Founded in 1957, the Shakespeare Oxford Society is a non-profit, educational organization dedicated to exploring the Shakespeare authorship question and researching the evidence that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (1550 – 1604) is the true author of the poems and plays of "William Shakespeare"
In short, the Society is "Dedicated to Researching and Honoring the True Bard"
There is a long and distinguished history of doubting the traditional "Stratfordian" attribution of the "Shakespeare" works. Noted doubters over the years include Mark Twain, Henry James, Charlie Chaplin, Sigmund Freud, U.S. Supreme Court Justices Lewis Powell, Jr. and John Paul Stevens, Orson Welles and noted Shakespearean actors Derek Jacobi, Michael York, and Jeremy Irons.
The fundamental point of disagreement between our Society and the traditional Shakespeare scholarly community concerns the name "William Shakespeare" itself. We believe the name was a pseudonym, a pen name, and not the real name of the living author. Traditional scholars hold to the view that "William Shakespeare" was the actual name of the author, a commoner from the Warwickshire village of Stratford-upon-Avon.
If "William Shakespeare" was, in fact, a pseudonym (just as "Mark Twain" was a pseudonym adopted by Samuel Clemens) then all attempts to graft the "Shakespeare" works onto the biography of the commoner from Stratford amount to "Barding" up the wrong tree.
In 2006, following the revelations about James Frey's admittedly fictionalized memoir, A Million Little Pieces, the Society called on traditional Shakespeare "scholars" to produce a truly non-fiction biography of William Shakespeare.
Paraphrasing Hamlet, the question is not "to believe or not to believe" this theory or that. It should be a matter of what we can prove or not prove. And so we issue this challenge to the traditional scholars: Show us the evidence! Where exactly is this conclusive, overwhelming evidence on behalf of the Stratford theory? Until conclusive evidence is produced, we should regard the Stratford claim as unproven. Let's re-open the case and explore the evidence with fresh eyes and an open mind.
