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What's New on Site | Shakespeare Skeptics Hall of Fame | Shakespeare Matters | FAQ
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Here is a new review of Irv Matus' (1994) book, Shakespeare In Fact.
Our FAQ includes a new section, "Is That All?" which discusses the Sanders portrait.
A few weeks ago I promised Pogo on Shakespeare. Thanks for your patience. Walt Kelley was another one of those deep thinkers who had little use, apparently, for the Stratfordian just-so story.
This new Shakespeare-in-performance section has links to most of the major Shakespeare performance festivals in the United States, Canada and England. Going travelling? Here's your resource for discovering local Shakespeare in performance.
This extensive article on the Prince Hal plays by Shakespeare Fellowship member Ramon Jimenez is our newest offering in the Histories section of the Virtual Classroom. Jimenez argues convincingly that Edward de Vere is the author of the anonymous Elizabethan history play, The Famous Victories of Henry V. The play itself, which was attributed by Seymour Pitcher in 1961 to the "young Shakespeare," is now available online at Elizabethan Authors.com, thanks to Barb Flues and Robert Brazil. In his essay, Jimenez goes on to discuss the relationship between Famous Victories and the canonical Henry V play conventionally attributed to "Shakespeare" and dated 1599. He argues persuasively that the Shakespeare play was originally conceived much earlier, perhaps as early as a 1583.
Here's a link to the University of Massachusetts Renaissance Center, created by Professor Arthur Kinney and other Renaissance academicians and enthusiasts in the Northampton-Amherst area, including some noted Oxfordians. If you live New England area, or are just visiting, you may want to stop in to vist the Center's impressive collection of books and scholarly papers. The center also hosts regular Renaissance-related events.
Check out our new shopping cart.
Also, here's a new cognitive pathway into the Minerva Britanna problem.
To the de Vere Bible section, chapters 1-4, 29-30 of Roger Stritmatter's disssertation. These are .pdf files which require adobe acrobat. Please read, downl0ad, print, and discuss at your discretion.
To the Virtual Classroom: Hot off the presses from the Winter 2003 issue of Shakespeare Matters, Shakespeare Fellowship Trustee Alex McNeil on Ferdinand Pessoa and the psychology of authorship.
The month has been a very cold one, and the Shakespeare Fellowship's computer had to be rebuilt from the ground up with parts delivered by Santa's elves in a sled pulled by reindeer with mittens on their noses to ward off the frostbite, but updates on the site have now been resumed. Perhaps the most notable addition is a new link to an impressive essay by David Chandler featured at the Elizabethan Review, in our State of the Debate section. Further chapters from Roger Stritmatter's dissertation are also now available here.
Some folks may have noticed that as I write this on December 13, close to the witching hour, some changes have been taking place on the links page. I've been reorganizing and distributing things, trying to tidy up so that you can find what you're looking for. And new sources just keep popping up on a regular basis. And of course the internet is like a living organism and if you spend any time on it you'll find some amazing developments in many feilds of inquiry and art. Here is one that really impressed me recently (laugh, its a good site for laugher): BeanWorld. I found it because I was doing research online about Walt Kelly. I'll post some resources for Kelley as I find them, for those who incline in that delicious direction.
Renaissance Literature section added to the links section. Analysis of the Sander's portrait and the Trinity College symposium. Paul Altroochi's review of Shakespeare's Face from the fall 2002 issue of Shakespeare Matters.
Steven Roth's new Hamlet site added to the links section. This stunning article on Elizabethan and Jacobean authorship ruses from Baconiana (yes, its true, the Baconians got some things right) to the virtual classroom.
Three additional chapters of Roger Stritmatter's PhD dissertation are now available in pdf format in the Virtual Classroom section on the de Vere Bible.
Daniel Wright's incisive synopsis of the Funeral Elegy Scandal. The book which Terry Ross once heralded as "a model for attribution studies" is the subject of a critical new study By Gilles Montsarrat of the University of Burgundy which confirms Richard Kennedy's identification of the author as John Ford, not "William Shakespeare". Donald Foster, the author of the theory identifying the bard as the author, has retracted his own theory. So much for "definitive".
The book review niche now includes reviews of Irvin Matus' Shakespeare, IN FACT and Elizabeth Appleton's An Anatomy of the Marprelate Controversy. The former book, originally published in 1994, represents an important early failure by orthodox scholars to deal honestly with the authorship question. Reviewer Richard Whalen identifies Matus as an adept "dodger" of real issues but ultimately unpersuasive as a scholar. By contrast Appleton's 2001 book, reviewed by Roger Stritmatter, addresses head on one of the most important remaining enigmas of Elizabethan literary history, a question doggedly ignored by orthodox scholars: who was the literary masked man, "Pasquill Cavaliero of England?"
The Book Review Niche is now open for your reading pleasure. The complete listing of reviews will be posted shortly.
Three new entries to the News section illustrate the growing circles of Oxfordian influence in the wider culture. William Niederkorn's June 20 New York Times article on "A Funeral Elegy," a very bad 1612 poem attributed to Shakespeare by Georgetown Professor Donald Foster in 1989 and 1995, credits Shakespeare Fellowship member Richard Kennedy with discovering the poem's true author, John Ford. A forthcoming book by Brian Vickers, Director of Renaissance Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, details Kennedy's theory.
The book led to Foster's very public recantation of his own theory, but not before Harold Bloom, the Riverside Shakespeare, and other prophets of the Shakespeare industry, had enthusiastically endorsed the wrong view. Clearly the revelation of Foster's recantation came as a shock to those who, like Foster himself at one time, had hoped that "Funeral Elegy" could supply a silver bullet to slay the Oxfordian monster. An irate 6-22 letter from Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt, who is working on a much-ballyhooed biography of the Stratford man, condemned The Times for asserting a connection between the Elegy controversy and "Gary Livicari"> the authorship question, and for presuming that the Oxfordians are not crackpots. "There is no evidence at all," wrote the Harvard Professor, that de Vere was the author of the Shakespeare canon. Gosh. "No evidence at all."
The Shakespeare Fellowship is pleased to present, from our spring Newsletter Mark Anderson's gracious but stinging rebuttal of Terry Ross's animadversions on Gabriel Harvey and the "Pierce Pennilesse" question. Anderson's article presents stunning new evidence that Harvey was "in the know" about the forthcoming pseudonymous publication of Venus Adonis in the spring of 1593: he boasts of being able to "unmask" a rich actor who is about to make a splash on the London scene. We invite all readers with an open mind to consider this new evidence, as well as weighing Anderson's critique of Mr. Ross's suasive and disengenuous methods of criticism.
Added to the Law archive of the virtual classroom: The complete text of Hamlet (from the second quarto of 1604) with legal annotations. A significant new resource for scholars and students, brought to you by Mark Alexander and the Shakespeare Fellowship.
Why all the fuss about Oxford? This online version of the Shakespeare Fellowship's 25 Connections (soon available from the Fellowship in a portable powerpoint version) gives a synopsis of the case for Oxford's authorship of the Shakespeare canon.
The Shakespeare Fellowship is proud to announce the establishment of an annual essay contest for 9-12th grade students in the United States and Canada. The contest guidelines are published on our Contest page.
To the virtual classroom: Richard Desper's astounding little gem on the "stars or suns" enigma from Henry V (III.7) illustrates the powerful interpretative character of the Oxfordian paradigm. This Oxfordian "mousetrap" in this canonical Shakespeare play amounts to a hidden signature of the real author, Edward de Vere, whose obscure family history is allusively refered to in the passage.
The Virtual Classroom now includes a section on Chronology, with two articles, one by Gwynneth Bowen (sister of the famed English novelist and historian Marjorie Bowen) on the date of The Tempest, and another by Paul Crowley, which exposes the orthodox dating scheme as a simple-minded "just so" story incapable of reasoned defense. We'd really love to hear what David Kathman and Terry Ross have to say in response to Crowley's brief but devastating critique of orthodox chronological assumptions. Will they respond? Based on their typical pattern of always ignoring the strongest arguments of their critics, we expect not. But perhaps we'll be pleasantly surprised.
The Beginners Guide to the Authorship question is now available in the Virtual Classroom. It contains links to Poetry of Edward de Vere, an abbreviated History of the authorship question (HTML version), Eva Turner Clarke on Spencer's nickname for Oxford, the Cuddy Question, and Andrew Hannas on Gabriel Havey's speech in which de Vere is saluted with the Latin epithet "thy will shakes speares" .
As you can see, we've been hard at work!
An abbreviated history of the authorship question is now available in the Virtual Classroom.
The Comedy section of the Virtual Classroom is now open for business. We're proud to present Robert Brazil's essay, "Unpacking Merry Wives of Windsor," reprinted from The Oxfordian, as our first offering on the exciting topic of reading Shakespearean comedies from the Oxfordian perspective.
Also, the State of the Debate section has been updated to include comparative links on the topic of Shakespeare and the Law. Read what David Kathman has to say on this subject on his web site, and then contrast that with the work of Mark Alexander on the same subject. We think you'll agree that Alexander's essay carries the day.
The Conference section. Online registration will be available shortly.
Our revised state of the debate section includes an update on the evidence of the Harvey-Nashe pamphlets. Does Thomas Nashe refer to Oxford as "Pierce Penniless" and "Master Apis Lapis"? You be the judge.
The new Classroom Resources section -- containing a growing selection of resources for secondary school educators -- is now available in the Virtual Classroom.
The 1st annual Conference of the Shakespeare Fellowship will be held the weekend of October 18-20, 2002 at the Sonesta Hotel on the scenic Charles River in Boston. Please visit our Conference page for details.
The virtual classroom now houses a new section on Shakespeare and the Bible, currently featuring a chapter from Roger Stritmatter's dissertation and several articles by him reprinted from Notes and Queries, the Oxford University Press publication in which Dr. Stritmatter, while still a graduate student, published several important building blocks of the argument eventually contained in his dissertation.
The Virtual Classroom now includes several important new articles: Dr. Daniel Wright, a leading authority on the Shakespeare history plays and author of The Anglican Shakespeare, writes on the representation of the Earls of Oxford in the Shakespeare history plays, Merilee Karr , MD, a distinguished Portland playwright surveys the history an implications of our ideas about authorship, and Roger Stritmatter reviews Naseeb Shaheen's Biblical References in Shakespeare's Comedies.
Check out this New York Times exclusive feature on the Shakespeare question.
The redesigned Virtual Classroom now has room for our archive of articles on Shakespeare. The new Hamlet section includes Rebecca West's essay,"A Court and a World Infected by the Disease of Corruption, "J. Thomas Looney's "Self Revelation: Hamlet," and a chapter on Hamlet from Roger Stritmatter's dissertation.
The new Bookshelf supplies direct links to ordering information for all the major Oxfordian works and other important Shakespearean items, such as Harold Goddard's classic The Meaning of Shakespeare. This section will be updated regularly as time and resources allow.
The FAQ now includes a section on the omnipresent bugaboo of Shakespearean orthodoxy: Conspiracy.
The new "State of the Debate" section in the virtual classroom has links to contending articles on the hot topic: "Was William Cecil Lord Burghley the historical prototype and inspiration for Polonius in Hamlet?" You read the essays and decide.
Meanwhile, The Shakespeare Fellowship continues to grow by leaps and bounds. In the past week alone we added 17 new members to our roster. Our goal of 350 members by the end of April 2002 now seems imminently achievable. Thanks to all the folks who have sent us notes of encouragement.
To the News. Shakespeare Fellowship Founding Member Elizabeth Appleton (aka Elizabeth Van Dreunen) has been awarded the honorary degree of PhD in History for her book, An Anatomy Of The Marprelate Controversy 1588-1596 - Retracing Shakespeare's Identity And That Of Martin Marprelate, which attributes the three pamphlets published under the nom de plume "Pasquill Cavaliero of England" (1589-1590) to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Watch for more details here soon.
The new Newsletter Page now includes excerpts from the second issue of Shakespeare Matters as well as the complete first issue. New postings include the second in Barbara Burris' impressive series of articles on the so-called Ashbourne "Shakespeare" portrait.
To the News: Jonni Lea Dunn, a former student at the University of Texas at Arlington, has recently authored an impressive Master's Thesis on "The Literary Patronage of Edward de Vere, The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford". A review including excerpts from the thesis and ordering information, is available in the News Section.
Updated the FAQ to include new links to online resources such as the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Edward de Vere, and additional commentary on the history of the authorship question.
Several of our members have recently marked up impressive personal accomplishments. Read about them in our News section.
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