Read Online The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl - Free Book Online
Authors: Charles Nicholl
Tags: Drama, Literary, General, Social Science, Historical, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Criticism, Shakespeare, Customs & Traditions, Cripplegate (London; England), Dramatists; English
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Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’ had been mentioned in print the previous year, and this may have sharpened Jaggard’s appetite. Shakespeare’s reaction is recorded by Thomas Heywood in 1612, when a new edition of The Passionate Pilgrim was published, still ‘by’ Shakespeare - ‘The author I know much offended with Mr Jaggard that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name’. 54
Publishers, said the poet Michael Drayton, ‘are a company of base knaves whom I both scorn and kick at’, and perhaps there were times when Shakespeare thought the same. 55 Ironically, it was the piratical Mr Jaggard who was one of the prime movers of the posthumous First Folio, and we might think he has thereby made amends for his earlier ‘boldness’ with Shakespeare’s name. The Folio includes eighteen previously unpublished plays - among them masterpieces like Macbeth , Twelfth Night and The Tempest - which might otherwise have been lost for ever.
PART THREE
The Mountjoys
HELENA: Which is the Frenchman?
DIANA: He - that with the plume.
All’s Well that Ends Well , 3.5.77-8
9
Early years
W e have an idea of Shakespeare’s habitat in these years in Cripplegate - the furnished room, the businesslike street, the neighbours whose faces he knew, the mansions split up into tenements, the little parish church with its peal of bells - but we have so far only a passing acquaintance with the most important figures in this landscape: the family he lived with. What is their story, and how does it come to intersect with Shakespeare’s?
Of the Mountjoys’ origins there is only fragmentary information. We know where Christopher Mountjoy was born but not when, and we know when Marie Mountjoy was born but not where.
In his act of ‘denization’ or naturalization (of which more later) Christopher is described as ‘a subject of the French King and born in the town of Cressey’. 1 ‘Cressey’ is presumably the English clerk’s spelling of Cr’cy. There is more than one Cr’cy in France, but most probably Mountjoy was from Cr’cy-en-Ponthieu. This is certainly the Cr’cy that Englishmen had heard of, being the site of the famous battle of 26 August 1346, when Edward III’s English archers routed the French army during the Hundred Years War. It lies in Picardie, in north-western France, in the fertile flat-lands of the lower Somme, which flows into the English Channel about 12 miles west of it. Mountjoy calls it a ‘town’ (or perhaps this is the clerk’s phrasing) but today it is little more than a large village, population about 1,500.
No record of the birth of Christophe Montjoi or Montjoie is to be found in the registres d’état civil for Cr’cy-en-Ponthieu, but the sixteenth-century registers are by no means complete. 2 For reasons I will give a little later it is likely he was born in the mid-1550s or early 1560s.
Various larger market-towns and trading centres were within easy reach of Cr’cy. The nearest was Abbeville, 10 miles away, but the most important one was Amiens, the regional capital of Picardie, famed for its Gothic cathedral (the largest in France) and its medieval water-gardens, Les Hortillonnages. Amiens was a centre for clothworking, part of that densely populated belt of northern France and Flanders which produced high-quality textiles: wool, cotton, silk and linen. In the 1593 ‘Return of Strangers’, a detailed listing of foreigners in London, there are twenty-five immigrants from Amiens, living in fourteen households. All of those whose employment is given are clothworkers - the majority are silk-weavers; there are also two ‘taffety-weavers’, a silk-winder and a silk-twister, a dyer and a bobbin-maker. Another nearby town was Arras, famous for those embroidered hangings. From here came more silk-weavers, two wool-combers and a feltmaker. 3
Christopher Mountjoy’s future trade of tiremaking is grounded in the textile industry of his
Publishers, said the poet Michael Drayton, ‘are a company of base knaves whom I both scorn and kick at’, and perhaps there were times when Shakespeare thought the same. 55 Ironically, it was the piratical Mr Jaggard who was one of the prime movers of the posthumous First Folio, and we might think he has thereby made amends for his earlier ‘boldness’ with Shakespeare’s name. The Folio includes eighteen previously unpublished plays - among them masterpieces like Macbeth , Twelfth Night and The Tempest - which might otherwise have been lost for ever.
PART THREE
The Mountjoys
HELENA: Which is the Frenchman?
DIANA: He - that with the plume.
All’s Well that Ends Well , 3.5.77-8
9
Early years
W e have an idea of Shakespeare’s habitat in these years in Cripplegate - the furnished room, the businesslike street, the neighbours whose faces he knew, the mansions split up into tenements, the little parish church with its peal of bells - but we have so far only a passing acquaintance with the most important figures in this landscape: the family he lived with. What is their story, and how does it come to intersect with Shakespeare’s?
Of the Mountjoys’ origins there is only fragmentary information. We know where Christopher Mountjoy was born but not when, and we know when Marie Mountjoy was born but not where.
In his act of ‘denization’ or naturalization (of which more later) Christopher is described as ‘a subject of the French King and born in the town of Cressey’. 1 ‘Cressey’ is presumably the English clerk’s spelling of Cr’cy. There is more than one Cr’cy in France, but most probably Mountjoy was from Cr’cy-en-Ponthieu. This is certainly the Cr’cy that Englishmen had heard of, being the site of the famous battle of 26 August 1346, when Edward III’s English archers routed the French army during the Hundred Years War. It lies in Picardie, in north-western France, in the fertile flat-lands of the lower Somme, which flows into the English Channel about 12 miles west of it. Mountjoy calls it a ‘town’ (or perhaps this is the clerk’s phrasing) but today it is little more than a large village, population about 1,500.
No record of the birth of Christophe Montjoi or Montjoie is to be found in the registres d’état civil for Cr’cy-en-Ponthieu, but the sixteenth-century registers are by no means complete. 2 For reasons I will give a little later it is likely he was born in the mid-1550s or early 1560s.
Various larger market-towns and trading centres were within easy reach of Cr’cy. The nearest was Abbeville, 10 miles away, but the most important one was Amiens, the regional capital of Picardie, famed for its Gothic cathedral (the largest in France) and its medieval water-gardens, Les Hortillonnages. Amiens was a centre for clothworking, part of that densely populated belt of northern France and Flanders which produced high-quality textiles: wool, cotton, silk and linen. In the 1593 ‘Return of Strangers’, a detailed listing of foreigners in London, there are twenty-five immigrants from Amiens, living in fourteen households. All of those whose employment is given are clothworkers - the majority are silk-weavers; there are also two ‘taffety-weavers’, a silk-winder and a silk-twister, a dyer and a bobbin-maker. Another nearby town was Arras, famous for those embroidered hangings. From here came more silk-weavers, two wool-combers and a feltmaker. 3
Christopher Mountjoy’s future trade of tiremaking is grounded in the textile industry of his
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