Cynthia Greenwood

Any Shakespeare enthusiast has a passing familiarity with the groundless hypothesis that aristocrat Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford, wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. As the story goes, only a university-educated noble close to the Elizabethan court would have been capable of such genius. But in order to swallow Oxfordian “history,” we must also imagine that the guy squirreled away modern cultural treasures such as King Lear, Macbeth, as well as The Tempest and other romances, which did not surface onstage or in print until after Oxford’s death in 1604.

To buy the gospel of Oxfordians, we must also imagine that myriad publishers who printed Shakespeare’s plays saw fit to engage in purposeless conspiracy; and that Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker, and others kept Oxford’s pseudonym a secret (in spite of Jonson’s own famous homage to the “Sweet Swan of Avon” in the 1623 First Folio).

In Anonymous, director Roland Emmerich and writer John Orloff do more than re-hash a 91-year-old conspiracy theory set forth by J.T. Looney in Shakespeare Identified. Instead they ask us to dwell in the lunatic realm of Oxfordian lore espoused in the Prince Tudor Theory, Part II. Anyone wanting a detailed version of this hypothesis should check out James Shapiro’s Contested Will, but here’s a nutshell version: The earl of Oxford hid his identity as a playhouse poet because he and Queen Elizabeth had a secret love affair that produced Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southhampton. Prince Tudor aficionados believe Oxford himself was the bastard son of the queen, who committed incest when he bedded Elizabeth, but their illegitimate child came along after the birth of three other illegitimate progeny who rose to power – the Earl of Essex, Mary Sidney, and Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s powerful advisor and son of the equally powerful counselor, Lord Burghley.

In his muddled mess of a screenplay, Orloff appropriates from the Prince Tudor fiction, positing a cover-up that suggests, without basis in the historical record, that the bastard Essex fomented his 1601 rebellion to take the throne simply because it was his birthright. Emmerich’s raffish vision of London court intrigue and the Bankside theatre milieu under Elizabeth I has about as much resemblance to history as the vision of Empress Nympho (remember Madeline Kahn?) as Nero’s wife in Mel Brooks’s 1981 comedy, The History of the World, Part I.

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