Dec. 14, 2015 — The video of Katherine Chiljan’s Ashland conference presentation, “Origins of the Pen Name ‘William Shakespeare’,” is now available on YouTube. Her lecture was presented on September 26, 2015. As Chiljan states: “The great author told us that ‘William Shakespeare’ was a pseudonym in Venus and Adonis and in his sonnets. Several of his contemporaries believed this, too, as related in printed references, and by including a hyphen in the surname.”
The purpose of Chiljan’s presentation is to explain why the author chose “Shakespeare” as his pen name, and to present evidence of its existence before its 1593 print debut beneath the dedication of Venus and Adonis to Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton.
Katherine Chiljan, an independent historian, has studied the Shakespeare authorship question for over 30 years. She earned her B.A. in History from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2011, she published Shakespeare Suppressed: The Uncensored Truth About Shakespeare and His Works. The book earned her an award for distinguished scholarship in 2012 at Concordia University (Portland, Oregon). She is a former editor of the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter and has published two Oxfordian anthologies: Dedication Letters to the Earl of Oxford (1994) and Letters and Poems of Edward, Earl of Oxford (1998). She has debated professors on the authorship question at the Smithsonian Institution, the Mechanics’ Institute Library in San Francisco, and the University of California at Berkeley.
You may now access this and other videos of SOF conference presentations in one place: the SOF website Conference Videos page. The page currently includes Bonner Miller Cutting’s talk on wardship at the 2014 Madison conference and Tom Regnier’s talk on evidence at the 2015 Ashland conference, with more to come in the future. (Update: These and many other conference videos, among others, are also available on the SOF YouTube Channel.)
You can support the SOF’s goal of making more conference videos available to the general public by joining the SOF or renewing your membership for 2016.
[published Dec. 14, 2015, updated July 2020]
