SAT Trustees

As trustees and associates of the SAT, we are not of one opinion ourselves concerning the authorship. We purposefully maintain a group of varied opinion in order to serve the space between different authorship societies and individuals, including those who believe that William Shakspere of Stratford is the author of the Shakespeare works. Our common aim is to encourage a beneficial sharing of insight while also refining and sharpening the enquiry.

Professor William Leahy is Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland, as well as a Professor in Shakespeare Studies. His early research specialised in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Processions resulting in his book for Ashgate Publishers, Elizabethan Triumphal Processions (2005) and, as section editor for the John Nichols’ Project, in “The Passage Of Our Most Drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth Through The Citie Of London,” The Progresses and Public Processions of Elizabeth I (Oxford University Press, 2014). His particular interests at the time were the role and representation of the common people in Elizabethan and Shakespearean literature, specifically Shakespeare’s history plays. As the book was published, he became interested in authorship attribution studies and has since published widely on the Shakespeare Authorship Question, most notably in his 2010 edition of collected essays, Shakespeare and his Authors: Critical Perspectives on the Authorship Question, as co-editor of The Many Lives of William Shakespeare, a special edition of the Journal of Early Modern Studies (2016), and as editor of My Shakespeare: The Authorship Controversy (2018).

Professor Leahy is currently Chair of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Dr. Kristin Bundesen is Associate Dean of the School for Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Studies at Walden University. She earned her doctorate in Elizabethan social and political history from the University of Nottingham. Her first degree was in Drama and Dance from Bard College. She served as a scholar of record for the “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare” exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Folger Shakespeare Library, and the American Library Association. She was a founding board member of the International Shakespeare Center, Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as multiple Shakespeare groups. Her research interests include family as the fundamental political unit, female agency, voices and philosophical influences on public discourse, and the intersections between fiction and history in understanding the early modern period. She presents and publishes for the academic and lay audience.

Julia Cleave, MA (Oxon) is a member of the academic board of the Temenos Academy. She originally studied Shakespeare with Professor Hugo Dyson, the most puckish of The Inklings, the literary group based in Oxford that included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Subsequently, in her career as a teacher and teacher trainer, she taught Shakespeare in the context of training courses for foreign teachers and lecturers sponsored by the British Council. Since 1998 Julia has worked as an independent scholar, tracing the presence of Hermetic traditions in Renaissance and seventeenth-century art and literature. Her interest in the Authorship Question was first piqued by reading John Michell’s book, Who Wrote Shakespeare? This interest has since deepened and developed through participation in Wisdom of Shakespeare workshops at The Globe, as well as the Shakespearean Authorship Trust conferences and lectures. She is a trustee of the Francis Bacon Research Trust and a member of the De Vere Society.

Annabel Leventon is an actor, singer, author, and coach. A professional actor since 1966, she has appeared in hundreds of plays, television shows, and films. Annabel was nominated “Actress of the Year” for her role in Hair!, and performed as a Transylvanian in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, comedy in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell with Peter O’Toole, Sir Andrew Aguecheek for the Royal Shakespeare Company, a dyke chicken in Olivier-award-winning musical Honk! at the National Theatre. She founded the ’seventies three-girl group Rock Bottom, on which the groundbreaking TV series Rock Follies was based. Her recent memoir, The Real Rock Follies, charts how she challenged a major television company over the theft of her idea. The test case in the High Court established the law on Intellectual Property in the UK. This experience led her to the Authorship Question, the most fascinating conundrum of the last four hundred years.

Sir Mark Rylance is an actor, author, and was the Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe from 1996 to 2006. A professional actor since 1980, he has acted in fifty productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Mark is an Associate Artist of the RSC, a friend of the Francis Bacon Research Trust and Francis Bacon Society, President of the Marlowe Society, and an honorary bencher of the Middle Temple Hall. His first play, I am Shakespeare, premiered in Chichester in August 2007. His second play, Nice Fish, premiered at the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, in 2013. Mark has most recently played Richard 3 and Olivia at Shakespeare’s Globe and The Apollo Theatre. Before that he appeared as Johnny “Rooster” Byron in Jerusalem in London’s West End. Mark received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Bridge of Spies in 2016.

Dr. Robin Williams spent twenty-five years writing best-selling and award-winning computer and design books, then formalized her lengthy independent study of Shakespeare with an MA in Shakespearean Authorship and a Ph.D. in Shakespeare studies at Brunel University London. She has been an Honorary Trustee of the SAT since 2003, and now is a formal member of the Board of Trustees. Robin wrote Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare?, now in its third edition, and is the founder and president of the Mary Sidney Society. Robin encourages the long tradition of Shakespeare reading groups with iReadShakespeare.org.

Lisa Wilson graduated from the University of Minnesota with degrees in International Relations, Sports Administration, and Theatre Arts. She has been documenting the Shakespeare Authorship Question for more than two decades. She is also the co-founder of 1604 Productions, which specializes in Shakespeare Authorship research & development and film production (1604Films). She provided script-consulting services on the motion picture Anonymous (Columbia Pictures, 2010) and produced and directed an 85-minute documentary film on the Shakespeare Authorship Question entitled Last Will. & Testament (First Folio Pictures, 2011). In 2019, Lisa became an Associate of the Shakespeare Southampton Legacy Trust.

Dr. Ros Barber, SAT Director of Research, is a senior lecturer in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London and a founding member of the International Marlowe Shakespeare Society. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, The Marlowe Papers (Sceptre 2012 UK, St Martin’s Press 2013 US) was winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize 2013, joint winner of the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2013, and long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2013. Her Ph.D. in English Literature was first in the UK on the Shakespeare Authorship Question; her academic articles on early modern literary biography and authorship attribution studies have been published in Rethinking History, the Journal of Early Modern Studies, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Critical Survey, Notes and Queries, and Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman (Ashgate 2010). As a three-time joint winner of the Calvin & Rose G. Hoffman prize for a distinguished work on Christopher Marlowe (2011, 2014, 2018), she is also author of the growing authorship question compendium Shakespeare: The Evidence.

Jenny Kirby, MA, Director of Admin, obtained a degree in Humanities, trained and worked as a family lawyer in Oxfordshire and Dorset for more than twenty-five years, during which time she also trained as a family mediator and worked through a second degree with the OU in Shakespeare studies and creative writing. In 2013 she left the law and set up her own family mediation business while working for an MA in Creative Writing. She was then lucky enough to be offered the role of Administrator with the SAT.

SAT Associates

Through our circle of Associates we endeavour to develop and sustain good relations with all those researching the authorship of the Shakespeare canon.

Charles De Vere Beauclerk: Author of Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth (2010).

Peter Dawkins, M.A., Dip. Arch. : Founder-principal of the Francis Bacon Research Trust. He received an award for distinguished scholarship in Shakespeare Authorship Studies from Concordia University, Portland, Oregon, USA.

Michael Frohnsdorff, MA: Past chairman and currently vice-president and research officer of the Marlowe Society. Has published works on Marlowe and the Elizabethan period, and on Marlowe’s local history connections in Kent.

Stephanie Hopkins Hughes

Sir Derek Jacobi: Actor.

Carole Sue Lipman: President of the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable.

Professor William Rubinstein: Historian; co-author of The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare.

Randall Sherman: Past President of the Shakespeare Oxford Society.

Earl Showerman, MD: Former trustee of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition and the Shakespeare Fellowship.

Professor John Spiers, Former Vice-Chairman and Librarian of the Francis Bacon Society; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London.

Hank Whittemore is an author and actor whose 900-page book The Monument (2005) presents a new “macro” theory of the Sonnets from an Oxfordian perspective.

Professor Michael Wood: Historian; author of In Search of Shakespeare, and presenter on the DVD of the same name.