Essay: ‘Anonymous’ and the Shakespeare conspiracy theory that wouldn’t die

In London, the Flat Earth Society explains that we live on a giant disk.

In Petersburg, Ky., the Creation Museum shows cave men and dinosaurs frolicking together.

(ASSOCIATED PRESS) - The famed Martin Droeshout engraving of the dramatist, printed on the cover of Shakespeare's first Folio, or first complete collection of his plays, printed in 1623.

Cast Your Vote

And in a movie theater near you, “Anonymous,” which opened Friday, reveals how the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

O brave new world — the culmination of more than 300 years of Enlightenment thinking and empirical science. But in the words of the Bard — whoever he was — “Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!”

Which brings us back to “Anonymous,” Roland Emmerich’s new costume drama that has English professors tying their tweed blazers into knots. After his success with the documentaries “Godzilla” and “Independence Day,” Emmerich has now brought his CGI touch to the Soul of the Age. (And if you think that soul was Shakespeare’s, I’ve got some moon rocks I’d like to sell you.)

Various alternative authors have been promoted over the past 150 years, but the current favorite is Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. (Pay no attention to the fact that he died before “Antony and Cleopatra,” “The Tempest” and “The Winter’s Tale” were written.) Behind every one of these claims is the assumption that only an aristocrat could have composed the immortal words of “Hamlet” or written with such precision about Italy or divulged the thoughts of kings and queens. Once you allow that some glovemaker’s son from Stratford with a grade-school education wrote those plays, you’re likely to start imagining that a cloistered old maid in Amherst, Mass., composed the greatest poetry of the 19th century. (But don’t listen to me. I’m nobody. Who are you?)

Following the basic plot of what’s called the Oxfordian Theory, “Anonymous” shows that de Vere was the real writer of what we call “Shakespeare’s work.” The action takes us all the way to the day when the Globe Theatre was burned to the ground in 1613 by fire-breathing dragons. (Don’t quote me on that — I have to check the date.)

Three different actors play de Vere at different points in his life, or possibly Emmerich believes that de Vere was actually three different people. It doesn’t help that the teenage de Vere is played by Jamie Campbell Bower, the lithe hunk from the Starz network’s “Camelot,” which made me realize that King Arthur probably wrote “King Lear.”

I have no dog in this fight. In graduate school, I studied American literature, not British, so I was busy trying to show that Nathaniel Hawthorne was a warlock. (Never found a single piece of evidence to disprove that claim.) But it got me thinking what it must be like for scholars who have spent their lives studying the Renaissance to be confronted again and again by the fact that the playwright who dominated the London stage was actually Queen Elizabeth’s son-then-lover writing in secret.

Last year, James Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia University, wrote “Contested Will,” a whole book about the debate, without losing his temper even once. But when I reached him by phone in London, “Anonymous” was pushing all his buttons.