Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

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...

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...

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...