Controversy Films

Nothing Is Truer than Truth Director Cheryl Eagan-Donovan Receives Research Grant Award

We are thrilled to announce that director Cheryl Eagan-Donovan has received a research award from The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship to visit several libraries in London to continue her work for her new project on the circulation of manuscripts by and among the members of Oxford’s literary circle.
In the SOF Newsletter, Eagan-Donovan says, “I am very grateful to the SOF and honored to receive the award. Building on the work of Steven May, Roger Stritmatter, John Hamill, Alexander Waugh, and other scholars, I plan to visit the British Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, and private libraries including Dulwich in the U.K. to look for manuscripts by and correspondence between select members of Oxford’s circle, including Marlowe, Nashe, and Peele. Because of Covid-19 travel restrictions, my preliminary research will be conducted using online collections.”

Watch Nothing is Truer Than Truth now on Amazon Prime and Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Name on Sky TV New Zealand!

We are very pleased to announce that we have signed a distribution agreement with NENT UK for Nothing Is Truer than Truth, which will be released in the U.K., Europe, and the rest of the world under the new title Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Name.
In October 2020, Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Name was featured as the key history title in NENT’s programme in Cannes at MIPCOM, the world’s largest film market. Read more here.
In December, the film became available in New Zealand on Sky Network Television Limited.

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Cheryl Eagan-Donovan is interviewed by NPR’s Jefferson Exchange host Geoffrey Riley in a lively conversation with Shakespeare scholar Earl Showerman. Hear it now!

Director Eagan-Donovan joins the Don’t Quill the Messenger podcast to discuss “Nothing is Truer Than Truth.” Listen here!

From The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship:

Oxfordian of the Year 2019: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan

Posted by: SOF October 20, 2019

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.