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
“Peter became one of the most brilliant scholars of the Elizabethan period late in life,” noted Dr. Uwe Laugwitz. “He was not an academic—he did not receive a doctorate, nor did he teach Shakespeare. What is special about his insights into Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age is that they derive from a most intriguing background—military officer, legislative aide, and education official, with degrees in engineering and economics.
“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 18th 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, 17th 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 82nd 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 Journalsince 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
MLA and World Shakespeare Bibliographies Select Journal for Indexing
The editors of Brief Chronicles are pleased to announce that six new members have joined its Editorial Board from England and the United States in the past month. Moreover, the contents of the journal have been selected for indexing by the Modern Language Association International Bibliography and the World Shakespeare Bibliography.
The peer review journal was launched as a free online publication in November 2009 at www.briefchronicles.com and is published annually as an inter-disciplinary journal focusing on Shakespeare and authorship studies. The original Board comprised six academics with terminal degrees from universities in the US and Canada, including scholars in theater, English, law and medicine.
“The goal of Brief Chronicles was to form an Editorial Board with inter-disciplinary capabilities that could examine both Shakespeare and Renaissance authorship issues with the scope and depth not previously available to humanities journals,” stated its General Editor, Roger Stritmatter. “We have achieved this with the addition of these six new members, which now gives the journal expertise in half a dozen academic disciplines from universities in the US, Canada, and England.”
At the same time, “selection for indexing by two international bibliographies in the humanities demonstrates the superb quality of scholarship already to be found in Brief Chronicles,” stated Gary Goldstein, the journal Managing Editor. “Since this selection comes immediately upon publication of our inaugural issue,” he added, “it is clear we have met the high standard expected of the scholarly community on an international level.”
The MLA International Bibliography is the most widely distributed humanities database, being the pre-eminent reference work in the fields of literature, language, linguistics, folklore, ethno-musicology, and teaching. It is compiled by the staff of the MLA Office of Bibliographic Information Services with the cooperation of more than 100 contributing bibliographers in the United States and abroad. The MLA International Bibliography annually indexes over 66,000 books and articles, lists over 1.5 million citations, and is available worldwide in print, on CD-ROM and online at www.mla.org/bibliography.
The World Shakespeare Bibliography is sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., edited by Professor James Harner at Texas A&M University, and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The online version is located at www.worldshakesbib.org.
The World Shakespeare Bibliography provides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare published or produced between 1960 and 2010. The scope is international, extending to more than 120 languages. The more than 123,496 records in the 2009 edition cite several hundred thousand additional reviews of books, productions, films, and audio recordings.
The six new members of the journal’s Editorial Board add English, Theater, World History and Economics scholars from universities in the US and England.
They include a Research Professor in Economics from the University of Hertfordshire; a specialist in historical codicology and textual dating from Harvard University; a former editor of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals/with an established expertise in 19th century anonymous publication; a Professor of Shakespearean studies from Blackburn College; and a widely published Professor of theater history from the University of Missouri. The sixth new member of the board is a pioneer in the use of biometric linguistics to establish authorship of disputed documents, a legal consultant in forensic linguistics, and a recognized expert on the Daubert Standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Daubert_standard.
Geoffrey M. Hodgson, PhD, is Research Professor in Economics at the University of Hertfordshire in England. He is an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK and the author of more than 12 books and 100 articles in academic journals.
Donald Ostrowski, PhD, is a Research Advisor in the Social Sciences and a Lecturer at Harvard University’s Extension School, where he teaches World History and survey courses, including the plays of Shakespeare. He has an extensive publication record in comparative history and methodology, with expertise in codicology, text dating and attribution.
Mike Hyde, PhD in English from Tufts University. Hyde served as the sub-editor for Walter Houghton on The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, a five volume (1974-1980)compilation of more than thirty leading British-Scottish-Irish magazines published between 1800-1900. In that capacity he conducted extensive research on anonymity as well as the use of pseudonyms, initials, pen names, and other authorial disguises. He successfully identified Mary Shelley as the anonymous author of dozens of magazine articles, including one in New Monthly Magazine (1829), titled “Byron and Shelley on the Character of Hamlet.”
Ren Draya, PhD, is Professor of British & American Literature at Blackburn College. Ren received her doctorate in dramatic literature from the University of Colorado, working under J.H. Crouch, founder of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Her B.A. in English is from Tufts University, where she studied under Sylvan Barnet, editor of the Signet Shakespeare series. She is editor of a new critical edition of Othello.
Felicia Hardison Londré is Curators’ Professor of Theatre at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Honorary Co-Founder of Heart of America Shakespeare Festival. She was the founding secretary of the Shakespeare Theatre Association of America. She was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in 1999 and elected to the National Theatre Conference in 2001.
Carole E Chaski, PhD, is President of ALIAS Technology LLC, and Executive Director of the Institute for Lingustic Evidence http://www. linguistic evidence.org/, the first non-profit research organization devoted to linguistic evidence. Dr. Chaski earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Brown University (1987). Dr Chaski developed and updates the ALIAS: Automated Linguistic Identification and Assessment System in order to provide objective measurements for statistical analysis. In 1995 she won a three year Visiting Research Fellowship at the US Department of Justice’s Investigative and Forensic Sciences Division, where she began the validation testing which has become an increasingly important aspect of forensic sciences since the Daubert ruling. Dr Chaski has served as an expert witness in Federal and State Courts in the United States, in Canada and in The Hague.
"The man that has no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils,
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted: mark the music.”
Lida McGirr will present "Margaret’s Wars," a brief study covering successive stages of Margaret’s career throughout the three Henry VI’s and Richard III as she takes on each of the archetypal roles Jung later described for the life cycle of a woman as virgin, wife, mother, wise old woman. Scenes from each of the scripts will be read and/or acted out, to chronicle these changes: i. Margaret & Suffolk, ii. a scene with Henry and Margaret, iii. scene where her son is killed, iv. either the prophecy scene in Richard III or the scene with Margaret, Elizabeth and the Duchess towards the end of Richard III.
SATURDAY MORNING:
"Absent thee from felicity awhile/And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my story"
-Hamlet - 5.2: 350
9:00 –10:30: Presentation & Conversation:
An Uncommon Noble Tells All:
Oxord’s Seventeenth Earl talks with Lady Mary (Sydney) Wroth in 1604 about his life and what he feared would be forgotten about himself, his queen, his family, his writings and his times.
Joe Eldredge: Architect, Author, Editor, Critic, Poet
10:30 – 11:00: Break
11:00-12:30: Presentation & Conversation:
“Who Are You?”
Over the years the traditional identification of “William Shakespeare” with a gentleman from Stratford-upon-Avon has been extensively questioned. Often the work draws upon intensely personal details of the writer and those about him, a potential source of embarrassment if the writer’s identity were revealed. Such could well be the case for the most prominent alternate identity of “William Shakespeare” – Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
Richard Desper: retired scientist and independent scholar of Shakespeare authorship.
12:30 – 2:30: Lunch in Concord
SATURDAY AFTERNOON
“Sweets to the Sweet.”
-Hamlet Act V, Scene 1
2:30 – 4:00: Presentation & Conversation:
"Shakespeare’s Women: Why Do They Have to Die?"
In Hamlet, King Lear and Othello we witness the moving, tragic deaths of Ophelia, Cordelia, and Desdemona. Why do these young women have to die and the heroes outlive them in each play? Is there an inspirational archetype that can increase our understanding of these events?
Robert Horner: (Yale B.A.) has taught high school English and theatre for many years. Lives in the City of Brotherly Love and lectures on American literature and esoteric studies, as well as the work of the Bard.
4:00-4:30: Break
4:30-6:00:
"Shake-speare’s Treason"
New York actor-writer Hank Whittemore will present "Shake-speare’s Treason," an Oxfordian interpretation of the Sonnets. His story is that the sonnets, those exquisite little mysteries, have finally fallen into place when read m as being written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, to Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, and Queen Elizabeth.
His production (with Ted Story, a New York writer-director) argues that Oxford not only wrote the plays of Shakespeare, a claim most literary experts reject, but that Southampton is the "fair youth" and Elizabeth the "dark lady" of the sonnets, and Southampton de Vere’s son by Elizabeth. Which is why the sonnets were suppressed when they were published in 1609. He has also written "The Monument", a 900 page analysis of the Sonnets and their place in Elizabethan history.
6:00-8:00: Dinner
SATURDAY EVENING
"All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players"
Jaques - As You Like It
8:00 into the Wee Hours: Evening Fest
Music, Merriment, Verse, Dance & Good Spirits
Friends and lovers of Shakespeare are invited step up and present their favorite sonnets, speeches, melodies, scenes from the plays, and related gems in celebration of the 400th anniversary of blessed bard’s Genius. SUNDAY MORNING:
"The purest treasure mortal times afford, is spotless reputation: That away, Men are but loam and painted clay."
-Thomas Mowbray, Richard II
9:00 – 10:30: Presentation & Conversation
Richard II: The Art and the Politics
Richard II gives us an opportunity to experience Shakespeare’s awareness of what is at work in political intrigue in a form that can only compel awe at the play’s combination of insight into humanity and dramatic and poetic mastery. Characters act upon suspicions or impulses aroused by what has been said and done by other characters in ways that, with no clear or intentional villain in sight, bear massive historical consequences for the destiny of the English people.
Charles Boyle: author, actor, and director
John Stirling Walker: poet and librettist
10:30 – 11:00: Break
11:00 – 12:30: Presentation & Conversation:
“Shakespeare/DeVere: The Monetary Backdrop”
The virtually unrecognized thread of monetary history and the economic ferment of the Elizabethan era provide a backdrop against which the life and works of the celebrated English bard (Edward DeVere?) were played out. The dramas sound with a moral timbre that is not merely behavioral, legal, or economically self-interested, but allegorical; a temporal tale of the Gods. Is this the elixir they hold for this “post-modern” era, soon to metamorphose (dare I “prophesy”) into a post-commercial age?
Richard Kotlarz: inquirer of the Economic/Social Order
12:30 - 2:30: Lunch in Concord
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on/ and our little life is rounded with a sleep"
Three Shakespeare Songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
David Conte asserts that Ralph Vaughan Williams’s "Three Shakespeare Songs" represent a supreme achievement in the repertoire of twentieth-century choral composition. More-over, the songs brilliantly fulfill the original pedagogical purpose: provide a challenging and grateful work for choral singers, using texts of the highest literary and spiritual quality. David Conte will illuminate how the unique character, color and structure of Shakespeare’s language inform one composer’s musical choices regarding melody, harmony, rhythm and meter, and form as expressed in these songs.
David Conte: Professor of Composition, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, & Award-Winning Composer. David’s recent performances and commissions include: a piece composed from President Obama’s victory speech and performed at the inauguration; “Homecoming” in honor of the 40th Anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., performed by Chanticleer at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City; and “Lincoln” commissioned for Concord’s Bicentennial Celebration of Lincoln’s birth.
Shakespeare in a Tarnhelm.
The “tarnhelm” was the golden helmet in Wagner’s Ring Cycle that allowed its wearer to assume any form or even become invisible; so it has been for several centuries with composers donning an interpretive tarnhelm to twist some of the great works of Shakespeare to assume a new form – along the way, some were so changed as to become nearly invisible. Brian Luedloff explores the evolution of Shakespeare’s work through the operatic form, including masterworks and rarely-performed and unknown works. Is the Shakespearean text illuminated or obscured by the element of song? How do character arcs differ in the transition to the operatic form? Discussion will include amusing anecdotes of hits and misses throughout the centuries as composers try their hand at adapting the work of the Bard of Avon.
Brian Luedloff: Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Opera Theatre for the University of Northern Colorado. He has directed operas across the country and served on the staging staff of San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago and Houston Grand Opera. He received his MFA in Directing from Boston University where he held a Directing Fellowship in the School of Theatre Arts and taught and directed in the Opera Institute."
ONE AND ALL ARE WELCOME
Contributions, as your fortunes allow, are invited to cover our costs, as we look ahead to the “Third Annual Concord Shakespeare Conference-Festival.”
Friday evening, May 29, at 7:00 p.m., Hank Whittemore will perform his one-man play, Shakespeare’s Treason, at the First Parish of Watertown, Unitarian Universalist, in Watertown, MA. There will be a discussion and reception after the performance.
On Saturday, May 30, 9:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m., we’ll hear presentations at the Watertown Free Public Library, also in Watertown Square. Below is a listing of our presenters and a description of their talks.
Cost: We are suggesting a donation of $10 for the Friday evening play, free to students. The Saturday event is free. Last year’s lunch was a huge hit with the group and we would like to provide lunch on Saturday at the library. If the weather is pleasant, attendees may have their lunch as a picnic in a nearby park. We are suggesting a donation of $20 for attending both Friday and Saturday events, (or $10 for either day) to offset the cost of lunch and other refreshments that will be provided throughout the weekend. You may make a donation by cash or check on the day of the event.
Registration: If you plan to attend, please RSVP by email: info@shakespearesymposium.org or telephone: 617-955-3198.
Saturday, May 30, 2009 at the Watertown Free Public Library: The program will start at 9:30 a.m. with coffee, and the first talk will begin at 10 a.m. Lunch will be 12:30 - 1:30 p.m. We will end by 4:30 p.m. There are restaurants in Watertown Square within walking distance of the library. People may like to go out to dinner in groups afterwards.
Alex McNeil, President of the Shakespeare Fellowship will be Master of Ceremonies for Saturday’s event. He will also lead us in a Shakespearean game after lunch.
10 - 11 a.m. Bonner Miller Cutting, "Shakespeare’s’ Will Considered Too Curiously"
When the Last Will and Testament of William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is his "notorious bequest” of his second best bed to his wife. In this presentation, Will’s will is compared with other wills of the era, and it becomes clear that there is more to lament in this document than a single unfortunate word choice.
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Mark Anderson, "Overjoyed, Over Him, Overbury: The New ‘Cobbe Portrait of Shakespeare’ and what it means for the authorship question" Mark will discuss his research and recent events regarding the Cobbe portrait.
12:15 - 1:30 p.m. Lunch
1:30 - 2 p.m. - Oxfordian Shakespeare game with Alex McNeil
2:00 - 3 p.m. Marie Merkel, "Raising the Dead: Ben Jonson & The Tempest."
"Mysteriously, it seems an inaugural work…", Harold Bloom
According to most scholars, The Tempest capitalizes on hot news of the day: the 1609 Wreck of the Sea-Venture, in the Bermudas. Since the earl of Oxford died in 1604, the burden of proof has been on his supporters, either to discredit the play’s many echoes of the Bermuda shipwreck, or to find a new author. Mysteriously, The Tempest just happens to be Shakespeare’s most Jonsonian play.
3:15 - 4:15 p.m. Bill Boyle, "Shakespeare and the Succession Crisis of the 1590s"
The succession crisis of the 1590s was a result of Queen Elizabeth’s refusal to name a successor, or even to allow discussion about the succession. Yet Shakespeare’s Richard II is accepted by most scholars as a comment on Elizabeth’s weaknesses and an implicit "thumbs up" to any potential Bolingbroke-like usurpers to the throne (e.g., the Earl of Essex). How deeply involved was Shakespeare in commenting on the succession crisis? What other works of his and others —such as Willobie His Avisa— may have shared the succession agenda of Richard II?
Biographies of our presenters:
Mark Anderson is a journalist who devoted more than a decade to researching the life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The resulting book, “Shakespeare” by Another Name, is recognized as a major document of the Shakespeare authorship discussion. Mark has published articles on de Vere in Harper’s Magazine, The Boston Globe, and on PBS.org, and has lectured worldwide on the authorship issue.
Bill Boyle is a graduate of Lake Forest College (BA, English, 1967); SUNY-Albany (Mastersin Library Science, 1973). He presently works as a cataloger at the Social Law Library (Boston, MA). Bill has been active in the Oxfordian movement for 30 years and was editor of two society newsletters about Shakespeare and the authorship issue (1995-2005). He founded several websites in the 1990s: Shakespeare Oxford Society (1995), and: The Ever Reader (1998). Bill has presented papers at the Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference (Portland, OR) and the conferences of the Shakespeare Oxford Society and the Shakespeare Fellowship over the past ten years. On the Internet he is presently maintaining a new website and blog, The Shakespeare Adventure, www.shakespeareadventure.com, a Shakespeare library with an online catalog, New England Shakespeare Oxford Library, www.shakespeareoxfordlibrary.org, and is working on a Shakespeare Authorship Resources online database, to be announced later this year.
Bonner Miller Cutting has studied the authorship of the Shakespeare Canon for several decades. She is on the Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Fellowship and is the President of the Lone Star Shakespeare Roundtable in Houston, Texas. Mrs. Cutting has recently presented papers at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, the 2008 conference on authorship studies held in White Plains, New York, and the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable in Los Angeles. A Louisiana, native, Mrs. Cutting holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Tulane University and a Masters of Music Degree from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, LA.
Alex McNeil received his B.A. from Yale University and his J.D. from Boston College Law School. A non-practicing attorney, he is the Court Administrator of the Massachusetts Appeals Court in Boston. Alex became interested in the Shakespeare Authorship question after seeing the 1989 PBS Frontline program on the subject. He was one of the founding trustees of the Shakespeare Fellowship, and currently serves as its president. He is the author of Total Television, a reference book on TV programming, and can be heard on the radio as the Friday host of "Lost and Found" on WMBR-FM (88.1, Cambridge MA), a program spotlighting lesser-known pop and soul music of the 60s and 70s.
Marie Merkel’s poems have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly and The New Republic. She is the author of The First Mousetrap: Titus Andronicus and the Tudor Massacre of the Howards, a full-length study of the play’s links with Howard family history, and the dramatic methods used to conceal this politically explosive story.
Hank Whittemore began researching the life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford in 1987. Since then he has been involved in organizations such as the Shakespeare Oxford Society, the Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference, the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable and the Shakespeare Fellowship. In the winter of 1998-1999, after more than a decade of studying the Sonnets in relation to Oxford’s life, he discovered that the numbered verses comprise an elegant "monument" to preserve a political diary for posterity…
At the center of the structure, Edward de Vere explains his "invention" or special language (akin to the language of DNA) that determines the entire form and content of the sonnet sequence. The result is the "living record" of Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton in relation to the ever-waning life, reign and dynasty of Queen Elizabeth I of England — a genuine historical document in which Oxford tells why and how he saved Southampton’s life by agreeing to bury the truth of his own life: "Your name from hence immortal life shall have, though I (once gone) to all the world must die."
The Monument demonstrates this discovery as it applies to each line of the 154 sonnets, while placing the entire sequence within a specific framework of historical circumstance and chronology. Also see: http://www.shakespearesmonument.com/
The Shakespeare Fellowship is pleased to announce the formation of a
new journal investigating the Shakespeare Authorship Issue from an
Oxfordian perspective: Brief Chronicles: The Interdisciplinary Journal of the
Shakespeare Fellowship.
The journal will begin as an annual online publication, with the goal
of appearing semi-annually in both print and electronic formats. The
inaugural issue is planned for summer 2009.
General editor of Brief Chronicles is Roger Stritmatter, PhD,
Associate Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at
Coppin State University in Maryland. Stritmatter holds an MA in Anthropology
from the New School for Social Research and a PhD in Comparative
Literature from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, with a
specialization in Early Modern Studies.
Managing editor is Gary Goldstein, formerly Editor of The Elizabethan
Review, a peer-reviewed history and literary journal which appeared
semi-annually from 1993 through 1999. Goldstein holds an MA in Media
Studies from New York University.
We hereby invite submissions of research articles, essays and reviews
for possible publication in the journal, which will employ a
double-blind peer review process. All submissions must conform to the
Chicago Manual of Style.
A peer-reviewed interdisciplinary publication, Brief Chronicles is
overseen by an Editorial Board comprised of academics with terminal
degrees and distinguished records of scholarship and teaching. The
journal will focus on the authorship of the Shakespeare canon from
the Oxfordian perspective, publishing research-based notes, articles and
monographs, as well as essays and reviews of books, theater
performances and movies based on the drama and literature of the Elizabethan and
Jacobean periods.
More generally, the journal solicits relevant materials that shed
critical light on the Shakespeare canon and its authorship, on
theories and problems in the study of Early Modern authorship and literary
creativity, and on related questions of early modern literary
culture, aesthetics, bibliography, psychology, law, biography, and history.
Contributions that utilize an interdisciplinary methodology that
draws on the conventions and data of more than one relevant humanities
discipline to produce original, carefully reasoned and readable
insights, are especially welcome.
The Editorial Board of Brief Chronicles comprises the following
members:
Dr. Michael Delahoyde, PhD, is a Clinical Associate Professor in
the Department of English, Washington State University. Dr. Delahoyde
is the former editor of the Rocky Mountain Review of Languages and
Literature, the quarterly journal of the Rocky Mountain Modern
Language Association.
Dr. Warren Hope, PhD. An award winning poet and scholar, Dr. Hope is
an instructor in English at the University of the Sciences in
Philadelphia and at Montgomery County Community College. He is the
co-author, with Kim Holston, of /The Shakespeare Controversy: An
Analysis of the Claimants to Authorship, and Their Champions and
Detractors /(McFarland, 1992).
Dr. Sky Gilbert, PhD, a noted popular entertainer, novelist, poet and
filmaker, received his PhD in Theater Studies from the University of
Toronto. Currently he holds the University Chair in Creative Writing
and Theater Studies at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
Mr. Tom Regnier, JD. Mr. Regnier taught at the University of Miami
School of Law as Adjunct Professor of Law (including a “Shakespeare
and the Law” course). He serves as a Florida public defender
and recently argued a case before the Florida Supreme Court.
Dr. Sarah Smith, PhD, has written multiple best-selling and
award-winning novels including Chasing Shakespeares (Atria 2003). Dr.
Smith received her BA and PhD degrees from Harvard University,
studied at the University of London as a Fulbright scholar and in London and
Paris on a Harvard fellowship, and has also held an Andrew W. Mellon
Fellowship in the Humanities. She taught at Tufts University for
several years and continues to teach fiction writing.
Dr. Richard Waugaman, MD, is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry,
Georgetown University School of Medicine; Training Analyst Emeritus,
Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. A regular contributor to
numerous psychoanalytical journals, Dr. Waugaman is a Reader at the
Folger Shakespeare Library specializing in the psychology and history of
pseudonymity.
We note that Michael Egan today announced his resignation as editor of The Oxfordian. We commend his decision; we wish him well in all future endeavors; we hope he will continue to keep an open mind on the Shakespeare authorship question; and we hope to have the pleasure of his company at future conferences.
In recent years nobody has played the game of defending Will Shakspere from the infidels with quite the zeal, or so succesfully twisted the news media around his little finger with publicity stunts, as Professor Ward Elliott, the Claremont McKenna political scientist turned computer Stylometrician.
Now it seems that former University of Massachusetts English Professor Michael Egan (now scholar-in-residence at Brigham Young University in Honolulu), who has for several years quietly been studying and writing about the obscure Elizabethan play, Woodstock , has turned the tables on Elliott. Woodstock is a drama which had been “in the air” at Umass Amherst since the Hampshire Shakespeare Company resurrected and produced the play at the urging of then-PhD candidate Roger Stritmatter in 1999. Mark Anderson, then writing for the Hampshire Valley Advocate, noted that the play “contains moments of genius, transcendent wit and youthful exuberance that would recommend this production to any lover of historical — and literary — mysteries.”
In an August 9 post to the Shakespere listserve, a follow up to this post of July 28, Egan reports that Over the years” Elliott has issued a challenge, recently repeated here, the substance of which is that he will pay 1000 British pounds to anyone able to prove that any anonymous Elizabethan play deemed non-Shakespeare by stylometry and himself is in fact by Shakespeare.”
Now it seems that Elliott has gone missing just when Egan came to collect his prize money.
“On 28 July (SHK 16.1251 Shakespeare by the Numbers) I accepted this challenge in the following form: if Elliott could refute my non-stylometric evidence and show that the anonymous Elizabethan play Richard II, Part One (also known as Woodstock ) is not by Shakespeare, I would pay him his one thousand pounds. But if he could not, he would write me a check for the equivalent amount. My evidence is detailed in The Tragedy of Richard II, Part One: A Newly Authenticated Play by Shakespeare (Edwin Melllen Press, 2005, forthcoming).
It is now two weeks later and the silence from the direction of Claremont Mackenna College has been deafening. Obviously the man is not showing up.
“It’s time” concludes Egan, “to call the stylomeretricious bluff.”
We’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate both Professor Egan and Edwin Mellen Press for publishing what is sure to be an important contribution to Renaissance literary studies.
Finally, however, we have a challenge of our own for Professor Egan: To win a free membership in the Shakespeare Fellowship, using the methodology employed by the late William Plumer Fowler in Shakespeare Revealed in Oxford’s Letters , prove to us that Edward de Vere did not write Woodstock .
First there was Concordia University’s Shakespeare Authorship Conference; now Washington State University Professor Dr. Michael Delahoyde, a Shakespeare Fellowship member and regular contributor to our discussion forum, has started a regular Honors Course (Honors 440) on the authorship question. “I am reasonably certain,” writes Delahoyde in his online course description, “this is the first time ever such a course has been offered anywhere at any time on earth: a semester of researching and studying the multi-disciplinary works of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604) and his life at Queen Elizabeth’s court.”
Like many other English instructors who have introducted students to the authorship question, Delahoyde reports an explosive intellectual energy is unleashed when students are invited to consider the authorship question with open minds: “several students stay after class every day wanting to know more about Oxford’s life and tackling their own research projects with detective zeal.” Congratulations, Professor Delahoyde!
