Note: This article is from the Guardian.

This article titled “Out, damn’d conspiracy! Shakespeare was no fraud” was written by Michael Dobson, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 26th October 2011 17.22 UTC

However much we may claim to be curious about hat really happened in history, it seems we often prefer our stories about the past to follow the pattern of fairytales. Shakespeare understood this very well. He gave his audiences Richard III, the hunchbacked wicked uncle, rightfully destroyed by the good avenging prince, for instance, rather than the complex politician of history, defeated and killed by an invading opportunist. History may provide good raw material for drama, but it will need a bit of underlying myth if it is really going to stay in the imagination.

To that extent, the film Anonymous – which offers a version of Elizabethan history obsessed with monarchy, parenthood and usurpation, in which the rightful heir to the English throne is wickedly kept from his inheritance – is only doing what costume drama has done since Shakespeare’s time, acting out our fantasies in fancy dress while mentioning a few real events and actual people. But Shakespeare never went so far as to claim that there was no real Richard III, only a pretender using a pseudonym. Nor did he suggest that 1485 was a year of complete peace, during which the traces of the Battle of Bosworth were cynically faked by the establishment. The plot of Anonymous, by comparison, is based on the premise that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare. It isn’t just a piece of sexed-up historical drama in the great Elizabethan tradition: it belongs to a much more recent mindset, that of the great Victorian conspiracy theories.

I say Victorian because nobody doubted that Shakespeare had written his own plays until the 1850s. The first claim to the contrary is Delia Bacon’s article William Shakespeare and his Plays; an Inquiry Concerning Them, printed in Putnam’s Magazine (in 1856). Bacon thought the Complete Plays represented a deliberate attempt to spread enlightenment, modernity and progress, and that rather than being the work of a single supremely talented showbusiness professional they must have been written by an occult committee of world-designing philosophers. Its leader, she hinted, could only have been Sir Francis Bacon, who had somehow scheduled its meetings in between his other duties as attorney general and his efforts to invent empirical science.

Delia Bacon died in an asylum after failing to find a single piece of evidence in favour of her claim, but her example has not inhibited successive waves of other champions, who have credited the plays to Francis Bacon alone, to Christopher Marlowe, to the Fifth Earl of Rutland, to the Sixth Earl of Derby, to the 17th Earl of Oxford, and even to Queen Elizabeth I, among many others. The obvious truth that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, sadly, is not news, and popular journalism since the 1850s has preferred news at all costs.

Shakespearean scholars, when they have managed to calm themselves, have sometimes paid reluctant tribute to the sheer determination and ingenuity which “anti-Stratfordian” writers have displayed, since any theory suggesting that the theatre professional William Shakespeare did not write the Shakespeare canon somehow has to explain why so many of his contemporaries said that he did, and why none of the rest ever said that he did not. Most observers, however, have been more impressed by the anti-Stratfordians’ dogged immunity to documentary evidence, not only that which confirms that Shakespeare wrote his own plays, but that which establishes that several of the alternative candidates, including Oxford, were long dead before he had finished doing so. How did this weird cult belief that Shakespeare was a fraud ever come into being?

By Delia Bacon’s time, the authorship controversy was an accident waiting to happen. In the age of Romanticism, such transcendent, quasi-religious claims were being made for the supreme poetic triumph of the Complete Works that it was becoming well-nigh impossible to imagine how any mere human being could have written them at all. At the same time, the popular understanding of what levels of literacy might have been achieved in 16th-century Stratford was still heavily influenced by a patriotic tradition of Shakespeare-worship which liked to depict the playwright as an uninstructed son of the Warwickshire soil, a thoroughly native genius who had out-written the world without any help from foreign or classical literary models. These two notions combined to persuade Delia Bacon and her more snobbish successors that the Folio’s title page and preliminaries could only be part of an elaborate charade, orchestrated by some more elevated personage. They accordingly misread the distinctive literary traces of Shakespeare’s solid Elizabethan grammar-school education visible throughout the volume as evidence that the “real” author had attended Oxford or Cambridge.

This misapprehension was reinforced by the 19th century’s deepening sense that there was an absolute boundary between poetry (a disinterested manifestation of high culture) and live theatre (a mercenary form of vulgar entertainment). At a time when the theatrical dimension of Shakespeare’s works was especially ill understood (the plays heavily cut and altered to fit the contemporary stage, and read by Victorian critics as sublime poems rather than as practical scripts), it became possible, perversely, for the fact that Shakespeare had been a known professional actor and man of the theatre to be cited as evidence that he could not have written the plays rather than as corroboration that he did.

The spread of conspiracy theories about Shakespeare has an international dimension to it. Both Hart and Bacon were Americans, and blue-blooded candidates for the authorship continue to find some of their most eager (and munificent) supporters in the United States. Members of other nationalities, too, have at times enjoyed the sense that they know the “real” Shakespeare better than do his compatriots: during the early 20th century German conspiracy theorists particularly favoured the Earl of Rutland, for example, though their French counterparts preferred the Earl of Derby, and in Austria Sigmund Freud, in a classic instance of the fantasies about secret aristocratic origins which he had identified in children, placed his own ill-informed faith in the Earl of Oxford.

The German director Roland Emmerich, then, has belatedly climbed on to a creaky Victorian bandwagon with Anonymous, a film which adopts the most lurid and B-movie-like variant of the theory that Oxford wrote the plays, in its quest to combine the commercial appeal of Shakespeare in Love with that of The Da Vinci Code. According to the scenario the film depicts, the Complete Works, especially Hamlet, encode the story of how Oxford was not only the secret author of the Shakespeare canon but was secretly both the son and subsequently the lover of Elizabeth I, and was thereby secretly the father of the Earl of Southampton and the unacknowledged rightful heir to the throne of England into the bargain.

Taken as a serious account of real history, this is so plainly daft, and so wildly at variance with all the copious evidence we have about Shakespeare, the Elizabethan theatre, Oxford, Elizabeth and Southampton alike, that it is beyond rational refutation. Taken as a version of one of our culture’s perennially recurring daydreams, however – the tale of the oppressed rightful prince, wickedly deprived of his true heritage and recognition – it ought to give us serious food for thought about the ease with which fantasy, in some minds, can prove far more compelling than mere truth.

- Michael Dobson is director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham

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