In this episode, Kate welcomes Scott W. Stern and Dr. Charles O’Malley to the show. Scott is a writer and lawyer who is the author of two previous books of narrative nonfiction and has written for many media outlets and scholarly journals. Charlie is a dramaturg and writer who has worked at theaters across the country.
Together, they teamed up to write a new book titled Shakespeare’s Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen. In it, they explore Shakespeare’s character Margaret, a woman loosely based on a historical figure who is the only Shakespearean character, male or female, whose entire life appears on stage. They introduce readers to her historical model, her creation by Shakespeare, and her evolution across centuries of performances to show how the character of Margaret illuminates the world in which she is created and brought to life. As they put it, her story “shows how Shakespeare’s plays have always been living collaborations among actors, directors, writers, critics, and history itself.” It seems only fitting that the book itself was a close collaboration. Scott and Charlie are co-writers, but they also began working on the book together shortly after they got married. By the time they were in the final editing stages, their twin sons had been born. We talked about how they navigated intertwined domestic and writing lives, as well as the challenges of bringing different voices and backgrounds together on the page.
Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. When you purchase books through these links, you support not only authors and indie bookstores but the podcast itself.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Charles O’Malley and Scott Stern, Shakespeare’s Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen
- Scott Stern, The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison ‘Promiscuous’ Women
- Scott Stern, There is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou
- Charles O’Malley, Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance
- Scott and Charlie’s LitHub piece on writing together: “What Co-Writing a Book on Shakespeare Taught Us About Marriage and Parenthood”
- The Internet Archive’s blog posts about the Controlled Digital Lending Program
- Sam Quinones, The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work
- Daniel Hahn, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. This is a show about how historians write history, and I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. Today's episode is a first for Drafting the Past. I got to talk to a married couple about how they wrote a book together. I'm delighted to welcome Scott W. Stern and Dr. Charles O'Malley to the show.
Charles O'Malley 0:20
We're so thrilled to be here. Thank you for talking to us.
Kate Carpenter 0:23
Scott is a writer and lawyer who's the author of two previous books of narrative nonfiction. He's also written for many media outlets, as well as scholarly journals. Charlie is a dramaturg and writer who edited a book titled Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance, and has worked at theaters across the country. Together they teamed up to write a new book titled Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen. In it, they explore Shakespeare's character Margaret, a woman loosely based on a historical figure who is the only Shakespearean character, male or female, whose entire life appears on stage. They introduce readers to her historical model, her creation by Shakespeare, and her evolution across centuries of performances to show how the character Margaret illuminates the world in which she is created and brought to life. As they put it, her story shows how Shakespeare's plays have always been living collaborations among actors, directors, writers, critics, and history itself. It seems only fitting that the book itself was a close collaboration. Scott and Charlie are co-writers, but they also began working on the book together shortly after they got married. We talked about how they navigated intertwined domestic and writing lives, as well as the challenges of bringing different voices and backgrounds together on the page. They both joined me for this conversation. You'll hear Scott's voice first. Enjoy my conversation with Scott Stern and Charles O'Malley.
Scott Stern 1:50
So, I've written two books of narrative nonfiction aimed at a popular audience, although my hope was that, you know, they would be academically rigorous. So, the first one I wrote, it emerged actually out of research that I was doing when I was like in college, it was my college thesis, and I was just really into it, and so I kept doing it full time after college, and then as I continued with my, like, got a law degree, and I became a lawyer, I kept working on it, and then it became a book, and that's called The Trials of Nina McCall, which is about a largely forgotten US government program under which the federal government and state governments imprisoned 10s of 1000s, likely over 100,000 women and girls who were suspected of having sexually transmitted infections. And then that research sort of tangentially led into my second nonfiction book, which was published last year, and it's called There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas, which is a history of sexual violence and the legal process in the Jim Crow South. And then, you know, I was kind of, after I finished drafting that, I was looking around for a new project, and that kind of dovetails, I think, with Charlie's answer here.
Charles O'Malley 2:57
So I'm a theater person, I was in grad school for dramaturgy at the Yale School of Drama, which is where I met Scott, not in the drama school, but in New Haven. So I got my master's degree and my doctorate there. Dramaturgy, for any listeners who aren't familiar, is kind of a academic and theoretical background to drama, and theater dramaturgs are kind of to plays the way that editors are to books. So people that work with either directors and reviving old plays or playwrights on creating new work. So that was what my training was in. I was writing my dissertation, which is a performance history, and I was wrapping that up a number of years ago, when Scott and I were chatting, he was finishing up the Arkansas book, chatting about next projects, and then we decided to jump into kind of co-creating a project, and that's how this book came to be.
Kate Carpenter 3:52
Well, before we dig into the book more, I do want to just know how you like to work. So, when and where do you guys like to do your writing?
Scott Stern 4:00
So, I think for this project we were trying to find a time when we could like work simultaneously and therefore you know like kind of draw energy from the other and kind of hold the other accountable and so this is a little different for me than like previous projects but the way that we did this was like we were both working largely full time jobs, you know, throughout the process that we were writing this book and neither of us is presently in academia, so the period of time when we had the most time to do the writing was after dinner. So, for a couple of years after dinner, pretty much every night we would start researching and writing. I sat on the couch, Charlie sat at a table, and we would just work for a couple hours until usually one of us would be like, you want to watch some TV, like when we were ready to call it a day. So that was largely our process until we had kids, which was very late in the process of writing this book. So I look back very nostalgically on this time when we had like these like vast, you know, hours after dinner, when we didn't have to, you know, like there was no bath time, and there was no wrangling toddlers. Yeah.
Kate Carpenter 5:08
How do you like to organize yourselves?
Charles O'Malley 5:10
Well, we started work on this. I was actually just looking at a calendar, and we started work on this project five years and one day ago. We were talking about, you know, beginning the, beginning the work, and what this would look like, and I had done a little bit of research on Shakespeare when in, during my comprehensive exams in grad school, and if you work in the theater, you're always working with Shakespeare too, so Scott had a lot of catching up to do, because I kind of had all of that theoretical and that academic background there, but when -- on that day that we started working on it, the first thing that Scott did was he created a Google shared, Google Drive folder, and that's where we kind of updated everything, and we were keeping everything saved there. We had so many, we have so, so many saved documents, we could buy extra storage on our Google account, and we would keep ourselves, or, we created this incredibly long outline for what the whole book was going to look like, almost on the paragraph level, of how this narrative was going to progress, because sometimes when you're writing, we've both written projects by ourselves, and you can keep a lot in your brain. But here we had to get everything out, you know, we had to talk through everything, because neither of us wanted to make assumptions about where the other person was, you know, whether it was me making assumptions about, oh, of course, you know this thing about this one theorist from the, you know, 18th century, or Scott, who has more experience writing narrative nonfiction, thinking about, you know, Charlie, this is not necessarily how you're going to structure this, right? So we were kind of constantly going back and forth on this, and when we were working on chapters, we would kind of basically separate section by section of the chapter, who had written what, who was going to work on what, and we'd send those back to each other, and then I'd make notes on Scott's, he'd make notes on mine, and then we'd send them back and send it back and send it back until we could put it all together in a Word document, chapter by chapter through the whole book. And so now we have these, you know, 500 page long Google Docs of all of our notes and stuff, which don't actually open because they're too large.
Scott Stern 7:05
Yeah, they crash now every time.
Charles O'Malley 7:07
Yeah, they crash every time you try to open one of these Google Docs. But then you know, after you know, a year or two of writing, it really starts to look like a book. And then we could start, you know, sending it to some people that we want to read, and to our agent, as we were working on actually moving from the draft section or the draft version to something that looks more like a book.
Kate Carpenter 7:31
How'd you keep track of all your research? Was that just Google Doc notes?
Scott Stern 7:34
So we did something that I have never done before. I don't think Charlie had ever done it before either. We created this like monster document that we called Taxonomy of Sources, and I think a lot of this ordinarily like --
Charles O'Malley 7:46
That sounds like something an academic would do.
Scott Stern 7:48
Right, exactly, like ordinarily I think you could --
Charles O'Malley 7:50
A taxonomy.
Scott Stern 7:51
Yeah, you could, like, you know, have a taxonomic structure in your head, but like we needed to externalize this because it was communicating as much as it was memorializing, you know, research. And so it is a really unwieldy document, but it served its purpose of being like, it's not like it's not as good as if I read a book and then took notes on it and put it in the taxonomy, it's not as good as if Charlie also read it, but it's better than nothing, and so we probably, you know, each went through the vast majority of the sources, we each went through them twice, basically, but it served this like communicative purpose of not just the information in the book, but also what we each considered important about the information in the book, or article, or source, or whatever it was. So it was largely through that taxonomy, and then a separate document that was this massive timeline, which I have done for all projects that I've done, because I kind of think chronologically, and it just is like you often notice these coincidences if you keep everything in this really pointillist day by day calendar, and so we could realize, like, oh, this thing was happening in 1586 and this other thing was happening in 1586 and maybe there was, you know, some influence there, that kind of thing.
Charles O'Malley 9:03
And a fun thing that I want to add about the timeline is, you know, we just, it's chronological, so we started with some really, really early dates, I think probably Edward the Third is the first person that shows up on our timeline, that's that's the 1300s and it goes all the way up until the present day, so we have things like at the end we have things like historical events that are happening, productions that are happening with people we know in 2023, 2024 and so that kind of also helped to put into context in our brain, because that's what our book does, it goes all the way from Hundred Years War up to the present, following this character, it helps put into our brains. But you know, the project that we're doing is also a part of this, this story, you know, because we can be in contact with these people, that some of the more recent people, so it's weird to see your name and Shakespeare's name at the same time.
Kate Carpenter 9:48
I imagine. What, what was it like to edit each other as you were working on, on revising and bringing everything together?
Charles O'Malley 9:56
Well, we have different approaches, to put it lightly--
Scott Stern 10:01
That's a gentle way of putting it.
Charles O'Malley 10:03
But no, but I mean, marriage is about communication, and I think that's taught us that, you know, just as much as raising children or buying a house. No, we really, I mean, we have different backgrounds, but I think that was something that we shared with our backgrounds. I, as mentioned, come from theater, and theater is all about collaboration, and it is all about putting your ideas out there and having collaborators who you trust, whether they be an actor or lighting designer or producer or an audience member, come to you and say, "This doesn't make sense to me," and that's kind of what dramaturgs are supposed to do. We're supposed to keep one foot in and one foot out, so that we can see something the way that an audience will see it. That was that was really what I brought to the process. Scott, you know, he is a writer who's worked solo for a long time, and so he, that was, he had a very particular eye for what the voice should look like, how to include different characters, how to include new characters, so he was constantly kind of like training me in that, and I was trying to, I was just trying to be open, say this is something I've never done before, I've never written narrative nonfiction like this, I was trying to, you know, really get that from him. Scott, what is your answer to this question? I'm curious to hear.
Scott Stern 11:17
Well, the short answer, that was very diplomatically put, Charlie, the short answer that we usually tell people, and it's true, is like I like editing, and Charlie likes being edited, and the reverse is not, you know, like it's not totally untrue, but like it, like those are, I would say, our instincts, and so part of this was leaning into that, and part of it was also, you know, trying to fight instinct, and so obviously I needed to be receptive to feedback, and I'm, you know, used to feedback from my agent or my editor, but it was a, you know, pretty foreign experience for me to get feedback this early in the writing process with the writing this raw. And I think for Charlie, who comes from in theater, like a more strictly academic background, I think that there was some amount of just communication between the two of us about, like, how you, as you say, like, introduce a character, and, like, what kind of information can you assume that your reader will have or understand. I remember we had this debate about whether, like, your average reader would know who August Schlegel was, and, and I was like, there's no way, and you were like, everyone knows who that is, and so I think we did end up having to like introduce him, but it was, it was conversations like that, and so I think it, you know, from my perspective, I think it, it made me a more generous writer, but it also, I hope, made the book better, because it united two different sensibilities, and so ensured that it had a kind of broader purview.
Charles O'Malley 12:45
Well, it's Schlegel, first of all. No, no, I mean, what I was gonna say is, well, something that also was very helpful is that I have a lot of Shakespeare training, and Scott was learning a lot about Shakespeare, so he was very.. it was very helpful throughout the process to have someone say, you know, we need to talk about this, you know, we need to explain a little bit more, and people aren't necessarily going to remember this. It's very helpful for our future readers, hopefully, that the movie of Hamnet just came out because it reminds people a lot about, you know, that for example women were not allowed to be performers at this time in England. This is the what it would have felt like going to the theater, and that's a lot of what we're trying to get into in this book, is to remind people about what the material conditions of theater going or art making were in this time, because they really affect the words that got on the page at the end of the day in both Shakespeare's plays, but in the other plays of the Elizabethan playwrights, and so I think that it was, it was helpful to have kind of someone who was learning what a lot of this academic, of the scholarship on Shakespeare was saying, and then that helped both of us to step back and say, all right, this is how we need to be introducing this, this is what we need to be reminding people, this is what we're introducing this here, this is what we need to remind people 10 pages later, because we want to make sure that the book is readable for anyone who has any sort of interest in Shakespeare or theater, but might not necessarily remember all of these names from The Wars of the Roses, from the history plays.
Kate Carpenter 14:22
Sure, that seems tremendously helpful. Were there other people that you turned to for feedback along the way?
Scott Stern 14:27
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the benefits of being, there being two authors of this book is that we have double the communities, so we have twice the, you know, former faculty, twice the friends, twice the acquaintances, twice the colleagues, and so we turned to a lot of people for input in ways like large and small. It was a lot of like asking people to think about a particular section or even a particular question, and like, does this ring true to you? Does this seem like a, you know, respectful way of putting this particular thing, and does this make sense holistically?
Kate Carpenter 15:01
If I read correctly, your marriage and this book are pretty closely intertwined. You've been working on this book through your whole marriage, is that right?
Scott Stern 15:10
Yes, that is right.
Kate Carpenter 15:11
Okay.
Charles O'Malley 15:11
Yeah, definitely. We, I think we got married a year before we started, right?
Scott Stern 15:15
Yeah, we got legally married in the summer of 2020 but then our, it was, you know, COVID, so our wedding itself was the summer of 2021 and we started this process in the middle there, so it was quite early in our marriage.
Kate Carpenter 15:27
It strikes me that you were learning to communicate as co-authors at the same time that you were learning to communicate as spouses, as partners. Was that challenging? Were there..how did you not kill each other, I guess, is part of my question.
Charles O'Malley 15:42
It wasn't challenging for me at all. I think that I think it was actually helpful, because I think it helped us to communicate about a whole bunch of different things, and I know that you know there are all types of relationships out there, and all are wonderful, but I cannot imagine being married to someone who I couldn't talk to about my work, and, and being able to work together on something is great. I always said I didn't want to end up with someone who worked in the theater, because you know, I need a little bit of separation from my work life, and someone needs to make money. But it's wonderful having someone who can appreciate that, and who can engage with it, and so to me this was just another way of, you know, we talk about politics, we talk about going to the movies, we talk about our friends and family members, and then we talk about the Margaret book, and that was just a really wonderful thing for us to have, and I, I really don't remember any major disagreements about the book.
Scott Stern 16:36
I mean, we disagreed on small things,
Charles O'Malley 16:38
Unless I've just blocked it out, like a lot of COVID.
Scott Stern 16:40
We disagreed on small things all the time. I don't think we had any significant disagreements, in part because we both, I think, went in with some degree of humility. You had never written a solo author monograph before. I had far less background in Shakespeare. I was like a fan, but definitely not a scholar of Shakespeare or his work or his times. I think like people often like sort of want a much more dramatic answer to this question, but no, it was, it was a quite a collaborative process.
Charles O'Malley 17:13
The real problem is that we finished writing the book in the spring of 2024 and then our twin boys were born in the summer of 2024 so that made the rest of the process more difficult, because of the whole sleep deprivation thing. Yeah, and it did make the editing process more difficult, because we now have all these, these two little, two little fellows running, well, they weren't running at first, but they're now running, and so that, that's made that process more difficult. But you know, I mean, I think that everybody has ways to work around their careers and their kids when they're trying to get their book done.
Scott Stern 17:45
Yeah, thank goodness they were born when they were, because at the beginning they just sleep all the time. If we were trying to, like, rewrite sections or make edits now, it would be like impossible. I mean, they're just so much more time consuming. I mean, we were sleep deprived as hell, but we had plenty of downtime, and now you know, kind of the opposite is true.
Kate Carpenter 18:03
I want to talk a little bit more about the book specifically, which I really enjoyed. It's hard to exactly describe this book, especially from a genre perspective, right? Because it's a biography, but it's a biography of a character who is a fictional character but also a real person, and there is some overlap between those two people, but not entirely. It's also a history of Shakespeare and his time and context, and then a history of the theater past Shakespeare. So, there's, there's a lot happening, happening in this book.
Charles O'Malley 18:34
Yeah, yeah, there is.
Kate Carpenter 18:35
It seems like that would have been really hard to bring that all together in a way that flowed smoothly, that made sense. How did you think about structuring it? I know you mentioned an outline that was almost to the paragraph level.
Scott Stern 18:48
Yeah, we, I mean, it became pretty clear early in our conversations that we wanted a narrative, so not like thematic chapters, like this is a chapter on, you know, Margaret's anger and anger in Shakespeare characters, and this is a chapter on her love and love, and, like that, that is certainly a valid approach, but we were going for more of a narrative, and that kind of lent itself naturally to a chronology, and so we felt that the thrust of the book, or like the meat of the narrative, really needed to focus on the birth, so to speak, of this character, and then her like maturation over the centuries, and so we devoted quite a lot of the book to the late 1580s early 1590s which is the period when Shakespeare's writing these plays, many of them with collaborators, and that allowed us to devote a chapter to say, like, here's what it would have been like as you're, as Shakespeare was writing Henry the Sixth, part two. Here's what was happening in London at the time. Here's what his, like, collaborators were doing. Here's what the Queen was doing. And then we would simultaneously narrate the play on the stage, and that would give us an excuse to talk about the play and its themes and its text without, you know, sort of devolving into a less narrative critical analysis of the play, so we were kind of smuggling a lot of like attempted critical insights into a broader narrative, and it was only fairly late, so that, so that you know, structure that I just described, starting with the quote unquote birth of Margaret, and like the 1580s and 90s, and then tracking the character over the, you know, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and into the 20-first centuries. That was true from our, like, our first outline. One of the only significant things that changed was the addition of the first chapter, providing like a kind of, like, a biographical precis of Margaret of Anjou, the historical figure, in the first chapter. We had something kind of like that, but it was different in the first chapter, and I think it was important just to give readers some grounding, and it also worked with the chronological approach, because that was the 15th century, and then the, you know, sort of the Shakespeare narrative starts in the 16th century, so that was our approach was this kind of, you know, narrative story, but with a way to smuggle in critical dissections of these four plays, which are so, which are the, you know, primary source for the character of Margaret.
Charles O'Malley 21:13
We did have a north star through this whole process, and that is that this character is fascinating, and she stands out in Shakespeare's body of work. She appears in four plays. She does things that no other character does. She talks so much, and she's one of the first characters he's written, and she is one of the most complex characters he's written, right up there with people like Othello, Iago, Lear, Hamlet. She's right, right up there with them, and there's so much of her, and so we really wanted to get into this character, how she's depicted, what influenced the writing of this character, because she's not necessarily one of the characters that people are going to remember from high school English or even college English classes, because people don't really focus on the history plays, but there's a lot there, and actors have always been drawn to this character, not just because she's the biggest female role in all the canon, and you know, half of all the actors want one of the roles that they can play, but because she's unusual, and so we wanted to find every different way we could get into this, whether that be the things that inspired Shakespeare and any collaborators at the time, or things that have inspired all of the actors and directors, dramaturgs, editors, producers, etc. who have touched the character in the centuries since, and so, knowing that, knowing that we always just wanted to be coming back to this character to figure out who she is, that helped us to determine what was important in terms of the biography of the real person, in terms of biography of the creator, Shakespeare, and the biographies also of all of the other people in the intervening centuries who've touched her.
Kate Carpenter 22:52
Were there things that you wanted to include that didn't fit into that structure?
Scott Stern 22:57
Oh my god, I held such a candle for the peasant uprisings of the 16th century. I drafted so much text, and just could not find a place to, quote unquote, smuggle it in. I tried really hard, and Jack Cade was like this really cool peasant rebel in the play Henry the Sixth, Part Two. I tried so hard, but it did not happen.
Charles O'Malley 23:20
Yeah, I think there was--We also had a lot more context about the Hundred Years War, which is the conflict between England and France that led to the Wars of the Roses, which is the Civil War in England, and it just wasn't necessary for the narrative. The one thing that I really regret not having in the book is there's this twentieth century production that had happened in Honduras, and it was this repertory production that lasted for decades, performed by the indigenous people of this island, and it was just an incredible story. And we actually have photographs from that production, but we could not get the legal rights to publish them, and you know that's just the way that you know publishing works and copyright works, and I would love to include the photographs because they're so evocative, but you know that's that's the way that uh that copyright works. In some in some future world, maybe we can we can find a way to publish those.
Kate Carpenter 24:15
To take a closer look at their approach to writing. I asked Scott and Charlie if they would read an excerpt from chapter two of their book, so we could talk about it in more detail. Here's Charles O'Malley reading from chapter two of Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen.
Charles O'Malley 24:32
"Just weeks before this play debuted, a young man strode through the seedy, vibrant London suburb of Shoreditch. His name was William Shakespeare. This provincial youth had only recently arrived in the big city—or, more accurately, its lively outskirts. And it was likely there, working alongside friends, that he began to create the character of Margaret. To the young Shakespeare, this place must have seemed like the center of the world. Born in 1564, he had come of age in Stratford-upon-Avon, a leafy, provincial market town about a hundred miles from the country’s capital. His father, John Shakespeare, was a farmer’s son on the make; he had risen from ale-taster to high bailiff (essentially town mayor) in just six years. Will’s mother, Mary, had come from a family of means, with ancestors who had fought in the Wars of the Roses. Young Will had thus grown up with access to literacy, to education, and even to theatre, which his father, as bailiff, had overseen. Yet sometime around Will’s fifteenth birthday, for reasons still somewhat obscure, his father’s reputation and finances began to crumble. Will apparently left school. He grew up fast; over the next five years, he would marry a local woman named Anne Hathaway, who would bear him three children. His life in the years immediately following this swift family formation is so mysterious that the period is known as his Lost Years. Almost all that scholars can say for sure is that at some point between 1585 and 1592, the young man, now in his twenties, likely left his wife and small children and found his way to London—and more specifically to Shoreditch—intent on joining the theatre.”
Kate Carpenter 26:06
So this is admittedly a little bit of a random passage, and one thing I have trouble with in picking passages for people to read in really well-constructed books is that it's hard to just pull a little bit out, right, because everything kind of builds on each other. So anyway, I just say that to say that there are lots of wonderful passages in this book. I picked this one partially because I want to talk about voice. You know, this could have been a sort of dry theater history book, and it is decidedly not. It's very engaging. Honestly, I like Shakespeare, but I'm not like a person who reads a lot of Shakespeare scholarship, and I wasn't sure that I would be that into this book, and I really enjoyed it. Couldn't stop reading it. I was wondering how you thought about voice while you were writing, especially as you know, combining two voices and trying to kind of have a shared way of writing, but I also wondered, did you have an ideal reader in mind? Did you think consciously about the voice of this narrative?
Charles O'Malley 27:02
Yeah, we talked a lot about it. Well, we both read each other's work a lot, and so we knew we knew we both know how the other one writes. And there are times when I even go back to the book now, and I think, "Oh, that's a word that Scott definitely put in there. I don't think I really used that word." But we actually read a lot of the same books as we were starting, and we talked through them. We would refer to them, you know, we'd say, "Oh, here are 1, 2, 3, and four books that I like that I would like to talk about." And Scott said, "Here are a couple more," and we'd read them or listen to audio books of them, and we talk about what they liked, what we did that they liked, and what we didn't like, and you know, what was important to us is that it be accessible to a reader who has just a passing interest in this, so in terms of things like tone, structure, vocabulary of our sentences, we wanted to make sure that everything could really flow, and that there wouldn't be hard cuts. In terms of our ideal reader, I mean, we really, I thought a lot about my colleagues in theater, and you know, would this be something that they would think a little on the academic side, or would this be something exciting? And then I thought a lot about my friends and family members outside of theater, people who go to the theater sometimes, people who maybe would have, as I mentioned, like seen or read Hamnet or Shakespeare in Love, have like a little bit of background there, but really want to, are comfortable with kind of going on a journey, so we did think about it, certainly in novelistic terms, in terms of how, you know, from page one to page 10 to page 50 you're going to become more and more involved in the story.
Scott Stern 28:37
Yeah, I would just add that, I mean, as Charlie mentioned a bit ago, like part of the process for us of writing this book was divvying up chapters into like chunks, and then we would each draft independently, and then exchange and edit the other's work, and so in that process there was some amount of smoothing our respective voices to try to make a unified authorly voice, and part of that was like excising certain ticks that we each have. Like I tend to overuse weather as, like, a scene setting tool, like it was a dark and stormy night kind of thing. That's a lot more difficult to do if you're writing about the 16th century, but you know, as we got into the 19th and 20th centuries, that became possible in the way that I've done it in previous books, which is largely like using like newspaper or almanac accounts of the weather, but we couldn't do that too much, or it would just start sounding weird. Charlie, you know, tends for certain formulations, like he makes a lot of use of, like, not x, but y, and so we were trying to, like, both of those sort of things, like weather or that formulation, like both of those are fine, but if it were only in, like, every other section, or every other chapter of the book that would start to seem really jarring, so a big part of our process was just trying to create a voice that was true to each of our independent voices, but also like read as unified and not like disjointed in some way.
Charles O'Malley 29:55
And again we're working toward the same goal too, so it's, you know, we want to really bring to life a lot of history that we're going into, you know, we describe a couple battles of the Wars of the Roses, you know, but also we wanted to talk a lot about Shakespeare, I mean, I'm sorry, a lot about theater through the years, so we wanted to try to really get people to know what it was like to see restoration drama, to remember that, for example, up until recently, you know, for hundreds and hundreds of years, theater was lit by flame, by live flame, and there was no amplification. So, we need to, you know, think about that. What does that look like? How does that feel like? What are the social.. when does the social breakdown of an audience change from either in Shakespeare's time, when it was kind of all classes leading into the 18th century, became something where people would sit in various parts of the theater. I mean that happened in Shakespeare's time too. Sit in various parts of the theater based on class. And then we move into 19th, 20th century. By the end of the 20th century, into the 21st century, we're seeing theater that is experimental, avant-garde. So, when we're talking about those productions, we want to talk about, you know, what the texture and feel of that theater going experience is like in the same way that we did in the 18th century, in the same way that we did, you know, in Elizabethan times. So, you know, trying to recreate that theatrical experience, which performance historians always have a really hard time with, because performance is ephemeral. We have to find a find a way of trusting the sources that we have to recreate what these artistic experiences are like.
Kate Carpenter 31:21
Yeah, that's interesting. Because I also want to talk about how you really bring places and people to life in this book. There is that texture, as you said, Charlie, that kind of that focus on physical detail that really makes you feel almost like you were there in the theater or walking the street here with Shakespeare. Did you have strategy? I mean, how did you look for those details? How did you make sure that it felt that way in the reading?
Scott Stern 31:44
Yeah, so I mean, as I said, like I think that there are certain narrative nonfiction tricks that, like, I, and you know, many people have made use of in the past that are much more, for me at least, applicable to, like, a 19th or 20th century, for instance, US history, than it would be to like the 16th century, when like we don't have a huge supply of like diaries, or you know, there weren't like newspapers that have survived in the same way, and so it's harder to say like on a particular Tuesday in May this exact thing was happening with this exact person, and the weather was such, and so we looked for those kinds of details, where we could find them. One excellent source was archeological studies of the places where Shakespeare lived and worked, because of just the sheer amount of attention that scholars and enthusiasts have paid to Shakespeare and his times and collaborators over the centuries, and we know a whole lot about, like, the Rose Theater, or the Theater, which was the name of a theater, and, like, we, you know, there have been, like, archeological studies of the Rose, for instance, that give quite a lot of information, like the exact dimensions, how many people it would have sat, what the acoustics would have sounded like, like, were there literally rats living in the thatches in the roof, so that kind of detail comes from archeology, which for me was a new source. I think for people who work on older periods than I usually do, that's a more common source. As we got into the, you know, 19th and 20th centuries, all of a sudden we start having the profusion of newspapers and theater reviews, and, you know, like letters and diaries that are, we have more easy access to that give us that kind of detail, and so you know we were trying, we were basically using different methods to summon those kind of descriptions for different time periods into the, you know, 20 late 20th and early 21st centuries when we have YouTube recordings of like a bunch of the plays, so pretty much every major production of these plays post, you know, World War Two, we have a recording of that, it's either up online or you can get access to it, and so we're able to say, like, she turned and she looked and she did x in a way that we can't, for like, you know, what it would have looked like in 1650 or 1590.
Kate Carpenter 33:59
It strikes me that one of the advantages you have as co-authors who also live together is that you're not just writing together but sort of separately, but that your whole milieu is is part of the writing process, that you could be discussing the book over breakfast, or while you're doing dishes, which I imagine could also drive you crazy, but, but it seems like that must have helped in sort of combining your voices and making it go smoothly, because you kind of were like workshopping things as you were just engaging in your daily life. Was that, did you find that was part of the practice, or did you try to separate when you were working on the book, and when you were just living.
Charles O'Malley 34:44
I'd say we talked about it all the time, we were, you know, really, really in conscious communication about it, in the same way that we would be about gossip about our friends, or something, you know, something that from our family members, something. I mean, we certainly, we had to set aside time because we needed time that we could both work, especially because we're not, as Scott was mentioning, in an academic position where we have dedicated time in our, in our, in our Monday to Friday for us set aside for, for our research, but yeah, I mean, it was, it was really constant. It helps that you know all of our sources are in the same home, you know, it's like I'm looking at them right now. They're across the room from me, and so we were just kind of, yeah, constantly, constantly churning and thinking through these things. We didn't have to, like, email each other in the middle of the night, because we could just talk in the middle of the night about, you know, this new source that had come in, or something like that.
Scott Stern 35:36
For me, at least, so much of, like, the insight I'll have about, like, oh, this is what I, this is how I should structure it, or I should bring this detail in, happens like when you're not specifically thinking about it. It's when you let your brain go to other ways, so you know the cliche is like you think of things in the shower, which for me personally happens all the time, or like I'll think of something right as I'm falling asleep, and I'm like I always have this conversation with myself where I'm like, will I remember that? Like, of course, I'll remember that, or do I need to write it like write it down, and the answer is I always need to write it down, because I never actually, no matter how like brilliant it seems, I'll never actually remember it unless I write it down. But that kind of thing happened even more since there's so much of our sort of quotidian domestic lives that we share, and so it's like, you know, whatever, washing the dishes or walking home from whatever one of us will have an insight and just like sort of blurt it out to the other, and that that kind of serendipity was shared, which was unexpected for me, but was really nice, and I also think was generative, because it gave two people to remember the one random comment that was blurted out in the middle of the night, and so it doubled our odds of success.
Kate Carpenter 36:42
There are a couple of practical questions I want to ask you about, and actually, Scott, this one is more for you. So, if I'm not mistaken, it was your agent who then took on this project to sell, right?
Scott Stern 36:51
Yes.
Kate Carpenter 36:52
I have sometimes talked to authors who worry about, you know, like having a brand and the type of book that they write and sell, and that agent, like some agents that matters to them, was that something you thought about with this book? Because it's a little far afield from your previous work.
Scott Stern 36:52
It is. Yeah, it was. It was something I thought about, because I mean, I was, even before we started writing this book together, I was working on a different project, which is much more in my wheelhouse to 20th century history of the US, and I'm still working on it, and I'm hoping that will be my next project, and this is very far afield from that, but, like, you know, for me, the way I thought about it was one of the benefits of not being in an academic position is that I have a ton more freedom, I don't have to think about, like, what will get me tenure, I don't have to think about a 10 year clock, and like, you know, the kinds of books that I write are for a general audience, but they're not like mega bestsellers, so I'm not as concerned about, like, the-- I want something to be of interest to a large number of people, and I want a publisher to buy it, but I don't need it to sell a million copies, and so it doesn't need to, like, I'm not going to shape the book proposal, I'm not going to abandon a proposal that I care a lot about because an agent or an editor thinks that a different proposal will work better. Like, for me, the project that I'm passionate about is more important, and I'm fine, you know, not making much money from this. So, for me, it was like I found this really cool, as Charlie, I think, mentioned, like, you know, this was something he was kicking around, even as, even before he started his dissertation, and I kept encouraging him to turn into a book, and he kept demurring, and so finally I thought the only way to get him to do it was, I said, "If you really want, I'll co-write it with you," and that was what eventually convinced him that we should do this. Because I thought this was such a cool idea, I, you know, I had come across Margaret in a high school English class when we read Richard the Third, and thought she was really cool, but I hadn't - I hadn't ever read the Henry the Sixth plays, and I certainly hadn't seen them on stage, and so I wasn't even aware that there was that much more there to this character, and I was particularly struck by the fact that, like, so many people, like, you know, lay people have never ever heard of her, and like, what a cool story, and also what a cool formal experiment trying to do a like a cradle to grave biography, but of a fictional character, someone who never actually existed. It would pose different sort of methodological challenges to my previous projects. You would have a different kind of archival approach, and so all of that struck me as like fun, and so I was less concerned about like diluting my brand, because my brand is not that valuable, and so I was comfortable, you know, doing this, and I'm just really glad I did, because you know, I learned a lot, obviously, about the subject matter, but also about writing and co-writing, and my own approach, and my own foibles, and I think it puts me in a better position as I return to independent work, which Charlie is as well.
Kate Carpenter 37:55
What's your approach to marketing this book? I think I read in a piece that you published that the whole family is going on book tour and to promote the book. How has that gone?
Charles O'Malley 38:06
We're fortunate to work with great marketing and publicity folks at Norton, and so you know we're trying to find all the different audiences for this book, whether they be through Shakespeare or theatrical circles, but also people that are interested in stories of powerful queen figures or European history. We are going on a book tour in August, where we are taking the toddlers with us, and very excited about that. Hitting up some East Coast - we live on the West Coast - hitting up a number of East Coast locations, we're doing some West Coast ones separately, as kind of day trips. So, if everyone listening could say a prayer for us, that it goes well, because we're going to be taking them around to a whole bunch of different cities, but really excited, exciting. We're doing some events also with with guests. We have actresses who are going to be performing with us at some of our book events, performing some pieces from plays. We're going to be in Los Angeles. Our event is going to be co-produced by the Pasadena Playhouse, so we're hoping to get, you know, a little bit of cross promotion there from our theatrical connections.
Kate Carpenter 39:38
Fantastic. I love that. Not many historians get to have people perform Shakespeare at their book event.
Scott Stern 40:01
I know. It's so cool.
Charles O'Malley 40:01
I mean, it's always something that, yeah, that Shakespeareans will say over and over again. These plays were not written to be read, they're written to be heard, and so when you hear, when you hear someone jump into it, and you hear the words aloud, it really just kind of shakes you in a different way. Scott and I were just listening to the audiobook. There's a fantastic narrator who does the audiobook, also a performer, and, I mean, I mean a stage actress, and she really just jumps into the sections of Shakespeare in text, and it just kind of shakes you out of your seat when you're listening, so it's really wonderful to, you know, it's-- because theater is an interactive art form. It's wonderful to have that, those kind of added things in there.
Kate Carpenter 38:06
That's awesome. I had another sort of practical question, which is that I noticed in your acknowledgements you have a note talking about the importance of the Internet Archives lending library, which is is now defunct, but how important it was to your to your ability to research this book, and how important it is, or was, for people, maybe outside of institutions, to be able to access scholarship. Can you talk a little bit more about how that that resource was so crucial to writing this book?
Scott Stern 41:54
yeah, so the Internet Archives Controlled Digital Lending Program, I think it was called, was something that was greatly expanded right at the start of COVID, and it basically gave access to a whole bunch of books, you know, some that were centuries old and some that were relatively recently published, and you could borrow them virtually, like on the internet, for an hour, and you could renew that, so you could, you know, functionally you could read through a whole book and take notes, and then, and then the book would go back, and you would lose access to it. And that was, for two people who were doing this without, you know, the benefit of like a academic library system with which we were affiliated, and without the benefit of, like, research funding, that was absolutely vital. I mean, there are so many books that you know, works of Shakespeare scholarship that were like published in the 30s or whatever, that are like kind of obscure, and so, like, our local libraries, interlibrary loan program, couldn't capture it, and sometimes we couldn't even find them, like, on eBay, but they were there on the Internet Archive, and we could, they were one click away. That kind of a resource was absolutely vital to two people working outside of the tenure system. And it is, I think, a real, it is a real shame. And I have stronger wording that I won't use, that some large publishers basically colluded to shutter it under threat of litigation, actually under force of litigation. I think it's a real blow to that kind of scholarly inquiry, because it really democratizes the access to knowledge. I know of some other non-fiction writers and journalists who have said they couldn't have written their own books without this resource, and I'm kind of nervous about, like, you know, I've already come across the challenges of relying on alternative means of finding these, finding these books, now that this resource is unavailable for my next project.
Kate Carpenter 39:38
The challenges of sort of for independent researchers or people who don't have the academic affiliation of accessing information, is yeah, it's such a challenge, and I think that the more people who don't end up in tenure-track jobs, don't have that kind of resource, the bigger this problem is going to be. I want to, before, before we kind of wrap up, I want to know some, some about your influences. So, I wonder if you could each tell me the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten.
Charles O'Malley 39:38
I have a whole lot. When I was in, when I was in grad school, we would do a criticism workshop, where we'd all read each other's works every Wednesday for three years, and that really just broke you completely down and built you completely back up. I still have the words of my old department chair in my head, which is thinking and writing are the same thing. You cannot write clearly if you can't think clearly, and vice versa. You need to absolutely know what you're going to say before you start writing. I know many people would disagree with that. Many people, you know, have their own, their own, their own processes, but for me that is just absolutely key to whenever I, you know, open a Word document.
Scott Stern 39:38
For me, it was my professor I was very close with when I was in college, Glenda Gilmore, who was a fabulous historian and writer, and she had a number of sort of aphorisms that she would use that I think about all the time. One was just a phrase that she used, called the big so-what. Like, what is it that, you know, why do we care about this thing? You always have to be foregrounding and thinking about the big so what. Another Glenda-ism was like, know your characters, who, going into it, or even for like a purely academic work or a journal article, who are who is a reader going to care about, and the final one was, I actually don't remember what the exact wording of this was, but it was basically like, if you are struggling to put something into words, and then you know, just try to, like, basically explain it to someone else, or explain it out loud, and whatever words you use, even if they're less formal, just use those, because that's the actual way that you'll get your meaning across.
Kate Carpenter 46:00
I like those.
Charles O'Malley 46:01
Can I throw one more in?
Kate Carpenter 46:02
Please.
Charles O'Malley 46:02
Scott mentioned, Scott namedropped one of his professors, so I will name drop one of mine as well. Gordon Rogoff, who has left us, but he had.. this is, this is a helpful piece of advice if you're thinking about the arts, maybe not, not so much for your other listeners: Always follow the money. All questions in theatrical history, in the arts can be traced to who is paying, who benefits financially. So, certainly in performance history, in art history, something we need to think about. Certainly, the case in Shakespeare's London.
Kate Carpenter 46:32
I think that applies to everyone. I don't think that's just arts.
Scott Stern 46:36
Yeah, I do as well.
Kate Carpenter 46:38
Awesome. I'm also wondering, Who you read, are there books that you, that you turn to for writing inspiration? Can you recommend any?
Scott Stern 46:45
I personally try to narr-- try to alternate a novel and a work of non-fiction, so I, you know, I think some people are squarely in one camp or the other, but I am not. But I, I, the book that I read recently that I've been recommending to absolutely everyone I meet, including literally last night to my mother, who was very questioning, was The Perfect Tuba by Sam Quinones. It's so good, and I know nothing about the tuba, and frankly, don't, didn't care very much about the tuba. It's a non-fiction book about the tuba and about people who play the tuba, and about the search for the perfect tuba, of which there are apparently two, and they live in Chicago, and they're called the York Tubas. And I just cannot recommend this book highly enough, even if you think this sounds silly or inane, like just give it a shot. Sam Quinones is this like really interesting, strange journalist who's written two books about the opioid epidemic, and was like, I need a lighter subject, and like it's so cool, anyway, it's a.. it really, to me, is a model of like the right writer can make any subject interesting.
Charles O'Malley 47:47
Yeah, I'm gonna promote a recent book about Shakespeare as well. I swear, there's more to me than Shakespeare, but a recent publication by Daniel Hahn called "If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation" just came out from Knopf. It's about the process of what it's like to translate Shakespeare, you know, kind of taking him as one of probably the most translated English writers, and he thinks about all these different world languages and all of the different things that a theatrical translator has to think about, because it's again not just for reading, it's for writing, it's for it's for hearing and performing, and I did the audiobook for that one, and then a whole cast of people reading, performing the Shakespeare text in all of these different languages from around the world. So that one just come out a few months ago for other Shakespeare enthusiasts or performance enthusiasts, people who want to think about the translation from from page to stage. If This Be Magic.
Kate Carpenter 48:40
Sounds really interesting. All right, I understand that you guys are not working on another book together after this one. I know you're still in the middle, of course, of promoting this one, but I'd love to hear how you're thinking about what comes next.
Scott Stern 48:53
Yeah, we joke, should we like do like a follow-up, like Lady Macbeth, the biography or something, but I think maybe the market's a bit saturated. Yeah, so my next project is going to be I very much hope a history of the fight for a right to a clean environment, especially in the 60s and 70s, like a whole range of people, like farm workers and auto workers and housewives and academics united behind this idea that just as the civil rights activists had said we have a right to be free from discrimination, or women's liberation activists had said we have a right to be free from gendered violence, that everyone had a right to be free from pollution. And so it is a history of that idea, and the fight, and the failed fight for that right, focusing particularly on a very small town in West Virginia, where a group of pretty poor people rose up against Union Carbide, which was one of the largest companies in the world, and was blanketing this small town with unbelievable quantities of pollution, and they took on Carbide, and they basically won, even though they didn't get the right that they fought to write into law.
Charles O'Malley 50:01
I've actually just signed a contract on my next book, so very much looking forward to that. Staying in the theater world, though, coming up to the 20th century, it's tentatively titled Theater for a New Age: Queer Performance in 1970s San Francisco, and it's looking at the era, the kind of decade between Stonewall and the onset of HIV aids in San Francisco, and what the kind of cultural production of the city was at that time, how it was, how it was this kind of avant-garde work that was combining lifestyle and performance. There was kind of no dividing line from a number of these, these radical queer artists, and looking at how it's different than what we think of when we think of queer art, which is very New York focused. So this is kind of the California look at that. So very much looking forward to that project coming out in a number of years, I'm sure. Yeah, very much looking forward to that, but also, you know, never say never, life is long, hopefully, if we're lucky. So I think that Scott and I could definitely work on another book together, but right now our joint project is definitely the kiddos. We'll see what the future holds, definitely.
Kate Carpenter 51:03
Well, I'm sure the kids give you plenty to talk about, also. But both of those books sounded like books I want to read, so I look forward to hearing more about them. Charlie O'Malley and Scott Stern, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past. Thanks for sharing how you wrote this book together.
Charles O'Malley 51:17
Thank you so much.
Scott Stern 51:18
Thank you so much.
Kate Carpenter 51:19
Thanks again to Scott and Charlie for joining me. Their book is Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen. You'll find the link to it, and all the other stuff mentioned in this episode, in the show notes. If you want to keep up with the podcast and all the exciting developments coming this year, subscribe to the newsletter, go to draftingthepast.com and click on newsletter. Until next time, remember that friends and spouses don't let friends write boring history.
