The Lodger…read in a day…

…first impressions.

The Bellot Mountjoy suit research he did kicks butt! Loads of little insights into everyday events that may or may not have been transformed into imagery and conceit.

i looked for the way the Jacobean lawyers who wrote the depositions spelled Shakespeare, and it was in each case Shakespeare; though others and SH himself spelt his name differently.

Meaning others thought of him as a Theatre practioner (writer and actor). Nobody questioned how he spelled his name. They knew who he was. He was treated with respect, one of only two Gentlemen that were deposed.

The information on George Wilkins, minor playwright and big time pimp daddy, co-authored Pericles with Sh, was priceless. The chapter on how one could co-exist with the other: Sh with gentle and noble mind, Wilkins kicker of pregnant women, illustrates the utter oneness of the Theatre and the criminal world. And their difference as well as sameness.

SO maybe Oxford was like the Don Corleone of the Elizabethan Theatre scene? And further up the social scale is where the bigger ciminals were sitting composing in their spare time and playing the people like pawns in their play?

The depositions refer to Sh. as being of Stratford, and of his being a Gentleman. This whole Bellott Mountjoy case should be on line for everyone to read. Might be an idea for Nicholl’s publisher to sponsor. Now that’s scholarship and appropriate use of the medium. They’d sell more books that way!

SO, if you’ve read the book, do you think the writers hated the printers? He deals with that whole pirate publications and how the first quartos out were usually rip-offs before a better version got published, as with Q2 Hamlet. He also deals with how SH dealt with pirate publications and bad press. Others said, Leave it! He’s alright our WIll.

The apprentices hated the Foreigners that’s for sure. Racism hasn’t changed much. Sh’s stance on the French language and people, and being a stranger in a strange land is still haunting me. The fate of the Huguenots under constant threat for taking English jobs is much explored.

He was from Warwickshire and chose to be in London for 25-30 years. His brother Edmund is dealt with briefly. Edmund came to London to act, got bit parts, had a baby son who died and died himself in 1607. Edmund is buried at Southwark Cathedral in the morning with an extra tolling of the bells at a cost of 20 shillings or some such. Assumed is that WIll paid for it.

Cripplegate the area he lived in, whether due to a desire to escape the limelight or avoid the plague, was close to other writers just outside the city walls. Also he overlooked an Herbalists garden. Good choice WIll. We’ll post the link to the parish in which Silver Street was situated.

Really really impressed with Mr Nicholl’s depth of scholarship . I’ll take archival speculation over idle speculation anyday.

I’ll definitely get his book on Christopher Marlowe now. Hope he does a book about Vautrollier, Richard Field’s printer master.