The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship board of trustees presented Paul Altrocchi, MD the Oxfordian Achievement Award today at the Overture Center in Madison, WI, during the second day of a four-day conference on the topic of the Shakespeare authorship. Altrocchi learned about the Shakespeare authorship question at the knee of his mother, Oxfordian scholar Julia Cooley Altrocchi. Hank Whittemore presented the award, praising Altrocchi as a physician, artist, and indomitable seeker of truth.
Whittemore said:
We honored Paul for his years of diligent research, his sharply written papers, several books, and one novel. His 2010 collection of his papers titled Malice Aforethought is the greatest expression of his work.
Altrocchi’s latest Oxfordian project is a series of ten anthologies featuring the best of Oxfordian research from 1965 to the present. The series is titled Building the Case for Edward de Vere as Shakespeare — available in soft and hardcover from Amazon.com.
Prime instigator Alexander Waugh presented conference attendees with material from Part One of his new Kindle Single title, Shakespeare in Court. Waugh analyzed bogus claims made by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust about the provenance of various buildings in Stratford-upon-Avon. Regarding the vaunted “birthplace” Waugh said, “Was Shakespeare actually born in this house? Where’s the evidence? If you look at the house today, every single atomic dot of what you look at was put there between 1858 and 1864.”
Professor Don Rubin of the University of York presented an amazing account of his run-in last year with with the Toronto newspaper of record, The Globe and Mail, whose theater critic objected to the university hosting the SOF conference held there last year when Rubin was the onsite organizer. Rubin’s riveting account of this gruesome story is available from Rubin and was also recorded and will be made available along with other presentations soon after the conference.
Also recorded were:
- Ron Hess on Oxford’s use of secretary hand,
- Heward Wilkinson’s talk about cultural amnesia,
- Hanno Wember’s presentation of Robert Detobel’s paper on the aristocracy’s view of art,
- Ramon Jiménez on six characters from the apocryphal plays who ended up in Shakespeare’s plays,
- Bonner Cutting on wardship, and
- Roger Stritmatter on Palladis Tamia and the Shakespeare question.
After dinner, film director Cheryl Eagan-Donovan conducted a premier screening of Nothing is Truer Than Truth, a film about the seventeenth earl of Oxford’s travel in Italy that she began in 2006. She is preparing to show the film at festivals next year and is developing an educational website that will support the concepts developed in the film. Her work was warmly received by all those attending.
