INTERVIEWER

How do you start a research topic?

BART VAN ES

There’s always a period of anxiety when you finish something, where you worry away at what could work. I had four proposals that I was jumping between before my current project on Robert Armin got underway. I showed those proposals to my agent and discussed them with her before making any decisions.

INTERVIEWER

How detailed were those proposals?

BART VAN ES

They were each about four pages long, describing an idea or set of ideas, all of which grew out of things I had been doing already. When Shakespeare in Company came into being, I was already engaged in a book that would have been an expansion of my thinking on history. It was going to be called something like ‘Poets Historical’ and would have been on figures like Samuel Drayton and Michael Daniel and the idea of how the role of the poet was combined with the role of the historian.

INTERVEWER

Which has a clear path from your first work, Spenser’s Forms of History.

BART VAN ES

Yes. I did quite a lot of research for that project and it seemed viable as a book. But when I got my post at Oxford, Emma Smith suggested some lectures that combined Shakespeare with other early modern dramatists. My work for those lectures led to this sense that early Shakespeare – in some of the grand speeches of Titus Andronicus or Richard III –  was quite a lot like Marlowe, in that high rhetorical, iambic pentameter style. And then late Shakespeare seemed to me quite a lot like Fletcher. But the middle bit didn’t look like anybody. That was the beginning of what became Shakespeare in Company. It started as a project to answer why that middle bit of Shakespeare should be so distinct. I was blown off-course from my histories project and began to ask myself questions like, what do we know about Shakespeare’s actors? Why did things change for him in 1594? That turned into the research project. It was a significant turn from the work I had been doing.

There’s a strong professional demarcation these days between ‘drama’ and ‘non-dramatic poetry’ in early modern studies. If you know the Shakespeare world, I think it’s a little unhealthy how much it’s a sub-discipline by itself. People who’ve gone into a Shakespeare doctorate end up either just always doing Shakespeare books, or perhaps doing books that are about drama with a Shakespearean set of assumptions about what a literary career looks like. I think it’s healthy to come at Shakespeare having done something else.

INTERVIEWER

So changing tack was a good thing for you.

BART VAN ES

For me it was. I like learning new things. The idea of going into a new area with questions I don’t know the answer to, but where I have a sense of a literary phenomenon that really interests me, that’s usually the way that something turns into a project for me. It very often comes from an old-fashioned sense of literary greatness. I think: I love this. This seems to me a magical text. And I’d like to explain why it feels magical to me. Though the stuff I get passionate about can be criticism, as well as literary writing from the period itself.

INTERVIEWER

What have you read recently in terms of criticism that you’ve found exciting?

BART VAN ES

What I’m really excited by at the moment is life writing, and the field of creative non-fiction. I don’t feel currently invested in anything that comes from a mainstream university press. Work that’s most excited me is the sort of stuff that a number of my colleagues are doing. Marian Turner’s Chaucer: A European Life did things with space and theory and biography that made me think this is the kind of stuff I wanted to write; Joe Moshenska here with his travel narrative, and other ways in which people are being imaginative outside the box of conventional academia. I really like Emma Smith’s This is Shakespeare. These things seem to me to return to literary affect, and a recoverable personable identity as a shaping factor on literature.

INTERVIEWER

It feels like something is loosening at the moment, concerning what we might think of as conservative academic writing. I wonder if that interest in more creative or affect-led approaches has been enabled by theorists like Latour and Rita Felski, and their work on non-human actors, which seems to afford more expressive critical moods.

BART VAN ES

Latour is definitely someone I read a lot. I like his stylistic experiments, writing things as dialogues or as travelogues. There’s something ludic about how he presents himself. He’s always been a thinker who is against reductiveness, who thinks we need to describe more rather than pin something down, which I like a lot. He is, very loosely speaking, an influence on what I do.

INTERVIEWER

We were talking about starting projects. Shakespeare in Company diverted you from an established project that you were in the middle of. Was it difficult to let go of something in which you were immersed? How do you make that decision?

BART VAN ES

I mopped up the historians in verse stuff I’d done with a few articles. I did an article on Drayton and England’s Heroical Epistles, and I wrote a thing on Spenser and the Mirror for Magistrates. Sometimes a thing isn’t a monograph, but you don’t want to have wasted work. Another book that hasn’t become a book for me, which was one of those four proposals I was showing my agent, was about children’s theatre companies. I thought that would be a book called The Dark Playhouses but again that got taken over by my Armin project. So instead I’ve written three articles on how Shakespeare’s repertory responded to child players. I don’t want to waste work that I’ve done, but not everything lends itself to a monograph. Or perhaps there are a number of monographs that I could have pursued at any time.

INTERVIEWER

How do you know that something is no longer a monograph?

BART VAN ES

I suppose for both the historians in verse book and the child companies book, once I saw it as a monograph they seemed too survey-like. I was imagining a chapter on the children’s theatre in the early Tudor court; a second chapter about the first Blackfriars; then a chapter about the revival of child companies; then a chapter about adult responses to it. Absolutely that was a workable project, just as the verse historians was a workable project. But neither seemed to me surprising and they wouldn’t have held a reader all the way through. I could imagine a reader picking the chapter they liked but not being that challenged by it. It would be reporting on areas where there was already a degree of scholarship. Whereas with Shakespeare in Company and now with the Armin book I felt I could write something that would be formally different and would stretch me intellectually. So compared with a relatively safe choice in writing an indoor players book, writing a creative biography of Robert Armin seemed – well, I like the way that people ask me: ‘will it be REF-able?’ It’s worth taking risks and challenging yourself.

INTERVIEWER

For early career academics, often the most pressing concern is just finishing the book at all. Yet the questions you’re describing now seem to be questions that can only flourish when earlier anxieties about your first book have been conquered or banished. Has there been a sophistication of the sorts of concerns you bring to your writing process?

BART VAN ES

I’ve been very lucky, in that I’ve not had horrific pressure on me at any point. Even with my first book, on Spenser, I was incredibly lucky to have four years of a JRF at Oxford. Otherwise I might well have been under pressure to turn a thesis into a monograph. I don’t know how good that book is, but it interested me at the time and each chapter does something different.

From where I am now, that book looks quite narrow. It’s a single-author book. If I were doing it now it would certainly not be a ‘Spenser book’. I would have had the ambition of writing a book that would have been about the Renaissance historical imagination in multiple authors. I wish I had had that sense of scale, and you have to really admire people who have held back from turning their book immediately into something slender and job-portfolio-like. But of course, people have pressures on them, and don’t necessarily have that sense of what the project could be.

INTERVIEWER

Perhaps certain critical questions, or ways of seeing a project, can only flourish at a certain stage of your career. For institutional as well as academic reasons.

BART VAN ES

I think that’s right. You get more of a hinterland. And writing becomes easier. I used to do a lot of re-writing, which I don’t do now. When I wrote my first two books I would plan the chapters, then write them by hand, then type them up, changing them as I typed. And then print them, and work over the typed print script by hand again. It was this palimpsestic process where the book would grow. That did work for me, but it was a cautious way of labouring. I never do that now. Now I do almost nothing on paper at all. Everything is on the screen.

INTERVIEWER

Could you broadly describe your typical process in writing a journal article?

BART VAN ES

I start with a messy coagulation of thoughts from which things gradually emerge that make themselves distinct. At the beginning of the Spenser project I didn’t have anything other than a broad interest in Spenser and history. You focus on what works.

Take my recent articles on the children’s companies. I started by isolating a set of books to read. I read all the children’s company plays, and read all the histories of child acting companies that I could find, and I suppose the thing that lit the first article was this striking discovery of the way in which Othello was Chapman’s play Mayday turned inside out. Mayday is also set in Venice, it’s also a cuckold’s narrative, it was on the stage in the same year as Othello, and so I began by thinking I could write an article on Othello and the children’s repertory, about the dominant misogyny of the children’s stage. For me, it’s usually about finding a new reading of a canonical work. But that article took me quite a long time of rewriting, trying to get the combination of generalising about many tens of plays in a repertory. I gave it a couple of times as a paper at other universities and it changed over time. An article begins with the moment that a play becomes more interesting for me because I understand a context for it. And then it becomes the labour of how do I make this argument.

INTERVIEWER

How long would you expect to spend writing an article?

BART VAN ES

My last two articles jointly took a year. I wrote them at the same time. Over the year I wrote those two articles and a shorter thing for a book. I was in that ‘between-books’ period, when typically I might be working on two or three articles at the same time.

INTERVIEWER

Do you usually have multiple articles or projects on the go at any one time?

BART VAN ES

I’ve now done the opposite of that. At a certain point you want to clear your mind and do one thing well. I’m happy doing multiple projects in the wake of a monograph or a big book. Those larger projects are a bit like a glacier. It’s pushed a lot of detritus in front of it that you can hive off and turn into a new project. I tend to think the transitions between books are the points I’ll write articles. And they’ll often be multiple things. But now, for instance, I have absolutely no articles that I’m even thinking about. I’m just thinking about my Armin book. And I would hope to only be thinking about that for the next three or four years. But it might be that after that there are a series of things that come off it.

INTERVIEWER

How do you organise your research notes?

BART VAN ES

I’m very proud of that. I do everything on computer. I have a ‘notes’ folder with thousands of documents that are just titled ‘author’ and ‘name of article or book’. Each one will be a Word file that has a full reference at the top of the document. And I type things across as I’m reading. I never annotate PDFs or anything like that. I will read an article or a book or a primary work of literature and type as I read, putting in very large amounts of quotations or summaries of what the argument is. And I have the page numbers as well. I don’t need to go back to the material for notes I’ve taken. And I never copy and paste. Copy and paste might encourage too much stuff; typing forces you to be selective. So I’m generally reading on one screen and typing on the other. So then I have searchable files that I can find by title or content search.

INTERVIEWER

When did you start that method?

BART VAN ES

Towards the end of my PhD. It’s a precious folder! I do a lot of backing up.

Sometimes while I’m working I’ll colour-code them. If I’m working on an article I might re-read my notes and change the colour of the file for things I want to work in. So all the theatre-historical stuff I’m using for an article might be grey; all the political-historical stuff might be green. Often then, having written something up, I’ll go back through notes and think about how the notes will fit into the prose I’ve already written.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever feel short of ideas to work on? And how do you navigate that?

BART VAN ES

Yes. I think there are those moments of loss, often after you’ve written something you’re happy with.

INTERVIEWER

Which is also often a time when the questions about what you’re working on next are most pressing.

BART VAN ES

Yeah. Now I’m really happy with what I’m doing with the Armin book, but after I finished The Cut Out Girl, I wasn’t in love with any of my other proposals. I couldn’t see how doing them would be as involving as I’d found doing The Cut Out Girl or doing Shakespeare in Company. And I really remember feeling quite lost when I finished my first book, my Spenser book. I carried on doing my historians in verse book and I remember thinking ‘yeah, it’s ok, but I’m not in love with this as a book’.

How do I navigate that? I end up going for long runs to help think it through. I think it’s good not to be too quickly satisfied with a project. If you just endlessly knock out books I tend to suspect they won’t be that good and that there is an element of pain involved.

INTERVIEWER

Some comfort for those who don’t knock out endless books.

BART VAN ES

I was feeling fairly anxious about what I would do next after The Cut Out Girl for quite a while. And I’ve felt anxious about what to do next after every book I’ve written. You’re delighted it’s finished, and hopefully you’re happy with it. Then there’s a worry about what kind of reception it will have, but also the question of: ‘well, can I do anything else?’

INTERVIEWER

How do you know when a book is finished?

BART VAN ES

I’ve never found that too difficult. Fairly early on with every book I have a complete plan for it, so I know the end when I get there.

Take the Armin book I’m working on now. I knew I was interested in Robert Armin. He seemed to be this under-explored influence on Shakespeare; the only other writer in Shakespeare’s acting company. He has nine published works that survive but isn’t a known name. He has this fascinating biography of having been a goldsmith in London, and his master was convicted for adulterating the coinage. He became a travelling actor and witnessed these strange cruel spectacles of household fools. He plays these transformative roles in Shakespeare’s plays and seemed to me interesting.

But I wondered how to write it. Should I do a straightforward biography? After having done The Cut Out Girl that didn’t seem the most daring thing to do. So I worried away at that for about a year and a half: how to tackle that story, how to make it interesting? And it was only relatively recently that I wrote three chapters that I showed to my agent. She was quite sceptical about it. She could see it was a fascinating world and was well-written but wondered why we should want to read it. ‘I don’t know what this is,’ she said to me. ‘Is it a novel? Or is it academic work? It seems to be both.’ I said that it was both, and that’s the idea. But it was good to get that negativity even though I was worried about it.

So then I stared at a blank page for three days and tried to figure out how to get it to work. Then suddenly it clicked into place structurally. And I wrote away, and now I have a complete chapter plan.

INTERVIEWER

How did you solve that problem? What clicked?

BART VAN ES

Now what I’m doing is quite close to creative writing, really. But with sections of me exploring things archivally. So the book begins with a performance of the play All is True, which is also the title of the book. It has Armin watching the fire at the Globe in 1613 after the reading of the play’s prologue, in which Armin is cut out of the play. That prologue about the ‘fellow in a long motley coat’ who isn’t going to appear. So it starts on a sense of betrayal and rejection, and then asks questions about how true that is, as a way of imagining Armin’s life. It shows me beginning to research Armin’s life – visiting King’s Lynn, finding his schoolroom, finding the house he lived in – and slowly a life emerges. So it’s now a book that jumps between imagined scenes of Armin’s life and actual scenes of historical writing.

INTERVIEWER

So part of the book narrativizes your research process, and the other is a creative response?

BART VAN ES

Yes. So the book is structurally quite close to The Cut Out Girl in having a double narrative. And has a betrayal narrative to it, also like The Cut Out Girl: why did Shakespeare exclude Armin from Henry VIII?

INTERVIEWER

Was it that structural move, of making the book a conversation between past and present, that solved your problem with the book?

BART VAN ES

No. The thing that changed it was doing something that wasn’t chronological. So now the book starts at the end. It struck me that most of the books that work for me at the narrative level are not straightforwardly chronological. The books that have most influenced me in the last four or five years are the novels of Karl Ove Knausgård in the My Struggle series, H Is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald, Rachel Cusk’s autofiction, Sebald’s writing, and then various academic books that are also biographies. All of those things are not chronological; they’re books that sometimes ask intellectual questions alongside narrativizing and imagining situations. I wanted something that would start with a provocation.

INTERVIEWER

The Neapolitan novels do something similar, starting with Lina having walked out.

BART VAN ES

Yes. And I love the fact that I’m now discussing those things. I was slightly disillusioned by discourses within early modern studies that seemed to include very little about the craft of how narratives work and what makes things compelling, what differentiates literary writing from other forms of writing. If you just think about literature within a purely materialist frame then that is an unanswerable distinction. That can be fascinating, but that’s never been what has driven me.

I had a nice conversation with Jenny Richardson at Newcastle recently. I was working on the Oxford edition of Thomas Nashe that she is editing. I was supposed to be editing Summer’s Last Will, but wasn’t enjoying it at all. I’m just not that kind of scholar. We had an evening together where I just said that from the age of seventeen I completely fell in love with literature. There is no greater pleasure for me than immersion in a literary world, where I’m struck by the brilliance of the writing, lighting up all sorts of historical and philosophical ideas. Editing a text is not something I get much pleasure from. And she said, ‘well you don’t have to do it. It sounds like you should do your Armin work’. And she’d read The Cut Out Girl and thought it made sense to try and carry on that method in early modern studies. She thinks of her work is a very different way to me. She’s an editor, she does collaborative projects with people and is highly intellectually sociable, which I think I’m not. I find it quite difficult to discipline myself to a large collaborative project like the Oxford Nashe.

INTERVIEWER

I’m interested in people’s habits or rituals that become part of the circumstances of their writing. Where are you when you write?

BART VAN ES

I have to be in a very tidy place. My office is obscenely tidy and if I’m writing at home it’s also extremely tidy. In an OCD-like manner I’ll have to tidy the kitchen if I’m writing in the kitchen. I can write either at home or in my office, but I do want to write in total silence and a totally controlled space. I could never write in a café. I can write in hotel rooms, or even on a plane, but again, I have to control my environment. So, earplugs and a tidy seat area.

INTERVIEWER

And you always write on a computer now?

BART VAN ES

Yes.

INTERVIEWER

Do you revise much?

BART VAN ES

Yes. What I’m doing now is more literary writing, and so a huge amount of labour is going into just massaging sentences and paragraphs. The first paragraph of All is True, as it stands, has probably had about two weeks of work put into it. Just tweaking and knocking into shape. Then when I feel it’s ready I won’t touch it any more. Some sections will come very quickly but others not. Generally the chapters of The Cut Out Girl took me between a month and three months to write. I know when it’s done if I can read through it without feeling that compulsion to move a comma or change a word that seems to be a bit cliched.

INTERVIEWER

Have you brought that eye back to your academic work?

BART VAN ES

I don’t make any distinction now between academic work and this thing I’m writing. I don’t think I will write another book with an academic press. For me now I really don’t think of this as less than academic. There’s a lot of research in the All is True book, and it’s about big questions such as how far is the past recoverable, how far do people have agency? One way these things are measured is whether they are REF-able, and The Cut Out Girl is going into the REF.

INTERVIEWER

I meant more that it sounds like you discovered this approach with The Cut Out Girl, but then have also been publishing articles in academic journals.

BART VAN ES

For me, academic writing should not be restricted to things that have footnotes. I always cared a lot about my prose in earlier forms of academic writing, and the shape of the thing mattered to me a lot.

INTERVIEWER

One of the things that seems up for debate at the moment is the notion of what the category of academic writing really is.

BART VAN ES

I think this is an interesting area and is something various people are pushing at. Does there need to remain a very clearly differentiated category of academic writing in a subject like literature, which is at least in part about beauty and literary affect? I would hope there’s room in our discipline for writing that is creative as well as intellectually rigorous.

INTERVIEWER

What writing software do you use?

BART VAN ES

Just Word. It’s very annoying the way that it’s impossible now to buy Word by itself.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a favourite font?

BART VAN ES

No. I generally write in Times but I think the new version has put me into a different font. I don’t really care.

INTERVIEWER

Does your writing day have a particular rhythm or schedule?

BART VAN ES

One of the privileges of academic work is that you have very few early mornings where you absolutely have to be anywhere. I like writing in the morning and not communicating with people and sitting and having my coffee. I’ll usually write from about 8.30am at home, and then come into the office after having done a bit of writing and move on to other things. Then there are some days when I can entirely write. Most days will start off with some writing.

INTERVIEWER

Do you know what you’ll say when you begin to write? How much is the shape of a chapter in dialogue with your writing process?

BART VAN ES

Once the book is there conceptually, I have a complete chapter summary. And I’ve had those summaries for every book I’ve written, together with a detailed plan of what the arguments are. You start doing the research first. For example, with Armin I spent about a year working in King’s Lynn and some London archives. And at that point I didn’t have a structure. Just a vague idea of how the structure would work. And then at a certain point you think – I need to shape this into something that will have chapters.

Usually then a big part of the labour is just the writing. Though I might sometimes hit something and think – no, this does need more research. For example, I have a chapter planned in the Armin book that is about his period as an apprentice goldsmith. When I come to that chapter I know that I’ll have to go back to the National Archives. And I hope that new things will come out about him and his master. Or, for the stuff on Armin’s childhood I was working through parish hallbooks that give accounts of the aldermen in King’s Lynn. But at a certain point you’ve got enough material, you’ve found a number of family wills, and that material then might well change the structure of the chapter as you had it planned. But the overall shape was in place. Essentially I knew the chapter on his childhood would be geared towards the moment where Armin sees his first play in King’s Lynn and the moment where he decides to leave for London.

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