Welcome to the Club

The latest fad seems to be delving into the conspiracy theories that someone other than the Bard of Stratford on Avon wrote all those Shakespearean plays.

The new movie entitled Anonymous comes out October 8.  (The opening of the film has been delayed twice to try to find a better weekend with lesser competition.)  The film proposes that Edward de Verre, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the works.

My book, The Shakespeare Conspiracy, of course, proposes that Christopher Marlowe was the real author.  You can check all this out on my web site: www.TheShakespeareConspiracy.com.

For your information, the stage version of my novel will be presented October 21 in a staged reading by the Artists Ensemble Theatre company in Rockford, Illinois, west of Chicago.

And they're presently preparing to shoot the movie version of the novel in Winnipeg, Canada.  I wish I had more information on that, but I don't.

But new conspiracy accounts seem to be formulating daily.

A new book is out entitled The Consequences of Anonymity and Attribution.  The final chapter in the book is called  "The Anonymous Shakespeare: Heresy, Authorship, and the Anxiety of Orthodoxy" by Bruce Danner.

Professor Danner, of St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York, is a widely published mainstream Shakespeare scholar.

Danner lists some of the central problems with the legendary author.  He writes, "Stratfordians have not established the chronology of the plays; they are ignorant as to the author’s political, religious, and cultural opinions; they cannot establish the authorial text for the plays. Such facts provide the foundations of literary study… and yet these are just such definitive issues that the Shakespearean profession cannot resolve."

Welcome to the club, Professor Danner.