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

called Ufranke de la Cole or Coles. The first entry, on 22 March, reads simply: ‘Mr Mountioy for his man qui abscurr’. The last word is a contraction of ‘abscurrit’ - Mountjoy’s question concerns an apprentice ‘who has absconded’. (Rowse tripped up here, misreading the Latin ‘qui abscurr’ as a name, ‘Gui Asture’, thus providing Mountjoy with an extra, fictitious French apprentice.) The second entry, a week later, tells us more: ‘Mr Mountioy for his man Ufranke de la Coles 1598 the 29 March. Qui abscurrit. He was in St Katherine’s and he came new [returned] unto Mountjoy’s house about the 29 March being Friday where he was taken & committed to prison.’ 60 It is not quite clear what the story is. Was Coles arrested because he had run away, thus breaking his indenture as an apprentice? Or had he run away in the first place to escape arrest for some other offence?
    Coles may be related to Peter Coale, ‘picture-maker’, listed in the 1593 Return of Strangers. He was from Antwerp, but was French speaking, and a member of the French Church. He lived near by, in the parish of St Botolph’s, Aldersgate, and was himself in prison in 1593. 61
     
    Part of what makes Forman’s casebooks so vivid is the fact that they were written down live, on the spot, currente calamo . He asks, he listens, he observes, he writes. The words he writes are often formulaic - thus when a woman ‘supposeth herself with child’, a frequent formula, the phrase is Forman’s not hers - but nonetheless these entries in his casebooks are redolent of the physical presence of Marie Mountjoy as she explains to him the small dramas of her life and her body: the lost rings, the freckled wench, the swimming in her head, the ever-present possibility of pregnancy.
    And then there are the revelations about her love-life. Beneath Forman’s brusque account of the missing valuables appears the name Henry Wood - a name volunteered by Marie. Was she visiting him on that September evening, when she lost those things from her purse ‘as she went’? It is not unlikely, for Wood himself soon makes an appearance in Forman’s casebooks, and one of his visits evokes a tremor of romance (see Plate 17) -
     
Mr Wood p [pro] Mari M
Vtrum gerit Amorem erga
alterum noc [nocte] 1598 the
20 march 62
     
    There is no doubt that this ‘Mari M’ is Marie Mountjoy. Mr Wood comes to Forman after dark ( nocte , ‘at night’), and he asks ‘whether she bears love towards the other man’ - a question which immediately suggests his own romantic involvement with her, and his fear of a rival. One perceives the hint of a narrative. In December 1597 Marie fears she is pregnant, which Forman seems to confirm - she is ten or eleven weeks gone. He also predicts she will miscarry, and as there is no evidence of any child born to Marie in 1598 we might think he was right. A few months later her lover Henry is fretting that she no longer cares for him. Perhaps the alteration in her feelings was precipitated by this narrow escape from the personal and practical difficulties of an illicit pregnancy - possibly not her first. This is speculation, but that Marie had some kind of affair with Wood seems fairly certain from the wording of his query.
    Henry Wood, as we learn from other entries in Forman’s casebooks - which concern affairs of business rather than the heart - was a ‘mercer’, by definition a general trader but in Elizabethan usage a trader in cloth. He was born on 18 August 1566, a punctilious piece of information (Forman usually only gives a querent’s age in years) which perhaps reflects a punctiliousness of Mr Wood’s. He was thus about the same age as Marie. He was himself married, so if there was an affair between them it was doubly duplicitous. The Woods lived down Swan Alley, a little sidestreet off Coleman Street too insignificant to appear on the Agas map or in Stow’s Survay . Coleman Street itself, running up from Cheapside to Moorgate,