Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

With the publication of the Shakespeare Fellowship online journal, Brief Chronicles Vol. 3 , Managing Editor Gary Goldstein resigned, citing philosophical differences with Brief Chronicles General Editor Roger Stritmatter. Goldstein's resignation follows his resignation from the Shakespeare Fellowship board of directors in July 2011 in protest against the board's decision to rescind their statement against the Prince Tudor aspects of Roland Emmerich's Shakespeare authorship film Anonymous . Goldstein's position against the so-called Prince Tudor theory of Shakespeare authorship also played a part in his decision to leave his position with Brief Chronicles . [Content withdrawn.]  Shakespeare Fellowship President Earl Showerman said the board is in the process of selecting a new managing editor and they would make an announcement when they had an agreement. He said that he hoped the announcement would be made soon. Resources: http://oberonshakespearestudygroup.blogs...

DeVere Society Secretary Richard Malim has announced the publication of his book  The Earl ofOxford and the Making of “Shakespeare”: The Literary Life of Edward De Vere in Context by McFarland. The book is currently available. McFarland said: The identity of Shakespeare, the most important poet and dramatist in the English language, has been debated for centuries. This historical work investigates the role of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, establishing him as most likely the author of Shakespeare’s literary oeuvre. Topics include the historical background of English literature from 1530 through 1575, major contemporary transitions in the theatre, and a linguistically rich examination of Oxford’s life and the events leading to his literary prominence. The sonnets, Oxford’s early poetry, juvenile "pre-Shakespeare" plays, and his acting career are of particular interest. An appendix examines the role of the historical William Shakespeare and how he became ...

In yesterday's article in the LA Times about why film companies have made several recent box office bombs -- Roland Emmerich's Anonymous among them -- Patrick Goldstein opines films of doubtful appeal were made on the strength of an established relationship between the artist and the corporation. While this is hardly an earthshaking notion, Goldstein gives some perspective on the issue. He said of  Sony studio co-chairman Amy Pascal: Pascal hedged her bets financially with “Anonymous,” which was co-financed by Relativity Media. But she says she has no regrets. “I believed in what Roland wanted to do. He had something fresh and entertaining to say, which is all you can ask for from a filmmaker.” For the full article, read "Why so many Hollywood relationship movies are box-office duds" in the LA Times ' 24 Frames blog. 

Metropolitan Opera's production of the new work Enchanted Island  based on Shakespeare's Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream will debut New Year's Eve and run through January 30 with a simulcast performance scheduled for 1 p.m. January 21, 2012.  From the Met: January 21, 2012, 12:55 pm ET U.S. Encore: February 8, 2012 at 6:30 pm local time Canada Encore:  March 3, 2012 at 1 pm local time                        March 26, 2012 at 6:30 pm local time In one extraordinary new work, lovers of Baroque opera have it all: the world’s best singers, glorious music of the Baroque masters, and a story drawn from Shakespeare. In  The Enchanted Island , the lovers from Shakespeare’s  A Midsummer Night’s Dream  are shipwrecked on his other-worldly island of  The Tempest . Inspired by the musical pastiches and masques of the 18th century, the work showcases arias and ensembles by Handel,...

Tasmanian Peter McIntosh, PhD, has published an article titled "Storms, Shipwrecks, and South America: from Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa's Voyages to Shakespeare's The Tempest " in the journal Colonial Latin American Review , Volume 20, Issue 3, 2011. The publication was released for retrieval online Dec. 13, 2011 by the Taylor & Francis Group. McIntosh is the author of Who Wrote Shakespeare's Sonnets (Ginninderra Press, 2011) that McIntosh says presents " . . . the evidence for Queen Elizabeth's authorship of Shakespeare's sonnets. "  His article for the Colonial Latin American Review   proposes Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa's journals as the source material for Shakespeare's The Tempest.  McIntosh provided an abstract of the article for our readers: The parallels between Shakespeare’s storm scene in The Tempest and the  1609 Bermuda shipwreck described by Sylvester Jourdain (1610), William  Strachey (1610?) and by the Council of Vir...

Shakespeare authorship researchers are beginning to embrace the publishing options available through e-publishing. Several important anti-Strat books have been recently released for Kindle and other e-readers: http://www.amazon.com/Hamlet-Scottish-Succession-ebook/dp/B006Q3YQT6/ref=sr_1_7?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1324856144&sr=1-7 Hamlet and the Scottish Succession by Lilian Winstanley ( edited by Mark Alexander Publisher Text.com, Dec. 2011 $0.99 http://www.amazon.com/I-Come-Bury-Shaksper-ebook/dp/B006KAMQ10/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1324937916&sr=1-1 I Come to Bury Shakespeare by Steve McClarran Publisher Stephen Steinberg, Dec 2011 $9.99 http://www.amazon.com/Apocryphal-William-Shakespeare-Authorship-ebook/dp/B006CRCGXY/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1324938080&sr=1-1-spell The Apocraphal William Shakespeare by Sabrina Feldman Dog Ear Publishing, Nov. 2011 (also in paperback) $9.99 http://store.untreedrea...

In a holiday present for all anti-Strats, Lynne Kositsky announced in a Christmas Eve post on her blog:  McFarland accepts our book, A Movable Feast! Kositsky and her research partner Roger Stritmatter, PhD have found a publisher for their research on dating Shakespeare's Tempest , a work titled  A Movable Feast: Sources, Chronology and Design of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Kositsky said:  Contrary to longstanding belief, the play’s New World imagery is derived not from William Strachey’s account of a 1609 shipwreck in Bermuda, but from Richard Eden’s 1555 Decades of the New World. The book will include detailed point-by-point rebuttals to two newly published critiques of our work: one by Alden Vaughan (2008) in Shakespeare Quarterly and another by Tom Reedy (2010) in Review of English Studies, showing how their misplaced confidence in traditional authority has led to misinterpretations of the evidence of the date and influence of Strachey’s manuscript. Grats, guys! ...

Professor Don Rubin  of the Department of Theater,  York University  will convene a one-day conference on the Shakespeare authorship question from 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., April 7, 2012 at York University in downtown Toronto. The event is open to the public and the cost will be modest, according to Rubin. A preliminary list of events includes: Shakespeare By Another Name   author  author Mark Anderson as keynote speaker, Keir Cutler  presenting "Is Shakespeare Dead?", a panel discussion chaired by Rubin, and Lamberto Tassinari author of  John Florio: the Man Who Was Shakespeare . Rubin plans on including representatives from the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario and others.  The Toronto conference is the culmination of a new, one-semester, three-credit, seminar for fourth-year students offered by the York University Department of Theater titled "Shakespeare: The Authorship Question". The class begins in January 2012. When asked about ...

 I n his blog entry titled "Queering Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes" posted yesterday on the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's Blogging Shakespeare site, University of Hertfordshire professor Graham Holderness discussed his view of biography as revealed in his new book, Nine Lives of William Shakespeare . Holderness said:   Since there is no direct evidence that Shakespeare did in actuality enjoy and suffer a gay relationship with the Earl of Southampton, or with any other man, it seems legitimate for a fictional commentary to take the form of invention, and to operate by parallelism and contrast rather than by historical narrative. ‘The Adventure of Shakespeare’s Ring’ in  Nine Lives of William Shakespeare  finds Holmes and Watson, pursuing the theft of ‘Shakespeare’s ring’ from Stratford’s Birthplace Museum, drawn into the gay milieu of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, and thence provoked into an acknowledgement of their own homosexual attachment . . . Hold...

English author and composer Alexander Waugh named Tony Pointon's  The Man Who Was Never Shakespeare  (Parapress, 2011) as one of his favorite reads of 2011 in Waugh's reply to a Wall Street Journal   article published December 17. With dry humor, Waugh said that he has vacillated in his response to the Shakespeare authorship controversy, and added: Mr. Pointon's book sets out to prove that "William Shakspere" (an illiterate player and tradesman from Stratford) never wrote the poems and plays credited to the pseudonym "William Shakespeare." The book's strength is that it doesn't attempt to peddle any of Mr. Pointon's own theories as to who actually did write them. His evidence is clear and compelling. So I am currently on Mr. Pointon's side against the Stratfordians, enjoying my gullibility and looking forward to re-reversing my views many more times in the coming years.  In the article titled "Twelve Months of Reading" , th...

A year ago in December 2010, when we Oberons gathered for our annual holiday feast at Tom and Rosey Hunter’s house, Tom was filled with enthusiasm for an unpublished work that he had just read, Steve McClarran’s I Come to Bury Shaksper , now available for the Kindle at Amazon. Upon receiving McClarran’s manuscript in November 2010, Tom had told the author, with characteristic warmth and humor:  “We will be getting together with the family to celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow. I have a feeling that I will be huddled up in a corner with your book. Just hope I don't get gravy all over it. Will report back as soon as I have something substantive to say or as soon as I think I have something substantive to say, whichever occurs first.” Within days, he reported to McClarran: “I have been waiting for the let down, and it hasn't come. The book gets better and better as it goes. The probing jabs have become body blows, and I hear air whooshing out of the Stratford...

I have just learned of a very nice new website which will, in time, be a series of podcasts on different aspects of the Shakespeare Authorship Question. The site is called The Shakespeare Underground and may be reached here: theshakespeareunderground.com The site is being put together by Jennifer Newton, who was at the recent SOS/SF Joint Authorship Conference in Washington, DC. So far there are two podcasts available: Where There's a Will (Bonner Miller Cutting on the will of Shakspere of Stratford) and The Law in Hamlet (with Thomas Regnier). The podcasts are basically interviews with these two well-spoken individuals by Jennifer Newton and are very well done. Bonner's interview is about one hour long and Thomas's interview is about 90 minutes. I recommend these podcasts very highly and I will be periodically checking the site for updates and more podcasts. The site mentions an upcoming podcast with Earl Showerman on the French Court in Shakespeare, but does not mention w...

Well, somebody's been talking about Richard Roe's Shakespeare Guide to Italy (Harper Perennial, Nov. 8, 2011) because last night (Dec. 12, 2011) on Charlie Rose , Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Michael Boyd inadvertently revealed that Roe's book was on his mind. Boyd appeared as a guest in Rose's "Why Shakespeare?" series where he happily held forth on the nature of all things Shakespearean. During a discussion of how he chose which Shakespeare plays to direct, Rose asked Boyd if he had to be older to tackle directing King Lear and Boyd responded in the negative. "Young people can imagine," Boyd said. "Just as an Englishman could imagine Italy in the English Renaissance." That was it -- no other discussion of imagination or Englishmen or Italy or the Renaissance, not to mention Italian references in Shakespeare or any bedamned books about any such thing. I cannot imagine that Boyd had read Roe's book; if he had, ...

A dozen Oberon members gathered  in the garden room at Hogan's restaurant on Twelve Mile last evening for our annual holiday get-together. Richard Joyrich toasted Oberons present and absent. We spoke of beads, books, grand-babies, work, travel, Anonymous , the SAC rebuttal to SBT, and where and when we will meet in the future now that the Farmington Hills Community Library is not available to us. Rosey Hunter spoke of support by friends and family and we felt the loss of our dear friend, Tom, so very much. Tom Townsend shared that he is preparing a version of his and Tom Hunter's joint paper on Romeo and Juliet --  that he delivered at the 2011 SOS/SF conference -- for a future edition of The Oxfordian . We are grateful to Tom Townsend and Richard Joyrich for making the arrangements to allow us to share fellowship on a rainy night in Michigan and we all wish our readers the joys of conviviality this holiday season.

The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition announced today that the SAC and twelve anti-Stratfordian groups have endorsed a rebuttal to  the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's "Sixty Minutes with Shakespeare" initiative launched to counter interest in the Shakespeare authorship question generated by Roland Emmerich's film,  Anonymous .  Oberon Shakespeare Study Group vice-chair and Shakespeare Oxford Society President Richard Joyrich, MD is among the anti-Stratfordian scholars who participated in the SAC project. Joyrich authored the anti-Stratfordian rebuttal to  the SBT's Question 18: What was Shakespeare's social status?, originally answered for the Stratfordians by SBT  Representative Trustee from the University of London, Rene Weis: William Shakespeare was the son of a successful yeoman glover who had served a term as mayor of Stratfordupon-Avon. Through his mother Mary Arden, Shakespeare may have been related to the ancient Arden family  of Park Hall. In 15...

Historian Mike Dash made the case for "William Shakespeare, Gangster" on his weblog, A Blast from the Past , and on the Past Imperfect weblog of Smithsonian.com  November 7, 2011. Dash discussed the dearth of historical data on William Shakespeare and, with evidence described in Leslie Hotson's 1931 book   Shakespeare Versus Shallow , made a case for Shakespeare as a thug. Dash concluded: That Will Shakespeare was somehow involved in the low-life rackets of Southwark seems, from Hotson’s evidence, reasonably certain. Whether he remained involved in them past 1597, though, it is impossible to say. He certainly combined his activities as one of Langley’s henchmen with the gentler work of writing plays, and by 1597 was able to spend £60—a large sum for the day—on purchasing the New Place, Stratford, a mansion with extensive gardens that was the second-largest house in his home town. It is tempting to speculate, however, whether the profits that paid for such an opulent r...

Journalist Mark Anderson announced on his SBAN weblog yesterday that the e-book edition of his iconic Shakespeare by Another Name (Gotham Books/Penguin Group USA, 2005) is now available on the Internet from e-publisher Untreed Reads and other bookesellers. According to Anderson's post, the new edition includes: SBAN's cover featuring a new bust of Edward de Vere supervised by Ben August and sculpted by Paula Slater (as  chronicled on this blog ).  An introductory chapter called "The Argument" that succinctly encapsulates the case for Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare" and addresses arguments against the Oxfordian camp put forward in James Shapiro's recent book Contested Will .  A new images section A new appendix addressing the recent media frenzy over the "Cobbe Portrait of Shakespeare" A new appendix concerning the movie  Anonymous  and the questions it raises over the "Prince Tudor" hypotheses -- i.e. concerning claims of on...

Georgetown University professor of psychology Richard Waugaman, MD, reviewed Rolland Emmerich's Shakespeare authorship film, Anonymous , for Roger Stritmatter's Shake-Speare's Bible weblog yesterday in an essay titled "Not unanimous on Anonymous". Waugaman's knowledge of the authorship issue, his insight into the forces contributing to the controversy, and his lucid writing style make reading his essay a necessary pleasure. Waugaman said: Psychoanalysts are in a unique position to elucidate the psychology of literary anonymity and pseudonymity. The evidence suggests that keeping one’s authorship secret helps promote what Keat’s called Shakespeare’s “negative capability”—keeping his own identity in the background as he created hundreds of utterly convincing characters. . . . When I am told that Oxfordians are simply unable to admit they’re wrong, I point out that every Oxfordian I know started as a Stratfordian, until they looked into the matter more deepl...

Hanno Wember of the Shake-speare Today website reports from Germany that major media in Germany has responded to Roland Emmerich's Shakespeare authorship film, Anonymous : Film release was Thursday [in Germany]. All major German (Austrian / Swiss) newspapers, magazines, many broadcast and TV-stations and an uncounted number of smaller media respond to the film [ Anonymous ]. Among them Frankfurter Allgemeine, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Die Welt, Neue Zuricher Zeitung, Financial Times Deutschland, Berliner Zeitung, Berliner Morgenpost, Der Tagespiegel, Salzburger Nachrichten, Wiener Zeitung, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, Focus, Stern, SWr, NDr, RTL . . . -- m any with full-page articles, some even twice or thrice this week.  During the last week we have posted 30 links on our webpage , but this is only one third or even less of the full number:  http://shake-speare-today.de/index.57.0.1.html .  The vast majority welcomed the film, taking the authorship questio...