Was Shakespeare a Fraud?

The Daily Beast

The new movie Anonymous says Shakespeare was a fraud and has literary scholars screaming “Fie!” Chris Lee examines the battle royale over the Bard’s authorship controversy. Plus, British historian Simon Schama debunks the fraud claims in Newsweek.

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In the period thriller Anonymous, which reaches theaters on Oct. 28, director Roland Emmerich dredges up a delicious historical controversy that has 2011’s literary scholars fighting like Montagues and Capulets. The issue even provides a pithy logline: Was William Shakespeare a fraud?

Perhaps “fraud” isn’t forceful enough to describe the slings and arrows that the Bard of Avon endures in this $33 million bodice-ripper.

In Anonymous, young Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) is depicted as a vainglorious buffoon and functional illiterate, a simpleton with a murderous self-preservation instinct who happily accepts credit (as well as vast wealth) for a body of writing he has no part in creating. That honor, in the movie’s take, belongs to the man who set Shakespeare up as his front and is really responsible for creating what is generally regarded as the finest body of work in the English language: the 17^th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. A trained lawyer, globe-trotting aristocrat, and theater-company patron (portrayed by Welsh actor Rhys Ifans of Notting Hill fame), de Vere dares not sully his social standing by taking his disreputable sideline of writing plays public. Nonetheless, he allows Shakespeare to mythologize himself, cranks out writing by the ream, and nearly manages to upend the royal court of Elizabethan England in the process.

Like The Da Vinci Code before it, Anonymous presents a revisionist history intended to challenge cherished notions about ancient times by reimagining the life—or in this case, the secret identity—of an Old Master.

Fanciful as it all may sound, however, the question of authorship wasn’t concocted by Hollywood’s fantasy factory to provide Emmerich, the German-born exemplar of Lowest Common Denominator Cinema (he’s responsible for such blockbusters as Independence Day, 2012, and The Day After Tomorrow), an empty exercise. Controversy has clung to Shakespeare for centuries with no less than Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Helen Keller among those who have deeply pondered the issue. And alternate speculation has held that other Shakespeare contemporaries—statesman Sir Francis Bacon, swashbuckling poet-playwright Christopher Marlowe, and William Stanley (the 6^th Earl of Derby), even Queen Elizabeth herself—might just as easily have been responsible for what has been attributed the Bard.

Reiner Bajo / Columbia TriStar-Sony Pictures

Anonymous’ screenwriter John Orloff first stumbled across the authorship debate while working for an advertising firm in the mid-‘80s. After he began to research the subject, though, the novice writer and amateur historian became convinced the issue was “not some crackpot conspiracy theory as it might appear at first blush.”
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