Shakespeare: A Life (55 page)

barber surgeons a new charter. Farther up the street were almshouses
lately founded by a former Lord Mayor, Sir Ambrose Nicholas, whose son
Daniel when testifying in a lawsuit, mentioned his talks with the
playwright.

That lawsuit reveals
Shakespeare's role in a nuptial agreement made when he was lodging
with Marie and her husband; it shows us how they regarded him, and
also introduces us to the minor playwright George Wilkins. It is
rather inaccurately said that Shakespeare lived in a parish
'adjoining' that of his fellows Heminges and Condell: neither was far
away, but they lived to the east beyond St Alphage's and St Alban's
parishes, at St Mary Aldermanbury's,
¹⁶
and other theatre men such as Jonson, Dekker, and Munday at about
this time lived to the north, outside the city's walls at St Giles.
Shakespeare did not have actors or poets breathing down his neck, but a
short walk would have taken him to the watermen for a ride across the
river, so he could possibly have reached the Globe in less than half an
hour.

In 1604 at any rate his
landlady made good use of him. About six years earlier, Marie Mountjoy
had welcomed a new apprentice in Stephen Belott, a young man of
French descent who seemed personable and competent. Just before that,
Marie had worriedly consulted Simon Forman who diagnosed her as
pregnant as a result of indiscretions with the mercer Henry Wood of Swan
Alley, but that had proved a false alarm, and a less risky amorous
prospect began to appeal. Clearly, her respectable assistant was keen
on her daughter Mary, though young Belott hesitated to propose
marriage. After consulting with her husband, Marie implored her
40-year-old lodger, Shakespeare, to persuade Stephen Belott to wed Mary
with a promise of a sum of money for Belott if he did. No one else,
apparently, was trusted with this mission: Christopher Mountjoy also
urged Shakespeare to help. As a go-between like his Pandarus, the
playwright did his best to move the apprentice to take the Mountjoy
girl, with the result that Belott and Mary were wedded at St Olave's
church on 19 November 1604.
¹⁷
,

Christopher Mountjoy, however, fell short of his promises. His
relations with his son-in-law soured, and less than eight years later a
summons in the Court of Requests (dated 7 May 1612) demanded that

-326-

Shakespeare and others give evidence in a civil action of Stephen Belott, plaintiff,
versus
Christopher Mountjoy, defendant.

The key issue in the civil action was whether Mountjoy had ever
pledged to give the young man £60 on marrying and also to leave him a
legacy of £200, as Belott claimed. None of the witnesses had a
remembrance at all of the legacy or an exact memory of the £60, so
Shakespeare's failure to remember those sums was not unusual. What was
said of the characters of the plaintiff and defendant, however, could
be crucial, and in his own comments Shakespeare's evenhandedness is
truly impressive (possibly this was not the first time he avoided
trouble by approving all parties). In his depositions, he rather
blandly characterizes the two contenders, finding them both admirable,
yet he delicately avoids implying that his own approval of Belott
could mean that Mountjoy had felt, or ever said, that the young man
was a profitable employee.

The poet
has known the plaintiff and defendant, alike, 'for the space of tenne
yeres or thereabouts', he gladly admits. Belott, as Shakespeare recalls,
'did well and honestly behave himselfe', and 'was A very good and
industrious servant'. On the other hand, to his, perhaps, imperfect
remembrance, he 'hath not heard the deffendant [ Mountjoy] confesse that
he had gott any great proffitt and comodytye by the said service' of
this Stephen Belott. And yet for that matter, Mountjoy did 'beare and
shew great good will and affecceon towardes' this servant. In fact, at
divers and sundry times, Shakespeare has heard the defendant and his
wife report that Belott was 'a very honest fellowe'. So far, so good.
In another response, Shakespeare conjures up what must have been a
rather fraught scene at Silver Street with Marie, then in her late
thirties, begging her gentlemanly lodger to persuade Belott to accept
the girl, though the legal form of the report is dry, enough:
Shakespeare'sayeth that the said deffendantes wyeff [Marie] did
sollicitt and entreat [him] to move and perswade the said Complainant
to effect the said marriadge and accordingly this deponent did move
and perswade the complainant thereunto'.
¹⁸

That scene had occurred in 1604, or about the time he was endorsing the view, in
All's Well
and in
Measure for Measure
, that reluctant bachelors need to be nudged into marriage. It is just possible that

-327-

Marie's dilemma gave him ideas for Helena and Duke Vincentio of Vienna, as Ernst Honigmann suggests,
¹⁹
but perhaps the important point is only that he had succeeded as a
persuader where others might have failed, since that in a small way
has a relation to his habits as a dramatist. He projects himself into
viewpoints not his own, and here, interestingly, he has not done so
without talking over, with his acquaintances, Marie's dilemma and the
behaviour and characters of persons. Daniel Nicholas, Sir Ambrose's
son, testified for example that he heard

one William Shakespeare saye that the defendant [ Mountjoy] did beare A
good opinnion of [Belott] and affected him well when he served him. And did
move [Belott] by him the said Shakespeare to have a marriadge betweene his
daughter Maryc Mountjoye [and] the plaintiff . . . as Shakespeare tould him
this deponent [ Nicholas] which was effected and Solempnized uppon
promise of A porc
i
on with her.
²⁰

Nicholas's phrase, 'make suer' (make sure), indicates that Shakespeare
had even brought about a troth-plight between Stephen and Mary in
his presence:

And in Regard Mr Shakespeare hadd tould them [Stephen and Mary] that
they should have A some of monney for A porcion from the father they weare
made suer by in, Shakespeare by gevinge there Consent, and agreed to
Marrye,

And did Marrye
²¹
.

Unable to reach a verdict on hearsay evidence, the court, not finding
itself vastly clarified on any point by any witness, referred the
Belott-Mountjoy suit rather wearily to 'Elders of the french Church',
who at last ordered Mountjoy to pay Belott twenty nobles (£6.13
s.
4
d.
), far less than he had sought, and later excommunicated Mountjoy for
'sa vie desreglée & desbordée'.
So the legal part of the wrangle ended. Shakespeare, if one may
speculate, perhaps moved out of the house in October 1606 when Marie
died, and before the Belotts returned to Silver Street for renewed
fighting.

One of the oddest witnesses
in the case had been the minor writer George Wilkins, with whom
Belott and Mary lived when they left Silver Street. In touch with the
underworld and reputedly a brothel-

-328-

keeper, Wilkins, in his late twenties, clearly had some acquaintance
with Shakespeare. He was a troubled young man, bitterly hostile to
women. In all of his work he is obsessed with sin and misery as if
displaying his guilt. He brutally kicked a pregnant woman in the belly;
he beat another woman, and then stamped on her so that she had to be
carried home. We know of his behaviour from legal records, and two
allusions to the kicking of women occur in Wilkins's plays.
²²
His novella
The Painfull Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre
( 1608) was not a 'source' for Shakespeare's drama as is assumed in a modern study,
²³
but is based on
Pericles
.

Did Wilkins himself write two acts of
Pericles
?
If he did, he presumably saw the older poet at Silver Street or in its
environs more than once. Living to the south-west of his friend
Stephen Belott, Wilkins aspired to respectability in the days before
he was arraigned for petty crime. Shakespeare is not to be blamed for
the company he kept, and, at any rate, just how well he knew the
younger poet is unknown. Wilkins's worst days were ahead of him. But
some of his attitudes and habits, including his brutal 'kicking', may
have been clear to Shakespeare, who observed what he could of wealthy
and of seedy London; we shall meet Wilkins again.

Groups of royal swans, once the delight of Queen Elizabeth, still
floated in calm indifference on the river Thames. These creatures
could be seen among low, flat-bottomed barges and high-masted vessels
on the smooth surface of the water. Many an actor living in the city
must have stepped into a waiting, upholstered wherry and crossed
within sight of the swans to Bankside -- to hear news or gossip at the
Rose or Globe. In the late summer of 1605 there was news of the royal
patron. King James had reached Oxford on 27 August. He had been made
to wait outside St John's College's gates for Matthew Gwinn's brief,
pretty welcoming pageant. Three young boys, in the dress of female
prophets or Sibyls, had hailed him as a descendant of the Scottish
warrior Banquo.
'Nec tibi, Banquo',
they told the King of England and of Scotland,

-329-

Not to thee, Banquo! but to thy descendants
Eternal rule was promised by immortals.

Happily not linked with the bloody usurper Macbeth, the King was next treated to Oxford's learning.
²⁴
For two days he listened to Latin 'disputations' in theology,
medicine, law, and other topics. One question debated at the college
was, 'An imaginatio possit producere reales effectus?' (Whether
imagination can produce actual effects?). The King's players, reaching
Oxford on 9 October, may have seen the academic questions which were
printed as a broadsheet. The 'imaginatio' one, by coincidence or not, is
answered in
Macbeth
when the killer's imagination alone creates a dagger in the air before Duncan's murder.

Oxford's events may not have inspired Shakespeare's play, but they perhaps reminded him of Macbeth and Banquo in Holinshed
Chronicles
.
The new reign's mythology elevated Scottish history, and, by chance,
regicide became a topic of talk in November in London. A horrific plan
had come to light. Guido or Guy Fawkes, a Yorkshireborn soldier, had
carried twenty barrels of gunpowder and many iron bars into a vault
under the House of Lords with the aim of blowing up the King, the
Queen, Prince Henry, the bishops, nobles, and knights, 'all at one
thunderclap'.

Interestingly, Guy
Fawkes was attached to a web of conspiracy which led up to the
Warwickshire gentry and included Catholics known to the Shakespeares
-- such as Robert Catesby, whose father had held land in Stratford,
Bishopton, and Shottery, and John Grant, a Snitterfield landowner. So
many sympathizers and plotters were local men that a board of jurors,
including July Shaw -- later a witness to the dramatist's will -- met
at Stratford in February 1606 to investigate the Gunpowder Plot. Like
Macbeth in confusing foul and fair, the plotters cannot have seemed
very remote to Shakespeare. Trials and hangings meanwhile took place
in London. Father Henry Garnet, the Jesuit Superior, was hanged on 3
May. His defence of the right to 'equivocate' at his trial puts one in
mind of the Porter in
Macbeth
who thinks of himself at Hell's
gate after Duncan is killed: 'Knock, knock. . . . Faith, here's an
equivocator that could swear in both scales

-330-

against either scale, who committed treason enough . . . yet could not
equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator' (11. iii. 7-11).

A few public events, then, may be traceable in
Macbeth
,
but was the Scottish tragedy played for two kings in the summer of
1606? Or was it written as a 'royal play' for their sakes? In August
the bristling, beflagged warship
Tre Kroner
touched Gravesend
with King James's brother-in-law Christian IV of Denmark aboard.
Having come over mainly to see his sister Anna, he was very well
entertained. After all this was the first state visit to England by a
foreign ruler in eighty-four years. A tall and almost stout,
whitish-blond Dane of 29, Christian IV had an ability to drink most
ordinary mortals under the table -- his gentle mother is said to have
worked her way 'through two gallons of Rhine wine a day' -- but he had
a weak grasp of his host's language. Anyway, the King's men performed
three times for the two jovial monarchs. There is no hint as to which
plays were staged, and no sign that
Macbeth
was one of them.
²⁵
(Later, the tipsy shipboard scene on Pompey's yacht in
Antony and Cleopatra
is said to have recalled a shipboard feast of James and Christian,
but nowhere else does the author so foolishly risk mocking his
patron.)

Nevertheless
Macbeth
was sooner or later acted at James's court, and its relation to the royal patron is fascinating. In Holinshed
Chronicles
,
Shakespeare had found Banquo himself involved in a conspiracy to kill
King Duncan, and this he may have changed to avoid implying that James
I's ancestor was guilty of treason. Yet to have shown Macbeth and
Banquo in league to murder a king would also have been faulty in
dramatic terms: he clears Banquo of complicity, so that Macbeth is
deprived of any excuse for killing Duncan.

At the same time he refuses to whitewash Banquo, or to give James I
an ancestral paragon. Banquo in the play admits to an 'indissoluble tie'
with Macbeth, and accepts the latter's accession, though fearing he
played'most foully for't'. He hopes the witches will help
him,
too. 'Why by the verities on thee made good', Banquo says of the Witches' aid,

May they not be my oracles as well,
And set me up in hope? But hush, no more.

(111. i. 8-10)

-331-