Anonymous or Why the Question of Authorship Actually Does Matter!

Of course one might argue that the Shakespearian plays should and actually do speak for themselves, as they have done during the past four centuries, sometimes more regarded sometimes less. And it would be just fine if we would leave it at this, but like the movie "Anonymous" - which as a piece of fiction is just fine, but whose director's "scientific" ambitions reveal a quite different approach - shows to some people the author and his biography are most eminent. A viewpoint that gets important in the 19th century and this surely comes as no surprise when one realises that this is the age, when acient myths are getting researched, eg in Canterbury we were told that the Victorians ventured to open Edward, the Black Prince's, grave or that it was also them that went looking for the two princes in the Tower allegedly murdered and buried by order of Richard III. An odd century that on the one hand went out to demystify and on the other hand developed a strong sense for the occult.
What we really lose, if we take the Shakespearian plays as mere depiction of autobiographical  events, is the idea that there is relevance beyond this, we are in a way limiting the plays' impact and their catholicity. In January Peter Brook expressed the viewpoint that the great thing about Shakespearian plays is exactly this catholicity, one can at no point extract the author's point of view as he gives expression and his art to depict the most differing ideas and parties. Thus like in Jaques' soliloquy "All the world's a stage", he presents all the world on stage. Of course I do understand that in our contemporary world of antagonism, where it's "either/or" and never "and/or",  it becomes very hard to imagine a human being who simply portrays it all, who gives the Lord what's the Lord's and the Emperor what's the Emperor's. But this again rather illustrates our shortcomings and never Shakespeare's. So eventually this whole business becomes a very modern phenomenon, but also a very dangerous for mind-numbing one: the utter nonsensical and depressing belief that only eminence can produce eminence.