Don Rubin, Professor Emeritus of Theatre at York University in Toronto and Second Vice President of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, was featured recently in York University’s online news. The article went out to 50,000 professors, university staff, and students on York’s mailing list, and members of the press across Canada also receive it.
The article quotes Rubin extensively about the authorship question and the SOF Annual Conference held in Hartford in October and features a photo of Rubin (at right) holding the volume of Herodotus once owned by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford — the prime alternative candidate for the Shakespeare authorship.
Rubin mentioned that the conference took place at the Mark Twain House in Hartford because Twain — “like Henry James, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Mark Rylance, Derek Jacobi, and even Tyrone Guthrie, first artistic director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario — doubted that the Stratford man was the writer.”
“The authorship debate goes back to the 16th century,” said Rubin, “contrary to what is still being argued by scholars who have not kept up with this research, and contrary to what is still being argued by the fusty Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT), which obviously has a vested tourist interest in maintaining that Stratford-upon-Avon was the home of the only writer of the plays, a writer whose family was actually illiterate and a writer who never once claimed that he wrote even a single one of these works during his lifetime or even in his will.”
In December 2018, Rubin edited a special issue of Critical Stages, the global theatre webjournal, devoted to the Shakespeare Authorship Question — one of the most significant breakthroughs into a mainstream publication in the entire history of the SAQ. Critical Stages, published by the Paris-based International Association of Theatre Critics, receives over 20,000 views a month and is read by theatre critics, professionals, and scholars in some 100 countries.
(Update: Professor Rubin completed two three-year terms on the SOF Board of Trustees in 2020. He was appointed in June 2021 to fill a vacancy on the Board and was elected to another three-year term on October 2, 2021.)
[published Dec. 13, 2019, updated Oct. 2, 2021]
