Christopher Rush 2008 on 'Will'

Christopher Rush has written an excellent book on how he sees Shakespeare giving his last will and testament and looking back at his life. We wanted to know more of his writing experiences and influences. Julia who reviewed the book also asked the questions.

JC: You have said that this book grew slowly for almost fifty years...once you actually started writing, how long did it take you?

CR: Will took 13 years to write. There were various reasons for this. Personally I was in bad psychological shape, having just lost my wife to breast cancer in 1993, and I had two young kids to bring up. But I set myself a massive reading programme - rather like Milton limbering up for Paradise Lost! I'd read Shakespeare ragged already, and knew all the critics, and I'd taught many of the plays. But I just had to do more. The novel was rejected 17 times. I lost confidence and shelved it. I eventually wrote the final version in 5 weeks.

JC: Did you have the plays constantly open beside you as you wrote, or is your mind so familiar with them that memory supplied the language effortlessly?

CR: They were already in my bloodstream. When I got the Shakespeare bug in my teens I read the Complete Works 5 times in one year. Hamlet I read 50 times, and then I went on to university, then to teaching Shakespeare. I don't think I ever had to look up a single quotation. They came unbidden. Later I checked them out, of course, but at the time it was as easy as breathing. I rarely even referred to the notes I'd amassed - I think they were there just to let me feel the ropes around me; give me confidence.

JC: What do you think of the present day Globe Theatre's productions, including their ‘original pronunciation' trials?

CR: I'm sorry I can't answer the Globe question. I live in a cottage in the fields overlooking the North Sea, I don't travel, and I go to London only when by publisher asks me to. I'm an armchair theatregoer. But I can't see the point of original pronunciation. The point is that Shakespeare didn't think for a minute he was ‘talking Elizabethan'. And he wasn't. He was writing in the language of the day. So in writing Will I wanted to ‘translate' Shakespeare's voice into the language of the third millennium.

JC: In the book you carefully evade definitions of Shakespeare's religious affiliations, although it's clear to the reader that you're fascinated by the ‘Was Shakespeare a Catholic?'

CR: Historically the family's roots must have been Catholic, and although the 16th century was a religious whirligig I think it's a safe bet he received a huge Catholic input to his thinking. But given the intellectual and political disruptions he lived through, and his own universalism and freedom from dogma (if we are to trust the plays), given his humanity and rich humanism, I imagine he had become a benign agnostic long before he died.

JC: Your book really brings Shakespeare to life for today; how in your experience do young students react to the plays?

CR: I spent 30 years teaching Shakespeare. I always tried to make the subject live., and in my experience young people will take to it if you teach it from the inside, full-bloodedly and dramatically, and really let them hear the music, see the spectacle, enjoy the characters, the language. All of life is in there, and young people love life.

JC: What next? Has finishing this book after such a long gestation period left a big hole and are you planning another Shakespeare book? Or moving on?

CR: I couldn't quite let him go. I've written a memoir called Sex, Lies and Shakespeare, which is published in Feb 09. I'm hoping to promote Will in schools in various ways, and to be involved with the making of the film with Ben Kingsley.

JC: Have you acted in, or produced, any of the plays?

CR: I once played the part of Edgar in King Lear. Forty years later I still have nightmares that I've forgotten my lines!

JC:  Which is your favourite Shakespeare play? And why?

CR: On one level Richard III. It was seeing Lawrence Olivier's film of the play in 1959 that changed my life. It was only a 12-inch black-and-white TV experience but it was an epiphany. But the play of plays for me is Hamlet, which tells us more than any other work of literature that we are united by our doubts and divided by our convictions; that because there are questions does not mean there are answers; that in revenge or feud there are not rights and wrongs, only bloody men and dead men. Terrorists should read Hamlet. It's a play for today, more than ever.

JC: Have you published academic books/articles on Shakespeare, and if so how did the experience of writing this book differ from that kind of work?

CR: I've written the odd article but writing Will was like slipping into the skin of the man Shakespeare, as he had got under mine - a living creative experience. It's putting flesh on dry bones. And it's not all leaps of faith and poetic licence; I've always tried to bring scholarship and creativity together.

JC: Apart from Shakespeare, which authors have been major influences on you...I might guess James Joyce, for example!

CR: You're right about Joyce - well spotted. And among modern writers I should add Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, DH Lawrence. At school I loved Milton and the Romantics and medieval and Old English writers. And the language of the King James Bible left its mark on me since childhood - as it did on Shakespeare too, of course!