The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (5 page)

In this context of professional uncertainty and cut-throat rivalry, the year 1603 brought Shakespeare a new promise of stability. On 19 May, just twelve days after King James’s arrival in London from Scotland, letters patent were issued licensing the Chamberlain’s Men as ‘His Majesty’s Players’. Nine actors are named, including Shakespeare, Burbage, John Heminges, Henry Condell, Augustine Phillips, William Sly and the comic actor Robert Armin. They are authorized ‘to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing comedies, tragedies, histories, enterludes, morals, pastorals, stage-plays and such others like . . . as well for the recreating of our loving subjects as for our solace and pleasure when we shall think good to see them for our pleasure’.
²¹
Henceforth Shakespeare’s company was called the King’s Men. This translation was timely, for just a few days earlier the company’s current patron - George Carey, 2nd Lord Hunsdon - had been forced to resign as Lord Chamberlain due to ill-health; by September he was dead, according to the rumours from syphilis.
²²

The company’s new status assured them of prestige and a measure of royal protection - indeed it made them, nominally at least, members of the royal household. In James’s coronation procession Shakespeare and his fellows are ranked as Grooms of the Chamber, though the listing of them under the subsection ‘Fawkeners [falconers] &c’ indicates their not very grand status.
²³
They also had the promise of court performances (‘when we shall think good to see them’). These they would need, for on the same day their letters patent were issued the theatres were closed down due to the plague. The court decamped hurriedly from London, and the King’s Men went on the road. Their first known performance under their new royal name was at Bath; they received 30 shillings. The beginning is anti-climactic but the company’s new solidity is real, and it will last.

We see in this brief résumé something of what Shakespeare would mean to the Mountjoys - a man pre-eminent in the theatrical world, with which they were themselves probably connected; a man with a minor foothold in the new court of King James, to which they doubtless aspired. It is possible that the appearance of ‘Marie Mountjoy, tyrewoman’ in the royal accounts of 1604-5 (see Plate 23) is a direct result of her contact with Shakespeare. She supplied the new Queen - James’s Danish-born wife, Anne or Anna - with head-tires, and perhaps other items, for which she received payments totalling £59.
²⁴
One of the payments is dated 17 November 1604, just two days before the wedding of Mary and Stephen which Shakespeare had helped to bring about.

Shakespeare at forty was, by the expectancies of the day, a man advancing into middle age. ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure.’ He might feel himself slipping towards the fifth of Jaques’s ‘seven ages’ - the portly justice,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances . . .
(
As You Like It
, 2.7.155-6)

- and one might think this an appropriate mien for the Silver Street marriage-counsellor. There is a theatrical tradition that Shakespeare played old men - the ghost in
Hamlet
, Adam in
As You Like It
.
²⁵
He was perhaps already balding, as he is in all the known portraits, a condition humorously associated with tonsured friars and sufferers from syphilis - thus prostitutes, in
Timon of Athens
, ‘make curl’d-pate ruffians bald’ (4.3.162).

Of the portraits only three have any real claim to authenticity - the engraving by Martin Droeshout in the front of the First Folio; the ‘Chandos’ portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, attributed to John Taylor; and the funeral effigy at Holy Trinity, Stratford, attributed to Gheerart Janssen. The first and the last are true likenesses by virtue of their context - they are definitely
of
Shakespeare - but as portraits they are maddeningly bland and uncommunicative. The funeral bust has been famously described as looking like a ‘self-satisfied pork-butcher’, a judgment laden with Edwardian snobbery but unfortunately apposite. The ‘Chandos’ portrait is not certainly of Shakespeare, but it has a convincing provenance, and a degree of similarity to the other two portraits, and its compellingly saturnine portrayal answers needs which the others leave untouched. In terms of execution, the ‘Chandos’ is the earliest (
c
. 1610) - the other two are posthumous - but the Droeshout engraving is based on an earlier portrait, now lost, which for various reasons can be plausibly dated back to around 1604.
²⁶
Somewhere behind that iconic but incompetent little cartoon which adorns the First Folio is an image of Shakespeare in his early forties - Shakespeare the lodger on Silver Street.

One saw a respectable-looking man but something shadowed that respectability. His status was dubious, tinged with the ambiguous aura of the playhouse, a place associated with moral dangers and depravities as much as with poetry, music and laughter. He was nominally a gentleman -
Mr
Shakespeare - with a fancy coat of arms which he had purchased on behalf of his father, and which was now his own since his father’s death in 1601. (The motto, ‘Non sanz droict’, was parodied by Jonson as ‘Not without mustard’.) But there were unresolved problems with the Herald’s Office as to the exact nature of his gentility. The herald who had awarded the coat of arms, Sir William Dethick, was under investigation. A note written by one of his antagonists lists some questionable awards, among them ‘Shakespeare ye player’.
²⁷
The inference - that a mere player or actor could not really be a gentleman - is a commonplace attitude of the time, and one that rankled in Shakespeare deeply. He expresses bitterness at his ill-starred profession in Sonnet 111:

O for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.

A more genial expression of the matter is found in an epigram addressed to Shakespeare in 1611:

Some say (good Will), which I in sport do sing,
Hadst thou not plaid some kingly parts in sport,
Thou hadst bin a companion for a King.
²⁸

To paraphrase, he had ruined his prospects of social advancement by choosing the career of an actor.

If he was a man of substance, it was the substance of money and property. Shakespeare’s earnings were high - estimates vary wildly, but something around £250 a year is plausible. By 1602 he owned three houses in Stratford, and 107 acres of tenanted farmland north of the town; three years later he invested £440 acquiring a ‘moiety’ or half-share in the income of Stratford tithe-lands.
²⁹
These are big sums, conjured out of the ‘insubstantial pageant’ of the playhouse and swiftly solidified into bricks, mortar and land. He did not neglect the small sums, either. In 1604, around the time he was betrothing Stephen and Mary on Silver Street, his lawyers were suing a Stratford neighbour for an outstanding debt of 35s 10d. He would not necessarily agree with Iago’s view that ‘who steals my purse steals trash’ (
Othello
, 3.3.161).

In an anonymous pamphlet of 1605,
Ratsey’s Ghost
, a provincial player is advised to go to London and ‘play Hamlet’ for a wager. ‘There thou shalt learn to be frugal . . . and to feed upon all men, to let none feed upon thee; to make thy hand a stranger to thy pocket, and when thou feelest thy purse well lined, buy thee some place or lordship in the country.’ Yes, says the player, ‘I have heard indeed of some that have gone to London very meanly, and have come in time to be exceeding wealthy.’ The author may have had the acquisitive player Mr Shakespeare in mind when he wrote this.
³⁰

Jonson jibed at Shakespeare’s pretensions to gentility (at least that is one interpretation of some lines in his 1599 satire
Every Man out of his Humour
) but when he came to praise Shakespeare in the preface to the First Folio, the first adjective he uses of him is ‘gentle’. This does not necessarily have the softness of its modern meaning - it refers to the perceived qualities of a ‘gentleman’: courtesy, loyalty, probity.

What else do we know of him as he takes up his tenancy on Silver Street? He was a married man, but his wife Anne
n’e
Hathwey or Hathaway was up in Stratford, rather too distant to impose husbandly virtues on him. He was a father scarred by the death of a child - his only son, Hamnet, had died at the age of eleven in 1596.
³¹
His remaining children were daughters - Susanna, who was twenty in 1603, and Hamnet’s twin sister, Judith. Neither was yet married. The problem of the ‘succession’ which had dogged Queen Elizabeth’s last years had been resolved, but Shakespeare had his own uncertainties of succession.

That he was a man of charm and geniality is attested by many eyewitnesses. In 1592, our first personal notice of him, the author Henry Chettle reported: ‘Myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace of writing, which approves his art.’
³²
‘Civil’ in his demeanour and ‘upright’ in his dealing - that was ten years ago, but there is no reason to think he was any less so now. However, one notes the circumstances of this testimonial: some gritting of the teeth may be discernible in Chettle’s compliments, for they are in the nature of a public apology. Shakespeare had complained to him about that notorious passage in
Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit
, which tilted furiously at ‘Shakescene’, the ‘upstart crow beautified with our feathers’ (in other words, a mere actor who was presuming to write plays). Ostensibly this was a pamphlet by Robert Greene, edited for publication by Chettle after Greene’s death, though some argue that Chettle cooked up most of it himself. Either way, it was he whom Shakespeare held responsible.
³³
Chettle also mentions some men ‘of worship’ who have come forward to vouch for Shakespeare - character witnesses, one might say. The description is precise - men ‘of worship’ were inferior to nobles or knights, who were men ‘of honour’: they were gentlemen, citizens, professionals, etc. One adds to Shakespeare’s civility and uprightness a certain steely quality - a young man ready to call on powerful backers, if needed, to assert his ‘honesty’.

Other contemporaries have left testimony, including two out of that mob of minor authors who are as much his literary milieu as the more famous names we remember today. Here is the calligrapher and poet John Davies, writing in praise of ‘W.S.’ and ‘R.B.’, undoubtedly Shakespeare and Burbage:

Players, I love yee and your qualitie,
As ye are men that pass time not abus’d . . .
Wit, courage, good shape, good partes, and all good,
As long as all these goods are no worse us’d;

And though the stage doth staine pure gentle bloud,
Yet generous yee are in minde and moode.
³⁴

And in 1604 one ‘An. Sc.’, sometimes identified as Anthony Scoloker, refers to him - on what precise grounds we do not know - as ‘friendly Shakespeare’.
³⁵

John Aubrey said he was ‘a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit’. Aubrey could not have seen him - he was born in 1626, ten years after Shakespeare’s death - but he had spoken to those who had. Among his named sources were the Davenant brothers, who had known Shakespeare personally, as children, when he stayed at their father’s tavern, the Crown in Oxford. Sir William Davenant’s testimony is complicated by his claim to be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son (of this more later), but his elder brother, the Rev. Robert Davenant, born in 1603, gives us a childhood memory of uncomplicated warmth. Thus Aubrey: ‘I have heard Parson Robert D say that Mr W. Shakespeare here [at the Crown] gave him a hundred kisses.’
³⁶

These are contemporary testimonies of Shakespeare the man - ‘civil’ despite provocation, ‘gentle’ whether or not truly a gentleman, ‘friendly’ to a junior author, lavishly affectionate to a little boy, ‘generous in mind and mood’. They are the upbeat impressions and memories: that there was a darker side must be inferred from his writing. How else could he impersonate so acutely every shade of cruelty and falsehood, every nuance of betrayal, every murky twinge of sexuality? He is not Iago or Edmund or Thersites, but he has found them in himself.

He was, in Jorge Luis Borges’s famous conundrum, ‘many and no one’.
³⁷
But that is metaphor. Biography stands by the idea - more prosaic but ultimately more mysterious - that he was someone.

3

Sugar and gall

W
hat was Shakespeare writing during his residency with the Mountjoys in
c
. 1603-5? There are five plays which belong in that broad time-span. They are, in probable order of composition:
Othello
,
Measure for Measure
,
All’s Well that Ends Well
,
Timon of Athens
and
King Lear
. A rate of two plays a year is about average for Shakespeare’s working life, and may even reflect an agreed productivity rate as the company’s ‘playmaker’. The cross-currents of composition, rehearsal and rewriting were complex. He was seldom working on less than two plays at once: ideas refract and reverberate between them.