Charles O'Malley and Scott W. Stern: Libraries Help Us Remember Who We Are

For years, Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern wrote together at home in the evenings, one on the couch and one at the table. “It was a highly collaborative process — much like theatre, actually,” they say in an interview with EveryLibrary. The two men have different academic backgrounds and approach their work in unique ways, yet they wanted to write Shakespeare’s Margaret with a single unified voice, a unity that carries through their interview responses.

“Charlie reads plays like a theatre artist and scholar of performance; he thinks about the way that actors move onstage, the different theatrical conventions that something is employing, the way contemporary productions are in conversation with centuries-old traditions,” they tell us. 

“Scott, by contrast, approached this project like a historian, asking what forces and conditions in Shakespeare’s time shaped Margaret, the way that popular movements or ruptures influenced her depiction over time, and even what the weather was like on any particular day that we were writing about. Our hope is that the finished product reflects and unites both of these focuses.”

Both authors found libraries to be crucial for writing this book. “We’ll probably never be able to count all the libraries that helped us along the way!” they tell us. “Charlie undertook significant research for productions and coursework while in graduate school at Yale, in the university’s Special Collections, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, and at the Yale Center for British Art. Once we began work on the book in earnest, we began to request documents from libraries around the world. Luckily, so many of the oldest documents have long been transcribed and digitized (and live online at places like the British Library), but to understand Margaret’s evolution over the following centuries, we needed documents from libraries ranging from the University of California, Santa Barbara to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas to the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute.”

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They felt especially lucky to have access to the Huntington Library, which they describe as a treasure trove. “This book would have looked different without its collections. We first looked at centuries-old books about Margaret, such as a rare volume by Madame d’Aulnoy from 1708, which allowed us to better understand how readers encountered the historical queen over the years,” they say.

“Remarkable primary sources, such as ‘Observations on Mrs. Siddons’ (by ‘A Lady’ from 1784), similarly gave us valuable insight into what audiences made of Margaret’s actors. We then saw more recent collections, such as the Pasadena Playhouse Records, which revealed the ways in which one production framed Margaret’s plays in an era hurtling toward world war. Repositories like the Huntington’s are absolutely vital to find sources, which — like the vast majority of archival materials — are not digitized and can only be encountered by opening a physical box at a physical table.”

Being able to access historical artifacts like manuscripts in person was a game changer for O’Malley and Stern. “Much of this history isn’t Googleable or otherwise accessible online. While reading production histories of Richard III, we began to read about Henry Irving, a popular nineteenth-century English actor who played that king many times,” they say.

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“We learned that the University of Bristol had a few documents about his productions in their archives, so we wrote to the fabulous librarian there who pulled a few nineteenth-century programs from their shelves and sent us scans. One program’s cover read: ‘Shakespeare’s King Richard III, Mr. Henry Irving as the Duke of Glo’ster, Miss Bateman as Queen Margaret.’ Margaret has only a small role in Richard III. Who was this actress getting star treatment? This sent us down a rabbit hole: learning about Kate Bateman, the entire Bateman family, the role of American actresses in nineteenth-century Britain, the weird trend of Victorian children playing Shakespeare’s adult characters, and more. If we hadn’t found that one program, we likely would never have found Kate. That one scan of a single piece of paper opened up a whole new avenue of inquiry.”

But O’Malley and Stern know those kinds of research discoveries rely on all of us continuing to support libraries and fight for library funding. “What will be left of cultural history when all the archives have closed, all the libraries are forced to curtail their hours, all the graduate student stipends have dried up, and all the repertory theatre companies have folded?” they invite us to consider.

“Our book is about a person and a character who has persevered over half a millennium. She wasn’t a hero or a saint. In fact, she was murderous and vengeful, but she is remembered, largely because Shakespeare read his history and wrote about her. So did generations of future theatre scholars and artists. If we lose our memory institutions — like libraries, universities, and theatres — we’re stuck in the cliché of repeating our tragic histories. Stories like Margaret’s are essential to remembering who we are, where we come from, what we’ve faced, and what we cannot repeat.”

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