Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

Germaine Greer hits the ball out of the park in her Oct. 6, 2015  New Statesman review of  James Shapiro's newest Shakespearean biography,  1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear  (Simon & Schuster, 2015) . Greer says: "For any writer of an extended narrative the temptation to abandon the conditional for the indicative is almost irresistible and Shapiro has not resisted it." Greer complains specifically about Shapiro's cavalier attitude toward uncertainties in dating Shakespeare's plays, about unwarranted elaboration of Shakespeare's relationship with London landlady Marie Mountjoy, about inventing the meaning of daughter Susanna's failure to take communion, and other issues. Greer said: With so little evidence, Shapiro is almost bound to overinterpret it. . . .  It is not easy for readers of 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear to determine when assumption becomes assertion, not least because Shapiro has chosen to provid...

by Richard Joyrich I would like to direct everyone's attention to a new e-book published by Keir Cutler. As readers of this blog will be aware, Keir is a celebrated author and actor, whose one-man show Is Shakespeare Dead (an adaptation of the work by Mark Twain) has been performed all over Canada and at several places in the United States (including at two of the past Joint SOS/SF Authorship Conferences). This play is available to view on You Tube. Keir is a spokesman for the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare ( www.doubtaboutwill.org ) and has made a wonderful five minute You Tube video about it, entitled "Why Was I Never Told This". This You Tube video is embedded at the very bottom of the Oberon blog page and I encourage everyone to check it out. Now, Keir has collected information from various articles of his to produce his new e-book, The Shakespeare Authorship Question: A Crackpot's View . It is available for Kindl...

Sir Derek Jacobi in PBS series Shakespeare Uncovered, Richard II episode by Linda Theil In a new six-part PBS series, Shakespeare Uncovered, elucidating the glories of the Bard’s plays, Sir Derek Jacobi “ . . . sets the fur flying”, as he says in his one-hour segment on the play, Richard II , by advocating Edward de Vere  as the author of the work known under the pseudonym William Shakespeare. The Richard II segment aired February 1, 2013 on PBS stations and is available on DVD and for viewing online from the Shakespeare Uncovered site at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/shakespeare-uncovered/video/richard-ii-with-derek-jacobi/ Retired humanities professor James Norwood of St. Paul, Minnesota has given Oberon permission to publish his commentary on the Shakespeare Uncovered series that Norwood originally posted to the late Robert Brazil’s private authorship discussion list, Elizaforum. Professor Norwood taught a course on the topic of Shakespeare authorship at the University...

From British TV listings for April 23, 2012: The King & The Playwright: A Jacobean History, BBC4, 9pm  World-renowned American scholar Professor James Shapiro re-examines the work of the world's greatest playwright during the troubled first decade of King James's reign, in this new three-part documentary series.  This is not the familiar Shakespeare of the time of Elizabeth, but the dark, complex Jacobean Shakespeare, at the height of his powers in truly turbulent times. . .    http://digiguide.tv/pick-of-the-day/23+April+2012 The King & The Playwright: A Jacobean History, BBC4, 9pm   A three-parter in which US professor James Shapiro looks at the influence of King James I on Shakespeare and his plays. During this time the Bard’s output reflected the troubled and unpredictable times ushered in but this new ruler, but being promoted to a King’s Player did wonders for his bank balance and profile (much to the chagrin of present-day schoolkids acr...

Richard Waugaman, MD , has emerged in the past decade as a primary proponent of research into the Shakespeare authorship query. When the  clinical professor of psychiatry at  Georgetown University School of Medicine was invited to deliver the  2012   Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Lecture he chose as his topic,  " A  Refugee from Chestnut Lodge Receives Asylum at the  Folger Shakespeare Library: New Discoveries about the  Authorship of Shakespeare’s Works”. In his presentation, Waugaman described -- among other issues -- his work on connections between the Sternhold and Hopkins Whole Book of Psalms and Shakespeare's work. He also discussed the psychological ramifications of Stratfordian resistance to Shakespeare authorship research. Waugaman's research is available at his website, The Oxfreudian , where a video of his Fromm-Reichman lecture will be linked when it becomes available. A transcript of his lecture is presented after the jump at th...

In an interview titled "Roland Emmerich talks Shakespeare . . ."  with Jeremey Gingrich published this month at Flix 66, Roland Emmerich said attacks  by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and by Contested Will author James Shapiro  against his Shakespeare authorship film, Anonymous , hurt the film's attendance. According to Gingrich, Emmerich said: It hurt. Because it made smart people not want to see the film. These guys are famous people. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is very powerful in England and Jim Shapiro is kind of your typical New York intellectual, and they were very smart how they handled this film in discrediting the film. And when you look at the reviews, you'll notice most were reviewing the [authorship] theory and not the film. The film opened to disappointing box office last fall, and was released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on DVD, Blu-Ray, and iTunes this week. Despite impressive CGI and extraordinary performances by Vanessa Redgrave...

In the current issue (Nov./Dec. 2010) of Biblical Archeology Review , BAR editor Hershel Shanks compares the Shakespeare authorship controversy to a New Testament authorship controversy raging in the field of biblical scholarship. In his First Person column titled "Shakespeare, the Earl of Oxford and Morton Smith".  Shanks refers to James Shapiro's Stratfordian take on the topic, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? published last year, but does not mention Shapiro's thesis that nineteenth century biblical study opened the intellectual doors to doubting the traditional Stratfordian attribution of Shakespeare's work. Richard Whalen's review of Contested Will   posted 01/19/10 SOS News Online Linda Theil's review of Contested Will   posted 12/05/09 SOS News Online

The Cleveland Plain Dealer featured my comment on their Saturday review of Contested Will in their Books Comment of the Day column this morning. I got a kick out of seeing this headline: Books Comment of the Day: 'I say that the authorship question is worth exploring' I submitted the comment yesterday in reply to David Walton's August 7, 2010 review titled: 'Contested Will' from James Shapiro is solid examination of William Shakespeare Here's the first paragraph of my comment that also features the first sentence of Walton's review: Regarding your statement, "The question of who else besides William Shakespeare could have written the poems and plays of Shakespeare is undoubtedly one of the most useless, fruitless, and irresolvable that humankind could devise.", I reply that the fact that the authorship inquiry is of no importance to you does not mean that the topic is of no importance. http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2010/08/cone...

The Winnepeg Free Press published Michael Dudley's review of James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?,  "Out, damned skeptics, author fills in blanks with Stratfordian doctrine" , on May 15, 2010. Dudley -- a senior research associate at the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnepeg -- is a long-time Shakespeare authorship skeptic who finds Shapiro's arguments for the traditional Stratfordian candidate to be "time-worn, weak and . . . fallacious". Dudley demolishes the key issue of Stratfordian attribution with one ultra-clear sentence: . . .  Shapiro, nevertheless, devotes the final chapter to setting out his case for Stratfordian orthodoxy, which, like most conventional biographies of "the Bard," consists primarily of conflating all contemporary references to a writer named Shakespeare with the man from Stratford, and filling in the blanks with conjecture. And a scathing analysis: It is difficult to imagine a...

Oberon Canadian correspondent and Shakespeare authorship expert Lynne Kositsky sends us this update on f ormer  New York Times  editor William S. Niederkorn's   review of James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?,  "Absolute Will"  in the April 2010 edition of  The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics and Culture . Kositsky says: The truth is getting out! William Niederkorn's review of Shapiro's book has received another, and bigger, boost. It has been posted by Critical Mass, the Blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, as an NBCC Featured Review: William S. Niederkorn on Contested Will by James Shapiro. This news has been picked up and relayed by a number of other book news observers. Here are the ones I've noticed so far: http://content.usatoday.com/ topics/article/People/ Politicians,+Government+ Officials,+Strategists/U.S.+ Representatives/John+Hall/ 0ekE6Lk1tDcdA/1 http://book-reviews.ma...

by Linda Theil Georgetown University psychiatry professor Richard M. Waugaman, MD, says eighteenth century deification of Shakespeare is partially responsible for twenty-first century resistance to authorship inquiry. In his article coauthored with Roger Stritmatter, “Who was ‘William Shakespeare’?”, in the current issue of the Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review ( Vol. 32, nr. 2 – 2009, pp 105-115) Waugaman says: Anyone who questions the traditional belief about Shakespeare’s authorship often encounters an unusual degree of opposition, which sometimes has the intensity of a religious war. This is not accidental. It is as though people’s faith is being questioned. We believe that there are, in fact, covert religious undertones to these reactions. Before 1769, there was relatively little interest in biographical facts about Shakespeare. But in that year, the great Shakespeare actor David Garrick organized a “Jubilee” in Stratford. This event put Stratford on the map as a tourist a...

Shakespeare Oxford Society journal editor Michael Egan was quoted in a CNN online review of James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? : "The case for Oxford derives from the fact that almost everything we know about Shakespeare of Stratford  doesn't seem connectible to the author of the plays," he (Egan) says. "It's that gap between what we could infer about the author, and what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford , which has raised the questions." Egan said he was sorry that the author, CNN entertainment producer Todd Leopold didn't use Egan's main objection, that ". . . Contested Will  is a profoundly dishnonest book in the sense that Shapiro's book 1599 directly reads Shakespeare's life from his works." Leopold's article published today on CNN Entertainment,   "Was Shakespeare's Ghostwriter Shakespeare? ", numbers the Shakespeare authorship controversy among conspiracy theories such as r...

I just want to be sure that we are appreciating the Wall Street Journal interview of James Shapiro for what it accomplished. First of all, the reporter states immediately, "today the controversy seems more alive than ever." That's a third party making a statement which the Strats have denied, and it is a direct result of her freshly done interview with one of the head Strats. No better third party than the Wall Street Journal . She does this, by the way, by framing Shapiro against Emmerich, so here is an early return on the Emmerich "investment" that perhaps we did not foresee. Second, Professor Shapiro states, "There are certain things you can't say or do [in academia], and one of them is to talk about who wrote Shakespeare." We have said this countless times and countless times have been denied as whiners. Now here comes the head Strat himself attesting to this truth about the state of free and open inquiry in academia. Thank you, Profe...

For a bit of fun, head over to Shakespeare Geek (the link is on the right side, the first one under Interesting Blogs) and click on the title. Look for the first post for today (April 1), titled "Actual Shakespeare Letters Found?!" and read it. Be sure to click on the link provided at the end of the blog entry to see what is really going on. Just remember what day this is. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but after you finish you will agree with me when I say that people in the past have gone to a lot of trouble to supply ANYTHING that could link William of Stratford to the author of the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare. Yes, Stratfordians would give their eye teeth (what does that expression mean anyway?) to be able to have even a millionth of what we Oxfordians have to link our candidate. The only recourse Stratfordians (like James Shapiro) have is to deny that the plays and sonnets can be autobiographical in any way or that they can tell us anything about what th...

Dear Oberon,   For those of you who might be interested, a dissident's view (by yours truly,) of James Shapiro's new book about authorship,  Contested Will , has been posted on the SOS blog.  I would like to hear your thoughts. Click here: Hunter reviews Contested Will   Tom Hunter

Oberon Chairperson Tom Hunter posted a comment on De Vere Society Secretary Richard Malim's report on the Nov. 28 conference at The Globe theater in London on the Shakespeare Oxford Society blog. Hunter's long comment addresses his understanding of Malim's report on James Shapiro's view of the authorship question -- a view that will be elucidated with the publication of Shapiro's Contested Will to be published March/April 2010. Hunter said, in part: Shapiro appears to be saying that (18th century Shakespeare biographer Edmond) Malone’s failing is this: “It diminishes the power of Shakespeare’s imagination: all his characters are within that imagination.” In other words, Shapiro has brought Stratfordians to another dead end, an equivalent of the genius defense, and a betrayal of their misunderstanding of how literature is created. View the report and Hunter's entire comment on the SOS blog at: http://shakespeareoxfordsociety.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/mali...