Oxfordian News

Hamburg, Germany, January 26, 2010… German publisher Verlag Laugwitz is pleased to announce publication of The Lame Storyteller, Poor and Despised, the collected Shakespeare papers of literary historian Peter Moore (1949-2007), which previously appeared in peer reviewed journals in the US, England, Holland and France from 1993 to 2006.

Among Moore’s discoveries are the following:

• The Shakespeare plays were written from 1585 to 1604 and not 1590 to 1613, as commonly supposed

• The Rival Poet of the Sonnets was Robert Deveraux, Earl of Essex and the Fair Youth was Henry Wriostheley, Earl of Southampton

• Shakespeare’s share of Two Noble Kinsmen was written the last year of Elizabeth’s life—and ended with her death.

• The dramatist attacked in Ben Jonson’s “On Poet Ape” was Thomas Dekker and not William Shakespeare

• Shakespeare used the Bible’s two-witness rule involving murder in designing Hamlet’s inner dynamic

• Shakespeare adapted the Earl of Surrey’s Psalm 8 as well as Piers Plowman in writing Hamlet’s soliloquies

• Shakespeare set Christian and pagan philosophies against each other in King Lear and mediated the debate through the concept of nature

• Shakespeare used ancient and modern notions of time and Epicureanism in devising Macbeth’s structure

“I would compare his contributions in the field of Shakespeare studies to that of Lessing’s,” added Dr. Laugwitz, referring to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the German philosopher, critic and dramatist who championed Shakespeare to German audiences in the 18^th Century. “Peter’s method is like Lessing’s: disassembling the false constructions of established authorities and trying to gain new ideas from his critical work by merging objective historical analysis with a keen literary sensibility. The combination of his intellectual power and classical temperament are the means by which Peter Moore aligns with Gotthold Lessing, both generating transformative insights into Shakespeare and the Elizabethan period.”

“What makes Peter Moore’s work of lasting value to scholars, theater professionals and the general public is his ability to delineate Shakespeare’s original intent in his most important works,” said Gary Goldstein, editor of the posthumous collection of nearly thirty papers. “The first half of the book focuses on the Sonnets, Hamlet, King Lear, MacbethOthello; the second half investigates the chronology of the plays and the controversial authorship issue of the Shakespeare canon, with Moore deconstructing the traditional case of Shakespeare from Stratford, then laying out new evidence that Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays.” 

Peter Moore studied engineering at Cornell University and University of Maryland, where he graduated with a BS in Civil Engineering, and later earned a MS in Economics at the University of Maryland. He served as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army’s 82^nd Airborne Division, became a legislative aide to US Senator John East from North Carolina, an official in the Georgia State Department of Education, and a director at a national non-profit organization dedicated to dealing with troubled youth.

Dr. Laugwitz has co-published with Robert Detobel the Neues Shake-speare Journal since 1997, Walter Klier’s The Shakespeare Case (2004); the play Edward III (1998); and the drama Woodstock in 2006 in its first German edition. In 2005 he published Kurt Kreiler’s translation of Edward de Vere’s poetry in the first German edition. Forthcoming is a German edition of the anonymous Elizabethan play, Arden of Faversham. Dr. Laugwitz received his doctorate in German Literature from the University of Hamburg.

Gary Goldstein was former editor and publisher of The Elizabethan Review, a peer-reviewed history journal which appeared from 1993 to 1999 in print and from 1997 to 2001 on the Internet (www.elizabethanreview. com). He served on the editorial board of The Oxfordian from 2004-2007 and currently is managing editor of Brief Chronicles: The Inter-Disciplinary Journal of the Shakespeare Fellowship (www.briefchronicles.com).

The Lame Storyteller is available throughout North America for $20 through the Shakespeare Fellowship at www.shakespearefellowship.org)

Contact: Gary Goldstein, garygoldstein1@bellsouth.net

Mark Anderson, author of the best-selling Shakespeare by Another Name, is again touring to promote his book and debate all-c0mers from the orthodox camp. Anderson will be in Houston (March 13-15), New York (March 27), Boston/Concord (May 30-June 1) and Las Vegas (July 11).
The final stop on this spring-summer tour is a debate (at Bally’s Casino!) on the Shakespeare authorship question, where Anderson will take on Alan Nelson of U.C. Berkeley (arguing for the Stratfordian theory) and William Rubenstein of the University College of Wales (arguing that Elizabethan courtier Henry Neville was the Bard). The verbal tussle will be part of the "great debates" series at the weekend-long Freedom Fest conference.

The March 25 issue of London Times Online carries notice of of a new book, Shakespeare in Venice, co-written by Shaul Bassi, a lecturer at Venice University, and Alberto Toso Fei:"Most scholars believe that what Shakespeare knew about Venice must have been the fruit of wide reading and his contact with Italians," says Mr. Bassi. "But the local references - implicit as well as explicit - are so numerous they point to an alternative hypothesis: what if he did come here after all?"

According to London Times Rome correspondent Richard Owen, about a third of Shakespeare’s works are based in Italy or make specific references to events and locations in Italy. However, "there is no concrete evidence that Shakespeare ever left England, and the most widely accepted theory is that he gleaned background information from Italian travellers and merchants, including Venetians, whose glass and other products were highly prized in Elizabethan England. "

Here at the Shakespeare Fellowship, we predict that the new book by Bassi and Fei is bound to incite further interest in the authorship question. Although there is no reason to believe that the bard of Avon ever left his native England, it is well known that de Vere toured Tuscany in 1575-76, and well attested tradition records that he was fond enough of Venice — then the most cosmopolitan city in the world — to build himself a house there.

John Aubrey probably exaggerates when he has the Earl remaining in Venice for seven years in humiliation after breaking wind in the presence of Elizabeth I, but it seems likely that he spent considerable time there during the decades after his 1575 junket.

The most important new book on Oxford’s authorship in some years, Mark K. Anderson’s Shakespeare By Another Name, will be released by Gotham Press, a division of Penguin books, this August.

A new offering from Greenwood Press, The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question, by Scott McCrea, sheds more heat than light on the authorship question. McCrea, identified on the book’s dustjacket as “on the faculty of the Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film” at SUNY Purchase, is a relative newcomer to the authorship question whose first contribution to the discourse was a December 2002 Skeptic magazine article, answered by Diana Price (vol. 11:3, 2005).

Bertram Feilds, copyright attorney and former editor of the Harvard Law Review, has weighed in with a generic anti-Stratfordian work, Players, published by ReganBooks, an imprint of Harper Collins.

Meanwhile in England, Great Oxford: Essays on the Life and Work of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604 (Parapress 21004), with a forward by Shakespeare Fellowship Honorary Lifetime Trustee Sir Derek Jacobi, advances the case for Oxford’s authorship. Look for review and further commentary on this site.

Much has happened in Authorship Studies in the months intervening since our last update to the NEWS. Over the next few weeks I’ll try to catch up with events as I begin adding new updates. But perhaps it is worth beginning with the news from Germany. Walter Klier, the author of the 1994 Oxfordian study, Das Shakespeare Komplott (Steidl Verlag), has issued a revised and greatly expanded version of the book under a new title: Der Fall Shakespeare (2004, Verlag Uwe Laugwitz).

The change in title from The Shakespeare Conspiracy to The Shakespeare Affair may reflect a bow to the prevailing allergy to the term “conspiracy” among apologists for the official view of Shakespeare. Surely most Germans understand, as Shakespeare certainly did, that the world runs by Komplott of one kind or another. But the change in title also reflects a much deepened appreciation for relevant details of the case for Oxford’s authorship of the Shakespearean canon, as evident not only by the one hundred pages of new material but also in the reference to contemporary scholarship which was not available to the author in 1996.

Lynne Kositsky, the Shakespeare Fellowhip’s Vice-President for Internal Communication, has been nominated for the prestigious Ontario White Pine Award for her most recent book, The Thought of High Windows, a young adult novel about the Holocaust. The book has also been optioned for an American Movie of the Week. Congratulations, Lynne!

Stephen Greenblatt’s Will In the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, just released by Norton, is the latest in a line-up of orthodox squibs which, since 1984, have attempted to put the Genie that Charlton Ogburn released back in the bottle. Greenblatt’s book, however — which sells for $7 on Ebay — breaks new ground by being the first orthodox book to appear in print with a public attack on the “preposterous fantasy” of those who think Will wasn’t Will. “The lack of…literary traces, combined with the imaginative leaps required to reconcile Shakespeare’s life and work, at least partly explain the currency of theories that someone else actually wrote the works,” opines Greenblatt. ” Will in the World doesn’t directly address the subject of an alternative authorship. But the process of writing the book, says Greenblatt, “has made me respect that preposterous fantasy — if I may say so — rather more than when I began…because I have now taken several years of hard work and 40 years of serious academic training to grapple with the difficulty of making the connections meaningful and compelling between the life of the writer and the works that he produced.”

Shakespeare Fellowship founder and Vice-President for Communication Lynne Kositsky, the award-winning Canadian novelist whose 2000 novel, A Question of Will (Roussan), brought de Vere’s authorship of the Shakespearean canon to many young readers for the first time, has scored again with her most recent young adult novel, The Thought of High Windows. The novel, about a group of young Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi death camps who take shelter in a deserted castle in France, has earned highest marks from Kirkus Review: “Superb, wrenching Holocaust fiction. Esther is a Jewish teen snatched out of Germany at the beginning of WWII by the Swiss Red Cross to live briefly in Belgium and later in a castle in France, under the nose of the Vichy government…. Swirling through the story is her tumultuous, ever-changing relationship with mercurial peer Walter. Esther is plagued with guilt and self-hatred as well as terror of dying in the looming Holocaust. Kositsky deftly describes the twisted pains of war, genocide, and cruelty. Kositsky’s poetic and piercing language honors Esther’s severe loneliness and the horrors she witnesses.”

Congratulations, Lynne!

Read more and order the book at Barnes & Noble.

A new science fiction novel, 1632 by Eric Flint (2002, Baen Publishing, distributed by Simon and Schuster), includes the following conversation:

Judith Roth finally managed to speak. “I can’t believe you. You actually–” She almost gasped the next words. “You actually saw Shakespeare? In person?”

Balthazar raised his head, frowning. “Shakespeare? Will Shakespeare? Well, of course. Couldn’t miss the man at the Globe. He was all over the place before he moved back to Stratford-on-Avon. Never missed a chance to count the gate. Twice, usually.”

Half-stunned, Morris walked over to a bookcase against the wall. He pulled down a thick tome and brought it over to Balthazar. “We are talking about the same Shakespeare, aren’t we? The greatest figure in English literature?”

Still frowning, Balthazar took the book and opened its cover. When he saw the frontispiece, and then the table of contents, he almost choked. “Shakespeare didn’t write these plays!” he exclaimed. Shaking his head: “Well, some of them, I suppose. In some small part. The ones that read as if written by committee. The little farces like Love’s Labour’s Lost. But the great plays? Hamlet? Other? King Bear?”

Seeing the look on his companions’ faces, he burst into laughter. “My good people! Everyone knows that the plays were really written by–” He took a deep breath, preparing for recitation: “My Lord Edward, Earl of Oxford….”