The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street [Paperback]

Wow. This book is an absolute peach, and kills stone dead the myth that `we know nothing of the real Shakespeare'. Nicholl has impeccable credentials as a student and textual detective of the 16th century literary underworld. If you have read and relished his book on the death of Christopher Marlowe `The Reckoning', you have some idea of the pacy narrative combined with careful scholarship that he deploys in the search for a glimmer of the real Shakespeare, located momentarily in time and place. `The Reckoning `won awards from aficionados of crime writing, and `The Lodger' is no different, providing literary history with a powerful narrative drive.

Nicholl starts with `Exhibit A': the testimony given by William Shakespeare, gentleman of Stratford upon Avon, in a tetchy law case involving his former landlords the Mountjoy family of Silver Street. The dispute about a promised dowry closely shadows plot elements of `Measure for Measure', and most tellingly of all, the deposition given by Shakespeare is our only record of his actual spoken words. From dusty archives comes the voice of a real man, rooted in the bustling London of the 1600s, and woven into the networks of literary and commercial relationships that surrounded him.

If you watched and enjoyed Michael Wood's series and book `In Search of Shakespeare' you have some idea of how the transcendent genius of Shakespeare becomes so much more human when placed in context. While the people surrounding the greatest writer in the English language are far from edifying individuals on the whole, they are powerfully human, flawed and fallible. Nicholl has shown how the actualities of 17th century life were turned into the most enduring dramatic and poetic art. He's done the Lodger of Silver Street a powerful service.

Charles Nicholl's books about Marlowe and da Vinci have previously graced my reading list: the first is a meticulous reconstruction of Marlowe's final meal in an attempt to explain the playwright's death, which is sometimes a little repetitive; the second a more conventional biography of the renaissance polymath.

The Lodger is closer to the first, in being a depiction of how Shakespeare possibly lived whilst in London, centring on a single event, the signing of a legal deposition by the playwright which concerned his landlord, but fortunately without the repetitiousness.

So little is actually known about the bard that to say it is amazing nobody did this before is an understatement, but it is a tribute to Nicholl that he has picked up the baton and run with it.

As with the Marlowe book, The Reckoning, in The Lodger Nicholl takes small clues from documents relating to Shakespeare's deposition and expands them, using contemporary evidence, to construct a likely picture of how Shakespeare and his acquaintances would have lived and worked.

Somewhat tenuous, but well done nevertheless, is the speculation around how Shakespeare may have drawn on his everyday life in order to write the plays. Previous attempts have been made, albeit on a grander scale, to prove that he was, for example, a seaman whose travels had given him access to the various locations featured in the plays. It takes less of a stretch to imagine Shakespeare incorporating at least some of his day-to-day experience into his works, for example his association with George Wilkins, nominally a victualler, in reality most likely a pimp and keeper of a bawdy house, which Nicholl contends could quite easily have formed the basis of the frolics in Measure For Measure.

Maybe as good as giving some colour to the life of the Swan of Avon is the picture Nicholl paints of the City of London in the early 16th Century. Throughout the book he carefully relates London then to London now, so he tells us, for example, what was formerly in the place where modern day Gresham Street is. This interests me especially because I walked the streets of the city on a daily basis for the better part of two decades with my job, but what an excellent resource he has provided also for visitors to London curious about the history of the area they're walking around, just over the Millennium Bridge from the Tate Modern and within walking distance of a performance of one of the plays at the Barbican.

Also quite clever is the way Nicholl takes us on a tour of the Huguenot immigrant community of the time, their networks and preoccupations and the milieu of tire-making, which then links into the headgear seen in brothels, stately homes and theatres, bringing us neatly back to Shakespeare himself and the possible reason he found himself lodging in the residence of the Mountjoys, themselves immigrant French tiremakers.

Nicholl's knowledge of the works of Shakespeare is extensive, and he uses this well in relating the events in the book to the events in the works. But beyond that is his knowledge of the works of other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers and playwrights, including that of the aforementioned George Wilkins, whose plays seem to echo his criminal record, but also seem quite self-aware in assessing the lifestyle of a debauched and decadent cad.

Sometimes, true, the book nudges towards a prurient nudge-nudge wink-wink suggestiveness regarding the bard's personal life, but somehow never quite gets there, more maybe than can be said for some of the plays themselves! Altogether, whilst lacking some of the gravitas of the likes of Frank Kermode, this is an educational, erudite and entertaining book, one any Shakespeare aficionado can't afford to overlook.

It is a rare thing to find a book on the Bard which manages to locate the poet for all time in his own time. Last year James Shapiro's '1599' gave readers an insight into the political landscape during the final years of Tudor rule, now Charles Nicholl zooms in a little closer to Shakespeare's own habitat. 'Shakespeare on Silver Street' raises the bar again for scholars, identifying Shakespeare amidst London's tradesmen and artisans, the back bone of his literature and the society about which he wrote. Here is Shakespeare the economic migrant, spending his working life away from home as an actor, small businessman, and wordsmith. Here are the domestic surroundings in which he toiled far from home.

At the peak of his celebrity, Shakespeare lodged at the residence of Christopher Mountjoy, his wife, daughter and apprentice. The Mountjoys leased the house and ran their business in it, producing elaborate headpieces, "tires" to a fashionable clientele including Queen Anne. Nicholl describes the house on Silver Street as having been much like the Shakespeare birthplace in Stratford from where John Shakespeare ran his tanning and glove making shop. Both premises comprised a workshop as well as space for interaction with customers and family living space above.

Like Shapiro, Nicholl uses Shakespeare's writings to help illuminate this world and does not seek to impose a retrospective academic or ideological approach. It is as though animation has been given to Andrew Gurr's 'The Extraordinary Life of the Most Successful Writer of All Time'. The twist being that prior to his triumphant retirement to one of Stratford's largest residences, so much of Shakespeare's life was spent in very ordinary surroundings.