Declaration of Reasonable Doubt

The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt is an Internet signing petition that seeks to enlist broad public support for the Shakespeare authorship question to be accepted as a legitimate field of academic inquiry by 2016, the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death. The petition was presented to William Leahy of Brunel University by the actors Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance on 8 September 2007 in Chichester, England, after the final matinee of the play I Am Shakespeare on the topic of the bard's identity, featuring Rylance in the title role. The document has since been signed by 3,143 people (as of April 2015), including 543 self-described current and former academics.

The declaration was met by scepticism from academic Shakespeareans and literary critics, who for the most part disregard or disparage the idea that some hidden author wrote Shakespeare's works. The declaration itself has been characterised as an exercise in the logical fallacies of argumentum ad populum (appeal to popularity or the appeal to numbers) and argument from false authority.

The declaration has been signed by prominent public figures, including U.S. Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O'Connor, in staged signing events followed by press releases in order to gain publicity for the goal of the petition.

Doubters claimed in the declaration

The declaration named twenty prominent figures from the 19th and 20th centuries whom the coalition claim were doubters:

• Mark Twain (1835-1910): all the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures â€" an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts"
• Henry James (1843-1913): "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."
• Walt Whitman (1819-1892): "Conceived out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalismâ€"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".
• George Greenwood (1850-1928), lawyer and first president of the Shakespeare Fellowship, an anti-Stratfordian organization.
• Sir Tyrone Guthrie (1900-1971) - Anglo-Irish theatrical director and writer. First Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival of Canada.
• Sir Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977): "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".
• Sir John Gielgud (1904-2000), actor, signatory to a petition requesting the Shakespeare Society of America to "engage actively in a comprehensive, objective and sustained investigation of the authorship of the Shakespeare Canon."
• Hugh Trevor Roper (1914-2003), historian: "The available evidence that the plays and poems were the work of William Shakespeare of Stratford is weak and unconvincing".
• William James (1842-1910), psychologist and philosopher: "The absolute extermination and obliteration of every record of Shakespeare save a few sordid material details, and the general suggestion of narrowness and niggardliness which ancient Stratford makes, taken in comparison with the way in which the spiritual quantity 'Shakespeare' has mingled into the soul of the world, was most uncanny, and I feel ready to believe in almost any mythical story of the authorship. In fact a visit to Stratford now seems to me the strongest appeal a Baconian can make."
• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): "I no longer believe that ... the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him."
• Clifton Fadiman (1904â€"1999), noted intellectual, author, radio and television personality. Graduate of Columbia University, chief editor at Simon & Schuster): "Count me a convert… This [book's] powerful argument should persuade many rational beings, who, well acquainted with the plays, have no vested interest in preserving a rickety tradition."
• John Galsworthy (1867â€"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. Thomas Looney's Shakespeare Identified as "the best detective story" he had ever read.
• Mortimer J. Adler (1902â€"2001), Chairman of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopædia Britannica: "Just a mere glance at [his] pathetic efforts to sign his name (illiterate scrawls) should forever eliminate Shakspere from further consideration in this question â€" 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."
• Paul H. Nitze (1907â€"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 Oxfordian hypothesis … are overwhelming"
• The 3rd Viscount, Lord Palmerston (1784â€"1865), an Anglo-Irish nobleman who was a British statesman and who twice served as Prime Minister: "Viscount Palmerston, the great British statesman, used to say that he rejoiced to have lived to see three thingsâ€"the re-integration of Italy, the unveiling of the mystery of China and Japan, and the explosion of the Shakespeare illusions." â€" Diary of the Right Hon. Mount-Stewart E. Grant.
• William Yandell Elliott (1896â€"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.
• Harry A. Blackmun (1908â€"1999) Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1970 to 1994: "The Oxfordians have presented a very strong â€" almost fully convincing â€" case for their point of view. If I had to rule on the evidence presented, it would be in favor of the Oxfordians".
• Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (1907â€"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."

Included with caveats

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803â€"1882) is included on the list along with an incomplete quotation that is interpreted as a statement of doubt: "Other admirable men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man in wide contrast". However, Emerson did not doubt Shakespeare's authorship, nor did he ever make a statement to that effect. In 2015, a caveat was added to his name on the list.
• Orson Welles (1915-1985) is included on the list on the basis of a comment taken from a collection of Kenneth Tynan interviews: "I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don't agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away". In other interviews conducted in the late 60's and early 70's, Welles expressed the orthodox opinion that Shakespeare wrote the plays: ". . . He was a country boy, the son of a butcher, who'd made it into court. He spent years getting himself a coat of arms. He wrote mostly about kings." In the 1980s he said "The mystery surrounding Shakespeare is greatly exaggerated. We know a lot about his financial dealings, for example. He was brilliant in arranging his finances, you see. He died very rich from real-estate investments. The son of a bitch did everything! And finally he got what his father had always wantedâ€"a coat of arms. His father was a butcher. And a mayor of Stratford." His listing his since been amended to acknowledge that Welles was not an anti-Stratfordian for most of his life.

2015 changes

In 2015, responding to criticism of the inclusion of some of the names on the list, the SAC removed two names, replaced them with two others, and revised the entries of two other names on the doubters list. The caveats were added to the entries on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Orson Welles. Charles Dickens (1812â€"1870) was originally included on the list based upon an incomplete misquotation that was interpreted as a statement of doubt. Leslie Howard (1893â€"1943), English stage and film actor and director, was included on the basis of the lines he spoke as the lead character in the 1941 film, "Pimpernel" Smith. Both names have been removed from the list, but the entries remain online in the "past doubters" pages of the website with the heading "Removed from Past Doubters list". These two names were replaced with Hugh Trevor Roper and George Greenwood.

Notes

References

• Beaton, Cecil; Tynan, Kenneth (1954). Persona grata (2nd ed.). Putnam. 
• Chaplin, Charlie (1964). My autobiography. Simon and Schuster. 
• Freud, Sigmund (1927). "Autobiographical Study". In J. Strachey. The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud 21. J. Strachey translator. London: Hogarth. 
• Hackett, Helen (2009). Shakespeare and Elizabeth: the meeting of two myths. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-12806-1. 
• Ogburn, Charlton (1992). The Mysterious William Shakespeare (2nd ed.). 
• Schoenbaum, Samuel (1970). Shakespeare's lives. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 

External links

• Shakespeare Authorship Coalition: Home of the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare. Accessed 2010-11-13.
• Jumana Farouky (2007-09-13). "The Mystery of Shakespeare's Identity". TIME. 
• Bill Varble (2010-09-24). "OSF's Nicholson signs 'Declaration of Reasonable Doubt'". Ashland Daily Tidings.