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[Expositions 10.2 (2016) 22–36]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Interview: Tiffany Stern, University of Oxford 

JOHN-PAUL SPIRO 
Villanova University 
 
 
At the time of this interview, Tiffany Stern was Professor of Early Modern Drama and Beaverbrook 

and Bouverie Fellow in English at University College, Oxford. She is now Professor and Chair of 

Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the 

author of several influential books on early modern theatrical practice: Rehearsal from 

Shakespeare to Sheridan (2000), Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (2004), Shakespeare 

in Parts (co-authored with Simon Palfrey, 2007), and Documents of Performance in Early Modern 

England (2009). In addition, she has edited several editions of individual plays and is one of the 

General Editors of the Fourth Series of the Arden Shakespeare. I had the chance to sit down with 

her in early July 2016 – a week after the Brexit vote – in her office at University College. We 

discussed her life and work, editing and collaboration, Shakespeare’s context and theatrical 

conditions, Shakespeare studies at Oxford and elsewhere, and current events. Below is a transcript 

of that conversation. 

  

 

Spiro: What brought you to the study of Shakespeare? 

Stern: When I was a child, I had an uncle who was a director. And he made his money directing 

a British soap opera called Brookside, which is about a little close [a residential street] in Liverpool. 

Over the years the characters on the show all would fall in love with one another, out of love with 

one another, kill one another, commit suicide, get AIDS… and eventually they had done 

everything – there was no more that people who are in a close can do with one another – and the 

soap opera came to an end. But this uncle who was directing that soap opera, his real passion was 

Shakespeare, and he had a Shakespeare company. And so whenever he wasn’t directing the soap 

opera, he was taking his little no-money company around. It was called The Original Shakespeare 

Company, and the idea was that they did Shakespeare in “the original way.” Of course, I have 

quotation-marks around all those words but at the time, I loved the company, I loved my uncle, I 



23  Spiro 
 

got to see tons of Shakespeare, and I got to follow the company round. I fell in love with all the 

actors; I could help out backstage. And, also, this put me by way of thinking, “Are they original? 

What is originality?” What would it be to know all these things? And I think all the questions that 

shape what I do arose out of that company that I had been following since I was nine or ten. So I 

owe a great, great deal to my uncle. I also think it means that I always loved Shakespeare, and I 

loved Shakespeare before I knew he was supposed to be difficult or arcane or old-fashioned, 

because I loved performance first, with all the vigor and excitement and energy of that. So that 

experience also shaped my thought. What became awkward for me was that eventually, over time, 

I discovered that my uncle’s Original Shakespeare Company wasn’t as original as he thought! And 

this caused some tensions! [laughs] But I must say here, that though I had to disagree with him, I 

owe him everything. So that’s how I got into Shakespeare. 

Spiro: Let’s talk about your work. You sometimes work collaboratively. You and Simon Palfrey 

on Shakespeare in Parts, and you edited Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance 

with Farah Karim-Cooper. And, as we know, in Shakespeare’s times, playwrights often worked 

collaboratively and the actors were very involved. How do you find collaborative scholarship? 

What is your process? 

Stern: The process is different, depending on who you are collaborating with. You are individual, 

so when you’re collaborating, you are two individuals putting your individualities together. So, 

with Simon, our collaboration was a difficult one. I think he would agree with me on that. Possibly 

why the book we wrote has tension and urgency and energy is because it’s the product of the fact 

that we weren’t fully agreeing. We were rigorously reading one another’s bits and rewriting on top 

of them. We each did our own bits and wrote on top of the other’s, so everything was very peer-

reviewed.  

One of the things I hadn’t expected in writing with Simon is when we first exchanged passages, I 

sent a very, very vague, rough version of what I thought was the Introduction. And he sent me 

something and I started reading it, and I was kind of, “oh, he’s also written the Introduction. I’ve 

written the Introduction and he’s written the Introduction. That’s awkward. We should have said 

which bits we’d write.” And anyway as I’m reading his bit, I started to think, “Oh no, this is really 

more like chapter one … and chapter two, and chapter six, and the conclusion.’ I said, “I don’t 

know how to read this. What is it?” I rang Simon and asked, “I’ve sent you the introduction. What 



Interview: Tiffany Stern  24 
 

have you sent me?” And he said, “The book.” And I realized, “Oh my! We don’t work the same 

way at all! Because I work sequentially and he writes a little typed bit and he then generates out 

of it, and expands it.” So we had to work out how to collaborate together. Our thoughts are radically 

different. We had a lot of disagreements. The book is maybe overlong because neither of us would 

give way on certain things. But as I said, I think what’s good about the book is the urgency that 

the tension and the disagreement, as well as the agreement, gave us.  

I think other interesting things I’ve learned from that process of collaborating is, at one point I 

hoped that… Simon has a very vivid, very passionate style. I’m a careful writer. And I thought, 

“Maybe I’ll get some of Simon’s tremendousness into me.” But, of course you don’t, because you 

write the way you write. So I never got that. I also thought, “Maybe some version of my careful 

logic would go into Simon.” No. That’s not how we are. But what I did get, which has made think 

a lot about collaboration, is that everyone has verbal tics. Simon had some verbal tics. I’ve got 

them, I got those: because you’re inside someone else’s sentences, someone’s language structure 

itself, it becomes your own. That has made me think quite a lot about some of the many problems 

I find with stylometric analyses. One is that you don’t come out of collaboration unscathed. As I 

said, I now have some of Simon’s verbal tics, and naturally it goes the other way [i.e., he has some 

of mine]. Often you can completely tell which of us generated a sentence because of the content. 

But if it’s just a bland sentence, if you simply analyzed it for hallmarks, the hallmarks of someone’s 

style, and you went, “Okay, this has all the hallmarks of Simon’s style”? Maybe I wrote it! But 

that’s a very particular point of collaboration.  

I have co-edited a book with Farah Karim-Cooper, and that was a very different process because 

we think in much more similar ways. So we weren’t trying to persuade the other – and it doesn’t 

have the persuasive edge of the book with Simon. In a way, Farah and I were just saving one 

another time. One of us would have more skills at one thing than another, but there wasn’t the 

tension. And maybe in that way we didn’t need one another in the way that Simon and I did: neither 

he nor I could separately have written the book that we wrote. It is the odd creature that is “us.” 

As I said, we’re not very similar. [laughs] I remember saying to Simon once, I said, “Ours is, this 

is like a troubled marriage.” And he said, “Yeah, it is like a troubled marriage, but look at the kid!” 

[laughs] 



25  Spiro 
 

Spiro: Another question about your process. You have edited a lot: The Merry Wives of Windsor, 

The Jovial Crew, and at least one or two other plays if I remember correctly. 

Stern: Yes, The Rivals, The Recruiting Officer, Country Wife. My editing keeps up my interest in 

seventeenth/eighteenth century. 

Spiro: So, what’s your process as an editor? I know there can be very fraught questions about 

sources and variants and the list can go on. How do you navigate that as an editor? 

Stern: I have a couple of answers to that, because I’m a general editor, General Editor of New 

Mermaids and Arden [Shakespeare] 4. Those questions are really questions for a general editor, 

because when you’re an editor-editor, what you do is follow the guidelines: the guidelines say, 

“Don’t do this, not in this edition.” So, as an editor, you don’t actually have much freedom of 

choice. You do what the guidelines set by the General Editor say. So, while I’m really interested 

in those questions, it’s not so much a feature of the editing I’ve done, which I’ve done to-rule.  

But in the position I’m now in, as General Editor of New Mermaids, which I have been for maybe 

the last ten years or so, that’s an edition really for high school and undergraduates, so that has very 

particular questions that go with it. For editions of that kind, you’re not rigorously collating. You 

are trying to do what it is that a current eighteen-year-old, say, wants. That’s very different from 

what an eighteen-year-old wanted twenty years ago. And we are slowly rethinking: How much 

should we have companion websites? We’re just at the starting point of thinking about this. So one 

thing is, how to use the internet as part of the editorial process. And another thing, and again I’m 

thinking New Mermaids, is that we’re trying to have it as a rule that anything you say about 

context, source, background, or whatever, should have a piece of close reading that illustrates how 

you can think about the text differently in the light of that additional piece of information. Because 

a lot of editions just give information because they do, and it just sits there. Particularly sources, 

and even things like theater history, where they say “So, in the eighteenth century, they did it with 

big wigs.” And you’re thinking, “But why does anyone want to know that? Make me want to know 

it.” So, anyway, we’ve been having these thoughts at New Mermaids, but I think where it’s really 

becoming crucial is that I’m one of the three General Editors of Arden Shakespeare 4, the next 

iteration of Arden, and Arden is a very particular, a very important thing. As far as scholarship in 

the Shakespeare community goes, it’s a benchmark, and we’ve got to rethink Arden from scratch, 



Interview: Tiffany Stern  26 
 

because the next Arden will have to be born digital. It may also be published in books but the 

thought has to be digital first.  

Spiro: The Arden Shakespeare editions have just gotten larger and larger. 

Stern: They’ve got larger and larger, and when you’re thinking of commissioning now for things 

that will come out… the first will come out in ten-plus years’ time, and you’re thinking of books 

coming out in twenty years’ time, thirty years’ time: we’re talking about a different world. Now 

it’s really extraordinarily difficult, truly, to have the born-digital thought, and we’re still working 

it out. Amongst the difficulties are these: in a book edition, you can have as many verbal notes as 

you can fit on a page, whilst still also having some text on a page. So that gives you a natural limit 

to the length of any note. If you’re online, you could have twenty-eight pages, “pages” as it were, 

of notes; you could name every Fool player ever; you could have a picture of every noun: “And 

here it is in a museum; and here’s another version of it. And now here’s Laurence Olivier fighting 

with it. And now here’s the OED definition of it. And now here’s every EEBO book that’s ever 

mentioned it. And here’s every JSTOR article that refers to it …” And now you’ve got an archive 

of the play. You haven’t got a readable text. So we’re still trying to work out how to tell editors – 

how to create the guidelines which tell editors – what not to supply when they can supply 

everything, when they’re no longer limited to the word or the length of the page. So, as I said, 

actually I’ve come up with more questions than answers, that’s because we’re still slowly working 

through what the answers to these things can be. But editing is going to be very different when 

you’re not thinking of text as printed word and note as printed word, and once you allow other 

things in: images, sounds, which are of course as much part of plays as the physical words… that 

really, deeply changes the thought. And, as I say, we’re slowly working through what that is, and 

the most difficult thing is not how to get hold of all this amazing information, but how to tell 

editors how not to get hold of too much amazing information. So editing, one of the major jobs of 

a future editor… I think editors of the past were trying to get as much as they could in books. 

Editors of the future, the job will be cutting down all the information, giving just the one crucial 

thing that explains it all. 

Spiro: Culling, filtering. 

Stern: Yes, it’s going to be an entirely different job. 



27  Spiro 
 

Spiro: At the moment there are quite a lot of people here at Oxford who do very interesting work 

on Shakespeare. In the recent past, it seemed like the groundbreaking work was being done, for 

example, at Liverpool or Berkeley, but now it looks like Oxford has become the best place to go 

for the study of Shakespeare. I’m curious: Is there an “Oxford School?” Is there a way that you 

think of yourself as part of something? Or is it just that you happen to have a lot of people here? 

Stern: I should say that I have just resigned from Oxford, so I’m moving to Royal Holloway: I 

will be part of the University of London, Royal Holloway. But to answer your question: truly, we 

happen to have a lot of people. It would be better if there were a different answer. But the actual 

structure is we all have our colleges, we teach in our colleges, we eat in our colleges, we socialize 

in our colleges, we have a college-based life – not a Faculty-based life. So we joke that we Oxford 

Shakespeareans meet one another at the SAA [Shakespeare Association of America]. Some of us 

are independently friends, but we don’t share papers, we don’t give papers to one another, we don’t 

hang around in a room discussing the future of things. So it is a bit of a coincidence, but I have 

some thoughts.  

I don’t think there is an “Oxford School of thought.” What I think might be more the case is that 

England, and Oxford, has become “modish.” England was never such a “theory” place as America 

was. And one reason for that is we’re a small country, we’ve got a lot of rare books, and I think in 

some way theory filled a gap for very good scholars, who were in Kansas, say, and they couldn’t 

read a rare book. And theory gave them a series of things they could do with a Penguin Classic. 

Now, the internet has given rare books to everyone, roughly, with EEBO and ECCO and more 

manuscripts are getting out there, and that has changed the shape of scholarship generally. And I 

think in Oxford and Cambridge, we had always taught bibliography, paleography (in the Master’s 

courses the basic skills are those) which had been outmoded elsewhere in the 80s and 90s, and 

people weren’t doing them. But Oxford and Cambridge had been teaching those things, and doing 

them for years, though they weren’t where the Zeitgeist was. But the stuff we’re producing, which 

arises out of the way we were taught and the way we do teach, is currently the “in” thing. Which 

makes Oxford “in.” But I wonder if that isn’t just lucky, a little bit.  

So the sort of things we do, which are now being done in a sort of post-theory enlightened way, 

are where the field now is a bit. And I think it maybe helps that at Oxford, too, some of the people 

we’re talking about, Laurie Maguire, Emma Smith, me … with more women, there’s maybe less 



Interview: Tiffany Stern  28 
 

antler-clashing. I mean, the men are still doing that, but with women there’s some more generosity, 

receptivity, and the flavor of scholarship is a little bit different. So maybe another advantage is that 

Oxford has so many good women. But I will be very intrigued to hear what my colleagues say.  

Spiro: Building on that, the return to more “scholarly” work, the use of archival materials, there 

has been a return to studying the original dramatic conditions. Just as you were saying about saying 

to your uncle, “That’s not the original way,” there is this strong attention to, “What was it like 

when the plays were very first performed, the words were very first heard? What role did the actors 

play, and the publishers, and the producers, and the audience?” What’s curious is that this is 

happening at the very same time that, performance-wise, to do what is called an “original” 

production is one choice among many others. Now it’s standard in some theater companies to set 

the play in a kind of no-place, or in a particular historical period that is not related to the play – the 

Old West, or feudal Japan, or the present day. And there are more serious questions about diverse 

casting. This seems to be a disjunct between where the scholarship goes, which is so much towards 

“What was it like in 1597, in the original production? What did they know? How does it help us 

to know what they know?” That’s my question: How does it help us to think about what they knew, 

what they first heard, how it was, at those first performances? 

Stern: Let me just, before I answer that question, say, I think if you love Bach – let’s say you love 

Bach, and you love the B Minor Mass, and you want as many recordings of the B Minor Mass as 

possible. In at least one of them, you want original instruments, to know how it might actually 

have sounded: everything wooden, everything soft. And you’ll also want a bright, sharp 

performance, modern instruments, extremely modern abilities, an exciting contemporary 

conductor: you want both. And you want all the in-between ones as well. Same with theater.  

So I think it’s incredibly important to think about the actual context for which the plays were 

written. You want to understand, what were the circumstances that made Shakespeare write in the 

way he did? What were the things he was bearing in mind? That has to be one of the important 

questions. That can also help you teach it to a student now, a student who will go, “Well, this 

seems alien.” And you go, “Not if you understand, that what an actor would have been given is 

this.” So, (A), understanding then helps you understand Shakespeare; (B), understanding then 

helps you understand now; but (C), understanding “then” doesn’t mean that “then” is better than 

“now,” and that that is how you should do everything. It’s more of a groundwork; it’s “I’m not 



29  Spiro 
 

sure you’re fully understanding Shakespeare if you’re not understanding Shakespeare’s context.” 

The context somehow brought Shakespeare out, and he brought the context out. So I think context 

is really important. 

And you are also right in what you say that we have a lot of concept-led productions these days. 

Ever since the rise of the director, in the Victorian period onwards, once you have a director, a 

director wants to have a concept that shows off him or her, the director. The director’s job is not 

simply making the words work as best they can. It’s putting something onto them that shows that 

person, the director. So there is an issue with all concept-led productions that they set up a rivalry 

between Shakespeare and themselves. A modern production is not a director just working to bring 

out Shakespeare. It’s a director seeing how they can twist the Shakespeare to be about [e.g.,] Iraq. 

And I have a lot of time for that. It does bring out certain things. But also, there’s a bit of me that 

thinks, “What a shame it’s no one’s job just to ‘do’ a play. What a shame that that would seem 

old-fashioned and ‘museum theater,’ or giving up.” So I’m also sad about that.  

I also think, though, we do additionally have a particular interest in “then,” even in the modern 

theater. We built the Globe in 1997. We’ve just built the Sam Wanamaker. In Staunton, Virginia, 

you’ve got the Blackfriars Theater. You’ve got lots of little companies who put on plays from 

“actors’ parts,” which is one of the things that I write about, and that Simon writes about, actors’ 

parts. They do that, a little bit because they’re trying to recover something more about context that 

might make the plays perform a slightly different way. And, they’re also doing it to save money 

because they don’t have to pay for a director. Still, there isn’t not an interest in original 

performance. There’s an original performance school, and there’s a director’s school, and I think 

as teachers as well as academics, we need to negotiate between the two. 

But, to return to why is it important, I find context very resonant. It helps me understand 

Shakespeare. I also think it’s very teachable. If a student gets a sense of what early modern London 

was like, what a theater was like, what being an actor was like, now these things that seemed 

recondite and complicated and weird, now they have a logic for it. And once you have a logic for 

something, you can like it, and not be frightened by it. 

Spiro: It seems to me that there is a somewhat separate conversation about relevance. “We’re 

setting Coriolanus in Iraq.” It’s a way of answering the relevance question. 



Interview: Tiffany Stern  30 
 

Stern: But that’s patronizing to Shakespeare. That suggests that he’s not relevant unless you add 

something that was never there to make it relevant! 

Spiro: Right, and it also frustrates what you’re talking about. It’s very useful for a student to try 

to think like somebody else, to go somewhere else and take on other ideas and assumptions. 

Stern: Which is what literature does, after all.  

Spiro: Another thing that your work in particular brings out is how much theater is a collaborative 

enterprise. How much what we think of as Shakespeare’s writing is the product of him, not just 

working with his partners and theatrical collaborators, but also responding to the audience and the 

censors and the ideas in the air. And not to fall too deeply into questions of authorial intention, but 

what does this to do our conception of these plays being by Shakespeare? There is this sense that 

the study of original theatrical conditions is taking Shakespeare off a pedestal and makes him into 

some sort of antenna. 

Stern: Well, you’re not properly appreciating Shakespeare if you have to put him on a phony 

pedestal and you feel threatened by actual information about how things were. [laughs] That does 

him no good service. I think, yes, there was an awful lot of collaboration in the theater of the time. 

That doesn’t stop him being the author of what he was author of. He was a very great author, but 

you can only understand both how great he was and also what his processes were by understanding 

how things were then. And that helps you see why he thought the way he did, why he organized 

his plays the way he did. And, it also helps you see that his process wasn’t uniquely other from the 

process of anyone else.  

I hate this “lone genius” thing because, as I say, I find it patronizing and disgraceful to the person 

who did what everyone else did better. [laughs] So I think, understand him, understand his 

contemporaries, and I sometimes feel very sorry for incredibly great writers like Fletcher who’ve 

been rather forgotten because of Shakespeare. Our balance is an imbalance. We have imbalanced 

things. This is not to denigrate Shakespeare in any way. He deserves all the attention we give him, 

but we have done so at the expense of his period and at the expense of other great writers. And 

that’s why I’m excited by the sort of work that Bart [van Es] is doing, which brings back the 

importance of other writers. Shakespeare was highly influenced by other writers and he went on 

to influence other writers and that’s part of the amazing benefit for us as well, as academics, what 



31  Spiro 
 

we do. We collaborate and influence one another; we influence our students; they influence us. No 

one’s just alone in some ivory tower, unshaped by all the events happening round them, and the 

world in which they live. And how outrageous to say that that is the case with, of all people, 

Shakespeare.  

Spiro: What is it that Shakespeare’s audience knew that is so important for us to know? I have 

been to productions where the program notes have to prepare the audience for, for example, the 

rhetoric games and theological questions that are dead to us. I have heard some directors say that 

all that stuff should be cut because it means nothing to the contemporary audience. What is it that 

we don’t know that we should know? 

Stern: One thing to say is, the balance of knowledge was different then, between then and now. 

For one thing, here is Shakespeare coining a lot of words. So there are a lot of his words that are 

familiar to us that would be unfamiliar to his audience. So we shouldn’t think they were finding 

Shakespeare easier than we are finding Shakespeare. There are lots of things that we find easy that 

they were finding difficult.  

But I think the difference there is that because years and years of teaching Shakespeare has made 

current audiences think that you should go to Shakespeare like you’re going to church, like it’s a 

liturgy. “You don’t understand it but it’s very important.” That is a very different attitude for an 

early modern audience going along and when they didn’t understand a word, they will have gone, 

“Fantastic! A new word!” because language was expanding all the time. “Let me get out my table-

book, let me note the new word down. I can’t wait to go home and use the new word! My neighbor 

just won’t know what I’m saying because I’ve used this fantastic new word!” So, I think they 

would have encountered some of the difficulties we do with understanding it, but I think for them, 

a new word would have been an exciting present, whereas for us, we’re inclined to say, “No, I give 

up now. I just didn’t understand that sentence.” So, I think there’s an attitude difference, that in 

some ways we’re having similar experiences but we’re feeling about them differently.  

And, as I say, one of the big problems here is the fact that Shakespeare has come to be a sort of 

badge of something that’s nothing to do with Shakespeare. You know, Shakespeare was funny and 

bawdy and lyrical and gorgeous and irreverent. We’ve got a mental-deadpan Shakespeare that’s 

just sort of, [deepens voice] “good.” And people go not to be entertained, not expecting a good 



Interview: Tiffany Stern  32 
 

time, but expecting and feeling, “I’ll be ennobled because I’ve seen a Shakespeare play.” So, I’d 

love to get at that attitude and tear it apart. And that can happen sometimes with really good 

productions, where people are kind of, “You know, I actually did laugh!” Or, “I actually felt 

moved!” Yes, of course you felt moved, because it’s the story of a father making a terrible mistake 

and his youngest daughter dying, of course you’re moved!  

Back to your question, there are all kinds of things they knew that we don’t know and vice-versa. 

They were very smelly and all sorts of things. [laughs] They were much nearer to their bodily 

functions in some ways than we are. They were much nearer to death than we are. Most people 

will have seen death, laid out a loved, dead person. Smelled death. They were much nearer to God 

than we are, a lot of them. Their experience of life was… more war, they’re much nearer to illness. 

Death haunted every single person. If you were a woman, how likely were you to die in childbirth? 

The second you’re pregnant, you’ve got a bomb inside yourself. It’s very likely you are going to 

die giving birth in incredible agony, or afterwards from some kind of blood poisoning. It’s so 

likely. That must have made impregnating your wife feel rather different, particularly if you loved 

her. You could die of toothache; you could die of flu. I think maybe every moment was more 

precious, was more lived. In the same way, a play had better be good, because you might be dead 

next week! Who knows? You don’t want to have wasted those hours. So, I think maybe they felt 

life a bit differently.  

And this is different from, of course, more formal issues: yes, they taught rhetoric at school. Word-

play would have been different. But actually, a lot of Shakespeare’s word-play, a lot of it is puns. 

We still love puns. It’s just that his puns aren’t always our puns. So a pun between “sheep” and 

“ship” doesn’t work so well for us because we say them in different ways, and wouldn’t confuse 

these words. But, we still find puns hilarious. Half our humor is still pun-based. So I think we 

should remember the differences but also remember the similarities between that audience and our 

audience.  

I think when you look at Shakespeare, one of the things is, he’s very interested in the underdog: 

the black person, the Jewish person, the bastard, the woman. He’s interested in all of those, and I 

think to him, they were a bit interchangeable. Those things, the underdog, the Other, they can be 

just as smart, as feisty, as witty, as rhetorically sophisticated, as deep, as an allegory. He has that 

interest. He is confronting the audience with some of its biases, and asking it to think through 



33  Spiro 
 

them. We still have a lot of those biases. Not always about the same things, though sometimes… 

look how racist it turns out England is! We’ve got the same biases!  

Spiro: People have been sharing on social media the passage from Sir Thomas More about 

refugees. 

Stern: So much of Shakespeare suddenly becomes… Shakespeare is being invoked all the time as 

our country falls apart. “Oh look, we’re stabbing each other in the back!” Just the day before, when 

[Michael] Gove stabbed Boris Johnson in the back and the papers were going, “Et tu, Brute?” They 

can’t stop! Cameron as an “over-reacher.” It is interesting, when something big happens politically 

and we want to reach out, we say “What’s the vocabulary, what’s the context for describing this? 

This is extraordinary, this is huge, this is epic, this is tragic! Where do we look but the Bard to 

explain this?” It’s been happening all through… It would be fascinating to go through the 

newspapers of the last week – we’re one week into the horrors of Brexit – to go through the 

newspapers and find how often Shakespeare has been invoked.  

Spiro: On every side. 

Stern: On every side, yes. As the Labour Party also falls apart, yes.  

Spiro: It reminds me of 2008, when Barack Obama was first running for President, and he had to 

distance himself from his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. At first he tried to explain their 

relationship, but as Wright became more embarrassing, Obama had to sever ties with him. A friend 

of mine sent me an article about it with the subject-heading, “I know thee not, old man.” 

Stern: Yes!  

Spiro: You had mentioned before to me that you think Brexit is going to have serious implications 

for higher education, for the study of literature. 

Stern: Yes, huge. There are practical ones, there are intellectual ones. Practical ones: for one thing, 

our economy is now terrible. 

Spiro: This is my first experience in England with a favorable exchange-rate. 



Interview: Tiffany Stern  34 
 

Stern: Yes, you’re a lucky guy! So, in universities that are not Oxford and Cambridge, it’s going 

to be way more expensive for academics to travel to Europe or the States, so they’re not going to 

be as present in conferences unless they’ve got private wealth. So, just, England will be a little 

more out of the game because it won’t have that kind of money. That’s a practical thing. Another 

massive practical thing: universities here got a lot of money out of Europe. A lot of grant money. 

So we won’t have that money, and we won’t have those European collaborations that were, I 

mean… Talk about context: in Europe, they’ve got a lot of early modern documents that we don’t 

have that will help us to understand ours, and ours can help them understand theirs. So all those 

collaborations you were hoping to have, looking at the Spanish theatrical documents and so forth, 

those things aren’t going to happen. So, again, practical things.  

But, more, the flow of people back and forth between continental Europe and here, with all their 

rich ideas, their own different contexts and backgrounds. You can’t travel into the past but you can 

travel into other places, and they get you into another way of thinking. There will be less of that. 

There will be fewer students, fewer academics from Europe, maybe. Perhaps you’re going to need 

visas to travel to these places. We’re only a week in. We know it’s absolutely terrible, really, really 

bad, for academia across the world. We can only start to think of how specifically bad it is in 

certain ways, but I think basically the “Little England” atmosphere takes us back to Shakespeare, 

of course. The “sceptered isle” idea of England in a global economy, and an intellectual economy 

as well as financial economy, is a terrible idea. All that is, supposedly, to put the “Great” back into 

Britain. But old Great Britain was a vicious, colonialist power. We should never want to be that 

again. We also don’t have that kind of money, the money we had when we were an empire. So the 

people who were voting for Brexit were voting for some kind of notional Britain that they’ve got 

off Downton Abbey or something. It never existed for everyone. It only ever existed for posh 

people, and it was repulsive when it was Victorian and weird. This is just a rant now, but I think 

it’s really bad for international exchange on every level, financially, intellectually, because it is 

limiting things. And at a point when Shakespeare studies… another reason, maybe, why Oxford 

has become more prominent is because we are more visible in America. We’re at SAA. We see all 

the Americans, they see us, once a year. If that becomes less the case, then so does that level of 

exchange. And then whoever can’t go to those conferences can’t feel where the field now is. 



35  Spiro 
 

Spiro: What trends in Shakespeare and early modern studies do you find particularly promising 

or interesting? 

Stern: I’m interested in the material culture trend. But again, I would be. It’s a different way of 

thinking about context. I’m very interested in “things,” books, material culture. Another trend that 

is bound to happen and maybe is happening a bit is that for a long time … you can see where we 

now are is a reaction to the Angry Guy Marxists before us. You can see how. Everyone was angry 

with literature, and now we’re very practical, very sensible, scholarly about literature. I think 

there’s been a long time since we had some positive passion about literature. We haven’t done 

“appreciation” for a long time. I’m sure there will be a movement that’s kind of aesthetic, 

appreciative, but finds a way of doing that that’s intellectualized in some way. In a way I think our 

kind of scholarship, actually, where you find context and then you close-read the literature in the 

context, is a kind of close reading hidden away as “stuff.” But I think there’s bound to be a kind 

of new aesthetics, a new appreciation of some kind in the future. I feel like it’s time for that. We 

all actually like the literature and we shouldn’t be ashamed to say so.  

Spiro: I remember in graduate school we used to confess that we actually loved it and we weren’t 

supposed to. 

Stern: You weren’t supposed to. You were supposed to spot its tricks. “I see what the book is 

trying to do to me.” 

Spiro: Its “hidden agenda.” And you were saying that Shakespeare is interested in the underdog. 

I remember hearing that he doesn’t take the underdog’s side enough. He’s a symptom of the way 

we look at the Other. You see not necessarily sympathy but interest. 

Stern: He’s interested in it. He is not a solver of problems. He is a displayer of problems. “Here 

you are. Then you can go off and think about it.” None of his plays solve. Every single conversation 

you have with a student about a comedy is along the lines of “Why is there something a bit bleak 

about the end of this comedy?” All the comic marriages are all kind of, [shrugging] “I don’t know! 

I’m not so sure!” They’re all think-pieces that he doesn’t solve, but he puts you in the way of 

thinking about these things: now you’ve got to have a position in the light of what you’ve seen. 

You’re going to have a discussion where you’re going to say, “Should the Friar [in Measure for 

Measure] have proposed to Isabella?” Now we must think about religion, we must think about 



Interview: Tiffany Stern  36 
 

ruling countries, we must think about rejecting sexuality and becoming nuns, we must think about 

love of your brother versus religion. It’s a think-piece. He doesn’t come up with any solutions. He 

just comes up with a load of problems for you to analyze. I think that’s one of the things he’s 

brilliant at. But anyone who reckons they’ve solved Shakespeare – or that Shakespeare is solving 

things – is being simplistic about Shakespeare.  


