I am an avowed Oxfordian because it’s impossible for me to believe that an untutored actor like William Shakespeare penned all those magnificent plays. Rather, I’m confident they were authored by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Nonetheless, there’s a whole establishment of scholars who oppose this theory and maintain that it was indeed an untutored actor — who died barely able to scrawl his name — who somehow conjured those timeless works.

Ultimately, of course, it doesn’t matter. But still, Oxford seems the most plausible candidate for true Bard. Charlton Ogburn is the most recent champion of this theory, and the American edition of his The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & the Reality, with a foreword by no less than David McCullough, provided some momentum for the Oxfordian movement. (I read its English abridgment, The Man Who Was Shakespeare, when I was at a cure in Germany in the 1980s.)

Roland Emmerich made the film “Anonymous” in 2011 espousing the Earl of Oxford theory, but the real point of the movie was simply to challenge the accepted version of events. The famous confusion surrounding the First Folio and the general lack of details about Shakespeare’s life and death make dubious the claim of the Stratfordians — as they are called — that William Shakespeare really did create an entire eponymous canon.

We anti-Stratfordians are in good company. Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Prince Philip, and even Charlie Chaplin were persuaded by the arguments against Shakespeare’s authorship, although opponents like to say the evidence is circumstantial. (They overlook the fact that everything known about Shakespeare’s life is circumstantial.)

Perhaps we need to accept that the true identity of the works’ author is lost in the mists of time and that, in the end, “the play’s the thing.”

Darrell Delamaide is an author and journalist in Washington, DC.