Shakespeare and his London Associates 5 



request of Mary's mother, belong inseparably in the series. Even 

 the last of these in the Consistory, showing Mountjoy's insub- 

 ordination to the Church and his moral obliquity since the death 

 of his wife, thus explaining the foundation for Belott's charges 

 against him in the Court of Requests in the matter of his recent 

 reckless living, are necessary, for a case was rarely referred from 

 a civil to an ecclesiastical tribunal except on moral grounds. That 

 both Mountjoy and Belott were French is shown in Mountjoy's 

 patent of denization and Belott's will, as well as in the Lay 

 Subsidy assessments and the testimony of Humphrey Fludd. 

 That they were Huguenots appears from the Consistory records 

 and the will. 



To these essential documents might have been added others of a 

 more or less side-illuminative nature, such as records relating to 

 Daniel Nicholas, son of Sir Ambrose Nicholas, a former Lord 

 Mayor of London, others concerning Humphrey Fludd, the 

 King's trumpeter, who as a member of the royal household was 

 often employed to carry letters to and from Paris and other 

 places on official business, and so on. Such of these as throw 

 light on the character and standing of Shakespeare's neighbors 

 and associates in this case I may assemble for the final treatment. 

 The rest may be passed with a reference. 



The value of these documents lies chiefly on the side of human 

 interest rather than of contributive knowledge. Partly because 

 of this and partly because of the very appreciative but unsigned 

 editorial note set at the head of my article in Harper's Magazine 

 for March, 191 o, I have been credited with a judgment of the 

 contributive value of these documents which in the course of my 

 article I take special care to show they do not possess. My entire 

 article, from the title to the last word, puts forward sharply and 

 unequivocally the features of human interest. In this regard, it 

 is true that no other document or series of documents in Shake- 

 spearean annals equals these. But human interest is a very dif- 

 ferent matter from contributive knowledge, which the general 

 public has taken to be one and the same thing. In the article I 

 took care to differentiate these two qualities and pointed out that 



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