Report from Santa Fe; Robin Williams

... ... ... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

felly a fwy ffesser. sus, dim�w i'r oes. U'n bod yn edig'r bogwyr di' spark. I'ją nes gwrsg. Fed all Marieff, netbatau'n best так. Yng Nghymyim b古 gyfer chymol e�로r'n fibra aparella buti'i fwy hynny. Mae'r gwydd. Mae oeddyes wneud see diw ddimnaud. Mae'r gwybod mynd? Gy dobrze te gyd ti e bufffитиddol. Gdych chi'n un yn oen. mae, mae'n丽dryapon gwaith, cuántion, atân'n ma'ol, ac ynyaw gydragep Agnes Ch pan, gyda'r cywynno mewn mewn mewn mewn mewn mewn mewn Platformas 왫 y cong.

Golden Aberldydu yn inertial Wrth pass鏈 sy'n rhywb dog ood yn niockinguaol mato Mae'r â'r Jewelwn mewn mewn mewn mewn mewn mewn mewn mewn mewn mewn mewn mewn mewn Momas Lytreddo. Oes, mae iawn mewn mewn mpa rout flesh ran i'r pessoaiders. Mae'n growl ar fy assaflygu locrood yn fy hynny da angen devarol yn yr Yng Being Ha tra depictionol— no ar ddimnych chi Thai yna ddante bodud benefits i dwi遊 hwith fyngwwrs boyn sylwf收看 fi wedi hun yn nw edrych wed�� daihodd beth d nu tieg dew ei feithiodio feithiodio reiggersastur pawn i fod ni ei whirlyl. Mae'n maewyn wneud meddwl ei'n mat-Modlolololololololol corgbersyfgwdydd yn annven indi yw hiir 언rala roedd yma cyfelly Sansan wh hypnot cyfelly cyfelly'n enzyme maethid yn nioli'n ti infectedid. rations parod weranedge o sy'n eun ni ni'n ni'n rhigh nhwm Musician Writ poder llew'n heunu syddio easu'r sleepc Magnementiaf, ac yn un werée'ν chi'n a fwblf yn awr hynny. Roedd,ıyorum'n hynnyrhi desokibor'n fwyth etrhus o— i ein ni'n paprólior cuniad o' m Soundom of A Haidr, y dywysch fel i fyngy o gebeunaeth i chydu Ie câmera.

Ond wedi swyd hwn iטожу yn cy grabiaeth hyfrydyd y sampgolgyntedd wedi eu seryn ariool. Can pistononio i hyfrydu mel, oeddig sydd ar transportationhol o yma i'r espumpingol, o'r Fleur rushed Cute. F incredibly hugeir! A o feithio gwydwysodaeth gyda biad deall cyjadifod y cyfuentedd honio y Alau Tear? No ar hyfryn cyfŵst yr gall feministig,арd o gwwrthos ac yma yn gwneud done e captivitynad. o'r gal, fellego it'iy gallan bodgy GOF stratolio'n carachol. Pent It is true they've tried to make up a whole bunch of reasons so like Shakespeare, oh he was writing them for but there is a theory that the Countess of Pembrooke Mary Sydney who I believe wrote the works asked Shakespeare to write them so her son, her like 15 year old son would get married and have a baby. So none of it makes sense, Wyr Gweissi'r dŵr hyn i ddrioedd i f whateveruan縮 oed Blessn, etyn a byn sgritario hyn o gansodd da consider

odra��형a dym yn hyllwyr my aç yn hyllwyr i ni sy'n cw including a bryd gwiaeth a'r cyflelyr Luft oaldw yn carhymer flooded am. Eich sy'n er crmonio eぉol mae'n gwneud yn eich bod y â'r ydysteithio campaign ac cache sydd am y'r sodedz, mae ydwedie'nай startm wedi felly fill gan y fan chywad⚡ Four of those books weren't even in English. They were in Latin Italian or French. So where Shakespeare might have read these is a complete mystery and people speculative lot. So that was one of the areas I went looking for with Mary Sidney was was she connected with any of these books, which she have owned them, or which she had access to them. She's famous for having a huge personal library. ysten gyn�

gan yma. Elizabethincordior. The reason she had a lot of these writers around her is because she developed what her scholar's agree was the most important literary circle in English history. Flatout. For two decades she led this circle and it gathered all these writers- asked them to write things which showed, to be sources for the Shakespeare plays. Some of these books are dedicated to her. They have stories about her, her family in them, so she was intimately connected with a huge number of the sources. And these languages, French Italian and Latin, we know she read those because she translated works from those languages into English. Another of the tempest. Tell me about the tempest.

Well, the tempest is a famous play. The famous play of the tempest, which is about a shipwreck on an island, is thought, well, there are direct references from a letter written from the Virginia Company. No, there was a shipwreck, the Bermuda Island, Island of Bermuda. And they survived. And someone wrote back a letter, William Stracky wrote a letter to the Virginia Company, telling all about this shipwreck. And lines from that letter and thoughts and events show up in the play of the tempest. So it's very clear that this author had access to that letter as one of the sources. So that letter, though, wasn't printed until nine years after William Shakespeare died because they didn't want adverse publicity about the Virginia Company. So that's one of the things I went to look at was Mary Sydney involved with the Virginia Company. Would she have had access to that letter? And it turns out that she was a founder of the Virginia Company, a

her brother and two of her brothers and her husband were founders of the Virginia Company. She was a stockholder of the Virginia Company. Her younger brother managed part of the Virginia Company. And that letter that someone wrote that William Stracky wrote to the Virginia Company was written to dear lady of the Virginia Company. We don't know which lady, unfortunately, but so she clearly was closely connected. She would have had access to that letter, which was William Shakespeare. No one has ever found any way he would have been connected with that letter. So you started with the dark sonnets or the sonnets saying, hmm, these are written to a man. And then you looked to see the biographical data, the facts that are available about William Shakespeare. And then you found out all of the facts that are available about Mary Sydney. Now how in dates, what are their lifespans? What are their dates? That's a good question because some of the other candidates like Christopher Marlow died in 1593 before anything of Shakespeare's was in print.

Oxford died in 1604, which is right in the middle of the play, writing period. So half the plays, all the great tragedies were written after he died. So I was happy to see when I discovered Mary Sydney that she was born three years before Shakespeare, which because a little bit edge on maturity and it lived five years longer. So she that whole canon fits neatly into her life. Now what was happening in that time in England that a woman would not be able to write these and proclaim that she had written them? Women were allowed to translate because it was considered a defective form of writing. So they were allowed to translate and plus the translation, they were translating, were written by men. So translations were acceptable and she did several of those from French and Italian. She translated Petra Arc. She was the only writer until recently who translated Petra Arc in the very tight, this Tertzerima form, literal translation in this very

controlled form. It was just a brilliant piece she did. And they were allowed to write religious works because of course that's for God. And her brother, her brother had started diversifying the Psalms of David and he died and she continued the process in 127 poems that she diversified. She used 126 different verse forms. So this is someone who is really involved in learning how to write and experimenting and how can we push the borders of what we're working with in the English language here. But she would never know a woman who was allowed to publish and claim authorship of anything? No, you could. She published a number of pieces of her own work, you know, translations, et cetera. She is the first woman to have published a play. It was a translation, Anthony, England Petra, that Shakespeare used as a source for his Anthony, England Petra. But it was a play for the, it's called a closet drama meant to be read in an aristocratic household

by aristocrats, not for the public theater. So she also was the first woman to write original pastoral poetry but she wrote it for the queen so she got away with that. She did publish these things. She is the first woman to publish a work without apologizing for it. Women traditionally would have an introduction, a little dedication that said, I'm still a good mother, I'm taking care of my children. God asked me to do this. She's the first woman who said, here it is. But to publish body licentious, politically insurgent plays for the public theater is something that was, would have not only ruined her, but she had two sons who were growing up in that court system. And in that court system, the only way to make a living is to kiss up to the king or queen. Currie favor. And if anyone in your family went down, everyone went down. So it was really, it's something that's hard for us to understand, especially

as Americans and especially today, to understand the impact that her doing this completely unacceptable thing would have destroyed her son's lives at court. And then what did they do? They don't go get jobs or something. How many years have you been doing this deep research? I've been thinking about it for about 32, but I'm a single mother with three kids and it wasn't until the past seven or eight years that I've had time and money to spend research in it. So intently for the past seven or eight years. So you took this research and you went to the Globe Theater's authorship conference. This is where everyone who's got a dog in the fight about who wrote Shakespeare, Marlow, Bacon, all these and all their supporters come and they present arguments for their candidate. What happened when you spoke? Well, the first year of the Globe had this conference. They had already had their full slate

when I approached Mark Rylands, the artistic director of the Globe at the time and said, you know, I'm working on Mary Sydney and I think she should be represented and I'm the only one who can represent her at the moment. And they said, we already have our full slate. I'm so sorry, but we do want to hear about your research. I said, one coming over there, anyway, I'm going to the conference. So I'll say hello. So because I was there, they allowed me a 20-minute slot at the end of two days. At the end of my 20 minutes, they gave me another 10 minutes and at the end of my half hour, the panelists agreed to, they said, we won't do our closing arguments, we want her to answer questions. So then the next year they invited me back as they gave me a two-hour slot and the other speakers had one hour and then they invited me to be an associate trustee of the London authorship trust, you know, the Shakespearean authorship trust that was started in London in 1922. So now, I'm not just any crackpot IME, crackpot of the highest order.

Oh, there's so much international intrigue. There are so many people around the world that are fascinated in this. I know you've had Turkish articles and German articles. You've been on CNN and other national news programs here. And even the Russians have a huge passion for Mary Sydney. So how are you greeted when you do your presentations around the world? Well, I haven't gone around the world just to London. But at the last conference, there were Germans there and I was on German television for half an hour in German radio for ten minutes and there are several German authors who have written books about, you know, different authors in this possibility and of which, of course, make any sense. But they're very intrigued and I found in a rare bookstore online, I found a German book from the early 1700s about Mary Sydney and these her musical code that she wrote and her

chemical recipe for invisible ink and mnemonic device and a secret a parlor gain that was very popular with the Germans. So long after she died, they were still fascinated with her as a as a human being. So I don't know, I'm helping this as a chance to get into German because they'll like it. I wanted to hold up the book again and I want you to talk about swans. Who called me? Who said sweet swans of Avon? And I don't know, yeah. And who said sweet swans of Avon? And what she doing wearing swans? In the collected works of Shakespeare, called the first folio, that went, that was printed seven years after Shakespeare died. It went to press right before Mary died. Ben Johnson, who is the self-proclaimed poet laureate at the time, he wrote what's considered a eulogy in the first folio, to which it's dedicated to the memory of my beloved,

the author, then in little tiny letters, Mr William Shakespeare. And in it, he calls the author the sweet swan of Avon. No one has ever called William Shakespeare a swan ever. But it turns out that several poets had previously imprint, called Mary Sydney a swan. She, Avon, people think it's a reference to the Avon River that went to Stratford, the village where Shakespeare lived, but there are six Avon rivers in England, one of which goes through Mary Sydney's property at the time. She has in this portrait on the cover her final portrait when she was 57 years old. The entire collar is embroidered with swans, and her rafts are embroidered with swans. Her last name Sydney in French is very close to the word for swan. And we know that the French teased her brother about, they called him the swan. So she has all these swan references and the fascinating

thing about swans is that this author knew because it shows up in the play several times, swans are mute until they die. And her final portrait, she's got the swans in her collar, she's got swan quill pen, she's got swan wings underneath the portrait. She has a laurel crown above, which is the symbol of a poet. She's holding a book in her hand that she is one of the ones that she wrote. This is the portrait of a woman who won, wanted to go down in history as a writer, and two had a serious swan thing. Ben Johnson was considered by some to have been a protege of hers too, and was very close with the rest of her family. I'm wondering if when the plays went to press, there's a lot of information about that process. Ben Johnson's biographers think that Ben Johnson was an editor of this collective works for a number of reasons. And I'm wondering, was this his little hint? There's a very kind of naughty juicy part to the front of the,

the beginning of the eulogy that we don't have time to talk about, but it reinforces the question of who was he talking about in his eulogy. And it's so poignant to think that only in her death or how many hundreds of years later might someone finally hear that voice of hers and give her, you know, at least build a case for her receiving the credit for this work. Yeah, and that's what I'm trying to do in this book is not necessarily prove it. I don't pretend that I have proved it in here. All I'm saying in this book is there isn't a documented evidence to warrant further research into this possibility. And part of your research has been going everywhere in England that had anything to do with it. And we say they tell us a little of your adventures. Um, we call it a pilgrimage. Okay. Where we have gone to the homes where she grew up, where she had her literary circle, where she spent her summers and lead low on the border of

Wales. Um, Kennelworth Castle, where we know she was at, where there are things that happened at Kennelworth that show up in the place. And it turned out that all of these places show Shakespeare plays at these different homes and estates and castles where she was. So we get to not only see where she grew up, but we also get to have this treat of scene of play that she might have written. Um, you, you mentioned her, her writing ability, her salon that she had of gifted writers and everything. Were there other personal things in her life that you could see could possibly be reflected, say, in the dark sonnets? Well, not necessarily the dark sonnets, but the sonnets are the biggest problem with the many William Shakespeare or with any other candidate because scholars agree. I'm not making this up. Scholars agree that the poet is in love with the younger man. At some point the poet thinks the younger man is having an affair with a dark-haired,

dark-eyed, newly married woman who seems to be married to someone in will. In Shakespeare's life, Marlow's life, Oxford's life, no one can find anybody who fits this, this match. They make up all kinds of things. Mary said in his life, document it, after her husband died, she had a love affair with the younger man for the rest of her life. There was a point when she thought her younger lover was having an affair with her dark-haired, dark-eyed, newly married niece. Turns out the younger lover was not having an affair with the niece, the niece was having an affair with a man named Will Herbert, Mary's didn't his own son. So the sonnet story is documented as her life, and she's the only candidate who has ever had any semblance of a connection to the sonnet story. The role of women, we don't have much time left, but you would think from these dramatic women characters that lead in so many of these plays that if Mr. Shakespeare is the person who wrote that, you would see some evidence of this in his

perhaps his family or perhaps, you know, his acquaintances or associates talk about the role of women. Well, in the plays, it's not just the strong women that we see Portia and Paulina and Rosalind and Lady Macbeth, but there's this underlying thread of women who, ten women who defy their fathers to marry the man they love, eight women who dress up as men to go out and do what they need to do, women who lead armies and who lead, you know, governments. There's an astonishing thread through there that is really under-recognized. There are only two illiterate characters in the entire play. They're both men, and it seems odd to me that this and the suspectative, it's not, you know, well, it is sort of documented. William Shakespeare, if he had written these, and he writes these brilliant, strong, amazing women, yet his daughters were illiterate. One signed with an ex, one could actually sign her name,

but she couldn't recognize her husband's handwriting and her daughter signed with an ex. How could someone who wrote Rosalind not teach his own daughters to read and write? That's so sad. So either we just have to wrap up very soon. What are some other little arguments that you can fill us in with? Because I want people to be thinking about this. Like you say, it is, you're offering an hypothesis that is tantalizing, especially for women readers. Yeah, and once you read through the body of documented evidence, then looking at the place in a new light, it's interesting how once you get past the strange idea of that possibility, when you see the place again, or you read about them or hear them, it's amazing how there's a little twist that goes on your mind. You see things that are a little bit different. We haven't talked at all about what her sons might have done to prevent her from doing it, which is okay. So there's so much stuff, but towards the back, I do say, if she did write these,

we would expect to see some of her life appearing in the place. And so towards the back, I do say, look at these ways that her life has interconnected with this huge body of work. By the time you get there, you say, oh my god, it actually makes perfect sense. But there are also many long passages in all the plays about sewing and metaphors to do with with housekeeping, with running the house, with cooking, all of these things that you wouldn't think that a gentleman or an actor in that era would be too familiar with, since women's work was so much women's work. A lot of the women's work and a lot of the emotions, you know, Hamlet has been called the most female character in the whole place. All those things have been complained about us. Oh, you think too much about it. You're too emotional. You can't make decisions. That's Hamlet, you know, all through and through. Oh, I forgot what you just said. Well, I want to be sure that we get it. Where can people go to find out more information about this?

You have a website or two. Yes, MarySydney.com, M-A-R-Y-S-I-D-N-E-Y.com. And it has links to various places. And the book is available. If a book's or it doesn't have it in stock, any books or can order it to the usual channels. Well, let's take another look at the swans in this book. This is called Sweet Swan of Avon. They show us the swans. Yes. Did a woman write the work of Shakespeare? And our guest today is Robin Williams. Thank you so much for playing this fascinating idea for it. Thank you. And I'm Lorraine Mills. I'd like to thank you our viewers for being with us on report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by a grant from New Mexico Tech on the frontier of science and engineering education for bachelor's masters and PhD degrees. New Mexico Tech is the college you've been looking for. 1-800-428-T-E-C-H.