Sir – The claim that Shakespeare stayed in the Painted Room (City to throw open its doors, September 11) needs a ‘possibly’ or a ‘perhaps’ added to it.

 

It rests, I think, on the tale that Shakespeare had an affair with the wife of John Davenant who kept The Taverne on the Cornmarket. This first gets written down half a century after Shakespeare’s death, so it is not even necessarily contemporary gossip. It comes from John Aubrey who is a  notoriously undiscriminating recorder of unreliable gossip.

 

In his account, John Davenant’s son, William, seems to have encouraged the notion “when he was pleasant over a glass of wine with his most intimate friends”. You can see why a playwright from a later generation might want to do that. According to Aubrey, Davenant said “that he writt with the very spirit that did Shakespeare and seemed contented enough to be thought his son”.

 

Unless there is other recent evidence which I do not know about, and this is the source, it seems a good idea at least to make the claim pretty tentatively.

 

David Webb, Oxford