There ' s nothing Anonymous about William Shakespeare ' s geniusConspiracists ignore a crushing weight of documentary and in - text evidence that the Stratford master authored the plays Bard likeness … an engraving on the title page of the William Shakespeare ' s First Folio . Click to see the full image . Photograph : Bettmann / CorbisIn 1593 , an actor and theatre manager called William Shakespeare published his first book , a long narrative poem called Venus and Adonis . It is the verbal equivalent of a Titian painting , which recreates the world of mythology in richly human , erotic language . This love poem instantly became a Renaissance bestseller , though today it is far less famous than his plays . But there is something else significant about it . It is one of the many pieces of evidence that add up to an overwhelming sense , beyond any reasonable doubt , that Shakespeare , the actor born in Stratford in 1564 , wrote Shakespeare ' s plays – a quiet proof that conspiracy theories about the authorship of these works , as peddled by the new film Anonymous , are nothing more than destructive absurdities . Anonymous Production year : 2011 Country : Rest of the world Cert ( UK ) : 12 A Runtime : 130 mins Directors : Roland Emmerich Cast : David Thewlis , Derek Jacobi , Edward Hogg , Jamie Campbell Bower , Joely Richardson , Mark Rylance , Rafe Spall , Rhys Ifans , Sir Derek Jacobi , Vanessa Redgrave , Xavier Samuel More on this film The clue is in the date the poem appeared . Shakespeare had never published anything before . He did his writing for the stage , to be performed . So why the sudden rush into print with Venus and Adonis ? There is a very striking historical context : in June 1592 , plays were temporarily stopped in London by the Tudor authorities due to an outbreak of the plague . William Shakespeare , man of the stage , suddenly had time on his hands . During the closure of the theatres he tried something new – he wrote Venus and Adonis . This episode , in other words , completely fits the biography of Shakespeare , theatrical genius from the Midlands – as do so many other details in his plays . Shakespeare breathed the theatre . As the RSC edition of his plays vividly stresses , they were written to be acted ( which is why they still are ) . He constantly used theatre itself as a poetic image , as in the famous speech he give Jacques in As You Like It : " All the world ' s a stage , And all the men and women merely players . They have their exits and their entrances , And one man in his time plays many parts , His acts being seven ages . " Images like this of life as theatre recur richly in his works – from the wooden O of the theatre building itself invoked in Henry V to the play within a play in Hamlet – and they add up to a powerful connection with Shakespeare the man : a man , plainly , who lived theatre so intensely it shaped the way he saw everything else . As any modern actor might say , theatre was his life , his world . Of course it was : he was William Shakespeare , who worked in theatre all his life , and it is this William Shakespeare ' s experience of life that informs his plays ( which also , for that matter , contain reference to his Midlands childhood , such as the Forest of Arden location in As You Like It ) . If all that is not enough , what about the testimony of people who knew him ? In the first complete edition of Shakepeare ' s works , the dramatist Ben Jonson comments poetically on his friend ' s portrait . The book begins with an engraved image of Shakespeare – the man from Stratford . It is a good likeness , confirms Jonson – the engraver fought with nature itself for supremacy . But here you only see Shakespeare ' s face . The portrait cannot capture the mind within : the artist cannot draw Shakespeare ' s " wit ", and " since he cannot , reader , look / Not on his picture , but his book ". Jonson , who knew Shakespeare in the flesh , testifies that the face printed in the First Folio , that of Will Shakespeare , is that of the plays ' author . Except he doesn ' t " testify " because he sees nothing to " testify " about – there was no mystery to Shakespeare ' s contemporaries about the authorship of Shakespeare ' s plays . This supposed mystery is a daft later invention . Anonymous is an insult to a great natural talent . It can only damage and degrade our relationship with our national genius .