Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

Michael Dudley,  Indigenous and Urban Services Librarian University of Winnipeg In his complex and comprehensive, nine-page opinion piece in the current issue of Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research , University of Winnipeg librarian Michael Dudley exhorts his fellow librarians to embrace the Shakespeare authorship question: . . . the potential benefits of engaging in this issue are many. This subject has engendered an enduring and high level of fascination which is certain to arouse the interest of our campus communities, as it represents a novel approach to locating Shakespeare and provides professional and amateur scholars alike with new perspective. The historical, multicultural and, most importantly, interdisciplinary interest in Shakespeare—be it through a conventional or skeptical approach to the author—implies that an open-minded approach to the question of authorship would appeal to the widest audience. This engagemen...

by Linda Theil Shakespeare Fellowship trustee and immediate past president Earl Showerman  kicked off his fourth year teaching the Shakespeare authorship question at Southern Oregon University’s Osher Lifelong LearningInstitute with a class titled,  titled, " The Shakespeare Authorship Challenge: State of the Debate 2013" . Following the first day of class on April 17, 2013, Showerman said: I have about 20 in class, half-of-whom are already converts. Not exactly preaching to the converted, but it is fun to see how people really light up when they get an idea about what is at stake and the terms of the discussion. . . . The SBT (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) polemic, “Shakespeare Bites Back” was discussed yesterday as a way [of] showing them how threatened and vitriolic are our critics. We'll use Steve McClarran's second edition of   I Come to BuryShaksper , (2011) (available later this month I understand) as a primary text.   Showerman also intends to discu...

Oberon Shakesp... By edited by Linda T... Book Preview An eBook version of the Oberon Shakespeare Study Group Yearbook 2012 is available FREE from Blurb at  http://www.blurb.com/b/4020042-oberon-shakespeare-study-group-yearbook-2012 . Print editions of the book are also available at publication price. The yearbook features all posts to the Oberon weblog published during 2012. Editions of previous yearbooks are also available at Blurb. Links to previous editions are listed in the sidebar of this blog. To access books, click on the book image in the illustration.

Happy New Year!  Our first meeting of 2013 is coming up fast. We will be meeting this coming Monday, January 28, at 6:45 PM at the Bloomfield Township Library (1099 Lone Pine Road) The Library is located on the northeast corner of Lone Pine Rd and Telegraph Rd although the entrance to the parking lot is off of a side road (Timberlake Rd). To get there, go east on Lone Pine Rd from Telegraph and then  turn right at the first street you come to (it's actually pretty obvious where to turn because you will see the library there). Although I'm not positive about it, I believe that our meeting room will be down the stairs you come to when you enter the library. Among the usual exchange of information and updates on upcoming events we will be hearing from Tom Townsend, our Chair, on the topic of Shakespeare's amount of "learning" and comparison of his "signatures" with other contemporary signatures. It is a fascinating topic with obvious impor...

Lamberto Tassinari Christopher Innes, David Prosser, Don Rubin, Michel Vais, Keir Cutler, Mark Anderson This past weekend Linda Theil and I represented Oberon at an Authorship Conference at York University in Toronto. This conference was organized by Professor Donald Rubin of the Theatre Department at York University as a culmination of a semester long seminar he taught at that university over the winter (more on this course in a later post). The conference was very enjoyable. Don Rubin was an excellent host and I was glad to meet him again (he had been at the Joint SOS/SF conferences in Houston and Washington). The conference began at 11:00 on Saturday with some opening remarks by Professor Rubin, in which he described how he became interested in the Authorship Question after reading Mark Anderson’s Shakespeare By Another Name and how he was very happy to have taught a course on the subject (over some objections by fellow faculty members at the University). Many, if...

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...

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 ...

While the public waits for Sony to approve release of “ The Shakespeare Authorship Debate with Roland Emmerich”  video recorded live at the  English-Speaking Union (ESU) in London   on June 6, 2011, interested readers may read  Stanley Wells’  and  Paul Edmondson’s  debate speeches on the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s site, Blogging Shakespeare. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust   chairman Professor Stanley Wells CBE and trust education director Rev. Dr. Paul Edmondson along with University of London professor  Michael Dobson formed the Stratfordian triumvirate at the ESU debate.  Anonymous  director Roland Emmerich, author Charles Beauclerk, and Dr. William Leahy who is head of the English Dept. at Brunel University where he runs the graduate program in Shakespeare authorship studies defended the anti-Stratfordian position.  The debate chairman was former head of speech and debate at ESU, James Probert, who  c...

The cover article of Reform Judaism Magazine's summer 2010 issue, "Unmasking Shakespeare: Were the Greatest Works of Western Literature Written by a Woman?" by Michael Posner is a discussion of the Shakespearean authorship claim of Amelia Bassano Lanier. The following open letter from Richard Joyrich to readers of the RJM article addressing the Lanier claim and the Shakespeare authorship question. Dear readers, I would like to make some comments regarding the article which appears in the recent issue of Reform Judaism on the “true identity” of Shakespeare being Amelia Bassano Lanier. As the article correctly states there is indeed a growing number of people who are dissatisfied with the “traditional” attribution of the plays and poems written under the name “William Shakespeare” (frequently “William Shake-Speare” perhaps indicating a pseudonym) to William Shaksper (this is the way it is always spelled on legal documents) of Stratford-upon-Avon for many reasons (...

As the only Oberoner to attend, I will take this opportunity to report on what happened during the four days of the 14 th Annual Shakespeare Authorship Conference, held at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon Day 1 —Thursday, April 8, 2010 The Conference convened at 4:00 PM. First up was Mark Goggin on "The Case for Bacon as the Author of Julius Caesar ". Mr. Goggin focused on the underlying symbolism and allusions of the play and how it is all about using rhetoric for persuasion. Of course Bacon was a master of rhetoric. Bacon also wrote the most of any writer at the time about the psychology of decision making, another important theme in this play. Mr. Goggin went through the usual "qualifications" that the writer Shakespeare must have had, such as knowledge of law, medicine, music, military matters, and the new astronomy as well as possessing a large vocabulary. Bacon fits the bill quite well. (Of course so does Edward deVere and, in my own opinion, ...