The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship is pleased to announce that newsletters from the earliest Oxfordian organization in the U.S. are now available on the SOF website for free viewing and download in searchable pdf format. The newsletters were published between 1939 and 1948 by the American branch of the Shakespeare Fellowship. The original Shakespeare Fellowship was founded in England in 1922, and its membership included J.T. Looney, the discoverer of the Oxfordian theory, and George Greenwood, an attorney, member of Parliament, and brilliant analyst of Shakespeare’s legal knowledge. Its purpose was to explore the Shakespeare authorship question. It had an international membership, with most members in either England or the U.S.
Although the organization was originally comprised of members supporting various candidates as the true “Shakespeare,” it eventually became a predominantly Oxfordian group. When the organization had to suspend operations in England in 1939 due to the advent of World War II, three American Oxfordian pioneers – Eva Turner Clark, Charles Wisner Barrell, and Louis Bénézet – founded the American Shakespeare Fellowship to carry the torch of Oxfordianism during that troubled time.
The SOF has now posted all 43 newsletters published by the American Shakespeare Fellowship from 1939 to 1948 – almost 600 pages’ worth – on its website. These newsletters provide an inside view of the history of the first Oxfordian organization in the U.S. and also contain fascinating early research and analysis about the authorship question by Clark, Barrell, and Bénézet, as well as other Oxfordians.
You can view or download all 43 newsletters by following this link. The webpage lists all the articles that are in each issue.
SOF president Tom Regnier said, “The SOF is proud to make these historically important newsletters from the earliest Oxfordian organization in America freely available to the world. We hope this will facilitate further research into the Oxfordian theory and also help provide a look into the development of the movement. The posting of these newsletters is a step toward the SOF’s long-range goal of ensuring that Oxfordian research materials are preserved for and available to future generations.”
Special thanks for making the webpage possible to: Eddy Nix for providing copies of the bulk of the newsletters, James Warren for providing a cataloguing of the newsletters through his Index to Oxfordian Publications, and Erik Eisenman for doing the lion’s share of editing, optimizing, and posting of the pdf documents. Thanks also to Jennifer Newton, Lucinda Foulke, Mark Andre Alexander, and the SOF’s Data Preservation Committee for their help and advice.
[posted April 16, 2018]
