The Lodger

"This is the Shakespeare biography, of all these ones, that I most wish I had written. I’m a huge fan of Nicholl’s writing, whether he’s writing about travels in South East Asia dealing with gunrunners and diamond merchants, or his books on Nash and Marlowe. But I think The Lodger is his best book. The last significant documents related to Shakespeare were discovered in the early 20th century by a strange American couple named the Wallaces. These were documents relating to a legal case in which Shakespeare was involved as a mediator in the household in which he was renting lodgings, between a young man, a young woman and the woman’s family. They were called the Mountjoys, and they were connected to tire-making, which is making headdresses at court. Shakespeare got dragged into a legal battle over what was promised to the son-in-law and what was actually given, and what he heard and remembered from a half-dozen years earlier. It is a rare glimpse of Shakespeare caught up in the everyday, and what Charles Nicholl is able to do is take these court records and then go to the area in London where Shakespeare lived at this time and recreate that moment, that time, that family, that household, what Shakespeare was writing then, what was 100 yards away, what was 50 yards away, and the ways in which all these things shaped Shakespeare’s creative life at this moment. It feels like a novel, but it’s historical and factually accurate. It’s what I would call a slice of Shakespeare’s life. I keep coming back to the impossibility of writing a cradle-to-grave story of Shakespeare’s life, but for the last 15 years of my life and probably for the next 10, all I’m going to be doing is trying to do what Charles Nicholl did in The Lodger and which I did in my book 1599 , which is to find an interesting period about which we know a considerable amount of Shakespeare’s life, and try to tell the story of that time. A micro-history rather than a biography."