1. The deposition. Shakespeare’s statement at the Court of Requests, 11 May 1612.
2. Plaintiff and defendant in a scene from a Jacobean law-court.
3. Witness-list for the first session of the Belott-Mountjoy suit, including ‘Willm Shakespeare gent’.
4. Signatures of (a) Daniel Nicholas, (b) William Eaton, (c) Noel Mountjoy and (d) Humphrey Fludd.
5. Hulda and Charles William Wallace, discoverers of the Belott-Mountjoy papers, at the Public Record Office, c. 1909.
6. The house on the corner. Detail from the ‘Agas’ map showing Silver Street and Muggle (or Monkwell) Street.
7. The Coopers’ Arms, on the site of the Mountjoys’ house, from a photograph of c. 1910.
8. St Giles, Cripplegate, with bombed-out buildings of Silver Street in the foreground. Drawing by Dennis Flanders, 1941.
9. Commemorative stone on the site of St Olave’s, Silver Street.
10. The surgeon of Silver Street. John Banister anatomizing a corpse at Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, 1580.
11. The author in bed. Title-page illustration from Thomas Dekker’s Dekker his Dreame (1620).
12. A Huguenot tailor at work, c. 1600.
13. Subsidy roll for Aldersgate ward, 1582, listing Christopher ‘Mongey’ and his wife as tax-payers.
14. ‘Mrs Monjoyes childe’. Burial entry in the St Olave’s register, 27 February 1596.
15. Marie Mountjoy consults Dr Forman about missing valuables, 22 November 1597.
16. Simon Forman, astrologer, physician and serial seducer.
17. Henry Wood asks Forman about ‘Mari M’, 20 March 1598.
18. Marie and ‘Madam Kitson’ in a jotting by Forman, c. January 1598.
19. A woman visiting an astrologer, from a seventeenth-century woodcut.
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.
22. Theatrical headwear in Henry Peacham’s sketch of a scene from Titus Andronicus, c. 1594
23. Payments to ‘Marie Mountjoy Tyrewoman’ in Queen Anne’s household accounts, 1604-5.
24. Queen Anne by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, c. 1605-10.
25. Signature of George Wilkins.
26. First edition of Wilkins’s Miseries, performed by the King’s Men in c. 1606.
27. ‘A punk after supper’. Customers eating in a Jacobean brothel.
28. The famous Southwark brothel called Holland’s Leaguer, in a woodcut of 1632.
29. Tire-wearing courtesan from a painting by Isaac Oliver, c. 1590-95.
30. A wherry on the Thames near London Bridge, 1614. These water-taxis took playgoers across to the Globe and adulterers upriver to Brentford.
31. The Three Pigeons at Brentford, owned by Shakespeare’s colleague John Lowin, seen here in a nineteenth-century engraving.
32. A handfasting. Detail from Gerrit van Honthorst’s Supper with Betrothal, c. 1625.
33. Wedding of Stephen and Mary at St Olave’s, 19 November 1604.
34. Burial of Marie Mountjoy at St Olave’s, 30 October 1606.
35. Register copy of Christopher Mountjoy’s will, 26 January 1620.
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.