Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

Richard Waugaman, MD will deliver the 2012   Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Lecture at 7 p.m. March 2, 2012 at the Chevy Chase Women's Club, 7931 Connecticut Avenue, Chevy Chase, Maryland. Tickets are $30 for members, $50 for non-members, and free to students and active military. Waugaman's topic will be "A  Refugee from Chestnut Lodge Receives Asylum at the  Folger Shakespeare Library: New Discoveries about the  Authorship of Shakespeare’s Works” Waugaman is clinical Professor of Psychiatry at  Georgetown University School of Medicine; Training & Supervising  Analyst, Emeritus at Washington Psychoanalytic Institute; and a Reader at the  Folger Shakespeare Library. Forty of his more than 100  publications are on Shakespeare and the psychology of  pseudonymity.  T he English literature journal Notes & Queries listed Waugaman's 2009 paper as the most-read online article for the month of October; and his 2009 and 2010 articles on the ...

Not only does I-don't-approve-of-speculative-biography author James Shapiro approve Graham Holderness' imaginative biography , Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Continuum Books, 2011), but he has recently also praised Germaine Greer's 2008 biographic speculation,  Shakespeare's Wife.  In a short article titled  "Fact and fiction don't blend well in biographies"  that appeared in the January 23, 2012 edition of  Hindustan Times writer Antara Das reported:    Shapiro is less dismissive of [Greer]‘s attempt to add substance to the somewhat sketchy portrait of Shakespeare’s wife (in the book of the same name). “Greer does bring her own preoccupations, concluding that Shakespeare died of venereal disease for which there is no evidence. But she did manage to shift perspectives and liberate Shakespeare from a clutch of mainly male biographers,” he says. In the end, the bravery of her attempt outshines the flaws of her book. Contesting the authorship of Sh...

Leslie Nielson in 1956 Forbidden Planet Richard Joyrich reported that the Redford Theatre will be showing 1956's  Forbidden Planet , starring Leslie Nielson, Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and introducing Robby the Robot today at 8 PM and Saturday at 2 PM and 8 PM. Richard said: There is usually a thirty minute organ "overture" before the movie there and a 30 minute organ "intermission" as well. As some of you may know (and others might be pleased to learn) this movie was inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest and has many parallel characters. It is considered one of the best science fiction movies of the 1950s. I hope you will consider taking advantage of this opportunity to see this movie on the big screen (it is, of course, available on DVD). I promise you that you will not be disappointed. And for those of you who don't live in southeast Michigan, check out the available Shakespeare films discussed by Jeff Heinrich in yesterday's Montrea...

Stephen Marche's vicious, NYT Magazine review of Roland Emmerich's film,  Anonymous,  earned brickbats from an atypical source last fall. On Nov. 16, 2011 the weblog Organizations and Markets  ran a post titled "Shakespeare and Epistemology" in which economist Peter G. Klein chastised Marche for his hubris in  excoriating   the anti-Stratfordian viewpoint.  "I don’t know anything about the issue other than what I’ve read in recent commentaries, but Marche’s case, in the piece linked above, is surprisingly weak," Klein wrote. He elaborated: some Shakespeare products are dated after de Vere died, which only proves that de Vere couldn’t have written those; the doubters are snobs who don’t believe a poor country boy could have written such beautiful verse, which could be true, but hardly establishes that the country boy did in fact write them; and other circumstantial bits and ex cathedra pronouncements. But his major criticism was for Stratfordian...

Robert Brazil’s childhood pal, Jefferson Foote, published Brazil’s book, Edward DeVere and the Shakespeare Printers , as an act of friendship. When Foote – a research scientist in Seattle, Washington – learned of Brazil’s death in 2010, he also learned of Brazil’s interest in the Shakespeare authorship question. “I found out he had written this book and he had published it as a Kinko copy (in 1999),” Foote said in a telephone interview on January 8. “And I’m not prepared to let this slip away – it is his life’s work and I wanted to see it preserved.” Although he had been long out of contact with Robert Brazil, Foote contacted Brazil’s brother, Tony Brazil, and received a copy of the contents of Brazil’s computer along with permission to publish Shakespeare Printers under the copyright of Brazil’s son and heir Jessie Brazil. “I had no trouble at all getting approval from the brother and sons,” Foote said. “They were delighted that I picked that up.” Foote also enlist...

Hello Everyone, And Happy New Year.   We have a finalized the meeting date, time and place for the first Oberon Meeting of the new year. It will be Monday, January 23 in meeting room 3 at the Bloomfield Township Public Library.  The meeting time is 6:45 to 8:30 PM. The address for the Bloomfield Township Public Library is 1099 Lone Pine Road, Bloomfield Township MI 48302 (phone:  248-642-5800 ). It is actually at the intersection of Lone Pine Road and Telegraph Road.   When you enter the library you can walk straight in for a couple of yards. You will see stairs on the right. If you go down the stairs and through the door you will see a modest conference room on the right. This is our meeting room! (There are elevators somewhere but I’m not sure where at this point!).   In this first meeting of the new year we have several things to talk about. However the main focus is to hear from everyone: What Shakespeare subjects would you like to discuss th...