Shakespeare Magazine 9
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Interview: Paul Edmondson<br />
about <strong>Shakespeare</strong> in performance<br />
and the various changes that a director<br />
may take a text through. And the final<br />
chapter is called ‘Why <strong>Shakespeare</strong>?’,<br />
which is about the after-effect of<br />
<strong>Shakespeare</strong> on international culture<br />
over the last 400 years.”<br />
Did you have a personal<br />
<br />
“It was an opportunity for me to really<br />
share my enthusiasm for <strong>Shakespeare</strong>,<br />
and to write the book I perhaps wish<br />
I’d most been able to read when I<br />
was setting out on the <strong>Shakespeare</strong>an<br />
journey. It was very interesting to<br />
visit, as directly as I do, the whole<br />
world of <strong>Shakespeare</strong> biography. This<br />
is something I have published on<br />
before, and obviously it’s something<br />
the Birthplace Trust is very interested<br />
in because of the way we present<br />
<strong>Shakespeare</strong> – in part – through the<br />
five <strong>Shakespeare</strong> houses and the many<br />
documents we care for here from the<br />
time. But I revisited all of this afresh,<br />
and I hope for chapter one I’ve really<br />
brought some fresh sidelights and<br />
some fresh illumination on what<br />
might be considered old facts.”<br />
<br />
examples of how you’ve been<br />
<br />
<br />
“I can. One of the other books I’ve<br />
been working on is about New Place,<br />
which is the house that <strong>Shakespeare</strong><br />
purchased in the centre of Stratford<br />
in 1597. We’ve been doing an<br />
archaeological dig there, so that book<br />
is about the dig, and that’s coming<br />
out from Manchester University Press<br />
in 2016. So perhaps that’s another<br />
conversation. But that is the big<br />
project for the <strong>Shakespeare</strong> Birthplace<br />
Trust in 2016, to re-present the site<br />
of New Place. And it’s very much a<br />
world-focused <strong>Shakespeare</strong> project,<br />
because we’re the only people who can<br />
do that – the site where he died, the<br />
site of his family home.<br />
“And in recent years, when you<br />
look at <strong>Shakespeare</strong>an biography, there<br />
is a renaissance in how New Place<br />
has come to be considered as part of<br />
his life. And one of the things I have<br />
sought to challenge, and which our<br />
re-presentation of New Place seeks<br />
to challenge, is this old crustacean of<br />
biography that is ‘Oh, he left his wife<br />
and family and went and did all of his<br />
work in London, and then retired back<br />
to Stratford’.<br />
“You hear that phrase ‘retired<br />
back to Stratford’ every day from the<br />
mouths of tour guides as you walk<br />
around Stratford, and every time I<br />
hear it I wince. Because if you owned<br />
a house the size of New Place from as<br />
early in your career – he’s 33 when he<br />
acquires New Place – there’s no way<br />
you’d spend most of your time away<br />
from it – it just wouldn’t be how you<br />
would wish to live.”<br />
What do you think New Place<br />
<br />
“It was a status symbol, his wife and<br />
family were there. Other members<br />
of his family… his brothers never<br />
married, so what did they do after<br />
1601, after <strong>Shakespeare</strong> leased his<br />
father’s family home, the Birthplace,<br />
“I wanted to write the book I wish<br />
I’d been able to read when I was<br />
starting the <strong>Shakespeare</strong> journey”<br />
which he’d inherited, to become a<br />
pub? They had to live somewhere,<br />
so my guess is that the extended<br />
<strong>Shakespeare</strong> family were living in the<br />
large New Place.<br />
“It took three to four days to<br />
travel from Stratford to London, and<br />
one of the things I wanted to do in<br />
my opening chapter is to build up a<br />
picture – and I’m not the first to do<br />
this – to emphasise <strong>Shakespeare</strong> as a<br />
literary commuter, somebody who<br />
got back to Stratford when he could.<br />
Here, one can start to imagine what<br />
his library looked like, a place for<br />
his books, a centre of stillness, to get<br />
away from it all, from the hectic life<br />
of professional theatre. And a place of<br />
retreat, to write and to think.”<br />
<br />
is quite different to how he’s<br />
<br />
“It’s all too tempting to imagine<br />
<strong>Shakespeare</strong> as an inky-fingered Joseph<br />
Fiennes, dashing off a sonnet, writing<br />
the next speech at the drop of a hat,<br />
and actually nothing can be further<br />
from the truth. When you look at<br />
the works carefully, he had books<br />
around him when he was writing<br />
some of those plays. Some of the plays<br />
directly lift from the source material –<br />
reshaping it, of course. I write about<br />
this in ‘How did he write?’ – the<br />
transforming power of his imagination<br />
on the sources he was using, and the<br />
sources he needed.<br />
“So New Place for me is a place<br />
of books, a place of writing, and<br />
therefore a place that <strong>Shakespeare</strong> used<br />
as a literary base as well as a family<br />
home. Over the time he was working<br />
in London, isn’t it interesting that he<br />
doesn’t have a permanent home in<br />
London for the whole of those 20 or<br />
30 years? He’s moving around different<br />
parishes… He does buy the Blackfriars<br />
Gatehouse towards the end of his life –<br />
of course, he didn’t know it was going<br />
40 SHAKESPEARE magazine