John Cole: Well good afternoon. Welcome to the Library of Congress (Library). I'm John Cole. I'm the director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, which is the Library's book and reading promotion arm. The center has been around since 1977 promoting books and reading. We do it primarily through national networks, the state centers for the book that help us in individual states, draw attention to authors and to the local book culture. And also through events at the Library of Congress such as this one, which is in -- Vanessa's talk -- is in our "Books and Beyond" series of author talks that try to demonstrate the resources of this library and other libraries are not only useful for doing study and research but also result in wonderful books that are there to share the wealth of collections such as the Library of Congress and the Folgers Shakespeare Library and similar institutions. We are filming this presentation for later showing on the Center for the Book's and the Library's websites. It will be a cybercast. And with that in mind, I ask you to be sure you turn off all electronic devices and beepers. And secondly, we will have a question-and-answer period following this, and we ask you to ask questions. Vanessa will have lots of answers. [ laughter ] But when you ask a question that really is you're giving us permission for you to be part of our cybercast, and I'd like that to be understood. We are co-sponsoring today's talk with the publishing office, as we did for the first talk that Vanessa gave here. And it was based on her "Genealogy of Greek Mythology.' And I remember we were in the same auditorium. And at that time, though, we didn't have such a large-size prop. We had the book itself, and I spread the book across the stage, but it turned out to be so miniscule that for the repeat performance we have a much larger form of this 17-foot wide masterpiece that Vanessa is presenting to us. To present Vanessa I am pleased to introduce Blaine Marshall from the Publishing Office who is the picture editor or a picture editor and a wonderful resource herself for all things visual throughout the Library of Congress. Blaine. Let's give Blaine a little hand. [ applause ] Thank you. Blaine Marshall: Welcome to everybody who came today. Thank you so much for being with us. I'm just going to give you a little quick overview of Vanessa's many talents and how she suddenly fetched up doing books. So we start with a question. How does a classically trained artist painter from England find herself designing for an Andy Warhol film? So it seems that with Vanessa's multitude of talents there are no boundaries. Creativity, imagination and a strong visual aesthetic drive all of Vanessa's work, as in the graceful border drawings for her books "The "Genealogy of Greek Mythology" and "Shakespeare's Genealogies," which she will talk about to us today. Or for sets of the soap opera, "Another World." Beginning in 1968, Vanessa designed several productions for Joseph Papp at New York's Public Theater, including William Burrough's "Naked Lunch" and Edith Wharton's "Old New York." She says, "I wanted to design the whole look of a production. The set's costume and lights not just a piece of it." And her versatility has led her to work in several mediums. She has designed for movies including "Sophie's Choice" and "Kramer vs. Kramer," T.V. miniseries such as Judith Krantz's "I'll Take Manhattan," off-Broadway productions, operas and her own stage company. In Europe she has designed for Rassegna Internationale, Parma Opera House, the Bristol Old Vic, and the Royal Court Theater. In 1991 she began teaching at Mount Holyoke, where fittingly for one of the first female art directors, her courses included a "Woman in Design" seminar that encourages young women to follow her into the field. At Mount Holyoke's Rooke Theatre, she has produced and designed productions with Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Suzan-Lori Parks and Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka. Her design work is documented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it's Costume Institute Library and permanent collection of the Museum of the Moving Image. We are delighted she has turned her prodigious imagination and scholarship to books, the second of which she shares with us today. Please welcome Vanessa James. [ applause ] Vanessa James: Let's see. Is that working? Yes. Good. Well thank you very much and thank you everybody for coming to this talk today. I'm very excited to talk about this book. It's been on my mind for a while. In fact, it's been about three years in the making, although several years before that in the thinking. So I'm thrilled that it's now actually really here. But before I start I would like to just thank John Cole so much for inviting me to speak here this afternoon. And to everyone at the Library of Congress, many of you who are here, who've worked so hard to make this event happen. And I'm most grateful to you all. I also wanted to thank my friend, dear friend Blaine Marshall who just introduced me, who encouraged me to publish my first book and actually supported me throughout the preparation of this one. And in the audience is also Vincent Berger [ spelled phonetically ] , who introduced me to my publisher Charles Melcher, Melcher Media. Thank you so much Vincent because Charles has not only been an extraordinarily supportive publisher, but actually a collaborator. And he came up with the format for this book. And his editor, Megan Worman who is also here today, it was their understanding and their sensibility that has made this book perhaps a little bit more than a book almost like a little art work, I hope. And I hope that you could see it that way, too. Other thanks I have is also of course to my distributors, D.K. of the Penguin Group and to furthermore grants in publishing and Mount Holyoke College who actually generously supported me with grants. So let's look a little bit at what this book really looks like. And here it comes in this lovely little folder package. And you can just take it out. And you can open it, and you can read it just like a regular book. But you can also unfold it. And when you unfold it you can see several pages together which is a very good thing because when you are dealing with family trees it's very hard to look at one little bit and then another little bit, but on this, you know, if you've got a nice, big family tree -- well there it is. [ laughter ] So we'll just leave this out [ inaudible ] . So, that's what it looks like and to just quote from Shakespeare in "Hamlet" he says, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in it." And I can assure you, there is some in the book. So what I'd like to do, actually, is to just briefly read to you a little bit of the introduction, which explains where this came from and where it's going to. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about the sections in it and what you can find in the book. What you might get all sorts of little interesting bits and pieces that you can -- information you can acquire which -- it sort of makes it rather like a one-stop shop for Shakespeare. And that was a little bit of the intention here. So in the introduction I've said that "Shakespeare's Genealogies traces the family trees of more than 1,000 characters mentioned in Shakespeare's plays and poems. It's designed to be a companion volume to the Genealogy of Greek Mythology," which was the earlier book that came out four years ago, "which traces the family relationships of more than 3,000 mythological gods and mortals from ancient Greek texts." But many, and I have to say this, many of Shakespeare's characters actually do appear in the Greek mythology book because, of course, he took a great deal of his information from Roman and Greek mythologies. So "People of the ancient," you know, "both ancient and modern, have always been fascinated by genealogy. Unraveling the intricacies of blood relationships can provide a clearer understanding of the family dynamics that drive the stories in our literature as well as in our own lives. Shakespeare was fascinated by these dynamics, and he used them unsparingly in his plays fueling his plots with familial jealousies, lust, passion and murder, and not to mention those old theatrical devices, mistaken identities and separated siblings. "In organizing the genealogical charts to correspond with the text, it was necessary," and this is important in this book actually. "It was necessary to rearrange the order of the plays, placing first those set in the most ancient times. Therefore, the plays do not appear in this book under their more familiar categories of tragedy, history, and comedy. Instead, they're placed under the headings, 'Myths and Legends, 'Legends into History,' 'Roman History Plays, 'British History Plays,' and 'Continental Plays, " which I'm happy to say sort of catches everything else. [ laughter ] So "Shakespeare has been credited with all or partial authorship of 37 extant plays, two lost plays and two dramatic poems. In recent years scholars have added three more plays to that list, the two noble kinsmen, 'Edward III' and ' [ Sir ] Thomas More.'" I can talk a little bit more about that when we come to it. But all 42 works are represented in this book. "And of these, 25 contain characters that are linked together by a common family history, dating back to pagan times." So it's kind of exciting to me to find that this was, in fact, the case, that you can link so many of his plays genealogically. "It's reasonable to imagine that Shakespeare was familiar with his characters genealogies and not only through contemporary historical writing, but also through myths, legends and common folklore. Early historians often present mythology as if it was historical fact. For instance, they claim that the British King Lear was descended from the Trojan Prince Aeneas. Both characters and their family connections are a part of unsubstantiated history, and therefore more properly belong to mythology. "Cymbeline is the first semi-historical figure because the Romans record him as the King of Britain, even though the storyline in Shakespeare's play is based mostly on legend. But Beth and King John are Cymbeline's much later descendants, so their plays include a stronger dose of recorded history and the later British history phase -- from 'Richard II' to 'Henry VIII, and the Roman history plays - 'Julius Caesar' and 'Antony and Cleopatra' are based almost entirely on recorded history although, more often than not, it was poetically and politically reinvented." So it's my intention in this book, that it should provide an effective and informative reference companion to when you're reading the Bard's work, and perhaps in some modest way contribute to the reader's enjoyment and appreciation of Shakespeare's dramatic works. So that is really what this book is about. Now at the beginning of the book, I actually do pay a little attention to Shakespeare's own genealogy. And so you can get a sense of that, and it's right here at the beginning, we can learn a little bit about his family, both his family before him and his family after him. Unfortunately, Shakespeare has no direct descendants living today. This is very sad, of course. He had three children, a daughter who was born very, very shortly after he was married. And he had twins named Judith and Hamnet, which is interesting, Hamnet with an "n" not with an "l." And these twins, of the two twins, the daughter survived and had two children of her own as did his older daughter Susanna. But his, sadly his son died as a child. And it's often thought that when his son died that was perhaps the reaction to that was the writing on "Hamlet," and that much of the feeling that he puts into "Hamlet" has to do with the death of his son. We don't know for sure. It's conjecture but it's interesting. Of course, if there is a little matter of William Davenant who some people claim, certainly William Davenant claimed to be Shakespeare's illegitimate son. And so I do, in this you can actually read the little story about how this came about and why people felt that he might very well have been so. He was actually the second poet laureate of England. He was a poet and playwright himself and quite a good one in some people's estimations and quite a bad one in other peoples. Anyway William Davenant never discouraged anybody's referring to him as Shakespeare's son. And of course his name was William, too, and clearly he was named after him. Actually William Shakespeare was William Davenant's godfather. That we do know for sure. But what further truth there is in the matter, well some people believe it; others don't. But there are Shakespeares in the world today. Actually Shakespeare was a very popular name. There are over 80 different spellings of the name from medieval times through the 18th century. And so certainly there are plenty of Shakespeare families. Shakespeare's family, however, is supposed to have survived, and I think is fairly well documented as having done so through his sister. So you find people with Shakespeare as their second, their middle name, not their last name, very well could be descended from her. Other descendants who have Shakespeare as their last name, many claim that they are descended from his uncle. And that is a possibility, although it's really not been substantiated. So I do talk about that a little bit at the beginning of the book. The important thing next is with the book is how it's divided. And into these sections of "Myths and Legends," "Legends into History," "British History Players," "Roman History Players," and prior to each section is actually a little piece of information for you which will describe something about the genealogies and how they worked in this particular period and how people were related to each other. Then as you proceed in the book further along, you'll find that you'll have the names of the plays and then a short synopsis of each of the plays. So just in case you forgot, you know, a little bit about what's in them, you can just get a quick rundown about that. It's done from the standpoint of genealogy but and the effects that genealogy has on the plays themselves and the characters within them. So then you come to the charts, and you'll see that the charts are also illustrated and have some interesting little pieces in them. This one I've chosen just to put up because it shows Brutus. And the chart itself actually describes how he was related to the originator of the Roman Republic who was Lucius Junius Brutus who actually helped to overthrow the Tarquins, and of course we know that the Tarquin was responsible for the rape of Lucrece and so that's how we connect back there through from the Roman history plays. And then we can go even further back from the Roman history plays and find ourselves connected to the Greeks because Aeneus, the famous traveler, Aeneus, whose ancestors founded Rome, we can then trace back to that point and of course to "Troilus and Cressida." And Aeneus does appear brief, if albeit very briefly, in "Troilus and Cressida." So there's a connection there. And if we wanted to go back further still, we could go back to Venus and Adonis, because Venus was, in fact related, of course, to Aeneus. And so you can see that way through this sort of mythological joining. How one play, in fact, sort of segues into another. On the right of this picture, I've also put in this nice little picture of the Booth family who the father of the family, John, was in fact named after Lucius Junius Brutus. And then one of his sons was also named Julius Brutus. And you can see here the picture John Wilkes Booth and Junius Brutus and, of course, the more famous Edwin Booth all appearing in a production of Julius Caesar. How very apt. So [ laughs ] . And here we actually find Hamlet, the genealogy of Hamlet. Hamlet, interestingly enough, was taken from a very ancient legend, Danish legend, which probably goes back to pre-Roman times. It may predate the Romans. We don't know for sure. But it is a legend. And it's a legend that follows the same story as the story of Hamlet. And although, you know, it's not tremendously well known, it's actually interesting because we're rather used to seeing Hamlet played perhaps more in contemporary Elizabethan times, or we associate it more with that perhaps because of the nature of the sort of, perhaps there's no references to Paganism. The references tend to be more Christian-oriented so one doesn't think of it as coming from such a distant point. And, but then of course, the Danes claim that they are, in fact, the descendants of Danaus who was an ancient, very ancient Greek figure featured in plays "The Danaids" and so on and. So that again takes us way back into mythology. Why the Danes feel this way? Well, of course, they feel they were named after Danaus, the Danes. So this is actually a chart which brings now a little bit closer and it actually contains both Cymbeline and Macbeth and on the right hand side you can see actually a really old genealogical chart. I think it's quite wonderful. Someone dug it out of the Bodleian Library. It's very, really quite ancient and it tells the genealogy. It shows a genealogical tree, literally a tree, about Banquo. Although, of course, Banquo was a fictitious character. The kings of Scotland in this tree are taken back to Banquo, and really and truly it shouldn't be Banquo. It should be Malcolm who was King Duncan's son, who's actually the person who did produce all these kings of Scotland. But this actually follows Shakespeare's idea of Banquo. What's interesting also is for, is that with "Cymbeline" that the King Cymbeline was also again related back to Chaeresilaus who was another Greek. Well actually Greek or Trojan you could say because he descended through the Trojan royal family. And he made his way to England and founded what we now call Cornwall. And of course this is mythology again, but it kind of has a certain fascination. So when we think of the later history plays of Shakespeare, they could all be traced back again and all finally end up in ancient Greek mythology. And these are just again a word about the continental plays. Of course with the continental plays, there's no way that they can be joined together. These are not plays that are about -in the main, about real people. Although one or two of them do include the odd character that could perhaps be recognized. But these plays are continental. They take place on the continent of Europe. None of them take place in England. And so what I've done with these plays actually is to talk a little bit about certain kinds of genealogy that's within them but that is not connected quite in the same way as the mythological and history plays. And what I said is that the continental plays refer to 12 plays that Shakespeare set outside of England. On the European continent, they take place in a time close to our contemporary, with Shakespeare's own period. Genealogical charts don't accompany these plays since they're not linked together with historical or family relationships. However, romantic entanglements and domestic complications certainly infuse the plots and motivate the characters in each play and seven of the 12 continental plays take place somewhere in Italy. And they include what may be Shakespeare's first play, "The Two Gentleman of Verona" and his last, "The Tempest," which were unassisted works for the stage. And then I go on to talk a little bit about the political structures in on the continent at this time and how they play into the actual drama, the dramas themselves. And by political structures I mean those of the systems that were in place at that time: kings, queens, duchesses, dukes, etc. And we look at all that. Then there are a few, one or two other sort of amusing and interesting things in here. Sadly one on the right did not come out. But there's a section on Shakespearian actors. There's a section on contemporary playwrights and writers, a section on patrons, and needless to say, a section on the [ laughs ] the authorship controversy. I put that in because everybody said, "You can't write a play about [ sic ] a book about Shakespeare unless you do this." So I have addressed the issue, and I think this is sort of interesting -- one little piece of interesting information in here that I'd like to give you now, and that's about the first person who actually thought that perhaps Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. And at the end of the 18th century, and English clergyman named James Wilmot proposed the theory that William Shakespeare was not the author of the body of plays and poems with which he was previously credited. Despite Shakespeare's proven credentials as a highly successful actor manager and theater professional, many others since Wilmot have been unwilling to accept that a man with a provincial education could have produced such a magnificent, artistic achievement. And I'm doubtless, you know, there are many opinions about this. We can talk what a provincial education was at that time and whether, in fact, this would be an issue. In an attempt to explain this discrepancy, some have suggested the plays were written either by a highly educated group of university trained collaborators or by a single aristocratic, and therefore, well educated writer working alone. And many well respected people have subscribed to these views including -- I'll list a few of them here: Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Joyce, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Wells, Leslie Howard, Mark Rylance, Charles de Gaulle [ laughs ] ,Benjamin Disraeli, Otto Van Bismarck, Helen Keller and Malcolm X. And it's also interesting to note that in 1987, three justices of the Supreme Court of the United States debated the issue of Oxford versus Shakespeare. Judges Blackmun, Brennan and Stevens voted 3-0 in favor of Shakespeare. [ laughter ] But, subsequently Stevens expressed some doubts, and Blackmun totally reversed his decision. So it's still up for grabs as a subject, and as I say, at the end of this the speculation continues. You could also read in here about a few of the people who have been credited as Shakespeare, the author of Shakespeare. And a little bit about why and how. So that's a little guided tour through the book, and I think now perhaps it might be helpful if anybody has questions you might like to ask me about them? [ applause ] Yes? Male Speaker: Did you include any of the first or second derivatives Shakespeare plays like "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"? Vanessa James: Did I include any of the derivative plays like "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"? No I didn't. And I would actually have liked to have gone into that a little bit but I was constrained, afraid by space. And there an awful lot of his own plays that had to be covered so I couldn't really do that, but maybe in another book. Yes? Female Speaker: Would you talk about what a provincial education was at that time? You seem to think that -- you indicated that would lay to rest concerns that Shakespeare couldn't have wrote his own works. Vanessa James: Yes, I'm happy to address that. The education -- I think one should first of all say is that Shakespeare, Shakespeare's father was at some point mayor of Stratford on Avon. He was not a lowly man of the community. He was a major person in Stratford at that time. He wasn't, of course, always very wealthy. He made money. He lost money. He made money. He lost money again. It was a very up and down business and might not always have been able to pay the school fees. But it's reasonable there was nothing proven about it. It was quite reasonable to assume that Shakespeare did go to school, to a grammar school to probably the best one in the city itself. So that he was educated. And at that time, the education, the educational system was based on Latin and Greek. And that's what you did. You went to school and you learned Latin and Greek. You didn't learn a great deal more than that. But that's -- so if he did indeed do that, he would have learned to read and write, of course, and he would have become very familiar with the writings of the classical authors. And which, of course, is what is very clear in his plays. So I suppose I feel from that standpoint that there's no reason to suppose that he didn't write them. Any other questions? Yes? Male Speaker: Did doing this project give you any new insights into any of the plays? Vanessa James: Oh, oh, oh yes I think it did. It gave me a number of new insights. Of course every time you read them you get new insights, it's -- you know, I think I first read the entire canon when I -- sort of between the ages of 10 and 12. And, you know, you get some insights then, but you don't get them all by any means. And then I have read the whole canon several times since then, apart from obviously seeing a number of the plays over and over my lifetime. And so, you know, every time you see them, you know, every time you read them, every time you see them, you see some other aspect that comes forward. I think that this last time I was reading them very much with a genealogical view in mind. And I was looking at that time for the kind of effects that family relationships were having on the play themselves. So, yes, it was, you know, was exciting from that standpoint. Yes? Female Speaker: In your description of the actors or illustration of the plays did you happen to include any illustrations or examples of the work by Judi Dench? Vanessa James: Of Judi Dench? Yes, I -- Go ahead and repeat the question so that it goes through to the video. Have I included any pictures of Judi Dench? Yes, there is, I think there were two pictures of her, actually in the book. Female Speaker: Is she in the actors list? Vanessa James: No, she's not, and there's a reason for that. I just decided in order to side step personal preferences not to put anybody in that list who was not already dead. And that seemed to be a good way to end it. Yes? Female Speaker: Would you speak to the difference between your experience with this genealogy and your first genealogy? Vanessa James: Oh yes. The difference between this genealogy and the first one I did, Greek mythology. Well the first difference is that it took me 20 years to write the first one. And this one I managed to do in three or four, but there was a reason for that. And that is that there weren't any computer programs available to me that would work for those kind of earlier -- the time when I started the first genealogy which would have, be now almost 30 years ago. So, of course, now I have these wonderful tools and I can work a lot faster. And I don't have to be there with little Post-Its or little stick-ums, you know, moving them around on a vast scroll which is the way that I delivered my first manuscript to Multi Media. I took -- it was four feet wide and 20 feet long and, you know, I sort of rolled it out in their offices. Fortunately their offices were large enough to roll it out. And then, of course you know, they looked at it and, and the question was how do you publish it? You know, as they rightly said, the days of the papyrus are over. We make books now. And so we had to think about it that way. But once we got the format, of course, working with the second one I adopted the same format. And I wasn't sure at first if actually the genealogies would fit it. But I was really happy to find that they did, that they worked in exactly the same way, that you could flip the book, get one part of the genealogy on one side, flip it and get the other one. So that worked very nicely. And as far as the content, and that's a part of it. The content, of course, is very different but it all links up. And you certainly could take both books actually and now put them all together, you know, down, one above the other. And each would link to the other book. So that I found to be a very exciting and nice part of it when I was doing that. And then, of course, trying to decide how much of the, you know, how to avoid putting too much of the previous book into the next one. Female Speaker: Do you mind if I ask a follow up? What inspired you to do the first one in the first place? Vanessa James: Oh what inspired me to do the first one? Oh well I suppose it was as a child my father, before I could read, my father used to read Greek myths to me, and I became absolutely fascinated with them and excited by them, I think as many children do. And so I entered a competition, I think, when I was like about seven for who could find the most Greek gods and goddesses and identify them. And I'm happy to say I won it. And I think I left everybody in the dust with the numbers [ laughs ] . So then I forgot about it for a long time. And then I was working on a production in New York, called "Gods and Goddesses," and it was about Greek mythology, and it had Ovid's "Metamorphosis" as its base and so I -- and Bulfinch's "Mythology" as well. And so I started to reread all that. And then I wanted to know more about the relationships of all these people and everything seemed to be so messy. You know, there was one -- you know, I could get one bit of information from one book and on from another and I couldn't put them together. And I thought this is crazy. There must be a way to do this. And so I started to try and do it but just really from my own exciting, you know, excitement from the subject. And then, of course, I found out to my astonishment that almost every person who appears in ancient Greek literature actually is related to somebody else. To the exception of probably of about 100 people, so it was -- so that's how I got hooked and I loved it. And then I suppose the next thing was with this book, you know, my publishers had told me and said, you know, what are you going to do when it's done? Because you're really going to, you know, it's really going to be hard for you. You are really going to, you know, have to come down after this. And so I said, no nonsense, nonsense. I'll be just fine. And then, of course, when the day came and the book went to the printer, it went to the printer in the morning, and I think by midday I was working on this one. [ laughter ] And then I realized how right they were [ laughs ] . Yes? Male Speaker: Now that this one is printed what happened midday? [ laughter ] Vanessa James: Oh! I was ready for it this time [ laughs ] . It wasn't quite as disastrous. However, yes, I think actually I didn't do it the same day but I did start within a couple of days on a new one. And, yes, I am working on it right now [ laughs ] . So it's an addiction, I think. Male Speaker: What is it? Vanessa James: I knew you were going to ask that [ laughs ] . Yes it's on the genealogies of the royal houses of Europe from the year 1,000 to the present. Yes [ laughs ] . I'm not sure yet, but I'm very excited about it, and I think it will be very interesting because, of course, they are all connected also. And as [ unintelligible ] has said, "The queen of England can trace her ancestry back to, on one side to Wotan [ spelled phonetically ] and on the other side to Adam and Eve." [ laughter ] So we're just fine. And so I think -- although I won't be going that far, I think. Just a 1,000 years is enough [ laughs ] . Yes? Female Speaker: Did young Shakespeare [ inaudible ] -- Vanessa James: Yes. No. No. I think they could be very well founded. You know, I think it's -- the new evidence and the new, at least -- yes I'm sorry. Yes. The question was about Shakespeare as a young man and his connections to Catholicism and also what, you know, what that meant for his plays. I think that there's no question in terms of what we've come to learn about the re-looking at the information of his life. We don't have a great deal more new information, but if we look at it within the structure, the political structure and the social structure of the time there's no -- he has to have been either Catholic or Protestant. He didn't really have much choice beyond that. And I think it's very reasonable to assume that he was, in fact, a Catholic. And I think much of the struggles, you know, within the plays that you can see do refer to that and refer to the fact, that, of course, he was living in a time when at one point, you know, within a few years you could either if you were Catholic you could be burned or beheaded or tortured or whatever. Or, if you managed to survive that, in a few years the same thing was happening to your neighbor who was a Protestant. And that's a very, you know, it's a very major context to think about. As far as his going to university, no. You know, he certainly did not go to university as far as we know. And would not have done because of the class really from which he came. The British class system which sort of originates back really to William Conqueror who came over with, you know, conquered England with all his Normans, set up a system where the Normans ruled, and everybody else didn't. And so that meant that the Saxons who lived in England at that time were demoted to being strictly peasants. And things haven't really changed greatly in terms of that relationship between at least aristocracy and everybody else. Any other questions? John shall we bring it to an end? John Cole: We'll bring it to an end. Please join me in thanking Vanessa one more time. [ applause ] I do want to comment, Vanessa, with all the new computer help you're getting, shall I go ahead and announce the date of your third book? We'll do this here at the Library in about a year or so? We'll all learn about the royal houses in Europe. Vanessa James: Megan says two years. John Cole: Two years. All right. Well we'll go ahead and book the auditorium and look forward to that. Well thank you once again for really a wonderful sharing of not only your knowledge but of producing this wonderful -- when you held it up I said it was a package, but, you know, it's such a special kind of package. It's an intellectual and well-designed intellectual package that is unique and fun as well as informative, and it's just a wonderful thing you've done and we do look forward to the third one. Vanessa James: Thank you so much John. John Cole: Okay. Thanks again. There is a book signing out back and you can get the book at a discount today so please talk with our author out back. Thank you. [ applause ] [ music ] [ end of transcript ] ?? ?? ?? ?? 16