More News of Shakespeare?

It is not only that we know very little about Shakespeare, but also that what we do know has been in the public domain for such a long time. The last significant additional items of information, directly relevant to his life, date back to 1909. These came from the Belott–Mountjoy papers, which were discovered in the Public Records Office by an American couple called Wallace. Stephen Belott was an apprentice who, in 1604, fulfilled the Jacobean dream of marrying the boss's daughter, but things did not turn out as well as he might have hoped. In 1612 he took his father-in-law, Christopher Mountjoy, to the Court of Requests (described by Charles Nicholl in this book as roughly equivalent to our small claims courts) on the basis that the £60 he had been promised at the time of his marriage had never been paid, and that there was also the £200 that Mountjoy had said he would leave him in his will but which did not look as if it would ever materialise either. One of those called to give evidence was a gentleman from Stratford called William Shakespeare, who, it turned out, had been a lodger in the Mountjoys' house around the time of Belott's marriage and who, at the specific request of Mrs Mountjoy, had been involved in the negotiations which preceded it.

The importance of this discovery can only be appreciated in the context of our frustrating ignorance of Shakespeare's life. To write his biography it would be useful to have a reasonably precise chronology, one that included, for example, a record of where he lived when. Documents which record Shakespeare's failure to pay tax suggest that, around 1597, he was living somewhere in Bishopsgate, north of the river, but that a year or so later he had moved south across it to somewhere in Southwark, closer to the Globe. The Belott–Mountjoy papers show that, some time between 1603 and 1605, he must have lived in the house which served the Mountjoys as both their home and workplace and which can be located precisely on a contemporary map as being on the eastern corner of Silver Street and Monkwell Street, in Cripplegate ward. This is a fact which is perhaps only very moderately useful, but the Belott–Mountjoy papers throw at least some light on what is another mystery of Shakespeare's life: the kind of company he frequented while he was living in London. Being a lodger in someone else's house does not mean that you are intimate with the landlords, but the fact that Mrs Mountjoy called on Shakespeare to help negotiate the marriage of her daughter does suggest that he knew the family quite well, and it is therefore of some interest that the Mountjoys and Belotts were tiremakers—that is to say, they manufactured the wire contraptions, sometimes studded with diamonds, which Elizabethan and Jacobean ladies of fashion wore on their heads. This was a highly skilled specialist trade, often in the hands of immigrant workers; both Belott and Mountjoy had in fact been born in France and begun their lives in England as Huguenot refugees. This might at first seem a body blow to all those anxious to establish that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic, but anyone familiar with the reasoning to which their anxiety leads will know how easy it is to present him as deliberately choosing to lodge with French Huguenots because it provided him with more effective cover.

Belott's case against Mountjoy gives us a precise address for Shakespeare and the names and status of some of the people he would have known, but it also provides us with the chance to hear him speak outside a fictive context, in propria persona. As Nicholl puts it on his first page, in reference to Shakespeare's deposition: 'We know the thousands of lines he wrote in plays and poems, but this is the only occasion when his actual spoken words are recorded...