At the 2022 annual Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Conference at the Ashland Hills Hotel in Ashland, Oregon (Friday, Sept. 23, 4:35-5:35), I’ll be speaking with Earl Showerman on The Tempest.

The abstract reads as follows:

This comprehensive session will review recent scholarship on The Tempest, including findings from Lynne Kositsky and Roger Stritmatter’s 2013 On the Date, Sources and Design of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Topics for consideration include the play’s Shrovetide design, sources of new world influence such as Richard Eden’s 1550 Decades of the New World, evidence for an “Elizabethan” Tempest, known among theatregoers by 1604 or earlier, and the hymeneal performance history and autobiographical dimensions of the play. It will also review the critical reception of Stritmatter and Kositsky’s book since 2013 to demonstrate the deficiencies of the published critiques.  It will be shown that the play’s symbolic  and structural features are readily explicable as aspects of a widely known Shrovetide pattern seen in many masques and plays of the period, that early Jacobean texts such as Di Schöne Sidea (written circa 1605) and Eastward Ho! (pub. 1605) already imitate and parody it, that Eden’s 1550  – not Strachey’s 1625 True Reportory – is the primary source of new world influence in the play, and that the play’s performance history connects it to the family of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

To recap the history, between 2007 and 2010 Lynne Kositsky and I researched and wrote a series of articles, and eventually a book,

“The Spanish Maze and the Date of The Tempest” The Oxfordian X (Fall 2007), 1-11.

“Shakespeare and the Voyagers Revisited,” Review of English Studies (September 2007), 447-472.

“O Brave New World: The Tempest and Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo” Critical Survey, 21:2 (Fall 2009), 7-42.

“How Shakespeare Got His Tempest: Another ‘Just So’ Story,” Brief Chronicles I (2009), 205-266.

“Pale as Death: The Fictionalizing Influence of Erasmus’s Naufragium on the Renaissance Travel Narrative” (with Lynne Kositsky). Verité I.1 (2009).

“A Moveable Feast: The Liturgical Symbolism and Design of the Tempest,” The Shakespeare Yearbook (2010), 337-373.

On the Date, Sources and Design of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  McFarland (2013).