In the canon of English literature, there is no figure about whom more scholarly ink has been spilt than William Shakespeare. Books about the Bard and his writings represent an industry unto themselves in books popular, academic, and everywhere in-between, compassing the full range of good, bad, and indifferent. The first of those groups is by far the smallest, but happily includes the book under review—a 2024 Furnival republication of a work originally published by Matador Press in 2015. That original print run was very small indeed, and the Furnival reprint has once again made this remarkable book available to those who are interested in the life of our greatest author.
The word ‘remarkable’ is chosen advisedly: whilst I have by now lost count of how many books about Shakespeare I have read, I have never encountered a book like this one written by Julian Dutton. It manages to proffer an hitherto-unknown fact or detail on nearly every page, all without ever becoming dull or dry. In large measure, this is down to the novelty of Dutton’s approach, which—unlike many ‘novel’ approaches to Shakespeare—actually succeeds. That approach, which he details in a thoughtful and eminently readable introduction, follows on from his acceptance of the fact that Shakespearean scholarship is a well-ploughed field, and there is vanishingly little that is new to say about this or that document, about which undoubtedly a hundred scholars have already written. Dutton’s inspired move to is realise that to understand a person means, at least in part, to understand his experiences; hence he seeks to discover something new about Shakespeare by walking in his shoes, as closely as possible.
Treading the path that Shakespeare once trod requires an acceptance of the conjectural nature of such an enterprise; but it also requires a thorough knowledge of history both local and geographical, such that the elements of conjecture can be grounded as much as possible in fact. It is in this regard that Dutton’s book differs from the work of others who have offered purely imaginative recreations of Shakespeare’s travels. Because there is solid documentary and historical evidence for what that trip must have entailed, it is possible to recreate it in some measure, and even to revisit some of the locations which yet endure. On this point, Dutton admits his approach is “ruthlessly historical”:
The aim of this book is very simple—to recreate Shakespeare’s travel from the City of London to Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, and as much as possible apply such an historical precision to the journey as may afford a sense of what it must have been like to be Shakespeare travelling through his England.
The reward comes in learning just how much of Elizabethan England still survives, and to understand that history is not something that happened in the past, once and for all time, with a finality that shuts the door on accessing those people and places which came before. Rather, history is an ongoing process happening even now—a process in which we are involved, and which we are both experiencing and shaping. It is not idle conceit to believe in the value of treading Shakespeare’s footsteps over again, and to hold that it can give us some insight into the man and his time. The physical process alone—so unfamiliar to modern people who have grown up in a world of fast, easy, and inexpensive transit—is itself an educational experience that will not soon be forgotten.
But it is one thing to travel Shakespeare’s steps in person and learn from them, and quite another to read about someone else doing so, in the hope that something of the experience will carry over from reality to print on the page. The sights and smells, to say nothing of other physical experiences, are integral to the understanding of the journey. Dutton proves an exceptional narrator in this regard; but he also, quite wisely, includes many photographs and historical illustrations, sometimes combining them in ways which underscore just how little has changed in the passing of four and a half centuries. Not only do these pictures suggest to the mind the sights that Shakespeare saw as he time and again made the trip from London to his family in Stratford-upon-Avon, but they also encourage readers to take the trip themselves with Dutton’s book as a walking-guide.
When Dutton departs from the realities of Elizabethan geography, he turns not to imaginative speculation, but to Shakespeare’s own works. Nor does he here limit himself only to the sights—rather, he includes the business of Elizabethan life and what it entailed. Discussing the speed of Elizabethan travel, with some people choosing to attach themselves to the local couriers, Dutton notes that their expediency was a matter of some renown and hence familiar to Shakespeare, in support of which he quotes King Lear’s “reeking post, Stewd in his haste, half-breathless,” Richard III, The Tempest, and Hamlet’s condemnation of his mother’s hasty attachment to his uncle, “to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets.” The sceptic might feel that what begins in modern geography must at first seem speculative, but Dutton also turns again and again to the Shakespearean canon, at once supporting the narration at hand, and also reminding his readers of the validity of this enterprise: the living connexions between our world and Shakespeare’s are still there, visible in the poems and the plays that echo his experiences.
Shakespeare is not the only author whose works find their way into this illustrative journey across time and geography. Observing that Shakespeare was likely to have stayed at the Saracen’s Head, “the most villainous house in all London road for fleas,” Dutton draws on the contemporary pamphlet of Thomas Hill, who in 1581 wrote that fleas could be drawn away by placing bowls of goat blood or boiled beans around the room, the better to entice the insects from human hosts. But one should not get too carried away in such speculations; as Dutton drily observes, “Whether Shakespeare spent half an hour arranging all these various elaborate solutions to the problem of infestation prior to going to bed is not known.”
Similar instances of capable wit and subtly conveyed humour suffuse the work without diminishing its informative content—and these are certainly one of the reasons it is such a pleasant read, indeed hard to put down. Dutton is, after all, a renowned professional comedian in addition to his authorial credentials. But as his other works show (e.g. Water Gypsies: A History of Life on Britain’s Rivers and Canals and The Parade’s Gone By: Everyday Life in Britain in the Twentieth Century), he has a ready skill for history and geography and the wisdom to know how to delight subtly, even as he edifies. Commenting on Shakespeare’s personal knowledge of insomnia, captured so exquisitely in Sonnet 27, Dutton amusingly observes that this is perhaps the first “ode to insomnia,” but he also notes that, “For someone to whom the flow of language came so easily, the ability to switch off that conduit was perhaps not so simple.” Thus, we are guided as readers to imagine Shakespeare’s lousy room, on a hot August night in the late 16th century, where he lies awake, thinking of seeing his family for the first time in many months, and naturally finds himself unable to sleep: the heat, the fleas, and the “words, words, words.”
As the journey draws closer to its Warwickshire terminus, Dutton travels through Oxford, where there are numerous Shakespearean connexions. But the Bard’s feelings here were likely ambiguous, as Dutton reminds us when he avers that “If his plays exhibit any consistent attitude or belief at all, it is a subtle but powerful denigration of the value of the academic life,” pointing out as an exemplar one of the greatest of all Shakespearean characters, Hamlet, and asking if he is not “the ultimate satire on the downside of a University education, producing in him not an active gentleman, outward-looking and fit for public life, but rather a dismal, introspective and powerless figure languishing in a learned helplessness?” As Dutton goes on to observe, “Shakespeare loved men of action, men who sailed close to the wind—‘banish plump Jack and banish all the world,’—and he loved the tavern above the lecture-hall.”
In this, we see that the trip is not only focused on the past; it also has something to say about the present. Our much-vaunted modern education is available now to ever greater numbers of people, albeit at an ever lower level of quality—hence “Oxford is now a tourist city, a theme park where somewhere, sometime, a little studying happens—but where, you cannot see.” This has produced not a single prince but rather a whole society of learned helplessness, epitomised by the “black pill” and the memetic phrase, “Nothing ever happens.” At worst, this helplessness finds its outlet in violence, as it does in Hamlet: whether in the form of the public violence of the mob and the riot, or in the form of the individual violence of hate crimes and random assaults. These are emphatically not decisive acts (although that is how their educated perpetrators imagine them); they are rather an expression of rage against a sense of futility and nihilism, a primal scream without any real path towards resolution, until—as in Hamlet—we all go down together, the good and the bad alike. Then, some other power will come in, like Fortinbras, and make the ruins his own.
In the 16th century, Shakespeare could imagine Hamlet in a form so fully realised that he seemed to step off the stage and into the human understanding of the world. Hence it is now, when we seem to be surrounded by Hamlets, that understanding Shakespeare’s world might well be the most important key to a better understanding of our own. We may wonder how this author could write King Lear, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra, and also be the same author who wrote in Sonnet 116 that love “looks on tempests and is never shaken; / It is the star to every wand’ring bark.” But many of the contradictions that our world seems to offer us as novel challenges will be found in a judicious perusal of Shakespeare, and of his whole canon as a complete enterprise, where the passions that seem to offer us simple solutions are shown to be fraught with danger and driven to ruin. Putting our feet on Shakespeare’s road—whether literally or literarily—will remind us of these timeless lessons, which Shakespeare understood better than any other author. With Shakespeare’s Journey Home, Julian Dutton has given us the means to better make that journey of understanding, ourselves.
