Monday, September 26, 2011

Was William Shakespeare A Fraud?

With the latest Hollywood movie questioning whether the great English bard William Shakespeare even wrote his greatest literary works, is it now high-time to separate the fact from the fiction of who really is William Shakespeare?

By: Ringo Bones

As the move Anonymous – directed by Roland Emmerich – hit the theaters back in September 2, 2011, tenured Shakespearean scholars and university professors are up in arms over the historical accuracy and authenticity of the latest Hollywood “polemic” of their Golden Goose, but is there a shred of truth that Shakespeare might not be the real author of his works?

Emmerich’s opus sure casts a worm of doubt over what all of us accept as the history’s official view of Shakespeare. According to the movie and indeed some few iconoclastic schools of thought is that the true author of William Shakespeare’s most beloved literary works was none other than Edward de Vere The Earl of Oxford and seen by history as the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I . And there was indeed a credible shred of historical evidence that Edward de Vere really wrote the literary works that most of us attribute to Shakespeare, and the Earl of Oxford was even aided and abetted by Dr. Samuel Johnson, the inventor of the modern definitive English dictionary.

A growing number of historians now start to believe that Edward de Vere, The Earl of Oxford, could indeed have been the true author of Shakespeare’s works because William Shakespeare did not possess the requisite life experience to write those works given that Shakespeare is – according to the Earl of Oxford’s believers - only a second-rate actor who could not have amassed enough wealth to travel in person to Italy to witness the turbulent romance of Romeo and Juliet and the dealings of the Merchant of Venice among other things.

According to Edward de Vere’s “fans”, the only probable reason why the Earl of Oxford had allowed William Shakespeare to become the “author” of his brilliant literary works is that during much of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the Earl of oxford was actively involved in a plot to overthrow the queen and sees that the only possible way for his brilliant literary works to be published and enjoyed by folks across merry old England is by assigning all of it as the work of the stage actor named William Shakespeare. Unfortunately, tenured Shakespearean scholars and college professors seem to perceive the idea as mere “Hollywood Hokum”.