2022 brings two Oxfordians of the Year: honors are shared by distinguished authors Stephanie Hopkins Hughes and Richard Malim. The award was presented at the conclusion of the SOF Annual Conference in Ashland, OR (see a video clip of the presentation).
Stephanie Hopkins Hughes
Stephanie received the award for her 2022 book Educating Shakespeare: What he knew and how and where he learned it, a deep dive into the sources used by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, in creating the Shakespeare canon.
Born Stephanie Mary Hughes in May, 1938, in a small town on the border between Minnesota and South Dakota, the eldest of three, her childhood consisted of a move every two years to another part of America as her father pursued a career as the Director of the annual community service fundraiser in one town or city after another. Having discovered the Authorship Question in 1987 with Ogburn’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare, her love of Shakespeare drove the following 30 years of the research which gave her material for her blog, politicworm.com, on each new phase as it revealed itself. In 1997 the then president of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, Charles Beauclerk, together with Charles and William Boyle, created a newsletter edited by Boyle and an annual journal, The Oxfordian, which she edited and the SOS published for the next ten years. A 2004 Concordia University Fellowship gave her six weeks to research the AQ in England. She hopes to have time to complete a book on the overlap between current Shakespeare studies and the so-called “University Wits” as she basks in a cheerful old age near two of her beloved daughters in Rockland County NY, across the Hudson River from the northern suburbs of Manhattan. She can be reached at hopkinshughes@mail.com or stephanie@politicworm.com.
Stephanie sent this note of thanks to SOF:
Many thanks for this honor, which must be shared with the indefatigable James Warren. Without Jim’s encouragement the information my book provides on Oxford’s childhood and whereabouts before he came to Cecil House would have remained tucked away on my blog. By publishing Educating Shakespeare, he provides the Authorship Community with the sources for Shakespeare’s imagery that so obviously reflect the years Oxford spent as a boy with his tutor, the great Sir Thomas Smith, at Smith’s home on the Thames in Berkshire, and later at Hill Hall in Essex, both places I visited while in England in 2004, and easily accessed by anyone living or visiting in England. I’m equally delighted to share the honor with my English colleague, Richard Malim, who provides innumerable instances where Oxford’s identity can be tied to passages in the plays. Equipped with our books, both available on Amazon, you’ll have a satisfyingly comprehensive answer to give friends who may be curious about the Authorship Question.
Richard Malim
Richard Malim has been recognized for his book Shakespeare’s Revolution, a cogent, thorough, immensely readable demolition of the Stratfordian position, published in June this year. His work rightly places Edward de Vere at the head of a stylistic and linguistic revolution that put the English language and literature at the center of world culture. A retired provincial solicitor, Richard has studied the Shakespeare Authorship Question for the past 30 years and was for fifteen years secretary of The De Vere Society, which promotes the 17th Earl of Oxford 1550-1604 as the author of ‘Shakespeare’.
Watch a video of Richard’s acceptance speech here and read an edited version below.
I am very sorry not to be with you today, especially as you are doing Stephanie and me such a great honour. Logistics for my visit are unfortunately defeating.
I am immensely flattered to be honoured and bracketed with Stephanie. With no university qualification of any sort (is that a first for the Oxfordian of the Year?), and following a long list of distinguished Oxfordians, I feel very much out of my depth, and very surprised and delighted at the Fellowship’s generosity.
In 2011 my book The Earl of Oxford and the ‘Making’ of Shakespeare: The Literary Life of Edward De Vere in Context was published. I rewrote and updated it this year in Shakespeare’s Revolution. In both books I have been careful to acknowledge by name those numerous Oxfordians and others whose ideas I have pinched and tweaked, incorporating a blanket apology for any overlooked. Needless to say in 2011 the one unforgivable lapse was my omission of Stephanie Hughes for her sterling work on the influence of Sir Thomas Smith on Oxford. While I was able to submit a groveling apology in private, it is nice to do it again in public, especially as Stephanie was on the Oxford scholarship scene years before me, and she now further graces it with her comprehensive Shakespeare’s Education.
I am not sanguine about any immediate breakthrough the ranks of ‘orthodox’ Academia. Indeed I rather aim my books at the first year university students of English, for they are the soft underbelly of ‘orthodoxy’. However, thanks to the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, the De Vere Society and the tribes of scholars all over the world, the battle is in fact won, and it remains only the victory to be conceded. I shall not see it, but maybe there are some aunts who will give a book (perhaps mine – hope springs) to a first year university student nephew or niece, who will help explode the bomb that will lighten up the sky for ever.
Those future students will find that the path is well maintained in America by the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, to whom we all owe so much, and now I in particular for the singular honour you have given me.
Congratulations to Stephanie and Richard for their significant achievements!
