The Tudor Age is endlessly fascinating and dramatic. TV brought us “The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth,” a film offered us Elizabeth’s doomed mother in, “Anne of a Thousand Days,” a trilogy by Ford Maddox Ford was devoted to “The Fifth Queen.” We have seen courtiers rise and fall in “A Man for All Seasons” and “Wolf Hall.” And then there’s Elizabeth herself who has been played by, among others, Bette Davis, Judy Dench, Glenda Jackson, and Cate Blanchett.
It is also, arguably, the greatest age of English literature. Shakespeare towers above all others, but a stellar supporting cast includes Jonson, Webster, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Donne and a couple dozen more. I first discovered that biography could be as gripping as drama from A.L. Rowse, the great Shakespeare scholar who would have been more at home in the London of 1580 than that of 1980. To him they were all family, and he knew intimately which Lord was the cousin of which Royal.
His heir in this ability to conjure up that lost world with detail and immediacy is Charles Nicholl. In one of the brief pieces that make up his collection “Traces Remain,” he calls a fellow historical sleuth “a tenacious archival ferret.” It is obvious he regards this as high praise indeed.
The same encomium applies to Nicholl. His several books are always readable and filled with fascinating detail that brings the past to life. They include “The Creature in the Map” about Sir Walter Raleigh’s abortive voyage to discover El Dorado in the South American jungle, a prowl through the Grub Street life of Thomas Nashe, a pamphleteer and one of the Elizabethan University Wits. He specialized in the kind of satiric snark that is still a specialty of the Brits.
Nicholl has occasionally strayed from Elizabethan England if he discovers a literary mystery worthy of investigation. So he has offered readers “Leonardo Da Vinci: Flights of the Mind,” and retraced the steps of Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet of the late 19th century, who abandoned his art at 19 and vanished into Africa where Nicholl follows.
But Nicholl is most at home among the Elizabethans. Another small book is his guide to the Elizabethan pictures in The National Portrait Gallery, and a pair of masterpieces concern the era’s two dramatic superstars. In “The Reckoning,” he reopens the cold case of the murder of Christopher Marlowe, the author of the tragedies “Dr. Faustus,” “Tamburlaine the Great,” “The Jew of Malta,” and “Edward the Second,” who raised Elizabethan drama to artistry for the first, and influenced all who followed.
He seems also to have been a double agent for Elizabeth’s treasurer, Lord Burghley, and her secretary and spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. His job was to infiltrate the ranks of Catholic enemies abroad and at home who were plotting the death of the queen. His own came in a seedy quarter of London in a meeting with disreputable companions that ended with a knife plunged into Marlowe’s brain at the age of 29. Why this tale of dark doings hasn’t become a film or teleplay is a mystery. Nicholl’s reconstruction reads like an Elizabethan Le Carre.
All of Nicholl’s works have in common the fact that they resemble mosaics where a vivid picture of the past has been assembled from a myriad tiny pieces of evidence mined form dusty archives, parish records, ancient maps, old law cases, scribbled letters and other such sources that have lain forgotten for centuries. Nicholl himself movingly celebrates the fact that this is so.
“Often when writing something which hinges in one way or another on manuscript evidence, I feel a kind of wonder at the tenacity and toughness of old documents. Houses are demolished, inscriptions merge back into stone, the old mulberry tree is felled, but against all odds that fragile-seeming, almost weightless object — a bit of paper — remains.”
His magnum opus, so far, is a thrilling demonstration of that fact. In “The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street,” Nicholl has ferreted out enough evidence to provide a portrait of the neighborhood the poet lived in between 1603 and 1605 when he was producing “Othello,” “Measure for Measure,” “King Lear,” and “All’s Well that Ends Well.”
Silver Street was some distance from the theaters. It was near Cripplegate in the parish of St. Olave’s, and Shakespeare rented a room from the Mountjoy family. In 1612, years after he had moved on, he was called as a witness in a court case when the landlord’s daughter and son-in-law sued her father for non-payment of their dowery.
This was a working class neighborhood with brewers, haberdashers, barber-surgeons, plasterers and goldsmiths. The Mountjoys ran a home business as tiremakers, which were not products of the Firestone sort but elaborate accessories employed by elegant Elizabethan ladies to pile their hair high. There were also tailors in the neighborhood and Shakespeare may have found his way to this little street involved in the fashion business because it provided costumes to the theaters.
Nicholl shows us the bustling neighborhood from the ground up. There were Englishmen here, of course, but also many immigrant tradesmen. Mountjoy was from Crecy in France. We see a diverse quarter of pubs, brothels, and workshops whose characters turn up in the plays that the lodger with the mind of a magpie was writing in his rented room. For instance, Nicholl has uncovered the fact that a few weeks before “King Lear” was first played, a Silver Street embroiderer baptized a new baby girl with a very unusual name, Cordelia.
If you want to time travel, Charles Nicholl in your man. And in his spare time, he guides an occasional tour for the Martin Randall Company. Next month, for example he will escort a lucky few to visit Shakespearean places in London and Stratford and to see five plays in six days. The ultimate literary nerd’s vacation.