It is with the greatest pleasure that the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship announces that Bill Boyle is 2023’s Oxfordian of the Year.
William E. Boyle, or Bill Boyle, as he is known to all of us, has worked to advance the Oxfordian movement in innumerable ways for nearly thirty years. He has dedicated decades of his life to investigating the Oxfordian idea and to strengthening the American Oxfordian organizations that promote research into it and that work to increase public awareness of it.
In the mid 1990s he was instrumental in modernizing the operations of the Shakespeare Oxford Society—by transforming its typed Newsletter into the professional publication it is today and by editing it for five years; by launching the Society’s website, one of the first Shakespeare websites to appear on the Internet, which made a wealth of information about the Oxfordian claim instantly available; and by launching and editing The Ever Reader, an online publication that brought important articles to the attention of SOS members.
Early in this century Bill was one of the founders of the Shakespeare Fellowship, and edited its important publication, Shakespeare Matters, for four years. He has published more than 130 articles, reviews, interviews, and other pieces that have greatly increased understanding of the Oxfordian idea. And he has published several important books, including his own A Poet’s Rage: Understanding Shakespeare through Authorship Studies, Hank Whittemore’s Twelve Years in the Life of Shakespeare, and the first four editions of James Warren’s An Index to Oxfordian Publications.
In 2005 Boyle established the New England Shakespeare Oxford Library and the Shakespeare Online Authorship Resources, or SOAR, a database of thousands of articles of special interest to scholars of the Oxfordian idea published over the past century. SOAR also includes brief summaries of hundreds of the most important articles, and hyperlinks to searchable full-text versions of many articles for which copyright restrictions do not apply.
The SOAR database is continually updated by a dedicated team of volunteers. To volunteer or learn more about this resource please send an email to info@shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org.
Bill significantly contributes to preserving documents related to the Oxfordian idea; the copies of the Shakespeare Fellowship News-letters, American and English, from the 1930s and 1940s now available on the SOF website, for instance, are reproductions of the copies that Bill had preserved. In their apartments, Bill and his brother Charles Boyle store extensive Oxfordian archives—an estimated 2,500 of their own books and those from the collections of Dan Wright, Ron Hess, and Betty Sears, plus over two dozen boxes of Oxfordian research materials and correspondence, including Bill’s photographs of conferences. Bill continues to search for a permanent home for this core collection of the New England Shakespeare Library.
As he explores these collections, Bill sometimes discovers unique, hard-to-find records of important research. He now is engaged in revisiting the investigation started by Barbara Burris into the restoration and attribution of the Folger Library’s Ashbourne portrait. His efforts to investigate the Ashbourne portrait and to uncover new information from the archives about its history surely will pay big dividends in the coming years.
In sum, Bill Boyle’s work has resulted in significant progress toward the day when Edward de Vere will be widely regarded as “Shakespeare.”
His Oxfordian of the Year acceptance speech can be viewed below.
It’s unfortunate that Bill couldn’t be presented the award in person, at the 2023 SOF Annual Conference in New Orleans, because he has been a regular participant in these conferences for so many years.
Congratulations and thank you, Bill!
