<위대한 비밀>로 재구성된 셰익스피어 저자론

Abstract

Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous(2011) questions whether Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him, and proposes Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as the real author. Emmerich’s film is in line with the Oxfordian theory that was first advanced by J. Thomas Looney in his “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford” in 1920. It is representative of the current tendency in which the question of Shakespeare authorship has been to the fore. Emmerich characterizes his film as an historical thriller whose story tells how Shakespeare came not to be the author of his plays in conjunction with who would succeed Queen Elizabeth and what was the cause of the Essex Rebellion. This paper discusses this historical thriller in terms of how Shakespeare became an author of those plays he did not write, and why the Earl of Oxford gave up on his legitimate claim to be an author. The discussion observes that it deconstructs the authenticity of Shakespeare authorship by a means of a ‘play within a film’ structure, and that this structure places an emphasis on the relationship between Ben Jonson and the publication of the First Folio in 1623, and on the true intention of Jonson’s words “Soule of the Age.” Then this paper concludes that an account of the authorship question displayed in Anonymous should be seen as one Shakespearean theory among others which have reinforced a legacy of his authority.