Professor Bill Rubenstein (1946-2024)
In Memoriam
We share the sad news of Professor Bill Rubenstein’s passing. We had the honor of presenting what turned out to be his final paper last week on this Substack. Public obituaries can be found here and here. As many Trustees knew and admired him, we wanted to share the following recollections from our Chairman, Bill Leahy, with our members.
Prof Bill Rubinstein was an active Associate Member of the SAT for many years and participated in our annual gatherings on a number of occasions. Bill was a strong advocate for the candidacy of Sir Henry Neville and was at least partly responsible for giving Neville a relatively high profile in the Shakespeare Authorship Question circles. He was most helpful in bringing my MA in Shakespeare Authorship Studies at Brunel University London to full approval (any such course needs such approval from two external Professors of standing) in 2007. He was always vocal in his support for the course. He subsequently provided a chapter for my collection of essays on the authorship question - Shakespeare and His Authors: Critical Perspectives on the Authorship Question – in 2011. This addressed what I consider to be Bill’s main contribution to the SAQ generally – a historian’s perspective on the SAQ as a normal, mainstream and typical question of historical evidence.
On a personal level, I found Bill to be a straight talker (I am told that is typical of New Yorkers), a true intellectual and, underneath it all he had a good heart. We have stayed in touch since he moved to Australia and I am glad that we could honour him by publishing his final words on the case for Neville. We will miss you, Bill.
Some of the many works by Professor Rubenstein can be found here. His blog on Neville’s candidacy as an author can be found here.
Further to Bill Leahy's recollections, I would like to add the following:
Professor William (Bill) Rubinstein OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia) FAHA (Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities) 1946 – 2024 published extensively on modern British history, especially the history of elites, and on Jewish history.
Here I want to recognise his contribution to the Shakespeare Authorship Question: Bill was a great champion of the case for Henry Neville as the author of the works of Shakespeare.
With Brenda James, the first identifier of Neville as Shakespeare, he co-authored the first book to make the case, THE TRUTH WILL OUT (2005); wrote a book that addressed all the leading authorship candidates, WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS (2012); and co-authored with Dr John Casson, a book that sets out all the then known evidence for Neville, SIR HENRY NEVILLE WAS SHAKESPEARE: THE EVIDENCE (2016).
Bill's passion fits with his other work as an historian that set the record straight whether on the myth of rescue (the Jews who died in the Holocaust were prisoners who could not be rescued) or on the source of Britain's economic power (manufacturing has never been more than 50% of UK GDP), on who holds and holds onto wealth in Britain (it's less about industry than land holdings, corruption, and empire), and even who shot JFK (Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone).
I first read Bill's work after a footnote in Patrick Keillor's book based on his unusual but brilliant film ROBINSON IN SPACE (1997) narrated by Paul Scofield. Keillor's Robinson explores England and considers the neglect of the UK's industrial economy in preference to the City of London.
When I first met Bill at the SAT conference at the Globe we spoke a little bit about Neville but more about his CAPITALISM, CULTURE AND DECLINE IN BRITAIN 1750–1990 (2002).
I think his first venture into Shakespeare authorship was in History Today in 2001 (WHO WAS SHAKESPEARE, HISTORY TODAY, AUGUST 2001) as part of a series of articles on "topics of enduring popular debate."
Bill's article summarises the situation that most of us would recognise today.
He notes the incongruity between the life of the actor from Stratford and the works of the playwright, the lack of evidence for anything much about the life of William Shakespeare, and the multiplicity of mutually exclusive theories for how the man from Stratford became the famous playwright.
He reviews the history of the question and gives a fair account with supporting evidence of the Bacon and Oxford theories amongst others.
Interestingly, Rubinstein also follows Frank Burgoyne (FACSIMILE OF A MANUSCRIPT IN THE ALNWICK CASTLE LIBRARY NORTHUMBERLAND, 1904) in suggesting that the Northumberland Manuscript was owned by Neville, and this is perhaps the first mention of Neville in an authorship article albeit not as an authorship candidate.
Rubinstein concludes that it is “not at all absurd” to consider an author other than Shakespeare but that the authorship question “is unlikely ever to be settled comprehensively.”
I believe it was this article that led Brenda James to contact Bill with her innovation that Neville was the author, and subsequently led to their collaboration, THE TRUTH WILL OUT (2005).
As I understand it, it was Bill that sourced the secondary material such as Owen Lowe Duncan’s PhD on THE POLITICAL CAREER OF SIR HENRY NEVILLE (1974) to complement the documentary research and speculations provided by Mrs James.
For Bill, the emergence of Neville as a candidate transformed the Shakespeare Authorship Question into one with an answer.
He now regarded Oxford to have died too early and Bacon to have died too late.
A second article on Shakespeare in History Today followed four years later (MYSTERY IDENTITIES, HISTORY TODAY, NOVEMBER 2005) to argue that much of history is unknowable, that mysteries create interest, that there are many historical myths where a story that is not supported by historical evidence has gained a hold in the popular imagination – and to make the case for Neville as Shakespeare and promote the publication of THE TRUTH WILL OUT.
A group of Neville researchers gathered around Bill in Melbourne including Professor Jim Goding and Bruce Leyland who wrote an article on Neville in The Australian (19 July 2006) and co-wrote SHAKESPEARE, SIR HENRY NEVILLE AND THE SONNETS: DECRYPTED (2015) and WHO WILL BELIEVE MY VERSE (2018), John O'Donnell, and Mark Bradbeer (AEMILIA LANYER AS SHAKESPEARE’S CO-AUTHOR, 2022).
Bill's last article (WHY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE DID NOT WRITE THE WORKS ATTRIBUTED TO HIM, AND WHY SIR HENRY NEVILLE DID, JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION, 2024) articulates evidence for the case for Neville and neither Shakespeare nor Oxford.
He was a social historian and the leading academic expert on wealth-holding in Britain from 1750 to the present.
His work was based on following the evidence and debunking myths and he found the case for Neville compelling.
Gregory Thompson