The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl

The Barnes & Noble Review

At first glance, this book's premise hardly seems book-worthy. In 1612, Stephen Belott, feeling cheated out of his dowry, brought a suit against his father-in-law, Christopher Mountjoy. One of the witnesses called to testify was Mountjoy's former lodger, William Shakespeare. Whatever his sense of the potential theatricality of foiled marriages and in-law relations, the Bard isn't very revelatory and fails to wax poetic on the witness stand. He claims not to remember much about what happened. The event -- our only record of Shakespeare's spoken words ever being recorded -- was unearthed by an intrepid researcher in 1909. It's remained largely unremarked for a century. Nevertheless, it offers a window, however narrow, into Shakespeare's daily life and dealings. Charles Nichol, to his credit, illuminates that window. He's studiously exhumed what faint traces of early Jacobean times remain in the parish where Shakespeare briefly resided, fleshed out the context of the case, and elaborated the place in London society of Shakespeare's French landlords. What arrives through this meticulous upending is not so much a portrait, but a series of faint glimpses of the playwright at one moment of his otherwise mysterious life, as well as of the odd backdrop against which he chose for a time to prop it. At times, the very ordinariness of the life revealed is the book's exhilaration, while at others the pleasure is glimpsing a world whose mores and artifacts are almost wholly lost to us. Nichols manages to make both types of revelation suspenseful. --Tess Taylor

From the Publisher

Acclaimed author Charles Nicholl presents a brilliantly drawn detective story with entirely new insights into Shakespearea (TM)s life. With evidence from a wide variety of sources, Nicholl creates a compelling, detailed account of the circumstances in which Shakespeare lived and worked during the time in which he wrote such plays as Othello, Measure for Measure, and King Lear.

The New York Times - William Grimes

The Lodger Shakespeare, resting on a solid foundation of teased-out biographical details, opens a window onto Jacobean London and the swirl of sights and sensations that surrounded Shakespeare and inevitably found their way into his plays. From a mere handful of dry facts embedded in an obscure lawsuit, Mr. Nicholl brings forth a gaudy, tumultuous, richly imagined world.

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

…readers, especially those with a taste for historical detection, will simply enjoy the way Nicholl recreates "the physical and cultural circumstances" of one brief and strange period in Shakespeare's life.

Publishers Weekly

Nicholl, winner of a Hawthornden Prize forArthur Rimbaud in Africa, re-creates the physical and cultural circumstances of the two-year period of 1603-1605 when Shakespeare, around 40 and at the peak of his profession, was a lodger in the home of a sexually lax Huguenot family who provided raw material for All's Well That Ends Welland other works. At the center of events is a 1612 lawsuit about a dowry unpaid by Shakespeare's former London landlord to his son-in-law. The landlord, Christopher Mountjoy, despite his success as a maker of women's decorative headwear, was a stingy man who withheld his daughter's dowry; after his wife's death, he was censured by church elders for fathering two bastards by his maid. Shakespeare may have played a larger role in the drama, persuading the reluctant bridegroom, who was Mountjoy's apprentice, to marry the daughter in the first place. While details of early Jacobean London are atmospheric, placing Shakespearean works into historical context, Nicholl's determination to sort out the biographical truths in Shakespeare's plays waxes tedious, and only the Bard's cultish devotees will care about the minutiae of headgear and wigs or the Mountjoy lawsuit. For the rest, it's much ado about nothing. 36 illus.(Feb. 4)

Product Details

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Table of Contents