A memorial service for the Rev. Dr. Daniel L. Wright is scheduled for Wednesday, November 14, 2018 at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, 4723 NW Franklin Street, Vancouver, Washington, 98663, to begin at 6:30 PM Pacific Time in the gymnasium. Dr. Wright was an English Professor (Ret.) at Concordia University and former Director of the Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre at Concordia. He passed away at the age of 63 on Friday, October 5, in Vancouver, Washington. He had been battling health issues for a number of years, largely related to diabetes. His untimely death was due to complications from this disease.
Video of the memorial service is expected to be available around 7:15 PM Pacific Time on November 14 at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzqSeds4Zi-7vzsPvuSdbMA/videos.
Dr. Wright is survived by his mother, Della Hatfield, stepfather David Hatfield, brothers Mike Wright, and Darryl Wright, plus many nieces, nephews, great nieces and a great nephew, and a host of friends and colleagues.
Dr. Wright was born in La Porte, Indiana on November 30, 1954 to Della and Alden Wright. After graduating high school in 1973 he went on to Valparaiso University, from which he graduated in 1976 with a double major in English and Political Science.
Dan next pursued a Master of Divinity degree at Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, graduating in 1980. He was ordained on August 15, 1980, and later went on to serve two years as a Navy Chaplain. After his Navy service he returned to Valparaiso and received his MA in English, and then went on to Ball State University for his doctorate in English, also teaching English there for several years. After Ball State he taught English at both Indiana University and Auburn.
In 1991 Dr. Wright moved to Portland, Oregon, to accept a position at Concordia College [later Concordia University] and served as a Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences from 1991 to 2013.
James Gaynor, an alumnus of Concordia and now a PhD candidate in Chemistry at the University of Washington, credits his own pursuit of a doctoral degree to Dr. Wright’s example and guidance during his student years, when he was also assisting him in putting on the authorship conferences each spring. He said of Dan’s profound influence: “I think it is fair to say that the brilliance, wit, passion, dedication, and generosity that characterized Dan’s work and life will be severely missed. The loss of a person with character of the magnitude of Dan’s is terrible.”
Within the Oxfordian community Dan’s presence had great impact from the moment he joined the Shakespeare Oxford Society [now the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship] in 1996, and continued right up until the day he left Concordia in December 2013. He regularly presented at society conferences and published papers in the society’s newsletters and journals. He was named Oxfordian of the Year in 2008.
In the fall of 1997 Wright joined the Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, shortly after taking the dramatic step of launching an authorship conference on his own campus (made possible by obtaining the permission of Concordia’s president). The first Edward de Vere Studies conference was held in April 1997.
The conference was immediately a smash hit, and at its height in the early 2000s nearly 200 attended each year. Charlton Ogburn, among many old time Oxfordians, was delighted, and felt that this was a breakthrough moment for the Oxfordian cause. The conference was renamed The Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference in 2004 as Concordia planned on creating a Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre within its new library building. The Centre opened amid much fanfare during the April 2010 conference.
One of the hallmarks of the annual April conference at Concordia was the wide range of presentations, ranging from Oxfordians to Marlovians, Baconians, Stratfordians, and others, and also hosting presenters ranging from undergraduate students to tenured professors from around the world.
Oxfordian scholar Dr. Roger Stritmatter remarked about the conference,
Dan Wright founded and steered the Concordia University Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference, creating an event and a forum for Oxfordians and other authorship skeptics that was both unique and invaluable. A gifted and charismatic speaker, Dr. Wright brought to the Oxfordian movement over a period of many years an opportunity for exchange and scholarship without which all of us would have been greatly diminished in our experience.
Among the large variety of conference presenters each year was UC Berkeley English Professor Alan Nelson, a staunch Stratfordian who was also a long-time friend of Wright’s and a frequent presenter at the conference. Dr. Nelson recalled these years:
Daniel Wright became my best friend in the Shakespeare “authorship” movement, in part because we held similar academic posts, but more because Dan was endowed with an unsurpassed gift for friendship. He welcomed me to conferences at Concordia, whether as a debater or as a presenter, both of which helped me clarify my own thoughts. . . . I lament the loss of a friend at once so gentlemanly, so urbane, so passionate and well-informed in his own beliefs, so tolerant of the earnestly held beliefs of others.
In addition to launching the annual authorship conference on his campus, and presiding over it for the next 16 years, Wright also played a significant role in several other important events in the recent history of the Oxfordian movement.
It was in 1997 (shortly after the first conference) that he became acquainted with Stephanie Hopkins Hughes, the newly appointed editor of The Oxfordian, since she had just moved from Boston to Portland earlier that year to be with family members. After having accepted a place on the SOS Board that fall, Wright was instrumental in persuading the Board to fund The Oxfordian, which allowed Hughes to produce a peer-reviewed annual scholarly journal dedicated to authorship research. Hughes said after learning of Dan’s passing:
Dan is still and will always be one of the best and dearest of my lifelong friends. Words cannot express how grieved I am by his death. Since we’ve been close only by phone for so many years, I had no idea of how sick he was. All we ever talked about was English history, English literature, and anything that gave us cause to laugh at the absurdities of the human condition. I miss him terribly.
Another important moment in Oxfordian history involving Dr. Wright was the awarding of a doctorate degree (based on a study of Edward de Vere, his Geneva Bible, and the Shakespeare authorship question) to Roger Stritmatter in April 2000. Wright was on the five-member Dissertation Defense Committee that reviewed Stritmatter’s defense of his PhD thesis (held at UMass-Amherst, April 21, 2000) and accepted it, thus making Dr. Stritmatter the first person to gain official recognition of the Shakespeare authorship question as a “reasonable” proposition within academia, one worthy of study in a PhD thesis.
During these last two decades of his life Dan Wright was deeply involved in every aspect of the Shakespeare authorship debate, playing a key role in making the Oxfordian movement a significant fact of life in the world of Shakespeare studies. His presence will be sorely missed but his many contributions will live on.
— contributed by William Boyle
[A longer remembrance will be published in the Fall 2018 issue of the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter.]
