Bart Casey discovered the Monica
Lewinsky of the Elizabethan age and turned her already incredible true story
into an enthralling dual time line tale of historic intrigue and contemporary
greed.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today Bart talks about his passion for forgotten stories, explains why Will Shakespeare continues to fascinate movie makers, and reveals how a mystery involving three famous Romantic poets is his work in progress.
Six
things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
How adman Bart researched his fiction in his lunch breaksWhy Shakespeare's life fascinates himHow sexual predation hasn't changed over the centuriesWhy he values historical accuracy in his workWhen facts are stranger than fictionThe appeal of dual timeline tales
Where to find Bart Casey:
Website: http://www.bartcasey.com/index.htm
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bart.casey
Twitter: @bibliomad
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/bart_casey
What
follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for
word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
And now, here’s Bart. Hello there Bart and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us.
Bart: Very happy to be here. Very exciting.
Jenny: Was there a “Once Upon A Time’ moment when you decided you must write fiction or you would have somehow let yourself down, or not completed something you were meant to do? And if so, what was the catalyst for it
Bart Casey - historical mysteries
Bart: Well it was actually more than just fiction, because it was about stories- coming across stories - especially in college and graduate school. They just seemingly needed to be told, things that I didn't think people would know about or that had been forgotten. Those stories then became the motivation I had to start writing. Sometimes, the non fiction ones are just as good. Once you find somebody like a Laurence Oliphant, the character I wrote a book about, who seemed to be like Forrest Gump - he sort of did everything.
The fiction I write has a lot of non fiction in it. Anything I put in my upcoming book about Shakespeare or the Elizabethan characters is pretty much real. So it's fiction, but it's also pretty much non fiction. But to get to your real question; it's the story. You come across a story, you think 'I don't know that, I don't think anybody else knows that-' and you really have to tell them. That's the motivation.
Jenny: You seem to have real talent for finding these stories that have been forgotten or ignored - your non fiction books perfectly demonstrate that.
Bart:You just have an "aha" moment when you come across some of thee wacky combinations, and you just think that's so out of the ordinary and so compelling that it writes itself. The advantage of non fiction is of course it's real, so you can tell it chronologically from the people's birth to their death and not make anything up. When you get into fiction, you have to improvise a little. But I try to always be plausible, I don't try to make up anything crazy.
Shedding light on forgotten history
Jenny: You’ve made a specialty of blending dual time lines – contemporary and Elizabethan – to shed new light on forgotten history. How did this passion first get sparked off?
Bart: Sometimes I think if the historical characters like Shakespeare, or Elizabethan people you read about them in school and you see anthologies of their poetry, and they don't seem real. You don't see them as people who have a cup of coffee, they didn't have a stomach ache - they weren't real. By putting them in the same type of treatment as the modern characters we can identify personally, they come alive more because they were real people.
What do we really know of Shakespeare?
So in this in this story I do have sections that talk about the Elizabethans but they're always talking about their actual lives. You know - getting packed ready to go somewhere, being worried about what they're going to find, what they might encounter at court, what shocks them, what happens to them.
And then when it's you it's juxtaposed with the modern people, we all can think 'oh well these are real characters.' And my thought is that you'll think the Elizabethans were also real characters, as they were. So that's why I go back and forth because I think it makes these people come alive more.
[00:04:14] As for where I where I came up with these the idea of The Vavasour Macbeth. I was a grad student in English and all of my education was about English literature. I mean just everything. Right up through graduate school I was going to be a professor. There weren't any jobs however.
So I did a lot of work studying up on people like Shakespeare and I was shocked at how few facts there are truly known about Shakespeare. My favorite biography of him by Sir Edmund Chambers is called William Shakespeare; A Study of Facts and Problems and there are more problems by far than facts - and that's true even Macbeth.
We all think we know everything about Macbeth, but that's just not true. You know the play we know today is an abridgement of a much longer play that was lost. And so when I have papers discovered in the tomb and they find that long-lost version of Macbeth which scholars concede had to have existed. What we have today is a cut down version to get it done at court in under two hours for the audience.
So those are interesting things that you discover in the book about even something as well-known and beloved as Macbeth and Shakespeare.
Remarkable Elizabethan love affair
[00:05:30] Jenny: Sure. And the "Vavasour" refers to someone who was a real courtier in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Anne Vavasour. She's such an interesting person and had such an interesting life that once again you think, 'Gosh it's amazing that we hadn't heard more about her before.'
[00:05:51] Bart: When you think of all the industry that is the Tudor novels, I mean they're wonderful Wolf Hall, (Hilary Mantell) The Other Boleyn Girl; (Philippa Gregory) They're just wonderful but somehow they missed this couple and Anna Vavasour and Sir Henry Lee. She was from birth really, brought up by her uncles who were at court to be a companion for the Queen. She was educated like a princess to be somebody that could actually be in the innermost circle of the Queen's attendance at court and they placed her there when she was 16.
Tudor stories like Wolf Hall and The Other Boleyn Girl
She went to court with her sisters and her uncles were there too. So she wasn't all alone there, but she had the great misfortune to get seduced by a sexual predator, an older courtier, the Earl of Oxford of all people, Edward de Vere.
He was at that point fourteen years older than her, estranged from his wife, at court alone and just kicking his heels with boredom, when in walks this beautiful young girl. He seduced her and ultimately ruined her because she gave birth to a bouncing baby boy in the room literally next to the Queen in the Attending Maidens' Chamber and she was sent off to the Tower with the baby the next day.
The Earl of Oxford was sent off to the Tower as well. He was banished from court for two years, but he was one of the greatest, most senior peers in all of the realm. So he managed to get somewhat back but she was just thrown out on her ear at age 17 with a baby.
You'd think that that would be the end of it, but it wasn't. There was an older courtier there, Sir Henry Lee who was the Queen's Champion at the Joust and he was rumored to be even the Queen's half brother, an illegitimate child of Henry VIII.
[00:07:53] He was the one who founded the cult of Elizabeth - he introduced all this chivalry into the court and he was her champion when they had the tournaments jousting. He was fifty seven. He was about to retire and he invited Anne, who was then twenty seven and her son to come live with him.
Sire Henry Lee - Queen Elizabeth's champion
He was one of the richest men in England and they lived together for twenty plus years. And when he died he left her all his money so she became one of the richest women in England - in fact one of the richest people in England.
[00:08:29] And that her story didn't even end then. It went on and on. The heirs to Sir Henry who were all very distant relatives, tried everything they could to get the money, but she wouldn't succumb and she lived - apparently till a rumor has it - into her 90s.
That means the first people who were Sir Henry's heirs and even their children and perhaps their grandchildren didn't get any money until she died - when they got whatever was left. So she had a hell of a comeback.
You could think she was ridiculed as like the Monica Lewinsky of her age and made a mockery of. And then she came all the way back. She was even a great friend of King James and his queen, Queen Anne of Denmark. They got on like a house on fire. James and his son the Prince of Wales would come hunting with Sir Henry and the Queen and Anne would sit around chatting all day.
Anne V : One heck of a comeback
This is all well recorded and documented in the correspondence from the time. She just had a wonderful relationship with Sir Henry who saved her and then went on afterwards with his money and got married again.
She was tried for bigamy at one point; she had two husbands but you know that was all fine with him. He was at Heaven by that time. So she was really a character.
Jenny: [00:09:53] Yes. Well I mean you just told us what a fascinating person she was and she's very much alive in the book. It's amazing that she was left for you to discover with so many people writing in the area.
Edward De Vere: sexual predator
