Managing Editor Gary Goldstein announced the Shakespeare Fellowship’s publication of a new journal investigating the Shakespeare authorship issue — Brief Chronicles: The Interdisciplinary Journal of the Shakespeare Fellowship. The journal will appear annually each fall as a free online publication at http://www.briefchronicles.com. Their goal is to publish semi-annually in both print and electronic formats.
In a press release, Goldstein reported:
The inaugural issue of Brief Chronicles will be introduced November 6, 2009 at the joint annual conference of the Shakespeare Fellowship and Shakespeare Oxford Society in the Doubletree Hotel at Houston International Airport. The publication is a peer reviewed journal overseen by an editorial board of academics with terminal degrees and distinguished records of scholarship and teaching in theater, English, law and medicine. Contributors to the first issue include academic and independent scholars from the United States, Canada, and Germany.
General editor of Brief Chronicles is Roger Stritmatter, PhD, Associate Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Coppin State University in Maryland. Stritmatter holds an MA in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research and a PhD in Comparative Literature from University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
“Shakespeare was a Renaissance intellect who integrated a wide body of technical knowledge into the canon,” Professor Stritmatter said. “To fully reveal the insights contained in his drama and poetry, and accurately assess the evidence that resolves the authorship of the Shakespeare canon, requires the expertise of an inter-disciplinary editorial board that embraces disciplines such as the law and medicine as well as English and theater. Moreover, plans are to further expand the board’s editorial scope to take account of other relevant fields, such as history and religion.”
Stritmatter pointed to the papers in the inaugural issue as examples of the research being generated by Oxfordian scholars. Two articles are derived from books by American and German researchers—the late Peter Moore (1949-2007) and Robert Detobel of Germany. “Peter’s previously unpublished paper on how Shakespeare employed the role of time and Epicureanism in devising Macbeth’s inner dynamic was the last one composed in a 20-year career of research,” Prof. Stritmatter said. “And it appears in his just released collection of Shakespeare studies, The Lame Storyteller, Poor and Despised. Robert Detobel’s paper is a chapter from his book manuscript, Shakespeare and the Concealed Poet, which demonstrates how Francis Meres revealed Shakespeare to be Edward de Vere in his 1598 book, Palladis Tamia.”
Other papers in the inaugural issue examine:
· the particulars of William Shakespeare’s will,
· the causes for the financial downfall of the Earl of Oxford,
· the influence of Greek drama and literature in Much Ado About Nothing,
· the personal and topical allusions in Titus Andronicus that reflect Oxford’s involvement in the play,
· essays on the psychology of anti-Stratfordian responses to the Oxfordian hypothesis over time,
· a comparison of two film performances of Hamlet (Mel Gibson’s versus Lawrence Olivier’s),
· and reviews of three books on the authorship issue and the Earl of Oxford published in the US, England and Germany, the latter effort by Kurt Kreiler being a major literary biography of the Earl of Oxford.
Gary Goldstein is managing editor. He is former editor of The Elizabethan Review, a peer-reviewed history and literary journal of the English Renaissance that appeared semi-annually from 1993 through 1999.
The journal will focus on the authorship of the Shakespeare canon from the Oxfordian perspective, publishing research-based notes and articles as well as essays and reviews of books, theater productions and movies based on the literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
“We hereby invite submissions for possible publication in the journal,” Prof. Stritmatter said. “We will employ a double-blind peer review process. All submissions must conform to the Chicago Manual of Style.
“More generally the journal solicits relevant materials that shed critical light on the Shakespeare canon and its authorship, on theories and problems in the study of Early Modern authorship and literary creativity, and on related questions of early modern literary culture, aesthetics, bibliography, psychology, law, biography, and history. Contributions that utilize an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on
the conventions and data of more than one relevant humanities discipline to produce original, carefully reasoned and readable insights, are especially welcome.”
Contact:
Managing Editor Gary Goldstein
The Shakespeare Fellowship
P.O. Box 421
Hudson, MA, 01749
www.shakespearefellowship.org
garygoldstein1@bellsouth.net
Cell: 561-504-3220
Brief Chronicles Editorial Board
Richard Waugaman, MD, is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine; Training Analyst Emeritus at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute; and a Reader at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Tom Regnier, JD, LL M, currently serves as law clerk to Judge Harry Leinenweber in U.S. District Court in Chicago. In 2009, he earned his LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan F. Stone Scholar. Mr. Regnier formerly taught at the University of Miami School of Law as adjunct professor (including a “Shakespeare and the Law” course), and also won a landmark case in 2008 before the Florida Supreme Court.
Michael Delahoyde, PhD, is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of English, Washington State University. Dr. Delahoyde is editor of the Rocky Mountain Review of Languages and Literature, the quarterly journal of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association.
Warren Hope, PhD, is an award winning poet and scholar, Dr. Hope was an instructor in English at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia for eight years and is currently teaching English at Montgomery County Community College. He is the co-author, with Kim Holston, of The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Claimants to Authorship, and Their Champions and Detractors (McFarland, 1992 and 2009).
Sky Gilbert, PhD, is a noted novelist, playwright, poet and filmaker. He received his PhD in Theater Studies from the University of Toronto. Currently, he holds the University Chair in Creative Writing and Theater Studies at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
Sarah Smith, PhD, has written multiple award-winning novels including Chasing Shakespeares (Atria, 2003). Dr. Smith received her BA and PhD degrees from Harvard University, studied at the University of London as a Fulbright scholar and in London and Paris on a Harvard fellowship, and has also held an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities. She taught at Tufts University for several years and continues to teach fiction writing.
The Shakespeare Fellowship, founded in 2001, is a non-profit educational organization whose mission is to promote and endow research and education in the European Renaissance, with particular emphasis on the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth I; to further the debate over the relevance of Shakespeare in the 21st century; to promote and endow research and education in the Shakespearean authorship question, with special emphasis on the theory first proposed by J. Thomas Looney identifying Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), as the true author of the Shakespeare canon.
