I have had time now to get over job interviews, book launch and two of my children’s birthdays. It’s been a hectic few weeks and rushing from one thing to the next meant I have had no chance to think about my launch until today. You can listen to an audio recording of the launch on the Ledbury Poetry Festival website.
A kind man emailed me the next day to say how much he had enjoyed the launch and the poems. It was very flattering to receive an email like that, especially as I was still high from the joy of the event. Having my book in my hands after many years writing and finding the space to be a writer as well as mother, worker, wife, daughter was an emotional thing. The second part of the email was some advice that I had mispronounced one of the names and that I had mixed up Shakespeare and Marlowe when I mentioned the play Edward II in relation to his queen, Isabelle.
The pronunciation is something I dread as I am self-taught. I didn’t study history at university, I studied literature and my research has been very much alone, in the library with my head in a book. And as much as you can read a name and know a lot about that queen, it doesn’t teach you how to say it correctly. It’s something I was afraid of getting wrong and now I must seek out some experts to make sure I don’t do it again.
As for Shakespeare and Marlowe, of course I know that Marlowe wrote Edward II. I have read the play a number of times and the collected works of Shakespeare has gone everywhere with me since I brought it from a charity book shop seventeen years ago. Noticeably absent in that collected works is Edward II.
Although there are many theories that Marlowe was Shakespeare so perhaps I was thinking about that without realising it. No, I was flustered and overcome with the emotion of the event. Also, just before I had left to go the reading, my youngest son hit his brother in the nose with a huge piece of wood and the swelling looked monstrous – I was sure it was broken. I was shaking so much when I got there, thinking I should really take my son to hospital*. It wasn’t an intentional smack in the face with a stick, purely accidental and the result of brotherly love/hate. The kind of brawling Kit Marlowe would have been familiar with in the bar room.
* but poetry is more important than broken bones
Ruth Stacey 