The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (48 page)

52
. H. G. Wright, ‘How Did Shakespeare Come to Know the
Decameron
?’ (
MLR
50 (1955), 45-8), argues his use of Mac¸on’s version. See also Howard Cole,
The ‘All’s Well’ Story from Boccaccio to Shakespeare
(Urbana, Ill., 1981).

53
. Nashe’s preface, ‘To the Gentleman students’, in Robert Greene,
Menaphon
(1589): Nashe 1958, 3.312. Thomas Lodge,
Wit’s Miserie
(1596), sig. H4v: ‘as pale as the vizard of the ghost which cried so miserably at the Theator, like an oister wife, Hamlet, revenge’. The ‘revision’ theory championed by Eric Sams (Sams 1995, 121-35, and ‘Taboo or Not Taboo? The Text, Dating and Authorship of
Hamlet
, 1589-1623’,
Hamlet Studies
10, (1988), 12-46) is not generally accepted, though questions remain about ‘memorial reconstruction’ as the source of bad quartos: see Maurice Charney, ed.,
‘Bad’ Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon
(Rutherford, NJ, 1988).

54
. Thomas Heywood,
Apologie for Actors
, 1612; EKC 2.218.

55
. Letter to William Drummond, 14 April 1619, referring to problems with the printing of the second part of
Poly-Olbion
(Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Michael Drayton’,
ODNB
2004).

PART THREE:
THE MOUNTJOYS

9. Early years

1
. PRO C66/1750 (Patent Rolls 5 Jas I, Roll 30); Shaw 1911, 11.

2
. Information provided by Fre’de’rique Hamm, Director of the Archives Départementales de la Somme, Amiens.

3
. Scouloudi 1985, 223-31, lists places of origin stated in the 1593 return, cross-referrable to her index of named individuals (147-221).

4
. Bibliothèque Municipale, Amiens, MS HH 749; I am grateful to the archivist, Thomas Dumont, for this reference. Some vaguer genealogical trawling finds a Monguiot family living in Le Harcourt in 1612; a Pierre Montjoie at Aubervilliers in 1658; and several Montjoies in Namur, Belgium, in the eighteenth century.

5
. W. Arthur,
Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names
(New York, 1857), s.v. Mountjoy. He notes that the name ‘is still retained in a division of the hundred of Battle, not far from the remains of the majestic pile reared by William the Conqueror’. War cry: T. Wylie,
The Reign of Henry V
(1914-29), 2.178.

6
. Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fols 254v, 263v; see Chapter 12.

7
. On Elizabethan marrying ages, see Ralph Houlbrooke,
The English Family, 1450-1700
(1984), 63ff.; Laurence Stone,
Crisis of the Aristocracy
(1965), 656-7. Shakespeare’s Juliet is fourteen, and her father thinks ‘two more summers’ should pass before she is ‘ripe to be a bride’ (
Romeo and Juliet
, 1.2.9-11); cf. Bruce Young, ‘Haste, Consent, and Age at Marriage: Some Implications of Social History for
Romeo and Juliet’, Iowa State Journal of Research
62 (1987), 459-74. In Samuel Rowlands’s
’Tis merry when gossips meet
(1602) a fifteen-year-old ‘mayde’ is urged to marry: ‘Your mother is to blame / To wish so womanly a wench to stay. / She knows fifteene may husband justlie clame’ (sig. D3). Rebecca Edwards was fourteen when she married the actor William Knell, and a widow at fifteen; she subsequently married John Heminges, and was a long-term acquaintance of Shakespeare. The average marriage age was, of course, much higher. Houlbrooke gives twenty-six as the mean age for Elizabethan women, twenty-eight for men; the figures were similar across western Europe.

8
. In his deposition of 1612 Noel gives his age as ‘thirty years or thereabouts’.

10. St Martin le Grand

9
. The origin of ‘Huguenot’ is debated: an early form, ‘eiguenot’, found in the
Chronique de Genève
(1550), suggests a derivation from German
Eidgenosz
, ‘confederate’.

10
. Alfred Sornan, ed.,
The Massacre of St Bartholomew: Reappraisals and Documents
(1974); Leonie Frieda,
Catherine de Medici
(2003), 248-72. Among those sheltered at the English embassy were Sir Philip Sidney and Timothy Bright; the latter relived their experience, ‘which my mind shudders to recall and flees from in grief’, in a letter to Sidney in 1584 (Alan Stewart,
Sir Philip Sidney
(2000), 86-8).

11
. Henry Gaymer of Rye is thus described, when in 1586 he detained the assassin of the Queen of Navarre, René’ or Renato, trying to enter the country (BL Lansdowne MS 48, no. 70).

12
. Nashe 1958, 3.158.

13
. Scouloudi 1985, 80, 129. On Huguenots in London see also Scouloudi 1987; Yungblut 1996; Picard 2003, 123-37.

14
. Stow 1908, 1.308, 2.342-3.

15
. PRO E179/251/16, fols 23-4.

16
. Kirk 1910, 2.338, 410; Scouloudi 1985, 173. Harman Dewman, tailor, also living in St Anne’s in 1582, is probably a brother.

17
. Hatfield House, Cecil MS 208/8; Kirk 1910, 2.349-50.

18
. Lang 1993, xlii-li.

19
. Stow 1908, 1.307.

20
. PRO E179/146/390; Kirk 1910, 2.244.

21
. Foster 1887, 951.

22
. GL MS 4515/1; PRO E179/147/494.

23
. St Dunstan’s marriage register (LMA Mf X024/068), 1 May 1627. Later Mountjoys in Stepney are recorded in IGI.

24
. On the French Church see Beeman 1905; Lindeboom 1950, 7ff. It remained on Threadneedle Street until 1840. The current church at Soho Square, designed by Aston Webb in ‘late Franco-Flemish Gothic with Romanesque overtones’ (N. Pevsner,
London
(1952), 6.394), opened in 1893.

25
. Picard 2003, 128.

26
. Scouloudi 1985, 81, 233-7.

11. Success and danger

27
. Scouloudi 1985, 196-7, 209. She considers Daniel Morrell and Samuel Morrell (listed one after the other in the 1593 return, with identical attributes) to be the same man erroneously duplicated. He had come to England in
c
. 1584; in 1593 he had no servants or apprentices. Swanston’s was a larger operation, employing five ‘stranger women’ and five English workers.

28
. PRO SP12/81/29; Tawney and Power 1924, 1.308-10.

29
. For the statutory restrictions invoked by the petitioners, see Scouloudi 1985, 49-50. For attempts to encourage immigrants in trades not practised by locals (e.g. silk-working) see Luu 2005.

30
. Richard Verstegan to Robert Persons, 27 [i.e. 17] May 1593; Petti 1959, 155. Verstegan uses continental dating (‘stilo novo’), ten days later than English reckoning.

31
. Strype 1824, 4.167. ‘Vyle ticket’: Privy Council directive to Mayor of London, 16 April 1593 (Dasent 1890-97, 24.187).

32
. Arthur Freeman, ‘Marlowe, Kyd and the Dutch Church Libel’,
English Literary Renaissance
3 (1973), 44-52; Nicholl 2002, 47-53, 347-52. The full text of the libel, in a copy of
c
. 1600, was discovered in 1971 among the ‘residual’ MSS of the nineteenth-century collector Sir Thomas Phillips.

33
. Petti 1959, 155, 163. Verstegan’s unnamed correspondent in England was probably the Jesuit Henry Garnet.

34
. Scouloudi 1985, 73-80; Strype 1824, 4, no. 107. Detailed returns survive in a MS owned by the Dugdale family (Merevale Hall, Warwickshire): it is damaged from being used as scrap-paper by Sir William Dugdale when compiling his
Antiquities of Warwickshire
(1656). Extracts and summaries of the census are in Huntington Library, Ellesmere MS 2514, and BL Lansdowne MS 74/31.

35
. BL Egerton MS 2804, fol. 90; Jeayes 1906, 77-8. The letter is addressed to Gawdy’s elder brother Bassingbourne.

36
. GL MS 6534, fol. 106.

37
. In the burial register the other three are: ‘——Seamer, child of Joan Seamer’ (24 September 1593); ‘an infant murdered by the mother, a servant to J. Sayers’ (14 November 1599); ‘—Pierte, infant of Elizabeth, in Jonas Scot’s house, imputed to the E of Desmond’ (11 May 1602). In the baptismal register (where the naming of the parent is only standard from 1600 onwards) the five entries are: ‘Lawrence Morrise, son of Olive by one Laurence Williams in Coleman Street’ (22 April 1604); ‘Sarah Hely, daughter of Ann, widow, illegitimate’ (3 October 1604); ‘Judith Gardner, daughter of Elizabeth or as was said one William Gardner in J. Gates’s house’ (19 June 1605); ‘Thomasine Gaber, daughter of Elizabeth with Mr Buckle’ (10 January 1605); ‘Jane Basket daughter of Jane, sojourner with Nicholas Terrell’ (30 March 1606).

12. Dr Forman’s casebook

38
. Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 254r. I read the date of the incident as 10 September (rather than the 16th, as read by Rowse and repeated by others). Forman’s zero has an embryonic upstroke where the pen completes the circle; his actual ‘6’ is much more pronounced. On Forman see Kassell 2005, Traister 2000 and (more generically) Melton 1620.

39
. Bod., Ashmole MS 411, fols 101-2. Other charges were 2s for a ‘purge’, 3s for a ‘comfortable drink’, 5s for a call-out, and 20 nobles (£6 13s 4d) for a regime (‘the Diet’) lasting twenty-four days. Payment was sometimes dependent on results: in 1601 a patient agreed to pay £6 down and the same again when cured, but ‘if she be not well at all I must give her £5 again’ (Rowse 1976, 215).

40
. W. Lilly,
History of his Life and Times
(1715), 16; Nashe 1958, 3.83. Nashe’s satirical portrait of the cunning-man in
Terrors of the Night
(1594) is in part suggestive of Forman: see Nashe 1958, 1.363-7; Nicholl 1984, 197-200.

41
. The story in Manningham’s diary (June 1602; Sorlien 1976, 77) was from ‘Ch Da’, i.e. Charles Danvers, a Wiltshire gentleman almost certainly acquainted with Forman. His father had intervened on Forman’s behalf in 1586: ‘The Bishop [of Salisbury] and I were made friends by . . . Sir John Danvers’ (Rowse 1976, 47). On Savory see Eccles 1991-3, s.v.

42
. Foakes 2002, 39 (Diary, fol. 17); Cerasano 1993, 150-53. Henslowe consulted Forman on 6 August 1596 (Bod., Ashmole MS 234, fol. 85), and again on 5 February 1597 (Ashmole MS 226, fol. 13v), suffering from ‘pain in the reins [kidneys]’ and ‘water in the stomach’, for which he was prescribed a purgative. Forman had other theatre people in his clientele, and was a keen playgoer. His ‘Bock of plaies’ (Ashmole MS 208, fols 200-213; SRI 3-20) describes productions of
Macbeth
,
Cymbeline
and
The Winter’s Tale
seen at the Globe in 1611; he also saw a
Richard II
but it does not seem to be Shakespeare’s version.

43
. The six extant casebooks provide a continuous record from March 1596 to November 1601. Statistical analysis of the first two (Kassell 2005, 129-30) shows 2,760 consultations, of which 60 per cent were by women.

44
. Bod., Ashmole MS 802, fol. 133; Kassell 2005, 98.

45
. Jonathan Bate,
Daily Telegraph
, 10 February 2001; John Bossy, ‘Haleking’,
LRB
23, 22 February 2006. Kassell (2005, 130-1) counts fifty-six records of sexual intercourse in Forman’s papers. A similar overtone of predation is found in the case of a surgeon, Tristram Lyde: ‘He would have caused the women to have stript themselves naked in his presence, and himselfe would have annoynted them [with quicksilver]’ (Manningham’s diary, February 1601; Sorlien 1976, 53). In 1599, aged forty-seven, Forman married the sixteen-year-old Anne Baker, whom he refers to in sexual notes as ‘Tronco’.

46
. These errors (Rowse 1973, 106) were pointed out by Stanley Wells (
TLS
11 May 1973) and silently revised in later editions.

47
. Bod., Ashmole MS 226, fol. 278v. Variant forenames: see Mary Edmond, ‘John Heminges’,
ODNB
2004; Rowse 1976, 306. Thomas Middleton’s wife, Magdalen
n’e
Marbeck, is also sometimes documented as Mary.

48
. E.g. ‘Joan, servant of Mr Borace of Radcliffe’, who was pregnant by him when she consulted Forman in 1598, and feared he was trying to poison or bewitch her ‘that she should die’ (Bod., Ashmole MS 195; Rowse 1976, 213). Margery Browne’s husband was Christopher Laughlin of St Botolph’s, Aldersgate (Webb 1995, 4.644).

49
. Schoenbaum erroneously names her as Michelle Art (SRI 39). The entry relating to her and Mountjoy (FPC MS 4, fol. 501) refers to ‘Michel Art son ancien’. He was the church elder responsible for Mountjoy, and it was his evidence which led to Mountjoy being ‘censured’. See Appendix 3.

50
. Bod., Ashmole MS 226, 17 May 1597, reproduced in Rowse 1973.

51
. The widow of the 1st Lord Hunsdon, Lady Anne, was still alive, but Forman would have distinguished her as the ‘old’ Lady Hunsdon (as her husband is ‘my old Lord’ in the reference above). On Elizabeth Carey, see Wallace T. MacCaffrey, ‘Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon’,
ODNB
2004; Nicholl 1984, 182-4. Nashe calls her an ‘excellent accomplisht court-glorifying lady’; Dowland’s tune, ‘My Lady Hunsdon’s Puffe’, was written for her. Forman himself had been patronized by Carey: ‘the 22nd of December [1587] I rode to Sir George Carey’s’ (Rowse 1976, 289). On the intellectual ambience of the family see Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Bess Carey’s Petrarch’ (
RES
50 (1990), 304-19), ‘Bess’ being the Hunsdons’ daughter Elizabeth, later Lady Berkeley.

52
. Hotson 1931, 111-22; H. J. Oliver, ed.,
Merry Wives
(Arden edn, 1971), xliv-lii. The plausible but undocumented tradition that the play was a royal command is first mentioned in the preface to John Dennis’s adaptation,
The Comical Gallant
(1702). That Shakespeare wrote it fast is also plausible, though Dennis’s ‘fourteen days’ is surely an exaggeration.