Loading summary
Transcript48 lines
- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn Brilliant Rivals, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Many of us will know something about the brief life of William Shakespeare's son Hamnet thanks to Maggie O. Farrell's novel and the Royal Shakespeare Company's subsequent stage adaptation. But Hamnet also had a twin sister, Judith, who outlived her brother by many decades. Now it's time for Judith later Judith Quinney, to take center stage in the highly anticipated novel the Owl Was a Baker's Daughter by Grace Tiffany, who introduced us to Judith as a young woman in her book My Father Had a Daughter. In this new novel we discover Judith as a woman in her 60s, fleeing her hometown of Stratford upon Avon under the COVID of darkness, accused of witchcraft and about to embark on a perilous adventure that will challenge everything she knows. Judith Quinney lived through a time of chaos and conflict when cavaliers clashed with Roundheads and religious fervor threatened to tear the kingdom apart. In the midst of this turmoil, Judith, a midwife and apocryphary, was forced to confront not only external dangers but also the ghosts of her past. It's a story that touches on themes that resonate deeply with our world today, from religious extremism to the challenges faced by women in male dominated professions. My guest today, the author of six previous novels, is Dr. Grace Tiffany, professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama at Western Michigan University. She's edited an edition of the Tempest and translated Jorge Luis Borges writings on Shakespeare. So there is no one better placed to blend historical accuracy and rigor with a boundless imagination and to bring Judith Shakespeare vividly to life on the page. I'm Professor Susanne Lipscomb and you are listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Professor Tiffany welcome to Not Just the Tudors.
- [02:55]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Thank you, I'm glad to be here.
- [02:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What made you want to return to the story of Judith Shakespeare.
- [03:02]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Well, I wrote a novel about Judith in her youth, and I created her as a kind of oddball, sort of weirdo child and young woman. But when my original story, my first novel ended, there was still so much of her life left to go. She was a relatively young woman, and she actually lived to be fairly old, particularly for her time period. She lived to be 77 years old. So there was so much time left to go. And I thought, you know, maybe it would be interesting to see what she's like as an older woman, you know, still unusual, still a kind of eccentric oddball. Especially because the. The times that she lived through, these kind of revolutionary historical changes that she lived through in the 17th century were a pretty interesting context for the character. So I just thought, why not? Let's have Judith as a. I don't want to call her an old lady, but she kind of calls herself that. An older lady.
- [04:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Older lady, that's right. And you've talked about the idea that what we know about Judith is essentially the skeleton of her life. How did you go about filling in the blood and the organs?
- [04:12]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
I like the fact that we don't know very much about her or her brother or her family. I mean, we just kind of know the raw outlines of births and deaths and what their names were, and the rest is a blank slate. And that's good if you're writing fiction. I'm sure Maggie O'Farrell felt the same when she came to the story of Hamnet, as we know. We know he was a twin. We know he died when he was 11 years old. We don't know how. And then you can fill in the blank with your imagination. And the way that I did that was imagining a connection between her and her father wherein she had inherited her father's gift for imagination. Perhaps not quite his literary talent, but just his imaginative tendencies. And also the fact that she was a twin. I thought it'd be fun to have her, and this is in my first novel that I'm talking about of Judith and her youth, particularly in her childhood. I thought it'd be fun to have her just inventing all kinds of imaginative games, partly based on what they knew about what her father had written and just sort of cavorting in the forest of Arden and her drafting her brother to play these different roles. And in the first book, it's just this sort of fun and playful tendency that issues in a tragedy that transforms her life with the death of her brother.
- [05:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I definitely want to talk a bit more about that first book, but I suppose, first of all, kind of general question about this, which is, have you found that the medium of the historical novel allows you to get at the emotional heart, in this case perhaps the relationship between father and daughter, in a way that biography sometimes can't? When we have that absence in the.
- [05:54]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Records, well, it allows you to imagine it. And that's something that biography can sometimes do. And in the best of situations, it can do that because biographers have access to. To letters and journals and depending on who you're writing about, sometimes people who knew these people and their accounts of how these people were. And people are so interested in Shakespeare, but we don't have any of that stuff. Not only not about members of his family, but not about Shakespeare himself. So you'll find biographers sometimes trying to come up with an inner life for Shakespeare and imputing all kinds of experiences to him, when what they have to go on are sonnets and plays, which are works of the imagination. And there's something kind of borderline, I guess, not legit about taking a work of the imagination as a reflection of what was going on in someone's life, because that's actually not how the imagination works. I mean, lives feed into literary work in some way or other. But we really can't know whether Shakespeare had an unhappy marriage because there's all these plays in which people seem to have problematic marriages. I mean, there is such a thing as imagination. So if you want to get at the inner life of either Shakespeare or his wife or his children, then you have to choose fiction and you have to declare it as fiction. You have to make that distinction between biography and fiction, and then you're free to fantasize. And so that's what you do.
- [07:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So completely accepting what you say about the role of imagination, but perhaps playing slight devil's advocate. It is clear, though, that many of Shakespeare's plays have the relationship of a father and a daughter at their heart. And you can see why it's so tempting to be drawn to that as if it's a blueprint taken from life. But what do we actually know about their relationship?
- [07:50]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Yeah, I can see that. And you are right about that. And in particular, there are all these father daughter situations that are intensified because a mother isn't on the scene. And so there's this kind of direct connection that Shakespeare seems very interested in. One thing I can say is that to present fathers having kind of intense and conflicted relationships with their daughters was very conventional for comedies on the Elizabethan stage. And so Shakespeare is not the Only person. I mean, he's trying to kind of make it as a writer of comedy and he's taking plots which are largely pre existent and that kind of conventionally have a father who doesn't want a daughter to marry somebody and the daughter elopes and, you know, whatnot. But when you're writing fiction, then you can take a situation like that and make it have some sort of interesting connection to Shakespeare's relationship to his own daughters. Well, because he had two, right? I focus on one, but he had two. What we do know about his relationship with Judith is really minimal because again, we only have documents that talk about specific things happening in her life. And one thing that we do have is some commentary about her or some provisions that he made for her in a will. And we can infer from those that he had a concern for her welfare. We can infer from those that he had a little bit of a concern about a man that she had just married and wanted to safeguard her future and not knowing exactly how that marriage was going to turn out. So we can infer those kind of things because of things that were going on. And so I hope that answers your question a little bit. I mean, that's something that we do know, that's an actual document reflecting something that was going on in their family that we do have.
- [09:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you. Your first novel takes Judith into the world of the London playhouses. How important was it for you to link her life to the heartbeat of her father's creativity?
- [10:01]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
That was very important because I think that people's interest in Shakespeare's plays is the only reason that people want to read about his life at all. Because that's the Shakespeare that we have. And that's certainly what interests me as a Shakespearean. And what drew me in was not just the plays themselves, but the circumstances of their production. I became very interested in stage history and in rivalries between playwrights and actors and the conditions of performance and the building of the globe and all of those sorts of things. So I thought to make the story very interesting, it would be important initially not just to have an interesting character in Judith, but to involve her in that life and have her. And again, this goes back to my first novel, to have her see her father at work. In the later novel, it's much, much later, a later time in England when theaters have fallen from fashion. They have in fact been not outlawed, but very strictly policed, shut down by a radical, reform minded religious government. And when she returns to the London that she visited in her youth, she finds it very much changed and she has to kind of go underground into the London underworld to find theatrical things going on in memories of her father and old people that she used to know. But I'd say in both the books she's drawn to that world in whatever form it's taking in a given decade in history.
- [11:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And one of the things that seems absolutely astonishing is that the daughter of perhaps the most famous writer in the English language might have been illiterate. What evidence do we have for this suggestion? And would it have been unusual for a woman in her social position?
- [11:53]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
She may well have been. And I have to say that's something that I had to change for my character because it just didn't work. So my imaginary Judith is highly literate and we don't know whether she was or not, but. But the possibility that she wasn't. And we know of it from the fact that there were one or two documents that she signed her name to, but did not sign with a name, signed with an X. And this suggested she couldn't write her name. And if you can't write your name, you're probably not literate. And on the one hand that's not tremendously surprising because about 90% of women in, you know, say the first part of the 17th century were not literate. In England that number was lower for the upper classes. And I guess Judith was sort of somewhere in the middle of that. You know, she was kind of middle class person, but gained prestige as the daughter of Shakespeare, who, as we know, bought his way into the gentry. If she was illiterate, she probably wasn't the only woman of her circle who was. But it still is, as you say, tremendously surprising or would be because she's Shakespeare's daughter. And I don't know what to make of that. You know, that would be a very strange thing or would have been a very strange thing to be the daughter of Shakespeare and not to be a reader. So we don't know. I mean, maybe she had a learning disability, maybe she was lazy. You know, we don't know about that one. It's kind of a mystery. But I had to change it for my story, as I said, because I couldn't come to terms with it.
- [13:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That makes a lot of sense in other ways you're grappling with the social context of her life, what it meant to be a woman in this period. And I mean, the theatre of the 16th century was an almost exclusively male environment. So how did you go about writing her as a woman in that age.
- [13:47]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Well, in her youth, when I first bring her to London and theater's thriving there, I just have her go underground as a boy. And this has to do with her my invented story of her relationship with her brother, where she ends up trying to sort of be him once he's not on the scene anymore and stealing his clothes and kind of masquerading as him. And that's how she gets into the theater that way, because as we know, it was an all male institution and boys played the roles of women on the stage in her age. When she comes back to a London where the theater's not really going on anymore, at least not in any public way, she's not that person anymore. She's doing something different. She's a grown older woman. She's actually a midwife and apothecary. But she does end up reconnecting with some men who were from that time period, men whom she knew who were involved in that theater world. And I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but she gets drawn into a kind of political plot lot that is at the same time highly theatrical with an actor that she knew from that prior time. And so she is asked to play a role, but not on the stage. It's a kind of a spy political intrigue. And this has to do with the contemporary situation of the civil war going on between royalists and parliamentarians and the kind of fraught situation of the king as he was holed up in Oxford. And I find myself going on telling too much of the story. But anyway, it's a theatrical plot, but it's a political plot. And it's kind of like a spy story at that point.
- [15:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's a wonderful device, but for those who haven't read the first novel, I'm going to ask you a few questions about that so we can get some sense of Judith before we pick her up in the English Civil War. Because many listeners will know Judith's name in connection with her twin, Hamlet, who died at the age of 11. And that must have been, you know, absolutely tragic to have lived through. How did you wrestle with what little we know of these events when you were developing your fictionalized version of the family of Judith?
- [16:06]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Well, I felt I didn't need to know any more than that they were twins and that he died when they were tweens, I guess we would say, in this country, I don't know if you have that word, you know, they're pre adolescence. And then he wasn't there anymore. I mean, I felt as much as I needed to know as that happened. And Shakespeare wrote some plays about twins and that was raw material for a plot in which I could invent the manner of his death, which we really don't know, but I invented. Well, she's involved in it in a way that haunts her and that leaves her feeling guilty and not only missing a brother. And everybody knows that twins have special relationships. And so she's not only grief stricken at the loss of him, but she feels responsible for the loss of him. And that leads to her wanting to reconstitute him in some way by absorbing the person that he was into her own being and sort of becoming this boy girl. And that's what leads her to go off to London and masquerade as her brother. I was partly inspired by having a couple of really good friends that I grew up with who were twins, a boy and a girl, really, really different but really, really close. And the girl was a tomboy and the boy wasn't. And you know, they're as different as could be. And happily they're still around and they're still together and they're still close, but just sort of imagining, seeing how they complemented each other that they sort of are different ways and imagining the effect of the loss of one on the other. You know, that's a sort of a special kind of closeness and a special kind of identity that twins experience between each other. So I brought those observations to the.
- [18:14]
C
When the Moore family ditched cable Internet and switched to Zigly Fiber, they got so much more. Mr. Moore got more upload speed for next level gaming and livestreaming to the masses with reliable service. Mrs. Moore is no longer her family's IT guru, leaving her more time to stream games into overtime. Let's go. And young Mason Moore got more done quickly uploading HD product demos and video conferencing without freezing.
- [18:36]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
The numbers look good. Brad, you're on mute.
- [18:38]
C
Switch from cable Internet to Ziply Fiber and get more of what you love for $65 less per month than cable@ziply.
- [18:43]
D
Fiverr.Com Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the Colosseum? Find out on the Ancient Spirit podcast from history. Hit twice a week. Join me, Tristan Hughes as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans. And visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the ancients from history hit.
- [19:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And as you say, it's not difficult to see parallels in Shakespeare's plays with the tragedy, with his family. Has writing about Judith given you a different perspective on the plays?
- [19:34]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Probably. It's a good question. As you know, I can't know how I'd be thinking about him if I hadn't been approaching them for years, both as a scholar and as a writer of fiction. But I can say that I do talk when I teach. For example, I do talk speculatively about Shakespeare's life. The fact that he had twins, the fact that he was interested in twins, the fact that he lost one of them. And it is interesting that in a play like Twelfth Night, for example, it's the boy twin who's lost, but it's also the boy twin who's resurrected. And there's something sort of poignant about that. I mean, it's discovered he's thought to have been drowned, and he is in debt, after all. And you have this beautiful reconciliation and recovery scene at the end. And it's easy to imagine Shakespeare kind of, you know, we'll never know. Maybe he was just writing a popular kind of comedy. But it's easy to imagine him playing out his own grief and sense of loss and fantasy of recovery on the comic stage.
- [20:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Absolutely. Now, there's a large gap of time during which there's little to no evidence of Judith in the historical record. And then at the age of 31, she married Thomas Grant Quinny. How was the marriage almost immediately colored by scandal?
- [20:55]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Well, he was accused of and confessed to having fathered a child out of wedlock with another woman. And this occurred, or it shows up in ecclesiastical records, within weeks of the time that he married Judith, Shakespeare's daughter. And so it was a bit of a scandal. And it's a reason that people think that perhaps the marriage and its future was in doubt. There were a couple of other reasons for that, that they didn't kind of file their marriage request in the right way by the right date. But that may be the reason that Shakespeare changed his will in a way that didn't cut Judith out of it, but protected her behest so that somehow they weren't in her husband's name. It's some sort of legal rigmarole. And it's hard to think that it wasn't something to do with that scandal, which may not have been that unusual a thing. There was this ecclesiastical court known as the Bawdy Court. That was the slang nickname. And the fact that there even was a slang nickname like that for it sort of suggests that it wasn't that unusual for people to be caught out and reprimanded for some kind of sexual indiscretion and shamed and made to do some kind of public penance. That's what happened to Thomas, in any case. That was the scandal. So he had apparently fathered a child with a woman that he did not marry, married Judith instead. And then she kind of had to cope with the aftermath of that. The child actually died, and the woman, the unfortunate woman, and her child died during childbirth. So then the problem kind of went away. Although it's sad for her, you know, and sad for her family.
- [22:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's interesting, isn't it, because, as you say, Shakespeare rewrote his will, so the bequest goes directly to Judith, but it was less, considerably less, than he gave her sister Susanna. Do you think we should read anything into this, or is this just a common sort of uneven distribution of goods?
- [23:01]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
I think as a writer of fiction, absolutely, we should read into it. And I have all kinds of reasons for that then have to do with Judith's own relationship with her father, which I have her speech speculate about in my novel. And it makes sense on her terms. She's not particularly resentful. She wonders about it. But she comes to the conclusion that it has something to do with the person she is and what her father knew about her and what would be good for her and what would be good for Susanna. In reality, you know, it's another one of those things that probably means less than it appears to mean that Susannah was the elder child. She had already had a child and was, you know, more in a position to, I guess, you know, the family name is not gonna be carried. Carried on through either of these children. But in place of having an elder son, you know, you have the elder child. And so that's fairly customary for them to inherit more.
- [24:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And just as Judith's young life had been marked by tragedy, so too was her married life. Can you tell me about Judith and Thomas's children?
- [24:11]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Yeah. Well, we know that she had three and that they all died, all male. The first was an infant, died in infancy. And this was a child she named after her father. She named him with her family name, Shakespeare. So he would have been Shakespeare Quiney or Shakespeare Quinny, however we pronounce that. But then she had two more boys, and they died as young men, Richard and Thomas. And so one of them died when he was 19. One of them was 21. Again, we don't know how we have their birth records, we have their death records. So we can only infer or invent causes for that, as I do. It wasn't. As you know, and I know all your listeners know, it wasn't unusual to lose children, either in childbirth or shortly after or somewhere along the way. But to lose all three of them is particularly harsh. And, you know, it's hard not to imagine that it was just traumatic for her, particularly at an age where she wasn't going to have more children. So that's actually where my story begins, in the grief and the loss. It got kind of a depressing first paragraph because it goes over those losses, but then it goes up from there as she rallies and she finds a way to confront life and to come to terms with those losses.
- [25:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, so this is in your newest novel, the Hours of Baker's Daughter. So Judith is now 61 years old. She's fleeing Stratford to avoid arrest for witchcraft. What made you pick up her story at that point?
- [26:06]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
It was mostly the time period which I found so interesting. If there's a civil war going on, and she actually did live through it, we know that Judith lived on into really through the war and through the interregnum and on into the first couple of years of the Restoration. So why not have her story pick up in this exciting and violent time in English history and then have her react to those events and get involved in them in one way or another? So the story begins in 1646, when, kind of in the middle of the war, maybe a little bit towards the end of it, there's still soldiers marching around everywhere and wreaking havoc in the town. And she's caught up in this partly because she's a surgeon and she's called into attendance to help on a nearby battlefield near Stratford. So it was really imagining this as a story in which she gets involved with politics and war in a way that she didn't in the first one, because there's all kinds of interesting political and military things going on, and she's a midwife apothecary.
- [27:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Did you feel that that made her particularly vulnerable to an accusation of witchcraft, which we know is happening quite a bit in the Civil War in this time of anarchy?
- [27:23]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Well, it was happening even before in the 16th century, too. So there people hunting down witches for a long time. But in her case, yeah, that seemed kind of a charge that older women, especially in the countryside, were always open to because of the suspicion with which their healing arts were regarded and the tendency of people to kind of look around for somebody to blame if your cow dies or something like that. So it seemed that it could be something that would happen to Judith and that would threaten Judith. In her case, she has an additional riskiness to her. I'm looking for the right word here in that she's got this legacy, this Shakespeare legacy, of being the daughter of a man who wrote all of these works in which the supernatural was involved. And sometimes black magic and witches, Macbeth, for example, these kinds of works of the imagination, which were frowned on by a more strictly religious Calvinist society. And so I thought it'd be interesting if being Shakespeare's daughter actually made her more of a figure of suspicion. You know, there's this shadow of her brother's death and her involvement in it that kind of hangs over her her whole life. So all of those things come together as a kind of perfect storm. There's an event that happens in my story where at a birthing, something goes wrong and is weird, and then the child sickens after the birthing, and suspicion sort of lands on Judith. And all of these different things about her coalesce together in the fear that she's about to be charged with witchcraft. And so she gets out of town. But I also wanted her to get out of town. So I wanted a way to get her out of town so that she could sort of embrace the freedom that she knew in her youth. And she rides back down to London, and she ends up involved in a whole new set of adventures there.
- [29:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And given that she's living through the Civil War, this amazingly dramatic period of English history, what would it have meant for the lives of everyday people like Judith and Thomas?
- [29:45]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Well, I think a war that is taking place on home ground in that way, it affects ordinary people in all kinds of ways. If you think of requisitions of supplies and maybe, you know, soldiers in your town having to be harbored, if it's a civil conflict, then you're having neighbors against neighbors, people taking sides, rivalries, even people joining different armies and shooting each other. So that rather than. I mean, just by definition, rather than a kind of unifying national event, it's a fracturing one. And so all of these things are going on, the sort of cultural changes that were imposed by puritanical city councils and parliament, embraced by some people, resisted by others. I mentioned the closing of the theaters. And these kind of social effects might not have been as strongly felt in smaller towns and out in the countryside as they were in London, because that's the entertainment center, the cultural center. And so that's what she finds when she goes back to London. That is a very different city than the one that she remembered. You know, the 1640s are not the 1590s. But she has already experienced all kinds of traumatic. She and her townspeople have experienced all kinds of traumatic effects from the war, coming close to them in ways that affect their material livelihood.
- [31:18]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And one of the ways, I suppose, it's affected them also is this sense that families could be divided by opposing loyalties. Do we know anything of Judith's political opinions?
- [31:29]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
No, we don't. We do have some suggestions that her sister, her older sister Susanna, was of a more royalist persuasion, although there's also a record of one of the chief generals of Cromwell's army having visited her house. But there's probably not too much that she could have done about that because, you know, the army is the army. And so we know that about her. And that comes into my story as a bit of conflict in Judith's own family. And I have Judith be fairly neutral. I mean, she conceives herself as a healer. She understands the Puritan cause. She becomes actually increasingly more sympathetic to it. She joins forces with a zealous Puritan friend who ends up having this influence on her. But her chief desire is for people to stop fighting. And she goes out to the battlefields and she ends up tending the wounds of these young men who remind her of her own sons who died earlier. And she's just tired of it. You know, she wants life, she wants peace, and so she sort of strives to be neutral.
- [32:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And so in many ways, then, this background of political unrest allows you to tell what is, in essence, a very personal story about a woman's grief.
- [32:51]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Yeah, there's one line, it's early on in the book. She's describing the effects of the war on her personal experience and on the countryside and on her town. And she's also been talking about all the losses of the men in her family, you know, for her father, starting with her brother and, you know, ultimately her father, the older generation and then her children. But she says, you know, given the war, it solaced me to bury my special tragedy in one so vast, in the nightmare that had swept up nearly every family I knew. And that's how I was thinking about it, is that everybody's grieving someone. So there's this large scale communal grief. But in a way, that's a kind of consolation. And the story, even though it isn't, it's not a depressing story. I mean, I've been told this pretty funny story. It starts out with sort of some stark descriptions of loss and violence and death, but she moves forward and up from there. But it does also end with this acknowledgement of, as the war is coming to a close, that she looks around and just the grief that lies everywhere. But it then becomes a kind of way of bonding with other families who have experienced losses of one kind or another.
- [34:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, because this novel was taking place long after the death of William Shakespeare, did you feel that it gave you more freedom to explore Judith's character away from the shadow of her famous father?
- [34:22]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
I did. Although he haunts the story in certain ways, and memories of him come up here or there, not just as she's reflecting back on things that he said, things that he did. Sometimes she runs into other characters who have their own memories of him. There's a section also where she's trying to come to terms with his will and the way he apportioned things between her sister. And there is one. She has a dream of him. She has one dream, because you can't. You don't want to overdo it with these dream sequences, but she has one sort of short dream in which she envisions him in a certain way that sort of reveals facts about him and about their relationship and her own grief about the next generation. So he's sort of in there, but he's in there as a kind of ghostly presence. And she's mostly on her own. She's a loner. She's a character, even though she does hook up with friends that, you know, she connects with these people who are almost as crazy as she is, or she's not crazy, but, let's say, oddball, weirdo, unusual. But she is an eccentric. She always has been. And in a way that makes her a good observer, as she's standing outside of more typical and conventional people, I think a good storyteller. And perhaps that's something that makes her like her father.
- [35:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Finally, then, Grace Tiffany, what is it for you that makes Judith's life so rich for storytelling?
- [35:57]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
It's a combination of how little is actually known about her, paradoxically, as I mentioned, how her life is such a virtual blank with little. Little bits of information that leave large gaps for the imagination to fill in. And also this amazing span of time that she lived through and the changes that England went through during that time that were so dramatic. She was born during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. She lived through the reign of King James and Charles I and the interregnum and the war, and then as I said, on into the Restoration, and she was 77 years old when she died. And so that in itself is just such a great canvas or context to use to involve to invent an interesting character and then put her in interesting times.
- [36:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And that is absolutely what you've done. Thank you so much for sharing something of the process as a writer, the facts of Judith's life, and the way in which you have used your imagination to find your way to bridge the gaps.
- [37:17]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Thank you. I've really enjoyed talking to you.
- [37:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher, Alice Smith, and my producer, Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susanna Lipscomb, next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors. From History.
- [37:35]
Dr. Grace Tiffany
Hit.