As the screenwriter of Anonymous, I've watched the reactions to the film both here in the UK and in the US with great interest and not a little surprise. The film-makers, myself included, expected controversy – one does not take on sacred cows naively – but I must confess that the vitriol of our critics has been impressive.
One American Ivy League professor, James Shapiro, has insinuated that our film is like Nazi propaganda. The county of Warwickshire allowed the Shakespeare Trust to temporarily remove Shakespeare's name from public signs – an act of protest against our film that seems counter-productive; anti-Stratfordians couldn't agree more with that act.
Throughout the run-up to the film's release, I have been reminded that one does not take on people's livelihoods lightly.
While our little film not only does not disparage the genius of Hamlet and Lear, but rather honours, rightly, the genius of the work, it does challenge two Bard-related industries – tourism and, perhaps more provocatively, Shakespearean scholarship itself.
By asking drama lovers to think for themselves, we are asking them to look past the Shakespearean scholar (and the supposed facts on offer) standing between them and the plays. Of course, this is threatening. Notable, and no doubt brilliant, professors have made careers out of spinning the small number of available facts about the man from Stratford into hundreds of pages – many of them full of guesswork, assumption and conjecture. For example, we're all taught that Shakespeare had but a grammar school education from the King's New School in Stratford-upon-Avon. And the evidence for such a claim? There is none, and it is quite possible that Shakespeare never went to any school at all.
Professor Shapiro – who, incidentally, has refused to debate with me – is happy to tell audiences that the greatest "obstacle facing de Vere's supporters is that he died in 1604, before 10 or so of Shakespeare's plays were written". Which 10 "or so" is he referring to? Perhaps one is The Tempest, which many current Shakespearean scholars definitively date to 1611. But what to do with other scholars such as Joseph Hunter, who, in the early 19th century, dated the play to 1596? Similar discrepancies in date can be made with Lear, A Winter's Tale and pretty much every single play attributed to Shakespeare – including Hamlet, which is mentioned by Thomas Nashe in 1589, a full 13 years before the currently accepted date of the play, 1602. Presumably, we are to ignore these inconvenient dates (Shakespeare was only 25 in 1589). Why confuse impressionable minds?
One could go on pointing out the smoke and mirrors with which Shakespearean scholarship provide the curious reader. Why are more than a third of the plays set in Italy? Some scholars have suggested Shakespeare was the servant of a travelling nobleman on a grand tour. Not a shred of evidence exists to support such a theory, but it makes for a good chapter in a book. Why is the law so accurately portrayed in the plays? Well, one scholar suggests that, after his trip to Italy, young Will did a stint as a legal assistant. Again, no actual facts to back it up, but it does fill the pages.
Once one starts to examine the scholarship regarding Shakespeare's actual life, one quickly discovers there's not much there. It is less a life than, as Winston Churchill stated, a myth. And Shakespearean scholars do not like their myth-making to be challenged.
