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A Discussion With Jennifer Lee Carrell (Continued...)

You've directed Shakespeare for the stage; in writing this book, did you develop a different kind of relationship with the works of Shakespeare than you'd had as a director?

Thinking about whether writing Interred with Their Bones gave me a different relationship with the works of Shakespeare than directing them did—I think I'd have to turn that question inside out. Writing the novel didn't rearrange my experience of the plays so much as directing the plays taught me how to write a novel.

As a director, it's your job to find the "through-story" of the play at hand—the story that you want your production to tell, the linear path down which you're going to lead your audience. With Shakespeare, that's a harder task than with many other playwrights—but also more exhilarating. Shakespeare is one of the most generous storytellers I've ever run across, in that he doesn't try to ride herd on his readers', actors', and directors' imaginations. He gives almost no stage directions, and his indications of setting are brief to the point of near-blankness. Compare Beckett or Shaw or O'Neill, for example—wonderful storytellers all—but their stage directions tend to be controlling and insistent. Shaw and O'Neill can go on for what seems like pages. Beckett's estate still famously refuses to license productions that do not adhere to the particulars of his stage directions.

By comparison, a Shakespearean play seems lush, loose, almost wanton with possibilities. Each of his plays can be tailored to tell a number of very different stories. In fact, many of his plays need streamlining in order to run in anything approaching the two hours' time that seems to have been the usual allotment for plays in Shakespeare's day as well as in ours. This very richness is one reason Shakespeare is hard to read: He makes his readers do a lot more imaginative work than most other authors do. In the theater, the job of meeting him halfway goes to the director. As director, you have to pick one main story that will make sense and develop it, distilling it out to clarity as you go.

Together with your actors, you have to figure out why each character must say these words, and not any other words, at just this point in time. How are they said? To whom? Why? And, once said, what effect do they have on the world of the play? When you, as a company, get it right, you know it: The words begin to conjure up a believable world, which in turn supports the words. It's this give-and-take—this resonating feedback—between words and the world in which they're said that makes them, in the end, so very powerful.

In a way, directing a Shakespearean play is a piece of detective work: piecing together evidence—each piece building on the next—to make, in the end, a story so plausible, so compelling, that the audience members will lose themselves in your fictional world, at least for a little while. By intuition and hard work, you have to figure out what's necessary to that story, and have the courage and conviction to pare away what's not—whether that's your own pet interpretation or an arcane phrase, confusing subplot, or out-of-date joke of the playwright's. It's this behind-the-scenes work—the investigative rehearsals leading up to performance—that are part of what I love most about theater. No doubt that's one reason I'm a director/writer rather than a performer!

With the novel, I started with a basic idea: a deadly treasure hunt that would lead to a lost play, and a letter that might—or might not—reveal the "real" identity of the playwright. Very early on, a clear vision of the ending—the cave, the flash flood, the final death—just appeared in my imagination. Some time after that, I just "saw" the beginning: Kate sitting on a hill with the golden box on her knees. I didn't know what was in the box, or what she was doing there. But I knew the Globe was burning below. (What was going to end in water, somehow needed to begin with fire.) To write the novel, I had to find a "through-story" that would link this beginning with the ending, somehow picking up lots of odd Shakespearean clues and theories along the way. As I worked, the process of plotting and writing the novel came to seem very similar to the process of directing—only I was alarmingly alone, without a script for guidance.

So, I wouldn't say that writing the novel made me think about Shakespeare in a new light because it's about Shakespeare. I'd say the novel gave me the chance to put into practice lessons I'd learned from Shakespeare in the theater about how to tell a story, how to make a world with words. The experience of storytelling "from scratch," as it were, embarking on making a story without a script as guide, has only deepened my awe for him as a supremely gifted teller of tales.

Were you given access to one of the First Folios during your research?

While researching this book, I needed to look at the First Folio time and again. Fortunately, I did not need to handle an actual First Folio—and doubly fortunately, good facsimile copies are not hard to come by. That's what I used when I needed to see what particular pages looked like, or get the wording (and spelling) of particular phrases. There's also a superb "library" of early Shakespeare editions, including the First Folio, online at Internet Shakespeare Editions (internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/index.html).

In my work as a scholar, I have handled many books from Shakespeare's era, so I know the marvelous feel and smell of books like the Folio . . . and the visceral horror at the thought of their desecration.

When I taught at Harvard, I used to have my students go look at the First Folio on display in Widener Library—both to see what the actual book looks like, and to think about the implications of the way in which the University displays it—along with a Gutenberg Bible, as it happens, in a case that looks a little like an altar, in a room that looks a lot like a shrine. Many of them would come back calling the place "The Church of Shakespeare"!

Giving myself a similar assignment, while researching the book I also visited displays of First Folios at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and the British Library in London, and displays of fine facsimiles at Shakespeare's Globe in London, and in Nash's House (next to New Place) in Stratford-upon-Avon.

While plotting the novel, I very much wanted to have a First Folio found at the library of the Royal English College in Valladolid, though I knew they did not have one. I consoled myself, however, with the idea that it made plausible sense, historically, that one might have found its way there. Then, during a marvelous private tour of the college, I learned from the librarian that they had indeed once possessed a First Folio, but had sold it off many years ago.... Sometimes fiction has a sly way of sidling up to fact!

Why do you believe that the works of Shakespeare still hold such relevance in these modern times?

Shakespeare wrote about the fundamental experiences of life: love, hate, greed, jealousy, laughter, death. He could focus intensely on one aspect of such an experience—say, first love in Romeo and Juliet—without getting stuck there, so that his plays about love grow and change as he did, moving from first love, to middle-aged passion, to the love of aged fathers for their daughters. He could write equally well—often in the same play—about the murderous drive to revenge and the mischievous delight in laughter. And he had a special affinity for the showing the soul tangled in the lures and perils of power. Furthermore, he wrote about all these subjects with startling clarity and sometimes almost unbearable beauty, all the while keeping sentimentality at bay with a sharp, skeptical edge of irony.

All that is just to say that he was a great writer, who knew the human soul well and could show us ourselves—or who we might turn out to be, in extreme circumstances. But there are other writers who have done all these things. What sets Shakespeare apart even from other great writers is, as I've said above, his imaginative generosity. He does not insist that this story be told in such-and-such a way, in any particular setting, with any particular ulterior motive or political message. He does not insist on his interpretation.

Which means that his stories—as tied as they are to the core of what it is to live a human life—have a remarkable elasticity that allows them not only to change and grow with one reader across a single lifetime, but also to make sense in widely different times and places. Hamlet is the quintessential tale of English aristocratic angst; it has also been enjoyed in the East African bush as a tale of witchcraft and proper punishment. Coriolanus has been produced as a Communist play; it has also been produced as a Fascist play. Lear and Macbeth make sense in Japanese as samurai films. Henry V has been produced as an adventure glorifying the heroics of war, and as a tragedy lamenting the waste of war.

Shakespeare is great because he wrote beautifully and powerfully about the most fundamental of subjects. He is still relevant, after four hundred years, because he not only allows but requires his readers to remake his stories into tales that make sense for them.

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