For anyone interested in the Shakespeare authorship question, we now have an extraordinary view of the research carried out since 1920, when J. Thomas Looney published “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1550-1604) up to now: AN INDEX TO OXFORDIAN PUBLICATIONS (First Edition: 2012), edited by James A. Warren, who has provided us with an invaluable gift in form of 273 pages of useful information.
The index includes more than 4,200 unique entries. For starters, it provides full coverage of everything published in the newsletters and journals of the current Oxfordian organizations: the Shakespeare Oxford Society, the Shakespeare Fellowship and the De Vere Society (UK). Also there’s full coverage of material printed by both the American and the English branches of the old Shakespeare Fellowship as well as in the Elizabethan Review (Gary Goldstein), the Edward de Vere Newsletter (Nina Green) and other publications – not to mention hundreds of citations for articles in books and magazines from the nineteenth century until the end of 2011.
Speaking for myself, I certainly could have used the INDEX when I started tackling this subject back in 1987 and realized that so many others, for decades, had been digging in the same field of Elizabethan-Jacobean biography and history. A veritable gold rush of research had been occurring, in regard to what I felt must be one of the greatest mysteries of all time, and no one had ever mentioned it to me! But this incredibly exciting (and blasphemous) material was scattered all over the landscape, without anyone having kept an accounting of which subjects had been covered by whom as well as when and where.
And now, complementing the INDEX, we have Shakespeare Online Authorship Resources (SOAR), created and run by Bill Boyle at The New England Shakespeare Oxford Library. SOAR is on its way to providing instant access to all the articles covered by the INDEX, including those from publications not currently available on the Internet.
“Perhaps the biggest benefit of this Index comes not from the articles indexed in it,” writes Jim Warren (who deserves an award for this work) in his introduction, “but from the reminder it offers Oxfordians today that they are part of the long and arduous effort to garner rightful recognition of Edward de Vere the seventeenth Earl of Oxford as the author of the greatest literary creations in human history.”
AUTHORSHIP QUOTE OF THE DAY:
“If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.” – Tennessee Williams
Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare Blog 