Prof in documentary about ‘Anonymous’ film

PULLMAN, Wash. – Some people call it one of the greatest literary mysteries of all time. Others call it ridiculous nonsense.

 

Who are you going to believe? The Folger Shakespeare Library or a school teacher named Looney?

 

The debate over who wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford has raged for centuries but, for the most part, the instigators have been outside the academy.

 

Those questioning whether a merchant and part-time actor from a small rural town, with limited formal education and no evidence of international travel, was the author of some of the most magnificent plays and poems ever written include school teachers, psychologists, actors, writers, even Supreme Court justices, but very few professional Shakespearean scholars.

 

As “Anonymous,” directed by Roland Emmerich—of “Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” and “2012” fame—opens in theaters this month, the debate is being brought to the public as never before. The film stars Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth I, Rhys Ifans as the Earl of Oxford and Rafe Spall as Shakespeare.

 

 

“I’ve been waiting for this,” said Michael Delahoyde, an associate professor of English at Washington State University. Delahoyde, whose academic vita includes undergraduate degrees from Vassar College and a doctorate in English literature from the University of Michigan, is a professional scholar. But he’s also an iconoclast.

 

How many other Shakespearean scholars have a poster of Jonathan Frid of the 1960s television show “Dark Shadows” on their office wall? The curios in his office on the third floor of Avery Hall form an eclectic mix of popular culture and high culture, much like his website, which reveals an abiding appreciation for both medieval authors and monsters – and, more improbably, for movies about dinosaurs.

 

Delahoyde started his academic career as a medievalist and now teaches a diverse set of courses, including science fiction, humanities in the modern world, mythology, Chaucer, monsters in literature and film, and medieval arts and humanities.

 

Interested in many, many subjects, Delahoyde said Shakespeare studies wasn’t one of them – until he was asked, on short notice, to teach Shakespeare in 1999. That semester he came across the work of J. Thomas Looney, an English school teacher who wrote “Shakespeare Identified” in 1920 and gave birth to the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare.

 

 

No one argues the merits of the plays or sonnets. The rub, as they say, is whether there is sufficient evidence to unthrone Shakespeare as the most celebrated writer in the English language and replace him with Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

 

While there is little evidence of Shakespeare’s personal life – no diaries, no personal letters, no unpublished plays, no drafts of unfinished poems – evidence of de Vere’s personal life is fairly plentiful.

 

As first pointed out by Looney, the worldview that comes through in many of Shakespeare’s plays is the same worldview that emerges in de Vere’s letters or can be constructed from his biography.

 

He was a nobleman with close ties to the Elizabethan Court. He was a poet, a playwright and a patron of the arts. He was highly educated, well traveled and fluent in at least four languages—exactly the vita you might expect of the author of “Othello,” “King Lear” and “Hamlet.”

 

 

“Anonymous,” Delahoyde said, falls squarely in the Oxford camp and goes it one further to espouse the Prince Tudor theory: Not only did de Vere write everything attributed to Shakespeare, but he and Queen Elizabeth had a long-term romance that resulted in a son who was never publicly acknowledged by Elizabeth or de Vere.

 

That relationship, and the succession problems created by an illegitimate, unacknowledged son, help explain, to Oxfordians at least, why de Vere could not claim authorship of the plays or sonnets.

 

With established academic journals refusing to publish papers on the authorship debate, Oxfordians have turned to other venues, including newsletters, conference papers, self-published books and, for the first time, a Hollywood film that supporters hope will be a blockbuster.

 

 

Over the past decade, Delahoyde has introduced more than a few young scholars to the authorship debate: in his classes at WSU, papers at academic conferences, guest lectures at local schools, including Lincoln Middle School, and an appearance in “Last Will. & Testament,” a documentary by First Folio Productions.

 

“Last Will. & Testament,” directed by Lisa Wilson, was created as a scholarship-based companion piece to the Hollywood movie, Delahoyde said. It is set to open Nov. 27 at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

 

A decade or so ago, Delahoyde would never have imagined he’d be at the center of the authorship controversy, interviewed on camera with high-profile Oxfordians such as Mark Rylance, former artistic director of the Globe Theater in London, and Charles Beauclerk, a descendant of the Earl of Oxford and author of “Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth.”

 

 

Back in 1999, Delahoyde was just trying to figure out what in the world was going on in “All’s Well that Ends Well.” He had allowed students to vote on which plays they wanted to study, and that’s the play they wanted to end the semester with.

 

“I was baffled by it,” he said. What was the playwright trying to say? What was the point? Neither a comedy nor a tragedy, “All’s Well that Ends Well” is considered one of Shakespeare’s so-called problem plays. Orthodox scholars have puzzled over it as well.

 

At a bookstore in Ashland, while attending the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Delahoyde was still struggling with how to understand or interpret the convoluted relationships and seemingly irrational motivations in that play when he discovered Charlton Ogburn’s book, “The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Man and the Myth,” which was published in 1954.

 

Ogburn’s book cost $50, so Delahoyde picked up the one next to it, “Shakespeare: Who Was He? The Oxford Challenge to the Bard of Avon” by Richard Whalen. That book, which cost about $12, included a chapter linking de Vere’s personal history to characters and plot lines in various plays, including “All’s Well that Ends Well.”

 

 

Delahoyde didn’t become an Oxfordian on the spot, but reading about de Vere’s personal history—which included convoluted relationships – did change things.

 

It took several years of scholarship and reading everything he could get his hands on, he said, but he’s now firmly in the Oxford camp. (WSU has faculty on both sides of the Shakespeare authorship controversy. Click here for a defense of Shakespeare.)

 

On Delahoyde’s website he explains, “Now this stuff makes sense. It’s exhilarating knowing that this work emerged out of real experience, real pain, real concerns – out of someone’s real life – instead of out of the blue.”

 

In class, Delahoyde said, he talks about the authorship controversy but allows students to consider the evidence and make up their own minds. Just talking about it, he said, frees students to be more inquisitive, more engaged and more critical in their analysis of the plays.

 

 

WSU student Leda Zakarison agrees. Her face lit up when she was asked about the authorship controversy recently.

 

“It’s seriously just the most interesting thing ever,” she said. Her class is studying “Hamlet” right now, she said, and it’s fascinating to think that the characters might have been drawn from actual people in Queen Elizabeth’s court.

 

“It makes so much more sense,” she said. “It adds a whole new dimension to everything you’re reading.”

 

Zakarison, like Delahoyde, is disappointed that “Anonymous” won’t open in Pullman until sometime later in November. When it does, she’ll be there. And it’s not even a class assignment.

 

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Source:
Michael Delahoyde, 509-335-4832, delahoyd@wsu.edu

Media contact:
Hope Belli Tinney, 509-335-8741, hopebt@wsu.edu