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Who was Shakespeare, that is the question By Caitlin Fowlkes of the Ashland Tidings Jul 23, 2019 05:43 PM A A 2 View all photos Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. At least, that’s what a large group of people all over the world believe, and many of them are meeting in Ashland this week to discuss their research. The name William Shakespeare allegedly was a pseudonym to protect the real author from the persecution writers often faced in the Elizabethan era because of political and religious unrest, said Steven Sabel, marketing director for the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. “Willy” was slang for poet, he said. Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship is an international society of scholars adding evidence to that theory. They call themselves Oxfordians after the man they believe to have written the stories — Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. They call the great debate the Shakespearean Authorship Question. This week Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship is meeting to discuss various aspects of the plays and how it all relates to the three Shakespearean plays this season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival: “All’s Well that Ends Well,” “Macbeth” and “As You Like It.” According to Sabel, the only records of a Shakespeare is a lowly businessman named William Shakspere who allegedly was illiterate. Sabel said the only record of writing by this man were six poorly written signatures on various legal documents, some of which misspelled his name. “There’s not one letter that was ever found with his handwriting,” Sabel said. “This is a writer who never wrote about anything to anyone.” Records show the man’s father and one of his daughters signed their names with an X, most likely due to them being illiterate as well. “Shakespeare wrote these very powerful female roles, which was huge at the time, but he wouldn’t teach his daughters to write and read about those characters?” Sabel asked. Attendee Charlotte Hughes came up for the seminar from Los Angeles. A literature major in college, she’s been a believer for 20 years and said the fact that Shakespeare’s daughters couldn’t write their own names says a lot about the theory. “If you’re a seeker of truth, you get fired up with outrage,” Hughes said. “What was the material in this artist’s life that led to, say, Hamlet? That is the compelling part.” Renee Euchner from the Bay Area said she’s new to the question but has noticed that people who are passionate about it all seem to thoroughly love Shakespearean plays, be very knowledgeable about the history of it all and are just looking for the truth. Sabel called this one of the greatest literary mysteries of all time, and one he takes to heart because of his love for the theater arts, especially Shakespeare. Sabel has been an actor, writer and producer for more than 25 years and has performed in more than 24 Shakespearean plays. Sabel said it matters greatly for Shakespeare junkies to know who the real writer was because it influences modern understanding of the stories’ historical contexts. “My appreciation for the play increases 100-fold when I realize he’s pouring his life out on the stage,” Sabel said. He explained that there are records of de Vere’s life that greatly parallel the plays. He used “All’s Well That Ends Well” as an example. In the play a nobleman is forced to marry a commoner against his wishes and leaves the country to avoid her for years, only to later find out that she bares his child and he eventually comes to take her as his wife. “That is de Vere’s life on stage,” Sabel said. “That’s what matters. When I see the play, I can better appreciate the pain of all the parts. He is the only author that could be the author of these plays. Each of his plays are autobiographical in some way.” Sabel said there’s so much money wrapped up in “William Shakespeare” that it gets sticky for academics and organizations to accept that it wasn’t the man everyone believes. Local scholar Earl Showerman called de Vere the “prime suspect in the mystery.” He said there are other candidates, but de Vere has the most evidence in his favor. Showerman teaches a Shakespearean Authorship Question class at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute each year. On Tuesday, he gave a presentation about “Shakespeare’s Physic” an explanation of Shakespeare’s extensive medical knowledge. Showerman presented this topic at the Globe Theatre in 2011. It circles back to the fact that a lowly businessman who could barely write his own name would not have the worldly, cultural, grammatical and literary knowledge to produce the writing that he is credited with. Sabel said “Stratfordians,” or the people who believe Shakespeare is Shakespeare, call Oxfordians snobs and claim they don’t think that a commoner can be a genius. “We believe that genius can pop up anywhere, but it has to have training and access to learning,” Sabel said. “If Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart grew up with a butcher for a father instead of a music teacher, do you think he would be the world’s greatest musician or the world’s greatest butcher?” Sabel asked. These types of questions will be explored over the next couple of days at Southern Oregon University’s Hannon Library from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The group will also attend each of the three Shakespeare plays at OSF through Thursday night. Anyone interested in attending the seminars can register on site in the Meese Room of Hannon Library, 1250 Siskiyou Blvd., Ashland. Each day costs $50 and includes lunch at Omar’s Restaurant. All participants are given a pre-release copy of “The Shakespeare Authorship Sourcebook.” Tuesday featured an exhibit of 16th- and 17th-century folio editions from the Margery Bailey Collection including several early Shakespeare “Folios,” Jonson’s “Folios,” both Holinshed and Hall’s “Chronicles,” William Camden’s “Britannia,” Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives” and Nicholas Rowe’s biography of Shakespeare. The folios were presented to the public for two hours Tuesday and then locked back in the library vault, Sabel said, because “they are very old and very special.” Between 150 and 200 scholars are expected to attend the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship annual conference in Ashland in the fall of 2020. For more information, contact seminar coordinator Earl Showerman at 541-890-9360. Contact Tidings reporter Caitlin Fowlkes at [email protected] or 541-776-4496. Follow her on Twitter @cfowlkes6. Andy Atkinson / Ashland Tidings.Roger Stritmatter looks through old collections of folios from the 16th and 17th centuries on display at the Hannon Library on the SOU campus. Roger Stritmatter is a humanities professor at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland and traveled all the way to Ashland to present during the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship seminar this week in Ashland, Oregon. Strittmater gave a presentation on a Shakespearean play at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this season - "As You Like It." He summarizes what exactly the Shakespeare Authorship Question is.{ }Ashland Tidings / Andy Atkinson and Caitlin FowlkesThumbnail