Picture Section

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1. The deposition. Shakespeare’s statement at the Court of Requests, 11 May 1612.

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2. Plaintiff and defendant in a scene from a Jacobean law-court.

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3. Witness-list for the first session of the Belott-Mountjoy suit, including ‘Willm Shakespeare gent’.

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4. Signatures of (a) Daniel Nicholas, (b) William Eaton, (c) Noel Mountjoy and (d) Humphrey Fludd.

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5. Hulda and Charles William Wallace, discoverers of the Belott-Mountjoy papers, at the Public Record Office, c. 1909.

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6. The house on the corner. Detail from the ‘Agas’ map showing Silver Street and Muggle (or Monkwell) Street.

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7. The Coopers’ Arms, on the site of the Mountjoys’ house, from a photograph of c. 1910.

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8. St Giles, Cripplegate, with bombed-out buildings of Silver Street in the foreground. Drawing by Dennis Flanders, 1941.

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9. Commemorative stone on the site of St Olave’s, Silver Street.

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10. The surgeon of Silver Street. John Banister anatomizing a corpse at Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, 1580.

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11. The author in bed. Title-page illustration from Thomas Dekker’s Dekker his Dreame (1620).

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12. A Huguenot tailor at work, c. 1600.

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13. Subsidy roll for Aldersgate ward, 1582, listing Christopher ‘Mongey’ and his wife as tax-payers.

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14. ‘Mrs Monjoyes childe’. Burial entry in the St Olave’s register, 27 February 1596.

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15. Marie Mountjoy consults Dr Forman about missing valuables, 22 November 1597.

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16. Simon Forman, astrologer, physician and serial seducer.

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17. Henry Wood asks Forman about ‘Mari M’, 20 March 1598.

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18. Marie and ‘Madam Kitson’ in a jotting by Forman, c. January 1598.

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19. A woman visiting an astrologer, from a seventeenth-century woodcut.

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20. A French dancer of c. 1580, wearing a head-tire of the sort made by the Mountjoys.

21. A lady (perhaps Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford) costumed for the masque

Hymenaei, 1606.

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22. Theatrical headwear in Henry Peacham’s sketch of a scene from Titus Andronicusc. 1594

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23. Payments to ‘Marie Mountjoy Tyrewoman’ in Queen Anne’s household accounts, 1604-5.

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24. Queen Anne by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, c. 1605-10.

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25. Signature of George Wilkins.

26. First edition of Wilkins’s Miseries, performed by the King’s Men in c. 1606.

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27. ‘A punk after supper’. Customers eating in a Jacobean brothel.

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28. The famous Southwark brothel called Holland’s Leaguer, in a woodcut of 1632.

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29. Tire-wearing courtesan from a painting by Isaac Oliver, c. 1590-95.

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30. A wherry on the Thames near London Bridge, 1614. These water-taxis took playgoers across to the Globe and adulterers upriver to Brentford.

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31. The Three Pigeons at Brentford, owned by Shakespeare’s colleague John Lowin, seen here in a nineteenth-century engraving.

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32. A handfasting. Detail from Gerrit van Honthorst’s Supper with Betrothalc. 1625.

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33. Wedding of Stephen and Mary at St Olave’s, 19 November 1604.

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34. Burial of Marie Mountjoy at St Olave’s, 30 October 1606.

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35. Register copy of Christopher Mountjoy’s will, 26 January 1620.

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36. Burial of Christopher Mountjoy at St Giles, Cripplegate, 29 March 1620.

a

All depositions and other documents in the Belott-Mountjoy suit are fully transcribed in the Appendix. Quotations from them in the text are sometimes pruned of repetitious legalisms.

b

In Nicholas’s second deposition (19 June) these computations are, more plausibly, given the other way round.

c

In the margin beside Interrogatories 3, 4 and 5 are written the names, respectively, of Humphrey Fludd, William Shakespeare and George Wilkins. They were expected to testify on these particular questions - but Shakespeare did not appear at the second session. Interrogatory 4 has phrasings attributed to Shakespeare by Daniel Nicholas.

d

This entry is written in what Wallace calls a ‘flourished court-hand of Gothic-Roman very difficult to read’. I have followed his transcription and given a rather speculative translation.

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