Vote starting today in the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship’s 2021 “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” Video Contest! This year the First Prize has been raised from $1,000 to $1,550, in honor of the birth year of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Second Prize has been raised from $500 to $717 (lucky seven plus 17), and Third Prize from $250 to $412 (Oxford’s exact birthday was April 12, 1550).
The SOF challenged contestants on March 15 to give their “take” on the authorship question. We’re now asking for your “take” on the ten finalist videos. View the finalists and vote for your favorite here! Voting is open from August 10 through September 20.
Anyone visiting our website can take part in selecting the winners, so after enjoying the creative array of productions and casting your own vote, be sure to invite all your family and friends through email, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media to watch the videos themselves and vote for their favorites too!
You’ll be helping to introduce as many people as possible to the SOF website and the Shakespeare authorship question that brings us together. This has been a mystery for more than 400 years, starting during Shakespeare’s own time, puzzled over by a remarkably diverse range of artists, thinkers, and leaders — including Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, Malcolm X, Vanessa Redgrave, Anne Rice, and U.S. Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, Harry Blackmun, and Lewis Powell, to name just a few.
The Video Contest winners will be announced on Saturday, October 9, 2021, during the public online Symposium of the SOF Annual Conference.
