SoS #51 | Heidi Craig: Drama during the English Civil Wars

This is a talk with Heidi Craig of the University of Toronto about her recent book on drama during the English Civil War period: 

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:00 - Drama during the English Civil Wars

00:05:46 - Old drama/new drama, when Shakespeare wasn’t first

00:08:45 - Periodization of drama

00:13:10 - Secret or underground performance

00:17:01 - Plays becoming literary and commercial products

00:21:50 - The effort to kill off drama and theatre and fun

00:27:28 - Elevating/ destroying drama politics/ pandemic

00:33:12 - Historic preservation and the digital age

00:36:45 - Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts (EMDP)

00:42:18 - Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO)

00:51:00 - The value of preservation

00:52:20 - The Last Age and Old Plays

00:56:26 - The value of the archive, Folger et al.

00:58:46 - Heidi’s current position/ the scholarly community

01:05:00 - Upcoming projects/ rags and paper

01:11:10 - Closing remarks

Transcript

This is speaking of Shakespeare conversations about things Shakespearean I'm Thomas Dabbs broadcasting from Aoyama Gakuin University in central Tokyo if you are joining us on YouTube you should know that this program is also available on your favorite podcast platform this talk is with Heidi Craig of the University of Toronto we will first have a look at Heidi's very recent book Theater Closure and the Paradoxical rise of English Renaissance Drama in The Civil Wars we will also discuss other areas of Heidi's past and future scholarly work including her contributions to research in dramatic paratext and to digital development in that area this series is funded with support from the Aoyama Gakuin University Institute of the humanities and also with a generous grant from the Japan Society for the promotion of science hello Heidi good afternoon to you is my morning your afternoon welcome back to our little series here it's so good to see you again great to see you Tom thank you for having me it was it it's our pleasure and let's get to your new book out of Cambridge University press with a title that I have practiced because it's kind of long this is Theater Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in The Civil Wars now to those of us who are not schooled in this there we are and uh those of us I didn't see you holding it up because I was uh I was reading it because I wanted to get the title right uh those of us who are schooled in this know uh one thing for certain that never has changed is that from in the 17th century from 1642 at the beginning of this Civil War period the several Civil Wars uh until 1660. that 18-year period is a dead zone for English drama and I think that was established long before we were on this Earth and it was something that no one has ever questioned and here comes Heidi Craig and you remind us that theater performance isn't the only way that drama survives and in some in some cases thrives and you have looked at this uh period and talked about the paradoxical rise now I'm going to hand this over to you because I think this is just brilliant it's just a brilliant contribution to scholarship and tell us a little bit about how you got into this and and what inspired you to look at this period this dead zone that none of us look at right we go up to 42 and then start again at 60. what inspired you thank you so the project started um my inclination as a Shakespearean is to be somewhat somewhat contrarian so I'm attracted to people who sometimes uh challenged the idea that Shakespeare was the greatest writer that the English language has ever produced people like Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, um Robert Greene for instance um and there was a bit of a rivalry there for Shaw as well um but for people who you know take um you know challenge the idea that Shakespeare is really the Pinnacle of high culture um so uh in the interregnum period the period I'm looking at between 1642 and 1660. that's really the um some challenging of Shakespeare par excellence and not only Shakespeare but Shakespeare's contemporaries and so really the entire tradition of English Renaissance drama or early modern drama which produced some of the you know most magnificent works of art um that we we now know and treasure um you know that whole tradition was really stymied and um closed down um for political but also um you know for cultural reasons so the period I'm I'm looking at um it really began with sort of a mystery um you know we know this great tradition of English Renaissance plays that flourished from the late 16th century um until the early 1640s uh and then of course we have the restoration tradition when the theaters reopened in 1660 you get the resumption of drama and some really you know Wonderful especially restoration comedies that we you know know and love um but my question was what happened in this intervening 18-year period uh when the theaters closed in 1642 between that time and when they reopened in 1660. now the story as you say is typically um the idea is that the theater's closed so everyone stopped thinking about drama everyone sort of forgot about the tradition and you know the theater's closed and that was that uh and to me this just didn't make a whole lot of sense you know censorship given what it is you know psychologically humans are drawn to towards what is withheld from us when something is censored it only makes us more interested and you know we're drawn to it in many ways um so I sort of took that as my you know governing principle and it really uh you know when I dug into the um into the archive and reading these materials about what people were um saying about English drama when the theaters were silent um it really rang true that people were thinking about drama in new ways they were printing it in new way stationers were preparing it and printing it in new ways and they were performing it in different ways and so I really think of this period as a key moment of not only production and consumption but also Innovation so so the paradoxical idea is when the theaters were closed that's when you get actually an incredible period of production and um sort of new plays in this moment when um in many ways drama was sort of old or dead to use one of my books governing metaphors yeah yeah and you've remarked on this and I saw this years ago when I was looking through whatever catalogs you know whether it's the uh what Pollard and red grave or the wing you know the old catalogs we used to thumb through uh that's giving away uh my age a little bit there uh but I saw this it was abundantly clear that at the period that we're talking about if you ask somebody who what who were the major dramatists of the old play period we'll talk about old plays in a moment uh immediately they would have said Beaumont and Fletcher uh and any any look at the publication history is Beaumont and Fletcher and of course that didn't last but I think you're kind of arguing uh that uh every ship rose with the tide if you have a strong uh dramatic collaboration like this with additions coming out that enhances more publication and in this period you show where these Publications are popping up and there's this uh Nostalgia but also there's a kind of um growth period of reset of the reception of old places that right yes absolutely one place I mean Paradox is for the key word for men for many parts of my book um and one of the paradoxes is as you said there's this um you know nostalgic um sort of attachment to the old plays but it's sort of expressed through this novelty this desire for Novelties you have sort of novelty on one hand and Nostalgia on the other so in the 16th um in the 1640s and 1650s you have stationers turn into old plays but plays that hadn't been printed yet so they were at once old and new so they were issuing these new editions sort of first editions of plays that had never been printed before and this was very um you know commercially enticing especially in a period of dramatic dearth stationers were able to offer Fresh Plays new plays that no one had ever seen before um and one person who was really um you know excellent at uh marketing these plays was Humphrey Mosley and he's a stationer from the 17th century who's sort of key to my story um and one thing he did his sort of canny marketing move was present a series of plays called new plays and no one had ever done this before no one had ever and of course first editions had been printed but he collected plays and presented them as new plays um and was sort of ironic because these new plays many of them had been presented on stage you know four decades prior but it really sort of speaks to the um desire for dramatic novelty and normally new plays but also the sort of creation of drama and the sort of excitement of new um New Creations on stage um so so tomfrey Mosley and his contemporaries really tapped into that by sort of putting together um you know old and new in this way yeah well I think uh I know you've been working on you've on this for years but uh in a way this speaks to how we uh collectively uh create uh this idea of periodization right post-world War II period or the prohibition period I I kept thinking there's not not a great analogy there but yes being drawn to that which you cannot have uh and things going underground uh the um you know Antebellum Period uh the before and after periods and clearly in our minds that was the old period before the wars and then you know what happened afterwards when uh Charles II came back uh and was restored um and you indicate that this periodization developed pretty much almost right on spot there it's not one of our Recreations of that they there was a real feeling of an end of an era

yes precisely um so do you have the sense of the 16 early 1640s as this real watershed moment um and part of it is just the fact of the Civil War all the physical destruction that was happening you know Cathedrals their windows were being smashed and icons are being uh smashed so there's a real sense of sort of a physical break from the past and also a cultural break from the past so the closure of the theaters um was felt um perhaps not immediately but pretty soon after as as a significant loss um you know some sometimes the theater closures of 1642 are compared with the earlier plane closures um and there is some Credence to that comparison so as you know um when the commercial theaters were open starting in the late 16 late 1600s the theaters were periodically closed for outbreaks of plague um and periods of national mourning and sometimes this would extend for months or even years at the time you'd have played closures lasting sometimes 18 months um so some people you know when the theaters closed in 1642 due to the war there was a sense that um you know among practitioners and and audiences of okay we've been here before the theaters were closed and they may remain closed for months or you know maybe years but they'll eventually reopen um so there was a sense of you had people complaining actors complaining um in print about the loss of their livelihoods and you know requestment theater to be reopened but there was always this sort of expectation that the theaters would eventually reopen and so in the first sort of five year period you have um you know people were writing they sort of have it two ways they can sort of paradox and be like Oh Our livelihoods are gone and everything's destroyed but you know know on the other hand of the theaters where we can reopen we can um you know we can get back to what we were doing and the illegal performances of the late 1640s um you know were performed by you know professional actors so they were sort of you know a lot of them were sort of standing at the ready to to resume drama at the theaters um were reopened um but around 1647 uh there was a change both politically so um you have uh no Charles Charles the first um and um the whole honey debacle um so where it's clear that um you know Parliament and Charles really won't be able to um you know reach an agreement and you know anything that you know any hope of Charles you know a government where Charles is installed at um as the Monarch um that's clear that that really won't won't be happening so you get the sort of breakdown in political discourse and that's accompanied by uh some clear breakdown in cultural discourse where you know Charles won't be coming back to the throne the theaters um even if they were to reopen things were just so far gone that you know things would be different even if they did reopen so you know I sort of after the first five years you get a sense that um you know you get a sense that 1642 really is a lie in the sand uh and there and then as you said they get a sense of periodization so it's happening not precisely in real time but you know pretty pretty quickly after the theater's closed people realize oh this is a um you know Epoch defining um activity or Epoch defining at the moment yeah I think we feel a sense of that now a pre-covered and post-covered uh in a much smaller time frame you know we we have to remember 18 years you know 18 years is a long time uh when you think of where you were 18 years ago and in case of my students they were barely here uh and it's a long time for things to go down now you do point out that there were uh drills uh the uh small dramas that uh kind of uh well closeted uh you know that people couldn't stop acting you know but uh and there's there's quite a good bit of evidence or a lot of things have survived that uh these drills in print right is that correct yes absolutely so drills are part of the uh illegal performance tradition that arose um in response to the prohibition um and so there's two sort of um sort of phenomena that are worth describing so you have the drills which are short uh playlists usually um usually they're drawn for longer from longer place you'll have a short extract from Henry IV or Blaze from Belmont and Fletcher and then they're usually comic and they'll be you know sort of a few minutes long and they're usually um stage the favorite favorite comic scenes from um from well-known place so a good example is the drool from Henry IV the robbers robbed or the bouncing Knight is essentially all of all staff scenes um sort of taken out from Henry the first um Henry the fourth part one and just sort of put together now these Jewels often don't make a lot of sense they sort of depend on a sort of folkloric knowledge of all staff or um in some cases you just like false deaths you want to see him on stage even if the plot doesn't make much sense because they just sort of the context is is really been removed um so you have the drills and the drill as a form sort of emerges in response to the uh the raids andron so that's the other thing that's so important to know about uh performance in this period so when people would perform uh plays in in London usually but also other places there was always a threat for uh government raids by the local um by the local authorities and these soldiers would go in um and bust up the performance um the money would be confiscated from the from the ticket sales and you know more devastatingly the costumes would be seized um and so it's interesting because our best knowledge of clandestine performance is actually due to these records of raids happening on performance because if the performances were you know if everything went off as planned you wouldn't really know about them because they're clandestine um so the raids is when we sort of hear about what went wrong and we have um in one story there's a performance of a play where the player had a ping on I had a crown on his head he was a player King and when they um you know the cops come in and bust up the performance and they take they take the player king crown it'll take turns you know trying it on and and so during a moment when the monarchy itself is um you know is that issue that's a very sort of symbolic symbolic moment and since costumes are so expensive the fact that um you know the the authorities would seize the costumes it was very devastating for the actors so the droll emerged partly in response to the threat of braids the idea being you can get up perform a play or play let very quickly and then just get out with your money and your costumes intact um so this sort of short form was a less risky way to to perform yeah uh so you just can't kill it off uh it's basically it uh you you can uh you can make it go underground I guess some of the uh soldiers who were raiding probably were in attendance at a performance you know it's just okay boys we got to go in and hit this it would be a little bit uh again that uh false analogy I'm making between prohibition you know the the idea that the you know the Mayors in the Speakeasy drinking with the boys until you know the word comes down he's got to close the place down so they make a big public exhibition you could see maybe something like this what a dramatic moment right it is busting up that's a play not within a play that's a play without a play you know that's right that's a good title and that should have been my answer I love my book time no no because no you're so uh textually oriented and this was the next thing I wanted to get to here was the fact that the value of reading uh I think you there's an indication here that it goes up there is a uh the idea of the old play now as a relic as something to preserve uh where I say you know well we did have big uh folio of course editions of Shakespeare and Johnson and Beaumont and Fletcher but uh still I think there was a struggle uh trying to figure out what were the value of these play texts now because they're not these unified uh poetic I think they're not Milton they're not Paradise Lost they're not uh fairy queen whatever they're these uh basically uh movie scripts that are out there um and uh there's I think I I've received from reading your book that there there is this value of reading trauma the the uh activity of reading drama and uh dramatic drama appreciation so it is in a sense sort of a precursor to our our field you know many well a couple of centuries later I guess that's what I would argue um so I mean the question of when plays went from trivial ephemeral entertainments to literature is something that our field is really interested and there's a few different moments you know the folio publication of Shakespeare in 1623 seems to be a moment when Shakespeare is presented not just as a sort of playwright who does entertainment but a serious poet who's writing dramatic poetry that will last for posterity and this really is literary um so that is an important moment but I think that Shakespeare is sort of an exception to um you know to the period you have and Ben Johnson might be another one for the most part the play is produced for the commercial theater are seen as you know Light Summer stuff to borrow a um a line from from one of my paratexts um so some of them are great but um you know some of the the plays and some of the playwrights are um literary but most of them are poor um you know more entertaining but I would say that this is a moment um in the 1640s and 50s that drama as a genre English Renaissance drama as a genre is both sort of coalescence as a genre so you can think of it as you know one thing that's something we call now English Renaissance drama so sort of this this thing that sort of coalesces I is elevated as a whole so even people who you might not think as particularly serious uh Thomas Haywood or you know people who are sort of right off plays you know hundreds of plays um in one sitting um they too were sort of elevated that's just a rising a rising tide elevates all boats um they're too elevated as part of this uh belonging to this Corpus of English Renaissance Trump where we have you think of incentives for what you think of sort of Shakespeare Johnson and other figures as belonging to one um sort of one coherent uh category yeah and also commercially viable this would not have happened these guys are not uh the university press is putting out you know scholarship uh that's publicly funded you gotta uh you gotta pay the um you have to pay the rent uh if you're a printer and so for a printer to move over and to do this amount of printing during this period indicates that these are very commercially viable yes it's sort of it's interesting it's a period of periodication but also also a commercial production

production we have high art on one side and then you know popular um economically viable uh text on the other side but I think this is a really appeared where uh those things dovetail partly because the stationers who um you know wanted to make money of course but they also saw themselves as um you know the Guardians of high culture um in the time where um you know it was very directly being attacked by by the authorities so the stationers wanted to preserve what they saw as high arch but they also wanted to to make money and Humphrey Mosley again is a key figure in that he was a great reader he actually printed Milton funnily enough even though Milton was um you know his political views didn't lie with Mosley's own royalist views um but Mosley was a great reader and he um you know he knew what would be uh what would be what would sell and also what was beautiful so it's interesting you know some of these key figures really we have to thank for um printing these texts so that we still have them to enjoy today yeah and I I think uh it's it's a hard argument for uh to make I've been making it throughout my career but if you don't have this period of reception afterwards obviously it dies it goes away and uh it falls into somebody's basement or attic uh whatever the whatever was printed or maybe it isn't printed you know there's so many people who have lived and died who may have we may remember as a great artist you know but it just that never happened and so these these old plays 18 years is long enough to kill off and that and that's what they uh the Puritans wanted to do they would have been perfectly happy to have had this whole thing erased you know in sort of maoist fashion from history uh but apparently they did not go after the printers they just went after that physical space I guess it's interesting I mean this is again this is um people have various uh thoughts about this idea some people would argue that the whole um sort of argument that the Puritans really had an in for drama really targeting drama is actually um sort of not entirely true um I mean I would argue uh Susan Wiseman makes this uh argument in um in her book the drama

and who's one of the great Susan Wiseman is a great uh person whose work I draw on Emma The Pledge is another person uh Rachel Willie uh these are these are people who've written um I'm not you know I didn't come up with this idea of working looking at the 1640s and 50s um you know I'm certainly drawing uh drawing on lots of excellent work but Susan Wiseman makes this argument that um what's perhaps right to say that uh the closure of the theaters in 1642 was more pragmatic than political uh it became a political campaign uh as as time went on um because there wasn't only one um ordinance there was an ordinance of 1642 been in the theaters but it was reissued several times and the one that was issued in 1647 for instance made it very clear that plays were not to be tolerated because they provoked God's Wrath and so there you it's very clear that um we're in 1642 it was a temporary injunction against plays only while the war was on by 1647. um you know the people who were issuing these degrees and they were people Puritans they wanted to end drama forever 20 female um so it is um even though sometimes the whole idea of a royalist you know the drama loving royalists of 110 and the drama hating Puritan on the other hand there is some more complexity to that but generally speaking I think that um you know you may have had individual Puritans who liked drama but I think Jung was speaking this sort of Puritan ethos um you know was uh very suspicious of drama so I think that's that's sort of those broad Contours are are still true even given the exceptions yeah yeah and even with the um the naming of people as Puritan there's a uh there's a problem there you know at what point did someone become a Puritan you know they're clear examples of people who uh just apparently didn't want anybody else to have any fun uh kind of our modern understanding but there were people who were uh you know there were you know men of the cloth uh who were very serious and they they felt that you know this probably wasn't the best thing for society and you know wouldn't vote against something like this but probably they privately enjoyed uh any number of things you know in terms of uh their own personal entertainment but then you have to think of the good of the commonweal and and that sort of thing and where we're going so it's so complex that period is so complex uh historically yes and it's not just plays I mean you know the the Government tried to ban uh Christmas celebrations tried to ban um you know drinking on Sunday or drinking altogether um you know Morris dancing Sports on Sunday so there was you know there's a lot of things Banning you know Banning Christmas that sounds that's like what the the Puritans and the Grinch have something in common but um yeah it really was um you know if you do think of even though you know given the the complexity of um you know it's sort of an oversimplification to say the Puritans were opposed to to fun um in practice you know the the ordinances they issued were um you know we're certainly um opposed to many things that we think of you know people having having a good time yeah well that came uh to the um to North America uh and uh I think I'm right my uh history of uh Christmas in North America it was not a big deal for the uh settlers the early uh Puritan settlers in the Northeast and I think it was the um the German immigrations and then the Germans were going to have their Christmas and that was more you know moving out to the Midwest and then of course uh the um the department stores and so forth people found out how much money you could make off of Christmas you know a long time ago uh but yeah the abolishment of Christmas anything uh this whole uh lack of Mirth uh the part of part of um social but individual and social Consciousness that you have this spectrum of people who have too much fun obviously you know they're they're drinking too much they're they're uh raising too much hell uh and yes this is not good for society I think we all agree and you go all the way to the other end let's just sit around and think about God and work and and do you know nothing anything fun is suspicious right and as I think you're saying is that most of us exist somewhere uh in the middle of that Spectrum perhaps it's funny you say that to them because Francis Rouse one of the people who crafted the original ordinance of 1642 which banned theaters he suggested replacing the theater with fasting so that doesn't sound like fair trade um so you could you know that really sort of speaks to it's a sort of a quite a dramatic example of yeah let's go out on Friday night and fast together right you know

but uh you see it now this whole thing carries up and until our time and I think that what the the kind of work that you are have done here and that you continue to do shows us and reminds us that what what is normally in our time kind of received is this High maybe academic art or high art or um you know above the uh the non-elite you know uh better than or most of this stuff was right there in society enjoyed by people uh on you know from you know uh common workers to uh the elite and so forth that this was General entertainment and the big problem was that it wasn't seen as high art right off the bat it had to work its way through a reception period that you've covered so wonderfully uh and it could have been lost but we are in our universities in our university positions and so forth uh still from generation to generation trying to keep this in play because we see the continuity here there's something valuable here that needs to remain in play you're absolutely right Tom and I think one one reason why I think this is a key moment of what we do today as Scholars is that in the 1640s and 50s you get people get the awareness that um you know whereas previously they can sort of count on going to the theater they can count on going to a play you know they didn't have to have a printed play in their hands to be able to enjoy drama when the theaters closed they really have this awareness that if I want to enjoy these plays for these plays not to fall into Oblivion um they really have to be printed because previously um and that makes sense to us now but previously there wasn't a sense that if the play is not printed it will disappear forever because there's always the chance that it could be performed again on stage but without the stage being a viable option it really has to be printed um and in that case I mean you know the sort of common person didn't enjoy these plays but once plays are you know legally in the exclusive realm of print you do get people looking at the sort of silver lining of this moment well where they say oh you no longer have vulgar uh people uh as audience as audiences for your place because only the literate people can read your plays so this was um you know people sort of presented this as a way um sort of elevating the drama insofar as the audience was now exclusively literate um now I think um you know that's um you know I do think that also thinking about our own moment um you know one thing that really um something that sort of resonated with the with my book sort of unexpectedly was um the connection between covid and uh and and the theater closures so I wrote this this book emerges from my dissertation which I finished in 2017. so I'd been thinking about it long before covid um but um you know in this in during covid you know the theaters closed public entertainments had to close actors were suddenly put out of work people had to sort of scramble and figure out what to do um and one thing one thing one sort of story people would tell about performance um or about the performance During the inter-regnum period my period um is that oh well there was a legal performance so you know things weren't too bad because people could perform illegally and they sort of eat that living now that is true but what one thing covid was um sort of brought to light was um you know similarly people would put plays on Zoom or you know have alternate forms of um theater but it really was devastating for the practitioners you know a zoom play didn't attract the same type of audience or the same Revenue as a play on the stage um so likewise you know in in our own covered time and then during the interregnum um just a simple fact of banning theater really had you know immediate um concrete consequences that so resonated throughout throughout the throughout the following years um and again too you know in covet it may may have been I mean we're still in the covet is still an issue but you know if there's sort of 18 months or two years when it was really you know really devastating to theater imagine 18 years right that would be yeah the cult American tradition sort of be obliterated and people who were uh you know one thing I talk about in my book is the sense of continuity um you know from you go from Richard Burbage to uh John John lowen for instance and sort of the successors of there's always someone else to pick up the Baton you get the sense of sort of a dead end and I think that's um and sort of one reason why we're attracted these plays why people were attracted to the plays in the 1640s was the sense of a dead end um and the sense of if we're not going to let these plays fall into Oblivion uh we really need to do something we need to make a concerted effort to print them to preserve them to read them to think about them carefully and so that's why I think um you know what's happening in the 1640s and 50s is important for what we're doing now today in 2023 um the sense of you know these we can't access them on stage anymore so we need to read them carefully really um so first preserve them physically and then read them carefully because um one argument I make in my book is that we have a lot in common with people in the 1640s because in 2023 we can't see a play as it was staged in the early 17th century and in the 1640s that wasn't true either um you know immediately that sort of tradition was was was cut off and was at a remove D people in the in the mid 17th century so that's you know the first sort of the moment of the The Scholar of early modern drama having to access the plays primarily through textual means that really starts in the 1640s so those people are are our predecessors yeah well we can return to this but I'm seeing a Segway right now uh and let's see if I can get this ship into Harvard uh you're you're dealing with a uh nostalgic uh attachment to the the prior age in in the age that you're considering the The Civil Wars you know with all of that uh disruptive stuff going on all over the place I mean real violence and real uh uh just Mayhem in in uh as these factions tried to get things sorted and you know reach a settlement or whatnot and uh at this at the time of all of this destruction even more you know destruction of uh relics and holy areas and so just terrible stuff all the way around in the middle of all this you have this burgeoning publishing industry that is doing something that it hadn't done before right now I'm making the uh comparison again with covid that as we had to close down now the poor actors uh people who stand up Comics people in entertainment who required studio and Studio audiences you know all of those people were hit so hard yet if I'd contacted Heidi Craig in 2017 to ask about her research at that point and said let's uh let's Zoom what is this guy you know right I think I think Thomas you know got into some mushrooms or something in his backyard I've never heard of this what in the world oh and we're going to sit here and talk like we're talking now that normalize that so we're fine we're fine with it now and so there was that there's the uh there's the birth of these things in the middle of the death of so much other stuff um I don't want to make a phoenix image here you know that's that's a complete it's a completely different thing but it's a quarter I guess what we call it is the unexpected outcome or unintended outcome there was no intention in covet it was just a virus uh there was a great amount of intentionality in the um uh Puritan Movement uh in you know the period you're dealing with but uh even before covet you and I both saw the value of uh preservation and a bibliographical cataloging the boring stuff the stuff that puts people to sleep that they ask you at a cocktail party what you do uh we were both drawn to digital digital means because it's so abundantly clear that when you're dealing with bibliography dealing with cataloging that the ability to search digitally just beats all right these big catalogs that you used to well you still do see all over the place where you'd have to pull down if if you're a lawyer you have to go to the statutes of the state of New Mexico and pull down 1949 and you know zip through and you'd hire people to do that for you and now you can just bring it up you know and pretty soon even now there's going to be a very uh directed AI that can they pull that you know do all of uh this stuff for you and you are doing digital projects and that's what I want to do is get into your digital projects we can return but you are working with two in particular and I'm going to hand this to you there's some acronyms here I don't want to mess up

Sony Messiah is mdip that's the acronym which stands for early modern dramatic para texts and it focuses on paratexts which were printed in English drama uh from the first days of printed drama so about 15 15 to the closure of the theaters in 1642. to the closure of theaters and then the reopening of the theaters the original book I actually have it here excuse me so this is the um the original uh paratex and English printed drama edited by Sonia Messiah and the late great Thomas L Berger yeah so um this book is a printed reference book and it's two volume I have um the other volume on my shelf here this is includes transcriptions of all paratexts so things that surround the drama dedicatory poems cast lists dedications commentatory poems Errata anything that sort of frames the play that isn't the play itself um so they in this two volume reference work they printed all all the parent texts for plays printed to the closure of the theater 1642 so that's important an important date um so when Sonia and Tom were working on this project to present parent checks which tell you a lot about the production of plays on stage uh the production of place in print ideas about performance ideas about the content of the place they're very rich it's a rich repository of information which was more or less untapped until Sonia and Tom published this book in 2014 with Cambridge University press um so when they were creating this this reference resource they decided to end in 1642 because they felt that the intervening period between 1642 and 1660 really represented a different body of material that was reflecting on the closure of the theater so they sort of put a pin in 1642 and said it will be for someone else to you know to something else someone else to take up um pick up the Baton so this is where I came in um when I was working on my uh originally my dissertation out of which my book emerged I was really interested in the paretextual materials printed after 1642 uh to 1616. so paratex in printed drama uh printed in the period of the theater closures which reflect on the theater produce and reflect on you know any number of things but weren't in this reference book so for my own purposes with for an independent study I thought oh I'll just do the follow-up Edition for my own independent study I'm thinking oh how long you know how long would it could it take me how many could there be a thousand Pages later of transcription a parent texts um using also I mean I use a lot of um I was in the archive but I also used English early English books online which is an incredible resource um I had this entire Corpus of all parent text and printed drama um between plays printed between 1642 when the theater is closed and 1660 when the theaters reopened um so I had this project and I got in touch with uh Sonia Masai one of the editors of um 1642 and we decided to join forces and our goals were twofold first to digitize these two foreign books which are you know really um incredible work of research but in many ways um are sort of designed for the digital format even though they're in print so um you know this book it has an index but it's not keyword searchable so if the index your reading doesn't have um you know the keyword you're interested in it might not be entirely useful whereas a digital project is dynamic fully searchable so you can search you know anything you want if it's in the Corpus of transcriptions it will appear um so our first goal was to digitize these two volumes into a very user-friendly intuitive Open Access digital database and that's what we did in collaboration with the holder Shakespeare Library who helped design the website and the center of digital Humanities research at Texas A M which also did a lot to um to design the website as well working with this large digital team and digital projects are always we launched um early modern dramatic paratexts um last year um so that phase one was to add all of the parent texts and Associated metadata uh the playbooks in which they appear that appear in this two volume reference work and you can see there's a lot here and there um it was long content so it's really even just having the digitized is is very useful for the um for the academic for our the academic world um phase two was to add the material from my own project which is paratex from 16 1642 to 1660. um so these um these materials previously weren't available um not in a in a modern reference Edition so uh Sony and I by joining forces we digitized existing books and then added my material so we're in the process of adding materials um we're now in beta which means the site is available for people to play around with um it's not perfect beta is not you know not the true blue launch um but it is the Corpus of materials is there for people to to experiment with what we're hoping by launching it in beta even with its sort of warts and all um is that people will use it tell us you know what they like what they don't like what they wish was available so that we could Tinker with the functionalities so if you want to search for um you know currently you can search by paratext type people search by keyword you can search by date you can search by author but there may be things that we're not considering that people would like so they can email us and say oh we would like to search by you know something else um so at this point we're still pretty flexible and another other exciting news is that the paratex project which was developed and hosted as I said by the Folger is now joining forces with lendo which is the linked early modern drama online which is hosted at the University of Victoria led by Janelle jenstad and you know again a wonderful team of collaborators so we're going to be integrated into the lemdo suite of projects and that is sort of in in process right now so that will be um the mdep our project will be fully Tei encoded which we're in the process of doing which will make it much more sort of functional and intraoperable with with other sites including the plays uh little Suite of yeah now by Tei that's text encoding initiative it's a long-standing way to encode or to present to frame text digitally and the digital Humanities Community has gravitated into this as the superior form and the uh what we're going to be using uh 10 20 30 years from now uh very in other words not uh what did Janelle call it uh this is Janelle gen stat of Victoria uh Boutique these Boutique programs that Afflicted a couple of projects uh some some years back and that now with changes in this highly technical language but basically uh it's just uh old old parts to an old car right don't fit the new car I think is the way it is best you know and you need to design things in which you can move forward and the Tei is flexible enough to to go with the the new waves of programming that come in uh generation to generation which is um a generation and this business can be three to five years uh so uh that's good and you're you're going to be part of the uh overarching limdo uh project at UVic uh and that hosted on their server is that right yes that's right and one great thing so lemdo is a long-standing project and they have critical editions of plays by Shakespeare but also plays that aren't also um readily available so sort of less less traditionally popular plays so plays that people want to read but can't find an edition of easily um so one great thing um you know obviously it's great to make these plays available um and one nice thing about us from the perspective of paratext is that they chose to exclude the parentection material um partly because they were aware that Sonia and I were working on this project so they thought we would eventually join forces but now it won't be a matter of a link to our project the project will actually be fully integrated in the lemto suite so you can go you know see the see the para text for uh the Jew of Malta uh and then you can read the doable to itself um and so yes yes excellent and this is all open access uh yes um so you know these those big books that you're showing us and you know the academic books can be uh out price the mere mortals uh I I think when I see some of these just astounding prices on academic books uh where well of course their marketing to libraries who had the funds to bring you know the books in but you know a lot of our viewers and listeners don't we have uh lay people out there who are just interested in this stuff and if you're not close to a big University Library it's kind of hard to get uh to this material and these Open Access online sites uh I yes I think most of us would say we like holding a little book in our hand and reading it but I I had to work quick to get access to Heidi Craig's new book and I was glad that there's the Kindle option while I wait on the hard copy right and so yes if you it's hard to find auditions sometimes the Jew of Malta in hard copy and and great that that could be accessed and searched yes it is

150 book but also access in terms of expertise so some of these reference books require a fair bit of prior knowledge to be able to just sort of parse you know for instance um in this book space was quite a consideration so there's a footnote that with a series of dates and information that you might not realize the first date is the publication date and the second date is the performance date and the third number is the STC number and so forth um so that requires a fair bit of expert knowledge and it's just the considerations of space um but when um you know I can I'll pull up uh pull up an image of our of our site a nice thing about the digital format is that we have you know all the space we want essentially so whereas previously you had dates where you might not know what corresponds to what um our metadata is presented very clearly so you can see oh this is the author this is the day that publication this is the data performance this is the Greg number this is the uh deep number and everything's presented very clearly so that you don't have to be an expert researcher to be able to understand um you know understand what these things are so that's another thing the digital format is both economically accessible insofar as it's open access and then it's just sort of um you know people who are not especially seasoned researchers yet you can also understand um understand what these materials are Janelle jenstad talked uh with me about the the notion what you want what you want is a site that you can put on a USB you know if necessary uh and uh and and that it has that functionality within within itself right that it isn't so tied up with uh knocking itself off this servers that server or whatever so dependent on so many other things being up and running and I think that's the way you guys are proceeding too uh if you're that's that's a really good point I mean one thing um you know printed books I mean I like printed books having them in my hand but another nice thing about print is that I put this on my shelf and tomorrow it will still be there and you know 25 years from now it will still be there um but with digital projects um you know that's less assured and you never know you know there's various things that could happen um you know software is updated or you know what how do servers go down and projects can disappear and I forget what the exact statistic is but you know the number of projects digital projects that were curated 10 years ago you know a fraction of them still exists DH projects and that is you know represents a lot of knowledge a lot of Labor that is just lost and one thing Janelle Jens that is really um you know really her important work she's doing is that projects are endings compliant so projects that um you know even if sort of the framework of the project is no longer um extent the data can be preserved uh forever much like a printed book will you know barring floods or fires or moths and the printed book will exist forever essentially um so for for the data for a budget to be endings compliant and Janelle is really the expert on this um you know ensuring that digital projects can be you know put on a USB key or saved um you know in some format such that no matter what happens um you know the data will will exist um you know in perpetuity and she's really um you know doing this doing this this work and it's really important work especially as we all start to turn into digital projects we don't want our work to to disappear well that's we've worked on this uh with the little project that we're doing at my University to digitize rare Bibles that we hold and not a huge collection but some very fine additions in there that nobody knows anything about uh I was here for uh 10 years and just didn't know that we had these in our library and there was it brought them out for an exhibition and I went downstairs uh we have a chapel downstairs and it was in the foia of the chapel where uh the Bibles and some other religious texts from uh 16 mostly 16th 17th century where did these come from our library right across the way you know we have special Collections and so that we began you know digitizing however just I'm making a short story long the uh the thing is this year we're making sure everything is on uh USB and it will be held uh you know after my retirement after the next person's retirement whatever it will be held in our departmental library on a USB so if someone gets interested in it there it is if for some reason the website disappears whatever we still have the data uh and images and so forth and I think that's very important yeah well it's funny we've come full circle in terms of preservation because in the 1640s it was all about the fear of Oblivion and what will happen to this this matter so it's really about you know preservation how can we keep these cultural artifacts for posterity so it is not not to go back to my book hello um yeah I can of course talk about that until the cows come home but um but these questions of um preserving our our cultural no inheritance is you know it's just as relevant now as it was in the 1640s and 50s it's just clearly a value for us we see it a lot of people don't and they they really never do until you take it away uh and the things that we had taken away from us during the pandemic at the early the early days in particular uh I think that now there might be a heightened sense of cultural awareness uh about what can be taken away so quickly and the uh even the quotidian you know day-to-day elements of Our Lives you know just walking down the street and saying hello to a neighbor even if you don't like the person that much they're your neighbor right you know it's nice to see you yeah what's going on back there you know your dog barks too much you know you take away the Barking Dog and the neighbor whatever of course I guess in the pandemic The Barking Dog was still there but anyhow you just take these things out of life out of day-to-day life and then you realize just how important they are and yeah I guess you can get through your life just fine without Shakespeare without uh a lot of the stuff that we study uh but it's so enriching for so many people and uh that's where I kind of want to move I have a couple of questions for you about this last age that uh stuck in my mind so selfishly uh I see this coming up even as late as the early 19th century they talk about the prior age and I I wondered when I was reading exactly what are they talking I think they're talking about The Shakespearean period or what they would see is the old drama that period before the war right the last stage and that stuck for over well over 100 years you know 150 easily and uh dodgely and is coming out you know let's say turn of 19th century what not coming out with his old plays and old plays when paper got cheaper just just huge just I mean auditions in addition and Shakespeare is prioritized in terms of single editions but uh within this whole flood of dramatists of the of the last age or the old drama it's stuck because it's funny you use the word flood um because actually um there was a running sort of metaphor in the restoration that Shakespeare's contemporaries were giants Before the Flood and the flood you can think of it as this sort of cataclysmic division the flood was the Civil War um you think of this sort of antediluvian period where you know before Noah things were different um but there was a sort of similar sense in the restoration that before the before the Civil War um you know these people were sort of different almost a different species people like Shakespeare and Johnson they were sort of Giants and of culture they wrote a different they spoke in a different way their plays sounded different the performance tradition was different um so it was a sense of something being sort of alien and removed from the restoration um but also very important so these sort of there were giants they were Titans on the field and they were doing um there was a great admiration but there's always a sense that a sense of sort of removal of what they were doing and I think that sort of carries through and godly that phrase old play that's a that's a word um boldness is a really important concept to my book um because very you know pretty early on around the late 1640s you get the sense of plays that weren't you know particularly chronologically old um you know they may be 10 years old um they were being grouped in with plays that were produced 100 years prior so you get the sort of sense of um those watershed moments of the Civil War and the closure of the theaters and everything produced before that which previously would be sort of striated you know James Shirley um in the Caroline period James truly didn't think of himself as a contemporary of Shakespeare Right There Was You Know 30 years dividing them um but from the restoration James Shirley and Shakespeare or in the 1640s even James Shirley is mentioned in the same breath of Shakespeare if someone belonging to period before so you get this sort of great you know what was before thought as a great variety of uh drama you know Elizabethan drama is different from Caroline drama and Tudor plays are different from uh Jacoby and plays um but after the theaters close it's all sort of sort of smooshed into one um you know so it coalesces into One Singular category which we now call early modern drama now they didn't use the phrase early modern drama in the 17th century but they did use old plays and they use it repeatedly and that's a phrase that you see um you know it's pretty consistently applied to plays before 1642 and become sort of a category in its own right and it's a category that's intelligible and that is you know something that's used by Robert dogslee or the category sort of sticks um and it's sort of interesting to think of you know oldness as in some ways you think about sort of a nebulous category like oh what's you know is this old or is that old um but certainly it's a phrase that's consistently applied to plays uh performed before 1642. yeah okay so you're doing this uh with without an archive you you I mean without the archive the the actual um uh physical archive where this the where the books are right you you don't have much to go on uh there uh you need that for your research which is something I love about this type of research you need the archive and in your case I think the Folger uh was very important uh other archival Holdings what uh did you get over to the bodland or their other uh places that were a particular value in your research well the Folger really was

um from uh 2018 to 2019 which in retrospect you know it was sort of Before the Flood of coven right and it was such a wonderful year you know there were so many wonderful people there who I got to collaborate you know have lunch with have coffee with just you know work together with and it was really such a wonderful um year sort of intellectually and socially and it was really vibrant um so the Folger was a wonderful place to work I also had the um the privilege to work at the Huntington Library in California and I mean that's Paradise you have the beautiful gardens uh you know Wonderful staff wonderful people um it is it's such a fantastic place to work so working with the early material there um and then I was at the Newberry as well working on with different material different on a slightly different project while I was there I saw I do take some material out from the 1640s and 50s just just to have a peek even though I was working on my second book project on rags and rag Pickers and textual contextual culture um but certainly I did I was I was very fortunate to be able to go into these archives and be supported by these fellowships so I really have to thank the Huntington and the new very end and especially in the Villager uh just wonderful that that uh exists out there uh for Scholars particularly uh early career uh in that case uh you may not think of yourself now as so much early career as I'm heading in more mid-career uh I still see you as early career uh and uh maybe that's good that's good a few tricks up my sleeve hopefully yeah and uh you are uh now at the University of Toronto and you have uh I believe the uh local you have Fort book over there uh which I've had the pleasure of uh visiting the it's just incredible uh visual of approaching the uh U of T Library uh which is uh also a place with the news astounding collection there uh so uh well I'm not jealous as much as uh uh it just you know I'm grateful that somebody thought to do that and uh so there you have it well I'm you have another friend in Toronto Tom so certainly if you want to ever want to come down and over to robarts library or the Thomas Fisher and uh enjoy it and an afternoon at Ford book I'll be there yeah it was you will be there yeah I'll have you have somebody there whether I spoke with Holger we were talking uh uh before about that and uh uh hoger syme who's a friend of the program there are a lot of people whose names have come up and there's so many more people Heidi I want to talk to uh you know there's we have limited resources and so it's uh you know it's uh there's there's a little bit of a sadness because you just see I'm thinking that you you did this you know with your your morbid chapter titles you know it's going to kind of uh there's a sadness because uh you had a list of names not in your acknowledgments and I'd go through and I would just think oh my goodness the people that I would love to you know I wish I could do this every day you know I don't I don't know if I could get through the reading but uh let them tell us you know but there's so many people out there that have worked uh you just showed an enormous network of people who are involved in this kind of stuff in your acknowledgments and it really I was people were so generous with me um when I was at the Folger and the Huntington I was relatively Junior um you know I had just come out of my PhD program and people really took the time to um you know sit down with me they didn't you know I wasn't didn't have a position I wasn't established but people were so generous with their time and with their ideas just to you know take me out for a coffee or and they often did you know buy me my coffee or my lunch and and just share their their time and their expertise with me um and so those are the people I really um you know who's who's expertise and whose academic generosity um has really sort of made me the scholar I am so I'm very grateful to them and you're part of that too John you've been so you know so wonderful inviting me to these programs and we had our um you know the digitizing the stage conferences at the bodilian um in 2017 and 2019. um so you're part of that too Todd you're you know I have to thank you as well certainly well yeah uh but I feel sort of humbled by some of the names in your acknowledgment list you know there's some uh extraordinary people in there uh all of them really uh but uh some people who have passed on now you know you were talking about Harry Berger uh and uh Sonia made is abundantly clear how much influence uh he had on her career you know you take this or you were talking about being contentious but this younger a contentious Italian woman who comes in and disagrees at a conference and instead of being exiled you know taken under the wing of a senior scholar at that time and guided and so forth it seems that you're talking about the same sort of mentorship that uh you know we talk about all kinds of things people bicker with each other you know there are a lot of family arguments and so forth but there's an enormous amount of mentorship and uh your case brings this out uh and that's absolutely absolutely uh really good that these people do take their time and you would think they wouldn't but they do they do yeah and you mentioned I mean I've had some mentors who have you know passed on you know at the University of Toronto at the University of Saint Andrews I work with Barbara Murray who worked on restoration adaptation of Shakespeare and she was really crucial to making me realize that there was this sort of you know afterlives of Shakespeare after you know after 1616 or after 1623 um so she she worked in the 1660s and and you know various adaptations of Shakespeare William davnet and so forth um I know I'm with her without her um you know I probably wouldn't be wouldn't be on this path so you know various mentors who have um you know whether they are still on this astral plane or who have shuffled off this Mortal coil I'm certainly very very grateful to them yeah yeah there's some people you just feel should just live forever you know then uh there is a kind of sadness there but then again there's also some happiness in the fact that we are uh we have survived this I mean the the people have been uh trying to kill off the humanities uh uh one of uh my podcasts is dedicated to that for decades now you know just globally kill it off you know there's I I don't think this is a puritanical thing it's more of a utilitarian I think uh movement you know as we moved into academe the the uh question it seems perennial comes up why do we need those folks over there and uh you know and then again if you just wipe it out the next day people are going what did you do that for I mean we we like that uh you know you know the uh yeah maybe our son and uh or daughter or whatever is not going to study Shakespeare at this University but we like the idea this university has Shakespeare you know right I think there's you know there's things like there's chat gbt I suppose um but chat PBT isn't particularly good at writing interesting things or beautiful it can write a grammatical sentence but it can't think interesting thoughts um and it will be you know it's good maybe graphing code or various things um but really humans are the best at writing beautiful poetry and wonderful essays and I don't think will be replaced um you know replaced by AI anytime soon so in terms of utilitarian I think the humanities will will run out eventually yeah we always do you know uh after you know just keep crawling out from under that rock they try to throw it uh but well um I want to find out a little bit before we end this I want to uh find out a little bit about what is next now what is next is obviously your digital work uh and uh you're in Canada now um but you are still that doesn't change in fact it might open up some opportunities some funding opportunities and so forth uh there are some very uh excellent funding sources in Canada I know from Janelle and also I uh elsewhere too because you need the funding to keep these things going uh it's just impossible without it well my next project will probably be um highly archival as well having been out of the archive the physical archive during during coven um but my next project I'm really interested in will actually most likely be a trans-historical project so starting in the early modern period but also looking a little bit earlier and especially a little bit later probably up to our own contemporary moment um so this project looks at rags and rag collection and waste picking as the raw material for cultural cultural production so it really started with looking at rag Pickers and these are the individuals who before the invention of wood pulp paper when paper was made out of linen rags would have to collect the old used Rags um you know door-to-door or Rags that people had thrown away collect these old you know really worn out disgusting Rags bring them to and bring them to the paper mill to be processed into paper on which you know the great plays and poems and prose works of our of our culture were printed um so they would if you want printing paper for writing or printing you had to have rags and they have to be collected by these individuals um so that is sort of my starting point um now it seems like I'm thinking more about um sort of waste collection and its relationship to cultural um you know culture production like now you have um there's a band called Coco um out of the Democratic Republic of Congo and they produce uh music on uh on instruments that they have just gathered out of the scrapyard and garbage stuffs so it's just the idea of you know out of the trash that we generate and some of it is generated in the global North and the center of the global Catholic where they have to deal with it uh unfortunately um you know art is generated out of that by you know people who collected themselves so speaking of the waste picker or the rag picker is my key figure um and out of that I'm sort of sort of Branch out uh in various ways um to to see where it'll end up certainly the key part of it will be the early modern red period because that is where the project started um what's sort of interesting again things sort of paradoxically I like things that are sort of contrarian um is the idea that you know Shakespeare's first folded this incredible important expensive work of art was generated out of the you know dirty old rides that have been thrown away uh and collected by someone who you know who didn't have a very high social status so that sort of idea the combination of high and low so that's my that's my next project yeah it went from um you notice I'm thinking of handless the guts of a beggar you know right yes the past a king passes through the guts of a beggar or whatever this cycle of um of things uh the I was reading Andrew pedigree So speaking of Saint Andrews Andrew pedigree's book uh with his graduate student whose name I I'll mispronounce uh both of course brilliant uh Scholars but the uh on the library the history of the fragile history of the library um and at one point uh was coming across the transition from uh parchment to rags uh in the uh where are we uh 16th early 16th late 15th where are we getting into Rags uh if you do have red collection even in the medieval period um in the certainly there's a there's an account of a um a a rag collect sort of a paper mill and that involved rags in the um in the 14th century um so I'm not sure I actually went uh when it exactly starts but certainly I haven't started my cut up date so far as the medieval year so I haven't really gone before that but that's a good question I should be able to answer that well yeah but I mean there's it's a it's mysterious uh and we can I mean very safely point to a uh a time in which parchment just was not now by parchment for my students we're talking about animal skins and that's you know not only do you have to kill animals to get their skins you uh it's expensive uh you know and you know you know the old joke about the I think it's my joke actually about the Sheep nervously on the side of the Hill wondering when Aquinas is going to finish at Summa you know the rumor that there's another volume out there has everybody you know just absolutely uh stressed out um but anyway when you change the rags you get away from the animals so it is cheaper but it isn't completely cheap because of Rags are labor intensive very expensive and so yeah if you can uh recycle the old clothing and you talk about the women who did this in uh one of your articles uh just right yes brilliant stuff and there are some YouTube videos where people try to do this uh I'm not sure about um Rags I know that parchment they're showing uh how you stretch it and dry it and it's a long kind of tedious process but these parchment I'm sorry these uh rag Pages hold up pretty well now that we're you know they do you're the first folio we're seeing how well things have held up uh and um uh yeah there's such a there's such a history there and that's going to put you in yeah you're back in the archive it's still early days but I'm still I'm excited to be to see where this project goes but it does seem like it in order to tell the story I'll have to jump out of the early modern period a little bit and that will be that'll be exciting if daunting yeah well uh then in closing uh Heidi uh let's see I want to uh make sure our viewers know that you are a new faculty member at the University of Toronto where you did your uh PhD work uh and uh and you're back home in a way that you are a you're a child of Montreal but uh very much also a Toronto do we we're Toronto and runtonian uh and uh I'm just so happy that you are are there my uh my son is trying to get the visa worked out and so forth you've faced this recently and I know uh in your American Expeditions and so forth but uh he's uh about to marry uh torontonian uh yeah he uh he met in college and uh so they're trying to work out the visa thing and um and they will uh they're both very capable uh people and so uh I will be I will see you I will see you I will see uh Holger sign our our friend friend of our program and others uh so so many good people uh at uh University of Toronto and of course all around at McGill of course uh we we just uh had Steve wittick on our campus and uh who uh did his work at McGill so I have a lot of fondness uh you know I grew up in the American South and so Canada was just this foreign country for us now but it's just it feels like a second or third home for me now uh lots of lots of friends here in Canada and that's exciting when you come when you come to visit we'll have to have a good uh I have to have a good big get together yeah well I I may have missed you I went to the RSA in Toronto some years maybe 2018 or 19. oh yes I guess well I didn't really know you then um that was before we knew each other uh yeah uh I that's right because it was before the digital and um and so my wife and I were there and we had a few extra days you know you want to go out and see so we went to Niagara now it was still cold oh it was beautiful it was just she loved it I thought it would be a little bit you know Niagara you know it's a sort of American uh sometimes made to look like Kitsch uh but at just the Falls you can't beat them you know they're spectacular they are spectacular and we had a wonderful time we went up to um we drove around a little bit and went to Niagara on the Lake the little town there which was very Charming it was very cold and I had a rental car and this Canadian fellow and his wife I parked and he was standing on the sidewalk and he said how do you like that car uh because he was thinking of buying I said well it's a rental and if it were not a rental you could drive it around and but please anyway we got the talking and he was Canadian his wife and he graduated from University of Tennessee and he found out in our conversation you know that I was from South Carolina and he said I'm trying to go back and visit because I had a wonderful time when I was in Knoxville and I had a wonderful time in college it was about my age and his wife said no way am I knowing no way are you taking me down there just for a little visit me no can I and he and I were kind of pleading saying that it's not as bad as people make it up to make it out exactly oh it's really wonderful Parts yeah

um I hope she was convinced she would have an excellent excellent visit if she made it down there well I've been trying in my life to improve the image of my my home turf and uh it's just something makes national news that brings us down again you know somebody does something you're doing a good job Tom you're doing it uh you're representing very well well I'll try and uh we have uh that so any anyhow Heidi uh you're not going to be a stranger I hope I can keep this going I don't know how long I can keep it going but I hope I can keep it going long enough to where we could have you back uh after your next big project comes out I would love to do a program on the digital stuff uh out of a university of Victoria and that that particular I really want to see that thing uh get better and better and I think that's the course is on right now wonderful that would be for a third

to privilege but that would be that'd be fantastic anytime you want to speak I'm I'm I'm certainly Keen when we have you on we're having a lot of other people on uh from the 17th century this program we're bringing uh we're collaborating with uh the dead and uh but uh not forgotten and uh partially because of your work uh largely I think in some cases because of your work and we're collaborating with the very much the quick uh uh the the people you have have acknowledged that have helped you and so forth so if I can't speak with anyone then I hope that I'm communicating somehow by proxy with those people but it is it has been our pleasure if I could ask you to stay just a moment after we finish and debrief just a bit but thank you again so much Heidi I'm sure that our viewers and listeners will be absolutely um just uh wowed by the work that you have been able to do in in your careers thus far thank you so much banks are all due to you Tom and as always to speak with you and really really a great great afternoon or morning for you as a case maybe it's always um really always very Illuminating and very enjoyable to speak with you so thank you for having me