Eagan-Donovan Film Nears Finish Line

Post-Production Kickstarter Appeal Underway

Cheryl Eagan-Donovan, 2019 Oxfordian of the Year and director of the acclaimed 2018 documentary Nothing Is Truer Than Truth (available on Blu-ray and Amazon Prime), recently completed principal photography on her new Oxfordian film, All the World’s a Stage (see trailer on Vimeo). She describes it as “the story of Edward de Vere’s career and leadership at the center of the Elizabethan theatre scene.”

The new documentary is now in post-production with an all-or-nothing Kickstarter appeal currently at 44% of its goal and a deadline of December 12. The film includes interviews and performances featuring numerous actors, writers, directors, playwrights, and scholars, such as Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir Mark Rylance, Richard Clifford, Elizabeth Winkler, Rosemary Loughlin, Mary Waugh, Annabel Leventon, Samantha Bond, and Costa Chard.

The film incorporates newly discovered documentary evidence to redefine Elizabethan England’s “Golden Age” of theatre, placing at its center Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, known to his contemporaries as “Phoebus Apollo” for his generous patronage of writers and composers.

It has been filmed at locations including Hedingham Castle, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn, Dulwich College, Stratford-upon-Avon, Hatfield House, and Bishopsgate and Shoreditch in London: sites of Fisher’s Folly (where Edward de Vere once lived) and London’s first two public stages, The Theatre and The Curtain.

Eagan-Donovan was a featured speaker at the SOF Centennial Symposium in 2020. You can read here how she became an Oxfordian. Her debut feature film was All Kindsa Girls (2006). She studied Shakespeare and poetry at Goddard College, earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Lesley University (Boston), and has published several articles about Shakespeare, screenwriting, and film. She teaches writing and filmmaking at several universities in the Boston area.