A Republican Dream? — Americans Question Shakespeare
Keywords:
Film Studies, 19th Century, AuthorshipAbstract
In late 2011, Anonymous, a large-budget movie from filmmaker Roland Emmerich — the producer of such films as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and The Patriot — was promoted on posters and in TV commercials by posing the question "Was Shakespeare a Fraud?" While contemporary media executives chose the advertising "tag line" for this film, the roots of their exploitative question go back to 1856 and the lead article, by American Delia Bacon, in Putnam's Monthly, A Magazine of Literature, Science, and Art. For the first time in the public press, a scholar argued that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon did not write the plays and poems that bore his name. Important to this re-mythologizing was Bacon's thesis that the plays promoted a republican political philosophy that ultimately led to the creation of the United States of America. This article startled some in nineteenth-century society and, via a tangled web, more recently has resulted in the script and publicity campaign for the movie Anonymous. The origins of this speculation about Shakespearean authorship, together with related commercial sensationalism, can be linked to the appropriation of Shakespeare's plays to support American republican ideology.