Vulgar History Podcast
Was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady A Witch? (with Mary McMyne)
December 11, 2024
Hey everyone, it’s Ann from the Vulgar History podcast. Before we get to today’s episode, I just have an exciting announcement to make, which is that I’m going to be in Halifax, Nova Scotia, towards the end of December. I was thinking if there are Tits Out Brigade members who live there or live near there, that we could do a little meetup. So, I’m just doing a little survey/RSVP, if you’re interested in joining this meetup, the first one in Canada, go to VulgarHistory.com/Meetup and just fill in a survey for what day and time might work best for you and maybe we’ll get the chance to hang out, sip some hot chocolate and just, like, gossip about our favourite oldey timey scandalous bitches. So again, just go to VulgarHistory.com/Meetup, if you’re interested in joining me for a casual hang in Halifax, Nova Scotia, towards the end of December.
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Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster and today I’ve got an author interview because this is a book that I think most of you, all of you, are going to be really hype about. It is a historical fiction novel with magical elements that is called A Rose by Any Other Name. The author is Mary McMyne, who you might know from her previous book, The Book of Gothel, which was a witchy book taking place in, like, medieval Germany.
Anyway, this book, A Rose by Any Other Name, it’s taking place in a time period that many of us know very well. It’s a time period of when Shakespeare was around, Queen Elizabeth I is in power and the main character of this is a real tits-out lady named Rose. Mary is going to explain more about the story and the real history that inspired it, but I do just want to let you know before we listen to the episode that we’re going to be talking about astrology, we’re going to be talking about queer history, we’re going to be talking about witchcraft. It’s just, like, major things that this podcast embraces and is all about, are all in this book. I think you’re going to also really love hearing from Mary and then I think you’re all going to really love reading this book. So, here’s my chat with Mary McMyne, author of A Rose by Any Other Name.
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Ann: So, we are joined today by Mary McMyne, author of the historical fiction novel, A Rose by Any Other Name. Welcome, Mary.
Mary: Thank you for having me.
Ann: Yeah! So, Mary, explain who the Dark Lady is.
Mary: So, the Dark Lady is the, sort of, muse of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The sonnets themselves, when you read them in order, which not a lot of people do, they tell a story. The ending sonnets are all about this woman named, who scholars call the Dark Lady. And the sonnets are often taught, like, these are really romantic sonnets, that Shakespeare was very much in love with her, and he was kind of writing these sonnets against the popular love sonnets at the time that idealized this fair, standoffish, cruel woman. He was writing to this woman who was sort of the antithesis of that. She had dark hair, dark eyes, skin that was darker than this idealized woman. The way I was taught to read them growing up was that he was romanticizing her.
But when I was reading the sonnets as I grew a little bit older, I noticed that there were some lines in them that seemed rather suspect, and they weren’t as kind as the way that I had been taught to read them. When you read them in order, and when you read them all together, you find out that there’s, like, jokes that she gave him and the Fair Youth (the other muse in the sonnets) venereal disease. There are lots of comparisons of women’s bodies to hell in them. And all this stuff is sort of in the subtext and for a long, long time, scholars were just sort of explaining all of that away and saying, “Oh no! You know, these are great sonnets.” And some of them are romantic, but others of them kind of read like… the Dark Lady in my book calls them “the spew of a jealous lover,” as if they had a terrible fight and he’s kind of, like, writing off these really angry poems about her.
So, the more that I read them, the more that I wanted to know if this was a real woman, what would her story be? What would she say about all this from her perspective? And over time, I looked more closely, and I thought of this character, this woman, who wanted to do this exposé against Shakespeare and what he was really like.
Ann: And that’s what your book is. Like, A Rose by Any Other Name is… Her name is Rose, and she is telling her side of the story.
Mary: Yes.
Ann: And this is all really, and you talk about this in your, I think it’s in the afterword in your book, just kind of the history that this is based on, but it’s a lot based on the sonnets themselves, like, you’re pulling information from there to build up this character. So, what was that like? Going through the sonnets, just trying to find any hint of like, “Oh, she plays this instrument” or like… What was that like, forensically examining them to build a character?
Mary: I really had a great time with that. You know, I’m a, I’m an English major and I have a sort of love-hate relationship with the sonnets. Like I said, some of them are pretty beautiful, but they’re kind of paired with these other ones. So, I went through, I read the sonnets in order about three times, and I was sort of taking notes on who she might be. I would write the notes about what he said and then I would jot down notes about, like, what the truth would be. [laughs] And that was a lot of fun. The book was conceived sort of like an angry correction. It was a lot of fun to write. So, there’s a lot of humour to it but it was actually the most delightful thing that I’ve ever written because I got to play a lot, you know?
I would take the details… Like, one of the first sonnets talks about her playing a virginal and the speaker wishing that he could be the keys beneath her fingers because he wants her to touch him so badly. Another one that everyone sort of knows is “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” and in that one, we get her physical description. And then they also tell a story as a whole and I wanted to work that into the structure of the novel. Only about 25, a little over 25, sonnets are about her, the rest are about this, the Fair Youth who is Shakespeare’s other muse and I wanted the novel to be sort of like that where, you know, most of it was telling Rose’s story and then Shakespeare played this, sort of, smaller role that she’s, like, subtly, and then more obviously taking him down. [laughs] So, it was sort of like a subversion. It was super fun. Rose is a super fun character too.
Ann: Well, and talk about Rose and the whole witchcraft plot.
Mary: That actually comes from a line in the sonnets and also, like, all of the references to hell in the sonnets. But there’s this one line that he asks, “O! from what power hast thou this powerful might” and he’s talking about, like, her control over him and that sort of gave me the idea, along with all the reference to witchcraft in Shakespeare, to sort of play with the ideas about witchcraft that were popular during Elizabethan time, or that were popularly understood, not really popular.
Ann: Yeah. Can you talk about what— Because this comes up in your book, like, how witches were… You know, like, Shakespeare writes them in his play and it’s like, “Ooh, this is creepy and sexy.” But in real life, if someone was accused of witchcraft, what was that like?
Mary: So, the Elizabethan era, they had lots of conceptions of magic, but witchcraft was one of the most reviled. It wasn’t the most dangerous time to be accused of witchcraft, but there were laws against witchcraft at that time and you could be imprisoned for it.
Oftentimes, the people who were accused of witchcraft, not just in Britain, but all across Europe were people who didn’t fit into society and people who, a lot of times they were widows who didn’t have the protection of a husband and maybe, like, the family wanted the land back that the widow had control of. Or they would be people with differences that people didn’t understand, and they would be accused. Or they might be… maybe there were unexplained deaths, there was, like, a sickness that plagued cattle and then a woman who was unpopular in the town, or maybe someone who was being supported by the church or by the town, they would accuse someone like that of it, kind of scapegoat her. The penalty was death, but it didn’t often happen at that time. Like, it was possible, but it wasn’t the most… There were other periods in time where people were constantly being burned and hanged but that sort of came later.
Ann: Yeah, no, like Scotland under James. But what I found really interesting about that, and this comes across really strongly in your book, is there’s kind of this, sort of like, witchcraft is illegal and whatever, but everyone’s into astrology. Like the queen, Queen Elizabeth has an official astrologer and your book has, like, so much astrology in it.
Mary: Yeah, yeah. So, the way that I like to write my books, they’re historical fiction, but they have speculative elements. They’re sort of, like, light speculative elements that become more prevalent as the novel wears on. I always write the magic as the beliefs of the period come to life. So, in my first book, it was in medieval Germany in the 12th century and so the witchcraft that people believe in then is the way that people would have believed it at the time.
So, when I first got the contract for this book, I proposed that I would write a retelling of the sonnets from the perspective of the Dark Lady and my publisher put in the contract “Magic infused story behind Shakespeare’s sonnets from the perspective of the Dark Lady,” and so, I had to figure out how to infuse the book with magic. It was actually pretty intimidating because there are so many different forms of magic during the Elizabethan era that people believed in. So, there’s astrology, there’s alchemy, there’s herbalism, there’s flower magic, they even sort of believed in music as being like magic. So, I wanted to try to figure out a way to incorporate all of that. I had to read about, like, the history of magic to try to figure that out and it turns out that astrology is, like, the umbrella sort of magic behind all of that.
Alchemy is based on awakening elements in metals or in minerals, all these different parts of elements that are controlled in some way by the stars, that have larger influence of some stars than others. And of course, there’s astrology, and there’s summoning magic, which would also be more fortunate at certain times in the heavenly year than others. And then even herbalism was based on these sort of elements within plants that were you know, one plant would be more Martian and the other would be, like, influenced by Venus. So, I just tried to incorporate all of that in the book, you know, in a subtle way and that was that was a lot of fun, too.
Ann: Yeah, like, were you looking at star charts and things, like, of the time?
Mary: Yes. Okay, so I really nerded out with star charts. [laughs] Every single star chart in the book is true. There’s an online astrolabe that you can use to, like, back-calculate what the stars were in any period. So, when Rose casts horoscopes, it’s actually based on, like, she casts one for Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, who is the candidate for the Fair Youth that I went with in the book, and that is actually based on his birthdate and on the place where he was born. It also references her chart. She has a real, you know, in my head, she has a real birthdate and that is her real chart. Her character is based off of the chart too, Shakespeare’s character is based off of his chart. Henry’s character really matched with his chart, but I didn’t plan that. [laughs]
Ann: Well, that’s why it was all meant to be! The charts are all true!
Mary: Surely. Yeah, it was it was that’s one of the parts of the book that was so much fun. I’d been interested in astrology; I’m very interested in the history of magic and so I was interested in it. But like, to learn to read star charts in the old-fashioned way, like, it was super fun with an ephemeris and all of that.
Ann: I just want to say because this episode is coming out, you know, in this lead-up to a time when people are buying a lot of books as presents, there are so many astrology people out there and I feel like this would be a great gift for those people because they could then, like, double-check your readings, you know? And like, the fact that you’re not just making it up, that you did that research, I think would appeal to a lot of people who are into that.
Mary: Yeah, yeah, it was it was probably not necessary [laughs] but it was so much fun. That’s how I roll.
Ann: So, in terms of astrology, too… And like, your book is very much like, this is Rose’s story, Shakespeare is kind of there, it’s not, like, her and him in lockstep for the whole book, he shows up very later on. But also, in the same sort of way, you’re subverting… There’s the character of John Dee who I’ve never talked about on this podcast, but I know our mutual friend, Allison Epstein is a big fan. And in here you talk about John Dee, but also John Dee’s wife. So, I guess first, can you tell people if they don’t know who John Dee is, like, who is that? And why was he cool?
Mary: So, John Dee was the official astrologer who did elective astrology to help Queen Elizabeth choose the date of her coronation. He was also an alchemist, also a mathematician, he did a lot. He was very famous during his period. There are classical paintings of him, you know, in a black cap and long, black robe at his home casting alchemical experiments.
Ann: Does he have a long beard as well? I just want to picture it. He’s, like, Merlin vibes.
Mary: Yeah. He looks like Merlin. In the paintings he does, you know, who knows what he was really like. But he was, you know, long black robes, doing an experiment, he’s dropping some sort of powder, there’s fire beneath it and the court is looking on. This is the legend of John Dee.
The truth of his life was that astrology was really popular at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign but as fear of witchcraft and fear of the Queen’s life and different kinds of magic became more and more prevalent, his fortunes in England waned. There’s a point at which he sort of stopped getting as much money from the Queen and had to do other things there and even travelled across the sea to Europe with his, sort of, grifter scryer, Edward Kelley, to go try to entrance other rulers of countries to pay them to do alchemy and discover the philosopher’s stone.
Ann: He reminds me of, sort of like, more oldey timey, Rasputin sort of guy. Just kind of like, very charismatic, very like mystical, very like, “Oh, I’m just going to go be friends with like the monarch and see how that does.” And then he had a wife and she’s in your book.
Mary: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I researched John Dee, and he had a very intricate diary. The entries are not super long. They’re pretty short for every day but he kept it for, you know, years at a time where he wrote down what happened that day and the important things. And there hasn’t been, I don’t think there are many portrayals of her in fiction at all, but there’s a really sad story about something that happened between them, also with this guy, Edward Kelley, who, I don’t know if maybe I should talk about that… Do you want me to?
Ann: Well, you mentioned he was a grifter and that is intriguing to me.
Mary: Yeah, yeah. So, John Dee, one of his big magical projects was trying to talk to angels to get advice on how to achieve alchemical enlightenment and also turn metals into gold. He searched throughout his life for scryers who could actually contact angels. He had a crystal ball, he had a showing stone, like, this black Aztec mirror sort of thing and they would try to contact the angels in there and get advice.
So, Edward Kelley was the scryer who John Dee thought was most successful. He was a real asshole, he wasn’t very trustworthy, and John Dee knew that; they had a very rocky relationship. But he put up with it because Edward Kelley was able to contact the angels, and Edward Kelley even helped him write down the angelical language that the angels spoke in. But Edward Kelley was constantly getting arrested. In that painting I talked about, he actually has ear flaps over the place where his ears would have been, he’s standing in the background, but he has ear flaps over the place where his ears would have been because they were cut off as punishment for something that no one knows what he did, I think it was in Lancaster. So, this guy, arrested in England, later when they go to Prague, he stays on and John Dee and him have an argument that we can talk about. But Edward Kelley stays and then soon is imprisoned by the emperor because he’s constantly promising things that he never follows through on. And later, John Dee would even be like, “This guy, he couldn’t deliver. He was lying. He was just a grifter.”
Ann: And what does that have to do with the wife?
Mary: So, I imagine that Jane Dee must have really hated Edward Kelley because this guy was always at their house, always locked in her husband’s study, trying to summon angels [laughs] and convincing John Dee that he was. And like I said, he was well known to have this very difficult personality.
And then later on, whenever they were overseas in Bohemia, there’s an entry in John Dee’s diary that says that… He talked about his wife and Joan, Edward Kelley’s wife, and it says something like, talking about Kelley’s wife, “She came to us and we rushed not from her.” And there were a lot of rumours about what happened at that time. Basically, what historians say happened is that Edward Kelley got really frustrated with John Dee and in order to, kind of, break off relations between them for good, he convinced John Dee that an angel had told Edward that the two of them were supposed to share everything, even their wives. And John Dee, at first, he completely balked at the idea and Jane definitely balked at the idea. But Edward Kelley, there were additional conversations with angels [laughs] and finally, John Dee was convinced and then the wives were sort of coerced to go along with this and there was an assault. Rumour had it that later, her young son was conceived around that time and some speculate that that was Edward Kelley’s son and not John Dee’s. And then after that, pretty soon after that, they all split up and everybody went their separate ways.
So, it’s a pretty horrifying story. I was researching John Dee and most of what you read about John Dee, I think there are a few fictional portraits that portray him in a negative light, but historically, most of what you read about John Dee is, like, “Poor John Dee. He was the astrologer for the Queen and then his fortune waned and at a certain point he was even convicted of witchcraft for doing a sort of astrology that wasn’t allowed.” And then I read about this, and I was like, “Why does no one talk about this? This is horrible.” I wanted to write it from her perspective. So, I wrote John Dee actually— Rose is an astrologer, she casts horoscopes for people, and she does rituals that are healing both physical things that her mother does to heal ailments, but then Rose and her mother also do this ritual that helps women overcome hurt. So, Jane hears about that, and she comes to Rose, and I show her explaining what happened and then Rose and her mother helping her start to heal from it with a ritual.
Ann: Another aspect of your book… I appreciate that the elevator pitch of your book is like, “What’s the Dark Lady? What would her story be?“ Shakespeare, again, is in this book, but this is not like the love story of Shakespeare and Rose. He shows up quite late in the book. The love story is a different love story, it’s a sapphic love story. Can you talk about that love story, but also what research you did about queer people in this era? Because Shakespeare, the whole Fair Youth, people speculate that that was him in a male-male relationship too.
Mary: So, I’ll talk about the fair youth sonnets first. There’s a sequence of sonnets, there’s three sections of them. The first 17 sonnets are, like, the speaker trying to convince this Fair Youth to get married and have children and there’s a lot of speculation around those being a commission that were paid by someone. And then something happens at Sonnet 18 and it really turns from this very formal argument to try to convince this youth something, to get married and have children, it turns to being really a love story. And the Sonnet 18 is a really beautiful sonnet. It’s, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” and I love the way that first sonnet is, like, a question. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Almost like he’s very tentative about asking, “Can I do this?”
And then from there, the sonnets show things like the speaker staring at the ceiling at night, wishing that he was around the Fair Youth, just longing for him. Others of them show this jealous relationship between the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady. So, just like people for a long time tried to say the Dark Lady sonnets were romantic, people tried to say for a long time that the Fair Youth was just a friend because the word “friend” does appear a few times in the sonnets. But when you read all of them, it’s very clear that the speaker is falling deeper and deeper in love and the sonnets, as a sequence, are definitely a bisexual sequence of sonnets.
So, because of that, I definitely wanted to write Shakespeare as bisexual. There’s a lot of play with gender in his plays, and sexuality, and that was something that I was definitely drawn to. So, in order to write that story, and in order to write Rose’s story, I wanted to portray queer people in Elizabethan England, and I wanted to let Rose have a romance of her own that was similar to the Fair Youth where she was struggling with falling in love with someone of the same sex. So, from that, I created the idea of Cecily, who is the main love interest in the book, and sort of the person who Rose is having a healthy relationship with. [laughs] It’s based on true love as opposed to this really rocky, intense, and at times toxic relationship with Shakespeare that happens later. I wanted to write their relationship to be sexy, but I wanted it to be deeply problematic. So, Cecily is Rose’s respite and true love, even though it takes a while for them to admit their feelings and be together.
So, in order to write both of those love stories, both Shakespeare and the Fair Youth, and Rose and Cecily, I did need to research queer people in the Elizabethan era. And there’s a whole lot about homosexual relationships, you know, love between men and sex between men. There were laws on the books that that was illegal, there were people who were imprisoned for it. But there aren’t a lot of references to lesbian relationships at the time. So, I had to dig into feminist and queer scholarship to, like, find references to it in letters, you know, where one woman would write to another, and you could definitely tell that they were in love. And again, there weren’t a lot of references, there weren’t any laws on the books.
Ann: Yeah, I’m trying to remember, I forget what time period it was, but we’ve talked about this in the podcast before where it’s like, people writing the laws, they didn’t want young women to get pregnant out of wedlock, basically. But they wouldn’t have thought that a woman and another woman would have sex, so they wouldn’t make a law about it because that would, presumably, generally, not result in a child outside of wedlock. So, it’s kind of like, who cares?
Mary: Yeah, yeah. I mean, or our mutual friend Allison said she doesn’t think people could conceive of sex without a penis. [laughs]
Ann: Yeah! Which is not to say that these relationships didn’t happen. But like, the male stuff, like there’s so many, like there’s laws and writings about that. But women, it’s just kind of like, “Meh!” Exactly, exactly. Like if people just can’t conceive sex without a penis, then it’s just like, well… So, there’s not a law but then it’s not written about, but we know it was happening. So yeah, so you just had to kind of dive into what was that like.
Mary: I had to read between the lines in letters and sort of get the idea. There are books that I read about this just to sort of get a feel for how the relationships would have taken place and how they would have been received at the time.
Ann: Well, and I’m almost thinking like, I’m thinking of Shakespeare’s plays. And like you mentioned before, there’s so much gender play and stuff in those, but you know, like in Twelfth Night, there’s the sequence where Viola is in disguise as a man, and then Olivia falls in love with her. And she’s like, “Oh no!” And that’s— Well, it would have been a man playing both roles in Shakespeare’s time, which adds a whole other level of things to it, but like, the fact that those plays were popular, like, the audience was aware that same-sex attraction could occur because that’s part of the humour of the plays.
Mary: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely. The one for a really long time, my favourite play was As You Like It, and the names… One of the things I tried to do with the book was pull things from Shakespeare’s plays. I know as a writer for me, I do not, you know, I write fiction, I do not write novels that are true, I’m not my main characters, but I always draw inspiration from my life. I wanted this story to kind of show, like, what the inspiration for certain aspects of Shakespeare’s plays might be. And As You Like It has Rosalind and Celia, and they’re one of the most famous bisexual characters in Shakespeare’s plays and that, or potentially bisexual or through subtext bisexual, however you want to look at it, and that’s where I drew Rose and Cecily’s names. And yeah… They’re portrayed as cousins in the book, but there’s a line about them being “As close as Juno’s swans,” which, you know, adds a whole layer there.
Ann: Yeah. So, I do want to emphasize for everybody that your book has got astrology, very well researched astrology, your book has got queer stuff in it, your book has got a sapphic love story, and also Shakespeare stuff. So, I feel like a lot of the listeners are, like, those are their three main things. So, this is the perfect book to be talking about on this podcast. And it came out— How long ago did it come out? Over the summer?
Mary: It came out this summer, yeah. In July.
Ann: And have you heard from readers, like how they’ve responded to it?
Mary: Yeah. I mean, people were really excited about the fact that I was portraying Shakespeare in a way that was more realistic and less glorified than a lot of people have done. There’s an apocryphal story about Shakespeare that someone wrote down in his time that he basically stole one of Richard Burbage’s groupies in a way that was pretty roguish. And people like that, you know, Shakespeare is sort of… I’m trying to think of how to explain it.
Ann: You show Shakespeare being sort of like a dirtbag instead of a great man of history. I appreciate that too because I think he was and to pretend that he was this, like, fantastical, legendary, iconic person. It’s like, “No, he was a shitty person.” Like so many people, like we all are in ways, but I mean, like he had a wife, but that didn’t stop him from fucking around with lots of people, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t write good plays.
Mary: Yeah, yeah. And his early plays are really problematic in the way they portray women. I think he gets better at portraying women as his life goes on, but this is taking place at that time. He really had to be a dirtbag in order to write these sonnets. And people are excited about the idea that the book focuses on her, you know, like you said, it’s not her love story with Shakespeare, it is her own story and how she got to the place where he wrote this story down in the poems.
Ann: Well, there’s this whole, I’m sure you know, there’s this whole sort of genre of fiction that’s like “The wife of so-and-so, or “The daughter of so-and-so,” where it’s just, like, taking a famous man in history and then writing a novel that’s like, “But what was his wife like?” And so, I like that your book sort of isn’t that it’s not called like, I don’t know, “His muse” or whatever, it’s just kind of like, well, who is she as a person? And her involvement with Shakespeare was not the defining function of her life and I appreciate that.
Mary: Yeah. Yes, definitely. I think at one point in recent history, those books were, like, a good way to get us started talking about women in history and thank goodness we’ve come further than that and we can talk about, you know, the lives of women, the secret love lives of women, the ambitions of women. And that’s another thing that people are really excited about with the book. Rose wants more than anything to be a musician and that’s the reason she goes— Well, I won’t spoil it, but there are other reasons she goes to London, but that’s why she has a dream of going to London is that she wants to be a musician, she wants to be known for her art and she has her own drive.
Ann: I also appreciate the way that you’re, that she, Rose, that you portray her very upfront about her sexuality, there’s been this, I don’t know, by the time this episode comes out, there’s been an ongoing discussion that I’ve been reading on social media, talking about how women sometimes in historical, I guess especially historical romance, which your book is not, but in historical fiction inaccurately showing like, “Oh, women didn’t know what sex was. Women were so sheltered, and shouldn’t we go back to that today?” is, like, the terrible conversation where your book is just like, “No, people had sex. People knew this stuff.” Women, like all people’s stories were not the same, there were some people who might not have known stuff, but I like the portrayal of Rose as somebody who just, like, is sexually active and she’s unapologetic about it, and she’s just going out there doing her thing like a lot of women will have been throughout all of history. I appreciated that.
Mary: Yeah, yeah. To say that there weren’t women who were unabashedly sexual is a very strange way of looking at history and to say that, you know, I don’t understand that at all because people are people, you know? There’s so much evidence, you know, women have sex drives. Even in the period, there was a debate over, like, the unhealthy, strong sex drive of some women and there were even astrological explanations for why some women were that way, that their humours were out of balance. But obviously, that was all very natural. Yeah, that was one of the reasons that Rose was a lot of fun to write. She does a lot of things that are subversive, and she doesn’t apologize for it and she’s complicated and she has flaws. I loved writing a woman like that in a historical piece.
Ann: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that is so— It’s just funny we’re talking about this because I was just reading this, this discussion yesterday. I think Courtney Milan, the romance novelist, was just sort of explaining that, like, women in history have not always been pure, delicate flowers and it’s weird to presume that of every… Like, there are certain tropes in romance novels that people lean into and that’s fine but one of the points that she made that I think we’ve talked about in this podcast before too is if women were inherently supposed to be submissive and non-sexual, then it’s like, well then why are there so many laws forcing women to be like that? Like, if that was naturally how women were, why would there have to be laws forcing that?
Mary: Right, there are even so many jokes in Shakespeare’s plays about cuckoldry, you know, about… And then there’s Taming of the Shrew, which I really, once upon a time, this is the story of my life with Shakespeare’s stuff, like, I loved Taming of the Shrew as a young person because like, oh my god, strong woman. But then as a much older, I had to go back and reread it because one of the things I played with is that Katherina is sort of the inspiration for Rose’s mother and Rose is also part of the inspiration for her as well. And I had to go back and read Taming of the Shrew, and parts of it are really funny and the relationship between Katherina and Petruchio is at times, I hate to admit it, it’s almost compelling, like, their banter is really witty and there’s a magnetic attraction between them that’s fun to read. But when you get to Act IV, it is like a primer in gaslighting, like, it is so disturbing to read Act IV in, you know, in the year of our Lord 2024, like, oh my god, that is a scary thing to read. But again, in that play, Katherina is this strong woman and there’s a lot of, like… I think we were talking about sex, and I sort of went off the subject, but… [laughs]
Ann: No. So, it’s interesting to think about, like, with Shakespeare’s plays, like they’re so widely discussed, they’re so widely read, but like you mentioned… So, for instance, in the sonnets, like you can see the changing relationships between him and the Fair Youth, between him and the Dark Lady, if those were in fact his experiences and not, like, a meta-narrative that he was experimentally doing. But in his plays, like you said, you can see the female characters, he starts writing better female characters if you look chronologically at the plays that he’s writing. And so, it makes sense to presume maybe he had more interactions with different kinds of women, and he found inspiration in that and he’s like, “Oh, women can be different kinds of people.” And so, that’s kind of a bit of what he gets from the relationship with Rose in your book as well, which is funny to me, the reverse… I’m very familiar with the movie Shakespeare In Love which is, like, a very different Shakespeare love story with a very blonde person. But it’s funny to think, like, how he finds inspiration in that and then in your book, it’s a much more like down to earth how he finds inspiration in… Yeah, not just in this pure, beautiful love story, but it’s kind of like toxic, weird, messed up love story.
Mary: Yeah, yeah. They meet in a brothel. [laughs] She is playing at a brothel, and they meet there, and it is one of the things that I tried to write, was that, like, strangely compelling but sexy relationship but also disturbing relationship between Petruchio and Katherina. I wanted to show, like, how they could be attracted to each other at first but then it slowly goes awry.
Ann: Yeah, yeah, like so many relationships do in life.
Mary: Right.
Ann: So, your book is called A Rose by Any Other Name and it’s available all over the place. Actually, do you know, like, a lot of people listening are in, like, US and Canada, is it is it in other countries too? Or do you know?
Mary: Yeah, it is in North America and there’s a world English version as well. So, you can get it in Great Britain, that version is also published in Australia. So, you really should be able to find it anywhere.
Ann: In all kinds of different places. And where can people find you? Are you online at all?
Mary: I am Yes, I am very easy to find. I am at MaryMcMyne.com and then on all the social media that I am on, I am just @MaryMcMyne and I’m on Instagram, Threads, and old-school I’m on Facebook. I was once on X but no longer. And I am a very text-based person, so I am not on TikTok. [laughs]
Ann: I respect that heartily. I tried TikTok for a minute, it was not for me.
Mary: Yeah.
Ann: But all love and all respect to people for whom it is for them.
Mary: Yeah, for real. Yeah, it’s just me.
Ann: That’s perfect. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today about your book.
Mary: Thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure.
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So, as Mary said, you can find a copy of this book in most, all…? English-speaking countries. So, you should pick up a copy for yourself and/or as a present for whoever you love the most, or your enemy this gift-giving season because it’s just such a good book and everybody should read it.
So, next week on the podcast on Vulgar History, we’re going to be having our annual holiday special episode for the holidays. If you’ve been listening for a while, I’ve fallen into a tradition where we do a historical biography episode around the holidays and it’s somebody whose life is not super depressing. It’s a story that I think you’re really going to be excited by who my guest is next week and you’re going to be really excited about the story. It’s just kind of like, I know that this is a time that some people are stressed out, some people are feeling lots of other emotions so Vulgar History is here for you with the story of somebody who overcame all of life’s problems. Also, next week, it’s a person who did a lot of stabbing and I think you’re going to like that.
In the meantime, in terms of gift-giving season, there’s lots of Vulgar History things that you can ask to be given by people who are giving you gifts, or that you can give to people who are fans of the podcast or if you just want to confuse somebody who is not yet a fan of the podcast. So, some things you can consider are… I do have a Substack, which first of all, you can join for free. Like, I just post free newsletters. That’s cool. That’s fine. You can do that. We’re at VulgarHistory.Substack.com, it’s where I post kind of, like, feminist rants and biographies of women in history and stuff like that. And/or if you want to get a paid membership to that, you can! Actually, if you get a paid membership right now, the annual membership is 50% off, which works out to something like $4 a month, if you want to support me and the podcast and my newsletter in that way, or if you want to gift that to somebody, what a nice gift that would be.
You can also support the podcast on Patreon. First of all, for free, I’m posting content there for all the free members. I see you, I respect you, I love having you there. I post sort of value-added content from the episodes, like pictures of the people that we’re talking about and stuff like that, poll questions, links to interesting articles you would like. That’s all available to all the free members at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter.
And then, if you want to buy yourself a paid membership, guess what? It’s 30% off if you want to become a paid member of the Patreon. So, $1, less 30% a month, you get early, ad-free access to all episodes. And then for $5, less 30%, you get access to the bonus episodes as well. So, that’s Vulgarpiece Theatre, So This Asshole, and also The Aftershow. I’ve just posted a new episode of The Aftershow where I’m talking with friend of the podcast, Allison Epstein about a movie that she and I both had to excitedly yell about to each other. It’s the movie Conclave about the elderly men in the Vatican scheming to be who’s going to be the new Pope. It’s such a good movie. Anyway, if you want to hear me and Allison talking about that, that’s available to all members of the Patreon at the $5 a month or more level. So, I know I’m throwing a lot of information at you right now, but basically, go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. If you want to join for free, you can; if you want to get a free seven-day trial, you can; if you want to subscribe for the annual thing, you use code “VULGAR” to get 30% off your annual subscription to my Patreon.
Also, at that $5 or more a month level, that’s where you get to join the community Discord, which is where Tits Out Brigade members are providing emotional support for each other, sharing pictures of our cats, and our dogs, and our other pets, recommending books and movies and stuff. It’s just like a giant group chat and that’s available to anybody at the $5 a month or more level. You can also gift a Patreon membership to somebody. So, you can ask your loved ones to give you a gift subscription to Vulgar History. And that’s the thing you can do. You go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter/Gift and that takes you to the thing to get a gift subscription.
Also, our brand partner, Common Era Jewelry, an amazing company that I love supporting. I’m really excited to continue working with them. And actually Torie, the owner, she’s got some really exciting new designs coming out next year and I’m really excited for when we get to tell you about those. So, Common Era Jewelry is a small business, it’s a woman-owned business that makes beautiful heirloom jewelry pieces inspired by classical history, classical mythology. Where we connect with them the most is women from history. So, their collection includes pieces with women from mythology like Artemis is there, Clytemnestra, Hecate, like, Medusa, I think she was recently posting that ever since the results of the recent American election, there’s been a real uptake in people getting Medusa-inspired pieces, which I like that energy. I like that, “Let’s just turn some people into stone with our snake hair” energy. Also, there are real women from history who have talked about on this podcast, like Hatshepsut is there, Anne Boleyn, Agrippina, Cleopatra, Boudica. Their pieces are available in solid gold as well as in more affordable gold vermeil. And if you’re buying something for yourself, or if you’re putting this on your wish list for someone to buy it for you, make sure they know that you can get 15% off your order from Common Era by going to CommonEra.com/Vulgar or using code “VULGAR” at checkout at CommonEra.com.
And then of course, for the Tits Out Brigade member in your life, and maybe that person is you, there’s Vulgar History merchandise, which is available for Americans at VulgarHistory.com/Store. Or if you’re outside the US, go to VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. We’re talking about “The Friend hath need of this,” or whatever that saying is; we have that on tote bags, on T-shirts. We have the Peg Plunkett’s Pub, we have the beautiful “Vulgar History: Not taking history seriously since 2019,” crew neck, like, varsity style shirt. We have Frances Howard “Titties Outies.” We have John Knox, the ghost of John Knox saying “Whoooores.” It’s just lots of inside jokes. Oh, and then also the holiday design by our friend Karyn Moynihan that says “Tits the Season,” and it looks like an embroidered jumper. And the design are lots of little breast imagery. Anyway, Vulgar History merch, you can get it at VulgarHistory.com/Storee in America and VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com in elsewhere.
If you want to get in touch with me, please do, especially if you go on holiday somewhere and you see a picture of a thing that has to do with someone we’ve talked about on the podcast. We’ve covered so many people in America. I just wanted to mention, for a long time, we hadn’t talked about America, but now we have, and I’m excited that people are sending me pictures who live around some of the places where any of those people hung out. If you’re in, you know, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, where Peggy Shippen’s family is from, or whatever, send me a picture of a sign because it delights me, and I like seeing these places. You can get in touch with me if you go to VulgarHistory.com. My email address is there, or you just fill out the form, and it sends an email to me, the little form. You can also keep up with me on social media. I’m on Instagram, and I’m on Bluesky, and I’m on Threads all @VulgarHistoryPod.
And yeah, next week, holiday special, get your stabbing knives ready. It’ll be a pirate-y good time. Until then, keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.
References:
Click here to buy a copy of A Rose By Any Other Name.
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Get 15% off all the gorgeous jewellery and accessories at common.era.com/vulgar or go to commonera.com and use code VULGAR at checkout
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Get Vulgar History merch at vulgarhistory.com/store (best for US shipping) and vulgarhistory.redbubble.com (better for international shipping)
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Support Vulgar History on Patreon
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