A BIG budget film that suggests the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays is about to be released.

But scholars have dismissed the latest conspiracy theory picked up by Hollywood as “total rubbish”.

One Oxford University professor said she feared Anonymous, set to be released next month, may be so successful that the public will start believing Shakespeare did not write the greatest plays in the English language.

The film, directed by Roland Emmerich, will repeat a century-old claim that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the real author of Shakespeare’s masterpieces, while the Stratford son of a glovemaker was a dull stooge who passed the work off as his own.

Prof Katherine Duncan-Jones, of Oxford University, said: “What is maddening is that it is a high-budget film with a rather good cast, and may be so good that a lot of people who get their history from films may think it is somehow authentic.

“My fear is that the film will be done well.

“The Oxfordians have been around since the 1880s, and I have always tried never to think about them because it is all total rubbish.”

Oxfordians believe that Shakespeare, who came from a relatively modest provincial background, did not have enough experience to write the work and there is not enough evidence to link him to the plays.

Instead, they argue de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote them, even though plays including King Lear and Macbeth were first performed after his death in 1604.

The theory was first put forwards by an English schoolteacher, J Thomas Looney, in 1920.

Julia Cleave, of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, said elements of de Vere’s life were echoed in Shakespeare’s plays, and he had intimate knowledge of court life having travelled through France and Italy. One offshoot fringe believes de Vere also had a child with Elizabeth I.

But Prof Duncan-Jones, a biographer of Shakespeare, said: “It is not something that happens: someone writes lots of brilliant works, and then passes them off as some dum-dum’s.

“If people who knew Shakespeare well and were envious of him had thought he was a fraud, someone would certainly have said so.”

Hertford College lecturer Dr Emma Smith, who wrote the Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare, added: “Most academics do not give this any truck, but I do not feel particularly bothered by the film it if it makes people interested in the period or the qualities that make Shakespeare special.

“It seems like a fun historical thriller.

“The worst thing that could happen is people don’t believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

“That would be wrong, but it will not take away from the plays.”