Read Online The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl - Free Book Online Page A
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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native Picardie. He doubtless served an apprenticeship, though we do not know where or in what. The creation of a head-tire involved various craft skills, among them silk-twisting, threadmaking, wire-drawing and embroidery. It also involved wigmaking, and I note the name Montois or Montoyes - possibly a variation of Montjoie - in a seventeenth-century list of maˆtres perruquiers (master-wigmakers) in Amiens. 4
The name could be of Norman origin, connected with the town of Montjoie in La Manche. But William Arthur’s Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names suggests a grander origin - that it may have been adopted by a French crusader, recalling a mountain near Jerusalem, which (according to that mysterious medieval globetrotter Sir John Mandeville) ‘men clepen Mount-Joye, for it gevethe joye to pilgrymes hertes, because that there men seen first Jerusalem’. Arthur also suggests a military connection, for in old French dictionaries ‘mont-joie’ is defined as ‘a heap of stones made by a French army, as a monument of victory’. Another authority tells us that ‘Montjoy St Denis!’ was ‘the French king’s war cry’. 5 Related to this, perhaps, is the fact that Montjoi(e) was from medieval times the title of the Chief Herald of France. These military and heraldic associations may suggest that Christopher Mountjoy was a descendant or offshoot of a family of substance.
In Shakespeare’s Henry V the French herald is indeed called ‘Montjoy’:
A tucket sounds. Montjoy approaches.
MONTJOY: You know me by my habit [uniform].
king: Well then, I know thee: what shall I know of thee?
king: What is thy name? I know thy quality.
MONTJOY: Montjoy.
king: Thou dost thy office fairly. (3.6.111-12, 135-7)
Some biographers have wondered about this, but as there is a purely historical reason for the name, it is hard to argue any in-joke reference to Christopher Mountjoy. There is also Shakespeare’s own statement that he first knew Mountjoy in about 1602, which makes it unlikely, prima facie , that he referred to him in a play performed three years earlier. On the other hand, it is possible to know of someone without having actually met them. It is in general worth remembering that Shakespeare’s statement in the Court of Requests refers only to his acquaintance with Christopher. He was not asked for, and did not volunteer, any information about how long he had known other members of the household - Marie Mountjoy, for instance.
One should not discount the presence of private allusions and in-jokes in Shakespeare. Plays like Love’s Labour’s Lost , The Merry Wives and Twelfth Night , all written for specific courtly or aristocratic audiences, are full of them. In this case it is just about possible that the ‘Montjoy’ of Henry V has some ulterior reference to the real Mr Mountjoy of Silver Street, but I doubt it. If it does, nothing much is made of it, though there was perhaps a titter at the Globe when Henry says to him, ‘Thou dost thy office fairly’ - a joke at the herald’s expense, in that to do one’s ‘office’ meant to go to the privy, often called the ‘house of office’.
We know nothing of the origins of Marie Mountjoy. She may have been Christopher’s childhood sweetheart in Picardie, or they may have met in London, in which case she could be from another part of France entirely. We do not even know for sure she was born in France - she could have been the daughter of French immigrants already settled in England.
What we do have is her approximate date of birth. According to her own statement, made to the astrologer-physician Simon Forman, she was thirty years old in November 1597. This useful precision is rendered less precise by her statement to the same doctor two weeks later that she was twenty-nine. 6 According to the laws of arithmetic at least one of these statements is false, and that one of them is false makes me wonder ungallantly if both might be slight
The name could be of Norman origin, connected with the town of Montjoie in La Manche. But William Arthur’s Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names suggests a grander origin - that it may have been adopted by a French crusader, recalling a mountain near Jerusalem, which (according to that mysterious medieval globetrotter Sir John Mandeville) ‘men clepen Mount-Joye, for it gevethe joye to pilgrymes hertes, because that there men seen first Jerusalem’. Arthur also suggests a military connection, for in old French dictionaries ‘mont-joie’ is defined as ‘a heap of stones made by a French army, as a monument of victory’. Another authority tells us that ‘Montjoy St Denis!’ was ‘the French king’s war cry’. 5 Related to this, perhaps, is the fact that Montjoi(e) was from medieval times the title of the Chief Herald of France. These military and heraldic associations may suggest that Christopher Mountjoy was a descendant or offshoot of a family of substance.
In Shakespeare’s Henry V the French herald is indeed called ‘Montjoy’:
A tucket sounds. Montjoy approaches.
MONTJOY: You know me by my habit [uniform].
king: Well then, I know thee: what shall I know of thee?
king: What is thy name? I know thy quality.
MONTJOY: Montjoy.
king: Thou dost thy office fairly. (3.6.111-12, 135-7)
Some biographers have wondered about this, but as there is a purely historical reason for the name, it is hard to argue any in-joke reference to Christopher Mountjoy. There is also Shakespeare’s own statement that he first knew Mountjoy in about 1602, which makes it unlikely, prima facie , that he referred to him in a play performed three years earlier. On the other hand, it is possible to know of someone without having actually met them. It is in general worth remembering that Shakespeare’s statement in the Court of Requests refers only to his acquaintance with Christopher. He was not asked for, and did not volunteer, any information about how long he had known other members of the household - Marie Mountjoy, for instance.
One should not discount the presence of private allusions and in-jokes in Shakespeare. Plays like Love’s Labour’s Lost , The Merry Wives and Twelfth Night , all written for specific courtly or aristocratic audiences, are full of them. In this case it is just about possible that the ‘Montjoy’ of Henry V has some ulterior reference to the real Mr Mountjoy of Silver Street, but I doubt it. If it does, nothing much is made of it, though there was perhaps a titter at the Globe when Henry says to him, ‘Thou dost thy office fairly’ - a joke at the herald’s expense, in that to do one’s ‘office’ meant to go to the privy, often called the ‘house of office’.
We know nothing of the origins of Marie Mountjoy. She may have been Christopher’s childhood sweetheart in Picardie, or they may have met in London, in which case she could be from another part of France entirely. We do not even know for sure she was born in France - she could have been the daughter of French immigrants already settled in England.
What we do have is her approximate date of birth. According to her own statement, made to the astrologer-physician Simon Forman, she was thirty years old in November 1597. This useful precision is rendered less precise by her statement to the same doctor two weeks later that she was twenty-nine. 6 According to the laws of arithmetic at least one of these statements is false, and that one of them is false makes me wonder ungallantly if both might be slight
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