Anonymous - To Believe or not to Believe

I know that I am on the late train with this, but the Theater Blog of the UK Guardian has a piece that really caught my eye on Anonymous, Sony Pictures period piece that asks the question --- what if William Shakespeare was a fraud?  Read it here.

This essay pretty much sums up my feeling on the whole subject. While I have no problem with a movie or book based on this tantalizing hypothesis, I do have a problem with the notion that a poor boy with a "grammar school education" could not possibly write anything good! It's snobbery at its worse.

Now, I have a confession to make that may seem sacrilegious to some, but here goes. I love Shakespeare, have since I read Hamlet in high school,  but unlike most I see his works as merely bawdy soap operas, melodramas full of incest, rape, sex, lies, love, family loyalty and all the stuff that plays on our deepest hopes and fears. That they have been elevated to such a place in our literary culture says as much about us as it does the plays. But that's just me.

So, why does it even matter if William Shakespeare wrote these plays? Because brilliance should not be questioned based on class.  I recently read a comment that stuck with me on a message board --- "To believe that Shakespeare wrote these plays is to believe in a dream that anyone, no matter the circumstances of their birth can grow up to be the greatest writer of all time. " Imagine that!