‘Anonymous’ an amusing ‘what if’ Shakespeare tale

There’s a bit of a brouhaha going on in international theater circles, having to do with Roland Emmerich’s film “Anonymous” (opening today locally). The costume epic sets out to prove an old theory: that William Shakespeare did not write his own plays. After The New York Times ran two major stories ripping the movie’s inaccuracy, the paper’s theater critic ran a third article that began with, “I don’t care who wrote Shakespeare’s plays.”

Well, I do. But even if you’re not a die-hard buff, it’s fun to follow what’s being said. It boils down to this: Shakespeare was “merely” the son of a glove maker, was a professional moneylender, not well-educated or well-traveled and therefore not likely to have had such wide knowledge of the world. Also, historical records are hard to come by. There’s very little solid information in those big, expensive books that purport to tell the facts of Shakespeare’s life. How then can we know for certain that this “simple” man wrote the greatest dramatic literature of all time?

The film’s take on events is that the sensitive, well-educated aristocrat Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, did all the writing but hid his authorship for political reasons. Shakespeare, lower-class man that he was, spent most of his time bedding whores, blackmailing de Vere and saying stupid things — all the while basking in the limelight.

Scholars are in a tizzy. Stephen Marche, in the Oct. 21 Times, called the film “historically inaccurate nonsense.” Among his observations:

■ In the movie, legendary playwright Christopher Marlowe watches “Henry V” in 1599. Marlowe died in 1593.

■ Characters are in awe that “Romeo and Juliet” is in iambic pentameter. But by the time the play came out, iambic pentameter was already a popular device.

■ The film implies that de Vere wrote “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as a child. It would be ludicrous to think that even Shakespeare wrote “Midsummer” as a child.

James Shapiro, writing in the Oct. 16 Times, notes that the accusations were first put forth in 1920 by Thomas Looney, a writer who “loathed democracy and modernity (and) argued that only a worldly nobleman could have created such works of genius.” I think the film implies that not being a nobleman means being an idiot.

Shapiro also points out that there’s no evidence Shakespeare didn’t write his plays, and there are sources that suggest he did, including recorded comments of contemporary writers.

Putting all the scholarship aside, the film can be an amusing “what if” tale. It’s not so amusing, though, to learn that the producers are providing educational materials to schools touting this as “a compelling portrait of Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.”

Marche bemoans: “Thanks to ‘Anonymous,’ undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious.”

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at vegastheaterchat@ aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.