Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

In aid of promoting her new book, Not Hamlet , actress Dame Janet Suzman used the Shakespeare authorship question to generate headlines by making uninformed comments derogatory of authorship skeptics Mark Rylance and Sir Derek Jacoby. Suzman said in an article titled "Much ado over whether Shakespeare wrote his plays" in Sunday's Daily Mail : 'And you have to be a snob if you just hate it that the greatest poet the world has produced was born into the humble aldermanic classes of a provincial town.' She added: 'How strange it is that Jacobi and Rylance, hundreds of years later, with their outstanding acting instincts, should embrace such a haughty view of the man who has made them as big as they are. 'We have seen a dozen times how thrillingly they themselves can conjure up fantastical character studies of fictional persons – without ever having been crowned king or murdered a rival in real life. It's what actors do for heaven's sakes, and ...

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...