Shakespeare's London Connection

Shakespeare was born, married and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon, but he spent most of his working life in rented accommodation in London. It was his place of business, the theatrical and literary capital to which he was drawn and in which he struggled to success as an actor and playwright. In statistical terms, the "sweet swan of Avon" was just one incomer among many — London's population doubled during the 16th century to about 200,000 in Shakespeare's day.

"London, thou art the floure of cities all," ran the old medieval ditty, but the Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Nashe had a different angle: "London, thou art the seeded garden of sin, the sea that sucks in all the scummy channels of the realm," he wrote in 1593, in a passage that earned him the wrath of the Lord Mayor and a spell in Newgate prison. Perhaps both views are true – London was one of the largest, liveliest and most sophisticated cities in Europe, but it was also overcrowded, squalid, corrupt, crime-ridden and plague-infested. The vigour and verve of the city courses through the low-life strata of Shakespearean comedy — Falstaff and his cronies drinking at East Cheap, the brothel-world of Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Overdone.

Shakespeare probably arrived in the late 1580s, in his mid-twenties, though the earliest sightings of him date from 1592 — the first performance of "harey the vi" (or Henry VI) at the Rose theatre, and a scoffing reference to him as "Shake-scene" in a pamphlet by rival Robert Greene.

According to the 17th-century biographer John Aubrey, Shakespeare lived in Shoreditch. It was here that the first purpose-built playhouses were located – the Theatre, built by James Burbage, father of the actor Richard Burbage, and the Curtain. These predated the Bankside playhouses south of the river. Elizabethan Shoreditch was little more than a shanty-town, a rampant overspill of "poor cottages" and "alleys backward" spreading through the fields and marshes and dissolved monastery gardens outside the city walls. But it was also, because of that connection with the theatres, the Bohemian haunt of Elizabethan London. Along its dirt roads lived some of the greatest writers of the day, among them Christopher Marlowe, who had lodgings in Norton Folgate just south of Shoreditch, and who is glimpsed with daggers drawn in an "affray" on nearby Hog Lane (now more respectably known as Worship Street) in 1589.

By the mid-1590s Shakespeare had moved upmarket, to the parish of St Helen's, Bishopsgate — still close to the northern theatres but now inside the city gates. We find him there in the Subsidy Rolls, which record individual tax assessments parish by parish, and are the nearest we have to an Elizabethan telephone directory. The earliest record of Shakespeare in Bishopsgate is in October 1596, around the time he was writing The Merchant of Venice and the first part of Henry IV. He was assessed to pay tax of five shillings, a middling sum, but the records show that he failed to pay up. This is unremarkable — the system was chaotic and evasion was common — but means the first actual documentation of Shakespeare in London is as a tax-dodger.

From Bishopsgate, Shakespeare moved south, across the river to Southwark. This can be related to the opening of the new Globe theatre, built there in 1599, a stone's throw from the bear-baiting and cock-fighting pits of Paris Gardens, and surrounded by dicing-houses, bowling alleys, taverns and brothels. These venues of leisure and pleasure flourished in the outlying "liberties" of the city, beyond the writ of the civic authorities. Southwark was particularly notorious for its "stews" or brothels, such as the Castle (on the site of the present-day Bankside pub, The Anchor), the Cardinal's Hat, and Holland's Leaguer. The latter, run by Elizabeth Holland, is shown in an old woodcut — a moated little fortress on the riverbank, with a jetty leading to a stout, studded gate, beside which stands a bouncer armed with a tall pike. Girls are glimpsed within, in provocative states of undress: "those milk-paps/That through the window-bars bore at men's eyes", as Shakespeare lubriciously phrases it in Timon of Athens.

If the moralisers are to be believed, the playhouse itself was little more than an annexe to the brothel and sexual assignations were as much part of the entertainment as the play itself. According to Thomas Dekker, prostitutes were so frequently in the theatre that they knew the plays word for word — "every punk and her squire, like the interpreter and his puppet, can rant out by heart" the speeches they have heard.

For the Elizabethan actor there were sexual opportunities aplenty — "The waiting-women spectators are over-ears in love with him, and Ladies send for him to act in their chambers". There are hints of a high-class scandal in a gossipy letter of 1619, which relates that the Earl of Argyll "was privy to the payment of £15 for the nursing of a child which the world says is daughter to My Lady and N. Field the player". There is a portrait of Nathan Field: darkly handsome, with the look of a languid pirate.

Did Shakespeare take advantage of these opportunities during the long months he spent in London, far from a marriage bed which had anyway — if the traditional account is to be believed — long ago turned cold? One story, jotted down in 1602 by young law student, John Manningham, suggests that he did. When the great Burbage was playing Richard III, a woman "grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the 3. Shakespeare overhearing their conclusion went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. The message being brought that Rich. the 3d was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Rich. the 3".

Beneath this, Manningham adds helpfully: "Shakespeare's name William." It is an unverifiable anecdote, with a suspiciously neat punchline, but it was plausible enough to the teller of the story.