With the release on October 10, 2011, of Roland Emmerich’s controversial film on the Shakespeare authorship mystery, Anonymous, I thought it might be a very appropriate time for me to enlighten my readers with an account of my own involvement in the authorship controversy before seeing the film and passing judgment on it.

As the author of The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, which took seven years to write, I have been very much involved in the Shakespeare authorship problem for quite a long time. Indeed, I first became aware that there was an authorship problem back in the early 1960s when Calvin Hoffman, author of The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare, came to my office at Grosset & Dunlap in New York, in the hope of getting us to publish a paperback edition of his book.

Hoffman’s claim was that the actual author of the works attributed to Shakespeare was the great poet-playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was supposedly killed in a barroom brawl in 1593. But Hoffman had read all of Marlowe and all of Shakespeare and had come to the conclusion that they were all written by the same person. But the problem of Marlowe’s alleged death made that premise impossible, unless he was able to prove that Marlowe’s death was faked, and that he actually survived to continue writing plays in exile.

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Sam Blumenfeld (photo)