by Bryan H. Wildenthal
Bonner Miller Cutting’s Centennial Symposium presentation — “Profiling the Author: Will the Real Shakespeare Please Stand Up?” — is now available on the SOF YouTube channel.
The SOF “Shakespeare” Identified Centennial Symposium was held on March 4, 2020, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., 100 years to the day after the publication of “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. That historic 1920 book by British scholar J. Thomas Looney launched the modern Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship.
Cutting, a noted Shakespearean scholar, author, and lecturer, was the fourth of five speakers at the March 4 celebration. The keynote lecture by James A. Warren is already posted on YouTube, as are the presentations by the late Tom Regnier and Cheryl Eagan-Donovan. (Update: The presentation by Professor Roger Stritmatter is also now available.)
Bonner Miller Cutting is the author of numerous scholarly articles on the Shakespeare authorship question. Audiences have long praised her lively and enjoyable lectures on the subject. Her most important writings are collected in Necessary Mischief: Exploring the Shakespeare Authorship Question (2018). Cutting, who lives near Houston, Texas, is also an accomplished pianist, having earned her B.F.A. from Tulane University and her Master of Music degree from McNeese State University in Louisiana. (Update: Cutting was elected in September 2020 to the SOF Board of Trustees.)
In this talk, Cutting explores Looney’s evidence-based “profile” methodology, and how it led him to the likely author of the works published under the name “William Shakespeare.” She also discusses key facts discovered or explored by later researchers, of which Looney was unaware, yet which have corroborated his findings. These include Queen Elizabeth’s mysteriously generous grant to Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford) of an annuity of £1,000 per year (an extravagant amount at that time), a topic on which Cutting herself has written and lectured.
Cutting was introduced by the Centennial Symposium moderator, award-winning journalist and author Bob Meyers, who served formerly as president of the National Press Foundation and director of the Harvard Journalism Fellowship for Advanced Studies in Public Health.
[published June 11, 2020, updated 2021]
