The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl

Author:Charles Nicholl
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: 1564-1616, Autobiography, Social Science, Dramatists, Historical - General, England), General, William, Biography & Autobiography, Literary, Shakespeare, Historical, English, Historical - British, Customs & Traditions, Cripplegate (London, Biography, Biography And Autobiography
ISBN: 9780143114628
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2009-02-24T22:04:06.152000+00:00

In his deposition at the Court of Requests Wilkins gives his age as ‘36 years or thereabouts’, but in another deposition two years later he says he is about forty. The best we can say is that he was born in the mid-1570s, and was at least ten years Shakespeare’s junior. He could possibly be George son of Walter Wilkins, baptized at St Botolph’s without Aldgate on 2 March 1577, but a more attractive proposition is that he was the son of ‘George Wilkins the poet’, who lived on Holywell Street in Shoreditch, and who was buried at St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, on 19 August 1603. This is plausible in itself, and is made more so by the younger George’s echoing description of himself, at the baptism of his own son, as ‘George Wilkens, Poett’. There is no trace of any printed work by George Wilkins senior - was he perhaps a ‘poet’ in the oral tradition: a balladeer or tavern entertainer? No trace of him, either, in the Shoreditch subsidy rolls, so he was not apparently a householder.4

In early 1602, in his mid-twenties, Wilkins married one Katherine Fowler. It is also in this year that his first tangle with the law is recorded: he was bound over to keep the peace, further to what we might call ‘threatening behaviour’ - a minor matter but prophetic of later delinquencies. His father’s death the following year may have brought him something, for by 1605 he has a house, in a chamber of which the Belotts are living. This was probably in St Giles, Cripplegate, where the parish register records the baptism of Wilkins’s daughter Mary on 13 December 1607, and her burial on 11 September 1609, and the baptism of his son Thomas on 11 February 1610. Wilkins’s briefly prolific literary career belongs to these years at St Giles. He is begetting children, and he is hectically writing.

The abrupt curtailment of his literary career - for reasons we do not know but which I will later guess at - does not remove him from view, however. Various later episodes in his life are known, though they are always a particular kind of episode, because they are recorded in the rolls and registers of the Middlesex Sessions - essentially the magistrates’ court - before which he appeared frequently, usually in the dock facing charges, and sometimes as a witness or surety for someone else facing charges.5 The earliest such record is from 1610, but one should resist the tempting narrative arc which suggests that Wilkins’s criminal career begins after his literary career stops. For various reasons there are few detailed Sessions records prior to 1608, so there may have been earlier cases against Wilkins of which no record remains. One needs only to glance at his Miseries of Enforced Marriage, written in late 1605, to know that the murky milieu in which his police-record places him was one he already knew intimately.

Here is a bald summary of George Wilkins in the magistrates’ court,

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