The Lodger Shakespeare

January 1, 2014

In 1612, Shakespeare testified in a court case involving other residents of the boarding house in which he lived. Beginning with this rare documentary evidence of Shakespeare's personal life, Nicholl dives into the details of the case, describing the other lodgers and the surrounding world of early 17th-century London, from its homeowners and tradesmen to its thieves and prostitutes. While often more a portrait of London than a biography of Shakespeare, this compelling book offers a great array of details about life in the city.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 29, 2007
Nicholl, winner of a Hawthornden Prize for
Arthur 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 Well
and 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.,