The Birthplace

Morris Gedge is a librarian at a dull provincial library in England that is "all granite, fog and female fiction". He gets a welcome offer to become the custodian of the Shakespeare house at Stratford-on-Avon. Although Shakespeare's name is never mentioned in the story (James used the name twice in his Notebooks when he was planning the tale), it's obvious to whom "the supreme Mecca of the English-speaking race" is devoted.

Once installed as the custodian, Morris begins to doubt the chatter he is forced to give to tourists who visit the home. He starts to qualify and hesitate in his spiel. This brings anguish to his wife and a warning from the shrine's proprietors. Gedge finally decides that if silliness is what's wanted, he'll supply it abundantly. The last section of the story shows him delivering a hilarious lecture on how the child Shakespeare played around the house. Receipts from tourists increase, and Gedge gets a raise.

This story is a superbly humorous play on James' common theme of how the imaginative "children of light" inevitably find trouble in the real, unforgiving world. Morris is something of an exception in that he triumphs over the world's attempts to grind him down...by giving the world exactly what it wants. The story illustrates T. S. Eliot's dictum that humankind cannot bear very much reality.

But the story does not read at all as a grim reminder of how people would rather hear sweet fiction than sour fact. James clearly sympathizes with the amusing way Gedge devises a more appealing "reality" in his great parodic lecture on Shakespeare's imagined childhood. As for the authorship question itself, James found it very hard to believe that the "Stratford man" wrote the plays and sonnets. But he had found it almost as difficult to believe in any of the other supposed authors, such as Sir Francis Bacon. The final message of The Birthplace seems to be that Shakespeare's works themselves are far more important than the biographical details of whoever wrote them.