Welles Included Among Shakespeare Doubters

[The Night Man]

From the BBC:

Actors including Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance have launched a debate over who really wrote the works of William Shakespeare. Almost 300 people have signed a "declaration of reasonable doubt", which they hope will prompt further research into the issue.

The 287-strong Shakespeare Authorship Coalition says it is not possible that the bard's plays - with their emphasis on law - could have been penned by a 16th Century commoner raised in an illiterate household.

The declaration, unveiled at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester, West Sussex, also names 20 prominent doubters of the past, including Mark Twain, Orson Welles, Sir John Gielgud and Charlie Chaplin.

The complete article can be read here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6985917.stm

I must say I was unaware (or didn't recall) that Welles had ever weighed in on this long-standing controversy.

[Vidamonte]

Could this have been Orson's F-for Fake part 2?
It would have been nice to know his opinion.

http://www.sirhenryneville.com

I posted this first in January 2006

[tonyw]

The debate concerning authorship of Shakespeare's works has been ragin for years and most of it has been colored by British class prejudice and snobbery. Could a humble lower class person write these great works? Talent is irrespective of class and springs up in the most unlikely places. Self-education is also important and this distinguishes an Orson Welles from a Cornelia Otis Skinner.

Politicians such as the late Enoch Powell dismissed from the 1960s Shadow Cabinet for his "rivers of blood" speech and snobbish elements have disputed whether a lowly (do we know whether Shakespeare was `illiterate' could have written these plays. Unfortunately, when talent springs up outside official class and educational boundaries (Bertholt Brecht and Brendan Behan are two examples of many that could be cited), this becomes too hard for the establishment to take.

I don't think Welles was at this event. Were he there he would have castigated these snobbish thespian Brits. desperate to find an aristocratic author for the plays they gained their knighthoods for, and affirmed an author who was a strolling player, a lowly artist seeking to bring his work to the widest possible audience under the aegis of entertainment as he did with his Mercury Theatre radio, stage, and film adapations where he pruned the text radically and was never a "Bard worshipper." He would not have been at home in such a gathering. Were he there he would have castigated these snobs with his caustic comments in the same manner he tongue lashed incomptent British TV producers doing advertising commercials. We must remember that Welles often had justification and Peter Tonguett'es recent book onf interviews shows us a gentle side of the director who also could not stand rouges and scoundrels.