Filmmaker Cheryl Eagan-Donovan

Filmmaker Cheryl Eagan-Donovan was named Oxfordian of the Year for 2019 by the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship for her documentary film, Nothing is Truer than Truth, which follows Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, as he travels to Venice and throughout Italy in 1575-76, discovers commedia dell’arte, and collects the experiences that would become identified with the works of Shakespeare. The film explores the role of de Vere’s bisexuality as a reason for his using the pseudonym “Shake-speare.”

Eagan-Donovan discovered Edward de Vere in Professor Don Ostrowski’s history class at Harvard University in 1997. This led her to read J. Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified and Joseph Sobran’s Alias Shakespeare. She later learned about Mark Anderson’s then-work-in-progress biography of de Vere, “Shake-speare” by Another Name. “As a writer and a filmmaker,” said Eagan-Donovan, “I knew that this story had all the elements for a great film: a complex protagonist, cinematic locations, and a true hero’s journey.” She soon met with Mark Anderson and optioned his book.

Cheryl Eagan-Donovan is the first Oxfordian of the Year to be selected by a special five-member committee appointed by the SOF president and formed for the specific purpose of bestowing that honor, a selection that had previously been made by the committee that organizes the annual conference. All members of the Oxfordian of the Year Committee are previous recipients of the award.

Read the entire announcement here.