UMKC professor applauds Shakespeare film ‘Anonymous’

Felicia Hardison Londre, a respected theater historian on the faculty of the UMKC theater department, was eager to see director Roland Emmerich’s new film, “Anonymous,” and not just because it delves into the world of Elizabethan actors and playwrights.

She was excited to see the movie because Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff embrace a theory about the authorship of William Shakespeare’s plays and poetry that has been subject to disdain and outright mockery by traditionalists for decades: that the true writer was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. That’s what Londre, a proud Oxfordian, thinks.

The idea articulated by the film is that Oxford wrote the tragedies, comedies, history plays, sonnets and narrative poems attributed to Shakespeare but, because of his social station, could not attach his name to his literary works....