Early modern hipster, Old Billy Shakespeare, has been getting some press recently because of this fancy new movie coming out about the authorship debate. Being the resident English lit. major at HJ I thought I might comment on this preposterous buffoonery.
The film, called “Anonymous,” strongly questions the true authorship of William Shakespeare’s (“The Bard”) plays and sonnets and things. The film, directed by Roland Emmerich of “10,000 BC” fame, (…ok and “Independence Day”, I’ll give him “Independence Day”) stars Rhys Ifans as the moody Earl of Oxford, the “true” author of Shakespeare’s works.
“Lies”
I was perusing the New York Times Magazine over my morning cup of Spirulina when I ran into this extremely arousing article. Yeah so Shakespeare arouses me, so what?
Anyway, the article tears down the “Oxfordian” view very simply:
“The craziest idea in “Anonymous,” however, is that Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford) wrote a version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” 40 years before its performance at court, putting the composition of the play somewhere around 1560… To put the issue in a contemporary framework, it’s one thing to say that somebody other than Jay-Z wrote “The Blueprint”; it’s another to say that this clandestine Jay-Z wrote “The Blueprint” in 1961. You can’t write a hip-hop masterpiece before hip-hop has been invented. And you can’t write “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” until English secular comedy has come into existence.”
Bam. Done.
The author of “Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare,” Stephen Marche, writes in scathing contempt and anger at filmmakers and people with connections to large audiences who put these silly, incorrect ideas into the minds of youths across the world who don’t know any better. He calls it a “…an unthinking left-wing open-mindedness and relativism…” that has given people who really have no reason to know anything about Shakespeare the “right” to proliferate their stupid opinions that have no grounds in history. “Just because an opinion exists does not mean that the opinion is worthy of respect. Some people deserve to be marginalized and excluded.” This is a man after my own heart.
Alright, I’ll take off my nerd hat now and concentrate on my Arthurian Legends professor.
Prose Before Hoes
