Anonymous Movie Response: Robert Brustein

Columbia Pictures new movie Anonymous has been creating a revived buzz about Shakespeare and the authorship debate.  In response, CSC has asked a few theatre artists and academics to weigh in on the topic. We asked:

1)      What was your first exposure to Shakespeare’s work?

2)      What are your thoughts on who wrote the plays widely attributed to Shakespeare and why?

Response from Robert Brustein*

I was first exposed to Shakespeare's works by having to memorize his soliloquies in grammar school. Luckily, I managed to see Olivier's Henry V innumerable times at the age of seventeen, which made me realize for the first time that these speeches were spoken by real human beings. Long live great theatrical productions!

The notion that Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare's plays was first attributed to a man appropriately named Thomas Looney. Looney and his lunatic followers have been eager to believe that Oxford wrote Midsummer Night's Dream when he was nine, and was responsible for ten more Shakespeare works after he died out of a conviction that in order to write masterpieces you have to be an aristocrat or a Ph.D. The major proof that William Shakespeare wrote the plays under his name is that (among many other contemporaries) Ben Jonson said he did, and Jonson was the most envious man in England. Surely Jonson would not have loved "the man this side of idolatry" if he was only a poor, ignorant and illiterate player. Attributing Shakespeare's works to other people is a form of grand larceny and should be punished by making the culprit memorize the complete works of Francis Bacon and whatever the Earl of Oxford actually wrote.

*Robert Sanford Brustein is an American theatrical critic, producer, playwright and educator. He founded both Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut and the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he remains a Creative Consultant, and has been the theatre critic for The New Republic since 1959. He comments on politics for the Huffington Post.