Ruth Loyd Miller, Editor of Pioneer Works on Edward deVere and Researcher in the Oxfordian Cause.

Click here to view Ruth Loyd Miller Curriculum Vita

Thirty-three years pro bono work for Edward deVere/Shake-speare

Ruth Loyd Miller an attorney for 47 years, wife of Retired Judge [Louisiana’s Third Circuit Court of Appeal] Minos D. Miller, Jr., Ruth and M D have three children, four grand-children and one step-grandson. 

Ruth was the first woman to serve on the Louisiana Mineral Board; a delegate and First Vice-Chairman of the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1973; and in 1984 the first woman to be elected Chairman of the Board of Supervisors of the Louisiana State University System (Member for 14 years, 1974-1988). 

In 1983-84 Ruth was named "Woman of the Year" by Delta Zeta’s National Sorority. Delta Zeta’s first “Woman of the Year” was Actress Gail Patrick, and a later “Woman of the Year” was Hollywood Fashion Designer Edith Head. 

Articles: (Links open new window. All files in PDF format.)
From where does Shakespeare derive the name Guildenstern in Hamlet?
From Guildenstern's 1559 week-long visit to Castle Hedingham (Oxford's heredary home).

Ruth is a member of Mortar Board, National Honor Society; Omicron Delta Kappa, National Honor Society; Phi Kappa Phi, National Honor Society; Phi Alpha Delta, Law Fraternity International; and Delta Zeta Sorority. 

Ruth was born in 1922 in the most northwesterly Louisiana Village of Ida. She graduated LSU, BA, Speech/Sociology in 1942; attended Union Theological Seminary, New York City, Summer 1941. After reading law for four (4) years and passing the 3-day Bar examination in 1957, Ruth was admitted to the Louisiana Bar [as the 53rd woman to have been admitted to the traditionally all-male coterie.] In 1987 at age 65 Ruth earned a MA, English, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. 

Ruth’s first interest in Edward deVere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as author of the Shakespeare Canon, derived from an article by Richard Bentley in the February 1959 American Bar Association Journal titled “Elizabethan Whodunit: Who Was ‘William Shake-Speare’?” The Bentley article and others that followed evoked so much interest the ABA Journal republished all the series in a little book titled Shakespeare Cross-Examination in a first printing in October, 1961. Though advertised only through occasional small ads in the ABA Journal, the book was a great seller having a Second Printing, December, 1962; Third Printing, February, 1974. Richard B. Allen (then Editor) in his February 1974 Foreword stated:

When Richard Bentley wrote the initial article for the February, 1959 issue of the American Bar Association Journal, little did [he] or the then Editor-in-Chief of the Journal, Tappan Gregory, realize what they were starting. Articles and letters poured in. The best were published, and they are in this book. Mr. Gregory died shortly after the first printing, and he was succeeded as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal by Mr. Bentley, whose stewardship of the Journal ended in June of 1970 with his death. 

Click for Main Page/Contents of Minos Publishing Company^® Online Catalog DiscoVERy for Listings of deVere/Shakespeare

To Ruth the publishing of the Shakespeare authorship articles in the ABA Journal and then in book form, Shake-speare Cross-Examination, are tributes to the ABA Journal editors’ literary taste, judgment and respect for truth in historical biography. However Ruth’s interest had to stay on the “back burner” for ten years while children were raised. Then in 1967 her long smoldering interest was re-ignited when United States District Judge Edwin Ford Hunter Jr. gave her a 1200 page book on the authorship case. Thus the quest began in earnest and grew into “Thirty three years of pro bono work for Edward deVere.” 

Attribution of authorship to a Stratford-on-Avon rustic had been questioned seriously since the mid-1700s. From 1850 through the first decade of 1900 research had centered on Francis Bacon, primarily because legal knowledge was a chief attribute of “Shakespeare,” and Bacon was the legal light of the Elizabethan Court. The scholar leading the anti-“Stratfordian” (i.e. anti-“William Shaksper of Stratford-upon-Avon”) assault from 1909 until 1920s was the distinguished Barrister Sir George Greenwood, M.P. After being convinced by the thesis set out by John Thomas Looney in 1920, Greenwood organized and became first president of the British Shakespeare Authorship Fellowship. Members of this Fellowship set out to further and implement Looney’s original work of 1920. Among those gifted and dedicated scholars was Eva Turner Clark, an American. Daughter of a wealthy Californian family, Eva was given a classical education in the East and abroad, married Edward Clark, president of the Homestake Mining Company. Eva had the talent and scholarly background, financial resources and a researcher’s focus to give us major works on deVere – two of which Ruth republished. Eva’s study of Love’s Labours Lost was reprinted in Ruth’s 3rd edition of Eva Turner Clark’s Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays (1933, which had first appeared in England in 1930 as Shakespeare’s Plays in the Order of Their Writing). With the advent of WW II, seeing the British Shakespeare Authorship Fellowship fading away as Britain was devastated by the Nazi air attacks, Eva Clark “imported” the authorship issue to the United States, founding the Shakespeare Oxford Society and funding it until her death in 1946. (See Ruth’s 3rd ed. 1974 of Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays.) Ruth’s additions to Clark’s work included extensive notes and annotations, many supplied from later published and unpublished articles by Eva Clark, color illustrations and reproduction of portraits. Ruth’s edition of Clark’s HASP is the definitive “text book” of Oxfordian studies. 

In January 1940 an electrifying article by Charles Wisner Barrell appeared in Scientific American revealing results from infra-red photographic and x-ray studies of “Shakespeare” portraits which Barrell had conducted. The controls and “bench marks” which Barrell used for comparative studies of “Shakespeare” and deVere portraits were the only two existing unaltered [not painted over] portraits of deVere—the “Welbeck/Duke of Portland” and the “Gheeraedts/St Albans”—and one of the best known portraits of “Shakespeare” called the Ashbourne Portrait (owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library). Barrell’s scientific investigation and research showed unmistakable evidence that the “Ashbourne” was a portrait of Edward deVere, over-painted to block out some of deVere’s identifying characteristics. 

In 1972 Judge Miller had been invited by the British Shakespeare Authorship Fellowship to deliver the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Fellowship. The meeting to celebrate the event was held at Newnham College, Cambridge. During discussions by Conferees at the Conference a concern was expressed that Stratfordians might purchase or acquire copyrights to Looney’s "Shakespeare" Identified and to another major source of information on deVere, B M Ward’s Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. After the conference, concerned about this possibility, Ruth Loyd Miller purchased from Mr. Looney’s daughter and grandson the copyrights to S.I. and all other Looney works, including his two splendid works: Poems of Edward deVere and his Golden Hine article on Merry Wives of Windsor. Then Ruth began her efforts to get back in print these pioneer works on deVere. In 1975 Ruth’s substantially expanded 3rd edition of Looney’s great discovery was published by Kennikat Press. By this action Ruth brought into print Looney’s fountain head work on deVere, and has never denied use of Looney’s original works to anyone. 

Additionally through a firm of Solicitors Ruth purchased both the copyrights and the literary properties of Capt. B M Ward, and Colonel B R Ward.

Though Ruth was unable to republish Ward’s biography The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, she has always given those desiring a copy permission to make photo-copies of it and has tried to make photo copies available to others at the cost of copying. And the concerns expressed at the 1972 conference at Cambridge were put to rest. 

To the facsimile of Looney’s original "Shakespeare" Identified, Ruth added over 800 pages of appendices, annotations, illustrations and beautiful color reproductions of relevant portraits of the period. Ruth added a facsimile reprint of John Thomas Looney's rare and almost impossible to find Poems of Edward deVere (printed in Vol I); a 65 page chronological summary of deVere’s life, taken primarily from B M Ward's Seventeenth Earl of Oxford; and a compilation of commentaries—some long out of print—and articles on deVere. With all the additions to Looney’s 1920 original, when Kennikat Press issued the 1975 3rd edition, it was as a two volume work. The index for the two volumes, found at the end of Vol II, is a tremendous aid to both new comers to deVere studies and “old hands.” 

deVere = “Shakespeare”
Articles and addresses by Ruth Loyd Miller include:

1) Abstract of Oxfordian facts: 5,000 copies distributed to high school and college students and to newcomers to the Oxford theory. The format and text Ruth developed has been extensively used by Oxfordians everywhere.

2) Oxford’s Stratford Moniment: Stratford-at-Bow’s moniment versus Stratford-on-Avon’s monument. 

3) The Nefarious Activities of the Rev. Joseph Greene, Principal of the Stratford-upon-Avon Grammar School. His part in the Alteration/ Restoration of the Stratford Monument. 

4) Welcome Gui(y)ldenstern to Castle Hedingham: The 1561 noble guest of John deVere, 16th Earl of Oxford. 

5) Oaths Foresworn in Love’s Labours Lost: The deVere/Hastings marriage contract, 1562 (which continues the fantastic study of Love’s Labours Lost by Eva Turner Clark, reprinted in Ruth’s 3rd edition of Clark’s, Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays, Kennikat Press, 1974). 

6) "Oxford’s 'Crown' Signature: An Enigma awaiting Time’s Solution with The Enigma Solved", 1998 (Miller’s discovery of deVere’s “designer” signature, used throughout his adult life, has created much excitement among Oxfordians, and reproductions of his signature has now become a “fixture” in Oxfordian biography). 

7) The 18th Earl of Oxford’s gift to Ben Jonson: Books from “Shake-speare’s” Library? 

8) Right you are, Dr Schoenbaum! 

9) Lawyers as Shakespearean Scholars. 

10) Gabriel Harvey’s “Singular Odd Man.” 

11) "The First Folio: A Family Affair" (an extract from Ruth’s longer article which appears as Chapter 1 in Vol II of her 3rd edition of Looney’s Shakespeare Identified. 

12) "Three Shakespeare Signatures Down the Drain": Ms. Jane Cox, the Custodian of Shaksper’s will at the PRO states the famous will to be only a “True copy” – not the original. [Jane Cox, “Shakespeare’s Will and Signatures” in Shakespeare in the Public Records London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1985 ISBN 0 11 440192 6, pages 24-35. PRO price at the 1985 publishing £2.95.] So the authenticity of three of Will Shaksper’s “six signatures” is questioned and challenged at the Public Record Office by a PRO authority. To our knowledge not one Stratfordian has acknowledged this break in their dike. Yet when a Stratfordian announces an alleged (and unproven) discovery of a new Shakespeare signature the announcement is given banner headlines worldwide. 

13) "Dating of The Tempest”: The Third Frobisher Expedition. 

14) The Tongue of Padua and “Taming of the Shrew.” 

15) "Prospero Tells it All in 'The Tempest': Key of Office and Officer." 

16) "Gary Tyler Flunks the Hyphen Test." 

17) "Oxfordian Odyssey: A Guide to deVere Country, England" (now being updated). 

18) Sonnet 116: one hundred ten words yielding four layers of meaning:

a.   Traditional theme on love and marriage;
b.   Nautical knowledge, metaphor for separation and reconciliation; 
c.   Geographic setting for its composition;
d.   Autobiographical elements. 

19) "Gad’s Hill Revisited." 

20) "Shake-speare’s Significant Omission of Magna Charta in 'King John'.” 

21) "Achilles Heel of the Stratfordian Position: Ostler versus Heminges" [Court of King’s Bench, Coram Rege Roll, plea of Thomasine Ostler against her father John Heminges, 1615 (KB 2u7/1454, rot. 692), 13th year of James I]. 

22) From a document tricking the long lost 108 stained glass arms of the deVeres that once glorified the clerestory windows in the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Lavenham, Suffolk, England, Ruth prepared replications of the original stained glass shields in color slides. A slide presentation of the 108 shields accompany her lecture on The Arms of the Family of Vere, Earls of Oxford, and the families with whom they were allied through marriage, as once depicted in Stained glass in 108 Clerestory Windows of the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Lavenham, Suffolk, England (Slides & Lecture). By invitation in 1982 Ruth presented this slide assisted address for The Heraldry Society, Burlington House, Society of Antiquaries Royal Academy, Piccadilly Street, London. She was introduced by the Personal Herald for Queen Elizabeth II. Again by invitation Ruth delivered this address to the Suffolk Heraldry Society, Ipswich, Suffolk, England where she was introduced by His Grace the Duke of Grafton. For these invitations to speak to these distinguished societies, acknowledgment is made to Mrs Olga Ironside Wood, then of Bures, Suffolk. Olga won the first Miller Award, for the best play on deVere/Shakespeare awarded through the Deep South Writers Conference (based at University of Louisiana at Lafayette). Olga's winning play Proud Passionate Boy had several readings and productions in England in the early 1980s. Olga’s son Tim Ironside Wood is noted for his three-part TV Series “The Ginger Tree” which appeared on British Television and later on U S nationwide Public Television. 

23) Ruth supplied many materials and transparencies used for the Frontline production of The Shakespeare Mystery, which has had two nationwide showings on U S Public Television. 

24) Not written "by" RLM, but she was written "up" in an article by James Lardner in the April 11, 1988 issue of The New Yorker, pp 89-106. Lardner interviewed Ruth along with several named Oxfordians for his in-depth article on “Who Wrote Shakespeare.” Lardner's review of the Shakespeare authorship controversy was in connection with media coverage of the "moot" case argued before three U.S. Supreme Court Justices in Washington, DC in 1987.