Anonymous Discredits Shakespeare
Lizzie Wood, Staff Writer
A new film will intrigue only
those who feel Shakespeare is
not wholly responsible for pro
ducing his body of work. Anony
mous, directed by self-pro-
claimed doubter of Shakespeare,
Roland Emmerich, explores the
theory that Ed-
ward de Vere,
an Elizabethan
aristocrat, is the
real genius be
hind the works of Shakespeare.
De Vere, said to be a literary ge
nius at a young age, was the 17th
Earl of Oxford and is portrayed
in the film as Queen Elizabeth
I’s illegitimate child. Elizabeth,
influenced by De Vere’s beauti
ful writing, begins an incestu
ous love affair with her son. De
Vere’s works are never published
because of his position in court.
Years later, De Vere wants to
support Essex, a successor of
the queen, so he decides to stage
his plays. Amid his scheming,
De Vere begins a relationship
with Shakespeare, portrayed as
a poor, low-life peasant. Edward
de Vere is played by Rhys Ifans,
Was Shakespeare
a Fraud?''
who was also in Elizabeth: the
Golden Age, and Queen Elizabeth
is played by Vanessa Redgrave.
The film may make some
Shakespeare scholars cringe. Ac
cording to Meredith’s resident
Shakespeare expert. Dr. Garry
Walton, the film
explores a pro
vocative topic.
Walton explains
that early in
his studies and in his career, he
never questioned the validity of
Shakespeare’s work, but after
he came to Meredith, some of
his students brought questions
to him, leading him to research
the theories: “In the early 1990s
I learned that a descendant of
the 17th Earl of Oxford, the most
recent claimant to have written
the plays, was touring in the area
to promote his own ancestor as
the author of the plays. So we
invited Charles Beauclerk (then
Lord Burford) to campus, and we
had a kind of point-counterpoint
debate in Joyner.”
Other theories explore the pos
sibility that Christopher Marlowe,
Charles Beauclerk “Lord Burford,” de Vere’s descendant visiting campus in 1992.
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Francis Bacon, or even Queen Eliz
abeth had a hand in Shakespeare’s
writing: “The hardest thing for
any of us to explain is the extraor
dinary, and clearly Shakespeare’s
plays are that. Our best
explanation is genius,
which is
another
way of
saying
‘we don’t
know
how he
did it.’
Part of
the argu
ment
against Shake
speare as the
author is that no
one who was not
an aristocrat and
not university-ed
ucated could have
known enough to
write the plays.
In some ways that
is a classist argu
ment - no com
mon person could
be that good. Per
haps the opposite
argument could
be made - no
aristocrat could
so accurately and
sympathetically
depict common
people as they are
presented in the
plays,” says Dr.
Walton.
“The hardest
thing for any of
us to explain is
the extraordi
nary, and clearly
Shakespeare's
plays are that.”
Walton explains Shakespeare is
certainly a man and author who
seemed to have an remarkable
grasp of human emotion: “Qne
could argue that no male could
present females so
well (Cleopatra),
or that no female
could create such
compelling male
characters (Ham
let). So perhaps
the author was
neither male nor
female, or both.
He must have been
a lover (Romeo),
but also a warrior
(King Henry 5), and a murderer
(Macbeth), and a crazed suicide
(Ophelia, Lady Macbeth), and a
bad king (Richard 3), and an old
man (King Lear), and a young
woman (Juliet). How is that pos
sible? My only answer is that he
had the most profound imagina
tion of any writer I have studied -
he had what Keats called a ‘nega
tive capability’ to imagine himself
as someone or in fact as multiple
someones that were not his real-
life self,” Walton adds.
The film will certainly stir up
new questions among the public
about Shakespeare’s honor—the
movie poster reads, “Was Shake
speare a Fraud?” Audiences will
be able to decide for themselves if
Shakespeare was a fraud . . . or the
literary genius we know him to be.