LEADING Shakespearean actor Sir Derek Jacobi has added his weight to claims that a former Earl of Oxford was the true author of the classic plays.

Sir Derek, who has performed numerous Shakespearean roles on stage and screen, said he was “99.9 per cent certain” that the real author of Shakespeare’s 37 plays and dozens of sonnets was in fact Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Sir Derek, along with Mark Rylance, the former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, in London, was among 1,400 people who have signed a “declaration of reasonable doubt” into the authorship of the play’s attributed to William Shakespeare.

Speaking at a debate at Brunel University, in London this week, Sir Derek said: “I’ve been a doubter for many years. My doubts started when I was finding there was no connection between the dramatist and what I was being asked to read.”

Many of Shakespeare’s plays were set abroad, or demonstrated detailed knowledge of court life – something doubters felt Shakespeare could not have known about.

Conspiracy theories about whether or not Shakespeare, who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1564, really wrote the likes of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Othello, have been circulating for centuries.

The Earl of Oxford has been the most popular alternative candidate since the 1920s, with other names linked to the works including Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe.

Numerous groups have been set up championing de Vere’s cause, including the Shakespeare-Oxford Society and the De Vere Society, and the new campaign is aimed at applying pressure for further research to be carried out into the disppute.

They say the case for Shakespeare being the true author rests on testimony in the First Folio collection of the plays, which was published in 1623 – but they say there is no documentary evidence about his life which confirms it.

Mr Rylance said: “The simple way to put is that I think you can be born with a genius in a certain area, be that writing or music or painting, but you can’t be born having travelled to Italy, or read books in all of the classical languages.”

Brunel University runs MA in Shakespeare Authorship Studies, the only course specialising in the issue.

fbardsley@oxfordmail.co.uk