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![‘A punk [prostitute] after supper’ – customers eating in a Jacobean brothel](images/books122707_01.jpg)
‘A punk [prostitute] after supper’ – customers eating in a Jacobean brothel |
The Bard’s bent for bawdiness
A new book on Shakespeare offers an insight into the man behind the writer – and reveals the origins of his strong interest in prostitution, writes Martin Sheppard
IN 1598 William Shakespeare bought New Place, the best house in his native town of Stratford-upon-Avon. The theatre and the court continued, however, to draw him to London.
In 1909 two American scholars, Hulda and Charles William Wallace, revealed exactly where he was living in 1604. They discovered “one Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house” in Silver Street, near Cripplegate.
Not only had Shakespeare lodged there, well away from the Globe in Southwark, he had helped promote a marriage between Mary, the daughter of the owner of the house, Christopher Mountjoy, and Mountjoy’s apprentice, Stephen Belott.
A dispute over Mary Mountjoy’s dowry later came before the Court of Requests. On May 11 1612 William Shakespeare, Gentleman, testified in the case. Oddly, for someone with a superb memory, he claimed to have forgotten how much Mountjoy had promised his daughter and son-in-law. Although we do not know the final outcome, the case provides a unique opportunity to get near to Shakespeare the man rather than the writer.
Even if the clues are slight, and often tantalisingly inconclusive, The Lodger is a compelling detective story. Charles Nicholl reconstructs life in the sizeable house, both workshop and dwelling, on the corner of Silver Street and Muggle Street.
(The area, burned out in the Great Fire of 1666, bombed in 1940 and then obliterated in post-war London, is clearly visible on the 1560s Agas Map.)
We are introduced to a range of the men and women, reputable and disreputable, who frequented it and were acquainted with Shakespeare and the Mountjoys.
Christopher Mountjoy and his wife Marie were Huguenot tire-makers, tires being elaborate head-dresses produced in their workshop for sale to aristocratic ladies, including James I’s queen, Anne of Denmark. Less costly versions were bought by women wishing to look fashionable, including those of easy virtue, and for use in the theatre.
The link between the theatre and prostitution has always been a strong one. Nicholl follows it enthusiastically and takes us on a tour of a rakish underworld: one of flirtatious and accommodating shop-women, dirty weekends in Brentford (where Mountjoy owned another house), illegitimate children, bawdy houses in Turnbull Street and a notorious stew in Southwark.
Shakespeare’s collaborator in Pericles, George Wilkins, was later repeatedly hauled before the courts for violence against women, almost certainly in the course of organised prostitution.
While his own reputation remains unsullied, it is intriguing that Shakespeare’s main play about sexual immorality, Measure for Measure, and his only play with a brothel scene, Pericles, date from this period, as does All’s Well That Ends Well, which is set in France and about a man pressed into marriage.
More specifically, the poet took in the processes involved in tire-making, using them, for example, in Macbeth’s “sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care”.
Nicholl also explains exactly how the underpropper, not ruff, which Shakespeare wears in the Droeshout portrait and which the Mountjoys might well have made, is constructed.
All in all, this is a readable and entertaining book that sheds light on Shakespeare from an unusual angle.
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