The Lodger Shakespeare
His Life on Silver Street
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
In 1612, Shakespeare gave evidence in a court case at Westminster-and it is the only occasion on which his actual spoken words were recorded. In The Lodger Shakespeare, Charles Nicholl applies a powerful biographical magnifying glass to this fascinating but little-known episode in the Bard's life. Drawing on evidence from a wide variety of sources, Nicholl creates a compellingly detailed account of the circumstances in which Shakespeare lived and worked amid the bustle of early seventeenth-century London. This elegant, often unexpected exploration presents a new and original look at Shakespeare as he was writing such masterpieces as Othello, Measure for Measure, and King Lear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.,
