Doubts about the true identity of the author “Shakespeare” have persisted for centuries. Some of the many political, literary, cultural, and intellectual figures who have expressed such doubts include comedian Robin Williams, who expresses his skepticism in this clip, and the familiar faces listed below.
Charlie Chaplin
“In the work of the greatest geniuses, humble beginnings will reveal themselves somewhere but one cannot trace the slightest sign of them in Shakespeare… Whoever wrote [Shakespeare] had an aristocratic attitude.”
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
“We are The Reasoning Race, and when we find a vague file of chipmunk tracks stringing through the dust of Stratford village, we know by our reasoning powers that Hercules has been along there. I feel that our fetish is safe for three centuries yet.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The Egyptian verdict of the Shakespeare Societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse.”
Sigmund Freud
“I no longer believe that… the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him. Since reading Shakespeare Identified by J. Thomas Looney, I am almost convinced that the assumed name conceals the personality of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford… The man of Stratford seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything.”
Sir Derek Jacobi
“Where did this Shakespeare come from? Where did all that knowledge and eloquence and truth come from? ... I believe Edward de Vere and not William Shakespeare [of Stratford] wrote Richard II and, in fact, all the plays attributed to the man from Stratford.”
Helen Keller
"[Research] led me to the conclusion that Shakespeare of Stratford is not to be even thought of as a possible author of the most wonderful plays of the world. The question now remains: Who was William Shakespeare?”
Malcolm X
"From 1604 to 1611, King James got poets to translate, to write the Bible. Well, if Shakespeare existed, he was then the top poet around. But Shakespeare is nowhere reported connected with the Bible. If he existed, why didn’t King James use him?”
Anne Rice
"I'm falling in love with this idea that the real Shakespeare was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford . . . It is astonishing what the Edward de Vere camp has turned up in the way of research to explain all kinds of mysteries of the plays and the life of the so-called Shakespeare. Very, very interesting stuff."
Walt Whitman
“Conceiv’d out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism, personifying in unparallel’d ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation) one of the wolfish earls so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendent and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works… I am firm against Shaksper. I mean the Avon man, the actor.”
Robin Williams
“You think about William Shakespeare, you think a man basically with a second grade education wrote some of the greatest poetry of all times? I think maybe not.”
For more information as to why these doubts about the true author of the Shakespeare works exist, visit our Authorship 101 page.
In addition, the following distinguished men and women have also either rejected or seriously doubted the Stratford attribution:
- Hamilton Basso (novelist, reviewed 5 Stratfordian biographies in The New Yorker 4/18/50)
- Prof. Louis P. Benezet (Dartmouth)
- Richard Bentley (President, Chicago Bar Association, and Editor of The American Bar Association Journal)
- Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun
- Otto von Bismarck
- Charles Champlin (Arts Editor of The Los Angeles Times)
- Charles DeGaulle
- Benjamin Disraeli
- Senator Paul Douglas (also a Chicago University Professor)
- Prof. William Y. Elliott (Harvard)
- Prof. Bronson Feldman (Temple University)
- W.H. Furness (literary scholar and father of the editor of the Variorum)
- John Galsworthy
- Sir John Gielgud
- Prof. Louis J. Halle (Ecole de Hautes Etudes)
- Leslie Howard
- James Joyce
- Kevin Kelly (drama critic, The Boston Globe)
- Lewis Lapham (Editor, Harper’s)
- Prof. Abel Lefranc (distinguished literary historian, professor at the Collège de France and member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres)
- Prof. W. Barton Leach (Harvard Law)
- Clare Booth Luce
- David McCullough
- Lord Palmerston
- Maxwell Perkins (eminent literary editor)
- Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.
- Mark Rylance (actor and Founding Artistic Director of the Globe)
- Dr. Peter Sammartino (Founder & First President, Fairleigh Dickinson University)
- Lincoln Schuster (of Simon & Schuster)
- Joseph Sobran (syndicated columnist)
- U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens
- Day Thorpe (Literary editor, Washington Star)
- Philip Weld (Publisher, International N.Y. Herald Tribune)
- John Greenleaf Whittier
Among those who have expressed either some doubt, or at least “wonderment”, about the Stratford attribution are:
- Prof. Crane Brinton (Harvard)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Tyrone Guthrie
- Thomas Hardy
- Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
- Prof. Sidney Hook (N.Y.U.)
- James Russell Lowell
- Prof. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Oxford University)
