154-9). In Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602) Pandarus’ efforts to get the eponymous couple in bed together include a kind of mock-handfasting: ‘Go to, a bargain made. Seal it, seal it. I’ll be the witness. Here I hold your hand, here my cousin’s’ (3.2.196-8). Pandarus is the prototypical ‘pandar’ or pimp (‘Let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world’s end after my name’), and what is ‘sealed’ by these actions is not a matrimonial contract but a sexual assignation involving his niece (here called ‘cousin’). In The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610) the shepherd attempts to handfast Perdita and Florizel, ‘Take hands! A bargain! / And, friends unknown, you shall bear witness to’t / . . . Come your hand, / And daughter yours’ (4.4.381-9), but the ceremony is halted by one of the witnesses, who is Florizel’s father in disguise.

17 . Johnson’s 1765 edn of Shakespeare; Wimsatt 1969, 112.

18 . Cf. John Earle’s character-sketch of an actor: ‘He is like our painting gentlewomen, seldom in his own face, seldomer in his clothes, and he pleases the better he counterfeits . . . He does not only personate on the stage, but sometimes in the street, for he is masked still in the habit of a gentleman’ (Microcosmographie, 1628, H3v).

29. Losing a daughter

19 . The marriage of ‘John Hall gentleman & Susanna Shaxspere’ took place at Holy Trinity, Stratford, on 5 June 1607. Their only child, Elizabeth, was born the following February. Susanna’s dowry was 107 acres of Stratford land, purchased by Shakespeare in 1602 for £320 and doubtless rising in value (Honan 1998, 291-2; Maìri Macdonald, ‘A New Discovery about Shakespeare’s Estate’, SQ 45 (1994), 87-9). This is somewhat bigger than Mary Mountjoy’s alleged dowry of £260 (a ‘marriage portion’ of £60 and a legacy of £200), and considerably bigger than her actual dowry (£10 and some ‘houshould stuffe’).

20 . Dr Hall himself seems to have been an ‘honest fellow’ tailor-made to Shakespeare’s requirements. He was a gentleman from a well-off Bedford-shire family; a Cambridge graduate (Queens’ College, MA 1597); and a respected physician (SDL 234-8; Harriet Joseph, Shakespeare’s Son-in-Law , 1964). By tradition Susanna was spirited and intelligent (‘witty above her sexe’, as a contemporary epitaph complacently puts it). She signed her name in a clear, rounded hand (Honan 1998, plate 30). A year before her marriage she was fined for non-attendance at church, which may mean she had Catholic leanings; her husband, to judge from phrasings in his casebooks, was staunchly Protestant.

Epilogue

1 . Mary Edmond, ‘Henry Condell’ (ODNB 2004); cf. Hotson 1949, 184. Mountjoy’s will (Appendix 4) has a further possible Shakespeare connection. Another of its witnesses, Raphe or Ralph Merifield, may be a son-in-law of John Heminges, whose will includes a bequest to ‘my daughter Merefeild’ (PRO Prob 10/485, 9 October 1630; Honigmann and Brock 1993, 164-9). However Ralph Merifield was a professional scrivener, ‘whose name appears frequently among the testamentary depositions of the Commissary Court’; the original will was probably in his hand (Whitebrook 1932, 94). This makes the connection with Heminges unnecessary but does not invalidate it. I have found nothing on the other two witnesses, ‘Ed: Dendye’ and Robert Walker.

2 . The baptism dates are: Anne, 23 October 1608; Jane, 17 December 1609; Mary, 9 October 1614 (buried 1 May 1615); Hester, 30 November 1617 (died before 14 April 1620); Hester, 14 April 1620; Elizabeth, 21 September 1621. The date of Anne’s marriage (apparently not at St Giles) is unknown. Jane married on 2 September 1633, aged twenty-three, and Hester on 29 June 1640, aged twenty. Jane’s son, Francis Overing junior, baptized on 23 May 1636, is Stephen and Mary’s first recorded grandchild, but he died at the age of fifteen months.

3 . See Appendix 4; similar petitions can be found in Journal of the House of Lords 3 (1620-28). On the gold-thread monopoly see W. R. Scott, Joint Stock Companies (1910-12), 1.174-7; Knights 1962, 77, 229; Sidney Lee and Sean Kelsey, ‘Sir Giles Mompesson’ (ODNB 2004). According to Thomas Wilson, the monopolists developed a ‘new alchemistical way to make gold and silver lace with copper and other sophistical materials, to cozen and deceive the people; and so poisonous were the drugs that made up this deceitful composition that they rotted the hands and arms, and brought lameness upon those that wrought it’ (Life and Reign of James I, c. 1625, 155).

4 Stow 1908, 2.28, 361; John Taylor, Three Weeks from London to Hamburgh (1617), 1.

5 . Belott had probably died recently when his will (Appendix 4) was proved on 25 February 1647. The registers of St Sepulchre’s parish, of which Long Lane was part, are not extant.

6 . On the Blackfriars Gatehouse: see Part One, note 56. On Susanna and Ralph Smith (a Stratford hatter, and nephew of Shakespeare’s friend Hamnet Sadler) see EKC 2.12-13; the consistory court found in favour of Susanna, 15 July 1613, and her slanderer, John Lane, was excommunicated. On the Welcombe enclosures: EKC 2.141-52, and cf. Part One, note 2.

7 . On Thomas Quiney (son of Richard, with whom Shakespeare corresponded in 1598) see SDL 238-41. Judith died in 1662, and with the death eight years later of Shakespeare’s childless granddaughter, Elizabeth Bernard n’e Hall, the direct line of descent from Shakespeare was extinguished.

8 . Charles Severn, ed., Diary of the Rev. John Ward, 1648-79 (1839), 183. The typhoid theory: Honan 1998, 406-7.

9 . The speech is followed by an eighteen-line rhymed epilogue (‘I would now ask ye how ye like the play’, etc), but this is clearly by Fletcher.