The lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street By Charles Nicholl, Allen Lane, £15

Despite the triumphs of historicism, old and new, and ever-burgeoning Shakespeariana, Borges’s little gem, “Everything and Nothing” (1960), remains unsurpassed as a telling of the bard’s life. A feat of concision, this sketch has blessed the biographer’s trade immensely, inspiring a particularly self-serving variation on this theme: if Shakespeare is everything and nothing, he may as well be anything. Stephen Greenblatt in Will in the World (2004), James Shapiro in 1599 (2005), and Stanley Wells in Shakespeare and Co. (2006) have used the Borgesian (as also a typically Shakespearean) formula of combining empathy, imagination and scholarship to produce some of the best accounts of Shakespeare’s life. These studies are grounded in what J.M. Coetzee calls “ficto-facts”, and use a mode of narration that weds learning to adventurous, and sometimes tendentious, guesswork. Inevitably, this approach combines empirical certainties with the liberal use of the conditional tense. It is not just enough to imagine Shakespeare in all his humanness; rather, he has to be portrayed on a historical canvas without pedantry, making even sophisticated research accessible to the common reader.

Charles Nicholl has sought this fine balance between evidence and speculation in The Lodger. As in his fascinating reconstruction of the murder of Christopher Marlowe in The Reckoning (2002), here too Nicholl is in his default mode of a literary sleuth. The image of a detective at work is reinforced when Nicholls invokes the first law of forensic science, also known as Locard’s Exchange Principle in the epigraph: “Every contact leaves traces”. For a historian who has to anchor his imagination in unassailable facts, the unavoidable peril of making too much of this method is to become susceptible to the charms of what is invisible, to allow his mind to venture too far into the realm of the possible and the probable. If the reader is less fanciful, or resists these theories, then the mystery might turn mundane. Marlowe’s death, for instance, may look less like treason and more like a pub-brawl turned fatal.

Such traps are never too far from the historical method of The Lodger, and this is evident from the very first paragraph. Nicholl begins with a statement or deposition that Shakespeare gave on May 11, 1612, in a lawsuit at the Court of Requests in Westminster. This sheet of paper, bearing Shakespeare’s signature (“Willm Shaks”) is Nicholl’s sacred fount, the source of his many inspired conjectures. The first goes like this: the hasty scrawl and truncated signature hint at “a note of perfunctoriness, or perhaps impatience”. Fair enough. But note the dreaded p-word here — “perhaps” is as ubiquitous in The Lodger as “blood” is in Macbeth.

This is not to belittle Nicholl’s achievement. He writes beautifully on a period that is not readily popular and on a subject that is, by every measure, obscure. The story — actually the mere outline of a story — can be pieced together from documents discovered in the Public Record Office, London, in 1928, by the American academic, C.W. Wallace and his wife, Hulda. In the 1612 deposition, Shakespeare gave testimony in a case between Christopher Mountjoy, his ex-landlord, and Stephen Bellot, married to Mary, Mountjoy’s only child. The “mean and crabby” Mountjoy had promised Bellot a dowry of £60 and sundry household articles during the latter’s betrothal to Mountjoy’s daughter in 1604, but characteristically forfeited his pledge. Joan Johnson, the Mountjoys’ maid, declared in court that “one Mr Shakespeare... lay in the house” when all this happened, while others confirmed that Shakespeare was, in fact, involved in persuading the reluctant Stephen to take Mary as his wife. These are extraordinary circumstances since the period 1603-05, of Shakespeare’s residence with the Mountjoys, coincides with that of the composition of two of his ‘problem plays’, Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, and of Othello, King Lear and Timon of Athens, all dealing, directly or indirectly, with marriage, property and the strife between generations. So it is tempting to read the plays in relation to what was happening to Shakespeare during these years.

In 1603, Shakespeare was touching 40, he had taken rooms with the Mountjoys on the respectable Silver Street, a hub of fashion in 17th-century London. (Mistress Otter, the vain old socialite in Jonson’s Epicoene, has her hair done there.) The Mountjoys were makers of ornate headgear, which were worn by members of royalty (Queen Anne was a regular customer) as well as by the actors in Shakespeare’s company, Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Nicholl has a fascinating theory about how Mrs Mountjoy could have known Shakespeare from as early as 1597. He traces the record of a session in the diary of the physician-astrologer, Simon Forman, where Mrs Mountjoy probably mentioned one Alice Floyd, a servant of the wife of the second Lord Hunsdon, patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Nicholl believes that Alice Floyd was related to Humphrey Fludd (a variant spelling of Floyd), stepfather of Stephen Bellot, who was then an apprentice with Mr Mountjoy. So, according to Nicholl, the Mountjoys must have known Shakespeare even before he became their lodger — a plausible, though rather circuitous, conclusion, given that Shakespeare, by the 1590s, was quite well-known anyway. Moreover, Nicholl himself admits that Mrs Mountjoy could have been a supplier of costumes to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and later, to the King’s Men.

Even establishing Mrs Mountjoy’s beauty becomes a feat of deduction, courtesy Dr Forman’s notebooks once again. In 1597, Mrs Mountjoy visited him again, fearing that she was pregnant, with her friend, Ellen Carrell. Nicholl notes that in the same year, there was a collection of sonnets by Robert Tofte, addressed to “la bellisima sua signora E.C.” Textual evidence shows that this E.C. could be Carrell. Even curiouser, a marginal note to Chaucer’s Testament of Love, in Tofte’s copy of the 1561 edition, says “Marie M—, damsel, beauty and gentlewoman”. “I am still tempted to wonder,” Nicholl writes, “if the roving eye of Robert Tofte had alighted on Marie Mountjoy.” If this were so, then Mrs Mountjoy was “a beauty”.

Interspersed with such ingenious deductions are brilliant insights into immigrant life in London, the worries that beset Shakespeare in his middle years (his older daughter turned 21 in 1604, the legally marriageable age), and his search for peace and quiet on Silver Street. (Did he simply want to be away from Southwark, where the plague was raging in 1603?) But the correlation between the life and the work could become tedious. Nicholl insinuates, with little reason, that the Mountjoys, squabbling over money, made their way into King Lear; or, with even less reason, that Shakespeare had a thing for his beautiful landlady. Paradoxically, the less he speculates closely on Shakespeare’s life and moves into larger themes in contemporary social history, the more illuminating Nicholl becomes for modern readers of Shakespeare.