Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

Jaws dropped last night when during a discussion of Roland Emmerich's Anonymous -- an upcoming film about the Shakespeare authorship question -- Oberon member Robin Browne  casually said in his understated British way, "I've seen some of the footage." What! Turns out our film-maker friend who is a member of the British Society of Cinematographers recently attended a local workshop held by Arriflex to demonstrate its new Alexa electronic, high-definition camera. Since Emmerich used the new camera to shoot Anonymous , the workshop included soundless footage of the film. "It does look very beautiful; it has a great feeling of the period," Browne said. "The little, tiny footage we saw was very beautiful and very atmospheric -- pictorially, it could be a gem." Emmerich's Anonymous is scheduled for release September 30, 2011.

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. SOS board member and SF/SOS conference committee member Susan Grimes Width said last night at the January Oberon meeting that she has scheduled a tour of the Folger Shakespeare Library for all conference attendees on Friday afternoon, October 14, 2011. The Bible belonging to the seventeenth earl of Oxford, Edward deVere will be on display as part of the tour. The 2011 joint Shakespeare Fellowship and Shakespeare Oxford Society annual Shakespeare authorship conference will be held October 13, 14, 15, and 16, 2011 in Washington, D.C. at an in-town site still under negotiation. Photo courtesy: Folger Shakespeare Library

The Shakespeare Fellowship has added a live news feed to its web site.  From the Shakespeare Fellowship Oxfordian News page: We would like our readers to get news as soon as it is posted here, so we have made this Oxfordian News page on the Shakespeare Fellowship website live. That means if you wish to add a live RSS feed from Oxfordian News to the list of live blogs on your website or weblog, this URL is now available for that service:  http://shakespearefellowship.org/news For more information, go to "Add live feed from SF Oxfordian News page now"

Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky at Crater Lake National Park -- Oregon, Sept. 2010 After five years of work on their joint project about Shakespeare's The Tempest , Roger Stritmatter, PhD and Lynne Kositsky  have completed the manuscript of  A Movable Feast: Sources, Chronology and Design of Shakespeare's Tempest,  a closer look at the sources and dating of the play. In a joint statement, Stritmatter and Kositsky said: We have no doubt that the book will be extremely controversial. It rebuts the usual theory -- together with its architects and latest contributors, Tom Reedy and Alden Vaughan -- that Strachey was the primary source of the Tempest, and demonstrates instead how many earlier texts such as Eden, Erasmus, and Ariosto are a better and more plausible fit than Strachey. If Strachey's  True Reportory , dated by most orthodox scholars to 1610 but actually published in 1625, was not the source, then the play could be much earlier. Dependin...

Ambient Tours division of Ambient Events Limited in Southwell, Nottinghamshire is offering a 7-day  Tudor Poets & Playwrights Tour  in March and May this year.  According to the brochure, Ambient's Tudor Poets & Playwrights Tour:   . . . provides an insight into the intrigue surrounding some of the most famous Tudor literary figures including Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Edmund Spenser, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford and William Shakespeare. Your tour will examine the lives and times of these literary greats. We will visit some of the places where they lived, studied, performed, and wrote their great masterpieces. Athough the London, Oxford, Cambridge, Stratford itinerary doesn’t include Hedingham Castle and other specifically authorship-related sites, Dilley said the Tudor Poets & Playwrights Tour will offer wide scope to the Shakespeare authorship question: When we started to research the concept over t...

Harvard lawyer and devoted Oxfordian Elliot Stone was eulogized today in the Boston Globe , "Elliot Stone, 79, lover of art, including the art of conversation"  by Brian Marquand. According to the Globe , Mr. Stone died of cancer on December 19, 2010 in his Cambridge, Massachusettes home. We offer our sincere condolence to his friends and family.

We were sad to learn that Irvin Leigh Matus, 69, author of  Shakespeare, In Fact  (Continuum, 1994), passed away on January 5, 2011 of natural causes, according to his website, Willyshakes . Matus' book and other work offered rebuttal of anti-Stratfordian authorship arguments. Links to his work are available on the All Things Shakespeare pages of his website. Richard Whalen's 1995 review of Shakespeare, In Fact titled "Matus's Cannonade Against Oxford Misfires" appears on the Shakespeare Fellowship website. Sources: http://www.willyshakes.com/ http://www.willyshakes.com/allshakes.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvin_Leigh_Matus http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Fact-Irvin-Leigh-Matus/dp/0826409288/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1294846793&sr=8-1 http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/Reviews/whalenmatus.htm

Cover of paperback edition of Kurt Kreiler's Der Mann der Shake-speare Erfand . . . German correspondent Hanno Wember -- administrator of the German  Shake-speare Today website, home of the Neue Shake-speare Gesellschaft (New Shakespeare Society) -- reports that Kurt Kreiler's Der Mann der Shake-speare Erfand: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (The Man Who Invented Shakespeare: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford) will be published in paperback. Wember said: . . . Insel will bring Kreiler’s book as paperback (German: Taschenbuch), which is a further step and will help to bring it to a broader readership. The German paperback edition of Der Mann . . . will be released April 18, 2011. Regarding an anticipated English translation of Kreiler's book, Wember said that things are not settled and he has no news to report. Kreiler's book was covered extensively in the German press when it was released in hardcover by Insel Verlag in Sept. 2009. John Tanke's English translation o...

Roland Emmerich's film "Anonymous" about the Shakespeare authorship question has made several lists of important films of 2011, such as this Rope of Silicon report,  "Previewing the Films of 2011: 25 Most Anticipated"  from Jan. 4, 2011. According to this report, the US release date appears to have been moved from Sept. 23 as reported earlier to Sept. 30, 2011. In this clip from the April 29, 2010 press conference on the set of  Emmerich's "Anonymous" at Babelsberg Studios in Berlin Rhys Ifans  said: I play Edward de Vere, the earl of Oxford, the author of these works. He has a mind like a creamy pumpkin the size of the universe. . . . I have been increasingly convinced as a wordsmith that this question allows us to access the magic of whoever person . . .  wrote this. . . .  a person whose life uncannily echoes every wail, every laugh, every limp every cry in Shakespeare's works. I'm kind of deeply moved by the whole thing and talking t...

James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, a Stratfordian view of the Shakespeare authorship question has been included in several best-books-of-2010 lists, and the just released (Jan. 6, 2011) UK paperback edition is #11 on the Amazon.co.uk history and criticism bestseller list  and is #801 overall on the Amazon UK bestselling books list. The US paperback edition is scheduled for release by Simon & Schuster on April 19, 2011. Although Shapiro argues for reliance on the traditional Stratfordian attibution of Shakespeare's works, the success of Contested Will is good news for those who wish to see the Shakespeare authorship question brought into wider discussion. The University of California Press new edition of the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 published Nov. 15, 2010 is #21 on the Amazon bestseller ranking of books. Although Twain was a notorious Shakespeare authorship skeptic, his hilarious commentary, Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography...