The story begins in 2002, when Richard Waugaman read the New York Times article about Roger Stritmatter’s Ph.D. dissertation on Oxford’s Bible at the Folger Shakespeare Library. He began attending monthly meetings about Shakespeare at a private club in Washington to which he belonged. Within a couple of years, the Shakespeare scholar who founded it asked him to take it over. He did for a few months, then they did ran it together.
All was well until Richard presented a paper at the Club on The Tempest, showing why it was probably written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Afterwards, he was told that he should never speak about Oxford again, because no one was interested. Although Oxfordians such as Markley Roberts had by then introduced themselves, he tried to comply. So, when he invited Tom Regnier to present on “Hamlet and the Law” in 2014, he asked Tom to say nothing of the authorship debate. Tom did as he was asked.
However, a new member of the Club, Gareth Howell, asked Tom, after his carefully non-committal talk on Shakespeare’s mastery of law as revealed in Hamlet, “whether it was not obvious that a sixteenth century provincial grain dealer and sometime jobbing actor impresario would be unlikely to have sophisticated legal knowledge of this kind.”
The room froze. Tom responded with further non-committal elegance, as he had agreed with the sponsors. After the event, Richard introduced himself to Gareth.
This incident motivated Richard to ask the steering committee of the Shakespeare group to rescind its informal taboo against discussing the authorship question. He was told, “We doubt anyone besides you is interested in the authorship question. You can try to form your own group if you want to discuss it.”
Richard replied that he would have lunch by himself on the fifth Thursday of the month at the Club, and think heretical thoughts. Little did he know that Gareth Howell, also a member of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, was not to be deterred. Nearly entirely on his own, Gareth worked through the power structure of the Club and won approval for a new group, named the “Shakespeare Authorship Inquiries Group.” In the seven years since, it has held more than 50 monthly presentations, both in-person at the Club and through Zoom. Questions are always welcome. Most of the presentations concern aspects of Edward de Vere’s life and times. Proponents of other candidates, such as Marlowe, are welcome. Oxfordians such as Bonner Miller Cutting, Mike Hyde, Bryan Wildenthal, Gary Goldstein, Roger Stritmatter and others have all spoken at the facility, located an easy walk from the White House.
