4

Shakespeare in London

The story of Shakespeare and the Mountjoys is a small chapter in the larger and longer story of Shakespeare in London. He was not actually a Londoner, of course. He was born, married and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon, and this provincial market-town remained, in most senses of the word, his home. His parents, wife, children and most of his siblings and cousins lived there. He inherited, as an adult, the house where he had spent his childhood. In 1598 he bought his own rather grand house on the edge of town, New Place, where he spent more and more time in his later years, and where he died, at the age of fifty-two, in 1616. In these fundamental ways Shakespeare was - precisely as he says in his deposition - ‘of Stratford-upon-Avon in the countie of Warwickshire’.

But, for all this, the fact remains that the ‘sweet swan of Avon’⁵¹ spent a lot more of his adult life in London than he did in Stratford. It was his place of business, the theatrical and literary capital to which he was drawn and in which he struggled to success and eminence. He was there out of professional necessity, though this need not imply he was there unwillingly. He was, like so many other Londoners, an incomer: part of a demographic rip-tide which saw the city double its population during the sixteenth century, reaching about 200,000 at the beginning of James’s reign. Many of his literary contemporaries were also of provincial stock - Christopher Marlowe and John Lyly from Canterbury, Thomas Nashe from Lowestoft, Robert Greene from Norwich, George Chapman from Hitchin, Francis Beaumont from Leicestershire, and so on. Even Sir Walter Ralegh, the acme of courtly sophistication, ‘spake broad Devonshire to his dying day’.⁵²

‘London, thou art the floure of cities all,’ ran the old ditty, though the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe had a different angle: ‘London, thou art the seeded garden of sinne, the sea that sucks in all the scummy chanels of the realme.’⁵³ Perhaps both views are true - by the end of the sixteenth century London was one of the largest, liveliest and most sophisticated cities in Europe, but it was also overcrowded, squalid, corrupt, crime-ridden and plague-infested. A rich whiff of danger and pleasure blows through those narrow wood-built streets, a human profusion which for the provincial newcomer must have been intoxicating. A sense of the city’s sheer verve plays into the wonderful ‘low-life’ strata of Shakespeare’s drama - Falstaff and his cronies drinking at East Cheap, the brothel-world of Nell Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, Pompey Bum and Mistress Overdone.

It is not known when Shakespeare first came to the city. The last record of him as a young man in Stratford is the baptism of his twins, Hamnet and Judith, on 2 February 1585 (it is not per se a record of him, but one assumes he was there). He was then twenty years old. The first records of him in London date from mid-1592 - the appearance of ‘harey the vi’ (almost certainly the play we now call Henry VI Part 1) at the Rose theatre; the attack on him in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit.⁵⁴ Between these sightings lie the legendary ‘Lost Years’, a documentary desert seven years wide in which the early biographers placed unsubstantiated oases of activity - he had been a ‘schoolmaster in the country’ (John Aubrey) or a ‘lawyer’s clerk’ (Edmund Malone) - and which more recent commentators have interpreted in terms of the clandestine movements of a young Catholic.⁵⁵ Any or all of these might be true, but a good part of the so-called lost years must be located in London. The whole tenor of Greene’s attack on him in 1592 shows he had by then acquired some success both as an actor and as a writer of plays, and was thus, in Greene’s view, an ‘upstart crow beautified with our feathers’. (‘Our’ refers to the clique of university-educated writers which also included Marlowe, Nashe, George Peele and Thomas Watson: the ‘University Wits’, as they are called.) The only place Shakespeare could have achieved this success, or notoriety, was in London, and it is generally agreed he was living there at least by the end of the 1580s.

At the close of his career he retired back to Stratford, but again the dates are vague. The Tempest, performed in 1611, has a valedictory note - ‘Our revels now are ended’ - but he continued to contribute work for the stage. Henry VIII, premiered at the Globe in the early summer of 1613, was a collaboration with John Fletcher, but the editors of the First Folio considered it (unlike Pericles) to have enough Shakespeare in it to merit inclusion in the canon. But two later ventures with Fletcher - The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio - had slighter contributions and were not included. It was during an early performance of Henry VIII that the Globe was burnt down, after a spark from a cannonade ignited the thatched roof. The razing of the great playhouse he had built and nurtured makes the day of the fire, 25 July 1613, a symbolic date for Shakespeare’s retirement from the city - though only a symbolic one, for he is spotted briefly in London in November 1614, when a Stratford acquaintance writes: ‘My cosen Shakspeare commyng yesterday to towne I went to see him howe he did.’⁵⁶

If these dates are broadly accurate, Shakespeare spent about twenty-five years living and working in London, and it is with Shakespeare in - if not quite of - London that this book is concerned.

We know something of Shakespeare’s residences in London before he took up his lodgings on Silver Street. According to John Aubrey, Shakespeare had ‘lived in Shoreditch’. Aubrey is not always reliable, but he was an expert sniffer-out of information, and his informant was in this case a good one - an aged actor- manager, William Beeston, whose father Christopher had acted alongside Shakespeare in the 1590s. In a manuscript note Aubrey writes, ‘W. Shakespeare - Q [quaere, ask] Mr Beeston, who knows most of him’. He interviewed him in the summer of 1681, a year before Beeston’s death. Perhaps he came too late, for he got just a few scraps of reminiscence about Shakespeare, one of which was that he had lived in Shoreditch.⁵⁷

The likelihood is that Shoreditch was an early Shakespeare residence in London, since it was here that the first purpose-built playhouses were located - the Theatre, built in 1576 by James Burbage, father of the actor Richard Burbage; and the Curtain. These predated the Bankside playhouses south of the river.

In the late 1580s, when Shakespeare was establishing himself in the theatre world, Shoreditch was little more than a shanty-town, a rampant overspill of ‘poor cottages’ and ‘alleys backward’ spreading through the fields and marshes and dissolved-monastery gardens outside the city walls. But it was also, because of that connection with the theatres, the Bohemian haunt of Elizabethan London. Along its dirt roads lived some of the greatest literary and theatrical talents of the day. Thomas Watson and Christopher Marlowe had lodgings in Norton Folgate just south of Shoreditch, and in 1589 they are glimpsed with weapons drawn in an ‘affray’ on nearby Hog Lane. The comedian Richard Tarlton lived his last days on Holywell Street (now Shoreditch High Street) with a prostitute named Em Ball. The red-bearded pamphleteer Robert Greene, author of that bitter sortie against Shakespeare, was another habitu’. His mistress, whom Gabriel Harvey describes as a ‘sorry ragged quean’, was also named Ball - her brother was a cutpurse known on the street as ‘Cutting’ Ball. She was probably related to Tarlton’s mistress Em Ball, and may have been the same woman. Their illegitimate son Fortunatus - little Lucky Greene - died in infancy and was buried in the parish church of St Leonard’s. Shakespeare’s future collaborator George Wilkins may also have spent his early years in the area: his father was buried at St Leonard’s in 1603. Actors and their families abound in the church register - Burbages, Brownes and indeed Beestons.⁵⁸ Aubrey’s interview with William Beeston actually took place in Shoreditch, at Beeston’s house ‘on Hog Lane, six doores down’.

By the mid-1590s Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate. He is still close to the northern theatres but now inside the city gates, within the pale. We find him there in the lay subsidy rolls, which record tax assessments and payments, parish by parish, throughout the country. The subsidies were levies by the Crown, usually collected in three annual instalments. The rate of taxation was controlled by Parliament. Property-owners were taxed on the value of their ‘lands’; others, at a lower rate, on their ‘goods’. The partially surviving London rolls, preserved in the National Archives, are an invaluable resource - the nearest we have to an Elizabethan telephone directory - and I will refer to them often in the course of this book.

The earliest record of Shakespeare in Bishopsgate is in October 1596. He was assessed on goods valued at £5, on which he owed tax of 5 shillings.⁵⁹ This immediately tells us something about his circumstances. First, his appearance in the subsidy rolls indicates that he is a ‘householder’ in the parish. This does not mean he owned a house there, which is unlikely, but suggests he had a long-term lease or tenancy agreement on a property. The assessment of £5 is a middling one. Among his fellow-parishioners, Sir John Spenser was assessed on lands worth £300, and another on £150, but the majority were assessed at £10, £5 or £3. The latter is the lowest assessment, though ‘strangers’ - in other words, immigrants - who fell below this threshold had to pay a poll tax of 4d per head. Comments in the literature of the day suggest that assessments of goods were as much an impression as a documentation of wealth. A character in John Lyly’s Mother Bomby (1585) says, ‘He that had a cup of red wine to his oysters was hoisted in the Queen’s subsidy books’ (2.5); and in the anonymous collection Jack of Dover, a man is rated at ‘five pound more than he was before’ because of his wife’s fondness for wearing expensive stockings.⁶⁰ These exaggerate the matter, but we can infer that Mr Shakespeare was doing reasonably well for himself by the mid-1590s.

Payment of the tax owed on the 1596 assessment fell due the following February. But Shakespeare did not pay it. He is listed as a defaulter in a certificate dated 15 November 1597. In the default notices the ‘petty collectors’ of the parish affirm that the persons listed were ‘ether dead, [or] departed and gone out of the sayde ward, or their goodes so eloigned or conveyed out of the same, or in such a pryvate and coverte manner kept’ that the money owed could not ‘be levyed of them’. Of these possible reasons for non-payment we can discount the first: Shakespeare was not dead. Nor, it seems, had he moved out of the parish, for on 1 October 1598 he is again listed at St Helen’s, with the same assessment of £5.⁶¹ The conclusion seems to be that he was evading payment. This is not remarkable - the system was chaotic, and evasion was common - but it is piquant to find that the first actual documentation of Shakespeare in London is as a tax-dodger.

The interest of Shakespeare’s tax affairs lies more in the company we find him in. The St Helen’s roll of 1598 shows him as one of nearly fifty names. Biographers have noted one of these, Thomas Morley - almost certainly the musician of that name, whose First Book of Airs (1600) has a setting of Shakespeare’s song, ‘It was a lover and his lass’, from As You Like It.⁶² But there are others of interest. One who catches my eye is Henry Mawnder. It is not a particularly common name, so it seems likely he is the same Henry Maunder who was serving a few years earlier as a ‘Messenger of the Chamber’. This rather bland job-description covered a multitude of activities, some of them shading into politically sensitive areas. It was Maunder who was despatched from court in May 1593 with a warrant for the arrest of Christopher Marlowe; he found his man down in Chislehurst, Kent, and delivered him to the Privy Council on 20 May. Marlowe died in suspicious circumstances ten days later. This may not have endeared Mr Maunder to Shakespeare, who had known and admired Marlowe, but perhaps he was able to elicit from Maunder some details of the Marlowe affair, which was still shrouded in rumour.⁶³

Here is another name that swims out of St Helen’s in the 1590s: Anthony Elbow. He is among the ‘straungers’ of the parish assessed in the subsidy rolls. He was probably the Anthony Helbow listed a few years earlier in a census of foreigners in London - a French silk-weaver from ‘Leley’ (Lille), with a wife named Margit, and an English servant. Like Shakespeare he failed to pay up, but in his case he was exempted by ‘the fell sergeant, death’, for the St Helen’s parish register records that Anthony Elbowe ‘out of Staveley’s Alley’ was buried on 13 October 1596.⁶⁴ It is a wonderful name, and it lodged in the capacious memory of Shakespeare, emerging some years later as Constable Elbow in Measure for Measure, a comic turn in that mood-shifting play, and perhaps one whose malapropisms - ‘cardinally’ for ‘carnally’, ‘Hannibal’ for ‘cannibal’, ‘respected’ for ‘suspected’ - elaborate a memory of the real Elbow’s broken English.

Shakespeare also failed to pay the tax due on that second assessment of October 1598, but in this instance his non-payment was because he had moved. The wheels of the Elizabethan bureaucracy turned slowly, but in time his arrears showed up in the Exchequer’s Pipe Rolls. There are two references to him. The first indicates that in 1599 he was resident in the county of Surrey; the second has the words ‘episcopo Wintonensi’ beside his name.⁶⁵ From this it appears that some time after October 1598 (when he was still listed in Bishopsgate), Shakespeare moved across to the southern, Surrey side of the Thames, and more specifically to the Liberty of the Clink in Southwark, which was under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester (‘Episcopus Wintonensis’). This move can be related to the opening of the new Globe theatre, built in the early months of 1599 on a leased site in Southwark, a few hundred yards away from the Rose theatre, where the Admiral’s Men played, and the baiting-pits of Paris Gardens, where bears were chained to a stake and harried by packs of mastiffs.

These are records of Shakespeare’s lodgings or tenancies prior to his move to Cripplegate in about 1603. He is plausibly glimpsed in Shoreditch, and he is definitely recorded in Bishopsgate and Southwark. These earlier addresses place him physically close to the playhouses which are his life and livelihood, but this is not at all the case with his new lodgings chez Mountjoy. To reach the Globe theatre from Cripplegate he had to walk southwards right across town, and then take a wherry or water-taxi over the river to Southwark. It seems inconvenient - interestingly so.

At this time, as I have noted, Shakespeare was at the peak of his profession. With that success come stresses and pressures. He is something of a celebrity - a subject for poets (‘Honey-tongued Shakespeare . . .’) and topical comedies (‘O sweet Master Shakespeare, I’ll have his picture in my study at court!’) and Inns of Court anecdotes (as recorded in the diary of John Manningham: see Chapter 27 below).⁶⁶ His face is known: he is an actor in his own and others’ plays. But celebrity - ‘the bubble reputation’, as Jaques calls it - is always double-edged, a burdensome illusion as much as an achievement. Is there a note of escape in his removal to Silver Street? Is this rather quieter, more respectable, more anonymous neighbourhood something of a bolt-hole from the boisterous and very public world of players and playgoers?

Aubrey’s source William Beeston gives us a hint of this, for another thing he remembered, or had heard from his father, was that Shakespeare ‘was the more to be admired q [quia, because] he was not a company keeper’. He ‘wouldnt be debauched, & if invited to, writt he was in paine’. This is unverifiable but has the backing of common sense. It refers us to the reclusiveness of authorship, the staking out of mental space. Instead of partying - those tempting debaucheries - he will settle down to write, by candlelight, in the silence of the city at night. How else could his output - at least thirty-seven plays, two book-length narrative poems and 154 sonnets, not to mention his involvement in acting, directing and general theatre management - have been achieved? An avoidance of ‘company’, for this more pressing purpose of composition, may be a factor in his move across town to Cripplegate.

There survives among the Cecil papers at Hatfield House a rather huffy letter from a court official, Sir Walter Cope. He writes to Robert Cecil, Lord Cranborne:

I have sent and bene all this morning hunting for players, juglers & such kind of creaturs, but find them harde to finde, wherefore leavinge notes for them to seeke me, Burbage ys come, & sayes ther ys no new playe that the Quene hath not seene, but they have revyved an old one cawled Loves Labore Lost, which for wytt & myrthe he sayes will please her excedingly.

Cope does not date the letter, but it is endorsed ‘1604’ by one of Cecil’s secretaries, and this date is confirmed by a performance of Love’s Labours at court in January 1605.⁶⁷ Shakespeare would doubtless have been one of the players so fruitlessly ‘hunted’ by Cope. Was he out that morning, when Sir Walter or one of his minions called by at the Mountjoys’ house? Or was he so ‘harde to finde’ because his whereabouts were uncertain, his private address not generally available? Let others in the company deal with snobbish courtly fixers like Cope, who considers actors on a par with ‘juglers & such kind of creaturs’. Perhaps the quibbling Clown in Othello gives the correct answer to such enquiries: ‘I know not where he lodges, and for me to . . . say he lies here or he lies there were to lie in my own throat.’

Thanks to the Belott-Mountjoy suit we do know where the famous but elusive Mr Shakespeare lodges, and we now head for Silver Street in search of him - a metaphorical visit, of course, but with a faint lingering sense that we too come uninvited.