Oi, Emmerich -- you're bard!

After his success with such cerebral blockbusters as Independence Day and 2012, director Roland Emmerich has turned his attention to an even greater fantasy: the notion that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were in fact the work of someone else. "Anonymous" has just opened here in the UK, to uniformly contemptuous reviews that make it sound like Dan Brown on a bad day, if such a thing is possible. US reviewers have been almost equally merciless.

The "it wasn't Shakespeare" movement has been going since at least the mid-nineteenth century, without ever coming remotely close to either disproving Shakespeare's authorship, or even agreeing on an alternative author. Emmerich's candidate, one of the many out there, is the Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere, known in his own time as a nasty piece of work and third-rate poet. Other putative candidates as the "real" author have included Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson and a host of lesser lights. Along the way, this nonsense has attracted adherents both distinguished (Mark Twain and Helen Keller both signed on at one stage) and comical, such as the appropriately-named J. Thomas Looney, a schoolmaster from that well-known centre of literary exegesis, Gateshead.

All of these claims have been comprehensively and repeatedly demolished by the US scholar James Shapiro, in "1599", an account of a year in the bard's life, and more recently "Contested Will", which trawls through the whole sorry history of Shakespeare denial. They are both worth reading. So is "Shakespeare's language", by the great Frank Kermode. While Kermode does not directly address the authorship question, his analysis of the uniqueness of Shakespeare's "voice" is very compelling.

Does any of this matter? After all, Anonymous is just a movie, and if it's as awful as people say, it's unlikely to be much of an opinion-former. Unfortunately, Sony Pictures has tried to up the ante by sending out study kits to US high schools, peddling the film's absurd conspiracy theories. Needless to say, James Shapiro doesn't merit a mention in Sony's fair and balanced look at the issues. It's a nasty and pointless piece of attempted brainwashing. One can only be grateful that they've stopped short of claiming that the Earl of Oxford was born in New Haven or somewhere, but perhaps they're saving that for the sequel.