Charles Nicholl

It was to support the village book shop and because the book contained amongst a few essays that looked interesting one on Arthur Cravan that I bought Traces Remain. Certainly I've no curiosity whatsoever about 16th- and 17th-century British writers nor Italian Renaissance figures and it's those that much of the book is about.

How pleasant it was, then, to find that each essay caught and held my attention. Virtually any writer of standard competence and knowledge could hold me rapt with a show more piece about a subject I'm deeply interested in; I doubt that many, though, could write something about John Aubrey or Ben Jonson that I'd read through, never mind enjoy as much as I did Nicholl's pieces.

I like this book too for what it isn't: So many columnists and reviewers (some of them writing for the same periodicals that first published the pieces in this collection) betray evidence of self-consciousness, especially in seeming to strive for a certain tone--often after reading a few paragraphs of their stuff I find myself thinking 'she's trying to sound breezy', 'he wants to be thought urbane', 'he's going for "knowledgeable but matey" ' and so on. Nicholl just writes, well and naturally, and to say that the reader is unaware of the writer, let alone the act of writing, is high praise. And whilst his style is informal it never seems forcedly so.

I kept this book at the bedside and began by reading it, out of sleepiness, only in bits, but it wasn't long before I began reading it in bits because I didn't want to come to its end. I'd not go so far as to read Nicholl's books on Marlowe and Leonardo, but I'd happily read more of his essays and explorations. show less

This is a real-life murder mystery set in the shadowy world of spies, provocateurs, and double agents. “Everybody knows” that Christopher Marlowe, the leading English playwright as Shakespeare was starting out, was killed, not yet thirty, in a tavern brawl. Sometimes what everyone knows isn’t true. Nicholl’s tireless research uncovered much new evidence about those with Marlowe on that fateful early summer day in 1593; he adds this to material that had previously turned up but show more hadn’t found its way into Marlowe biographies. While Nicholl admits that we may never know exactly what happened, we can be sure of what did not happen: neither the tavern brawl of popular legend nor the mishap in which Marlowe was the aggressor and his slayer acted in self-defense, as the version hastily adopted at the inquest would have it. Instead, Nicholl builds the case that Marlowe seems to have been the (not so innocent) pawn of a ferocious power struggle between the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Ralegh (as Nicholl spells the name). Seems plausible, but unproven.

In the course of the fast-moving tale, we encounter freethinkers, occultists, poets, and recusants. Behind them all sits an aging queen with no heirs, along with the various noblemen whose ill-fortune it was to have a claim to the soon-to-be vacant throne.

Takeaway from the book: Poets are not necessarily nice people. As lamentable as Marlowe’s early demise may have been, he seems to have been little different from the three men in the room with him on the last day of his life: an ambitious young man from humble origins who supplemented the meager, uncertain rewards from his writing with some spy craft. show less

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

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 show more 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. show less

Charles Nicholl takes an extremely narrow focus and spins gold out of seemingly insignificant straw in The Lodger Shakespeare. The one place in the historical record where the man’s spoken words appear is in a trial deposition transcribed by a court reporter. Shakespeare had been the tenant of a man who was sued by his son-in-law for not coughing up a promised dowry, and was called to testify as to what the agreement really was. He hemmed and hawed without helping to settle anything, but show more the episode turns out to reveal a great deal about his everyday life in 1612. The landlord worked as a theater costumer; a neighbor was a pimp, a thug, and an eventual writing collaborator; and the local priest had secrets of his own. Nicholl takes dry details from property records, marriage licenses, and other legal documents and conjures an entire raffish community to vivid, breathing life from four centuries in the past. His history is like a Jacobean-era Desperate Housewives with serious intellectual cred. show less