Stephanie Hopkins Hughes — Why Is It Taking So Long to Get the Truth Out?

After more than 400 years, why is it still so hard to get the truth about Shakespeare’s authorship accepted? Why lie about it in the first place? Why continue to lie long after both the purported author and the real author were dead? Why continue to lie long after it became known that the purported author of the world’s greatest works of English literature could not so much as write his own name the same way twice?

Why, when the universities finally got around to creating their English Departments, did they people them with philologists whose interest to this day remains focused on the structure of Shakespeare’s language? Why do they show so little regard, by comparison, for the grandeur of his dramas, their poetry, their passion, and their rather obvious connections to the events and personalities of his time?

There must be some central overriding reason why four centuries of fascination with Shakespeare continues to stall on the question of his identity. Indeed, there is. Perpend, sweet chucks, perpend.

Stephanie Hopkins Hughes has been a member of the SOF and its predecessor, the Shakespeare Oxford Society, since the early 1990s, when she first assisted Charles and Bill Boyle with their annual birthday lunches at the Harvard Club in Boston. Her first paper, on the similarities between the lives of Lord Byron and Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford), was given at the 1994 SOS Conference in Boston.

Hughes created and served as founding editor (1998-2007) of "The Oxfordian," the annual peer-reviewed scholarly journal still published by the SOF — a venue where scholars denied access to most academic fora can publish important in-depth research on authorship and related questions. Stephanie’s own website and blog (Politicworm.com) was launched in 2009. Having put her 30 years of research into several forthcoming books, she plans to return to the first question that struck her after reading Ogburn’s 1984 biography: What was Oxford’s connection to the University Wits?

This talk was presented on October 18, 2019, at the SOF Annual Conference at the Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, Connecticut.

For more on the Shakespeare authorship question see ShakespeareOxfordFellowship.org.

Note: A skip in the video recording, around 8:20, obscures a transition in which Hughes observed that it was the murdered 5th Earl of Derby’s younger brother, the 6th Earl of Derby (William Stanley), who in 1995 married Oxford’s daughter, Elizabeth Vere Stanley (Countess of Derby).

Видео Stephanie Hopkins Hughes — Why Is It Taking So Long to Get the Truth Out? канала Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship