The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (24 page)

On the evidence of the ‘houshould stuffe’ inventory we can say that the activities of the Silver Street workshop included fine wire-drawing and various kinds of thread-twisting. Both these are confirmed by a later document involving Stephen Belott. In 1621, Belott petitioned against the activities of the Monopolies Commission.
⁵⁰
Among his complaints was that an agent of the monopolists had confiscated his ‘mill’, which was ‘the only instrument of his living’. This mill is for wire-drawing: it is the iron or steel plate, perforated with die-holes of different diameters, through which the wire is drawn. Belott also says that for many years he has ‘gotten his living by working gold and silver thread’, and he describes himself as ‘sometime servant to Monioye, gold wiredrawer’.

Christopher Mountjoy is elsewhere mentioned as one who practised the ‘mystery’ of making and working ‘Venice gold and silver thread’.
⁵¹
Venice gold was another term for gold thread, though the Venetians had in turn imported the art of making it from the Middle East, and it is sometimes called ‘Damask [Damascus] gold’. There is some evidence that true Venice gold involved a particular technique using strips of gilded vellum - both lighter and cheaper than wire - but the term as used in England was probably not so specific. Shakespeare refers to Venice gold in
The Taming of the Shrew
- it is part of a catalogue of exquisite and expensive materials to be seen in Gremio’s ‘richly furnished’ town-house: ‘Tyrian tapestry’, ‘Arras counterpoints’, ‘Turkey cushions bossed with pearl’ and ‘valance of Venice gold in needlework’ (2.1.345-50). Venice gold was primarily used by embroiderers, and is frequently found in the accounts and inventories of the Queen’s wardrobe.

We have at least a broad idea of the daily activities of the Mountjoy workshop - enough, perhaps, to mock up one of those informatively captioned engravings, often continental, which show us everything happening at once. In one part of the shop an apprentice sits at a table or bench, drawing wires of gilded silver through die-holes to make the fine wire suitable for gold thread. There are hammers and rollers to flatten the wire into strips ready for spinning into thread. In another part of the shop bundles of lank raw silk are being separated into ‘sleaves’. A third person is working the ‘twisting wheel’, turning those sleaves into silk thread, and silk thread into sparkling Venice gold. Elsewhere there are women sewing and stitching, the snipping of those ‘little scissors’, the application of colour and glitter to beautify the wiry carapace of the tire. Here we see bales of cloth - the gauzy ‘lawn’ which Cotgrave calls ‘toile d’atour’, or tire-cloth; the satins and taffetas ‘of sundry colours’. Here too are ribbons, laces, purled bands, feathers, tinsels, nets, veils, bodkins, seed-pearls, black bugles - and baskets filled with a faintly sinister cargo of human hair, also of sundry colours, yellow and silver being especially sought after. In the background, in an adjoining room, a fashionable lady receives a finished headpiece graciously proffered by the tiremaker’s wife.

It is a scene of small-scale, miniaturist work: repetitive and delicate. It is hard work on the eyes, and is made more so by the law that immigrants’ shops should have a ‘lattice before the window’ so their wares cannot be seen from the street. Metal fumes hang in the close air of the workshop, the smell of glues and dyes. Perhaps these, rather than pregnancy, were a cause of those stomach pains and ‘swimming in the head’ of which Marie complains to Dr Forman.

Just outside the frame of our imagined engraving - involved only in a casual, non-professional sense, but involved nonetheless - is a well-dressed gentleman of middle age who might perhaps be a merchant or mercer, but who is in fact the tiremaker’s lodger, ‘one Mr Shakespeare’. He passes on his way to and from the street, keeping his slightly odd hours; he is a shadow in the doorway, a footstep on the stairs. He is familiar with the scene whose outlines I have tried to construct: he observes and enquires, and what he sees and hears is stored away in that capacious and miraculously accessible memory, to be used in turn as raw material in the manufacturing of metaphors -

Thou immaterial skein of sleave-silk, thou green sarcenet flap for a sore eye, thou tassel of a prodigal’s purse . . . (
Troilus and Cressida
, 5.1.29-30)

Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care . . . (
Macbeth
, 2.2.36)

Be’t when she weav’d the sleided silk
With fingers long, small, white as milk . . . (
Pericles
, 4.Chor.21-2)

Breaking his oath and resolution, like
A twist of rotten silk . . . (
Coriolanus
, 5.2.96-7)

These are in approximate chronological order (the exact date of
Coriolanus
is uncertain). The earliest is Thersites’ ingenious insult from
Troilus
, a play first mentioned in the Stationers’ Register on 7 February 1603, and probably composed in 1602, the year in which - according to his later recollection - Shakespeare first met Christopher Mountjoy, and thus the earliest date for his sojourn on Silver Street. It is redolent of the tire-shop. The author’s eye has taken in not only the skein of sleave-silk, which is ‘immaterial’ both visually - light, flossy, frothy - and because it is irrelevant or unusable until separated into spinnable filaments, but also the sarcanets and tassels which are part of the tiremaker’s decorative arts. We find sarcenet (a fine soft silk of taffeta weave) associated with tires in Queen Elizabeth’s accounts - ‘sarcenets [for] tuftinge, tyringe of hedpeces, and gyrdells’.
⁵²

The line from
Macbeth
, composed
c
. 1606, is famous but often misunderstood. In the first edition of 1623 (despite its fame today the play had no separate edition before the First Folio) ‘sleave’ is spelt ‘sleeve’; and that is the word most people hear in performance, especially in conjunction with ‘knit’. The line is therefore taken to mean that the anxious mind is repaired by sleep, as a frayed sleeve is repaired by knitting.
⁵³
This is cogent but the metaphor seems bland. We are at a moment of high psychological drama: the murder of King Duncan is done; Macbeth is confronting the trauma of guilt, which will bring in the play’s insomniac visions and night-terrors: ‘Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more!’ His state of mind is imagined not as frayed but as tangled, confused, knotted (sense 1 of ‘ravel’ in
OED
, ‘to become entangled or confused’) and most modern editors endorse the reading of ‘sleave’, as first proposed by George Steevens in the eighteenth century. Sleep brings order to this bundle of emotions as the hand of a silkworker unravels a tangled sheaf of sleave-silk.

In this reading the metaphor is visually linked with the simple but vivid image of the lost daughter Marina in
Pericles
, and her slender white fingers weaving ‘sleided’ (sleaved) silk. The play was written with George Wilkins in
c
. 1607-8, by which time Shakespeare had probably moved on from Silver Street. The image may be a memory of the Mountjoy workshop - one wonders whose pale hands he is remembering.

17

The underpropper

W
e imagine Shakespeare on the periphery of the Mountjoy workshop, observing those details of the tiremaker’s trade which surface in his texts. To see him in our mind’s eye we borrow from various images of him, chief among them the engraved portrait in the First Folio, at once the most authentic and problematic of the portraits - the domed forehead, the perfunctorily stippled beard, the stiff, tray-like collar. The sombrely stylish ‘Chandos’ portrait is more attractive, and more theatrical, but it is the Folio engraving which has the imprimatur of Shakespeare’s contemporaries - it is placed at the threshold of his Collected Works by editors who had known him for decades, and who presumably considered it a reasonable likeness.
⁵⁴
And just possibly this iconic little portrait of Shakespeare has, in itself, a connection with the Silver Street workshop.

The circumstances of the portrait are mysterious. All we know for certain is to be found in the three millimetres of margin that surrounds the engraving, where a neat cursive inscription reads, ‘Martin Droeshout sculpsit London’. But exactly which Martin Droeshout ‘sculpted’ or engraved it is not clear. The Droeshouts were a dynasty of immigrant Dutch painters and engravers - the contemporary English spelling ‘Drussett’ broadly conveys the correct Dutch pronunciation. There are two Martins on record, uncle and nephew, and both have their proponents as the engraver of the Folio portrait.
⁵⁵

Whichever one it was, it is more or less certain that his engraving was based, as most of them were, on an earlier portrait. It was a copy. According to Roy Strong the original portrait was a miniature, as ‘evidenced in the linear terms [of the engraving] which could derive from a miniature in the Hilliard manner’. He compares William Marshall’s engraving of John Donne, published in the 1630s, but based on a painted miniature of 1591. Others see no specific evidence that the original was a miniature; it could have been a line-drawing, or a ‘small-scale panel or canvas painting’.
⁵⁶
The fact that the engraving is a copy explains some of its technical deficiencies, particularly the disproportion of the head and body. The head and the collar go together well enough but the shoulders do not belong at all - they are too small, and are skewed at an odd angle, resulting in the meaningless physiology of the upper-right arm. A ready explanation is that the original portrait showed only the head and the collar - a common enough format in miniature portraits. These the engraver copied; the rest, for which he had no model before him, he ‘infelicitously invented’.
⁵⁷

How old is the man in the picture? The first impression is of seniority - the drastic baldness, and also the greying of the hair, particularly around the left temple. (This is a deliberate engraver’s effect - the lines representing the hair are discontinuous; the flecks of grey are uninked paper.) But the face looks younger than the hair would suggest; it is alert and rather fine featured. The high forehead reveals no wrinkling; those bags under his eyes seem indicative of tiredness - too much composition by candlelight, perhaps - rather than saggy with age. He certainly looks younger than the stout burgher depicted in the Stratford funeral effigy, which would show him in his last years (and may do so quite accurately, as there is some evidence that the sculptor - another immigrant artist, Gheerart Janssen junior - knew him personally). He also looks younger than the world-weary man in the ‘Chandos’ portrait, conventionally dated to
c
. 1610, when Shakespeare was in his mid-forties.
⁵⁸

These are subjective impressions but the conclusion to which they tend seems a sensible one. It is that the Droeshout engraving shows Shakespeare in early middle age, perhaps around forty or so (middle age came earlier then), still vigorous, but with signs of wear and tear. This would give us a date of
c
. 1604 for the original portrait - not a bad time for Shakespeare, newly elevated as one of the King’s Men, to have his picture painted.

This is not contradicted by the dating evidence provided by the wide, stiffly starched linen collar (not, as is sometimes said, a ruff) worn by Shakespeare. It is engraved with great specificity (see Frontispiece). The arrow-shaped markings are not merely decorative, but realistically depict the ‘narrow darts made on the inside of the linen band to shape it to the neck’. This conveys also the fineness of the collar’s fabric, the sheer linen through which the pleating underneath is visible. If this collar or ‘band’ was part of the original portrait, its style could suggest a date as early as
c
. 1604. Thus Tarnya Cooper of the National Portrait Gallery: ‘This type of collar with triangular sewn darts fanning out from the face appears in portraits that date from around 1604 to 1613.’
⁵⁹

The age of the sitter and the style of his neckwear broadly concur - when Shakespeare was forty that collar was newly fashionable. The evidence, such as it is, suggests that the lost portrait of him copied by Martin Droeshout was painted in or shortly after the year 1604 - precisely the period of his sojourn on Silver Street.

And perhaps the collar has something more to tell us. As well as the triangular darts fanning out from the neck there is visible a curving line running roughly parallel to the outer edge of the collar. This is not something sewn on to it. It is part of a wire supporter or ‘underpropper’, visible through the fabric of the collar. Formal ruffs and bands were heavily starched, and needed additional support underneath to hold them up at the back of the neck, in order to frame the face in the desired way. The Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbes, whose
Anatomie of Abuses
(1583) rails against contemporary vanities, and in doing so gives a detailed account of the fashions of the day, defines the underpropper as a ‘certain device made of wyres . . . whipped over either with gold thread, silver or silk’. It is ‘applied’ around the neck, ‘to beare up the whole frame and body of the ruff from falling and hanging down’.
⁶⁰

We find them in Queen Elizabeth’s wardrobe accounts. In 1588 her silkman Roger Mountague supplied ‘one supporter of wyer whipped over with silke’. In 1601 Dorothy Speckard supplied ‘a fyne ruffe pinned upon a French wire’, and ‘two rebata wyres’ (a rebato was a collar that stood up almost vertically behind the wearer’s head).
⁶¹
And Lady Rimelaine, in Erondell’s
French Garden
of 1605, chooses between ‘a ruffe band or a Rebato’, but looking at the ruff she finds ‘the supporter is so soyled’ that she cannot wear it. ‘Take it away, give me my Rebato of cutworke edged’ - but this too is dirty: ‘the wyer after the same sort as the other’.