Shakespeare’s debt to the neighbours
All the world’s a stage, but Elizabethan Londoners living near the playwright’s lodgings were his players
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S vivid depictions of supernatural characters and foreign countries he had never been to may have been inspired by his neighbours, a historian has claimed.
Following a decade of research, Geoffrey Marsh, a theatre historian and director of the V&A’S department of theatre and performance, has identified exactly where Shakespeare lived in London in the late 1590s.
He says he has pinpointed the very house in St Helen’s parish where the playwright lived when he was writing plays including Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Richard II.
His findings could explain why there are witches in Macbeth, the story of the music in As You Like it and even lines from King Lear as well as why so many of Shakespeare’s plays are set in foreign locations, particularly Italy.
Although the house where Shakespeare lived was demolished long ago, Mr Marsh was able to pinpoint its location – and rough time that the playwright moved in – at the corner of St Helen’s Churchyard and Bishopsgate Street after scouring historical records held by the Company of Leathersellers.
Shakespeare’s house was to the north of the church yard. The historian told The Daily Telegraph: “He was living in one of the wealthiest parishes in the city, alongside powerful public figures, wealthy international merchants, society doctors and expert musicians.
“The merchants had connections across Europe and doctors were linked to the latest progressive thinking in universities in Italy and Germany. It’s the equivalent of today’s Notting Hill businessmen, living alongside artists, particularly musicians.
“Mixing with these kinds of people had a profound effect on him.” Shakespeare’s most influential neighbours, Mr Marsh argues, may have been two wealthy doctors – Peter Turner, who had lived and trained in Germany, and Edward Jorden, who had qualified at Padua, Europe’s leading medical university.
Dr Turner would have inherited a library of books from his doctor father and one could assume Shakespeare would have got a lot of his information about the world from this library, Mr Marsh said. “How on Earth would Shakespeare know anything about Italy?” he said. “Well, now we know. Dr Jorden lived 50 yards away from him. We can’t prove that they sat down to dinner together, but conversations between them must have taken place.” Dr Jorden was also fascinated with women’s health, said Mr Marsh. During the 16th-century, it was common to attribute anything from menstruation to hysteria to the supposed movement of the uterus, referred to as “the mother” inside the body.
The phrase makes a prominent appearance in King Lear, when he says: “O! how this mother swells upward toward my heart!”
In 1602 Dr Jorden was involved in a famous witch trial, known as “The Mary Glover affair”, in which a 14-yearold girl claimed she suffered from fits caused by the black magic of an older woman. The doctor appeared in court for the older woman and gave evidence saying that the girl’s apparent symptoms of bewitchment were mentally induced. Quite possibly, this could have provided the inspiration for the three witches in Macbeth, said Mr Marsh. “There is also that scene when Lady Macbeth obsessively tries to wash her hands which may have been influenced by it,” he said. Lady Macbeth’s famous lines “out, damn’d spot!” represent her attempt to root out psychological demons by physical actions.
The historian said it was most likely that Shakespeare moved to the parish before late 1594 when Sir John Spencer became lord mayor. Sir John was “a very rich and mafioso-style unpleasant man” with such a passionate hatred of theatre that he tried to close them all down, so it is “highly unlikely” that the playwright would have moved in while he was in power.
Sir John’s anti-theatre campaign came following a major outbreak of the plague – when about five per cent of St Helen’s parish reportedly perished. From late 1592 to 1594, all the London playhouses were closed down as they were seen as a source of infection and this was “crucial” to his career. James Shapiro, professor of English at Columbia University and author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, said that the playwright’s “London life during these years remains a cipher”. But he said that Mr Marsh “has now begun to fill some of the gaping holes”. “I’ve always been curious how Shakespeare knew the musician [Thomas Morley], with whom he collaborated on It Was a Lover and His Lass in As You Like It. Thanks to Mr Marsh’s work, I now know they lived cheek by jowl in St Helen’s.”
Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies, at Oxford, said the findings were “very significant”, adding: “To find something genuinely new is really something.”
We now know where Shakespeare lived in London during the 1590s, a formative time in his life, thanks to detective scholarship by the historian Geoffrey Marsh. New facts about Shakespeare are rarer than 100-carat diamonds. But if Shakespeare lived to the north of St Helen’s churchyard, Bishopsgate, his civilised neighbours included two doctors, Peter Turner and Edward Jorden, who had studied in Heidelberg and Padua. Musicians were among other neighbours. It rings true, for, though we half think the playwright’s native woodnotes were issued straight from his genius, he must obviously have mixed in civilised company since his days at grammar school. The London parish where Shakespeare lived resembled the mixed society in which, two generations later, Samuel Pepys enjoyed collecting books, seeing plays and making music. Shakespeare could have set Romeo and Juliet in Verona without having a neighbour who knew Italy, and have written of witches in Macbeth without knowing a doctor who testified in a celebrated claim of bewitching. But it adds perspective to know him by his neighbours.