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Interviews
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Revealing Shakespeare Rivka Jacobson in conversation with Professor René Weis Shakespeare led a life of Allegory: his works are comments upon it (John Keats) René Weis set out to prove it, and prove he did in his Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography (published by John Murray). The book was described by Michael Arditti in the Telegraph Review as 'thought provoking from the start'. Weis provides the reader with a challenging opportunity to be acquainted with the Stratford boy and provincial glover's son who grew into a man whose name is synonymous with genius. We get to know William as well as Shakespeare. The reader is taken on an astonishing journey through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets revealing his inner life in the context of the reality of external events. We get to know William the son, father, husband, lover and shrewd businessman who did not buy a house in London but invested in theatres. Numerous old documents examined by Weis in conjunction with Shakespeare's writings provide him with vital clues on his subject's personal life. In the words of The Observer's critic, Robert McCrum, 'Weis sets out to prove, with impressive learning, just how deep are the connections between art and experience, and also to demonstrate that 'the plays and poems contain important clues not only to Shakespeare's inner life, but also about real, tangible external events'. Yes, we all know that Shakespeare intrigued and captured the imagination like no other playwright that ever lived. Yet one wonders how Shakespearean scholars manage, after 391 years, to find more information on this giant of the universal stage. To find out, I went to meet Professor Weis who is regarded as one of the leading scholars on Shakespeare. Weis is a professor of English literature at University College London, one of the first universities in England to offer English as a degree subject and the first in the world to appoint a professor of English! How appropriate. A warm and friendly welcome launched us into an enjoyable and stimulating conversation. The impact of illustrated playsAt the age of 11 and growing up with two siblings in Luxembourg, young René was given illustrated books of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Hamlet by his Anglophile mother. He loved the books. At the age of 13 he read King Lear and was most intrigued by it. That was the onset of a lifelong passion for Shakespeare the poet, playwright and individual. "My English comes from my mother," he admits. "She fell in love with English during the war, a teenager clandestinely listening to the BBC at night, fearful for the British and American air crews in the skies above. They were after all not much older than herself." She became obsessed with anything English or American and still uses words that are reminiscent of the 1940s. Weis' late father spoke very good English. The parents passed on their Anglophilia to their three children. At the age of 26 Weis crowned this profound affiliation with his academic achievements and his appointment as a lecturer in English at UCL. Early CareerThere is an old saying in Arabic that luck is covered by straw. Listening to Weis' account of how he started his career at UCL I understood that luck means opportunity-not-missed. Weis was invited to write his doctoral thesis by Karl Miller, his Head of Department. It was to be entitled Antony and Cleopatra and androgyny in the English Renaissance. Little did he know that Antony and Cleopatra would be the key to his future career. "The person who was scheduled to give the lecture on Anthony and Cleopatra was ill and I stepped in," he recalls. "I was 26 years old. I started teaching and I have been here ever since." He has never looked back. "It has been an enormous privilege," he hasten to add. "Teaching is immensely rewarding and enjoyable. The standards at UCL are very high and we have a one-to-one tutoring'. A short tour through the history of the department and you are gazing at the founder and leading scholar on Shakespeare, Frank Kermode. "He was an inspiration to me," confesses Weis who joined the Department just when Kermode had departed for Cambridge, leaving a rich legacy, maintained and further enriched by dedicated scholars and writers such as Karl Miller (yes, Jonathan Miller's brother-in-law), and the distinguished novelists Dan Jacobson and A. S. Byatt, to name but a few. "They generated a climate of creativity and excellence." Weis is devoted to his students. "The students are very challenging. The idea of coming to classes unprepared is not there and therefore no teacher would dare come to his classes unprepared. I have learnt an awful lot from marking the six hour exams on Shakespeare. Some of the best writing comes from students' exam essays.' I am not sure who is more fortunate, the teacher or the students! It seems that in Weis' case both are equally blessed with mutual inspiration and respect. Shakespeare - A Biography "Why bring out another biography on Shakespeare? Aren't we saturated with biographies on the man?" I ask. Weis points out that too many biographies of Shakespeare are books about books: "stuck in a rut," he says with a hint of indignation. Very few biographers have taken the trouble to research the available records at Stratford-Upon-Avon, which are immensely important and contain clues on Shakespeare and his family. If you put all the biographers of the last fifty years and ask them where Richard Shakespeare, William's grandfather, lived, they would not know, although the information is readily available in the archives. This encapsulates and demonstrates the need for Weis' biography, with its attention to fine detail. He adds that he has been meaning to write a life of Shakespeare ever since reading Samuel Schoenbaum's documentary life in 1975. Weis was puzzled by Schoenbaum's view that Shakespeare was not a real person, assuming instead that there was an "unbridgeable gulf between the writer and the flesh and blood man". Weis was struck by how mysterious Shakespeare's life seemed - "so near in the plays and poems, so far in every other respect". He held the view that the plays cannot be uncoupled from the playwright's life. "His life and the plays and poems are inextricably linked, mutually reflective and illuminating," said Prof. Weis. "That view is the cornerstone of my book, along with an acute sense of the debt that Shakespeare owed to his Warwickshire background." In Shakespeare Revealed - or Shakespeare Unbound, as it is titled in the forthcoming USA publication of the biography (Henry Holt & Co, October 2007) - Weis successfully manages to make Shakespeare real and tangible using neglected sources in Stratford, including records now held by The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, of which he is a trustee, plus local contemporary publications. Weis feels at home in Warwickshire where landscape and oral traditions equipped him with the insights needed to reveal a rounded picture of Shakespeare. I pointed out that the narrative in the biography is peppered with "it is possible that" and "may well have been". Are these mere speculations? I asked. Weis explains that every writer has to use phrases like that if only to highlight hypothesis. It has to be intelligent speculation based on intellectual honesty. For instance, to say that he watched his father work as a glover is not speculation but an inevitable conclusion. He must have done. There are degrees of hypothesis based on inevitable conclusions "In the archives at Stratford-upon-Avon they begin to see bits of the William Shakespeare myths being peeled away. I realised that these archives provide a fairly solid basis for demolition of these myths that have grown around him." What was the most exciting experience when researching for this book? "Undoubtedly the most exciting experience was handling a document with two signatures on it. On the left hand side there was the signature of Shakespeare's daughter Susanna, and on the right that of his granddaughter Elizabeth. That was worth all the work, to see his daughter's signature just as it is on the Coat of Arms. I found this document immensely moving. There it sat before me just as it did before them all those years ago," Weis remarks with excitement Weis regards The Comedy of Errors a masterpiece and as the most theatrical of all Shakespeare's plays. "It is a miracle of comic timing and a tremendously touching play." I cannot resist asking which two plays he would take with him if he was marooned on a desert Island. Without hesitation he says King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream, in that order of preference! Weis does not shy away from placing Chekov on par with Shakespeare. Molière is not far behind. Apart from this biography, Professor Weis has written two other books Criminal Justice and Yellow Cross. We discussed these books briefly. Criminal Justice a biography of Edith Thompson (1893-1923)"You wrote Criminal Justice (published by Hamish Hamilton; Penguin) in 1988. It was your first book. What was the driving force behind a Shakespearian scholar to write a book on the judicial execution of Edith Thompson? " "I wrote Criminal Justice in response initially to the debates on capital punishment in the House of Commons in the early 1980s. More than most, Mrs Thompson's tragic case illustrates the moral bankruptcy of the case for the death penalty. No one now believes that she was guilty of the charges brought against her. Rather, she was an innocent young woman who became a victim of the moral climate of the time, Emma Bovary by another name. Edith Thompson's vivacious, intensely literary and sexually coded letters offer a unique window into the popular culture of the early 1920s. It is cruelly ironic that this same correspondence became the case against her by the Crown," he replies, passionately incensed by the grave injustice done to a young talented woman whose name is yet to be cleared of the charge that led to her untimely and brutal end. Weis vehemently opposes the death penalty and regards it as barbaric. He points to Friday after-prayer executions in Saudi Arabia, lamenting the West's hypocrisy and the morally bankrupt campaign of certain groups which raise their voices to condemn Israel but keep silent in the face of outrageous breaches of human rights in other countries. Yellow Cross This is a harrowing, dramatic and vivid account of desperate people, the Cathars, whose religion was based on the Gospels but contradicted the tenets of the 13th century Catholic Church. They were regarded as a threat and therefore were brutally persecuted. Thousands were summarily tried and burned at the stake as heretics. Weis is not just a gifted scholar, he is passionate and compassionate about the silent oppressed. He dedicated years of research into the fate of the Cathars. His fluency in French, German and Italian provides him with the key needed for thorough research on this subject. The Vatican library was one of the crucial sources for his information. He ploughed through depositions taken from the Cathars before their trials. Their accounts were meticulously recorded by Jacques Fournier who later became Pope Benedict XII in Avignon. The records centred on the daily lives, rituals and the sexual mores of a tiny PyRenéan community of shepherds, priests, and scouts, all of them 'heretics' and almost all of them based in the Ariegeois village of Montaillou. "The depositions taken by Fournier as inquisitor recreate the lives of these people in the minutest detail," Weis explains. "While some of these documents had been analysed before, the story behind them had never been fully told and this is what I set out to do, in the process deeply immersing myself in their world and walking the same mountain tracks, almost tangibly in their footsteps." This can be sensed when reading the extraordinary account of the Cathars in Yellow Cross (published by Penguin and Viking). Writing on subjects other than Shakespeare did not distract Weis from writing on his special subject before his latest biography. In1993 he edited King Lear - A Parallel Text Edition where he juxtaposes the 1608 Quarto printings with the revised edition of the play in the First Folio of 1623. He offers a scholarly study of the different versions. Apparently there are three versions of this masterpiece. There are two Quarto versions with some variations, both substantive and consequential, as well as the Folio version. Weis' notes are comprehensive and enlightening. This volume is now a highly recommended text book used by English departments in some Universities. Weis explains that stage directors are engaged with the question as to which version to choose. The ending in each version is rather different. Weis enthusiastically points to the concluding lines:
In the 1608 versions they are attributed to Albany, while the 1623 text this speech is assigned to Edgar. For those who wonder about the meaning of such a change, Weis explains that the 1623 version represents a breach of decorum, as these concluding lines should be spoken by the play's most senior character, Albany, who is Lear's legitimate heir. Had Weis chosen the legal profession at the English Bar, I have little doubt that he would have been a leading Human Rights lawyer or a QC in Criminal Law. His meticulous research of evidence and analysis, combined with his care to give voice to oppressed minorities is astonishing. When asked about his hobbies, Weis, points to books on Opera. He frequents Covent Garden. The programme notes of Thomas Ades's The Tempest at the Royal Opera included two of Weis' essays on Shakespeare's play. He loves indulging in material comforts, yet he loves growing his vegetables and gardening. He describes himself as 'a tree hugger'. He adds with a bashful smile, "When I retire, I intend to devote my time and energy to my garden." As he is only 53, the garden has a long wait to receive his undivided attention.
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