Like a tangled chain

(Warning - this post is rather a ramble!  There's a lot going on in my brain at the moment!)

Apologies for the radio silence. What a few weeks it has been since Christmas...

I've spent the last six weeks giving myself a crash course in the state of touring Shakespeare in 1881 and I'm finally about to try and bring it all together to create some sort of comprehensible document.  I have so much I want to say about this topic that leaving any of it out is going to be hard,  

I've also managed the 'untangling' of Winifred Isaac's book about Ben Greet - a fascinating task, not least because I've had to ask myself the question, 'Why does the structure of this book annoy me so much?' 

Isaac had clearly done a huge amount of research and had gathered together a vast number of (mainly uncredited) sources.  Pulling it all together into one volume would have been a complex task - and I don't understand why she made it more complicated by arranging the material in themes rather than chronologically, allowing us to see the development of each of the elements of Greet's work. Why couldn't she just be a bit more 'J.C. Trewin' about the whole thing and structure all that disparate material into a coherent narrative?

It was the word 'narrative' that made me stop and think.  As a former English teacher, amateur crime-writer and self-confessed book addict, I'm aware I think primarily in terms of building narratives whenever I write something.  I want there to be a 'story' of sorts and I'm sure this love of narrative is  the thing that draws me to history as well. 

But I'm aware that any history worth its salt has to be more than just a narrative, that any 'story' we construct from the facts is very much dependent on our overview - the distance between then and now allowing us to see a pattern or structure emerge from the events of someone's life is not the way they experienced it.  This distance is both illuminating and distorting.  For example, when I read about Benson being knighted at the Tercentenary performance in May 1916, I already know what follows - the loss of Stratford upon Avon, the death of Eric Benson, the break-up of the company, the collapse of a marriage and the years ahead of touring in a world that had shifted away from his type of theatre towards the 'realism' of cinema and Hollywood.  I have the advantage of being able to construct a narrative from the facts. 

Isaac's book is, in some ways, a good example of how not to do something - the traps that lie in wait for those who think writing history is a doddle - but it has also been something of a wake-up call.  I've noticed my own total lack of academic confidence can often be masked by an approach which comes across as the exact opposite: a confident arrogance bordering on the smug. I have absolutely no right to have any sense of superiority: I've yet to prove myself capable of anything.  It is always easy to be critical of the players from the bench...

Whatever its flaws, Isaac's book has proved an absolute gold mine of information and my research would have been much more difficult without it. In some ways, the fact that it is arranged in the way it is means it AVOIDS narrative: the facts presented without any attempt at making them tell a story, leaving me free to weave my own narrative from what it suggests.  

I'm not sure where I'm going with this just at the moment, but I do know that as a direct result of reading Isaacs' book, my own research has taken me along a different road to the one I thought I was on in December.  It has shifted something in my thinking and that can't be a bad thing at all.