by Alex McNeil and Matthew Cossolotto
November 24, 2009
The Shakespeare Fellowship and the Shakespeare Oxford Society awarded the 2009 Oxfordian of the Year Award to John Paul Stevens, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Justice Stevens has long doubted whether William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon is the real Bard.
The award was conferred jointly by the Shakespeare Fellowship and the Shakespeare Oxford Society, the two leading American organizations that promote the case for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the true author of the works attributed to Shakespeare.
On November 12, 2009, representatives of the two groups — Alex McNeil, Tom Regnier, Michael Pisapia, and Melissa Dell’Orto — traveled to Washington, D.C., where they presented a plaque to Justice Stevens recognizing him for his interest in and support of the Oxfordian thesis.
Melissa Dell’Orto, Tom Regnier, Justice Stevens, Alex McNeil, and Michael Pisapia, Nov. 12, 2009 (credit: Steve Petteway, Collection of the U.S. Supreme Court).
Appointed to the high court by President Gerald Ford in 1975, Justice Stevens has been interested in the Shakespeare authorship problem since 1987, when he participated in a moot court debate on the topic at American University. Justice Stevens identified himself as an Oxfordian to the New York Times in 2002 and to the Wall Street Journal in 2009.
(Updates: For the newsletter report on Justice Stevens’s Oxfordian of the Year award, see Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter 45:3, Dec. 2009, p. 1. An in-depth article on the 1987 moot court debate and the prevalence of Oxfordian views and authorship doubts on the Supreme Court is available here. The SOF report on Justice Stevens’s death in 2019 is available here. The New Yorker magazine, also in 2019, reported about “Justice Stevens’s Dissenting Shakespeare Theory.”)
[originally published on the Shakespeare Oxford Society website, November 24, 2009; updated April 2021]
