The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship today honors the memory of the late W. Ron Hess by posting two videos on the SOF YouTube Channel.
Hess, a prolific Oxfordian researcher and author, died during the weekend of May 18–20, 2019. He and his wife, Dorothy Hess, were found by police in their home in Winder, Georgia (between Atlanta and Athens), shot to death, victims of a double homicide which remains so far unsolved. Oxfordians are deeply shocked and saddened by this tragedy. We post these videos as a tribute to Ron’s tireless research and unflagging devotion to the authorship question and the Oxfordian theory.
Ron Hess was a retired civil servant with an M.S. in Computer Sciences. He taught information technology security at various night schools in the Washington, D.C., area, including an extension center of Johns Hopkins University Graduate School. He became an Oxfordian in 1991 after attending the 1987 moot court debate (Oxford vs. Shakspere) at American University. Ron published numerous articles in The Oxfordian and other journals, as well as two volumes of his magnum opus, The Dark Side of Shakespeare (Volume I, 2002, and Volume II, 2003). A more detailed obituary appeared in the Summer 2019 issue (pp. 9–11) of the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter.
The first video posted today is Ron’s presentation, along with Dr. Jan Scheffer of the Netherlands, entitled A Wedding Joust in Trebizond: Commedia Erudita and Sinister Politics in 1575, at the 2018 SOF conference in Oakland, California. Their presentation introduced Commedia Erudita (“Learned” or “Erudite Comedy,” or what the authors term “Palace Comedy”), and suggested that it was far more likely than the lower-class Commedia dell’Arte to have influenced Shakespeare’s comedies. The key is the importance to Shakespeare of “dialogue,” which trended toward nonexistent in the multilingual Commedia dell’Arte, while it thrived in Shakespeare’s time in palace or manor venues. As an example of Commedia Erudita, Hess discusses the Tirata della Giostra (“Tirade” or “Rant of the Joust”). While trying to translate it in 2004–05, Hess discovered that there was a sinister subtext under what appeared to be a silly spoof — it is actually a seriously sinister political document. The subtext only emerges from curious contractions, truncations, deliberate misspellings, resorts to myth and lore, and references to literary figures prominent in the 1575–76 timeframe when Edward de Vere (17th Earl of Oxford) was traveling in Italy. Ron’s article on this subject appears in the Summer 2018 issue (pp. 9–20) of the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter.
The second video is Dr. Jan Scheffer’s tribute to Ron Hess at the 2019 SOF conference in Hartford, Connecticut, In Memoriam: Ron Hess, a Great Oxfordian Scholar. Dr. Scheffer was trained as a psychiatrist and neurologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and later as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. He worked for 25 years in forensic psychiatry and held various offices in the psychoanalytical community. He became an Oxfordian in 1994 after being introduced to Charlton Ogburn’s book, The Mysterious William Shakespeare.
Dr. Scheffer joined the De Vere Society and in 2004–07 organized four authorship conferences in the Netherlands. He spoke at the Ashland SOF conference in 2015 and joined presentations with Ron Hess at the SOF conferences in 2016, 2017, and 2018. This year, Dr. Scheffer traveled from Europe to Hartford to pay his heartfelt tribute to Ron’s memory.
We hope you enjoy these reminders of our ever-living friend, Ron Hess.
[published Nov. 14, 2019, updated 2021]
