"The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on
Silver Street" by Charles Nicholl (Viking, 9780670018505, $26.95, 378 pages)
This new year may still be young, but I feel secure in declaring "The Lodger
Shakespeare" the finest new Shakespeare-related book of 2008. Its author,
Charles Nicholl, is a winner of the James Tait Black Prize for biography,
and in this new work he follows in the steps of James Shapiro's excellent "A
Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599" by offering a tightly
focused and beautifully written study of one short but productive period in
the Stratford playwright's life.
From 1603 to 1605, Shakespeare rented a room above a craftsman's shop in a
quiet corner of London. It was there that the bard turned forty and there,
too, that he wrote several great works, including "Othello," "Pericles," and
"King Lear." His landlord and landlady were Huguenots, part of a wave of
Protestant French immigrants who offered their skills and their flare for
French fashions to the royal courts of Elizabeth and James I. As Nicholl
shows, these craftsmen's lives entwined with Shakespeare's in curious and
surprising ways that have never been explored fully in previous works of
Shakespeare biography.
Nicholl's stepping-off point is a court case recorded in 1612: Shakespeare
was called as a witness in a dispute between his former landlord and that
man's son-in-law. The surviving testimony gives us not only our sole record
of the playwright's spoken words but also fascinating glimpses of his home
life: Shakespeare's statement shows that he was much more than a bystander
to the young man's marriage to his French landlord's daughter; in fact, he
was the go-between, the essential intermediary who helped make the match and
seal their bond.
What image could be more perfect and intriguing than Shakespeare as
matchmaker, Shakespeare in the midst of love? Well, there's more, and
Nicholl finds it: for instance, there's also Shakespeare and his friend the
pimp. A part of the poet's time as a lodger on Silver Street was spent
collaborating with a coarse but talented character named George Wilkins, who
in his life was both a writer and the keeper of a bawdy house. Together, the
too men penned the magical play "Pericles," which wedded their talents for
summoning the muddy and the miraculous.
These images are but two examples of the provocative biographical gifts
Nicholl offers his readers. By focusing his attention so closely on a few
outstanding years, he's able to use the sadly meager documentary record to
conjure a complex web embroidered with the rich and tacky threads of
Renaissance England. He gives us the difficult daily lives of immigrants,
the social overlap of court and slum, and the furtive visits of pregnant
housewives to their astrologer. But above all, he gives us the quiet,
observant eyes of an aging man, lodged in a dim room up narrow stairs, a man
who takes a pen in hand and puts down words that will outlast kings.
If you count a Shakespeare lover among your friends or family, put this book
in his or her hands. It truly is the finest new Shakespeare book of the
year.
Review by
Mark
David Bradshaw, March
13, 2008
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