| |
Virtual Classroom | Fellowship Home
Meet the Trustees
Earl Showerman, President
Earl Showerman graduated from Harvard College and the University of Michigan Medical School, and practiced emergency medicine in Oregon for over 30 years. A longtime patron of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, after retiring from medicine in 2003, he enrolled at Southern Oregon University (SOU) to study Shakespeare and to pursue his decades-long love affair with the authorship question. Dr. Showerman has served as a trustee of the Shakespeare Fellowship and The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition in the past and was executive producer of Mignarda’s recording, My Lord of Oxenford’s Maske, a compilation of lute duet music connected to Edward de Vere. In recent years he has presented a series of papers at Concordia University and the joint SF/SOS authorship conferences on the topic of Shakespeare’s “Greater Greek”.
Dr. Showerman’s research has included a reexamination of the Greek literary sources and allegorical elements in Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Much Ado about Nothing, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the Tudor interlude, Horestes. Most recently he has delivered a series of lectures on his research at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at SOU and is the chair of the 2010 Ashland Authorship Conference.
Dr. Richard Desper, Treasurer
Richard Desper attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in 1959 and 1960. He then achieved a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1966 at the University of Massachusetts, then and now renowned for its preeminence in the field of polymer science. After his doctoral degree, Dr. Desper pursued a career in polymer materials science for some 30 years, making significant contributions to the science and engineering of advanced polymeric materials, specializing in polymer microstructure and its relationship to important physical and mechanical properties. He has since retired from his scientific career.
Dr. Desper's interest in the Shakespeare authorship question was aroused in 1989 with the Public Broadcasting System telecast in America of The Shakespeare Mystery, a program featuring Charlton Ogburn Jr. as the chief proponent of the Oxfordian viewpoint. He found the Oxfordian arguments compelling and began at that time his own research efforts into the authorship question, resulting in a number of literature papers setting forth his findings, including several in refereed journals, The Elizabethan Review and The Oxfordian.
Sean Phillips, Secretary
Sean Phillips is a Web designer, semi-amateur historian, and a freelance epistemologist. A former theater technician and lighting designer, he has worked for such diverse organizations as Shakespeare & Company, the Boston Opera Company, the Kennedy Center and the band Aerosmith. A Colorado native, he now resides in Boston, where he spends his time annoying his friends by fruitlessly rooting against the local sports teams.
Bonner Miller Cutting, Trustee
A Louisiana native, Bonner Miller Cutting graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Tulane University in New Orleans and has a Masters of Music from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, where she served as adjunct faculty after her graduation. Both of her degrees are in piano performance, and she is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Bonner still concertizes occasionally and appeared recently as soloist with the Columbia River Chamber Orchestra in Longview, Washington, playing Mozart's 21st piano concerto. In years past she has appeared as soloist with the New Orleans Symphony and other orchestras in Louisiana. She was a teacher of piano for many years and still judges piano festivals and auditions for the National Guild of Piano Teachers and other organizations.
Bonner came to the Shakespeare Authorship debate by right of heredity. As most of you know, she is the daughter of Oxfordian pioneer Ruth Loyd Miller and Judge Minos Miller. As Bonner tells the story: "Mom's interest began when I was in college. Mom was a lawyer and had read a series of articles on the authorship question that appeared in the Journal of the American Bar Association. The articles were published together in a little green book titled Shakespeare Cross-Examination. Mom was intrigued and ordered the book. That little green book was the culprit! She was intrigued with the Shakespeare Authorship debate and things just snowballed from there!"
In recent years, Bonner assisted her mother in her continued research, and is now working to further the cause in which her parents made such significant contributions. Bonner notes that "Being a Cradle Oxfordian is a lot of responsibility."
Gary Goldstein, Trustee
Gary Goldstein is the managing editor of Brief Chronicles, the peer reviewed online journal published by the Shakespeare Fellowship. He is the former editor and publisher of The Elizabethan Review (ISSN 1066-7059), a semi-annual peer reviewed journal published from 1993 to 1999 in print and from 1997 to 2001 on the Internet (www.elizabethanreview.com) focusing on the English Renaissance. In 2003-04 he served as editor of the quarterly Shakespeare Oxford Society Newsletter, and from 2004-07 he was a member of the Editorial Board of The Oxfordian (ISSN 1521-3641), an annual journal on the Shakespeare Authorship Issue. He also edited the recently released Shakespeare studies text, The Lame Storyteller, Poor and Despised (Verlag Laugwitz, 2009), the collected Shakespeare papers of literary historian Peter Moore.
Tom Regnier, Trustee
Tom Regnier is an attorney and teacher who currently serves as judicial law clerk to the Honorable Harry Leinenweber in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Illinois. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English (Phi Beta Kappa) from Trinity College, Connecticut. He earned his Juris Doctor degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Miami School of Law, and his Master of Laws degree from Columbia Law School in New York, where he was a Harlan F. Stone scholar. He previously served as an Assistant Public Defender, Appellate Division, in the 11th Judicial Circuit of Florida and clerked for the Honorable Melvia Green in the Third District Court of Appeal of Florida.
Tom has taught a seminar on "Shakespeare and the Law," as well as other law courses, at the University of Miami School of Law. His article Could Shakespeare Think Like a Lawyer? was published in the University of Miami Law Review. He has presented lectures at Shakespeare conferences on such topics as Richard the Third and the Law of Treason and Henry the Fifth and the Salic Law. He has been active in theatre and has performed in seven Shakespeare plays. In Miami, he was a member of the nominating board for the Carbonell Awards, the South Florida theatre awards.
In November 2009, Tom was honored to be a member of a delegation that presented the "Oxfordian of the Year" award to Justice John Paul Stevens at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Ted Story, Trustee
Ted Story has spent most of his adult life in theatre, first as an actor and then as director and producer. He most recently directed the premiere of "Flights of Angels," a play about paratroopers in WWII, at the Emelin Theatre in Mamaroneck, NY. Off-Broadway he produced and directed "GRACE & GLORIE" at the Laura Pels theater, starring Estelle Parsons and Lucie Arnaz, He was part of the producing team for "Metamorphosis" (Tony Award - Best Play 2002), "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" (Tony Award - Best Revival), "The Lonesome West,""Hedda Gabler" (with Kate Burton), "The Real Thing,""June Moon," and "Annie Warbucks.
Emeritus and Honorary Trustees
Honorary Lifetime Trustees
Sir Derek Jacobi
Sir Derek Jacobi is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished Shakespearean actors of the 20th century. His myriad stage roles have included Cyrano de Bergerac, Uncle Vanya, Adolf Hitler, Oedipus Rex, and a slew of Shakespearean heroes and antiheroes. Jacobi is perhaps most well known, among followers of contemporary cinema, for his stunning performance in the title role in the award-winning I, Claudius (1977), one of several miniseries in which he has starred.
Jacobi's many film credits include collaborations with Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, and voiceovers for two documentary series by Ken Burns. His most recent appearance on film was Gladiator (2000) with Russell Crowe. Jacobi was knighted in 1994. Beginning in 1995 he won the affection of PBS audiences as Ellis Peters's inquisitive monk in the eponymously titled Cadfael series. His interest in the authorship question goes back some years and was cultivated through private conversation with the late Sir John Gielgud, a convinced Oxfordian.
Michael York
Michael York is well known audiences all over the world as one of the most prolific and talented stage and screen actors of our day, having appeared in over 100 films, among them Cabaret, Romeo and Juliet and, most recently, The Omega Code. Audiences have long admired Michael York's versatility. With an impressive body of work on screen, stage, television and with audio recording over the past 40 years, this consummate performer still retains the fire for the actor's life which first blazed when he was a teenager in England.
York is also an accomplished writer and lecturer, who has written several books. His book on performing Shakespeare, A Shakespearean Actor Prepares (written with longtime colleague, actor/director Adrian Brine) was praised by Spectator magazine as "A triumph... the most illuminating study of the dramatist since Granville Barker's Prefaces. It deserves to become a classic." In the book, York declares his belief that Oxford was the true mind behind the Shakespearean canon: "Like other actors --Leslie Howard, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin -- I have an instinctive feeling that there is something that does not quite add up," writes York in that book. "The glorious renaissance mind revealed by the plays does not square with the crabbed, litigious personality of the Straford claimant with his trivial, almost anonymous legacy of a few scrawled signatures, a second best bed and not one single book. Wheras Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, appears an ideal candidate."
