York University Professor Emeritus Don Rubin has been elected president of an organization that seeks to legitimize the Shakespeare authorship question by increasing awareness of reasonable doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare.
Prof. Rubin at the Mark Twain House and Museum holding a copy of a 1565 volume that may have been owned by Shakespeare. The volume was purchased at auction for $65,000
Announced earlier this month, Rubin will serve as president for the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition (SAC) and lead the group of authorship “doubters” into its 14th year. He will also serve SAC as its principal public spokesperson.
Rubin was a founding member of the Department of Theatre at York University, where he became Department Chair and then Founding Director of the Graduate Program in Theatre Studies. His areas of specialization include Canadian Theatre, African Theatre, Criticism, Theatre Theory, Modern Drama, and the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
He worked as a print, radio and television critic for the Toronto Star and CBC Radio. He was a founder and long-time editor of Canadian Theatre Review, editor of Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings, and founding editor of the World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre.
He was president of the Canadian Centre of Unesco’s International Theatre Institute, president of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association, a member of the Executive Board of the International Association of Theatre Critics, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. In 2015, he became managing editor of the well-regarded online journal Critical Stages.
He has taught and lectured at universities and theatre schools in South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Russia, China, Japan, France, England, Sweden, Mexico, and universities across North America. He created and taught a course titled “Shakespeare: The Authorship Question” that had students investigate the mystery surrounding who wrote the plays ascribed to “Shakespeare.” In 2019, he edited a special topics section on the authorship issue for Critical Stages, including contributions by leading doubters Sir Mark Rylance and Sir Derek Jacobi, plus several international critics and scholars. He has organized Shakespeare authorship conferences in Toronto, Chicago, and at Mark Twain’s House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut.
For more on the SAC, visit doubtaboutwill.org.