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By Christopher Hart

Last updated at 11:14 PM on 26th October 2011

Was Shakespeare a fraud, demands the sensationalist strapline to the controversial new film, Anonymous. In other words, was the genius from Stratford-upon-Avon really just a barely literate oik, serving as a cover for the true writer of those immortal plays — the sensitive and aristocratic Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford?

‘No. Next question,’ might be the answer most sensible people would give.

But alas, Hollywood has got hold of this theory almost a century after it was first propounded by one Thomas Looney, a suitably named schoolteacher from Tyneside, who spent years researching the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.

The controversial new film, Anonymous is released tomorrow and focuses round the so called 'Shakespeare mystery'

And Looney’s is just one of numerous loony tunes surrounding our Bard.

Nowadays, it’s just as fashionable in academic circles to ask: ‘Was Shakespeare gay?’ There is even one ‘Shakespearologist’ who believes he was a woman called Amelia Bassano, who was born in London in 1569.

Radio 4, meanwhile, produced a funny April Fool pretending to have uncovered evidence that Shakespeare was French. Mon Dieu!

But none of this evident looniness has deterred the movie business from lumbering in and making a movie out of Looney’s theory.

I haven’t seen Anonymous, which opens nationwide tomorrow, and am in no position to review it, but the early indications are ominous.

Meanwhile, the good citizens of Stratford-upon-Avon are up in arms about this slight on their native son. Stratford’s Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has initiated a rather clever and sarcastic campaign — it is blanking out Shakespeare’s name on several road and pub signs in and around the town.

The director of Anonymous, Roland Emmerich, doesn¿t have the most auspicious record with regard to historical dramas

The point they are making is: ‘What would Stratford-upon-Avon be without that crucial Shakespeare connection but just another pleasant Midlands market town?’

It sounds like the starting idea for an Ealing comedy: an inspiring battle between a small, determinedly traditional English provincial town, proud of its world-class heritage, taking on the powerful international alliance behind Anonymous — the German film industry, Hollywood (Columbia, Sony Pictures) and several uber-luvvies who ought to have more sense.

These include the actors Derek Jacobi and Vanessa Redgrave, both of whom have done very well out of playing some of Shakespeare’s finest roles.

The thing about actors is that they’re great at acting, but not a lot else. When they start lecturing you about politics, or turning literary detective, it’s best to put your hands over your ears and hum loudly.

The director of Anonymous, Roland Emmerich, doesn’t have the most auspicious record with regard to historical dramas, having previously directed such sensitive movies as Independence Day (a sci-fi movie about an alien invasion of Earth) and The Day After Tomorrow (a sci-fi disaster film).

And we mustn’t forget Mel Gibson’s The Patriot. To widespread outrage, it was an abomination that depicted 18th-century British soldiers in America behaving much like the Nazis in Europe.

Mel Gibson in a scene from The Patriot: To widespread outrage, it was an abomination that depicted 18th-century British soldiers in America behaving much like the Nazis in Europe

Of course, there is a tradition of Brit bad guys in blockbusters ranging from Anthony Hopkins’s psychopathic killer in Silence Of The Lambs to Alan Rickman’s terrorist in Die Hard. Then there was Braveheart, which portrayed English troops savagely butchering noble Scots, and Rickman’s pantomime turn as the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham trying to kill off American star Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood.

As for The Patriot, it featured a British colonel ordering an entire village to be herded into a church, which was then locked, barred and set alight. Such an event never happened in real life.

The Hollywood scriptwriter based the scene on a hideous atrocity in World War II when, in 1944, the Nazis, in retribution for the killing of an SS officer, herded all the women and children of a French village into a church and burned it — and the rest of the village — to the ground.

Does Emmerich have something against the Brits, I wonder?

His other films have tried to raise public awareness about global warming, when he is not spewing out his own carbon emissions by jetting back and forth between his three homes in Germany, New York and Los Angeles. A noted connoisseur of fine art, his private collection includes images of a crucified Christ in a Katherine Hamnett-designed T-shirt and a Princess Diana lookalike engaged in a sex act.

Who better, then, to solve the mystery of the greatest literary genius the world has ever known?

What he clearly doesn’t understand is that Shakespeare has long been entwined with this country’s sense of patriotic pride.

Dr Paul Edmondson, of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, describes the Bard as being ‘at the core of England’s cultural and historical DNA’. Surely, no other writer has ever been so acutely aware of the corruption of politics, the demonic attractions of worldly power or of how kings and generals have to operate in order to get to the top and stay there.

He would not have been at all surprised by our low opinion of politicians today — for the savage life and grisly death of Colonel Gaddafi, read Macbeth.

Vanessa Redgrave stars in the film despite having done very well out of playing some of Shakespeare¿s finest roles

The debunking new film version about the so-called ‘Shakespeare mystery’ centres on the allegation that little is known about the real William Shakespeare. But this is nonsense. We know far more about him than we do about many of his contemporaries.

The theory behind this new film’s plot rests on sheer snobbery. How could this William Shakespeare, a mere grammar-school boy from Warwickshire who never went to university, know so much about classical mythology, Roman generals, kings and queens, and the rituals of high politics and courtly love?

The answer, of course, is his brilliant imagination. Something the sceptics don’t seem to possess. As for Shakespeare not going to university, neither did many other writers in his day.

Fellow tragedian John Webster, playwright Thomas Kyd and Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson finished their education the day they left grammar school (they were rather better at reading and writing than school-leavers today, I suspect).

If some of the earliest anecdotes about Shakespeare are to be believed, he was no great scholar, preferring to do a spot of deer poaching and getting his older girlfriend, Anne Hathaway, pregnant.

Yet this Warwickshire country boy with an eye for the girls is exactly the kind of man you might expect to create those wonderfully vibrant plays.

Shakespeare's name is being temporarily removed from pub and street signs to support a campaign against a new film which questions whether the Bard was 'a fraud'

They breathe the air not of the library but of life itself.

Another ancient story says that Shakespeare died of a fever after a boozy night out with Jonson. Could this be true of the man who created Falstaff? Absolutely. Spot on.

But instead of accepting what is obvious to everyone else, the producers of Anonymous offer us an alternative Bard — the willowy Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

There is one funny story that historians have told about De Vere, which I strongly suspect will not appear in the movie. It was recorded by the incorrigible 17th-century gossip John Aubrey.

Apparently, on one occasion, De Vere made such a low, straining bow to Elizabeth I that he broke wind loudly. He was so embarrassed that he fled abroad for seven years. When he returned, hoping the incident would long since have been forgotten, he was promptly greeted by the Queen with the words: ‘My Lord, I had forgot the fart!’

All of which suggests that Edward de Vere was less of a universal genius than a monumental twit, something like an Elizabethan Mr Bean.

As for Shakespeare, I doubt he would have cared much either way about Hollywood’s latest take on his life. ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ he might have laughed, just like his mischievous Puck.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2053944/Why-does-Hollywood-hate-English.html#ixzz1bw23OHpp