New York actor-writer-researcher Hank Whittemore has been named 2017 Oxfordian of the Year by the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. The award was announced today by SOF President Tom Regnier in a ceremony at the SOF Annual Conference at Loyola University in Chicago.
Whittemore, a long-time Oxfordian, was feted both for his overall work in the field of authorship studies and for his 2016 volume, 100 Reasons Shake-speare Was the Earl of Oxford. The book was published by Forever Press in Massachusetts and is available in both paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon. The “100 Reasons” are based on a blog he wrote over many years for people who wanted to know why he believed Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, used the name “Shakespeare” (often spelled “Shake-speare”) as a pseudonym.
On its publication last year, Kirkus Reviews called 100 Reasons a “tour de force defense … with a breezy but very intelligent tone; the reader is neither patronized nor boggled by minutiae and jargon. Instead, there is a magnetic sense of history, art, politics, and human nature injected into a smooth and eminently readable storytelling style. It is obvious that the author’s research has been painstaking, but the resulting document is … downright pleasurable.”
Whittemore is the author of 11 books ranging from a bestselling novel, Feeling It (1971) (a Literary Guild selection), to a groundbreaking 900-page study of Shake-speare’s Sonnets (1609), entitled The Monument (2005). Since 2008 he has been performing a solo show entitled Shakespeare’s Treason, based on The Monument, written with director Ted Story.
Also connected to The Monument is Whittemore’s Shakespeare’s Son and His Sonnets (2010), which combines not only Shakespeare and English literature but also history, biography, and the unraveling of the mystery surrounding the authorship question. Another volume of note is Whittemore’s Twelve Years in the Life of Shakespeare (2012), a series of essays about Edward de Vere connecting events in his life with the plays of the Bard.
Hank Whittemore began his career as a professional actor at the age of 19 appearing on Broadway in Take Her, She’s Mine, with Art Carney, and later as Henry in The Skin of Our Teeth, with Helen Hayes. Later, also in New York, he went into newspaper work at The Reporter Dispatch in White Plains, and in radio at WVOX in New Rochelle. His first book was a biography of the transit labor leader Mike Quill, which he followed with another bestseller, The Super Cops (1973), made into an MGM movie directed by Gordon Parks.
Whittemore’s award-winning documentary films include CNN: The Inside Story, about Ted Turner and the start of his all-news network, and So That Others May Live, about search-and-rescue dogs. He has won two Emmy Awards as well as a Writers Guild of America Award, and has also written around 100 journalistic cover stories for Parade, the large-circulation Sunday newspaper supplement.
Hank says his love of Shakespeare began at his alma mater, Notre Dame, while playing the roles of Cassio in Othello and Laertes in Hamlet. As a scholar-researcher, he has presented papers at the Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conferences formerly held at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, and at numerous annual gatherings of the Shakespeare Oxford Society and Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. His work has also appeared in academic journals such as The Oxfordian and Brief Chronicles.
Hank lives in Nyack, New York, with his wife Glo and their son Jake.
A complete list of all Oxfordians of the Year is available here.
[posted Oct. 14, 2017, updated 2021]
