IS this a blagger that I see before me? Tomorrow the film Anonymous goes on general release, questioning whether Shakespeare was a fraud and just the frontman for the real playwright, the educated Earl of Oxford.

Friends, yeomen, funkymen, lend me your shears. Isn’t it time we cut these absurd conspiracy theories down to size and buried them rather than praised them? I’m no Shakespeare scholar (isn’t Coriolanus a medical condition?) but these tiresome claims about the bard keep surfacing. Just accept it and be proud. Shakespeare was the greatest Englishman who ever lived and penned, arguably, the world’s greatest plays. Why question it without proper proof?

If the claims of Anonymous were true, how bitter it would be for Lord Oxford to look into success through another man’s eyes. But no one questioned the legitimacy of the bard’s authorship while he was alive. And, for all the centuries of research, no one has come up with sufficent evidence to make me doubt it today.

You could argue that it does not matter who penned the dramas. After all, what’s in a name? They are masterpieces, whoever wrote them.

Give the devils their due, there’s method in the madness of the producers of Anonymous who will make some glistering gold at the box office by fanning a winter of academic discontent.

And, of course, it is possible that Anonymous, too, is a work of quality. (How would the director – who was also the director of Godzilla – feel if future generations denied his involvement?) But we won’t know if it’s worth watching until after it is released tomorrow.

To see or not to see? That is the question.