The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

loosely based on a real-life murder case, and performed by Shakespeare’s company in c . 1606.
    The first law of forensic science, otherwise known as Locard’s Exchange Principle, is that ‘every contact leaves traces’. 15 I cannot call this book a ‘forensic’ study - the word refers to criminal investigations - but it is animated by a similar idea of proximity: of lives that touch, and the traces of evidence they leave. To find out more about the Mountjoys and their world has seemed to me worthwhile in itself, but is primarily a means to find out more about their lodger, the famous but so often obscure Mr Shakespeare, with whom they were in casual daily contact. His deposition is a beginning: a few curt sentences of reminiscence. From there the paperchase leads on, through the dark streets and alleys of Jacobean London, to arrive at a certain house where a light burns dimly in an upstairs window. After 400 years the traces are faint, but he is there.

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    Sugar and gall
     
    W hat was Shakespeare writing during his residency with the Mountjoys in c . 1603-5? There are five plays which belong in that broad time-span. They are, in probable order of composition: Othello , Measure for Measure , All’s Well that Ends Well , Timon of Athens and King Lear . A rate of two plays a year is about average for Shakespeare’s working life, and may even reflect an agreed productivity rate as the company’s ‘playmaker’. The cross-currents of composition, rehearsal and rewriting were complex. He was seldom working on less than two plays at once: ideas refract and reverberate between them.
    Othello and Measure for Measure can be dated quite precisely. Both have references which suggest Shakespeare was at work on them in 1603, and both were performed at court towards the end of 1604 (their first recorded performances, though not necessarily their first performances). 38 By contrast, All’s Well and Timon have no documentary dating. Neither was printed before its appearance in the First Folio of 1623, and no early performances are recorded. (The recording of King’s Men performances is anyway very sketchy: there exists no ledger for the Globe comparable to Philip Henslowe’s diary, which lists performances and box-office takings at the neighbouring Rose.) All’s Well is generally dated to c . 1604 because of its affinities with Measure , and Timon to c . 1605 because its verbal parallels with King Lear seem more likely to be anticipations than echoes. 39 Lear itself, that mightiest of works, was first performed at the end of 1606, and its early gestation can also be placed, in a purely topographical sense, on Silver Street.
    It is in many ways a curious list. Bookended by two of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies are these three rather odder, less popular works. One could call them ‘experimental’ but Shakespeare was constantly an experimenter, so perhaps one means they are experiments which do not wholly come off.
    Measure for Measure and All’s Well are two of that group traditionally called the ‘problem plays’, or the ‘dark comedies’ - also in this group is the earlier Troilus and Cressida ( c . 1602), which falls outside my defined time-period but belongs with it in mood. The term ‘problem play’ is old fashioned but still more or less serviceable. It was coined by F. S. Boas in 1896, taking a tinge of the chief dramatists of the day, Ibsen and Shaw. Shaw tended showily to disparage Shakespeare, but liked these particular plays, where he found Shakespeare ‘ready and willing to start at the twentieth century if the seventeenth would only let him’ 40 - as perverse a statement of Shakespeare’s intentions as one could hope to find.
    They are ‘problem’ plays because they are hard to categorize. Their tone is elusive, blurred, faintly unwholesome. ‘The air is cheerless,’ in Dover Wilson’s aphoristic summary, and ‘the wit mirthless’. The admirable characters are not entirely likeable, and the