Doubts about whether Shakespeare himself wrote the plays attributed to him first surfaced in the 1850s.
They coincided with the huge boom in what George Bernard Shaw called “bardolatry”, in which Shakespeare was hailed as the greatest playwright of his or any age, and with the birth of historical-biographical scholarship that looked closely at and weighed up the evidence for famous life stories, most prominently that of Jesus.
The questions about Shakespeare’s authorship were spurred by disjunctions between the erudite, fluently written plays and what was known of his life. There’s no doubt he was an actor, manager and theatre-owner, and there are contemporary references to his plays, but there are no works of his in manuscript — in fact, there’s nothing at all in what could be deemed to be Shakespeare’s own handwriting except six signatures on legal documents, each of which is spelled differently or abbreviated in various ways.
In Elizabethan times, the official spellings of English words had not yet stabilised, so many words are spelled differently at different times — but to spell one’s own name in different ways?
This was seen as evidence that Shakespeare was illiterate or semi-literate, as were his parents and the rest of his family. His will mentions no plays, though it makes small bequests to old comrades in the acting trade. By then, though, he would have long been retired to his Stratford home, where he focused on being a merchant.
Usual suspects
He may or may not have gone to a grammar school, which may have furnished him with the classical and other knowledge displayed in the plays. Some believe such knowledge too wide to belong to a grammar-school boy, hence the alternatives for who “really” wrote Shakespeare, most of them being scholarly aristocrats such as Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh or Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.
Another theory has it that Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s older contemporary and friend, was not in fact murdered in 1593 — could Marlowe have faked his death and reappeared as “Shakespeare”?
Or was the real author in fact Mary Sidney, sister of the poet Sir Philip and centre of a famous literary circle, who found ways around the fact that an aristocratic woman could not write plays for the stage or publish love poems such as the sonnets?
Her candidacy would explain some of the puzzles to do with Shakespeare’s sonnets, in which a curious love triangle is recounted: older poet (poetess?), younger man, Dark Lady … (And that would at least relieve conservative Shakespeare scholars of trying to prove that he wasn’t really involved in a homosexual or bisexual ménage.)
Such piquant ideas led, over the years, to a veritable madness of searches for hidden evidence, ciphers within the work, and even attempts to open Bacon’s tomb for clues — it all makes The Da Vinci Code look positively straightforward, though where is symbologist Dr Robert Langdon when he’s needed?
In 1920, the delightfully named J Thomas Looney published Shakespeare Identified, which punted the Earl of Oxford as the real author, as did a 1 300-page tome by Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn Snr, The Star of England (1952). This is the theory out of which Roland Emmerich’s new movie, Anonymous, makes a riveting story, though given its argument a better title might have been Pseudonymous.
Emmerich is known for his slam-bam action movies, Independence Day for instance, and is quoted in David Bordwell’s book The Way Hollywood Tells It as saying action movies need “a certain amount of plot” to make sense of the action and get us from one action sequence to another.
Anonymous has more than “a certain amount of plot” — it’s very plotty indeed, detailing secrets, conspiracies and revelations, many embedded in a complex flashback structure. This means that, for it to work, it needed a carefully and tightly organised script. Kudos to John Orloff, then, for providing one.
Anonymous has a framing device with Derek Jacobi on a stage telling us that no manuscripts exist in Shakespeare’s hand; this appears to be the only real reason for such an introduction. But soon we’re into the meat of it, with playwright Ben Jonson on the run from agents trying to destroy the “Shakespeare” oeuvre and legacy, implicated as it is in the power politics of the day.
A damn fine story
Here is the core idea of Anonymous, which must propose a thoroughgoing conspiracy theory if it is to explain how the illiterate actor Shakespeare got the credit for all that playwriting and poetic labour, and it does so very well. You don’t have to buy into any of the theories about alternative authorship to enjoy this speculative game, for whatever its truth value it makes a damn fine story.
Anonymous is gripping from start to finish, with much to tease the mind, as well as many felicitous touches that illuminate its characters — the chilly Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans), the dithery old Queen Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave), the fiery Jonson (Sebastian Armesto), the bumptiously self-regarding actor Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) who is suddenly given the role of a lifetime.
The mostly British cast does this all with consummate skill and style (and it’s fun to see Redgrave play the older Elizabeth when she played her adversary to Glenda Jackson’s Elizabeth in 1971’s Mary, Queen of Scots; appropriately, Redgrave’s daughter, Joely Richardson, plays the younger Elizabeth in flashback). The period look is evocatively mounted, the camerawork fluid and expressive, and the whole highly entertaining. Let’s say this: it’s not Shakespeare, but Anonymous is an excellent movie.
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