In Honor Of 'Anonymous' Movie Release: Literary Scandal In Film

By Christine Spines via Word & Film:

In the annals of provocative movie taglines, “Was Shakespeare a Fraud?” ranks right up there with “Meet the Marquis de Sade. The Pleasure Is All His.” Each of these works of marketing haiku was devised to entice and intrigue moviegoers into seeing films about literary transgressors (either on the page or in the sack) — seemingly heady subject matter that might at first glance look more like homework than titillating hot-button entertainment.

Nothing could be further from the case. The latter graced posters for “Quills,” the high-brow biopic, released in 2000, about the notorious eighteenth-century French author whose debauched and depraved writings landed him in an insane asylum. And you may have noticed the former ad copy printed in bold type across posters for “Anonymous,” director Roland Emmerich’s new piece of cinematic controversy kindling based on suspicions that William Shakespeare may not have authored the body of work attributed to his name.

“Anonymous,” which is opening in theaters nationwide, casts the Bard of Avon (Rafe Spall) as a callow and craven opportunist who gladly accepts credit for a library of plays and sonnets ghostwritten by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), a high-class gent who doesn’t want to compromise his social standing by outing himself as an ink-stained wretch.
Though this film seems to be a radical departure from Emmerich’s previous special effects extravaganzas — “Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow” — “Anonymous” contains no shortage of combustible material; only in this case, the explosions have been designed to detonate off camera, in fiery debates among academics, the media, and moviegoers. Already, literary heavyweights like Simon Schama and a raft of Stratfordian Shakespeare scholars have railed against the film’s claim that the Bard was a fraud, while a group of academics known as the Oxfordians have long held that Shakespeare was an uneducated rube who lacked the sophistication to produce the masterworks attributed to him.

Though “Anonymous” may only deepen the divide between the two camps, the film has already succeeded in commandeering the cultural conversation by turning the volume up on a centuries-old literary conspiracy theory. It’s a testament to the power of the pen that literary scandal has become increasingly fertile ground for filmmakers. But don’t just take our word for it. Check out the following highlight reel from Hollywood’s longstanding fascination with disgraced literary stars and scandalous word-slingers.

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Comments

[TheWM]

10:46 AM on 10/31/2011

“Was Shakespeare a Freud?”

William Shakespeare and Sigmund Freud -- the same person? Dude, you just blew my mind!

[ESerafina42]

11:05 AM on 10/30/2011

The difference is that all these other movies (with the possible exception of Citizen Kane, which is a fictionalized bio of Hearst) are about things that REALLY happened. Anonymous is fiction through and through, fueled mainly by snobbery, IMO. "Oh, how could this grammar school-educated country hick have written such great plays? It MUST have been done by someone from the NOBILITY, or at least someone who had gone to Cambridge or Oxford."

[TheWM]

10:37 AM on 10/31/2011

Snobbery of the upper and educated classes is how the anti-Stratfordian theories began, but since then there's been a very ironic development: today, almost all of academia is solidly Stratfordian. Of course, academia is much more democratic, much less exclusively upperclass, as it was a century ago. Today, there may still be that upperclass snobbery among the anti-Stratfordians, but it has definitely been joined by an anti-intellectualism, which paints today's academics as closed-minded and protecting their turf instead of truly serving the cause of education.

[ESerafina42]

03:08 PM on 10/31/2011

I have the book Contested Will, which I've just started, and in that the author says that for the first 200 years no one questioned Shakespeare's authorship. It's kind of ironic that it seems the snobbery only came in around the time of the Enlightenment and the ascendance of the ideas of democracy and equal rights.

[bbriani3842]

11:27 PM on 10/29/2011

Saw the film last night ... very good movie despite the controversy.

[mmorgann]

12:48 PM on 10/29/2011

The PR machine for the "Anonymous" film is amazing. The media is saturated with references to the film well before it is released. That is usually a sign that the movie is terrible ... because they are attempting to get large numbers of people into the theaters before word gets out about how bad the movie is.

[TheWM]

10:31 AM on 10/31/2011

"The media is saturated with references to the film well before it is released."

HP is saturated with pieces which are mostly neutral-to-Oxfordian-friendly -- which is a lot like being somewhere between neutral and petroleum-industry-friendly on the subject of greenhouse gasses. Note how both global-warming deniers and people who deny that Shakepeare could've written those plays and poems attack academia in general. Maybe in both groups there are a lot of people who were told in school that they were stupid -- because they were -- and have been burning with the desire to turn the tables ever since.

Maybe schools should find a less harsh way of dealing with their less successful students. Seems like the backlash can be very severe.

[acorus]

11:02 PM on 10/28/2011

the historical william shakespeare couldn't even sign his name the same way twice in the smattering of extant examples, and his wife was illiterate. but there's much more compelling evidence that there was authorial hanky-panky surrounding this bard, and i'm glad that finally hollywood deemed it worthwhile to address the inconsistencies framing one of the most monumental frauds of the last 400 and some odd years

[Paul Hoogeveen]

04:15 PM on 10/29/2011

The Oxfordian view is simply classist-elitist BS. Shakespeare was not only educated, but educated such that by the time he was teen he had read Cicero, Terence, Virgil, and other classical authors -- in Latin. That was, in fact, typical of the grammar school education of its time. It was hardly uncommon in his day for spelling to be mutable. The classic mistake here is one of anachronisms -- judging historical "grammar school" and "literacy" by modern standards. Beyond that, the film is rife with historical innacuracies aimed at supporting the absurd Oxford claim, rather than being true to known history.

[TheWM]

10:18 AM on 10/31/2011

"Shakespear­e was not only educated, but educated such that by the time he was teen he had read Cicero, Terence, Virgil, and other classical authors -- in Latin."

I'm a Stratfordian, but I disagree with this. In fact, one very striking thing about the Shakespearean oeuvre is the lack of evidence of knowledge of Latin.

"That was, in fact, typical of the grammar school education of its time"

There has been a lot of argument in the last few days about the level of formal education Shakespeare received, and the assertion has frequently been made than we have no concrete proof of his school attendance. Which has surprised me because I had thought it was well-established that Shakespeare attended grammar school, but only for a short time, before he had to leave school owing to a reversal in his family's fortunes. I may have been wrong about that. (Then again, I may have been right.)

Formal education has its advantages, but there have been many great writers who were autodidacts. Some of the most highly-esteemed American writers of the 20th century either never attended college or were college dropouts.

[Spartan112]

04:54 PM on 10/29/2011

There is no legitimate evidence in support of anything other than shakespearean authorship.

[TheWM]

10:19 AM on 10/31/2011

Well, that's -- hmm. How should I put it -- true.

[naschkatze]

01:01 PM on 10/28/2011

Someone once posted on FDL that "Rosebud" referred to the thingy of Hearst's Hollywood mistress. I forget who she was.

[anastasiabeaverhousen]

04:56 PM on 10/30/2011

Marion Davies.