Pimpernel Smith and the Earl of Oxford

Posted By Roger Stritmatter on March 6, 2010

Leslie Howard’s classic anti-Nazi film, after being widely available on vhs in the late 1990s, appears to be out of print again except for this Spanish version (good for the Spanish!) on Amazon. Still, fair use doctrine has its uses, and I’ve managed despite my technological incompetence to break out a few relevant clips, which I’ve always thought to use in a short YouTube on Oxford.

Alas, I can’t easily seem to find the time for such an ambitious project.

Meanwhile, however, I’ve had some requests to see Howard live on the internet. Howard’s character does an inimitably charming and comical send-up  of Nazi pretensions. Moreover,  his comments are still relevant to those reactionary folk who in 2010 still seem to think that insinuating that  anti-Stratfordians are the moral and intellectual equivalent of  “holocaust deniers”  edifies their own preening sense of self worth. For this and other reasons, the film has become  a cult classic among the Oxfordians.

So, without further ado,  here’s Leslie Howard (who produced as well as starred in the film),  in persona “Horatio” Smith, on Shakespeare and Oxford (clip #1):

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Roger Stritmatter

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Keir Cutler Ph. D. performs Mark Twain's "Is Shakespeare Dead?"

Cutler debunks the still-living myth that Shakespeare wrote the works of "Shakespeare."

"A magnificently witty performance!" (Winnipeg Sun). "Highly entertaining and engrossing!" (EYE Weekly). "Is Shakespeare Dead? marshals startling facts into an elegant and often tenacious argument that floats on a current of delicious irony" (Montreal Gazette).


About the author

Roger Stritmatter

Roger Stritmatter is an Associate Professor of Humanities at Coppin State University and the General Editor of Brief Chronicles: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Authorship Studies.