Recent news and press...
On November 21, 2009, Bill was keynote speaker for the annual Thanksgiving luncheon sponsored by the Mayflower Society at the Union League Club of Chicago. A large, enthusiastic audience attended his slideshow presentation on the early Civil War career of Ulysses S. Grant. Bill was also featured in the latest issue of the society’s newsletter, and all copies of his Grant book quickly sold out at the event.
On February 26, 2009, Bill was interviewed for over 20 minutes on Chicago WJJF Radio by author and humorist Ray Hanania. In conjunction with the Lincoln Bicentennial, the topic was Bill’s second book Ulysses S. Grant 1861-1864, and Grant’s relationship with Abraham Lincoln. After discussing how both Lincoln and Grant changed their minds about Abolition during the course of the war, Ray asked Bill for an interpretation of this opinion shift and his response was “To me, it’s a sign of intelligence.”
In January 2009, at the request of the famed Bardo Museum in Tunis, Bill donated two copies of his most recent work, Perpetua of Carthage, to the museum library. The book features cover art photographed by the author’s wife Marion during their 2007 visit in Tunisia. The Bardo Museum contains one of the world’s largest collections of Roman mosaic art.
In 2008, Bill was admitted as a member to the Midland Society of Authors, Chicago’s oldest and most prestigious group of its kind.
On November 15, 2008, a copy of Bill’s most recent book, Perpetua of Carthage, was auctioned off (after some competitive bidding) at the annual Martinmass fundraiser sponsored by Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, Illinois.
Alumni Ink: Ulysses S. Grant, 1861-1864: His Rise from Obscurity to Military Greatness
By William Farina ’78, ’81 J.D.
Evanston Ill.
McFarland & Company Inc.
Valpo (Valparaiso University alumni magazine)
Fall 2008
His biography about Ulysses S. Grant details the three years in which Grant rose from shop clerk to general in chief of the U.S. Army. Grant's campaigns, including Vicksburg and Chattanooga, are discussed in depth in the book, as are topics that include Grant's personal qualities, background and his informal and unorthodox command style. Farina answers the question, "What happened in between the battles?"
WREG-TV Memphis Live at 9 Interview
January 24, 2008
Bill returned to Memphis WREG-TV to be interviewed on "Live at 9" by Alex Coleman and April Thompson for his book Ulysses S. Grant, 1861-1864. After discussing how Grant personal views on slavery changed as the war progressed (Grant had not originally been an abolitionist), Mr. Coleman asked Bill: "Did that part of the man Ulysses S. Grant, did that even surprise you?" Bill responded "Yes, that is not what you’re typically taught in school, I don’t think."
Southern Voices
Evanston Review
October 4, 2007
Dorothy Andries, Michael Bonesteel, and Sara Burrows
His maternal ancestors were in the Confederate Army, and William Farina of Evanston remembers hearing Civil War stories that had been passed down through the generations. “My mother’s family in Georgia all came out for the worse,” he said. “As a kid I thought the tales were exaggerated, but when I was doing research, I learned that many family stories were true.” The result is Farina’s book, Ulysses S. Grant, 1861-1864. Two of Farina’s great-grandfathers and one great-great grandfather were in the Battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam), the bloodiest day of the Civil War. “We have big family pictures with no men in them,” he said. “In some ways, this is an anti-war book.” Farina will present a slide show of his family’s photos and talk about his book at 7p.m. Oct. 8 at the Evanston Public Library.
(Farina's Ulysses S. Grant, 1861-1864 was named by the Evanston Review as one of eleven notable books by local authors.)
Questioning Shakespeare’s authenticity
Medford, Oregon Mail Tribune
September 20, 2007
Bill Varble
Author will be in Ashland Monday to sign his book, which suggests the Bard’s plays were written by one Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford
William Farina came to the Shakespeare authorship question through a friend’s cleverness.
“He told me to just not worry and to believe what the experts said.” Farina says. “He knew how to push my buttons.”
Farina worried enough to write De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon (McFarland & Company, 2006), a book which examines the 37 plays, two long poems and sonnets attributed to William Shakespeare to make the case for Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, as their author.
Farina concedes that a smoking gun may never be found, but he’s convinced the evidence points strongly in one direction.
“I’d bet a buck he was the main guy involved,” he says. “I’m about a seven on a scale of one to 10.”
Farina plans a book signing and talk at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland.
An amateur researcher who holds a law degree and is a commercial real estate executive in Chicago, Farina says he quickly discovered that there is surprisingly scant evidence connecting Will Shakspere, the man from Stratford-Upon-Avon who became a London actor, with William Shakespeare (a spelling Shakspere never used).
It’s an old - sometimes heated - argument. Those on the orthodox side are “Stratfordians.” Academia remains predominantly Stratfordian. Many Stratfordians deny there is an “authorship question.”
Many have refused to believe that Shakspere wrote Shakespeare, including Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance and many others. Several candidates have been put forth, but de Vere’s star took off during the past century. His advocates are “Oxfordians.”
The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, a nonprofit California group, recently issued its “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare” to heavy media attention (visit www.DoubtAboutWill.org), saying, “It is simply not credible for anyone to claim, in 2007, that there is no room for doubt about the author.”
Farina claims to have found countless parallels between the themes of the plays of Shakespeare and the life of de Vere. Take “The Tempest.” Farina says the themes of isolation, Prospero’s books, his dispossession and the marriage of children of former enemies all mirror the earl’s later life. Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” thought to be Shakespeare’s favorite book, was translated by de Vere’s uncle. A Spanish prose romance and possible “Tempest” source was translated by Anthony Munday, a de Vere employee. Another influence, the commedia dell’arte, would have come to de Vere’s attention during his travels in Italy. There is no evidence Shakspere ever left England.
Stratfordians say the shipwreck in “The Tempest” disqualifies de Vere as the author, claiming it was based on a 1609 English shipwreck in the Bahamas (de Vere died in 1605). The play refers to “the still-vexed Bermoothes.” But the “Bermoothes” was a London vice district near Charing Cross – and perhaps a very Shakespearean pun pointing to the play’s drunken revelers.
Farina finds parallels to de Vere’s life in “Hamlet,” which Oxfordians consider a barely disguised de Vere biography. De Vere’s father died, and his mother remarried, like Hamlet’s. His guardian (later his father-in-law) was William Cecil, Lord Burgleigh, analogous to Hamlet’s Polonius. Like Polonius, Burgleigh pontificated. He also sent a son to Paris. He wrote advice to his son much like Polonius’ advice to Laertes (“to thine own self be true”). Like Hamlet, de Vere was captured by pirates on the English Channel. And his brother-in-law was the English ambassador to Elsinore.
The biggest objections to the Oxfordian case are the traditional dates of the plays (many after de Vere’s death) and the question of why such an elaborate conspiracy would have been necessary.
Oxfordians date the plays earlier than Stratfordians. And Farina thinks de Vere’s Shakespeare conspiracy not only spared him the stigma of being a playwright (beneath a noble’s dignity), it covered up the fact that the pro-Tudor slant of the history plays came not from a country commoner but the high nobility, and an ostracized noble living on a grant at that.
“My main point,” Farina says, “was to show people this is a real question.”
Alumni Ink: DeVere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon
By William Farina ’78, ’81 J.D., Chicago –
McFarland & Company Inc.
Valpo (Valparaiso University alumni magazine)
Spring 2007
William Farina’s book discusses why William Shakespeare could have been the pen named used by Edward DeVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, to disguise his true identity. It studies documented facts on the authorship of works of literature written more than 400 years ago, and generates debate and controversy. The book offers a fresh and easy-to-understand analysis and is a must-read for academics, theater-goers, literature enthusiasts and anyone with an intellectual curiosity about Western civilization’s most famous writer.
Evanston man joins battle of the bard
Evanston Review
October 5, 2006
Dorothy Andries
Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Was the greatest playwright in the English language the actor Will Shakspere from Stratford-upon-Avon, the glove-maker’s son? Or, as some have opined, was it Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon?
And what about Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford?
De Vere was an Elizabethan courtier poet, who, according to William Farina of Evanston, may have been the one who penned all those masterpieces.
Farina will make his case at 7 p.m. Oct. 9 at the Evanston Public Library. He is an unusual candidate for such a conjecture. Originally from Indiana, he has been a national real estate consultant and appraiser for 27 years.
“But my background is in the humanities and English,” he said, during an interview at Pioneer Press. “I studied Shakespeare and actually heard about the authorship question when I was in high school.”
Early interest
His interest in the controversy grew over time. “A friend gave me the book The Mysterious William Shakespeare by Charlton Ogburn,” he explained. “It got me thinking. I saw something about the authorship on PBS Frontline. There seemed to be some substance here.”
He read books, he collected clippings, and “I ranted about it to my wife,” he said, smiling. To which she replied, “Write a book!”
The result is De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon, published by McFarland & Company, Inc. Oxfordian refers to those who believe that William Shakespeare was the pen name for de Vere. “They also believe that the actor Will Shakespere of Stratford was hired as a front man for him,” he added.
But why? Why would such a brilliant playwright not claim authorship of his work?
“Now we get into speculation,” Farina continued. “I think it had to do with politics. The Puritans were very much against plays and theater. They eventually destroyed the original Globe theatre.”
De Vere’s name first surfaced as a possible author in the 1920’s, he continued. “In the 19th century there was talk that Francis Bacon wrote the plays,” he said. There is also the theory that English playwright Christopher Marlowe faked his own death, went to Italy and sent back plays to England to be published under Shakespeare’s name.
Traditionalists of Stratfordians dispute all of this. And Farina is quick to add, “It is not impossible that the actor Will Shakspere from Stratford is the author of the plays.”
Provocative parallels
However, his handsome high-quality paperback makes a different case. The book, well-designed and reader friendly, presents one play after another, providing parallel information from de Vere’s life and background. “Hamlet,” for example, was set in Denmark and de Vere’s brother-in-law had been the English ambassador to Elsinore during the 1580s.
More to the point is the revelation that de Vere’s father died when the lad was 12 and his mother remarried hastily. Then she and her husband died a few years later and the child became a royal ward. “Thus,” Farina writes, “every time we see a performance of ‘Hamlet’ we may be witnessing the reenactment of a domestic tragedy played out…over 400 years ago.”
Of great interest are the many plays set in Italy, including Romeo and Juliet,The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice, which display great familiarity with Italian life and customs.
“Aside from showing a prodigious and astonishing knowledge of Venetian society,” Farina wrote, “Shakespeare takes us right into the heartland of legal philosophy with The Merchant of Venice".
Edward de Vere had studied law and was in legal trouble all his life, Farina explained. The well-traveled nobleman spoke Italian and had visited the great cities of the Renaissance. “For de Vere,” he writes, “one can only marvel at the close parallels between his personal Italian experiences and the Italian influence on Shakespeare’s work. If this be mere coincidence, then it is certainly one of the great series of coincidences in the history of world literature.”
The talk at the Evanston library should be lively.
WREG-TV Memphis Live at 9 Interview
September 18, 2006
Bill was interviewed for his book DeVere as Shakespeare by Marybeth Conley and Alex Coleman of WREG-TV Memphis (Channel 3) on their popular morning program, “Live at 9.” Ms. Conley asked Bill: “You sit down on an airplane next to somebody and tell them what you do and about your book, and what do they say nine times out of ten?” Playing on the state nickname of Tennessee, Bill responded: “Number one, I never volunteer it.” “Smart man” chipped in Alex Coleman.
Shakespeare by any other name would smell as sweet
Daily Herald
August 31, 2006
Burt Constable
Returning with my family from our book club’s annual Shakespeare pilgrimage in Spring Green, Wis., I hear the minivan radio mocking me. A commercial for Arlington Park suggests Shakespeare plays are tedious, girly and “sucketh,” and that we’d all have a better time at the horse track instead.
Watching diminutive men in pastel, silk pajamas whip horses? Sorry, I’d rather see guys in tights and women with cleavage engage in witty repartee and sword fights.
Even George W. Bush, in an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, noted that during his vacation in Crawford, he “read three Shakespeares.”
William Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever. Shakespeare is a genius. Shakespeare’s works are… Mostly written by flamboyant courtier and poet/jousting champ Edward de Vere, argues William Farina, 50, a suburban real estate executive and “Shakespeare hobbyist” who has authored a book titled De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon.
“The traditional biography of William Shakespeare is widely viewed as the greatest ‘poor boy makes good’ story ever told,” writes Farina, who was in high school when he learned the story of how the son of illiterate laborers grew up to be the great playwright.
His teacher said “the only people who doubt Shakespeare’s identity are snobs,” Farina says. “And that’s what I believed for 30 years.”
Then Farina researched the question and became convinced something was rotten.
“I ended up writing a book at the instigation of my wife,” says Farina, who is married to Marion Buckley, an appellate defense attorney and fellow Shakespeare fan. “She suggested I write it to get it out of my system.”
The debate has created discontent for many writers. A century ago, Mark Twain was pushing the theory that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s works. But true believers did, and still do, fervently embrace the legend of Shakespeare as unlikely genius.
“To my astonishment, I found there are a growing number of academics who do take it seriously,” says Farina, who, with his wife, used to run the Chicago Oxford Society, which boasted about 40 members and featured speakers about all things Shakespeare.
Right about here is where somebody sitting trackside at Arlington park is shouting, “Who cares who wrote ‘to be or not to be’ when I’m trying to decide whether to bet on horse 1-A or not 1-A?”
“It may be a small problem in today’s troubled world, but it goes right to the heart of western culture,” Farina counters. “To know more about a writer’s life is to have a greater appreciation for the writer’s work.”
Batavia’s Toni Hix has read, acted in and directed Shakespearean plays since her undergraduate days at Northern Illinois University.
“It matters to scholars, because that’s what their job is. But it doesn’t matter to me,” Hix says. “To me, the work is what matters.”
The play’s the thing as well for Julane Sullivan, founder of Batavia’s Shakespeare on Clark.
“They are timeless. They are genius. And quite frankly, I don’t really care who wrote them. The work is just fabulous,” says Sullivan, who has staged Shakespeare performances with kids as young as 8.
De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, has “a lot more credibility,” says Jim Hirsch, executive director and founder of the Elk Grove Center of the Performing Arts, which just finished its 13th annual Shakespeare Summer’s End Festival. If forced, he’d say Farina is right about de Vere being the main author of Shakespeare’s works.
“But very few people ask me, and I never, ever, ever think about it unless people do,” Hirsch says. “It doesn’t really matter. What you love about the plays is they are so beautiful.”
While the debate won’t end with Farina’s book, the author has moved on to a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. “He went from being a complete nobody to arguably the most powerful person in the country,” says Farina, who adds that “all of my ancestors fought in the Confederate army against Grant.”
As for his Shakespeare tempest, all’s well that ends well.
“One of the windfalls of the whole process is that I enjoy Shakespeare more than ever,” says Farina. Debate isn’t bad.
“We could do a lot worse,” Farina concludes. “People could stop reading and enjoying Shakespeare altogether.”
In which case, they might find themselves at Arlington Park, willing to give anything to find a horse that could win a race. Or, as de Vere might have said, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”