Claims that Shakespeare did not write his plays are based on conviction – but no evidence
ROLAND EMMERICH’S film Anonymous, which opened yesterday, “presents a compelling portrait of Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays”. That’s according to the lesson plans that Sony Pictures has been distributing to American literature and history teachers in the hope of convincing students that Shakespeare was a fraud.
A documentary by First Folio Pictures (of which Emmerich is president) will also be part of this campaign.
The case for Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, dates from 1920, when J Thomas Looney, an English writer who loathed democracy and modernity, argued that only a worldly nobleman could have created such works of genius; Shakespeare, a glover’s son and moneylender, could never have done so. Looney also showed that episodes in de Vere’s life closely matched events in the plays.
His theory has since attracted impressive supporters, including Sigmund Freud, US supreme court justice Antonin Scalia and his former colleague John Paul Stevens, and now Emmerich.
But promoters of de Vere’s cause have a lot of evidence to explain away, including testimony of contemporary writers, court records and much else that confirms that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him.
Not a shred of documentary evidence has been found that connects de Vere to any of the plays or poems. As for the argument that the plays rehearse the story of de Vere’s life: since the 1850s, when Shakespeare’s authorship was first questioned, the lives of 70 or so other candidates have also confidently been identified in them.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle facing de Vere’s supporters is that he died in 1604, before 10 or so of Shakespeare’s plays were written.
Anonymous offers an ingenious way to circumvent such objections: there must have been a conspiracy to suppress the truth of de Vere’s authorship; the very absence of surviving evidence proves the case. In dramatising this conspiracy, Emmerich has made a film for our time, in which claims based on conviction are as valid as those based on evidence.
The most troubling thing about Anonymous is not that it turns Shakespeare into an illiterate money-grubber. It’s not even that England’s virgin Queen Elizabeth is turned into a promiscuous woman who is revealed to be both the lover and mother of de Vere.
Rather, it’s that in making the case for de Vere, the film turns great plays into propaganda.
In the film de Vere is presented as a child prodigy, writing and starring in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1559 at the age of nine. He only truly finds his calling nearly 40 years later after visiting a public theatre for the first time and seeing how easily thousands of spectators might be swayed.
De Vere is clear in the film about his objectives: “All art is political . . . otherwise it is just decoration.” Sony Pictures’ study guide is keen to reinforce this reductive view of what the plays are about, encouraging students to search Shakespeare’s works for “messages that may have been included as propaganda”.
Anonymous weds Looney’s class-obsessed arguments to the political motives supplied by later de Vere advocates, who claimed he was Elizabeth’s illegitimate son and the rightful heir to the throne. By bringing this unsubstantiated version of history to the screen, a lot of facts – theatrical and political – are trampled.
Supporters of de Vere who have awaited this film with excitement may come to regret it, for Anonymous shows how high a price they must pay to unseat Shakespeare. Why anyone is drawn to de Vere’s cause is the real mystery. – (New York Times service)
James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, is the author of Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
Anonymous star Joely Richardson speaks to Donald Clarke: Weekend Review, page 8