Roland Emmerich's 'Anonymous': Ten Reasons Why Shakespeare Was A Fraud (VIDEO)

It's been a long-standing urban legend that Shakespeare didn't actually write his own work, but now a new film brings this theory to the big screen.

In advance of his movie "Anonymous," out in theaters October 28th, director Roland Emmerich spouts off ten powerful arguments against the Stratford-upon-Avon scribe's authority as the author of 36 plays, 154 sonnets and two poems. In true Emmerich fashion -- he of catastrophe movies "Godzilla," "Independence Day," "2012" -- the movie's thunderous trailer presents Shakespeare as an elaborate ruse and hyperbolizes 16th-century England, with beheadings, sordid affairs, and a confused-looking Vanessa Redgrave thrown into the mix. My middle school English teacher may have a heart attack, but that's besides the point: Emmerich actually makes some pretty solid points throughout, the most powerful of which are presented in the video above. We've ticked off the most convincing.

• Born to illiterate parents, Shakespeare went on to possess the largest English vocabulary of any writer in history. Yet his two children, Susanna and Judith, couldn't read or write.
• The largest literary hunt in history produced not a single hand-written note by Shakespeare.
• Shakespeare makes grandiloquent references to Italian cities, French court life, and the manners and etiquette of foreign lands -- a third of his plays are set in Italy -- but no documented record exists of him having traveled outside of England.
• His last will makes no mention of any books or manuscripts, leaving the impression that he did not care about what happened to his life's work after death.
• Shakespeare retired in his late 40s and promptly returned to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he never wrote a single poem or sonnet again.

Curiously, Emmerich also makes the point that "writing comes from the heart... call me a romantic, but I believe great artists are inspire by our life," leaving us to ponder what giant earth-shattering events transpired in this disaster-loving director's own life.

UPDATE: OCTOBER 16th, 5:14pm. "Anonymous" screenwriter John Orloff wrote in to dispute our usage of the phrase "urban legend" and offer his own argument against Shakespeare, which we've copied for you below.

I'd like to think current and past US Supreme Court Justices don't believe in Urban Legends. Namely, Justices Stevens, Blackmun, O'Connor and Scalia all think there is reason to doubt the validity of the actor William Shakespeare having written the plays history ascribes to him.

As does historian David McCullough. As do authors such as Mark Twain (whose last book, "Is Shakespeare Dead" is dedicated to the issue), Henry James (who said he was "haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting Public"), and Walt Whitman (to name a few).

As do Shakespearean actors Sir John Gielgud, Sir Derek Jacobi, and Orson Welles (who directed and starred in several Shakespeare plays). And Mark Rylance, who is not only perhaps the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation, but a man who was also the Artistic Director of the Globe Theater in London for ten years. Think about that last name; the man who ran the Globe theater for a decade doesn't think Shakespeare wrote a single word.

And we can add Sigmund Freud in there as well.

An Urban Myth is something proven to be false. I'm not sure we're there on this particular issue.

Either way, I am reminded of Winston Churchill's statement on the subject when he was asked about the Authorship Issue. His response? He replied he wasn't that interested in Oxford because, in his words: "I don't like to have my myths tampered with".

He meant the Shakespeare myth.

Comments

[TheWM]

12:48 PM on 10/31/2011

Roland Emmerich presents reasons why he thinks Shakespeare was a fraud. I see indications that Emmerich doesn't have much imagination.

How could Shakespeare have described places he'd never been? He read about them.

How could the writer of such great works have signed his name so sloppily, in contrast to other great English writers of the time? Literary genius and penmanship are two different things.

Emmerich says, how could a man with little or no formal education have had the largest working vocabulary of any author writing in English? One, assuming the lack of evidence of Shakespeare's education means he received none, it's called autodidactism, Shakespeare would hardly be the only example of it, and two, the lack of evidence of Shakespeare's formal education does not prove he received none.

Related to the previous point by the aspect of evidence or lack of it: Emmerich asked why we don't have any written documents -- other than the few above-mentioned signatures -- in Shakespeare's own hand? I answer this question with a request: please gather up all the documents you can find which were hand-written by other writers of Shakespeare's time, and when you get back to me with all of those, we can see how odd the lack of documents in Shakespeare's hand seems.

And staying on the topic of evidence, please provide some evidence that anybody else wrote Shakespeare's works, to back up these doubts that Shakespeare couldn't have written them.

[c-tom]

11:19 AM on 10/31/2011

"Shakespeare makes grandiloquent references to Italian cities, French court life, and the manners and etiquette of foreign lands -- a third of his plays are set in Italy -- but no documented record exists of him having traveled outside of England."

Following this logic how can we believe a German director and an American screen writer could make a film about Shakespeare. There is no evidence they can time travel. Who really made this film???

[TheWM]

10:57 AM on 10/31/2011

Mr Orloff delivers a crushing blow. 14 famous people have never all been wrong about something.

[spilkus]

12:25 AM on 10/27/2011

#5 Shakespeare never wrote about the death of his son.
Sonnet 33. Very likely the psychology of a grieving father.
Stick to blowing up models of historic buildings.

[spilkus]

11:57 PM on 10/26/2011

A big budget Hollywood block buster director? He would never hype the controversy to inflate his box office revenues.

Other famous people doubt too. I trust famous people rather than professors who use footnotes and research methodology.

[inapickle]

02:42 AM on 10/21/2011

http://skepticalhumanities.com/ Very good rundown on the theories the film purports- and why they're not substantiated.

[inapickle]

10:52 PM on 10/20/2011

Slight spoiler to the film:

In another sign that this film was lightly researched to say the least (even a lot of research won't turn up anything) one of the central points of the film seems to have to do with the Earl of Essex paying the Chamberlin's men to put on Richard the Third the night before Essex's rebellion. This is key as the hunchback references are supposed to refer to a Cecil who Oxford was battling with. Anyway, I don't know how it all plays out in the film, but they seem to think it's important that it was Richard III played- all well and good except it was Richard II- something there is rock hard evidence for as they were all hauled in to answer for themselves after the plot failed the next day and those records exist and are crystal clear. Fail.

[Joseph Schulz]

07:32 PM on 10/20/2011

Have you heard they've pulled back on the film's release date ? It will be in "limited release" next weekend because so few people have any interest in seeing it. They are hoping to stir up "word of mouth" praise for it! Lots of luck! They were afraid that it would totally tank the opening weekend and sink like a stone! Well, never mind. It will be over soon.

[jefersun]

10:36 AM on 10/18/2011

If Shakespeare didn't write these plays, why would the person who really wrote the plays, a person with such an amazing talent want to be anonymous to the theatre world of his time, and how could he get away with being anonymous during his own time? Where is the playwright? No one in John Milton's (Paradise Lost) family was as brilliant as he was. How many families can say the same thing about a family member? Just because your kids can't read, doesn't mean dad can't. Silly logic leads to silly conclusions.

[StevenKeirstead]

02:19 PM on 10/18/2011

Exactly. If William Shakespeare were a fraud, some of his contemporaries would have been writing about the deceit then. As it is known now, questions about Shakespeare's authorship were not raised until about 150 years later. Such hypotheses are not based on any actual evidence, but merely upon speculation that an actor like Shakespeare would not have had learned enough to write the plays. However, he was not born into a time when books unavailable. Nor did he live and work in a vacuum, but was surrounded by brilliant contemporaries who produced work of similar literary caliber, yet also came from humble backgrounds. Christopher Marlow, for example, came from a family of shoemakers, not a privileged noble house.

The movie "Anonymous" is based on the hypothesis that Edward de Vere used Shakespeare as a pseudonym/agent to produce these plays and poems. Really, the title of the movie should really be "Pseudonymous," but I suppose Roland Emmerich though even the art-house target movie audience would not know what that means.

To make an extraordinary claim about a historical figure you need real evidence to back up your hypothesis, otherwise you are just playing a game of "what if?" Evidence actually exists that Shakespeare's best plays and sonnets were performed or published years after de Vere died in 1604. This movie is mere light entertainment, like the similarly ahistoric "Amadeus," which does not accurately depict the relationship of Mozart and Salieri.

[StevenKeirstead]

02:47 PM on 10/18/2011

Oops I meant to write "Such hypotheses are not based on any actual evidence, but merely upon speculatio­n that an actor like Shakespear­e would not have BEEN learned enough to write the plays," not "had learned." Sorry for the foul edit.

[DanInALionsDen]

02:38 AM on 10/18/2011

I hope people do the research for themselves rather than accepting a film as historical. No serious Shakespeare scholar, or Oxford scholar for that matter, doubts the attribution of these works to Shakespeare. Moreover some of the points made above seem to display such a lack of knowledge regarding Shakespeare's works that one wonders whether the director has read them. For example, the author points to the fact that Shakespeare was not well travelled on continental Europe as evidence that he could not have written the works attributed to him. However, Shakespeare's works are fraught with the sort of geographic errors one might expect to see from someone who had not travelled Europe thoroughly. Often, people who lack the talent to achieve notoriety through their own faculties will turn to vitriol and attack whatever is most sacred to a culture in order to garner attention. I'd suppose that is what is happening here.

[Lorindol]

01:10 AM on 10/18/2011

The authorship controversy is the result of the nineteenth-century snobbery of folks who couldn't stand that their favorite plays were written by a commoner. To rob WS of his work, they've put forward many different nominees, including Queen Elizabeth, Bacon, Oxford, Marlowe, et al. Each argument puts forth the same evidence - none whatsoever. The proponents ignore any evidence of WS's authorship and build their case on supposition and myth, usually bolstered by their outright ignorance of the era.

[Joseph Schulz]

08:41 PM on 10/18/2011

Also, Delia Bacon, who was an early proponant, ended her life in a mental institution. Later they consulted "physics" who "channeled " the dead to prove their point. (coughs) crackpots! (cough, cough.)

[inapickle]

01:09 AM on 10/18/2011

As Shakespeare would say, what a load of bollocks.

Everything Emmerich says is either unsubstantiated or has been refuted. My #1 would be that he doesn't know how many plays are attributed to Will- it's 37 not 36.

Shakespeare's father was a successful merchant and local politician whose children could attend school for free. His father applied for a grant of arms and the right to style himself gentleman.

Shakespeare was a well-known figure in his time. He was an actor and part owner of the troop of actors who performed plays which they and everyone else attributed to him. There is more documented evidence of his life and literary output than virtually any other writer of the era. No one questioned authorship until the middle of the 19th C. nearly 250 years after his death.

The Earl of Oxford died in 1604 while the Tempest appears to have been written after 1609 based on contemporary references the play makes.

Italian culture and plays were all the rage- and Shakespeare stole their plots with abandon. He made lots of mistakes re: court and aristocratic life. He was friends with a successful bookseller.

He invented more words than any other writer of English, he did not use more words than any other, either then or now. These works were produced for everyone and if his language was not understandable to the hoi polloi they wouldn't have done very well.

One can go on and on debunking this stuff. It's classism.

[Joseph Schulz]

08:42 PM on 10/18/2011

Right? Class Warfare!

[FardelBearer]

10:07 PM on 10/18/2011

The number of plays is 38 if you include "Two Noble Kinsmen" which I believe most people think was written by Shakespeare and Fletcher. Yes, it's a collaboration, but it is probable that one or two others were also collaborations.

[inapickle]

01:59 AM on 10/19/2011

Yes, he did collaborate and there is at least one lost play (Cardenio) as well as other contenders for authentication. But anywhere you look up Shakespeare, any complete works will include 37 plays- not 36. It just suggests that he didn't do the very most basic research (or editing) when he put out his little commercial and can't even get the traditionally accepted number of plays right. Sheesh! :)

[LVGuy]

11:07 PM on 10/17/2011

Very rarely there are human beings born with transcendent genuis. Newton, Dante, Michelangelo, Euler come to mind. Trying to call into question their accomplishments using
minor inconsistancies in their behavior seems a little silly.

[robodawa]

10:43 PM on 10/17/2011

This is all compost. Mr. Roland does not mention the Great Fire, Puritan Purgings and other acts that destroy paper ephermea. And, if he such an expert on Shakespeare, why does he not mention
'The Song of Songs" & "The Book of Job" which Wm S. wrote for the KJII Bible? I think Roland was paid off by the people at the Goethe Foundation and the Dostoyevsky League.

[Gasparilla]

09:07 PM on 10/17/2011

Some of Shakespeare's plays were published during his lifetime, others gathered in the First Folio by some of his fellow actors after his death. All have his name and no one at the time disputed their authorship. Speculation centuries later means nothing.
http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=928