As President John Hamill previously reported, we have lost our beloved friend and colleague, our former President Tom Regnier. Tom’s funeral service was held on April 21. A beautiful memorial page and obituary has been posted on the website of the T.M. Ralph Funeral Home in Plantation, Florida. The family welcomes all friends of Tom to contribute your thoughts and memories in the guestbook on that page. Many messages have already been posted. You may also view a short video with photographs going back to Tom’s childhood.
We are touched and honored beyond words that Tom’s family, knowing his passion for the Oxfordian cause, also suggests: “In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship.”
With the family’s gracious permission, we draw upon the information and text in the published obituary, as well as our own records and memories of Tom’s decades of involvement with the SOF and its predecessor organizations, for the following overview of Tom’s life and work.
More tributes to Tom are forthcoming in our quarterly Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter and this fall in our annual scholarly journal, The Oxfordian. A memorial episode in our Don’t Quill the Messenger podcast series is also planned.
Updates: The tributes are available here on the SOF website. The memorial DQTM episode is available here. Tom’s valedictory lecture at the Centennial Symposium on March 4, 2020, is available here.
Obituary: A Life of Liberty, Love, and Shakespeare
Thomas G. Regnier (he always preferred to go by “Tom”), President of the SOF from 2014 to 2018, Oxfordian of the Year in 2016, and one of the most important Oxfordian leaders and scholars in recent decades, died on April 14, 2020. He was 69.
He lived in Plantation, Florida, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale just north of Miami. He worked as an appellate attorney with the law firm of Kramer, Green, Zuckerman, Greene & Buchsbaum, in Hollywood, Florida — a busy and exciting new job that he only just started in January of this year, after many years of running his own successful solo law practice. He was admitted to the Plantation General Hospital in early April with symptoms of Covid-19, and went into intensive care. His condition seemed to improve at first, but he eventually lost his struggle with the virus that has killed so many in recent months.
Tom was a prominent scholar and lecturer on Shakespeare’s knowledge of the law and pervasive use of legal language. In the words of John Hamill, Tom’s predecessor and successor as SOF president, who speaks for all of us: “Tom was an outstanding human being. He was a powerful guiding force for the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship and for the Oxfordian movement worldwide. We are devastated by this loss.” There has been an outpouring of similar remembrances and grief from SOF members. These will be collected in a forthcoming tribute in the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter.
Tom was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on October 1, 1950, the eldest child of George and Betty Regnier, who predeceased him. He graduated from Hall High School in Little Rock and earned his Bachelor of Arts from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Most SOF members are aware of Tom’s lifelong love of acting. After graduating from Trinity, Tom moved to New York to pursue an acting career, which included a stint with the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival. Even after later focusing on his successful career in the law, a calling he also loved, Tom remained attached to his first love of acting. He served as a panelist evaluating theatre productions for Florida’s Carbonell Awards. He performed in many Shakespeare productions, appearing frequently with Peter Galman’s Shakespeare Troupe. He became well known for his often humorous and touching Shakespearean vignettes at the end of our annual SOF conferences (see photo below and, e.g., Fall 2017 Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, p. 34).
As stated by President Hamill: “We were very lucky to have him with us. Tom Regnier was truly a Renaissance Man. He was a lawyer, actor, writer, researcher, presenter, Shakespeare lover, and so much more.”
After his time in the New York region, Tom moved to Florida, and also spent time assisting his parents with their retirement in Mountain Home, in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.
Tom returned to Florida to earn his law degree, graduating summa cum laude in 2003 from the University of Miami School of Law. His first major publication, while still a student in 2003, was his law review “Comment,” an exhaustively researched, heavily footnoted, 52-page article, “Could Shakespeare Think Like a Lawyer? How Inheritance Law Issues in Hamlet May Shed Light on the Authorship Question.”
After law school Tom obtained the first of two judicial clerkships (a coveted honor for new lawyers), with Judge Melvia Green of the Florida State District Court of Appeal. He then began practicing law in south Florida. During his career, Tom won appeals in the Florida Supreme Court, all five of Florida’s District Courts of Appeal, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He also worked as a public defender. He taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Miami School of Law, offering a course on Shakespeare and the Law.
Tom went back to New York City to earn his Master of Laws (an advanced graduate degree obtained by relatively few lawyers) in 2009, at Columbia Law School, where he was honored as a Harlan F. Stone Scholar. He then obtained his second judicial clerkship, in Chicago, with Judge Harry Leinenweber of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. He also taught as an adjunct professor of legal writing at John Marshall Law School in Chicago, before returning to south Florida to resume his law practice.
Tom’s lecture on “Hamlet and the Law of Homicide” was selected in 2016 by the Dade County (Florida) Bar Association to inaugurate its Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Lecture Series. He published five major law review articles, in the University of Miami Law Review (2003) (cited above), Akron Law Review (2004), University of Missouri Kansas City Law Review (2004), Santa Clara Law Review (2011), and New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy (2011).
Tom contributed chapters to the books Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? (2013) and Contested Year (2016), and published many additional articles and essays on the Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ), in The Oxfordian, Brief Chronicles, the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, and on the SOF website.
Tom was a brilliant teacher. The two most-viewed videos on the SOF YouTube channel, by a wide margin, are lectures by Tom providing superb overviews of the SAQ. He has a total of seven on our channel currently, with another forthcoming (his talk at the Centennial Symposium on March 4, 2020) (update: now available here). Indeed, three of the current top ten videos are his, including his acclaimed 2015 lecture on “The Law of Evidence and the SAQ.” His second-ranked video, with more than 28,000 views (and counting) — “Did Shakespeare Really Write Shakespeare?” — was taped at the Gable Stage Theatre in the historic Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida. Tom was introduced by award-winning director Joseph Adler, who by tragic coincidence died of cancer just two days after Tom’s own passing. In March 2016, he discussed the SAQ on the Broward County (Florida) Public Schools TV show, Spotlight on the Arts.
As SOF members are well aware, Oxfordians and other authorship doubters embrace a vastly diverse range of political, religious, and social views: Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and others; from conservative to liberal, deeply religious to atheist, and socialist to libertarian. Tom was a politically active Libertarian. He served a term as state secretary and vice chairman of the Libertarian Party of Florida, and in 1997–98 he managed the party’s successful referendum campaign to amend the Florida Constitution to guarantee equal ballot access for minor parties.
Tom believed passionately in individual liberty, equality, privacy, constitutional rights, and the rule of law. Most of his law review articles focus on constitutional rights such as those guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech) and the Fourth Amendment (protecting the people against unreasonable searches and seizures).
And Tom practiced what he preached. He was profoundly respectful of the disagreements and divergent views of others, and ardently defended the rights of all to express even views that he personally opposed. He led the SOF with a skillful, moderate hand, always seeking consensus and mutual respect. Just one example is the debate over “Prince Tudor” theories that have sometimes divided Oxfordians. Tom himself (like many Oxfordians) was skeptical of such theories, but he strongly defended the rights of everyone to express their views. He firmly believed that the SOF website, and all our publications, should be open to any civil, thoughtful, and well-articulated views on the authorship question, whether from an Oxfordian or Stratfordian perspective, or in support of other authorship candidates.
It is no surprise, in that light, that Tom took a leading role, working with John Hamill and others, in achieving the reunification of the American Oxfordian movement in 2013, with the merger of the Shakespeare Oxford Society (SOS) and the Shakespeare Fellowship (SF) to form the present SOF. He served as a board member and president of the SF before the merger and was elected President of the SOF in 2014. The SOF bylaws impose a presumptive limit of three annual terms as president, which can be waived to allow nomination for a fourth term only by unanimous consent of the board of trustees. In 2017 the board unanimously waived that rule for Tom and he was reelected by acclamation.
Both during and after his time on the board and as president, and up to his final illness, Tom served as chair of the Communications Committee and editor of the SOF website. He took the leading role in developing our annual video contest. He was also very active on the Conference Committee and the Centennial (SI-100) Committee. He devoted an astonishing amount of time to all his Oxfordian work, purely as an unpaid volunteer.
For Tom, this was all truly a labor of love. And love’s labors are not lost, even as we mourn the tragic loss of Tom himself, our friend and colleague. Tom’s work has enriched the SOF and advanced the Oxfordian cause, and will continue to do so, in ways we have yet to fully appreciate.
The professional highlight and thrill of Tom’s life, merging with poetic perfection his fascination with both law and Shakespeare, was meeting Justice John Paul Stevens in his chambers at the U.S. Supreme Court, when he joined in presenting Stevens with the Oxfordian of the Year Award.
When Justice Stevens died in July 2019, and was then churlishly and falsely depicted as a conspiracy theorist by Professor James Shapiro, Tom leaped to the defense of this distinguished jurist. He delivered an eloquent memorial tribute to Justice Stevens at our most recent SOF conference at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut (see the photograph above, at the outset of this obituary). For refutations of the “snobbery,” “conspiracy theorist,” and other false, incoherent, and offensive slanders often directed toward Oxfordians and other Shakespeare authorship doubters, see this essay.
Tom is survived by his life partner, Angel Acosta; by his three siblings: Janie Regnier, J.G. Regnier (and wife Billie), and John Regnier (and wife Kate); and by his five nieces and nephews: Charlie Waybright and Emma, Noah, Brennan, and Roan Regnier.
Angel shared with us this photograph, which captures Tom’s joy and love of life, and asked us to include it. On our Facebook page, Angel thanked the SOF for our remembrances of Tom, and we in turn thank him for the love and happiness he shared with Tom.
Tom was taken from his family, and from all of us, at the height of his personal happiness and professional success. We commiserate with his family’s grief. But we gain some comfort knowing the love and happiness that Tom shared with all his family and friends. We find some comfort, as Tom himself often did, in the words of the poet who brings us together in this fellowship. Tom’s time was cut cruelly short, a theme that poet explores.
But as the poet suggests in Sonnet 60, the deeper beauty of hope, love, and truth will survive even the relentless passage of time:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
. . .
And time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
Editorial Note: This obituary was published April 25, 2020, updated 2021. The title was inspired by that of Sheila Rowbotham’s scholarly biography, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (2008). Carpenter, the English writer, mystic, and social reformer, was a long-distance friend and correspondent of the great poet and Shakespeare authorship doubter Walt Whitman, who anticipated the Oxfordian theory 32 years before it was proposed by J. Thomas Looney, by intuitively grasping that the author “Shakespeare” must be “one of the ‘wolfish earls’ so plenteous in the plays themselves.” Whitman, “What Lurks Behind Shakspere’s Historical Plays?” in November Boughs (1888), p. 52.
