The Oxfordian articles

Recent articles from The Oxfordian

Reclaiming the Passionate Pilgrim for Shakespeare
January 1, 2012... The Passionate Pilgrim (1598-1599) is a hornet's nest of problems for academic Shakespeareans. This small volume is a collection of twenty poems with the name "W. Shakespeare" on the title page. Only fragments of the first edition survive; its date is reckoned as late 1598 or 1599, the same...

The Playwright's Progress: Edward De Vere and the Two Shrew Plays
January 1, 2012... For more than 400 years the two Shrew plays--The Tayminge of a Shrowe (1594) and The Taming of the Shrew (1623)--have been entangled with each other in scholarly disagreements about who wrote them, which was written first, and how they relate to each other. Even today, there is consensus on...

The Psychopathology of Stratfordianism
January 1, 2012... What accounts for the astonishing longevity of belief in the legendary author of Shakespeare s works. Because we re right, say Stratfordians "and because there's no question whatsoever that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare." I have no simple answer to the enigma of this orthodoxy. Instead, as a...

An Historic Document: The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition Answers the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
January 1, 2012... On 1 September 2012, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) in Stratford-upon-Avon announced "a campaign to debunk the "conspiracy theories surrounding the authorship of Shakespeare's works." This was inspired by Roland Emmerich's film, Anonymous, released October 28. The SBT campaign featured...

III Met by Moonlight
January 1, 2012... In his History of the Russian Revolution Trotsky observes that war is the locomotive of history, drawing change swiftly in its train. In our own more modest realm, scandal and publicity, alas, are among the most powerful drivers of revolution. The stirrings-up wrought by the movie Anonymous,...