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Richard Schoch, "Shakespeare’s House: A Window onto his Life and Legacy" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
00:59:26
An interview with Richard Schoch
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- [00:00]
A
Hi, everyone. I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy, College Matters from the Chronicle. College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Check out College Matters wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:50]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because we are discussing a book that's just been published, published by Bloomsbury in 2023, titled Shakespeare's A Window Onto His Life and Legacy, which pretty much does what it says investigates Shakespeare's actual house. Well, as we're going to find out, it's a bit more complicated than that. Just saying how singular is part of what's fascinating about this. But before I give too much away, thank you so much to the author for being here, Dr. Richard Shook. Thank you for being with us, Miranda.
- [01:28]
C
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you and with your listeners.
- [01:31]
B
Well, we're very pleased to have you. But before we get into all things Shakespeare House, Richard, would you mind introducing yourself and explaining why you decided to write this?
- [01:41]
C
I'm Richard Shook. I'm a professor of drama at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. And I have long been interested in all things Shakespearean, the man, the works, the theatre, all of it. And I've recently had occasion to spend time in Stratford, which is, of course, where Shakespeare's birthplace is on the north side of Henley street, where it's been since the 16th century. And you know, the birthplace is the most popular place in the world devoted to Shakespeare. More people visited than the Globe Theatre in London, the reconstructed Globe more than visit his gravesite in Holy Trinity Church. And before the COVID pandemic, when tourism was at its height, 400,000 people a year from more than 100 countries visited the birthplace. So there is something about the birthplace that has for centuries been capturing, I think, the hearts and the minds of people who like Shakespeare. And it also struck me that there was no book on the history of the house. I thought this was Insane. For all the hundreds of thousands of people who are visiting it and who are interested in this site, there's no book for them to read beforehand or after their visit. So being of course the arrogant academic that I am, I thought, well, this book doesn't exist, so I better write it myself. And I had a hunch that this would be a rather wonderful and surprising story to tell because the birthplace didn't become the birthplace all by itself. Other people had to make it happen. And by the way, those other people did not include William Shakespeare. It happened long after other people had to make it happen and for reasons of their own. And it seems to me that in a very interesting and ironic way that the changing fortunes of the Shakespeare's house, his birthplace, those changing fortunes mirror the changing perceptions we've had about Shakespeare over the past four centuries. And hence the subtitle of the book, A Window onto His Life and Legacy. So that's why I decided to write Shakespeare's House.
- [04:24]
B
Thank you for that context and for kind of hinting at a number of things I think we will discuss further. It does provide quite an interesting window into a number of things, not just, I think, Shakespeare's life, but also kind of the times in which he lived and some of the times after that as well. So before we get into the specifics of the house itself, I think some of that context would be helpful. And in fact, you include this in the book as well. So can you take us back, back in time to understand when Shakespeare was born, what was a modern house? You know, when people were like, oh look, my house is all shiny. What, what did a modern house mean at that point? And to what extent did the birthplace match these ideals?
- [05:14]
C
That's such a fascinating question, Miranda, and thank you for asking it, because we can find it hard to believe, I think so invested are we in sort of picturesque historical nostalgia. We can find it hard to believe that the Tudors, the Elizabethans, people in Shakespeare's time, wanted their houses to be modern. When we look at a two story timber framed oak house, which you find everywhere in places like Stratford, we see the past. That's not what Shakespeare and his contemporaries saw. They, in a sense, were looking for the future, the house. They were looking for how their houses could be updated. So when you got a bit more money, like John Shakespeare for a while, as your economic fortunes rose, you kind of plowed that money back into your house, not usually by building a newer house or a larger house, but by updating the fixtures and furnishings in the house where you already were. So if you got some money, you might put bits of glass in the window. And if you only had a little bit of money, it would be just the windows in the front overlooking the street, so that you could make everybody passing by jealous about how you could afford glass in your window, because most people couldn't. They would just have shutters, or maybe not even shutters at all. Or maybe you would replace those painted cloth hangings in your parlor with some very expensive but rather wonderful wood paneling. And if you really wanted to splash out, you'd get a fantastic four poster canopied bed with the sort of richest pillows and the most luxurious mattress that you could find. So it's always the newness, the modernity and the way in which a house signals a family sense of its own changing status that we have to bear in mind when we think about Shakespeare's house. It wasn't a cultural heritage site to him and to his family. It was the public face of the family.
- [07:34]
B
No, that is very helpful for us to keep in mind. And I think the idea of being a public face of the family is really interesting to think of it as being a museum now. But before we get into the museum phase of things, can you therefore tell us a bit more about the house itself? Right. What was it built out of? How was it laid out? How was it used?
- [07:57]
C
The records, of course, the house itself, much of it still still exists. There are some very interesting records. And beyond that, we have to remember that ordinary townhouses for ordinary families in ordinary towns like Stratford Upon Avon really did more or less look alike. So Shakespeare's house was very much like a family home of other families of his time and other families of his economic status. So it's a two story. Well, there's a third story that's, that's an open loft area, but two habitable stories. It's a two story structure, half timber. That is to say, it has, it has oak frames, it has vertical oak frames. And in between the frames there's wattle and daub. And the wattle is this kind of lattice or web of dried twigs, leaves, hair, animal dung that's sort of hardened and becomes the infill between the timber frames. And then that's pasted, plastered over, give it the sort of white or off white appearance. So that's called half timber. The alternating vertical oak posts and then the sort of a plastered infill in, in between. And there are the requisite number of windows, though the windows you see today are more ornate than they were in Shakespeare's time. And it's built on low foundation of stone couple feet high. Local stone was quarried. The oak was cut down from the nearby Forest of Arden, so everything was sourced locally. And then there's a cellar, which you cannot see today, but the cellar survives, and that's underneath. So Shakespeare grew up in a house with six rooms. And you can walk through them today if you visit the birthplace on the ground floor, or as my fellow Americans say, the first floor, but that is on the lower floor, there's a parlor, a hall, and what was John Shakespeare's workshop as a glover? So remember, John Shakespeare, like most artisans and tradesmen and craftsmen of his time, was worked at home. There was the Stratford Market on Thursdays where he would set up his stall, so to speak. But basically, he and his apprentices worked in the workshop, in the house. And also, obviously, if they were dying animal hides and there were noxious fumes floating around, they would do that work out in the back garden. But he spent his days in the workshop. The main room of the house was the hall. Now, this doesn't mean corridor. It's hall in a formal sense, like the Royal Albert Hall. It's the. Although not large, it was the room where the family lived together, where they dined, where they prayed, where the father might give his lectures to the children, where they told stories to each other, where they played backgammon or chess, and most especially, where they received visitors. Because that's where you. You entered. That's where you entered into when you stepped in off Henley Street. That was the formal living space in the house. And then off to the side is the. Is the parlor, as I said, a secondary living space and also sort of a workspace where Mary Shakespeare, her daughter, her serving maids, might take out the spinning wheel and mend some clothes or might do some food preparation or other household tasks. So that's the lower floor, the upper floor. There are three bedrooms. On one side is the room that has long been taken to be the room where Shakespeare was born. We don't know that for sure. It's a pretty fair bet he was born in the house, but we don't know it's exactly in that room. But there will be no harm in believing that he was. And that's the room that is now presented as the birth room. The other two bedchambers are open. One follows into the other. They're on the other side of the staircase. And both of those rooms are open to the loft area above. And that would. That Would have been used for storage in Shakespeare's time. If they had put in some floorboards, you might have some of the apprentices up there, kind of rough sleeping quarters. And then the cellar was where you would store grains, canned fruits, canned vegetables, other dry goods. But basically six rooms to live in in the house over time, that is, after Shakespeare's lifetime, a few more rooms have been added, particularly in the back. But Shakespeare himself grew up in a house with those six rooms, which was pretty roomy at the time. That was, that was a good sized house for people at the time. I just learned the other day that Shakespeare's schoolmaster at the grammar school lived on site in one tiny room. Not much for the schoolmaster. One of the most educated people in the town. Pretty high status position. Shakespeare's family had six rooms, so they were fairly well off. Today the house is isolated. The surrounding structures were torn down in the 19th century. So it looks, you know, like, like a landmark. You know, your eye is drawn to it. But in its time it was one of many houses on Henley street. All more or less the same height, all more or less built of the same materials, all more or less with the same facade to the street and all occupied by more or less the same kind of family. And this in later years becomes an interesting part of the story. Well, how can it be that a singular genius like William Shakespeare, a one of a kind literary and artistic figure, how can it be that he grew up in a completely ordinary, unremarkable house?
- [14:48]
B
Thank you for taking us through that. Especially as you said, sort of seeing it today. It's no longer kind of, that's not what a normal house looks like now. So remembering how ordinary it was then does take a bit of kind of imagining and very helpful to have you walking us through kind of what the house was like and how it was used. Obviously Shakespeare's kind of general biography is well known. I don't want to ask you to just sit here and repeat facts to us. But on that point of how he comes from somewhere so ordinary and ends up very much not ordinary, you have a great statement in the book. Shakespeare the boy learned all the right lessons about domestic life and then Shakespeare the man is ignored, every one of them. Given I think this quote does a really good job of taking us from kind of the ordinary house to the not at all ordinary man. Can you maybe give us some examples of what he learned about domestic life, how things were meant to go and then how he very much didn't do that?
- [15:53]
C
Sure. And thank you for bringing that up, because in a sense, that's the story under the story, right? There's, there's. There's a kind of bricks and mortar, though it's not bricks and mortar, the bricks and mortar story of the house. But then the story of what the house signifies, what it represents, what it represents, what its cultural value is. When I say Shakespeare learned, you know, Shakespeare, the boy learned all the right lessons about domestic life. By right lessons, I mean the dominant values of his time about upholding family status, about how a man should be the one to run a household in partnership with his wife, but it's the man who runs the household. And related to that, about the essentially secondary place of wives, daughters, in the household and in the larger society. So these, if you will, other kind of lessons that domestic structures and domestic life teach. And Shakespeare would have understood this very well growing up in a conventional situation. And the irony is that he didn't seem to care very much at all about these values. He inverted those norms in his life. He did not live, as it were, domestically, the way he was supposed to live. So when it comes to the idea of house and households, I think Shakespeare emerges as a. As a figure of paradox. He worked very hard, for example, so that John Shakespeare, his father, would be honored with the status of gentlemen. And on the second try, he was. But it was William Shakespeare who kind of chivied that along. So Shakespeare worked really hard to make his father a gentleman in Stratford with the family coat of arms. That family coat of arms was granted to John Shakespeare, not to William Shakespeare. Shakespeare worked very hard for that, but then went off to London to make his own name and fame and fortune. So Shakespeare himself didn't seem to care about being a gentleman in. In Stratford, at least not primarily. And although he became wealthier than his father and more prominent in the world, he didn't really want anything to do with civic life in Stratford. Unlike his father, he had business affairs, he owned property and ran some trade, but he wasn't involved in the. In the, in the corporation of Stratford, in the civic life of the town. Now, he clearly wanted his family to live in probably the best, or the second best residence in Stratford, New Place on Chapel street, right in the center of Stratford. So he wanted his family to have one of the grandest houses in Stratford, but it was not important that he himself lived there and that he himself run that household. So in defiance, I think, of social norms, he was content for his wife, Anne Hathaway, and Shakespeare to take on those traditionally masculine Responsibilities of running the household. You know, I liken her to the Portia of Warwickshire. She's the one in charge and in charge of a rather grand estate. All this time, Shakespeare is living a hundred miles away as an itinerant lodger in other people's houses. So I find this fascinating that Shakespeare had a clear idea of what was expected of him as a man, as a husband, as a citizen, as a householder, and then went his own way, I think.
- [20:06]
B
I mean, that's why I raised it. Right. It is interesting to do this comparison, to situate him in the context of where he's coming from, what his father was doing, and not just kind of think of him as Shakespeare all by himself. Right. There is this context that is interesting to add in. But the book is about the house, so I won't go further too much further into Shakespeare the person. Let's focus on the house. So can you talk us through kind of still in this era, he's still alive. What was the status of Shakespeare's house? Well, really, his house is during his life and immediately after his death.
- [20:45]
C
Right. So it gets a little complicated. So bear with me, I'm going to do my best. You know, property, property records and property deals are never straightforward, but let's give it a go. So the first thing to remember is that it's John Shakespeare's house, which he acquired probably first as a tenant and then owned in late 1550s. William Shakespeare is born in 1564 in his father's house. He grows up in that house. At some point, we don't know exactly because the lost years intervene. At some point he leaves. He may or may not have lived in the Henley street house after he married Anne Hathaway, we don't know. But for X number of years, say 18 years, that's how old he was when he got married. Shakespeare lived in his father's house on Enley Street. And then in the early 1590s, he pops up in London. Shakespeare's father, or I should let me backtrack a bit. Shakespeare makes his way in the theater, writes some poems, some sonnets, establishes his reputation, makes or borrows some money, and in 1597, buys his own house in Stratford New Place, where his wife lives and his daughters, Susanna and Judith. Alas, by this time, Judith's twin brother, Hamlet is dead. But it's Shakespeare's wife and his daughters, Susanna and Judith, who live in the house. That's 1597, 1601. John Shakespeare dies. William Shakespeare, as the oldest son, immediately inherits the birthplace the house on Henley street, his father's house, but he doesn't live there. So who's living there in 1601 after his father dies? Well, we know that his mother, Mary Arden, Mary Shakespeare, was obviously living there. He may have taken her back to New Place so that she would feel more looked after because she was now on her own, we don't know. But she may have continued to live in the birthplace, or she may have moved in with Shakespeare's own family. In new plays at some point. Shakespeare's sister Joan, who is married to a hatter named William Hart. So Shakespeare's sister Joan Hart moved in, or moved back in to the birthplace on Henley street with her husband and her children. And they had lots of debts, they never had much money. So you can imagine why, you know, they would want to live under somebody else's roof. So Shakespeare is. Shakespeare becomes the owner in 1601, but never moves back in because he has his own big house. New Place. Shakespeare dies in 1616. Susanna Hall, Shakespeare's eldest surviving child, is his heir, and she immediately inherits both the birthplace and New Place. She lives in New Place, but in Shakespeare's will, he says, I'm giving to Susanna the birthplace, the house on Henley Street. He never called it the birthplace. Shakespeare says, I'm giving to Susanna the house on Henley street, but I'm letting my sister Joan live there for a peppercorn rent, I think 12 pence because she has nowhere else to live. And so Joan Hart and her family continue to live in the birthplace past 1616, even though Susannah hall is now the owner. So right away we get this kind of divided history where there's one set of people who own the house and another set of people who are living in the house, but they're all related to each other. 1649, Susannah hall dies. She and John hall had one child, Elizabeth Barnard Barnard was the name of her second husband, Shakespeare's granddaughter. She in 1649 inherits both new Place and the birthplace, but she doesn't live in either of them. So New Place is rented out. And in the birthplace on Henley street, the Harts and later generations of the Harts keep living there. And then Elizabeth Barnard dies in 1670. That's the end of Shakespeare's line. And she gives the birthplace, she outright gives the birthplace to her second cousin, Thomas Hart, who is then living there. So the Hart's become the owners and then they continue to live there for another hundred, 125 years. I told you, it gets a little complicated.
- [26:23]
B
Well, no, I think that that's helpful to understand the sort of chronolog of it. And I think the other useful piece to add in is something that. I mean, as soon as I read it in the book, I was like, oh, of course, obviously. But I hadn't actually put it together before. So I think it's worth sort of highlighting that throughout this chronology you've taken us through of the various deaths and transfers of ownership, no one else cared. Right. Shakespeare's house was not a public discussion. This was all just like, okay, this is a house. This person gets the house. This wasn't a thing that anyone outside of these particular people cared about. Which obviously begs the question, kind of, well, at some point that changed, right? Otherwise we wouldn't have a book. So what changed? Both kind of immediately, but also you make this argument about changes in the wider culture to get to the point where a house that this person who died a while ago is actually of public interest. Can you walk us through this transformation?
- [27:30]
C
Yes, and you raise a good point, which is that the house would never be the cultural heritage site that it is unless people cared about Shakespeare as a person and as an authority. And for people to care about Shakespeare as a person and an author, they have to care first about literature. They have to think that there is something called English literature. And it was really only at the end of the 17th century, so, you know, 50, 60 years after Shakespeare's death. Death, that the idea emerged that there was this thing called English literature, sort of a distinct body of texts, of printed works, a collective artistic achievement that spanned centuries, and that included poetry, drama, and epic. And the reason to care about this thing known as English literature, was because it expressed national identity, England's own character, if you will. That literature, a native literary canon, was England's homegrown answer to the classical laureates of Greece and Rome. So the idea of England's own literature becomes a point of focus in the late 17th century and by this time. And here, we have the theater to thank as well. At the center of that corpus of literature is William Shakespeare. But to understand Shakespeare's genius, a little context is always helpful. And that context was nothing other than the author's life, the life behind the works, the life that produced the works. And this is a point first made in texts like Edward Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum 1675, or more famously, Gerard Langbain's An Account of the English dramatic poets. That's 1691. And these are the first biographical dictionaries of English playwrights And what these biographical dictionaries add, it's not really new knowledge. You know, there weren't so many facts about Shakespeare's life known in the 1670s or even the 1690s. So it's not knowledge that these dictionaries are adding. It's a perspective, a way of seeing. And I think a good shorthand for that perspective is the idea of the life work. If you want to understand an author's work, Shakespeare or any other author, first you must understand that author's life, because it's the life that generates the work. And where.
- [30:48]
B
I'm sorry, go ahead. No, please, go ahead.
- [30:50]
C
And where else would you go if you want to understand an author's life than the house where he was born? So I think that's conceptually the change in ideas and attitudes that led to the house being an object of fascination and interest. It's not the house that changed. It's people's ideas that changed.
- [31:20]
B
No, and this is fascinating and I think really important because in some ways it's easy to go, okay, well, here's a house, and here's what changed in this year and that year. And trace the history of the physical object is easier in a lot of ways, but that doesn't tell us that much. Right. It's tracing the ideas that really help us understand this jump in perception. So speaking of people's perceptions, staying on this track of changes in how people thought, what changed in people's perceptions specifically around his house, now that they're beginning to become interested in it between 1700 and, say, 1760?
- [32:00]
C
Again, I think it's related to this idea that the house is a point of origin for encountering the author, that the house is a point of departure for the reader's or the theatergoers journey into the works. And I'm going to say something that might sound banal, but I really don't think it is. The point I want to make is that a house, more than a book, more even than the First Folio, a house is what makes Shakespeare a person, a knowable person, a fellow human being. Because we've all lived in a house, and we all think that our houses say something about us, reveal our personality. You know, when Louis theobald, in his 1. His 18th century edition of Shakespeare, I think it was around 1753, and he wrote about. He was writing about New Place, but he said Shakespeare bought this house and, quote, modeled it to his own mind. I think that's a fascinating phrase, this idea that the house is an expression, an Extension of the author's mind. The author's mind made visible, made palpable, made apparent. So there's something about the house, symbolically, in its familiarity, because we've all had a house, and in its particularity, in that it was modeled to Shakespeare's mind, that sort of makes it the key that unlocks something about Shakespeare. And this, I think, accounts for the extreme emotional reaction that people, particularly in the 19th century, had when they visited Shakespeare's birthplace. They would burst into tears, they would spontaneously start to write poems, they wrote their names on the walls and the ceilings, they took out pocket knives and carved their names onto the windows, if you can imagine such a thing. People were so moved by the idea of sharing a space with Shakespeare that it touched them very deeply and led to some rather erratic behavior.
- [34:32]
B
Is there an. All right. I think that's. I don't know, I'm still stuck on the erratic behaviour and kind of going back into the book and going like, oh, yeah, I remember that bit. That was odd. So, yeah, no, fair enough. I'd like to talk about some of that erratic behavior. Obviously, we're not going to go into all the detail that the book does, so maybe this will just be an enticement to listeners to investig further, because we do have. I'd like to pick out one situation particular and I know that there's kind of. There's a before story and there's an after story to this one, but this one, to me, this one really got me. So I have to ask you about it. How did we get to the point where the birthplace meant sort of two things at the same time? There was a physical location that had pretty much nothing in it, and a separate location across the street that was not the birthplace, did not pretend to be the physical birthplace, but had all of the objects. That is strange what is happening here.
- [35:38]
C
Thank you for bringing that episode up, because it is wild. So this was around 1820, and the landlady of the house, the owner was a woman named Ann Court, and her tenant was a woman named Mary Hornby. And it was Mary Hornby, who had been living there in the birthplace for decades, had been gradually acquiring all sorts of fake relics and kind of on the side, running it as a tourist trade. But it was getting more and more well known, gaining more and more notoriety. And, you know, Ann Court was like, I think, you know, why is my tenant making all this money from the tourists? I should be making it myself. So she raised Mary Hornby's rent sky high. I think increased it by 20 times to the point where Mary Hornby had to leave. But she left in a huff. And before she left, she whitewashed all those signatures on the ceiling and the walls, which, of course, Taurus loved. Looking at these illustrious past visitors, she just whitewashed them, obliterated them. She scooped up all her fake relics, which were her property. They didn't belong to the house, they didn't belong to Ann Court. She scooped up all her fake relics, marched across the street, got a new house right across the street, set up her own Shakespeare quote, unquote museum, and the two of them would stand in their doorways and fling profanity at each other while also trying to attract customers. And this dichotomy, this kind of war between the two of them raises a very interesting question, which is what were people expecting to find when they went to the birthplace? And what did they think would happen? Were they looking for sort of spirit of the place? And then even if the house were empty, the house is there and you'd be in that space and that might have a particular thrill or vibe or aura to it, or did you actually want to handle, touch, hold, caress, maybe even steal some of those relics? So did you want a spiritual experience or did you want a material experience? And it seems that people wanted both.
- [38:16]
B
And yet they had to cross a street to get both of them, to get them together.
- [38:20]
C
They did. And it was like a war zone.
- [38:24]
B
Wild. I just. I cannot get over that. Even just the mental image in my head is like, oh, my goodness. All right, so I will not dwell on that episode further, but it is just, as you said, wild. So thank you for sharing it with us. If we move forward, however, can you take us through, by the mid-1800s, how was the birthplace being talked about? And again, if we trace kind of how people's perceptions changed and why.
- [38:57]
C
Yeah, I think certainly by Queen Victoria's reign, Shakespeare has sort of ascended to the heights from which some people would say he's never descended from. So, you know, peak Shakespeare worship was the mid 19th century. It was people in the 19th century who, you know, called themselves, who invented what we would call Shakespeare idolatry. It was Bernard Schall at the end of the century who coined the phrase bardolatry. And he didn't mean that in a polite or proving way. He meant it as an insult. But it was the 19th century that really worshipped Shakespeare. So he was now more than English literature. He was transcendent, universal human genius. He was, to put it not so delicately, part of Britain's mission of cultural imperialism. So there's a kind of global redeeming idea that Shakespeare is good for everybody, no matter who you are, no matter where you are. So you won't be surprised to find out that the discourse, the language, the metaphors used to talk about Shakespeare in the 19th century become much more overtly religious. Idolatry, shrine, pilgrim relic, sacred site, high priests of Shakespeare. So we're beyond literature, we're beyond artistry, we're beyond the theater. We're into something universal and transcendent. So the house becomes now more than a private biographical space. It is a shrine, a secular church where the public from the world over now can come and worship Shakespeare. And this is the moment when it becomes very important for England's own sense of its cultural superiority and its cultural imperial mission. It becomes very important that the house be removed from private hands. This is when the house in the middle of 19th century becomes public property.
- [41:37]
B
Which sounds simpler em, when you say it than the process was actually. So can you kind of. Let's poke at that a bit. What problems? I mean, I'm glossing over slightly the process of it literally becoming public property to get to the kind of. That sounds like then it's all sorted, right? Like if it's a shrine then now it's been bought by the public, great, we're all set up. Except. No, really, not at all. So what were the problems that were created after the quote unquote public eventually successfully kind of bought the birthplace. How did they deal with these problems?
- [42:22]
C
So, so many problems. As you said, none of this was straightforward. I think the only thing straightforward was the desire, the fulfillment of the desire, the execution, the logistics of fulfilling the desire were a nightmare. So the purchase of the house by something called the Shakespeare Committee, Shakespeare Committee of London and Stratford. The purchase of the House in 1847 by those committees which were, you know, a sort of quasi charitable, nonprofit, public minded organization. The purchase of the house at the auction in 1847 was the moment when the house was removed out of private hands and was held sort of in trust for the nation. It wasn't owned by the. By the government. They wanted nothing to do with it at all. But it was now sort of owned and looked after by what was shortly incorporated as the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which still own the birthplace and other Shakespeare properties and look after them. So it was a sort of charity on behalf of the nation that acquired the house in 1847. But as you say, that wasn't the end of the story. That was only the beginning of a story of many problems. The first problem was they did not have enough money. The house cost £3,000, which is insane because the house is priceless. But they bought it in 1847 for £3,000. They did not have the money. So in a sense, they had to, you know, write an iou, a promissory note. They just, you know, a check that couldn't be cashed. They had a series of benefits. There were some celebrity Shakespeare performances in London, particularly over the next few years. Charles Dickens did some, did some readings, and they finally were able to sort of pay off the debt, clear the debt and own the house outright. So they solved the money problem in a few years. But the bigger issue was, what are you going to do with the house? And they decided that they would restore it to make it look like what it had been in Shakespeare's time. That was their goal. They were going to restore the house because it was in a terrible state. You have to remember, it was run down. There was an 18th century brick facade that was put on. Part of it, half of it was a really sort of tacky Tavern of the Swan and Maidenhead with a. With a sign hanging out in front. It looked like it was falling down. It looked like it had nothing to do with Shakespeare. It was just. It was a wreck, derelict. The hearts and the subsequent owners never put any money into keeping it up. It just got worse and worse and worse. So in a way, it was on the verge of falling over. So they decided to restore the house to make it look like what it was in Shakespeare's time. But, you know, that's easier said than done because nobody knows what it looked like in Shakespeare's time. So what did they use as their model? There was no floor plan. There were no drawings from Shakespeare's time. The earliest, right back to your earlier point that nobody cared about it at Shakespeare's birthplace. So why would there be drawings? There wouldn't be. The first drawings of the birthplace were not made until the 1760s, when it was first becoming a tourist attraction. So that was their earliest visual point of reference, point of comparison, a drawing made by Richard Greene in 1769. That's the year of Garrick's Stratford Jubilee. The problem, of course, is that this drawing from 1769 is not itself original. It's not based on any authoritative source, because there isn't any. In fact, this drawing is a complete fantasy. It is a vision of the grand manor house that Shakespeare should have been born in, because he's Shakespeare, but wasn't so the house in the image, the image that guided the restorers, is a fiction, which means the restoration was itself a kind of fiction. The architectural restoration of Shakespeare's birthplace in the 1860s produced not a restored house. It produced a version of Shakespeare's greatness. So what did they do? They bought and then tore down the surrounding houses, because, remember, it was a townhouse in a row of other houses. So they made it a standalone house. It has that landmark feel. Your eye goes right toward it. And they did that by buying and tearing down the other houses. And then they essentially took three structures. A cottage on one side, a disused butcher shop in the middle, and the Swan and Maidenhead Inn. They took those three structures and merged them into one grand structure, the single grand structure that we see today. Today, Shakespeare's house looks like one big house. But that wasn't the case. It was, for a long time, three separate units. They were adjacent, but they were sort of three separate structures, three separate dwellings. And then they cleaned up the front and they gave it mullion windows and this kind of fancy look that it never had before. And they put in a porch, and they put in the Shakespeare family crest, which was never, almost certainly in front of a house. And the garden in the back, which in Shakespeare's time was a working garden. There would be chickens and pigs and vegetable gardens and vats for the animal hides. There would have been a barn, places for gutting fish and dressing meat that was gone. And they turned it into sort of a lovely paved garden with hedges and Shakespeare flowers, a place you could stroll through or sit down on a bench and enjoy a quiet moment. Nothing at all like a garden was in Shakespeare's time. So the restoration claims to take you back to how it was in Shakespeare's time, but it does something very different. It doesn't take you back to how Shakespeare was. It takes you into how the Victorians wanted Shakespeare to be. The Victorian restorers of the birthplace gave Shakespeare the house he deserved but never had.
- [49:35]
B
So this is why, I assume. I mean, this is why I started the interview asking you for kind of, well, what was a normal house like? How well did it fit in? And I'm guessing that's probably also why you started the book that way, so that we didn't fall into the same trap of kind of assuming that what it looks like now, the Victorian restored version, is what it looked like then, to give us that context. But I was, in some ways, I guess, I think you came to an interesting position on this restoration, because in the book for our listeners, after you describe all of this, you don't condemn it. You don't say kind of here, all the things, I mean, you do explain, like, here are the things they changed and no, there wouldn't have been this in the window or whatever. But you don't say, okay, obviously the answer is we have to change it again and try and make it go back to the way it was originally. Partially from the practical element that I think it's worth bringing back in from what you mentioned at the beginning, the idea that people at the Elizabethan time changed their houses a lot, so which year would we go back to? Right. Like that would be hard. But you also kind of take it further. You have this great quote that I'd love you to kind of expand for us. Writing this book has taught me that instead of regretting all the ways in which Shakespeare is lost to us, we actually do prefer it that way.
- [51:00]
C
Thanks for raising that, because I feel that very strongly. You know, as a cultural historian, I'm not interested in judging the decisions and actions of people in the past, but I am interested in understanding them. What were the states of mind, what were the values, what were the priorities of people in the past that would lead them to act as they. As they did now? Of course, Shakespeare's life story as they knew it in the 19th century was pretty much the life story as we know it today. There haven't been so many new documents discovered. And the archival record itself, I think, is full of episodes of disappearance and loss in William Shakespeare's story, right? You know, the glover's son from Stratford, he drops out the historical record in 1585, the so called lost years. And then he doesn't reappear until 1592 when he pops up in London 100 miles away as the upstart crow, as he was called, of the late Elizabethan theatrical world. And 2023, when we're recording this, is the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, which we celebrate not least because if it were never printed, then our knowledge of Shakespearean drama might be cut in half because 18 of his plays are printed only in the First Folio. So Shakespeare has always come to us a figure of partiality, of gaps, of blanks, which of course means we have to fill in the blank. We have to fill in the gap. There's a role for us in making sense of Shakespeare. And I think we like this. I think we like a Shakespeare who is a bit elusive, a little vague, always a bit mysterious, you know, not too little, not too much. We know just enough about him because.
- [53:16]
B
Well. Sorry, go ahead.
- [53:18]
C
I say because when we go out looking for Shakespeare, because of all these gaps and blanks, all these unanswered questions, when we go out looking for Shakespeare, we can be pretty sure that we will find the Shakespeare we want. I mean, like those Victorians, you know, who remodeled the birthplace to make it convey their own exalted view of the playwright. Just like those Victorians, which is why I don't judge them. We, too, are always making Shakespeare our contemporary. One way or another, Shakespeare is conforming to us, not the other way around, because we're the ones who make him do it. And that's why, ironically, Shakespeare really is for all time, because we are the ones who bring him into our time.
- [54:21]
B
But helpfully, for those who want to know about Shakespeare but do want to know the history and not just a Victorian version of it, you said at the beginning that you looked into this and there wasn't a book about the house, but now there is. So that's helpful because some people do want to kind of know this history and trace it and not just necessarily believe the Victorian restored version. So thank you for walking us through all of that. And I'm sure that there will be people who have been to the birthplace listening and going, oh, I didn't know that. And maybe people who listening to this are going, oh, I never thought about going before, but now I'm intrigued. So who knows? But before I let you go, and perhaps, I suppose we've stopped talking about the birthplace at this point, but I do still have a final question. Now that this book is out, released, available in the world, is there anything you might be working on next, even if it's not about Shakespeare, even if it's not a book that you'd like to preview for us?
- [55:23]
C
Thank you. I'd love to. I am working on another book. It is not on Shakespeare. It's on Stephen Sondheim, the great composer and lyricist, I think the greatest figure in 20th century musical theater.
- [55:40]
B
And I will not contest that.
- [55:44]
C
That is wall to wall sond time at this minute. So it's been a particular pleasure to take an hour with you and your listeners to talk about Shakespeare.
- [55:55]
B
So we'll get a Sondheim book from you at some point. Is that what you're telling us?
- [55:58]
C
You will? It's called the working title is Being Alive, which is a song from Sondheim's company. The working title is Being Alive. What Stephen Sondheim can teach you about life.
- [56:12]
B
Oh, interesting.
- [56:14]
C
It's a popular book, not an academic book. And it's we'll forgive you. I'm all about public humanities. And it's not so much, it's not so much a study of the works, a critical study of the works. It's what we can learn from them about leading a fuller, richer life. Because I think Stephen Sondheim has a lot of lessons that we can learn and profit from. Well, from Shakespeare to Shakespeare.
- [56:49]
B
Yeah, exactly. From Shakespeare to Sondheim. Goodness, what a list of projects. So thank you for sharing that little preview with us. And of course, the book we've been discussing for any listeners enticed to learn more is titled Shakespeare's A Window Onto His Life and Legacy, published by Bloomsbury in 2023. Richard, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast.
- [57:12]
C
Miranda, thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you.