Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

 I n his blog entry titled "Queering Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes" posted yesterday on the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's Blogging Shakespeare site, University of Hertfordshire professor Graham Holderness discussed his view of biography as revealed in his new book, Nine Lives of William Shakespeare . Holderness said:   Since there is no direct evidence that Shakespeare did in actuality enjoy and suffer a gay relationship with the Earl of Southampton, or with any other man, it seems legitimate for a fictional commentary to take the form of invention, and to operate by parallelism and contrast rather than by historical narrative. ‘The Adventure of Shakespeare’s Ring’ in  Nine Lives of William Shakespeare  finds Holmes and Watson, pursuing the theft of ‘Shakespeare’s ring’ from Stratford’s Birthplace Museum, drawn into the gay milieu of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, and thence provoked into an acknowledgement of their own homosexual attachment . . . Hold...

University of Warwick doctoral researcher Peter Kirwan posted a commentary about a new book edited by William Leahy ,  Shakespeare and his Authors: Critical Perspectives on the Authorship Question ,  on his Shakespeare Apocrapha blog dated April 1, 2010 . Before offering his insights on Leahy’s collection of essays, Kirwan made this statement of his viewpoint regarding two key issues in the Shakespeare authorship scrum: 1) That academic institutions - and English Literature departments in particular - are deliberately and systematically dedicated to the silencing (as opposed to answering) of anti-Stratfordians, or in fact anyone who expresses doubt. This is something I'm very happy to concede. The book collates some shockingly extreme and offensive language applied to anti-Stratfordians that compares them to Holocaust deniers or Creationists. The violence of the academy towards anti-Stratfordians, to my mind, is ill-judged, unprofessional and very troublesome. There is noth...

When I was browsing in Shaman Drum last month, I came upon a set of slim volumes with the series title, Shakespeare NOW! The series is published by Continuum Books, London and New York and is edited by Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie with the intention of offering “ . . . a series of intellectual adventure stories: animate with fresh and often exposed thinking, with ideas still heating in the mind.” The book that caught my eye is Shakespeare Thinking by Philip Davis of the University of Liverpool School of English. This is a dense book in terms of ideas and thrilling to read – I believe Davis has met the challenge of talking about the work of Shakespeare in new and challenging ways. From what I understand, Davis argues that Shakespeare’s language accesses the actual creation of thought – that Shakespeare shows us reality coming into language, unfiltered by consciousness. In this language, nothing is taken for granted and nothing is already known. With Shakespeare, whatever it is, it is ...