1871-1947, Founder of the American Oxford Society.

   Following Looney’s startling discoVERy of Edward deVere as the dramatist/poet behind the pseudonym "Shake-speare," many lay people in England, chiefly retired professors and professional persons, formed a research group called the Shakespeare Fellowship. Unremittingly for the next twenty years, until research in England was halted by World War II, they searched for evidence in the British (Library) Museum, Public Record Offices, Bodelian Library, and Manuscript Collections of the Marquess of Salisbury at Hatfield House. They transcribed thousands of documents from various State Papers, the Lansdowne, Harleian, Rawlinson, and other archival collections, and sought information at the French Foreign Office and Vatican Archives.

   Outstanding among this group was Mrs. Eva Turner Clark, a daughter of California pioneers, John Benjamin Turner and his wife, Francis Gill. Eva’s parents encouraged her natural interest in languages, literature, and history and prepared her for later historical research by according her an exceptionally fine education in California and in Baltimore.

   Later, encouragement came from her husband, Edward Hardy Clark, financier and former President and Chairman of the Board of the Homestake Mining Company, who died in 1945.

   When hostilities of World War II extinguished research in England, Mrs. Clark founded the American Branch of the Fellowship, which by 1947 had as members in the New York Chapter some twenty professional writers and journalists, several lawyers of international reputation, an ex-ambassador, members of faculties of half a dozen universities, and representatives of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Eva Clark supplied the chief financial support for the American Society from its founding until her death in 1947. She also financed the extensive research work of Charles Wisner Barrell, Editor of the Newsletter and Quarterly.

   `With a natural gift for clear and concise expression, Eva Clark combined good judgment, remarkable organizational ability, and unlimited mental capacities with meticulous care in the preparation of her materials. Many of her discoveries and conclusions have modified the orthodox approach to the Shakespeare-authorship problem to a considerable extent.

   Three of Clark’s four books on Oxford-Shakespeare were reproduced by Ruth Loyd Miller in Miller’s one volume 3^rd edition of Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays: A Study of the Oxford Theory Based on the Records of Early Court Revels and Personalities of the Times. This work appeared in England originally under the title, Shakespeare’s Plays in the Order of Their Writing. In the 3^rd edition Miller added Mrs. Clark’s Axiophilus or Oxford alias Shakespeare, an Anagram from Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, republished as an appendix in the 1974 edition of "Shakespeare" Identified, and The Satirical Comedy of Love’s Labour’s Lost, originally published in 1933, and printed in full in Miller’s one volume edition of Clark’ Hidden Allusions.

   Eva Clark advanced the thesis that Love’s Labour’s Lost is a court satire of the most highly sophisticated type, full of abstruse language patterns, scholarly slang, and allusions to political events and personalities in the Elizabethan smart set and the French court. Clark’s interpretation has been increasingly adopted, more subconsciously than consciously, by Stratfordian Shakespeare commentators during the last twenty years. Though few of the orthodox scholars acknowledge their indebtedness to her, Eva Turner Clark would be the last to complain. She always gave more credit to her fellow workers in the same field than to herself.

   Some forty of her essays and special articles of notable excellence were published in the Shakespeare Fellowship News-letter. Her last, and one of her most valuable and provocative writings, was "Shakespeare’s Strange Silence When James I Succeeded Elizabeth." (October 1946, Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly), reprinted in full in Ruth Loyd Miller’s 2 volume, 3^rd edition of John Thomas Looney’s "Shakespeare" Identified, Vol II. pp 290-302.

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