Shakespeare Shakedown on the Big Screen

Roland Emmerichâ??s inadvertently comic new movie, Anonymous, purports to announce to the world that the works we deluded souls imagine to have been written by one William Shakespeare were actually penned by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. James Shapiroâ??s fine book Contested Will chronicles the long obsession with depriving Shakespeare of authentic authorship of his works, mostly on the grounds that no manuscripts survive but also that his cultural provenance was too lowly, and his education too rudimentary, to have allowed him to penetrate the minds of kings and courtiers. Only someone from the upper crust, widely traveled and educated at the highest level, this argument runs, could have had the intellectual wherewithal to have created, say, Julius Caesar.