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6. YOUR TURN: Now that you have read, watched, and heard what other people think- what is your conclusion? Do you think William Shakespeare really was the true playwright, or was it someone else? Leave a comment with your name, opinion (including who you think it was if not Shakespeare), and reasoning below.

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6. YOUR TURN: Now that you have read, watched, and heard what other people think- what is your conclusion? Do you think William Shakespeare really was the true playwright, or was it someone else? Leave a comment with your name, opinion (including who you think it was if not Shakespeare), and reasoning below.

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5.                               < Listen to this OR                              watch this>

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5.                               < Listen to this OR                              watch this>

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Shakespeare's plays were set all over Europe, but he had never left the country. Is this a clue?

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Shakespeare's plays were set all over Europe, but he had never left the country. Is this a clue?

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1. This is what scholars generally think about Shakespeare and his work:

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1. This is what scholars generally think about Shakespeare and his work:

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**CLICK ON "VIEW ORIGINAL" IN TOP RIGHT CORNER**

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Listen to this story:

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4.  There was even a movie made about it!

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4.  There was even a movie made about it!

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Watch this trailer:

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http://bit.ly/clevvermovies - Click to Subscribe! Anonymous hits theaters on September 30th, 2011. Cast: Rhys Ifans, Xavier Samuel, David Thewlis, Vanessa Redgrave, Jamie Campbell Bower, Joely Richardson, Derek Jacobi, Tom Wlaschiha, Edward Hogg, Sebastian Armesto, Rafe Spall Set in the political snake-pit of Elizabethan England, Anonymous speculates on an issue that has for centuries intrigued academics and brilliant minds ranging from Mark Twain and Charles Dickens to Henry James and Sigmund Freud, namely: who was the author of the plays credited to William Shakespeare?

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What do the Anonymous director and cast think?

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What do the Anonymous director and cast think?

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Watch this video to see...
**CLICK ON "VIEW ORIGINAL" IN TOP RIGHT CORNER**

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Academics are supposedly up in arms about this Elizabethan thriller directed by Roland Emmerich because of its controversial premise: William Shakespeare did not write the 37-or-so plays, 154 sonnets and various other works that bear his name.

To my mind, this is about as worthwhile as global warming experts complaining that Emmerich's 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, in which Manhattan is hit by a giant tidal wave, gets climate change a bit wrong. The German director's films are always extravagantly daft; it just so happens that his latest one destroys a great writer rather than a great city.

Anonymous might be riper than a month-old plum, but it's every bit as juicy. Rhys Ifans has a ball as the Earl of Oxford, who's compelled by the voices in his head to write plays in iambic pentameter. Oxford asks the playwright Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) to stage them as his own - it would be unseemly for a man of Oxford's standing to be outed as a writer - but a puffed-up actor called Will Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) rumbles their plot and blackmails Oxford into using his name instead. Naturally, this all ties into a conspiracy involving the royal family.

While John Orloff's script has a sprinkling of in-jokes (the first page of Oxford's Twelfth Night manuscript has "What You Will" scribbled out at the top), it's much closer in tone to Blackadder than Shakespeare In Love, and merrily fudges facts and dates to suit its preposterous premise. But this is all part of the fun - as is Vanessa Redgrave's extraordinary turn as Elizabeth I, monstrous as a Matsys portrait and chewing so much scenery that she almost gnaws down the Tower of London.

There are straight-faced pleasures too: the use of large-scale sets and photorealistic graphics to recreate Elizabethan London is hugely successful, as is the casting of both Joely Richardson (Redgrave's daughter) as the young and far-from-virginal Elizabeth in flashback, and the stage actor Mark Rylance, who gives a goosebump-raising performance as the Chorus in Henry V.

Thanks to the introductory sequence, in which the story is set up by a noted present-day actor in a Broadway theatre, Anonymous can be legitimately described as a tale told by Derek Jacobi, full of sound and fury and signifying not much - but it's a great deal of fun nevertheless.

Anonymous: Seven Magazine review, by Mike McCahill

Seven rating: * *

On the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, who can we trust - centuries of academic research, or Roland " Independence Day" Emmerich and Rhys "Last-Seen-Emerging-from-The-Groucho-at-Four-AM" Ifans? It's curious that this pair should, with Anonymous, be reiterating the snobby Oxfordian line, insisting only a duke could have written Hamlet.

Emmerich ladles production value like gravy over the mock-Tudor history and lumpy performances: it's a dog's dinner, albeit served with a certain batty flair.

You'd hope Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance and Vanessa Redgrave signed on knowing it would do as much to debunk the said theory as perpetuate it.

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Academics are supposedly up in arms about this Elizabethan thriller directed by Roland Emmerich because of its controversial premise: William Shakespeare did not write the 37-or-so plays, 154 sonnets and various other works that bear his name.

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Stanford astrophysicist's new book takes a statistical approach to the Shakespeare authorship question and, after presenting evidence, asks readers to decide for themselves.

Wikimedia Commons

Poor William Shakespeare is having an identity crisis.

Most people are content to accept that an Englishman with that name was born in 1564, died in 1616 and wrote plays, sonnets and poems in the interim that changed English literature forever.

Some, however, see things differently. They don't doubt that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon existed, or that the plays attributed to Shakespeare are foundational and sublime. But elements of the Shakespeare canon are incompatible with his known biography, they say. An intimate knowledge of court affairs. Fluency in French. Familiarity with Italy. Shakespeare, they claim, was not written by Shakespeare.

Both sides hold heated opinions in the centuries-old debate, but in the absence of definitive physical evidence, the decision is up to you, says Stanford University's Peter Sturrock.

In his new book, AKA Shakespeare: A Scientific Approach to the Authorship Question, Sturrock explores the argument through the eyes of four fictional characters, each with a different perspective on the debate. They voice their opinions on 25 pieces of evidence, but Sturrock invites readers to weigh in as well and arrive at their own conclusion.

Sturrock, 88, is a professor emeritus of applied physics and an eminent astrophysicist. While writing his 2009 memoir, A Tale of Two Sciences, he revisited his early pastime of writing poetry.

"The only poem I could remember was a parody of that famous sonnet, 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' My parody began, inevitably, 'Shall I compare thee to a winter's night?' and it went on from there."

This led him to re-read all 154 of the Bard's sonnets, which he felt were autobiographical.

"But once you start asking what the sonnets are all about, you are automatically led to the question: Who was the author anyway?"

The authorship question, he reasoned, could be addressed by a scientific approach. Years before, while studying pulsars, Sturrock devised a new method to process information using statistics. His method was based on a statistical concept known as Bayes' theorem, which states that probabilities change depending on the information you have.

Sturrock describes the concept in his book: If you reach into a bag with 99 white balls and 1 black ball, you would say that the odds of picking the black ball are 1 in 100. But if you know the black ball is cracked, you have new information, and your odds improve dramatically. Using Bayesian statistics, Sturrock can incorporate information from both theory and data in his analysis.

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, is the leading alternative candidate, Sturrock said, so his characters choose between Shakespeare, Oxford and a possible third, unknown author, dubbed "Ignotus."

"The evidence comes in many forms," Sturrock said. "From the plays, from the sonnets, from editorial comments in the First Folio [1623 collection of the plays], from the dedication of the sonnets, and so on."

As his book progresses, Sturrock's characters weigh in on 25 questions surrounding the authorship controversy. Was the writer of the plays educated or not? Could Shakespeare write legibly, given the quality of his known signatures? Is there a secret message on a monument in the Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-upon-Avon? Each response is factored into the character's "degree of belief" in each of the three candidates.

Sturrock invites readers to tabulate their own responses and beliefs into charts in the book. An online tool, "Prospero," connected to the book's website, allows readers to calculate their final degrees of belief.

Although Sturrock wants readers to arrive at their own conclusions, he does have an opinion.

"As I thumb through the 25 charts [of characters' evolving degrees of belief], I see Shakespeare going down and down and Oxford going up and up," he said.

There must be a right answer. Somebody wrote those plays. One of Sturrock's characters asks if it really matters who. "Knowing the plays were written by Lord X or Lady Y will not change one word in any of those plays," she says. "So why is it important? What difference would it make?"

After all, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet ..."

Paul Gabrielsen is an intern at Stanford News Service.

Media Contact

Peter Sturrock, Applied Physics: (650) 723-1438, sturrock@stanford.edu

Dan Stober, Stanford News Service: (650) 721-6965, dstober@stanford.edu

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Who wrote Shakespeare's plays? Stanford professor lets you decide

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Stanford astrophysicist's new book takes a statistical approach to the Shakespeare authorship question and, after presenting evidence, asks readers to decide for themselves. Wikimedia Commons Poor William Shakespeare is having an identity crisis. Most people are content to accept that an Englishman with that name was born in 1564, died in 1616 and wrote plays, sonnets and poems in the interim that changed English literature forever.

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Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship

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Shakespeare, alone of all the great writers in Western civilization, presents a unique enigma. Doubts about the author's identity refuse to go away.