Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

Paul Manganello and Jim Manganello: Fratellanza The Fratellanza collaborative of Jim Manganello and his brother Paul Manganello visited Oberon last night to talk about The Mute Quire , their new play running currently at Mix Studio Theater in Ypsilanti. Their energy and dedication to the art of theater thrilled us. "They made me feel young again -- as if anything were possible."  Joy T. said. The Mute Quire is about the production of The First Folio and features, according to co-writer Jim Manganello, an antagonism between printer William Jaggard and actor John Hemminge about whether the play As You Like It should be included in the folio. Actors John Hemminge and Henry Condell signed a foreword in The First Folio testifying to the worthiness of the content and the co-signatories are often termed "editors" of the book by traditional Stratfordians. Most anti-Strats consider Ben Jonson the one and only editor of The First Folio , as Oberon chair Richard J...

Professor Daniel Wright, Ph.D., director of the Richard Paul and Jane Roe Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre at Concordia University in Portland OR,  announced this year's Shakespeare Authorship Studies Seminar will be held August 22-26 at the center: Friends, The summer is upon us, and that means it's time again for the SARC's annual Shakespeare Authorship Studies Seminar!  This year's seminar will begin in a couple of months - specifically, at 6:00pm on Wednesday, August 22 - and will close at noon on Sunday, August 26.  The theme for this year's 30-hour intensive study week/weekend (we meet eight hours a day on the 23rd, 24th and 25th and 3 hours on the 22nd and the 26th) is "The Motive for Shakespeare."  We'll be studying why Shakespeare became Shakespeare so late in life and we will focus, Looney-like, on the plays and poems to see what revelatory offerings they may suggest about Shakespeare's purposes.  We will focus on some of Shake...

Our friend Jim Manganello who did such a fabulous job directing Richard II for The Rude Mechanicals has a new project playing at the Mix Studio Theater in Ypsilanti through July 1. The play, The Mute Quire , a comedy about the production of Shakespeare's First Folio, was written and produced by Fratellanza for the New Theater Project . Manganello's promo says: Fratellanza is a new collaboration between Jim and Paul Manganello committed to generating live theater with physical rigor and imagination. [The play is]  Written and performed by Jim and Paul Manganello with Josh Berkowitz. Two forgotten actors. A printer and his apprentice. An absurd clown and a sad one. All these characters collide in a print shop to publish the plays of the recently dead Shakespeare. Before ink meets paper, they're battling over the soul of poetry, drama, nonsense. Using verse and movement, Fratellanza transforms history into a living celebration of love. The Mute Quire is told from a t...

Last year's release of Roland Emmerich’s Shakespeare authorship film, Anonymous , caused spasms among arch-Stratfordians fearful that their candidate for Shakespeare authorship might not survive public scrutiny. But Stratfordians have more than popular media to worry about. Having barely survived the onslaught of publicity surrounding Emmerich’s film, anti-Strats must now contend with anti-Stratfordian theatrical presentations such as Monster Theatre's The Shakespeare Show , the release of authorship publications such as Richard Paul Roe’s Shakespeare Guide to Italy and films such as the recently released     Last Will. & Testament co- produced by Lisa Wilson and Laura Wilson Matthias . In addition, the academic mainstream supports oblique challenges to the Stratfordian attribution with new investigations into pseudonymity in Elizabethan England -- Starner and Traister's Anonymity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2011) -- and the authorship of the Shakespearean apocr...

The New England Shakespeare Oxford Library director, Bill Boyle, announced a book sale to raise funds for the library: Last year I had a special fundraiser sale on my library bookstore site, and it worked out pretty well, so I'm doing it again this year. Here's the URL:  http://www. shakespeareoxfordlibrary.org/ NESOL_Fundraiser.html There are 13 books for sale, ranging from a Star of England to a couple of Baconian texts. For each book purchased a bonus gift can be selected, either one of the library's recently published books (Jim Warren's Oxfordian Index, Hank Whittemore's Twelve Years in the Life of Shakespeare , or Charles Boyle's Another Hamlet ), or a copy of the April 1999 Harper's , or a Castle Hedingham guidebook.  Hope folks here can find something they like (or would like to give someone else) and can help support the New England Shakespeare Oxford Library and the Shakespeare Online Authorship Resources project.