11/11/11
A contentious debate is erupting over the new film Anonymous from Roland Emmerich, the director better known for end-of-the-world thrillers than period dramas. For centuries people have believed that the plays and poems of Shakespeare were not written by a commoner named William Shakespeare, but actually by a nobleman named Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Even Derek Jacobi and other prominent theater personalities have adopted this theory.

This movie, however, takes an even more eyebrow-raising position — that Shakespeare was in fact an illiterate buffoon who blackmailed, cheated and even committed murder to take credit for authorship.

The film has prominent actors like Jacobi, and even Vanessa Redgrave, to lend it legitimacy for this tough sell. Obviously this kind of debate will spur some strong opinions. A Shakespeare professor wrote this editorial (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/opinion/hollywood-dishonors-the-bard.html?_r=1 ) immediately after the opening, and the screenwriter responded with this one. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-orloff/shakespeare-anonymous_b_1034885.html )

Ordinarily I would invite you to read them for yourselves and make up your own minds. As the group moderator I try not to take sides on such issues, but when misinformation is presented as fact, I do feel obligated to set the record straight, and there’s quite a bit of that in this discussion. (Here I use the word “Shakespeare” to refer to the actor from Stratford, whether he wrote the plays or not, and “Bard” to refer to the true author of the plays, whether he was Oxford, Stratford or someone else.)

We don’t know as much as we would like to about the Bard, whoever he was. Some things we will never know, and certainly there are others we think we know, but don’t. Unfortunately this is a breeding ground for rumor and urban legend, and as tempers rise, accusation of lying are sure to follow. In the course of this argument, both sides accuse the other of propagating lies, or at least shading the truth. As you read the two editorials, bear in mind what is clearly known from the historical record:

• William Shakespeare began his life as a penniless actor and ended up as the wealthiest man in Stratford. He was well-known in his time for his business acumen. Say what you want about him: Whether or not he could read and write, he was certainly no fool, as the film makes him out to be.
• The plays incorporate such a bewildering knowledge of the classics of Roman literature, much of which had not been translated into English at the time, to suggest that the Bard must have been able to read the original works in Latin, to say nothing of French and Italian. Oxford was fluent in all three languages, and there is no record of William Shakespeare attending college, or even grammar school. However, 1) there was an excellent grammar school in Stratford open to the sons of any man wealthy enough to send them there, and 2) Shakespeare’s father was wealthy at the time. There would have been no reason for young William NOT to have attended. His father fell on hard times a few years later, but since Latin was a required subject, presumably a clever student would have learned enough during that time to continue his studies on his own. Certainly there is no reason to believe that he was illiterate.
• There are definitely political caricatures in the Bard’s work: Joan of Arc, no hero to the English, is portrayed as a murderous harlot. Likewise the Bard’s depiction of Richard III as physically and morally deformed serves more as propaganda than entertainment, but not, as the screenwriter suggests, as a sly poke at Oxford’s political rivals. In fact, the Bard was following the conventions of his time in dehumanizing Richard III in order to legitimize the reign of Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII, who had defeated Richard in battle. Never at any time in his career did the Bard lampoon anyone politically powerful. (He even changed the name of Falstaff from “John Oldcastle” because of complaints from relatives of a man with that name.)
• It’s true that the Earl of Essex commissioned a performance of Richard II “to incite a mob to aid him in his rebellion against the Queen.” To suggest that the Bard was complicit in this plot is belied by the historical record: in the bloody housecleaning after the failure of the revolt, Shakespeare’s acting company was investigated, but publicly cleared of all charges. It is likewise ridiculous to claim, as the movie does, that Oxford participated: by all accounts he was a loyal, if ineffectual, supporter of the queen, and widely regarded as one of her favorites.
• There are historical references to earlier productions of plays about King Lear and Hamlet. The screenwriter attributes great importance to these plays, which the Stratford man could not conceivably have written, but which the much older Oxford might. Or, perhaps, they were written by completely different playwrights, of whom dozens were active in England at the time (Thomas Kyd is the leading suspect as the author of the “Ur-Hamlet”.) The screenwriter scoffs at this notion, implying that they must have been from the same hand, and that hand was Oxford’s. To demonstrate the fallacy of this argument, imagine arguing that since the original movie called Godzilla came out in 1954, a year before Roland Emmerich was born, he could not have directed a remake of Godzilla in 1998.

With that said, I will leave you to your own devices. By all means read the articles and decide for yourselves whether you want to see the movie or not. As for me, I think I’ll wait until it appears on TV. I don’t want any of my money to add to the box office total of this historical hatchet job.