Clare Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, will deliver the inaugural Hobart-Ives Lecture at Fordham University on Tuesday, 16 April 2013.
Clare Asquith, is an independent scholar, the author of Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare. When her husband Raymond, the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, was British Ambassador to the USSR, she noted how contemporary Soviet plays would covertly mention, evaluate, and even criticize the tyranny that existed in Soviet society. Starting from the hypothesis that Shakespeare was in fact a Catholic living under religious tyranny, Clare has investigated his writings for evidence that they too were an outlet for the views of the marginalized Catholic community.
Herself a descendant of the Pollen and Baring families, Clare and Raymond live in Mells Manor, the ancestral home of the Horner family whose acquisition of this "plum" property in the time of Henry VIII is memorialized in the nursery rhyme "Little Jack Horner." Raymond's grandmother Katharine, the last of the Horners, married Raymond Asquith, the Prime Minister's son, in 1907 and later converted to Catholicism. Mells Manor has since then been a second home for other famous converts, including Monsignor Ronald Knox, Maurice Baring, and Siegfried Sassoon.
The Hobart-Ives Lecture Series will focus on contributions of contemporary Catholic thinkers within a pluralistic society. The series is named for Levi Silliman Ives (1797 to 1867), a former Episcopalian bishop who became professor of rhetoric at Fordham, and his wife Rebecca Hobart Ives (1803 to 1863), daughter of Bishop John Henry Hobart and goddaughter of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. Following their conversion, they devoted their lives to promoting Catholic causes, especially the protection of destitute and abandoned children.
Clare Asquith has entitled her lecture Shakespeare and the Image of Holiness, which will be delivered in the Flom Auditorium (Rose Hill Campus) on Tuesday, 16 April, at 6 pm and followed by a general reception in the O'Hare Room on the 4th floor of the Walsh Family Library.
