Click here to visit the Oberon Shakespeare Study Group site and read Linda Theil fascinating account of Jefferson Foote’s friendship with Brazil and his decision to publish his friend’s book posthumously.

http://oberonshakespearestudygroup.blogspot.com/2012/01/jefferson-foote-publishes-brazil.html

The book is available for sale on Amazon.com.  Here’s the link:

Robert Brazil's Edward de Vere and the Shakespeare Printers

Edward DeVere and the Shakespeare Printers by Robert Sean Brazil:
http://www.amazon.com/Edward-Shakespeare-Printers-Robert-Brazil/dp/1467951552/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1325962685&sr=1-1-catcorr

You can search inside the book on Amazon, and I encourage you to do so.  In Chapter Two you can read almost 19 of Brazil’s 33 reasons to doubt the traditional Stratford attribution of the Shakespeare works.  Even that partial list is worth reading.  To get the whole list of 33, you’ll have to buy the book – which is worth doing.

Here’s just a taste of what Linda Theil writes in her excellent post:

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Jefferson Foote publishes Brazil — electronic version to follow soon
Robert Brazil’s childhood pal, Jefferson Foote, published Brazil’s book, Edward DeVere and the Shakespeare Printers, as an act of friendship. When Foote – a research scientist in Seattle, Washington – learned of Brazil’s death in 2010, he also learned of Brazil’s interest in the Shakespeare authorship question.

“I found out he had written this book and he had published it as a Kinko copy (in 1999),” Foote said in a telephone interview on January 8. “And I’m not prepared to let this slip away – it is his life’s work and I wanted to see it preserved.”

Although he had been long out of contact with Robert Brazil, Foote contacted Brazil’s brother, Tony Brazil, and received a copy of the contents of Brazil’s computer along with permission to publish Shakespeare Printers under the copyright of Brazil’s son and heir Jessie Brazil.

“I had no trouble at all getting approval from the brother and sons,” Foote said. “They were delighted that I picked that up.”

Foote also enlisted the aid of Robert Brazil’s friend, Lisa Duff — owner of the audio-book publishing firm, Wetware Media, LLC — who advised Foote on the publishing process. He used the Amazon print-on-demand company CreateSpace as printer of the volume and published under the name of his Seattle research firm, Cortical Output, LLC. The book was released on Brazil’s birthday, November 19, 2011, with all profits going to Brazil’s heirs: Jessie Brazil and David Brazil. “We want to keep the price moderate; their priority is to get the widest circulation,” Foote said.

###

Again, here’s the link to read the entire post by Linda Theil.

http://oberonshakespearestudygroup.blogspot.com/2012/01/jefferson-foote-publishes-brazil.html

http://www.shakespeareanauthorshiptrust.org.uk/pages/conf.htm

The Shakespearean Authorship Trust, in collaboration with Brunel University, hosts an advance screening of a major new authorship documentary, Last Will. & Testament at Shakespeare’s Globe on Sunday 27 November.

At a time when the Shakespeare world is being rocked by the imminent appearance of Roland Emmerich’s feature film, Anonymous, as well as the publication of several books based on new research, including Richard Roe’s The Shakespeare Guide to Italy and Katherine Chiljan’s Shakespeare Suppressed, there comes the first major documentary on the authorship question for 22 years. The timing could not be better, and we are very fortunate to have the film’s director Lisa Wilson with us to introduce the work and answer questions on it. (Lisa was also a consultant on Anonymous, and is a trustee of the SAT.) She will be joined by no fewer than seven luminaries who took part in the documentary: Diana Price, author of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, Professor Roger Stritmatter of Coppin State University in Baltimore, actors Sir Derek Jacobi* and Vanessa Redgrave*, the Chairman of the SAT, Mark Rylance, Dr. William Leahy, Head of the School of Arts at Brunel University, and Charles Beauclerk, author of Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom.

Last Will. & Testament is a 90-minute film that explores the evolution of the authorship question since Shakespeare’s time, with particular reference to William Shakspere of Stratford and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, though other candidates are discussed. Among those defending the orthodox position are Stanley Wells and Jonathan Bate, both of whom were invited to speak at the conference. The documentary is beautifully shot and has exclusive access to footage of Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous, which is due for general release on 28 October 2011. The film will be shown in three parts in order to give conference attendees proper time to digest and discuss the material as the day unfolds. It promises to be a fascinating and provocative experience, with plenty of opportunity for the audience to engage with guest speakers.
*subject to availability

Date: Sunday 27 November 2011
Time: 11:00 – 18:15 (Tea and coffee available from 10:30)
Venue: Shakespeare’s Globe, 21 New Globe Walk, Bankside,               London, SE1 9DT
Tickets: £35 (including tea and coffee)
Booking: Shakespeare’s Globe Box Office: Tel: 020 7401 9919
Booking opens: 17 October 2011

Click here for the programme schedule in pdf format.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/27/shakespeare-scholars-authorship-plays-anonymous?intcmp=239

Our film Anonymous asks viewers to think for themselves about Shakespeare

Criticism of Anonymous has been vitriolic. But scholarship about Shakespeare’s life relies on smoke and mirrors

John Orloff

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 27 October 2011 11.00 EDT

As the screenwriter of Anonymous, I’ve watched the reactions to the film both here in the UK and in the US with great interest and not a little surprise. The film-makers, myself included, expected controversy – one does not take on sacred cows naively – but I must confess that the vitriol of our critics has been impressive.

One American Ivy League professor, James Shapiro, has insinuated that our film is like Nazi propaganda. The county of Warwickshire allowed the Shakespeare Trust to temporarily remove Shakespeare’s name from public signs – an act of protest against our film that seems counter-productive; anti-Stratfordians couldn’t agree more with that act.

Throughout the run-up to the film’s release, I have been reminded that one does not take on people’s livelihoods lightly.

While our little film not only does not disparage the genius of Hamlet and Lear, but rather honours, rightly, the genius of the work, it does challenge two Bard-related industries – tourism and, perhaps more provocatively, Shakespearean scholarship itself.

Read More:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/27/shakespeare-scholars-authorship-plays-anonymous?intcmp=239

Who Wrote Shakespeare?

by Eric Idle* November 21, 2011

While it is perfectly obvious to everyone that Ben Jonson wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, it is less known that Ben Jonson’s plays were written by a teen-age girl in Sunderland, who mysteriously disappeared, leaving no trace of her existence, which is clear proof that she wrote them. The plays of Marlowe were actually written by a chambermaid named Marlene, who faked her own orgasm, and then her own death in a Deptford tavern brawl. Queen Elizabeth, who was obviously a man, conspired to have Shakespeare named as the author of his plays, because how could a man who had only a grammar-school education and spoke Latin and a little Greek possibly have written something as bad as “All’s Well That Ends Well”? It makes no sense. It was obviously an upper-class twit who wished to disguise his identity so that Vanessa Redgrave could get a job in her old age.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/11/21/111121sh_shouts_idle#ixzz1eIqtT1Mb

In any event, here’s the link to the Huffington Post followed by a few graphs from Orloff’s article.  Enjoy, Matthew

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-orloff/shakespeare-anonymous_b_1034885.html

The Shakespeare Authorship Question

As the screenwriter of the upcoming Elizabethan drama Anonymous, I read Columbia Professor James Shapiro’s opinion piece (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/opinion/hollywood-dishonors-the-bard.html?_r=1) regarding our film in the NY Times last week with great interest. In it, Mr. Shapiro seemed to take great personal offense at the premise of our film; namely, that the works attributed to the actor William Shakespeare were in fact written by another man, Edward de Vere.

Not only did the NY Times decline to allow me to fully respond, but Mr. Shapiro refuses to be on the same stage with me at Q & A’s following screenings of the film — though he is happy to take questions from audiences as long as I am not present to defend myself or my film.

As the Shakespeare Authorship Question is a rather complex issue, I won’t attempt to prove my case that Shakespeare is not the man responsible for the works attributed to him in this forum.

SNIP

Again, here’s the link to the full article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-orloff/shakespeare-anonymous_b_1034885.html

But the amazing thing to me about this piece is how much it depends on snobbery as a way to attack the snobbery of Oxfordians.  Maybe Marche should devise an exam for “undergraduates” that counts how many unfounded assumptions and appeals to snobbish expertise his article contains.  Anyway, it’s worth reading.  He does make several good points about the historical inaccuracies of Anonymous.  Hey, I’m not here to defend Anonymous the movie.

But attacking the movie’s flaws should not be allowed to be a substitute for attacking the Oxford theory in general.  That’s too broad a brush.  It continues to amaze me that the traditional assumption — and it’s nothing more than that — that “Shakespeare” continued to write plays after 1604 — some with partners? — is presented so often as the slam dunk refutation of the Oxford theory.  The hard evidence for this is … what exactly?

The fact that so many so-called experts accept the traditional “narrative’ as fact is not the same thing as real evidence.  And I love that Galileo is invoked without any sense of irony since Galileo was punished — forced to recant what he knew to be true — by an establishment view of the world that was … well … flat wrong.  Sometimes those who come up with alternative theories that challenge orthodox opinion turn out to be right after all.  Not always.  But sometimes.  And resorting to emotional appeals, reckless ad hominem attacks, branding them as heretics, etc. is neither constructive or productive.

It’s not particularly helpful to make an argument based on historical analogies.  Those can easily cut both ways and don’t really advance the state of the debate.  They usually inflame the debate and only serve to generate much more heat that light.  There may be lots of legitimate reasons to question the validity of the Oxfordian theory, but the alleged snobbery of Oxfordians, Rick Perry’s anti-climate change or anti-evolutionary views, the “aptly named” proponent of the theory, or the unfounded assertion that Shakespeare “wrote” plays after 1604 are not among them.  Why do anti-Oxfordians so often stoop to these specious lines of attack?  Can’t they muster a real case against Oxford without injecting these bogus and logically challenged arguments?  Apparently not.

the good news about this article … and other reviews of the movie … is that the authorship question is being discussed widely in the media.  It would be a shame if various parties to the debate simply resort to their tried-and-true arguments to put down the other side.  This isn’t an election campaign.  We don’t have to “go negative” to get votes.  We should be evaluating and assessing evidence, not trying to score debate points.  Maybe one day we’ll evolve to that stage in this discussion.  Matthew

Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare?

By STEPHEN MARCHE

Published: October 21, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/wouldnt-it-be-cool-if-shakespeare-wasnt-shakespeare.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&emc=eta1

“Was Shakespeare a fraud?” That’s the question the promotional machinery for Roland Emmerich’s new film, “Anonymous,” wants to usher out of the tiny enclosure of fringe academic conferences into the wider pastures of a Hollywood audience. Shakespeare is finally getting the Oliver Stone/“Da Vinci Code” treatment, with a lurid conspiratorial melodrama involving incest in royal bedchambers, a vapidly simplistic version of court intrigue, nifty costumes and historically inaccurate nonsense. First they came for the Kennedy scholars, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Kennedy scholar. Then they came for Opus Dei, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Catholic scholar. Now they have come for me.

[SNIP]

In the movies, a few mistakes don’t matter, but the liberties with facts in “Anonymous” become serious when they enter our conception of real history. In scholarship, chronology does matter. And the fatal weakness of the Oxfordian theory is chronological, a weakness that “Anonymous” never addresses: the brute fact that Edward de Vere died in 1604, while Shakespeare continued to write, several times with partners, until 1613. “Macbeth” and “The Tempest” were inspired by events posthumous to the Earl of Oxford: the gunpowder plot in 1605 and George Somers’s misadventure to Bermuda in 1609. How can anyone be inspired by events that happened after his death?

[SNIP]

The original Oxfordian, the aptly named J. Thomas Looney, who proposed the theory in 1920, believed that Shakespeare’s true identity remained a secret because, he said, “it has been left mainly in the hands of literary men.” In his rejection of expertise, at least, Looney was far ahead of his time. This same antielitism is haunting every large intellectual question today. We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skeptics like himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” Of all the candidates with their various rejections of the scientific establishment, how many could name the fundamental laws of thermodynamics that students learn in high school? Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.

# # #

Emmerich Takes On Shakespeare

http://www.torontosun.com/2011/10/21/emmerich-takes-on-shakespeare

“One of my favourite historical dramas is Amadeus. But when you analyze Amadeus, not much of it is true as it is depicted in the film “¦ That’s why we chose Richard III in Anonymous. The historical Richard III was not a hunchback. Shakespeare made him a hunchback for dramatic reasons.
“That’s how I see this. There’s always an inner truth and there is the storytelling part in which you try and work in as many real facts as you can.”
So, if Shakespeare, as Emmerich paints pretty convincingly, was a fake, one wonders how much longer it will be before this is accepted as a matter of convention.
“I think Stratfordians will have a hard time in the coming decades,” he said. “Don’t forget, the people saying that this is nothing more than a conspiracy all have something to lose. They are all history professors living in Stratford.
“But I’m always very simple. I say, ‘Show me a letter by William Shakespeare that he wrote during his life.’ There’s not one measly letter. That, for me, is the most amazing thing of all. A writer, a man of the word, and not even a note to his wife saying, ‘How’s it going honey? I’m doing fine in Southwark.’
“Even something like that, I’d say, ‘Fine, I’ll stop. You’ve won.’ Until that happens, I’m sure I can stand up to anybody in the literary establishment.”

http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Suppressed-Uncensored-Truth-About/dp/0982940548/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313618470&sr=1-2

Here’s some basic information about the book and the author.  Sounds like a great read.   And great timing in advance of the worldwide release of the Roland Emmerich movie, Anonymous.   Let the Shakespeare authorship debate begin!

About the Author

KATHERINE CHILJAN (BA History, UCLA) is an independent scholar who has studied the Shakespeare authorship question for over 26 years. She has debated the topic with English professors at the Smithsonian Institution and at the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco. Chiljan served as editor of the Shakespeare-Oxford Newsletter, and edited two anthologies: Dedication Letters to the Earl of Oxford, and Letters and Poems of Edward, Earl of Oxford.