Vulgar History - Shakespeare's Greatest Character, Margaret of Anjou

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast.

00:00:15.540 My name is Anne Foster. I'm a historian and an author, and I've been curious about the Tudors

00:00:19.880 since I was a little girl. This season on the podcast, we will be talking about the notorious

00:00:24.560 Tudors, who they were, the times they lived in, and what was happening elsewhere in the world

00:00:29.180 at the same time. So in terms of this podcast and this season, the Tudor era I'm defining as

00:00:35.680 starting in 1421, which is the year of the birth of Henry Tudor, aka Henry VII, and ending in 1603,

00:00:43.540 which is the death of Elizabeth I, who was the final Tudor monarch. So anyone who was alive

00:00:49.480 at all between those two years is fair game for the season of the podcast. And this is a massive

00:00:54.720 amount of time. It's almost 200 years. And so 1421, like we're talking about like back England,

00:01:00.840 the wars of the roses, the Yorks and the Plantagenets and the Lancaster, like this whole,

00:01:05.840 this whole mess. We talked about it last week on the podcast and all these cousins who are

00:01:09.320 fighting each other. And then the end of the Tudor era, Elizabeth I dies. Like this is like

00:01:14.420 Shakespeare. We're in the Renaissance. Like this whole second goes from what a lot of people would

00:01:19.580 consider like the medieval period into the Renaissance period. And this episode covers

00:01:25.160 both because we're talking about Margaret of Anjou, who was Queen of England during the Wars

00:01:31.980 of the Roses era, kind of on and off because her husband, Henry VI, kept being kicked off the throne

00:01:37.060 and then he's put back on the throne and she's such a powerful woman. And then almost like 200

00:01:42.360 years later, William Shakespeare writes a bunch of plays and she's in those plays, Margaret of Anjou.

00:01:48.700 and she has the most screen time or I guess stage time of any female character in any

00:01:56.120 Shakespearean play because she appears in several of his different plays because she was around for

00:02:01.400 so much this time period but I think this is such a good episode to have for this podcast for this

00:02:05.820 season because we're talking about a character a real life person who was alive during the beginning

00:02:10.720 of the Tudor era and then how somebody William Shakespeare towards the end of the Tudor era

00:02:16.420 wrote a play about her. So it's like both ends all at the same time. And what we're talking about

00:02:22.480 today, it's an interview with two authors, it's Charles O'Malley and Scott W. Stern, who are

00:02:26.400 authors of the new book, Shakespeare's Margaret, The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen, which is

00:02:31.360 looking at the life of Margaret of Anjou as she's portrayed in Shakespeare's plays. It's a really

00:02:36.540 good book. I really recommend it. It's such an interesting concept for a book. In our discussion

00:02:40.460 you're about to hear, we talk about the real Margaret of Anjou, but then also what theater

00:02:44.200 was like when Shakespeare was writing his plays, and why Shakespeare's Margaret is maybe one of

00:02:50.100 Shakespeare's best characters, certainly his most interesting female characters. So please enjoy

00:02:55.580 this chat with Charles O'Malley and Scott W. Stern, authors of Shakespeare's Margaret,

00:02:59.760 The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen. Okay, so today I'm joined by Charles O'Malley and Scott

00:03:10.600 W. Stern, authors of the new book, Shakespeare's Margaret, The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen,

00:03:16.180 which is a really, I've never read a book like this before. It's like a biography of a fictional

00:03:20.080 character, but also the biography of the real life person and also talking about what it was

00:03:25.140 like to do plays in a Shakespeare time. It's a lot all together. I'm excited to talk to you. So

00:03:29.380 welcome. Charles and Scott, if you can each just introduce yourself and explain kind of what your

00:03:33.640 background is with this topic. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having us. We're totally thrilled

00:03:38.960 to be here talking about Margaret and her portrayals. So my name is Charlie O'Malley.

00:03:43.700 I am a dramaturg. So I'm kind of the theater person on this project. And so what a dramaturg

00:03:51.660 is, it's kind of, for those of you who don't know, it's kind of like an editor who works with plays,

00:03:55.620 new plays, old plays. So I have a lot of history with reading Shakespeare's work and putting it

00:04:01.280 on stage in a whole bunch of different contexts. And I'm also a historian and a writer. I love

00:04:06.420 looking at theater history and figuring out how these stories are relevant and working with new

00:04:12.600 plays too and figuring out you know how we can make uh how we can really bring you know new

00:04:17.080 voices to the stage and so i i've been intrigued by the character of margaret she shows up in four

00:04:23.560 shakespeare's earliest plays um his history plays where he's writing the history of the recent

00:04:28.660 history of england um kind of memorializing like what the english character is so i think margaret

00:04:34.820 is just a fascinating person and I've been in love with her for decades. And Scott, my co-conspirator,

00:04:41.500 also spouse, is a writer and he kind of had the idea that we could work on this project together.

00:04:46.820 So I'll pass it over to Scott. Yeah, well, thank you so much for having us on this podcast. Yeah,

00:04:51.560 I'm Scott Stern. I am a writer and a critic and a historian. And I come to this less from a theater

00:04:59.920 background, in fact, no theater background, and instead from a history and nonfiction background.

00:05:05.840 I've previously written two books of narrative nonfiction, both about the history of gender

00:05:11.220 and violence. And so Margaret's story is of a much earlier time period than what I'm really

00:05:17.520 used to, but there are a lot of themes of sort of structural misogyny and violence and also

00:05:23.640 resistance that really carried through. And so to me, this was a very exciting new project where

00:05:29.520 Not only did I get to collaborate for the first time on a book, but also write about an earlier era. And as you say, write a somewhat unusual narrative in that we call this a biography, but it's not a biography of the historical person. It's a biography of the character and the way the character has changed over several centuries.

00:05:50.260 on what i thought we could focus on for this conversation because the book is so interesting

00:05:55.420 and there's so many levels to it but just so we can sort of like explain introduce it to people

00:06:01.080 who might not have a lot of background and understanding about shakespearean theater

00:06:04.580 or understanding with this part of english history one of the things that i think a lot

00:06:08.600 of people probably know from movies like shakespeare love is that this play these plays

00:06:13.720 during shakespeare's life the women's roles were played by young men yeah so can you talk about

00:06:20.060 what and this was the first Margaret so she appears in four Shakespeare's plays and I thought

00:06:26.000 we could kind of go in order her appearance in each of those plays and what it's like

00:06:29.380 how much were audiences at that point used to watching a young man play a woman's role

00:06:33.660 how long had that been happening for it had been several decades that in English on English stages

00:06:40.460 certainly in the capital I mean had been exclusively boys in dresses playing women

00:06:45.520 And earlier centuries, there had been women appearing on stage and actually on the European continent, there were still women appearing on stage at that time.

00:06:53.100 But for a variety of reasons, England started only having young men in drag playing female characters.

00:07:00.780 And so that was like totally normal for audiences at the time.

00:07:05.460 Now, that doesn't mean it was uncontroversial.

00:07:07.800 There were a lot of religious figures who really, really aided this and viewed it as evidence of theater's depravity.

00:07:14.740 But audiences would have known to expect it.

00:07:17.260 And there's some interesting evidence and some sort of scholarly speculation that this may even have provided a kind of thrill or like titillation for audiences.

00:07:26.380 But they kind of, you know, got off on seeing gender play on stage.

00:07:31.500 And, you know, playwrights like Shakespeare really played with those expectations.

00:07:35.460 So there's a lot of characters in Shakespeare who are women who then like dress as men.

00:07:40.820 So, what you're really seeing is, like, a boy dressing as a woman dressing as a man.

00:07:45.060 And, like, that kind of, like, gender play was something that it appears audiences really responded to.

00:07:51.380 So, this is the 1590s.

00:07:54.200 So, this is, you know, as you were mentioning, you know, Shakespeare in Love, or if people know the movie or the book Hamnet, this is around the same time.

00:08:01.660 Early in Shakespeare's career, late in Queen Elizabeth I's life.

00:08:05.740 She's the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty.

00:08:08.600 And Shakespeare is writing these plays about how the Tudor dynasty came to be.

00:08:13.440 So he's, you know, if you might remember from old English class or something, Shakespeare wrote comedies, he wrote tragedies, and he wrote these plays that were also called histories.

00:08:21.240 So they're kind of chronicles of English history.

00:08:25.340 And they all kind of have to flatter Elizabeth and her family, because there was a lot of censorship going on at the time.

00:08:33.020 She had a really strong, she loved theater, but she also had a really strong hand in what was being performed on public stages.

00:08:39.600 So these plays had to kind of, you know, show her family, people that ended up being her family, in a good light.

00:08:46.680 And as Scott was mentioning, you know, you do have these plays, you know, for example, if you remember As You Like It or Twelfth Night,

00:08:53.420 those are plays in which, you know, the boy plays a girl who goes for most of the play in costume as a male as well.

00:08:59.880 But when he gets to Margaret, he comes up with this person. He comes across this person in history who is a real person. She was a foreigner, a French princess, who as a teenager, she was forced, you know, by diplomatic relation to marry the King of England to kind of hopefully provide some sort of peace between England and France who had been at war.

00:09:20.240 But she also ruled the way a continental woman would, which is not a way an English woman would.

00:09:25.600 There were no queens regnant in England at the time. 0.99

00:09:29.640 We didn't have a process of women ruling in their husband's place. 0.86

00:09:34.660 But when Margaret comes along, she kind of thought she could do that.

00:09:37.720 And so Shakespeare's really playing with that.

00:09:39.760 He comes up with this idea of this woman who dominates these plays.

00:09:44.280 And she is not just going to sit back and say, yes, my lord.

00:09:47.340 she is going to come forward and tell her husband what she thinks and he creates all of these

00:09:51.880 you know kind of incredible scenarios that she finds herself in in these places he's kind of 0.97

00:09:57.200 experimenting with you know how do we address women in power um just like you know as we're

00:10:02.040 coming to the end of Elizabeth's life we know she doesn't have an heir you know en route and

00:10:07.220 how are we kind of working that out on our public stages in in uh you know on London stages I think

00:10:13.640 it's an interesting sort of balancing act that shakespeare needs to do with this character

00:10:17.720 the audience are people who are used to having a woman in charge because elizabeth's been on the

00:10:22.420 throne for decades and they're used to that and they know she's good at it and like she's a pretty

00:10:25.920 popular monarch but at the same point the character of margaret is a foreigner and she is on ultimately 0.80

00:10:33.480 the losing side of this war so showing like well here's a powerful woman but also like but she's

00:10:38.760 also kind of a villain because you know she's french and like those are still kind of our 0.78

00:10:43.280 enemies so just um can you speak about the i i guess how audiences would have viewed this

00:10:49.520 character like if we're looking at her first appearance which is in what we now call henry

00:10:53.680 vi part two we'll explain that later it's like the like star wars chapter four um so it's just

00:11:01.220 henry vi part two how do you think he wrote her for an audience like how do you think they would

00:11:07.820 have seen how they would have accepted this character. So when she's first introduced in

00:11:13.380 this play, which as you mentioned, is kind of picking up in the middle of the timeline,

00:11:16.540 he later goes back and does the, you know, kind of prequel plays. She is introduced kind of

00:11:21.060 structurally as an antagonist. She is married to the king. You don't necessarily know that

00:11:26.920 she's been married to him against her will. And Shakespeare sets her up as one of the power

00:11:31.380 players in the court. He creates an extramarital affair for her, which we have no evidence that

00:11:37.400 Margaret had an extra...

00:11:38.620 Then she ever cheated on her husband, the King of England. 0.96

00:11:40.760 When she was 14, yeah.

00:11:42.560 When she was 14, which would have been a wild thing to do with a man

00:11:45.480 who actually was in his 50s at the time.

00:11:47.380 But Shakespeare creates a love story for them.

00:11:50.660 And though she is kind of... 0.99

00:11:52.540 She's very harsh and she's very cruel. 0.98

00:11:55.440 In the subsequent play, you know, we see her kill people on stage. 0.99

00:11:58.980 We also see a lot of vulnerability for her.

00:12:02.380 We see her, you know, in this play, in 106th Part 2, she has this lover.

00:12:06.580 her lover is then killed and she comes on stage holding his head holding his severed head she and

00:12:13.320 she speaks to it and the king is talking to her and saying what are you doing and she can't she

00:12:17.400 can't see anything so just imagine what this was like for audiences in the 1590s seeing a 13 year

00:12:24.380 old boy in a wig carrying a crop head with big blood on it um talking to it and this is the queen

00:12:30.140 of England. This is radical at the time. We'd never seen royals behave like this. And this

00:12:37.980 is something that Shakespeare is kind of playing with. And this is before he's written people like

00:12:42.340 Cleopatra or Juliet or some of the other really famous women in his plays that later we've had

00:12:52.160 so many marvelous performances of. But Margaret has rough edges, but she can really vacillate

00:12:58.880 between someone that you just kind of really kind of hate and also someone that you pity 0.65

00:13:04.300 because she does have a real human side to her and she has a lot of wrong there she's wronged

00:13:09.140 in a lot of ways in this place i think that's a great point charlie and i think the other thing

00:13:13.900 is like that kind of ambivalence about margaret as both villain and like a really sympathetic

00:13:18.760 figure is something that i think that's probably the sentiment audiences would have had at the time

00:13:23.380 And it reflected real anxieties they had about Queen Elizabeth I, who was aging. And there was real anxiety about the lack of an heir. And so, you know, there was a true cult of personality surrounding her in England in the early 1590s. And so, there were people who were, you know, very devoted to her.

00:13:43.800 And at the same time, there were popular uprisings against her and people were really stressed out about what was going to happen next.

00:13:50.120 And to kind of see that, that anxiety among some other anxieties we can talk about being metabolized on stage in this character of Margaret, who was, you know, a name people might have recognized from the past, but probably not one they knew much about.

00:14:02.720 So she's kind of this blank slate that Shakespeare is projecting all of these anxieties onto.

00:14:07.120 too. Well, and also you were mentioning like with, you know, coming on stage with the head and

00:14:10.820 everything. Like, I do think it would be good to explain to the listeners that at the time going to

00:14:15.820 see a play, like now it's like, oh, I'm going to go see Shakespeare at the festival and the ticket

00:14:20.200 is $200 and it's like Sir Patrick Stewart and it's all very like classy. But then it's like,

00:14:26.100 you're either going to go see a play or you're going to go see like someone like fighting a

00:14:29.340 bear. Like these are, and they both cost very little or like could if you're depending where

00:14:34.840 you're sitting. So could you explain like Shakespeare at this time? He's like trying

00:14:38.960 to draw in crowds by just having things that people are going to be like excited about.

00:14:43.240 Yeah. Shakespeare is like mass entertainment. This is a time obviously before television,

00:14:48.400 but also before like widespread literacy. So most people couldn't read. So like telling stories was

00:14:53.900 a principal form of entertainment. And yeah, as you say, the other forms of entertainment that

00:14:58.040 people would pay or sometimes not pay to see were like bear baiting or bull baiting, clowning,

00:15:04.660 miming, also public executions. So this was like a populace that was used to pretty extreme forms

00:15:13.860 of entertainment. And so Shakespeare really had to lean into that. So now these plays are seen as

00:15:18.360 classics and elevated pieces of culture and something that's not often thought of as mass

00:15:25.980 appeal. But at the time, these were extreme. There were battles on stage. There's love affairs.

00:15:31.820 There's, you know, people coming back from the dead and talking as ghosts.

00:15:37.060 And this was a form of entertainment for the masses.

00:15:39.880 And basically all of the other popular playwrights from the 1580s and 90s and early 1600s meant it to be for the masses and easily comprehensible.

00:15:53.600 And so that shaped the way that these characters were portrayed.

00:15:57.000 They were not meant to be on a pedestal and at a distance.

00:16:01.040 They were physically very close by and they were meant to be figures that audience members could identify with or hate righteously or love.

00:16:10.900 I'm just wondering how much you know, Charlie, about like what the how gruesome the special effects would have been in a ship like this.

00:16:19.360 Like when you bring out the head, like how gross would it have looked?

00:16:23.220 It would have been probably pretty extreme.

00:16:26.160 There's a lot of evidence in the text of Shakespeare's plays, and not to get to, you know, this is what scholars think, but there's a lot of evidence if you just look at the lines, where you can tell there's meant to be some interplay with the audiences or just kind of some joking around with them too.

00:16:40.040 You know, we have this idea that you sit quietly and hold your hands and the lights go down, but these were shows done outdoors. People were kind of coming and going. People were selling goods. There was, you know, sex work happening.

00:16:51.180 one of the later plays in the early 1600s they would use cannons um that's actually why the

00:16:57.060 first globe theater burnt down because of a spark from a cannon during a performance um so yeah

00:17:02.740 as scott said they're they're you know trying to keep up with like the bear baitings next door

00:17:07.220 they know that people want something really dismal um and in a way we still see this a lot

00:17:12.940 with the way people engage with um you know i mean like dating shows or something they want to feel

00:17:18.260 like they're seeing something real like reality television elizabeth herself actually really 0.60

00:17:22.500 enjoyed performance she sponsored some troops and that's something that a lot of people in her court 0.94

00:17:27.100 didn't like they thought it was low and they thought it was popular but she liked it um and

00:17:31.940 she had you know certain actors that she liked and you know i think if you if you remember there's

00:17:36.640 some scenes in shakespeare in love in which they go and they perform at the court that's very

00:17:39.660 different than when they're performing for for you know for the the groups of people would pay

00:17:43.780 just a penny to stand and they'd stay in the afternoon sometimes they get rained on as they're

00:17:47.720 watching you know these you know crazy battle scenes these these history plays have huge casts

00:17:53.180 with so many characters and and battle scene after battle scene after battle scene today we look at

00:17:59.120 them we're like okay maybe you should condense a little bit but at the time that's really what

00:18:02.720 the audiences love to watch well and the plays would have been what like two or three hours long

00:18:07.240 like you need to keep people entertained in a sustained way for quite a period of time oh yeah

00:18:12.240 and that's also why there would have been probably these you know you would have read a whole series

00:18:17.080 of history plays. As you mentioned, Henry VI has three different parts. He was responding to

00:18:22.480 popular tastes. These ones, you know, he wrote part two, or what we now call part two. He wrote

00:18:27.780 a sequel play, and then later he wrote an earlier play, you know, kind of like trying to add on to

00:18:33.360 the, as you mentioned, like Star Wars or something, or like, you know, like kind of fan service,

00:18:37.780 like there's another Ligley Blanc, there's another Devil Wears Prada, you know. People wanted to see

00:18:42.260 these characters again, and sometimes in the beginning of the plays, they do the same thing

00:18:45.740 that they do in like the devil was brought to where they they'll call back they'll be like

00:18:49.800 remember this character here here's me you know reminding you what she did in the previous play

00:18:54.220 well and that's where i'm curious to know so like the the play comes out chronologically the first

00:19:00.120 one what we now call henry the sixth part two margaret is like a fairly major character in

00:19:05.240 this play and then clearly people respond to her because in the next one does she have an even

00:19:10.340 bigger part or similar size part? Oh, yeah. In the play we now call part three, which is kind of 0.76

00:19:16.540 the end of this trilogy, that's kind of the climax of the Wars of the Roses, which is this,

00:19:21.920 you know, dynastic battle that Margaret's court is involved in. And that's the one where we see

00:19:28.540 her really take over for her husband. And she leads armies. She has this tremendous speech to 1.00

00:19:34.600 her troops. That is very reminiscent of a speech that Elizabeth gave to troops. So they're really,

00:19:41.940 really kind of Shakespeare and, you know, everyone he was working with on these plays,

00:19:46.880 because they certainly were collaborative endeavors. It wasn't just one genius sitting

00:19:51.040 alone at a computer, right? This is a whole group of people participating. They want to really play

00:19:55.920 up that similarity to Elizabeth. And I mean, this is also like, you know, she's not just sort of

00:20:03.380 akin to a protagonist of Penry the Sixth Part 3, but she's also like continually heightening

00:20:09.380 the stakes and doing things that would have shocked the audience. So like the play basically

00:20:13.220 opens with her calling her husband, who is the king of England, like weak and incapable. And 0.64

00:20:19.240 then she like says, I divorce thee and like leaves him and goes off to raise an army herself. So she 1.00

00:20:25.920 is like from the get-go of Penry the Sixth Part 3, she is set out as the far more militant

00:20:33.100 royal in charge and the one who is going to be leading the army and the one who pretty early in

00:20:40.480 the play stabs her principal rival at the time, the Duke of York. And so she is like, she's set

00:20:49.120 up as the head of one of the two warring factions in this, like, basically a civil war that is

00:20:54.480 wracking England. And so audiences would have understood her as, like, basically a general

00:21:00.220 akin to any of the other male generals on the stage

00:21:03.100 in something that's completely wrong historically

00:21:05.620 is like leading armies in battle,

00:21:08.980 like in the front of the army on stage.

00:21:11.940 I'm just wondering, you talk in the book

00:21:13.840 and I kind of know this from Shakespeare in Love,

00:21:15.760 like my main understanding of plays in this time.

00:21:18.960 People are like, there's, you know,

00:21:20.640 they're buying food and stuff.

00:21:21.780 And if they don't like the play,

00:21:22.480 they're throwing tomatoes or whatever at the actress.

00:21:26.820 Do you think that she was a character

00:21:28.920 that people were like, hell yeah. Or people are just like, oh my God, this woman, she's

00:21:32.300 overstepping. Like, this is horrifying. And they would throw stuff at her. Like, what

00:21:35.460 do you think, how do you think they would have understood a woman leading troops into 0.95

00:21:39.320 battle in this play?

00:21:40.920 So that's a really good question. And I think that part of it has to do with Elizabeth I

00:21:46.360 who had, who didn't personally like, you know, she was not at the head of the army, but

00:21:50.260 she, there's a very famous moment in her rule where she puts on like male battle armor and 1.00

00:21:56.880 gets a pretty famous speech where she talks about having the heart and the stomach of a king.

00:22:03.520 And so I think audience members would have understood that this was an obvious allusion

00:22:07.920 to Elizabeth I. And so they might've been a little reluctant to be like too vocally opposed.

00:22:12.800 But I also think that like there is some evidence from Shakespeare's time that suggests that Margaret

00:22:19.080 was very popular. So she probably was not the person who was getting like food or having like

00:22:23.960 tomatoes thrown on her face. Like, it appears that some of the lines about her were, like,

00:22:30.260 among the more popular ones. And probably the strongest evidence that she was popular is that

00:22:34.760 Shakespeare kept bringing her back. He keeps inserting her into scenes that in history she

00:22:39.760 wouldn't have actually been in. And then he, like, you know, he writes the sequel, Henry VI Part 3,

00:22:44.900 and then later he'll write the prequel, Henry VI Part 1, and then after that he'll write Richard

00:22:49.440 the third. And he easily could have cut her from any of those plays. You know, the sort of historical

00:22:55.920 documents that he was basing these plays loosely on did not pay much attention to Margaret. But

00:23:01.460 the fact that it keeps bringing her back, it's an indication of the fact that Shakespeare was

00:23:05.560 really into her, but also probably that audiences really respond to this character, quite possibly

00:23:09.940 more than the other characters in the play. She's also memorable. When you're watching these plays,

00:23:16.060 There are a lot of dukes.

00:23:18.480 It's the same when you're watching Star Wars or World War II thing,

00:23:21.980 and you have all these generals, and you're like, who are these people?

00:23:24.580 But she knows that if there's the one woman in the play,

00:23:27.100 you're going to remember her.

00:23:28.760 And when she's offstage, you notice that she's gone, too.

00:23:33.820 At the beginning of part three, she ties up her enemy,

00:23:38.280 kills his son in front of her, 0.61

00:23:40.340 wipes her handkerchief in his son's blood, 0.99

00:23:43.080 and wipes that all over his face.

00:23:44.600 that's a tremendous thing for a person to do and even today people have trouble playing that scene

00:23:50.540 because it's so difficult at the end of the play margaret's son is killed in front of her

00:23:54.740 spoiler alert for history that's you know many centuries old but and then she weeps over his 0.85

00:24:00.480 body and she says please kill me too i need i need you to kill me too and they won't do it

00:24:04.480 the enemy soldiers won't do it and that's just such a tremendous shift for one character to do 0.99

00:24:11.740 over the course of a two or three hour play.

00:24:14.140 And Shakespeare is trusting a 14-year-old boy.

00:24:17.080 That's what I was thinking, yeah.

00:24:18.180 Or an apprentice player

00:24:19.860 because they would have apprentices 1.00

00:24:22.040 that would often play the female roles

00:24:23.440 and the more studied, more practiced actors would play,

00:24:26.360 you know, Richard III, the big male roles.

00:24:28.560 But he has some sort of young actor

00:24:30.560 who he thinks can play this.

00:24:32.760 That must show us something

00:24:34.560 about what was going on at the time.

00:24:36.000 There must have been actors that he trusted

00:24:38.620 or talent that he saw

00:24:40.140 that he could write these characters for.

00:24:42.060 Well, and you're saying characters,

00:24:43.840 and because Shakespeare, you say in your book

00:24:45.900 that he includes more interesting women characters

00:24:49.760 than most of his contemporaries would.

00:24:51.720 Can you speak about, just about the difference

00:24:53.760 in how he writes women versus how other people might have?

00:24:58.600 Absolutely.

00:24:59.400 So just to skip ahead a little bit to part one,

00:25:03.200 which we've mentioned is kind of that prequel

00:25:04.700 that he wrote a little bit later.

00:25:06.120 One of the central characters of that

00:25:07.620 is a character called Joan Pussell,

00:25:09.220 who we all know is joe bark um who i'm sure is you know very familiar to most listeners

00:25:14.300 and she just you know she was french like margaret um she was fighting against the english but on

00:25:19.680 behalf of the french and she was kind of a central character in that play and then she disappears

00:25:25.020 very quickly as we know she she's that she's executed end of that play margaret comes on so

00:25:29.720 he's kind of replacing one militant woman who is who is really you know uh kind of uh exploding 0.99

00:25:37.680 expectations for the way that women should behave in these stories with another one. And that's how

00:25:42.660 he chooses to introduce Margaret, you know, when she's young, when she's a young girl in that

00:25:47.640 story. But there really weren't other characters that were kind of appearing like this at the time.

00:25:53.620 And I would just add that, I mean, you know, you are seeing in works like of other,

00:25:58.440 like Shakespeare's contemporaries, so people that you might have heard of like Christopher Marlowe

00:26:01.920 or Ben Johnson, you're seeing the emergence of what we would now call kind of an anti-hero,

00:26:06.520 which is like a flawed protagonist.

00:26:09.140 Someone like Richard III,

00:26:10.260 who's like really intriguing to watch

00:26:12.220 and you're like maybe even rooting for him a bit,

00:26:13.980 but you also know he's like a bad person.

00:26:16.500 Shakespeare's real innovation was that in Margaret

00:26:19.760 and in some of the other characters in these plays,

00:26:22.420 he's creating characters like that that are women.

00:26:26.520 And so this is Margaret and it's, you know,

00:26:29.320 Joan and it's Eleanor Cobham,

00:26:32.580 who is a rival of Margaret's in Henry VI Part II.

00:26:35.600 And these are female characters who are just as complex and just as violent and dangerous

00:26:42.340 as their male counterparts.

00:26:44.040 And so that was unusual and something that audiences might have recognized at the time

00:26:48.680 as something of an innovation and something that would have kept them coming back and

00:26:52.980 is, you know, probably part of why Shakespeare has persisted.

00:26:56.400 Like, you know, there are the famous male characters like Hamlet or Macbeth, but there's

00:26:59.860 also like Lady Macbeth and there's also Margaret.

00:27:02.120 And so we have this, like these totally singular characters.

00:27:06.020 And I think that was an innovation from the time.

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00:29:46.000 Well, and I'm wondering, I just have,

00:29:47.300 I saved this quote from your book

00:29:48.540 because I thought it was really interesting.

00:29:50.140 It was talking about, just as,

00:29:52.400 I'll quote from your own book.

00:29:53.940 Just as Will was writing,

00:29:55.260 England was wracked by a persistent concern

00:29:57.180 about young women bucking the convention of marriage

00:29:59.340 and living and working independently or masterless to use a term from that time.

00:30:04.400 So in terms of what you were saying, like what these plays say kind of about society

00:30:09.080 and what was going on.

00:30:09.800 So he's writing more female characters and in society, women are kind of doing a different 1.00

00:30:14.360 thing.

00:30:14.940 Can you speak about that connection?

00:30:17.100 Yeah. 0.99

00:30:17.360 So women, there was kind of a rise in the 1580s and 1590s of women who were at the time known 1.00

00:30:22.940 as masterless. 0.97

00:30:24.060 So these are women who are living basically on their own or certainly independent of a 1.00

00:30:28.520 spouse or a father. And that was a huge source of anxiety for those in power in England at the time.

00:30:35.100 This is also probably not coincidentally an era where you see a peak in witch hunting. There was

00:30:42.240 a huge anxiety in England about witchcraft and people who were most often targeted and executed

00:30:49.740 as witches were women. And so you see all of this, again, this is probably not separate from

00:30:55.620 the anxiety about Elizabeth, this like queen who had been in charge for decades, but is soon going

00:31:00.180 to die and doesn't have a clear air. There's all of this gendered anxiety swirling through the air

00:31:06.460 of England. And so it like makes a lot of sense that a popular piece of drama is going to put a

00:31:11.520 lot of that on stage where you have a female character who is violent, but also sympathetic,

00:31:17.460 who is kind of ungovernable, but also ultimately brought down. And so you see the ambivalence

00:31:25.360 that Shakespeare has toward Margaret reflecting the way that his audience would have felt about

00:31:29.860 all of these young women around them who are seen as like behaving in inexplicable ways or

00:31:35.260 misbehaving or acting dangerously. I'm just thinking again about all of these things are

00:31:40.960 happening and the roles are being played by young men. Yeah. It's a whole other interesting level.

00:31:47.580 I don't know if that makes it because obviously like at the time like that was sort of some people

00:31:52.020 were scandalized or offended by by men and drag but also if that makes it a more palatable message

00:31:58.260 to watch a woman quote-unquote behaving in these masculine ways but actually it's actually a man

00:32:03.360 doing it i don't know yeah i think so i mean i think that um it's still an incredibly sexist

00:32:13.220 society and it's an incredibly regulated society um these plays were one of the the playhouses were

00:32:20.800 one of the very few places that people could get together and talk about these

00:32:24.820 issues. There were not, you know, obviously there were not blogs,

00:32:27.640 but there were also not really,

00:32:28.740 there was not really news media in the same way.

00:32:31.580 And anything printed was very highly censored.

00:32:35.500 So this was a place where people could, you know,

00:32:37.440 and the plays were censored as well. They had to pass scrutiny,

00:32:40.500 but Shakespeare obviously is literally Shakespeare.

00:32:42.740 So he can slip things in, right?

00:32:44.540 As are some of these other great Elizabeth and dramatists,

00:32:47.040 they can slip things in and they can kind of create conversation about this.

00:32:49.880 and they know too it's not just the literary it's the performance that people are seeing too it's

00:32:54.920 the way people speak it's the sounds the voices the textures so that the theater going experience

00:33:01.740 is also part of that conversation and the fact that we have no women whose voices that we're

00:33:07.920 hearing we have not a sing you know this is a man writing and these are male people performing

00:33:13.960 there's obviously gender play going on there and that's what a lot of people were you know

00:33:18.860 really uncomfortable with but also you know we're not we're not really seeing you know we're up there

00:33:25.680 on stage speaking we will a couple a couple generations generate a generation or so after

00:33:29.580 shakespeare's death we we do start seeing professional actresses in shakespeare i mean

00:33:34.080 i'm sorry in england um but not at this time you know it's still a very regulated uh performance

00:33:39.320 style well and i just wanted if we're going chronologically like he writes part two part

00:33:44.600 three then the prequel part one and as he's writing these plays Shakespeare is becoming more

00:33:49.440 famous like his he's he's becoming no like at first you mentioned you know and you say in your

00:33:53.620 book to the early plays it was just kind of known like these are collaborations people working

00:33:57.340 together but eventually he starts working on his own and then like oh it's a new Shakespeare play

00:34:02.140 like can you talk about how that shift happened in his career where suddenly he became himself

00:34:07.860 that's the draw it's like oh it's a Christopher Nolan film like oh I'll see it no matter what

00:34:12.480 the focus is Christopher Nolan. It's like the same thing like Shakespeare, right?

00:34:15.580 So like the era in which Shakespeare wrote the three Henry VI, or the first two parts,

00:34:21.180 certainly of the Henry VI plays, and possibly the third, are in what is referred to as his lost

00:34:27.240 years. And it means that there are like these like seven years where we know virtually nothing

00:34:32.380 about what he was doing or even where he was living. And this reflected that like Shakespeare

00:34:36.360 was a young guy from a small town who was not yet a well-known quantity. And during the exact years

00:34:43.500 that he's writing these plays, he's also writing other plays that become equivalently popular.

00:34:48.960 One example is Romeo and Juliet. He's also writing poetry that was massively popular. And so

00:34:55.160 for, you know, by the early 1590s, he was probably principally thought of more as a poet than as a

00:35:01.360 playwright. But what he's really doing is just getting a ton of words out on the page and on

00:35:07.140 stage. And by the early to mid 1590s, he gets together the money probably from like a wealthy

00:35:15.100 benefactor to become part of a new theater company. And he gets more control over the

00:35:23.860 works that are getting put on stage. And that helps him to sort of become cemented very quickly

00:35:30.380 as like the leading or one of the leading practitioners of theater in the country.

00:35:35.940 And it really helped, I think, that Elizabeth I seemed to like him and that her successor,

00:35:41.860 James I, really, really liked Shakespeare's work and the work of his company.

00:35:46.040 And so his rising fortunes are that something that's happening as he's writing these plays

00:35:50.740 and can probably be seen in the fact that he gets so much license as these plays goes

00:35:55.500 on to really play around with the history.

00:35:57.600 So in Richard III, which is the fourth of the plays in which Margaret appears, he brings her back completely unhistorically. She's literally not in England at the time, during the years that are depicted, but he brings her back. And I think that kind of freedom that he had to do that is reflective of the fact that he's becoming a more powerful figure in a more known quantity in the English theatrical world.

00:36:19.700 and he's experimenting with a lot of new things when he's writing richard the third

00:36:24.500 so richard for if you you know think back to like high school english class or something when if

00:36:29.920 you've if you've ever read or seen this play he's the main character but he is such an anti-hero he's

00:36:35.100 this horrible person but he's so smart and he's so charismatic it's where actors love to play

00:36:39.900 richard because he is you know he's constantly cunning and he's coming up with all of these

00:36:45.140 these wild you know kind of conceits and then Margaret is this character that Shakespeare

00:36:51.320 brings back kind of unhistorically to spar with him she you know her husband has been deposed

00:36:57.060 from a throne she is sent to exile back in France where she ends up where she ends her life

00:37:01.260 but Shakespeare brings her back to be this kind of Cassandra prophet figure who is going to say

00:37:06.160 you know this is like your Richard your sins will catch up with you your family's sins will

00:37:12.400 catch up with you and she's right character of margaret is right of richard's family the yorks

00:37:16.940 they do lose power and the tutors do take over and they become the ruling class and so shakespeare

00:37:22.260 is kind of using her as a figure there to kind of go back and forth with him and to provide kind of

00:37:27.680 some philosophical commentary on the way that history unfolds um and the way that that's kind

00:37:34.720 of set the stage for well the metaphorical stage for where we've landed in the early modern era

00:37:40.420 and in the Tudor era, how we got

00:37:42.420 monarchs like Henry VIII,

00:37:44.800 Elizabeth's father, and then

00:37:46.460 Elizabeth herself. 0.93

00:37:48.220 I have to say, Margaret's appearance in Richard III

00:37:50.660 is personally my favorite

00:37:52.140 because she's just like...

00:37:55.260 She's unfiltered.

00:37:56.940 She's just like... 1.00

00:37:58.160 No fucks to give. 0.97

00:38:00.280 She's just kind of like, everything has happened to her. 0.98

00:38:02.660 She has nothing left to lose when she comes to nothing.

00:38:04.600 She's a good ghost, kind of.

00:38:06.680 You mentioned in your book, The Hollow Crown, which is

00:38:08.340 kind of this like tv version of the history plays and i didn't know the henry the sixth plays at all

00:38:13.800 so i was experiencing them for the first time and then when sophie okanito shows up and richard the

00:38:18.320 third i'm just like what my fave is back it was it was exciting and i feel like an audience

00:38:24.200 in shakespeare time might have felt the same just like oh my god her i remember her from the other

00:38:28.160 plays it's absolutely it's that's actually a leading like scott scholarly theory on why

00:38:33.200 margaret's in the place because she's not necessarily in energy not necessarily important

00:38:38.480 to the plot but she provides tremendous context and she's fun to watch um and she was probably

00:38:43.940 um a fan favorite that he brings exactly kind of spar with this new character that he's created

00:38:48.880 you know like on a sitcom when i don't know you know like steve urkel walks in and the audience

00:38:54.100 is like like i feel like that's actually coming out yeah and that was my first introduction to

00:39:00.180 Margaret was when I was in high school in English class, we read Richard III. And even then I was

00:39:06.180 like, who is this like character who just comes in and is just like, you know, like saying the

00:39:11.780 most devastating insults to the King of England, like with seemingly no fear at all. Whereas every

00:39:17.300 other character is really cowed by Richard and is predicting his death and downfall. And I think

00:39:25.780 that is probably the way that audiences at the time would have reacted to her too. Not just like,

00:39:29.740 oh my god it's my favorite from this old place but also like oh like you go girl like you tell

00:39:34.540 it because you the audience are seeing things the other characters aren't you're seeing like

00:39:38.420 richard is talking about like all of his evil plots and how he's gonna like have all these

00:39:42.460 people killed and margaret is the one who's like continuously calling him out and rallying the

00:39:47.660 other female characters to oppose him and so she's just delightful to watch and in the in the latter

00:39:54.520 every book you talk about various performances of these plays and how for quite a bit of time

00:39:59.760 her she was removed from yeah from richard the third she's often excluded from those and it's

00:40:04.840 kind of brought back like she's been sort of reinserted in some ways but i liked i forget

00:40:10.420 if it was helen mirren or one of the other actors who said like there's no other character in

00:40:13.720 shakespeare who you can play from a young woman all the way through her life to an old woman and

00:40:18.160 the fact that she's in so many plays, are there any equivalent characters for men who have that

00:40:24.680 same sort of ubiquity? There are no other characters in Shakespeare of any gender who

00:40:30.840 you see their entire life depicted on stage the way you see Margaret. Margaret first appears

00:40:35.140 in Henry VI Part I as a very young woman, basically a young teenager who's newly wedded to the King

00:40:41.600 of England. And she last appears in the chronology of her life in Richard III as a very old woman.

00:40:48.160 very near death. And there is no other character who you get the entire sweep of their life like

00:40:53.680 that. So in that respect, she really is singular. Yeah, there are a couple other characters in these

00:40:59.160 history plays, like Richard III himself, he shows up as a young man and then you kind of see him

00:41:03.780 age across the place. So sometimes theaters will do this thing where they'll take all these history

00:41:08.680 plays and perform them in like a marathon, you know? Or The Hollow Crown that you mentioned

00:41:12.740 on television where they'll have um that was that's a series from about two years ago they

00:41:17.440 had Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III uh Tom Hiddleston was in it and so the way they did it

00:41:22.320 was they had you know one actor play those characters all the way through you know make

00:41:25.600 it like a series essentially and whether or not Shakespeare actually saw me as a series you know

00:41:30.080 scholars debate but um but so there are a few that you see like that but none that you really see

00:41:35.220 with the way that you do with Margaret um and you know and I don't want to take anything away from

00:41:40.040 the other wonderful characters that Shakespeare wrote in, you know, non-serial plays, you know,

00:41:45.520 people like, like I, you know, mentioned Cleopatra or maybe Macbeth or Othello, you know, these

00:41:50.860 wonderful characters, but you see them in portions of their lives. You don't see them really age over

00:41:55.280 the course of many, many decades. And you see, you know, one thing Shakespeare's also talking

00:41:59.580 about is the toll of war on people over many years. You know, we see decades and decades of

00:42:06.120 civil war. A war within

00:42:08.100 England and war between England and other territories.

00:42:10.820 And he uses characters like

00:42:12.140 Margaret and some of the other

00:42:13.960 there are some other mourning widow characters 0.52

00:42:16.000 that show up in Richard III, other queens

00:42:18.260 whose husbands

00:42:19.960 have been killed in the wars.

00:42:21.780 And he's trying to figure out

00:42:23.400 what effect does this have on the population

00:42:25.800 when countries have been at war for so long.

00:42:28.260 And Margaret is, I think, one of the strongest

00:42:30.040 voices of that.

00:42:32.220 I think that's a good thing to keep in mind

00:42:34.140 when looking at Shakespeare's plays

00:42:36.160 is just like the audience,

00:42:37.480 you know, and it's often,

00:42:38.460 it's illiterate people

00:42:39.720 or people who have very hard lives

00:42:43.000 who are going there.

00:42:43.960 And it's just like,

00:42:44.420 let's just have a nice time.

00:42:45.460 Let's get our mind off of things.

00:42:46.400 But one of the things

00:42:46.860 we're getting their mind off of

00:42:47.940 is the fact that the country

00:42:48.840 is still getting, 0.88

00:42:50.360 like their parents,

00:42:51.360 their grandparents,

00:42:52.020 like would have experienced

00:42:53.100 war and famine and like plague.

00:42:55.940 Well, I mean,

00:42:56.300 how many times in your book

00:42:57.060 did they say the theaters

00:42:57.840 are shut down because of the plague?

00:42:59.860 And like Shakespeare has to pivot.

00:43:02.040 Like the people are living

00:43:03.120 these rough lives so being able to sort of see a play where they feel themselves maybe represented

00:43:08.880 in this grieving in this mourning yeah we've also been through stuff like that that's interesting

00:43:13.480 even though it's like what are the events like margaret's life was 100 or 150 years before the

00:43:20.040 plays something like that yeah it's like 14 1430s to about the 1480s um and shakespeare's writing

00:43:27.860 almost exactly a century later in the 1580s and 1590s yeah and to them that wouldn't be that long

00:43:32.880 really yeah it would be like if you're watching a miniseries or something about world war one

00:43:37.040 um you know maybe your great grandparents great great grandparents spending on your age would

00:43:42.000 remember it but um you know also these are a lot of stories that have been passed down they

00:43:46.400 recognize some of the names but not all of them and another really fabulous thing and why so many

00:43:52.840 people are interested in elizabethan theater is because these playhouses were a place where you

00:43:58.140 can really see social classes come together and you can see people exploring things you know

00:44:02.620 kind of moving you can really understand in looking at this era in theater history how

00:44:08.380 theater would interact with society how people would respond to it you know people would make

00:44:12.480 a day of it they would go to the bear weddings as well you can see like where it was and you know

00:44:16.760 we have we have a lot of evidence as to where it was in the city of london where these theaters are

00:44:20.740 so you can you know they were really really a part of people's lives and that's something kind

00:44:25.920 of new in the end in like shakespeare's day theater hadn't been around for a hundred you know

00:44:30.220 um this these type of you know narrative dramas they were like only a couple decades old so they

00:44:35.420 were like really a place that people came together to experience stories together um whether they be

00:44:40.740 you know historical stories or stories that Shakespeare or any of the other playwrights at

00:44:44.520 the time had adapted from you know classic myth or something like that you talk about this in the

00:44:49.560 book as well I'm just like everyone read the book but like if you could also just explain

00:44:53.660 the sort of like to wrap things up a bit these play like Richard III is one of Shakespeare's

00:44:58.480 best known plays, like people studying in school, it's performing all the time. Henry VI, I didn't

00:45:02.660 know, and I'm like a medium Shakespeare fan, like I just had never heard of it until it was included

00:45:09.360 in part of The Hollow Crown. Like why, why did those plays, why aren't they as popular, do you

00:45:15.740 think, other than Richard III? Well, so I think that there are a number of reasons and, you know,

00:45:20.860 part of this is just speculation, but the Henry VI, Richard III is a true masterpiece. The Henry

00:45:26.660 the sixth and richard the third also this is a point you made earlier was written by shakespeare

00:45:30.980 alone the hundred the sixth plays were the product of collaboration possibly because of that they're

00:45:36.260 somewhat uneven there are these like amazing scenes often many of them margaret scenes um but

00:45:41.180 they're also like a lot there's like so much complexity like this duke is taking on this

00:45:45.620 cardinal and it's like it's some of it is kind of dull and so you have this amazing character

00:45:50.400 persisting through these plays but the plays themselves are very uneven and the other thing

00:45:55.200 that some scholars have thought about is like, the Richard III play has a very clear male

00:46:03.400 protagonist. The Henry VI plays do not have a clear male protagonist. They have a really weak

00:46:09.540 king. And then they have this like really powerful female character, which for like, 0.98

00:46:15.100 you know, directors or starring actors who wanted a vehicle for themselves.

00:46:20.140 It's not necessarily like, who are you going to play? Are you going to play the antagonist who

00:46:25.040 get stabbed to death? Or are you going to play the like really weak king? Are you going to play

00:46:29.140 any of the other like assorted dukes? You probably can't play Margaret, who's definitely the most 1.00

00:46:34.160 interesting figure. And so the Henry VI plays in that respect are just not attractive to a lot of

00:46:39.280 like theatrical managers or leading actors in the 18th and the 19th centuries, and even in the early

00:46:45.600 20th century. And it takes really like, you know, a number of things, but in part the sexual

00:46:52.780 revolution, to really get more interest in the leading female characters of Shakespeare.

00:46:58.680 And in particular, in Margaret, you start seeing famous actresses like Peggy Ashcroft

00:47:04.960 and Helen Mirren, and later Sofia Canedo playing Margaret only in the late 20th century.

00:47:10.500 Once we've had the second wave of feminism and the women's liberation movement, and much

00:47:16.080 more interest in female characters than there would have been in, say, the 18th to the 19th

00:47:21.940 centuries, when it really was about like, which king am I, you know, leading male actor going to

00:47:26.740 play? It's funny that it's called Henry VI when he is such a, he's not the main character.

00:47:33.320 Yeah. Well, and that wasn't necessarily the title that it would have had in Shakespeare's time.

00:47:38.220 Those are titles that were applied when, like after Shakespeare's death, when his collaborators

00:47:43.120 are creating the first folio. And so that's where you get these titles, Henry VI Part I, Henry VI

00:47:48.500 part two, that's not even the way that Shakespeare necessarily even thought of them. But it just

00:47:53.340 kind of becomes this convenient shorthand for like, oh, yeah, this is the play about this king.

00:47:57.880 This is the play about the next king. It becomes easy to track them historically. But yeah,

00:48:02.860 Henry VI is like an interesting character, but he's not heroic. He's not like someone who,

00:48:09.620 he's like thoughtful, but he's not decisive. He's no Richard III.

00:48:14.580 and something that we track toward the end of the book is in recent decades there's been a lot more

00:48:21.580 interest in paying attention to female characters from drama um and so there have been a number of

00:48:27.640 productions that are about margaret where an actress or an actress and a director want to

00:48:32.880 take on the character so they will cut cut and paste and they'll take all the margaret scenes

00:48:37.300 and they'll make their own drama and they'll give it a new name um sometimes it's called queen

00:48:41.840 Margaret or Magriad or something. And they'll create a play that's just about her by cutting

00:48:47.880 and pasting three scenes from, you know, four different plays together. And they'll, you know,

00:48:51.800 use a couple of scenes that she's not in to fill it out and make it a whole narrative.

00:48:56.760 And, you know, it's actually not a new tradition. People have been chopping and cutting and pasting

00:49:00.760 Shakespeare's plays since right after his death. You know, people are always cutting characters,

00:49:05.160 you know, putting in musical interludes or something. Adaptation is part of the game.

00:49:08.600 i mean all of shakespeare plays were adaptations um you know he didn't have any original ideas he

00:49:13.000 was he was adapting all these other stories um and so that's something that's really kind of

00:49:18.060 exciting about margaret in recent years is people are saying all right you know uh you know and in

00:49:24.920 when i'm in drama class you know in drama school uh you know the boys are going to go off and play

00:49:29.420 hale and richard iii and and you know maybe the girls would want to you know play margaret she's

00:49:33.760 one of these great roles you know it's like um and so there's been an effort to reclaim her

00:49:38.780 really in recent years uh which has been really cool and exciting and some of these plays have

00:49:44.280 you know really gone on some of them you know were experiments that you know we were not as

00:49:48.420 successful but you know we're really seeing her kind of especially in the 21st century um you

00:49:53.420 know when there are you know people are kind of comparing her to different uh you know figures in

00:49:57.480 in real world and in real life politics um uh because she you know she is she is a leader you

00:50:03.120 You know, and some people are comparing her to like, you know, Margaret Thatcher or something, pre-21st century.

00:50:08.560 And she's kind of taking on a new life that way.

00:50:11.600 It's interesting.

00:50:12.500 I'm just thinking because, you know, when the plays came out, Elizabeth is the queen and everyone's used to this kind of powerful figure.

00:50:18.420 And then when the plays start being sort of reassessed, it's like you've got Margaret Thatcher and then you've got like Hillary Clinton.

00:50:23.440 So it's like you need to have women in power for people to accept a play about women in power.

00:50:28.420 I don't know. 0.99

00:50:29.000 Something like that.

00:50:30.060 I'm just percolating.

00:50:30.820 Yeah, and as we know from Elizabeth's reign, as we know from, you know, Thatcher and Clinton as well, like, just because a woman is temporarily, you know, in the seat of power doesn't mean that we've gotten rid of every sexist trope in society, right?

00:50:46.060 You know, it's still really present. And Elizabeth leaves, you know, she dies in the early 1600s. And England becomes, you know, it continues to be a very, very sexist society where women have, you know, much harder lives than the men in those communities.

00:51:02.680 So at the time that this episode comes out, your book is it's in the world. People are able to buy it. Do you have readings and events and things that people can keep up with you? Do you have a website or what do you recommend?

00:51:13.860 Yes, we will be touring with the book. We're going to be talking at a bunch of bookstores and theaters about the book. A couple of those events will have actresses reading some of Margaret's lines. So you can see those events on our personal websites. Mine is scottwstern.com. Charlie, yours is-

00:51:43.860 In June of 2026, we're going to be in Alameda, California and Los Angeles, California.

00:51:51.980 And then in August of 2026, we're really going on tour.

00:51:55.800 We're going to be in Washington, D.C., New York, Pittsburgh and Boston.

00:52:02.280 Wow. No, that's wonderful. I'm glad that they'll be.

00:52:04.880 I love the idea of having women reading the Margaret's lines.

00:52:08.860 I think that would be not just talking about Margaret, but so people can have experience what it's like.

00:52:13.860 Yeah, you really can't like fully appreciate Margaret unless you hear the like the speeches because like, you know, she's I think she lives like a really interesting life.

00:52:21.700 And like we can describe her and I hope make her compelling.

00:52:25.120 But then you hear these really intense speeches that she gives and it's just like hair raising.

00:52:30.600 I mean, it's amazing.

00:52:32.160 I am glad that that folks will be able to experience that firsthand.

00:52:36.980 And if people are curious, you know, a lot of this lives on YouTube, too.

00:52:40.060 So you can find even some old performances from, well, I mean, old, you know, for as far back as YouTube goes, from the 1970s, 1960s, where you can see all sorts of different actors playing this role.

00:52:51.220 And so, you know, it's, you know, just hear that, hear those words embodied.

00:52:54.960 You know, Shakespeare wrote for people to speak.

00:52:56.500 He didn't necessarily write for people to read his words.

00:52:58.500 He didn't know that people were going to, his plays were necessarily going to be published or people were going to read them.

00:53:02.520 So when you hear them, it just really takes on a different, you know, takes on a different meaning.

00:53:07.100 You can really feel it in your body.

00:53:08.280 that's that's the theater person in me coming through no no that's and that's what i i have

00:53:15.120 found as well you know like studying shakespeare in school it's one thing but then when i was a

00:53:19.140 teenager i i volunteered for the shakespeare in the park festival and seeing those plays done

00:53:23.980 you're like oh this is fun this is like it's not it's so much better than just reading it so yeah

00:53:29.780 yeah and people think it's just the comedies that are fun but these history plays they have so much

00:53:35.440 they have drama they have comedy they have pathos they have there's so much action and excitement in

00:53:39.760 these plays as well because you know shakespeare he had to pay the rent too you know he wanted his

00:53:43.260 place to be successful so he'd get more commissions exactly and if you want people to go see your play

00:53:47.640 instead of go to watch the public execution then you've got to have a disembodied head you've got

00:53:52.780 to have someone carrying out a head you have a disembodied head too um thank you guys both so

00:53:58.840 much for talking with me today your book is it was so fascinating i really enjoyed reading it

00:54:02.760 And best of luck with your tour and everything.

00:54:06.080 Thank you so much.

00:54:06.700 Thank you so much.

00:54:07.560 Yeah, we're thrilled to talk to you today.

00:54:13.720 So I super recommend this book, Shakespeare's Margaret, The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen.

00:54:18.160 It's really, really, really interesting, especially if you're like me, if you had a theater kid

00:54:22.340 phase, like just getting and reading all about what it was like to perform during Shakespeare's

00:54:26.980 time and then how the play developed and how the character developed through the years.

00:54:30.500 so interesting it's a combination of like theater history and British history and Tudor history

00:54:37.640 so good so interesting everybody should read it for sure and I wanted to mention also speaking

00:54:44.180 of Shakespeare we were talking about various Shakespearean plays in this episode my favorite

00:54:49.700 Shakespeare play is one that's also not much discussed it's not Henry VI it is in fact Titus

00:54:56.120 Andronicus, which is Shakespeare's, one of his messiest plays. It was written during the era

00:55:00.240 when he was kind of co-writing with other playwrights. It's such a messy story. I love

00:55:05.700 it so much. And I recorded an episode, a bonus episode of this podcast with my friends,

00:55:10.020 Lana Wood Johnson and Alison Epstein. It's going to be available next week on our Patreon.

00:55:13.820 And if you want to listen to that, I mean, now's the time to join my Patreon. So anyone who joins

00:55:19.560 my Patreon, it's like a place where you pay a little monthly amount of money and you get bonus

00:55:25.960 stuff for that. So if you pay $1 a month, you get ad free episodes of this podcast,

00:55:31.960 Vulgar History. And if you pay $6 or more a month, you also get bonus episodes like the

00:55:36.880 upcoming Titus Andronicus discussion, as well as we have movie discussions, various different

00:55:43.180 bonus episodes are going on there. Sometimes I post videos there. And this month, the month of

00:55:47.360 July, when we're just kicking off this tutor series, you can get 30% off your Patreon membership

00:55:52.940 by using code TUTOR, so 30% off an annual membership or 30% off your first month of a

00:55:58.900 monthly membership. Either way, I really appreciate the support and I hope that I'm providing lots of

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00:56:15.020 and having a really good time. So anyway, if you want to join my Patreon, go to patreon.com

00:56:21.040 slash Anne Foster Writer for all the details. There's a link in the show notes as well,

00:56:25.520 but just use code TUTOR to get that sweet, sweet 30% off discount to join my Patreon,

00:56:30.580 patreon.com slash Anne Foster Writer. And if you love my writing, which maybe you've read my

00:56:37.660 writing, maybe you haven't, but if you're interested in what my writing is like, I have

00:56:40.560 written a book. It takes place in the Regency era. It's called Rebel of the Regency, and it's

00:56:44.960 a nonfiction biography of another queen from British history who has a bad reputation. It's

00:56:50.780 about carolina brunswick and you're available that book is available now to buy wherever you

00:56:54.940 get your books get more on that at rebel of the region c.com and next week i mean we're just

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Vulgar History - July 22, 2026

Shakespeare's Greatest Character, Margaret of Anjou

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