Roland Emmerich ,Shakespeare And Baconian Theory

The subject of his latest film is pretty much in line with the rest of his oeuvre in that it takes the world of esoteric knowledge which has been outlawed by the academy and packages it for a mass audience.Theories such as that the Pyramids are twelve thousand years old depicted in his film 10,000BC or that the Mayans have prophesied the end of the world for next year featured in his film 2012, have been  around under the radar in obscure books and magazines. Emmerich has taken these ideas and re-packaged them in a big budget movies. The difference between his Shakespeare film and the others is that it is such an old conspiracy theory in effect dating from the 19th century then updated in the 20th by someone changing the name of the suspect from Bacon to Oxford.Strangely one link between the Baconian theory and beliefs such as that of Atlantis is the figure of Ignatius Donnelly.Ignatius Donnelly was an American author who  created the modern craze for Atlantis in the late 19th century with his book Atlantis The Antediluvian World. This became a best seller and Gladstone who was British prime minister at the time even considered sending a Royal Navy expedition to look for remains of the lost continent. Donelly went on to become a champion of the Baconian theory and wrote a book The Great Cryptogram which set out to prove that there was a cipher hidden in Shakespeare's plays  that would prove they had been written by Bacon.