Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

Hugh Trevor-Roper circa 1980 at Oxford. Photo by Graham Harrison courtesy The Sunday Times Was Hugh Trevor-Roper an Authorship Doubter? Letter to Charlton Ogburn, Jr., discovered by  Alexander Waugh, confirms that he was by Oberon guest blogger John M. Shahan, Chairman of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition Most Oxfordians probably know that Hugh Trevor-Roper , (1914-2003) Baron Dacre of Glanton, Regius Professor of History at Oxford University and the British intelligence officer who tracked Hitler during World War II, wrote an article in which he marveled at the strange elusiveness of William Shakespeare. The following famous quote appears in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? (Shahan and Waugh, eds., 2013) and is paraphrased in the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt : Of all the immortal geniuses of literature, none is personally so elusive as William Shakespeare. It is exasperating, and almost incredible, that he should be so. After all, he lived in the full day...

Oxfordian of the year! Roger Stritmatter, PhD was named Oxfordian of the Year at the 2013 Shakespeare Oxford Society/Shakespeare Fellowship joint conference held at the Metropolitan Hotel in Toronto, Ontario, October 17-20. SOS President John Hamill and SF President Tom Regnier, JD announce the results of the unification vote. Members of the Shakespeare Oxford Society (138 to two) and the Shakespeare Fellowship (74 to four) voted in favor of unification. Hamill will assume presidency of the unified organization, the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, when legal papers are filed today. Update 10/22/13: Ann Zakelj posted a video of the presidents signing the new bylaws at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQK7J2d9r8&sns=em . Shakespeare Authorship Coalition Director John Shahan spoke to attendees at the conference banquet about what they can do to forward the cause of anti-Stratfordian research: 1. read and sign the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt , 2. share auth...

by Linda Theil I received Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? Exposing an Industry in Denial (Llumina Press, May 23, 2013)  edited by Shakespeare Authorship Coalition director John Shahan and  Alaxander Waugh from Amazon today. My initial examination reveals a  book of monumental import to the Shakespeare authorship inquiry. This  book is a  comprehensive report on the current state of  anti-Stratfordian commentary. Divided into two sections,  the first  section is a series of twelve essays by prominent anti-Stratfordian  researchers:  A J  Pointon, PhD; Frank Davis, MD; Ramon  Jimenez, Bonner Miller Cutting, Alexander Waugh, Thomas Regnier, JD, LLM; Earl Showerman, MD; John Rollett, MA, PhD; and Richard Whalen.  This section covers the topic of why there is reasonable doubt about  the attribution of Shakespeare’s work to William Shaksper of  Stratford. The second section is a complete reproduction of the  ...

The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition announced today that the SAC and twelve anti-Stratfordian groups have endorsed a rebuttal to  the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's "Sixty Minutes with Shakespeare" initiative launched to counter interest in the Shakespeare authorship question generated by Roland Emmerich's film,  Anonymous .  Oberon Shakespeare Study Group vice-chair and Shakespeare Oxford Society President Richard Joyrich, MD is among the anti-Stratfordian scholars who participated in the SAC project. Joyrich authored the anti-Stratfordian rebuttal to  the SBT's Question 18: What was Shakespeare's social status?, originally answered for the Stratfordians by SBT  Representative Trustee from the University of London, Rene Weis: William Shakespeare was the son of a successful yeoman glover who had served a term as mayor of Stratfordupon-Avon. Through his mother Mary Arden, Shakespeare may have been related to the ancient Arden family  of Park Hall. In 15...

In yesterday's London Telegraph  contributor William Langley wrote an interesting essay on Sir Derek Jacobi's decision to play Shakespeare's  King Lear at long last. Langley's mini-bio is titled "Sir Derek Jacobi: Bard to the bone" with the subtitle: "Sir Derek Jacobi doesn't believe Shakespeare wrote King Lear -- but he's still given one of the greatest performances in the role, says William Langley." Jacobi's anti-Stratfordian viewpoint is given some prominence in the article: In recent years, Jacobi has emerged as a leading Shakespeare sceptic, taking the view that a semi-educated country boy from Stratford-upon-Avon couldn’t possibly have written the great works attributed to him. Three years ago, he co-launched the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition – a group dedicated to proving that the plays must have been penned by others, and later, in a speech to a like-minded American research organisation, declared: “The only evidence of S...

In  the death of Joseph Sobran on September 30, 2010 the literary community lost a superb writer and William Shakespeare lost a brilliant advocate. Sobran’s polemic on the topic of the Shakespeare authorship,  Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time , was published in 1997 by Simon & Schuster. In December 1999 Sobran defined his viewpoint in  "How Old Was Oxford's Daughter and When Did William Lose his Hair?" , a reply to academic criticism of his work: . . . in my view the balance of nature requires that some of us nonscholars be able to detect fraudulent scholarship. That is what  Alias Shakespeare  is meant to do. Bogus scholarship is especially rife in academic Shakespeare studies, which are based on the dubious dogma that William of Stratford was, beyond doubt, the poet-dramatist we call “Shakespeare.” The scholars, their reputations at stake, can’t afford to admit that there is any question whatsoever about this....

Minnesota psychologist Thomas Bouchard said academics are conformists in the July 3, 2009 edition of the journal Science , according to New York Times blogger Nicholas Wade in the TierneyLab blog . Wade reports that Bouchard said: The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You’re an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of “expert” they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you’ll bear the less comfortable label of “maverick,” which is only a few stops short of “scapegoat” or “pariah.” (See Source, below) This psychological insight explains why Doubt about Will founder John Shahan's campaign for the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt about the Identity of William Shakespeare is so effective in eroding that hole in the dike of academic resistance to the a...

Note: Oberon will include a discussion of the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt at our Shakespeare's UN-birthday celebration on April 23, at the Farmington Community Library. LT From Shakespeare Authorship Coalition Chairperson, John Shahan: This Tuesday, April 14, will be the second anniversary of the launch of the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare . On that day in 2007, same-day signing ceremonies were held at  Concordia University  in Portland, Oregon, and at UCLA's  Geffen Playhouse . Each event involved a Declaration signing by ten prominent authorship doubters, the most notable being former  LA Times  Arts Critic Emeritus Charles Champlin. Since then,  1,470 people have signed  the Declaration, including 263 current or former college and university  faculty members . Of the total, 214 have doctorates, and 310 master’s degrees. Overall, 895 are college graduates, the largest number of them in Engli...