» Update your details

• Extract
• Synopsis
• Reviews
• Product details
• Interview

• Biography
• More titles by Charles Nicholl

Synopsis

‘One Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house…’ In 1612 Shakespeare gave evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster – it is the only occasion his spoken words are recorded. The case seems routine – a dispute over an unpaid marriage-dowry – but it opens up an unexpected window into the dramatist’s famously obscure life-story. Some eight years earlier, we learn, Shakespeare was lodging in the house of a French immigrant family, the Mountjoys, in the Cripplegate area of London. And while there he was called on by his landlady to ‘persuade’ the family’s former apprentice to marry their daughter.

Charles Nicholl applies a powerful biographical magnifying glass to this fascinating but little-known episode in Shakespeare’s life. Marshalling evidence from a wide variety of sources, including previously unknown documentary material on the Mountjoys, he conjures up a detailed and compelling description of the circumstances in which Shakespeare lived and worked, and in which he wrote such plays as Othello, Measure for Measure and King Lear. Nicholl also throws new light on the puzzling story of Shakespeare’s collaboration with the hack-author and brothel-keeper George Wilkins.

In this subtle and atmospheric exploration of Shakespeare at forty, we see him not from the viewpoint of literary greatness, but in the humdrum and very human context of Silver Street, where to the maid of the house he was merely ‘one Mr Shakespeare’, renting the room upstairs. In The Lodger, one of the celebrated literary detectives of our day has created something all too rare – a fresh and original book about Shakespeare.

Reviews

Customer Review: 19 June 2008

Reviewer: Elliot Miller

' This is one of the most assiduously researched and interestingly written biographies out. It takes Shakespeare biography to a new level. The research is impeccable and monumental. It brings us back vividly to Jacobean England.'

Critic Review:

‘Part biography, part detective story, Nicholl’s latest work ranks among the finest books ever written about Shakespeare’s life’ James Shapiro, Guardian

‘The participants in this story might be in the next room. The detail is delicious … a triumph’ Peter Ackroyd, The Times

‘Not only the best kind of detective story, but also one of the most rewarding books of the year’ Daily Telegraph

‘Throws a new light on the man who was both a universal genius and just like us’ Sunday Times, Books of the Year

‘The real excitement lies in the sense we get of Shakespeare himself' Antonia Fraser, Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year

‘The most absorbing work of Shakespearean biography I have ever read … he reanimates his subject’s world with a vividness and intensity that is almost impossible to achieve’ Jonathan Bate, Sunday Telegraph

‘This account glitters’ Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

‘Nicholl excels as an imaginer of Elizabethan London’ Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Detailed and vivid … by plunging us so deep into the sweaty tumults of Silver Street, Nicholl makes us see sharper than ever the greatness of the man in the upstairs chamber … A modest, enchanting book’ Ferdinand Mount, Sunday Times

‘Both erudite and engrossing’ Independent

Interview

Interview with Charles Nicholl author of The Lodger

Publishing Director Stuart Proffitt on The Lodger by Charles Nicholl

There is one instance, and only one instance, where we have a record of words which William Shakespeare actually said, rather than wrote. He was called to give evidence in a case in the Court of Requests in 1611, when a young man called Stephen Belott married the daughter of a theatrical wig-maker called William Mountjoy, whose apprentice he had been, and Belott was suing his tight-fisted father-in-law for non-payment of a dowry. As one of the maidservants who also gave evidence put it 'one Mr Shakespeare laye in the house' - that is, lodged in rooms on the top floor of the house on Silver Street, just north of what is now the Barbican, where the Mountjoys and young Belott had lived and he knew what was going on. So Shakespeare is called and says what he knows about Belott's character and that he actually counselled him to wed the girl.

Charles Nicholl is one of the great literary detectives and one of the most seductive literary non-fiction writers of our time. Nicholl takes this tiny biographical fragment, the Belotts, the Mountjoys, the house on Silver Street, the legal deposition, and out of it, amazingly, not only conjures the life of London right at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but by connecting up a series of gossamer thin strands actually has something new and original to say about Shakespeare, whose life and circumstances have been so exhaustively picked over by generations and generations of scholars.

He follows the trails of the case to take us into the low-life of theatres, prostitutes, costume-makers, the world of literary collaborations which over-lapped with them all, the sights and sounds and smells of London in an extraordinarily immediate and way. It is an amazing piece of historical recovery. You get the sense of the mists which always make Shakespeare's life so difficult to see suddenly parting, and as the maid put it 'one Mr Shakespeare' is there in the upper room, writing Measure for Measure and moving through London, and brought to us, for a moment, more authentically than in any other book I know.

Product details

Shipped within 24hrs.
FREE UK Delivery on all orders

• Full delivery details

• » View your basket