From The Times Literary Supplement, 26 September 2014, page 15 (see archived version at: https://web.archive.org/web/20140928013044/http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1462934.ece):
Shakespeare at the Tabard
Martha Carlin
A new glimpse of Shakespeare and his circle appears in a description of the London borough of Southwark, written around 1643 by an anonymous antiquary, and now part of a portfolio of twenty-seven loose sheets of paper in Edinburgh University Library (MS La. II 422/211). The recto sides of these pages contain manuscript notes, in fair copy, described as “Some notes for my Perambulation in and round ye Citye of London for six miles and Remnants of divers worthie things and men”.
The notes chiefly concern Southwark and Hackney, and derive partly from Anthony Munday’s edition (1633) of John Stow’s Survey of London. There is also much material that appears to be otherwise unrecorded, however, and the author announces that his survey is intended
only to notice those places and things that have been passed by or littled [sic] mentiond [sic] by those greate Antiquaries that have written of this noble Citye and ye which places are fast ruining as the Tabard Inne and ye many houses of Priesthood old Monuments Halls Palaces and Houses of its greate Citizens and Lords and may be useful to searchers of Antiquitye in time to come.
In Southwark, he notes, there are “many ancient places yet to be seen and fast falling in ruine and not noticed by others”: not only the priory of St Mary Overy and the Bishop of Winchester’s palace, but “ye old House of ye Poet Gower”, London Bridge and “those Stews so long a source of profitt to ye Maiers of London and Bishopps of Winchester ye Bear Gardens and Playes”. Each September the Mayor, Sheriffs and Aldermen of London paid an official visit to Southwark Fair, and the antiquary describes how they used the Tabard inn in the high street as their headquarters, concluding with the following remarkable passage:
Ye Tabard I find to have been ye resort Mastere Will Shakspear Sir Sander Duncombe Lawrence Fletcher Richard Burbage Ben Jonson and ye rest of their roystering associates in King Jameses time as in ye lange [see note below] room they have cut their names on ye Pannels.
Shakespeare (1564–1616) and Burbage (1568–1619) had been associates since the 1580s, and members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men since the 1590s; Jonson (1572–1637) began to write for the company in 1598. The following year, the company transferred its operations from Shoreditch to the new Globe on Bankside in Southwark. In 1603, King James became the company’s patron, and Lawrence Fletcher (d. 1608), an actor who had come to London in the royal entourage, became a member of the company now renamed the King’s Men.
Shakespeare is thought by some scholars to have lived near the Globe at the end of the 1590s. (This is suggested by annotations to tax records from his previous residence in the City, but there is no corresponding evidence in the extant records for Southwark.) By 1604, however, he was certainly living in the City, and is not known to have lived in Southwark thereafter. Fletcher settled on Bankside, where he lived from at least 1604 until his death in September 1608. Burbage, the company’s leading actor, lived in Shoreditch, and Jonson in the City, but – if the alleged graffiti were genuinely theirs – they all seemingly enjoyed the hospitalty of the Tabard, and commemorated it by carving their names on the panelling of one of the public rooms.
Sir Sander (or Sanders) Duncombe seems unlikely to have been their fellow “roisterer”. Knighted in 1617, and with a reputation, among other things, as a healer (according to John Evelyn’s Diary, when Evelyn’s mother lay mortally ill in 1635, Duncombe tried to save her life with “his celebrated and famous powder”), Duncombe was presumably younger than Shakespeare, Burbage, Jonson and Fletcher, and is not otherwise recorded as their associate. A Justice of the Peace for Middlesex in the early 1640s, he might have carved his name alongside theirs as an act of homage.
The most likely time for Shakespeare and his “roystering associates” to have congregated at the Tabard was probably the decade after the opening of the Globe in 1599. (In 1609, the new indoor theatre at Blackfriars became the preferred theatre of the King’s Men, although they continued to perform at the Globe.) Lawrence Fletcher’s own graffiti certainly would have dated from this period, between his arrival in London in May 1603 and his death. In the following decade, Jonson became a member of a group of men, composed largely of lawyers and politicians, who met at the Mermaid tavern in the City. Shakespeare, however, was not a member of that group, leading some to doubt the credibility of John Aubrey’s and Thomas Fuller’s later accounts of the many lively “wit combates” between Jonson and Shakespeare. Perhaps these exchanges did indeed take place– at the Tabard in Southwark.
The Tabard, celebrated in Shakespeare’s day and after as the inn where Chaucer’s pilgrims gathered in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, stood opposite the sessions house (formerly St Margaret’s Church) on the east side of Southwark’s high street. This was well south of London Bridge and quite some distance from the Bankside theatres, and so would seem an inconvenient place for Shakespeare and his theatrical companions to have met – perhaps they chose it specifically for its association with Chaucer. Unfortunately, the Tabard that they knew was burnt down in the great Southwark fire of 1676. Although rebuilt and restored to use, any earlier remains that might have survived were demolished along with the rest of the inn in 1874–5.
The antiquary’s name does not appear in his notes, but it is clear from them, and from a page of personal reflections dated “November 1643”, that he was an unmarried royalist with an interest in the capital’s medieval monuments. He was acquainted with “Dr Harvey”, and was a friend of the Bohemian artist Wenceslaus Hollar (in England from December 28, 1636 until 1644), whose magnificent panorama of London, published in 1647, was taken from the tower of St Saviour’s Church (now Southwark Cathedral). These features – and the initials “JE”, which occur on one page – would fit the diarist John Evelyn. The hand of the notes does not appear to match Evelyn’s early or mature hands, however, and Evelyn does not mention the ruinous antiquities of Southwark or Hackney, or a gentlewoman named Mabel Acton, in whom the anonymous antiquary had a romantic interest. Evelyn’s references to Dr William Harvey (1578–1657) date from after Harvey’s death and do not imply a personal acquaintance, and he does not report visiting Southwark Fair until 1660, when he described such sights as dancing monkeys and conjoined twins, not the Mayor’s visit or the Tabard inn. So for now, the author’s identity remains a tantalizing mystery.
*Author’s note: I subsequently corrected the reading of this word from “lange” to “large.”
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(From The Times Literary Supplement, 3 October 2014, Letters to the Editor, page 6, letter by Prof. Grace Ioppolo:)
The Tabard Inn
Sir, – In her Commentary article (September 26), Martha Carlin states that the Tabard Inn that Shakespeare, Jonson and the other “roystering” associates “knew” was “burnt down in the great Southwark fire of 1676”, implying that the inn was the same building then as was standing in the early sixteenth century. However, if Shakespeare knew the Tabard, it was not the same building that Carlin’s “antiquary” discussed at some point between 1633 (the date of Anthony Munday’s edition of John Stow’s Survey of London, which the antiquary cites) and 1643, the approximate date Carlin assigns to the Edinburgh University Library manuscript. St Saviour’s parish churchwardens and constables produced a survey on February 27, 1635 of “newe buildinges as haue been erected wthin the said parish so far as they knowe or cann learne since the 2 yeare of the Raigne of or late souereign Lord King James”.The survey’s authors note the following: “In the Inn called the Talbutt a newe building of brick built vppon an old foundacon aboute 6 yeares past by Mr William Garford Landlord thereof & William Chafey his nowe tennaunte worth aboute 10li per Annum” (personal.umich.edu/~ingram/StSaviour/foun-dations.html). Other documents cited by William Rendle and Philip Norman in The Inns of Old Southwark (1888) make clear that this is in fact the Tabard Inn on the east side of Borough High Street after St Margaret’s Hill and that on March 25, 1629 Garford (also called Garfoote) had taken up the Inn’s lease from Philip Bernard (to whom it had descended from his grandfather, John Preston). Judging from the authors’ comments on other “new” buildings in the 1635 survey, the new brick Tabard building was not a separate or “seuerall” building but either all or most of the original inn. Even if only part of the Inn was rebuilt of brick on the old foundation, there is no direct connection between this post-1628 inn and Shakespeare, nor is there any evidence that a graffitied wooden panel was reinstated in this new brick building.
GRACE IOPPOLO
Department of English Literature, University of Reading.
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(from The Times Literary Supplement, 17 October 2014, Letters to the Editor, page 15, response by Martha Carlin to Prof. Ioppolo’s letter:)
The Tabard Inn
Sir, – The list of new buildings in the parish of St Saviour, Southwark, drawn up in February 1635 and cited by Grace Ioppolo (Letters, October 3), reports that in the “Talbutt” (Tabard) inn a new brick building had been built on old foundations about six years previously (i.e. 1628–9). This means exactly what it says: that one of the inn’s buildings had been rebuilt in brick. This new building was valued at only £10 per annum, whereas the Tabard had been valued at almost £23 per annum back in 1544. From 1306 to 1538 the Tabard was owned by Hyde Abbey. Behind the streetfront gatehouse, flanked by shops and lodgings, the inn site occupied the southern portion of the property, and the abbot’s townhouse the northern portion. After the Dissolution, the abbot’s former townhouse was merged with the inn. William Rendle and Philip Norman’s Inns of Old Southwark, also cited by Professor Ioppolo, describes some of the inn’s buildings in 1601. Page 189 supplies the likely identity of the new brick building of 1628–9: in 1629 the will of the Tabard’s owner, Philip Bernard, noted that the former lodging of the abbot of Hyde was “now converted into a brewhouse” for which the lease was to begin on Lady Day [March 25] 1629. This brewhouse probably was the building reported in 1635. Thus, there is no reason to assume, as Ioppolo does, that a room used by Shakespeare’s circle could not have survived, with its defaced panelling intact, in 1643. The anonymous description of the Tabard’s Shakespearean graffiti may, of course, derive from some unknown earlier source. If so, however, the reference to Shakespeare and his fellows cutting their names “in King Jameses time” means that it was written well after the King’s death in 1625.
In either case, the passage provides someone’s eyewitness account, from the reign of Charles I, of the names of William Shakespeare and his “roystering associates” carved into the panelling of a room in the Tabard inn.
MARTHA CARLIN
Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201.