and another in London, or he may have been as variable with the pronunciation as he was with the spelling.
We don’t know if he ever left England. We don’t know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was. We have no record at all of his whereabouts for the eight critical years when he left his wife and three young children in Stratford and became, with almost impossible swiftness, a successful playwright in London. By the time he is first mentioned in print as a playwright, in 1592, his life was already more than half over.
For the rest, he is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron – forever there and not there.
To understand why we know as little as we do of William Shakespeare’s life, and what hope we have of knowing more, I went one day to the Public Record Office – now known as the National Archives – at Kew, in west London. There I met David Thomas, a compact, cheerful, soft-spoken man with grey hair, the senior archivist. When I arrived, Thomas was hefting a large, ungainly bound mass of documents – an Exchequer memoranda roll from the Hilary (or winter) term of 1570 – onto a long table in his office. A thousand pages of sheepskin parchment, loosely bound and with no two sheets quite matching, it was an unwieldy load requiring both arms to carry. ‘In some ways the records are extremely good,’ Thomas told me. ‘Sheepskin is a marvellously durable medium, though it has to be treated with some care. Whereas ink soaks into the fibres on paper, on sheepskin it stays on the surface, rather like chalk on a blackboard, and so can be rubbed away comparatively easily.
‘Sixteenth-century paper was of good quality, too,’ he went on. ‘It was made of rags and was virtually acid free, so it has lasted very well.’
To my untrained eye, however, the ink had faded to an illegible watery faintness, and the script was of a type that was effectively indecipherable. Moreover the writing on the sheets was not organized in any way that aided the searching eye. Paper and parchment were expensive, so no space was wasted. There were no gaps between paragraphs – indeed, no paragraphs. Where one entry ended, another immediately began, without numbers or headings to identify or separate one case from another. It would be hard to imagine less scannable text. To determine whether a particular volume contained a reference to any one person or event, you would have to read essentially every word – and that isn’t always easy even for experts like Thomas, because handwriting at the time was extremely variable.
Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to twenty different – often very different – ways of shaping particular letters. Depending on one’s taste, for instance, a letter d could look like a figure eight, a diamond with a tail, a circle with a curlicue, or any of fifteen other shapes. A’s could look like h’s, e’s like o’s, f’s like s’s and l’s – in fact, nearly every letter could look like nearly every other. Complicating matters further is the fact that court cases were recorded in a distinctive lingua franca known as court hand – ‘a peculiar clerical Latin that no Roman could read’, Thomas told me, smiling. ‘It used English word order but incorporated an arcane vocabulary and idiosyncratic abbreviations. Even clerks struggled with it because when cases got really complicated or tricky, they would often switch to English for convenience.’
Although Thomas knew he had the right page and had studied the document many times, it took him a good minute or more to find the line referring to ‘John Shappere alias Shakespere’ of ‘Stratford upon Haven’, accusing him of usury. The document is of considerable importance to Shakespeare scholars, for it helps to explain why in 1576, when Will was twelve years old, his father abruptly retired from public life (about which more in due course), but it was only found in 1983 by a researcher named Wendy Goldsmith.
There are over a hundred miles of records like this in the National Archives – nearly ten million documents altogether – in London and in an old salt mine in Cheshire, not all of them from the relevant period, to be sure, but enough to keep the most dedicated researcher busy for decades.
The only certain way to find more would be to look through all the documents. In the early 1900s an odd American couple, Charles and Hulda Wallace, decided to do just that. Charles Wallace was an instructor in English at the University of Nebraska who just after the turn of the century, for reasons unknown, developed a sudden and lasting fixation with determining the details of Shakespeare’s life. In 1906 he and Hulda made the first of several trips to London to sift through the records. Eventually they settled there permanently. Working for up to eighteen hours a day, mostly at the Public Record Office on Chancery Lane, as it then was, they pored over hundreds of thousands – Wallace claimed five million* – documents of all types: Exchequer memoranda rolls, property deeds, messuages, pipe rolls, plea rolls, conveyancings and all the other dusty hoardings of legal life in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century London.
Their conviction was that Shakespeare, as an active citizen, was bound to turn up in the public records from time to time. The theory was sound enough, but when you consider that there were hundreds of thousands of records, without indexes or cross references, each potentially involving any of 200,000 citizens; that Shakespeare’s name, if it appeared at all, might be spelled in some eighty different ways, or blotted or abbreviated beyond recognition; and that there was no reason to suppose that he had been involved in London in any of the things – arrest, marriage, legal disputes and the like – that got one into the public records in the first place, the Wallaces’ devotion was truly extraordinary.
So we may imagine a muffled cry of joy when in 1909 they came across a litigation roll from the Court of Requests in London comprising twenty-six assorted documents that together make up what is known as the Belott–Mountjoy (or Mountjoie) case. All relate to a dispute in 1612 between Christopher Mountjoy, a refugee Huguenot wigmaker, and his son-in-law, Stephen Belott, over a marriage settlement. Essentially, Belott felt that his father-in-law had not given him all that he had promised, and so he took the older man to court.
Shakespeare, it appears, was caught up in the affair because he had been a lodger in Mountjoy’s house in Cripplegate in 1604 when the dispute arose. By the time he was called upon to give testimony eight years later, he claimed – not unreasonably – to be unable to remember anything of consequence about what had been agreed between his landlord and the landlord’s son-in-law.
The case provided no fewer than twenty-four new mentions of Shakespeare and one precious additional signature – the sixth and so far last one found. Moreover, it is also the best and most natural of his surviving signatures. This was the one known occasion when Shakespeare had both space on the page for a normal autograph and a healthily steady hand with which to write it. Even so, as was his custom, he writes the name in an abbreviated form: ‘Willm Shaksp’. It also has a large blot on the end of the surname, probably because of the comparatively low quality of the paper. Though it is only a deposition, it is also the only document in existence containing a transcript of Shakespeare speaking in his own voice.
The Wallace find, reported the following year in the pages of the University of Nebraska Studies (and forever likely to remain, we may suppose, that journal’s greatest scoop), was important for two other reasons. It tells us where Shakespeare was living at an important point in his career: in a house on the corner of Silver and Monkswell Streets near St Aldermanbury in the City of London. And the date of Shakespeare’s deposition, 11 May 1612, provides one of the remarkably few days in his life when we can say with complete certainty where he was.
The Belott–Mountjoy papers were only part of what the Wallaces found in their years of searching. It is from their work that we know the extent of Shakespeare’s financial interests in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres, and of
