To be or not be, that's the question

Did William Shakespeare really write the works attributed to him? That is the question. In Anonymous, director Roland Emmerich offers a possible answer.
"I'm fascinated by the fact that the biggest name in literature could have been a fraud," says Roland Emmerich, best known for effects-laden blockbusters like Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 - is clearly comfortable being at the heart of an academic tempest.
His new film Anonymous portrays William Shakespeare as a drunken, inarticulate buffoon, played by actor Rafe Spall.
Rhys Ifans is Edward de Vere - the 17th Earl of Oxford - who is credited as the true genius behind the words of Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear.
His interest in putting Shakespeare onto the big screen goes back some 10 years when he read a draft of John Orloff's screenplay, then titled Soul of the Age.
At the start of Anonymous, actor Sir Derek Jacobi strides into a modern-day theatre and suggests that Shakespeare is "a cipher, a ghost".
Conspiracy theories have circulated for more than a century and prominent doubters from the past include Mark Twain, Orson Welles, Sir John Gielgud and Charlie Chaplin.
Some in the "anti-Stratfordian" camp believe that a collective group of writers is responsible for the works attributed to Shakespeare, while others suggest a single writer such as Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe.
The "Oxfordian theory" about De Vere, an Elizabethan nobleman, started in 1920 after the publication of a book about him by an English teacher called J Thomas Looney.
To coincide with the film's release, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has launched a campaign to demonstrate that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was indeed the true author of the 37 plays and 154 sonnets which bear his name.
Is Emmerich prepared for the reaction to the film from Shakespeare scholars?
"I'm no professor, but I cannot believe that somebody who had nearly no education could write like this.
"The Earl of Oxford is the most likely candidate. He was a renaissance man, he spoke eight or nine languages fluently, he travelled the world, he was incredibly educated. And Shakespeare's plays are the work of a very educated man."