I’ve always liked Shakespeare, ever since I was a kid and my mother used to take us to see productions of “Shakespeare in the Park” in the summer time when I was growing up. (I’m not sure why, but I mostly remember the comedies, especially Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night. Perhaps mom didn’t take us to the tragedies?) Lately, my attraction to Shakespeare has threatened to turn into a full-blown obsession. One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to see—either live or on DVD—every single play I could find. Talk about a fun resolution! Lately it’s been Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson in Much Ado About Nothing. I find myself humming “hey nonny , nonny” whenever I feel sad.  

Also as part of the obsession I’ve been reading and re-reading biographies and histories, the most recent of which is The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street by Christopher Nicholl. William Shakespeare defies his biographers at every turn, for it is famously known that not a single letter, not a notebook, diary, journal or any personal correspondence of his of any sort remains.  It is an omission so great and glaring that it is generally agreed it must be deliberate. At some point Shakespeare must have destroyed all his personal letters. The only thing we have to prove he even existed are his plays, his signature on a few bills, one will, and a couple entries in church registries marking his birth and death. And one short deposition in an obscure court case over a bride’s dowry given on Monday, May 11th, 1612.  On that day and that day only we hear the echo of William Shakespeare, actually talking. 

Nicholl uses the event of that court case as a starting point to reconstruct what Shakespeare’s life might have been like during a couple of years that he was known to be living as a lodger with a French family on Silver Street in London.  And I was riveted.  It is a book not so much about Shakespeare as it is about what it might be like to live when Shakespeare lived. If anything, it is the story of the Mountjoy household—“Mountjoy” being the name of the family from whom Shakespeare rented his room.  Nicholl sets his reader down on Silver Street and points in one direction, towards Cripple Gate, describing the houses you can see and who lives there, up to and including the physic garden recently installed at the Alchemist’s Hall at the end of the street by no less a person than the famous herbalist John Gerard only a few years earlier.  He points in another direction towards the unsavory Turnbull Street, infamous for its brothels and bawdy houses (including an inn owned by one George Wilkins, a pimp and wannabe writer who is actually known to have collaborated with Shakespeare on Pericles.) He opens the door and lets you peer inside to the workshop of Mr. Christopher Mountjoy, a French immigrant and “tire-maker,” meaning he had a business constructing those elaborate headdresses, wigs and hairpieces that one sees in portraits of Elizabethan and Jacobean noblewomen.  I could go on and on about wigs and how infrequently Elizabethan women washed their hair, but this newsletter is long enough. I do go on and on about it here if you really want the awful details!