Shakespeare authorship doubters

</noinclude>The Shakespeare authorship question, the ongoing debate about whether the works attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon were actually written by another writer, or group of writers, has attracted many notable authorship doubters since the subject was first introduced in the 18th century.
Those who question the traditional attribution believe that "William Shakespeare" was a pen name used by the true author (or authors) to keep the writer's identity secret. Of the more than 50 candidates that have been proposed, several claimants have achieved major followings and notable supporters. Major nominees include Edward de Vere, (17th Earl of Oxford), who has attracted the most widespread support since first being proposed in the 1920s, statesman Francis Bacon, dramatist Christopher Marlowe, and , who—along with Oxford and Bacon—is often associated with various "group" theories.
A fundamental principle of those who question Shakespeare’s authorship is that most authors reveal themselves in their work, and that the personality of an author can generally be discerned from his or her writings. With this principle in mind, authorship doubters find parallels in the fictional characters or events in the Shakespearean works and in the life experiences of their preferred candidate. The disjunction between the biography of Shakespeare of Stratford and the content of Shakespeare's works has raised doubts about whether the author and the Stratford businessman are the same person.
Declaration of reasonable doubt
On 8 September 2007, actors Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance unveiled a "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt", on the authorship of Shakespeare's work, after the final matinee of "I Am Shakespeare" a play investigating the bard's identity, performed in Chichester, England. The document was sponsored by theShakespeare Authorship Coalition and has been signed by over 1,600 people, including 295 academics, to encourage new research into the question. Jacobi, who endorsed a group theory led by the Earl of Oxford, and Rylance, who was featured in the authorship play, presented a copy of the Declaration to William Leahy, head of English at Brunel University. The Declaration named twenty prominent doubters (past and present), including:
*Mark Twain: "All the rest of vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures — an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts"
*Mortimer J. Adler (1902 - 2001, Chairman of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica.): ""Just a mere glance at pathetic efforts to sign his name (illiterate scrawls) should forever eliminate Shakspere from further consideration in this question — he could not write." "Academics err in failing to acknowledge the mystery surrounding 'Shake-speare's' identity … They would do both liberal education and the works of 'Shake-speare' a distinguished service by opening the question to the judgment of their students, and others outside the academic realm."
*John Galsworthy (1867 - 1933, English novelist and playwright, winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize for literature. Best known for The Forsyte Saga and its sequels): Described Oxfordian J.T. Looney's "Shakespeare Identified" as "the best detective story" he had ever read.
*Clifton Fadiman (1904 - 1999, Noted intellectual, author, radio and television personality. Graduate of Columbia University, chief editor at Simon & Shuster): "Count me a convert… This powerful argument should persuade many rationale beings, who, well acquainted with the plays, have no vested interest in preserving a rickety tradition."
*William Yandell Elliott (1896 - 1979, Harvard government professor, counselor to six presidents, Rhodes Scholar and noted poet, he studied at Vanderbilt University, Oxford and the Sorbonne.): advocate of Earl of Oxford.
*Sigmund Freud: "I no longer believe that ... the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him"
*Harry A. Blackmun (Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1970 to 1994): "The Oxfordians have presented a very strong — almost fully convincing — case for their point of view. If I had to rule on the evidence presented, it would be in favor of the Oxfordians".
*Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Other admirable men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man in wide contrast".
*Walt Whitman: "Conceived out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism — only one of the 'wolfish earls' so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works".
*Henry James (1843 - 1916, author, literary critic, and major figure in trans-Atlantic literature. He wrote 22 novels, 112 tales, several plays and essays, and often contributed to The Nation, Atlantic Monthly,Harper's and Scribner's.): "I am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world."
*Paul H. Nitze (1907 - 2004, High-ranking U.S. government official; co-founder of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Among his positions were Director of Policy Planning for the State Department, Secretary of the Navy, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Member of U.S. delegation to Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, Assistant Secretary of Defense for international affairs, Special Adviser to the President and Secretary of State on Arms Control.): "I believe the considerations favoring the hypothesis … are overwhelming"
*Lord Palmerston — Henry John Temple, Third Viscount Palmerston (1784 - 1865, British statesman, twice served as prime minister of the U. K.): ""Viscount Palmerston, the great British statesman, used to say that he rejoiced to have lived to see three things—the re-integration of Italy, the unveiling of the mystery of China and Japan, and the explosion of the Shakespeare illusions." — Diary of the Right Hon. Mount-Stewart E. Grant
*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 had an aristocratic attitude".
*Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (1907 - 1998, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1972 to 1987.): "I have never thought that the man of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays of Shakespeare. I know of no admissible evidence that he ever left England or was educated in the normal sense of the term.
*John Paul Stevens (The senior Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1975-present): "He never had any correspondence with his contemporaries, he never was shown to be present at any major event -- the coronation of James or any of that stuff. I think the evidence that he was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt."
*Antonin Gregory Scalia (Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1986-present): "My wife, who is a much better expert in literature than I am, has berated me. She thinks we Oxfordians are motivated by the fact that we can't believe that a commoner could have done something like this, you know, it's an aristocratic tendency... It is probably more likely that the pro-Shakespearean people are affected by a democratic bias than the Oxfordians are affected by an aristocratic bias." "
*Sir George Greenwood - British lawyer, Member of Parliament, Shakespeare scholar
*Archie Webster - In 1923, he wrote "WAS MARLOWE THE MAN?"
*Calvin Hoffman - author of The Murder of the Man who was Shakespeare (1955).
*David Rhys Williams - author of Shakespeare, Thy Name is Marlowe (1966).
*Lewis J.M. Grant - author of Christopher Marlowe, the ghost writer of all the plays, poems and Sonnets of Shakespeare, from 1593 to 1613 (1967).
*William Honey - author of The Shakespeare Epitaph Deciphered (1969) and The Life, Loves and Achievements of Christopher Marlowe, alias Shakespeare (1982).
*Louis Ule, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1609): A Biography (1992).
*A.D Wraight - author of The Story that the Sonnets Tell (1994) and Shakespeare: New Evidence (1996).
*Peter Zenner - author of The Shakespeare Invention (1999).
*Alex Jack - Hamlet, by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare - 2 vols. (2005) (related website)
*Orson Welles - actor, director, writer, producer
*Marjorie Bowen - British historian, biographer, novelist
*Sigmund Freud - pioneer of psychoanalysis
*Sir John Gielgud - Shakespearean actor, president of the International Shakespeare Association 1974-2000
*Charlton Ogburn - historian, investigative journalist, researcher, author
21st Century
*Mark Anderson - journalist, researcher, author, astrophysicist
*Michael Rubbo - Australian documentary film maker who, in 2001, made the TV film Much Ado About Something in which the Marlovian theory was explored.
*Rodney Bolt - author of History Play (novel) (2005)
*Virginia M. Fellows, Author of the Baconian work, The Shakespeare Code (2006)
*Samuel Blumenfeld - author of The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection: A New Study of the Authorship Question (2008)
*Daryl Pinksen - author of Marlowe's Ghost: The Blacklisting of the Man Who Was Shakespeare (2008)
*Peter Farey - Farey's Marlowe Page
*Harry Blackmun - U.S. Supreme Court Justice
*Gelett Burgess - author, critic, poet, artist
*Michael Egan - academic, university English professor, Shakespearean scholar and author
*Roland Emmerich - film director, screenwriter, producer; producer and director of Anonymous (2011)
*William Farina - biographer, nonfiction researcher and author, essayist
*Warren Hope - academic, university English professor, Shakespeare scholar, author
*Leslie Howard - actor, director, producer
*Christmas Humphreys - British barrister, judge, author, Shakespeare scholar
*Rhys Ifans - actor
*Jeremy Irons - actor
*Sir Derek Jacobi - Shakespearean actor, director
*J. Thomas Looney - British pedagogue, researcher, Shakespeare scholar, author
*David McCullough - historian, author, biographer
*Paul Nitze - longterm high-ranking U.S. government official and Presidential advisor, ambassador
*John Orloff - screenwriter
*Keanu Reeves - actor
*Mark Rylance - Shakespearean actor and director, director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre 1995-2005
*Antonin Scalia - U.S. Supreme Court Justice
*John Paul Stevens - U.S. Supreme Court Justice<ref name=wsj />
*Michael York - actor<ref name=nyt />

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