Peter: According to the Shakespeare Oxford Society, the answer is, YES! They quote him on the home page of their websits, to wit:

"“I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away…” Orson Welles.

Further research suggests that they got that idea from the folowing source: Orson Welles. “I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away…” (As quoted in Kenneth Tynan’s Persona Grata (London : Allen Wingate Ltd., 1953).

However, if we search for the context of his remark, as relayed by Tynan, we find this result:

"People have compared [Welles] to Thurber's Eliot Vereker, the explosive
intellectual whose trick it was to throw hard-boiled eggs into electric
fans, and who would loudly toss off aphorisms such as: 'Santayana? He's a
ton of feathers', or: 'When you have said Proust was sick, you have said
everything'. Welles's opinions are equally sweeping, but a trifle more
amiable. 'Negro actors are all untalented', he may assert: 'Paul Robeson was
just Brian Aherne in black-face'. A moment later: 'What's the problem about
*The Cocktail Party?* It's a straight commercial play with a traditional
comic climax that Saki used and Evelyn Waugh used-surprising martyrdom of
well-bred lady in exotic surroundings.' What does he read most? 'You'll
think me pompous, but P.G. Wodehouse. Imagine it! A benign comic artist in
the twentieth century! Nothing about personal irritations, the stuff
Benchley and Dorothy Parker wrote about-simply a perfect, impersonal,
benevolent style.' Shakespeare: 'I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you
don't agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away. . .
.' Welles's conversation has the enlivening sciolism of Ripley's Believe it
or Not. His library of snap judgments is magnificently catalogued."
(98)

And so, Peter, you have a lesson in the perils of scholarship, if you had not already have had many enough!

I leave it to you to trek further into the dank interior of this subject from you outpost in China.

Glenn

Glenn,

The Lilly has Welles's copy of Looney. If I remember correctly, he got it in the very early '30's when it was truly considered "looney".

The authorship of Shakespeare's works is a subject worthy of F for Fake. I always assumed, based on this film, that Welles truly didn't care who wrote the works.

Came across this website a few months ago while doing some light research on Shakespeare that lists Welles, along with Whitman, Twain and others who they consider to be "past doubters" of Shakespeare's ability to author the works that are credited to him. A number of interesting theories to be sure.

http://www.doubtaboutwill.org/

Yes, that would seem to be the case. In the 1974 interview with Richard Meinstras, which focuses almost entirely on Shakespeare, Welles makes no mention at all of someone else having written the plays. Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anything of that sort in the 1967 interview with Tynan for Playboy either, although Welles does talk plenty about Shakespeare. Welles' personal copy of the Looney book would be worth looking at, however, to see if he wrote any notes in it.

Here's a strange but intriguing article that posits Francis Bacon as "Shake-speare". In the Tynan interview, Welles calls Bacon 'the second greatest man in Elizabethan England.':
http://baconisshakespeare.50megs.com/whats_new_4.html