Long ago when I was in high school I read and enjoyed Shakespeare of London by Marchette Chute, an attempt to reconstruct William Shakespeare's life and times as a celebrated dramatist. Thus I was attracted to this similarly themed book The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl. This book is built upon one scrap of the public record which includes a rare instance of Shakespeare's signature which is upon a deposition in a court case regarding a bride's dowry. That dowry is unpaid by Christopher Mountjoy who with his wife Mary are French immigrants living in London and manufacturing head-dresses for women. Mountjoy also rents out rooms in his home and thus is Shakespeare's landlord as Shakespeare takes a room to live in while working in the theaters of London.

From this court record, Nicholl extrapolates details about Shakespeare's life in London around the time that he turned forty. He builds his case on public records, written experiences of Shakespeare's contemporaries, the plays and poems of Shakespeare himself and lots and lots of speculation. It is at times fascinating, tantalizing, and just down right irritating, but mostly fascinating. We learn a lot about what houses were like in the Mountjoy's Cripplegate neighborhood, the trade of "tire-making", 17th-century marriage practices, the immigrant experience, and the solitary and bawdy aspects of working in the the theater. Nicholls also speculates about Shakespeare's atypical positive view of foriegners in his plays as well as the attention to detail in apparrell that may have been influenced by Shakespeare's association with the Mountjoys.

If you're interested in learning about the life of Shakespeare you're probably going to be disappointed by this book, but on the other hand you will get a healthy dose of "his times" which is not a bad thing. Nicholls is both detailed and imaginative and always lively in his writing even at the times where the details may grow tedious. ( )

William Shakespeare defies his biographers at every turn, for it is famously known that not a single letter, not a notebook, diary, journal or any personal correspondence of his of any sort remains. It is an omission so great and glaring that it is generally agreed it must be deliberate. At some point Shakespeare must have destroyed all his personal letters. The only thing we have to prove he even existed are his plays, his signature on a few bills, one will, and a couple entries in church registries marking his birth and death. And one short deposition in an obscure court case over a bride’s dowry given on Monday, May 11th, 1612. On that day and that day only we hear the echo of William Shakespeare actually talking.

Nicholl uses the event of that court case as a starting point to reconstruct what Shakespeare’s life might have been like during a couple of years that he was known to be living as a lodger with a French family on Silver Street in London. The street no longer exists; there is a highway overpass on the site above one’s head, and an underground parking garage below one’s feet. Standing there, amidst the cacophony of constant freeway traffic, the author proceeds to point off in each direction, walking the reader along, carefully rebuilding each house and street corner as it must have existed in 1605 when William Shakespeare was actually living there.

His attention to detail is staggering (a friend of mine called it “turgid”). It takes the author almost fifty pages to go, step by step, from the front stoop of the house where Shakespeare lodged, through the front room, up the narrow stairs to the top floor, and finally into the attic room—which gets a chapter all its own called “the chamber” wherein the author describes what kinds of furniture might have been found, what the desk may have looked like, what may have been painted on the clothes that were hung over the bare walls, what books were most likely in the wooden chest by the desk, what might have been seen if one peered out the tiny top floor window. Unlike Ann Wroe, who had refused to reconstruct “how they dressed, how most of them talked, the rooms they lived in,” Nicholl it seems can barely reign himself in. The smallest details of the neighborhood, the house, and its occupants capture his attention and interest. That the landlady frequented an astrologer for medical advice, that this astrologer was also a known seducer, that the landlord was a notorious skinflint and lecherous old man . . . all these “facts” are teased out of the miscellaneous records that have floated down through history—notations of disapproval by the local church authorities, cryptic entries in the ledger of the astrologer-doctor, complaints filed with the civic authorities, listings in the account books of clients and customers.

And I was riveted. It is a book not so much about Shakespeare as it is about what it might be like to live when Shakespeare lived. If anything, it is the story of the Mountjoy household—“Mountjoy” being the name of the family from whom Shakespeare rented his room. Nichol sets his reader down on Silver street and points in one direction, towards Cripple Gate, describing the houses you can see and who lives there, up to and including the physic garden recently installed at the Alchemist’s Hall at the end of the street by no less a person than the famous herbalist John Gerard only a few years earlier. He points in another direction towards the unsavory Turnbull Street, infamous for its brothels and bawdy houses (including an inn owned by one George Wilkins, a pimp and wannabe writer who is actually known to have collaborated with Shakespeare on Pericles.) He opens the door and lets you peer inside to the workshop of Mr. Christopher Mountjoy, a French immigrant and “tire-maker,” meaning he had a business constructing those elaborate headdresses, wigs and hairpieces that one sees in portraits of Elizabethan and Jacobean noblewomen. In fact, it was here, in the extensive section on the Mountjoy workshop and the art of Elizabethan head-dresses, that I had my only moment of thinking “well, this is too much information.” It came after reading a description of a lady dressing her hair to go out:

First she must have her scalp rubbed: “Come Joyle, rubbe well my head, for it is very full of dandriffe.” For this procedure there are “rubbers”, which the page has earlier been ordered to warm. Next she has her hair combed, but “give me first my combing-cloth, otherwise you will fill me full of hayres”. Two combs are used, one of ivory and another “boxen” (boxwood), and when the combing is done, the page is ordered to clean them with “combe-brushes” and to “use a quill to take away the filthe from them”.

It is odd what sets us off, isn’t it? I, who had read through an extremely detailed description of what the human body goes through when afflicted with cholera, who can recite the definition of “nightsoil” without batting an eye, felt my stomach flip and turn at the image of a serving woman picking away at the crud caught in a lady’s hair comb.

The Lodger solves none of the mysteries of Shakespeare’s oddly undocumented life but it does an excellent job of recreating the background through which he moved. The stories and small domestic dramas that surround his time on Silver Street are extraordinary perhaps because they are so ordinary—fights over money, affairs and secret assignations, battles with tax collectors. There is a tendency to view history as a progressive thing, that each age is somehow an improvement over the one before—culminating, naturally, with our own time. But these street-level stories and micro-histories of small events and unimportant people remind us that while history might progress, human nature stays wonderfully, marvelously constant. That whatever the pressures driving kings and princes, the over-riding motivations of their subjects remain achingly familiar—a curious man’s desire to know how the world works, a wife’s desire to be loved, a man’s desire for more money, a woman’s desire to look pretty. And, after reading that last bit in The Lodger, a most serious desire on my part to wash my hair. full review

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1100310.ht...

It's the story behind the only surviving documentary record of Shakespeare's own spoken words, his evidence in a court case of 1612 relating to a family dispute in the household of his former landlord, Christopher Mountjoy. Back in 1604, Mountjoy's daughter Mary had married his apprentice, Stephen Belott. Shakespeare was not only the upstairs lodger in the Mountjoy's house; he also "perswaded" Belott to marry Mary and officiated at their handfasting ceremony a few weeks before their church marriage. The newlyweds then moved out and became tenants of George Wilkins, a brothel-keeper and occasional playwright, with whom Shakespeare was collaborating on Pericles. Both Stephen Belott and Christopher Mountjoy were French, and as Nicholl points out it is rather interesting that at precisely the same time as Shakespeare was persuading a young Frenchman to get married he was writing a play, All's Well That Ends Well, featuring a young Frenchman who is persuaded into marriage.

Nicholl has produced a real gem of a book here. He takes us in and out of the small corner of London where it all happened (now buried by the Barbican); he goes deeply into customs of marriage and sex, and also the immigrant experience, illustrating them with a wealth of contemporary documents. (Though I could perhaps have been satisfied with two chapters rather than four on tire-making, the manufacture of ladies' head-dresses which was the trade of the Mountjoys and Bellotts.)

Part of the charm of Nicholl's approach is that he has clear views about the people whose actions he is reconstructing. Christopher Mountjoy, Shakespeare's landlord, is described as a tight-fisted irritable git - the court case relates to his alleged non-payment of his daughter's dowry (and was referred by the English court to the elders of the French church, who found for the Belotts but awarded them much less than they sought). On the other hand, Nicholl seems attracted to and fascinated by Mountjoy's wife Mary, who had died by the time of the court case but is very visible in other surviving records of the early James I years, supplying headgear to the new Queen, consulting with the notorious astrologer Simon Foreman. Nicholl speculates that Shakespeare may have been a little in love with his landlady; one gets the feeling that Nicholl himself certainly is! He doesn't quite dare to investigate Shakespeare himself too deeply, his most substantial point being that Shakespeare's convenient and probably feigned uncertainty on a crucial fact in the court case probably prevented the Belotts from getting the settlement they deserved.

So, this is a brilliant example of how to take a single documentary source and weave a real historical apparatus around it, something I have seen done both well and badly by others.

Rant on tangentially connected subject: My biggest irritation is that the book has endnotes rather than footnotes - this is just about tolerable if the endnotes are mere citations of sources, but if as in this book they contain substantial nuggets of additional fact, it is bizarre to bury them hundreds of pages away, and a huge disservice to both writer and reader on the part of the publisher. In these days of advanced software, why not as a matter of course put the notes at the bottom of the page, where they clearly relate to the relevant text? I just don't understand. ( )

This biography is based on a court document showing that William Shakespeare testified in a lawsuit while lodging on Silver Street in London. The author uses this information, as well as his knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and of Shakespeare's writing to create a biography of this relatively short period of Shakespeare's life.

There is a lot of speculation in the book....and the author readily admits it. As he says, "we are searching for facts, but listen also to whispers..." I found this a bit frustrating at times.

Also, the book is described as a love story, with Shakespeare bringing two lovers together, but this a very minor part of the writing. It is much more a study of Shakespeare's writing related to the times in which he lived. ( )

The author has managed to bring these few years of Shakespeare's life in Silver Street to life as well as Jacobean London itself. Charles Nicholl wears his scholarship lightly: you realise how much research and reading he has done but I felt perpetually engrossed and not overwhelnmed by it all. It isn't the first book I've read about Shakespeare but it sure comes in the top three. ( )