The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship and the authorship question receive lively coverage in the latest issue of The New Yorker, one of America’s more venerable periodical publications. See “Justice Stevens’s Dissenting Shakespeare Theory,” published online July 29 and set to appear in the magazine’s print issue of August 5 & 12, 2019.
The article, by Tyler Foggatt, is based partly on interviews with Alex McNeil, Tom Regnier, and Michael Pisapia, who presented the Oxfordian of the Year award to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens in 2009. On hearing of Justice Stevens’s death on July 16, Ms. Foggatt consulted his Wikipedia biography, which mentioned his designation as Oxfordian of the Year and led her to the SOF website. She read Tom Regnier’s tribute to Justice Stevens and then contacted the SOF.
Foggatt’s article includes a brief summary of the Oxfordian theory. As she states (her emphasis), the Oxfordian theory “explains why the plays are so good, so complicated, so familiar with the concerns of nobility and the geography of Italy.” She describes the 2009 award presentation in Justice Stevens’s chambers at the Court, and mentions the SOF’s 2019 conference plans at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. She also notes Twain’s skepticism of the traditional authorship theory.
Founded in 1925, The New Yorker now publishes 47 issues a year, featuring an eclectic mix of journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry.
This is not the first time The New Yorker has reported respectfully about the authorship question. In April 1988 it published a cover story by James Lardner on the authorship moot court debate held in Washington, D.C., on September 25, 1987. That debate, held before Justice Stevens and two of his colleagues, was a crucial turning point in the modern development of Shakespeare authorship doubts and the Oxfordian theory, especially on the Supreme Court.
Granted, a bit less respectful was “Monty Python” comedian Eric Idle’s riff on the subject, published in The New Yorker in November 2011 — but still amusing and even, perhaps, a bit revealing.
Going back even earlier, the “Talk of the Town” section in The New Yorker‘s issue of April 4, 1959, featured an interview with attorney Francis Carmody, one of the founders and the original president of what was then called the Ereved Foundation (“Ereved” is “de Vere” spelled backwards). Carmody explained that he first became interested in the Oxfordian theory in 1920, when the headmaster at his prep school asked him to review “Shakespeare” Identified by J. Thomas Looney, the book that introduced to the modern world the theory that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true genius behind the pen name “Shakespeare.”
Carmody described his difficulties in trying to persuade his father-in-law, Nathan L. Miller, a former governor of New York, to accept the Oxfordian theory. Miller resisted his arguments for many years, but then visited Stratford-upon-Avon in 1949 and, ironically, came back a confirmed Oxfordian! He agreed with Carmody that the evidence for Oxford was conclusive. Miller even wrote and privately printed his own book on the Oxfordian theory.
In 1953, Carmody sent copies of Miller’s book to several people, which led to the establishment of the Ereved Foundation in 1957. Shortly after the 1959 New Yorker article appeared, the Ereved Foundation changed its name to the Shakespeare Oxford Society, and in 2013, upon its merger with the Shakespeare Fellowship, assumed its current name as the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship.
