Our friend and colleague James A. Warren has done an amazing job, performing a real and lasting service, with his latest updating of AN INDEX TO OXFORDIAN PUBLICATIONS. What Jim has accomplished is impossible to describe in terms of the work — the hours, the labor, the care for detail and accuracy and thoroughness — that he has put into it. Here, folks, is the history of the Oxford case in print, from earliest records to now. And I predict that one day every college library, along with most if not all public libraries, will have at least one paper copy on hand along with a well-used link to the kind of interactive searching that Bill Boyle is providing by means of his New England Shakespeare Oxford Library’s SOAR catalogue. Boyle’s announcement contains the following:
The Third Edition of An Index To Oxfordian Publications is now available on amazon.com ($39.95). and for a special discounted price ($30.00) at The New England Shakespeare Oxford Library Bookstore (sample pages are also available at the Bookstore site). This latest edition is 50% larger than the 2nd Edition (2013), with two thousand new listings having been added, for a total of more than 6,500 listings. In addition to updating the Index with the most recent publications from Oxfordian societies, the 3rd Edition also includes new sections on worldwide reviews and commentary on the Oxfordian theory that expands its already extensive coverage of all Oxfordian publications since the 1920s, and a selected bibliography of books.
The Index’s Oxfordian periodical coverage includes currently published titles (The Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, The De Vere Society Newsletter, Brief Chronicles and The Oxfordian) through the end of 2014, plus full coverage of all past publications from both independent Oxfordian publishers and older Oxfordian societies, such as The Shakespeare Fellowship Newsletters (both the English and American branches, 1930s to 1950s), Shakespeare Matters, The Elizabethan Review, The Spear-Shaker Review, The Edward de Vere Newsletter, The Shakespearean Authorship Review, and The Bard.
The major new section in the Index includes more than 1,000 articles from 200 non-Oxfordian publications that have reviewed and commented on the Oxfordian theory, including the regular Oxfordian columns that appeared in Louis Marder’s Shakespeare Newsletter (1979-1991) and in The Shakespeare Pictorial (1929-1939). Other articles indexed range from ones in The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, Shakespeare Quarterly, Notes & Queries, etc. to numerous other commercial and literary publications (large and small) from around the world.
James A. Warren
And finally, the Index has also been expanded to include an extensive, selected bibliography of Oxfordian or Oxfordian-related books, along with selected non-Oxfordian books on the Shakespeare authorship question in general. The 350 listings in the new book section include both nonfiction commentary and criticism, and also fictional works inspired by the Shakespeare authorship question, particularly the Oxfordian theory.
Editor James Warren is owed an enormous thank you from all Oxfordians (and all Shakespeareans, for that matter) for his tireless work in compiling the original Index in 2011-12, and for expanding on it over these past three years, to where it is now the definitive “go to” resource for any questions about past Oxfordian scholarship.
The next step, as Warren notes in his Introduction, is providing subject access to all this material, and providing copies of the articles themselves to anyone who wants to read them. This is the mission of The New England Shakespeare Oxford Library’s SOAR Catalog, which presently includes approximately 80% of what is in the 3rd Edition of the Index, and by the end of 2015 will include 100%, plus the beginnings of extensive subject access and access to the articles themselves.
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