“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.”

“How curious and interesting is the parallel – as far as poverty of biographical details is concerned – between Satan and Shakespeare … They are the best-known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet.”

“I no longer believe that … the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him … I am almost convinced that the assumed name conceals the personality of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford … The man of Stratford seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything.” 

“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.” 

“… he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse … but that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed … that he should not be wise for himself;—it must even go into the world’s history that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement.” 

“The King James translation of the Bible is considered the greatest piece of literature in English … They say that from 1604 to 1611, King James got poets to translate, to write the Bible. Well, if Shakespeare existed, he was then the top poet around. But Shakespeare is nowhere reported connected with the Bible. If he existed, why didn’t King James use him?” 

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

“ … 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 — works in some respects greater than anything else in recorded history … I am firm against Shaksper. I mean the Avon man, the actor.”

(Letter dated 4th January 1956): “Are you interested in the opening up of Walsingham’s tomb, to look for Shakespeare’s MS? I wish they would find something, if only to irritate the Stratford people!” 

“Where did this Shakespeare come from? Where did all that knowledge and eloquence and truth come from? ... I believe Edward de Vere and not William Shakespeare [of Stratford] wrote Richard II and, in fact, all the plays attributed to the man from Stratford.” 

“Any friend of ‘Shakespeare’ is a friend of ours! In signing the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt along with over 4,500 others to date, we merely want to set the record straight about why some of us have our doubts.” 

“I'm falling in love with this idea that the real Shakespeare was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford ... It is astonishing what the Edward de Vere camp has turned up in the way of research to explain all kinds of mysteries of the plays and the life of the so-called Shakespeare. Very, very interesting stuff.”

“You think about William Shakespeare, you think a man basically with a second grade education wrote some of the greatest poetry of all times? I think maybe not.” 

“I’ve always wanted to know since I was growing up who really wrote the plays of Shakespeare. So I want to be there at that moment when ‘Shakespeare’ – because I don’t think it was William Shakespeare, I’m an Edward de Vere-ian, so the Earl of Oxford – so I’d like to be there 1600’s … ‘Shakespeare’ writing Hamlet.”

“I have lingering concerns about some of the gaps in the evidence … You can’t help but have these gnawing doubts that this author may, perhaps, have been someone else … Shakespeare is a pseudonym for an exceptionally well-educated person of noble birth who was close to the English throne.”

The winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics, Sir Roger Penrose, is also an Oxfordian. When interviewed in 2014, Sir Roger said: “The [Looney] book made a very strong case – I think I am rather persuaded that … it was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford … I went to see The Tempest … and that seemed to me very clearly a play where the author himself was revealing himself, and the person Prospero was clearly somebody who was in the aristocracy, he was not somebody who came up from nothing.”