Comparative Drama

This is the latest of several recent books about the bard's connections to the city. Some, like Stephen Porter's Shakespeare's London: Everyday Life in London 1580-1616 (Amberley, 2011) or David Thomas's A Visitor's Guide to Shakespeare's London (Pen and Sword, 2016), use the name of Shakespeare as a hook on which to hang a more general account of the early modern metropolis. Others, like the collection of essays Shakespeare in London, edited by Hannah Crawforth, Sarah Dustagheer and Jennifer Young (Bloomsbury 2014), and Duncan Salkeld's Shakespeare and London (Oxford, 2018), explore the ways in which Shakespeare would have experienced London and how those experiences shaped his works.

Marsh has written a kind of hybrid book that will appeal to both the educated general reader and a more specialist academic audience. At the core of the book is a microhistory of the parish of St Helen's in the late-sixteenth century where Shakespeare can be placed around 1597. The evidence for his presence, however, is slim, consisting of the appearance of his name on several tax-related forms that suggest he defaulted on his payments. Assessed at $5 by the local authorities, Shakespeare was one of the better off parishioners.

The story Marsh tells, however, reaches both in time and place far beyond the short period Shakespeare spent in St Helen's. For example, Parts 1 to 2 explore the theater industry in London beginning with the building of the original Shoreditch Theatre itself in 1576. This is a familiar narrative, but one that Marsh places in the context of broader national and international events relating to mostly Reformation and counter-Reformation violence.

Marsh takes the reader on a fascinating historical, topographical, and prosopographic tour of St Helen's. Well before Shakespeare's arrival, St Helen's was a well-to-do and intellectually lively part of London, full of prominent organizations and people. Adventurers like Sir Humphrey Gilbert and venture capitalists like Sir Thomas Gresham belonged to a group of local worthies interested in global trade and the establishment of overseas settlements. The notoriously anti-theatrical Lord Mayor, Sir John Spencer, lived in the impressive Crosby House (later home to the East India Company), while the Company of Leathersellers took over various parts of the old convent. Members of other professions like doctors, antiquarians, lawyers, and musicians also settled here, many part of the avant-garde of their specializations. Marsh is especially good on the parish church itself, where many of the local great and the good were buried, and whose tombs survive to this day. [End Page 422]

Marsh may lament the paucity of sources for studying St Helen's in this period, but the survival of the Leathersellers' Company property leases and deeds, as well as extensive parochial records, makes it one of the better-documented parishes of early modern London. Marsh's impressively extensive research in the archives is documented in copious footnotes, tables, spreadsheets, charts, maps, and an Appendix that forms a kind of book-within-a-book. It's in the appendices that Marsh tries to fix Shakespeare's exact address, his probable landlord, and likely neighbors.

As March acknowledges, the sources only take us so far, and we ultimately fall back on informed speculation about Shakespeare's life in St Helen's. This is a book full of speculation, of course, but the speculation is built upon a solid evidentiary basis. We can forgive Marsh if occasionally he gets a little carried away—imagining our hero finding inspiration for the gravediggers' scene in Hamlet as he gazes out across the parish churchyard (306). It is tempting but dangerous to push too hard at the question of whether Shakespeare's "life in St Helen's impacted on his writing in any way" (302).

Weighing in at 4.23 lbs. and measuring 8" x 11," this is an unusually large book that is quite uncomfortable...