Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

We Shakespeare lovers would be better served if supporters of the status quo would attempt to eliminate a distorting Stratfordian lens from their view of all things Shakespeare. Too often, information is presented as if the Stratfordian view were confirmed, when the truth is much more complex and much more interesting. The Folger Shakespeare Library recently published on their webpage a promo of a talk on heraldry titled "Shakespeare's Coat of Arms . . . " by Kathryn Will. They said: "In 1596, Shakespeare secured a coat of arms for his father, thus earning himself the title "gentleman." But the herald who granted the coat faced attacks from his own colleagues for elevating a mere playwright to gentle status. How did Shakespeare, early modern heraldry officials, and their contemporaries view the relationship between heraldry and gentility? And have heraldry's meanings changed over the past few centuries?   In this talk, scholar Kathryn Will e...

by Linda Theil The Folger Institute has extended the deadline for National Endowment for the Humanities grants to support travel and lodging to their “Shakespeare and the Problem of Biography” conference to be held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC on April 3-5, 2014. The new deadline for aid applications is February 14, 2014. NEH grants are available to qualified graduate students and faculty from US institutions and may be applied for online at the Folger Shakespeare Library: info at “Scholarly Programs Application Guidelines” and “The Folger Institute Application forAdmission” . Enrollment to the conference is open to all, and those who are not applying for grants must send a registration form that is available online and the $50 registration fee to arrive at the Folger no later than March 21, 2014. I was delighted to hear that the great Folger plans to address the issue of the Shakespeare authorship and I read the conference précis with interest: Th...

The Folger Shakespeare Library education department publishes a web-log titled   Making a Scene: Shakespeare in the Classroom   that   gives teachers advice on how to help students learn about the Bard. On Thursday, the topic of the post was "Teaching Shakespeare FAQs" that is a list of basic questions and answers about how to handle Shakespeare in the classroom. One of the questions considered basic by the Folger had to do with Shakespeare's biography: Do I need to teach about the Globe Theatre or Shakespeare’s Life? The simple answer is “No.” While telling students that Shakespeare had three children and that he and Anne Hathaway had to get married might be interesting, it really doesn’t help them understand the plays. It’s much better to integrate some facts about Elizabethan life when they come up in the plays. So when Francis Flute protests, “Let me not play a woman. I have a beard coming” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that’s the perfect opportunity to explain the...

Shakespeare Fellowship President Earl Showerman asked us to share this request for papers for the Shakespeare Fellowship/Shakespeare Oxford Society conference to be held Oct. 13-16, 2011 at the Washington Court Hotel in Washington, D.C. Deadline for proposals is Aug. 1, 2011. The 2011  joint authorship conference  sponsored by  the Shakespeare Oxford Society and the Shakespeare Fellowship will be held in Washington DC from  October 13-16, 2011. Arrangements for a block of rooms at the Washington Court  Hotel  are being finalized. The program will include a tour of the Folger Shakespeare  Library  with a viewing and discussion of the Earl of Oxford's Geneva Bible.  The SOS and SF are organizations dedicated to academic excellence, as  defined through the independent scholarship of several generations of  scholars, among them J.T. Looney, B.R. and B.M. Ward, Charles Wisner  Barrell, Charlton Ogburn, Jr., Ruth Loyd Miller, a...