DURHAM -- To be or not to be? That's a tough question. Here's an easier one: Who wrote those ageless words?
It was Shakespeare, of course, no matter the lunacy put forth in "Anonymous," a new film premiering today in some cities and due in the Triangle area Nov. 4.
No Shakespeare scholar grants any credence to the bogus claims, advanced in Roland Emmerich's new film, that Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford, was the real author of Shakespeare's plays. It is not taken seriously as a question because it is based on a series of false conjectures, anachronistic claims, anti-intellectualism and snobbish fantasies.
But when something is shouted loudly enough and often enough and to enough people, with no checks on the accuracy of what's being shouted, an ignorant, downright silly claim can come to sound like a long-suppressed truth.
Emmerich's film revives, in its strongest form, the anti-Stratfordian fantasy that de Vere really wrote Shakespeare's plays. That's fine. But this one comes cleverly accompanied by "study" guides emailed to high school teachers and English professors, leaning on the faulty assumption that there are questions where, in fact, there are none.
The questions raised with conspiratorial insinuation include: How could a son of a provincial glove-maker have written these plays? Why is there a big silence between the death of Shakespeare and the printing of the first folio? Why are there no autographed play manuscripts?
A few pesky facts: The earl of Oxford died in 1604 - a dozen years before Shakespeare's death - so it takes a particularly strained conspiracy theory to promote the notion that he wrote most of Shakespeare's tragedies and the late, great plays. Those were penned mostly after the earl's death.
Other anti-Shakespeare arguments are based on historical ignorance and blunders. His name was occasionally spelled differently? Yes. There was no such thing as standard spelling at the time. And to expect there would be autographed copies of Shakespeare's plays - as some say there should be - is to misunderstand the nature of writing for the theater. Plays were written for the company who owned them, not as a personal exercise for the playwright. Autographs weren't customary.
Finally, the popular suggestion that Shakespeare wasn't smart enough to write as he did vastly underestimates the sophistication and breadth of his education. It is also a gross reduction of literary and dramatic imagination. The bard most certainly had the intellectual capacity to write as he did.
Perhaps I'm stupid to take the bait. It is just a movie, after all, albeit one that might make gobs of money - like Dan Brown's appalling book "The DaVinci Code," which claimed that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child who went on to found the Merovingian dynasty, a "fact" hidden by the Catholic Church for a couple of millennia.
But like every other English professor in the land, I am constantly asked whether Shakespeare really wrote his own plays, and my heart sinks at the idea that thousands of people will first encounter Shakespeare through this idiotic and bloatedly self-important piece of fluff. There are so many more interesting questions to discuss than this nonquestion. Just like the "creationists" who claim creationism should be taught in schools alongside evolution because it is a rival theory (rather than an article of faith), Emmerich grants the Oxfordian fantasy a spurious credibility.
My greatest concern is the damage done to Shakespeare's works. The great plays become texts to be decoded and unmasked, and every character in them is game for a truffle hunt, linked to wholly extraneous biographical figures that the plays are "really" about.
The words of the plays can never be read and accepted, watched and pondered, granted the credence to function as works of theater. And in the process the sheer gorgeous imaginative reach of the plays is damaged, as is the power of the imagination itself. That is a significant blow to the joys of reading, watching and understanding theater.
Sarah Beckwith is chair of Theater Studies at Duke University and author of "Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness."
