Shakespeare Magazine 09

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