by Bryan H. Wildenthal
The SOF got some good coverage on June 15 in Willamette Week, the alternative weekly newspaper serving Portland, Oregon, and its metropolitan area of more than 2 million people. The article highlights “the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship” as “an international organization that posits Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford,” as “the true writer of the Shakespeare canon and rightful source of the pen name ‘William Shakespeare.’ Such skeptics are known as ‘Oxfordians’ and have historically included the likes of Sigmund Freud and Orson Welles.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!
The article notes the regrettable fact that the authorship question is “dismissed and deemed either far-fetched or beside the point in most academic circles.” But it credits the SOF podcast program, “Don’t Quill the Messenger,” with exploring the “undocumented and invented history of Stratford’s Shakespeare and plumbing the life of de Vere for textual connections.”
Willamette Week interviewed podcast host Steven Sabel, who urges: “Everyone should be fascinated by this topic. It’s the greatest literary mystery of all time.”
The DQTM podcast was created by the SOF in 2018 and launched in January 2019, the brainchild of SOF Trustee Julie Sandys Bianchi. It is produced for the SOF by Jake Lloyd Bacon of Dragon Wagon Radio (DWR). The SOF Board of Trustees and DWR recently adopted a memorandum of understanding reflecting their shared rights and interests, reaffirming the SOF as the sole podcast sponsor with responsibility for the program host and guests.
