The New York Times Magazine tries for a new record in academic killjoy columns: "Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare?"
Professors of Shakespeare — and I was one once upon a time — are blissfully unaware of the impending disaster that this film means for their professional lives. Thanks to “Anonymous,” undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious. “Anonymous” subscribes to the Oxfordian theory of authorship, the contention that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Among Shakespeare scholars, the idea has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts.
Oh, criminy. Just like undergraduates have been confidently asserting for the last decade that the boy actors in Shakespeare's time were actually women who look a lot like Gwyneth Paltrow and really wanted to get it on with the bard?
