Roland Emmerich's upcoming De Vere-was-the-Bard movie vs. Bill Cain's Equivocation and the-Bard (Will)-was-a-Catholic stage play

photo by Jenny Graham

I know, I know, the Identity Question can be a real pain in the tuchus, but this looks like fun:

Film director Roland Emmerich, who has given us huge planet-killing flicks like 2012, has announced his intention of directing a different sort of (forgive me) what-if fantasy, this one forwarding the so-called “Oxfordian” theory that the author of the Shakespeare Plays was really Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. (Go here for a mini-interview with Emmerich on the subject.)

With a name like Murphy, I suppose I may be forgiven for having come to think that all the little mysteries and conundrums surrounding the Bard’s life, “hidden years” and famous religio-political slipperiness are more elegantly answered by the theory, steadily gaining ground among Shakespeare scholars, including Stephen Greenblatt, that Shakespeare’s roots and sympathies were Catholic at a time in England when that was a potentially dangerous attitude to express.

For more on the latter, see the new Bill Cain play, Equivocation, recently premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. An exploration of the influence of the infamous Gunpowder Plot on a wizened Shakespeare who can’t quite shake his Catholic roots, even when commissioned by master Machiavel Robert Cecil to write a play on the Plot imbued with governmental spin,  the rip-roaring OSF production, directed by OSF artistic director Bill Rauch, was a huge hit. I saw it three times and have talked to at least two people who saw it five times. The OSF production has since gone onto Seattle, another production has opened in Los Angeles and a third is  in the works in New York. Indeed, Equivocation has evoked such a buzz—the word “Pulitzer” has been bandied about on more than one occasion—that I suspect ir will soon be produced all over the country.

(N.B. I’m working on an article on the subject of Shakespeare-as-Catholic, what it might mean and what it doesn’t mean, using Equivocation as a point of reference.)