Screenwriter John Orloff and actor Rhys Ifans featured on title card of today's Don't Quill the Messenger podcast by Linda Theil In a long reminiscence of Rolland Emmerich's 2011 film Anonymous, screenwriter John Orloff recalled Robert (sic) Shapiro as an "asshole". Twice. In the Oct 20, 2023 "Not so Anonymous" episode of his anti-Stratfordian Don't Quill the Messenger podcast, host Steven Sabel spoke to Orloff for over an hour about the making of Emmerich's epic flop that brought the Shakespeare authorship question to international prominence. (See: "Anonymous Opens . . ." , et al on Oberon weblog.) At time-mark 38:30 during a discussion of the Anonymous post-release furor, Orloff opined regarding Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro -- although Orloff did Shapiro the ultimate disrespect of not remembering his first name correctly: "Robert (sic) Shapiro! Oof, that guy! . . . he's such a dishonest broker. Above anythin
by Linda Theil When asked by an interviewer why all the experts disagree with her on the legitimacy of the Shakespeare authorship question, journalist and author Elizabeth Winkler calmly replied, "You've asked the wrong experts." * With that simple declaration Winkler exploded the topic of Shakespearean authorship forever. Anti-Stratfordians need no smoking gun, no convincing narrative, no reason who, how, when, or why because within the works lies the unassailable argument: Shakespeare's knowledge. Ask the lawyers. Ask the psychologists. Ask the librarians. Ask the historians. Ask the dramaturges. Ask the mathematicians. Ask the Greek scholars. Ask the physicists. Ask the astronomers. Ask the courtiers. Ask the bibliophiles. Ask the Italians. Ask the French. Ask the Russians. Ask the English. Ask everyone. Current academic agreement on a bevy of Shakespearean collaborators springs from an unspoken awareness of how much assistance the Stratfordian presumptive would h