He stole the show at the Oscars. At the Bafta Awards it was the same story. Now William Shakespeare is looking a good bet to top all the Man of the Millennium polls as well, writes Reg Little.

These are certainly proving unhappy days for supporters of Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

For while the world has been enjoying Shakespeare in Love, they say it should really be a case of Shakespeare in Trouble. The De Vere Society, founded by the Earl of Burford, has long believed that an aristocrat - hitherto only famous for breaking wind in front of Queen Elizabeth I - was the real author of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and all the rest.

And now they are mounting a desperate spring offensive on both sides of the Atlantic to set right history's greatest "fraud".

Today, the world is marking Shakespeare's birthday as never before, amid all the hoo-ha caused by the Oscar-winning film. But it will also see a renewed effort to show that for nearly 400 years, we have been celebrating a man who could could barely write his own name, while the true literary genius lies forgotten. So should we really all have been watching Oxford In Love all along?

It certainly seems the hot-tempered De Vere, sensitive, wayward and every inch a Hamlet himself, would have been an altogether more fascinating subject than the Stratford businessman.

Yet poor Oxford, for all his grace and style, won notoriety for breaking wind when bowing low before the Queen. So ashamed was the Earl, that he stayed away from court for seven years. On his return Elizabeth is reported to have said: "My Lord, I had forgot the Fart." It's a truly terrible thought that possibly the greatest writing genius of all-time is remembered only for a digestional indiscretion.

The De Vere Society argue that De Vere wrote the plays using the pseudonym William Shakespeare. Christopher Dams, the secretary of the De Vere Society, readily explains why De Vere did not write under his own name.

"Players at the time were considered the lowest of the low. For a senior aristocrat to be seen writing for them would just not have been socially acceptable."

De Vere was educated and a well-travelled courtier. Twice married, he kept a mistress and was a favourite of Elizabeth I, who awarded him an unconditional pension of £1,000 a year for life (about £500,000 at today's value). "If you think about it, 36 out of the 37 plays were set in courtly surroundings or wealthy society," said Mr Dams. "That was Oxford's world, not Shakespeare of Stratford's.

"The only written works passed down to us from Shakespeare are six signatures, all on legal documents. And even these are dodgy, with an expert in the public records office saying they were not written by the same man."

But the 17th century diarist John Aubrey said that Shakespeare regularly stopped at Oxford on his way between Stratford and London. He stayed at the Crown Inn, Cornmarket, with his friend John Davenant, the innkeeper, who was Mayor of Oxford. Mr Dams, a retired businessman who read English at Cambridge, recently left Henley, his home for 27 years to live in Somerset.

He said that even the likes of Shakespearian actor Sir Derek Jacobi and the artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London, Mark Rylance, no longer believed William Shakespeare wrote the plays. Previous non-believers include Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Henry James and Enoch Powell.

The De Vere Society was founded in 1986 by one of the great man's descendants, Lord Burford, then a student at Hertford College, Oxford. He upset Oxford English and history dons by challenging them to refute his case. The idea has now really taken root in America, where there is a flourishing Shakespeare Oxford Society. Shakespeare's birthday will be marked by the Annual Oxford Day Banquet at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A few weeks ago, the Annual Edward de Vere Conference convened at Concordia University in Portland, while the Washington Post and Harper's magazine joined in the authorship debate. But Mr Dams reckons Shakespearian experts here will never be able to swallow their pride, whatever the evidence.

"Too many have built their careers and made their reputations on researching this man from Stratford. For them to stand up and admit 'we got it all wrong, we got the wrong man' would be too much."

Story date: Friday 23 April

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